The Good News Horror Story

I was baptized in the Methodist Church when I was eight years old. At the time, I received a faux red-leather copy of the Good News Bible. It contained the same books as the King James Version of the Holy Bible, but it was worded a bit differently and branded with a new title to emphasize the neighborly teachings of the historical Jesus Christ.

The good news that Jesus shared with us reminds me of the words of another teacher, Raghavan Iyer, who writes, “Life is no cruel burden imposed upon human beings by some capricious external power, but rather a festival in which there is continual learning and living and loving. But these cannot occur without unlearning, unloving, undoing the excess and illusion of the past.”

Our institutions of government and religion are corrupted by the excess and illusion created by our repeated efforts to achieve some sort of status in the world of appearances at the expense of those who are voiceless and disregarded. Today and every day we have the opportunity to forgive those who trespass against us, but this is not all we have to do if we are to emerge from the tomb we have been placed in under the name of the laws of our land.

I grew up believing that communitarian and identitarian policies would lead to a better world for future generations. But you know it doesn’t matter what we think is right, or good. The left will find a way to take the place of the right. The polarity will be reversed, and we will find ourselves on the wrong side of history if we hold onto once-and-for-all solutions that simply add more laws to the books without taking responsibility to keep showing up when things go wrong.

I have learned that family court is not a court of law, but a court of equity. I have learned that judges have wide discretion to issue legal orders that deny parents the same rights to due process that are guaranteed for alleged criminals. I have learned that federal Title IV-D funding incentivizes states to separate children from their parents in a way that maintains the system at the expense of families.

For all my expertise in the application of behavioral analysis and learning theory to demonstrate how anyone can see that emotional cutoff behavior is reinforced by court intervention, I look forward to the day that this common sense approach is the first step in addressing attachment issues surrounding high-conflict divorce, not the last resort. Family court is no place for families.

I think about those I have encountered since I first experienced the cruelty of a legal system designed to profit from separating children from their parents. When I realized that feminist and social justice ideology was being used against families in the court system, you can only imagine the horror that I experienced. Unless it happens to you, you are not likely to believe the experiences of families in the court system, or even hear about them.

Imagine it is a fine spring day when a team of armed FBI agents converges to arrest you in front of your children at a church playground, and take you to jail. Unbelievable right? Until it happens to you, or something like that. You will look the other way now, unless you are like me. That is not my story, but it is the true story of parental alienation from the life of a sweet young mother I have had the privilege of knowing for a few months now. The courage she has to continue on is something that is shared among the clients I help to recover their beloved children.

But a horror story is a horror story. There is not one horror greater than another horror. Wherever there is that sense of unreality, the sense that nobody would believe you even if you told them, the horror is there. The good news is there is no tomb that can hold the spirit prisoner when we develop the capacity to see things as they are, to manage our emotions and take the steps that will lead to a legacy of pride for our children to carry forward and redeem the good in the people they come from, from all their relations. There is no power greater than the power of love for each other, and forgiveness.