This is my painting, “Main & 25th,” which is my former home where I abided for a spell, not un-recently.
I know the persons in this painting, and painted them with acrylic and pastel on a linen cloth with tenderness and care. I spent days and nights with these folks, and know a bit about their troubles, frustrations, senses of humor, their loves, their aspirations and private griefs.
This is the homeless row of downtown Vancouver, Washington, around the corner of Main Street and 25th Avenue. Most ironically, this is where sits the lusciously designed and expensively constructed Vancouver Housing Authority building.
Most of the time, in my experience living on this street, the VHA building is unfrequented by the homeless who live there. Much of the building’s space seemed underutilized to me while I was homeless, and came in to use their restroom and printer. It was also curious to me during this time, that although from various news sources that huge sums of monies had been granted to VHA and Council for The Homeless, For transitional housing, I never saw it going to that, could not figure out where that money was going, and absolutely not one of the persons who work for these and other homeless organizations and city-county government, would not respond to my requests to see the accounting of those funds.
My name is Heidi Hansen, and I was one of these invisible persons, part of the collective Throwaway population of Vancouver’s unresolved homeless culture.
Homeless culture is a sad fact of life, many Vancouver residents and politicians say over and over and over but from what I have seen on the ground, the voters, and persons of credibility and power fail to implement solutions that actually make it different.
In family systems — found in counseling psychology as well as on a macro-level in sociology — when a pervasive and unwanted problem exists in a group and is a continual source of source of problem-solving dialogue and vague attempts at solutions, which fail, we must face ourselves honestly and ask the question “Is this problem actually undesirable? Do Vancouver people really want the homelessness problem to be fixed? Is there secondary gain for keeping the homeless right where they are? Is there some scapegoat value that our society does not really want to give up? And what might that be?””
Shocking words eh? Outlandish and nervy question?
But it must be answered.
Sometimes groups act in ways to preserve their “problem child” — their scapegoats — because of an overall and pervasive, unspoken commitment to their base need for the function of that problem staying right where it is.
That’s what I want Vancouver to think about when they look at “Main & 25th.” That is why I am proposing “Know My Name,” — a viable solution to getting more homefullness outcomes, more sustained and maintained homefullness culture, and a visible transformation for individuals from living out homeless culture to transforming themselves in homefull culture.
Homelessness strips away a person’s identity, and then, a person’s self-esteem. Both are required for a person to survive, thrive, remain stable and become fruitful in their lives.
“Know My Name” is a project I propose that recruits a volunteer force of homefull persons who have become sustainable in homefullness culture, and are stable and confident enough to be a mentor, a sponsor, for an up-and-comer homefull person.
A homefullness sponsor does not do social work or donate money or housing itself.
A homefullness sponsor will go through a training with me, (I’ll be the leader and organizer here) and be matched with a sponsee who is willing and determined to not relapse once housing has been achieved.
A homefull sponsee and their sponsor will set out an attainable goal plan to get strong in their identity in their new homefullness culture and get strong in their areas where relapse back into homelessness is a risk or vulnerability.
In other words, a sponsor shows the sponsee the ropes of homefullness culture, walks beside them to guide and support them in building their own new personal identity and by so doing, prevents relapse into homelessness — and instead, finds a meaningful and valued niche, homefull relationships and groups, and becomes useful in homeful culture.
This operates on the premise that we become more like the people we hang out with. If we want certain successful traits and habits, we will get them by spending more time around people who have achieved those success habits and traits
I am inviting interested persons to email me and sign – up to be sponsors, and then I will set up some Zoom meeting trainings to review the expectations, skills, and nuts and bolts of goal setting and communication.
Each week a sponsee will communicate with me to stay on track, while they stay in weekly communication with their sponsee, sharing their experience, strength and hope, motivating and encouraging and celebrating those goals, reinforcing their new positive relationships and activities, and be there for their sponsee when homefullness stress and discouragement hits.
Remember, this is not social work and not monetary. It’s humanity at its own best reservoir for solving a very human set of problems.
Then, I will look for sponsees who want to participate in this project, and match them up with a suitable sponser.
I am asking you, reader, and asking those in social services to help spread the word on this project, and send referrals my way so I can start to organize matches.
This is brand new for me, and brand new for sponsors and sponsees, so this is the time to float your ideas and suggestions and be a part of the building up of this project, if you desire.
I do believe that homelessness relapse can be prevented, and that newly homefull persons can contribute so solidly to their new culture — once they know what that is after living in a marginalized culture — and that this “Know My Name” project can be a viable, life-affirming action with observable, measureable series of viable results.
Interested in helping out?
Please email me at dog.hotel.hansen@gmail.com, or call me at 360-835-8591, room 111 in Washougal to discuss your thoughts, questions and suggestions.
Thank you for your interest and your help.
You can get to know me better by exploring my websites at:
http://www.theartistschronicles.wordpress.com
http://www.thetraumaproject.health.blog
http://www.thementalhealthdetective.wordpress.com
http://www.doghotelbooks.wordpress.com
http://www.themuseacademy.wordpress.com
http://www.nativicabook.wordpress.com
Thanks, and take great care of yourself — you are definitely a great person, and I love it that you read this!
Heidi Hansen
When you walk through a city street and see homeless people, when you ride a city bus and see large immigrant families wearing raggedy clothing and carrying bags from the local food bank, when you see 600 – lb. individuals trying to ride a grocery store cart filled with cakes and chips, what are the first thoughts that come into your mind?
I would like you to consider marginalized persons– including those in and out of incarceration, drug and alcohol treatment, mental health hospitals, those whose highest paycheck is he amount on their disability check, those whose home pantry will not exceed what they can get from their EBT SNAP card, those who look healthy, young and fit but live on social security disability checks and in public housing, those who can’t get their kids into the good schools because they don’t fit the income bracket of the neighborhood — I would like you to go back in time to when these persons were young children.
There is a lot of very robust social science research going on right now on Adverse Childhood Events and adults outcomes of homelessness, addictions, incarceration, learning dysfunctions, mental illness, poverty and unemployment.
Social scientists have used this research to arrive at computation tables that itemizes and scores each adverse child event and show the higher the ACE, the higher the marginalization and disability and poorer health and economy of that person as an adult.
Adverse Childhood Events are basically traumas of early childhood — traumas that are sudden, acute, and intense, like abuse or death of a parent, and those that are more subtle, pervasive, and lingering like food scarcity and addictions.
As my readers know, I am using my own family system to show a number of the effects of trauma and traumatic family dynamics that alter not only the personalities and behaviors of the family members, but the culture of toxicity of the family as a whole.
As you all know, this is the basis for a book I am writing.
So now consider the “Throwaway People.”
I am in that class, and have been for much of my life since childhood, when my older siblings and parents decided to keep the sex abuse from the pedophile uncle Ronald Safsten a secret.
At that time, my family determined that I was expendable. My personhood and health and safety came second, or not at all, in lieu of protecting the sex offender who ate at our table, worked on my sister Diana Hansen’s Hawaii Senatorial campaigns, and was often putin charge of babysitting me.
Long before I was born, my older sister Melanie was sexually molested by Ronald Safsten for years when she was a young child. The family and the Mormon church knew something was going on, but chose to keep that a secret.
When I was two years old, and my older sisters were in their late teens, our family moved to Hawaii for a job offer for my father.
Guess who followed us, but the pedophile Ron Safsten, who was targeting the fresh meat in the cute little toe- head girl Heidi.
If Melanie had told someone in authority that Ron Safsten had molested her for years, and had that adult told the law, I would not have endured his sexual abuse of me.
Had the Mormon church leaders who knew of Ron’s molestations of Melanie told the law, I would have been spared.
And anyone who knows the loud, vocal, bulldozer of a personality of my older sister Hawaii State Representative Diana Hansen, who built her campaign on ”fighting for the little guy, the underdog,” and on holding the “fat cats” in power accountable can not possibly believe that she did not know about Melanie’s sex abuse — they were only about one year apart in age and together all the time. It is not realistic to believe that State Representative Diana Hansen was unaware of her campaign marketing artist Ronald Safsten grooming and abusing me, or that she was unaware that Melanie was being molested by him for ten years right under her nose.
Somewhere in all that time, spanning about 17 years, from being a close-knit, enmeshed mormon family in Bellingham, Washington, to Honolulu Hawaii, this “good mormon politically good” family decided that I was expendable. That I would be the Throwaway.
Later of course, it was Diana who wanted to get her screenplay read by a famous Hollywood producer that she was willing to trade me in to him for some sex time in trade to get her screenplay read by that producer.
By a hair, I escaped the molestation because I already knew what that train looked like on that track and I dodged it.
But when I heard the chillin word’s of Representative Diana Hansen tall me in the hotel elevator, “just don’t tell mom or dad I brought you here, okay?” I knew I was expendable. A throwaway.
So then as a pregnant woman asking my older brother Leif Hansen of Leif’s Auto collission center for protection from my abusive husband Aaron Steweart Heusser one night because he was hurting me and I was worried about the baby inside me, and Leif’s answer was, ” a man’s house is his castle, and a wife belongs in his castle, I can’t take a man’s wife out of his castle.” I knew I was expendable. I was a throwaway.
But I already knew that about Leif, as it was his friend David who took me into Leif’s bed as “man and wife,” while Leif watched with his friends and they all laughed, I knew I was expendable. I was a throwaway.
The only way I got mentally well was to get out of my family as soon as I could as a teenager, cut off all communication with them, and live my life as though they did not exist. I have to do the same thing now, today, at age 56, and the older siblings — the sex abuse enablers — are into old age — cutting myself off from them is again yielding me health, safety, peace, growth, freedom and independence from the grasp of these sociopaths.
If you talk to anyone of these older siblings, they will be all shocked and plather on about how much I was loved, spoiled, doted on as the precious youngest daughter.
But control over a family member is not love.
It is not love to create and maintain a throwaway person.
It is not love to make them mentally ill so that if she ever told about the reality of sex abuse rampant in the family, or domestic violence in her marriage, she would not be credible.
It is certainly not the legal way, the Mormon way — but these are the people who made the laws and saw to their Mormon flock’s needs, and became big business charitable contributers in the community.
Yet they abandoned me to a wife-beater, they abandoned me to a first-class manipulator in court without an attorney, they abandoned me to homelessness on the streets of Vancouver, Washington. Just like they abandoned me to a known pedophile.
They aided and abetted child estrangement by lying for and with Aaron Heusser in his use of child estrangement in an illegal custody play — which is illegal and unlawful at this present time and could mean prison time for them, as well as civil litigation to recoup the damages of parental attachment loss.
These people pretend to be so righteous and the paragon of virtue and success, but in reality, created an expendable person who became society’s throwaway person and represents a reality they go crazy trying to separate themselves from.
But they cannot escape the truths of what they have done and arranged to utilize to protect themselves from being caught. Just create an expendable person to carry that weight for you.
Control is not love. Abuse wrapped up in “This is for your own good,” and “you’ll thank me for this later” while throwing a vulnerable family member under the bus is not love. It is not strength. It is not sane.
Creating a throwaway person and sanctioning more trauma for that expendable person to endure — so they don’t have to face the music of their own behavior — is not love. Not family. Not church. Not safe, not admirable.
It’s immoral, sociopathic, and criminal.
And I’m calling them out.
——————————————–
My last few posts on this site will provide the context and background for the shaping, and eventual passing of a new domestic violence-child custody law which for now, is named “Heidi’s Law.”
We are now a group comprised of two volunteer attorneys — one a trial lawyer the other a family law attorney — three family therapists one court child custody mediator, and four domestic violence counselors and case managers.
What we have so far is a working draft of a law — a hybrid of family law and domestic violence law — that punishes a parent for manipulating child custody as an extension of his domestic violence during the marriage/divorce process, resulting in child estrangement from the victim parent.
Just as importantly, allows domestic violence restraining orders and punishments to be dispensed to any extended family member of either divorcing party, or co-worker, friend, associate, church leader, family member or significant other who meddles in or provides aid, support, alibi or cover stories for that domestic violence perpetrator in provoking, establishing, or escalating child estrangement from the victim parent.
Thirdly, “Heidi’s Law” will include monetary sanctions for the guilty party using death insurance actuarial tables and algorythyms to determine the monetary value of the abused parent’s lost time and relationship with their child as a result of the above stated manipulations and law violations. This is a new, more focused and more stringent set of punishments for child estrangement and any party who has helped the offending parent can also be arrested and criminally prosecuted and punished using those same insurance tables as restorative justice for the parent who has suffered from the manipulated child estrangement.
Fourth, any persons or divorcing parties who knowingly and willingly provoke, establish or escalate child estrangement within the framework of a divorce or child custody arrangement shall be charged with child abuse, and criminally prosecuted, retroactive to 1994.
Soon we will be gathering the initial round of necessary signatures, and asking for community involvement, advertising and endorsements.
Do you have a story to tell? Would you benefit from “Heidi’s Law?”
Heidi’s Law will grandfather in past cases going back to 1994, and includes cases where the children of the child estrangement manipulation can also sue for damages from the offending parent if they are now adults.
Much much more to come on this, and I’ll be posting here as well as direct-mailing updated newsletters to any and all — individual or advocacy groups — who want to have a voice in this very timely, and long-overdue, family law.
Contact Heidi Hansen to participate, tell us your story, or donate supplies or monies for this cause at dog.hotel.hansen@gmail.com, call 360-335-4939, and thank you.
Join me at my new site, The Mental Health Detective — click on Zoom Room Enter in the main menu! Participants at “Coffee With Heidi” get a free, hand-painted coffee mug heat wrap from me — take good care, Heidi
I wanted to give something to my world family as an artist. A gift for those suffering from the Caronavirus and the effects of this pandemic, a song, “The Night The World Wept As One…”
Here is an art version of The Night The World Wept As One,” using Heidi Hansen’s own art. Lyrics are provided at the end of this post.
I wanted to give something to my world family as an artist. A gift for those suffering from the Caronavirus and the effects of this pandemic, a song, “The Night The World Wept As One…”
Here is an art version of The Night The World Wept As One,” using Heidi Hansen’s own art. Lyrics are provided at the end of this post.
Lyrics to “The Night The World Wept As One:”
Is it a dream, is it a poem, is it a prayer?
If I close my eyes, I know I’ve always been there…
Dear Darlin,’
When stars fall, and you can’t find North any longer,
find a river, and let it ride, a river is mother to the world.
It will ride with you, it will ride you,
A river will ride you back to me.
Dear Darlin’,
When promises fail, and you can’t find a friend any longer,
find the ocean, find the sea —
the sea is mother to the galaxy.
Let it fly you there, let it fly you there,
it will fly you home to me.
Dear Darlin’,
When stars fall,
and the world weeps as one and longer —
find the butterfly flyin’ on the mountain,
watch it send new breezes to the shore.
Can the love over here
Become the hope over there?
When I shout into the canyon,
and it echoes back with grace,
“what kings cannot control,
the artists already know” —
the world is one for you and me.
copyright2020heididhansen.
Please feel free to sing and share this song with others. Commercial or for-profit use is prohibited without artist permission. Copyright2020Heididhansen. Contact Heidi Hansen of Vancouver, Washington at email: dog.hotel.hansen@gmail.com.
Thank you!
Take care of yourselves, use this time at home to find your creative talents, make a world family of art — instead of sickness and fear — for future generations to identify who we are as one world, right now. — Heidi
Do you have, or have had, a Vacuus in your life?
Are you a Vacuus in someone else’s life?
As most of my readers know, I am writing and publishing a tell-all trauma book about my own personal story living in a family filled to the brim with sex abuse, emotional and physical abuse, crimes, sex and drug addiction, deceit, exploitation, and manipulative games that destroyed my bond with my son.
If what happened to me as a child was happening now, several family members and siblings, some of whom are high profile public figures, would be in jail.
In my childhood era, my family got away with keeping the secrets and living in duplicity. One world, sordid, dirty, twisted, sociopathic. These same persons also created a simultaneous world for people outside the family to see — solid mormons, close-knit, service oriented, caring and compassionate, prominent politicians, big-name business owners, published and famous artists and writers — while actively participating in the abuses, and making decisions that kept my sex abuse experiences a secret that led to severe post traumatic stress and clinical depression in childhood on into adulthood.
My new book will feature the sly, hidden destructive dynamics of my siblings Leif Hansen of Leif’s Auto Collision Centers in Portland, Oregon, Diana Hansen-Young of Hawaii State Legislature and painter-writer fame, Melanie Silvester, professional genealogist in the Mormon church, evangelist for the Mormons, and others.
How these individuals became Vacuus is unknown to me, as they are all about 14 years older than me, but I will be speaking directly to the choices they made that knowingly allowed sex abuse to run rampant in my young life, and the sadistic manipulations they used to cover it up, and assist in helping my ex-husband, Aaron Stewart Heusser, to get away with domestic violence in the marriage, and extend his domestic violence into child custody and get away with turning our son against me with dark lies about me that has caused my son not to want to talk to me or see me in nine years. He is 22 now.
The Vacuus.
Vacuus is a term I have given the vile, viscous villains in an imaginative tale I wrote called “The Muse Academy.” (www.themuseacademy.wordpress.com).
But Vacuus are not entirely fictional, in fact, they exist and thrive in hiding in plain sight in realtionships, settings, tasks and contexts of all variety.
Vacuus are persons who steal your narrative, or manipulate it to suit their own sadistic needs, the lust for drama gossip, the pornography of fabricating crisis, conflict and chaos, the evil of splitting close bonds apart, splitting people apart and sowing contention just for the sport of getting a drama fix — that would be sibling Melanie Silvester and Diana Hansen-Young.
Hard to believe, given Melanie’s presentation of the supra-righteous poster woman for the Mormon church and its holy values, that she would destructively align herself with my ex-husband, Aaron Stewart Heusser to fabricate high drama and crisis for her own drama fix, while partnering with him in such a way that he could lie in court testimony to underhandedly and illegally seize custody of our son.
Hard to wrap my head around, how Leif Hansen and Diana Hansen-Young can deceive the public, their voters and constituents and customers and advertisers and vendors — with such sly duplicity, and keep all their dark, twisted behaviors a secret from all of them.
This is the passive-aggressive, sneaky, depceptive and duplicitous way in which the Vacuus work their wiles.
You wake up one morning and your life is turned upside down and you don’t know how that happened, but then you spot the stink of Vacuus footprints all over the home and you know, Melanie and Aaron and Lei and Diana have been at it again.
For what purpose? So Melanie could get her drama high, and Aaron could control her to the point of making her lie to the judge because he didn’t want to share our son, he wanted to own our son. Our son was a possession for Aaron, and a game pawn for Melanie.
Like any addict, the drama fix, the gossip fix, the crisis fix, the power fix, the control fix, the ownership fix, must get bigger each time to get the same addicted satisfaction.
Its how Vacuus get their jollies.
I cannot get back what was lost, and likely to remain lost, with my son from the sociopathic duo of Melanie and Aaron, but there is a legal option for me to sue them both for child estrangement. I am actively researching that as a point of my recovery from their trauma, which is restorative justice.
So, there is The Dramatist Vacuus, the Gossip, the Empty, the Void, the Sadist, the Destroyer, the Stomper, the Bully, the Thief.
The Bully and Stomper would be Leif Hansen.
You’ll have to buy the book to find out how.
Do you have any of these Vacuus in your life? Are you secretly hiding and denying the fact that you might be one of these to other people?
Ammends must be made, accountability taken, consequences allowed to take their natural course and the burdens and pain put back on the shoulders of the perpetrators, not any longer on their victim’s backs.
Persons of trauma learn to suspend their judgement, to mistrust or second-guess their inner voice, their gut instincts, so they tend to go along with the Vacuus instead of claiming and displaying their own truths, the facts that Vacuus want to deny.
My encouragement is to trust your Self, your perceptions, your initial judgement-calls, so the Vacuus don’t have a void to fill. You’ve claimed your space and are outwardly making it known that the Vacuus no longer have a seat at your table.
Know that speaking your truths, or simply acting with choices based on your truths, will bring some blow-back. The Vacuus do not like paradigm shifts. Not only do they not want to give up their power and control, they are deathly afraid of being exposed. Shining a flashlight under the bed poofs away the boogey-man. Shining light on dark secrets will bring you peace, ultimately, because you are no longer allowing Vacuus to rent rooms in your head and heart and soul without paying rent while destroying your property.
Self-care is a necessity, not a luxury. Self-care includes setting boundaries, maintaining your privacy, disengaging from persons who do not respect these. Distancing your Self from destructive person’s manipulations, stop being the focus of their possessiveness, get out from under their ownership, dodge their compulsions to write your narrative for you.
Build yourself a place of peace in your home, and inside your Self that you can carry with you everywhere you go, and quietly dwell in there, and communicate with others from that space, everywhere and anywhere.
This place of peace is still, it is reasonable and from that posture life becomes reasonable.
It is both a refuge and a shield from Vacuus storms.
Your mind, you heart and personality are yours and only yours. You are a child of creation, creativity is innate within you — so go on and create your Self the way you want that artwork to be.
Thanks for reading,
Heidi D. Hansen, M.A.
email: dog.hotel.hansen@gmail.com
You may not even see the family annihilator, he or she may be invisible, but you will certainly be feeling and reeling from their destruction.
There are two kinds of Family Annihilator: The Silent Stealer, and the Invader – Infector.
This holiday will be especially difficult for those families who have lost children in divorce and custody battles. These are areas of vulnerability that a Family Annihilator just cannot resist. They may have already done their deeds of damage and all you can do is try to breathe.
Family Annihilators are compulsive, driven by insatiable needs for control, drama, possession, violence, sadism, with unending narcissistic appetites. They need to divide and conquer other people’s family relationships, or own and possess other people’s children in order to feel valid, real, alive, potent, just to feel their own skin.
They are cunning and often passive-aggressive, although many are overtly violent and will have domestic violence, rape, molestation, or emotional abuse in their background. They have often lost their own children or partners due to these personality disorders, and were unwilling or unable to get effective treatment and so they resort to a rudimentary satisfaction which is to act-out those patterns on other people’s families and their primary relationships with their children.
“Well, don’t they care about the children?” You might ask. “It’s one thing to act-out against another adult, but to harm a child to accomplish a perverted control compulsion is hard to fathom.”
It is hard to fathom. That is why many people don’t believe it’s possible for Family Annihilators to exist — they just can’t wrap their heads around the part about hurting the children. That’s how Family Annihilators get away with it. Especially in divorce and custody. It can also be an extension of domestic violence.
Konrad Lorenz was a sociobiologist in the 1950’s and is considered to be the father of that field, which is the study of how animals act in groups. In his famous book, “King Solomon’s Ring,” Lorenz tells of his observations of many animal species who act in altruistic ways. He tried to find their motivation for the altruistic acts, and likened that to humans.
Lorenz also observed acts of destruction, sabotage, and violence against an animal’s or species’ own close kin. He asked why, and tried to liken it to humans. His book is very revealing about human behavior more so than animal behavior and I strongly encourage it to be on every home’s bookshelf.
Why do parents love their children more than themselves? Why will they give up, sacrifice their own lives, needs, selves, to give all and more to their children?
And why do some people destroy families?
I myself have witnessed the two types of family annihilators, and this holiday my heart and thoughts will be with those who are also suffering the empty chairs at the holiday table with the spirits of the annihilators pervading the room.
The Silent Stealer needs to control other people so much that he must own the child of the custody dispute, must posess them, to the exclusion of all others and cannot find rest or peace until he has accomplished this and severed any possibility that the other party will be able to share in the child’s affections or relationship.
He must be King. The other parent is a threat to his dominion and rule. Children are objects, things, items and artifacts he accumulates as emblems of his power and rank.
Yet, the silent stealer lives under a rock. He does these things passive-aggressively, looks like the perfect gentleman on the outside, says and does all the right things, dresses and grooms very well, is super smart and does generally what others expect of and want from him. But. But. It’s what you cannot see that is his real life, his duplicity is a cover for the back-story power grab. This is the person who will charm you into a position of relaxation and trust while committing his social violence in ways you will not see until it is too late.
This is the man who must steal his children in a custody battle, and wins. He will not feel the need to justify or rationalize his antisocial behaviors — he will feel entitled to them, and expect others to allow him his due.
Once this person has custody or seized emotional control of the child, he will con and lie and use other people to manipulate things so as to make the other parent not be able to participate in that child’ life. He will construct a new reality for the child, a dual universe, which the child will understand not to dispute or contradict, lying to the child, telling horror stories about the other parent, making that child afraid or ashamed of the other parent, while rewarding the child for loyalty with material possessions and social status.
The Silent Stealer is actually quite impotent and often controlled by more mature, GrandMaster Manipulator-nurturers such as his own mother or mistress, sometimes both being one and the same.
The silent stealer is actually quite dull and devoid of personality and in life when it comes to actual, legitimate power and status. He must con his way through. He has nothing that he hasn’t cheated or lied or conned to get. He has very little social skill in the realm of authentic, deeply engaging and spontaneous relationships. And so the silent stealer is too scared to act alone. He often manipulates cohorts to assist him in stealing the child and sealing the deal sureptiteously.
A sheister lawyer, for example, or his mother to whom he has never fully disengaged, a mother who controls him and wants him all to himself, who refuses to see his flaws and will not let anyone hold the Golden Boy accountable. She owns him. Now she wants the grandchild to own. Together they are partners in crime.
Neither can change, learn or grow from experience. Nor can they feel remorse, or feel for the damage and sorrow that will follow that child all through the child’s lifespan because they have lied and conned and manipulated the other parent completely out of the child’s life. The insatiable compulsion to own the child occludes any sliver of humanity or mature, long-term thinking.
Empathy was never a functioning factor in the first place. Where empathy is, where a conscience is, for most people, the Silent Stealer has a void in his personality.
In my life I have also seen The Invade – Infector Family Annihilator. This type is usually a Borderline Personality who has an insatiable appetite for high-intensity drama, and like a heroin addict, needs a higher and higher intensity of drama each time to get the same high.
This person has long line of relationship carcasses in her wake. This type of family annihilator is a sociopath in that they do not have a conscience about their violation of other people’s rights. As for causing pain and suffering, well that’s more gravy for their own sense of tragedy. It gives them an excuse to indulge in dark feelings and melodrama. They cannot see what they are doing to others — even the child — all they can see is getting the drama jacked up higher and higher, stirring the conflict, instigating crisis where there was none and none needed to be.
This person is a terrific social engager — she can play roles like a chameleon, read the people in the room in a few seconds and adapt her personality to fit in and get the gossip. What wrong with that? You ask. What’s wrong is what comes next. She will get under people’s skin to control them very nimbly and without the other person being aware of it. While the silent stealer controls others from the outside, the invader- infector gets inside another person and controls from the inside of their personality.
It’s like they do not have a Self, and must parasitically inhabit another person’s internal structure to feel real, valid, a borrowed personality.
From this position she can easily con and cheat and lie to get control of the child in a custody drama. Somebody else’s child, somebody else’s life.
Why? What’s the motivation?
To feel real, to feel viable, to be in control, to be Right, to temporarily have a personality and a position of importance.
Why choose custody battles? Why target children?
Because they are easy targets. Like the Silent Stealer, the Invader-Infector is a coward. She and He cannot face the world of adults head-on. They are too weak and know they will not be acceptable if adults saw them for who they really are. Children are easy marks, however, and in the fog of custody war, they can hide their nasties.
The Invader – Infector will meddle in other’s families to the point of destroying the bonds and attachments between parent and child. She must own other people’s children and comes alive in the high chaos of destruction. Then she alone can save the child from the crisis she manufactured. She is the social-emotional version of Munchausen by Proxy disease.
She will have no conscience, just a set of supra and grandiose justifications, usually dramatic narratives in which she is somehow a victim in the tragedy she manufactured. She will control her narrative with false and inflammatory gossip that splits people apart, fabrications on top of fabrications, tall tales with privy information, she will be the One In The Know.
She feels entitled, even religiously called to intervene in other people’s families, which is her cover and excuse for causing the chaos, crisis, confusion and conflict that rob one parent of their child and gives the undue advantage to the other parent. Is there no greater power to have in life than to decide the home of someone else’s child?
The Borderline Personality must always create stark sides to feel safe, so there is no middle ground in her crisis-mongering. Once she has manipulated herself in the driver’s seat, the choices to her are simple. No consequences.
Just like their is no child. To her, the child is a tool to accomplish getting herself a mirror so she can see her Self and other people can too. The child is invisible. To these types of sociopaths, the concept of ‘other’ is non-existent. The concept, reality and validity of Child is non-existent.
This person has such little sense of Self she is ultimately easily manipulated by stronger antisocial manipulators such as the Silent Stealer, who needs a front man. She needs the drama, he needs the delivery person. Two peas in a pod. A symbiotic relationship made in mental illness heaven. The costs to the child don’t matter. There is nothing beyond the high of the intensity and urgency of the moment for the Invader – Infector.
She will have tall tales to tell the child and the general community to accomplish this. Terrible tragic and horrible fabrications that the child will believe, and the silent-stelaer will support and exploit to work his ends. Truth and facts are not her friends. Facts are too boring and accomplish nothing in her drama addiction. She may be ultra- righteous, a pillar of the moral community on the outside, but that’s just a cover so people won’t question the verocity of her pathology. No one wants to be on the receiving end of her manipulations and chaos, so no one holds her accountable.
No one holds the Silent Stealer accountable, either. He looks to good to be “like that.” He’s no “Joe Six-pack.” He’s the perfect gentleman.
So if your holiday table is empty of the child who has been manipulated out of your life in divorce and custody by the Silent Stealer and/or the Invader – Infector, you are not alone. And you are not crazy. They are the crazy ones, it’s just that they don’t look it.
So don’t you look it either. Don’t give them their win. Don’t let your child lose. Use the time away from your child to mend your wounds in your own private way, get stronger and wiser and make a strategy where your child gets a winner of a parent out of you, even if it takes time for that child to see it. You’re still the parent, and your child
still needs you.
And kick out the silent stealers and invader-infectors from your table, your home, your mind, your personality. No matter what they have done to you, the lies they have told about you, the lies and cons they have gotten away with, and been rewarded for, just know that it wasn’t you who did all that. You are not like them. Thank God you are not like them.
Your child needs you so much to NOT be like them.
—- Heidi Hansen
Puppies?? Puppies at Dog Hotel? A new Dog Hotel Courtesy Taxi roaming around town doing courtesies for homeless persons? What ‘s this that the Countessa said?
Yes.
It’s all here with an unexpected outcome in the new animated song -story Dog Hotel short story.
It’s the only holiday movie you’ll need this year. It will pull your heart up and off the couch and get you up celebrating life, because, as the Countessa said, “…Life is beautiful, and we must celebrate it every day.”
Coming soon to this and the official Dog Hotel website by Heidi Hansen at http://www.doghotelbooks.wordpress.com.
oh — and what is Dog Hotel doing on a trauma recovery website?
Because practicing joy, practicing comfort, is necessary, not a luxury. These are vital to good mental health. Life-affirming activity with high engagement is central to trauma recovery.
See you soon at Dog Hotel — take care, — and carpe woofum!
Heidi
There are five masteries — high life-affirming skills — to learn in our recovery and resiliency of traumatic experience:
I am hosting another Trauma Project workshop to provide safe, private and renewing education on these 5 acumens — and I really hope you’ll join us for this. It’s on Saturday, September 28, 2019, at 9 a.m. in Vancouver, Washington.
It’s free, and I’m bringing the coffee — the good kind!
Journals and sketchbooks will be provided at no charge, and good pens.
Email me at dog.hotel.hansen@gmail.com to RSVP and confirm location details.
Remember, trauma changes us, but we get to say how.
So until then, rest, restore, and renew.
— Heidi D. Hansen, M.A.
cash.app/$doghotel2018 is the link to donate a tad of cash to help fund The Trauma Project. Heidi is an experienced clinician and understands the necessity of providing truly excellent mental health care to those who can least afford it, and everything about the Trauma Project is free to all. So, donations here at this link go directly and exclusively to fund the overhead and upkeep of The Trauma Project, and I will write and sign a receipt for your tax purposes and also express exactly where your donation went — was it printing costs, or stamps for mail-outs, was it to pay for the meeting space, the sketchbooks/journals we use in our workshops, was it for refreshment in the workshops — I’ll let you know. That’s Heidi’s promise, your money goes exactly where I say it goes. Thank You!
the trauma project 