Beneath the DivorceSystemic bugs and a drive through the unconscious — a book about high-conflict divorce and custody disputes
Working title of the English edition. The manuscript is being written in the author's native language; an English edition is planned. By Miroslav Ćurčić.
The thesis is simple and uncomfortable. What happens to a parent in a high-conflict custody dispute is not personal bad luck. It is a pattern — and it runs at every level at once: reflex, group, myth, culture, state, institution, family, and the self.
The title names the place where it happens: beneath the divorce means beneath the threshold of detection, in the part of the process that a system calibrated to visible harm does not measure. The book walks through those levels one chapter at a time, from a reflex older than any court down to the reader's own unfinished business. It does not claim the pattern can be cured. It claims something smaller and more useful: it can be brought into remission.
A pattern you observe loses power.
A mirror, not a sword
The book refuses the saviour role on its first pages. It does not rescue anyone, and it does not promise that you will win. In this system, it says, you do not win; you hold a course. What it offers is a mirror: a name, a mechanism and an age for what is happening to you — and then the same instrument turned on the reader, and on the author first.
That is also the difference between this book and an activist one. It is diagnostic. The enemy is never a person. It is a mechanism that needs no evil people, only an arrangement in which nobody hears the whole story.
Who it is for
It was written primarily for a father in a custody dispute, because that is where the author stands. But the mechanism it describes has no gender, and the book says so repeatedly: the pattern has no sex; the subsidy has. The behaviour is human; the system decides for whom it pays. Where the father holds the child, the father plays the same game — the chapter on Strasbourg case law includes judgments where exactly that happened.
If you are a mother living the same sequence with the roles reversed, the steps are the same, and so are the tools.
The enemy in this book is never a woman. The enemy is the mould.
How it works
Every chapter asks for a decision — because, in the book's words, a decision is the only thing that belongs to your future self. Not an insight, not a feeling: one concrete move, written down, with a date.
It begins before the first chapter. The prologue ends with an exercise: before you read on, write down what you want working with this book to bring you. Keep the page. You will read it again at the end. You can do that now, with any piece of paper, without waiting for the book.
What is written, and what is not
The book is not finished, and this map is honest about it. Chapter descriptions are concepts only. There are no publication dates here, because none have been set.
Written
14 — The author's own case as the book's laboratory (not published here).
In progress
Planned
Leave your email and you will hear from us when a chapter is ready for early readers. No dates are promised, and the address is used for nothing else.
About the author
Miroslav Ćurčić writes as a father in the sixth year of custody proceedings that are still running, and as a systems and diagnostic practitioner — someone whose working habit is to ask what mechanism produces a result before asking who is to blame. He grew up in an alcoholic family and at nineteen promised himself he would break the chain. Decades later he found he had been solving an individual problem, while the problem was systemic; that discovery is the public premise of the book.
He describes his position as witness, not prophet: he saw it earlier than he would have liked, and paid to see it. He is the first test subject of every protocol in the book, including the ones he got wrong the first hundred times. The book does not depend on how his own case ends.
Why a station
The last chapter proposes three stations that a family-law system should have. The first is education before marriage — informed consent about what a marriage is, what leaving it costs, and what divorce does to a child. The second is measurement before court — an assessment of the level of conflict, of both parents' capacity, and of the child's voice, before positions harden. The third is enforcement after divorce — a way of noticing small obstructions and responding in graded steps. That third station is still being written.
None of the three exists yet. Until they do, this site is a station for the parent: a place to recognise the pattern, to understand how it runs, to look up the vocabulary, to pick up a tool — and to leave with one dated move.
What is written stays. What is spoken evaporates.