Divorce Coaching Is More Than a Profession, It’s A Calling!

In this article, we’re going to take a rare peek behind the curtains of CDC and get some real, honest insight into what CDC is all about, and what a difference being a divorce coach can make – not only in your own life, but in the lives of others. Pegotty Cooper, co-founder of the CDC Certified Divorce Coach^® Program, shares what led her and her partner and husband, Randy Cooper, to create the program, and why they are so passionate about it.

Pegotty and Randy both had traumatic experiences with divorce, as almost anyone who has gone through the process can relate. The following is Pegotty’s story of how the CDC Certified Divorce Coach^® Program was born.

In 2010, I was busy growing my coaching practice when my husband Randy told me the story of the day he had been picked up at school by his mother and taken to a new home and a new school 20 miles from his old neighborhood because his parents were divorcing. It was a devastating experience for a 14-year-old, to be torn away from all of his friends, removed from his neighborhood where he walks to school with his friends and after school, they play for hours in someone’s yard, or in the empty lot being cleared for more houses.

The Lowest Point in Life for a 14-Year-Old

Miserable in the new school and desperate to see his friends again, as spring arrives, he trudges the better part of those twenty miles back to his old neighborhood where he arrives late in the day to spend only a couple of hours with two of his friends. Come evening, he finds an empty house under construction to lay down to sleep before the long walk back to the alien home and neighborhood. And more than anything, before he falls asleep, he thinks about how much he misses his dad whom he adores.

Divorce for him as a child was a very low point in his life and as a result, he took on a ministry as a Certified Family Mediator to never have that happen to another child. It broke my heart to listen to his gut-wrenching 14-year-old experience and I too got on the bandwagon to create a better experience for individuals and families going through divorce.

“I wish I had a divorce coach in my divorce”.

A few months later we were starting our own divorce coach training program because in talking with many people who had been divorced, when they heard about the concept of a divorce coach, almost to a person they said, “I wish I had a divorce coach in my divorce. I might have made different choices with less fighting and less money and less trauma for our children.”

We had also both experienced divorce as adults, and I learned from my divorce that when you keep secrets, those secrets take away your freedom to make certain choices. I was deeply ashamed of the bad choices I made in my 20’s, and that shame kept me from even acknowledging what I had done. When anything related to divorce got on my radar screen, I would walk away so I didn’t have to confront my secrets deeply buried in my memory. So, when the question of divorce coaching was put on the table as a way to impact the process of divorce for individuals and families, I had to choose to reveal my secret if I was going to take an active role in this new endeavor.

As a result of Randy’s childhood experience, his own divorce as a young man, and my coming to terms with my own shame around divorce, in 2011 we created a whole new profession with a foundation of best practices, personal excellence, and a commitment to see only the best in our clients, so that we could help them to find the answers they were looking for. We co-founded the Certified Divorce Coach^® Training and Certification to train a variety of other professionals to use counter-intuitive ways to help individuals going through divorce to be better engaged in decision-making, empowered, in command of their facts and aligned with their values, and becoming a credible client with effective communication skills to advocate for themselves and their children.

Divorce Coaching Is Universal

This isn’t just a business for us, it is a calling, a cause, and you have to have your heart and soul in it, so you stay the path and not quit when others cast aspersions on your efforts. Since 2011 we have trained over 900 people. Our classes are live and interactive with plenty of exploring, coaching, and reflecting on how we will apply what we are learning with our clients who are going through traumatic times.

The CDC Certified Divorce Coaches come from over 20 countries around the world with the greatest concentration in the US, then Canada, then Europe, and Pacific, Middle Eastern, and African countries. Divorce Coaching, as it turns out, is a universal need as men and women alike struggle to separate their property and their parental responsibilities, and to now become, in some instances, co-parents and at the same time create a new self-identity and purpose so they can find new meaning in their life. Many women are also challenged to translate their household and child-rearing skills into new work on the path to becoming what must become self-sufficiency and a new beginning.