Recently, someone asked me how a parent might prepare for a custody or parental fitness evaluation. I have conducted many evaluations and while it has been a long time since I sat in the evaluator’s chair, the question brought me immediately back to something I learned doing that work: describe the behavior rather than diagnosing the person.
For instance, if you tell an evaluator, “He’s a sex addict,” don’t be surprised if the next question is, “Can you give me an example?” Maybe he spent hours viewing pornography. Maybe he left explicit sites open on the family computer where your eleven-year-old could find them. Maybe he repeatedly wanted you to participate in sexual activities that made you uncomfortable. Those are the things I would want to know. “He’s a sex addict” tells me the conclusion you’ve reached about the behavior. Describing what actually happened gives me information I can consider for myself.
The same is true of another word we hear everywhere these days: gaslighting.
I’ve written about gaslighting before, including the more subtle patterns I think of as ambient gaslighting, and I certainly think having a name for something we’ve experienced can be enormously validating. But telling me, “He gaslights me,” still doesn’t tell me what happens between the two of you. Does a conversation about something that hurt you somehow become a conversation about everything you’ve ever done wrong? When you bring up a concern, does the other person change the subject, deny what happened, exaggerate some unrelated detail, or turn the conversation around until you are defending yourself? Do you enter the conversation wanting to discuss one issue and leave it apologizing? Do you find yourself wondering how in the world you got from, “I’d like to talk about what happened yesterday,” to defending something you said three Christmases ago?
Now I have something I can understand.
When Psychological Language Becomes Shorthand
We have a lot more psychological language available to us than we once did. Gaslighting, narcissism, trauma, toxic relationships, triggers, love bombing, sex addiction, emotional abuse and parental alienation have all made their way, to varying degrees, into everyday conversation. Some have specific clinical or legal meanings. Some describe recognizable patterns. Some have been stretched so far by popular culture that they can mean almost anything depending upon who is using them.
Sometimes having the right word for an experience is exactly what we need. The problem comes when the word begins replacing the experience itself.
If I tell you someone is a narcissist, for example, I’ve handed you a ready-made character. You may begin filling in the blanks before I’ve actually told you what happened. In that way, the label can swallow the person, but it can also swallow my story.
This was particularly important when I conducted custody and parental fitness evaluations because I wasn’t simply trying to determine whether one person had behaved badly during a relationship. I was trying to understand a family. I needed to understand who these people were, what daily life looked like, how conflict unfolded, how each parent responded to the child’s needs, where each parent’s strengths were, where the concerns were, and what happened to the child in the midst of all of it.
If every question about parenting becomes another opportunity to tell me that your former partner is a narcissistic, manipulative, sex-addicted gaslighter, I may eventually know a great deal about how you experience your former partner and surprisingly little about either of you as parents.
Serious Behavior Doesn’t Need Embellishment
None of this means minimizing behavior that is abusive, frightening, coercive, dangerous or inappropriate. In fact, specificity often makes serious behavior much clearer.
If someone threatened you, describe the threat and what was happening when it occurred. If you were frightened, explain what happened that made you afraid. If someone pressured you sexually, describe the pressure rather than feeling that you have to find the perfect psychological terminology for it. If your child was repeatedly exposed to inappropriate sexual material, describe what was accessible, how you discovered it and what happened afterward. If conversations routinely left you doubting your own memory or perception, describe what those conversations sounded like and what happened to you during and after them.
There is also an important distinction between what we observed, what someone told us and what we concluded from that information. “I saw explicit material left open on the computer three times” is different from “I believe he was viewing pornography every night.” The second may be a perfectly understandable concern based upon the first, but they are still different pieces of information.
The same distinction applies when a child tells us something. “My daughter told me…” is not the same statement as “I witnessed….” Again, this doesn’t mean the child’s report isn’t important. It simply means we are being clear about how we know what we know.
I think that distinction matters far beyond forensic work. We interpret our experiences all the time. We put pieces together, develop concerns, make assumptions and sometimes discover later that we were exactly right. Other times we discover that something was more complicated than we initially understood. Knowing which part is observation and which part is interpretation gives us room for both.
Don’t Let the Negative Language Take Over the Story
There was another thing I wanted to know when I conducted these evaluations, and this is something I would encourage any parent going through one to remember: I also need to learn about you.
Tell me about your child. What makes her laugh? What does he struggle with? How do you know when your child is worried even though they insist everything is fine? What happens at bedtime? How do you set limits? What do you do when you’ve lost your patience? What are you good at as a parent, and where do you struggle?
And yes, I might want to know what your child loves doing with the other parent.
Acknowledging that someone has strengths doesn’t invalidate concerns about their behavior. A parent can say, “He loves our daughter and they have always shared a love of music. I also have serious concerns about his judgment around sexual material in the home.” Those two statements do not cancel each other out. Human beings are inconveniently complicated that way.
Likewise, not every terrible thing that happened in an adult relationship necessarily tells me something about parenting. Someone can have been a lousy spouse and still have parenting strengths. Conversely, something that initially appears to be a relationship issue may become very relevant to parenting when the behavior begins affecting the child’s safety, emotional well-being, stability or environment. The important part is explaining the connection rather than assuming the label explains it for you.
What Happened Before You Had a Name for It?
The more I thought about the question I was asked, the more I realized this principle reaches well beyond custody evaluations. It matters in therapy and supervision, in relationships and conflict, and perhaps especially when we’re trying to make sense of our own lives.
If I write in my journal, “She manipulated me,” I have named my conclusion. But what happens if I stay with it a little longer and ask myself what she actually did? If I write, “He gaslighted me,” what happens if I go back into the conversation and remember how it unfolded? I may notice that every time I tried to discuss something that hurt me, I ended up defending myself against an accusation that had nothing to do with what I originally raised. I may remember apologizing simply because I was exhausted and wanted the conversation to stop. I may recognize that I routinely left those exchanges confused, belittled or doubting something I had felt certain about beforehand.
Now the word gaslighting has context. More importantly, I have information about my own experience.
That is why I wouldn’t suggest abandoning psychological language. Sometimes finding a word for what has been happening is the moment everything clicks into place. Naming an experience can be clarifying, validating and even liberating. But the name should help us understand the story rather than become a substitute for telling it.
So if I were sitting across from someone preparing for a custody evaluation today, many years after conducting my last one, I think I would still begin in much the same place. Tell the evaluator what happened, what you actually saw and heard, whether it happened once or became a pattern, how you responded, and what effect it had on you or your child. Be willing to talk about your own parenting too, including the parts you might wish you had handled differently. And when there are things you don’t know, it is perfectly acceptable to say that you don’t know.
You don’t have to prove that someone is a narcissist or persuade an evaluator that your former partner is a gaslighter. You don’t have to diagnose a sex addiction in order to describe sexual behavior that concerned you. In fact, the more serious the concern, the less it needs decorating.
After all these years, perhaps that is the part of the work that has stayed with me: before we decide what to call another person’s behavior, there is value in slowing down long enough to describe what actually happened.
Give me the story. The labels can wait.
Download the Tip Sheet: Preparing for a Custody or Parental Fitness Evaluation
I no longer conduct forensic evaluations, but in a prior chapter of my professional life, I conducted parental fitness and custody evaluations for nearly a decade (2000-2008). During that time, I completed nearly 200 hours of continuing education in forensic and child/family assessment and presented on parental fitness, forensic evaluation, child welfare, and related topics at state, national, and international professional conferences, and conducted/supervised hundreds of forensic evaluations for the courts. This post reflects general professional observations and is offered for educational purposes only. It is not legal advice, forensic guidance, or a substitute for consultation with an attorney or the professional conducting an evaluation.
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