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Some emotional abusers are particularly adept at using a technique called “gaslighting” (from a movie starring Ingrid Berman and Charles Boyer) to drive their victims to question their own grip on reality and even to make them feel like they are going insane. The essence of gaslighting is to make somebody believe a falsehood and to wonder why they didn’t remember or recall it previously. It is a mind game often used to distract from their own problematic behaviors and to create self-doubt in their target of abuse. Many Borderlines and some with related personality disorders from the DSM-IV Axis II Cluster B group (including Borderline, Narcissistic, Antisocial, and Histrionic) personality disorders are particularly skilled and prone to using gaslighting on their partners and people close to them.

In The Gaslight Effect: How to Spot and Survive the Hidden Manipulation Others Use to Control Your Life, Dr. Robin Stern sums up the behavior like this:

Gaslighting is when someone wants you to do what you know you shouldn’t and to believe the unbelieveable. It can happen to you and it probably already has.

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Some of the most emotionally abusive relationships and traumatic divorces involve the mentally ill. One of the most difficult of these mental illnesses is Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) because it is not easily diagnosed. Behaviors can range from extreme violence to subtle patterns of emotional blackmail and projection. On top of that, many Borderlines tend to live in denial, constantly avoiding their own feelings of emptiness, insecurity, anger, disappointment and fear that more often than not stems from an abusive childhood. It is hard to treat and help someone if they don’t want to face their own abuse — abuse that they themselves suffered or the abuse that they themselves do.
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Donna Anderson wrote ”Red Flags of Love Fraud – 10 Signs You’re Dating a Sociopath” to explain how to detect if your romantic relatioship might be with a sociopath. If you didn’t realize this soon enough and had a child, she’s got some other advice for you on how to cope with the problems of trying to co-parent with such a person.

On her website, I happened across a very good posting on LoveFraud.com titled LETTERS TO LOVEFRAUD: Tips for co-parenting with a sociopath containing advice on how to co-parent with a sociopath. Sociopaths are people who manage to portray themselves to the general public as friendly, caring, nice people but in reality they are manipulative, deceitful, and endeavor to hurt others to get what they want. Some of the common sociopaths you are likely to find in family law courts are people who are “acting out” Borderlines, Narcissists, and Antisocials. Their morality can be summed up in one sentence: If it gets me what I want or will hurt somebody I don’t like, it’s A-OK.
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Eric Moelter has started to speak up a bit about what has happened in the false sexual abuse and child custody abduction case of Cindy Dumas v. Eric Moelter now that all three boys are living with him once again. He believes their mother Cindy Dumas suffers from Borderline Personality Disorder and has been waging a distortion campaign against him for years.
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(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.
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(Note: This article was published together with Personality Disordered Abusers in Family Law Courts. That article focuses on the more general problems encountered in family law disputes involving personality disordered abusers.)

A common opinion of many people suffering harm due to a current or former partner who is a personality disordered abuser is that a psychological evaluation performed for a family law case will describe and label the personality disorder and help protect the victims, including the children and spouse, from the abuser. Disturbingly, this seldom occurs. Instead, what often happens is that the evaluation leads to more conflict and poor outcomes in family law courts that put children and the target parent and their extended family at increased risk of continuing abuse at the hands of the personality disordered abuser and her or his associates.
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Parental alienation is a form of emotional abuse in which a normal positive parent/child relationship is damaged or destroyed by another party using emotional manipulation, threats, false accusations, and other means. It involves at least two basic elements. The first is an alienator engaging in access blocking to keep a child from seeing a parent. The second is a pattern of denigration and destruction of reputation to make the child dislike the parent. When parental alienation becomes severe and/or extended in duration, the child may start to avoid seeing the target parent, repeat the statements of the alienator as if they were the child’s own, and even make up new “reasons” to dislike having contact with the target parent. Often these “reasons” are complete nonsense and have little to no accuracy.

If you’re suffering as a target parent and are aware of parental alienation, probably none of this is news to you. However, what may be news to you is that parental alienation isn’t limited to the most commonly discussed situation of parents involved in divorce or child custody battles. For starters, you may be alienated from your children by your spouse while married.
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Borderline Mom: A Quick & Dirty Manual of Emotional Self Defense for Children is a new title by Georgiana Wright for people dealing with a mother suffering from Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), whether formally diagnosed or simply suspected. One of the key decisions children of Borderlines eventually must make is whether the destructive relationship with their mother can be fixed by setting boundaries or whether it is better to cut off all ties and write their mother off. Author Georgianna Wright explores both choices in her new book.

Recognizing Borderline Women

Borderline women are generally abusive to those around them, particularly to their husbands, boyfriends, partners (including women partners — lesbians and bisexuals can be Borderlines just as heterosexuals can), and children. It is important to realize that many Borderlines were abused as children, some have genetic tendencies for extreme emotional behavior, and some have both characteristics. Recognizing a Borderline often depends upon noticing how they affect the people who are their close family and friends. These people often are afraid of the Borderline and can spend years being manipulated and controlled via abusive tactics, rages, and false blaming. The Borderline will often have endless complains about all of these people, seemingly justifiable unless you have actually met and seen them and therefore know that they are not the source of the problems.
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Do you ever have guests in your home? Not to be antisocial, but your guests could inadvertently help land you in a heap of trouble, even if they do nothing illegal or immoral and have no ill intentions towards you. That’s because of America’s blatant disregard for its Constitution. If this doesn’t make sense to you, read on because you need to know about this threat to your family, your freedom, and even your life.
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Reading through Dr. Tara Palmatier’s excellent and entertaining website A Shrink For Men, one can see how men are frequently abused by mentally ill women. The women may have grown up in abusive homes, have hormonal imbalances, or just are “plain crazy” perhaps with a personality disorder (especially the DSM-IV Cluster B ones including Borderline, Narcissistic, Histrionic, and Antisocial) or two mixed in. Add in some other disorders, such as common co-morbid conditions including bipolar disorder, depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, and an eating disorder and you’ve got almost a purpose-built “killing machine” who can and will attack and ruin anybody who gets in her way. She’ll likely get away with it, too.

Our society enables and encourages women to abuse others. From domestic violence to child abuse to psychological terror, women are treated as if they are authorized to ruin the lives of others with no repercussions on themselves. Amazingly, they often are able to recruit “professionals” to help them conduct their abuse campaigns against men. Besides the typical gender biased CPS social workers and other government servants, one of the most notable of these abuse allies are incompetent mental health professionals.
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