Breaking the Loneliness Cycle After Divorce

One of the hardest parts of divorce isn’t signing papers—it’s the silence that follows. The empty evenings. The awkward solo weekends. The crushing sense that you're suddenly invisible.

In this episode of UnYoked, Todd Turner gets real about the loneliness that follows divorce—and how to break that cycle before it breaks you.

This isn't a pity party. It's a lifeline.

You’ll Hear:

• Why loneliness after divorce feels so intense
• How isolation tricks you into staying stuck
• First steps to reconnect with people—and with purpose
• A reminder: you're not broken. You're rebuilding.

If you're a single, empty-nester, or just tired of eating dinner alone, this one’s for you.

🟡 UnYoked is for Christian singles navigating life, faith, and freedom after divorce.

 https://toddturner.com/solo

Transcript

Ever sit in a quiet house and realize that the silence is deafening?

Welcome to the Unyoked podcast where we talk about things you don't really see on Instagram, sort of the dark side of being single, the tough stuff. Like what it's like to be single in a quiet home. Now listen, personally, I have a roommate, but it's a child, an adult child, and he's living his own life. So he's a come and go kind of kid. And it's not like we eat dinner together. He literally can come and go.

We're at the age where he doesn't even tell dad, hey, I'm leaving or I'm coming home at any time. it's a unique situation. So I am alone quite often and I have lived alone. I've been an empty nester before. This is just a season of my life where I'm not. being alone is tough because when the kids leave and you're not partnered up, the quiet hits different.

because it is not like someone's going to be walking in that door and going to change things up. Sometimes you're going to bed alone. You're going to wake up tomorrow alone. And it is a very interesting feeling to be single and to be an empty nester. And you mix the two together and it can lead to moments of just feeling like it's never going to end. Like, where am I going to get?

my energy from, especially if you have the personality that you need people in your life to fill your tank. And, you know, for those of you who are recluse and introvert, you probably love the quiet, but there's many of us that maybe we need to recharge with some quiet, but we don't get our energy from quiet.

It's a weird mix of freedom, sometimes guilt and uncertainty. The silence sort of becomes a mirror and you can start to hear your own thoughts as you sit around the house alone and as you go for walks alone. But you have an opportunity. I know I have to hit a reset button. I've learned what to do in the silence.

Instead of just filling the space and just staying busy and always having something to do, which I went through years of that of let me go to this party. Let me schedule a dinner with somebody. Let me go a ⁓ concert or travel, whatever it was. I was taking the opportunity as a single person who has less and less responsibility and not a partner.

And that, you know, to go do things, it sounds fun and it was fun. And I'm not saying I don't do that. Um, I, there's a lot of opportunities and beautifulness, if you will, of being single and be able to do and say things and put energy into passion projects and hobbies and service and conversations with people that didn't have time before. And that is glorious. It's wonderful. But there are.

plenty of moments where you might just sit down on that couch and you wished there was a partner, you wished there was someone to engage with and they're not there. There's no one there and there's no one coming. And so those moments like what do you do with those moments? How do you not get bitter? How do you not get lonely? How do you not get depressed? Well, those are all realistic and real options.

that happened and I probably have been all the above. But over time, I've worked through some strategies to help me in these moments of emptiness, loneliness.

One, I schedule my own noise, if you will, putting intentional rhythms into my life. Music, walking, worship, podcast that I listen to, journaling, is every morning my little thing. If you follow me on Facebook, I think I have a wide open profile. So if you don't know me, Todd Turner, you can find me. But I...

Every morning I wake up, I do the same thing. I make my coffee with protein and I put my fiber and whatever else I have in there. And I sit on my patio, I have a calf stretching little apparatus that I stand on that stretches my calves. And I do some squats and I just drink my, my drink, my coffee. But I also, when I'm doing all that, I walk in and I put a record on and I hit play.

and I have a Sonos system in my house, which sounds so lovely. And I listen to half of a record while I'm getting ready. And then when I come in, I flip it and listen to the other side. So I listen to a record every single day. And, you know, I have over a hundred something records and you you, times that out. It's almost a year's worth of songs and something about music and something about listening on a record versus putting on Spotify. I do plenty of Spotify.

Something about the record is intentional. get to feel the vibe of the artists and what they're doing. I sometimes even sit down and look at the words. I consume that music and I own all their albums and records that I want. So I already have my library. I don't even really buy anything new because I already own what I want to own. And it's a big enough library that I can just sit with it. But I've created rhythms and habits that I look forward to. literally look...

line up my album for the week and I know what I'm going to listen to for the week and it's just really nice to put that in that quiet morning space of rhythmic intentional, rhythmic activities in my life that I get to sort of plan, build up for and just find that rhythm. It's really, really wonderful.

Also, I say yes to first. First time to do something. If I have an opportunity to do something, let's call it taking a weird pottery class or learning how to dance or traveling. I just got a phone call literally this week of somebody who wants to put together an international trip for the fall. We don't even know where we want to go. We talked about Morocco. We talked about Spain. We talked about Thailand and the Philippines. And the answer was we said yes.

What do we say yes to? We don't know. We said yes to an adventure and that's what we're going to do. We're going to create an adventure and we're going to go. Now that gives me something to research, look forward to, plan, look at my wardrobe, make sure I have everything I need. just puts something in my life that keeps me from sitting down and watching Netflix and just burning away the day with the rhythmic nonsense. Say yes to first.

things. It's huge.

Realize too that loneliness is a human thing. It's a human feeling that can happen to all of us. We're not broken because we get these little moments of FUNK but staying lonely is optional. You can maneuver through this feeling by being intentional, right?

You've survived harder things than this, especially those of you listening who've been through a tough divorce. Loneliness is tough. You've been through tougher. Let's turn the page. Let's get out of these feelings that some of them are just in our head. That's what the quietness does. It creates these feelings in our head and we keep echoing them and we don't have anything in our world to throw us off of those echoed thoughts of, woe is me.

in my last podcast, I talked about in a positive, healthy world, have a telescopic lens where we look up and everything feels new and endless and opportunistic. And we're going through tragedy. We are trauma. look inward like a microscope. And I think being lonely is this microscopic look where we look inward. It's it's, the things aren't the way I want them to be. I don't know how to get them the way I want to be. And we have to.

flip ourselves out of and there are tactics to do that.

If any of this resonated with you, here's one of the tactics on my website. I get told all the time that, you know, it's just, it's hard to travel as a woman. You know, men have it so lucky. And I'm not saying some of that's not true, but I literally created a solo travel starter guide on the website. I think it's Todd Turner.com slash solo. I'll put a link to it, but I made this just for you. For those of you.

who are looking for something to do, something to look forward to. I talk about planning a trip, where you can go, what time of the year you could go, where, the things that you need to go alone. It's not that hard. Getting out of the house is the first thing. If you don't love traveling, maybe that's an issue, but whether it's a road trip, whether it's a three-day weekend, whether it's international travel, getting out of the house, planning a trip.

and having those memories are just glorious. It's one of the first things I encourage people to do is leave the house. a solo trip is just that. It's a great opportunity.

And remember, you're not stuck. You're just getting started. Let's break the cycle, break the habits of unhealthy thinking about being lonely and not having a future. You have a future. You have to create it. Let's go together.