The Post-Separation Abuse Podcast

Is nine nights/five nights becoming the new default parenting arrangement after Australia’s 2024 family law reforms? 
Danielle Black examines the rise of 9/5 recommendations in family reports and final outcomes, why mathematical ‘balance’ is not the same as a child-focused assessment, and what protective parents should ask when expert recommendations do not clearly connect the evidence to the proposed parenting schedule. 
This episode explores equal parenting time, attachment, child development, family violence, report writers, expert evidence and the difference between a recommendation and a court order.

This podcast provides general educational information and is not a substitute for legal advice or individual coaching specific to your circumstances.
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
1:1 Coaching
👉 https://www.danielleblackcoaching.com.au/1-1-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
Claim Your Name™: Burning the Good Girl Contract
👉 https://www.danielleblackcoaching.com.au/the-contract-you-never-agreed-to

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.

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, clear communication boundaries, parallel parenting and careful documentation.
Danielle then joins the conversation to address one of the most difficult questions protective parents face: what happens when the other parent refuses to agree to arrangements or safeguards that you believe are necessary for your children?
Together, Danielle and Brigid discuss:
Why parenting orders are not always the “golden ticket” they can appear to be
The false choice between acquiescing and immediately commencing court proceedings
Parenting plans, established arrangements and the importance of 'status quo' precedents
Parallel parenting when collaboration is neither safe nor realistic
Protective measures that may be implemented without court orders
Holding firm when faced with anger, accusations or threats of legal action
The difference between avoiding conflict and protecting your children
Situations in which formal orders and urgent legal advice may be necessary
This episode is not an argument against parenting orders. It is an invitation to question the assumption that court is automatically the only alternative when agreement cannot be reached - and to understand that parenting without orders does not necessarily mean parenting without boundaries, structure or protection.
This podcast provides general educational information and is not a substitute for legal advice specific to your circumstances.
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
Claim Your Name™: Burning the Good Girl Contract
👉 https://www.danielleblackcoaching.com.au/the-contract-you-never-agreed-to

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.

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 may continue to love, seek approval from, or maintain a connection with a parent who has caused harm. Their relationship with that parent is not yours to design - and their love for you should never depend upon managing your feelings about it.
Trauma matters. It shapes our nervous systems, our relationships and our responses. But trauma cannot become an indefinite exemption from responsibility for what we transmit to our children.
The work is not to become a perfect mother. It is to interrupt the Good Girl Contract so our children inherit something different.
And that requires more than boundaries. Our children need to know us as a specific person - not simply as Mum, protector, organiser, provider or function. They need to know our preferences, our edges, our contradictions, our pleasures and our name.
Because the Good Girl Contract was never designed merely to make girls and women "good." It was designed to make them interchangeable.
This is where that transmission ends.
This ends here. This ends with us.
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
Claim Your Name™: Burning the Good Girl Contract
👉 https://www.danielleblackcoaching.com.au/the-contract-you-never-agreed-to
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.

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 life often intensifies its operation rather than resolving it. Because the overfunctioning that occurred during the relationship is continuing to play out -  overfunctioning for the ex, the children, the lawyers, the report writer, the school, the extended family ...
She then names one of the least-discussed dynamics in the post-separation space - pity-driven capitulation. Which is the pattern of primary care givers, well past the point of separation, agreeing to arrangements not because they are afraid of their ex, but because they feel sorry for them. 
Danielle also dives into what our children are watching, and what they are learning, about who women are from watching their mother in relation to their father. What they can absorb, at the level below conscious analysis, is that women are functions in the household and men are named specific people. Which is exactly what the Contract exists to teach the next generation - not through instruction, but through demonstration.
Importantly, there is no scenario in which recognising a pattern too late is worse than not recognising it at all. The recognition itself is the beginning of the interruption. Which is exactly what our children need.

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
Claim Your Name™: Burning the Good Girl Contract
👉 https://www.danielleblackcoaching.com.au/the-contract-you-never-agreed-to
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.

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 maintaining a boundary can feel like in the body, and show up in life -  the tightness in the chest, the urge to add paragraphs of explanation, the rehearsing of conversations hours after they ended. And she makes clear that holding a line is not the absence of discomfort. It is the presence of discomfort, plus the decision to hold anyway.
Danielle shares the substantive reframe that changes what this whole series is for... The Contract’s purpose was never really to make us "good". That was the surface story. The mechanism underneath was different. The Contract’s purpose was to make us interchangeable - to sand off our specificity so we could slot into the same shape, the same function, as every other woman shaped by the same training.
Which means the intervention this series is walking us toward is not to become "bad", or "rebellious", or "naughty". Those framings are still operating inside the Contract’s own moral vocabulary. The actual intervention is bigger. It is to be named. To become so specifically, unmistakably yourself that you cannot be substituted for another woman.
And ultimately, Danielle would rather be one person’s shot of whiskey than everyone’s cup of tea. That is what this episode is about.
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
Claim Your Name™: Burning the Good Girl Contract
👉 https://www.danielleblackcoaching.com.au/the-contract-you-never-agreed-to

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.