Divorcing a Narcissist
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Divorcing a narcissist? When my divorce began, my daughters were four and two. My therapist named our home Empathy Boot Camp. Here is what that work looked like, and a letter to every parent doing it now.
I get accused of being anti-father more than almost anything else. It's not true. This Father's Day, I'm honoring the good dads, starting with the two who shaped my life most.
Before I ever became the founder of One Mom's Battle or wrote a single word about divorcing a narcissist, I was a child being failed by the family court system. This week, two new studies confirm what survivors of high-conflict divorce and narcissistic abuse have been telling family courts for decades.
Behind many of the most difficult abusers in family court, there is an enabling mother. She shows up in declarations, submits letters to attorneys, and presents herself as a credible witness. Knowing the language she uses, and how to decode it, is one of the most important tools a survivor can have.
I've had 36 years to let this opinion age. When you've worked three million acres of southern Utah, tracked troubled teen wilderness programs, and watched how power and lineage operate in that landscape, you see a documentary like this differently. What struck me wasn't just what was shown. It was everything they chose to leave out.
When a documentary with real reach takes on a family court story, I pay attention. When it gets it catastrophically wrong, I cannot stay silent. Hulu’s The Nightmare Upstairs had every ingredient to become one of the most important documentaries ever made about the family court crisis in America. Instead, it handed the narrator’s chair to an invested party, left the reunification industry…
In February, I announced that I was stepping back from One Mom's Battle. What I did not know then was that a new development would emerge that changes everything and forces a decision I cannot make alone.
Mother's Day is complicated for so many of us. For those who grew up without the mother the cards describe, for those who have been failed by a system that was supposed to protect them and their children, and for those who are quietly grieving something that was never there to lose. You are not alone in that. This post is for you.
You should not have to carefully craft your words to communicate with someone who abused you. And yet, inside the family court system, how you communicate can significantly shape how a judge, guardian ad litem, or custody evaluator perceives you as a parent. This is where Yellow Rock comes in — a communication framework developed specifically for survivors navigating court-involved co-parenting…
He had a blueprint. And I was never in it. If you have spent time in a high-conflict relationship wondering why the rules kept changing, why nothing you did was ever right, why he seemed to have a script you were never given, this post is for you. The blueprint does not disappear after separation. It relocates to the courtroom. And understanding that changes everything.
