Here’s the transcript for this first part of the interview:
00:00
Angel J Storm
Hi, everybody. Welcome to my YouTube channel. I’m doctor Angel Storm. I am so excited to be here with you today with a very special guest. Catherine Bonandin was a former client of mine. We are still good friends. We keep in touch. And she is here to share her story with you about her struggles with the family court system, keeping her children homeschooled, and a host of other things that people often deal with when they are facing a narcissist in family court. So I am so excited to bring her on today. She has so much information and knowledge to share with you. Catherine, thank you so much for being with me today.
00:38
Caterina Bonandin
Hi. Thank you for having me on.
00:40
Angel J Storm
I’m so excited for you to share your story. I know it’s been kind of a long journey for you and your family, and, you know, everything that you’ve gone through with family court and figuring out the family court system, which, as we all know, that’s a whole monster of its own that you really have to figure out when you end up in it, right? You’re in the system until the system decides that you’re done with it, even if you’re done with it long before that. So where do you want to start, Catherine? Do you want to just share a little bit about how. How you came to the point of knowing that you needed to get divorced from your first husband?
01:20
Caterina Bonandin
Yes.
01:22
Caterina Bonandin
So I actually wasn’t legally married to my first husband. We had a common law marriage, and in the state of Texas, that’s a legal marriage.
01:32
Caterina Bonandin
So I was with him from 2010 until 2017.
01:40
Caterina Bonandin
We had a wedding in 2013. And I knew before we got married that I was not in the best situation. But I had a lot of pressure from me, from family, from friends. And we had a very public relationship.
01:58
Caterina Bonandin
We were both activists.
02:00
Caterina Bonandin
We met each other from different states. I lived in Missouri, he lived in Texas. And I would actually be a guest on his FM radio program in Austin, Texas. And we had such good chemistry that the network offered us a morning show. So I came down to Texas. We briefly did a morning show for about three months. That’s a story for another time.
02:22
Caterina Bonandin
And we had really good chemistry in a lot of ways. But there were some very early warning signs that things were not healthy. And I’m not coming from this from the perspective that I am a victim. I made choices here, too. And I came into this relationship in a not good place, which was evidence through my codependency, my perpetual forgiveness, and inability to set or enforce any type of boundaries in my life.
02:56
Caterina Bonandin
In fact, I didn’t even realize that I needed boundaries or that boundaries were being violated. Things started to get very toxic. We broke up for about six months in 2010 after a very scary. I don’t want to use the word violent, because it wasn’t. I wasn’t touched in any way, but there was a very scary episode that took place, and we broke up, and were apart for about six months. And I began a healing journey, not just from that relationship, but from my activism. I had been arrested twice on free speech issues. I had been acquitted in one case. The charges dropped, and another.
03:37
Caterina Bonandin
It was scary.
03:38
Caterina Bonandin
I was kidnapped and put in a cage for speaking, for using my voice. And I had a lot of healing to do with regards to that. Well, one day he showed up, and he wanted to try our relationship again. And I said, okay, let’s do it. And within two months, I was pregnant.
03:57
Caterina Bonandin
So that began the deep entwining of the two of our relationships and our lives. And I knew the whole pregnancy, something’s wrong. This isn’t okay. That’s when things began to get scary. They sometimes were violent. Infidelity, just really scary. But our relationship was so public. As I said, it basically started on FM radio, and it continued in that way. We were very public on Facebook. We presented at events together.
04:30
Caterina Bonandin
We were just everywhere. In fact, by the time that I was pregnant with our second child, there’s an 18 month gap between the two. We had started creating a docu reality show, and six episodes have been created. Those were getting aired at events that we would go to, and they were all about our attempts to get off the grid and live a more sovereign lifestyle, grow our own food, just really take care of ourselves and our family, natural health, these types of things get out of the top down institutions that exist in our world, homeschool our kids, these types of things. And Man, it was really humiliating for me when the relationship got so bad that I needed to leave, and I set a deadline for myself. I said, I’m going to leave. If my daughter turns five and these things behind closed doors are still happening, I’m going to leave, because at that point, you know, I will be teaching her that this is okay and teaching my son that this is how you treat women and children and animals, and I will have to go. And so I set that deadline for myself. And when she was five and a half, I left.
She’s my older child, my oldest, and I began a really amazing journey of true healing.
05:56
Caterina Bonandin
At that point, I went to Peru and I started, you know, doing things to really find myself. And I met my current husband, and years went by. I was dating my husband. My ex was dating his current wife. We were traveling together. We were figuring out how to make it work. And my current husband and I decided we wanted to get married. And so I asked my ex for a legal divorce because I did not want to put my husband’s green card at risk in any way, shape, or form. And if you’re accused of marriage fraud, that could prevent us from living together ever in the same country.
06:35
Caterina Bonandin
And so since we had an actual wedding and pictures of a wedding could show up and we presented online as husband and wife in Texas, we needed to get a divorce. And when I asked for that divorce, it was like holy hell was unleashed on me. And I had no idea what was coming because were so anti institution in our activism together. I did not understand or predict or have any clues that this was going to turn into a battle for my children, for my lifestyle, and for my freedom. And that is what happened starting in 2019.
It was excruciating.
07:19
Angel J Storm
Yeah. Let’s just pause there for a second. You brought up so many points that I think a lot of people, you know, can’t perceive into the future when they’re dealing with a narcissist, one of which is that they’re, what you believe is their true value system is not actually their true value system. Right. I’ve seen this time and time again with my clients who are like, no, my. My ex would never allow the kids to watch that type of stuff on the tv or play that type of video game or eat that type of food or go to that type of place or do that kind of thing, and then they get divorced or they end up in family court and no laws apply in the home now.
07:58
Caterina Bonandin
Right.
07:58
Angel J Storm
Everything that they said that they were against is actually like, that was just a facade. It was getting them to something. And so what’s interesting about your situation is that publicly, your ex was still presenting one way and yet fighting this legal battle kind of quietly, if you will, and asking for something completely different. So I think that’s, number one that’s really important for viewers to understand is that whatever it is that you think your exit or the parent of your children’s value system is, there’s a reason for it. It helps them get something that is what they’re actually after.
08:40
Caterina Bonandin
Right.
08:40
Angel J Storm
That’s not their true value. That’s the facade. That’s the stepping stone on the way to get the thing that their true value is. And in this case, it’s clout, right? It’s power and control, influence and so forth. So I think that’s really important. And before this, you had mentioned before you, before this last part where you met your husband, you had mentioned that you guys were on a little break and you started to do some healing. I wonder if you could share just a little bit about what that was for you at that time. You know, the first time that you guys split, before you had children, what kind of healing did you do? And what. What, if anything, could you go back and tell yourself, hey, also include this.
09:26
Caterina Bonandin
Yes. First, I want to say the first point you made, I really hope people let that sink in, because if you are in a situation with someone who has this type of personality, you are likely being deceived. My ex is still homeschool courses online to people who have no idea that when they pay for a homeschool course, they are paying the legal fees to somebody who has used the state to enroll our children in public school. So there really is a facade. There really is an act going on. And I believe that my silence is really what has allowed this to perpetuate, which is why I’m doing this right now. I’m speaking up. I’m speaking out. Now, the first time of healing that I had to go through, both of my arrests were for free speech, right? And I was an activist.
10:16
Caterina Bonandin
I was videotaping, I spoke up both times. I saw a police officer hurting somebody, and I used my voice and ended up in jail both times, the state, the judge, the System institution agreed I had done nothing wrong because we do have First Amendment protected speech here in the United States. But I was traumatized. I was afraid to drive. I was afraid of getting pulled over, and I was also afraid of going to jail. During this time period, I had a court hearing waiting over my head.
10:50
Caterina Bonandin
I got arrested in March, We broke up in June. And I didn’t have my hearing in New Hampshire, where I was found not guilty and acquitted until October. So during this time period that were broken up, I was terrified of being put in a cage. And it’s interesting because this later happens again while I’m going through this custody battle with my ex. And maybe I revealed to him how scary that is for me, you know? And I showed him my cards at the time, how traumatic that was for me. And so it was something he could bring up later.
11:25
Caterina Bonandin
Now, I decided I had to stop activism. I had to fight the system in a different way. And for me, that was slowing down and growing food, getting my hands in the soil, planting vegetables. I learned how to milk a cow. I went and lived on a three acre ranch in dripping Springs, Texas. Did a work trade. I don’t know if anyone’s heard of wolf farming, where you trade your time for labor. And I took care of chickens, couple pigs, helped garden, and really just started getting back to the land. And that, for me, made all the difference in the world.
12:07
Caterina Bonandin
And if I had known about therapy things like that, I really probably needed a therapist at the time because I was living in a lot of fear and I had gone through a lot of trauma but really, gardening and farming is what helped me to recover and to. And I’m not going to say I fully recovered, but it helped me start the process of calming down my nervous system and just feeling better in my body.
And that, I think, is when I started the process of speaking out less and really trying to…I didn’t go completely behind the scenes yet, but that was the beginning of the process, from front end activism to what I do now, which is what I call back end activism, where I help lift people up who have a louder voice than me right now.
13:12
Angel J Storm
Yeah, that’s really good. Cat, you were also part of my narcissistic detox intensive. And do you remember that before. Before you joined, were just talking about kind of what’s going on and that kind of thing. And I remember one of the things that were talking about was using your voice. And I remember you saying to me, yeah, I’ve done that. I’ve already used my voice. I’ve already, you know, and it didn’t work out for me. And I remember saying, yeah, I understand that you think that you have used your voice in a certain type of way, but it’s not effective for the system that you’re in.
13:50
Angel J Storm
And one of the things that I really try to help people understand, and please use your experience to help this audience understand a little bit more, is that the way that you use your voice has to be conducive for the environment that you’re in. And what we think is true, our true story at the time is. Is just the culmination, if you will, of all of these experiences that we’ve had that have never had justice, or we’ve never come to terms with them internally for ourselves. And they come out in such a way that’s so aggressive.
It can even sound discoherent. And that’s one of the things that can keep people from making they’re making valid points. They’re saying true statements, and yet it’s not. It’s not having the impact that they think that it will have, because it hasn’t gone through this kind of refining process of coming out of a vessel that’s whole and clean and healed and all of that kind of thing. Can you speak to that a little bit for your specific situation?
15:00
Caterina Bonandin
Yeah, absolutely.
15:02
Caterina Bonandin
Early on, I would just run at the mouth, and I would say exactly what I was thinking and exactly what I was feeling in the moment without considering how it would affect other people. Now, the two times that I got arrested, I probably would not repeat now because I have children, but I was in the right. I was in my integrity at that time but if you looked at the way I was communicating, let’s say, online, even after having children with my ex, the two of us would get online and be like, we’re raising children correctly, and these are all the things that everyone else is doing wrong. And people would be like, hey, man, you’ve got an 18 month old and a newborn. What are you even talking about? You don’t even know. Wait till your kids are this age or that age and we came off as very arrogant and confrontational, and it rubbed a lot of people wrong. And I actually made a post in 2014 apologizing for the way I communicated publicly because it was so judgmental and crass, and it really came from this victim mentality.
16:14
Caterina Bonandin
And I have found that was reflected through multiple layers in my life. You know, I was a victim of the state, and I was a victim of my ex, and I was a victim of this and a victim of that. And when you’re coming from that mindset, that seeps out in your language, and it seeps out in your tone of voice, and it seeps out in the way you communicate. Now, I can look back, and I can take full ownership of all of those situations, and I can see how I was a co creator in all of them. I never was a victim. I always was free, and I was making choices.
16:50
Caterina Bonandin
And those choices resulted in a lot of different things, some of them good, some of them bad but now I definitely feel I speak from an empowered place, from a place of inner knowing, right? I know who I am. I know where I’m going, and I know what I want to accomplish in this life and I’m not gonna just run at the mouth like that anymore, because I’m not suffering in fear, I’m not suffering in pain, and I don’t feel like a victim anymore.
17:24
Angel J Storm
Yeah, that’s so important, too, because your inner world is coming out, is being reflected back to you in your outer world. And so you can definitely tell when people have made changes. And let’s fast forward. Let’s fast forward to you’re in family court for the first time. Your story has multiple parts. Like, a lot of people who end up in family court has multiple parts. So let’s fast forward to the first time that you’re in family court. What kind of started this whole thing? I know you had mentioned you wanted a legal divorce from your first husband to get married to your current husband, but kind of talk to me about what is happening while you’re in family court. The first time.
18:07
Caterina Bonandin
So the first time were in court, I was blindsided. I was very naive. I had no idea what to expect and I was honest with everybody.
18:18
Caterina Bonandin
I was honest with the judge. I was honest with the guardian at Lydum, and my ex was not. My ex went after every single part of my life, and these were things that we had shared together. I’m doing this interview from a converted school bus. I actually lived in this converted school bus for seven and a half years, and three of those years was with my ex. And the three years that I lived in this converted school bus, it wasn’t completely converted. It was only after he moved out that were able to. And I say we, my friends who showed up to help me because they found out the conditions he had me living in, they helped me fix it. My current husband came and continued to help me fix it.
19:03
Caterina Bonandin
And it’s a really sweet little space now, but he went after my home in family court. So here I am, living in a state where I don’t have a lot of family. I do have some aunts and uncles who live in Texas, but no one was in the Austin area. And he was trying to have my home taken away from me, and I had to let the state come in here and tour our home.
19:26
Caterina Bonandin
Keep in mind, we had made videos traveling the country together. He was essentially bragging about living in a converted school bus and about traveling all the time and how we unschooled and homeschooled. I mean, when you’re talking about toddlers, everybody’s unschooling, right? Like, there’s no curriculum for a toddler. But that was the banner cry that he was utilizing, and he created this Persona online that was like, we’re doing this really cool lifestyle. We get to go live in this place and live in that place. And here we are waking up on the beach in our converted school bus, and here I am. I get to work from anywhere, and then as soon as we’re in court it was like, take her home from her, she travels too much. She’s going to run with the kids. She doesn’t make enough money. I was a stay at homeschool mother, right? And so it was literally every single aspect of my life that I co-created with him was under attack in court. And where I would have done things differently is I would have spoke up for myself but I was so afraid. I was so scared of losing my children because there were things that were happening that at the time, my kids didn’t want to be there alone with him.
20:41
Caterina Bonandin
And I was being forced to split time 50/50, which I had never done before, even though it’s so funny, right, how we manifest things and we don’t know what we’re asking for. I used to beg him to take the children more. Please take the kids. Take the kids. They want to be with you. They need to be with you. I need some time to work, to whatever. And it just never happened. And then as soon as we got into court, it was like, now I was required to split my time with him, with the children, 50. And that was traumatizing for all of us. And it was excruciating. And I got what I had been asking for, and I didn’t understand what I was asking for that whole time, right? So I got it. And in the end, I’m grateful because the state was involved in our lives. Even though we are libertarian, philosophical, anarchists, voluntarist, we believe in freedom, the state being in our lives resulted in a better relationship between my ex and the children because he could no longer treat them the way he used to. There are no voluntary solutions that I have found or that my community has been able to present to me that actually deal with domestic issues when there is aggression or violence in the household. So having the state involved in the end actually benefited my family in some ways, although it was excruciating in other ways.
22:15
Caterina Bonandin
He took everything in court that he could, including homeschooling. So right now, this man who sells the homeschool course is sending his children to public schools. And so I made some desperate moves, which I think made me look ridiculous to the court because it came from desperation. So the day before a court hearing, when I knew I was losing homeschool, and he had them enrolled in a private school 3 hours away from where I lived, I enrolled them in public school to try and not have my kids taken away, to try and not have them court ordered into a school where I didn’t live, which wouldn’t allow me to be with my kids if I stayed where I was living, right.
22:58
Caterina Bonandin
And things like that made me appear irrational. And maybe at the time I was irrational because I was terrified if I could go back and do things differently, I would have stood in the power of homeschooling, and I would have advocated for that instead of making fear based choices. And fear based choices are what I made. And so I came off as crazy.
23:26
Angel J Storm
And so. And so it is important to be able to look back on the things that have happened and didn’t have the outcome that you wanted so that you can understand what to do different right, the next time around. And I always say fear is an invitation into freedom. It really is giving you the opportunity to overcome whatever is the obstacle in your inner world so that you can be free in your outer world as well. So in your first court, in your first trial, explain what was the ruling and what ended up happening after that ruling was made for you and your children.
24:07
Caterina Bonandin
Yes, absolutely. So, first and foremost, I want to say I made a very big strategic error because I didn’t realize what I was dealing with. I hired an attorney who specialized in high conflict divorce, but who did not specialize in personality disorders. And the attorney I hired encouraged me to try and come up with a. An agreement with my ex by communicating directly he and I. And I told him the date I intended to file. And because I did that, he filed three days before me in the county where I didn’t live. And he later told me that was a strategic move. He did that on purpose because he knew I would have to move back to be close to him. He told me that, yeah, I actually.
24:57
Angel J Storm
Want to pause right there for just a second, because it is really important that people understand how critical choosing the right attorney is for their case. And unfortunately, a lot of attorneys will put people who are dealing with narcissists into this high conflict category. When you do not have a high conflict case, you have a coercive control case, and they’re very different. And if you don’t approach them differently, if you try to treat these things the same, the outcome is going to be devastating to the person and the family that’s being victimized in the situation. So family law attorneys are extremely important to your case. They are the second most important part of your case. You’re the number one part. You’re the first part. And when attorneys don’t truly understand what a narcissist is. This is such a buzzword these days, right?
25:52
Angel J Storm
Every attorney out there is going to say, I’ve dealt with it. Narcissist. I know what a narcissist is. They don’t understand that unless you. You need to dive deeper into that right and ask the right questions, because a lot of times, they don’t understand what a narcissist is. And they certainly have never dealt with a. With the opposing counsel also being a narcissist, which, in my experience, I’ve never seen, where the narcissist does not hire a narcissistic attorney, then the attorney is also going to be a narcissist. And it’s really important that the other side, the people who are trying to break free from this, understand that. That’s the dynamic right before you get into that. So thank you for bringing that up, because that is really important. Everything that you say to a narcissist can and will be used against you and it’s really important that people understand that.
26:41
Caterina Bonandin
Yes, absolutely. So in my case, I did have a great attorney. She’s now a judge, and she worked really hard to help me, but there was no way that she could actually help me successfully because she did not understand what she was dealing with. And honestly, at the time, neither did I.
26:59
Caterina Bonandin
So I ended up with 50/50 everything but the requirement was I had to move back. I had to move 3 hours to be near the person who had abused me. And I really didn’t want that because I didn’t want to run into people who I felt like, there’s this saying in this community, the flying monkeys. I didn’t want to run into the people at the grocery store who invalidated what I went through because they worshiped this person who had this public Persona, because especially when you’re dealing with someone who has an outfacing Persona. And, you know, in my case, were activists. We were, you know, public speakers but it doesn’t matter if they have a, you know, big public Persona in a church or their career or whatever. There’s all sorts of ways where you can have a very public kind of facing Persona. People don’t believe you when you start telling them something’s wrong. And not only do they not believe you, but they will attack you and shame you and condemn you and tell you that you’re wrong and that your experiences didn’t happen or that you’re lying. And so I didn’t want to run into these people, and thankfully, I had a region that I could look into, and I chose a county away from my ex, although he’s now moved here into this county. I ended up with 50 everything, and the hard part about 50 everything is that you can’t change anything without the consent of the other parent. And so that is where we started to run into problems and why we ended up in court a second time.
28:44
Angel J Storm
So, yeah, let’s just pause there for a second. How long were you doing 50/50 before you ended up back in court?
28:53
Caterina Bonandin
Well, were initially granted 50 when we filed, and so that was in the spring of 2019, and we ended up back in court. The divorce was finalized in January of 2020, although he wouldn’t sign the divorce decree until May of 2020. During the lockdown, that almost prevented me from marrying my italian husband, who, I don’t know if you remember at the time, Italians could not come into the United States, and his visa was running out. He literally tried to prevent my marriage by refusing to sign the divorce during the lockdown, which was awful and very stressful. So the paperwork was signed finally in May of 2020, and it was December of 2020 that we ended up back and forth.
29:51
Angel J Storm
And was there a specific instance that led to that or what ended up making you realize this is an unsuitable outcome for me? What was the catalyst for you ending up back in court?
30:08
Caterina Bonandin
Well, I knew the whole time it was an unsuitable catalyst because my children were enrolled in a school I didn’t consent to.
30:15
Caterina Bonandin
Now, my daughter loved it. Fine.
30:19
Caterina Bonandin
I wasn’t going to try and change anything for her. I supported her going. She loved it. She wanted to continue going. My son did not. I was hearing from the children that my son was getting in fights with his father to not go to school. Hiding under the bed, trying to physically fight him to not go to the school. He was telling me he didn’t want to go to the school. There were just a lot of warning signs that something wasn’t right.
30:45
Caterina Bonandin
Now, as a homeschool mother, I was able to help my daughter learn how to read very quickly on a normal pace. I did notice because at the time, my children were going to this private school three days a week and homeschooling with me two days a week, and I noticed there was something different about the way my son was learning to read and write.
31:06
Caterina Bonandin
I’m dyslexic. My husband is dyslexic. I saw warning signs. We did not meet his teachers in the fall of 2020 because of COVID lockdown. We were not allowed into the school. So I had never met the woman that was teaching my son until Thanksgiving break. Thanksgiving break, we have a parent teacher Conference, and they provide a binder that’s supposed to be their portfolio for each child. My daughter’s binder was full of work, every subject full of work.
My son’s was empty, blank.
Not a single piece of work had been produced. And I said, what is going on here? So we started talking to the teacher, and she revealed that my son would try to hide in closets, that he would try to hide under rugs, that he was very overwhelmed during school, that he would cry during lessons.
32:03
Caterina Bonandin
He didn’t want to be there. And in the end, this teacher, both of my children had complained about the way she communicated. She was aggressive and both my ex and I seemed to be on the same page at this parent teacher conference, where this way of communicating with children is unacceptable. It’s got to change. And what is going on? Why is our son slipping through the cracks? And at the end of the meeting, she decided, and I have this meeting with audio recorded, she decided that were racist. I had no idea this woman was black until the parent teacher meeting. Her name was Ashley.
32:45
Caterina Bonandin
We had never met, ever. This was the first time I met her. My children had never told me what her ethnicity or race was. And she said that were racist, and that’s why my son was not doing well in her class. So that was the first, like, oh, something’s wrong, I thought. My ex and I were on the same page.
By the time the next week rolled around, they had pulled my son from the first 2nd grade class back to the kindergarten class, saying that was the only way they could get him away from that teacher and that his academics were suffering so bad he needed to be in kindergarten. He was crying, saying he felt like a baby, he didn’t want to be in class with the babies.
33:31
Caterina Bonandin
And my ex decided that we could not pull our son out of school and that I was, in fact, the problem, that the school was struggling with our family because of my advocacy for our child. And so as I began to speak up and push back and say, hey, I’d like a copy of that binder. And I went and picked up the binder and took pictures of it. I knew I have to get my son out of this school. Something wrong is happening. He’s going to slip through the cracks. He’s not learning to read. I told them at that parent teacher conference, I thought he was dyslexic. They said, we don’t have the means to test him, and we don’t have the means to accommodate him. My ex refused to allow me to get our child tested for dyslexia until 18 months ago.
34:22
Caterina Bonandin
That was 2023 I finally was able to get my son tested for dyslexia, and he was positively diagnosed just over a year ago.
In January 2022 is when he agreed to get him tested. January 2023 is when we got the. The diagnosis, so I brought him to court to get him out of that school, and I went to court very pregnant with my youngest daughter without a lawyer, and I lost everything.
34:53
Caterina Bonandin
I lost educational and mental health rights, and we still share time 50/50.
I still have 50 medical, but I have zero say over my children’s academics or mental health.
There were some things that happened strategically that were good. I blurted out when the judge was giving the verdict. I blurted out, we’re having a baby.
We need family therapy. And so I have that written in to the decree is that we do have family therapy, and it’s with a specific therapist, and he cannot intervene with that. Although he has tried therapist who showed me the emails, he has tried to intervene with our family therapy, but this was a behavior that happened a lot over time. You know, when we had 50, he would call therapist and cancel appointments that we had agreed to have. He would call. I was court ordered to get Medicaid when the children were going through the divorce, and he called and tried to have Medicaid change the doctor on my Medicaid without telling me.
36:03
Caterina Bonandin
So, like, these are the types of things that were happening behind the scenes and what I found out in our third court case is that he was emailing the school and telling them I was crazy. Telling. Using that word crazy, calling me names, calling me lazy, saying I was selfish, basically telling them that I was a problem.
So when they got to court, they testified against me, saying that I was a problem, when all I was doing was saying, I believe my son is dyslexic. And so, thankfully, at the time, my friends rose money for me, and I had myself evaluated by a forensic psychologist. And I had this forensic psychologist not only evaluate me, but evaluate all of our text messages together, all of our emails together, and read every correspondence I had with the school.
36:55
Caterina Bonandin
So keep in mind, this was during COVID lockdown. Every correspondence I had with the school was in writing, except for the parent teacher conference, which was recorded.
37:04
Angel J Storm
This is really important aspect of what you’re talking about right now, which is that if there’s something going on, especially with the children, the narcissist is never going to want to appear to be incompetent or like they were in any kind of way, shape, or form on the. On the wrong. In the wrong in this situation. And so they will absolutely read what’s happening. Narcissists are extremely good at reading people. And I think a lot of people, you know, have this perception of narcissists that they’re. They’re just not smart or they’re just not like, what they’re. They are some of the most perceptive people you will ever come across. They are extremely good at reading the situation. Just because they don’t act in a way that you think a normal person would act does not mean that they can’t read what’s happening.
37:56
Angel J Storm
They absolutely understand, and they are many steps ahead because of that. So in this situation, your ex could already see the school is getting frustrated because they don’t have the means to test or accommodate your son, even if the test results came back that he was dyslexic. Right. And that you’re already being accused of being a racist. There’s already things that are, okay, we’re. We’re moving in the direction of trying to formulate a case against this mom. This mom is the problem, not the child or the school or the. Or the ex husband. The ex husband can see, hey, this is what’s happening. I’m fixing to play into that. And it’s really important that people understand this, because I think so many times people do think we’re on the same page as this.
38:42
Angel J Storm
Like, of course we want what’s best for our children, and it’s just not true. The narcissist doesn’t love anybody more than they love themselves. They’re incapable of doing that. And not only that, they’re very attached to the facade that they’ve built. They put a lot of energy, a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of, you know, all of their resources into building this facade. And anybody who threatens that facade must be destroyed in the narcissist’s mind. And so I think that it’s just really important for people to understand when you start to see things like this, we have to start. We have to start thinking in a different way. Just because you think that’s an unreasonable action and that they would never. Somebody would never do that. Just because you would never do it doesn’t mean that they won’t do it.
39:25
Caterina Bonandin
I think it’s really important that people who are in situations like this understand the power of discovery, because during this court case, I didn’t know to ask for the emails between him and the school. And so, you know, the forensic psychologist is reading the emails between me and the school and saying, this is normal advocacy. It wasn’t until the third court case that I actually had a narcissistic, abuse informed lawyer who knew to get those emails. We got those emails in discovery and then click. I understood what was going on because in those emails, the school and my ex literally colluded to take my rights away. The school said, I hope you win custody. I hope you win decision making. My ex said to the school, say X, Y and Z in court, and I will win decision making. They said, x, Y and Z in Court, and he won decision making.
40:22
Caterina Bonandin
They also strategically kicked the children out of the school during the lunch break of our court hearing, I got blamed for that. And in discovery in the third court case, we get the emails that show the children were invited back, but I lost my rights because I got them kicked out of this school. Even though if you go back and read the emails, my ex got them kicked out of the school as a strategic move to take my rights away.
And then what happens? We go right back to homeschooling after he wins educational decision making in court, colluding with a private school. A private school that, by the way, was financially incentivized to the tune of $800 a month per child to collude with my ex to take my rights away. He then ends up essentially screwing both of us over. He takes away my education rights, and he takes away the students that they thought they were fighting in court to have. They thought they were fighting me to have both of these children paying tuition at their school. And in the end, he didn’t re enroll them and he told the kids. They were kicked out because of me.
41:41
Angel J Storm
Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so let’s break this down a little bit for. For the audience who isn’t familiar with your case.
41:49
Angel J Storm
Previously you had gone to court. You ended up with 50/50 everything. This is now 2020. You’re back in court. This is the second time that you’re in court, and you end up losing final decision making authority. Right. So no educational, no medical decision making authority. Your ex has that ability now to decide where the kids go.
42:10
Caterina Bonandin
Medical.
42:10
Angel J Storm
You still have medical.
42:13
Caterina Bonandin
Health and education.
42:15
Angel J Storm
Okay, good. So they broke that down even further. So that’s great. Okay, so in the second, when you’re. When you’re in court the second time, you are unaware at this point of the communication that your ex in the school was having, was there any other things that you were unaware of during the second court hearing?
42:37
Caterina Bonandin
I could feel that something was off. The school was not treating me in a way that was in alignment with the way I was acting. And so I could feel in my heart and in my gut that something was wrong, but I didn’t know what. And this is why I got the forensic psychologist, and I literally went to him, and I sat down, and I said, is there something wrong with me? Tell me if there’s something wrong with me, because something isn’t right, and I don’t know if it’s me or them.
43:02
Angel J Storm
Yeah. Was that during the second court hearing?
43:05
Caterina Bonandin
Yep, it was.
43:07
Angel J Storm
Prior to the trial of your second court case?
43:10
Caterina Bonandin
Of your second, yes, it was in between the temporary and final hearings in the second court case. And because I didn’t have a lawyer, I didn’t know how to properly introduce evidence. I had the forensic psychologist there ready to testify, but he was an expert witness, and that required a different type of disclosure, which I didn’t know, so the judge threw him out. I also didn’t know I couldn’t read my notes because my divorce lawyer read notes during the hearing, but I was also the witness, and witnesses can’t read notes. And so I showed up so unprepared, absolutely flustered every time I had some sort of evidence, because they also said I was perpetually tardy. They said I was perpetually tardy. My ex, there’s a login system.
43:52
Caterina Bonandin
My ex was tardy literally 16 times and I was tardy once the last day of school, because my son forgot his shoes. I had to turn around and get them, and I contacted the school. I called them, I got the shoes, and we showed up, like, ten minutes late but my ex was the one who was perpetually tardy, and both my ex and the school testified that it was me, and I couldn’t figure out how to submit the sheets that showed that. I would say, okay, yes, I have the logs, and I was there on time, except for once, and he was always late. Would you like to see those? Is what I would say to the judge. And she would just look at me. No response. Yeah, I didn’t know how to say, I would like to submit this evidence in this way.
44:37
Angel J Storm
Yeah, that’s such a good point. I think, to bring up about this, too, is that there is a way that you can represent yourself, pro, say, in a family court system, but you have to go into it understanding this is a legal system, not a justice system. A lot of people think I’m going to come in, I’m going to get to share my evidence. All my evidence is going to be heard, and of course the judge is going to side with me. There’s so many barriers to that actually happening. Even if you have an attorney, even if you have a good attorney, that when you do it on your own, you really have to dive into what is the legal system? The legal system. There’s legal procedures that you have to follow if you want any of this stuff to be admitted.
45:20
Angel J Storm
And like I mentioned before, the narcissist attorney is likely a narcissist. And you have to understand they’re very familiar with the legal system and they’re a narcissist. So these things are all working unto their benefit and against your position. And so I think that’s such a good thing to bring up, is that you can have all of, I tell people this all the time, you can have all the evidence in the world, and evidence isn’t going to win your case. You’re going to win your case because the chances of even this stuff getting admitted is unlikely. And I think that’s really hard for people to understand if you’ve never been in family court, and even if you are in family court, it’s like, how come the narcissist is doing all of this stuff?
46:04
Angel J Storm
It’s because they understand how to manipulate the system just like they understand how to manipulate people. And it’s a different way of thinking. If you don’t think that way, you’re not going to think that way.
46:14
Caterina Bonandin
Right.
46:14
Angel J Storm
And so I love that you’re bringing this up, is that you had actually all of the things that would show what you’re doing is the right thing. What you’re doing is protecting your children and advocating for your children. And actually, you had a great best interest case that you could have made at this point, but it wasn’t heard by the court.
46:32
Caterina Bonandin
Court, correct.
46:34
Angel J Storm
What happens during this court case? You know, you’re not able to present the forensic psychologist who has done this evaluation on you and the rest of the messages and so forth. You’re unable to present the fact that they’re lying about you being tardy, you know, perpetually late to everything. And your. What is the case that the other side is making against you at this point?
47:01
Caterina Bonandin
Essentially that I’m the problem. The school doesn’t like me because I’m too aggressive. I’m the problem. I shouldn’t have educational decision making. And here’s what actually ended up the very final thing. I think the judge was hearing me. She seemed to understand where I was coming from. And then she found out, I live in an intentional community.
We run a homeschool school. So the kids got kicked out their school in January of 2021 during our court hearing.
So that whole semester, were homeschooling and my children could hear the homeschool that runs at our intentional community. They could hear the children playing from our house, and we would do our homeschool work, and I’d let them play after school. Well, they were done with academics in the homeschool co op, and they were in the garden doing gardening, and the garden teacher said, hey, do your kids want to come spend time in the garden and join us? And I said, sure, that’s fine. So, in the end, because I allowed my children to go play with other homeschooled kids while were homeschooling. I didn’t enroll them anything. I didn’t pay any tuition for anything. I didn’t sign them up for anything.
48:16
Caterina Bonandin
I let them go play at a homeschool co op where we live with their neighbors, their friends. While were homeschooling, the judge took away my rights. That was it for her. She said, you violated the order. You didn’t have the right to send them. You lose your rights. So here I am, I’m just naive, innocently going along this path, just making mistake after mistake, which are good parenting moves, but they were bad legal moves and I had no idea. I just had no idea. And that is why I ended up losing my rights. Now, in the end, I lost my rights sending my children to a homeschool co op for 2 hours that he later enrolled them in, and they attended for two and a half years. So, for two and a half years my children attended the homeschool co op that I was fighting for in court, that I lost my rights over. And I attended school with my son every day because he was struggling. He couldn’t read and I continued to tell my ex, I think he’s dyslexic. We need to get him tested. I think he’s dyslexic. We need to get him tested. And he just would not.
And so the summer of 2022, the school district locally came to our homeschool co op to let us know about services they offer to homeschoolers. And one of those was testing for dyslexia, and they would do it for free. And so my ex and I went to a meeting with the school, and we brought all of my son’s work, and we showed them his writing, we showed him his schoolwork, and they said.
50:01
Caterina Bonandin
He is very probably dyslexic.
The whole semester goes by. He would not consent to the testing. Then when he finally did consent to the testing, he didn’t let me know. He tried to do the appointment sneakily without telling me. I had to contact the school and find out myself. He finally got him tested. I showed up to every single test, brought my son snacks, and he would show up crying. He’d get out of the car with my ex crying and show up, and there would be mom, and he would run to my arms, and I would have snacks for him. And I stayed there during the whole test. And in January of 2023, we got a positive dyslexia diagnosis. Now, we had already ended up back in court during this time period.
50:51
Angel J Storm
Explain that.
50:52
Caterina Bonandin
Yep. Yes. A tutor that my ex hired, who was working with the kids on non homeschool co op days hit my daughter, hit her with her hand. And so I believe I was I already doing coaching with you when that happened, or did I come to you because that happened? It was right around that time period.
51:18
Angel J Storm
Correct. We had started, I think, just like a week or something, right prior to this happening. It happened like, you hired me, and then a week later, this happened. And, you know, earlier, you were kind of talking about the ability to, like, pull into your outer world, what’s already in your inner world.
51:41
Caterina Bonandin
Right.
51:41
Angel J Storm
So when you want a catalyst, there’s gonna be something there that is gonna jumpstart this other part of the journey. And unfortunately, it was the situation with your daughter. And so. And so what. What. What ends up happening with this case, with this situation specific, is, again, very indicative of how a narcissist behaves.
52:07
Caterina Bonandin
Right.
52:08
Angel J Storm
You bring up. I’ll let you tell the story.
52:13
Caterina Bonandin
About the tutor that hit my daughter.
52:15
Angel J Storm
Yes. And how your and your ex involvement in what ends up happening next.
52:21
Caterina Bonandin
Yes. Okay, so this woman hits my daughter. I don’t know. Nobody tells me.
The children tell him because it happens at his office on his time, and he had to go out of town. And so he said he would like the tutor to see the kids, and he would like me to bring the tutor while he was out of town. I said, okay, that’s fine, but I’d like her to come here and they did the tutoring in the schoolhouse. But my children were acting very strange leading up to her arrival. Very similar to how my son would get hysterical about going to that previous private school. They were acting very resistant to doing tutoring with her. And I was like, why? What’s going on? After tutoring, both children tell me that she had hit my daughter. And I said, what do you mean hit?
And they both come up and smack my arm.
Both of them. They both tell me this happened.
So I messaged dad, and I said Hey, the kids are telling me that the tutor hit our daughter, and you didn’t tell me.
I’d like to know what’s going on.
Can we talk about it first?
He tells me it wasn’t. I can’t remember the exact words. Oh. He says, it was a strike. I’m like, what do you mean? He says, they didn’t. She didn’t get hit. It was a strike. And I’m like, what’s the difference between a hit and a strike at this point? He then changes his story after he gets the kids back and tells the children that it never happened.
53:58
Caterina Bonandin
My daughter was at a friend’s house, and she listens. The mother listens. My friend listens to my ex and my daughter on a phone call on speakerphone where my daughter is saying, yes, she did hit me. And my ex is saying, no, she didn’t. You don’t remember it, right? And my daughter’s saying, oh, okay, I guess I don’t remember it, right. So literally gaslighting a child who was hit by an adult, okay, telling her memory was incorrect, then saying, I’m making it up. And so I decide to go and try and get a restraining order for my children. And I was unable to. They said, because she wasn’t a family member, I couldn’t get a restraining order. So I guess I don’t really understand how restrainers straining orders work. But they told me to go to the justice of the peace and to tell what happened.
54:48
Caterina Bonandin
And so I did. I went to the justice of the peace. I wrote up an affidavit discussing everything that my children had told me. I sent the screenshots of my ex saying it was a strike because I said, oh, I remember exactly how it was said. I said, we don’t believe in corporal punishment. And he said, it wasn’t corporal punishment. It was a hit or a strip. That is corporal punishment. So anyway, I write up, I put the screenshots, I submit it, and the judge presses charges.
Now, in the end, my ex goes to court and defends the tutor, and says I’m a liar, and then I’m crazy. And then I lost my educational rights because I was crazy with the last school. This is just me trying to sabotage his good educational choices because I’m a vindictive ex. Well, I also got the text messages between him and the tutor. He was calling me names to the tutor, too. Same thing with the private school. He was calling me names the whole time.
He called me crazy three times to the tutor.
55:52
Angel J Storm
During this time, did you have an attorney? Were you with your first attorney?
55:58
Caterina Bonandin
Here’s what happens, I walk through downtown Bastrop, small town I live in, and I found an attorney who would take my case. Right? This attorney ended up sending a letter to the wrong school, a nasty letter, anot nice letter, because, of course we’re going back into court, right? So he decides he’s going to put them back in school because this is what happens every single time we’re in court. He puts them in school, we’re out of court. We homeschool. Let’s see what happens now that we’re out of court, if we’ll go back to homeschool. I really hope we do. But he decides to put them back in school, and he brings them to a charter school, a classical academy that is not a good fit for previously homeschooled children.
And he has them tested.
He says they have to be held back a grade. And the school refuses to release the test information to me and tells me, I have this conversation, audio recorded that my ex said, I don’t have any rights to that information, and they’re not going to release it to me.
57:06
Caterina Bonandin
And so this attorney sent a letter to the wrong school. Sends a letter to the school that did the dyslexia testing, who was wonderful. Thank you for that. They were wonderful. Sends a nasty gram to the wrong school. And I ended up firing that attorney.
And I thankfully found an attorney on Instagram the same way I found you, who was narcissistic, abuse informed and who was local, and he was able to take my case and pro homeschooling.
57:43
Angel J Storm
This interview is split up into two parts. So check back tomorrow for part two.
