My previous post concerned distortion, specifically by those with narcissistic personality disorder (one of a number of personality disorders that may lead a person to make false allegations, that is, to distort the truth). Restraining order fraud, whether committed by pathological liars or the garden variety, tends to go over smashingly, because judges’ biases (perceptual and otherwise) predispose them to credit and reward fraud.

Below is a list of cognitive distortions (categories of automatic thinking) drawn from Wikipedia interspersed with commentaries. Many if not most of these cognitive distortions are applicable to restraining order decisions and clarify how it is that slanted, hyperbolic, or false allegations made through the medium of the restraining order stick.

(Cognitive distortion or automatic thinking is pathological thinking associated with neurological disorders.)

All-or-nothing thinking: seeing things in black or white as opposed to shades of gray; thinking in terms of false dilemmas. Splitting involves using terms like “always,” “every,” or “never” when this is neither true, nor equivalent to the truth.

Restraining order rulings are categorical. They don’t acknowledge gradations of culpability, nor do they address the veracity of individual allegations. Rulings are “yea” or “nay,” with “yea” predominating. That some, most, or all of what a plaintiff alleges is unsubstantiated makes no difference, nor does it matter if some or most of his or her allegations are contradictory or patently false. Restraining order adjudications are zero-sum games.

Overgeneralization: making hasty generalizations from insufficient experiences and evidence.

Restraining order applications are approved upon five or 10 minutes of “deliberation” and in the absence of any controverting testimony from their defendants (who aren’t invited to the party). All rulings, therefore, are arguably hasty and necessarily generic. (They may in fact be mechanical: a groundless restraining order was famously approved against celebrity talk show host David Letterman because its applicant filled out the form correctly.)

Filtering: focusing entirely on negative elements of a situation, to the exclusion of the positive. Also, the brain’s tendency to filter out information which does not conform to already held beliefs.

Judicial attention is only paid to negative representations, and plaintiffs’ representations are likely to be exclusively negative. Judges seek reasons to approve restraining orders sooner than reasons to reject them, and it’s assumed that plaintiffs’ allegations are valid. In fact, it’s commonly mandated that judges presume plaintiffs are telling the truth (despite their possibly having any of several motives to lie).

Disqualifying the positive: discounting positive events.

Mitigating circumstances are typically discounted. Plaintiffs’ perceptions, which may be hysterical, pathologically influenced, or falsely represented, are usually all judges concern themselves with, even after defendants have been given the “opportunity” to contest allegations against them (which opportunity may be afforded no more than 10 to 20 minutes).

Jumping to conclusions: reaching preliminary conclusions (usually negative) from little (if any) evidence.

All conclusions in restraining order cases are jumped-to conclusions. Allegations, which are leveled during brief interviews and against defendants whom judges may never meet, need be no more substantial than “I’m afraid” (a representation that’s easily falsified).

Magnification and minimization: giving proportionally greater weight to a perceived failure, weakness or threat, or lesser weight to a perceived success, strength or opportunity, so the weight differs from that assigned to the event or thing by others.

Judicial inclination is toward approving/upholding restraining orders. In keeping with this imperative, a judge will pick and choose allegations or facts that can be emphatically represented as weighty or “preponderant.” (One recent respondent to this blog shared that a fraudulent restraining order against him was upheld because the judge perceived that he “appear[ed] to be controlling” and that the plaintiff “seem[ed] to have some apprehension toward [him].” While superficial, airy-fairy standards like “appeared” and “seemed” would carry little weight in a criminal procedure, they’re sufficient qualifications to satisfy and sustain a civil restraining order judgment, which is based on judicial discretion.)

Emotional reasoning: presuming that negative feelings expose the true nature of things, and experiencing reality as a reflection of emotionally linked thoughts. Thinking something is true, solely based on a feeling.

The grounds for most restraining orders are alleged emotional states (“I’m afraid,” for example), which judges typically presume to be both honestly represented and valid (that is, reality-based). Consequently, judges may treat defendants cruelly according with their own emotional motives.

Should statements: doing, or expecting others to do, what they morally should or ought to do irrespective of the particular case the person is faced with. This involves conforming strenuously to ethical categorical imperatives which, by definition, “always apply,” or to hypothetical imperatives which apply in that general type of case. Albert Ellis termed this “musturbation.”

All restraining order judgments are essentially generic (and all restraining order defendants are correspondingly treated generically = badly). Particulars are discounted and may well be ignored.

Labeling and mislabeling: a more severe type of overgeneralization; attributing a person’s actions to their character instead of some accidental attribute. Rather than assuming the behavior to be accidental or extrinsic, the person assigns a label to someone or something that implies the character of that person or thing. Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that has a strong connotation of a person’s evaluation of the event.

The basis of a defendant’s “guilt” may be nothing more than a plaintiff’s misperception.

Personalization: attributing personal responsibility, including the resulting praise or blame, for events over which a person has no control.

The restraining order process is entirely geared toward assigning blame to its defendant, regardless of the actual circumstances, of which a judge has only a plaintiff’s representation, a representation that may be false or fantastical. A circumstance a defendant may be blamed for that s/he has no control over, for example, is a plaintiff’s being neurotic, delusional, or deranged.

Blaming: the opposite of personalization; holding other people responsible for the harm they cause, and especially for their intentional or negligent infliction of emotional distress on us.

• Fallacy of change: Relying on social control to obtain cooperative actions from another person.
• Always being right: Prioritizing self-interest over the feelings of another person.

This last category of automatic thinking sums up a judge’s role and m.o. to a T. And, at least in the latter instance (“Always being right”), shouldn’t. If, to the contrary, judges always assumed their first impressions and impulses were wrong, any number of miscarriages of justice might be avoided.

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