The Custody Blueprint

Today, we’re stepping into a conversation that sits at the intersection of survival, strategy, and systemic failure. My guest is Reneé Rodriguez, founder of The Custody Blueprint® Program — a framework that has helped countless protective parents navigate high‑conflict custody battles, especially when the other parents weaponize the system.

Reneé isn’t just a strategist. She’s a survivor. She’s a disruptor. And she’s someone who looked at the chaos of family court and said, ‘There has to be a better way.’

I relate as I went through a traumatic divorce and domestic abuse myself

Today, she’s going to walk us through that better way.”

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hi everybody, it's Mimi from Be Hard, Empower Yourself. And today we have with us Renee Rodriguez. Did I pronounce your name right? Yes, you did. I try to be an expert at that. And um Renee is the founder of the Custody Blueprint Program, which we're going to talk about. And many, many, many mothers, um, and maybe fathers too, have been in this situation because of that intersection that comes up when children are involved. And sometimes we're we think we're doing things for the children, but we're doing them for ourselves, and the children get hurt. But Renee, uh, say hello first and tell us a little bit about you. Yes, hello.

SPEAKER_02 0:58

Hello, hello, everyone. Um Yeah, so uh my name is Renee Rodriguez. I am a custody strategist. I spent about 15 years in nonprofit and corporate strategy, and then another 10 moving the strategy into the family court space. But I'm also um a certified DV advocate and certified in um strangulation prevention. I'm a divorce mediator and a parent coordinator in New Jersey as well.

SPEAKER_00 1:30

Yeah. And you and you're also a survivor of the kind of things that you now help people with. Very much so. Yeah. Um my uh well, the father of my children, I don't even want to use the word husband, but the father of my children, it's a long time ago. But when I uh divorced, when I finally had up and divorced him, like he used the children as pawns, and some of the things he did was dangerous to them. Like he put sugar in my gas tank in my car. Now, if someone didn't tip me off, who knows? I have the kids in that car, you know, things like that. He was violent. Um, but you know what? It was the early 70s, and they did not protect women at all. At all. There was no hotline, nothing. And um I went through a lot of stuff where I think now, boy, I wish I had some of the things that are available now. But I survived. I survived, and um, my kids are great. They went to college, they have careers, they have children of their own. So I do a good job there. So, what was the breaking point that made you realize that uh parents needed a blueprint, that uh their own custody battle um needed help?

SPEAKER_02 2:59

Yeah, I I would have to say it was uh in the middle of my own custody battle. Um I had a great lawyer. I still felt like there was a gap. I still felt like there was more that he could have understood. There was more that I could do to help us in family court. And I had happened upon, and this was a long time ago when there really was no such thing, like the uh divorce coach. I don't mean like the, like the goat, which she's sort of still remains, but rather she was the only one out there really doing it. So I worked with her. Um, she was the one who identified that it was rare that she had seen someone who uh she said was the second worst case of psychological abuse she had ever seen in her life. Um but we did quite well and then it reached a point where we were going to be in a custody evaluation. Now, this is a piece of a custody battle where um, if the custody battle goes on long enough, they bring in somebody to spend an extensive amount of time investigating you and your co-parent and talking to the kids to determine what should the custody arrangement be, what should that evaluator recommend to the court? And when I went to my divorce coach and said, you know, how do I prep for this? She said, you know, this is this is a big, huge thing. I know a couple of people who are starting to help people with this. I think they're full, but I'll ask. She went back, she came back to me and said, one of them is not doing it anymore. She can't take all of the stories of abuse. And the other one is is full for for months.

SPEAKER_00 4:42

And you had your children. You had them in your custody while this was going on. Yes.

SPEAKER_02 4:48

I did. Yeah, absolutely. And she said, you know, Renee, the thing of it is is you have a background in strategy. What if you just try to put something together and me and you will do our best? So I went ahead and put something together, keeping in mind my background. And when I showed it to her, she said, I've never seen anything like this. I've never seen abuse laid out so clearly and so compellingly. And she said, You should be doing this. Um, to which I was kind of like slow you roll over in the middle of a custody battle. But a year and a half after my custody battle was done, someone else who was working with Tina had said, you know, she's sharing your templates and your tools with everyone. And they're so good. And you should expand and you should take real ownership of these things and do this. So I retired from doing all the strategy and the nonprofits and the corporations, and I decided to simply strike out and create something to fill that gap that was there. And in truth, even now, as we get more people into the field, is still there. So for me to be able to create that due to the background I had was something that felt like a calling, but it also became something that became very natural for me. I uh very much enjoyed the places I worked, but do something that had such real, direct, immediate impact. Yes. You know, it almost seemed like something I couldn't walk away from. The real challenge, of course, as usual, finding the balance between indeed, you know, someone, many people walk away from this because hearing these stories all the time, if you don't have the right kind of personality to be able to have complete empathy for it, but but to compartmentalize it, yeah. You need that for your own health, but you also need it in order to be able to do it well. So um, you know, now at this point we're a company, you know, there's uh quite a number of people, about 20 of us, and um, we're we're doing the work that's based on the custody blueprint, which I did indeed expand to cover City A to Z. But the truth is that my heart and my personal passion when I'm working one-on-one with people, most of the people who are sent directly to me for preparing for that all-important custody evaluation, because 85 to 90 percent of judges will go along with whatever that custody evaluator recommends. So it's the evaluator that you need to get right.

SPEAKER_00 7:22

Yeah, we didn't have those things back in the day, but my um sore spot with any situation where people are breaking up and they have children is my ex did this. They use the children as pawns. And um, that is you know, so terrible to me. And um, for instance, like he would tell them, Oh, I'm gonna he had weekends, you know, they get weekends, and there were weekends he didn't come, and then, or he'd say, I'm coming next weekend, and we're going to Disney World. Now I knew that wasn't gonna happen. So the one Sunday they sat in the window watching him, watching for him for an hour. And of course he didn't come. And I said, You know, something must have happened, and then you have to try not to say anything bad about the other person. Let's go to the park. One other short thing he did, which you know, it's just amazing to me that people are like this, so evil. I had to um be on welfare because he didn't pay child support. Yeah, but the lucky part of that is at the time, anyway, if you were a mother with children and not receiving the child support, therefore had no income, because you couldn't work even, you know, um, they got money, food stamps, and they gave me money to go to college. They paid for my college and they bought me a car. It was like, oh my god. So they were in, I got them in two good nursery schools because they would the age difference, the one school would not take unless you were potty trained, you know, which today there there's some schools like that too. Anyway, I would take them to their daycares, I would go to college, I would study at the university, and between classes, I would do my homework because I wasn't gonna have time at home, you know, that kind of thing. And he saw that I was succeeding and becoming something, and he called the uh welfare office and said, um she's working, which is a lie. He told her I was working. So um they stopped the welfare and everything. And then one other time I had the children and um he took them for the weekend, but he had literally um moved in with a woman that wanted children, and so the weekend he took them, he kept them. He kept them, thinking this woman could be their mother figure. I mean, really, it took me. In fact, I he had she, not him, had them for months, and I did get a job and I worked. But guess what, Renee? I was seeing them on weekends. And after a while, I said, you know what? This isn't bad because I spent more time with them on the weekends than when it was reversed, right? So I was gonna let it go on. But when he when he saw that I overcame it and accommodated it, he came to my parents' house on Easter Sunday, left the kids at the door, drove away, they rang the doorbell, and I went down there, and they said, Mommy, daddy said, if you don't want us, we have to go to an orphanage. Now that's just evil. Evil, evil, evil, you know. So that's just that part of my story, and that was in the 70s, and there's a lot more outlets now that you can go to and people, but still, you what you do is very important because he didn't want custody. He just wanted to torture me. And anyway, that's my part of my little story, just to throw that in there. So the listeners know that I've been through it. I understand what you're talking about. And with your program, um, you help the parents respond to the post-separation abuse that continues through the legal system. Explain what that means.

SPEAKER_02 11:45

Well, it it's similar to what you were just talking about. It's about punishment, right? It's um it's essentially I must punish you for seeing through me, I must punish you for leaving me, I must punish you for identifying that I'm not much of anything. Um, I must punish you for taking my property, the children, my property, yourself, my property, anything else.

SPEAKER_00 12:10

Oh my gosh, yes.

SPEAKER_02 12:11

Anything. It's about punishing the other person um for nothing.

SPEAKER_00 12:18

It act, but it falls over to the kids too, because they witness things they shouldn't witness, they hear things and they see their mother upset. I'll say mother because I can only talk from that aspect. But um what you said about ownership. Um, yes, there are some narcissistic or psychologically ill men. I have to talk about the men because I only have that experience. You can talk about the other side, but they do look at you as property. Like my ex-husband considered me his property. And even after I divorced him, he stalked me for two years. Like he would not let go. He wanted me back, and he also made it uh so impossible for me to survive. And I think other women have done this, that a couple of times I tried to go back and make it work. And it what couldn't work, and and then of course, when I'd say it's not working, we go back to the punishment phase, you know. So the toll it took on me. I don't even notice what happened at the time because I was so concerned about my children, you know. But there's a book, um, The Body T Takes the Score. Have you heard that? Yeah, Body Takes the Score by Bessel Basic Score. Yeah. Oh my God. So that that is it. That stays in you, that doesn't go away. Even when I finally got rid of him, and you know, uh it's still all in there, and other things came up, and you know, I have I had to rebuild myself psychologically and spiritually, yeah. So you find too, I'm sure the same thing.

SPEAKER_02 14:03

I mean, it's and it varies as to how long it might take for any of these women. I know you said, you know, we talk about men. I I do want to make it clear that you know, 85% of domestic violence victims are women, and out of the 10 to 15 percent really who are males, 49% of those males are being abused by another male, and 48% are being abused by a woman. So, yes, absolutely women can be women. It's this much of the, you know, most of the time it's going to be the father, unfortunately. Um, but recovering from it is something that it really takes time. And I'm so glad that you're so familiar with Van der Koch's work with The Body Keeps the Score, because he really goes through the top four ways to recover from it. Yeah. Right. These are the things that there are lots of things you can do that will help. But if you're looking to really get rid of the trauma, here's basically what you should be doing. And so, of course, I'm going to recommend it's a very dense read. And so many times a lot of my clients have said that when they do uh, you know, are brave enough to start listening to it, which I think everyone should, listening to it on audio is um, you know, a much easier way to go for many people. But when it comes to I I would say custody, and this is where it gets important, that trauma showing up in court can seriously hurt the case because that punishment, that post-separation abuse that you were asking about, um, can really be weaponized in court, most especially and most effectively by the abuser creating a narrative. You know, look at this mom, look at this woman. She's the children are anxious because she's anxious, she's mentally unstable, she had PBD, she had which she may or may not even have had. Um, you know, she's this way, she's that way. And when that trauma shows up in the courtroom on that protective parent, on that protective mom, it fulfills that false narrative coming from the abuser. Yes, it does. So it's really crucial that what when we're doing the work, we call it a court persona, and I'll tell you why, because that may sound cold, but it's a way for people for that we find very effective for our protective parents to sit up and take notice about the fact that you have different personas that are necessary and that are largely or completely authentic. You're a different person when you are parenting your kids, you're a different person at a parent-teacher conference, you're a different person when you're interviewing for a job, you're a different person in an interview with, I'm sorry, at a meeting with your boss in church, uh having margaritas with the girls, right? You're a different person in each of these circumstances, but that doesn't make any of them fake. No. We know that you know, we are made up of all these different things inside of us that come out. And there does need to be a court persona as well that's equally as authentic. Yeah, that there is that same level of awareness that one might have, for example, going into a job interview. What is the decorum there? How is it that you're showing up? Yeah. What it's okay to say, and what do you unfortunately need to let go because the court is not trained in it, or they don't recognize it, or they don't care, or it doesn't fit the law for them.

SPEAKER_00 17:27

Oh, I know.

SPEAKER_02 17:28

All the things you have to let go of, even though they're an important part of the story, in order to focus on the important parts of the story to make a difference in custody case so that you can get the custody arrangement that's safest for your children.

SPEAKER_00 17:43

Yeah. And I grew up in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and Joe Biden's sometimes. I always just say that because we actually knew his younger brother, because he's older than us. But anyway, Scranton was a very political and even connected mafia people were in the town, connected to the larger web. They were the smaller web of a big family that might be, you know, I'm talking about mafia families. And um, my ex was involved with people in both of those areas, and it wasn't what you knew, it was who you knew. Okay. So it didn't matter if you beat your wife, if you didn't pay child support, when you went to court, you know, and they looked over and they saw who your lawyer was, who was also a big deal, they would err on the side of my case and go with them. Um, and I had that happen to me quite a few times. And then last time they did it to me, I mean, he hit me in front of my children, you know. And then another night, this is all the same case. Um, I did go out with girlfriends, like you said, and my girls were with my parents. I think that's responsibility for a mother, they're with safe people. I could stay out as long as I wanted to. I was over 21 and I left a place, and uh, my date and I had a great time with the two bartenders. So we closed up. So it was like two in the morning, and we left, and we're walking towards our cars, and he stopped. See, he I don't know how he found out, but he knew a lot of people. Somebody in the bar that night told him I was there. So he stopped his car in the middle of the street with the engine running, jumped out. Now, mind you, this guy was a bouncer. So he was six foot four and he weighed about 280 pounds. He was a big man. He jumped out, went right by the men, punched me in the face. He punched me right in the nose, he knocked me out. I was unconscious. Unconscious. I had four, I had three witnesses, right? And then he like ran back to his car and drove off before the guys could, you know, it was so fast they couldn't stop it. So I go to court with all of this. I they did make up what they call a bill. You know, you have to have it passed first by the grand jury. So um, I had the three men testify. And when I went to testify, the guy that I think was folks being on my side that would want the bill passed, he kept emphasizing that I was out drinking till two in the morning. And like I said, wait a minute, the children were with their grandparents. Long story short, the bill didn't pass. And and I, like I said, it's a who-you know town. I left there, I was so ripping mad. I walked down to the DA's office, I walked in, and I said to the lawyer that did this trial, I don't know how much they paid you or who paid you, but I need you to know that I am going to buy a gun right now. I'm leaving here and I'm gonna buy a gun. And he said, I don't think you should tell me that. And I said, Yeah, I think I should tell you that. Because it's that bad, it's that bad that when he does stuff like this and the police come, he's already gone. And they tell me, we can't do anything because he's not here now. And one day a police from this is this is hard to believe, but it's true. It's it's in my book, um, Raised by Wolves, Trapped by Demons. He hit me one night when I was coming home from being out with the girls, and my kids were with my parents. It was a weekend. And I called the police, and the police man said before he left, look, we can never do anything unless they're actually on the scene and we could see, you know, what's going on. Get a gun and shoot 'em next time. Very right. It's to like in Florida, they have the uh what's it called? I can't think her name. Sanderground, Sanderground law. So that's this is back in the 70s. They didn't do that then. And he this is the funny part. He said, and if he's outside the apartment when you shoot him, drag him inside. Well, I thought this is amazing. But I didn't shoot him. I did have a gun. Uh I did, I did buy a gun, I did have it, yeah. But didn't come to that. But there was nothing else for me. And then, like I said, that was 19 between 1974 to uh 1980, that I had him in my life that I couldn't get. I even moved away. He went to the town I moved to. It was like, what am I gonna do? You know, so I totally understand the predicament when you're going if custody battle. This wasn't even a custody battle, this was an ownership of his ex-wife battle. Yeah. But I I totally understood the children, the children are affected by this, you know, in the custody battles. I can only imagine. You can't keep everything from them.

SPEAKER_02 23:19

Well, I think it's I think it is possible to keep everything from them, but I think that the uh the abusive parent does tend to drag them into the middle of it.

SPEAKER_00 23:32

It's kind of hard not to. I, you know, being in their shoes, yeah, I never I never wanted to say bad things about their father. Like I never told them when they were young, oh I he hit me last night. You know, I wouldn't say that. But I remember one Christmas, my daughter wanted a bike, and there was no way I could buy a bike. And I slipped and I said, Well, if your father paid his child support, I could get you a bike. Oh my God, I was so sorry after I said that. You know, that was one of the things you're now told not to do, you know, blame the other parent for that. But I felt badly for her that I said that because it damaged her, you know. But with um when you said they they don't notice, kids notice pretension, I'm sure.

SPEAKER_02 24:23

Absolutely, absolutely, they absolutely do. Yeah, whether or not that's due to a custody battle is a different thing, but they absolutely do. You know, it's I have a lot of um, I hear this a lot from clients where in some manner or another they share that their children have shared with their therapist or their teacher, whatever, that um, you know, my parents don't like each other very much. It's an interesting thing the way they have that interpretation, because really what we find is that the abusive parent is bad mouthing the heck out of the protective parent. And the protective parent is just very tense around their abuser. And so a child sort of defines that as the two parents not liking each other. Clearly, the one doesn't like the other, they read the tension as not liking, um, you know, and which, of course, there's truth to that. Obviously, an abused victim is not going to like their abuser, but the abuser is usually quite vocal about their disdain for others, even including the child's mother. Whereas a child's mother is just living in a very triggered state whenever they have to see their co-parent, whenever they're hearing about their co-parent. And I know parents who handle uh, you know, the abusive parent being talked about beautifully. You know, you know, dad took me to Disneyland and bought me all kinds of stuff. Meanwhile, she hasn't gotten paid child support, she hasn't been reimbursed for medical expenses, she hasn't seen anything, but she's not going to badmouth the dad. But of course, she's gonna feel triggered by the fact that she's taken on a second job, she's taken on a side hustle in order to make up for doing it all alone financially, and really raising the children alone anyway, because an abusive co-parent is just somebody who um is giving the healthier parent a break from parenting for a minute when they do get them. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, I know. Of course, the children are gonna think the parents don't like each other.

SPEAKER_00 26:20

Oh, yeah, there's no way, I mean, there's no way to fake it. And even if I could fake it, he was always hostile. So that came through. And he would say things about me that weren't true. And well, I'm gonna put them in an orphanage. I mean, to say that, forget about hurting me. That's child abuse. That's child abuse, absolutely. Yeah, and um, when my kids were teenagers, well, first of all, through all the trauma I had in the first part of my life, I became a functional alcoholic because the alcohol's a coping mechanism for me. And but I was very functional, like I was involved in all the school activities, I sent my kids some dance lessons, I had parties for their friends, and nobody ever thought of me as a drunk. Okay, but I was an alcoholic by standards of uh the health industry. And when I got sober years later, I was still depressed and I was still unhappy until I went to an inpatient institution to work on go deeper. And I was there for three weeks and I was a lot better, and then I came back and five years went by and I went into a deep depression. Now, they had told me at rehab that I was clinically depressed and had panic disorder. Oh, I wonder why. So those things didn't go away. And with clinical depression, like people don't have to be bad to you, and your life doesn't have to be bad, it's just all of a sudden it comes out of nowhere. And I went to the Karen Foundation for five days, and guess what they worked on? The family you grew up in, because unfortunately, we marry our fathers. And my father was alcoholic, and my mother was a narcissist. Okay, and I bring that into the picture because until I did all that work on myself, and the mothers that you work with, I'm sure they know they have to do a lot of work on themselves because the tall, just the battle, the battle going through this is so harmful to the psyche, like the woman. You know, it really is. I mean, I felt very um powerless, powerless. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 28:52

Yeah, yeah, there's a real, there's a helplessness and sometimes even a hopelessness that comes with that.

SPEAKER_00 29:00

And you can sometimes as a woman uh turn to another man, not because you really want to be with him, but as a protective device or turn to alcohol and drugs because you're so frantic. And um, that's the danger, too, that's out there. So with someone like you helping them and having an actual plan, that would relieve so much of the stress that that could prevent those side things that we are tend, we tend to do that. A lot of women do. And I don't blame them. I did it, you know. But uh, so let's go back to this. So when gathering evidence for the custody battle, uh they make mistakes. You see, there's number one, there's a number one mistake they make. What is that?

SPEAKER_02 29:52

No, it's not documenting enough, and it's a shame too, because um the thing about documentation, about getting evidence is that uh there's like this trend on the internet saying, you know, you don't have to get everything, you don't have to get everything. And um the we're finding more clients coming to us who have followed that advice, followed that trend. And then they're saying, hey, I'm being accused of of X, Y, and Z. And we'll be all kind of like, well, all you have to do is produce evidence against it, show that, show your recording of the exchange to show that you know that never happened. And by the way, when it comes to recording, children should never be aware that you are. But you know, and they'll say, Well, I didn't really, I don't have a bunch of stuff because it was getting exhausting. And I was kind of told you only use a small percentage anyway. It's kind of like, yes, but you use a small percentage of the total amount of what you've gotten. So it's um it's the number one thing we come across is that people don't have evidence of something. And we live now, it's like especially the last few years, you would think it would be longer, but time is in a little bit of a warp for people when they realize how easy it is to record. It hasn't actually been that long since it's been easy to record, it's been about three years or so.

SPEAKER_00 31:05

I didn't have multiple, unfortunately. I wish I did. Instead of a gun, I would have I should have bought some mace. That's what I should have done. I think back and I think, you know, every time I saw him, if I hit him with some mace, maybe he would have left me alone. Maybe. Yeah, but back then, you know, you just even the mindset of a woman back then was totally different than in this decade. Totally different. I was the um exception to the rule. I did not think that the woman had to be lesser than the man. I didn't believe that. I always wanted to go to college, I always wanted to be a teacher, and my parents and husbands, you know, they stood in the way. But at 27 years old, I put myself to college. Never too late. That was something I wanted, so I did it, you know, and um I at that age, I did not pursue being an educational high school English teacher, which was my original dream. But I did become a teacher because I taught handicapped people how to live alone in their own house or apartment where they were in nursing homes put there by their families. And I taught them the skills. I taught quadripleetics and got them out of nurses home, not nursing homes. And the families hated me. They hated me. Why? Because they were afraid, they were afraid, and I would show them the equipment that I got, how they could do things just by touching something with their forehead. I had it all mapped out. So the plan for me wasn't the plan that I made, but guess what? I was a teacher, right? I wasn't teaching English, but I was teaching something more important, actually. I think. So once these women, I just want them to hear this, once you get through all of this chaos, you know, and go through your stress levels and get yourself to a point where you can love yourself again. There is a path and you can get on it no matter how old you are. It doesn't matter, you know, life's not over. But you see them when they're really uh beaten up emotionally.

SPEAKER_02 33:26

Yeah, and I think what you're talking about really is like that next chapter. Yes. Right.

SPEAKER_00 33:32

So it's another chapter, maybe two.

SPEAKER_02 33:35

Yes, yes. But no, when we're working with them, they are still in the thick of it. Yeah. And I would have to say, you know, the second biggest mistake that we see with documentation, which I was hinting at, is um the idea that because you've gathered all this documentation, that you should be using all of this documentation when really the reason you're gathering that volume is because you're looking for the few pieces of gold in there that you can then use. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:04

Yeah, I know exactly what you're saying. So um if you can help the parents stay grounded when they feel everything's stacked against them, how do you do that? How do you get them to feel like it's gonna be okay?

SPEAKER_02 34:20

I think that as they begin to see their case being built in a way that can actually work, it can really help to calm down the nervous system and see things more clearly. Um, you know, we, you know, we've talked about the fact that we're using a methodology, we're using a set of tools and template templates called the custody blueprint. But what we're doing with that is we're taking there are the pieces everyone should be using. So we have everyone go through those, and then we have a full body of templates that are very specific to the custody blueprint. We then will find certain pieces that belong with certain people for their cases. So, really, what's happening is that these moms are able to say, okay, now I'm beginning to understand what I've got. Now I'm beginning to also understand what out of my story, out of what the reality is of me and my children's lives, the court actually cares about. And while the rest of it is valid, though those are the things that we need to let go of in order to focus on what will make a difference in court, because the rest becomes noise. It muddies the waters so that what is useful isn't as well paid attention to because there's there's too much and there's irrelevant stuff. Very relevant to these children, very relevant to these women, very relevant in the world of abuse, but not to court. And so we're looking at the abuse that will matter in court. We're looking at the control at the actions, at the documentation that will work in court, and then we're going beyond that, right? So what I'm looking at is the advantage of me having an actual real strategy background is that I'm able to take everything that I know and my way of doing things and look at it and say, okay, now that we've put together your case in a way that we know will make sense to the court, how can we push the envelope? How can we possibly help the court to see the abuse, even though we can't call it abuse, even though we can't, you know, push it too far? What is it that we can put in there that will make it so that they cannot look away, they cannot stop hearing the story, but truly understand it, and this can make a difference. And so, well, our work is transforming their cases. So if we have someone who came in and you're describing someone who's very powerful, very well connected, small town, where we get cases that are like that, whether they have all of those elements or some of those elements, it's still an uphill battle and it's still a losing case. So we're looking at this person was the primary caregiver. How can we keep her the primary caregiver? And if it looks like what they want to do because of the connections, is take the children away completely, then we have to decide is our strategy to show she's the primary caregiver, or is our strategy to simply be allow these children to still be with her? And we're able to look at it through a lens and decide what we want to do. My first choice is always going to be that the primary caregiver stays a primary caregiver. And that's the number one thing I'm fighting for. It's very hard for me to give up and step back and say we need to change our strategy to at least onto strategy. But if that's what we need to do, of course, that's what we're doing. I can't be the dog.

SPEAKER_00 37:40

So why don't you just clarify it a little bit more? Let's go through the core pillars of the blueprint. Sure.

SPEAKER_02 37:49

So there are three pillars to the custody blueprint. One of them is strategy and then there's evidence and mindset. We talked a little bit about mindset, which, you know, as we're working with people, we talk about their core persona, but also under the umbrella of mindset is how is this parent presenting her parenting? Because um there are places where women can get trapped into talking about their own parenting in a bad way, even though there's nothing bad about it. There are also particular, I mean, look, it it used to be that people would say, well, there's no manual to being a parent. There are all kinds of manuals to being a parent. There are entire sections in bookstores that could be a parent, right? And so sometimes people might be raising two or three kids and one of them is having problems. So sometimes we might take a look at saying, talk about what you're doing with each of these kids, talk about what's working, what's not, so that we can focus on making the court understand that you're a good parent, this didn't work, but it's not because you're a bad parent, right? So we we're sort of looking at both of those things, and people get very surprised by the way we talk about it, right? But we're looking at that, and all of it has to be 100% truth. Anyone who's coming in to the court saying something that isn't accurate, that isn't completely true, they're gonna get caught one way or another, and then they lose credibility entirely if they're female, right?

SPEAKER_01 39:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 39:13

The other two pillars then are gonna be um strategy and evidence. We've talked a little bit about evidence in a larger way, yeah. But we're really drilling down, when we're doing a deep dive into everyone's evidence, we're really looking for the top two or three categories that they can go in with, and then we're finding a way to make those things so robust, so convincing, right? And we're doing this in a way that helps their lawyer. The work we're doing does not take the place of a lawyer, rather, it actually really helps the lawyer. When people hire a lawyer, I think too many protective moms think of the lawyer as their savior. They're gonna come in and they're gonna win my case. That's if you ask me, if if we take aside the literalness of it, it's not actually really completely a lawyer's job. The lawyer's job is to be your voice in court. Yeah. So if people step back and say, well, of course, my lawyer's job is to win, okay, yes, I will agree with that statement in and of itself. But I'm working behind the scenes. I'm trying to fill the gap to breach the huge, gaping chasm between my lawyer is my savior, and yet why am I not winning?

SPEAKER_01 40:23

Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 40:23

The reason why they're slowly but surely, death by a thousand paper cuts for many protective moms, losing more and more time with their children, more and more protection of their children, is because they're leaving the case in the hands of their lawyer. Yeah, right. Absolutely. So the first thing they need to do is understand that they are the ones driving this, they are the ones preparing their case. They really are. And the second thing they need to do is to do that in exactly the right way.

SPEAKER_00 40:54

Right. I have a funny thing to say. With the parent, the father of my children, his lawyer. I am now married to his lawyer's brother.

SPEAKER_02 41:08

My God, that is hysterical.

SPEAKER_00 41:10

So ironic, right? And I actually sat across from him when he was defending my ex. And it was years later. And uh I had been in a relationship, and every time I tried to be in a relationship, if it didn't work out, the ex would find out, he'd call me immediately, like he can't couldn't let go of me. Like it could have been three years, four years, and oh, you're single again. Like he wants to worm his way back. So when I got with my husband, God, it had been I want to say 14 years since I was divorced from the tormentor. And he called. And my husband, my well, I'm with 40 years now, okay? He's sitting next to me, and the ex started. Oh, I heard you're single. I said, No, not only am I in a relationship, but it's with your lawyer's brother. I enjoyed saying that so much. Yes, I bet you did. That is anyway. It's sort of an ironic twist at the end, you know. But uh, yeah, it wasn't me. We're together 40 years. I guess it wasn't me that was the bad person, you know. Yeah, and my kids loved love my husband, they call him Poppy, and he's been in their life since they're teenagers, you know. So he walked them down the aisle. He's there, he's the one they think of. And our grandchildren, um, they adore him, they adore him. So I looked up, I made it, I survived. There is there is a way. Survive and thrive. Yes, that's the thing, is survive and thrive. So tell me one of your success stories that a parent whose case was in the garbage, it wasn't going anywhere, and it came to you and you kind of transformed it with your program. Sure. Um, I'm sure there's many.

SPEAKER_02 43:19

There are there, but I'm trying to think. I will admit the one that's popping into my head right now is the one we work all throughout Canada, United States, and a few other countries as well. And she was over in the Midwest, and um her case was a tough one because her ex was really taking the children. Um, you know, they had three girls, and basically uh disparaging the mom and alienating um the children. The trying to alienate. The problem is that he was problematic himself, but you have to understand, and well, I'm sure you know well enough, that um the way they show up in court is like sincere, wonderful father. And then the minute they step out of the courtroom, it's um there's a lot of cruelty. And he was particularly overt. They're either overt or covert. It's either behind closed doors or anytime, just not in front of the right people, right? Um, and he was particularly problematic, you know, to the point where one of the children didn't really want to have much to do with them anyway. But he decided that he wanted to go for 50-50, even though these children were practically in their teens. They, you know, had mom as the primary caregiver. Um, but he was also trying to, and every time, this is very common, very common. He also um is taking constantly taking her to child support court to try to keep getting the child support lower, lower, lower, lower, lower, finding reasons to not pay it at all. So the 50-50 idea um was uh, you know, it's often, and uh sometimes we when there are studies where they there are surveys where they will actually admit that it's kind of like look, the number one reason I need to do this because I don't want to be paying. I don't want to be paying, right? And if they get 50-50, then their chances of having to pay diminish significantly. And if they do have to pay, it's much less. And that's what this guy was really going for. They ended up getting a custody evaluator, and this woman turned out to um singularly be very, very good. Um, now the other thing that made this difficult was the children were being kind of caught. Like one of the girls was especially not sure like where she wanted to live and what she wanted. She was ready to testify on behalf of her father, which is just child abuse, right? Um, but also this particular client didn't present well. Not because there was anything wrong with her, but because it was also upsetting for her that she would cry at the drop of a hat, which we, you know, find obviously the trauma, the idea of these children being subjected to their abuser more was particularly upsetting for her. Um, you know, because he was refusing to pay for this, that and the other thing, money was tight. So the evaluations, which are expensive, very expensive, they'll be in the thousands, um, felt even more high stakes than it already was. And so a lot of what we did was we were working on getting her body of evidence ready, right? So she ended up having an immense amount of evidence. Um, his messages to her were it's almost as if he forgot the things in writing are forever. Um put these things together. But here's what's really interesting about this was that she felt she had some evidence that she showed me. And I could tell, which I often can, that there was probably more. So I asked her to go looking for some doctors' um, you know, clinical notes. I asked her to look for teachers' emails, and I also asked her to dig a little bit deeper in her own messages and emails. And she ended up giving me a huge amount of evidence that she employed us to look through. And it was unbelievable what we found. It really was. And then, and this is where it gets really interesting, and it happens all the time, Mimi. I can't tell you all the time. It turns out that her children were recording their phone calls with their father. And she had me listen to a couple of these calls to see what we should do to them. And it was horrifying the way he talked to these children. He mocked them, he bribed them, he called them names, he disparaged the mother. He was it, there was manipulation the whole way through, coercive control the whole way through.

SPEAKER_01 47:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 47:47

And so I ended up telling her, look, it's so fascinating that these children came to you and said, Mom, use this. And it's heartbreaking that they did that. You know, we can't really use it. But what you can know is that your children are going to be interviewed as well. And it sounds like they're going to have a lot to say.

SPEAKER_00 48:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 48:09

Oh, by the time the children were interviewed by the evaluator and by the time the mom was done with all of her evaluations, this the evaluation report came out almost entirely in my client's favor. I say almost because if you have an eval report that is 100% in someone's favor, it's probably going to get thrown out. So, you know, I've had, I don't know that every evaluator works this way. I certainly cannot speak for reevaluators, but there is some recognition that it can look biased because perhaps it is biased if it's exactly completely in favor. But the reality is when you have someone who is abusive and manipulative, it's very hard to throw them a bone. You know what I'm saying? It's very hard to give them anything.

SPEAKER_00 48:54

Giving back to the children. Um, I know from my own experience, it's like all the stuff that went on in those days and everything, they still love their father. I mean, they still loved their father. Yeah, there's no way. And um, this internal paternal love. Um of course they weren't subject to everything, they didn't know everything, nor do I want them to know everything. Um, but it all over, you know, finally, like I said, I married his brother, but he's still supposed to pay child support, and he didn't. And um, after a while, it built up, and um, I had him arrested, you know, because it was against the law not to pay child support. And uh he went to jail, and the first thing he told his kids when he got out was, your mother sent me to jail. Yeah, that's funny. Yeah, that happened twice that he went to jail, yeah, and that was the only money, only child support I ever got from him. But again, it's still their father. I never bring it up, I don't talk about it, even though it's years, of course. And they're like 50 years old. These I have full-grown adult children, you know. But um their father, their biological father, had heart problems, and um my youngest daughter, he came to her after not being around, not seeing his grandchildren, not calling, but because he was in trouble and had nowhere to live, and she had a basement apartment and she let him move in there. And my granddaughter was like horrified, and she told me about it. But my granddaughter's also, uh, I won't say, well, I'll say it, she's a shit stir, you know what I'm talking about. And we're sitting on the patio with my daughter and my granddaughter, that's it, and Vanessa. My granddaughter says, Oh, Nana, do you know that uh they call him Big Daddy because he's so big? Do you know Big Daddy's gonna come live with us? Because she she didn't realize um how I would react. And I turned to her and I said, I think that's wonderful that your mother is doing that. What a wonderful thing to do. Tracy, I applaud you for doing that, for helping him out. And my granddaughter was like her her mouth just dropped open because she had heard some of the stories, you know. And I thought, look how strong that bond can be. Now the other daughter wants nothing to do with him. So again, uh, you know, they talk about daddy's girl or mommy's girl or whatever, but parental linkage is very hard to break, no matter how abusive the parent is. Does that make sense to you? It does, and it is true.

SPEAKER_02 52:10

Um, but it gets easier to let it I I'm not gonna say let go, actually. It gets easier for someone to have a firmer boundary, yeah, you know, in in some cases, and if they you know, it is about what you served, which is um at having at least one healthy parent who has an awareness and really handles this right, can help mitigate the aces that the children are suffering through that they're experiencing.

SPEAKER_01 52:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 52:44

So I think where it really comes out more so honestly, is you know, somewhere in the 25th year, the prefrontal cortex of the brain is fully formed. Now the the brain is fully formed, the sense of security, the sense of self. And it's just it's about the therapies, it's about the recovery from having a childhood with an abuser person. I mean, there's a billion jokes out there about going to therapy because of your parents, but when one of them was abusive, then we really are talking um particular kinds of therapies, particular kinds of work in order to overcome the messaging that the child was received and adopted because that's how children operate.

SPEAKER_00 53:32

Yes. And luckily, um, I have done therapy, I still do therapy. My daughter is a therapist, she is a psychologist with her own business, and she's done therapy. And my granddaughter has done some therapy. She resists sometimes, but she's bipolar and she needs to do it. And um thank God we have that, you know, like because my parents, if I said, Oh, I need to go to therapy, I want to talk to a counselor. What we're talking about, we're decades apart here, Renee. You know, my experience are as much as I can give my advice and uh my uh take on what I went through with this situation, it's vastly different than what happens today. There are more resources and then more there are more ways to collect information, to document, you know.

SPEAKER_02 54:31

I think the one thing that still has a long way to go is um But it's more than 1972 or three.

SPEAKER_00 54:38

You're you're really well well we're gonna run out of time, so I have to ask you a couple important things. So, what do you want every protective parent listening to know? The most important thing. I think I know the answer, but give it.

SPEAKER_02 54:53

They need to take ownership of their case.

SPEAKER_00 54:56

Yes, and the documentation of everything really is key. That's a part of it. Yeah. So, what's next for the custody blueprint programs? What's your long-term vision for how this work is going to help change the custody landscape?

SPEAKER_02 55:14

Yeah. Um, so we have been developing um over the past year or so some apps, some programs. Um, it took us a long time to come to the app area because everybody's got an app type of thing, but we were like, we need something that's actually going to work.

SPEAKER_01 55:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 55:31

Um, so we're creating something that can make it easier for clients to be able to handle the sheer volume of documentation and understanding. We're trying to get sort of my strategy brain into something. We'd like to um make that more available to people so that people we can only take so many clients at a time. Many times we have a waiting list. And so we wanted to create something that could um go out to the masses so that more people could have access to something, even if it is on a scale that isn't as large as working side by side with us, something that could still make a huge difference in their cases.

SPEAKER_00 56:09

Oh, it would, absolutely. Well, Renee, thank you. Thank you for your courage, your clarity, your commitment. Uh and for people that feel unheard and unseen in the system, you are very well needed. And to everyone listening, if you're in the middle of a custody battle or you know someone who is, remember this. You're not crazy. You know, you're not crazy, you're not overreacting and you're not alone, okay? Because I know that feeling. There is a blueprint, there is a strategy, and there's a way forward. And thank you, Renee, for showing that to us. Thank you, Mimi, for allowing me to be here and talk to your audience. It was wonderful. We could talk more, we will talk more another time. All right, everyone. Be your be your own warrior, but you need help and you need documentation. Okay. Have a great day.