Andrea Dunlop

So you've got the family members, the non-offending spouse or the collaborating spouse.

In some cases, unfortunately, the other family members, the community members, the church members that donated money and the people who brought casseroles and the doctors, everyone that gets pulled into this is it really does demolish your ability to trust both other people and your own instincts.

And that's really part of the long-term psychological damage.

And doctors are included in that to find out that you've been used to do unnecessary surgeries on a child, that you've made a child suffer, not by any fault of your own, because, of course, many doctors in these cases are not at fault.

They are trusting what a parent is saying and the parent is lying to them.

But, of course, that doesn't make it any better when you've learned that you've done that.

You really have a spectrum with the partners.

Again, much of the partners in abusive head trauma cases where that's usually a woman and you get everything from someone who acts in a very protective manner.

And the minute that they have the information that they need to put it together, the minute that compelling evidence has been placed in front of them.

They will do everything they can to protect their child.

You have everything from that spectrum to people that are completely checked out.

And this is not terribly uncommon with the gender dynamics of marriage and parenthood in our culture.

You see these dynamics a lot in these specific situations where you know maybe you have a dad who's in the military or they travel a lot for work.

So maybe there's a reason that they're not as involved in the day to day or they're just completely checked out for their own reasons and they go, oh, the kids are her thing.

And so they don't know for a long time.

And then you get these other situations, which we've had a couple on the show where the dad is enabling to the point where I consider them a collaborator.

Yeah, and that's extremely common.

Hey, what's going on with dad?

Like, how much of your interaction?

And they're like, oh, when he's here, he doesn't talk.