My rendition of the marriage of Scott and Kelley Wolf will be painfully short because I did not have a clue who they were or are until late August. I dismissed it as another tabloid divorce until I read that courts were restricting Kelley’s access to her kids (ages 11-14) and assertions were made that she had violated court orders.
Those announcements piqued my interest because most judges confronted with high profile cases don’t want to be perceived as tipping the scale for either party. And even though men are advancing in their pursuit of custody equality, most lawyers would agree that there remains a tip of the scale in favor of moms, especially when the case is new.
The Scott and Kelley Wolf odyssey moved quickly. Just after Labor day, it was announced that Kelley Wolf was entering a treatment facility. Then, word leaked that she had left the treatment center and, today was charged with a misdemeanor for seeking to communicate with her son. How could it be a crime to contact your own kid?
We don’t have the real facts here, but the Wolf Family appears to be grappling with a condition that is afflicting more and more “nice” (i.e., affluent and educated) families. Early in my practice a lawyer might occasionally encounter a case where a child became addicted to drugs. The typical issue at the adult level was addiction to alcohol or diet pills. But, over time, the pharmaceutical industry has vastly expanded the menu of addictive drugs that come into our households. Many are intended to address short term pain relief. Unfortunately, their effectiveness is matched by their addictive qualities. In a word, your lovely neighbor who is obssesed with tennis or biking may be fighting a raging addiction issue because of a short term ‘script for a common anelgesic written after knee surgery. No, this does not signal drug dealers coming through your otherwise nice neighborhood to make deals on the back deck. But, we have seen nice people like your neighbor arrested while “shopping” in neighborhoods they otherwise would never visit.
The other concern arising out of the Scott and Kelley Wolf reporting is how quickly she departed from treatment. People who suffer from substance addictions don’t cope well in treatment centers. Those facilities have to break not just the physical dependency. That is challenging enough. But, often other deep seated anxieties have grown like vines around the addiction. They are not easily identified nor are they quickly treated. In order to address those emotional issues, treatment centers often insist that the patient sever communication with friends and family. That seems counterintuitive but while the anelgesic script or addictive substance is the immediate cause of harm, relationship anxiety (i.e., your friends and family) may play a major role in causing or aggravating addiction.
That may explain why the court in the Wolf case appears to be enforcing a “no contact” order relating to the children. There are bilateral reasons for this. For parents, children ages 11-14 can be a significant source of anxiety in their own right. And people struggling with addiction or their own mental anxieties don’t typically respond well when tweens and teens mouth off to their parents. On the child side of the equation; kids that age are too often painfully aware that something isn’t right with mom or dad and they want a break from their parents to reset their own emotional compasses. Judges struggle when asked for these “no contact” orders because they seem counterintuitive. The treatment community responds by saying that they need to view the patient in isolation from friends and family to identify sources of the underlying problems.
The treatment center is faced with enormous challenges. Step one is to carefully undo the substance addiction, knowing that can be an excruciating experience for the patient. The greater challenge for the professional staff is trying to indentify the “baggage” that often travels with addiction. It can be things like physical or sexual abuse. It can be something as simple as a narcissistic parent or spouse. That baggage can be recent. It can be ancient. Once these problems are identified, you try to get the patient to acknowledge the issues and adopt coping strategies to address them.
So, we like to read about the tragic death of people like Matthew Perry or problems confronting the Wolf family because we take solace in the idea that the rich and famous have burdens, too. Then, we can obsess over why we haven’t seen our neighbor for a month when his car hasn’t moved from the driveway. The more important question is; what is going on in our own households and can we help to course correct those problems before courts and the mental health community have to intervene?