“I don’t help women through divorce. I help women stop abandoning themselves.”
It’s a bold distinction and one that has defined the psychologist and founder of The Untamed Movement’s work for more than two decades. Her insights challenge everything we think we know about resilience, reinvention, and the courage to choose ourselves.
Read on as she shares her perspective on resilience, self-trust, and the journey back to oneself.
Could you introduce yourself and share a little about your professional journey?
I am a psychologist, psychotherapist, EMDR therapist, mediator, author, and founder of The Untamed Movement.
For more than twenty years, I’ve been fascinated by one question:
Why do some people go through unimaginable hardship and somehow keep their inner flame alive, while others lose themselves under circumstances that appear far less difficult?
That question became the foundation of my entire career.
It led me into trauma psychology, neuroscience, psychotherapy, refugee work, and eventually supporting women through one of society’s most misunderstood life transitions: divorce.
At first glance, these worlds seem very different.
But I kept finding the same thing.
Whether I was working with trauma survivors, refugees rebuilding their lives, or successful women sitting across from me who looked like they had everything, the real question was always the same:
How do we reconnect people with the part of themselves that never disappeared?
What I’ve really spent twenty years studying is human resilience.
The flame inside people.
The part that survives.
The part that knows.
Because the flame is never gone.
It gets buried beneath fear.
It gets buried beneath guilt.
It gets buried beneath responsibility.
It gets buried beneath years of being the good wife, the good mother, the good daughter, the woman who takes care of everyone else.
But it never disappears.
Most people think I help women through divorce.
I don’t.
I help women stop abandoning themselves.
Divorce is simply where many of them finally realize they’ve been doing it.
What personal experiences or career moments inspired you to specialize in psychology, trauma work, and supporting women through major life transitions?
Long before I became a psychologist, I was fascinated by human resilience.
I remember reading stories about Holocaust survivors and asking myself the same question over and over:
How can two people experience extraordinary suffering, yet one somehow keeps their spirit alive?
I became obsessed with understanding what allows human beings to endure, adapt, and rebuild.
That curiosity led me into trauma work, psychotherapy, refugee support, and neuroscience.
Years later, I started noticing the exact same pattern among women navigating divorce.
Not because divorce itself was the common denominator.
Self-abandonment was.
I saw women who had spent years becoming everything for everyone.
The reliable one.
The responsible one.
The caretaker.
The peacemaker.
The woman who held everything together.
And somewhere along the way, they disappeared from their own lives.
The refugees I worked with had lost a country.
Many of the women I work with had lost themselves.
Different stories.
Same question.
How do we help people reconnect with the part of themselves that never left, only got buried?
That is still the work I do today.
Over the years, what common emotional struggles have you noticed among women who appear successful and accomplished on the surface?
I often joke that the women I work with could run a small country if necessary.
They manage careers, children, households, aging parents, social calendars, emotional labor, and everyone else’s needs.
The one person they often stop taking care of is themselves.
Not because they’re weak.
Because nobody ever taught them that they were allowed to matter too.
One of the biggest misconceptions is that successful women struggle because they aren’t strong enough.
In reality, many are carrying far too much.
The greatest epidemic I see is not divorce.
It’s self-abandonment.
Women becoming so skilled at meeting everyone else’s needs that they lose touch with their own.
The heartbreaking part is that society often rewards this.
We celebrate women for sacrificing themselves and then wonder why so many wake up one day feeling disconnected from their own lives.
You often discuss the concept of self-abandonment. What does self-abandonment look like in everyday life, and why is it so difficult to recognize?
The greatest epidemic I see isn’t divorce.
It’s self-abandonment.
Most women think self-abandonment happens in one dramatic moment.
It doesn’t.
It’s death by a thousand compromises.
It’s saying yes when you mean no.
It’s swallowing words that need to be spoken.
It’s shrinking your desires so nobody feels uncomfortable.
It’s becoming so focused on being loved, needed, appreciated, and approved of that you stop asking yourself what you actually want.
The tragedy is that society often rewards this.
We praise women for being selfless.
For being accommodating.
For putting everyone else first.
Then we wonder why so many successful women wake up one day and think:
“I have everything I thought I wanted. Why don’t I feel alive?”
Women are taught how to be good wives.
Good mothers.
Good daughters.
Good employees.
Very few are taught how to belong to themselves.
That is why self-abandonment is so difficult to recognize.
It often looks like being a good woman.
Until one day you realize you’ve disappeared from your own life.
Many women remain in situations that no longer align with who they are. What psychological factors make change feel so challenging, even when the need for it is clear?
I don’t think most women stay because they don’t know.
I think most women stay because they’re afraid.
Not afraid of leaving.
Afraid of what leaving means.
Afraid of hurting a good man.
Afraid of disappointing their children.
Afraid of judgment.
Afraid of becoming the villain in someone else’s story.
One of the most dangerous messages we give women is:
“Nothing is wrong, so you should stay.”
I don’t believe that.
The absence of misery is not the same thing as fulfillment.
Many women are waiting for a fire alarm that never comes.
They keep searching for a dramatic reason that would finally justify choosing themselves.
But life doesn’t always work that way.
People were not put on this earth to spend decades slowly disappearing simply because their unhappiness isn’t dramatic enough to justify change.
You describe divorce as “identity recalibration” rather than failure. What led you to develop this perspective?
I think we’ve become so obsessed with saving marriages that we’ve stopped asking whether the woman inside the marriage is still alive.
That may sound provocative, but I see it every day.
Women come to me and say:
“My husband is a good man.”
“We don’t fight.”
“Nothing is really wrong.”
And yet they haven’t felt like themselves for years.
They’re lonely.
Disconnected.
Living on autopilot.
Existing rather than fully living.
One of the biggest misconceptions is that divorce represents failure.
I don’t see it that way at all.
A marriage is a structure.
A relationship is what happens inside that structure.
Those are not the same thing.
Society spends enormous energy protecting structures.
I think we should spend more energy asking whether the people inside those structures are thriving.
For many women, divorce is not the transformation.
Divorce is the door.
The transformation begins when she walks through it and starts asking questions she may never have asked before:
Who am I when I’m not taking care of everyone else?
What do I want?
What brings me alive?
What if my needs matter too?
That is why I call it identity recalibration.
Because the legal divorce may take months.
The journey back to yourself can change the rest of your life.
What inspired you to create The Untamed Methodology™, and what makes it different from traditional personal development approaches?
One of the things I noticed after years of working with women is that awareness alone doesn’t create transformation.
Traditional therapy is incredibly valuable. It helps people understand what happened to them, how it affected them, and why they feel the way they do.
But understanding something and changing it are not always the same thing.
Many women can tell me exactly why they struggle with boundaries, why they stay in relationships that no longer fit, or why they keep putting everyone else first.
The problem isn’t a lack of insight.
The problem is that the deeper programming is still running.
The rules they learned about love.
The rules they learned about being a good woman.
The rules they learned about keeping the peace, avoiding disappointment, earning approval, and making themselves smaller so everyone else feels comfortable.
Awareness of those patterns is important, but awareness alone doesn’t rewire them.
That is why I created The Untamed Methodology™.
It combines psychology, neuroscience, nervous system work, behavioral change, and identity recalibration to help women move beyond understanding and into transformation.
Because the goal isn’t simply to know why you abandon yourself.
The goal is to stop abandoning yourself.
That is where real change begins.
Without revealing confidential details, can you share a client transformation story that highlights the impact of your work?
One client came to me convinced she had a divorce problem.
She didn’t.
She had a self-abandonment problem.
She already knew her marriage was over.
What kept pulling her back wasn’t uncertainty.
It was guilt.
What if I hurt him?
What if I destroy the family?
What if I’m selfish?
What if I regret this?
As we worked together, she realized something profound:
She wasn’t trapped by her marriage.
She was trapped by the belief that everyone else’s needs mattered more than her own.
Today, she has a peaceful co-parenting relationship, thriving children, and a life that feels deeply aligned.
Not because she got divorced.
Because she stopped abandoning herself.
The nervous system plays an important role in emotional well-being. How can it influence decision-making, self-trust, and personal growth?
Far more than most people realize.
People think decisions are logical.
Most decisions are emotional first.
When fear takes over, the brain starts scanning for danger.
It becomes difficult to trust yourself.
Difficult to imagine the possibility.
Difficult to access courage.
Fear puts blinders on possibility and convinces us that what we see is the whole truth.
It isn’t.
Growth isn’t about becoming fearless.
It’s about creating enough internal safety that fear no longer runs your life.
Many women are praised for being resilient and dependable. At what point can constantly being “the strong one” become emotionally harmful?
When strength becomes an identity rather than a skill.
Many women have spent their entire lives being the strong ones.
The capable one.
The dependable one.
The woman everyone leans on.
At some point, strength stops being empowering and starts becoming armor.
They know how to carry everyone else.
But they don’t know how to let anyone carry them.
What looks like strength on the outside is often exhaustion on the inside.
True strength isn’t just about enduring.
It’s also about receiving.
What are some practical ways women can begin rebuilding self-trust after years of putting others’ needs before their own?
Self-trust grows every time you stop abandoning yourself.
Most women think self-trust returns after one big decision.
It doesn’t.
It returns through evidence.
Every boundary you honor.
Every truth you speak.
Every time you choose authenticity over approval.
Every time you stop betraying yourself to make someone else comfortable.
Every time you choose yourself, self-trust grows.
Every time you abandon yourself, it shrinks.
Self-trust is built one act of self-loyalty at a time.
What misconceptions about midlife reinvention, relationship changes, or starting over would you most like to challenge?
The biggest misconception is that starting over means becoming someone new.
I don’t believe that at all.
Most reinvention is actually remembering.
The woman my clients are searching for is usually already there.
She’s simply buried beneath expectations, fear, guilt, responsibility, and years of living according to everyone else’s rules.
The work is not creating a new woman.
The work is uncovering the one who has been there all along.
The flame was never gone.
It was simply hidden.
Looking back at the women you have worked with throughout your career, what lessons have they taught you about courage, resilience, and transformation?
After more than twenty years of studying resilience, I have completely changed my definition of courage.
I used to think courage was the absence of fear.
Now I think courage is telling yourself the truth.
The women I work with remind me every day that courage is rarely loud.
It doesn’t usually look heroic.
It often looks like a woman sitting alone in her kitchen, finally admitting:
“I can’t keep living like this.”
Not because her life is terrible.
Not because her husband is a bad man.
But because she can no longer ignore herself.
For me, that is the essence of resilience.
Not becoming someone else.
Returning to yourself.
Whether I was working with trauma survivors, refugees rebuilding their lives, or women standing at the doorway of divorce, I kept finding the same thing:
The flame is never gone.
It gets buried beneath fear.
Buried beneath guilt.
Buried beneath responsibility.
Buried beneath years of being everything for everyone.
But it never disappears.
And sometimes the most courageous thing a woman can do is uncover it again.
If a woman reading this interview feels disconnected from the life she once worked so hard to build, what message would you most want her to hear today?
Just because you worked hard to build something doesn’t mean you have to stay inside it forever.
The question is not what you have built.
The question is how you feel inside of it.
Many women stay because they think leaving means they failed.
I don’t believe that.
If your life no longer feels aligned, if you wake up feeling disconnected from yourself, if you keep telling yourself you should be grateful but something inside you knows there must be more, don’t ignore that voice.
You don’t have to blow up your life tomorrow.
But you can start building your next chapter today.
One small step at a time.
Because life is not meant to be endured.
It’s meant to be lived.
And my hope for every woman is that one day she can look at the life she has created and think:
“Oh my God, I love this.”
Not because it’s perfect.
But because it finally feels like hers.
To learn more about Isabelle and her work, visit her Instagram @isabelle.ulenaers or explore her website at www.isabelleulenaers.com.
