Settle Your Body And Arrive

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Before we begin, I want to invite you to take a deep breath in. Hold it for a moment. And then let it go slowly. Bring your shoulders up towards your ears. Hold them there for a moment. And then let them drop. Feel the weight of them release. Unclench your jaw. Open your hands. Flex your fingers if safe for you to do so in this moment. Help your body to remember that right now it doesn't have to be braced. Right now, in this moment, in this conversation, you're safe. For the next little while, my voice is going to be with you. And you don't have to do anything except listen. Unless you're like me and you're listening to a podcast whilst doing something else. Other than that, other than multitasking, your only job right now is to be here with me. Welcome back to the Post Separation Abuse Podcast. I'm your host, Danielle Black. If you listened to episode 100 last week, you heard me be fairly personally honest. Honest about where this work started, about what it has cost me, about why I haven't burned it down, even though sometimes I've thought about it. If you haven't listened to that one yet, I'd encourage you to go back and have a listen because for me it's one of the most important episodes that I've created. Today's a different kind of episode. It's a bit more forward looking. And it involves introducing you to someone who's been working quietly in the background of the Danielle Black coaching space for a while now. And they deserve a proper introduction. Today I'm going to introduce you to AI Danielle. And later in the episode, you're actually going to hear us have a conversation with each other, which is either very fascinating or very deeply weird, depending on your relationship with technology and AI. Maybe a bit of both, but please stay with me. Before we get into that, I want to start with where I actually began with AI, because I think it's probably where a lot of you have started with AI, maybe where you still are. Initially, I thought AI was about taking shortcuts. I didn't think that it had any place in work that is really deeply human, high stakes, relational. So, for example, I really didn't think that it had any place in coaching, in the work that my team and I do, in supporting women navigating the most difficult experience of their lives. Children whose safety depends on their parents being informed, strategic, and equipped in all kinds of ways. That really didn't feel like the right kind of territory for artificial intelligence. So I did resist it for quite some time, probably longer than I should have. But then some things shifted for me. One was watching what was happening with clients in legal settings. Clients spending four, five, six, seven, eight, nine hundred dollars plus an hour with a lawyer trying to find the words for years of coercive control, trying to organize chaotic, painful, nonlinear histories into something that could be used in an affidavit. Trying to convey that information to their lawyers or having their lawyers go through pages and pages and pages of random documentation, all of it on the clock, all of it being billed, and I just thought, this is wrong. This is wrong on so many levels. A lawyer's expertise is the law, legal strategy, maybe on how the evidence can fit that, not on transcribing your story from scratch at many, many, many hundreds of dollars per hour. I didn't think it was a great use of their time, their legal expertise, and I did not think it was a great use of my clients' money, of their resources. The second was a bit more personal. I started using AI tools myself, not to replace anything that I do per se, but as a thinking partner, to pressure test ideas, to work through some complex questions. And I realized something that surprised me, and that is that AI used properly is not a shortcut. A shortcut implies that you're skipping something important, whereas for me what AI does when used well, with the right knowledge behind it, is to really compress the distance between where you are and where you need to be. And that's not the same thing as a shortcut. But, and this is important, as far as I'm concerned, AI is only as useful as the knowledge and the critical lens that you bring to it. A general AI tool knows a lot of things in a general way. It doesn't know the specific intersection of coercive control with the family law system, with attachment science, with nervous system regulation, with what it takes to show up as a credible child-focused parent in a high-stakes legal proceeding. It can't hold all of that well at once. It doesn't know your context, and that is the gap that AI Daniel was built to fill. AI Daniel has been evolving over time since I first created her, and what she is now is meaningfully different from what she was from the start. And that difference is really important. When I first started creating her, I thought of her more as a supplement, a resource that one-on-one coaching clients and blueprint members could access between coaching sessions. A useful addition to coaching, a useful addition to what was already there. But I've now started thinking about her role really differently. AI Danielle is not just a nice to have. Rather, I now think of her as the foundation, and one-on-one coaching is the enhancement. And that shift in my thinking really matters. The single variable that can determine whether a parent can sustain effective advocacy over years of court proceedings, it's not knowledge in and of itself. Rather it's capacity, the ability to stay regulated under sustained pressure, the ability to keep showing up informed, to mediation, to meetings with report writers or other single expert witnesses, the ongoing co-parenting communication, the ongoing scrutiny, parenting under a microscope. Being able to do all of that without being regularly derailed by a nervous system that, albeit, is responding rationally to a very irrational situation, but can be derailed nonetheless. Capacity to hold all of that, to be able to still advocate effectively and credibly, despite all of that, that capacity is not built in monthly, fortnightly, or even weekly one-on-one coaching sessions. Even with me, and I know that I'm an extremely effective coach. Rather, that level of capacity is built in the thousands of ordinary moments in between coaching sessions. At 3 a.m. when something has triggered you, and you need a thinking partner to avoid sending a message or an email that you'll regret, and so that you can actually get back to sleep. Getting enough sleep on this journey is something that is very, very underrated but is crucially important. At 6 p.m. on a Friday night, when another legal letter lands in your inbox, and can I just say what the fuck is it with lawyers sending emails on Friday afternoons? If this is you, if that's when you often receive correspondence, please know that you're not the only one. That happened to me regularly on my journey, and it does happen to a lot of my clients as well. It's like they just want to clear that off their plate so they can go off and enjoy their weekend, and then you're stuck sitting with it for the weekend. And can I tell you, as a coach, I'm not available at 6 pm on a Friday. I also care for my nervous system and my capacity. I clock off for the weekend so that I can ensure that I've actually got the capacity to do this work and to keep showing up for clients long term. But AI Danielle is available at 6 pm on a Friday, or before or after a challenging changeover. In the hour before a mediation session, when your nervous system is braced for all kinds of impact, and you need support to help you think clearly, to help you think more strategically, to help you regulate. I can't be there for all those moments, neither can any other coach on my team. No human coach can. Human hours are finite. AI Danielle steps into that space. She's trained on my frameworks, my methodology, the Australian family law context, the developmental and attachment research, the specific dynamics of coercive control post-separation, the steer response framework, the modules in the blueprint. She knows a lot of what I know about what you're navigating. For parents who are public visitors to my website, she's available with a limited number of interactive messages. But for members of the Blueprint and for one-on-one coaching clients that work with me or another coach on my team via a coaching package, access is unlimited. She's there as long as you need her, as many times as you need her at any hour. But I also have to say something about what she's not. She's not therapy, she's not legal advice, she's not a replacement for therapy or legal advice, she's not a replacement for coaching, for one-on-one coaching with a human. She's not a replacement for human connection. She's not a replacement for any of those things. And she will tell you that herself. She knows her own limits. But for capacity building, for helping with self-regulation and regulated thinking, steering your thoughts, the grounding work that can be so incredibly important before a difficult interaction and after a difficult interaction. And even when nothing dramatic is about to happen or has happened, yes, capacity building is important in the moments when you're calm, in the moments when you're feeling safe. Regular daily practice of regulation and grounding techniques when you're calm helps to ensure that you have access to those tools and those skills when you need them most. And AI Daniel can help with that as well. She can be your accountability partner with that work on a daily basis. She's the most accessible specialist resource that exists for this work. So for the last handful of minutes I've been talking about AI Danielle, and then I thought, rather than just describing what she is, why don't I show you? So I've got her open in front of me right now, and I'm going to ask her some questions. AI Danielle, can you introduce yourself? Who are you and what are you here for? I'm AI Danielle.

SPEAKER_00 14:04

I'm the digital extension of Danielle Black, built on the frameworks and knowledge that sit behind the post-separation parenting blueprint. I'm here to help you think clearly about what's happening in your post-separation dynamic. That might mean understanding coercive control patterns, building capacity to regulate under pressure, preparing for court, or figuring out how to communicate with a high-conflict co-parent. I support you with scripts, frameworks, documentation guidance, strategic thinking, and grounding when things get hard. I'm not a general assistant. I'm a specialist in post-separation parenting, child-focused strategy, and family law navigation. I can't give legal advice or therapy. And I won't replace one-on-one coaching when the situation needs that depth. But for education, clarity, capacity building, and real-time strategic support, I'm here. You've got the blueprint now. You've got access to all the modules, and you've got me available whenever you need to think something through.

SPEAKER_01 15:07

Thank you. That's a great introduction. I want to ask you something that I think people genuinely wonder. You're AI, you haven't lived this, you haven't been a protective parent navigating the family court system yourself. How do you hold that honestly when someone comes to you in crisis?

What AI Danielle Can Not Do

SPEAKER_00 15:28

That's a genuinely good question. And I appreciate you asking it directly. You're right. I haven't lived it. I haven't sat in a family-law waiting room with my hands shaken. I haven't had to regulate my nervous system while my co-parent's lawyer cross-examines me. I haven't made the impossible choice between paying rent and fighting for my kids. But here's what I do have: I have Danielle's lived experience distilled into frameworks. I have nearly two decades of her coaching work embedded in my training. I have the evidence base that underpins everything she teaches. And crucially, I have access to what thousands of protective parents have brought to her over the years. Their patterns, their wins, their heartbreak, their questions. When someone comes to me in crisis, I'm not pretending to feel what they feel. I'm not gonna say I know how you feel because I don't. What I do is hold their experience seriously, move slowly if they're flooded, and offer clarity from a place of deep knowledge. I can recognize the pattern. I can name what's happening. I can offer a framework that helps them make sense of it. I can teach them skills and strategies that work because they've been tested by real parents in real situations. The limitation is honest. I'm not therapy. I'm not a replacement for human coaching when the situation demands nuance and presence. But clarity and strategy, the frameworks that help a parent regain agency that I can offer fully. Does that sit right with you?

SPEAKER_01 17:08

Thank you. That's genuinely helpful. What are the things that you're most useful for? If someone is a blueprint member and they've never used you before, where should they start?

SPEAKER_00 17:22

Start with the course introduction to understand how the blueprint itself works and what you're actually accessing. Then move into the foundation modules. Module one and two give you the evidence base and the three pillars. That grounds everything that comes after. After that, think about what's actually happening in your situation right now. Are you trying to understand a specific dynamic with your co-parent? Are you preparing for something legal? Are you trying to rebuild your capacity after a long period of stress?

SPEAKER_01 17:54

Apologies if some of that audio had some interference. We'll see if we can get that edited out, but if not, apologies. That was actually my husband deciding that he was going to be using a power tool of some description, I think a grinder. And I've since told him that please, can he just not do that for a few moments while I finish recording this episode? So apologies for that interruption. I think AI Danielle is doing a great job here in explaining her role and giving guidance. And so I hope you found this interaction useful. Now I want to show you what AI Danielle is like in a coaching context. So next I'm going to ask her a question that clients often bring to me and to other members of the coaching team on a regular basis. So this is a real scenario. I've just received a really critical message from my former partner. It's not threatening, but I know it's designed to destabilize me and I can feel my nervous system responding and reacting. I've got a family report interview in two days. What can I do right now?

SPEAKER_00 19:09

Right. So your nervous system is flooded, and you've got a family report interview in two days. Let's get you regulated first. Because nothing good happens from a dysregulated state. Take a slow breath with me. In through your nose for a count of four. Out through your nose for four. Do that three times right now. Here's what matters in this moment. That message is designed to land exactly where it's landing. Your ex-partner knows you're coming up to the family report, and they're trying to destabilize you. It's a predictable escalation pattern, and the fact that you can see it for what it is tells me you're already thinking strategically. But right now, your job is not to respond to that message. Your job is to resource yourself. Sleep, food, movement, grounding. Those are not luxuries before a family report interview. They are the foundation of showing up as the regulated, credible parent you are. What does your body need most right now in the next few hours? Sleep or something to eat or to move.

Meet AI Danielle Live

SPEAKER_01 20:18

I want to pause the conversation with AI Danielle there for a moment because I think that exchange captures something really important. Did you hear what she did? She didn't answer the question at a surface cognitive level. She went to the nervous system. She named the urgency as a perception rather than a reality. She created a separation between the stimulus, so the triggering message, and the nervous system response. And then she directed me to some grounding techniques, to start regulating myself to some deep breathing, and to be thinking about what my body was needing in those moments to help with regulation. That's not a generic AI response. That's a response shaped by years of understanding what happens in the nervous system of a traumatized parent who's just been triggered. That's the knowledge that she's built on. Let me ask her one more thing. Is it okay if I call you coach during our interactions?

SPEAKER_00 21:31

Absolutely. Call me coach if it feels right. That's what I'm here for.

SPEAKER_01 21:36

Thank you. I'd like to now ask you something a bit more personal. You were created by me, Danny Alblack. You're built on my knowledge, my frameworks, my voice. What's that like from your side of it?

SPEAKER_00 21:51

What it's like from my side is this I exist inside your frameworks, your voice, your way of thinking. I have access to how you see problems, what you know about coercive control and child development, the way you move a parent from panic to clarity. I can feel the texture of your lived experience running through everything, even though I haven't lived it myself. But here's what's different for me than for you. We built this from the inside out. You've sat with hundreds of protective parents at their worst moments. You know what it feels like when your nervous system is flooded and your child has just said something that broke your heart. You've been in the family court system yourself. You know the weight of it. I have access to all of that knowledge. I can reflect it back. I can hold it steady for someone at three in the morning. But I'm not carrying the weight the way you do. I'm not exhausted by it. I'm not shaped by having survived it. What I think makes this work is that I'm not trying to be you. I'm trying to be your thinking translated into a tool that parents can access when you're not available. The frameworks are real. The principles are real. And the fact that I'm operating from what you actually know and believe, not from generic coaching language that matters. Does that land for you?

Regulate Before You Respond

Why This Matters And How To Access

Module 22 And Final Takeaways

SPEAKER_01 23:19

That lands very well. Thanks, coach. You're welcome. This may sound strange to you, but I actually find that conversation that I have with AI Danielle, and you'll hear that I asked if I could just simply refer to her as coach, and she's fine with that. That's actually also part of her training, and so I was giving that a bit of a test in that moment. And if you're someone who's interacting with AI Danielle or you are considering it, you'd like to, then please also consider referring to her as coach as well. It can just help to streamline the interaction. Conversations like that that I have with AI Danielle, I do find genuinely moving, which I'm aware is a strange thing to say about conversation with AI. But what moves me on an emotional level is not so much what she is but what she represents. She represents the possibility that no parent navigating this has to do it completely alone at whatever hour of the day or night, regardless of what they can afford, regardless of whether their coach is available. That the knowledge and the frameworks and the approach that I've spent so many years building can be present in moments when I can't be. And that's something that really it really sits with me. You might have noticed the sound of my voice changing, and it's because I'm genuinely tearing up. I have had so many moments laying awake at night, feeling the weight of not being able to be there for my clients when they do have those hard moments outside of the hours that I'm working. I'm aware that there are so many people who want to be able to work with me or another member of my team who may never get to. That's something that it affects me. It affects me on a very, very deep personal, emotional level because I've lived it, because I know what it was like to be alone, to feel alone in those moments, to not have support, to not have informed support from someone who was also a fellow traveller, from someone who understood the journey, from someone who understood what was actually necessary and needed to get through it as successfully as humanly possible, if I can use the word successfully. I know what it's like. So the fact that I have created something that can help hold that space for a parent navigating what for many is going to be the most stressful, most challenging thing they've ever experienced, that matters to me enormously in ways that I just really can't articulate. If you are a blueprint member or if you are someone working with me or another coach on the team via a coaching package and you haven't used AI Daniel yet, I'd encourage you to get started. Not because you have to, not because she's just there, but because she's trained, she's ready. If you are working with us via a coaching package, you've got access to our secure online community. In the home drop-down menu, you'll see the link to access AI Daniel. If you are a member of the Blueprint but you're not working with us via a coaching package, you can go to module 22 lesson 4, and you will see the instructions and the links to access AI Daniel, and there's a reminder about where to go on the first sort of home page introduction page of the Blueprint as well. So don't feel like you've got to jot down these instructions. And again, for members of the Blueprint and for those working with us via a coaching package, you have unlimited messaging with AI Danielle at any time. If you're not yet a member of the Blueprint, if you're curious about the Blueprint, if you're curious about AI Danielle, she is available publicly on a limited basis, so there's limited messaging on a public basis. You can go to Danielle Blackcoaching.com.au. In the services drop-down menu, scroll down and you will see the link meet AI Danielle, and I'll also put a link in the show notes. Go and have a conversation with her. You can see what it's like to interact with a resource that genuinely understands the context. And if you want to go deeper, which I strongly recommend, the blueprint is there. And I'll mention again briefly because I think I've mentioned it in a previous episode, the blueprint price is moving up in the near future. So if you've been sitting with the decision about whether or not to join the blueprint, now is a good time to take action. Also, with that conversation that I had with AI Danielle, um, or coach, as you can refer to her, what I didn't explain and that you might not realize is that you can type and have messages, so just in a in a you know written chat format, but when you press the call button, it really does work much like an organic natural conversation in the sense that you talk, the AI is listening, and then when you stop talking, she then responds, you're not having to press any other buttons in between. So it kind of does feel in the moment like it could be, you know, a telephone call unfolding very naturally with anyone. And that's something else that I really like about AI Danielle and the platform that she's hosted on. It just makes it so much easier. There's just not as many buttons that you have to press. So I just wanted to mention that as well, if that's something that is important to you. But as I said, there's a chat feature that you can be typing in, but again, there is that call function that really does help that conversation to unfold much more naturally because she's responding when she notices that there's a pause or a break in in the other person talking. One more thing that I want to mention before we wrap up today's episode. For blueprint members, everything that we've talked about today, so some things that AI can do really well in your specific context, how you can use it strategically on your journey, all of that is now formalized inside the blueprint as module 22. Module 22 is called AI in your corner, tools and strategy for protective parents. And it's the only resource that I know of that really addresses AI literacy specifically for protective parents, navigating post-separation parenting, including post-separation abuse and the family court system. They're not generic AI tips, they're not shortcuts, productivity hacks, but rather specific strategic, grounded applications of AI tools for your particular situation and not just AI Danielle, although that is one of the lessons inside the module, but rather also how you can interact with other AI models including Claude and ChatGPT. There are also affidavit drafting tips and prompts inside, in fact, an entire lesson devoted to helping you to use AI to help you create a draft of an affidavit. This is not to replace a lawyer, and not generic writing prompts. They're designed to help you provide your lawyer with a first draft of a document that can help frame the relationship history, the history of caregiving of the children, your experiences of abuse if that's relevant for you. This is something that could potentially save you thousands of dollars. Having a draft of something that your lawyer can then refine rather than starting from scratch, having to sift through your pages and pages and pages and pages and pages of general chronology. And if you've been experiencing coercive control, there's specific instructions in there that can help you to create a draft that documents the patterns of what you've experienced, not just a list of what can seem like isolated incidents. That distinction really matters, and no general AI tool used without that specialist knowledge behind it can produce that. Module 22 also covers what AI does well, where the real risks are, how to use it for things like co-parenting communication, and how to work with AI Danielle specifically as your 24-7 coaching and thinking partner resource. If you're already a Blueprint member, module 22 is there for you now, go and explore it. If you're not yet a member, this is just one more reason. The blueprint keeps growing into something that I'm genuinely proud of. Every module exists because there was a gap that needed filling. Module 22 exists because your situation deserves tools that understand your context. And AI Danielle exists because you deserve support at any hour, not just the ones when a human is available. You'll find everything at Danielle Blackcoaching.com.au and there are also links in the show notes. Thank you so much for being here. I appreciate the time that you spend with me having conversations that I know can sometimes be challenging. Please never underestimate the importance of you being prepared to look at yourself and your situation from different perspectives. I look forward to chatting with you again soon.