When Divorce Tests Your Faith: Protecting Kids & Staying Strong with Top Divorce Lawyer, Bree Sullivan-Howell, JD
Journey Beyond Divorce Podcast
Release Date: 05/20/2026
You Can Insure Your Divorce Settlement. Here's How, with CEO/Founder of NASDF Ronald Platt
Journey Beyond Divorce Podcast
You spend months, sometimes years, negotiating child support and alimony. Then a layoff, a disability, a business bankruptcy, or a death can stop those payments overnight, and most people have no idea there’s a way to protect that income. In this episode, Karen McMahon sits down with Ron Platt, founder of the National Association of Single and Divorced Families (NASDF) and creator of Support Insured, the only policy on the market that covers child support and alimony together. Ron shares how an idea he and his father developed 30 years ago was turned down by carrier after carrier because of...
info_outline
Should I Stay Together for the Kids?
Journey Beyond Divorce Podcast
Should you stay for the kids? Karen McMahon opens this solo episode with a composite scene drawn from moments she has seen over and over in her work: a dinner table, a parent’s jaw tightening, and a silence that lasts a beat too long. Two children respond in two different ways. Nine-year-old Emily fills the quiet with bright chatter, and five-year-old Jake gets smaller, hoping to take up less space. Their parent watches it happen across the table and recognizes the same fear in both of them. From there, Karen explains what those moments teach. Children who grow up around tension build coping...
info_outline
AI and Divorce: What Your Chatbot Could Cost You in Court with Amanda DuBois
Journey Beyond Divorce Podcast
Everyone is turning to AI to get organized, prepare for attorney meetings, and make sense of divorce. Seattle family law attorney Amanda DuBois, founder of DuBois Law Group and 30 years into practicing, explains why that instinct can backfire. Amanda walks through why conversations with a chatbot have no attorney-client privilege, which means your prompts and the AI’s answers can be requested in discovery or subpoenaed. She connects it to something she has seen for decades: journals and diaries are discoverable too, unless you are keeping them at your lawyer’s direction for the case....
info_outline
When Women Out-Earn their Spouse: Navigating High-Conflict Divorce with Divorce Coach, Ksenia Muench
Journey Beyond Divorce Podcast
High-achieving women often carry the whole household on their shoulders. They build the career, bring home the bigger paycheck, and still come home to the kids, the laundry, and a spouse who assumes they can handle it all. When divorce enters the picture, and especially a high-conflict divorce, that weight doubles overnight. In this episode, Karen McMahon sits down with fellow high-conflict divorce strategist Ksenia Muench, founder of Thrive Again Divorce Coaching and creator of the High Conflict Playbook, who lived her own high-conflict divorce as the higher-earning spouse. Karen and Ksenia...
info_outline
How to Prepare for Divorce: 5 Steps to Take Before You File
Journey Beyond Divorce Podcast
Whether you've decided to divorce and haven't told your spouse yet, or the decision has been made for you, the first weeks can bring a wave of fear, guilt, overwhelm and uncertainty. In this solo episode, Karen McMahon, high-conflict divorce coach and founder of Journey Beyond Divorce, explains how to prepare for divorce in a way that protects your emotional health, your finances and your children. After 16 years of coaching, Karen has seen that how you handle the emotional side of divorce shapes how well you handle the legal, financial and co-parenting decisions that follow. She explains why...
info_outline
10 Year Anniversary Episode: How to Thrive After Divorce: A Midlife Survival Guide with Karen McMahon
Journey Beyond Divorce Podcast
To celebrate a decade of Journey Beyond Divorce, we're sharing a special collection of episodes featuring Karen McMahon as a guest on some of her favorite podcasts. Over the years, Karen has joined incredible hosts across the divorce, coaching, and personal growth space to share her story and her expertise. This collection brings those conversations together in one place, offering a look at Karen's voice and message from a different angle, through the eyes of the hosts who welcomed her. Thank you for being part of this journey, and for helping Journey Beyond Divorce grow into what it is today....
info_outline
The Divorce Digital Blind Spot: What Your Lawyer Isn't Warning You About with Jonathan Steele, Esq.
Journey Beyond Divorce Podcast
Changing the locks is no longer the same thing as changing the access. In this episode, Karen McMahon sits down with Jonathan Steele, a Chicago based family law attorney and certified cybersecurity professional, for a conversation Journey Beyond Divorce has never had in over 425 episodes. Jonathan has spent more than a decade litigating high conflict, high net worth cases, and he brings a layer of technical expertise that most family lawyers simply do not have. Karen opens with the uncomfortable truth that almost nobody going through divorce thinks of themselves as a cybersecurity target....
info_outline
How to Stop Anxiety from Controlling Your Divorce Decisions with Mindful Drinking Coach, Colleen Freeland Kachmann
Journey Beyond Divorce Podcast
If you've ever felt like you can't think straight, can't stop second-guessing yourself, or can't figure out why you keep making decisions you regret, this episode is for you. One of the most damaging and least talked about effects of divorce is what anxiety does to your decision making. Fear takes over, your nervous system goes into overdrive, and suddenly you're not making choices from a clear, grounded place, you're reacting. Most people don't even realize it's happening until the damage is done, and for many, anxiety and alcohol end up feeding each other during this exact chapter of life....
info_outline
10 Year Anniversary Episode: High Conflict Relationships: Self-Love Deficit, Delusions & Boundaries
Journey Beyond Divorce Podcast
To celebrate a decade of Journey Beyond Divorce, we're sharing a special collection of episodes featuring Karen McMahon as a guest on some of her favorite podcasts. Over the years, Karen has joined incredible hosts across the divorce, coaching, and personal growth space to share her story and her expertise. This collection brings those conversations together in one place, offering a look at Karen's voice and message from a different angle, through the eyes of the hosts who welcomed her. Thank you for being part of this journey, and for helping Journey Beyond Divorce grow into what it is today....
info_outline
The Masculine Dilemma: Why Divorced Men Keep Repeating the Same Mistakes with, Relationship and Men’s Work Coach, Geoff Laughton
Journey Beyond Divorce Podcast
What if divorce wasn't really about her? That's the question Karen McMahon poses to open this episode of Journey Beyond Divorce, and the question at the center of her conversation with Geoff Laughton, a Relationship and Men's Work Coach with 33 years of experience, 300+ workshops, and thousands of clients. Geoff calls the pattern the "Masculine Dilemma," a set of unconscious traps that quietly erode men's marriages long before divorce ever becomes a possibility. He's also 44 years into his own marriage, so he's not just teaching this work, he's living it. Karen and Geoff dig into what actually...
info_outlineDivorce can rattle everything you believe in. Your sense of family, your identity, and even your understanding of God's plan for your life... And for many Christians, the place that should offer the most comfort, the church, can sometimes feel like the last place they're able to be honest about what they're going through.
In this episode, Karen sits down with Bree Sullivan-Howell, divorce attorney, passionate children's advocate, and award-winning Christian author of Crush Your Divorce & Keep Your Faith and Crush Your Comeback, for a conversation that brings together sharp legal wisdom and deep spiritual grounding in a way that is rarely offered to people navigating divorce.
With more than 20 years of experience in high-stakes custody litigation and family law, Bree has sat with men and women at some of the most painful and disorienting moments of their lives. What she brings to this conversation is both practical and profound, an understanding of how faith doesn't disappear in the middle of relational chaos, but can actually deepen through it.
Karen and Bree explore how traditional church messaging can unintentionally shame Christian women going through divorce, how misunderstood scripture can leave people feeling pressured to stay in unhealthy or even abusive marriages, and how an eternal perspective, rooted in prayer and truth, can replace fear with clarity. Bree shares how she weaves scriptural wisdom directly into her legal strategy, encouraging clients toward dignified conduct, truthful evidence, and emotional steadiness even when everything around them feels unstable.
They also speak candidly about fathers navigating custody, a dimension of divorce that often goes underserved. Bree addresses the reality that many loving, involved dads face an uphill battle to stay connected to their children, often needing to "double prove" their parenting, resist adopting a negative narrative pushed by an ex, and communicate with intention using tools like BIFF, all while continuing to simply show up for their kids, consistently and without fail.
Whether you are at the beginning of this process, in the thick of it, or trying to find solid ground on the other side, this episode offers both the legal clarity and the spiritual encouragement to take your next step with confidence. God's purpose doesn't end when the marriage does, and this conversation is a powerful reminder of that.
Connect with Bree:
- Free Gift: Devotional for the Divorcing - www.crushyourdivorce.com
- www.sullivan-firm.com
- Book: https://a.co/d/0v4Iqql
- Instagram: @lawyerbree | @crushyourdivorce
- TikTok - @lawyerbree