What's Working and What Is Not

Dear Friends,

There are so many opportunities for us in the ACEs, trauma informed, and resilience building movement, that I decided the most efficient and effective way for us to get our powerful scientific based message out to all those who can help us end the nightmare of narcissistic abuse, is to publish a book.  So, I am taking a 2-month sabbatical from running the Alliance (including the face book and LinkedIn pages) to write.

But before I do, I wanted to up date you on:

What’s working and what is not.

What’s Not Working?—The same things that never worked.

 Some targeted parents are still trying to prove “parental alienation” in family court.  GRRRRR.  Please remember that there aren’t any States with statutes that define “parental alienation” let alone have made it a crime.  A lawyer would have to prove “it” by case law- Good Luck with that, Perry Mason.

 I’ve had contact with a few lawyers and GALs who know that one parent is using alienation strategies to discard the TP, but that’s as far as they get.  Even if they get past the obstacles of trying to prove something that most legal professionals have strongly held misconceptions about, there are no laws or protocols to take it to the next level. 

Usually the courts think that the next level is therapy for the child and TP.  We know where that goes-- No protective separation---No reunification.  Therapy further harms the child and further traumatizes the TP.  In addition,  children who express strong desires about placement with one parent, intimidate Judges and GALs.  They are afraid that the children will be too traumatized if they transfer custody from the abusive parent to the TP and they will be held accountable.

What IS Working.

1. Using an advocate.  Advocates can be another parent, friend, sibling, spiritual leader, therapist, a coach or anyone who is willing to help you manage the stress of being re-traumatized by Family Court and Child Protective Services.  It is very hard for targeted parents to effectively manage their own high conflict cases even with all that we know about the circumstances and people.  

2. Designing a plan.  Targeted parents do not have the luxury to “wait and see” what will happen in the next court hearing.  I can almost guarantee it won’t be good.

The abuser is spending 24/7 planning how to execute the next attack, the next step to devalue you and the final phases of discarding you.  He or she has been in the drivers seat since the beginning.  And don’t give credit to the lawyers,  your ex-partner calls the shots.

Plan to take the offensive. Use your advocate. Your lawyer will not take the lead and fix this. Family law professionals do not understand child development, attachment systems, personality disorders or trauma.  We cannot teach them all of this, we must lead them through what needs to be done.

3.  File contempt every time your ex violates a court order (including child support).  The only way the court will “see” the narcissistic/borderline traits will be if you show them.  You want the conflict to be between the abuser and the Judge; not between the two of you.  It won’t take long for the court to see that he/she has no respect for authority and will not comply or cooperate with anything that supports your relationships with your children. This is abuse!

4. Convince the GAL or your lawyer to request psychological evaluations for both of you, as soon as possible.  Use an independent clinic that is competent is diagnosing personality disorders. These objective mental health professionals are pretty easy to find.  Do not use custody evaluators; they work for the court and will not diagnose the personality disorder or work on your behalf once the evaluation is complete.

When the diagnosis comes back with the personality disorder, be prepared to push the court to involve CPS.  If they won’t, you will need to file an abuse report on your own.  It doesn’t cost anything but your persistence.

5. File Child Psychological Maltreatment (also called psychological abuse and neglect, emotional and/or mental abuse and neglect) with your local Child Protective Service Agency.  Child Psychological Maltreatment is the most prevalent and damaging type of child abuse.  And although it co-occurs with physical and sexual abuse it is a formidable type of abuse on its own. Narcissistic/borderline personality disordered parents are psychologically abusive to their children and (ex) partners 24/7. 

These are not custody cases they are abuse cases.

6. Make your concerns about child abuse and neglect known to anyone and everyone.   Otherwise, it looks like you don’t care and you could ultimately be charged with neglect       (I’ve seen it happen)!

7. Keep processing your trauma and elevating to new levels of healing. There is a plethora of information available on the best ways to treat trauma, but you can’t do it alone.  Work with a trauma informed therapist and do your homework.  

8. Become a trauma expert by getting familiar with the ACES, trauma informed and resiliency movements.  They are really very easy to understand and the most powerful agency we have. 

Our children have ACE scores of 8+.  This precisely defines what is at stake.  If a psychologically abused child is not removed from a narcissistic/borderline abuser and isn’t allowed to rekindle the attachment with the healthy parent,  he or she will be at extreme risk for developing self-destructive behaviors such as substance abuse, promiscuity and criminal or antisocial lifestyles.  These adverse experiences in turn trigger the onset of the most common chronic diseases and a premature death.

Until I blog Again,

Kay

Nothing Baffling About Psychological Abuse

The most common and harmful type of child abuse is psychological maltreatment (emotional abuse and neglect).   Decades of research confirm that parents who thwart their children’s emotional and psychological needs cause long term problems equal to and often worse than physical and/or sexual abuse.  Psychological maltreatment is described in two ways.  One description focuses on the parent’s abusive behaviors such as; terrorizing, exploiting and rejecting.  The other way to describe child psychological maltreatment is in terms of the symptoms a child displays when being psychologically abused or neglected.  

Some authors argue that there are mild or moderate degrees of emotional  abuse, but these cases fall below the threshold of psychological maltreatment.  Mild or moderate cases of emotional abuse can be treated as dysfunctional parenting problems.  Psychological maltreatment on the other hand is characterized by chronic, severe, and escalating patterns of psychological abuse that puts the child at risk of psychological harm.

 A growing number of parents who have been linked to psychological abuse display relationally abusive narcissistic/borderline traits.  These parents are very reactive under relenting stress.   Typically, they are unable to transition through the divorce process they escalate their abusive behaviors toward the other (targeted) parent.  Ultimately, the abuser wants to drive the targeted parent out of the children’s lives.   The harm this causes every psychologically abused child (and the targeted parent) is extreme and it is widespread.  Harman and Biringrin (2016) and other authorities estimate that the number of families struggling under this emotional assault could be as many as 22 million.   There is an immediate need to break the cycle of narcissistic/borderline psychological abuse, one family at a time.

Despite the urgent need for intervention in cases of psychological maltreatment, child and family welfare courts and agencies seriously underreport. under investigate, and rarely intervene in these cases.  In the article, Unseen Wounds (Spinazolla, 2014) the authors  suggest that child welfare professionals may be baffled by the “covert” and “insidious” nature of psychological abuse and that those who are responsible to prevent and intervene for the children, may adopt an apathetic or helpless attitude.   As pathetic as this sounds, it may be true.   The problem of stopping child psychological abuse would seem insurmountable,  IF social workers, mental health providers and the courts focused on the abuser only.   Obviously, investigators cannot get behind closed doors to personally witness what any abusive parent is doing.    No one “sees” these acts, except for the (ex) partner who is often not given much support or credibility, and the traumatized child, who should not be re-traumatized by having to testifying against either of his or her parents.  

However, if social workers, mental health providers and the courts used the evidence presented by psychologically abused children in the same way they do for physically and sexually abused children, these professionals would realize that there is nothing covert, insidious or baffling about psychological maltreatment.   In fact, a physically or sexually abusive parent and their victim may be able to hide scars or bruises, or make up stories about how the child fell or had an accident, but psychologically maltreated children cannot cover up their symptoms with clothes or lies.  In fact, these cases are much easier to identify, locate, intervene, and provide treatment for than physical and/or sexual abuse cases, because severely psychologically abused children act out so outrageously that the family draws attention.

Identifying a severely psychologically abused child is as easy as opening your eyes.  The child will conspicuously and reliably display three (3) profoundly abnormal and delusional symptoms when relating to both parents inside and outside of court.  Anyone with a little training can learn to identify the indicators of psychological abuse, as defined by the state statutes and the DSM-V.  The icing on the cake is that the child will hyper bond or enmesh with the abuser against the other parent, leaving no doubt as to which parent is the perpetrator.

Locating psychologically abusive parents is as easy and going down to the court  house.  Due to the abusers’ patterns of narcissistic/borderline traits and their need to escalate conflict, these families can be found in protracted contested custody cases, filling family court dockets across America.   There is not another crime where the perpetrator walks right in through the court doors.  

Intervention and treatment for these psychologically abused children is fairly simple.  The non-abusive parent and abused children need a time of protective separation from the abuser for psycho-educational healing and reuniting.  In addition, each family member needs to learn how to recognize and prevent further psychological abuse.   The family is monitored to ensure that that treatment is effective and preventive measures are put in place, thus breaking the cycle of narcissistic/borderline psychological abuse, one family at a time.

I'm working on linking the full documents described in these blogs.  Anyone know square space?   Kay

Harman PhD, Jennifer; Biringen PhD, Zeynep (2016-01-03). Parents Acting Badly: How Institutions and Societies Promote the Alienation of Children from Their Loving Families (Kindle Locations 522-523).  . Kindle Edition.

Spinazzola, J., Hodgdon, H., Ford, J.,…Kisiel C., (2014). Unseen wounds: The contribution of psychological maltreatment to child and adolescent mental health and risk outcomes.  Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, 6, 518-828. doi.org/10.1037/a0037766

The End of Parental Alienation

                                 When the Moon is in the seventh house,

and Jupiter aligns with Mars.  Then peace will

guide the planets,

                            and love will steer the stars.  

                               –The Fifth Dimension (1969)

2016 is the year that parental alienation (as we know it) will end.  It’s only January and already, the traditional framework of parental alienation is disappearing and a new era is emerging.  Almost everyday I find another piece to the puzzle that brings us one step closer to ending this nightmare.  We are light years away from that dark place were there was no hope that people or systems would ever understand and care enough to change. 

Up until now, it’s probably a good thing that we didn’t know how complex and damaging the problem is.   If we had, most of us might have given up in the face of such comprehensive adversity.   What we were unaware of is that many other people have been also been working on aspects of our problem under different names.  It is now becoming clear that any one domain couldn’t possibly have discovered the multifaceted aspects of parental alienation.  And indeed what we call parental alienation is just one aspect of a bigger problem.  This is why we have struggled trying to explain or get others to understand our crisis.  This is also why individual approaches to resolving the issue have failed.  

The attachment-based model of parental alienation1 is the only model that identifies the multifaceted interaction of the clinical psychological definition of parental alienation, but even that does not account for the impact of the longstanding social injustices of custody allocations, parenting and gender role biases that have as much or maybe more of an impact on the problem.  Make no mistake about it, parental alienation is a huge, huge problem, possibly our county’s number 1 public health problem and the solution is just as big, but not insurmountable.

There is nothing that is insurmountable for targeted parents because we have the one thing we need to overcome this worldwide assault on our children, our families and our country.   We have the GOLD bullet; the most valuable possession in the world.  It’s called attachment.

Attachment is the most powerful force on earth.

Attachment is the enduring emotional bond between a healthy parent and his or her children and it is our superpower.  It exists with no boundaries in time or space.  Nothing can destroy it.  Nothing can stop it.  It is how David beat Goliath.  It is how we can be immersed in intolerable pain, but not be debilitated by it.  It is how we endure being stripped of our personal and civil rights and still step forward.  Attachment is how targeted parents can work full time jobs, plus put in 20-30+ hours a week preparing for court, mediation, and still fight for the good of the order.  In addition, targeted parents spend every moment thinking, working, praying, sharing, and caring for our children, whether we have contact or not.   We are either crazy, or invincible and know that I’m not crazy. 

Filing A Licensing Board Complaint

Last week I received an email from the Wisconsin Department of Safety and Professional Services; Division of Legal Services and Compliance.  Among other things it said,   

 The Marriage and Family Therapist Section screening panel will review and evaluate your complaint at their November 30th meeting and the Social Worker Section screening panel will review and evaluate your complaint at their December 16 meeting.  Each screening panel will evaluate all the treatment that your therapist provided and if the treatment fell below the minimal standard of care, then they can discipline that therapist.

 That’s all I needed to hear!  If either panel decides to discipline this therapist that will be the least of his concerns!  I’m going shopping for a malpractice lawyer!

Before I filed my licensing board complaint, actually long before my family ever  saw this therapist, I had checked him out pretty carefully.  I looked up his credentials and I had a good idea of what the standards of practice were for Marriage and Family Therapists in Wisconsin.  Then, I talked to him directly, explained my situation and my concerns and asked him if he thought he could help.  I even discussed his previous experience with my personal therapist. 

This therapist had had government contracts for providing intensive family interventions with the most troubled families in the inner city.  He told me that he subscribed toBowen’s family systems theory, and was a master at working with people who had narcissistic personality disorders.  I was pretty confident that I had found the best therapist in the area for our Family Court ordered intervention.  I couldn’t wait!

It had taken 4 years to get my ex-husband to participate in this intervention. He had never followed one family court order and masterfully sabotaged countless orders for therapy between my children and me.  However, by this time we were in criminal court, and that is an entirely different ball game.  The Judge ruled that my ex-husband had a choice of participating in this intervention or going to jail.  When my-ex-husband “swore on a stack of bibles” that he would make reconnecting my children and I his top priority, both the Judge and I knew he was lying.  I knew that he would get my children to burn me at the stake to get him off the hook.  They did.  I didn’t. 

This intensive family intervention was my very last chance to do something that would make a difference in my kids’ lives, and I had the probation officer alerted that I would call her if he didn’t show up. 

He did show up, flanked by a child on each side.  The intervention was more like a homecoming game for my ex-husband and I was the “away” team.  I’ve posted my complaint here,  but you really had to be there to believe it. 

I don't know if I will ever stop being

surprised by the bizarre events

that accompany a person with

narcissistic personality disorder. 

I have to give credit to Dr. Craig Childress for my back up plan;  filing a licensing board complaint.  I’ve never done anything like this before, but I felt confident. 

It helped that I understood the seriousness of this pathology and how the therapist would have to assess for it.  It helped that I knew that there must be substantiated evidence and a diagnosis. It helped that I knew that every therapist has to have a written treatment plan clearly indicating how the techniques to be used should resolve the problem and eliminate the symptoms (in a reasonable amount of time).  It helped that I knew that the therapist was supposed to have shared this with us and it helped that I knew the standards of practice that this therapist could be held accountable for.

 It really helped that I knew these things before we started the intervention, because I was able to immediately recognize which standards of practice were missing.

Knowledge is our weapon against all of the atrocities that come against us.  The Alliance is dedicated to providing you with the best, objective, accurate, and helpful knowledge to assist you in stopping child psychological abuse by narcissistic/borderline parents.  It's taking some time to get it out to the website, and we are in the process of "trying out" some things, but we are making good progress.  If you're looking for some information that you can't find, contact me here, I'll see what I can do.

Kay