In this episode, Andrew and Barbara talk with Dawn McCarty, who was kidnapped by her own mother at age four and reunited with her father decades later, about her story and family court reform.
Note: This podcast was originally hosted on Barbara La Pointe’s website, which has since gone offline. I’ve reposted the episodes here so people still have access to the materials.
Transcript
Andrew Folkler: Welcome, everyone, to another episode of Broken Families, where we host conversations on divorce, parental alienation, and high-conflict relationships. My name is Andrew Folkler.
Barbara La Pointe: And I’m Barbara La Pointe. Today, we are going to discuss family court reform and parental alienation, and that is why we have brought on a very special expert guest to lead this conversation.
Barbara La Pointe: Dawn McCarty is a powerhouse in the parental alienation movement, with a riveting personal story that took her from victim to advocate. Dawn’s story began when she was kidnapped by her own mother at four years old, resulting in losing all contact with her biological father for 44 years. Dawn grew up in a chaotic and high-conflict home, never truly being accepted or feeling a sense of belonging in her stepfamily, and this led her to leave home at the age of 16.
Barbara La Pointe: As an adult, Dawn began searching for her father. However, due to not knowing about her father’s birth date, and he had a very common Irish surname, it wasn’t until 2016 before Dawn was reunited with her biological father. Again, that’s a whole 44 years of estrangement. Today, Dawn has channeled herself to be a speaker for the parents suffering from parental alienation, standing as a director of the National Shared Parenting organization, Kids Need Both organization, and she is also the co-host to the Humanly Possible podcast.
Barbara La Pointe: So without further ado, welcome Dawn.
Dawn McCarty: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. This is great, great to be able to access different platforms so we can reach, a lot more people than we can just in one place. So the more the better, I think, that we need to start sharing and using our voices, which is what I do.
Dawn McCarty: I try to encourage people to use their voice, that their voice is valuable, that they do have a voice that they can use, and sometimes it’s just been suppressed and we just need to find it.
Andrew Folkler: You’re absolutely right. And just want to say this is the first episode of our podcast where we now have two formerly alienated children on the podcast.
Andrew Folkler: So I mean, for listeners, definitely take notes, see what are the commonalities within our own experiences so that way you can apply that within your own journey through alienation.
Dawn McCarty: Absolutely, and I think that many of us that have gone through this, we have the same stories. We just have different events that happened in that particular story.
Dawn McCarty: So we really kind of relate to each other well, at least the people that I have spoken to, where there’s a connection that somebody finally gets me. Somebody really understands what it was like for me to go through this, to be that person, that child during those events. And that is a big benefit, I think, for those of us that are starting to unite and to support each other.
Dawn McCarty: So thank you, Andrew. You’re inviting me on here. That’s just another way that we can support each other.
Andrew Folkler: Absolutely. So one thing that I know we hear a lot in the alienation community, and seems to be a pattern within all of our stories is there’s that aha moment where we realize things are not as they seem, that maybe we’ve been led astray or, we’ve been following the wrong direction.
Andrew Folkler: Or somebody else had, you could say, more selfish needs that led to us being manipulated. What was that aha moment like for you?
Dawn McCarty: Surprisingly, it was only recently. It was recently because I didn’t realize there was something wrong with me, or not that there was something drastically wrong, but I didn’t realize there was something wrong inside, that internally I was in turmoil.
Dawn McCarty: I didn’t know that that was turmoil. I didn’t know that that was the opposite of happiness. I just knew that I was reacting to the world around me. I was the why is this always happening to me kind of person. Why is everybody so mean to me? Why don’t they accept me? Why are they rejecting me?
Dawn McCarty: It was always about what was happening to me, and then I reacted. I was a reactive type of person, where something happens and I would, spin off into whatever reaction occurred for that particular event. So it wasn’t until when I started getting my bachelor’s degree in criminal justice, my keystone was on childhood abduction and human trafficking, which ironically I was abducted, so it kinda started putting pieces together for me, when I found a group of people that were also abducted by their parent.
Dawn McCarty: Now, when I was growing up, we talked about my mom kidnapped me. My stepdad always talked about how he helped my mom kidnap me. It was common to have this conversation, and it was used often like a joke where, “Yeah, I just went down there and kidnapped her.” And that was the way I grew up about this whole thing occurring, and to me, it was just my life, and it was just what I knew as normal.
Dawn McCarty: I didn’t know that that was wrong. And so when I found this group of people and I started hearing their stories, I was reading about their... That was ‘cause I was doing my own research for my own paper, and the more I read their stories, I’m thinking, “That’s just like my story.” And then I kept digging in, and I finally send in my own essay saying, “Hey, I wanna know more about this organization.”
Dawn McCarty: So I submitted an essay to be part of a study that was going on in 2011 for the parental childhood abduction and the long-term effects. That was the name of the study, and it was being put on through the Metropolitan University in London. And so a lady came from London, came out here, and she interviewed all of us in the group about what we went through as far as being abducted by our parent and those long-term effects.
Dawn McCarty: And it wasn’t until then that I started realizing, wow, this is pretty big, and now I’m starting to identify more with where was I before all this happened? And so I started doing the work. I participated in that. It gave me a really good chance at seeing things that I needed to work on and improve in my life to find happiness.
Dawn McCarty: So starting to do the work was a great first step, but it wasn’t consistent, so it was on again, off again, ‘cause I still wasn’t really aware that there was something turmoiling inside of me that I just didn’t know that needed to be fixed. So then when I finally found my father in 2016, that’s when the Pandora’s box just blew open, and all of the anger, all of the pain, all of the hurt, all of the everything just came at me at once like a fire hose aimed at my chest, and it was really overwhelming.
Dawn McCarty: And for the first time, I could not handle where I was going on a daily basis as far as my emotions, so I had to start getting help. And it was then that I started learning how to deal with these emotions in a healthy way instead of just the reaction. Like, in high school when I was mad at somebody, I ripped the toilet paper dispenser off the wall and just had that outburst of anger.
Dawn McCarty: And now I’m learning how I can use these tools to really have a healthy way of dealing and working through the issues. So then learning who my father was, filling in the holes in the heart, the pain that, kind of exists in us even though you don’t realize that it’s there, you do at some point.
Dawn McCarty: And you realize, wow, this is really starting to make me feel like my true self, and I feel more authentic at this point. So the more I felt authentically myself, the harder I worked at becoming more myself. So my aha moment came after I found my father. And that’s when my advocacy really started, setting in.
Dawn McCarty: And if you see on my social media it says Dawn Andrea McCarty, that’s because that is my true identity. That’s the person that I was before I was taken. And I had these different personas that I had to become throughout the years, and now I have gone back 100% to my true identity, which is Dawn Andrea McCarty.
Dawn McCarty: So it’s only been in the last few years that that aha moment has really hit me, that I needed to work a lot harder, and it has helped me find my voice. And then I realized that now the voice still needs to be heard. Even though I found mine, I need to help others find theirs.
Barbara La Pointe: Dawn, that’s an incredible journey that you’ve gone on, and I imagine very traumatic as well.
Barbara La Pointe: And some people don’t have the opportunity to resolve their trauma, and in fact, you’ve done it and you’re doing it. It almost sounds as if you were disempowered before and now you’re in an empowered place. How do you...
Dawn McCarty: Found my power.
Barbara La Pointe: Found your power. Great. And I just wanted to add in that about 4% of North American children are abducted by their parents.
Barbara La Pointe: So the stat is about 4%, I believe. So it’s more common than what we might think.
Dawn McCarty: 4% actually sounds like a small number, but in perspective, when you think about how many kids are in the country, that’s actually still a pretty big number. And I’m glad that the number is only 4%, because I don’t think people realize the trauma that it creates for the child.
Dawn McCarty: Having that disruption, the imbalance of having a secure environment is really hard on a child. They don’t understand. They know that the person that they trust has either disappeared or has drastically changed their life, and that’s really hard to be in a limbo. And I called it my twilight zone, where it just didn’t feel real.
Dawn McCarty: I felt like I was just in my own episode of The Twilight Zone and I was gonna wake up someday and things would be back to normal. But normal never came until 44 years later.
Barbara La Pointe: That is a symptom of trauma, by the way, when you feel like everything’s kind of like a dream or not real. Or you call it the twilight zone.
Dawn McCarty: I felt like I was the character in my life, and everybody else was just stand-ins just interacting with me as I was going through this world. So I was like a disassociation as well.
Barbara La Pointe: How interesting that you started that degree and started working on that paper. That kind of...
Dawn McCarty: It’s interesting how I’ve been led to certain things.
Dawn McCarty: So I’ve always wondered what my purpose was. When I was a child and going to church, they talked about, “You’ll have a purpose, and you live your purpose. You have a family, you do all these things.” And I kept thinking, “What is my purpose?” Because I was a punching bag, I didn’t have a really close relationship with my mother, obviously, for lots of reasons, where she left me when I was two and then came back and stole me.
Dawn McCarty: So she left as a parent, and then she came back and she brought me a different parent, so she replaced one, and I basically grew up thinking that parents were not really required, that anybody could just step in and be a parent. And that is, on a child’s perspective, that is the furthest thing from the truth because I never let go of the fact that I knew who my real father was.
Dawn McCarty: She brought in this replacement father, but I never identified with him as being my father, because I knew I already had one, and that’s who I wanted. I wanted him to come and rescue me and take me back, but he never showed up because he didn’t know where I was. I didn’t know that. I often wondered, “Why isn’t he showing up?
Dawn McCarty: Why don’t I see Christmas cards or birthday cards? Why doesn’t he call me on my birthday?” And my mom’s like, “Well, he, may not care enough,” which was part of that gaslighting effect that takes place and the denigration that they... She didn’t want me to think about him. Now, I didn’t have the opportunity to reject him, like a lot of children may have when they’re going through the situation, because their parent is still around.
Dawn McCarty: My parent wasn’t allowed to be around, so I never had that. But I still heard the same horrific stories trying to make me believe he was somebody else, that he was this evil person. And at some point, at some times I would come to the realization that, well, maybe it’s true if he’s not even trying to find me.
Dawn McCarty: Maybe I just don’t know the whole story. My teenage years I was trying to figure out, do I wanna find him? Did he care enough? If he doesn’t care about me, then why should I even bother? So you go through these kind of tormenting kind of thoughts, ‘cause you don’t understand any of it.
Dawn McCarty: So it was really difficult to decipher what was true back then. And as a child, it’s really hard to know the whole story until you actually put it together yourself. And that means that you have to reunite with that parent. You have to have the opportunity to establish a relationship. And I’m not talking about just, like, meeting for lunch.
Dawn McCarty: I’m talking about really working on building the relationship so that you can get all of those answers and find the truth, and then come to your own realization, whether you believe it or not. And then that way it’s yours, and you own it. And I think that’s huge for those of us that have rejected a parent, and they think, “I’m fine without them.
Dawn McCarty: I don’t really need them.” You kind of actually do, ‘cause you don’t realize you’re in turmoil.
Andrew Folkler: You’re definitely correct there. I mean, I went through something similar myself too, just that desire to play detective and try and figure out what is the actual truth. I mean, and that was back in 2013, I think, when I started conversing with my mother again and trying to understand, mostly because at the time, like, I was going through my father’s...
Dawn McCarty: And it’s really hard sometimes as children, even adult children, when you have to think back and go through this stuff. One, it can either be too painful and you don’t wanna bother, or it can be eye-opening and you either are drawn into, okay, now I have to know all the truth. And that’s what I got.
Dawn McCarty: I got to that point where I have to know the truth now. And I was fortunate to be able to find my father, to have that opportunity to ask him the questions I needed to ask him. And I’ve described the pain that a child goes through as, you may have seen it on Facebook, where there’s, like, a stone figure of, it looks like a man holding a hand of a child, and they both have holes in them.
Dawn McCarty: Have you seen, do you know which picture I’m talking about? So I use that as an example where each of those holes are the pieces that are missing, and as a child, those holes have nerves around the outside edges that are painful. So as we grow and that pain is there, we start stuffing things in those holes to try and reduce the pain.
Dawn McCarty: Well, when you grow in, as an adult, that pain is still suppressed, but it doesn’t mean it’s not there. When I found my father, I was able to unpack some of that stuff that I pushed into these holes trying to feel normal or feel less pain. I was able to unpack that and actually heal the part that was the painful part, and then fill that up with the love that he always had for me.
Dawn McCarty: So those holes have been replaced with the padding of protection with love, the love that every child has an inalienable right to have from one or both of their parents. They have that right to be loved by both parents.
Barbara La Pointe: Wow, I have goosebumps right now, Dawn. You know, Mark Wolynn talks exactly about what you’re saying, and he wrote a book called It Didn’t Begin With You, and he talks about how children build their core.
Barbara La Pointe: And if they don’t have a sufficient love first from their mother, and you had a break in the bond with your mom when she left, mommy breaks down your core, and it kinda becomes like Swiss cheese. And then you have to go back and fill it in exactly what you’re explaining so that love can be built again. That’s beautiful. And earlier you talked about rejecting parents, and when we do reject our parents, we become really vulnerable to having diseases later in life.
Dawn McCarty: Your Body Keeps the Score. I know there’s a book on that, and I can tell you my body has kept the score, and I’ve dealt with a lot of health issues, a couple years ago, especially when I was going through my own divorce.
Dawn McCarty: I was depressed. I was having a really hard time functioning and dealing with how to... I didn’t even know how to deal with the conflict really. I just didn’t even know how to react with this whole falling apart of my own marriage, which I really struggled with because I didn’t wanna take my children’s father away from them.
Dawn McCarty: I stuck it out an extra four years hoping that it would work out, but it didn’t. It never got easier. And then my second child was born in between, in that four-year period, and then I felt like I was really stuck, and in a unhealthy marriage, and I didn’t know what to do. I had no way of dealing with this person on an argument level.
Dawn McCarty: There was no reasoning. I didn’t know how to carry out the conversation that needed to be had that he would understand. I felt like if I just explain it to him over and over again, I’ll just keep trying a different way, maybe he’ll understand it this way. You know, I tried to, think I’ll just improve our lifestyle.
Dawn McCarty: I tried to do all these things, then never once did I consider the fact that he really didn’t want to make any changes. He was perfectly fine the way he was, so me trying to make changes even though I thought it was an improvement wasn’t for him. So, one, I didn’t choose a spouse correctly. I didn’t have the skills to know what was a good relationship and what wasn’t, because I wasn’t given a good example of that.
Dawn McCarty: So I literally married my mother. More or less. I found someone that replaced that familiarity and that enmeshment, that desire to try and please and improve and constantly cater to, and it failed in my marriage. So it wasn’t what he wanted. I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know how to deal with the conflict, so it just kind of all fell apart.
Dawn McCarty: And when we went through the divorce, it was very traumatizing. I was triggered through the whole thing, and very emotional about a lot of it, and things that he would say. And I didn’t have the rationality to think, “Well, go ahead and try,” or, just say, “Okay, you’re upset. Let’s talk later,” and just hang up the phone.
Dawn McCarty: I didn’t have the foresight to just react that way. Instead, I reacted in a way that was not healthy for either one of us, and it just created more conflict. So I ended up having a high-conflict divorce myself, and it didn’t need to happen. It didn’t need to go that way. But because that’s what I was taught in this transgenerational perpetuance of how we have relationships, it just kinda transfers down, and it gets to the point where, as children, as adult survivors, we have to say, “Okay, it stops here.
Dawn McCarty: It has to stop here because it can’t go forward any further.” What we’ve been through is not something I wish on my children. So by becoming an advocate, I’m taking a stand and saying, “It is not okay to behave in this way,” and we need to understand and be able to have good communication and know how to deal with conflict and know how to deal with choosing people that are compatible and being okay with those that aren’t and being able to walk away and having a good, meaningful relationship and meaningful conversation, which I didn’t learn until this last decade.
Barbara La Pointe: Well, I mean, I really have to acknowledge you because of all the awareness that you’re bringing forward, all the awareness and consciousness that you’ve cultivated to heal. That’s really what’s stopping the next generation from experiencing or activating this kind of trauma in their DNA, and stopping it from spreading out in your family tree, is the consciousness work that you’ve done.
Andrew Folkler: Thank you. I definitely wanna highlight one thing that you said that rang true for me as well, just the element of where in our childhood we develop some sense of familiarity with the high conflict people, and the behaviors that they have, both the positive and the negatives.
Andrew Folkler: And so growing up and seeking out our own relationships, we are unconsciously attracted to those kind of personalities to fill in the roles of our parents. I think that was something Bill Eddy brought up during his interview through Imago Relationship Therapy. It was even mentioned quite a bit at length in the book, what was it?
Andrew Folkler: Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples by Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt. So that’s something that many of us, I think even beyond alienation, just people in general, where we have our own attractions towards the things that were never, you could say, satisfied as children, or the traumas that were left unresolved.
Dawn McCarty: Absolutely. And, and one of the things you said made me think of the fact that, how do you feel love when you’ve been traumatized your whole childhood? What does love look like to you? And to me, love looked like conflict. It looked like if he wasn’t mad at me or he wasn’t yelling at me over something, then was that really love?
Dawn McCarty: So you look for love in the wrong places, and in the wrong forms, where I should never identified that as love, because that’s not the act of love that we should be teaching our children. And we’re unconsciously teaching our children what love looks like, and we need to start being very careful about what they’re watching, because they’re going to repeat what they see. And it’s really hard to stop that repetitiveness if there’s no awareness.
Dawn McCarty: Without the awareness, we’re gonna constantly repeat over and over again. And you know, when I left my children, because I lost my father, that was the one thing that kept me a little bit different than what my mom did to me. Because I didn’t want them to go through what I went through, I stayed.
Dawn McCarty: But that’s not healthy either. So I didn’t put my kids through what my mom put me through, but I didn’t give them a good example of what a healthy relationship looks like. But what I did do is when I left, I took a stand by saying, “I can’t be treated this way anymore.” So I had to leave, right? And I didn’t, they didn’t denigrate their dad like my mom did mine.
Dawn McCarty: That was one thing that I didn’t even talk about him for the most of their childhood. They didn’t find out half the stuff, or more than half the stuff, until they were adults, and they got to discover it on their own and on their own terms. And then they also got to reunite with him because he was a absent parent.
Dawn McCarty: He didn’t try to come and see them. He wanted them to always come to him. It’s still kind of like that now, where he wants them to put forth all the effort. He didn’t really want to be a parent. Which is another example of me marrying my mom, ‘cause my mom also didn’t wanna be a parent. She wasn’t the motherly type.
Dawn McCarty: She wasn’t nurturing. Of course, ‘cause she left when I was so young, that to me is the exact opposite of a nurturing parent.
Dawn McCarty: So it’s really ironic that what we live through, we kind of grow into in our adult lives, and continue living that same lifestyle, more or less.
Dawn McCarty: It’s not really a lifestyle, but you’re kind of stuck in the same limbo, the same twilight zone, the same patterns, because you don’t have the awareness.
Barbara La Pointe: Well said, Dawn. It just carries on. If that trauma, it wants to be resolved, so it’ll just stay with us until it’s addressed and released.
Barbara La Pointe: So bang on with what you’re saying. I was just curious, like, because you mentioned your mom, how’s your relationship with her now considering that you are conscious that you had a break in the bond with her and that you did not receive the nurturing that you really needed to build your core as a child?
Barbara La Pointe: So how are things with your mom now?
Dawn McCarty: Well, I wanna first preface it with the fact that I do not hate my mother, and I know that a lot of people by proxy hate my mother. They think of her as the villain, but I can’t go that direction because that just perpetuates the trauma. It keeps me there.
Dawn McCarty: I have to be able to understand, and I had to look into her particular situation herself because I know if this transferred from her to me, then what transferred from her mother to her, and then her mother to her? So I look at the epigenetics of the situation, and not that I... I’m still upset with what my mom did, but I can see why she was led to do that.
Dawn McCarty: So it’s not about hating or, continuing this conflict. It’s about recognizing the whole picture. So she was traumatized as a child herself in different ways, but in similar ways at the same time. Her mother was not very nurturing for her at all, so she didn’t have a great example of how to be a nurturing mother for me.
Dawn McCarty: So, okay, we don’t like it, but it’s understandable. And when you can understand what happens, it makes it a whole lot easier to deal with, and you know exactly what you’re dealing with, and that’s a big key too. So we don’t talk very often. I think when we’re in the same city, same town, we did a lot of things together.
Dawn McCarty: We’d go to lunch. We have what I would say is equivalent to a good friendship. We’ve never had a mother/daughter type... I don’t know what that’s like. I don’t know what that kind of closeness is. So I see TV, the movies, and I see mother and daughters being close, and I’m like, “What is that like?”
Dawn McCarty: ‘Cause I just don’t know. And I don’t think she knew either. She didn’t have that same type of relationship with her mom, and then her mom’s mother had seven kids, so... And then her mother died when she was 14. So it was just a series of bad parenting just passed down.
Dawn McCarty: And I’m the one that just happens to be the one that needs to put the stop to it.
Dawn McCarty: And it took my childhood, going through what I went through, to be able to be here today to speak to it. And I’ve also created my cybersecurity side. Working on Securing Everything is the name of the cybersecurity business. But it bridges with my childhood, and I’ve always been protecting someone or something, so it kind of made sense that now I can sit here and say I’m actually grateful for the experiences.
Dawn McCarty: Not that I wanna do it ever again, and I don’t wish that on anybody, but I’m grateful that I had those experiences, that I had, one, the strength to endure it and also to come out of it and to find myself here in a healing pattern or a healing version of myself where the twilight zone exists in the middle, but I am who I’m supposed to be right now.
Dawn McCarty: I was able to find my way back and use the voice of all those experiences so that I can bring that awareness and attention to what we’re doing to children today and how we’re treating them in divorce.
Barbara La Pointe: Honestly, Dawn, I’m just shivering because what you’re saying is super, it’s powerful.
Barbara La Pointe: Like, you’ve had the strength to look, not only look inside, but you have explored your family tree and the generational trauma that you inherited and the generations of broken bonds in your mom. Like, what you said about your mom not receiving love from her mom or that complete nurturing from her mom that passed down to you is really profound.
Barbara La Pointe: Like, I didn’t know we were having a podcast about inherited family trauma and mother wounds, but you can see how it affects everything. And when you do look out at your family tree, your ability to heal through just, you mentioned epigenetics, just becomes so much greater to address your core. So, wow, thank you for sharing that.
Dawn McCarty: And I consider, like, your 2D trauma. Your 2D trauma is you’re still in yourself. You’re still looking outward for what the pain is. So something else is causing my pain, and that is all that 2D level, just as a way of trying to put a picture on it.
Barbara La Pointe: That’s good.
Dawn McCarty: So until you move into that third realm and that 5D realm and you become more aware of the whole thing, I think you don’t realize you need to heal until you can move past that 2D version where it’s just a simple cut and dry, black and white, “You did this to me and that hurt me, so it’s your fault.”
Dawn McCarty: You know? We can’t have that mentality because that does not promote healing or growth. And sometimes, and I hate, I hated to say this for myself, but when I could actually tell myself if something were to... You know, I still get triggered. Andrea, I don’t know if you still have those moments where, I think this is something we deal with over our lifetime.
Dawn McCarty: It’s not gonna go away. We’ll have moments where we get re-triggered over certain situations that it’s just part of the complex PTSD version of it. So until I was able to say, “Somebody said something that hurt my feelings, so what is it in me that bothers me about what was said?” And I had to really learn how to, and some people call it mirror work, how to reflect inwards rather than react to what they said to me.
Dawn McCarty: Did they intend to hurt me? Maybe, maybe not. Most of the time, probably not. So why is it that I got upset? And I had to learn how to do that by having someone come in and show me how to do that, ‘cause I didn’t learn that as a kid. I didn’t learn how to deal with that kind of stuff. So learning as an adult was a lot harder to figure out what I needed to do.
Dawn McCarty: But that self-reflection and looking at yourself whenever there’s pain and where that pain’s coming from, ‘cause a lot of times it’s that inner child, and most of it call comes from here. And when you can address that and figure out, “Okay, I can talk to,” I mean, we call it, like, my little girl. My little girl’s really upset right now because somebody said something, and you have to appease the little girl.
Dawn McCarty: We’re adults now, but you still have that little girl, and it’s kind of... I don’t know if you wanna call it an arrested development on that aspect, but sometimes we are arrested in that age, that mindset, that we have to learn how to grow, help that little girl grow past it, or the little boy in us. We have to learn them how to grow past that trauma so that they can heal.
Dawn McCarty: And the more that we heal, the... When we come together as one person, which I really kind of, I feel like I finally have reached that level where my little girl and my adult self are now one person, and I can talk to and I can speak to a lot more without falling apart.
Andrew Folkler: I can definitely relate to that. And to kind of go off of your question whether I do or not experience various triggers, yes, of course I do.
Andrew Folkler: And as an adult, obviously I’m a lot better at hiding it, but it’s just kind of the way the game is. Most days, because, like you, I did a lot of personal and reflective work, a lot of meditation and trying to figure out what are the values that I want to stand by and what are the parts of myself that were, you could say, imprinted as a result of the alienation rather than organically a part of myself.
Andrew Folkler: So yeah, absolutely. I do remember recently, actually, I had someone that I felt was a close friend, and he was engaging in behavior that I disagreed with, that I thought was manipulative, and I called him out on it. And we had a back and forth, but ultimately it came down to he was gonna stick by his behavior and I was going to stick by my opinion.
Andrew Folkler: And my conclusion was that if he’s gonna stand by those behaviors I was calling him out on, then that would mean that, he feels those behaviors are justified, which I deemed were wrong, and I got very upset about it. And for maybe the first year or so, in my mind, it was a matter of, well, I was upset because those people that he was being, you could say, manipulative with were done wrong.
Andrew Folkler: But in reality, the reason why I was so upset was because I was worried that I was falling into that trap or falling into that pattern. And that realization only came maybe about a year later when I thought about it and I thought about why I was so upset. I’m trying not to be too specific or too... and not gonna name names or anything like that.
Andrew Folkler: But the thing was, like, I recognized that I was still afraid of being manipulated, afraid of being coached into something that...
Dawn McCarty: Trust is huge, and it’s one of my biggest things where if I can’t trust somebody, then there’s definitely a problem. But one of the things, a word that came to my mind when you were describing that was boundaries.
Dawn McCarty: And maybe it’s the same for you where I didn’t know where to set boundaries or how to set boundaries, and I’m learning as an adult something I should’ve learned as a kid on how to set boundaries. The typical things that you learn by instinct, maybe like being a mom and stuff.
Dawn McCarty: There were certain things that I learned by instinct or through instinct, but there was something about boundaries, especially when it came to my own mother. I did not know how to set boundaries with her, and that’s part of that enmeshment piece as well, where even as an adult she can still push those buttons, and I’m right back to that little girl again trying to figure out, how am I gonna make her happy again?
Dawn McCarty: And it’s not my job, and that was really hard to learn, that it is not my responsibility to make sure she’s happy. That’s her responsibility. And recently she wanted to move in to our house, and it was to the point where my kids were like, “No.” They’re adults now, and they did not see it as being a healthy thing as well, and I was struggling really hard with, how do I tell her no?
Dawn McCarty: That was really difficult, and it was very complicated, and I was stressed out beyond belief because it’s the first time, well, I can’t say it was the first time. It was a big thing where she was gonna be homeless if she didn’t have a place to go ‘cause her husband had died, and the roommate that she was living with sold the house, and now she had nowhere to go.
Dawn McCarty: How could I not help her? So boundaries were really important for me to learn, and me living with my mother is not healthy. We’ve never had a healthy relationship where we lived together, so I couldn’t allow it to happen now because if I did, I would, my children, I stood to lose them. So now I’m in a position where I’m choosing either my mom or my kids, and going forward it has to be them.
Dawn McCarty: They’re my children. They need to be 100% sure that I love and value them and put them first, which is something I never had. So I found a way. It was hard, but I finally found a way. And so she’s living with another family member, and she’s doing okay as far as I know. I haven’t seen her for several years now, since 2018, I think, and we don’t talk very often.
Dawn McCarty: Occasionally she’ll answer an email that I send. She usually doesn’t do the initiating. I always have to contact her. And she’ll say, “Oh, I know you’re busy. I don’t wanna bother you.” And I’m thinking, “Just call. If I can pick up, I’ll pick up.” You know, maybe I need a distraction from that busy, but yeah, it doesn’t it still is something I deal with today. And even after I found my father, the denigration was still going on, and so it never stops. It’s always there. And we don’t have a lot of opportunity to talk about him now, but when we have, it’s still somewhat negative about him.
Dawn McCarty: So even though he’s dead and gone, that alienation action, that act of trying to change my perception or my opinion of him as a person still happens. And I’ve seen that with other people as well, where, as an adult, they’re still dealing with the fact that they’re being gaslighted about their other parent or whatever the action is.
Dawn McCarty: It still happens.
Barbara La Pointe: That’s a hard way to learn how to work or set boundaries.
Dawn McCarty: It is.
Barbara La Pointe: Rubber to the road, that is.
Dawn McCarty: I can set boundaries at work. At work I have no problem setting boundaries. But when it comes to my mom, and even sometimes with my kids, I’m learning now that I can’t be so much the opposite that it’s not good or healthy for them, so I have to work with boundaries on that as well. So it is definitely the hardest way to learn.
Andrew Folkler: Yeah, I can definitely emphasize with that too.
Barbara La Pointe: When you do step in and you set a boundary, especially with someone like your own mother, what opens up for you that’s even more important?
Dawn McCarty: It was almost like when she finally stopped with the relentlessness of it, it was such a relief that, oh my gosh, I finally was able to put my foot down.
Dawn McCarty: Now, I put my foot down with her in other ways when I was beyond angry. The person that’s not dealing with things correctly, just reacting, I had no problem reacting towards her in anger. But now that I moved past the anger, what does that look like? So it was a different way of responding to her.
Dawn McCarty: So it was just a foreign example that I had to figure out. It’s like trying to just figure out the problem. But it’s constant work. It is really constant work. But I would not have it any other way because now I feel more myself. I’m happier than I’ve ever been as far as true happiness and being who I am and who I’m meant to be, and knowing that I have been validated in all of my feelings, and everything that I’ve been through has been validated, that I’m not crazy.
Dawn McCarty: It was true. You know, I was bullied as a kid because my friends didn’t believe my story. So I went through a very traumatic high school, those years in high school that I was just laughed at, called a liar. Said basically that I was, the epitome of pond scum because I would tell this horrific story.
Dawn McCarty: Like, “You’re not abducted. Those are your parents,” because we had this pretty, this picture perfect image of a family. And they just couldn’t wrap their head around the craziness. So now it’s finally to the point where I have been validated and to some extent vindicated.
Dawn McCarty: Like, okay, people definitely believe me now, and that’s huge because we need that validation. I was talking earlier about the love languages. We all have different forms of love language, and when you are only given a certain type, a certain expression of love that’s not yours, even as a child you still have your own, it’s really hard to identify what is love and what’s not love.
Dawn McCarty: So I had to learn that how I express love is probably how I want to receive love. So I learned it backwards.
Andrew Folkler: Definitely relate to that too. One thing I wanted to ask, kind of flipping the script a little bit. If parents found themselves in your father’s shoes where one day unfortunately their child has vanished.
Andrew Folkler: Their ex has taken their child somewhere, either out of the country, out of state, just left no trail behind. What can they do to work on that reuniting process? I imagine it’s a little bit easier now with social media and the internet, but in your shoes it was probably virtually impossible.
Dawn McCarty: It was virtually impossible, and sometimes the scenario that each... ‘cause they’re so different, they may not have any ability to access whatsoever, and the children are in an environment that they have no idea what they’re going through, and you don’t know what they’re being told. So I think for parents, the most important thing is to make sure that you have love and happiness in your life because that is like a magnet for a child.
Dawn McCarty: If you are nothing but love and happiness, they’re gonna be drawn to you. Where if you’re still working through all of the reactionary items, the things that you’re reacting to, that is going to repel them because they don’t want that. It’s too complicated for a child to be able to understand or comprehend, and it’s gonna push them away or keep them away.
Dawn McCarty: It’s like the polar opposite of a magnet. You want to attract them, but if you’re not full of happiness and joy, you’re going to repel them. They’re going to just be distant, and it’s gonna be really hard to reunite. So as hard as it may sound, and I can’t imagine the pain that a parent goes through. I just feel that it is so important for a child’s perspective that that parent always is the safe parent, and that they’re always living the exact opposite of what they’re being told.
Dawn McCarty: So if they’re being told that they’re just out of control, they’re always overreacting, and then you actually overreact, it’s just going to validate the other parent’s story or narrative. I think that it’s important that parents find a way to heal and communicate even if it’s not directly to their child.
Dawn McCarty: I think that leaving a journal, breadcrumbs is what I call it, of proof, evidence that you actually did love them and you thought about them every day will go a long way when the time does come. So I hate to even put years to any... I had 44 years. Dad had 44 years without me. I don’t want anybody to know what that feels like.
Dawn McCarty: However, what he did do when I did find him is, one, he kept pictures of me. I never saw a baby picture of myself until I reunited. I didn’t even know what I looked like as a kid younger than five years old. I didn’t know what that was. It’s like I just started existing at five ‘cause before that I saw nothing.
Dawn McCarty: So he had all those pictures of me, and he also tried to look for me. He tried to find me. But one of the things he did in person was that, and I think this is super important, whenever I asked him questions and he knew that the answer was gonna be hard, he prefaced it with, “I always loved your mother, and I still do.”
Dawn McCarty: And here’s my answer. And he told me no matter how hard it was if, to tell the truth, he said we were stupid kids. I was, I was 21, she was 21. We were just kids that had no business being parents yet. We hadn’t really, like, grown up ourselves. We were still kids. And the relationship fell apart and he told me stories that I’m now being able to piece together, well, that would make sense why she did this.
Dawn McCarty: So I was able to piece some things together from both sides to really see a clear picture. But he always made sure that he never once said one bad word about my mother. Not once. And I think that’s huge because that made me feel like I had a safe place to land, that I had a place to be able to come and talk to him and get what I needed as far as the answers that helped heal all those holes in my heart and made me realize the whole picture and that what had really happened.
Dawn McCarty: And now I know who’s doing what, who did what. I know my answers. And that’s where children need to be able to get at some point is to know what really happened so we know what we’re dealing with. And also for the forgiveness piece of it that a lot of people mention to me about how can, “How could you possibly forgive your mother?”
Dawn McCarty: Or, “You should just forgive her because that’s, you need to forgive because it’s for you.” And what I have to say about that is that forgiveness it’s never first. It’s always last. And I say that because if I don’t know the whole story, then how could I possibly forgive it? So I need to find everything.
Dawn McCarty: I need the knowledge. I need the information. I need you to be straight with me. I need you to answer my questions, and that’s when I can work towards forgiveness. True forgiveness in an authentic way so that I can move forward as an individual being healthy and having a good peace of mind, reestablish my own self security, my own self-worth, my own self-value.
Dawn McCarty: So it’s important that parents take the calm road, as tragic as this is, and I know that’s gotta be very difficult. Like I said, I can’t even imagine what it’s like to go through. I have my children. I don’t know what I would do if I was removed from their life. That I have no idea, but I do know from my perspective the fact that I was able to talk to my dad and he didn’t overreact, he remained calm.
Dawn McCarty: He would stop and take a breath and tell me that he loved my mother. And then he would tell me the answer. That was huge. That was huge. Did that answer your question?
Andrew Folkler: Oh, yeah. It’s really amazing just how much you’ve come through this journey. And there’s a lot of sentiments that you say that I try and echo as many times as possible, either on this podcast or whenever I’m talking with parents in this field, especially when you’re on that process as a formerly alienated child to discover your own truth.
Andrew Folkler: When I reunited with my mom, I do remember learning more about her side of the divorce and how much everything I knew was one-sided. And the journey of understanding and piecing together both sides and stitching together my own form of truth, my own version of the truth so that I would understand why both parties did what they did and what led them to the actions that they took, brought so much catharsis.
Andrew Folkler: Just like the way you were saying, that it’s an incredible feeling for yourself as someone who’s going through a healing journey. But it’s also something that allows for, like you said, forgiveness. You know, I recognize the faults in both my parents. I can humanize them, like you’ve been saying this entire podcast, and from there comes the ability to accept and forgive them for who they are as people, and living a life where I can have a relationship with both of them.
Andrew Folkler: So I mean, everything you’ve said so far this past 45 minutes has just been incredible, and I really appreciate all the wisdom that you’ve shared so far.
Dawn McCarty: Well, thank you, and thank you for allowing me to be able to come on here and share my insight because I’m hoping that as we find more adult survivors that have gone through this, that they can see it doesn’t have to be an ending relationship to have a new relationship, that they can be separate and independent of their parents’ divorce or breakup, that they can still have a very loving relationship with both even if they don’t agree.
Dawn McCarty: When we learn how to put boundaries in place and we let them know, ‘cause one of the things when I did start setting boundaries with my mom is one of the first things I told her was I was looking for my dad, and she started this rampage about things that could happen. I looked at her and I said, “I’m not asking your permission.
Dawn McCarty: I’m just letting you know this is what I’m doing.” And even though I was able to do it then, it’s still a cycle, and it depends on the scenario on can I keep that up? It was a learned practice to be able to apply boundaries, and I’m still learning it. It still can be difficult. But these are the long-term effects.
Dawn McCarty: These are effects... And I’ve said it in other platforms where we’re dealt a life sentence. It’s not just about the divorce when we were children or the breakup when we were children. It’s about how it affects the rest of our lives and our decisions and my relationships and our health.
Dawn McCarty: It affects everything about us. It’s not just about until we turn 18 and poof, magically it all disappears. That’s a myth. The myth that they’ve tried to say that children will, they’re resilient, they’ll come back when they’re 18, they’ll know what to do, it’s all a myth. And if anybody tries to convince you of that, that’s a lie.
Dawn McCarty: Everybody has some work to do here. But it is a life sentence that is handed down to kids through family law when this is going through the court system, and you have to choose which one of the parents is the better parent. Every time that decision is made, the child always loses.
Dawn McCarty: Always.
Andrew Folkler: Absolutely. So on that front, since we’re getting close to that hour mark, I did wanna squeeze in a couple more questions before we wrapped up. The first one being could you tell us more about the National Parental Organization, and how that can change the landscape for shared parenting?
Andrew Folkler: Just so if there was a listener out there that wanted to be a bit more of an activist or even just learn more about how to change family reform policy.
Dawn McCarty: Sure. So it’s the National Parents Organization, and I’m the founding chair for the state affiliate for the state of Florida.
Dawn McCarty: And I joined this because I wanted to bring the child’s perspective to light. And I started to help working on... it was a alimony bill, divorce-type bill that also included a phrase that said, “The rebuttable presumption of equal shared parenting would be established.” Now, I wanna say that my primary goal is to make sure that parents are equal in the eyes of the law so that you are both established as a parent. And then go from there.
Dawn McCarty: There’s a lot of controversy over the 50/50 or the, that equalness part of it. And although I think that 50/50 is the best for a child, in the event that there’s no harm or danger that could come from being, so that has to be established. That’s the rebuttable presumption.
Dawn McCarty: When a family has no concerns over any kind of abuse or neglect for a child, then the child should always have as much or as close to equal parenting time as possible. And that being said, that doesn’t mean you’re gonna automatically get 50/50. 50/50 is just the baseline. It also depends on does mom work out of the home?
Dawn McCarty: Does dad work out of the home? Do one of them work in the home, one works out of the home? Is one, a fireman or fire, people? They have three days on, three days off or, some kind of crazy schedule where they may not have that ability to do a 50/50 split. So it depends on each family dynamic on how time is allotted towards each parent.
Dawn McCarty: But as long as the child has consistency and they know what is expected and where they’re supposed to be, and I’ve seen it work in many situations where the child knows what day they go where. And they have to become accustomed to having two homes. They have two homes. They have two beds. They have two sets of clothes.
Dawn McCarty: They have, two different neighborhoods. They have to adapt to that, but it’s completely possible. In fact, it’s easier to adapt to that than it is to the absence of their parent. So I think it’s really important that we don’t remove a parent when it’s not necessary to remove one, and that we have as close to equal parenting time as possible depending on schedules.
Dawn McCarty: And that, I think, can be worked out in the mediation stage where I also work with Kids Need Both, and our goal is to keep families out of court so that we’re not getting into that high conflict, so that we’re not getting into an adversarial position. Because you don’t have to go to court to get a divorce, and I don’t think that many people realize that.
Dawn McCarty: You just have to have an agreement that the judge can sign off on, and you can do that outside of the court. You can do that without an attorney. You can do that with collaborative attorneys, with mediators, with people that know how to walk you through getting a divorce in a more healthy way that’s better for the child or children.
Dawn McCarty: So National Parents Organization strives for that equal shared parenting. And like I said, my goal is to make sure that parents are equal in the eyes of the law so that they both are established and, what’s the word I’m looking for? I guess established is good enough, to where they are both recognized as a parent in that child’s life and not having one of them removed.
Andrew Folkler: And then the second question I wanted to throw in there, and then Barbara, I’ll throw the ball into your court. So the word or the term parental alienation just, it has a lot of stigmas attached to it. If you add in syndrome at the end, I’ve been told by lawyers and other colleagues that it’s not a favored term in family court.
Andrew Folkler: Then you tack on all the shenanigans, for lack of a better word, that Richard Gardner has tacked onto it due to his reputation, and now we have a bit of a mess in my line of work, in marketing, we have a huge mess because it’s not a good word. It has too many stigmas attached to it.
Andrew Folkler: So do you think that, or do you agree that there should be, like, a newer term for it, considering that we’re still trying to get it into the DSM-5, we’re still trying to get it to be a bit more acknowledgeable in family court? Should there be a better term for it or maybe even a set of subsets for that catchphrase or buzzword?
Dawn McCarty: So I’m gonna go a little crazy on you here and say that, okay, first of all, parental alienation is a action. It’s not a label. It’s actually an action, something that takes place. I realize that there’s some controversy over somebody, and whether or not those reasons are true or not is besides the point because we’re not talking about the Gardner action.
Dawn McCarty: We’re talking about, what are parents doing today and what is that called? Alienation is the most common, or parental alienation is the most common used term that most people around the world recognize, and they understand it in its context of one parent removing another parent through whatever force necessary.
Dawn McCarty: I understand that there are domestic violence situations that people are being heard or not being heard, the wrong party’s being heard. I get all that. But that doesn’t remove the actual action that these other cases have. So I try to refrain from using parental alienation as much as possible, but depending on the audience that I’m in, it might be the easiest way for them to understand what I’m referring to by using parental alienation.
Dawn McCarty: Oftentimes I will preface it as being the obstruction of the family bond, hostile parenting, any other way that you can describe it, but hostile parenting and the obstruction of family bond requires a follow-up question like, what is that? I realize that parental alienation is not the preferred word, but everybody, even the ones that don’t like it, understand what we’re talking about.
Dawn McCarty: So is there a better word? I don’t think we’ve found one yet.
Andrew Folkler: I think so far I’ve been using child estrangement. Unless I have to be very specific and like you said and say parental alienation.
Dawn McCarty: Well, then the estrangement piece of it is, that’s when a child decides not to have a relationship with a parent.
Dawn McCarty: So it depends on if they’re looking at the actual meaning, is it really the right word? So I don’t think we have a perfect word, but I think semantics is part of the conflict. And we’re not trying to promote anything about Richard Gardner as far as domestic violence and allowing people ways to hide behind this phrase.
Dawn McCarty: I don’t think any one of us would agree to that. I think if there’s actually domestic violence or if there’s, child abuse, I think all of us would stand up against that. So it’s not the word. It’s not the word that’s the problem. It’s that everybody wants the word to mean one thing.
Dawn McCarty: But there’s so many people around this world that use this particular phrase that you may think you can change it by complaining and saying that it’s means something else, but it’s still the most common, commonly used term to describe what we’re talking about. And as far as PAS, I will never claim to be a child of PAS.
Dawn McCarty: Because PAS would mean that I have a medical condition that’s considered a syndrome, and I don’t have a syndrome. This is something that happened to me, but it’s not something that stemmed out of genetics or, biological aspects. So I don’t feel like I am so damaged and sick that I can’t come out of this and heal.
Dawn McCarty: So I choose not to use the word syndrome at all. So if I use anything, it would be parental alienation, but, it could be hostile parenting, ‘cause that’s definitely what I’ve witnessed. My mom did alienate me. If you use just the word alienation, she did alienate me from my father ‘cause she tried to coerce me or gaslight me into believing he was someone that she wanted me to believe he was, not who he actually was.
Dawn McCarty: So alienation is appropriate, right? If we use just the word by itself, alienation fits. And if we consider who’s doing it, it’s a parent, right? My parent alienated me from another parent, and that’s a fact. So it depends on the context, and we’re always gonna have people that disagree with what we’re using.
Dawn McCarty: So like I said, I think that the voices need to be heard on all aspects. And if someone is being abused, nobody should be able to hide behind this phrase. And I think that’s a problem with the family court, not the people. So we’re fighting with amongst ourselves when it should actually be the family courts that we’re fighting with, because they’re creating this adversarial life for people.
Dawn McCarty: But yet they’re not giving anybody or affording anybody the opportunity to defend or to bring charges against, because it’s family court. So if there is validity in an abuse charge, that should be a criminal case, and there should be somebody taking that up in criminal court. Because I think once you can prove that something’s wrong in criminal court, family court becomes a lot easier and less congested.
Dawn McCarty: We’re always gonna be congested though, so how do we fix that problem? The problem is for most cases, most divorces, they don’t need to go through court, ‘cause it just clogs the system. We think we need to go through court, we have to have attorneys, we have to show up. We don’t have to do all that.
Dawn McCarty: Alls we need to do is come to an agreement. When two parents aren’t adversaries, they can come to an agreement and divorce amicably. That would be a lot healthier for the child, if we can get to that point.
Barbara La Pointe: And, Dawn, I just wanna say that that’s a really nice place to just have a soft, safe landing.
Barbara La Pointe: Just reminding everyone that family court is not a loving place, and it was never set up to deal with families and to deal with children. So I just love that you underscored that, and also love that you highlighted that parental alienation is not a place to hide abuse, domestic abuse. It’s great.
Barbara La Pointe: Sometimes that clarification is not made, and I think it’s really neat that you did bring that up.
Dawn McCarty: It’s very important, Fanana. And for someone like me and Andrew, our voice is important, and I think everybody’s voice is important.
Andrew Folkler: All right. Well, before we wrap up, Barbara, did you have any last-minute questions you wanted to throw at Dawn?
Barbara La Pointe: I don’t. I mean, I always invite our guests to send out a few last pearls of wisdom. We don’t want you to go away without something that was unsaid. So if there’s something that’s in your heart that you’d like to share, I invite you to do that now before we close.
Dawn McCarty: Oh, well, you guys let me say so much that, I think I covered most of it.
Dawn McCarty: I think that we have to move in the direction of finding a solution instead of the infighting. One of the things that I see as the chair for the parents’ organization is this gender argument over who’s, it’s the mothers, it’s the fathers. And as the child, I don’t care.
Dawn McCarty: I really don’t care. You know? And it has nothing to do with gender. In my scenario, it just happens to be that my father was the one that was the victim. And so when I speak about fathers, I’ll have people actually, come at me because, it’s the mothers. And none of that matters as far as my perspective.
Dawn McCarty: It matters at the, with the level of who it was in my particular story. And having these gender wars is not solving the problem. And what I see is that we have a high level of fathers that have been removed from the family, but we’re starting to see an increase in the mothers. And if we allow this to become an equal problem, then we have our children that are parentless in almost every home. So we can’t allow this to elevate to the level of fathers.
Dawn McCarty: We need to bring fathers down. We need to minimize the removal of a parent without just cause, and not allow this whole war between it should be the mothers, it should be the fathers, or it’s more the fathers than the mothers. None of that matters, ‘cause none of it solves the problem. And we have to solve the problem, which means that parents need to be equal in the eyes of the law so that they both equally have an opportunity to be involved in their children’s life, whether that’s 50/50, 40/60, three days on, three days off.
Dawn McCarty: I don’t know what that looks like for each individual family. But there is a way to work through that on a whole different, level through mediation, whatnot. And what works for each family is what they need to figure out. But we do need to stop the wars with the genders and work together, because we all went through the same situations.
Dawn McCarty: Whether you’re a child, the children have gone through similar situations. Mothers and fathers have gone through similar situations. When we can band together, we’re closing the gap, and we’re bringing a louder voice. Our voices will be amplified because we’re doing it together, and we’ll be heard because we’re not in conflict with each other.
Dawn McCarty: If we can’t organize, then we can’t win a war. We have to organize. We have to be in unison with each other and not look at it as a gender problem. And I think that is my closing statement.
Andrew Folkler: Very powerful. Thank you. Thank you, and I agree 110%.
Dawn McCarty: Thank you. Thanks...
Andrew Folkler: Dawn. All righty. Dawn, what would be the best way for listeners to reach out to you if they wanted to learn more about what you do or just contact you?
Dawn McCarty: I have a Linktree account. So if you go to Linktree, it’s, I think it’s... I forget the address, actually. It’s link.tr, I think, and it’s Dawn McCarty is my username. So on there is, it has all the ways that you can access, get access to me on social media. I’m on Facebook as Dawn Andrea McCarty.
Dawn McCarty: I also have Securing Everything on Facebook. My website is www.securingeverything.com. And I think that’s, yeah. I mean, if you Google my name, I come up on all the different platforms, too.
Andrew Folkler: All righty. Well, that is all we’ve got time for today. Once again, everyone, thank you for taking the time to be with us.
Andrew Folkler: And if you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our channel either on YouTube or through our podcast through the various podcasting platforms. Don’t forget, we always have a downloadable document below. It’s gonna be on Barbara’s website at barbaralapointe.com/podcast to help you and your loved ones deal with these challenges of trauma, high conflict, and parental alienation.
Andrew Folkler: Barbara, if listeners wanted to reach out to you, what would be the best way to do so?
Barbara La Pointe: Barbara@barbaralapointe.com.
Andrew Folkler: And if you wanna reach me, you’re welcome to email me at startnow@andrewfolkler.com. As always, everyone, thank you for taking the time to be with us today at the Broken Families podcast, where we help you discuss and find solutions to divorce, parental alienation, and high-conflict relationships.
Andrew Folkler: Have a wonderful day, everyone.
Barbara La Pointe: Thanks, Dawn.
Andrew Folkler: All right. That was...