Dawn Wiggins
Today we have with us Kate Anthony, host of the New York Times recommended podcast, The Divorce Survival Guide Podcast. She’s a divorce coach who helps women, especially those with children, either heal their relationships or exit with grace. Welcome, Kate.
Kate Anthony
Thank you so much for having me, Dawn.
What is Going On in Kate Anthony’s World?
Dawn Wiggins
Tell us about where things are in the world of Kate and The Divorce Survival Guide podcast. Who are you? What are you up to?
Kate Anthony
What is going on in my world? I had a rocky few years. My menopause and perimenopause were both long and challenging. I’m back to working out at the gym four days a week, and my hormones are regulated and balanced and I feel better than I have in a long time, so, I’m stoked about that.
My work is fulfilling, but it’s really hard.
I love helping women make the decisions that they need to make to get through divorce as unscathed as possible.
The work that I do tends to be pretty intense, often involving domestic violence and abuse cases. But I try to keep balance. Women are all striving to find balance.
Finding Balance Amid the Challenges of Divorce and Abuse
Dawn Wiggins
We are so blessed to have you on today. You have worked with so many women and talked to so many experts. You have such wisdom of experience. So I’m excited about all the things we’re going to talk about today, especially The Divorce Survival Guide podcast.
Kate Anthony
Thank you.
A Personal Journey: The Life Moment That Shaped Kate Anthony’s Approach to Divorce Coaching>
Dawn Wiggins
What’s a moment in your life, outside of your career, that most shaped how you guide women through divorce and their struggles?
Kate Anthony
A huge moment in my life was in college, and I went to school for acting. In freshman year, at the end of every semester, they would do cuts, and boot people from the program. So each semester, the class size got smaller. Our starting class was maybe 50 people and then our graduating class was 17.
I was talented and had sailed through everything.
But halfway through my sophomore year in my conference, my professor said to me, “You’re a bitch. You have no idea how you come across. When you talk, you come across as a bitch and I don’t think you mean it.” And it was one of the most devastating moments of my entire life because I was so codependent—all I wanted was for everybody to like me. And he was right—the way I communicated didn’t align with who I was.
I learned this communication style from my upbringing, and in particular, my mother, who is very cutting and critical. I had a friend say about my mother once, “All she wants is love and every tool she uses to get it does the opposite. She pushes people away.”
Dawn Wiggins
Isn’t that wild how humans do that?
Kate Anthony
And that’s exactly what I was doing—and I didn’t know it.
The Turning Point That Shaped Kate Anthony’s Approach to Communication
Kate Anthony
I went home from that meeting and I was devastated. I was sobbing. Then I had to process it and realized that he was 100% correct. From that moment, I think it set me on the path to being the communicator that I am.
I learned how to communicate because it was so important for me to be authentic in who I was and to portray my intention.
We always talk about impact versus intent. I don’t care how you meant it, how it came out and how it impacted me was not that.
Dawn Wiggins
Not congruent.
Kate Anthony
Yes. And so I learned. I took that very seriously, and I learned how to align those things, and it’s the greatest gift I think anyone ever gave me.
Dawn Wiggins
What’s so remarkable to me about that moment is how you went home and came to the realization he was right—that is more the defining moment. Your internal deliberation and your willingness to take your own inventory, which is what so many of us struggle with.
Kate Anthony
It was the beginning of a journey—an incredible gift.
Dawn Wiggins
It’s just so remarkable. It was years of teasing out that communication style.
Breaking Free: Stepping Outside the Box of Conditioning
Kate Anthony
When I was 28, probably nine years later, I remember having this experience where I felt like the world that I had been living in was this box created by my mother. Then I suddenly popped my head out of the box and realized there was a whole world out there. I realized I could choose. But while I was living inside that box, I had no choice.
There was something in the personal work I was doing that made me realize, “Oh, wow, this is a box, and I don’t have to be in it.”
Dawn Wiggins
I experienced something similar—I’d feel empowered to take action, but then immediately think, ‘I’m going to hell.”
Kate Anthony
It’s terrifying because we often strip before we rebuild. In the process of stripping your beliefs, you’re naked in the world without all the tools that you’ve been using up until this point. You don’t know who you are. You ask, “What do I do now?” And then you start to rebuild. But there is that period of vulnerability, confusion and terror.
Dawn Wiggins
As you’re deconstructing the beliefs, you don’t have what you perceived as a safety net of your belief system underneath you anymore. So you feel, “If I slip off this tightrope, I could just free fall.”
And it’s not true, but that’s how it feels. That’s how we women perceive it.
Kate Anthony
Sometimes we do freefall, and then we realize, ‘Oh, I’m okay.”
From Acting to Advocacy: Kate Anthony’s Journey Beyond Hollywood
Dawn Wiggins
Since we did our first interview, I learned that you played a role on Grey’s Anatomy.
Kate Anthony
I was an actor for the first part of my life. I started as an actor when I was very young on Sesame Street. I grew up in New York City. My parents were actors, so I was sort of around it all the time. I did my first professional off-Broadway show when I was 11. I just worked and worked, and then I went to college and I worked in mostly theater and some television. And then I moved to LA and landed a role as a nurse on a then-new TV show, Grey’s Anatomy.
It was great. We had a super fun time. But towards the end of that role, I got divorced and I felt done with acting and the industry. I was leaving an emotionally and verbally abusive marriage, and I felt like the entertainment industry was an abusive relationship for actors. There was something in me that was like, “I am going to leave this.”
I had grown to be a person who no longer fit.
If I could have continued to do theater, I probably would have, because theater is a much different medium for actors. It respects the craft, it respects the artist, and it’s a family. The community is an amazing place to be, but you can’t do that as a single mom.
Pioneering Divorce Coaching Before It Was a Thing
Kate Anthony
So, I decided I wanted to do this thing called divorce coaching that nobody had ever heard of at the time in 2009. There was no Instagram, there were no podcasts. Social media was Facebook, and that was for reconnecting with your high school friends. That’s why I created The Divorce Survival Guide Podcast.
Dawn Wiggins
You are a fierce advocate who gives women permission to be unapologetic about their decisions. When was the last time you had to give yourself the same permission? And what did it teach you?
Kate Anthony
The last time I permitted myself to make a difficult decision… It might be to parent my son in the way that he needed, not in the way that everyone told me I should.
Some of my biggest parenting regrets are when I was doing things that other people were doing, because I thought that’s what I was supposed to do.
Fierce Advocacy: Fighting for a Child’s Rights in an Unyielding System
Kate Anthony
I have a neurodivergent son who has faced significant challenges within the education system. To advocate for him, I had to go up against a lot. For me, being his fiercest ally and advocate meant going up against the system. Advocating for him in the face of all of this lack of understanding and lack of education was a huge one.
Dawn Wiggins
I’m all in on homeopathy and my daughter has a good bit of neurodivergent underlying stuff and we’ve been unwinding as much of it as we can.
Kate Anthony
Yes. And the school systems don’t always work. In one of his schools, at the beginning of the school year, I sat with the special education department head and mapped out his 504. But I kept getting called every single day. I would ask, “Did you follow the plan?” Eventually, I blurted out to one of the teachers who called me. “I don’t understand. He has a 504. This is all delineated in the 504.” And there was like this dead silence, and she tells me, ‘Kate, there’s no 504 on file for him.’”
And I went in there and I was like, “Look, I’m not here to raise hell. I am here to get my son’s accommodations. What he needs and what he deserves.”
Standing in Strength: The Art of Assertive Communication
Kate Anthony
I learned how to communicate assertively without being aggressive, standing confidently in my own power—especially as a mother.
Dawn Wiggins
If children of divorced parents could internalize one core value from how their mothers handled the experience, what would you hope that value would be?
Kate Anthony
That they value themselves, and that it’s okay to leave something that doesn’t work for you. That we can disagree and separate and not abandon ourselves, but also we can disagree and separate and do it in a healthy way, with healthy communication.
The Secret Sauce: Helping Women Embrace Self-Worth and Model It for Their Children
Dawn Wiggins
You have some secret sauce you share in The Divorce Survival Guide podcast for how you help your coaching clients step into that, valuing themselves and teaching their children that they’re valued.
Kate Anthony
I want women to have a healthy sense of self. One of the most important things that we lose along the way is our connection to who we are. There are so many things stacked against us as women.
We are expected to sacrifice ourselves. Our happiness doesn’t matter. We’re told to put our kids’ needs above our own. We put our spouses’ needs first. We just cater to everybody.
Until we hit a wall and simply can’t anymore. And we’re so lost. We have no idea who we are and we don’t even know why.
Women’s intuition is incredibly powerful, and studies support that we have a heightened sense of intuition. Men have better problem-solving skills—that’s real too—but our intuition is very strong and important.
Dawn Wiggins
It’s a gift to the world.
Kate Anthony
It’s a gift. It’s what keeps our children safe.
When our babies cry or fuss, we instinctively know what they need because of our intuition. It’s powerful and it’s also one of the biggest threats to the patriarchy. Entire systems have been developed to suppress it.
The $60 billion diet industrial complex is designed around you not having a connection with your hunger and fullness cues. Every diet you’ve ever been on has told you that you’re not hungry, you’re just thirsty. We wonder why we have such rates of obesity and eating disorders.
Reclaiming Intuition: A Radical Act of Self-Connection
Kate Anthony
Reconnecting with our intuition means sitting in that quiet space of, “What do I want? What do I need? How do I need to nurture myself? What do I need from a partner?” We lose this in so many aspects.
Women’s sexuality is like a whole complex map of ecstasy and creation. Men are intimidated by our sexuality. They’re confused by it. They certainly don’t do a whole lot of work to try to understand it. So we just disconnect.
Dawn Wiggins
How often do we women get the question, “Is it anxiety or is it intuition?” It’s confusing.
Reconnecting with Intuition: A Powerful Act of Rebellion
Kate Anthony
For us to reconnect with our intuition, we’re going up against all of these systems that were created to shut us down. That’s the greatest thing that we can do for ourselves—and then to be able to teach that to our children.
Sit with your kids at dinner and when they say, “My belly feels full,” you can say, “Okay. It’ll be here if you’re hungry. I’ll save it for you and you can have some more later.”
Dawn Wiggins
We experience that with my daughter, where she’ll say she’s not hungry or she’ll say her stomach hurts.
So her stomach will ache and she can now, as a 10-year-old, tell you, “I have a tummy ache and it’s emotional,” or “I have a tummy ache and it’s food.” She can now tell the difference.
Kate Anthony
What a gift you’re giving your daughter.
Choosing Yourself: The Ultimate Act of Rebellion in Divorce
Kate Anthony
A woman choosing is a radical act of rebellion.
It’s an act of rebellion for saying that you want a divorce. Deciding is an act of rebellion because women don’t make decisions. We wait for boys to ask us to dance at the school dance. We wait for men to ask us on dates and for men to ask us to marry them.
Dawn Wiggins
You talked earlier about loss of identity and loss of sense of self. There’s so much grief in a divorce process: There’s grieving an identity, a community, a relationship.
You’ve talked to so many people over the years and in The Divorce Survival Guide podcast. From your experience, what’s the most overlooked type of grief in the divorce process?
Grieving the Dream: The Heartache Beyond the Divorce Itself
Kate Anthony
Grieving the loss of the dream is a big one.
We had a vision for our lives, and we didn’t get that. And even if the marriage was terrible, you still get to grieve it.
Dawn Wiggins
You didn’t want a divorce. You wanted relief.
Kate Anthony
That’s the whole thing women experience.
People ask, “Well, why didn’t you leave? If it was so bad. Why didn’t you leave?” Because I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t want the marriage to end. I just wanted the relationship to get better.
The Heart’s Dilemma: When Divorce Brings Unexpected Clarity
Dawn Wiggins
There are two different types of divorces.
There’s the woman who was blindsided by it when he asked for it and then there’s the woman who made that very difficult decision.
I’ve talked to a lot of women over the years who made a decision and then got wobbly on it for that exact reason.
Kate Anthony
For me, it was so confusing. My ex-husband said, “We started getting along really, really, really well after we decided we were going to get divorced.”
It may not be typical, but it can happen a lot. It was so confusing to me. I started to think, “Should we reconsider this? Can we suddenly get along?”
And he said, “Kate, we’re getting along because we finally took meeting each other’s emotional needs off the table. Now we know that’s a done deal. We can just be great friends.”
The Silent Grief: Navigating the Judgment of Choosing Divorce
Dawn Wiggins
We know statistically women file for divorce more often than men. Society says, “If you chose this, what would you be upset about?” There’s less permission or space to grieve.
Kate Anthony
This is why you don’t take divorce advice from people who have never been divorced, gone through the process, or aren’t a professional in divorce coaching.
Book “The D Word”: A Guide to Reclaiming Power and Making the Hardest Decision
Dawn Wiggins
Tell us about your book.
Kate Anthony
My book is called The D Word: Making the Ultimate Decision About Your Marriage. And it’s about making the decision.
It’s a definitive yet accessible guide for everyone who wants to take control of their lives, either by ending or repairing their marriage.
It’s about reconnecting with the self, but it’s also an almost feminist manifesto because I talk about why it’s so hard for women to make these decisions, and why it’s so hard for women to stand in their power.
Also, before you make a decision about divorce, there are a lot of things to consider, and so I try to lay out as much of that as possible in the book.
I have a chapter on what if your spouse is an addict or mentally ill. If they are a cheater or a sex addict. I go through how divorce works, like spousal support work and child support.
Breaking Free: Naming Abuse Without Letting It Define You
Kate Anthony:
Another thing in my book? Defining abuse and how it is an essential part of breaking free and being able to trust oneself.
How do we define abuse? Name it, identify that that’s my past, my lived experience, and then not let it keep me small.
The first step in all of this is actually to acknowledge the victimization, because we are so gaslit into believing that there’s something that we’re not doing that’s causing it to happen. There’s something about acknowledging being a victim that is actually really empowering.
From Self-Doubt to Self-Discovery: Reframing the Question
Dawn Wiggins
But I see so many women ask, “What’s wrong with me?”
Kate Anthony
Here’s what’s wrong with you: You were raised in a society that teaches you to believe there’s something always wrong with you and that men have more power than women.
I believe that we all have our relationship blueprints that brought us to this point and that we can take responsibility for that.
We can take responsibility for choosing people. I, from my earliest years, conflated love with rejection because the person who was supposed to love me rejected me.
And so I attached those two things to my infant brain. So as an adult, it is my responsibility to disconnect those things and go, “Oh, wait, rejection isn’t love. What is love?”
When we reflect on that, we can take responsibility. If we flip it around a little bit, it’s not “What’s wrong with me” but “What happened to me that I grew up to be the kind of person who would make these choices?”
Abusers love really powerful and awesome people, as they’re way more fun to bring down.
The question is, “Okay, how did I get here? What happened?” This might give you some kernels and nuggets of power, and as we heal each of those little nuggets, the relationship stops fitting us.
I remember when we were in couples therapy and our couples therapist said, “Individual therapy kills relationships.” That didn’t make sense to me, so I went to individual therapy and it was through healing my childhood wounds and understanding that I was in my infant brain all the time.
I learned to get my adult brain online with my critical thinking and my prefrontal cortex and all of those pieces that were able to discern about relationships came to me.
Then I decided to get a divorce. Did individual therapy kill my marriage? No. Individual therapy healed me. I knew my marriage no longer worked for me and I understood why.
Growth Requires Two: When One Partner Won’t Evolve
Dawn Wiggins
And there are occasions where two people can go through that process together and separately, and it still works.
In my experience working with couples, often one of them does not want to go to the depths of that transformative process.
Kate Anthony
Marriages and long-term relationships are the most fertile ground for discovery and growth. But if your partner isn’t as invested as you are in that, it becomes a deal breaker.
Where to Begin: Exploring Kate Anthony’s Work on Divorce and Empowerment
Dawn Wiggins
How can people find you?
Kate Anthony
The podcast and the book would both be great places. It’s KateAnthony.com and the podcast is The Divorce Survival Guide podcast.
Dawn Wiggins
Thank you so much for being here, and for sharing your wisdom. You are just such a gift to the world and to us, to our listeners. Thank you for teaching us all how to be the most powerful version of ourselves.
Kate Anthony
Thank you so much for having me, Dawn.
About Dawn Wiggins
Divorce Recovery Coach • Holistic Healer • Founder of Cocoon
Dawn Wiggins is a licensed marriage and family therapist who combines science and holistic healing to help women recover from divorce. Through EMDR, homeopathy, and compassionate guidance, she helps clients process pain and rediscover confidence. Dawn created Cocoon, a supportive divorce recovery community for healing and growth after divorce—because you don’t just deserve to heal, you deserve to thrive.
