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Join certified trauma professional Dr. Amy Hoyt and licensed therapist Leina Hoyt, MFT at https://www.mendingtrauma.com as they teach you how to recover from trauma and cPTSD. Trauma shows up in our everyday reactions and sensations and recovering requires a multi-prong approach that considers the mind, body and spirit. Dr. Amy and Leina will teach you the most emerging research and skills to empower you to overcome your past traumas. They address nervous system health, somatic therapy, trauma, cPTSD, EMDR, Neurofeedback, IFS (Internal Family Systems therapy), and many other modes of recovering from trauma. As mental health experts, sisters and trauma survivors, they teach you the tools that actually helped them recover, are backed by research and have helped thousands of their clients. Each episode is packed with clinically effective methods as well as scientific findings to guide you through your own trauma healing journey. Whether discussing cPTSD, PTSD, medical trauma, somatic therapy, nervous system regulation, EMDR or neurofeedback, Amy and Leina will help you recover from trauma so that you can reconnect to yourself and others.
Dr. Amy Hoyt (00:01)
Welcome back everyone, we are happy to be here, we love our time with you, and this week we are addressing high conflict divorce, custody battles, and trauma. Let's talk about those.
Leina (00:17)
Those are inexorably linked in my opinion. Having, well, having done a lot of work in family court in Sacramento for almost 20 years, really, it's really difficult to have a high conflict divorce and to have custody issues and not have it spark some trauma in you. It's, it's almost impossible.
Dr. Amy Hoyt (00:21)
How so?
Leina (00:45)
So because trauma and traumatic experiences are individualized and the level of trauma is also individualized, we can't say that everybody in this situation is having trauma or that they are now diagnosable with PTSD. But in general, the dynamic that's created in that kind of difficulty that involves
family law, family court, that is a very traumatic dynamic. And unfortunately, because family law is kind of broken in most states, it mimics the dynamic of intimate partner violence because there's somebody else in charge and controlling the situation. You don't have any control.
Dr. Amy Hoyt (01:35)
That is super interesting. Let's backtrack a second. How do you define a high conflict divorce?
Leina (01:43)
How I define a high conflict divorce is a divorce in which there is constant interaction where one partner or former partner is berating, bothering, stalking, criticizing, judging, engaging over and over and over again. And the person who's on the receiving end of this...
Like, the fact that they're getting divorced doesn't make any difference to their exposure of abuse.
Dr. Amy Hoyt (02:19)
So can you ever have a high conflict divorce where there wasn't abuse in the marriage?
Leina (02:25)
It is likely that there were abusive dynamics that maybe were not as evident prior to the divorce. But it would be, mm-hmm.
Dr. Amy Hoyt (02:34)
Okay. And then the divorce starts to kind of bring some of this into a new heightened level. Okay. Okay. So what I know, I've done high conflict divorce workshops with a colleague of mine. And one thing that we saw as a pattern is that in all of the high conflict divorces that we were working with,
Leina (02:42)
Yeah
Dr. Amy Hoyt (03:04)
one of the partners was some type of narcissist.
Leina (03:09)
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Amy Hoyt (03:11)
And that created, you know, and that's, know that's not always a hundred percent of the case, but in this dynamic, it created this need for an emotional reaction that they were constantly trying to get from their soon to be ex partner.
Leina (03:28)
Right. So the person who had those characteristics or traits of narcissism, you're saying, they would constantly bait the partner or former partner to get a reaction. Yep.
Dr. Amy Hoyt (03:34)
Mm-hmm.
Exactly. And there was a lot of gas lighting, a lot, a lot of bid for sole custody.
Leina (03:45)
Absolutely.
Correct, because it's a power thing.
Dr. Amy Hoyt (03:54)
Hmm. Which led to, you know, extended time in the court, which was almost what I noticed, was almost like fuel for this person.
Leina (04:09)
Right. The person who you're saying had a lot of these traits. Got it. Yeah.
Dr. Amy Hoyt (04:13)
Correct.
And what I saw, the dynamic I noticed is that the person filing for divorce was kind of fed up with the dynamic and really couldn't take it anymore. And that triggered even more of the narcissistic behavior from the soon to be ex partner.
Leina (04:39)
And the bid for sole custody makes perfect sense when you're dealing with a power and control dynamic. The other thing that I don't know if people realize this consciously is that when you have been in a less than ideal partnership or marriage and there have been abusive behaviors and the person who
has the power, seeks sole custody, it is absolutely horrifying for the parent who has been victimized by this person's behavior to think of their child or children under sole supervision of this abuser. And I can remember some of the work that I did years ago was coaching people who had had an abusive relationship
into being less reactive in court because the judges would see, oftentimes this would be a woman, the judges would see this woman as unreasonable, dramatic, histrionic, reactive, without any realization that this was a survival response. And the idea of your child having no protection from this person who's been abusive is so awful
that you can hardly stand it.
Dr. Amy Hoyt (06:08)
Absolutely. We are taught, mean, you know, gender dynamics comes into play in all parts of society and including the family court system. And, you know, there's no one size fits all anymore. We see custody going to men where, you know, 50 years ago that was unheard of. We see women who can be abusive. So we know that the cut and dry
Leina (06:33)
Absolutely.
Dr. Amy Hoyt (06:38)
dynamics of male abuser female victim are not necessarily always the case. Nevertheless, it is definitely still the predominant dynamic of, you know, typically we see male abusing female physically, sexually. So the verbal abuse can be more nuanced.
Leina (07:03)
Right.
Dr. Amy Hoyt (07:07)
There can be a lot more female to male verbal abuse because I mean, I could never overpower my first husband, but I could yell and scream and fight back in that way. And so I think that's the other thing that's really important to address is that when I was a victim of domestic violence,
Leina (07:18)
No. No.
Sure.
Dr. Amy Hoyt (07:37)
but I also participated as an abuser, right? Verbally. And that's part of the dynamic is this really like explosive relationship. It's super rare that you have someone that never responds to the abuse. Now, does that mean? Sure, it can.
Leina (07:39)
Right. Right.
Correct. It can happen, but it's very rare.
Dr. Amy Hoyt (08:07)
But that doesn't mean, you know, that I somehow made him hit me or, you know, so I just want to kind of clarify for a long time, I had so much guilt and shame about that, you know, calling him the abuser when in fact I felt like, you know, cause I would try and hit back, I would try and fight back. So then, you know, it really, it just becomes such a dysfunctional and explosive dynamic.
Leina (08:23)
I hate
Right.
Yeah, and it's hard to see accurately in that dynamic. And I would like to clarify that more and more we're seeing more women use a style of engaging and some characteristics of personality that are maybe sometimes more subtle and that are
Dr. Amy Hoyt (08:43)
Yes.
Leina (09:07)
using that in the court situation or custody situation to manipulate. And so there are more and more men who are being impacted by that type of domestic violence within the relationship.
Dr. Amy Hoyt (09:16)
Yes.
Great, great point. Yes, those clear gendered lines are no longer, you know, as distinct as they were in terms of who's victimizing who's the victim. Yes, thank you for that distinction.
Leina (09:34)
Right.
But I do love your clarification, Amy, about how confusing and...
foggy it can be about responsibility in terms of if I fought back or if I tried to protect myself or if I had an emotional reaction, does that mean that I am equally at fault? And I don't know that that's at all helpful and it doesn't take into account the actual dynamic. So if you look at it from a dynamic standpoint, it is the person
in general that has the most power that is going to be able to engage in all these behaviors and if you try to respond or react or fight back to them it is likely that they will turn that on you and act like you're the one in fact that's a hallmark of domestic violence actually is I have to do this because you won't do what I want like if you yeah go ahead
Dr. Amy Hoyt (10:39)
Yeah, I remember my husband called the police on me because I fought back and it's not unusual.
Leina (10:46)
Yes! Yes! That's not unusual. No! It's terrible.
Dr. Amy Hoyt (10:54)
And so then I was the one who was being talked to by the police and I was the crazy out of control one.
Leina (11:00)
Correct.
Correct. That is very, very common. That's why a lot of laws, particularly in California after the O.J. Simpson case, that's why a lot of laws in the states will demand that if there's a domestic violence situation you have to separate the two immediately and that sometimes you have to take both people in because it's not clear. It looks clear, but it's not clear.
Dr. Amy Hoyt (11:30)
Yeah, that's really interesting. when we have, let's talk about how obvious, I to me, it seems like the link to trauma is so clear. But one of the things I noticed when I was doing the workshop is that a lot of people have a definition of trauma where it's, they didn't really account for the fact that this could be trauma,
Leina (11:32)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Amy Hoyt (11:57)
going through a high conflict divorce or going through a custody battle. And while every high conflict divorce and custody battle is not necessarily trauma, because as you all, all of our listeners remember, trauma is very individual. You can grow up in the same house, have the same thing happen. Some people experience it as trauma and some may not.
Leina (11:57)
Right!
Yeah.
Well, and it might be a better word to use traumatic because that kind of implies the personal maybe that sometimes what you experience is traumatic for you, but it may not be for somebody else.
Dr. Amy Hoyt (12:39)
Well, and I'm actually thinking of the word trauma because of the sense of overwhelm. there are things that will overwhelm our system. That is, you know, the hallmark of trauma, that sense of overwhelm where we believe, we cannot cope. I mean, we can't cope. That's the overwhelm. So that leads to, you know, either a collapse, a fight, a flight...
Leina (12:45)
Oh, okay.
Right.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Dr. Amy Hoyt (13:08)
reaction. And so I'm thinking of that sense of overwhelm. So there are going to be people going through a high conflict divorce and custody battle that don't necessarily feel flooded by overwhelm. But I would say that's fairly rare.
Leina (13:21)
Mm-hmm.
Well, and I think also the other thing is that this is a nervous system state that is not conscious and not controllable consciously. And it's this sense that totally overwhelms the nervous system. And so you have really very limited options. You can collapse or you can fight or you can run.
Dr. Amy Hoyt (13:55)
Yeah, yeah. And we just want to be super clear that this can be a trauma.
Leina (14:03)
Right.
Dr. Amy Hoyt (14:05)
And you know, sometimes...
I don't know why there's reluctant. I guess the reluctance to name something a trauma is, it seems much more serious. It seems much more scary, I guess. But I think when we understand that it can be labeled as a trauma, then we have the option to seek help for it if we choose, right? And sometimes not in the middle
of the high conflict divorce. Sometimes we don't have the bandwidth, but just be aware that this can be considered a trauma and that there is help.
Leina (14:43)
no.
And oftentimes it will be, you know, months or years down the road before you have the bandwidth to get the help you need. There are some clients that I've worked with that are in this relationship in their marriage or their partnership where there's a lot of power and control dynamics. And we, we still work together and we still work to help them. I still work with them to help them have a sense of, in,
healthy entitlement and individuality and boundaries and that kind of thing. And so I don't stop working with them because they're still involved in this dynamic. But oftentimes after there's been some space and you don't have as much interaction with the person who's perpetrated violence against you, that's when you can maybe get in and start doing the work.
And it's okay, it's okay. we're just doing what we need to to survive. And it's okay that things happen at different times for different people.
Dr. Amy Hoyt (16:02)
I love that. That's so true. I was just talking to one of my older children last night and they had a friend over, were FaceTiming and the friend made a comment about, you know, this milestone in life that they haven't gotten to until now and they're kind of behind and, and we were talking about how it doesn't, the timeline is not what's important. It's really the trajectory.
Where are we going from here? Even incrementally. And in fact, we know from our training and trauma that incremental changes are super impactful.
Leina (16:39)
Absolutely, that's a great point.
Dr. Amy Hoyt (16:42)
So we are grateful that you are here with us. As always, we would love to hear from you via email. Hello at Mending Trauma if you have any ideas for episodes or questions. And we are honored that you spend time with us.
Leina (17:02)
Thanks for joining us. Have a great week, everyone.