Picture this. You’re sitting at your own kitchen table, and a stranger with a clipboard is sitting across from you. She’s asking about bedtimes. About the bruise on your son’s knee. About your job, your ex, your bank account. She’ll ask you a hundred questions before she leaves. And she’ll write down every answer. Every pause. Every time your voice cracked. But there’s one question she will never ask you. Not once. Not one time. Who are you?

She’ll walk out of your house with a file on your family. That file can decide where your children sleep tonight. And nobody who wrote it ever tried to understand the person they were writing about.

This is the Father’s Advocacy Network podcast. I’m Adam Neuerburg. And this is Hardwired, part one. Today we’re starting something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. It’s a weekly series called Hardwired. Every week, we look at the child welfare system through one lens, the Core Values Index. And by the time we’re done, I think you’ll see your case, your caseworker and your judge in a way you never have before. Because the same wiring that makes you who you are explains why a terrified parent gets written up as dangerous. It explains why caseworkers abuse their power in the same four ways, over and over. It explains why your judge rules the way they do. And it explains why this whole system is built to break families instead of understanding them.

So let’s start at the beginning. What is the Core Values Index? It comes from a company called Taylor Protocols, and it was developed by a man named Lynn Ellsworth Taylor. And I love where it came from. It didn’t come out of some academic lab. It came out of decades of business turnaround work. Going into companies that were failing and figuring out why. Before that, Taylor built speech recognition systems for personal computers. So this is a man who spent his life figuring out why systems break. There’s a line in his handbook I think about all the time. Every business problem is a people problem. Hold onto that. Because every CPS case is a people problem too. The assessment itself takes about ten minutes. It’s 36 sets of options, and in each one you choose between words. That’s it. No essay. No trick questions. At the end, it scores four core values. Your highest score is your primary value. Your dominant one. Your second highest is your secondary. And everybody has all four. Every single person. Just in different proportions. Taylor Protocols says more than 1.3 million of these assessments have been completed, and that it’s worked with more than 400 companies and more than 50,000 people. Those are the company’s own figures. But think about what that means. Businesses take the time to understand how the people they hire are wired. And the system that takes children? It doesn’t bother to understand the people it’s taking them from.

Let me walk you through the four. Each one has an energy. And each one has what Taylor calls a catalytic value. Think of that as the fuel that keeps the core value healthy. First, the Builder. The Builder’s energy is power, and their catalytic value is faith. Builders use their personal energy to make a positive difference. They’re direct. Bottom line. Short and commanding. They don’t want the long explanation, they want to know what we’re doing and when. They’re driven by urgency and by results they can see, and they take responsibility. Taylor says the Builder learns by deciding and doing. And the Builder’s deepest fear? Being powerless. Impotent. Vulnerable. Second, the Merchant. The Merchant’s energy is love, and their catalytic value is truth. Merchants are the connectors. They work toward an inspired vision while nurturing the best in themselves and in other people. They lead by inspiring. They build teams and relationships, and they’re drawn to people, to music, to stories, to beauty. They need appreciation, and they need honesty. They learn by talking and listening. And their deepest fear is that they are not love. That they’re unloved. Third, the Innovator. The energy is wisdom, and the catalytic value is compassion. The Innovator sees how things are and knows what to do about them. They’re the ones asking, what if? There’s got to be a better way. They observe first, then they solve. And when everyone else says it can’t be done, they’re already looking for the alternative. Their deepest fear is being a fool. Feeling foolish. And fourth, the Banker. The energy is knowledge, and the catalytic value is justice. Bankers know the facts, through research, measurement, proof and records. They gather information, organize it, preserve it, and share it. They want stability, fair process and accountability. They’re the ones who warn you when danger is coming. They learn by reading and analyzing. Their deepest fear is being ignorant. Now listen to those four fears again. Powerless. Unloved. Foolish. Ignorant. And then think about the first week of a CPS case. You have no power over where your kids are. Somebody’s telling you that you don’t love them right. You feel like a fool because nobody explains the process. And nobody will tell you what’s in the file. For a lot of families, every one of those fears gets hit in the first few days.

This next part is the heart of this whole series. The CVI claims to measure something different from your personality. Taylor Protocols says behavior, personality and mood fluctuate. They move around. What the CVI claims to measure is your innate core nature. The part of you that doesn’t change. They put it this way. It measures who you are, not what you are. The idea draws on the psychologist Abraham Maslow, and what he called the unchanging real self. And Taylor Protocols describes our learned behavior patterns as, in their words, a warped version of our real core values nature. A warped version. Think about that. The way you act after years of pressure. After hard things happened to you. After you learned how to survive. That’s not the real you. It’s a bent copy. And here’s why that matters so much for families. Taylor Protocols says that under stress, when defenses are down, the real core self comes out. Your wiring shows up the moment you’re afraid. So how stable is this? Taylor Protocols reports 97.7 percent repeat reliability. That’s whether you get the same result when you take it again. They compare that to earlier test-retest studies, which they say were typically 94 percent or greater. And they say Myers-Briggs struggles to reach 70 percent. Those are the company’s own claims. But the point is clear. This is meant to describe something in you that doesn’t move. Now I need to be really clear about something. The CVI doesn’t diagnose anybody. It doesn’t predict abuse. It doesn’t tell anyone whether you’re a good parent or a bad one. It describes wiring. How you’re built, and how you tend to react when you’re afraid. And that’s exactly what the child welfare system never looks at. It judges you on behavior. Behavior on the worst day of your life. Behavior under a kind of fear most people never feel. And then it takes that one snapshot and calls it the truth about you.

I’ll be honest with you. I didn’t just read about this. I’m a certified CVI coach, through Hardwired Coaching. That’s where the name of this series comes from. And I’ve taken the assessment myself. I’m a high Innovator. My secondary value is Merchant. In the CVI, that pairing has a name. Merchant and Innovator together is called the Creative contributor type. So what does that mean for how I fight? It means when somebody tells me a family’s case is hopeless, the first thing in my head is, there’s got to be a better way. It means I’m the guy asking why. Why was this report written this way? Why doesn’t this date match that date? Why did nobody ever ask the parent? And the Merchant side of me can’t let go of the people. Here’s what I see over and over. A parent calls from a parking lot, because they can’t fall apart in front of their other kids. They apologize for crying. I can’t hear that and walk away. But I know my dark side too. Taylor says an Innovator’s negative cycle starts when their tolerance, acceptance and forgiveness shrink. That happens when they feel rushed, or when they see their ideas casually dismissed. And the Innovator’s conflict strategy is interrogation. Accusatory questions. Getting clever. Questioning every piece of data. Getting stubborn. I’ve felt it start. Sitting across from people in this system who wouldn’t answer a straight question, I’ve felt it rising. And that’s exactly why I believe in this. Once you can name your wiring, you can stop it from running you. Taylor Protocols says it in one line. What you don’t know about yourself controls your life.

So let’s put it all together. A parent’s wiring meets the worst fear of their life. And the system writes down the wiring as if it were the danger. FAN lays this out in the material we give to counties. Take a Builder parent. The worker sees hostile. What’s actually happening is protective intensity, because a child is threatened. A Merchant parent shuts down after they’ve been betrayed. The worker writes, not bonded. But shutting down after betrayal is a trauma response. It isn’t indifference. An Innovator parent asks detailed questions. The worker writes, evasive. But detailed questions are information-seeking. That’s cooperation. A Banker parent goes quiet and complies. The worker writes, withholding. But quiet compliance is processing. It isn’t an admission of anything. Four different parents. Four completely normal human responses to terror. And four case notes that make every one of them sound like a threat to their own child. Call it whatever you want. I won’t call it child protection. And understanding isn’t hard. It takes about ten minutes to learn how a person is wired. Ten minutes. But a system with the power to take your children never asks the one question that would change how it reads everything you do. They’ve got your file. They just don’t have you.

If you’re in the middle of this right now, maybe sitting in your car before a hearing, I want you to hear me. You are not your case file. So here’s where to start. This isn’t legal advice. FAN is not a law firm. But these are things I’ve seen make a difference. One. Learn your own wiring. Every parent who joins FAN can take the Core Values Index for free, with a one-on-one debrief with a certified CVI coach. Knowing how you react under fear is the first step to not getting trapped by it. Two. Find your fear. Is it being powerless? Being unloved? Looking foolish? Being kept in the dark? Whichever one hits you hardest is where the system will get its worst case notes on you. Know it before they find it. Three. Write everything down, the same day. Every visit, every call, every name and every date, and what was said. Your record of who you are has to exist somewhere, because theirs is already being written. Four. When you can get your case notes, read them and look for the labels. Hostile. Evasive. Not bonded. Withholding. Next to each one, write down what was actually happening in that moment and why. Then give that to your attorney, in writing. And five. You don’t have to carry this by yourself. If nobody in this system has asked who you are, we will, so go to fathers advocacy network dot com slash case help.

Next week on Hardwired, we go to the darkest place in all of this. Backs Against the Wall. The four ways every one of us fights when we feel cornered, and how CPS manufactures that fear and then writes down your reaction as evidence. If this one opened your eyes, share it with one parent who’s fighting right now and feels like nobody sees them. And follow the show, so you don’t miss a single part of this series. FAN’s work on the Core Values Index is at fathers advocacy network dot com. I’m Adam Neuerburg. This is the Father’s Advocacy Network. Let the silenced speak.