Been There Got Out Podcast

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,...

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...

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 violen...

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 broke...

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 practice...

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 hea...

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 t...

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,...

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 hand...

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 ali...

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 p...

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 pro...

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 o...

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 corpo...

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...

🔁 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-leve...

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 p...

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 ...

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...