The Post-Separation Abuse Podcast

"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-separation parenting. It opens on a family doctor advising a mother with serious safety concerns about her ex's capacity to care for their two-year-old to "give him a chance, how else is he going to learn." From there, the episode walks profession by profession - coaching, mediation, post-separation parenting programs, parenting orders programs, family therapy, the professional development circuit - naming what the credential actually requires and what it does not.
The episode also introduces an argument Danielle hasn't made publicly before: that family report writers are the load-bearing role for the entire family law system's claim to be child-focused. Every other professional in the system who has not been required to study child development has, in effect, outsourced that requirement to the report writer. 
If the report writer doesn't have the knowledge either - and there is no uniform requirement that they do - the system has no foundation under any of its claims about children's best interests. A specific anonymised case example - a play therapist identifying a trauma response, a family report writer reading the same presentation as grief - lands the cost in concrete terms.
The episode closes with the one question to ask every practitioner in this space, the test that takes thirty seconds and tells you almost everything you need to know about whether you are going to trust them with your children's story.
A dedicated standalone episode on family report writers will follow the conclusion of the Working As Intended series.
The Post-Separation Parenting Blueprint is the structured way through this work - built for protective parents bringing the knowledge the system never required its practitioners to have. 
AI Danielle is available any time, any hour. 
Both at danielleblackcoaching.com.au
Support: If you are in Australia and need to talk to someone, 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732) is available 24/7. In an emergency, call 000.
Explore the supports offered by Danielle Black Coaching
The Post-Separation Parenting Blueprint™
👉 https://www.danielleblackcoaching.com.au/the-post-separation-parenting-blueprint-1
AI Danielle - Your 24/7 Digital Coach
👉 https://www.danielleblackcoaching.com.au/meet-ai-danielle
1:1 Coaching
👉 https://www.danielleblackcoaching.com.au/1-1-coaching
The music you hear in this outro is 'Calm is Credible' - an original track created exclusively for the Post-Separation Abuse Podcast and Danielle Black Coaching.  You can listen to this song, or download free, by visiting danielleblackcoaching.com.au
The music you hear in this outro is 'Calm is Credible' - an original track created exclusively for the Post-Separation Abuse Podcast and Danielle Black Coaching.  You can listen to this song, or download free, by visiting danielleblackcoaching.com.au
About Danielle Black Coaching:
Danielle Black is a respected authority in child-focused post-separation parenting in Australia. With over twenty years’ experience across education, counselling and coaching - alongside her own lived experience navigating a complex separation and family court journey - she supports parents to think strategically, build capacity, and protect their children’s safety and wellbeing within complex legal and relational systems.
Through Danielle Black Coaching, she leads a growing team of specialist coaches and a structured support ecosystem designed to provide professionally held, evidence-informed guidance for parents navigating high-conflict separation and family court processes.
Learn more at danielleblackcoaching.com.au

This podcast is for educational purposes only and not legal advice. Please seek independent legal, medical, financial, or mental health advice for your situation.

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 the pre-1975 system, however sexist in its assumptions, was accidentally more aligned with what attachment science would later confirm than the reformed system that replaced it. And what the 2006 transactional lens cost children.
If you've ever wondered why the person appointed to represent your children's "best interests" appears unfamiliar with what those best interests actually require - this is the longer answer.
The episode opens with a brief clarification refining two specific points from part 1.
The Post-Separation Parenting Blueprint is the structured way through this work - built for protective parents equipping themselves to advocate for their children with the knowledge the system never required its practitioners to have. AI Danielle is available any time, any hour. Both at danielleblackcoaching.com.au.
Support: If you are in Australia and need to talk to someone, 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732) is available 24/7. In an emergency, call 000.
Explore the supports offered by Danielle Black Coaching
The Post-Separation Parenting Blueprint™
👉 https://www.danielleblackcoaching.com.au/the-post-separation-parenting-blueprint-1
AI Danielle - Your 24/7 Digital Coach
👉 https://www.danielleblackcoaching.com.au/meet-ai-danielle
1:1 Coaching
👉 https://www.danielleblackcoaching.com.au/1-1-coaching
The music you hear in this outro is 'Calm is Credible' - an original track created exclusively for the Post-Separation Abuse Podcast and Danielle Black Coaching.  You can listen to this song, or download free, by visiting danielleblackcoaching.com.au
About Danielle Black Coaching:
Danielle Black is a respected authority in child-focused post-separation parenting in Australia. With over twenty years’ experience across education, counselling and coaching - alongside her own lived experience navigating a complex separation and family court journey - she supports parents to think strategically, build capacity, and protect their children’s safety and wellbeing within complex legal and relational systems.
Through Danielle Black Coaching, she leads a growing team of specialist coaches and a structured support ecosystem designed to provide professionally held, evidence-informed guidance for parents navigating high-conflict separation and family court processes.
Learn more at danielleblackcoaching.com.au

This podcast is for educational purposes only and not legal advice. Please seek independent legal, medical, financial, or mental health advice for your situation.

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 built to adjudicate disputes between adult parties - to resolve property, allocate parenting time, and produce court orders. It was not built, in its foundations, to see children. 
And when we ask that architecture to do something it was never built to do, it produces, predictably, the outcomes we often see - children ordered into arrangements that are at best inappropriate, and at worst doing serious and lasting harm that could be prevented.
In this first episode, I look at one of those foundations: how the lawyers inside the system were trained. 
There are eleven mandatory areas of study required to be admitted as a lawyer in Australia - known as the Priestley 11. None of them is family law. None of them is coercive control. None of them is child development. None of them is trauma. None of them is post-separation abuse. A specialisation that, for most family lawyers, rests on a single elective subject - if it was taken at all - and on whatever they "pick up on the job".
This is the foundation. And it is producing, predictably, what foundations like this produce.
In this episode:
The focus: the system is working as designed; the problem is what it was designed for
The Priestley 11 - the eleven mandatory areas of study to become an Australian lawyer, none of which is family law
Why this is a structural argument, not an attack on individual family lawyers
And, in the closing minutes - what practising family lawyers themselves say about the training gap, in their own words
For protective parents navigating this system, the work I do in the Blueprint is built for exactly this - becoming the expert in your own situation, because, as this episode shows, the people advising you may not be. It's there if and when you want to go deeper.
Coming next: what an Independent Children's Lawyer (ICL) actually is, and what an ICL was actually trained to do.
Support: If you are in Australia and need to talk to someone, 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732) is available 24/7. In an emergency, call 000.
Explore the supports offered by Danielle Black Coaching
The Post-Separation Parenting Blueprint™
👉 https://www.danielleblackcoaching.com.au/the-post-separation-parenting-blueprint-1
AI Danielle - Your 24/7 Digital Coach
👉 https://www.danielleblackcoaching.com.au/meet-ai-danielle
1:1 Coaching
👉 https://www.danielleblackcoaching.com.au/1-1-coaching
The music you hear in this outro is 'Calm is Credible' - an original track created exclusively for the Post-Separation Abuse Podcast and Danielle Black Coaching.  You can listen to this song, or download free, by visiting danielleblackcoaching.com.au
About Danielle Black Coaching:
Danielle Black is a respected authority in child-focused post-separation parenting in Australia. With over twenty years’ experience across education, counselling and coaching - alongside her own lived experience navigating a complex separation and family court journey - she supports parents to think strategically, build capacity, and protect their children’s safety and wellbeing within complex legal and relational systems.
Through Danielle Black Coaching, she leads a growing team of specialist coaches and a structured support ecosystem designed to provide professionally held, evidence-informed guidance for parents navigating high-conflict separation and family court processes.
Learn more at danielleblackcoaching.com.au

This podcast is for educational purposes only and not legal advice. Please seek independent legal, medical, financial, or mental health advice for your situation.

"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 most weaponised terms in family law. It is invoked, again and again, by parents accused of abuse to discredit the parent who has tried to protect their children from them. It is also gestured at to name a phenomenon that is genuinely real: one parent deliberately damaging a child's relationship with the other. The same term carries two very different things, and that ambiguity is precisely what makes it so easy to weaponise.
In this episode I take the term apart, and put something more precise in its place - drawing on the work of Dr Emma Katz, the current Australian legal framework, and what I have learned from years of working with protective parents through exactly this. I address gender carefully, because the statistical pattern matters, and it is not the whole picture. And I offer two things to anyone living through any version of this: a framework for staying in your own lane when you are the one being accused, and a way of thinking about recovery and connection if your relationship with your child has been damaged.
This episode follows episode 105. Coercive Control: What It Is, and What It Isn't. If you haven't heard that one, I'd recommend listening to it first as it sets the foundation this conversation builds on.

In this episode:
Why "parental alienation" survives despite being scientifically discredited - and how it functions as a coercive control tactic in its own right 
Dr Emma Katz's reframe: parent-child relationship sabotage, and Child and Mother Sabotage (CAMS)
A note on gender and direction - most often, but not only
What the current Australian family law landscape (post-2023) actually says, and how it differs sharply from the United States
Staying in your own lane: a framework for responding to accusations from a grounded, protective place
Recovery and connection when your relationship with your child has been damaged: presence over pressure, autonomy over fixing
If what I've described is your life - whether you're facing these allegations or living through the sabotage itself - the full version of everything I've worked through here lives in the Blueprint: Module 19 for this, and Module 17 for the coercive control underneath it. It's there if and when you want to go deeper.
Support: If you are in Australia and need to talk to someone, 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732) is available 24/7. In an emergency, call 000.

Explore the supports offered by Danielle Black Coaching
The Post-Separation Parenting Blueprint™
👉 https://www.danielleblackcoaching.com.au/the-post-separation-parenting-blueprint-1
AI Danielle - Your 24/7 Digital Coach
👉 https://www.danielleblackcoaching.com.au/meet-ai-danielle
1:1 Coaching
👉 https://www.danielleblackcoaching.com.au/1-1-coaching
The music you hear in this outro is 'Calm is Credible' - an original track created exclusively for the Post-Separation Abuse Podcast and Danielle Black Coaching.  You can listen to this song, or download free, by visiting danielleblackcoaching.com.au
The music you hear in this outro is 'Calm is Credible' - an original track created exclusively for the Post-Separation Abuse Podcast and Danielle Black Coaching.  You can listen to this song, or download free, by visiting danielleblackcoaching.com.au
About Danielle Black Coaching:
Danielle Black is a respected authority in child-focused post-separation parenting in Australia. With over twenty years’ experience across education, counselling and coaching - alongside her own lived experience navigating a complex separation and family court journey - she supports parents to think strategically, build capacity, and protect their children’s safety and wellbeing within complex legal and relational systems.
Through Danielle Black Coaching, she leads a growing team of specialist coaches and a structured support ecosystem designed to provide professionally held, evidence-informed guidance for parents navigating high-conflict separation and family court processes.
Learn more at danielleblackcoaching.com.au

This podcast is for educational purposes only and not legal advice. Please seek independent legal, medical, financial, or mental health advice for your situation.

"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 term has become more widely used, it has also become more loosely used - and when everything is called coercive control, the word begins to lose the meaning that the people who have genuinely lived it depend on. 
If everything is coercive control, then nothing is.
In this episode I bring the precision back. I walk through what coercive control actually is - a deliberate, sustained pattern of behaviour designed to dominate another person and strip away their autonomy, producing fear and compliance - and some of the tactics that make it up. 
Then I draw the harder lines: how being "controlling" is not the same as coercive control, and how to think clearly about the trickier middle ground, including withholding contact with children, post-separation behaviour, and reactive behaviours. I also address who perpetrates coercive control: a framework that is gender-neutral in principle, alongside a statistical reality that is anything but - held in a way that erases neither women's overwhelmingly documented experience nor male victims.
This is a measured conversation, on purpose. The precision I'm arguing for is exactly what the people whose lives were shaped by coercive control deserve.
In this episode:
What coercive control actually is - pattern, intent, domination, fear, compliance and loss of autonomy
The tactics that constitute it
Why "controlling" behaviour is not the same as coercive control
The trickier middle ground: withholding contact, post-separation behaviour, and reactive abuse
Who perpetrates coercive control - the framework, and the statistics
Three questions to ask yourself if you're unsure
Where to find support, and where to understand this in depth
If this episode gives you language for something you have been living, the work continues in the Blueprint - Module 17 in particular is the extended treatment of coercive control, the foundation the rest of it is built on.
Support: If you are in Australia and need to talk to someone, 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732) is available 24/7.   In an emergency, call 000.

Explore the supports offered by Danielle Black Coaching
The Post-Separation Parenting Blueprint™
👉 https://www.danielleblackcoaching.com.au/the-post-separation-parenting-blueprint-1
AI Danielle - Your 24/7 Digital Coach
👉 https://www.danielleblackcoaching.com.au/meet-ai-danielle
1:1 Coaching
👉 https://www.danielleblackcoaching.com.au/1-1-coaching
The music you hear in this outro is 'Calm is Credible' - an original track created exclusively for the Post-Separation Abuse Podcast and Danielle Black Coaching.  You can listen to this song, or download free, by visiting danielleblackcoaching.com.au
About Danielle Black Coaching:
Danielle Black is a respected authority in child-focused post-separation parenting in Australia. With over twenty years’ experience across education, counselling and coaching - alongside her own lived experience navigating a complex separation and family court journey - she supports parents to think strategically, build capacity, and protect their children’s safety and wellbeing within complex legal and relational systems.
Through Danielle Black Coaching, she leads a growing team of specialist coaches and a structured support ecosystem designed to provide professionally held, evidence-informed guidance for parents navigating high-conflict separation and family court processes.
Learn more at danielleblackcoaching.com.au

This podcast is for educational purposes only and not legal advice. Please seek independent legal, medical, financial, or mental health advice for your situation.