When Reality Is a Moving Target: Cognitive Distortions in Action
When an estranged parent says she has no idea why her children left, she’s convincing. The pain in her eyes, the confusion or indignation in her voice, they’re all real. In the face of that conviction, it’s hard not to believe her.
That’s why I’m starting a series of blog posts called When Reality Is a Moving Target: Cognitive Distortions in Action. Each post will focus on an instance in which both sides get to tell their version of the story. The purpose is to show how people speak and act when they’re under the influence of cognitive distortions, and how they respond when their distortions are challenged. If you’ve dealt with someone who uses these distortions, I hope you’ll find it validating. If you’re new to dealing with personality disorders, I hope you’ll find it illuminating.
Today’s example is the classic mother who has no idea why her daughters don’t want to see her. Full props to Dr. Phil–his record is hit and miss, but in this video he peels the mother apart like an orange.
https://youtu.be/SwAxOvgXS-0
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I’m a big fan of your series and found your annotations of the video so helpful (and hilarious).
I thought I might draw your attention to this recent family court judgment from Canada:
http://www.canlii.org/en/on/onsc/doc/2016/2016onsc72/2016onsc72.html
It’s written in very plain language and details a relationship between a mother and a young daughter that I think might become a parent-child estrangement in about 20 years. The judgment provides multiple perspectives on each event, and the cognitive distortions in evidence (primarily the mother’s) are VERY similar to what you’ve written about on your site.
It’s extremely long and you may or may not find it interesting, but since it reminded me so strongly of your website I thought I’d send the link.
http://www.canlii.org/en/on/onsc/doc/2016/2016onsc72/2016onsc72.html
Thank you! I take no credit for the video annotations, though–they’re the work of Excrementalist, who uploaded the video to Youtube.
The court case is FASCINATING. I’m only a tiny portion of the way through–my god, this thing goes on and on–and it’s interesting to watch how the judge builds the case. If he stuck to comments about who was calmest and who appeared to be the most child-centered, I’d be skeptical, because presenting the right face is a skill that personality-disordered people often master and that women are often at a disadvantage in, but the judge also pays an enormous amount of attention to whose testimony is coherent and how people react under pressure. Upon reflection, legal personnel should be excellent at just that, but it’s a skill set that’s lacking in most people who deal with the personality disordered.
Thank you for this. It’s going to keep me occupied for a while.
I was up reading until almost 11, and I got to the end only because I skimmed the parts about financial settlements. It just gets worse and worse. The birthday party broke my heart.
In among the lying, the evasions, and the mounting evidence of neediness so deep that the school resorted to calling CPS, one incident stayed with me. It was tiny in the grand scheme of things, but it reveals a lot about the mother:
————-
374. The Respondent’s friend Chantel Danis testified she saw the Applicant’s fiancé White videotaping as the Respondent picked Paige up from school one afternoon.
a. Danis testified she happened to be at the school on October 7, 2013 and noticed a woman wearing a black hoody as if to conceal her face. She couldn’t get a good look at her.
b. Because it appeared the woman was videotaping the Respondent, Danis said she quickly took two photographs of the woman on her child’s i-pod.
c. During examination in chief, she said she was “90% sure” the woman was the Applicant’s fiancée Catherine White.
d. Under cross-examination she quickly admitted maybe it wasn’t White.
e. The two pictures themselves were of no assistance. They looked like blurry snapshots of Big Foot. You could barely make out that it was a person, let alone identify the gender, facial features, or what they were doing.
f. Notably, Catherine White not only denied – categorically – ever taking pictures or videos of anyone at Paige’s school. White also produced detailed cell phone records confirming she was in Toronto (where she works) at the precise time she was accused of videoing the Respondent in Waterdown.
g. At one point during the trial, the Respondent’s lawyer actually withdrew this weak allegation. Inexplicably, she later resurrected it.
————-
Catherine White presented absolute proof that the allegation was false /before the trial/, but the mother went ahead with the accusation. Her lawyer withdrew it in the face of the proof, but the mother brought it up again. It was stuck in her head, and no amount of counterevidence could dislodge it.
I wonder whether there were brief periods immediately after she was shown the evidence where she agreed that the allegations were false, or whether she always thought they were right. I’ve seen people do both, and ironically, the first pattern is the hardest to deal with. It’s like fighting smoke. Once an emotionally satisfying idea is stuck in their heads, it’s always there, and they’ll always forget any inconvenient facts that get in their way.
I’m so glad you found it interesting! It’s impossible to know how much the mother believes the account she gave the court; it may be more than I assumed she did, reading the judgment. It’s hard to know how deep the distortions go; there’s a horrible lack of empathy and insight in so many of her decisions as reported by multiple witnesses. The images of a six-year-old child being sent outside in cold weather without her winter coat, or crying because “Mommy says she’s going to die without me”, will stick with me for a long time.
I appreciate the judgment and find it fascinating, but it’s constrained by the basic assumptions of law — one of which is that everyone can easily understand what they are doing wrong, alter their course and behave better. I suspect the mother came out of the litigation feeling even more righteous and persecuted than before and it will be difficult for her to change.
Here’s an interesting coda to the case: the same judge’s ruling on the award of costs based on who prevailed on the issues: http://flwg.com.au/data/attachment.php?id=4802&for_session=d04215c0f87353551779bc546e158d9a
Thanks for posting! The judge basically called the NMom a psychopath:
“On several key topics, I concluded that the Respondent’s evidence was not credible. More commonly, I concluded the Respondent’s evidence demonstrated a profound lack of insight and fairness. ”
“Profound lack of insight” is specific to psychopaths.
But wait, there’s more. The 2018 update: https://www.canlii.org/en/on/onsc/doc/2018/2018onsc258/2018onsc258.html
And to think I almost went to bed at a reasonable hour.
I’m about halfway through that briefing and it’s incredibly sad. Poor Paige.
I’m living through this with my Partner. It’s sick, he’s trying so hard but nothing is ever his mother’s fault. Every time he tries to get an apology it’s just the same not my fault stuff!
I’m sorry he (and you, by extension) is dealing with this. It can be a long road to get from knowing intellectually that you’ll never get an apology, to understanding that you’ll never get an apology.
Have you tried talking with him about what things would look like if he never got an apology? Would he want to carry on the relationship anyway? Pull back a little? Cut off entirely? He may not be ready to stop trying for an apology, but thinking about what the world would look like if he never got one might help him move a little farther along the path.
Thank you Issendai for this Post-I wish I could get the video to work-but the topic is excellent. Is this the (one) time where the defrocked Dr. Phil had the PD “Mugger” (ex: she stole her kid’s beds because she didn’t get physical custody, stole one of their prom dresses etc.) and has her adult children present who are trying so hard, treading so carefully, to get her to do/be what she flat out refuses to do/be-like honest? Empathetic? (How ’bout reality based?!) Cognitive distortions all over gawds creation if it’s the show I’m thinking it is.
Thanks and props to bisky as well. The case you referenced is very interesting and sadly pretty much the average court case involving a CB. (Please believe me, it gets worse-and this one is gonna.) Those same court proceedings occur in the US in Family Court on a daily basis; however, you can’t just sit in to watch the trial or easily access Family Court records either as they are sealed. Because judges are bound to work by case law the outcomes are often unsettling or not at all what we’d wish. Is anyone satisfied with the outcome of this case? What do you think will happen next with each of the principles in this case? I ask this because as far as the CB “mother” is concerned, this is simply the opening salvo in her scorched earth war and in her view, “negotiations” have now commenced. IMO the peace negotiations in the Middle East have a better chance of success than anything involving a CB-But maybe she’ll surprise me. (And maybe I’ll become an expert on all things lunar/moon because I can see it out my windows at night.)
Yk how CBs are not real fond of even being gently told, “Please stop standing on my foot?” Well, in my experience they have a huge paradoxical response to any “request.” Especially written ones. Especially through a Court. And most especially emanating from a judge.
I’m surprised there isn’t more discussion on this Post-lots of “good stuff” here 🙂 I’ve been saying for decades Cluster B thinking is not like the normally neurotic (so to speak) thinking: They have far more in common with the thinking of a career Criminal. When the *only* constraint on an adult’s behavior is *what they think they can get away with,* this is exactly how a career criminal views-and lives-in the world. It’s not just the external Locus of Control-although that’s patently obvious-but the Content of that “Control” that informs their world view and behavior. Again, I’m talking about adults, not kids-wanna make that clear.
As far as EPs/CBs are concerned, you all are so nice and proper to call them “toxic” parents. I’ve call/have experienced them more like Fukishema on two feet.
Thoughts? Ideas? Anyone?
Again, thanks!
TW
In California, Family Court records are not sealed as long as they are incident to a divorce/annulment/separation. You can just go to Court and watch and check out the file to read. Technically parentage (paternity) cases are sealed, but they are heard right along with the divorce cases so while you can’t read the file, you can usually watch the proceedings. I don’t know about other jurisdictions, but I suspect most Family Law cases are open — it’s just not something that’s common knowledge.
I practiced Family Law for several years and it was my observation that any hotly contested case generally involved someone that was likely to have a PD. Usually there is one person driving the conflict and one fairly reasonable person that is frantically trying to protect themselves and their children. Unfortunately it was also my observation that the Court (and custody mediators) continues to hold firmly to the belief that “it takes two to tango.” However, with the litigation model, it really doesn’t. Or maybe the analogy works if you consider that one partner is leading, while the other is just trying to follow. William Eddy has written quite a bit about this, and he was hugely influential in my practice (and in my decision to get out — between my upbringing, my own ex, and the litigants, I realized that I had had my fill of PDs/PD traits).
“Usually there is one person driving the conflict and one fairly reasonable person that is frantically trying to protect themselves and their children. Unfortunately it was also my observation that the Court (and custody mediators) continues to hold firmly to the belief that “it takes two to tango.” However, with the litigation model, it really doesn’t.”
A big YES to all of this. From my own experience working in family law, this is exactly true. Sometimes BOTH ex-spouses are disordered and unreasonable — but often it is only one, and it takes a lot of work to convince a judge of that.
Bill Eddy is a great resource, though I saw him lecture once and he attributed the cycle of domestic violence to BPD — which I think is a gross oversimplification at best. I think his insights are most solid with regard to “garden variety” disordered people and not the most severely violent criminals — some of whom, alas, one also encounters in family law.
Are you in Bill’s jurisdiction? If so, we might know each other.
I would agree that it is an oversimplification to attribute domestic violence to a PD. I also don’t think his high conflict custody mediation format would work well in a DV setting either. His strategies are great for dealing with former partners that have BPD, are narcs, or are just high conflict in general, but there’s really no fixing someone that is violent, in my experience. Unfortunately, I’ve encountered my fair share of those people too.
I do appreciate though that Bill has created a framework for approaching custody on a more therapeutic model in order to overcome some of the difficulties presented by personality disorders. I just wish that judges had a better understanding of people than they do. I always wondered why none of them seemed to see patterns of high conflict with certain firms or attorneys, for example. The Court in my jurisdiction is pretty bad at reining in bad conduct, in general.
“Is anyone satisfied with the outcome of this case? What do you think will happen next with each of the principles in this case? I ask this because as far as the CB “mother” is concerned, this is simply the opening salvo in her scorched earth war and in her view, “negotiations” have now commenced.”
I doubt anyone is satisfied. I expect that there will be more judgments, publicly reported or not, wherein the judge further restricts the mother’s access to the child, because I don’t think a person who does the things described in the judgment, refuses to admit any wrongdoing ever, and says things like “I will never have a mental health issue” on the stand, is a person who can be persuaded to look at her behaviour and try to change it. The judge will just become part of the father’s “team” of persecutors in the mother’s eyes and the mother will likely not even try to cooperate, focusing on trying to undermine the judgment or have it overturned, which means more litigation and more legal fees. I think the manipulations of the child will continue, and at some point (like adolescence) might even be successful in alienating the child from the father, albeit probably temporarily.
Based on *what’s in the judgment,* I don’t think it will escalate beyond that, although I do idly wonder what kind of action will be/has been required to get the mother to move out of the family home (which was ordered sold). I doubt that was/will be an easy process.
It boggles me that the judge recognized all the problems the mother had caused and would cause, and he STILL gave the mother primary custody until September. That’s not a warning to get herself together, that’s a deadline by which to finish alienating the daughter.
He gave the father sole legal custody (decision-making power) right away and the mother 50% physical custody until the fall. I understand his reasoning and think it makes sense (he didn’t want further disruptions to the child, he didn’t want to validate the fears the mother had planted that she would “never see Mummy again”, etc.) but I too see nothing but escalating abuse in the child’s 2016.
The legal system is really not good with severely disordered people. Not in Canada, not in the US and not in any area of law.
Nope. Which is ironic, because the severely disordered account for the lion’s share of the courts’ time.
Update from 2018: we all called it.
https://www.canlii.org/en/on/onsc/doc/2018/2018onsc258/2018onsc258.html
The mother kept on abusing the child; the judge further restricted her access; then…the mother decided to stop coming to court, stop participating in court proceedings, and *stop seeing her daughter entirely.*
“The [mother] proposed that because she is no longer involved in [her daughter’s] life – because she is “no longer a parent” as she put it – she should not be required to pay any child support either retroactively or prospectively.”
She didn’t get what she wanted, so she decided to abandon her daughter. Physically, emotionally, and financially. That poor, poor child.
Since we’re talking about cases here, I wanted to bring to your attention a remarkable case just decided in Washington state, although not framed in the usual family law context. I’m going to describe it in this comment so it won’t get held up in moderation with case names for the googling convenience of readers, and then provide the links in a second comment. I would love to hear others’ takes on this.
The bare facts: high-level employee of Microsoft, married with two young children, long history of psychiatric treatment, living in Seattle, commits suicide in early 2012. Both sides of the family are Jewish, therefore burial by tradition occurs quickly. At the request of MIL/FIL, the widow delays the interment briefly so FIL can fly in from Japan. Widow’s dad (prominent Seattle real estate developer) buys the burial plot and the burial occurs in Seattle four days after the death.
*Over two years later* MIL petitions to have her son disinterred and reburied near her in Portland, OR because widow is “disrespecting his memory and his grave” by not putting up a headstone (in one of her few statements in the case widow says the children are designing a headstone now that they are old enough). The petition is dismissed within six months, and the appeal has been going on for two more years. The Court of Appeals (intermediate appellate court in Washington) affirmed the dismissal earlier this week.
As the lawsuit and the appeal went on, MIL also aired more and more of her grievances against DIL, first in the lawsuit, and then in the press: she isn’t allowed to see her grandchildren, DIL changed their last names, DIL moved to Los Angeles, MIL lost other family members right around the time she lost her son and has breast cancer, etc. She got some press coverage spinning this as “powerful local real estate developer (widow’s father) crushes grieving mother in court,” but the piece of hard-hitting journalism advancing this theory doesn’t even get the poor man’s date of death correct. If you search on the names Braun Selig Faenov you can find the Court of Appeals opinion and a Seattle Weekly article that I will link in a moment.
Access the slip opinion here: http://www.courts.wa.gov/opinions/index.cfm?fa=opinions.showOpinion&filename=729489MAJ
Seattle Weekly article here: http://archive.seattleweekly.com/home/956673-129/seattleland-latest-selig-latest-real-estate
Really, it’s like a Greek tragedy.
Do you know how to see the rest of the court records? A commenter to the article posted photos from the records, and I really, really want to see what else is there.
Are there any clues about why Braun jumped to exhumation, rather than petitioning for a tombstone to be placed on his grave? She wouldn’t have much more chance of getting that than of having her son exhumed, but it’s so much more reasonable than exhumation that I’d like to hear her justification for taking the extreme route.
What was on the stone that Faenov’s friends bought? Why were they able to get a stone put on his grave? Why did Selig have it removed? There’s so much missing from the story that I have a hard time believing it as written.
And since all of this is over a tombstone, why didn’t Selig cut the years of litigation short and buy a tombstone? Even if the permanent one isn’t designed yet, she could place a simple one with his name and dates. Boom. Done. Braun would move on to other issues, because this is a power struggle that has nothing to do with Faenov’s stone, but the official issue would be resolved.
In my jurisdiction you go to the courthouse where the records are stored. There is a records department, where you fill out a short form and show your I.D. The file is brought to you and you can review it in the department and you can mark pages for copying. Pay the cashier for the copies and then pick them up. Turnaround depends on the number of pages. Sometimes they take a few days to do it. If you’re not in the same location, you can get a filing service to do it for you. A lot of them seem to have their own scanners/copiers.
Ah, so they’re not online? The King County courthouse has electronic copies, but you have to pay per page to download them, and I’m not quite interested enough to invest.
Some jurisdictions are more progressive than others. Mine’s still paper mostly. Others are online.
I have some of the documents (I have a standing account there), including, I think, the mother’s declaration, and will email them to you.
Thank you! Downloading them now and girding my loins for the battle.
Notes:
* He moved his site from faenov.com to faenov.net in… 2011? The cited URL is incorrect. As for the contents of faenov.net, the Wayback Machine shows nothing but a short corporate bio of Kyril, and a page suggesting that he used the site as access to a server. The old faenov.com has more pages, but they belong to other people who had accounts on the site. It wasn’t a personal site and doesn’t appear to have been an important resource, so Selig’s decision to close it wasn’t the attack on Kyril’s memory that the lawsuit claims.
* Braun implies that because of the dates when Selig sold her house in Seattle and moved to LA, Selig must have started the move before Kyril’s death. The timeline doesn’t look suspect to me, especially when the main party is wealthy and has experience in real estate.
* Changing the girls’ last names six weeks after their father’s death? Fishy.
* Braun is kitchen-sinking. Her legal documents are filled with anecdotes designed to prove that Selig doesn’t love Kyril like Braun loves Kyril. Her main argument is that she’ll take better care of Kyril’s grave than Selig will, so the court should give Kyril’s body to her. Meanwhile, Selig’s documents are dry dissections of the legal merits of the case.
What I get out of the collection of documents is that Selig has moved on from Kyril. Given the speed with which she did it, she may have been ready to go for a while. Braun, OTOH, isn’t ready to move on, and is wretched that her son’s memory is legally in the hands of someone who cares so little for it.
After that, it’s hard to make out the merits of either side. Braun doesn’t come across as the most logical of thinkers, and her kitchen-sinking smells of dysfunction, but it doesn’t scream at me as loudly as it could. The curt replies Selig gives her could be bitchy, but they’re also the kind of response relationship forums recommend when dealing with pushy people.
I do wonder why Braun hasn’t filed for grandparent visitation. She could have a case, but she seems to view her loss of contact as another strike against Selig in the fight to move Kyril.
The part where Braun’s narrative started heading south for me is where she starts recounting the other tragedies in her life (mother died, father died, breast cancer) that Selig wasn’t sympathetic to so Braun is … therefore?…entitled to dig up the grave.
Selig has mostly maintained a silence. I believe there is a small placeholder stone on the site now, but it is not elaborate enough for the mother.
I am currently listening to the case on my screen reader. I feel so bad for the girl feeling like she couldn’t tell her father she had a headache without him freaking out. My parents were like that, too. So very stressful, and you don’t feel comfortable calling it abusive/neglectful because hey, at least they care that you have a headache? But it’s so stressful to hide your headache from their reaction to it if they find out.
You have to wonder if there’s a punitive element to the freaking out. People train other people not to bring problems to them through a variety of unpleasant responses, and it’s easy to recognize the self-protective element when someone gets irrationally angry or condescending when faced with a problem. Is there an element of covert aggression in the freaking out? Or are they just incapable of handling their anxiety?
In either case, “at least they care” is cold, cold comfort. Like the analysis of Rapunzel that I read decades ago, where the author noted that the witch wasn’t punished because what she did to Rapunzel, she did out of love. True enough, but does it matter that she didn’t mean to hurt Rapunzel when she raised her in isolation in a locked tower?
I know that this is three years ago and nobody will read it, but I just wanted to say to Pft that this is the first time I’ve heard someone have the same experience that I’ve had with my parents. Any time I was sick or hurt, my mother would start screaming, and there was always an accusatory ferocity in her behavior. Just a few years ago I genuinely fainted during an illness, like I collapsed on the floor, and when I came to she was yelling at me, “What, am I going to have to take you to the ER now?!” I managed to say, “are you SERIOUSLY making this out to be something I’m doing TO YOU?” And she calmed down. She’s not as bad as some people. But it’s stuck with me and made me see other injuries from childhood in a different light.
I had no idea other people experienced this! I am so sorry you had to go through that. I know how much it sucks to have to hide vulnerability from people you love. You find yourself, or I found myself, in my 30s wondering why I couldn’t tell my long-term boyfriend that I was having a bad day. Because I thought if I told him, he’d leave me. Is that what you’ve experienced, too?
All right, I just finished listening to the ENTIRE custody case. The part that sticks in my mind the hardest is the mother removing the child’s glasses on transition days so she would associate going to her father’s house with having a headache. SO TWISTED! I agree that she will want to stay away from this woman once she has a choice!
The mother’s cruelty to the daughter was so pervasive, so crushing… and she almost certainly believed she was doing right by her daughter, the same way she’d believe she was doing right when she took her daughter to the dentist. Sometimes necessary things are painful. And it was more important to keep her daughter away from her father than to keep her daughter happy in the moment.
I am itching to send you the exchanges between my mother in law and myself, and the grandparents rights petition my own mother filed against me at the same time. 😂😂 I think you’d have a field day with them.
Now I’m curious!
I am pretty fascinated by the whole grandparents’ rights thing and the sense of entitlement that requires. My mother didn’t go as far as to file her own petition, but she did try to recruit my ex to file for full custody to circumvent me (he declined, not that it had any chance of success in the first place).
Long story short, my mom was an extremely abusive mnarc and I was her SG. I had a baby at 18 when I lived with her and now have 4 she is trying to gain rights to. I tried to allow my mother a relationship with my children but she started pulling the same tricks on them she did with my sister and I when we were children while we were staying with her (we were moving to a bigger house). I warned her if it continued I would have to cut her off and she did not stop so I went LC a few days before I had my fourth. She called CPS on us, told them I was crazy, dangerous and was living out in the streets with a newborn and three older children. When CPS didn’t take my kids (because that was entirely false, we were moving, not living in the streets) she filed a petition for grandparents rights- her petition says I’m punishing her because I was expected to do chores when I lived with her or stayed with her during our move. She lost, and is now appealing.
She is a member of grandparents rights forums. 😂
At the same time, my MIL found out I was talking about her emotional abuse during my first pregnancy as a teen (she came to my house after the baby was born and kept saying I wasn’t sure if the baby was her son’s etc.) in the context of discussions about systemic social abuse against pregnant teens. She sent me a letter calling me a hateful liar who didn’t have anything to be proud of for raising my child, called me a bad hostess and sent me an inventory of all the money she has given her son, including birthday gifts and things that have nothing to do with me, like paying their joint credit cards. I told her gaslighting didn’t work on me, I know what she did and it’s not up to me to protect her image- if she was going to behave like that she wasn’t to contact me again etc etc. She and her daughter (22, lives with mom) began sending DH increasingly disrespectful and harassing emails/pictures/texts (you are my favorite child, everything wrong in our lives is her fault, she’s falsified her memories, you hurt me, you need to look at the facts, she has no proof, I’m not financially abusive I just expect respect and civility, I always knew she was promiscuous, etc) are stalking and reporting my Facebook etc accounts trying to get them all shut down.
So if you want full exchanges and legal cases, I got ’em. 😬😬😬
I read the following at an EP Forum:
EPs are estranged from their son and DIL. DIL, let’s call her “Sally” is “da debil,” the cited cause for the estrangement. There is a death in the family and the poster and her husband decide he will send their ES and EDIL an email notifying them of the death. Shortly thereafter, they receive an email back from ES and EDIL stating, “We already heard…” and 3 more short lines of appropriate condolences. A few hours later, they receive a slightly longer email from ES as follows:
“*SALLY* and I love and care about both of you. Our thoughts are with the family at this sad time..” and another two or three lines of again, appropriate condolences. ( My emphasis on “Sally.”)
The very first comment from a forum member cuts out the DIL’s name and focuses on the ES’s use of “I.” This remarkable transformation from “Sally and I” to just “I” continues in all the following poster’s comments. The very first word, “SALLY” is completely carved out of the second response *as if it did not exist.* In this distortion the email is de facto immediately translated as “I love and care….” by the following posters. And why is this second email containing the word “I” more significant and personal? Because the ES’s second email is “…free from the influence of his toxic wife.” Apparently the written word is no barrier to reality busting by simply ignoring completely the DIL’s name is the first word of the carefully parsed second email.
Ohdeargawd help me. This is so far beyond a failure to communicate it’s as if the Hubble Telescope sent a message to The Mariana’s Trench of Dark Matter: “I don’t see it because I don’t want to and therefore, it doesn’t exist.”
(Excuse me while I retrieve my eyebrows from the back of my head and my jaw that rolled under the couch. Walks away muttering.)
Over Christmas, members of that same board went running to the defense of a mother who has not one but 3 blogs focused on berating and threatening her estranged daughter. The daughter would not let the mother to meet her young grandchildren. Forum members followed a link to a maudlin post about The Holidays and apparently took not 10 seconds to inspect the blog’s other content. Which would be juuust about what a normal person would need to back away slowly.
Oooo Sameoldstory, I bet that was real incentive for the daughter to hurry right back!-just in case she was taking the occasional hit off the hopeium pipe. I’m sure she was carefully re-evaluating her decision in light of all those Fukushimas of pathological pathos.
In the bad old days before the Internet post NC, mine would periodically rev up another Snail Mail Shock and Awe Campaign and send me several one or two line letters a day for 4-6 wks. When I bothered to open any given day’s worth of cray cray I was alternately berated, threatened, told what I “HAVE to do” (huh?!) carrot-and-sticked with a variety of ah, gems a la:
-Stated she met a local policeman who said he went to high school with me-but “strategically” withheld his name. That ought to ensure a response considering I graduated 30+ yrs. previously (there were 400+ graduates) and I had never been back to the area. Yep, it would be an accurate assumption I had moved on from high school. I would have been far more interested in her “how we met” story: “Meeting” cuffed in the backseat of a cop car is a possibility.
-Vague references to her investments. I don’t know if she got her wealth management advisor mixed up with a bail bondsman but it is a possibility.
-“Woe-Is-Me” who does “NOT KNOW WHERE YOU ARRREEE!!!”
Her letters came directly to my home address. ALL of them over the decades. I never tried to “hide” no matter where I moved and her PIs were just as obvious as her handwritten accurately addressed envelopes. So I must be there. And I was. (And your PIs had a shit ton of pictures to prove it: Pay your bill if ya want ’em.)
-Reminding me of a Mother’s Day Card I made in kindergarten->45 yrs. previously. It was as I recall a group activity. (Hell, even POWs cave under the pressure.)
-The weather report in her vicinity (I lived several hundred miles if not states away) and an update on what season it was: *Her* Birthday Season, *Her* Christmas Season, *Her* Mother’s Day Season-no wait, that was every day-*Her* Divorce Season, *Her* “Last Date I Heard From You!” Season (actually, it was a year earlier than she decided it was but what the hell would I know about my own life anyway?) etc.
-*Her* current state of mind, i.e., An exercise in identification of *Her* Feelings: Sadder, Madder, Gleeful Gloating or Gladiator. Or D, all of the above-just give her a few minutes.
There are decades worth of this but I’m sure you get the idea-as does that other daughter who hopefully is making sure she has hard copies of all her EP’s written material in case the Legal Route is pursued.
So, if first ya don’t succeed at sucking up all the “attention” just double down. If first you do succeed, just double down as well.<Yes, you did read that correctly. Methinks this daughter who is being Blogged and Flogged is standing back in awe at the distant mushroom cloud. Nothing says "I love you and really want to repair our relationship" like multiple assualts of derision via snail mail or Blogs or In Person Ambushes/Lawn Tantrums. It's just so classic for cray cray EPs to really believe they are that important, "the whole world is watching" them and "everyone should KNOW" or give a shit about them, their estranged Adult Offspring etc. including masses of people they don't even know. (Possibly viewed as their "adoring public.")
IMO their patterns of behavior reveal their internal conception of their lives as truly bad soap operas, a parody of a Life. Like a failed Suicide Bomber, the only one who goes up in smoke with this "approach" is the EP. Wouldn't surprise me if mine was in the backyard wailing at the moon, "Don't Cry For Me, Daughter Tina!" when she "met" my long lost high school class mate, the cop who came to arrest her.
Issendai captured so very accurately this subset of EPs who are genuinely mentally disturbed. My only regret is not having others like all of you around decades ago when I was living this flavor of crazy. I'm very grateful you are now. Thank you.