The Garden of Roses: Stories of Abuse and Healing

Therapeutic protocols and the legal system often facilitate the worst emotional abuse in high-conflict divorced and divorcing families.  Both legal and therapeutic professionals are aware that problems exist, but neither has addressed the problem with inadequate medical and legal protocols.  This may be due to the fact that Father’s Rights and Protective Mother advocates are at loggerheads over who is most responsible for and most victimized by these abuses.  But high-conflict families are the ones that produce the children most wounded by divorce.  Moreover, the emotional abuse suffered in these families is every bit as damaging to children as child sex abuse.  I know this because my son, daughter, and I all suffered extreme emotional abuse from my ex-husband and his second wife.  While my son and I survived the emotional abuse with permanent emotional scars, we are basically OK.  On the other hand, my daughter long struggled with Borderl...

I wrote this blog about a decade and a half ago, or maybe a little longer.       I was thrown out of my Catholic Church in 2004 for handing out articles that showed that the Provincial Minister of the Franciscan Order had known about our former Franciscan priest pastor’s abuse of minors and a few adult women. Instead of protecting vulnerable children and adults, he covered up the priest’s abuses. The priest had been wonderful with my autistic son, so kind and friendly. My son loved him, but eventually I realized it was really good for my family that the priest was removed, or my son might have become one of his victims. While I came to terms with why the priest had to be removed, I felt the provincial minister who had decades earlier covered up the priest’s abuses should have also suffered consequences. So I handed out articles on the priest and the provincial minister before and after Mass at my church. During Mass one Sunday, the female pastoral associate came up b...

  Both my ex-husband and I suffered trauma in our childhood. Mine is discussed elsewhere in this blog. Look for it. My ex-husband’s parents never married and were unprepared to be parents when he was born. Growing up, he was shuffled between different family members’ homes. Some family members were loving and supportive. Some were stressed by their lives. They tried to give him a good life but also failed to give him all the love and support he needed. Perhaps due to his insecure childhood, my ex-husband was the most jealous man I had ever dated. In addition, I was eight years older than him and had worked about four years as an observer on foreign fishing vessels in the Bering Sea and the Gulf of Alaska. The job came with lots of male friends and significant growth in my self-confidence.  Before we married, my husband and I went to couples’ counseling to work on our struggles. The therapist told my soon-to-be husband to be less jealous and gave us a book by Harville Hendr...

Please note that I wrote this blog when I still attended a Catholic Church—something I have not done for ten years. Growing up in America, I learned prejudices against Muslims -- that they restrict the rights of women and are religious fanatics willing to blow up people to achieve their religious and political aims -- or so I thought until I got to know some actual Muslims quite well.  I met a few Muslims during college but never became close friends. I became close friends with some Muslims in the latter half of the 1980s, when I worked as a fisheries observer on Soviet fishing vessels in a joint venture with American catcher boats in Alaskan waters.  The Muslims I became friends with were fishermen from Muslim Republics of the Soviet Union. While working on the fishing vessels, I learned that the old saying that sailors have a girl in every port isn’t untrue, although not every sailor is equally unfaithful to the woman or women in their lives.  Infidelity on all sides i...