How come children who grew up together sometimes describe such strikingly different experiences of their childhoods? Why can they have sharply colliding views of what their parents were like as people, and as parents? Why can one person’s memories sound like inventions to his or her siblings? These differences in perspective can cause…
For twenty years I’ve been receiving messages from furious men, or reading their spit-spraying rants online. I’ve chosen not to respond to them (well, maybe I did give into temptation a couple of times) because I don’t believe it serves any purpose. That style of man never examines what he’s saying, and he isn’t entering…
Have you ever noticed that we refer to all animals as “he” unless we know for sure that they’re females? If you referred to, say, a squirrel as “she,” people would say to you, “Wait, how do you know it’s a ‘she’?” But if you call it “he,” nobody asks you how you know it’s…
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…
I received a large (and at times agitated) response to my post on the difference between abusive men and narcissists. In the midst of those dialogues I promised to pursue the issues further in a Part 2. In the mean time, I wrote a post explaining my view of narcissists, to help clarify the…
I’ve promised to write a second part to my post about the difference between narcissists and abusers. But I decided that first I need to explain a number of key concepts regarding severe self-centeredness, also called “narcissism” or “personality disorder.” So that’s what I’m exploring today. I’m not writing here about abusive men. I’m writing…
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…