I’ve been meaning to publish a review of Welcome Back Pluto: Understanding, Preventing, and Overcoming Parental Alienation for some time now. Having watched it myself and with some children who are targets of parental alienation, I think it is a very helpful video for most kids who are at risk for alienation but who have not yet been totally turned against parent they are being encouraged to hate.
There are a lot of positive reviews of this video on Amazon, I’d encourage you to read them. Instead of simply rehashing the universally positive general comments about the video, I’m going to outline chapter by chapter what you’ll see when you watch it so you can better understand what Dr. Warshak is trying to accomplish with this video.
Chapter 1 – What is Alienation?
This first chapter explains what parental alienation is and what it isn’t. It makes it clear that even though it sounds like it has something to do with space aliens, it has nothing to do with this. It explains alienation in the general sense, that people can hate a person, their government, or their family. It breaks down the level of alienation in levels via the terms disillusioned, alienated, and estranged. It also explains that alienation can be realistic, such as when somebody has been very cruel for a long time, or unrealistic when the rejected person was once loved but now is not despite not having done anything to justify this.
I often use the term “target parent” to refer to what the video calls the “rejected parent”, in part because I’ve observed that such parents are often not only targeted for alienation but also for defamation, false accusations, harassment, intimidation, and more by the parties who are out to harm them and the children’s relationships with them. Read more…
If you’ve been going through a nasty divorce or child custody battle that has lasted years, it’s likely you have experienced a great deal of chronic stress. Years of such stress can create devastating health problems that are often misunderstood and inadequately treated. The stress of dealing with a high-conflict co-parent is particularly likely to badly damage a person’s health as the troubles often continue until well after the children grow into adulthood. But often medical professionals treat these problems as merely mental health issues when in fact there has been significant physiological to the body. This article points out some of the common symptoms of the physiological damage and refers you to additional reading on medical tests that can help you determine appropriate treatment for such conditions.
Personality Disorders and “High Conflict Personalities” Can Cause Severe Mental and Medical Damage
Parents who are dealing with a person who appears to suffer from a personality disorder such as Borderline, Narcissistic, Histrionic, Antisocial, or Paranoid personality disorders are particularly prone to devastating health effects. Often these people engage in parental alienation child abuse such as by blocking the children from contact with a capable or loving parent and trying to force the children to hate that parent. The children are clearly being abused along with the target parent. It’s entirely possible that the young ones will develop mental and physiological injuries from this abuse, too.
Some are literally driven to their deaths by years of abuse. A few even commit suicide to escape it. Others end up on work disability and require expensive medical care for many years. Yet for them, the symptoms still linger for even decades because often medical professionals treat these people as if they are simply suffering from “major depression” or “generalized anxiety disorder” when in fact they are physiologically very ill and in need of medical care, not just counseling and psychotherapy.
Common Symptoms of Physiological Damage from Chronic Stress
The following symptoms are often signs of long-term damage to the stress management systems in the body. Every one of them can result from damage to the adrenal glands after they have been forced to pump out vast quantities of cortisol for years trying to help you cope with the ex’s harassment and attacks. Read more…
California Coalition for Families and Children and activist attorney Marc Angelucci have recently published a draft amicus curiae brief for submission to the California Fourth District Court of Appeal in case D057480, the appeal of the San Diego County Superior Court Case No. 37-2008-00093885-CU-BT-CTL in which Judge Jay Bloom sided with the corrupt family law courts and disreputable Dr. Stephen Doyne, one of the court’s favored 730 child custody evaluators, by ruling that Doyne is immune from suit and one of his victims, Dr. Emad Tadros, should pay his legal fees.
Dr. Emad Tadros caught Stephen Doyne using what are credibly alleged to be fraudulent credentials issued by a “diploma mill” style organization. Evidence of this is shown in documentation regarding Doyne’s credentials. This is just the tip of the iceberg in the growing allegations against Doyne and many other San Diego divorce industry profiteers.
CCFC and Angelucci are looking for members of the public who understand the abusive conduct of many of the 730 custody evaluators in San Diego County to sign the brief in support of the notion that nobody should be above the law, not even the divorce industry “professionals” favored by the corrupt judicial officers on the bench in San Diego.
Angelucci explains the current dire situation in the letter soliciting public support for the brief. Read more…
What is the one thing a sociopath does not want other people to know? The truth. More specifically, sociopaths do not want the truth about them to be known as they are insecure, malicious, and devious people. Beyond being embarrassed by the truth of their behaviors and thoughts, they have a deathly fear of being exposed and rejected. That’s in large part because they use lies, manipulations, and distortions to control other people and get what they want. If others were to know about their true nature, they realize that most would want nothing to do with them. They would lose the support networks of malicious minions they control and incite to abuse other people. Therefore sociopaths have a strong motivation to attack, discredit, harass, and ruin anybody who presents arguments and facts that might tend to raise questions and doubts about their behaviors and their false statements.
Many sociopaths are so insecure and malicious that they feel similarly motivated to go on the offensive, perhaps with lesser severity, in reaction to people who might embarrass them with obviously nasty (to them) comments like “Is that lettuce stuck between your teeth?” or “Your car is filthy! There’s a $3 carwash special across the street.” If that gets them unhinged, just imagine what being exposed as a child abuser, false accuser, liar, or thief will do.
Sociopaths Experts At Blaming Others, Greatly Fear Being Blamed
Nobody likes to be blamed, but a responsible person will accept blame for something appropriate. Sociopaths don’t like to accept blame for anything, even if it is well-earned. While part of this is likely from their typically narcissistic “I’m better than you” and “rules don’t apply to me” attitudes, there’s more to it than that. They may realize that blaming is how they control others to harm the targets they viciously attack, often family members or former love interests. They understand both the destructive and defensive powers of blaming and make regular use of both.
Sociopaths may be especially cognizant of the risk that people whom they have used to abuse others might even turn against them, especially those who might be greatly angered by how they were manipulated into participating in destructive and harmful activities against others. People like to blame others. While sociopaths do it with extraordinary intensity and dishonesty, the people they manipulate are likely to do it, too. After all, a sociopath was able to manipulate them into unjustly attacking a former partner, a child’s other parent, teacher, doctor, counselor, therapist, or some other party the sociopath doesn’t like and that clearly demonstrates they are the sort of people who are into blaming others. Who is to say they won’t turn and attack the sociopath when they realize how they were used? Read more…
Once someone like Stephen Doyne, ill-reputed San Diego custody evaluator, or many of his Associate Family Court Dismantlers recommend a restraining order between two parents, the divorce industry is on its way to milking profits from yet another family. The Honorable Judge is highly likely to rubberstamp such recommendations. Why? We suspect many, perhaps most, have been receiving unpublicized Election Campaign Donations from such people. Such judges know how to support their financial backers.
As soon as the restraining order is issued, if mom or dad tries to communicate on any level, it will be considered a crime! No collateral contacts of any type are allowed — no priests, no friends, no family members of any side, no direct or indirect contact or any US mail or email or phone communications from any parent is allowed. Why? The divorce industry wants to isolate the parties from each other, sticking themselves in the middle where they can be sure to encourage the parents to fight until they exhaust their funds by limiting, monitoring, and controlling all communications.
The court then finds itself justified to make the next move by ordering a “mediator” such as Doyne & Associates. Stephen Doyne and those like him charge for back and forth phone communications between parents because it is now illegal for parents to communicate by any means by order of the court. Every phone call is about $75 or more to each parent. The more phone calls claimed, the richer the dismantlers become. Even if there is a simple inquiry about food for the children, instructions for medication, or questions about a school assignment, with a restraining order on board the divorce industry profiteers will be the only ones making the calls. They make a fat check from back and forth phone calls between them and both parents, turning a few minutes direct conversations into claims of several phone calls. The court won’t allow verification of such calls, so families should be rightly wondering just how many of them were actually placed and how long they took.
Imagine this order is enforced for a few years. Would this order alone pay the evaluator’s or mediator’s house payments? Would this order compel such dismantlers serving the court order to more generously contribute secretive judicial election campaign funds? Read more…
Sweden seems like a progressive country to the uninformed. It has parental leave policies for both genders. While mothers have always availed themselves of such leave, fathers seemed reluctant. So the parental leave laws have changed over time to encourage fathers to take time off of work after the birth of a baby. At present, two months of the 390 leave days allocated for parents must be used by the father or they are lost.
Consider contemporary family life in Sweden. In the past, new parents split 390 days of paid leave however they liked—monthly, weekly, daily, and even hourly. Women used far more of it than men. But today, new fathers no longer rush back to work, leaving the mother to raise little Sven all by herself. The reason for the change? Smart public policy.
In 1995, Sweden passed a simple but revolutionary law: couples would lose one month of leave unless the father was the one who took it. A second use-it-or-lose-it month was added in 2002, and now more than 80 percent of Swedish fathers take four months off for the birth of a new child, up from 4 percent a decade ago. And a full 41 percent of companies now formally encourage fathers to go on parental leave, up from only 2 percent in 1993. Simply put, men are expected to work less and father more.
By altering the roles of the Swedish father and the Swedish worker, Sweden’s paternity-leave legislation has, in turn, rewritten the rules for Swedish men (and, by extension, women). “Swedish dads of my generation and younger have been raised to feel competent at child-rearing,” writes Slate’s Nathan Hegedus, an American who experienced the system firsthand. “They simply expect to do it, just as their wives and partners expect it of them.” If a man refuses time at home with the kids, he faces questions from friends, family, and, yes, other guys. Policy changes produced personal changes—and then, slowly but surely, society changed as well.
On the surface, this sounds quite progressive. The United States lacks similar leave policies and American men often feel discouraged from taking time off from work for family matters. They fear they will be looked down upon, ridiculed, or passed over for promotions if they take more than a short time away from work for a new baby.
But the reality is that Sweden’s progressiveness is merely a veneer over a solid core of the same false feminist male-bashing that predominates in the Western world. Children in Sweden, you see, are treated as property of the mother. If the mother doesn’t want to share, she simply starts making false abuse allegations. No proof is required, obviously a mad mom’s word is more reliable than all the evidence in the world. She will be quickly and easily rewarded with sole custody, marginalizing the father to no more a few days per month with the children.
Many fathers quickly see even this small amount of contacted whittled down to just a few hours of supervised visitation, supervised because obviously fathers cannot be trusted with children if the mother says so. In Sweden, as in the United States, men are guilty upon accusation and must struggle to prove themselves innocent, a task which is effectively impossible in many cases. After all, if you are a man who was accused of some crime that nobody else saw and there is no evidence of it occurring or not occurring, how are you to prove that you didn’t do it when a mom says you did? You can’t, so her lies win.
If a father fights for equal child custody, Swedes will consider him a brute. If he is beaten senseless by false accusations from a malicious mom, his life in tatters, he will suffer in many ways including by very limited contact with his children. Then Swedes will consider him a deadbeat. Being a father in Sweden is a losing proposition, the only chance of success is at the whim of a woman. But if she changes her mind, for any reason — her affair, her drug abuse problem, etc. — the father is instantly a degenerate who should be banned from seeing the children without the watchful eyes of the state closely monitoring his every move.
This is no different, really, than the United States and many other nations in which men are not even second-class citizens in all matters involving families and children. Not only is this extremely unfair, it contributes to a wide range of social problems including gender conflict, parental alienation child abuse, and harming children’s educational attainment and mental health.
To their credit, many women understand these issues very well and fully support equal rights. Some of them are strident enough about it to actively support both the father’s rights movement and going to significant effort to ensure their own ex-partners stay involved in their children’s lives. Unfortunately, there are more than a few naysayers remaining. Some of them are quite intent on not only denying equal rights but going so far as to even any messages that advocate for changes they do not approve.
Amnesty International Shows Its Sexist Bias
A lot of children in Sweden are upset about deprivation of access to a loving parent, generally their fathers. Four Swedish high school students, Sara Sivesson, Jerry Wallén, Sandra Atas, and Oskar Krantz, set out to expose Sweden’s human rights crimes against children and fathers to the world. They produced a video which they submitted to Amnesty International for a human rights video contest. Their video explains what happens to so many Swedish fathers who long to spend time with their children but who are prevented from doing so by the typical false feminist tool of false accusations.
The video made it to the finalist stage. The students were of course very excited by this.
But then a woman’s violence organization in Uppsala reportedly demanded that Amnesty International remove the video from the competition and its website. Read more…
Dr. Amy Baker is a researcher studying and reporting on parental alienation and parental alienation syndrome. As she explains, parental alienation refers to the behaviors and tactics used to cause children’s relationship with a parent to suffer. Parental alienation syndrome (PAS) refers to the effects on the child, especially when they become so severe that the child doesn’t want to spend time with a parent and expresses disgust and dislike for that parent without a valid reason.
In her book Adult Children of Parental Alienation Syndrome, she discusses many case studies of parental alienation and presents summaries that show common alienation tactics and the long term damage to the children and the target parent.
The video below features Baker talking with WABC TV host Ken Rosato in 2009. She discusses what motivated her to study parental alienation and some of her findings on common alienating tactics and effects on children. Read more…
Given the lack of psychological education for children, many suffer badly from child abuse with no help coping. Many of these abused kids go on to become abusers themselves.
Few know how to identify these abusive adults until after they marry them and discover they are being emotionally, verbally, and sometimes physically abused on a frequent basis. It is far too easy to inadvertently marry a sociopath.
Even when you figure out you have married an abusive person, the courts will often, perhaps even usually, not protect you from these people. Instead, they take the abuser’s side and help them commit even more abuses. “Take the kids, take the house, it’s your reward for terrorizing your spouse” is the common refrain of the black-robed bandits in American family law courts.
Is it any wonder why more and more people are wondering whether marriage in America is even safe any more?
Personality disorders are a growing problem in the United States. Recent NIH studies indicate that 20% or more of Americans suffer from one or more personality disorders. Author Bill Eddy points out that in his experience about half of “High Conflict Personalities” (or HCPs) involved in destructive divorce and child custody battles probably do have one or more full-blown personality disorders. The other half may not meet all the criteria for a full-blown personality disorder yet still show many traits consistent with troublesome personality disorders such as BPD and NPD.
I believe that about half of HCPs have a personality disorder and about half have some of these traits, but not a full personality disorder. This means that they are still difficult, but may respond more easily to approaches designed for people with personality disorders.
It helps to understand some of these traits, but it is important to not tell someone you think they have a personality disorder. They may become very defensive and angry with you, as defensiveness is a common characteristic of those with personality disorders and those just with traits.
I fully agree with Eddy’s advice about not telling a person they may have a personality disorder. To be clear, this is not because it is better for them but primarily because hearing this news seems to turn them into even more destructive abusers than they were in the first place. Even if you are only trying to help, they will probably interpret your words as dire threats and redouble their efforts to destroy you. There is also a substantial risk that you will be ridiculed for your reasonable beliefs by divorce industry “professionals” who have an agenda that does not make room for unpleasant truths unless they are stated by an expensive paid expert. Read more…
A common problem that many parents in child custody battles experience is the malicious false police reports generated by the nasty ex exhibiting sociopathic behaviors. Such people may suffer from a personality disorder associated with pathological lying such as BPD or NPD, but not all people with BPD or NPD will resort to filing false police reports.
You might think that when the police investigate and find that the ex lied or can’t keep her or his story straight, that will be the end of it. But for many target parents, that is not the case at all. Instead, the nasty ex takes those reports and uses them as the basis for spreading defamation that looks very official and credible looking to the average naive person on the street. With a little effort, she or he can have dozens or more people believing the lies by using the police reports to deceive and manipulate them.
Sometimes, false police reports even get people arrested wrongly. Look at what happened to the father in the article Ben Vonderheide Exposes Pennsylvania’s Abusive Child Profiteering Racket. He was falsely arrested and his son taken from him. Later, his falsely accusing ex and her new boyfriend were convicted of filing false police reports in a criminal court with its far higher evidentiary standards than family court. But he is still suffering from the damage caused by the false police reports even years later.
More often, false police reports and the resulting “official looking” papers generated are used to defame and harass the target parent. This is a common element in the distortion campaigns practiced by Borderlines, Narcissists, and other abusively dishonest personalities. Read more…
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