"Every Moment of Every Day": Protective Parenting Guidance with Dr. Christine Cocchiola

Navigating court-ordered visitation can be overwhelming for children, especially when they're required to spend time with predatory parent. Many kids cope by masking their true emotions, staying compliant during visits, and then unraveling once they're safe at home—often exhibiting behaviors like anger, withdrawal, people-pleasing, or even sudden aggression. These responses leave protective parents feeling confused, guilty, and drained.

In this episode, we review Dr. Christine Cocchiola’s insightful children's book, Every Moment of Every Day, and delve deeper into what’s really going on beneath the surface for mothers and children navigating custody orders. Dr. Cocchiola, a clinician, protective parent, and author, sheds light on how coercive control intentionally disrupts a child’s attachment to the safe parent through shame, manipulation, and false narratives. She explains the four stress responses—fight, flight, freeze, and fawn—and why children may mimic an abuser, appear "fine" when they're not, or act out upon returning home.

The conversation offers practical strategies for navigating transitions, such as co-regulation instead of interrogation, empowering children with choice, and using rhythmic, relational activities like music, dancing, trampoline play, drumming, or pillow forts to help them release stress. We also discuss Dr. Cocchiola’s “three Ps” for managing high-stakes handoffs and acknowledge the difficulty of healing when court-mandated contact persists. Still, Dr. Cocchiola reminds us that meaningful recovery is possible through informed, protective parenting and intentional repair.

If you’re concerned about child safety, family court custody battles, trauma-informed parenting, or the impact of coercive control, this review and discussion of Every Moment of Every Day will equip you with critical insights and actionable steps for supporting children through challenging transitions.

Transcript

Court-Ordered Visits And Child Distress

SPEAKER_00 0:00

When courts mandate that children have visitation with an abusive parent, it can be a distressing and complex experience for both the children and their primary caregiver, often the mother. In this discussion with Dr. Christine Cociola, a leading expert in protective parenting and coercive control, we address strategies for managing the process before, during, and after visitation with a focus on attentive listening, effective parenting, and truly nurturing children faced with some of life's most difficult challenges. I'm Maria McMullen, and this is Genesis the podcast. Dr. Christine Cociola is a clinician and coach specializing in the traumatic experiences of adult and child victims of coercive control and narcissistic abuse. Dr. Cociola supports victim survivors before escape, after escape, navigating family court, and most imperatively, how to best support children harmed by the coercive controller. She is a trained therapist, a victim survivor, and a protective parent. She has authored two books, framed Women in the Family Court Underworld, and the newly released children's book, Every Moment of Every Day. Dr. Cociola, welcome back to the podcast. Thank you so much for having me, Maria. It's great to see you again. It's been a while since we talked, and the last time we talked on the show was when you released your book, Framed Women in the Family Court Underworld, in 2024. I cannot believe that was two years ago. But I'm delighted you are back on the show and here to talk about your latest book, a children's book, entitled Every Moment of Every Day. And we're here to talk about that book and how to navigate the visitation with an abusive parent post-separation or divorce, because often these are court-mandated orders that parents and children are required to comply with. First off, tell us about the story and who did you write the book for?

SPEAKER_01 2:03

It's a great question. So I wrote this book for little boys and little girls who have to go off to another parent's home. It doesn't necessarily have to be abuse, but it was written from a clinical perspective. How can we help these little ones who maybe just are going to miss mommy and don't want to go to dad's, not because he's an abuser, or maybe these children are being forced to go and they don't want to go. How do we help them regulate? It's really a guide for the children to recognize that their feelings are okay. And it's a guide to help the protective parent really be available to their child during this challenging transition. So I wrote it for little ones, probably ages three or so, even two to like 10 or 12. I've had moms read it to their 12-year-old children. And one little boy was laying with his mom when she was reading the book, and he said, Mommy, where was this book a long time ago?

SPEAKER_00 3:07

Oh wow. Yeah. That just gave me powerful. That gave me powerful. That may be all the feedback that we need about how effective this book can be and how effective words can be in just recognizing and acknowledging what kids are going through.

SPEAKER_01 3:26

It's so challenging for them, right, Maria? It's like, especially the child who's forced to go and maybe has an overt fear, like they all fear. If it's an abusive situation, they all fear that parent. But some of them are literally overtly fearful of going and they're being made to go. They're being made to go. And so how do we navigate? It's like um, we call it a moral injury, right? Like when a protective parent has to make their child do something they know isn't just, isn't right, isn't healthy. So how do we navigate that? How do we really empower the protective parent to handle those really challenging behaviors sometimes a child might have either when they're going or when they're returning?

What Kids Experience During Visits

SPEAKER_00 4:21

Yeah, and these are really challenges of our time, right? I mean, it's probably an age-old challenge, but even more so now with the way that the family courts handle custody orders. Let's talk about what kids are going through when they are mandated to spend time with an abusive parent, especially when they do not want to.

SPEAKER_01 4:41

So I think what we know is that children feel an unsafety. I like to liken it, everything that I do relates to attachment. So if I'm made to go with someone I'm afraid of, there's a feeling of untethered. It's like I liken it to the stormy seas of the coercive control or of the predatory parent. The seas are just so stormy. And now that child has to get out into that sea. They have to go. And even if going, and this is the tricky part, right? Even if going can be fun, can maybe give them extra freedom. They don't have to maybe get off their phone at a certain time, or they get to be on their iPad for an extended time. There is a knowing that the only reason why it's okay when they go to that person's house, if it is okay, is because the child has followed the rules. They know that that abusive parent, that predatory parent, is requiring something from them. And they figure out at a very young age, if I do exactly what's required of me, I will not lose that parent's love. I will not feel the wrath of them, I will not suffer the consequences like my protective parent has, frankly, or maybe even like a sibling has. This is why we see this in family systems. We'll have one child who totally aligns with the abusive parent. The other child doesn't align. Well, the child who aligns figures out that's easier, actually. It's easier if I just go along with it. So they go along with it, they spend time with this person, but we have to ask the question when I'm with that person, even as an adult victim, whenever adult victims are with their abusers, they realize they can't relax. They have to behave a certain way, or there's gonna be a problem, there's going to be some kind of challenge, right? And so what we know is that these children figure out how to regulate their behavior. And if I have to regulate my behavior the whole time I'm with that other parent, well, guess where I let it go when I come back home.

SPEAKER_00 7:14

Right, because it has to come out sometime, right? There needs to be an outlet because you can even as an adult, you can only hold things in for just so long. And that sounds like an intense amount of pressure on a child.

SPEAKER_01 7:32

Intense, intense, whether it's I have to go or whether now I'm coming home. Now let's add another variable. I'm coming home to my safe spot, but I've been told all weekend long that that safe person actually isn't safe, that that safe person is kind of disappointed in me, doesn't love me, loves my sibling more than me, took all the family money. Like the narrative that children are subjected to when they're with that predatory parent creates another level of dysregulation. And what happens is protective parents, you know, trauma victims themselves, right? When their child comes home in these ways and these behaviors are manifesting, remember, children show us how they feel before they tell us how they feel. When they come home this way, a protective parent's first reaction, because they feel unsafe when the child's dysregulated, is to be reactive, to yell, to say, why are you treating me this way? Why would you say that? That's disrespectful. No, that's not true. Dad is wrong, or like to say something bad about the other parent. So the focus of the book is how do you handle the child who maybe is having challenges going, but also coming home to your house and creating challenges in the family environment. How do you help them through that process?

Attachment And Malicious Fracturing

SPEAKER_00 9:04

Yeah, those are all very important questions, and I hope we can get to those in this episode. And I would think just to add on to that, this is a cycle, right? This is going on and on every week, every other week, every month, potentially for years. And so getting ahead of that or getting a handle on how to navigate it is super important. But I want to back up to something you said, because you said everything you do is related to attachment. Help our audience understand what attachment means, especially in this context.

SPEAKER_01 9:43

Absolutely. So what we know about most children is that they need to grow up securely attached to a safe parent. And so that's really about a place where a child can be themselves, are loved unconditionally, are never ashamed. Their parents are truly a place, a safe landing place for them, no matter how they're behaving, no matter their choices, it doesn't matter. So you take a little child who at two years old or three years old, a little boy who starts crying because he lost his toy, his favorite toy, and his father or mother says, Stop it. Grow up. Stop it. You're acting like a girl, right? That's a shaming process. And so what the child learns over time when these kinds of behaviors happen, and as you know, my area of expertise is courts of control. Courts of control is the underpinning of all abuse. It can be physically violent, but it isn't always. And oftentimes, the psychological tactics used by abusers are the first thing that abusers are using. Abusers, this father that maybe shames this child didn't start off by hitting the child. He started off by shaming the child. That's a psychological fracturing in the brain. The child begins to recognize I can't be myself. I'm not loved for who I am, I need to hide who I am. I need to pretend and be something different when I'm around this parent. And so what we know from so much of the research, and Gabor Mate talks about this a lot, is that authenticity, my ability to be authentically myself, is very much related to attachment. So if I can't be myself, if I'm not loved unconditionally, then I guess I'm not good enough. And so when you grow up in an abusive family system where there's a coercive controller and a predatory parent, you quickly learn that you can't be yourself with that parent. The only thing you can be is what they want you to be. And then what these tricksters do is then they make the child think they can't be themselves with the safe parent. They take that away from the child, they take that attachment away. My work, what I call it is they maliciously fracture attachment. They take away what every child deserves to have in their life. And the good news is, I always like to put a little something nice around it, is that if a protective parent had that from the beginning, which when the child was born, that it can never be entirely eradicated, but we must understand that's what abusers are attempting to do. So you send a child home from an abuser's house, and they've just heard over the weekend, once, twice, five times, that mommy never really loved our family. That your mommy thinks your brother is actually smarter than you. Or mommy, she has no time for you nowadays, right? Because she has a boyfriend, right? And so the idea is to slowly erode away that attachment to maliciously fracture it so the child has no tethering. They're like unanchored, right? And who do they and then who are they more likely to anchor to? Predatory parent because they're powerful, because they usually give the children what they want. So it's really harmful. I call it broken brain, it literally does, and then the child's brain isn't functioning the way it should because they don't feel safe. And then if you have a really wonderful protective parent who then decides to be angry about the child's behavior instead of seeing, oh, my kid's suffering, they actually are being actively abused at that other person's home. And they're coming home and projecting it all onto me. And this really sucks, but I've got to take it, I've got to handle it, I've got to be able to help my child heal through that process. And that's what the book is about.

Signs A Child Is Struggling

SPEAKER_00 14:14

Yeah, that's really the goal, right? I appreciate you explaining attachment, and I know you do a lot of attachment work, which is different, right? So we can build on that maybe in a minute. So let's talk about when that child comes home from visiting with the other parent or the abusive parent. Help us understand the signs a child is struggling with that visitation.

Co-Regulation And Rhythmic Movement Tools

SPEAKER_01 14:38

Yeah, I think it's important for everybody to recognize that we all have different responses when we're stressed out. And the four prominent ones are fight, flight, freeze, and fawn, right? So children sometimes come home really angry and they behave in a really horrible way. There's some children who mimic the abuser's words, literally say the same exact thing. That's the fight response, right? The flight is, you know, I love it when protective parents tell me they're such a great student, they're doing awesome in school. I'm like, that could be a trauma response. Like being the perfect student, doing so well, really trying hard to be as ideal of a child as possible. And then there's the freeze, which is a disassociation entirely. Everything was fine. It's okay. Dad forgot to pick me up, no big deal, right? Like disassociating, and then the fawn, which is people pleasing, just doing whatever the abuser wants, acquiescing, right? And so when the kids come home, there's gonna be a variety of reactions we're gonna get. How do we handle them and how do we meet the child where they are? This is really important. It's like your child comes home, they're really you could tell they're angry, you could tell they're there's some reaction going on in them. Is that the time to say it's time to do homework? Or is that the time to say, I can see you're really angry, we should talk about this? Or is it the time to say something like, I'm here if you need me? And that's what the book details is like the child comes home and we can do whatever you want to do. We could do nothing. We could sit and read a book and snuggle, you can talk about how your visit was, or not at all. I won't ask you questions. You get to choose. You get to, I will follow your lead, I will guide you. And then what I also I'll show a quick picture. I have a little girl and she's like so upset she doesn't want to go. Oops, a little girl, she doesn't want to go, and then a little boy, and then, but then in the book, what I try to detail is what are the things we can do as interventions. And some of that is just as simple as we can make a pillow tent and hide, or we can actually dance in the kitchen. What we know helps children to heal their bodies is movement. It has to be repetitive, something that we do again and again as much as they want. It needs to be rhythmic. It really has to be, it could be music, it could be drums, it could be jumping on a trampoline, it could be throwing a frisbee. Rhythmic, right? And relational. Like it's based on I'm gonna accept you for who you are in this moment, no matter what your behavior is, and the relationship is what takes primacy. And so a mom who has a child who's screaming and yelling and says, something like, Would you like to go on the trampoline? Or do you want to go punch the punching bag? Meeting the child where they are, they get to actually release in their body the stress they are carrying. Instead of us punishing or being angry or trying to get a child to do what we want them to do, we meet them where they are. And by the way, this actually fortifies attachment.

SPEAKER_00 18:11

That's what I that is what I was just gonna ask you. Are these all ways of not just responding appropriately to the child's experience and giving them back a sense of agency, but also a way to build that bond with them?

SPEAKER_01 18:27

A hundred percent. So if I can authentically be myself no matter how I'm behaving, right? No matter how I'm behaving, fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. I can be myself with you and you accept me as myself, attachment. The abuser won't let me be my authentic self. I'm not allowed to get angry. We have a lot of these children, I see it all the time. They show any emotion, or their protective parent shows emotion. They're like, you yell all the time, and the parent's not even yelling, or they won't cry, they won't show their emotion because abusers make that very challenging for the child to experience authenticity. And so at that house I couldn't be myself. I was performing, I was doing exactly what that abusive parent wanted me to do so that I can keep stability, just like the victim, the adult victim did. It's the same thing. So I couldn't do that here. So guess what? I'm gonna come home. Please just let me be myself. It may not be pretty, it actually might kind of suck, but let's just meet me where I am and recognize what I've just experienced. Or if I'm going to that person's house and I'm behaving in a way that is problematic, I'm just angry, I'm just not listening to you. I'm not, I'm not gonna say, oh, I don't want to go. Maybe I don't even say that to you, but I am dysregulated before that visit. Meet me where I am.

Preparing For Transitions With The Three Ps

SPEAKER_00 19:54

Yeah, that's a good point because we didn't talk about the before. Right? There have, and I know you have strategies for preparing to go for during the visit. And then of course we just talked out the about the coming home. So let's talk about the before.

SPEAKER_01 20:12

Sure. So, you know, what I always say is that why wouldn't you say to yourself, today's Friday, my child is going to their other parents' home on Monday. They don't usually like to go, or they often misbehave before they're going. How do I create the space where I'm prepared for that? Right? I always I use I call it the three P's. Predict the behavior. Just predict it's gonna happen. And now prepare yourself so that you can better protect yourself, but also so the child is protected, more importantly, so the child is protected, right? But like again, I always say we heal in synergy with our children. When our child is doing okay, we're gonna do better. Right. So, how do you like predict that it's gonna be a rough Saturday Sunday afternoon because it's Sunday at six, they're getting picked up? How do you predict that? And then now what do you do to prepare for that? Is that maybe doing some kind of a again, a somatic healing experience? Whether you walk a dog, whether you go to the local little farm and you stand on the fence and you watch the donkeys, like these are all somatic healing experiences. How do you change? Is it we all get so busy in our lives, right? Okay, at three o'clock, they're going to dad, so we've got this from 12 to 1, and then we're going there from 1 to 3. No, no, no. What if you had from 2 to 3 where you had this space of healing? How does that now change the transition a little bit? So it's very intentional work. It's like saying, Okay, next Thursday at five o'clock, they're going to visit their other parent. How am I gonna plan for this so that things go better? For my child. And so I think it's about being really intentional and recognizing that in those moments, the day before the visit, the week leading up to the visit, two hours before the visit, these children are dysregulated. They may not show it. It can look totally like they're playing too many video games. They may not show it, but they may show it. Either way, you know what's going on. How do you help them regulate? How do you help them feel safe with you? And if they decide to have a temper tantrum at three years old because they don't want to go, how do you just sit with and we call it co-regulation? How do we just sit with them and let them have that tantrum and just be right there waiting with a cold face cloth? Instead of you're being fresh or you're misbehaving or stop it, or we're at the grocery store, we're at Nana's, you can't do this. Like, how do we meet them where they are? Because their brains are being harmed, actively harmed in this process. It's the unacknowledged child abuse. Nobody ever calls this child abuse, do they, Maria? Like nobody calls it child abuse.

SPEAKER_00 23:15

Right. I'm just shaking my head because it is child abuse. We know that, our listeners know that, and it's all manipulation of some of the worst malicious forms. One of the things that I know we find challenging at Genesis is that the children that we care for are very often in these situations that you describe where they still have visitation or contact with an abusive parent. And although they receive counseling, therapy, and so on, we can't in those moments or in that space of where they have to continue to have that contact. We can give them tools, we can help them cope, we can give them mom strategies, we can build attachment, but healing their trauma once and for all, 100%, is typically not achievable when visitation must continue. Is that your experience?

SPEAKER_01 24:17

I think that's accurate for sure. I think that we can, as you said though, and it sounds like this is exactly what your work is in the work of Genesis, but it's we can remediate it. And I think part of that remediation is ensuring that protective parents know how to handle this correctly. And I think part of the problem is that there is an unawareness that a child who is experiencing this is experiencing the same thing you did. It may look slightly different, but they are experiencing coercion and control. And here's the problem: an adult victim hopefully grew up in a home or a family system where they had a strong attachment to someone, we hope a secure attachment to someone. But your child's attachment to the abuser is not secure, is not healthy. And now the abuser is probably trying to take away your child's attachment to you. As a protective parent, I'm sorry to put more burden on you, but you are the difference between a child healing and a child either being more likely to be in an abusive relationship, or frankly, being more like an abuser.

Family Court Failures And Repair Work

SPEAKER_00 25:39

Yeah, I agree with that. And I also just want to add a thought. We're all human, right? But we don't all have a really strong understanding of human behavior and what these expressions and emotions really mean and like how to interpret them. And so none of us was given the playbook when we had a child of how to actually care for that child. A lot of it is intuitive and some of it is trial and error. And often it a lot of it goes well, and some of it maybe you made some mistakes, but I think it's important to have resources like your work, the Protective Parenting Program, the book that we're talking about today, and the Genesis website, and your website, and lots of other things to support, especially mothers, going through this very thing with resources and how-to's and like actual tangible steps that they can take to help their child and intervene and build attachment. Now, we haven't yet talked about everything that led up to writing this book, right? Can you help us understand how mothers and their children are forced into these situations that require continued contact with the abusive parent?

SPEAKER_01 27:03

Absolutely. And I want to, I'm just gonna go back just for a moment and I want to say to everybody listening: none of us are perfect parents, and we all make mistakes. The difference between someone who has an understanding of what their child is experiencing and can do repair work when we make mistakes, and someone who doesn't, that's the vast difference, right? So I'm not a perfect mom, I made mistakes, I continue to make mistakes, but the goal is to do repair work, to have that ability to self-reflect. Abusers do not have that ability. So that's honestly, when you think about it, that's our golden ticket, isn't it? This is what discerns us from the abuser, is that we can take responsibility without it being, I'm so sorry, so sorry, because we don't want to come across as a victim. We want to come across as, you know what, mom made a mistake. I'm human. And and that is such a powerful thing for a child to experience. And so I would say that my work has always been about advocating against child sexual abuse, child abuse in general. And I was sitting at my desk in 2022 and I said every single story of all of these mothers that I work with, it's just over and over again how there is significant, all I can say is the family court system is not built to protect children. The family court system is built on this idea of high conflict cases. And the problem is that once a case is determined to be high conflict, in my opinion, that is an immediate red flag that there is one person who's an abuser. But the court doesn't see it that way. And oftentimes victims go into court like ready to fight for what's justly theirs, and they can be, they can appear to be high conflict, even if that's not what they are. And so we have a court system that does not understand the pathology of abusers at all, does not even recognize that these are character traits that are extremely, for lack of a better word, covert very often. These are not people who are showing up with signs saying I'm an abuser. And so they show up to court in a way that seems very respectable. And a victim who is overwhelmed and flooded from years of abuse and being worn down, and now her abusive partner is going to get perhaps partial custody doesn't appear that way oftentimes. So there's a pathologizing of woman, there's not understanding the character traits of abusers and not really discerning that at all. It's not hard. Once you start looking at it, it's not hard to determine who the abuser is. It's usually the person with more money, it's usually the person who continues to bring people back for contempt, it's usually a person not cooperating, giving over the financials when they're supposed to. There's just so many reasons. And then the last thing the courts aren't aware of is the psychological trauma to a child when you force them into repair therapy with someone they witnessed, and the word witness is so wrong, because once a child actually is in the environment, their body truly experiences that, whether it happened in the other room, whether they're coming home after an incident happened, the yelling, the screaming, the name-calling, the physical violence, whatever it is, a child's body actually experiences that. And there's no accountability. There's none. It's really quite hard to wrap our brains around that we live in a world where children are not actually prioritized and their safety is not prioritized.

Protective Parenting Program And Real-World Training

SPEAKER_00 31:34

Yeah, it's really devastating, especially many of the cases that you and I have talked about in the past, and some of the things we've seen recently in the media are distressing. I'm really grateful at those times that there are people like you and people like or places like Genesis doing this type of work because we have no other choice but to continue and we have no shortage of people to support. So let's talk a little bit then about your signature program, the protective parenting program. I think I can guess from everything you've just said, but tell us what led you to develop this curriculum and how does it help?

SPEAKER_01 32:18

So you probably know I have my own story, right? So I was with my abuser for an extended period of time, and I did not realize my children were being indoctrinated to think bad things about me until one day an incident happened, and my daughter, I said, When did this start? And she said, Oh, when I was nine, and that was eight years prior. And I I wondered why I had a child who had a lot of contempt for me, and I knew there was a lot of counterparenting going on. I just couldn't put my finger on it. I knew I thought I was crazy, right? I thought there was something wrong with me. I was going to therapy, I was working on myself, and my son not quite the same response, but certainly there was some mistrust and betrayal. He didn't feel like he could really trust me. And so when I decided to go on for my doctorate, and I worked under Dr. Evan Stark, who propelled the term course of control, it all came together. It was like, oh, this is what's been happening in my family system. Now I understand. And at this point, I had divorced. So I decided that the best healing for these children, and this was me as a clinician and working in my own home with my own adolescents who were having challenging behaviors. That my best, the best healing was actually me. Like I could send a child to a therapist, but what if the therapist doesn't realize my ex is an abuser? And my child's going to therapy and saying terrible things about me because that's what they're made to say about me. So, you know, therapy can work, but it has to be a very skilled therapist who understands. And you probably know I do a course of control professionals training just for therapists and attorneys and coaches, because the idea is that we need to be able to figure out who the abusive parent is to support the child. That doesn't mean we say, oh, your dad's an abuser, but we certainly can help a child with critical thinking, with healthy versus unhealthy relationship dynamics. And so the protective parenting program was born out of this idea: how do I equip protective parents with the skill set they need to actually help their child heal? How do I actually help them reignite and fortify an attachment that an abuser is consistently trying to maliciously take away? And that's the program.

SPEAKER_00 34:48

Uh it sounds incredible. And first I want to thank you for talking a little bit more about your story, which is definitely insidious, and I feel like it takes an incredible amount of strength and work to come to the other side of that and do the work that you're doing now to help other families. And this book in particular, Every Moment of Every Day, I think is it's so simple, but it is so groundbreaking, right? Because it brings together all the elements and it brings you right back to when you were in that abusive cycle within your own family and faced with these types of signs from your children, but yet you didn't understand them. So it's remarkable that you could give back that much and give up so much of yourself to all of us so that we can form strong attachments and we can help women and children who struggle with abuse. I want to just mention family court again for a moment because the abuse is the problem, right? The courts are problematic, but we have to back up to the abuse is the problem, and that's how we get to family court, and that's how we end up with these visitation struggles and children who are suffering PTSD. Do you have the opportunity to educate family court judges and others who work on these types of cases and perhaps interview these children?

SPEAKER_01 36:28

Absolutely. I've been so grateful the past couple of years I've been able to do large trainings for family court judges, for guardian edlightems, court, any kind of court professional. And I welcome those opportunities. I am typically given about an hour to an hour and a half, as you could imagine. It's not enough time, but it's time, and I'm grateful for those opportunities. And so many judges and court professionals have come up to me and said, thank you so much for speaking on this. We have good people working in the system. The problem is we have a few bad people working in the system. It is a money-making machine. There is money to be made in this process. There is also, as I said, a pathologizing of victims very often and a lack of understanding of how predators actually show up in court, like charlatans. Nobody wants to believe this person is problematic. And you know, for your listeners, I think it's important when I share a little bit about my story. I want people to know, I've been doing this work since the age of 19. I actually have been a domestic abuse sexual assault crisis counselor since that time, yet I didn't know I was living in it. And I think that's important because I'm a therapist, I'm a college professor teaching social work every single semester on the power and control wheel, yet I didn't know I was experiencing it. So we often miss the signs, and that's what abusers hope for, particularly when there's no physical violence. We miss it. And then we are always in self-doubt. And then, of course, our children are in that place. And so, how do we heal? What's the best healing for all of us? It's when our children are healing. So, what if you could empower yourself to parent differently? I love like so many great people, do all these parenting. Dr. Becky Good Inside is amazing, you know, the attachment nerd, they're all amazing. And their work is so profound. But there's another layer here. This is about a child, a typical child who might have some dysregulated behaviors. And now let's add on coercive control. That no one in the planet is recognizing their suffering. Right? And so this is about empowering protective parents to recognize they have so much influence. They can heal their children. It's two steps forward, one step back. It's not easy. It's a marathon, not a sprint. This is like a life's like a life's journey of work. But who better to do this? And what a privilege, by the way.

SPEAKER_00 39:06

I I really value that because it really clarified something for me. Children are experiencing the abuse that you, survivor yourself, are experiencing. And to me, that makes so much sense when you say that, because I don't know that we can all put ourselves in that place to be that self-aware to say, oh, yeah, I know what this is. I've lived through this or I'm living through this.

SPEAKER_01 39:33

Well, and I would say that there's a disassociation because who wants to believe that the person you were partnered with who you're now sending your child to is actually actively abusing your child even if there's no bruises? What? Like, who wants to believe that? That's a painful place.

Spotting Coercive Control And Love Bombing

SPEAKER_00 39:52

It's a painful place to be. It's a hard thing to accept, for sure, to be able to accept it and then try to get you know through it. It might be helpful to give our listeners a couple of examples of coercive control that they might be able to recognize. Because, as you said, it can be difficult to determine if that is what you're experiencing.

SPEAKER_01 40:21

Sure. So I think when we think about again, it's the underpinning of abuse. Abusers don't show up with signs, but they often in the beginning of a relationship, it can feel really good. There's love bombing, which is actually now part of the crown's definition of course of control in the UK. So there is a lot of you're wonderful, you're amazing, you're my soulmate. And they do this with us, but now let's ask the question: do they do it with our children? Oh, absolutely. Even if you have a predatory parent, I call them predatory parents, even if you have a predatory parent who was very authoritarian in their style. They were like, you need to do this, you need to do that, and the child was afraid of them. These abusers figure out at some point that that tactic is not gonna lure the child in. The thing to lure the child in is of course gifts or freedoms or experiences. So you take a queen who maybe they were really overtly afraid, or you take an eight-year-old who was really afraid of their, like the child, the children in this book, right? They're afraid of that abuser. They don't want to go about that age. And then you take them, and then by 10, they're not as afraid anymore. What's happened? This is coercion. It's a coercion of, it's like I'm gonna coerce you into a different belief system. I'm gonna coerce you into believing your protective parent isn't safe, that they don't love you. And I'm also gonna coerce you into believing that I'm amazing, that I'm I'm actually the parent you want to rely on, even though I'm only doing that. Pathology of the abuser. I'm only doing that to hurt the adult victim. As Dr. Stark states, children are secondary victims not because they're not as relevant, but because they're used as a weapon for the primary victim.

Where To Learn More And Genesis Resources

SPEAKER_00 42:16

Yeah, that's an excellent point. Where can people learn more about you and your work?

SPEAKER_01 42:22

Thank you so much. So I'm at Course Control Consulting or I knowyourheart.com is another URL they can use. And I'm on Instagram and wherever else. I'm always offering all kinds of information out there trying to educate on this particular topic. And I have a circle community where protective mothers can join and they can join various support groups or they can just join for free and come online and just meet other moms who are experiencing this.

SPEAKER_00 42:50

Perfect. And the book Every Moment of Every Day is available now just about everywhere, right? It is. It is. Dr. Coachella, thank you so much for your work and for talking with me today. Thank you so much, Maria, for having me.

SPEAKER_01 43:05

I appreciate it. This is, I think, my third or fourth time back on Genesis. So I feel like a special special. I appreciate it.

SPEAKER_00 43:14

You are a regular, and we will see you again next time. Thank you. Genesis Women's Shelter and Support exists to give women in abusive situations a way out. We are committed to our mission of providing safety, shelter, and support for women and children who have experienced domestic violence and to raise awareness regarding its cause, prevalence, and impact. Join us in creating a societal shift on how people think about domestic violence. You can learn more at Genesis Shelter.org and when you follow us on social media, on Facebook and Instagram at Genesis Women's Shelter, and on X at Genesis Shelter. The Genesis Helpline is available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, by call or text at 214-224. four nine four six help two one four nine four six four three five seven.