Been There Got Out Podcast

"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 conversation, Lisa sits down with Garth to unpack the difference between force and power in relationships, why men are conditioned from childhood to stay silent about what's actually hurting them, and what happens when decades of suppressed emotion finally come out "in the wrong pl...

"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 people living with legal abuse and parental alienation. So she brought in Jen Gallagher, a limited license psychologist in Michigan with over 20 year...

"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 almost never hear on this channel: what parental alienation looks like from the step-parent's chair. Jessica spent 15 years inside the court system conducting custody evaluations, and she also lived through alienation herself as the new partner a mother tu...

"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 stuff. The quiet, everyday moments: a comment here, a video call there, a "your mom isn't as good as you think" dropped into an otherwise normal afternoon.

In this conversation, Pinkal joins Lisa Johnson to unpack exactly what g...

"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 pull back the curtain on OurFamilyWizard (OFW), one of the most commonly court-ordered co-parenting apps in the country. If you've ever wondered why a judge would order you onto a parenting app, whether it...

"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 mind for the hundredth time. 
 
If you're navigating high-conflict divorce, co-parenting with someone who won't cooperate, or the daily uncertainty of parental alienation, you already know this loop intimately. Chris Barry welcomes back somatic psycho...

“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 divorce litigation, breaks down exactly what judges weigh when deciding custody, and what doesn’t move the needle at all, no matter how unfair that feels. She walks through a real case where a mother spe...

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 ever walked in armed with a binder of everything your ex has ever done wrong, this episode will change how you prepare. Sue shares why "suitcases full of papers" backfire, why a...

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 why the abuse can ramp up after separation, and exactly what to do about it.

Louize knows this from the inside. After a 16-year marriage, she survived severe financial and post-separation abuse, came close to ho...

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 Dimopoulos, who has spent 25 years handling complex, high-conflict divorce and custody cases in Westchester County and New York City. After his article “The Equality Trap” struck a nerve, we asked him to walk us...

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 the hard truth Liz names out loud: the court will never understand your abuser the way you do. Judges are busy, they're drawn to whoever tells the cleanest, most linear story, and...

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 Jersey, and both specialize in domestic violence alongside family law. Nilaja handled domestic violence contempt matters on the prosecution side before moving into an exclusively matrimonial, custody, and domestic violence practice...

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're Your Kids Too, a guide for parents navigating a broken family law system, and she co-developed one of the earliest models of co-parent counseling with therapist Carol Marx. She's still licensed in...

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 carry blame for the reaction.

Ashish Joshi practices family law and focuses nationally on domestic violence and parental alienation cases. His first book, Litigating Parental Alienation, is one Lisa...

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 as someone making a healthy choice. They’re cast as the one who “deviated,” the one who is “morally depraved,” the one the children must be protected from. Sherri explains exactly how this plays out as...

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 weakness. Because of science.

In this episode, Lisa sits down with Dr. Christal Badour, a licensed clinical psychologist and professor at the University of Kentucky, where she runs a research la...

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 sits down with Max Weigand, a positive psychologist from Germany and the creator of Psychosomatic Intelligence — a method that brings together the science of the mind, subc...

Two parents cannot sit across a table without it turning into a fight, so the mediation moves onto Zoom. Each one waits in a separate breakout room while the attorneys shuttle between them, trading a religious holiday here for an extra week of summer there, until an agreement takes shape without the two of them ever having to look at each other.

Ian Steinberg practices matrimonial and family law in New York City, where his firm handles divorce across the city, Westchester, and Long Island. He is also a friend of Chris and Lisa's, returning for a...

If you've ever found yourself paralyzed by the fear that your ex is slowly turning your children against you and there's nothing you can do about it, this conversation is for you.

In this episode of Been There Got Out, Lisa Johnson sits down with Dr. Alicia del Prado, a licensed counseling psychologist based in the San Francisco Bay Area, to talk about one of the most painful experiences a parent can go through: parental alienation. But rather than focusing only on what's happening, Dr. del Prado brings her clinical expertise to what you can actually do — sp...

If you've been ordered into parenting coordination, or you're wondering whether a parenting coordinator could help your high-conflict custody case, this conversation is for you.

Lisa sits down with Nicole Sodoma, a family law attorney with 26 years of experience, founding partner of Sodoma Law (seven locations across the Carolinas), and a practicing parenting coordinator since 2005. What makes Nicole's perspective uniquely powerful is that she's not just an expert — she's a targeted parent who has personally worked with three different parenting coordinators since her own separation in 2019. She knows this process from every angle.

Together, they br...

What does a Guardian Ad Litem really think when a 10-year-old says they want 50/50 custody?

Crystal Wright has heard it hundreds of times — and she can tell instantly when a child has been coached. As a family law attorney AND a working GAL in Atlanta, Georgia, Crystal is one of the rare practitioners who has seen the custody system from every angle: as the attorney fighting for clients, as the neutral investigator protecting children, and as the professional who has had exactly one parent incarcerated for defying her court orders.

In this conversation, Crystal joins Li...

Jon went four years without speaking to any of his four children. This episode is a follow-up: two weeks before recording, one of his daughters texted him for the first time since telling him, in her twenties, that she never wanted to see him again.

Jon, the advocate behind the Male Victims of Female Narcissists community, coaches men who are dealing with an emotionally abusive ex and parental alienation, work that grew out of his own long marriage and divorce. He describes his ex as someone who worked her way between him and his kids, and between...

Lynn Price once walked away from a negotiation and left real money on the table on purpose. After twenty-five years and more than eleven thousand negotiations as a corporate attorney, she did it because the conflict was making her sick and she valued peace more, and she calls that a strategic decision, not a defeat.

Lynn Price is a negotiation speaker, trainer, and author, and an attorney who spent over two decades as in-house corporate counsel. Across roughly eleven thousand negotiations she started noticing patterns and turned them into a simple, memorable formula she calls the three...

What does a family court judge actually think when you walk through those courtroom doors?

If you have ever walked out of a hearing asking "why did the judge do THAT?" — this conversation is for you.

Peggy Walsh spent 18 years as a family court judge — after first building her career representing parents, caregivers, and children as a family law attorney. Then she took off her robe. Not because she stopped caring, but because she believed that the people who love a child should be the ones making decisions for that child — not a stranger, however well-i...

🔁 Dr. Premela Deck is back — and this time, she's going deeper.

If you're navigating reunification therapy, supervised visitation, or simply trying to understand why court-ordered therapy isn't fixing anything, this is the conversation you've been waiting for.

Dr. Premela Deck holds a rare trifecta of credentials: she's a family law attorney, a Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker (LICSW), and a PhD-level social worker who has spent her career studying high-conflict families. Her practice, ST Family Services in Massachusetts, brings together psychologists, social workers, attorneys, and even a retired judge under one roof.

In this...

Freeze has no movement in it, and Annie Brook says that is exactly the problem. When you go numb before a hearing there is nothing moving, so there is nothing to feel, so there is no way back to your own awareness. Everything she teaches works by putting movement, breath, weight, or pressure back into a body that has stopped producing any.

Dr. Annie Brook is a body-centered, or somatic, psychologist with a doctorate and decades in practice. She runs The Brook Institute, which trains therapists, publishes online courses, and gives away a substantial free library of...

Finding the right therapist for your child during a high-conflict divorce is one of the most important and misunderstood decisions you'll make.

Most parents want immediate results. They want their child to sit down in session one and start processing everything that's been happening at home. But experienced art therapist Ahimsa Luciano has seen this expectation backfire again and again, and she has a more effective approach to share.

In this conversation, Ahimsa breaks down what effective therapy for children in high-conflict situations actually looks like, why it takes longer than parents expect, and why...

Julia Hochstadt has spent years listening to accounts that sound impossible, and she does not treat the implausibility as information. When a child discloses, her instruction to parents is to believe them and to say so explicitly, repeatedly, in those words. Fear of not being believed is one of the reasons people stay silent for decades.

Julia is a licensed clinical social worker practicing in New York and New Jersey, consulting and speaking nationally, and testifying as an expert witness on domestic violence, intimate partner violence, and sexual violence. She works with primary survivors and with secondary...

James Porfido spent decades on both sides of a criminal courtroom, prosecuting cases and then defending them. What he saw over 35 years became a book about a system he believes has tilted out of balance.

James Porfido has practiced law for more than 35 years, starting as a certified criminal trial attorney in a New Jersey prosecutor's office and later moving to the defense side, where he handled sex crimes and child abuse cases. He is now of counsel at a large New Jersey firm, teaches advocacy and persuasion as an adjunct law professor, and has spent 25 years...

The limbic system floods the cortex when a child goes into a rage, which is why talking them down does not work. Tosha Schore puts it plainly: you can feel your way out of thinking, but you cannot think your way out of feeling, and in that moment there is nobody home to reason with anyway.

Tosha Schore is back on the show, and this conversation is about children who are not only emotionally aggressive but physically violent. She founded Parenting Boys Peacefully and co-authored Listen: Five Simple Tools to Meet Your Everyday Parenting Challenges with her...

🎯 "I don't know what to expect — and that terrifies me."

If that's where you are right now, this conversation was made for you.

Dr. Benjamin Garber is a New Hampshire-licensed psychologist, former therapist of 30 years, custody evaluator, and legal consultant who has spent two years building one of the most practical resources available to family court litigants: DiffuseDivorce.com, a free library of advance orientation programs to prepare you for every stage of the family court process.

His central insight? The fear, overwhelm, and anxiety that fills your world when you step into famil...

The word trigger gets used casually enough that it has stopped meaning one thing. Dr. Andrea DePetris separates two uses of it. In the trauma field it means a stimulus that activates the trauma memory network, where a person feels as though the danger is happening right now. In everyday use it means something in the present activating something unresolved from the past, often tied to early attachment.

Dr. Andrea DePetris is a clinical psychologist with an academic appointment at Yale School of Medicine who also works in private practice. Much of her caseload is adults who...

Monique represented herself in her own California custody case, then went to law school. Along the way she became a trained domestic violence advocate, and she now helps organize around a bill built to address the thing that kept happening to her and to people she works with: an ex who could no longer reach them any other way, so they filed a motion just to force them back into a courtroom.

Monique is a former BTGO client, a current law student, and a co-founder of a grassroots survivor advocacy group in Southern California. She is not...

Somewhere around the teen years, a lot of alienated parents hit the same wall: the child who used to run to them now refuses to come at all. In this episode, psychologist Dr. Gloria Vanderhorst, with fifty years helping families, offers advice that's both bracing and full of hope.

She starts with a truth few say out loud: some alienation is almost unavoidable in divorce, and it tends to peak in adolescence. But she reframes the picture: your child is half the other parent, and protecting them means helping them value that half. She and Lisa get...

One assumption does real damage in a contested separation: that child protective services is a route to custody. Sara Vandenberg, who worked those cases from the inside, says the agency does not recommend custodial arrangements between two parents and cannot hand a child to one of them. Court is where custody is decided, and calls made for custody reasons tend to come back on the person who made them.

Sara Vandenberg is a psychotherapist and trauma professional who specializes in familial sexual abuse and incest, and works with survivors of abuse more broadly. She spent about three...

Ninety seconds is what Dr. Sylvia Kalachinsky asks for. Breathe, observe, describe, yield. She walks Lisa through it live in this episode, and by the end of it Lisa notices her shoulders have come down without her deciding to lower them.

Dr. Sylvia Kalachinsky, known to her audience as Dr. Sylvia K, is a licensed marriage and family therapist with a doctorate in family therapy and over twenty-one years of practice. She has worked with at-risk youth, provided family therapy inside juvenile detention centers and in clients' homes, worked with migrant families in California, and led group...

Children handle a strict teacher and a lenient one in the same school day without much trouble. Dr. Jill Leibowitz applies that to co-parenting: what a child needs is for each home to be predictable inside itself, not for the two to match. The trouble starts when a parent decides the other house has to fall in line.

Our guest is Dr. Jill Leibowitz, a clinical psychologist with a private practice in New York City, back for another conversation. She does play therapy with young children, talk therapy with adolescents and adults, parenting work, and dyadic sessions...

Horses read your state, not your words. That is the whole premise of this conversation, and it is why Kasia Bukowska says a horse can find something a person has been talking around for years.

Our guest is Kasia Bukowska, an equestrian coach and equine-assisted therapist working from Poland. Her own path into this was not smooth. Her horses would not do what she asked, she went home frustrated and in tears, and she started painting to process it. Analyzing her own paintings afterward, asking why she had used those colors, why the horse's head was up...

A liar is a liar today, tomorrow, and twenty years from now, David Goldberg says, and so is someone telling the truth. That is his argument against rushing to book the fastest, cheapest examiner you can find when a false allegation has just upended your custody case.

David Goldberg is a state-licensed, advanced board-certified polygraph examiner. He spent his early career in law enforcement, and in the roughly 25 years since he has run more than 20,000 examinations for people who were never arrested or charged: parents accused in custody disputes, people facing rumors or workplace accusations, students, and...

The baiting is the point. When a co-parent pushes a boundary the court will not enforce, drops the kids' things off after being told not to, needles you in front of the children, it is engineered to spike your nervous system so you react and end up looking like the problem. Dr. Jordin Wiggins works on the one thing you can actually control in that moment: your own physiology.

Dr. Jordin Wiggins is a naturopathic doctor of more than a decade who noticed her patients' health complaints kept overlapping with coercive control and abuse, then lived through...