safety and emotional readiness

by | Oct 15, 2026 | Divorce and Separation, Family Justice Advocacy

When people start contemplating separation, their first thought is usually about the money. They want to know who gets the house and what happens to the pension.

There is likely a reason you’re contemplating separation. Things aren’t working. You want out of this painful period as soon as possible. Get the money sorted, you think. Tell me how bad it’s going to be, and then let’s get on with it.

Those questions matter. They are not the first ones.

I will say it plainly. If you move into a money conversation with your partner too quickly, you can end up in a situation that harms you.

Safety comes first

First, ask yourself whether you have any safety concerns. If you think your partner may react badly to a separation, or may harm you, talk to someone who understands separation and intimate partner violence before you take any other step. Those steps include anything your partner could see: a text, an email, a new bank account, a search on a shared device.

Do not do anything until you talk to a professional who understands what can happen when one partner tells the other they want to separate. In BC, you can contact BWSS at 1-855-687-1868.

At a minimum, if your partner controls the family finances, put protections in place before you discuss money. Money control is one of the most common forms of control in a relationship. It can make leaving impossible.

In an emergency, call 911. VictimLinkBC (1-800-563-0808) is free, confidential and available 24 hours a day in many languages. It serves anyone, of any gender.

This is why I wrote Screening 101. A professional who doesn’t screen for family violence can walk you into a process that isn’t safe for you.

Once you are safe, ask a second question. Can you afford housing and basic needs while you work through this? If you can’t answer yes yet, that is the next thing to solve. You can’t make good decisions about property while you are worried about where you will sleep.

When both answers are yes, you can start learning about the next steps to separate financially.

Your emotions are part of the process

Most people assume separation is about dividing money. Money is central, but the process is deeply emotional.

It is easier to talk about property, child support and spousal support when you are not in the middle of a crisis. It is easier, though still not easy. Professionals who centre your well-being will tell you to build emotional support before you dive into legal and financial matters. That is your first signal that a professional is the right fit. They know that legal protection and financial security only work if you can absorb and act on the advice you are given.

Here is where I start.

  • Validate your feelings. Grief, anger, relief and fear can all show up in the same afternoon. None of them mean you are doing this wrong.
  • Be kind to yourself. You are doing something hard.
  • Find people who have been where you are. Look for someone who came out of separation steady, with less conflict with their former spouse than they had before. That is your model. Ask what helped them. Ask who they used for emotional support. If the conversation goes well, ask whether they’d be willing to mentor you. They can point you to the groups and professionals that worked, and you may find helpful groups in your community along the way. A mentor is for emotional support, not legal or financial advice. What worked for them may not fit your situation.
  • Choose a professional who understands family violence. Look for a coach or therapist trained in family violence and coercive control who screens for it. Unfortunately, this training isn’t always required. Ask people you trust for referrals.
  • Build a support circle. Friends and family can listen, but they likely don’t understand how the justice system works or how coercive control operates. Choose people who can listen without taking sides or trying to fix it.
  • Check in with your children. They need time to adjust. They will take their cues from you.

Why this is a money issue

Emotion drives conflict. Conflict drives cost, and it also drives more conflict.

If you don’t address the underlying conflict productively, your separation will cost you thousands now. It will cost you again when you try to rebuild your life on reactive decisions instead of collaborative ones.

Most high legal fees come from conflict, not from the complexity of dividing property. A clear-headed person uses a professional’s time well. A person in crisis uses it to be heard, and that is an expensive way to get support. A lawyer is not the right place for it.

Coaches and therapists trained in divorce understand the impact of a separation. They can give you tools to navigate the process. Lawyers may have picked up some of these tools over the years. They may not have. It’s not their training. Hire someone to support you emotionally. I explain who does what, and what each costs, in Choosing a Family Justice Professional.

The most effective way to lower the cost of your separation is to support yourself emotionally throughout. It sounds soft, but it is the most practical advice I have.

What this looks like in practice

Before you meet with anyone about the legal or financial side, check three things.

  1. Are you safe? (Talk to a professional if you have any doubt.)
  2. Can you cover housing and basic needs?
  3. Who is on your side emotionally?

If you can answer all three, you are ready to start. If you can’t, work on those first. Most of the process will still be there. Some deadlines apply, though. The Basics post covers them.

Next in the series: Understanding the Basics.

Screening 101

by | Oct 1, 2026 | Divorce and Separation, Family Justice Advocacy

Screening 101

Who this is for

If you’re separating and about to hire a lawyer, mediator, or anyone else to help you through the family justice system, this is for you.

The first meeting sets your path. The right professional gets you the right help. The wrong one can cost you years and a lot of money.

Screening is how you tell the difference.

What screening is

Screening is when your professional gets to know you before deciding how to help.

They should ask about family violence. Not just physical violence. Control, threats, fear, financial control, someone watching what you do.

They should also ask about what else shapes your life. Trauma. Neurodivergence. Your kids. Your money. Who’s in your corner.

This isn’t small talk. It decides which process is safe and fair for you. Mediating with someone who controls you isn’t a fair negotiation.

It’s already the law in BC

Since 2013, section 8 of BC’s Family Law Act has required family dispute resolution professionals to assess whether family violence may be present. That includes lawyers, mediators, arbitrators, parenting coordinators, and family justice counsellors. (source)

They have to consider how it could affect your safety and your ability to negotiate a fair agreement. Then they have to talk with you about which process makes sense. (source)

Here’s the gap. Mediators, arbitrators, and parenting coordinators have screening rules, and they must complete family violence training. Lawyers don’t. The regulations don’t say how a lawyer should do it. (source)

So it’s up to each lawyer.

In my experience, many don’t. I’ve worked alongside many family law professionals. Some screened, and some didn’t.

Why it costs you, and why it’s worth it

Real screening takes time. It means telling your story. Most people don’t want to pay an hourly rate to share their life story. I get it. It’s a burn.

But your life story is needed. Trauma, neurodivergence, and family violence can change which process is safe, what you can negotiate, and what help you’ll need along the way.

Skip it, and you can end up in the wrong process. Mediating with someone who controls you. Agreeing to things you can’t live with.

Yes, it’s user-pay. For now. Unfortunately, the BC family justice system doesn’t work like BC’s medical system. You have to pay for the help your family needs, and yes, professionals in the family justice system have high hourly rates. There is some help out there. That is another post.

What good screening feels like

You should leave the first meeting feeling seen.

A good professional asks, then listens. They’re curious about how your life works. And this is the interesting part. They don’t apologize for billing you for your story, because they know it’s key to helping you find the path forward.

If I had my wish, every professional would bill for the time it takes to screen you. And if they can’t help you, they’d help you summarize your story to take to someone who can.

They’re willing to understand you, even when your story is complicated. Especially then.

And they don’t treat you as incapable. You’re not someone to rescue. You don’t need a daddy. You need a professional who sees what you’re up against and helps you decide.

You’re screening them too

While they’re screening you, you get to screen them.

Do they seem trauma-informed? Or did you walk away feeling worse?

Unfortunately, you have to figure out why. Learning how the family justice system works can make you feel worse. I know it did for me. That’s not on them.

But what if it’s how they made you feel when they asked you questions? Did they make you feel gross? Did they add to your trauma? Did they do it in a way that means every visit will trigger you?

That’s okay. They may not be the right professional for you.

I know, it’s hard. I lucked out when I found my lawyer. An acquaintance referred me to her. She had helped them separate. Ask people who’ve been through it who helped them.

Questions to ask, and red flags

Ask at your first meeting; you could ask the following:

  • Will you ask me about safety and family violence before recommending a process?
  • What training have you had in family violence and coercive control?
  • How do you adjust when a client is neurodivergent or has trauma?
  • Which processes are safe for me, and why?

Red flags:

  • They never ask about violence, control, or fear.
  • They push mediation or settlement before they know your story.
  • They talk over you or talk down to you.
  • They make you feel like the problem.
  • You leave with a bad feeling. Trust it. It’s time to look elsewhere.

So ask

Screening is required. It isn’t happening consistently. That gap gets smaller every time someone asks for it.

So ask.

Sources

The Job Nobody Trained Me For

by | Sep 25, 2026 | Divorce and Separation, Family Justice Advocacy

The Job Nobody Trained Me For

I have a professional designation for numbers. Nobody gave me one for what actually happens in a separation process.

Split the assets, calculate the support, file the paperwork. Almost nobody makes those decisions from a place of clarity. They make them from fear. Fear of losing the house, fear of what the ex will do next, fear that the sister who died two years ago and the friend who died this year mean their own body is next. The math is the easy part. Fear is what’s actually driving the decisions.

I’ve watched this pattern for years now, with different clients, different situations, the same shape every time. Someone hires me for the financial piece, the piece I’m actually qualified for. Then, slowly, I become the person they text at 6:40 in the morning to ask if their ex was emotionally abusive. Not because I offered to be that person. Because I was there and competent, but most of all, I listened. That gets mistaken for capacity.

It is not capacity. I am not a therapist. I have never claimed to be one, but for a long time, I kept trying to help because no one else was. When the system doesn’t provide anyone else, people reach for whoever is closest and paying attention, and I do care for the people I’m helping, yes, even the ones who behave badly. I can understand why; I’ve been there. There is always a reason underneath the behaviour.

I used to think the answer was to be a better boundary-setter. Write the email to the client explaining how they really needed a therapist or a coach, then hold the line. And that helps, some. But it treats the problem as mine to manage, one relationship at a time, instead of what it actually is: a gap in the system itself. Nobody going through a separation is routed toward the emotional support they need alongside the legal and financial process. They’re routed toward lawyers and mediators and, if they’re lucky, someone like me, who can help them get clear on the finances once the fear isn’t running the show. Otherwise, fear sits there, unaddressed, and keeps making the decisions.

I don’t have an answer for this yet. I keep writing the boundary emails. I keep believing the system needs to build in what it currently leaves out. Both are true at the same time, and I don’t think they will ever resolve into a single lesson.

The CRA Punishes Two-Household Families

by | Sep 14, 2026 | Divorce and Separation, Family Justice Advocacy

The CRA Punishes Two-Household Families

I originally wrote this piece in 2018 and have advocated for change ever since.

When I wrote this, I was a part-time single mom and a self-employed Chartered Professional Accountant. For years, I’d worked in the Collaborative Practice as a financial neutral, supporting families as they navigated separation and divorce, and much of that time went to helping recently separated clients navigate the Canadian tax system. What I found was an unfair, unnecessary burden placed specifically on two-household families, one that has nothing to do with fairness and everything to do with which words a lawyer happened to use in their separation agreement.

Here’s the specific mechanism, and it applies specifically to families with two or more children in a shared parenting arrangement: single parents can claim the eligible dependant credit for one child, worth roughly $3,100 (in British Columbia, it varies by province) today, but only if they don’t have a legal obligation to pay child support. Canadian and provincial family law require every parent who parents less than 60 percent of the time to contribute financial support based on their income. When two parents in a shared arrangement earn different amounts, the higher earner typically owes the lower earner more. Lawyers often simplify this in the separation agreement by netting the two obligations into a single “offset” or “set-off” payment, partly because most family lawyers aren’t fluent in the fine print of Canadian tax law, and partly because it’s simpler for families. Coordinating two separate payments between parents takes trust- trust that the higher earner will actually pay, when a lower-income parent often can’t front their own share and hope it comes back.

That single wording choice determines everything. If the agreement uses offset language, the CRA treats the higher-earning parent as the only one with a legal child support obligation, and denies them the credit outright. If the agreement instead states that each parent pays the other separately, both parents qualify. Two families in the exact same financial and parenting arrangement can end up with completely different tax outcomes, purely because of how one lawyer phrased a clause differently than another.

My own family’s agreement used offset language. My co-parent and I have shared parenting since separating in 2013, and I was, and still am, the lower-earning spouse. When I filed my first post-separation return, I went through a one-time review to prove our separation and shared parenting. After that, I had no trouble at all getting the eligible dependant credit reflected on my own taxes, along with exactly half my Canada Child Benefit entitlement, correctly reflecting our shared arrangement.

My former spouse, the higher-earning parent, had a much harder time. The CRA automatically defaults a child’s tax record to the mother every time, and doesn’t cross-reference between spouses’ files. Even after I told them directly that we shared custody and proved it on my end, the CRA still required him to separately prove the children were his, a step that was both time-consuming and hard to navigate. Most families never get told this step exists, which likely means a lot of separated families are losing out on half their Canada Child Benefit without ever knowing why.

Then came the actual Eligible Dependent Credit fight. The CRA denied it for the 2015 tax year because of our agreement’s offset language. I responded to the review on his behalf, was denied again, then filed a formal notice of objection, and eventually won, after roughly ten hours of my own professional time. The following year, he was denied again, and the entire cycle restarted: a new review response, a new objection, another copy of our full separation agreement, over a hundred pages, sent to the CRA. That agreement has now been sent to them seven separate times. I don’t know where those seven copies went, or why they aren’t simply kept on file.

If it takes ten hours of dedicated professional expertise to win back roughly $3,100 for one family, an average family without that expertise can’t sustain the fight. Only families with real resources can pursue it, and those tend to be exactly the families who need the credit least. The families who need it most are the ones most likely to give up.

In 2022, I took the issue directly to the Minister of Finance’s office, and they forwarded it to a manager within the CRA’s Appeals Branch. She called me and later confirmed by email that she understood the problem precisely: that under a set-off agreement, only the lower-earning parent gets approved for the credit, while an agreement stating the same two amounts separately gets both parents approved, even though the actual legal child support obligation is identical either way. She asked for the full paper trail from our 2015 and 2016 fights, notices of reassessment, objections, and correspondence, and told me the CRA was actively working on it.

She also confirmed something I’d suspected but never had proof of: in 2016, my co-parent’s credit was approved only after I sent a letter informing the CRA that he had no legal obligation to provide child support to me. This wasn’t true. It turned out I hadn’t actually convinced the CRA that he lacked the sole obligation. What I’d really done was tell them I wasn’t holding him to it. I’d negated our child support agreement in writing, on my children’s behalf, something I wasn’t actually allowed to do. The CRA accepted it anyway, while acknowledging, separately and in writing, that the underlying issue remained unresolved for every other family in the same position.

I believed her when she said this would get fixed. When I followed up later, she had moved departments, and the issue seemed to have moved with her, forgotten rather than resolved.

None of this is about hardship in the dramatic sense. It’s about a family that made shared parenting work, splitting time and responsibility fairly, only to have the tax system quietly punish the specific wording a lawyer chose years ago, wording neither parent had any reason to think mattered at the time. And it’s a system that, even when someone inside it agrees the problem is real, still lets it disappear the moment the right person moves to a different desk.

Two-household families already navigate enough. The tax system shouldn’t be another hurdle they have to fight through, especially over a technicality nobody warned them about in the first place, and especially once the government’s own officials have confirmed, in writing, that the technicality is unjust.

Luck Shouldn’t Be Part of It

by | Sep 2, 2026 | Divorce and Separation, Family Justice Advocacy

Luck Shouldn’t Be Part of It

When telling the story of my divorce, at some point I say: I was lucky that when my spouse and I separated, the news was spotlighting the Collaborative Process. A news article led us to find the lawyers who helped us transform our lives and get us back on track.

When I discovered my spouse had filed for divorce, I was in a terrible emotional state. I spent my days anxious. What would become of our children, and us? Where would we live? How would we survive? Some days I seriously wondered if I’d make it to the next one, half-convinced I might have a heart attack from the stress alone. Our seven-year-old and four-year-old sons picked up on it all. Our eldest broke out in cold sores and started isolating himself from the rest of us. Our youngest had frequent breakdowns, more screaming, more hitting than we’d ever seen from him.

After my first consultation with the lawyer who’d become my Collaborative lawyer, I actually considered hiring a bulldog instead. But everything I kept reading said the same thing: children suffer most when their parents have a high-conflict divorce.

Choosing a Collaborative lawyer was a hard call at the time because I genuinely believed I was right and that I’d win if I took my spouse to court. I didn’t understand yet that when one spouse wins, the children lose.

I also didn’t think a Collaborative lawyer could actually get my spouse to engage honestly and productively. What I didn’t understand was that the law here already has a strong default built in: the starting point for financial separation is fifty-fifty on assets and income. Policy and case law have built a family law process specifically designed to leave both spouses starting from roughly the same financial position afterward. A bulldog lawyer might have made my spouse look bad in front of a judge, but it wouldn’t have moved the financial outcome much at all. It would have cost me thousands more, and bought nothing but more conflict inside my own family.

Our lawyers helped us reach something we could both grudgingly live with, and helped keep our conflict away from our kids.

Today our children are sixteen and thirteen. We just celebrated our eldest’s birthday together: pitch and putt, dinner at his favourite restaurant.

Parenting is one of the hardest jobs there is, and juggling full-time parenting on a part-time basis has never been easy. My ex and I have navigated plenty of hard parenting decisions over the past nine years, but fortunately, we navigated them together, for our kids.

I’m grateful we found lawyers who understood that the real work of separating is keeping the family together while the finances come apart.

And I’m doing what I can to make sure luck stops being the deciding factor for families going through this. It shouldn’t come down to chance. The default family law system needs to put families and children first, as a baseline, not as something you happen to stumble into.

Extortion, By any other name

by | Nov 19, 2023 | Family Justice Advocacy

Extortion, By Another Name

Systems are insidious. They keep us trapped even when we know better. How do we escape one? I don’t know. I’m part of this one. It surrounds me; I can’t elude it, and I’m forced to be complicit.

The family justice system is one of those systems. It works the same way extortion works, and my own divorce is where I first recognized it.

The family justice system forced me to choose between two evils: agree to shared parenting, or have it forced on me through the courts anyway. If I hadn’t agreed, my former spouse could have gone to court and gotten the same result. Shared parenting is the system’s default answer to nearly every parenting dispute, and I’d have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars and deepened conflict in my family to get the exact outcome I could have agreed to. So I capitulated, all the while knowing what my family actually needed was mental health and emotional support, not a court order.

I met with a group of moms this past weekend, all currently navigating their own separations. One woman was new to it, still believing she’d be awarded primary custody. Her soon-to-be ex had never really parented their young children; he travels extensively for work. The other moms, further down this road, laughed wistfully. “Oh, he’ll get fifty-fifty. The only thing that stops fifty-fifty is if your co-parent’s in jail.”

A lawyer in the room and I both told her the best thing she could do for her kids was to stay out of court. And the only way to do that was to agree to fifty-fifty parenting anyway. That’s the extortion, right there, stated plainly by the people meant to be helping her.

Extortion has kept me complicit. It’s kept me quiet.

Every decision I’ve made about my own children has been the lesser of two evils, and that’s the only kind of decision this system leaves room for.

It carries into my work too. I help clients divide their finances, or they go to court; those are the only two options the system gives them. Dividing the money doesn’t resolve what’s actually wrong. Their financial and emotional pain continues long after the paperwork is signed, because the real problem was never really about the money. It doesn’t go away until the underlying conflict does, and financial work alone was never built to touch that.

I’ve kept doing this work anyway, because I think about my clients’ children. If I stood my ground and said, no, you need mental health support before financial planning, they’d go to court instead, and their kids would be worse off for it. That’s the system finding one more way to extort compliance, this time from me. And underneath that, I have my own kids to support financially, which is its own quieter form of the same pressure.

But there’s a point where staying quiet starts costing more than it saves. It wears a person down from the inside.

So I’m done staying quiet.

The current family justice system in BC perpetuates trauma at every level, in children, in parents, in the professionals working inside it. It has to change.

A push is underway to transform the system. It’s not enough. The people doing that work are doing it in their spare time, and there is no spare time, not when you’re also trying to run a practice, raise kids, or hold your own life together. The collective applies for grants and receives laughably small amounts, twenty thousand dollars here and there, which is roughly the cost of a single day in court for one family.

I’m calling on the BC government to properly fund the family justice system: real money directed at keeping families out of the courts and into the mental health and parenting support they actually need. The people already doing this transformation work have the knowledge and the will to fix this. What they don’t have is the funding to do it at the scale the problem demands.