Before anything academic starts, the kid gets asked how the week went. Ten minutes later they have said the thing they had been carrying around all day, and then they can work. Dominique Benson does that on purpose.

Our guest this episode is Dominique Benson, who runs a tutoring team and came to it from the sciences. She double majored in biochemistry and biology, took a master's in medical science, and started the company to get more kids interested in math and science, on the theory that a little extra attention moves a student from hating a subject to liking it. The company grew past that, but math and science remain the specialty. She and Lisa also share a background in education, which is where the conversation starts.

The framing comes from an interview Lisa had recorded days earlier with Dr. Christopher Willard, a psychologist and Harvard Medical School lecturer, who called tutors unsung therapists. Dominique's version of why is that the hour is private, the adult is not a parent, and nobody is probing. She listens without asking the next question, which some kids need more than they need the insight. She tells the story of a homeschooled student whose parents divorced mid-relationship: she kept the sessions going, offered to halve them rather than walk away, fed the mother what she was seeing week to week, and showed up at the boy's showcase, where a grandmother she had never met walked over and hugged her.

From there they cover the ground that matters for a family in litigation. Why a teenager who resists therapy will accept tutoring, because everyone has homework and nobody has to be broken to need help. How weekly sessions create the consistency and routine that courts look for, and the confidence that follows when a kid finally asks the question they were too embarrassed to ask in class. What slips through when a parent's attention goes to discovery and documentation, including the one email about a dropped grade. What a single hard year can cost a tenth grader with a specific school in mind. Why the accountability matters just as much for kids who are not headed to college. And how to hire: smaller over large, per family rather than per child, and rapport as a real criterion.

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

🎓 What you'll learn

• Why a tutor gets the conversation a teenager will not have with a parent or therapist
• The ten-minute check-in that makes the rest of the hour work
• Staying the constant for a child while the households are moving
• Why tutoring carries none of therapy's stigma for a resistant teenager
• How weekly sessions build the consistency and routine a court looks for
• What slips past a parent when discovery and documentation take over the inbox
• What one hard year can cost a tenth grader, and why it is not only about college
• How to hire: smaller teams, per family rather than per child, and rapport as a criterion

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 From research scientist to a tutoring company
3:00 "Tutors are unsung therapists," and the ten-minute check-in
6:30 The homeschooled student, and staying the constant through a divorce
10:30 Why tutoring carries none of therapy's stigma
12:00 Routine, safe questions, and confidence that spills into class
15:00 What parents miss when court takes over the inbox
17:30 The tenth grader whose grades slipped, and what a year costs
19:30 Accountability for kids who are not headed to college
20:30 How to choose a tutor, and why smaller often works better
23:00 Rapport, and matching a tutor to 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
🔗 Dominique Benson at Engaged Minds Academy: https://engagedmindsacademy.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.

Pairing a phone to a car over Bluetooth leaves a record of the pairing, and depending on the manufacturer, of a good deal more than that. Then the divorce settles, your ex buys the vehicle out, and everything the onboard computer holds goes with it. Vance Long says this is the piece almost nobody writes into an order, and it is not hard to write in.

Vance Long is a cybersecurity consultant who trains law firms, police departments and private clients, and works on getting courts and legislatures up to speed on the technology showing up in their cases. He runs an intensive for attorneys, a short course for individuals covering password management and two-factor authentication, and a plain language guide series he updates as things change, on the view that this subject should be treated as basic literacy rather than a specialism. He has been a guest on the show before.

He opens on what a breach does to a legal case. A state court system knocked back to paper filings, with no restoration date. Police departments losing custody of digital evidence, which can be enough to unravel a criminal matter that a family court case was leaning on. Law firms targeted because of what family law files contain, and, in his account, sometimes targeted directly, since a month of attacks against a small firm's website costs about what one party in a bitter case might spend on a filing fee. From there he gives the questions to put to your attorney about how your own file is held.

The second half is about ordinary objects. Vehicles that collect and infer far more than drivers expect, and manufacturers whose policies allow that data to be sold. Rental cars that hold onto your phone data after you think you have deleted it. Smart speakers, unsecured doorbell cameras, smart televisions, and a listener's account of devices given to her children by her ex. AirTags, which Vance wants named specifically in protective orders, along with the problem that some court staff do not yet know what one is. AI tools that generate fake explicit images from a photograph, and why a custody case is a bad place to have to prove a negative. He ends on the three basics: keep systems updated, use a password manager, and turn on two-factor authentication everywhere.

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

🎓 What you'll learn

• What a court system going offline does to a case the other side is already stalling
• The three questions to ask an attorney about how your file is stored
• Why your vehicle is a recording device, and what to write into the order when a car changes hands
• Why deleting your phone from a rental car's screen does not remove your data
• Smart speakers, doorbell cameras, and devices that arrive as gifts for the kids
• Why data someone bought from a broker sits in a different category than data they stole
• AI-generated fake images, and why the damage lands before you can prove anything
• The three basics Vance starts everyone on, and the one most people skip

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 AI, automated attacks, and a state's court portals going dark
5:00 What a breach means for financial, medical and psychological records
7:00 Questions to ask your attorney about how your file is held
9:00 Attacking a law firm's website as a litigation tactic
11:00 Your car as a recording device: Bluetooth, rentals, and resale
15:00 Opting out, and vehicles that will not let you
19:00 Where to start, and treating this as basic literacy
21:00 Smart speakers, doorbell cameras, and gifted devices
25:00 Data brokers, purchased location data, and the admissibility question
27:00 AI-generated fake images, and proving a negative in a custody case
31:00 AirTags in protective orders, and the three basics

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 Vance Long on this podcast
Ep 54: Hidden Cameras, Trackers, and Digital Stalking

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. Christopher Willard hears a version of the same question from parents in high-conflict cases: my child is at the other house right now, what am I supposed to do with myself. His answer is not acceptance. It is that these hours are the only conditioning time available, and they decide what your child walks back into.

Chris is a psychotherapist who sees clients weekly, teaches at Harvard Medical School, writes books on mindfulness and mental health, and speaks internationally. His practice spans families, couples, and kids, and a good portion of it involves children caught between two households. Lisa has had him on before, and this conversation picks up where that one left off.

He explains why a child who comes back from the other parent and immediately falls apart is not rejecting the safe parent. Transitions are disorienting even in amicable families, and children act out what they cannot yet name. What helps is a welcome, then space, then their own snacks and their own room and their own things. He also gives parents permission they rarely get: you will break down in front of your kids, you will say something you regret, and the repair afterwards is the part that teaches. Under the court's watch that permission is hard to accept, which is exactly why he offers it.

Chris and Lisa cover his less conventional suggestion, which is to physically move a child out of the drama loop through camp, teams, after-school programs, sometimes a semester away, so the child spends real time surrounded by people who are not fighting over them. He talks about therapy at the wrong moment souring a kid on therapy for twenty years, and about tutors and coaches as what his mother called the unsung therapists for families that will not agree to one. They define poisoning the well, and the identity bind it creates when a child hears that half of who they are is the problem. And they close on rituals, predictability, and planning things to look forward to together, which hands a child back a measure of control, and on what he tells parents whose children have already pulled away.

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

🎓 What you'll learn

• What to do with the hours your child is at the other parent's house
• Why a child who comes home and lashes out is decompressing, not rejecting you
• Why the repair after you lose your temper teaches more than never losing it
• How camp, teams, and activities take a child physically out of the drama loop
• Why therapy at the wrong moment can put a child off therapy for decades
• Coaches and tutors as the adults a kid will actually open up to
• What poisoning the well does to a child's sense of their own identity
• Rituals and predictability, and why they lower the odds of a trauma response

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Meeting Chris Willard, and the mindfulness angle on high conflict
3:00 What to do with the hours your child is at the other house
6:00 When they come home and lash out instead of settling
10:00 You will lose it: why the repair matters more than being perfect
14:00 "Good enough" parenting, and kids who work it out years later
17:00 Camp, activities, and school as a way out of the drama loop
20:00 Therapy at the wrong time, and the tutor as unsung therapist
26:00 Poisoning the well, and the loyalty bind it puts kids in
29:00 Things to look forward to, rituals, and giving kids a say
34:00 Predictability, and why it lowers the odds of a trauma response
37:00 When your child has already pulled away

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. Christopher Willard: https://drchristopherwillard.com/
🔗 Dr. Chris Willard on Instagram (@drchriswillard): https://www.instagram.com/drchriswillard/

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.

Shawniel Chamanlal asks new clients a question that sounds simple: what was your frame of reference growing up for how a relationship is supposed to work? Most people have never been asked, and the answer explains a lot about who they keep ending up with.

Our guest this episode is Shawniel Chamanlal, a licensed clinical social worker, certified trauma therapist and empowerment speaker who founded Healing Springs Wellness Center in Plantsville, Connecticut. The center runs counseling alongside nutrition and holistic services, works with a team of therapists in person and online, and is built around trauma-focused care. Shawniel's route into the field was her own: raised by a single mother after her father returned to Jamaica, carrying abandonment patterns into adult relationships, and doing the reckoning after a seven-year relationship and engagement ended.

In this episode she and Lisa cover how these patterns start, in childhood or in a single adult relationship that reshapes how you see yourself, and how you notice one running. The signal is a recurring feeling rather than a recurring situation: not feeling prioritized, a physical reaction you talk yourself out of, the same body sensation with different people. Shawniel explains EMDR, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, as a way of unfiling a traumatic memory from the negative belief attached to it. Lisa adds that Chris found it powerful in very few sessions.

They also talk about inner child work and asking that younger version of yourself what it needs, why fear of betrayal generalizes onto safe people too, why a secure relationship can register as boring or as waiting for the other shoe, and how to tell you are actually healing: boundaries you can hold, needs you can state, conflict you can move through without ending the relationship. Shawniel closes with a client whose work reached both her mother and her daughter.

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

🎓 What you'll learn

• How to spot an unhealed pattern by the recurring feeling rather than the recurring situation
• What EMDR does with a traumatic memory and the belief filed alongside it
• Why journaling works as a mirror, and what to look for reading it back
• How inner child work gives you something to do with a trigger besides suppress it
• Why a healthy relationship can feel boring or frightening after years of conditioning
• The signs you are genuinely healing, from boundaries to naming your non-negotiables
• How one parent's healing changes what their children learn about relationships

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Shawniel's practice, and what led her into the work
3:00 Where relationship patterns start, in childhood or a single adult relationship
6:30 Recognizing an unhealed pattern: recurring feelings and body signals
8:30 Journaling as a mirror, and what forty years of it shows
11:30 Fear of betrayal, and why the mind generalizes onto safe people
14:00 EMDR, and why triggers still surface after the work
16:30 Moving from fear to curiosity: mindfulness, inner child work, grounding
21:00 Healing is not linear, and duality is allowed
25:00 Why a secure relationship can feel boring, and knowing you are healing
33:00 The ripple effect through a family, and a client's story

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
🔗 Healing Springs Wellness Center: https://healingspringswellness.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.

At mediation, one spouse arrives with a folder of statements and the other arrives with a blank legal pad. That is not an oversight. Catherine Shanahan says walking into a room without your own numbers is how bad agreements get signed, and that the person with nothing on paper is usually the one applying the pressure.

Catherine Shanahan is the co-founder of My Divorce Solution and its divorce financial specialist. She has worked in finance since 1988, holds the certified divorce financial analyst credential, and is trained in mediation, which she says matters because division scenarios are a negotiation and not just arithmetic. She built the company with a business partner who handles the document side, after her own divorce taught her that her financial terms were fine and her agreement language was not. Her marriage lasted twenty-three years, and she describes the behavior she lived with as narcissistic and financially abusive even though both of them worked in finance.

This episode is built as a run of myths against facts. Whether you can afford to leave, and what staying is costing you. Why a retirement account with one name on it is still a marital asset, and why an employer has nothing to say about it once a court orders a qualified domestic relations order. What has to be decided inside that order before you sign, including who processes it, whether you receive market growth during the wait, and what happens if the employee spouse dies before it is executed. Whether a judge awards on moral character or on the case you build, which Catherine answers with a story from her own hearing three years after her divorce was final.

Catherine also walks through the red flags of financial abuse, from a spouse who takes the mail out of your hand to a paycheck deposited into an account you cannot log into. She covers rebuilding credit, where closing cards and being dropped as an authorized user both work against you, and where automating a minimum payment protects you. She covers refinancing timelines and the support payment history a lender needs to see. And she closes on the client who says she cannot survive on her own, with the five questions that usually turn out to answer it.

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

🎓 What you'll learn

• How to ask for documentation behind what a spouse tells you, and what the reaction tells you
• Red flags of financial abuse: blocked mail, no account access, anger at money questions
• Why a retirement account in one spouse's name is still a marital asset
• QDROs: who drafts them, and the language to settle before you sign
• Dissipation of assets, and when chasing money costs more than it recovers
• Rebuilding credit: why closing cards hurts, and what to automate instead
• Refinancing after divorce, and the support payment history a lender wants
• Why giving up the money to keep the kids tends to cost you both

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Can you afford to leave, or can you afford to stay?
4:00 Ask for the documentation, and watch the reaction
7:00 "I will take care of you," and why promises belong in the agreement
9:00 Red flags of financial abuse, from the mail to the paycheck
12:00 Retirement accounts, marital property, and the QDRO myths
16:00 Dissipation of assets, and the cost-benefit of chasing it
19:00 Catherine's own day in court, and letting an ex show the judge
23:00 Mediation without numbers, and the pressure to sign anyway
32:00 Credit after divorce: what to close, what to automate
36:00 Refinancing, and the myth that you cannot survive on your own

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
🔗 My Divorce Solution: https://mydivorcesolution.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.

Guilt is running a lot of the decisions in a high-conflict separation, and Anthony Johnson wants to know how those decisions have worked out. Staying because the kids did not ask for this. Loosening every rule because your child is struggling and you think you caused it. Buying things. Becoming a friend instead of a parent. He is not unsympathetic about where it comes from. He is direct that it does not leave anyone feeling better afterward.

Our guest this episode is Anthony Johnson, a co-parenting coach. Before coaching he spent more than two decades in leadership, first as an Army officer running training, then in the Air Force as a coordinator for the sexual assault response program, the person survivors came to and the person who walked them through the investigation. He moved into the co-parenting space because he sees fatherhood as the leadership role that matters to him, and he is candid about what it takes to hold professional boundaries as a man doing this work.

Anthony reframes what a parent is for. Not protecting a child from every hurt, because hurt is coming either way, but teaching them how to handle it, on the theory that the job is to prepare them for a life you are not in. From there he takes it to the case people here are living: you cannot protect your child inside the other household, so the thing you control is what they come back to. If they leave chaos and arrive at chaos, nothing has been gained.

He and Lisa go through the good-night text and who it is really for, why a parent who falls apart every exchange teaches a child that other people's feelings are their job, boundaries with an ex who still treats your life as their business, and how to answer a parenting app message that mixes real information about your kid with an attack on you. Anthony closes on acceptance, including the question he asks people who cannot get there: is there anything you are getting out of staying stuck.

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

🎓 What you'll learn

• Why decisions made out of guilt and shame rarely feel right afterward
• Overcompensating when your child struggles, and how it makes you a smaller parent
• What a parent's job actually is, and why shielding a child from hurt works against it
• You cannot control the other household, so control what your child comes back to
• Why missing your kids out loud puts a weight on them you did not intend
• The good-night text: how to tell whether it is for your child or for you
• Answering a parenting app attack while writing for the judge who will read it
• The question to ask yourself when acceptance will not come

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Anthony Johnson's background, from the military to coaching
5:00 Guilt and shame as decision-makers, and why they never pay off
9:00 Overcompensating when your child is struggling
11:00 What a parent's job is, and why shielding backfires
13:00 You cannot protect them over there, so be the calm they return to
15:00 Missing your kids, and why they cannot be your whole world
19:00 The good-night text at the other parent's house
23:00 Boundaries with an ex, and responding on a parenting app
31:00 Giving yourself grace, and moving toward acceptance
37:00 The uncomfortable question: is there a payoff in staying stuck

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.

There is a club nobody signs up for. Jim Littlefield-Dalmares uses that phrase for families raising a child with different abilities, and he joined it the day he was pulled out of a work retreat and told his daughter was arriving three months early.

Our guest this episode is Jim Littlefield-Dalmares, host of the Seeing Ability podcast and author of the book Seeing Ability: Finding Your Path in Parenting a Child With Special Needs. He spent his career in marketing and fundraising for nonprofits, including more than a decade at a pediatric therapy center in Louisville, Kentucky. His daughter Sophia was born at 26 weeks at a pound and a half and spent ten weeks in the NICU. The name of his podcast comes from the word disability: take off the first three letters and what is left is ability.

Lisa invited him because a striking number of BTGO's clients are also raising a child with special needs, and the parallels kept surfacing. Two parents who disagree about whether the goal is to fix what is wrong or to build on what is there. The sibling nobody is watching, which Jim illustrates with a mother whose typically developing daughter told a mall Santa she wanted spina bifida for Christmas, because that was what got you trips and attention. The oxygen mask that gets ignored, and the mother who could only ask for help by sitting down on the floor and asking a friend to come sweep it.

They also talk about identity, and the years when nobody uses your name because you are somebody's mom or dad. About the difference between a visible disability and one nobody can see, where a child in a store looks like any other child and the judgment falls on the parent. And about what Jim calls the never-ever list, the inventory of futures a parent rules out in advance, and the argument for putting it down: no parent has a crystal ball for any of their children, and the list costs you the years in front of you. He closes on who he is still looking to interview, which includes adults who grew up as the child with a disability, siblings, therapists, teachers, and the nonprofits doing this work.

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

🎓 What you'll learn

• Where the name Seeing Ability comes from, and the reframe underneath it
• The parenting split these families hit: fix what is wrong, or build on what is there
• Why the sibling's needs go missing, and the Santa Claus story that made it obvious
• The oxygen mask problem, and what asking for help actually sounds like
• Losing your own name in the parenting years, and why identity matters here
• Visible versus invisible disability, and the public judgment that comes with each
• Turning a stranger's stare into a bridge instead of a fight
• The never-ever list, and what it costs you in the years you are actually living

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 The book, the podcast, and where Seeing Ability comes from
3:00 Why these families carry extra strain
4:30 Sophia's birth at 26 weeks, and the years that followed
6:30 Fixing the problem versus building on ability
8:30 The sibling nobody is watching
10:30 The oxygen mask, and asking for help out loud
12:00 Losing your own name in the parenting years
14:30 Invisible disability, public judgment, and building bridges
17:30 Letting go of the never-ever list
22:30 Who he wants to hear from, and how to reach him

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
🔗 Jim Littlefield-Dalmares at Seeing Ability: https://seeingability.com/
🔗 Seeing Ability: Finding Your Path in Parenting a Child With Special Needs: https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-Ability-Finding-Parenting-Special-ebook/dp/B0DBM5BTTK

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.

The parents get to separate. The children do not. They pack a bag, cross town, and adjust to a different set of unwritten rules, and then do it again three days later. Dr. Wayne Benenson says the confusion of that lands as a child's own failure long before anyone explains otherwise.

Our guests this episode are two returning friends of the show. Dr. Barb Hughson is a family law mediator who works inside the court system, a child and family therapist with more than 25 years in private practice, and a parent and leadership coach. Dr. Wayne Benenson spent his career teaching, from preschool through graduate school, and now works in mindfulness instruction. Together they run Great Masters and are the authors of Claim Your Light. Lisa brought them back while working on the section of Book 2 that asks the question every one of our clients asks first: how can my kids be okay?

They open on the effects of separation on children, including in the calmer divorces, and on how long adjustment takes, which depends on the child's age, the severity, and how secure things were beforehand. Barb explains social referencing, the way a baby as young as eight months checks a caregiver's face before deciding whether a situation is safe, and traces it forward into the parent education classes she teaches, where the emotions parents list for themselves and the emotions they list for their children turn out to be the same list. Wayne's line on this is that how a child adjusts to a divorce tracks how the parent does.

From there it becomes a toolkit. Self-care rebuilt as something the new family unit does together, including the Friday board games Wayne plays with his grandchildren over video. Shaking as a remedy for a child locked in anxiety, and a simple clapping game for one about to blow. Asking a teenager to teach you the thing they are good at. Giving a child the choice about therapy rather than delivering them to it because you are ready. Modeling a mistake out loud. Building a vocabulary past mad, glad, and sad, and reading faces to get there. A family code word for the moment before someone loses it. Saying 'I am sad right now' and adding the part that matters, which is that your child does not have to fix it. And finally, what to do when your child has taken on responsibility for the other parent's feelings, where Wayne goes to core values and Barb goes to a boat, a river, and a life preserver you throw rather than jumping in after them.

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

🎓 What you'll learn

• What separation costs children even in the calmer divorces, and what drives how long adjustment takes
• The three questions kids ask silently in each house: am I okay, am I safe, can I be myself
• Social referencing, and why your emotions become the list your child reports
• What a child's adjustment tracks, and why it comes back to the parent
• Self-care as a family project, and building traditions that replace what was lost
• Shaking, clapping games, and getting a teenager to teach you something
• Why giving a child the choice about therapy protects their willingness to ask for help later
• What to do when your child feels responsible for the other parent's feelings

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 What divorce costs kids, starting with faith in family
5:00 Two houses, two sets of unspoken rules
7:00 How long adjustment takes, and "am I safe here?"
9:00 Social referencing, and why your emotions land on your kids
11:00 What a child's adjustment actually tracks
14:00 Self-care as a family project, and new traditions
18:00 Laughter, shaking, and the games that shift a mood
25:00 Getting a teenager to teach you, and letting kids choose therapy
33:00 Past mad, glad, and sad, and the family code word
43:00 When your child feels responsible for the other parent

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
🔗 Great Masters: Dr. Barb Hughson and Dr. Wayne Benenson: https://www.greatmastersinc.com/
🔗 Dr. Barb Hughson's court-ordered parent education classes: https://www.courtparentclass.com/
🔗 Claim Your Light by Dr. Wayne Benenson and Dr. Barb Hughson: https://www.amazon.com/Claim-Your-Light-Gaining-Fulfilling/dp/099856561X

🎧 More with Dr. Barb Hughson and Dr. Wayne Benenson on this podcast
Ep 2: Trauma-Informed Mediation
Ep 19: Mediation and the Child's Voice
Ep 106: Will My Kids Be Okay?
Ep 113: Kids, Boundaries, and Trauma
Ep 121: When Your Child's Anger Turns Physical

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.

Collapse is a stress response, not a character flaw. That distinction runs through this whole conversation, because in the middle of a family court case the collapsed parent gets read as unmotivated by everyone around them, including the professionals who are supposed to be on their side.

Dr. Yael Dubin trained and practiced as a psychiatrist before her former spouse went after her medical license, years after their divorce was already final. She surrendered it, moved into work that suited her better, and spent years absorbing the harassment that followed. She now coaches, and she works from Internal Family Systems. She is direct with Lisa about the fact that she did all of this without a coach of her own, and about how long it took her to want a marriage again afterward.

The framework she teaches here is the window of tolerance, a one-to-ten scale of your own physiology. The low end is shutdown: flat energy, no attention span, forgetting things, unable to take information in. The high end is agitation and fight or flight. The middle is where you are present, connected, and capable of making a decision you can live with. Yael's argument is that everyone moves across that scale, that it is what bodies are designed to do, and that the goal is widening the middle rather than never leaving it.

She and Lisa go through what widens it. A daily practice, with her caveat about trauma-informed approaches for anyone whose trauma was physical. Co-regulation, which she says works over video as well as in person, and finding people who steady you without needing the whole story. Managing your own feed, because a diet of other people's disastrous outcomes is its own stressor. She also explains what Internal Family Systems calls self energy, and why she treats the frightened reactions as parts of a person rather than the whole of them. The last third is about children: what they pick up nonverbally, why what looks like a child turning against you can be that child's own survival response, and what to say to a kid who asks if you are okay.

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

🎓 What you'll learn

• What the window of tolerance is, and how one to ten maps onto your own body
• Why shutdown gets mistaken for laziness by lawyers, friends, and family
• How both collapse and agitation can be used against a parent in family court
• Why relaxation practice is the answer at both ends of the scale, not only the high end
• Co-regulation: finding people you settle around, without having to tell the story
• Why your social media feed and what you watch belong in a stress plan
• Self energy and parts: treating the frightened reaction as one piece of you
• What to say to a child who asks if you are okay, without involving the other parent

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Yael's own case, and the Been There Got Out club
5:00 What the window of tolerance is, from one to ten
7:00 Collapse: what shutdown looks like, and why people read it as lazy
11:00 Widening the window instead of waiting for less stress
15:00 Daily practice, and "Olympic level torture"
19:00 Find your tribe: how people co-regulate each other
22:00 Your feed, mirror neurons, and what you take in
25:00 Self energy, parts, and where your strength lives
28:00 What your kids read off you, and what they need from you
34:00 The same scary text, handled from inside the window
41:00 When your ex goes at the kids, and trusting your gut

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. Yael Dubin: https://www.yaeldubin.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.

Her community agrees on which man is the right one. Church, college, no record, no other children. It goes badly in ways she had no language for at the time. When it ends, the same people who chose him for her explain that she must have done something wrong. Christelyn Karazin is describing her own twenties, and she says the structure of it is not personal, it is systematic.

Christelyn Karazin is a journalist and author who has written on health, lifestyle and business for national publications, and who co-wrote Swirling, a book about dating and marrying across race from a Black woman's perspective. She founded the site Beyond Black & White and, more recently, a body care line called Watered, built for women of deeper skin tones. The publication of Swirling drew a backlash she describes as a war she has now been fighting for more than a decade, and it is where this conversation starts.

The frame she uses is communal narcissism, a term given to her by a psychologist who studies it: a community that holds certain ideals and enforces them on its members, sustained by denial and by pressure not to say the obvious out loud. In her account of how it operates, the men are prioritized and protected and the women are asked to carry the rest of it, and any woman who names a problem is treated as the problem. She and Lisa work through how closely that maps onto what happens inside a single coercively controlling relationship, where the target eventually accepts the blame for everything because everyone around them has agreed on the story.

Christelyn is specific about the cost. What it does to reporting when a community treats involving law enforcement as a betrayal, and how that leaves people who have been harmed sitting at the same table as the person who harmed them. What being praised only for strength and endurance does to a person's health, and to whether their pain is taken seriously by professionals. How families raise sons and daughters under different rules, which she argues rehearses a girl for a relationship where nothing is ever the other person's fault. And the online economy that has grown up around degrading Black women, and the young men it is aimed at. Lisa asks what people outside the community can usefully do, and Christelyn answers plainly.

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

🎓 What you'll learn

• What communal narcissism means, and how a group can run the same playbook one partner does
• Why the blame for a failed relationship can land on the woman no matter what happened
• Reproductive coercion: what it is, and how it gets used to control someone
• Why abuse inside a community can go unreported, and what people are told to protect instead
• What a lifetime of being praised only for endurance costs someone physically
• How different rules for sons and daughters rehearse a girl for a controlling relationship
• The online industry built on degrading Black women, and the young men it recruits
• What people outside a community can actually do, starting with listening

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Christelyn's background, and what communal narcissism means
5:00 Prioritizing the men, and the double standard for the women
10:00 The manosphere, and what it tells women they have to be
13:00 The man who looked ideal on paper, and what happened
18:00 When it ends, and why the blame lands on the woman
19:30 Violence, underreporting, and being told to keep it in house
25:00 Leaving, and the cost of choosing differently
31:00 Raising daughters, loving sons, and being groomed early
35:30 The double standard on marrying outside the community
49:00 Submission, "my program," and the trust deficit
54:00 What outsiders can do, and pouring back into 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
🔗 Beyond Black & White: https://www.beyondblackwhite.com/
🔗 Watered Body Care: https://www.wateredbodycare.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.