angiEmedia

Never in the history of the world has there been a situation so bad that the government can’t make it worse. — Unknown author

Ashley Gonis

Frank Gonis of Montreal, Canada, hasn’t seen his 10 year old daughter Ashley in two years. His ex, Araceli Bravo, illegally abducted her in January 2007 and took her to British Columbia to keep her from seeing her father despite court orders that required her to share custody of their daughter. An arrest warrant was issued for her in Quebec, but she wasn’t found until Ashley dialed 911 from a train station pay phone to get help after running away from her mother.
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Harmony DBT in St. Louis, Missouri, offers nine free audio tracks for people to learn about Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT). DBT is a mainstay in psychotherapy treatment for people with certain personality and mood disorders. It was developed by Marsha M. Linehan for use in treating Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) patients.
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The Five Love Languages of Children truly is a great and important book for every parent to read. It explains the five different approaches of providing love to a child and teaches parents to recognize and speak their child’s love language. By speaking the right love language, Moms and Dads can avoid many parenting issues and pitfalls by effectively connecting with their children and redirect their efforts to building family relationships that are filled with mutual and genuine respect, affection and commitment. Parents who read the book will also learn much about themselves, understand what their own love language is, and thereby improve relationships with their spouse or partner and even their own parents.

Apart from the basic physical needs of food, shelter and clothing, every child needs unconditional love; love that accepts and affirms a child for simply being who they are, not for what they do. Without unconditional love, a child will wither emotionally and can become stunted for life by feelings of inadequacy, fear, anger and resentment.
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As the misleadingly named “swine flu” spreads across the world killing a few people here and there, a combination of scientific illiteracy and emotional idiocy are hurting a lot of people and businesses.

The pork industry is seeing sales plummet as people errantly think eating pork is dangerous due to the virus.
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On March 20, 2009, Ellie Cunningham viciously attacked her husband Adam with a broken wine glass, repeatedly slashing him and leaving him with multiple severe cuts on his arms and legs and a broken ankle. When police arrived and found him on the steps outside of their home in Surrey, British Columbia, Canada, it was clear Ellie had badly assaulted him.

Ellie was arrested by police and a domestic violence (DV) investigation ensued. A restraining order was issued on the wife, and Adam moved in with his mother to recover from the assault. He had extensive stitches to hold together his slashed skin and surgery to repair his broken ankle. Unfortunately, he was found dead on his mother’s sofa three weeks later. An autopsy indicated the cause of death to be complications from the surgery to fix the damage from the DV assault.

During the time between the assault and his death, Adam was interviewed by police and wrote about his experiences during the nearly four years of marriage to Ellie. He recounted how Ellie would have outbursts and become verbally abusive.

Video news coverage of Adam’s death, including photos of his injuries and an interview with his sister Nikki, can be found at:

Global BC TV News Coverage of Death of Adam Cunningham

Oddly, his wife published this obituary claiming that she’ll miss him:
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Amine Baba-Ali was falsely convicted of child sexual abuse against his four year old daughter based upon false accusations from his ex-wife, lies from a doctor, and prosecution fraud by the New York City Queens District Attorney’s Office. Although his conviction was overturned in 1992 and he was released from prison, he continues to be persecuted due to the false conviction. The persecution has continued for two decades, despite the conviction being overturned. It has even extended to Mr. Baba-Ali being turned down for a job with the Census Bureau on account of the false conviction. The $2 million awarded to Mr. Babi-Ali in March 2009 by the New York State Court of Claims just barely begins to make up for what the government wrongfully did to ruin this man’s life and deprive his daughter of a father.

Vindicated, but Still Not Freed From Court’s Injustice
(excerpted from New York Times)
Amine Baba-Ali, a father wrongly convicted of raping and molesting his 4-year-old daughter, is the first person ever held by a state court to have satisfied every facet of the unjust-conviction law that he sued New York State under, according to the court’s decision. His lawyers proved that the Queens district attorney’s office fraudulently prosecuted him for a crime he did not commit. The court awarded him $2,093,428.

But Mr. Baba-Ali, 52, cannot shake the sense that this case will haunt him for a lifetime, not least because his daughter, now 26, was forever removed from him once he was convicted. He has not seen her for two decades, and has no idea where she is living.

“Though I am thankful, the fact of the matter is that I’ve lost my daughter,” Mr. Baba-Ali said in an telephone interview from his Manhattan apartment on Tuesday. “I’ve lost the most important part of my life.”

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(Click here for more coverage on parental alienation.)

Psychologist Dr. Robert M. Gordon has testified in many court cases about the form of child abuse known as parental alienation. One of the things that frustrates him is that advocacy groups such as NOW (National Organization of Women) dispute the existence of parental alienation and Parental Alienation Syndrome to the extent that it becomes difficult to talk in court about a very real phenomenon backed by research. Yet most of these articles disputing that PAS even exists don’t mention research. Many are full of anti-father diatribes, others of individual cases in which PAS was claimed by an abusive father and the alienation wasn’t really PAS but the children’s legitimate reaction to child abuse.
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People who suffer from Borderline Personality Disorder are often sexually promiscuous. They may have learned early in life that sex is a way to control or manipulate others, possibly because they were sexually abused as children. Borderline women may have unusual fascinations regarding sex with “unavailable” men that lead them to affairs with men who already have relationships and might even be married.

Borderline women have a unique feature that Borderline men don’t have — they can become pregnant. As Borderlines often have abandonment issues, behaviors that many of them exhibit are to conceive a child with a man whom they have told they are using birth control, can’t get pregnant, or some other distortion to reassure the man that they aren’t going to inadvertently father a child.

But the Borderline woman may simply be lying to cover up her intent to become pregnant. She may not be taking any birth control pills or it may be prime time during her menstrual cycle for getting pregnant. She might have punched a whole in her supply of condoms so they won’t work. She might even use the contents of a discarded condom to impregnate herself after her “catch” has fallen asleep or left. The end result is that a man who has a relationship with a Borderline woman has a very high chance of having children with her without his consent.
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(Click here for more coverage on parental alienation.)

The article to which this post links was written by Shari Schrieber, a child of parental alienation who is now a therapist. She loved her father very much, and felt intense pain as her mother cut him out of her life starting at age five. Her mother falsely accused her father of molestation and succeeded at mostly driving her father out of her life.

In retrospect, she wishes the courts had assigned custody of her to her father rather than to her mentally ill mother. She believes that her mother’s inability to emotionally provide for her as a child caused many problems in her life that took years for her to overcome. These problems could have been avoided if the courts would have had her live with her mentally healthier father. He wanted to be involved in her life, but the courts and her mother refused to permit it. Instead, they insisted she should live with her mother even though her mother was mentally ill and caused enormous damage because of it.

In the article, Schreiber mentions how personality disordered parents are often unable to emotionally provide for their children. Such parents may be able to meet basic physical needs of the children such as shelter and food. But their children develop low self-esteem, inability to trust, inability to have healthy relationships, and a variety of mental health problems themselves as a direct result of their primary parental relationship being with an emotionally chaotic or unavailable mentally ill person.

Click below to read the article:

THROWAWAY DADS; Children’s struggle for wholeness in the wake of divorce.

(Click here for more coverage on parental alienation.)

Actor (“30 Rock”) and author (“A Promise to Ourselves: A Journey Through Fatherhood and Divorce“) Alec Baldwin speaks September 22, 2008, to The Commonwealth Club of California about parents turning their children against a former spouse.

Our Review of Baldwin’s Book

Book Review: A Promise To Ourselves, by Alec Baldwin

Sheena Berg’s Review of Baldwin’s Book

Blended-Families.com‘s Sheena Berg briefly reviews Alec Baldwin’s book A Promise to Ourselves: A Journey Through Fatherhood and Divorce.

Other Reviews of A Promise to Ourselves

Book Review: Alec Baldwin’s “A Promise to Ourselves“

Alec Baldwin: A Promise to Ourselves

Alec Baldwin’s A Promise to Ourselves Captures the Brutality of Divorce Wars

Divorce American Style (review by New York Times)

Recommended Books on Parental Alienation