Novi Sad, Serbia – 4/28/23
This is a pathology of lies. Everything – everything – surrounding this pathology is a lie.
What you take for reality, is a lie.
This presents as a custody conflict. That is a lie. One parent drives the family conflict into the legal system to abuse the ex-spouse by making it as hard as possible to see their child, and costing them thousands and thousands of dollars fighting in court.
It is financial and emotional abuse of the ex-spouse from a desire to put them on “trial” for being a bad parent (spouse) and making the targeted spouse-and-parent defend themselves against false allegations of being abusive of their child.
This isn’t about custody. Custody is simple. It’s either shared 50-50 or one parent gets school-week and the other gets every-other-weekend.
This isn’t about custody, it’s about pathology. A child rejecting a parent is an attachment pathology – a problem (pathology) in the love-and-bonding system of the brain.
The ONLY cause of severe attachment pathology (a child rejecting a a parent) is child abuse by one parent or the other. In all cases of court-involved custody conflict, a proper risk assessment needs to be conducted to the appropriate differential diagnosis for each parent.
All cases. It should be routine, and the diagnostic assessment protocol should be standardized at the highest professional quality. When possible child abuse is a considered diagnosis, our diagnosis needs to be accurate 100% of the time.
We can do that. We need to do that. We never abandon a single child to child abuse. Not one. We always protect the child from all forms of child abuses 100% of the time.
All forms.
This isn’t about custody. That’s a lie. This is about pathology and its treatment. Attachment pathology. We need a proper risk assessment for child abuse to the appropriate differential diagnosis, and we need an effective treatment plan to fix the attachment pathology displayed by the child.
A pilot program for the family court with university involvement for evaluation research would greatly assist in developing high-quality diagnostic assessment and treatment protocols for the family courts.
We need to end the fighting surrounding the child. This is not complex. It is simple. The ONLY thing that’s missing is the motivation to solve it.
That’s changing. I traveled to the Balkans because it’s changing there.
I encourage the professionals in Serbia and the Balkans to consider an APA presentation in 2024 in Seattle to inform your American colleagues of your developments in your approach to court-involved attachment pathology surrounding child custody conflict.
Come visit me in the Pacific Northwest in 2024. We’ll go visit Mt. Rainier and take in a Mariners game. I’m confident the APA would welcome an international submission. You have top-tier professionals working toward a solution. Work for a year, then come and tell us about it.
Craig Childress, Psy.D.
Clinical Psychologist, CA PSY 18857
GreatCosmicMothersUnite 