Insights

Writing on coercive control, family court abuse, workplace abuse, trauma, and grief. Practical, grounded, and written for survivors, not about them.

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What Family Court Does to a Person

17 April 2026

If family court has made you feel flattened, unreal, or split from the person you were before the proceedings started, this is about what that process does. The waiting that nobody warns you about. The strangers who handle your worst experience as a file. The legal language that strips the heat from your own story. The months between hearings that your body keeps score of. And the quiet, unseen work of holding onto yourself while a system processes you.

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How the Legal System Can Re-traumatise Survivors

4 December 2025

When a survivor speaks out, the legal system can become another source of harm. Court dates, cross-examinations and endless demands to “prove it again” can reopen the original wound in ways the public rarely sees. Drawing from Brittany Higgins’ statement about being re-traumatised through litigation, this article shows how the system can be used as a weapon, and what it costs survivors emotionally, physically, and over years of their lives.

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How To Read a Threatening Lawyer Email Without Losing Your Mind: A Trauma-Informed Guide

22 November 2025

This “How To” is a guide for anyone who opens a lawyer email and feels their whole body go into meltdown before they have read a single sentence. It explains what is actually happening in your nervous system, why your stomach drops, your jaw locks and you reread the same paragraph ten times, and why that reaction is biology, not weakness.

You will learn how threatening legal emails are written to multiply fear, how to separate facts from theatre, and how to spot tactics that are designed to make you shut up rather than because you are wrong. The article gives you a simple timeline for what to do in the first hours and days after the email arrives, and practical steps to help your body settle before you respond.

If you have ever thought, “I cannot think straight when I read this stuff,” this guide helps you understand why, and shows you how to read lawyer threats without abandoning yourself or your rights.

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How Family Law Enables Post-Separation Abuse

6 November 2025

This guide is for survivors of coercive control and narcissistic abuse who left the relationship only to discover the abuse didn’t end. It just slipped into family law. If you’re getting swamped with his lawyer’s emails, accused of non-compliance, hit with repeated “concerns,” or feeling that familiar dread when another application lands, you’ll see yourself in this immediately.

It shows how surveillance becomes “information requests,” criticism becomes “raising concerns,” punishment becomes “consequences,” and isolation becomes “parental responsibility.” It explains why the system keeps calling it “high conflict” and why it isn’t that at all. You’re not difficult. You’re not obstructive. You’re facing the same control in legal language. This guide helps you recognise the pattern, stay anchored in your reality, and stop blaming yourself for abuse the system still doesn’t know how to see.

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When the Family Court Is Weaponised

10 October 2025

When abuse doesn’t end at separation, it often evolves into something harder to name, legal coercive control. This piece exposes how abusers weaponise the family court system to keep survivors trapped through endless applications, financial pressure, and credibility attacks, all under the guise of “co-parenting.”

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Family Violence and the Family Court: What Survivors Need to Know

8 January 2025

If you are navigating the family law system and family violence, you may have been pointed to the Court’s Family Violence Best Practice Principles. It is a long, formal document. Many people cannot get through it, especially when they are already frightened, exhausted, or living with ongoing coercive control. This piece translates what the Court is saying about safety, disclosure, credibility, coercive control, systems abuse, and children. It also names what survivors often discover in practice, and why the gap between the two is not your fault.

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When the Family Court Can’t See the Abuse

8 January 2025

If you’re facing family court because you left an abusive relationship and now have to prove to strangers that the abuse was real…. I need you to know something. The system you’re about to enter wasn’t designed for you. It wasn’t built to recognize the kind of harm you survived. You’re going to walk into rooms where your abuser is charming, calm, and reasonable. Where you…. traumatised, exhausted, afraid…. will be the one who looks unstable. This isn’t your failure. This is systemic failure.

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