Documenting Child Custody Battles and Abuse

 I went through a high-conflict child custody battle that included false accusations of abuse and other wrongdoing made by my ex-husband against me; I won despite the accusations. How?

I obtained the best documentation I could to cope with false accusations of abuse—a therapist for my children and a court-ordered Parenting Time Coordinator for my ex-husband and me. My ex-husband resisted obtaining a coordinator and using his health insurance to pay for my children to be in therapy, so I had to pay for our children’s therapist out of pocket while I waited for our court-ordered mediation to fail so the case could be heard by a judge. My ex-husband had found the therapist, but he rarely took our children to therapy and, even more rarely, went to therapy with them and the therapist. 

Guess which parent the therapist testified in support of?

Me, obviously.

What do you do when you can’t afford therapy?

Well, you do what a therapist would advise you to do.

What would a therapist advise you to do?

Therapists all have to take continuing education classes. Parents do not, so a therapist can give you the most up-to-date advice. I can tell you what worked for me twelve or more years ago. However, I doubt there has been so much change that my advice won’t be worth following.

The kind of skills a therapist would advise you to learn include Nonviolent Communication (NVC) and the skills taught in Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), which include Distress Tolerance, Emotion Regulation, Mindfulness, and Effective Communication. 

Effective Communication is similar to NVC, although I find Nonviolent Communication easier to use. However, both NVC and Effective Communication are valuable to learn because they teach similar skills from slightly different perspectives. Although you can buy books, check books out of libraries, or watch YouTube videos on both skills, the best way to learn the skills is to take a workshop, class, or module facilitated by someone trained and certified to teach the skill. I learned about both NVC and the various modules in DBT from both books and YouTube videos.

I also learned another skill, Compassionate Listening, to listen to survivors of Catholic clergy abuse in my Catholic Church group. Before, Catholic clergy abuse survivors were treated very poorly by other parishioners as well as by church personnel such as priests, nuns, and lay employees; they were very angry. You must not try to argue with such wounded people, but if you listen to them and try to express compassion for their experiences, you can sometimes provide them with enough emotional support for them to feel better, at least right here and right now. 

I tried using Compassionate Listening with my daughter. It did not work so well. There are two reasons why. The first reason was not my fault.

When my daughter was thirteen, she went to live with her father, stepmother, and stepsister. Almost immediately, my contact with her went to zero.

I suspect that my daughter’s stepmother coached her own daughter to coach my daughter into blaming me for family problems and making false accusations of abuse against her brother and me. My daughter hated her stepmother and probably would not have done what she told her to do, but she loved her stepsister. Although they sometimes fought with each other, my daughter’s stepsister, not her father, was the person who spent the most time with her. When my daughter missed a family meal, her stepsister sometimes made food and shared it with her.

Another night, my daughter had a fight with her stepmother, and her stepmother told her to leave the house in the middle of the night. So my daughter left. It was my daughter’s sister, not her father, who ran after her and brought her back home.

So if my daughter’s stepsister criticized me, my daughter listened.

        She learned from her stepsister to hate me and blame me for all her problems. Except my daughter also secretly loved me. After we were reunited by court order, when my daughter and I went to therapy, my daughter would spend the entire session criticizing me. Honestly, family therapy with my daughter and her personal therapist was traumatic. I remembered events very differently, but the therapist was my daughter’s therapist. I wasn’t allowed to share my side of the story,

In our reunification therapy, I would try Nonviolent Communication, but my efforts only resulted in my daughter going on a tirade. Our reunification therapist, however, praised my skill. Since I had not had formal training in NVC, maybe I was not sufficiently non-judgmental for my daughter to feel comfortable with what I said. Or did her stepsister coach her to go on an angry tirade at me during therapy?

I felt scared that my mom/daughter date schedule to take place after therapy would be filled with conflict, but as soon as we walked out of the therapist’s office, my daughter was loving and kind and remained that way until I returned her to her father’s home.

What do you do in a situation like that?

When we had the parenting coordinator, my ex-husband would have sent a three-page email criticizing me and blaming me for upsetting our daughter. I normally sent a very diplomatic response that was also three pages long.

These long emails from my ex-husband and me frustrated our court-ordered parenting time coordinator, but he testified for me because I was diplomatic.

So you want to do what I did. Communicate your situation and what you want to happen in five to ten sentences. If you need more space to tell your story, try to keep it to one page.

Taking classes, workshops, or modules taught by professionally trained facilitators is the best way to learn skills such as Nonviolent Communication or Dialectical Behavior Therapy. If you can’t afford these classes or modules, find every book you can in a local library or bookstore and/or watch every video you can find on the internet, and journal all your conflict-filled experiences not only with a co-parent or children but also with bosses, co-workers, and friends. Practice, practice, practice.

And ask the judge presiding over your case for court orders for you and your co-parent to communicate about your children via email or a parenting app. If you learn and use healthy communication skills, you may be able to use your communications as documentation to support your side in any court case presided over by a judge.