What Family Court Does to a Person

By Geoffrey Clow | Twinkling of the Soul

The bench is bolted to the wall. Four Phillips-head bolts, painted the same pale grey, so the whole thing looks like it has always been here. It is hard in the way only government furniture is hard, a hardness that says: comfort is not the purpose of this room. You are supposed to move through it. You have not moved through it. It is 11.40am and you have been here since 9.15, and the matter before yours has run over, and nobody has told you what is happening because nothing is happening to you. Something is happening to someone else. You are in the queue.

Your mouth is dry. It has been dry since the car park. There is a water cooler at the end of the corridor that gurgles every few minutes, but getting up would mean leaving the bench and the bench is the only fixed point in a morning that has no others, so you stay, and you hold the folder, and the folder contains your life arranged in numbered paragraphs, and your hands are doing the thing they do now before hearings, which is a fine, constant tremor that is not visible to anyone but you.

If family court has ever made you feel flattened, unreal, or split from the person you were before the proceedings started, this is about what that process does to a person. Not what the law says it does. What it actually does, in the body, in the kitchen, in the months between hearings that nobody warns you about.

A woman is sitting three feet to your left. You do not know her name. Her folder is green. She is wearing a blazer she does not usually wear, and she keeps pulling the cuffs down. You recognise the gesture. You are doing your own version of it with the list, the handwritten list folded into the front of the folder, opened and re-opened so many times the paper has gone soft along the crease. The list contains the points you must make. The list is a rope. You are holding the rope.

It is, for the people who work in this building, a Tuesday.

The Truth You Expected

You believed courts find truth. You believed this the way most people believe it, completely and without examination, because the story we tell about courts is a story about justice, and justice is a process by which the truth is presented, weighed, and honoured.

You were not entirely wrong. The court does weigh evidence. It does make findings. But the distance between “findings” and “truth” is a distance you did not know existed until you watched the other side file material that you know, with the certainty of a person who was in the room, is not what happened.

You expected the system to recoil. Someone with authority and a lanyard to read what they filed and say: this is not right. This did not occur.

Nobody recoiled. The material was filed. It went into the system. It became part of the record, printed in the same font, on the same paper, bound with the same clip as your affidavit, the one you wrote at the kitchen table over eleven nights while the children slept and the house was so quiet you could hear the fridge and nothing else, the one that cost you something to produce because every paragraph required you to go back into a room you have spent years trying to leave.

Their document was drafted on a Thursday afternoon, probably between two other matters, probably with a sandwich going stale on the desk. It now sits in the same file as yours, and the court will weigh them with the same scales, and the scales do not have a setting for “this one was written by someone who was there and that one was written by someone who charges six hundred dollars an hour to not have been.”

This is the adversarial system. It is not a truth-finding mechanism. It is a contest. And discovering that, not as a concept but as a lived experience, standing in a corridor with your trembling hands and your soft-creased list while the other side’s version of your life sits in the same file as yours in the same font with the same weight, is the first thing the system takes from you. It will not be the last.

The Strangers

The other side’s barrister is standing near the window. Phone in one hand, coffee in the other, talking to their instructing solicitor in the murmur of people discussing logistics rather than lives. They are wearing the suit the way people who wear suits every day wear suits, which is without thought. They put it on this morning the way you put on the blazer you keep adjusting, except they did not stand in front of the mirror wondering whether it was right.

This person knows your name. Has read the material, or the summary their solicitor prepared, which is a summary of a summary of a life. This person will stand up in court and say things about you that are not true, and they will do this with professional calm, and at the end of the day they will pack their bag and go home and not think about you, because you are not a person to them. You are a matter. A file number. A set of issues to be managed and then closed.

This is not cruelty. You know it is not cruelty. Everyone in this building is doing their job. The problem is that nobody in this building is required to feel what you are feeling, and the gap between their calm and your terror is a gap you have to stand inside, alone, while the day continues around you. Your paragraph 47, the one about the night that changed everything, the one you could not write without stopping, sits in a bundle between someone else’s property settlement and someone else’s exhibit list, and it will be read carefully but briefly and without the flinch that you still feel every time you see those words on the page.

It doesn’t. It feels like being processed. And then the process asks you to do something worse than be unheard. It asks you to speak its language.

The Language

You learn the court’s language because you have to, and in learning it you feel something leave.

You learn to say “the respondent” instead of his name. “I seek orders” instead of “I need this to stop.” You learn to draft correspondence in a tone that is firm but measured, professional but not aggressive, clear but not emotional, because emotion, in the legal register, is a contaminant. It makes you less credible. It makes the judge glance up from the page and pause, and you catch the pause because you have been trained by years of living with someone to catch pauses, to read micro-expressions, to detect shifts in atmosphere the way a sailor reads wind, and what the judge’s pause says is: noted. Emotional. Possibly unreliable.

And so you strip the heat out of your own story. Your terror becomes “apprehension.” Your entrapment becomes “a dynamic characterised by power imbalance.” The night you thought you were going to die becomes an “incident” and is assigned a subparagraph and a date and takes its place in a chronology, as though the experience of living in fear were a series of discrete events with gaps between them rather than what it was, which was constant.

The language does not just describe your experience differently. It teaches you to experience it differently. The more fluently you speak the court’s language, the further you travel from your own. You start referring to your life in terms of applications and orders. Thinking in paragraphs. Assessing your own mornings for evidentiary value, as though a thing that happened to you is only real if it can be exhibited.

You are standing at the kitchen bench making coffee and you catch yourself composing a submission in your head about the coffee, about the morning, about the fact that mornings are hard, and you stop. The system is not just processing your matter. It is processing you. And it is doing it slowly.

The Slowness

Three months to the next directions hearing. Six months to a final hearing if you are fortunate. Twelve if you are not. The matter sits in the system like a letter posted but not delivered, and during those months you are expected to function as a person, a parent, a human being with a life outside the proceedings, while carrying the proceedings inside you at all times, like a second pulse.

The proceedings follow you home. They are at the kitchen table while you make the children’s lunches. They are on the pillow at 3am, when the correspondence arrives in your mind even though it landed in your inbox nine hours ago, and you draft replies in the dark, not on paper, just on the ceiling, turning the sentences over, testing them for tone. Your jaw is clenched. You do not notice your jaw is clenched until morning, when it aches, when it has ached every morning for weeks, a dull, constant pain that sits at the hinge and radiates upward.

During these months the other side’s lawyer sends correspondence. The correspondence requires you to engage with things you know are false, in language you did not choose, on a timeline you do not control. You sit at the kitchen table, the same table where you make the lunches, and you draft your response, and the kitchen feels different now, annexed, as though the proceedings have colonised even this room.

And during those same months their lawyer bills their client and goes to dinner and sleeps through the night, because the matter is, for them, a file that closes at 5pm. Your matter does not close at 5pm. It is the first thing when the alarm goes and the last thing when the dark comes and it is there in between, heavy and patient.

And underneath all of it, the thing that does the most damage, is the time. Not the hours on the bench, but the months in the body. The slow, compounding, unseen toll of living in a state of legal suspension while the system moves at its own pace and your nervous system moves at yours, and these two paces have nothing to do with each other.

Every month the matter remains open is another month of hyper-vigilance. Another month of disrupted sleep. Another month of the jaw, the chest, the particular buzzing heaviness in the limbs that arrives on the days when correspondence is expected and does not leave when it arrives because the content requires a response and the response requires the language and the language requires the performance and the performance requires you to leave your body just enough to function inside a system that was not designed for what you are carrying. And somewhere in the middle of all this, you realise you have a new problem. You are losing track of who you were before the file number.

Holding Onto Yourself

Here is the thing that nobody acknowledges and nobody compensates and nobody even names: the work of remaining a person while the system takes these things from you, one by one.

Your belief that the process would be fair. Your expectation that the truth would land with weight. Your own language for your own experience. Your time. Your sleep. Your kitchen. Your jaw.

The system requires a version of you. The applicant. The person who speaks in measured tones and does not cry, or cries in the right way, because there is a window for acceptable emotion in a courtroom, narrow and unspoken, and if you fall short of it you are cold and if you exceed it you are unhinged and nobody tells you where it is, and you are supposed to find it in real time, under oath, with your hands doing the tremor and the other side’s barrister watching you with the expensive pen and the professional calm of a person for whom this room is not an emergency.

You perform this version. In the corridor, on the bench, with the folder and the steady face. In the courtroom, where you say “Your Honour” and “if the court pleases” and “I refer to paragraph 34” as though paragraph 34 were a document and not a wound. In the correspondence, where you write “I note the respondent’s position” when what you mean is: he is lying and I am exhausted by the requirement to translate that into a tone that sounds like something other than what it is.

And then you go home and you are supposed to become the other person, the real one, the one who makes dinner and helps with homework and answers the phone when your mother calls and says “how did it go” and you say “fine” because there is no true answer to that question that would fit inside a phone call.

You walk out of the building at 4pm into daylight that feels too bright after the fluorescent corridor. The street is doing what streets do. There is a strange, floaty lightness in your chest that is not relief but is the aftermath of sustained adrenaline leaving the body with nowhere to go. Your legs feel uncertain. The car is wherever you parked it and you will sit in it for longer than you need to before turning the key.

One Last Thing

If you have read this and recognised yourself in it, you are not going mad. You are inside a system that requires you to become smaller than you are in order to fit, and the becoming-smaller is not something you are imagining. It is the thing that is happening to you.

That distance is real. It is not a sign that something is wrong with you. It is what happens when a system that was built for procedure meets a person who is already carrying more than procedure can hold.

The person in the affidavit and the person in the kitchen are the same person. The paragraph numbers are not the story. The system’s language is not your language, even if you have learned to speak it fluently, even if you sometimes catch yourself thinking in it.

Support matters here. Not because you are weak, but because the process is disorganising, and staying connected to yourself while a system processes you is not something any person should have to do alone. A counsellor, a trusted friend, someone who can hold the version of you that the court does not require and the proceedings cannot see.

One day, not today, but one day, you will put the folder down.

And the person holding it will still be you.