This is a guest post by a survivor, ‘Ava,’ who sent me one of the most inspiring and encouraging stories I’ve heard in a long time. It’s also a painful story, but it demonstrates that conditions can improve dramatically sometimes. So keep on fighting for a life of freedom and love – it…
Many of you have read Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, or have seen the Sean Penn movie of the same name; the movie starred Emile Hirsch and included a poignantly beautiful soundtrack by Eddie Vedder. If you did, you learned a version of the story with all the abuse excised from it. Into the…
AKA KIDS WHO SIDE WITH THE ABUSER By the time children pull away from their mothers, they’re profoundly wounded. They wouldn’t pull away otherwise. On a deep level they desperately want to be close to her. Those loving feelings may be buried under huge piles of emotional injury, but they’re still there. They distanced themselves…
NOTE: The first 30 pages of In Custody are now free for anyone to read. Go to the book’s website, InCustodyTheNovel.com, and click on “Read Chapters 1-5.” I’ll give the short answer first. I wanted something we could hand to people who don’t get it. I wanted to be able to tell them that the…
In Part 1 of this post, I began exploring some of the reasons why kids may side with a man who abuses their mother, especially if he’s their father. We looked in particular at kids’ desperate desire to feel safe – and it feels safer to be on the abuser’s team — and their desire…
Several weeks ago, I wrote a post about kids who see through the abuser. To my surprise, it was the most popular piece I’d put up in a long time; a lot of my readers are trying to see through kids’ eyes. How do young people form their understandings of what is happening when their…
Divorce professionals are fond of saying that children feel “caught in the middle.” But a lot of kids don’t feel that way at all. They see clearly where the abuse is coming from, and they recognize their dad or step-dad’s manipulations. They wish he would stop bullying Mom and stop bullying them. They wish he…
It’s time to say the obvious truth straight up. No pretty ribbons, no proving how “reasonable” I am by sugar-coating the harsh reality of what’s actually happening. Here it is: The family court system across the continent has become the moral equivalent of a slave trade. Mothers and children have no rights at…
(This tirade is a little different from the more measured writing you may be accustomed to from me, so take a deep breath. The piece is in two parts, both of which are below.) Part 1 The abusive man learns early in life, from his surrounding society and beyond, that when he becomes an…
A terrific podcast has recently gone up where an adult brother and sister discuss their experience growing up with a father who abused their mother. They open up about how the experience has affected their lives, and discuss the kinds of healing they have done to overcome the emotional wounds they experienced. I…