Been There Got Out Podcast

When your child starts pulling away, it's natural to want to prove to the world what your ex is doing. But the parents who make the most progress are often the ones who focus on patterns, on protecting themselves, and on asking for the right kind of help, rather than fighting over labels. In this conversation, Lisa sits down with parental alienation expert witness and author Dr. Lynn Steinber...

If you've been fighting in family court for months or years and your body won't cooperate, you are not failing. Maybe you're exhausted but can't sleep. Maybe you forget things, feel numb, or gain weight no matter how hard you work out. Your nervous system is doing exactly what it was built to do under chronic threat. In this episode, Lisa talks with Dr. Jen Lee, a physical ther...

When your child won't talk to you, the pain can feel so physical that you don't know where to put it. Lawrence Joss knows that feeling well. He started Parental Alienation Advocates because he couldn't find anything that could "reach the itch," and today its free, peer-run 12-step meetings, Parental Alienation Anonymous (PAA), are a lifeline for alienated parents and grand...

Can your therapy be used against you in a custody case? It's one of the most common fears we hear, and it keeps far too many parents from getting help they need right when they need it most. New York matrimonial and family law attorney Lisa Zeiderman returns to Been There Got Out with an honest answer. When custody is at issue, your mental health records can often be subpoenaed. But the paren...

🎯 "I thought my world had collapsed." When Katy Harris separated, a court order followed her 11-year-old son's wishes: he would live with his dad, while his older and younger brothers stayed with her. Within months, contact had stopped. Then came the part no court ever sees. In this deeply honest conversation, Lisa talks with Katy and her colleague Lucy, two UK family mediators on...

"One parent becomes the good parent, and one parent becomes the bad parent." That's how Shawna Leatherman describes the moment parental alienation actually begins, and it's almost never in a courtroom. It starts small: a "no more juice" overruled at bedtime, a rule at one house that quietly doesn't apply at the other. Thirteen years into her own experience with p...

"A toxic environment is a toxic environment, whether the parents are together or they're separate." That's not a divorce coach talking. That's Dave Kopeny — a former probation officer, school counselor, and sheriff's department investigator who now works as a private investigator specializing in families whose teenagers are struggling with substance use. And what he t...

"Force demands fairness. Power prepares for reality. Force chases. Power disengages when engagement is useless." That's the framework Manalizing founder Garth Haslem uses to explain why so many marriages, divorces, and co-parenting relationships fall apart — and it's strikingly close to what we teach in our own Strategic Communication Course. In this raw, unscripted conversatio...

"I would wake up every single morning, there'd be a moment when I'd forget who I was, and then I would just be furious. And it wasn't even at my ex — it was at the system allowing this to go on and on and on."   If that sounds familiar, this conversation is for you.   Lisa opens this episode admitting that rage is one of the single most common emotions she hears about from...

"One hundred percent of what was reported back to me was untrue." That's what it's like to be the step-parent inside a parental alienation campaign — standing in the middle of a custody war that started long before you arrived. In this conversation, licensed clinical social worker, former guardian ad litem, and 40-year psychotherapist Jessica Anne Pressler shares something we a...

"That is gaslighting — because the parent isn't thinking about what the child is going through. They're just making the child question their own reality." That's how licensed Marriage and Family Therapist Pinkal Panchal describes one of the most common — and most invisible — things that happens to kids caught in a high-conflict divorce or custody battle. Not the dramatic s...

"Our Family Wizard is the single source of truth." That's how attorney and Guardian ad Litem Elle Barr describes the platform she helps educate judges and family law professionals on nationwide - and it's a line worth sitting with if you're currently fighting to be believed by a court, an evaluator, or your own attorney.    In this episode, Elle joins Lisa and Chris to pul...

"Obsessive thinking is repetitive self-stimulation. It has movement in it — thought is a movement, it's an energy form." That's how somatic psychologist Annie Brook describes the loop so many of us get stuck in when life feels unsafe and unsolvable — the 3am replaying of a text from your ex, the imagined arguments you have in the shower, the same worry circling through your min...

“The court doesn’t care who was mean.” That’s not a throwaway line, according to Beverly Hills divorce attorney Nikoo Berenji, it’s one of the biggest blind spots she sees parents walk into family court with, and it can quietly sabotage an otherwise strong custody case. In this conversation, Nikoo, Senior Counsel at Berenji & Associates and a 20-year veteran of high-net-worth, high-conflict di...

She spent five years on the inside of the family court system as a Connecticut Family Relations Counselor — the person who meets with both parents, talks to the kids, and writes the recommendation the judge leans on. In this candid conversation, Sue Gabriele explains the quiet, well-intentioned mistakes that sink good parents before they ever reach a courtroom, and what to do instead. If you have...

Most people believe that once the divorce is final, the chaos finally ends. With a high-conflict, narcissistic, or unpredictable co-parent, the opposite is often true. As they lose day-to-day control, they learn to control you from afar—through the kids, the money, and the legal system. In this honest, practical conversation, UK coach and psychotherapist Louize Yafai joins Lisa Johnson to explain...

Everyone walks into family court assuming the “fair” answer is to split the kids right down the middle. Fifty-fifty. Equal time, equal say, problem solved. But what if that instinct toward fairness is quietly setting your children up for years of stress — and setting you up to lose the very argument you should be winning? In this conversation, Lisa sits down with veteran matrimonial attorney Gus D...

If you have already left an abusive relationship and you're now staring down the family court system, this conversation was made for you. Lisa Johnson of Been There Got Out sits down with Liz Ortenberger, CEO of SafeNest, the largest domestic and sexual violence nonprofit in Las Vegas, Nevada, for a frank discussion about what actually works once you're in front of a judge. Here's t...

New Jersey judges are now hearing from children directly in custody matters, and parents whose exes have spent years working on those children are alarmed. Nilaja Ford's counter is that the children were already in the middle of it. The revision changes who gets to hear them. Nilaja Ford co-founded Ford Brown Law with her partner Donnett Brown. Both were prosecutors for the state of New Jerse...

Anne P. Mitchell coined the term "co-parenting." Decades before that, she was one of the first two attorneys in the country to argue that children have a right to an ongoing relationship with their father after a separation, work she started before she even went to law school. Anne is an attorney, law professor, law dean emeritus, and legal journalist. She's the author of They'...

Two labels get used for very different situations in family court, and mixing them up changes who the judge thinks is to blame. A "high conflict" case is two parents who can't agree on a pediatrician or a summer camp. A family violence case is one parent behaving abusively while the other parent, or the child, reacts to it. Attorney Ashish Joshi says that second parent should never...

What happens when your ex doesn’t just badmouth you to the kids, but tells them God is on their side? In this episode, Lisa talks with interfaith minister and trauma-informed therapist Sherri Heller about one of the most under-recognized weapons in a high-conflict divorce: faith itself. When a marriage involving a high-control religious system breaks down, the parent who leaves is rarely treated a...

If you've been living in a high-conflict divorce or custody battle, you probably know that feeling all too well — the exhaustion that never quite leaves, the hypervigilance, the sense that your nervous system has forgotten how to relax. And for many people in these situations, a glass of wine at the end of the day has quietly become two, or three, or something stronger. Not because of weaknes...

You know that feeling. Your phone buzzes. You see their name. And before you can even read the message, your heart is racing, your chest tightens, and you can barely think straight. You're not overreacting. You're not weak. Your brain has been literally wired by trauma to respond to that notification as if your life is in danger — because for a long time, it was. In this episode, Lisa si...

If you’ve been told that mediation is impossible when you’re dealing with a high-conflict ex—or that it’s never safe when there’s been domestic violence—this conversation with New York family law attorney Ian Steinberg is going to challenge that assumption. Ian is a matrimonial attorney with Burkman Botker Newman & Shane, a 25-attorney firm based in Manhattan with offices in Westchester and Lo...