In this episode, Andrew and Barbara talk with Carrie Gour, CEO and co-founder of PwrSwitch, about how to document and organize communication with a high-conflict ex for your divorce.
Note: This podcast was originally hosted on Barbara La Pointe’s website, which has since gone offline. I’ve reposted the episodes here so people still have access to the materials.
Note: PwrSwitch has since gone out of business, and its website is no longer online. If you need one place to keep co-parenting communication documented, OurFamilyWizard is a widely used option.
Transcript
Andrew Folkler: Welcome, everyone, to another episode of Broken Families, where we host conversations on divorce, parental alienation, and high-conflict relationships. My name is Andrew Folkler.
Barbara La Pointe: And I’m Barbara La Pointe. Today, we are going to discuss how to prepare and organize your documentation for divorce. And to help us really dive deep into this topic, we’ve invited Carrie Gour, CEO and co-founder of PwrSwitch.
Barbara La Pointe: PwrSwitch is an Android app that helps you save all relevant email, conversations, text messages into one little PDF that you can use in your divorce. So without further ado, welcome Carrie to Broken Families Podcast.
Carrie Gour: Welcome. Thank you, Barbara.
Carrie Gour: Thank you, Andrew...
Barbara La Pointe: So great that you’re here. I think we better start at the basics, and maybe just tell us why PwrSwitch and what is it?
Carrie Gour: PwrSwitch is the result of me really trying to solve my own problems in my own high-conflict separation. So one of the characteristics of a high-conflict personality is that they communicate via multiple channels at high volume, and it’s really a way that they destabilize the other person by constantly being present and alive.
Carrie Gour: So when I first left my ex, it sounds crazy, and it was, but I received 40 to 50 text message, emails, and phone calls every day, not for weeks, not for months, but what went on ultimately for more than a year. And then periodically that volume for years after that. This is not unusual. And.
Carrie Gour: For anybody in this situation, they’re advised by their legal counsel, by their therapist, by sometimes a mediator or a parenting coordinator if they’re involved, to document all of those communications so that you have a record of what’s transpired to help support your case. It’s also not unusual in high-conflict divorce or separations for police to be involved, and so in that case you also need this kind of evidence.
Carrie Gour: So needless to say, when I left, my children were three years old. I had twin three-year-olds. I was trying to work. I’m dealing with the emotional fallout of this impossible separation, and then just the onslaught of that. You cannot take that many screenshots.
Carrie Gour: You just can’t. And so your results, your legal results, are in direct proportion to the quality of the evidence that you have to support your claims. I documented kind of badly, which means sporadically. I took kind of a highlight reel of badness, and got really poor results as a result of having poor evidence.
Carrie Gour: And I just thought, “What would make a difference for me?” And I thought, “What if all this documenting was automated?” And so that’s PwrSwitch. And it actually is for Android and iPhone. We have it for both platforms, and it will collect and consolidate your text and your emails for as far back as you have them, we’ve done as much as 10 years for people, and puts them all in, like you say, a single searchable PDF.
Carrie Gour: You can search, you can highlight, you can annotate years’ worth of conversations between you and as many people as you need. So again, in high conflict, it’s not unusual for your high-conflict personality to enlist other people to harass you. So it might be your ex and their sister and their mother and their best friend, or whatever.
Carrie Gour: So you can collect all of that...
Barbara La Pointe: Go ahead, Andrew. Sorry...
Andrew Folkler: It sounds like it has a built-in feature that it can backtrack through already, say, I guess, sent and collected emails then, or collected text messages. Or does it only work from once you got it installed and then it starts tracking it?
Carrie Gour: No. It does both. So it grows from the time of sign-up forward, but it also collects historically. So for some people who have this high-conflict situation in their lives, we have pulled communications off four devices over 10 years, because people are afraid to get rid of their phone because they don’t wanna lose those communications in case they need them.
Carrie Gour: So for example, PwrSwitch is two years old, and like I say, I created it wishing that it was the product that existed when I needed it. Well, because I’m in a high-conflict separation, again, the fundamental nature is that they never end. So I’m now six years on, and there’s a saying in technology, when a founder uses their own product, it’s called eating your own dog food.
Carrie Gour: Well, I ate my own dog food as recently as two weeks ago. So my experience was that my lawyer wanted to prove a pattern of behavior over time, and this is where PwrSwitch was, I had that experience that we hear our customers have all the time, which is, “Oh, my God. Thank God,” because I pulled four years of texts and emails, and then was able to i highlighted and annotated all of that so that my lawyer could just quickly see what was going on over the last four years, and we made, finally, a conclusive argument about this: these are not one-off crazy events on his part, that it’s a regular cadence of abuse and harassment.
Carrie Gour: That then, of course, has direct impacts on the kids and on me.
Barbara La Pointe: So I mean, there’s a lot of benefits I can see that we’re gonna talk about. But I have to imagine that this saved you a lot of money with your lawyer. Does it save you money to use your app with your family lawyer?
Carrie Gour: Yeah. So this is something that people wouldn’t know until they’ve been in the system for a bit, because you don’t know.
Carrie Gour: And here’s the thing. Most of us, even if we have this high-conflict person in our lives, when we divorce them, we are optimistic. We think, “Oh, finally. The hardest thing has happened, and I have left this person, and it’s all gonna be resolved soon. And I know they care a lot about money, but you know what?
Carrie Gour: I’m gonna give them all their money, and it’s all just gonna be resolved.” But that is not the nature of a high-conflict person. Sorry, what were you gonna say?
Barbara La Pointe: Oh, you’re preaching to the choir here. That’s true.
Carrie Gour: So when you’re optimistic, you don’t know that you’re gonna be in this for years to come.
Carrie Gour: So the way it saves you money is that in the beginning when you’re optimistic, you just wanna pay your lawyer to take care of things, and the lawyer, their team, their paralegal and legal assistant, they do all of the work that PwrSwitch does. So you send them screenshots, and you send them your email forwards, and then they put them in a time sequence.
Carrie Gour: They are looking for that pattern of behavior over time. They’re chasing you maybe for what was the conversation before this and after this so that they have some context. We have had customers who’ve said they’ve spent over $10,000 just for this piece. That’s not for legal advice.
Carrie Gour: That’s just for the legal team to do what PwrSwitch can do in half an hour. So in my case, because I did all that work, I supplied the PwrSwitch reports, and then I highlighted so that he didn’t have to read 600 pages of texts and emails and then I had little notes, right?
Carrie Gour: ‘Cause you can annotate on this PDF so that there was some context that connected to the timeline of events that I had also created. It didn’t cost me anything in paralegal time. So at $175 an hour, that adds up fast.
Barbara La Pointe: But when you were getting those 30 to 40 texts per day and doing this documentation yourself or your lawyer, I have to imagine you were exhausted.
Carrie Gour: So it’s a couple of things, right? So yes, when we have surveyed our customers, they have told us that... And these are people who have been in their high conflict journey for three to five years on average, sometimes more, sometimes less. But they spend an average of five hours a week just dealing with the documenting of stuff.
Carrie Gour: So yeah, so that’s exhausting, just the physical labor, but it’s actually the emotional piece that’s the most exhausting because there’s being constantly triggered by the ding of your phone. And then there’s being re-triggered by having to scroll back and capture stuff constantly, and then you’re either printing it out or you’re sending it to your lawyer with some, whatever the story is.
Carrie Gour: So you’re constantly having to be in it, and that’s really emotionally exhausting. So this is the other great thing, right? So PwrSwitch will just collect it, you go through it once, you send it off. It’s done. And the other thing is that when you’re dealing with a lawyer, you’re charged for every email that you send, right?
Carrie Gour: It might be 50 bucks an email. So if you’re sending screenshots and email forwards, you’re being charged every time you send that. If you send one with an attachment, there’s savings there too.
Barbara La Pointe: A significant savings. I mean, don’t you think sometimes when you’re the recipient of all those letters or texts or emails, 10, 20, 30, 40 a day, you feel like, “Stop running my lawyer bill up?”
Carrie Gour: So again, there are some generalizations in this high conflict space. One of the generalizations is that typically there’s an inverse power dynamic, and it’s either power and money. That’s typically what it is. I’ll just talk about my own experience. So which is, I think, prototypical.
Carrie Gour: He’s very wealthy, and he’s very important. He’s very fancy. In these kinds of situations, this is not an unusual kind of dynamic. I think that litigation and financial abuse is rampant, and what I mean by that is because he has money and I comparatively don’t he’s constantly filing court motions, right?
Carrie Gour: And we’re on this litigation hamster wheel that I’m constantly trying to get off.
Carrie Gour: But there’s this pull to be on. So yes, I do feel like, “Stop running up my lawyer bill,” but I think from his perspective, that’s part of the point.
Barbara La Pointe: Well, those high-conflict personalities, we call them frequent filers.
Barbara La Pointe: Frequent filers.
Carrie Gour: If only you could get points for that.
Barbara La Pointe: So this sounds like a miracle app.
Carrie Gour: It is if you’re somebody who needs mobile evidence to support your claims. And really for us, the majority of our customers are using PwrSwitch for changing parenting orders, that sort of thing, because, like I said, they’re in it now for they’ve been in it for three, four, five years, so.
Barbara La Pointe: Right, and when you collect better digital evidence, as you say, and you get those better outcomes, do you also maybe at times get better court orders because you’ve had those better digital evidence experiences?
Carrie Gour: Yeah. I mean, better evidence does get you better outcomes, for sure.
Carrie Gour: Because what happens a lot in all family court is he said, she said. So if it’s you and I, we’re recalling a situation differently, and this becomes very untenable, and then a judge makes a decision based on what he or she thinks often, or on the evidence that’s presented, which might just be each person’s version of events. When you have this, and this is part of the value proposition, I guess, of PwrSwitch, is because you’re getting this comprehensive history, it’s objective.
Carrie Gour: And what I mean by that is it often happens that we too behave badly because it’s like, “Oh my God, I am losing my mind,” and just, “Stop it already.” And so maybe you say things that you regret later, but that can actually help you. So it’s embarrassing on the one hand. On the other hand, in the context, it’s like, well, who wouldn’t lose their mind?
Carrie Gour: And then it’s defensible if opposing counsel brings this thing up. It’s like, yeah, well, you can defend it because you know it’s there. But certainly I would say the objectivity in this comprehensive nature, because you have all the context, is really helpful in getting better results.
Carrie Gour: What I can say, when I was collecting manually with screenshots in the beginning, is that his counsel successfully made the argument that I was cherry-picking to frame him in a poor light, because I didn’t have everything.
Carrie Gour: And so, which was not true. I just could not conceivably keep up.
Barbara La Pointe: It’s a lot of work.
Barbara La Pointe: A lot of work.
Carrie Gour: Well, have you been there?
Barbara La Pointe: Just about.
Barbara La Pointe: Hours and hours a day, and your office is full of papers, and it’s overwhelming. So I also wished I would’ve known about this app back when it might have served my situation.
Barbara La Pointe: But what do you think about all this, Andrew?
Andrew Folkler: I mean, it’s something I can relate to. Granted, I haven’t been in a divorce with a partner, but I have gone through the divorce process with my dad, and having to help him with all the documentation, and the back and forth, and the re-reading and re-reading affidavits, and suggesting edits, and all that.
Andrew Folkler: Like you were saying earlier, Carrie, how emotionally taxing it is. And then I can’t even imagine just being bombarded on top of that with hateful and spiteful messages from an ex. Which honestly is probably intended to push you over the edge.
Andrew Folkler: We’ve discussed in previous episodes, especially on high-conflict personalities, how these people are often trying to take over and change the narrative, and show that they’re somebody to be admired, and in a very narcissistic light, and that they’re also looking to instigate conflict and then blame you for it.
Andrew Folkler: So I wholeheartedly agree with you, Carrie.
Carrie Gour: And you’re totally right. I do think it’s intentionally destabilizing. And the other thing is that the very nature of a high-conflict personality is that they’re not emotionally regulated. So it’s just like fireworks all the time, not in a good way.
Barbara La Pointe: This app can really help you take back your control on the post-separation abuse that occurs so often. I was just wondering how counsel and how family lawyers feel about your app.
Carrie Gour: I just wanna pick up on something you said, which is about taking back the power. That’s where our name, right?
Carrie Gour: It’s right there. It’s like switch the power dynamic, take some power back. And so, yes, we’re selling technology, but really what we’re selling is power back to people who feel they’ve lost it, and control to people who feel like they have none, because you really feel like you’re out of control when you’re in this situation.
Carrie Gour: But in response to your question about how counsel feels, the ones that are using it and recommending it for their clients, they have said it’s a game changer for their practice. Now, these are lawyers who have a high degree of, what I would say, client integrity, meaning they care about saving their clients money, and that their clients are paying for their legal expertise and not for their administration abilities.
Carrie Gour: But as lawyers with better evidence, they also get better results. And so if they can get better results faster for less money for their clients, which is what is happening, that turns into, I refer to it as this virtuous business development cycle, because happy clients refer other clients, and they remain clients.
Barbara La Pointe: That’s a really win-win-win, win-win for everyone.
Andrew Folkler: I imagine then PwrSwitch can help a great deal for people who are self-representing as well?
Carrie Gour: Yeah. So we actually met with the chair of the Access to Justice Committee for the Canadian Bar Association because they are the association that supports self-represented litigants.
Carrie Gour: Because they really see PwrSwitch as an access to justice tool. Because a lot of self-represented cases fall apart because of evidence that is either poorly captured or poorly presented. So we solve for that because people can pull this history and then just search for what they need and be able to present it in a way that’s easily consumable by a judge.
Barbara La Pointe: That’s incredible.
Barbara La Pointe: I mean, something else that’s popping into my mind is when you’re self-represented, you could even be more overwhelmed with the sheer volume of paperwork that you have to do and organize. And I really think I’m just supposing someone at some point must just feel like, “I give up,” “I just can’t keep up with the documentation.”
Barbara La Pointe: Can be so overwhelming, and maybe even more so if you were self-represented.
Carrie Gour: So I think when you’re self-representing, it’s overwhelming because you’re not just learning how to document your evidence, say. You’re also having to learn legal process and court protocol, and you’re reading case law.
Carrie Gour: It’s a lot. And you’re dealing with this really difficult person in your life on top of that, who probably has paid for representation often. So a really great mid-ground is people are going to legal coaching or what’s called unbundled services.
Carrie Gour: And so what that is, is people go to a lawyer to get coached on how to best present their case. But again, PwrSwitch has a part because it takes care of that evidentiary piece. But then a lawyer can help you choose the pieces of that document that are relevant. So something that you might not know going into a self-represented situation in family court is that you’re allowed a maximum of 40 pages in your affidavit.
Carrie Gour: So that means you have to be very strategic about the evidence that you include. So I would argue that PwrSwitch lets you do that really efficiently.
Barbara La Pointe: That’s another great side benefit. Where does this information go? So you get the app, and then what happens after that? Where is it stored?
Barbara La Pointe: Where does it go? How does it work, from a user standpoint?
Carrie Gour: So from a user standpoint, you sign up for an account. You put in your contact information, so your phone number and email address. And then you put in the phone number and email address or addresses if it’s somebody who contacts you by multiple phone numbers or emails.
Carrie Gour: We call them a sender. You can have as many senders as you want. As I said, maybe it’s a scenario where there’s multiple family members who you wanna collect that conversation from. And then you hit start. It’s a bit different for Android. On Android, it’s all on device.
Carrie Gour: It collects right off the phone. For iPhone, people will require a laptop or a desktop to back their phone up to. And that’s just the nature of the iPhone operating system. And then you can choose a date range. So maybe you only want the conversations from, like, January to today. You can just select that date range, and it’ll pull a PDF for you of that.
Carrie Gour: In terms of where it’s stored, it’s on Amazon cloud storage, and it’s all encrypted in transit, and recognizing that it’s sensitive data that we’re collecting.
Andrew Folkler: Sounds like PwrSwitch could also be used not only just in divorce but in abuse cases, in situations where there’s just conflict in general, especially if you wanted to, before entering litigation or even like how you were saying earlier, afterwards as well.
Carrie Gour: We say it’s a dispute resolution tool because it’s really an objective source of truth. It’s like, there is no more he said, she said or he said, he said or she said, she said. It’s just what subjectively transpired. So the answer is yes, Andrew, really in any kind of conflict.
Carrie Gour: And even outside of the family space, had a disagreement with your neighbor. You had an understanding about, I don’t know...
Andrew Folkler: You could probably use it at work too. I mean, if you have a difficult boss or something, and maybe you’re at a level where you’re contacting each other with either i imagine it would probably include work emails and work phones as well. I mean, it wouldn’t be that hard to try to show a superior a track record of poor leadership behavior or poor behavior in general.
Carrie Gour: And in fact, that is a use case that we’ve had, is to your point, poor leadership or mismanagement or harassment.
Carrie Gour: All of a sudden you have this very tiny document that you can take into HR. Again, it’s not you saying that it’s happened, but you have this objective document to validate your claims.
Barbara La Pointe: I mean, I guess you don’t know what you don’t know. So what’s some top advice or top insights that you might like to share with women in conflict or anyone in conflict, divorce or otherwise, since you deal in conflict yourself?
Carrie Gour: Top advice on how to deal with conflict. Well, this is not very original, but I would say really everyone needs good therapeutic support in their lives. So whatever that looks like for people. That often, especially in the early days, but not exclusively, I think people lean a lot on their lawyers, and that’s a mistake because lawyers are not trained to manage your psychological health.
Carrie Gour: The other thing is they don’t care. They are about what’s legally out of bounds. And you’re paying them 300, 400, $500 an hour to listen to you be sad or be outraged, A. And B, they’re not equipped to help you process that. So for half of that, for $200 an hour, you can go and get a professional who deeply cares about your outrage and your sadness, and who is trained to help you process it in a healthy way.
Carrie Gour: Recognizing that not everybody can afford that, but... And if you can’t, then even a girlfriend or a sister or to not spend that $500 an hour, don’t spend your outrage on your lawyer. Don’t pay them to listen to that. It’s not money well spent.
Andrew Folkler: It’s definitely true.
Andrew Folkler: That’s one thing that Barbara and I have talked about where lawyers are not social workers, and at the end of the day, they always get paid...
Carrie Gour: And you know what? Honestly, if you have a really good one, they feel badly for you, but mostly your mental health is not their problem, so they don’t care.
Carrie Gour: So if you can find somebody who does care, that’s better for you, and it’s better for your pocketbook, and it’s ultimately better for them, too.
Barbara La Pointe: So another way you can save money, save time, get better digital evidence, take back your control. What are some other upsides of just downloading PwrSwitch right now and if you’re in a high-conflict situation?
Carrie Gour: Really, I think, and this is something that I experienced, and it’s something that we hear all the time from customers, is really the sense of relief and safety in knowing that you have a year, two years, you’ve got it captured, and you have it living on your computer or you’ve filed it into the drive or whatever.
Carrie Gour: Just knowing that you have it if and when you need it is a massive gift really to yourself. And in Alberta, the law is if you feel you’ve been criminally harassed, whether that’s by an ex or anywhere, to Andrew’s point, you have up to two years to lay charges. So this was a change in the law that happened a few years ago, and it was really legislators recognizing that sometimes when you’re in it, you don’t have any perspective because you’re just soaking in it.
Carrie Gour: And as humans, we’re infinitely adaptable, and so we just keep adapting to this abusive situation until we don’t. And sometimes when you’re out of it, it takes you a while to recognize what that was exactly. And so in Alberta, you have up to two years. So if you have a PwrSwitch report, it’s just there as a backstop if at some point you wanted to do something with it.
Carrie Gour: Or alternately, if your high-conflict person wants to challenge you, you have it. So that if you lose your phone or drop it in the toilet or whatever happens, it’s like you have all of your stuff.
Barbara La Pointe: That would bring a sense of calm and safety and to mindset.
Carrie Gour: And it just frees you from being a constant evidence collector, right?
Carrie Gour: Because that’s... I have been there, is you’re just a full-time evidence collector. This is what I do.
Carrie Gour: I parent, I work, and I collect evidence. When it’s coming at volume. So this crosses that off the list.
Barbara La Pointe: The lawyers can do what the lawyers need to do, and you get to do other stuff besides organizing evidence or taking screenshots.
Carrie Gour: And of all the things in the world that I wanna spend money on, I promise you, it’s not paying a paralegal to stack up my screenshots and emails. That is 5 or $10,000 I do not wanna spend.
Barbara La Pointe: I think families wanna spend their money on other things like their kids, like their children, rather than on legal bills.
Barbara La Pointe: So this is making me kinda curious, and I’m just imagining someone watching this podcast, how... may I ask how much it is to get this app as a person?
Carrie Gour: Yeah. So right now, for iPhone, because it’s still relatively new, we’re still offering it for free, which is bananas.
Barbara La Pointe: iPhone?
Carrie Gour: Yeah. So, but like I say, if you have an iPhone, you will need to back your phone up to a laptop or a desktop. Now, here’s the thing that really, I think, sets us apart, is our customer service. So there are other text extractors that just will pull your text messages, for example, on the market.
Carrie Gour: Everything out there for iPhone has the same challenge, where you have to back it up to your laptop, and if you’re not really technically literate, it can be really challenging. And a lot of those, most of those in our experience, don’t have any customer service. You’re out in the iPhone downloading wilderness.
Carrie Gour: We will hop on a screen share with you typically within hours of making a request, and we’ll just make sure that you get what you need. So there’s that. And for Android it’s $20 for six months, and again, that’s just an introductory price. All of this pricing will change in the next three months.
Carrie Gour: What we expect is that it will probably be like $120 a year, which is similar to OurFamilyWizard, and then you can dip into PwrSwitch as often as you need within that year. So people typically, we’re seeing them come back. Some people are in there constantly, but most people are in every quarter, I would say.
Carrie Gour: Just to top up their record.
Andrew Folkler: And 120 versus 10 grand, I mean...
Carrie Gour: No contest, right?
Barbara La Pointe: No-brainer.
Barbara La Pointe: A no-brainer. It’s such a super accessible tool.
Barbara La Pointe: Really, truly no-brainer. And so you can get it in Canada, can help out in the United States?
Carrie Gour: Yeah. In fact, we’ve helped quite a lot of people in the United States, and even in other areas, like people in the US are using it to resolve issues in wills and estates, like other kind of family where they’ve had some internal family dispute and they need to pull the communications around stuff, or landlord and tenant, or these kinds of things.
Andrew Folkler: That’s another great possibility. With landlords and tenants especially, well, especially now, I mean.
Carrie Gour: With respect to whatever the understanding was, right?
Barbara La Pointe: Great. What did you call it? Conflict resolution tool?
Carrie Gour: Yeah.
Barbara La Pointe: Oh, it’s...
Carrie Gour: Beautiful. Conflict resolution or dispute resolution.
Barbara La Pointe: It’s a very empowering tool.
Carrie Gour: Right there in the name.
Barbara La Pointe: PwrSwitch.
Carrie Gour: And also, and I have to explain, it’s like the vowels aren’t there because PwrSwitch with all the vowels was trademarked by a bank, so we weren’t going to be able to buy that.
Barbara La Pointe: But I love the name. It’s so, it says it all. The name truly does say it all.
Andrew Folkler: I guess you were speaking about how other competitors, they would just only probably just pull just the text you were saying? And what other things does PwrSwitch do that’s even better than the rest of the competition?
Carrie Gour: So other apps, because we’re new, right?
Carrie Gour: We don’t have the same level of functionality, and what I mean by that is, we can’t pull your WhatsApp or your OurFamilyWizard messages or whatever. So other extractors have more functionality, so they can access WhatsApp and maybe Facebook Messenger or something.
Carrie Gour: That’s coming for us. So our intention is, WhatsApp will be the next piece that we collect, and probably Facebook Messenger. But the thing that really sets us apart is the aggregation. So we’re doing text, email, and on Android you can also get phone logs. So it’s knitting it all together. So if it’s you and I, Andrew, and we text and email, I’m not just pulling all of my emails and then pulling all of my text messages and then manually putting them together, because that’s what you have to do now.
Carrie Gour: PwrSwitch will time sequence all of that simultaneously. And what we have heard, again, and it’s something particular to high-conflict divorce or situations, is often a high-conflict person will... I didn’t have this experience, but we hear this often, will send you a question or something by text, and then you respond, and then they respond in an email, and then right? So they’re doing that intentionally to make it difficult to document or to track the conversation.
Carrie Gour: So we solve for that. And once we are collecting other channels, the same thing will be true.
Barbara La Pointe: Savvy.
Andrew Folkler: That makes a lot of sense, because, like you were saying earlier, it adds to the destabilization of the other party.
Barbara La Pointe: Big problem in our modern world today. These high-conflict communications and high-conflict divorces and high-conflict people, we know they’re on the rise, so I can only imagine have quite a demand.
Carrie Gour: Bill Eddy says 30% or something, or no, 10%. 10% of the population is a high-conflict personality.
Carrie Gour: And so I think of that in the context of, they say 10% of the population is alcoholic or something. This is a big issue. These high-conflict individuals are everywhere.
Barbara La Pointe: Chances are you’re gonna run into one.
Carrie Gour: Even if you’re not in an intimate relationship with them, you might work with one, like Angie says, or you might move next door to one, or you might have one in your family, right?
Carrie Gour: Maybe it’s a sibling or a parent.
Barbara La Pointe: So very relevant. So Carrie, before we wrap up, if I were to just invite you to imagine a very best outcome happening for one of your clients, what might that be? Very best outcome for someone going through a high-conflict situation.
Carrie Gour: In the context of our platform?
Barbara La Pointe: Yeah.
Carrie Gour: The very best outcome would be, number one, just a sense of calm and safety and certainty around, “Okay, I have all of that.”
Carrie Gour: And that allows you to be more present in your life. This sense of being freed from being a full-time evidence collector, and being psychologically distracted by that job.
Carrie Gour: What that means is that you’re able to engage more in the things that matter in your life, right? You’re more present, I think, to your children. And when you’re calmer and more settled, you’re more present. So there’s that. In terms of legal outcomes, the best would be that you saved thousands of dollars because you did this all yourself, and because you reviewed it all in advance and were able to highlight the stuff that your lawyer needed to look at, rather than reading every single item.
Carrie Gour: And then from there, you got maybe finally the outcomes that you wanted. So maybe that’s supervised visitation. Maybe you needed to make a case for that, that your children needed supervised visitation with their parent, your co-parent. Maybe it’s sole custody. Maybe it’s a unilateral psych assessment.
Carrie Gour: It’s like maybe you can make the case based on the communications that your co-parent needs this. I think it’s whatever your desired outcomes are, that PwrSwitch can help you achieve them. So a sense of calm and security, money savings, and then that you are able to actually validate...
Barbara La Pointe: Some very powerful outcomes for people. Very powerful outcomes.
Carrie Gour: Well, and I’m speaking from some experience here, right? I mean, really recent experience even.
Carrie Gour: So when I think about ideal outcomes, I’m thinking about even my own situation here.
Andrew Folkler: You you’ve walked the journey.
Barbara La Pointe: It’s really relevant. Incredible.
Andrew Folkler: Love it. Well, the best entrepreneurs know exactly what their clients are going through, so it’s amazing how much you’ve helped people just in general with PwrSwitch, and it’s gonna be really exciting to see how PwrSwitch will change the game in the legal front in the years to come.
Carrie Gour: That’s our plan, and from your lips to god’s ears.
Carrie Gour: Very exciting.
Andrew Folkler: Carrie, is there anything that you would like last pearls of wisdom that you would want to throw out there for the audience listening, before we wrap up today?
Carrie Gour: Around the app or around just...
Andrew Folkler: Just in general.
Andrew Folkler: I mean, whether it’s from experience or even just using the app moving forward.
Carrie Gour: So just generally what I would say, and this is a huge challenge for those of us in a high-conflict situation, there’s two things. The first is that a high-conflict communication strategist told me this years ago, and it changed everything for me.
Carrie Gour: I’d just met her, and she anticipated everything that my ex was doing and was saying almost verbatim. So I was amazed, but what I learned there is that high-conflict people are kind of the same. It’s like they’ve all read the script, and they’ve read their part, and they’re playing it. And what was powerful about that, and this is what I wanna tell people, is that it feels intensely personal because the abuse is very private and very personal.
Carrie Gour: But it’s actually not personal. It is not about you. It is entirely about them, and were it not you, it would be someone else. It actually isn’t personal. That really freed me up because I thought if this person is like a character in a play, that means that there are strategies I can employ to just manage that personality type, not that person.
Carrie Gour: And so I was able to, through the High Conflict Institute, learned a number of things around how to manage the personality type.
Carrie Gour: And here’s the second thing, is we can’t get too fixated on our problems with our high-conflict person. And what I mean by that is where your attention goes, reality grows.
Carrie Gour: And so if you’re fixated on the problem, my experience is you get more problem. And so if we focus on where we want to be and what that looks like instead, I think we’re better served. And again, this comes from some experience, ‘cause I have done all the wrong things.
Barbara La Pointe: We’re feeling it. That is very powerful.
Andrew Folkler: It’s incredible. That first insight especially, at least for me, I mean, that they’re pretty much following the same script, and that the personality types are very similar, I mean, person to person, and how they treat other people is very similar.
Carrie Gour: That was like, oh my gosh.
Andrew Folkler: That is just absolutely huge.
Carrie Gour: Just a personality type. There are strategies to deal with them.
Andrew Folkler: Well, Carrie, if people wanted to reach out to you or learn more about PwrSwitch, what would be the best way to do so?
Carrie Gour: Well, people can get PwrSwitch.
Carrie Gour: Right now we’re working on a Google authorization, so we hopefully will be in the Play Store in the next few months. But right now you get it from our website. So that’s pwrswitch.com, and there’s a little Get PwrSwitch button there. You can download it for Android or iPhone. And if they wanted to get in touch with me personally, you can reach me by email, which I’m sure my address will be in the show notes.
Andrew Folkler: All righty. And that looks like it’s all we have time for today. Once again, thank you for taking the time to be with us, and if you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our channel either on YouTube or through our podcast on the various podcast platforms. Don’t forget to use the downloadable document below to help you and your loved ones deal with these challenges, learn how to document correctly, especially through all these high conflicts.
Andrew Folkler: And Barbara, if listeners wanted to reach out to you, what would be the best way to do so?
Barbara La Pointe: Barbaralapointe@gmail.com.
Andrew Folkler: All righty. And if you’d like to email me, feel free to email me at startnow@andrewfolkler.com. And as always, thank you for taking the time to be with us today at the Broken Families podcast, where we discuss and help you find solutions to divorce, parental alienation, and high-conflict relationships.
Andrew Folkler: Have a wonderful day, everyone. Thanks.
Barbara La Pointe: Bye.