As a mental health therapist that counsels abuse survivors, I see the horrible damage every day from the abuser using the family court system to continue to harm their abused partner and their children. Proposed state laws that assume all divorces should end in 50/50 custody for the children are apt to make this situation even worse. My hope is that survivors will work together to lobby their state legislatures and squash these potential and harmful bills.
Lundy Bancroft discusses Kayden’s law and how we can reform the family court system to make custody rulings safe for children with abusive parents.
Sadly, family courts are failing in their mission of protecting at-risk children. Why? What can be done?
The statistics for domestic violence are staggering. According to the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey created by the Center for Disease Control, "1 in 3 women and 1 in 4 men in the United States have experienced some form of physical violence by...
When we are not securely attached to our primary caregivers, we are more apt to experience PTSD when we are traumatized. What can we do to heal from this, and prevent it from happening to our own children?
In my last blog, I talked about the ways your kids have been affected by the abuse you've experienced, a difficult topic. Today, I will talk about how you can begin to help them heal from the domestic violence you have all experienced once you are no longer...
In my last blog, I talked about how seeing or experiencing domestic violence affects the lifelong health of children. Today, I explore this further. This is a tough topic, something about which no protective parent wants to think. However, I believe this is vital...
I recently heard a TedTalk given by Dr. Nadine Burke Harris that talks about how childhood trauma affects a person's health across a lifetime. Even though I have written about this before, hearing it again still shocked me....
The more I work with domestic violence survivors, the more I realize how many have been sexually abused as children. I am no longer shocked in my counseling sessions when someone begins sharing how their father, uncle, brother or cousin sexually abused them when they...
We all want people to think well of us. Do you find yourself hiding your past, (even your present) from others? Why do we do this? Maybe we think we aren't good enough. Maybe we are ashamed of some of the things we have done/are doing. Maybe we think people will shun...
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