Something just happened
Nobody sits down and decides to research temporary injunctive relief. They open a banking app and the balance is zero, or it is seven o’clock and the children are not back. This page is the site organized the way that actually happens — by the thing that just happened, not by the legal category it turns out to belong to.
First, the ones that are not about paperwork
If you are in immediate danger, or you believe a child is, this page is the wrong one. In the United States, 911 is the number, and the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233, twenty-four hours.
If someone is reading your phone, your email or your location, do that reading on a device they cannot reach before you do anything else — including before you search for any of this. How to check, safely.
Protective orders, and what they do and do not do · How a protective order actually works
Money
The joint account has been emptied
This is common enough to have a name in family courts, and it is one of the few things that gets attention quickly. Do not empty the rest of it back. Two people draining accounts turns a clear complaint into a mutual one, and judges have seen it before.
- Get statements now, before access is closed — the last twelve months of every joint account, showing the transfers.
- Write down the balance and the date. That number is the starting point for everything that follows.
- Open an account in your own name at a different bank, and have any wages redirected.
They have stopped paying the mortgage
The lender does not care whose fault it is. If your name is on the loan, the missed payment lands on your credit too, and a divorce decree does not change your contract with the bank.
- Find out whether it has actually been missed, or is about to be — call the servicer and ask for the payment history.
- Ask the servicer what forbearance or partial payment options exist. They exist more often than people expect.
- This is the classic reason to ask for a temporary order that says who pays what while the case runs.
The support payments have stopped
There is a difference between cannot and will not, and the remedies are different. Either way the arrears keep accruing from the day each payment was due, and in most places they cannot be wiped out retroactively.
- Keep a record of each missed payment and its date. That list is the case.
- If your order came through the state child support agency, they have enforcement tools you do not — licenses, tax refunds, passports.
- If they genuinely cannot pay, a modification filed now is worth more to both of you than arrears neither of you can fix later.
My cards were canceled and I have no money of my own
Being cut off from money is a recognized problem, not a personal failure, and courts can order the better-resourced spouse to fund the other side — including their legal fees. Do not sign anything to get short-term cash.
- Check whether you were a joint account holder or only an authorized user. It changes both your liability and your credit history.
- Apply for credit in your own name while you still have any joint history to point at.
- Ask specifically about interim fees and temporary support — two separate things.
I think they are hiding money
Suspicion is not evidence, and the route from one to the other is a formal process with teeth. Do not go looking through their accounts yourself. Accessing someone else’s email or bank login can be a crime, and it can make what you find unusable.
- Write down what made you suspicious, with dates. Lifestyle that does not match the declared income is the classic starting point.
- Preserve what you already lawfully have — joint tax returns, statements that come to your house.
- The formal tools are discovery, subpoenas and, where it is worth it, a forensic accountant.
My health insurance has been canceled
If you were covered as a spouse on their employer plan, the notice duty is on you, not on the employer, and there is a deadline measured in days rather than months.
- Find out today which plan it was and who administers it.
- COBRA continuation after a divorce or legal separation runs up to 36 months — but the plan administrator has to be told within 60 days.
- Check whether losing coverage opens a special enrollment window on the marketplace. It usually does, and it is also time-limited.
The children
The children were not brought back
First, the distinction that decides what happens next: is this a violation of an order that exists, or a dispute where no order exists yet? Without an order there is often nothing to enforce, and the answer is to get one.
- Write down exactly what was agreed, what happened, and when — times, not impressions.
- Keep your own messages calm and factual. They will be read out.
- If you believe the children are in danger, this is the one where you stop reading and call the police.
They are threatening to move the children to another state
Two separate questions, and people conflate them. Which state can decide custody is a jurisdiction question with its own rules. Whether a parent may relocate is a different question with notice periods that vary enormously by state.
- Find your state’s relocation notice requirement now — some are 60 days, some are far shorter, and missing the objection window can be decisive.
- Do not agree to a “trial period” in writing without understanding how it affects where the children are held to be habitually resident.
I have been accused of abusing or neglecting the children
An allegation and a finding are different things, and the process that follows has its own rules. What you say in the first conversation matters more than almost anything after it.
- Do not contact the person who made the report.
- Get advice before an interview, not after it. This is true even if you are certain the allegation is baseless.
- Keep everything. Messages, schedules, medical records, the lot.
The case, and the people in it
I have been served with papers
The important thing on the front page is the deadline to respond. Missing it can produce a default, and a default can hand the other side everything they asked for without anyone hearing your side.
- Find the response deadline and write it down. Everything else can wait an hour; that cannot.
- Being served is not an accusation you have to answer emotionally. It is a procedural step.
- Read what has actually been asked for. It is frequently less alarming than the covering letter feels.
I have been locked out of the house
Whether you can be excluded from a home you own or rent is a matter of state law and of what order exists. Changing the locks back is rarely the winning move, and forcing entry can turn a property dispute into a criminal one.
- If there is violence in this, that is a different and faster route — see the box at the top of this page.
- Do not remove your name from the lease or the deed to make the situation calmer. It is very hard to undo.
- Exclusive use of the home is something a court can order, and it is one of the most common temporary orders there is.
My own lawyer has gone quiet, or is doing nothing
You are entitled to your file, to an accounting of what has been billed, and to change representation. The unused portion of a retainer is generally still your money.
- Ask for a written status update and a current billing statement. In writing.
- Before you fire anyone, know what it costs in delay — and get the new person lined up first where you can.
- If the concern is dishonesty rather than slowness, the state bar is the route.
My ex has died
Almost everything changes at once, and the order that governed your life may or may not survive them. Support usually ends; arrears usually do not. Whether anything continues depends on what was written down years ago.
- Find the decree and any life insurance that was meant to secure support.
- If there are minor children, benefits may exist that nobody will tell you about.
- Do not assume the estate will contact you. Frequently it does not.
The order is being ignored, over and over
A pattern is a different case from an incident, and it is worth documenting as a pattern rather than firing off a complaint each time. Courts respond to a log.
- Keep a dated record. Not a diary of feelings — a table of what should have happened and what did.
- Work out whether what you want is enforcement of the existing order or a different order.
- Repeated breaches are also evidence for a modification, which is sometimes the better remedy.
Four things that are true of nearly all of these
Write it down today. Not how you felt — what happened, at what time, and what it cost. Contemporaneous notes carry weight that a reconstruction six months later does not.
Do not retaliate in kind. Emptying the account back, withholding the children back, changing the locks back. Every one of these converts a situation where one person behaved badly into one where two people did, and it is the single most reliable way to lose an advantage you already had.
Assume everything you write will be read aloud. Messages, emails, posts. Write the version you would be content to have read out, and send that one.
Fast is not the same as urgent. Some of these genuinely need action within days. Others feel like they do and do not. We have deliberately not printed timescales, because they vary so much between states that a confident number here would do more harm than the reassurance is worth. Your state’s page has the real ones.