When Loving Your Children Means Refusing to Tear Them in Two

A Snapshot of Life Three Years Out of The Captive’s Psalm

I want to address one of the major battles I was referencing in my last post.

I am dealing with parental alienation and post-separation abuse in a form that is particularly difficult to explain, much less prove: the use of the children and technology as proxies for continued control. At first there was always a reason—an event, a practice, something that could be explained. Eventually, there no longer needed to be one. My children simply began being picked up during my court-ordered time.

The behavior I am describing is controlling, manipulative, and abusive. When a person shifts from pleasant to aggressive the exact moment they lose power over us or the children, they are exhibiting coercive control and dangerous escalation tactics. Court orders and boundaries are only meaningful when there is some mechanism for enforcing them. And once HD and others like him repeatedly violates those boundaries without consequence, what incentive remains to respect them?

That is one of the most maddening parts of this. When there is a mediation or custody agreement already set in place, law enforcement does nothing to help us enforce exchanges. They say that it is a family court issue, a civil matter, not their issue.

Path of Least Resistance

So we are left trying to answer an almost impossible question: How do we prove coercive control over children when the children themselves have learned that compliance is the easiest way to keep the peace? A behavior appropriately termed the path of least resistance. And I know exactly what that is because I lived my life that way for years. You learn that appeasing the person creating the conflict is sometimes easier than enduring what happens when you do not. From the outside, compliance can look like choice. From inside the dynamic, those can be two very different things.

Untraceable Coercive Control

I miss my children, and my heart is breaking.

My youngest (FS: first son) is largely spared this particular pressure when he is with me because his father does not have the same access to him, as he doesn’t have a cell phone. What makes that striking is that HD also does not routinely ask to speak with him while he is here. Whereas I ask to speak with him when he is at his father’s whenever I speak with the girls.

But it’s not the access that is the problem.

It’s the fact that he knows he cannot harass me. Direct communication between their father and me is documented, on record, which creates accountability. Communication with the girls through phones on his account is different. Their phones have passcodes I do not have, and whatever is communicated to them can happen completely outside the record between the adults. I can document the occasions when they have been picked up during my parenting time. What I cannot independently document is everything that happened on those phones beforehand.

Possessing Evidence vs. Proving It in Court

This has haunted me because my children were not “running away” from me. From what I experienced, they were responding to pressure and doing what they believed would restore peace. Keeping the peace and choosing survival. Yet proving the pressure behind the action is another matter entirely. Unless the underlying communications become evidence, I am left able to document the result while struggling to document the mechanism that produced it.

So I can prove that he interferes with parenting time but unless someone were to force him to turn over his phone records, which I doubt they would, I cannot prove the abuse. These same courts of mine, same judge, have watched Ring footage showing him strike a bathroom door with his elbow while I stood beside it and still denied my request for protection. That experience changed the way I understand the difference between possessing evidence and successfully getting a court to understand what that evidence means. Same shark lawyer. I’ll come back around to that next.

Pro Se Representation Against High-Priced Lawyers

But then comes the second conundrum. Do I make a living, or do I spend forty hours a week learning how to represent myself well enough to have a chance against an experienced family-law attorney? Because if you don’t know how to represent yourself and you’re facing a lawyer that is a shark, you have zero chance. Even if you have a great case.

A strong case does not present itself. Someone has to understand procedure, evidence, objections, deadlines, motions, hearings, and how to make a complicated pattern comprehensible within the tiny window the court gives you. I have personally watched a one-hour hearing become consumed by an appeal over another ruling in which I believed the underlying conduct was clear contempt. By the time the second matter was reached, approximately five minutes remained. The ruling went against me. I did not receive additional time to make the case I had come there to make.

Then what?

Do I lose more working hours? Prepare another contempt filing? Learn another piece of procedure? Go back to court and spend still more of the resources I am desperately trying to rebuild?

The Family Court Cottage Industry

During my research, I have found there is a term for something I thought I must be imagining when it seems like the lawyer and judge are working together. It is called family court cottage industry, explained as follows:

• The Network: Judges, local family law attorneys, and court-appointed evaluators work together daily. They form professional relationships and systemic habits that prioritize moving cases off the docket over solving deep-seated psychological abuse.

• Procedural Escapism: Judges often focus on minute, bureaucratic details rather than core safety issues because procedural boxes are easier to check than untangling a complex web of coercive control and digital harassment.

• Stalling as a Strategy: His lawyer runs out the clock intentionally. They know that you are paying in emotional currency and survival energy, while their client is paying with abundant resources. They are trying to fatigue you into total submission.

I wish I was joking. I do not need to claim that judges and lawyers are secretly conspiring with one another to recognize the structural problem. I don’t know whether to be more sickened that it is so prevalent that there is a name for this behavior with outlined specifics, or sick at being at the wrong end of such a heinous injustice.

Institutional Betrayal & Gender Bias

But it only gets more devastating from there, as then this all leads to what is called the systemic loop: the court ignoring overwhelming evidence, treating a stay-at-home mother with open dismissal, and allowing an aggressive lawyer to “run out the clock”—a widely documented systemic failure known as institutional betrayal.

This comes with its own scope of reality.

• Millions of Families: Statistics and family court research show that custody battles involving domestic abuse, coercive control, or post-separation harassment regularly end with the system punishing the protective parent.

• The “Dumb Wife” Trope: Courts heavily rely on gendered biases. A mother who gave up a career to raise children for 12 years is routinely painted by high-priced lawyers as “bitter,” “uncooperative,” or “alienating” simply for trying to enforce basic safety and boundaries. (My personal experience as example, but the term literally described it, go figure.)

• The Resource Gap Bias: Family court judges are often overloaded and under-trained in coercive control. They tend to favor the parent with the polished, expensive legal team because that team presents information in a way that minimizes administrative work for the judge.

The Heart of a True Mother

My daughters have not been home in two months. I have seen them, thankfully, but my parenting time should be respected, as I have always respected their father’s.

There is zero accountability. And zero justice for someone who wants to make the right choices. I do not want to become someone who seeks destruction in my own life or anyone else’s simply because I have been hurt. I want accountability. I want boundaries to mean something. I want my children free to love both parents without being placed in the middle of an adult struggle for control.

There is an additional resource disparity now because their father remarried quickly after our divorce to a woman who built a successful career and has substantial resources of her own. I could say many angry things about what it feels like to watch another woman participate in a life with my children while they are being kept from their mother. Underneath the anger is something much simpler and much more painful: she did not create the twelve years of motherhood I am grieving. She cannot know what it feels like from this side to watch the children I raised living a family life from which I am increasingly excluded.

Granted, she hasn’t seen the other side yet. Right now she is a useful tool to validate his perfect-dad image and fund his lifestyle.

I signed the divorce papers because I needed to get out. I needed to protect my life, my sanity and myself from his escalating legal accusations, hoping I’d also be protecting my children. I left the house and nearly everything in it. The equalization payment I received was quickly consumed again through litigation. Now I am starting over after twelve years spent raising our children while facing people with far greater financial and legal resources than I have.

That is the simplest way I know to say it: I am outmatched, exhausted, and resource-starved.

And yet I am still here.

This feels so much like the story in 1 Kings 3:16-28 right now. We are in desperate need of a wise and discerning Solomon.

Building Our Own Underground Networks

One thing I have discovered through all of this is how many protective parents have been forced to become students of systems they never wanted to understand. They learn terminology, procedure, documentation, technology, evidence, boundaries, and strategy because loving their children eventually requires learning how to navigate institutions that may not readily recognize coercive control when it does not arrive in an obvious form. They find one another. They share what they have learned. They try to leave breadcrumbs for the person coming behind them. I am going to start adding links to these very helpful ones as I find them.

A Priestly Blessing

I am exhausted, so I will pause here. I do not know yet how this part of our story resolves. I know only that I will continue trying to walk through it without allowing injustice to decide who I become.

I pray redemption over us. I pray God’s presence be with us. I pray the priestly blessing over us and our children, and I pray for the families who came before us whose suffering became the research, testimony, case law, statistics, and hard-earned wisdom that may help those of us walking behind them:

The Lord bless us and keep us; the Lord make His face shine upon us and be gracious to us; the Lord turn His face toward us and give us peace.

God told Moses that in placing His name upon His people, He would bless them.

So place Your name upon us, Lord.

Amen, Lord, Amen.