Motion For Change Of Parental Rights And Responsibility Custody: Fill & Download for Free

Well, you're certainly not the first man to be in this position, and my heart goes out to you. Almost universally, in every American state,a child born in a marriage is automatically (as you have found out) the child of the husband.I actually had the opposite heartache. Me and my baby's mom weren't married, my daughter needed a compatible liver transplant, the mom wouldn't allow it, and I had NO legal rights to request or force it because I was presumed NOT to be the father because I was NOT married. My daughter almost died after receiving an incompatible liver. Our laws make sense on paper, but you can look and say “oh that makes sense” but then there's the 7 or 8 percent of the time where situations are totally backwards:A guy gets cheated on and the state is like pay child support for your son, deadbeat. A child is in a life or death situation and the mother is going after a multi million dollar medical malpractice settlement. Sure, I could have donated but the mom would have to have agreed I was the father-and then I automatically would have been noticed in the settlement and gotten half the pain and suffering money.Sure, MOST of the time, it makes all the sense in the world to say, they're married, that's his kid, he has legal rights, and if the marriage ends, both rights and responsibilities. MOST of the time, a child born out of wedlock your going to say well sure the mother has sued no one for paternity, no man has proven he's the dad (I did Sue but the mother refused to comply with the court DNA test until she got her millions in another court) so therefore no man should have visitation or any other rights unless and until… and that also works great MOST of the time until you get a surgeon in a white coat standing there telling you we have no compatible liver, you've said you'll donate, we think it's her only best chance… and the mother prevents you with attorneys. Had been there since birth, VOLUNTARILY paid child support, and in a day (after the doctors accidentally sliced my daughter's liver in a surgery), everything changed. I had no actual legal rights.So, brother, I get you and I totally understand the feeling of anger and powerlessness. In my case, I was going to go up against a woman who had tons of money. Hiring an attorney wasn't going to be an option for me. I would never be able to match dollar for dollar in a war of attrition. But I cared about my kid and any mom who could make that decision needed to be kept in check. What would prevent her from, as the years go by, denying medical care to inherit daughter's part of the settlement ($4,000,000)? I was going to have to go to de facto law school, study my ass off at the local library, and become an attorney like my daughter's life depended on it, because it did. And that's exactly what I did! I also never lost, so I'm pretty well qualified to answer your question. They spent over $100,000 on their supposedly bulldog attorney. THE MAN NEVER BEAT ME IN A MOTION HEARING!! Not once, not ever. He had tons of clients. I just had one. There was no limit to the amount of time and preparedness I could devote to that one client. He was time limited and kept overlooking me because I was just a simpleton, a pro se non attorney. What foolish pretense! I literally had nothing to do for years other than study law and figure how to win this one case! He of course had to know what his client had done! How foolish to underestimate a father who watches all that at the hospital and listened to the ex Brag about getting rich when the child dies! It was a crucial miscalculation. I'm not nearly as dumb as I look ha ha ha…So here's the deal. You have a couple options. First of all, you could win the custody case outright in ANY state, take custody of the child and be like ok, cool, I'm raising my son. Of course, she would owe you child support. This is not a do it yourself legal project unless you're crazy like I'm crazy. But here's the strategy of this approach: Who's this not going to set well with? Both the real Father AND your ex wife, the mother, who will also be none too happy about paying child support. What this means is that in a period of days and weeks, not months and years, after you win custody, one or the both of them will sue you (and, in an amusing twist, if they aren't together anymore, file third party cross claims against each other while you sit back and laugh) and in doing this they will both HAVE TO allege you're not the father and they'll have to move to compel a DNA test and therefore nullify your parentage. Of course, when you're winning the custody case, you NEVER bring that up. The reason for this is going to depend on your jurisdiction how reversible the parentage is and since you didn't provide your state, I can't make 100% true statements because it's going to matter if you live in Virginia, Florida, or California. But the basic strategy would be to win a typical custody case, never mention you're not really the father, and either let your ex try to move to compel a DNA test in the confines of that case or go to round two. Let the people with an actual vested interest turn around and Sue to reverse this. (In a couple states, if I recall, you wouldn't have the standing to nullify but the biological father or other interested aka your ex, would. There's some backwards shit in some states.When you have two parties petitioning to invalidate your parentage, then it can be nullified. Your ex will probably be under legal advice not to mention the DNA when you win custody because her and her lawyer will both think she's going to **** you on child support. That's why this strategy ONLY works if you win. To do this way, you MUST win. That means if your ex is actually a decent human being aside from being a cheat-but she's an ok parent- it will be extremely difficult to exceed 50/50. However, I don't know anything about your ex wife other than she's a dishonest cheat. Is she a dishonest cheat with a nasty Crystal meth addiction who was once arrested for DUI with a minor child in the car? Now, we're talkin baseball. Point is this strategy can ONLY possibly work if your chance of winning outright is greater than 85%. Again, depending on the state, that may not matter because you may be able to lose AND then file and initiate a subsequent action to nullify on DNA. You may be able to have it both ways. I just don't know where you are.In SOME BUT NOT ALL states, you can file a petition yourself to quash false parentage via DNA in the context of martial infidelity. That is to say despite being married, they're are jurisdictions that DNA automatically overrides any presumed martial obligations. You run into problems in the Bible belt because they're can be a presumption that marriage trumps all because everyone fears Jesus and no one ever cheats, and anyway he forgives soon and that's your blessing and responsibility. There are some whack laws I've read, and precedent setting court decisions.The reason I didn't suggest this-petitioning to nullify your own paternity- first is because I don't know where you are and this remedy isn't available to you in every single US state. Ideally, this isn't a do it yourself legal project either. I don't know your financial situation and there are staggering differences between being in a Commonwealth state (VA,MA,PA,KY), being in the only state based on the FRENCH not the British judicial system (LA), or being in a very liberal state (WA, NY, CA), versus a republican or super Evangelical state (TX, MS, GA, WY). So there are a lot of moving parts here and variables that change everything.I've tried to kind of share my experience with you and offer some really outside the box legal strategies. Your next, best, and absolutely necessary move is go to a couple legal consultations- free 30 minutes at many family law practices. You'll be able to talk to a member of the bar (not an ad hoc pro per commando like myself ha ha) who is well versed in the nuances of your states laws for situations like yours. Take heart, this has happened millions of times. There's a lot of case law precedent for it. Fighting my case I would stumble upon these cases and occasionally read them since I had the exact same problem only 180 degrees total opposite in reverse. That's how I know there are pretty major variances between the states. But take heart: This has been adjudicated literally everywhere by now so you aren't going to be the poor SOB who was on multiple appeals to be the guy that created your states disposition on this. There is some law, both statutory and case law that governs your exact situation by 2019, no matter where you live.My heart goes out to you and I'll say a prayer for you tonight. Divorce is hard enough by itself. Been there too.But keep your head about you and make cold, calculating legal decisions, and please heed my advice on getting some consultations with guys and girls who know exactly what your state does, here. As a point of encouragement for you, this child that the doctors said would not survive eight years ago, and the well funded mother who would never run out of attorney money are both doing well. My daughter enjoys staying with me and we had a great time at the playground, then Jersey Mike's yesterday. I didn't win full custody, but I won a damn lot of it. Since the days of the botched transplant and such, I have represented myself repeatedly. Multiple restraining order efforts (have won in both a standard Federal rules of civil procedure state-Florida AND a Commonwealth state-Virginia!) I have successfully defensed criminal charges (two felonies-Florida, actual outcome guilty of six misdemeanors, no additional jail time, was facing ten years, and a West Virginia misdemeanors totally dismissed) and where this was all born was of necessity.I tell you this to encourage you thus: Do not ever believe you can't win. I'm not going to tell you that you're not in a crap legal position. You are. How crap it is depends on what state you live in. However, for a man who never went to law school, I think you can agree that by any standards, my story is pretty incredible. It would have been easy to listen to the countless voices: Oh, you're screwed, just walk away, she won't live anyway, oh dude you're gonna get ten years, forget it, take the prosecutor 3 year plea. All the while I never gave up. I damn sure wasn't going to plea to a crime I didn't-and couldn't have possibly- committed. And I wasn't writing a sick child off like a loss carry forward in an LLC.I'll leave you with what my motto was that carries me through the hardest times of my personal war. It's from US General Patton. Here's the quote: “You are not defeated until you admit it.”So it is, my brother! So it is!Godspeed,Eric E. Moore, II.

I’m a fan of M. Scott Peck, especially his book, “People of the Lie.” In it he describes a case of parents with malignant narcissism. Read if you dare!The case of Bobby and his parentsIt was February in the middle of my first year of psychiatric training. I was working on the inpatient service. Bobby, a fifteen-year- old boy, had been admitted the night before from the emergency room with a diagnosis of depression. Before seeing Bobby for the first time I read the note written in his chart by the admitting psychiatrist:Bobby's older brother, Stuart, 16, committed suicide this past June, shooting himself in the head with his .22 caliber rifle. Bobby initially seemed to handle his only sibling's death rather well: But from the beginning of school in September, his academic performance has been poor. Once a B student, he is now failing all his courses. By Thanksgiving he had become obviously depressed. HIS parents, who seem very concerned, tried to talk to him, but he has become more and more uncommunicative particularly since Christmas. Although there is no previous history of antisocial behavior, yesterday Bobby stole a car by himself, crashed it (he had never driven before), and was apprehended by the police. His court date is set for March 24th. Because of his age he was released into his parents' custody, and they were advised to seek immediate psychiatric evaluation for him.The aide brought Bobby into my office. He had that typical body type of fifteen-year-old boys who have just undergone their early adolescent growth spurt: long, spindly arms and legs, like sticks, and a skinny torso that had not yet begun to fill out. His badly fitting clothes were nondescript. His slightly long, unwashed hair fell forward over his eyes so that it was difficult to see his face, particularly as he kept his gaze riveted on the floor. I shook his limp hand and motioned him to sit down. "I'm Dr. Peck, Bobby," I said. "I'm going to be your doctor. How are you feeling?"Bobby did not answer. He simply sat staring at the floor."Did you have a good night's sleep?" I asked."Okay, I guess," Bobby mumbled. He started picking at a small sore on the back of his hand. I noticed that there were a number of such sores on both his forearms and hands."Are you nervous being here in the hospital?"No answer. Bobby was really digging into that sore. Inwardly I winced at the damage he was doing to his flesh. "Pretty much everyone's nervous when they first come to the hospital," I commented, "but you'll find that it's a safe place. Can you tell me how you happened to come here?""My parents brought me.""Why did they do that?""Because I stole a car and the police said I had to come here.""I don't think the police said you had to come to the hospital," I explained. "They just wanted you to 'see a doctor. Then the doctor who saw you last night thought you were so depressed, it would be better for you to be in the hospital. How did you happen to steal the car?""I don't know.""It's a pretty scary thing to steal a car, especially when you're alone and when you're not used to driving and don't even have a driver's license. Something very strong had to be pushing you to do it. Do you know what that something was?"No answer. I didn't really expect one. Fifteen-year-old boys who are in trouble and seeing a psychiatrist for the first time aren't likely to be very verbal—particularly when they're depressed, and Bobby was clearly very depressed. By this time I had had a chance to catch several quick glimpses of his face when he inadvertently raised his gaze from the floor. It was dull, expressionless. There was no life in his eyes or mouth. It was the kind of face I had seen in the movies of concentration camp survivors or victims of natural disasters who had seen their homes destroyed and their families wiped out: dazed, apathetic, hopeless."Do you feel sad?" I asked."I don't know."Probably he didn't, I thought. Young adolescents are just beginning to learn how to identify their feelings. The stronger the feelings, the more overwhelmed they Will be by them and the less able to name them. "I suspect you have some very good reasons to feel sad," I told him. "I know that your brother, Stuart, committed suicide last summer. Were you close to him?""Yes.""Tell me about the two of you.""There's nothing to tell.""His death must have made you hurt and confused," I said.No reaction. Except that maybe he dug a little deeper into one of the sores on his forearm. He was clearly not able to talk yet in this first session about his brother's suicide. I decided to drop the issue for the present. "How about your parents?" I asked. "What can you tell me about them?""They're good to me.""That's nice. How are they good to you?""They drive me to scout meetings.""Yes, that's good," I commented. "Of course that's the kind of thing parents are supposed to do when they can. How do you get along with them?""Okay.""No problems?""Sometimes I'm mean to them.""Oh, like how?""I hurt them.""How do you hurt them, Bobby?" I asked."Like when I stole the car, that hurt them," Bobby said, not with triumph but with a dreary, hopeless heaviness."Do you think maybe that's why you stole the car—to hurt them?""No.""I guess you didn't want to hurt them. Can you think of any other ways you've hurt your parents?"Bobby didn't answer. After a long pause I said, "Well?""I just know I hurt them.""But how do you know?" I asked."I don't know.""Do they punish you?""No, they're good to me.""Then how do you know you hurt them?""They yell at me.""Oh? What are some of the things they yell at you for?""I don't know."Bobby was feverishly picking at his sores now and his head had drooped as far as it would go. I felt it would be best if I steered my questions to more neutral subjects. Perhaps then he would open up a bit more and we could begin developing a relationship. "Do you have any pets at home?" I asked."A dog.""What kind of dog?""A German shepherd.""What's his name?""Her name," Bobby corrected me. "Inge.""That sounds like a German name.""Yes.""A German name for a German shepherd," I commented, hoping somehow to get out of my interrogational role. "Do you and Inge do a lot together?""No.""Do you take care of her?""Yes.""But you don't seem very enthusiastic about her.""She's my father's dog.""Oh—but you still have to take care of her?""Yes.""That doesn't seem quite fair. Does it make you angry?""No.""Do you have a pet of your own?""No."We clearly weren't getting very far on the topic of pets, so I decided to switch to another topic, which often elicits some enthusiasm from young people. "It's not long since Christmas," I said. "What did you get for Christmas?""Nothing much.""Your parents must have given you something. What did they give you?""A gun.""A gun?" I repeated stupidly."Yes.""What kind of gun?" I asked slowly."A twenty-two.""A twenty-two pistol?""No, a twenty-two rifle."There was a long moment of silence. I felt as if I had lost my bearings. I wanted to stop the interview. I wanted to go home. Finally I pushed myself to say what had to be said. "I understand that it was with a twenty-two rifle that your brother killed himself.""Yes.""Was that what you asked for for Christmas?""No.""What did you ask for?""A tennis racket.""But you got the gun instead.""Yes.""How did you feel, getting the same kind of gun that your brother had?""It wasn't the same kind of gun."I began to feel better. Maybe I was just confused. "I'm sorry," I said. "I thought they were the same kind of gun.""It wasn't the same kind of gun," Bobby replied. "It was the gun.""The gun?""Yes.""You mean, it was your brother's gun?" I wanted to go home very badly now."Yes.""You mean your parents gave you your brother's gun for Christmas, the one he shot himself with?""Yes.""How did it make you feel getting your brother's gun for Christmas?" I asked."I don't know."I almost regretted the question. How could he know? How could he answer such a thing? I looked at him. There had been no change in his appearance as we had talked about the gun. He had continued to pick away at his sores. Otherwise it was as if he were already dead—dull-eyed, listless, apathetic to the point of lifelessness, beyond terror. "No, I don't expect you could know," I said. "Tell me, do you ever see your grandparents?""No, they live in South Dakota.""Do you have any relatives that you see?""Some.""Any that you like?""I like my aunt Helen."I thought perhaps I detected a faint sign of enthusiasm in his reply. "Would you like it if your aunt Helen came to visit you here while you're in the hospital?" I asked."She lives quite far away.""But if she came anyway?""If she wanted to." Again I felt in him the faintest glimmer of hope—and in myself. I would be getting in touch with Aunt Helen. Now I had to end the interview. I couldn't tolerate any more. I told Bobby about the hospital routines and explained that I would see him the next day, that the nurses would be watching him quite closely and that they'd give him a sleeping pill at bedtime. Then I took him back to the nurses' station. After writing his orders I walked out of the building into the courtyard. It was snowing. I was glad of that. I just let it snow on me for a few minutes. Then I went back to my office and became very busy with dull, routine paper work. I was glad of that also.The next day I saw Bobby's parents. They were, they told me, hard-working people. He was a tool-and-die maker, an expert machinist who took pride in the great precision of his craft. She had a job as a secretary in an insurance company, and took pride in the neatness of their home. They went to the Lutheran church every Sunday. He drank beer in moderation on the weekends. She belonged to a Thursday-night women's bowling league. Of average stature, neither handsome nor ugly, they were the upper crust of the blue-collar class—quiet, orderly, solid. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the tragedy that had befallen them. First Stuart and now Bobby."I've cried myself out, Doctor," the mother said."Stuart's suicide was a surprise to you?" I asked."Totally. A complete shock," the father answered. "He was such a well-adjusted boy. He did well in school. He was into scouting. He liked to hunt woodchucks in the fields behind the house. He was a quiet boy, but everyone liked him.""Had he seemed depressed before he killed himself?""No, not at all. He seemed just like his old self. Of course, he was quiet and didn't tell us much of what was on his mind.""Did he leave a note?""No.""Have any of your relatives on either side had a mental illness or serious depression or killed themselves?""Nobody in my family," the father responded. "My parents emigrated from Germany, so I have quite a few relatives over there I don't know much about, and I can't tell you about them.""My grandmother became senile and had to be put in a hospital, but no one else had any mental difficulty," the mother added. "Certainly no one committed suicide. Oh, Doctor, you don't think that there's any chance that Bobby might…might also do something to himself, do you?""Yes," I replied. "I think there's a very significant chance.""Oh God, I don't. think I could bear it," the mother wailed softly. "Does this sort of thing—I mean, hurting yourself—does it run in families?""Definitely. Statistically, the highest risk of suicide exists in people who have a brother or sister who's committed suicide.""Oh God," the mother wailed again. "You mean Bobby might really do it too?""You hadn't thought of Bobby being in danger?" I asked."No, not until now," the father replied."But I understand that Bobby's been depressed for some time," I remarked. "Didn't that worry you?""Well, it worried us, of course," the father responded. "But we thought it was natural, what with his brother's death and all. We thought he'd get over it in time.""You didn't think of taking him to see someone like a psychiatrist?" I continued."No, of course not," the father replied again, this time with an edge of annoyance. "We told you we thought he would get over it. We had no idea that it might be this serious.""I understand that Bobby's grades have gone way down in school," I remarked."Yes. It's a shame," the mother responded. "He used to be such a good student.""The school must have been a bit concerned about him," I commented. "Did they get in touch with you about the problem?"The mother looked slightly uncomfortable. "Yes, they did. And of course I was concerned, too. I even took time off from my job to go in for a conference.""I'd like to have your permission for me to communicate with the school about Bobby if it seems necessary. It might be quite helpful.""Of course.""In that conference you had," I asked, "did anyone from the school suggest that Bobby see a psychiatrist?""No," the mother answered. She seemed to have so rapidly regained her composure, I wasn't sure she'd ever lost it. "They did suggest he might get some counseling. But not a psychiatrist. Of course if they had suggested a psychiatrist, we would have done something about it.""Yes. Then we would have known it was something serious," the father added. "But because they said counseling, we thought they were just concerned about his grades. Not that we weren't concerned about his grades too. But we've never been ones to push the children unless we had to. It's not good to push children too hard, is it, Doctor?""I'm not sure that taking Bobby to a counselor would have been the same as pushing him," I commented."Well, that's another thing, Doctor," the mother continued, more on the offensive than the defensive. "It's not that easy for us to take Bobby here or there during weekdays. We're both working people, you know. And these counseling people, they don't work on weekends. We can't be just taking off from our jobs every day. We've got a living to make, you know."It didn't seem as if it would be fruitful for me to engage Bobby's parents in an argument over whether they could or could not have discovered available counseling services in the evenings or on weekends. I decided to raise the issue of Aunt Helen. "You know," I said, "it's possible that my supervisors and I may decide that Bobby will need more than a brief hospitalization—that he may need a complete change of scene for a good while. Do you have any relatives with whom he might stay?""I'm afraid not," the father responded immediately. "I don't think any of them would be interested in having an adolescent boy on their hands. They've all got their lives to live.""Bobby mentioned to me his aunt Helen," I suggested. "Perhaps she might be willing to take him."The mother jumped in. "Did Bobby tell you he doesn't want to live with us?" she demanded."No, we haven't even talked about the subject yet," I replied. "I'm only seeing what all the options are. Who is Aunt Helen?""She's my sister," the mother answered. "But she'd be out of the question. She lives at least several hundred miles away."That's not far," I responded. "And I'm thinking in terms of a change of scene for Bobby. That distance might be just right. It's close enough so that he could visit you but far enough so that he'd be away from where his brother committed suicide and perhaps away from some of the other pressures that he's experiencing.""I just don't think it would work out," the mother said."Oh?""Well, Helen and I aren't close. No, not close at all.""Why is that?""We've just never gotten along well together. She's stuck up, that's what she is. Although what she's got to be so stuck up about, I don't know. All she is is a cleaning lady. She and her husband—he's not very bright, you know—all they have is a little house-cleaning service. I don't know what makes them think they can go around acting superior all the time.""I can understand that you and she don't get on too well together," I acknowledged. "Are there any other relatives with whom it would be better for Bobby to live?""No.""Even though you don't like your sister, Bobby seems to have some positive feeling for her, and that's important.""Look, Doctor," the father interjected, "I don't know what you're insinuating. You're asking all these questions like you were a policeman or something. We haven't done anything wrong. You don't have any right to take a boy from his parents, if that's what you're thinking of. We've worked hard for that boy. We've been good parents."My stomach was feeling queasier moment by moment. "I'm concerned about the Christmas present you gave Bobby," I said."Christmas present?" The parents seemed confused."Yes. I understand you gave him a gun.""That's right.""Was that what he asked for?""How should I know what he asked for?" the father demanded belligerently. Then immediately his manner turned plaintive. "I can't remember what he asked for. A lot's happened to us, you know. This has been a difficult year for us.""I can believe it has been," I said, "but why did you give him a gun?""Why? Why not? It's a good present for a boy his age. Most boys his age would give their eyeteeth for a gun.""I should think," I said slowly, "that since your only other child has killed himself with a gun that you wouldn't feel so kindly toward guns.""You're one of these antigun people, are you?" the father asked me, faintly belligerent again. "Well, that's all right. You can be that way. I'm no gun nut myself, but it does seem to me that guns aren't the problem; it's the people who use them.""To an extent, I agree with you," I said. "Stuart didn't kill himself simply because he had a gun. There must have been some other reason more important. Do you know what that reason might have been?""No. We've already told you we didn't even know that Stuart was depressed.""That's right. Stuart was depressed. People don't commit suicide unless they're depressed. Since you didn't know Stuart was depressed, there was perhaps no reason for you to worry about him having a gun. But you did know Bobby was depressed. You knew he was depressed well before Christmas, well before you gave him the gun.""Please, Doctor, you don't seem to understand," the mother said ingratiatingly, taking over from her husband. "We really didn't know it was this serious. We just thought he was upset over his brother.""So you gave him his brother's suicide weapon. Not any gun. That particular gun."The father took the lead again. "We couldn't afford to get him a new gun. I don't know why you're picking on us. We gave him the best present we could. Money doesn't grow on trees, you know. We're just ordinary working people. We could have sold the gun and made money. But we didn't. We kept it so we could give Bobby a good present.""Did you think how that present might seem to Bobby?" I asked."What do you mean?""I mean that giving him his brother's suicide weapon was like telling him to walk in his brother's shoes, like telling him to go out and kill himself too.""We didn't tell him anything of the sort.""Of course not. But did you think that it might possibly seem that way to Bobby?""No, we didn't think about that. We're not educated people like you. We haven't been to college and learned all kinds of fancy ways of thinking. We're just simple working people. We can't be expected to think of all these things.""Perhaps not," I said. "But that's what worries me. Because these things need to be thought of."We stared at each other for a long moment. How did they feel, I wondered. Certainly they didn't seem to feel guilty.Angry? Frightened? Victimized? I didn't know. I didn't feel any empathy for them. I only knew how I felt. I felt repelled by them. And I felt very tired."I would like you to sign permission for me to communicate with your sister Helen about Bobby and his situation." I said, turning to the mother. "And yours also," turning back to the father."Well, you'll not have mine," he said. "I'll not have you taking this out of the family, you acting so superior, like you're some kind of judge or something.""To the contrary," I explained with cold rationality. "What I am trying to do is my best to keep it in the family as far as possible. Right now you and Bobby and I are the only people involved. I feel it is necessary to involve Bobby's aunt, at least to the extent necessary to find out if she can be of help. If you tie my hands in doing so, then I will have to discuss the issues thoroughly with my supervisors. I suspect we would conclude we have an obligation to refer Bobby's case to the State Childrens' Protective Agency. If we do that, then you'll have a real judge on your hands. We may have to do it anyway. It seems to me, however, if she is able to help, that approaching Helen is a way that we can avoid notifying the state. But it's up to you. It's completely your choice whether you want to give me permission to communicate with Helen.""Oh, my husband's just being silly, Doctor," Bobby's mother exclaimed with a gay, charming smile. "It's just been very upsetting to him to have to see our son in a mental hospital, and we're not used to talking to highly educated people like yourself. Of course we'll sign permission. I have no objection whatsoever to my sister being involved. We want to do whatever we can to help. All we care about is what's best for Bobby."They signed permission and left. That night my wife and I went to a staff party. I drank a bit more than I ordinarily do.The next day I got in touch with Aunt Helen. She and her husband came to see me right away. They understood the situation quickly and seemed quite caring. They too were working people but were willing to have Bobby live with them as long as his psychiatric care could be paid for. Fortunately, through their employment Bobby's parents had insurance coverage with unusually good psychiatric benefits. I contacted a most competent psychiatrist in Helen's town, who agreed to take on Bobby's case for long-term outpatient psychotherapy. Bobby himself had no understanding of why it was necessary for him to live with his aunt and uncle, and I didn't feel he was ready to deal with any real explanation. I simply told him it would be better for him that way.Within a couple of days Bobby was quite amenable to the change. Indeed, he improved rapidly with several visits from Helen, the prospect of a new living situation, and the care he received from the aides and nurses. By the time he was discharged to Helen's care, three weeks after his admission to the hospital, the sores on his arms and hands were only scars, and he was able to joke with the staff. Six months later I heard from Helen that he seemed to be doing well and that his grades had come up again. From his psychiatrist I heard that he had developed a trusting therapeutic relationship but was only barely beginning to approach facing the psychological reality of his parents and their treatment of him. After that I had no more follow-up. As to Bobby's parents, I saw them only twice more after that initial meeting, and then only for a couple of minutes each time, while Bobby was still in the hospital. That was all that seemed necessary.Whenever a child is brought for psychiatric treatment, it is customary to refer to her or him as the "identified patient." By this term we psychotherapists mean that the parents—or other identifiers—have labeled the child as a patient—namely, someone who has something wrong and is in need of treatment. The reason we use the term is that we have learned to become skeptical of the validity of this identification process. More often than not, as we proceed with the evaluation of the problem, we discover that the source of the problem lies not in the child but rather in his or her parents, family, school, or society. Put most simply, we usually find that the child is not as sick as its parents. Although the parents have identified the child as the one requiring correction, it is usually they, the identifiers, who are themselves most in need of correction. They are the ones who should be the patients.This was exemplified in the case of Bobby. Although he was seriously depressed and desperately in need of help, the source, the cause of his depression, lay not in him but in his parents' behavior toward him. Although depressed, there was nothing sick about his depression. Any fifteen-year-old boy would have been depressed in his circumstances. The essential sickness of the situation lay not in his depression but in the family environment to which his depression was a natural enough response.To children—even adolescents—their parents are like gods. The way their parents do things seems the way they should be done. Children are seldom able to objectively compare their parents to other parents. They are not able to make realistic assessments of their parents' behavior. Treated badly by its parents, a child will usually assume that it is bad. If treated as an ugly, stupid second-class citizen, it will grow up with an image of itself as ugly, stupid and second-class. Raised without love, children come to believe themselves unlovable. We may express this as a general law of child development: Whenever there is a major deficit in parental love, the child will, in all likelihood, respond to that deficit by assuming itself to be the cause of the deficit, thereby developing an unrealistically negative self-image.Bobby, when he first came to the hospital, was literally gouging holes in himself, destroying the surface of himself piece by piece. It was as if he felt there was something bad, something evil, inside him underneath the surface of his skin, and he was digging at himself in order to get it out. Why?If it happens that someone close to us commits suicide, our first response after the initial shock—if we are normally human, with a normal human conscience—will be to wonder what we did wrong. So it must have been for Bobby. In the days immediately following Stuart's death he would have remembered all manner of little incidents: that only a week before he had called his brother a stupid slob; that a month before he had kicked him in the midst of a fight; that when Stuart picked on him, he often wished that his brother would somehow be removed from the face of the earth. Bobby felt responsible, at least to some degree, for Stuart's death.What should have happened at this point—and what would have happened in a healthy home—would have been for his parents to begin reassuring him. They should have talked with him about Stuart's suicide. They should have explained that even though they themselves did not realize it, Stuart must have been mentally ill. They should have told him that people don't commit suicide because of everyday squabbles or sibling rivalry. They ought to have said' that if anyone was responsible, it was they, the parents, the ones who had had the biggest influence on Stuart's life. But as far as I could ascertain, Bobby had been given none of this reassurance.When the reassurance he needed was not forthcoming, Bobby became visibly depressed. His grades fell. At this point his parents should have rectified the situation or, lacking the insight to do so themselves, should have sought professional help. But they failed to do so, despite its actually having been suggested to them by the school. It was likely that Bobby even interpreted the lack of attention his depression was receiving as a confirmation of his guilt. Of course no one was concerned about his depression, he felt; he deserved it. He deserved to feel miserable. It was appropriate that he should feel guilty.Consequently by Christmas Bobby was already judging himself to be an evil criminal. Then, unsolicited, he was given his brother's "murder" weapon. How was he to understand the meaning of this "gift"? Was he to think: My parents are evil people, and out of their evil., desire my destruction, just as they probably destroyed my brother? Hardly. Nor could he, even with his fifteen-year-old mind, think to himself: My parents gave me the gun out of a mixture of laziness, thoughtlessness, and cheapness. So they don't love me very well—so what? Since he already believed himself to be evil and lacked the maturity to see his parents with any clarity, there was but one interpretation open to him: to believe the gun an appropriate message telling him: "Take your brother's suicide weapon and do likewise. You deserve to die."Fortunately Bobby did not immediately do likewise. He chose what was probably his only other psychological option: to publicly label himself a criminal so that he might be punished for his evil and society might be protected from him by means of his imprisonment. He stole a car. In a very real sense he stole it that he might live.All this has been supposition. I had no way of knowing precisely what had occurred in Bobby's mind. First of all, adolescents are the most private people. They are not apt to confide the inner workings of their minds to anyone, much less a strange, frightening white-coated adult. But even if he had been willing and able to confide in me, Bobby still would not have been able to tell me such things, for his own awareness of them would have been dim indeed. When we are adults, the greater part of our "thought life" proceeds on an unconscious level. For children and young adolescents, almost all mental activity is unconscious. They feel, they conclude, and they act with precious little awareness of what they are about. So we must deduce from their behavior what is going on. Yet we have learned enough to know that such deductions can be remarkably accurate.From such deductions we can arrive at another law of child development, this one specific to the problem of evil: When a child is grossly confronted by significant evil in its parents, it will most likely misinterpret the situation and believe that the evil resides in itself.When confronted by evil, the wisest and most secure adult will usually experience confusion. Imagine, then, what it must be like for a naive child who encounters evil in the ones it most loves and upon whom it depends. Add to this the fact that evil people, refusing to acknowledge their own failures, actually desire to project their evil onto others, and it is no wonder that children will misinterpret the process by hating themselves. And no wonder that Bobby was gouging holes in himself.We can see, then, that Bobby, the identified patient, was not himself so much sick as he was responding, in the way that most children would, 'in a predictable fashion, to the peculiar, evil "sickness" of his parents. Although identified as the one who had something wrong with him, the locus of evil in the total situation lay not in him but elsewhere. This is why his most immediate need was not so much for treatment as for protection. Real treatment would come later, and would be long and difficult, as it always is for the reversal of a self-image that does not correspond to reality.Let us turn now from the identified patient to the parents, the true source of the problem. Appropriately, they should have been formally identified as the sick ones. They should have been the ones to receive treatment. Yet they did not. Why not? There are three reasons. The first, and perhaps most compelling, is that they did not want it. To receive treatment one must want it, at least on some level. And to want it one must consider oneself to be in need of it. One must, at least on some level, acknowledge his or her imperfection. There are an enormous number of people in this world with serious and identifiable psychiatric problems who, in a psychiatrist's eyes, are quite desperately in need of treatment but who fail to recognize this need. So they don't get treatment, even when it is offered on a silver platter. Not all such people are evil. In fact, the vast majority are not. But it is into this category of persons most intensely resistant to psychiatric treatment that the thoroughly evil fall.Bobby's parents gave many indications that they would have rejected any type of therapy I might have offered them. They did not even pretend to demonstrate any guilt over Stuart's suicide. They reacted only with rationalization and belligerence to my intimations that they had been remiss in not earlier seeking professional help for Bobby and that their judgment had been poor, at best, in their choice of his Christmas present. Although I sensed in them no genuine desire to care for Bobby, the idea that it would be better for him to live elsewhere was anathema to them because of its implied criticism of their ability as parents. Rather than acknowledging any deficit, they refused to assume any blame on the grounds that they were "working people."Still, I might at least have offered them therapy. Just because in all probability they would have rejected the offer, this was insufficient reason not to make it—not to at least make the attempt to help them grow toward understanding and compassion. But I sensed that even if by some miracle they had been willing to undergo psychotherapy, in their case it would have failed.It is a sad state of affairs, but the fact of the matter is that the healthiest people—the most honest, whose patterns of thinking are least distorted—are the very ones easiest to treat with psychotherapy and most likely to benefit from it. Conversely, the sicker the patients—the more dishonest in their behavior and distorted in their thinking—the less able we are to help them with any degree of success. When they are very distorted and dishonest, it seems impossible. Among themselves therapists will not infrequently refer to a patient's psychopathology as being "overwhelming." We mean this literally. We literally feel overwhelmed by the labyrinthine mass of lies and twisted motives and distorted communication into which we will be drawn if we attempt to work with such people in the intimate relationship of psychotherapy. We feel, usually quite accurately, that not only will we fail in our attempts to pull them out of the morass of their sickness but that we may also be pulled down into it ourselves. We are too weak to help such patients—too blind to see an end to the twisted corridors into which we will be led, too small to maintain our love in the face of their hatred. This was the case in dealing with Bobby's parents. I felt overwhelmed by the sickness I sensed in them. Not only would they likely reject any offer I made to help them but I also knew I lacked the power to succeed in any attempt at healing.There is one other reason I didn't try to work with Bobby's parents. I simply didn't like them. It was even more than that; they revolted me. To help people in psychotherapy it is necessary to have at least a germ of positive feeling for them, a touch of sympathy for their predicaments, a smidgen of empathy for their sufferings, a certain regard for their personhood and hope for their potentials as human beings. I didn't feel these things. I could not envision sitting with Bobby's parents hour after hour, week after week, month after month, dedicating myself to their care. To the contrary, I could hardly stand being in the same room with them. I felt unclean in their presence. I couldn't get them out of my office fast enough. From time to time I will attempt to work with someone whose case I suspect to be hopeless on the off chance that my judgment is wrong, and for the learning value to me, if nothing else. But not Bobby's parents. Not only would they have rejected my therapy; I rejected them.”I myself have been in preciously few interactions with malignant narcissists. I can though, as an Atheist, their presence has nearly made me a man of religion, for their manner is evil, and evil is the business of religion.

This is a great question. Since there is a court order that has specified child support arrangements, I am sure there is also a custody order. Getting the order modified is very simple. All your husband needs to do is put in for a modification of the custody order and child support order. He can do both at the same time and, if he is the parent who has been providing care, the court should order a change in custody and change in child support after a brief hearing. This is a very routine issue and happens very often. Custody can be a fluid thing and can change over time.Your husband will not be able to press charges; not seeing your child is NOT a criminal matter! It is a civil matter! Once you open the case to revisit the custody and child support issue, your husband’s ex wife must be notified. If your husband and his former wife came to an agreement, she may seek to take the children back right away, which she will be able to do if she has a current custody order in her possession. I STRONGLY encourage you to talk to your husband and ask him what HE wants to do before YOU do anything! Often, men have reasons for giving an ex-wife leeway and it is usually because they care about what happens to her and want to make sure she is OK. The new wife usually has a different agenda, so I encourage you to tread softly and COMMUNICATE with your spouse and then honor HIS wishes! If he is unmotivated to take his ex-wife back to court, then you should make your peace with that or move on.He can consult a local attorney where in his jurisdiction, but your husband truly does not need an attorney in a case like this. He just needs to put together a proper motion and file it with the clerk and then go to court and ask for the change since he already has custody now.Please remember to keep the needs of the child first!