Just Like His Father? Is nearly four years old now and my own son is nearly eight. At the time the book was released, scientists were still engaged in the genetics versus environment debate regarding the development of antisocial behavior. That debate is now over and every authority accepts that antisocial behavior and antisocial personality traits develop due to a gene-environment interaction. I am working on revising the book because now some specific genes have been identified.
Thankfully, I have not had to cope with the toxic environment a sociopath/psychopath creates for their offspring. Just Like His Father? doesn’t really grapple with that issue other than to encourage people to consider that the child may be better off with only one parent. At time the book was written, my thinking was based on two false premises. The first falsehood, I was taught in residency, “antisocial individuals abandon their young” has turned out to be perhaps the biggest problem at-risk children face. Antisocial individuals do not necessarily abandon their young, but they do abuse them and use them as pawns to damage other people and they also use them in their cons.
Four years ago, I naively believed that the family courts would naturally dictate that sociopaths/ psychopaths should be kept from harming their children. This second premise has also turned out to be false and is the basis for the nightmare many people I now count as friends are living.
It follows that in addition to teaching the material in the book and workbook, to save at-risk children we also have to take on the system-hopefully by working together. The system is composed of mental health professionals who really do not understand antisocial personality disorder let alone the meaning of psychopathic personality traits to parenting. It is also composed of Judges who want to make the tough decisions easy by giving themselves judicial sound bites to go by. Here is the official mantra of the state of New York Family Court:
“Visitation by a noncustodial parent is presumed to be in the child’s best interest and should be denied only in exceptional situations, such as where substantial evidence reveals that visitation would be detrimental to the welfare of the child.”
The important words there are “substantial evidence.” Just what constitutes substantial evidence? I am working on researching the answer to that question and have access to an extensive online law library through the university where I teach.
I am preparing a generic document that people can use as a resource regarding the harmful effects of parenting by antisocial individuals and emotional and verbal abuse on children. Some recent research shows that the developmental damage done by emotional and verbal abuse is as severe as that due to physical and sexual abuse.
But we really have to change the legal mantra. Given what we know of genetic risk, we have to not only protect at-risk children from abuse, we have to provide them with an enriching, nurturing environment to prevent the intergenerational spread of disorder. The new mantra should be:
“In cases where one parent has antisocial personality disorder (psychopathy) the child deserves the best upbringing the least disordered parent can provide.”
AND
“The least disordered parent has a right to live life free of the sociopath/psychopath they were conned by.”
Setting the least disordered parent free facilitates his/her mental health and contributes to the well-being of the child.
Here is what you can do to join this effort:
- If you went through a custody/visitation battle and your children are old enough for you to comment on how the battle and the sociopath affected them please write me. I am especially interested in talking with offspring over 18 about their perspectives.
- If you have an ongoing situation you are willing to share please write. Recently, people from Alabama and New York asked me for help so I compiled the case law for those states. The goal is to compile the case law for every state then make the info available on the web.
- If you want to volunteer to read the case law and help me organize it, I’ll put you to work right away.
- If you are an attorney or legal assistant who wants to help please let me know.
- If you have political connections, we need you.
I am looking to form a committee of workers committed to this cause.
Last but not least, I regret the title of my book because it suggests gender. The title merely reflects my own personal experience. This is NOT about gender or fatherhood versus motherhood. Normal men love and nurture their children and I do not dispute that children need that love and nurturing. This is about a psychiatric disorder for which there is no proven treatment, antisocial personality disorder/ psychopathy.
We are working to save the most vulnerable of all children from abuse, neglect and disorder. We are advocating for those children who carry genetic risk for antisocial personality disorder and who have a mother or father who is not capable of loving and nurturing them.
Contact Dr. Liane Leedom at drleedom@lovefraud.com.
Holy moly- these stories are so familiar to me. I just finished almost 8 years in family court and we ended up with 50/50 custody and I owe him child support because he owns his business, therefor can hide his money.
We have had 2 730 evaluations done by a court appointed psycholigist who recommended I have full custody and which showed results of my ex to have the charactersitics of Antisocial Personality Disorder, which is the actual diagnosis of psychopath. The Judge went against the recommendation.
Our daughters had 2 court appointed attorney’s, one who recommended that I have full custody, because she tried to work with him, but couldn’t. Found out when she changed her mind, she was sleeping with his attorney. The next court appointed attorney turned everything back onto me, I was the jilted ex wife. She said straight to my face, “It is OK that your ex and his wife hit each other, as long as he does not hit the girls.” This from a court appointed attorney to protect my girls. I guess the only abuse is pysical.
The one comment I hear throughout court is they don’t care what happens to the parents in the case, they just worry about the kids. The courts give permission to the psychopath to continue the abuse after the divorce. I had over 500 harrassing emails from my ex, but because he did not threaten to kill me, only say things like I was no better than a drug addict, or that I will one day commit suicide, the courts did nothing to him. I was abused in our marriage and the courts allow the abuse to continue even after I got myself out of the abusive situation to safe and healthy and o protect my daughters from the same abuse.
The courts confuse money and control as love from their dad to our kids. Of course he is active in their school and extra cirricular activities, this gives him the recognition that he needs and the way to make sure their mother is unable to be a part because he controls their activities, does not tell me when they have special shows or presentations, thenk you 50/50 visitation, this gives the psychopath the ability to cut you out 14 days a month to brain wash and abuse our children.
Sorry, this is a touchy subject for me and today a little more sensitive, we have a court order for nightly phone calls with our childre, he says they will be out of service for 5 days so I will not be able t talk with them. That is a lie, but what consequences does he receive?
Is there anything that I can do to help with this cause, let me know.
WhoamI:
YOU GO!
I did the same thing…..backspathed em! Your right….they’ve got us pegged as their victims……groomed for years…..played the role very well thank you!
UNTIL….I figured it out……and educated myself.
I took the ‘high’ road……and fought him on that same ‘High’ road…..but called on my inner sociopath and learned to think like a spath……and backspathed him.
He too …..NEVER saw it coming!
My kids want nothing to do with their father either……it’s been 2.5 years.
From what I’ve learned in the past few years……it’s the ONLY way to play the court ‘game’ with them…..to expose their behaviors and pull out all the spath stops.
Was that a book by Ann Bradley? That was the only book I found in regards to the topic in a court environment.
I think it would be a valuable asset if you could share that book with us!
We get support emotionally…..but very little legal support.
I highly recommend doing our own homeword in the legal sysltem and find out all there is to know about the divorce process in your state! EVERYTHING!
The more knowledge…..the more power!!!!
Congratulations on y0our success…..and I hope you have some peace now!!!!
My hat is off to you!!!!!
Castle- you are amazing. I am at work and also receive these emails and have been reading the blogs for years now and never participating until now. Your story is exactly mine and I am so glad that someone has said everything so elequently. You talked about the abuse you don’t see, the punishment we receive if we do not do what they want us to do, the fact that the courts make us “work” with that man who has abused us, raped us for years, the feeling that we are going mad because they can pick, pick, pick behind the scenes while no one is watching him and we blow up u=in public because we were taken past our breaking point and we look out of control. People do not see what goes on behind the scenes, they see what the psychopath shows them so they can get what they want.
Castle, you wrote a wonderful, descriptive, detailed and accurate account of how it is to be married and divorced from this horrible person, I like to describe him as close to satan as you can get here on earth. I too am suppotive and willing to do what is needed in this situation o help those that have been in this situation, not only for our precious kids but also for those that have been abused by these psychopath’s.
Castle:
You sound like a CRUSADER girlfriend!!!!!
You WILL make it through this…and your kids WILL be okay!!!!
I agree with everything you wrote. We must remember, we at LF are all in different stages of ‘mess’ and cleanup…..from the spaths. We also are not all victims of a romantic spath….but some are boss’s and some spaths are our children……
As you have lived the evolution…..it is a necessary part of the path. I too feel empowered to make a difference, this is what I’ve told Donna all along…..
I am finally finding some peace…..this past few days…..and it’s a ‘new’ feeling for me.
I’m sure spath will rear his ugly head again…….and that will be what i deal with then!
For now….i’m in control…..and I WILL continue to make a difference in ways I can. I speak to people every single day about sociopathic behaviors……from credit counselors to attorneys and judges and even the census workers to my mortgage bank foreclosure folks…..if my mouth opens……the topic WILL come up!
You have a very strong voice……this will carry you far!
We will all join forces!!!!
Dr, Leedom, it just dawned on me. I am writing a paper in college class and beleive that I have read some of your work on pschopathy in the journal of psychology. I am writing a paper on if there is a difference between antisocial personality disorder and the psychopath.
Good work and very interesting.
Castle,
Thank you for that brilliant post, particularly the following:
The capacity he has […] for calculating behaviors years in advance to achieve a certain outcome, is just mind-boggling. Part of me can’t accept that people even exist who are able to do this ”“ who are able to think so far ahead that they can begin planting seeds in fertile minds, and continue to water them for years upon years to achieve a desired result. The focused, lasting patience of a person who often exhibits less patience than a two-year-old in the throes of a tantrum, is hard to accept as a reality.
You’ve described my mother to a “T”. And that’s what’s so terribly wrong with Hare’s PCL-R: by his use of the diagnostic criteria “Impulsive” he has, in my opinion, described low-functioning psychopaths only and excluded those high-functioning predatory individuals like your ex and my mother – the ones who skate just under the radar, the ones who terrorize only “select victims” for years upon years (and make them look mad or bad to boot) but who look like saints to everyone else. So even if we attempt to educate “the system” about psychopathy, the very diagnostic criteria themselves work against us if we’re up against this type.
As for the criteria “Poor behavioural controls”, that’s another one that makes me shake my head. My mother would exhibit “poor behavioural controls”, but that in itself was ALWAYS a supremely controlled act – only ever used when it would produce terror in witnesses, and only ever done in front of those “select victims” – when she could be sure it wouldn’t come back on her.
dearjohn,
I’m sure you realize what a rarity you are – a father who actually managed to use the system to get custody of his children away from their abusive mother. You must have some pretty effective supports! I can attest to the truth of PAS; my mother brainwashed my brothers and I against our father even while he was in the same house. I’m glad you’re taking ErinBrock’s advice; the high road is definitely the way to go here in terms of your son. Not so much with his mother, though.
It wasn’t until after my father’s death that I realized how thoroughly I’d been brainwashed, and that my father was, at heart, a decent, happy, fun-loving guy (the father I remember from my childhood) who’d been destroyed by a demon and only after years of abuse with nowhere to turn turned into an angry, bitter, frustrated man. So I wish you well (from the bottom of my heart) in what you’re doing for your “real” family. Congratulations on getting out, and for getting custody of your son.
Delta1,
I’m fascinated by and grateful for the sage advice you’re giving here, and agree with your statement that “the question posed in the original article by Dr Leedon needs to be ’qualified’ a bit.” You’ve made absolutely brilliant, brilliant, brilliant comments. As Wini says, thanks for being “one of the good guys/gals in the system”. The only exception I have would be with your position on PAS – I can personally attest to the existance of this type of brainwashing and, like most abuse, I don’t think it’s at all related to gender.
And thank you for pointing out the following, which is too often forgotten: “Often we clash with our adult mental health colleagues. Their client is essentially the adult ”“ and ours is the child.”
I’m most interested to hear more of your thoughts around the following:
“Mostly I work around empowering a child to have a ’kind of contact’ that they can cope with.”
“I think that we do actually name abuse and help children to ’make choices’ to ’know’ that what is happening at home is ’not okay’. I think that giving this message to children is actually one of the most important parts of my job.”
“Giving the knowledge to a child WILL help them ”“ getting them to a place where they understand their parent is disordered in some ways, helping challenge the parents behaviour as they grow older , helping the child to understand that it’s RIGHT and PROPER to have boundaries etc etc. In other words what’s called ’protective behaviours work’. Going to Young Carers groups can be brillaint ”“ helps kids to know ’they’re not the only ones with sometime abusive parents. Or groups for ’family/friends’ of a person with Cluster B diagnosis of one kind or another.
That’s not the right solution for severe emotional abuse of course. But I’m saying that there’s a whole box of tricks of ways that we all (and children too) can learn to protect ourselves better and be healthier and happier individuals and this is the ’positive’ part of the system in some senses.”
I couldn’t agree with you more, and I think you’ve hit the nail exactly on the head. It is preferable to remove a child from the abuses of a sociopathic parent, but given how difficult that is there has to be a second level of defence (particularly when the abuser is the mother where sole custody granted to the father is so rare to be almost statistically insignificant). I think giving the child skills and tools to “see” and defend against mindf***ing and abuse is absolutely the way to go, and I’d love to hear more of your thoughts on the above, and also on ’protective behaviours work’ (I’m not familiar with that expression).
Dealing with my ex spath has taught me alot about my own anger – and how it can trap me. I feel so lucky to have found many resources that have helped me learn that anger is only energy – is VALUABLE energy – but I need to drop the storyline (even though his actions have been way bizarre and destructive for years) – But what’s helped me is making a conscience effort to drop the Anger part and utilize the precious energy to keep records, keep logs, and keep my ducks lined up – It’s the only way I’ve been able to protect myself and my children – and I’m following through on what the Court promised my children (child support from a wealthy father) 10 years ago.
I learned not to show him my anger – to s’paths, that is our Achilles heel. Stay under their radar and be a meticulous Record-keeping warrior – Keep attorneys posted on everything. (I have been at my attorney’s office so many times – and in the Court room so many times, – my path is well worn) I started to feel better when I stopped MINDING. And I feel a whole lot better now that I have accepted this – my Legal battles are far from over, but reading letters and comments on this site has helped so much: So many drops of water wear away the rock. Keep the light on these disconnected people, don’t ever show them emotion – but be sure to tell your story to people who can identify.
RE: are children better-off with one parent?
I think this is a moot question because more than half of all children Are raised by only one parent, for one reason or another.
The question I’d rather see answered is this: how can we convince law enforcement agencies to INVESTIGATE cases involving sociopaths? And, how can we better train psychologists, therapists, etc. to HELP and advocate for victims (like us) of sociopaths?
That question keeps me in a quandry.
The most powerful work I’ve read (about children from abusive families) is by the psychotherapist, Alice Miller, who wrote:
The Drama of the Gifted Child and Thou Shalt Not Speak, et al.
Too bad her work is so hard to read (she’s an academic, NOT Dr. Phil!)
Back in my days as a social worker, the term used was “the best interests of the child.”
But, who determines that, esp. when a sociopath can appear normal in public, whereas quirky people or artsy-fartsy people like myself seem less credible.
fpt