Why I Started SoulForge Community
There's no single moment I can point to and say that's when I decided to build this. SoulForge Community grew out of years of slow, hard reckoning — first with what had been happening to me inside my marriage, then with what unfolded after it ended. By the time the idea took clear shape, it felt less like a decision and more like something I owed: to the men coming up behind me, and to a younger version of myself who could have used something like this and didn't have it.
I'd been married for fourteen years before I left. It took me most of those years to recognise that what I was living inside was domestic abuse. That sounds astonishing when I say it now. It isn't, really, when you've lived it. The pattern came at me gradually — verbal, psychological, financial, sometimes physical, sometimes sexual — and it wove itself into the rhythm of daily life until I stopped being able to see it as anything other than the way things were. There were no single, dramatic moments that broke me open. There were a thousand small ones that quietly reshaped me, until one day, in conversation with someone outside the marriage, the word abuse was named — and I started to be able to see what I'd been inside.
After I left, I thought the worst was behind me. I assumed I'd see my two sons regularly, that we'd find a way through the separation, that whatever came next would be hard but workable. Instead, after six months, their mother disappeared with them to another part of the country. False allegations had been made against me. I would not see my sons in person again. As I write this, that has now been the case for over five years.
What followed were two sets of family court proceedings, each lasting around two years. I represented myself for much of it, learning the system as I went, producing position statements and chronologies and cross-examination questions, sitting through hearings, watching professional reports that I did not recognise as accounts of conversations I had been part of. The first proceedings ended in a fact-finding hearing where the judge made findings against me on the strength of limited evidence. The second ended with the court formalising the only contact I now have with my sons: monthly letters, parcels at birthdays and Christmas, and a written report from their mother about how they are doing.
During those years, other things happened too. I had a cardiac arrest — a previously known heart condition, but the stress around it was not coincidental. Both my parents died. My only sibling stopped talking to me. Old friendships drifted away. I left the town I'd lived in. By the most acute period, my life had been emptied out in almost every direction it could have been.
And yet — and this is the part that matters, because without it SoulForge wouldn't exist — I came through it. Not unmarked. Not without grief that still surfaces. But the man writing this now is, in ways I would not have believed possible at the time, stronger than the man who left that marriage. I have a partner I love. I have a young daughter. I have work that suits me. I have, I think, more honesty in me than I did before, more clarity about what matters, more willingness to stand my ground. The situation with my sons hasn't resolved — I still don't know when or whether it will — but I am no longer being held hostage by the unresolved-ness of it. I've learned to keep hope in my heart and clarity in my mind, and to keep going.
That phrase — strength through adversity — became the motto of SoulForge Community because it isn't a slogan. It's a description of what actually happened to me, and what I've seen happen to other men who walk through similar fire and don't let it define them.
SoulForge exists because almost everything I just described, I had to figure out alone. The legal system was disorienting, often unjust, and stretched well beyond my means. The support landscape was overwhelmingly built for women — which is not a complaint, women need it too, but it left me and many men I've since met without comparable provision. The few peer support spaces I found were a mixed bag: some genuinely helpful, some places where anger went round in circles without ever turning into growth. The cultural script for what men in my position were supposed to be feeling was either get over it or get angrier, neither of which served me. What I needed — and what I think most men in this situation need — was something quieter, steadier, and more practical. A place that took the legal and the emotional seriously at the same time. A place that didn't flinch from the worst-case scenarios but also didn't let despair settle in. A place that knew, from the inside, what it was like to be where I was.
I couldn't find that place. So I started building it.
SoulForge Community is a UK-based not-for-profit working to support men affected by domestic abuse, parental alienation, and the family court system. We're a small operation in our earliest months, run by people who have lived the issues we're addressing. We don't aim to be everything. We do aim to be useful, honest, and steady — and to grow, deliberately, in the directions men we serve tell us are needed.
Some of what we want to build will take years and funding we don't yet have: a moderated peer forum, a helpline, a specialist legal advice service, subsidised trauma-aware therapy, refuges, and eventually a retreat centre that brings it all together. Other parts are already here. This website. This blog. The slow work of building a community of men who understand each other because they've been there.
If you're a man who's reading this and recognising yourself — whether in the abuse, the alienation, the legal struggle, or just the bone-tiredness of carrying it all — I want to say two things, plainly.
The first is that what you're going through is real, even if no one around you can see it clearly. You aren't imagining it. You aren't weak for being affected by it. You aren't alone in it, even though it almost certainly feels that way.
The second is that there is a road out — not necessarily out of the situation, because some situations don't fully resolve, but out of being defined by it. Many men have walked it. Not without scars. But often, in ways they couldn't have predicted, into versions of themselves they wouldn't trade back for the lives they'd lost.
That's what SoulForge is for. Walking that road, together.
— Mike