LISA ARTERTON
Coercive Control & Post-Separation Abuse Specialist
About
Hello, I'm Lisa
I see what others too often miss
The work I do today grew out of something I came to understand both personally and professionally:
Leaving doesn't necessarily mean that it ends.
I know what it is to leave an abusive relationship and discover that there can still be messages. Child arrangements. Solicitors. Court. Professional involvement. Decisions being made about your child by people who know only fragments of what has happened.
However, post-separation abuse doesn't only happen through court.
It can happen through finances. Divorce. Co-parenting. Contact. Apparently reasonable messages. Sudden cooperation. Pressure disguised as concern. Or conversations that begin perfectly calmly and somehow end with you frightened, defending yourself or agreeing to something you never wanted.
And somehow, amongst all of that, you're expected to carry on with your life.
To make decisions, to parent, to work, to communicate calmly, to know when something is important and when it isn't and sometimes just to work out:
What the fuck is actually happening here?
I know that world because I've lived in it.
But my work today isn't just based on what happened to me.
LISA ARTERTON
Coercive Control & Post-Separation Abuse Specialist
Different
experiences.
The same feeling.
You're not alone
here.
MY EXPERIENCE IS PART OF THIS WORK.
IT ISN'T THE WHOLE OF IT.
I've navigated coercive control and post-separation abuse personally for 18 years.
I've also worked therapeutically for almost a decade.
So my understanding of this work comes from both sides of the room.
My own experience taught me what it can feel like when fear is misunderstood. When attempts to protect your child are viewed through a different lens. When you are trying desperately to make someone understand years of context whilst knowing that how you communicate it may itself be scrutinised.
But the women I've worked with have taught me something equally important:
No two stories are the same.
I don't assume that because I've lived through coercive control, I automatically understand someone else's experience.
I listen.
We look at what is actually happening.
The patterns, the context, the children, the impact, what she has observed, what she is being asked to navigate now.
I don't believe lived experience alone makes someone an expert and I don't believe professional know is useful if it can't recognise the reality someone is actually living in.
For me, the combination matters.
That's what I bring to this work.
I STARTED NOTICING THE SAME THING.
Over years of working with women, I kept seeing versions of the same problem.
Women becoming the focus whilst what was happening around them disappeared from view.
Fear being examined without enough curiosity about what she was frightened of.
Exhaustion being examined without looking at what she had been living through.
A mother trying desperately to protect her child being described as difficult, controlling, anxious or unable to move on.
Individual incidents being looked at separately when the pattern between them was the story.
Women arriving with years of messages, incidents, child disclosures, professional involvement and court history thinking:
"Where the fuck do I even start?"
This is where much of my work sits today.
It's not about automatically asking what's wrong with this woman?
But becoming curious about:
What's happening to her?
What's happening around her?
What is she responding to?
What patterns are we seeing?
What actually needs her attention now?
It's not
always about
"healing".
Sometimes it's
about understanding what's STILL happening.
THE WORK ISN'T ONLY ABOUT COURT.
Sometimes coercive control continues through family court, CAFCASS or professional involvement. Sometimes it comes through finances, divorce, child arrangements, co-parenting. Messages that appear reasonable on the surface. A sudden period of kindness or cooperation that makes you question everything you thought you understood. Or pressure that goes on for so bloody long that eventually you don't even care what you agree to anymore - you just want it to stop.
This is part of my work too.
We begin recognising the patterns.
The entry points.
The moments where something apparently reasonable becomes pressure, fear, obligation or self doubt.
The places where his voice has become so loud in your head that you can barely hear your own and we start separating those things.
What does he want you to believe?
What are you frightened will happen?
What do you actually think?
What do you actually want?
Are you making this decision because it's right for you - or because you desperately need the pressure to stop?
That distinction can be incredibly important.
SOMETIMES THERE IS GRIEF.
Recognising what's happening now can mean beginning to understand what happened then and that isn't always some lovely, liberating moment.
Sometimes it's fucking devastating!
There can be grief for the relationship you thought you had.
For the years you spent trying to make something work.
For the things you tolerated because you were trying to keep the peace.
For the decisions you made when none of the available options felt safe.
For the person you were before you became so busy managing everyone else's reactions.
For how far away from yourself you became.
We make room for that too.
This work isn't about only understanding him. Ultimately, it's about helping you hear yourself again.
"The only thing that truly helped me was working with Lisa.
I felt really supported & understood at a time when nothing & no one else was helping me to understand what I was experiencing."
WHAT THIS LOOKS LIKE IN PRACTICE.
I work predominantly with mothers navigating coercive control and post-separation abuse whilst it is STILL affecting their lives.
Sometimes we're preparing for a CAFCASS, ISW, CWO or other important professional meeting.
Sometimes we're looking at what's happening around contact and what a child is actually saying or showing.
Sometimes we're sitting with years of information and working out what actually is important amongst it.
Sometimes and email, report, allegation or interaction has arrived that morning and everything suddenly feels enormous.
Sometimes we're looking at a pattern that keeps pulling you back into fear, defending, explaining or appeasing.
Sometimes we're slowing down a decision that you're under enormous pressure to make.
Sometimes we're holding what comes up when you begin to understand what you've actually been living through.
I don't provide legal advice and I'm not here to tell you what decisions to make. Your solicitor handles the legal work.
I work with the woman HAVING to live through it.
I help you understand what you're dealing with, recognise patterns that can become almost impossible to see when you're living, stay connected to what you know and make clearer decisions without losing yourself underneath everybody else's noise.
YOU DON'T HAVE TO MAKE ME UNDERSTAND WHY THIS IS COMPLICATED.
You don't need a perfect chronology. You don't need to know which three screenshots are important. You don't need to tell your story precisely correct and you don't need to convince me that something deserves looking at before we're allowed to look at it.
Bring me what's happening.
We'll start there.
LISA
Coercive Control & Post-Separation Abuse
Specialist