In the dream, it is three in the morning. I am out walking again in the dead of winter. The moon shines silver as it rides high and distant and alone in the December sky. Its face is as hard and polished as a newly minted dime. There will be no solace from the moon tonight.
It’s freezing cold and the wind has picked up. It’s gnawing away at me right down to the bone. But I have nothing else to do and nowhere else to go. So I keep walking. Now I find myself alone on a broad and vacant boulevard. The traffic signals pulse red and yellow, fanning out for miles in every direction. This street is different from usual, however. I have this dream all the time and generally I wind up in some suburban Xeriscape or other where the lawns are perfect and the oversized tract homes are devoid of life. It’s not real. It’s an architect’s model, that’s all. A plasticine landscape of hard perfection and, ultimately, of lifelessness. Suburban America at the dawn of the new millennium. Tonight, the dream is different. I have passed far beyond the industrial districts, beyond the airport. I have crossed the river. I’ve come farther than ever in the past. I’m out on a prairie, a no man’s land of dirt, wind, and scrub brush. Uprooted plants cartwheel by me in the wind, lit up by the moon momentarily before vanishing into the darkness. But here’s the really strange part: To either side of me, I am walled in by the silhouettes of closely planted cypress tees. This is not a street that I can turn and walk away from.
***
I’ve been quite shaken up by the death of Richard Gardner. It’s taken me this long to organize my thoughts into a statement. I shouldn’t be surprised. I never met Dr. Gardner directly. We spoke one time briefly on the phone. Yet, when I first learned that he had died, I had a vague sense that the man who had saved my life had just died. That made no sense, I recall thinking quickly; too quickly. It took a while before the truth began to dawn on me. Richard Gardner spoke to me at a time in my life when I was seriously depressed and was considering suicide. I had recently lost my only child, my beloved son, to Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS). Even though I am a psychiatrist, I had never heard of PAS. All I knew was that my life had suddenly become a surrealistic nightmare. Suddenly, no one perceived the truth and everyone embraced lies.
The section that opens what I write here wasn’t, in fact, a dream I ever had. I’m a writer. It’s the remnant of a story I started to write that ultimately died. I held on to the scrap. So, it wasn’t a dream, but it came from the same unconscious that creates my dreams, so I asked myself what its symbolism might be. I’d had precisely this nightmarish and unreal sense of my life after they took my son from me, yet before I could fully comprehend that it was true, and I’d written dozens of poems and passages with the same desolate and vaguely sinister undercurrent.
I decided that the scrap might mean something and turned my attention to it. It goes without saying that I was depressed. That’s clear. I’d just been told in a seven-and-a-half-minute hearing that I could never have any contact with my son again for the rest of my life. My son had always loved me deeply. Now I beheld him in Court avoiding eye-contact with me and gazing off. His face was a wooden mask of cool indifference. I was depressed alright. The symbolism of the cypress trees was fairly obvious. But then I realized that they had another layer of meaning that was more complicated than death in any simple sense. I had been struck by the fact that the trees were so dark in the passage. In my mind’s eye, they were black. I realized that they symbolized judicial robes. They were the countless judges I had turned to in trust, all of whom had turned their backs on me.
The ominous column of dark cypress trees lining either side of the road ultimately symbolizes the backs of everyone I had formerly depended on—friends, colleagues, relatives. To my astonishment and horror I had watched them pronounce their verdicts one by one—guilty. My street was a prison without bars. No bars were needed. Everyone had turned their backs on me at the same time. The world itself had doomed me simply by turning his back. Who needed barbed wire fences and prison grates?
That is what had, in fact, occurred in my life. I was suicidal when the full horror of what was happening began to descend. I am not the only man or woman to have gone through this and I am fortunate to have survived. Some of us do not. A pivotal turning point arrived when I discovered the writings of Richard Gardner. They told me I was not alone. I had thought I was.
So, I realized that Richard Gardner did indeed help me, along with other elements, to hang on. He did help to save me from death. Nor did the rescue come during our brief phone call. What helped me to hang on and survive were his ideas. The truth is what saved me. This is something the cretins who have made such tasteless and sadistic remarks on the Net in the wake of Gardner’s death do not understand. Gardner discovered important truths. These hate-mongers can gloat if they choose to that he is dead, sure; but his ideas will endure and grow simply because they are true. When you’re a fascist, the truth can be a real bitch.
Fascists and tyrants have discovered this over and over for centuries. Nothing stops the truth. You can execute the man who speaks the truth, sure. You can send thugs to smash the printing presses. You can herd people up into stadiums that they will never leave alive. It doesn’t do any good. The truth continues to grow. They never seem to learn.
****
I am frequent contributor to publications and sites that advocate for the rights of target victims in contested custody battles during divorce. Richard Gardner was a beacon for me. His light ultimately refracted and led me in many directions. He helped me to grow in wisdom. But first he helped me to survive (no one who has been a target victim ever truly heals). I feel a need to say something that honors his spirit. I regret that it is belated in coming.
We tend to use the masculine pronoun when we speak of target victims in PAS. It’s understandable, I suppose. Most target victims are men. I worry, though, about our tacit acceptance of the expression, “men’s movement.” If this movement belongs to anyone, it is the children, not their warring parents. At the deepest level, PAS has absolutely nothing to do with gender. It’s about abuse of power and ultimately the complete corruption of one’s personal morality. It’s about greed, vengeance, narcissism, and hate. When it comes to these very human traits, I view both genders as equal. We’re equally bad, and it’s quite bad actually. Evil is dormant in all of us, like a seed. Hate groups and lawyers water the ground, but we give rise to the weed that sprouts from the seed. I ask you to understand and be patient with me if occasionally I get careless and slip into phrases that imply PAS is solely an affliction of men. It is not. I suspect that few people are as lonely and misunderstood, in fact, as the women who are bona fide victims of this scourge. If I appear to overlook that carelessly on occasion it not intentional. I do not believe that the best way to deal with very disturbed women who hate men, and the lawyers who pander to them, will be found in encouraging men, even those who have been victimized, to hate women.
Although innumerable sites and organizations that go generically by the title of “men’s movement,” may superficially seem similar, they are not all the same. The best are about far more than the preoccupations and peeves of men; the best they should be. All of us must deal with Parental Alienation Syndrome. If it were not for the terrible injustices now being imposed (yes, right now predominantly against men) by the family law courts, it is unlikely that there would be a "men's movement," or "father's movement."
I suspect, however, that terms such as these can mislead people. The pendulum could swing at any time. (If you are ever curious to know which way it is about to arc, just follow the lawyers you see running in that direction). PAS is not about gender. It’s about abuse of power, and ultimately the complete corruption of one’s personal morality. It’s about greed, vengeance, narcissism, and hate.
Still, I sometimes worry that people who are not familiar with the issues might get lulled into thinking of our concern as an issue of “men’s rights,” as an “ism” if you will (as in “political activism,” “masculism” versus “feminism,” etc.) I suspect that many people think of the men’s movement as comprised of “political” types who hurl invective and misleading statistics at their aggressive distaff opponents, who lob burning braziers back. They picture spoiled upper middle class Baby Boomers bickering about who does the housework and who leaves the lid up.
No! This involves the spiritual annihilation of a generation of children, our children. God help us if we who are concerned about this blight if we fail to get this fundamental point across. So far, by and large, we have failed. The hour is drawing dangerously late. Any person who plans to marry and raise a family should be aware of PAS and positively terrified of it. Anyone who cares about society’s survival should be gravely concerned. And yet many people still have never even heard of the term. PAS is the largest and most threatening epidemic in the western world that no one has ever heard of. It is not just a concern of the men’s movement. It’s the central overarching concern that drives that movement. And it should be everyone’s concern.
I believe that we who profess to speak for this movement do not appreciate this sufficiently. But we might never have grasped it at all had it not been for Richard Gardner.
Although I should have been aware of PAS three years ago because of my professional role, I was not. That is when I lost my retirement savings, my professional reputation, and for a period my will to live at all. It began as a harrowing divorce. It ended with me virtually demolished. Most of my money was stolen from me. My ex-wife committed felony perjury with impunity. I lost constitutional rights. I am remarried now and live in Canada. My conviction on bogus charges of "Domestic Violence" now imperil my attempt to immigrate. Still, I have no doubt that I could have recovered from all of these set-backs. What I will never remotely recover from is the sudden and irrevocable loss of my relationship to my only child. I am forbidden to see him, call him, write to him, or even send him a birthday card for the
remainder of my life. The legal ruling that severed me from my son is a permanent restraining order. It was issued in a seven minute proceeding. I was charged with no crime in the matter. Anyone in Colorado can seek and obtain a permanent order against an ex-spouse simply by stating to
a court clerk that she is afraid that a spouse might become "emotionally abusive." I say "anyone." In reality, they are virtually always issued to women and seldom to men.
That is how I fared. On the surface my ex-wife fared better. She got all of the money. For a time this was extremely important to her. Vengeance, too. Vengeance can be sweet, I suppose, and she sure got me. But I suspect she paid a price, which was selling her soul. I’ve watched these situations develop and explode for three years now. I think I know why. I think that the reason some Obsessed Alienators are like pit bulls who can never let go resides in their guilt. I think that deep down they know that what they are doing is terribly wrong. They could, of course, at such a juncture admit (if only to themselves), “I’ve gone too far.”
But I think that what these OA’s seem to have in common is their narcissism. They cannot stand to admit that, even believe that, they are ever wrong. When they sense this unconsciously the only option open to them is to demonize the target victim even more, heap further abuses on his head, and up the symbolic ante still higher. Then they can exclaim, “Just look at this monster! Now maybe you can see why I had no choice except to act as I have!” This is why we find some of these individuals still waging ferocious war with their ex’s ten years later. No one is left at the site of the massacre. Everyone left the killing ground a long time ago. But there she stands, alone in the darkened coliseum, the feminist avenger, flailing away at the air with her sword. In the end, I do not believe that my ex-wife came out ahead.
My son? I couldn’t really say. I have been cut off from all information about him for over three years. But I’ll ask you—how do you imagine he is doing?
I had never even heard of PAS until it was inflicted on me. Before I recovered from the shock of what was being done to me, I had been vilified as an “abuser.” The truth is that I have never raised a hand in anger against another person. I was not "emotionally abusive" to my ex-wife or son. I was not guilty of any of the soft and elusive legal sophistry now invoked when there is no evidence for actual violence-- "crimes'' such as 'behaving in a verbally hostile and sarcastic manner." I adored my son and he loved me. But even if I had been guilty of some component of these charges, would that justify taking away a man's children for the rest of his life?
No, my son was brainwashed. He was subverted into believing that he was afraid of me and wanted a restraining order against me after a month of relentless pressure from his mother and her lawyer. He had just turned twenty-one. Age technicalities in PAS are just that--technicalities. Children this old and older do succumb to it. But to make matters worse, my son had just begun to recover from a two year bout with severe bipolar depression of psychotic proportions. He inherited it from five successive generations on his mother's side. At the time his mother, her shark, and his clinical psychologist bombarded him with sophisticated propaganda and mind control techniques, he was still having occasional auditory hallucinations.
I was his primary caretaker for the last two years I was with him. When the malignancy of my ex-wife’s intentions began to become clear, a colleague sent an unsolicited letter to the courts urging them not to permit the permanent order to be allowed. I asked him not to send it. I had learned by then how corrupt the courts were and feared it might backfire. He told me he had to. His own ethics allowed him no choice in the matter. He feared for my son's life.
He did send the letter and stated that, in 1999 alone, I had single-handedly saved my son's life not once but twice. It's true. The judge read this letter while we were in session, crumpled it up in front of me, and tossed it to a corner of the desk. Later she claimed to have "lost" it.
I saw my son for the last time when I was dragged into a courtroom handcuffed and manacled to a chain. I had been thrown in jail on bogus charges of domestic violence. The conviction was later overturned, but this did nothing to improve my situation. My ex-wife burst out laughing when I was hauled out of the courtroom by two sheriff’s deputies after the order was granted. My son could not bring himself to look at me.
I quickly learned what every father in this situation learns. No one advocates for you. Colleagues and friends abandon you. Everyone, whether he is forthright about his real opinion or not, inwardly pronounces his true verdict—“guilty.”
“Well, David,” one particularly pompous colleague said to me. “I will grant that it’s hard to imagine you actually abusing them. But I myself have experienced the sting of your sarcasm and the rapier manner in which you use words when you argue your point on something.” As he spoke he leaned back in his Eames Chair and stared at the ceiling as though he was reading from a Teleprompter in Heaven. He puffed contentedly on his pipe, an image that would be a cliché when describing a psychiatrist were it not true. “Let me put it this way,” he said. “You must be guilty of something.”
“Why’s that?”
More puffs—smoke rising from the chimney of the Vatican. “This isn’t Soviet Russia, David. You must be guilty of something.”
You must be guilty of something… People chanted that like a mantra.
Yet, I must confess, until PAS happened to me, I suspect I would have behaved just like my colleagues did and vilified the accused “stalker,” or “emotional abuser,” or “verbal threat-maker.” Had it not been I…You must be guilty of something… Up to that point I had been the quintessential hawk when it came to men who "beat their wives." Men who committed Domestic Violence were the lowest kind of scum, in my view, and deserved no mercy.
Then I was one. The Courts said I was. It was only after losing my son that I encountered the works of Richard Gardner. At the time I did, I suspect that I was within weeks of killing myself. For a man the humiliation and helplessness one is subjected to are almost unbearable. Try spending thirty-six hours in jail. You’ll see what I mean. I adored my son. He was sick at the time. I had always believed that I had been put on earth to protect my children and I always did my best. I would gladly have taken a bullet for him. I begged God to beset me with bipolar disorder instead of my son. To feel so abjectly helpless at the worst possible time, to be forced to watch his destruction when I was bound and gagged…Yeah, I was suicidal all right. To those who are not familiar with PAS, all of this might seem to indicate some kind of serious psychiatric problem in me. Those who have gone through what I have will instantly understand. We all reach points where we feel that way.
In Tangled Up in Blue, Bob Dylan writes:
Then she opened up a book of poems
And handed it to me
Written by an Italian poet
From the thirteenth century.
And every one of them words rang true
And glowed like burnin' coal
Pourin' off of every page
Like it was written in my soul from me to you,
Tangled up in blue.
I cannot overstate the impact that Gardner's words had on me. For the first time in two years I was comprehended by someone. For the first time in two years I was believed. For the first time in two years I understood what was happening to me. I cannot honestly say that this was the beginning of my healing process. No one EVER heals from losing a child in this way. But it was the beginning of my restored determination to go on living. Many men never get that far.
I am a professional writer as well as a doctor. I have dedicated myself to writing as effectively as I can to advocate and advance this movement. My contribution will be a modest one, but my commitment is sincere. I stand, along with many others now, on the shoulders of Richard Gardner. He made it all possible. It was he who hoisted us high enough to see over the wall. Dr. Gardner has died. What he revealed to us, however, will not be repressed, as some obviously hope. A lot of us stood on Gardner’s shoulders whether we realize it or not. We have not praised him sufficiently or conferred upon him the status he is entitled to in my opinion. How can we expect politically motivated entities to take PAS seriously when we ourselves have been thus far so tepid in our own responses?
A man once wrote a letter to the Court in my son’s behalf. He said that I had saved my son's life. It’s true, but I only did what any father would do. I was blessed with knowledge that helped. That was sheer coincidence. Unfortunately, the American legal system is hopelessly corrupt (and will drag America under along with it unless people are stirred to protest, and very soon). I never saw my son again and it has now been over three years. I’m not unique. My case is run of the mill. It happens every day to hundreds of men and dozens of women. At the deepest level, PAS has absolutely nothing to do with gender. It’s about abuse of power, corruption of personal morality. It’s about greed, vengeance, narcissism, and hate.
Beyond that, however, as one person standing on my own, I need to say something at this point. Richard Gardner did save my life. His ideas (and his refusal to pipe down about them) has saved tens of thousands of lives. I don't think he set out to be a hero. Rather, I suspect that he was dragged kicking and screaming to that fate. Most heroes are. The thing of it is: he saw the truth and could not, would not, allow his integrity to be compromised.
What he began cannot be stopped and will not be stopped. I extend
my deepest condolences to Dr. Gardner's loved ones. I can tell you without fear of hyperbole—Dr Gardner saved my life. And today, after three years, I can also say that I am grateful that he did. For a long time, I was not. To others, I would say—there still is hope.
But our children are imperiled. We must carry on what Gardner started. And we’ve got to do better! Soon!
I grieve the passing of Richard A. Gardner. I do not have to grieve for the insights he has bestowed upon the world. They will not, as one lawyer publicly stated he “prays” will happen, die with him. They are here to stay. That’s the funny thing about truth. It really irks people who are corrupt, greedy, and hateful. It’s a damned nuisance—truth. Ask any hate monger. It’s less like a dove of peace, really, and more like a homely and hardy burrowing rodent. It always somehow survives. It burrows in and refuses to leave. It gets under the world’s skin. It becomes an irritant, and it doesn’t stop burning until the world is compelled to scratch. Ultimately this will happen. Just not in time for my son and me, that’s all.
No one should be surprised by the crap Gardner’s enemies are dredging
up. Just look at Nazi-like atrocity they have created—PAS. What would
you expect from such people? A trace of humanity? Richard Gardner
must have had to be a very courageous man for many years. I wonder
if we will now be able to summon the courage to face down these bullies
now. Because God help us all if we don’t.
David
E. Reiser, MD.
In 2000, David lost his only son to Parental Alienation Syndrome. "Before my divorce in 2000," he says, "I had never been charged with anything worse than a speeding ticket...They threw me in jail and dragged me into a courtroom handcuffed, weeping, and manacled to a chain. The proceeding required less than ten minutes. I never saw my son again... I'm no 'expert.' I'm just one more broken man. I hope to do something positive with what is left of me. My resume is one line long--I am a father who lost the most beloved person in his life--my son. I do what I can now, not because I'm noble, but because I have no choice. I try to do the right thing because I sense that this is my only hope. My ideals are all that, in the end, they couldn't take from me. I refuse to accept a world where hatred routinely prevails over love, and where the destruction of our children is viewed as simply the cost of doing business. I'm no saint. I'm dazed and terrified. I'm not sure what "God" even means, and I'm sure as hell no hero. But I will stand up to any legal system, hateful mob, or totalitarian regime whose code of ethics is built around cruelty, power, and lying; and whose only god is money."
