Countdown to Lift Off
Climb aboard our growing community. We have big plans and want you along for the ride
The calendar flipping over to a new year is a traditional time of reflection. A time of fresh starts, of renewal and rebirth. A blank canvas waiting for a brush of color or a fresh field of snow calling out for fresh tracks. Of course, some of us give in to cynicism and scoff at these manufactured moments of reflection. But a day of demarcation can serve as a psychological launchpad for powerful change, a new chance to hit escape velocity and release ourselves from the gravity of all that has come before and fly into the future a little lighter and stronger.
I realize for many of us the gravity of this very moment is just too strong. I want you to know that I’ve been there, and so have so many others in our growing community. Below I offer a few words from my book, The Respondent, about my journey, with the hope they might be a little rocket fuel. If things are just a little too heavy today, maybe there is your own personal New Year’s Day not too far away that you can point to on the calendar and make your own.
We are grateful you’re here. We have grand plans and big projects in the works to improve family law and make life better for children and parents in 2023. We’ll be announcing many exciting details imminently! I hope you’ll join us for the ride, and share what we’re doing with others who need our help. Let’s get the word out.
I won’t shout Happy New Year! I think “Better New Year” will do just fine.
Countdown to lift off…
Excerpt from The Respondent:
A Work in Progress
[The] DSM-5 is the bible of psychiatric conditions and diagnostic criteria, a book woven together by professionals and ratified by their clubs. These days, outside the courtroom, our world is drowning in exhibitionistic blogging, vlogging, and flogging of DSM-5- verified subprime psychology. Social media is a broken spigot of opportunists promoting their embattled psyches; a cloudburst of performative sharing of defects and frailties; an infinite video wall of people revealing their scars. One would be hard-pressed to argue against the notion that collectively we just might be testing the limits of odious oversharing and naked narcissism.
I point this out in understanding of the tasty irony that—with this book and the accompanying video series and podcast—I am sharing my story in multimedia and so there is a contradiction to reconcile. While I believe we must decommission victimhood as a national currency and pump the brakes on pathological social media oversharing, at the same time I wonder at the alternative. After all, what are we to do—go back to the days when all the pain and anger backed up in a bottomless reservoir behind a dam of the damned? Where would all this anger be if not burning up Twitter? Is social media channeling anger into little controlled burns, or stoking things to an out-of-control conflagration?
For my part, I remain, without question, a work in progress. The steps I took that morning in March 2015, walking into Department 60 of the Los Angeles Superior Court, were profoundly fateful ones. I crossed over an invisible but solid border, leaving the United States of America to enter the dominion of family law—and that is a foreign land, one which quickly consumed and then discarded me without a whiff of the due process and other protections I thought I had as an American citizen. My resulting sense of isolation cannot be reduced to words. The world had turned on me and the speed of the pivot was so shocking, the sense of injustice so complete, it felt like being squeezed out of existence. And so, my journey of genuine self-discovery began, out of the ashes of an existence that had, in every objective sense, been incinerated. The lessons which had accumulated during my extended emotional vacation slowly revealed themselves and I, for the first time, was ready to receive them. That developing recognition has helped me cope with the aftermath of everything that has happened.
As I sifted through the debris of my life, salvaging what was worthy, I began to catch glimpses of a new reality. The moments where I wasn’t so alone have, for example, increased steadily over time and have lessened the harshness of the lessons, which allowed me to better synthesize some of the shame. That awful feeling—that I was the author of my own demise—continues to be assuaged as I work to unearth the mass grave of fathers who walked into a family courtroom completely foreign from the America they had been so convinced lay just outside the doors.
And thus, a new nerve in my restless psyche was aroused. I believe that by talking and sharing I might help others rise up and find their path to a better place, and it is that spirit that animates these pages. Others who understand that, at the heart of this culture so steeped in the exposition of our internal turmoil, there exists a system of indulgences within family law where the rights enjoyed by the masses don’t apply to mere mortal men; a system that refuses to receive the shortcomings and vulnerability of empathetic, honest men.
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Find out more about everything we’re doing at The Respondent and CPU.
Read about one of our community member’s path out of darkness.
If you’re having thoughts of self harm, please contact a hotline (US). (If you’re in another country, check here.)