"Lacks Insight" — and Other Unfalsifiable Verdicts

There's a phrase that turns up in family court reports more often than you'd think. Two words. Once they're written about you, they're almost impossible to shift. They don't function like an observation. They function like a trap.

Lacks insight.

I first came across it in a Cafcass report partway through my proceedings. The officer had spoken with me for about an hour. I thought it had gone okay, actually. She seemed to be listening. Asked reasonable questions. I came away thinking I'd at least given a fair account of myself.

When the report finally arrived, it told a different story. Buried in the professional language, there it was. I lacked insight into my role in the family's difficulties. Into what had happened in my home. Into why things had got to this point.

I sat with that for a long time. It stung, for a start. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised something worse than the sting. I had no way of challenging it.

Here's why. If you've read Catch-22, the mechanism will feel familiar.

Say you agree with the professional's assessment. You accept their version of events, acknowledge the behaviours they've attributed to you, show appropriate remorse. Then you have insight. Progress has been made.

Say you disagree. You maintain that the report doesn't reflect what actually happened. That the allegations weren't true. That the version of events the professional has taken as the baseline isn't yours. Then you lack insight. You're in denial. You're minimising. You're failing to take responsibility.

No third option. The framework simply doesn't allow for the possibility that your version might be accurate and the professional's might not. Disagreement is itself the evidence of the problem. A Catch-22, built into the structure of how these assessments work.

I want to be careful here, because I know how this sounds. It sounds like exactly what a man who'd genuinely behaved badly might say to avoid accountability. And I can't prove otherwise — which is, of course, the whole point. The verdict is designed to be unfalsifiable. The challenge itself becomes evidence of the problem.

What I can tell you is this. I know what happened in my home. I know what kind of father I was before any of this started. I know which of the allegations were true and which weren't. And by the time those allegations reached the professional writing this report, they'd already passed through several institutional filters — each one treating them as credible, each one building on the last. By the time the report landed on my doorstep, the conclusion may already have been reached before the conversation that supposedly produced it.

The 'lacks insight' label didn't go away. It showed up in the next report. And the one after that. It became part of the texture of the case — one of those things that, once in the file, just keeps accumulating.

A further twist: denial as danger

It isn't just that denial counts against you strategically. Within the system's own logic, a man who keeps denying findings is considered more dangerous than one who accepts them. Regardless of whether the findings are true.

Accept the findings, show remorse, say you're committed to change — lower risk, more cooperative, safer around children. Maintain your account, insist the findings are wrong, stick to your version — higher risk, less cooperative, potentially dangerous.

The danger rating isn't based on what happened. It's based on how you respond to what the system has decided happened. Compliance brings the threat level down. Honesty pushes it up. The system rewards performance. It punishes integrity.

What can you do about it?

Honestly, not a lot once it's in a report. The options are limited and none of them are clean.

You can challenge specific factual inaccuracies through the proper procedure. Most courts allow you to submit a response to a Cafcass report identifying errors of fact — carefully, specifically, without emotion. Not a blanket rejection of the report's conclusions. Just precise, evidenced corrections of specific things that are demonstrably wrong. It goes on the record, even if it doesn't change the report itself.

What you want to avoid is relitigating the underlying question in hearings. Every time you go back to but the findings were wrong, in a context where those findings are being treated as settled, you risk confirming the assessment. The judge is working from the file. The file says you lack insight. Pushing back hard looks, from the outside, exactly like what the file predicted.

Working with what's available — except the trap follows you here too

Cafcass will often recommend — or effectively require — that a father complete something called a Domestic Abuse Perpetrator Programme. A DAPP. The idea, on the surface, is straightforward: do the work, show change, move toward contact. The problem starts at the door.

Most of these programmes require you to accept the findings before you can get on them. You have to say what you did — specifically, the behaviours the court found against you — and show genuine remorse for them. For a man who knows those findings to be false, that means standing in a group setting, over several months, under professional scrutiny, saying things he knows aren't true.

Here's the part that really needs saying. The men most likely to get through that process — to accept the findings convincingly, articulate remorse fluently, perform the required change under scrutiny — are the men who most need to change. And they'll get through it by performing. Six months of saying the right things, showing the right remorse, ticking the right boxes — and walking out no different from when they went in. The programme won't touch them, because performance is already their native language.

The man least likely to get through it is the man who genuinely didn't do what he's been found to have done. He can't perform remorse convincingly for things he didn't do. He's not built that way. The same honesty, the same inability to sustain a strategic lie — those are probably the qualities that made him a target in the first place. And they're the same qualities that now count against him in the process supposedly designed to help.

The system, as it stands, is better calibrated to process cooperative performers than to help honest men who've been falsely accused. Some men have looked for alternative programmes — courses that allow genuine reflection without requiring acceptance of specific findings. But the escape route can close there too. Alternative programmes are sometimes rejected on accreditation grounds. And even completing an approved programme in full isn't always enough — there's a pattern of the other parent or Cafcass arguing afterwards that the man only did the course because he was made to. Comply and it gets dismissed as performance. Refuse and it confirms the finding. The Catch-22 closes its final loop.

The choice I made — and what it cost

There came a point when I understood clearly that maintaining my account was going to count against me. A judge told me so, plainly. He was bound to treat earlier findings as facts. My refusal to accept them would be noted.

I kept my account anyway. Not aggressively — I'd learned by then that pushing hard made things worse. But I couldn't accept a version of myself I knew to be false. Because doing so felt like finishing the job that had been started on me — replacing the man I know myself to be with a fiction. The psychological damage of that, I decided, would be greater than the strategic damage of refusing.

I'm not telling you that's the right call for everyone. It has costs. Real ones. I carry them. What I am saying is that it's worth knowing clearly what you're choosing between — because drifting into compliance without understanding what you're giving up is its own kind of loss.

What eventually helped

Understanding this — really understanding it, not just being angry about it — changed something for me. The drive to be vindicated, to have someone in the system finally see what I knew to be true, was burning through energy I couldn't afford to keep spending. Redirecting it — toward whatever relationship with my children was still possible, toward building a life that didn't depend on the case going right — wasn't giving up. It was the only thing that made sense.

The system's findings and the actual truth are not the same thing. The system produces decisions. Only you carry the knowledge of what really happened. And that knowledge, and the integrity with which you've held it through all of this, is not nothing.

The system said I lacked insight. I know what I know. Those are two different things, and only one of them is mine to carry.

For practical guidance on working with Cafcass and other professionals, visit soulforge.org.uk/resources-solicitors-professionals. For more on common pitfalls in family court, visit soulforge.org.uk/resources-common-pitfalls.

• If this has resonated, find more at soulforge.org.uk — resources, honest guidance, and a community of men who understand.

John B - a member of SoulForge Community. He shares his experience here. Some details have been changed to protect his identity.