For a while, the relief was the loudest thing. The marriage was over, and for the first time in years, breathing felt easy again. But within weeks, something else moved in to take its place. Not sadness exactly. Something quieter and harder to name.
Judit Thom remembers the question that followed her everywhere that year: who am I now, outside of this relationship? She had no answer. She looked for one anyway, in other people, in new routines, in anything that might fill the space where her marriage used to be. Nothing did. Today, as founder of The Next Chapter Process™ in Brittany, France, Thom works daily with women rebuilding their sense of self after divorce, drawing on both her own experience and her formal training as a Master Life Coach. Her defining conviction is a simple one: time apart from a marriage is not the same thing as healing from it.
A Coach by Training, Not Only by Experience
Thom is a CEPC-accredited Master Life Coach, and that formal grounding matters to her as much as anything she has lived through personally. Her own divorce sharpened her understanding of what women need when a marriage ends, but it is her training, her coaching methodology and years of structured client work that shape how she actually practices. The Next Chapter Process™ did not emerge from instinct alone. It was built, deliberately, as a coaching framework, tested and refined across real client work since 2023.
That combination, lived experience paired with formal coaching skill, is what she brings into every session. She does not ask a client to simply relate to her story. She asks better questions, structures the work in stages, and holds her clients accountable to their own goals, the way a trained coach does.
Eleven Years of Learning What the Body Already Knew
Before she trained as a coach, Thom spent eleven years in West London as a reflexologist and holistic therapist, supporting women through stress, fertility struggles, IVF, pregnancy and the early months of motherhood. She trained through ITEC in anatomy and physiology and reflexology, later adding Emotional Freedom Technique certification. That period taught her something she later carried directly into her coaching: the body keeps its own record of what a woman is going through, whether or not she has the words for it.
She built that practice from 2008, an entrepreneur supporting many women through some of the most physically and emotionally loaded seasons of their lives. Then her own marriage ended, and she turned toward formal coach training to understand, professionally as well as personally, how to rebuild an identity from the ground up.
What she found reshaped her thinking entirely. She had assumed the work was about getting over what happened. It wasn’t. “The real work wasn’t about moving on,” she says. “It was about rebuilding myself from within.” That distinction, between recovering from a marriage and rebuilding an identity outside of it, became the foundation for The Next Chapter Process when she launched it in 2023.
Why Years Apart From a Marriage Isn’t the Same as Being Free of It
The women who come to Thom are rarely in crisis in any way an outsider would recognise. They function. They work. Some have been divorced for years. But internally, she says, they are still asking why it happened, what they could have done differently, whether they were somehow not enough. Or simply they stilll feel stuck and unable to move forward, “You cannot create your best next chapter,” Thom says, “while continually revisiting the previous one. You need to find your identity before you do it so.”
Her process moves through three deliberate stages: Release, Reclaim, Recreate. Release is where a woman examines not just what happened to her, but her own patterns within it, what she tolerated, what she ignored, where she abandoned her own needs. Reclaim is where she starts experimenting with a life built around her own preferences again, often for the first time in years. Recreate is where clarity turns into decisions, about dating, boundaries, work, or simply where and how she wants to live.
Different Women, One Recurring Shift
The results show up differently for every client, because Thom refuses to run one script for any of them. One client, married 28 years before an unexpected divorce, arrived 18 months later still emotionally trapped in rumination. “The ruminating about the past is not serving my healing, the present or my future,” she reflected near the end of their work, describing how the realisation had helped her get unstuck. Another client, facing a difficult settlement while frightened of relapsing into a depression she’d known before, moved from being consumed by fear to taking ownership of an outcome, and a life, she says she never imagined for herself.
What ties these stories together is not the circumstances. It’s the shift Thom watches for in every client: from why did this happen to me to what do I want now. She tracks it not through a clinical scale but through evidence in real time, whether a woman is trusting her own decisions more, taking action instead of overthinking, and beginning to imagine a future no longer shaped by the one that ended.
What Stays After the Ninety Days End
Thom coaches entirely online, in English and Hungarian, which lets her work with women well beyond France regardless of where they’re rebuilding their lives. She stays in touch with many clients long after their formal sessions end, not out of obligation, but because she genuinely wants to know whether the shift held. For her, that’s the real test. Not whether a woman can say she’s over her divorce, but whether she can say something sturdier.
She still remembers where her own answer eventually led her. Not to someone else filling the gap her marriage left behind, but to a version of herself she hadn’t met yet, one she now helps other women find through both her training and her own hard-won understanding of what that process actually takes.
The relief was never the destination. The woman who shows up afterward is.
Judit Thom is a CEPC-accredited Master Life Coach and the founder of The Next Chapter Process™, based in Dinan, Brittany, France. She coaches professional women through the emotional and identity transition of divorce and separation, helping them move from feeling stuck to consciously creating what comes next. To connect with Judit, visit her LinkedIn or book a clarity call at https://calendly.com/thomjudit/45-min-free-coaching-call.
