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Divorce is hard. Divorce with kids — especially boys who feel things deeply and don’t always show it? That’s a whole different battlefield. In this powerful episode, we talk about surviving high-conflict divorce while protecting your kids’ emotional well-being. Whether you’re in the thick of it or supporting a friend who is, this conversation is full of clarity, comfort, and “I-can-do-this” energy.
Our guest, Lisa Johnson, knows the system inside and out after spending years fighting through the courts during her own high-conflict divorce. Today, she empowers parents to recognize toxic dynamics, safeguard their children, and rebuild their lives with confidence and strength.
Lisa Johnson is the co-founder of Been There, Got Out, an advocacy and coaching organization helping people navigate high-conflict divorce, legal abuse, and toxic relationship fallout. After spending nearly a decade in family court fighting for her children’s well-being, she turned her hard-earned knowledge into a mission to support others walking the same path.
She is a certified domestic-violence advocate, a speaker, writer, and co-host of the Been There, Got Out podcast. Lisa teaches parents how to document effectively, communicate strategically, protect their children from emotional manipulation, and rebuild their lives with strength and self-respect.
Her upcoming book, When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You, will be released in 2026.
This episode isn’t about surviving divorce — it’s about protecting your kids, protecting yourself, and stepping into the next chapter with your head high and your heart intact.
The information provided in this podcast is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute professional advice. Consult with a qualified professional for specific guidance.
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Suzy Shaw: Welcome to the Mothers of Boys Survival Guide. I’m your host, Suzy Shaw, author, boy mom, and your partner in navigating all the beautiful chaos that comes with raising sons.
Today, we’re going to tackle one of the toughest transitions a family can face, which is divorce. I have held the hands of countless friends and family as they have navigated the upheaval that comes with divorcing their spouse while trying to protect their children. Every year, more than 600,000 couples in the U.S. legally divorce, and over a million children are affected. Behind those numbers are moms and dads doing their best to protect their kids, hold it together, and somehow stay sane through the storm.
In this episode, we’ll talk about how to recognize a high-conflict situation, how to protect your boys from emotional fallout, and how to stay grounded and confident through it all. Our guest understands divorce all too well. Lisa Johnson, co-founder of Been There, Got Out, turned her own experience with a high-conflict divorce into a mission to help others survive and rebuild. She’s an advocate, author, and coach, and helps parents manage conflict, communicate safely, and prioritize their kids’ emotional health, even when co-parenting isn’t easy. Welcome, Lisa.
Lisa Johnson: Thank you so much for having me and letting me talk about this topic.
Suzy Shaw: It is a topic which I think these days everybody knows somebody that has gone through a high-conflict divorce. So can you tell us a little bit about how you got into coaching and your book and website beentheregotout.com?
Lisa Johnson: Yeah, so I actually used to be a high school English teacher and a writing teacher, and my background is also as a professional writer, and I stopped teaching when my first child, my son was born, and I loved teaching, but I ended up loving figuring out a career that I could do from home, and so I was lucky enough to be able to stay home with him, and that’s when I really began my writing career. I thought I would take off teaching for a year and then go back, but ended up, like I said, loving staying with him, and then by the time it was time to go back, I was in court all the time.
I spent 10 years in the legal system trying to divorce and deal with, unfortunately, his father, and so I realized that I can’t go back to teaching in person the way I used to, and then COVID hit. My son’s almost 26, so this is two decades plus later, and I have learned so much along the way. I always say I got my best education in the trenches of family court, that I thought, maybe I can use the wisdom and knowledge and experience that I never wanted to turn into something.
At that point, my partner Chris and I, who are a couple in real life now, it’s been more than 10 and a half years, and he went through his own crazy situation, which we didn’t realize we were both dealing with when we met, we thought, let’s do something, and so we really started Been There, Got Out, which actually began as a book idea. We really just started honing in on toxic relationships, and then we niched down even more to something called legal abuse, which is my specialty with those 10 years in court, and then it’s just exploded since then.
Suzy Shaw: So, as I mentioned, I have been on the sidelines of some really ugly divorces, and it’s just heartbreaking to see the devastation that happens to the families. What do you recommend right at the beginning? Because some people don’t realize they’re in a high-conflict situation, they’re a little bit in denial mode, so what are the red flags to watch out for, and initial steps that should be taken?
Lisa Johnson: Okay, first, I should note, as a state-certified domestic violence advocate, that one in two people in abusive relationships don’t even realize exactly what’s going on, because we often think that abuse is physical violence, that people are experiencing emotional abuse, and often they’ve been in the relationship for a while, so they don’t even realize that this is not normal, because things get worse over time.
Sometimes, talk about the analogy of a frog in a pot of boiling water, that if a frog just jumped into boiling water, it would jump right out, but that’s not how these relationships happen. It’s that it’s good in the beginning, and then slowly things get worse, and you don’t even realize how bad it is until often you want to get out.
So just know that from the beginning, and when somebody starts a divorce, it’s generally high-conflict if it’s not amicable, because everyone’s angry and everyone’s upset, and of course you never plan to break up. So it could be hard to tell if something is high-conflict, but usually, after four to six months, people start calming down, the bills are getting really high, and they think, “all right, let’s start putting aside a bit of our grievances, and focus on the kids and moving forward.
That is not what happens in high-conflict divorce, because one of the indicators of high-conflict divorce is anger that does not subside. And I can say that even years after my ex and I have been apart, he filed for a $4 million lawsuit against us 9 years later for defamation, because it’s like, I still need to keep this fight going. Anger that does not subside, no matter how many years pass, this is an indicator of high-conflict divorce.
Another thing to watch for is if somebody has a personality disorder and or an active addiction. I’m not talking about someone in recovery who has the proper judgment, but when someone has a personality disorder or an active addiction, their judgment is impaired, and so they can’t even make good decisions for themselves. And they’re often so overtaken by their emotion that they do things without thinking about the consequences, like spending tons of money, ruining relationships with their children, and again, not thinking about the future.
So those are a couple of indicators of high-conflict divorce, and there’s more, but I figure there’s probably a lot we’re going to talk about, so I don’t want to go through everything.
Suzy Shaw: Right, and when you talk about addiction, I mean, the obvious ones are alcohol and drugs, but I’ve seen people that are addicted to sex and sexual… just the whole craziness and the accessibility of platforms these days, I feel like, has accelerated that kind of addiction as well.
Lisa Johnson: For sure, we see a lot of that in our community.
Suzy Shaw: So, how can a parent protect their kid from being pulled into the middle of the conflict? Because that seems to be what happens.
Lisa Johnson: One of the most common things we see actually in our world of dealing with legal abuse, which is when a person is using the legal system to basically wear the other person down and bleed them dry financially, is a parent who attempts to turn the children against the other parent, and we’ll get into that in a little while, because that’s the topic of our current book and course. So you can’t prevent your ex from doing it. You have to kind of plan for it and expect it.
And so there’s a lot of ways they do it, and actually this often starts while you’re still in the relationship, sometimes referred to as grooming. And it’s almost like creating a situation where the child will have loyalty to that other parent instead of you. So some of the signs of what we call pre-alienation, which is coined from a friend of mine, an alienation coach named Charlie McCready, is when you’re still in the relationship, your spouse will mock you to the kids, undermine your authority.
Like, I think back to when my son was really little, and I would discipline him. I’m not talking about punishment, just talking about discipline. Like he did something wrong and I’d say, okay, you need to like sit out for a while. And his father would come in and interrupt and say, no, Izzy, you don’t have to listen to mom. You can just take it back. So he would basically undermine my ability to parent because he made our son feel like that he was the main parent and that I was just cranky. So that’s an example of something like that.
But in terms of what you can do about it, I mean, because everyone gets scared. They see it happening. They’re like, oh no, oh no, my kids are going to turn against me because my ex is saying all these terrible things.
One thing that has worked really well, and this is not like a quick fix, but it’s something called the 10-minute rule. And I got this idea from interviewing a child psychiatrist named Dr. Olayera-Akinboye. And she said that more than anything of any age, kids want your attention and they want control. So if as soon as you can, you start spending, if you’re able to be in contact with them, 10 minutes a day where you get on their level and you say, “what are you interested in? Teach me how to do this or show me what you’re up to. I don’t know how to do this video game, even if you don’t like video games. Like, can you show me how to do it? I don’t know how to cook this dish and you’re so good at it. Can you teach me how to do something?”
So spending those 10 minutes with your child really gives your kid an opportunity to bond with you. So it makes them less likely to be, to fall prey to alienating behaviors when the parent tries to turn them against you because you’re establishing your own memories with them and it helps them develop critical thinking skills. So when they hear, oh, let’s say mom’s this terrible person, I’ll be like, wait a second, mom and I have, we have these rituals, we do these things together, like I’m less likely to believe it as a child because I know my mom, my mom spends time with me, she gives me her attention, so I know it’s not real.
So I’d say that’s probably the best long-term plan is to make sure you spend whatever time you can, again, not long vacations with them, but just a few minutes a day where you’re checking in with them and letting them lead.
Suzy Shaw: And I would think that would be easier than ever now that we have FaceTime and video… you don’t have to physically be in the same place with them to still build this relationship and check in on them if you’re physically separated.
Lisa Johnson: I mean, there’s so many things you can do, like sometimes parents who don’t live near each other, near the child, like they’ll watch a show together and talk about it together, and they’ll each eat popcorn. I mean, there’s so many things that you can do to still bond with kids.
Suzy Shaw: So one of the things I’ve noticed is that there’s a significant difference in the maturity age of the kids and how they process what’s going on.
And this is not exactly the same thing, but we went to a nursery school that was a co-op and a psychologist came in to talk to us after 9-11. And one of the things that he said was, you don’t have to worry about your little kids because your little kids aren’t going to understand what’s going on right now in this tragedy. And your older kids who are teenagers in high school, they should be emotionally mature enough to be able to process what’s going on. But the real danger age is that preteen, that teen time when they’re probably in middle school, when the children are old enough to understand something is going on, but not emotionally mature enough to process it. So, can you give us some advice for navigating communication with your child based on how old they are during that process?
Lisa Johnson: Yeah, so first of all, the best thing you can do in general in these situations is to have yourself as regulated as possible. No matter what age your kids are, you need to make sure that you have support to get through this because, whatever age you’re parenting, they are going to feel emotionally responsible for you. They are tuning into your energy and your anxiety and your fear. So the more support you can get on your own, completely separate from parenting, the better it’s going to be for everybody.
So as long as your kids of any age know like mom’s okay, like I’ve got it, you have your friends, I have my friends. Like this might be a hard time for us, but you don’t need to take care of me. Just still like do your routines and go out with your friends and show them that you’re able to have fun. That’s going to make everybody better.
With little kids, I think what we do when we’re in these really, really stressful situations is we forget that we have a different filter through how we are processing what’s going on. And sometimes it feels like because my world is consumed by this crazy divorce, my kids are feeling the same thing. They’re not. Little kids, like you said, they are doing their own thing. So I think it’s better to not really, I think it’s better in general not to talk about it. If they come to you, then you deal with it. Little kids can be distracted a little more easily. So I would say listen to whatever their concerns are and then be like, okay, whatever, listen and then distract. Got it, let’s take care of your feelings. But now, hey, we’ve got this birthday party to go to or let’s go get some, something, something to distract. Because they’re not really interested. They just need to know I’m okay, my parents are going to comfort me and now I can go on with my life.
Teenagers, similar thing, it’s probably a lot harder for them because they are much more aware, but they also have their social life and their friends, and they’re not really interested. They don’t wanna hear about what’s going on with you.
The pre-teens, I imagine like they also don’t want to hear, but anytime a kid of any age comes to you with anger and aggression, which is super common in these situations, you want to make sure that you don’t try to explain things to them from your perspective because they don’t care. Again, you’re the adult and they’re the child. So if anything, you have to not make yourself center stage. Like they’re the ones suffering. And to basically be brave, which can be hard and just sit there and be quiet and say, tell me more. Like I’m here for you. I just want to hear what you have to say and try not to judge, try not to interfere, but realize they need to be able to get it out even though they’re going to be angry at you and heartbroken. It is so hard to be a witness of that because as mothers, we want to fix. We don’t want our kids to ever suffer.
Realize you can’t make it stop. And so instead of acting like things are fine and it’s going to be okay, just be like, you know what? This is really, really hard. Like I hear you and I am here to help you or whatever you need from me, I’m here for you. And that’s really it, but not try to fix things.
Suzy Shaw: That empathy, I think, is really powerful. And in a calm, as calm and controlled as you could be, as you’ve mentioned.
Lisa Johnson: Right. Yeah, they are. So that I mentioned the word before, self-regulation. Like you need to be as regulated because there’s a term called co-regulation. It’s you are helping your child process an experience. So you can do that well if you are self-regulated and if you’re not regulated, then how are you supposed to help your child understand how to respond in this situation?
Suzy Shaw: Boys in particular often internalize stress and anger and can be explosive in their communication.
Lisa Johnson: I know. Right?
Suzy Shaw: And so I would imagine when you were going through your divorce, that might’ve been something that happened with you. So how can moms recognize when their son is really struggling and maybe get in front of it before it just totally blows up?
Lisa Johnson: Yeah, I mean, I think any child struggles with divorce and that’s why courts are likely to give therapy if anyone asked for it, because it’s hard for anybody high-conflict or not. It’s hard for kids to now be going back and forth between two homes, which is usually happening. Their lives are completely disrupted and we know that in general, human beings need routine and consistency and stability. So it’s really, really hard.
So I would say ahead of time, just assume that your kid probably needs therapy and in terms of a therapist, think about the kind of person that your kid really likes. Like think about their favorite, you can even ask them like about their favorite teacher or their favorite coach or their favorite camp counselor and why they like this person and what that person did to make them do well, succeed or show up for something. And then think about that as you’re choosing a therapist for your child.
Like I know with my son, I have a daughter and a son. When I was picking the therapist for my son, I found this guy, his name was Mark. He was a former Hells Angel. He had dropped out of high school, but he was brilliant. He had had like two master’s degrees and he’d come into the therapy place on his big motorbike as this huge guy in leather jacket and he and my son would go in and talk about anything except the divorce for a while. And I was kind of like, when are they going to like get to dealing with my son’s feelings? They would talk about politics and debate and whatever else and the therapist said, don’t worry because I need to first establish a rapport with your son and then we’ll get to the stuff and just be really patient.
My son also had moments where he was really, really aggressive and he was bigger than me. And I remember initially being frightened and feeling like I got to get him out of here because I can’t deal with him. And unfortunately my ex-husband pretty much abandoned the kids. So they were dealing with that, and I couldn’t just send him to his father. So I remember one time Izzy had like this huge explosive thing in his room and he’s flinging things around and I was like, I can’t deal with it. And we called Mark and Mark said, Lisa, now is the time that you cannot say I’m going to send you to like Kids in Crisis or one of these resources in town that’s supposed to help because his father’s already left him and he’s testing you. He needs you now to be really strong. So you have to do the opposite of what you feel like doing. You have to stay strong and let it pass and recognize this as him finally letting out these feelings that he’s kept inside for so long as we’ve been talking about debate and politics and everything except that.
And that was really, really helpful to me to hear that. So it goes back to like finding support for your kids that’s appropriate. And again, the kind of person that they could establish a good rapport with. And there’s a lot of other things dealing with aggressive kids. There’s some really good programs out there, but again, they need to have at least one adult that they can talk to. Their friends can’t fix things, but to have one trusted adult, even if it’s not you, just somebody they can talk to to work through this is going to be really, really helpful in the end.
Suzy Shaw: That’s great advice. And so in my book, I called my boys Ernest and Exuberance and both of them went through counseling for one thing or another at some points in their life. And we called it “mental floss.” I mean, we tried to sort of make it just, and you just gotta clean out some of the gook in there. And we also called everybody a “coach.” So they had organizational coaches, they had life coaches, which was the counseling, the mental counseling person. And that just to help them, I think, be okay with it because coach was something they were familiar with and happy with.
Lisa Johnson: Yep, that’s something, especially boys, they don’t wanna feel like something’s wrong with me if you say you have to go to therapy. So we say the same thing as like, let’s get coaches and people who are thinking forward in terms of resolution and kind of rah, rah, rah, rather than like, oh no, you need to sit on a couch and it’s all your trauma.
Suzy Shaw: Yeah, and we also had a very cool male and that was somebody that was very relatable to them. So how can moms help their sons process what’s going on when the father is not modeling very good behavior and treating the mom, and might be speaking negatively to the children, might be acting like they’re a youngster again, right? So what’s a mom to do to help their son during and their daughters, their kids during that process?
Lisa Johnson: Yeah, I mean, I think that the things I said so far, like having that time together with them, making sure you’re validating their feelings and listening. And I think also making them feel like they have some agency in their lives and some choices.
So the ex is going to be bad mouthing, I would say just for that in general, not to try to tell them the truth about it, because kids think of their parents as authorities. Both authorities and authorities don’t lie. So if one parent is telling me something about the other and then the other saying the opposite, like let’s say like my ex is talking badly about me. If I just said, that’s not true, this is what the truth is. I’m doing the same thing that my ex is. I’m telling my kids what to believe.
So you need to make kids feel like you respect their judgment. So if they say, you know, dad’s saying all these terrible things about you, you can kind of throw it back to them and say, has that been your experience with me? Where are you getting, what do you think? So really practicing that critical thinking muscle.
Suzy Shaw: One of the things that I always did with my mantra in my head really with my kids, especially when they were in that, they want to pick a fight with you mode. And I would advise friends if the same thing, but I call it Don’t Bite, right.
So somebody’s fishing and they’re fly fishing and they’re throwing barbs at you. It’s your choice to bite. You could just let it bounce off your chest and then they move on because they’re not getting the reaction that they wanted. And I think that, you know, goes with kids as well as, you know, possibly the divorcing spouse.
Lisa Johnson: Yeah, and so as you’re saying that I’m thinking of the term baiting, they’re baiting you, they want you to do something. So one thing that I remember trying before the divorce, just being silly with my kids is like, if they get mad at me, I’d be like, what do you wanna do? Like, if you could, like, what would you do? Like rip my arms off, tie me to a car and like drive really fast, like getting ridiculously disgusting. And then they’d laugh and then it was just done.
Suzy Shaw: Right, so shifting the conversation to legal aspects, you know, and with years going on for 10 years, you probably almost got a law degree yourself during that period.
Lisa Johnson: My case was published as case law.
Suzy Shaw: Good grief, that’s not necessarily something to be proud of.
Lisa Johnson: No, I am really proud of that.
Suzy Shaw: Thank you for getting through it, right? Yeah. So, you know, based on your experience and what you’ve been doing ever since, what should moms know about documenting interactions and using the court system wisely because it can get very costly very quickly?
Lisa Johnson: Oh, tell me about it. Yeah, I always say I save well over a million dollars, you know, representing myself for 7 ½ years through about 100 court appearances. Okay, so I think it’s really important first, and this is a lot of what we teach with our clients, is to understand what’s called the best interest factors, as well as another thing we call the alienation factors.
That’s basically what the court really thinks is important when they’re thinking about custody. And then whenever you’re communicating with your ex, you’re only communicating about things that actually matter because, as we just use that word baiting, people like our exes and our clients’ exes will do whatever they can to still try to engage our attention and use the kids to do it. So often they’ll be, when people meet us, there’s all this communication going back and forth about bedtimes and diet and allergies that have never been diagnosed and just on and on, and what are you going to do about this and that and things that like the court doesn’t care about. And so realizing the things that don’t matter can be such a relief to people because they’re like, oh, I don’t actually have to get into a written conversation about that.
So one thing that we teach more than anything with everyone is something we call strategic communication. And we have a whole course on it called How to Communicate with Your Ex Without Destroying Your Case or Losing Your Mind. But it’s making sure that you are, and this turns into documentation for a case, but where you’re communicating with your ex, you’re always writing to them, but you are writing for an invisible audience. And so the goal is you’re presenting as the most reasonable, best co-parent ever, but at the same time, you are documenting your ex’s patterns of behavior over time, the impact it has on your children and on your relationship with your children because like I said, they’re going try to create what’s called loyalty conflicts and make them discard you.
So understanding those best interest factors or custody factors, that’s going to be the things that you communicate about, and that turns into documentation for your case. But again, it’s important to, you know, and this is too much to get into here, but to really understand what matters and what doesn’t so that you’re not constantly engaging because that’s really what your ex wants is just to keep this thing going.
Suzy Shaw: Well, and that it’s just so depleting too, which is part of the strategy, I think.
Lisa Johnson: Yeah, for sure, for sure.
Suzy Shaw: So I had some friends do something called nesting during their divorce where, you know, the kids stay in the family home and the parents are moving in and out. And it just seemed incredibly complicated to me and that nobody really felt secure. And it was just in this constant state of flux and more expensive because now you have three different, you know, locations that you’re trying to manage. What do you recommend if you have, you know, younger kids about this co-parenting, and what’s your impression of nesting?
Lisa Johnson: So nesting, so keep in mind that Chris and I, we only deal with high-conflict cases. Nesting for amicable couples like might work, that’s fine. If you wanna do that, the kids get to stay in the same home. They don’t have to go back and forth. The parents go in and out and that could work. For our clients, absolutely never.
There’s a safety issue. A lot of our clients’ exes are surveilling them. They’re stalking them. Sometimes they’re planting things that could end up being part of some weird court records, like drugs or guns or who knows what. So we don’t trust our exes to be in the same living space as us. So we never want nesting.
Now it’s really hard because divorce is so expensive, especially in America, to have two homes. But you cannot continue indefinitely to share a home with someone that you’re trying to get away from because also you’re exposing your child to an unhealthy relationship dynamic. And living like that, your kids think that this is not only normal, but that it’s the best that they can do and that’s what they’re going to be drawn toward. So I really don’t recommend nesting for any kind of domestic violence situation, even if there hasn’t been physical abuse. It’s just not good for the kids to see that. And it is, like you said, it’s kind of unsustainable. It’s like, how long are we going to keep pretending that things are okay?
Suzy Shaw: Right, right. And I agree. You do think when you’re doing these sort of things, you have to think about, what is it that I’m teaching my child? And limits are a good thing. So boundaries are healthy.
Lisa Johnson: Yeah, yeah.
Suzy Shaw: So what advice would you give a mom who’s wrapping up the divorce and trying to reinvent herself and heal? And do you have any resources?
Lisa Johnson: I think, again, it goes back to that self-regulation.
Number one, we don’t want you doing what’s called doom scrolling. So a lot of times people in these cases, they’re so worried and they’re like, what should I do? And they’ll look at social media and they’ll see all these awful articles about terrible things that happen to children. Or they’ll see the opposite of like, everyone else is doing great except for me and they feel bad either way. So we don’t want you doomscrolling. I think it’s really great to find a community of people that are experiencing what you’re dealing with that can kind of go along with you.
Now, I’ve been to normal divorce groups when I was first at the beginning of my own divorce and it was really, really tricky because my case was so different and everyone else was talking about settling down and becoming friends. That was never going to happen for me. So I felt even more isolated.
So Chris and I actually have a support group. It’s called the Weekly Legal Abuse Support Group. And we do a very unusual thing where we blend our male and female clients together because we know that abuse is a human issue, not a gender issue. And since all of our clients are going through very high-conflict situations, it’s great to have the people we call our “babies,” those are at the very beginning of the process. And then our “grizzled veterans” who have been in it for a while, especially post-judgment, who can kind of guide them along, offer emotional support. A lot of our clients are very well-educated professionals and they are awesome at researching. So they’re always bringing things to the group, like resources to share.
And I think being in a group that also is more resolution focused and not on just keeping you in a trauma loop and feeling like, oh, you deserve this, that, and the other thing, but it’s more like, how can our family get through this as best we can is way more helpful. So finding support groups like ours, which I’m very, very proud of.
And there are different groups around. Some are in person. Some domestic violence centers have free support groups. I would make sure that whatever group you get involved with, you feel really comfortable with whoever’s running it and the people in it, because sometimes people go to support groups and they end up feeling worse. You don’t want to subject yourself to something like that.
Suzy Shaw: Right. And there is affordable counseling out there as well, which is often associated, I think, with those domestic violence kind of groups.
Lisa Johnson: Yeah, yeah. I mean, our domestic violence center has free counseling for victims and has free counseling for kids. It’s just amazing. And I wish I had found them sooner than I did.
Suzy Shaw: So I understand you’ve got a new book coming out in 2026. Can you tell us a little bit about it?
Lisa Johnson: Yeah. It’s called When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You. And we actually have a course that’s like 20 plus hours long on it. And so we have a podcast. It’s called the Been There, Got Out podcast and YouTube channel. And I have interviewed professionals extensively for the last couple of years on this topic. Because, like I said, it is just baked into legal abuse and post-separation abuse.
And so the book is really a culmination of what you can do when your ex is doing this in the legal system and out of the legal system. And I counted, and I think I have at least 52 professionals whose advice I’ve kind of woven into how to handle this situation. So the book is coming out in January, 2026. I am so excited. We’re so passionate about this topic. And I love doing lots of content on it.
I mean, it’s a heartbreaking topic, but it affects between 20 to 22 million adults in just America and Canada alone. And so in our own legal abuse support group, alienation comes up all the time. There’s always this group of like 5 or 6 women at the end, because we turn our cameras off for the, Chris and I, for the last 15 minutes and let them talk. And that seems to be such a major topic.
So I’m really excited because I’m already teaching some of the content from our book. We just got off like a double header session with one of our clients about how to effectively use storytelling. And she’s a mother of a boy, she has two boys actually, of how to try to get them back and how to persuade a judge that even though a child who might be close to aging out, legally you don’t have that much time, but this is the sort of thing that affects a child’s ability to form relationships for the rest of their lives. And if there’s a parent that is trying to take away one of their primary attachment figures, even though that other parent is the victim, but the child is really the victim because it affects everything, their ability to trust, and they can have all kinds of mental health issues later on. So it’s so important to recognize the signs as early as possible and to stop it from getting worse.
Suzy Shaw: Well, we wish you all the best with the unit support and a success with your new book. And so keep us in the loop, we’ll be happy to promote it when it’s out.
Lisa Johnson: Thank you.
Suzy Shaw: At the end of each one of our podcasts, we ask guests to give a motto or something they can say to themselves when they’re going through, which today is divorce. And we’ve already sort of talked about some, I mean, I talked about Don’t Bite, like that’s sort of something you could say to yourself, but what would you suggest to your clients and to parents?
Lisa Johnson: So I think of one of my favorite quotes that I got from an interview with a bodyguard named Steven Dana, who also started a nonprofit called Protection From Abuse. And he said, “an abuser’s greatest tool is fear.” And I think that that is what keeps people in a position where they feel paralyzed and scared and like they can’t move forward and they can’t heal.
So I think it’s so important to educate yourself and to understand that this is something that your ex is doing to keep you from standing up to them. And often, at least in our clients’ cases, they’re bullies. And once you start learning how to turn the power dynamic around, which you have complete control over, because most of the time that fear isn’t real, it’s what you think. It’s like they’re still squatting between your ears, we like to say. Once you can get them out of your head, everything changes. Getting rid of that fear is just a world of difference and there’s ways that you can learn how to do that. So just know that. Like it feels like the most terrifying thing and that everything’s out of your control. There’s a lot more things you can control than you think you can.
Suzy Shaw: That’s such a powerful thing to model for your children too, right? Resilience, resistance, self-respect. I mean, it’s all sort of wrapped up in that.
If you would like more information about Lisa and her partner, Chris’s book, Been There, Got Out, Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances, or her new book, which is called When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You, please visit their website, beentheregotout.com. We’ll also link to their website on the mothersofboys.life website.
And thank you for joining us today. Follow The MOB (Mothers of Boys) on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and your favorite podcast platform. Be kind to yourself, moms, and have a great week.
