When No One Has Died, But Everything Has Changed

When parents separate, the losses extend far beyond the end of a relationship. Yet grief is rarely recognised for what it is in family court.

The mother sitting opposite me hasn’t slept properly since her husband left. She’s anxious. She’s started having panic attacks, the first of her life. Last week she had one in the Woolworths car park and sat there for forty minutes before she felt safe enough to drive home. She has never been away from her children for more than a few hours. Now they’re spending the weekend with their father, and the silence in the house feels unbearable.

Their father has never cared for them on his own for more than a few hours either. He doesn’t always notice the things she notices, their moods, their routines, the subtle signs that one of them is becoming overwhelmed. She knows how this sounds. She tells me she knows how this sounds. But she cannot persuade her body that her children are safe.

Later that week I meet a father who hasn’t seen his children in four months. His wife left while he was at work. Within weeks there were allegations he still struggles to explain. He’s waiting for a supervised contact service to have capacity so he can spend two hours on a Saturday with his children in a room where a stranger watches the interaction.

He tells me all of this while looking at a point on the carpet. He’s working longer hours because work is the only place where his mind quietens down. He no longer goes to Sunday lunch at his mother’s house. He can’t bear sitting across from her while she cries about not seeing the grandchildren, and he can’t fix it, so he stopped going.

I’m writing family reports on both of them.

In a fortnight I’ll sit down at my desk and try to describe these parents. Everything I’ve just witnessed must find its place somewhere. It could appear under Presentation as a clinical observation. It could appear under Parenting Capacity as a concern. Or perhaps it belongs somewhere else entirely. Because what I’ve described isn’t necessarily psychopathology.

It’s grief. Not every parent I assess is grieving. But enough are that that I have learned to be careful not to mistake grief for character.

The difficulty is that the family law system doesn’t have a good place to put grief. When people think about grief, they usually think about death. But grief isn’t a response to death. It’s a response to profound loss.

After separation, those losses accumulate quickly.

The relationship ends. The family home may be sold. The identity of being someone’s husband or wife disappears. The daily rhythm of parenting changes overnight. If they’re fortunate, parents lose half the time they expected to spend with their children. Many lose far more.

Alongside those practical losses is the future they imagined. Birthdays. Christmas mornings. School graduations. Ordinary Tuesday dinners. The small moments people quietly assumed they would always have together.

In a matter of weeks, that future disappears. Then the same people are expected to walk into mediation, interim hearings and assessment interviews, presenting as calm, organised and emotionally regulated adults.

Many can’t. Not because they lack resilience. Because grief is profoundly disorganising. It disrupts sleep. It heightens vigilance. It narrows attention onto whatever feels most precious or most threatened.

In almost any other context we would recognise these as ordinary responses to extraordinary loss. In parenting proceedings, however, those same behaviours are often described in a different language. This creates one of the hardest challenges in family report writing.

The presentations associated with grief can look remarkably similar to the presentations associated with more enduring psychological difficulties, particularly when you’re observing someone for only a few hours during one of the worst periods of their life.

The parent who appears emotionally overwhelmed may recover steadily over the following year as the grief settles. The parent who appears calm and composed may later prove to have far more significant concerns than were visible in the assessment room.

The interview alone rarely tells you which is which.

That’s why collateral information matters so much.

When I request subpoenas, I’m not simply gathering documents. I’m trying to understand who these parents were before the crisis. I want the GP records from two years before the separation. School records. Counselling notes. Anything that shows me a version of these parents before litigation, before affidavits, before every conversation became evidence.

It slows the process down. It costs money. Lawyers are sometimes frustrated because they want the report before the next directions hearing.

I understand that.

But without collateral information, I'm describing a photograph and calling it a portrait.

Grief doesn’t always announce itself. It looks like the parent who tells me they’ve moved on, then can’t quite finish the sentence. The one who keeps talking about what should have happened instead of what has happened. The one who has stopped answering their friends’ calls and isn’t entirely sure why. The one who insists life is good and genuinely means it yet can’t remember the last meaningful conversation they had with another adult.

Grief quietly reorganises a person’s life around the shape of what’s missing. Sometimes the language of family law misses that distinction. A mother’s tearfulness can be described as emotional dysregulation. A father’s withdrawal from family and friends can be said to display depressive features that may affect parenting capacity. A parent who repeatedly checks that an asthma inhaler has been packed is described as hypervigilant, controlling or enmeshed.

Sometimes those descriptions are entirely accurate. Sometimes they reflect difficulties that existed long before the separation. But sometimes they describe a parent eight months into the worst year of their life.

The behaviour may look the same. What matters is understanding why it’s happening. Perhaps the more important question is when we’re asking people to co-parent. Six months after the end of a relationship, many people cannot calmly negotiate school holidays with their former partner. That doesn’t necessarily tell us how they will parent two years later. It tells us where they are in their grief.

Interim decisions are made while people are still in the middle of the storm. Sometimes the report written during that period continues to shape arrangements long after the grief itself has faded. What appears to be a parenting deficit may instead reflect a parent in acute grief.

Given time, good support and a chance for their nervous system to settle, many of those parents become perfectly capable of making thoughtful decisions alongside the other parent.

Even with all of that, the people who eventually read the report are angry. Not always at me personally, although that happens too (a lot). More often they’re angry because the report doesn’t feel like them. They’ll say some version of “that’s not who I am”. In an important sense, they’re right.

A family report is not a biography. It isn’t a summary of someone’s life or a measure of their worth as a parent. It’s a description of a particular period, observed in a particular context, alongside the collateral information available at the time.

If someone observed me during the hardest months of my life, then wrote a document that helped shape decisions about my children, I’d struggle with it too.

None of this is an argument for dismissing concerns because someone is grieving.

Some parents have long-standing difficulties that pre-date the separation. Sometimes those difficulties become more visible during family court proceedings. Sometimes grief and more enduring vulnerabilities exist side by side, and those are often the most complex assessments of all.

That’s why I seek collateral information and look for patterns across time rather than relying on a snapshot taken during crisis. The interview is only ever one piece of the picture.

I think about the mother who sat in her car outside Woolworths because she couldn’t persuade her body that her children were safe. I think about the father who stopped going to Sunday lunch because he couldn’t bear watching his own mother grieve the loss of her grandchildren because he couldn’t bear watching his own mother grieve while he was grieving too.

But both remind me of something that is easy to forget. Before I assess parenting, I’m often sitting with people whose lives have just been dismantled.

Grief doesn’t explain every behaviour. It doesn’t erase genuine concerns. It doesn’t answer every question that family law must ask.

But if we forget to ask whether grief is in the room, we risk mistaking loss for character.