by Jon Klement
Dedication:
To my fellow divorced dads, my brothers. I hope this helps you.
Chapter One: Divorce Court Destroyed My Life, Now What?
On Saturday, March 30th, 2012, in a downpour, I chucked my 6-year-old son’s favorite toys into a dumpster. I didn’t want to. It broke my heart. One of my best friends, Don Elson, was helping me and I was thankful that the pouring rain probably disguised the silent tears running down my face.
Don and I were throwing things away because March 30th, the last day of the month, marked the end of my family’s lease for our apartment at the time. We were a single dad family consisting of me, my two sons, Max and Ian, and my daughter, Sabrina. We couldn’t renew our lease because our monthly income didn’t even cover the rent each month, let alone food, utilities or anything else. After the State of Missouri seized so-called “child support” from us, we were left with $400 per month. Our rent alone was $500.
We were moving into a 1970’s giant station wagon, given to me by another of my best friends, Nathan Cormier. There was no room for toys. Waves of anguish and sadness wash over me even now, in 2024, 12 years later, as I write this to you, fellow divorced dad, my brother.
This eBook, “Divorce Court Destroyed My Life, Now What?
But this particular book isn’t about me. It’s about YOU. This is a quick start guide for YOU. If you are interested in more of my story and what happened to our family when the car died and we were put on the streets, resulting in me being mugged and almost stabbed, etc., you can check out another book of mine instead, “The Divorced Dad’s Dojo: A Survival Handbook For You and Your Kids Against a System That Would Destroy Your Family”. That book tells my story more in full. You can find it here.
In the meantime, let’s get to work with your situation.
I understand that for many of you readers out there, it can be tempting to skip this part of the eBook. You could be in immediate, urgent distress in financial terms, food security terms, healthcare terms, legal lawfare terms, etc. At the end of the day, you paid for this copy of the eBook. It’s yours. If you want to skip around, it’s your call, and you may need to make that call if there is some solution or lifehack that you desperately, urgently need in the virtual pages ahead. I get it. I was, at one point, living on the streets homeless after my second divorce. Let’s hope that’s not you today as you read this, but if it is, my heart and prayers go out to you. I promise you that I will make this product and all the products and information that I put together for The Divorced Dad’s Dojo and Hearts of the Fathers Ministries as useful as possible to as many of you divorced dads out there as possible.
If you do skip ahead, I urge you to make sure that you come back and read the entire eBook because as desperate as your immediate physical needs may be, the real way that you’ll survive and succeed long term is mental, not physical. Short term, yes, you’ve got physical needs: food security, financial needs, health challenges, legal bills, etc. However, those challenges will keep coming, one after another, for as long as you are in the grip of the Divorce Industrial Complex. Even if we could address all your food, shelter, financial, legal, and health needs today, right now, with a magic wand, as soon as tomorrow, the Divorce Industrial Complex could launch a fresh new salvo of attacks on you and your children.
So while taking care of physical needs is short term, what you and your children need long term is for you to have mental strength, emotional strength, psychological strength, resilience, endurance, and fortitude. Stress, when prolonged over years with no end in sight, kills. Divorced dads are about 2.5 times more likely to commit suicide than the average person. A 2016 study published in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health found that men who were divorced or separated were 39% more likely to die prematurely from any cause, including suicide.
So, skip ahead to the lifehacks and strategies on urgent, physical needs if you must, but whatever you do, please come back here and catch up on important information for developing a mindset that will see you through the abuse and mind games of the Divorce Industrial Complex and also make you the man you need to be for your kids.
Chapter Two: Myths About The Situation Divorced Fathers Are In
Let’s start building your survivor mindset by dismantling some of the myths about what divorced dads face when they are in the grip of the Divorce Industrial Complex. Taking apart these myths is important because believing them will impede your progress in getting your future and your children’s future back on track. They are dangerous lies.
Myth I.) What you’re going through is an exception. For whatever reason, you’ve just slipped through the cracks in the system.
I was told this lie by a lot of ignorant people over the years. Some of them were even well-meaning. However, it’s just not true. The system is thoroughly corrupt and intentionally father destroying.
Even if it were true that you and your kids somehow fell through the cracks of an otherwise good system, shouldn’t what’s happened to you and your children be corrected? Are you and your children obligated to accept what’s happened just because you “fell through the cracks”? Is that some kind of excuse of the system? No, of course it isn’t.
It doesn’t take much observing the world around us or doing research online to discover that you haven’t fallen through the cracks. The system is working exactly as it is designed to, to enrich the Divorce Industrial Complex, particularly judges and attorneys, but also prisons and bureaucrats, by disenfranchising you and by breaking the continuity of generations by preventing you from raising your offspring.
When an American State, say, Missouri, Illinois, or any State, seizes income from you in the name of so-called “child support”, the amount seized is reported by the State to the Federal government. Next, the Federal government rewards the State by paying to the State’s treasury an amount that varies from State to State between 10¢ and 60¢ on the dollar. The State is then issued a waiver that grants the State discretion in how the funds are used. In many States, a large portion of these funds are earmarked for judges’ retirement programs. This is legalized racketeering. This is a conflict of interest for every family court judge. The more income that is seized from you in the name of so-called “child support”, the more often judges will swing from hammocks in Hawaii sipping mimosas paid for with money that would have been in your children’s college funds.
The preceding paragraph sounds outrageous because it is outrageous. Unfortunately, it’s not so outrageous that it’s not real. It’s quite real and easily verifiable. 42 U.S. Code § 666 contains the bulk of it. (Yes, it’s really section 666.)
So, there are a few points here:
Myth II.) What’s happening is your own fault.
Another psychological weapon that the Divorce Industrial Complex tries to use against divorced dads is self-blame. People will try to convince you that you yourself are the cause of what’s happening to you and your children. Now, I’m not going to give you a blanket pardon at this moment and just say that you are entirely not to blame, because I don’t know you personally. I don’t know your particular situation personally.
Maybe you cheated on your kids’ mom. Maybe you have alcohol issues or drug issues or anger issues. Maybe you’ve been in jail several times. I can’t, at this point, say that you had nothing to do with setting the current set of events in your life in motion, because I just don’t know you personally.
However, I absolutely can tell you that the Divorce Industrial Complex doesn’t care. The Divorce Industrial Complex is the real enemy. No matter what you may or may not have done to contribute to you and your kids’ mom splitting up, the Divorce Industrial Complex is anti-family, anti-child, and anti-father, whether you’re Ward Cleaver or a bum. It doesn’t matter. If you’ve split from your kids’ mom for any reason, whether that reason had anything to do with you or not, the Divorce Industrial Complex is ready to move in and destroy you and your children.
In life, there are two kinds of events, things that we ourselves caused, and things that we ourselves didn’t cause. Understanding that takes nuance and a willingness to sort things out. A lot of people that you and I meet every day don’t want to go to that kind of effort in life. They go to one extreme or the other: either 1.) nothing is ever their fault and they blame others for everything, or 2.) everything is their fault and they destroy their own self-esteem, confidence, and motivation by beating themselves up even harder than the world would, and the world, as we know, beats people up pretty hard.
It’s important in life to sort out which of your issues are your fault and which are not. Own the ones that ARE. Refuse to beat yourself up over the ones that AREN’T, no matter how much people will try to convince you that they are.
First, let’s talk for a moment about issues that ARE yours.
If you do actually have things in your history or your present day that you have to make right such as alcoholism, violence, drugs, crime, etc., then you do need to fix those things. As I write this, I am reminded of the sermon from my local home church last Sunday, in which the brilliant Pastor Billy Foster told a story about a person who had huge issues with self-worth and self-acceptance because they felt that they could never be a “good-enough” person because their mother didn’t love them enough to get off drugs and straighten her life out for them. He told of the devastating effects on young people with parents in prison because they feel that their parents don’t love them enough to straighten out their lives enough to be able to stay out of prison once they get out. Like I said above, I don’t know you personally. Your issues may not be as extreme as alcohol or prison or drugs or violence or having cheated on your kids’ mom, but if there are real issues that are actually yours, you HAVE to deal with them.
Now, on to issues that are definitely NOT yours.
In 2016, I testified before three Missouri State Supreme Court so-called “justices”. I testified to my experience in 2012 being made homeless because so-called “child support” was seizing 86% of my income in spite of Missouri law supposedly limiting it to 50%. I testified to my mugging and near stabbing on the streets of St. Louis. One of the so-called “justices” on the bench responded by telling me to my face that what had happened to me was my own fault for “not making enough money”.
What is a black-robed tyrant like that doing on a judicial bench anywhere? Let alone on a state supreme court?
Do not let people, no matter who they are, hypnotize you into thinking things that are NOT your fault are. That is a form of mind control to get you to accept abuse, mistreatment, peonage, and disenfranchisement.
One particular thing that many people will tell you is your fault is that you are the one who chose the mother of your kids. They will tell you: “There were signs or red flags you should have seen” or “You should have taken more time to get to know her.” I’ve been told this by idiots over and over. Some of those idiots have apologized and are still my friends to this day. The idea that what your spouse did is somehow your fault for choosing her is pure hogwash. Newsflash: People lie! People can be fake!
My current wife Anita, before I met her, was a single mom. She was impregnated by a man who dated her, lying the entire time saying that he was a single man, when in fact he was a married man with multiple kids already in his marriage. Once, when I was courting my current wife, she told me how moved she was that I unconditionally accepted Angel my stepdaughter. By that time in my life, I already had a total of three kids from two divorces. I told Anita that I understand that sometimes liars reproduce with you.
Marriage is a covenant, like a contract or a treaty. It’s a promise. How is it YOUR fault if OTHER people break THEIR promises?
No matter what you may or may not have done to precipitate divorce, what is happening to you is most certainly not your fault with regard to the Divorce Industrial Complex. In this book’s previous discussion of Myth #1, we covered the financial motivations of the Divorce Industrial Complex to destroy you and your children. The Divorce Industrial Complex is the real enemy.
Myth III.) Kids figure it out eventually.
No. Not in most cases, no. That’s a VERY poisonous myth because it becomes an excuse for complacency. Rights-violated parents are depressed and feel defeated anyway. Rights-violated parents are usually exhausted beyond what they ever thought their limits were. This pernicious myth promises them that if they just wait, time itself will fix everything for them. Nothing could be further from the truth.
There are rare cases of adults-stolen-as-children (or ASCies), who later did figure things out, but those are the rare exception and not the rule. In 2003, a colleague at a job I had at the time told me the story of how he had spent, as he had reckoned it, half of his life hating his dad and the other half hating his mom.
His mom had programmed him to hate his dad and to shut his dad out of his life completely. Then, when the man telling me the story turned 18, it was time for him to go to college and there was no money. His mother went upstairs to their attic and started bringing down from the attic box after box after box. These boxes contained letters from the dad to his son that the mom had plucked out of the mail any time that they came, for years, and had hidden them from her son. Along with each letter was a check, written not to the mom, but directly to the son. The checks were all still good to cash. Years and years of them. The son deposited these checks for enough money to pay for his college. This man spent the first half of his life hating his father because he’d believed lies about his father and then spent the second half of his life hating his mother for lying about his father, and, in effect, stealing his father from him.
In 2019, a colleague at a job that I had that year told me about his adult daughter and how she had learned the truth about him and stopped hating him. She had been raped for years and years by her mother’s live-in boyfriend. The courts had done nothing. My colleague fought to get custody every day for years and years until his daughter turned 18 and aged out of the system. Because she had been psychologically messed up by her horrible childhood of regular rape with her own mother doing nothing about it, it was hard for the girl to adjust to life as an adult and land on her feet with her own place and self-sufficiency. Even though she hated her dad because of lies her mom had programmed her with, out of desperation she went to live with her dad.
One day, my colleague came home from work to find his daughter bawling on the floor inside a circle of papers laid out all around her. She had gotten into her dad’s court records and learned the truth, that her daddy had NEVER given up on her, that he had fought for her EVERY DAY all the way until she had turned 18 and the courts dumped the case because she aged out. Her mom had lied to her all those years, telling her that her dad didn’t care about her and wanted nothing to do with her.
My colleague said that his daughter clung to him for a long, long time, crying, not wanting to be let go, because she finally realized that she had had a good father all the time of her life, and that the system and her mom had stolen that good father from her, who did every thing possible the whole time to stop the raping and get her away from it. He said that he and his daughter are very close now.
Those two stories of kids figuring things out later in life are the rare exceptions, and look what these two kinds went through. No one should have to go through that.
Parental Alienation is the topic of the second volume in my Divorced Dad’s Dojo series, to be released Fall 2025. There, an entire book will be devoted to this topic. For the purposes of mentioning it here, I want to point out that the idea that “Kids Will Figure It Out Later On” is a myth and a lie from the Pit of Hell. If you sit back and do nothing, then you are doing exactly what the enemy wants you to do by believing this lie.
So what do you do about Parental Alienation? Well, this book is about how to take care of your mindset and you and your kids’ immediate needs. The Divorced Dad’s Dojo, Volume 2 will devote an entire book to dealing with adult kids who have moved out and, unfortunately, believe lies about you, their belief in those lies preventing them from bonding with you.
Myth IV.) Your kids’ drama mama is the problem.
No. While she certainly CONTRIBUTES to the problem, especially if there is narcissism, physical violence, pathological lying, perjury, child abuse, and other issues that she may contribute to the overall situation, believe it or not, she is not the problem.
How can I possibly say that? Me, of all people! I used to be beaten by my second ex. When my first ex decided to divorce me and demanded that I move out of the house, I made my intentions known that I would stay in the house, in a spirit of prayer and reconciliation, that the Holy Spirit might heal our marriage. In order to get me out of the house, my first ex threatened to lie to the police, to make up fantasy events that never happened, in order to get me to move. I knew that police in such cases aren’t objective, but automatically side with the woman no matter what, so I left.
So, how can I, of all people say that the ex is not the problem? Because if the courts did their job, then the ex’s shenanigans wouldn’t fly. The COURTS are the problem! Not the ex. The courts incentivize, empower, enable, and abet your ex’s shenanigans.
Back in the discussion of Myth #1, I went into detail on exactly how the Divorce Industrial Complex profits from destroying you and your children. Your ex is your children’s mother. Even if she is terrible, she is still your children’s mother. She needs to be treated like your children’s mother by you, but by the courts, she needs to be treated as an EQUAL parent to you. That’s the problem, the REAL problem! Her garbage and shenanigans simply would not fly if the courts actually did their jobs. They are the problem.
So, stop focusing on your ex as the problem. That’s what the real enemy, the courts, want you to do. That’s how they profit. That’s how they keep everyone focused on just their own one personal case instead of organizing en masse to change the whole system for everyone, to bring down the Divorce Industrial Complex once and for all.
I’ve said it before in this book and I’ll keep saying it: In 2025, America has entered an age of accountability for public officials. Never has there been a better time than now for organizing and stopping the Divorce Industrial Complex.
In the meantime, having discussed four of the major myths about dealing with being a divorced dad, let’s get on with the main event, things that you may need to do to survive and to prepare for you and your children’s comeback in life.
Chapter Three: Strategies, Techniques, and Life Hacks for Divorced Dads
I.) Building the Mindset of a Warrior: Mental, Psychological, and Emotional needs
a.) Your Self-Esteem and Self-Perception.
I hope this sounds obvious to you when I say that you are not garbage. I hope the Divorce Industrial Complex hasn’t beaten you down that far as to completely dismantle your self-esteem, though it WILL try. And, for some men, it succeeds. It’s worth mentioning here again what I’ve said before that divorced dads are about 2.5 times more likely to commit suicide than the average person. A 2016 study published in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health found that men who were divorced or separated were 39% more likely to die prematurely from any cause, including suicide.
The current system, until we the people succeed in changing it, wants one of three outcomes for you:
A man’s self-esteem and sense of self-worth, his psychological well-being, is tied to his ability to provide for his children. When the government, in the form of the anti-family courts, systemically and systematically dismantles a man’s ability to take care of his children, it is a weaponized psychological attack on his psyche. For over a year, starting in 2013 and continuing into 2014, the State of Missouri seized my driver’s license, because it was mathematically impossible for me to pay 86% of my income for so-called “child support” and have enough left over to ACTUALLY support my children and myself. Of course, I had to get to work or my income would stop. I told the Missouri State government stooges over the phone that I would continue to drive because they gave me no choice. The world of 2013 didn’t have remote work from home normalized the way it is today as I write this in 2025, and remote work from home isn’t the answer anyway.
The government has no right to interfere with your ability to work and earn income to feed and otherwise care for your children as a single parent. I had no choice but to defy the government to feed and otherwise care for my children as a single parent. The government itself forced me to defy it. Otherwise, I would not have been able to feed and care for my children as a single parent.
By God’s grace and mercy, I was simply not pulled over during the 13 months that my driver’s license was wrongfully seized before I could get it properly restored. However, after 13 months of having my driver’s license seized by the State of Missouri, the very next day after my license was restored to me, I was pulled over for a pretty normal warning citation. I thought of the almost 400 days that 13 months is, and how easily it could have been on one of those days that I could have been pulled over, without a license. I believe God had made my driving invisible for 13 months. You might believe it was just luck or chance. Either way, American States that seize driver’s licenses from parents for reasons pertaining to so-called “child support” are intentionally attacking parents’ ability to take care of themselves and their children.
We’ll look at some life hacks (other than driving illegally like I did relying on divine blessing or sheer luck) in a section of this book coming up that may assist you if your license has been seized. Feel free to skip to the section on Basic Survival Stability if you need to at this point.
As a divorced dad, your mind is under severe psychological assault not only in the form of legal abuse by your government and courts (and yes, they are yours because you are a taxpayer), but even if your government treated you fairly and non-abusively, divorce all by itself would take its toll on your mental health.
There is a dream that I have had twice in my life, once during each divorce. In each of these two dreams, I was standing inside our large kitchen wastebasket while my soon-to-be-ex-wife made dinner there in the kitchen. As she made dinner, she piled potato peels, carrot peels, plastic packaging, and other waste from the dinner preparation process right on top of me in the trash can. As the dream continued, I was slowly getting buried with the other thrown away trash. This is why I started this section by stating unequivocally that YOU are not garbage.
You may not be a fan of therapy or counseling. That’s fine. I’m not here to tell you what to do. I’m here to provide strategies that I and others have found helpful and useful.
I strongly suggest you find someone with whom you can talk to process what you’re going through. Isolation and loneliness, separation from others, lack of support network or community, these things are psychological weapons of the system. Find someone, a friend, a counselor, a therapist, a support group, someone who will lift you up.
Find a good one. There are, unfortunately, groups out there who claim to support divorced dads, but are toxic, grifting charlatans who make our society’s situation for divorced dads worse, not better, as they rake in cash from non-profit donations and government grants. The way you can tell the toxic ones apart from the good ones is that the toxic ones teach that fathers should accept their status as second class citizens and second class parents as opposed to supporting them in being EQUAL parents to their children with their children’s other parent. It really is that simple.
Find a good person, persons, or group to talk to. Don’t try to handle this like a lone commando. If you can’t find one at the moment, say “hi” to us at the Divorced Dad’s Dojo Facebook group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/547234798371835.
Your mind and emotions are under assault. You need to take care of them and keep them healthy just as you would your body.
II.) basic survival stability
a.) food and water, place to live, basic physical needs
b.) antibiotics
c.) jobs
d.) driver’s license seizure
e.) resources if you are homeless
Maintenance
Conclusion