For a couple of years in my early teens, I did judo. Every Tuesday night, my brothers and I would traipse up to the dojo a block away from our house. I’d grapple with other girls and sweaty teenage boys as I practised the moves our senseis taught us.

I never got past orange belt. But for the first time in my life, I felt what it was like to best someone who was bigger and stronger than me. It didn’t happen right away, and there were a few things I had to learn first.

Like how to break your fall. You have to slam down hard with your free arm just before your back hits the mat. I forgot to do that once. I will never forget that feeling of being so winded that I struggled to breathe for a few minutes.

You also have to unlearn a lot of your natural instincts in judo. When someone comes at you, your urge is to pull away, and to resist them. If you do this, you just make things worse for yourself. The more you resist, the more leverage your opponent has. When you relax, you take away their momentum. You stop giving them something to push against.

The importance of that lesson only hit me years later, when I found myself in a different kind of grappling match. This one had no mats or uniforms (unless you count the gowns that judges wear in court). The throws were emotional, and most of the holds were invisible to everyone but me.

For instance, there were the emails, sometimes manipulative, but more often accusatory, pompous, and directive. Just like in judo, I had to learn to behave counter-intuitively, to go against my natural instinct to fight back, to explain, defend myself, and justify my actions. It took me a while to realize that doing all of this only gives the other person more power.

Judo has a move that exploits that instinct. It’s called kuzushi, breaking your opponent’s balance before you even touch them. You don’t meet force with force. You pull your opponent in, misdirecting them to shift their center of gravity.

That’s what protective parenting after separation demands of us. We have to suppress all our natural instincts to push back and retaliate in kind. We learn to stop engaging on their terms. We stop being a dog running after a stick, trying to win the argument. Instead, we start protecting our equilibrium and our children’s. We start redirecting our energy to what really matters.

Then there’s ukemi, the art of falling safely. As I already mentioned, it’s the first thing you learn, because you will fall.

In the early days after separation, I fell hard. Just like that one evening I forgot to break my fall in the dojo, I forgot to protect myself. I took every provocation personally, every legal letter as a verdict on my worth. It winded me. But over time, I learned to metaphorically slam my arm down before my back hit the mat, to catch myself before the fall incapacitated me. I stopped treating every provocation as a battle that I needed to win. I stopped dancing to my ex’s tune.

That’s ukemi in practice. You pause before you reply to a baiting text and decide whether your response is actually needed. You document, instead of debating your ex in a 14-message-long thread.

And finally, there’s tai sabaki, body movement, the ability to pivot out of the line of attack. In high-conflict co-parenting, this is the skill that keeps you sane. You don’t stand still and absorb the blow. You move. You change the subject. You change the medium. You change the expectation. You learn that sometimes the strongest thing you can do is step sideways and let their energy carry them past you.

I’d like to say I got to black belt here, at least, but I didn’t. Some days, I still forgot to break my fall. But I learned enough to know that you don’t survive by going at it full-on, 24/7. That’s nothing but a fear response. You might as well just hand your life to your ex on a plate.

As a divorce coach, I see that each of my clients consistently has their own type of fear response. Some of them go into fight mode, and get caught up in an escalating message-go-round. Sometimes, they instinctively respond to their abusers’ (or their abusers’ lawyers’) attacks by catastrophizing and spiraling into panic, falling into paralysis, or blaming themselves

In judo, you learn to understand your own weaknesses and work against them. In life, a big part of breaking your fall is addressing your own inherent fear response(s).

I had a client who, whenever her ex came at her with accusations, would say, “I must be wrong.” (This is the “fawning” fear response). Every single time. I’d point it out, we’d work through it, and the next session, there it was again. Then, one day, she messaged me, describing something he’d done. And at the end of it, she wrote: “I’m doing that thing again. Blaming myself.” That was the moment I knew she’d learned to break her fall.

The clients I see making the biggest leaps are the ones working with a therapist alongside our coaching, digging into the negative core beliefs and wounds underneath the fear response. The “I must be wrong” is more than just a habit. It’s a belief my client carried, long before her ex came along. Changing that belief is black-belt work. And it's where the real freedom is. Other core beliefs can be reflected in thoughts like “I’ll never be safe”, “I’m powerless”, “He’ll always control me”, “No-one will ever believe me”, “If I make a mistake, everything falls apart.”

When you’re dealing with an abuser and their enablers, you need to be smarter about where you put your strength. My youngest brother, who was shorter even than me, won a national judo championship in his teens. Judo taught me that the smallest person on the mat could throw the largest one if they understood leverage.

Leaving an abusive husband taught me the same thing: you don’t need to overpower your opponent. The real win comes when you stop feeding their momentum and start understanding and addressing your own trigger points.

If you're not sure which fear response trips you up, or you’re tired of handing your energy to someone who doesn’t deserve it, book a free 30-minute consultation with me. We'll figure out where you're losing leverage and what to do about it. Click the button below.

Want to know more about what I do?

This week’s resources are three blog posts that can help you move from white-belt newbie to emotional black belt.

This blog post contains a bunch more useful life lessons from judo. The line about how “by naming the fear—whether it’s fear of inadequacy, rejection, or loss—we weaken its hold” is pure gold. Our fears are like monsters under the bed until we start naming them and identifying our fear response.

Here’s a resource that can help you break your fall by turning off that fear response. The distinction it draws between perceived danger and actual danger jumped out at me. A baiting email from your ex isn't a bear in the woods, but your nervous system doesn't know the difference. This post gives you practical tools to remind it.

Finally, here’s some more information on how to identify the core beliefs that underlie your fear responses. I think this is best done with a therapist who’s experienced in this field, but I also know that not everyone can afford one.