If you have been told your whole life that you feel things too much, this episode reframes it. Therapist Elizabeth Cush describes high sensitivity as a genetic trait rather than a temperament problem, and one that changes how you should handle a high-conflict ex.

Elizabeth Cush, known to most people as Biz, is a therapist licensed in Maryland and Delaware who has built her practice around soul support for highly sensitive women, though she works with men too. She hosts the podcast Awaken Your Wise Woman. She is a mom of three and a rescue dachshund owner, she is highly sensitive herself, and she is also a survivor of domestic violence, which she says she has in common with a good share of this audience. Elaine Aron's research is where the field started, and Aron's self-test at hsperson.org is where Elizabeth sends people who want to check.

Elizabeth and Lisa work through what the trait actually covers: processing everything deeply, overstimulating easily, feeling other people's emotional weather as if it were your own, and real sensitivity to sensory input, down to a clothing tag or the seam on a sock. They talk about the common misuse of the label, where an aggravated or unkind person gets described as sensitive, sometimes by their own choice as a way to manage someone else.

The rest of the conversation is about surviving contact you cannot avoid. Why the empathy that makes you good to people also keeps you supplying excuses for an ex's behavior. Why a manipulative person who has clocked those traits can reach you so easily. And what to actually do about it: build in recovery time on either side of every exchange, and take the pause, out loud if you need to, because a deep processor asked to decide something in the moment is being asked to work against their own wiring.

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

🎓 What you'll learn

• What high sensitivity is as a genetic trait, and what it is commonly mistaken for
• Why deep processing means you need longer to work out that you were not misreading it
• How heightened empathy makes it harder to leave, not easier
• Why highly sensitive people so often become people-pleasers
• What high sensitivity looks like in children, from clothing tags to reading a room
• How to build recovery time in before and after contact with a high-conflict ex
• How to take the pause out loud, and why a delayed reply is usually the better reply

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Sensitive versus highly sensitive, and why it is a genetic trait
3:00 Meeting Biz, and how sensitivity shows up in kids
5:00 Empathy on overload, and learning to manage everyone else's state
7:30 How common it is, and the misconceptions people carry
9:30 When a claim of sensitivity gets used to manipulate
11:00 Why empathy makes leaving harder, and where people-pleasing starts
12:30 Elaine Aron's self-test, and the upside of feeling deeply
15:30 Protecting yourself when you cannot get away from the person
18:00 The pause, the permission slip plan, and why waiting works

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
🔗 Elizabeth Cush Coaching: https://www.elizabethcushcoaching.com/
🔗 Progression Counseling (her therapy practice): https://www.progressioncounseling.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.

A parent comes in certain of two things: that they will get sole custody, and that their ex's behavior during the marriage is the reason why. Attorney Lisa Zeiderman spends a lot of her practice explaining why neither one is a safe assumption, and what a court is actually weighing instead.

Lisa Zeiderman is managing partner of Miller Zeiderman, a matrimonial and family law firm with offices in Manhattan and White Plains, New York. Her practice centers on high-stakes custody matters and high-net-worth financial litigation, and she is the attorney other attorneys refer complicated cases to. She writes and speaks widely on divorce and financial independence. On this show she is here for the reality check: what custody means, what is realistic, and where parents damage their own cases without knowing it.

Zeiderman starts with definitions, because the words get used loosely. Legal custody is decision-making, and it breaks into zones: education, medical and therapeutic, extracurricular, religious. Parenting time is separate. Joint legal custody, in her agreements, always carries a tie-breaker, often deference to the professional with the relevant expertise rather than to a parent. She is candid about parenting coordinators too, including how the process can be used to keep a conflict running rather than resolve it.

She and Lisa then take on the situations that come up constantly in high-conflict cases: whether abuse between parents affects custody and what makes it relevant, why disparaging the other parent to a teacher or a friend's parent reads as a lack of judgment, what regressive behavior in a child looks like to a court, and why involving a child's therapist is close to a last resort. They cover reports to child protective services, including what happens to a parent whose reports are repeatedly unfounded, and finish on plan drafting: right of first refusal, radius clauses, travel itineraries, and enforcing the small violations before they become the pattern.

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

🎓 What you'll learn

• What legal custody actually covers, and the four zones of decision-making it splits into
• Why joint legal custody needs a written tie-breaker, and how Zeiderman builds one
• When abuse between parents changes custody, and the question a court asks first
• Why a child's therapist belongs off the witness stand, and how their information reaches the case anyway
• What courts do with unfounded CPS reports, and how a wellness check differs
• Behavior that signals poor judgment: talking to teachers, other parents, and social media
• Right of first refusal and radius clauses: what they promise and what they deliver
• Why complying perfectly with your own agreement protects you when you go to enforce it

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Custody, access, and the four zones of legal decision-making
5:00 Why "sole everything" is rare, and what courts routinely order
7:00 When abuse changes custody: was the child present
10:00 Judgment on display: teachers, other parents, and social media
12:00 Regressive behavior, and why school observations carry weight
13:00 Keeping a child's therapist out of the courtroom
17:00 Forensic evaluators, attorneys for the child, and the hearsay problem
19:00 Supporting the other parent's relationship, and the ways parents undermine it
23:00 CPS reports, wellness checks, and unfounded allegations
28:00 Parenting plans: transitions, tie-breakers, and parenting coordinators
33:00 Right of first refusal, radius clauses, and enforcing the small stuff

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
🔗 Lisa Zeiderman (lisazeiderman.com): https://lisazeiderman.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.

Perfectionism and people-pleasing usually get treated as personality: this is simply how I am. Dr. Shannon Sauer-Zavala's research says otherwise. Personality traits move over a lifetime on their own, and there is evidence that a person can speed that up on purpose.

Our guest is Dr. Shannon Sauer-Zavala, a licensed clinical psychologist and a professor of psychology whose research is on developing interventions that shift the traits that are no longer serving someone. Much of her clinical work is with anxiety, depression, and borderline personality disorder. She also built Personality Compass, an assessment based on the five factor model, a framework that has been tested across languages and cultures for decades, which she offers free on her website because most of what people can take online is not grounded in the science at all.

In this episode she explains where people-pleasing usually starts: praise for being easy, for taking it all on, for the straight A's, until your sense of worth is filed under other people's reactions. She draws a clear line between being reliable and being rigid, and describes perfectionism as an anxiety process held in place by never having tested the feared outcome. Her answer is behavioral experiments, including one she calls doing eighty percent of your best job, where the point is to gather data rather than to argue yourself out of the belief.

Lisa turns the conversation toward parents in the middle of a drawn-out custody case, who feel they are missing their child's childhood while distracted by the legal process. Shannon's response covers black-and-white thinking about parenting, the values exercise she runs with clients across eleven areas of life before asking them to pick three, and why she rejects the language of balance in favor of deliberate choices about where energy goes. She and Lisa land in the same place BTGO does with clients: this stretch is your life, not a waiting room before it.

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

🎓 What you'll learn

• Why people-pleasing and high achievement so often develop together
• That personality traits shift with age, and can be shifted deliberately
• The difference between being high achieving and being rigidly perfectionistic
• The fear underneath perfectionism: no data on what happens if you fall short
• The eighty percent experiment, and how to pick where to run it
• Values work: eleven areas of life, and what happens when you can only pick three
• Why "you have the same 24 hours" is bad advice for someone in survival mode
• Treating rest as an investment rather than something you earn

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Why people-pleasing and high achievement travel together
3:00 Personality traits shift, and you can speed that up
5:00 What perfectionism is, and the fear that keeps it running
9:00 The 80% experiment: collecting data instead of arguing with yourself
13:00 Kids who are never allowed to fail
15:00 Parent guilt when a court case takes your attention
18:00 Burnout, values, and making hard choices about your time
22:00 Rest as an investment, not something you earn
25:00 Personality Compass, and why most online tests miss

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
🔗 Personality Compass (free assessment): https://www.personality-compass.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.

A woman asks SkyeBlu Cutchie where to start after a relationship that took everything, and Blu's answer is a two-part question, one half of which almost nobody asks. The half people do ask is what they want in a partner. The half they skip is how they want to feel in a relationship.

SkyeBlu Cutchie, known to clients as Blu, is a certified relationship, intimacy, and sex therapist and a licensed mental health counselor, with a master's in counseling psychology and AASECT certification. She works with women on reconnecting with themselves, being empowered in their no, and rebuilding a relationship with their own pleasure. She also grew up watching a marriage that was emotionally and physically abusive with alcoholism running underneath it, and is straightforward about the fact that she had no healthy model to copy and built one anyway.

She and Lisa start by defining intimacy properly, as closeness, vulnerability, and emotional and physical safety rather than a synonym for sex. Blu respects the listener who has decided they are finished with relationships, and says an intimate relationship with yourself is a real and complete thing. For the listener who wants something different, she walks through the sequence: the willingness to look at your own part without blaming yourself for someone else's behavior, and then the two questions about how you want to feel and what you value.

The harder half of the conversation is about sex after it has been used against you. Blu starts with safety inside your own body, and describes the routes in: restorative yoga, walking, stretching, anything with breath and intention behind it. She explains why people cry doing exactly that, and that grief, relief, and even joy all come out the same way. She and Lisa also cover the stress hormones this audience is soaking in and why pleasure is not a luxury against that, why dating again goes better with a therapist or coach in the picture, and how to read your own nervous system on a first date instead of talking yourself out of what it is telling you.

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

🎓 What you'll learn

• What intimacy actually means, and why safety is part of the definition
• Why choosing to stay single is a real answer, not a stage to get past
• The two questions to ask before you make a list about a partner
• Building a model of a healthy relationship when you have never seen one
• Where to begin when sex has been used as a weapon against you
• Calming the nervous system through movement, and why that brings up tears
• Reading your own body on a first date, and what to do with what it says

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 What intimacy means, and being empowered in your no
3:00 Deciding you are done, and why that is a real choice
5:00 No healthy model growing up, and learning one anyway
9:00 The self-reflection step, and the two questions to ask
12:00 Lisa's first dating profile after twenty years
15:00 When sex has been used as a weapon, and where safety starts
17:00 Movement, the nervous system, and why people cry doing it
19:00 Dating again, baggage, 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
🔗 SkyeBlu Therapy: https://www.skyeblutherapy.com/
🔗 Intimacy With Blu on Instagram (@intimacywithblu): https://www.instagram.com/intimacywithblu/

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.

Ask your child what happened at the other parent's house and you have already told them something. Attorney Michele Locke has one question she asks her own kids when they come back, and it is whether they had fun. Nothing else. Open every call with are you okay, are you safe, and a child learns that the other house is a place where they might not be.

Michele Locke is a Texas family law attorney in her twenty-third year of practice, whose caseload is mostly high conflict, including a two-week jury trial on an alienation case. She hosts her own divorce-law podcast, she is divorced, and she is co-parenting three boys, which means she speaks about this from both sides of the desk. She has been a guest on this show before.

The conversation opens on a heavily reported celebrity custody case, which Michele treats as a case study rather than a verdict, and she is deliberate about what anyone outside a family can actually know. What she reads is the public record: an incident on a plane, separate federal and state investigations that produced no charges, allegations maintained across years of litigation, a court order requiring one parent to hand over the children's phone number, and a child legally dropping a parent's surname. She and Lisa also discuss why all six children rejecting the same parent simultaneously is worth noticing, since one targeted child rejecting a parent while the siblings do not would be the more credible version of events.

The rest is mechanism and remedy. Michele explains why she argues the behavior rather than the label in a courtroom, and why she withdraws from a case if she finds a client on either side has lied, including about abuse. She and Lisa go through how parents set each other up to be the bad guy by agreeing to an event on the other parent's time, and why becoming the liaison with other families puts you in the middle. She explains why a child aligns with the parent hurting them, since even children removed from a home for abuse want to go back, and how being punished for enjoying the other house makes compartmentalizing a survival skill. They cover what that costs in adulthood, the ambiguous grief a rejected parent carries with no closure available to them, and how her advice shifts with a child's age: fight while they are young, give a teenager room, and keep sending the birthday message that asks for nothing in return.

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

🎓 What you'll learn

• Why a child's rejection is a data point to analyze rather than proof of alienation
• Why Michele argues the behavior in court instead of arguing over the label
• What "are you okay, are you safe?" teaches a child, and the only question to ask instead
• How parents set each other up to be the bad guy over parties and events
• Why a child aligns with the parent who is hurting them, and what contingent love does
• What alienated children carry into adulthood, and what breaking the cycle takes
• Why the advice changes with a child's age, and what she tells parents of teenagers
• Stepping back versus giving up, and what a no-pressure message actually looks like

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Why a celebrity custody case is worth studying, and the two extremes
5:00 Arguing the behavior instead of the label in court
7:00 False allegations, and the uphill battle for a wrongly accused parent
9:00 "Are you safe?" versus "did you have fun?", and setting the other parent up
13:00 Losing control after divorce, and a name change as a signal
17:00 The plane incident, two investigations, and no charges filed
22:00 Six children rejecting at once, and why it's a data point
25:00 Why a child aligns with the parent hurting them, and learns to compartmentalize
30:00 What alienated kids carry into adulthood, and the grief on the other side
33:00 Advice by age, and stepping back without giving up

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 Michele Locke on this podcast
Ep 271: A Former Judge on Conduct 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.

Lisa Watson calls her framework the reparenting method, and its premise is that the beliefs steering your adult relationships were downloaded early, from the people around you, before you could evaluate any of it. She spent 28 years in what she describes as a narcissistic relationship, and did not recognize her own nervous system was dysregulated until she was in her fifties.

Our guest this episode is Lisa Watson, a transformational coach who works with people breaking out of self-abandonment patterns, codependency and people-pleasing. She wrote a book on reparenting and is publishing a series of children's books teaching mindfulness and breathing to kids, which she treats as two halves of the same project: work with the adult's inner child, and give the actual children something better to download. She spent years nannying to study child development directly, and says a good share of her current caseload is men, including fathers in the middle of divorces from partners using the children as leverage against them.

She and Lisa Johnson cover the beliefs that show up most: that you are the emotional caretaker for everyone in the room, that your needs come last, that wanting something for yourself is selfish. They talk about how you build self-awareness when the dysregulation is all you have known, starting with a week of pure observation, tracking where a feeling lands in your body and what you stop yourself from doing after it. They get into shame as the mechanism, using the ordinary example of a small child told to hug a relative they do not want to hug, and what that teaches about whose feelings count.

The conversation closes on asking for help. Lisa Johnson describes a client facing displacement who could not accept a neighbor's offer of a place to stay, because accepting felt like failure. Both of them make the same point back: no one was designed to carry this alone, and refusing support is not the strength it gets mistaken for.

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

🎓 What you'll learn

• How to tell your nervous system is dysregulated when dysregulation is all you have known
• The first exercise Lisa gives clients: observe yourself for a week and change nothing
• Why an old emotional pattern feels like an eight-lane highway and a new one feels like a dirt road
• How shame gets installed in childhood, and what that has to do with an adult toxic relationship
• Why inner child work applies to men just as much, including fathers in high-conflict cases
• How to catch a feeling before your brain builds a story to justify it
• Why refusing help is programming rather than strength

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 What a transformational coach does, and the reparenting method
4:00 Lisa's own 28 years, and why she works on generational patterns
5:30 The core fear-based beliefs: caretaking, unworthiness, self-abandonment
9:00 Recognizing a dysregulated nervous system you have always lived with
11:30 The first assignment: observe yourself and change nothing
14:00 Eight-lane highways and dirt roads: building a new pattern
17:00 Community, and why nobody was built to do this alone
22:00 Shame, authenticity and what small children learn about whose feelings count
26:00 Where to find Lisa, her books and her one-on-one program

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
🔗 Lisa Watson at reparent-yourself.com: https://reparent-yourself.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.

Joe Dillon puts the odds of mediation working at 90 to 95 percent, even when the two people are furious with each other. Only about 2 percent of divorces, he says, truly need a judge. Most of the rest are couples who are angrier than they are actually far apart.

Joe Dillon is a divorce mediator and the founder of Equitable Mediation Services. He came to the work from an unusual direction, with an MBA in finance and negotiation and about thirty years of studying how agreements get made, and he mediates entirely online across several states. He also grew up inside the opposite approach: his parents litigated a divorce so bitter that his father had to be restrained in the courtroom while Joe watched from the back.

In this conversation, Joe and Lisa work through what he does differently with a high-conflict couple. He explains options creation, where each person goes away, ranks their choices, and comes back to find they were in agreement all along, and the phrase he uses for couples who are screaming past their own consensus: violent agreement. He describes his role as part guide, part referee, part cheerleader, why he keeps sessions to two hours, and why five to eight of them beat years of waiting on a court's calendar.

Joe is direct about preparing with data rather than emotion: building a real budget, knowing your assets and liabilities, and tying every decision back to your kids' routine. He explains why a good mediator will not let you leave with a bare-bones agreement, and offers his honest test of a job done right, both people walking away a little annoyed with him.

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

🎓 What you'll learn

• Why a mediator puts the odds of mediation working, even in high conflict, around 90%
• "Options creation": how ranking choices separately reveals you agreed all along
• The mediator's three jobs: guide, referee, and cheerleader
• Why two-hour sessions beat all-day marathons, and how many it usually takes
• Why you should never sign a skeletal agreement, and which details to nail down
• How to prepare with a real budget and hard data instead of emotion
• How tying every decision to your kids' routine keeps the negotiation grounded

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Why 90–95% of divorces could mediate, and the 2% that can't
3:00 What's different with a high-conflict couple: options creation
7:00 "Violent agreement," and the surprise of agreeing all along
11:00 Guide, referee, cheerleader: the mediator's real role
15:00 Rules of engagement, and looking through the windshield
17:00 Why one session isn't failure, and how many it takes
19:00 Why two-hour sessions work (the gym analogy)
21:00 Don't sign a skeletal agreement: flesh out the details
25:00 Preparing with a budget and data, not emotion
31:00 The Wizard-of-Oz judge, and "see me now or see me later"

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
🔗 Joe Dillon at Equitable Mediation Services: https://www.equitablemediation.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.

Most of the things we take seriously come with preparation. Careers, marathons, music. Parenting arrives without a manual, and Dr. Karen Molano got tired of meeting families only after the damage was done. So she built one: eight dimensions of health, aimed at the whole child and the whole family, which she calls multidimensional parenting.

Our guest this episode is Dr. Karen Molano, a child psychologist and an infant, family, and early childhood specialist with 25 years in the field, including years with Los Angeles County working alongside child protective services on cases that reached them only after everything else had failed. She is the founder of LumiTot, and her focus is pregnancy through the first five years, the period she describes as shaping how a person will see the world, themselves, and everyone else. She has also been through her own divorce, with a young son, and she uses that rather than avoiding it.

Karen and Lisa begin with bonding, because BTGO clients ask constantly whether a relationship built early can hold once one parent starts working against it. From there they move to what a parent can do now: starting with your own connection to yourself, reading what a trigger is actually telling you, and why masking your feelings teaches a child that theirs are not allowed either. Karen walks through moving emotion through the body, and the rhythmic, side-to-side activities that help, including walking, drumming to a song, and cooking together.

The heart of the conversation is the line between letting your child see you feel something and asking your child to carry it. Karen gives both versions of the conversation, from her own home, and offers one question to sort them: are you doing this for them, or for you? She closes on repair, on what children internalize when nobody ever comes back and says they got it wrong, and on how much influence a single steady parent keeps, even when the other household will not do any of this.

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

🎓 What you'll learn

• What multidimensional parenting is, and why it starts before the problems do
• Why children read your energy long before they understand your words
• What a trigger is telling you about yourself, and why that comes first
• Why masking your sadness teaches a child their feelings are not allowed
• The line between letting your child see you cry and leaning on them, with both versions of the conversation
• One question to tell them apart: are you doing this for them, or for you?
• Why repair after you get it wrong teaches more than getting it right every time
• How much influence one steady home keeps when the other parent will not do this work

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Does conflict affect kids, and what multidimensional parenting means
5:00 Bonding from the beginning, and how children read energy
7:00 Start with yourself: what a trigger is telling you
9:00 Why hiding your feelings backfires, and what to do instead
11:00 Moving emotion through the body: walking, drumming, cooking
13:30 Letting your child see you cry, without handing them the weight
16:30 Are you doing this for them, or for you?
17:30 Repair, and what kids internalize when it never comes
19:00 One steady home, and how much influence it carries
21:00 The skills these kids build, and what they carry back

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. Karen Molano at LumiTot: https://www.lumitot.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.

Separating a marriage is separating a business, Maggie Nielsen says, and anyone with dollars in it needs someone whose job is the dollars. Attorneys are good at the law. That is a different discipline from tax treatment, mortgage qualification, and what an asset is worth a decade from now.

Maggie Nielsen is a partner at Purse Strings, an organization built around helping women be financially fearless. It publishes free tools and resources and maintains a vetted directory of professionals who focus on serving women: Certified Divorce Financial Analysts, money coaches, mediators, attorneys, and mortgage professionals. Purse Strings also produces a podcast about money that Lisa was booked to appear on shortly after this recording.

Maggie lays out the team and the order to build it in. She starts people with a CDFA rather than an attorney, adds a Certified Divorce Lending Professional when a mortgage is involved, because qualifying on support income has rules of its own, and treats a divorce coach and a therapist as part of the roster rather than extras. Her cost reasoning is the counterintuitive part: doing the financial work with someone billing less protects you from paying the attorney's rate to do the same work slower.

The conversation then turns to what happens when your ex has been the financial authority for years and is now telling you not to waste money on professionals. Lisa disagrees with Maggie on one point, and it is a useful disagreement: Lisa's position is that mediation can work in a high-conflict case, and that what makes it work is leverage, which is precisely what a good financial analysis gives you. She describes a mediator in her own case telling her ex that his position on child support would not fly, and how differently he received it coming from an authority.

The rest is practical. Maggie's checklist of what to gather before you say the word divorce out loud, and her reminder that your name on an account entitles you to the records whatever the password now is. When a forensic accountant is the right call, and the DIY route for people who cannot afford one. And the point she and Lisa land on together, which is that people settle early to end the conflict and then spend years trying to reopen something that was signed in an afternoon.

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

🎓 What you'll learn

• Who belongs on the financial side of a divorce team, and in what order to hire them
• What a CDFA does, and why starting there costs less than starting with an attorney
• Why a Certified Divorce Lending Professional matters when a mortgage is in play
• What to do when your ex is still the authority on money in your own head
• How a financial analysis creates the leverage that makes mediation work
• The checklist to gather before you say the word divorce out loud
• Why your name on an account entitles you to the records, whoever changed the password
• When a forensic accountant is worth the cost, and the DIY route when it is not

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Who needs a financial professional in a divorce
3:00 Maggie, Purse Strings, and the vetted list
5:00 Why the team costs less than the attorney doing all of it
7:00 When your ex is still the authority on money
9:00 Leverage in mediation, and knowing what is actually yours
11:00 The checklist to gather before you say the word divorce
13:00 When to bring in a forensic accountant
15:00 Conflict avoidance, and the cost of settling early
17:00 Do not sign what you do not understand

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
🔗 Purse Strings: https://pursestrings.co/

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.

What would it take for you to believe that a relationship where you are treated well is genuinely available to you, and not just something other people got? Johnny Fernandez says most of the women who come to him cannot picture it, and that until they can, nothing else in the process works.

Johnny Fernandez is a love coach who works with women leaving toxic and abusive relationships. He and his wife, Dr. Lara Fernandez, run the Feminine Radiance and Courage Institute and have been coaching together for about twenty years. He practiced law before moving into teaching and then into this. He is sixty, married for twenty-four years, and has an adult daughter. He also grew up inside the thing he now works on: his mother remarried a man who was emotionally, physically, and financially abusive, and Johnny describes evenings that ended either at bedtime or in an emergency room, with no way to predict which.

In this episode he explains the counterfeit-bill method he uses with clients, where the training is in what a good relationship looks like rather than in spotting bad ones. His reasoning is that a person who screens everyone as a threat is never actually available, and that someone decent will read being treated as a suspect and leave without argument. He and Lisa talk about the contented single, which he says is a fine outcome, and about how to tell whether that contentment is genuine or is fear that has found a respectable name.

Johnny describes what he means by an intervention, which is not usually meeting somebody new. It is the moment a person says out loud that they cannot live like this. He tells the story of being told, in some detail and by someone qualified to say it, that he would end up alone, and what rose up in him instead. They also get into why keeping abuse hidden creates the sense that you are the only one it is happening to, why a peaceful relationship can feel boring to a nervous system trained on chaos, why information alone does not produce change, and the observation that at work you are replaceable and at home, in the right relationship, you are not.

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

🎓 What you'll learn

• Why studying good relationships beats learning to spot bad partners
• The difference between being treated as a prospect and being treated as a suspect
• Why a familiar pattern repeats even when nobody would choose it
• Being a contented single, and how to tell that apart from fear wearing a better name
• What an intervention actually is, and the sentence that usually starts it
• Why hiding it convinces you that you are the only one it is happening to
• Why steady can feel boring, and what that tells you about your baseline
• Why more information does not produce change, and what does

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Why the pattern repeats, and the familiar feeling area
5:00 Twenty-five years with Lara, and how he became a love coach
6:00 His childhood, his stepfather, and the night his mother ended it
11:00 The contented single, and when it is actually fear
14:00 The counterfeit-bill method: study the real thing
16:00 Prospect or suspect, and why good partners walk away
19:00 The intervention: I cannot live like this
24:00 Keeping it hidden, and the loop that follows
27:00 When steady starts to feel boring
33:00 Information versus transformation, and where to find 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
🔗 Feminine Radiance & Courage Institute: https://radianceandcourage.com/
🔗 Johnny and Lara Fernandez: https://johnnyandlara.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.