Episode Details

Someone calls a child therapist and says: we have just come out of an abusive relationship, we are in court, please see my child. Edel Lawlor's answer is that she will meet with the parent, and she will not take the child. It is not a small thing to say to someone who is asking for help. She has reasons, and they come from twenty-five years of children telling her what happened to them afterwards.

Edel Lawlor is a child and adolescent psychotherapist and play therapist based in Ireland, specializing in play therapy and running the practice Expressive Play. She spent ten years working directly with children in a women's refuge before moving into private practice, she now also prepares voice-of-the-child reports for the Irish courts, and she works online with families well outside Ireland, including in Saudi Arabia, Dubai and Lebanon. Her TEDx talk is called Unconditional Kindness towards Children. She describes children as the whispers of domestic violence, because in a house or a refuge full of adult accounts, the children are the ones nobody hears.

In this episode she explains why children's therapy and live litigation do not mix. A child is told the room is private. Later a solicitor discovers the child attended and asks for a report, and the promise is broken retroactively by adults the child never met. Lawlor has seen that turn teenagers off help entirely. She has also seen children arrive coached, repeating a good weekend they did not have, which makes the session something other than therapy. What she recommends instead is therapy with the report requirement removed, and she explains why a court order saying the child's therapist can never testify is protection rather than a loss.

She and Lisa also go through what she calls the stretch: two parents pulling in opposite directions until a child has to let go of one hand. Why children already know far more than parents believe, down to recognizing the solicitor's number on a phone, and why naming it plainly lowers a child's fear instead of raising it. Why being questioned after a handover, which children call being grilled, produces answers designed to please rather than anything true. The coached phone call, with one parent out of frame giving directions and someone else recording, and what that does to an eight-year-old. Teenagers, who do not cope better despite the assumption that they do. And Dr. Bruce Perry's work on trauma healing through relationship, which shapes how she runs a playroom.

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

🎓 What you'll learn

• Why a child's therapy and an active court case work against each other
• How a later request for records can turn a child's therapy into a betrayal they remember for years
• What a voice-of-the-child report is, and why children handle it differently from therapy
• Why a court order barring your child's therapist from testifying protects your child
• What to say to a child who can see you are upset, instead of insisting you are fine
• Why questioning your child after a handover gets you less truth, not more
• How to make it safe for your child to talk about the other parent at all
• Why teenagers do not cope better with a parental court case, and what shows up instead

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 "The whispers of domestic violence"
3:00 Ten years in a refuge, and what she promised on the way out
5:00 Why she will not take a child into therapy mid-litigation
7:00 The voice-of-the-child report, and why children know the difference
11:00 What kids already know, and why naming it lowers the fear
15:00 Being grilled after a handover, and the book at both houses
19:00 Coached phone calls, the child who freezes, and teenagers
25:00 Bruce Perry, safe fights, and healing through relationship
29:00 Protecting the