Heartbreaking Stories in Bend and Corvallis, Oregon

After driving around the Cascade Lakes Scenic Byway, my son and I stopped by a Mexican restaurant for dinner. We were wearing pink sweatshirts that read, "High Conflict Divorce is Child Abuse."

A man, a woman, and a five or six-year-old girl sat down at the next table, and, after reading our shirts, the man said, "I like your shirts.

He then proceeded to tell us that his wife and stepdaughter had been put through lots of trauma by his wife's first husband. The situation had been so difficult that the little girl's older sister had committed suicide.

The family was on their way to an evening church service and invited us to come along because they found so much healing in their religion.

I respect their choices, but I have a strong science background and don't feel comfortable in fundamentalist or evangelical churches. I fit in better at Catholic or mainline protestant churches, but I understand that this family's church supported them through a difficult situation.

The following Thursday in Corvallis, Oregon, my son and I stood with our sign that reads, "Emotional Abuse (Coercive Control) Damages Children and Loved Ones. We Need Laws to Protect Victims."

A man and a woman who appeared to be his intimate partner soon came out and made a beeline to my son and me. The man was wiping tears from his face as he told us his story. He had lost a court room battle for custody of his son to his ex-wife. Once again, I don't know the details of the case in either how much contact the man had with his son or why his ex-wife won the case. I don't know if he had done something to justify him having less time with his child. I only know his heartbreak, and I think therapy should be a part of the divorce and child custody battle process. If people can't afford good lawyers, they may not know how to best present their cases in court. And, while children need loving relationships with their parents, they also need to be safe from abuse. I feel that a therapist working with this family might have been able to help the situation.

What I Learned From Coercive Control Victims in Eugene, Oregon

My son and I first went to stand in front of the Lane County Courthouse in Eugene, Oregon around lunchtime one day in October with our sign that reads:

Emotional Abuse

(Coercive Control)

Damages Children
And Loved Ones.

We Need Laws

To Protect Victims

I realize many would say the person who uses coercive control on "loved ones" does not love them, but I was trying to write something people would understand that would also fit on a poster.

Please also understand that I am not able to verify any of the stories people told me

We were first approached by a woman accompanied by a friend and her older parents. She was found in contempt of court because she wrote a letter to her daughter, who was living in her father's care. The court had ordered that she have "no contact" with the daughter. Maybe if I knew the details of this case, I would agree with the no-contact order, but I don't know why there was a no-contact order. What I do know is how painful it is to be unable to see or even contact a child. My ex-husband kept me away from my daughter for most of a year and a half. The day I lost my daughter, I went to bed and cried for a week. What had this mother, who came out of the courthouse in Eugene, done that was so wrong that she couldn't even see her daughter in visitation supervised by a therapist?

Next, a woman who was on jury duty told my son and me a horror story. After her 15-year-old son finished taking a shower, but while he was still in his underpants, his father began shouting at him and forced him to go outside in freezing weather and stand while holding onto a pole. Mother and father divorced. She took two children and moved to Oregon. Her ex-husband stayed in the state of Virginia with their other two children.

Then a father and daughter came out. The father had two partially healed black eyes. The daughter appeared to be a young adult. The father's ex-wife had taken their minor children from him, and he is unable to see them. Next, she hired a man to beat him, giving him two black eyes and breaking one eye socket, so that the socket now needs surgical repair. The prosecutor reduced charges against the ex-wife from a felony to 4th degree assault, which is a misdemeanor in the state of Oregon. The man felt that the attack was worthy of a felony. Since I don't know all the facts in this case, it is possible that the man did something that caused him to lose his children. Still, his ex-wife hiring a hit man to give her ex-husband two black eyes does not speak well of her character. Should such a person have exclusive custody of minor children, or should her parenting be observed and supervised by a therapist?

I must again emphasize that I do not know most of the facts in these three cases. What I do know is that I was unfairly kept away from my child, but although I won my legal case to be able to see her so thoroughly that the judge ordered my ex-husband to pay 90 percent of my attorney's fees, the process of going to court to regain contact with my daughter took a year and a half.

The legal system operates slowly, but children grow up quickly. We need legal protocols requiring families to work with specially trained therapists who can advise judges on family mental health and conflict-related issues without requiring parents to spend months or years navigating our court system.

Children need to be safe from abuse, but false accusations of abuse happen much more often in high-conflict child custody situations. Falsely accusing a co-parent of abuse is the easiest way to take a child away from a loving parent. At the same time, children need to be safe from abuse. All therapists are mandatory reporters. Moreover, parents who use coercive control on children and co-parents don't like taking orders from a therapist. They reveal themselves by their behavior.

 What I Learned About Child Custody Issues, Domestic Violence, and Child Abuse by Meeting and Working With Survivors, by Being a Survivor Myself, and by Meeting With Professionals Who Work For Agencies That Work With Survivors

by

Virginia Jones

Story Number One: I had the police called on me after I handed out articles on the clergy abuse scandal in my Catholic Church in 2002. The priest who baptized my children and me Catholic the year before had a long history of sexually abusing boys. He had been removed during the 2002 clergy abuse scandal. He had also groomed my then 5-year-old son and me in the months before he was removed. Being thrown out of my Catholic Church only strengthened my desire to advocate for clergy sex abuse survivors. I learned the skill of Compassionate Listening, taught by The Compassionate Listening Project, and taught a small number of interested Catholics the skill. Then I scheduled a private showing of a film about clergy abuse, and contacted an attorney, Kelly Clark, who represented survivors of clergy abuse, and invited him to send his survivors to the showing along with my small group of interested Catholics. Several survivors came. I also managed to secure coverage of this event from the local NPR station, so other survivors attended the showing as well. But one survivor was too fragile to come. Instead, I went to him. He struggled with drug addiction, emotional outbursts, and deep depression. His father was also an addict, and his family was chaotic, so, within a few years, the survivor ended up homeless, too.

Lesson Number One: Addiction, child sex abuse, mental illness, family chaos, and homelessness all go together.

Story Number Two: At a farmer’s market in the Willamette Valley on August 16, 2025, I met a woman selling produce who was a big fan of President Trump—an opinion I don’t share. The reason she liked President Trump was his tough stands on drug use and crime. She had been a homeless drug user and a criminal, and being arrested and put in prison was the best thing that ever happened to her. In prison, she received Dialectical Behavior Therapy, which helped her heal. She had become a criminal to support her drug habit. The reason she had a drug habit was to dull her pain. She had left home without finishing high school and had become a homeless street kid because her home life was simply awful. Her parents were drug and/or alcohol addicts..I don’t know which. Their “home” was chaotic.

The Dialectical Behavior Therapy this woman received in prison healed her. After she was released from jail, she attended Clackamas Community College and graduated with a degree in horticulture. She now works two jobs and is saving to buy a house.

Lesson Number Two: Many people in prison suffer traumatic childhoods.

Lesson Number Three: When survivors of abuse and other forms of childhood trauma receive proper mental health care, such as a course of Dialectical Behavior Therapy, they can recover.

Lesson Number Three Update: I just watched a YouTube video made by a therapist who works with people who have Borderline Personality Disorder. I learned that the majority of people diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder are actually people with chaotic childhoods that included instability, emotional abuse, neglect, parents with addictions, but not necessarily physical or sexual child abuse. So the experience of this woman is typical rather than unique. The best thing our society can do to prevent homelessness is to give everyone free or low-cost Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) or similar therapies, of which there are several, because good mental health prevents so many problems. The cost may be high initially, but in the long run, the problems of homelessness, addictions, abuse, divorce, and dysfunctional families will decrease.

Story Number Three: Also on August 16 at the Clackamas County Fair, my son and I met a teenage girl showing her sheep in a 4-H exhibition. She saw our t-shirts that read, “Coercive Control is Child Abuse,” on the front and, “It Should Be Illegal,” on the back, and told us her story. Her mother and stepfather not only smoked cigarettes and drank lots of alcohol, but they also tried to force her to smoke and drink too…after she complained about their bad habits. She asked her grandmother if she could live with her. The grandmother told her that she had to be a Christian. She decided that being Christian was healthier than being in a chaotic household. Her mother was reluctant to let her leave her household. I suspect there may have been a financial benefit to the mother for keeping her daughter in her household, but the girl did not disclose this information to me. The girl did disclose that she had to get Child Protective Services involved to get her mother to let her move to her grandmother's house.

Story Number Three: In Klamath Falls, I attended the Third Thursday event on August 21, 2025. I met with an advocate with the Klamath County CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates). She told me that only 10 to 20 percent of the children she worked with were victims of sexual or physical abuse. Most had parents who were drug and/or alcohol addicts and had other mental health issues. Their homes were chaotic.

Story Number Four: M was a child sex abuse survivor born to a child sex abuse survivor. Her mother struggled with addictions and abusive relationships, and although the two loved each other deeply, M's mother was often not there when she needed her. M married young and gave birth to four boys, whom she adored. Unfortunately, her husband was abusive. A neighbor called the police after her husband shot at M with his gun. During their divorce, she received custody of the four boys. They moved to the Oregon coast to be with M’s mother, and M went to work as a waitress while her sons attended the local school. This was around 25 years ago, when lawmakers were less aware of the effects of abuse and domestic violence. M’s ex-husband moved to a state less supportive of domestic violence victims than Oregon and filed for sole custody of his four boys. Then he went to the town where M lived, presented the court order for him to have custody of his four sons at the school, and returned to his new home state with them.

M did not have the resources to fight her ex-husband to have contact with her children. So she gave up and went into the dark hole of drug addiction. She ended up in prison for selling drugs. However, because M lived in NW Oregon, she received Dialectical Behavior Therapy in prison and recovered significantly from her traumatic childhood and adulthood. After prison, she married and gave birth to a little girl whom she doted on, making her tulle skirts and fairy princess dresses. As her sons turned 18, they started calling her. They did not understand why they had not seen her for so many years. When she told them what happened, they did not believe her. She later left her second husband because he, too, used drugs. She soon returned. She confided to me that she feared losing custody of her beloved young daughter. She struggled to support herself and her daughter without her husband’s construction worker income.

Story Number Six: On August 31, 2025, I went to the Lake County Fair in Lakeview, Oregon. I met a recruiter for the Oregon Department of Corrections. I congratulated him on the Oregon Department of Corrections' use of Dialectical Behavior Therapy because so many criminals suffered child abuse, and the therapy is able to heal the wounds of abuse and help the survivors become productive citizens. 

He replied, “I wish we had the resources to provide Dialectical Behavior Therapy. We don’t. Prisons on the western side of the state provide Dialectical Behavior Therapy with the help of university professors and their students.”

Story Number Seven: In Grants Pass on August 30th, I met a representative of an agency recruiting people to be foster parents. She confirmed what the CASA representative in Klamath Falls said—that only 10 to 20 percent of children removed from dysfunctional families are removed due to physical or sexual abuse. Most were removed due to parental drug and alcohol use, child emotional abuse, or other forms of parental dysfunction. She pleaded with parents to take mental health classes, but most declined. However, it is unclear to me if this was the foster parents or the biological parents of the children placed in foster care.

Story Number Eight—My Story: I am 66 years old as I write this. I was sexually abused by two teenage boys at age 4, while my mother sat on our living room couch, so depressed she did not know or care where I was. A few weeks later, she dropped my brother and me off at our day baby’s sitter's house with two paper bags of our clothes. She told us she was not coming back. That afternoon, I watched as all the other children’s parents came and picked them up, and my parents did not come.

I thought, “Other children have parents who want them. Why don’t my parents want me?”  

That night, I kept the babysitter’s family up, crying until she yelled at me to be quiet.

A couple of weeks later, my father’s aunt came to care for my brother and me, and we were able to come home. Unfortunately, my mother spent much of my early life in and out of psychiatric facilities. Later, after Governor Ronald Reagan closed down many psychiatric facilities, my mother stayed home and became an alcoholic. Fortunately for me, I was a good student, and my father paid for me to attend college. I initially worked in wildlife and fisheries, but permanent job opportunities were scarce, so I returned to college to become a registered nurse and worked as a psychiatric nurse. However, I struggled through many years of depression and anxiety. When I was 43, my cousin called me and told me that our aunt told her that our grandfather sexually abused all the girls in the family.

Later, I went through a child custody battle with my ex-husband. The incident that initiated the battle took place when my ex-husband’s girlfriend, who later became his second wife, forced our son, who has Asperger’s Syndrome, to lie on her bed and repeat her criticisms of me back to her. My son, who considers Asperger’s to be his superpower, because you can’t change his mind when he knows he’s right, refused.

Several years later, after doing this kind of thing to everyone around her, Dad’s second wife called my ex-husband stupid in front of our daughter and then said to her, “Isn’t your father stupid?”

My daughter replied, “Yes, my father is stupid.”

Later, when my daughter told me the story, she recalled that she repeated her stepmother’s criticisms partly because he father told her to do what her stepmother said and partly because she was afraid that her stepmother would start criticising her.

This form of abuse is now called coercive control.

My children and I went through almost a decade of coercive control by their dad and his second wife. They took my daughter from me and prevented me from seeing her. I had to go to court to see her, but the legal system operates very slowly, so 18 months passed before I regained regular contact with my daughter. By then, she had been diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder, which is a diagnosis common among survivors of chronic child sex abuse. The treatment of choice for Borderline Personality Disorder is Dialectical Behavior Therapy.

I won the child custody battle with my ex-husband to regain contact and partial custody of my daughter so thoroughly that our judge ordered my ex-husband to pay 90 percent of my attorney’s fees. I won because I had previously obtained court orders for our family to work with a therapist for our children and a parenting coordinator. The parenting coordinator testified for me in court. My daughter’s therapist was willing to testify for me, but after the coordinator's testimony, the judge's comments indicated that I had already won. I was the parent who usually escorted the children to therapy, and I was better at following their orders than my ex-husband. Unfortunately, this process took several years. During those years, my children were subjected to almost a decade of emotional abuse primarily by their stepmother. It also cost tens and tens of thousands of dollars, better spent on college educations for children than on lawyers for their parents. There are protocols for the physical and sexual abuse of children, but none for emotional abuse that often presents as coercive control.

Childhood trauma, whether it is physical or sexual abuse of children, coercive control, or simply parental addictions and dysfunction, can lead to serious mental illness, drug and alcohol addiction, and criminal behavior in children, such as my daughter’s Borderline Personality Disorder diagnosis. My son, who stayed with me, but who had to keep visiting his father and stepmother for many years, developed Irritable Bowel Syndrome, which is a stress-related disorder. Why is Coercive Control legal? Why are there no medical and legal protocols for coercive control concerning child custody?

I wrote a book, Losing My Daughter, Finding Myself: A Memoir and Workbook About Healing Childhood Trauma While Winning a Child Custody Battle, to help other parents going through high-conflict child custody battles. My family's parenting coordinator and my children’s therapist introduced me to Nonviolent Communication, which I found easier than the Effective Communication module in Dialectical Behavior Therapy. I also learned Compassionate Listening to be able to better listen to child sex abuse survivors, and it helped me better cope with my daughter’s prolonged emotional outbursts that are so characteristic of Borderline Personality Disorder. When I wrote my book, I didn’t think I could tell domestic violence survivors to listen compassionately to their emotionally abusive co-parents, so I adapted it to be effective or appropriate listening.

Story Number Nine J was a graduate student studying a social work-related subject at a university in Portland, Oregon. She had given birth to a baby girl several months before I met her and just before my husband took my daughter from my care. The father of J’s daughter had also taken her daughter from her and would not let her see the child. We commiserated as mothers who couldn't see the daughters we loved and missed. We also commiserated because our cases to see our children moved slowly through the devastatingly slow legal system. J was very familiar with Dialectical Behavior Therapy and meditated mindfully regularly, so I suspected that she was a child sex abuse survivor. She denied this. Because J was a graduate student in a field related to mental health, there were other ways she could have known about Dialectical Behavior Therapy. 

J and I both wanted to teach homeless community members mental health skills, but they declined. J still accompanied me when I handed out food and clothes to homeless people. Eventually, she asked me to testify on her behalf in a court case for her to have unsupervised visitation with her daughter. By then, I had occasion to meet the father of her child at least once. I found him hostile and abusive. When I testified in court, I was questioned by the court-appointed attorney representing J’s child. She had obviously spent considerable time talking with the father. The attorney focused on the mother having Borderline Personality Disorder. Because I am a former psychiatric nurse and because my daughter was also diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder, I was very familiar with the symptoms, which often include intense and prolonged emotional outbursts. I testified that I had only witnessed brief and mild emotional outbursts by the mother, after which she quickly reigned herself in. The child’s lawyer focused on the fact that she had outbursts at all, and the judge ruled against the mother having unsupervised contact with her child.

While I was waiting to testify at the trial, I met J’s mother, who told me what I had always suspected—that the father had sexually abused J when she was a minor. Unfortunately, she declined to press charges. My son later looked up the father online and found out that he had spent several years in prison for sexually abusing a different young girl after he sexually abused J. After he was released from prison, he went to stay with J and fathered their child. A few weeks after their baby was born, he left with the baby. He told the judge that J had thrown a book at him while he held the baby in his arms. J told me she threw a spiral-bound notebook at him, not a hardcover book. Apparently, the court-appointed lawyer for the child had not done as much research as my son and did not know the father had a record of sexually abusing minor girls. In France, judges investigate criminal cases. Perhaps we should adopt the French legal system. So why did J not tell the judge what the father of her daughter did to her and at least one other minor girl? Sometimes abuse victims develop paradoxical attachments to their abusers. Sexual abuse often includes acts of kindness, which are intended for seduction rather than as actual kindness. These acts are a form of coercive control.

Story Number Ten: I knew many domestic violence survivors were like the ones I had worked with and were often victims of some form of child abuse, AND did not have the resources for either lawyers or therapy, so I traveled the state giving copies of my book to domestic violence agencies in rural Oregon including Lakeview, Baker City, LaGrande, Hood River, Astoria, Tillamook, Dallas, Oregon City, and Florence. I asked some agencies how often they encountered survivors going through high-conflict child custody battles. In Coos Bay, they said it was once a week. The Florence agency said they encountered such survivors more than once a week. In Lakeview, which serves fewer survivors spread out over a much larger area, they reported encountering such survivors only about once a month. They added that survivors tended to be tight-lipped and usually made six or seven visits to the agency before leaving their abusive spouses.

Story Number Eleven: Newport, Oregon, doesn’t have a domestic violence agency anymore, so in May, I stood outside the county courthouse with signs saying, Coercive Control is Damaging Abuse, It Should Be Illegal. A young man approached me first and shared his story with me. He came from one of those chaotic homes with emotionally abusive parents absorbed in their own problems. He dropped out of school and became a homeless drug addict. I gave him a copy of my book and told him that I had a similar childhood, and that he could find healing. A deputy led him into court, but he never came out. My guess is that his judge sent him straight to jail. Then a man who was waiting for his wife, who was getting eviction papers for her dysfunctional tenants, told me his story. He and his wife lived in Portland, where his elderly father also lived in a separate house. When he found out that his father’s neighbor was a Registered Nurse, he encouraged her to look in on his father. Soon she took over his father’s life. She accused the son of abuse and took out a restraining order against him, preventing contact between father and son. The grey-haired son wept as he told me his story. How is this legal? After the man’s wife came out, she told me her story too. Her dysfunctional tenants were her adult children, who were using drugs and alcohol and neglecting their children. She had tried everything she knew to get them to be more responsible, but nothing worked. She was very worried about her teenage grandchildren, but did not know what to do.

Story Number Twelve: I was at a farmer’s market life event with my son in the Willamette Valley. I was wearing a blue t-shirt that read, “Emotional Abuse (Coercive Control) is Very Damaging,” and my son was wearing a pink sweatshirt that read, “High Conflict Divorce is Child Abuse.”

We stopped by a table selling crafts oriented towards children. Behind the table sat a woman in her thirties, an older, grey-haired woman, and three children ranging in ages between 5 and 12. 

As we examined the crafts, the woman in her thirties said to my son, “I like your sweatshirt.”

I asked her, “Are you going through this?”

“Yes,” said the woman.

“I wrote a book that might help you,” I said.

I pulled a copy of my book and gave it to her. She rolled it up and gave it to the grey-haired woman, who put it in her bag.

I then selected three craft pieces to buy, paid for them, and then my son and I left without asking any more questions. We understood that the woman needed to be quiet about her situation in front of her children.

Lesson Number Two: Parents with drug and alcohol addictions traumatize their children and often cause them to develop drug and alcohol addictions. Child sex abuse is strongly correlated with parental drug and alcohol addiction, even when the parent isn’t the abuser.

Lesson Number Three: Parental child custody battles are devastating for both children and parents, and can also cause mental health problems in children that are as serious as those caused by child sex abuse. These battles are also correlated with parental mental health problems.

Lesson Number Four: Effective mental health treatments are available for serious mental illnesses caused by child physical, sexual, and coercive control abuse. One of the most scientifically studied and validated in Dialectical Behavior Therapy, but other therapies are very helpful too. These include Nonviolent Communication and listening skills.

Question Number One: If coercive control can cause the same mental health disorder as chronic child sex abuse, why is it legal?

Question Number Two: Why do we have to go to court to get parenting coordinators and family therapists if our abusive co-parents don’t want to work with parenting coordinators and family therapists? Going to court takes a lot of time, and hiring a lawyer, if a parent can afford one, is very expensive. Therapists are expensive too, but not as expensive as lawyers. I spent far more money hiring a lawyer to be able to see my daughter than I spent paying a parenting coordinator and a therapist to help me and my children cope with my ex-husband’s and his second wife’s harassment of us. Why did I have to go through a protracted legal battle to see my daughter? Couldn’t a judge just automatically consult with the mental health professionals who worked with our family and order one? Shouldn’t laws be written to be in the best interests of the children? 

Question Number Three: Dialectical Behavior Therapy and Nonviolent Communication (NVC) already have decades of scientific studies validating their efficacy. Numerous studies have validated the importance of listening skills for mental health practitioners and parents of children. Can court orders for parents struggling with parenting and/or divorce custody battles to study and learn NVC, listening skills, and the skills taught in Dialectical Behavior Therapy be automatic? Better yet, why can’t learning these skills be required for people getting married or becoming parents, and if these parents separate and divorce? Why don’t we teach these skills in school to reduce bullying and help children cope with complicated home lives?

Solutions:

1. We need laws requiring teachers, parents, healthcare professionals, and maybe lawyers too, to learn and use mental health and healthy communication skills, such as Nonviolent Communication, listening skills, and the skills taught in Dialectical Behavior Therapy. These skills can be taught in public schools, in college, before marriage, before and after the birth of children, and before and after divorce.
2. Can domestic violence agencies help teach parents these skills? Can we fund parenting and healing skills classes taught by domestic violence agencies by taxing family practice attorneys and their clients 5% of attorneys’ fees and awards for attorneys’ fees, like the monetary award I received from my ex-husband when he sued me for custody of our daughter? How about adding taxes to the lawyers' fees paid by parents who bring frivolous lawsuits like my ex-husband? This money needs to be spent each year to help struggling families, rather than politicians building up reserves before implementing a policy, the way our current governor has done.
3. Our public schools are overwhelmed with mandates, but I believe that teaching children Nonviolent Communication, listening skills, and self-care skills, such as Mindfulness Meditation, may reduce bullying and other mental health issues experienced by children attending public schools. 
4. Why can’t our society also encourage religious institutions to offer free classes of religious practices that also heal trauma from both combat and the various forms of abuse, including Centering Prayer which I relied on after I converted to Catholicism, Buddhist (mindfulness) meditation, Tai Chi, Native American practices such as sacred dancing and the sweat lodge, both the secular and religious Hindu practices of yoga. All these practices have been studied and scientifically validated as healing

I have been a registered Democrat most of my adult life. Sometimes I feel as though some Democrats have an allergy to religion. I think Democrats need to become more open-minded on the issue. We must not force anyone to practice a religion. That freedom of conscience is guaranteed to us by our constitution. It is a sacred right. When religion is forced on people, it often alienates them from that religion. At the same time, many religious practices heal trauma. I personally find centering prayer easier than mindfulness meditation and use centering prayer instead of mindfulness. If we encourage people to choose a religious practice that heals in line with their pre-existing religious faith, they might be better at maintaining the practice.

Lesson Number Eleven: I recovered from many years of episodic depression after I won my child custody battle with my ex-husband. I spent so much time praying and learning multiple mental health skills that I healed myself without a therapist. I couldn’t afford a therapist while paying for lawyers for myself and for therapists for my children. So I am proof you can heal from serious childhood trauma without a therapist if you work hard learning mental health skills.

A New Way for Society to Cope with High Conflict Separating and Divorced Parents: Mandate Parenting Coordination and Family Systems Therapy Instead of Going to Court

Author's note: I wrote this blog in 2018. While I think mandating parenting coordinators and therapists to work with high-conflict divorced families, this only works if the families have enough money to pay for therapists and parenting coordinators. Most don't, so I think we should have mental health class mandates instead, while allowing high-income parents the option of working with private therapists and parenting coordinators.

People partnered in marriage sometimes separate and divorce because the thrill is gone. Sometimes they separate and divorce because they are in conflict.  Sometimes, both partners behave badly.  When partners are co-parents, their conflict hurts not only each other but also their children.  Fortunately, 75 percent of separating co-parents reduce conflict within two years after divorce and need no intervention.  The other 25 percent continue their conflict for a long time, sometimes indefinitely.  Four to fifteen percent engage in extreme conflict.  Some parents discover their children have been physically, sexually, or psychologically (now called coercive control) abused by their co-parent, but can’t prove it in court to the satisfaction of a judge.  Many domestic violence victims lose their children during divorce proceedings because nobody seems to realize that a parent who harms their co-parent is likely to harm their children, too.  Other times, one parent disrupts the relationship between their children and their loving and previously loved co-parent. These psychologically abusive parents also often make false accusations of physical, sexual, and psychological abuse against their co-parents. These problems are all made worse by the fact that the parent most able to afford an attorney is most likely to prevail in court.  In addition, judges make decisions based on available evidence and legal protocols.  But just because evidence is not available in a form that satisfies a judge, it doesn’t mean an accusation of abuse isn’t real.  Nor does it mean that an accusation of abuse isn’t false.  My divorced family experienced both false accusations of sexual, physical, and psychological abuse (now called coercive control) and real cases of coercive control that were documented but mostly ignored by healthcare professionals because their protocols don’t place coercive control on par with sexual and or physical abuse. 

How was coercive control expressed in my family? We went through almost a decade of it, but two examples stand out in my memory. When my son was 10 years old, his father's girlfriend, who later became his second wife, spent twenty minutes grilling him about me and trying to force him to repeat back to her her criticisms of me.

"Stop criticising my mother," my son said.

Nearly ten years later, my daughter, her father, and her stepmother were walking around Montreal, Canada, together. The stepmother placed my daughter's father in charge of navigating the streets of Montreal. My ex-husband is very intelligent, but navigation skills are not one of his gifts. After a while, they realized they had missed a turn they were supposed to take and turned around to find that turn. In the meantime, my ex-husband's second wife began berating him for being stupid.

Then she turned to my daughter and said, "Isn't your father stupid?"

My daughter hesitated because she did not want to call her very intelligent father "stupid."

"It's ok," her father admonished her, "Do what she says."

So my daughter said, "Yes, my father is stupid."

She later confided to me that she also said this because she feared that Stepmom would start criticizing her if she did not do what she was told.

Fortunately, I did not have to experience Stepmom's abuse at such a close range, but I think she pushed my ex-husband to take my daughter from my care. I had little contact with her for almost two years as the ever-so-slow legal system wound its way through court before reaching a judge's courtroom.

My ex-husband's legal papers accused both my son and me of abusing my daughter despite the fact that child protective services had found the accusations "unable to determine.

My daughter, in fact, had denied the accusations to the CPS social worker, who felt uncomfortable taking a position either supporting or opposing the truth of the accusations. The truth is, I had previously obtained court orders for our family to work with a court-ordered parenting time coordinator who was a forensic psychologist and a therapist for the children.  Moreover, I was usually the parent who took my children to therapy, while my ex-husband only rarely accompanied them. Abusive parents usually don't go to therapy with their children and follow the therapist's orders.

Fortunately, the judge heard testimony from both our Court-Ordered Parenting Time Coordinator and our daughter’s court-appointed attorney and saw Dad’s emails to me.  All indicated his behavior as a parent and co-parent, which I believe was not merely guided by but demanded of him by his second wife.  

My daughter's therapist was scheduled to testify, too, but before then, my attorney said that from the judge's comments, I had already won the case.

So how can we enable both therapists and judges to recognize the difference between real and false accusations of abuse? 

I know what to do because I prevailed in court against my ex-husband’s false accusations of physical, sexual, and psychological abuse of me and our son.  What I couldn’t do was protect my children from psychological abuse, now called coercive control, by their father and stepmother.  In this article, I outline first the problems experienced by our family and others.   Next, I outline solutions based on what worked and didn’t work for our family.

Problem One:  While both physical and sexual abuse are illegal, coercive control is legal.  Unfortunately, psychological abuse causes serious harm to both children and adults.  My ex-husband and his second wife subjected me, but even more importantly, both our son and daughter to serious psychological abuse.  My son suffered significant anxiety and ultimately was diagnosed with Irritable Bowel Syndrome, which is caused, in part, by stress.  My daughter developed Borderline Personality Disorder, which is common among adult survivors of child sex abuse.  Both my children developed their illnesses despite going through years of therapy.  These therapists did not have medical and legal protocols allowing them to intervene soon enough--the right way to help my children.

Problem Two:  Medical and legal protocols for therapeutic interventions by therapists and judges that affect child custody do not currently adequately recognize that parents who abuse their co-parent during cohabitation or after separation are also likely to abuse their children.  

Problem Three:  Whichever parent has the most money and can hire the best attorneys often prevails in court.  Domestic violence survivors are often stay-at-home mothers who cannot pay attorneys, although many fathers lack financial resources, too.  These parents must represent themselves in court, which is both challenging and time-consuming.  Legal codes are so complex that few parents can prevail against attorneys in court.  Moreover, legal procedures don’t always provide family court judges with the best information they need to rule.  I prevailed in court because I had just enough money for attorneys, therapists, and a Court-Ordered Parenting Time Coordinator. I also possessed excellent documentation and witnesses (therapists and the Coordinator) with years of experience working with my family. 

Problem Four:  In Oregon, at least, medical and legal protocols for therapists working in acute or subacute care settings do not require these professionals to communicate with therapists who have worked with an individual or a family previously, even if those personnel have many years of experience working with the individual or family in question.  Abusers can be charming over the short term.  Over the long term, they reveal their abusive tendencies.  In order to make good recommendations for an individual or family, particularly concerning child custody and visitation, therapists need medical and legal protocols that require them to have all the information possible from multiple sources so they make well-informed recommendations.  For example, therapy professionals who worked with my daughter during her short-term stays in psychiatric hospitals did not speak to our Court-Ordered Parenting Time Coordinator or the other therapists who had worked with our family for more than five years.  They recommended that our daughter go live with her father.  If they had communicated with our long-term therapists, they would have found out that Dad had a poor record of attending therapy with our children and that the therapists had observed him criticizing, interrupting, laughing at, and putting our son down.  In other words, Dad psychologically abused our son during therapy.  The hospital therapists made recommendations for our daughter without contacting these other therapists, despite the fact that I gave them written permission to do so.  Why did the hospital-based therapists not speak to our long-term therapists?  It was not in their protocol.

Problem Five:  Parents or their attorneys plead their case in court before a judge over a few hours or a few days when their conflict has been proceeding for years.  Somehow, a judge is supposed to know enough to rule. In order to properly evaluate what is happening in a family, a judge needs documentation of interpersonal interactions between different members of that family over as many years as possible.  Why?  Abusers can be charming over the short term.  Over the long term, they reveal their abusive tendencies.

Problem Six:  Every family experiencing intense conflict and either false or real accusations of abuse has many mental health problems.  People who perpetrate psychological, physical, and sexual abuse often have psychiatric diagnoses such as Borderline or Narcissistic Personality Disorder.  Both these disorders may have a genetic predisposition, but they are also often caused by trauma, including childhood physical, psychological, or sexual abuse.  People who suffer from these personality disorders resist therapy.  If patients with these disorders embrace therapy, they can get better.  If parents are required to work with therapists who reject therapy, this rejection provides evidence for Borderline or Narcissistic Personality Disorder that therapists may miss during limited interactions.  In addition, everyone else in the family has been abused and traumatized by the disordered parent and needs mental health support, too.

If a parent with Borderline or Narcissistic Personality Disorder gets better with therapy, this is good news. Having two loving and functional parents is the best possible outcome for all children, but how do we get there, and what can we do about abusive parents who behave badly and resist therapy? Would parents with one of these disorders be more likely to embrace therapy and recovery if threatened with the loss of their child and consequently paying more child support?  

Therapy also helps co-parents and children process the trauma of coping with a parent with Borderline or Narcissistic Personality Disorder and figure out how to cope.  

Problem Seven:  Both the government and families usually operate with limited financial resources.  Therapists are less expensive to work with than attorneys.  Specially trained therapists, such as Court-Ordered Parenting Time Coordinators and Family Systems Therapists, are better equipped than judges and attorneys to evaluate what is happening in a high-conflict family, supervise parents, and help everyone heal.  Moreover, the legal system works slowly.  I had to spend more than $65,000 on two legal cases in order to obtain a Court-Ordered Parenting Time Coordinator, Family Systems Therapy for my daughter and me, and visitation with my daughter.  That money could have been spent on all the coordination and therapy we needed several times over.  In addition, the two separate legal cases took  three and a half years to get the needed therapists in place, which greatly slowed healing. 

Problem Eight:  Currently, nobody pays attention to whether or not one of the co-parents harasses the other.  Communications and other interactions between co-parents provide evidence of who is more responsible for conflict and, potentially, child abuse in the family.  Moreover, problematic communications and parenting schedule issues place children in the middle of conflict between parents.  For example, my ex-husband made frequent schedule change requests and would not take no for an answer.  Conversely, when I made one of my rare schedule change requests, he turned it down, no matter how serious the reason for the request.   For example, when I broke my right elbow and had surgery on it, he waited until just after I got home from the hospital to request a schedule change for the upcoming weekend, and then he spent the next five weeks refusing my request to change my vacation date so I had enough time to recover to be able to drive before going on vacation.  In both cases, our Parenting Coordinator had to intervene on my behalf.

My ex-husband also frequently waited until the last moment, or even after the last moment, to respond to my emails regarding parenting time.  Sometimes he never answered my emails, or he communicated vital information at the last minute.    For example, when my ex-husband was stalled in a snowstorm 150 miles from our town, he did not bother to phone me until ten minutes before I was to pick up the children.  This was a problem because he insisted I pick up and drop off at a Starbucks located a thirty-minute drive from my home.  I was already there waiting for him and faced a choice of sitting there for two hours or making multiple trips back and forth between Starbucks and my home.  If this were a one-time event, this would be no big deal.  But this kind of problem happened routinely.  Perhaps the most egregious example of my ex-husband’s failure to communicate with me appropriately was the two times he failed to inform me he had taken our daughter to the emergency room after she attempted suicide.  Fortunately, our judge was appalled when she found out about this during the Parenting Time Coordinator’s testimony.  His testimony helped the judge rule in my favor.

In addition, Dad’s emails to me were emotionally abusive.  His answer to my question about parenting issues would be one sentence in a dense, three-page email filled with criticism and blame.  To find that answer, I had to comb through his emails carefully, taking notes to make sure I understood what he was saying to find that one critical sentence.

To truly resolve the problems posed by extreme conflict and both false and real accusations of abuse in separating and divorced families, we need to change how we handle divorce and child custody proceedings.  High-conflict families don’t need courtrooms; they need to learn therapeutic communication and stress reduction skills and work with therapists to learn how to better interact with each other.  Their cooperation or lack of cooperation with therapy provides documentation that either supports abuse accusations or evidence that perhaps the accusations are overstated or even false.  Ultimately, the goal is to nurture happy and healthy families.  Unhappy and unhealthy children and families are much more likely to experience drug and alcohol addiction, crime, and homelessness.  Below are my proposed solutions to the problems listed above.

1. Require romantic partners who wish to marry to take relationship and communication workshops on subjects such as Non-violent Communication, Compassionate Listening, mindfulness, distress tolerance, and emotion regulation skills from Dialectical Behavioral Therapy.  This will help people be better partners and parents.
2. Require separated and divorced couples to take refresher workshops on the same skills
3. Require the parents to communicate via a parenting website, such as Our Family Wizard, or via emails involving neutral third parties.  In emergencies, parents can communicate by text message followed by a phone call.  Inform parents that their communications with each other will be examined by third parties if one parent or the other reports problems.  Emails provide documentation of psychological abuse.  Is a parent reasonable, respectful, and cooperative with their co-parent, or do they criticize and blame their co-parent for problems and obstruct their parenting time?
4. If parents are struggling with conflict, give them precise guidelines for the content of their communications.  No non-child care issues can be discussed.  Emails need to be about parenting issues only.  Parents are to use Non-violent Communication format (I observe…, I feel…., I need…., and I request….) when bringing up issues with their co-parent.  Emails should contain no more than one issue and four sentences.  No more than two emails should be sent per day.  Answers to these emails should also be brief.  No criticism or blame is allowed in emails.
5. Number limits should be set on schedule changes in both emergency and non-emergency situations.  
6. If a parent says no twice with a reasonable reason to the same schedule change, then the co-parent must consult with the Parenting Coordinator before bringing it up again. 
7. Parents need to answer e-mails  about sensitive issues within 24 to 72 hours.  
8. Parents who come to pick up and drop off more than an hour late without an emergency should risk losing parenting time.  If they repeatedly come thirty minutes late to pick up and drop off their children for visitation, they should also risk losing parenting time.
9. Parents must also communicate about emergencies and schedule change requests promptly.  
10. If parents cannot follow the guidelines I have listed above or mediate their issues outside of court, instead of requiring them to file lawsuits, automatically appoint a Court Ordered Parenting Time Coordinator with a background in therapy to mediate parenting issues, and a Family Systems Therapist to help parents and children work on their relationships and an attorney to work with the therapists to convey the best interests of the children to a judge.  Family Systems Therapy recognizes that different family members affect the relationships between other family members and that dysfunction exists not just in the individual but in the interactions and relationships of the family as a whole.  The Family Systems therapist will relay what they observe and make recommendations to the Parenting Time Coordinator and the children’s attorney.  If a child resists family therapy, they can be assigned an individual therapist, but this therapist is always subservient to the other two therapists because they advocate for one individual and don’t know the stories of other family members.  In cases of abuse or extreme conflict behavior by one parent, a Parenting Coordinator can also make recommendations about child custody and child support to the children’s attorney, who will then convey their concerns and recommendations to the judge for court orders.  If one parent is substantially responsible for abusing their children and/or co-parent, they may have their parenting time reduced, supervised by the Family Systems Therapist, or eliminated.  They will also have their child support share increased to reflect the fact that they spend less time parenting their children.  
11. If the parent who has lost parenting time does not like the judge’s decisions, they can appeal to a judge, but they will be going against the recommendations of at least two therapists who have been working with the family over the long term.
12. Medical and legal protocols need to be developed for psychological abuse that are as binding as those for child sex and physical abuse for psychotherapy professionals and others who work with children and their parents.  
13. No medical or mental health professional should ever make a recommendation about child custody in a high-conflict divorced family without consulting with other therapists who have worked with the child and the family over the long term.  
14. If families cannot afford mental health classes and services, then the family should be charged sliding scale fees, and society should pay the rest. If we pay for police and prisons, why can’t we pay for prevention?   The costs of providing therapy and therapeutic skills workshops would be recouped in the long run.

These protocols are not meant to be a final solution to the problems posed by high-conflict families and psychological, physical, and sexual abuse within those families.  They are based on what worked for my family and what did not work, and what needs to be changed. I plan to travel he country speaking to domestic violence and child sex abuse advocates for their ideas and experiences working with wounded families.  I also want to invite mothers and fathers struggling with extreme post-separation and divorce conflict to share their stories and ideas with me. Please understand that I am one person working alone. I need help, and until that help comes, I cannot give anyone ongoing support, just limited, one-time support.  Please also know I am going to tell you the best way to cope without the laws being changed is what you can do on your own. Work with therapists and take their advice. And if you can’t afford therapy, then you can find books on Non-Violent Communication and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy at your local library or bookstore. Join a support group for these skills if you can.  If you can’t, use journaling to learn these skills on your own.