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The Pastor's Heart with Dominic Steele
Christian leaders join Dominic Steele for a deep end conversation about our hearts and different aspects of Christian ministry each Tuesday afternoon.
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The Pastor's Heart with Dominic Steele
Coercive control in Christian families and the impact on children - with Jenni Woodhouse
How do we help children in Christian families escape and recover from the devastating effects of domestic abuse?
Pastoral consultant Jenni Woodhouse says there is a hidden epidemic of coercive control where a parent with narcissism or borderline personality disorder makes life impossible for their both their spouse and children.
We also explore the impact of domestic abuse on children of all ages, from teenagers to toddlers.
What responsibility does the church have? What should a church leader do?
How can we as church leaders detect and address these issues in the congregation?
Jenni Woodhouse is a pastoral care consultant with the Church Missionary Society.
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The impact of domestic abuse on children in our churches and what to do about it Today. Coercive control in Christian families. It is the pastor's heart, dominic Steele, and today we are joined by Jenny Woodhouse. It is happening in all our churches. Coercive control in a family. The kind of personalities involved are borderline personality disorder and narcissism. Mostly till now, we've talked about what this looks like for the other partner in the marriage, but there's also a massive impact on children. 23% of Australian children witness physical violence against mum or step-mum, and churches are not immune. But what responsibility does the church have and what should a church leader do? Pastoral care consultant for the Church Missionary Society of New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory, jenny Woodhouse is with us again on the Pastor's Heart Capital Territory. Jenny Woodhouse is with us again on the pastor's heart, Jenny. I'm going to come to the impact on the child in a moment, but this is sobering for our pastor's hearts, for this is going to be a problem in every church community.
Speaker 2:Unless you have maybe one or two families in a tiny weenie church. Yes, you've just quoted 23% of Australian children witness physical violence against their mother or stepmother. It's upwards of 40%. So 39 point. I don't know whatever. 8% of Australian children have witnessed domestic abuse in their homes from one parent to another.
Speaker 1:The types of personalities at the heart of the problem borderline personality and narcissism. Let's just jump in and do the definitions. Okay, thank you.
Speaker 2:There's been quite a large amount of research into this. Within our churches, particularly, I think, within evangelical churches, we don't often see the incredible physical violence and aggression by men that is often prevalent in homes where the woman is physically abused. Often prevalent in homes where the woman is physically abused and I'm using kind of as everyone does mostly men, statistically speaking, are abusive that way to a partner In our evangelical churches it's more likely to be a coercive control kind of situation, an emotional, psychological abuse within the family. That is quite well hidden. That we see. Research is actually linking that with people with symptom clusters and those symptom clusters reflect what's the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders that classify as narcissism or borderline personality disorder. Now, borderline personality disorder is the research into is really changing how we think about it? I'm using the term borderline personality disorder, which is a little bit old-fashioned, just because most people will understand that and grab hold of that just because most people will understand that and grab hold of that.
Speaker 2:The research will show that a lot of people who are diagnosed or have been diagnosed in the past with borderline personality disorder, in fact they're changing the definition now to complex post-traumatic stress disorder, because most people who have that cluster of symptoms have suffered some trauma in their childhood. That's, generally speaking, narcissistic personality. Let me stop and just say by personality disorder we all have traits of narcissism, believe it or not, and we all have traits of that cluster of symptoms of borderline personality disorder. When we talk about a disorder, we're talking about a cluster of symptoms that is significant enough to negatively impact on most of your relationships. That's a disorder.
Speaker 2:With narcissism there's a, you know, we think of maybe one or two political leaders around the world say who may be grandiose narcissists, but mostly it's not that grandiose narcissism where I am the best, most important human being in the history of the world.
Speaker 2:It's more subtle and complex than that.
Speaker 2:There are folks that are vulnerable narcissists who are almost the most important victim in the world or the one that needs the most attention some other way than being the best person.
Speaker 2:So it comes out in a whole variety of different forms, but it's mainly a lack of empathy or very, very shallow empathy, a sense of entitlement, and it comes from like a sense of not being anything or anyone and I can't live like that and so I just have to be somebody important somewhere, so that might be the world's best rescuer or the world's best victim. But it's that lack of empathy, it's that sense of entitlement, it's that inability to apologise, that sense that I cannot possibly be wrong. And the black and white thinking, that splitting kind of thinking which is you're all black or you're all white, which is also a characteristic of borderline personality disorder or CPSD. So that splitting is you're either on my side and for me, or you're an enemy, you're against me and I have to cut you off. So put that into a family situation and you get very complex dynamics situation and you get very complex dynamics you just said outside the church we're seeing more physical.
Speaker 1:Inside it's the more coercive control behaviour.
Speaker 2:Yes. So by April this year in Australia 28 women had been murdered. You know gendered violence. So we're not generally seeing that with inside churches. Mostly men who flip and get that aggressive are not men who are attracted to churches. Men who are attracted to churches with this narcissism, this kind of cluster of symptoms down that end that make them extremely difficult personalities to get along with and to have in a church are attracted to church settings because it's an area of control. They're often on parish council or a church board. They're often on a parish council or a church board. They're often the most vocal person within the church who knows exactly what should be done and tells the minister what to do. So they're very attracted to that setting. Within churches it's an easy place to be.
Speaker 1:The gender balance of the. I mean it's clear that when it's physical violence, it's the man that's the bigger, the perpetrator. Yeah, what about in the coercive control relationships? Is it more even or?
Speaker 2:It's well, the jury's out, Mostly when you're looking at that quite abusive nature where it starts out coercive control and gets harder and harder and harder to live with and then starts to get violent you know, 10, 15 years down the track or starts to get violent perhaps with the kids when they become teenagers and start to stand up for themselves, and that's when the violence sets in. It's mostly men with those narcissistic personality cluster of symptoms, um, with borderline personality disorder or complex ptsd. Um, many people are now saying it's 50, 50 men, women, men, women. Men are usually misdiagnosed with, I don't know, depression or maybe bipolar disorder, something along those lines, whereas women tend to be more diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. Interesting it doesn't. In a sense it doesn't matter. In the end, what we're talking about is a cluster of symptoms there with that disorder that stems from an intense fear of being abandoned, an intense fear of being alone and therefore clinging to people and taking control of someone's life in a sense because I can't let you go, because you might abandon me which impacts children so that sometimes one child might be that child for the person. Say, it's a mum who's got this cluster of symptoms. One child may be mum's go-to person that feeds her emotionally that she can't let go of, and the other children may be much more neglected by her. Or it may be that first child comes along and she's just all in with this first child and when the second child comes along, that child gets ditched for the second one. And so what she's doing she doesn't mean to, she doesn't know she's doing it, but what she's doing is actually rejecting, then abandoning that first child for the second one.
Speaker 2:I worked with a woman once who did exactly this and by the time that the first little boy was five, he couldn't count up to three or four. He was five years old at school and he just couldn't count up to three or four. He, he was five years old at school and he just couldn't count. Um, he just was so terrified of displeasing mum because she'd you know she'll just kick him out because the little girl was all important um that he couldn't learn. He was just on. He was hyper vigilant, looking out for mum all the time. He couldn't do life because everything had to be I've got to check out how's mum going to react. So he just found life too hard to do.
Speaker 1:Now we've got a lot of senior pastors watching us here and these kind of problems are going to come to the senior pastor. What are you saying when I think, oh, I just feel a sense of uncomfortableness here, or what's your advice to us here?
Speaker 2:If you're seeing someone within the congregation who is clearly quite a difficult human, you know, Coming alongside them, wanting to get a sense of what is difficult for them. Is it because they're not being heard? Is it because they're finding life at home difficult? You're wanting to find a sense of where that personality is having its buttons pressed in a sense. If you're picking up that the marriage is in a difficult state because of personality issues with one or other person in the marriage.
Speaker 2:What you're looking for there is how to get around each of the people in the marriage to support them. What we do neglect often, I think, is well, what impact is that having on the children? And I think we usually think, oh, the kids won't be seeing this, they won't be understanding that dad is entitled, dad is. But we're not looking at well, how is dad relating to the kids?
Speaker 2:And often in those kind of narcissism kind of personality traits, people are there for the person with narcissism. That's what you're for. You're not a friend, you're not a wife, you're not a child. You're there for me, to serve my needs, to fill my needs emotionally. And so the children grow up with this sense that they are an extension of dad. They are there to make dad proud. They are there to be the most intelligent child ever born in the history of the world. They are there to be the best sportsman ever, so that dad can boast about what a wonderful daddy is. They're there to serve dad. And so, while you're looking at these kids thinking, oh, you know, they're achieving and they're doing well, we often don't dig a little deeper into what's going on with the kids until they reach teen years.
Speaker 1:I'm just thinking, though. I mean, I've had this strong paradigm the parent is the primary carer the primary responsibility person for the child and, as a pastor, I'm functioning as the parent's delegate to spiritually care for their children, to spiritually grow their children in Jesus, me, the youth leaders under me, those kind of people. But you're talking about a scenario where I'm losing confidence in the parent as being able to make optimum decisions and actions for their child. You know, and well, that's a very dangerous place for me as a pastor to go.
Speaker 2:Don't go there. Yeah, I don't want to. Don't go there, you'll get shot. Yeah, no, you can't do that. What you can do, though, is you can support the family from outside. You can provide.
Speaker 1:Firstly, before you talk to me about what to do, I mean, having those thoughts is not an unreasonable thought, that is a very reasonable thought.
Speaker 2:Dominic Stick with that thought.
Speaker 1:It's a goodie. Okay, I've got that thought.
Speaker 2:You're not there to interfere in. You know to tell people how to parent their children.
Speaker 2:No, it'll just blow up in my face, oh yeah totally no, that's, and it's not your role either, but we can. We have such an opportunity as congregations, as a church, to actually provide alternate scenarios for kids. We have such wonderful opportunities to invite children into our homes to see different parenting styles, to see different marriages, to see ways that families function well and healthily, so that kids are not just growing up in this isolated sense that this is all my fault. If only I could behave better for dad, he'll like me. If only I could please mum. She won't reject me. So actually giving children the opportunity to see healthy families and healthy marriages is the best thing that churches can do for children who find themselves in these family dynamics.
Speaker 1:Let me break it down a little. Let's do teens, then we'll do primary kids, and then we'll do babies and toddlers and that kind of thing. What's the word? I mean, you said a little for teens before, but just how can the church help the teen?
Speaker 2:Yeah, when you hit pubescence, your brain starts to myelinate. So when you're a child, your neural pathways are going all sorts of ways. Oh, I want to explore this, I want to explore that. I want to be an astronaut, I want to be a doctor. When you hit pubescence, your brain's myelinated. So when you have a piece of wiring taking electricity from the switch to the light, you know the electricity goes pretty fast. But when you myelinate it, when you put plastic coating on it, it goes a million times faster, and that's what our neural pathways do. So when you hit pubescence, your brains are starting to find the neural pathways that are important to you and ditch the other ones, and they're myelinating, they're making it faster, they're making it like a neural pathway that you're going to use a lot, which is why they're looking at friends rather than why they're trying to separate out from families, et cetera.
Speaker 2:And at that point, when the teenager's brain is trying to work out, do I be like dad? Do I, you know, or do? Am I watching mum getting abused by dad? Has dad raised us to think mum's hilarious and stupid? Has dad raised us to think mum's? You know a crazy person and therefore I'm not going to be like dad or actually do. I think women are crazy people because my mother's a crazy person. They're all starting to mile in at that time and pick ways to go, and if a teenager is going to so one of the rising issues in our culture in Australia is reports of domestic violence from teenagers towards their mothers, from teenagers towards single mums who have left men who are abusive.
Speaker 1:Teenage boys or girls. Teenage boys Boys yeah. What's happening there?
Speaker 2:Well, their brains are myelinating. All they've seen is dad humiliate mum for the last 15 years of their life.
Speaker 1:So I don't respect mum I have no respect for mum.
Speaker 2:She's an idiot. Dad says so.
Speaker 1:And we repeat the cycle really yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, a lot of what's happening with kids in domestic violence situations is being teaching kids to repeat the cycle which fits with the post-traumatic stress thing, that you were saying before.
Speaker 1:I want to come back to post-traumatic stress, so stay on, teens.
Speaker 2:Yeah um, the other half of the teens? Well, probably not half, but a lot of teenagers are realising that this is by seeing their friend's mothers or their friend's fathers, or the minister's relationship with his wife, or whatever it is seeing alternatives.
Speaker 1:They're starting to see, oh, there are some healthy relationships out there.
Speaker 2:And losing respect for the abusive parent, and then they're going to stand up to that abusive parent and that's when the sparks start to fly, and that's so in our refuges around Australia, about 45% of the kids 42% to 45% of the kids have left domestic violence situations that are in the refuges teenagers. So it's an incredibly tricky time of life where they're fleeing from domestic violence themselves.
Speaker 1:But I think I'm just joining some dots here. I think what you're saying is a family in a church that sees another family that they might have a little concern about. Well, a subtle thing that they could do that wouldn't be too controversial is just sometimes have the kid for lunch. Absolutely, yeah, absolutely, and just so that they get to see and they get to see that whole family relating well together and learn some.
Speaker 2:Oh, it doesn't have to be like it is at one place, yeah, give them alternatives and in fact do that intentionally. So if you as a senior minister, are starting to get vibes from a particular family that not all is well at home, actually asking people in your congregation older wives of people can you take notice of this child, can you catch up with that child? Can you just, you know, maybe have the family for lunch so that the kids in the family can see another family, Whatever it is. Give them alternatives.
Speaker 1:Okay, primary kids infants kids.
Speaker 2:Yes, primary and infants, kids, fmris. So those are neural imaging things that show brains lighting up, show us that for primary and infants and primary children who are growing up in a domestic violence situation, domestic abuse situation doesn't have to be physical violence, but this coercive control, emotional, psychological abuse. Their brains light up in the same places that men who are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, from combat lights up. These kids are growing up hypervigilant. They're growing up coming from a situation where if I do the wrong thing, it's life or death. If I do the wrong thing, I'm going to be seriously punished. If I do the wrong thing, I'm going to be seriously punished. If I do the wrong thing, I'm going to be rejected. If I don't do what dad wants or mum wants and goodness knows what that is, because they never explain it and it changes every day I'm going to be, I don't know, punished in some horrible emotional way. I'm going to be told I'm wrong. I'm going to be told I'm an idiot. I'm going to be whatever it is. I'm not going to be allowed to go to my friend's place anymore. It's just these random punishments will come on them.
Speaker 2:So children at that early age, even as young as babies if I can skip to babies now are showing that hypervigilant, high cortisol levels in their brains that are meaning they're finding it hard to learn at school, they're finding it hard to make and keep friendships, if you think, I think now of a little boy that I know he's about 10, he's grown up at home where his mum suffers from borderline personality disorder and she's all over the place and that's marked by instability in relationships, that kind of cluster of symptoms. So at one minute she'll be blowing up and nobody will know why. In the next minute you're the best little child ever in the history of the world and she loves you. So this backwards and forwards and unable to predict mum's behaviour is meaning that his little brain's all over the place and he will get a whiff of a friend starting to behave a bit like mum might behave and off goes his little neural pathway networks going.
Speaker 2:This is dangerous. This is dangerous and getting aggressive towards his friend to the point where people in the church are asking the dad please don't bring him over for a play date anymore because he's too aggressive. Nah, wrong, wrong. Don't do that to the little boy. Have the little boy over for a play date. Ask dad to come along with him, ask a couple of families to come over all at the same time, but don't reject the little boy. Yeah, so otherwise you know.
Speaker 1:It's just going to compound. Yeah, it has to compound, yeah, yeah. What about role reversal where the child end up telling fighting parents, stop that, go to yeah.
Speaker 2:That's actually that often happens in homes where one or other of the parents has got this complex PTSD or borderline personality disorder. I'll answer that question then I'll come back to that when the kids are taking on responsibility like this five, six, seven years old taking on the sensible parent responsibility, asking mum, please stop yelling at dad. Asking dad. Seven years old taking on the sensible parent responsibility, asking mum, please stop yelling at dad. Asking dad, please stop. You know whatever it is. And kids growing up with that have very little like their imaginative. Play decreases their ability to interact with other kids, their own age decreases. There are so many things that impact on kids that start to do that, so watch out for that. If you see that at church where you've got a little child saying things like you know I have to tell mum to do this or just that's an alarm bell.
Speaker 1:I want to say these are not folks In a sense, it's almost inevitable at one level if you've got a teenager and they're seeing I don't know a parent acting irresponsibly. Do you know?
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, that can happen. Yes, it may not happen. Teenagers may just shut down and think, yep, it's their problem, not mine. They may leave, find themselves in a refuge, Like there are all sorts of scenarios. I just want to come back to these clusters of symptoms in folks. I'm not wanting to say they're wicked, horrible, evil parents. That is not what I'm saying. In fact, I would ask that we have compassion.
Speaker 2:That is not a place you want to live really in a head that just thinks you're going to be rejected and abandoned, and or you're always right and nobody ever listens to you, and the world is a horrible place. It's not a happy way to live, and so I'm asking for us to be compassionate with mum and dad, but at the same time, they are having an impact on the children in the family time.
Speaker 1:they are having an impact on the children in the family. Just, you've talked here about, if you like, high overlap between what we used to call borderline personality disorder and post-traumatic stress. When I've talked to you before, you've been not that positive about somebody moving out of borderline personality disorder, but I have been positive about people moving out of post-traumatic stress disorder, do you know? And so I'm just trying to put that together.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so there's post-traumatic stress and you get that. You witness a car accident, you have post-traumatic stress.
Speaker 1:Or a sexual assault. Or a sexual assault, you'll have post-traumatic stress.
Speaker 2:You just will. That's how our brains work. But it becomes a disorder when your brain gets into this hypervigilance, when it gets into super controlling of everything around you because you don't want anything to go wrong, or it gets like. The symptomatology of post-traumatic stress disorder are things that appear after a year or two years or three years after the event or the events that have occurred, and it starts to negatively impact on your relationship. If you're able to understand this is what's happened I can actually trace this back to what happened at that point in my life or what happened to me as a child throughout my childhood Then you can actually there is a lot of help available for working out how to help your brain stop those thoughts in its track. You never get to a point where you stop the thoughts because your emotional, your amygdala's response, your fight flight response, happens before you're even aware of it. But you can get to recognise your fight-flight response and know that that's what it is and where it's come from and you can develop strategies to help with that. Complex post-traumatic stress disorder is, as the term implies, more complex, so you're getting harder actually it's getting harder to tease that out. Kids who grow up in domestic violence and domestic abuse households who do start to develop that post-traumatic stress response often becomes complex post-traumatic stress response because it's the very caregivers that are causing the damage. In war, you know, it's the enemy that's causing the damage. In a family where abuse is occurring, it's your caregivers causing the damage. That's very complex.
Speaker 2:There is, and with borderline personality disorder, where a child suffered abandonment at a young age or some traumas happened for them at a young age, there is dialectic behaviour therapy that can have an impact on people's ability to continue relationships. But they've got to recognise my relationships are not all that relationships are meant to be. I need to work on this, I need to figure this out. But you get to a point down the disorder spectrum where often people are so entrenched in their way of doing relationships and doing the world that they don't even recognise they're the problem and that's where you're getting to the end, where it's just difficult. It's how do we manage this person in our church? How do we manage this person's relationship with his or her children With narcissistic personality disorder?
Speaker 1:Because they won't let me inside. Yeah, that's right. I mean I find, whenever I'm in a disagreement with anybody, if I understand where they're coming from and I can feel for them, but if I'm not inside, I, yeah, yeah, no.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, no, because you're wrong and. I'm right and you have no understanding and you're picking on me and I'm the victim, as usual. I'm the world's worst you know hardest, done by victim.
Speaker 2:With narcissistic personality disorders that's a different thing. I was going to say a different kettle of ball games, as my mother used to say. But it's more an entitlement, it's more a lack of empathy, it's an inability to even recognize that I could be wrong. I'm not wrong, You're wrong, and if you disagree with me it's because you're attacking me. It's not because we have a disagreement, it's because you're out to get me. And so you get fairly quickly this you're on my side, you're a friend or you're an enemy scenario happening. So that's intractable. There's not a lot you can do about that. That's intractable. There's not a lot you can do about that. People say to me of course people with narcissism can be helped. Well, yeah, but I've never met one. I've never met anyone. I don't know any psychologists or psychiatrists who have ever met somebody who's recovered, in a sense, from having narcissistic personality symptoms.
Speaker 1:Is it a bell curve? Yeah, yeah, and so I mean presumably that's the case with somebody right up one end of the bell curve. Yes, we all have those symptoms to some degree, and I look at selfishness in my life and think I want to try and be less selfish. I want to ask God, with his spirit, to help me be less self-centred.
Speaker 2:If you had narcissistic personality disorder where it was negatively impacting your relationships, you would not be thinking that. Right you would not be saying that, you would be saying….
Speaker 1:This is the right way to think.
Speaker 2:This is the right way to think, and I don't understand why people are not listening to me, right?
Speaker 1:A couple of quick scenarios One where you've got a problem in a family with kids and it's the woman who is causing the complexities, and one where you've got a family with men I'm sorry and it's the man who's causing the complexities.
Speaker 2:Okay, Well, let me just say, statistically speaking, about 80% of domestic abuse is never reported anyway by women who are the victims. About 95% of domestic abuse where the man is the victim is never reported. It's you know. We can understand why that is, I guess.
Speaker 1:I mean we've found in our divorce care ministry here. Actually, when you're sitting in divorce care and people are talking about their past experiences, you think, oh, actually you were a victim of domestic abuse. You just never labelled it as that all those years ago. Yeah, and actually it's been astonishing the high percentage of men in our divorce care groups. I mean it's higher than the reported percentage of men.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so that 95 that you're saying?
Speaker 1:rings true, yeah.
Speaker 2:Because your divorce care group's probably the only place they've ever found where they're feeling safe to say you know, I'm not a real man, I've been abused, yeah. So good on you, keep going, because actually the abuse of men is quite significant. Men work out. Men are generally not threatened for their life, whereas often women feel threatened for their life, in domestic abuse situations Particularly. Oh so come back to your scenarios. If mum is the issue, the man may just be able to cope with it well by being out a lot or by, you know, just ignoring her or by standing up as physically bigger and physically stronger and therefore feeling a bit more power. I think in those cases it's often the kids that will cop it a lot more from mum, but they will also be hearing mum get angrier and angrier and angrier at dad.
Speaker 2:A psychologist friend of mine thinks that the and this is anecdotal from her perspective thinks that marriages a marriage to someone with those borderline personality characteristics that are entrenched and difficult for anybody or for her to even acknowledge those marriages last on average about five years before it starts to break down, not necessarily before it separates, but before it starts to break down. It separates, but before it starts to break down. So I guess the kids are often left then with the concept of going between 50-50 mum and dad and often are terrified to stay at mum's. They're just terrified to stay at mum's because they don't know what's coming. Or mum uses the kids pretty well so she may not be emotionally engaged with them but she's emotionally engaged with lots of their problems and that's all Dad's fault. So there are so many different dynamics where the kids can be used.
Speaker 2:In those kind of scenarios We've got a man who's abusive, who may have those narcissistic characteristics, is abusive, who may have those narcissistic characteristics. Those marriages the women actually find it very, very hard being told because they're in a vulnerable position physically and being told that you're the problem and you're not a good enough wife. I've talked to so many women where ministers have said to them in the past try harder, have more sex with him, be more available for him, you know, make him feel like a man or whatever it is. So those dynamics just feed straight into her being the problem and her being the one that has to fix it all the time. And what she does is often try and protect the children from his abusive rants or his abusive behaviour towards her. She can't protect them from everything, but she will be utterly worn out, basically exhausted and worn out, and often not be as available as she'd like to be emotionally for the kids, because she just is keeping her head above water herself.
Speaker 1:I have a thousand more questions, but we should stop there. Thanks so much for coming in and talking to us, jenny, and we will look forward to having you back and talking further on these topics. Thank you. My guest on the Pastor's Heart, jenny Woodhouse, and she is the pastoral care consultant for the Church Missionary Society in New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory. My name's Dominic Steele. You've been with us on the Pastor's Heart and we will look forward to your company next Tuesday afternoon.
