EXPEDITE DIVORCE CASES INVOLVING MINOR CHILDREN

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In 1997, Guam enacted a law authorizing no-fault divorce (P.L. 24-134). The legislative intent was “to reduce the pains that such turbulence causes in the lives of our people, especially our children.” In other words, if we let couples divorce more easily then we will have less conflict and healthier children.

The opposite has happened. Just read the news. Busted families and damaged children abound, with much of the burden falling to schools and teachers to try to put children back together again before they are able to teach them anything.

While I can’t prove causation, there is at least a demonstrable correlation between the rate of family fragmentation and the increasing number of children diagnosed with an ever widening array of dysfunctional behaviors and developmental disorders.

Since the legislature is never going to rescind the sacred cow of no-fault divorce (aka “irreconcilable differences”), there is something the legislature can and should do to address at least part of the fallout: expedite divorce cases involving minor children.

Right now, the only thing expedited is child support - wherein one parent is forced to pay the other simply because “the other” has the kids.

Because our society assumes that Mommy has the kids because Daddy left, our system has no problem immediately punishing Daddy. However, statistics from Divorce.com show that women initiate 69% of divorces, and in cases where a parent makes off with the children, MissingKids.com says that “mothers are the most common abductors.”

Contrary to common opinion, stealing your own children is not a crime if there is no custody order. A parent can simply pack up the children, abandon the marriage, file for divorce, and hold the children hostage.

Once divorce is filed, the child support law is mobilized and the parent without the kids is forced to pay the parent with the kids regardless of why the other parent has the kids in the first place.

The abandoned parent can fight to get his or her kids back, but that fight - usually an expensive one - is fought in the divorce court, not the child support court. And because the divorce is not expedited (as is child support), it can take months or even years for final custody to be determined.

It is ironic that among the stated purposes of our current Child Support Guidelines there is this:

“To eliminate the animosity associated with financial incentives to take sole custody of children (and) to prevent the Guidelines from being misconstrued as an income redistribution tool.”

It’s ironic because this is precisely what the Guidelines inadvertently encourage. Because the law immediately penalizes the abandoned parent and rewards the abandoning/"kidnapping" parent before any fault is determined, there exists the incentive for the abandoning parent to financially punish the abandoned parent so that he/she runs out of money and is unable to pursue the actual case.

Add to this the constant pressure by both attorneys and the courts to “settle,” and the abandoned parent is on a fast track to giving up - which is usually what the abandoning parent wants.

We already have a law on the books which mandates the best possible legal recourse in such sad situations. 19GCA§8404 requires “that children spend as much time with each of their parents as possible, when the parents are not living together.”

However, we first have to get into court to get the order, and as already mentioned, this can take a long time - precious time for a child whose psyche is being damaged by the day.

To make things even worse for an already traumatized child, in cases of parental “kidnapping,” there is usually also the manipulation of the child by the “kidnapper” parent to despise or even forget the other parent - otherwise known as “parental alienation.”

This happens, as one expert says, “when a parent hates the other parent more than he or she loves the child.” The more time the alienating parent has to do this, the more the child will be alienated from the abandoned parent, and, given the aforementioned correlation, the child becomes increasingly prone to developing dysfunctional behaviors and developmental disorders.

In “the best interest of the child” - a judicial mantra, the only way forward at this point, given the irreversible damage permitted by our divorce laws, is to expedite divorce cases involving minor children so that the child - as the law already requires - “can spend as much time with each parent as possible” - and as soon as possible.

Tim Rohr has resided in Guam since 1987. He has raised a family of 11 children, owned several businesses, and is active in local issues via his blog, JungleWatch.info, letters to local publications, and occasional public appearances. He may be contacted at timrohr.guam@gmail.com     

HANDLING ESTRANGEMENT

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In my previous column, I addressed what a Time magazine article calls the “epidemic of estrangement.” According to the article, one in two Americans is estranged from a close relative with estrangement usually occurring between a parent and an adult child.

I shared how I had personally experienced estrangement with multiple adult children and promised to share how I dealt with it.

At first, I didn’t. I was in shock. Without getting into personal details, I’ll just say it was sudden and incomprehensible. There was no fight, no disagreement. After many years of a normal and mostly warm parent-child relationship, there was a sudden “I never want to see you again.” And then I was blocked, cancelled, erased. It’s been nearly eight years.

A couple of my daughters actually did their “I never want to see you again” message on social media and included some pretty terrible accusations. As horrible as this was at the time, it turned out to be helpful.

Friends who saw those postings - even though they were as shocked and saddened as I was - reached out to me. One of those friends was a social worker who recognized the elements of the associated phenomenon of “parental alienation.”

I say “associated” because alienation and estrangement are two different things. Alienation is the manipulation of a child (adult or not) by one parent to turn on the other, whereas estrangement is the adult child (or other relative) acting on his or her own. In either case, the end is the same: the sudden and baseless isolation and estrangement of the “target,” who is usually a loving parent.

Thanks to the article that my social worker friend sent me, I quickly recognized that I was not alone. Understanding you are not alone is probably the most important thing since the sudden shock of being cut off, cancelled, and erased by a loved one can lead to a most intense loneliness that can quickly descend into self-harm.

So that’s one of the reasons I am writing this column: to let you - if you have experienced this - know that you are not alone.

In my case, the shock was exponentially intensified by my daughters trashing me on social media, and later, some very hurtful accusations filed in court which the local media picked up and blasted all over the news for nearly a week in May 2018.

It is coincidental (?) that all this happened just weeks after the Vatican had found then-Archbishop Apuron “guilty of “sexual abuse of minors,” a matter in which “Tim Rohr and his associates” (Apuron’s words) had played a "conspiratorial" role. But said “coincidence” is a topic for another column.  

Through it all, though, I was surrounded and supported by people who had known me for many of the thirty years I and my family had thus far lived in Guam.

Part of this support was a result of my own action and I would recommend you do this. I immediately contacted friends and neighbors and calmly assured them that the accusations were false. The fact that I didn’t hide or run away had much to do with my own self-confidence and also brought relief to those who wanted to have confidence in me.

It helped that I had no history of being or acting anything like what I was being accused of, so, as the saying goes: “don’t do in the dark what you wouldn’t do in the light.” You never know when you are going to need your “history.”

So, establishing support is number one. The second thing is educate yourself. Starting with the article my friend sent me, I soon found ever more information and support in every possible format - especially on YouTube where I heard the stories of other parents who could have been telling my exact same story.

The third thing - and this was hard - was for me to go “all business” - to see the whole affair objectively and to deal with my accusers as accusers and not loved ones. In a way, the absurdity and falsity of their accusations helped. They left me no hope of reconciliation, and it’s the false hope of reconciliation that keeps you paralyzed and leads to self-harm.

Lastly - and I’ll have more to say about this in another column - was understanding that once my children reached age 18 I had no right to them. My job was done. So I forgave them, gave them back to God, and moved on. I recommend you do the same.

Tim Rohr has resided in Guam since 1987. He has raised a family of 11 children, owned several businesses, and is active in local issues via his blog, JungleWatch.info, letters to local publications, and occasional public appearances. He may be contacted at timrohr.guam@gmail.com    

 

CHOOSE TO HAVE A MERRY CHRISTMAS

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According to a recent Time magazine article, “How Estrangement Has Become an Epidemic in America,” 1 in 2 adults in the U.S. are estranged from a close relative.

Given the season, perhaps I should be writing about something more Christmassy instead of something as serious and sad as estrangement.

But since estrangement from close relatives is usually felt most acutely at this time of year, perhaps it’s a good time to address it. It may even help some who suffer with this to know they are not alone.

Few things are as painful as being estranged from a loved one, particularly when that loved one is your child. It happened to me. And it happened suddenly and severely.

For quite awhile I was in a daze - to put it mildly. One minute everything was normal and the next minute, and out of nowhere - at least as I experienced it, I was cut off, blocked, erased - and by multiple children.

In time, I would learn that I wasn’t alone. Once they heard about it, friends came forward to share with me their own accounts of being cut off, blocked, and erased by their adult children, and, in some cases, accused, as I was, of everything from neglect to abuse.

I found the same stories in online support groups, one of which is hosted by Dr. Joshua Coleman, one of the authors of the aforementioned Time article.

Dr. Coleman, a psychologist and therapist, is unique among psychologists and therapists in that he blames the estrangement epidemic - at least in part - on psychologists and therapists.

In another article, Dr. Coleman writes: “As therapists, we hold up the ideal parent or family experience as a way to shine a light on what an adult’s life might have been if she’d had better parenting. This serves the purpose of helping our client to not blame herself for self-limiting and self-hating voices, and to allow her distance from parents and others whose contact tends to amplify that voice, rather than diminish it.”

In other words, “don’t blame yourself, blame your parents.” As Dr. Coleman writes: “…therapists tempt adult children to feel contempt or even hatred for their parents.”

Such therapy has become an industry, a lucrative one. It’s not hard to see how easily psychologists and therapists - even well-meaning ones - can get clients for life, or at least keep them coming back for the next session and the next.

No one wants to blame him or herself, especially not in today’s “victim” culture, so who more convenient to blame for your troubles than your parents, and if you’re a female, particularly your father.

This becomes even more destructive when the other parent, mother or father, takes the side of the child to fan the flames of blame on the target parent.

However, one doesn’t need a therapist to learn to blame one’s parents. We are surrounded by a culture which elevates the child over the adult, a culture, particularly via movies and other media, which casts adults as bumbling idiots and children as mature masterminds - a delusion that warps into evermore damaging estrangement when that child becomes an adult.

Unfortunately, we parents have participated in our own destruction by wanting to give our children the proverbial “better life than we had.” So we are not as hard on them as our parents were on us. And whereas we more than likely received scant and rare praise from our parents, we shower our children with ours.

And the result? 1 in 2 U.S. adults are estranged from a close relative and it is usually an adult child.

I don’t know about you, but there was plenty to blame my parents for, particularly my father with whom I had a strained relationship, especially as an adult. However, it never ever occurred to me to disrespect my parents or to cut them off.

So when I look at how much gentler I was to my own children, it’s hard to understand how they could disrespect me and cut me off, that is until I take into consideration the victim culture they live in and the kind of “therapy” Dr. Coleman writes about.

So what to do? This is the constant cry of the parents in the online groups that I am in. I can tell you what I did, but I’ll leave that for a future column. Meanwhile, CHOOSE to have a Merry Christmas. That’s what I’ve done for seven Christmases now. Choose.

Tim Rohr has resided in Guam since 1987. He has raised a family of 11 children, owned several businesses, and is active in local issues via his blog, JungleWatch.info, letters to local publications, and occasional public appearances. He may be contacted at timrohr.guam@gmail.com    

NEVER GIVE UP, DAD. NEVER GIVE UP.

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In my column of April 24, I wrote about parental alienation, a type of psychological child abuse.

PA usually occurs in the context of a divorce wherein one parent seeks to turn a child against the other parent and uses all manner of lies, exaggerations, and manipulation to do it.

Particularly confounding with PA is the phenomenon of the child allying with the alienating and usually abusive parent, an anomaly noted in a paper published by the American Bar Association:

“It is remarkable that abused children frequently remain attached to their abusive parents…a maltreated child may have ambivalent feelings toward the abusive parent; however, the alienated child almost always has highly negative attitudes toward a non-abusive parent.”

I ended the previous column saying that usually this situation breaks open a world of hurt and bewilderment for the targeted parent and that I would offer some advice on what to do if you find yourself in this terror. So here it is.

As hard as it is to do when your heart is breaking, the first thing you must do is educate yourself as to what is really going on. Get online, particularly YouTube, and search for “parental alienation.”

You need to hear, and hear immediately, from other parents who have gone through this (and usually still are), and also from adults who were alienated from a parent as children and who later reunited with the alienated parent.

There are good written resources as well, but you probably won’t be able to read through your tears, so best to just immerse yourself in listening to others for a while.

While it’s okay to seek support from family and friends, don’t expect answers. Parental alienation is so counter-intuitive, so illogical, that those who haven’t experienced it, including close family members, will wonder “what you did” to make your child hate you.

Second, learn to think of yourself as the “chosen parent.”The “chosen parent” is the parent who the child trusts to never abandon her (I’ll use a daughter for the example), even if she has to join the alienating parent in targeting you.

In short, the child is so assured of your unconditional love that she is willing to risk rejecting you to please the alienator. She knows you will always love her but she has no assurance that the alienator will. So she “chooses” you to hang in there for her. In other words, she is only rejecting you to please the abusive, unstable parent.

Third, work on yourself. Work on becoming strong, mentally, spiritually, and even physically. Understand that the alienating parent wants to break you, and break you in front of your child. Do not let that happen.

In the end, becoming a better you is the only way your child will come back. A child wants to be taken care of, wants to be secure, wants to be loved. She’s not going to get that from the unstable, needy parent. The child will eventually see, if she hasn’t already, that you are the rock in the family.

Fourth, whenever you do have time with your child, never bash the other parent. Remember, that is the kind of stuff the poor child has to deal with all day every day from the alienator. Just by not doing it, you set yourself apart as the mature, stable parent that the child needs and wants now more than ever.

Lastly, so long as your child is a minor, never give up the legal battle for as much time with your child as the law allows. I say “as the law allows” and not “as the court decides” because your rights to your child are a matter of law.

Guam law states: “It is legislative policy that children spend as much time with each of their parents as possible, when the parents are not living together.” 19 GCA §8404(8)

So even if you don’t have primary custody, you still have the lawful right to “as much time…as possible” with your child and you must fight for every minute of it, not just because it is your right, but because your child wants to be fought for.

In the words of my son: “Never give up, Dad. Never give up.” 

Tim Rohr has resided in Guam since 1987. He has raised a family of 11 children, owned several businesses, and most recently been active in local issues via his blog, JungleWatch.info, letters to local publications and occasional public appearances. He can be contacted at timrohr.guam@gmail.com. 

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Parental Alienation Awareness Day is April 25

April is a popular month for causes. At the top of the list are Autism Awareness, Sexual Assault Awareness, and Child Abuse Prevention.

While we are all familiar with the sort of child abuse and neglect we all too often see in the news, there is a not so well known type of child abuse which has its own awareness day on April 25: Parental Alienation (“PA”)

A paper published by the American Bar Association offers the following definitions of PA:

The following was written by Dennis Prager and was originally published on July 11, 2023 on Townhall.com. 

As a personal note, I am very familiar with the issue and it took me awhile to comprehend the incomprehensible: children with whom you previously enjoyed a normal and even loving relationship suddenly and inexplicably cut you out of their lives - and, as far as you know - forever. 

Most of what I've read and studied about the issue has been the product of psychologists, therapists, or people otherwise involved in this professionally. Mr. Prager is a social commentator, and in this column, he not only correctly calls it a "pandemic," but gives dead-on reasons for why it is a pandemic, a pandemic of cruelty. 

The following is his column copied in full from Prager's column.

A PANDEMIC OF CRUELTY

By Dennis Prager, July 11, 2023

There is a pandemic in the Western world — especially, but not only, in America — that few are talking about, let alone addressing.

This pandemic doesn’t actually kill people. But it does destroy people, ruin lives, crush families and cause permanent, debilitating pain — far more than have the vast majority of cases of COVID-19.

This pandemic consists of adult children who have decided never again to speak to one or both of their parents. The vast majority of these people were never sexually or physically abused. In fact, nearly all were loved by their parents.

So, then, why have these people decided to hurt their mother, their father or both in one of the worst ways possible?

There are three primary reasons.

The first is the ascent of the therapeutic mentality. Prior to the explosion of psychotherapy, people were governed by “shoulds.” Beginning in the 1960s, however, the therapeutic model replaced the moral model as the guide to one’s behavior. People who lived at that time will recall the phrase, “there are no shoulds.”

I will use a family story to illustrate this point. Despite the fact that his mother was a very difficult woman, my father called her every night, and every night she would yell at him. I heard the yelling because instead of holding it to his ear, my father would place the phone on the kitchen table while she ranted.

Had my father been born a generation later and gone to a therapist where he discussed his mother, if he said how much he dreaded calling his mother, the therapist would likely have led my father to believe there was no reason he should talk to her. And a culture that declared, “there are no shoulds,” would have concurred. The therapist would have declared my grandmother “toxic” and thereby given my father the green light to avoid calling her.

But my father lived in the age of shoulds, and he was a religious Jew who had been taught the Ten Commandments since childhood — the Fifth of which commands us, “Honor your father and mother.” Moreover, he believed, as did most Americans, that the Ten Commandments were given by God.

In our post-biblical age, there are no Ten Commandments. In fact, there are no commandments, period. That’s what “no shoulds” was all about — no Commandments. Instead, you do what you feel is right. If you don’t feel like talking to your mother or father, you don’t. My father, governed by the Ten Commandments and many other shoulds, called his mother every night despite the fact that he rarely felt like doing so.

Though the Bible commands us to love our neighbor, love the stranger and love God, there is no commandment to love our parents. On the other hand, there is no commandment to honor anyone except our parents.

A second reason for the Ignore-Parents (IP) pandemic is parental alienation. This is usually caused by one parent against the other during and/or after a divorce — frequently, though certainly not always, by the mother against the father. She is so angry at her husband or soon-to-be ex-husband that she has decided to hurt him in one of the worst possible ways — by convincing one or more of their children that their father is a terrible human being, unworthy of their love, respect and time. The children should therefore not only cease to love him but have nothing to do with him.

A third reason for the IP pandemic is ideological. In these instances, a spouse may be involved, but often it is the decision of the child. This is the newest reason for ignoring parents. I suspect few of us ever encountered parents whose children did not speak to them because of how the parent voted. As much as Democrats and other liberals hated Richard Nixon, it is hard to imagine a grown man or woman in the late ’60s or early ’70s refusing to speak to a parent because the parent voted for Nixon. But there are probably hundreds of thousands of parents who voted for Donald Trump who have a child who will not speak to them because of that vote — or because the parent holds some conservative value such as that marriage should be defined as the union of a man and a woman.

For the record, I am not speaking about myself. My two sons and two stepsons and I speak regularly, love one another and share values. But I know how lucky I am. I have written this column because I have spoken with an inordinate number of wonderful people who have a child or even children who do not speak with them.

Yes, there are times when a parent is so pathological or evil — or when it is the parent who has chosen to ignore a child — that communication is essentially impossible. But in general, the infliction of such pain on a parent is about as great an act of cruelty as most people will ever inflict on another human being. If there is a God who gave the Ten Commandments, these people will be judged accordingly. 

APRIL 25. PARENTAL ALIENATION AWARENESS DAY

By Tim Rohr

The following is an unpublished letter to the editor.

April is a busy month. It is Autism Awareness Month, Sexual Assault Awareness Month, Parkinson’s Awareness Month, and along with other “awareness-es” it’s also National Frog and Testicular Cancer Awareness Month. (Look it up.)

And within the month of April there are also national awareness “days.”

One of those days, April 25, according to the New Jersey Law Journal, is “Parental Alienation Awareness Day…” (See: End Parental Alienation Now, Law.com, April 23, 2018)

The Journal states that April 25 “is one day out of 365 on which public attention is drawn to this very important topic. Let us remember that the children being alienated from a parent, and the targeted parent, suffer every hour of every day of every year, and it is high time for something to be done to stop that.”

Never heard of “Parental Alienation Awareness Day?” No worries. You’re not alone. It’s hard to pick pet awareness days among so many others.

However, given that there are more than a few bewildered parents who do not understand why their once loving child now hates them, the NJ Law Journal’s technical description of the phenomenon is worth copying:

“Parental Alienation is most aptly defined as the condition that results from a parent or grandparent denouncing, with continuing, dedicated and pervasive expression of hostility toward or marginalizing the targeted (alienated) parent. The hostility expressed toward the targeted parent results in a child becoming hostile toward and rejecting the targeted parent without just cause. Some dedicated alienators go so far as to make false allegations of sexual abuse of a child by the targeted parent (or convince the child to make the allegations). This not only results in the child being weaponized’ against the other parent, but also drastically raises the stakes and costs of the targeted parent who is trying hard not to lose his or her child or children.”

It’s difficult to improve on the Journal’s article, so I’ll just add a few more quotes before by my own closing thought:

“The theft of a child’s affection by one parent…from the other parent occurs frighteningly often.

“…courts do not always spot alienation at its early stages, adequately penalize it when it occurs, save the children who are being victimized by an alienator, or correct the misbehavior of the alienating parent whether by coercion or other means.”

“The very first time a young child with a previously good relationship with a parent states that he or she no longer wants to stay overnight for some…inexplicable reason…warning bells should be sounding. A child who refuses to speak to a parent by telephone for no reason whatsoever, is a budding problem. A parent who refuses a child the freedom to talk to the other parent in privacy, is a major problem.”

“An alienating parent often has no fear of consequences.”

“A child who is being attacked by an alienator often perceives the targeted parent as being wicked, evil, disagreeable, abusive, hateful toward the alienating parent, or guilty of any number of other imaginary misdeeds. These false beliefs are inculcated by the alienating parent and are fed like so much poison to the impressionable child, often with tears or drama, to achieve the nefarious goal of marginalizing the targeted parent.”

“…even then a poisoned child not wanting to offend his or her alienator may say what pleases that parent and the judge will…not want to upset that youngster. (The truth is that the youngster who is repeating the alienator’s line likely wants to be “forced” to go with the other parent!)"

This last quote is where I’d like to end with my own thought.

The most important thing is for the targeted parent to not despair. Your despair will fuel the alienating or targeting parent since he or she is counting on you, the targeted parent, to self-destruct, before your child can discover the truth.

Instead, work on yourself. Become better instead of bitter. Whether your child returns to you or not is ultimately not in your control. But becoming better instead of bitter is. Meanwhile, never give up on your child...or on you.