There was no physical violence, and that does not weaken your case.It changes what your case is made of. Yours is proven by pattern, and a pattern only exists if someone writes it down.
Psychological and emotional abuse is family violence under s. 1 of the Family Law Act — intimidation, harassment, coercion, threats, unreasonable restrictions on your financial or personal autonomy, following you, damaging your things. It counts whether or not he meant to harm you. A pattern of coercive and controlling behaviour is something a judge is required to consider when deciding on a protection order.
But a physical case comes with photographs and hospital records. Yours does not. What you have instead is twenty or thirty specific things that happened on specific days, which together form a shape anyone can recognise. Written down, that is evidence. Held only in your memory, it is a feeling you are trying to describe.
Four rules before you start
Write it as though he is reading it
Because he will. Everything filed with the court gets served on him. This one constraint will keep out the venting and the exaggeration, and both of those would cost you far more than they could ever gain you.
Facts, not verdicts
Do not write that he was abusive, controlling, or a narcissist. Write what he said and what he did, and let whoever reads it reach that conclusion on their own. They will. Characterisations get discounted; specifics do not.
WeakHe was constantly controlling about money and made me feel worthless.
StrongFrom about March 2024 I had no access to the joint account. He gave me $60 on Sundays for groceries and asked to see the receipt. In June 2025 I asked for money for Maple's shoes and he told me to explain why I could not manage on what he gave me.
One exaggeration costs you the whole document
If a single line can be shown to be overstated, everything else on the page gets read with suspicion. Understate if you are unsure. If you cannot remember whether it was twice or five times, write "at least twice."
Do not include everything
Petty grievances sitting next to serious incidents make the serious ones look smaller. If it would not matter to a stranger, leave it out.
What each entry needs
WhenA date if you have one. "Early June 2025" or "the weekend before Maple's birthday" is fine. Approximate honestly rather than guessing precisely.
What happenedWhat was said and done. Actual words where you remember them, in quotation marks.
Where, and who was thereEspecially whether Maple was present, in the next room, or awake.
What you didLeft the room, slept elsewhere, called someone, gave in. This matters — it shows the effect on you.
Who else knowsAnyone you told at the time, and roughly when you told them. This is the single most valuable column.
Anything that survivesTexts, emails, photos, a bank statement, a voicemail. Note where it is.
Things people forget to include
Nobody can recall this on demand. Go through these one at a time and something will surface for most of them.
Money
- Having to account for what you spent
- Being given a fixed amount, or having to ask
- Not knowing what was in the accounts, or being kept off them
- Anything that made working, or keeping your own money, harder
- Debt taken on in your name or without your agreement
Who you were allowed to see
- Reactions when you saw friends or family
- Being made to pay for it afterwards — the sulk, the argument, the cold week
- Plans that became impossible often enough that you stopped making them
- People you gradually stopped seeing, and roughly when
Being watched
- Your phone being checked, or the expectation that it could be
- Location sharing, and whether you could have turned it off
- Being asked to account for your time
- Him turning up where you were
- Your things being gone through
Threats
- To take Maple, or to make sure you never see her
- To tell people things about you
- To leave you with nothing
- To hurt himself — including the dates and what he said
What was said to you
- Names, insults, the specific words if you remember them
- Whether Maple was there, or in the house
- Whether anyone else ever heard it
- Being told things did not happen, or that you were remembering wrong, or that you were unwell
The house itself
- Anything punched, thrown, or broken. Walls and doors count.
- Your belongings damaged
- Being kept awake, woken to argue, or arguments that ran until morning
- Being blocked from leaving a room
Maple
- What she has seen or heard, and when
- Anything she has said about it afterwards, in her words
- Changes in her — sleep, clinginess, going quiet when he came in
- Times she was used to get to you
The drug incidents go in their own section
These are the concrete part of your file. Everything else establishes the pattern; these are the incidents a judge can act on immediately. Give them more detail than anything else in the document.
For each one: the date as closely as you can fix it, whether he was solely responsible for Maple at the time, what you actually observed — speech, balance, the state of him, how long it lasted — what you did, and whether anyone else saw it.
The two occasions involving the bag need to be exact. Where it was found. That Maple picked it up and brought it to you. What he said when you raised it. What you did with it. Write these as though they are the only two paragraphs anyone will read, because they may be.
Do not go and get evidence. Nothing on this list is worth going back to that house for, and nothing on it is worth taking a photograph of something in his possession. Write down what you already saw. That is admissible and it is enough.
Corroboration is worth more than detail
One person who can say "she told me about this in July 2025" is worth more than four pages of your own recollection. Go through your phone and pull anything that survives — texts to your mother or your sister, messages where you cancelled plans, anything you wrote at the time.
If you ever mentioned any of it to a doctor, a nurse, a counsellor, or a public health nurse at one of Maple's appointments, say so and note roughly when. Those records exist, they are dated, and they carry real weight precisely because nobody made them for a court.
Where to keep it
- Not on a device he has ever had access to, and not in a cloud account he knows the password to
- Not in a shared photo library
- Email it to yourself on an account he has never seen, or keep it on paper with your mother
- If you use your phone, use an app with a passcode and turn off message previews on the lock screen
How to actually get through it
This is a raw working document, not a court document. It can be messy, out of order, and full of things that later get cut. Someone at the Justice Access Centre or duty counsel will help you turn the strongest ten or fifteen entries into the version that gets filed. So do not try to write it well. Just get it out.
Do it in short stretches, half an hour at most, with someone else in the room or in the house. Not late at night, and not alone. Start with the last twelve months, because that is what you remember most clearly and what matters most, and work backwards only if you have the energy.
You are not writing this to prove that it was bad enough. You are writing it because the pattern is the evidence, and right now it only exists in your head.