Divorce Rock Bottom: Her Mom Had a Stroke & Marriage Ended | Gabriella Pomare

Australian family lawyer and author Gabriella Pomare joins Ned for an essential conversation about rebuilding family life after separation. Five years ago, Gabriella experienced her own devastating rock bottom: navigating a messy separation with a one-year-old son while simultaneously watching her mother suffer a catastrophic stroke that left her paralyzed and without memory. Despite being a seasoned family law practitioner, she discovered that professional expertise doesn't insulate you from the raw grief, anger, and confusion of divorce.

That double trauma became the catalyst for a profound realization: separation doesn't create broken families. It creates opportunities to rewrite the family story with intention, maturity, and collaboration. Her new book The Collaborative Co-Parent offers a practical roadmap for parents navigating the impossible terrain between ending a marriage and raising healthy, emotionally secure children together.

Gabriella introduces her four pillars of co-parenting communication: listen, pause, reflect, and respond. This framework helps parents regulate their own triggered emotions, filter every decision through the question "would my child be proud of this message?", and slowly transform high-conflict interactions into functional partnerships. She emphasizes that collaboration doesn't require being best friends or taking family vacations together. For some, collaboration means simply being able to exchange text messages without explosive conflict. For others, it's attending school concerts side by side or sharing holiday dinners. The definition varies by family, but the core principle remains constant: put the child's wellbeing at the center of every decision.

The conversation tackles the hardest moments in co-parenting: driveway handoffs where tension is palpable, introducing new romantic partners, navigating holidays, managing the impulse to make children into confidants, and the ongoing grief that resurfaces unpredictably even years after separation. Gabriella shares her own rock bottom moment as a co-parent: a Christmas Day five years ago when she let anger about her ex's new relationship prevent their son from spending time with his father. That moment of recognizing her own failure became the springboard for everything that followed.

She breaks down why the family law system often fails families, how courts can't address the emotional trauma of separation, the myth of parental rights (children have rights to relationsh