Be On Guard to Listen First or How to Cope With Toxic People

Sometimes even when we know what to do, we don’t know what to do in the moment.

I met a toxic person recently in a place where I thought I’d meet kind people — a progressive Christian group. It is the type of Christian group populated with kind-hearted, highly educated people with high incomes who are generous in helping people who appear to need money, but that’s another story.

After church services, people prepare snacks, including fresh fruit and raw, unsalted nuts, cookies or brownies, and coffee and tea. People sit at tables with chairs, which is probably pretty normal for most churches.

After services, I gathered with others to set up tables and chairs for people to gather and chat while they ate their snacks. I ended up sitting across from one of my favorite attendees—an older man who served time in prison after bombing a military recruitment center in the 1960s. He was serving a life term in prison when he realized he had used violence to protest against violence and that choice was wrong.

Other people soon joined us, including a mother of several children who came without a husband or father for her children.

I am not sure how we got on the subject of high-conflict divorce. She revealed that she had a court-ordered parenting coordinator to help her cope with the high-conflict father of her children. Her children were running around the church community space, eating snacks, playing, and sometimes seeking their mother’s attention.

I am not sure how the topic came up. My aging brain forgets details more easily than it used to.   I began talking about what I am doing—advocating for how to handle high-conflict divorce in a way that supports family mental health over courtroom battles. Children grow up quickly, and courtroom battles are expensive and time-consuming. For example, I had very limited contact with my daughter for over a year and a half after she chose to live with her father. The cost of paying an attorney to be able to obtain a court order to see her in therapy and then for mom/daughter dates was over $40,000. Most people don’t have $40,000 lying around to pay lawyers so they can have a relationship with their children. I didn’t either. Fortunately, my credit was good, so my credit card let me borrow the money, and my family’s court-ordered parenting coordinator testified on my behalf, which helped the judge award me 90% of my attorney’s fees.

The mother confided that she was going through a high-conflict post-divorce relationship with her children and that she too had a court-ordered parenting coordinator right now, as opposed to me having one fifteen years ago. She also revealed that she was studying to be a therapist.

I repeated this story and how I want to mandate mental health classes in Nonviolent Communication and the various modules from Dialectical Behavior Therapy, including Effective Communication, Mindfulness, Distress Tolerance, and the other one that I have forgotten.

I thought this other mother would be supportive, but she wasn’t.

“You can’t order people into therapy; it has to be voluntary.”

This is the consensus among therapy professionals, but I disagree. If you have to wait for a Narcissist to go to therapy and follow a therapist’s advice, you will be waiting until the universe ends in a Big Bang or a thin, grey soup, or however the universe is going to end.

At this point, if I had remembered all of my listening training, I would have said something like, “Tell me about your experiences.”

I decided to tell her that I had been a psychiatric nurse, hoping she would have more respect and appreciation for my knowledge.

She replied, “You were the person who gave out the meds.”

Meds is short for medications.

“Yes, I said, I was the person who gave out the meds.

I should have added a few stories that illustrated that giving out meds was not all I did.

For example, we admitted a teenage girl from an immigrant family who had been sexually abused by her father for several years. After she reported his abuse of her, she was placed in a foster family where she proceeded to sexually abuse other children.

What happened to her is called imprinting. She had learned the behavior of sexual abuse because she had been sexually abused.

The result was that she was constantly suicidal. She could never be left alone. One night I had to sit perfectly still in her darkened room while she attempted to sleep. Tears come to my eyes writing this. I wanted to hug her and tell her that everything would be alright, except you cannot hug a child in a psychiatric ward, especially one who has been sexually abused. Nor will everything be alright because sexual abuse doesn’t only damage the body; it damages the Brain and causes Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and, sometimes, Borderline Personality Disorder or, at least, chronic depression.

Oh, and I also led a few support groups where people could talk about their day or their thoughts or feelings or concerns. And I was the nurse who went in to talk to patients who had become violent and were restrained.

Maybe sending in a pregnant woman (me at the time) into the rooms where violent patients were restrained wasn’t the safest idea for the baby with whom I was pregnant at the time. On the other hand, even the violent patients were inclined to want to care for my baby and me. I never had problems with a patient becoming violent with me.

I could have told the woman all this since she seemed to disrespect my knowledge of mental health.

Instead, I tried to argue sense into her, and what I said is true, but she had heard from her professors with PhD’s in psychology or social work that you cannot and must not even try to force people into therapy.

So I tried to explain my experiences with obtaining the court-ordered parenting coordinator and therapy. I took the children to therapy every other week and followed the therapist’s advice. My ex-husband took the children to therapy twice a year and argued with them and the parenting coordinator whenever he disagreed with their instructions, and he often disagreed with the coordinator’s instructions.

The other mother told me I was interrupting her, so I sat silently and listened, then explained that when a parent resists going to therapy and following a therapist’s orders, it shows they are not willing to work to improve their parenting and co-parenting skills.

This was not what the woman had heard from her professors, and she repeated that therapy, even Nonviolent Communication classes, had to be voluntary,

So I explained I had worked with two female survivors who had lost their children to the men who abused them. They were low-income, so they could not afford therapy or lawyers. Because therapy is expensive, I don’t think I could persuade legislators to pass a bill to give everyone getting a divorce free therapy. Nor do I think we could mandate parents who can’t afford lawyers to use non-existent income to pay for therapists. The cheapest way to help parents who can afford therapists or lawyers is to teach all parents mental health skills such as Nonviolent Communication, mindfulness, and similar skills, and the other modules in Dialectical Behavior Therapy such as Distress Tolerance, Effective Communication, and Emotion Regulation. If you don’t know what Dialectical Behavior Therapy or Nonviolent Communication is, you should find resources on sets of therapeutic skills online and in bookstores and libraries.

The mother studying to be a therapist repeated that you can’t force people into therapy.

Probably the best thing I could have done was to ask her to tell me more and then think, as I listened to her, about where I could add something that might help her understand my position.

Instead, I walked out. Honestly, I felt mistreated and disrespected. I think this woman is probably significantly responsible for her co-parenting problems with her ex-husband.

I have only been going to this church for three months. I decided to try a progressive Catholic Church with a good reputation closer to my home. Maybe it will work out better. Maybe it won’t…because after all, I am the kind of person willing to hand out articles on clergy abuse even if the church calls the police to remove me.

But thinking back on the incident, I still think my best response to this woman who put me down was to listen more and talk less.