Survivor of domestic violence hosted at conference (Fairfield, Connecticut)

It is good to see survivors of domestic use their experience and knowledge to help others as this woman has. Dad ULNER STILL received one of the longest prison sentences ever in a domestic violence case where the victim survived.

This case illustrates how phony the whole "parental alienation sydrome" label is. The badmouthing or "alienation" that this father perpetrated against the mother did not happen as part of a discrete "syndrome." It was just one part of his arsenal to utterly control and destroy her life and the life of their children.

http://www.minutemannewscenter.com/articles/2010/07/01/fairfield/news/doc4c2ca9f681b19415956302.txt

Fairfield hosts survivor of domestic violence
Published: Thursday, July 01, 2010

By Meg Learson Grosso

Susan Still shared with police, prosecutors, and advocates for victims of domestic violence, just how she could have stayed as long as she did with the man who almost killed her. Last Friday morning, at a seminar at Fairfield Police Headquarters, attended by police from many of the surrounding towns, as well as by prosecutors, victim advocates and judges, Still told her story, one which has already been featured on ABC’s 20/20 with Diane Sawyer.

Susan Still and her husband Ulner Still had been together for 24 years, when she left him in 2003. They had a 21-year-old daughter, a 13-year-old son and an 8-year-old son. Her 13-year-old was forced to videotape Ulner’s verbal abuse and physical abuse of his mother. While verbal abuse occurred during the last ten or so years, the physical violence only occurred in the last two. Ulner Still beat and punched his wife and almost strangled her.

The videotapes show a woman standing utterly still while she listens to her husband call her "stupid" numerous times in 36 minutes.

Lynn, her boss at an insurance office, noticed one day that Susan Still had a wound on her head and asked her about it. She also noticed that Still said, "Yes Master" and "No Master," when she spoke to her husband on the phone.

Behind closed doors, Susan Still told her boss what was happening, but begged her not to tell anyone. Her boss agreed, and told her she was there for her. She also began to document on her calendar when Still came in with visible bruises. This later turned out to be the only reason that the judge was able to give Ulner Still the longest sentence ever given to a perpetrator of domestic violence whose victim did not end up dead. The dates and times of the observed bruises, noted by her boss, gave a third party’s objective evidence.

Still later told a Minuteman reporter that this would be the most important thing that she would advise someone who knows someone in an abusive situation to do.

Still decided to escape after "a horrendous weekend." She went to work as usual, trying to cover her bruises with make-up. Her boss said, "This has got to stop." Susan picked her 8-year-old up from elementary school while police picked the 13-year-old up from middle school. Her 21-year old sided with her father, even testifying for him.

Why did she finally leave?

"I knew that if I stayed any longer, I was going to die," said Susan Still. She is unusual for a domestic violence victim because she knew when she left, that she would never go back, she said.
On ABC’s 20/20, Diane Sawyer asks her what she sees when the videotapes show a woman standing still while she listens to her husband call her "stupid" numerous times in 36 minutes.

"I see a woman desperately seeking to salvage whatever she can of her family," said Still.

Her children joined in the verbal abuse because they knew what would happen to them if they didn’t. Her husband would turn on them. They had been brainwashed, Still said. She, herself, thought for a long time that if she could only "fix" herself, everything would be fine.

"How does that happen?" Susan Still rhetorically asked on Friday morning. "I was not a person that grew up with poor self-esteem. I was fine with myself and so I wondered how I ended up in a whole different place and I didn’t understand that until I got out." Only through counseling did Susan Still begin to believe differently.

"In the original videotape, you’d be able to see how he took a statement that I made and change it into something entirely different," said Still of her former husband. "So my brain was kind of split into two. Half was trying to stand there correctly and to give him respect. I was trying to explain myself out of any trouble I was in. If I could only do things right, this wouldn’t be happening. Anything I could do to fix it, I would, but the other half of my brain still had common sense. The other half said, ‘When he comes at me, what should I do? Should I run out the door? Should I grab a child? If I run into a room, what can I grab to protect myself?"

When her daughter came home from work that day, her husband made the children sit and watch the video, while she was within his reach, so he could hit her when he critiqued her actions. "After that, I knew I would end up dying if I stayed," Still said.

Ulner Still also made a threat to the 13-year-old son who had gotten in trouble that week. Susan Still said, "It was one thing when he hurt me, but…when he made the threat to my son, that drew the line in the sand and I knew I would have to get out the next day."

"How did I get there? He had me programmed to believe that everything was my fault."

"I met my husband when I was 18 years old. We are very emotional creatures ... I was very much in love with my husband. He was very much Prince Charming. He made me feel loved, but how he made me feel loved was in the guise of caring. In the guise of caring, he took control."

Susan’s husband was in a band and traveled a great deal, so she would make plans to go out at night. He would say, "Oh, no, Honey, I don’t want you going out of the house after dark. It’s too dangerous. I want you to stay in the house," and she did unless it was to her mother’s. Eventually, even contact with her family was cut off. When she finally escaped, her mother met her at the police station, but she had no idea of the abuse.

One time, before the relationship deteriorated, Ulner was in a time zone that was twelve hours different. He called Susan in the morning—her time, thinking that it was night where she was as well. She wasn’t there and "I can’t tell you how many people were looking for me. He had a large family so it was like a small army looking for us."

Her children didn’t go out on play dates with other children. They pretty much did things as a family.

"After we got over this wonderful love we had, that’s when he started attacking the family." Susan said that when things went wrong for her husband, it would be, in his mind, the family’s fault.

If something was wrong with the cable bill, or something from a catalogue, Ulner would ask Susan to call. "I would say, why don’t you call, but he wouldn’t. If that call ended up in a way that he wasn’t happy, it was my fault."

That day on the video, her son had asked her for lunch and then gone upstairs with her husband. She made the lunch and then asked herself, "Do I ask my son if he wants lunch or leave him alone with my husband? Which decision was right?"

Today, she realized that even to have to mull over a question like that is ridiculous, but, at the time, making the wrong decision, "meant being knocked on the floor."

She also knows today that whatever decision she had made, it would have been the wrong one, because to her husband, it was all about power and control.

He turned her children against her. When he asked them to criticize her, they did, because they knew that if they were quiet, he would turn on them, Still said.

Her older daughter was subsequently on Oprah, after she had received many years of counseling and when Oprah asked what she was thinking as she watched her Mom being abused, her daughter said, "It was just part of our lives. I just thought it was regular life.…We just listened to him and thought, this is what is supposed to happen."

Susan told the police assembled in Fairfield on Friday morning, that it is important to understand that the children’s reaction will be different from a policeman’s. "For you, this is a horrible sight and unacceptable," she said, but the children will not want you to take their father away. Neither will the wife. The wife knows that if you take the husband, he will be back, and so she has to be ready for what’s going to happen when he comes back, Still said.

"You’re not dealing with stranger on stranger crime. There’s love involved here. Love doesn’t stop because they punch you in the face and for a child, Dad is usually second to God. They love this man so, understand you may not always get the response that will be logical to you," Sill said.

There may be dynamics between the children as well, said Still, telling of how her children were interrogated separately at the police station, but when the younger son was questioned, he could see his older brother and mother through a glass pane in the door. The advocate covered the pane and moved the child so he could not even see the door, where his brother was glowering at him.

Her husband manipulated the children to choose him over his wife, by among other things, telling her that she was not allowed to hug and kiss the children, without letting the children know that he had done so. Then he would say to them, "She doesn’t love you. Did she kiss you good-night last night?"

When he found one time that she had hugged and kissed them, he punched her until her ear drum was broken.

Nonetheless, when the prosecutor told Still that her children would have to testify against their father, "She sounded like a monster to me," said Still, who, at that time, didn’t want the children to be responsible for putting their father in jail.

Ultimately, she realized that they had to do it. "I knew I couldn’t let my children see him win again."