Why the System Fails Families

The adversarial court system was designed for determining fault, liability, and guilt, not for healing relationships or restructuring family systems. Applying the adversarial model to intimate, emotional, and interdependent human beings has created what many call an “iatrogenic legal system”: one that often harms the very people it aims to help.

Historically, the adversarial model evolved from English common law as a contest between two parties presenting evidence to an impartial arbiter. The system rewards argumentation, positional bargaining, and the strategic use of conflict and procedure to achieve a “win.” It assumes opposing interests, not shared ones. In contrast, family relationships, particularly those involving children, require cooperation, empathy, and future-oriented solutions. When adversarial logic governs divorce, it reframes spouses as enemies. When parents are drawn into the adversarial system, their children are dragged in too, and if parents can hardly endure it, children are nearly defenseless inside it.

The court’s binary framework is structurally inappropriate for nuanced family realities. The proceedings tend to exacerbate hostility, reduce co-parenting capacity, and prolong emotional recovery after divorce. Even the American Bar Association and the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts have formally recognized that the litigation model escalates conflict, depletes family resources, and undermines children’s adjustment.

The legal machinery forces intimate relational breakdowns into procedural molds built for impersonal disputes over property or crime. The courts, and most family lawyers, are simply not equipped to repair attachment injuries, regulate emotions, or restore trust.

Because lawyers are not trained to address trauma, emotional regulation, or systemic family dynamics, they often overlook the harm produced by the litigation process itself. While attorneys may succeed in achieving favorable legal outcomes, the emotional and relational consequences of the process itself often go unaddressed. In family cases, this omission undermines the client’s long-term well-being. Some have argued that by failing to account for this dimension of harm, the legal profession falls short of its own ethical mandate to act in the client’s best interest. Protecting a client’s welfare in a family context requires safeguarding their capacity for long-term stability, communication, and post-litigation functioning.

Attorneys are skilled in advocacy, not in discerning what relationships can be healed or how to protect clients from the harm of litigation. This perspective does not suggest that lawyers become therapists, but that the legal system’s ethical framework expand to recognize emotional and relational injury as part of the harm to be mitigated. This is where RESCET™ comes in.