Today we’d like to introduce you to Lisa Johnson and Chris Barry.
Hi Chris and Lisa, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
No child dreams of growing up to be a high-conflict divorce coach, but we feel like we were made for this unusual career and absolutely love what we do. Both of us work with people going through the worst divorces and separations, with children often caught in the middle. These are the cases where the fight doesn’t end when the divorce is finalized, as post-separation abuse can go on for years, both in and out of the legal system. We are also a romantic couple who have been together now for more than eight years and were both pretty early in our own situations when we first started dating. It took us a while to realize why our divorces were taking years and what factors were contributing to our extraordinary legal battles. We were very lucky to have each other during that time because our situations were not “normal” compared to others getting divorced, and it was validating to have another person to turn to in the midst of all that chaos.
As we started educating ourselves and understanding what was going on and why, we decided to write a book, thinking that our own experiences could help many other people, specifically by saving them time, money, and energy.
We then discovered that the publishing industry had changed tremendously since the publication of Lisa’s first book nearly two decades prior, and were told to start building our social media platform first. Lisa was busy with her own active post-judgment case, and she started an Instagram account in part to document her own mind-boggling experience in family court. When we realized that there were approximately 80,000 people dealing with the same thing – years stuck in the family court system battling a toxic ex – we put the book idea on the back burner and started the world’s first Legal Abuse Support Group back in April 2021. That’s when things began to blow up.
Lisa had become a state-certified domestic violence advocate, and when Chris became a certified high-conflict divorce coach, we decided to focus on specifically coaching people in toxic relationships, high-conflict divorce/separation, custody battles, and co-parenting hell so that they would have the chance of the best outcome in family court and beyond since legal abuse had become our specialty.
Our clients are all over the world, and we always say that the laws are different, but the issues are the same, and we are thrilled that the strategies we help people develop are apparently effective wherever they are!
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
What’s ironic is that one of the main obstacles in our lives ended up being the catalyst for our business success.
When we first conceptualized Been There Got Out, we didn’t know what facet of this huge problem to concentrate on, but fortunately, the answer was right in front of us with the nightmarish challenges we both faced in the legal system.
Lisa’s prior career was as a high school English teacher, and she took time off to raise her kids. When she decided to try to get back into secondary school education, she was in the thick of her legal case with her ex and found that whenever she had a potential job, she would have to put everything on hold to deal with prepping for court and making sure she was available for dozens of appearances over several years. When we finally discovered the term “legal abuse” and recognized it as the perfect description of both of our experiences, it was the impetus for us to start honing in on where people were suffering the most and what we knew so well.
We always say that we got the best education possible – right in the trenches. And the fact that Lisa was successful on both the trial and appellate court levels without an attorney was a tremendous achievement. We have not only learned so much along the way, especially in terms of what is effective in court, but experiences like these allowed us to develop radical empathy, as we have lived the situation that most of our clients are dealing with, yet also bring a big dose of hope to the process, which our community desperately needs.
One fear that we both had was that dealing with people in these kinds of situations would be triggering or re-traumatizing to us, but fortunately the opposite has been true; our career is quite therapeutic and extraordinarily rewarding!
We’ve been impressed with Been There Got Out, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
The term “coercive control” is something most Americans are not yet familiar with, but a tremendous amount of people are experiencing it in their intimate partner relationships. Women’s Aid defines the relationship power dynamic as being one in which there is a “pattern of acts of assault, threats, humiliation and intimidation that is used to harm, punish, or frighten…this controlling behavior is designed to make a person dependent by isolating them from support, exploiting them, depriving them of independence, and regulating their everyday behavior.”
Most people in toxic relationships often don’t even realize that they are being abused because life has become normalized to accept this kind of power dynamic. Yet people at the very beginning of the process of separating from an abusive ex are often in the most powerful position to avoid many of the most egregious mistakes people make, starting with safety.
An abusive person’s behavior is often illogical and confounding to both a victim and often their lawyer, and this is why it is so important to have resources like us who can help people strategize as early as possible, especially on basic issues such as how to choose the right attorney.
One of our biggest strengths is our access to expert resources, which we connect our community to through online content, specifically conversations with professionals who work in the trenches daily. Lisa generally does long-form live interviews with lawyers, mental health workers, and trauma-informed professionals on topics relating to everything our community desperately needs more information on – family court, financial issues, helping children get through major life transitions.
Our core work is helping people with practical, actionable advice – strategies and steps they can use to implement to give them the best chance of an outcome they can at least live with.
Can you talk to us a bit about the role of luck?
Luck has played a significant role in the origin of Been There Got Out. We met over Match.com, and Chris had been just about to delete the daily notifications email containing Lisa’s profile…luckily he didn’t, because look what’s happened since then!
The way our publisher found us was lucky – Lisa happened to be interviewing one of her authors, and she watched, then decided to convince us to finally do the book that we’d put on hold several years earlier. “Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How To Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances” was released earlier this year. It’s doing well, and we are currently working on a second book now, which focuses on how to make sure your kids are ok.
Another lucky moment happened as Lisa was one of the early speakers to provide live testimony for Jennifer’s Law, which ended up being streamed all over the world (it also passed, making Connecticut the third state in America, along with Hawaii and California, to expand its legal definition of domestic violence to include coercive control). A non-profit called Operation Safe Space, which had already been following our account for a while, decided to hire us to train lawyers and domestic violence advocates in Barbados. That also helped launch us into the spotlight as being the “go-to” for people dealing with legal abuse all over the world.
Contact Info:
- Website: BeenThereGotOut.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/been_there_got_out/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BeenThereGotOut
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/been-there-got-out/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/beentheregotout
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@BeenThereGotOut
- SoundCloud: https://beentheregotout.buzzsprout.com/
- Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@been_there_got_out
Image Credits
Kyle Miller took the “Personal Photo” of us at one of our programs. The book cover is courtesy of our publisher, Wordeee. The rest we took ourselves!
