Lisa & Chris: Breaking the Cycle of Toxic Relationships

Your children will gravitate toward what feels familiar when they start choosing partners, and what feels familiar is the relationship they grew up watching. That is the reason Chris and Lisa push back on staying together for the kids' sake when the relationship is an abusive one.

There is no outside guest on this episode. Lisa had been speaking at a parenting summit about helping kids build safe relationships, and she pulled Chris on afterward to talk it through. Between them they have spent years coaching people through high-conflict divorce and legal abuse, and both know the version of this decision that comes before any of that, when someone is still weighing whether to go at all. Lisa stayed roughly twenty years in hers, held partly by the idea that leaving would make her responsible for breaking up the family.

They revisit the list from a workshop they ran on the dangers of staying, and spend most of the time on one item: a child inside an abusive household takes that in as the normal shape of a relationship, and painful as a divorce is for kids, modeling the other thing costs more. Lisa then talks about a book by Dr. Amy Hammel-Zabin, Conversations With a Pedophile: In the Interest of Our Children, written from a decade of letters with an incarcerated offender. The lesson she carried into her own parenting was about how secrecy is used, and how to raise kids who have an open channel to you and to other trusted adults.

Chris takes the last stretch on keeping a relationship with a child while the other parent works against it. He describes staying scrupulously off the subject of what kind of person his ex is, addressing only the specific action in front of him, and being the consistent one for long enough that it registers. Neither of them promises it produces a result this week. The point is that the groundwork is there when your child is ready for it.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• Why staying in an abusive relationship for the children's sake tends to backfire
• What kids absorb as the normal shape of a relationship, and how it repeats later
• Why waiting until the kids leave for college is a different calculation when abuse is involved
• How offenders use secrecy, and how to build a channel your child will actually use
• Why every child needs trusted adults besides you, and how to set that up
• Chris's rule for addressing your ex's behavior without attacking your ex
• Why consistency matters even when your child does not respond to it yet

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Why "stay for the kids" kept Lisa in the marriage
3:00 What kids absorb as normal, and why the cycle repeats
5:00 Waiting until the kids leave home, and where that logic breaks
7:00 The dangers of staying, and the one Chris keeps returning to
9:00 Secrecy, grooming, and building a channel your kids will use
11:00 Chris on addressing the action without attacking the other parent
13:00 Why you never bash your child's other parent

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.