Kristin Cavallari embraced the “pain” she suffered during her divorce from Jay Cutler.
“The Hills” alum said during Tuesday’s episode of the “Let’s Be Honest” podcast that until she divorced the NFL star, she hadn’t learned “to love the hard times too.”
“There is beauty in pain and we need the dark to appreciate the light,” she said of her high-profile divorce.
“For so many years, as long as I could remember, I didn’t wanna feel anything,” the Uncommon James designer recalled. “I wanted to push everything away. I was like, ‘I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine. I’m the tough girl.’”
She continued, “I was fine, I didn’t know how to ask for help, I couldn’t be vulnerable.”
Her divorce from Cutler after nearly seven years of marriage, however, gave her the opportunity to experience everything.
“I was like, ‘You know what? This is the first time in my life I wanna feel it all,” the reality star recalled.
“I wanna experience it all. The good, the bad, the ugly, I wanna feel the pain. I wanna sit in it. I don’t wanna rush or run from it.’”
Cavallari added, “Thank God I did, because that was where the majority of my growth and life came from. The pain, and the hurt, and the suffering is there to teach us something — that’s where we learn and we grow.”
She explained that “instead of running from the pain” and “pretending like it’s not there,” she faced the loss head-on.
“That’s how you get to the other side, where it’s even more beautiful,” she said.
Cavallari, 39, and Cutler, 42, married in 2013 and welcomed kids Camden, 13, Jaxon, 11, and Saylor, 10, before announcing their split in a joint statement in 2020.
“With great sadness after 10 years together we have come to a loving conclusion to get a divorce,” the statement read, attributing the separation to “the situation of two people growing apart.”
They finalized their contentious divorce in 2022 — though the fallout from the split has continued to generate headlines as they publicly dispute the terms of their settlement.
In 2024, she compared co-parenting with the athlete to a “bumpy road” — despite attempts to keep things friendly.
“[It’s] really hard. It has not been easy, to say the least,” she confessed during a “Dumb Blonde” podcast appearance at the time.
Cavallari has since dated TikTok star Mark Estes, though the former pair parted ways after seven months back in September 2024.
