Sophora Acheson: Can an Abusive Partner Actually Change?

Someone arrives at Restorative Pathways because the next domestic violence charge means prison, or because child protective services has said the next call takes the children. The opening question is almost never how do I change. It is how do I get out of this. Sophora Acheson says that is a fine place to start, as long as what happens next is real.

Sophora Acheson is a licensed marriage and family therapist and the CEO of Restorative Pathways, an organization based in the Bay Area that grew out of the country's first domestic violence shelter and now runs residential housing, clinical care, youth programs and outreach across the region. She is married with two children, and she speaks about this work as a survivor of childhood abuse and of domestic violence in adulthood. This is the second half of a conversation with Lisa that got cut off partway through the first attempt.

About ten years ago, working in a shelter, Sophora noticed different women arriving with the same abusive partner behind them, and started asking what the field was doing to stop the pattern at its source. RAFT, Restorative Action for Family Transformation, is the answer she built: a residential program brought over from a proven New Zealand model, surrounding people who have caused harm with peers, therapists, advocates and case managers, and working on the shame underneath the behavior the way the substance use field learned to. It was a free pilot with six beds when this was recorded, with a university researcher preparing to publish outcome data.

Sophora and Lisa talk through the screening that rules people out, the six-to-twelve-month timeline and why pulling someone out early undoes it, the clinical training required to work with this population safely, and internal family systems as the modality that has moved the needle. They cover what restorative justice actually means here, which is far more often two people learning to co-parent without hatred than any reconciliation. And they close on communities that harm rather than help, including the red flag Lisa names immediately: a group with one rigid path is running the same dynamic as an abusive relationship.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• Who a program for people who have caused harm can work with, and who it screens out
• Why shame, not anger, is what keeps an abusive pattern repeating
• How internal family systems breaks the all-good, all-bad framing the field defaults to
• What restorative justice usually looks like in practice, and why it rarely means reconciliation
• What services the other parent receives at the same time, and how safety planning continues
• Red flags in a support community: rigid prescribed healing, and losing your own autonomy
• Green flags in a support community, starting with whether people actually listen
• How to ask a family court for a restorative justice option instead of a standard anger management class

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Community as the thing that carried her through
3:00 Why the field was missing the person causing harm
5:30 Shame, accountability and how people actually get in the door
8:00 Can people change, and the ones Sophora says cannot
10:00 Screening, timelines and what a day in the program looks like
13:30 Anger management training and internal family systems
15:30 RAFT: a free six-bed pilot, and the research underway
16:30 Asking a family court for a restorative justice option
19:30 Red flags in a support community, and the ones worth staying in
23:30 Reliving trauma versus moving forward

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183
🔗 Restorative Pathways: https://restorativepathways.org/
🔗 Sophora Acheson on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophora-acheson-ma-lmft-14087b63/

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.