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.

RELATED: We need to start trusting our primal survival instincts again

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.

​Cluster b, Lifestyle, Childhood abuse, Therapy, Coaching, Narcissism, Mothers, Fathers, Intervention 

Anyone who attends a university event, browses a college website, or strolls through a city park has likely heard a Native American land acknowledgment. These statements now function as the incense of the modern academy — burned at the start of a ceremony, meant to signal moral clarity, and producing the intellectual equivalent of secondhand smoke.

Arizona State University, where I teach philosophy, posts these statements on the webpages of the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law and the Hayden Library. The library even affirms that “we are on Akimel O’odham land, and that always needs to be at the forefront of our thinking.”

Pluralism, the real kind, permits disagreement and debate. What we have now resembles stage-managed pluralism: You read the script you are handed, or you stay quiet.

The implication is clear: U.S. sovereignty becomes an open question. That is the point. These acknowledgments aim to “problematize” the legitimacy of the United States, a central goal of the academic decolonization movement.

For six years, ASU’s New College has required faculty to listen to one at the start of every meeting.

A harmless ritual? A gesture of respect? A symbolic nod?

I wondered the same — until I conducted a small experiment.

A revealing reaction

At last week’s New College faculty meeting — a meeting of state employees conducting public business — I asked a straightforward question.

“Given our commitment to diversity, may I also read a land acknowledgment of my own before each meeting?”

My acknowledgment was not provocative. It thanked the generations of settlers, farmers, builders, capitalists, and families who transformed the Salt River Valley into a place capable of supporting a world-class university. It affirmed that we serve all students and help them prosper.

I made a motion.

Discussion required only a second. Not approval. Not endorsement. Only a willingness to debate the proposal.

Not one person seconded it.

I did not ask colleagues to agree with my acknowledgment. I asked only to read it. In fact, I would gladly see everyone read their own. Let every faculty member present a statement, a grievance, or a cause they feel compelled to highlight. Why limit the practice to one perspective?

Yet the official record now shows that not one faculty member at ASU’s New College would second a motion to expand diversity.

Appearance vs. reality

The episode highlights a distinction philosophy once taught clearly — the distinction between appearance and reality. Faculty preach diversity in language that collapses into ideological uniformity. Many cannot describe a competing view without reducing it to a script: oppressed versus oppressor. Anyone who falls outside their categories becomes a threat.

My request challenged the boundaries of that framework. To the decolonization mindset, my acknowledgment represents the wrong category — heritage tied to “settler guilt” or “oppressor identity.” The ideology cannot imagine anything beyond that narrow frame.

Pluralism, the real kind, permits disagreement and debate. What we have now resembles stage-managed pluralism: You read the script you are handed, or you stay quiet.

The academic left rose to influence by praising inclusivity and toleration. Once in power, it exempts itself from those principles because tolerance, in its view, cannot extend to anyone labeled “bigot” and inclusion cannot extend to anyone lumped into the category “fascist.” Only the Marxist dialectic survives the screening.

The ideology behind the script

Some readers may think these acknowledgments amount to harmless gestures. They are not. They originate in decolonization theory, rooted in works like Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” which defines decolonization as the overturning of settler society. Practitioners describe their own project as Marxist; that is the label they choose.

Land acknowledgments do not describe history; they advance ideology. They treat land as permanently tied to racial or ethnic groups, a “blood and soil” logic the same theorists claim to reject. They question private property, Western legal concepts, and American national legitimacy.

Seen through that lens, the reaction to my request becomes predictable. The ideological system divides the world into oppressed and oppressor. My acknowledgment, in their view, inserts the “oppressor” and threatens the narrative.

Hypocrisy becomes impossible to miss. Faculty who go along to avoid conflict now face an uncomfortable truth: The ideology they tolerate openly rejects the pluralism a university claims to defend.

RELATED: Antifa burns, the media spin, and truth takes the hits

Photo by: Spencer Jones/GHI/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Academic reasoning is out

One hopes university professors — presumably trained to evaluate arguments — could step outside ideological commitments long enough to examine their assumptions. The job once required that. But critical theory, as taught in many departments, closes off that possibility. It demands that every fact, dispute, or policy fit into a predetermined narrative of oppression.

Herbert Marcuse, in “One-Dimensional Man,” argued that intellectuals must not describe reality as it is but reshape society toward liberation from capitalism and Christian tradition. That approach leaves little room for honest debate.

The real remedy

Critical theory teaches that man is a victim of systems and structures. Scripture teaches that man is a sinner in need of redemption. Marxist theorists believe society must be remade. Christians believe the heart must be reborn.

Jesus told Nicodemus, “You must be born again” — a direct claim about the human condition. Our deepest problem is not a defective system but a corrupted heart. No bureaucratic revolution can fix that. Ideologies that promise liberation from greed or power often create something worse when handed authority.

The human dilemma runs deeper than political structures, and the solution rises higher than any academic program. Here is the acknowledgment I would like to hear at our university: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”

​Opinion & analysis, Land acknowledgment, Diversity equity inclusion, Colleges and universities, Diversity, Liberation day, Capitalism, Oppressor, Oppressed, Herbert marcuse, Christianity, Decolonialization, Eve tuck, K wayne yang 

Dominica Mosby appeared before a judge on Thursday morning at the Shelby County Criminal Court to face a first-degree charge of murder in the death of a 3-year-old boy.

The 29-year-old woman allegedly admitted to horrible abuse of Kevin Horton, the son of her boyfriend, according to court documents. The boy was found beaten to death by police at a residence in Memphis, Tennessee, on Nov. 5.

‘I get to the house; she’s standing outside. … I go in there to see my son. He’s ice cold.’

Judge Taylor Bachelor ordered Mosby to undergo a mental health evaluation in the hearing that lasted only minutes.

Police said they were called to the residence on Beacon Hills Road by the boy’s father, who found him unresponsive. The boy was declared dead at the scene.

Mosby initially told police that she had the boy go to bed after he got sick, according to investigators. She later allegedly admitted that she burned the boy’s genitals and ear with a lit cigarette after he urinated on the floor.

Mosby said that when the boy disobeyed her, she hit him on the head and chest and stomped on him.

An autopsy report said the boy had a lacerated liver, internal bleeding from his stomach, bruising on his torso, as well as burns to his ear and genitals. A medical examiner determined the cause of death to be homicide.

“I get to the house; she’s standing outside,” recalled the boy’s father, Keith Horton. “I have the fire department all in the house. I go in there to see my son. He’s ice cold; he’s purple. He had been dead.”

Mosby was charged with first-degree murder, aggravated child abuse, and aggravated child neglect.

“I feel bad because we loved him. I loved him like he was mine. Like I had him. Like I love my oldest son,” the boy’s grandmother said to WHBQ-TV.

RELATED: Man sentenced to 50 years for ‘staggering’ torture of daughter, including force-feeding laxatives

She is being held without bond.

A GoFundMe page was set up by the boy’s aunt, who claimed that his biological mother was incarcerated and that some of the funds were needed to bond her out so she could attend the funeral.

Mosby is scheduled to appear in court next on Dec. 11.

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​Dominica mosby, Torture and killing of child, Dad’s girlfriend kills son, Kevin horton death, Crime 

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.

RELATED: ‘He’s not that smart’: Homan lampoons Chicago mayor for pleading with UN to intervene against ICE

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.

​Opinion & analysis, Donald trump, Law and order, Crime, National guard, Washington dc, Chicago, Democrats, Jb pritzker, Brandon johnson, Anarcho-tyranny, Ben shapiro, Voters, Immigration and customs enforcement, Ice 

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.

Want more from Sara Gonzales?

To enjoy more of Sara’s no-holds-barred takes on news and culture, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Steve deace, Steve deace show, Blazetv, Blaze media, Epstein, Epstein transcripts, Epstein files transparency act, Donald trump, Epstein files 

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.

RELATED: Eric Swalwell challenges Greg Gutfeld to bench press contest after getting mocked — and gets ridiculed again

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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​Swalwell lawsuit, Swalwell sues bill pulte, Bill pulte, Mortgage fraud, Politics