No One is Coming to Save Us 42:58

Before we begin, a quick warning that in this show we discuss child abuse, and this content may be difficult for some listeners. If you or anyone you know is a victim or survivor of medical child abuse, please go to MunchausenSupport.com to connect with professionals who can help. Like many of us, I have extremely complicated feelings about the criminal justice system. I'm intrigued by and interested in alternatives from restorative justice to the abolitionist movement.

But in the world as it is, the world that we do have, I think it's crucial to pursue criminal investigations of people like Joe's mom Donna and of my sister. There was never a criminal investigation into Donna for her abuse of Joe, and there should have been. There was one into my sister, a two-year-long police investigation, in fact, that was ultimately referred to the prosecutor's office.

However, by that time, as often happens in these cases, family court had already returned her children. So no charges were ever filed. And that meant that my sister, like Donna, like most perpetrators, never suffered any consequences for her actions.

Megan wasn't even ever truly separated from her kids for any length of time because her children were placed with her in-laws during the investigation, and they let her be with them unsupervised pretty much all day every day, despite the court's orders. So this is just all to say that I'm not here to defend the systems we do have. Why would I when they failed my family so completely?

So I'm all in for conversations about change, about restorative justice, about community building, about looking for solutions outside of the extraordinarily fraught child welfare and criminal justice systems.

But the loudest calls right now on this issue are not about these kinds of solutions. They're about, quote, medical kidnapping. They're about devoting massive media attention in films like Take Care of Maya and Mike Hicks and Bach's Do No Harm series to painting perpetrators of child abuse as victims of an unjust system and instilling fear in parents of legitimately sick children.

There is a staggering statistic that friend of the show, Bea Yorker, shared with me from her recent mandated reporter training in California. In confirmed cases of child abuse, not suspected, confirmed, 7% of children were removed from the home.

Now, there's nuance here, of course, and if a parent is taking appropriate steps and accountability, there are times where removal is not the right solution. And I don't take splitting up families lightly. I recognize also how awful some of the alternatives are. But 93% is a lot of kids going back into abusive homes. So given that we know that the vast majority of abusers will not have their children removed, let alone face any other consequences, what do we do about them?

By the time an adult Munchausen by proxy survivor discovers their own horrible history, the question of child welfare is moot. And sadly, considering that there's often barely any will for law enforcement to get involved when there are vulnerable children living in the home, the idea of them devoting resources to an investigation long after the fact is hard to imagine. So when the evidence is found, when the pieces are put together, what do you do? What does justice look like for someone like Donna?

People believe their eyes. That's something that is so central to this topic because we do believe the people that we love when they're telling us something. If we didn't, you could never make it through your day. I'm Andrea Dunlop, and this is Nobody Should Believe Me.

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That's the thought that stuck in my head when I heard the news about Donna, who was found dead alone in her apartment while we were making this season. I knew that as long as Donna lived, she would be looking for a way back into Joe's life. And it seemed inevitable that Joe would continue to have to devote energy and time to maintaining the hard-won boundaries they'd set with their mom.

So in that sense, I admit, Donna's death came as a bit of a relief. However, even if there was freedom on the other side, for Joe, it was still a long way off. First, they'd have to survive the aftermath of Donna's death. So I'd been in Minnesota for a couple weeks helping with organizing the funeral, trying to go through my mom's stuff and do all of that, take care of anything I needed to in Hutch. And then I went home and...

moved to a new apartment for a week. I have zero memory of that, but it happened. I unpacked everything. So my roommate Spencer says that I was just moving nonstop. And then I went to Utah for a few days. And I think I was like convinced that just being in the mountains would be really like soothing and healing. And I

There were moments, I would say, like glimmers of peace, but for the most part, I could not even get out of bed, really. So it was a very expensive depression trip, it felt like. But I did get to see some people that I care a lot about, so that was nice, at least. And then a few days after that,

I got back home. I actually went to a residential treatment center, which is currently still where I am probably for a couple of weeks.

Donna's death and the trip to Hutchinson, during which Joe had to not only witness but clean up after the scene of their mother's demise, plan a funeral, and face family members, some of whom both enabled and doubted Joe's abuse, had been an immersion in the most intense trigger stew one could imagine. ♪

And as therapist Carly Osler explained, in abuse situations, trauma is not a single discrete event, but something that builds over time. How I like to talk about complex PTSD in terms of trauma, I like to talk about it as like stubbing your toe is blunt force trauma. It is really small blunt force trauma, but

But if you stub your toe in the same spot again and again for a month, your body is going to automatically adjust and evolve to try not to stub your toe again, like trying to avoid that pain. And also if you're stubbing your toe in the same spot every day,

Again and again and again, you might also develop a larger trauma to your toe. It might start gushing blood at some point as it weakens the skin barrier. And so I like to think of complex trauma as a lot of the little traumas, the systemic traumas that interweave into more complex expression.

of pain, of what gets stuck. Trauma is generally defined as something that's too much, too fast, too soon. And when it all kind of builds up and builds up, we develop more complex reactions. Joe's PTSD is deep and multilayered. And after Donna's death, as the waves of grief crashed over them, even the most basic daily tasks begin to feel impossible.

I was really proud of them for taking the step of going into treatment and for knowing that that's what they needed, even if it felt in the moment like taking a huge step backwards. I spent 10 years in and out of treatment centers before, truly thought I would never have to do that again in my life. But I think now,

Pretty quickly, within obviously a month of my mom passing, I realized, like, I'm going to need extra help. I think that...

I struggled a lot with feeling like if I went to a residential center, then that meant that I was taking steps backwards and everyone was going to be really disappointed in me. And that would mean that I had relapsed or done something bad and I was just trying to be sick and get attention. And then it was like really...

Shocking to me because every single person that I even said like, I kind of think I might need to do this thing. Every person was like, yes, yes, you do. And was very not even just like you need help, but like you deserve support. And I think that.

was wild. I don't think that I've ever really experienced that. I think in the past, if I've ever needed to step up to a higher level of care or something, I think there are always people that would be like,

Oh, you're just back at it again. So I feel like this was the first time it felt very, like, unanimous, which I think part of that's because I think people can understand grief differently than they can mental health struggles in general. In listening to Joe talk about Donna, so much of it feels like this hellish loop. These escalations of abuse, the cycles of denial and gaslighting, and the never-ending chaos.

But in those lowest moments, it was truly possible to see what had changed about this situation. Joe had changed. Joe had worked hard to build a life under immeasurably difficult circumstances. They now had close friendships with people who understood them and could support them. Donna had done everything in her power to isolate Joe from the moment they were born.

Donna, like many Munchausen by proxy abusers, had positioned herself to be not only omniscient about Joe's illnesses, the only one who understood her child's medical complexities, the one who knew better than all the doctors. But also, she was omnipresent in the other parts of Joe's life, presenting herself at school as the involved mother, and even taking the job of cheer coach, leaving Joe with no safe spaces where they could get some relief. ♪

And the devastating thing about this abuse is the way that the sense of isolation can linger long after a perpetrator has the power to literally control who their child is allowed to see and interact with.

This abuse can just demolish a person's ability to trust and connect with others, which is all compounded by the fact that people often don't understand what this abuse even is, and still others deny its existence outright. But Jo had done the hard work to heal and repair, and they'd built a community around themselves. There will always be pieces of her with me, but...

They don't have to have any control over me. I don't have to self-destruct. I can like fully live now. And I think like the most, one of the most recent art pieces I did was like something about what it would look like to take the next step forward or something. I don't know if that's what it was, but I drew me and then

my two of my friends like by my side and then underneath me I had all these like affirmations like I'm safe now all of these like really nicely worded things and then like around my head and around me where it was like all these like you have to die I'm the only one that can take care of you

I'll love you if you come to me, I need you to save me, all these different, all the voices and all the things or whatever. But within that, what I found really interesting was I didn't draw my mom.

The words were there, but that's all it was. It was just words, just thoughts. No real danger. And my friends were standing by my side and I was still grounded in truth and grounded in reality and all of those things. And I think I'm slowly getting to that place where I'm able to actually comprehend more that the danger is gone.

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Something my fellow parents will be familiar with is the concept of an extinction burst. So often, when you try to halt some undesirable behavior in your child by no longer rewarding it, the behavior will get dramatically worse right before it gets better. An example would be bedtime with my five-year-old. If I've been on the road or it's just been an especially stressful time, I'll sometimes let my daughter sleep in our bed with us.

which usually results in a cascade of other pushed boundaries, like nighttime snacks, extra bedtime stories, and her just being up way too late. Then, when I try to get her back on schedule so that mornings are not a zombie death march, she rages, and inevitably there will be at least a night or two of operatic protest before she gets back on track. She's not getting what she wants, so she tries harder and harder until eventually she relents. ♪

In the weeks after Donna's death, the pieces of her that lived inside Joe raged like they never had before. And the community surrounding Joe couldn't protect them entirely from the threat that lived inside their own mind. Watching this all go down after Donna died, I felt like despite her earthly hold on Joe being at an end, the psychic hold she had on them was experiencing a massive extinction burst.

Until she died, I did not realize how much of my daily life still surrounded around her. Even with being no contact, even with building my life, even with doing all these things,

I still every day would do little things or worry about if she was sick or if she was okay or if she was dead or have like all these different little triggers if I heard a siren or think she was dead, you know, like we talked about. I did not realize how much space she still took up in my life. With that all, I think the other really big thing is that I realized how much brainwashing

that there's been from my mom. And I don't,

It's not like I have like memories like, oh yeah, mom did this or like anything like that. But I've always had this like voice in my head that was sometimes just get like very, very loud and like be very punitive and like say like that you have to hurt yourself, you have to die, like say like really intense, loud things. And this has been my whole life. And I didn't really know what

where any of it came from and it's still like I don't fully know where any of it comes from but it used to happen not very often and then once my mom passed it was like multiple times a day and would be like really intense and I'd get really confused and really lost and started to just realize that voice is

is my mom's voice. Within that, I think that I realized, like, it's like I've always been really scared of it. It always just felt like something other than me, but I've never really understood it. And like I said, I don't know, like,

how it got there or where it comes from. But me and my therapist here have talked about how it feels almost like my mom implanted a little device in my head that I don't know when it gets switched on, but sometimes it just gets switched on. And once it's like on, I have no access to like any of my normal thoughts or anything. Like I don't know how to switch it off. And so it's just like...

I don't know how to get through that. So that's why I've obviously had to be here through all of that because it just has been so much louder. And then I'll have moments where I'm like, oh, I have a life and things like that. But then it'll get switched on and instantly it's like my mom was the heart and I'm just an arm.

Some of the scars Joe has from their mom's abuse are physical, like the vocal cord dysfunction they have from when their mom induced vomiting as a baby, or the difficulties with their immune system that resulted from being constantly made sick as a child. But the psychic wounds are so deep that Joe often has difficulty distinguishing between Donna's voice and their own.

I don't have this in the same way because, of course, Megan wasn't my parent. But as my own therapist has helped me understand over the years, because she was my older sibling, she did have a big influence on my squishy little kid brain. And while I've mostly had great relationships with other women and have some of the best friends anyone could ever ask for, my sister baggage has led me into a number of extremely toxic friendships with other women in my adult life.

These dynamics, unfortunately, are usually only visible once the whole thing blows up. After one recent bust-up, I sighed to my therapist that I felt like I should really be over this by now. For God's sake, I'm in my 40s. She gently told me that it was just something I'm always going to have to watch out for. It just went too deep. It's never going away completely.

Also not going away, for either Joe or me, are the after-effects of gaslighting. And I mean this in the clinical sense, where someone makes you doubt yourself and question your own judgment by systematically distorting your reality. Once you realize you were literally living inside a lie, it's really hard to trust yourself. So this is why it's so important to do everything you can to get a hold of the truth.

So, despite the fact that it was a bit unsettling for me personally that Donna died during the making of this season, it turned out to be something of a blessing for Joe because it meant that they were that much further along in their journey into the truth. I spoke to my colleague, Dr. Kathy Ayub, a nurse practitioner and associate professor of psychology at Harvard who's been studying Munchausen by proxy, both perpetrators and survivors, for decades. And she explained why knowing your story is a key piece of healing. ♪

One of the things at least that I've heard from survivors is the first thing is they need to understand what happened to them. So oftentimes survivors take a journey

They go back and they talk to the doctor that saw them. I think of Mary Burke, who was one of the first survivors who came forward. And she tells a beautiful story about how she went back to the doctor who treated her and said, you know, I want to see my medical records. I need to tell you, doctor, what happened to me. You know, my mother actually pulled a hammer out of her bedside table and

at the same time every day and pounded on my joints and that's why they were the way they were. So in whatever way, that's certainly not the only way, but there are a number of ways. Some people like Julie Gregory write a beautiful book. Some people really decide they need to tell their stories in other ways and they need to work with other adults who were victimized.

I think there are probably many, many ways of doing this, but one is connecting and understanding what really happened. Because that really breaks through the whole traumatic consequence of building around building relationships and around relationships.

really being able to set your life on a pattern where you really firm your own identity. This is what happened to me. This is what occurred to me. And here's how I'm going to work through it and beyond it. So at least we believe fairly strongly that this needed to happen and that if children are out of an abusive situation, that this is something that they really might want to be offered the opportunity to do in adolescence.

You know, one of the things that I've really advocated for is if victims want to see their own records, I'll say, I'd be glad to sit down and go through them with you. Let's figure out what they say. Some people may not want to do that. And then the second step is really understanding who is safe and who isn't safe.

And it's very, very hard. Their mothers are often very persistent about seeing them, connecting with them, being with them. And that is a lot of energy. And again, they have to decide what they want to do, how much contact they want to have. The truth about someone like Donna or my sister Megan is horrific and hard to accept. And this is why so many people aren't willing to, no matter what evidence they're presented with.

But until you do, you will never be free of the lie. And if you're an adult in this situation, as long as you're in the lie, you're an enabler of it. And at some point, you cross over and become an accomplice. For survivors, the lie consumes their entire life story, and it robs them of the chance to be the master of their own fate.

Joe had already done a lot of work to disentangle themselves from their mom's version of the story. And now, with Donna gone for good, I'm hopeful that this will give Joe even more agency to write their own. Donna won't get a chance to edit her legacy now, and depending on your belief system, maybe you think she's answering to a higher judge. Courts of the afterlife notwithstanding, I don't think Donna's untimely end is what anyone would want.

I asked Jo what justice here on Earth might have looked like for their mom. I think that in a better situation, I would have never even ended up really being around my mom. I think that my sister would have been taken out and put in a safe home.

when she was a child and then ideally I would have joined her wherever she was because the systems are so flawed and I think it would have just been like people showing more unconditional love and support and listening and just validating what I was going through you know we've talked about how

there are a lot of people that are the reasons that I'm sitting here and alive and well today. And we've also talked about how alone I still felt and how alone I still, at the end of the day, was. So I think that

It would have been like letting me in a little bit more on like what they knew, which is complicated. And like that's a hard situation too, right? Because if someone had told me like your mom's dangerous when I was five or something, obviously that wouldn't have gone well for anyone because I needed my mom to be safe because I needed a safe caretaker and she was the only option.

But I think that there are like age appropriate ways to still like show up and be there. And I think that's where I lean into more of that like community care sort of thing.

aspect of things like you talked about with like growing up in a small town like that's what you sometimes picture or things like that and I think could have totally been the situation outside of different stigma or things so I think within that with my mom I think all I've ever wanted was

all I ever wanted was for her to get help and to have support from people that could safely give that. Donna's actions were indefensible, but she was still a human being and I have no doubt she was suffering, as I think anyone who perpetrates this kind of harm on others is suffering. I would like very much to live in a world where we could both keep children safe and help people like Donna. I wish it didn't have to be a choice.

But if it is, we should always, always prioritize the safety of kids. That should be non-negotiable.

One of the things I discussed with Kathy Ayoub was how perpetrators do differ from each other and how they often fall in different subgroups. And Kathy shared some insights into the group of perpetrators that I believe Joe's mom, Donna, fell into. I think the biggest one are the mothers who really don't do a lot with their children unless they're on stage. Because the bond between the child and the parent is

is really not there from the parent's perspective. And those are the individuals who have recreated themselves, as my colleague Kirk Schreier says, they are impostering as nurturing parents. And that takes up their whole time, their whole being. And those are the folks who I think are very, very difficult to

I mean, that's where you're really not going to get admissions. And treatment isn't effective without some kind of an admission. Professor Ayub also illuminated how complicated it is to find a solution in these cases that will truly keep kids safe. In terms of thinking about, so how can the child be safe? How can they be cared for? And how can they have some permanent placement? And I think

We also did some follow-up around placements and what we found, which was some of it was very sad. Anyway, but in their current positions, we found there were really two groups of fathers, were really two family constellations. There was the two-parent family. And in those situations, almost always the father was enabling the perpetrator.

And there often times were additional maternal family members in particular that were also supporting. In some cases, there were other maternal family members who were really, really trying to get into the system, grandparents, you know, aunts and uncles. And they couldn't kind of break this couple because dad really supported mom. There's another fairly significant group of fathers that

are estranged from their partners. Either were never married or oftentimes were quickly married and divorced, and they're fighting for their children. And those situations show up most often in family court. And I think there are a couple of us who have probably done more work in family court than a lot of other folks.

And it's almost the hardest to manage those cases in family court because in family court, when you come in for a divorce, the assumption is that both parents are fit. And so it's often very hard to really demonstrate that this is going on. As we covered earlier this season, Joe's dad's situation was complicated to say the least.

Reza wasn't in a position to fight for them, and Dale, Joe's stepfather, didn't really step up and try beyond housing Joe for a brief, tumultuous time when they were removed from Donna because of her alcohol abuse.

And despite the boundaries Joe worked so hard to set, their mom was difficult to escape. Munchausen by proxy abusers have an outsized influence on their children because of the cult-like dynamic they have with them and the ways in which they isolate and gaslight their victims. So even after her death, Donna's ghost was going to be hard to let go of.

There's this figure in Greek mythology, Cassandra, that I feel like typifies an entire era of my life. Basically, the time between the first investigation into my sister 13 years ago and, well, the release of this podcast. Cassandra was a princess of Troy, and according to myth, she was so beguiling that the god Apollo granted her the power to see the future. ♪

But, like the ancient Greek incel that he was, when Cassandra rejected him, Apollo piled on a curse. She would always speak the truth, but nobody would ever believe her. And that's how I felt for years, until I made this show and started hearing from more and more people who did see what I saw. And hearing this doesn't change what happened, but it's hard to overstate how much it means to be believed when you've been through something like this.

As we spoke to so many of the key figures from Joe's past, it became clear that they too were no longer subject to Cassandra's curse. Because people did see, they did know the truth. They worried about them and they tried their best to help. People like Joe's childhood best friend, Bree. I remember like trying to do like plotting of how like we could get me out of the house. We knew that your mom was terrible and we knew she was not a fit mother.

Bree was a kid at the time. She couldn't take Joe out of their abusive home. But she could be there to make some happy memories in it with them, to bear witness to what they experienced, and to reinforce the truth as Joe was looking in the rearview. Likewise, Joe's teacher, Mrs. Becker, she was also there. She saw. And she did everything she could to help. It's like a very frustrating process, the reporting and like being worried about somebody.

Because typically, I'm not probably exaggerating, but I maybe make 10 reports a year and none in the last three years have been investigated. Yeah, it is hard. I have obviously like some really great memories here. Obviously, there's some people that, including you, that have like really meant so much in my upbringing and are literally reasons why I'm sitting here right now today. Yeah.

One thing that Joe and other Munchausen by proxy survivors don't get much of is normalcy. Just the chance to be a kid rather than a pawn in their parents' nightmarish game. And because of friends like Kristen, Joe got to have some of those memories in their own life to hold on to.

We just had the best times together. We would hang out for, not even that, like we'd hang out for, I don't know, a couple hours and watch TV and just have the best time, like just chilling, doing literally nothing. Eating Rice Krispies. Yes, like eating, chilling, like just hanging out. But you just always brought so much light with you. And it's surprising because you were going through so much that...

I didn't, I wasn't really fully aware of and you've only ever brought light to my life. And one of the brightest spots in this journey was Joe's reconnection with their sister Crystal, who despite being in an impossible position, did everything they could for Joe. But like I was a child raising a child that wasn't mine. And I thought that I was doing the best I could with, with everything.

the tools I had, which wasn't much. Like you said, you were parentified and like all of that and like you were a kid. Like you should have never ever had to do all the things that you did for me and I hate like, I hate that you had to do all of that and obviously I'm like forever grateful.

So many people are rooting for Joe. People like Bea Yorker, one of the country's most well-respected experts in Munchausen by proxy, who is supporting Joe in their work. For me personally, I am so delighted to have an academic mentee. My hope for Joe is that they will continue to blossom and find joy in

And even one of Joe's most challenging relationships, with their father Reza, is starting to show signs of life. Joe is often felt deeply alone, but these conversations have helped them realize that they weren't, and that they aren't now.

I also have just built such a lovely community and family for myself. And so I think that that obviously like the people that are surrounding me now are people that genuinely care unconditionally. So I think that that also made a difference.

Munchausen by proxy abuse, mishandled and misunderstood as it is, can feel like an intractable problem. In the current climate, with so many people working actively to deny the very existence of this abuse, it can be hard to have hope. The systems we need to change aren't going to change in time to help the kids who are suffering now. Sometimes I'm haunted by this feeling that I had when the first case and then the second case against my sister were dropped.

This sense of, "Oh, no one is coming to help. We're alone in this. No one is going to stop her." Just like no one stopped Donna. And we should keep trying to change these systems. We should keep holding the people who put vulnerable children back in harm's way accountable. But there are people who need our help right now. And making this season has really driven home for me how much child abuse is a community problem.

This is a shameful thing that thrives in the darkness, that flourishes behind closed doors. The systems failed Joe, and their community kept and keeps them alive. So that's the takeaway. Whether you have kids of your own or not, children are the responsibility of us all. If you know something is wrong, you owe it to that child to do what you can to intervene.

Be the safe person. Be their Jen Becker. Be like Joe's pediatrician, Dr. Leah Wilson. Be the person who believes their life is worth saving. The events of the past several years have left many of us feeling disconnected from our neighbors, from family, from our communities. And this is the thing we need to push back against the most. Because it's true. No one is coming to save us. We have to save each other.

The only way out is together. Nobody Should Believe Me is written, hosted, and produced by me, Andrea Delmop. Our senior producer and editor is Mariah Gossett. Greta Stromquist is our associate producer. Engineering by Robin Edgar. And administrative support from Nola Karmush. Music provided by Johnny Nicholson and Joel Shupak. With additional music and sounds from SoundSnap.