Dave the Divorce Doula

Supporting grief, clarity, and growth

A winding path leading over hills toward the sunrise

Divorce is one of the most painful, yet transformative experiences of your life. You are navigating difficult emotions while learning an unfamiliar process and making high-stakes decisions. How you move through this process now will shape your emotional well-being, finances, and quality of life for years to come.

You deserve support during this short but pivotal chapter. Our sessions make space to understand and heal the emotional pain this experience brings up. Separating the emotional work from the legal process helps you make sound decisions that move the divorce toward resolution with less conflict, lower costs, and fewer expensive mistakes.

I help you avoid costly mistakes by giving you access to the insights and lessons learned, from me and from my clients, that are most relevant to your case. You see how different choices tend to unfold, where the hidden risks and costs are, and which fights aren’t worth the time, stress, or money. That can save far more than the cost of our time together.

People appreciate working with me because I’m compassionate, warm, and informative. My ability to help you navigate complex problems, understand tradeoffs, and make steady progress toward an inspiring new vision comes from decades of coaching executives at agile tech startups. My ability to offer timely insights, reframes, and inspiration comes from a lifelong passion for philosophy, spirituality, and personal development, with skills I’ve developed through Nonviolent Communication and Internal Family Systems.

Your first call is free, it’s a chance to get a feel for working with me before deciding on a short-term or open-ended engagement.

Schedule a free call

In the sections below:

Supporting Your Transformation: As your Divorce Doula, I help you mourn the life you thought you would have (Death), find your way through uncertainty (Valley of Darkness), and recognize the new life you are creating (Rebirth).
Four Pillars of Support: I help you stay well resourced in the four areas of Litigation, Therapy, Community, and Self.
Benefits to You: Working with me creates more Ease, so you can move through things with greater Efficiency, resulting in meaningful Savings from lower legal bills and fewer costly mistakes.
Next Steps: I walk you through how I usually work with people, from a free call to a short-term or ongoing engagement.

I was a little uncertain about how a doula could help me through my divorce process. But the experience has been absolutely phenomenal. Dave helped me reframe the story of my divorce in a way that’s enabled me to process the pain and uncertainty while supporting my healing. He’s guided me to invaluable resources that have been instrumental to my ability to persevere. And he’s helped keep me grounded and focused during the ups and downs. My divorce is not a story of failure… it’s a story of my personal transformation. And Dave has been with me the whole journey. I’m so very grateful.

Kevin · 58yo · Married 20 years (Gay Interracial Couple)

Coming soon

Supporting Your Transformation

I provide calm in the overwhelm with a clear roadmap of incremental next steps, so you can look to the horizon, where you define and claim the new life you are stepping into. I support the alchemy of you reclaiming your life story, owning your challenges, identifying your unmet needs, and fulfilling the life you desire.

This isn’t about the divorce. It’s about you stepping into a better life.

I’m here for the whole journey: mourning the death of the life you thought you would have, finding your way through the valley of darkness, and recognizing the new life you are already creating.

Death

When a marriage ends, it’s important to grieve the loss of the relationship, your best friend, and the future you thought you would have.

Even if the decision to separate came as a surprise, the end of the marriage may have been long and painful. You may have spent years trying to save it, living with distance or conflict, and realizing how far the relationship had drifted from what you once hoped it would be.

You are grieving the loss of an identity. Your home, family life, possessions, routines, financial stability, and the future you had been holding onto are all changing at once.

It is easy to get lost in anger, sadness, shame, blame, fear, lost confidence, and stories of failure that make the path through this loss even more painful and confusing.

Grief allows us to move forward.

Valley of Darkness

Separation throws you into painful and anxious uncertainty. You are juggling changes to housing, possessions, finances, legal decisions, communication with your ex, parenting, and the rhythms of everyday life. You may be learning how to live with time away from your children, pets, and old routines.

It is difficult to find the support you need. Friends, family, lawyers, and therapists each offer an important perspective, but each of them only sees part of the picture. You are the one who has to weigh their advice and recognize when it is inaccurate, unhelpful, or shaped by someone else’s assumptions, fears, or unresolved experiences.

I’m there with you as you take in that larger picture, helping you find and stay connected to your inner compass. I’m able to offer you insights and perspective from my experience supporting other people through challenges across these areas, especially in those moments of uncertainty when different perspectives, fears, or parts of you are pulling in different directions.

Together, we identify the important decisions ahead, surface options you may not have considered, sort through competing advice, consider reframes, and weigh the tradeoffs of different paths.

Through our sessions, your own path becomes easier to see.

Rebirth

This is an amazing opportunity to understand the larger story of your life: who you were when this relationship began, how you grew through it, where that growth became limited, and what parts of you are asking to be cared for now.

I help you listen to these parts with curiosity and compassion. We look within feelings of anger, grief, and into painful stories to understand what they’re teaching you about your values and unmet needs, and how new boundaries can support your growth.

As your parts feel heard, cared for, and understood, the pain of old beliefs can begin to soften. Your responses become less reactive, more intentional, and more aligned with who you are choosing to be.

You are being born from the choices you make today.

Litigation

The legal team you choose and the decisions you make with them will shape how difficult your divorce is right now and the impact it has on you in the years to come.

Our conversations help you understand the process, evaluate your team, consider their advice, prepare for important meetings, and decide what will serve you best. I’m here to support your decision-making process, not to provide legal advice.

You become a more informed and confident client. You get better at telling the difference between what you can pursue and what is worth pursuing, looking at the full cost in time, money, emotional energy, and the impact on your relationship as co-parents. You use your legal team more efficiently to resolve open matters and complete your divorce without prolonging conflict or running up unnecessary costs. You make choices that reduce the emotional weight you carry and help you move forward with your life.

Therapy

The therapist you choose, the approach you take, and the work you prioritize all shape what you get from therapy.

Our conversations help you reflect on what is happening between sessions, notice the deeper themes underneath the latest events, and decide what deserves more time with your therapist. We can also talk about how past individual or couples therapy has shaped the way you feel about therapy now. I support the work you are doing in therapy without trying to replace it.

You become more intentional about how you use that time. You spend less of the session catching your therapist up on everything that happened that week and bring more of the hard, deep work that benefits from their training and care.

Community

The people you surround yourself with are your most valuable resource, especially as you begin a new life. These relationships bring joy, connection, and a sense of belonging.

Our conversations help you create the community you need for your interests, availability, and the ways you want to grow. We make sure you’re showing up to those relationships with openness, balance, and ease.

You become more intentional about making time and space for these new friendships and relationships to grow. Little by little, you build a community that supports the new life you’re creating.

Self

The care and intention you bring to your relationship with yourself shape how you heal, grow, and experience the life you are creating.

Our conversations help you identify what supports that growth. We may look at diet, exercise, sleep, routines, rituals, boundaries, self-compassion, the stories you tell about yourself, and the ways you care for yourself when old fears or wounds are activated.

You become more able to soothe yourself, recognize what belongs to you, and know when something deserves deeper attention in therapy. Time alone begins to feel more like time with yourself. You strengthen the secure and loving relationship you have with yourself and become more intentional about the life you are choosing to create.

Benefits to you

You deserve support during this relatively short, but very high-stress and high-stakes chapter of your life. The decisions you make now will have a significant impact on your emotional well-being, finances, and quality of life for years to come.

Our weekly Zoom sessions help you stay grounded, get clear on what matters, make more informed decisions, and move forward with confidence. This creates more Ease in your life and helps you resolve the divorce and heal more Efficiently, which creates meaningful Savings in time, money, and emotional energy.

Ease

The stress, uncertainty, and emotional weight of divorce can make it harder to sleep, work, parent, socialize, and enjoy time with yourself.

I make difficult decisions more approachable by helping you process your emotions, understand your options, learn from my own experience and what I’ve seen clients do, and identify clear next steps. I help you honor the struggle without getting caught in it.

You make confident, informed decisions from a grounded place. You spend less time reliving the past or fighting things you cannot change. Week by week, you feel calmer, clearer, and better able to appreciate the life ahead.

Efficiency

The emotional challenges of divorce make it easier to react from fear, anger, or hurt, which quickly complicates the process and makes it harder to resolve.

Our sessions streamline the legal process by moving emotional issues out of litigation.

We identify the things you need to push your legal team to resolve, make space to process the emotional pain that is surfacing, and identify the deeper themes you want to work on in therapy. This keeps emotional pain from driving legal strategy, clouding important decisions, or extending conflict.

You get through the divorce faster, with greater confidence in the decisions you’ve made, while making meaningful progress on the personal growth and healing this experience has brought to the surface. You move into your new life sooner, with less of the past following you and more freedom to live your best life.

Savings

The decisions you make right now are some of the most financially consequential decisions of your life. Your combined net worth is being divided while emotions and expensive legal teams complicate and prolong a process that quickly burns through your life’s savings.

Our weekly Zoom call can easily cost less than an email from your lawyer. In that hour, you prepare for legal conversations, think through major decisions, identify what your legal team needs to move forward, and keep emotional conflict out of the legal process.

You reduce the cost of your divorce by using your legal team more efficiently, avoiding unnecessary legal bills, costly mistakes, and battles that do not serve you. You protect your time, money, and emotional well-being so those resources can go toward your new life.

Next steps

Free call
Use this link to schedule a free 30-minute call. You can tell me a little about where you are, what feels most difficult right now, and ask any questions you have about working together.
Intake form
After our call, I’ll send you a short intake form so I can learn more about you and your situation before we begin.
First session
Our first session is two hours. This gives us time to slow down, get to know your story, understand the larger picture, and identify your most pressing needs.
First week
Many clients like to meet two or three times during the first week. This is often when you feel most overwhelmed and when there is the most new material for us to cover.
We use this time to get me up to speed, work through the backlog of questions and decisions, and make sure anything with a tight timeline gets the attention it needs.
Weekly sessions
From there, most clients meet with me for one hour each week on Zoom. This regular rhythm gives us enough time to stay connected to the bigger picture while responding to whatever is happening in your life that week.
We can add sessions when important matters come up and adjust the frequency as your needs change.
Optional In-Person Sessions
Clients also meet with me at my private studio in Berkeley for a two-hour in-person session. We can spend the full time talking, take part of the session outside for a walk, or combine an hour of our usual work with an hour of Reiki.
The extra time and in-person setting give us room to go deeper, move through what you’re feeling, and work together in whatever way feels most supportive that day.

Dave the Divorce Doula

Supporting Your Transformation

Death

Valley of Darkness

Rebirth

Four Pillars of Support

Litigation

Therapy

Community

Self

Benefits to you

Ease

Efficiency

Savings

Next steps

Free call

Intake form

First session

First week

Weekly sessions

Optional In-Person Sessions

Rate

About me