Been There Got Out Podcast

When your child won't talk to you, the pain can feel so physical that you don't know where to put it. Lawrence Joss knows that feeling well. He started Parental Alienation Advocates because he couldn't find anything...

"I thought my world had collapsed." When Katy Harris separated, a court order followed her 11-year-old son's wishes: he would live with his dad, while his older and younger brothers stayed with her. Within months...

"One parent becomes the good parent, and one parent becomes the bad parent." That's how Shawna Leatherman describes the moment parental alienation actually begins, and it's almost never in a courtroom. It starts small...

"A toxic environment is a toxic environment, whether the parents are together or they're separate." That's not a divorce coach talking. That's Dave Kopeny — a former probation officer, school counselor, and sheriff's...

"Force demands fairness. Power prepares for reality. Force chases. Power disengages when engagement is useless." That's the framework Manalizing founder Garth Haslem uses to explain why so many marriages, divorces, and...

"I would wake up every single morning, there'd be a moment when I'd forget who I was, and then I would just be furious. And it wasn't even at my ex — it was at the system allowing this to go on and on and on." If that...

"That is gaslighting — because the parent isn't thinking about what the child is going through. They're just making the child question their own reality." That's how licensed Marriage and Family Therapist Pinkal Panchal...

"Obsessive thinking is repetitive self-stimulation. It has movement in it — thought is a movement, it's an energy form." That's how somatic psychologist Annie Brook describes the loop so many of us get stuck in when...

“The court doesn’t care who was mean.” That’s not a throwaway line, according to Beverly Hills divorce attorney Nikoo Berenji, it’s one of the biggest blind spots she sees parents walk into family court with, and it can...

She spent five years on the inside of the family court system as a Connecticut Family Relations Counselor — the person who meets with both parents, talks to the kids, and writes the recommendation the judge leans on. In...

Most people believe that once the divorce is final, the chaos finally ends. With a high-conflict, narcissistic, or unpredictable co-parent, the opposite is often true. As they lose day-to-day control, they learn to...

Everyone walks into family court assuming the “fair” answer is to split the kids right down the middle. Fifty-fifty. Equal time, equal say, problem solved. But what if that instinct toward fairness is quietly setting...

If you have already left an abusive relationship and you're now staring down the family court system, this conversation was made for you. Lisa Johnson of Been There Got Out sits down with Liz Ortenberger, CEO of...

If you’ve ever been told that your child’s therapist wrote a letter for court and then watched a judge refuse to even look at it, this conversation explains why, and what actually works instead. In this interview, New...

Some of the language we all use in family court every day didn’t always exist. The word “co-parenting” is one of them — and the attorney credited with introducing it sits down with us in this conversation. Anne P...