An Open Letter to Professionals: How to Stay out of the Blender

Dear Provider,

When you signed up to work with children, I’m willing to bet you didn’t plan on working with families as complicated as this one. You wanted to work with kids; not get caught in the middle of a never ending series of Judge Judy episodes. 

(And if you enjoy these episodes, please find another profession. I have met some of you–CPS workers, doctors, law enforcement, and attorneys. I have seen you pull out your proverbial popcorn, and it is not only highly unprofessional, but also harmful to the very children you are supposed to protect. This letter is probably not for you.) 

Let me begin by saying that I am so, so sorry that things are not the way they are supposed to be in this family. I ,too, have spent hours grieving this fact, so I can honestly say that I know how you feel. I know personally how frustrating it is for you to know that things could be so much better for this child if his or her parents could just “get their stuff together.”

The thing is, in some of these cases involving dysfunctional families, there is a history of domestic abuse. It’s different from when the parents are both equally responsible for the toxic family dynamics. All forms of abuse, whether physical, sexual, or psychological, have one thing in common: the offender is an expert in coercive control and manipulation. There are families in which there exists one offender and one victim, even though both accuse each other of dysfunction. Often that victim has made an incredibly difficult decision to separate or divorce from the child’s other parent with full, agonizing knowledge that it’s going to hurt their child(ren). But they got out in hopes of their child having at least one healthy parent, because staying could have meant two unhealthy parents. That protective parent would give anything to free his or her child(ren) from this mess, including bearing the weight of character defamation, smear campaigns, and false accusations.

One thing I have learned from working with many pediatric professionals over the years is that there is a tendency to place “co parenting with an abuser” in the same category as “co parents who are choosing not to get along.” There are a lot of rolled eyes, sighs, and even some psychological hand slapping at times with underpinnings of: “You two need to stop acting like children and GROW UP.” I’d like to challenge professionals to an increased awareness that there are actually enormous differences between co parenting situations characterized by high conflict and co parenting situations characterized by coercive control. 

Unfortunately, as of the writing of this letter, our U.S. family court systems force this miscategorization into the majority of final divorce judgments. Until lobbying and legislation can change that, you as a professional will definitely continue to encounter families affected by domestic abuse and coercive control. And when you do, I hope you are willing to embrace this opportunity to influence the discontinuation of post-separation systemic coercive control.

Because I have lived on both the professional and the personal side of this experience at the same time, I wanted to take the opportunity to offer a few of the ways you can learn to recognize the dynamics of coercive control and adjust your approach accordingly.

THE DON’TS

• Don’t panic or isolate.

If this is your first time working with a complicated, confusing family like this, please know that you are not alone. Reach out for supervision. Reach out to domestic violence advocacy groups for education. Watch out for signs of fight, flight, freeze, and fawn in yourself. Welcome to a new phase of your career. You now know what it’s like to cross paths with an abuser who has been systemically enabled to continue offending. 

If this is not your first time working with a complicated family like this, please remember that there is always something new to learn regardless of how many times you’ve been through this before. It’s okay to reach out for supervision, education, and to care for yourself. Thanks for sharing your experience level with families like this.

For further study, explore the power and control wheel and post separation power and control wheel.

• Don’t get stuck in the blender, and don’t throw gas on the dumpster fire.

Someone is always lying, and you’ll make yourself absolutely crazy trying to figure out who it is. This is a boundary within your own mind, so it’s one thing you CAN control. It says that you will remain curious at all times no matter how compelling the narrative may be. You must resist the desire to fill in all the blanks and answer all the questions. You may have lots of credentials, but you have a mere window peephole into what life is actually like when you haven’t been around. There’s always more going on than you can observe. Despite your experience and credentials, there’s always a bigger context that can’t fully be understood within the limits of your professional constraints. 

More than likely, if you’ve been with the parents for more than 15 minutes, you’ve already been frustrated by the sense that someone is withholding information and/or lying to you. You know that it is impossible for both of the contradictory stories you are hearing to be true, and it’s making you feel like your thoughts are being whipped up beyond recognition in a blender. 

And that sensation is 100% valid. If communication is happening from both parents, someone is always lying to you, always manipulating you, and they are very good at it. And, someone is also telling the truth. You are not immune to being sucked into this thought blender– torn first one way and then the next. No matter how experienced or credentialed you may be, these offenders will effectively disguise an entire dumpster fire within a compelling narrative and proudly sail it right past you while you unknowingly throw more fuel at it. I repeat: YOU ARE NOT IMMUNE.You can be sucked into the blender at any point. The important part is to recognize it, get out, stay out, and hold more firmly to healthy boundaries than ever before. More on that in the next section.

Part of keeping yourself out of the blender is to resist concluding that you have enough information or context to tell who is lying without clear, court admissible documentation. (That means it isn’t based on hearsay.) The offending parent’s narrative is often surprisingly more inviting, more polished, and more believable than the one told by the protective parent. It will rarely look like the dumpster fire that is hidden inside. (For those of you who are visual, imagine a giant dumpster fire burning quietly in the bowels of a gorgeous multi billion dollar luxury cruise ship. Even if you’re a really keen observer, you’ll still miss it at first.) One of the favorite narratives (among many) that offenders will use includes accusations that the protective parent is crazy with some form of mental illness such as Factitious Disorder (formerly known as Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy). The offending parent may have manipulated powerful systems and providers before you into believing the narrative, which makes the cruise ship disguise even more convincing. Do yourself a favor and trust that you are strong enough to handle that the truth may or may not be revealed to you in time. Your job, ultimately, is to support the child while they are in your care. You may never know who was lying, and that has to be okay with you. Anything else will get you sucked into the blender. All that spinning around will cause you to throw gas on the dumpster fire despite your best intentions. Please remember that when you throw gas on the dumpster fire, you are violating your duty to do no harm. 

For further study, explore the topics of gaslighting, minimizing, justifying, blame shifting, psychological abuse tactics, and the court definition of hearsay.

THE DO’s

• Document, document, document. 

Keep a folder on your email account or cloud storage of every single written communication to and from both parents. If a conversation happens in person or on the phone, summarize it (objectively!) in an email and send it to yourself and/or the parents EVEN if you believe it was neutral, harmless, or inconsequential. If one parent communicates with you without cc’ing the other, ask permission to share and then cc the other parent as soon as possible. Encouraging a firm “reply all” boundary will cut down significantly on the feeling that you are stuck in the middle of everything. It also allows the protective parent to make educated decisions for the child’s well being.*

*There is some room for discretion in sharing fully with both parents in certain clinical therapeutic gray areas, and when offenders are under a protection order prohibiting communication with the victim or when exposure may cause harm to the child. For cases outside of those exceptions, this is a great black and white boundary for teachers and other developmental service providers outside of the family therapy field*

For further study, explore love bombing, the cycle of abuse, and triangulation.

• Coordinate Care.

Encourage accessing additional services as needed and ask for releases to speak with these other providers.* A protective parent will usually recognize and support the value of coordinated care.** On the flip side of that coin, isolation is key to the offending parent maintaining opportunities for coercive control. Adding additional safe adults to the child’s life and accountability across service providers is a threat to the offender’s narrative, although they’ll try not to let it show. It will likely be resisted in covert or overt ways such as through verbal refusal, a refusal to offer billing reimbursement or other required financial support, a pattern of tardiness or missed appointments, sharing contradictory or inconsistent information across providers, and privately telling the child that their treatment options don’t work, are unnecessary, or are an unfair waste of time. Remember that the majority of these things are unlikely to be directly observed by professionals like you. This does not make them any less valid.

 *Other providers may be ignorant of the coercive control dynamics in use, so remember “Don’t #2.” If the provider speaks primarily from a subjective viewpoint, don’t get sucked in. Ask for data. Ask for documentation. Stick to the things that can be proven. When multiple providers get sucked into the blender, miss the dumpster fire, and throw gas on it, the explosion and harm done to the child is even bigger than when one does it alone. 

**One other exception here is that sometimes a protective parent will also initially resist adding more providers to the care team because the lack of professionalism they experienced previously has caused them quite understandably to experience a lack of trust. There’s nothing you can do or say to talk them out of the harm that was done by professionals before you. The thing you can control is remaining objective and trustworthy one day at a time. Validate their concerns and experience without judgment and give them time.

Spending childhood in the care of any unsafe, controlling, manipulative adult can cause unimaginable harm to a child. Most likely, you aren’t going to be able to fully protect the child all on your own. But, you can take action to keep from making things worse for them. Stay in your professional lane. You can do this! As much as it is possible, stick to objective data and observable hard facts when making decisions and discussing the family. Your presence is one more safe adult in this child’s life, and that matters.

Sincerely,

A protective parent and professional