The Wounded Child & the Good Mother

This cover from The New Yorker by Barry Blitt, "Mother's Day Special" (May 5, 2008), illustrates an insight that took me more than fifteen years to figure out.

Like a child at a pet store window, an energetic woman seems spontaneously absorbed in an imagined new role. She envisions herself as mother, while the man holding her hand turns his back, horrified at her excitement.

Blitt's whimsy offers a glimpse of many romances that end in sorrow, terror, even tragedy. It helps us understand why many good mothers lose their children in custody court. It captures the dynamic tension that motivates some wounded men to fight for children they may never have wanted.

Why are so many good mothers losing their children in custody courts? Or, even more troubling: Why are so many vulnerable children being torn away from good mothers?

As executive director of a shelter for battered women, I kept running aground on a certain type of custody case that gets dragged out interminably regardless of its merits. In these cases, fathers often had a long history of violence, coercion, sexual abuse, or neglect of their children. Yet the court was giving these children to their fathers. Why?

The thing that attracted me to these cases gave me a clue: like the woman in Britt's illustration, these moms are magical. In the shelter, other women's children would gravitate to them. Their talent for creating wonderment fascinated me. They were everything I had not been to my own children.

I watched how they related to children, how they listened, how they responded, how they taught with spontaneity and playfulness.

Then I looked at the men. I looked beyond their evident narcissism and recognized within each one a wounded child who sulked and demanded attention.

As the mothers compared notes about the men who sought custody of children they had once ignored or terrorized, we realized that these men shared similar childhoods. Not only had they been severely abused, but they could not talk about their pain. Often the women only learned of this childhood abuse from others in the family.

So the Wounded Child in the narcissistic man yearns for a Good Mother and is drawn to that kind of woman. She, in turn, recognizes the Wounded Child within him and tenderly draws that child out of hiding.

When they have children of their own, the Good Mother bonds instantly with them, while the Wounded Child lurches back into his childhood hurt. He becomes resentful and jealous. (These are the very words the father projects onto the mother in the psychologist's report in "Lies, Rumors, and Innuendos," above.)

The Wounded Child punishes the Good Mother when she bonds with their children. He may use the jargon of Father's Rights to insist on "co-parenting" children whom he actually resents. If the children resist him, he will accuse their mother of "alienating" them from him. If he is also exploring his sexuality, the children are all the more at risk.

When custody courts fail to recognize these patterns, they set the stage for tragedy, that plays out with alarming frequency, like in the Castillo case below.

Junk Science in Custody Courts

If there were an international child protection award for clinicians, I would nominate The Psychologists Board of Queensland, Australia. On March 3, 2008, the board disciplined prominent Brisbane clinical psychologist William Wrigley for unprofessional behavior when he reported "parental alienation syndrome" in a custody case.

Those investigating Dr. Wrigley unanimously ruled that his evidence three years ago, which led to a mother losing custody of her two children, constituted "professional conduct that demonstrates incompetence or a lack of adequate knowledge, skill, judgment or care."

Search the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) for "parental alienation syndrome" (PAS), and you will not find it recognized as a scientific diagnosis.

New Jersey psychiatrist Richard Gardner created PAS without peer review in 1985 and used it to build a lucrative career winning child custody for fathers until his suicide in 2003.

Gardner convinced judges that children who complain of physical and sexual abuse by their fathers have been merely "alienated" against those fathers by their mothers. This diverted the court: Instead of investigating potential criminal charges, courts began punishing those who reported the alleged crimes.

Meanwhile, Gardner lobbied against mandatory reporting of child sex abuse and wrote, "The child should be able to pity the father for the curse (in our society) of having pedophilic tendencies. In other times and other places, he would be considered normal."

In 2006, the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges discredited Gardner’s "syndrome" for its failure to meet standards of evidence. The Council urges judges to strike references to "parental alienation" from any reports to the court.

Yet efforts to portray Gardner's junk science as valid and reliable continue to spread like a virus. Over the past three years, alienation activists persuaded Bermuda's minister of rehabilitation and an assortment of United States governors to announce a "Parental Alienation Awareness Day," affirming the jargon, while dropping claims to be a psychiatric "syndrome." They called for children's "right to be loved by both parents."

That notion may sound benign, but it has often proved deadly.

Some people might condemn pediatrician Amy Castillo, who admitted to hiding her children from their father when she saw alarming signs in his behavior. She warned a judge that her estranged husband, Mark Castillo, had threatened to punish her by killing their children. She pleaded for a permanent restraining order. But a psychologist reported that the father spoke of his love and commitment to his children, and evaluated him at low risk if he took his meds.

The judge ordered the mother to hand over the children, ages 2, 4, and 6, for unsupervised visits. On March 29th, they went with their father on a trip to Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. Instead of bringing them home, Mark Castillo ended their visit by drowning them in a hotel bathtub.

The Castillo deaths brought to seven the number of Maryland children killed by their fathers in custody-related murders in the four months since Thanksgiving. It has been a wakeup call for Maryland legislators and courts to the dangers facing children who are subjected to threats, humiliation, and terror during court-ordered visitation.

Instead of promoting the junk science of parental alienation, American clinicians who want to protect children should join their Australian colleagues in condemning this fraudulent theory. They could use their knowledge to help courts recognize signs of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) that clinicians diagnosed in Mark Castillo.

Narcissists' sense of personal entitlement and exploitive behavior often find expression in what we call the "Batterer’s ABCs." Rather than acknowledge problems in themselves, narcissists project their controlling behavior onto the protective parents, whom they accuse of alienating, brainwashing, and coaching children to disrespect them.

Clinicians who reinforce this narcissistic personality disorder, or who place any parent's rights above children's safety by conjuring up parental alienation in the courtroom, should be reported to their state board of licensure and discipline. State health department websites publish complaint forms.

The Australian Board advised Dr. Wrigley that "referring to an unrecognised syndrome in his reports" violated their code of ethics. Scores of Queensland custody cases may now be challenged because of similar violations by other clinicians. In addition to saving the lives of children, the Board's censure may help to restore the integrity of their own profession.


Confidential comments may be sent to Anne Grant at parentingproject@cox.net