When I first graduated with my master's in counseling from SDSU, I was drafted to be a Guardian Ad Litem by another counseling graduate who was working as one at the time, but who was looking to pass her caseload to someone else because her full time job was overwhelming her. When approached about taking over her Ad Litem caseload, I thought this would be an interesting resume building experience, and an interesting match to the full time position I was working with abused and troubled children placed in long term residential treatment. Guardian ad Litem's are court appointed advocates for children who have been brought to the attention of the court system as being in need of protective court services. Because the residential treatment facility operated seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, I had enough flexibility to take on a part time job as long as that job was also pretty flexible. As the Ad Litem job paid $12.00 an hour which was a significant sum per hour back then, I was very happy to earn this extra money and I thought at the time this was a great opportunity learn more about child abuse from two related but different perspectives within my field of choice.
The significance of the stories and the profiles of the children I met and I observed in both jobs continues to evolve for me as I pursue my personal research on anti-socials and anti-socials who are also unfortunately parents. The children I worked with in residential, long term treatment were so emotionally damaged by their experiences that they needed in patient care. These children were deemed too violent and/or too dysfunctional to be placed in foster care, or to be offered up for adoption, or even to be allowed go to public school. Despite the severity of their symptoms and the horrors of neglect and abuse they had experienced, many of these poor children were in fact on track to be returned to their parents if the court deemed this appropriate after reasonable treatment for the child and treatment as deemed appropriate for the parent was also completed to the court's satisfaction. The prevailing wisdom then and even now is to reconcile the family, no matter how dysfunctional, if possible. So the long term care plans for many of these children involved their parents getting outpatient treatment to address the parent(s) issues at the same time the children were receiving inpatient treatment. Of course there were variable situations where the parents had been through the legal system before for abusing their children severely and theses parents' rights were thankfully in the process of finally being revoked and there were still other situations involving parents who were in prison because their abuses and crimes were so severe they were considered a danger to society as well as to their children. It is important to note there were and are all kinds of abusive family situations that land children in residential treatment facilities. I think it was in the opening pages of the novel Anna Karina that Tolstoy so aptly stated that all happy families resemble each other, but all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way...or something to that effect. This author's observation was in fact extremely apt in my opinion and I thought so the first time I read the words. In truth there are so many crazy, dysfunctional, abusive family situations that it would be impossible to detail all the ways people can hurt each other and violate the members of their own families without writing volumes on the subject. So, let it suffice to say that that some families never reconciled, some had court ordered reconciliations that never should have happened in my opinion, and other families just limped along with the human services system shoring them up as as best they could as everyone in the situation was damaged in some capacity. Some abusive parents were not evil people so much as they were ignorant and simple, and such individuals actually had no clue how to be parents and very few resources to help them stabilize in the communities where they were barely eking out a living in to begin with. So if they had nothing to eat, they went hungry. If there were no clothes, they went without shoes. If they were sick, they didn't go to the doctor. Indeed, there are all kinds of unhappy families.
The CHIPS (Children in Need of Protective Services) children assigned for me to case manage as a Guardian Ad Litem were not having the obvious behavioral and emotional problems so evident in these severe cases I worked with in residential treatment and the Ad Litem cases I worked with were able to live in the community without most other people around them, in many cases, having a clue they were even involved in court ordered services. All my Ad Litem children in fact were attending public school, living with at least one parent, and able to act and function with relative normalcy. However, these children also had experienced violence and/or other abuses including sexual abuse severe enough that they had been brought to the attention of the court and social services was involved with each of these families on a long term basis. The Guardian ad Litem's job duties involved advocating for these children and their best interests based on doing interviews with the children, their parents, reviewing the legal documents pertaining to their cases, interviewing all providers involved, observing the family and the children interacting in their family settings if possible, and by reviewing the social services documents pertaining to their cases.
I soon discovered that this entire area of human services was definitely not my calling. I could not accept the prevailing wisdom that the first goal of the court and human services was to return these abused children to their abusers or to bend over backwards to give abusers removed from the home visitation and ongoing contacts with the children they had abused and often against the wishes of the spouses they also had terrorized. The entire legal system in fact favors the abuser giving them multiple opportunities to correct their behaviors and to become acceptable parents. This prevailing wisdom sentences children to merry-go-round lives of horror where they are taken away, receive treatment and placement with foster care parents, emergency shelters, residential treatment centers, subsequently stabilized and then returned to their abusers for another round of abuse, violence, and neglect. I have to note that the hands of the service providers in this very broken system are absolutely tied because the way this system functions is governed by law and by politics and by the manipulation of public perceptions during the elections of public officials. No elected official or individual seeking to become an elected official wants to be dubbed the individual who voted to separate children from their parents. No elected judge wants that political ad with his name attached, no member of the house, no member of the senate, no governor, and no president. So a lot of passionate words are mouthed that child abuse must end and that healthy families must be sustained and supported, but there is no meat in legislation to really help abused children until their abuses become so severe that they were in imminent danger of death; and even those cases where an imminent danger of death was assessed, their abusive parents are still often given another chance with a round of treatment, parent education, and home visits by well meaning social workers hoping to heal the world. Abusers and the abused soon learn the truth about the system that in general only delivers a hand slap to the abusers and a reprieve to the abused.
Is it any wonder really that many of the severely abused children I was working with in residential treatment were very angry and violent. They bit their care givers as hard as they could, they screamed obscenities and verbal abuses, they hurt other children, they hurt themselves, they touched caregivers in their private parts when they could sneak a feel in, and they threw raging tantrums that required physical restraints. Working in residential treatment, I was taught the prevailing philosophy that these children behaved in this manner because they had been abused and/or neglected severely. Because of their rage and their other behaviors, the treatment facility was responsible for providing a safe environment where these children could heal, learn to bond with adults and peers in a positive manner that did not involve abuse, and the caregivers were to model appropriate behaviors so the children could learn by example how to act normally at all times. If the treatment was successful, these children could then be placed in foster care or released for adoption, or reconciled with their families. Many of these severely behavioral children were also perpetrators repeating the sexual deviance that had been done to them on other children whenever they had any opportunity to do this or especially whenever they found a willing victim within their peer group of victims receptive to the deviance they proposed. They also assaulted other children physically using fear and intimidation tactics to keep their unwilling victims quiet and they could be very secretive and sneaky when hurting other children so the caregivers would not see what they were doing right under their noses at times. All employees had to be on high alert at all times working with these children because they were literally fingering other children they had decided to target or who they had found to be willing victims under the nursery room sized tables they sat at to eat their meals and snacks. At night as soon as bed checks were done they leapt into the beds of their room mates fondling them in some cases and hurting them to keep their victims quiet and these children were not even ten years old.
I recall one little boy in particular who was around five years of age, plump and sweet, with a face like a little cherub who would watch me come in for the morning wakeup routines and he would purposely defecate and urinate in his bed for the pleasure of making me and his various caregivers clean up the mess. This darling looking little boy was particularly violent. One evening I remember vividly holding him on my lap to prevent him from attacking other children as he was in an "episode." He sat in my lap spitting in my face continuously telling me he knew what my "cunt" looked like" and how it would feel on his face over and over again in very graphic detail. I have often wondered if this adorable looking little guy grew up to be a full blown psychopath or if by some miracle he responded to his treatment, stabilized, healed and lived even a semblance of a normal life. I honestly don't know what this child's longterm outcomes were, but his verbal and physical behaviors were like no other five year old's that I have ever known or observed since.
I have to wonder about those children who are so severely behavioral at such a young age as this boy was and I have often wondered how many end up being long term residents of the prison system. For many of these poor little ones even if they were not born with psychopathy, they had become psychopaths very early in their development displaying all the classic symptoms: rage, lying, no remorse, no fear, no normal range of emotions, no sense of embarrassment, inability to love/bond, and more significantly no guilt about inflicting pain and suffering upon others. Easily frustrated, these children would howl with rage, physically flailing about as the painful processes of teaching them to control their behaviors was a large part of their treatment planning. Many of these severe cases had absolutely no family support when released from treatment as young adults. So the future for them under the best of circumstances would have been difficult, but with a history of violent emotional/behavioral problems the odds were even more against them. Because many of these children have literally no one to go home to if they are released from residential treatment, they have no one to guide them as young adults either which makes them extremely vulnerable to fall into violent and criminal acts to survive. The bonds of these children's young lifetimes may have been limited to a parade of ever changing professional caregivers that came and went constantly with each shift and with each employee turnover and for that matter each round of impatient treatment. Their playmates and classmates were children like themselves. For every child who healed and who came out of long term treatment healed and functional, residential treatment facilities are invaluable. For those who never will be normal, well they have to be placed somewhere and this is the best human services has to offer broken system or not. In deed without some system in place, these children would have absolutely no intervention at all. At least children receiving some treatment have a chance to heal, a possible vision implanted in them that life does not have to be the way it was presented to them by their abusive parent(s), and in good treatment facilities every effort is made to teach these damaged souls a normal range of behaviors and how to distinguish social rights from social wrongs.
Unlike the children I worked with in residential treatment, most, if not all, of the ad litem children I worked with were essentially by appearances any way, "normal" children in unfortunate situations. Many of these "unfortunate situations" involved one severely dysfunctional parent coupled with a relatively normal parent who was also a victim of the severely abusive parent. Other situations, however, were not so clear cut involving two criminal parents, but neither one so criminal that they couldn't keep up appearances when under court scrutiny and "toe the line" so to speak. They made their deadlines, they completed their treatment, they said the right things, and their children tended to go right along with what their parents were saying. Some of these dysfunctional families appeared to all be in agreement in whatever they were doing, choosing each other rather than choosing separation. One case that I recall that really interested me involved two grade school youngsters whose father had tried to kill them and who insisted to me they wanted their daddy back in their lives. In this case, dad was beating their mother so severely that she couldn't get out of bed, the children would go to school, attend class all day, and say nothing to anyone including their peers or their teachers. Finally dad went so out of control that mom actually fled the house fearing for her life and she ran to a neighbor's home to call the police. Dad responded by nailing the doors to the home shut barricading himself and the two children inside. As the police closed in, he splashed gasoline on the doors and around the home threatening to light the home on fire incinerating himself and the children. I think the police finally wounded him to end the standoff, but I'm not sure about that piece of the story at this time. I do know Dad was sent for treatment, because I interviewed him at his treatment facility, and mom filed for a divorce and wanted him out of their lives. Dad however, claimed he was very sorry about what he had done, and he wanted visitation to be part of the divorce settlement; so the children were assigned a Guardian ad Litem to be the objective voice representing their best interests in the matter. The fact this dad's request for continuing contact and visitation with his children was even taking the courts time and that multiple providers had to be paid to provide testimony on the matter is in my opinion absurd. He threatened to kill his own children and he physically splashed gasoline around his own home, trapping the children inside to make his point by nailing all escape routes shut. He most likely required a gunshot to stop him. Really, what, was there to talk about??? But that is the way our broken child services system works. The abuser gets every opportunity to get treatment, to straighten up his or her act, and to maintain contact with the children because some one, some where, determined that children were best served knowing their parents, no matter how abusive or how crazy these parents may be even to the point of trying to kill them.
This could lead me on quite a rant about the numerous worthless human services positions that exist only to drain tax dollars, and employing college graduates who have almost no real authority to accomplish anything; there are numerous positions that in fact serve to help perpetuate and not resolve real life threatening problems because these positions and the people who fill these positions are just cogs in the wheels of a very inadequate broken human services system in general; and I could write a regular dissertation how well meaning human services professionals do the best they can in this broken system only to burn out and to get out whenever they embrace the truth that they can't really help these children in far too many cases because the laws and the prevailing philosophy governing the institutions and the providers favors the abusers and not the abused, but all of the above is not really the focus of this blog. But I have to say, I would not dare write these words if I was not retired from human services. To state such things is the kiss of death to your human services career. You have to pledge to this system and claim absolute belief in this system to even land a job within the system. Speak against it, doubt it, criticize it and you are out of a job. When I was working, I often thought of the classic Mel Brooks line from the 1974 flick Blazing Saddles: "We gotta protect our phony, baloney JOBS......!!!" Question the system and dare to expose it and it was pretty likely a lot of people would be unemployed; and the higher up you were in the department pertaining to the system you were questioning, the more stake that administrator had to silence all questions, opposition, and to enforce with all their subordinates that they had to sing the praises of the selfless good that was being done by all the providers and especially within that area of service they were in charge of while ignoring the lack of power the service had to serve and to protect the most vulnerable they were charged to protect. Also, since the funding for these services is completely tied to local, state, and federal government dollars, you would be a fool to bite the hands that feed you by criticizing the very legislation governing the system that signs your paychecks. No instead you thank your legislators and praise them ad nausea for all the good they do and how the dollars allocated make such a huge difference in the communities you serve. However, the inevitable evidence that the system barely functions and has within it multiple failures continues to bubble to the surface causing spontaneous public outcries when well publicized accounts of children's deaths by torture and systematic abuses surface and the fact that multiple agencies were involved or notified there were problems with this family and actually involved with them surfaces; including the fact the children were often removed and then returned to their abusive parents. When these cases surface in the media, people in general are quick to blame the low level social worker or agency for what they believe is their incompetence. People in general just don't know how limited the power of these agencies and their employees are to serve and protect children. But the administrators of these failed programs who earn big money at the state and federal levels of government to be in charge of these programs and the dispensation of legislated policies and monies to the counties in their states must then propose to the legislators the solution to these cases that have apparently "fallen through the cracks" and it is at that point that they generally start lying through their teeth about why the system failed with the result that another piece of paper or documentation is then added to the whole system as this piece of paper becomes the new magic bullet or proposed solution to make the social workers or providers more accountable to the legislators in how they have provided their services. This discussion is in fact the very sad history of our struggling human services system and how worthless administrative paperwork duty upon worthless administrative paperwork duty is legislated that in most cases accomplishes absolutely nothing, fails to address the real issues of the lack of legal authority providers have to force real interventions, ignores the providers legislated duty to reconcile families whenever possible, and how providers time is continually burdened with frivolous paperwork that has to be done because it has been legislated and the funding of the agency or service employing them is completely tied to their ability to prove their paperwork compliances.
I will move toward ending this blog entry by noting is it any wonder in a society, in our civilized world in general where only the most severe physical abuses and neglects that can be perpetrated upon children receive attention, how, it is also true, that the comparatively functional families being terrorized by a psychopathic parent who can keep up and enforce public appearances are largely ignored. In fact, these families are virtually off the radar of professionals for the most part with only the most severe cases commanding attention. The first real unmasking of the psychopathic family may have come in the process of researchers calling attention to messy divorce custody disputes, involving one parent being alienated by their minor children. There was a subset of these cases where there was no evidence that the alienated parent was either abusive or diagnosable in any manner. In tracking this subset of custody dispute cases, researchers discovered a pattern among alienating parents and psychiatrists involved in these cases began assessing psychopathic/antisocial/narcissistic personality disorders in the alienators and these findings began to surface in the literature. In fact, the first good literature I found on the subject of psychopaths raising children and their ability to apparently brainwash and control family members, fell right in the category of P.A.S. or Parent Alienation Syndrome. But these studies of divorce cases are just a piece of the puzzle in really dissecting psychopathic parents and how they shape and control the families they raise. What is especially significant to note is that families with one or two psychopathic parents in charge can appear very functional if you are on the outside looking in. It is only if you are on the inside looking out that you really know what abuses are happening within the family and even on the inside you can become compliant and completely loyal to the abuser. It is quite clear from the P.A.S studies that some children become brainwashed minions of the psychopath in charge and that these children have given up or surrendered their independent will to emotionally survive just as adults do when indoctrinated into a cult. Like the character of Reek/Theon Greyjoy in game of thrones, those who have surrendered their will become extremely grateful for any small kindness shown to the point of feeling overwhelming love for their abuser when rewarded, they are completely loyal to their abuser and thank them for all manner of things to the point of absurdity, and the brainwashed do and say exactly what they are told to do and say to please their abuser. I found it especially significant how the literature on P.A.S. discusses in some detail what is dubbed "the independent thinker phenomena" where the brainwashed children say terrible things about the parent they have estranged at the will of their psychopathic parent and claim these thoughts as if they were their own. The literature also indicates it can take years of therapy and separation from the controlling psychopathic parent to break this conditioning once it has been accomplished, but this has been done when persistent loving parents threw every resource they had and went to the mat to fight for their minor children. However, it is speculated that many of these types of cases are lost or brought to a stalemate because the court system as whole is not prepared to deal with these kinds of cases; also, there are few experts adequately trained to work with the children and deprogram them, and, finally it is difficult to get the children separated from their controller long enough for the children to feel safe enough to deprogram especially if this controller is the mother and she has physical custody in the midst of the divorce dispute. Sometimes in adulthood, an adult brainwashed as a child has had a break through and realizes what was done to them and actually seeks out their alienated parent. I have spoken to a number of these people online and I have spoken with mothers who after a decade or more of separation from their children heard from them when they had a break through. I have no information though on the percentages or actual likelihood that adults who were brainwashed by a controlling parent as children, realize what happened to them. The ability of the intelligent psychopath to control those within their sphere of influence and to simultaneously keep up an acceptable public appearance is precisely why until there is a rift in such families, such as a messy divorce, that the psychopath's hidden abuses, including the brainwashing of their family members, the reality of their iron clad control over the thoughts of their children, their abilities to tell ridiculous and cruel lies to maintain control, and their insidious manipulations of others without remorse may be made visible. It is often only in the process of their systematic exposure with the help of seasoned professionals who are aware of and trained in P.A.S. that this type of abuse may be made visible for all to see.
Tragically, intervention in childhood for the victims of psychopathic parents appears to be almost non-existent. The vast majority of work on the survivors of psychopathic parents is being done with adults who are going in for therapy when they reach adulthood. Because there are so many recognized survivors of these psychopathic led families and so many books on the subject for all to read the scope of this very vast problem is finally coming into focus. The reality is that these adults who grew up being abused by psychopaths as children never received in many cases any intervention as children and in many cases the abuse going on at home was completely hidden to outsiders. I know this was certainly true for me and for my father as we both lived under the tyrannies of my psychopathic mother. Even those who did know something was going on in our home, knew in fact very little, and in fact my father and I were very obedient when it came to keeping our family secrets, secret; but more on that subject at some other time. Another point I want to make is that children displaying psychopathic traits such as some of the youngsters I worked with in residential treatment are theoretically likely to grow up to be psychopathic parents who may in turn not only abuse their families but give birth to or train/groom other psychopaths by their example. The co-occurance of more than one psychopath within a family is well documented at this point whether the psychopathy is learned or inherited genetically is however a matter of much discussion. Not all severely abused children I worked with displayed psychopathic tendencies. A significant percentage in residential treatment however did. As, this was a more select population of abused children, this observation is not surprising when you think about it. These children were in residential treatment based on the severity of their symptoms and often because they were considered a risk to other children. However, not one of these children to my knowledge was diagnosed as psychopathic as there was and is a great reluctance to label a child with any diagnosis and the prevailing wisdom is to give dangerous and violently behavioral children a much softer label like oppositional defiant disorder or conduct disorder for example. So if they were diagnosed, it would only be much later in life when they were adults and most likely due to incarceration as psychopaths are known to not be seekers of mental health services. Based on the number of survivor stories I have read and the number of survivors like myself I have met online over the last decade, I am very confident most psychopaths are never diagnosed. The vast majority of these psychopaths appear to be living fairly functional lives and they are limiting their abuses to immediate family members, dishonest business deals, and petty manipulations within their social circles, jobs, and communities, but they are smart enough in many cases to mask themselves so effectively that people really don't know them and what they are unless they become their targets for whatever reason. Examples of extreme cases of this ability to mask even severe psychopathy are not at all hard to find. One needs only to look at Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy to see how even severely psychopathic men can be very functional members of society and extremely lethal when they give into their psychopathic urges and allow their psychopathic pleasures to trump their ability to mask themselves from others. People who thought they knew these men well as classmates, colleagues, and friends, stepped up to defend them and to pledge to their good characters when they were arrested. A well masked psychopath may be invisible to anyone until they choose to reveal themselves for whatever reason, and they are quite able to disguise themselves to even their own family members.
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