The initial patterns are subtle, designed to be easy to justify as if somebody maybe had a bad day, or maybe you could have framed that differently.

In the beginning, it starts off like some fairy tale dream. Constant texting. Fast declarations. A partner who already seems to know you better than anyone has. They feel perfectly made for you. Fate.

They create a version of themselves specifically made for you by mirroring back your characteristics and things that you said you wanted in a partner.

This is intentional. That way, you always have something important to compare it back to once things change. You can always believe in their “potential”. Because you’ve seen it before. So naturally, they have to be able to get back to that version of themselves, right?

If you just work harder at being a better partner, the person that you fell in love with will come back to you, right?

That’s part of what makes it so hard to leave.

I’ve supported more than 500 women leaving coercively controlling relationships. All of the relationships are unique, but they all follow the same pattern.

Amazing, perfect, too good to be true.

To a couple of outbursts, but being able to work through them.

Then, over the years, a slow degradation of their autonomy to where they don’t even recognize themselves.

This article expands on the signs of emotional abuse, the red flags to check for for coercive control, and define what a healthy relationship actually looks like.

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The Signs Most Often Explained Away, and What Healthy Looks Like Instead

Evan Stark, whose research is the foundation of most coercive control law today, states: “In the coercive control model, what men do to women is less important than what they prevent women from doing for themselves.”

The damage that coercive control causes extends far past any single disagreement. It’s a slow erosion of one’s autonomy. He also refers to coercive control as a liberty crime.

The Psychological Maltreatment of Women Inventory, developed by Richard Tolman and validated in 1999, asks women how often a partner did each of the following. The scale’s own wording says “him,” because it was validated on women with male partners. The bracket below is the only change made to the original text.

Isolation, read as devotion

• “My partner monitored my time and made me account for my whereabouts.”

• “My partner was jealous or suspicious of my friends.”

• “My partner interfered in my relationships with other family members.”

• “My partner restricted my use of the telephone.”

What healthy looks like instead: Your time is yours to account for. Your friends don’t need approval, and seeing them doesn’t require an explanation afterward. Researchers call this autonomy support, and across three studies it was one of the strongest predictors of how secure a relationship actually feels (La Guardia, Ryan, Couchman, & Deci, 2000).

Control over decisions, read as one partner just handling things

• “My partner used our money or made important financial decisions without talking to me about it.”

• “My partner tried to keep me from doing things to help myself.”

What healthy looks like instead: Money decisions get made together. There is clarity around both parties’ finances. Both partners are supportive of each other’s goals to advance their education, career, friend circle, hobbies, etc.

Distorting what’s real, read as a rough patch in communication

• “My partner accused me of having an affair.”

• “My partner told me my feelings were irrational or crazy.”

• “My partner tried to make me feel crazy.”

• “My partner blamed me for [their] problems.”

What healthy looks like instead: Your feelings are validated. When something goes wrong, you can talk about whose responsibility it actually is without either of you rewriting what happened. Researchers call this perceived partner responsiveness: a partner who accurately reads what you feel, treats it as legitimate, and shows they care (Laurenceau, Feldman Barrett, & Pietromonaco, 1998).

Contempt in daily life, read as a bad temper

• “My partner called me names.”

• “My partner swore at me.”

• “My partner yelled and screamed at me.”

• “My partner treated me like an inferior.”

What healthy looks like instead: Any bad day or argument is followed with an apology, accountability, and actionable steps taken after to avoid the same issue happening again. Gottman and Levenson followed 73 married couples for four years and found the ones who stayed together kept roughly 5 positive interactions for every 1 negative one, even during conflict.

Anything below that 5:1 ratio, separation and divorce rates doubled.

The first two categories tend to get the most cover, because isolation and financial control can be dressed up as care: a partner who “just worries,” a partner who’s “better with numbers.”

The second two are harder to hide once you’re looking for them, which is part of why they usually show up later, after the isolation has escalated.

Disclaimer: Pattern recognition and diagnosis are separate things. I’m not a psychiatrist, and nobody can diagnose a partner who’s not in the room. What this list gives is language to describe what may or may not be happening in your partnership.

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How It Starts, and Where It Turns

Love bombing, defined in one study as “the presence of excessive communication at the beginning of a romantic relationship in order to obtain power and control over another’s life as a means of narcissistic self-enhancement.”

In a research survey, the people who love-bombed scored higher on narcissistic traits than the people who didn’t. Volume of communication and time spent together, isn’t a direct correlation of love.

Most of the women I work with have their own version of the same pattern:

• In the beginning, it felt too good to be true. They were 100% certain that they had found their soulmate

• Then conflict increased.A physical altercation, a freak-out, or being pressured into signing a prenup or postnup they weren’t comfortable with, timed to the wedding night, the night before, or a couple of days out. By then the wedding is 24 hours away, family has flown in, and everyone thinks they’re celebrating a perfect partnership. So what is she supposed to do? Cancel everything and throw the money away? No. None of them ever do.

• They justified the increase in conflict and minimized everything else in between. They all held on to the potential of who their partner was before they got married, some for just a few years and some for decades. Ultimately, they were able to break free of the control cycle, saw how bad the abuse was, and decided to divorce

This is a proven cycle.

1. Tension builds until something breaks: an explosion, a blowup, a night that ends badly.

2. Then comes the repair: apologies, gifts, the same flood of attention from the beginning, bigger this time.

3. Then things are “back to normal”.

4. Then tension starts building again.

Researchers found this exact four-part cycle decades ago in women who’d survived physical violence. The same pattern can present even without the physical violence.

Love bombing comes back in the repair stage, and it makes it more effective because now you have that perfect version that the relationship once was to compare it against.

A partner whose affection comes on an unpredictable loop has a higher dopamine response than a predictable loop.

I expand on this more in my article, Trauma Bonding with a Narcissist.

What a Good Day Actually Means

One of my clients told me: “It took me over 20 years of being married to realize that a good day isn’t classified as just not getting into an argument. I didn’t know what a good day was until I moved out and had space for my nervous system to regulate and get away from the partner who was causing me so much stress and so much pain.”

Chronic stress rewires the brain’s threat response, and that shift is reversible once the source of the stress is gone.

If you recognized your relationship somewhere on this list, you don’t have to act on it today. Naming a pattern isn’t the same as leaving it.

It can just be the first step in, finding the language to describe what is happening.

If any of this describes your relationship and you’re not safe, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available 24/7: 800-799-7233, text START to 88788, or chat at thehotline.org.

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Disclaimer: This is educational content. It is not therapy, medical care, or a diagnosis. Cassie is a divorce strategist. She is not a licensed clinician, and no one can diagnose a partner they haven’t personally evaluated. If you’re in immediate danger, call 911 or the National Domestic Violence Hotline above.

Sources

• Stark, E. (2007). Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life. Oxford University Press.

• La Guardia, J. G., Ryan, R. M., Couchman, C. E., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Within-person variation in security of attachment: A self-determination theory perspective on attachment, need fulfillment, and well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(3), 367–384. (Sample: 448 undergraduates across three studies.)

• Laurenceau, J.-P., Feldman Barrett, L., & Pietromonaco, P. R. (1998). Intimacy as an interpersonal process: The importance of self-disclosure, partner disclosure, and perceived partner responsiveness in interpersonal exchanges. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(5), 1238–1251.

• Gottman, J. M., & Levenson, R. W. (1992). Marital processes predictive of later dissolution: Behavior, physiology, and health. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63(2), 221–233. (Sample: 73 married couples, 4-year follow-up.)

• Tolman, R. M. (1999). The validation of the Psychological Maltreatment of Women Inventory. Violence and Victims, 14(1), 25–37. Instrument text: SABI Database, UNC

• Strutzenberg, C. C., Wiersma-Mosley, J. D., Jozkowski, K. N., & Becnel, J. N. (2017). Love-bombing: A narcissistic approach to relationship formation. Discovery, The Student Journal of Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences, 18(1), 81–89.

• Walker, L. E. (1979). The Battered Woman. Harper & Row. (Sample: approximately 1,500 women, non-random; Walker herself noted the data could not support broad generalization.)

• Fiorillo, C. D., Tobler, P. N., & Schultz, W. (2003). Discrete coding of reward probability and uncertainty by dopamine neurons. Science, 299(5614), 1898–1902.

• Dutton, D. G., & Painter, S. (1993). Emotional attachments in abusive relationships: A test of traumatic bonding theory. Violence and Victims, 8(2), 105–120.

• Arnsten, A. F. T. (2009). Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(6), 410–422.

Netflix’s three-part docuseries, released August 26, follows the death of Mica Miller, a 30-year-old Myrtle Beach pastor’s wife, found at Lumber River State Park on April 27, 2024, two days after she served her husband, John-Paul Miller, divorce papers.

Her death was ruled a suicide. Her family, and federal prosecutors, are bringing to light a pattern of surveillance and control that initially, never left a mark and was designed to be invisible.

The documentary shows her story, and how the abuse intensified over the years.

What it didn’t expand on is what happened after her death.

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What the Documentary Actually Shows

John-Paul Miller was indicted in December 2025 on two federal counts. Cyberstalking, covering alleged conduct from November 2022 through April 2024, including posting explicit images of Mica without her consent and placing a tracking device on her vehicle.

And lying to FBI investigators in October 2024 about how often he called her and about restrictions on his contact with her. He has pleaded not guilty to both (shocker). His pretrial hearing is scheduled for October 6, 2026, after six delays.

None of that leaves a bruise. Isolation from family. Control over money. A location tracker on a car. Monitoring calls timed to control her day. A pattern built entirely out of behavior that isn’t necessarily “illegal”.

Though varying forms of physical abuse were present when she was still in the home, the coercive control escalated after she finally left.

If a stranger had tracked her car, slashed her tires, and approached her at a gas station, it would have read as a stalking case that needed to be taken seriously right away.

John-Paul was still legally her husband while he did all of it, and often, that status is a lot of why the same behavior didn’t get read as criminal.

Whether it gets treated as stalking or as “marital issues” depends on who did it more than what was done.

South Carolina also requires a full year of living separately, without reconciling, before either spouse can file for an absolute divorce. If reconciliation is attempted, then that one year has to start over.

Mica served him divorce papers two days before she died. She had to wait a full calendar year from moving out to take any sort of legal steps to simply start the divorce process.

Separation is often the most dangerous time for a woman leaving a coercively controlling partner, and she had to live that for an entire year.

She Asked For Help

Mica reached out. Repeatedly, over two years, through more than one channel, to more than one person who could have done something.

On February 21, 2024, she told a Myrtle Beach police officer that John-Paul had groomed her since she was 10 years old. On March 11, after her tires were slashed and a man approached her at a gas station, she found a tracking device on her car at a Honda dealership and went to the magistrate’s office seeking a restraining order, telling them she was afraid for her life. A trial for that case was held March 26. It isn’t publicly known whether the order was granted before she died.

Bruna Pabon says in the documentary: “Mica told me and my husband she was afraid for her life... He’s gonna put a bullet in my head and then tell everybody I killed myself.” Her siblings’ own court filings say she confided in family and church members too.

The tracking device and tire slashing were reported, but none of it ended up in John-Paul being charged. The police said there was insufficient evidence.

None of what happened to her, on its own, broke a law. Solid Rock Church didn’t remove John-Paul from his pastoral role until the Sunday after her death, once the investigation into it had already been announced.

John-Paul hid behind his image of a pastor. He was enthusiastic, had a following, and had power.

Mica had to fight to be believed over a man the congregation had already decided was one of the good ones.

What the Documentary Leaves Out

I want to take a moment to acknowledge the powerful work that Mica’s loved ones have been doing

The docuseries cover a death, an investigation, and a marriage. It didn’t cover what her family has spent 2026 doing in a South Carolina statehouse.

The work her loved ones are doing deserve attention.

They’re fighting to get a bill passed called Mica’s Law. If that law is passed, it would make coercive control a felony in South Carolina, punishable by up to 10 years, and require law enforcement to be trained to recognize psychological, financial, and emotional abuse as domestic violence, not just physical violence.

Her sister Anna stated at a hearing: “Because you’re married to someone, that’s not harassment in South Carolina. That’s why Mica’s Law is so important to us as a family.”

Her sister Abigail Francis testified in front of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on April 15: “Between the years of 2022 and 2024, Mica called the police on seven different occasions seeking help against her alleged abuser. But there was nothing for them to do since there were no laws to guide them against coercive control.”

She went further: “The lack of accountability over the years, allowing this bill to lapse, was detrimental and unforgivable, as this could have saved our sister’s life.”

Seven calls to police. Seven times the system had nothing to offer, because the words for what was happening to her are not widely known, and there is not a law that makes this behavior illegal.

The bill is currently stalled in committee. South Carolina’s legislative session ended May 14 without a floor vote, which means it’s effectively dead for 2026 and has to be reintroduced in 2027.

Its sponsor is running for state attorney general this year and won’t be the one to bring it back. Her brother Nate said the federal charges against John-Paul “only reflect a fraction of what he did to her.”

The family is still fighting for the state to put this bill in the legislature.

Safety Disclaimer: If there is a safety concern in your situation, this article is not the one for you right now. Safety comes first, before everything else in this process. The National Domestic Violence Hotline is 800.799.7233. You can text START to 88788 or chat at thehotline.org. Advocates are available 24/7 and they will build a personalized safety plan with you.

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It Doesn’t Take What Happened to Mica for This to Count

Mica Miller’s case is extreme.

Most women reading this are not living inside a case that extreme, that’s exactly why it’s easy for them to minimize their abuse.

From my professional experience and according to the research, it doesn’t have to be as extreme as Mica’s to be dangerous.

Coker et al. (2000) followed 1,152 women through family practice clinics and found that psychological abuse without any physical violence at all was associated with worse physical and mental health outcomes at rates statistically similar to physical abuse: more chronic pain, more disability, more migraines.

Coercive control/complex emotional abuse can still damage your physical and mental health at rates similar to physical abuse.

Follingstad et al. (1990) asked 234 women who’d experienced physical abuse.

When they were asked which hurt more, the physical abuse or the emotional abuse. 72% said the emotional abuse had a more severe impact on them.

The abuse doesn’t have to escalate to the same extreme as Mica’s to be real and to be damaging.

If your partner tracks where you are, controls what you spend, isolates you from the people who’d tell you something’s wrong, or monitors your calls, you’re allowed to call it coercive control.

Why So Many Women Stay

Survivors of coercive control are often not believed. This form of abuse is designed to be invisible.

The period right after someone tries to leave is also the most dangerous.

Campbell et al. (2003) studied 220 women killed by a partner against 343 who had survived abuse and hadn’t been killed.

A highly controlling partner already raises the risk of homicide. But if the woman separates, that risk nearly triples. From an adjusted odds ratio of 2.90 (controlling partner, no separation) to 8.98 (controlling partner, after separation).

For a lot of women, separation is the most dangerous point in the relationship.

In North Carolina, a couple has to live separately for a year and a day before either one can file for an absolute divorce. In South Carolina, it’s one continuous year, and if the couple reconciles even briefly, the year has to start over. The documentary doesn’t touch on that.

I’ve supported many women through divorce in both states, and I believe those laws need to change.

Plenty of women can’t afford a year of running two households. Plenty of them don’t have a support network to fall back on, especially if they moved across the country for their partner in the first place.

And in a state that doesn’t recognize coercive control as domestic violence, a woman living through that year has no legal language for what’s happening to her while she’s required to sit inside it.

This is why so many women stay. Staying is, in a lot of these situations, statistically safer than leaving. The relationship isn’t safe. Leaving without a plan can be more dangerous than staying without one.

Where to Start

South Carolina doesn’t have a coercive control statute yet. Your state might not either. But that doesn’t mean that your abuse is invalid, and it doesn’t mean that your state won’t have these statutes in the future.

The states that do recognize coercive control recognize it as a pattern proven over time, which it’s important to document the abuse that you’re experiencing now. In any form of high conflict divorce, the case is built before it’s filed.

How to document it:

• What was said or done

• Whether there was a witness

• The impact it had on the children

• Entire text message or email threads

• Any financial abuse

If you’re considering separation, contact a local domestic violence advocate can help you build a safety plan specific to your situation and your timeline.

The National Domestic Violence Hotline does this free, by phone or chat, 24/7: 800.799.7233, text START to 88788, or chat at thehotline.org.

If anyone reading this is experiencing coercive control, your abuse is real, your pain is real, and calling it coercive control is not a dramatic label.

The legal system may not recognize it yet, but that doesn’t mean that your experiences cannot be validated

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Disclaimer: This is educational content, not legal advice. Nothing in family law is guaranteed. Rules, procedures, and outcomes vary state by state, county by county, and case by case. Always consult a licensed attorney in your jurisdiction before making decisions about your case.

Sources

• Time, The Heartbreaking True Story of Mica Miller and Netflix’s ‘Death of the Pastor’s Wife’

• Netflix Tudum, Where Is JP Miller Now? Death of the Pastor’s Wife Update

• WMBF News, Netflix to release documentary on Myrtle Beach pastor’s wife Mica Miller

• WMBF News, Pending criminal charges as Netflix documentary draws new attention to Horry County

• WMBF News, S.C. advocates push for new coercive control law (source for Abigail Francis and Anna’s testimony)

• WPDE, Bill advocates dubbed ‘Mica’s Law’ fails to progress in SC legislature

• WPDE, TIMELINE: Everything we know about the Mica Miller case (source for the February 21 and March 11, 2024 police reports, the restraining order filing and hearing, and Solid Rock’s timing on removing John-Paul from his pastoral role)

• Oxygen, Mica Miller Allegedly Told Friend She Feared Husband John Paul Miller Would Kill Her and Stage Her Suicide (source for the Bruna Pabon quote from the documentary)

• Yahoo News, ‘Keep praying for me’: In month before death, Mica Miller said faith, friends kept her strong

• North Carolina Judicial Branch, Separation and Divorce

• South Carolina Code of Laws, Section 20-3-10, Grounds for divorce

• Coker, A.L., Smith, P.H., Bethea, L., King, M.R., & McKeown, R.E. (2000). Physical health consequences of physical and psychological intimate partner violence. Archives of Family Medicine, 9(5), 451-457.

• Follingstad, D.R., Rutledge, L.L., Berg, B.J., Hause, E.S., & Polek, D.S. (1990). The role of emotional abuse in physically abusive relationships. Journal of Family Violence, 5(2), 107-120.

• Campbell, J.C., Webster, D., Koziol-McLain, J., et al. (2003). Risk factors for femicide in abusive relationships: results from a multisite case control study. American Journal of Public Health, 93(7), 1089-1097.

• The National Domestic Violence Hotline. 800.799.7233, text START to 88788, or chat online.

At a high level, their job is to advocate for the children and/or run their own investigation to get a better understanding of what is truly going on in the homes, then write up a report to explain their findings to the judge.

1. A guardian ad litem is appointed by the court to look out for someone who can’t fully advocate for themselves in the process, in this case, minor children. They investigate. Interview both parents, visit both homes, pull records, and hand the judge a recommendation.

• A GAL doesn’t decide anything and isn’t your child’s attorney. They report to the court. Nothing said to a GAL is protected. Anything can be used in the divorce process.

2. A custody evaluator is usually a licensed mental health professional, brought in to run a more formal, often psychological, assessment. Their job, by the field’s own governing standards, is to function as an impartial examiner and produce information and opinions about custody, parenting, and access for the court and both attorneys. Less of an investigation and more of a clinical evaluation.

3. An attorney for the child, called minor’s counsel in California and a children’s attorney in some other states. This one is an actual practicing attorney, representing your child’s stated wishes as a client. They have full attorney-client privilege. The job is to advocate for what your child says they want, even when the attorney privately disagrees, and even when a judge appoints them because it’s in the child’s best interest to have that advocate, not because your child requested one.

Every state runs this differently, with different practices and different people who can be brought onto your case to investigate and advocate for your kids. Talk to your attorney, or do your own research, to understand what those options actually look like where you live.

Bringing in a third party to evaluate everything sounds like a great idea. But when you’re dealing with a coercively controlling partner, with what’s been referred to as invisible abuse, and with training that isn’t consistent from one state to the next, this sometimes can do more harm than good.

Disclaimer: This is educational content, not legal advice. Nothing in family law is guaranteed. Rules, procedures, and outcomes vary state by state, county by county, and case by case. Always consult a licensed attorney in your jurisdiction before making decisions about your case.

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The Case For Having One

A judge in a contested case gets maybe an hour of hearing time and two people telling opposite stories. A GAL or evaluator is often the only person in the process with the time and the authority to go look. Visit both homes. Talk to the pediatrician. Sit with the kids without a parent in the room.

Done well, it’s the closest thing to the truth the court gets. I’ve had clients with a GAL who came from a background in child psychology, or family law, and genuinely wanted to help the kids in the middle of a high-conflict case. Those are the ones who often advocate clearly. Who can explain a complicated family dynamic to a judge in language the judge already uses.

The judge weighs what they say heavily. When those professionals were trained/experienced in what coercive control or domestic violence can look like, they gave a very clear report that advocated for the best interest of the child.

In my line of work, that meant awarding the mother more than 50% parenting time and decision authority.

Guardian Ad Litem Red Flags

I’ve also worked on cases where the GAL had minimal training, was disorganized, and ended up making rulings that put the children in greater danger.

Newer to the role. Less training behind them. Working in a state where the bar to become one is lower than it should be. They came in to investigate a real abuse claim and couldn’t pick up on the signs, even when the abuse was there to see.

The investigation wasn’t thorough. And it landed where these cases land when nobody catches the pattern: something close to a 50/50 split, recommended to a judge who weighted it just as heavily as they’d have weighted a good investigation.

A judge doesn’t discount a recommendation because the person who wrote it was undertrained. Regardless of the training or background, the report carries the same weight.

There’s no national training standard for GAL’s.

It’s set state by state, sometimes county by county. Some states run structured programs with real oversight. In others, a lay GAL needs a short online course, a background check, and a very simple exam.

One family law attorney told a local reporter: “it’s harder to get a driver’s license than to become a lay guardian in some places.”

There’s often no formal mechanism to hold a GAL accountable when they get it wrong.

Saunders, Faller, and Tolman ran the largest study of custody evaluator bias to date, funded by the National Institute of Justice.

Evaluators without domestic violence training significantly underestimated real abuse allegations. They were more likely to recommend joint or unsupervised custody to the parent accused of abuse. Only about a 1/3 of the evaluators in that study consistently used any standardized screening protocol for abuse, even though nearly all of them asked about it informally.

Evaluators with specific training in post-separation violence and danger assessment were substantially more likely to side with the parent raising the safety concern.

Joan Meier’s research on family court outcomes found when a mother raises abuse and the other parent counters with a parental alienation claim, courts tend to believe the alienation claim, even when the abuse is documented.

Family court’s track record with protective mothers isn’t new. I expand on this more in my article “How Family Court Has Failed Mothers for Years.”

A controlling partner it doesn’t have to build a stronger case than you. They only have to perform “reasonableness” in front of the person writing the report. Many of them charming and great in front of authority figures

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How Much it Costs

Private ones typically run $100 to $300 an hour, more if they’re an attorney-GAL in a major city. Initial retainers run $1,500 to $5,000. A genuinely contested case, going in front of a judge, can run $5,000 to $20,000 in additional cost.

And in a private custody dispute, none of it is covered by the court. You and your ex split it, usually 50/50 or by earning capacity, by the judge’s order.

In addition to the financial cost, this can also add anywhere from 3 to 12 months onto the divorce case.

In many of my cases, once both parents understand the cost of a GAL or evaluator, they choose to solve it in mediation, or through the standard court process.

If your attorney or mediator suggests getting a GAL, custody evaluator, or minors’ counsel present, it is very important to understand exactly how much this could cost you and how much more time it will add on to your divorce case.

Ask:

• Is this a necessary step?

• Can it help your case?

• If not, then what other options are available

How to Work With the Person Investigating Your Family

Once someone is appointed, it’s important to understand what information they’re going to need from you, how they’re going to run their report, and what is the best way to show up in front of them.

The report they write holds a lot of weight in the determination of custody, and you get to control how you come across while they’re writing it.

Stick to the facts rather than your interpretation of what the facts mean.

Ex:

Say: “They picked the kids up 40 minutes late and didn’t call.”

Instead of: “They doesn’t respect my time”.

Let the GAL or evaluator draw their own conclusions from what actually happened.

Keep the other parent out of it unless it’s directly relevant to your child. A GAL’s client is your child, not you. A session that turns into a list of grievances about your ex reads as exactly what a controlling partner wants a judge to see: two parents in conflict, rather than one parent managing a documented pattern.

Respond to requests promptly and in writing when you can. Slow or incomplete responses get remembered, and they get read as evasiveness even when the real explanation is that you’re overwhelmed.

Keep your reaction steady, even when what’s happening feels unfair. A visibly emotional or hostile interaction can overshadow the facts you’re trying to get across, regardless of how justified the reaction is. This interaction becomes part of a written record a judge will read without you in the room to add context.

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Questions to Ask Before a Guardian ad Litem Comes Onto Your Case

If a GAL, evaluator, or attorney for the child gets appointed, you have the right to ask questions before that person starts writing findings that can determine the outcome of the custody case.

• Ask: what they do, specifically, when a party raises abuse or coercive control. Not whether they “consider it.” Ask whether they use a standardized screening protocol, and which one.

• Ask: how many hours of domestic violence or coercive control training they’ve completed in the last 2 years. Training is the strongest predictor, in the research, of whether an evaluator sides with the parent raising a documented safety concern.

• Ask: for their fee agreement before the appointment is finalized. Hourly rate, retainer, and their estimate of total hours for a case at your level of conflict.

• Check your state’s GAL or custody evaluator registry, if one exists, for licensing status and any public disciplinary record. Not every state has one.

• Ask your attorney how the evaluator plans to interview your children. With which parent present or absent, and whether raw notes or only conclusions go into the final report.

If You Need a Change

Removing a GAL or evaluator from your case is hard, and in some states it’s close to impossible outside of extreme circumstances. Many GALs carry a form of immunity for the work they do in that role, and judges are often reluctant to remove someone they’ve worked with on other cases, especially without clear evidence of an ethics violation or an investigation that was never actually conducted. Filing to remove one and losing that motion can leave you worse off than if you’d never filed, because now you’re stuck with the same person for the rest of the case and a judge who may read the attempt as combative.

A written, factual, non-accusatory complaint through your attorney, before a final report is filed, is the version of this that actually has a chance. Some states have a formal process for it. Wisconsin, for example, allows either party to request a status hearing to review a GAL’s actions after 120 days. Ask your attorney whether your state has something similar, and if it does, use the formal channel instead of an informal one.

You can still challenge a report once it’s complete. At the evidentiary hearing, a written report is not automatically accepted as fact. Your attorney can cross-examine the GAL or evaluator on how the investigation was actually conducted.

You can present counter-evidence: school records, medical records, other witnesses. In some cases, your attorney can bring in an independent expert whose findings contradict the report. There’s no guarantee the outcome changes.

Document your concerns as they happen throughout the entire investigation. Timing is important. A pattern raised early, in writing, is something your attorney can act on before it’s locked into a final recommendation. The same pattern raised for the first time at trial is much harder to do anything with.

The Part Nobody Can Promise You

Sometimes, you can’t choose who gets appointed. You can’t make a judge weigh a bad investigation less than a good one. You can’t control how your ex shows up in front of the evaluators.

You can control the record. What you asked. What you documented. How you showed up. And if your case allows, you can work with your attorney to present GAL or custody evaluator options for the opposing party to pick, preferably ones that have the training in the abuse patterns that you may be experiencing.

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Disclaimer: This is educational content, not legal advice. Nothing in family law is guaranteed. Rules, procedures, and outcomes vary state by state, county by county, and case by case. Always consult a licensed attorney in your jurisdiction before making decisions about your case.

Sources

• Saunders, D.G., Faller, K.C., & Tolman, R.M. (2011). Child Custody Evaluators’ Beliefs About Domestic Abuse Allegations: Their Relationship to Evaluator Demographics, Background, Domestic Violence Knowledge and Custody-Visitation Recommendations. National Institute of Justice.

• Meier, J.S. (2020). U.S. Child Custody Outcomes in Cases Involving Parental Alienation and Abuse Allegations. GWU Law School Public Law Research Paper.

• LegalClarity, What Is a Child Lawyer Called? Guardian ad Litem & More

• LegalClarity, How Much Does a Guardian ad Litem Cost?

• Live 5 News, “Too much power”: Push to hold Guardian Ad Litem more accountable in family court

• Sinatra Legal, Can You Challenge a Guardian ad Litem’s Report in a Custody Case?

• Karp Law Firm, Can I Have the Guardian ad Litem Removed From the Case? — Wisconsin-specific but illustrates the general pattern of judicial reluctance and status-hearing review options.

• Pro Legal Care, What Not to Say to a Guardian ad Litem

• Cal. Fam. Code § 3150.

• AFCC, Model Standards of Practice for Child Custody Evaluation

Contrary to the title of the article, I don’t believe that anybody wins at the end of divorce.

Family court is a legal system, not a justice system.

Just because I can accept that as true for now, doesn’t mean that I like it. Quite frankly, I hate the family court system. It is over thirty years outdated and is in dire need of massive reform.

Most people are losing money. They’re losing time with their children. They might be losing friends. Extended family. The marital home.

So I never like to approach high-conflict divorce strategy as “How do we win the divorce?”

I like to look at things as “How do we stack up wins within a broken system while trying to get a divorce from an unfair partner who is committed to keeping control over you as long as they possibly can?”

And the women I’ve supported who stayed focused on “winning the divorce” were still living inside the abusive loop. They were just paying attorneys to fight for them instead of focusing on building safety and stability on the other side of it.

They were more focused on “beating” their partner in the divorce than they were on themselves and their children.

So that’s my position. Nobody wins the divorce.

But daily, I have the privilege of seeing women still choose to claim their small victories while fighting an unfair battle inside of an unfair system.

Both of these can be true.

What follows are three of those wins. Names and some details are intentionally left vague to protect the identity of these women. The stories and the patterns are exactly as they happened.

Safety Dicalaimer: If there is a safety concern in your situation, this article is not the one for you right now. Safety comes first, before strategy, before settlement, before every other consideration in this process.

The National Domestic Violence Hotline is 800.799.7233. You can text START to 88788 or chat at thehotline.org. Advocates are available 24/7 and they will build a personalized safety plan with you.

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The Win That Happened in a Couple’s Therapy Session

One of my clients had a couple’s therapy session this week where her partner AND the therapist wanted the same thing from her. An answer. Was she staying or was she leaving. (Upon reflection, she also decided that this was the last session that she was going to have with this couples therapist. It became clear that this couple’s therapist was projecting their personal biases onto the relationship and giving her advice that was not helpful when dealing with a coercively controlling partner.)

She was panicked going in. So we worked on two things beforehand.

1. How she was going to speak her truth.

2. And how she was going to release the expectation that this would finally be the time where her partner finally heard her and finally changed.

Then we planned.

• What was her truth, and how did she want to say it?

• What were her boundaries going into this conversation? (i.e. what was she available to discuss and what was she not)

• What would a boundary violation look like?

  • If her boundaries were crossed by either the therapist or her partner, how was she to exit the therapy session?

This is what she said, after decades of marriage.

I do not want to be with you any longer. I am not coming back home. And I am not comfortable discussing anything regarding cohabitating throughout the divorce process. I am only available to discuss the next steps forward on how we can go through this, either together or with attorneys.

Boundaries are a large part of what my clients build in this process, and they aren’t only with the high-conflict partner.

Boundaries are essential with everybody on their team. Therapists, attorneys, friends, family, co-workers, bosses. Anybody in their life that knows about their divorce.

I challenge my clients to challenge me. My coaching is one opinion from one person.

No attorney, no therapist, nobody in her life should be taking away her ability to make her own decisions for herself and her children.

Most of the women I work with arrive having lost trust in themselves. They believed they were choosing a good partner. That partner turned out to be coercively controlling and had not had their interests or their children’s interests in mind from day one.

Learning to trust yourself again is, in my opinion, one of the most important parts of this process.

You get to decide who has a say in your decisions, including the professionals you’re paying.

Her win was establishing enforceable boundaries with a person of authority and her partner at the same time, all while speaking her truth and releasing any expectation that her partner was finally going to see her, validate her pain, and make actionable change

The Settlement That Came in Millions Short

Another client is close to 3 years into her divorce.

Her final settlement was not what she wanted initially. It’s probably 1.5 million dollars less than what she believed she should have gotten.

The case ran long enough that her ex was able to sell businesses, move money around, and devalue the marital estate while it was still pending.

Is that fair?

Absolutely NOT.

But you can’t ask for money that isn’t there, even when you’re legally entitled to it.

Once it became clear that the marital state had been devalued, we had to adjust strategy. I wanted her to get very clear on which hills she was willing to die on in her settlement.

She chose the three 529 accounts that they had set up for their children.

And she was willing and ready to go to trial over them.

She went back to mediation one more time than she had planned for. And in the final settlement she got the marital home, retroactive child support, and 100% control of the 529 accounts.

529 accounts are included in the marital balance sheet. and you can negotiate who has control over that money for the children.

A 529 has one account owner. The Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board, which regulates these plans, states: “An account owner manages the account, selects the beneficiary, chooses the investment options, makes withdrawals and can terminate the account.” And “only the account owner may make a withdrawal from a 529 savings plan account.”

The child is the beneficiary. Whoever owns the account decides whether tuition gets paid, when it gets paid, and whether the money stays in that child’s name at all.

Her children were also victims of coercive control. Her partner had been using that money to force them to spend time with them, share details about their life, and speak to him when they didn’t feel comfortable doing so.

She wanted to give her kids the same financial freedom that she fought three years for. Even though she lost $1.5 million in the settlement process due to her partner’s behavior with money, she and her children gained complete financial autonomy.

They’re all free.

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The Win That Came Without an Attorney

The third client has been in the legal process for over 4 years. It’s one of the worst cases of legal abuse, and of the legal system failing a mother, that I have ever seen.

She has been dropped by three attorneys. Her ex’s attorney generates so much chaos in front of the judge and opposing counsel that three of her own lawyers decided they could not take the case any further.

Meanwhile, even though there have been court orders present for over four years, her partner still continued to not pay anything. No child support. No extracurricular costs. No medical costs. Absolutely nothing.

Her attorneys had filed for contempt of court multiple times, and even though the evidence was clear that her partner was in violation of a court order, all of those attorneys still lost the hearings.

Since her last attorney dropped her, she decided to represent herself for a contempt hearing over her children’s medical expenses.

So we made a plan. What opposing counsel was going to say. What cases in her state had been argued in front of this judge. What statutes and laws were used in them, and what the outcomes were.

Then she walked in and stood toe to toe with a judge who had dismissed her for years, an attorney who had belittled her for years, and her abusive ex.

She had documented everything. All of her evidence was organized into a binder. She stayed on track. She did not take the bait when opposing counsel worked to pull her off it.

She gave the judge more clarity than her past three attorneys had.

The judge ruled in her favor. Mandatory wage garnishment for the children’s medical expenses her ex had been ordered to pay for the last year and a half.

It comes out automatically now and goes to her, so she can keep the continuity of care going for the children she has 100% of the time.

Her first win in over 4 years of this.

The settlement still isn’t even close to being solved for. And her ex still owes her tens of thousands of dollars.

But she advocated for herself, built a plan around what she’s experienced for the last 4 years to prepare, and now there is a court order that her ex doesn’t have to choose to comply with that guarantees that her children get their medical expenses paid for in the care that they deserve.

I’m not an attorney, I don’t give legal advice, and nothing here is a suggestion that anyone represent themselves. What I want named is what 4 years of being failed did and did not take from her.

What These Three Women Have in Common

None of these are “she got more money.” None of them are “she beat him.”

What relates all of them is that these are women advocating for themselves strategically against adversity.

Fighting when they don’t want to fight anymore. Learning how the legal system works. Managing their teams and managing their own cases.

In all different ways, finding a voice that was silenced for years and years of being with a partner who was committed to keeping them small.

They all still lost something. None of them, in my opinion, got a “fair” deal.

The money that these women and their children are entitled to, for what they had to endure, is not a dollar amount that exists in their ex’s bank account.

What all of them did was release the idea of fairness and get very clear on the few things that actually mattered to them.

You can stop waiting for this process to be fair and still get specific about what you want out of it.

The Wins That Don’t Look Like Wins

The wins I find most important are the quiet ones, and those are available every week of this process.

Picking up a hobby again. Saying no. Choosing not to engage with the smear campaign. Choosing not to speak poorly about the other parent in front of the children. Continuing to be the emotionally safe parent in that house. Choosing what is worth fighting for and what isn’t to gain autonomy back post-divorce.

These women are playing the long game, and they can play it because they understand exactly what they’re standing inside of.

A legal system, not a justice system.

They can’t choose the ruling.

They can choose how they move through the process, and the ones I’m describing are choosing to move through it with grace and love for themselves and for their children. Even when it’s not fair. Even when it feels impossible

The ones still in the middle of the fight have wins. Every time they choose themselves. Every time they show up for their children. Every time they advocate when it would be easier to go quiet.

None of those show up in a settlement number. Those are the ones I celebrate the most because they happen all the time.

Winning here looks like choosing yourself and choosing to rebuild after what you have been put through. It looks like releasing the control they once had over you, letting them be exactly who they are, and responding accordingly.

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Disclaimer: This is educational content, not legal advice. Nothing in family law is guaranteed. Rules, procedures, and outcomes vary state by state, county by county, and case by case. Always consult a licensed attorney in your jurisdiction before making decisions about your case.

Sources

• Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board, Investor’s Guide to 529 Savings Plans. The MSRB regulates the municipal securities market, which includes 529 savings plans. Source for account owner authority over management, beneficiary selection, investment options, withdrawals and termination.

• U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, An Introduction to 529 Plans, Investor Bulletin. Background on account holder and beneficiary roles and withdrawal rules.

• The National Domestic Violence Hotline. 800.799.7233, text START to 88788, or chat online. Advocates available 24/7 to build a personalized safety plan.

The amount of contested issues in divorce is the clearest pattern to anticipate how much it can cost you.

In Martindale-Nolo’s 2019 survey of divorced readers, attorney fees ran about $4,000 with nothing contested, about $10,400 with at least one issue that settled, and about $21,500 with a trial on 3 or more. That’s a self-selected reader survey with an undisclosed sample size, so hold the exact dollars loosely.

The more you fight about, and the longer it takes to settle, the more money you pay.

A single study that breaks down family law spending by activity doesn’t exist. Nobody has measured how much of a divorce bill goes to discovery versus motions versus the custody evaluation versus reading your emails.

This article is about billing mechanics that are documented, court data regarding numbers, and tips that you can take away immediately to cut your attorney fees down.

Disclaimer: This is educational content, not legal advice. Nothing in family law is guaranteed. Rules, procedures, and outcomes vary state by state, county by county, and case by case. Always consult a licensed attorney in your jurisdiction before making decisions about your case.

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Mediation Is Not Always The Lower Cost Alternative

Mediation can absolutely save money. In the lower-conflict cases I’ve supported, it saved both parties thousands of dollars.

But these are cases where there is full financial transparency. High trust. No coercive control, emotional abuse, or other abusive patterns. Both parties able to sit down and reach agreement on the asset split and the parenting plan on their own, then bring in a mediator for a defined list of open issues and to finalize everything so they can file jointly, or whatever their state allows.

That’s how I’ve seen a divorce cost less than $5,000.

I’ve also supported many clients that came to me 6-12 months after the divorce had been filed. They had all spent over $50,000 in attorney fees and mediator fees, and absolutely nothing was solved for.

There was not full financial transparency. One party was trying to have the kids 100% of the time. There were abusive patterns present. The client that I was supporting was desiring an amicable divorce, hoping that mediation would allow her to have that and keep attorney fees down. The other party was committed to winning the divorce and to extending the abuse patterns that were present in the relationship throughout the legal process as long as they could.

You can want an amicable divorce and have a high-conflict partner. You are not going to get amicable anything. Instead, you’re going to waste time and money hoping that if you explain something differently, that maybe they’ll finally settle down and you can solve for this together.

That doesn’t usually happen.

What I tell those clients: you have been fighting for free for years, so let’s not just throw money at people aimlessly to pay to fight in the legal system.

RAND’s evaluation of court ADR programs found that referral to mediation produced no significant change in time or cost. A federal review concluded that family law mediation research shows minimal cost savings. Every specific “mediation costs $X, litigation costs $Y” figure in circulation comes from a mediation service’s own marketing.

There have been steps taken to have mediators screened for domestic abuse prior to working with two parties.

The Model Standards of Practice for Family and Divorce Mediation, updated July 2025 by AFCC and the ABA Section of Family Law with the ABA Section of Dispute Resolution, ACR and APFM, require the mediator to screen each party “separately and confidentially” for domestic abuse before asking for consent to mediate, and to ask each party privately whether they believe they’ll be “safe and able to make autonomous decisions.”

Standard V states the mediator “shall not undertake mediation without specific training on identifying the nature, context, and dynamics of domestic abuse, including but not limited to coercive control and its impact on parenting, co-parenting, children, and the mediation process.”

Even with that, it’s not a mediator’s job to identify abusive patterns for anybody, and they might not even be trained to see coercive control. It’s a mediator’s job to help both parties facilitate a compromise.

If there is not a history of you and your partner coming to a compromise outside of the divorce process, then it’s pretty unlikely that you’re going to be able to come to a compromise in the divorce process without anybody on your team advocating for you and only you.

What a divorce attorney retainer actually covers

The initial retainer is not the total price of your divorce. It’s a deposit to get the divorce started.

The money sits in a client trust account, and your attorney draws from it as work gets done. When it runs low, most agreements require you to top it back up. The number they quote you at the consultation is the initial cost for them to get started on your case

Every time your attorney does work on your case, they pull from your retainer. Billed in fractions of an hour:

• Every email they read from you, and every one they write back

• Every phone call, including short ones

• Meetings and consultations

• Drafting, reviewing and filing documents

• Reading everything the other side sends

• Prep time before a hearing, mediation or deposition

• Time in court, plus travel and waiting

• Paralegal and associate time, billed at their own rates

• Sorting through the information that you sent to them

There are additional fees associated with divorce that aren’t your attorney’s time but still cost you money:

• filing fees

• service of process

• court reporters

• the mediator’s fee

• a custody evaluator

• a forensic accountant

• an appraiser

• moving costs

Legal fees are not the only cost in divorce. I’ve worked on plenty of cases where my client spent more money on the forensic accountant than their attorney.

Create a budget for all of these costs, and then, with the professionals on your team, run a cost and benefit analysis to see which ones are truly worth your money and which ones might just be throwing money out the window.

How divorce lawyers bill: 6-minute vs 15-minute increments

It’s important to get clarity on how your divorce lawyer will bill. The most common ones that I see are 6-minute increments and 15-minute increments, but of course, there can be other increments that exist in between those.

There is no uniform rule that requires attorneys to bill in the same minute increment. All are legal. Understanding how billing increments work can help you manage your retainer fee more intentionally.

Ex: a 2-minute phone call billed at a tenth of an hour costs you 6 minutes of the rate. The same call billed at a quarter hour costs you 15. At a $325 hourly rate, that’s $32.50 versus $81.25 for the same 2 minutes.

If you retain a lead attorney that is not the only person that is touching your case, it’s important to get clear on what the hourly rate for every person who might touch your file.. Associates and paralegals bill at different rates. You will see all of those fees on your statement.

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How to budget for your divorce attorney

It’s important to have a budget for your attorney fees and to have a plan for if that budget gets capped out and the divorce isn’t done. How are you going to continue to fund the rest of this process?

Your attorney will keep a running list of what they’re using your retainer for, but since this is your case and your money, you should keep a spreadsheet of that as well.

Keep your own running log of:

• Emails you send

• Phone calls you have

• Meetings

• Mediation fees

• Trial and hearing fees

• Filing fees, evaluator and expert costs

Keeping this list can also help you hold yourself accountable to make sure that you are using your attorney strictly for what they are experts in: the legal process

Then check it against every statement they send you. Attorneys hold many clients. This is your life and your case, and nobody’s going to care about it more than you will.

Your attorney is not your therapist

They are professionals and experts in the law, and they should be used for the law. What your divorce attorney actually does is a less than what many people expect.

Now, this doesn’t mean that they’re not effective at their job. It means that attorneys are attorneys. They are not therapists. They are not financial planners. They are not forensic accountants. They are not parenting coaches. They are not domestic violence advocates.

They should not be used as a place to dump information about your partner to regulate your emotions, or anything else along those lines. They respond to what you bring them.

As harsh as this might sound, garbage in, is garbage out.

If you give them a messy timeline full of disorganized events that reads more like a journal entry rather than a chronological timeline, then you will be charged more for them having to sort through all of that. They might not pick up on what you actually want them to focus on, since there is so much for them to sort through, and that is not entirely their fault. They can only work with what you have given to them.

Not all attorneys are created equal. Some are more trauma-informed, some are more patient, and others are not. Treat them all as the legal professionals that they truly are, and do not expect them to do anything outside their area of expertise.

Go in with a plan, a clear list of questions, and information already drafted.

I know this might sound simple, but it’s easy to forget, especially if you’re going through a high-conflict divorce:

You are the only person that has lived what you are experiencing. The more concisely that you can translate that into a document for any of the professionals on your team, the quicker and more effectively they can advocate for you.

What to prepare before you hire an attorney

1. Your timeline of what happened

Write down what happened, with dates where you have them, so the pattern is visible. Where you have evidence that pairs to an entry, note it and note where it lives.

They need a clear understanding of your story from day one. That’s what lets them advocate for you effectively. It’s also what lets them tell you what matters in the legal system and what doesn’t, so you can spend your energy on the things that will actually move you toward your desired outcome.

2. Your concerns

List out any concerns or challenges that you’re currently experiencing. If they don’t know what kind of person you’re up against, they cannot advise you or build a legal strategy appropriately. If coercive control is part of your case, the law on it is changing, so it’s worth doing some research on the laws of your state to see if this can be used to assist in building your case.

Some family law attorneys are more trauma-informed than others. Some thrive in low-conflict cases. Others are more of a litigator, so they are more comfortable in high conflict.

The clients that I have supported who were the happiest with their legal team were the ones that went in with their exact conflict style and a list of the anticipated tactics that they presume their partner is going to use. They chose the attorney who they thought had the most effective legal strategy on how to counter the anticipated conflict.

3. Your expenses, assets and debts

If you have the time, document all three of these before the consultation.

• A year of your past expenses

• A list of your assets and debts

• A list of the accounts you know exist but have no insight into

You want to give them a roadmap. What you don’t have information on but know exists is equally as important as what you can hand over.

Get creative. If you don’t know what their income is, look at listings on Indeed for similar jobs to get an idea of what they’re being paid.

If you have nothing on the house or the mortgage, pull a rough estimate off Zillow or Redfin. It starts to line out where the money could be. And what your lifestyle costs will matter for child support and alimony if those are part of your case.

4. Your interim plan for after you file

Attorneys will not do this for you.

The interim plan is what is going to happen after you file/or after you tell them, through to when the divorce is officially over.

• Are there going to be new rules or boundaries?

• Are finances going to stay status quo?

• Do you need temporary spousal support or child support?

• Are you going to start separate parenting time even while still in the home?

• Do you plan on living with your partner, or do you plan on moving out?

If you want to move out, or you want your partner to leave the home, that needs to be very clear and clearly stated to your attorney. If there’s abuse present and safety concerns in the home, they need to know so they can advise you on what your legal rights are. That applies whether you plan to leave the home over a safety concern, or you have enough to file a motion for primary access to the marital home so that they’re the one who has to leave.

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How to work with your attorney without running up the bill

Attorneys work with clients differently.

Ask in the consultation: “how do you like to work with clients?”

Then give them a budget example. Right now I have $10,000, so what’s the way I can use that most effectively with you? Is there anything I can do on my end to make your job easier and keep my fees down?

I’ve supported many clients who have a very collaborative approach with their attorney, where they’re doing the bulk of the administrative work and giving it to their attorney for a final review before submitting it.

I’ve also worked with many clients whose attorneys just take their information and run with it. They build the strategy first and inform them of their plan second.

Neither approach is wrong. It just depends on the approach that you want for the attorney that is going to support you through what could be the most stressful time of your life.

Get organized

Label every document clearly. Last name, first name, the details of the document.

Ask your attorney: what is the best way for me to label my documents so you can clearly find them?

Make spreadsheets to keep track of your case on your end too. You can cut down on your legal fees a little bit by not having to ask your attorney where everything is and having them have to send you an update or the documents again.

If you’re chasing missing documents, build a spreadsheet for it.

Being concise in your emails

Before you send anything, stop and ask yourself: is this something I need to be sending to my attorney?

And if it isn’t, then who else does this go to?

Hand them a messy, disorganized set of documents and you’re paying their rate for someone to sort it. Send a long panicked email at midnight and you’re paying for the time it takes to filter through it and find the actual question. That’s administrative time, and it’s billed like everything else.

So say what your question is up front. List things out. One email, one clear ask, and follow up if you don’t hear back.

Have a plan for your meetings and calls, too. Before you get on the phone, be clear with them about what this call is for. Your attorney may have their own agenda, usually an update on where the case stands. If you have questions you need legal guidance on, say that at the start so both things get covered in the time you’re paying for.

The decision-making stays with you

The biggest mistake I see women make is blindly putting faith in the professionals in their world to make decisions about their life for them.

Divorce is a very big step in reclaiming your autonomy, and you should not give that decision-making power away to people who have not lived what you have lived. Even if that’s your attorney.

Their job is to advocate for what you want in the legal system and to advise you within it. Not to make the important decisions for you.

If you can’t afford a divorce lawyer

Being able to afford an attorney is a luxury. I understand that many women don’t have that.

Here are some other options that exist:

• Legal aid. Eligibility runs at 125% of the federal poverty guidelines. Effective January 26, 2026, in the contiguous states that’s $19,950 for a household of 1, $27,050 for 2, $34,150 for 3, and $41,250 for 4. Programs can adopt exceptions up to 200%, which is $66,000 for a household of 4. Apply even if you think you’re over the line. There are exceptions, so ask the intake staff if you qualify for any of those.

  • Legal Services Corporation’s Justice Gap research found that low-income Americans receive no help or insufficient help for 92% of their substantial civil legal problems. In the same research, 98% of households with recent domestic violence had at least one civil legal problem in the past year, not counting the violence itself.

• Law school clinics, this is the most underutilized resource that I see. The Center for the Study of Applied Legal Education surveyed 185 of roughly 192 accredited law schools and counted 1,512 clinics, a median of 7 per school. Family law clinics exist at 40% of schools. Domestic violence clinics are at 25%, down from 28%. Search “[your state] law school family law clinic” and call the clinic director’s office directly rather than the general law school line.

• Court self-help centers, operating or in development in 25 states. They give legal information, not legal advice. They can hand you the right form and tell you where to file it. They cannot tell you what to do, represent you, or assess whether you’re safe.

• Limited scope representation, where you hire an attorney for defined pieces of the case instead of all of it. It’s permitted in all 50 states and DC under some version of Model Rule 1.2(c). One caution: permission to limit the scope of the work is universal, but a court rule letting an attorney appear for one hearing and withdraw without leave of court is not. Ask specifically what your court allows.

• Domestic violence legal advocates through your local DV agency, who can often help with protective orders at no cost and know which attorneys in your county take reduced-fee cases.

Your attorney is not there to save you.

Your attorney should also not be the only person on your team. Having a trauma-informed therapist, domestic violence advocate, friends, family, support groups, are all equally important.

The responsibility falls on you to help build the case for your attorney so that way they have what they need to continue to advocate for you throughout this process.

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Disclaimer: This is educational content, not legal advice. Nothing in family law is guaranteed. Rules, procedures, and outcomes vary state by state, county by county, and case by case. Always consult a licensed attorney in your jurisdiction before making decisions about your case.

Sources

• Martindale-Nolo Research (2019). Divorce Survey: Attorney Fees and Costs. Attorney fees by contested-issue count: $4,000 with none, $10,400 with at least one that settled, $21,500 with trial on 3 or more; overall average $11,300, median $7,000. Non-attorney costs (filing fees, evaluations, appraisals) average $1,480, median $500. Self-selected reader survey; sample size not disclosed. nolo.com

• Kakalik, J.S., et al. (1996). An Evaluation of Mediation and Early Neutral Evaluation Under the Civil Justice Reform Act. RAND, MR-803-ICJ. No significant change in time or cost from ADR referral.

• Office of Justice Programs (1994). Does ADR Really Save Money? The Jury’s Still Out. NCJ 152500.

• Saccuzzo, D.P., Johnson, N.E., & Koen, W.J. (2003). Mandatory Custody Mediation: Empirical Evidence of Increased Risk for Domestic Violence Victims and Their Children. National Institute of Justice, NCJ 195422. n=400 mediations, San Diego County. ojp.gov

• Holtzworth-Munroe, A., et al. (2021). Shuttle and videoconferencing mediation for parents reporting intimate partner violence. National Institute of Justice randomized trial, DC Superior Court, n=166, MASIC-screened.

• Association of Family and Conciliation Courts & ABA Section of Family Law, with the ABA Section of Dispute Resolution, ACR and APFM (July 22, 2025). Model Standards of Practice for Family and Divorce Mediation, Standard V. afccnet.org

• State Bar of California, Committee on Mandatory Fee Arbitration (2016). Arbitration Advisory 2016-02: Analysis of Potential Bill Padding. Minimum billing increments enforceable only if disclosed in the fee agreement; both tenth-hour and quarter-hour treated as existing practice. calbar.ca.gov

• Clio (2026). Legal Trends Report, 2025 rate data. US family law average hourly rate $344. Aggregated from Clio’s own user base, which skews solo and small firm. clio.com

• State Bar of Michigan (2026). Economics of Law Survey Results, with the ABA Center for Bar Leadership. Family law respondents n=393: 25th percentile $295, median $325, mean $357, 75th percentile $400, 95th percentile $500. 4,652 valid responses from 32,816 members, 14.2% response rate. michbar.org

• American Bar Association (May 3, 2023). Formal Opinion 505: Fees Paid in Advance for Legal Services. Model Rules 1.15(c), 1.16(d). americanbar.org

• New York, 22 NYCRR Part 1400, §§ 1400.2 and 1400.3. Domestic relations retainer agreement requirements: all personnel rates, refund circumstances, itemized billing at least every 60 days, no charge for discussing bills, nonrefundable retainers prohibited, restrictions on liens and confessions of judgment. law.cornell.edu

• California Business and Professions Code §§ 6200, 6201, 6204. Mandatory Fee Arbitration: voluntary for the client, mandatory for the attorney if the client commences it; non-binding absent written agreement after the dispute arises.

• ABA Standing Committee on Specialization. State Sources of Certification. States certifying family law specialists. americanbar.org

• American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers. Qualifications for Fellowship. 7 years admitted, 75% practice concentration over 5 years, 12 hours annual family law CLE, substantial lead-counsel trial experience, peer and judicial references. aaml.org

• The Florida Bar. Consumer Pamphlet: Attorney’s Fees. Client guidance to organize information in logical order and share everything relevant. Guidance, not research. floridabar.org

• National Center for State Courts, Family Justice Initiative (2018). The Landscape of Domestic Relations Cases in State Courts. n=147,436 domestic relations cases, 11 counties in 9 states, FY2016-17. 72% at least one self-represented party, 34% both, 17% default judgment; roughly 1 in 4 new cases projected to reopen. iaals.du.edu

• Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System (2016). Cases Without Counsel: Research on Experiences of Self-Representation in U.S. Family Court. 128 self-represented litigants interviewed.

• Legal Services Corporation (January 26, 2026). Income Level for Individuals Eligible for Assistance. 125% guidelines for the 48 contiguous states and DC; exceptions to 200% under 45 CFR 1611. federalregister.gov

• Legal Services Corporation (2022). The Justice Gap: The Unmet Civil Legal Needs of Low-Income Americans. NORC survey, 5,000+ adults. 92% of substantial civil legal problems receive no or insufficient help; 98% of households with recent domestic violence had one or more civil legal problems in the past year.

• Center for the Study of Applied Legal Education (2022-23). Survey of Applied Legal Education. 185 of ~192 ABA-accredited schools, 96% response; 1,512 clinics; family law clinics at 40% of schools, domestic violence clinics at 25%.

• National Center for State Courts & Maryland Access to Justice / Appleseed (2023). Survey of court self-help centers; 25 states operating or developing programs.

• ABA Model Rule of Professional Conduct 1.2(c). Limited scope representation, adopted in some form by all 50 states and DC.

They can also very clearly articulate the control that they are experiencing. Telling me that they have to lie about how long they’ll be at the grocery store and sit in the car parking lot to take calls with me since their partner tracks their location.

Or how every time that they ask to see the marital finances, they are told that they know what they need to know and that they are bad with money, which is why their partner never shares any information with them.

They mainly refer to this as emotional abuse because they didn’t have the proper language to actually categorize what they’ve been enduring. Their labeling isn’t incorrect, but if their partner is actively taking the steps to limit their autonomy, then coercive control is often the better definition for it.

Emotional abuse is a category of behavior. Name-calling, degradation, humiliation, telling you your feelings are irrational, etc.

Evan Stark defined coercive control as "a strategic course of oppressive behavior in which some combination of physical and sexual violence, intimidation, isolation and control are used to dominate, exploit and/or subjugate a partner and deprive them of basic rights and liberties." The goal is to make their partner feel trapped in the relationship.

There can be emotional abuse without coercive control.

The research has shown for nearly thirty years that this kind of abuse can be just as damaging as physical abuse. The family court system is unfortunately quite outdated in the U.S.

This article expands on what the research has consistently shown about the damage from this kind of abuse, why the family court system is so outdated, how they’ve been trying to catch up and how to document this kind of abuse in the format that the court understands currently.

Disclaimer: This is educational content, not legal advice. Nothing in family law is guaranteed. Rules, procedures, and outcomes vary state by state, county by county, and case by case. Always consult a licensed attorney in your jurisdiction before making decisions about your case.

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What the Research Says About the Damage

Ann Coker and colleagues surveyed 1,152 women recruited from family practice clinics between 1997 and 1999. 13.6% had experienced psychological intimate partner violence without any physical violence.

Those women were significantly more likely to report poor physical health , poor mental health, chronic pain, and a disability preventing work.

“Psychological IPV (intimate partner violence) was as strongly associated with the majority of adverse health outcomes as was physical IPV.”

Women who did not experience physical violence, reported these health problems at rates comparable to women who did.

In 2006, Picó-Alfonso and colleagues researched 75 physically and psychologically abused women, 55 psychologically abused, 52 control subjects.

Both abused groups had higher depressive symptoms, anxiety, PTSD, and thoughts of suicide than the controls. There was no difference between the physically and psychologically abused groups.

Their conclusion: “psychological IPV is as detrimental as physical IPV, with the exception of effects on suicidality.”

Diane Follingstad’s team interviewed 234 women with a history of physical abuse in 1990.

72% reported that the emotional abuse had a more severe impact than the physical abuse. These are perceptions from a help-seeking sample, which means that this evidence is weaker than a measured outcome.

Regardless, most of the women who lived through both said the invisible part hurt more. (This is not to take away from the severity of physical violence. This is just stating data from interviewed women from the study.)

Jacquelyn Campbell’s 11-city femicide study compared 220 femicide victims against 343 abused control women. The risk of being killed by an intimate partner rose 9-fold when a highly controlling partner was combined with separation after living together.

When a controlling partner is present, separation is the most dangerous time for women.

This kind of abuse is very serious, even if the courts don’t treat it as such yet.

Why Emotional Abuse Doesn’t Land in Family Court

Courts adjudicate incidents. Coercive control is a pattern of conduct.

Carrie Leonetti, in the William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice in 2024: courts’ “continued focus on discrete incidents of physical violence between adults conceals the patterned and gendered nature of most interpersonal violence in which women are victimized.”

Stark told Vermont’s House Judiciary Committee the same thing in 2015: “Interventions focused on discrete assaults (rather than course of conduct) miss the significance of abuse in the vast majority of cases.”

Physical violence is easy to see. It leaves bruises, hospital records, witnesses that can clearly testify to what happened. Coercive control/ complex emotional abuse is designed to be invisible.

describing these patterns with evidence that pairs could help describe to a judge exactly what’s happening and why it’s dangerous, but the rules that many of them follow were built to see single events

Credibility is decided by demeanor.

Deborah Epstein and Lisa Goodman, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 2019: “A woman may tell a story about how her partner sexually assaulted her as if she is talking about the weather outside.”

And the trap: “The symptoms of their trauma, the reliable indicators that abuse has in fact occurred, are perversely wielded against their own credibility in court.”

Hardesty and colleagues tested this on 603 custody evaluators in 2015. Mother’s demeanor was the most consistent predictor of recommendations and of credibility judgments. Evaluators who read about a pleasant mother were roughly 4 times more likely to believe her domestic violence allegations. Those in the hostile-mother condition were over 5 times more likely to recommend father custody over joint.

Demeanor moved the outcome more than the severity of the abuse being reported.

The other side is building a record too. Ellen Gutowski and Lisa Goodman surveyed 222 survivor-mothers across 36 states and built the Legal Abuse Scale. Over half those cases had run 2 years or longer. The strongest-loading item on the entire scale: “was dishonest about your character or mental health to professionals on your case.”

The other side is often telling a story about these mothers to try to discredit them in the legal system.

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Why the Law Is Behind the Research

1. The category is barely in the law, and almost never in criminal law. California wrote coercive control into the Family Code in 2020 through SB 1141, in the restraining order statute. Connecticut followed with Jennifers’ Law in 2021. Washington, Vermont, Massachusetts and Colorado are all civil and family law. As of a 2025 Marshall Project review, Hawaii was “the only state to directly criminalize it so far,” as a petty misdemeanor inside a 5-year pilot. Washington tried for a gross misdemeanor and failed. So in most of the country none of this generates a criminal record.

2. For 40 years the field looked at physical acts. The dominant research instrument asked whether someone had been pushed, grabbed, shoved, slapped. Russell Dobash and colleagues took it apart in Social Problems in 1992: “Confining self-report data to a checklist of acts, devoid of motives, meanings and consequences cannot insure objectivity, validity or an adequate development of theory.” Andy Myhill tested the alternative on a large national survey in 2015. Counting acts produces roughly equal rates between men and women. Measuring coercive control shows abuse that is “highly gendered, with women overwhelmingly the victims.”

Many courts still look at physical acts.

3. The professionals deciding your case have very little training in this. Daniel Saunders reported in 2015 that custody evaluators had attended a median of 4 seminars and read a median of 18 books or articles on intimate partner violence across an entire career. Surveying 1,187 judges, attorneys, domestic violence workers and evaluators, Saunders, Faller and Tolman found “judges, private attorneys, and evaluators were more likely to believe that mothers make false DV allegations and alienate their children.”

4. And the counter-move works. Joan Meier coded 4,338 published US custody opinions from 2005 to 2014. Mothers who reported a father’s abuse lost custody in 26% of cases. When fathers cross-claimed parental alienation, that doubled to 50%. Courts credited claims of child sexual abuse 15% of the time, and with an alienation cross-claim, in 1 of 51 cases. These are published, largely appellate opinions rather than a random sample of family court.

Sally Jeffries, studying custody proceedings in common-law courts, found that“When faced with a scenario of coercive control, they appeared unable to recognize it and simply relabelled it as ‘mutual conflict’.”

The research very clearly recognizes the severity of these patterns. The legal system still processes events, staffed by people trained on single physical incidents.

This is where the gap is. If you have experienced complex emotional abuse or coercive control, your experiences are very real, even if not fully validated by the family court system.

How to Document Emotional Abuse So It Can Be Used

Emotional abuse and coercive control can be difficult to prove. The way that I like to frame this to my clients is “we are trying to translate your story into the language that the court speaks.”

Log in the language of the court system. Richard Tolman’s Psychological Maltreatment of Women Inventory, built in 1989, is 58 items and openly published. When your entry mirrors that wording, it stops reading as a complaint and starts reading as a documented behavior evaluators recognize. (The items say “him” because the validation sample was male partners.)

Verbatim:

• “My partner monitored my time and made me account for where I was.”

• “My partner used our money or made important financial decisions without talking to me about it.”

• “My partner told me my feelings were irrational or crazy.”

• “My partner tried to make me feel like I was crazy.”

• “My partner blamed me for his problems.”

• “My partner tried to keep me from seeing or talking to my family.”

• “My partner restricted my use of the car.”

• “My partner threatened to take the children away from me.”

• “My partner tried to turn our family, friends, and children against me.”

• “My partner threatened to have me committed to a mental institution.”

Here’s the difference it makes. “They made me feel worthless for years” is a statement and a personal opinion. A judge has nothing to rule on. There is no evidence. And opposing counsel can easily poke holes in that.

“On 3/14 at 7:40pm they told me my feelings were irrational when I brought up the joint account, and my sister was in the kitchen. They then told me I was bad with money, which is why I never had access to the marital bank accounts” hands the court 4 usable things: a date, the words said, what set it off, and a witness who can be called.

20 entries like that, in order, is the pattern.

One line per incident. Date, time, what was said, who else was there. When documenting this for your legal team, you do not need to include how it made you feel.

Export message threads whole, with timestamps. If you’re just submitting screenshots of the worst messages, then the opposing counsel can refer to that as cherry picking and claim that the conflict is mutual rather than one-sided The full thread shows the pattern: 14 messages in 40 minutes, 3 weeks of nothing, then a dealing with one the morning of a hearing.

Pull 24 months of statements from every account, including any closed in the last year. Banks purge older records. Economic control leaves a paper trail, and it is the easiest piece of this pattern to prove.

Name the statutory category. “Coercive control” and “economic abuse” are in statutes and in the research. “Narcissist” is in neither and is diagnostic language.

Even if you’re not planning on filing for a divorce for a couple years, start documenting this pattern now as it can help you in the future.

Tie the Abuse to What You’re Actually Asking For

There unfortunately isn’t any research that shows if you tie the documentation of the abuse to what you’re asking for (i.e., if you want an 80/20 custody split then tie the abuse directly on how it impacts the children) is going to increase your chances at getting that.

I spent a long time looking for that, so what follows is additional research that relates to this topic.

1. Alesha Durfee found petitioners without legal representation significantly less likely to have protection orders granted, even in courts designed to work for people without lawyers.

2. Anne Groggel analyzed over 1,000 protection order cases in Nebraska and found that being married to the person you’re filing against, sharing children with them, and which county you file in all changed the result, after controlling for the severity, recency and type of the abuse.

The strength of your account does less work than you think. What it’s attached to does more.

If you’re asking for a uneven split of the assets. Emotional abuse on its own rarely moves property division. The behavior with money can. The doctrine is dissipation, sometimes called marital waste: marital money spent for one spouse’s benefit on something unrelated to the marriage while the marriage was breaking down. Courts want specifics.

• Ex: “the marriage broke down in 2024 after an affair was discovered. Since then, I have been locked out of shared bank accounts, and a luxury vehicle was purchased.”

These rules vary state by state.

Florida reaches back 2 years before the petition.

Illinois requires a formal notice of intent to end the marriage to claim dissipation, filed 60 days before trial or 30 days after discovery closes, and bars claims older than 5 years. Texas builds a “reconstituted estate,” the value the marital estate would have had if the spending never happened, then divides that.

Negligent mismanagement doesn’t count anywhere. So the entries that matter here are financial: dates, amounts, accounts, and what the money went to.

If you’re asking for more than 50% parenting time:

The standard is the best interests of the child. Always research and confirm with a local attorney what your state looks at specifically regarding the best interests of the child. There is no uniform standard.

• Michigan’s best-interests factors include the length of time the child has lived in “a stable, satisfactory environment, and the desirability of maintaining continuity,” the child’s “home, school, and community record,” and separately “domestic violence, regardless of whether the violence was directed against or witnessed by the child.”

• Florida and Minnesota list stability and domestic violence the same way. Tying the abuse to your child’s stability argues 2 statutory factors at once.

• Xyrakis and colleagues reviewed 51 studies on children exposed to interparental coercive control in 2024 and found it associated with harsher parenting, higher levels of child abuse, strained parent-child relationships, children used as tools, increased internalizing and externalizing problems, and increased bullying.

  • Their conclusion: coercive control is “a unique contributor to adverse child wellbeing outcomes, independent of exposure to IPV more broadly.”

• Jane Callaghan’s team interviewed 21 UK children aged 8 to 18 and concluded that children in these households “can be reasonably described as victims of abusive control.”

So when you log an incident, note how it negatively impacted the minor children. Go to your courthouse website if you don’t have an attorney yet and look at the exact language that your state uses as it relates to the best interests of the children

That’s the entry that connects your evidence to the standard the judge is applying.

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Whether This Is the Right Arena

What you went through matters. The question is whether family court is the place to have it recognized.

Family court is a legal system and not a justice system. It divides property, sets a parenting schedule, and moves on. Being believed happens there only as a byproduct of winning a specific point, and not the job of any judge to validate your experiences.

I always instruct my clients to confirm with their legal team if what they’re experiencing at home is strong enough evidence to add to the case that they’ve already built to give them a better chance of outcome that they are looking for.

Staying in the legal system has both physical and financial costs

• Gutowski and Goodman studied 220 family court-involved survivor-mothers in 2024 and found legal abuse predicted worse post-traumatic stress and depressive symptoms, running through the vocational losses the litigation caused.

• Christina Smith and Jennifer Freyd named the mechanism in American Psychologist: “Institutional betrayal occurs when an institution causes harm to an individual who trusts or depends upon that institution.”

You do not need the family court system to validate your experiences for them to have actually happened to you and to cause you this much pain.

There are so many steps you can take outside the family court system to process what you’ve been through and slowly start to remove the power those words once had over you.

The 2023 VA and Department of Defense guideline gives its strongest recommendation to 3 treatments: Cognitive Processing Therapy, EMDR, and Prolonged Exposure.

Some of this is worth fighting in court. A lot of it belongs with the trauma-informed professionals who actually have the training to support you through recovering from this experience while still having to be exposed to the abuser.

Keep Documenting Even If Your State Isn’t There Yet

Your state might not recognize coercive control.

Document it anyway.

I’ve supported a lot of clients in Colorado, and Colorado passed HB26-1309 in May 2026, one of the furthest-reaching family court abuse statutes in the country. Colorado is now including coercive control in their definition of domestic violence. The burden of proof is high, but it now exists.

On parental responsibilities, the court “may consider any relevant and admissible evidence,” with findings on the record by a preponderance of the evidence. The act also says a person’s protective behaviors are not domestic violence.

That’s a state deciding that what happened to you counts in family court whether or not anyone was ever charged.

It’s slow moving. It’s still happening.

You might not get the custody arrangement you want this time. Keep documenting anyway, because the pattern you’re building now is what a modification is made of later.

Take what you’ve collected to an attorney and ask the direct question: is this enough evidence to file on, and if it isn’t, what’s missing?

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Disclaimer: This is educational content, not legal advice. Nothing in family law is guaranteed. Rules, procedures, and outcomes vary state by state, county by county, and case by case. Always consult a licensed attorney in your jurisdiction before making decisions about your case.

Sources

• California Senate Bill 1141 (2020), “Domestic violence: coercive control,” Chapter 248, Statutes of 2020, approved September 29, 2020. Amends Family Code § 6320 only; creates no criminal offense. Text

• Colorado House Bill 26-1309, “Abuse in Cases of Separation,” Chapter 163, signed May 27, 2026. Amends the Uniform Dissolution of Marriage Act. Quoted language is from the Colorado General Assembly’s official summary of the act as enacted. Bill page

• Connecticut Public Act 21-78 (2021), “Jennifers’ Law,” signed June 28, 2021. Codified at C.G.S. § 46b-1(b)(4); operates through the civil restraining order statute.

• Callaghan, J. E. M., Alexander, J. H., Sixsmith, J., & Fellin, L. C. (2018). Beyond “witnessing”: Children’s experiences of coercive control in domestic violence and abuse. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 33(10), 1551–1581. Qualitative; interviews with 21 UK children aged 8–18. Record

• Campbell, J. C., Webster, D., Koziol-McLain, J., et al. (2003). Risk factors for femicide in abusive relationships: Results from a multisite case control study. American Journal of Public Health, 93(7), 1089–1097. 11-city case-control study of 220 intimate partner femicide victims (via proxy interviews) and 343 abused control women. PDF

• Coker, A. L., Smith, P. H., Bethea, L., King, M. R., & McKeown, R. E. (2000). Physical health consequences of physical and psychological intimate partner violence. Archives of Family Medicine, 9(5), 451–457. Cross-sectional survey of 1,152 women recruited from family practice clinics, February 1997 to January 1999. Archive

• Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. “Can a debt collector contact me about a debt after a divorce?” Page

• Dissipation and marital waste: Uniform Marriage and Divorce Act § 307 (”contribution or dissipation”); Fla. Stat. § 61.075(1)(i) (2-year lookback); 750 ILCS 5/503(d)(2) (notice deadlines, 5-year outer bar); Tex. Fam. Code § 7.009 (reconstituted estate); N.Y. Dom. Rel. Law § 236(B)(5)(d)(12)–(13). Doctrine summarized in Driskell, E. (2006), Journal of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, 20(1), 135–154. Rules vary substantially by state; check yours. AAML PDF

• Dobash, R. P., Dobash, R. E., Wilson, M., & Daly, M. (1992). The myth of sexual symmetry in marital violence. Social Problems, 39(1), 71–91. PDF

• Durfee, A. (2009). Victim narratives, legal representation, and domestic violence civil protection orders. Feminist Criminology, 4(1), 7–31. The study reports the representation effect as statistically significant and gives no published effect size. Record

• Epstein, D., & Goodman, L. A. (2019). Discounting women: Doubting domestic violence survivors’ credibility and dismissing their experiences. University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 167(2), 399–459. Legal scholarship synthesizing trauma research and court practice; not an empirical study. PDF

• Follingstad, D. R., Rutledge, L. L., Berg, B. J., Hause, E. S., & Polek, D. S. (1990). The role of emotional abuse in physically abusive relationships. Journal of Family Violence, 5(2), 107–120. Interviews with 234 women with a history of physical abuse; the 72% figure is self-reported perceived impact, at p. 114. Corroborated in Street, A. E., & Arias, I. (2001), Violence and Victims, 16(1), 65–78.

• Gutowski, E. R., & Goodman, L. A. (2023). Coercive control in the courtroom: The Legal Abuse Scale (LAS). Journal of Family Violence, 38(3), 527–542. 222 survivor-mothers across 36 US states involved in family law proceedings; convenience sample, 77.5% White. Open access

• Groggel, A. (2021). The role of place and sociodemographic characteristics on the issuance of temporary civil protection orders. Law & Society Review, 55(1), 38–69. Over 1,000 civil protection order cases, Nebraska. Record

• Gutowski, E. R., Goodman, L. A., Riley, M., & Slocum, A. (2024). Vocational and financial losses as mediators between legal abuse and mental health for family court-involved survivor-mothers. Journal of Family Violence. Mixed methods; n = 220 quantitative. Record

• Hardesty, J. L., Hans, J. D., Haselschwerdt, M. L., Khaw, L., & Crossman, K. A. (2015). The influence of divorcing mothers’ demeanor on custody evaluators’ assessment of their domestic violence allegations. Journal of Child Custody, 12(1), 47–70. Multiple segment factorial vignette design, N = 603 custody evaluators. The 4x and 5x figures as reported in California Judicial Council, Beyond the Bench 25 preconference materials. PDF

• Leonetti, C. (2024). Missing coercive control in family court proceedings. William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice, 30(3), 447. New Zealand–focused analysis drawing an explicit parallel to the United States. Repository

• Jeffries, S. (2016). In the best interests of the abuser: Coercive control, child custody proceedings and the “expert” assessments that guide judicial determinations. Laws, 5(1), Article 14. Analysis of common-law family courts, primarily Australian. Open access

• Maccoby, E. E., & Mnookin, R. H. (1992). Dividing the Child: Social and Legal Dilemmas of Custody. Harvard University Press. Longitudinal study of 1,124 divorcing California families; 10% substantial legal conflict, 15% intense conflict.

• Meier, J. S. (2020). U.S. child custody outcomes in cases involving parental alienation and abuse allegations: what do the data show? Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law, 42(1), 92–105. 4,338 published US custody opinions coded from 2005–2014; 2,351 in the analytic dataset. Mostly appellate, so not a random sample of family court. See also the NIJ report, Meier, Dickson, O’Sullivan, Rosen & Hayes (2019), NCJ 304419. Full text PDF

• Myhill, A. (2015). Measuring coercive control: What can we learn from national population surveys? Violence Against Women, 21(3), 355–375. Record

• Michigan Compiled Laws § 722.23; Fla. Stat. § 61.13(3); Minn. Stat. § 518.17, subd. 1(a). Best-interests factors naming both stability/continuity and domestic violence. Custody statutes vary by state; the weight given to domestic violence varies sharply. See the NCJFCJ chart, State Custody Statutes Relevant to Domestic Violence. Chart

• Picó-Alfonso, M. A., Garcia-Linares, M. I., Celda-Navarro, N., Blasco-Ros, C., Echeburúa, E., & Martinez, M. (2006). The impact of physical, psychological, and sexual intimate male partner violence on women’s mental health: Depressive symptoms, posttraumatic stress disorder, state anxiety, and suicide. Journal of Women’s Health, 15(5), 599–611. Cross-sectional; 75 physically/psychologically abused, 55 psychologically abused, 52 controls; Spanish sample.

• Saunders, D. G. (2015). Research based recommendations for child custody evaluation practices and policies in cases of intimate partner violence. Journal of Child Custody, 12(1), 71–92. Reviews Bow & Boxer (2003), n = 115 evaluators, for the median 4 seminars and 18 readings. PDF

• Saunders, D. G., Faller, K. C., & Tolman, R. M. (2016). Beliefs and recommendations regarding child custody and visitation in cases involving domestic violence: A comparison of professionals in different roles. Violence Against Women, 22(6), 722–744. Survey of n = 1,187 judges, legal aid attorneys, private attorneys, DV program workers and custody evaluators. Record

• Smith, C. P., & Freyd, J. J. (2014). Institutional betrayal. American Psychologist, 69(6), 575–587. PDF

• Stark, E. (2007). Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life. Oxford University Press.

• Stark, E. (2015). Written testimony on H.103, Vermont House Judiciary Committee, February 25, 2015. PDF

• The Marshall Project (June 28, 2025). Reporting on state criminalization of coercive control, source of the finding that Hawaii is the only state to have directly criminalized it and that Washington’s attempt failed. Article

• Tolman, R. M. (1989). The development of a measure of psychological maltreatment of women by their male partners. Violence and Victims, 4(3), 159–177. 58-item Psychological Maltreatment of Women Inventory, 2 subscales (Dominance–Isolation, Emotional–Verbal). Item text as published by the UNC SABI instrument repository. Instrument PDF

• U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and Department of Defense (2023). VA/DoD Clinical Practice Guideline for the Management of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and Acute Stress Disorder. Strong recommendation for Cognitive Processing Therapy, EMDR, and Prolonged Exposure. Synopsis published as Schnurr, P. P., Hamblen, J. L., Wolf, J., et al. (2024), Annals of Internal Medicine, 177(3), 363–374. Full guideline

• Somatic Experiencing evidence base: Kuhfuß, M., Maldei, T., Hetmanek, A., & Baumann, N. (2021). Somatic experiencing: effectiveness and key factors of a body-oriented trauma therapy: a scoping literature review. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 12(1), 1929023 (16 studies, 2 RCTs, mixed quality). Positive trial: Brom, D., et al. (2017), Journal of Traumatic Stress, 30(3), 304–312 (n = 63, waitlist-controlled). Null trial: Andersen, T. E., et al. (2020), European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 11(1), 1797306 (n = 114). Listed as an emerging recommendation by ISTSS; absent from the VA/DoD guideline.

• Xyrakis, N., Aquilina, B., McNiece, E., Tran, T., Waddell, C., Suomi, A., & Pasalich, D. (2024). Interparental coercive control and child and family outcomes: A systematic review. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 25(1), 22–40. Systematic review of 51 studies; narrative synthesis, no pooled effect size. Record

Naturally, when they think that everything in the relationship is their fault, they start to work on themselves. They read up on communication styles, try to fix the things they were told were wrong with them, start going to therapy to learn how to be a better partner.

They made the commitment of marriage, and they’re not somebody who gives up easily. They are actively doing everything that they can to try to fix what they believe is broken and not give up on the commitment that they made.

They weren’t people pleasers at the beginning of the relationship. They became one by trying to appease a coercively controlling partner who consistently told them that they were doing everything wrong.

They often describe it as becoming a shell of themselves, since it is such a gradual change that they didn’t even realize it was happening until they got so far removed from who they originally were that they didn’t recognize themselves.

Many of them come into our first meeting describing themselves as having an anxious attachment style, being codependent, or needing to heal a people-pleasing pattern, which many of them do.

But they didn’t have these traits at the beginning of the relationship. They acquired them over years of coercive control.

And usually this kind of behavior only shows up with their partner. They don’t have any issues saying “no” to friends or family when something doesn’t serve them. Many of them work in high-performing jobs where they have a lot of responsibilities and call very important shots.

Then, when they come home to their partner, everything shifts. They become the smaller version of themselves that they had to create to try to minimize conflict and keep the children safe.

This article dives into the research behind why this happens and what you can actually do about it.

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How the Change Happens in Increments

Mary Ann Dutton and Lisa Goodman built a model of how coercion actually runs inside these relationships, published in Sex Roles in 2005.

It has 5 moving parts:

• setting the stage so the threat is believable

• the demand itself

• a credible consequence attached to the demand

• surveillance to check whether she complied

• and delivery of the consequence when she didn’t

They separate two kinds of demand.

The spoken kind, which in their example sounds like “You’d better be home when I get here!”

And the implied kind: “You know what you need to do.”

Past that, they describe compliance becoming “internalized or routine,” with her actions take on the appearance of being ‘voluntary.’

The threats aren’t verbally being made anymore. She just adapted to a new routine, knowing that if she strayed away from it, it would cause conflict.

Nicola Sharp-Jeffs, Liz Kelly and Renate Klein in Violence Against Women in 2018 followed 100 women using domestic violence services over 3 years and built 2 scales: one for coercive control and one for what they call space for action, meaning how much room a woman has to make her own decisions.

The more control a woman experiences, the fewer decisions she made herself.

Appeasement, the Research Term for What You Were Doing

In 2023, a team including Stephen Porges, who developed polyvagal theory, and Jaycee Dugard, who was held captive for 18 years, published a paper in the European Journal of Psychotraumatology arguing that Stockholm syndrome should be retired as a concept.

Their objection was that Stockholm Syndrome entered legal, clinical, and popular use with almost no empirical support behind it, and that it framed survivors as having something wrong with their attachment.

They proposed the term appeasement instead.

Definition: under sustained threat, brainstem survival circuits activate the social engagement system. Warmth, softness, accommodation, reading the other person’s face and matching it. The purpose is to calm the person who is dangerous and reduce the risk of harm.

Their conclusion: appeasement is a survival strategy.

In 2007, Cantor and Price called appeasement the most likely biological signature of complex PTSD and identified it as the mammalian defense best suited to traumatic entrapment.

In short: a situation where leaving is not an option

Fighting back creates escalation. Leaving wasn’t available yet. Ignoring it didn’t make it stop.

Appeasement was the only option left. And it works well enough to where women stay with an abusive partner longer than they initially want.

It kept the peace. It kept things calm for the children. It worked often enough that she kept doing it.

I’m not a psychiatrist and I can’t diagnose anyone, and neither can a trained professional who hasn’t sat with that person.

What I can tell you is that this pattern is documented, it’s common, and it does not indicate a deficit in the person doing it.

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Why Childhood and Codependency Don’t Explain It

Many articles on this subject send the reader back to reflect on their childhood. Neglectful caregivers. Inner child work. Really trying to get to the origin of co-dependency.

For some women this makes sense. They grew up in an emotionally unstable and potentially abusive household, so they’re repeating the same pattern that they were taught at a young age was normal.

For many of the women I work with, it isn’t there. They had healthy parents. They had a self. They can tell you exactly who they were before this relationship, and they can tell you that woman would not recognize who they became inside it.

They developed the pattern inside the relationship, as adults, in response to one specific person.

This is learned people-pleasing. Learned late, learned from one person.

Why Setting Boundaries Didn’t Work

I feel like the term “people-pleasing” has a negative connotation to it. That it has come to mean “weak”. Someone who can never say no. Someone who has never had boundaries.

Evan Stark spent a career arguing against that. Stark is the researcher who defined coercive control, and his 2007 book is the foundational text in the field.

One of his central objections was to the psychological model that described abused women as helpless and passive.

His research showed the opposite. Women in these relationships resist constantly, in dozens of small ways, and they can generally explain exactly what is happening to them.

A boundary works because the other person recognizes her as a separate person with the right to make decisions about her own life. Stark’s entire definition of coercive control is the refusal to recognize that. He calls it a liberty crime, one that deprives a person of the resources required for personhood.

Most of these women are not bad at setting boundaries. They’re setting them with somebody who is committed to disrespecting them.

How to Recognize Learned People-Pleasing in Yourself

I am not a psychiatrist so of course I do not have the ability to diagnose any of these patterns. Here are some of the journal prompts that I give my clients to reflect on:

• Who are you at work, and who are you at home?

• Does your voice change when they walk in?

• Do you rehearse ordinary sentences before you say them out loud?

• Do you read their face before you decide what kind of mood you’re allowed to be in?

• Would the people you work with recognize you at home?

• Has anyone who knew you before mentioned that you seem quieter, or smaller, or different?

• When they’re gone for a few days, does something in you come back?

Dana Crowley Jack, a psychologist at Western Washington University, published Silencing the Self in 1991 and then built her Silencing the Self Scale, published with Diana Dill in 1992,

It’s a 31-item instrument with 4 subscales. One of them is the divided self: the gap between the compliant outer self and the inner one that has gone quiet.

She built it from a longitudinal study of clinically depressed women, then validated it in 3 samples, one of which was residents of battered women’s shelters.

Researchers have used it for more than 30 years.

What Self-Silencing Costs Your Health

Self-silencing is consistently associated with depression. The Sex Roles review reports a moderate correlation, around .39, and 4 prospective studies in which self-silencing measured at the start predicted depression 3 to 18 months later. Most of those 126 studies were run in the United States and Canada with White, heterosexual participants.

In 2007, Elaine Eaker and colleagues published results from the Framingham Offspring Study in Psychosomatic Medicine.

They followed 3,682 adults for 10 years and asked how they handled conflict with their spouse.

After adjusting for the standard risk factors, women who self-silenced during marital conflict were 4 times more likely to die during the follow-up period than women who did not.

Disclaimer: It’s a correlation, not a demonstrated cause. And it measured conflict in a general population sample, not abuse specifically, which means it isn’t a study about your relationship.

Jacquelyn Campbell’s review in The Lancet documented higher rates of chronic pain, particularly back and neck pain, along with gastrointestinal and gynecological problems.

A 2026 systematic review in the Journal of Family Violence found dysregulation of the stress-response system in women exposed to intimate partner violence: flattened cortisol slopes, elevated evening cortisol, blunted awakening responses.

Sustained appeasement is a physiological state that causes your body chronic stress for years.

What People-Pleasing Costs You in a Divorce

The decision to leave is a difficult one, because you’re breaking years of this learned people-pleasing pattern. You’re actively standing up against the abuser who caused you so much harm.

Make a floor deal in the very early stages of the divorce process. Get clear on the hills you’re willing to die on.

How much money do you actually need out of the marital net worth?

What is the parenting plan that prioritizes stability and safety for your children?

Bring that to your legal team so they’re aware of where you’re willing to move, where you’re willing to be flexible, and where you’re willing to fight.

Divorce against a coercively controlling partner is an emotionally and financially exhausting battle. Identifying your floor deal early gives you something to fall back on when the fight is long and you’re willing to accept two pennies just to have a semblance of peace on the other side.

Many of the women I work with start to fall back on what they wanted at the beginning of our work together, because this is exhausting.

These people are going to be angry because you left. It doesn’t matter how kindly you frame it or what you offer them.

You might as well let them be upset while you advocate for yourself, rather than hand over things you actually want.

What to Take From This

Women who end up with coercively controlling partners do not lose themselves because they are weak. They adapted, gradually and intelligently, to a person whose behavior required adapting to.

Their brain did exactly what it was designed to do, and that is adapted to keep them safe.

Understanding these patterns and how they may be impacting you is an important step in taking back control over your narrative and being able to label and identify what is happening to help you feel a little bit less lost.

The women I work with often have a very large team. They have a divorce coach, an attorney, a trauma-informed therapist, friends and family in their corner, all there to help not only support them, but validate their version of the truth to keep them grounded in the divorce process.

Breaking free of these learned patterns is not easy, but it certainly is possible.

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I am a divorce strategist, not an attorney or a therapist. Nothing in this article is legal or mental health advice. If you are divorcing or separating from a coercively controlling partner, work with a licensed attorney in your jurisdiction who understands these dynamics.

References

Bailey, R., Dugard, J., Smith, S. F., & Porges, S. W. (2023). Appeasement: replacing Stockholm syndrome as a definition of a survival strategy. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 14(1), 2161038.

Campbell, J. C. (2002). Health consequences of intimate partner violence. The Lancet, 359(9314), 1331–1336.

Cantor, C., & Price, J. (2007). Traumatic entrapment, appeasement and complex post-traumatic stress disorder: evolutionary perspectives of hostage reactions, domestic abuse and the Stockholm syndrome. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 41(5), 377–384.

Dutton, M. A., & Goodman, L. A. (2005). Coercion in intimate partner violence: toward a new conceptualization. Sex Roles, 52(11–12), 743–756.

Eaker, E. D., Sullivan, L. M., Kelly-Hayes, M., D’Agostino, R. B., & Benjamin, E. J. (2007). Marital status, marital strain, and risk of coronary heart disease or total mortality: the Framingham Offspring Study. Psychosomatic Medicine, 69(6), 509–513.

Epstein, D., & Goodman, L. A. (2019). Discounting women: doubting domestic violence survivors’ credibility and dismissing their experiences. University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 167(2), 399–461.

Hardesty, J. L., Hans, J. D., Haselschwerdt, M. L., Khaw, L., & Crossman, K. A. (2015). The influence of divorcing mothers’ demeanor on custody evaluators’ assessment of their domestic violence allegations. Journal of Child Custody, 12(1), 47–70.

Jack, D. C. (1991). Silencing the Self: Women and Depression. Harvard University Press.

Jack, D. C., & Dill, D. (1992). The Silencing the Self Scale: schemas of intimacy associated with depression in women. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 16(1), 97–106.

Jack, D. C., Brody, L. R., & Sikov, J. (2026). Advancing the next generation of research on self-silencing and depression: a narrative review and synthesis of three decades of research. Sex Roles, 92(2), 7.

Rodrigues, M., Wood, E. P., Green, N., et al. (2026). Intimate partner violence and cardiovascular disease risk: a systematic review of biological stress-response mechanisms. Journal of Family Violence.

Sharp-Jeffs, N., Kelly, L., & Klein, R. (2018). Long journeys toward freedom: the relationship between coercive control and space for action, measurement and emerging evidence. Violence Against Women, 24(2), 163–185.

Stark, E. (2007). Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life. Oxford University Press.

She had been unhappy in her marriage for over 30 years and figured she had maybe 10 good years left. Her words “I’m not going to spend the rest of my good years with someone who always made me feel small”.

She is part of the fastest-growing group in American divorce, the Gray Divorce. Gray divorce is a divorce that happens after age 50, usually ending a marriage of 20 or 30 years or more.

Every woman I’ve supported through divorce regrets not acting sooner. They’re smart, empathetic, and driven women. They blame themselves for not seeing the signs and staying for so long.

They did the best they could with the knowledge they had at the moment. Faced with two impossible choices.

1. Stay with someone who they’ve identified is not healthy for them to avoid the grueling divorce process.

2. Bulldoze headfirst into conflict with someone they spent years making themselves small for to try and keep the peace for the children.

There is never a right time to leave.

But it’s also never to late to leave.

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Who Is Actually Filing for Gray Divorce

More than half of my current clients are over the age of 55. They waited until the kids were out of the house to start the divorce process. All of them had made the decision to leave years prior. They waited mainly to protect the kids from conflict, and not have to co parent with coercively controlling patterns.

Between 1990 and 2021, the divorce rate for adults 65 and older tripled. For women 65 and older, it nearly quadrupled. By 2019, 36% of all divorces in the country involved someone 50 or older, up from 27% in 2010.

Gray divorce is becoming increasingly more common.

Why the Timing Never Arrives for Divorce After 60

There is always a reason it is not the right time.

I could lay out a calendar and every week will have a reason for what it’s not.

The kids are still in high school. Then one is in college and the tuition depends on the marriage looking stable on paper. Then their mother gets sick and she is the one driving to the appointments. Then they retire and are home all day, and there is no eight-hour window left where the house belongs to her making it impossible to plan. Then her own diagnosis comes back and she thinks, well, now is certainly not the time.

A client in her 60’s told me she had a folder of divorce attorney names she had been adding to since 2003. 22 years of wanting to leave. She had a few consults. Filed once 10 years ago then retracted it.

There was never going to be a good time. She just finally got tired of the constant verbal abuse and decided that there was not a price she could put on her peace. She wanted to enjoy a quiet retirement with her grandkids and friends in a modest home, pursing her hobbies that her husband always said were a “waste of time”.

Every one of those reasons was real on the day she thought it. What accumulated was a habit of postponement, and after enough years she got tired of being unhappy. Anything was better than staying.

What a Generation of Women Was Trained To Do

Many of my older clients grew up being taught what a “good wife’s” role is. Do not make a scene. Do not embarrass your spouse in front of company. Keep the peace and the marriage keeps itself. Do as your told. Don’t talk back.

So they stay quiet.

Psychologists have researched what years of self silencing does. At Harvard in 1992, Dana Jack, at Harvard identified the four components of it: judging yourself through other people’s eyes, putting everyone else’s needs ahead of your own as a definition of love, holding your tongue to avoid conflict, and living with a gap between what you show and what you feel.

30 years of research since then has found self-silencing associated with depression at a moderate correlation, around .39, and four longitudinal studies found that self-silencing measured at the start predicted depression three to 18 months later. Self silencing can lead to depression.

That is the thing my clients over 60 are actually trying to unlearn. They finally feel safe enough to vocalize their discontent, and take the steps to do something about it. The divorce is only one part of it.

I see their energy shift in as quick as a few months. They’re lighter. More energized. Booking solo cruises. Joining clubs to meet new people that share their same hobbies. Spending time with their kids and grandkids without their partner.

You can claim back your autonomy and peace at any age.

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What Staying in an Unhappy Marriage After 50 Costs Physically

Hui Liu and Linda Waite followed about 1,200 married adults between 57 and 85 in the National Social Life, Health and Aging Project. They found that negative marital quality raised cardiovascular risk, that a bad marriage did more harm than a good marriage did good, and that the effect got stronger with age.

It impacted women more than men.

So when a 68-year-old woman starts questioning her choice, telling me that she is too old for this. That it’s not that bad. That she can move into a different room and put space between them. I remind her of her why. It’s never my job to make decisions for women, but to reflect back what they told me day one, and remind them that staying can be even harder than leaving.

The cost of staying takes a toll on your physical health just as much as your mental health. But by removing the chronic stressor, both of those can improve quickly.

What Happens to Women After a Late-Life Divorce

Bourassa, Sbarra and Whisman, in the Journal of Family Psychology in 2015, found that marital quality changed the outcome entirely. Women coming out of the lowest quality marriages gained life satisfaction after divorce.

A 2025 study in the Journal of Happiness Studies tracked 1,462 women through relationship dissolution against 2,587 matched women who stayed partnered, across 9 waves of data.

The results: steady before, a real drop in the years right around the separation, and long-term gains after. The 3 things that moved the recovery were social support, a sense of control over her own circumstances, and income.

You can control your social circle and your divorce plan before you even share the news.

For the Woman Who Thinks She Waited Too Long

There is never going to be a right time to leave. Especially if there’s a lot of conflict in your marriage. Many of the women I’ve worked with started planning 2-3 years before they met me. Going back to school, saving money, some even securing food and clothes in a storage unit to have essentials for their kids if they had to leave in the middle of the night.

Leaving may take time to do safely once the decision has been made. But every small step, is a step closer to your freedom.

I have supported more than 500 women through this. I have never once had a client who left early. Every woman arrives convinced she should have known sooner, including the ones who left within a year.

The women who leave at 63 do not consider a woman leaving at 40 late. They look up to her for taking action before she could.

My 82-year-old client was able to get through divorce quickly because she spent months planning prior. She was ecstatic to describe to me how she was able to decorate HER new home the way she had always dreamed. And how she gets to wake up every morning to have coffee on her patio, without someone there to ruin her day before it starts.

She finally found her peace later in life.

It’s never too late to find yours.

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Sources

• Brown, S. L., & Lin, I-F., National Center for Family and Marriage Research, Bowling Green State University. Divorce rate trends for adults 50+ and 65+, 1990–2021, drawn from CDC Vital Statistics and American Community Survey data. Summarized in AARP, “Study: Gray Divorce a Trend Among Boomers.”

• Jack, D. C., & Dill, D. (1992). “The Silencing the Self Scale: Schemas of Intimacy Associated With Depression in Women.” Psychology of Women Quarterly, 16(1), 97–106. Wiley

• “Advancing the Next Generation of Research on Self-Silencing and Depression: A Narrative Review and Synthesis of Three Decades of Research.” Sex Roles (2025). Source of the r = .39 correlation and the four prospective studies.

• Liu, H., & Waite, L. (2014). “Bad Marriage, Broken Heart? Age and Gender Differences in the Link Between Marital Quality and Cardiovascular Risks Among Older Adults.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 55(4). National Social Life, Health and Aging Project, n ≈ 1,200, ages 57–85. PubMed · Summary

• Bourassa, K. J., Sbarra, D. A., & Whisman, M. A. (2015). “Women in Very Low Quality Marriages Gain Life Satisfaction Following Divorce.” Journal of Family Psychology, 29(3), 490–499. PubMed

• Arcangeli, O. J., & Ejova, A. (2025). “Does Time Heal All Wounds? Life Satisfaction Trajectories in Australian Middle-Aged Women Before and After Relationship Dissolution.” Journal of Happiness Studies, 26(3). Australian Longitudinal Study on Women’s Health, 1,462 women vs. 2,587 matched controls across nine waves. Springer

• Lin, I-F., & Brown, S. L. (2021). “The Economic Consequences of Gray Divorce for Women and Men.” The Journals of Gerontology: Series B, 76(10), 2073–2085. Health and Retirement Study, 2004–2014, n = 590. Oxford Academic

• Social Security Administration, Actuarial Life Table (2023). Female life expectancy at exact age 82: 8.64 years.

• Social Security Administration, Benefits for a Divorced Spouse. Ten-year marriage duration requirement, the 50 percent figure, and the two-year rule.

Disclaimer: This is educational content, not legal advice. Nothing in family law is guaranteed. Rules, procedures, and outcomes vary state by state, county by county, and case by case. Always consult a licensed attorney in your jurisdiction before making decisions about your case.

Greene wrote down how power is actually taken and held, with the conscience removed. High-conflict and narcissistic personalities run naturally, without ever having to read the book.

Almost every woman I work with comes in wanting an amicable divorce. Of course she does. Nobody wants the other version.

The ones who have sat in reality and accepted their partner for who they are understand that this is going to be a bumpy road, and that playing fair is not going to get them a fair deal.

Now, this isn’t saying that we’re playing dirty. That’s not at all ethical, and it’s not how I coach people. It’s simply identifying what patterns were present in the marriage to predict what patterns are going to be present in the divorce process, and then applying a methodology to them.

That way, it’s something tangible that you can grasp, with an action step you can take to counter it, or at least mentally prepare for it.

Disclaimer: This article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Evara Consulting provides coaching, not legal representation. Consult a licensed attorney in your jurisdiction about your specific case.

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Law 3: Conceal Your Intentions

The law. Keep people off balance by never revealing what you’re actually after. Greene’s argument is that intentions announced are intentions defeated.

What it looks like

They tell you they want this amicable. They don’t want to fight. They just want what’s fair. They want to remain child-centered. They’ll make sure you’re taken care of. They’ll give you anything you ask for.

Meanwhile, they’re slowly moving assets that you may not have access to. They’re making comments to the children about how much they’re going to miss seeing them every day, and throwing subtle jabs that it’s your fault. They’ve already started a smear campaign to your friends, your family, even the grocery store clerk if they’ll listen, about how devastated they are that their spouse left, and that all they want is for you to come back so they can be a family again. Probably claiming they have no idea what led to this. Maybe even accusing you of cheating.

This tactic can also be referred to as DARVO. Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. Psychologist Jennifer Freyd coined the term in 1997. They deny what they did, attack your credibility, and install themselves as the injured party.

It works, which is the part that makes people feel crazy. Harsey and Freyd (2020) found that people exposed to a DARVO response showed less belief of the victim and more blame of the victim. The same study found that participants who were taught what DARVO was beforehand rated the perpetrator as less believable.

At home, they’re playing nice, making comments about how you can solve for this in mediation.

“Why don’t we just drop our attorneys instead of throwing all of our hard-earned money at them? “

“Do you not trust me?”

Coercively controlling partners clearly love things that they can maintain control over. They can’t maintain as much control over a legal process when you have an attorney. They can maintain control in mediation.

Their intention is to maintain control over you and over the settlement deal. Not fairness or amicability.

How you can use it

Observe their actions and do not listen to their words. Oftentimes, these personality types have a history of actions and words not aligning, so naturally that’s going to continue in the divorce process when their finances and time with their children are on the line. They’re quite good at saying the right things to bring your guard down and get you to trust them again.

Try to keep all communication in writing. Don’t agree to any deals outside of your attorney or a mediator. Stand firm on your decision to leave, even when they’re saying the right things.

My coaching style is quite direct. When I say this, I say it from a place of love. But simply stop talking and plan. The more words you give them, the more ammo they have to use against you, so just keep communication to what is absolutely necessary.

You don’t owe them your filing date, your attorney’s name, your settlement floor, or the fact that you’ve started documenting. They behave differently the second they think someone is keeping records. Their unguarded behavior is the most useful evidence you will ever collect, and you only get it while they still feel safe.

Most of the women I work with are used to overexplaining themselves. Years of coercive control conditioned them to do it. The ones who start saying less and planning more are amazed at how much more in control of the situation they feel. They slowly start to get their sense of self back and realize that even though this is their partner, and often the parent of their children, they don’t owe them an explanation. This was never a fair fight. This was never a communication issue where, if you explained yourself clearly enough and with the right language, they would finally understand. This is a divorce from somebody who wants to maintain control.

The less you say, the more power you hold.

Write down what they promise. Then log what actually happens.

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Separation ends the marriage without ending the control. The child is the last remaining point of contact, so often, the children and the parenting plan are weaponized to maintain control.

Spearman, Hardesty and Campbell (2023) reviewed the research on post-separation abuse and listed what the pattern includes: legal abuse, economic abuse, threats and endangerment to children, isolation, discrediting, harassment and stalking, and manipulation of systems. Katz, Nikupeteri and Laitinen (2020) traced how child contact keeps coercive control running after the household ends.

Carter, Hardesty and Ogolsky (2026) matched survey answers from 173 divorcing mothers against their real circuit court records: more coercive control meant more filings, about 6.8% more per unit increase, in the period before the final decree.

Douglas (2018) interviewed 65 women in Australia, and 30 of them described an ex using the litigation itself as the abuse — adjournments, variation applications, repeated returns to court. Legal abuse is common enough that Gutowski and Goodman (2023) built a 14-item scale to measure it.

Together, the five moves below describe parallel parenting: two households running on a written custody order, with the exchange of information limited to what the order requires.

You cannot have a healthy co-parenting relationship with a coercively controlling partner that is committed to maintaining some level of control over you even once the divorce is over.

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One Written Channel for Every Co-Parenting Message

She is a single platform to maintain all written communication through. No calls, no texts outside of the agreed-upon channel, no verbal agreements at the exchange. When they call: “Please send that through OFW”.

Coercively controlling partners have a long history of saying one thing and going against that later. Keeping everything in writing helps to eliminate that.

It also creates an asymmetry. Under Federal Rule of Evidence 801(d)(2), their own messages can be used against them with no hearsay objection available. Yours do not work the same way in reverse. You generally cannot put your own messages in to prove that what they say is true.

Parenting Apps: Irving and Boxall (2026) interviewed 18 separated mothers using co-parenting apps with abusive ex-partners, 13 of them court-ordered. 9 found the apps protective. 7 found the apps made things worse. 2 reported both.

One participant’s ex used read receipts to work out what time she woke up, then timed messages to land for maximum effect. Participants described writing every reply carefully to avoid being baited. They worried about coming across as curt or emotional in a permanent record, while their ex-partners wrote messages designed to look reasonable to a judge.

They learn the language of the court system and do not hesitate to weaponize that language.

From what I’ve seen in my work, the co-parenting apps do help to absorb conflict, if the opposing party actually agrees to use it. In many cases, they just don’t communicate through the app. They refuse to use it for anything and continue to call my clients and text them on their personal number, even when there is a court order that states otherwise. They have to document that to build a case to have an escalation measure reinforced in front of a judge for going against the court order.

Most of the professionals recommending these apps have never used one. Payne and colleagues (2022) surveyed 344 family law professionals in Australia and New Zealand. About three-quarters recommended an app. About two-thirds of those had never used one, and roughly a third had clients who experienced or feared coercive control through an app.

Use one anyway. Go in knowing the record runs both directions, and that your timing, your read receipts and your tone are all visible.

One-Sentence Replies: JADE, BIFF, and What to Send Instead

Coercively control partners are very skilled at conversation traps and using your language against you. The fewer words you give them, the less they have to weaponize. The less you react to their baiting, the less control that they have.

JADE is the list of things to avoid: justify, argue, defend, explain. Their message is written to get one of these responses, and each one puts more of your words on the record while treating their accusation as a fair question.

• Justify or defend, and the next hearing is partly about you.

• Explain, and you hand over facts nothing required you to give.

• Argue, and you produce the back-and-forth that gets attached to a motion as proof that both parents are in conflict.

Many times, my clients do not explain their reasoning poorly. They just have a partner that is committed to misunderstanding them

The acronym comes out of Al-Anon and reached co-parenting through narcissistic abuse recovery communities.

The BIFF method is the structure to use instead: brief, informative, friendly, firm. Bill Eddy built it at the High Conflict Institute and is the most commonly used framework to communicate with antagonistic personality patterns.

• Brief: short.

• Informative: logistics and facts, with no commentary on what they said.

• Friendly: not hostile. That is a lower bar than warm, and an easier one to hit on a bad day.

• Firm: the message closes. Eddy’s example is a line like “that’s all I’m going to say.”

The more you write, the more material the other person has to criticize.

One sentence is BIFF compressed. Brief and informative carry it, friendly drops to neutral, and firm happens because the message ends.

Parents in the Irving and Boxall study described doing this — grey rock, careful drafting — to avoid handing the court a reaction. Both the BIFF method and JADE are practitioner tools with no effectiveness research behind them.

The Information You Share Is What the Order Requires

Joint decision authority comes with consistent communication responsibilities. Medical information, school records, treatment decisions, anything your parenting plan says you decide together. Most custody orders also require notice, and often written agreement, before either parent takes the child out of state, outside a set radius, or out of the country.

When dealing with a coercively controlling partner, it’s important that the custody order names all of them to give them minimal room for interpreting things to say what they want them to say.

When the order lists the categories, the timeline and the method, co-parenting conflict can be reduced. Without that language, every request turns into an argument about what a reasonable parent would share.

Everything outside the children is your private life. Your friends. What you do on the weekends the children are with them. Someone new you have started seeing. Your physical and mental health. The plans you are making for the next few years, and what you are exploring to rebuild post divorce.

If they ask how you’re doing or what your plans are for the weekend, your response: “I’m only available to discuss child-related topics in our court order, not my personal life”.

If something in your own life does carry a legal disclosure obligation like a change that affects support, a move that starts a relocation process, it goes through your attorney, in the form and on the timeline the order or the statute sets.

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A Dated Log That Documents the Pattern

Courts act on patterns. One bad night reads as two parents in conflict. 27 dated entries across eight 8 read as conduct. What you document, and in what order, helps translate your lived experience into a clear pattern that your attorney can use to support your case.

“They are late for every single exchange” is a habit claim under Federal Rule of Evidence 406. What makes a habit claim work is the number of instances behind it and how consistently the person did the same thing. You need to show the volume with dates and time stamps and pairing evidence.

The log itself rarely goes into evidence.

• Rule 803(5). You can read a log into the record only if you can no longer remember the events well enough to testify. It becomes an exhibit only if the other side offers it.

• Rule 803(6) and Palmer v. Hoffman (1943). Business records are admissible because businesses keep them to run the business. A record kept mainly for litigating falls outside that rule, and a log you started because of the custody case is close to that example.

• Rule 612. If you use the log on the stand to refresh your memory, the other side gets to inspect it, cross-examine you on it, and put any relevant part of it in front of the judge.

• Self-authentication of electronic records under Rules 902(13) and (14) needs a certification and advance written notice, settles authenticity only, and states have adopted it unevenly.

Keep documenting anyway. It makes you a precise witness, it shows your attorney the pattern and Rule 406 needs the consistency. Write every entry as something the other side may read.

A Custody Order Specific Enough to Enforce

The goal of a parenting plan is to ensure stability for the minor children and be very clear on the roles and responsibilities of both parties. Divorce doesn’t make new patterns with these kinds of people. It just shines a very bright light on the previous patterns that were existing in the partnership. Try to think of common points of conflict and see if you can work with your attorney to get a clause to get ahead of it

• Right of first refusal. Illinois has the clearest rule. Under 750 ILCS 5/602.3, a court ordering right of first refusal without an agreement between the parties has to spell out four things: how long an absence triggers it, what kind of childcare counts, how notice and response work, and who handles transportation. The length of time is up to the court. In In re Marriage of Whitehead (2018), an Illinois appellate court upheld an eight-hour trigger over a request for four, reasoning that a shorter trigger would force the parties into more contact and more conflict.

• Non-disparagement. Narrow clauses survive. Broad ones get struck as a prior restraint on speech. In Israel v. Israel (Ind. Ct. App. 2022), the court kept the part of the clause covering the child’s presence and struck the part barring disparagement to friends, family, doctors, teachers, coworkers, employers and the press. In Shak v. Shak (MA, 2020), vacating non-disparagement orders without a showing of grave and imminent harm, while leaving in place clauses the parties had agreed to voluntarily. Draft to the child’s presence and expect anything wider to fail.

Rowen and Emery (2018) asked young adults about parental denigration. More exposure predicted feeling less close to both parents, with the most distance from the parent doing the denigrating, along with higher depressive symptoms and lower life satisfaction. Denigration was largely reciprocal between parents, and the data gave no support to the alienation hypothesis. Restraint in front of your child protects your relationship with your child.

• Lateness and forfeiture. Geauga and Greene Counties in Ohio forfeit the exchange at 30 minutes without notice. The Texas Standard Possession Order has no lateness provision at all. Michigan requires every circuit to run a makeup parenting time policy under MCL 552.642, which a self-executing forfeiture clause can conflict with. Pull your own county’s standard parenting order before the initial parenting draft is sent over.

Co-Parenting Claims That Do Not Hold Up

“Records from the co-parenting app are automatically admissible.” False. Rule 801(d)(2) removes the hearsay objection to their statements offered against them, and does nothing else. Authentication, relevance and completeness objections all survive.

“Court-ordered in all 50 states.” Vendor marketing, unverifiable. No court system runs an approval program for these products, which is why none are named in this article.

“Grey rock and BIFF are evidence-based.” There are zero peer-reviewed effectiveness studies for grey rock and no empirical evaluation of the BIFF method, and JADE came out of a 12-step tradition with nothing behind it either. All three are practitioner frameworks, and worth using on those terms. Parents in high-conflict cases clearly do use them (Irving and Boxall, 2026). I do see them reduce conflict, but the conflict often increases before it dies down because you’re changing the communication method that was present for years, so naturally there’s going to be friction.

“Your custody journal is admissible in court.” See Rule 803(5) and Palmer v. Hoffman above.

“Four hours is the standard for right of first refusal” and “you get fifteen minutes at an exchange.” Neither number is a national rule. Both come from local drafting practice, and they move by county. Always confirm with your attorney.

What Sits Inside Your Control

• Which channel the communication runs through, and how firmly you enforce it.

• The length of your replies.

• What information you volunteer past what the custody order requires.

• Whether you update your parenting log daily, or whether you try to update it weeks in the future from memory.

• What language and clauses you put in your parenting plan.

You cannot control their reactions to anything, but you can control your response to their response. Co-parenting with coercively controlling partners is a very long journey. Do what you can to lay the firm foundation on how the relationship is going to work while actively in the divorce process

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Cassandra Dill is a divorce strategist and founder of Evara Consulting, specializing in high-conflict divorce involving narcissistic partners and coercive control. This article is educational and does not constitute legal advice. Evidence rules, relocation statutes, right of first refusal provisions and non-disparagement law vary by state and change. Consult a licensed attorney in your jurisdiction.

Sources

Spearman, K. J., Hardesty, J. L., & Campbell, J. (2023). Post-separation abuse: A concept analysis. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 79(4), 1225–1246. https://doi.org/10.1111/jan.15310

Carter, S., Hardesty, J. L., & Ogolsky, B. G. (2026). Associations between coercive control and rate of court filings during the divorce process. Journal of Family Violence, 41(2). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10896-026-01090-5

Douglas, H. (2018). Legal systems abuse and coercive control. Criminology & Criminal Justice, 18(1), 84–99. https://law.uq.edu.au/files/28536/Douglas%20Systems%20Abuse%202017.pdf

Gutowski, E., & Goodman, L. A. (2023). Legal abuse and its association with mental health among survivor-mothers. Journal of Family Violence, 38(3), 527–542. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10896-022-00408-3

Irving, H., & Boxall, H. (2026). Post-separation parenting apps as tools for control and resistance. Violence Against Women. https://doi.org/10.1177/10778012261429100

Payne, J., Smyth, B., Irving, H., Heard, G., & Althor, G. (2022). Co-parenting apps and family law professionals. International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family, 36(1). https://doi.org/10.1093/lawfam/ebac029

Katz, E., Nikupeteri, A., & Laitinen, M. (2020). When coercive control continues to harm children. Child Abuse Review, 29(4), 310–324. https://doi.org/10.1002/car.2611

Rowen, J., & Emery, R. (2018). Parental denigration: A form of conflict that typically backfires. Family Court Review, 56(2), 258–268. https://doi.org/10.1111/fcre.12339

Nitschke, F. T., McKimmie, B. M., & Vanman, E. J. (2019). A meta-analysis of the emotional victim effect. Psychological Bulletin, 145(10).

Eddy, B. BIFF: Quick Responses to High-Conflict People. High Conflict Institute Press. Method summary: https://www.highconflictinstitute.com/how-to-write-a-biff-response/ (practitioner framework; no published effectiveness evaluation)

Federal Rules of Evidence 801(d)(2), 803(5), 803(6), 406, 612, 902(13)–(14). https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/fre/rule_801 · https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/fre/rule_803 · https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/fre/rule_406 · https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/fre/rule_902

Palmer v. Hoffman, 318 U.S. 109 (1943). https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/318/109/

750 ILCS 5/602.3 (right of first refusal). https://www.ilga.gov/Documents/legislation/ilcs/documents/075000050K602.3.htm

In re Marriage of Whitehead, 2018 IL App (5th) 170380. https://cases.justia.com/illinois/court-of-appeals-fifth-appellate-district/2018-5-17-0380.pdf

Israel v. Israel, 189 N.E.3d 170 (Ind. Ct. App. 2022).

Shak v. Shak, 484 Mass. 658 (2020). https://law.justia.com/cases/massachusetts/supreme-court/volumes/484/484mass658.html

Fla. Stat. § 61.13001 (relocation). MCL 552.642 (Michigan makeup parenting time).

I’ve supported more than 500 women through divorce. The most infuriating, expensive, and exhausting tactic, is when the opposing party abuses the discovery process.

They won’t respond to discovery requests. They miss deadlines, so she has to schedule court hearings to force what the rules already require. They produce incomplete documents. They stop engaging. It looks like chaos from the outside, and it is, unfortunately, one of the most effective tactics they have, because dragging the process out works.

When I’m supporting women in the pre-divorce planning stage, if there are coercive controlling behaviors around money, then she at least has time to strategize and find a good attorney to try to get ahead of this. Understanding how much it will cost her and how long it’s going to take to uncover enough financial information to get an equitable deal.

When I’m supporting women that are in a legal holding pattern due to discovery abuse, then it’s about strategizing with your attorney and really getting clear on your floor deal. How much money do you need at minimum to walk away and be in a comfortable spot? You need to get clear on what is worth fighting for and what isn’t.

And no, it’s not fair. But fairness is a very fun myth in family law. Very rarely does it exist when someone is leaving a coercively controlling partner.

Discovery is the phase where each side has to hand over the financial records the other needs to divide property and set support. It runs on the assumption that both people comply. The rules require it, and the rules do not enforce themselves.

Across hundreds of these cases, the pattern is the same. The obstruction is strategic. The goal is to drain her of money and stamina until a lowball offer starts to look like relief.

Once the relationship is over, the legal process is the last mechanism of control still available to them, and discovery is where it gets used, because it is the phase where one party holds the power. Withholding information and forcing you to ask them for it.

No study has tested whether obstruction causes under-resourced parties to accept worse settlements. But it is something that I see happen quite often. Especially when the bank accounts are drained and there is no energy left to fight what feels like an unwinnable battle

Mnookin and Kornhauser (1979) showed settlement turns on each party’s ability to bear the cost of the fight.

Watson and Ancis documented survivors naming prolongation as a deliberate tactic, and Bradshaw and colleagues measured the financial devastation that follows.

I’m a divorce strategist, not an attorney. Nothing here is legal advice. Always consult with a licensed attorney in your state regarding your case.

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What happens when a spouse ignores discovery requests?

When a spouse ignores discovery requests, the rules are on her side and nothing enforces them for her. There is no automatic penalty. A response deadline passes and the court does not notice. Someone has to file a motion to make the obligation real, and that someone is the person experiencing the discovery abuse, and they have to pay for it.

Family courts respond to what is brought to them. There is not a clerk watching all of the cases for missed information in the financial disclosures. You have to build a case to bring to your attorney to let them know what is missing. After multiple attempts at getting that information with informal deadlines, then there may be enough to escalate this to a judge.

A high-level timeline:

1. Follow-up. Your attorney sends a letter noting the missed response and asking opposing counsel to produce the missing documents.

2. Meet and confer. Most states require a documented, good-faith effort to resolve the dispute directly before the court gets involved.

3. Motion to compel. Your attorney asks the court to order the other side to produce what the rules already require. A motion to compel is a formal request asking a judge to force a non-responsive party to answer.

4. Sanctions. If they defy the order, you goes back and asks the court to penalize them, usually with fees.

5. Fee award. You asks the court to make them pay the cost their conduct forced.

Every step is a filing, and every filing is time and money. And nobody has counted how often any of this happens. No study measures how frequently discovery is obstructed in family court, how often motions to compel are filed or granted, or how often sanctions land.

I see it in most financial abuse cases that I work on. There are different levels to it, but it is usually present in some way.

The courts do not collect this data. This is an experience the system does not measure, which is part of why I often see this tactic underestimated

What counts as an incomplete financial disclosure?

An incomplete financial disclosure is a production that leaves out documents the rules require. It turns from careless to strategic when the gaps cluster in the exact categories that would establish income or asset value, and those same categories stay empty after a court orders more, while everything else fills in.

Late and selective are two different tactics.

The clearest data on the differences I found comes from outside family court. A Federal Judicial Center study of federal civil litigation (Willging and colleagues, 1997 data) found that document production was the single worst source of discovery problems, and that those problems split into two kinds: failure to respond adequately and failure to respond timely.

Lateness is a timing problem. It spreads across categories at random, because disorganization does not know which account matters. An overwhelmed person produces everything eventually, and the missing pieces are scattered.

Selectivity concentrates. The tax returns come but the K-1s behind them do not. The personal accounts arrive and the business accounts stall. The statements for the quiet years show up, and the year of the bonus, the sale, or the large deposit stays missing. Order a fuller production and the ordinary categories improve while the same few stay empty.

Track which categories are missing, and watch whether the pattern survives a court order. Disorganization improves across the board once a judge orders more. Strategy keeps the same gaps in the same categories.

This is a practical discriminator rather than a validated instrument. No such instrument exists. It is a way to read the pattern alongside an attorney, not any diagnosis.

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Where ordinary discovery delays come from

Most discovery friction is ordinary. Counsel is overloaded. Records are genuinely a mess. Some estates are complicated, and untangling a decade of commingled accounts takes time that looks like stalling from the outside.

The same federal research argues against overreading it. In that data, 52 % of civil cases involved no formal discovery disputes at all, and only 15% of lawyers reported opponents using discovery to harass even slightly.

Discovery friction also increases with marital net worth: problems climbed from 27% of the lowest-value cases to 69% of cases worth more than two million dollars. In a high-asset divorce, some friction is simply what large numbers produce, whatever anyone intends (quite literally more money, more problems).

Both things are true at once. Most delay is ordinary, and the pattern above is how to tell it from the other kind. It works precisely because the worst case cannot be assumed at the outset.

Watch which categories change after a court order, and which do not.

How do courts handle a self-employed spouse who underreports income?

Courts treat reported income as a claim they can test. When a self-employed spouse underreports, a judge can weigh lifestyle against stated earnings, impute income the reporting does not explain, and order subpoenas to banks, clients, and vendors rather than to the party already withholding.

A W-2 is hard to fake. Self-employment income is self-reported, which makes it easy to understate: cash that never hits a deposit, personal expenses run through the company, income deferred on paper because the divorce is happening this year. Courts treat that reported number as income unless you can prove otherwise.

The tools test it. Lifestyle analysis compares what someone spends against what they claim to earn, because spending is harder to hide than income.

Imputation lets a judge assign an earning figure the reported numbers cannot account for.

Subpoenas move the request onto third parties who have no reason to protect them: the bank, the merchant processor, the biggest client.

When the gap between the reported number and the real one is large enough, a forensic accountant pays for itself, and part of an attorney’s job is being honest about where that line sits.

Examples of this being applied in 2 California cases:

1. In In re Marriage of Rossi, a wife won a lottery prize worth about 1.3 million dollars and filed for divorce less than two weeks later. California requires each spouse to list every asset on a financial disclosure signed under penalty of perjury, and she left the winnings off hers completely. The divorce closed before her husband knew the money existed. When he discovered it afterward, the court applied California's penalty for concealing an asset in bad faith and awarded him the full prize, rather than the half he would have received in an ordinary community-property split.

2. In In re Marriage of Feldman, a husband concealed a foreign bond, a multimillion-dollar property purchase run through an entity, a large loan, and nine newly created companies. The court imposed 250,000 dollars in disclosure sanctions plus 140,000 dollars in fees, and held that no proof of injury to the other spouse was required. The sanction exists to enforce the disclosure duty itself.

California’s disclosure and fee provisions are unusually strong, so they show the remedy can exist somewhere (usually at the end after a long legal battle).

The real question for any woman is what her own state requires, and what it does when the requirement is ignored. And both are appellate decisions, which by definition means someone could afford to litigate them to a published opinion.

The remedy does exist. It just costs significant time and money in order to actually get it.

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What does a motion to compel actually cost?

Every motion to compel is billable attorney hours and buys the other side more time. That asymmetry is only reversed through a record. Sanctions and fee awards are built on a documented pattern of specific, repeated, unmet requests, and that record exists, but you need to document it from day one.

The sequence is simple and expensive.

Draft the motion, pay for the motion, wait for the hearing, and then MAYBE the judge orders the opposing party to do what they were always required to do. I’ve seen many women follow the proper steps and not have a judge rule in their favor.

Meanwhile, the opposing party had weeks to move money around and make it harder to find.

If the plan is to drain you of your money before trial and you are forced to file motions, then unfortunately, the plan working. This is the mechanism Mnookin and Kornhauser described in 1979: the party who cannot fund the fight is the party who rationally accepts less to end it.

Documentation is how the asymmetry turns if the record is already there. A single missed deadline can read as a simple mistake. Months of specific requests, deadlines, gaps, and court orders reads as a pattern, and a pattern is what sanctions and fee awards are built on.

You have to start documenting at the first failure and keep track of everything throughout this process. it’s not necessarily your attorney’s job to do that for your case. Every letter, every proof of service, every incomplete production kept exactly as it arrived. That is the exhibit that turns their conduct into their liability.

Document their behavior to use it against them.

Their lack of compliance is the argument that can build a strong case to have legal fees reimbursed. Lawyer fees spent on repeated, well-documented motions to compel can be recoverable as sanction-based fees, which work differently from need-based fees.

Need-based fees rest on the gap between the two incomes. Sanction-based fees rest on what they did. A documented obstruction record converts a cost problem into their exposure. Most people aren’t aware that the documentation is their responsibility to assist their attorney in building a stronger case

Two things to have in place before this starts

If obstruction is coming, it can be prepared for. Two things belong in place before the first document is late.

Know how much time and money it’ll cost. What representation costs, what a contested divorce can cost in total, and how much money you need access to get through the legal battle. Then plan for how much time and energy this process can cost you.

Get clarity on the attorney’s strategy. Anticipating obstruction means asking directly, before it begins: what is the plan when documents don’t arrive, at what point do we file, are we building toward sanctions or a fee award or both, what does each motion cost, and what do we give up by letting a request go. An attorney argues the case they are handed. Walking in with organized exhibits and a written agenda helps your legal fees be used efficiently. because it hands the attorney a record instead of paying to build one.

Discovery abuse is the last way a coercively controlling has to maintain the control you strip away by leaving. Seeing it as strategy rather than chaos changes what she does about it.

Stops trying to be reasonable enough to make it stop, because being reasonable does not remove their incentive to stall. Starts building the record that makes the delay expensive for the person running it. You cannot control whether they obstruct. You can control whether it costs them anything when they do.

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I’m a divorce strategist, not an attorney or a therapist. Nothing in this article is legal or mental-health advice. Family law varies by state, by county, and by case, and nothing in it is guaranteed. Always consult with a licensed attorney in your state.

Sources

• Watson, L. B., & Ancis, J. (2013). Power and control in the legal system. Violence Against Women, 19(2), 166–186. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077801213478027

• Gutowski, E., & Goodman, L. A. (2023). Legal Abuse Scale. Journal of Family Violence, 38(3), 527–542. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10896-022-00408-3

• Bradshaw, S., Gutowski, E., & Nyenyezi, A. (2024). Violence Against Women, 30(1), 101–125. https://doi.org/10.1177/10778012231205586

• Carter, Hardesty, & Ogolsky (2026). Coercive control and the rate of court filings. Journal of Family Violence. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10896-026-01090-5

• Willging, Stienstra, Shapard, & Miletich (1998). Discovery and disclosure practice. Boston College Law Review, 39, 525. https://bclawreview.bc.edu/articles/1271/files/63bebc96b03d8.pdf

• McKenna & Wiggins (1998). Empirical research on civil discovery. Boston College Law Review, 39, 785. https://bclawreview.bc.edu/articles/1277/files/63bebfa92cc1e.pdf

• Mnookin, R. H., & Kornhauser, L. (1979). Bargaining in the Shadow of the Law. Yale Law Journal, 88, 950. https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-articles/713/

• In re Marriage of Feldman, 153 Cal. App. 4th 1470 (2007). https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/2284647/in-re-marriage-of-feldman/

• In re Marriage of Rossi, 90 Cal. App. 4th 34 (2001). https://law.justia.com/cases/california/court-of-appeal/4th/90/34.html

The women I work with explain the same thing. Many of them say that the pain of leaving makes staying feel like a better option. Second-guessing their decisions, asking if it’s really that bad and if they were just being dramatic when talking about the very clear coercive control that they experienced.

They’ve been planning for exit for months, some of them years. So when they finally share the news and leave an unhealthy environment, the adrenaline gets them out the door and into their new space. The exhaustion arrives after, when their body finally registers that it is safe enough to feel what happened.

The crash.

That exhaustion hits people very differently. Some just need a few hours to really sit and feel the gravity of leaving. Some need to take a few days off work to really give themselves space. Other women I’ve supported have had to take over a year off of work to really allow their body and mind the healing that it needs to find its new baseline.

There is no right or wrong way to heal. Every person is unique in their upbringing, personality, temperament, and past traumas, etc. So whether it takes a few days or years to find your new baseline, there is never a timeline that you should put on your healing journey.

I really wanted to understand why. How can two people go through a parallel experience and have such a different time processing it and working through it?

That’s what this article is about: a deep dive of the neuroscience behind what actually predicts recovery after narcissistic abuse and what predicts staying stuck in that pattern.

Why You Feel Worse After Leaving Than You Did Inside It

In 2022, researchers studied 421 women survivors of intimate partner violence in Lithuania and sorted them into 4 groups based on: growth, trauma symptoms, resilience, and how central the abuse was to their sense of self.

46% landed in what the researchers called positive growth. High growth, high resilience, low trauma symptoms.

25% landed in distressed growth. High growth and high trauma symptoms at the same time.

25% of the women in that sample were growing and suffering simultaneously.

Women whose violence had ended more than 2 years earlier were more likely to be in the positive growth group. The symptoms came down over time. The growth stayed.

In this data, growth and distress run at the same time for a long stretch. Distress is the part that fades.

The Intermittent Reinforcement Loop

A relationship with a narcissistic partner does not deliver warmth on a schedule. It delivers warmth unpredictably. Good week, bad week. Contempt on Tuesday, the version of them you fell for on Saturday. Apology, then the same behavior. The affection is real enough to chase and rare enough that you never stop checking.

In short, that is the intermittent reinforcement loop. If the reward that you are seeking is not delivered in a consistent pattern, then it becomes more addicting.

In 2003, researchers recorded from dopamine neurons while varying how likely a reward was. When a reward was certain, or certainly not coming, dopamine showed almost no sustained activation.

The sustained response climbed as the outcome became less predictable and peaked at exactly 50%, the point of maximum uncertainty. Less at 25% and 75%. Absent at 0% and 100%.

Your dopamine system fires hardest when you do not know which version of your partner you were getting. Were they going to be the person you fell in love with, or were they going to be the person you were scared of?

Certainty is what shuts the loop off. Certainty is the one thing that relationship never gave you.

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Why the Inconsistency Made It Harder to Leave

Behavioral research documents something called the partial reinforcement extinction effect. Behavior that was rewarded only sometimes takes far longer to extinguish than behavior that was rewarded every time.

Consistent affection produces attachment that fades on a normal timeline when it stops.

Intermittent affection produces attachment that keeps going long after the reward has completely stopped coming.

The inconsistency makes the connection feel addicting. Every unpredictable good day was a deposit into how long you would keep waiting for the next one.

This is also the mechanism behind “trauma bonding”. Dutton and Painter named it traumatic bonding back in the 1980s and tested it in the 1990s.

Trauma bonding is a power imbalance plus abuse that comes and goes produces unusually strong emotional attachment to the person causing the harm.

So you’re not insane for missing someone who treated you poorly. There is actual neuroscience that explains why this happens.

Why Leaving Feels Like Withdrawal

In 2010, researchers scanned 15 people who had recently been rejected by a partner they were still in love with. On average they were 63 days out and reported thinking about that person roughly 85% of the day.

When they looked at images of the person who rejected them, the scans lit up the ventral tegmental area, the nucleus accumbens, the ventral pallidum, the orbitofrontal cortex, the insula, and the anterior cingulate.

Those are reward and craving regions. The authors reported overlap with the activation pattern seen in cocaine craving, and concluded that romantic rejection engages the same neural systems that underlie addiction.

That study was on ordinary breakups. Nobody in it had been through years of coercive control. Treat it as a conservative estimate of what separation does neurologically after a relationship that ran on intermittent reinforcement for a decade.

In the first months after leaving, the craving, the obsessive checking, the 3 a.m. urge to reach out, the physical sickness when you see their name, all of that is withdrawal.

It is the predictable response of a reward system that has been running on an intermittent schedule and just had the schedule terminated.

Withdrawal is worst at the beginning and it resolves. That is why you feel worse before you feel better.

And it explains something my clients apologize to me for constantly. Going back has the shape of a relapse. It arrives on the same timeline, under the same conditions, driven by the same circuitry.

The women who are able to leave and stay gone are the ones that are able to sit in that discomfort without going back, knowing that it will get better. It just takes time.

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What Chronic Stress Did to Your Thinking Brain

The other half of the crash is what years of unpredictable threat did to your capacity to think.

A 2009 review in Nature Reviews Neuroscience laid out what happens to the prefrontal cortex under stress. The prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain that handles working memory, planning, judgment, and impulse control.

Uncontrollable stress switches control of behavior away from the prefrontal cortex and over to the amygdala, which runs faster, more primitive, conditioned responses.

Under chronic stress, the effect becomes structural. Dendrites and dendritic spines on prefrontal neurons retract. Amygdala dendrites expand in the opposite direction.

Threat detection gets stronger. Deliberation gets weaker. That is the physical trade your brain made to keep you functional in a house where reading their mood accurately mattered more than thinking clearly.

It explains what women describe to me as the “fog”. Not being able to answer what you want for dinner. Reading the same email six times. Freezing on a decision that should take ten seconds. Those are the documented downstream effects of what that environment does to prefrontal function.

The review also describes the acute impairment as reversible. Prefrontal processing is disrupted by stress and it recovers when the stress is removed.

So the fog is a stress response with a documented mechanism and a documented recovery. The fog lifts once you remove the chronic stressor.

What 22 Studies Say About Recovery After Abuse

A 2025 systematic review in Trauma, Violence & Abuse consolidated 22 studies on post-traumatic growth among adult survivors of intimate partner violence. It asked two questions:

Where do survivors actually grow?

What factors are associated with that growth?

Growth showed up most in two areas: spiritual growth and new possibilities.

New possibilities means recognizing options for your life that were not visible to you before. New work. New relationships. A different way of running your household.

The review then sorted every contributing and inhibiting factor it found into three categories: interpersonal, contextual, and intrapersonal.

The women that I support that are able to seemingly recover quickly are the ones that start dreaming early on. They start to plan out their goals and start to plan out what their life is going to be like on the other side.

Most of them have minor children, so they are well aware that the stressor will not fully be removed from their life. They start dreaming, they start thinking about the friends that they’re going to reach out to, the new job that they’ll be able to get.

Many of them go on to start a business or start to volunteer at their local church or domestic violence center because they want to give back and show other women that it’s possible to live a beautiful life after experiencing years of narcissistic abuse.

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The Four Things That Predict Post-Traumatic Growth

Social Support

Support gives you a fresh perspective on your own story, which is the thing that gets destroyed in a relationship built on rewriting reality. One consistent thread in this work is that support also shapes how survivors do the identity work described below. What you need are people in your corner, who will point out the patterns that they are seeing and hold you accountable to your goals. Sympathy is a separate thing and it does less.

Identity Exploration

After a relationship where someone else defined your preferences, your competence, and your reputation, growth is associated with actively testing what you actually want instead of locking into a new fixed version of yourself right away. Trying things. Changing your mind. Being unsettled on purpose for a while. That period of not knowing who you are yet is uncomfortable, and it is doing something.

Cognitive Processing

In this literature, cognitive processing mediates between the negative effects of the trauma and the positive ones. Meaning the symptoms don’t convert into growth on their own. Something has to happen in between, and that something is the work of making sense of what happened.

Deliberate Rumination

Thinking about the abuse on purpose, with a direction. This will be explained in detail in the following section.

Thinking About It On Purpose Is Different From Replaying It

There are two different ways to think about abuse:

Intrusive rumination is automatic and involuntary. It shows up early. It is the 3 a.m. replay of the same argument, the same text thread, the same moment you should have seen it coming.

Deliberate rumination is reflective and intentional. It shows up later. It is asking what this cost you, what pattern you missed and why the pattern worked on you, what you want your life to look like now, what you will require going forward.

In a 2022 path model of 200 women with intimate partner violence histories, the model explained 31% of the variance in post-traumatic growth.

Deliberate rumination predicted growth directly. And there was a sequential path: how central the event was predicted intrusive rumination, intrusive rumination predicted deliberate rumination, and deliberate rumination predicted growth.

The involuntary replay is where this process starts. It pays off when it converts into the intentional kind, and can cost you years if it doesn’t.

The takeaway: stop asking how to make the thinking stop. Ask whether you are thinking or rehearsing.

Rehearsing sounds like reviewing the evidence again. Building the case again. Explaining to an imaginary jury why you were right. Searching the same 400 texts for the line that finally proves it.

Thinking sounds like: what did this cost me, what did I learn about how they operate, what am I building instead.

Same subject. Completely different outcome.

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The Two Things That Keep Women Stuck

Self-Blame

The review places self-blame among the factors that work against growth, and it appears throughout this literature as a maladaptive coping strategy. Self-blame keeps cognitive processing aimed backwards at what you did wrong, which is a question with no useful answer and no end point. It burns the exact resource that deliberate rumination needs.

Many emotionally intelligent people blame themselves. They take accountability for what they did wrong, and it allows them to feel a sense of control over what happened to them. Accountability names the pattern you missed and builds a filter so it doesn’t work on you again. Self-blame runs the same trial with yourself as the defendant every night, and the verdict never gets entered.

And the reinforcement schedule answers most of what women blame themselves for. You stayed because a variable schedule of affection produces exactly that behavior in every organism it has ever been tested on.

Event Centrality

How much the relationship sits at the center of who you are.

Centrality works in two different ways. In the profile study, both growth groups saw the abuse as central to their identity, and the low-impact group did not.

In the path model, centrality predicted growth. Something has to be significant enough to force you to reorganize how you see the world, and abuse qualifies.

Centrality also feeds the intrusive replay, and it tracks with higher trauma symptoms.

In the group with the worst outcomes, the event stayed central and the growth never arrived.

Duration is what matters here. Centrality early is how the processing starts. Centrality that never resolves is how women stay stuck for a decade.

I have written before that the identity of “healing” keeps people identifying with their trauma and their abuser. When the relationship is still the central organizing fact of your life at year four, the person who did it is still the main character in your story.

They do not have to be present to keep the position. You keep giving it to them every time you organize a day around what they did.

Being Clear About the Research

The systematic review covers 22 studies. Most of the mechanism work I’m citing comes out of Lithuanian and Polish samples, and much of it is cross-sectional, which means it can show that two things travel together and cannot prove which one caused the other. The samples skew toward women who were already connected to services.

The neuroscience carries its own limits. The dopamine work was done in monkeys. The rejection scans covered 15 people in ordinary breakups, not survivors of coercive control. The prefrontal cortex review draws heavily on animal models alongside human imaging. None of these studies were run on women leaving narcissistic partners specifically, because that population is not what the research was studying.

What this research gives you is the ability to label what is happening to you and the ability to do something about it, which is more than the self-help version of this conversation offers. They do not give you a diagnosis and neither do I. I am not a psychiatrist and I am not a clinician. What I do is pattern recognition, and the research is what keeps that pattern recognition honest.

Treat this as a list of which patterns that have evidence behind them, then make sure you have a trauma-informed team to support you throughout this process.

What This Changes About What You Do

• Build one relationship where you are honest about the whole thing. A therapist, a support group, one friend who has the capacity for it. Isolation is the condition the abuse created, and rebuilding contact is one of the strongest findings in this literature.

• Plan for the withdrawal window instead of assuming you’ll power through it. Decide in advance what you do at 3 a.m. when the urge to reach out arrives. Who you call. Where the phone goes. What the block list looks like. Willpower is the weakest tool available for a craving response, and the research says that is what you are dealing with.

• Convert the replay. When you catch yourself rehearsing, redirect it with a question that has an answer. What did this cost me. What do I want instead. What am I willing to require going forward.

• Write down what you learned about the pattern, once. Then stop reopening the case file. You document a pattern so you recognize it faster next time. That is the whole purpose.

• Notice when self-blame is passing as accountability. Accountability produces a change in what you do. Self-blame produces another night of the same argument.

• Put something on the calendar that has nothing to do with the abuse. A class. A certification. A trip. This is what identity exploration looks like in practice, and it is what “new possibilities” means in the research.

• Watch the ratio. Ask what percentage of your week is organized around what happened versus what you are building. Track that number over months. One hard week tells you very little. The trend tells you everything.

How Long Recovery Actually Takes

Every woman I have worked with who got to the other side went through the crash.

That is the stretch that reads as failure while it’s happening and reads as the turning point in hindsight. In the data, the exhaustion and the growth were happening in the same women at the same time, and the exhaustion is the part that came down with time. In that sample, past the 2-year mark was where the positive growth group lived.

You are coming off a schedule that was engineered, whether they understood what they were doing or not, to make you keep waiting for the good version of them. Your reward system ran on it. Your prefrontal cortex paid for it. Both of those recover, and both of them recover slower than the paperwork does.

What you feed it decides where it lands. Feed it support, honest questions about cost and direction, and time, and it becomes growth in areas the research can measure.

The recovery journey is hard, but I promise it is worth it.

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Sources

• Machinga-Asaolu, R. O. (2025). Post-Traumatic Growth Promoting and Inhibiting Factors Among Intimate Partner Violence Survivors: A Systematic Review. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 26(4), 789–803. Link

• Bakaitytė, A., Kaniušonytė, G., & Žukauskienė, R. (2022). Posttraumatic Growth, Centrality of Event, Trauma Symptoms and Resilience: Profiles of Women Survivors of Intimate Partner Violence. Journal of Interpersonal Violence. Link

• Bakaitytė, A., Puente-Martínez, A., Ubillos-Landa, S., & Žukauskienė, R. (2022). Path to posttraumatic growth: The role of centrality of event, deliberate and intrusive rumination, and self blame in women victims and survivors of intimate partner violence. Frontiers in Psychology. Link

• Ogińska-Bulik, N., & Michalska, P. (2021). The Mediating Role of Cognitive Processing in the Relationship Between Negative and Positive Effects of Trauma Among Female Victims of Domestic Violence. Journal of Interpersonal Violence. Link

• Fiorillo, C. D., Tobler, P. N., & Schultz, W. (2003). Discrete Coding of Reward Probability and Uncertainty by Dopamine Neurons. Science, 299(5614), 1898–1902. Link

• Fisher, H. E., Brown, L. L., Aron, A., Strong, G., & Mashek, D. (2010). Reward, Addiction, and Emotion Regulation Systems Associated With Rejection in Love. Journal of Neurophysiology, 104(1), 51–60. Link

• Arnsten, A. F. T. (2009). Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(6), 410–422. Link

• Dutton, D. G., & Painter, S. (1993). Emotional Attachments in Abusive Relationships: A Test of Traumatic Bonding Theory. Violence and Victims, 8(2), 105–120. Link

• Partial reinforcement extinction effect. Encyclopedia of Animal Cognition and Behavior, Springer. Link

If you don’t have full insight into your own finances, you are not naive and you are not alone. This is the most common version of it there is.

Financial abuse runs on a spectrum. On one end is total control. You swipe a card and someone else pays it off every month, and they want to see the receipts. Or you get a cash allowance. Or they interfere with your job, or block you from getting one, so the money is never really yours. On the other end is full transparency, both people seeing everything. Most marriages sit somewhere in between.

I work with women at every point on that spectrum. Where you land on it matters, because the level of financial control is what determines how much work, how much money and time it takes to uncover everything.

Not having access to independent funds is the reason so many women stay far longer than they want to. They finally look at the numbers, realize they can’t afford to leave yet, and that is what sets off a two- to three-year exit plan. If that’s where you are, How to Plan a Divorce When You Have No Money and No Access to the Finances is where to start.

In over 500 cases, only a handful of the women I’ve worked with had complete transparency into the finances. Those divorces are usually straightforward. The rest are where it gets messy. A business in the mix. Tax debt. Debt she never knew about. Property bought without your knowledge. A company that funds the entire lifestyle and is tangled up with a dozen other things.

A divorce is really two agreements: a financial one and a parenting plan. The goal of the financial one is an equitable deal, where both people can rebuild comfortably on the other side. You cannot ask for an equitable deal when you have no idea what the marriage is actually worth.

That is the question this article answers: how do you find hidden assets in divorce when you never had full access to the money?

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How Hidden Assets in Divorce Actually Disappear

A 2021 survey conducted by The Harris Poll for the National Endowment for Financial Education found that 43% of U.S. adults who combined finances with a partner admitted to financial infidelity, and 39% had hidden a purchase, a bank account, a statement, a bill, or cash.

That’s the baseline in low conflict relationships. In high-conflict divorces where one partner already controls the money, the incentive and the opportunity are far higher.

Here are the most common ways assets are hidden:

1. Underreporting income. A partner who owns a business or works on commission reports a fraction of what actually comes in (mainly to fall into a lower tax bracket). Personal and family expenses run through the company. The lifestyle stays expensive while the income that’s reported to the IRS is significantly lower.

2. Deferring compensation until after the divorce. They ask an employer or a client to hold a bonus, a raise, or a commission check until the case is closed. They know that the money is there, but since it doesn’t exist in any marital accounts, then they technically don’t have to disclose it.

3. Overpaying the IRS on purpose. They send the government far more than they owe. It looks like a tax payment, so no one questions it. After the divorce, that overpayment comes back as a refund, and it comes back to them alone.

4. “Loans” to friends and family. Money moves to a brother, a business partner, a loyal friend, described as repaying a debt or a temporary loan. Everyone understands the money comes back once the divorce is final. (

5. Phantom debt. They collude with someone to invent a loan or an expense that never happened, so the marital estate looks smaller and more burdened than it is.

6. Funneling money through a business. A business is the easiest place to bury money. Fake vendors, a salary paid to a family member who does no real work, personal purchases booked as equipment, profits left sitting in the company instead of paid out until after the divorce.

7. Undisclosed accounts. A separate bank or brokerage account you were never told about, sometimes offshore, sometimes just at a bank you don’t use.

8. Cryptocurrency. Digital wallets move and store value with no traditional paper trail. Crypto has become one of the most common places to park money quietly, and one of the harder ones to trace without help.

9. Cash and cash equivalents. Slow, steady withdrawals converted into physical cash, cashier’s checks, or savings bonds that sit somewhere you’ll never look.

10. Custodial accounts in your kids’ names. Money moved into an account for a child looks generous. It’s still marital money, and it’s still under the controlling partner’s signature until they decide otherwise.

11. Delayed or overlooked stock options and RSUs. Restricted stock units are one of the most missed assets in divorce. They don’t show up on a pay stub or a bank balance. According to Kiplinger, unvested RSUs granted during the marriage are often marital property, yet many spouses don’t know they exist, and the value hides inside grant letters and vesting schedules most people never see. A partner changing jobs can quietly forfeit and re-grant equity so it looks like a post-separation asset.

You don’t need to prove any of this yourself. You need to recognize the shape of it, so that when you sit across from your attorney you can say “my partner is self-employed and I’ve never seen the books,” or “there was a bonus every March and I don’t see one on this disclosure.”

Takeaway: Write down every pattern above that sounds like your marriage, with the specific detail attached. Self-employed with no visibility into the books. A bonus that always came and now doesn’t. An account you know exists but can’t open. That list is your discovery roadmap, and it’s very important resource to give to your lawyer.

What Financial Discovery Is

Discovery is the formal pre-trial process where each side can legally require the other to turn over financial information and documents. In a divorce, it is how both spouses exchange a full picture of income, assets, and debts, and how one spouse can compel the other to produce records they control. It is extensive, and it shows up once a divorce is contested.

Here is what it consists of:

• Mandatory financial disclosures. Both spouses are required by law to hand over a full financial picture early on: income, assets, debts, accounts, tax returns. It’s the floor, and it’s only as honest as the person filling it out, which is why the rest of these tools exist.

• Interrogatories. Written questions the other side must answer in writing, under oath, usually within about 30 days. Lying here is lying under oath.

• Requests for production of documents. A formal demand for specific records: bank and credit card statements, business books, tax returns, loan applications. Loan applications matter, because people tell the truth about their income when they’re borrowing money, even when they lie about it in a divorce.

• Subpoenas to banks and employers. A subpoena goes around your partner straight to the bank, brokerage, or employer and compels them to produce records. Your attorney can only subpoena an institution they know to ask about, which is why your roadmap matters.

• Depositions. Sworn, recorded testimony given in person, under oath, with attorneys present. It’s where inconsistencies surface, because it’s hard to keep a fabricated financial story straight for hours of direct questioning.

Discovery carries real consequences when someone lies or stonewalls. Courts can impose sanctions, meaning financial penalties, for hiding or failing to produce. A judge can draw an adverse inference, treating missing information as if it would have hurt the party who hid it, and can hold someone in contempt.

A liar is going to lie, even in the legal process. I remind my clients of this constantly. If someone has hidden assets for the entire marriage, it is unlikely they will suddenly turn honest because a court is involved.

Discovery gets drawn out often. Ask your attorney what their plan is for keeping it moving when the other side won’t produce what you’re producing, because I’ve seen discovery run into tens of thousands of dollars. When concealment is proven, courts routinely award the hidden asset disproportionately to the other spouse, and in some cases the conduct crosses into fraud with criminal exposure.

Takeaway: Hand your attorney your roadmap early, and ask what they need from you to build the discovery plan around it. Discovery only works when someone points it in the right direction, and you are the one who knows where the money in your marriage actually went.

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The Financial Team

Once discovery is complete enough and you still don’t have clarity on the marital assets, you often need to outsource a financial team. Attorneys know the law. A financial team gives your attorney that clarity, plus the legally acceptable documents to bring to hearings, mediation, and court dates. In high-conflict and high-net-worth cases, more money often goes to the financial team than to the attorney.

Two common professionals involved:

• A forensic accountant is an investigator with an accounting license. They trace funds, reconstruct income from messy records, value a business, and run a lifestyle analysis that compares what a family clearly spends against what’s being reported as income. When those two numbers don’t match, the gap is your case.

• A CDFA (Certified Divorce Financial Analyst) works the other side of it. Instead of hunting hidden money, they help you see what a proposed settlement actually means over time: the tax consequences, whether to keep the house or the retirement account, how the split plays out in 5 or 10 years. A forensic accountant proves what’s there. A CDFA helps you divide it without getting shortchanged.

You need a forensic accountant when the money is likely hidden and the estate is large or complex enough to justify the cost: self-employment, a business, real estate, or a partner who has controlled every record for years. A CDFA, or discovery alone, may be enough when the income is a straight salary and the accounts are known.

these additional professionals do cost money and sometimes those fees can be reimbursed in the settlement. Or, if you want the other side ordered to pay while the divorce is still going, you usually have to schedule a court hearing, which costs money just to get in front of a judge, and ask them to order your significant other to cover the forensic and legal fees.

Takeaway: Get clear on which problem you have before you hire. “Is there money I can’t see” is a forensic accountant. “Will this settlement hold up for me over time” is a CDFA.

What It Costs, and How to Decide If It’s Worth It

When I’m supporting clients through the divorce process, the pursuit of fairness and justice is what has cost women far more money than accepting a deal built on the money they already have clarity on. And no, it is not fair. It is hard to know there are tens of thousands of dollars sitting in accounts that were never disclosed.

The real question is how much money, time, and energy it will take to uncover that, to maybe get half of it back in the settlement.

Estimated Costs:

Forensic accountants generally bill by the hour. Rates run roughly $300 to $500 an hour, with junior analysts lower, around $150 to $250, and credentialed partners or expert-witness testimony reaching $450 to $800 an hour (Space Coast Forensics; ForensicLedger, 2026). Most firms take a retainer up front, commonly $3,000 to $15,000, and bill against it.

For a full divorce engagement, current 2026 figures put a basic lifestyle analysis at roughly $4,000 to $12,000, asset tracing at $7,500 to $20,000 or more, and a high-net-worth case with genuinely hidden assets anywhere from $15,000 to $60,000 (ForensicLedger, 2026). The complexity of the money drives the cost more than anything else. Multiple businesses, offshore accounts, or reconstructing years of missing records we’ll make a case more expensive.

A CDFA typically bills $250 to $400 an hour, and some offer flat-fee packages for a defined scope of work (San Diego Family Mediation).

Discovery costs are mostly your attorney’s time drafting interrogatories and document requests, plus fees for depositions, which include a court reporter and transcript. These vary widely by state and by how much the other side fights.

3 steps to run a cost-benefit analysis:

1. Estimate what's missing. Put a rough dollar figure on what you think is hidden. If your family clearly lives like there's $400,000 a year coming in but the disclosure only shows $150,000 in income, that difference points to income that isn't being reported. If a bonus they get every year isn't on the disclosure, add that in too.

2. Weigh it against the cost to find it. Uncovering hidden income also pays off beyond the cash, because it raises the baseline for child and spousal support for years, not once.

3. Decide. Pursue it when the recoverable amount clearly beats the cost of finding it. Skip it when the numbers are close or the amount is small. It’s not worth it to spend $15,000 chasing $8,000.

Example 1: Say your self-employed partner is hiding about $120,000 in unreported income and a deferred bonus. A forensic accountant quotes a $7,500 retainer and estimates $18,000 total. Spending $18,000 to recover $120,000 makes sense. Add the second layer: if that hidden income raises your support by even $1,500 a month, that’s $18,000 a year, and support runs for years. You make the forensic cost back in the first year, before the $120,000.

Example 2: You suspect maybe $10,000 in an account you can’t see, the estate is otherwise simple, and the same accountant quotes $12,000. You’d spend more than you can recover, and a subpoena to the bank is the smarter tool. if it costs more to uncover the money than the account is worth, then it’s often not worth fighting for

Family court is a legal system, not a justice system. You can ask for your legal fees to be covered, and in many states a judge can order the higher earner to pay them, known as fee-shifting (Central Divorce & Family Law). But you need money up front to start the process at all.

Like the last section said, getting that order means paying your attorney to build the case and bring it in front of a judge who can rule that the other side covers your legal and financial team fees. If they are hiding money, they are not going to volunteer to fund the search that exposes it.

So when you first meet with your attorney, especially if you don’t have much cash to fund this, get clear and stay realistic about:

• how much it will actually cost to get to that money

• what they can do early so you don’t burn through your cash and lose the ability to pay the team that gets you access to it

Takeaway: Run the three-step math, then have the honest money conversation with your attorney up front: what it will cost to reach the hidden money, and how to fund the fight without going broke before you get to it. Realistic expectations are what keep the pursuit of fairness from costing you more than the money is worth.

The Close

When dealing with a coercively controlling partner, keeping you cut out of the finances is an intentional control tactic. You often have more information than you think you do, but you just have to think in a creative and strategic way to start to put together those pieces of the puzzle.

There are tools to help in clarity on the marital estate. Discovery forces information into the open. A financial team gives your attorney the proof and the documents to bring to the table. Fee-shifting exists, even if you usually have to fund the fight to use it. What it all takes is knowing what you’re up against and making a clear call about what is worth chasing.

You may not get every dollar back, and chasing fairness for its own sake will cost you more than it returns. What you can get is an honest picture of what the marriage is worth and a settlement you can rebuild on.

You can’t make this fair. You can make it strategic. That is what gets you to the other side.

Resources: pull your free credit reports at annualcreditreport.com, and if safety is a factor, the National Domestic Violence Hotline (1-800-799-7233) offers confidential guidance on financial and digital safety before you begin.

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Cassandra Dill is the founder of Evara Consulting and The Divorce Strategist. She helps women leave high-conflict and narcissistic partners through evidence-based strategy and preparation, drawing on patterns from more than 500 cases. She is not an attorney or a financial advisor. Her work is pattern recognition and strategy.

This content is for educational and informational purposes only. It does not constitute legal, financial, or mental health advice and should not be relied upon as a substitute for individualized professional guidance. Rules, procedures, and outcomes vary state by state, county by county, and case by case. Readers are encouraged to consult a licensed attorney and a qualified financial professional in their own jurisdiction before making any decisions related to divorce, separation, or safety planning.

References

National Endowment for Financial Education / The Harris Poll. (2021). 2 in 5 Americans Admit to Financial Infidelity Against Their Partner. https://www.nefe.org/news/2021/11/2-in-5-americans-admit-to-financial-infidelity-against-their-partner.aspx

Justia. Hidden Assets & Your Legal Rights in Divorce. https://www.justia.com/family/divorce/dividing-money-and-property/hidden-assets/

McKinley Irvin Family Law. (2024). What to Do If You Suspect Your Spouse Is Hiding Assets. https://www.mckinleyirvin.com/family-law-blog/2024/may/what-to-do-if-you-suspect-your-spouse-is-hiding-/

Kiplinger. RSUs: In Divorce, They’re Easy to Hide (or Misunderstand). https://www.kiplinger.com/personal-finance/rsus-in-divorce-easy-to-hide-or-misunderstand

Space Coast Forensics. How Much Is a Forensic Accountant for Divorce? https://spacecoastforensics.com/how-much-is-a-forensic-accountant-for-divorce/

ForensicLedger. (2026). How Much Does a Forensic Accountant Cost? (2026 Pricing Guide). https://forensicledger.com/blog/how-much-does-forensic-accountant-cost/

San Diego Family Mediation. What Does It Cost to Work with a CDFA? https://sandiegofamilymediation.com/what-does-it-cost-to-work-with-a-cdfa/

Central Divorce & Family Law. Family Code Section 2030: Need-Based Attorney’s Fees. https://www.cfli.com/family-code-section-2030-need-based-attorneys-fees/

National Network to End Domestic Violence. About Financial Abuse. https://nnedv.org/content/about-financial-abuse/

Most of the women I work with learn that the hard way. I’ve supported over 500 of them through divorce, many leaving coercive, controlling partners, and I’ve watched this system fail mothers and children from the chair right next to theirs. Different names, different states, different judges. The same system. Women who walk into family court believing it exists to protect their children, and walk out understanding it was never built for them at all.

If that’s you: what happened is not a reflection of your intelligence, your preparation, or your worth as a mother. You read the system correctly. The system failed anyway. Both of those things are true.

There are people working to change this. Researchers, lawmakers, and mothers who lost everything and refused to go quiet are exposing how family court fails protective parents and forcing reform onto the books. That work is real, and it matters. It is also slow, and it may not reach your case in time.

So the real work starts where the power actually is: what you can control right now. That is where I have watched the biggest changes happen.

Where the Family Court System Came From

Family court was not designed to fail mothers. Understanding how it drifted here matters, because what you’re up against is a century-old system built for a different world, running about thirty years behind what we now know about abuse. Knowing how it got here shows you where its blind spots are.

The idea of a separate court for families is barely a century old. It grew out of the first juvenile court, created in Cook County, Illinois, in 1899, largely through the work of Chicago women reformers. The founding logic was the state acting as a kind of guardian, and the whole model was meant to be protective rather than adversarial.

Specialized courts for divorce and custody followed in the decades after.

For most of the 1800s and early 1900s, custody ran on the “tender years doctrine,” a presumption that young children belonged with their mother. That doctrine fell in the 1970s and 1980s, struck down in many states as sex discrimination and replaced by a standard that sounds fair on paper: “the best interests of the child.”

“The best interest of the child” has almost no fixed definition. The Uniform Marriage and Divorce Act of 1970 offered a list of factors, and most states adopted some version, but the standard is deliberately open-ended.

That openness hands enormous discretion to a single person: the judge. Legal scholars have criticized this since the 1970s, because a standard with no firm anchor becomes a mirror. It reflects back whatever the decision-maker already believes, and whatever expert or theory the court trusts that day.

California passed the first no-fault divorce law in 1969, signed by Governor Ronald Reagan and effective in 1970. By the mid-1980s nearly every state had followed. Divorce rates climbed sharply through the 1970s, and the central work of family court shifted from whether people could divorce to who gets the children.

In the 1980s, states rushed to adopt joint-custody laws and “friendly parent” provisions, which reward the parent seen as more willing to support the child’s relationship with the other parent.

The intention was connection. The consequence, for a mother trying to limit a dangerous parent’s access, is a trap: object to contact and you can be labeled the unfriendly one.

And as judicial discretion grew, courts leaned harder on custody evaluators and guardians ad litem to tell them what to do, often people with little training in domestic violence or child abuse.

In 1985, child psychiatrist Richard Gardner coined “Parental Alienation Syndrome,” the claim that one parent programs a child to reject the other. Much of his work was self-published and never peer-reviewed. No diagnostic manual recognizes it.

The American Psychiatric Association declined to include it in the DSM-5 in 2012, and it appears in neither the DSM nor the World Health Organization’s ICD-11. And yet, relabeled and repackaged, parental alienation is argued and believed in family courtrooms every single day, most often used against a protective mother the moment she raises abuse.

And that’s a high-level timeline on how family court ended up the way it is today. An indeterminate standard, near-total judicial discretion, a friendly-parent trap, undertrained evaluators, and a discredited theory that still moves cases.

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What It Looks Like When Family Court Fails

In 2018, seven-year-old Kayden Mancuso was killed by her father during a court-ordered unsupervised visit in Pennsylvania. Her mother, Kathy Sherlock, had raised alarms about his violent history and a psychological evaluation that flagged concern.

A Bucks County judge granted unsupervised custody anyway, reasoning in part that he had never been violent toward Kayden specifically. He beat her to death and then killed himself. The court had the warning. It weighed the risk too narrowly, and a child paid for it. (Sources: NBC Philadelphia; PublicSource.)

In 2017, five-year-old Aramazd “Piqui” Andressian Jr. was murdered by his father in California, roughly eight days after his mother, Ana Estevez, asked the family court for sole custody with supervised visitation and was denied. She had reported abuse. The court did not act on her warning in time. The father later pleaded guilty to first-degree murder. (Sources: KTLA; Type Investigations.)

There are many cases that follow the same pattern. All of them equally heartbreaking. Mothers asked for help. They spoke their truth, and the system that was supposed to help, failed them and their children.

Most cases don’t end in such tragedy. More commonly, these cases end in the parenting rights being removed from the mother who was fighting to keep her children safe. Even with documented proof, the professionals assigned to the case, without proper training on what to look for, can put a child in more danger

In a Colorado case documented in depth by ProPublica, a mother the outlet referred to as Christine, reported that her son was being physically and sexually abused. The record went well beyond her own account.

Mandatory reporters, doctors, psychologists, and school staff filed more than thirty-six reports. One judge found a preponderance of evidence of domestic violence and restricted the father’s contact.

Then the case moved to a second judge, who discounted the abuse concerns and emphasized instead “each parent’s attitude toward the other.” A custody evaluator concluded the allegations were fabricated and described the mother’s behavior as pathological. The father was awarded primary custody and full medical decision-making. The mother was cut down to two weekends a month. (Source: ProPublica, “Parental Alienation and Its Use in Family Court.”)

Three different families, one systemic failure. Documented evidence discounted. A mother’s warning treated as hysteria or strategy. The friendly-parent factor turned against the protective parent. An evaluator’s opinion outweighing a stack of medical reports. A theory with no diagnostic standing deciding where a child sleeps at night.

In the majority of all custody cases, most of which settle without a fight, mothers still receive primary physical custody. The failure lives in contested cases, where abuse is alleged and “alienation” is claimed in response.

A 2019 study led by Professor Joan Meier at George Washington University reviewed thousands of published custody opinions and found that when mothers alleged abuse and fathers cross-claimed parental alienation, mothers’ rate of losing custody roughly doubled, and courts believed the abuse claims far less often. (Parental-alienation researchers have contested the study’s methodology and Meier has published rebuttals; the debate is real, and this is still the most serious empirical work we have on the question.)

The evidence says the family court has a specific failure point, and knowing where it fails is the first thing that puts a little power back in your hands.

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Family Court Reform: The People Trying to Fix It

After Kayden Mancuso’s death, her mother and a coalition of advocates pushed for reform, and in March 2022 Congress passed Kayden’s Law as part of the Violence Against Women Act reauthorization, formally the Keeping Children Safe from Family Violence Act. Congress cannot rewrite state family-court rules directly, so the law uses funding as leverage: states that adopt its reforms become eligible for additional federal grant dollars.

The reforms it asks for go straight at the failure points. Limit court-appointed experts to people with real training in domestic violence and child abuse. Restrict the coercive “reunification” programs that strip children from a safe parent. Require ongoing judicial education on abuse, coercive control, and trauma, and curb reliance on unscientific theories like parental alienation. (Sources: Title XV, VAWA 2022; National Safe Parents.)

Colorado was the first to enact the full child-safety provisions in 2023. Utah followed in 2024 with a version called Om’s Law, and other states have passed pieces of it. California enacted Piqui’s Law, named for Piqui Andressian, restricting the traumatic reunification treatments and requiring abuse and domestic-violence training for judicial officers. Pennsylvania passed its own Kayden’s Law. The map is uneven, and advocacy trackers don’t always agree on who has adopted what, so the honest picture is a patchwork that’s filling in year by year. (Sources: National Family Violence Law Center; California Legislative Information, SB 331.)

The National Family Violence Law Center at George Washington University, led by Joan Meier, is the academic and legal engine of the reform effort. Policy advocates like Danielle Pollack have carried Kayden’s Law from statehouse to statehouse. The Center for Judicial Excellence tracks children killed in the context of custody disputes, a grim database that keeps the human cost on the record. And investigative journalists at ProPublica spent years documenting the alienation-over-abuse pattern until it could no longer be dismissed as a handful of unlucky cases.

The reform is slow, and it is arriving unevenly. But the ground is moving in the right direction for the first time in decades. There are researchers, lawmakers, and mothers that are working tirelessly to fix this systemic issue.

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What You Can Control

I never want the articles that I write to be doom and gloom. This system is outdated. It is unfair. Mothers and children are being failed on a daily basis from judicial biases. So let’s focus on the things that you can actually control if you are currently navigating the family court system in a high conflict case.

Reminder: You cannot control the judge you’re assigned, the theory opposing counsel runs, or what your ex does next.

You can control the case you build, who you hire for your team and the strategy applied to get yourself out.

Get very clear on your goals: Not every violation is worth a motion. Not every provocation deserves a response. Every fight you pick costs you three currencies at once: time, money, and your own nervous system. Some battles cost more to win than to lose.

Before you engage on anything, run a cost-benefit analysis: What does this fight cost me, what do I actually gain if I win it, and does the judge assigned to my case even care about this issue? Choose deliberately. Fighting everything and fighting nothing are both losing strategies. The women who do best are the ones who fight selectively. divorce is two main things:

• a financial agreement

• a parenting plan

Ask yourself: Does this directly impact the division of my assets? or does this help me get the parenting plan that prioritizes stability and safety for my children?

Treat every bad moment as data: When your ex does the thing again, you get two options: spiral, or document. Spiraling changes nothing. Documentation changes your case. So you feel it, you name it, and then you write it down with a date and turn it into evidence into the language that your specific court speaks. Your job is to build a record so clean and so calm that the pattern becomes undeniable to a stranger who doesn’t know either of you.

Understand that the judge determines almost everything, and manage what you can control accordingly: Outcomes are heavily judge-dependent. Fairness is not guaranteed and often not delivered. Betting your peace of mind on the system doing the right thing is a losing bet. So you stop managing the system’s fairness, which you can’t, and you start managing your credibility, your documentation, and your composure, which you can.

I understand that none of this is fair.

And then there’s the part nobody wants to hear. You have to redefine what winning means.

Divorce from a high-conflict partner is a lose-lose battle. Nobody walks away unscathed, not you, not them, not even the ones who “win” the order they wanted.

So if winning can’t mean beating them, it has to mean something you can actually reach. Winning means choosing your peace. Winning means releasing the control they had over you every day you spent consumed by the fight. You cannot control what they do. You can control your response to what they do. That circle, the one that’s entirely yours, is where a rebuilt life actually gets built.

You will not get every outcome you deserve from this system. But I have watched women walk through this exact process, lose things they should never have lost, and still come out the other side clear, planned, and free of the hope that their ex would ever change.

No judge hands you that freedom. You build it. Hope is not a plan. A plan, a record, and a woman who has stopped waiting to be rescued is a force this old system was never built to withstand.

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Disclaimer: This is educational content, not legal advice. Nothing in family law is guaranteed. Rules, procedures, and outcomes vary state by state, county by county, and case by case. Always consult a licensed attorney in your jurisdiction before making decisions about your case.

Sources

• Illinois Courts, “Illinois Supreme Court History: Juvenile Courts”; WBEZ/NPR, “How Chicago Women Created the World’s First Juvenile Justice System” (2019) — origins of the juvenile/family court.

• Mary Ann Mason, “The Roller Coaster of Child Custody Law over the Last Half Century,” AAML Journal — tender years, best interests, custody-law history.

• Uniform Marriage and Divorce Act (1970), §402 — best-interests factors.

• No-Fault Divorce history; California Family Law Act of 1969 (eff. 1970).

• ABA and Santa Clara Law Review on joint-custody statutes; Clare Dalton (Harvard) on friendly-parent provisions.

• Richard Gardner, “Parental Alienation Syndrome” (1985); American Psychiatric Association DSM-5 decision (2012); ProPublica, “Parental Alienation and Its Use in Family Court.”

• Joan S. Meier et al., “U.S. Child Custody Outcomes in Cases Involving Parental Alienation and Abuse Allegations” (2019/2020), Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law — plus the Harman/Lorandos critique and Meier rebuttals.

• Daniel Saunders et al., NIJ (2011/2012) — custody evaluators’ knowledge of domestic violence.

• Kayden Mancuso: NBC Philadelphia; PublicSource. Piqui Andressian: KTLA; Type Investigations; CA Legislative Information (SB 331). Colorado “Christine” case: ProPublica.

• Kayden’s Law / Keeping Children Safe from Family Violence Act, VAWA 2022 (Title XV); National Safe Parents; National Family Violence Law Center at GWU; Center for Judicial Excellence child-fatality data.

If you are planning to leave a coercively controlling partner, leaving is just the beginning of a new series of conflicts that will happen in the legal system. Those conflicts are exhausting and can be very expensive.

A motion here. A continuance there. An emergency filing the week you finally had plans. A demand for documents you already sent. Another hearing. Another day off work. Another retainer payment.

If it feels like the case itself has become the abuse, that is because for a growing number of people, it has.

It is called litigation abuse, and in family court it has become one of the most common ways a controlling ex keeps a grip on you after you leave. This is one of the clearest forms of post-separation abuse, and it continues long after the relationship is over.

My article, “The Abuse Doesn’t Stop When You Leave,” expands on post-separation abuse deeper

There is now a way to measure it, and a small but growing body of law that is starting to treat it as what it is.

What litigation abuse in family court actually is

Litigation abuse is the misuse of the court system to keep power and control over someone after separation. The tactics are ordinary court actions used for an extraordinary purpose:

• repeated motions and petitions

• endless requests for continuances

• appeals with no real legal ground

• discovery demands designed to bury you

• false or inflated allegations

• forcing you back into a courtroom again and again for no reason other than to keep you tied to the person you left (WomensLaw, National Network to End Domestic Violence).

Read on paper, each individual filing looks legitimate. Any single motion is deniable. A judge glancing at one document sees a party exercising their rights. The harm lives where it always lives with coercive control, in the accumulation.

The point is rarely to win. The point is to maintain control over you.

Every filing costs you money, time, sleep, and focus. Every hearing pulls you back into contact with someone you are trying to build distance from. The court becomes the one room they are still guaranteed to have you in. Of all the narcissist divorce tactics women read about, this is the hardest one to name, because every filing looks like the legal system doing its job.

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What the research on legal abuse actually proves

For years this got filed under “high-conflict divorce,” a phrase that quietly splits the blame down the middle and treats a pattern of abuse like a personality clash between two difficult people. The research now tells a different story.

In 2022, researchers Ellen Gutowski and Lisa Goodman at Boston College built the Legal Abuse Scale, the first validated tool to measure legal abuse as a form of coercive control run through the court.

They developed it with 222 survivor-mothers in family law proceedings and refined it down to 14 items across two dimensions: harm to you as a person and a parent, and harm to your finances. Draining you through the court and draining your bank account are two sides of the same tactic.

What survivors had been describing for decades now has an instrument behind it. Legal abuse is measurable, and it maps directly onto the same control patterns that show up inside the relationship.

A 2026 study in the Journal of Family Violence went further and connected the two directly. Following 173 divorcing mothers, researchers found that the more coercive control a person used during the marriage, the more court filings appeared before the divorce was even final. Each increase in coercive control predicted a 6.8% higher rate of filings. The behavior does not stop when the relationship ends. It moves into the courtroom.

Why this matters: the pattern in your relationship and the pattern in your case are the same pattern.

Divorce doesn’t create new patterns. Divorce exemplifies patterns that were already there in the relationship.

Abusive litigation laws are starting to name it

Most states still have no specific tool for this, which means the burden falls on you and your attorney to frame the pattern in language the court already understands. But that is changing.

Washington passed an abusive litigation law in 2020 (Chapter 26.51 RCW). It lets a survivor ask the court for an order restricting abusive litigation. When a pattern is shown, the law creates a rebuttable presumption that the litigation is primarily meant to harass, intimidate, or maintain contact.

Once that order is in place, the abusive party has to get a judge’s pre-approval before filing anything new, and the court can order them to pay your attorney’s fees and lost wages and can let you testify by phone so you are not forced into the same room. Idaho, Vermont, and Tennessee have enacted their own versions.

The newer coercive control laws are folding this in too. When Colorado’s 2026 custody law and others define domestic violence to include economic abuse and coercive control, weaponized litigation is part of what a court can now weigh, because draining someone through endless filings is both.

Slowly, the system is being taught to see the pattern.

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How to document litigation abuse for court

You cannot always stop someone from filing. You can make sure that every time they do, they are building your case instead of theirs. The goal is to turn a blur of stressful paperwork into a clean, countable record a judge can see at a glance.

How to prove a pattern of abuse in court

• Keep the whole docket. Save every motion, petition, notice, and order, with its date. The single most persuasive exhibit in a litigation-abuse argument is a simple timeline of filings. Volume and frequency are the pattern.

• Count the cost, in numbers. Track legal fees spent responding, hours of work missed, days in court, and continuances requested. “They keep dragging me back to court” is a complaint. “14 filings in 18 months, 9 continuances, and $22,000 in fees responding to motions that were denied or withdrawn” is evidence.

• Log the timing. Note when filings land. A motion dropped right before your vacation, a holiday with the kids, or a work deadline is not a coincidence, and a pattern of strategic timing is worth documenting.

• Name it in the court’s language. Judges act on patterns of conduct, courses of behavior, and specific documented incidents. Translate what is happening to you into those terms. If you are in Washington, Idaho, Vermont, or Tennessee, ask your attorney directly about the abusive-litigation statute. Everywhere else, ask about vexatious-litigant findings, motions for sanctions, fee awards, and pre-filing restrictions your state already allows.

• Protect your baseline while it plays out. This is a long game. The goal is often to drain you of your energy and your money, so that way you just accept a deal that you don’t even want to get the process over with. Keep your documentation in one organized place your ex has never had access to, and treat every filing as data to log rather than a fire to put out at 11pm.

If you have felt like you are losing your grip somewhere in this process, unable to think straight, convinced no one believes you, wrung out by a case that never ends, understand that this is the intended effect and it has been documented in the research. You are not disorganized. You are not dramatic. You are the target of a strategy, and strategies can be countered.

The court can be used as a weapon. It can also be handed a record it cannot ignore. One of those is in your control, starting today.

Nobody’s coming to save you. But a documented pattern speaks a language the court is finally learning to read, and you are the one who gets to write it down.

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Disclaimer: This is educational content, not legal advice. Nothing in family law is guaranteed. Rules, procedures, and outcomes vary state by state, county by county, and case by case. Always consult a licensed attorney in your jurisdiction before making decisions about your case.

Sources

• Litigation Abuse (WomensLaw.org, National Network to End Domestic Violence)

• Coercive Control in the Courtroom: the Legal Abuse Scale (LAS). Gutowski & Goodman, Journal of Family Violence (2022)

• Associations Between Coercive Control and Rate of Court Filings During the Divorce Process. Journal of Family Violence (2026)

• Chapter 26.51 RCW: Abusive Litigation, Domestic Violence (Washington)

• Chapter 26.51 Abusive Litigation overview (WomensLaw.org)

For a long time, the law agreed with the person hurting you. If it didn’t leave a mark, it didn’t count.

That is changing. Not everywhere, and not fast enough, but genuinely, and in 2026 more than in any year before it.

Coercive control is moving out of the therapy office and into the statute books. Judges in a growing number of states are now required to look at the whole pattern of behavior instead of a single physical act. If you’re in the middle of a divorce, a custody fight, or leaving a partner you never married, this is the shift that finally puts language around what’s been happening to you.

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First, what “coercive control” actually means in law

Coercive control is a pattern of behavior. It’s the strategic use of intimidation, isolation, manipulation, financial restriction, surveillance, and threats to strip away another person’s freedom and autonomy.

Any one piece can look small or even explainable on its own. That’s the whole design. It’s built to be deniable. To be difficult to explain and to take years to actually understand what’s happening to you. The harm lives in the accumulation.

The laws being passed right now try to name that pattern directly.

They list the tactics:

• cutting you off from family and friends

• controlling the money

• tracking your phone or location

• threatening the kids or the pets

• using the court system itself as a weapon

• damaging property

• monitoring your every move

When a statute names those things, a judge is allowed, and sometimes required, to treat them as abuse. That’s the point. It turns “they never hit me, but…” into a sentence the court can act on.

How we got here: a timeline

2015. The blueprint (England & Wales). The concept first became a crime across the Atlantic. England and Wales made “controlling or coercive behaviour” in an intimate or family relationship a criminal offense under the Serious Crime Act 2015. It became the reference point advocates in the U.S. would point to for years. It proved that criminalizing this behavior can be done.

2020 to 2021. California opens the door. California passed SB 1141, which folded coercive control into the state’s definition of domestic abuse for family-court purposes. Effective January 1, 2021, it let survivors seeking a restraining order describe a pattern of control such as isolation, financial abuse, and threats, without having to prove physical violence. It worked through the civil courts. It was the first time a U.S. state told survivors that a pattern of control counts, even with no bruise to show.

2021. Hawaii and Connecticut go further. Hawaii became the first U.S. state to criminalize coercive control directly, treating it as a petty misdemeanor. That same year, Connecticut passed “Jennifer’s Law,” named for Jennifer Dulos and Jennifer Magnano, two women killed by coercively controlling partners. It expanded the state’s definition of domestic violence to include coercive control and made it easier to get a restraining order and protect children without proof of physical harm.

2021 to 2022. The federal government reauthorizes VAWA and shows its limits. The Violence Against Women Act, the landmark 1994 federal law, came up for reauthorization. The House passed its version in 2021, and after a long stall it became law in March 2022 as part of a larger federal spending package. It renewed critical funding and protections for survivors. The federal reauthorization did not criminalize coercive control, and it did not close the “boyfriend loophole” on firearms. The boyfriend loophole is a gap in federal gun law. Federal law bars people convicted of domestic violence, or placed under certain restraining orders, from owning firearms, but for years that protection reached only spouses, people you had lived with, or someone you shared a child with.

An abusive dating partner who never married you, never moved in, and never had a child with you fell right through the gap and could keep their guns. That’s the loophole, and it’s the same one a bipartisan 2025 federal bill is still trying to close. Congress renewed the old framework and left the new one unbuilt. That is why the momentum on coercive control shifted to the states, and why, to this day, whether the pattern of control you lived through is legally recognized depends far more on your state than on Congress.

2024. Massachusetts, and a name the whole country learned. In June 2024, Governor Maura Healey signed a law making Massachusetts the seventh state to classify coercive control as a form of domestic violence. That same spring, Mica Miller, a South Carolina woman, died by suicide in April 2024 in the middle of divorce proceedings, after what those close to her described as relentless coercive control that existing law couldn’t touch. Her death became a rallying point for reform. Her memory now drives a legislative fight that is still going.

2026. Colorado sets a new high-water mark. In May 2026, Colorado signed HB26-1309 into law, the strongest coercive-control custody law in the country. Colorado family courts must now screen for domestic violence before deciding custody, and the definition explicitly includes coercive control, economic abuse, and technological abuse. If abuse is found, the law presumes that handing responsibilities to the abusive parent is not in the child’s best interest, and it puts the burden on that parent to prove otherwise by “clear and convincing evidence.” It even removes time limits on considering past abuse. The pattern counts, and the burden shifts.

2026 and beyond. The next wave. South Carolina is fighting to pass “Mica’s Law,” a criminal coercive control bill tied to Mica Miller’s death. It has been reintroduced for the current session after previous failures, and it’s generating hearings and testimony right now. New York has a proposal to make coercive control a felony.

Bills are live or pending in West Virginia, Arizona, Maine, and Kentucky. At the federal level, a bipartisan bill introduced in 2025 aims to close the boyfriend loophole, though that one deals with firearms and stalking, not coercive control itself. The federal government still hasn’t named the pattern. The states are doing the work.

The 2026 map: where the law protects you now

There are two very different kinds of “coercive control law,” and confusing them will cost you.

Criminal laws are still rare. Only Hawaii has directly criminalized coercive control as a standalone offense. South Carolina is the state to watch for the next one. If you’re anywhere else, “it’s illegal” is not yet the right frame.

Family and civil-court frameworks are the fast-growing majority. This is where most of the movement is, and where it matters most for divorce and custody. California, Connecticut, Washington, Massachusetts, and now Colorado let family courts weigh coercive control when deciding restraining orders and custody. You aren’t asking the state to jail someone. You’re asking a family-court judge to see the pattern and protect you and your kids because of it. Colorado’s 2026 law is the strongest version of this so far.

Pending or reintroduced. South Carolina, New York, West Virginia, Arizona, Maine, and Kentucky all have active or recently reintroduced legislation. The direction of travel is one way.

Even in states with no coercive-control statute at all, family courts increasingly can consider these patterns when they decide custody and protective orders. National model legislation for family-court judges has been steering courts this way since 2022. So “my state doesn’t have a law” does not mean “the court won’t hear it.” It means you have to do more of the translating yourself.

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What to do if your state HAS a coercive control law

You are in a stronger position than survivors were even two years ago. But a law on the books does not enforce itself. You still have to bring the evidence.

Learn the exact language of your state’s statute and use its words in your filings and your testimony. If your law names “isolation,” “economic abuse,” “technological abuse,” or “surveillance,” those are the words you build your account around.

You want specific incidents mapped onto the specific terms the law recognizes, not a general sense of feeling controlled. Get specific.

Colorado’s standard shows why. Courts want a pattern demonstrated to a real evidentiary bar, so the more concrete and organized your documentation, the more the law can do for you.

Talk to a family-law attorney who knows how your state’s coercive-control provisions have actually been applied in custody rulings, because a two-year-old statute may already have case law shaping how judges read it.

The law caught up. Your job is to meet it with a record it can act on.

What to do if your state does NOT have a coercive control law

If your state isn’t on that map yet, don’t decide you’re out of options. You’re not.

Document it anyway.

Just because your state doesn’t recognize coercive control today does not mean it won’t tomorrow. This map is redrawing itself fast. Colorado didn’t have this law two years ago. Massachusetts didn’t have it three years ago. The states passing these laws in 2026 and 2027 will be deciding cases built on conduct from before the law existed, and several of these statutes explicitly allow courts to look back at past abuse. The survivor who kept a record is the survivor who’s ready the moment their state passes new laws.

Even now, in a state with no statute, family courts are increasingly willing to consider these patterns for custody and restraining orders, as long as you can present them in a form the court understands. A judge can only act on a pattern that has been documented, dated, and organized.

What you can do:

• Build a full timeline. Coercive control lives in the accumulation. One controlling text is easy to dismiss. 90 of them across six months, laid out in order, is a pattern a court can see.

• Capture the tactics as they happen. Screenshots of messages, records of financial restriction, logs of monitoring or tracking, notes on isolation (”blocked from seeing my sister on these dates”), threats to the kids or pets, and property damage. Date everything.

• Save it somewhere they can’t reach and can’t delete. Keep it outside any shared account or device, and if there’s any chance your devices are being monitored, use a phone and a login they have never had access to.

• Write contemporaneous notes. A short, dated entry written the day something happened carries far more weight than a memory reconstructed a year later in a courtroom.

• Name it in the court’s language. You translate what actually happened to you into terms the legal system already accepts, like a pattern of conduct, a course of behavior, and specific documented incidents, so that when the law does recognize coercive control, or when a judge is willing to consider it, your record already speaks their language.

The abuse was designed to be invisible and deniable. Your record is how you make it visible and undeniable.

You are building the case now for a system that is still catching up, so that whether the law changes next year or your judge is simply willing to look, what happened to you is written down in a form that can finally be acted on.

The map is being redrawn in your favor. Your job is to be ready when it reaches you.

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If you’re navigating a divorce, a custody case, or a high-conflict breakup involving coercive control and you want help building a documented, court-ready record of what actually happened, that’s some of the many work I do with clients.

Disclaimer: This is educational content, not legal advice. Nothing in family law is guaranteed. Rules, procedures, and outcomes vary state by state, county by county, and case by case. Always consult a licensed attorney in your jurisdiction before making decisions about your case.

I’m not saying women aren’t owed support. Any woman that’s experienced abuse deserves more than what their ex can pay them.

I’m referring to a check arriving every month from the person you just left is not the freedom it looks like.

A monthly payment is an ongoing tie. It means the person who controlled the money still has a say in your life every 30 days. If they decide to stop paying, you don’t get to call the police and have them picked up that afternoon.

You go back to court. You wait. You spend money you may not have to enforce money you were already promised. And the whole time, the arrangement quietly repeats the thing you left: your stability depends on their cooperation.

I would rather see a woman walk away with a lump-sum settlement up front than a stream of payments she has to keep chasing, even if that means settling for less than what the law says you “could” be entitled to.

A house has a deed. A retirement account has a balance. Those don’t require your ex to stay willing.

I know that doesn’t sound fair. Divorce isn’t fair. The legal system isn’t fair. Abuse isn’t fair.

That’s why I always try to get away from the idea of fairness and get clarity on the deal that matters to you and what allows you to be at a comfortable spot to rebuild on the other side, even if things are tight for a couple of years.

That’s is why I focus so heavily on a rebuilding plan.

• Can you work?

• How much can you currently make?

• What does your life with children cost at a minimum?

• Do you need to go back to school or go through job training to start a new career?

• What life do you want to build?

I understand that lump sum deals aren’t realistic in all cases. Transitional support is often necessary for full financial independence, especially in cases where my clients were out of the work force to raise children.

So you need to get clear: how much do you need for how long and what for?

The takeaway: when you map your exit, separate what you’re owed from what you can actually control. Ask your attorney how property division and spousal support work in your state, and what enforcement really looks like when the payments stop. A number written into a settlement is only as good as your ability to collect it.

All of the women that I’ve supported who have taken a deal that, on paper, was less than they could have been legally entitled to do not regret it because they had a financial rebuilding plan post-divorce that did not require their partner’s cooperation for anything.

That’s what freedom truly looks like.

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2. Being a stay-at-home mom is the most necessary job in the world, and one of the most financially dangerous.

Stay-at-home moms are running a household that would cost a fortune to staff out. A private chef. A nanny. A driver. A tutor. A house manager. When the numbers get run, the replacement cost of that labor lands somewhere between $140,000 and well over $200,000 a year, on an average workload of around 106 hours a week, and that’s before anyone tries to price the emotional labor. (Insure.com; Salary.com)

Being essential is not the same as being paid. The world does not cut you a check for that work, and it will not protect you if the arrangement ends.

And it can end in more ways than people plan for. This is not only about a partner who leaves or a partner who’s abusive. Your partner could get sick. Your partner could get injured and stop earning. Your partner could die. Any one of those ends the single income the whole household was built on, and you’re the one left holding the gap, often with no recent work history and no money of your own.

Women’s household income falls by roughly 41% in the first year after divorce, almost double the drop men see, and in divorces after age 50 the standard-of-living decline reaches about 45% for women versus 21% for men. (GAO; Bowling Green / Journals of Gerontology) Layer on this: economic abuse shows up in 94% to 99% of abusive relationships, because controlling the money is how a partner makes leaving feel impossible. (NNEDV; Adams et al.)

Doing this safely means staying connected to your own financial life while the family gets everything you have.

• Keep a bank account and a credit card in your own name, so you have your own money and your own credit history.

• Stay legible on the household finances. Know every account, asset, debt, and password. Not because you expect betrayal, but because you refuse to be the last to find out.

• Keep one skill warm. A license you renew, a certification, freelance work, anything that could start earning money quickly.

• Make sure there’s life insurance on the earning partner, and confirm you’re the beneficiary and you know it’s in force.

• Keep retirement in your own name where you can. A spousal IRA exists for exactly this reason.

The goal is simple: if the income disappears tomorrow, you are not starting from zero.

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3. Couples therapy with a coercively controlling partner is dangerous (and a waste of time)

About one-third of all couples who enter therapy are experiencing some form of domestic abuse or coercive control. Most of their therapists don’t know it. (Psychology Today) Most therapists aren’t trained to identify coercive control unless they’ve voluntarily pursued additional training in domestic violence dynamics. (New Harbinger) Standard graduate programs don’t require it.

Abusers tend to be cunning, convincing, and charming in that room. They present their best selves. Their partners show up reactive, emotional, exhausted. The therapist reads the room and draws a conclusion. It’s not always the right one. (PMC, 2024)

I’ve watched this play out hundreds of times. Years in therapy. The woman is doing the work. Reading, showing up, trying. Her partner is performing. She leaves sessions feeling like she’s the problem, because in that room, she looks like the problem.

Then she goes home.

At home, the therapy language follows her. What used to be their instinct is now a framework. Her partner tells her she’s not respecting their boundaries. They say she’s the one who’s controlling. They use the vocabulary of healing to do the same thing they’ve always done. Now it has clinical cover. (Minaa B., When Therapy Language Becomes Weaponized)

This is all intentional.

There’s a reason most ethical therapists won’t do couples counseling when there’s coercive control. The room requires two people who hold roughly equal power and both want repair. Abuse breaks that setup. (Center for Excellence in MFT; Washington County guidance) You sit there begging, explaining, hoping they’ll finally understand you. They won’t. You’re spending your energy auditioning for someone who already decided.

On the cheating specifically: the therapy world will tell you most couples make it. One AAMFT survey found 74% of couples stayed together after working through an affair. But staying together and actually repairing are two different measurements.

When researchers track genuine reconciliation (restored trust and real satisfaction over time), the number drops to roughly 15-20%. (Affair Healing; NY Behavioral Health) Most of those higher numbers come from the corner of the internet that sells affair recovery services.

My opinion: if someone cheats, leave.

I’ve watched this play out hundreds of times. A woman discovers the affair, pours months of time and hope into therapy, and it turns out the affair never ended. They were lying in the marriage and lying in the therapy chair. They put your health at risk and looked you in the eye about it.

That’s not a rough patch to work through. That’s manipulation.

A leaving plan can looks like months to years. Many of the women I’ve supported made the decision to leave years before they found me. Leaving a coercively controlling partner safely takes time. But in that time, they consistently took steps towards their freedom.

The woman that I’ve supported that spent s years, sometimes decades, trying to rebuild after infidelity always wished that they left sooner.

One thing I do support: a co-parenting coach or therapist when children are involved. Not couples therapy. A co-parenting specialist creates a neutral space specifically for building a workable parenting plan. The goal is structure. My clients who include one in their case consistently get better outcomes on the parenting agreement.

The reason women stay longest is almost always the kids:

The most consistent finding in the resilience research is that children do well when they have at least one stable, committed relationship with a supportive adult. (Harvard Center on the Developing Child) You can be that person. You cannot force your partner to be that person. Stop waiting on them for it. The job of being the safe parent falls to you, even if you only have the kids half the time.

The takeaway: take the energy you’re spending trying to be chosen and put it into the one person you can actually rebuild. Yourself. Heal. Get your footing. Be the stable one. That does more for your children than any amount of staying.

Nobody wins in divorce.

Everybody loses something. The question is what you lose on the way out.

I don’t use winning language in my work. I’ve watched it cost women more than losing would have. Three years in. Six figures in legal fees on a high-conflict divorce.

Still in discovery. Still in court. Both parties bleeding the same pool of money into their respective attorneys while nothing gets resolved, because the goal shifted from getting out to beating the other person.

Divorce has two things to accomplish. A financial agreement. A parenting plan that creates stability for the kids.

That’s it. Everything else is noise.

The women I’ve worked with who come out actually okay with where they landed are not the ones who got everything they asked for in the beginning. Some of them didn’t have full transparency into the finances. Some settled for less than what they were owed.

What they had was a plan that was entirely theirs. They accepted who their partner actually is instead of staying in litigation waiting for a different version of that person to show up. They built the agreement to be as enforceable as possible. And they had a path forward that didn’t require the other person to cooperate at all.

That’s what led to stability.

The takeaway: keep the actual goal in view. A financial agreement. A parenting plan. Your footing on the other side.

So many sources tell you to wait. To hope. To keep pouring yourself into someone who isn’t pouring back.

“What about your vows?”

“Is it really that bad?”

“Have you tried everything?”

Put that energy somewhere it actually builds. Your footing. Your money. Your life.

The power to change this was always yours.

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Disclaimer: This is educational content, not legal advice. Nothing in family law is guaranteed. Rules, procedures, and outcomes vary state by state, county by county, and case by case. Always consult a licensed attorney in your jurisdiction before making decisions about your case.

If you have searched how to find hidden assets in a divorce, how to divorce when you don’t have access to the bank accounts, or whether you are responsible for debt you never agreed to, that search usually comes from the same place. You are being told to make one of the biggest decisions of your life without the information you would need to make it well.

There is a reason so many women are in that position. Financial abuse is present in 99% of domestic violence relationships, according to the National Network to End Domestic Violence. Controlling the money is one of the most common ways power gets held in these dynamics, which means the woman sitting across from me usually does not have full transparency into the finances. She has fragments. A number she saw on a statement once. A business she knows exists but has never seen the books on. A retirement account she assumes is there.

Most articles about hidden assets promise to help you find every dollar. This one starts somewhere else.

You do not need to know what they have to know what you need.

Start With Your Number, Not Their Secrets

Every one of these cases begins the same way. Before we talk about what they are hiding, we get clear on what you need.

• What are your goals?

• What is your true financial need?

• What does a settlement look like that lets you live comfortably and rebuild on the other side?

We build that number first, because in most of these cases we are flying blind and gathering data slowly. The strategy gets built on your need. The data we collect later either confirms it or adjusts it.

I call that bottom number your floor. It is the minimum you need to walk away and build a stable life. Not the dream number. Not the punishment number. The number that means you are safe, housed, and able to move forward.

Here is why it is essential to establish a floor deal early on:

When a case is a true mess, hidden assets everywhere, multiple real estate properties, multiple businesses where everything is entangled, I level-set early. There is no fair.

Nobody is untangling all of that unless you have $100,000 or more sitting in an account to fund the work. In cases like that, more of your money goes to the financial team than to your attorney, because forensic accountants are the ones who reconstruct the full picture of what the marital estate actually holds.

That work is real and sometimes worth it. It is also expensive. I have watched women spend tens of thousands, sometimes more, chasing a money trail, burning down the marital assets to do it, and land on the same floor deal they could have taken at the start.

It is never my job to make that choice for anyone. It is my job to lay out the cost and the benefit and ask you the only question that matters. Do you want complete clarity on what they did with the money, or do you want enough to rebuild and have peace when this is over?

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Know the Contract You Signed

Marriage is a business contract. Especially when there are no minor children involved, that is what the court sees. Understanding the rules of the contract you entered matters most at the moment you have to leave it.

Nine times out of ten, assets acquired during the marriage are marital assets. Nine times out of ten, debt incurred during the marriage is marital debt. This holds in community property states, where debts taken on during the marriage are generally shared regardless of whose name is on the account, and in equitable distribution states, where debt from the marriage is generally marital even when one spouse incurred it. You can have kept your own finances clean and squeaky, and still be responsible for helping clean up a mess your partner made.

It is not fair. This is a legal system, not a justice system. The sooner you operate from the rules as they are instead of the rules as they should be, the sooner you stop losing time.

One more thing the contract does not do. A divorce decree can assign a debt to your ex, but it does not remove your name from the creditor’s contract. If both names are on the account, the lender can still come to you. That gap is exactly where a lot of women get hurt after the divorce is over, and it is why the strategy has to account for debt from the beginning.

There is a specific version of this worth naming: coerced debt. Debt you were pressured, threatened, or manipulated into taking on in your name. It is common, and the traditional remedies are weak.

Research on survivors leaving abusive marriages found that divorce is an ineffective way to resolve coerced debt, with legal rights under debtor-creditor law working for fewer than 10% of those debts. The better news is that a growing number of states, eight as of New York’s law, now let survivors dispute coerced debt directly with creditors instead of waiting on a court. If any of your debt was forced on you, that is a specific avenue to raise with your attorney, and a reason to document how the debt was created.

Now, the three versions of this I see most.

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The Stay-at-Home Mom Who Never Saw the Accounts

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How do I say it?

What happens after I do?

What if they say no?

Many of my clients ask me how to say it. The word choice. The tone. Whether to do it at the kitchen table or in a therapist’s office. That’s the part your brain can plan, so that’s the part it wants to solve.

The first question should be whether it’s safe to have a direct conversation with them about this at all. Then we dive into the how.

For a lot of women, the answer is yes, with structure. For some of you, the honest answer is no, and doing it the “mature” way is the most dangerous thing you could do. The rest of this decides which one you are.

The belief that gets women hurt

There’s a story most of us are handed about how to end a relationship the right way. You sit them down. You’re honest. You explain your reasons. You give them a chance to respond. You leave with closure and mutual respect.

That story assumes the person across from you wants the same things you do. A resolution. A fair ending. Their own dignity intact and yours too.

With a coercively controlling partner, that assumption is where it goes wrong.

You are not ending a relationship with someone who wants a fair outcome. You are removing yourself from someone whose entire operating system runs on maintaining control over you.

Your leaving is received as a loss of control. And for a certain kind of person, a loss of control is the most destabilizing thing that can happen to them.

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Leaving is the most dangerous window, and the data is not subtle

Jacquelyn Campbell is the researcher who built the field’s understanding of when abusive relationships turn lethal. Her 11-city study, published in the American Journal of Public Health, compared 220 women who were killed by an intimate partner against 343 abused women who survived, to isolate what was different about the cases that ended in death.

A few of the findings matter enormously for the woman deciding how to tell them.

70% of the women who were murdered had been physically abused by that same partner before the killing. The violence almost always came first.

Separating after living together roughly tripled a woman’s risk of being killed. Having left, or having asked the partner to leave, carried similar statistics.

And the combination that mattered most was control plus separation. When the partner was highly controlling and the couple had separated, the risk of being killed rose to nearly nine times higher than the baseline.

Control alone was dangerous. Separation alone was dangerous. Together they compounded into the single most lethal pattern in the study.

There’s one more finding I want you to have, because it’s a warning sign women routinely explain away. A prior non-fatal strangulation, one time they put their hands around your throat, raised the odds of later being killed by that partner more than sevenfold. Most women file that under “a bad fight.” It’s one of the loudest predictors we have.

None of this means leaving is the wrong move. Staying with a coercively controlling partner has its own steep costs, and they compound over years. What the data means is that the exit has to be planned around the risk.

The red flags that mean you plan before you say a word

Disclaimer: I’m not a psychiatrist. I can’t diagnose your partner, and neither can anyone else who hasn’t evaluated them in person. What I can do, after 500 cases, is help you read a pattern. The list below is built from lethality research.

If any of these are present, the disclosure conversation stops being a conversation. It becomes a safety event, and the plan comes before the words.

• They have ever put their hands on your neck. Strangled you, choked you, held you down by the throat, even once.

• There is a gun in the home, or they can get to one.

• They have threatened to kill you, the kids, themselves, or a pet. Even once. Even “as a joke.”

• They have threatened you with a weapon or shown you one to make a point.

• The violence is escalating, getting more frequent or more severe.

• They control your daily life already. The money, your phone, your movements, who you see. Campbell’s own screening question is blunt: does your partner try to control all of your daily activities?

• They track you or check up on you. Your location, your messages, showing up where you didn’t say you’d be.

• The jealousy runs to “if I can’t have you, no one can.”

• They have forced sex or used pressure to get it.

• The abuse started or got worse during a pregnancy.

• They’ve threatened suicide over the relationship ending.

• The last time you tried to leave, it escalated.

Understanding why a controlling person reacts to your leaving the way they do is not about excusing it, and it’s not about waiting for them to finally understand and change.

If the pattern is real, that change is not coming. Seeing the pattern clearly is what lets you stop organizing your exit around their feelings and start organizing it around your safety.

Two ways to deliver the news

Once you know which situation you’re in, the method follows.

If the red flags are present, you do not sit them down.

This is Campbell’s instruction almost word for word, straight out of the study: if a woman is planning to leave an abuser, she needs to leave when he is not present, and inform him afterward by note or by phone. Not in the room.

So the plan comes first, and the plan is logistical.

• A place to land that they don’t control and ideally don’t know about.

• A go-bag already there or already hidden. ID, medications, a phone charger, cash, a change of clothes, the kids’ essentials.

• Your critical documents copied and out of the house. Tax returns, bank statements, retirement and mortgage paperwork, insurance, vehicle titles.

• A transportation plan, and a window of time when they’ll be gone.

• One trusted person who knows the plan and the timing.

• A domestic violence advocate who can help you make a safety plan compliant with your state’s laws

• Qn attorney that is assisting in the legalities of the divorce process

You leave inside that window. Then, and only then, you deliver the decision, from a distance, in writing or by phone. A short boundary text you drafted in advance does more to keep you safe than any perfect speech delivered in a room with no exit.

If you’re at this level of risk, this is also the point to bring in a domestic violence advocate who can build a safety plan with you specifically. The National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233, and they do exactly this.

If the red flags are not present, you can deliver it in person, with structure.

This is where the script matters, and where most women overcomplicate it. The goal is not to make them understand. The goal is to inform, clearly and finally, and then leave. This is an informational conversation, not a negotiation.

A few rules I give clients for this version:

• Keep it in bite-sized pieces.

• You do not have to cover the whole divorce in one sitting.

• Set a time limit before you walk in. Thirty minutes, not “until we’ve resolved this.”

Lead with the bottom line and don’t argue the reasons. “I’ve put a lot of thought into this, and I’ve decided it’s time to move forward separately.”

That’s a complete statement. It does not require their agreement to be true.

Pick two or three broken-record phrases and use them on repeat when they push.

• “This is the decision I’ve made.”

• “I’m not going to discuss that right now.”

• “We can bring that to the mediator.”

Controlling people escalate to pull you back into engagement. Flat repetition starves the escalation.

Decide your exits in advance and write them out. One for the time limit. One for if it escalates. One for if they loop you back to “but why.” When you hit one, you use the line and you go.

If saying it out loud feels like too much charge in the room, leave a letter alongside the conversation. It gives them space to react without an audience, and it gives you a clean record of exactly what was said.

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“What if they say no”

You are not asking a question. You are delivering information. There is nothing on the table for them to approve. A divorce does not require both signatures of enthusiasm. It requires one person who has decided and who follows the process.

Their “no” carries no legal weight over your decision. you don’t need them to say yes to file. “No” is a reaction, and you plan for a reaction. Expect the bargaining and the sudden promises and the blame, and hold your line anyway.

The women I work with who get through this cleanly are the ones who stopped needing the other person to agree. They shared the news, stood firm in their decision, and stuck to the plan

What to take with you

Start here this week, before you plan a single sentence.

Read the red-flag list again and answer it honestly. If any of them are true, your first move is a safety plan and a call to an advocate, not a conversation.

If none of them are, you can move to the script, and the script’s only job is clarity delivered in bite-sized pieces with an exit already planned.

This is not a communication problem that can be solved with different words and using a softer tone.

It’s a safety and strategy problem first.

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They all follow the same script.

I joke with my clients that it feels like their exes all sat down and read the same book on how to make this process as painful, expensive, and drawn-out as possible. Same lines. Same moves. Same timing. Different names.

So if you’re trying to figure out what to expect when divorcing a narcissist, this is it. I want to walk you through the three patterns I see most, because knowing what’s coming does something for you. It won’t stop the behavior.

There usually isn’t anything legal you can do to make a controlling person stop being controlling. But when you can see the move before it lands, you don’t get blindsided. You get to respond instead of react.

I’ll say this too, so you don’t walk away thinking I’m minimizing it. Naming a pattern doesn’t drain the emotional energy it takes to live through it. You can know exactly what they’re doing and it can still wreck your week. Both things are true. Let’s get into it.

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Why a Narcissist Pushes for Mediation With No Lawyers

Here’s the line. Almost word for word:

“We don’t need attorneys. Do you not trust me? We’re going to spend so much money on legal fees. Why don’t we just drop the lawyers and do mediation instead?”

It shows up at one of two moments. Either right after you’ve told them you’re filing and mentioned you retained an attorney. Or a few months into the process, once their usual behavior stops getting the reaction out of you that it used to.

On the surface it sounds reasonable. And that’s what makes it hard. Most people genuinely would save money working with a mediator instead of two attorneys and a litigated case. So part of you hears it and thinks, maybe they have a point.

Here’s what’s actually happening underneath:

Coercively controlling people hate anything they can’t control. They can’t control a legal process. They can’t control your attorney. They can’t control the team you’ve built to get you through this with a fair financial outcome and a stable parenting plan. What they can control, or at least have a much better shot at controlling, is you and a mediator in a room with no attorneys in it.

That’s the whole play. Get the professionals out of the way and get you back across the table alone, where the old dynamic still works. Mediation with a narcissist can work, but only with your own attorney in your corner and your eyes fully open.

So when a client is dealing with a controlling partner, dropping your attorney to trust someone you already know you can’t trust is one of the worst moves you can make. It hands them the exact thing you’ve been working so hard to take back.

This one is emotionally brutal, and I want to name why. They’re saying all the right things. And a lot of you don’t want this divorce either. So when they show up sounding calm and reasonable and reminding you of the money, there’s a real pull to believe them.

Remember why you made this decision. Remember how they made you feel. Remember everything that led you here.

Then keep your team.

Love Bombing and Reconciliation Attempts (Hoovering)

This one’s always fun.

There’s a name for it, hoovering. It’s the sudden pull back in right when you start to move on. It comes in two waves.

The first hits right after you share the news, and it’s usually a flood of promises:

• They’ll go to therapy.

• They’ll show up better.

• They’ll be there for the kids.

Sometimes they go further and turn into a parent you’ve never met. Suddenly they’re at the doctor’s appointments they never went to. They’re at every therapy session. They’re cleaning up around the house. They look like parent of the year at the recital, the game, the school event, anything you both show up to.

The second wave comes later. Months into it. Sometimes years. And it looks like devotion. They keep asking if you’ll come back. They tell you this is a waste of time and money. They remind you of the vows. Some of them start weaponizing faith around this point.

I’ve had clients walk out of a court hearing to a love letter tucked under their windshield wiper. A lavish gift on their birthday. A handwritten card in the mail on what would have been the anniversary. All of this while they are actively litigating against her.

And the second you reject the reconciliation, it flips. Now it’s your fault:

• You’re destroying the family.

• You’re putting all this stress on the kids.

• You’re the one burning money on legal fees.

Everything lands on you. I’ve watched them run this play while they already have a new partner at home. Because most of the time it was never really about you. It’s about the supply and the image. The perfect family they built is coming down because you filed, and once the picture of the spouse and the kids is gone, there isn’t much left to hide behind.

The move here is simple to say and hard to do. Don’t engage. Keep communication strictly about the children and strictly about what’s necessary. No responding to the letters. No answering the “don’t you remember the vows.” They run on your reaction. Starve it and they lose steam eventually. They always do.

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Using the Children: Emotional Regulation and Parental Alienation

A lot of controlling partners see the children as extensions of themselves. The kids are also useful. They’re proof, to family and friends and coworkers, that this person is a wonderful parent.

So if you’re the one who filed, watch what gets said. How sad they are that they can’t see the kids as much. How much pain you’ve caused. How you’re the reason the family is split up. Or the softer version, that they’d love to see the kids more, but since you didn’t want to stay, everyone has to live separate now.

They’re often the fun parent too. Late bedtimes, junk food, unlimited screens. And here’s the part that isn’t fair. The kids may start asking for more time over there, because you’re the one holding the line. You do the rules. You do the bedtime. You do the consequences.

But you’re also the safe one. And that shows up in a way that gets used against you.

Your kids will fall apart in front of you. The anger, the crying, the tantrums, the sadness. They let all of it out with you, because you’re the parent they feel safe enough to be a mess in front of. They hold it together at the other house because they’ve learned that over there, falling apart gets you yelled at or punished. So they perform calm.

Then the other parent points at that calm as evidence. “They’re fine with me. It’s only a problem at your house.” What they’re seeing isn’t a happier kid. It’s a kid who doesn’t feel safe enough to show them anything real.

Here’s what to do with it.

Stay consistent. Keep being the safe parent. Keep the rules and keep taking care of yourself. Try not to respond to the narrative they’re building. Be the parent who sets boundaries, because that’s what teaches your kids how to set their own down the road.

And keep a documentation log of the alienation attempts. Every comment, every incident, dated. That log is useful for your attorney and it shows the pattern over time, which is far more powerful in a legal process than any single moment.

I know this is one of the biggest fears women bring to me. If I’m the only stable one, is that enough? Are my kids going to be okay with one steady parent and one chaotic one?

Here’s what I’ve seen in my own life. Here’s what my clients tell me years down the road. And here’s what the research says, because this fear deserves more than my reassurance.

There’s a study out of Arizona State called the New Beginnings Program. Researchers worked with divorced mothers. One parent. They focused on two things: warmth in the relationship with the child, and consistent, non-harsh discipline. The exact combination you’re already running. Then they followed those families for years.

The kids whose one parent got stronger on those two fronts had fewer mental health problems, less substance use, fewer behavioral problems, and better outcomes than the kids whose families didn’t. And this held. They measured it at 6 years out, and again at 15 years out, when the kids were grown adults. The quality of parenting from that one parent was the mechanism that carried the whole effect.

So when you worry that being the only stable parent isn’t enough, the research says the opposite. One warm, consistent parent is the single biggest lever on how your kids come out of this. In the language of the study, you are the protective factor.

It’s exhausting right now, and it’s mostly thankless. It’s also the most protective thing in your child’s life.

What to Take With You

None of these patterns are personal, even though every one of them is designed to feel personal. They’re a script. And once you can read the script, you stop being surprised by the next page.

You will still feel it. Knowing it’s coming doesn’t make the love letter or the “you’re destroying this family” text hurt any less in the moment. That’s normal. Feel it, then set it down and go back to your plan.

Keep your team. Keep communication about the kids and nothing else. Keep the documentation log. Keep being the safe parent.

That’s not passivity. That’s you refusing to hand back the control you’ve worked this hard to take.

Nobody’s coming to save you. But you’re not helpless in this. You’re building the exit, one boring, consistent, documented day at a time.

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