Personality Disordered Abusers in Family Law Courts
Written by: Rob
Print This Article Share Use of Our Content (Reposting and Quoting)
(Note: This article was published together with Personality Disordered Abusers in Psychological Evaluations. That article focuses on problems encountered when psychological evaluations are used in an attempt to deal with a personality disordered abuser in a family law dispute.)
William Eddy is an attorney and licensed clinical social worker who has written many excellent books on personality disorders and how they manifest in family law battles. In his recent books, he has taken to calling people with personality disorders who engage in extensive and unreasonable litigation as High Conflict Personalities (HCP). He’s stated that a large part, possibly as much as 40%, of the litigation in family courts involves HCPs.
Yet despite the prevalence of these psychological problems in family law courts, judges often fail to understand the problems and are prone to reward the abusers for their conduct. This is likely to intensify the abuses because they have been positively reinforced with rewards such as sole physical and/or legal custody, financial awards, or simply emotional satisfaction of seeing the hated target being berated by a judge the abuser manipulated.
While HCP is a great term in many ways, it does not convey how abusively many of these people act particularly towards others in their families or former families. I’ve taken to using the term Personality Disordered Abuser, PDA for short, to refer to these people. Like many personality disorder victims, they are generally victims of child abuse. More importantly, they are abusers themselves. They often abuse children, spouses, ex-spouses, and other current or former family members.
Please keep in mind that not all Axis II personality disorder victims are PDAs. For instance, there is a large subset of people with Borderline Personality Disorder who engage in “acting in” behaviors which primarily hurt themselves. These people are the ones who cut and mutilate themselves, abuse drugs, engage in reckless and dangerous behaviors that primarily risk their own well-being, and often attempt suicide. While this may cause a substantial amount of emotional harm to the people around them, they are often not intending or plotting to harm others.
This is significantly different from the PDAs who generally have goals to cause harm to others. They use manipulation and abuse to control people and situations to get what they want. PDAs as a group engage in systematic “acting out” behaviors targeted against others.
Note that it is entirely possible for a person to engage in both acting in and acting out behaviors. However, usually if you look at the whole scope and pattern of behaviors you will see they primarily engage in one or the other. A person who primarily engages in unprotected sex, abuses alcohol and drugs, and has repeatedly attempted suicide but is known to infrequently hit another person while intoxicated is probably not a PDA. PDAs are much more intensively focused on causing harm to others than this example.
PDAs Hurt Targets for Own Benefits
A Borderline who “acts in” may succeed at killing herself or himself by many means, including accidental drug overdoses, car accidents due to reckless driving, or intentional suicide. PDAs “acting out”, on the other hand, are far less likely to hurt themselves this way as they avoid self-harm and are instead intent on severely damaging a select group of people around them. Those people often include their children, siblings, and current or former spouses, significant others, or close friends.
PDAs often benefit from their abusive behaviors. This is particularly the case if they are highly intelligent and skilled at manipulation.
PDAs are often able to “push the buttons” of their abuse targets, provoking them by using repeated threats, crimes, and other attacks. When the abuse targets finally respond to the continuing and possibly escalating attacks, they often do so out of desperation to make them stop. They are often in fear for their own safety or well-being or that of their children and loved ones. Then the PDAs are often able to deceive others into thinking that they are merely victims of some hostile crazy abusive person when in fact they are the abusers. They thereby further intensify their control and escalate the damage they are able to inflict upon their targets.
Personality Disordered Abuser Behavior Patterns
Many of us who have endured the ravages of a marriage and family law battle with a PDA can recite example after example of their abusive and bizarre behaviors going back many years, even decades. Sometimes we are even aware of their similar conduct with their birth families, but may have learned of it far too late to prevent major damage to our children and ourselves.
We have experienced their rages, screaming, and berating for no apparent reason, only to see them change their mood moments later acting as if they had done nothing hostile. Then they act as if we are the problems when we are not friendly towards them after being repeatedly attacked.
We have endured their constant threats, provocations, and refusal to cooperate with reason, fairness, common sense, and court orders that typify the unrelenting efforts of the PDA to control everybody and everything around them. At times we may be in fear for our lives from these people, but because they are very good at controlling their own behaviors to appear reasonable around most people, few can understand how truly dangerous they are.
We have suffered their vilification and distortion campaigns that spread into our children’s schools, doctor’s offices, workplaces, and to friends and family. Often only years after it started, we find that we have been described as vile, hateful, dangerous people to hundreds or thousands of people around us who have never even met us but believe all these lies because they have heard them unchallenged for so long. We have been overwhelmed by how dozens or even hundreds of people hate and malign us because they are too uneducated in psychology and easily duped and controlled by the PDA.
Gathering Minions for Attacking the Target
One of the methods PDAs use is to build a support system they can use to attack their targets. This is easiest to do with ex-spouses or former boyfriends or girlfriends, but sometimes can be used to attack children, siblings, parents, and others.
PDAs learn to identify weak-minded people as potential recruits for their distortion campaigns. These people are often very gullible do-gooders poorly educated in psychology. Occasionally they may be mentally impaired themselves, but even when that is the case it is only sometimes severe. They may be thinking they are somehow doing good by helping to attack the target. In fact they have been subverted into destructive behaviors by a masterfully manipulative abuser who deceives them and prevents them from discovering the facts.
PDAs sometimes are able to find other PDAs to ally with them. For instance, a PDA who had an affair with another PDA may recruit the person to assist them with attacking a spouse or former spouse. Elevated levels of criminality can be achieved while maintaining plausible deniability for the instigating PDA. She may be able to convince her personality disordered lover to stalk her ex-spouse, hack his email, and even physically attack him. While she is the instigator and it is a conspiracy of harassment, the broken family law courts will probably let her off with no consequences for the crimes she caused.
Building False Reality from Partial Truths and Lies
PDAs are especially good at sprinkling in enough plausible or partial truths amidst the outright lies and twisted distortions to convince the uneducated and ignorant people around them to accept their version of reality. They will often produce “proof” of their overall story in the form of other people repeating their claims, writings or notes that look hostile or unreasonable, or altered or abridged documents that may be very official-looking and convince the majority of people who have never seen a police report, court declaration, court transcript, or other such government document. That these documents are not complete nor accurate is often entirely outside the awareness of the people being manipulated in this fashion.
When one is being defamed and attacked relentlessly, it is only natural to want to defend one’s reputation. However, even this can be twisted by the PDA to cause more damage to the target. The attempts by the targets to defend from the PDA’s onslaught, hold her or him accountable for the abuse, and to get her or him the help needed to learn to stop these behaviors often backfire. This is especially the case in family law courts as judges are woefully untrained in psychology and rely upon custody evaluators who are usually incapable or unwilling to do what is needed to protect the victims from the abusers. They are also often highly unwilling to consider testimony of people who witnessed events and saw and/or heard what the PDA said. Such accounts often sound bizarre and therefore are dismissed as hearsay or incredible, even though they are objectively accurate.
Legal Self-Defense Is “Criminalized” By Family Law Courts
It is natural to want to defend one’s freedom and reputation from these assaults by a PDA. Some may also want to help people understand what has gone wrong, stop the spread of defamation, and help the family get needed help, all of which in theory should be easier to accomplish if people could name and discuss what has gone wrong with the out of control false accuser.
If the victim of false accusations responds by disclosing the false accuser’s behaviors and applies a personality disorder name to explain why she or he is behaving this way, that is often regarded as a very serious offense by the courts.
Blatant disregard for freedom of speech is commonly shown by family law judges. PDAs are routinely given free reign to defame their victims and to recruit allies to attack them. If the victim of this defamation writes about what the PDA has done in a blog, discussion group, or email to get help or defend against the defamation, incompetent or corrupt family law judges will use that as reason to reduce child custody, denigrate the victim, and make financially punitive rulings.
Family law judges do not like freedom of speech. Perhaps that is because they realize that if the public truly knew the crimes and offenses they routinely commit against children and good parents that they would be removed from office or prosecuted. So it appears that one of the foremost goals of many poor family law judges is to shut up the litigants by use of intimidation, threats, and illegal orders. For a PDA, this is no problem because the PDA is used to spreading defamation without being discovered. Targets, however, are not used to this and may find that they have just been told by an idiot judge that they should just sit back and watch their reputations be trashed and if they do anything to stop if that they will never see their children again.
The courts often rule that defending one’s freedom and reputation from the PDA by writing, speaking, or other public disclosure, or even such disclosure just to family members, is a form of harassment and it will be punished. But these same courts will do nothing to punish the PDA for engaging in false criminal allegations, defamation, and harassment in the first place. This destructive double standard is precisely what is being practiced by many judges in many family law cases all across the United States.
Courts also often side against a party who has been abused by the court when that party publicly points out the abuses committed by the court. Personality disordered abusers are often very successful at getting what they want because they build armies army of minions to attack the ex by various legal and illegal means. These parties too often include the judge in the case.
While it is clear the interests of justice are not being served by such judges and they should recuse or even resign their office given an obvious lack of objectivity, criticizing the judicial bias and misconduct risks even more judicial harassment in response. But saying nothing simply lets such judges continue their misconduct.
It is a common observation from people in cases involving a PDA that many family law judges are against free speech and will punish a parent and harm their children in retaliation. This willingness to persecute people and abuse their children for speaking up about the conduct of family law judges appears to be intended to forcibly suppress any negative publicity about bad judges and how they reward false allegations and other tactics that PDAs use with great frequency.
Gender Does Affect Risk from PDAs
The people at most risk of permanently life-altering harm are male targets of female PDAs. That is partly because of the gross misconceptions popular with the public about men being abusers and women being victims and partly because of sexist judges and laws.
While gender inequality is a huge problem in this area and men are more often than not the victims, female targets can easily have their lives ruined by male PDAs, too. This is especially the case when the male PDA is viewed as having special credibility such as working as a doctor, lawyer, minister, or other occupation which the public mistakenly believes is highly unlikely to allow abusers into its ranks.
Don’t Depend Upon Any Protection from Courts
The bottom line is that if you are a target of a PDA, you cannot count on any protection whatsoever from today’s family law courts. If you try to protect yourself, you will probably be persecuted for it. You are in a lose-lose situation because the abuser is likely to be assisted and rewarded by incompetent and/or sexist judges and foolishly destructive and/or sexist laws.
Possibly your only sure means to safety when being abused by a PDA is to disappear. The PDA may continue to attack you for some time, but if you are nowhere to be found and nobody who hears the defamation against you sees you again, it may have little if any lasting effect upon you.
While disappearing is feasible for people with no children, those who have children usually do not have such an option. They are stuck between only a few legal choices, all of which are horrible. These include abandoning their children for their own safety, staying and living with the ongoing abuse of the PDA against the children and themselves and possibly their extended families, trying to defend themselves in court which is virtually a guarantee of financial devastation, or trying to defend themselves outside of court which will almost certainly be spun by the PDA to get them into trouble with police, CPS, and courts. Meanwhile, the PDA keeps right on with the abuse.
Family Law Courts Perpetuate Child and Spousal Abuse by PDAs
Far too many of today’s family law judges lack any significant training or education in psychology and further lack personal experience being abused by a person afflicted with a personality disorder. Such judges are very likely to do exactly the wrong thing in many cases. These judges get bad data and act on it as if it is true. Even when it is pointed out to them exactly how it is wrong by a psychological evaluator or a party citing objective and accurate evidence, they often will not believe it because they cannot comprehend how powerfully effective the manipulations of the PDA are and therefore believe the PDA’s target is mistaken or dishonest and the evaluator was too easy on him or her.
William Eddy and others like him have been trying to educate judges and others in the legal profession about these problems. Sadly, these efforts are far too little to fix the problems even in areas where Eddy has done many presentations and training sessions.
One of these areas is San Diego County, California, where Eddy lives and works much of the time. A psychological evaluator from that region with whom I’ve spoken has stated that the family law courts there are “the most broken they have been in [the evaluator's] three decades” of involvement with the courts and CPS on behalf of children. The region’s courts are direct contributors to serious harm against children and families. This is especially alarming when well-intentioned activitists such as Eddy have spent years trying to educate the county’s judges on personality disorders and how they affect family law cases. It calls into serious question whether family law courts can ever be repaired to function effectively and justly.
Given their dereliction of duty, egregious incompetence, and frequent bias, many family law courts have no business being involved in family disputes involving allegations of abuse or mental illness. They only intensity conflicts, increase abuses, and worsen the harm done to all parties except for possibly the abusers they assist and reward. However, even the abusers are suffering because these broken courts enable them to continue their abuses rather than get on the road the psychological recovery.
I strongly believe that family law courts in the United States today as a general rule are incapable of effectively, fairly, and timely hearing cases involving PDAs.
The judges who are assigned family law duties are often newbies with zero experience in family law courts and no training in psychology. Yet they are being asked to figure out the truth in matters with people who are expert liars and are fully capable of making many other people believe their lies and repeat them. The methods they are using includes very weak evidentiary standards and allowing family law courts to be used as kangaroo courts for criminal prosecutions that would obviously fail for lack of evidence in a real criminal court. They are also willing to drag out no-contact and supervised visitation periods against falsely accused people for months or years with little to no evidence to support such actions. Sometime the evidence that supports there being no basis for a safety concern is even hidden by CPS and the children’s attorney, if there is one, for years until it is finally “discovered”.
The result of these broken courts is that children and families are frequently harmed. It is extremely easy for a skilled manipulator to lie and deceive, stage attacks to generate “evidence” that the victim is the abuser, cause the courts to become allies in the abuse, and to jerk around the evaluators, courts, and entire system to delay cases for years while they build their armies of hate and establish a “parenting track record” that the idiot judges in the broken family law courts will interpret as meaning they are capable parents (when in fact they are often highly abusive to the children, frequently by parental alienation and other forms of emotional abuse) and the target parents are irrelevant because they have had little contact with their children for years.
Reforming Broken Family Law Courts Proves Difficult
Many target parents end up with little or no contact with their children for years, are financially ruined, have difficulty working or functioning well after the abuses they have endured, and are sometimes even incarcerated for crimes they did not commit or “fake crimes” caused by temporary restraining orders that turned normal things like calling one’s children into crimes that can result in jail time. These are not isolated miscarriages of justice, they are common and are occurring to likely millions of parents, many of whom are so beaten up and devastated that they simply leave. Many of them end up being derided as “absent fathers” or “deadbeat dads” who lost their children, livelihoods, freedom, and health at the hands of abusive personality disordered females and broken family law courts.
Resolving these problems is very difficult because the public has little to no understanding of how many innocent good parents are being caught up in and ruined by this broken system until it happens to them. Then these fresh victims are usually stigmatized as child abusers, spousal beaters, convicted criminals, and/or deadbeats who don’t pay child support. (Note that “deadbeat” can apply to both genders of parents and that some statistics show a slightly higher percentage of mothers than fathers fail to pay child support.) Almost nobody who has not been similarly abused will listen to them. They and their children are the victims of the family law courts even more than they are the victims of the personality disordered abusers in their lives. The PDA could cause great harm, but the courts made that harm more or less permanent.
While I have emphasized how men are at increased risk from personality disordered abusers and their manipulations of family law systems, these abuses are happening to many women, too. This is not a gender issue so much as it is an issue of violation of civil and constitution rights, broken courts, and public apathy about a major crisis afflicting millions of Americans. The people who gain advantage from this broken system who consider their own financial security paramount over the well-being of children and families don’t want it fixed and often try to portray the problem as a gender issue to balkanize the public and impede reform attempts. There are certainly judges, attorneys, and psychologists who are disgusted with the system the way it is today, but they seem to be few and far between. Most of them are apathetic, as if they forgot the ideas of public service and helping people that might have once motivated them at the beginning of their careers.
Whores of the Court: The Fraud of Psychiatric Testimony and the Rape of American Justice
A take-no-prisoners condemnation of psychiatric experts being waved into the witness box, this account trashes psychiatry in general as a quack profession. Hagen (a psychology professor) assails most of the diagnostic tools of the field in her text, which roams among court cases whose outcome hinged on the testimony of mental-health experts. Her fundamental contention is that psychiatry is a junk science whose theories when extended to matters of legal culpability go against common sense. Indeed, Hagen assumes the posture of that legendary legalism, the “reasonable person,” and her prose is peppered with exclamations and rhetorical questions like “Who could believe that?” which might annoy as many readers as it might convince about whatever points are in question. Among them are such topically current items as battered-wife syndrome, recovered memory claims, post-traumatic stress syndrome, and urban psychosis claims. The average person could easily encounter in divorce and child custody litigation the situations Hagen vigorously complains of, so her energetic attack could gain considerable attention. Gilbert Taylor
Further Reading
Personality Disordered Abusers in Psychological Evaluations
Relationships and Divorces with Someone Who Suffers Borderline Personality Disorder
Borderline Mom: Emotional Self Defense for Children
Abusive Women “Acceptable” By Double Standards
An Online Personality Disorder Test
Recovering from Personality Disordered Abusive Relationships
Detecting Borderline Personality Disorder to Begin Treatment
Breaking Mental Illness, Violence, Divorce, and Murder Cycles
| BPD, Child Abuse, Child Custody, Children, Civil Rights, Courts, Crime, Divorce, Domestic Violence, Family, Government Abuse, Legal, Marriage, NPD, Parental Alienation, Partner Violence, Psychology |
I could not agree more with your analysis. My experience has been exactly as you described including arrest & incarceration for non-domestic violence crimes. When I presented the fact that the allegations were considered not DV by the criminal judge, the family court judge changed her story and stated the extreme measure (5 year criminal protective order) was necessary because I was on the VERGE of alienating BOTH children from the other parent. Neither child has ever stated they hated the other parent. Alienation was never argued/heard in her court and was nothing more than another excuse to discriminate and abuse the kids and me. William Eddy’s book helped me to understand my ex’s behavior. His book only touches the surface of the bigger problem of Negative Advocacy. I think there should be another study done on the impact of Negative Advocates in the legal system. My ex has a diagnosed DSM-IV disorder which I recently presented to the court along with actual threats that she made and she boldly states she can do these things and more anytime she pleases (which of course included the threat to destroy the bond between the kids and me). The hearing was continued to next month, I guess so they can prepare some more excuses to force the kids to stay with the true abuser.
Once again, your article is right on the money. I began studying this issue in 2004 when I became overwhelmed with excessive litigation (all fabricated untruths) in my own family law case which is now 33 volumes (LASC Family Law Case BD403783). This same study and analysis was conducted by Dr. Edward Workman as it pertained to Medical Claims and Sociopaths. His work concluded the same results. They can be viewed and compared by accessing Google –The Classic Sociopath. Individuals with Anti-Social Personality Disorder – http://www.lectlaw.com/filesh/tabbpd.htm – From The ‘Lectric Law Library’s Stacks Client Personality Disorders Can Wreck an Otherwise Good Case – by Edward A. Workman, MD, FAAPM *
Janette,
Thanks for the link to Ed Workman’s article. He’s focusing on BPD and ASPD in his article, but NPD (Narcissistic Personality Disorder) is another very common kind of aggressive and destructive personality disorder that is often involved in family law cases. I’ve come to think of all three of these personality disorders, along with HPD (Histrionic Personality Disorder), as being essentially varying flavors of sociopathic personalities.
It’s really unfortunate that DSM (the mental health industry’s Diagnostic and Statistics Manual) doesn’t adequately distinguish between the “acting out” and “acting in” variants of these. While Workman points out that even an “acting in” Borderline who engages in cutting, self-mutilation, etc. may turn on a doctor or therapist and file baseless complaints or lawsuits, it’s been my observation that the “acting out” variants are far more dangerous to other people, especially as they engage in vicious and abusive litigation, defamation, and persecution against others as common practice. This is why I’ve come to call them “personality disordered abusers” to emphasize that they routinely operate by abusing other people.
Such sociopaths never seem to be satisfied with the results they get. They can strip you of your home, job, income, assets, and most importantly children and yet still not be satisfied and continue to attack relentlessly. Many are also very adept at manipulating others to join them, creating communities of people who hate the PDA’s target and are willing to join in the madness and abuse.
Gullible do-gooders such as teachers, church pastors and members, therapists, doctors, and cops are frequent recruits to such communities. They inaccurately appear to many outsiders as “good natured” people. Because of this, they can greatly assist at ratcheting up the credibility of the PDA in the eyes of others.
Some of them are arguably even more guilty than the PDA of abuse because they should know better, particularly those who are working in the mental health field. Yet it is common for a PDA to dupe a therapist or psychologist into believing outright lies or other distortions to get them to file false CPS and police reports against the target.
Because of how the courts and law enforcement assume guilt and persecute people who are falsely accused, often for months or years without charges or trials, the damage to the target can be really severe even if eventually the truth of the matter is discovered. The co-abusers in the courts and law enforcement almost never apologize for the atrocities they committed. Sometimes they will even continue to commit more atrocities in an attempt to “kill the messenger” because they know their victims could get their stories out and cause a lot of damage for them if the public were to believe the truth. So they have a vested interest in perpetuating the lies of the PDA and continuing to victimize and abuse their targets, even after they fully know the PDA’s accusations were false.
The typical person reading about such cases foolishly has trust in the courts, government, and supposedly good-natured people. They readily believe the lies and regard the truth as implausible, thus siding against the true victims.
They should be reminded of what supposed do-gooders often are really doing. The Catholic Church’s complicity in the Holocaust, the US government’s genocide against the American Indians, and the racist concentration camps for Japanese Americans in World War II all show how much damage can be done in the name of common good or by people or organizations who are commonly believed to be good.
Such extreme atrocities continue today in other forms. Just consider the actions of criminals wearing black robes such as Judges Michael Conohan and Mark Ciavarella who sentenced thousands of children to private prisons for their own profit for such “serious crimes” as criticizing a school principal on a web site. This continued over the course of several years while “officers of the court” including attorneys, clerks, and other court personnel watched and ignored their crimes and violations of civil rights and the US Constitution. All the while, such “good people” probably believed these evil judges were “good people” too and the children, the real victims, must really deserve the treatment they were getting.
There are so many of these sociopathic people, as Workman says around 10% to 12% of the population, that it is impossible to avoid them. Add on their allies who are collaborators, often due to their own ignorance, and it’s possible that almost everybody knows somebody who is or has been abusive due to sociopathic behaviors.
There seems to be little way to counteract these people except via education, but that education is not being provided today. Kids need to grow up learning about the sociopaths in their midst. Without such education, our children are nearly all going to become entangled with sociopaths and suffer from such experiences. Some may merely assist such sociopaths, others will fall prey to them, and a sizable number will become sociopaths themselves. I believe that much of this could be avoided with proper education on psychology starting when children are very young, even in preschool and kindergarten.
I’d be interested to hear any ideas you may have about how to stop the madness and abuse of sociopaths running amok in our society.
Rob
Women’s rights on other humans’ lives are inhuman, feminism is a fascistic political ideology (femi-nazism) which arrantly polluted our system now for over 50yrs, fakefun&feelgood-terrorists, we have to rechange their backwarding norms&laws, feminism is worse than racism, feminism is a severe mind-control illne$$, femini…sm is character murder, in essence family-murder on children&fathers, infanticide and male-genocide, the main target of feminism is to destroy normal families, destroying men’s interests is their interest even abusing children as weapon&shield, the whole feminist-concept is a historic lie making first low selfish esteems to next empower their irrationally frustrated made idiots, ridiculous borderliners turning-twisting-spinning antisocial&destructive (sociopaths), from evil to worse, good feminists don’t exist, stop the dirty feminized heterophobic homophile U$A-UN sex-war against children&fathers, hetero’s and normal families, the mismaking of children-men&women, feminism destroys the world.
@Michael
Wow I thought you were talking about what just happened to me. EXACTLY. I am shocked at how Family Court is run.
I am a woman who has been raped, and I strongly disapprove of people using the metaphor of rape about other situations, such as court. I disapprove the title of this book. I have been through more than 15 years of therapy to deal with multiple rape experiences. I have experienced PTSD. I am underemployed, which means my employment does not match my capability in terms of the talents and skills I possess. Rape has been a truly life-altering, devastating, and cruel experience, leaving me with deep psychological and physical wounds that have taken me years and large sums of money and personal time to address. For example, physiotherapy exercises to recover from rape wounds at one time involved three hours per day of bio-feedback and other exercises. I may never be able to experience pain-free sexual intimacy with my partner. I am lucky in that I am able to live a relatively normal life with a caring partner — many in my position are not able to experience intimacy at all. The effect of rape is so immense, I can not describe it sufficiently. It is wrong to apply the word “rape” to other events and situations. It is wrong and minimizes the horror of rape, and the respect due to survivors. I would truly appreciate people being open-minded enough to genuinely consider my words, and, even better, change their use of the word “rape” and discuss this issue with any one else who uses the word “rape” inappropriately. Thank you.
Julie,
I didn’t name that book. I do find it interesting that your explanation of what you have experienced from sexual assault is very much like what many parents experience from the family law courts when they are manipulated by a sociopath. PTSD, depression, anxiety, fear, inability to enjoy normally pleasant things like spending time with your kids and family, life-long need for medical and mental health intervention, and chronic unemployment and underemployment are all among the many results of what the broken family law courts do to a good parent when manipulated by a sociopath. Although you clearly didn’t intend to do so, you’re actually making a compelling argument that “rape” applies very well to such atrocities.
Taking this a step further, a sexual assault is generally a one-time incident. I know a woman who was sexually assaulted, raped in her bedroom by a stranger who was never caught. The total psychological damage from this experience to her was far less than that routinely heaped upon many children and good parents by family law courts. Of course the impact will vary with the specifics and the victim, so I don’t mean to imply that in general this is true of all rape victims. But it is very clear to me that what the courts and government do at the bidding of sociopaths is often far worse than even a very serious crime such as sexual assault.
That’s in part because what family law courts do at the instigation of sociopaths is seldom ever just a one-time attack that lasts only an hour or less. On the contrary, such abuse is generally repeated over and over many times for many years. Often the children and a decent caring parent are subjected to this abuse for going on even more than a decade. The government is very strongly to blame despite being manipulated by the sociopathic parent. The use of false child abuse, false domestic violence, stalking, harassment, defamation, and perjury by sociopaths is a very common pattern of abuse seen all the time by the government. Yet despite this, they often assist in the abuse rather than put a stop to it.
Rather than so quickly dismissing the book author’s choice of the word “rape” to apply to what she’s seen happen in courts due to the misapplication of psychology, perhaps you would better serve yourself and everybody else by appreciating just how much in common the psychological damage from government abuse via “psychology experts” and a sexual assault have in common.
You state you have PTSD from your rape experience. Many parents end up with “complex PTSD” from the actions of a sociopathic ex-spouse and the government abusers and criminals who aid them. The symptoms of each are very similar. The difference mostly has to do with PTSD being tied to a single extremely traumatic experience rather than years of very traumatic experiences.
I’d encourage you to read about the case of the Wade family in San Diego, California. What that family was put through by the San Diego government amounts to crimes far worse than sexual assault that actually did occur to the young daughter involved. Yet the government criminals who participated in these crimes got away with them and even retained their jobs.
As many other horrific stories in recent years have revealed, San Diego CPS and family law courts continue to behave in a similar fashion against families two decades later. People who live in that city have plentiful reasons to be afraid of its government and courts. But these crimes are by no means limited to San Diego, they are shockingly common across the United States.
Rob
In general, people with Borderline Personality Disorder destroy relationship after relationship of everyone that’s around them. Sometimes it seems, the stronger the emotions of admiration they have towards a person, quickly becomes polarized in the opposite direction of devaluing that same person when the slightest thing goes wrong. What that equates to in the work force is they typically try and get their co-workers fired. Many of them are smokers that have additional substance abuse problems that almost always crosses over into the workplace. Mood wise, they are usually constantly irritable and many of them become obsessed with hate and revenge in the midst of their anger, which they use to their advantage. They can be quite cleaver in fabricating stories of wrongdoing of abuse when going around playing the roll of a victim wherever they go.
The False allegations brought on by people with Borderline Personality Disorder are more common than people realize and is something that very few people understand. However there are entire legal teams that are dedicated in defending people against frivolous and malicious lawsuits brought on by people with the disorder. Some studies suggest that in almost all of the cases where a thorough psychological evaluation was performed on both parties, in the cases where the evidence showed that the allegations were false, almost all (75%) of the falsely accusing plaintiffs were diagnosed with BPD. Ever seen the movies Play Misty for Me or 1987 Fatal Attraction starring Glenn Close?? Both movies depict BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder) and explains a lot.
Douglas Emberland
I am so thankful for this article. I am currently writing about my experience with a man whom I believe to be a sociopath. He is a former police officer, a marine, a civil and criminal lawyer and holds a phd. (So he claims) I don’t believe it.
No one is listening to me. He has the court system believing that I am the crazy one. The GAL who was appointed believes his lies. He has people convinced that I am a raving lunatic even though except for HIM filing NUMEROUS false allegations against me, I have never been in trouble with the law.
I am appalled and disappointed in the court system.
I’m married to someone who is a PDA, full time , almost 24 hours non stop. He never never ever quits twisting, distorting, manipulating, blaming, falsely accusing me, confronting me, bullying me, provoking me, etc. Whatever he can and whenever he can do something to target me he does.
PDAS, are extremely convincing at having you beleive that they are sweet and victimized, then suddenly there is an assault of either psychological and physaical combined, and or one or the other.
Personally, for me I constantly feel like I’m being sucked into a sharp whirlpool with my husband that I’m incapable of escaping. I went to four different lawyers and none of them were even really able or willing to help me. Trying to communicate with them about his PDA was like speaking to them in another language, so I didn’t pursue, as I felt I would be destroyed in court and I still feel that way.
To date I have not seen anything about People with obsessive compulsive disorder people as being difficult and vendictive like people with BPD.
Yet my husband has been diagnosed with OCD and he’s every bit as destructive as a BPD.
To me OCD should be categorized along with NPD, BPD HPD,etc.
Kirsten,
What you are describing does not sound like OCD.
Unfortunately, diagnosis of mental health problems is not very precise. Furthermore, many therapists may fail to understand a patient until having spent months or years working with them.
I suggest that you go get a book called Stop Obsessing!: How to Overcome Your Obsessions and Compulsions by Dr. Foa and read it. My guess is that you will see that nowhere in there does it say anything that reminds you of the malicious distortion behaviors you are describing. Somebody with OCD may lie to cover up their embarrassment, but seldom do these people lie to get other people in trouble unless something else is wrong with them beyond the OCD.
If you don’t see at least some of your husband’s behaviors in there, it is exceedingly unlikely he has OCD as that book is an excellent self-help book on the topic used by many therapists with patients who really do have OCD.
OCD generally involves irrational obsessions that the victim often tries to hide because of shame. The obsession piece is what the victim focuses on, the compulsion piece is what they do to feel better when they are feeling anxiety from the obsession. Often their behaviors are highly ritualistic. For instance, a typical OCD victim might have an obsession with extreme cleanliness. They may feel disgustingly dirty even from opening a door and touching the knob or handle in the process. To relieve that anxiety, they may then engage in compulsive behavior such as scrubbing their hands with AJAX cleaner for 5 minutes, leaving them raw and in pain but feeling like they are clean again until the next time they have to open a door.
Foa’s book has many other examples of OCD behavior patterns, it is quite comprehensive and readily readable by the typical person who has at least some interest in psychology but little or no expertise in it.
It appears from recent medical research that OCD may be caused in part by chemical imbalances in the brain. There are some studies on using nutritional therapies such as high-dosage NAC (N-Acetyl Cysteine) to treat OCD and some other disorders with similar compulsive behaviors that are very troubling for most victims.
It is entirely possible that somebody with BPD could have OCD, also, as it is common for BPD victims (or those with NPD) to have multiple other mental health disorders.
But most people with OCD would not behave the way you are describing.
Translating this into the realm of medical diagnosis as a metaphor, consider a person who is diagnosed with a moderately deep cut requiring stitches and a course of antibiotics. This person also happens to have AIDS. But you would not generalize to say that this means all or most people with cuts that require stitches carry a deadly communicable disease. The same line or reasoning goes for for your husband, he might have OCD but even if so that isn’t likely the cause of the behaviors you are describing as most people with OCD do not engage in the distortions, false accusations, bullying, and so forth that you describe.
More likely is that your husband is good at fooling a therapist into thinking something else is wrong with him. Borderlines and Narcissists are often very good at doing this and they can avoid an accurate diagnosis for many years even when in therapy. Sometimes they switch therapists when they get the sense that the latest and greatest therapists might be on to them. They can keep up the deceptions for decades if they are really good at it, all the while getting wrong diagnoses and continuing to hurt others. The Borderlines who are diagnosed the quickest tend to be the ones who are less deceptive and more into self-harm, these people are often called the “acting in” group. Your husband sounds more like he’s an “acting out” group member who tries to hurt others as a way to deal with his own deep-seated insecurities.
Another possibility is that you have heard from your husband that he has OCD, but you have no independent confirmation of this and he’s made it up to cover for BPD, NPD, or something else so as to explain to you why he is getting mental health treatment.
If you do much reading on personality disorders, uou may also find out that there is an obsessive compulsive personality disorder abbreviated as OCPD. This is not the same as OCD. The obsessions are not nearly as irrational or detrimental. A typical OCPD person would be highly detail focused and ordered and might work as an accountant, engineer, or in some other profession with extreme focus on “perfection” and be really good at what they do. Many of them may be known as “anal retentive” in their focus on perfection but most observers would acknowledge they are really sharp at nailing all the details in their chosen professions. These people do not tend to be troublemakers at all and are even less likely to behave as you describe. OCPD is so mild in its negative effects that it’s almost questionable to call it a disorder as in many cases it leads to great success for people with that style of thinking if they are in an appropriate profession. In general, OCD is much more damaging to its victims than OCPD.
If your husband does have both comorbid OCD and BPD “acting out” subgroup, that would be a really bad combination. Such a person tends to be obsessed with harming their targets by any and all means they can invest.
Rob