2025 EDITION — REBUILDERS INTERNATIONAL

The State of Divorce Recovery 2025

What 3,628 people going through divorce told us about where they actually are.

All figures drawn from Fisher Divorce Adjustment Scale assessments completed during calendar year 2025. Each person counted once, at their first assessment. Free to cite with attribution.

People are arriving in worse shape every year

Adjustment among people seeking divorce recovery has fallen three years running, across five of the six areas we measure.

n = 223 / 1,292 / 3,576 people, each counted once at first assessment. Anger is the only measure that did not fall.

Two explanations are possible and this data cannot separate them. People going through divorce may genuinely be doing worse. Or our reach grew — assessment volume rose roughly sixteenfold across the period — and we may now be meeting people in greater difficulty than when the audience was narrower. We report the decline and name the question.

Who seeks divorce recovery

n = 3,621.

n = 3,627. Self-reported.

Help-seeking after a divorce is not evenly distributed between the two people in it. The person who was left goes looking for support considerably more often than the person who left.

Recovery language tends to assume agency. For half this population, the defining event was not a choice.

n = 3,627.

The common image of divorce recovery — a young couple, small children, a few years in — describes the minority.

Adjustment norms for 2025

n = 3,576.

n = 3,576.

Grief and trust are where people arrive worst off, both at roughly half the available range.

Reference norms by situation

Out of 500, with population percentile. Every cell n > 400.

The finding: it is not about anger

People who were left arrive 48 points behind people who left — more than half the gain a ten-week programme produces. Almost all of that gap is one thing.

Someone who ends a relationship begins detaching before they leave, so they arrive with that work largely done. They are no less angry and no more trusting. Leaving is not easier — it is further along on exactly one dimension and identical on the rest.

Does divorce recovery have a season?

We expected adjustment to vary across the year. It did not. The index moved between 58.2 and 60.4 across the entire year — a range of 2.2 points, which falls below the threshold at which we consider a movement distinguishable from ordinary sampling variation.

The finding is the absence of one. Adjustment among people arriving at divorce recovery is remarkably stable month to month. Whatever seasonality exists in divorce filings, it does not appear to produce seasonal variation in how people are actually doing.

A professional seeing a difficult caseload in August is not seeing a seasonal effect in the population.

What did not matter, and one thing that did

Length of marriage barely predicts adjustment: 287 for marriages under five years, 302 for marriages of twenty-one years or more. The assumption that longer marriages are harder to recover from is not supported.

The lowest-scoring group in the entire dataset is people who answered "not sure" when asked when their divorce would happen — 274, below every defined timeline including those still considering. Uncertainty appears worse than any stage of certainty.

What this report does not show

• Not a random sample of divorcing adults. Everyone here sought out a divorce recovery assessment.

• Self-reported on a single instrument, with no independent clinician rating.

• Who ended the relationship is self-reported.

• Assessment volume reflects our own activity as much as underlying demand.

• Trust readings rest on a narrow base — one subscale worth 40 of 500 points.

Full detail on instruments, population and method is on the methodology page at rebuildersinternational.com/research/methodology

Suggested citation

Rebuilders International. The State of Divorce Recovery 2025. https://rebuildersinternational.com/post/state-of-divorce-recovery-2025

About Rebuilders International

Rebuilders International trains mental health professionals and divorce coaches in the Rebuilding method, developed by Dr. Bruce Fisher over more than forty years. Individuals going through divorce can find programs, classes and a free self-assessment at rebuilders.net.