Going Mental with Dr Tara Palmatier and Paul Elam: Abusive Women, Smart Men, Bad Choices

Whatever your feelings about relationships, there is no doubt that men’s lives with women can be both crazy and comical — sometimes both at the same time, sometimes not.

For a thousand arguable reasons, it is our relationship lives where logic often goes out the window and all things limbic have a way of taking over. That is true for both sexes, and it can have not only a profound impact on mental health, but on the lives of the people involved.

The world spends a nauseating amount of time obsessing on women’s experience in this area. But, at the risk of sounding cliché, what about the men?

While more people are becoming aware of men’s issues, they still suffer neglect.

Responding to that deficit is the aim of a new live Google Hangout with Dr. Tara Palmatier and Paul Elam, “Going Mental,” a program about how men experience modern relationships, good, bad or indifferent. The show debuts today, Wednesday, March 19 at 1 PM Pacific, 3 Central and 4 Eastern Time on Shrink4Men and on AVoiceforMen.

The first program will include a brief discussion about the show, followed by a discussion between Paul and Dr. T on the reasons so many men make themselves unnecessarily vulnerable, emotionally and legally, to women; the failure of many men to establish and hold fast to limits with what they will tolerate, and why all of this happens.

We are also going to focus on what can be done about it.

Please feel free to join us as we explore the side of men that most people know about but few discuss. You can watch the show live in the viewer below or at a later time that is more convenient for you.

For those who like to download podcasts to listen to on your commutes or at the gym, you will be able to do so on the Live365 AVoiceforMen Channel.

To watch the podcast, please follow this link and scroll down to the viewer:

Going Mental Podcast 01

Shrink4Men Counseling, Coaching and Consulting Services

Dr. Tara J. Palmatier, PsyD provides confidential, fee-for-service, counseling, consultation and coaching services to help both men and women work through their relationship issues via telephone and/or Skype chat. Her practice combines practical advice, support, reality testing and goal-oriented outcomes. Please visit the Shrink4Men Services page for professional inquiries.

In His Own Words: Living a Nightmare

Shrink4Men, AVoiceforMen and DAHMW kick off Domestic Violence Awareness Month with one man’s tale of domestic violence that involves, physical and emotional abuse, psychological abuse, child abuse, sexual abuse, smear campaigns, false allegations, DARVO, gaslighting and a host of other cruel behaviors.

To read this story, please follow this link:

In His Own Words: Living a Nightmare

Shrink4Men Counseling, Coaching and Consulting Services:

Dr Tara J. Palmatier provides confidential, fee-for-service, consultation/coaching services to help both men and women work through their relationship issues via telephone and/or Skype chat. Her practice combines practical advice, support, reality testing and goal-oriented outcomes. Please visit the Shrink4Men Services page for professional inquiries.

 

Domestic Violence Awareness Month: Men Are the Invisible Victims

October is domestic violence awareness month. In the true spirit of raising public awareness,  Shrink4Men, AVoiceforMen and DAHMW (Domestic Abuse Helpline for Men and Women) would like to shine a spotlight on a group of individuals who comprise approximately half the victims of domestic violence. A group who is afforded very few resources and are typically ignored and/or ridiculed when they speak out about their victimization — often by the very individuals seeking to raise public awareness about the insidious social malady of domestic violence.

Who is this invisible and marginalized group of domestic violence victims pushed to the periphery of public awareness?

Men.

[*If you are already aware about the difficulties male victims of domestic violence face, please scroll to the end of this article to find out how you can help.]

Men are turned away from most domestic violence shelters. Men do not meet eligibility to receive aid from most domestic violence support organizations by virtue of being men, which is nothing short of overt discrimination, sexism and bigotry.

To the best of our knowledge, there are no court advocacy programs for male victims of domestic violence. Men (and their children) are not eligible for state and federal stipends for safe housing from their female abusers. There are no free or subsidized counseling programs nor are there free legal services/legal aid for male victims of domestic violence.

In the United States, there is only one shelter for male victims of domestic violence (the Valley Oasis Shelter in Antelope, CA) out of the approximately 1,800 shelters available to women and their children nationwide. Canada also used to have a domestic violence shelter for men that was run by the late Earl Silverman.

Mr. Silverman committed suicide this past spring after succumbing to a state of learned helplessness and hopelessness after years of begging for funding and assistance for his much needed shelter. Essentially, Canadian women’s domestic violence organizations locked arms and blocked Mr. Silverman from the funding trough. The same thing happens to organizations like DAHMW in the United States.

The repeated message to organizations that want to help male domestic violence victims seems to be, “Be grateful for the few scraps of government funding that drop from the table and if you complain about the disparity, you won’t even get that.” The reality is that most governments are willfully blind to and/or profit from the suffering and victimization of their male citizens. Since men are currently the most underserved group of domestic violence victims, one would think funding the few organizations that help this population would receive priority from state and federal programs. Instead, male abuse victims are begrudgingly acknowledged, that is if they are acknowledged at all.

According to RADAR (Respecting Accuracy in Domestic Abuse Reporting), less than 10% of the United States OVW’s (Office of Violence Against Women) funding is used to help male victims. A big part of the problem lies in the very names of the OVW and the VAWA (Violence Against Women Act). “Violence against women” is exclusionary and ignores half of all domestic violence victims. Even worse, it demonizes men as perpetrators and women as victims in the majority of domestic violence cases, which simply is not true.

It also doesn’t help that the U.S. Department of Justice refuses to fund research about male victims of domestic violence. On page 6 of the DOJ’s solicitation for proposals on intimate partner violence and stalking, they have a section that explicitly states what kind of projects they will not fund, including:

Proposals for research on intimate partner violence against, or stalking of, males of any age.

It is hard to imagine in this day and age that any victim of domestic violence is ignored, scoffed at or denied support, but this is precisely what we do to male victims. It will come as no surprise to many of you reading this that men are approximately 40% to 50% of domestic violence victims. Sadly, most people are still woefully ignorant about domestic violence in large part due to persistently dishonest and misleading public awareness campaigns, data gathered via unscientific methodology and woozles like the 1 in 4 woozle about rape on college campuses.

Despite the abundance of peer-reviewed research on male domestic violence victims and female perpetrators, most domestic violence awareness campaigns focus exclusively on female victims as if our society isn’t already well aware that women can be victims of domestic violence. Many domestic violence organizations persist in publishing long ago debunked statistics that portray women as the victim and men as the primary aggressors in the majority of domestic violence cases.

Raising Public Awareness about Male Victims of Domestic Violence

In His Own Words

In an effort to bring attention to the pandemic of male domestic violence victims and female abusers, we will concurrently publish an In His Own Words post on both AVoiceForMen and Shrink4Men everyday in October. These posts will be from men who are or have been victims of domestic violence.

Heterosexual men aren’t the only invisible domestic violence victims. The two other populations that are also egregiously ignored are individuals in same sex relationships and the transgendered. We welcome your stories, too.

If you would like to share your story about domestic violence, please send it to shrink4men@gmail.com. We are looking for written narratives and/or audio or video recordings that describe or illustrate the abuse you have suffered. If you have an audio or video file of your wife, girlfriend, ex, etc., in the midst of an abusive episode, we will publish those as well.

Please adhere to the following guidelines:

1. Limit written testaments to no more than 2000 words and send as a Microsoft Word Document.
2. Use paragraph breaks, spellcheck, etc.
3. Please send video/audio recordings in a format that can be readily uploaded to YouTube.
4. If you send and audio/video recording, also provide a written description of the file (i.e., the circumstances leading up to the abuse episode).
5. Edit out identifying information before sending Word, video or audio files.
6. If your abuse case is already a matter of public record (e.g., in a newspaper or online publication), you may use identifying information.
7. Use DV AWARENESS SUBMISSION in the subject header of your email.

Due to time constraints, we may not be able to use submissions that require a great deal of editing, so please try to have your materials in the best shape possible before sending.

Additionally, please consider including some of the following in your submissions:

• Who is or was your abuser? Wife, girlfriend, fiancée, ex, grandmother, mother, sister, grandmother, aunt, etc?
• How long did the abuse go on?
• What kind of abuse? Emotional, physical, parental alienation, financial, smear campaigns, stalking, false allegations of abuse, sexual, falsely obtained restraining order and other abuse via the courts and law enforcement, etc?
• When did you realize what you were experiencing was abuse?
• Did you have difficulty believing you were being abused? If so, why?
• Did you tell anyone you were being abused? Friends, family, therapist, clergy, police? What was their reaction?
• If you were physically abused and called the police, what happened? If you did not call the police, why didn’t you?
• What is your message to other men and boys who are being abused?

Activism Posters

DAHMW would like some help creating activism posters to offer for download on AVoiceForMen for everyone who participates in poster campaigns. If have poster creation skills, please contact us at the same email address listed above.

Financial Assistance

If you would like to help by donating money or time to a real organization that helps abused men, you can make a donation to DAHMW or become a hotline volunteer.

Thank you in advance for helping us support men and their children who are victims of domestic violence.

Kind Regards,

Dr Tara J. Palmatier, PsyD

Shrink4Men Counseling, Coaching and Consulting Services:

Dr Tara J. Palmatier provides confidential, fee-for-service, consultation/coaching services to help both men and women work through their relationship issues via telephone and/or Skype chat. Her practice combines practical advice, support, reality testing and goal-oriented outcomes. Please visit the Shrink4Men Services page for professional inquiries.

MWT Radio Tonight: Lake Tantrum Special with James Mongiat

James Mongiat became so accustomed to his wife Whitney’s childish fits that he decided to video one of them in order to show people just how out of control and immature she really is. He posted the video on YouTube and it went viral.

It also sent Whitney to an attorney, and set the “guys are always wrong” media machine into full overdrive. James has been lambasted by white knights and other elements in the media about as mature as Whitney since the video made such a splash.

As we all know that is not an unusual turn of events for men dealing with abusive women.

We welcome you to join Paul Elam and Dr. Tara Palmatier for a special episode of Man, Woman, Truth Radio, where we will interview James Mongiat, to get what the mainstream won’t ever give him, a fair chance to tell his side of the story in full. Needless to say, there is a whole lot more to this story than what you saw on the video. According to James, the behavior captured in the lake tantrum video is benign compared to the the other abuses and domestic violence he has suffered while married to Whitney, which will be all to familiar to Shrink4Men readers.

The show airs tonight (Thursday, August 1st) on blogtalkradio at 6pm PST/7pm MST/8pm CST/9pm EDT. We will be taking calls. The call in number is 310-388-9709.

SHOW PAGE

Shrink4Men Coaching and Consulting Services:

Dr Tara J. Palmatier provides confidential, fee-for-service, consultation/coaching services to help both men and women work through their relationship issues via telephone and/or Skype chat. Her practice combines practical advice, support, reality testing and goal-oriented outcomes. Please visit the Shrink4Men Services page for professional inquiries.

In Defense of James Mongiat (Soon-to-Be_Ex-Husband of the Lake Tantrum Lady

There’s a new article on www.shrink4men.com that debunks the criticisms leveled against James Mongiat, the man who filmed his 30-year old wife having a temper tantrum because he would not take her boating on the lake.

You can read the article here:

Lake Tantrum: James Mongiat is Wrong

Shrink4Men Coaching and Consulting Services:

Dr Tara J. Palmatier provides confidential, fee-for-service, consultation/coaching services to help both men and women work through their relationship issues via telephone and/or Skype chat. Her practice combines practical advice, support, reality testing and goal-oriented outcomes. Please visit the Shrink4Men Services page for professional inquiries.