The most heartbreaking dramas that sociopaths create are those that involve children. Many sociopathic parents stand up in court proclaiming that they “only want what is best for the children.” They’re lying. What they really want is to use the children as clubs to beat their ex-partners into submission.
There is no such thing as a simple phone call to find out what little Johnny needs to bring to soccer practice. Every phone call or e-mail is an opportunity for the sociopath to manipulate, denigrate and infuriate the ex, through lies, innuendo and misinformation. For the parent trying to protect the children, it’s exhausting.
A few months ago, Lovefraud published a letter from “Penny,” who is in this situation. She wrote her Tips for co-parenting with a sociopath. One of Penny’s recommendations was that parents request that all communications with their former partners go through Our Family Wizard.
Our Family Wizard
Our Family Wizard is a website designed to facilitate communications between separated or divorced parents in relation to their children. It promotes “cooperative parenting:”
Parents can coordinate shared custody and joint custody parenting time schedules, health records, immunization histories, expense sharing, school information, virtual document storage and much more on a website specifically designed to deal with the issues that arise in co-parenting situation.
Our website is committed to removing conflict and improving the lives of children. In fact, judges in all 50 states order families to utilize the site in contested cases to reduce conflict.
The Our Family Wizard website is a great tool for managing difficult parenting relationships. The website provides excellent documentation to help reduce conflict that may arise from ineffective communication. Should you need to return to court, all pages are printable and most come with a preformatted print option with all the necessary data you will need to show that you have met your parenting obligations.
The service costs $99 per year per parent. “This fee is worth it,” Penny wrote. “I know this because the judge hearing my case ordered that communication between my ex and I take place solely on the Our Family Wizard website. The judge also ordered that no verbal communication is to take place between the parties facilitating the exchange of my child.”
No creative language
Thousands of families use Our Family Wizard, according to Jainarain Kissoon, CEO. One reason why it helps in high-conflict situations, Kissoon says, is because the website’s structured format allows no room for “creative language.”
“Phone conversations used to turn into heated battles, then the battles moved to e-mail,” Kissoon says. “The site helps compartmentalize what everyone is doing. In co-parenting classes, they emphasize businesslike communication. The site provides organization—there are no long e-mails back and forth.”
With Our Family Wizard, parents can limit communication to filling in the blanks—soccer game, what day, what time, what the child needs to bring.
Features
Our Family Wizard includes the following features:
- Calendar—each calendar event, such as soccer practice, includes which children participate, the location, the drop off parent and the pick up parent.
- Journal—entries can be shared or private. It’s a place to document any incidents, and all notes are time and date stamped.
- Message board—With no outside e-mail servers, there are no lost messages and always a way to verify a message has been received.
- Info bank—A place to manage all family information, such as schools, childcare providers, immunization history, emergency contacts, insurance and more.
- Expense log—tracks shared expenses, automatically calculating each parent’s contribution.
Documentation
An important benefit of Our Family Wizard is its level of documentation:
- Each entry is time and date stamped—who created it and when
- Every page is stamped with the last time both parents viewed it
- Messages cannot be altered or unsent
- Dates on journal entries cannot be altered.
- One parent cannot change the other parent’s information
- Nearly everything can be tracked back to an IP address
- An accurate chronology of events can be produced
- All pages are printable
The software includes the option of third-party accounts, so, if necessary, therapists or guardians ad litem can monitor communications. If a parent engages in abusive behavior, it is readily discovered and difficult to deny.
With Our Family Wizard, it becomes easy to tell who is complying with court orders, and who is not. Kissoon relates why one judge said he liked the software: “It gives people enough rope to hang themselves.”
In an early pilot program for the software, a judge ordered 40 families to communicate only through Our Family Wizard. For two years, none of the families were back in court.
Testimonials
The Our Family Wizard website includes testimonials from parents. “Manuel S” wrote:
I am thankful to this avenue of communication. It has controlled the nasty phone calls from my ex-wife to me and my wife, and has put an end to her foul language since she is aware the content of messages is monitored. I have documentation to avoid he said she said situations and her violations of my rights to see my kids!”
Penny says the website works. “Please mention to readers that they can request that Our Family Wizard be ordered by the judge hearing their case,” she wrote. “The judge can order the Our Family Wizard email as the sole means of communication between couples litigating a child custody/visitation dispute.”
For more information, visit the website below. If you decide to subscribe to OurFamilyWizard, Lovefraud will earn a commission from your purchase.
Jeannie. It sounds like a nightmare. Thank God your kids are grown and the co-parenting is over. I’m curious, do the kids see him for what he is now?
So glad you got to keep the house!
And like I said before, I’m glad you’re here with us.
Hi Kim,
No, the kids say that their dad taught them that family sticks together. They seem to worship their dad and they don’t see that I did much of anything for them.
It used to hurt. I finally had to distance my heart, cause my ex has more influence over the kids.
I posted last night on here, but I don’t know how to view my posts.
Jeannie
jeannie812, hi 🙂 I found a post you wrote last night in the wee hours, you can type your user name in the search box at the top of the page, it will show a few recent posts. Glad you found this site, it has been a blessing to me. Here’s a link to the article you posted on…
http://www.lovefraud.com/blog/2007/05/02/ask-dr-leedom-why-does-it-seem-i-know-more-than-the-experts/comment-page-1/#comment-68375
JEANNIE812- wow, he was a ‘peach.’ that’s not the word i really want to use. how twisted and sick. he’s a really good manipulator.
good job on the house! very good. you used a good strategy.
glad you found your way here. lots of really good articles. you seem to know exactly what he was doing in each of the instances you cited; your awareness is very high.
kathleen hawk wrote a very good series on healing. you can access it in the menu to the left.
take care
one step
Hi one step,
Thank you for pointing out the sites to see. I may have already read her site. I read a bunch last night, and earlier today.
Wow, I was floored to be told that my awareness was high. Thank you!
It feels wonderful to have my thoughts validated. Thank you.
Hi ShabbyChic,
thank you for the welcome. Well here’s to clicking on that link. I’ll probably get goofed up into next week.
jeannie812 – you are very welcome! you really called the manipulations and laid out the pattern and tactics. those are such important skills. they are steps on the way of being able to predict their behavior, disengage from it, and protect ourselves and others.
lots of mom’s here, there is lots of help for dealing with spath exes when children are involved.
have you read this article? think you might see some circular logic here that you recognize; http://www.lovefraud.com/blog/2010/03/18/the-sociopath-holding-court/
I read Steve’s post. OMG I really was with sociopaths. I could relate to most of it.
I didn’t post, cause everyone was having fun, and I didn’t want to spoil the mood.
My ex-husband demanded sex even when I was in late pregnancy (I was huge, I was carrying a 9 1/2 LB baby) and I was having problems because of the pregnancy. It hurt to sit, hurt to stand, I was beside myself, I hurt all the time, and felt sick all the time.
I was worn out. I couldn’t sleep cause I couldn’t get comfortable. I felt like cow laying on it’s back trying to upright itself. It hurt to lay on this side, hurt to lay on the other side. By the time I finally got comfortable, I had to pee! Than I had to start all over with getting comfortable, just to have to pee again and again! I was exhausted and had to take care of my lively small children all day, until their 8:00 PM bedtime.
Yet, he wanted his sex. He said he felt like I more like a sister and he wants a wife. He said put out, or he’ll go get it elsewhere. He kept demanding it even when it was bringing on false labor. The doctor said sperm can bring on false labor. Here I had small children to take care of, and I was in bed with false labor. Then he complained that the house was not clean enough. He told his family that the house isn’t clean, and they stared at me with an evil eye the next time they saw me.
It was so bad.
Jeannie
Wow Jeannie,
I can kind of relate. When I was 8 months pregnant with our son, please excuse the graphic nature of this, but I lost my mucus plug because of rough sex that was not a choice by me, but of course him. I didn’t really mind sex so late in the pregnancy, but I did ask him several times to be a little gentler as it was more uncomfortable. Now the kicker was, as I found out months later, he had started another relationship with another woman when I was 7 months pregnant and was sleeping with both of us.
My other comment pertains to the wizard. Fast forward two years and I have left him. I have tried NC but as we all know it is so hard with children. Not that he gives a shit about the child, but we all know how that goes. Anyway, I am willing to give up and totally walk away from child support if he would just leave us alone. Not gonna happen. He has tried calling, texting, threatening, etc. and of course now I’m being slandered all over town for being vindictive, unable to move on, blah blah. The thing is, if this were really about our son which I suspect (I KNOW) it’s not, wouldn’t he just drag me into court and avoid the attempts at contact? I have responded to as few texts as I can, but I have made it clear that I don’t want my son around him. Wouldn’t a normal parent take the other one to court if it were really about the child? This to me is not about our son, but attempts on his part to insert his insane ass into my life as much as possible, and only because I asked him to leave me alone. He says he wants nothing to do with me, as he has moved on and is in love and Im going to puke…. but am i crazy or am I right? Is this a pathetic attempt to manipulate me? If hes so happy with his new relationship why would he rock that boat by contacting me instead of keeping it antiseptic and going through the legal system. There is free help available to fathers as well as mothers through public aid and he knows this, so why isn’t he utilizing these services?
Hi Wakingup,
Yes, your ex knows better. He likes to mess with you. He misses that power and control he had over you. That is what he is in love with.
I gotta ask what happened when you lost your mucus plug? Your water broke? Oh, my gosh I am so sorry.
My husband too was rough. He would jump on me like a dog on a tree.
I found it disgusting. I told him that he doesn’t want a wife, all he needs is a rubber doll.
I’m sure he was also with another woman, going by what he was telling me.
These guys could have harmed the baby with their reckless behavior. They could have planted STD’s in us while we were pregnant. They induced labor with their recklessness.
My labor also came after a night of his rough sex. I went into hard labor at 5:00 am. Baby was born at 7:00 am.
Scary thing about that is I wasted the first hour. I thought it was more false labor. I didn’t want to wake him. It would have pissed him off, if I was waking him for nothing, and then he would have ignored me, if it became real. So I made sure it was real labor before I woke him.
I woke him. We had to pick up his mother so she could watch our kids, and bring her over to our apartment, this took over a half hour. His mother acted offended that I wasn’t friendlier. I was walking while in hard labor, doing the breathing exercises, and couldn’t comment if my life depended on it.
He took me to the hospital. He ran every red light. It freaked me out. I said obey the law, this is stressing me out! He ignored me and continued running red lights.
We got to the hospital. I could barely talk or walk because of the hard contractions. I found out that my husband had never registered me (even though the hospital told him to months before.)
He had smiled at them and agreed eagerly. But he did nothing.
So here I had to register myself while I was in hard labor. Of course he didn’t sit down to take care of this. He disappeared. He reappeared around the corner after I took care of business.
Baby was born about 20 minutes later.
Your ex-guy is not done with you. He is all over you. He is all over the town about you. He is using his/your own child in a attempt to control you.
He doesn’t bother with the court, cause he is not interested in the child.
He just wants to make you miserable.
Beware that in time he might approach the court. But, this will be a last ditch effort to get his hooks in you.
I’ve been there.