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Your First Steps:

What to Do in the First 30 Days

The first weeks of separation are the hardest. Everything feels urgent. This guide cuts through the noise and tells you exactly what to focus on first.

Written by Katherine Waterhouse, Separation Support Practitioner, based on lived experience and years of supporting others through exactly this stage.

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Your First Steps:

30 Days

From The Separation Companion

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If you've just separated, this guide is for you. You don't need to have everything figured out. You just need to know what to do first, and what can wait. This guide gives you exactly that: a clear, practical checklist for the first 30 days, written by someone who has been through it and come out the other side.

What's inside

A week-by-week breakdown

Days 1–3
The immediate priorities

What to do right now, and what not to do. The decisions that matter most in the first 72 hours.

Days 4–7
Getting your paperwork in order

Which documents to gather, where to find them and how to start building your file.

Week 2
Finances and accounts

What to do with joint accounts, direct debits and financial paperwork, and what your rights are.

Week 2–3
Telling the children

How to approach the conversation, what to say, what not to say and how to support them in the days that follow.

Week 3
Understanding the process

A plain English overview of what comes next, divorce, financial remedy, children's arrangements.

Week 4
Getting the right support

What kind of help you need, where to find it and how to avoid spending money you don't need to.

Written by Katherine Waterhouse. Katherine is a Separation Support Practitioner and McKenzie Friend based in Essex. She experienced her parents' traumatic divorce as a child, and later navigated her own separation as an adult. She founded The Separation Companion to offer practical, grounded support to others at exactly the stage she found most overwhelming, the very beginning.

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