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Conducting Child Custody Evaluations: A Comprehensive Guide

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if you are going to have a child custody matter you better read this book!!! read what they look for before you have an evaluation, be prepared!

A surprisingly fresh and impressively comprehensive guide to the convoluted process of custody evaluations. The need for these court-mandated evaluations arises when one of the parents - often, the father - is a repeat offender, an abuser.

Abusers are thought by practitioners of psychology to be emotionally disturbed, the twisted outcomes of a history of familial violence and childhood traumas. They are typically diagnosed as suffering from a personality disorder, an inordinately low self-esteem, or codependence coupled with an all-devouring fear of abandonment. Consummate abusers use the right vocabulary and feign the appropriate "emotions" and affect and, thus, sway the evaluator's judgment.

As Lundy Bancroft correctly observes, Confronted with this contrast between a polished, self-controlled, and suave abuser and his harried casualties - it is easy to reach the conclusion that the real victim is the abuser, or that both parties abuse each other equally. The prey's acts of self-defense, assertiveness, or insistence on her rights are interpreted as aggression, lability, or a mental health problem.

The book draws attention to these pitfalls and provides a through description of the system and its protagonists. Sam Vaknin, author of "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited".