A father in Rhode Island is asking the state Supreme Court to strike down a law that allows grandparents to petition for court-ordered visitation with his child over his objection. The case is working its way through the legal system as a constitutional question about parental authority. The attorneys will argue about due process. The judges will cite precedent. Somewhere in a conference room, a legal brief is being drafted that never once mentions what is actually happening inside the bodies of the people involved.
I am not going to weigh in on the constitutional question. I am a marriage and family therapist, not a lawyer, and the Goldwater rule keeps me from diagnosing a father I have never met. What I can tell you is what I see clinically, over and over, when families get pulled into these exact dynamics. A parent fighting the state over who gets to cross the threshold of their home is not being stubborn. Their body is doing what bodies do when the ground underneath a family starts moving without consent.
The peg is the case. The article is about what happens inside a family when a court tries to legislate intimacy, and why the attempt almost always makes the wound worse.
Answer:
A couple in my office last week spent their entire session aggressively
fighting over a legal letter from the husband’s parents demanding formal
visitation rights to their toddler. The husband sat rigidly on the couch,
suggesting they just comply to avoid a costly court battle. His wife sat on the
far armrest, coldly explaining that if a judge forced her to hand over her
child, she would pack up and disappear entirely. I let them spiral into this
legal terror for a few minutes before I gently stopped the conversation. I have
watched this hundreds of times in my sixteen years of clinical practice [1, 2].
Family lawyers will constantly tell you that a grandparent visitation dispute is
simply a complex clash of constitutional rights. As a clinician, I have to tell
you that this common assumption completely misses the biological reality. When
the state threatens to forcibly open your family bubble, you are almost never
dealing with a simple legal dispute. You are actively drowning in a profound
limbic emergency [3, 4].
To understand how an extended family dynamic devolves into a courtroom
battlefield, you must understand a severe negative cycle that I clinically call
the Waltz of Pain [5, 6]. In this ancient survival system, your nervous system
does not view state mandated family access as a minor inconvenience. It detects
a literal, life threatening invasion [4, 7]. For the grandparents filing the
lawsuit, the loss of access triggers an absolute biological panic of
abandonment. Their amygdala fires, their prefrontal cortex goes entirely
offline, and they pursue relentlessly with aggressive legal demands to
forcefully secure a connection [4, 8]. For the parents receiving the subpoena,
this intense legal pursuit feels like a massive, suffocating wave of engulfment.
Crushed by the immense weight of feeling powerless, their survival brain
triggers an equally fierce defensive reaction [9, 10]. You are not fighting over
a visitation calendar. You are fighting a neurobiological war where multiple
generations are using extreme legal armor to survive crushing attachment wounds
[11].
I know exactly how devastating these biological alarms can become because I
grew up as the child of two broken homes, carrying my own childhood wounds of
abandonment [12]. When an attachment system is pushed to its absolute breaking
point, human biology forces family members to deploy catastrophic weapons
against the people they should love [13]. The profound tragedy of this dynamic
is that the legal system actively pours gasoline on the fire. A judge can
mandate physical proximity, but a court order absolutely cannot force genuine
emotional safety or repair a flooded nervous system [14]. You simply cannot
settle a biological panic by treating your family like a courtroom where the
state declares a definitive winner.
If you want to understand what the Rhode Island grandparent visitation case
actually reveals about the collision between government mandates and human
attachment, we have to look entirely past the legal precedents to safely examine
the hidden biological reality controlling the crisis.
Conversation: 2d6d572e-0615-40d0-857d-57a25ae124cd (turn 1)
From the Courthouse to the Couch
Here is the pattern I want to name. When a family ends up in front of a judge fighting over access to a child, the legal question is almost never the real question. It is the content. And as I have said many times in my office, the content is a red herring. Underneath every legal motion is a survival response trying to answer two older questions: Am I safe? Is my child safe? When the state steps into the middle of that, it does not settle the system. It amplifies it.
The Content Is Never the Content
A couple sat in my office once, in the middle of a divorce, having spent over ten thousand dollars in legal fees fighting over a forty-dollar toaster. Eleven months of litigation. Her attorney thought she was unreasonable. His attorney thought he was petty. When I asked her what the toaster meant, she cried. He had bought it for her the first Christmas they were together, before the kids, before everything went wrong. She was not fighting for a toaster. She was fighting for proof that she had once mattered.
I bring this up because the Rhode Island case, on its surface, is about visitation hours. About whether Grandma and Grandpa get Sundays. But the father asking the state’s highest court to throw out the law is not fighting over Sundays. His body is fighting for something older, more biological, and less articulable than a parenting schedule. He is fighting for the integrity of the container he is trying to build around his child.
When people in distress end up in legal proceedings, they are trying to solve a limbic problem with a cognitive tool. The amygdala fires before the rational brain comes online. By the time a parent is ready to evaluate a proposed visitation schedule, their survival brain has already decided it is a threat. The frontal cortex lags behind the survival brain. You cannot out-reason that gap. You can only work with it. Courtrooms are not built for that work.
What a Child Actually Needs
John Bowlby, the grandfather of attachment theory, said love is an emotional bond, cradle to grave. A child is born completely dependent. The parent’s first job is to settle the child’s body until the child can internalize that capacity themselves. That settling does not come from a village vaguely defined. It comes from a primary bond, held inside a stable container that the parents are building together.
In my book of frameworks, I call that container the Sovereign Us. It is not fusion, where two parents merge into a single anxious blob. It is not independence, where they operate like separate contractors. It is two people staying present with something they have created together, a third thing with its own needs and its own borders. The couple, or the single parent, or the co-parenting unit after a separation, is the ground the child grows on.
When that ground is solid, the child can relax. They stop scanning. They stop managing the adults around them. They can be a kid.
When the ground is contested, the child’s body does not distinguish between a grandparent’s lawsuit, a bitter ex, and a tax dispute. It registers one thing: the people who are supposed to be holding me are distracted by something they find more urgent than me. That registration happens long before the child can name it. It gets stored in the body.
The Body Is the First Ledger
Long before there were blockchains or legal filings, the autonomic system was already functioning as a distributed ledger. It records what happens. It remembers who was present and who was absent. It encodes the felt experience of safety and the felt experience of rupture. Trauma, shame, belonging, love. All of it gets written somatically, below the level of language.
This is why I keep saying that the rational case and the body’s case are two different cases. You can win a legal argument and lose the attachment argument in the same afternoon. You can secure visitation rights and simultaneously confirm, at the deepest level, that the grandchild’s parents are not safe to trust. The body keeps its own record, and the body is very hard to overrule.
For the parent being sued, the ledger entry reads: the adults who claim to love my child are willing to drag us into court. For the child, as they grow older and understand what happened, the ledger entry reads: the people who said they loved me fought over me. These entries do not get erased when the final order comes down.
Close the Doors to Repair the House
In my clinical work, I teach a specific move to couples and families dealing with extended family stress. If there are unhealed injuries between the parents and the extended family, or between the parents themselves, the first task is to close the doors for a chapter. Patch the roof. Then open the doors again and see who can come back in.
I use this metaphor a lot with clients: if you have never fixed the leak in the roof, adding a second story will not go well. You will just create more rooms for the water to get into. A family that has not repaired its own injuries cannot absorb more traffic. It needs a chapter of relative privacy to do the repair.
A law that allows a court to force visitation over parental objection is a law that legally forbids this clinical move. It says to the parents: you may not close your doors. You must keep the roof leaking and the front door open at the same time, and you must keep smiling while strangers track water through your living room. This is not a neutral legal framework. It is an active interference with the conditions under which repair becomes possible.
I am not making a legal argument here. I am making a clinical one. Whatever the courts decide, the clinical truth is that families need the capacity to pause contact in order to metabolize rupture. When the pause is not available, the rupture cannot be processed. It just keeps happening.
Fiat Love and the Problem of Decree
There is a concept I have been developing in my forthcoming book that feels relevant here. I call it Fiat Love. Fiat means by decree. Fiat money is money that has value because the state says it has value, not because it is backed by any hard asset. Love by decree works the same way. It is a relationship held together by declaration rather than by the actual ongoing labor that makes love real.
A court-ordered relationship is the purest form of this dynamic. The state decrees that this bond shall exist. It does not require any of the underlying proof of work that generates actual connection. It does not require the grandparents to have been attuned, or safe, or reparative. It does not require the parents to feel that their child is being handed to someone trustworthy. It just prints the relationship into existence and expects the bodies involved to treat the currency as valuable.
Bodies are not fooled by decree. They are exquisite detectors of whether the connection in front of them is backed by anything real. A child sent to visit someone under court order, in a home their parents do not feel safe sending them to, will feel the lack of backing. They may not have words for it. Their body will know.
This is not an argument that grandparents do not matter. Grandparents can be the most calming adults in a child’s life. I have watched grandparents carry the repair work that parents could not do. The question is not whether grandparents matter. The question is whether relationships can be legislated into being. They cannot. They can only be built, through repeated presence over time, in ways that the relevant bodies actually register as safe.
The Keynote Speaker at the Wrong Conference
One of the patterns I see in every high-conflict family case is what I call being the keynote speaker at the conference of your opponent’s flaws. Everyone becomes the world-renowned expert in what is wrong with the other person. The grandparents build their case about the parents. The parents build their case about the grandparents. The attorneys draft briefs that are essentially keynote addresses delivered at conferences no one should be attending.
The Story of Other, as I have named it in my work, never leads to growth. It never leads to healing. It never leads to the kind of inner ground that lets a family actually function. It produces heat, paperwork, and legal fees. It does not produce connection.
A courtroom is structurally a venue for the Story of Other. It rewards the most articulate keynote speakers. It cannot reward the harder, quieter work of each side owning their own contribution to the rupture. That work has to happen elsewhere, if it happens at all.
What the Third Chair Would Say
In every family conflict, I imagine a third chair at the table. The parents sit in two of the chairs. The third chair holds everything they both claim to be fighting for. In this case, the child. The relational infrastructure the child will grow up inside. The felt sense of safety that will either become the child’s inheritance or not.
When grandparents and parents end up in court, the third chair is usually empty in the legal proceedings, even though everyone claims to be fighting on its behalf. Every motion filed, every hearing attended, every legal bill paid, either protects what is sitting in that chair or depletes it. The legal strategy that wins visitation but teaches the child that love requires litigation has not protected the chair. It has burned the chair for firewood and called it a victory.
I am not saying the Rhode Island father is right or the grandparents are wrong. I do not know their story. I am saying that whatever the court decides, the family members who will carry the real labor are the ones who can keep asking, after the ruling, what is actually in the best interest of the small human whose body is keeping its own ledger.
Application: If You Are Living This
If you are a parent in a dispute with extended family, a few things from the clinical work are worth holding.
The legal channel is real and sometimes necessary. Document what needs documenting. Get the attorney who knows the territory. Do not pretend goodwill will solve what requires structure.
At the same time, notice that the loop you are in with your in-laws or your own parents is very likely an older loop than the current dispute. The content in front of you is today’s content. The dynamic is older. If you can get curious about the older dynamic, you will make better decisions about today’s content.
Protect the chair. Whatever legal strategy you pursue, keep asking whether it deposits into your child’s long-term sense of safety or withdraws from it. Not every legal win is a clinical win. Not every clinical loss is a legal loss.
And if there is any capacity for relational repair, even a thread of it, outside the courtroom, tend to it. Courts impose outcomes. They do not heal families. Families heal families, slowly, in rooms where no one is billing by the hour.
What to Do Next
If you are inside a family dispute that has moved, or is moving, toward legal proceedings, the legal track is only half the work. The other half is what is happening in your body underneath the case. You can have the best attorney in the state and still be running a loop that no ruling will resolve.
Take the free relationship quiz to see the pattern you are actually in. Five minutes. It will give you language for what your body already knows.
Start AI Relationship Coaching today if you want ongoing support in the space between therapy sessions and legal appointments. Figlet is built on the same frameworks I use in my office, trained on the clinical work I have been practicing for sixteen years. It will not replace your attorney. It will not replace a therapist. It will help you stay steady enough to make the decisions that actually protect the child sitting in the third chair.
Whatever the Rhode Island Supreme Court decides, the families living inside these disputes will still have to go home and live with each other, or not live with each other, for the rest of their lives. The court cannot do that work. You can. The question is whether you will.
