Ten past three in the morning.
Awake for no reason. Not a noise, not a dream, nothing. His eyes simply opened and his head was already at full speed — on the filing that arrived on Friday, on the phrase the other side’s lawyer used, on the judge’s expression when she heard that passage. He has already rehearsed three answers. Already rewritten a whole paragraph in his head. Already worked out how many days are left before the hearing.
He turns over, looks at his phone, calculates how many hours of sleep are still available. Two and a half, if he drops off now. He will not drop off.
At six the alarm goes and the day begins like every other: the diary full, the deadlines that did not stop running just because his private life came apart, the meetings where he has to be entirely present. And, mid-afternoon, that odd sensation of having read three pages of a document without taking in a single line.
It has been like this for seven months. Or fourteen. Or two years, with an expert assessment somewhere in the middle.
When someone arrives at the consulting room in that state, the opening line tends to be roughly this: “It’s not depression, it’s just the case — when this is over I’ll be back to normal.” Said with conviction, and with good reason for the conviction. It is true that there is a clear external cause. It is true that anyone in that situation would be struggling.
Perhaps you recognized your own routine in that description. Or perhaps you thought of a colleague — someone in the middle of a dispute like that, whose quality of presence in meetings has been different lately. If so, either way, it is worth saying at the outset: there would be nothing wrong in that. A drawn-out contested divorce is one of the heaviest stress exposures an adult can go through, and suffering because of it is a predictable response, not a sign of fragility.
It is not an event. It is prolonged exposure.
Here is the distinction that almost never gets made, and it changes everything about how you read what is happening to you.
There are difficult events that have a date. They happen, they hurt a great deal, and then the reorganising begins. The body responds intensely and afterwards returns to rest.
Litigation is not like that. It is a succession of peaks with irregular gaps, over months or years: the service of papers, the response, the hearing that gets moved twice, the psychosocial report, the expert assessment, the opinion that lands on a Friday evening, the appeal, the new hearing. Each of those moments switches on the same state of alert. And between one and the next there is no full return to rest — because at any moment something else may arrive.
The human organizm copes reasonably well with acute, intense stress. What it does not do well is stay on alert for an indefinite period, with no end in sight. And “no end in sight” is the defining feature of a contested case: nobody knows when it finishes, and every expectation of conclusion that gets disappointed restarts the count.
What the body does when there is no finish line
This shows up in concrete ways, and they are worth naming, because they usually get put down to other things.
Sleep changes its architecture. It is not difficulty getting off — plenty of people fall asleep from sheer exhaustion. It is the waking in the small hours, almost always at the same time, with the head in full activity. And it is sleep that does not restore: six hours, and you wake as though you had not slept at all.
Attention gets hijacked. Part of your processing capacity stays permanently allocated to the case, even while you are doing something else. That is why reading becomes unproductive and meetings pass you by. It is not a lack of focus. It is focus already occupied.
Irritability rises. It shows up first with whoever is closest — the team, the children, the business partner. It is one of the first things other people notice and one of the last the person themselves recognizes.
The body joins in. Neck tension, a clenched jaw on waking, changes in appetite and weight, blood pressure that swings, digestive symptoms, aches with nothing to explain them on the tests.
The capacity to decide narrows. Decisions inside the case itself start getting made in two bad ways: impulsively, to have done with it, or through paralyzis, putting off what needed answering. Both are expensive — and neither is a failure of character. They are the predictable effect of deciding under sleep deprivation and continuous alert.
The particular trap for people who know the field
This part is for those who work in law, and it deserves saying without hedging.
Being a lawyer, a judge, a prosecutor or a court official and being a party in your own case is a position of particular difficulty. Because you understand every move. You read the filings with a technical eye. You anticipate strategies. You know what that order means, what usually comes next, how long the whole thing can drag on.
That looks like an advantage. In part it is. But it has a specific cost: technical knowledge prevents rest. Someone who does not understand proceedings can, to some degree, delegate and stop thinking about it. You cannot — because your head carries on working the case automatically, without your having asked it to.
There is a second cost, and it is harder. The professional distance you have used for twenty years to look at other people’s conflicts does not work when the conflict is yours. And because it has always worked, its absence gets felt as a personal failure. It is not. It is the condition of being a party.
When the dispute involves the children
I am not going to go anywhere near how your case should be handled legally — that is not my place. But there is a clinical aspect that comes up in almost every appointment of this kind, and it deserves naming.
Disputes involving custody or contact put a person in a position where their own capacity to be a parent becomes the object of external assessment. That is experienced, almost always, as a threat to identity — far more so than any question about property. And it produces an exhausting vigilance: every message written with excessive care, every weekend with the sense of being watched, every conversation with your child gone back over afterwards in your head.
Added to everything else, this tends to be the factor that wears people down most. Not because the person is fragile, but because there is no way of sustaining that vigilance for months without a cost.
Where it stops being an expected reaction
Nothing I have described so far is an illness. It is what happens to healthy people exposed to this kind of strain for a long time, and most of them reorganise once the pressure lets up.
What changes the conversation is this: some conditions stop tracking the proceedings and start moving on their own. The signs that this may have happened are not the intensity of the suffering — they are how independent it has become of the facts.
It is worth paying attention if, over weeks:
– The state has become continuous, the same every day, even in stretches when nothing at all is happening in the case. Good news in the proceedings produces no relief whatsoever. – Sleep does not settle even in the long gaps between steps. – Concentration does not return at any point, including on tasks that have nothing to do with the dispute. – Something that always gave pleasure — sport, music, the friends you have always had — has stopped entirely and has not come back. – Your work has fallen off in a sustained way, with delays and slips that are not your standard. – You notice that important decisions, inside and outside the case, are being made in a state you do not trust.
That last item is, in practice, the one that matters most. A contested case demands of you exactly what it most compromises: judgment, clarity, and the capacity to hold a position over time. Coming to the end of proceedings with decisions made under two years of sleep deprivation is a cost that lasts far longer than the case does.
This is not about turning your pain into a diagnosis
It is worth being explicit, because this is the resistance that comes up most often.
Seeking an evaluation does not mean accepting that you have a mental illness, or that your reaction is out of proportion, or that your suffering needs reclassifying. Nobody is going to tell you that struggling during a contested divorce is a symptom.
What an evaluation does is separate two things that get confused: the suffering caused by the situation, which is expected and is not treated, and the accumulated functional consequences — sleep, attention, mood, the capacity to decide — which may have started operating on their own and which, once they do, are not resolved by waiting for the final judgment.
That is a clinical question. It gets answered with someone who has the time to put the whole history back together, not in twenty minutes and not alone, at ten past three in the morning.
You do not have to conclude anything today.
Have the divorce proceedings started to affect your body?
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Dr. Leonardo Sodré is a psychiatrist and psychotherapist in Brasília, Brazil (CRM-DF 14.206 · RQE 14.761). He holds a PhD in Psychiatry from UFRGS and teaches at the University of Brasília School of Medicine. This content is informational and educational, and does not replace individual clinical evaluation, diagnosis, or treatment.