angiEmedia

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A California representative, Democrat Jim Beall, has reintroduced legislation as Assembly Bill 612 (AB 612) to ban the discussion of parental alienation in child custody evaluations. California judges, psychologists, and family law attorneys all oppose this legislation because they know that parental alienation is a real problem that is harming children in many families, especially in high-conflict divorces. So do the many California parents who have been alienated from their children. And so do the grown children who are victims of parental alienation and recognize it for the damage their alienating parent caused in their own lives.

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Until you have personal experience of divorce and child custody litigation, it would be difficult to understand or appreciate what Alec Baldwin (with Mark Tabb) writes about in his book A Promise to Ourselves: A Journey Through Fatherhood and Divorce.

Many, I think, would consider his book as being some far-fetched Hollywood gossip and a way to gain more celebrity status, or even a way to defend his case and blame it on the ex. I suppose it’s hard not to be influenced by the roles actors play in movies and what you read in trashy magazines and newspapers. To me, Alec Baldwin certainly doesn’t have the “nice guy” reputation — if anything, it’s more like the “womanizer”. Then again, Kim Basinger is no angel, either.
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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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The Parent Custody Blog frequently posts links to news and video clips on topics such as parental alienation, CPS abuses against children, and divorce child custody battles.

The author of the site describe his motivation as follows:

I am a father of three boys. I have one of them living with me as his mother had some “issues”. I am the one with parent custody (placement is the actual correct term here). The other two are living with their mom and I haven’t seen them in about a year and a half due to her new husband and father in law both being lawyers and some mistakes in dealing with her on my part. So obviously in this case she is the one who has parent custody.

One of the problems that I have seen in this system, which has worked both for and against me, is that unless you can afford a lawyer, your rights usually are not enforced. This is something that can be good and bad, but will rarely take into account what is best for the child or children. If both parties are reasonable, they can usually work things out, even if neither is entirely comfortable with the end result. This is usually when both parents are looking out for the child as opposed to their own self-interests.

The flip side of this is that one or both parties are not reasonable. This is far more common, and will usually end with either the person who is able to best afford the lawyer getting their way, assuming it’s not totally outrageous, or an ongoing legal battle in which the children become pawns. Neither of these options are good for the kids more often than not.

People need to learn to drop their agendas, their personal hurts, their own selfish wants and whatever bad feelings are left over for the sake of their kids. This in and of itself would solve a lot of issues when it comes to the parent custody issue. Think about it, and then think of your kids. It can make all the difference in the world.

(Click here for more coverage on parental alienation.)

Dr. Jayne Major, former police officer Catherine MacWillie, and film director Shelli Ryan discuss parental alienation syndrome on The Gregory Mantell Show. Some topics mentioned in the discussion include Shelli Ryan’s movie on parental alienation called Jake’s Closet and the murder of Dr. Rick Lohstroh by his ten year old son after his mother, Deborah Geisler, had brainwashed him into hating his father and allowed him to take a gun to his father’s house.

(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.)

New York Firefighter Richard Smulczewski has two teenage daughters. His ex, Susan Smulczewski, committed parental alienation against their two daughters, brainwashing them into hating their father, and blocking access to the kids. She was found to be committing parental alienation by the courts and deemed an unfit mother. The court remanded custody of the daughters to their father. Yet the mother has refused to comply with court orders, continued to alienate their daughters against him, and continues to have custody.
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(Click here for more coverage on parental alienation.)

Here’s an interview with Jayne Major, Ph.D., a Los Angeles psychologist and educator advocating means to stop parental alienation behaviors and heal the damage they cause. In the interview, she answers common questions about parental alienation. She describes the range from mild bad-mouthing to sociopathic intent to brainwash children to hate the other parent. She notes that in severe alienation cases, the target parents (those who are alienated against) must learn to stand up for the truth if they are to have hope of not losing their children permanently to the brainwashing of the alienating parent. She notes that the most dangerous alienating parents often have one or more personality disorders:

Few lawyers, judges, nor laypersons are able to recognize seriously disturbed people who look and often act “normal.” Yet, their numbers are large and the damage they do to other parents, their children, and society is staggering. Sociopaths are cruel—without moral conscience, empathy, sympathy, or compassion. Their purpose is to win by domination. Harvard psychologist Martha Stout, in her book The Sociopath Next Door, states that one in twenty-five people is a sociopath. Furthermore, there is an estimated 20% of the general population with personality disorders. Those individuals who are the most dangerous are described in the DSM IV, Axis II Cluster B. The descriptive labels of these disorders are borderline, narcissistic, histrionic, and anti-social.

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RationShed is a Christian group in New Zealand promoting the concept of “equal parenting” involving the whole biological family, including both parents and all four grandparents. Its website at http://rationshed.wordpress.com hosts a mix of original content and repostings from other news and opinion sources, including angiemedia .

RationShed is also sponsoring an “equal parenting petition” to show support for shared 50/50 parenting as presumed default. Click here to view and sign it.
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