Nightmare in Hostage Hills
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I love you too, my darling Jade Despite your being taught to hate and spit on me, ignore me, pretend I am invisible, treat me like an old toilet paper roll and toss me out as a leper and shun me, or display your middle finger at me with accolades from your fa-ther in his affirming look of sanctioning such behavior, I know it is not who you truly are. The truth of who you are is tucked deep inside until it is safe to emerge and love me again. Here is the most astute intuitive explanation I have found of why you, my Jade, Zach, and Leonard, must retreat inside and away from reconnecting with me in a loving manner which we once enjoyed for many of your childhood years due to the cruel repercussions of your narcissist batterer father. You must align yourself with his horrific campaign of denigration and abuse of me to survive. Dr. Craig Childress in one of the most profoundly accurate expla-nations of what I witnessed in your transformation through the program-ming/brainwashing process during our custody battle 2003-2009 in his article “Stark Reality” states: http://drcraigchildressblog.com/2014/07/29/stark-reality “The pathological cruelty capable from the narcissistic parent is hard enough for a fully developed adult psyche to endure, it is devastating to the still in-formation psy-che of the child. How can we ask the child to show affection toward you (the “targeted” parent) un-less we can first protect the child from the psychological retaliation of the narcissis-tic/(borderline) parent that is sure to follow any display by the child of affectionate bonding to you, or even just the child’s insufficient display of rejection of you? As long as the child must live in the world of the narcissistic/(borderline) parent, as long as we cannot protect the child from the psychopathology of the narcissis-tic/(borderline) parent, the child must find a way to psychologically survive in that world.” My Loves, does this scenario resonate with you? Dr. Childress continues through an intuitive, empathic experience of a child experiencing what you guys may have had to endure in his 1st session with the child on a visit with victimized/targeted mother: “Child (in my mind’s imagination): “Dr. Childress, can you help me escape from here? I’m trapped, buried deep inside. I don’t want to reject my mother. I love my mother. But I have to reject her because it’s what my dad requires me to do. He’ll torment me if I don’t. Can you rescue me? Can you help me escape from here? Dr. C (in my mind’s imagination): I’ll see what I can do. Child (in my mind’s imagination): “But Dr. Childress, don’t get me half way out. Be-cause if you only get me half way out my dad will torment me for showing affec-tion for my mom, for not rejecting my mom. If you can’t rescue me, if you can’t get me all the way out, then just leave me here”. Dr. C (in my mind’s imagination): Okay, I’ll see what I can do. That’s the voice of a child in “parental alienation”. “Help me. My authenticity is trapped deep inside here. Please, I want you to rescue me. But if you can’t get me all the way out, if you can’t rescue me, then leave me here, because otherwise the pathological parent will torment me if I try to escape but can’t get fully away.” “At least if my authenticity is buried deep inside, hidden beyond my awareness, then it’s safe. If you expose it but cannot protect it, then the narcissistic/(borderline) par-ent will destroy it.” {Stark Reality, Dr. Craig Childress, 2014, http://drcraigchidressblog.com/2014/07/29/stark-reality, p. 2-3} DSM-5 Diagnosis 309.4 Adjustment Disorder with mixed disturbance of emotions and con duct V61.20 Parent-Child Relational Problem V61.29 Child Affected by Parental Relationship Distress V995.51 Child Psychological Abuse, Confirmed {Foundations: An Attachment-Based Model of Parental Alienation, Childress, C.A., PsyD., 2015, p. 313} I was unable to see clearly what domestic violence really was and that we were living in the home of a batterer under his rule and reign of fear, in-timidation, coercion, abuse, power and control. “Emotional abuse is like brainwashing in that it systematically wears away at the vic-tim’s self-confidence, sense of self-worth, trust in her perceptions, and self-concept. Whether it is done by constant berating and belittling, by intimidation, or under the guise of “guidance” or “teaching,” the results are similar. Eventually the recipient of the abuse loses all sense of self and all remnants of personal value. Emotional abuse cuts to the very core of a person, creating scars that may be far deeper and more lasting than physical ones. (In fact, a great proportion of the damage caused by physical or sexual abuse is emotional.) {The Emotionally Abused Woman, Beverly Engel, 1990, p. 10} What could I have done differently? God did for me what I could not do for myself. He has a plan for you guys and for me and for us together soon. God rescued me from a violent cruel man. Through my treatment for “battered woman syndrome” I grabbed on to my healing from all this abusiveness like a dog with his favorite bone. Your father could have gotten help, but he didn’t. He was recommended to attend treatment at Bruised Reed Healing Center for himself and to get involved in his 12 Step recovery program, but he didn't. He refused to follow therapeutic direction for the sake of our wholeness and peace in our family. I did. I continue to heal and trust in Jesus to bring you back to Him and to me. Healing is available in safety and peace here with me. Our story will be a Light to help illuminate the dark world of domestic abuse and DV by Proxy as children and families are being victimized not only by the abusers at home but by the systems involved-mental health and family law-which are supposed to protect us, ensure safety, timely effective inter-vention, and appropriate treatment but fail miserably due to lack of knowledge of the dynamics of domestic violence in a human being and in a family. Chapter 7 “In situations of captivity the perpetrator becomes the most powerful person in the life of the victim, and the psychology of the victim is shaped by the actions and beliefs of the perpetrator.” Judith Herman, M.D., Trauma and Recovery
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“Sadly, Christina’s journey, and her children’s experience of being collateral damage, is not atypical. Kudos for her strength and bravery in putting her story out there as a cautionary tale for others.” (Dr. Susan Weitzman, author, Not to People like Us: Hidden Abuse in Upscale Marriages).
“Christina Mask’s Nightmare is constructed around fragments from a life in agony as one woman attempts to escape abuse, retain her sanity, and regain the custody of three children the family court and her husband have taken from her. It’s all here—the daily records over months, then years; the diary entries; the self-blame; the excuses; the shame; the absurdist dialogues with family therapists; marginalia from readings or lectures or religious texts; letters pleadings with judges and lawyers and evaluators; poems; letters to and from the children, real and imagined; the reports that put her claims of abuse in quotations; and so, so much more. These pieces are loosely joined by a narrative and an interior monologue that I sometimes found too much to bear. But then I realized I was scanning something akin to a Picasso painting, whose underlying truth lay not in what was on the page, not the fragments, but in the hope that put them out here, no more evident than in the endlessly reasonable letters Mask writes to intractable foes. Mask has cast her eye on what Yeats termed ‘the broken, crumbling battlement’ of the self and lived to write it. As one director famously said about the sixty women and children crowded into her six-bedroom shelter, ‘If they can manage this, they can manage anything.’ Christina’s book gives us faith that she is right.” (Evan Stark, PhD, MSW. The writer is professor emeritus at Rutgers University, and author of Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life [Oxford, 2007]).
About the Author
As a vibrant wife and mother of our 3 adorable children, we were blessed to have childhood years together where we sang and danced, laughed and played, prayed and praised Our Lord Jesus Christ many moments together, hugged, and kissed morning noon and night. School, homework, soccer, swimming, gymnastics, piano, friends, picnic’s, family reunions, making dinners, family movie nights we enjoyed together in our seemingly normal upscale, loving family all the while a trap was being laid for our destruction by my husband and father of our 3 children.
It is now over 13 years that my 3 children have been alienated from their mother and held hostage by their father. DV by Proxy and narcissistic abuse hurts.