When the judge in the Matt and Glenna Bevin divorce case declined to recuse herself this week, after the former Kentucky governor’s legal team alleged bias, the headline read like a procedural update. Another motion. Another ruling. Another chapter in a four-year public divorce that has already included restraining orders, custody disputes, and enough filings to keep court reporters busy through the next election cycle.
But I want to offer a different reading of this moment, because I have sat with enough divorcing couples in my office to recognize what I am looking at. When a spouse in a high-conflict divorce accuses the judge of bias, we are rarely watching a clean legal strategy. As recent coverage in Psychology Today of relational trauma reminds us, we are watching a body in attachment panic, reaching for the only authority figure left in the room and demanding that authority figure validate its story. And when the judge declines, the panic escalates.
You keep expecting a judge to settle what your partner never could.
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I am not diagnosing Matt Bevin. I am not diagnosing Glenna Bevin. I have never met either of them, and the Goldwater rule means I would not presume to assess people I have not sat with clinically. What I am doing is pointing at a pattern we see over and over in these dynamics, because if you are reading this from inside your own divorce, or about to enter one, the Bevin case is a doorway into something that might actually matter for your life.
From the Courthouse to Your Kitchen Table
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The thread I want to pull runs through every contested divorce I have ever worked adjacent to. It is this: the legal process assumes two rational actors making decisions based on their interests. But in a high-conflict divorce, there are no two rational actors. There are two nervous systems in survival mode, trying to use a cognitive instrument (the court) to settle a limbic wound (the collapsed bond).
This is not a metaphor. This is the mechanism. And once you see it, you cannot unsee it.
From Empathi’s research: in 58,221 completed relationship assessments, sad was the third most common deep feeling and hopeless the fifth, at 17,094 and 9,160 people.
You Are Not Fighting About What You Think You Are Fighting About
A couple sat in my office. They had been married nineteen years. Two kids. Both had good jobs. On paper, this should have been straightforward.
They had been in litigation for eleven months over a toaster. Not a fancy toaster. A four-slice Cuisinart. Maybe worth forty dollars on eBay. Their combined legal fees on this single item had exceeded ten thousand dollars. Her attorney thought she was unreasonable. His attorney thought he was petty. The judge was irritated with both of them.
I asked the wife: “Tell me about the toaster.”
She started crying. “He bought it for me the first Christmas we were together. Before the kids. Before everything went wrong. It was the last time I felt like he saw me.”
She was not fighting for a toaster. She was fighting for proof that she once mattered to someone.
The toaster was never about the toaster. The retirement account is never about the retirement account. The custody schedule is never about the custody schedule. And when a high-profile divorce drags on for years, filling headline after headline, the assets and custody arguments you read about in the paper are never really what the people are fighting over.
Your body does not care about content. It does not care about the dishes, the money, or the schedule. It cares about one question: Am I safe?
Attachment theory is the best theory we have of what love is. Love is an emotional bond. We need to be bonded from the cradle to the grave. Inside every relationship, the body is running two questions on loop: Are you there for me? Am I enough for you?
When the answer feels like “no,” the house catches fire. Not literally. Biologically. The limbic system perceives the disconnection as a threat to survival and responds accordingly. The client burning ten thousand dollars fighting over a forty dollar item is not irrational. Their body has converted that item into evidence of their deepest fear: that they do not matter.
The Two Patterns We See in Contested Divorce
Every couple in distress dances the same choreography. I call it the Waltz of Pain. And within that dance, partners fall into one of two patterns.
The first pattern is the Protester. Driven by fear of abandonment. Critical, blaming, disappointed. In the therapy room, this is the partner who cannot stop bringing up the past, who follows you from room to room wanting to talk, who sends the long text messages at midnight. In divorce, this pattern shows up as aggressive litigation. Scorched earth. Excessive motions. Irrational demands for justice. The Protester will not drop a legal fight because stopping feels like accepting abandonment. Their inner experience, the part they cannot articulate, is: I feel abandoned. I feel like I am not a priority. I feel like I am screaming into a void and nobody hears me.
The second pattern is the Withdrawer. Driven by fear of disappointment and shame. Shuts down, rationalizes, retreats. In divorce, this shows up as missed discovery deadlines, stalled execution, ghosting counsel. The Withdrawer presents a case, rationalizes, builds a logical argument. The attorney thinks “this is my reasonable client,” when in fact the client is dysregulated in language that lawyers happen to recognize. Looks like they do not care, when actually it is the opposite. Every document is another opportunity to feel like they have failed at the most important thing in their life.
Neither type is being difficult on purpose. Both are physiologies in survival mode doing the only thing they know how to do.
Why Allegations of Judicial Bias Are Almost Never Really About the Judge
Here is where the Bevin news peg becomes clinically interesting. When a contested divorce produces an allegation of judicial bias, something specific is happening beneath the legal language.
The legal system is built to validate a story. You hire an attorney to construct a legally binding narrative about what your spouse did, what you are owed, who was wrong. Divorce court is the literal manifestation of a framework I teach in my clinical work: everyone is the world-renowned expert in the problems of their partner. If you hosted a global conference on what is wrong with your spouse, you would be the keynote speaker. Divorce court is the stage. The attorneys write the slide deck. The judge sits in the front row with the deciding vote.
When the judge does not clap, the speaker does not update their slides. The speaker attacks the judge.
This is the defended self at work. The defended self wants confirmation above all else. It has built a view of the marriage that is full of evidence. It is always justifiable. The world never runs out of confirmation. When the judge fails to confirm, the survival response reads this not as “a neutral arbiter is weighing the facts,” but as “the last authority figure in the room is also abandoning me.”
And here is the uncomfortable truth the legal system cannot tell you: righteousness is the currency of litigation. Being right is what attorneys sell. But being right, pursued to its logical end, destroys what the client actually needs.
The Courtroom Offers a Cognitive Solution to a Limbic Problem
Your attorney is good at their job. They understand the law, the process, the strategy. They can tell you what you are entitled to, what the likely outcomes are, and how to protect your interests. What they cannot tell you is why you are spending ten thousand dollars fighting over a toaster.
You keep expecting a judge to settle what your partner never could.
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Every decision you make during a divorce is filtered through your body. And your body does not care about the law. It does not care about equitable distribution or parenting time calculations. It cares about one thing: Am I safe?
When you sit across from your attorney and they present the terms of a proposed settlement, your rational brain evaluates the numbers. But your survival brain evaluates the threat. Is this person abandoning me? Am I being punished? Will I be okay?
If your survival brain says no, it will override your rational brain. You will reject favorable terms. You will file motions driven by emotional urgency rather than legal strategy. You will spend six hundred dollars an hour telling your attorney the story of what your spouse did rather than focusing on what you need.
This is not weakness. It is biology. The rational brain runs behind the survival brain. By the time you could evaluate the settlement clearly, the body has already decided it is a threat.
Your attorney can draft a perfect settlement. They cannot make you sign it while your physiology is locked in survival mode. Your attorney can calculate an equitable division of assets. They cannot stop you from burning through the estate fighting over items that represent something your rational brain cannot articulate. Your attorney can draft a parenting plan that is in the best interests of your children. They cannot ensure that you follow it when your ex triggers the loop that sends you back into survival mode.
The Compass of Shame and Why We Attack the Judge
There is a framework I use in my clinical work that comes from the work of Silvan Tomkins and Donald Nathanson called the Compass of Shame. When the attachment bond collapses, individuals drop into a flood of shame that registers biologically before it registers as thought. Shame is a biological event. Because human beings cannot tolerate its raw weight, we organize protective moves in four directions. One of those directions is Attack Other.
High-conflict litigation lives almost entirely in that quadrant. By attacking the ex-spouse, and then attacking the ex-spouse’s attorney, and then attacking the judge, the individual is desperately trying to shield themselves from the devastating vulnerability of feeling unchosen, unacceptable, unlovable.
A recusal motion inside a contested divorce is often, clinically, the Attack Other response one level up. The spouse is no longer just attacking the other party. The spouse is attacking the person who declined to fully validate the story of the other. That refusal to validate registers in the body exactly like a parent refusing to take the child’s side against a sibling. The child does not say “thank you for being neutral.” The child says “you never loved me.”
I say this not to diminish anyone in a real divorce, including anyone in the Bevin case. I say it because if you are reading this from inside your own collapse, you deserve to know what your body is doing while your attorney is typing.
The Trap Your Attorney (and Sometimes Your Therapist) Cannot See
There is a professional risk in any helping relationship with someone in divorce. It is the risk of hearing only their pain, only their negative story of the partner, and beginning to see the world through their defended view. Supporting the victim story without meaning to.
The story of the other is always justifiable. Always evidence. The world never runs out of confirmation. Your client will love you for it. Your client will feel supported. Your client will keep coming. You might even feel good about the work. That is the trap.
It reinforces the defended self. It validates the part that protects from deeper vulnerability. The system becomes invisible. The story becomes fixed. And the relationship, or what is left of it, dies by certainty.
In divorce, this is not malpractice. It is the adversarial system working as designed. But if you are the one inside it, you need someone in your life, a therapist, a trusted friend, a reflective journal at 3 a.m., who can see beyond the story of the other. Because the judge will not do it. The attorney cannot do it. And the courtroom is not built for it.
If any of this is landing close to home, you can talk it through right now with Figlet, Figs’ AI relationship coach, and get an answer about your own situation in seconds. Ask Figlet about fighting inside a courtroom..
Connection First, Problem Solving Later
Here is the principle that changes everything, even in divorce: connection first, problem solving later.
In intact marriages, this means you do not try to solve the dishes conversation until you have restored the emotional bond. In collapsing marriages, it means you do not try to settle the custody schedule until each person has had their pain witnessed somewhere, by someone, in a container that is not the courtroom.
The courtroom is not that container. The courtroom operates by decree. It offers cognitive outputs: who gets what, who goes where, who pays whom. It cannot do the reflexive work of meeting a grieving body. And when we ask it to, we pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce documents that do not heal the wound they were supposed to heal.
A divorce decree can divide assets. It cannot settle the somatic ledger. The body records every interaction that mattered, every moment of safety, every moment of abandonment. No judge, biased or unbiased, recused or not, can make that ledger balance.
Related and more specific: when your partner threatens to leave during arguments
What This Means If You Are the One Reading at 2 A.M.
Maybe you are not a former governor. Maybe you are just someone whose marriage is three months or three years into collapse, and you are watching your life get processed by strangers in a language you do not speak.
I want you to hear this clearly. Your physiology is running the case. You will file motions your rational brain would not endorse. You will spend money your rational brain would not spend. You will reject settlements your rational brain would accept. You will feel, at moments, that every person in the system is biased against you, including the judge. Some of that may be accurate. Most of it will be the body mistaking unmet need for active threat.
The work is not to win the courtroom. The work is to find ground beneath your feet that does not depend on the courtroom’s verdict. Because whatever the judge rules, you still have to wake up the next morning and live inside your own body. If the body is still in survival mode, no decree will feel like peace.
This is not a you problem or a them problem
“Relationship distress is a feature, not a bug, of loving someone so much that their emotional distance feels terrifying. It is the predictable dance of two nervous systems desperately trying to survive the perceived loss of one another.”
“The fight is never about the content. It is always about the bond.”
Figs O’Sullivan, LMFT
What to Do Next
If you recognize yourself in any of this, whether you are contemplating divorce, already inside one, or trying to rebuild after one, the work of finding ground is available to you, and you do not have to do it alone.
Take the free relationship quiz to see where your attachment patterns are running you, especially under the kind of stress that divorce, contested custody, and adversarial legal process unleash. Five minutes. Real clinical insight. No spin.
If you want something more sustained, start AI Relationship Coaching today with Figlet, the coaching tool I have been building to bring the frameworks from my therapy office into a format you can use at 2 a.m., when the motion just got filed and the body is screaming and there is no one to call.
The courtroom will decide what it decides. The judge will rule. Your attorney will do their job. But what happens inside your body, and inside the bodies of your children, is not on the docket. That is yours. And it is the only thing a ruling cannot take from you, and the only thing a ruling cannot give you either. Build it.
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