This account is shared in the exercise of my right to freedom of expression. It reflects my lived experience, understanding, and perceptions at the time. It does not seek to identify or name any individual, nor to assert findings of fact or legal conclusions. It is written solely to describe personal impact and experience, not to attribute legal or criminal responsibility.

Originally written: 16 December 2024
Transferred to NAAVoices as part of the Two Years On series

When the System Sees Performance, Not Risk

Experience six of eight in the family court process. This is my personal account of what happened, as I experienced and understood it at the time.

This piece took time to write when it was first published. It has taken even longer to revisit.

I am now two years on from the day I left. This account forms part of a wider series about how abuse can continue after separation — through family court processes, legal correspondence, financial pressure, silence, and repeated exposure to the person who caused harm.

I have approached it carefully, because it sits at the centre of a wider pattern. It does not stand alone as one difficult day. With distance, I can see it more clearly as one point in a much longer sequence.

Some hearings will be written about in time. Others still sit too close to the surface. Trauma does not unfold neatly, and revisiting certain moments still comes at a cost. This is not about withholding the truth. It is about writing when I can do so safely, without losing myself in the process.

What I understand now is that this day was not isolated. It was one of several points where coercive control appeared to adapt and move through process, paperwork, delay, and narrative. Naming that does not make it less painful. But it does make it clearer.

Before I reached the doors

Attending family court while still living with the effects of coercive control was one of the most difficult experiences of my life.

Before I even entered the building, I was on my knees outside. My heart rate was over 140. I was dizzy, shaking, and barely able to stand. The distress had been building for weeks, but it peaked before I reached the doors.

Taking lorazepam to get through a legal process was something I never imagined I would need. I do not say that with shame. I say it because people need to understand the physical reality of trauma. Walking into a courtroom with someone who has harmed you is not a neutral act. It is a physiological event. Your body remembers what your mind is trying to manage. Nothing about it is “just a hearing.”

In the weeks beforehand, I was still waiting for the police Protection of Vulnerable People team to return and take a further statement. They had attended only the month before in relation to coercive control. As far as I understood, the investigation was still live. I had also recently shared another file with police about continued harassment after separation.

I went into that hearing believing I might be asked to sit through further ABE interviews about the domestic abuse that had already occurred. I was trying to prepare for court while still bracing for more police processes. Trauma does not pause while systems catch up. It stacks.

I did not go alone

My friend came with me. She is the woman I trained as a nurse with, my child’s godmother, and one of the few people I trust to notice when I am not okay, even when I cannot say it.

I was genuinely afraid the stress could trigger a serious medical event. I needed someone beside me who would know what to do if my body gave out.

Before we reached the building, my legs went. My vision flashed. Inside the court, I sat taking ECGs with crushing chest pain, staring numbly at the wall as my vision blurred. I did not know whether what I was experiencing was cardiac, neurological, trauma-related, or all of it at once. That uncertainty made everything worse.

I also knew I could not let him see how much he affected me. That was part of surviving the room — not only because of what I had experienced for years, but because of what I believed my children had experienced too.

How a record can be reshaped

This is the part I most need people to understand, because it is where I believe the system failed us.

His bail restrictions had been removed because there had been no contact — not because the investigation had concluded. My understanding was that matters were pending further investigation. In court, that distinction did not feel properly recognised.

With a change in my solicitor, and limited context carried forward from earlier hearings, it felt as though he could present me as someone who simply complained about everyone, rather than someone trying to evidence a pattern of harm. He did not need to say it outright. The implication was enough.

There was reference to a misconduct-in-public-office investigation involving a sergeant, framed in a way that seemed to connect it to me negatively. My understanding was the opposite. That investigation existed independently of me. My later contact with Professional Standards was to understand how information connected to my case appeared to be circulating.

Police names were used during discussion of the coercive control case in a way that, to me, created the impression I had exaggerated or invented events. At one point, his barrister referred to someone as though they were a police officer and suggested the coercive control case was going nowhere. My watch showed my heart rate pass 160, then drop sharply. The person referred to was, as I understood it, a civilian statement taker — not a police officer. That distinction mattered. In the room, the way it was presented appeared to carry an authority it should not have had.

I became deeply concerned that he seemed to have access to information I did not understand him having at that stage. I contacted Professional Standards because I needed clarity on how that could have happened. At the time, I did not receive a clear explanation. My understanding is that a name was passed for anti-corruption checks. The uncertainty itself became part of the trauma.

And I could not even read his position statement myself. Every submission seemed to contain another distortion, another reframing, another attempt to present himself as the victim. I had to send it to a friend and ask her to read it aloud, because I already knew what it would do to me. That was not avoidance. That was survival.

This is what I want people to sit with: claims were allowed to stand, while I felt I had no real space to answer them with the evidence I held. A pattern I could document was treated as a series of complaints. That is how a truthful account can be quietly overshadowed — not by being disproven, but by never being properly heard.

The name for it

At the time, I did not know the term DARVO — Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. I do now.

I wish I had known it at the first hearing. I wish I had understood that what felt chaotic and cruel also had a recognised pattern, and that I could name what I was seeing before it was used so effectively against me.

After changing solicitors, everything felt different. I had a wonderful solicitor who instructed a prepared, skilled, and deeply professional barrister. But by then, some damage had already been done. She warned me that seeking a fact-finding hearing would be challenging, particularly given how earlier hearings had unfolded.

What mattered to me more than winning was that she saw it. She could see what I believed was happening, even when others could not. Like most people who took the time to review the evidence, she appeared visibly dismayed by what had unfolded over the previous twelve months. She was professional, but she was also human. That mattered.

How control survives separation

Coercive control does not always stop when a relationship ends. Sometimes it adapts. In legal settings, it can appear through narrative control, selective detail, official-sounding language, professional name-dropping, delay, financial pressure, and using process itself as leverage.

It is not always loud. It can appear calm, organised, and reasonable on the surface, while the person who has been harmed is left looking dysregulated, unwell, anxious, or difficult — because their body is reacting to trauma. That is one of the hardest parts. The courtroom sees behaviour in the room. It may not see the history that created it. And that is where victims can be misunderstood.

This is why trauma-informed practice matters in family court. Not to remove scrutiny. Not to accept every account without question. But to understand that presentation is not the same as risk. A calm person is not automatically safe. A distressed person is not automatically unreliable. The task should be to understand the pattern, not to judge the performance in the room.

My mental health was raised, but not as the predictable consequence of prolonged abuse, fear, and repeated re-traumatisation. It felt as though it was used to discredit me. I was asked whether a GP had diagnosed me. No — a psychologist. I found myself having to evidence weight loss and PTSD, while his narrative was given space to land.

When trauma symptoms become visible, the focus can shift from what happened to you to how you are presenting. The harm moves into the background, and the injured person risks becoming the problem. That is not safeguarding. That is misreading trauma.

When the hearing ended

My body finally gave up. Outside the courtroom, I was sick from the stress. I could not regulate my breathing. My vision was full of stars. My best friend knelt beside me, held my hair back, tried to keep me conscious, and helped me make sense of the ECGs I had taken.

The magistrates did not see that. They did not see the collapse that followed, or what it had cost to sit still and stay upright in that room.

My friend saw something else. She saw the look he gave as he left. A smirk — directed at her, not me. I did not need to see it myself for it to matter. She understood what it meant in the context of everything she had witnessed.

Others can put on a façade. I cannot. My body tells the truth whether I want it to or not.

The control that ran alongside the court

The coercive control did not stop at court. It ran alongside it.

He had pushed for the mortgage to be resolved and for me to pay him out within a short timescale. I progressed it much faster than expected. After that, there were delays. He was difficult to contact, including through solicitors, and the signing process dragged on for months. He eventually signed shortly before court, after repeated chasing. In the meantime, from July to December, I was paying over £600 more per month on the mortgage alone. That was crippling.

Child maintenance was also inconsistent. I did not rely on it, but I claimed it because I wanted to understand whether the control would continue. It did. The Child Maintenance Service later moved him onto “collect and pay” because payments were not arriving consistently. That did not resolve the wider impact, but it confirmed what I had already felt.

Delay can be control. Silence can be control. Financial instability can be control. And when children are involved, that instability affects them too.

There were also inconsistencies around where he was living. The address declared in court did not appear to match information provided elsewhere. My understanding was that safeguarding checks were carried out at an address where he may not actually have been residing.

That mattered, because safeguarding checks are only meaningful if they reflect reality. If the wrong address is checked, risk can be missed. If inconsistencies are not challenged, the burden falls back onto the person trying to raise concerns. Again.

What I cannot make peace with

This was one of the hardest days of my life. Looking back, it still is. At no point did I feel properly heard. I looked emotionally numb and detached. In reality, I was in an absolute state. I genuinely believed I might walk into that building and not walk out again.

What haunts me most is how easily someone with a long-established pattern of behaviour can appear credible in a professional space, while the traumatised person is left looking unstable, defensive, or difficult. I had evidence of patterns, but I did not feel I had the space to present them. A diagnosis that existed because of trauma was used in a way that felt damaging, while other relevant context went unchallenged.

That day changed the way I saw the world. It showed me how easily truth can be overshadowed by performance. How quickly harm can be reframed as credibility. How easily a victim can be positioned as the problem.

My children and I left that process feeling invalidated again. I did not feel there was real recognition of risk. I did not feel there was a meaningful sense of safeguarding. I did not feel the impact on us was understood. I was left fighting to stay upright, while the focus seemed to move further away from the children’s safety. That is the part I cannot make peace with.

The lead-up was difficult. The day itself was traumatic. The aftermath was brutal. And through all of it, the one thing that should have mattered most felt barely protected: my children, especially our shared child.

Why I started writing

That week, I founded the original website, NurseAgainstAbuse.co.uk. I did not create it because I had answers. I created it because I needed somewhere to put the truth — somewhere to explain what coercive control looks like after separation, somewhere to show how systems can misunderstand trauma, somewhere to advocate for victims who are seen as difficult, emotional, unstable, or obstructive when they are actually trying to survive.

That site eventually became part of the wider journey that led to NAAVoices. Looking back, it was not just advocacy. It was survival. It was my attempt to make something useful out of something that was still harming me.

This is my personal account of events as I experienced and understood them at the time. It is not legal advice. It is not written to speak for every survivor, and it is not written to attack the family court as a whole.

It is written to show what it can feel like when coercive control continues through systems that do not fully recognise it. Because trauma is not always visible in the courtroom. Because the person who looks calm may not be safe. Because children’s welfare must remain central, especially when adults are performing credibility around them. Safeguarding cannot depend on who appears most composed.

Post-separation abuse does not always look like abuse to the people watching. Sometimes it looks like paperwork. Sometimes it looks like delay. Sometimes it looks like calm words in a professional room. And sometimes it looks like a victim on her knees outside court, trying to stand up before anyone sees.

If you are affected by anything in this post: support is available. In an emergency, call 999. The 24-hour National Domestic Abuse Helpline (run by Refuge) can be reached on 0808 2000 247. For mental health support, you can call Samaritans free on 116 123 at any time.