Do you recognise this?

The system

Courts, social services, experts, files. Nobody here needs to be a bad person for the sequence to run.

• You tell the court "I am a good parent" and the arguments do not land — as if a role had been waiting for you before you spoke.

  The book calls this: The imagined enemy (ch. 2): the structure needs someone to fill the empty corner.

  → Glossary: imagined enemy
• Your documentation is accurate, so it becomes "obsessive" and "controlling". Come with nothing and you are unprepared; come with everything and you are obsessed.

  The book calls this: Labelling instead of refuting (ch. 3).

  → Glossary: labelling instead of refuting
• The better you parent, the better your child copes — and the system concludes that nothing is wrong.

  The book calls this: The competent parent's paradox (ch. 3).

  → Glossary: competent parent's paradox
• The obstruction was noted on paper — more than once — and nothing followed.

  The book calls this: Step two of the pattern: the system reacts formally (ch. 4).

  → The pattern, step two
• You hold a court decision that nobody enforces.

  The book calls this: Step three: decisions are not enforced (ch. 4).

  → Pattern D4: Enforcement Failure
• You feel time working against you. Every month the "established situation" hardens, and you are afraid of the day someone says: it is too late now, change would harm the child.

  The book calls this: Steps four to six: time works, fait accompli, "it's too late" (ch. 4).

  → The pattern, steps four to six
• Your child's voice reaches the judge as three sentences in someone else's report. Nobody in the building says your child's name; they say "the case".

  The book calls this: The file as a machine that turns a scream into silence (ch. 8).

  → Glossary: two readers

The other side

Moves, not character. Each statement describes something that is done — not who the other parent is.

• Cancellations, conditions, unanswered messages, shifted handovers — each one too small to react to. Together, a wall.

  The book calls this: Step one: obstruction below the reaction threshold (ch. 4); restrictive gatekeeping (ch. 15).

  → Glossary: restrictive gatekeeping
• After talking to the other parent, you check your own emails to make sure what was actually said.

  The book calls this: Gaslighting (ch. 15). Paper cannot be persuaded that it did not happen.

  → Glossary: gaslighting
• You start the conversation as the injured party and end it apologising.

  The book calls this: DARVO — deny, attack, reverse victim and offender (ch. 15).

  → Glossary: DARVO
• You meet a condition and a new one replaces it. Nothing you fulfil ever closes anything.

  The book calls this: Moving the goalposts (ch. 15). The aim of the game is the game.

  → Glossary: moving the goalposts
• Warmth arrives exactly when you have become indifferent — never when you asked for it.

  The book calls this: Hoovering (ch. 15).

  → Glossary: hoovering
• A decision was announced to your child before you were asked. Now you can agree, or disappoint your child.

  The book calls this: Fait accompli, the everyday version (ch. 15).

  → Glossary: fait accompli
• The other parent is not lying — they are certain. And your evidence does nothing against certainty.

  The book calls this: Emotional reasoning (ch. 15): emotion increases conviction, not accuracy.

  → Glossary: emotional reasoning

Your child

What you see in the hours you do have.

• Your child comes home carrying sentences that are not theirs.

  The book calls this: Borrowed sentences (ch. 16). The move: receive, redirect, continue.

  → Tool: borrowed sentences
• For the first hour after the handover, your child is not quite your child yet.

  The book calls this: The adjustment period (ch. 10); transition time (ch. 16).

  → Glossary: transition time
• Your child resembles the other parent — and you catch yourself reacting to the resemblance.

  The book calls this: Don't judge the mirror (ch. 10): judge the pattern, not the one who carries it.

  → Glossary: mechanism, not diagnosis
• You have become a "weekend parent" — a visitor to your own child.

  The book calls this: Symbolisation (ch. 2): "weekend parent" is a label that turns a parent into a visitor.

  → Tool: parallel parenting and anchors
• Photographs of you have disappeared from your child's other home. You have become a first name, or just "him" or "her".

  The book calls this: Erasing from symbols (ch. 15).

  → Glossary: erasing from symbols
• Your child is asked what you do and who comes over, is sent with messages about money, or is told "don't tell".

  The book calls this: Child as spy, messenger and keeper of secrets (ch. 15).

  → Glossary: child as messenger

Yourself

The part the book insists on: the instrument turned on the reader.

• At three in the morning you have thought: maybe I really am the problem. So many institutions cannot all be wrong.

  The book calls this: Diagnosis (ch. 4): a point in the middle of a distribution cannot be crazy.

  → The pattern: three uses
• Friday evening, the house empties, and the silence is too loud.

  The book calls this: A charge point (ch. 12) — a predictable trigger, which means you can prepare for it.

  → Tool: Release
• One sentence in an email hits exactly where it hurts. Something physical switches on in your chest, and the reflex says: answer now.

  The book calls this: The thirty-minute rule (ch. 16) and Release (ch. 12).

  → Tool: BIFF response
• You know every article of the law, and you have not slept properly, trained or seen a friend in months. You have become the subject of your own case.

  The book calls this: The Father's Wheel (ch. 13): roundness before height.

  → Tool: the Father's Wheel
• The pain is out of proportion to the trigger. An unanswered message keeps you up all night.

  The book calls this: The cry (ch. 11): pain out of proportion to the trigger is one of its signs.

  → Tool: Release
• You do not really want an agreement from your ex. You want them to see you. Your court submissions are, underneath, letters.

  The book calls this: The cry (ch. 11). The system does not hear a cry; it hears a record.

  → Glossary: two readers
• You have noticed the dispute changing you: black-and-white thinking, anger that flips on an email, bending rules "because they started it".

  The book calls this: Look for the same cluster in yourself (ch. 16).

  → Glossary: Cluster B — recognition without diagnosis

Tick what you recognise.

The counts update as you go, and a starting point appears here. This is not a score and not a diagnosis — it only shows where most of your recognition sits, so you know which door to open first.