12/11/2025
🌿 Seeing Through Charm: Reflections for Counsellors, Mediators, and Helping Professionals
Lately, I’ve been supporting families through complex separations and noticing a pattern that many of us in the helping professions still struggle to recognise.
When a relationship ends, and especially when children are involved, the story we hear depends a lot on who tells it.
Charismatic, confident individuals often present as the “reasonable” ones – calm, articulate, charming. Meanwhile, the partner who’s been living under that charm’s shadow may appear angry, anxious, or emotionally frayed. It’s easy to misinterpret composure as credibility and distress as instability.
But charm isn’t proof of sincerity.
Charm can be a form of social camouflage – a survival strategy for the manipulative, an automatic bias trigger for the rest of us.
As professionals, we’re trained to stay objective, yet even the most self-aware practitioner can be disarmed by someone who seems pleasant, cooperative, and well-spoken.
We must remember that abuse doesn’t end when the relationship does.
Many women find themselves re-traumatised through the systems meant to protect them – questioned, doubted, or subtly judged as “over-reactive.” The bias runs deep: centuries of stereotypes about “hysterical women” and “unfairly maligned men” still shape our instincts.
It’s not about vilifying men; many fathers navigate separation with integrity and care.
It’s about staying awake to the power of presentation, especially when privilege, position, or charisma make scrutiny harder.
As one client said to me, “He was the hero in every room except our home.”
We can do better – by pausing, listening, and checking for congruence between words and behaviour.
By remembering that calm isn’t always truth, and distress isn’t always manipulation.
And by extending compassion to those who have already endured enough self-doubt for one lifetime.
Empathy and discernment can coexist.
Let’s make sure both are present in the rooms where decisions about families (and futures) are made.