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My mother was evil; here’s how I help others face their own abusive childhoods
Almost every coaching client I serve says something like this:
“What am I supposed to think about my mother? I don’t want to think of her as a bad person, but would a good person treat her children the way our mother treated me and my brothers and sisters?”
These good shards of her personality could never coalesce into a normal-range person. But I have an idea of who that woman could have been.
Who are these clients, and what am I doing with them that we’d be talking about this?
If I were a licensed mental health “professional,” you’d call what I do counseling. Since I’m not a licensed professional, I call it personal coaching and consulting. As a man who was raised by a mother deranged with borderline and narcissistic personality disorders and who became a self-destructive alcoholic for much of his life, I offer peer support and advice from someone who lived it.
Accepting reality
Let’s return to the question we opened with. No, a good person would not abuse her children the way the parents of my clients treated them. That’s the answer that many people don’t want to hear. But accepting the ugly reality of an abusive parent is a minimum requirement for getting past the psychological damage this inflicts on children who later become damaged adults.
For many people who grew up this way, accepting reality is necessary but not sufficient. They don’t know what to do with the memories of the good times, the apparent kindnesses they remember from otherwise frightening parents. I’m going to come back to this below with some stories about how I’ve turned this over in my mind as I’ve tried to grapple with who my abusive mother really was.
How did the parents of my clients treat them? Many of my clients had parents who threatened or attempted suicide in order to extract care and pity from their children. Some of my clients were nearly killed by their fathers. (Yes, I mean that the fathers consciously, knowingly tried to kill them; strangulation is the usual method.) Some were pimped out as prostitutes by their mothers.
Not everyone had such a florid experience, but nearly everyone I serve was raised by a parent who could not be trusted. My clients were abused as children. Actually abused, not “TikTok” abused. They don’t ruminate on how being denied an ice cream cone at age 8 ruined their lives. Instead they’re people who suffered under cold, capricious, and sometimes sadistic parents. And decades later, these adults who never did anything to deserve what they got still feel it is their fault their mother didn’t love them.
A moral problem
As I’ve written about before, we are living in an age characterized by what are known as Cluster B personality disorders. These are better thought of as character disorders, in the vein of psychologist George K. Simon. He’s one of the few practicing and writing psychologists who recognize that people who are intensely narcissistic, exploitative, manipulative, dishonest, and cruel are not suffering from a medical problem. They are suffering from a moral and spiritual problem. A personality disorder is not an organic brain problem. It is not a “disability.” It is not diabetes. It is the state of having an immoral and warped personal character.
My goal with clients is to give them a kind of conversation that will allow them to see, and to accept, the reality of their parents’ derangement. If you grew up in a normal, loving family, you may have a hard time accepting that I’m telling you the truth about what kinds of people these parents were to their kids. There is a taboo against acknowledging that some mothers (it’s not symmetrical; people have no problem believing this of fathers) do not love their children and try to annihilate them.
To hell with the taboo. Reality doesn’t conform to what we prefer to feel.
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Stefano Bianchetti/Getty Images
Emotional balance sheet
Grown children from abusive homes usually don’t know, or can’t accept, that their parents were bad people. Many of my clients hesitate to use the word “abuse,” even a moment after a client tells me a story about how her mother hit on her teenaged boyfriend and then slapped the daughter, accusing her of being a slut. Genuinely abused children spend decades denying the truth and working overtime to rehabilitate the image of a grossly destructive father or mother. It is only when alcoholism, depression, or a string of failed relationships drive them to despair that they’re ready to take steps toward telling the truth.
When a person crosses the threshold and accepts that her mother or father was not a good person, did not “do their best,” and did not really love their children, she’s made enormous progress. This is the first and most important goal in recovering equanimity. But it’s not enough for many of us. What are we to do with the good memories? How are we to see our mother when we remember the times she imparted skills and wisdom to us? How do those affect the emotional balance sheet’s bottom line?
I’m going to concede something but with an important proviso: Yes, it’s generally true that no person is all good or all bad. But here’s the proviso: The kind of parents we’re talking about are not “a normal mix of good and bad.” We’re talking about parents who are, to a close approximation, 95% “bad” and only 5% “good.”
The arithmetic on that is straightforward. Five percent achievement will not get you a passing grade on a test, and it does not give these adults a passing moral grade for parenthood.
Glimpses of good
Still what about the good times? I’ve thought about this for years. I’ve talked about it with my (non-woke, conservative, old-school) therapist for years, and it’s been on my mind lately.
Back in the late ’80s, my mother and I were watching TV, and something came up about women’s place in society, how to have a career and a family at the same time. We’ve all heard these topics discussed for decades; it was one of those times when something “truthful-ish” leaked out in my mother’s conversation.
My mother was a deranged woman with borderline and narcissistic personality disorders. She was abusive and horrible. I use the past tense even though she’s still alive because I permanently removed her from my life 10 years ago.
But there were times when a real person glimmered through. Sometimes you could see and hear the intelligent, insightful woman she could have been if her good qualities hadn’t been subsumed by her moral and psychiatric derangement.
The mother she wanted to be
This conversation in the ’80s was one of those times. I remember it so well because it’s one of my memory’s best examples of the woman I hoped she truly was — the woman who could have been the good mother that deep down I think she wanted to be but could not.
We were listening to the TV discussion. I don’t remember the specifics, just that it was filled with the usual pat feminist answers that contradicted each other and demanded a world of circumstances for women that was never realistic. Having cake and eating it too, that sort of thing.
My mother reflected on all that, and she had this to say:
“It’s impossible for you to understand how strong the biological drive to have children is for women. We like to pretend it isn’t real and say it’s not real, but it is. A woman can feel the pull, and it’s overwhelming. I wanted to be a mother and have children since I was a little girl. It’s all I wanted to be.”
Living with the contradiction
This was true but only sometimes. My mother had borderline personality disorder, and such people have extreme and often opposing desires that conflict with each other. Their problem is that they don’t know how to integrate these conflicts, or how to live with the conflict and ambiguity. So instead of acknowledging the conflict, they pretend it’s not there. The next day, for example, my mother could rail at the top of her lungs about how women were enslaved, how they had a right to be “more than just mothers.”
A contradiction, yes, but an understandable one. My mother would have been better off if she’d found some way to live with the conflicts that most women feel, especially in a society that treats the status of women and mothers in such a, well, borderline way. My mother may have been crazy globally, but she was not “crazy” to react badly to these contradictory messages.
She also said this:
“Young women are making a mistake waiting so long to have children. You just don’t have the energy at 30 or 35 that you have when you’re 20. It’s not the same. Women were built to have children, and we were built to have them as young women. Today’s mothers are going to have problems they’re not counting on because they waited so long.”
She was right. Even my mother, a florid Cluster B personality case, could see the truth in traditional wisdom. Even she, a screeching feminist liberal, could admit that men and women were built differently and that women had biological drives to bear children.
Unanswered questions
My mother and I had many conversations like that over the years. Long talks where honesty crept in, even if it was gone the next day. I remember them so well because they showed the woman she could have been, they showed the best of her intellect and perception.
I miss them. I do know, of course, that there wasn’t a stable version of my mother just waiting to blossom. These good shards of her personality could never coalesce into a normal-range person. But I have an idea of who that woman could have been.
So it goes with many of my clients. A son remembers his intensely selfish and punitive father who sometimes imparted helpful wisdom. A daughter remembers a mother who once took real joy watching her daughter graduate from college, even though the week before, mom overdosed on pills in a sick bid for attention.
Who are these people? We may never know. This is not how I want to end this essay. I don’t like unanswered questions and puzzles that can’t be solved. Nevertheless here they are.
Blue cities reject law, reject order — and reject America
Allow me to shock some of my readers by declaring my opposition to President Trump’s plan to send the National Guard into crime-ridden cities. My objection has nothing to do with constitutional authority. Having studied the matter, I believe the president does, in fact, have the power to deploy federal forces to address rising urban crime.
History also shows such interventions can work. The drop in violence in Washington, D.C., after federal forces arrived to restore order is evidence enough.
If residents wanted leaders who took crime seriously, they would vote for them. Their refusal to do so exposes their political priorities.
I also concede that a case can be made for this step in the District of Columbia. Washington is under congressional jurisdiction, and the president, operating within that framework, has made the city safer for residents, political leaders, and foreign visitors. The mayor has even expressed appreciation for the assistance, although the District’s electorate — heavily black, heavily Democratic, and deeply hostile to the administration — continues to seethe at the very idea of federal involvement.
And for the record, the president is entirely justified in directing Immigration and Customs Enforcement to pursue illegal aliens with criminal records. These offenders have no right to remain in the United States, and the Democratic effort to preserve them as foot soldiers for the party is as cynical as it is transparent. The administration deserves credit for removing these “high-value” assets from the Democratic client network.
Ungrateful, unwanted
My problem arises with Trump’s call for federal intervention in cities where the local government — and most of the population — passionately opposes it. Even if the president can deploy the National Guard without a governor’s approval, prudence suggests he shouldn’t.
I can think of few officials more odious than Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) or Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (D). Yet both remain far more popular in their city than Trump or the GOP. Johnson’s approval is collapsing, but it is almost certain that whoever succeeds him will be another black or Hispanic Democrat who wins votes by railing against our supposedly “fascist” president.
Residents of Chicago’s most violent neighborhoods express emphatic disapproval of Trump’s plan. These are people who live amid constant danger yet habitually vote for leftist mayoral candidates. The same pattern holds in Portland, Charlotte, St. Louis, and Baltimore — cities Trump proposes to “liberate” with federal intervention.
Voters chose this
I cannot imagine why Trump should insert himself where voters clearly do not want him.
If residents wanted leaders who took crime seriously, they would vote for them. Their refusal to do so exposes their political priorities. I consider those priorities misguided and even self-destructive, but it is absurd to claim “the people are demanding” help when most are vocally rejecting it.
Voters should be allowed to live under the governments they choose. If they wanted different policies, they would stop electing Democrats who call for defunding the police, eliminating bail, and condemning crime prevention as racist. Despite the Fox News narrative, minorities who vote this way are not “victims” of Democratic manipulation. That idea is as fanciful as the GOP refrain that today’s Democratic Party is simply the slaveholding party of the 1830s. Voters who elect leftist Democrats are not trapped. They are expressing, clearly, the type of society they want.
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Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images
The vote that counts most
Ben Shapiro recently said something that rattled some listeners but which I find eminently defensible: If you abhor the politics of the place where you live, move. He followed his own advice, leaving deep-blue California for increasingly red Florida. Some interpret this as a call to uproot families and abandon long-standing communities.
But what exactly is the alternative? Should the federal government override election results because a city or state radicalized itself? Should Trump nullify votes? That will not happen. Nor can we easily disenfranchise those who lawfully exercise the franchise and continue electing the mayors, prosecutors, and governors responsible for our collapsing urban order.
Those who reject the leftist agenda retain one real option: vote with their feet. This path frees citizens from majorities who have democratically chosen anarcho-tyranny — not only for themselves but for everyone else who lives under their jurisdiction.
If a community insists on preserving violent disorder, permissive prosecutors, and ideological governance, the federal government cannot save them from themselves. Only the voters can. And until they do, they deserve the government they support.
Was the latest Epstein document dump just Trump’s 4D chess trap? Steve Deace answers.
After two major Epstein document dumps left the nation deeply disappointed — no bombshells, no convictions — America is once again holding her breath in anticipation of the “big one”: the full DOJ files mandated by the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which President Trump signed into law last week.
In the meantime, however, a separate batch of more than 50,000 pages of Epstein estate records released by the House Oversight Committee in September and November 2025 has already delivered some politically explosive material.
Steve Deace, BlazeTV host of the “Steve Deace Show,” says he has gotten the same question over and over again from his audience: Was this Trump’s 4D chess master plan all along: Let Democrats dig their own grave by demanding transparency, knowing these already-released House documents would drop and embarrass some of their biggest names?
While the question is undoubtedly warranted, Steve says the answer is no — this was not some premeditated plan. It’s just the age-old paradigm at work again.
“I know people very close to the president of the United States … the kind of people that would know if such a plan existed,” says Steve, “and they were quite dismayed this summer when the president just kind of suddenly changed his tune back in July and said … ‘It’s not a story. Why do you care? Move on.”’
But the chain of events certainly has the optics of a big Democrat gotcha scheme, he says. The timing of the revelations that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) asked Epstein for campaign donations after Epstein’s sex-crime convictions and U.S. Virgin Islands Delegate Stacey Plaskett (D) was taking real-time instructions from Epstein on what questions to ask during a congressional hearing seem almost too perfect to be accidental.
“And so I can see why people are wondering, ‘Was this just part of a very well-coordinated plan?’” says Steve. “It wasn’t. I can promise you it wasn’t.”
There’s an “undeniable truth in American politics” we all need to understand: “You can always count on Republicans to pre-emptively surrender,” and “you can always bank on Democrats then completely overreaching in response.”
This is true of our current administration, says Steve. The only difference is “their surrender line is not as pre-emptive as the previous people.”
“This dynamic plays out over and over and over and over and over again,” he says, citing the most recent cycle: Republicans folded early on Obamacare repeal and lost 40 House seats in 2018; Democrats then overreached with a stolen 2020 election, lawfare against opponents, and vaccine mandates, only to get crushed in the 2024 red wave that swept Trump and the GOP back into power.
The same cycle is repeating itself with Epstein right now, he says. The GOP promised that heads would roll, but nearly a year into President Trump’s second term, not a single arrest has been made. Then Democrats overreached by demanding full transparency on the Epstein files — pushing the bill through Congress themselves — only to watch their own members get scorched by the revelations. Enter Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) — a “total clown,” says Steve — trying to deflect by screaming “what is Trump hiding?” even though Democrats never touched the Epstein files during their four years in power.
So will this third release finally deliver?
Steve says most likely no. “I’ve already seen Tom Fitton at Judicial Watch going through the language of the legislation. He’s like, ‘I’m still going to have to sue these guys like a half a dozen times to get really everything we want.”’
But that doesn’t mean the drop will be all smoke like the first two. The fact that Larry Summers — Harvard president emeritus and Democrat heavyweight — has already resigned in anticipation of the release tells us there’s some real heat behind the smoke.
Steve reiterates his lesson: “You can always count on Republicans to pre-emptively surrender, and then you can always count on Democrats to way overreach in response to that, thus self-generating their own backlash.”
Add to that the fact that Donald Trump has this “providential anointing” that allows him to benefit greatly from his enemies, and it’s clear: This is no “seventh-dimensional chess that was nine months in the making,” says Steve.
“It’s just the paradigm.”
To hear more of Steve’s analysis, watch the episode above.
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FED UP: Bessent Says ‘Very Good Chance’ Trump Names Powell Successor By Christmas [WATCH]
![FED UP: Bessent Says ‘Very Good Chance’ Trump Names Powell Successor By Christmas [WATCH]](https://hannity.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/GettyImages-2214095040-300x200.jpg "SWITZERLAND-US-CHINA-DIPLOMACY-TARIFF-TRADE")
President Trump may name a replacement for Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell before Christmas, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Tuesday.
Church worker pretended to be ICE agent to extort $500 from massage therapist, police say
The safety director at Gateway Community Church of Webster, Texas, is looking for a new job after his arrest for allegedly pretending to be an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent.
Donald Doolittle, 58, pulled out an ICE identification card after getting into an argument over payment with a Houston massage therapist and threatened to have her taken away, according to an affidavit.
Mayans paid him the money, and he allegedly sent her a text saying that she would not hear from ICE agents.
The masseuse, identified as Rita Dumont Mayans, said she showed him a temporary visa.
“He demanded she Zelle him $500, or he would take her away and she would never see her family or children again,” a magistrate said at his court hearing.
Mayans paid him the money, and he allegedly sent her a text saying that she would not hear from ICE agents. He also allegedly told her to delete the texts.
Police were notified about the incident the next day when Mayans spoke to officers at a luncheon.
When he was interviewed by police, he denied being at the business or getting a massage, but security video contradicted his statements.
Doolittle was charged with impersonating a public servant.
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The church said Doolittle was fired from his position. The affidavit said that he had worked there for 10 years.
“Upon learning of these allegations on Saturday night, we took immediate steps to ensure the safety and well-being of our congregation and community,” reads a statement from the church.
Bond was set for Doolittle at $10,000.
Critics of ICE agents wearing masks have warned that others could impersonate them in order to harm innocents. The Trump administration has argued the coverings are necessary to protect agents from threats, especially from the far left.
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Eric Swalwell sues Trump administration over alleged privacy violations
Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell of California is suing a Trump administration official for allegedly violating privacy rights in order to seek prosecution of the president’s political enemies.
Swalwell, who is running for the governorship of California, filed a 19-page federal civil lawsuit against Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte.
Swalwell alleged in his lawsuit that the charges against him were filed ‘at a critical juncture in his career.’
The housing official referred Swalwell to the Department of Justice for alleged mortgage and tax fraud.
“Pulte’s brazen practice of obtaining confidential mortgage records from Fannie Mae and/or Freddie Mac and then using them as a basis for referring individual homeowners to DOJ for prosecution is unprecedented and unlawful,” the lawsuit alleged.
Swalwell also posted a statement on social media.
“Today I have filed a civil lawsuit against FHA director Bill Pulte for violating the Privacy Act and First Amendment,” he wrote.
“Director Pulte has combed through private records of political opponents. To silence them,” Swalwell added. “There’s a reason the First Amendment — the freedom of speech — comes before all others.”
Pulte was instrumental in the charges that were brought up against New York Attorney General Letitia James. Those charges were dismissed by a federal judge on Monday, but the Trump administration vowed to appeal.
Swalwell alleged in his lawsuit that the charges against him were filed “at a critical juncture in his career: the very moment when he had planned to announce his campaign for Governor of California.”
Pulte also helped bring criminal referrals against Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff (Calif.), as well as Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cook.
CBS News said the Federal Housing Finance Agency did not respond to a request for a comment.
Swalwell added a quote from novelist George Orwell: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
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