Today’s post is going to be a little controversial. But then, that will hardly be the first time that has happened. I want to address a message I’ve received from men many times, one that has a particularly angry tone and goes something like this: “Why do you only talk about abusive men?? Why don’t…
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…
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…
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…