Tina Swithin discovered that there is only one thing more difficult than being married to a narcissist, and that is divorcing a narcissist or someone with a high-conflict personality. In her book, Tina will explain how a smart, independent woman can fall prey to a narcissistic man. Tina discusses the red flag reflections that initially, she didn’t recognize as concerning while dating and during the marriage. When Tina’s plight to protect her children began, she was forced to act as her own attorney due to severe financial abuse. Through her nightmarish journey through the family court system, Tina discovered a flawed system that prioritized her ex-husband’s parental rights over her children’s rights to safety. Tina experienced repeated institutional betrayal at the hands of child welfare services, law enforcement, child custody evaluators, minor’s counsel, and judicial officers yet, she refused to give up.

Tina refused to accept that shared parenting or 50-50 custody arrangements were in her daughter’s best interest, and she set her sights on learning the system inside and out. Tina became a fixture in the courthouse and at hearings, studying high-conflict cases that were similar to hers, watching court proceedings, and talking to attorneys in the court hallways. A painful realization was that to the court system, her custody battle was just a business transaction and a case number. Through radical acceptance and with her growing knowledge of the family court system, Tina began to embrace the importance of being fueled by strategy versus emotion. Tina’s story is the story of one mom’s battle to protect her children in the patriarchal, antiquated family court system but her story is the story of thousands of mothers around the world.