A Conversation with Oona Metz, Nationally Recognized Therapist and Author of Unhitched: The Essential Divorce Guide for Women

Oona Metz is a nationally recognized therapist and author who has spent more than 30 years studying the strange, tender, deeply human ways we navigate relationships, self-abandonment and change. Her new book, Unhitched: The Essential Divorce Guide for Women (Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster), launched in January and has already earned remarkable attention. Gayle King praised it on CBS Mornings, Maria Shriver highlighted it in her newsletter, Time Magazine ran an exclusive excerpt, and it’s been featured on CBS News and NPR's Morning Edition. It also quickly became a top divorce book on Amazon.

She speaks candidly about why women initiate nearly 70% of divorces, and how that statistic is less about endings and more about awakening — about the cumulative weight of emotional labor, the slow erosion of self and the eventual decision to choose alignment, truth and self-trust.

Oona’s work is deeply aligned with conversations about reinvention and becoming. In this episode, we discuss:

• the quiet realization that something needs to change
• the emotional courage it takes to leave a life that once made sense
• the nonlinear path from grief to clarity to self-reclamation
• how women rediscover identity and purpose in midlife
• the unexpected freedom and possibility that can follow loss
• what it means to consciously step into a new version of yourself

Her five-phase model of divorce grief offers a thoughtful framework for understanding the emotional arc of transformation — not just as loss, but as a process of becoming.

As both a therapist and someone who rebuilt her own life after divorce, Oona brings a rare blend of clinical depth and lived wisdom to conversations about resilience, reinvention and the deeply human process of beginning again.

Oona is a Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker, a Certified Group Psychotherapist and a Fellow of the American Group Psychotherapy Association. She has three decades of clinical experience and specializes in treating women navigating divorce. She leads three weekly Divorce Support Groups and is the founder of the Beacon Group Fellowship, a program which trains mental health professionals across the country to lead divorce groups. She has given over 100 talks and workshops locally, nationally and internationally.

Learn more:

www.oonametz.com

https://www.instagram.com/oonametz/

https://www.facebook.com/womennavigatingdivorce/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/oona-metz-licsw-cgp-6a14a41b/

https://www.youtube.com/@OonaMetz

https://www.oonametz.com/book-unhitched

https://time.com/7344525/why-women-divorce/

https://www.cbsnews.com/video/why-more-women-are-initiating-divorce/