In Her Father's Tribe--A Story About Emotional Abuse Now Called Coercive Control

Social Scientists noticed that people feel good when they hear their religious and political views praised and angry when they hear facts that disprove their beliefs. We humans are like this because when our ancestors walked the earth as hunter/gatherers, they needed the protection of a tribe for survival in the wild, with mountain lions and wolves and African lions and hyenas or elephants and tigers. Unfortunately, in the modern world, tribal thinking causes racial discrimination, wars, ethnic tensions, and conflict in divorced families.

My children’s father and I co-parented well when we first divorced. Then he married a very controlling woman who divided our family into tribes.

In my tribe, we called my daughter’s father every night because when my parents divorced, I lived with my mother, but my relationship with my father was important to me.

In my tribe, I wrote letters to the teachers to make sure they gave all school information to my daughter’s father and not just to me, her mother and custodial parent.

In my tribe, I cared for the children when their father could not take them because he was too busy. 

In my tribe, we scrimped and saved so that I, mom, could stay home to homeschool my son on the autism spectrum, but also so I could cook dinner with the children and read books to them at home every night at bedtime. 

In my tribe, we went camping and picnicking and hiking up streams through fern-filled gorges.

In my tribe, we spent long summer afternoons playing on ocean beaches.

In my tribe, we scrimped and saved and bought clothes at Goodwill.

In my tribe, we shared cell phones to save on bills.

In my tribe, we spent our saved money on swimming, horseback riding, guitar lessons, acting lessons, and Brownies troop dues.

In my tribe, we toasted marshmallows in the fireplace while we watched movies on the DVD player (because it was almost 20 years ago).

In my tribe, we went on mother daughter dates to Barnes and Noble cafe and read books while we sipped Frapuccinos.

In my tribe, we drove to Los Angeles to visit my aunt, and along the way we visited the Redwoods, San Francisco, Monterey, and the Giant Sequoias.

In my tribe, I took my children to therapy every other week to talk about the pain and problems in their lives and paid out of pocket because Dad, who had insurance, would not ask for authorization for payment for a therapist. 

In my tribe, my daughter wrote a beautiful Mother’s Day poem for me in 2009, and made pictures and art and diary entries declaring her love for me and expressing what a wonderful mother I am. 

In her father’s tribe, my daughter was given Tomagachis, DSs, and iPods. 

In her father’s tribe, they bought my daughter dresses and shoes from Nordstroms.

In her father’s tribe, they took trips to Montreal and stayed in Airbnbs.

In her father’s tribe, my daughter was told that it was hurtful to your father if you criticized your father to the therapist, so beginning in the spring of 2008, my daughter didn’t talk about her father to the therapist even when she was angry at him.

In her father’s tribe, it was right and good to criticize your mother in therapy.

In her father’s tribe, I, her mother, am the enemy.

In her father’s tribe, I, her mother, am to blame for all problems.

In her father’s tribe, I, her mother, caused her to become suicidal when I attended a school event she invited me to.  So I could not attend her school events anymore. 

In her father’s tribe, I, her mother, abused her and caused her to have nightmares and become anxious and depressed.

In her father’s tribe, the story is that I bit her while driving and left a bite mark on her shoulder, but somehow her father took three weeks to return the repeated phone calls from the Child Protective Services investigator asking to interview her. When interviewed, she confesses to the CPS investigator that the mark is just a scratch mark I left when I grabbed her by her sundress strap to keep her from jumping out of a moving car.  But as the years pass, she hears her father’s story so many times that she starts repeating his story.  While driving, I bit her and left a bite mark on her shoulder while not crashing the car.

In her father’s tribe, I, her mother, caused her to become suicidal when I took the computer away from her after she did not do schoolwork or chores during seven hours of computer access.

In her father’s tribe, when I, her mother, bring a support person to a supervised Mom/daughter date because I, her Mom, don’t want to be falsely accused of wrongdoing, I am actually bringing someone to spy on my daughter.

In her father’s tribe, I, her mother, traumatize her if I write to a teacher to ask them to understand my daughter’s lack of access to the internet at her father’s house and her resulting failure to complete school assignments.

In her father’s tribe, it is acceptable and appropriate for me, her mother, to never be able to spend time with her on my birthday.

In her father’s tribe, it is so stressful for her to see me, her mother, in family therapy that we can’t meet in family therapy to heal the wounds between us.

In her father’s tribe, it is right and good for her to refuse to see me, her mother, at all for months and years.

In her father’s tribe, it is right for her father to take the phone jack out of the wall so she cannot call me, her mother, in private when she wants to, but if my daughter tells this incident to the therapist, this would harm her father, so she cannot tell the therapist that her father removed her landline phone and jack from her room and, thus, cannot call me, her mother, privately.

In her father’s tribe, they did not call me the night my daughter tried to kill herself by hanging herself from a rafter in the garage. They also told Emergency Room personnel because they said I, her mother, had caused her to become suicidal, although I had no contact with her for the preceding three months.

In her father’s tribe, I, her mother, rarely saw her or spoke to my daughter for 18 months until a judge ordered her father to facilitate family therapy and contact between us based on the testimony of our Court-Ordered Parenting Time Coordinator.

At the court-ordered reunification therapist’s tribal office, my daughter remembered loving me and having fun with me.

In our tribe, we had fun together for 2 and 1/2 years going to the coast to walk on beaches and try gourmet cheeses. We had fun together sitting in Barnes and Noble cafe while she did her school work on my computer. We had fun making dinner together when she slept over at my house. We had fun visiting the zoo together, watching wolves and feeding hummingbirds. We had fun walking through trendy neighborhoods with goats, gardens, and Bernie supporters. We had fun going to food truck courts together and trying Peruvian, Cambodian, and Scandinavian food, Japanese curry, and Okonomiyaki.

In her father’s tribe, she was punished for obeying the judge’s orders that she have visits with me, her mother. In her father’s tribe, her father and stepmother limited her access to wifi and her ability to do schoolwork. 

In her father’s tribe, her father and stepmother criticized and blamed me, her mother, for family problems when her daughter sent me text messages in her rare moments of wifi access, begging for me to take her, which I, her mother, could not, because she was in her father’s custody per court order.

In my tribe, I, her mother, dutifully took her to see her therapist every other week and then to family therapy for both of us together the remaining weeks.

In her own tribe, she cried and screamed and accused me of wrongdoing during an entire therapy session when the family therapist tried to teach us Nonviolent Communication. The therapist told me, “She has Borderline Personality Disorder,” just before she fired us as clients.  

In the therapist’s tribe, the therapist confided that we were the most difficult family she ever worked with.

In the therapists’ tribe, my daughter did the same thing with the next family therapist, who also told me that she had Borderline Personality Disorder.

In the tribe of child sex abuse and physical abuse survivors, many have Borderline Personality Disorder because survivors learn their relationship skills while living in the tribes of abusers, so survivors learn to survive by lying to an abusive parent who will never interact with them respectfully or honestly.

In her father’s tribe, when she neared 18, her father and stepmother cut off her access to wifi and caused her to start failing her classes in school.

In her father’s tribe, they criticized her, blamed her for all the family's problems, and didn’t even share the food with her when she made dinner.

In her father’s tribe, when she neared 18, they called me, her mother, the night she tried to kill herself by taking too many of her antidepressant pills, but they did not come to the Emergency Room to support her.

In her father’s tribe, as she neared 18, they went to Europe while she sat in the psychiatric hospital losing weight because she didn’t like the hospital food, while I, her mother, drove thirty miles from a different city and brought food from Whole Foods twice a week to feed her something she liked to eat.

In my daughter’s tribe, after she turned 18, I became an abusive, mentally unstable, religious nut with an undocumented arrest record that I cannot remember.

In my tribe, I lost a child I cannot grieve for in public because she is not dead.  

In my tribe, I grieve the loss of my daughter alone because the Protective Mothers believe I must be guilty of abuse because Dad and Stepmom accused me of abuse, and the Parental Alienation people ally with Father’s Rights people and believe that all custody arrangements should be fifty-fifty.

In my lonely cave with no tribe, all by myself, I don’t think child custody laws should place a child with coercively controlling parents fifty percent of the time.

In my tribe, I think laws should require all divorcing parents to learn mental health skills such as Nonviolent Communication, Mindfulness, Distress Tolerance, and Emotional Regulation from Dialectical Behavior Therapy.

In my tribe, all parents should be required to communicate via a parental app or email so therapists and judges can examine which parent is working harder to be the better parent and co-parent.

In my tribe, children deserve loving and healthy parents who respect each other and put their child’s well-being above their egos.