The Post-Separation Abuse Podcast

This is part 9 of our "When Children Resist or Refuse" series. This series explores what a child's resistance or refusal might mean. When a child says 'no', our job isn't to immediately decide what the 'no' proves. It's to understand what might be happening, notice what every adult is bringing to the interpretation, and work out how to respond without l...

This is part 8 of our "When Children Resist or Refuse" series. This series explores what a child's resistance or refusal might mean. When a child says 'no', our job isn't to immediately decide what the 'no' proves. It's to understand what might be happening, notice what every adult is bringing to the interpretation, and work out how to respond without l...

This is part 7 of our "When Children Resist or Refuse" series. This series explores what a child's resistance or refusal might mean. When a child says no, our job isn't to immediately decide what the no proves. It's to understand what might be happening, notice what every adult is bringing to the interpretation, and work out how to respond without losing sight of the child...

This is part 6 of our "When Children Resist or Refuse" series. This series explores what a child's resistance or refusal might mean. When a child says no, our job isn't to immediately decide what the no proves. It's to understand what might be happening, notice what every adult is bringing to the interpretation, and work out how to respond without losing sight of the child...

This is part 5 of our "When Children Resist or Refuse" series. This series explores what a child's resistance or refusal might mean. When a child says no, our job isn't to immediately decide what the no proves. It's to understand what might be happening, notice what every adult is bringing to the interpretation, and work out how to respond without losing sight of the child...

Your barrister might be excellent. Your lawyer might know family law inside out. They may have decades of experience, strong professional judgement and a far better understanding of the legal system than you do. They still cannot see the future. In Episode 4 of the When Children Resist or Refuse series , Danielle turns the spotlight toward legal advice, professional opinion and the enormous tempta...

This series explores what a child's resistance or refusal might mean. When a child says no, our job isn't to immediately decide what the no proves. It's to understand what might be happening, notice what every adult is bringing to the interpretation, and work out how to respond without losing sight of the child. What does your nervous system have to do with a child resisting or refu...

This series explores what a child's resistance or refusal might mean. When a child says no, our job isn't to immediately decide what the no proves. It's to understand what might be happening, notice what every adult is bringing to the interpretation, and work out how to respond without losing sight of the child. What the fuck is a "meaningful relationship" anyway? We use p...

This series explores what a child's resistance or refusal might mean. When a child says no, our job isn't to immediately decide what the no proves. It's to understand what might be happening, notice what every adult is bringing to the interpretation, and work out how to respond without losing sight of the child. What does it actually mean when a child says they don't want to sp...

Is nine nights/five nights becoming the new default parenting arrangement after Australia’s 2024 family law reforms?  Danielle Black examines the rise of 9/5 recommendations in family reports and final outcomes, why mathematical ‘balance’ is not the same as a child-focused assessment, and what protective parents should ask when expert recommendations do not clearly connect the evidence to the prop...

When parenting arrangements cannot be agreed upon, many protective parents believe they have only two options: give in to what the other parent is demanding or begin family court proceedings. But those are not the only paths available. In this episode, Senior Coach Brigid Morgan shares her lived experience of navigating shared-care parenting without formal court orders in a high-conflict post-sepa...

This is the final episode in the six-part Good Girl Contract series: Your children are not doomed by what they have experienced (and neither are you). But what happens next matters. In this episode, Danielle speaks directly to protective mothers about the work their children actually need from them: protecting while they can, modelling healthy boundaries, accepting their children’s boundaries in r...

This is where the lens widens. Parts 1 through 4 focused on the Contract as it operates in the woman herself - her history, her patterns, her practice of interrupting it. Today, Danielle takes on the intergenerational dimension. Because the Contract does not stay contained to a woman's inner life. It is operating in her relationships right now, in her parenting arrangements, in the decisions...

Part 4 of The Good Girl Contract series. This is where the series pivots. Parts 1, 2, and 3 were diagnostic in nature - naming the Contract, walking through what happened when we took it into adult intimate relationships, and naming the mirror problem that comes from being trained not to hold our own boundaries, and not to receive other people’s. Today we talk about what interrupting the Contract...

If you have been quietly noticing that you struggle to accept other people's boundaries with you - that their no’s, their unavailability, their limits land in you as evidence of your own worth rather than as data about their life - this episode is naming what that actually is. Part 3 of The Good Girl Contract starts with Danielle reflecting on a conversation from part one - the tropes in our...

Their woundedness was a moth to a flame to your overfunctioning. Part 2 of The Good Girl Contract walks through what happened when you took the Contract into your adult intimate relationships.  Why the men who found you were not random.  Why your nervous system recognised them as home.  Why leaving felt so much harder than the surface story would suggest - and why so much of what has been sold to...

When your childhood taught you that having needs was dangerous - that being pleasing, useful, and indispensable was the difference between love and its withdrawal - the reason boundaries are so hard as an adult is not that you are weak. It is that your nervous system learned exactly what it needed to learn to survive the environment you were in. Part 1 of The Good Girl Contract is the foundational...

If you have been listening to our Working As Intended series, and you have been quietly wondering "if lawyers were never trained in what my children need, and I have to bring all of that myself, do I even need a lawyer at all?" - this episode is the rest of the answer. Danielle opens with information that she hasn't shared on the podcast before - the fact that when she was dragged i...

If you've been with Danielle across this series, you now know how the family law system in Australia was built, what its practitioners were and were not trained to know, and how to test whether anyone in the post-separation space is genuinely child-focused.  This final episode of Working As Intended brings the arc to ground. You still need a lawyer. You still have to work with these professio...

"Child-focused."  Two words that appear on the website of virtually every practitioner in the post-separation space.  Every lawyer.  Every mediator.  Every divorce coach.  Every family therapist.  Every family report writer.  The language is everywhere - and in part 3 of Working As Intended , Danielle walks you through how to tell, in thirty seconds, whether the person using those two wo...

Nine hundred and fifty dollars. An online module and a one-day workshop. That's the specialist training that qualifies a family lawyer to represent your child's best interests in court - and that's the starting point for part 2 of Working As Intended . In this episode, Danielle walks through the structural reality of Independent Children's Lawyer accreditation in Australia, inc...

What your family lawyer was taught - and what they weren't.  The first of four episodes on the architecture of the Australian family law system.  Eleven mandatory areas of study to be admitted as a lawyer in Australia. Family law isn't one of them. The system isn't rigged. It isn't broken. It's working exactly as it was designed to - and the problem is what it was designed...

"Parental alienation" is one of the most weaponised terms in family law. In this episode, Danielle Black takes the term apart, puts something more precise in its place - and explains why the protective parents on the receiving end of those accusations are almost never the ones doing the harm. Your child loves you. They may simply not feel safe to love you. This is the reframe I want ever...

"Coercive control" has entered the mainstream - and started to lose its precision. This episode brings it back: what coercive control actually is, what it isn't, and why the difference matters for everyone. "I felt trapped in my own life."  It's a phrase I hear again and again from clients, it's how I felt all those years ago,  and it captures something the techn...

The decisions you make in the early stages of separation can shape your family for years to come. And yet, most parents make critical mistakes during this most vulnerable time - often because they're following well-meaning but misguided advice from friends, family, or even professionals who don't understand child development or the realities of post-separation parenting. In this episode,...