Editor’s note: The following article was written by a Lovefraud reader who we’ll call “WalkonMom.”
I used to think that “six” was my lucky number. And sometimes, I used to remind myself to show gratitude for six little things, like, the sound of New England leaves as they rustle underfoot, the first snowfall with really huge flakes, each breath flowing in and out, especially when you recognize that you are free for the first time, the scent of your baby’s head as you cradle and rock her in your grandmother’s rocking chair, the preciousness of each holiday, along with the sacred spirit of wonder that fills you as you see your child grow from year to year. Falling in love, and realizing that, no matter what, you’ll be strong enough to fix any boo boo or heal any abuse in the relationship, however seemingly impossible, because, well, you chose to love that man, and that’s supposed to mean forever, and, besides, you’re a mom—that should be enough.
But to survive in a situation of domestic violence, how much love could it EVER take for you alone to mitigate or hold it at bay? And when you realize that nurturing is never enough, that you can’t solve or ever heal it, and when you need to leave Hell to save your child, how much LOVE will it take to get you both out—alive? How much love will it take, years later, when your once kidnapped child chooses borderline behaviors to blame you for everything the sociopath did?
I’ll never forget. November 4, 2008. The night my 17-year-old daughter returned to NH from NJ after nearly six years, finally reaching out to me for help—a plea in the darkness. It was late, and I was tucking her into bed. My second husband and I had just returned from our honeymoon to pick her up in Hartford earlier that night. She had recently voiced some problems (again) with her Dad. I wasn’t given to know what the seriousness of his issues were over the past several years. She and I had only visited on a few rare occasions during her six-year transition to womanhood.
This is what I do know: While she was away, she’d attempted suicide and ended up in the hospital on multiple occasions. She’d cut herself, developed impetigo from self-injury. She took varying cocktails and combinations of drugs over the years, sometimes in dangerous and lethal quantities. She’d engaged in dangerous sexual activity, run away, sometimes being found on a city bench. Most horrific of all, as I was to discover that night, she held an ominous secret close to her heart, one that loomed much larger than the two of us. Bigger even than life itself.
No match
I’d left my first marriage in 2000, and with nothing, save one child, and a NH restraining order. I was no match for this cruel man who would stop at nothing to punish me. He was incapable of love, and as his warped mind was obsessed with obtaining and destroying the one thing he knew I cared about, his sole aim became that of molding our precious child’s soul into something he could torture me with forever, a meted out, deliberate punishment for my daring to leave his controlling, jealous, narcissistic personage, a payback for my rejecting his penchant for enjoying watching me suffer—and for leaving the abuse. “You’re it until I die, baby,” he used to say, over the years. “You’re IT.”
And so I had to borrow money from Mom to keep NJ courts from snatching my daughter back unwillingly, even as she and I had moved to NH with his physical help, and his written, signed understanding that I had no choice but to leave the marriage because of his abuse.
We endured death threats, were in hiding twice, hired one corrupt NJ attorney, “enlisted” the aid of therapists, NH DOVE attorneys—family services workers. But we were no match for the lies, death threats, the unending stream of NJ Italian family money, all fueling corruption that carried a singular purpose: to wear me down while making me appear as “crazy.”
Thus, we fought a three-year long, fledgling court battle with a corrupt judge, between two states, both warring for the acquisition of my child’s tender flanks.
Kidnap
It was in 2003 that he decided to kidnap our child, at the end of a month-long visitation. And it was during that fateful year that the same vulnerable girl who used to plead desperately for the abuse to stop, decided inexplicably, to go back to NJ—to live with her father.
When she returned for a short time to NH with FBI help, she’d evolved into a demanding, enraged, uncontrollable, borderline, destructive teen, filled with angst, three-inch devil horns super glued to her forehead, and Celtic swirls painted where two eyebrows used to be, in the style of her famous half brother’s band.
Once I’d witnessed just how cleverly he’d turned her head with those expensive Lolita skirts, shit kicker boots and a multitude of other promises to be involved with the band, how he coerced her with things he purchased during his “quality kidnapping time,” I knew my role as a mother was over. All I had left was my right to mourn, to breathe, and to try to walk on.
She walks away
At 12, she’d arrived at her own ironic version of an age of reason. For me, it was just another hellish turning point in the ongoing dialectic of domestic violence, an unholy grail of horror from which I knew I would never emerge, because he’d continue to use her to seek and secure a lifetime of vengeance and vitriol from me. What else could I do? I had to play dead, and let her go. She tried to push my mother down the stairs—threatened to kill all of us. So on one fateful summer day, I watched her put on her goth armor, the teeny weeny sexy skirts he’d purchased, and I let her choose to walk away. July 27, 2003—that remains the date of her death, regardless of our current and future interactions.
And so, this same beautiful soul and creature who once begged me to leave her father, now openly rejected the peaceful life it had taken several years for me and Mom to create for her, after finding the courage to leave the abuse. In the silence of one oceanfront family home, I was left alone to nurse these impossibly painful, openly weeping, inner wounds. From that day on, I mourned my daughter as dead. The mere possibility of having to hold, within, the fear and possibility of her death at his, or her own hands, in light of the risks I knew awaited inside the Hell she was to re-enter, now alone, without a mother’s protection or presence, would have driven any mother mad. I screamed and ripped my hair out for a week, and cried and vomited for one more. Then, I donned my teacher’s clothing, and went back to work, telling the story as if I were reciting summer vacation details. The only eyes that no longer had tears were my own.
No one validates this kind of death as mourning, so again, I was not given the grace of sharing it with anyone, for fear of being called crazy, or over-dramatic. Those few people I brought into the circle of the story blamed me, for being stupid enough to “choose” a sociopath, for letting her go, for feeding her Twinkies in grade school, for simply having been born at all. “What kind of mother leaves her child?” they would query. Well, the kind whose child threatens to kill Mom or use their Daddy to kill the family so that she can live the “Secret Life of Walter Mitty” (that he promised her, replete with sex, drugs and rock and roll in NJ), that’s who! I couldn’t compete against a band that was becoming famous; without that, he’d have had no power to sway her into the world of the perverse. Boundaries. It all boils down to boundaries.
Loss of motherhood
For six years, half of me tried to imagine living again as some fictitious single woman, one would never be again a wife or mother, while the other half keened as the woman whose child was absent and had died at the age of 12, to a murderous and conscious-less husband. I checked the NJ obituaries on a weekly basis.
Since that time, regardless of whether or not my daughter still breathes, I will always mourn the loss of motherhood. Life can be ironic, particularly if the devil won’t let you out of Hell.
I’ve read that children of divorce in the context of abuse tend to seek love unrelentingly from the parent with whom they feel unsafe, the one they instinctively know does not love them sincerely. My daughter and I were always so close that, had I demanded she stay with me, she would have given me the middle finger and left anyway, not because of hate, but because she needed me to prove to her, against her father’s protestations, that I loved her enough to let her go, to figure out who her daddy was on her terms, not mine, or the court’s, or any therapist’s. She compartmentalized her love, keeping me in a box only for the tough times.
Meanwhile, after years of trying to keep her safe before puberty, and to hold all of this up alone, I was battle worn, devoid of personal power and hope; in some ways, it was a relief to let her go. Years of his unrelenting torture had kept her hostage, and me from moving on with some kind of half-life. You see, she and I were so connected that I know that she knew all this, too. Deep inside, she knows that she and I were always just pawns, even as her budding psyche needed to fill that void in inner space in which we all need to KNOW that we are loved by our parents unconditionally, even if it’s not true.
Just a pawn
She had always been scared of her father’s unpredictable, controlling nature—many NH friends who called, after she left, validated this when they told me how shocked they were to discover she had chosen to live with him. But the hardest part for me throughout all the “she said” accusations, and through all the dirty legal tactics, his M.O., to avoid accountability, was my knowing from his eyes (and her mouth) that she was “just a pawn” between two equal parents, and an innocent victim of a lose-lose, power-over scheme, in which her Mom was the sole instigator, merely a cartoon character in a b-movie, a buffoon, an inconsequential, incompetent piece of shit, whose indomitable spirit as a mother existed in order to be squelched and mocked, at all cost.
Yet she could only see the situation at that time as any child would, stuck between two divorcing parents who would act upon love only and therefore fight for HER behalf. In spite of circumstances, children all need to believe that their very existences hold real meaning, and that both parents are acting sincerely. That is why she felt so vehemently angry. Since she knew that she could always be herself with me, and that I would love her back without question, while holding her very birthright, which carries also a permanent reminder of my sole personal responsibility for her rage about being born in the first place, within my own being.
In 2008, six years had passed since I’d experienced being a mother to my only child, six years since I’d been lost inside his torturous definition of divorce hell, a place in which I was stripped of all motherhood, raped from the inside out by a cruel and damaged man. Looking back, she and I both knew that all this irony and complexity required that she release herself from the fire of her daddy’s life, and from mine. She had needed to figure it all out by herself, to pull herself up by her Goth corset straps, and eyebrow-less face.
Something to show you
Within this set of sixes in years, I hadn’t known if my child were alive or dead, or even whether or not I’d ever find the will to continue living for myself. So simply for us to come back together, just before she reached the age of 18, was a small miracle. Naturally, she and I were catching up, that November night, on lost years of talking, about little things—how she’d run away from Dad again, how she was missing too many days at school in her senior year, how she didn’t want to live in NJ anymore. I remarked on how very thin and frail and sad she was, compared to how she had looked when she had visited in the summer. I asked her if she was feeling better. She’d vomited when we picked her up, lying in the back holding her stomach all the way to NH. She said, casually, “Oh you know, Mom. I’m withdrawing from heroin again; when I ran away from Dad last week, I had to stay with my friends.” Her friends had held her together, even as the drugs to mute the pain of trauma and long-term abuse were gradually killing them all.
I tried not to pry, even as I felt that sudden, old and all-too-familiar adrenaline rush from the past, that trembling murderous rage within that makes you want to kill the bastard that did this to your child, to erase that power-ridden, sociopathic smirk forever from his evil, stinking face.
It was then that she said, “Mom, I have something to show you.” I tried to draw her out tenderly by guessing what it might be, but then she slowly lifted the fabric of her pants up over her emaciated pajama-donned legs, revealing a horrendous, ugly truth, a horrific badge describing the six years she had taken on a un-winnable and pointless battle all on, by herself. Her precious flesh hung in tatters; there was a long series of deep muscle scars running up and down her thighs; some cuts were half-infected, others long healed. A few were one to two inches deep. I could not breathe, but I knew this moment could either save her life or end it; her future, carrying the basic will to live, was in my hands. I felt IT coming. I stayed steady, like a ship withstanding a rogue wave, turning my bow into the white squall.
His son
And then she said, “I know now why I’ve done this since I was young.” My response was a silence in deep waves of impending grief and doom. I held my breath, as I could sense that dread and nausea and relief were rising up faster than I could feel the blood coursing through my veins. Slowly, and with utterly slow agony, she revealed that her 29-year-old half-brother, son of her father (from his 1st marriage), had raped her, had sex with her. He’d done it while her father was downstairs; my former stepson and daughter up in her bedroom. She said that it was consensual, that she loved him, but that it also led her to take heroin. It made her cut. It made her run away. She’d stopped going to school. It was her senior year. She had done this over the years. I knew then that it hadn’t been the first time, but it wasn’t mine to say it. Her half brother had thrown her across the room before coming to see me; that’s when I realized there was no going back. This was bigger than incest or abuse. This was a life or death situation.
My daughter’s precious life depended, in that moment, for me to be stronger for her than the ocean is deep. She needed, more than oxygen, for me to hold her as a fortress- of understanding, compassion and love. And so as I rocked and held her, I struggled to keep all my past wolves at bay. She spoke only of one incident, yet the cutting and the sex and the problems with her father and his son likely occurred since she was a little girl.
As long as I could focus on breathing out into that eternity, into the inferno of that moment, and as I held her, I felt that we both began to let go, to breathe back in all the life from those lost years back into the corpses of one other. To keep the horrendous thoughts from ripping me apart, I consciously drifted into my realm of gratitude, and uttered seven silent things for which I was now truly grateful, as “six” was no longer my lucky number:
For scent of song in a sky of blue, for dancing and healing and walking on, for the gift my daughter bestowed, which was to let her mother go so that she could be free and learn to grow strong enough to climb back into the abyss again to save her daughter’s life, for the phrase “love goes on forever” engraved on our laundry basket by one nine year old child, for newspapers that do not yet contain the obituary of my own child, for the hope that someday truth will prevail over lies, with the spirit of good triumphing over the hell of insincerity.
Lastly, for the power of imagination lying deeply within the understanding that there will always be many different kinds of deaths we must accept, all of which she and I have endured.
Into the fire again
As she was a minor, the abuse was reported by her, to therapists, and to her father, and to DYFS. Yet still, She chose to enter back into the fire again. She is now 21, trying to bully me into believing that “none of this happened,” trying perhaps to assuage her guilt that I’m slowly dying, by striking the truth from the records of her history. She also has developed borderline personality. In the meantime, I’ve been diagnosed with a rare connective tissue disorder, and fear that these things will never be resolved between us, as my time on earth is limited, keeping me from being able to let go of her. Time is short; most of all, it is unfailingly precious.
Motherhood, too, with a sociopath, is a tenuous, bitter, lose-lose hole into which we fall; it burns me inside that the revelation of the perpetrators must die with me. Yes, against my better judgment, I must do as I am told by US therapists: to keep these secrets under wraps until after I die. One never wants to stir the hornet’s nest, and the revelation of the names themselves will be the margin of safety I leave for my new husband and his family, in the event they are ever threatened. It all seems so ludicrous, and it is exactly why perpetrators continue to get away with murder. I will never see the fruit of my womb heal from her own wounds; I will never be able to protect her from this genetic disease, which she, too, carries. Most of all, as she eschews the truth of her history, she refuses to honor our connection as mutually respectful. I am no longer a mother.
In life with a sociopath, I believe now that one gives up the right to motherhood. The rights to breathe and live on are defined by sheer whim, luck, space, and a lot of grace.
Yet, The one thought that will always bring me the only comfort as I die is this:
In the bowels of Hell, there is but one gravestone, and the only surname that is and will ever remain engraved on it belongs to the sociopath and his son.
walkonmom-Big e-hug to you. You are the first woman I’ve read about that felt like you’d lost your motherhood. I do too, but not one person I’ve ever spoken with can understand that.
You, and so many others who post here are so brave. I’m relatively new here. I finally registered today because I wanted to reach out to you and thank you for sharing your story.
Hi Floating Feather,
I am so sorry that you have lost your motherhood, too, and that you, like so many of us, have had difficulty in being able to put a voice out there, to be validated and seen for who you are. You are so very brave, too!
There are so many beautiful women, children and people out there who have lost a child, a primary parent, an important connection, due to man-made sociopathic influences. The stigma, however, associated with talking about or even revealing to anyone the losing of that birthright of connection with our children, is huge; many of those I’ve told in “real” life judged and rejected me, assuming that I MUST have been a bad mother to have lost a child, that in divorce, both parties have an equal footing, equal power, which is not true. Most people are just afraid that our bad luck will rub off on them; they choose to see us as damaged goods, so they won’t have to look at the abusive/dysfunctional patterns in their own marriages.
So I lost many potential friends, any sense of belonging and of community, and have suffered unwarranted judgment for years (and then lost the rest of them once I got sick); it felt as if a part of my body had been cut off, while my fate seems that of utter invisibility. I CHOSE to tutor a child with cancer who was dying, partly because she was my student and loved her as my own child, but also because I could understand and take the pain of losing a loved one, and nurture the part of the broken heart of a family losing her life, just as I had lost a huge part of my own life- in many ways, doing hospice work helped me walk on. I had to rip that wound wide open to prove to myself that I was not alone.
It isn’t always the flower that blooms in a bouquet that we notice; there’s always the one in the back of the bunch that never has a chance, and in many ways, as in nature, some lives carry that fate, no matter what we do to stop it. But still we must try. To open up into the light. For most people, that is how it works. For the rest, well, that’s something that cannot be cured or remediated, and the only way to stop it is to learn how to avoid sociopaths like the plague. Pure hearts are such apt magnets for the insincere.
In power over schemes, through marriage with narcissistic/sociopathic people, the battle with children is already lost once it has begun.
Society walks around as if this very REAL, invisible relationship, indeed a very real death, is not real. Yet it is meted out for us via punishment: for our sincerity and love for kids, and especially for leaving (or even staying in) the hostage situation.
Society’s unspoken message is that divorce from a spath is a blow we should suck up and walk on with, but without ever speaking of it. Even if we can raise our kids, the spath uses them, twists their reality, and us, as pawns in his twisted, sordid game, for as long as we have ANY contact with him. Courts just don’t get this. They don’t see that we are hunted down, just like deer in the forest. Our children are abused, yet the spath is given free rights. Our deepest selves, the people we are and were, become fiction, whispered in rooms, noted by the absence of holiday invitations, girls’ nights out, and the unwillingness for most single men to take on such “baggage” in dating, (as if they don’t have any!)
And so, we should at the very least, secure the right to tell our stories, to hold each other up, to give ourselves a fair shake at creating a new life, so that when our children come back, (if they ever do), they can begin to get to know us as who we truly are, not that fictionalized weirdo the spath created to bastardize. Each of us is the person that life and nature and all the good things that the Universe wants every human being to share. That’s what we were born to be!
And if the children don’t turn around, then at least we can share, with those that do understand, the successes of what we DID do right, how we were the ones who nurtured and loved unconditionally, how we did everything in our power and more, in spite of the fact that every spath’s glib words are so much more powerful and believable to the kids than the Truth.
Unconditional love never stops, while conditional sociopathic machinations are cancers that destroy the fabric of love and life itself.
May we all find the life above the ground by following the light, and by letting our true soul seeds germinate from the roots of our genetic birthrights, come what may. Who knows what kind of garden will we find above the ground? Curiosity alone makes the journey worth it.
Love and Light,
walkonmom
This is one of the most “SPOT ON” articles I have ever encountered. I am a mother of 4 children, 3 of which are currently with the Narcissistic Spath (my eldest is not his, thank God…one less child having to deal with his relentless chaos).
I recently learned about love Fraud.com from an online abuse recovery group that focus on relationships with Narcissists, Psychopaths and Sociopaths. My ex-huband happens to fit ALL criteria for diagnoses. The charming, Jeckyll and Hyde with creepy eyes who projects his downfalls onto others blaming them for his faults via use of lies and manipulation utilizing church and state as a crutch as his grandiose entitled self seeks sympathy by suggesting he is the victim. What would you like for dinner? … “cyanide”. Nothing more than a shell of existence (empty), a mere martyr who uses and abuses others to get what he wants in life. Using relationships and sex with females to “appear” normal, he needs others to keep himself upright within the community as he cannot do it alone. It’s all about appearances for the sociopath and how things appear are not even remotely close to reality as I’m sure you well know.
I admire the fact that you have utilized your unfortunate experience to educate others, I am trying to do the same but to no avail. Unfortunately the only resolution to the situation I am in is through public exposure of the TRUTH but just how to go about getting someone to televise it remains amiss. I believe only personal experience can shed light on what its truly like dealing with a spath.
I was married to a master manipulator for over 10 years who has been Clinically Diagnosed with Borderine Personality Disorder, Narcissistic Traits, Intermittent Explosive Disorder, Depression and Adjustment Disorder, I truly believe he is a Psychopath…literally, he accepts no responsibility for his actions and shows no empathy or remorse for those whom he has hurt. His methods are cold, calculated and premeditated. What started out as continual verbal threats and put downs, led to physical acts such as spitting in my face, confinement, choking, biting my face, attempted rape, suspected poisoning then murder for hire and I his intended victim. All of which has been reported and documented by the authorities.
I’ve had a no contact order and 3 orders of protection, all of which he has violated and only served 6mo. probation-they referred to the incident as “invasion of privacy”, he had threatened my life by stating he was going to burn down my house with me in it-even pled guilty to this because I had evidence that he had placed unauthorized changes on my phone bill, I also had unauthorized charges on my credit card and he had accessed my mortgage account online and changed my username and password-all of which illegal activity. The entire commission of the murder for hire is on audio obtained by the LPD in Indiana, the person he solicited and conspired with was an informant for the police. The Chief of Police maintained they had “more than sufficient evidence for conviction” the Prosecutor NEVER FILED CHARGES and indicated to the public that he “backed out” which could not be farther from the truth as he indicates 9 times that he has intent at a later date, even inquired how much it would cost. During the interrogation which is video taped he indicates “I don’t know how to get out of this mess, she doesn’t deserve half” hence motive.
He continued to harass and stalk me even after the divorce was finalized which took 14 months to have him removed from the residence and another several months to be finalized. I lost over $70,000 in assets, got stuck with a $10,000 lien against my home and was awarded only $42 a week child support for 3 children (daycare during the summer cost $205 weekly). My X owned a restaurant at the time and of course lied about income, he also collected over $2,000 mo. rental income in addition he started a job @....... Chrysler. I petitioned the court for increase in CS and was informed that I should be paying him money…What? (he made way more money than I). I also requested a quit claim deed to the residence I was granted in the divorce and that was denied as well, allowing my X to maintain control once again because if I end up dead he gets the home and the contents.
Taking the X back to court led to further stalking type behaviors and corrupting the children into thinking I was the one who broke up the family, was unwilling to reconcile and that he was the victim (all alone) and somehow suffering. Via use of parental alienation my children bought into his fantasy therefore denied the reality of any and all abuse against me including the murder for hire which was headline of the Pharos Tribune in 2007. In their minds none of this ever happened, I was told by my eldest at one point that maybe I deserved the abuse. I frequently hear verbatim insults spewed from the mouths of babes all of which learned from their father. My children became physically abusive towards me, my eldest was choking her siblings and I. The X started filing false allegations of abuse against me and encouraged the children to corroborate his stories when questioned by the police and CPS, one report was somehow “substantiated” because my daughter happened to have a dime sized bruise-none of the “story” made any sense… the X and my daughters all had conflicting testimonies. Yet somehow I was deemed the guilty party.
I petitioned the court to move from Indiana to Illinois (my
hometown) to remove myself and my children from the excessive abuse and control of the X. He in turn filed for custody and was granted it. The judge then court ordered that I have a psych evaluation to prove the children were safe with me without due cause, he then ordered the sheriff’s police remove the children from my home and the children are not allowed out of the State for visitation. I had a psych eval done as Ordered which concluded NO Diagnosis and that my visitation should be unrestricted in any way, it was deemed “Inadmissible” by the judge.
Getting custody was not enough as well you know that the Spath is never satisfied and will exhaust someone to the point of wanting to kill yourself. I was then brought back to court by the X still not happy (as one never is) he asked for all the kids belongings-he was given half of them when we got divorced but of course they grow out of things and he did not feel he should have to pay for anything. He lives with his mother…cannot even support himself. I was court ordered to pay $209 weekly child support $906 monthly (which was 80% more than I received) I have a mortgage to pay and am unemployed because the day my children were taken, I immediately quit my job-Due to the ongoing obstruction of justice I left the State as I was sure I’d end up dead as authorities do nothing to protect me.
The X has been neglecting and abusing all 3 of my children for the past year he has had custody. I have sent emails and placed phonecalls to their school (“your concerns do not warrant a report to CPS”), doctors (“we do not have an obligation to report hearsay”), counselor (“there is no evidence”), police and CPS all of which refuse to get involved or substantiate anything even though there is Physical evidence of impetigo (not taken to the doctor), my eldest is suffering from ulcerative colitis, my 6 y/o son started a fire in the home while unsupervised, my 9 year old went from size 10 to size 16/18 in one year, my son said he was hit so hard he could barely move and was out of breath on the phone…the officer called informed me CPS would follow up, I found out later he never made a call to report the incident.
Because of my continued efforts to expose the X’s abuse and neglect he decided to go for the jugular and started stalking me during my visitation (every other weekend), he showed @....... my sons baseball game-I called the police to file a report. Due to it being a “public place” the police could not do anything…as usual, although they did agree he belonged in prison for the Murder for hire, Really? I indicated I was going to make a public announcement that my X is a stalker that has a history of violence and should be serving a life sentence in prison, I included they should access my Facebook account to hear the downloaded Audio obtained by the police during their investigation of the murder for hire to learn the “truth” I had also asked the police to access this, hit the share button to do a public service to the community as no one is safe with him on the streets. I informed the police he has chosen his next victim and was informed she is a “well known drug abuser in town”…thats just great because she apparently watches my kids. This event was misconstrued by the X who alleged that I am “crazy” and even convinced the kids’ counselor to write a report for the judge in hopes to terminate and or supervise my visitation.
Court was 6 weeks ago. I remain unemployed (for the past year) and represent myself,I filed an objection to terminate visitation. I informed the counselor and CPS caseworker that when my children end up dead for not removing them from the X’s it will be on their head and suggested a criminal should not be raising children nor should his mother who raised him and they all live under her roof. The judge rehired the guardian ad litem who is biased and for the X who conveniently left out of her report that my X was on probation for violation of the protective order and referred to me as “condescending”. I was then informed that due to the extensive nature of the case that ultimately one parent need be completely out of the picture. It was suggested again that I seek psychiatric help so the psychiatrist could shed some light on the situation. The GAL suggested it be someone “in the area” which is 3 hours from where I live, I have no insurance or funds to pay for help that I do not need.
Since when is it ok to victimize someone for a lifetime even after you have moved on, then for the courts to suggest that the victim needs help (completely negating the history of a perpetrator with horrific acts of violence and plot to murder their victim)?…Then victimize you further by taking your children, giving them to the perpetrator to be further victimized and corrupted to the point they soon will be delinquents with interpersonal problems. This is why so many victims end up dead…people turn a blind eye, there is no “justice”.
It breaks my heart knowing that I cannot help my children because no one is willing to listen, nor do they understand the actions of a Narcissistic Sociopath. I cannot sleep, eat, concentrate or stop crying, I’m losing hair by the handful. I long for some normalcy in life with my children but unfortunately its never going to happen until he is put in jail for his crimes…the individuals that have assisted him in his ploy should be sent there with him.
To be robbed of any and all sense of self by a perpetrator of violence then deemed by a Judge unfit to maintain custody of your children because “you cannot let the murder for hire incident go”, giving the children to the perpetrator, court ordered to have a psych eval to prove your children are safe with you (the victim), the evaluation performed by a Psychiatrist with 30yrs experience which clearly indicates No diagnosis is deemed “inadmissible” merely adds unfathomable insult to injury. This is one of the most blatant reprehensible and appalling cases I’ve ever known and I’m personally living it. My children and I continue to suffer as a result of ongoing Obstruction of Justice.
My situation may seem too incredible to believe but if you have truly encountered a spath, you know exactly where I am coming from..your heart and soul completely torn apart by a monster in disguise and a “system” who has condoned his actions by not holding him accountable.
The Bible says “be sure the truth shall find you out”…My First Ammendment Right to Freedom of Speech may be all I have left in life since my children were taken and I intend to use it. Google “Murder for Hire Guilty or Not?…You Decide”, the audio obtained by the police is downloaded with some history of the case which was conveniently kept under wraps by a Prosecutor who is guilty of obstruction of justice. Hit the “share” button for all to learn they are not alone in their fight for their children, public exposure can be a real eye opener.
Thanks for sharing your story, you are not alone.
WOW. Here is one crazy story…
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/11/02/michigan-pastor-charged-in-killing-fiancee-daughter/
Traumatized ~
So sorry to read your horror story. You are not alone and I’m glad you found your way here to LF.
You may want to check out a web site – safekidsinternational.org. It was suggested previously by a frequent poster and it has a lot of information.
Best of luck to you.
oh my god, what a horrific story… I’m so sorry.
Traumatized:
My heart goes out to you. Since I don’t have any kids, I don’t have any advice, but my thoughts are with you.
To both of you, I am so sorry that you went through what you did. They were horrors that I wanted to spare my son.
I succeeded in part.
He was kidnapped by two of them. He was hospitalized twice for suicidal ideation.
Ultimately, I got him away from the Ps, the mental health efforts worked, and he is growing into a wonderful adult, but the problems with the police and the courts, I have had those, too.
I am on (I hope) the home stretch of dealing with my son’s P father. Everytime I read stories such as yours, I am so grateful that he wanted nothing to do with my son. That we did not have that cancer present in our lives is a blessing, although before I knew what he was, I thought my son was worse off for his absence.
A friend was concerned by the effort that I have put into this case. He thought that I might be intent on revenge and suggested that I find a baseball bat and go visit the guy. He looked shocked when I answered that I am long past any need for revenge; I want to bring awareness and change the system.
I want to stop stories like yours. Nobody should have to live through that. It saddens me that people do not understand how much we suffer. It is troubling that they assume that our feelings would be on the same level as the Ps. Why can’t people understand that what we’re trying to do is bring normalcy and peace into our lives and those of our children?
As for doing what I have done, if I hadn’t, the fear of having a child destroyed would have been too much for me to bear.
I am truly sorry for your grief and pain.
traumatized,
what a horrific ordeal, I’m so sorry.
Traumatized, I’m so sorry to read of your horrific experiences and subsequent battles with the Legal System. “Legal,” it may be, but “common sense” and “justice” are ideals that never get past the metal detectors.
I can’t offer any suggestions other than to look into legal resources through your local domestic violence hotline. The website: http://www.ndvh.org can at least put you on a course of various actions, including legal aid.
I am so sorry that 3 of your 4 children are in the spath’s clutches. At some point, they will be able to make their own decisions (to a degree) and they will seek you out in desperation. Be prepared for this. It’s also possible that one of your children may develop a tremendous trauma bond with their spath parent as so often happens. Be prepared for that, as well. It won’t make it any easier to accept, but knowing what it is, what causes it, and that it’s beyond our control is helpful in our recoveries.
Brightest supportive blessings