PAS Step Parent Role

As we begin to move towards holding a New York City conference on this topic a number of themes have surfaced which point towards its complexity. Parental Alienation clearly falls into that peculiar human wasteland between power and love which so few understand and so many take advantage of.

In considering this we cannot exclude the new parent of the alienated children who in many cases represent driving forces behind causing the alienation in the first place. A step dad for example who has lost two families is desperate to make the third work and sees the natural father of the children as an adversary he must destroy. This kind of man or woman will do everything they can to become the dominant parent, again so similar to the brainwashing that occurs in long-term kidnappings. The natural alienating parent has to be both oriented to alienating her former partner and lover and parent of her children, and be also a compliant type of individual with impulses to obey authoritarian figures.

In cases where the natural alienating parent has come from an alienating mother or father, it now becomes her reality to repeat this process and the authoritarian new step parent can take great advantage of this situation. Of course neither of these alienating natural parents and step parents reflects on the supreme damage this is doing to the emotions and realities of the children.

This kind of split reality is held in the psychiatric literature particularly from the Edinburgh School of Psychiatrists to be one of the causes of schizophrenia and manic depressive psychosis, particularly in a family. Dr. Ronald David Laing practiced  and wrote extensively on this for many years and it generally applies to PAS. Thus making it even more important to get it out into the open as it is in Canada and be considered the form of cruel child abuse that it is.

Money is in the Misery

In order to understand what family court and divorce proceedings are all about it is best to eliminate any preconceived notions in your mind about justice being a process for discovering the truth or resolving a disagreement through a process of debate and arbitration. It may be that other forms of court accomplish this but family court seems to have some other difficult to understand modus operandi and purpose.

Conflicts between people are not resolved in most instances, they are made worse. And they are made worse largely due to lawyers whose role is to create work for themselves by keeping the fire under a conflict. Although on numerous occasions we went in with seemingly rational and reasonable requests, the other side with the judge’s help turned these requests into negatives and through a great deal of simply put “lying” they were able to secure a victory. This was not Perry Mason wherein the opposing lawyer can say “objection” when a lie is told, nobody ever in nine years even said that word.

What it really boiled down to was who the best liar was and who knew the judge the best. My lawyer was an honest woman and did not know the judge very well, particularly socially. So the best advice here is to find the most dishonest lawyer who seems to be the most social and hire him or her if you have to go to court. You will find they are expensive and as one divorce lawyer said to me once,” a divorce is worth everything you can pay” and she may be right.

Lawyers get bored of endless divorces and the only thing keeping them interested is their fees. The system is entirely geared to keeping a conflict alive, even judges depend on marital disagreements for their jobs.

What is most fascinating is that assuming you do not agree on issues with your spouse the court will not remedy this, they can order something but it is only going to happen if he or she follows the order since finding a way out just requires a better liar to be your counsel so, you may as well as not have gone to court to start with unless you can win the liar’s contest and have a line in to the judge. With those things in place, go to court, without them; don’t even go close to it.

Medical Ladies

A brief dramatic/comic interlude from the “What Not to do in Marriage and Divorce” manual you are wasting your time reading in this blog. What you might call a change of pace which still covers a phenomenon which is critical in our lives.

Who do you believe delivers the medical care you get when you visit the doctor or even end up in the hospital? You know out of the whole amount of time you are scheduling or at an office visit you actually see the doctor or nurse practitioner for what……..10 minutes, five minutes three minutes, less? You make the appointment, wait in the office waiting room and wait in the examining room usually ½ clothed for 1 hour, 2 hours 3 hours or more.

In the hospital you lie in bed and see the doctor if at all once every two days and even someone on the level of a nurse practitioner or RN once an hour.

Since you are reading this blog you are probably smart enough to know this is okay because if you get more attention from the higher ups something is wrong, the higher the rank you see in a medical situation the sicker you are so you rarely ask for El Capitan except to get out.

But you must have thought about whom the people are you do have contact with and seem to be the primary determinants in your care.

Welcome to the “medical ladies,” those women who are usually seriously overweight, a current or “past” smoker whose children have either left or been removed from her custody or does not have children because she parties so much which you hear her talking about constantly if she is not complaining about her life or eating. She is always bad tempered, always too busy to talk with you or answer the phone and is constantly misplacing or outright losing files.

My favorite was the most recent (and staff of the top cardiologists in New York City replete with the New York Magazine covering stating so) when a group of “medical ladies” was gathered behind the reception desk discussing various bars and how late they stayed open and which had the best chicken wings and biggest drinks. Ignoring me they continued their bar discussion at some point a sixth woman in a white coat (that makes them important!) asked if anyone had seen Mrs. So and So’s file who was a patient who needed a new pacemaker, which is generally something a person needs immediately, and after some reluctance to change the beer and wings conversation no one had seen the file and she thought perhaps this woman’s charts had gone in with a Mr. This and That who was probably there for a stress test but now has a pacemaker. I wondered if the surgeon wondered why there was no pacemaker to remove in a replacement job, but she or he I am sure knows how much fun those medical ladies are!

It is these uneducated or in rare cases very partially trained women who run medicine and who by default are your caregivers. These women who do not know confidentiality from constitutionality and who in the outside world would not last as Burger King swabbies and who have absolute control over your health.

Next time you deal with a medical office, ask questions, check your own chart and pray for the time when all of this is totally automated by technology. And just ignore their snarls and mean faces or else order up a burger with fries and a chocolate milkshake which might get you more than the incompetence they demonstrate in the medical office..

Parental Alienation Syndrome and King Solomon

PAS is finally beginning to get recognition as a form of child abuse, a number of provinces and some states are just beginning to punish abusers for doing this to children and although the force of the alienation is directed at the “target” as I am so affectionately called in the clinical literature, the real damage is done to the children who are left emotionally scarred for the rest of their lives. We are going to have to get a little personal to describe this phenomena with all its force and incredible hate.

I am continually reminded of the biblical story which to paraphrase concerned the need King Solomon had to figure out which one of two women was the mother of a baby boy brought before him. He offered to tear the boy in half and make each mother happy, the first woman agreed that this was a equitable solution but the second broke into tears and would not allow him to take that action. Was my ex-wife willing to destroy the children to proof they were hers, without a doubt and what she did and is doing represents some of the foulest abuse of a child I have ever seen and I spent 20 years working with abused children as a child care professional and administrator.

The real question as you read this story is how to avoid it happening to you.

During the last dozen or so years of married family life and particularly in the last six or so years I was the main breadwinner and because I essentially ran my business from home I also took on a more dominant parenting role allowing the ex to first be a ’super volunteer’ and then to take on a professional position and eventually become a sales manager of medical products and to make a six figure income. She would drop the children off at school in the morning  and I would pick them up and feed them in the afternoon handling homework and activity transport duties.

During the last two years my ex-wife’s patterns began to change, she drank more and over time became angrier and angrier. Calls were received from other wives of her work associates and our own intimacy completely disappeared. Knowing the worse was coming I built up a fund so if I had to leave I had some separate financial means and meanwhile continued to try to live with the situation and to look after the children.

I taught the children to cook, to this day my son likes to cook and considered becoming a chef, all three children are well-schooled and I spent six years as a soccer coach for my youngest girl. When I finally had to leave since every minute with the ex had become a loud violent battle I suggested to her that we continue to have me do the same things with the children and that I be either at the house or in my own place to help them tansisition, in other words one of those civilized separations and divorces designed to leave the children with two parents they could both love.

But the ex was having nothing to do with this approach. As quickly as possible she got a court order for divorce, changed all the locks in the house and got a court order keeping me away from the children which was a little difficult since I had no history of abuse and worked in the child care business. Through a series of lengthy maneuvers her lawyer was able to get this done as well as get the court to require a Parent ad litum report all of which kept me away from the childern long enough for her to begin what is clearly a brain-washing process of destroying who I was in their eyes.

By not letting me near the children and even ignoring visitation orders when we got them and claiming all sorts of improper behavior on my part over what has now been 8 almost 9 years the ex made what was not true into the reality.

Let me give you one very telling example. Once when I was in the house getting some personal clothing I noticed that she had taken a photograph of me and attached a couple of meaningful items to it signifying my life, one was nail and I forget the other but it looked like a little memorium to me as though I was dead and gone.

And this is what she did and this is what is effective and horrible, by pretending I was permanently gone she convinced the children I had left them as well whereas the truth was that after thousands of dollars I had got the court to give me joint physical custody but she blocked it, ignored it and talked up my leaving to the point where my children thought I really did not love them, she was their only source of information. And of course I could not tell them what she was doing, still can’t because it violates the court order.

My children are now all young adults, 17-25 and except for the middle child I have no contact with my children because now they will not return calls or requests for a visit since they are so thoroughly convinced I do not care. I have paid thousands of dollars for their care and tens of thousands for college all borrowed during the time I was ill and they have no idea I did this all voluntarily. I wanted to pay for college somehow for them and did but the ex was and is constantly attempting to convince the court I am not paying which the court rolls over each time but it still requires all the prep time, a hearing and then then there is always some kind of compromise. All designed to make me look bad to my children while those people outside this circle can see exactly what is happening it is also true that no one understands or wants to intervene.

As I have described this to folks who have never experienced it, it is as though your children were kidnapped and kept away from you and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it except to pay and pay and pay for brief views of them. Those children who suddenly re-appear after a dozen years of being kidnapped but who have been living in the complete open society all this time become a lot easier to understand when you can see what a parent filled with hate can do.

I have consulted with the top practitioners in this field and they are all stymied about what is to be done. It has happened to celebrity couples and even the whole syndrome practiced in full view of the media. The power of this to destroy a child’s love is really too much to have to bear.

Looking back, the only possible thing I can think of is to maneuver yourself and your child in physically proximate environments without the ex’s influence. This has been the only way I have been able to even have a relationship with my middle daughter and I can always tell when she has visited or spoken to her mom. My son is at this point a complete loss to me because his mother cleverly built in a component of “rescuing” and he is basically a young man who thrives on “helping” women. Unfortunately, I can easily see where this leads him to in future life and it is terrible but there is nothing I can do. The youngest is just a lost cause who cannot yet think for herself and has no worldly knowledge so fails to understand anything about this except what she is told.

I have paid and suffered and paid and suffered to help my children and they have absolutely no idea what is going on. Their mother even gets refunds back from colleges and forces the children to pay off loans that were unnecessary blaming me for not paying enough money. I can’t show them the books, I actually tried but they are children who believe I am lying and cannot read financial statements anyway.

So there it is, Parental Alienation Syndrome. It is a weapon that all parents have but should be put in jail if they attempt to use it or at least required to undergo therapy. The courts are finally starting to catch up on this but there is so little incentive I am not hopeful.

We do know that a mini-conference is planned for the future in mid-town Manhattan that will attempt to provide tools for parents experiencing being targets and there are some attempts to build up childrens’ self-esteem to resist this brainwashing but always bear in mind, this is a parent attempting to corrupt her or his child, probably the most sacred of all relationships.

And…..remember the King Solomon tale.

Give me your sick, your old and your poor so I may render them further destroyed and damaged

One of the most curious aspects of this whole so far nine year experience in Family Court has been the total and absolute lack of compassion or caring for the “target” as she or he is called in Parental Alienation theory.

Early on in this process I became very ill diagnosed with a very serious heart condition making this 1/2 century + old person into an invalid and causing a six year hiatus in the ability to earn money. One would think and I certainly did think that being as ill as I was, with seven hospitalizations confined to bed rest for very long periods and taking seven to eight medications daily to chemically re-form my heart that this would have some impact on how the court treated me.

If this happens to you and even the stress of this divorce litigation can cause severe health problems, do not expect the court or your family to show the slightest consideration. Opposing counsel for the ex used it as a basis for insulting and further demonstrating that I was a worthless and vile human being.  Even though I had no income, the court still required that I pay out almost $4,000 a month for various school and support costs. It was completely outrageous but even when we attempted to dispute some of the terrible math the other side was using it cost me 48 hours in prison, in prison for trying to present accurate numbers. In order to keep this in line I had to borrow against everything I owned just to keep even with the court’s demands (and legal fees). The so-called financial statements I was required to file were never even discussed as I gave up hundreds of thousands of dollars I did not even have, it was borrow or be put in prison (not jail by the way but a maximum security corrections facility). Period

So you would ask as I definitely did,” What about our lawyer?” Well the lawyer story is woven through this like a snake through the grass. The first lawyer who lasted about six months was fired by me because she missed several filing deadlines and when I asked her about it she swore at me and that was enough, of course she worked it out so she kept the whole retainer and I just plain lost everything and had to start over. The next lawyer was  a woman who  had done some work for us but we did not realize she was simply a bad litigator who also was bad at math and came to believe we were hiding money so did not try very hard.

The lawyer lesson is if you have to hire a lawyer make sure they have a good track record, make sure they believe your story and support you (critical) and make sure they can handle numbers. We did not know this before running into these problems, particularly when it was obvious my income had nosedived.

And, you should also understand that lawyers in family court are kind of like a dysfunctional family. Many of the lawyers, except for the really good ones who do not usually practice in family court, are looking to the next case and not yours. They are playing a much larger game with judges and other lawyers than just your case so frequently what you need becomes secondary to making deals with these other lawyers and judges to essentially build up credits for something else. In other words they will not really “go to bat” for you but trade you in and you may not even realize you just lost when the lawyer could have reached for a win. They have an expression in family court, that lawyers and judges, “keep a book,” which lists these times when others have stood up to them and they will take it out on the lawyer for a case long forgotten except by them. Lawyers are afraid of judges who do this and the more experienced they are the more they “play the game.”

If you really understand what is going to happen in court it will help you a lot to get through with some kind of life left. Being sick or broke or even a good parent is meaningless, absolutely meaningless to these people and an ex-spouse with a gladiator lawyer who wants to harm you and who is willing to throw the children into the fire can absolutely slaughter you and permanently damage your children. Man or woman, father or mother, I have now met many people on both sides of this equation who would absolutely underline these words.

The best advice: “If you possibly can, stay out of court, nothing gets resolved fairly there except for possibly very small issues you could work out yourselves!”

Be Prepared

For those of you who are contemplating separation and divorce for whatever reason please use the experiences to be described over the next few posts as lessons for you which if listened to will save you a lot of pain in so many ways.

In my situation I had been married for almost 20 years and the marriage had lost its intimacy, arguments were constant and the wife was becoming involved in other relationships which caused several angry wives to call me and provide more detail than I wanted about the affairs. We went through counseling and spent time talking together but could not fix the problems. The affairs were a constant problem and made me as the cheated-on husband feel that I had some kind of right to leave and that ultimately the wrong being done to me would impact the resolution of the marriage.

But this was not how this part of the separation worked. It did not really matter that the ex was involved with other men, there is no longer a rule that says divorce and custody are determined by such behavior. I also did not realize that there was no way to describe to the children why I was leaving, you cannot tell your children about such adult behaviors, they simply do not understand it.

I also thought that it was possible to have a civilized separation and divorce but was only considering my own feelings. I knew people and had read stories about rational divorces in which the children are shared to their benefit and co-parenting is the agreed -to approach. I did not realize until several years afterwards that my ex-wife had evolved a tremendous hate for me and would use anything including the children and lying to judges in order to try to destroy me and my relationship with the children. I did not know that co-parenting even if in Massachusetts you are required to attend mandatory co-parenting classes that this is simply lip-service. No judge we were ever in front of ever enforced co-parenting. Even though I fought for and achieved joint physical custody our judge, the afore-mentioned Michael Livingstone or his predecessor never forced her to obey the court orders around co-parenting or custody and constantly let her keep the children whenever she wanted.

My lawyer did not even contest the custody issue because it seemed to be too low on her radar and was not worth the trade-offs she would have to make which I will touch on later.

For now, bear in mind that when you enter this world of family court, separation, divorce, custody and parenting that absolutely nothing is going to be fair or reasonable, the guiding determinants will not ever be what you think they should be, everything has far more to do with the relationships between judges and lawyers and lawyers and lawyers, nothing else.

Be prepared by reading descriptions such as this from real people who have been through this process before you take any actions. Live with the problems as long as you can, make a plan, talk to people and then do what you have to. You will see how bizarre and awful this all gets.

The Hard Work Continues

After a several month hiatus following the forced resignation of Judge Michael Livingstone we have decided to return to the continuing saga of our treatment in the Plymouth County Probabte and Family Court. We thank all of you who participated and know you will find at least some comfort as we proceed to tell the full personal story of a family torn apart by the court, its judges, lawyers and parental alienation. It appears that the system is designed to encourage the worst of all of the foregoing elements.
This will be a personal story being told for several reasons. Everything discussed is the absolute truth with some minor changes or non-mentions made to avoid more unwanted litigation.
There is a story here of what happens to older and younger children when they hear one side of a story told to them by a parent they love and trust but who is so full of hate for her former spouse that she has now spent almost nine years taking him to court every few months having at her disposal the resources of a good job and a well-off new husband who for his own personality defects is essentially a sophisticated bully.
This is going to be an absolutely true tale of the perfect storm of parental alienation using the love of children against their father, greedy and incompetent lawyers and a terrible confused family court process court system, and the insistence of a loving couple to do whatever it takes to fix all of this. Which in the end may be the only answer for all of you facing this same set of problems, and there are clearly many people in this position, love and tenacity must be ramped up and used.

Wounded Veterans Housing

We have recently learned of a terrible situation as regards veterans permanently disabled by their wounds and how these disabilities are not being addressed in their homes with very little help available from the government or housing industry. Veterans advocates say that there are 259,000 people who now need specially built or modified housing that will provide support for these folks and help facilitate a more “normal” life.

“Universal Design” is the name for fully handicapped accessible homes and supplies the answer but very few governmental authorities are doing anything to encourage such construction and there is simply not sufficient profit for builders to privately create this housing.

Brockton Court Workshop Proves Need for Elected Judges

This workshop was interesting to be a lurker at. It was intended as a way for lawyers to address their process issues with the judges. We counted at least seven times that the judges reassured the lawyers that there would not be retaliation for whatever they said.

Of course that tells us something else, does this mean that “retaliation” is the norm? It sure sounded like an accepted practice, retaliating against a lawyer when she exercised free speech. Some have said that Judge Livingstone was the tip of the iceberg.

Do judges retaliate when a lawyer does her job? This is pretty amazing and throws another weight on the scale for elected judges using restricted campaigns. Never thought we would feel this way but at least elections make these judges accountable to someone and if we have to put up with some of the downside of elected officials it may be worth it.

Will a judge retaliate against a lawyer or civilian if they know the papers may make a story out of it and they will lose their next election? Probably not, although the recent fear the media demonstrated with the Livingstone situation does not provide much hope.

Where Now?

We never dared think that there would be an “after it is over” moment to have to think about. But we are there.

What occurred with this judge demonstrates the kind of problems in our judicial system. It was hard not to notice that a lot of staff and other court house folks were hurt by the judge’s resignation. For them it represented the loss of a family member but also someone who shared their sometimes very caustic view of defendants and plaintiffs.

The Probate and Family Court is supposed to be more accessible than other courts allowing for Pro se to be effective. Perhaps this is a good and positive place for the head of the state court and her staff to start by really reviewing the support and help the public gets in this court and eliminating the tremendous advantage lawyers still seem to have. Positive strides could be made by training and monitoring clerks in making sure they help folks and giving them the technological knowledge to be more effective at this.

The difference between county courts in this regard is palpable. And your future and your family’s well-being should not depend either on who you get for a clerk, how his or her day is going or how much money you have to pay a lawyer, or not.

So that is a good place to start.