Grounding Before Heavy Content

SPEAKER_00 0:01

You might have noticed recently that I've been starting each episode with something intentional. A moment to help your nervous system settle before we dive into the content. Because the topics that we cover here matter. And your brain will take them indifferently, more usefully, if your body isn't braced intense when you're here. So I'd like to invite you to take a deep breath in, to hold it for a few seconds, and then to let it go gently. Shoulders up to your ears, hold them there, and then let them drop. Feel the release to unclench your jaw, to open your hands, stretch your fingers if safe to do so. Notice your body loosen even slightly. Right now you're physically safe. Your nervous system can afford to relax. And when it does, you'll be able to engage in our conversation more clearly and more deeply. Okay, let's begin. Before we go further into today's episode of the Post-Separation Abuse Podcast, I want to offer you a brief heads up. I'm going to be talking about some of my own experience today, my personal history with the court system, with post-separation abuse, with coercive control, and with the particular kind of harm that can happen when the systems designed to protect you fail to do so. If you're in a raw place right now, please take care of yourself as you listen. Pause if and when you need to. Feel free to come back when you're ready. There's no urgency. Okay. Episode 100. I've thought a lot about what I wanted to say on the one hundredth episode of the Post Separation Abuse Podcast. What would be useful, what this episode needed to be. A hundredth episode of anything should absolutely be a celebration. And in many ways it is. One hundred episodes of showing up, one hundred conversations about some of the hardest things that parents navigate one hundred times sitting down in front of the microphone and deciding that this work matters enough to keep doing it. And that is worth marking. I am really proud of it. But more than a celebration, this is a line in the sand, a moment where I do want to look at where this work came from, to be honest about where we still are, and then stand up and say very clearly and publicly about where I'm going and why. And an invitation for you to come with me. So welcome to episode one hundred of the post separation abuse podcast. I'm your host, Danielle Black. More than seventeen years ago I was a young mum with a baby son who had just turned twelve months old. I was trying to leave a relationship that had been by any accurate definition abusive. And as I sat across from a lawyer, a family lawyer, a family law specialist, someone who was I thought, supposed to be guiding me through a system designed to protect children, I was told that I should just agree to equal shared care arrangements. Yes. fifty fifty for a baby for a twelve month old with a man that I was afraid of. And I did it because I was told that it was the reasonable thing to do, because I was told that it was the progressive thing to do, because I was fucking exhausted and frightened and didn't have the framework to understand what I was navigating, what I was agreeing to, or what that arrangement was going to cost my child and me. The years that followed were not easy ones. I developed CPTSD not as a label that I sought, but as the lived reality of a nervous system that had been under threat for far too long and didn't know how to come back down. I would dissociate regularly. A text message from my former partner could send me into a full physiological threat response before I'd even read the words. Which is why I kept my phone on silent for over a decade, not as a preference, as a survival strategy. Ten years. My son grew from a toddler into a teenager while I navigated the world with my phone on silent because the alternative was too costly to me and my nervous system. And through all of that, I was performing reasonableness, showing up to the changeovers, managing the relentless communication, trying to do all the things the system told me constituted good parenting. While my nervous system was in pieces, while the arrangement that I'd agree to was causing harm that I could see but felt powerless to stop, while accusations that had no basis in reality were used against me. I'm not sharing any of this with you for sympathy. Rather, I'm telling you this because I'd love for you to understand the baseline from which this work began. The baseline from which the post-separation parenting blueprint was eventually born. The baseline that shaped every framework, every resource, every conversation that I have had with every client who has come to me since. And I'm telling you this because 100 episodes later, I'm still seeing that same baseline. Different parents, same system, same failures, same cost. In the years since I began this work, the family law landscape in Australia has changed significantly on paper. The Family Law Act has been amended. The presumption of equal shared parental responsibility has been removed. The paramount consideration of the child's best interests has been recentered. Coercive control is increasingly recognised in legislation and in community awareness. In ways it simply wasn't seventeen years ago. The research base has grown enormously. I've watched parents get excited when those changes were announced. I watched the hope. And I understand that hope. It was real and it was warranted because legislative change does matter, and the people who fought for that deserve credit. And then I watched those same parents walk into discussions with their lawyers, intermediation, interfamily report assessments, and I watched what happened. The game is the same. The practitioners who were operating with inadequate frameworks for coercive control before the amendments are, in most cases, still operating. The same lawyers, the same mediators, the same family report writers, carrying the same outdated training, the same outdated assumptions and ideologies, the same outdated pattern recognition that fires and doesn't fire in the same situations that it always did. The game has new rules on paper. The people playing it largely learned it in a different era, and unlearning things is slow, and the families in front of them can't wait for the institutional culture to catch up. Now this might sound really cynical on my part. And yeah, I guess in some ways it is. In saying that, there are genuinely skilled, genuinely trauma informed practitioners in the post separation space who are doing the hard work of updating their frameworks. I know they exist, but I also know that they're not the majority. And the biggest mistake that I see parents make over and over across seventeen years is believing that family law has anything to do with children. As we unpacked in last week's episode, family law is a legal system, an adversarial system. It operates on legal principles, legal processes, legal timelines, legal outcomes. It's not a child welfare system, it's not a trauma informed system, and it's not designed to assess the invisible architecture of a child's daily life, or the nervous system impact of coercive control on a primary caregiver, or the difference between a parent who can perform cooperation in a formal setting and a parent who's genuinely safe. No family lawyer is required to know a damn thing about child development, about attachment science, about what the research says a three year old needs from their primary caregiver. Nothing. That's not part of their qualifications, it's not expected. It's not family law. It's we help you to divide your kids in half law. And that gap between what families actually need and what the system is designed to provide is why the blueprint exists. Because if the system is not going to protect your children by default, then you need the knowledge, the capacity, and the advocacy skills to protect them yourself from within the system, using its own language, understanding its own processes well enough to navigate them strategically. That is what I built. That is what this podcast has been building towards for one hundred episodes. Something that I don't think gets said often enough in post separation spaces is that this work is fucking hard. It's genuinely significantly hard in ways that are invisible to most people who aren't doing it. On a typical working day, I can wake up to fifty or more emails and DMs from clients and other people in my community, and many of them have what I can only describe as a life or death flavour. People in crisis, people in fear, people who are trying to hold themselves together for their kids while their nervous system is in freefall. Holding that day after day, year after year is its own particular kind of weight. It doesn't go away at the end of the working day, it doesn't clock off. And I'll be honest with you, I've had moments where I've thought about walking away more than once. There have been moments sitting with the weight of it, looking at what I've built and what it costs to maintain it, where I've genuinely wondered whether it would just be easier to step back entirely. Sometimes in those moments I just have a fantasy about knitting scarves. And then something happens that reminds me why I'm here. A parent tells me about the arrangements that have finally changed because of their knowledge, their capacity building, their advocacy work that I helped them with. They tell me that their child is doing so much better. They tell me that they are now feeling so much more spacious, so much safer. They tell me that they're finally feeling protective as a parent. And it's in those moments that I know that I cannot knit scarves, that this is where I'm supposed to be, that what my son and I lived through together has to mean something because the alternative that it was just loss, just damage, just years of fear for no reason that serves anybody, that alternative is just something that I cannot embrace. So I protect my energy really carefully. I take the school holidays off usually, more or less entirely, stepping away from the work completely to be present with my family. I don't work on weekends. These are not luxuries, they are the reason that I'm still here at episode one hundred, still thinking clearly, still building things that are worth building. And I want to model that for you, not as a performance, but as a genuine lived example of what it looks like to do hard work over a long period of time without destroying yourself in the process. So many of you are doing your own version of that, holding everything together for your children while your own nervous system is screaming, performing reasonableness while you're quietly falling to pieces. Doing something sustainable is not selfish. Boundaries are not abandonment. You're allowed to be a full human being with needs and a nervous system and a life that is larger than the hardest thing that's currently happening in it. So one hundred episodes, seventeen years post separation, and I want to tell you what I'm doing with what I've learned. I'm redefining my mission. Not because what I have built isn't working, it is it's it's almost working too well. But rather because I see more clearly than ever that what the full scope of this work is for me. What it is that I'm actually trying to do, and I want to say it explicitly and publicly. My mission, the thing that gets me out of bed many mornings, even on the days when the weight of it can feel enormous, is to change the system. Not through legislation, though that does matter, not through loud protest, though that does have its place, but from the inside out, through the accumulated weight of informed, prepared, credible, child focused parents who stop accepting recommendations that sound fair but ignore what their children really actually need. What I believe is that every parent who walks into a family report assessment knowing the research, who presents their case clearly and calmly, who shows up as credible, can challenge that report writer to think differently. Every professional who encounters a protective parent who is impossible to dismiss is quietly incrementally changed by that encounter. Not always immediately, not always visibly, but the encounter leaves a mark. And if the report recommendations are not what you hoped for, that's not where it stops. Because credible advocates don't stop there. They say bring it on, fuckers What's next? They dig even deeper. They lock in. They strategically analyze the report. They connect with a coach, someone like me who has experience with this work. And yeah, they consider having that family report writer at their final trial being cross examined. They consider having that report tested as one piece of many pieces of evidence. This is how the ideology shifts. Not in a single dramatic moment, but in the accumulation of thousands of interactions where the old answer no longer quite works and where the professionals in the room are confronted with something that they cannot dismiss, where the parent across from them is clearly undeniably child focused and credible. And I can't do that alone. I need more people who are willing to be informed, more parents who are willing to do the internal work, the capacity building, the regulation, the shift from reactive to strategic. More parents willing to show up in their rooms in their own cases, not as adversaries, but as their own experts, not as victims demanding to be heard, but as fucking advocates who cannot and will not be ignored. That is what the blueprint is for, that is what this podcast is for, that is what AI Daniel, the digital coaching resource now available twenty four hours a day to every blueprint member is for. Not as a nice to have, but as a foundation that makes everything else possible. AI Danielle truly is an incredible capacity building partner. She's there when me and the other coaches on my team can't be, when no human can be, at three AM when a parent needs steadying before they do something that they will regret, or before they accept something that they should challenge. This is the ecosystem that I have spent seventeen years building, and I'm drawing that line in the sand again now on episode one hundred, because I think we're ready for it, to say it more plainly, to reach more parents, to resource more people to walk into those rooms differently, to build the critical mass that the system will eventually have no choice but to respond to. This is the moment that I'm choosing to stand and I'm asking you to stand with me. There are so many things that I know now that I didn't know when I was the young mum with a twelve month old. I know now that the family law system is not designed to protect children. It's designed to resolve legal disputes between adults. Understanding that distinction early, clearly and without illusion, that's not pessimism. It's the beginning of strategic thinking because you simply can't navigate a system well if you fundamentally misunderstand what it is. I know now that cooperation and safety aren't the same thing. Being told to be reasonable, to be cooperative, to be the progressive co parent who puts the child's relationship with both parents above their own worries, that framing in the context of a coercively controlling relationship is not good advice. It's advice generated by a system that doesn't have the framework to see what parents are actually navigating. I know now that coercive control leaves marks on a nervous system and on other bodily systems that look from the outside like instability, hypervigilance, dissociation, keeping your phone on silent for a decade. Those things weren't character flaws for me. They were the entirely predictable consequences of sustained psychological harm. And the fact that the system couldn't reliably tell the difference between someone destabilized by trauma and someone unstable, that's not a personal failing, it's a systemic one. And I know now that you can survive it. That the woman who is where I was seventeen years ago, who can't imagine what the next decade looks like, who's holding her child and holding the fear and holding everything together on the outside while she's falling apart on the inside, she can come through it. Not unaffected, not unchanged, but through it nonetheless. My family, my husband drew, our children, the life that we've built that's evidence of that. That it is possible to come through the hardest thing and build something beautiful on the other side. I do want you to know that. I want to wrap up this episode by speaking directly to someone. To all of the parents who might be where I was all those years ago almost two decades ago now. Someone who might be listening in their car, parked outside of their house because they just need five more minutes before going in and performing that they're okay. Someone who might be listening to this at two AM because sleep's not coming. Someone who might have just been told by their lawyer to agree to something that their gut is screaming is wrong. Someone who has just reported something to the police and has been met with something that wasn't help. I see you. I don't say that as a platitude, I say it as someone who was you and who knows exactly what it costs to keep going. What you're feeling right now, the sense that the systems around you can't see what you can see, that the people who are supposed to help you don't have the framework to understand what you're navigating. You're not imagining it, you're not being paranoid, you're not being difficult or unreasonable or hysterical. You're accurately perceiving a gap between what you need and what the system is currently equipped and designed to provide. That's information. Hold on to it, don't let anyone talk you out of it. The work of protecting your children in a system that is not designed to see what you see is the hardest work there is. It requires knowledge that most people never need to learn. It requires capacity for sustained self-regulation in conditions of sustained stress. It requires the ability to advocate clearly, credibly and strategically in rooms that have not been designed to hear you. None of that comes naturally. All of that can be built. You're not alone in this. I know it feels like you are. I know the two AM feels very quiet, very alone. But one hundred episodes of this podcast exist because hundreds of thousands of people have found their way to it, because they were navigating something that the people around them couldn't fully see or understand. And they needed a voice that could that community exists and you're part of it. And to the version of me who sat across from that lawyer with her twelve month old son and agreed to something she shouldn't have because she didn't know what she didn't know. I'm not angry at her. I understand exactly why she did what she did. She was doing her best with the information and the capacity that she had at the time. What I can do, what this podcast does, what the blueprint does is to do what I can to make sure that the next person who sits in that chair knows more than she did. Is more prepared than she was. Has a framework that she didn't have. So that the choice that she makes is an informed one. With her eyes wide open. I'm going to close this episode with the debut of another original song. It's called Stronger Braver Together. But before you hear it, I want to say a few things about it, because there are a few lines in it that deserve some context. And I want you to understand what this song means to me and what I hope that it will mean for you. This song was written about this work, about this community, about what it means to choose deliberately, with your eyes open, to stand, to take a stand, to draw that line in the sand. There's a line in the final chorus that says this is the life we've planned. Now I know what some of you might feel when you first hear it, because the first time I felt that too, that no one's planned for this. That no one sat down and thought, yeah, I'd like to navigate a coercively controlling relationship, then spend years fighting for my kids in a system that was not designed to see what I could see, and then build a career making sure other parents don't have to learn what I learned the hard way like I did. No. No one's planned for that. But here's the reframe that I want you to sit with. The choosing to stand, that choosing to become informed, that choosing to build capacity, that choosing to advocate for your children with everything that you have, that choosing to be part of something bigger than your own case, that's chosen. That is deliberate. That is a plan. Not the plan that any of us would have drawn up if we'd had a choice about the circumstances, but the plan that we're making right now. The life that we are choosing to build from this on purpose and with intention. This is what I'm doing today. On episode 100. I'm choosing this deliberately. I'm standing here, not perfectly, not without the weight of 17 years, but here. Not perfect, but here. Choosing to stand, inviting you to stand with me. And those words, not perfect, but here that's the most honest description of my work that I've heard. I am not perfect, and I have never claimed to be. I've had days where the weight of this was heavier than I could carry. But I've kept showing up. Not perfectly, but here. And there's another line that I want to name before you hear it, and that is with nothing real to defend. In the context of this song, this speaks to what so many protective parents experience. The years of defending themselves against accusations that have no basis in reality, against narratives built from nothing, against the exhausting grinding work of having to prove what isn't true. Nothing real to defend means we're done shrinking to fit a false narrative. We're done defending ourselves against ridiculous lies. We can just stand, be clear, be here, and let our truth speak. So 100 episodes, 17 years post-separation, and this song is the final word. This is stronger, braver together, and I hope it lands for you the way that it has landed for me. Because we are stronger, braver together.

SPEAKER_01 27:04

Standing strong because we had to be now choosing something different.

SPEAKER_02 27:09

No more silence, where truth should stand, no more shrinking. To fit a plan. We've seen the cost, we know the way, and we're not walking that way again. We've learned to trust where we feel inside. Not alone, not anymore. We don't stay there. No more guessing. No more doubt. We know what this is about. We don't dust We don't we don't add we do that we don't add the future. We grow not louder. Strong back, brave up to get the wheat stand. This is the life we've played. No more silence, no more fear. We know why we are here. Strong back, brave, get the weaver, no more strength of lift with it.

Gratitude And Keep Standing

SPEAKER_00 30:37

Thank you so much for being here with me for this one hundredth episode of the Post Separation Abuse Podcast. I value you, your time, the effort that you're making to see yourself and your situation from different perspectives. For those of you who are clients working with me or another coach on the team one-on-one, thank you so much for being part of this work. Thank you for choosing to take a stand. Thank you for being part of this movement where we are changing the system from the inside. For everyone who is a blueprint member, thank you. Thank you for being part of this work. Thank you for taking the time to build your knowledge, to grow your capacity to become a credible strategic advocate for yourself and your children. For every inappropriate parenting time request that you say no to, for every well-meaning, if not misguided, suggestion from a lawyer that you challenge, you too are helping to change this system from the inside out. You too are standing with me on that line saying no more. Thank you. Thank you for standing with me. I am stronger and braver because of you. And I hope that you feel a little bit stronger and braver because of me. I'll look forward to chatting with you again soon.