Julie & David Bulitt: Therapist and Lawyer on High-Conflict Divorce

Every decision you make in a high-conflict divorce tends to set off something you did not plan for. David Bulitt calls it the law of unintended consequences, and after 37 years as a divorce attorney he treats it as a working rule: before you send the email, file the motion, or answer your child's hard question, stop and ask what else could follow.

David Bulitt has practiced family law almost exclusively since the late 1990s and is a partner at a Washington-area firm. Julie Bulitt is a family and marriage therapist of more than 35 years who works with individuals, couples, and groups. They have been married 37 years and raised four daughters, two biological and two adopted, and they started writing and teaching together after realizing they were having versions of the same conversations in their separate offices, his from a legal chair and hers from a therapeutic one. That split screen runs through everything they say.

With Lisa, they work the seam between strategy and psychology. David can tell you what works against a bully; Julie can tell you why the bully became one, and both agree you usually need the two together. They talk about why so many separating parents assume they have no power left, when understanding an abusive person's patterns makes that person more predictable. They also dig into why family courts still struggle to identify emotional abuse, even in a county that built a separate courthouse for family cases: limited time on the docket, limited money for evaluations, and the plain fact that mental health is hard to see from the bench.

The back half is about the children. Julie lays out how to move a child out of black-and-white thinking by teaching them to live in the gray, why you give kids an age-appropriate truth rather than a comforting lie, and how shutting down a hard topic teaches a child to stop bringing things to you at all. David makes his case, against a listener who pushed back on it, for why a parent should still tell a child that their other parent loves them. That is the kind of communication work, saying the strategic thing instead of the satisfying thing, that our Strategic Communication coaching is built around.

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

🎓 What you'll learn

• The law of unintended consequences, and why to pause before every decision or reply
• How to stand up to a bully ex without looking bad under the court's microscope
• Why your ex wants a reaction, and what refusing to give one does to their strategy
• Why family court often fails to identify emotional abuse, and what closes that gap
• The "table" model for support: lawyer, therapist, and specialists each in their own role
• How to get ahead of your own therapy or diagnosis history instead of letting it be used against you
• Self-care a stressed parent can actually use: sleep, meditation, journaling, regulating first
• How to help kids out of all-good or all-bad thinking, and why no topic should be unsafe to raise

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Meet Julie and David: a therapist and a divorce lawyer, married
3:00 The law of unintended consequences, and controlling only yourself
7:00 Bullies: hitting back without looking bad under the microscope
13:00 Why your ex doesn't share your values, and refusing to take the bait
17:00 Why family court struggles to see emotional abuse
19:00 The table metaphor: building a team of support
23:00 Is going to therapy supported in court? Getting ahead of it
31:00 Safety first, the blame-and-shame trap, and self-care that works
39:00 Splitting: teaching kids to live in the gray
45:00 Telling kids the truth, and the "your other parent loves you" debate

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
🔗 Julie & David Bulitt at TheBulitts.com: https://thebulitts.com/
🔗 David Bulitt at Joseph, Greenwald & Laake: https://www.jgllaw.com/attorney/david-bulitt/

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.