One parent goes away for a weekend. In her absence the other gets the kids cooking, setting the table and washing up, and within a day of her return the whole arrangement is gone. Jon tells that story as the thing he can point at most cleanly: it was never about the chores. Somebody needed those children to keep needing her.

Jon posts under the name Male Victims of Female Narcissists, and he has been a guest here several times. He was married for twenty-seven years and describes a covert dynamic rather than an obvious one: no shouting for most of it, no obvious cruelty, just a steady, patient rearrangement of the family around one person. He has said he was the frog in the kettle, and that the temperature came up so slowly he did not notice until the water was hot. He deliberately waited until his children were out of the house before filing, hoping to give them something intact. Two of the four have not spoken to him since.

In this episode, Jon and Lisa go through what the pattern looked like from the inside. A long power struggle over the children that started when they were toddlers. A parenting goal aimed at dependence rather than independence, and what that produced in an adult son who could not order for himself. Triangulation and gatekeeping, where every conversation, even with his own parents and sisters, routed through one person first. The children as an audience and then as reporters, and the attention they earned by carrying information back. Lisa connects each piece to the alienation factors she teaches from Dr. Amy Baker's research, and adds the borrowed scenario: a child repeating a complaint in vocabulary that was clearly handed to them.

The rest is about repair, and its pace. Jon describes what his ex said the day he told her he wanted a divorce, and what it revealed about how long the ground had been prepared. He explains why he will not defend himself to his children, will not discuss their mother with them, and will not accept a relationship built on being used, and how he holds that line while leaving the door open. He describes rebuilding trust with his youngest over dinners, one at a time. And he lays out the parable he keeps coming back to, of a father who lets life do the teaching rather than chasing, and who is still there when his child turns around. He also talks about why the space he runs is largely gender-neutral, and who actually shows up in it.

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

🎓 What you'll learn

• Why alienating behavior often starts years before anyone files anything
• Fostering dependence: what it looks like at three, at thirteen, and at eighteen
• Triangulation and gatekeeping, and being the last person told in your own house
• Why children of a covert abuser become the supply, and why the pattern takes longer to see
• The borrowed scenario: when your child repeats a grievance in words that were never theirs
• Why correcting the record with facts rarely moves an alienated child's position
• How to decline a relationship built on disrespect without closing the door on your child
• Why chasing an alienated adult child backfires, and what waiting actually looks like

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Why alienation starts long before the separation
4:00 Independence vs dependence, and being the last to know at home
8:30 Infantilizing: the candy bar at the skydiving center
12:00 The weekend she was away, and how fast it was dismantled
16:00 Covert vs malignant, and children as the supply
20:00 Kids as reporters, and what they get rewarded for
24:00 The spin, the borrowed scenario, and why facts don't settle it
31:00 "Some of your children will never speak to you again"
34:00 Four kids, four outcomes, and refusing disrespect
39:00 The prodigal son, and waiting without chasing
46:00 How long it takes, and the advice that never changed

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 222: Parental Alienation and Surviving the Holidays
Ep 360: Four Years of Parental Alienation, Then a Text Back

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.

Dara Marias practices a kind of divorce law that sounds impossible for BTGO's world: holistic, amicable, mostly out of court. She is the first to say safety comes before any of it, and that a high-conflict ex makes it harder. But the skills she teaches are the same ones that keep any case from spiraling.

Marias is a Las Vegas attorney with both a law degree and a master's in social work, and a former child custody mediator who did her mediation training in the Los Angeles conciliation court. She now practices holistic, largely non-litigated divorce, and supports people in litigated cases by building their emotional and co-parenting skills. Lisa met her at an amicable-divorce conference, and this conversation is about how those skills change the experience of a divorce, and its cost.

At the center is what Marias calls emotional agility: not making an important decision while you are either avoiding the whole thing or consumed by it. She teaches value-based decision-making, running each choice through a value you hold, usually your children's wellbeing, rather than through what someone deserves. For the kids she leans on the CPRs, continuity, protection from the details of the divorce, and reassurance, with the parent as the calm the child takes their cue from. And she is direct about the poisonous-message problem: when a child parrots something cruel from the other parent, defending yourself makes the child a judge between two parents, so the better move is to stay calm, keep them out of it, and let your steady conduct settle the question over time.

The other half is about pace and cost. Marias explains why "amicable" describes the attorneys, not the spouses, and how choosing an attorney who lowers the temperature rather than raising it protects both your money and your children. She talks through keeping a case out of court, where you hold more say than you would handing your family's future to a judge, and the small strategic moves that get a difficult ex to agree, connecting the process to what they value, and letting settlement feel like their idea. She also shares the reference materials she gives clients, from the legal vocabulary they'll hear to a fresh, private email account and the stages of grief no one warns them about.

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

🎓 What you'll learn

• Emotional agility: why you should never make a major divorce decision from a non-neutral state
• Why "amicable divorce" means the attorneys are amicable, not the spouses, and how to choose one
• Value-based decision-making: filtering every choice through what matters, not what someone "deserves"
• The CPRs for kids in divorce: continuity, protection, and reassurance
• When your child repeats a poisonous message, why correcting it puts them in the middle
• How not badmouthing the other parent also strengthens your custody case
• Keeping a high-conflict case out of court: the amicable network, and making it the ex's idea
• Why no stranger will decide your children's lives better than you can

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Meet Dara: an attorney with a social-work background
5:00 Emotional agility: don't decide from a non-neutral state
7:00 Why "amicable" means the attorneys, and choosing yours
9:00 Preparing: get familiar with your own finances
12:00 Value-based decisions, and the CPRs for kids
15:00 The flight-attendant analogy, and helping kids express feelings
19:00 When your child repeats a poisonous message
23:00 How not badmouthing also helps your custody case
27:00 Fencing in litigation: the amicable network, and making it their idea
35:00 Changing the dance with an oppositional ex, and staying out of court
41:00 Getting organized, and Dara's Divorce 101 resources

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
🔗 Dara Marias at Kainen Law Group (see the "Holistic Divorce" page): https://kainenlawgroup.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.

Emotional literacy, the way Darlynn Childress defines it, is three things: knowing what you feel, knowing how to talk about it, and knowing what to do with it. The third one is where everybody gets stuck. And the reason she can tell a parent in a brutal custody fight that they do not need their ex on the same page is that a child only needs one person teaching this, the same way a child only needs one person teaching them to read.

Our guest is Darlynn Childress, a life and parenting coach with roughly fifteen years teaching parents, a former teacher, and the host of the Become a Calm Mama podcast. She runs group programs for parents of younger children and parents of teens, and teaches a full model she breaks into calm, connect, and correct: regulating yourself, coaching your child's emotions, and setting limits without shame.

Lisa opens with her own fear at the time of her separation, that her kids would be ruined for every relationship after it, and Darlynn reframes what being OK even means. Not a good career or a nice house. A decent relationship with yourself, which is what makes a decent relationship with anyone else possible.

From there: why denial is a reasonable coping strategy when you are afraid that if you start crying you will not stop, what happens in a person's body when someone finally names the feeling correctly, and why behavior in a child or in yourself is information rather than a problem to be managed. Darlynn teaches her connection tool step by step, narrate, name, now what, and shows the teenage version, which happens silently, where you do the work in your own head and simply arrive as a compassionate witness. They close on loyalty used as a condition of safety, and what a child needs to hear from you when it is.

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

🎓 What you'll learn

• Emotional literacy in one line, and why the third part is where everyone gets stuck
• Why one emotional coach is enough, so two co-parents do not have to agree
• What being OK actually means, and why it is about relationships rather than outcomes
• Fake calm: why your child's nervous system reads yours no matter what your face says
• How parentifying starts from a parent trying to protect their child
• The connection tool: narrate the circumstance, name the feeling, then now what
• What to say when your child comes home repeating what the other parent told them
• Why nobody else can undo your relationship with your child except you

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 The claim: co-parents do not need to be on the same page
3:00 What being OK actually means, and Lisa's fears at the split
7:00 Emotional literacy, explained like learning to read
15:00 Denial, and what happens when someone names the feeling
19:00 Behavior as a clue, and curiosity instead of judgment
21:00 Fake calm, and how parentifying starts
25:00 The connection tool: narrate, name, and now what
31:00 When your child repeats what the other parent said
35:00 Being a compassionate witness to a teenager
41:00 You cannot outsource the relationship, and loyalty used as leverage

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
🔗 Darlynn Childress at Calm Mama Coaching (podcast and free resources): https://calmmamacoaching.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.

Somebody rinses with mouthwash, rushes out the door, blows into the device, and tests positive. Soberlink locks the device for fifteen minutes when that happens, on purpose. Rinse, wait, test again, and if the second result is clean the whole event is recorded as compliant.

Chris Beck is vice president of business development for family law at Soberlink, where his work is educating attorneys, judges, and the professionals around a case on what remote alcohol monitoring can and cannot do. Soberlink combines a handheld breathalyzer with facial recognition and transmits each result to everyone named in the monitoring agreement, so nobody is relying on anyone's word. He is a parent of five himself, with a spread from four to fifteen, and he is direct throughout about how a tool built to keep a parent in a child's life gets used as leverage instead.

This episode is about how monitoring gets written into a parenting plan and what happens once it is there. Chris explains the two models: testing bookended around parenting time, which is what most families use, and daily testing, which functions more like a treatment program. He explains why random testing made sense when monitoring meant driving to a lab, and why it mostly generates anxiety now that the device sits in someone's pocket. He and Lisa also talk through why a supervisor present at a visit does not remove the need for a sober parent, and what children pick up on and remember long after the adults have forgotten.

The rest is objections and edge cases. What happens when someone insists they do not have a problem, and what tends to shift that. Why a step-down belongs in the order, so sustained sobriety reduces the testing frequency rather than leaving it indefinite. How a co-parent demanding six or seven tests a day turns the tool into a burden rather than a safeguard. Why a single clean result around a drinking episode does not hold up over months. And what somebody does when they have tested clean for years and nothing about stepping down was ever written down. Chris finishes with a story about a father whose daughter covered his device in rhinestones, which is the reframe he wishes more people arrived with.

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

🎓 What you'll learn

• What remote alcohol monitoring is, and how a breathalyzer plus facial recognition works
• Parenting-time testing versus daily testing, and how to decide which one belongs in your plan
• Why random testing creates anxiety without buying any extra protection
• Why supervised visitation does not remove the need for a sober parent
• How a positive from mouthwash gets resolved, and what the retest window is for
• How monitoring gets weaponized, and what overtesting looks like
• Writing a step-down into the order so continued sobriety actually earns something
• What to do when you have been compliant for years and want the requirement lifted

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Red flags before a separation, and what Soberlink actually is
4:00 What a BAC reading means, and why random testing isn't recommended
6:00 Parenting-time testing versus daily testing, and how to choose
8:00 Why supervised visitation still needs a sober parent
10:00 What children notice, and what they remember
11:30 "I don't have a problem": denial, and how long people stay on
13:30 Step-up and step-down: building a route off the plan
15:30 Mouthwash, false positives, and the fifteen-minute retest
18:30 Overtesting, weaponization, and why one clean test proves little
21:30 Getting off monitoring, and the dad whose daughter bedazzled the device

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
🔗 Soberlink: https://www.soberlink.com/
🔗 Soberlink Stories on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/soberlink.stories/

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.

Raquel Reis took pride in growing up fast. She sees the same thing now in clients who are high functioning and successful, and she can tell you what it cost her, because it caught up with her. On the surface a child in a high-conflict home takes on adult traits early. Underneath, something did not get nurtured, and it is still waiting.

Our guest this episode is Raquel Reis, a relationship coach who works with couples and individuals on turning conflict into connection. She and Lisa know each other in real life, and Lisa says plainly at the start that she would never send a BTGO client to couples work, because in a domestic violence situation that is dangerous. What brought Raquel on is different: she is the adult child of a high-conflict marriage, and this is the first time she has spoken about it publicly.

She defines high conflict without volume. One parent largely absent and angry when present, another volatile, and a family that looked accomplished from outside. The damage she names is not the fighting. It is the loss of a steady reality, the sense that the rug can be pulled at any moment, and the loss of trust in your own read of the room.

The rest of the conversation is about what repairs that. Consistency and the strength of one parent, which Raquel is emphatic does not have to be both. Routines that are yours and do not have to look like anyone else's family dinner. Boundaries stated once and briefly, without defending the position. Self-regulation as the thing that makes co-regulation possible, and Raquel's argument that the presence of one calm, consistent adult changes what a person is capable of at any age. She closes with the emotional jacket, and the case for having somewhere safe to fall apart so you can come back together for your kids.

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

🎓 What you'll learn

• What high conflict looks like when nobody raises their voice
• Why a child who stops trusting the room stops trusting themselves
• The coping strategies kids build, and why they made sense at the time
• Why one consistent parent is enough, and what consistency actually means day to day
• Everyday rituals that do the work, and why they do not have to be family dinners
• Why stating a boundary briefly beats explaining and defending it
• Consistency, stability, and routine as things family courts actually weigh
• Self-regulation before co-regulation, and how to talk to kids without the details

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Kids who grow up fast, and what is underneath it
3:00 Who Raquel Reis is, and why this is not couples counseling
5:00 Defining high conflict when nobody is yelling
9:00 How children cope, and why the coping made sense at the time
11:00 Consistency, and why one steady parent is enough
13:00 The morning dog walk, and rituals that are not family dinners
17:00 Boundaries as safety, and why short beats over-explaining
21:00 Self-regulation, co-regulation, and the Harlow monkeys
25:00 Talking to kids about what is happening without the details
29:00 The emotional jacket, and a closing word for parents

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
🔗 Raquel Reis Coaching: https://raquelreiscoaching.com/

🎧 More with Raquel Reis on this podcast
Ep 198: Negotiating Calmly With a High-Conflict Ex

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.

Rapport is not the pleasant extra on top of therapy. Lauren Barnett's position is that it is the mechanism, and that the research bears this out: the therapeutic alliance between two people predicts whether the work succeeds more reliably than any technique used inside it.

Our guest is Lauren Barnett, founder of a Connecticut practice built around matching individuals and families to the right mental health professional. She has three decades in the field, across schools, hospitals, camps and community settings, and she is deliberate about what she is not: not a psychotherapist, not doing the sessions herself. She got here because families kept coming back to her with the same problem, and she kept solving it informally by knowing who would suit whom.

She opens on something parents in a high-conflict case need to hear. Getting your child a therapist while you stay untreated leaves half the work undone, because the child learns a set of tools and then comes home to a house that has not changed. Any change the parent makes benefits the child.

The rest is the machinery of matching. What she asks a child, which is about the coach or babysitter or teacher they connected with and why, and how quickly that turns into self-knowledge for them. What she asks clinicians, which is not only their specialty but which clients light them up. Why she distrusts directories and algorithms that sort by diagnosis and geography. Why therapy does not have to run for years to have worked. And what happens on the clinician's side when both people arrive already wanting to be there. Lisa maps all of it onto choosing a divorce attorney, and Lauren declines to answer a question about reunification therapy on the grounds that it is outside what she knows, which Lisa points out is its own kind of credential.

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

🎓 What you'll learn

• Why the therapeutic alliance predicts success better than any specific method
• The question to ask a child before you look for a therapist for them
• What a referral list from a community group actually costs you in months
• Why sending your child to therapy while you stay untreated is half a plan
• What to ask a clinician beyond their specialty: who do they love working with
• Why directory algorithms sorted by diagnosis and zip code miss the point
• That therapy can be a few months of work, not a permanent commitment
• How to apply the same standard when you are choosing a divorce attorney

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Get your child help, and get help yourself at the same time
4:00 Thirty years in the field, and the pivot to matching
6:00 The contact-lens problem with therapist directories
8:00 What a community-group referral list actually costs you
10:00 The questions she asks a kid about their favorite coach
12:00 Rapport is the science, not the soft part
17:00 What she does not claim to know
19:00 Intuition, and why an algorithm cannot do this
22:00 Therapy does not have to last years
25:00 Matching the clinician too, so both sides show up excited
27:00 Choosing an attorney, waiting lists, and finding the unicorn

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
🔗 Lauren Barnett at Family Consultants of Westport: https://www.familyconsultantsofwestport.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.

Maura McIntyre met Lisa at a networking event, heard what BTGO does, and felt her heart start pounding. Her first instinct was that she did not want this conversation anywhere near her. She opens the episode by saying so, and then explains what she did with that reaction instead of obeying it.

Maura McIntyre is a recovery coach who also works as a nutrition coach and a trainer in barre and Pilates. She defines a recovery coach as someone who builds a plan with you and clears the obstacles in front of your recovery, and she is firm that recovery covers far more than substances: grief, divorce, trauma, and anything else a person is coming back from. Her own history runs through a difficult divorce and, during the pandemic, a cancer diagnosis that arrived while she was building a career in health and fitness.

The conversation is built around a few tools and one uncomfortable idea. The tools: breath first, because a shallow-breathing body reads the situation as an emergency; putting a hand on your heart and asking what you are actually feeling; talking to anxiety instead of pushing at it, since anxiety is always about a future that has not happened; and pulling up a stored memory of a time you felt safe and supported, in enough detail to use it. Lisa contributes the trick of adding the word yet to a catastrophic thought, and an example of walking her own daughter through pre-departure nerves by listing everything she had already survived.

The uncomfortable idea is Harville Hendrix's, that we select partners who will raise the material we most want to avoid, which is why the same relationship keeps arriving in a new shape. Maura's view is that most people never do that work, because it is frightening and because shame gets there first. She and Lisa spend the last stretch on that shame: the disinvitations, the sense of having failed your kids, the friends who turn out not to be there, and the remarks people make when something bad happens to someone they thought was exempt. She ends with a short list of things you can do in the next five minutes.

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

🎓 What you'll learn

• What a recovery coach does, and why recovery is not only about substances
• The loop: why the story keeps circling, and the first thing Maura does about it
• Why an ignored feeling gets louder and eventually turns up in your body
• How to talk to anxiety rather than push it away, and the question to ask it
• Adding "yet" to a catastrophic thought, and asking what if it works out
• Building a safe memory you can pull up on demand, in enough detail to be useful
• Harville Hendrix's premise on why the same relationship keeps arriving in a new shape
• Where the shame comes from after a divorce, and why very little of it is yours

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 The guest who didn't want to talk to Lisa, and what a recovery coach does
5:30 Breath, and the loop that won't switch off
9:00 Sitting with a feeling instead of outrunning it
16:00 Talking to your anxiety instead of pushing it away
18:00 Catastrophizing, "what if it works out," and adding "yet"
23:30 A memory where you felt safe, and reminding kids what they've survived
28:00 Harville Hendrix, and why we choose who we choose
32:30 Why most people never do the work
35:30 Shame, "failing" your kids, and the friends who vanish
44:30 Maura's cancer, and walking around the block
51:00 The five-minute toolkit, and where to find Maura

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
🔗 Maura McIntyre at WellnessM2: https://wellnessm2.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.

Swim team practice meets every morning at the pool near one parent's house. It is an hour and a half from the other parent's house. Nobody said a word about custody, and the summer schedule changed anyway.

Maarit runs Blended Family Frappe, the blended-family and high-conflict co-parenting resource she built with her husband Dan once their kids reached eighteen. Each of them brought a child of the same age into the marriage, and each had an ex who made ordinary co-parenting advice useless. Her high-conflict parenting-plan checklist, the thing that first put her on Been There Got Out's radar, began as an email to her sister, an attorney whose own divorce lawyer kept drafting clauses that read when both parties agree.

Maarit and Lisa work through extracurriculars as an alienation tactic, which she describes as a Trojan horse because the activities themselves look so ordinary. Sign-ups timed to swallow the other parent's days. Programs booked on the weeks the child is at the other house. Fees that were never agreed to and cannot be argued about afterward. And the message delivered alongside the schedule, that the other parent is unsupportive, does not understand, does not really know them.

They also cover what a parent can actually do. Capping the number of activities and splitting costs in the order rather than leaving it to agreement. Replying to a schedule argument with a statement of values, which is harder to push back on than a counter-proposal. Long-distance custody and fighting for summer blocks. Who is responsible for the gear a child leaves at the other house. Attending games when the other parent will not acknowledge you, and why Maarit thinks performing a friendly family in public teaches a child something you do not want them to learn.

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

🎓 What you'll learn

• Why activities make an easy alienation tactic: nobody questions a sign-up
• How practice locations and start times can absorb the other parent's days
• What to put in a parenting plan about activity limits, approval, and cost splits
• Answering a schedule argument with a values statement instead of a counter-argument
• Long-distance custody: protecting summer and holiday blocks from the season calendar
• Who is responsible for forgotten gear, and why Maarit puts it on the child
• Whether to sit together at events, and the case against performing a happy family
• Why being the unpopular parent can be the more useful thing to model

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 The checklist that started it, and a lawyer's own divorce
6:00 Blended families, two exes, and rules that stop applying
9:00 Extracurriculars as a Trojan horse for alienation
11:00 Swim team and after-school programs: how parenting time disappears
14:00 "Your dad just does not care": the message layered on the schedule
16:00 Fees, sign-ups, and putting limits into the order
20:00 Leading with values instead of arguing about the calendar
24:00 Long-distance custody, summers, and packing the gear
29:00 Games and recitals: seating, being ignored, and whether to fake it
35:00 Being the unpopular parent, and modeling boundaries for your kid

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
🔗 Blended Family Frappe: https://blendedfamilyfrappe.com
🔗 Blended Family Frappe on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/blendedfamilyfrappe/

🎧 More with Maarit on this podcast
Ep 74: Stepparenting in High Conflict

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.

Secure attachment is not a shield, and Dawn Brauer is careful about that. It does not keep bad things from happening to a child. It works more like an inoculation, and it is where resilience actually comes from, because resilience is not hardwired. A child learns it from being shown it, in small doses, by someone who keeps coming back.

Our guest this episode is Dawn Brauer, back for another conversation. She is a pediatric physical therapist with twenty-five years in the field, working in early intervention with children from birth through three, and she is known on Instagram as Secure Babies. Alongside the clinical work she has read deeply into adverse childhood experiences, attachment, and parental alienation, driven by her own experience of it, and she teaches the parents of the babies she treats how to build a secure attachment while they still have the easiest window to do it.

Lisa frames the problem first. After separation, an abusive ex has three levers left: money, the courts, and the children. The children last the longest. Dawn's contribution is what happens on the inside of that. She describes alignment with the parent who looks powerful, the covert version where a child believes the rejection was their own idea, and the tell she keeps coming back to, which is a child who idealizes one parent and holds the other in contempt while giving reasons far too small to explain it.

From there: emotional enmeshment and why a child needs to individuate, repetition compulsion and the partners people pick to rewrite an old ending, reactive abuse and why the person who finally snaps is the one who looks unwell, and the four-and-four contrast between how each parent presents in court. Dawn is emphatic that emotional regulation is training rather than a trait, and she and Lisa land on the long game: document rather than argue, never demand a child back into your life, and hold the standard of a good enough parent instead of a perfect one. She closes with the small anchors she used, the packed travel bag and the bear with a heartbeat, and with what infantilization taught her about her own family.

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

🎓 What you'll learn

• What secure attachment does and does not do, and why resilience is taught rather than innate
• How good parenting gets reframed as control, from a tracking app to ordinary discipline
• The tell that separates alienation from estrangement: contempt with reasons too small
• Emotional enmeshment, why teenagers push hard, and what individuating is for
• Repetition compulsion, and why people pick a partner who lets them redo an old ending
• Cool, calm, charming versus anxious, agitated, afraid: how each parent reads in court
• Why arguing a child out of it pushes them further away, and what to do instead
• The good enough parent, and the small anchors that tell a child you have them

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Meeting Dawn Brauer, and what secure attachment does
5:00 Legal abuse, and why the kids last the longest
9:00 Good parenting turned into evidence against you
11:00 Alienation vs estrangement, and the child who idealizes one parent
17:00 Emotional enmeshment, individuating, and repetition compulsion
23:00 Cool, calm, charming vs anxious, agitated, afraid
27:00 Presentation and emotional regulation as training
31:00 When your child repeats the other parent's words
41:00 The good enough parent
47:00 Small anchors, infantilization, and the long game

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

🎧 More with Dawn Brauer on this podcast
Ep 9: Secure Attachment When Your Ex Is Alienating
Ep 27: Secure Attachment When Co-Parenting With a Narcissist

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.

New Jersey's family courts have always been able to weigh a person's full history when deciding a restraining order, whether or not anything was ever reported before. Attorney Melissa Cohen says that's been an advantage over states where a single incident has to fit neatly into one legal box. The state's new coercive control law builds on that foundation.

Melissa Cohen is a family law attorney at Seiden Freed in Cranford, New Jersey, where she handles the full range of family law matters alongside a significant number of domestic violence cases, work she says she finds especially meaningful. She's been a guest on the show before, and this conversation picks up a debate that started at a lunch-and-learn Melissa and Lisa did together, over whether coercive control legislation helps or complicates cases for the people it's meant to protect.

Melissa lays out what New Jersey's law formally recognizes now: financial control, isolation, digital and cyber stalking, legal abuse through repeated false reports, revenge porn, and other patterns that never left a mark but were always abuse. She and Lisa talk through how a case actually gets built: keeping a dated journal instead of relying on memory, using a parenting app that can't be edited after the fact, and staying calm in the courtroom because a judge is watching both parties' behavior, not only the evidence. They also cover the parenting-time gap that follows a temporary restraining order, sometimes weeks or months before a hearing, and what that delay does to a falsely accused parent's relationship with their kids.

Lisa shares a piece of her own story: getting her son a non-custodial-parent waiver for college financial aid after his father refused to submit his financial information, and the years it then took to enforce the resulting court order. She talks about why she now pushes so hard for orders that spell out real deadlines and real consequences instead of language a difficult ex can simply wait out.

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

🎓 What you'll learn

• Why a final restraining order in New Jersey never expires, and what that means for how judges weigh the evidence
• What New Jersey's coercive control law formally recognizes: financial control, isolation, digital stalking, legal abuse, and revenge porn
• Why courtroom demeanor can matter almost as much as your documentation
• Where men's worry about coercive control laws comes from, and why the law isn't about physical strength
• Why a temporary restraining order can suspend parenting time for weeks or months before a hearing
• How to keep a dated journal and use a tamper-resistant parenting app to build credibility
• Why court orders need real deadlines and real consequences, not language an ex can simply wait out

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Catching up, and the debate behind Jennifer's Law
5:00 What coercive control actually adds: financial, digital, and legal abuse
9:00 Why a New Jersey restraining order is permanent, and the one case that got one vacated
13:00 Proving a pattern: harassment as the catch-all, and "show, don't tell"
17:00 Custody exchanges, intimidation, and safer handoff logistics
21:00 The totality of the circumstances, and why prior history counts even unreported
27:00 Self-representation, and an experimental "informal trial" from another state
31:00 Men, coercive control, and the misconceptions around it
35:00 The parenting-time gap after a restraining order, and what's still being proposed in New Jersey
45:00 Lisa's own fight: financial abuse through college costs, and building enforceable orders
53:00 Building your case: journaling, tamper-proof apps, and courtroom credibility

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
🔗 Melissa E. Cohen, Esq. at Seiden Freed: https://www.seidenfreed.com/melissa-e-cohen-esq/

🎧 More with Melissa Cohen on this podcast
Ep 48: Virtual Court and Smarter Documentation

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.