About Bitter or Better: Real Stories of Divorce and Resilience
Bitter or Better is a raw and real podcast about the messy middle of divorce— the quiet strength you lean into to get through the toughest days, the resilience and confidence you build along the way, and the ways you learn to rebuild a life that’s your own. Hosted by an accomplished marketer, National Board Certified Health & Wellness Coach and aspiring author writing her first novel about her own traumatic divorce experience, Abby England has been through it all herself. This show isn’t about legal advice or therapy jargon; it’s about real people - everyday folks navigating love lost, co-parenting chaos, financial fallout, and finding their way back to themselves. Each episode features unfiltered conversations with people who’ve lived through the heartbreak of divorce—what broke down in their marriages, how they survived the storm, the tools that helped, and their core values they rediscovered along the way. This isn’t a highlight reel—it’s a safe space for the stories that are too often whispered, showing that while divorce can break you, it can also build you into someone stronger, wiser, and, yes, even better.
Ep. 13 - Foreign Land, Foreign Healing: Navigating MS And Isolation
Navigating marriage when critical information is kept in the dark drains every ounce of your energy, leaving you second-guessing your own reality. Moving across the globe and facing a chronic illness diagnosis only amplifies that isolation, forcing you to question everything you built your life around. In this episode, host Abby sits down with her long-time college friend Sarah, who shares her raw experience with diplomatic life overseas, dealing with a surprise Multiple Sclerosis diagnosis f...
2 Jul 2026
Ep. 12 - Red Flags: Surviving the Slow Death of a Marriage
Denying reality is the quickest way to lose yourself. When you spend years desperately hammering square pegs into round holes, the eventual crash is inevitable. Host Abby England sits down with Leslie to discuss the painful unraveling of her long marriage and the difficult journey of rebuilding her life from scratch. We get into the raw mechanics of a relationship declining over time and the realization that shared love cannot replace aligned values. Leslie details the fight or flight surviva...
11 Jun 2026
Ep. 11 - Rebuild Your Confidence: Life After Infidelity and Job Loss
Isolation is a silent profit leak for your mental health when going through a major life upheaval. For men especially, the cultural pressure to suppress emotion during a crisis creates a heavy burden that delays actual recovery. Host Abby England sits down with old college friend Matt to look past the surface of standard coping mechanisms and dive into what it actually takes for men to process the reality of a broken marriage. We sit down to discuss the hidden emotional toll of marital separa...
21 May 2026
Ep. 10 - From Contempt to Freedom: Rebuilding Life After 24 Years of Marriage
The end of a long-term marriage is rarely a sudden explosion; more often, it is a slow, quiet accumulation of unexpressed resentments that eventually hardens into contempt. In this episode, we sit down with Stacey, a business owner and mother who walked away from a twenty-four-year marriage that looked perfect from the outside but left her feeling increasingly invisible. Now on the other side of fifty, she shares the raw, unvarnished reality of rebuilding her identity from scratch after decad...
30 Apr 2026
Ep. 9 - Radical Empathy: Co-Parenting Without the Drama
Staying in a marriage for the sake of the kids often sounds like the noble path, but white-knuckling through a connection-less partnership eventually drains the life force out of everyone involved. When the internal cost of "staying" outweighs the fear of the unknown, the decision to leave isn't a failure—it's an act of preservation. In this episode, we sit down with Morli, an e-commerce CEO and mother, who navigated the end of a decade-long marriage while pregnant with her second child. We ...
16 Apr 2026
Ep. 8 - Blindsided and Relieved: Why I’m Grateful He Had an Affair
A 24-year marriage can end in a single sentence. Nicole hears it in marriage counseling when her husband stands up, walks out, and comes back to admit he’s been having an affair. What follows isn’t a neat breakup story; it’s the messy middle: numb shock, control as a coping mechanism, protecting the kids from the blast radius, and figuring out how to survive when your support system is thin and your whole life just moved cities. We talk through the long runway that leads to that moment...
2 Apr 2026
Ep. 7 - Reinventing at 47: Embracing Your Second Chance at Life
Divorce doesn’t always arrive as one explosion. Sometimes it shows up as a quiet, relentless grind that slowly convinces you something is fundamentally off. I sit down with Tanya Garcia to talk about what it’s like to realize the cracks are there early, push through anyway, and then spend years trying to make a marriage work while your body and mind are screaming for relief. Tanya takes us from a lightning-fast courtship and a big move to France to the reality of daily incompatibilities, chr...
19 Mar 2026
Ep. 6 - The Gift of Loneliness: Rebuilding After Divorce
A protective order, drained accounts, and a month without seeing their kids would break most people. Casey walks us through how it felt to sit in a parking lot late at night with no phone, no money, and no idea who would believe him and how that fear turned into a long, grinding divorce process that demanded patience he didn’t think he had. We talk about the reality of betrayal and false narratives, why “the person you marry is not the person you divorce,” and how the legal system can ...
5 Mar 2026
Ep. 5 - Highschool Sweethearts to High-Conflict Divorce
A whisper at 4:30 a.m., a drive to the gym, and a truth that splits a life in two. Lauren takes us through the raw, human reality of discovering not one but two affairs, both with close friends, and the slow, steady climb toward a healthier future for herself and her kids. We start with young love and a faith-filled home, then move through IVF, adoption, and the first shock of betrayal. What follows is a masterclass in hard choices: how to attempt forgiveness, recognize red flags, and decide ...
19 Feb 2026
Ep. 4 - Necessary Endings: Breaking the Silent Treatment
Heartbreak can be loud, but clarity often arrives in the quiet. We sit down with Monica to follow her honest path from early sparks to a marriage defined by emotional withdrawal and the constant tension of walking on eggshells. When a cross-country move created space, she finally saw the pattern clearly: hope without progress keeps you stuck. With that shift, she chose a necessary ending, faced the fear of filing, and navigated the messy middle, debt, taxes, stigma, and the surreal drama of s...
5 Feb 2026
Ep. 2 - I Discover the Truth. Game On.
The story starts with whiplash: apologies at 11 p.m., holiday intimacy, then another abrupt stop. We pull back the curtain on what it takes to navigate a stop-start relationship, gather facts without losing yourself, and make bold moves when words and actions no longer match. This isn’t legal theater; it’s real life, lawyers, CPAs, depositions, and the unglamorous truth that divorce delivers decisions, not justice. Abby walks through the mindset shift from hoping for reconciliation to protec...
Heartbreak can flatten your plans and rewrite your identity in an instant. Abby opens up about the shock of betrayal, the weight of unfairness, and the paradox of missing someone who broke every boundary you trusted, then shows how small, stubborn choices stack into real resilience. We go deep on grief’s unpredictable waves, the “paper cut” triggers that sting out of nowhere, and the mental shift from revenge fantasies to a life that actually feels good. From there, we get practical. Abby wa...
5 Feb 2026
Ep. 1 - There’s a Landmine in my Happy Marriage
A love story can look solid on the outside and still fracture in the quiet hours. We open up about how a decade of loyalty, drive, and shared goals slowly bent under the weight of identity shifts, corporate pressure, and a move that erased our community. Abby and Megan retrace the path from Bentonville meet-cute to an Atlanta executive apartment where letters on countertops replaced conversations and intimacy turned into red light, green light. It’s raw, sometimes funny, sometimes brutal, and...
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Apple Podcasts (US)
5.0 / 5
9 ratings
Spotify
5.0 / 5
8 ratings
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