Why We Need to Focus Families on Healing Instead of Fighting Child Custody Battles in Court

 My son and I arrived about a half hour late at a rural county courthouse distant from our home to stand with our signs--"High Conflict Divorce is Child Abuse."    

We like to arrive about fifteen minutes before the usual noon court recess when employees, litigants, and lawyers stream or trickle out of the courthouse, depending on whether the location is rural or urban. Maybe my son got up late on his day off from work, or maybe I did not plan enough time for our three-hour drive, or some of both.

My son feels a passion for this work, as do I, although I write all the blogs and press releases that the media usually ignores. When he was 10 years old, his father's girlfriend tried to force him to look her in the eye and repeat her criticisms of me back to her.

"Your mother is nothing but a leech on your father."

He reacted instead, "Stop criticizing my mother."

My son knew the truth. My mother was 39 when I was born, and my father was 50. They died before my children were born, leaving me with a modest amount of money and lots of antique furniture. My son also knew that I had stayed home to homeschool him. He was on the bright end of the autism spectrum. He could not adjust to daycare, pre-school, or a private kindergarten class with only four students. So I homeschooled him. He was in therapy and transitioning to a public school classroom, but he needed my attention and support.

Lastly, he knew that I had used my inheritance from my parents to pay for both the house we lived in and his father's graduate school education. Our divorce agreement required his father to pay that money back to me. He knew his father had a high income, but between supporting his two children and his new girlfriend, he had lots of expenses. That meant he could not pay for everything his new girlfriend wanted.

The story is long, so I will skip most of the rest. Suffice it to say that Dad's girlfriend tried very hard to turn my children against me so they would choose to live with her father. She also tried to provoke problems between my children's father and me, and my children and me. She succeeded with my daughter and her father. With my son...well, my son considers autism spectrum disorder his superpower, the way Greta Thunberg considers it her superpower. If my son knows something to be true, you can't manipulate him and change his mind.

But, in the meantime, our whole family went through about ten years of harassment, manipulation, and fighting.

I won the ultimate courtroom battle for custody of my daughter by obtaining therapists for my children and a court-ordered parenting time coordinator for my ex-husband and me. Then I followed their advice for me as a mother. The coordinator and the children's therapists weren't my personal therapists. They did not listen to my problems, but they told me what I needed to do for my mental health and communication skills. I followed their advice well enough that the parenting coordinator testified in court on my behalf, and my daughter's therapist was willing to do so as well. However, after the coordinator testified, it was obvious to my attorney that I had won the case, so she did not call my daughter's therapist.

Of course, there were far more complications and challenges than I have recited here. They could fill a book, but this blog is not a book. In the long run, some things worked out, and others did not.

One thing that did work out was my mental health. I survived an episode of child sex abuse and generational sex abuse trauma because my mother also survived child sex abuse. Back in the 1960s, she periodically spent weeks and months in psychiatric hospitals. I perceived her absences as her not wanting me. When she was home and functioning, she was a good mother. 

But I had other challenges. I was the nerdy kid who got bullied in school. I became depressed, and my parents sent me back east to live with relatives and attend school in their hometown in Connecticut. When I returned home after the school year ended, my parents separated and divorced, and my mother began drinking. I bounced between my parents' houses. My stepmother didn't drink, but she made it clear that she didn't want me in her house. So my father put me in my own little house by myself.

Long story short, I struggled with depression and low self-esteem for decades. My self-esteem eventually improved. My father paid for me to go to college, and I became a wildlife and fisheries biologist. I loved the work and excelled. I still suffered from episodes of depression.

When I went through the custody battle with my ex-husband, I still struggled with sadness and lots of anxiety. When the battles ended, and I had won, I realized my depression was gone, and it never came back. All the mental health skills my children's therapists told me to learn helped me heal.

The moral of the story is that though therapists are very knowledgeable and helpful, there is much you can do to heal yourself.

Well, because this is a blog and not an article, I kind of ran on and on.

I could just barely afford therapists and lawyers, but just barely is so much better than not being able to afford therapists and lawyers. What do parents without the money to hire therapists and lawyers do? I thought we could teach them the skills the therapists told me to work on. Then we could observe how well they learn and use these skills by doing what the parenting coordinator did with my ex-husband and me--requiring us to communicate by email or parenting app so he could observe our communications for conflict behaviors and communications. Lastly, because most parents can't afford parenting coordinators, we could have social workers read communications, work with parents, and make recommendations to judges.

I am not alone. Many parents go through trauma. I know my ex-husband and his girlfriend went through their own childhood trauma. Let's families heal instead of fighting.

And so my son and I stand in front of county court houses around Oregon to meet parents struggling through their own co-parenting and child custody woes--to tell them there is a better way and to help them with the workbook I wrote after winning my own child custody and mental health battle -- How to Heal: A Workbook for Survivors by a Survivor Plus Tips for Documenting Abuse https://www.amazon.com/How-Heal-Workbook-Survivors-Documenting/dp/B0GMQBP8R8