Why I Recorded Ahead

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome back to the Post Separation Abuse Podcast. I'm your host, Danielle Black. Before we get into today's episode, I want to give you a little bit of context. If you're listening to this when it's released, I'm not sitting behind a microphone this week. In fact, I haven't been for several weeks. Rather, I'm taking some time away from work to spend the school holidays with my family. For those of you who have been around for a little while, you'll know that this is not unusual for me. Every school holidays, I take a step back. A big step back. Not because I don't care about this work. In fact, it's the opposite to that. I care about it deeply. I care about it enough to know that I can't show up in the way that I want to consistently, hopefully, for many, many, many years to come if I never take regular breaks, significant breaks. And those breaks don't happen by accident. They require planning. And I've recognised within myself that I need those breaks. I'm not a robot, I'm not AI, I'm a human being. I need rest. I need time with the people that I love. I need space to think, to breathe, and to just simply be present in my own life. And that's why this episode, in fact, this entire series, was recorded many weeks ago. I wanted the conversations in our podcast to continue to reach you while I was away without sacrificing the boundary that's become one of the most important things for me in sustaining this work over the long term. We'll talk about boundaries a little bit later.

The Question Behind The Series

SPEAKER_00 1:56

Over the past four episodes of the Working as Intended series, we spent a fair bit of time pulling back the curtain on the Australian family law system, looking at what lawyers are actually trained to do and just as importantly, what they're not trained to do. We talked about the role of the independent children's lawyer, the ICL. The widespread use of terms like quote child-focused by professionals who often have little or no training in child development, attachment, developmental science, really, anything that would help them to actually understand what being child-focused actually looks like. We've also explored why understanding the limits of professional expertise matters just as much as understanding the expertise itself. Throughout that series, I stated several times that your lawyer is the expert in the law, but that you are the expert on your children. We spoke about the fact that when each person stays in their lane and when those lanes work together instead of competing with one another, families are often in a much stronger position. But I also know that many people might have listened to those conversations and come away wondering something like, well, if lawyers aren't trained in child development, if family law isn't even a prerequisite for becoming a family lawyer, if the developmental knowledge has to come from somewhere else, then do I even need a lawyer? Why am I paying this person? And this is a fair question. Particularly when legal representation is financially out of reach for so many. Today's episode is my answer to that question, again, recorded many, many weeks ago. So if any of you have emailed me with that question or emailed via the contact page, contacted us or reached out in any way regarding that, you know, why do I actually need a lawyer? Well, because I'm on leave, I haven't actually read any of those emails. But me recording this episode was preemptive of those questions, because it's actually something that I wondered myself on my own journey. And I think having an honest look at self-representation in family law is really important. Because the reality is that understanding how the court works, how the federal circuit and family court works, is only one part. Knowing what forms to file is only one part. Understanding procedure is only one part. But there are other questions that are often overlooked. Because the reality is you could Google and learn a lot about how the Family Court works. From the Federal Circuit and Family Court's own website, there is a lot of information. There are forms that you can access and download. If you were to take the time, you could have all of that at your fingertips. But knowing what forms to file and when, and what to include in them, that's only one part. Understanding the procedure is only one part. There are far more significant, far more deeper aspects of things that influence the trajectory of a family court outcome that you're not going to find online. For example, you need to know what you're actually trying to achieve when you're in the court system, when you're engaging with family law at all. And you need to know why you're seeking it with a high level of detail, a high level of accuracy. You also need to know whether you have the emotional, educational, practical, and nervous system capacity to carry that responsibility yourself. Again, this is relevant to those who are self-representing currently or those who are considering self-representing. That's what we're exploring today.

A Moment To Regulate

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Before we jump into all of that, I'd like to invite you to take a slow deep breath in, in through your nose, holding for a few moments and letting it go slowly through your mouth. You can do that a few times if you like. Lifting your shoulders up to your ears and then letting them drop. Clenching and unclenching your hands, unclenching your jaw. Maybe give your body, your joints, a bit of a bit of a shake, a bit of a stretch, you know, the drill. While you're here, while you're listening, you might as well do some regulating. You might as well get back in touch with your body. That's so important on this journey. So, as I said, I haven't been checking my emails for the past couple of weeks, but I am anticipating some questions about why do I need a lawyer? If I need to do so much of the heavy lifting, and if my lawyer's really only there for the law, for the legal risk management, why am I paying them so much money? Why do I need them? Completely understandable. It's often very frustrating when we realise that there's so much knowledge that we need to bring to this process ourselves, that we need to then communicate it in a particular way to our lawyers so that they can best hear it, and so that they can then frame it in ways that the system will best receive it. Even that, I mean, it can sound like far more work than you ever intended. Again, particularly if you're paying a lawyer a lot of money, it's fair and reasonable that when you signed up for that, you were thinking, yeah, I'm just going to handball all of this to my lawyer, they'll handle it, it will be okay. But across the working as intended series, instead, what I've told you is that there's now other things that you really need to manage if you want to optimise the outcome for yourself and your children. And some of you might have walked away from those episodes thinking, I wonder if what Danielle's trying to get at is that maybe we should be self-representing, if maybe we don't actually need lawyers after all. And it's really important that I let you know that that's absolutely not what I was saying or pointing toward. Instead, what I wanted with that series was for you to understand the need for you to bring the substance of your children's developmental needs into the process yourself, because the majority of the professionals around you were not required to be trained in it. And that you need to use your lawyer strategically for the things a lawyer can do. That's obviously very different than saying you don't need a lawyer at all. Whether you're considering self-representation, whether you're currently self-representing, or whether you're working with a lawyer and wondering whether or not you'd be better off self-representing, this episode is for you.

My Own Brush With Self-Rep

SPEAKER_00 9:43

Before we jump in, I'm going to tell you a story. When my former partner initiated parenting proceedings in family court, I was at home with my three older children and my toddler son. There was not a lot of money for lawyers because at that point in time I wasn't working. Or not substantially. And understandably, I was then doing the mental maths that anyone in that position does. What can I afford? What do I need? What's going to happen if I get this wrong? Something that I don't think I've shared publicly before. My stepfather was a family law specialist lawyer for his entire 40-plus year career. Now, in any other circumstance, he was someone who would have been by my side through what I was about to be navigating in terms of the family court system. Helping me draft documents, giving advice on the timing of submissions. He would have been the ally that everyone who's self-representing would have hoped to have. I mean, come on, a family law specialist in the family, as a parent. I mean, what a gift. But unfortunately, he couldn't be that person for me because when my matter came into the court system, he was living with a significant illness that he was deteriorating from. It was taking him rapidly from us, and he has since passed away. I'm mentioning this to you because if you're thinking about what having an in-family legal expert would make possible for a parent considering self-representation, yeah, I know what that would have looked like for me. It would have been amazing, and I would have given self-representation significant consideration if my stepdad had been available to support me in that capacity. But that wasn't available to me the way that I know that it's not available to most of you listening. I'm telling you all of this because I want you to know that I'm not talking about self-representation from a perspective of never having considered it. You know, I've looked at my own capacity honestly and decided what I could and could not do, and I've coached over many years women who have chosen to self-represent, sometimes fully, sometimes partly, sometimes right through their entire case, sometimes for only parts here and there. Some have done so brilliantly, some have come to me after they've been self-representing for a little while, and things are going pretty catastrophically. So let's look honestly at the people who consider or who actually self-represent in Australian family courts.

Who Self-Represents And Why

SPEAKER_00 12:33

I think a lot of the current market presents self-representation as being some kind of democratic choice that's available to everyone. But that's really not what the lived reality of this shows. Access to legal representation in Australian family court is not equally distributed. It's honestly based on wealth. That's not how it should be in a country that positions itself as valuing fair process, and honestly, I think it's something that we all should be ashamed of as Australians. The fact that accessing quality legal representation requires money, significant money. It shouldn't be that way, but it is the reality of our system. The self-representing population in Australian family court is not just made up of one type of person. It is a spectrum. The majority are people who can't afford lawyers and are self-representing under financial strain and duress. That's the largest single group. They haven't chosen to self-represent because they're making some kind of strategic choice about how to allocate their resources. They're simply doing what they have to do because the alternative is not accessible to them. So this is in situations where they just don't quite meet the cutoff for legal aid. Alongside them are women for whom English is a second or maybe even third language, and for whom the cultural literacy of the Australian legal system is missing on top of that language load. These women often have children with Australian partners and can't return to their country of origin because of parenting orders. Their capacity to navigate the system unrepresented is severely constrained, and there's almost no infrastructure appropriately supporting them. There are women whose ex-partners have deliberately depleted joint assets through years of legal fees and manipulation, and who now can't afford the lawyers that they could have afforded at the start. That can be a specific tactic, financial abuse, legal systems abuse. It's very real and unfortunately it's not rare. There are women whose savings have simply drained across years of court time and who have now reached the point where a lawyer is just no longer possible. Not because their former partner was strategically depleting assets, but because family court matters can take years and the legal fees obviously can add up significantly. There are also women who have concluded, you know, sometimes correctly, that no lawyer that they can afford is going to appropriately advocate for what their children need. That's an informed refusal. And it's important that we do talk about that. For some parents, it is evidence of a clear-eyed assessment of what the representation has and hasn't delivered for them to this point. There's a subset of people who genuinely believe that they can do it better than a lawyer would. Some of them are right, many of them are not. The ones who do fit into that category can also have friends or family members who are experienced in family law, which again, as I mentioned when talking about my stepdad, you know, having someone in your corner like that makes a massive difference. There's also some with the specific combination of financial buffer, time, capacity, and system literacy who can self-represent competently. Those people do exist, but they're not the majority of the people who are self-representing. So the people who choose to self-represent in family law, they exist on a spectrum. And so this is what this episode is geared towards the spectrum of people who are currently self-representing or considering self-representation.

Forms Are Not The Substance

SPEAKER_00 16:29

We're living in a time where there's increasing education available online regarding separation, divorce, family court, podcasts, courses, do-it-yourself products. And as I said at the start of the episode, even from the Federal Circuit and Family Court's own website, you can learn a lot. You can get a really good understanding of the legal process, the court forms, the filing sequences, the procedural requirements, evidentiary norms, you can learn how the system works, all without paying a lawyer for any of that. But, yes, there is a but. Missing from the heart of all of that is that understanding the legal process in and of itself is really not the substance of a legal case of your family law matter. The substance is knowing what to seek, and what to seek is not really a legal question. The court forms, the filing sequences, the procedural requirements, the evidentiary norms, they do matter. Getting them wrong can have consequences, but they're not the key substance of a parenting matter. The substance is what arrangements would actually serve your children? What can you legally seek? What's legally defensible to seek that is also genuinely in your children's best interests? How do you need to frame all of that in terms of your children's needs? How do you need to frame that in a way that it will be received as credible by the court and by report writers, you know, the professionals who are in the system? What position can you hold with the developmental evidence to back you up? None of those questions is answered by understanding court forms. None of them are answered by knowing how to file an affidavit or what a notice of risk is or how dispute resolution processes work. Those things matter for the operational reality in terms of progressing through the system, but the what to seek question, which is the actual substance of your matter, whether this is for property or parenting, sits largely outside the entire do-it-yourself legal education space. And this connects directly to our working as intended podcast series, in the sense that lawyers were never trained in that substance either. Which means that learning what lawyers were trained in, which is what, you know, most of what you're going to be able to find out online is about, including in podcasts, you know, those sorts of things, the Federal Circuit Family Court website, that's not the substance. Essentially, it's it's just filling the gap that the lawyer would provide. But it's not going to answer the questions that your property or parenting matter is actually going to turn on. So whether you're self-repping or whether you're working with a lawyer, if you don't know what to seek and why, and how you can frame it in language that the system can hear, can receive, the procedural knowledge in and of itself is not going to save you. So that's the important reframe with all of this.

What I Could Do And Could Not

SPEAKER_00 19:51

I want to come back to my own story now because, well, partly I think it's a good way to articulate what self-representation actually requires. And perhaps in ways that you might not be aware of. So what could I do in my own situation? Well, I'm intelligent, I'm articulate, I'm a former teacher. I've often had clients ask me over the years why their lawyer can't write the way that I do, why their lawyer can't articulate things the way that I do. It is a particular skill that I've developed across a lifetime of reading, writing, and teaching. And in practical terms, it meant that I had the written language capacity to draft a lot of my own documentation, including my own affidavits, which is what I did. I wrote pretty much my entire affidavits myself. My lawyer needed to tweak very little. That's one of the ways that I was able to keep my legal fees quite low. I didn't use my lawyer for co-parenting communication with my ex ever. I really only used my lawyer for reviewing documents that I drafted, for making suggestions and changes where needed, and for submitting things when they needed to be submitted. That was it. Other than that, she didn't hear from me. So that's what I could do. But there were things that I couldn't do. Despite having the skills to manage the procedural and the written work, there's no way that I would have had the time or the emotional capacity or the nervous system capacity to manage my case alone. I was caring for four children, including my youngest, who was only about one year of age at the time. I was doing the bulk of the domestic labour, the parenting work. Drew was out there working, he was the primary earner. I was also still processing what had brought me into the family court system in the first place. I was still understanding what it was that I was dealing with from my ex and what I had endured for so many years. Self-representation for me would have required a level of sustained cognitive and emotional resources that I just didn't have available. But the good thing was that I knew that I didn't have it available. Now, you might be thinking, oh Danielle, you're being too hard on yourself or you know, you're selling yourself short. I don't think I am. Instead, I really do think that it's just an honest self-assessment. Knowing my own strengths and my own limits and just not pretending otherwise. There really are multiple capacities that self-representation requires in order to do it well. The written language capacity, the literacy skills, they're they're one, obviously, but not the only one. The issue can be that it's what most of what's currently available to you, so for example, all of the information that's available on the Federal Circuit and Family Court website, you know, PDF forms, so much of the information that you need that fits into that written language capacity piece. You know, it would be easy to think that, hey, yeah, I can read this, I can understand this, I get what this form is wanting me to provide. Yes, fantastic. We can tick that box, but again, that's only one of the capacities. And unfortunately, I think partly why it's one of the main or only capacities that's addressed by a lot of the information that's out there is because the other things are a lot more challenging to address. They can seem a lot more abstract, a lot more intangible.

Four Capacities You Must Assess

SPEAKER_00 23:58

In my view, there are four capacities that can determine whether self-representation is genuinely viable for you. And if this is something that you're currently doing or currently considering, I would invite you to honestly assess yourself on all four of these capacities. The first one is time capacity. Self-representation is not something that you can just do in your spare time. That is not what I would advise. It can involve a substantial ongoing workload with hard deadlines that don't shift just because you've had a hard week or the kids have been sick or whatever the case may be. Emails from the other side that you can't just ignore without missing something significant, responses to various documents, preparing of documents, filing of documents, corresponding with the lawyer on the other side or with the ICL if one has been appointed to your case, preparing for hearings, reviewing potentially hundreds of pages of subpoenaed material, reading and analysing your ex's affidavits, reading and analysing family reports, child impact reports. Someone earning enough money to be genuinely disqualified from legal aid but not enough to comfortably afford a lawyer is usually working something pretty close to full-time hours. Full-time hours plus self-representation plus parenting plus everything else that a solo parent is often doing, that's a load that could be easily underestimated. And the load doesn't shrink, it can grow across the years that a family court matter can take. Next there's emotional capacity, and this is the piece that I'm not sure very many people speak about or warn about, but it's arguably the most important. Self-representation means direct correspondence with the other side. If your ex has a lawyer, that means legal letters from that lawyer. Some of those letters might contain the most egregious accusations without any factual basis. And there are no consequences for there being baseless accusations in legal correspondence. The most offensive claims can be made in writing presented as fact, and the lawyer making them faces no professional consequence. This is just a reality of the system as it currently operates. If your ex is self-representing, then you're dealing with them directly, absorbing all of the correspondence in real time with no buffer. So that can be a lot of emotional labour on top of everything else that you've got going on, and it can feel relentless. It doesn't stop for weekends or school holidays or for the days that you're already right at the edge of what you can manage. A lawyer, when working well, can absorb some of that, not all of it, of course, and it's not their job. You still obviously have to see the correspondence, but they can mediate it a bit. They can filter it, they can tell you which of the accusations require a substantive response and which are just noise that can be ignored. They can take the immediate emotional impact of the letter and translate it into a technical response. Without that buffer, you're absorbing the full impact directly. Now, for some of you listening, you might be thinking, you know what, I think that's manageable for me. I don't think that's going to throw me off too much. But there might be others of you listening who are thinking, hey, yeah, there's absolutely no way that I want to be putting myself in that position for what could be potentially years. And unfortunately that can be the reality of the family court system, particularly if your matter goes all the way to final trial, which we hope it doesn't, you know. Most cases don't, but it is a possibility. There's then the nervous system capacity. Sustained post separation abuse, oftentimes coercive control with the clients that I'm working with, can produce measurable cognitive impairment. Trauma can reduce the capacity to focus, to remember things accurately, to think strategically under pressure, to hold multiple threads and facets and nuances of information simultaneously. And you know, these effects on the human brain, on the human body from trauma, they're documented effects. So it's not that any one person who's dealing with any of that is somehow doing something wrong. It's not a moral failing. It's just simply what can happen to the brain, to the body, as a result of trauma. And it's relevant here because the people that are most likely to be self-representing in family court or considering self-representing in family court, a lot of those people who've experienced coercive control, a lot of those people are protective parents who have been dealing with years of abuse. And unfortunately, those people are the least cognitively resourced oftentimes to do the sustained procedural work that self-representation requires. And again, this is not at all a personal failing. Rather, it's just a nervous system reality. Your capacity to hold complex procedural material in memory, to respond calmly to inflammatory correspondence, to prepare an affidavit that presents evidence in the right sequence and register, to be able to wrap your head around what you should be seeking and how to articulate that, how to understand why that should be what you're seeking. All of that can be significantly destabilized when you've also got a high level of trauma. If you're considering self-representation and you have been living inside a coercive controlled dynamic, and particularly if that's still going on for you in some way, shape, or form, you really do need to be reflecting on your nervous system capacity in your assessment for whether or not self-representation is the right path for you. And again, it needs to be an honest self-assessment, not an aspirational or hopeful self-assessment, not what you might be able to achieve or what you hope you might be able to manage, but what's actually the reality for you and your nervous system capacity right now. There's then the educational and literacy capacity. And again, it is important that we talk about this honestly, even though it can be uncomfortable to reflect on and to talk about. The reality is that self-representation requires substantial reading and writing capacity, not just for drafting your own affidavits, but also for reading and analysing the affidavit of your former partner. And as you get further on in the court system, those can sometimes run to hundreds of pages. There can be substantial reading and writing capacity, analysing capacity when we're talking about child impact reports and family reports for reading and analysing Supaned documents, which in some cases, in some circumstances, can amount to hundreds, even thousands of pages across the course of a matter. And then we've got aspects of needing to be able to understand the developmental substance of your matter and the evidentiary rules of the court. Some people absolutely have that capacity, but many don't. There's no shame in acknowledging that you don't have that capacity. Some people are neurodivergent and can struggle with reading loads specifically. Some might have English as a second or third language, and the legal terminology, the legalese can be another load on top of that. Now, AI can help with some of this, but there's many gaps that it really can't make up for. Partly because what you get from AI is only as good as what you put in. A parent who can't articulate their situation clearly and appropriately is not going to get a usable affidavit from ChatGPT. AI can oftentimes help you to sharpen and format material that you already have, but it can't generate the substance of your matter from a rough prompt. And if your reading capacity is limited, AI can't help you to read and analyse hundreds and hundreds or thousands of pages of bundled surpended documents. And that's not even getting into the legal ramifications of that. This is not to say don't use AI. In the post-separation parenting blueprint, we've got a module specifically on the use of AI. So I'm certainly not against AI, but rather we do need to be honest about what AI can and cannot compensate for. So we've covered those four capacities: the time capacity, emotional capacity, nervous system capacity, and the educational and literacy capacity. Most of the current resources available to you, again, whether we're talking about the court website or other, you know, law firms often have a lot of information on their websites. Wherever it is that you're getting support and information, a lot of the resources available out there are only talking about the writing side of it. And if you're considering self-representation, you really do need honest assessment on all of those four capacities, in my view, before you commit to that self-representation path.

When Self-Rep Becomes Exposure

SPEAKER_00 34:10

There's also something else that I think is important to cover here, and it might land a little bit uncomfortably, but you know, I don't think we should shy away from it because of that, because it's real. I've watched it play out across my many years of coaching, of doing this work, and of the work that I've done with clients that are self-representing. There is a subset of self-representing parents, you know, on that spectrum that we've spoken about, the spectrum of people who choose to self-represent. There is a subset of self-representing people who choose self-representation primarily because no one is going to hold them back. No one's going to temper them. They choose it because they can pursue, you know, every grievance, seek every remedy, raise every issue without a lawyer telling them what is achievable or not, what it will cost, you know, if it's going to cost more than it's going to give back potentially, especially if we're talking about property matters, what might land badly with a report writer or other court professional, what might prolong the matter without changing the outcome. Some of those people are self-representing because they've concluded that lawyers are not going to advocate for what they really need or what they want. That's an informed kind of refusal, and we spoke about it at the start of this episode. And sometimes that's absolutely correct. But some people are self-representing because they want to go in guns blazing on everything that they feel is deserved, and they're thinking that a lawyer is just going to slow them down. And that's, you know, that's not really freedom or liberation in my view. Rather, it's really problematic exposure. Because the tempering influence that a lawyer provides, the legal risk management, the outcome prediction, the pulling back from the brink of legally weak positions, yeah, I mean, it's not always right. I've said many times, including across the working as intended series of our podcast, that lawyers get it wrong. They often get it wrong. They often speak about things they've got no business speaking about, such as what you should be ordering in terms of time for your children, talking about it, you know, in a in a manner that they are putting forward as being, quote, child focused, when what we know is that unless they have pursued some kind of independent education and training, what we know is that their legal training included none of that information. So absolutely, lawyers get it wrong. Their risk management framework often throws kids' developmental needs, age needs, all the needs under the bus completely. It is a profession that has not done the work that it does need to do, that it desperately needs to do, to serve protective parents well. All that's true. And even when the lawyer's specific advice is wrong, the fact that they're pushing back on your position tells you something. It's data. It gives you information about how it might land with other court professionals, including a judge. It gives you data and information about what it might cost you, about what the process might look like if you pursue it, about how you might need to frame or articulate what you're seeking in a way that the system can understand it. Without that data, without the information and the data from a lawyer, you do run the risk of making decisions with less information that you should have. So making much less informed decisions. And the reality is that guns blazing self-representation can prolong matters, it can escalate conflict, it can cost a lot more emotionally, and it can end in much worse outcomes than if somebody was legally represented, if they were represented by a lawyer. It can also result in parents reaching final trial exhausted, completely depleted, and much further away from where they originally wanted than where they would have been if they'd had a lawyer guiding them. So if part of what's drawing you towards self-representation is sort of a version of, well, no one's going to stop me from pursuing what I want to pursue, well, you know, it's important to be honest about that. And, you know, this is not an accusation, but we do need to be honest about that as information, because the instinct of just wanting to, you know, go for broke and pursue whatever it is that you want to pursue without a lawyer holding you back, that that could very well be a thought, an instinct that's going to cost you and your children far more than it will gain you.

The Strategic Middle Ground

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So what's the middle ground? We don't need to look at this in an all or nothing black and white way. We're not choosing from spending all the money on a lawyer. Just all of it, just have all my money. It's not a it's not a choice between that or self-representing. There's a strategic middle ground, which is how to use a lawyer well when you have one. And that's honestly the position that I think best serves the majority of protective parents. It's not full retention of a lawyer with just total deference to their advice. And so it's important that we do steer away from that black and white binary of either we fully retain a lawyer and just defer everything to them, or self-represent and do it all ourselves. In practice, the strategic middle looks more like using your lawyer for reviewing what you've drafted for your affidavit, for example. Using them for procedural strategy, for court appearances where representation is required or strongly advisable, for submitting things at the right times in the right format, specific things that your lawyer is trained to do. But they're not for co-parenting communication with your ex. That's expensive, unnecessary, and often escalating. That's something that the vast majority of people can and should handle themselves. And this is where coaching can help. The support of coaching and the frameworks for how to communicate under certain conditions, including coercive control, is something that coaching provides a lot of support with. Your lawyer's not there for the emotional processing of the legal letters from the other side. The emotional processing is what you take to a coach, a therapist, a trusted friend, not to your lawyer from anywhere between $400 and $1,500 an hour. Your lawyer is not for figuring out everything that you should be seeking. Because again, a lot of that is not actually a question about the law. It's not a legal question. It's a developmental and an evidence question. And your lawyer was not trained in the developmental needs of children, in what's age appropriate, in what the research says best serves children in terms of parenting arrangements after separation. That's not the information that they have unless they've sought it independently or unless you bring it to them. And they don't necessarily have the skills to take what you're wanting, to take what you are presenting to them is appropriate based on what you know from the developmental science, from the attachment information. Many of them aren't trained in okay, how to take that and then frame it in a way that the system will understand. This is why you having a deep understanding of this is so important. This is exactly why I created the post-separation parenting blueprint, so that you can have a firm understanding that you can then articulate to your lawyer. And I think this is where we need to clear up the fact that there is not actually anything that you can or can't seek in parenting orders in particular. It's not a case of, oh well, what am I allowed to ask for? You can pretty much ask for whatever you want. Whether it's likely to be seen as realistic, whether it's likely to be seen as appropriate, you know, there's all kinds of other factors, but just because one lawyer doesn't like it or poo-poos it, all that tells you is that they haven't had experience potentially with a parent coming to them with developmental science, with an understanding, a solid understanding of what's age appropriate. As an example, I've had a lot of clients come to me when there's no parenting orders in place at all. They're talking with a lawyer. There could be back and forth legal letters going between them and the other side, and they're getting pressure from a lawyer who's saying, You have to be offering more. You have to be putting more on the table. And the client comes to me concerned, upset. And my first question is. Hang on a second. Just so I understand, you know, for me to be able to give, you know, to help a parent understand what their children need, again, I'm not giving legal advice. I'm helping parents to understand what would best serve their children developmentally first. That's the first thing that needs to be ascertained before a parent can then make a decision about what to seek in parenting orders or even in a parenting plan. And so I'm saying, look, have you currently got orders? You know, I'm a little bit confused. Your lawyer's saying that you have to be doing XYZ, but you're saying that there's no orders, and then the parent will confirm and say, no, you know, there's no parenting orders, we've never been to court. But the lawyer's telling me that I have to do XYZ, I have to offer overnights, or I have to offer more overnights. Now that's categorically untrue. If you don't have parenting orders, you don't actually have to do fuck all. Now are there certain things that you potentially should do? You know, are there things that might be perceived unfavourably if you end up in the court system and you haven't done them? Maybe, but that's, you know, a totally different question. So there are so many parents out there who I don't know, they they don't realise the the training gap of their lawyer. They don't realise that there's not actually something in particular that you should or shouldn't be seeking, that you should or shouldn't have in place, that you should or shouldn't be offering. There's actually nothing in the law about what you have to seek in terms of parenting times. This is just one more reason why just leaving that in the hands of your lawyer, I mean it's essentially like walking into your lawyer's office, dropping your kids off and saying, There you go, this is my most precious little people in the world that I love more than anything else, and I'm entrusting them to you. And I'm assuming you wouldn't do that. And it's the same with this. It's the same with this because in so many ways figuring out what to seek is not a legal question. It's a question about well what's happening for your individual children? What are their ages? What are their stages of development? Who's the primary caregiver? To what extent was the other parent providing regular daily care, emotional attunement, getting up in the middle of the night. I'm not talking about, yeah, every now and then the other parent made a few dinners, did some school pickups, even if it was every day. That's not the same, you know, picking up from school, making some dinner, saying, no no, see you in the morning, that's not being a primary caregiver. There's so much more that goes into it than that. But these are all of the things that need to be ascertained, that need to be really sifted through when we're thinking about what to be seeking in final orders to ensure that we're number one, putting the needs of children first. You know, this is what being child focused is actually about, and it's not what your lawyer has been trained to do, again, unless they have sought their own further independent education and training in this area. So that's not what they're for. They're not for the capacity work either. They're not for helping you to regulate or manage trauma. None of that's got to do with the law. But all of those things are still essential to your capacity to advocate well for yourself, so they do belong in the ecosystem.

Coaching And Evidence-Based Support

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And this is where what genuinely helps for those things is coaching. The post-separation parenting blueprint, AI Danielle, who is available at any hour of any day. Community and peer support, where you can find it. So people that work with us via a coaching package also have access to our secure online community. Therapy for the trauma work, if that's something that you need, if it's something available to you and if you've got capacity for it. Getting whatever legal advice that you can afford. You can ask about deferred payment arrangements after property settlements. There are some lawyers who will work with clients to that extent. There are lawyers who will step in and step out to assist at key moments rather than running the whole matter. So you can talk to lawyers about limited scope representation, sometimes called unbundled legal services. You can put your capacity and knowledge work into the layers that no lawyer can do for you, which again is about you understanding what your children actually need when we're talking about the parenting side of things, and building the evidence-based case for it. This is the strategic middle where most protective parents actually need to be. Not because it's a compromise, but because it's a genuine, honest match with what different resources can offer and what your matter really requires. And for the property side of things, look, this is not something that we've delved into very much on the podcast. It's obviously not what the post-separation parenting blueprint covers, because that is directed at parenting. But in my many years of coaching, I have worked with a lot of clients where what they're navigating is both property and parenting matters, or even just for clients who are simply navigating a property matter, where they still need a coach. They need a coach who understands the landscape, who understands what they're dealing with, who understands how to help them stay focused on their goal, who can help them to analyse the benefits and the risks of particular options, pathways, proposals. And again, back to the post-separation parenting blueprint, that's the perfect resource to help you to understand and to answer the question of what it is that you should be seeking in terms of what your children need, what is going to be in their best interests. And it's the question that nothing in the legal education space, you know, can answer. It's nothing that stuff on the Federal Circuit and Family Court website can answer. Because it's got nothing to do with filling in forms or navigating court procedures. You know, and that's not what the blueprint's for. It's not about filling in forms, but it does help you with the capacity side of things, the capacity in the nervous system work, the regulation, the somatic knowledge, the specific practices that can help you to hold steady under sustained conflict. Because truly everything else in this space, in this work, depends on your capacity to bring it. And capacity is not decoration, it's not nice to have. It's really foundational. There are modules on the developmental evidence for what children actually need at different ages and stages, on framing, on documentation, on what makes advocacy credible. And as you heard me mention before, I'm a former teacher. I'm not a former lawyer. I honestly think that my background is a strength, not a weakness. The reason that my work is so fit for purpose for parents navigating post-separation abuse is that it is not built on the framework that the legal profession is trained in. Because that framework, honestly, the framework that the legal profession is based on, I personally think is very problematic. And it doesn't contain what parenting matters actually turn on. Rather, what I've created in the work that I do, the work that my team does, is built on the substance, the developmental science, the attachment literature, the coercive control research, the lived experience of parents who have navigated the system with the knowledge that their lawyers were never trained to have. Unfortunately, putting children first after separation is just simply not something that the legal profession has been trained to do. It's something that a different kind of education and information and training builds. And that training and education and information is what this podcast is for, it's what the post-separation parenting blueprint is for. It's what the coaching that my team and I do is for. The post-separation parenting blueprint is what the substance work looks like. Coaching takes what's in the post-separation parenting blueprint and applies it to your specific situation to your specific children. AI Daniel helps to make it available at any hour of any day, and together they form a layer that no lawyer can give you, and that no legal product can give you, that no family court website can give you. If you're self-representing because you can't afford a lawyer, the post-separation parenting blueprint is the substance layer, the foundational layer. It's what helps you to understand what your children need so that you then understand what you should be seeking in the first place, and how to frame it so that the system will best receive it. If you're working with a lawyer and you're trying to use them well, the post-separation parenting blueprint is still the substance layer because your lawyer wasn't trained in what your children actually need. You need to bring that. The blueprint is what building that capacity looks like when it's organized for you. If you came into this episode wondering why on earth you need a lawyer after listening to the working as intended series, I hope that things are now a little bit clearer. The truth is that they do come in handy for the legal side of things. But you need the substance work for everything else. The two together held strategically is the position that most protective parents need to be in. The post-separation parenting blueprint provides that layer of substance that helps to make it possible. Self-representation is possible for some parents. And it's also one of the hardest things that a protective parent can attempt, particularly if they're still dealing with post-separation abuse. It's important that we talk about that honestly because you deserve the honest picture before you commit to a particular pathway or before you conclude that self-representation is preferable to a middle ground strategic compromise that might actually serve you

Boundaries And The Next Series

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better. At the start of this episode, we spoke about boundaries. Boundaries aren't always easy. Sometimes they disappoint people, sometimes they require a lot of work up front, and maintaining them, maintaining them can be even more uncomfortable. Setting them's one thing, being able to maintain them can be something else entirely. But they are one of the reasons that I can continue to do this work without becoming burned out, resentful, or feeling as though my work has consumed every part of my life. Being consumed by work might be hard for you to imagine if you have a job where you walk away from it at a certain time and then not have to think about it or don't feel pulled to think about it in any significant way until your next scheduled workday. To be honest, I could think about the post-separation landscape all day, every day, not because I've got some kind of weird obsession, but rather it's something that I'm passionate about. I'm passionate about helping people who are struggling. And particularly I'm passionate about helping children, in helping protective parents get better outcomes for their children. That's why the tagline here at Danielle Black Coaching is putting children first after separation. I've seen so much harm come to children, first to my own child, and then to the children of others. Even now, when my eldest child is struggling in some way, shape or form, I find myself wondering, does this issue, this struggle have anything to do with what has happened to us? Does it have anything to do with what they experienced, with what I experienced? Could it have been prevented? Again, not as an obsessive thought. I'm just a concerned, compassionate mum, a curious mum. A mum who wants to help other parents do a better job of protecting their children than I did. And I'm not saying that to be hard on myself, I'm just being honest. Any form of healing of moving forward first needs honesty, at the very least with ourselves. The fact that I'm honest with myself about my own failings on my post-separation journey is one of the reasons that I'm able to do this work with such a high level of effectiveness. Because I've held a mirror up to myself. I'm able to help my clients hold a mirror up to themselves to see honestly what's reflected back. Not for a purpose of feeling guilt or shame, although working through those things can be part of our journey. But again, because we can't truly heal and move forward unless we're prepared to see ourselves and our choices honestly. There's something so liberating about reflecting honestly and saying to ourselves or to our coach or even to our kids, I've messed up a few things along the way. I did the best that I could in those moments, but that's not where I want to leave things because I know that I'm capable of more. I know I'm capable of better, and I want to try. But thinking about all things post-separation would not be healthy for anyone. And I have a husband and four kids that I love and I really want to spend time with, not to mention other family members and friends. So for me, boundaries around my work are really necessary. And boundaries are exactly what we're going to be talking about in the next series of episodes here on the Post-Sparation Abuse Podcast.

How Girls Learn To Earn Love

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Across a series of episodes, together we're going to explore the specific ways that girls are taught from a very young age to earn love. Yes. I said earn. To earn love. Already that might have prompted some thoughts and feelings for you. We'll be exploring the way that girls are taught to earn love through performance, compliance, self-sacrifice, and keeping everyone else comfortable. We'll look at how that conditioning can shape the partners that we choose, the dynamics that we tolerate, the way we can struggle to set healthy boundaries, and the way that we can sometimes struggle to accept the healthy boundaries of others. We'll talk about what happens after separation, why those patterns don't simply just disappear because an intimate relationship ends, and why the real work is learning more about them so that we can interrupt them, so that we can dismantle them. Perhaps surprisingly, many of the same patterns that shape the way that women navigate intimate relationships also shape the way that we navigate separation, divorce, the court system, and conflict in general. And this isn't just about us. It's also about our children. It's about whether the next generation inherits the same patterns or whether they're given permission to do something different, whether they are modeled something different, a different way of being, a healthier way of being, a healthier way of relating to themselves and to others.

Closing And Back Soon

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I look forward to sharing those conversations with you. I value your time and your commitment to yourself and to the fact that you're open to viewing yourself and your life from different perspectives and making space for different thoughts and ideas. I look forward to chatting with you again soon. And to my wonderful coaching community and particularly my one-on-one coaching clients. If I've mapped things out correctly on my calendar, by the time this particular episode gets released, I think it will be the following week that I will be back on deck chatting with you, responding to your messages, to your emails, jumping right back into the thick of it. And I've had a lovely break, and I can't wait.