Titles Don’t Tell You Enough

Coaching Versus Therapy And Law

Stress, The Brain, And Decision-Making

What Effective Coaching Actually Does

Why System Knowledge Matters

Cooperative Versus Coercive Separations

How Abuse Plays Out Post-Separation

When “Calm” Masks Compliance

Reading The Room And Real Risk

Choosing Support With Better Questions

Beyond Narcissism: Strategy That Works

The Three Steps To Protective Parenting

Outcomes, Advocacy, And Real Change

Closing Reflections And Thanks

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hello. Welcome back to the Post Separation Abuse Podcast. I'm your host for today's episode, Danielle Black. Over the past few years, the post separation support landscape has grown rapidly. There are now lawyers, mediators, therapists, counsellors, psychologists, collaborative practitioners, and coaches, all offering different forms of support for people navigating separation and divorce. And in many ways, that growth is a fantastic thing. Separation is one of the most destabilizing experiences that a person can go through. And the research consistently shows that it activates the same neurological threat responses as physical danger. Your nervous system doesn't distinguish between a tiger and a text message from a controlling X. It responds to both as a threat to survival. And when you're in that state, chronically activated, perhaps sleep deprived, emotionally exhausted, trying to make decisions about your future, your children's future, access to the right support genuinely matters. But there's also a challenge that comes with this expansion of the support landscape. For someone who is newly separated or who has been separated for years but still feels stuck, the range of options can feel incredibly overwhelming rather than reassuring. Who to turn to? What kind of support do you actually need? And perhaps most importantly, what do all of these different titles, qualifications, and credentials actually mean? Because not all support is created equal. And the wrong kind of support, even if it's well intentioned, can make things harder rather than easier. One word that has become increasingly common in this space is the word coach. You will now see people describing themselves as divorce coaches, separation coaches, co-parenting coaches, high conflict coaches, relationship coaches, and that's just scratching the surface. And increasingly, professionals from other disciplines, lawyers, counsellors, mediators, are also starting to use the label coach in some capacity. I want to be clear about something up front. I am a coach. That is the lens through which I work. And I believe deeply in the value of coaching that is done well. I also think it's important to be honest about the fact that the word coach is entirely unregulated. In Australia and in most parts of the world, there is no licensing body, no mandatory qualification, no minimum standard that someone must meet before calling themselves a coach. Now this doesn't mean that qualifications don't exist. They do. There are reputable coaching bodies, evidence-based training programs, and professionals who have invested significantly in their craft. But the title alone tells you very little. A person can attend a weekend course, create a website, and begin charging for coaching the following Monday. And a person can have decades of experience, deep specialist training, and a rigorous ongoing practice, and also call themselves a coach. The word covers an enormous range. And this means that when you're looking for support, you need to be looking beyond the title. Before I explain what I believe that coaching is at its best, I want to be clear about what it's not. As I've said before on other episodes, coaching is not therapy. Now this distinction really matters. Not because I want to diminish therapy, therapy is a genuinely powerful intervention for the right person at the right time. But therapy and coaching operate in different domains with different goals, different training, and different ethical frameworks. Therapy, broadly speaking, is oriented towards healing. It often involves exploring the past, unpacking the roots of patterns, processing trauma, working through grief. A qualified therapist has clinical training to hold that kind of work safely. And for many people going through separation, therapy is exactly the right container. And therapy can sit alongside coaching. As I've mentioned on previous episodes, a number of our clients are engaged with us, their coaches, and they also have a therapist. Coaching is oriented toward development. It's working primarily in the present and toward the future. It's asking, given where you are right now, what do you want to build? What is serving you and what isn't? What capacity do you need to strengthen to achieve your goals? Importantly, it's also about getting clear on what the priority and the goals actually are. Trauma-informed work is absolutely appropriate for a coach. However, coaches should not be doing deep trauma processing work without the relevant clinical training. Coaching is also not legal advice. However, coaching can assist you to better instruct your lawyer. An effective coach can also help you think clearly about the advice that your lawyer gives you so that you can make an informed decision that is aligned with your goals and your priorities. This is something that an effective coach will help you with. This is important because if your nervous system is in chronic threat response, you might be sitting across from a lawyer receiving perfectly good advice, but not retaining it, not processing it, not being able to act on it, not being able to provide instructions to the lawyer based on the advice. This is where coaching can intersect with legal and therapeutic support. It's not a replacement for either, but rather it's a different layer of the puzzle. So what is coaching if it's done well? I want to answer that question at a deeper level than what many people do because simply saying something like, quote, coaching helps you to think clearly and make better decisions is true on the surface. But it doesn't explain why or how or what is actually happening when that works. We need to start with the brain. When we are under acute or chronic stress, the brain's threat detection systems become dominant. The amygdala, the part of the brain responsible for scanning for danger, becomes highly activated. When that happens, the prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain responsible for logical reasoning, perspective taking, long-term planning, and emotion regulation, that goes offline. Not metaphorically, literally. The neural resources that support complex thinking become less available when the threat response is activated. This is not a character flaw, it's biology. It's what the brain is designed to do when survival feels at stake. The problem here, of course, is that navigating post-separation life, particularly when children are involved, requires exactly the kind of thinking that chronic stress makes really hard. You need to be able to hold multiple perspectives. You need to be able to think about yours and your children's long-term needs rather than just the immediate situation. You need to be able to make strategic decisions rather than reactive ones. You need to manage your own emotional state well enough to co-parent with someone you may have significant unresolved pain around. Potentially someone who's still perpetrating some form of abuse. All of that requires prefrontal cortex engagement. All of that requires a regulated nervous system. And a good coach, an effective coach understands this not just as a concept, but as the central challenge of the work. Good coaching, effective coaching at a neurological level is about creating the conditions for the brain to access its higher functions. It's about interrupting the threat response long enough for someone to be able to think rather than just react. And that happens with a combination of things. It can happen through the quality of the questions being asked. Because good questions redirect attention, open new perspectives, and activate different neural networks. It also happens through nervous system regulation practices. It happens through the quality of the coaching relationship itself. Because the experience of being genuinely heard actually has a measurable calming effect on the nervous system. And it happens through helping people identify and work with their own thought patterns. Because the stories we tell ourselves about our situation directly affect our emotional state and nervous system activation and therefore our capacity to act deliberately and intentionally rather than reactively. That is what good effective coaching is doing underneath the surface. It's not just asking nice questions in a warm tone of voice. It's about genuinely helping someone to strengthen their brain's capacity in order to function under pressure. In my opinion, a good coach, an effective coach, does not just know the theory. They also live the practice. But I think we can take this a step further because I think there's a dimension of this that not everyone talks about or is aware of. And that is that the most effective coaches in the post-separation space are not just people who have done personal development work. They are people who deeply understand the system that they're helping clients to navigate. There is a real difference between understanding that system from the outside, from the outside looking in, from textbooks, from training from other people's stories, and understanding it from the inside, genuinely being a fellow traveller. I'll speak a bit more personally here because I do think it matters. I've been through the family court process, not as a professional observer, as a parent. Having to navigate it in real time with a lot at stake. I've sat in meetings with report writers. I've experienced the particular pressure that comes from your own lawyer, not just the lawyers from the other side. I've experienced when the advice that you're being given does not feel right for your situation. I've navigated ongoing post-separation abuse, legal systems abuse, co-parenting dynamics where control continued long after separation through the very processes that were meant to protect children. The other coaches on my team have experienced similar things as well. But this isn't something that we lead with in order to position ourselves as victims. We don't, and that's not how we see ourselves. We lead with it rather because it's the foundation of a very specific kind of understanding, and an understanding that in my view you cannot genuinely acquire any other way. When you've sat across the table from a report writer, you understand in your body, not just in your head, how those interactions work, what's actually being assessed, what inadvertent mistakes parents make that have nothing to do with their actual parenting, and everything to do with not understanding the process that they're in. When you felt the pressure from your own legal team to settle or compromise in a way that doesn't serve you or your children, you understand that having a lawyer doesn't automatically mean having an advocate who shares your priorities. When you've experienced the way that coercive control morphs and adapts inside legal processes, when you've lived through having your children weaponized or been on the receiving end of legal systems abuse, you develop pattern recognition that no amount of professional training can ever fully replicate. And this is where the word strategic comes in and why that word matters to me. And why I think it gets misused in this space. Strategy in a post-separation context is not a mindset, it's not positive framing, it's not about simply having a plan. Real strategy is knowing how family reports actually influence judicial decisions. It's understanding how a particular communication pattern will read to a family consultant. It's recognising when a legal process is being weaponised and knowing what that looks like in practice because you've seen it, felt it, and navigated your way through it. A coach who uses the language of strategy without that foundation is offering something well-intentioned but fundamentally limited. They may be able to help you feel calmer, they may be able to help you process your emotions. Those are obviously genuinely valuable things. But if your goal is to optimize your outcome, your parenting arrangements, your financial settlement, your long-term position, then the person supporting you needs to first deeply understand the system you're in. Understanding the system with a depth that goes beyond what's in a manual. This is not about credentials. This is about whether the person on the other end of the call has genuinely been where you are. Now I want to address something that I don't think gets talked about enough or honestly enough in the post-separation space. And that is that not all separations are the same. Some are genuinely difficult and painful but fundamentally cooperative. Both parents can communicate without significant distortion. They can sit in a room with a mediator and negotiate in good faith. They can prioritize their children above their own grievances. They may not like each other very much, they might be grieving deeply, but they're fundamentally working towards the same outcome. In those situations, collaborative processes can be incredibly effective. Mediation, family dispute resolution, collaborative law, these work when the underlying dynamic is one of mutual good faith. But there's another reality that many people navigating separation are living with, and that is one that the support industry doesn't always know how to hold. And that is the separation that involves high conflict, coercive control, or other sustained patterns of abuse. What's important to understand about that reality is that coercive control dynamics and other forms of abuse do not end at separation. In many cases, abuse intensifies because separation itself is experienced by the controlling person as a loss of power that must be recovered and maintained. The legal system, the mediation room, co-parenting frameworks, these don't neutralize that dynamic. They can instead become a new arena in which it plays out. Litigation can become a tool. Communication becomes an intrusive mechanism for maintaining pressure and ongoing harassment. Co-parenting arrangements become a site of ongoing power struggle and entitlement. The part that often gets missed with this is that the parent on the receiving end of that dynamic doesn't always look like someone who's struggling. They look capable, and oftentimes it's because they genuinely are capable. Many of them are extraordinarily high functioning professionals. At Danielle Black Coaching, we work with a significant number of clients in the medical field drawn to our work specifically because of its evidence base, who are separating from equally educated, equally credentialed partners. On paper, a collaborative process looks like it's exactly the right fit. Two intelligent, reasonable adults, surely they can negotiate. But collaboration assumes that there is a level playing field. And what years of coercive or controlling dynamics or other forms of abuse, what those things produce is a nervous system that's been trained, neurologically, to respond to any attempt of self-advocacy as a threat to safety. Think about what that means at a brain level. When a person's lived for years in a relationship where pushing back, we're expressing needs, setting a boundary, or just simply disagreeing, when that's been met with consequences, their nervous system learns. It adapts, it builds neural pathways that connect self-advocacy with danger. Over time, the most efficient survival strategy becomes compliance, appeasement, giving the other person what they want before things escalate. Those pathways don't disappear the moment that separation begins. So you can have a parent who is professionally brilliant, who presents as composed and articulate, who from the outside looks completely capable of holding their own in a negotiation. But on the inside, their nervous system is screaming at them to just give the other person what they want, to make it stop, to avoid the consequence that their entire history has taught them is coming. That parent in a mediation dynamic is not negotiating freely. They're negotiating under the influence of a threat response that they might not even consciously recognise, because their brain has normalized it over years. And a mediator or a practitioner who doesn't understand that dynamic, who sees two composed adults across a table and reads the situation as collaborative, that practitioner may facilitate an agreement that one parent experienced as genuinely fair and the other signed because they were terrified not to. That is not a failure of the process in the abstract, but it is a failure to read the room. Support that's designed for an amicable separation can be actively counterproductive in situations of high conflict or family violence. Encouraging a more cooperative parent to keep communication open and to focus on collaboration without first understanding what that openness has historically cost them can amount to advising someone to remain accessible to someone who uses that access to cause ongoing harm. This is why the nature of the support that you choose matters, and why a coach or any professional working in this space needs to be able to recognise not just high conflict in an obvious sense, but the more invisible version, the one that looks fine on paper, the one where one parent seems perfectly reasonable and the other seems fine too, but where the dynamic underneath is something that only becomes visible when you actually know what you're looking for. So if titles and credentials aren't enough, what should you actually be looking for? Here are some questions worth asking when you're considering the support after separation. What is your actual methodology? Not just the brand name, not just the tagline, but rather what tools does that professional actually use and why? Can they explain the mechanism? Can they tell you what underpins their approach? If the answer is vague or purely anecdotal, that tells you something. What do you know about family violence including coercive control? Even if you're not sure if that's happening, even if you're not sure if you've experienced family violence, if you're not sure if there's ongoing post-separation abuse, the answer to this question tells you a great deal about the depth of their knowledge. Can they speak with nuance about coercive control? Do they understand the difference between conflict and abuse? Do they understand how those things are perceived by the system? Another question that it can be worth asking is what does your own ongoing development look like? Not just their initial qualifications, but what are they actually doing right now to continue growing? Are they engaged with current research? Do they have a coach? A practitioner who stopped learning when they completed their training is a different proposition from one who remains actively engaged. Another important question is to ask about their body of work, not just testimonials, but rather how do they think? Do they write, speak, create content that demonstrates the depth of their approach? Can you get a real sense of how they engage with complexity? Or does everything feel surface level? And this brings me to something that I want to address directly because it connects closely to the question about body of work, and it's something that my team and I feel strongly about. A few years ago, language around narcissism began entering the separation and divorce space in a significant way. Terms like narcissism. Narcissistic abuse, covert narcissist, the quote narcissistic ex, these started appearing in a lot of coaching content in online communities in the framing that many practitioners use to describe what their clients were experiencing. I was one of the people using that language early on years ago. And I want to be clear, I wasn't using it casually or without foundation. Part of my training actually includes specialist high conflict coaching certification with Tina Swithin. You might have heard of her if you've engaged with any of her one mum's battle content. Tina's well known for her work on protecting children from high conflict and personality disordered parents. It's something that she's known for around the world. My training with Tina also included clinical and legal education alongside practitioners like Dr. Romani Dervisulla and US Attorney Rebecca Zhung, people who were genuinely at the forefront of advocacy in this area who you might have also seen online. My broader background beyond this spans education, parenting coaching, psychotherapy, counselling, trauma-informed practice, and paralegal training. I say that not to list credentials, but rather to make a specific point. I didn't move away from narcissism framing because I didn't understand it. I moved away from it because I understood it deeply, perhaps more deeply than most, and because the evidence in my work with clients over the years was very unambiguous. The reality was that it simply wasn't helping parents achieve what they were coming to me for. My professional focus and my genuine passion in this work is about helping parents move from conflict avoidant to protective. Helping them find the capacity, the clarity, and the strategic understanding to truly protect their children from harmful parenting arrangements. That's what I'm here for. That is the outcome that matters. And the truth is that labelling someone as a narcissist has nothing to do with that. Understanding the behavioural patterns that you're dealing with, yes, perhaps. Knowing how behaviour patterns may manifest in legal processes, in co-parenting dynamics, that knowledge can have strategic value. There's often a missing piece here though, and that is being able to understand how the behaviour pattern of your former partner impacts your children, both in the past, now, and how it may impact them in the future. There's also a significant difference between understanding a pattern in order to navigate it more effectively and spending your energy cataloguing which type of narcissist your ex is. One of those things moves you forward, and the other can very much keep you oriented towards someone who, frankly, has taken enough of your time and energy already. And this is the piece that I think is almost never said clearly enough, particularly for parents in Australia. That is that the majority of narcissism-focused content in this space originates from the United States. And the US family law system is a fundamentally different environment to ours. In the US, character assassination of a former partner is far more common in legal proceedings. The adversarial emphasis, the way that evidence is presented, the culture around litigation, it creates a context in which building a case against your ex's character is a more viable strategy. And that's not the system that we operate in here. Australia's family law system, for all of its genuine flaws and challenges, is much more child focused when compared with many other countries. The question that the court here is ultimately asking is not who is the worst person or who is the better parent. It's what parenting arrangements best serve these children. A parent who walks into that system or mediation or a family report process, visibly oriented towards their former partner's pathology, focused on naming and diagnosing or cataloguing, is not presenting as a protective parent. They're presenting as someone who's stuck in the conflict. This isn't just strategically unhelpful. In some cases, it actively damages outcomes. And spending time engaging with that content can inadvertently influence how you show up to professionals, can inadvertently influence how you are perceived. So when I see coaching content in this space that's primarily built around narcissism typologies, content designed to help people identify and name their former partner's disorder, I'm not simply rolling my eyes at a style choice. I'm genuinely concerned for the parents who are consuming that content. Because that content is validating, it's compelling, it's reflecting real experiences back to people in a way that can feel, at least for a period of time, it can feel like it's exactly what you need. But validation's not strategy. And in the Australian context, a practitioner who's consistently producing that kind of content is not just underserving their audience, they're potentially inadvertently harming the outcomes of the very parents that they're trying to help. The parents I want to work with are not the ones who want to become experts on what kind of narcissism their ex has. Rather, they're the ones who are ready to do something far more powerful than that. Over the years of working in this space and through my own journey through the family court system, I developed a framework that reflects everything I know that actually works. I call it the three steps to protective parenting. The first step is building knowledge, not just understanding the dynamics of your situation, but genuinely understanding what your children need, according to their age, their stage of development, the specific impact of conflict and separation on their nervous systems and their attachment. This is evidence-based, research-grounded work, not ideology about what feels fair to the grown-ups, but rather genuinely child focused knowledge that equips you to speak about your children's needs with authority and with credibility. The second step is growing your capacity, because knowledge alone is not enough if your nervous system is running the show. This is where neuroplasticity becomes deeply practical, building new neural pathways, developing the capacity to hold boundaries, to regulate under pressure, to move from reactive to deliberate. This work is the foundation that makes everything else possible. The third step, which the first two make possible, is advocacy, becoming the expert in your own case, understanding the system well enough to confidently instruct your legal team and in some cases to educate them. Staying the distance, building a case that is credible, consistent, and genuinely child focused all the way to a final hearing if that's what it takes. That is what protective parenting actually looks like in practice, and that's a very different conversation from your ex's potential personality disorder. One approach keeps you stuck, oriented towards someone else. The other builds something that is entirely, powerfully yours that will help you to optimize your outcome. If you're newly separated and looking for support, or if you've been at this for a while and questioning whether the support that you have is actually serving you, I want to invite you to take your time to look beyond the titles, to look beyond the marketing, and rather look at the body of work, look at how someone thinks. Look at whether their approach matches the reality that you're navigating. And more than that, look at what they are orienting you towards. Are they helping you to understand the type of narcissist that your ex is? Or are they helping you to understand yourself, your children, the system that you're in, and how you can optimize your overall outcome, particularly when it comes to parenting arrangements? Are they keeping you in the story of what happened to you? Or are they building your capacity to shape what comes next? Are they inadvertently creating a situation in which you are dependent, perhaps reactive, or are they encouraging and supporting you to genuinely become the expert in your own case? The parents that I've watched achieve fantastic outcomes, real parenting arrangements that genuinely protect their children, along with financial settlements that are truly equitable, lives rebuilt with genuine strength and clarity, they didn't get there by becoming experts on the kind of narcissism that their former partner has. They got there through the three steps to protective parenting. They built their knowledge, they grew their capacity, and they became advocates for themselves, for their children, in a way that the system and the professionals in the system could not continue to ignore. I've supported parents who have walked into this work barely able to get out of bed in the morning, but emerging from it with a quality of strength that has genuinely brought me to tears. Parents who have surprised themselves. Parents who discover a version of themselves that they didn't know existed. One that's grounded, one that's credible, confident, and completely unfuckwithable. I do this work because I believe in it so completely, and I do it also in part because I couldn't fully protect my own child on my post-separation journey. That will always sit with me in some way, shape, or form, and it's part of what gets me up every morning to do this work as well as I possibly can. I believe that this work matters, not in an abstract way, but in a very concrete, real way. Our children who are at the center of this, they need their protective parent to be strong, to be knowledgeable, to be capable of advocating effectively in a system that, for all of its child-focused intent, still requires parents to show up and show up well. That is what good support builds. That is what my team and I are here for. Thank you so much for your time. I appreciate the fact that you've taken time to share in this conversation. I look forward to chatting with you again soon.