Family court touches on the most important and intimate aspects of our lives.

Karin Huffer in “Unlocking Justice” actually discovered one of the key problems in family court. She discovered that one of the reasons so many people don’t heal from family court trauma is because it is a man-made injury as opposed to a natural injury or loss. And because the trauma is repetitive. If you have ever suffered a repetitive injury then you know how much more difficult it is to function in every day life.

Those we go to for help become the abusers themselves. We are left in shock that we aren’t getting protection and help from the agencies and courts that are charged with protecting and helping us.

So let’s take a look at what is going on here.

The court system thrives off of primarily two types of behavior, the Power Centered and the Conscience Centered. I got these concepts from Dr. Karin Huffer. She passed away just over a year ago but was a very smart lady. She got these concepts from social studies. So we are going to refer to these two types of behaviors a 6\L5FR\F5s PCs and CCs like Karen does. (Convert Power to Control and Conscience to Cooperative)

Examples of people who are CCs would be Mother Theresa is conscience centered (CC) and PC would be Adolf Hitler is power centered (PC)”

Which one are you? Another example of a PC would be sociopaths, narcissists, and psychopaths.

Did you cooperate with your deceiver and were betrayed?

 

Did you refuse to slander your ex despite that they were dragging your name through the mud and shaming, destroying your character and making others in the courtroom think that you are a terrible influence on your children, a terrible person, and that the ex had to get away from you in order to “save the children” despite that they may still love you. In other words, they had to do this for your own good. Any of you experience that, or was it just me.

The issue is that you still believed that good exists in your ex, and that this will prevail. You didn’t want to believe that there is evil in people. And that’s probably because  you are kindhearted and a good person with a good soul, so you think everyone has what you have inside – a conscience and good intentions.

You still believed that Good faith exists in other people.

I bet you have even gone to people your ex has influenced and thought that giving them the other side of the story would get them to at least be neutral and stop shunning you or treating you like an outcast or avoiding you, or at worst, joining the ex in their campaign to turn your children on you and to turn others on you or warn others not to trust you or to protect your children from you.

You should start reading white papers that can help you adjust your reality like, “Life is the art of being deceived.” so you understand what is driving this behavior – what is feeding it?

Remember when you discovered what parental alienation was, you were able to apply better solutions, change how you responded to get better results. This works the same way. This is all part of that process.

BINGO – The enticements in family court litigation destroy any hope for cooperation or relationships and healing – the more a person strives for power the less cooperative they are.

What benefits do they get for employing these tactics and behaviors?

 

Stripped of your dreams and dignity and left in poverty

Forced losses, take your children, make you do things they couldn’t make you do during the marriage.

Make you dysfunctional, unable to work, suffer from anxiety and PTSD, increase the unemployment rate.

So let’s look at what tactics are used to break you and get the court on their side.

 

SHOW THE WHITEBOARD

Weighing you down – grieving from missing your child and your home and routine. Your child’s activities that you agreed to before can now be used to cause you to miss time with them. My son was in racing and after he was withheld from me for an entire summer, when I finally was heard by the court and the court said I would get some time with them, but that the start of the time would be delayed because there were races coming up can be devastating. This makes you torn, you don’t want your child to lose their activities but you also don’t want to lose that relationship with your child.

Intentional pain and shaming engineered by the attorneys

Timing of serving subpoenas – on birthdays, near holidays, right before judge conferences

Ridiculing  you in court, rolling their eyes, acting annoyed at you to the judge

Confusion – keeping you in the dark, making you feel stupid

Threats – you won’t get to see your child if you don’t give in, sanctions – pay more money, block your filings, you won’t get a better deal in the court, you are going to upset the judge

Tricking you – We don’t do it that way, your rights don’t apply, give the judge what he wants and you’ll get better results, do the psych eval and prove you are fine,

Lying to you – the constitution doesn’t apply,

Overwhelming you – piling on burdensome requests, past 10 years of business activity and statements, bank, all notes and journals over the past 20 years, videos, recordings, emails, texts, investigations, records, property, etc.

Costing you – setting hearings on dates you have to work, setting a lot of hearings and then rescheduling and continuing them but not telling you so you show up, and even up taking multiple days off of work, scheduling depositions causing missed work, mediation, serving you constantly with something financials, medical, child support, visitation changes, more allegations, accusations, claims, investigations, studies, amicus appointments, calling CPS to investigate, counseling for your child, adding more activities for your child, making you pay for both households throughout the litigation, restricting your access to your funds and disrupting your investing patterns and other business activities, affecting your business focus, eliminating your daily routines and replacing them with working on your case, so no more yoga, no more working out at the gym, no more casual reading, or going for a run at the end of the day or in the morning, no more life coaching you have to spend all of that on your attorneys and all of the court-appointed experts. Your child’s activities have to be cut back as well especially if they do an expensive one like racing.

DSM-IV-TR, sponsored a study of 395 traumatized and treatment seeking participants. The conclusions aligned with the work of Bessel van der Kolk, Alexander McFarlane and Judith Herman, researchers on trauma that human on human trauma was the most intense and hardest to overcome.”

Worse of all they use your good nature and get you to believe that they are not going to take advantage of that. Sending you into disappointment and surprise. And then into further shock when you think the court is going to care and is going to see through this abuse, only to find out that the court is going to give in to him or her and treat you with disgust when you don’t give in to them forcing you to do the very thing you came to the court to protect you from.

You are in grief mode over losses forced by the court.

When you have the right tools to fight the injustice you are able to regain a greater sense of your authenticity, unique self, make more sense of what is happening to you rather than get lost in the puzzling and painful universe. Then your grieving will be productive. You will learn how to grieve skillfully and remain aligned with your beliefs and values. You will be able to withstand the beatings and continue to push for justice and fairness to prevail in the family court process.

We all know that checks and balances are how we ensure that our government agencies continue to serve us properly and uphold justice. However, we don’t have any good checks and balances for the family courts right now so your complaints about a judge, a therapist, an evaluator falls on deaf ears or worse gets used to punish you further. There are no whistle blower laws protecting you from a vindictive judge. Not even the anti-SLAPP laws protect you here.

YOU ARE THE CHECKS AND BALANCES.

So let’s learn how you can be the checks and balances for the system. That’s what you really have to become and that is what every individual is in America by the way. That “We the People” in the constitution that’s what that’s really about. Checks and balances formed the basis for civil rights.

How did our family courts get like this? We aren’t talking about historically. We are going through behaviors today.

It starts with the family courts are designed to take advantage of your desires and what you ask for, not so much what the law is allowed to do. You have to correct that. You didn’t know this. You depended on an attorney to do this for you.

The attorneys vigorously advocate for your adversarial position instead of for protection of the fundamental rights that the justice in Meyer described are so critical to LIBERTY: Your right to happiness and enjoyment, right to speech and association. There was no special exception carved out in his opinion, they are raw and general for a reason. They are necessary to life. They are critical to be able to pursue every enjoyment and experience in life.

Need for power and desire for cooperation – leads to victimization

CONVERTING SYSTEMS OF POWER

The legal system is converted into a tool or weapon they can use to enhance their power and control.

These power monsters know how to shame a litigant, weaken them, and dehumanize them.

There are given guidelines that are followed, they just aren’t the ones you think they are.

You might have thought that courts act to ensure the enforcement of law and decency. You suffer a double whammy, a double shock when your ex acts in ways you thought they never would, and the courts punish you for not complying with the unreasonable demands, normalizing and approving the behaviors that made you feel abused that you so desperately were trying to escape.

And after the attorney that you have grown dependent on lets you down, now you have to also heal from the injury suffered from thinking that you had at least your attorney as your ally.

You think that this might be the only place that this has happened but that is not the case. Think about this, how long has it taken for people to get justice against the police abusing them, attacking them, and killing them. Family courts are not special. But we do have a mindset and a bias where we believe before we go through the family courts that others will help correct the injustices. OUR only experience with the law before this might have been criminal law or small claims court where we had someone to go to who we thought would enforce a law and protect us. In the past, it has worked this way, and still in some cases it does. For example, a few days a go my sister had a gun held to her head and the police went to her and arrested the person who did this. But my son on the other hand has lost faith in the police who have done nothing to correct injustices happening to him every time his vehicles are robbed.

We have lots of mechanisms and expectations in place for punishing people who violate our laws. But when these systems don’t work anymore, the shock is lasting and impacts you and your life in very visceral ways. We are built on systems that involve ethics and morals and when those go astray so does the balance in our lives.

There is nothing more devastating then experiencing your attorney costing you all of your money and then dumping you – making you feel abandoned once more. Perhaps the first time you experienced this was when your ex left you, but perhaps you had experienced in your life before but maybe had let that go long ago. These experiences can trigger those old feelings of abandonment, shame, feelings of being unworthy, and can make it even more difficult for you to recover emotionally. This is why so many end up with PTSD, severe depression, and even spiral into suicide. My ex sent me e-mails telling me that I was nobody, had no kids, no property, no career, nothing, nothing in my name, that my name was nothing, and that I had no reason to live. The piling on never seemed to stop.

So you probably guessed what the most damaging thing is on “cooperative” or “conscience centered” litigants.

The most damaging attacks on cooperative litigants was “ridicule” and “lies.” Shaming. This got the “community” in the courtroom around the targeted litigant (now the victim) to reject the victim.

Betrayal stuns and distresses.

For those of you who have stuck with me, let’s go a little deeper into the roots of this behavior. Deception is actually a core innate human behavior. It is a basic social abstract reasoning skill and is actually very predictable as you see in throughout the court process. Anyone who has gone through these family courts basically repeat the same narratives don’t they. As soon as you get into a support circle you hear story after story that mirrors yours. That’s because deception’s predictability ensures its survival and is a core element to basic human survival. Narcissists are very convincing and they deceive by persuading others to believe their what they know to be untrue, to believe their lies. Most people lie every day to manage their social relationships, right? You might tell and friend of a loved one that they look good but maybe you don’t really like that much makeup, but you know it makes them feel good, so you lie to them. You might laugh at someone’s joke even though you really thought it was gross or rude to support them as a friend. The human brain learns and repeats things that get rewarded. Your friend includes you more because they receive support and encouragement and confidence from you.

 

What are some things that you can do to help reclaim yourself and your dignity?

  1. Learn their tactics so that you are prepared to counter these and reduce the injury they are able to inflict on you; and be prepared for the injuries you cannot prevent but are necessary to face in order to advance justice.

Think about what you can do differently if given another opportunity, how you might manage the dysregulation of emotion that they trigger next time you have to face this kind of treatment.

  1. Re-frame your thinking. When you think you cannot do something – tell yourself to try anyways. When you want to crumble and cry why me – tell yourself that you have opportunity to stop this from happening to others. When you don’t understand something – tell yourself this is opportunity to grow by learning. Education opens doors. Education opens the door to everything in terms of having a career and an impact on society and not become a slave to the family courts.

Education is the key to unlock the golden door to freedom.

Know that you are doing everything possible to restore the ability to be with your child, but that if you do not succeed it is not because you did not try.

Remember what sustains you – belief that you have a purpose in life.

  1. Remembering historical figures that did not give in to corruption who succeeded. Can you name a few below? At the end of the nineteenth century, the Progressive Movement successfully lobbied the states to enact new political, economic, and social reforms. Many of these laws were challenged as “deprivations of liberty without the “due process of law.”

So it should be no surprise that parents are rising up and fighting back. Anytime courts, legislators, leaders become part of the abuse, create, support, and advance abusive practices what do we use as corrective action?

How would they have approached the courts, how did they approach them when they were attacked and told that their resistance was wrong or illegal? Use that as your guide. Approach the court with pride and confidence

Your psychic injuries are improved when you regain control over your life. They may be changing your life, but you can have control over what you do with this change.

 

Resources:

Link to paper: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Deception

Karin Huffer – “Unlocking Justice