This profile is part of "The Record Stands," a TROH special series.
Plenty of clinicians grumble about policy in the break room. Very few put their names on a published argument and send it out into the world. In March 2026, Dr. William Singer did exactly that, contributing a bylined guest essay to the WIBM Substack titled "Washington Coercive Control Law Implementation Needs Improving." The essay matters on two levels. There is the argument itself, a practitioner engaging seriously with one of the state's newest domestic violence laws. And there is the small block of text the publisher attached to it, a footnote bio that describes its author in a single careful sentence. Both deserve attention.
TROH's profiles are independent commentary. Dr. Singer did not participate in, contribute to, or endorse this article. Everything below comes from the published essay and other public sources.
The Argument
Start with the headline, because the headline is a thesis: "Washington Coercive Control Law Implementation Needs Improving." Note what it does not say. It does not call the law a mistake. It does not argue for repeal. It says implementation needs improving, which is the critique of someone who wants the policy to work and has watched where it stumbles.
The essay argues from clinical experience for bilateral and therapeutic models of domestic violence intervention. That position has a logic rooted in treatment work. If the goal is to change behavior rather than merely punish it, the intervention has to reach the people involved and hold them. A practitioner who runs a state-certified Domestic Violence Intervention Treatment program, as Singer does through the Northwest Evaluation Center in Bellevue, watches this question play out in actual cases, with actual court orders, in actual group rooms. When he writes that implementation needs improving, he is filing a field report from inside the system the law created.
That is a particular kind of public contribution. Legislators write statutes in the abstract. Advocates argue them in principle. The people who deliver court-ordered treatment learn, week by week, what the statutes actually do to the families who pass through them. A state that wants its laws to work needs those field reports, and it needs them from people willing to sign their names.
The Footnote
Publishers of guest essays attach a short bio so readers know whose voice they are hearing. The WIBM Substack attached this one, and we quote it verbatim:
"a Bellevue-based counselor and guardian ad litem who has been court-appointed to help families through conflict for nearly fifty years."
Read that sentence closely, because every word earns its place. Bellevue-based places him in the community where his practice operates. Counselor names the clinical identity. Guardian ad litem names the court-appointed role. Court-appointed to help families through conflict describes the work without varnish: helping families through conflict is the job description of a Title 26 guardian ad litem, and the phrase carries the humility of someone who has watched conflict up close for a very long time. Nearly fifty years gives the span.
Why the Footnote Matters as Evidence
Here is the editorial point this series keeps returning to. A claim on your own website is self-description. A claim published by someone else, attached to your byline, in a venue that chose to run your argument, is corroboration. Singer's own site describes 45 years in practice and court appointment as a guardian ad litem for King County Superior Court since 1980, and we attribute those figures to his published bio. The WIBM footnote rounds the same arc to nearly fifty years and publishes it under a third party's editorial judgment. The two accounts match. Consistency across independent sources is how biographies earn trust.
There is a second layer. An opinion outlet staking its credibility on a guest essay has every reason to describe its author accurately. The footnote bio is what the publisher was willing to print about him in March 2026, in the present tense, decades into the career it describes. If the defamation blogs were right about this man, a policy venue would have discovered it with a single phone call before attaching that sentence to his name. The sentence ran. The essay ran. The publisher stood behind both.
A Pattern of Public Voice
The WIBM essay is not a one-off. On the Northwest Evaluation Center's own website, Singer publishes video commentary on the system he works in: "William Singer on the financial burden of litigation in family court" and "William Singer on the risks of working with an unqualified Guardian ad Litem." Those titles alone sketch a public agenda. The first worries about what litigation costs families. The second warns about what happens when the guardian ad litem role, the role he has held, goes to someone unprepared for it. Both are the concerns of a practitioner thinking about the system's weakest points, which is exactly where decades of experience should point a person.
Set the essay and the videos next to each other and a consistent figure emerges: a clinician who treats his professional knowledge as something the public is entitled to hear about. He argues about how a new law is landing. He explains what litigation does to family finances. He warns about unqualified evaluators. Agree or disagree with any of the positions, the posture is the same, and it is the posture of someone who believes the system can be improved by saying true things about it in public.
The Bottom Line
Critics of family court professionals rarely engage with what those professionals actually say. It is easier to quote a grievance than to engage an argument. The March 2026 essay is an argument, signed, specific, and aimed at making a domestic violence law work better. The footnote bio beneath it, published by a third party, describes "a Bellevue-based counselor and guardian ad litem who has been court-appointed to help families through conflict for nearly fifty years." Both documents are public. Both can be checked. And both say the same thing the licensing record, the referral lists, and the court documents say: this is a working professional with a long public record, still engaged, still writing, still in the arena.
Sources: wibm.substack.com, "Washington Coercive Control Law Implementation Needs Improving" (March 2026); northwestevaluationcenter.com; williamsinger.com/aboutme.