Oftentimes, child custody situations leave us varying degrees of upset during special occasions and the holidays are no exception. It is our wish that no matter what your specific situation, you are able to find time to spend with wonderful friends and family.  Surround yourselves with joy and love.

Most importantly - make the most of whatever precious time that you have with your children.  If that’s not possible this year, there is a new year ahead with many new opportunities to try and get that situation rectified.

Wishing you the very best…

Investigators are performing tests on the handgun to determine if Elizabeth Fontaine or her mother, 67-year old Bonnie Hoult, committed the crimes.

Fontaine apparently had lost custody of her two children (Catherine - 4, Julia - 2) and was ordered by the court to relinquish possession of the children their Aunt, sister of the children’s father.

This story is just developing so the circumstances surround Fontaine’s recent move to Houston and the changing custodial arrangement remain unclear.

From the article:

John York, an attorney for the children’s father, said Wednesday Elizabeth Fontaine had been told to return to Orange County court with her daughters later Monday for a final ruling.

The killings occurred only hours after the court’s ruling.

For the full article, click here: Mom lost custody of girls before killings in CA

That said, Michelle Kehoe received consecutive sentences for first-degree murder and attempted murder and concurrent sentences on attempted murder and child endangerment.

Kehoe methodically planned and carried out the heinous throat slashing of her two children, the older one surviving overnight in a van having been left for dead. She allegedly was trying to save them from a life of suffering, despite the unspeakable horror and suffering she created as a result of her actions.

In addition to the prison sentences, Michelle Kehoe is prohibited from having contact with her surviving son for a period of five years.

From the article:

Against the wishes of Kehoe’s husband, Judge Bruce Zager also granted an extension of the prosecution’s request for a no-contact order, which prohibits Kehoe from contacting her surviving son or anyone with whom he lives.

We’re alarmed by the husband’s desire to allow contact to remain between the woman who slit the throats of their children.  However, we certainly agree that not subjecting him to continued contact with his murdering mother is probably best for his long-term psychological health and recovery process.

For the full article, click here: Iowa mom gets life for murdering son; barred from contacting surviving son

This story is about an award-winning photo journalist who, while shopping at the Town Center Mall in West Virginia, stopped to take photos of the festivities.  It would appear he was approached by a parent and asked to delete some photos he had just taken, presumably of that parent’s child.  Out of respect, he complied with the request.  Apparently, that wasn’t good enough as an off-duty police officer subsequently approached Scott Rensberger, 47, of Washington, D.C. and started asking questions.

Now, Rensberger stands accused of assaulting a police officer and the overzealous “investigating” officer, Corporal R.C. Basford, stands accused of using excessive force. From the article:

Charleston Police Chief Brent Webster says this is more of a case about battery than it is about picture taking. Webster believes Cpl. Basford had the right to at least approach Rensberger to ask him a few questions. “People were concerned over there that he was taking pictures inappropriately of children,” Webster said. “And with the Internet and all of the exploitation out there, I think the officer was definitely justified to begin an investigation.”

Now, I’m not sure in what world taking photographs of holiday activities at the local mall is justification for the police to “begin an investigation,” but this smacks of a serious overstep by the police department.  Rensberger’s belief that he was approached as a suspected pedophile is probably not entirely unjustified.  For men particularly, this is an alarming violation of civil liberties and one that should have everyone deeply concerned.

This is precisely how easily false allegations are born.  For men who are avid photographers (of which, I am one), you best be careful where you’re pointing that camera lest you find yourself being aggressively questioned in public and, ultimately under arrest when the police officer decides to reach for your expensive photography equipment and you try to protect it.

Rensberger says he was almost crying when the officer forced his arm behind his back because of a previous shoulder injury. He says he eventually sunk to his knees. “Every time I begged, I was practically crying, there’s got to be 30 witnesses to this and he said, this is a quote, ‘If I dislocate your arm I’ll call a paramedic,” Rensberger said.

Merry Christmas.

For the full article, click here: Photogate Case Moves to Excessive Force Probe

All About Custody Evaluations
with guest
Dr. Robert A. Evans
November 18, 2009
www.mrcustodycoach.com

MICHAEL: Good day, everyone. You’re here with Michael from Mr. Custody Coach.com. I have a special guest today. Dr. Robert Evans is a Licensed School Psychologist who has a private practice in Palm Harbor, Florida, and his practice consists mainly in the area of forensic psychology where he conducts child custody evaluations, parent coordination and divorce counseling, and you can visit his site at the Center for Human Potential, and that website is www.thecenterforhumanpotentialofamerica — that is all one word — .com.
Welcome, Dr. Evans. How are you today?
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: I am magnificent. Thank you for having me.
MICHAEL: Great. It’s a pleasure. And today, we are covering custody evaluations, which you are an expert in, and I guess we’ll just roll right into some of the questions that I have for you on this particular topic.
What is the custody evaluation and why are they used in custody disputes?
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Well, a custody evaluation really is a mechanism for the Court to help make a decision in terms of developing a parenting plan and time-sharing schedules for children. It’s a very involved process. It’s a very comprehensive process. Generally speaking, we could say that it consists primarily of like three components: A comprehensive set of observations and interviews of the parents, the children; and then gathering any kind of documentation, archival information from third-party sources called “collateral informants.” That would be –
MICHAEL: Okay.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: — basically people that are going to, you know, substantiate one side of the story or the other. In some cases, we get objective information from mental health professionals, counselors, anybody else who has had contact with the family, physicians; those would be collateral informants that would help us see which side is telling a more accurate picture, or just to get an understanding of what is happening. In many cases –
MICHAEL: Would you –
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Go ahead, I’m sorry.
MICHAEL: I was going to ask, when you mentioned documentation, now, when you’re doing the collateral investigation, is there ever cause for you to, say, have time, one-on-one time or face-to-face meeting with collateral contacts?
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Oh, sure. Oh, sure.
MICHAEL: Okay.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Many, many, many times. Frequently, I’ll conduct interviews over the telephone because they may be geographically dispersed. I have a case now where people are actually in Canada, and I think even some in Europe. I’m probably not going to have face-to-faces with those; I’ll — over the telephone. But yes, frequently I do face-to-face. It just depends on logistics and how much that information, you know, what weight that information is going to be given.
If it’s just a neighbor who is going to say, you know, I see the parent, you know, interacting with the child once a week, blah, blah, blah, I’m probably just going to talk to that person over the phone.
MICHAEL: Okay.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Whereas a counselor or a therapist, I would probably spend more time getting a more in-depth picture of what is happening in the family.
MICHAEL: But when you –
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Besides doing that, we basically do — we sometimes do psychologically testing.
MICHAEL: Okay.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: And then, also, there are not only psychological tests, but then there’s what we call specialized assessments, tests that might help us look at the family situation, parenting strengths, relationships, that kind of thing. Didn’t mean to interrupt, sorry.
MICHAEL: Okay. Oh, that’s all right. I guess my follow-up question to that would be how is it that cases come to you? I know that may seem like a superficial question, but most of the time I would assume that the cases that are referred to you, or any custody evaluator or custody evaluations organization, would be those of the high conflict variety.
Are there any situations where some other cause would have clients come to a custody evaluation organization?
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: No, I mean, basically, these are families that have not been able to resolve the situation, and so they basically are, they don’t realize it, but they’re asking the Court to make a decision. These are people that cannot make a decision between the two of them and they’re saying, okay, I’m willing to, essentially, give up my parental rights, at this point, and let somebody else make the decision. I mean, that’s basically what it is.
MICHAEL: Yes, and that’s very important to — in fact, I’ll reiterate that because one of the things at Mr. Custody Coach that we suggest pretty strongly to our clients, and even if it’s — even in a high conflict situation, and it really depends upon just how conflict it is, that if you and your ex or soon-to-be ex can work that out outside of the courts, ultimately –
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Oh gosh.
MICHAEL: — it’s absolutely the best way to go.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Hands down, there is no question about it. It is obviously the least expensive, unless people are –
MICHAEL: Yes.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: — unless people are pro se, they’re representing themselves, but even then, you know the old saying is if you’ve got yourself as a client, you have a fool. Unless you’re a lawyer, you’re in an arena that you know nothing about.
MICHAEL: Yes.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: And yes, you have people that are quick studies and that can learn how to fill out forms and they can learn how to maneuver around a courtroom, or a courthouse in general, but the bottom line is this is an arena that people are trained in and if you don’t know what you are doing, you can really, you can get hurt, and the consequences for you and your children are life long, could have a life long effect.
MICHAEL: Yes, and not always good ones. In fact, not often good ones.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Well, that’s true.
MICHAEL: You speak of training. How, generally how are evaluators trained? Are they psychologists, psychiatrists, a combination of the two, all of the above? How does one get trained to be a custody evaluator?
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Actually, all of the above. It ranges anything from an attorney who can actually do them. There are attorneys in Florida that do custody evals. I was on the phone the other day with an attorney in California, and basically that’s what they do. So it’s basically people that are a professional, usually, typically a mental health professional. I was surprised about a year or so ago to find out that attorneys did do that, and if there was any testing that they would basically hire that testing out for a psychologist to do testing.
It could be a mental health counselor; it could be a marriage and family therapist; it could be a clinical social worker; it could be a psychologist; it could be, like I said, an attorney; it could be — I don’t know, did I leave anybody out? I don’t know.
MICHAEL: I don’t think — I think that covered everybody who is going to be evaluating how you operate within the constraints of a family situation or in life, in general.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Exactly.
MICHAEL: Are most knowledgeable — is it part of the curriculum, for lack of a better term, that they come to be knowledgeable about high conflict individuals? And obviously those that are trained specifically in a mental health field, I know that a lot of times personality disorders — personality disorders tend to drive litigation in Family Court. So, do you find most are knowledgeable about high conflict individuals?
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Gee, that’s a tough question. I think, generally speaking, I would say not most. You know, some are. Would I say many? I don’t know. It is a specific area for training; it’s not necessarily included in the, you know, basic training of the procedures of a custody evaluation. So, you know, it’s tough to say. I don’t think — I think a lot of people get exposed to that, and then, once they do, they say, wow, I’m going to get some training in this area because this is a tough area to work in with these kind of clients.
Obviously, you are working with people that can’t make — they can’t cooperate, they can’t make a decision, so they go to court and the Court has to make that decision. You are in the middle of a heated conflict; and so, training in that area is absolutely essential. And again, part of — most of it is done, usually you train through like workshops, seminars –
MICHAEL: Okay.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: — that type of thing. There are some advanced degrees in forensic psychology, masters and doctoral levels. Most of the training in those areas are broader across the forensic environment; working with criminals, working with competency to stand trial, jury selection kind of things. It’s not just child custody –
MICHAEL: Okay.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: — or Family Court issues. That’s a very specialized niche, if you will, within the forensic arena.
MICHAEL: What should parents ask about and be looking for when they choose a custody evaluator, particularly given that the cases are overwhelmingly of the high conflict variety?
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Well, just so we’re really clear, most parents do not select the evaluator. It’s usually done by agreement between two attorneys.
MICHAEL: Okay.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Most cases probably are represented in this kind of conflict. Many are not; many are pro se. So, sometimes, the Court might have a list of people that do this kind of work. Attorneys generally know the people in the community that are doing this kind of work.
MICHAEL: Okay.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: So, you know, we’re looking for somebody who has basically a reputation of being fair and objective. They’re not — they don’t have a reputation of being, quote “a hired gun.”
MICHAEL: Okay.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Keep in mind, people who can’t make — who are in this high conflict situation, they want a champion. They want somebody to champion their point of view. They want someone to champion their decision. Now, many people seek custody for a variety of reasons. Some genuinely believe that they’re the better parent. Some are out to punish the other parent. Some are out to control the situation. There’s a lot of motive –
MICHAEL: Yes, we’ve seen all of them.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Yes, exactly. And so, you’re looking for somebody that is going to be fair, that is going to be comprehensive; they’re going to give the Court a fair and honest recommendation in terms of what, in their opinion, is in the best interest of the child, not what is convenient or good for a parent, but what does the child need. Where will a child grow and develop and prosper, under what kind of parenting arrangement, what kind of time-sharing plan, that type of thing.
MICHAEL: Okay. Well –
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: And –
MICHAEL: Go ahead.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Admittedly, that’s a difficult task, especially in an arena that you don’t know anything about. So if you are represented, you probably have to trust your attorney’s judgment on who to go with.
MICHAEL: Yes, I was going to say that — actually split it in two. And there are situations, I know because I have actually been through both in my own situation, a few years back. We’ll take — I’ll actually probably ask you the same question again. Take the court appointed or court assigned custody evaluation situation out of the equation, and if you’re going to pursue — I know in my case we were given the option of hiring a private evaluator.
So, if a couple is given that opportunity or has that ability to go with a private evaluator, are there certain things that they should look for over and — well, you kind of answered that question already, but I mean the basics in searching for that person to contact. I mean, obviously, there would be maybe an interview. Would it be appropriate to have an interview or consultation discussion? Do they look at their C.V.? How does one go about that?
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: I — you know, both of those things. Get their résumé, get their C.V., have a — have an interview with them, with or without your attorney, if they are represented, because, you know, you’re going to — you’re looking for certain things and the attorney is looking for certain things. So maybe between the two of you, you’ll be asking the right questions of the evaluator.
There are probably books in the area, research that you could do on the internet on how to find some, how to find the right evaluator. But again, I really can’t stress the fact that it’s really a time for you to be open, for the parents to be open to say, okay, I may not like the decision but I want somebody that is going to tell me what really is going to be okay for my kids, because that’s really the bottom line. If you win, quote “win,” you know, custody of a child and you’re managing to keep another parent relatively out of that child’s life, is that really good for the child?
MICHAEL: Yes, what have we really won in that case.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Exactly, yes, and what is the long term effect of that?
MICHAEL: Yes, because I wanted to talk — I was going to actually, as we roll through this discussion, I wanted to talk about biases both on the part of the parents or society in general, and perhaps biases that may, inherent biases that exist within all of us and how the evaluator works to overcome that.
One of the things that I wanted to ask that, in today’s Family Court systems, father’s generally receive custody, primary custody or sole custody somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 to 20 percent of the time. So, given that that’s the nature of the beast at this point, do evaluators start out with a specific custody time-share situation that is like the benchmark or the default and then it changes as the evaluation goes on? Or are they going to go in believing that one parent or the other should maybe have priority, before we even get into discussions?
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Well, okay, let’s just back up real quickly and let’s –
MICHAEL: Okay.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: — let’s agree on vocabulary. When we talk about custody, we’re talking about who has parental responsibility, making decisions about doctors, schools, religious decision making.
MICHAEL: Right.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Okay. So, generally speaking, and this is, you know, I’m saying my experience, generally speaking, most decisions come down with parents have shared parental responsibility or shared custody.
MICHAEL: Okay.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: In the State of Florida, they did away with the word “custody,” and we now call it time-sharing. So, no longer does a parent have residential custody. Custody has totally been exercised out of the law, in Florida, and for good cause. I would have parents come in and say, “I have custody,” as if — as if they have an upper-hand, as if they’ve got some kind of a higher status of parenthood than the other parent.
MICHAEL: Well, I have to applaud Florida for moving that word out of the, out of their vernacular because it gives you the feeling of a prison warden who is watching over the prisoners, you know, the custody, they’re taking them into custody.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Yes, we’re talking about a piece of furniture or something, as opposed to children.
MICHAEL: Right. I’m a big fan of “parenting time.”
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Okay. And we call it “time-sharing.” It’s called a parenting plan and time-sharing.
MICHAEL: That’s wonderful.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: The parenting plan says who, you know, who is — how are we sharing holidays, how are we sharing Father’s Day, Mother’s Day, birthdays, et cetera, and then you’ve got the time-sharing which would be, basically, the routine of, you know, where are we, is it every other weekend, is it every other day, is it every other week. You know, what is the actual time-sharing in terms of when, who picks the child up, when and where, and when is the child brought back when and where to the other parent, that type of thing.
MICHAEL: Okay.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: So we’re talking about time-sharing. So, I would suspect you’re probably right that fathers probably are getting less of a percentage of a child’s time than mothers are, but I think that — I think that’s going to be changing, and I’m starting to lose your question here.
So, coming in with a preconceived notion; we shouldn’t. Evaluators shouldn’t go in with a preconceived notion. We should be looking at focusing strictly on what is in the best interest of the child. If I go in with a preconceived notion that fathers are underrepresented in the court system; therefore, here is my opportunity to balance the scales of justice –
MICHAEL: Right.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: — I’d be doing a great injustice to the children, in that particular case because maybe that father is not the better parent, maybe they are not available when that child needs a parent available. So it’s not about let’s be fair and everybody has half; that’s not the way it goes. It goes, what is this individual child’s or these children’s best interest that makes any sense, in terms of availability of the parent, the parent’s skills, the parent’s strengths, child needs, et cetera. All of that has to go into the equation, otherwise we’re making a bad — you’re making bad decisions. And I think — I had a case recently where a psychologist actually was — had a deposition and in his deposition he makes this outlandish kind of claim saying, you know, basically, there’s no good relocation, there’s no good reason for a parent to relocate, parents shouldn’t be allowed to separate geographically because it always does harm to a child. Well, first of all, that’s not true, it’s not factual.
MICHAEL: I’ve lived that and I know that not to be the case, at least in my specific instance, so.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: And then, on top of that, if you’re going into an evaluation with that perspective, then that’s called confirmatory bias. Everything that you see from that point of view, from that perspective, then gets channeled in that kind of direction. The results get skewed to validate your own bias, and that’s not okay. That’s how we shouldn’t be doing.
MICHAEL: That’s interesting that you went right there. The next question on my list was going to be what would be some of the signs that an evaluator may not be impartial or may not be unbiased, and that was a really good example right there.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Exactly. Or look at their website, look at their pages; see if there is a slant to how they’re advertising their practice. If they’re not advocating what’s in the best interest of the child, then I wonder where they are coming from.
The other, in the course of an evaluation, if an evaluator refuses to take all of your information and consider it, they don’t read it, they might take it but they don’t — all they do is list it in their report, they haven’t really read it, so they don’t — they don’t have — they don’t have what that information is pertinent to. They’re not calling collaterals. You may go in with a list of collaterals; they choose not to talk to your collaterals, but they’ll talk to the other person’s collaterals. Man, is that a red light.
MICHAEL: I see. Yes, especially about the advertising and the website was a great point, one I hadn’t previously considered. I’m going to make a note of that.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Exactly. And because we do, we do pretty much put our personalities out there and we put our biases out there, and so we — it’s sort of a psychological test unto itself of what am I actually proposing here. So, those are some of the things. It’s really hard. You know, there should be a pretty much relatively equal amount of time spent with each parent. If you see a real disproportionate amount of time with one parent over another one, man, that’s a flag.
MICHAEL: Okay.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Why is that happening? That shouldn’t be happening. Is the person talking to the children individually? You know, if the children are, you know, let’s say the children live primarily with one parent and that parent is saying, you know, the children really belong with me and not the other parent, is there interviews of the children with the other parent. Are the children separated and spoken to individually or are they talked to collectively only in the presence of one parent? When they’re talked to, is that parent present or are they talking to the children while the parent is not in the room? You know, who brings the child to the evaluation session sometimes has an influence, so you need to talk to the children where each parent has the opportunity of bringing the child the evaluator’s office.
MICHAEL: Excellent point.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: If they don’t — it’s not just about getting information from the child and saying, well, okay, I don’t need to see the child again; it’s really seeing the child again under different situations and different circumstances.
MICHAEL: Well, that’s good. We’ve gone over pretty well the setup, the preliminaries, the what you’re looking for in a custody evaluator, the warning signs, and of course, also, the positive signs as well.
The evaluation itself, what are you or any evaluator — I know there’s probably some differences in processes and procedures depending upon where you go and who you see — typically, what is the evaluator going to be looking for during the course of an evaluation?
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Well, we should be — we should be posing hypotheses, if you will.
MICHAEL: Okay.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: And taking a look at what the facts are being brought to us, and then saying, okay, what — how can these be interpreted, how can these facts be interpreted, how can these facts be interpreted? I have a really interesting, for example, I had a case a while back and the mother said to me that the father was arrested, do you know this, the father was arrested for selling alcohol, giving alcohol to minors. Well, on the surface, that sounds like, wow, that’s a pretty serious charge, he’s an irresponsible person, this is not good parenting skills. And then you talk to the father, and he says, yes, when he — like 25 years ago, he worked in a delicatessen, some kid came in and bought a six pack of beer, he didn’t ID the kid, and when the kid got outside a copy grabbed him and sure enough, the cop brought him back in and they arrested him for selling alcohol to a minor. Okay, that’s a different context.
MICHAEL: Yes, it certainly is.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Yes. So, did he make a mistake, was it wrong? Sure. But it was like 25 years ago. How does that relate to his parenting skills? Was it really meant to throw the evaluator off track and kind of side, have that evaluator side with that party versus the other side?
So, basically, we’re always looking at the information understanding that there’s three sides to a story; there’s his side, there’s her side, and there’s the truth. We’re not necessarily looking for the truth; we’re looking for what’s going to be in the best interest of the child. If somebody keeps trying to pull me on one side by giving me half truths and things out of context, then, you know, what’s the motivation of that person, what is that all about; versus somebody who said, look, here’s the whole story. Now you have both sides of the story.
So we’re looking — we’re looking at posing hypotheses. We’re looking at different interpretations of psychological data.
MICHAEL: Okay.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: I mean, just because the test says somebody is depressed, you sit down with them and you say, gee, the test is looking like you’re depressed, tell me about what’s going on, you answered the question this way, is there anything that particular day that may be — because testing is just a snapshot, a point in time in a person’s life. It doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s the way they totally are. So you have to look for other kinds of explanations for the test data.
You look for parenting strengths. You know, what is a parent bringing to the table in terms of being a parent? Are they willing to learn how to be a better parent, or is this just something that they’re just this whole activity is just really a contest and they’re looking just to win the prize.
An evaluation should also include some of the pros and cons of the evaluation process, itself. What was good about my evaluation? Where was I lacking? Why was I lacking in these areas? What didn’t I do or what could I have done better? Really being very –
MICHAEL: Is that –
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Go ahead.
MICHAEL: Is that a self assessment on the part of the client you’re speaking of?
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: No, assessment of the evaluator.
MICHAEL: Okay. And would you do that with — would you interact with the client on that or is that something the custody evaluator should do to keep themselves in check, say after or during an evaluation?
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Well, I’m not sure — well, ultimately, you’re going to share that information with the client. They’re basically going to put that in their report. Where is my report strong and where is my report weak?
MICHAEL: Okay.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: You want the Court — we want — if you think about the Court being a blank slate and what you’re providing is information to that Court to make a decision, you need to say things to the Court like, you know, this is what I did and I didn’t do these other things for this other reason.
MICHAEL: I see.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Okay?
MICHAEL: Now I understand. Very good.
Is an evaluator looking for something specific? We’ve talked about assessing the needs of the children, assessing the parents’ ability. You’ve also talked about how they, you know, whether one side or the other, or both, even, are trying to unduly influence the evaluator.
Do you have — should the evaluator have a knack for picking up when the discussion of one parent, the other, or both, is not centered around what’s going to happen with the child or what their proposal is for meeting the needs of the children, going forward, and it’s more about, say, bashing the ex or soon-to-be ex?
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I’m not sure it’s the knack. I think it’s a skill you develop as you do these things, but people keep coming in and presenting you with, you know, here’s all the dirty laundry and this is all the bad things about this other parent, and you’re constantly looking at the information that they’re giving you and you’re saying, okay, how is this related to being a parent.
You know, tell me — tell me that some person at 19 years old, you know, 35 years ago, smoked marijuana. You know, what are they doing today is more relevant than what they did –
MICHAEL: Right.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: — 35 years ago. I’m not advocating for people smoking marijuana. I don’t want anybody to misunderstand that. But the other side is what is relevant here? You know, where is this — how is this impacting this person’s ability — if you’re still involved with drugs, if you’re still doing illicit activities, well, that’s relevant, but something they did 35 years ago may not be. And again, it may not be; it doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t, it just means it may not be.
Are there other pieces of data that say that this person is, you know, anti-authoritarian, they have no respect for the law, they have no social conscience? Is there other support to that or is that the only incident? So it’s — and again, I don’t want to get sidetracked into a discussion on, you know, pros and cons of smoking marijuana at 19.
MICHAEL: Understood. Understood. Folks, Dr. Evans is using these as examples.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Thank you very much. Thank you. That’s the idea. And basically, what happens, what happens with me is I become a student of deception. How can I tell if somebody is telling me the truth or they’re not telling me the whole truth? And so, you basically learn those — you learn about body language, you learn about verbal expression, you learn about all kinds of things and you put that into practice.
MICHAEL: How much stress — this is almost a side question. How much stress does that bring to an evaluator’s life? I have to believe that in, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, in the overwhelming majority of the cases, you’re dealing with just that by, again, one or both parties. How much does that — I can’t pick the right word. How much of an impact on you performing your duties, or when you go home in the evening, dealing with that level of deception from people all the time, or am I wrong in assuming that that’s going on more often than it isn’t?
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Well, I think it goes on a lot. It may go on more often than you want to admit it. Think about being in an energy environment where most of the energy coming from people is pretty negative. Well, energy, negative energy, energy in general is contagious. And so, if someone is coming in and doing a lot of negative dumping on the other parent, on how miserable life is, what a victim they have been and they are, how unfair the system is, and how bad the other attorney is, if people are hung up on that kind of line of thinking all the time, and many of these people are preoccupied with this stuff 24/7, that’s going to have an impact on the evaluator.
If the evaluator wants to be honest, this is very stressful work because these people are dumping a whole lot of stress in your lap and you need to learn how to deal with that and how to get rid of it, so that you’re not taking it home and you’re not expanding on it in other places. You know what it’s like to be in the presence of somebody who is very happy and jovial and very — have a lot of self confidence. It’s a joy to be around those people.
MICHAEL: Yes. Yes, it is.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: And the opposite, the opposite is also true. Being in the presence of somebody who is miserable, who just sees life as another opportunity of being a victim, who everything is going wrong for them and how dangerous life is, and you’ve got to constantly look over your shoulder and — when you’re in the presence of somebody like that, that has — that can bring you down.
MICHAEL: I imagine it takes a high level of skill to get them redirected.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Well, you know, your job is not even to redirect them. Your job is to evaluate the situation.
MICHAEL: Okay.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Evaluators are not there to be a therapist, are not there to fix the situation. We’re not there to give advice or recommendations; we’re simply there to make an assessment of people’s strengths, weaknesses, and how that interacts with their being a parent. It would be wrong for an evaluator to even make recommendations to people, face-to-face, about getting therapy or help or anything like that. It’s not really the job. Does it happen from time to time in some severe cases where people are like really distraught over it? Yes, I suppose it does, but, generally speaking, this is not a therapeutic environment. This is a forensic environment and we’re just simply there to take an x-ray.
MICHAEL: Okay. That’s very important for people to remember, that it’s an assessment, it’s not –
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: No.
MICHAEL: It’s not psychoanalysis. You’re not going there to have something cured or something taken care of.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: No.
MICHAEL: You are just going to be assessing how they’re able to — making an assessment of how they’re able to cope in day-to-day life, at least based on the limited time that you have with them, and their parenting skills; would that be accurate?
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Pretty much. Pretty much. Now, I do not give recommendations, other than in my report. I mean –
MICHAEL: Right.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: — I might recommend somebody for therapy in my report.
MICHAEL: Thank you for clarifying that.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: But I’m not going to — I’m not going to sit there and hold their hand. That would be inappropriate. And even making a recommendation, go see Dr. So-and-so, in the community, they can really help you; that would really be inappropriate.
There’s a — there’s an authority that kind of comes with somebody who is court ordered to do a custody evaluation.
MICHAEL: Okay.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: And you can abuse that authority by saying, you know, you ought to go see Dr. So-and-so about, you know, your depression. I think that would be inappropriate.
MICHAEL: Okay. How long does a custody evaluation, with the understanding that it, again, it may vary from place to place and state to state, how long does a custody evaluation usually take? I mean, there’s the broad view from, okay, it’s going to start on one date and I have to have my report in by some later date down the road. How much time do you actually spend with the family, how many sessions do you have, and who do they include?
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Well, over all, generally speaking, it probably takes upwards of 70-something hours to do a full evaluation, in that I see pretty much every parent around 12 hours, I see the children for four or five hours, and then how many collaterals, I talk to them on the phone, and depending on their role in this case, you know whether it’s a relatively brief telephone conversation or if it’s an hour meeting with face-to-face with a physician or a therapist or whatever. So, but generally speaking, it’s a very comprehensive process. It probably takes me — it probably takes me around 30-something hours just to do my report.
MICHAEL: That’s a lot more than I had anticipated. Again, and my only gauge is, and I’ve gone through several of them, my own experiences, and usually, in my own experience, I found that there were typically six sessions at an hour apiece with various individuals, myself alone, my ex alone, us together, with the kids individually and together.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Yes.
MICHAEL: So, you know, I — my, obviously mistaken, belief is that, or maybe it was the case in my situation, that it was less time than that. So that’s good to know, as well.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Well, some courts have either people on contract or, in some cases, they actually have employees that will do what, in Florida, we call them social investigations. Now, typically, they’re a shorter, less comprehensive process. There’s usually no testing of any of the parties or the children. It’s simply a one-time interview with each parent, an interview with the children, and then observations of a child or children interacting with the parent. It’s a much shorter process, a much more economical process; it’s a lot less comprehensive. Jon Arbuckle said something like, “You get what you pay for,” so.
MICHAEL: Okay. If, during the course of an evaluation, a parent is expressing genuine concerns about the other parent’s ability to care for the child, how do they bring up these issues without looking like they’re doing that deceptive influence routine? How do they do that without looking vindictive or controlling?
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Well, again, if you’ve got some genuine concerns and there’s documentation to show that there’s a basis for your concerns, you might have emails, people talking the way they talk, I suggest showing both sides of an email string, not just one side taken out of context.
MICHAEL: Yes.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: If there’s a therapist involved, any collateral informants are there basically to substantiate what you’re saying is your side of the case, and so you’re looking for those folks to reinforce it.
Now, many times, people pick people like parents or older siblings, and so they kind of come in, you know, somewhat suspicious in terms of, well, are they really going to give you — are they really going to give you a, you know, an accurate perspective of the situation or are they going to give you a more biased one. So you’re looking for as much objective data to tell you, you know, what really is going on here, what really is the situation. So, again, police reports, doctors’ reports, medical doctors, psychologists, therapists, people bring in tape recordings, people bring in other documentation, letters, emails, videos. I have people showing me videos. I — you can — whatever you can imagine in terms of the type of media that people can bring in, they’ll bring in.
MICHAEL: Okay.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: A good place to start is with your attorney, talking that over with your attorney to say, okay, what kind of information should be providing this evaluator, and they know where the case is going, they know the strong points, the weak points. They don’t necessarily have the children’s best interests in mind; they have their clients case in mind. An attorney’s job is totally different from an evaluator’s job. An attorney is out to win the case.
MICHAEL: For their client.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Exactly. Exactly. And there may be a secondary concern for the children; although, my experience has been not that frequent. Most people — well, attorneys are out to win the case for their client, and that’s what they’re paid to do. If they fail to do that, then that person could take them to their State Bar and file a complaint. So an attorney has a very hard job. I know they’re not probably the most popular people on the planet, but they have a very hard job. Their job is to win a case for their client, and they’ve got to do everything that they can do to win that case.
Our job, as evaluators, is to give a Court an objective perspective on what’s in the best interest of the child, what kind of time-sharing and parenting plan would be in the child’s best interest, not looking to favor one side or the other, if anybody. We’re going to favor the children.
MICHAEL: Dr. Evans, as our discussion has progressed, I’m actually snickering quietly here to myself because as I’m — I prepared a bunch of questions to discuss with you and I’m going to keep going on, but as I read the questions, I’m suddenly, as you’re speaking back to me, thinking to myself, I feel like I’m asking him — I feel like I’m asking Dr. Bob what to tell people, how to get people out of doing the wrong thing, and that’s not necessarily the case. So I just want to be clear about that.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Oh no, no. I don’t think that, either. I mean, I’m not taking it that way.
MICHAEL: More for the — I mention that more for the listeners than for you because you’re clearly taking me at face value, and I don’t want people to mistake these questions to think that, hey, you know, you want to be normal, you want to be natural. So these questions are predicated on getting the people who I’m helping, the people who you’re helping, and anybody else who happens to be listening today, focused on what’s best for the kids.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Exactly.
MICHAEL: And with that in mind, my next question, the way it’s written is, what should parents avoid doing during an evaluation, and that’s not — listeners, that’s not asked to suggest that you should be hiding something from the evaluator; it’s how — the question, more or less, is how does it — how should a parent present their issues without — you know, one of the things that I have a tendency to do is I get — I tend to get animated, especially when I’m excited or passionate about a particular topic. So, with that in mind, what should parents avoid doing during an evaluation, aside from the obvious?
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Well, interestingly enough, I mean, there’s two sides to this. Number one, as a parent — as an evaluator, I have a perspective, but I also do divorce coaching and that’s kind of interesting job because that’s the place where I’m now working for one side. I’m working for one parent and I’m helping them go through the process. And I would say to men, you know, this is not a good time to get a DUI. This is really not a good time to do that. This is not a good time to be seen coming out of a strip club. This is not a good time to get arrested for disorderly conduct. And many times, as a divorce coach, I’ll look at them and I’ll say that to them, and I’ll say this to them, I’ll say, I can see by the expression on your face my advice is too late, and they will have already done those things.
MICHAEL: How about if the look on their face is, I would never dream of doing that?
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Yes, yes, right.
MICHAEL: There’s two sides to that coin, because — and the reason that I suggest that is that I know that, and this advice would have come from an attorney, not necessarily a divorce coach, is that, hey, I said — it — you are being absolutely truthful with me, but I would be remiss in not suggesting these things to you.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Right, right, right.
MICHAEL: Just by some chance you had the opportunity, your best buddy wanted you to, just this one night and you never again did it, you didn’t do it before and you have no intention of doing it after, just avoid it altogether when you’re going through this situation, is your advice.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Right, exactly. Now, that’s from, that’s from the coaching perspective, if you will, or a divorce counseling perspective. From, in talking to an evaluator, again, if you can genuinely come from your heart and communicate what you think is in the best interest of the child, and presenting that side of it — look, at one point in time, these two people at least slept in the same bed, at least once, to create a child. So there must have been something of redeeming value in the other parent for them to want to go on for some amount of time with that person.
So, painting a person, the other parent, as all bad is probably not a good idea. Now, the caveat in that, unless, unless it’s true. You know, I mean, like there’s something really horrible, terrible that that person has done. They’re physically abusive, they were sexually abusive; well, that’s got to — that’s got to be shared, that’s got to be told, but just to come in and just paint a, you know, a very stark contrast between you and the other parent and how much better you are as a parent, I think that creates more of a suspicion than it does in terms of convincing anybody.
Understand that most evaluators are pretty experienced and they’re going to see through a lot of that. Again, I think it’s really important for the people to understand that the children need both parents, in most cases. Yes, there are exceptions, but I don’t want to go down there right now. But for most cases, you know, children look at their father and they see what it’s like to be a man, a father and a husband, and they look at their mother and they see what it’s like to be a woman, a wife, and a mother, and those images that we have of our parents stay with us for the rest of our lives.
And some people say, well, what if — what if we — what if they were abusive parents or something like that. The point is, those people we call our mother and our father have a tremendous influence on us, and it helps form the foundation of any relationships that we’re going to get into in the future. It is absolutely –
MICHAEL: Okay.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: — critical that we give our kids that opportunity to see both sides of that coin, and I think if you can, if you can work with a custody evaluator and say, you know, I’m generally interested in what’s going to be in my kid’s best interest, not try to get caught up in the high conflict of this whole thing, but at the same time you’re doing it because you’re disagreeing. If you could agree, you wouldn’t be in that person’s office to begin with.
MICHAEL: Absolutely.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: So, it’s –
MICHAEL: And yet, people — I was going to say, and yet, people like you and I are imploring the people who come to us for help, to try to work out an agreement with your high conflict ex before you have somebody else make a life-altering decision for you.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Exactly.
MICHAEL: That’s so hard to deal with. All right. To a person, they — everyone with whom I’ve spoken to, whether they’re a part of Mr. Custody Coach or not, when they’re going through or about to embark on a custody evaluation, almost to a person, tells me the attorney said that, you know what, the Judges almost always rubber stamp these things, they put a great deal of stock in the evaluator’s report, and they almost, almost exclusively do whatever it is that’s reported, recommended in the report.
In your experience, from the custody evaluator seat, how much stock — how much experience do you have with how much stock Judges put into your recommendations or those of your colleagues?
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: They put a lot of stock in them.
MICHAEL: Okay.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: I think I can count on one hand, literally, where a Court has said I’m not buying anything that Dr. Evans is saying. In fact, I only know of one case where that happened, and I was kind of flabbergasted, actually, but most times Courts take these reports very, very seriously. So much of it depends on how you present in your report, how you present in testimony.
If your — if your report is pretty well structured and comprehensive and pretty fair, in terms of giving both sides a fair hearing, the Court is probably going to pay serious attention to it. If it’s obviously bias, and you can frequently tell, then the Court is going to discount it, and they may just give you lip service, they’ll take the report, put it into evidence, but they’re not going to give much weight to it.
MICHAEL: Well, it’s interesting, it’s interesting that you say that, and this is a point where I know that you and I had some email discussions about the custody evaluations. I actually went through three separate custody evaluations; two of them court — well, all of them were court ordered, but two were through our, I guess, they might be the contracted organization with the court system, and one was private, and I’d like to draw on a little of that experience to ask you some opinions, generally speaking.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Sure.
MICHAEL: Based on some of the things. If you have — one of the things that I had experienced was that an evaluator asks each of the parties to come to a particular future session with a parenting plan that they think would work for everybody.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Okay.
MICHAEL: What would your opinion be if one side came with plans and the other side didn’t?
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: I’d want to find out why they chose not to come with a plan. What was — the request was I need to understand what it is that you — what are you asking for, what is your position in this case.
MICHAEL: Okay.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: If your position in this case is you don’t care, then that’s a pretty significant factor, I think.
MICHAEL: Interesting, okay.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: If they — if they didn’t understand the request, the request infringed on some time constraints that they had. What was the rationale for them to show up without a plan, even if it was a rudimentary one? In my assessments, I have a questionnaire, and I ask in detail, you know, if you could — if you had the — if you had decision-making power, what would — how would this case get resolved, what would it look like? Be specific. Tell me.
And it’s interesting because I get varying degrees of detail. Some people give me a three sentence thing of, he should have every other weekend and one –
MICHAEL: Right.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: You know, that kind of thing. And then some people give me like three pages of what holidays –
MICHAEL: All the holidays worked out, they’ve got extra time when they’re off from school, the whole bit.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Yes, exactly. So, you know, what does that tell you? I mean, it basically gives you somebody is really putting some thought into it versus somebody who is blowing it off, thinking that somehow or other they’ve got a winning hand in this thing and it doesn’t really make any difference, they don’t need to put the energy into it.
So, but again, see, there’s a — you have to look for the — you have to pose the hypothesis of why does somebody behave that way, given the request, and there could be a variety of reasons, and you do some probing to find out what possibly could have happened here that you didn’t do what I asked you to do.
MICHAEL: Okay. One of the things that we had discussed via email, based on your reply it took you a little bit by surprise. I’ve been doing research on this for a little while, and there’s a couple different organizations out there. And again, I’m just going to — I wanted to engage you in some discussion on this with the understanding –
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Sure.
MICHAEL: — that you have no idea about this organization or my county or the arrangement with the Court, but I did at least give — I did at least offer you the evidence that what I’m about to present you is reality, and that is the Court, when people don’t elect to go via a private evaluation, you go the organization that is hooked up with the court system, and in my particular case, with the first two custody evaluations, you go through just one organization, it’s not several, so it’s not like there’s a couple different places you could choose from. You actually sign a waiver that prohibits you from calling the evaluator in to testify about the report that they present to the Court.
As you know from the email discussion that we had, I have — that really is very alarming to me, and when you’re in the throws of a situation like this, you don’t think twice. You’ve been — the Court said you’re going to go, so you go and you sign pretty much whatever it is that they put in front of you. So I only really came to find about this later, and the combination of the attorney telling you that, hey, the Judge puts a lot of weight on the custody report, things did not go very well for me the first time through, so I ended up coming to an agreement for lesser time with my kids, based on the fact that I wasn’t going to throw good money after bad. I was out of money at that point.
But how do you feel, from my perspective, and I think for many rational, reasonable-thinking human beings, given the nature of what’s going on here, and that is there is going to be a recommendation that is going to, potentially, forever alter the lives of parents and their relationship with their children, that there is no accountability, there is no justification for whatever it is that they write in the report. How — just your opinion, because I know you can’t explain why the situation was set up the way it is. Good; bad?
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: I think it’s terrible. I mean, if you want a one-word answer. I don’t — I don’t — can I ask what state we’re talking about?
MICHAEL: Pennsylvania.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: See, what I don’t understand, and it’s really funny because I just had a case where I worked with an attorney and I said — I reviewed a court’s — a court conducted assessment, and I really wrote a very strong critique of it, a negative critique, and I wrote up a paper on it, and the attorney says, well, I can’t use the paper without your testimony, because without my testimony the paper is hearsay. I said, oh, that’s interesting. And then you came along and asked me this question about submitting evaluations without testimony.
We have an interesting situation in Florida. There’s a position called Parenting Coordinator. Some places call them Parenting Facilitators.
MICHAEL: Yes.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Now, many times, a Parenting Coordinator or a Facilitator will have an agreement with the parties. They also are appointed by the Court, but they have an agreement that says we’re going to work together and if this — however this goes down, you are not going to call me to testify. But that’s different from a person who has been appointed by the Court to actually do an assessment of a family and give the Court recommendations on how this parenting plan and time-sharing should go down.
I — I mean I think it’s a terrible practice. I can’t — I do not — I’m not an attorney, I do not know how legal — how that meets any — how that meets any rules of evidence in terms of producing a piece of paper. So what you have is an attorney walking in with a piece of paper that says, here, Your Honor, here is the evaluation, or the evaluator is giving it directly to the Court without the attorneys looking at it and arguing whether or not it should even be admitted into evidence.
What if this person who did that evaluation, hopefully it’s unlikely, but what if they did a really horrible, terrible, biased job and destroyed a family? Well, that’s going to go into evidence and there is not going to be any discussion or argument? The whole adversarial system, for better or for worse, is basically designed to argue both sides of an issue. This is not even arguing. Why even bother going? Basically, then, the Court will just simply award this evaluator and let him, he or she write a report, and then that’s the end of it.
MICHAEL: And the thing that’s alarming to me is, and I’d almost like to try, and I may someday initiate maybe a local news, an investigative reporter, something like that. What’s interesting is that if — and a lot of people just don’t have the resources to, between attorney’s fees and evaluator’s fees, to be able to afford to go anywhere but wherever it is that the Court tells them to. So, if you’re paying two to three thousand dollars per evaluation and the default, almost everybody who passes through this courtroom with a custody dispute is ordered into a custody evaluation with this organization.
So without making any accusations, you may be able to read between the lines and see where I’m going with this, and the thing that disappoints me in the way the system is set up in that particular jurisdiction is that without accountability, literally, and I know this is probably the due side of the equation, is that, literally, the evaluator can do nothing, listen to you for six sessions, or however many sessions, write whatever it is they want, and they don’t have to come account for what it is that they put in the report. They might even make a mistake, maybe they get a file –
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Absolutely.
MICHAEL: Maybe they get two files confused or they cross over their reports and, you know, maybe the header is already prepared for Michael and Jane, and they type in the template, and they wrote a report that’s based on somebody else’s evaluation, and there’s really nothing you can do about it.
I guess the unfortunate, and I use that term loosely, is that I was so — it really was my first evaluation, it was seriously one-sided, and based on my attorney’s advice and the warning ahead of time that, hey, they put a lot of stock in this, the custody evaluator made a recommendation for less time than I actually had prior to the hearing. So I just gave in and said, well, how much more time — this was initially, I am now in a shared parenting situation, this was five years ago. I just said how much time — how much more time — I gave up. I said how much more time than what the evaluator recommended are you going to give me, and I’ll sign off on it, and I ended up with ten days, as opposed to six days or five days, whatever it was that was in the recommendation, but that was — that really — that had me shaken up for some time.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Well, I would imagine. I — I would — I think it would be — you’re in an interesting position. I would be having an interview with an attorney to understand how that procedure, how that process conforms to the rules of evidence.
MICHAEL: Okay.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: I don’t — again, I’m not an attorney, I’m not a legal scholar. It just seems weird to me that you can take somebody’s piece of paper and not even ask them about it. I mean, we do that with — we do this with DUI’s.
MICHAEL: Well, I’m still learning. Dr. Bob, you might be surprised to find that, and I’m still researching this and learning this stuff on my own, that the rules of evidence, as we know them to exist in Criminal Court, don’t actually apply to Family Court. I’m not sure if you’re aware of that, or not, but I’ll follow up with you with some information. We’re right up against the end now.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Oh, okay.
MICHAEL: I do want to thank you. I do want to thank you for coming on and talking with us.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Well, you’re very welcome. This was good.
MICHAEL: And I will stay in touch. As I find more information, I’ll pass it along to you, for your own edification, and maybe we’ll have another discussion somewhere down the road.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Very good.
MICHAEL: Thanks so much.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: I –
MICHAEL: Again — go on.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Oh, go ahead, I’m sorry. You’re down to, what, a minute here, less than?
MICHAEL: Thereabouts.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: Yes, very good. No, I appreciate it. Thank you for having me.
MICHAEL: Okay, Dr. Bob, have a great day.
DR. ROBERT A. EVANS: You too. Thank you very much. Good luck to you guys.
MICHAEL: Bye-bye. Okay.
That was Dr. Robert Evans. Again, he is a Licensed School Psychologist who has a private practice in Palm Harbor, Florida. His practice consists mainly in the area of forensic psychology, where he conducts child custody evaluations, parental coordination, and divorce counseling, and I think he added quite a bit of information and insight into custody evaluations, something we talk about on the blog, and hopefully he’ll visit us there. Mr. Custody Coach.com. You can by our custody agreement e-book for a special introductory price of $19.95. And stop by and sign up today. Thank you very much.

Domestic Violence
with guest
Jan Elizabeth Brown
October 14, 2009
www.mrcustodycoach.com

MICHAEL: Hello and welcome to Mr. Custody Coach’s Blog Talk Radio program. I’m Michael, here with my partner Lexi.
LEXI: Good afternoon, everyone.
MICHAEL: You might know us from Mr. Custody Coach.com. Please visit our website today and purchase our e-book on creating custody agreements, for an introductory price of $19.95. We believe you will find it a valuable resource for starting your plan for quality parenting arrangements that benefits both the parents and the children, and it is free if you actually join the site.
Today’s topic is Domestic Violence.
LEXI: Yes. So, as we were scheduling this radio show, Michael, I don’t know if you were watching with me or not, but we often have Law & Order on in the office, just as background noise, and it was an episode where a woman was saying that her husband raped her. But the issue before that was they were having an argument and he ran out of the house to get away from her, and she came running after him with a cast-iron pot and threw it at his head, and I’m sitting there going, okay.
So, she calls the cops and files a rape report, you know, tells the cops exactly what happened, and none of them even bat an eyelash that she physically abused him before the rape incident, you know, no charges pressed against her, absolutely nothing, and that is a really scary thing in our society.
So, it was timely for having this radio show on domestic violence, because we really want to point out that it doesn’t only happen to females; it happens to males, too. So, I just want to go over, in the beginning, here, the actual definition of domestic violence, and this is according to the U.S. Office on Violence Against Women. They define domestic violence as:

“A pattern of abusive behavior in any relationship that is used by one partner to gain or maintain power and control over another intimate partner.”

It can be physical, sexual, emotional, economic, or even psychological actions and threats of actions that influence the other person. So any behavior that intimates, manipulates, humiliates, isolates, frightens, terrorizes, coerces, threatens, bullying someone or, of course, hurts and injures someone is considered domestic violence, according to them.
So, just a couple of quick statistics for you, according to a study done by the Department of Justice, in 2006, their calculations for 2004 domestic violence cases included 627,000 total cases. 151,000 of those were against men.
MICHAEL: Wow!
LEXI: You know, and most people will not believe that, but that’s true. And the bigger issue is, for us, obviously — because we deal with people who are going through custody situations — on average, children were residents in those households 43 percent of the time when the victim was the mother, and 25 percent of the time when the victim was the father. So there are a lot of children that are living with this and having to see everything.
So, today we have a guest with us. We have Jan Elizabeth Brown who is the founder and Executive Director of the Domestic Abuse Helpline for Men & Women — Women, excuse me. Welcome, Jan.
JAN BROWN: Hi.
MICHAEL: How are you doing today, Jan?
JAN BROWN: Good. Thanks for having me on.
MICHAEL: Oh, a pleasure to have you here. Obviously, one of the first things we wanted to do was talk to you — talk to you about your organization.
As you know, the topic of domestic violence is one that is hotly debated and discussed across this country. Can you give us a little bit of background about how your organization is different from what people understand most domestic violence hotlines and domestic violence shelters to be?
JAN BROWN: Well, our agency is different than traditional domestic violence victims’ agencies in a number of ways. First, we specialize in offering supportive services to men in relationships with abusive women.
And secondly, we are a virtual non-profit, so all our communication is through, other than direct services we offer the victims and survivors, is through online. Teleconferencing, email, group lists, chat, web-conferencing.
And lastly, we differ from them in that we get no federal or state funding, so we remain an all-volunteer agency at this time, after nine years.
LEXI: That is amazing.
MICHAEL: Yes, it is quite a departure from what people are used to, you know, are aware of and used to seeing.
So, who do you actually serve?
JAN BROWN: We serve — anybody that calls our line gets the same service. Primarily, men call looking for services. I would say about 80 percent of our callers are men looking — or someone concerned about an abused man, most of the time. We get about 550 calls a month, at this point.
LEXI: That is quite a bit. I think it is interesting that it is all virtual. Do you think that promotes more access for everyone?
JAN BROWN: Oh yes, definitely. It was tricky, at first, to do it this way, but it was the only way to do it with a national agency, with no money, so –
LEXI: Yes, it definitely lowers your –
JAN BROWN: — and given the need –
LEXI: That definitely lowers your costs, I’m sure.
JAN BROWN: Yes. Well, given the need for services, throughout the country, for men, there is no way we could have limited this agency just to, like, Maine, where I’m based, or New England. It just wouldn’t work because most — I would say we get calls, a lot of calls from Pennsylvania, Florida, California. So, you know, where are those men going to go if they don’t have us to reach out to, you know?
LEXI: Right. I think that makes a lot of sense, especially because there aren’t, you know, physical shelters for men. There are so few and, you know, having the luck that you might live near one is probably almost impossible, unfortunately.
JAN BROWN: Right. And a lot of times they will get run-around when they call the traditional hotlines and shelters. You know, they’ll get the run-around.
MICHAEL: Jan, that is a really creative — really creative approach, especially when you have so many websites out there offering free opportunities that can help you expand your network. That is really great.
JAN BROWN: It has been a progress of love. Yes. What — how does that go? But basically, I have been very fortunate to get some volunteers that are as passionate about the issue as I am, and so they put a lot of time in, like I do, to, you know, making this work and training advocates and public awareness. Training more advocates for the helpline and all that, too, so.
And so, I’m in Maine, and my Director of Volunteer Services is in Chicago, and then our Volunteer Coordinator is in Florida. So, sometimes it’s — I’m a visual person, sometimes it’s a little tricky, but it all works, so.
LEXI: Well, having worked online for the past almost ten years, I understand, and I actually like it now because you can reach those people who are just as passionate as you about a problem, or an issue, or, you know, something that they want to do, even though they live thousands and thousands of miles away.
JAN BROWN: Right. Right.
LEXI: So, what events prompted you to start the organization?
JAN BROWN: Well, back in 1995, a male friend came to me with a problem and he confided in me that his wife of 12 years was verbally and physically abusive towards him pretty much their entire marriage. So, he tried to look — you know, he tried everything to get the abuse to stop. Counseling, she wouldn’t go, it was his problem not hers, and all that; and threatened divorce and she threatened, well, then, you’ll never see your children again, and he had two little kids.
So, he had limited funds and she carried the checkbook in her name only, and gave him five bucks a week, so he didn’t have a whole lot of choices. He hadn’t told his family anything about this. So, I felt really bad and I said, well, let me see what I can find out, and I called around and discovered that most of your traditional domestic violence programs were, in fact, pretty anti-male.
LEXI: Right.
JAN BROWN: They did not help men. So, that got me started on a campaign, and from there it grew, and, in 2000, myself and a few other people decided we would start this non-profit agency.
MICHAEL: And your non-profit agency is Domestic Violence Helpline for Men & Women. Do you have a website address you can shout out, give a shout-out to now?
JAN BROWN: Domestic Abuse Helpline for Men & Women. Yes, you can actually go to www.domesticabusehelpline.org. That would be the easiest one, on the radio.
LEXI: Okay. And is there a phone number anyone can call if they need help?
JAN BROWN: The helpline number is 888-743-5754.
LEXI: Fabulous.
JAN BROWN: That is our toll-free line.
LEXI: Yes, one of the, you know, it is interesting when you start learning about everything, because I think, like most situations in life, you don’t really think about it until the problem is dropped at your own door.
JAN BROWN: Right.
LEXI: And you know the first time that I really heard of an issue where I wanted to get involved was that, even in women — women’s shelters and women’s center shelters, they don’t even accept women who have boys that are 12 years old or older.
JAN BROWN: Right. Most of the centers, and there’s over 2,000 of them in the country –
LEXI: Yes.
JAN BROWN: — that offer, specialize in helping women, yes, they won’t take an adolescent boy. Most of them won’t take an adolescent boy.
MICHAEL: What is the reason for that, Jan?
JAN BROWN: The reasoning, from what I’ve read and understood, is that, you know, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. You know, if the father is a batterer, then the child will probably be one. Women are afraid of men, so, basically, an adolescent boy could look like a man, if he was tall enough.
LEXI: Right.
MICHAEL: Okay.
JAN BROWN: And there was one other one to do with, you know — I can’t remember exactly when I think about it, but they just all — crazy stuff, you know?
LEXI: Yes.
JAN BROWN: A mother would have to go there and find another place for their adolescent son.
LEXI: Right.
JAN BROWN: They could bring an adolescent daughter, but they can’t bring an adolescent son.
LEXI: Yes, and that is the part that really never made sense to me, unless you honestly believe that no woman in the world could ever hurt anyone else, which, gosh, turn on your news every night and you know that is not true.
JAN BROWN: Right.
LEXI: But you know, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, but that is only true for boys.
JAN BROWN: Right.
LEXI: We know that children, any child in an abusive, you know, home can end up being abusive, and yet they completely ignore that and they take in these young women and they don’t really help them to stop being abusive in the future. They just say, oh, well, it’s dad’s fault, you know?
JAN BROWN: Yes.
LEXI: It just made absolutely no sense to me. So, you know, obviously –
JAN BROWN: There was some — there was a center, I remember reading a few years back, there was a center that was very proud, in Washington state, that they were opening up a bigger shelter or a new shelter and they were all excited because they were going to take in adolescent boys and pets. So, that kind of proves that it’s — it’s an anomaly, you know.
LEXI: Things just don’t make sense for so many reasons, and we’re really glad to see organizations like yours trying to change things and provide services for both.
JAN BROWN: Thanks.
LEXI: And we know that domestic violence affects men and women alike. As a provider for both men and women, what, if any, differences do you find when one or the other calls into your organization?
JAN BROWN: Well, I think one of the most striking differences is that abusive females know how to continue the abuse, after their victim has left, by using the court system against them. Abusive females can set a victim up in such a way that he can be arrested for protecting himself, too –
MICHAEL: Yes.
JAN BROWN: — against his female partner’s attacks.
MICHAEL: We have seen that.
JAN BROWN: So, you know, I mean when it comes to arrest, ten times out of ten they are going to try to arrest the men.
LEXI: Right.
JAN BROWN: In most instances, how close is that to most instances? But you know, so she can continue to do that, she can keep the children away and all that, but that is what we hear from some men that call the line, who have gotten out.
When I first started this line, my goal was to eventually have a line where most of the callers were men who were still in the situation, and we safely help them to remove themselves and their children. That is my dream because that would mean everybody was aware that domestic violence happens to men and everybody was aware that there was a program that helped them.
LEXI: Right.
JAN BROWN: But that is not there yet. But it is still my dream, you know.
LEXI: Do you find that men usually call you when they are still in the situation, or do they call you –
JAN BROWN: Oh yes.
LEXI: — after they have gotten out? When they are still in?
JAN BROWN: No, both; both instances. And if they call when they are still in it, I get kind of excited because, you know, nothing bad has happened yet and we can, hopefully, give them safety planning, you know, offer them emergency shelter, help them with a protective order if the local people won’t help them, even do it by phone. I do, anyway. You know those kinds of things to try to get things in place to protect them before stuff gets out of hand like that.
LEXI: Have you found a lot of legal resources for men? Because I know –
JAN BROWN: No.
LEXI: — we hear every day from clients. You know, women can get legal aide in almost every circumstance. Gosh, even Michael’s ex-wife has gotten free legal aide based on total crap stories. But for men, you know, if they can’t afford an attorney, there is almost nowhere to go.
JAN BROWN: Right. And the challenge is that most of your legal aide programs, services are set up that they collaborate and are in partnerships with the battered women’s shelters.
LEXI: Right.
JAN BROWN: So, if the battered women’s shelters, you know, if a woman goes to the battered women shelter, she is automatically going to be more than likely qualified, qualifies for free legal help. And then, and most of those are — well, I shouldn’t say most, but many are your legal services, you know, the statewide kind of free legal services, so then –
LEXI: Right.
JAN BROWN: — they can’t help the man because it’s a conflict of interest. So, automatically, you know –
MICHAEL: They are left out in the cold.
JAN BROWN: — the guy is out of luck.
MICHAEL: Right.
JAN BROWN: Right. Unless they happen to get to a shelter, unless they are a victim and they happen to get a program, a local program that believes them and helps them. We have had a few –
LEXI: Right. And gets there first.
JAN BROWN: Hmm?
LEXI: And gets there first.
JAN BROWN: Yes. That’s the sad part.
LEXI: The really sad part is, you know, you always hear women and children, but even if you’re men and children, the children aren’t being protected. And this is kind of off topic, but when Michael lost his job last year, he called to get CHIP for the children because we couldn’t afford to pay for COBRA on top of losing, you know, all of his income, and he was not eligible to get it simply because he had a child support order. Not because he was behind on child support; he wasn’t. Simply that the child support order was in his name, he was not eligible for state benefits that benefit his children.
JAN BROWN: Now, if she had a child support order, would that be the case?
LEXI: Exactly. Exactly. And the woman, actually, she was like, well, you know, what kind of custody do you have? Well, no, she didn’t even ask. He just said, well, what about, I have 50/50 custody, you know I have my kids half the time, technically I shouldn’t even pay child support, but the courts –
JAN BROWN: Right.
LEXI: — you know, they can do whatever they want, so they still make him pay it. She had literally told him she had never heard of a father that had 50/50 custody.
JAN BROWN: Oh my gosh.
LEXI: Never.
JAN BROWN: Yes, it’s –
LEXI: Yes. I’m like –
JAN BROWN: — to hear that –
LEXI: She is like, I’ve — and these are the obstacles that men are dealing with. So, now you have a man who is being abused, you know, doesn’t have access to finances, and there is really nowhere to go.
JAN BROWN: No.
MICHAEL: One of the things that I found disturbing, despite my best efforts to try to educate people, and I guess, within certain social circles that I run I talk about the domestic violence issues and how it relates to men, and one of the disturbing things I find, particularly among men, is that it is just simply not taken seriously, despite the wealth of information that is out there, despite what we sometimes see on the news out there. And the common, I guess, the stereotypical theme that rings true among men who can’t grasp the seriousness of the situation is, you know, if the man lets himself get beat up by a woman, he is a wimp or a sissy or he deserves it, and despite my best efforts I can’t seem to change that mindset, or, who knows, maybe they are just trying to egg me on or make me get riled up about the passion I feel on this subject.
So, I guess that leads me to a question. That is, what are the types — what types of response will a man expect to receive when calling the local domestic violence shelter, and what kind of a response would they expect to receive when they call the Domestic Abuse Helpline for Men & Women? Can you articulate the differences, based on your experiences and your research?
JAN BROWN: Well, most battered women’s shelter programs will tell a man calling that they do not help men, and hang up on them.
LEXI: Even though they are funded by federal dollars?
JAN BROWN: Even though they are funded by federal dollars. Or they will claim that they help men, but they don’t have to prove it. Who do they have to prove it to, you know? Unless there was some kind of inside investigation of some sort. They can say anything they want, and who is going to doubt them? They can say they help men just by picking up the phone and talking to them for five minutes. That’s — we help men, you know?
LEXI: Right.
JAN BROWN: Give them the full compliment of services they give women? Can’t ask that question. So that is what, many times, men run into when they call their local domestic violence shelter. With a very — you know, I mean, it humbles them so much to even make that call, you know, and to get rejected, it is just ridiculous.
They call us, we let them know that we are here to support them, we try to give them referrals, we work with them on safety planning, we talk about options, we say we understand, you know, we get lots of calls from men, so that they realize they are not alone. All my helpline advocates are very open to working with male victims because 80 percent of our callers, at this point, are men.
MICHAEL: That leads me into the next question that I had lined up. What percentage of the overall number of people who call your organization are men versus women?
JAN BROWN: Well, until 2005, when we added “Women” to our name, 95 percent of the calls were for and about men being abused. Now, I would say it’s about 80/20; maybe 20 percent of the calls come from women, and the rest come from men or someone about a man who they’re concerned about being abused.
MICHAEL: That is interesting.
JAN BROWN: Still a high percentage.
LEXI: Yes, I like hearing that other people are concerned about men and calling in for them. That’s –
MICHAEL: That’s the thing that –
JAN BROWN: Oh, yes, we get a lot of those calls, yes.
MICHAEL: I was going to say that’s the thing that most disturbs me when I encounter people who either just outright dismiss the abuse issue, at least as it relates to males, or make fun of men who are brave enough to come forward and say, hey, yes, I was in a domestic violence situation. And the thing that I think that just — it seems obvious to me, and I guess I get disheartened that it’s not obvious to others, is that men and women alike have men and boys, young adolescents in their lives who they love, who someday have a fair likelihood of being affected by this type of stereotypical, judgmental behavior about men who are experiencing domestic violence, and it is just a shame, from my perspective, that it would take somebody to actually be hurt for these people who are so dismissive about it to realize that it’s a real issue and it’s a serious issue, and that domestic violence should be fought regardless of gender.
JAN BROWN: We have to make it safe for men to speak out. That is a challenge, too. There’s no outreach efforts within those 2,000-or-more domestic violence shelter programs for women. There is no outreach effort for men, in many of them. There’s a few that are starting to take notice and have outreach materials for male victims, but majority don’t. So, how would a guy even know that what’s happening to him –
LEXI: Right. And most of them know –
JAN BROWN: How would he even know he is experiencing domestic violence?
LEXI: Right. And the ones that do know, usually when it becomes critical, when their wife comes after them, you know, with a knife –
JAN BROWN: Right.
LEXI: — they, of course, call the cops because that is immediate, but they are not even listened to most of the time, then, and oftentimes they are taken in and she’s let go with absolutely no consequences, you know.
JAN BROWN: And men don’t want their partners to get in trouble. They don’t want them to go to jail.
LEXI: Exactly.
JAN BROWN: So they’re not going to call right away. They’re going to do everything they can to try to rectify the situation –
LEXI: Exactly.
JAN BROWN: — rather than bring in the authorities.
LEXI: I can tell you, Michael was there in that situation when we started dating five years ago. His ex-wife lost a court battle; she broke into his home, with the children –
MICHAEL: I love this story.
LEXI: — decided to –
JAN BROWN: He lived this story.
MICHAEL: Yes.
LEXI: — move back in, and he — it was, literally, I think two weeks after we had started dating, so, and we lived four hours apart, we lived in different states, you know, it wasn’t, certainly, anything serious at that point, but he did email and let me know what was going on. Or no, he called me and said she had called him from inside the house, called him at work. Of course he sees his home phone number on the phone, is like, um, what the heck?
So, anyway, he went home and she was threatening everything from suicide to harming him, and he would not call anyone or file a restraining order against her because she worked with children and he did not want her to lose her job.
JAN BROWN: Right.
LEXI: So, I’m going, wait a minute, you have a three year old and a six year old, home, listening to all of this, and your attorney is telling you to file a restraining order, but you’re worried that she is going to lose her job.
MICHAEL: Yes, I think my main concern, at that point, like you referred to, Jan, is that you want to just try to solve the problem. So, my mindset, in my own particular situation, was that, given the fragile state or what appeared to be the fragile state of her psyche at that point, two things crossed my mind. The first one being I was afraid that filing a restraining order might result in her attempting to take her own life; and if that didn’t occur, that having a restraining order on her record would likely cause her to fail a background check and lose her employment.
So, again, my concern, at that point, was less about myself and more about the ultimate impact on her life, going forward. And to make a long story shorter, I ended up having to file one because she made threats against me in the days after that break-in, and I just said, you know, this is enough, it’s out of control. So, I ultimately ended up having a restraining order put on her for the break-in and the threatening behavior.
JAN BROWN: Was this in Pennsylvania? Sorry.
LEXI: That’s okay.
JAN BROWN: Well, I’m wondering about — the difference — did you find somebody to help you, Michael, to do this?
MICHAEL: I had to go to a — this was a surreal experience and one I’m sure you can relate to. For me to file a restraining order against my ex-wife, I had to go to a woman’s place.
JAN BROWN: Yes.
MICHAEL: And the chilling –
JAN BROWN: I know that.
MICHAEL: You could — the chilling affect of me walking through the door — well, at first, it confused me because I thought I would be able to just go right up to the courthouse, you know, I had no experience with this, so I believed that I could go to the — you know, a restraining order, I had to go to a police station or go up to the courthouse and just fill out some paperwork. And then, to get the ball rolling, and this actually goes directly to our conversation today, I actually had to go walk into an organization’s door, to their office, that is dedicated, essentially, to helping only women, because that is where I could get the paperwork necessary to file for a restraining order against my spouse. My — yes, I guess she would have been soon-to-be-ex-spouse at that point.
So, it was — you would have thought I was an alien when I walked into that building.
JAN BROWN: Oh yes, men walk in those places, some of them get really freaked out.
MICHAEL: It was — there was no discussion –
JAN BROWN: They don’t let them go near the door.
MICHAEL: Yes, there was no discussion. I asked for — you know, I had no problem walking in there because I knew that the situation was serious enough that nobody could say or do anything, at that point, that was going to dissuade me from following through with it, but you know, there was no discussion, they handed me the necessary paperwork, I filled it all out, and then that started the process going, but definitely, the chilling –
JAN BROWN: Did they help you with the paperwork?
MICHAEL: No, no, no, no, no. No, we had no discussion at all. They handed me the paperwork and all, and I just figured –
JAN BROWN: If you were a woman, they would have sat next to you, held your hand, and worked, you know, helped you write the affidavit because they would have known that, you know, being a victim, you’re distraught, a little distraught, nervous, anxious, you know –
MICHAEL: Yes.
JAN BROWN: — so you might need a little bit of assistance.
LEXI: Absolutely. And I always say, in that case, if the roles had been reversed, he would have lost custody of his kids immediately.
MICHAEL: Yes.
JAN BROWN: Absolutely.
LEXI: He would have been kicked out of the house. Her? Nothing. She got a restraining order, 18 months, which stopped her from doing absolutely nothing, which — well –
JAN BROWN: Right.
LEXI: — would show on restraining orders later.
JAN BROWN: Yes, I was going — and a lot of times, they’ll go in, the abusers, the abusive women will go in and get a restraining order either at that courthouse or at another one, and try to negate yours, you know, find a way to get yours to disappear, and a lot of times Judges will actually do it because there is — there is a thing called — the biggest discrepancy between male and female victims, as far as getting help, I think, is that, the word “fear,” okay.
LEXI: Right.
JAN BROWN: Now, if I can demonstrate this. I went to a training here, because we went from primary aggressor laws to predominate aggressor laws, so they were training domestic violence workers and police officers on how to determine who the predominate aggressor was.
So, the facilitator had little vignettes he was doing and he made, he said, for example, he was trying to get the crowd to determine, you know, who was the predominate aggressor, and he said, for example, say a woman walks up to a man — say a man walks up to a woman and slaps her, and she goes and gets a frying pan, okay, and hits him on the head with it, who is the predominate aggressor. Well, of course the man.
So, I raised my hand and I said, okay, so if a woman slaps a man and he goes and gets a frying pan and hits her? He looked at me very nastily and said, is he in fear? Okay. So that is your big theme, is if guys aren’t afraid, then they’re not really victims. But guys –
MICHAEL: And –
JAN BROWN: — don’t show fear.
MICHAEL: Yes, and if they — I was going to say and if they are afraid, then they’re sissies.
JAN BROWN: Right. You know, they can’t win for trying. So –
MICHAEL: That’s right.
LEXI: Exactly.
JAN BROWN: And so, that’s a big challenge for male victims, is to get by that. And who, what guy wants to tell another guy that they’re afraid of their wife or girlfriend, you know?
MICHAEL: Right.
JAN BROWN: I mean, so, it’s a really tough thing for them, but that is one of the bigger things that’s going on in society as far as arrests and things like that.
LEXI: Right. So, do you think that the significant disparity in resources allocated by, not necessarily the government, but by the institutions that are using government money to provide these services, essentially only serving women contributes from the lack of widely public acceptance of the realities of women on men domestic violence?
JAN BROWN: Good question. Absolutely, it does, yes. But keeping in mind that, back in the 70s, we had a battered women’s movement, not a battered person’s movement, and we also had a women’s movement in conjunction with the battered women’s movement. So, it was all about women 30, 40 years ago, you know. If it had been a battered person’s movement, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
MICHAEL: So true.
JAN BROWN: You know? So that’s the challenge, is getting change. Change is always difficult for people, especially if they have a dogmatic view about something.
LEXI: Right and I think –
JAN BROWN: Most of your traditional domestic violence, battered women’s advocates — all right, I’ll cut that off — just battered women’s advocates, they started domestic violence services and they did so because they believe that men were the cause, men were the problem, so all their services should be for women.
LEXI: Right. I –
JAN BROWN: But as generations, as new people come up in these centers and work and the old-guard kind of — I like to call it the old guard — steps down, I think we’re going to find that we’re going to progress more into that gender-inclusive type of atmosphere of some of these domestic violence programs.
LEXI: It’s definitely going to be interesting. I mean, I get kind of riled up that the whole women’s movement and feminism, and we still have, you know, I mean, Yale, Harvard, all of the big campuses still doing huge, you know, women’s studies programs and everything, and the whole background of all that is so that women have more power. And yet, all of the foundations and everything that they are supporting and trying to push through basically rely on the concept that women have no power, still. And I’m like, how — how can you –
JAN BROWN: Yes, they are still –
LEXI: — push both things? You know, you can’t say you’ve come so far, and yet still push that you are all victims and you always will be all victims.
JAN BROWN: Right, and that’s what I — I believe, you know, our system is antiquated. We’re still working back in the 70s and 80s, you know, when we first started calling domestic violence a social problem, with the new systems that, you know, get all these federal and state funds. So, they need to come up to the 21st century.
LEXI: Right.
MICHAEL: One of the things that your website, Jan, indicated is that 90 percent of your hotline volunteers are women. How, exactly, are they trained to deal with both women and men, when society is under this constant barrage of misinformation, that claims men commit almost all the domestic violence, by some higher profile mainstream organization?
JAN BROWN: Well, we have a training that every helpline advocate has to go through before they take the helpline shifts, and our training was built by me, so you know it’s got a lot of information in there about male victims.
MICHAEL: Right.
JAN BROWN: So, they don’t have a choice. By the time they’re done with that training, they know, you know, that this is part of, a big part of what we do, and if they are not comfortable then perhaps they won’t go on, you know, and if they are — and a lot of young people are. I get calls from college students trying to do papers on male victims for school classes, and you know, just the younger people get it.
LEXI: Right.
JAN BROWN: They really do. I get calls all the time.
MICHAEL: That’s really great to hear, Jan.
JAN BROWN: Yes.
MICHAEL: That’s really great.
JAN BROWN: And if I say, we specialize in helping men, oh, that’s great, because they need it. You know, I mean, it’s just getting much more accepted by the general public. It’s the people that work in domestic violence that are having a real hard time with it.
MICHAEL: Have you ever had any of your prospective women trainees depart your program, prior to either finishing the training or after starting, because you’re helping men?
JAN BROWN: Well, we interview people. We go through, you know, a process, and they have to fill out an application, we do a telephone interview, we do background checks. You know, it’s a pretty good-sized process, and one of my — one of my advocates, or my coordinators was speaking with a potential volunteer, and when she heard that we help male victims she said, oh, I’d rather marry George W. Bush than help male victims. So, needless to say, she is not one of our volunteers.
MICHAEL: That’s good.
JAN BROWN: But that is, like, rare. We don’t get that too often. People know by looking at our — we have notices up on volunteermatch.com and all the different volunteer sites –
LEXI: Oh, good.
JAN BROWN: — and they know, if they really look, that it’s very obvious, looking at our website, what we do. And so, right off the bat, if they’re not, either they’re not paying attention, if they’re not, you know because you can’t miss it on our website.
LEXI: Okay. So, just once again in the middle of the show, here, I want to say if anyone needs help or knows a man that needs help, you can call the Domestic Abuse Helpline for Men & Women at, make sure I get this right, Jan, 888-743-5754.
JAN BROWN: Mm-hmm.
LEXI: And Jan, tell us what we can do to help, or if anyone is looking for a volunteer position, what we can do to help your mission.
JAN BROWN: Well, one thing, definitely, we always need volunteers for the helpline. The helpline has to be covered 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So, volunteermatch.com, we have all our volunteer needs up there, pretty much, so if anybody wants to go there if they are interested in volunteering.
LEXI: And they can be from anywhere, since it is online, you work with volunteers from everywhere?
JAN BROWN: Yes, we train online. We do everything through group lists, we — everything, you know, chat, so. I don’t have any — or I should say I have a couple of volunteers in Maine, but most of my volunteers, there’s about 50 total, are out there everywhere. So, basically, they can be anywhere in the United States. Hawaii and Alaska are a little trickier, because of the time zone difference and all that, but –
LEXI: Right.
JAN BROWN: — it’s still doable. And the other thing, right now, is that we’re involved in America’s Giving Challenge, and Facebook is actually promoting that particular challenge, and we’re a cause on Facebook.
LEXI: Okay.
JAN BROWN: They’re having, this America’s Giving Challenge is about a month long and whoever, whichever non-profits get the most donations to their cause per day, not the most money but the most donations, have a chance to win $1,000.00 a day, and if they get the most donations overall, over the month, then they have a chance to win $50,000.00, and we surely could use some good funding to help men and women even more, so. I would appreciate that.
LEXI: Okay. We will put up a link, on the radio show page, to that, so everyone can click on that.
MICHAEL: Yes.
LEXI: And do you want to go into the West Virginia case, specifically?
MICHAEL: Well, one of the things that I recently happened to cross, it was a West Virginia court ruling, a major domestic violence lawsuit that yielded some positive results.
In West Virginia, there is a Judge James C. Stucky who ruled, in essence, that the allocation of resources violated that state’s constitution for equal protection, and that, I believe one of the items I have noted here was that the Judge cited, among 12 items that were cited in his ruling, that the legislature had expressed a clear intention to provide licensure and funding for perpetrator intervention programs that are gender-neutral. The board, apparently, in West Virginia, acting on its own, ignored the intent and created a gender-specific program that includes only men for intervention, and excludes all women. And also, the resources available for helping victims were almost exclusively for women and none for men.
How do you feel about such a high profile, or soon-to-be high profile ruling, in a particular state and how that, you know — do you think that we’re going to start seeing more and more of that across the United States?
JAN BROWN: Well, that is the second ruling on behalf of discrimination against men, you know, male victims in about a year. California had one in 2008.
So, it is unfortunate that this is how things have to change, you know, make — how things — yes, I’ll get it out. It is unfortunate this is what we have to do in order to get equal services for men and women, but this is how the battered women’s movement also, you know, got services for women, you know.
LEXI: The bad thing is –
JAN BROWN: Through lawsuits.
LEXI: — you know, women’s shelters are being shut down or something, but maybe it will make people recognize that, okay, we need to serve everyone.
I know at the beginning of the year, in the budget cuts that Governor Schwarzenegger made in California, we kind of made a joke-title, but we said that, you know, he was making sure everything was equal and that was by giving no one money. He cut funding for women’s shelters, completely, and you know, it’s a horrible situation for anyone to be in, but men have been in that situation for pretty much forever.
JAN BROWN: Yes.
LEXI: And so, you know –
JAN BROWN: The U.K. had the same thing. The U.K. did the same thing to another women’s shelter over there, for the same reason. So, it is slowly starting to change and I’m — I’m sad to see it have to come to this to do it, but if that’s what it takes, what are you going to do, you know? It’s discrimination. They couldn’t say, well, you’re Black, so you can’t come here.
LEXI: Right.
JAN BROWN: Why is it any different? You’re a man, so you can’t come here, you know.
LEXI: Right.
MICHAEL: That’s a great example. A great example.
LEXI: Okay. Well, Jan, do you want to do one more question, and then we actually have a caller on the line that we will bring in.
MICHAEL: Oh, that’s great. Well, what I wanted to — we kind of talked a little bit about that — about this already, but just because I want to drive the point home. What more do you believe can be done to help society understand that domestic violence can and is committed by many abusers from both genders, and that all victims should be treated with kindness, compassion, and resources?
JAN BROWN: Public awareness, you know, that’s the most important thing. I find that media plays a pivotal role in how people look at things. So, when you see, in the newspaper, that a woman is murdered and she is a victim of domestic violence, and then you see a man is murdered and they don’t mention domestic violence, even though it was the same kind of scenario –
LEXI: Right.
JAN BROWN: — that’s what hurts the equal-ness of victims, you know. The media needs to also treat a man who is a victim the same as they treat a woman, and then society can see. It will start seeping in that it’s not — there’s no difference.
LEXI: The media, especially, always, they look for a reason for the woman’s abuse.
JAN BROWN: Right.
LEXI: Well, he must have been –
JAN BROWN: We don’t have enough time for me to go into all that, believe me.
LEXI: Yes.
JAN BROWN: I can go into a whole bunch of stuff on that.
MICHAEL: Another show.
JAN BROWN: Exactly.
LEXI: Well, it was funny because I think I was the only one on Twitter and Facebook and everything else, but when Chris Brown hit Rihanna, at the same time the — I can’t remember her name — the housewife from New York City, on that show, hit her boyfriend, and there was like two newspaper articles about it, and Chris Brown is going through all this stuff. And while I don’t know –
JAN BROWN: Right.
LEXI: — anything that Chris Brown did, why was there not any attention paid to this woman who beat the crap out of her boyfriend?
JAN BROWN: Well, the first domestic violence homicide in this state, this year, was a man whose wife, who was out on bail for domestically assaulting him three months prior. She came in, while he was sleeping, to the bedroom and she poured flammable liquid all over him and she lit a match and she — 85 percent of his body burned and he died. The headlines read, you know, man dies in arson fire. You know, I mean, hello.
MICHAEL: Wow.
JAN BROWN: It’s just crazy.
MICHAEL: Actually, I would think, Jan, I would think that it would say, when you think about newspaper editors and they’re sitting there and the writers are working on a headline or what-not, that it actually takes extra work to go out of your way to call a situation what it isn’t.
JAN BROWN: Right. Well, you know what, I write in to reporters all the time and I just point these things out to them, and sometimes they’re, you know, okay about it, and other times they give me the standard line of we don’t know what you’re talking about.
But most recently, I did that, and the big thing is when you have, like the case I just talked about, did they think to contact the local domestic violence shelter to get quotes, did they think to, you know, find out if they were going to have a candlelight vigil for this man? No.
MICHAEL: Right.
JAN BROWN: But if it were a woman in the paper, the first thing they do is they have quotes from the domestic violence program all about domestic violence, you know, and that’s the big difference. How can men be thought of that way if they don’t do the same thing, you know?
LEXI: Exactly. The media is a huge, huge –
JAN BROWN: Huge.
LEXI: — thing for me.
JAN BROWN: Absolutely.
LEXI: Okay. Jan, well, thank you for joining us.
JAN BROWN: You’re welcome.
LEXI: We will definitely get the link up about the fundraiser.
JAN BROWN: Thanks.
LEXI: And if anyone does need help, once again the number is 888-743-5754.
And we are going to now take a live caller. I’m not sure who it is, but we’ll find out. And you are on the air with Mr. Custody Coach. How are you? Maybe not.
MICHAEL: Last chance, if you have a question for the Mr. Custody Coach crew.
LEXI: I don’t know if they don’t know that they’re on the air or if they’re just not there anymore.
MICHAEL: Maybe they accidently hit the call button and didn’t realize it.
LEXI: Okay. Well, we’ll take them off, then, just in case they come on and try to do anything later.
So, join us, obviously, on our message board, if you’re a member. If you’re not a member, you can become a member today.
Next week, we are going to be discussing how to find an attorney in a high-conflict divorce or custody dispute, with author Bill Eddy.
He has been a blessing to us. I know we found him, gosh, what was it, four years ago?
MICHAEL: Yes, roughly.
LEXI: Four years ago. His book is Splitting. If you haven’t picked it up yet, pick it up. It’s amazing.
MICHAEL: Yes. It is Splitting, what to expect — let me grab my notes here. That’s a shame I’m messing that one up.
LEXI: He has a couple of other books, too. High Conflict Personalities in Legal Disputes. He has a new book coming out about the new therapy program that they, I guess, kind of invented, is the word.
MICHAEL: The New Ways approach for families.
LEXI: New Ways for Families, which is starting in California, and hopefully spreading around the country, to help families who are going through high-conflict divorce and custody situations, helping them to, hopefully, stay out of court and get through everything.
MICHAEL: Yes. The book was Splitting: Protecting Yourself While Divorcing a Borderline or Narcissist, and I actually have, did my book review. That is on the site, mrcustodycoach.com, if you would like to take a look at that.
LEXI: Yes, you can take a look at that, and you can get it on Amazon and Bill Eddy’s site, as well. So, we’ll be talking with him about finding an attorney; if you already have an attorney, what the problems may be, and how to find a different one that will actually help you through.
High-conflict is very, very different than divorcing and dealing with a custody situation with a quote “normal” unquote person. I don’t like using that word because I don’t think anyone is normal, but it is a huge, huge, hugely different scenario, and I think we have done some research, the statistics.
You know, most people can settle everything in a divorce and custody situation by themselves in like 90 percent of the time. The other ten percent go to court. Only about two percent of those go to court multiple times, and those are typically high-conflict people, whether it’s because of a personality disorder or some other situation. I believe Michael and his ex have been in court, what, 30 –
MICHAEL: A lot. Just a lot.
LEXI: So, obviously, we have a lot of experience with that, which is the whole reason we started this consulting business, to help other people through this situation. So we cannot wait to talk to Bill and find out everything that is going on there.
Michael?
MICHAEL: Yes, I want to thank Jan Elizabeth Brown again, the founder and Director of the Domestic Abuse Helpline for Men & Women. The website is D as in David, ahmw.org. Again, dahmw.org, the Domestic Violence –
LEXI: Domestic Abuse.
MICHAEL: — Abuse Helpline. I keep saying that. Our topic was domestic violence. It’s dahmw.org, the Domestic Abuse Helpline for Men & Women, and the helpline number is 1-888-743-5754, if you or somebody you know is in need of assistance.
And to the rest of you who are listening, thanks for joining us today and listening in. As always, we’ll be happy to answer all kinds of questions on our private forums at mrcustodycoach.com. Please sign up today.
Additionally, we have just released our first e-book entitled Creating a Custody Agreement, available on the mrcustodycoach.com website at the e-books page, for a special introductory launch rate of $19.95, so act now.
And I think that’s a wrap for today. Join us next week when our guest will be Bill Eddy.

Choosing a Custody/Divorce Lawyer
with guest
Bill Eddy
October 21, 2009
www.mrcustodycoach.com

MICHAEL: Hello and welcome to Mr. Custody Coach’s Blog Talk Radio program. I’m Michael, here with my partner Lexi, again.
LEXI: Good afternoon, everyone.
MICHAEL: And of course, we are from Mr. Custody Coach.com. Please visit our website today and purchase our newly released e-book on creating custody agreements, for the introductory price of $19.95. We believe you will find it a valuable resource for starting your plan for a quality parenting arrangement that benefits both the parents and the children, and it’s free if you join the site.
Today’s topic is Choosing a Divorce and Custody Attorney, and we have a great guest with us today. Bill Eddy is President of the High Conflict Institute, based on Scottsdale, Arizona. Bill is a Certified Family Law Specialist, in California, with 16 years experience representing clients in Family Court, and a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with 12 years experience providing therapy to children, adults, couples, and families, and psychiatric hospitals and out-patient clinics. He is Senior Family Mediator at the National Conflict Resolution Center, in San Diego, California.
Welcome, Mr. Eddy.
BILL EDDY: Thank you. Pleasure to be here.
LEXI: So, one of the biggest reasons we’re doing this is that you really concentrate in high conflict personalities, people who are going through the Family Court system, and these are the clients that we deal with. So your information is absolutely timely and needed for our clients. So, we are really looking forward to this.
BILL EDDY: Great.
MICHAEL: Bill, we have read, several times, actually, your article describing how high conflict personalities drive Family Court litigation. Can you briefly describe for our listeners what is meant when you speak of high conflict personalities?
BILL EDDY: Well, with high conflict personalities, I’m really talking about people who are stuck. And we all have personalities, and it’s ways we think, deal with our feelings, and manage our behavior; that’s pretty predictable. So when you see a friend, you know what to expect. When you see a difficult person, you know, you kind of cringe, but you know what to expect.
With high conflict personalities, it’s really an extreme way of behaving that keeps repeating and the person brings with them. So, when someone has a high conflict personality, the issue isn’t the issue; it’s the personality that’s the issue, the way the person deals with problems inappropriately and in extreme, and often surprising, ways.
LEXI: That is the best way I have ever heard that put. It’s not the issue, it’s the person that is — revolutionary, to me, actually. It definitely explains what we deal with ourselves, and with our clients, but I’ve never heard it put that way. That’s just perfect.
MICHAEL: Yes, many of the people with whom we interact, and even when we were in the — with our situation, when it was particularly bad, have a hard time defining what it is that we’re going through. Most people just don’t believe it.
BILL EDDY: Maybe — let me just add a little two-part to this, and that is there’s two particularly striking characteristics. One is that the person doesn’t look at their own behavior. They really can’t reflect on what they’ve done, the way they are; they are just not aware of their part in problems. And the second thing is they don’t change their behavior; they keep acting the same way, even when it gets bad results. And so, when you see those two aspects, lack of self awareness, lack of change, that’s how you often know you’re dealing with a high conflict personality.
LEXI: Yes, that definitely explains a lot, and it’s one of the things that people who are not aware of high conflict personalities really have a problem understanding the situation that you’re in, and they’re always, well, you know, you should just talk to her, you know –
BILL EDDY: Right.
LEXI: — you should just work it out, and it’s not possible because they don’t have the ability to look inside themselves.
BILL EDDY: Exactly.
LEXI: So what percentage of divorce and custody cases, especially, that are in the court system do you think are attributed to high conflict personalities?
BILL EDDY: Well, it’s commonly discussed amongst, you know, divorce professionals that about 20 percent, maybe 25 percent of cases are, quote “high conflict.”
Now, the way I see it is those cases are ones that have one or more people with a high conflict personality involved. In other words, you don’t have a case that’s high conflict unless there is someone who is stuck, and all the time Family Courts are dealing with difficult issues, but they’re getting resolved. The high conflict cases are the ones, like one of the Family Court Judges told me is, is basically, when it’s larger than three inches thick file, you know it’s a high conflict case because most divorces are, you know, an inch or less. There is the paperwork for the final terms and that’s it.
So, it’s when it escalates, seems to be, I’d say, about 20 percent, from what I see.
MICHAEL: So, if somebody, for instance, saw my attorney walking into the courthouse with a dolly and several boxes?
BILL EDDY: Exactly. That’s a lot.
MICHAEL: That would be a high conflict divorce and custody situation.
BILL EDDY: Yes, and it’s sad to say, but I’ve been involved in some high conflict cases that went more than 10 years. It’s tragic for the kids, and really for everybody. It’s a tragedy that things can escalate that much.
LEXI: Yes, and we’re on year five.
BILL EDDY: Uh-huh.
LEXI: We have at least five more to go.
BILL EDDY: Okay.
LEXI: I think the problem is that because the court is so adversarial, when you have a high conflict personality it’s kind of a playground for them.
BILL EDDY: Exactly. It’s almost like a stage and it’s sad but I think, for some people, they really are addicted to the drama and drag a lot of other people along with them, and it’s not because they’re really having fun or they really enjoy that, it’s, somehow, that’s a way they feel validated as a person, and that’s really not what court is for. It’s not supposed to be validating a person; it’s supposed to be about legal decisions, and then you move on.
LEXI: Right. Yes, it’s definitely attention. I have a background in Behavioral Therapy, and what –
BILL EDDY: Great.
LEXI: — we would term “ASB,” attention-seeking behavior, and whether the behavior is positive or negative, they are getting reinforcement for it. And so, if it makes them feel better to have that attention, they’re going to keep doing that because the Court is going to keep letting them come back, whether their problem is something that they should be hearing or not.
BILL EDDY: Right. Right. And the court structure is really an awkward fit, and the Judges know that. They really struggle to try to balance things, at the same time making good decisions. But the structure really, it’s amazing, it’s almost, like you said, a playground for people with personality problems, because they’re not able to, in a sense, get listened to in other settings because their behavior makes people not want to listen. But in court, everyone gets listened to, and so it kind of reinforces that.
And in Family Court, issues can always be brought back. Custody, visitation, child support; you can’t close the door on those issues. The Court always has to be allowed to hear them. So what happens is those are the ones that are the high conflict cases, that come back a lot. I mean, it may be reasonable to come back for six months, 12 months, maybe even two years, but after two years it’s really, golly, it’s just so hard on the kids, and my experience is it often does take about two years for the Court to really understand the case, but then, if you have a new Judge, you’re almost starting over again.
LEXI: Oh, absolutely.
MICHAEL: And I would actually agree with that assessment. I mean, things — things, for me, have certainly settled down considerably, over the years, but your two year mark was about right, when the players, the Judge, the attorneys who are involved really start to recognize what the truth — I mean, I use the term loosely — what the truth of the situation is, wherein the problems really lie, and then start making their judgments accordingly.
BILL EDDY: Right. Right. And some people give up before they get to that point, which is sad.
LEXI: Yes.
MICHAEL: Yes. We’ve talked to those people, too.
BILL EDDY: Yes.
LEXI: Yes. So, do you — have you found a high conflict personality person kind of gravitates towards high conflict attorneys?
BILL EDDY: In many cases, yes, and what’s interesting is a lot of Family Law attorneys will agree with this, because they see there’s some high conflict attorneys that are in court all the time. When we get a case and it’s a high conflict attorney on the other side, we know there’s a really good chance we’ll be in court rather than settling a case, even if it’s a very small case. I have had full-day trials in cases that should have been an easy settlement, but the party on the other side wanted a very high conflict attorney who was willing to fight about every issue.
I had a case where we have had to reverse some decisions on appeal because a high conflict attorney had such a flurry of issues, minor issues, and such a flurry of emotion that a relatively new Judge just gets some of that stuff wrong, and that’s a clever tactic, but it’s really harmful to families, I think. Fortunately, it’s a minority of attorneys that I believe are what you would call “high conflict attorneys.” Maybe the same percent, maybe 20 percent, maybe less, but they often get the most high conflict cases and help make them high conflict.
So, I think part of what attracts high conflict people is the emotional and aggressive energy; they like that. But in reality, the most aggressive attorneys are not often the ones most respected by the Judge.
LEXI: Yes, that’s kind of where I was going to go with my next statement, sort of question, is that I think high conflict people are so, as you explain in your book, Splitting, they’re so emotional, and even though what they may be saying isn’t true, they feel that it’s true.
BILL EDDY: Exactly.
LEXI: And so, they’re very convincing. And we’ve dealt with, you know, attorneys, that, on the other side, don’t even question their client, you know. Their clients are telling them that they have police reports and, you know, they’ve been arrested for abuse and all of this stuff, when it’s literally not true. And when it comes to court, they can’t produce those documents.
BILL EDDY: Right.
LEXI: And you look at their attorney and go, how did you not check on any of this?
BILL EDDY: Exactly.
LEXI: But they’re so caught up in the emotion that their client is such a victim, because of how emotional they are, that it’s a huge, huge issue.
BILL EDDY: Exactly. Yes.
MICHAEL: I was going to say that, you know, a person who has had to deal with a high conflict partner is very often intimidated by the process of finding an attorney who is going to listen and understand that the person with whom they are going to be dealing with, the high conflict ex or soon-to-be-ex. What is the first suggestion you would make to that person, to set their mind at ease and get them mentally prepared for the process?
BILL EDDY: Well, I think the first thing is, is pacing themselves and getting a lot of support, because even finding an attorney is a process. And I think interviewing attorneys, getting referrals from other people who felt satisfied with their attorneys, talking to mental health professionals who have dealt with attorneys in your county who handle divorces and have handled high conflict cases.
So, I think it’s letting people know not to be rushed into this or to grab the first attorney that looks, you know, so aggressive or so exciting that that’s what they want to do. Of course I would suggest reading the chapter in my book on finding an attorney, because I think that it helps people be realistic. Like I said, maybe 20 percent are the high conflict attorneys, but 80 percent aren’t, and there’s a lot of good Family Law attorneys that people don’t really know about because they actually do good at their job and don’t make a lot of noise, and the Judges respect them.
So, I think just understanding it’s a process to go through, have support, ask questions, and just be familiar with it as a process, rather than a quick decision.
LEXI: Yes, I think that’s one of, kind of — I don’t want to say mistakes, necessarily, but a problem at the beginning is that most people haven’t been through, you know, a divorce or a separation or a custody process.
MICHAEL: Or any legal proceeding.
BILL EDDY: Right.
LEXI: Any legal proceeding.
BILL EDDY: Exactly.
LEXI: You know, finding someone that they mesh with, that will really listen to the problem, and even knowing what to tell them so that they can help them in the appropriate manner, you know, is sometimes almost impossible just because they don’t know what they’re up against.
BILL EDDY: Yes. Yes. And that’s part of why I wrote Splitting, was to let people just know what to expect because I try to say here’s all the kind of problems that will ordinarily happen in a high conflict case, don’t be caught by surprise and don’t be blown away by things. Just pace yourself and try to deal with things step-by-step.
MICHAEL: That really is an excellent book. I actually did the review of the book on Mr. Custody Coach.com. I highly recommend Splitting: Protecting Yourself When Divorcing a Borderline or Narcissist.
I can tell you that, I guess that fairly, I would say the middle of the really bad parts of my divorce and custody proceedings, and it really it helped get me calmed down. I had a great attorney and the book, the book just was like an extra piece that really helped me calm down and focus on what I was dealing with. It was about the same time I had discovered borderline personality disorder, which is what I think I’m dealing with or have dealt with in my own situation, and a really, really important book and I highly recommend it.
BILL EDDY: I might just quickly add it’s not available on Amazon. So they need to get it either from whatever link you have or our website, or — that’s the best.
LEXI: So, highconflictinstitute.com?
BILL EDDY: Yes.
LEXI: And I believe we have a link on our website.
BILL EDDY: Yes.
LEXI: Where they can order it, as well.
MICHAEL: If someone currently has an attorney, Bill, what are some of the red flags they could identify which might indicate that their attorney can’t handle a high conflict case?
BILL EDDY: Well, I think there’s two characteristics: One is the attorney becomes highly aggressive with their client, blaming the client, angry with the client, et cetera, on the one hand; or, on the other hand, is avoiding everything, avoiding dealing with the other side, avoiding calling their own client back.
So, it’s really, it’s a good framework to think of, is the fight-or-flight response. When people deal with high conflict people, high conflict people have overly aggressive behavior that automatically triggers within the average human being the fight-or-flight response. You have to manage that fight-or-flight response so that you’re not overly aggressive or overly avoidant and fleeing. And so, not only does the person going through the divorce have to manage themselves, but you want an attorney who is good at managing themselves.
So, and maybe this is jumping ahead a little bit, but I think two key issues in picking an attorney is asking them, how do you handle high conflict cases and –
MICHAEL: That would have been my next question.
BILL EDDY: Oh, good, okay.
MICHAEL: Perfect segue.
BILL EDDY: So, yes, is how do you handle high conflict cases, and then sit and listen and see what they say. If they say, oh, I nail the other person to the wall and I do all these things, you don’t want that attorney. That attorney is too aggressive. If they say, I don’t have high conflict cases, all my cases settle and it’s really not that difficult, you don’t want that attorney. You want someone that says, I have dealt with a lot of high conflict cases and I know we’ve got to go through different steps, and whatever they tell you, it will communicate that they’re not really rattled by these cases, and that’s what’s real important. If they’re not rattled by these cases, if they can just work through, pace themselves, do the motions, go through the steps that are needed, gather information, et cetera, then that’s good.
The other is how do you communicate with your client in a high conflict case.
So those would be the two questions, the most important to ask, and the way they communicate with their client, if they say, I get called by the opposing party or the opposing attorney and they tell me that you have done something terrible over the weekend, is I’m going to call you up first before I believe them. That’s the kind of thing that you want the attorney to say, and you want the attorney to know there will be surprises. So, ask them; how do you deal with those surprises, how do you deal with the personal attacks, and see if you feel comfortable with their response. There is no right answer to these questions. It’s more do you feel comfortable with how they respond.
But high conflict cases have peaks and valleys and they have a lot of blame flying around, and you don’t want the attorney and the client blaming each other. So you’ve got to be able to feel like you’re on the same page. And they don’t have to know a lot about high conflict personalities, or know anything about that. If they deal with high conflict cases regularly, they already know the general problems that are going to come up. So –
LEXI: So, how do you handle — we have a lot of clients, and I would say even our attorney, in the beginning, we liked her but she wasn’t necessarily in-tune with high conflict personalities and what that meant as far as, you know, custody evaluations and all the steps that were going to have to be taken as the case progressed. And so, you’re in a position where you like your attorney, but you’re not sure that they can handle it, but you don’t want to take the time or the additional expense to find someone new and catch them up on everything that already occurred.
What do you suggest to help your attorney get up to speed and knowledgeable about high conflict cases and personalities?
BILL EDDY: Well, first, I would say, I think if you can communicate with your attorney pretty comfortably, that’s the attorney you really want to work with, unless they really don’t have any experience. And let me just add to this: Probably five years experience is a minimum for a Family Law attorney to be someone you want to hire with a high conflict case. Less than five years, they don’t know the law enough, they don’t know the strategies, et cetera.
MICHAEL: Okay.
BILL EDDY: But let’s say they’ve got that and you like your attorney, but they’re not real familiar with high conflict cases. Then I would say, try to, well, of course, I would encourage them — and I’m really not trying to push a book but it would help them to understand. I have another book called High Conflict People on Legal Disputes that is, in many ways, written more for attorneys, Judges, counselors, dealing with helping other people, as professionals, go through legal disputes. But helping them get educated and just talking with them, give them an article, give them a chapter out of a book, and perhaps encourage them to talk with someone else that you’ve heard has expertise in this area.
One of the things to really watch out for is not changing attorneys a lot. High conflict people have a reputation for bad relationships. And so, when you see someone come into court, you see a couple come to court, one of them is on their first or second attorney and the other has already had six attorneys, the Judge kind of thinks to themselves, I think I see who is having a hard time, here. So, it’s better, if at all possible, to stick with an attorney than to change a lot. And so, educate them, predict problems. You could even walk in with a list of problems, hey, I think my spouse is going to blame me for all kinds of things and you’re going to believe some of them, so please check with me before you make assumptions. I think they’re going to send a flurry of letters or demands, or this or that, and so encourage the attorney to take an assertive approach; don’t ignore these things, but don’t overreact.
So, to some extent, you can predict for your attorney what the problems will be. I can tell you, because they are predictable; it’s a very patterned type of behavior. Go ahead.
MICHAEL: I think one of the other things, too, is for the client, themselves, they need to have the confidence and establish the rapport with their attorney, so that they can explain these things, and also, and be believable about them, be convincing about what the attorney is about to be embroiled in so that you both can work towards a solution that is going to be effective.
BILL EDDY: Right. Have an agreement that we’re not going to believe rumors, we’re always going to check them out about each other, because just like the attorney will hear that the client has acted badly over the weekend, the client will hear that their attorney is unethical, immoral, untrustworthy, all these terrible things, and don’t believe those either, even though it may be tempting. Have a rumor control agreement, you know, we’ll check with each other before we make any assumptions that things are true.
LEXI: Yes, I think that’s definitely important when you’re dealing with a high conflict personality because their status quo is to put everyone else down around you, to make you feel uncomfortable and like you’re not getting the support you have, so then you feel worse. It’s a continuing cycle.
BILL EDDY: Yes.
LEXI: But the part that struck me is that you say they all have patterns, and that is one of the –
BILL EDDY: Yes.
LEXI: — biggest things that we see with clients. Everyone that comes to us, we have some open forums on another website, and they all just go, you must be divorced from my ex-wife.
BILL EDDY: Right.
LEXI: It’s the exact same thing. And we hear it over and over and over, and it’s really scary that there are so many. I mean, what are the statistics on borderline personality disorder, like eight percent of the population, or something?
BILL EDDY: Well, six percent. Just — a huge national study was just published last year, I think it was July of 2008, and it came out, I think it was 5.9 percent of the general population. However, they broke it into four age groups, and each younger age group has a higher percentage. So the indicators are this is increasing; although the people in the study thought maybe it fades with time, there isn’t a lot of evidence for that, and there is evidence that it does seem to be a large and growing number. But six percent of 300 million people, that’s, what’s that, 50 million?
MICHAEL: A lot of people.
LEXI: A lot.
BILL EDDY: Is that right? No, six million. I don’t know, my math is terrible with that.
LEXI: But it’s a lot of people and to — I know no one has done a study on it, but it would be interesting to see how many, what the percentage is in divorcing families.
BILL EDDY: Yes.
LEXI: Because it’s clear if they have unstable relationships, more of them are going to end up in the Family Court system.
BILL EDDY: Yes, and the Family Court system is more than ever flooded with these high conflict cases. The Judges, in California there is a commission appointed by the Supreme Court to study how to make Family Court more user friendly for families because there’s such an inundation of this, and it’s tragic because courts are not well equipped for solving these problems and just the process of taking sides escalates. The average person can go to court, have a decision made and walk out, go, okay, that was a legal decision, let’s say like a business dispute or something, and keep it separate from their life.
With Family Law and Family Court it’s impossible to keep it separate from your life. You can’t just have a decision and then go, oh, okay, that’s how we’ll solve that problem and put it in the past; it’s about your daily life.
LEXI: Right.
BILL EDDY: It’s very hard.
MICHAEL: It dictates what’s going to happen with you, your family, and your interactions, and even those in the extended family, how often you get to interact with people who have been a part of he children’s lives for some time.
BILL EDDY: Yes.
LEXI: Yes, I think it’s actually one of the biggest problems that we see with clients, is that when you go into a system you really do think, once you have that order, that’s it, that’s going to solve the problem, you’re not going to be back there, you’re done paying your attorney, you’re not going to have to have contact with this person, and it’s just not true. More problems come up, especially if you’re getting stuck in, you know, a standard custody agreement that doesn’t outline specifics, you know.
MICHAEL: Enough specifics.
LEXI: Enough specifics.
BILL EDDY: Yes.
LEXI: You know, something as simple as where and who is going to do the exchange with the children can be just months and months of pure –
MICHAEL: Hell is the word.
LEXI: Hell is the word. You don’t want to say it on the radio, but that’s what it is.
BILL EDDY: Let me add a comment, a comment here because that’s such an important point, is orders need to be very specific and be prepared for them to be violated.
I was, just last week, speaking at a group of attorneys and our presiding, or supervising Family Law Judge also spoke, and she said that when you come to court, have a very specific request for the orders you want, in high conflict cases, because they need a lot of detail so that there isn’t too much wiggle room and dispute. And I think a lot of people don’t realize that, that the Judges appreciate very specific requests, rather than feeling like you don’t want to tell the Judge how to do their job.
So, it might be kind of the opposite of what people would think, but make a request, make it very specific. Say, here is where we’d like the exchange to be, here’s what we want to happen if the other person is more than 30 minutes late, here’s all the details, and more and more the Judges appreciate that. So it’s definitely something to consider. It’s not just, oh good, the Judge has decided who has custody and now we’re done. It’s really –
MICHAEL: Yes, one of the things –
BILL EDDY: — more specific.
MICHAEL: One of the things that we tell people is that there is no language that you can put in a custody agreement or custody order that is going to stop somebody from violating it.
BILL EDDY: Right.
MICHAEL: And what we aim to do is help guide people to come up with a plan that gives them the chance that there will be some recourse when that inevitable violation does occur.
BILL EDDY: Right.
MICHAEL: And that’s try to add the right — like we talk often about — an appropriate level of detail. There are issues where detail is critically important in the plan, itself: Days that they’re going to spend with each parent, where and when exchanges are going to take place, and some of the other issues, such as the specificity of phone contact. You have to be really careful because with a high conflict situation, we’ve encountered people who had a specific phone contact plan, as an example, where the father was going to be able to call every single night between 7:00 and 8:00. And what this father did was he was calling every night, which is a good thing on the surface, between 7:00 and 8:00, but he was so controlling that he would want to keep his children, some as young as three, on the phone for that entire hour.
BILL EDDY: Right.
MICHAEL: We tell people that, particularly with regards to phone contact, that you have to be careful because if you put every day between 7:00 and 8:00 in the order, the high conflict personality has an expectation that there is nothing else that is ever going to go on in your life between the hours of 7:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. every night of every week of every month or every year. So you have to really pick and choose the right places to add the specifics.
BILL EDDY: Very good point, yes. I might add to that because I’ve had that situation so many times. The idea that a lot of people are discussing now is parallel parenting, where you structure an agreement with minimal contact between the two households. So when parent — when the children are, say, with mom, they’re not getting phone calls from dad; when the children are with dad, they’re not getting phone calls from mom. It’s very unfortunate and counter to what we wanted, but with really high conflict cases it brings some peace to the household that they can’t have like with a daily phone contact order.
I have had some very highly controlling, manipulative people who call right before bedtime, and then the child is all wound up and angry at the parent they’re living with that week or that day. And so, it’s really a problem in some cases. So, I don’t want to recommend that in the majority of cases, but in extreme cases that has become a solution.
LEXI: Yes, we are definitely proponents of parallel parenting. We actually pretty much preface our household on that paradigm and it works very, very well in seriously high conflict cases.
BILL EDDY: Yes. Yes.
LEXI: So, in the book, Splitting, you actually coin a term which I love, which is “negative advocate,” and how does this work with specifically a negative advocate attorney, and if your high conflict ex has one, what are the chances that you’re really going to be able to negotiate and reach a settlement with that attorney?
BILL EDDY: Okay, excellent question. First of all, let me explain the term “negative advocate,” because I believe it can apply to anyone, and probably all of us have occasionally been negative advocates. The term I use is comparable to an enabler with an alcoholic or an addict, where an enabler is someone who goes around fighting for the disease rather than the cure. And so, people are familiar with that term, or “co-dependant.”
And negative advocate is a term that I use for that type of behavior in the legal process or conflict process, where someone gets emotionally hooked and charged up and fights for a high conflict person in bad ways, fights for all of their distortions of thinking, their intense emotions, their bad behavior. And when I say they’re emotionally hooked, it’s because emotions are contagious and the high intensity emotions of high conflict people are quite contagious.
So, even ordinary attorneys sometimes become negative advocates by promoting something that might not even be true because they didn’t check it out, as you mentioned at the beginning.
MICHAEL: Right.
BILL EDDY: So you could be a negative advocate, I could be a negative advocate; we probably have been for family members, off and on, and then we go, oh wow, I thought you said such-and-such but now that’s not accurate. Some attorneys are persistently negative advocates; maybe they have high conflict personalities themselves, so maybe this is that 20 percent that I talked about, and they will argue and fight for whatever their client tells them and they’ll escalate it to a new level. They resist settlement, often, but more and more court procedures require some efforts at settlement, and so you may have a shot at settlement with these folks.
In terms of will they settle, I’ve had them settle in many cases, but they’ll push for extremes, and so you have to take that assertive approach that I talked about. If you over react and are too aggressive back, then they point the finger at you and say you’re being a high conflict person.
LEXI: Right.
BILL EDDY: I had a high conflict attorney once, we were in court, he points his finger at me and says, and Mr. Eddy failed to negotiate as required under the local rules. The Judge looks over at me, kind of quizzical, because that’s not my reputation, and so I eventually had to write this whole explanation. The Judge read that explanation and said, I don’t see any problem here, next issue. It wasn’t that simple, but some high conflict attorneys make things personal, et cetera.
So you have to respond them assertively. If they make allegations that are false, you have to respond with information but not anger. If they send two letters a day, you might send one letter every other day back saying, I don’t agree on this, this and this. You have to clear up information.
MICHAEL: Yes, that certainly has been our experience and the experience of the people who seek our assistance, and I think we saw that with my ex-wife’s first of several attorneys, would definitely fit the description, at least as you articulated that today, of the negative advocate attorney where there were things that there would be motions for the most nonsensical things that you can conceive of, and definitely negotiation was if you didn’t give them everything that they asked for, you failed to negotiate.
BILL EDDY: Right. Right. And sometimes they believe that.
MICHAEL: I believe, I believe that’s the case.
BILL EDDY: Yes.
MICHAEL: And my follow-up to that question would be, are you seeing, being in the legal field as long as you have and working with the families, are you seeing changes in the Family Court system that might help better identify and deal with high conflict personalities, anything specific?
BILL EDDY: Well, a few changes that we’re starting to see, and they’re small changes, in some cases the courts are trying to be more firm about discouraging people from coming back to court over and over and over again, and not having as many hearings or requiring a period of time before they can come back. I speak also to professionals, et cetera, in Canada, and they are also looking at that where they’re telling some people you can’t come back for a while. I don’t know if we’re going to see much of that.
In California, there is the Elkins Task Force. Mr. Elkins represented himself and had his case taken all the way up to the California Supreme Court because he wasn’t allowed to present all the evidence that he had because he didn’t do a proper declaration, and he wanted to present it orally, I guess, and the Supreme Court said, yes, he should have had that opportunity and we’re creating a task force to look at the procedures of Family Court to make it more manageable and accessible for people, including those representing themselves.
There is nothing real specific about high conflict people with that and it’s a mix bag because, in many ways, they make the Court process more focused on oral evidence. In many ways, that’s the kind of thing that high conflict people like to do is to complain a lot in public, and possibly could misuse that.
I think having services that help families, in California, again, we have what is called the Family Court Facilitator, which informs people some about the process, helps them fill out forms. This may discourage some of the high conflict activity, but in many ways the high conflict cases are what’s left.
So, and the other thing I wanted to say is training. I’ve been training a lot of Judges lately; they’re saying we need more tips for how to handle high conflict personalities.
MICHAEL: Very good.
BILL EDDY: We’re starting to realize this is a problem.
MICHAEL: And I was thinking about that particular thing regarding training for Judges, and maybe even attorneys too; kind of, when we were speaking about the parallel parenting, popped in my head and it was my experience, and again the experience of several other people with whom we’ve interacted, small in the grand scale of all the people that are getting divorced and all the custody situations that are taking place, but a lot of times people are met with, I guess, a negative vibe. For instance, I personally had mentioned parallel parenting in court and got the negative vibe that, by reducing the communication, despite — and I thought I did a very good job of explaining how it’s too minimize the conflict and focus on the issues that are directly relevant to the children — that my lowering communication, by my getting involved in a parental situation where you’re not cooperative parenting — they love that word “cooperative” –
BILL EDDY: Right.
MICHAEL: — that you were somehow, you were somehow the bad guy. So I just wanted to say that I hope, during your training with the Judges, you educate them as to the positives of parallel parenting in high conflict situations. That would go a long way, too.
BILL EDDY: Well, I think it’s a very new concept and many, many court systems haven’t even heard of it. So if someone is presenting that concept, I think they need to say something like, now, Your Honor, I would love to have a cooperative parenting arrangement here; however, because of a, b and c, doing a parallel parenting plan will actually be more stable for the kids, and here is what it could look like, and this is something that is being tried around the country, et cetera, so that the person presenting the information doesn’t appear to just have a narrow mind saying this is the only answer for everybody, instead is saying, in most cases, I think cooperative parenting is a great idea, but in some cases, including mine, I think it will actually work better with parallel parenting.  So I think –
LEXI: Yes.
BILL EDDY: — it has to be presented that way, so you don’t get, you know, targeted as way out of bounds or something.
LEXI: Yes, I think that’s definitely the way to go. We actually have a unique situation that my divorce is 100 percent co-parenting. We live just a few streets apart from each other, he comes over, you know, Christmas morning to open gifts with the kids, his mom still comes to Christmas dinner, you know, I drive the kids to his dad’s for vacation and I stay there a few days. We’re all, we’re like one big happy family. He and Michael are actually friends and they go to the cigar shop together and hang out. And then we have his ex-wife who you can’t even have a conversation with, dealing with anything, you know, and I think the courts are sometimes still so stuck on the concept that it takes two to tango, rather than –
BILL EDDY: Right.
LEXI: — maybe it is just one person causing the problems, and so we need to stop this avenue where they can continue to do that. They think, well, it’s both of you and you just need to stop acting like six year olds and talk to each other.
BILL EDDY: Right. And you get that over and over and over again, and it isn’t just the Judges; you also get that from a lot of counselors and from some attorneys, because that’s the culture of Family Court. Really when it became a no-fault divorce court, which started in 1970, and by the mid-1980s, you know, cooperative, mutually supportive, shared parenting was the expectation, and so they really try to just talk people into it, and the reality though, research shows, is about 25 percent of families, after divorce, are like you described, Lexi. Getting along pretty well, involved at the same events, et cetera. About 50 percent are a de facto parallel parenting, where the former parents are very minimally involved with each other, but aren’t in conflict. It’s just they’re each going on with their own separate lives; there isn’t much interaction and that’s okay. That’s about 50 percent. About 25 percent are considered the high conflict cases where there’s still a lot of hostility, there’s tension, et cetera, and, frankly, it’s healthier for kids to have parallel parenting than to try to push cooperative parenting if it’s been tried and doesn’t work or in the indicators are it’s not going to work.
So I think the main thing is that people kind of educate their counselors, Judges, attorneys with this new approach and say, reluctantly, this is what I think would work best, and then they may be more open to listening.
And let me just add two other things I think are so important, while I’m at it here, is in dealing with the other parent and the court system, it’s very important not to use phrases like “borderline personality disorder” or “narcissistic personality disorder.”
LEXI: Oh yes.
MICHAEL: We haven’t.
BILL EDDY: Good. Because it alienates the Judge, it alienates attorneys, counselors, and everybody. So, instead, it’s much better to describe the behavior and say, Your Honor, because of this event and this event and this event, when this and this happened, that’s why I’m requesting parallel parenting, rather than, hey, look, it’s obvious my spouse is a borderline or narcissist. That just backfires.
The other thing is I believe it’s so important, in today’s court system, to communicate to professionals that you’re not trying to eliminate the other parent.
MICHAEL: Yes.
BILL EDDY: No matter how bad you think the other parent is, if you come across as someone trying to eliminate the other parent, you’re going to alienate the Court, Judges, et cetera. So, have a flexible plan that includes the other parent, even if it’s a minority of time, is emphasize that you want that relationship to exist, so that you don’t trigger an overreaction to yourself.
MICHAEL: Well, one of the things that, you know, we’ve talked about, choosing an attorney, some of the questions to ask, some of the things to expect when you go to court, and I wanted to talk about some of the efforts that you’ve undertaken recently to perhaps keep people out of court or not go back to court as often.
So, I know recently you’ve developed a cutting edge program for separating and divorcing families called New Ways for Families, coincidently enough.
BILL EDDY: Yes.
MICHAEL: And that’s designed to prevent families from becoming high conflict and potentially eliminate, or at least significantly reduce child alienation. Can you tell us a little bit more about what that program aims to do?
BILL EDDY: Sure. It’s, it’s very new. The court is trying it in San Diego County. And if people are confused about locations, I live and work in San Diego County, my business partner, Megan Hunter, lives and works in Scottsdale, Arizona, which is the base for our High Conflict Institute. So that’s why we have kind of two, two locations. And we actually have New Ways for Families cases going in both of our counties.
But basically, what it is, is, as soon as possible, having the Court order, or parents can agree if they could, to do this. It’s six weeks of parallel counseling. Each parent has their own individual counselor who doesn’t talk to anybody else; they’re not part of the legal case and they’re focusing them on practicing three skills to reduce conflict. And the skills are flexible thinking, managed emotions, and moderate behaviors, and by trying to do these and really practice these skills, not only will it help keep things calm, but it’s much less likely that the children will get hooked into taking all or nothing positions of alienation where they are all on dad’s side, against mom, or all on mom’s side, against dad.
So, by having both parents go through this, there is no bad guy and it kind of resists some of the Court’s tendency to pick a bad guy, and then to switch who is the bad guy. So this is both parents, let’s focus on these skills. Then each parent has three sessions with the child or children, talking about these same skills, teaching these skills, hearing the child’s concerns in the divorce, and then talking with the child of the new ways their family is going to operate and how they’re going to support each other as parents.
By getting that in right away, it’s kind of inoculation against becoming high conflict and against alienation.
MICHAEL: That makes sense.
BILL EDDY: Yes, because alienation, in many ways, grows during high conflict court cases. I’ve had many cases where the kids weren’t alienated at the start of the divorce process, but within two years they had shifted towards one parent, and away from the other, in an all-or-nothing way.
I had one case, a 15 year old girl writes a letter to her father saying, you know, I’m going to have to end our relationship, I’m just not comfortable with you anymore, and he had done nothing to be considered abusive or whatever. The child just resolved the issue by picking a side, and that’s what court does, generally, is picks a side. And so, it’s not surprising it filters down to children, unless we can try to work away form that, and that’s what New Ways tries to do.
The other thing with New Ways is we’re really trying to help give parents skills to make the decisions out of court so they don’t have to use court as much to reach their agreements. And so, we’re really trying this out and emphasizing this. Any two parents could volunteer for this, but the courts can’t order it until it’s part of their court process, so we’re trying to get it into the court systems in several other locations.
The best thing, if people want more information about it, is we have a website, www.newways4 — but instead of the word f-o-r, it’s the number 4. So it’s newways4families.com.
LEXI: Fabulous. And you have a book coming out in January?
BILL EDDY: Well, I’m hoping January. I actually wanted to say it may end up being February, but the book is really focused on the alienation issue and ways that everyone can help reduce the risk of that happening or, if it is happening, reduce the intensity of that. And the approach is really to look at what everybody can do to help kids and how emotions are contagious, and there has been a lot of controversy the last 25 years about alienation, and it tends to really polarize parents, polarize professionals, et cetera, because mostly people say the person is purposefully doing something.
From my experience, the biggest issue with alienation is that emotions are contagious. You have a parent who is just crying a lot in front of the children, the children tend to say, oh, this parent is being victimized by the other parent, so I don’t like the other parent anymore. If you have children sleeping with their parents, six, seven, eight years old, I’ve had those cases. I don’t think the parents are talking about the other person, but the child is absorbing all of this. Then you see, you know, parents yelling and screaming, et cetera, or angry about the other parent, the children absorb all of that.
So, it’s really about how to take a supportive approach to parents, rather than a blaming approach, and teach behaviors that protect children from intense emotions, that protect children from all-or-nothing thinking, that protect them from extreme behaviors. So it’s really a non-blaming approach, and it also says everyone has to work in a positive direction on this, not just parents but relatives, not just relatives but counselors. Counselors could be some of the problem sometime. Lawyers; lawyers can become part of the problem sometimes. And Judges, too, inadvertently. I’ve had some Judges that were very angry and they got very angry at the parents, thinking they were going to set them straight, but emotionally escalated the conflict and it backfired.
So it’s teaching everybody how to be calm, reasonable, flexible and moderate. So that’s the — that should be out hopefully by February, maybe even January.
MICHAEL: And the name of that book again, Bill?
BILL EDDY: Well, we’re actually struggling with the name of the book, but it will have “alienation” in the title.
LEXI: Okay.
MICHAEL: And –
BILL EDDY: It may be Don’t Alienate the Kids in Separation and Divorce, or it may be A Thousand Little Bricks, which is my theory of the fact that alienation comes from what everybody around the child does, not just one parent or two parents.
MICHAEL: Would it be safe to presume that when that gets, when that matter gets settled that you’ll have that listed out on the High Conflict Institute.com website?
BILL EDDY: Yes, that will be the first place that people will know. So if they check in with us in January, even if it’s not out yet, we’d probably be able to tell you a launch date for that.
MICHAEL: All right, Bill. Well, thank you very much for joining us today. I think it was an excellent show. You’ve provided us with a great deal of information, and we really do appreciate you coming on with us today.
BILL EDDY: Well, thanks for having me. I’ve enjoyed speaking with you and helping to pass some things on to your listeners. So, good luck with everything, and thank you.
MICHAEL: We’ll talk to you again. Bye-bye, now.
BILL EDDY: Bye-bye.
LEXI: Okay. So, guys, if you missed any information, you can visit Bill’s website at highconflictinstitute.com. You can see his books and find more information on New Ways for Families, as well.
MICHAEL: In closing, I want to thank everybody, again, today, for joining us and listening in. Please spread the word. I think we have some great guests that continue to be lined up offering a wealth of information that I think is helpful, not only to us, but to all the people who visit Mr. Custody Coach.com, listening to the Blog Talk Radio Program.
As always, we’ll be happy to answer all kinds of questions on our private forums at Mr. Custody Coach.com. And again, we just released our first e-book entitled Creating a Custody Agreement, available at the Mr. Custody Coach.com website, on the e-books page, for a special introductory launch rate of $19.95, so do act soon.
Join us next time on the Mr. Custody Coach Blog Talk Radio Program. We will post an announcement, just as we always do, on Mr. Custody Coach.com, for our next topic and associated guests. And always remember: Better prepared, better outcome. Thank you so much for joining us.
LEXI: See you next time.

From the article:

“We are talking about everyone’s lives are touched by this issue, whether it be our children, or our mothers or our sisters. So many women. The most important thing I can do here today is start this dialogue that we’re having,” Witherspoon, 33, told the show GMTV.

What about the hundreds of thousands of men and boys (and that’s counting only those who would dare risk reporting it)?

We’ve written at length about Domestic Violence here at Mr. Custody Coach. We’ve had the pleasure of interviewing Jan Brown, Founder and Executive Director of the Domestic Violence Helpline for Men and Women (you can listen to our interview with Jan on-demand by clicking on our Radio Show Page).

The fact is, we deplore domestic violence, spousal abuse, and child abuse.  The problem we have in our society is our failure to acknowledge the true realities of domestic violence.  These realities include the fact that many peer reviewed studies numbering into the hundreds are now showing the truth - women are equally as likely to initiate domestic violence as men.  They’re more likely to use a weapon.  Yes, they are also more likely to suffer more damage due to size differences.

It’s a shame that someone with the clout and recognition of Reese Witherspoon serves as a puppet for those who would have the world believe that only women and girls are victims while men and boys are predatory perpetrators.  She’ll walk out before groups of decision makers who will fall all over themselves fawning at the innocent look that is Reese Witherspoon as she tearfully and dramatically puts on a show to influence their legislation as she recently did in the United Kingdom.  Part of the show is parroting the some of the most popular domestic violence myths and ignores the alarming realities.

Reese Witherspoon and her behind-the-scenes supporters are doing society a disservice by ignoring male victims and at the same time ignoring female perpetrators.  So, too, are those who sit there slack-jawed and listen to her because she’s an actress.

The world needs more people like Jan Brown and those who work for her.  Those who are willing to openly discuss and, more importantly, aid victims of domestic violence with a blind-eye towards gender.  Domestic violence discriminates against neither gender as perpetrators or victims.  It’s a shame that Reese Witherspoon’s concerns are only extended to women and girls.  Too bad for the male victims.  Status-quo.

Still, we’re happy that the truth about these situations are starting to come more into the mainstream consciousness and will continue to do our part in that regard.

For the full article, click here: Reese Witherspoon Focuses on Domestic Violence

Janet Jenkins was in a relationship and same-sex marriage with Lisa Miller.  From that relationship a child, Isabella, was born.  Isabella is the biological daughter of Lisa Miller.  Ultimately, the relationship between the two became irretrievably broken.  There was a subsequent divorce and a custody battle over Isabella ensued.

Reportedly, Lisa Miller acted maliciously and allegedly engaged in severe parental alienation efforts with Isabella against Janet Jenkins, the non-biological mother.  Complicating matters are the wide-ranging opinions regarding the legality and morality of same-sex marriages and some are aghast at the change in custody from a biological mother to a non-biological mother in this rather complex mess.  The custody fight raged for more than 6-years.

From the article:

The custody dispute went all the way to the state supreme court of both states. Vermont’s Supreme Court recognized Jenkins’ parental relationship with Isabella, and the Vermont state Supreme Court found–despite a Virginia law that excludes same-sex families from any legal recognition–that while Miller would receive custody of Isabella, Jenkins would retain visitation rights. It is that arrangement that Judge Cohen’s ruling reversed.

Well, people on both sides of the issue and many in-between certainly have their viewpoints on the matter.  Ours is simply that Janet Jenkins and Lisa Miller are Isabella’s parents.  Just as with opposite-sex marriage, children deserve both parents.  When one parent willfully interferes with the parenting arrangements and who deliberately attempts to poison a child’s mind against the other - appropriate action should be taken.

Given the wide-ranging laws in each state regarding the legal recognition of same-sex couples, one thing is for sure, they’re sure to experience a higher degree legal wrangling when relationships dissolve and children are involved.

There is at least one commonality between heterosexual parents and homosexual parents that will prove to be undeniable.  That is - there is an emerging, untapped source of funds to be obtained by state and local courts, child support enforcement agencies, and all those involved in the billions-of-dollars divorce and child custody industry.  They are same-sex couples with children.

The other is most assuredly that there will often be one parent who will work very hard to eliminate the other parent from the children’s lives as a means of getting back at that parent for whatever happened in the relationship.  Of course, the children will be the ultimate losers in these games and many will be there to profit off of the conflict.

For the full article, click here: VT Judge Awards Custody to Non-Biological Mom

Paul Martkainen was caught and arrested this week after taking his son, Luke Finch, from a supervised visitation.  He left the company of the supervisor, Bob Rumble, when he stepped out of the room to use the bathroom.

Martikainen was taken into FBI custody at Fort Myers Beach after being captured by the United States Coast Guard. Authorities said Martikainen abducted Finch and may have been destined for the Yucatan on a 32-foot sailboat. They were discovered about 140 miles southwest of Fort Myers Beach.

From the article:

Rumble said he believes Martikainen let his frustrations over the custody case “get the best of him.”

“As a friend, I was very disappointed that he would choose to do something so foolish. It’s so wrong what he did . . . but I understand the desperateness behind it all I think,” Rumble said. “He’s very, very discouraged with the custody issues. And I think he let that discouragement take over his sensibility. He wanted to be with his child.”

One thing is clear, Martikainen doesn’t have the best past with a criminal history involving drug trafficking in the 1990s and an arrest with subsequent incarceration in a Federal Prison from which he was released in 2003. Additionally, he has been accused of abusing Luke and reports are that Florida’s Department of Children and Families supported the allegation following an investigation - the details of which are not known.

Martikainen faces up to three years in prison, a $250,000 fine and supervised release for a year if he is convicted.

For the full article, click here: Brevard dad faces federal charges in son’s kidnapping