People don’t usually walk into a family lawyer’s office asking how to reflect and evolve—but in our experience, a failure to learn from past relationships is often what brings people back. Again and again.
In this episode, Ben and Heather talk to Dr. Robyn Goodwin, a clinical psychologist from LSC Psychology in Sydney, to explore how to learn from broken relationships so you can move forward with clarity and reassurance.
Topics covered include:
Marriage Decline, Separation & Life Rebuilding, Dr Denis Ladbrook: This is the flow chart that Dr Robyn Goodwin refers to, showing 4 distinct pathways following separation.
The Deluth Model, Wheel of Equality: referenced by Dr Robyn Goodwin as providing green lights (rather than just red lights) when moving into a new relationship.
Dr Robyn Goodwin talked about a Reddit study that suggested that attachment bonds with your ex partner will take as much as 4 years to subside. She actually conflated two studies, and these are listed below:
Reddit Study: Emotional and cognitive costs of romantic breakup: a study based on reddit post data that predicts breakups several months before they occur.
The Long-Term Stability of Affective Bonds After Romantic Separation: a study that found the persistence of attachment bonds was significant, with the midpoint of relinquishment being just over 4 years.
It’s Called a Breakup Because It’s Broken, by Greg Behrendt: a manual for finding your way back after separation. Dr. Robyn Goodwin has not personally read this book, but some of her client’s have and found it helpful.
Spiritual Divorce, by Debbie Ford: a book that Ben sometimes recommends to clients, that some find helpful and others find too raw.
AppleSpotifyAmazonPocketcastiHeartRadioGoogle
Benjamin Bryant: Welcome to episode 66. I’m your host Benjamin Bryant from Bryant McKinnon Lawyers. Today we’re stepping back from the legal side of separation to look at something more personal, but just as important: how we can learn and grow from broken relationships. Now, people don’t usually walk into a family lawyer’s office asking how to reflect and evolve, but in our experience, a failure to learn from past relationships is often what brings people back again and again. To help us explore the emotional side of separation and how to move forward in healthier ways, we’re joined by Dr Robyn Goodwin, a clinical psychologist with LSC Psychology in Sydney. Robin has worked across public, private, educational and not-for-profit sectors and specialises in interpersonal emotion regulation. In short, she understands the emotional chaos that often follows a break-up and she’s here to help us make sense of it. And of course, I’m joined, as always, by my partner and family law specialist Heather McKinnon, who still hopes that one day none of her clients will ever need to return. Whether you’re newly separated or still carrying the weight of an old relationship, we hope this episode offers clarity and reassurance, and maybe even sets you on a path to something better. If you know someone going through a separation, please share this podcast with them. Today’s episode is about the long view, but our growing library also offers practical answers for more immediate concerns, helping listeners feel more informed and less overwhelmed. So let’s get started.
Benjamin Bryant: Well thank you for joining us, Robyn. And welcome back Heather.
Benjamin Bryant: Let’s start by talking about the pain of separation. Robyn, why does a relationship breakdown hurt so much even when you know things weren’t working?
Robyn Goodwin: There are no emotions that are off the table when it comes to separation. I’ll just go through a few of the common ones that a lot of people experience. The first one is grief. For obvious reasons. Guilt and shame come up. That’s around a sense of failure, around the person’s family and their own expectations about the relationship, how they expected that it would go. But separation is a deeply personal experience that’s so defined by a person’s individual circumstances that people can often feel very alone and lonely because it just represents the finality of a person who was once an intimate confidant, being now, at the very least, lost and at worst like an enemy. And I think if you’re unlucky enough to have kids along for the ride, too, you’ll be feeling a lot of parent guilt about putting them through a separation because they’re often very upset, confused. And it’s a very disruptive experience for them that you have to manage on top of the feelings about the separation that you have personally.
Benjamin Bryant: And like you said, Robyn, all separations are different. No emotions are off the table. And people also, when they reach out to others, they share their experience with other people’s experience. Sometimes, learning about what emotions they were going to. And that’s not the emotions that you have and that can create other emotions. And also sometimes people might be feeling the same thing, but also at different times. There’s no one way to separate. So there is a cycle of grief for sure. But what that looks like for everyone is completely different.
Robyn Goodwin: They can also have positive emotions as well as part of separation, depending on barriers that you saw to the relationship ending and things that you were putting up with. On the other side, realising that, you may sense relief or happiness as a result of the relationship ending as well.
Benjamin Bryant: For sure.
Benjamin Bryant: And we often hear, learn from your mistakes. But that’s easier said than done when you’re still angry or grieving. How do strong emotions get in the way of reflection or growth?
Robyn Goodwin: I would say there’s three main ways they can get in the way of reflection and growth. And the first one is so obvious to everyone, and that’s that strong emotions can cloud our thinking. So they can deeply affect our cognitive functions, the way we perceive things, our memory, planning, decision-making processes. And that doesn’t set us up for success in any way. The second way it can impact us is through self-protective functions. So this is a little bit more complex. But sometimes as humans, our psychological defences kick in to protect us from bad stuff. Like if we’ve done something really bad, we can kind of engage in some kind of cognitive distortions around that and minimise it, so that we don’t feel so bad. Or to keep us apart from our own mortality and our existential sense that we’re all going to die. We have ways of shutting off from that. Those are just a couple of examples.
Robyn Goodwin: But when it comes to really strong emotions, sometimes things like anger can get in the way of you experiencing other feelings or taking responsibility for something that you’ve done wrong, especially if you’re in a cycle of resentment and anger. It can have you looking outwards rather than inwards. And similarly, if you’re someone who is, very self-blaming, you can be upset, you can be distressed. Those feelings are causing you to blame yourself too much and not look at some of the external influences that might be at play.
Robyn Goodwin: The other thing is that strong emotions can be really exhausting to experience, especially if you’re continuing through a process that’s not ending and that you can’t really dip out from. When our resources are depleted, they just make us more reactive, more vulnerable to stress. And that’s really compounded by all the changes that we need to take on around separation, like maintaining the kids routine, how to talk to them, how to communicate with other people and your family and your community, how to function independently of your partner, how to stay focused on your work, the financial stresses that are going to come alongside separation. Looking for a new house to live in. All of these things. It’s such a seismic change, and these strong emotions coming at the same time just really derail everything. A lot of the time.
Benjamin Bryant: Yeah, absolutely. All of the things and Heather, I guess what we’re looking for in identifying with clients, but also with people on the other side is insight, essentially whether they have any insight as to what’s happening or whether they’re just in the thick of it or the storm of it. Do you have anything to say about how you kind of identify or get insight into your clients or the other side?
Heather McKinnon: Yeah. Look, it’s a lifelong journey, isn’t it, Rob? Often, we’ll get an expert report back. I’ve got an interview with someone later today where the expert has said, they have no insight. And I’m doing everything I can to try and get this person to someone like Robyn to see if they can get that anger and that grief calmed a bit, so this person can start thinking. But some people, as Rob, will know, it’s impossible. And you hear it in practitioners on the other side. I mean, it’s interesting to be in a separation process where you’ve actually got lawyers who are tied into emotion and not thinking. Yeah, really interesting way that humans react.
Benjamin Bryant: And, Robyn, how does one go about unpacking or processing these emotions, especially in the early days?
Robyn Goodwin: I’ll answer that question directly in a moment, but I want to spin off something Heather was saying. And that is, these events don’t happen in isolation, do they? Right. They happen to a person; they happen to a couple. And we’re so individualistically oriented in our society that we think about it as being, that’s those people’s separation. And that’s how the law looks at it. But it’s like a bomb goes off in your family system and your community when this happens, and everyone needs to reorganise themselves. And so there are all of these rippling impacts around who’s being affected. If you’re a solicitor and you’re working with someone who’s going through a separation. You’re taking on that anxiety. It’s impacting your nervous system and then it’s impacting your circle of influence, too. Not to mention, the kids and other people in that nuclear family structure we’re talking about. But it does have a huge impact. I can’t emphasise it enough, but I will link it to your question in some way here. Ben, I’m going to say that processing the emotions is, first of all, recognising that this is having a seismic impact, internally and intrapsychically. It’s going to have a communal impact as well, that the person who’s in the separation has to manage in some way.
Robyn Goodwin: That can really help people with their feelings of guilt and shame and so on, is that they start thinking, oh, these are all my problems. They’re actually everyone’s problems to hold on to and help people recover from. We talk about processing emotions a lot. I talk about it all the time, but I’m guilty of not really having a definition for what processing emotion even is. I think it really just involves identifying, understanding, accepting, and making sense of your feelings, just in order to move through them constructively. I think our feelings are actually powerful helpers for us. They give us information about our needs, and if we block them out, if we ignore them, if we compartmentalise them, they’re going to come up and cause problems for us somewhere else. So if there’s a way you can healthily manage the emotions, so not lashing out or not drinking yourself into a puddle or going and engaging in a bunch of risky behaviour to kind of dampen those internal signals, you might learn something really important about what you actually need and how to meet that, that need for yourself and your community.
Benjamin Bryant: For sure. Thinking about it, Robyn, is there any practical questions or exercises that you recommend, like in your practice for people to start, in terms of unpacking it?
Robyn Goodwin: I think it depends on a lot of things. I suppose, it’s really helpful just for someone to have someone to talk to who’s not part of that system I’m talking about. It is obviously important to talk to your family and friends, but it can be invaluable for people to talk to someone who is outside of their situation. And it doesn’t have to be a psychologist. It can be sometimes even a work colleague who you don’t have that close relationship with, although don’t form a relationship with that person as a result of disclosing your heart’s vulnerabilities. I’ve seen that happen. But just being able to talk about those things and connect your cerebral functioning, right, your cognitive and executive functioning to those emotional experiences and help you understand what you’re going through and slow things down a bit.
Benjamin Bryant: And also, Robyn, you need to be careful, at least I do as a practitioner, helping people in terms of what resources that I give to people because not all resources are for everyone. For example, I have the book by Debbie Ford, Spiritual Divorce, which is a pretty, significant hefty book and about, the purpose of your relationship and divorce and everything happens for a reason, all these different things. And I’ve had clients that absolutely love it and say, yes, I was ready for this. This all makes sense now. And I’ve had other clients who can’t get through the first chapter because they’re like, no, no, no, no, no, this is too raw, too raw. So it’s really difficult. It’s not a one size fits all approach.
Robyn Goodwin: Yeah. And the kind of support that you might need changes depending on where you are in your journey. There was a really great diagram that I came across a while ago by Dr Denis Ladbrook. He’s not an academic or anything, but he has drawn this beautiful picture of the marriage decline, separation and life rebuilding. And it’s a pathway that is drawn and along the pathway are all those things about courtship and the early relationship and your hopes and dreams and then, changes in your sex life and the children coming in and changes in your development. And then there’s this sort of, like a cyclone that happens at the point of separation, and then it branches out into these four different pathways. And the pathways are building a new life, right. Which is what we all want to do. The next pathway is the rebound relationship pathway, which at first feels really nice and healing and soothing, but actually causes more long-term problems and later suffering. Then there’s the continuing the crisis pathway, which is all about melodrama, not letting go, resentment, really, suffering, well-being wise. And the last one is drifting through life, not being able to recover from what’s happened. Fatigue, withdrawal, indecision, giving up the struggle. And it’s really poignant to look at those pathways and to sort of plot where you might be headed. you need the tonic of time to be able to plot that chart. But it’s a really helpful map, I think. Anyway, I’ve rambled for too long. Get on to the next question.
Benjamin Bryant: I don’t think you’ve rambled at all. I think you’ve described that map very well, and I might actually ask you at the end of the show whether you’d provide it to us so we can use that. That’s fantastic. Can you still learn something, even if you feel the other person was mostly at fault in terms of the separation?
Robyn Goodwin: Well, I think, I mean, I’m a psychologist, so I’m biased. I think you can learn something no matter what happens. You can reflect on things and think about yourself in all circumstances. But I want to say very clearly that sometimes when you separate or something bad has happened in a relationship, it’s not your fault at all, right? Especially in cases of abuse or when people have conducted themselves in a way that’s extremely harmful. Violence and other things. That happens. And I think we need to be careful not to blame people who have been the targets of that, because they often engage in a lot of self-blame themselves, because they’ve been subject to psychological abuse around that. However, I think it’s still worth asking the question: how did I choose this person as my life partner? How did I come to make that decision? Because if you’re using words like sociopath, narcissist, you know this person’s like Satan incarnate, and there’s nothing good about them. Then how come you thought there was? Right. How come at some point you felt that this was the one for you? And it may be that they tricked you? Right. And they put on a show, and there was nothing that you could have done. However, I work with a lot of people who have experienced family violence in therapy, and all of them they look back and they go, there were red flags, Or they’ll say something like, it was all too good to be true, things like that, that they look back and now interpret their experiences in light of their current knowledge. And sometimes people just do that because they need to feel a sense of control over their journey and they honestly couldn’t have known. But I think there’s some value in asking the question, because it helps you to figure out if there was a role that you played in the relationship, whether it’s not the breakdown, but perhaps maintaining a relationship with someone who was not good for you.
Benjamin Bryant: And I think it’s interesting. It’s easy on the sidelines looking in. And this is what people do, especially if they’re in litigation, they’re at court, they’re getting an umpire in. Someone is, on the sidelines looking back. But they’re not just looking at what you want them to look at. They look at the whole picture and when you’re on the side, it’s quite easy to do that. But when you’re in it, it’s really quite difficult to do that. So I think it’s, very important to see someone like yourself. there’s always room for self-reflecting.
Benjamin Bryant: Robyn, how do we avoid slipping into either blame or self-blame when looking back?
Robyn Goodwin: Well, I guess there’s a healthy level of responsibility that needs to be taken, right? And I think I like the distinction between guilt and shame as something that I talk to people about when they are stuck. Same is like an emotion that is putting you into a, like a sump, you know, like this disgusting well of filth that you can’t get out of. And it becomes self-perpetuating and it becomes really self-focused as well. Like, I’m a terrible person. I’m bad. That kind of stuff. That kind of language. Whereas guilt is an emotion that motivates you to right wrongs. Okay. It’s like, oh my gosh, I’ve done the wrong thing. I better quickly, right it. I better tell that person I’m sorry or do that thing that I know I’m responsible for. It’s a much healthier emotion because it really keeps things turning interpersonally, and it repairs relationships. it’s people changing their behaviour. And I think if you’re if you’re used to feeling guilt repeatedly over and over, you can just like slump down into shame, or there are other factors causing a shame kind of reaction. So, I mean, I like to differentiate between those two states and look at one as actually being quite healthy, and the other one as being pathological.
Benjamin Bryant: Interesting. Another thing we’ve learned Heather. We’ll use that. And Heather in your experience, what happens when someone doesn’t do the reflection or chooses not to learn from what went wrong?
Heather McKinnon: Well, I can tell you, after 40-odd years in my regional community, you’ll turn up in my office again. As Robyn said, I think one of the stark learnings is that people will often enter a rebound relationship because it is a preventative to doing that hard work. And you get a lot of feedback from colleagues and friends and family, “Oh, it’s great you’ve just been able to shut that door and now we’re going to the next wedding.” But wow, the pain that comes when that second one or that third one ends, and people actually start to examine themselves. It’s way worse than I think, trying to have a gap. But you can’t stop people, can you, Robyn? It’s a very difficult thing because…
Robyn Goodwin: I want to stop people.
Heather McKinnon: But not it’s not our role.
Robyn Goodwin: Alarm going off.
Heather McKinnon: It’s such an interesting thing, but often it’ll prevent people from going to people like Robyn. Rather than examining what happened in the failed relationship by taking a new lover. That intimacy replaces what that hard work should have been. And the thing that amazes me is the external validation that it’s appropriate. Like instead of your friends and family saying, don’t do it. They don’t. They just go to the wedding and buy another present.
Robyn Goodwin: I know, and I mean, your true friends are the ones who are going to challenge you in this as well, right? They’re not just like, let’s surround ourselves with yes men. It’s not that kind of a thing that’s actually going to help. And I’ve seen people in therapy: they don’t tell me they’ve formed another relationship sometimes because on some level they know that I’m going to say, are you sure that’s a good idea? Or tell me about that relationship. Tell me about all the red flags and green flags we’ve been discussing and tell me if they’re present or absent. Yeah. And then they’ll drop out of therapy. And sometimes they come back six months, 12 months later. And they disclose, they give me their confession like I was seeing someone else, and it turned out terrible. And now there’s another AVO. And you’re just like, why didn’t you tell me? But they know, right? People do know on some level. And you’ve got to ask yourself, why aren’t you telling anyone about this relationship? Or why is everyone only telling me positive things about this? But I’m, you know.
Benjamin Bryant: But it’s also the reason you do what you do, and we do what we do: we love people. Infinitely interesting.
Benjamin Bryant: Robyn, in your work, do you see people repeating the same relationship patterns? And what are the signs that someone might be heading down that same old road?
Robyn Goodwin: Well, yes, I do. I just alluded to it then, didn’t I? I do see people repeating the same patterns. I have to say, I am not saying this from a judgmental place at all. I’m saying it from a place like we all do this, I do this, humans do this. We have our little vulnerabilities and our weaknesses, and if we’re in it, we can’t see it. And it’s really difficult because sometimes we play out these patterns that happened and occurred for us in our relationships as infants and toddlers, right? With our attachment figures, with our parents. We learned on a very primal level what creates equilibrium in an intimate relationship. And it’s nonverbal. We don’t have words at that time. Infants and children, their first language is an emotional language, the behavioural language. They learn, how can I get my caregiver to be in a state of homeostasis? How can I get them to be functioning as well as possible? And if that caregiver doesn’t like a crying baby and they get upset about it and they become upset, the baby stops crying, right? They stop putting their needs out there to be met. Equally, there’s a distant caregiver who’s, involved in a lot of different things and maybe abusing substances or something. I’m using an exaggerated example here. That baby needs to really escalate to get what they want, right? And sometimes it works if they’re loud enough. Right. And so you can see people’s personalities being shaped. And as you can see what makes them feel comfortable in an intimate relationship. And those are the patterns, those non-verbal patterns, the ones where we kind of find our space and our personal space with our intimate family members. That’s the place where we’re repeating patterns and we don’t necessarily know that’s what we’re doing.
Benjamin Bryant: Insight again,
Benjamin Bryant: And what’s your advice to someone who feels stuck like their past relationship still defines them?
Robyn Goodwin: Um, look, I guess there’s two things I want to say about that. One is, you have to accept that your relationships will always define you in some way. I mean, the question is not will it define you, but how is it going to define you? Okay. So, sorry that experience is now woven in the tapestry of your life. Like there’s no unstitching that. There’s no sugar coating some of it. But other things are also embroidered alongside of that as part of the bigger tapestry of your life. And that you may feel more grounded in, and you feel more at home in your self-definition and the way that you talk about this experience, the way that you’ve put it in context, is really the most important thing. I guess the other thing I want to say is that it’s really normal to feel attached to your ex-partner for quite some time. There was a study that came out this year that looked at, I think it was like Reddit discussion boards, or someone had done some big data thing. I hope I’m not misrepresenting it. I’ll send it through to you. And you look at it and shake your head and be like this. What are you talking about? I was probably looking at it late at night, but I was really quite interested in.
Robyn Goodwin: The finding was that they looked at all these discussion boards and the language that people used, and they kind of did some calculations and decided that it took people around four years for people to get halfway toward, being over the relationship. Obviously, you can read the study and I’m sure there’s some kind of methodology issues and things like that, but it is a really powerful reminder that when we form these attachment bonds, you don’t just snip them off. Right? And some people act like that’s occurred, but you’re always going to feel attached to that person. And when you’re feeling vulnerable, like you know, you’re alone at Christmas or something bad happens to you, you lose your job or something, you start yearning for that person, or you start like thinking about the relationship. Like, was it really that bad? Or maybe, you know, should I reach out to that person and reconnect or… You’re vulnerable, right? We’re human beings. We need that kind of relationship. That’s what we’ve evolved to survive with, those kinds of attachment relationships. So be easy on yourself, right? It’s normal to kind of feel, it’s hard to get over, whatever that means, right?
Benjamin Bryant: That is great advice. Robyn, you’ve mentioned the study. You’ve given us that diagram or the map, the four different paths.
Robyn Goodwin: It’s probably something like four months and I’ve said four years.
Benjamin Bryant: So I’m going to ask you, is there any other resources that you find yourself giving in this circumstance to your clients. Is there like a go to website or resources that you use all the time?
Robyn Goodwin: Well, Ben, like you said before, I shy away from giving general advice because everyone is in a specific circumstance. Like, really, I could recommend something and it’ll be the worst thing for someone to look at, depending where they are along that path, depending on who they are and what happened in their relationship. There are two things that I like to do, though. One is, because I work with a lot of people who have experienced abuse, if in fact they have experienced abuse and family violence, we look at what that constitutes. We look at how to understand what abuse is. And I use the Duluth Wheel for that, which I can send you through. But they’ve also developed another one, which is not all doom and gloom. Like it’s all about, you know, what is violence and what is financial abuse and all this other stuff, which is kind of depressing. It’s important. But at the same time, I like to talk about green flags, right? So if you’re going to go into another relationship or if you’re going to, put yourself out there or feel that someone could be entering your space of connection, what green flags can you look for next time instead of red flags? It’s not taking a negative view so much, which I think is really helpful for people who have been through a hard time.
Robyn Goodwin: So I can put you in touch with those things if you want them. The other thing is there’s a book that I have not read, and so here I am recommending something to some listener out there who I don’t know in any way for something that I’ve never read myself. A couple of clients have read this book, and they really like it because it’s funny and it’s relatable and it’s written for women, but I think it’s also quite useful for men. The book It’s Called a Break-Up Because it’s Broken, and I think a couple has written it from memory. I can send that through to you. sometimes you want to read something, and you want to feel like you have an anchor in this process, and that can provide that. And if not, throw it in the bin immediately. That is my professional advice.
Benjamin Bryant: Thank you, Robyn. I’m going to end up. asking Robyn and Heather you both the same question. Let’s start with you, Robyn. What is the one piece of advice you would give listeners in the aftermath of a broken relationship to equip them for future relationships?
Robyn Goodwin: Oh, one piece of advice. Well, I want to give like 20. But just based on what I’ve learned professionally, I would say get to know yourself, right? Get to know your internal architecture. Get a handle on some of those things I was talking about before, about what makes you comfortable in a relationship. Like what’s your equilibrium in terms of power dynamics, in terms of approach and avoid dynamics, in terms of avoidance and pursuing someone and where you feel comfortable. If the person is moving away from you or moving towards you. There are big differences in how people feel about that kind of stuff. Attachment dynamics. I’d say definitely get to know that internal architecture and it’ll help you in all of your relationships throughout life. And I want to say that future intimacy is not going to work in a sustainable way if those things are miscalibrated.
Benjamin Bryant: Heather one piece of advice?
Heather McKinnon: Look, I think at 65 and looking back, that Reddit study about the four years, for me, it’s the eastern philosophers who talk about the march of a thousand days. In any major transition in your life, take a breath and take that three years to recover, and in that time, learn to love yourself. Then at the end of that journey, you can go forward. But I think what we see is so much damage happens when people don’t take that breath.
Benjamin Bryant: Well, thank you, Heather, and thank you so much, Robyn. What a brilliant episode and thank you for your green flags, I love that.
Robyn Goodwin: My pleasure.
Benjamin Bryant: And that brings us to the end of this episode of The Family Matters Show. A heartfelt thank you to Dr Robyn Goodwin for sharing her insight into how we can process the emotions of a break-up and take something meaningful from the experience. And of course, thanks to Heather McKinnon for sharing over 40 years of experience watching people learn and grow from separation or sometimes returning after the next relationship breakdown. If you’re feeling stuck in the aftermath of separation, we hope today’s conversation has given you something to reflect on and maybe even a sense of hope. And don’t forget, The Family Matters Show is more than just today’s episode. Our growing library covers everything from co-parenting to property settlements, from legal basics to emotional well-being. So if you’re working your way through separation or supporting someone who is, take a moment to explore the back catalogue. You can find all of our episodes at bryantmckinnon.com.au or search for The Family Matters Show wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time, thanks for listening.