The Post-Separation Abuse Podcast

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-separation dynamic. She explores the certainty parents may hope court orders will provide, what orders can and cannot realistically achieve, and how a workable arrangement may sometimes be maintained through established care patterns...

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 return, and becoming a parent their children do not have to emotionally manage.

This means confronting some difficult truths. Your children will eventually determine the shape of their relationship with each parent. They ma...

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 she is making about and for her children - and in what her children are absorbing about who women are.

Danielle walks through why the Contract persists after the relationship ends, and why post-separation...

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 actually looks like. Not in theory. Not from the other side. From inside it, using my own current life as the example.

Danielle walks you through what ma...

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 favourite movies and novels - and then moves on to name 'the mirror problem', which is the observation that the same nervous system that cannot hold it...

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 you as insight about your ex has been missing the more important insight about yourself.

T...

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 episode of a new series. In this episode, Danielle speaks about childhood abuse. Physical and emotional abuse. Punishment for having emotions. Punishment for having needs. Punishment for...

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 into the court system all those years ago, there was not a lot of money for lawyers. Her stepfather (the person who, in any...

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 professionals. You can't opt out of the system entirely. So what do you actually do with everything you now know?

Part 4 answers that question. Specifically: how to use a...

"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 words actually has the knowledge they're claiming.

This episode widens the lens beyond the legal profession to the entire industry that has built itself around post-se...

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, including the Australian Institute of Family Studies finding that there are no uniform professional development requirements for ICLs across jurisdictions. 

From there, the episode pivots into an argument you won't hear in most family law commentary - that t...

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 for.

This is the first of a four-part series on the architecture of the Australian family law system. The system was bu...

"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 every protective parent who has watched their child pull away to carry, because it changes everything.

"Parental alienation" is one of the...

"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 technical definitions can't quite reach.

In recent years, "coercive control" has moved from the margins into legislation, headlines, and dinner-table conversation. That shift is profound and overdue. But as the te...

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, Danielle walks through the five most damaging mistakes she sees parents make repeatedly in early separation:

• Avoiding conflict at all costs

• Believing "50/50 is best"

• Believing you need the non-primary parent's agreement for everyt...

There is a phrase I have heard, in various forms, from many of my clients over the years:

"If her name was Brian instead of Barb, the recognition and response would have been completely different."

That phrase is the whole problem, distilled into one sentence.

This solo episode is for two audiences at once.

The first is every woman who has experienced family violence or post-separation abuse perpetrated by a female partner - and who has watched as professionals, police, and even community bystanders failed to recognise what was being done...

This Mother's Day episode is for every mother who knows the day might be complicated.

For the mothers without orders, whose former partners simply deny contact on Mother's Day. For the mothers who get a few hours - children dropped in the morning, collected later that same day, no unhurried time for the burnt toast or the homemade card. 

For the mothers whose former partners will withhold the children; yet again prioritising themselves and their own desire for revenge over the needs and rights of their children.

For the mothers whose children are r...

In this episode, Danielle unpacks something that comes up constantly in her work with clients: the tendency to invalidate our own pain by comparing it to someone else's. To stay in situations that are harmful - not because we can't leave, but because leaving feels harder than staying. To choose the familiar difficulty, the 'comfortable discomfort', over the unfamiliar one, without ever consciously naming it as a choice.

Because here is the truth: everything is hard. Staying is hard. Leaving is hard. Fighting for your children is hard. Giving up is hard. The question is never whether...

What if you had access to a specialist coaching resource trained in coercive control, the Australian family law system, attachment science, and nervous system regulation - any time of day or night, at no additional cost?

In this episode, Danielle Black introduces AI Danielle - the digital coaching resource built for the Post-Separation Parenting Blueprint™ - and does something she's never done before on this podcast: has a live, unscripted conversation with her on air.

This is not a demo. This is a real interaction - Danielle asking questions, AI Danielle responding in real time. Yo...

One hundred episodes.

In this milestone episode, Danielle Black does something she has never quite done before - she tells the full truth about where this work came from, what it has cost, and why she hasn't walked away.

More than seventeen years ago, Danielle was a young mother with a 12-month-old son. She was told by a family lawyer to agree to the 50/50 care arrangements that her abusive ex was demanding. She developed C-PTSD. She kept her phone on silent for a decade because the sound of a message arriving triggered a full panic...

Your lawyer is not trying to find the truth. And once you understand why - once you really understand how the adversarial legal system is designed and what it is and isn't built to deliver - everything changes.

In this episode, Principal Coach Danielle Black explores one of the most misunderstood dynamics in family law: the gap between what parents expect from their legal team and what lawyers are actually trained and tasked to do. It's not a failing of your lawyer. It's the design of the system. And knowing the difference is one of the most...

Dating after domestic violence, coercive control, or post-separation abuse is one of the most under-discussed topics in the survivor space. Most people are somewhere between terrified and convinced it's simply not possible for them.

In this honest, personal episode, Danielle Black shares what dating after abuse actually looked like from the inside - not a glossy highlight reel, but the real experience of venturing back into connection while still afraid.

This episode explores:

Healthy relationships after family violence, and in the midst of post-separation abuse, are possible - but they are rarely talked about honestly in survivor spaces.

In this special anniversary episode, Danielle Black is joined by her husband Drew for a candid conversation about what it actually looks like to build a safe, equal partnership after coercive control, trauma, and years of family court proceedings.

This episode does not offer a fairy tale. It offers something more useful: evidence.

Danielle and Drew explore:

Family Reports can be influential pieces of evidence in Australian family court proceedings - but they are widely misunderstood.

In this episode, Danielle Black explains what Family Report Writers are actually assessing, why protective parents can be misread and mischaracterised, and how nervous system responses to trauma can impact presentation in interviews.

Drawing on lived experience and years of supporting parents through the Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia, Danielle explores:

• What a Family Report is - and what it is not
• The training gaps that can affect coercive-control cases
• The co...

Collaboration is often presented as the gold standard after separation.

Parents are encouraged to communicate openly, compromise, and "work together". In the right circumstances, a collaborative approach can indeed produce faster, less adversarial, and more sustainable outcomes.

But what happens when the conditions for genuine collaboration don’t exist?

In this episode of The Post-Separation Abuse Podcast, Danielle Black explores the realities behind collaborative approaches, including mediation, and family dispute resolution in the Australian family law system. Drawing on research into post-separation conflict and child wellbeing, she explains why collaboration is no...

International Women’s Day bonus episode

In this special episode, Danielle Black explores something rarely named in conversations about parenting after separation: the invisible architecture of childhood.

The planning.
The anticipating.
The emotional holding.
The daily mental load of raising children that rarely appears in legal documents, mediation rooms, or parenting orders.

Across decades of research, we know that primary caregivers - most often mothers - carry the majority of this invisible labour. Yet when families separate, the systems designed to determine parenting arrangements often st...

What does a divorce coach actually do - and how do you know if the support you’re choosing after separation is right for your situation?

In this episode of The Post-Separation Abuse Podcast, principal coach Danielle Black unpacks the rapidly growing world of divorce coaching, high-conflict separation support, and post-separation parenting guidance.

As more professionals begin using the label “coach,” many separating parents are left wondering who to trust and what kind of support they actually need - particularly when navigating coercive control, high-conflict co-parenting, or the Australian family court...