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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
