304 - Lipstick On A Pig With A PayPal Link

“Trust the process” might sound like comfort, but for dads in family court it can function like a sedative. We unpack the divorce coaching trap and why the booming divorce coach industry can be a minefield when you’re fighting for custody, parenting time, and long-term influence in your kids’ lives. If you’ve been flooded with feel-good promises about navigating divorce with grace, this briefing offers a data-backed reality check that most people won’t say out loud.

We dig into a major conflict of interest hiding in plain sight: a surprising number of divorce coaches come from inside the family court ecosystem as attorneys, mediators, and other court-involved professionals. That background can sound reassuring, but it can also mean the advice you get is designed to keep the gears moving rather than protect your rights. We talk about why “be flexible” often translates into giving ground, how high-conflict dynamics punish peacemaking, and why the preponderance-of-evidence standard makes narrative control and documentation critical.

Then we zoom out to the part too many services ignore: the day the judge signs the decree is not the finish line. Your parenting plan is a blueprint you and your children will live in for years, and small loopholes can turn into massive losses later. We close with a clear mission and practical next steps for dads who are done hoping and ready to lead their divorce with strategy, stability, and enforceable boundaries.

Being unprepared is how great fathers become weekend visitors. Most ground is lost quietly through "drift" and decisions made under pressure. Stop the drift today at TheDivorcedDadvocate.com.

Access your tactical tools:

• Risk Assessment: Identify your "quiet loss" exposure in 10 minutes.
• Protection Session: Book a private triage to ensure mistakes don’t become permanent.

Your kids are counting on you.

Transcript

Why Divorce Coaching Raises Flags

The Unregulated Coaching Wild West

The Insider Conflict Of Interest

Why Peacemaking Fails In Conflict

Trust The Process Is A Sedative

Family Court Math And CPS Reality

SPEAKER_00 0:51

Hello, and welcome to this week's briefing. I sincerely appreciate you being here, dads. Today we're going to be talking about something that came up in a conversation that I had with a client, our new prospective client. And what he shared with me really sent a red flag up and got me thinking and doing a little bit of research around the whole divorce coach industry. I'll share with you in just a little bit what it was that this that he told me. But today what we're going to do, we're going to have a real conversation about the landscape that you're walking through. Now, if you've spent more than two minutes looking for help online, you've probably been bombarded by ads and social media posts for divorce coaches. They all use this very feel-good, soft language, promising to be your thinking partner or your emotional guide, or the person who will help you navigate this transition with grace. I love that one. I don't even know what that means or how you do that. But but these, and and that's not to say any of this stuff is bad, but it sounds it it sounds exactly what you need when your world is falling apart. But I want, I need you to listen to the data that I'm going to share today. It's some some data-backed reality that no one else in the industry is telling you, and no one else in the industry is really admitting. And that is that the vast majority of these coaches are just a fresh coat of paint on the same broken machine that is designed to sideline you. So, you know, I and I've had it's been about two or three guys now come on board and have been working with another coach and heard some of the stuff that they shared with me that their former coach was doing, which I just kind of took with a grain of salt. And I don't want to badmouth any other coaches or anybody that's trying to help dads through this through this process. But once I had this conversation this week, it really started to bug me. So we're gonna we're gonna pull back the curtain on what I call the coaching trap. Right now, this industry is the absolute wild west. There's no board of standards, no formal accreditation, zero professional oversight. Anyone can print up some business cards, take a weekend seminar, print a certificate, and then start charging you how however hundreds or thousands of dollars. But the real danger, the danger isn't this amateur that's doing something like that. The the danger in what I've found, and in now looking back on these two or three uh guys that have come through and and and and trying to learn a little bit more about the the former coach, the real danger is the system insider. The research I found into the demographics of this field reveals a conflict of interest that you that should have you really looking for the exit immediately if you if you run into one of them. A staggering number of these coaches are actually attorneys or former judges, paralegals, court-involved therapists, or mediators, or LLPs. And and they're simply looking for a fresh revenue stream. See, what they don't do is they they're not fixing the system, they're just finding new ways to basically put lipstick on a pig, right? In a recent survey, 25% of practitioners in the divorce coach space reported holding a JD degree. That's an uh an attorney's degree. On the surface, okay, you might think, oh, well, hey, that's great. That's a benefit. They know the law, right? But I gotta tell you, this is exactly why you should run. These individuals have spent 20 or 30 years as high-functioning cogs in the family court industrial complex. Their entire professional worldview is built on a system that grants fathers. Now, this is the sys that currently grants fathers a national average of only 35% parenting time. 35%, that's the national average, dads. 35% parenting time for dads nationwide. This is now you see this, and so one of the things you see often is with mediators who have tacked on divorce coaching on their menu of services as a high margin add-on, or some of the law firms that push the the collaborative divorce process, which isn't necessarily a bad process, uh depending on the situation, but in high conflict, it is terrible. And so they they'll push these uh collaborative divorces and use an in-house coach to keep the gears moving along, if you will. You have to understand the tactical setup here, though. These collaborative coaches are not there to be your gladiator. Let me just I want to emphasize this again. The the collaborative divorce coaches are not there to be your gladiator, they're there to be peacemakers. In a high conflict situation, peacemaking is just a polite way of training you to be a well-behaved victim. And that it's just the truth. They will coach you to be reasonable and to stay flexible. But in this world, flexible is just a code for saying yes to every one of your wife's demands. An insider coach is never going to tell you that the system is structurally biased or that the best interest standard that is used is frequently used as a blank slate for judicial gender bias. And if you listened last week, I went through the the statistics on that. And if you haven't listened to last week's, go back and listen to it because it'll be a wake-up call for you. You need to know this information. That's why I'm sharing this. That's why I'm doing that. That's why I'm doing that this this week. And like, gloves are off, guys. Like, we need to we need to be changing this system, and and you guys need to be having time, parenting time, equal parenting time with uh with your kiddos. There's there's no there's no greater thing for for as a predictor of their success in adult life than whether or not you're gonna be spending time with them. But I digress. So back to back to the to the gender, the judicial gender buyers. So to admit the floor is slanted would be to admit their entire career was built on a tilted scale. So they're not gonna tell you. They're training you to just be a good guy so you don't cause friction for the colleagues that they're gonna see at the Bar Association lunches every Tuesday. That's just how it is. When these coaches tell you to, and and so this is the word, this is the phrase that that that this guy told me this week that is that his divorce coach coach told him was trust the process. She told him to just trust the process. That should, that is a huge red flag. So when these coaches tell you to trust the plot the process, they are feeding you a sedative. They're not giving you a strategy. You need to be the one to wake up to the fact that trust the process is not a legal standard, it's a scripted narrative designed to keep you quiet and cooperative while your rights are being surgically removed. So let's look at the lethal math of that flexibility. Some of this is a little bit about what I've talked about last week and the last few weeks, but family court isn't a search for the absolute truth. I'm going to keep telling you that, guys, until until you just accept it. And I'm sorry, and or until it just changes, which is a long way off. Family court isn't a search for the absolute truth, it operates on the standard of a preponderance of evidence. That's the 51% rule. If the judge is even 1% more convinced by her narrative than yours, even if that narrative is built on biased stereotypes, you lose. Trusting the process in a system like that is strategic suicide. When she launches a false allegation or starts gatekeeping your children, trusting the process means you are agreeing to sit on your hands for six to twelve months while a slow, broken bureaucracy like Child Protective Services investigates your life. Yes, CPS, and it's a nightmare. And let's so let's talk about the realization of what most of these department, you know, most of these departments. They they run with the same institutional rot and incompetence you see at the post office. Except the problem is they're not just losing your letter to grandma, they are impacting your life for the next 20 years and your children for the rest of their lives. These investigators aren't searching for the truth of your bond. They're practicing defensive social work. Research proves, this is more of the research that I wanted to find for you guys, that they are up to six times more likely to wrongly label an innocent family as guilty, a family member, like a dad, than they are to miss a guilty one six times. They're wrong six times in one direction. Well, what does that tell you? I mean, you know, sometimes there's statistical anomalies, et cetera. Like I told you last week with all of the statistics around family court and dad's parenting time, custodial parenting, like all of that stuff. This is simply to minimize their own agency's liability. They would rather ruin your life for a year just to be safe than risk a headline. So while your coach is whispering in your ear to take the high road and be the bigger person, your ex is using that window to establish a new normal. By the time that investigation finally ends, your kiddos have adjusted to your absence, and the judge will be loath to disrupt that status quo. And if it's even worse, and you've got a disordered person, mentally, emotionally challenged individual that you're divorcing, they're alienating the kids, they're doing all kinds of other things. So it can get real bad real quick, guys, is is the point. And man, look, if you don't, if you don't believe me, just come to some of our some of our meetings. You can check it out at the divorceadvocate.com. They're free. It's the second and fourth Saturday of them of the month. It's our our group tactical meeting. You'll hear some of the stories. And I know some of you guys are saying, well, it'll never happen to me, et cetera. And I hope that it does it, but you can be prepared to mitigate it if it does happen. So that's why putting together a plan, and you'd be just unbelievable. Your head will be spinning how quickly it can go badly. So I that's why you've got to be warned about this. So back to the to the industry. So this is where the cottage industry coaches fail you the most. They're structurally incapable of thinking past the finish line of the legal case. For them, it's just gets you through the divorce. Your life is just basically it's a transaction. They want to get you from the initial filing to the signed decree as quickly as possible so that they can collect their fees on average, sometimes$2,000 or more, which is unbelievable, uh, and move to the next file. But the the here's the thing, guys, for you, the day the judge signs those papers is not the end. So, how you get through this process and what the agreement is post-divorce has an impact. It's that is the first day of a 20-year reality for some of you that have young kids that you have to live in. The structure of your agreement today is the blueprint for your children's entire future and not just their future of you parenting them, their future in their adult life too. Because if you're not involved in it, they are missing a whole part of their life and what they need in order to be healthy, functioning adults. If that blueprint is flawed, the collapse won't happen tomorrow. It will happen a decade from now. So let's look at the actual math of what happens on when a father's role is marginalized. Again, these are some of the statistics from last week. I want to carry them forward this week to emphasize for you the Census Bureau data and long-term studies prove that children who lose significant contact with their fathers face a 9 to 13% reduction in their future adult earnings and a 63% jump in teen birth rates. Now, these are just two statistics. I shared a few more last week. There's a whole podcast like last year that I went through all of the positive statistics that that that are impacted on children by having a father present and active in their lives. So, and look, these are not set just sad statistics, guys. These are the direct results of dads who accepted a standard agreement because their coach or their atone or their attorney told them to find peace, if you will. Children of early childhood divorce who don't have an involved father face also face a 40% higher chance of ending up in a jail cell. Again, these aren't like a statistical anomalies. These aren't outliers, these are big differences. You don't have to look any further to find the the problem here. 40% higher chance of ending up in a jail cell. We want to solve these problems, get dads involved, stop marginalizing dads. So if your coach is talking about emotional healing while ignoring the critical time between the court dates where your long-term influence is either won or lost, they're leading you into a trap. This standard schedule might feel like peace today because the yelling stops. But 10 years from now, when you find yourself living 200 miles away because you didn't have a geographic restriction in the orders, or when your kids see your time as optional because you agreed to a flexible schedule, that peace is going to turn to ash, I promise you. And your children don't need a dad who just got through the divorce. They need a father who stood his ground and built an agreement with zero loopholes. You are the only person in that room who is truly fighting for your children's future. The attorneys, the mediators, the system tied coaches, they're all part of a professional circle that relies on the system staying exactly the way it is. None of them are going to stick their necks out to save your bond with your kids. So here's your mission for this week, dads. Stop looking for a savior. Start being the leader of your divorce that your kids need. Go to the divorce dadvocate. I'm telling you from now on, I'm going to tell you every single week. So you're going to you're going to end this episode. You're going to hear the mid-roll. You're going to hear the post roll. Go to the site right now to the divorced advocate.com. Take the risk assignment assignment. It's going to identify exactly where your trust has left you exposed to the quiet loss of your authority. You do not want to lose your parental authority. It is absolutely critical. Look at the people that you've hired. If they are telling you to trust the process, quote unquote, or just get through it, quote unquote. You're talking to a system actor, not an advocate. You need an advocate. We're the divorced advocate. That's why we call it that. You need to move from a state of hope to a state where you are managing your digital environment, your physical environment to support restraint. You need a record of stability so dense that their narrative cannot climb it. And if you don't do this, guys, the decision gap is closing every single hour. Every single hour there's an opportunity for whatever that flexibility is to calcify or for some situation or circumstance where you would be able to demonstrate your narrative, gets passed over. So you need you know, every day that this you spend hoping that the ground you're giving in peacemaking is is hurting you. Reclaim the role, build your defense, make sure you're the one deciding what the next 20 years looks like. All right, guys, so that's it. I I hope that this comes across as a warning for you. It's not that divorced divorce coaches are bad. It is who your divorce coach is and what is it that that they're telling you. If they're part of the system, then you should you're forewarned now. You need a coach to get through this process. Just like anything that you've that you've done the first time or the second time or even the third time, you're not going to know how to do it. And the the internet is great, AI is great now these days, etc. But you do not know and understand the intricacies of what goes on in the system. And you definitely don't have people out there telling you the truth about the bias against you as a dad in this system. So I hope that you found some value in what I shared with you today. If you did, please, please help us to put this across like get this out to more people on social media. Give us a star rating. Even better, give us a comment. It just keeps things moving and gets more dads into the system. And collectively, we can share that collective intelligence and help each other even more. Dads, stay strong. God bless.