Manjula Shaw, CFP®, CDFA®
“Tips from the Trenches” is a series of articles based on conversations with professionals who work with individuals facing or considering the prospect of divorce. Watch this space for conversations with professionals in Family and collaborative law, Forensic-Certified Public Accountants, Mediators, Marriage Counselors, Family Court Judges, and Valuation Specialists.
Manjula Shaw is a Certified Financial Planner (CFP®) and Asst. Vice President at Tanglewood Legacy Advisors. As a Certified Divorce Financial Analyst (CDFA®) and a Collaboratively trained Financial Neutral, Manjula works with individuals facing late-stage divorce.
Manjula’s conversation is with Alberta Totz, a former attorney turned psychotherapist based in Texas. With more than 3,000 hours of clinical training and two decades of personal psychodynamic therapy, Totz brings a rare dual perspective—legal and psychological—to divorce recovery. Her research-based curriculum, grounded in the work of renowned grief expert Dr. Alan Wolfelt, addresses the emotional aftermath that begins where the legal process ends.
Divorce is a seismic shift. Yet the world often expects the dust to settle long before the ground has stopped shaking. There is a quiet but relentless pressure to find closure, move on, and return to productivity—as though a signed decree is the finish line.
It is not.
For many individuals—particularly those whose financial lives were deeply intertwined with a spouse’s, or who find themselves navigating Texas’s legal landscape as a stay-at-home parent—the real work begins after the paperwork is done. Alberta Totz helps her clients understand why healing does not follow a predictable timeline, and what it takes to genuinely move forward.
Grief is Private. Mourning Requires a Witness.
We tend to use the words “grief” and “mourning” as though they mean the same thing. Totz draws a clear distinction: grief is the internal experience—the anxiety, sadness, and disorientation that lives inside you. Mourning is the outward expression of that grief. And that expression, she says, cannot happen in isolation.
In our culture, there is enormous pressure to keep pain private, because visible suffering makes others uncomfortable. The result is that many divorcing individuals are shamed into silence—internalizing trauma rather than processing it. Totz is direct about what this costs:
“Grief is internal. It’s what you feel… but mourning can only be done with someone.”
Healing, she explains, requires both a safe space and a witness. You cannot transcend what you cannot express.
The Myth of the Stages of Grief
According to Totz, many people arrive at therapy expecting a tidy, linear arc—that once they have worked through anger, bargaining, and sadness, those feelings are behind them. This model is not only inaccurate; it can be actually harmful.
The reality of grief is cyclical. A song, a photograph, an offhand remark—any of these can surface an emotional reaction years after a divorce that feels as raw as the day it happened. When divorcees have been told they should be “finished” with a particular emotion, resurgence feels like failure. Totz reframes this entirely: the goal is not to eliminate triggers. It is to integrate them.
The Misconception: Grief moves through a fixed sequence of stages that, once completed, are left behind.
The Reality: Healing is non-linear. Emotional reactions can surface at any time. Honoring them, rather than pathologizing them, is part of the work.
Your Body is Keeping Score
When grief goes unexpressed, it does not disappear. It migrates. This is the neurobiological reality that Bessel van der Kolk, a Dutch Psychiatrist and author, made plain: unprocessed trauma takes up residence in the body and in behavior.
Totz sees this manifest in recognizable patterns—workaholism that numbs the silence, disordered eating as a bid for control, financial paralysis rooted in years of deferred decision-making. In the context of divorce, one of the most common presentations is what she calls “financial uneducation”: the terror of taking ownership of finances that were previously managed by a spouse.
“When we internalize our grief or our trauma, our body keeps score… our emotions end up controlling our trauma.”
The path forward, she says, needs to be intentional—a neurobiological commitment to changing how the brain responds to the trauma of the past. This is not passive. It requires consistent, deliberate work.
Divorce as a Mirror to Your Attachment History
A marriage ending is rarely only about marriage. For many of Totz’s clients, the dissolution of a long-term relationship acts as a catalyst—surfacing unresolved patterns from childhood and primary attachment relationships that had shaped their choices without their awareness.
Why did they remain in a situation that no longer served them? Why is their sense of worth tied to being in a partnership? Why do financial decisions feel impossible without a spouse’s input? These are not rhetorical questions. They have answers and finding them is the work.
When individuals examine these reflections honestly—rather than simply moving toward the next relationship or the next chapter—they gain self-awareness to make choices based on clarity rather than compulsion. The second act, Totz believes, should be built on intention, not repetition.
Hard Medicine: Personal Accountability
Perhaps the most challenging piece of Totz’s philosophy is also the most essential: healing is an active choice. Whatever a divorcing spouse has experienced—an inequitable legal outcome, an abusive partner, a system that failed to value years of unpaid domestic labor—their recovery is ultimately their own responsibility.
This is not a dismissal of real injustice. It is an acknowledgment that externalizing blame, while understandable, forecloses growth. Totz is candid with clients who are not ready for this:
“No matter what happens to you, you, and only you alone, can take accountability to change… If you want to spend all your time externalizing, being angry, blaming… you’re never going to get there.”
She compares emotional healing to training for a marathon—not a single session, but a sustained, often grueling commitment. It requires individuals to take the lead in their own recovery.
Beyond the Legal Decree
The finalization of a divorce is a legal event. The recovery from one is a human process—and it unfolds on its own timeline, not the court’s. For individuals whose financial and emotional lives have been shaped by years of partnership, that process requires more than paperwork. It requires support, self-examination, and the courage to be witnessed in the full weight of what has been lost.
Totz maintains that as you navigate this transition, consider: Are you allowing unprocessed grief to shape the architecture of your next chapter? Or are you ready to do the harder, more intentional work of integrating your past and building something new from a place of genuine clarity?
Alberta Totz and Manjula Shaw are both available to clients in the Houston area who are navigating the emotional and financial complexities of divorce.
Contact Manjula Shaw at mshaw@family-cfo.com if you have any questions.
Link to Manjula’s blog on all topics divorce is Blog – Family CFO
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