angiEmedia

(Originally published January 15, 2009. Updated August 27, 2010.)

So you’re getting a divorce, or have already gotten one. Have any kids in the picture? You can bet they are confused about what you and your ex-spouse (or soon-to-be-ex-spouse) have done by breaking up the family. Kids need to understand what is going on from such a big family change as a divorce, and it’s not a simple thing for them. Why? Well, for starters:

• Children often blame themselves for the divorce.

• They need to know that divorce is an adult problem, not one caused by children.

• Child self-blame for divorce creates psychological problems, some of which can be long-term and severe.

• Children need to know that it’s OK to love both parents.

• They are often put in the middle and made to “pick sides” by one or both parents and don’t like this at all.

• They need to know that parents who try to make them “pick sides” and bad-mouth the other parent are doing the wrong thing so they won’t participate and may possibly help their misguided parent(s) control themselves.

Even in an amicable divorce involving children, there are going to be questions and worries. All of the books discussed in this posting can help with those, especially for the intended audience which is generally late toddler-hood to early grade school, about ages 2 to 9.

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Until you’ve been through a divorce in a child abusing nation like the United States or United Kingdom, you likely have no clue of the extortion and abuse families are put through by the courts and governments of such nations. But that may change as more and more fathers with ties to the entertainment and mass media industries start to open up about their experiences, particularly how their children and they are blocked from contact with each other with the full cooperation of the courts in what amounts to state-sponsored parental alienation child abuse.

Noted writer Louis de Bernieres, author of Corelli’s Mandolin which was later turned into the movie Captain Corelli’s Mandolin starring Nicolas Cage and Penelope Cruz, has recently experienced state-sponsored parental alienation himself. He seldom gets to see his children Robin and Sophie, all of five and two years old respectively, as the courts engaged in the usual sexist practice of marginalizing the father. He’s now joined UK’s shared parenting group Families Need Fathers to fight against the ongoing abuse by UK courts and government against children and families.
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In my previous article Extreme BPD / NPD Behaviors Are Internally Triggered, I discussed the puzzling ways in which normal circumstances seem to trigger abusive behaviors from Borderlines, Narcissists, and other personality disordered abusers. My advice to those who can do so is to get away and stay away from these people as they are a serious danger to your own mental health, even your freedom and your life, if you continue to have anything to do with them.

Unfortunately, not everybody can easily extricate themselves from the abuse without severe consequences. This is particularly true for parents of children whose other parent is a Borderline or Narcissist. Staying in the children’s lives means staying in the line of fire of the abuser. Leaving is likely to subject the children to even more abuse. Often the abuser has focused most of her or his rage against their former partner or spouse. But if that parent leaves, the rages, abuses, and emotional manipulations are not going to stop. They will probably be redirected at somebody else close to the abuser as loved-ones are the tops targets for these sick people. The children are a likely target for even more abuse than they have already received. This chronic abuse with no escape (as the healthy parent has disappeared) is likely to create severe psychological damage, even personality disorders, in these children as they have even less means to defend themselves against one of these sociopaths than an adult does.
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Recently a reader of our site wrote a comment about our article Talking With A Borderline citing how it didn’t show how non-Borderlines trigger the negative behaviors associated with Borderline Personality Disorder. The comment seemed to be intended to place some of the blame for Borderline behaviors on the people around them, particularly people who are essentially the targets of Borderlines who do not suffer from a personality disorder or engage in abusive behaviors themselves. This is mostly a mistake in my view. It also makes me wonder if the comment came from somebody with a Borderline son or daughter or who is personally suffering from BPD and therefore may be prone to blame-shifting as a means of coping with his or her own guilt or shame.

Most of the people around a Borderline are not abusive, yet they may trigger reactions in Borderline akin to an actual abuser even when they aren’t displaying an iota of aggression or hostility. In most of these situations, the Borderline perceives aggression or abuse in their own minds, even when a neutral disinterested person would say none is present, and then launches into a reaction that is similar to what they might do if there actually was an abuser trying to harm them. The trigger is much more internal, in the mind of the Borderline, than external. This is what makes is so difficult for others to understand why the sociopathically inclined individuals, be they Borderlines, Narcissists, or something else, behave as they do.

Extreme Reactions Product of Child Abuse

Borderlines are sometimes said to suffer from “emotional dysregulation” because they react in extreme ways to normal stimuli. This extreme reaction in many cases developed from their experience as child abuse victims, an experience most of them share, and trying to find ways to avoid being abused again. Many of them have found that extreme reactions including false blaming, projection, lying, and other behaviors associated with Borderlines and Narcissists alike are reasonably effective at either drawing fire away from them and making somebody else the target of their abuser. Other times, their extreme behaviors may somehow justify in their own minds why they are deserving of abuse, perhaps giving them some delusional feeling of control over the abuse. Over time, many of them may generalize these maladaptive behaviors by applying them to people who are not abusing them but by whom they are reminded of what it feels like to be abused.
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We’re looking for feedback on your experiences with exchanges and visitations, particularly those involving those either professionally or informally supervised. We hope to write some articles over the next couple of months on what works, what doesn’t, and to include comments on particular service providers. If you’d like to be anonymous or to include your name, either is OK with us.

Many parents end up suffering the high expenses and interference of supervised visitations because of false allegations made by a malicious ex and how abusive courts regard parents as guilty until proven innocent, even when there is no evidence to substantiate the allegations. Yet despite the hassle and expense, sometimes these court ordered services actually do end up helping to clear up the false allegations. That’s because some of the providers are competent and honest enough to write accurate reports of how the children behave around both the falsely accused parent and the accusing or alienating parent and are not afraid to give examples of why it appears there are false allegations and parental alienation at work.

We’d like to help guide our readers to use facilities that are competent, fair, and honest and that use exchange and visitation monitoring techniques that are not overly intrusive yet can head off a lot of problems. If you’ve got recommendations for or against particular providers and techniques, it would be terrific if you would take a few minutes to write them down and forward them so others can benefit from your thoughts.
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Dr. Tara Palmatier’s Shrink4Men website has recently been bombarded with abusive comments from somebody who sounds like she has BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder) with malicious acting out behaviors, or as I’d call her, a personality disordered abuser (PDA). The good psychologist is hoping to help identify the attacker and perhaps help her victimized ex in the process.

(from Lost and Found: Does Anyone Have an Ex-Borderline Girlfriend or Wife in the West Hempstead-East Northport-NYC Vicinity Whom You Told about Shrink4Men During the Break-Up?)

Perhaps this is not the best way to go about doing this, but I’m a big believer in implementing consequences for crazy and malicious BPD behavior, so here we are. Beginning late last week, a woman, whom I assume is the former spouse or girlfriend of a man who frequents this site, began spamming my site with puerile comments in which she engages in name calling and other typical BPD verbal attacks against Shrink4Men readers/commenters and me.

None of these comments have been approved nor will they be approved because they’re nothing more than lame attempts to hurt my readers feelings and my feelings and they would only distract from the meaningful dialogue, sharing and support that takes place here. The irony is that her attacks don’t hurt my feelings. In fact, my thoughts are, “Gee, I can see why her ex broke up with her” and “I wonder how many texts and voicemails the poor bastard who was dating/married to her is getting everyday?” If anything, her spams only reinforce my beliefs about BPD and the information presented on this site.

Now, the reason I am posting this rather than something more productive: Gentlemen, if you believe this is your ex/gf/wife, please contact me and I will send you all of her spam comments with the date, time stamp and multiple IP addresses, so that you can include them as evidence of her unstable/stalker/harassment behavior in any pending divorce/restraining order cases. If need be, I have access to an Internet security expert who can trace pretty much anything directly to the source.

Information warfare by a nasty PDA, often one who suffers BPD or NPD (Narcissistic Personality Disorder), is a frequent feature of the ending of a relationship involving such a person. But the comment spamming mentioned above is really among the less serious of attacks.

Distortion campaigns can become ruinous and virtually unfixable, especially if there are children involved. Some might call it a catch-22 situation in which anything you do to try to fix the disaster only makes it worse. When the Internet becomes involved, the risks of this may be even higher as I’ll discuss below.
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Many American judges believe they are above the law. They are a large part of what is wrong with the United States today as American governments from federal to local levels continue to violate civil and human rights and institute police state measures to marginalize any serious opposition. The growing abusive corruption of the government and its use of threats, illegal actions, intimidation, and harassment amounts to government-sponsored terrorism against American families. The end of America has arrived and the abusive power-hungry bastards in government are its pallbearers.

Crime Pays When You’re A Judge

Corrupt and abusive judges like Sacramento’s Peter McBrien and Pennsylvania’s infamous duo of Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan are directly responsible for much of the government’s terrorism against citizens. They benefit from it directly via more workload and therefore job security plus campaign contributions from attorneys and others who benefit from it. Others, like the Pennsylvania couple, benefit via outright bribes. The mess they have made of the courts is the means to enslaving and pillaging families for their own ends. It ensures job security, lax oversight, and plenty of opportunity to exchange favors between judges and lawyers such as campaign contributions, minor’s counsel appointments, fee awards, and raiding family estates into bankruptcy to reward attorneys who cooperate with abusive and crooked judges.

There is no way that Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conohan could have gotten away with many years of denying legal representation and throwing kids in private prisons for kickbacks without the complicity of the lawyers appearing in their courtrooms. These crimes continued on the public records with “officers of the court” in full awareness of them for several years to the tune of $2.6 million in accumulated bribes.
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Sacramento County, California, is the home turf for Superior Court Judge Peter James McBrien. It is there he feels comfortable to show his true nature as a criminal, abusive and biased judge, and scourge of children and families throughout the county. We’ll be covering McBrien’s kangaroo family court misconduct in future articles and have already been getting some input from readers who have been cursed with this judge. But this first article in the series focuses on McBrien’s crimes a decade ago involving his criminal conviction for premeditated vandalism against public property that aptly shows how little regard he has for the law and the public.

McBrien has a fetish for chopping living things to bits. Beyond the usual family law judge practice of chopping up families, children, parents, income, and assets to pad the pockets of friends in the divorce industry and ensure judicial job security, he also enjoys chopping down trees on public property for his own benefit.

When trees in a county park blocked the view of the American River from his exclusive home up on a bluff, he paid Mark Chamberlin of the Titan Tree Company to illegally chop down the trees which cropped his view. A local real estate expert estimates that he increased the value of his home by $100,000 by improving the view by his illegal actions. Paying to illegally chop down five mature oaks and three younger ones to get a a nicer view is apparently the sort of thing Judge McBrien thinks is acceptable conduct. He clearly believes that his interests trump those of the public and the law. He also knows that it is virtually impossible for anybody to hold him accountable for his actions because of judicial immunity and the influence he wields over local attorneys, judges, and law enforcement.
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The Canadian Symposium for Parental Alienation Syndrome will be held at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City on October 2 to 3, 2010. The speakers include a wide variety of experts from across the United States and Canada.
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Parental alienation is a very serious form of widespread child abuse aided and abetted by the corrupt and abusive courts in the United States and Canada. Parental alienation is driven by the psychological problems of parents abused as kids as well as by the government and divorce industry. Courts are commonly encouraging conflict in divorcing families that leads to parental alienation and other long-running conflicts damaging children. From this, they derive income and job security.

In a very real sense, parental alienation is government-backed child abuse. When you see a judge in a black robe, if you are reminded of the grim reaper or angel of death coming to kill your family because that’s its job, you’re not far off the mark. Parental alienation will not stop unless court reforms are implemented that support shared parenting, move away from the adversarial “winner takes all” decisions common today, and put into place support systems that help parents work together for the benefit of their children without repeated conflict-inducing trips back to court.

Parental alienation is a form of emotional abuse against both children and the alienated parent, sometimes called the target parent, and often his or her entire extended family. As parental alienation expert Dr. Amy Baker has found in her research, it causes greatly elevated rates of long-term depression and substance abuse in the children who are victims. The harm does not stop when they become adults, either. A large portion of alienated children will in turn enter into emotionally abusive relationships which result in them being alienated from their own children.

(from Parental Alienation Book For Middle School Kids: “I Don’t Want to Choose!”)

Alienated children frequently are psychologically damaged in long-term ways. They often develop depression, substance abuse problems, eating disorders, and even manipulative behavior patterns similar to their alienating parents. Some compare growing up with an alienating parent as being kidnapped and brainwashed. Of her 40 research subjects covered in Adult Children of Parental Alienation Syndrome: Breaking the Ties That Bind, some notable statistics are:

• 70% suffered from depression
• 58% were divorced
• Half of the 28 who had children are estranged from their own children
• 35% developed problems with drugs and alcohol

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Nursing infants should be able to spend quality time, including overnights, with their fathers. Yet some mothers try to use nursing as an excuse to block contact between infants and their dads. Courts should be fully aware that there are plentiful means to ensure a good supply of breast milk for use by fathers caring for infants.

Robert Franklin of Fathers & Families recently penned the posting Expert: No Conflict Between Breastfeeding and Shared Parenting about an article from a breastfeeding advocate who claims fathers are trying to assert in court that breastfeeding is inappropriate behavior:

(Breastfeeding Court Letter, by Katherine A Dettwyler, Ph.D., Anthropology)

In addition, my research has been used to counter charges of child abuse and “inappropriate parenting behaviors” in many court cases, especially involving divorce and custody disputes, where fathers may accuse the mother of “inappropriate parenting by virtue of extended breastfeeding” as a strategy to gain custody of children, or may simply claim that ‘continued breastfeeding’ is not relevant to shared custody arrangements.

At this point (2005), all of the research that has been conducted on the health and cognitive consequences of different lengths of breastfeeding shows steadily increasing benefits the longer a child is breastfed up to the age of 2 years, and no negative consequences. No research has been conducted on the physical, emotional, or psychological health of children breastfed longer than 2 years. Thus, while there is no research-based proof that breastfeeding a child for 3 years provides statistically significant health or cognitive benefits compared to breastfeeding a child for only two years, there is no research to show that breastfeeding a child for 3 years (or 4-5-6-7-8-9 years) causes any sort of physical, psychological or emotional harm to the child. This has recently been confirmed in the 2005 American Academy of Pediatrics “Recommendations for breastfeeding the healthy term infant” (see below).

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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.

Classifying Borderlines as “Acting In” or “Acting Out”

Not all borderlines are focused on harming others. Some are so busy with their own inner demons that they are trapped in a realm of substance abuse, suicide attempts, and self-hate that for most can be traced back to child abuse or neglect. They are often known as the “acting in” type. If this is the kind of Borderline in your life, count yourself lucky. That’s because they are both more likely to recognize their own problems and work on them and less likely to focus on destroying other people in a desperate attempt to portray themselves as worthy people who are victims in need of assistance.

The other group of Borderlines, sometimes called the “acting out” group, are narcissistic sociopaths with little sense of guilt or remorse. They often have little limit to what they will do to make themselves “win” and you “lose” and don’t care who else they hurt in the process. If you have been in a relationship with a person suffering Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD), be aware that much of what is written about “acting out” Borderlines applies equally to Narcissists.
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There are probably thousands or more mother’s rights groups around the world. The web is replete with their sites such as Justice4Mothers and Rights for Mothers. Generally they are irate about being deprived of contact with their kids and being financially and emotionally destroyed by family law courts. I certainly understand that as it has happened to me, too, as it has to many other parents. Unfortunately, some of these moms have gone off the deep end into sexism and gender warfare that is both counterproductive to their cause and to the interests of their children. A very obvious sign of this is the many mother’s rights web sites that issue blanket denials of the existence of parental alienation, a form of emotional child abuse that is common in divorces and troubled families.

Kids Need Both Parents

Mothers deserve to spend time with their kids, just like fathers do. In almost every case, aside from extreme abuse and neglect, kids benefit from significant time with both of their parents and their parents’ extended families. That judges in family courts across the United States and in many other nations use child custody as a means to encourage conflict and thereby increase workload, revenues, and relish in their own power as family dictators is a disgusting display of tyrannical behavior that must be stopped.

If the family law courts of which I am aware are even remotely similar to those in other parts of the United States, the many abusive family law judges in this country are a far worse threat to the safety and security of the typical American child than Al Qaeda 9/11 terror attacks and BP oil spills combined. In opposing the tyranny of the family law courts, I support these mother’s rights groups in regards to their intent to stop the abuses of the government and its war on families. I have similar opinions of the father’s rights groups in this regard.
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For anyone who hasn’t read Taken into Custody: The War Against Fatherhood, Marriage, and the Family, I just finished it and highly recommend it. Many are familiar with Professor Stephen Baskerville’s basic theories and some have read excerpts from the book. Published in 2007, this book is a comprehensive and up-to-date description of the enormity of the problems endemic to the current tyrannical status of the judicial system as a whole, not merely family court. It is an extraordinary work.

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California Assembly Representative Jim Beall is back with another attempt to shut down destructive use of child custody evaluations. This new Assembly Bill 2475 has grown out of his failure in 2009 to pass his Assembly Bill 612 that wrongly aimed to ban discussion of parental alienation in family law courts. This time around, AB 2475 is on more solid ground as it aims to strip quasi-judicial immunity from private family court appointed experts such as psychological and custody evaluators. This would provide a legal fallback for civil suits for egregious cases of misconduct by these professionals.

Failed AB 612 from 2009

Last year, Jim Beall wanted to outlaw the discussion of parental alienation in family law cases. We and many other organizations that support shared parenting and protecting children from abuse and neglect vehemently opposed the AB 612 legislation he introduced. AB 612 was nothing but whitewashing of emotional child abuse to enable abusers to get away with hurting children and in many cases rewarding them for doing so. That bill, AB 612, was gutted by legislators who understood that parental alienation is a real phenomenon. Beall later withdrew the bill.
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Cole Stuart Arrested During Family Law Protest

In the wake of what appears to be a wrongful arrest of California Coalition for Families and Children co-founder and president Cole Stuart, the evidence is building that one of the primary culprits in this matter is the San Diego County Bar Association (SDCBA).

We’ve obtained copy of computer file containing a letter directed to Patrick L. Hosey, President of the San Diego County Bar Association. In the letter, Cole Stuart describes the events of the April 15, 2010, family law seminar sponsored by the SDCBA at which their staff and private security guards allegedly handcuffed and removed him from the event. This is despite the facts that he is a licensed attorney who paid for admission to the event, the arrest warrant for him was obtained in an irregular fashion that suggests judicial misconduct was involved, and the San Diego Police Department (SDPD) and San Diego Sheriff Department officers on the scene wanted to wait until after the event to make an arrest.

SDPD officers pointed out that it was highly unusual for an arrest warrant to be issued over a misdemeanor alleged violation of a temporary restraining order. Possibly even more unusual is that the TRO was not served on Cole Stuart until April 16, two days after the issue of the arrest warrant tied to the TRO and one day after he had already been arrested.
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Protecting citizens from crime is a good goal. Technology has contributed many new tools to the effort such as burglar alarms, car security systems, and cell phones. But some technological tools have vast potential for abuse. GPS monitoring devices being used for family law and civil restraining orders are one such application fraught with serious abuse potential.

GPS Monitoring Raises Risks of Convincing But False Accusations

The potential for false accusations and harassment is aggravated dangerously if GPS tracking devices are used in family law and civil restraining order cases in which there has not been any conviction in a criminal court. That’s exactly the common case for many people falsely accused of domestic violence who have temporary retraining orders (TROs) slapped on them with no evidence, no chance to contest the false allegations, and no due process. This is business as usual for abusive judges like Lorna Alksne and Lisa Schall of the San Diego Superior Court as well as other similarly abusive judges across the United States. They issue such orders routinely without even a shred of evidence and no chance for a defense until much later.
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On April 15, CCFC co-founder and attorney Cole Stuart was arrested in what appears to be a stunt staged by San Diego family law system employees, possibly including Judge Lorna Alksne and Judge Lisa Schall. It appears incontrovertible that the impending CCFC protest at the San Diego County Bar Association family law seminar on April 15 was well-known to court employees starting on April 14, the day on which an arrest warrant was issued for Cole Stuart.

We have observed there was a spike in activity on our web site by employees of the San Diego Superior Court on that, less than two days after we posted our article discussing the impending CCFC protest at the SDCBA family law seminar. While this doesn’t prove judicial bias on its own, it shows these judges were likely aware of the impending protest. It is also consistent with the opinion that San Diego judges viewed having Cole Stuart arrested as an opportunity to quash vociferous political opponents by abusing their authority.
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CCFC co-founder Cole Stuart was recently wrongfully arrested due to what appears to be manipulation of the police by his ex-wife Lynn Stuart and possibly various elements of the San Diego family law system. While malicious alienating parents using courts and police to abuse their children’s other parent is commonplace particularly in a broken family court system such as that in San Diego, she has been aided at this by a particularly dirty San Diego lawyer. Lynn Stuart hired Jeffrey Fritz. He has earned a reputation as an attorney who is a “shark” who will resort to all manners of abusive and unethical tactics to “win” cases for his clients while driving up huge billings that severely damage the finances of all but the very wealthiest. He typically attracts high-conflict clients such as Lynn Stuart.
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Donna Andersen

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 want I want or will hurt somebody I don’t like, it’s A-OK.
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