Seeing a goofy shrink

On my attorney's advice, I went to see a psychologist who might rebut my court-ordered custody evaluation. The shrink turned out to be useless.

I told him that there is nothing in the report that can justify the conclusions. He kept saying, "you have to read between the lines." When pressed, he pointed to a line that suggests that I take the kids to school late, and asked if that was true. I said, "I took them to school late exactly once in the last year, and that was only 5 minutes late. But so what? Even if I was a half-hour late every day, would that justify a custody change?" He said "no".

He may have agreed with me that the report was bad, but he wouldn't admit it. At one point, he said, "That's why I don't do such brief evaluations. I only do in-depth evaluations where I do much more extensive interviews -- 6 hours with each parent, interviews with the kids, observations of the parents with the kids, psychological tests, ..."

At another point, he said, "The court cannot really do custody evaluations. What would you do?" So I explained to him how a psychologist could do his job without violating either the law or his professional ethics. He had no response. He just wanted to get rid of me at that point.

These shrinks make a lot of money doing custody evaluations and court-order psycho-therapy. I think that they know how bogus the evaluations are, and they just won't admit it. Despite my repeated requests, this shrink could not even come close to connecting the dots from the data to the conclusions. I think that he really wanted was for me to come back to him for a $10k in-depth custody evaluation.