Restrictive Gatekeeping
Restrictive Gatekeeping
Mother of The Motherless, and Fathers of The Fatherless: We know your pain.
You are a victim. A victim of restrictive gatekeeping.
You are a good person
You wish that life's easy questions had easy answers. "How are your children doing" and "Do you have kids?“ is very difficult, or maybe impossible to answer.
You lie in bed sleepless at night worrying about your children, and have no way on earth to answer that question.
Nothing you do seems to matter. The outcome of everything you can possibly do will be the same - you don't know where your children are or what they are doing.
Everything you do is turned against you.
You just want your child/children to be safe and have a good future.
Nothing that you used to enjoy, is enjoyable, because you can’t share it with people you love and miss.
TV commercials with children walking with their fathers make you turn away. Some family movies are unbearably painful.
Your family is worn out from dealing with your drama. The only people in your life who will listen are people you pay hundreds of dollars per hour to.
People keep telling you, “don’t worry, they will turn on their mother and come back to you when they grow up.“
You struggle to focus on day-to-day activities.
Your child avoids you, has judged you by things others have told them, and hates you. They won’t even except gifts from you. You don’t even have any place anyway to give gifts to them.
You feel all alone, nobody but you understand the danger that your children are in. Like every danger life poses to your child, you have no way to explain the danger they are in, because it is a topic too mature for them to understand.
You have spent years proving your innocence, and at every turn, with every new person entering your life, you will have to do it all over again.
You have had your entire history rewritten for you by someone who hates you fiercely.
You have lost all sense of time and judgment. Things that used to be easy for you, you approach the task and can’t focus and determine what simple thing needs to come next. "My child is in danger" is the only thought you can have.
People in divorced families trivialize your trauma, and try to rationalize your experience to “bad dad” fathers who have willfully left children on their own kids. "After all", they say, "those children did not have a father in their lives and they turned out OK."
You document and record everything, out of the sheer terror that you will forget what is real and what is an illusion, or worse, forget how wonderfully beautiful your children are. Your sanity feels like it is slipping away and each day your real memories push backward. You struggle to not become the monster they have created you to be.
You dread the idea of telling your story to another new shrink, lawyer, judge, or even potential friend. "Why would this one be any different?" you reason.
There is an impenetrable wall between you and what you know to be true, in the world that your children live in.
You’ve had your rights trampled on, and even crimes committed against you, and nobody cares.
The prospect of making new friends is terrifying to you, because you don’t have explanations for anything in your life.
You have been proving your innocence for as long as you can remember, and there’s no end in sight.
You are in a hostage situation. If you do the right thing, your children will suffer. If you ask for your rights, your children will suffer.
"It takes a village to raise a child." You realize, there is no village. There is only you.
"Research shows children of divorce show the best long-term adjustment when they enjoy quality relationships with both parents. When a parent is trying to minimize the other parent’s involvement with the child without justification, then he or she is engaging in restrictive gatekeeping and this will be harmful to the child. When a parent is supportive of the other parent’s relationship with child and engages in gate-opening behaviors to help with access and involvement, then this represents facilitative gatekeeping."
~ William G. Austin, Ph.D.