Arizona HB 2995, the Alec and Lydia Act, would force family courts to weigh domestic violence and coercive control before parenting time.
Post-Separation Abuse
Post-separation abuse is the ongoing, willful pattern of intimidation and control perpetrated by a former intimate partner after the end of a relationship. It is not a continuation of conflict. It is a continuation of coercive control through new channels — channels that the legal system, the family court, and the co-parenting framework involuntarily provide.
A 2022 peer-reviewed concept analysis published in the Journal of Advanced Nursing defined post-separation abuse by five essential attributes: fear and intimidation, domination and control, intrusion and entrapment, omnipresence, and manipulation of systems. A literature review published in The Lancet in November 2025 named it an ignored public health crisis — documenting the full breadth of its tactics and its consequences for survivors and children, and calling for urgent research, policy, and intervention responses.
The specific tactics through which post-separation abuse operates are well documented across the research literature. Legal abuse — the weaponization of family court proceedings, custody disputes, and civil litigation to financially exhaust and psychologically destabilize the targeted parent — is among the most consistently documented. Economic abuse, including the deliberate withholding of child support and the destruction of the survivor’s financial independence, continues the financial control that characterized the relationship. Stalking, harassment, and surveillance extend the physical control of the relationship into the post-separation period. The weaponization of children — using them as messengers, as intelligence sources, as instruments of emotional manipulation — turns the co-parenting framework itself into an instrument of ongoing coercion. Discrediting campaigns, including smear campaigns deployed across social networks, professional contexts, and legal proceedings, are the social-level extension of the gaslighting that characterized the relationship.
Post-separation abuse is a gendered phenomenon. Research confirms that the most persistent and most lethal forms — intimate terrorism, severe physical violence, stalking — are overwhelmingly perpetrated by men against their female former partners. The point of separation is the highest-risk period in a coercively controlling relationship. Research on domestic homicide consistently finds that approximately 40% of intimate partner homicide victims had separated from their partner or were about to at the time they were killed.
Narcissistic Abuse Rehab addresses post-separation abuse across multiple resources — the co-parenting guide, the lawfare resource, the post-separation abuse hub, and the Global Coercive Control Legislation Index — because separation does not end coercive control. It redirects it.
If you have spent any time inside the legal system as a survivor of coercive control, you know what it is to watch a piece of legislation move. You know the years between a bill arriving in committee and a bill reaching enforcement. You know the difference a statute makes when it names what happened to you. You also know…
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