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.
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
Heidi Hansen can be reached at dog.hotel.hansen@gmail.com, and is available to lecture more on this and related topics for a professional fee of $250.00 per hour.
the trauma project 