There is a particular kind of gaslighting that is almost impossible to name while you’re inside it — the kind where someone spends years convincing you that you can’t survive without them, and you believe it so completely that leaving feels less like freedom and more like stepping off a ledge. That was Kelly Sundberg’s reality before her divorce. Her ex-husband had her convinced she was incompetent — that she couldn’t parent alone, that she couldn’t care for herself, that without him, she would fall apart. What happened instead was that she left, earned a PhD, raised her son to 80% custody with extraordinary closeness, wrote two celebrated books about surviving domestic violence and healing after trauma, got remarried to someone who met her as a whole person and loved her that way, and became one of the most important voices in the conversation about why women stay in abusive marriages. In this warm, luminous episode of Divorce Happens, host Olivia Howell sits down with Kelly for a conversation that is equal parts literary and deeply, disarmingly human.

Kelly’s first book, Goodbye, Sweet Girl, told the story of her marriage and why she stayed as long as she did. Her second, The Answer Is in the Wound — published through Roxane Gay Books — is a hybrid essay collection and memoir about what comes after: surviving PTSD, reclaiming identity after coercive control, learning to be alone, single parenting, and slowly, improbably, learning to love again. She talks in this episode about what surprised her most after leaving: not how hard it was to be a single mother, but how much easier it was than being married to someone whose presence was itself a burden. She had been carrying his emotional weight, managing his moods, parenting him alongside their son — and she hadn’t even known it. The relief of her own home, her own decisions, her own mess, her own peace, was something she genuinely hadn’t anticipated. Her time as a single parent, she says, was her favorite season of motherhood.

But the moment that might stop listeners in their tracks comes when Kelly talks about codependency — and offers one of the most quietly stunning reframes in recent Divorce Happens memory. She describes how those old codependent impulses surfaced when she started dating the man she would eventually marry. And then she says this: they had nowhere to go. Her partner, eight years younger and emotionally grounded, had no interest in being managed, fixed, or rescued. Her need to caretake had no foothold. And so it faded. For anyone who has ever feared that their patterns will follow them into their next relationship, Kelly’s story is both a warning and a profound piece of hope: the right person isn’t someone who accommodates your old wounds. They’re someone whose presence simply doesn’t feed them. This episode is a gift for anyone surviving domestic violence, healing after an abusive relationship, or trying to believe that a full, joyful, loving life is still waiting on the other side of the hardest thing they’ve ever done.

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