Nilaja Ford co-founded Ford Brown Law with her partner Donnett Brown. Both were prosecutors for the state of New Jersey, and both specialize in domestic violence alongside family law. Nilaja handled domestic violence contempt matters on the prosecution side before moving into an exclusively matrimonial, custody, and domestic violence practice, and she has been conducting child interviews since before the statute was revised to formalize them. She and her partner also run a free legal-services clinic at a women's resource center in Newark. Everything she describes here is New Jersey practice, though she notes much of it tracks other states moving the same way.

The conversation opens on hearsay, because it is where parents lose ground without understanding why. A letter from a therapist, a teacher, or a supportive friend generally cannot stand on its own at a hearing; the person who wrote it has to be available to be questioned. Nilaja walks through the exceptions she leans on, particularly business records like school attendance, and why expert reports come with the expectation that the expert can be asked how they reached their conclusions.

She then explains what the revision, nicknamed children in charge, actually does. New Jersey's best-interest standard and its 14 factors are unchanged. What is clarified is the mechanism: a recorded interview with the judge, under a protective order rather than something a parent can post, with questions submitted by both sides. Age affects how much weight a child's preference carries, not whether they are heard. And the question she puts on her own list is not who do you want to live with, it is what the ideal arrangement would look like, in specifics, because the specifics are what reveal what is really going on.

Nilaja and Lisa then work through the situations BTGO's clients live in. A parent asking for sole custody, and her first question, which is always why. Reporting abuse, and why the investigating body has to be the state agency rather than you. Cayden's Law, and what these changes are trying to prevent. A teenager who has already aligned with one parent, and Nilaja's uncomfortable point that acts and omissions count, that timing counts, and that a case arriving late arrives with a history already built. She also covers legal decision-making, stonewalling, and the 24-hour clause she has had written into orders so one parent cannot run out the clock on the other.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• What hearsay is, and why the letter from your child's therapist may not come in
• Which records do come in, and why school attendance is used so often
• What New Jersey's children-in-charge revision actually changed, and what it did not
• How a child interview is conducted, who submits the questions, and who can hear it
• How age affects the weight of a child's preference rather than their eligibility
• Why "I want sole custody" gets answered with a question, and what she is listening for
• Why the state agency, not you, has to be the one investigating an abuse allegation
• Acts, omissions, and timing: why a case brought late arrives with a history attached

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Nilaja's background: prosecutor, then family and domestic violence law
3:00 Hearsay, and why the therapist's letter will not come in
7:00 What the children-in-charge revision actually changed
9:00 How a child interview works, and who writes the questions
11:00 Age, weight, and New Jersey's fourteen best-interest factors
17:00 "I want sole custody." Her first question is why
19:00 Reporting abuse: the agency that investigates, and why it cannot be you
25:00 Teenagers who have already been turned against a parent
31:00 Getting to the whys behind what a child says
39:00 Legal decisions, stonewalling, and 24-hour clauses

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183
🔗 Nilaja Ford at Ford Brown Law: https://www.fordbrownlaw.com/

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.

Anne is an attorney, law professor, law dean emeritus, and legal journalist. She's the author of They're Your Kids Too, a guide for parents navigating a broken family law system, and she co-developed one of the earliest models of co-parent counseling with therapist Carol Marx. She's still licensed in California and continues to write and advocate through her Substack and her YouTube show, Fathers Are Parents Too.

In this conversation, Anne walks through the pattern she learned to recognize in her own practice: a parent losing control of custody starts escalating, and a false allegation of abuse is often what she calls the "nuclear option." She lays out the concrete steps she told her clients to take before an allegation could land, and the case that pushed her to co-develop co-parent counseling, including the "cut the cake" method for getting a resistant ex to agree to a therapist. She also names what she calls the "silver bullet" strategy, where a parent files a restraining order early specifically to gain a custody advantage, and why she considers it as dangerous today as it was decades ago.

Lisa and Anne also get into what to do when your own lawyer doesn't have experience with alienation or false-allegation cases, and how to push for a second opinion or a new attorney without damaging that relationship.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• Where the term "co-parenting" actually came from, and why the framing matters for your case
• The real driver behind most high-conflict acrimony, and how to recognize it escalating
• Early warning signs that a false allegation of abuse may be coming
• Concrete steps to protect yourself before an allegation ever gets filed
• What co-parent counseling is, what it isn't, and why it works when little else does
• The "cut the cake" method for getting a resistant ex to agree to counseling
• Why proving a false allegation can flip custody in some states
• The danger of the "silver bullet" restraining-order strategy being pitched online

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Intro
4:00 One of the first US attorneys to take up fathers' and children's rights
7:00 The case she could have won, and why she didn't
10:00 From "visitation" to two parents in two homes
13:00 False allegations, and what she told clients to do about them
19:00 Supervised time as a control tactic, and documenting everything
22:00 Restraining orders filed for custody leverage
25:00 What co-parent counseling is, and when courts order it
31:00 Pre-divorce counseling, and building a schedule around the real family
37:00 A case in progress: reunification therapy with teenagers
40:00 Finding a counselor, and how to coach your own attorney

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.

Ashish Joshi practices family law and focuses nationally on domestic violence and parental alienation cases. His first book, Litigating Parental Alienation, is one Lisa has recommended for years. His new one, Litigating Family Violence, covers the wider category: coercive control, emotional and financial abuse, immigration used as leverage, international abduction, and the child psychological maltreatment that alienation falls under. He also teaches on these issues at legal and judicial conferences, including for judges in areas with few family law resources.

In this conversation, Ashish and Lisa work through the difference between parental alienation, parent-child contact problems, and alienating behaviors, and why courts sometimes need all three distinctions to get an order right. They talk about what makes a reunification order enforceable: a named therapist, a deadline, and consequences for the parent who is supposed to bring the child to sessions. They cover why letting a rejected teenager decide how often to attend therapy undermines the process, when a judge can find alienation from a parent's own text messages without an expert witness, and what changes once custody has already been reversed but the child is still in constant phone contact with the parent who alienated them.

Ashish also talks about the research on men experiencing coercive control and intimate partner violence, and about vicarious trauma, both for professionals who handle these cases and for the parents living through them.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• Why "high conflict" is the wrong label when one parent is abusive and the other is reacting to it
• The difference between parental alienation, parent-child contact problems, and alienating behaviors
• Why no child is ever "too old" for court intervention, as long as they're under the court's jurisdiction
• How to write a reunification order that can't be stalled: a named therapist, a deadline, and real consequences
• Why letting a child set their own therapy schedule undermines the whole process
• When a judge can find alienation without an expert witness, and when you actually need one
• Why safeguards, not just more parenting time, matter once custody has already changed
• The difference between a child's voice and a child's choice, and why courts should never confuse the two

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 What "family violence" means, and why Ashish wrote a broader book
7:00 Why "high conflict" is the wrong label for these cases
11:00 Parental alienation vs. parent-child contact problems vs. alienating behaviors
15:00 When to bring resist-refuse dynamics to court
17:00 Severe cases: custody reversal, and why no child is "too old"
19:00 Writing a reunification order that can't be stalled
25:00 Why letting a rejected teenager set the therapy schedule backfires
31:00 When you need an expert witness, and when a judge doesn't
35:00 After the custody flip: the phone, enmeshment, and safeguarding reunification
39:00 The new book, self-care for the fight, and where to find Ashish

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183
🔗 Ashish Joshi at Joshi: Attorneys + Counselors: https://www.joshiattorneys.com/
🔗 Ashish Joshi on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashishsjoshi/
🔗 Ashish Joshi's latest book at the American Bar Association: https://www.americanbar.org/products/inv/book/456601936/

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.

Ian Steinberg practices matrimonial and family law in New York City, where his firm handles divorce across the city, Westchester, and Long Island. He is also a friend of Chris and Lisa's, returning for a second conversation. His first career was in real estate litigation, which taught him how a courtroom actually behaves; he later trained in mediation and collaborative law, convinced there was a less destructive path through a divorce. He traces his feel for conflict resolution back further than that, to refereeing adult-league hockey as a teenager, holding the whistle as the youngest person on the ice.

Ian lays out how mediation works when one side holds far more of the power. In its classic form, two parties meet with a single neutral mediator and each consults a private attorney between sessions, so no decision binds anyone until it is written down and signed. He explains why a retired judge sitting as mediator can rein in a parent who is used to getting their way, and how separate rooms, in person or over video, keep a frightened party from having to negotiate across from someone who frightens them. He also makes the case for what mediation saves: money that would otherwise go to motion practice, and the momentum that comes from shrinking ten open issues down to two.

For anyone walking into a first session scared, Ian offers a plan: prepare with your lawyer and your divorce coach, name the triggers you already know your ex will use, and write down every ask in advance. Above all, you are never required to say yes in the room, and a good lawyer will not corner you into it. He is equally clear about the cases where the power imbalance is too great or the conflict too raw, and mediation should not go forward at all.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• Why mediation can still work in a domestic violence case, but only with firm guardrails in place
• The difference between classic mediation and attorney-guided mediation, and when each one fits
• How a retired judge serving as mediator can shift a lopsided power dynamic
• What a consulting attorney does, and why nothing is binding until it is on paper
• How separate rooms and Zoom breakout rooms keep a frightened party from facing their ex
• How to prepare: your written asks, your known triggers, and the professionals around you
• Why you never have to agree on the spot, even when your own lawyer is pushing to close
• The signs that mediation should stop, or was never the right fit for your case

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Welcoming Ian back, and what litigation costs you
3:00 Learning conflict resolution as a teenage hockey referee
5:00 When family court does not protect the target
7:00 Two kinds of mediation, and the consulting attorney outside the room
11:00 Retired judges as mediators, and shifting a power imbalance
13:00 Lisa's own mediation, and the momentum of small agreements
17:00 Zoom breakout rooms and four-way conferences for safety
21:00 Preparing a scared client: asks, triggers, and support
25:00 Not getting pressured to settle, and informed consent
27:00 When mediation should stop or was never the right fit

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183
🔗 Ian Steinberg at Berkman Bottger Newman & Schein: https://www.berkbot.com/attorneys/ian-steinberg/

🎧 More with Ian Steinberg on this podcast
Ep 128: What Family Court Judges Actually Weigh

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.

Jon, the advocate behind the Male Victims of Female Narcissists community, coaches men who are dealing with an emotionally abusive ex and parental alienation, work that grew out of his own long marriage and divorce. He describes his ex as someone who worked her way between him and his kids, and between him and his extended family, gradually rather than all at once.

In this conversation, Jon and Lisa go through the two forms of alienation he sees most often: one that plays out through the court system with younger children, and a slower version with older kids, where the distance starts to feel like the child's own choice. He talks about why he now thinks he divorced too late, what he said when his daughter finally reached back out after four years of silence, and the story from the Bible's prodigal son that shaped how he waited for her.

Jon also shares what he tells the men he coaches: why chasing an adult child who has cut contact usually backfires, why he still doesn't discuss the marriage's problems with his kids, and why everyone he has talked to about this points to the same pattern: the parent who stays consistent tends to be the one a child eventually comes back to.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• The two different kinds of parental alienation: one enforced through the court system, one that develops slowly with older kids
• Why Jon now believes divorcing earlier might have given his kids a stable home sooner
• What he actually said, and didn't say, when his estranged daughter reached back out after four years
• Why chasing an adult child who has cut contact rarely works
• Why he doesn't discuss the marriage's problems with his kids, even years later
• The prodigal-son framework that shaped how he waited for his daughter to reach out
• Why acknowledging the hurt on both sides mattered as much as the apology itself

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Two kinds of parental alienation
5:00 Why he waited to divorce, and what he'd do differently
11:00 The text that said "see you never"
13:00 The prodigal son framework: waiting without chasing
19:00 The actual reconciliation call, and not pulling punches
25:00 Advice for parents whose kids are still young
29:00 Taking the high road, and where his other three kids stand
35:00 Coaching men through this, and where to find Jon

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183
🔗 Male Victim Jon on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/malevictimsoffemalenarcissists/

🎧 More with Male Victim Jon on this podcast
Ep 180: Parental Alienation With Adult Children
Ep 222: Parental Alienation and Surviving the Holidays

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.

Lynn Price is a negotiation speaker, trainer, and author, and an attorney who spent over two decades as in-house corporate counsel. Across roughly eleven thousand negotiations she started noticing patterns and turned them into a simple, memorable formula she calls the three Rs. Her book, Negotiate It!, breaks the whole skill down.

In this episode, Lynn and Lisa adapt that formula for a toxic ex you feel powerless against. They work through being Ready, Relatable, and Reasonable, and Lynn's system of sorting every want into three buckets: your have-to-haves, your helpful-haves, and your hopeful-haves, the ones you can trade away. She explains why you make the ask even when the other side holds the leverage, why you make it and then stop talking, and a line she learned early: if it feels good to say it, don't.

They trade the moves Been There Got Out teaches too, anchoring to a shared goal, never asking or answering why, and never letting your ex see how much you want something. Lynn is practical about how to build the skill: practicing out loud in front of a mirror or a camera so your words and your face do not give you away, and even rehearsing with AI. Her core message is that negotiation is learnable, not a personality trait, and preparation is what turns fear into confidence.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• The three Rs of negotiation: being Ready, Relatable, and Reasonable
• How to sort every want into have-to-haves, helpful-haves, and hopeful-haves
• Why you make the ask even when the other person holds the leverage
• Why you should make your ask and then stop talking
• The rule "if it feels good to say it, don't," and how to use a pause
• Why you never ask or answer "why" with a difficult ex
• How to prepare by practicing out loud, recording yourself, even rehearsing with AI

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Negotiation vs. mediation, and Lynn's 11,000 deals
3:00 The three Rs, and confidence from small wins
5:00 Leverage is perception: you still get to make the ask
9:00 Prioritizing your ask: the three buckets
13:00 Being relatable, and anchoring to common ground
15:00 Make the ask, then go silent
17:00 "If it feels good to say it, don't"
19:00 Being reasonable, and never asking or answering "why"
27:00 The price of peace, and cost-benefit
29:00 Preparing: practice out loud, record yourself, even AI

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183
🔗 Lynn Price at Lynn Price Consulting: https://lynnpriceconsulting.com/
🔗 Negotiate It! by Lynn Price (Amazon): https://www.amazon.com/Negotiate-Develop-Negotiation-Muscle-Workplace/dp/0692152539

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.

Dr. Annie Brook is a body-centered, or somatic, psychologist with a doctorate and decades in practice. She runs The Brook Institute, which trains therapists, publishes online courses, and gives away a substantial free library of articles and tools. Her specialty is what she calls pre- and perinatal work: the impressions laid down before a person could think, including birth and adoption trauma. She is candid that this is her own material as well. She was born premature, spent seventeen days in an incubator without touch, and did not connect her adult perfectionism to a fear of being sent back there until her forties. She has also worked with children in the court system, and says the experience damaged her confidence in it. This is her first appearance on the show.

In this episode, Annie explains how an early template sets the questions a nervous system keeps asking, and what she looks for in an adult: whether you let someone very close very fast, whether you override your own instincts, whether you keep getting blindsided. She and Lisa spend time on shame and self-blame, which Annie treats as a serious drain on personal power, because once you have lost the felt sense of your own potency you make strange decisions and turn your anger inward. She also describes a small girl in her office who taped shut the gap in a folding screen and would not let her in, and what that turned out to be about.

The second half is a toolkit, and Annie walks through each one so a listener can do it while listening. A ball you imagine breathing between your hands, for coming out of a frozen state. Weight and pressure, which she calls proprioception, done invisibly against a desk or a chair. Three sentences worth having ready. A spatial boundary you fill with your own energy rather than leaving collapsed for other people to walk through. Pushing down through your feet before you push outward. She and Lisa talk about high tone, low tone, and the middle you want under pressure, about blending fierceness with compassion without losing either, about interrupting self-attack by twisting a towel under the table on a video hearing, and about why she suggests watching a fish.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• Why hopelessness after one of these relationships isn't evidence that you're broken
• What Annie looks for in adults: moving too fast, overriding instincts, getting blindsided
• Why shame and self-blame drain your sense of your own potency
• Proprioception: using weight and pressure in a courtroom without anyone noticing
• Three sentences worth having ready before a hearing
• The spatial boundary you fill instead of leaving collapsed
• Pushing down through your feet before you push outward, and why the order matters
• High tone, low tone, and how to stay in the middle during a hard phone call

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 The "bad picker" belief, and why hopelessness isn't proof you're broken
4:00 Meet Annie Brook, and patterns encoded before you could think
7:00 Attachment, and the template an early experience sets
10:00 Being blindsided, and what shame and self-blame cost you
12:00 What children show in play: the folding screen
15:00 Body awareness, and the spatial game to play with a friend
18:00 The breathing ball, and coming out of freeze
22:00 Four things to do right before court, and the boundary you fill
27:00 High tone, low tone, and staying in the middle
32:00 Fierceness with compassion, and pushing down through your feet
36:00 Self-attack thinking, and twisting a towel under the table

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183
🔗 Dr. Annie Brook and The Brook Institute: https://anniebrook.com/

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.

Julia is a licensed clinical social worker practicing in New York and New Jersey, consulting and speaking nationally, and testifying as an expert witness on domestic violence, intimate partner violence, and sexual violence. She works with primary survivors and with secondary survivors, the family members and friends who are also carrying it. Her clinical practice starts around age fifteen, though many of her clients are parents of much younger children, which is where this conversation lives.

A large part of it is about trusting yourself. Julia points out that the parents in this audience have often spent years being told they are not smart, not capable, not a good parent, which is designed to erode exactly the instrument they now need. So when they notice a change in a child's mood, grades, friendships, or preferences, they second guess it. Her advice is to lean in rather than watch and wait, and to use whatever supports exist, including a teacher, a school counselor, or a pediatrician.

Then she gets concrete about safety planning for a child who has to go back because an order says so. She models it on fire safety: built in advance, practiced, and revisited a couple of times a year as the school year, sports seasons, and vacations change, rather than assembled during an emergency. Devices and who a child would call. Which neighbor, and the backup for when that neighbor is away. What to do if a parent is unresponsive or making threats. She wants children brought into the planning at whatever level fits them, because they know their own routine better than the adults do. Julia also responds to a case where the reports went nowhere, a forced reunification arrangement is making a child worse, and the protective parent is being labeled an alienator for objecting. She talks about what the research says about a believing, supporting parent, why staying is sometimes the safety decision rather than a failure, and why not every attorney or clinician is equipped for these dynamics.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• What to do in the first minutes after a child discloses, and the words to say out loud
• Why an unbelievable-sounding account is not a reason to doubt a child
• How to trust your instincts after years of being told your judgment is wrong
• Signs worth leaning into: mood, grades, friendships, and changes in preferences
• Safety planning for a child the court still sends back, built like a fire drill
• What a plan covers: devices, which neighbor, times of day, and the backups
• Why bringing your child into the planning produces a better plan
• Why not every attorney or therapist understands these dynamics well enough

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 The one thing not to do when a child discloses
3:00 Believing the unbelievable, and saying "I believe you" out loud
5:00 Julia's background: primary and secondary survivors
7:00 Signs something is wrong, and trusting a gut that has been eroded
11:00 Who to reach out to when you feel you have no support at all
13:00 Safety planning when the order says the child goes back
17:00 What a plan covers, and revisiting it like a fire drill
23:00 When the system fails, and a forced reunification makes things worse
27:00 What a believing parent's support does for a child's trajectory
31:00 What to say to a child you still have to hand over
37:00 Why "just leave" is not the right answer for everyone

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183
🔗 Julia Hochstadt, LCSW: https://www.therapywithjulia.com/

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.

James Porfido has practiced law for more than 35 years, starting as a certified criminal trial attorney in a New Jersey prosecutor's office and later moving to the defense side, where he handled sex crimes and child abuse cases. He is now of counsel at a large New Jersey firm, teaches advocacy and persuasion as an adjunct law professor, and has spent 25 years as a legal analyst commenting on high-profile cases. He is the author of "Unequal Justice: The Search for Truth, the Balance in the Scales."

In this conversation, James and Lisa focus on the theme that torments their audience: a court process that moves so slowly it becomes its own punishment, and an ex who exploits that. He explains New Jersey's lifetime restraining orders and the narrow path to dissolving one, why the "I'll just explain it to the judge" instinct fails, and how a parent can lose all contact with their children while an allegation, sometimes a coached or false one, sits unresolved for a year.

They also get practical. James is candid that these cases are a fight, and that the right attorney is one who knows the courthouse and its people, not only the statutes. He walks through the questions worth asking before you hire, and why "how much do you charge" should not be the first one. And he shares the harder argument from his book: that a restraining order is sometimes granted as a tactic to gain leverage, which pushes back the people with real injuries waiting at the back of the courtroom for the protection they actually need.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• What New Jersey's lifetime restraining orders mean, and why they're so hard to dissolve
• Why "just telling the judge you didn't do it" is not how any of this works
• How the delay between a temporary and a final order can itself become a weapon
• What happens to a parent's contact with their kids while an allegation is pending
• How a coached allegation can flip a parent from presumed innocent to presumed guilty
• Why knowing the "players," not just the law, is what you want in an attorney
• The questions to ask before you hire, beyond "how much will this cost?"
• Why genuine abuse cases deserve priority over the ones weaponizing the system

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 What a legal analyst does, and trials as storytelling
5:00 From prosecutor to defense, with a grounding in DV cases
9:00 New Jersey's lifetime restraining orders, and how hard they are to undo
13:00 Why you can't just "tell the judge," and the side-of-the-road trap
15:00 When the delay itself becomes the weapon
17:00 Kids under a restraining order, and a parent becoming a stranger
19:00 False allegations, coached children, and being presumed guilty
21:00 Surviving the limbo, and an attorney who knows the players
25:00 The questions to ask before you hire (not "how much?")
29:00 Unequal Justice: when restraining orders get weaponized

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183
🔗 James Porfido at Porfido Law: https://www.porfidolaw.com/

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.

Tosha Schore is back on the show, and this conversation is about children who are not only emotionally aggressive but physically violent. She founded Parenting Boys Peacefully and co-authored Listen: Five Simple Tools to Meet Your Everyday Parenting Challenges with her mentor Patty Wipfler. She has three sons, now grown, and describes the morning that started this work: reading the news, noticing that the violence in it was almost all committed by men, and deciding to find out what a parent can change while a boy is small.

Tosha and Lisa map the predictors first. Fear, in all its forms, and change a child had no say in, which is what a divorce is. Rigidity, and the child who cannot cope when today runs differently from yesterday. Then the difference between an outburst anyone might have and a pattern you can see coming, which is the sentence that starts with hoping he does not throw the remote again this week.

The tools follow. Keeping everyone safe, including the parent, and why she would rather your door got dented than your arm scratched. Saying almost nothing, because it lands on a brain that cannot use it. Not naming your child's feelings for them, which she says goes over like lighter fluid. Stay listening, meaning staying present without trying to fix anything, and the notes some parents pass under the door that turn into a written back and forth about things too hard to say aloud. Tosha also takes on disrespect, and what to do when the words coming out of your child sound exactly like your ex, and closes on connection between the hard moments: rough and tumble play, indoor snowballs, dragging a kid around the floor on a sheet, and a timed block where they lead and you follow.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• What predicts aggression in a child, and why change they did not choose sets it off
• The difference between a one-off outburst and a pattern you can see coming
• How to keep everyone safe in the moment, including yourself
• Why you cannot talk a flooded child down, and the little you should say instead
• Why naming your child's emotions for them makes the outburst worse
• Stay listening: staying present without fixing, and the notes under the door
• What to do when your child's words sound like your ex coming out of their mouth
• Connection between the hard moments: rough and tumble play and letting them lead

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 How Tosha came to this work, and why she focused on boys
4:00 Predictors: fear, change nobody chose, and rigidity
6:00 A one-off outburst versus a pattern worth addressing
7:30 In the moment: keeping everyone safe, including you
9:00 Why you cannot talk a furious child out of a feeling
11:00 Nervous laughter, and the shame that follows hurting you
13:30 Stay listening, and the notes people slide under the door
16:30 Time-outs, and teaching a boy that asking for help is strong
19:00 When you hear your ex's voice coming out of your child
23:00 Rough and tumble play, and special time where they lead

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183
🔗 Tosha Schore at Parenting Boys Peacefully: https://parentingboyspeacefully.com/

🎧 More with Tosha Schore on this podcast
Ep 167: Aggression in Boys, and What Actually Helps
Ep 209: Aggressive Kids, Loving Limits, and Connection

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.

Dr. Andrea DePetris is a clinical psychologist with an academic appointment at Yale School of Medicine who also works in private practice. Much of her caseload is adults who present as though they have it together and describe the opposite privately: anxiety, stress, and a sense that it could all come apart. Her work is helping people understand what earlier circumstances and relationships are still running underneath, and then updating it so their inside matches the life they are actually living.

In this episode she explains the window of tolerance, the range in which a person can stay clear, connected, and responsive. Trauma narrows it. Above the window is hyperarousal: fast speech, urgency, heat, volume, tension, the pull to win the exchange. Below it is hypoarousal: going silent, passivity, shrinking, emotional flatness, checking out. Andrea points out that which direction your body takes depends partly on how much agency you feel in the moment and partly on the environment you grew up in, and that both are the body protecting you rather than failing you.

The practical half covers what to do in the moment and what to rehearse beforehand. Adjusting posture and feeling your feet on the floor if you tend to shut down. A prepared sentence and physical distance if you tend to activate. Breathing with a long exhale to reach the parasympathetic system. Scanning your surroundings for five neutral objects, or one color, when focusing inward does not feel safe. Andrea and Lisa also talk about doing this in front of children on purpose, and about the repair conversation afterward, because a parent modeling regulation is teaching it.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• Two different meanings of "trigger," and which one people usually mean
• The window of tolerance, and what narrows it
• Hyperarousal and hypoarousal: the body signals that tell you which way you're heading
• Why your reaction depends on how much agency you feel, and on how you grew up
• The pause, and what it looks like differently for shutting down versus escalating
• Breathing for a long exhale, and why the exhale is the part that matters
• Grounding outside your body when focusing inward doesn't feel safe
• How to repair with your kids afterward, and why that's the modeling, not the failure

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 What "trigger" actually means, and whether warnings help
5:00 Meet Dr. Andrea DePetris, and the window of tolerance
8:00 Hyperarousal and hypoarousal: which way your body goes
11:00 The body signals to catch before an exchange goes sideways
12:00 The pause: posture for shutdown, stepping away for activation
16:00 Practice beats perfection, and repairing after you lose it
18:00 Breathing in flowers, blowing out birthday candles
19:00 When the body doesn't feel safe: grounding outside yourself
23:00 Coaching yourself, and completing the cycle with your kids

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183
🔗 Dr. Andrea DePetris, The Verity Practice: https://drandreadepetris.com/

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.

Monique is a former BTGO client, a current law student, and a co-founder of a grassroots survivor advocacy group in Southern California. She is not an attorney, and she is careful to describe SB 1192, the Reclaim Act introduced by California State Senator Susan Rubio, as a proposal moving through the legislature rather than as current law.

In this episode, Monique and Lisa work through how the bill is structured: defining who qualifies for protection, an affidavit that a domestic violence advocate or a mental-health professional can sign, and protected filings on the other side of it. She explains that it would recognize repeated frivolous litigation, including filings meant only to insult, injure, or maintain contact, as post-separation abuse, and that where it applies, filing fees can be waived and an attorney provided at no charge. It builds on California's existing coercive-control protections rather than starting from scratch.

The back half is about advocacy itself: how survivor-led, bottom-up organizing gets laws like this passed, why testimony is most effective when it stays factual and within the time limit, and how Connecticut's Jennifer's Law opened the door other states are now walking through. Monique closes on the community work behind all of it.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• What California's proposed Reclaim Act (SB 1192) is trying to do about post-separation litigation
• Why the bill treats repeated frivolous filings, even ones meant only to force contact, as abuse
• The three-part structure: who qualifies, an affidavit, and then protected filings
• Who can sign the affidavit: a trained domestic violence advocate or a mental-health professional
• Where it applies: filing fees waived and an attorney provided at no cost
• How it builds on California's existing coercive-control protections rather than replacing them
• How survivor-led, bottom-up advocacy actually gets a bill like this passed
• Why testimony lands hardest when it stays factual, and how Jennifer's Law became the model

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Reunion: from pro se client to law student
3:00 SB 1192, the Reclaim Act, and who introduced it
5:00 The three-part test: who qualifies
7:00 The affidavit: who can sign it, and the evidence
9:00 Frivolous filings, waived fees, and a free attorney
13:00 Protecting the advocates who sign
17:00 Survivor testimony: keep it factual
21:00 Getting a law like this passed in your state
25:00 The community work behind the bill

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.

She starts with a truth few say out loud: some alienation is almost unavoidable in divorce, and it tends to peak in adolescence. But she reframes the picture: your child is half the other parent, and protecting them means helping them value that half. She and Lisa get practical: why your face and body at the exchange say more than words, how to rebuild trust with a wary teen the way you'd earn a rescued animal's trust, and what to do when a teenager refuses contact. Respect it, but never disappear. Write the letters. Keep the box. Because in her experience, the children come back.

This is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

✅ WHAT YOU'LL LEARN
 ✅ Why some alienation is almost unavoidable in divorce, and why it peaks in adolescence
 ✅ Why your child needs to value the half of them that's the other parent
 ✅ What your face and body communicate at the exchange (and how to check yourself)
 ✅ The "rescued animal" approach to rebuilding trust with a wary teen
 ✅ How to reframe a "strong-willed" child as a strength, not a problem
 ✅ What to do when a teenager flatly refuses contact
 ✅ Why writing letters and keeping them matters more than you think
 ✅ Why the children so often come back, and how to be ready

⏱️ TIMESTAMPS (+1:00 for the bumper)
 0:00 Intro
 1:00 Meet Dr. Gloria Vanderhorst: 50 years with families
 2:48 Why some alienation is unavoidable in divorce
 4:30 The attachments kids lose, and the one they cling to
 6:55 Honor the other parent: your child is half of them
 8:52 Reframing a "strong-willed" child as a gift
 13:45 What your body says at the exchange
 23:01 The "rescued animal" approach to rebuilding trust
 26:24 When your teen refuses: respect it, and stay connected
 31:22 Write the letters, keep the box: why kids come back
 36:38 You can't do this alone
 41:42 Where to find Dr. Vanderhorst

CTA (spoken): Losing your teenager to alienation? Book a free discovery call at beentheregotout.com.
 Books: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You — https://www.amazon.com/Been-There-Got-Out-Against/dp/1967674183 · Been There Got Out — https://www.amazon.com/Been-There-Got-Relationships-Circumstances/dp/194627495X/
 Tags: parental alienation, alienated parent, teenager refuses visitation, reconnecting with child, co-parenting teenager, staying connected, custody, high conflict divorce, protecting your kids

Sara Vandenberg is a psychotherapist and trauma professional who specializes in familial sexual abuse and incest, and works with survivors of abuse more broadly. She spent about three years as a child protective services caseworker in Texas before moving into clinical practice, and she now runs Tonalli Counseling Services along with a coaching and consulting practice. Her book, Choosing to Love Again, is about recovering from betrayal, from familial abuse to infidelity and abandonment. This is her second conversation on the show.

She starts by lowering the temperature: investigations are common, they are usually short, and removal is rare. Then she draws the line that changes how you understand the whole process. A caseworker is not assessing whether you are a good parent. They are assessing whether the child is safe, which is why an investigation can close with nothing happening even when real harm is present. Her risk-versus-danger frame does the rest of the work: risk is the deer-crossing sign, danger is the deer in the road.

The rest is practical. What to document, and why she wants a record of your child's behavior rather than a file on your ex. What a caseworker notices in a home, which is closer to milk in the fridge than an immaculate kitchen. What defensiveness sounds like when a parent lists everything they do and everything their ex does not. Preparing a child for an interview without coaching them, and how coaching gives itself away. Substances, including hair follicle testing that looks back months on a child. Getting written confirmation that a case was ruled out. What to do, early, if a placement may be coming. And repeated false reports: why you cannot stop them, and what a pattern of them eventually says about the person making the calls.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• Why a report to child protective services is not a route to custody
• The difference between clinical harm and what an abuse statute actually covers
• Risk versus danger, and which one an investigation turns on
• What to document before an investigation, and why it's your child's behavior
• What a caseworker looks at in your home, and what they are not looking at
• How to prepare a child for an interview without it reading as coaching
• How to get written documentation that a case was ruled out
• What to do early if a placement may be coming, and how a safety plan differs from a removal

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 How common investigations are, and how rarely a child is removed
3:00 The myth that child protective services decides custody
5:00 Handling the panic, and how short the process usually is
8:00 What to document, and clinical harm vs. the abuse statute
12:00 Risk vs. danger: the deer-crossing frame
14:00 Defensiveness, and what a caseworker hears in "I did, he didn't"
16:00 What they look at in your home
18:00 When a caseworker can act before a judge signs off
20:00 Substances, hair follicle testing, and preparing a child for the interview
24:00 If placement is coming: naming a safe person early
27:00 Repeated false reports, and how children actually handle them

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183
🔗 Sara Vandenberg at Tonalli Services: https://tonalliservices.com/

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.

Dr. Sylvia Kalachinsky, known to her audience as Dr. Sylvia K, is a licensed marriage and family therapist with a doctorate in family therapy and over twenty-one years of practice. She has worked with at-risk youth, provided family therapy inside juvenile detention centers and in clients' homes, worked with migrant families in California, and led group therapy at Mount Sinai for people stepping down from inpatient care. She started writing her book "Lonely AF" during the pandemic when her clinical hours were cut, and she now lives and practices in Geneva. She also hosts her own interview podcast.

This conversation begins with what intergenerational trauma actually means: adaptive strategies passed down through at least three generations, some of them learned and modeled, some of them never questioned because challenging a family rule carries its own cost. Sylvia explains why people are drawn to partners who reproduce how they felt in their family of origin, and why a nervous system conditioned to one environment will reject a healthier one for feeling unfamiliar. She also widens the definition of trauma past the obvious, using a reframe from her EMDR training: anything that was too much for too long, or too little for too long.

The second half is about what you can do while a case is pending and your nervous system is already overloaded. Sylvia describes the amygdala hijack, why the executive part of the brain goes offline under threat, and why the interventions people are usually told to try, meditation and yoga, are not available in that state. Instead she teaches in-between moments: relaxing your hands around the phone, moving one toe until you cannot think about anything else, and the BODY skill in ninety seconds. She explains why practicing when you are calm is what makes it available when you are not, why she advises doing it silently so a difficult ex cannot weaponize it, and what a child learns when they watch a parent regulate rather than being sent away to manage it alone.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• What intergenerational trauma means, and why patterns show up across three generations
• Why people are drawn to partners who feel familiar rather than safe
• Why a conditioned nervous system rejects a healthy relationship at first
• A wider definition of trauma: too much for too long, or too little for too long
• The amygdala hijack, and why calm-down advice does not work in that state
• The BODY skill: breathe, observe, describe, yield, in ninety seconds
• Why to regulate silently, so a difficult ex cannot use it against you
• How to draw a genogram and read your family's pattern for handling conflict

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 What intergenerational trauma means, and why it shows up in every family
4:00 Sylvia's background, and the book she wrote in the pandemic
7:00 Choosing partners who feel familiar rather than safe
10:00 A nervous system that rejects what is healthy for being unfamiliar
13:00 Little-t and big-T trauma, and why minimizing is its own adaptation
16:00 Hypervigilance under legal threat, and the amygdala hijack
19:00 The big-toe trick, and using the in-between moments
21:00 The BODY skill: breathe, observe, describe, yield
28:00 Doing it without announcing it, so it cannot be used against you
31:00 Somatic work over talk therapy, and modeling regulation for your kids

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183
🔗 Dr. Sylvia Kalachinsky: https://drsylviak.com
🔗 Dr. Sylvia K on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drsylviak/

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.

Our guest is Dr. Jill Leibowitz, a clinical psychologist with a private practice in New York City, back for another conversation. She does play therapy with young children, talk therapy with adolescents and adults, parenting work, and dyadic sessions with a parent and infant together to build secure attachment. She is the author of two children's books, The Untold Story of Itsy Bitsy's Long Emotional Day and its sequel Mama's Stressed, which model both sides of a meltdown: helping a child regulate, and repairing afterward when the grown-up is the one who lost it.

Jill starts with why a child says different things in different homes, and why that is usually not lying. A feeling that was true Tuesday can be untrue Thursday. More than that, a child brings one part of themselves to one parent and another part to the other, and each parent ends up certain the other is missing something.

She and Lisa then go through the specific things that inflame a case. Relaying your child's complaint to the other parent as an instruction. Insisting on identical rules when the thing that actually needs to be consistent is sleep, not bedtime routines. Screen time, and the question Jill wants a parent to ask before starting a fight: where will this battle get me. Being looped into a group text with the kids so they can lobby for the other parent's position, and the one-line reply that ends it. Sleepaway camp, and how two parents each amplify one half of a child's ambivalence. And what to do when you are the parent who never hears the hard stuff.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• Why a child telling each parent something different is usually not lying
• Code-switching between two homes, and why kids handle it better than parents expect
• What actually needs to be consistent across households, and what does not
• Why telling the other parent how to parent in their own home backfires every time
• The question to ask before you fight about screen time in a house you are not in
• How to answer when your ex loops the kids into a text thread to lobby you
• Sleepaway camp: how two parents each feed one half of a child's mixed feelings
• Why giving a child decision-making power is a burden, not a gift

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Meeting Dr. Jill Leibowitz, and her two children's books
3:00 Why a child says one thing to you and another to your ex
5:00 Bringing a different self to each parent, and why both are true
7:00 Telling the other parent how to parent, and why it backfires
9:00 Consistency between homes: what has to match and what does not
13:00 Screen time, and where this battle actually gets you
17:00 When your ex loops the kids into the text thread
19:00 Summer camp, and the child who is excited and terrified at once
23:00 The parent your child does not bring the hard stuff to
27:00 Why power is a burden for a child, and where to find Jill

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183
🔗 Dr. Jill Leibowitz at Real Talks Everyday: https://realtalkseveryday.com/
🔗 Dr. Jill Leibowitz on Instagram (@realtalkseveryday): https://www.instagram.com/realtalkseveryday/

🎧 More with Dr. Jill Leibowitz on this podcast
Ep 216: Keeping the Conflict Away From Your Kids

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.

Our guest is Kasia Bukowska, an equestrian coach and equine-assisted therapist working from Poland. Her own path into this was not smooth. Her horses would not do what she asked, she went home frustrated and in tears, and she started painting to process it. Analyzing her own paintings afterward, asking why she had used those colors, why the horse's head was up or down, is how she began to decode what the animals were showing her. She keeps six horses and works with four, including one she uses rarely and only with experienced people, because several vets once told her he was too dangerous to keep.

Kasia walks through what a session involves. She and the client talk on the walk up to the paddock, then she opens the gate and lets one or two horses take themselves into the arena. Nobody rides. The horse wears nothing, so it can move away, come closer, or ignore the whole thing, and each of those is treated as a response rather than an accident. She sets a task, deliberately without instructions, and watches how the person solves it. Her guiding line, which she says she picked up at a seminar, is that the way you do one thing is the way you do everything.

The reason this lands for a BTGO audience is what she describes about reliving. If you are talking about being pushed around while a horse walks toward you, the horse will read the state you are in rather than the sentence you are saying, and it may walk straight into your space. Kasia also covers the version of this for people with no access to horses at all: watching one animal closely enough to leave your own head, getting genuinely grounded rather than performing it, and saying out loud that you are scared. She ends on how to find an equine-assisted or equine gestalt practitioner locally, and the same practice applied to a cat, a dog, or a tree.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• What an equine-assisted session actually involves, and why nobody rides
• Why the horse wears no halter, and what it means when it walks away
• "The way you do one thing is the way you do everything," tested in an arena
• Why a horse responds to the memory you are reliving, not the words you are saying
• How to get something out of watching horses from a fence, with no session booked
• Saying out loud that you are frightened, and what that releases
• Why addiction, anxiety and self-blame keep leading back to the same core
• How to find an equine-assisted, equine gestalt, or online practitioner

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 You do not need to own a horse for any of this
3:00 Kasia's work, and painting her way to what the horses were saying
7:00 What a session actually looks like
11:00 Why the horse stays loose, with nothing on it
13:00 The horse answers what you are reliving, not what you are saying
15:00 "The way you do one thing is the way you do everything"
19:00 Addiction, childhood, and the same core underneath
22:00 If all you can do is watch horses from a fence
25:00 Saying out loud that you are scared
29:00 Finding a practitioner, and how online sessions work
33:00 The shire horse, the pole, and what softening did

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183
🔗 Kasia Bukowska at Heart Horse Experience: https://www.hearthorseexperience.com/
🔗 Kasia Bukowska on Instagram (@equestrian_kasia_bukowska): https://www.instagram.com/equestrian_kasia_bukowska/

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.

David Goldberg is a state-licensed, advanced board-certified polygraph examiner. He spent his early career in law enforcement, and in the roughly 25 years since he has run more than 20,000 examinations for people who were never arrested or charged: parents accused in custody disputes, people facing rumors or workplace accusations, students, and adults trying to confirm something they remember from childhood. He describes himself and Lisa as being in the same line of work in one respect, which is that people arrive at both of their doors in a state of panic.

The conversation opens on that panic, because David treats settling someone down as part of the job rather than a courtesy. He books one client a day and gives that person as long as it takes, on the reasoning that a rushed intake produces badly formed questions. He then walks Lisa through the sequence for a parent whose children have been removed on an allegation: the intake, questions built both around what you say happened and around what the other side is claiming, the verbal result the same day, and a detailed written report inside 24 hours.

They cover what a parent can and cannot make happen. You cannot compel your ex to test. A court can order one, and therapists and evaluators sometimes request one. David also talks about what the waiting costs while a case sits, in terms of contact with your children and the relationship you then have to rebuild.

The last part is the part people argue about. David names three reasons someone fails, and says the frequent one is withholding information rather than deception. He explains how to vet an examiner, why an examiner experienced only in pre-employment screening is the wrong choice for a custody or abuse allegation, and where to check credentials. On admissibility he is precise: the charts do not come in, the report can where a judge allows it, and he has had cases dropped by an agency before a courtroom was ever involved. He closes on what he sees when he tells someone they passed.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• What a polygraph can realistically do for a falsely accused parent
• Why an examiner should settle you down before testing, and why that does not skew results
• The sequence: intake, pre-test interview, same-day verbal result, written report
• Why the report is written in detail rather than as a pass-or-fail page
• Whether you can make your ex take one, and when a court can order it
• The three reasons David says people fail, and why holding back is the common one
• How to choose an examiner, and why to avoid referral services
• What is admissible: the report versus the charts, and the cases that end before court

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Calming down before you test
3:00 David's background, and the range of issues he tests for
9:00 Falsely accused in a custody case: the process step by step
13:00 The verbal result, then the detailed written report
15:00 Can you make your ex take one? Can a court order it?
17:00 What the waiting costs you and your children
19:00 The three reasons people fail a polygraph
23:00 Choosing an examiner, and the shortcuts to avoid
25:00 Admissibility, and using a result outside the courtroom
33:00 What closure actually looks like

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183
🔗 David Goldberg, Executive Protection Group: https://www.executiveprotectiongrp.com/

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.

Dr. Jordin Wiggins is a naturopathic doctor of more than a decade who noticed her patients' health complaints kept overlapping with coercive control and abuse, then lived through an abusive relationship herself without seeing it at the time. She now helps high-achieving people recover, using nervous-system regulation and a reconnection to their own sense of self. She and Lisa found their common ground fast: their clients are the capable, empathetic people abusers tend to seek out.

The first half is recognition. The "super traits" that make you exceptional at work and vulnerable in love, the boiled-frog way coercive control erodes you until you cannot remember what you like, and the particular shame of being the role model it happened to. Jordin explains how chronic stress shuts the body down, why reclaiming small pleasures and plain fun is part of recovery, and how much of the injustice, from the ex to a court that will not act, is real and worth being angry about.

The second half is the toolkit. Feel and finish your own feelings rather than suppressing them or projecting them (she spends real time on a simple feelings wheel, because the word she hears most is "overwhelmed"). Use the watchdog, possum, and wise owl to get back to your thinking brain. Stop overexplaining. And train regulation when you are calm, through tiny repeatable practices like a skincare routine or the lotion challenge, so that when your ex shows up at the door to bait you, you can bring yourself back down. She closes on where to find her and a worksheet to start.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• Why "super traits" like empathy and loyalty make you excellent at work and easy to target
• Why emotional baiting is designed to trigger your nervous system, and how not to take the hook
• The watchdog, possum, and wise owl: getting back to your thinking brain before you respond
• Why overexplaining to someone intent on misunderstanding you always backfires
• How to validate and complete your own feelings instead of suppressing or projecting them
• Why you can't control the ex, the court, or the system, and where your power actually is
• Nervous-system regulation you practice alone, so you have it when the baiting starts
• Small pleasure practices (like the "lotion challenge") that turn the stress response back down

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Protecting your energy when co-parenting with an abusive ex
3:00 "Super traits," and why capable people don't see the abuse
7:00 The boiled frog: how coercive control erodes you slowly
11:00 Losing yourself, and the shame of "you of all people"
14:00 Stress, the body, and reclaiming what you actually like
19:00 The power of fun, and forgetting who you are
21:00 A real co-parenting case: baiting, boundaries, and injustice
25:00 Feeling your feelings instead of managing everyone else's
28:00 Watchdog, possum, wise owl, and why overexplaining backfires
31:00 Completing the emotional cycle, and getting your power back
39:00 Regulation you train alone, the lotion challenge, and finding Jordin

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.

Dr. Debi Silber is the founder and CEO of the PBT Institute, PBT standing for post betrayal transformation, and she has been coaching in health, wellness and personal development for over three decades. Her research began after two betrayals of her own, one within her family and one from her husband a few years later. She looked for a book or a program that addressed what she was living through, found nothing that fit, and enrolled in a PhD program to study it herself while raising four children and running a practice. She has since written several books on the subject and now certifies coaches, therapists and other practitioners in her model.

In this episode Debi lays out the three findings from that research. That betrayal is a distinct kind of trauma, because unlike grief it is experienced as deliberate, which takes rejection, abandonment, belonging, worthiness and trust down with it. That there is a recognizable cluster of physical, mental and emotional symptoms afterward, which she named post betrayal syndrome and which does not resolve on its own with time. And that recovery runs through five stages in a predictable order, with a known set of moves for getting from each one to the next.

She also walks through the window of willingness, her scale for what a betrayer offers once they are caught: full ownership at one end, an excuse next, blame aimed back at you after that, and flat denial at the far end. She and Lisa spend time on stage three, survival, where most people put down roots because it feels so much better than the shock that came before it, and on what changes at stage four when someone stops waiting for the other person to make it right. They close on trust, and on why rebuilding trust in your own perception and your own decisions has to come before any question about trusting anyone else. Lisa shares her own path through it, and where she landed.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• Why betrayal is a different kind of trauma from grief, and what it does to self-trust
• The window of willingness: four ways a betrayer responds, and what each leaves you
• Why "I did it because you" is where the window closes, and why none of it is yours to carry
• Post betrayal syndrome: the physical, mental and emotional symptoms that cluster together
• Why time on its own doesn't heal betrayal, and what deliberate healing involves instead
• The five stages, and why stage three feels like recovery when it isn't
• What people find themselves outgrowing on the way to stage four
• Why rebuilding trust starts with your own judgment and perception, not the other person

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 What betrayal is, and why the depth of trust changes the damage
2:00 Why Debi went and got a PhD to study it
4:00 Finding one: betrayal is its own kind of trauma
5:30 Why the support is different, and why people hide it
8:00 The window of willingness: four responses, four very different futures
11:00 Betrayal is a choice, not a mistake
13:00 Finding two: post betrayal syndrome, and why time doesn't do the work
19:00 Finding three: the five stages, and the four-legged table
22:00 Stage three: survival, and why people put down roots there
25:30 Stages four and five: a new normal, and who comes with you
28:30 The trust misconception, and rebuilding self-trust first

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183
🔗 The PBT Institute: https://thepbtinstitute.com/

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.

But according to Liz Merrill—who spent 20 years married to a narcissist scientist before becoming a divorce mediator herself—it's worth trying. And here's why:

"A surprisingly high percentage of people who come with high conflict divorces get through the mediation process successfully without having to resort to litigation," Liz explains. "Because by the time they start mediating and working through and understanding what their options are, they kind of realize that they're not likely to get a better resolution by litigating."

Even if mediation doesn't result in settlement, you gain something invaluable: information.

"Keep your mouth shut and listen to what they're having to say and encourage them to talk," Liz advises for that crucial first session. "You will learn a lot about what's important to them, what they are thinking about, what their strategy might be. And that's all information that you can use in the future, even if you're not using it right now. And that's worth a lot."

This conversation reveals why mediation is always worth trying, how to prepare strategically, what you can realistically expect, and why sometimes the "difficult" partner actually comes to mediation thinking they're smarter than everyone else—which creates an opportunity.

What You'll Learn:

✅ Why high-conflict parties often come to mediation (thinking they can "bamboozle")
✅ The role of a CDFA (Certified Divorce Financial Analyst) in keeping things factual
✅ How facts, law, and math create a limited range of outcomes regardless of process
✅ Why it's "absolutely always worth trying" mediation (even if only costs a few thousand)
✅ The first session strategy: Keep your mouth shut and gather information
✅ What you can't mediate (hint: anything that happened in the past)
✅ How to prepare for mediation: agenda, goals, realistic expectations
✅ Why you shouldn't tell your mediator your "whole sad story"
✅ Strategic approach: Easy wins first to build goodwill vs. tackle hard stuff
✅ How to use what you learned in session one to inform session two
✅ Avoiding "barstool counsel" (Facebook groups, well-meaning friends)
✅ Second Saturday workshops: Free divorce education for women
✅ Why emotions are "on fire" and how professionals help manage them
✅ When Liz's daughters asked "Mom, can we get divorced?"

About Liz Merrill:

Liz Merrill, known as "the divorce whisperer," is a Colorado-based divorce mediator who spent 20 years in a marriage with a narcissist—a very successful research scientist considerably older than her. They had three daughters together and moved all over the world. "I thought I had to stay in this situation for my children and for my own safety and for my financial safety," Liz shares. When her daughters (all around mid-teens at the time) came to her and asked, "Mom, are we—can we get divorced? Why are we?" she realized she wasn't being brave by staying—she was scared. She filed that day. The divorce process was as horrible as she feared, requiring a loan to pay for it. She went from attorney to attorney trying to explain her situation, and "almost all of them were horrible to me. They were acting like I was the problem." This experience, combined with recognizing how badly the court system is set up for divorces (particularly for people in abusive marriages and domestic violence situations), caused her to shift careers midlife. She used her limited maintenance time to get mediation training and build her business. For seven years now, she's helped hundreds of couples navigate divorce, with her approach informed by lived experience of surviving high-conflict marriage. Her company is Open Space Mediat

After making the film, Ginger started helping families reunite directly. What she's learned is often the opposite of what the court fight teaches you. The instinct is to prove your case and win the big victory. The thing that works is quieter: keep the door open, keep encouraging your child, and stop making reconnection about who was right. She and Lisa talk through what reunification actually looks like, why it happens fast for some and slowly for others, and how to stay steady in the waiting.

✅ WHAT YOU'LL LEARN
 ✅ Why reconnection is possible even after years of estrangement
 ✅ What the parents who actually reunited did differently
 ✅ Why "winning the argument" tends to push an alienated child further away
 ✅ How to keep the door open without pressuring your child
 ✅ What real reunification looks like, start to finish
 ✅ Why some families reconnect fast and others take much longer
 ✅ The "one big victory" trap, and what to aim for instead
 ✅ How to stay steady while you wait for a child to come back

⏱️ TIMESTAMPS (+1:00 for the bumper)
 0:00 Intro
 1:00 From "Erasing Family" to reversing alienation
 6:28 What the film taught her about reunification
 11:30 The first alienation cases she worked
 16:30 Blessing your child instead of fighting
 21:30 What reunification actually looks like
 26:31 Why some kids come back fast, others slowly
 36:34 The "one big victory" trap
 41:36 Where to find Ginger

CTA (spoken): Trying to reconnect with a child who's been turned against you? Book a free discovery call at beentheregotout.com.
 Books: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You — https://www.amazon.com/Been-There-Got-Out-Against/dp/1967674183 · Been There Got Out — https://www.amazon.com/Been-There-Got-Relationships-Circumstances/dp/194627495X/
 Tags: parental alienation, reversing parental alienation, ginger gentile, erasing family, reunification, estrangement, alienated parent, high conflict divorce

Danny Karon is a consumer-protection and class-action attorney based in Cleveland, Ohio, who has taught complex litigation at the law-school level and wrote a guide to legal wellness for people who never thought the law was for them. This is a general access-to-justice conversation rather than a family-law episode, so his stories come from small claims and consumer cases, and Lisa connects them to the family-court audience.

In this episode, Karon and Lisa cover why leaning on AI for legal work is dangerous, given the hallucinated citations that have gotten lawyers fined, and what it actually takes to represent yourself: knowing what to file, how to serve the other side, and when to lean on the clerk of courts for help with the mechanics. He talks about dressing and behaving in a way the court takes seriously, reading the room, and letting go of the dramatic-courtroom fantasy that sets people up to be disappointed.

He closes on legal wellness as prevention: read your contracts, notice the arbitration clauses and liability waivers you cannot change, and adjust your behavior around them. The message he keeps returning to is empowerment through education, doing what you can for yourself and hiring a lawyer only when you truly need one.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• Why outsourcing legal work to AI is risky: invented case citations, and lawyers being sanctioned
• Representing yourself means being held to the same rules of procedure and evidence as any attorney
• Getting the mechanics right: what to file, how to style it, and how to serve the other side
• Why the clerk of courts can be a real ally, especially in small claims
• Why dress and demeanor matter: look the part, because the judge does
• Reading the room: watch the judge, and know when to stop talking
• Legal wellness as prevention: read your contracts, arbitration clauses, and waivers before signing
• The through-line: empowerment through education, and hiring a lawyer only when you must

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 When the system meant to help makes things worse
3:00 Meet Danny Karon: Cleveland lawyer and professor
5:00 Why AI is a bad idea in law
7:00 Representing yourself: same rules apply
8:00 Getting your filings and service right
9:30 The small-claims story: preparation shows
11:00 What to wear, and looking the part
15:00 No Perry Mason moments: courtroom reality
18:00 Read the rules, and make the clerk your ally
21:00 Legal wellness: reading the contracts you sign

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183
🔗 Danny Karon at Your Lovable Lawyer: https://yourlovablelawyer.com/

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.

Stacy is a licensed professional counselor in Colorado, licensed in Texas as well, who specializes in grief work and in children caught in parental conflict. This conversation picks up mid-thread after a dropped connection, and it moves fast through the things she hears from kids that their parents never do.

First is money. Kids of divorce know what the case costs, and Stacy has children telling her they feel guilty for having an expensive interest, or deciding not to ask for anything at the holidays. In one family a parent brings up the legal bills whenever a chore goes undone. Then there is magical thinking, which is the reason a young child concludes the divorce is their fault. Believing something is wrong with them is easier than believing the adults have lost control of the world, and Stacy points to a children's book where a kid asks whether the divorce happened because of the chocolate pudding on the wall.

Her working principle is that if power is going to be taken from a child, she is going to find them some. That means talking about what they do control, which is their thoughts, their reactions, and how much of their own time they waste being miserable. One of her clients described being in the middle of a tug of war, and she asked him what it would be like not to pick up the rope. The tool she builds with them is a comfort kit, assembled around the five senses so it works in both houses and needs nobody's approval: scent, because it reaches the brain fastest, fabric swatches that kids reach for more than any purchased fidget, fidgets that make no noise rather than the ones that irritate a whole classroom, and notes written ahead of time by the parent they are away from. She closes on the child who dislikes one house, and why distraction counts as a coping skill when the countdown is the situation.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• The shiny kid: why the child performing well may be the one carrying more
• How much kids know about what the divorce is costing, and the guilt it creates
• Magical thinking, and why a young child concludes the divorce is their fault
• The tug-of-war reframe: what happens when a child does not pick up the rope
• How to build a comfort kit around the five senses that travels between houses
• Why scent works fastest, and why fabric beats the expensive fidgets
• What to tell a child counting down the days at a house they do not want to be in

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 The shiny kid: doing fine on the outside, struggling underneath
3:00 Kids who feel guilty about what the divorce is costing
4:00 Locus of control, and the child who would not pick up the rope
5:00 Magical thinking, and why kids decide it is their fault
7:00 Giving a child agency when they have almost none
8:00 Building a comfort kit around the five senses
10:00 Scent, texture, fidgets, and notes from the other house
14:00 The house they dislike, and distraction as a coping skill
16:00 Where to find Stacy

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183
🔗 Stacy Schaffer, MA, LPC: https://stacyschaffer.com/
🔗 Stacy Schaffer on Instagram (@hoperestored): https://www.instagram.com/hoperestored/

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.

Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky, who goes by Liz, is a marriage and family therapist running a clinic with offices in Virginia Beach and Fairfax, Virginia, where she also trains other therapists in emotionally focused couples counseling. She is licensed across roughly seven states, which is a consequence of military life. She is a military spouse from a dual-military family, her husband was deployed while this was recorded, and a large part of her caseload is military couples, which shapes much of what she has seen. This is her second appearance here, and she hosts a podcast on communication in military relationships.

The seven types come from published work by Scott Woolley, an international trainer in emotionally focused therapy. Three of them are relational. The protest or revenge affair, where each partner answers the other, which Liz watched run back and forth for seventeen years in a couple who were still working to repair it. The come-and-get-me affair, which is really about manufacturing jealousy or testing whether the love holds, and which she sees more often early in a relationship than late. And the burned-out exit affair, a way of ending a marriage without having to say the words. She and Lisa also cover what tends to come first: either conflict that spirals over nothing, or a couple who have stopped talking altogether in order to avoid it.

The other four sit with the individual. Escaping life stress into romance, the version that can run for years and sometimes produces two households, which Liz says people rarely manage to end, because there is genuine attachment and loyalty on both sides. The hedge fund affair, where somebody braced for abandonment keeps a second person in reserve. The power player affair, which is about control rather than attachment and tends to look like a series of emotionally distant encounters, and which Lisa recognizes instantly from this audience. And the compulsive affair, which behaves like an addiction, is usually about numbing anxiety, and often traces back to bullying or abuse in childhood. Liz is clear about recovery: the individual types take considerably longer than a relational repair, growth should be visible along the way, and none of the context converts a choice into an accident.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• The seven types of affairs, and what each one is actually driven by
• Why four of the seven have little to do with the state of the relationship
• The protest affair, the come-and-get-me affair, and the burned-out exit affair
• What tends to precede a relational affair, and why "we're roommates" is one signal
• The escape affair, and why attachment on both sides makes it so hard to end
• The power player affair: control rather than romance, and where it comes from
• Why the compulsive affair behaves like an addiction, and what recovery involves
• Why context can make a choice easier and never makes it an accident

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Why the seven types matter when you're busy blaming yourself
3:00 Liz's background, and what deployment does to a marriage
8:00 The protest or revenge affair
10:00 The come-and-get-me affair
12:00 The burned-out exit affair, and the signs that come before
17:00 Escaping life stress into romance, and the two-household version
22:00 The hedge fund affair
23:30 The power player affair, and where it comes from
28:00 The compulsive affair, and why it works like an addiction
35:00 Is there hope, and why it is still a choice

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183
🔗 Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky at Communicate & Connect: https://communicateandconnect.com/

🎧 More with Dr. Elizabeth Polinsky on this podcast
Ep 279: Learning to Trust Again After Betrayal

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.

Paul Roseberry is a relationship coach based in Los Angeles who works with both men and women, mostly on romantic relationships, and who also performs as a comedian. He teaches what he calls the security method, built on a definition of security as the ability to protect something valuable. He is open about where the work comes from: he grew up overweight and poor, he stuttered, he got picked on, and he says he has done everything the wrong way at least twice. Lisa admits at the top of the episode that she nearly passed on him, because healthy-relationship coaching sounded like the wrong fit for a community dealing with abusive exes, and then changed her mind after they talked.

In this episode, Paul lays out the difference between an interest-based relationship and a need-based one, and why so many people stay in relationships that are serving a purpose other than the relationship. He walks through his fives exercise, a running list you keep in your notes app over weeks rather than finishing in ten minutes. He describes what he calls the short game, the day-to-day communication that decides whether two people actually work, and why that matters more than the first impression. He and Lisa also talk about how popular culture sells jealousy and reconciliation as proof of love, and what that teaches people who never saw anything healthier.

The part Lisa keeps coming back to is his line about keeping the ability to walk away. He is careful to say it is not a threat and not a dark way to live. It is the opposite: if you know you could leave, you have chosen the person on purpose, and you may well never need to.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• Why fear of starting over keeps people in relationships they have already given up on
• The fives: a running list of what you bring, what you want, and what makes you good company
• Interest-based versus need-based relationships, and how to tell which one you are in
• Why someone who has never seen a healthy relationship does not go looking for one
• How "nobody else would put up with you" works as a control tactic
• Flipping the script: doing the assessing instead of waiting to be assessed
• The short game, and why day-to-day communication decides more than first impressions
• Why keeping the ability to leave usually means you never have to use it

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Confidence as self-awareness, and where people skip a step
3:00 The security method: interest-based, not need-based
5:00 Staying because the relationship serves some other purpose
7:00 The fives, and what you bring to the table
9:00 When you have never seen a healthy relationship up close
11:00 A whole half instead of a half whole
13:00 Lisa's list, and twenty years of not matching it
15:00 Pop culture, jealousy, and mistaking conflict for closeness
19:00 When is it time to leave?
21:00 Flipping the script, and keeping the ability to walk away
26:00 Where to find Paul

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183
🔗 Paul Roseberry: https://paulroseberry.com

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.

Our guest this episode is Olaolu Ogunyemi, a US Marine officer, leadership speaker, children's book author, and the founder of Parent-Child Connect, which builds resources for the parents, teachers, mentors, coaches, and caregivers around a child. He grew up in Louisiana; his father immigrated from Nigeria for college. He has a wife and three children spread across a decade, and a family large enough that he has lost exact count of his nieces and nephews. He graduated college at twenty-two already married with a three-year-old, which is roughly how he describes his qualifications at the time.

His argument is that no parent does this alone. He was, in his own word, a knucklehead: insecure, overweight, teased for his name, and drawn to whichever crowd would take him. His parents were saying the right things the whole time. It took coaches and mentors saying the same things in a different register before any of it landed. That is why he wants a parent in a hard custody situation to resist the instinct to close the circle.

He and Lisa work through what to do when a child is acting out, starting with the root cause rather than the obvious culprit, and with the question of what the child is trying to be accepted for. They talk about anxious kids growing up inside an information stream their parents never had, and why telling them to unplug is not a plan. Olaolu describes the wall of emotion words he printed out, and the day his six-year-old used it to say she was disappointed in a friend, and then went and told the friend. He closes on his children's book Crow from the Shadow, where the shadow is any person, place, or thing that tells you what you cannot be.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• Why no parent can be everything to a child, and why other trusted adults matter more here
• Finding the root cause of a child acting out instead of the obvious explanation
• Acceptance: what your child is trying to be accepted for, and whether home supplies it
• Anxious kids in an information stream we never grew up with, and why unplugging is not a plan
• Discipline versus compliance, and why the root of the word is teaching
• Modeling first: why a child copies what you do and not what you tell them
• The emotion board that gives a child words beyond happy, mad, and sad
• Preparing a child for the person who hears them out and does not care

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Why other adults matter, and meeting Olaolu Ogunyemi
5:00 Being a knucklehead, and the people who said it differently
7:00 Finding the root cause instead of the obvious answer
9:00 Acceptance, and what a child is trying to be accepted for
11:00 Anxious kids in a world we did not grow up in
13:00 Discipline vs compliance, and crossing the street
17:00 Empathy, modeling, and emotional intelligence
19:00 The emotion board, and a six-year-old who said "disappointed"
21:00 Preparing kids for the person who does not care
23:00 Crow from the Shadow, Lead Last, and where to find Olaolu

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183
🔗 Olaolu Ogunyemi at Parent-Child Connect: https://parent-child-connect.com/

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.

Ron Platt is the co-founder of NASDF, the National Association for Single and Divorced Families. He describes it as a not-for-profit membership association built on the model people know from AARP: you join, and a single organization gives you access to a pooled set of products, services, discounts, and support instead of hunting for each one on your own.

In this episode, Platt lays out what the membership is designed to bundle, including mental-health sessions, real-estate referral rebates, and career re-entry help for a parent who stepped out of the workforce. He focuses on the piece he built first, an insurance product he calls Support Insured, meant to keep child support or alimony flowing if the paying parent dies, becomes disabled, or loses their income involuntarily. He distinguishes that from a parent who simply refuses to pay, which he says is already handled by the courts and the IRS.

This is more of a product overview than a strategy conversation, so the details here are Ron's own account of what his organization offers. If it sounds useful for your situation, the current terms and coverage are on the NASDF site.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• What a membership-association model for single and divorced families is trying to bundle
• The idea behind Support Insured: continuing support if a paying parent dies, is disabled, or loses income
• The line Ron draws between involuntary non-payment and a parent who simply won't pay
• How a group discount model (his "Costco" framing) is meant to lower costs at scale
• Where mental-health sessions, realtor rebates, and career help fit into the membership
• Why a lower-earning spouse can fall into a gap: too much income for free help, too little for a retainer

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 How "insurance for divorce" came up
1:45 What NASDF is: the AARP model
3:00 Mental-health and daycare benefits
3:40 Real-estate referral rebates for members
5:00 Career help for a returning stay-at-home parent
6:30 The retainer gap, and a planned legal-costs card
7:40 Support Insured, explained
11:40 Where to find NASDF, and the foster-care mission

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183
🔗 NASDF, the National Association for Single and Divorced Families: https://www.nasdf.org/

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.

Marisa De Sa is a psychotherapist with over twelve years of experience across hospital settings, community mental health, and schools. She is now in private practice at the Cognitive and Behavioral Care Center in Greenwich, Connecticut, working with children, adolescents, adults, and families, and she sees clients virtually as well, so she is not limited to one area. She specializes in cognitive behavioral therapy and dialectical behavior therapy, has training in internal family systems, and runs what DBT calls middle path sessions for a parent and teenager who have dug in on opposite sides.

She starts by taking apart the assumption that a personality disorder is intractable, which she describes as an unfair narrative that adds stigma and hopelessness to people who already feel plenty of both. She explains what these disorders are, why they tend to surface in adolescence or early adulthood, and the environmental and attachment factors that appear to feed them. Then she gets to the harder question: how anyone gets into treatment when the defining feature is not wanting to be told what to do. DBT builds commitment strategies into its pre-treatment phase for exactly that reason, including acknowledging out loud that the patterns have been serving a purpose, which moves a resistant person further than pushing against the resistance.

The back half is about communication. Marisa walks through DEAR MAN, DBT's structure for making a request, using a co-parent who shows up ten minutes late for pickup: describe the facts with no judgment attached, express how it landed using I statements, ask for the specific change, and reinforce what is in it for the other person, all delivered mindfully and with some give and take. She covers David Burns's five secrets of effective communication, and why agreeing with someone you are in conflict with feels backwards and still works. Lisa maps it onto the strategic communication Been There Got Out teaches, and they compare their language for the same goal: lowering the temperature, disarming the other party, and negotiating from the thing you both want.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• What a personality disorder is, and why clinicians don't treat it as a life sentence
• How DBT builds buy-in with someone who doesn't believe they need treatment
• The four DBT skill modules, and which one high-conflict co-parents use most
• DEAR MAN step by step, worked through with a real co-parenting example
• Why validating the other person lowers their defensiveness even when you resent them
• Universal agreement: finding the one thing you both want and negotiating from there
• How CBT differs from DBT, and what each one is good for
• Walking the middle path when a parent and a teenager have polarized against each other

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Is a personality disorder a life sentence? What DBT was built for
4:00 Where these patterns come from, and how someone ends up in therapy
7:00 Building buy-in with a person who doesn't want to be controlled
8:00 What DBT actually is: individual therapy plus a skills group
11:00 The time commitment, and what progress looks like
13:00 How CBT differs, and what it's good for
15:00 Applying both to a high-conflict divorce
17:00 DEAR MAN: a script for asking without starting a fight
20:00 The five secrets, validation, and finding universal agreement
24:00 Middle path sessions, teaching kids to negotiate, and staying hopeful

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183
🔗 Marisa De Sa at the Cognitive and Behavioral Care Center: https://cbcarecenter.com/

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.

Alexa Sasha is a results coach and narcissistic abuse healer based in Brooklyn, and the founder of Your Higher Self Actualized. She draws a distinction between life coaching and results coaching, which she describes as goal getting rather than goal setting. She began her career teaching high school special education in Brooklyn after studying psychology in college, and that training shows in how she teaches: concepts broken down, made visual, and tied to what a person can actually do next. She also runs a weekly creative writing circle called From Ink to Evolution.

In this episode, Alexa explains overt and covert patterns and why the covert version is harder to name: entitlement covered by pity, and behavior calibrated to whoever will tolerate it. She and Lisa work through the childhood-trauma explanation that so many people are handed about their ex, and why an explanation is not an assignment. Most people had something happen to them, and most people do not do this.

The second half is about getting out of the loop when going no contact is not available to you, which is the situation for anyone sharing children or caring for a parent. Alexa argues that support has to be layered: someone who understands this specific experience rather than teaching from a textbook, nervous system work like breathwork, yoga, and trauma release exercises, and a creative outlet. She says talking through the layers without ever being asked where your power is can send you further down, which is what happened to her. Lisa describes the mosaics she made on her porch at the end of her marriage, and the seed bombs that recently scattered across her yard.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• A plain definition of narcissistic abuse, and why the damage is so hard to locate
• Overt and covert patterns, and why someone can be one way with you and another with everyone else
• The childhood-trauma explanation for an ex's behavior, and where your responsibility ends
• Why criticism lands so hard on someone with no established self-esteem
• The signals people miss: waking up exhausted, ruminating, the conversation that gets flipped on you
• How to reduce the drain when going no contact isn't possible
• Why support has to reach your body, not only your talking
• Creativity and play as a path back, and what talk therapy alone can miss

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Results coaching, and Alexa's path from the classroom
4:00 What narcissistic abuse is, and why it's harder to see than bruises
6:00 The colleague who told her his diagnosis
8:00 Overt and covert patterns, and who gets to see which
10:00 The trauma explanation, and where your responsibility ends
12:00 The signals: exhaustion, rumination, and the flip
16:00 When going no contact isn't an option
17:00 Layered support: the right helper, and nervous system work
19:00 Creativity as the way back, and Lisa's porch
22:00 From Ink to Evolution, play, and your highest self

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183
🔗 Alexa Sasha Marshall on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexa-sasha369/

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.

Ken Childs is a licensed California private investigator and the founder of Paramount Investigative Services, based in Los Angeles. Surveillance is the core of the practice, with insurance and workers' compensation fraud making up much of the work, alongside custody and infidelity matters, witness interviews, and litigation support. He has testified as an expert witness, and his cases have been covered in national media. This is his first appearance on the show.

Childs is useful here because he does not oversell. Infidelity, in California, rarely moves a case on its own, but a spouse who denied it under oath has created a credibility issue an attorney can work with. A background check on the adult who is suddenly around your children runs a couple of hundred dollars and can settle a question that has been keeping you up. And when nothing turns up, he treats that as the good result it is.

The section on choosing an investigator is the one to replay. Read the site, read the reviews, and pay attention to whether the person is listening or selling you fear. Childs's view is that an investigator who tells you the situation is desperate and you need to move right now is the one to walk away from, and he extends the same test to hiring an attorney: skip the name brand, read the references, and look for the ones who say this person fought for me. He and Lisa also talk about what to photograph before you file, why he wants a conversation with your attorney, and why an investigator who impersonates you to a bank is handing the other side a reason to exclude everything they found.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• What a private investigator is genuinely useful for in a divorce or custody case
• Why infidelity may matter less than the lie told about it under oath
• When a background check on a new adult in your child's life is worth the money
• How to vet an investigator, and the warning sign of someone selling you fear
• Childs's test for hiring an attorney: references over name recognition
• What to photograph and document before a divorce filing if assets may be moved
• Why an investigator who impersonates you to a bank makes the evidence unusable

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 What people actually hire a private investigator for
3:00 How Childs got into the work, and what keeps him in it
5:00 Infidelity, credibility, and where it lands in a California case
7:00 Background checks on the adults around your children
9:00 Choosing an investigator, and spotting one who sells you fear
13:00 Twenty-seven years of surveillance, and what he says makes the difference
15:00 Hiring an attorney: references over name brands
17:00 Working with your attorney, and catching order violations
18:00 Financial fraud: photograph everything before you file
19:00 Where investigators cross the line, and why it ruins the evidence

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183
🔗 Ken Childs at Paramount Investigative Services: https://licensed-investigator.com/ken-childs-private-investigator/

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.

Doug Fifer was born in Homer, Alaska, and spent 25 years with the Anchorage Police Department. Over that career he moved through units most officers never touch, including the forensic crime-scene team, before settling into hostage negotiation for most of his years on the job. He has since written a true-crime book built from cases he worked himself. He joins Lisa to translate what he learned across a phone line with barricaded suspects into something a person negotiating custody and safety with a difficult ex can actually use.

Doug's throughline is that the fundamentals are the same for almost everyone. Build rapport, find the hooks you can both speak to honestly, and stay off the triggers that collapse a conversation. He explains why he taught his negotiators never to lie, and walks through the moment a serial killer holding two hostages asked whether he was going to jail, and how a truthful, careful answer kept the line open. He talks about how ego drives people, and why a sincere compliment can keep a combative ex engaged rather than heading to court. And he covers the domestic-violence realities he saw on hundreds of calls: mandatory-arrest laws that can catch the wrong person, why recording an incident on your phone is legitimate evidence, and why leaving, even for one night, beats staying in a house that has turned into a time bomb.

His plainest advice is the one he says every target he interviewed already knew in their gut and talked themselves out of. When something feels wrong, step back and protect yourself. It holds in a dark parking garage at two in the morning, and it holds in a relationship you already know is not going to change.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• Why the same negotiation fundamentals work on almost everyone, a difficult ex included
• The hook-and-trigger method: steer toward common ground, stay off what makes them shut down
• Why you should never lie in a negotiation, and how to answer a hard question truthfully but carefully
• How ego drives behavior, and why a sincere compliment can keep a combative ex at the table
• Why any physical act in front of police can trigger a mandatory arrest, even of the non-aggressor
• Why recording an incident on your phone is fair, useful evidence in a he-said, she-said
• Why leaving a volatile household, even for a night, beats staying to prove a point
• "Follow your gut": the warning every target he interviewed knew and overrode

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Alaska, isolation, and why violence runs high
3:00 From Homer to a 25-year police career
5:00 Becoming a hostage negotiator
7:00 Rapport, hooks, and triggers
9:00 Never lie: the serial killer who asked if he'd go to jail
13:00 Playing to ego to keep someone at the table
15:00 Domestic-violence scenes, mandatory arrest, and getting out
17:00 When the target is the one arrested, and documenting evidence
19:00 The barricade story, and believing people until disproven
23:00 Protecting your kids, following your gut, and Doug's book

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183
🔗 Doug Fifer's website: https://dougfifer.com

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.

Our guest this episode is Jane Frumberg, a clinical social worker who owns her own practice, Light Within Therapy. She specializes in trauma and works in internal family systems, EMDR and dialectical behavior therapy, with teenagers, parents, postpartum mothers, women, and the LGBTQ+ community. Trauma, she says, is the umbrella, and everything else sits underneath it. Lisa went looking for her because Bill Eddy keeps recommending internal family systems therapists for children in high-conflict custody cases, and nobody had explained to BTGO's clients what that actually means.

Jane draws the line between internal family systems and reunification therapy, then explains the parts language: the anxious part, the protector that avoids because avoiding feels safer, and the younger version of a person carrying the original hurt. The instruction is not to get rid of a part but to get curious about it. In a high-conflict case she would start people separately, the child with a therapist trained in the model and each parent on their own, so that the language exists before anyone tries to use it together. It also gives a parent a way to hear a child's hostility as parts doing their job rather than as a verdict on them.

For a target parent whose child has pulled away, Jane's position is that consistency does the work: children push against limits and feel safer inside them, and they want to know you will still be there when they come back. She has watched clients' children start questioning the story as they get older and see things for themselves. The rest of the conversation is how to find the right person, from what to ask in a consultation to why you should choose for your child's temperament rather than your own, plus Lisa's trick of asking a kid what they liked about a favorite teacher or coach and shopping for those qualities.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• The difference between internal family systems therapy and reunification therapy
• What parts and protectors are, and why the goal is never to get rid of one
• Why individual work usually comes before any joint session in a high-conflict case
• How the parts language helps a parent hear a child's hostility differently
• Why consistency matters when the other parent will not participate at all
• What to ask in a free consultation, and how to judge emotional safety fast
• Why you choose a therapist for your child's temperament, not your own
• Red flags: subtle invalidation, not being heard, and vague answers about training

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Internal family systems therapy versus reunification therapy
3:00 Parts, protectors, and the younger version carrying the pain
6:00 How it works when you cannot be in a room with your ex
8:30 When one parent will not participate, consistency does the work
12:00 Why children start questioning the story as they get older
15:00 Choosing a therapist: the consultation, safety, and the energy match
19:00 Red flags, and the question to ask about their actual training

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183
🔗 Jane Frumberg at Light Within Therapy: https://www.lightwithintherapy.net/

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.

Agape Garcia is the founder of Confronting Domestic Violence, a nonprofit built around getting real resources to people in real time, including relocation assistance when a family has a safe place to go and no way of getting there. Her background is unusual for this field: alongside advocacy she has worked in human resources and as a corporate security consultant specializing in access control, and she has volunteered for over a decade as a pro bono advisor to California legislators, identifying loopholes and reporting them to the people who write the fixes. Her own story is a double attempted homicide about twenty years ago while eight months pregnant and far from home, and then, years later, a car accident she was not expected to survive. The organization was decided on from an ICU bed.

She and Lisa start with why resources are so hard to find when your emotions are running ahead of your logic, and she describes the more than eight hundred calls it took her, most of them producing another number, some of them disconnected. Her shortcut now: find a domestic violence advocate, and if your local resource center cannot point you to one, ask the attorney general's office. They cover the difference between financial abuse and economic abuse, and why minimizing shows up in almost every group room, including from people describing extraordinary things.

The second half is the workplace. Agape explains what SB 553 requires, that it goes beyond a written policy into drills, communication plans, and knowing how to respond before emergency services arrive, and that Cal/OSHA enforces it. She describes the two industries she says are exempt because they already have their own standards, why an inspector showing up for any other reason will still ask for the plan, and what she tells employers about using the training they already have rather than starting over. For anyone listening who is not in HR, she gives the sentence to say to your own HR rep, and the two ways to reach her organization directly, one of which is a confidential form and the other a searchable directory by zip code.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• Why finding resources, not deciding to leave, is often where people get stuck
• The difference between financial abuse and economic abuse, and how each one works
• How to find a domestic violence advocate when the local search comes up empty
• Why minimizing is nearly universal, and how status adds shame instead of protection
• What SB 553 requires of California employers, and who enforces it
• Why work is often the safest place a target has, and what that means for employers
• How to ask your own HR department whether a plan exists
• Two ways to get help directly, including a directory searchable by zip code

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Why finding resources is where people get stuck
3:00 Financial abuse and economic abuse are not the same thing
5:00 Her own story, and the calls it took to find help
7:00 Finding a domestic violence advocate, and who to ask
8:00 Mine isn't that bad: minimizing in a group room
13:00 Shame, status, and why targets are chosen for their strengths
17:00 Work as the safe place, and what COVID took away
19:00 How abuse spills into the workplace
21:00 SB 553: what California employers now have to have
31:00 Asking your own employer, and how to get help directly

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183
🔗 Confronting Domestic Violence: https://confrontingdomesticviolence.org/
🔗 Confronting Domestic Violence professional services and SB 553 training: https://confrontingdomesticviolence.org/professional-services/

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.

Renee Bauer is the founder of Happy Even After Family Law, a firm practicing throughout Connecticut, and she is an author and speaker as well as a lawyer. She is also twice divorced, and she talks openly about the shame that came with that and about deciding to make the conversation about divorce her work. That combination is why this conversation moves easily between courtroom strategy and what it takes to make decisions again after someone else has been making them for you.

Bauer's first red flag is the attorney who guarantees an outcome. What a good consultation sounds like, she says, is a range: including the honest version where your best realistic result is still one you will not love. She uses Bill Eddy's positive and negative advocate distinction as the frame, and she is direct about the economics of the aggressive approach, where the intensity tracks the retainer balance rather than the case.

The practical half covers how to hire. Meet more than one attorney so you have something to compare. Pay for a consultation when the alternative is a rushed free one. Ask about communication style and expect a response within a day. Set two or three goals and measure every decision against them. Take ownership of your own paperwork, which she argues is where clients save themselves real money. And on resolution: Bauer and Lisa both come down on the side of an agreement over a trial, including the cost of trial preparation, the number of sessions a real mediation takes, and the option of mediating most of it and leaving one contested issue for a short hearing.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• Why a lawyer who promises an outcome is telling you what you want to hear
• Positive and negative advocates, and how an attorney becomes the second kind
• What the aggressive approach costs: motions that go nowhere and a retainer that runs dry
• Questions worth asking in a consultation, and why you meet more than one attorney
• Why a paid consultation often gives you more than a free one
• Setting two or three goals, and using them when the case drifts toward vengeance
• Organizing your own documents, and why it changes how your lawyer works your case
• Why an agreement you negotiate covers your family better than a judge's order

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 What a "pit bull" attorney sounds like in a consultation
3:00 Promises as a red flag, and setting real expectations
5:00 Pop culture, vengeance, and what family court is for
7:00 Renee's own story, and the shame that comes with divorce
9:00 Grit and perfectionism, and how they work against you
11:00 What the aggressive approach costs: motions, retainers, no progress
14:00 Positive and negative advocates, and setting goals you can hold to
17:00 Making decisions again, and building a team around you
19:00 What she wants from a client, and the patterns people repeat
24:00 Organizing your own case, and the client lawyers work harder for
28:00 Agreement vs. trial, mediation timelines, and the cost of trial prep

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183
🔗 Renee Bauer at Happy Even After Family Law: https://familylawyerct.com/

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.

Our guest this episode is Kristin Cogan, a licensed professional counselor and coach based in Houston and the founder of Imperfectly Wonderful Counseling, a practice built around anxiety and grief work with mothers and teens across Texas. She is a mother of five, and the thing that drew Lisa to her work is her focus on small wins, which maps directly onto a group of people whose big wins are controlled by a court calendar and an ex.

Kristin walks through the 5-4-3-2-1 grounding exercise step by step, with Lisa doing it in real time, and explains why it works: connected to your senses, you are in the present, which is the one place the rumination and the catastrophizing cannot follow you. She covers rating your distress before and after so you can see the shift, adapting the exercise for insomnia when there is nothing to look at, reframing the 3am thought that you will never get back to sleep, slowing everything down as a signal to the body, and the acupressure mat some of her clients keep in the bed.

From there they get to what counts as progress. Pausing before responding to a triggering text. Three breaths before you open the email so you read it grounded. Setting the phone down and walking away, which is allowed. Kristin is warm about the people who cannot do any of it yet, and specific about how to start: two seconds is longer than a millisecond. She shares the affirmations she anchors a morning with, including one Lisa stopped to write down. And she closes on why this is not self-indulgence: children absorb a nervous system from the adult in the room, and that is where the cycle either continues or stops.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• Why the freeze response is your body protecting you, not you failing
• The 5-4-3-2-1 grounding exercise, step by step, and how to rate the shift
• How to adapt grounding for insomnia when there is nothing to look at
• Reframing the 3am thought that you will never fall back asleep
• What a win looks like when the big outcomes are out of your hands
• Micro wins: three breaths before the email, and putting the phone down
• Affirmations that anchor a morning, including the one Lisa wrote down
• Why regulating yourself is the part your kids inherit

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Overwhelmed as the baseline, and what freeze actually is
4:00 The 5-4-3-2-1 grounding exercise, walked through live
7:00 Adapting it for insomnia, and reframing the 3am thought
9:00 Slowing everything down, and the acupressure mat
11:00 What counts as a win when the big ones are out of your control
12:00 Micro wins: three breaths before you open the email
13:30 When you cannot stop yourself from answering
15:00 Affirmations that anchor the day
17:00 What your nervous system teaches your kids
18:30 Spending everything on your kids and nothing on yourself

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183
🔗 Kristin Cogan at Imperfectly Wonderful Counseling: https://www.imperfectlywonderful.com/
🔗 Kristin Cogan on Instagram (@imperfectlywonderfulmotherhood): https://www.instagram.com/imperfectlywonderfulmotherhood/

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.

Deana and Lizzie were married to the same man, Deana for twenty-seven years and Lizzie for six after her. They met when Deana's son asked his mother to call the woman who was leaving his father, because she was going to need to understand what she had been living with. That call turned into hours, then into a friendship, and eventually into the Surviving Toxic Relationships podcast, which they have now hosted together for roughly two years alongside a YouTube channel and a private group for women who do not want to be public about any of it.

In this episode they retrace the whole sequence. What Lizzie was told about the ex-wife, and how much of it was true enough to believe. The accounts that started locking her out. The retreat he went on to work on the marriage, and the week she packed. The cards she found in a drawer that turned out to be from a third woman, and what the dates on them proved. Finding that woman, and the phone call where a red coat, a motorcycle, and a gift from a trip he supposedly took alone all stopped adding up.

They also talk about the parts that outlast the marriage. Credit ruined without her knowing, a retirement account drained while his sat untouched, being denied a studio apartment with nowhere to go. Why they never held it against the woman who came next, and why they think an ex-wife who reaches out is worth hearing. Lizzie explains why she now aims her teaching at people who are not in an abusive relationship at all, and tells the story of the friend who told her she had found a place to live, and was killed by her husband that night. Deana closes on what she left nine times before she left for good, and what the years after actually felt like.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• Why warning your ex's next partner so often goes wrong, and when it is still worth doing
• How admitting to a smaller wrong can make someone seem more trustworthy, not less
• The gaps that gave it away: dates on cards, a trip taken alone, a coat that was not a gift
• What financial abuse looks like in a second marriage: credit, retirement, a denied lease
• An annulment for fraud, and how fast a restraining order can follow
• Why neither of them ever blamed the woman who came next
• What real accountability looks like, and what it looks like when it only lasts until they have you back
• Why educating people who are not in it may matter as much as reaching people who are

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Two women, the same husband, and the friendship after
3:00 The warning Deana decided not to give
5:00 What Lizzie was told about the ex-wife, and how she got out
9:00 Cards in a drawer, and a third woman nobody knew about
12:00 Finding her, and the phone call that unravelled it
18:00 Credit, retirement, and being denied a place to live
21:00 The annulment for fraud, and what happened with wife four
24:00 Why admitting fault made him seem more trustworthy
29:00 Why they never blamed the woman who came next
33:00 The podcast, the matadora, and teaching people not in it
45:00 Not knowing it was abuse, and what healing actually feels like

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183
🔗 Surviving Toxic Relationships Podcast with The Matadoras: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1709167

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.

Oscar Pena is the host of the Daughtered Podcast, a show about fathers and daughters built around three ideas he keeps coming back to: stronger, more mindful, more present. He has served on active duty in the military for more than eighteen years, has been married for twenty-two, and has three daughters, thirteen, nine and five. The podcast came out of the youngest one. She was born during COVID, he was home with her constantly, and what that showed him was how much of his older two he had not been there for. He started talking about it with a friend who also had daughters, and the two of them worked out they could not be the only ones. Lisa was the first woman he interviewed, about her own father, and this conversation is the reverse.

Pena is candid about where he started. His first instinct on learning he would have a daughter was that his job was to be the barrier between her and the world, and he says that has changed through several years of interviewing people: the work is to be a guide and to hand a child the tools to protect herself, from physical dangers and from emotional ones. He also describes how fathers find help, which is rarely by joining a circle and talking. For him it was books first, then podcasts, hearing another man describe the same problem and realizing he had not asked anyone for anything. He is now part of a group of fathers doing exactly that in public, including the parts where they get it wrong.

He and Lisa also talk about the difference between his role and his wife's. He is the loud, playful one, and he thinks of himself as representing what life outside the house is going to be like, which he admits tips into being too hard for a child's age. His wife tells him when it does, and he says learning to nurture from her has been the harder skill.

The last stretch is the reason Lisa wanted him on. Chris's biggest fear when his own boys' custody schedule was set was losing his identity as their father, and Pena, who says plainly that he has not been through this, does not pretend otherwise. What he offers instead is what he has learned from being away for work, and what he tells separated fathers he knows: you matter whether you are in the room or not, your children are already thinking about you, and the only variable is what they are thinking. His answer on presence, learned the hard way from his own job, is the line worth taking away.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• Why being home but checked out registers with a child more than being away
• The shift from protecting your daughter to handing her tools to protect herself
• Why most men will not join a support circle, and how they actually find help
• What a father contributes that is different from what a mother contributes, and where that goes too far
• Why a father's identity takes a hit when a custody schedule is set
• What to say to the assumption that children should be with their mother most of the time
• What separated fathers can do in the hours they do get
• Why your children are thinking about you either way, and what decides which way

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Lisa on the Daughtered podcast, and her own father
3:00 Why he started the show, and what he missed with his first two
6:00 Finding out you are having a girl
8:00 The couple of months he asked for before their third
10:00 From protecting them to handing them the tools
11:00 Why men do not join support circles, and what they do instead
15:00 Books versus contact, and where information alone stops
18:00 The playful parent, and "the representative of life"
23:00 Losing your identity as a father inside a custody schedule
27:00 What he would say to a parent who assumes she should have them most
29:00 Stronger, mindful, present, and why home-but-absent is worse

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183
🔗 Oscar Pena, the Daughtered Podcast: https://daughteredpodcast.com/

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.

Suzanne Taluy is a licensed clinical social worker and the founder of a group practice in Norwalk, Connecticut, where the clinicians work with children through older adults and specialize in trauma and life transitions. She is EMDR certified and trained in emotionally focused therapy for couples. She and Lisa met in person over lunch, which is part of why this conversation goes where it does.

Suzanne opens with the range of reasons people arrive at couples counseling, from newlyweds wanting a foundation to one partner dragging the other in hoping the therapist will take their side. She describes how she screens: a consultation before anyone books, direct questions about substance use and physical or emotional abuse, and a willingness to pause the work and send both people to their own therapists. Her comparison is to treating someone whose trauma is ongoing, where stabilizing is close to impossible while the source is still active.

Lisa then describes her own experience of couples counseling with a therapist who had been her ex's individual therapist for years, and being told to set her own feelings aside. Suzanne names the ethical problems in that plainly. They also cover why therapists are trained not to tell a couple whether to stay or go, and the situations where a clinician is obligated to speak up anyway. Toward the end, Suzanne gives the questions to ask any therapist before you commit, and Lisa raises what happens to a child in court-ordered therapy who knows their words are going back to the court, so nothing in the room is really private.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• Why an abusive dynamic makes couples therapy unsafe, and what a therapist should do instead
• How a good clinician screens for abuse and substance use before taking a couple
• Why the person who arrives second to their partner's longtime therapist is at a disadvantage
• The questions to ask in a consultation: training, years with couples, and what they aim for
• Why therapists are trained not to tell a couple to separate, and when they speak up anyway
• How a manipulative partner works on the therapist, and why training is the defense
• Why trauma sits on a spectrum, and who to look for if you are the one seeking help
• What court-ordered reporting does to a child's ability to trust their own therapist

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Why people come to couples counseling, and who gets screened out
5:00 How Suzanne screens for abuse before she takes a couple
7:00 You cannot stabilize someone while the harm is ongoing
10:00 What to ask a therapist in a consultation
12:00 "Process consultants," not fixers
14:00 Lisa's experience: her ex's therapist as their couples counselor
19:00 Why therapists rarely tell a couple to separate
22:00 How a manipulative partner works on the therapist
24:00 What to do instead, and finding a trauma-trained therapist

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183
🔗 Suzanne Taluy at Embrace Psychotherapy: https://www.embracepsychotherapyllc.com/

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.

Our guest this episode is Torie Wiksell, a therapist and boundaries coach who has practiced for roughly twelve and a half years and spent much of that time working clinically with people who have personality disorders, including borderline, narcissistic, antisocial, and histrionic presentations. She also grew up with a narcissistic mother, which is the reason colleagues started sending her the cases that fell outside their comfort zone. She runs a membership community for adults with toxic parents, built an app called Confident Boundaries for cycle breakers, and hosts the weekly podcast You're Not Crazy. Her parents divorced when she was a teenager, and her father's family aligned with her mother completely, so the dynamic BTGO clients describe in court is one she lived in.

Torie and Lisa map the roles that show up in these families and why they matter to a parent in a custody fight: the enabling parent, the scapegoat, the golden child, and the black-and-white worldview that makes them possible. They talk about why oversimplified healing advice adds shame rather than relief, why not every parent loves their child in a way that means anything, and why a child who already senses the truth may not be able to say it while they still depend on the person they would be saying it about. They also cover the gendered assumptions that get people believed or disbelieved, and how black-and-white thinking about abuse ends up protecting the person doing it.

The last stretch is for parents whose kids have already pulled away. Torie describes what shifted when she left home and met people whose families worked differently, why the early attachment you built is not erased by an estrangement, and how to build a support system when your own relatives have taken your ex's side. She also names the red flags in the recovery space itself, starting with anyone who tells you it is simple.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• The roles in a family with a toxic parent: enabler, scapegoat, and golden child
• Why the scapegoat is often the healthiest member and still the last one to leave
• Why five-step healing advice adds shame instead of relief
• Why a child can know the truth and still be unable to say it out loud
• What tends to change once a child gets out from under the other parent's daily control
• Why the attachment you built in your child's early years still counts later
• How to build a support system when your own family has sided with your ex
• Red flags in the recovery space: who is selling, and who is teaching

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 The myth that everyone else has a healthy family
3:00 Growing up with a narcissistic parent who looked like the perfect mom
5:00 When your ex's family lines up behind them instead of you
9:00 Gender, the cycle of abuse, and men who are not believed
11:00 Scapegoat, golden child, and the enabling parent
15:00 Why five-step healing advice makes the shame worse
19:00 Why a child cannot say out loud what they already know
25:00 Growing up in a cult, and what happens when a kid gets out
31:00 Why the early years you had with your child still count
35:00 Building a support system, and red flags in the healing space

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183
🔗 Torie Wiksell at Confident Boundaries: https://www.confidentboundaries.com/

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.

Bailey Payne worked in child protective services, primarily overseeing reunification after a child had been removed or separated from a parent during an investigation, and later became a board-certified behavior analyst. She now consults in schools, provides private behavioral therapy in homes, and teaches future educators at the university level. She's also a single mother and wrote a book, Behavior Breakthrough, drawing on both her professional background and her own experience parenting through crisis.

Bailey and Lisa talk through what reunification actually means, why it remains the goal even after real abuse or a parent's incarceration, and why family courts push so hard to preserve a relationship with both parents: kids who lose contact with a parent in childhood very often seek that parent out again once they turn eighteen, whatever happened before. They cover what to actually do when CPS calls or visits (behave normally, don't over-clean, don't perform) and address false allegations honestly: Bailey acknowledges the system fails people, but says most false claims get dismissed within a few visits and calls, and an unsubstantiated report reflects on the person who filed it, not the parent it named.

The second half of the conversation moves into Bailey's current work: practical ways to work on a difficult or aggressive child's behavior, why giving yourself grace as a parent matters as much as any technique, and why noticing what your child is doing right changes their behavior faster than only managing what's going wrong.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• What reunification actually means, and why it's still the goal even after documented abuse
• Why family courts push so hard to preserve a relationship with both parents, even a harmful one
• What to actually do when CPS calls or visits: behave normally, don't perform, don't over-clean
• Why most false allegations get dismissed within a few visits and calls, not months of investigation
• Why the wait during an investigation is a symptom of an overloaded system, not a signal about your case
• The mindset shift that changes a child's difficult behavior faster than any single technique
• Why giving yourself grace as a parent matters as much as any parenting skill

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 What reunification means, and why it's still the goal even after abuse
5:00 What a reunification plan actually includes
9:00 Why courts push so hard to preserve both-parent relationships
11:00 False allegations: what usually happens, and who it actually reflects on
13:00 What to do, and not do, when CPS calls or shows up
15:00 The long wait, and why it isn't a signal about your case
17:00 From caseworker to behavior analyst: giving yourself grace in crisis mode
19:00 The mindset shift that changes a child's difficult behavior

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183
🔗 Bailey Payne: https://www.baileypayne.com/

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.

Dr. Sasha Reiisi is a licensed professional clinical counselor and a doctor of education, practicing in California with adults, couples and families. His specialty is early childhood trauma, and he built it the long way round: years of clinical work with children from birth to five, much of it with low-income families and single-parent households. What changed his direction was noticing that the difficulties he was treating in a three-year-old showed up almost unchanged in a thirty-year-old, still unrepaired, still shaping decisions the adult could not trace back to anything.

He and Lisa start with what trauma actually is. Not the event, he says, but what the nervous system does during it, and the conclusion a child draws afterwards. He gives the small version that carries no obvious incident at all: the parent who is late to the school gate most days while every other child gets collected, and the belief a child assembles out of that about whether anyone shows up when they say they will. He also takes apart the idea that damage is permanent. Repair is possible at any age, in either direction, and adults keep giving their parents chances to get it right long after it looks reasonable to.

The practical half covers what to do when the person who hurt you will not acknowledge it, and what reparenting means in that case. Why healing is relational and community matters alongside therapy, plus a straight answer to Lisa's question about support groups that keep people circling the same grievance instead of moving. Why the body is half the work, what bilateral movement is, and why he takes teenage clients for a walk rather than sitting them in a chair. And his answer for anyone with no time: healing happens in the pause before you go out the door, and in the apology after you snapped, and children need roughly ten minutes of real attention a day.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• Why trauma is what happens in the nervous system, not the event itself
• How trauma builds with no single incident, and what a repeatedly late pick-up teaches a child
• Why repair is possible at any age, whether your child is four or thirty-four
• What healing looks like when the person who hurt you will never acknowledge it
• How to tell a support community that helps from one that keeps you circling
• Why talking is only part of trauma work, and how movement reconnects you to your body
• What bilateral movement is, and why hard conversations go better on a walk
• How to make real progress in small doses when you have no time to spare

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 "I want to do better than my parents"
5:00 What trauma actually is, and where it happens
9:00 Trauma that builds: the late pick-up, the empty fridge
11:00 Why repair works at any age, even decades later
13:00 When the person who hurt you will not acknowledge it
15:00 Talk therapy, community, and getting back into your body
17:00 Bilateral movement, and hard conversations on a walk
19:00 Which support communities heal, and which keep you circling
24:00 Healing in small doses when you have no time
27:00 Micro-progress, and moving from automatic to aware

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183
🔗 Dr. Sasha Reiisi on Instagram (@dr.sashareiisi): https://www.instagram.com/dr.sashareiisi/

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.

Mia Poppe has practiced matrimonial law in the New York metro area for 18 years, with her office in Midtown Manhattan and a niche competency in high-conflict matters where custody is contested. She is also a member of what she calls the club: she went through a litigated custody case of her own, with young children, and came out the other side. That combination shapes how she talks to clients, which is directly, and as partners rather than dependents.

Mia and Lisa work through what it means to treat your case like a business. She describes the old, patriarchal model of lawyering, the one that tells a frightened client to sit down and say nothing, and why it costs people dearly. She explains the levels of client involvement, when it is fine to lean fully on your lawyer at the start, and why that has to be temporary. And she connects the financial waste in a high-conflict case to its hidden costs: more drama, more angst, and the toll a nervous system stuck on high alert takes on your health.

There is practical ground here as well. Why questioning a line on your invoice makes you a better-served client. How to find the trial-retainer clause most people skip. Why Mia refuses to walk a client down what she calls the parade of horribles. She and Lisa also talk about children, and why letting kids sit with hard feelings, supported by their own team, builds a resilience no parent can hand them.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• Why going passive with your attorney can repeat the same power dynamic you just left
• The quarterback approach: your lawyer runs the field, you call plays with the information only you have
• How overusing even a great attorney drains money meant for your kids
• Running the numbers: putting a dollar figure on each motion, and weighing the price of peace
• Why reading your invoices and questioning charges makes you a better-served client
• The trial retainer buried in your retainer agreement, and why to read it before you sign
• How the stress of a long case shows up in your body, and why managing it is strategy
• Why you cannot shield your kids from all of it, and what actually builds their resilience

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Strategic oversight, and empowerment at your most powerless point
3:00 "I work for you," and why you can't step off the field
5:00 The old patriarchal model of lawyering, and why it fails
7:00 The quarterback and the sideline: who calls the plays
9:00 Levels of involvement, and the cost of overdepending on your lawyer
13:00 Why you can't save your kids, and building their team
19:00 The A+ client, and mitigating cost to mitigate drama and stress
25:00 Reading your invoices and pricing out a motion
31:00 The price of peace, the trial retainer, and the fine print
35:00 Plain English, your exhaustion, and refusing the parade of horribles

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183
🔗 Mia Poppe: https://www.miapoppe.com/

🎧 More with Mia Poppe on this podcast
Ep 64: A Family Lawyer's 3-Year Custody Battle, and the Turn
Ep 245: Managing Your Reactivity in Family Court

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.

Our guest is Emma Kate Freatman, a licensed professional counselor with a private practice in Wilton, Connecticut. Before going into practice full time she worked at Silver Hill Hospital in New Canaan, where she was intensively trained in dialectical behavior therapy and cognitive processing therapy and ran intensive outpatient groups for adults and adolescents. She still contracts there doing trauma and PTSD work in the transitional living program. Earlier she worked for Kids in Crisis, in outreach and in their safe haven shelter, and as an in-school teen talk counselor at a Connecticut high school. She is licensed in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey.

Emma Kate opens with what a parent should actually watch for before deciding a child needs help: changes in sleep, appetite, and mood that outlast the stressor that caused them, headaches and stomachaches, and a social withdrawal that does not resolve in a couple of weeks. She talks about the teenager who does not want to be there, why she spends the first several sessions building rapport instead of teaching coping skills, and how she handles confidentiality so a child is never surprised by what gets shared.

Then she and Lisa get into the part that matters here. Anxiety produces avoidance, and a frightened parent accommodates it, which is a reasonable instinct that ends up feeding the thing. Emma Kate walks through protecting versus demanding, the mental health day that was sometimes the right call and sometimes a dodge, and what happens when a child is anxious about going to the other house and can feel their parent is anxious about it too. They also cover therapists in custody cases, requests to testify, and what a parent gets out of the training even though the outcomes are measured on the child.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• What SPACE stands for, where it came from, and why the parent is the one in the session
• Anxiety defined simply: overestimating the threat, underestimating your ability to handle it
• The changes in sleep, appetite, mood, and friendships that mean a child needs support
• Protecting vs demanding, and why neither response builds your child's confidence
• How accommodations you never noticed end up feeding your child's avoidance
• Why a child in a custody fight reads your regulation as the answer to whether they are safe
• How a therapist handles confidentiality when parents are in conflict, and requests to testify
• Why SPACE can be a route forward when your ex will not agree to therapy for your child

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 What SPACE stands for, and meeting Emma Kate Freatman
3:00 Signs a child needs support: sleep, mood, appetite, pulling away
5:00 The kid who refuses to be there, and building rapport first
9:00 How much a parent gets to know, at ten and at seventeen
13:00 Confidentiality, and never surprising a child with what you share
15:00 Parents in conflict, and being asked to testify in court
19:00 How SPACE differs from CBT: treating the child through the parent
23:00 Protecting vs demanding, and accommodations that feed avoidance
25:00 School refusal, and the anxiety around going to the other house
29:00 What the sessions look like, and where to find Emma Kate

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183
🔗 Emma Kate Freatman, LPC (clinician profile, Silver Hill Hospital): https://silverhillhospital.org/clinician/emma-kate-freatman/

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.