Divorce support options

01Individual therapy

Individual therapy is clinical care from a licensed professional, one to one. It is the only option on this page that is treatment rather than support: assessment, a plan, and a clinician who is accountable for your care. Everything else listed here is support, and support, whatever its value, is not a substitute for treatment when treatment is what you need.

Cost depends on how you pay and where you live. Online therapy platforms in the United States generally run roughly $260 to $400 per month, and some now accept insurance, which can change the real cost considerably; the platform or the office can tell you what your plan covers. Local rates vary too widely by city and coverage to quote one honest number.

Individual therapy fits a woman who needs clinical, individual care: an hour that belongs to her alone, with a professional trained for what this season has asked of her.

02DivorceCare

DivorceCare is a structured divorce recovery program: 13 weeks of video sessions plus group discussion, moving through the material as a cohort, so you join a group rather than drop into a room. Groups meet in person, typically at churches, and online, and the program points to a track record it puts at 25 years. The framing is explicitly Christian and stated up front, so you know the shape of the room before you walk in.

Cost varies by local group; the group you are considering can tell you what it charges. Its site keeps a searchable directory of local and online groups, so finding one near you is a search rather than a guess. DivorceCare fits a woman who wants a structured, faith-based, cohort-style program with the same faces week after week.

03Circles

Circles is a support app built around live, audio-only group sessions, led by a mix of licensed professionals, certified coaches, and peer leaders. It is open to adults of any gender, 18 and over, and it currently positions itself primarily around narcissistic abuse recovery, with divorce as one of its named verticals. Its own site reports more than 160,000 members, a self-reported figure. Circles frames itself as not a substitute for therapy.

Pricing runs from about $15 to $29 per month depending on plan and promotion, with a 7-day free trial; no free plan is advertised on its site.

Circles fits someone who wants scheduled, facilitator-led live audio rather than a text conversation.

04Free forums

Reddit's r/Divorce forum is the exemplar: free, public, with a large membership posting under pseudonymous usernames, mixed gender, and unmoderated in the facilitation sense; there are rules, but nobody is leading the room. Someone is awake there at any hour, and the price of that company is that everything posted is public.

Facebook groups for divorce support exist too, and they vary too much to describe as one thing: free, with moderation that differs group to group, and tied to an account that usually carries a legal name, which matters if you would rather your reading and posting not sit beside it.

Free forums fit a woman who wants venting and advice at any hour without paying for it, and who can carry the tradeoff that what she writes is public.

05In-person groups

Meetup-style listings surface local divorce support and social groups: a set time, a real place, other people who also showed up. Cost and quality vary group to group, and the listing itself is where you learn what exists near you and what it charges. Some groups are support-first and some are social-first, hiking clubs and dinner tables as much as seated support, so the description is worth reading before you go. If nothing is listed near you, that is an answer too, and the online options remain.

In-person groups fit a woman who wants faces across a table and social-first connection rather than another app.

06Steel Magnolias

Steel Magnolias is our product. This entry is written by the people who build it, so weigh it accordingly; it belongs on this page in the same shape as everything above. Steel Magnolias is a private, pseudonymous community app for women navigating divorce, especially the high-conflict kind. The community came first: it existed for more than a year before a line of the app was written.

Roots (the community forum) and crisis tools are free. Full membership is $129/year or $14.99/month. Founding members (the original community and waitlist) get their first year for $59.99 on iPhone; Android is coming soon.

The format is text-first and pseudonymous. Gardens is the live community chat that comes with full membership. Roots is a free community forum you can read and post in. Receipts is a private documentation tool with consented voice-note transcription, the audio deleted after transcription. Crisis tools are free and never paywalled. Pseudonyms are the default, with screen-capture shielding and an optional app lock: we take the threat model seriously, and we never claim to be abuser-proof.

Steel Magnolias fits a woman who wants a women-only, pseudonymous, text-first community with private documentation alongside it, on iPhone today.

07Choosing

These options combine. Therapy plus a community is a common pairing: a clinician for the clinical work, a room of women for the nights between sessions. The right pick comes down to budget, format, and whether you want a women-only space, and it can change as your circumstances do. Format is the most honest of the three questions, because the option that fits is the one you will actually use: live audio you will speak in, a forum you will write in, or a room you will drive to on a Tuesday night.

Our crisis resources are free for everyone, member or not. One line bears repeating as you compare: Steel Magnolias is peer support and general information, not therapy, not medical advice, not legal advice.