Episode Details

In the middle of a custody fight, the other parent recruits your own family. Not distant relatives, but the parents you cut contact with, for reasons you have spent years in therapy over. They start appearing in filings as the involved grandparents, and you are left looking like the person who abandoned everyone. That is where this episode starts, with one client's situation that turned out to describe many.

Marnie Grundman is a therapist, an author, and a large presence on TikTok, and she works specifically with adults who were raised by narcissistic or emotionally abusive parents. She describes her own mother as narcissistic and sociopathic, went no contact more than thirty years ago, married a violent man at nineteen, and came out the other side into the work she does now, including EMDR therapy. She has been a guest before, and this is the follow-up conversation.

Marnie explains why the support system other people assume you have was never built in the first place, and why family court hits that particular wiring so hard. Emotional abuse in childhood teaches you that approval is earned and always slightly out of reach, so a hearing where you are being judged reactivates all of it: the urge to be liked, the rush to answer, the certainty that you have to be a perfect parent or lose your children. She and Lisa translate that into courtroom mechanics, including practicing the pause against rapid-fire questioning, asking what someone means by a question to buy yourself time, and rehearsing the ugliest thing the other side can raise so it lands as history rather than as a reveal.

The rest covers the family side. What to say when people ask about your holiday plans, and how their reaction sorts them onto or off what Marnie calls her island. Grandparents' rights when the grandparent is the abuser, and why supervision of those calls and visits matters. Why nobody owes an explanation to a person who says get over it. The pressure to perform amicable co-parenting with an abusive ex, and what that models for a child. And why children align with the parent who withholds love, plus what the rejected parent can do while waiting it out.

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

🎓 What you'll learn

• Why being raised by a narcissistic parent often means having no support system when a court fight starts
• How childhood emotional abuse resurfaces in a courtroom, and what it does to how you present
• Practicing the pause: handling rapid-fire questioning without matching their speed
• How to prepare for the question you least want asked, instead of dreading it
• The island test: reading someone's reaction to your no contact as information about them
• Grandparents' rights when the grandparent is the person you went no contact with
• Why the amicable co-parenting expectation teaches a child the wrong lesson about abuse
• Neutral trust: rebuilding trust without swinging from trusting everyone to trusting no one

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 The client with no one: an ex who allies with your own family
3:00 Marnie's story, and why we repeat the relationships we were raised in
5:00 Why court reactivates childhood abuse, and the pressure to parent perfectly
11:00 Catastrophizing, and the one word that changed how Lisa waited
16:00 What the brain does when it's triggered, and practicing the pause
18:00 Rapid-fire questioning on the stand, and taking back the pace
21:00 Preparing for whatever they can bring up about you
24:00 No contact at the holidays, and the island test
27:00 Grandparents' rights when the grandparent was the abuser
35:00 The amicable co-parenting myth, and why kids align with the other parent
44:00 Neutral trust, love bombing, and why safe can feel boring

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