Disraeli said never apologize for feeling, because to do so is to apologize for truth. He was right, and Utah family law should take him seriously. A parent’s fear for a child can be accurate before the parent can fully explain why. A teenager’s anger can contain information a court should not dismiss merely because it arrives emotionally. A mother who is frightened may know something nobody else has yet seen. A father who says he is being pushed out of his child’s life may be describing something real long before the pattern is obvious on paper.
Utah’s own statutory scheme recognizes that human relationships cannot be reduced to arithmetic. Section 81-9-204’s best-interest factors include the child’s emotional needs and the depth and quality of emotional ties. No judge can assess those things without taking feeling seriously as information.
But feeling is not proof. That is how family law gets difficult.
Call the competing instincts by names everyone already knows. Dr. McCoy reads or hears from the frightened mother and understands immediately why she could be afraid. Mr. Spock asks whether the thing she fears actually happened. McCoy sees the father who has gone months without meaningful time with his child and recognizes the injustice that may be unfolding. Spock asks whether there is a lawful and factually supported reason for the separation. McCoy hears the teenager say, “I won’t go.” Spock asks the question compassion alone cannot answer: Why?
Family law must implement both approaches.
A purely Spock approach—rules, logic, and evidentiary categories with the human variable treated as noise—can produce technically orderly decisions that miss the family standing in front of the court. A purely McCoy approach—empathy, intuition, and moral conviction without sufficient evidentiary discipline—can produce decisions that feel (and look to the outside world) righteous while being wrong.
Neither is the disciplined administration of law and equity. Both are shortcuts around the harder work.
What Pure Logic Without Mercy Produces
Consider imputation of income under § 81-6-203. It is easy to write “income imputed at $4,000 per month” into an order. It is much harder to look at the parent who may have to spend most of that amount on child care just to earn it and ask whether the fictional income on the worksheet bears any meaningful relationship to that family’s actual life.
The statute itself recognizes this problem. Subsection (2)(e)(i) bars imputing income where the reasonable cost of child care approaches or equals what the parent could earn. Subsection (6)(a) requires findings regarding the evidentiary basis for the imputation. The law is not “employable adult, therefore impute.” It requires sound judgment.
A court that skips those steps has not followed the statute too faithfully. It has followed it too shallowly.
The same problem arises in parent-time enforcement. Widdison v. Widdison, 2022 UT App 46, addressed affirmative parental interference. It does not stand for the proposition that every child’s refusal to attend parent-time proves sabotage by the other parent.
Picture two teenagers both saying, “I don’t want to go.”
One has been subtly recruited into a parent’s campaign against the other for years. The other has developed an independently formed estrangement based on experiences the court has not yet understood. The words coming out of their mouths may be identical. The causes may be entirely different.
If a court cites Widdison, orders compliance, and never asks which child is standing before it, the citation can be correct while the judgment may still be poor. The law was seen and heard. The child was not.
Custody evaluations and private guardian ad litem reports carry the same risk in quieter form. The § 81-9-204 factors exist to discipline judgment, not replace it. A professional can check every box, quote the right statutory language, and still fail to perceive the actual family dynamics. A child can become a collection of reported symptoms, a parent can become a diagnostic label, and a relationship can be reduced to a score on a factor sheet that an overworked court is more than happy to rubber stamp.
That is Spock without McCoy: not reason at its best, but reason stripped of the humanity that tells us what the reasoning is for.
What Pure Feeling Without Discipline Produces
The opposite error may be more emotionally seductive.
A frightened person can be telling the truth. A frightened person can also be mistaken. And, uncomfortable though it is to say, a frightened person can (and in family court, he/she often does) lie.[1]
The judge’s duty is not to punish fear for failing to prove itself. Nor is it to reward fear merely because it appears sincere. The duty is to take the professed fear seriously enough to find out what happened.
I have written before about the unfalsifiable-villain mechanism. Once someone becomes certain that the other parent is dangerous, narcissistic, abusive, alienating, controlling, unstable, or manipulative, every new fact can be made to fit the theory. Contrary evidence becomes proof of clever concealment. Neutral witnesses become accomplices the moment they say something inconvenient. Identical conduct is characterized differently depending on which parent engaged in it. That is not evidence testing a belief. It is belief swallowing the evidence.
Section 81-9-204(2)’s preponderance standard exists precisely because sincere (or seemingly sincere) conviction is not self-verifying. If the court is going to restrict a parent-child relationship, alter custody, or make findings that may follow a parent for years, “I feel sure” cannot be the end of the analysis.
Protective orders present the same danger in especially concentrated form. Real distress, fear, and trauma matter. A court should not sneer at any of them. But their mere existence or seeming existence is not itself a finding that necessarily supports the issuing of a protective order.
A person can tremble while telling the truth. A person can tremble while sincerely misunderstanding what happened. A person can tremble while exaggerating or simply lying through her teeth.
That is why evidentiary thresholds matter. They are not there because the law is indifferent to fear. They are there because the consequences of getting fear wrong can be enormous.
The same caution applies to trauma-informed practice. Trauma-informed practice has a legitimate place in family law because courts should understand how trauma can affect memory, demeanor, disclosure, and behavior. But glibly throwing around trauma terminology cannot become a substitute for proof of the underlying event.
Saying “I was triggered,” “I dissociated,” or “that was coercive control” may describe a person’s experience. It does not, merely by using clinical language, establish every factual proposition embedded within the description.
McCoy without Spock hears the pain and stops asking questions. That may feel compassionate. Sometimes it is profoundly unfair.
Family Law Is Dangerous Because Certainty Is Often Impossible
Family law has a feature that should make everyone involved more humble: courts frequently must act before certainty is possible.
A judge may not know whether a teenager’s refusal is the product of manipulation or independent judgment. A commissioner may not know whether a parent’s fear is prescient or misplaced. An evaluator may not know whether a child’s guardedness reflects trauma, loyalty conflict, ordinary adolescent anger, or several causes at once.
Yet decisions still have to be made.
Children still have to go somewhere Friday afternoon.
Someone may have to ejected from the house.
Support must be set.
A protective-order request must be granted or denied.
The court cannot always postpone action until reality becomes perfectly clear. That makes analytical rigor more important, not less. It also makes compassion more important, not less.
When certainty is unavailable, the answer cannot be to pretend that emotion gives us certainty. Nor can the answer be to retreat into mechanical rule application and pretend that the statute relieves us of the effort that exercising judgment requires.
The work is to make the best decision the evidence permits while remaining humble enough to recognize what the evidence does not establish. That is much harder than choosing a side and becoming certain. A perfunctory decision that “looks prudent” on the surface without actually being prudent is judicial sloth.
Rules and Compassion Are Both Work, Not Shortcuts
Pure Spock lets a decision-maker say, “I followed the rule. My hands are clean.” Pure McCoy lets a decision-maker say, “I believed her,” or “I believed him,” as though sincerity of belief resolves the question. Both statements can function as ways of avoiding the real job.
Neither rules nor compassion are supposed to do the thinking for us. Rules are guardrails for judgment. Compassion tells us which facts may deserve closer attention. Neither determines the answer automatically.
A rule may tell the court where the boundaries of a lawful decision lie. It does not necessarily tell the court which decision inside those boundaries is right for this child and for these parents.
Compassion may tell the court that a frightened parent’s testimony deserves serious attention. It does not tell the court whether every factual allegation within that testimony is true. Administering family law requires the decision-maker to hold both propositions at the same time.
Accountability Protects Us From Someone Else’s Certainty
This is where accountability becomes more than procedural housekeeping.
An evaluator can become certain. A PGAL can become certain. An attorney can become certain. A commissioner can become certain. A judge can become certain. Because someone else became certain:
a parent can lose months with a child;
a child can be forced into a relationship that genuinely frightens him;
a false allegation can metastasize; and
actual mistreatment can be overlooked.
Certainty is cheap. Rigor is not. Findings that reveal and vindicate the court’s reasoning mark the difference.
“I believe her” takes seconds to say. Explaining what evidence supports that belief, what contradictory evidence was considered, why one inference was stronger than another, and how the governing burden of proof was satisfied requires work. That work is not bureaucratic fussiness. It is part of the price the state must be required to pay before it rearranges a family.
Shuman v. Shuman, 2017 UT App 192, and Rayner v. Lund, 2013 UT App 269, reflect that principle. Reasoning cannot merely exist somewhere inside a judicial officer’s head. It must appear in a form the parties and an appellate court can test.
That requirement protects litigants from decisions driven either by mechanical rule application or unexamined emotional impressions.
The same principle operates among litigants. Section 81-9-204(2)’s preponderance standard and Rule 7B’s enforcement mechanism require people to answer for what they allege and what they do. The parent alleging serious harm should have to support it. The parent violating an order should have to answer for it.
That is not hostility toward frightened parents or aggrieved parents. It is protection against unaccountable certainty.
And accountability can protect both sides at once. It protects a falsely accused parent from an allegation that never has to clear an evidentiary threshold. It protects a genuinely estranged teenager from having his experience waved away with the word “alienation.” It protects a victim from having real abuse dismissed because the accused parent presents better. It protects the other parent from being condemned because visible distress was mistaken for proof.
Accountability and Compassion
Accountability is one of the ways compassion becomes reliable. Compassion without accountability can become sentimentality, favoritism, or projection: the decision-maker feels deeply, but may be feeling deeply about the wrong thing. Accountability requires compassion to answer to evidence, consistency, law, and consequences. It asks not merely, “Whom do I feel for?” but “What actually happened, what does the law require, and who will bear the cost if I am wrong?” Compassion becomes trustworthy when it is disciplined enough to survive those questions. Accountability makes compassion answerable to reality. Accountability is what keeps compassion from becoming indulgence.
Neither Justice Nor Mercy Can Do the Job Alone
Alma 42:25 warns that mercy cannot rob justice. But mercy properly understood does not compete with justice; it keeps the administration of justice from degenerating into mere severity. Family law makes that distinction especially important. A ruling is not just because it is “pure” or harsh, any more than it is merciful because it is lenient. Justice requires proportion, attention to circumstance, and consequences fitted to what was actually proved. Mercy supplies the human perception necessary to see those things. Without justice, mercy can become indulgence. Without mercy, justice can become mechanical, disproportionate, and cruel while still congratulating itself for having followed the rules.
Mercy is not the opposite of justice, and justice does not become unjust merely because it is painful. In family law, the danger is confusing severity with justice and leniency with mercy. Justice must remain proportionate, particularized, and attentive to human consequences. Mercy does not excuse wrongdoing or erase standards; it prevents the administration of justice from becoming mechanical, excessive, or indifferent to circumstances that matter.
The task is not to split the difference between emotion and reason. It is to refuse to surrender either one.
Believe that the frightened parent may know something nobody else yet sees—and demand proof before condemning the other parent.
Listen when a teenager says, “I won’t go”—and care enough to find out why.
Enforce the order—and ask whether the order is actually being violated and whether the law supplies the remedy requested.
Require evidence—and never forget that the evidence describes human beings who must wake up tomorrow and live inside the ruling.
A court does not honor emotion by surrendering to it. It honors emotion by taking it seriously enough to test it. A court does not honor law by applying it mechanically. It honors law by reading it carefully enough to understand what judgment the law actually requires.
That is harder than being Spock. It is harder than being McCoy. But it is the least that competent administration of family law requires.
Utah Family Law, LC | divorceutah.com | 801-466-9277
[1] Family court creates an unusually fertile environment for dishonesty: powerful incentives can attach to being believed, accusations can affect custody and leverage almost immediately, many disputed events occur in private, and the distinction between fear, interpretation, exaggeration, selective omission, and outright fabrication can become remarkably difficult to police. Add anger, self-interest, confirmation bias, litigation strategy, and the temptation to recast ordinary conflict in legally consequential terms, and “frightened” cannot safely be treated as synonymous with “truthful.” There is much more to say about why family litigation can reward both conscious and unconscious distortions of fact—but I digress. That subject deserves its own blog post.