How to Heal: A Workbook for Survivors by a Survivor Plus Tips for Documenting Abuse

by. V. Jones

This is the title of my book, available for purchase at https://www.amazon.com/How-Heal-Workbook-Survivors-Documenting/dp/B0GMQBP8R8.

    Last year, I traveled around Oregon to promote my first book, which included a workbook and stories of my childhood trauma and the things that went right in my life. For example, I worked in wildlife and fisheries, which helped me gain self-confidence. Then I studied to become a Registered Nurse and became a psychiatric nurse. I also wrote about my marriage and divorce, and the child custody battle that followed. I won that battle so thoroughly that the judge ordered my ex-husband to pay 90% of my attorney's fees. My life's story is very interesting, in part because I worked as a Foreign Fisheries Observer on Soviet, Japanese, and Polish fishing vessels in the 1980s. 

    Although I think my life story is interesting, I found people were mostly interested in a workbook for survivors by a survivor. So I cut most of my life story, leaving in only a few stories that illustrated important points I wanted people to understand, such as what coercive control is and how it manifests as child abuse.

    During my trip around Oregon last year, I met so many survivors of coercive control that I came to feel that coercive control is damaging enough that it needs laws to help families, particularly divorcing and separating families, to cope with coercive control. Specifically, I stood by county circuit courts, and people would come out crying because they lost custody of or parenting time with their children.

    Some of those parents may be abusive, but most likely, they had imperfect parents and learned imperfect parenting skills. Others may have had wounds from childhood trauma. That sounds like both my ex-husband and me, as well as his second wife. My ex-husband is a good person who went through considerable childhood trauma, but did not fully heal. I healed from my childhood trauma in the most unusual way--by going through more trauma. 

    My ex-husband's second wife did not want him paying me child support. She wanted to have custody of both our children so I would pay them child support. Please understand, I have a very valid objection to this. My father died and left me a couple of hundred thousand dollars after I married my husband. The first thing I did with that money was to pay off my ex-husband's loans from college and graduate school. I naively thought we were happily married and did not demand that he sign legal documents to repay me the money I had given him.

    My ex-husband and his second wife succeeded in taking our daughter from me, but they could not take our son on the autism spectrum from me. I stayed home to homeschool my autistic son until a therapist gave him the right diagnosis. Only with the right diagnosis could he receive help in school. This took a few years. By the time my son was diagnosed, my ex-husband and, particularly, his second wife had subjected both our children and me to lots of coercive control and harassment. I probably would have gone back to work if my ex-husband's second wife had left well enough alone, but she kept trying to take my children from me by criticizing me.

    One day, while my son was visiting his father, who was at work, his girlfriend tried to force him to look her in the eyes and repeat back her criticisms of me.

    "Stop criticizing my mom," my son said.

    People on the Autism spectrum feel stress more easily and more strongly than most people not on the spectrum. If my ex-husband's girlfriend wanted my son to leave my care, she did exactly the opposite of what she needed to do. If she wanted sole custody of him, she should have found out what he enjoyed and done more of that. Instead of doing something constructive, she doubled down on coercive control of the whole family.

    I had to fight for my kids' well-being. I could not approve of them spending more time in their stepmother's care. So I obtained court orders for my ex-husband and me to work with a court-ordered parenting time coordinator and therapists for our children. Then I did what these therapists told me to do. I was imperfect and made many mistakes, but I did enough that was right that, in the long run, our family's therapists felt the children felt safer with me. This article leaves out about 99 percent of the story, which could and did fill a book.

    The short story is that I focused so much on my family's mental health that I ended up healing myself. I needed to learn skills such as Nonviolent Communication, Compassionate Listening, the value of journaling, and, finally, mindfulness and similar practices such as yoga and centering prayer that I learned when I converted to Catholicism. Truthfully, I relied on centering prayer. I was too stressed much of the time to use mindfulness. My thoughts would wander to all the bad things going on in my life. 

    Centering prayer is now taught as focusing on a single word, such as "peace," but when I converted to Catholicism, I learned it as a brief phrase, such as "God have mercy on me."

    I changed that to, "Please God, help me be strong."

    Many a sleepless night during the years my ex-husband and his soon-to-be second wife fought me for custody of our children, I fell asleep praying that prayer over and over.

    Although I think my personal story is very interesting, you can skip it and just learn the skills you need to be mentally healthy by buying my second book--How to Heal.... It would be best to work with a therapist as well as work on my workbook, but if you can't afford therapy, my workbook is much better than doing nothing.

    However, in the meantime, I want to pass a law to require counties to teach parents, especially divorcing and separated parents, skills such as Nonviolent Communication, listening skills, journaling for both documentation purposes and healing, and trauma healing skills such as mindfulness, yoga, or centering prayer, which can be taught for free by churches. Parents should also be required to communicate through a parenting app or email so therapists and social workers can monitor their communication skills. Are they mistreating their co-parent, or are they communicating appropriately? If there is a problem, the therapist or social worker can make a recommendation to a judge to change child custody arrangements and child support. I think parents are more likely to embrace mental health and communication skills if there is a monetary value attached.

@ Virginia Pickles Jones