angiEmedia

I’m an active reader of Angiemedia but I couldn’t disagree more with this article. We don’t want or need more government oversight. It’s incompetent, crude, and mostly dishonest. Pushing for more intervention by police only exacerbates the problem.

What the writer of this article misses is that government intervention, and the possibility that one or the other parent can increase the pain on the other parent, is the problem–not the solution. Parents feuding who feel that they can cause pain or trauma to the other parent opens the tug of war. “There can be no peace when the only option is war.”

The solution is not more tug of war. The solution is clear and easy rules of custody. Family Courts should be handcuffed to offer only very, very limited dispute resolution mechanisms. This removes the potential to hurt another parent by taking away the discretion of a judge to rule strongly in favor of one or the other. 50/50 custody, period. That’s it. No more ability to fight about it? Good. Move on with something more productive. End of dispute.

Peace to all of you in custody disputes–be gentle–your child’s future is at stake, and never forget the story of King Solomon re: “splitting the baby”.

From Wikipedia:

The saying is based upon the Biblical passage in 1 Kings 3:16-28, where two new mothers approach Solomon, bringing with them one dead baby boy. Each mother presents the same story and accusation: She and the other woman live together and have both recently given birth to baby boys. One night, soon after the birth of their respective boys, the other woman woke to find that she had smothered her own baby in her sleep. In anguish and jealousy, she took her dead son and exchanged it with the other’s child. The following morning, the woman discovered the dead baby, and soon realized that it was not her own son, but the other woman’s.

After some deliberation, King Solomon calls for a sword to be brought before him. He declares that there is only one fair solution: the live son must be split in two, each woman receiving half of the child. Upon hearing this terrible verdict, the boy’s true mother cries out, “Please, My Lord, give her the live child—do not kill him!” However, the liar, in her bitter jealousy, exclaims, “It shall be neither mine nor yours—divide it!” Solomon instantly gives the live baby to the real mother, realizing that the true mother’s instincts were to protect her child, while the liar revealed that she did not truly love the child.”

It is often better to give than receive.

Peace to all.

@Cole Stuart

I agree with you that 50/50 custody should be the law and there should only be deviation from this with agreement of both parents or severe circumstances and solid evidence.

Putting clear rules on the areas mentioned above can help reduce conflict. Vague rules result in sociopaths trying to twist the meanings and intent and find loopholes and grey areas to cause trouble.

Do you disagree with all the points or just the one about doing exchanges at a police station? I can see why you’d disagree with that given the bias of police against guys, but if you’ve experienced your children’s other parent refusing to turn over the kids, turning them over late or not showing up, going in your car without your permission, making the children cry and upset by pinching them as they are handed over, and other such stunts, you really do not want to be doing exchanges without somebody monitoring them. Surveillance is also a great idea, but some judges are too ignorant to understand why other judges ordered surveillance. Apparently they can’t seem to get it through their thick skulls or into their diminutive brains that having a recorded record of an exchange makes the exchanges more likely to go smoothly because it means the really egregious problems are far less likely to happen.

I think the best place to exchange kids is through schools as the kids get some decompression time between parent A dropping them off and parent B picking them up. Also, the staff probably know something about parents disagreeing in divorces and want to stay out of it. But that’s not an option on weekends, evenings, or for babies. Police stations are better than residences when you’re dealing with a nasty sociopath.

Even better is somebody who is trustworthy and both parents like, but the odds are such a situation will not last as the sociopath will mess it up by a distortion campaign and other tactics. You could quickly find the “neutral” exchanger suddenly is making the exchanges more difficult because of being manipulated by the sociopath.

Professional exchanges center are an option, too, but the costs add up. I think the chances of exchanges being peaceful goes up if both parents are required to split the exchange costs equally and the first choice option is the lowest cost one such as a school with the other ones like professional exchange centers only being used if conflict levels go up or the other less expensive but still safe methods are not available.

Respectfully Rob- You have never lived thru the trauma. My ex had supervised visits and at the request of the referee I naively agreed to my ex’s friends being supervisors so kids didn’t have to go to local abuse center for supervised visits. The ex immediately started in on campaign of portraying himself a victim of cruel malicious vindictive wife. He twisted their minds. He had his friends pretend to be CPS workers during supervised visits, he had his friends spying from other parts of the home to see how kids responded when I picked them up, told his friends I called them obscene names and they called the police on me during a pickup at ex’s house. My kids told officer I never swore but just asked the supervisor to go back into the house and let me parent my children- but who did authorities believe it was two adults against one. I could tell you other horror stories. Finally the parenting coordinator ordered exchanges at police station- specific order that ex husband and supervisor was to stay outside and I was to wait inside. On next visit the ex was waiting inside with his friend. I quietly reminded ex and supervisor that they were to reimain outside and the supervisor told me that I was a legalistic “pharisee”. Finally after two years of court battles, court ordered therapists, my requsting and then following thru with communicating with ex is via email- the truth is being understood. So- waiting at a police station for ex to drop off kids is truly in the best interest of the child when dealing with these types of situations. The police at our station have maintained a respectful neutral and it has cut down on the drama associated with each and every exchange. I wish I had pushed for this earlier in the case even though my ex had “supervisors” with him. Unless you have lived it you can’t believe it- it is hard to believe even when you are going thru it.

Sylvia Gunther has a wonderful book for those of Christian Faith on how to deal with “Saul Personalities” (ie Saul of OT who persecuted David). It contains the best biblical description of a sociopath that I have found. It addresses how sin and wounding creates a sociopath. It also gives concrete means of getting your life back and healing: not throwing back barbs, not engaging with the abuser, healty boundaries of which the above guidelines would work for many cases, and maintainnig a non-bitter heart by praying for good for your abuser is the best way to handle. My frequent prayer now days is that God gives me the extreme wisdom in parenting our children and the peace to follow His directions. Which is how I ended up hear- looking for concrete ways to parent our two children so they can grow up as healthy as possible.

@Jan

Jan, I’m sorry to hear that you’ve had such bad experiences. This happens to both mothers and fathers as there are plentiful sociopathic parents of both genders and target parents often have no real idea why nor resources to help them until after they and their children have been badly harmed, often for many years.

I have lived through the trauma.

I’ve been falsely accused of domestic violence, child sexual abuse, and more.

I’ve been through exchanges with my ex who refused to turn over the children and tried to traumatize them about being away from her.

I’ve been through exchanges in which my ex’s friends went to significant effort both to harass me and stress out the children. Then they went to court and lied about it to a biased and incompetent judge, falsely claiming that I was the reason the exchanges were difficult and thereby causing even more damage.

In my opinion, anybody dealing with a sociopath who is their children’s other parent needs a parental coordinator who is trained in psychology and understands that regardless of gender, there are many sociopathic malicious liars who will go so far as to abuse their children if they think they can frame the other parent for child abuse or even just agitate them.

Merely having training in psychology ensures nothing. There are plenty of counselors and psychologists who assist in child abuse willingly and eagerly because they are too gullible or biased to be able to see their clients are malicious manipulators. They lack complete information, yet are eager to side with the sociopath to harm the children and target parent.

A poorly trained or biased parental coordinator could make things worse, just as counselors, therapists, and psychologists who lack the training and experience with personality disorders and custody conflicts often do.

Psychological evaluations are not particularly helpful, either. You can spend tens of thousands of dollars only to get a report that is then completely disregarded by a biased or incompetent judge and then be faced with even a worse situation than at the start.

The skills of competent and fair psychological evaluators would be far better applied as parental coordinators. They could do a lot more good for the families involved and they would end up having a much better understanding of the destructive dynamics created by each particular sociopathic parent and how to protect the children and the target parent while still enabling the kids to have relationships with both of their parents.

Neutral exchange sites are needed, too. But depending upon people who are present to understand what they are seeing is not adequate. There should be full surveillance of these sites with multiple camera angle video and audio recordings retained for multiple years and accessible by subpoena and to the parental coordinator. It is best if the sociopathic parent and target parent are kept far apart and the children can engage in some distracting activity on the way from one parent to the other.

You can’t simply trust the police. Even a good cop will not be able to pay full attention all the time. A short distraction such as a call on the police radio could enable a sociopathic parent to set up an incident to frame the target parent. Worse, many police officers are readily manipulated by a sociopathic parent. You could find yourself handcuffed, arrested, roughed up, or even with a gun pointed in your face by a cop who isn’t skilled enough to understand how he or she is being manipulated by a sociopathic parent and is convinced that you, the target parent, are the bad person.

One of the best exchange sites is the children’s school lobby that is surveilled by multiple video cameras. Kids can be “decontaminated” by a day in school before seeing their other parent, giving them plenty of time to forget to some degree the bashing and denigration that many of these kids hear from their sociopathic parent. One parent drops off before school, the other parent picks up after school. There are hours between, so there should virtually never be a legitimate need for the two parents to be present in that school lobby at the same time.

Ideally, school staff should be trained on parental alienation, child abuse, and common problems in custody battles. There should be a counselor or psychologist who is well-versed and unprejudiced in these areas to help them stay neutral and to do what is best for the children. Sadly, this does not seem to be a common situation.

As for religion, it is often a tool of the sociopath. As many writings on parental alienation discuss, religious groups often take the side of a sociopathic parent. Religion can become a tool used to denigrate the target parent to the children. In their zeal to “do good”, church staff and members often become enablers and participants in child abuse, yet they think they are “helping” in some way. “I’m so sorry your father abused you” or “not everybody is a sinner like your mother” might seem to them to be helpful comments, but often they are simply assisting in emotional child abuse by repeating the lies they have been told by the sociopathic parent. They become directly responsible for emotional child abuse themselves.

It’s great that you’ve found some religiously oriented text that is helping you deal with your children’s sociopathic parent. Certainly there are some religious people who do understand the problem of parental alienation. Unfortunately, in my own experience, it is far more common for a self-proclaimed “person of faith” to fail to understand his or her own religion and to engage in child abuse, harassment, defamation, and other illegal activities because he or she is too gullible to recognize manipulation via misinformation by a sociopath. The sociopath often looks pretty or handsome, almost invariably plays the victim well, and can readily repeat all sorts of religious phrases that help suck in the do-gooder as an ally for evil deeds. In such situations, churches can become very harmful to children.

Please help me understand…is it beneficial for a child to have private visitation with the sociopathic parent? Are you as parents fearful for your child’s well being? What do you do when your child is a baby and can’t tell you that the other parent smacks and belittles them?

Maybe somebody here can give me some advice: This is a very, very short outline of what I got into, and does even not contain the emotional abuse I went through.

I have 2 children (2y and 10 months old) with a NPD mother, going through divorce, and she pretty much refuses to work, but is building up her business No. XYZ. I know for a fact by now, that she treated her partners as banks (paying for further education etc) while cheating on them. Of course she is of charming, ‘lucid’ appearance, but to date she successfully prevented any discussion of issues with anybody else present (she cut me off from all my friends early on).

I am a heavily involved father, however, I am also the only bread winner since she decided to stay at home. Pretty much everything she ever told me about herself (I know her now 3 years) from degrees or whatever happened in her past life is bluntly lied. She always refused to pay bills, and is indebted seriously (before our relationship). Within our relationship she brought us pretty much to the brink of bankruptcy by just taking money to build up her businesses which were apparently never successfully run (as the ones before we met).

Coparenting with this woman is hell. The screaming of her towards me in front of the children subsided a bit, but still: taking out the kids for 6h straight will make her fight me in rage as taking out the kids at 65F (too cold). The kids can get scratches at her place, but when they get one at mine or the older one fell and has a scratch on his knee I get emails saying that she is not sure if the kids are safe with me. If I want to take the kids out on a warm evening (6-7.30) to the beach (they LOVE the beach and she ‘does not do the beach’) she will be furious that I am risking a heat stroke of the younger one). Etc etc.

She is completely devoid of empathy, although she is good to the children (I believe). The financial pressure is enormous and her position to not work but being there for the children puts me even more into a bad position in regard to custody issues (she is primary caretaker, since I care enough to get rents – her and mine – paid). Way too much to explain here.

Anyway, it is clear that she pretty much wanted a child, and after being pregnant she pretty much dumped me. Only her grandma which she respected (and who is dead now) apparently convinced her to stay with me, and eventually she got pregnant again (form having sex once, what are the odds?). But it is apparent that she wanted to have a child with somebody who can provide. I am with the kids every day, every lunch, bring them to bed every day and bath them or one of them every day. 3 nights the week they are with me, every Saturday and second Sunday. In the last 2 months I had them pretty much 5 evenings/nights the week, every Saturday and Sunday since it was convenient for her (she got a side role in a performance which allows her to brag without interruption on facebook how important she is), and in fact she called me a ‘glorified babysitter – nothing more’.

My children mean everything to me, and the thought that they will grow up with this woman who is devoid of real feelings, ethics, empathy, who is lying, cheating, defying, etc, etc scares me to death. And I am paying already my ass off since she doesn’t want to have a job and thus is with the children during the day, while my life is no different from a widowed single dad with a job, beside of the stream of threats I am getting (she moves away, will freeze my assets, I won’t see my kids again, I’m walking on egg shells, and I think she just filed a restraining order – and that although I never harmed anybody in my life, and she hit ME lately…).

What can I do? What are my chances? What is ‘best’ for the children, according to common sense and/or jurisdiction??