When a Custody Deal Precedes a Family Tragedy: What the Mechanicville Case Exposes About Nervous Systems Pushed Past the Edge
The Mechanicville story arrived the way these stories always arrive. First the deaths. Then the questions. Then, this week, the paperwork. In a recent WRGB report, court papers reveal that a child custody deal was in place shortly before the Mechanicville family deaths. The community is holding a grief no filing can settle.
I am not going to diagnose anyone in this case. I have never sat with them. The Goldwater rule applies even when the family in question is not famous. And I want to be careful here, because when a story ends in this kind of catastrophe, the last thing anyone needs is a therapist tossing frameworks around like they explain it. They don't. Nothing does.
What I can do is speak to the pattern underneath. Because the pattern is what shows up in my office every week, in less catastrophic form. Two adult bodies in attachment alarm. A legal instrument being asked to close a wound the instrument was never built to close. A survival response reaching the outer edge of what a human being can hold. Most of the time, the edge holds. Sometimes it doesn't.
If you are reading this from inside your own custody fight, your own separation, your own reopened wound, I want to slow down with you. Because the thing the news report cannot tell you, and the responding officers cannot tell you, and the eventual judge cannot tell you, is that a custody dispute is not, at its root, a legal event. It is a biological one.
Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.
The Paperwork Is Not the Story
There is a fantasy embedded in the way we cover these cases. The fantasy is that if we can just get the timeline right, if we can just read the custody agreement carefully enough, we will find the sentence that explains what happened. We won't. The paperwork is downstream of the actual event. The actual event happened in the bodies of the people involved, long before anyone signed anything.
Here is what I know from sixteen years of clinical practice. When two people fight over their children in family court, they are not fighting over their children in the way a rational observer would understand fighting. They are fighting for their emotional survival. The children are the terrain. The court is the arena. The custody schedule is the language. But the war underneath is happening at the level of the body, and the body does not know it is 2026 in Mechanicville. It knows only that the primary attachment structure of a human life is being cut apart, and that this feels like death.
From the moment you are born, if your primary person is not there for you, the dingoes come. That is not a metaphor. That is the evolutionary logic your body still runs on. Your limbic system detects when your person, or the people you have organized your life around, are being pulled away. And it responds as if life itself is at stake. Because for two hundred thousand years of human history, it was.
Now put a court order on top of that biology. Add attorneys. Add filings. Add the humiliation of having your parenting evaluated by strangers. Add the specific terror of watching a person you once trusted with your whole heart become the person testifying against you. That is not a legal dispute. That is a body being told, over and over, in the most authoritative language a society has, that everything it organized itself around is gone.
The Waltz Nobody Wants to Be Dancing
I have written before about the choreography of high conflict separation in the context of Justice Sotomayor's custody dissent, and the mechanism I named there is the one operating here. Two bodies locked in what I call the Waltz of Pain. One partner pursues. The other retreats. The pursuer's aggression is a survival strategy against abandonment. The retreater's shutdown is a survival strategy against engulfment and shame. Neither is chosen. Both are ancient.
In a custody battle, the choreography does not stop. It gets legally weaponized. The pursuer files motions. The retreater goes silent, or hires their own attorney to do the pursuing on their behalf. The lawyers, who are good at their job, translate the biological panic into cognizable claims. Now you have a case. Now you have a schedule. Now you have a courtroom. And the whole time, the actual thing driving the fight is completely absent from every document in the file.
Underneath most hardness is longing. Underneath most contempt is grief. Underneath most dismissal is fear. Nobody gives the court that soundtrack. You have to learn to hear it yourself, and by the time most people are ready to hear it, they have burned through their marriage, their savings, and their capacity to look at the other parent without flinching.
Protectors Colliding at Full Speed
When safety is entirely removed, the vulnerable self goes into hiding, and the protector parts take over the organism. These parts are not personality. They are not flaws. They are not conscious. They are the physiology doing what it had to do to keep a human being alive inside conditions that were not safe.
In a custody fight, your protector meets your former partner's protector. Their protector meets yours. Two childhood strategies collide, and the fight becomes a reenactment of wounds neither of you caused. The problem is that a court proceeding does not slow this down. It accelerates it. Every motion is a fresh puncture. Every hearing is another wave. Every text through counsel is another confirmation that the person you once slept beside is now someone whose lawyer can write to your lawyer about the pickup on Thursday.
Whatever you do out of strategy to get away from hurting deep down inside is probably going to trigger the other half of wounding in your former partner. If you pursue harder, they retreat harder. If you retreat harder, they pursue harder. The protectors do not know how to stop. And the legal system, which is built on the assumption that two rational actors will negotiate toward a rational outcome, has no framework for what to do when the actors are not rational because their prefrontal cortex has been offline for months.
The Versus Illusion, Made Statutory
The adversarial legal system is built on what I call the Versus Illusion. Plaintiff and defendant. Petitioner and respondent. Custodial and noncustodial. The whole apparatus assumes you and the parent across the aisle stand on opposite sides of a line, and that the judge's job is to draw that line correctly.
Inside a family, that is not the actual shape of the problem. The shape of the problem is that a dynamic between you is suffocating what remains of the bond, including the bond you both still have to your children. You are not fighting your former partner. The two of you are stuck inside a cycle doing things to both of you that neither of you, in your right mind, would choose. But the court cannot see the cycle. The court can only see the two of you.
So the court does what the court does. It picks a winner. Or it splits the difference. Or it hands both of you a schedule and tells you to make it work. And you leave the building with a piece of paper that has legal force but no biological reality, because your body did not sign the settlement. Your body is still in alarm. Your body is still watching for the next puncture.
The Window and the Boundary of Safety
I want to name something clinical here, because in a case where a family has actually died, glossing over it would be dishonest. There is a boundary my work does not cross. When someone has become so dysregulated that they are blocking exits, making physical contact with others in aggression, or entering states of desperation that put anyone in the household at risk, we are no longer in the territory where couples work or family systems work can help. We are in the territory of stabilization. Of separation. Of law enforcement. Of psychiatric intervention. Of getting people alive first, and only then, maybe, thinking about what any of it meant.
Everything I have written above about biological alarm is still true. But it is not an excuse. It is not a justification. It is a description of a system, and part of understanding the system is knowing when the system is past the point where relational tools apply. If you are reading this and you feel yourself, or your partner, moving toward that kind of collapse, please stop reading and call someone. A crisis line. A friend. A therapist. The police, if you have to. I am serious. The framework can wait.
Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.
The Story of Other Is a Corridor With No Exit
One of the most seductive traps in a custody fight is what I have come to think of as the story of other. Once the marriage collapses, both parties inherit a job the legal system requires them to do. Build a case. Assemble a narrative in which the other parent is the danger, the failure, the reason. Everyone around you will help you build it. Your attorney. Your friends. Your mother. The internet.
The story of other is always the easier path. It is always the path of least resistance. You can spend your whole life running that corridor. Not because the story of other is wrong. Sometimes real harm was done and real accountability is required. But the corridor itself, the endless replaying of the other person's faults as the explanation for your suffering, will never set you free. It never leads to growth. It never leads to healing. It never leads to sovereignty. It is the corridor the lab rat discovers again and again has no food at the end.
The reason this matters clinically is that a custody battle, by its structure, requires you to spend months and often years inside the story of other. You have to. Your attorney needs the material. The court needs the material. But the version of you that emerges from that corridor is not the version of you your children need on the other side. Your children need a parent who has done the harder work of also examining themselves. Who has some sense of their own contribution, their own protectors, their own patterns. Not because self-blame is virtuous. Because self-knowledge is what makes it possible to actually parent from ground, rather than from alarm.
What the Bridge Between Two Houses Really Carries
I have written more about this in Two Homes, One Childhood, but the piece I want to name here is this. After a family separates, the household divides into two, but the bridge between them, the bridge your children walk back and forth on, is still one bridge. What happens on that bridge matters more than what happens in either house. The bridge carries the tone. The bridge carries the tension. The bridge carries whether one parent will speak the other parent's name with softness or with venom. The bridge, ultimately, is what your child inherits.
If you want to name your own pattern before doing anything else, you can take the free Figs Quiz. It will not settle your case. It will not calm your body. But it will give you a starting point for understanding what is happening in your body when it feels like the ground is moving.
I want to be honest about what a parenting plan can and cannot do. It can allocate time. It can allocate authority. It can create structure. What it cannot do is settle a body, force a parent to become emotionally available, or teach two adults how to speak to each other without setting off each other's oldest wounds. That work happens somewhere the court cannot reach. It happens in therapy, or in coaching, or in the slow, private work of a human being learning to sit with their own alarm long enough to notice it is alarm, and not truth.
The Personal Piece I Cannot Leave Out
I grew up as the child of two broken homes. I carry my own wounds of abandonment. I know from the inside what it feels like to be the small body on the bridge. That is part of why this work matters to me. It is also part of why I refuse to write about these cases from a clean intellectual distance. There is no clean intellectual distance from this. If you are inside a custody fight right now, you are carrying something I have carried, and something my clients carry every week, and something no legal filing has ever fully touched.
What This Means for Your Own Life
Bring this back to your kitchen table. If you are inside a separation, or watching one from close by, notice what your body is doing while you read the news. Notice the tightening in your chest. Notice the story you are already building about the other parent. Notice how quickly your mind wants to skip past the biology and get to the strategy.
The strategy will still be there in an hour. Your activation, if you slow down enough to listen to it, has information you cannot get any other way. It will tell you where you are on the map. It will tell you whether you are inside the window where you can still make good decisions, or whether you have crossed into a state where every decision you make is going to make things worse.
Your children do not need a parent who wins the custody fight. Your children need a parent whose body can come back to ground often enough to be present with them. That is the work. It is not glamorous. It is not litigable. It will not be in the paperwork. And it is the only thing that actually matters on the other side.
Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.
A custody agreement is a piece of paper. A tragedy is a body that ran out of room. The distance between them is the work. Do yours before the paper is all that is left.
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