(This article expands on information provided in How to Respond to Parental Alienation and is meant for parents and professionals.)
Parental alienation can be difficult to recognize for anyone not experiencing it first-hand. It’s like a riptide: hidden and forceful. Rejected parents can find themselves struggling against a powerful force as it pulls them further and further from the relationship they once had with their children. They feel the resistance and fight against it. But the more they fight, the more exhausted they become. It seems as if there’s no one to appreciate how difficult it is to stay buoyant in these deceptively calm waters. They search for someone—anyone—to throw them a lifeline.
The experience of being targeted by your co-parent is upsetting. But to be rejected and hated by your own child, feeling and watching them slip away, and fearing that you’ll never see them again, is like witnessing that child die a slow death. While they remain physically alive, they become increasingly emotionally dead to you. The radiant love in their eyes turns dark and vacuous and the joyous sound of their voice turns blue and hateful.
In my work with rejected parents, I’ve often witnessed them be tragically seduced into making mistakes while they are in the throes of the painful, intractable, and insidious drama of parental alienation. This isn’t because they’re hopelessly flawed human beings, but because they’re in unknown and turbulent waters. Rejected parents flounder and their mistakes can become fatal and sink their chances of reconciliation with their children.
By highlighting the five most frequent or common mistakes made by rejected/targeted parents, it’s my intent that they, the members of their “village,” and the professionals they encounter, will better understand and, subsequently, overcome the destructive force of parental alienation.
1: The Rejected/Targeted Parents Misunderstand their Children and Personalize the Rejection
Alienated children are often caught in a torrent of multiple post-separation family dynamics. Although most children can endure a high-conflict divorce with resilience, very few are able to avoid the powerful force of parental alienation where one parent actively—or sometimes unwittingly—seeks to separate the other parent from their children. The powerful alienation process, in effect, severs the relationship with the targeted parent and serves to align the children’s loyalty to the alienating parent.
Let that sink in: When the children show any love, interest, or affection to the targeted parent, they fundamentally feel as though they’re being disloyal and unloving to the alienating parent. Likewise, when the children display an attitude of hate and disrespect while resisting and refusing contact with the targeted parent, they feel loyal and loving to the alienating parent. Most children simply can’t withstand nor extricate themselves from this deep and powerful attachment dynamic without intervention.
A way to understand what’s happening to such children is to think of parental alienation as a type of psychological tumor that impacts the cognitive function in their brains and the emotional wiring to their hearts. It’s invasive and at risk of growing and metastasizing if ignored and left untreated. While multiple post-separation dynamics can contribute to its inception, the toxic attachment process that requires the children to maintain a loyalty contract to the alienating parent feeds it. And, as it grows, this tumor begins to negatively impact functions in the children’s heads and hearts.
The Loyalty Contract
Alienated children become desperate to maintain their loyalty contract with the alienating parent. They develop a narrative to fit the contract that requires a polarized view of the alienating parent as all good and the targeted parent as all bad. Because most relationships don’t fit these polarized black and white characteristics, the children are required to distort and bend reality in order to fit each parent into rigid cognitive constructs. Although children can have an affinity toward one parent over the other, it’s markedly atypical—outside of parental alienation—for children to idealize one parent as perfect while denigrating the other as disposable.
This polarization only grows over time. The growing psychological tumor potentiates the growth of an encapsulated delusional thought system: a belief in the targeted parent’s extreme dangerousness, woeful ineptitude, and irredeemable incapacity to love, despite any evidence of a good base-rate relationship prior to parental alienation setting in or of substantiated abuse and neglect claims. The developing narrative is not based in objective reality but is an inter-subjective narrative between the alienating parent and the children that solidifies the loyalty contract between them.
Most untrained professionals—therapists, attorneys, mediators, and judges—don’t understand this dynamic and will either ignore its presence or prescribe contraindicating treatments and parenting time arrangements. For example, they observe the children experiencing symptoms of dysfunction—disobedience, verbal abuse, emotional withdrawal, anxiety, irritability—when in the presence of the rejected parent, while observing these same children functioning in an optimal and sometimes exceptional way elsewhere. They can’t fathom that the acting-out behavior is encapsulated and dormant when the children are in the presence of the alienating parent but becomes enlivened and active when they’re exposed to the rejected parent.
When Children’s Lying is Misinterpreted
Rejected parents mistakenly believe, and report, that their children are lying about events and situations. This causes them to look bad as a parent and be perceived as unfit and dangerous. From my experience working with alienated children, I know very well that they’re at risk of sharing stories full of distortions, exaggerations, and manufactured incidents. On the face of it, these stories distort facts and reality and, in other situations, could be perceived and treated as outright lies. But I don’t believe alienated children are intentionally lying. I believe the process of parental alienation causes them to slowly lose their orientation to reality.
Rather than naming the distortions and exaggerations as lies, it’s more accurate to call them “confabulations”—a memory error often found in patients suffering from cognitive decline due to brain diseases such as Dementia or Alzheimer’s. In such patients, it’s believed that the individual confabulates to fill gaps in memory or to keep their self-identity intact. Similar cognitive impairments present in parental alienation, but with psychological underpinnings rather than emanating from a neurological disease process. Whereas lies are selfish manipulations to empower the liar, confabulations serve to reduce the suffering and, in the case of parental alienation, enable children to cope.
Alienated children will make up stories, distort, and exaggerate facts to manage the “lost” memory of a loving connection with the rejected parent. It’s lost, because to hang onto it, or find it again, will be, in effect, an active violation of the loyalty contract with the alienating parent. The confabulations are feeble, yet desperate, attempts to knit together a cohesive narrative to justify the hate and rejection for the rejected parent while nourishing and strengthening the loyalty contract with the alienating parent.
This process doesn’t empower or enhance a child’s mental wellness; it’s a means of survival. While they may effectively confabulate stories to honor the loyalty contract with the alienating parent and to maintain their polarized black and white world, it comes at an enormous cost to their mental, emotional, and relational well-being. The psychological tumor quickens the deterioration of any loving and caring memory tracts of the past and impedes the cultivation of any current loving and caring experiences. Their need to confabulate stories follows them into other relationships that have to neatly fit into their polarized tribal world including with extended family, friends, and professionals associated with either Dad or Mom.
The Desire to Connect Implodes
It’s painful to watch your children’s memory fade—erasing any cherished memories or revising them into tragic disappointments—while simultaneously cementing memories of all your mistakes. The rejected parent is forbidden to take any sentimental journey with their children at the risk of being accused of not “getting it,” not listening to them, and only wanting to minimize all the bad stuff. The parent is basically deemed manipulative and “clueless.” Their anguish is compounded when they’re blocked from creating any new loving experiences since all those efforts are labeled as either fake, ill-timed, not enough, too much, selfish, or just not quite right.
The children live with debilitating anxiety and must be hyper-vigilant to their loyalty contract with the alienating parent. Even the civility of normative salutations afforded to strangers or remote acquaintances is ignored and traded in for blatant rudeness. Normal, successful, or loving experiences aren’t allowed because to have any can effectively shrink the psychological tumor and that’s forbidden.
Unfortunately, the path of least resistance, the one that will cause the minimal amount of suffering for the children, is the path to sever the relationship with the rejected parent. The children will eventually end up providing only one way for the rejected parent to express their love: stop fighting for them and let them go.
More than fearing the rejected parent, what the children actually fear is rejection and disapproval from the alienating parent. They’re in pain. The hope is that the rejected parent will understand, not personalize it, and love them, nonetheless. Although they see the rejected parent fighting for them, the children intuitively know that the odds are not in that parent’s favor. They know the power of the alienating parent because they see that parent’s tribe growing, with more professionals willing to support the false narrative and unwittingly contribute to the psychological tumor’s growth.
I’ve witnessed children desperately plea for the targeted parent to just let them go and stop fighting for parenting time. These children can’t describe or name what’s happening because the words are unspeakable and a violation of the loyalty contract with the alienating parent. Instead, they appeal to the unconditional love of the rejected parent, stating, “Our life is just easier without you, less stressful. Please understand, this is so stressful for us. Please just stop fighting and leave us alone.” I’ve seen tormented, targeted parents, faced with these words stop fighting, release their children, and say “goodbye” in an expression of love.
How could this behavior feel anything but personal? It’s terrorizing to hear such pleadings from your own children and to be told through words and/or behavior, “Get out of our lives!” It hurts and scares the rejected parent more than anything ever has. But, as much as it hurts, they have to recognize that it’s not about them. The more they think it is, and the more they think their children are rejecting them from self-agency, the more hurt and anger it will cause. And that can lead to the second mistake.
2: The Rejected/Targeted Parents Believe that Increased Punishment and Discipline will Put an End to Misunderstood Attitude and Behavior
While alienated children notoriously function quite corrigible and respectfully to almost all other adults in their lives—teachers, coaches, the alienating parent’s extended family—they’re remarkably disrespectful and defiant to the targeted parent and often any adult connected to them. I’ve seen children ignore their parent, not even offering a civil acknowledgment of their presence—not a look, a touch, nod, or a word. I’ve heard children both deny all positive memories and offer no vision of hope in restoring the relationship with the rejected parent. I’ve worked with alienated children who have destroyed parental property, abused step-siblings, and ignored and defied step-parents. They hole up in their room for whole weekends, refuse to eat or socialize, even endanger themselves by running away from court-ordered parenting time. And, I have seen targeted parents’ desperate attempts to use discipline to curb this disturbing progression of attitude and behavior.
The temptation to think this will work is understandable since disciplining disobedient and defiant children is considered normative and reasonable. However, to address the source of the problem merely as willful defiance and resistance reinforces to the child that the parent doesn’t “get them” and will likely intensify their anger. Although they may look, sound, and act like naughty and rebellious children in need of lectures and discipline, they’re not. To the contrary, alienated children are very troubled and in need of proper understanding, compassion, intervention, and treatment. If the rejected parent approaches them only with increasing levels of discipline, that parent eventually plays into the children’s false narrative that they’re bad, mean, and unreasonable.
I’ve counseled and evaluated many targeted/rejected parents who’ve been seduced into this line of thinking and have unwittingly fallen into an authoritarian style of parenting:
- The parent who eventually forced his 13-year-old daughter to take a shower after she refused for the sixth day in a row during a hot summer week of daily soccer practices;
- The parent who took the door off the 15-year-old adolescent’s room after several weekends of his isolating and refusing to come out for any family time including meals;
- The exasperated parent recorded in a tirade that foster care is where his children belong until they can learn to follow the court orders;
- The parent who dropped his chronically-combative 14-year-old off at the fire station to wait for the alienated parent to pick her up because, once again, she would not stop screaming in front of the younger siblings in the car;
- The parent who prohibited his star adolescent athlete from going to football practice during parenting-time which caused his son to be ineligible for an important game.
With proper context, one could argue the appropriateness of these parental actions. But, all of these get decontextualized and inserted into the inter-subjective narrative between the alienating parent and the children—often a child therapist is eventually co-opted as well—and downloaded as “data” to prove the targeted parent is bad, poor, and unfit. In some cases, child protective services (CPS) is contacted and targeted parents have been investigated and sometimes even substantiated for neglect or abuse. The agency has marching orders to substantiate abuse and neglect, not contextualize it.
Discipline and Negative Campaigning
While structure and discipline can’t be cast aside, they can’t unilaterally be the solution for the incorrigibility. This plays into the false narrative and the negative interchange in the attachment process between parent and child. Not only is there a loyalty contract being constructed in the inter-subjective narrative between the alienating parent and the children, there’s an aggressive campaign to prove the targeted parent defective. If politicians can effectively use negative propaganda and messaging to win elections, so can parents to win custody.
The alienating parent operates stealthily behind the curtain, hoping for the targeted parent to act out on center stage, so they can shine a spotlight on them as the glaring problem in the family psychodrama. This campaign is strengthened when the targeted parent provides any data that can be used stripped of context, intent, and history. Yes, the targeted parent may feel under attack, unfairly scrutinized, and held to unreasonable standards, but such is the nature of negative campaigns and their seductive impact on others. Although the targeted parent can’t control the campaign, if they understand what’s happening, they can work to not provide any fodder.
The other reason to avoid thinking that strict or rigid discipline will fix incorrigibility is the importance of reducing the negative interchange between the targeted parent and their children. It can play into the parent’s anger toward the children and cause increased feelings of guilt and shame in them. The parenting brain says the anger is righteous and that it’s normal to dislike the children’s attitude and behavior. The parenting brain thinks the children should feel guilty for bad behavior, —feeling bad for ruining the birthday party—and a little healthy shame—”shame on you for calling your stepmom a bitch.” However, this negative interchange only foments the parent’s anger and increases the children’s sense of being bad.
The loving and caring bond wanes, the parent’s exasperation and the children’s defensiveness waxes. This becomes a vicious and escalating cycle, often leading to the third mistake: enlisting the help of extended family members.
3: The Rejected/Targeted Parent Enlists or Allows Extended Family and Friends to Lecture and Advise the Children
The parental alienation dynamic may function in children as a malignant psychological tumor. But, in the “village” that is involved in raising your children—grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, step-siblings, step-parents, coaches, teachers, and friends of the family—it spreads like a contagious virus.
This often happens at the same time alienating parents are securing negative allies in their village—family, friends, and professionals—to support the children’s wishes and to testify to an alienating parent’s love and fitness as a parent. Targeted parents sense this trend and either enlist help from their village or merely support the effort individuals make to advise and correct the escalating behaviors and attitudes of alienated children.
Alienated children are hypersensitive and hyper-vigilant to the tribal communities developing in a climate where the alienation virus spreads. They view the supportive people in the targeted parent’s village as a threat seeking to “social distance,” while seeing supportive others in the alienating parent’s village as safe with whom to “quarantine.” The targeted parent’s village grows wary and frustrated with the experience of social-distancing and may begin to angrily confront the children.
The children—similarly to how they feel and respond to the rejected parent’s confrontations—end up feeling attacked and shamed by these social encounters. They begin to suspect that the rejected parent put them up to it, or they just feel intruded upon, invaded, or contaminated. The children begin to see the rejected parent’s village as increasingly more dangerous and wish to increase their social-distancing, quarantine, and seek refuge in the alienating parent’s social bubble. This, of course, increases the tension between them and the rejected parent—for example, “how dare you treat your grandparents like that.”
Children’s Resist and Refuse Response
Although rude children who reject a whole village of loving and caring people need to be challenged, it can backfire when the alienation virus is not eradicated through effective intervention and treatment.
Children don’t experience confrontation as loving and caring; only as shaming and critical. The alienating parent uses these conflictual encounters to reinforce the narrative of how “those” people are bad, mean, and infected by the targeted parent’s influence. It reinforces that social distancing is needed for the children to be “safe” and not stressed out. The alienating parent’s allies use those negative encounters to point out how upsetting and disruptive they are to the children’s emotional state. In so doing, they commit a fundamental attribution error: Because the children are upset and feel shamed by the social encounters in the targeted parent’s village, that village is unsafe and unhealthy for them. They erroneously conclude that increased social distancing is warranted to secure the children’s safety and best interests.
On occasion, because of court orders and the fear of appearing in contempt of court, the alienating parent will disallow the children’s request to avoid parenting time—essentially to quarantine with the alienating parent’s social circle. They send the children to parenting time sometimes forcibly. This show of force is often used as proof that it is not the alienating parent’s fault for the resist and refuse dynamics. It is the children’s “independent” choice. The false narrative is that the children make the decision to isolate or leave after contemplating what is best, healthy, and safest for them. The children function as if to avoid contamination from the rejected parent and that parent’s village. This is accomplished by remaining physically distant, and emotionally and verbally disengaged.
These children will isolate in bedrooms, bury themselves in homework, read books, or play video games; anything to avoid interacting with the rejected parent’s village. They will resist and refuse picnics with family or birthday parties with friends and family, and if forced to go, will socially distance. If their efforts to avoid and disengage are confronted, there’s a risk of escalating conflict. Unfortunately, what children bring back to the alienating parent or the negative allies are stories of reactive invasion, criticism, and disrespect by the rejected parent’s village while they leave out their own social distancing actions or overall discourtesy. The children’s behavior can escalate even to the point of physical assaults, property destruction, or running away from the rejected parent’s village.
Damage Done by the Untrained and Uninformed
The vicious cycle of toggling in and out of what are now tribal communities creates a convincing narrative to the uninformed. They intuit: the targeted parent’s village must be abusive, neglectful, and dangerous otherwise the children wouldn’t be behaving like this. They don’t behave like this in the alienating parent’s village, at school, or on the sport’s team. Again, untrained ears and eyes make fundamental attribution errors.
Consequently, allied therapists will write unethical letters and erroneously testify in court for reduced parenting time with the targeted parent, citing the hostile environment and the children’s destabilization. Judges will be deceived into signing an ex parte order after an attempt to run away by the alienated child following a climactic, combative social encounter. The alienated children eventually get what they think will make them safe and healthy again: quarantining with the alienating parent.
What they actually get from naïve and colluding professionals is greater exposure to the virus—the alienating parent and his/her village. Consequently, the psychological tumor inside the child metastasizes and the rejected parent’s anger grows. The temptation to seek revenge against the alienating parent can lead to another mistake.
4: The Rejected/Targeted Parent Retaliates Toward the Alienating Parent
I’m sure it’s become increasingly clear that a good offense (intervention, judicial oversight, engaging trained professionals, etc.) is one of the best defenses to combat alienation dynamics. This offense is weakened by the mistake of succumbing to the temptation to seek revenge on the alienating parent. Why? Because the acts of retaliation can be used by sly alienators to buttress their narrative of the targeted parent being abusive and unfit. Also, alienated children will use any retaliatory actions to justify their alliance to alienating parents while pointing out how mean and dangerous the rejected parent is.
Rejected parents grow frustrated. They can’t understand how the alienating parent’s behaviors go unnoticed and that they’re often not held accountable. This growing frustration and impatience hatches into the idea of taking matters into their own hands rather than waiting for the hands of justice or mental health professionals to do something to help. It seems that the professionals and court have had plenty of time and they’ve just had enough of it all.
Acting-out is a Barrier to Reunification
Feeling frustrated and ignored, rejected parents begin to compose snarky email responses, make sarcastic comments during parenting time exchanges, or blow up in a reunification counseling session about how the alienating parent is poisoning the children against them. They’ll make idle threats to the alienating parent or vent on social media attempting to expose the alienating parent’s true motivation. They may seek out their own counselor to advocate for them outside ethical roles and standards: Someone who will write critical assessments of the alienating parent’s behavior, despite not having met nor professionally assessed the situation. The targeted parent may even withhold the alienating parent’s court-ordered parenting time to “make up” for lost parenting time, or extend a vacation they feel entitled to.
These actions can all be understood considering the targeted parent’s frustrations, but most often, they will be used against them as further evidence of their unfitness as a co-parent. While retaliatory actions may feel good, they do not do good. The feelings of anger and frustration need to be expressed and managed. If not, they can easily be acted out in a fashion that ultimately dis-empowers the targeted parent and impedes their mission to gain greater access to their children and to stop the alienation. If not managed well, this can lead to the next mistake.
5: Rejected/Targeted Parents Present as Angry, Argumentative, and Obstinate to Professionals
Growing frustration and fears can lead the targeted parent to present to mental health and legal professionals in angry, argumentative, and obstinate ways. This can prevent them from getting proper help, since most professionals find parental alienation dynamics counter-intuitive. In other words, they intuitively get that children will reject and fear bad parents, but they don’t understand how children will reject and fear good parents.
Accordingly, these professionals are often scrutinizing the rejected parent’s attitude and behavior to confirm their bias of believing that resist and refuse dynamics are caused by a parent’s abuse, neglect, or unfitness. And guess what? The rejected parent’s angry, argumentative, and obstinate attitude and behavior plays right into the professionals’ biases and the parent is misunderstood and seen as the problem.
Uninformed professionals fail to see the attitude and behavior as a direct result of unaddressed, unabated alienation. They erroneously conclude that the targeted parent’s attitude and behavior are the cause of the resist and refuse dynamics rather than the unfortunate result. And once the estrangement/abuse/neglect construct gets supported; it becomes very difficult for targeted parents to extricate themselves from the box they’re put in. Understandably, this can further exacerbate their anger, fear, and oppositionality.
The professionals, in turn, become advocates for the estrangement theory and will cite specific behaviors the targeted parent has exhibited to support their conclusions. They’ll transcribe the vicious voice mails, the email bombs, and tirades in counseling sessions, or report any obstinance or outright opposition the targeted parent shows towards participating in various sessions. (Note: Although it’s important for targeted parents to not engage in faulty treatment plans that fail to address the alienation dynamics—or worsen them—this refusal needs to be done smartly and strategically.) No matter what defense mechanisms targeted parents choose, they need to realize it will take more brains than brawn to remove themselves from the estrangement box.
The way out for targeted parents is to manage their feelings and behavior, so that the best version of themselves—rather than the wounded, desperate, and angry one—shows up. They need to be grounded in the literature on parental alienation, including what type of counseling intervention helps or hinders. They need an attorney who understands alienation and knows how to work with mental health professionals; an attorney whose goal is to educate professionals and advocate to retain professionals who understand alienation dynamics, all the while presenting to professionals or the court legitimate signs their client is fit, rational, and reasonable. That they’re madly in love with their children, not mad. That they wish to win their children’s hearts and minds, not win a case or one-up the co-parent.
When professionals are faced with targeted parents who are grounded and have these admirable intentions, there’s a better chance that the professionals will advocate for justice, accountability, and healing, rather than become another manipulated agent in the alienation dynamic.
A Word to Rejected/Targeted Parents
The aggregate of these five common mistakes can be visible and palpable while the stealthy and insidious moves of the alienating parent often remain latent and hidden. The greatest chance you have of pulling back the curtain on alienation dynamics is to not take center stage with the drama caused by these mistakes but to instead work to pull back the curtain and put the spotlight on the alienation that’s taking place.
You must be methodical and strategic. Don’t be afraid to ask for help and seek counsel. Time is your enemy and experts can help you assess the severity of the alienation and appropriate interventions, up to and including court involvement. It won’t hurt to have a coach/counselor, consultant, and a good attorney on your team.
Parental Alienation isn’t only a psychological tumor that grows in your child, it’s contagious. Its toxins can spread to you and your extended village. It’s important to realize that, just as in treating a tumor that’s at risk of growing and metastasizing, home remedies won’t work to resolve alienation.
Targeted/rejected parents need help. And sometimes the first, right, next step, is learning to help yourself. The arduous battle to save the hearts and minds of your children often requires expert strategy, but it can only be won when you are in it with an attuned mind and loving heart.
Amazing article. I have struggled with many of these – including wanting to “even the score”. However, even while being denied phone calls I was able to ensure that my alienating ex was getting fifteen minute calls on my weekends with my daughter. After being denied phone calls for a week or two at a time, I still upheld MY responsibility. The hardest thing in the world to do – be the bigger person and hope it pays off, both in court and with your child. Unfortunately, being a targeted parent is generally a no-win situation. All the more reason professionals must have mandatory training in this cancer!
Ryan: Thanks for the compliment on the article and I’m heartened it has been helpful to you. You sound like you’ve done what is so difficult to do as a targeted parent–take the high road, or as Gandhi said, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” The sad tragedy is that, in severe cases of parental alienation, targeted parents can avoid the 5 common mistakes and still struggle to develop and maintain a loving and involved relationship with their children. While avoiding the mistakes can help immensely, the “no-win” situations in parental alienation are prolific, imposing, and challenging as you allude to. The presence of trained professionals can assist in exposing these manufactured dilemmas and place the accountability for them where they belong. I wish you the best in exposing the truth and creating a healthy environment for your children as you aspire to go high in the name of love and integrity when others are going low.
I completely agree. I am the parent that was alienated, and the mother of all things. I had custody and never kept his kids from him. But now it’s like he’s always the priority and I’m wrong for telling them I just want them to love me . I have spent thousands of dollars on my kids especially my son, but to no avail, it don’t matter. Even now being with someone they have known for years , my son seems to always stick up for him, and forgets all that I do. Then I’m the one he says that thinks everybody owes something to. I just don’t know how much more I can take. My daughter barley talks to me . And I don’t know what I ever did. But now I know this is what they have. Yes they been through a lot. The father has family members in the court system and he is able to win my children over, even though I am remarried, working, paying child support, and all extras. It was never enough.
Hi, I know your pain. My kids are 27 and 25. I’ve been divorced for 14 years and he still does it. All I want is a healthy relationship with my kids (my daughter is the hardest) and I feel so defeated and lost. I don’t even mention his name to the kids. I don’t understand why he is this way. It’s a competition. He can pound on his chest, “they pick me”, or something. We had an incident this week, and I’m just very hurt. I am not sure how to deal with it. If I show emotion then I’m too sensitive and so on.
Did you file for sole custody?
William: As you can note in all of these comments, I try to refrain from offering specific advise on your case, since I am aware of too many dynamic variables involved in these decisions to tell you to file or not file for sole custody. I can say that it is the right thing to do for some rejected/targeted parents, but usually the court requires clear and convincing evidence to change an established custodial environment. As such, you would have to present your case of parental alienation really well to convince the judge it is in the best interests of the children. When I have functioned as an evaluator, consultant, or coach in these cases, I am in a better position to render an opinion as to what is your best strategy given the dynamic variables in your case. I wish you the best.
Hi Angela,
I was the mother 80 percent of the time. Yes I know how it feels. My son was given a car by dad and now he is gone. Now he gets all the time he wants to party and have girls over as dad is gone most of the month. So my 16 year old is left alone most of the time and just pines for his dad’s affection. Its sick, his dad has made only 2 of his birthdays. I am so sad for my sweet little boy. I Lost chasing after a man that in 60 years has never been able to hold down a relationship or communicate effectively. This is what my son has as a teacher now. All I have done for 16 years is wipe away and try and replace, as an example, of how to be. He didn’t even bother to let me my son for mothers day at 15 or 16!
This is soooo true I am in hell right now and have no money for a lawyer
Unfortunately, to get out of parental alienation “hell”–severe alienation–money becomes part of the currency to fight for justice, and that isn’t always a guarantee. I wish you the best.
I feel your pain. My kids are 44, 42, and 38. My oldest is autistic, intellectually challenged, and now living in a group home. I always worked and was the breadwinner while my wife worked hard taking care of my son and other two children. My middle son would never have anything to do with me hanging out etc. and always addressed me by my first name. My wife thought that was cute. What father wouldn’t want to be called “Dad?” It wasn’t worth the argument so I just left it alone back then. My daughter always spent time with me when I was home on weekends. Anytime I needed to discipline my middle son, my wife would intervene and diminish my effort to correct whatever he did i.e., vandalizing and breaking the neighbor’s Christmas yard decorations, stealing valve stem caps off a car, etc. He held a grudge against me for years.
Now later in life after we’ve retired my wife shares every argument between us with my daughter and son. They both adore her because she has always been generous with our finances to them as well as empathetic to any little thing that came up in their lives. If I happen to disagree with anything, I am the bad guy and they don’t respect my opinion. Any disagreement between my wife and me is immediately judged as my fault.
My wife is not a social person and doesn’t want to make the effort to go outside of the family as friends so she doesn’t have any close friends to vent to other than our kids and that, of course, alienates them with me. My son and I have no relationship and pretty much he is alienated from me as well as his wife and now their children. I try to attend all the ball games and such but they have called me accusing me of not doing enough while my wife stays home with the excuse of allergies and never goes to anything, even the inside games. They never mention anything to her about not attending inside games, etc. My wife has groomed the kids over the years that I’m an angry, grumpy person who always yells at her and they have no respect for me because of her constant influence over them in their lives.
I am not that person she describes to my kids at all. It serves her purpose to keep them feeling sorry for her. We go out to eat almost every day and enjoy our time. We live a comfortable life but if she’s in a bad mood, I just stay away from her as she’ll provoke an argument and turn it against me with the kids. It’s a no-win situation.
JDJ: While this article is written to discuss Resist and Refuse Dynamics (RRDs) in divorced families, you describe potential alienation dynamics within an “intact” non-divorced family. The division you describe sadly highlights the power of an alienation dynamic, particularly how the loyalty contract seduces even adult children into polarized loyalties.
Dear Randy,
All the information you have presented here is wonderful. I arrived here from a link on the site that outlined what to do when you are the targeted parent. Everything said here resonates very closely to what is happening in my life at the moment. It is terrifying, heartbreaking and devastating. My 11y/o son is acting in ways that almost seem like this was written with him, us, the alienating parent as the case study.
I have been diligent, strategic and calm. We separated in April about 7 months ago, and i now recognize that these behaviours began long ago even before the separation, and in turn – with no voice, being written off as a father i had no choice but to leave. And now – i find myself alone, broken. The process has not gone to court, i have my allotted time but the quality of that time is what is described – self soothing with video games, audio books etc. My counsel is in the process securing an agreement that embeds reunification therapy and i am on my knees praying that this will help. Do you have any thoughts, advice, even experience with reunification therapy?
Thank you for the article. And for all the parents out there going through this – i feel your pain and struggle, and I hope we all are able to connect, hold and hug our beloved children again as we once did.
Dennis: I’m sorry for your situation. I wrote this article for many reasons, but one was to speak to parents like you and to help you feel you’re not alone. I also note your empathy for other parents struggling with parental alienation.
Regarding reunification counseling, yes, I’ve heard of it, in that I provide that service along with evaluations, expert consultation, coaching, and parenting coordination. Outpatient reunification counseling is controversial in that it may not be effective in severe cases or when it is being provided by an untrained professional—sometimes it can cause more harm than good when untrained professionals are involved. Also, if parental alienation hasn’t been identified by an evaluator or the court, the reunification therapist can make a fundamental attribution error and conclude a child is resisting and refusing parenting time or disengaging with a parent due to the targeted parent’s poor parenting fitness, abuse, or neglect rather than because of the alienating parent’s parental alienating behaviors (PABs). Sometimes, a reunification therapist focuses too much on trying to “repair” the relationship between the child and targeted parent by working with that dyad, rather than focusing on the origin of the child’s resist and refuse dynamics (RRDs); the relationship the child has with the alienating parent. This loyalty bind the child feels needs to be addressed as does the alienating parent’s PABs.
It is my hope that your attorney has vetted your assigned reunification therapist, your case is milder, and progress can be made in reunification therapy. Take care of yourself and avoid the top 5 mistakes.
Dear Dennis,
I am in the exact situation like you right now, except I am a mother to my kids and also the targeted parent. My husband is very powerful, so I do not know how to fight this. I am also not divorced but separated 1 year ago with no formal agreement either.
I have been abandoned by my four now-adult children. Wednesday, January 8, 2014 at 7:27 a.m. was the last time I got to drop my children off at the bus stop. My ex-husband sexually molested my oldest and was physically and mentally abusive to me. For the past seven years, my children have seen my mother defend that man so now they think I’m a monster when all I’ve done is fight for them.
I lost my children and she adopted them and everything this article says is happening. I’m tired. I have given up in life itself. I catch myself planning my funeral and they are not invited. I love my children with all my heart and soul but the pain is so bad. It’s physical and, at times, I want to peel my skin just so my soul can rest a while.
Before, I couldn’t blame my children because they were under my mother’s watch but now they are 26, 22, 18, and 18. They are adults with a damn tumor that has picked their soul and brain as a home! I have lost hope. I’m too tired to keep fighting a battle against my own mother, the woman who was supposed to protect me once upon a time. So I must say goodbye to my children and it’s killing me. My situation is gonna kill me if I don’t or if I do.
I don’t know how to go on living without my motivation, my oxygen. I’m missing five important parts of what makes me who I am. My four children and my mother, and nobody seems to understand. I scream from the top of my lungs “Help” and nobody hears my plea. So now I keep quiet and little by little I let life go without meaning to. Life is fair, but my path isn’t. So many questions and no answers.
I was nothing to my children. They let me go. That mental tumor killed my children and now I’m left to bury them. And I don’t know how. Do you understand? Is there somebody who understands me? My soul is too tired. I can’t find anything that can take my children’s place. Thank you.
Margarita: Thank you for sharing your story. The loss of your mother and your children is not something you can easily move on from. I hope you will seek support and counsel from a trusted source to help guide you along this path.
I understand you completely. Unfortunately, no one knows this kind of pain but those of us that have been through it!
What do you do if you find yourself midway through court and your therapist and lawyer are struggling to understand?
I find I am angry at all forms of injustice as I have encouraged my child to love and be joyous about their family, and my mental health has suffered and I complain about other injustices which then makes my alienating ex seem very compliant and likeable… any advice? It is very despairing and I grieve a lot when I feel I’m doing what I can to be good to my child and other parent.
Josie: Unfortunately, I hear your frustration and despair often from rejected/targeted parents who I coach or counsel while they struggle to effectuate justice and the best interests of their children when battling parental alienation.
I recommend your attorney read my colleague, attorney Ashish Joshi’s new book on litigating parental alienation. Most therapists are not trained in parental alienation, but instead on estrangement dynamics or generalized parenting strategies post divorce, so they don’t appreciate the resist and refuse dynamics you might be challenged to respond to from your children along with the insidious alienating co-parenting behaviors. There is plenty of professional literature and conferences from which your therapist can learn more about parental alienation and resist and refuse dynamics.
Please remember that you can only do so much to create a loving and caring environment and work to effectuate change and hold the alienator accountable. The rest relies on effective legal and mental health professionals to help. I wish you the best.
Excellent article. I have done all the mistakes. The longer alienation continues, the more devastating the outcome. After 7 years of “behind the scenes” manipulation and engaging family and step mom to view me as the villain, my daughter (now 21) is now in a worse place.
Alienating parents may feign remorse ( that maybe they weren’t the greatest parent in the past) but they will discard the child when it no longer serves them. Parental Alienation is abuse. It’s not about parents “ not getting along”. Abusive ex-husbands often use the child as a tool to bring the mother pain. Then tell everyone “mom is just bitter and says bad things about me”. Parental Alienation is abuse and has life long consequences.
Christine: Yes, parental alienation is a form of psychological abuse that can have a lifelong impact on adult children who don’t ever recover from it. It is also a deep and painful loss/wound for targeted parents who didn’t ask for or deserve this rejection but have to work on their own recovery.
You mention a valid progression seen in some families where domestic abuse is occurring during the marriage, and parental alienation becomes the primary post-divorce abuse/control tactic. I hope your personal lifelong consequences are ameliorated by your own recovery work and perhaps your children experience an awakening from some life experience and they seek to reconcile with you.
How do I reconcile?
Tee: Unfortunately, there isn’t a prescription or a three step process I can give you in this medium as there are too many dynamics relative to history of issues, age of children, court history, family evaluations and/or counseling professionals involved, your parenting fitness status, economics, etc. This is an important but very personal question, hence, why I provide individualized coaching and consultation services. I wish you the best.
Parental alienation can also be misused. Someone I know very well abused their child and had numerous CPS reports filed against them by people counseling the child, teachers, and the child’s doctor. The child is still in Elementary School. Twice the Grand Jury has ruled that the parent didn’t need to be charged. The other parent was granted sole physical and legal custody. The case went before the Judge and the custodial parent retained sole physical and legal custody. Supervised visitation for 2 hours once a week was ordered 6 months later. There are no visitation centers anywhere near us. In the middle of COVID-19, the parent was able to take the child to places the custodial parent would not take the child to. The child was attending school where strict guidelines were in place to prevent COVID. The children were spaced out, ate lunch in the classrooms, parent’s checking children out were met at the door to sign them out. Judge referred to Mediation. By the time of Mediation, the parent parent that had sole physical and legal custody was accused of Parental Alienation and became the Defendant with the Abuser the Plantiff. The child had willingly played with the parent who abused the child and had fun while with that parent. That parent did whisper threats in the child’s ear. The child has been in counseling since the age of around 3 years old. The child will probably be in therapy for the rest of their life. The parent accused of Parental alienation was found innocent Please, please DO NOT BELIEVE all the people who cry Parental alienation against the other parent are telling the truth. They very well may be child abusers themselves or narcissistic. Read about co-parenting with a narcissist… you can’t!
Tina: Yes, parental alienation can get misused as a specious defense against actual abuse/neglect causing resist and refuse dynamics (RRDs). And abuse/neglect issues can be speciously used for furthering an alienation dynamic. What is true in one case can be false in another and sometimes professionals are at risk of pursuing professional biases. This is why we need competent and trained professionals who can appreciate this reality and approach cases with multiple hypotheses, letting the preponderance of the data determine their opinions or orientation to the family case, rather than confirmation biases.
Your story is my story. I am so worried about my daughter, and I miss her so much. It’s been like a “death.” I am in counseling currently because my history with a suicide attempt was when he left me for the new woman. Then she chose to go live with him. And it began, all the love and bond we had unraveled in a year’s time and I ended up in the behavioral health hospital again – so that I could stop thinking about my light of my life being gone and going through with suicide again – I was almost successful the first time. He is not a good person.
How late is too late … My 17 year old daughter refuses any and all contact with me, tells people that to her I don’t exist, that I am worthless and we are nothing alike. She tells stories of her times with me that distort and warp all the things that happened, she argues with her brothers about how things were when they were younger. The boys remember as it was…. She doesn’t. Is it too late to try when there is barely 6 months before she turns 18 and then legally there is nothing? Is it worth it to even try to get her to go to therapy with me or not….
Roberta: 6 months does not leave you much time for the courts to help, but a good therapist might be able to give you a hand with this. I wish you the best.
This is the best article and understanding I’ve ever read. It’s word for word of the evil attacking my beautiful family. I being the target parent making everyone of these mistakes. A court system and counselors who have continually made it worse by a wrong diagnosis and court plans.
I’m at wits end and the depression, anxiety, frustration, are literally suffering me to death. Unable to be heard by a Judge and I am on 6 attorneys not one of them understanding what or how to fight this.
Michael: Sadly, your story is much too common since many professionals find parental alienation counter-intuitive and thus don’t understand how to fight it, address it, or intervene to mitigate it.
We have much work to do in our universities that train future counseling and legal professionals, as well as in continued education and training of our current professionals. This is a specialized discipline that requires unique and specialized training. A person needs to seek such training because it isn’t yet compulsory throughout the country. While family law is a division of law, there are family attorneys now who specialize in litigating parental alienation since it requires unique strategies. Similarly, there are now mental health professionals who specialize in resist and refuse dynamics, parental alienation, and high conflict divorce. If you aren’t seeing one of these trained professionals, you are at risk of them making mistakes, not malevolently, but unwittingly.
It is my hope you find specialized help, effective healing, and expeditious reconciliation.
I am now in my 15th year of alienation and recognize a couple of things I did wrong. The problem isn’t the targeted parents, it’s the alienating parent. It is a worldwide, trans-generational phenomenon and occurs regardless of nationality, religion, socio-economics, race, or gender. It is induced psychological splitting in a child … an alignment or enmeshment for the alienating parent.
Alienated children display unjustified contempt and an attitude of entitlement towards the targeted parent and have a perception of an “all-wonderful” alienating parent and an “all-bad” targeted parent. This is a dysfunctional coping mechanism which, if not addressed, leads to an unstable personality disorder and disrupts social-emotional development throughout a child’s life as a consequence of Parental Alienation. These alienated children will grow up and marry someone like their alienating parent and have their own children. Studies show a high percentage of these now-grown alienated children will end up becoming the targeted parent.
Dr. Jennifer Harman’s studies have confirmed that at the very least 22 million parents in the US alone and millions more around the world are experiencing Parental Alienation. Statistically, 4-5% of school children under the age of 18 are experiencing some level of mild, moderate, or severe alienating tactics and Parental Alienation is 3x more prevalent than children on the Autism Spectrum.
Those who engage in severe alienating tactics often, but not always, have a personality disorder. If you think a child could never be brainwashed … think of charismatic cult leaders like Jim Jones, Rev Sun Moon … thousands of adults were manipulated. How could a child resist their own parent?
Thank you for your article … Caron
Thank you for your attention to this issue that I am learning affects far more people than I ever imagined. I think I have probably made all of the mistakes – and then some. And yes, it is a lonely place to be. In my case, I believe the alienating behaviors were not intentional, but yet very powerful. (9 kids, 8 with complete estrangement, 1 partial). It has also been a game of whack-a-mole with false memories and accusation that kept coming up. Do you have any suggested reading for issues of unintentional alienation and or false memories? Thank you.
Tom: I wrote this article, because I’ve witnessed many good and loving rejected parents make these mistakes and I wanted to shed light on them. I do believe that some favored parents unwittingly reinforce an alienation dynamic without malevolent intention. The dynamics of high conflict divorce, individual coping mechanisms of certain children, misguidance from untrained mental health professionals, extended family tribal warfare, the mistakes of rejected parents, etc., can all unwittingly support an alienation dynamic in children.
You raise awareness to the dynamic of false memories or tainted memories. Once a false narrative about the history of individuals and relationships strengthens and is legitimized, it can contribute to false memories and contemporaneous false or exaggerated allegations in children. It is a snowball effect and yes, at times, a “game of whack-a-mole”.
While there is much information published about the psychology of false memories, there is not so much on unintentional parental alienation. I think the book Divorce Casualties by Dr. Douglas Darnell provides a decent description of severity levels of parental alienation. He notes that the mild alienator does at times present with unintentional alienation and is more amenable to education, counseling, and change. The professional literature also refers to Counter Productive Protective Parenting (CPPP) as a mild form of unintentional parental alienation in cases where substantiated parental unfitness has been documented on the rejected parent.
I do wish you healing and reconciliation as you continue to research and learn about parental alienation.
As an alienated parent whose daughters are now beyond reach at 22 and 19, I wish I had read this article some 15 years ago. I made pretty much every single mistake listed in this article while fighting aggressively to get back my daughters and ended up failing abjectly. I was hoping that my daughters would see through what was going once they turned into adults but in fact, it only became worse since once they went out of the jurisdiction of the courts, there could be no compulsory counseling (not that it did much good other than allowing me to get some face time with them) nor any kind of minimum visitation time.
The only silver lining in my case is that my situation motivated me to go to law school somewhat late in life and become a lawyer. However, I do not intend to focus exclusively on family law as I find the whole system pretty mindless and corrupt, especially in the Dallas area where I live.
One question of you – have you ever seen any case where adults who were alienated as children ever saw the light and came back to the alienated parent and if so under what circumstances?
Venky: I’m sorry the alienation dynamic didn’t spontaneously resolve once your children aged out of the family court. I’m heartened it motivated you to complete law school and use your experience to advocate for justice for others. I sometimes hear mental health and legal professionals mollify a grieving targeted parent by projecting that the children may “come around” once they aren’t forced by the court to comply with any parenting time order. I think they underestimate the power of how the emotional tumor grows and lodges inside the children’s psyche and soul despite their leaving the alienating parent physically as a young adult.
The answer is “yes” to your question about adult children returning to the targeted parent. I have experienced this in my clinical practice. It required intensive therapy for these individuals to heal and grow. It requires a courageous journey of questioning much of what they believed in and oriented themselves to including reconstituting relationships, grieving their past, and the hard work of reconnecting with a parent they rejected for dubious reasons. Nonetheless, they discover a more healthy, autonomous, and gratifying life by working on this journey, rather than remain imprisoned in a delusion, and at risk of repeating unhealthy attachment patterns with others.
I wish you the best in your personal and professional life.
I was a targeted parent and my two girls, now 40 and 36, have absolutely nothing to do with me as well as their children. I also live in the Dallas area. Today I blame the judges, lawyers, and psychologists whose help we sought, but we got blown off, ignored, or blamed. I no longer condemn my self for the outcome. Targeted parents are as much as a victim as the children. Courts, lawyers, and psychologists allowed the alienator the power to alienate.
Susan: I’m sorry to hear about your ongoing alienation from your adult children–this is not uncommon, particularly in alienation cases from decades ago. While courts, attorneys, and psychologists are intervening in parental alienation more effectively in certain cases today, we still have a long way to go. Your tragic story is why I try to educate the court on intervening even with late adolescents while they remain minors, because once they turn 18 years old, they may remain alienated from good moms and dads for life. This is tragic and unnecessary. The court must see late adolescents as minors and move swiftly to address the alienation and work toward accountability and reconciliation. I hope miracles may happen for you and your children in the future.
How do you identify and address cases of false accusations of alienation where a parent who has alienating tendencies himself projects that onto the other parent?
Anonymous: This is often best proven via an evaluation by a trained psychologist who understands parental alienation and can provide a psychological evaluation for projection tendencies. Incidentally, it is also possible for a parent to accuse the other parent of parental alienation, and it may in fact be estrangement/abuse/neglect that is causing a child to reject a parent rather than an alienation dynamic. You point out that a parent can be alienating the children, but be in denial about his/her behavior, and defensively project those intentions and motivations onto the targeted parent. Unfortunately, sometimes if the 5 mistakes noted in this article manifest, the alienating parent can use those mistakes in their arsenal to further alienate the children. The alienating parent will point out how a good and loving parent doesn’t behave like that while decontextualizing it and not noting how the mistakes are causative of the intense stress of being rejected, vilified, hated, and defied. Parental alienation can be difficult to detect in a family where both parents are alleging the other of it, but not by a professional psychologist with training and expertise in this specialized field.
I wish my husband would have had this article seven years ago. At the advice of his attorney, he stopped pushing for [his ex-wife] to follow court ordered visitation, which she wasn’t anyways, which lead to him not being able to speak to the children at all. The first year he texted and called the children without ever getting a response. A year later he found himself back in court where he lost his children and [his ex-wife’s] new husband adopted them that very day.
Now here we are seven years later and out of the blue his daughter, who is an 18-year-old high school student with a three-month-old baby and a boyfriend who her mother has tried to have disappear too, now wants contact. My husband, of course, is so excited to be a part of her life again, and now his grandson’s, but I do not trust it. His son, who is 16, was the first to make contact. He has only made contact a handful of times during the last year but will still ghost my husband then use the excuse “I work a lot” when contact is made again. My husband has only seen his son once for about 30 minutes when he showed up at our door at 3:00 am. The mother was out of town at the time but then it was four months before he received a text from him again. He has gone and seen his daughter, who’s living with her boyfriend’s grandmother at this time, I believe, 4-6 times.
After all the lies, schemes, and pain, I watched my husband stuck in for the first two years my guard, along with husband’s parents’, is way up. My husband doesn’t realize/accept he was one of [his ex-wife’s] flying monkeys before I came along (Yes, it was all my fault that the kids wanted nothing to do with him). These two children I took care of full time for our first 2 years together. Happy years for the kids and finally my husband had a loving partner who loved the kids and wanted to help raise them in a positive environment, something none had experienced before. These children asked their dad to find them a mom who loved them because after the divorce their mother moved across the United States and had very little to do with either of them. Minute or less phone conversations with kids but long conversations with my husband, which I put an end to. Her focus was controlling the kids, my husband, and the goings on in his house from where she moved to, which she was doing, until I came along. She used to get on my husband for instilling fear of making mom mad or stressing her out into the kids. That was a constant!!! And a huge mistake I’m sure he will always regret.
I want to know how to help my husband NOW! I don’t trust the ex not to be behind the contact made by his daughter. I just don’t trust her. She had too many of her mother’s characteristics seven years ago!! Already caught her in a lie that she’s not in contact with her mother because she still is. And this is the one who, just prior to going no contact, came over every weekend for a month being sweet as pie while packing up old pictures and sentimental items in her bag, without our knowledge, and taking them back to her mother. Things her mother was fine leaving behind when she left them (her children) and my husband to be with her dead best friend’s husband (who was also one of her flying monkeys) and work on the pipe line. His daughter has told him horrific stories of their life with them. More abuse and neglect than either of us thought could/would happen without at least one of them reaching out for help!!! Knowing her the way my husband did it’s not surprising, but we honestly (stupidly) thought her husband would protect them from her the way my husband did prior to their divorce.
Being a psych RN for almost 10 years I’ve seen a lot and am not ignorant to NPD and BPD and how they work and the joy they can get out of others’ pain. I want an article on after these damaged children finally reach out to the loving parent. What should we expect? From the children? From the narcissistic Ex? How do we protect ourselves from all her evil ways this time?
Fearful she is still using these children and now a grandchild to hurt him, which she knows hurts me, again just out of boredom and/or because of the anger she still has for losing such a dedicated flying monkey (my husband) or maybe just for the fun of it all!
Remember, legally these are not his children any longer, even though she’s been receiving a SSI check monthly for both kids for the last seven years because my husband is disabled, so our hands are tied. Both children just found out about the money she’s been getting this whole time.
They could all be gone again tomorrow without any explanation or even a word!!! Leaving my husband who had always put his children’s interest above everything, even the ex spoke about how great of a dad he was until it didn’t fit in with her agenda any longer, back in the bed with debilitating anxiety and depression (PTSD) for who knows how long this time.
We were united in the fight for those children seven years ago. This time we are not. I don’t want them in our home and I have no interest in speaking/seeing them until they no longer have any contact with their mother or she’s dead. Now, with a defenseless grandchild in the picture, I feel keeping my heart closed to all of them is the only way to protect myself but I don’t like how it’s slowly building a wall between me and my husband, which could very easily be the ex’s new strategy to try and get me out of the picture, since nothing worked before the grandchild.
I admit to having a couple of narcissistic traits myself, but work hard to keep them in check because I hate those parts of me (thanks Mom!). I have my own two grown children and three grand kids under five that love my husband, he’s the best grandparent and stepdad!!! Didn’t consider marriage until my children were grown because I never thought it possible for man to love the way he does. He’s always willing to run the roads/babysit/whatever is needed to help my daughter regardless of how much pain he’s in (that he deals with daily) even if I’m at work or sleeping all day after working a night shift and not available to help, which happens a lot since COVID hit and the schools and daycare are shutting down every time we turn around. My children’s dad also has BPD and NPD and my kids, along with the grand babies, don’t know him as anyone of importance in their life; his own choice not mine or my children’s. My daughter married and just recently had to divorce another BPD/NPD!!! and I don’t want them or myself to suffer the loss of one of the only positive male role models, who loves all of us unconditionally, we have. My husband and I are very similar (empaths) but fearful that this new situation is bringing thoughts and feelings up in me that only a narc would have.
I need to know how to help my husband!!! Am I right or wrong in not having contact? (Afraid ex just waiting on “ME” to do so before she starts next step in her attempt to destroy us). Husband told his daughter where I work, that’s concerning. I have a nursing license to protect also! Yes, I’m sure you will suggest therapy, but no insurance at this time or $ to pay for it. I realize I’m being selfish to a point but we both need guidance on how to handle things while protecting ourselves and the ones we love from the wrath of an angry narcissist and the two children that have had her in their heads for the last seven years and still do today.
Christina: You outline and explain your situation well and anticipate my response: yes, getting consultation, coaching, or therapy would be helpful for you and your husband as you traverse, respond, and make decisions in this complicated extended family dynamics. You also point out a phenomenon not addressed much in the professional literature that is, whether to approach or how to respond to alienated adult children. As you describe, one cannot assume their reaching out is genuine and without hidden devious motivations. But, I am also aware—as I have worked with adult children and targeted parents of parental alienation— that healing and true reconciliation does occur. Sometimes, the adult children extricate themselves from the control of the alienating parent, or they have a transformative and enlightening experience in relationships outside the power and control of the alienating parent.
It wouldn’t be appropriate for me to offer you prescriptive advice in this format as any good and helpful advice would emanate from a direct professional relationship with you or your husband, where I can listen, ask questions, gather history, learn dynamics, prior to providing specific direction and recommendations.
We continue to learn and grow as professionals in this developing field of parental alienation, and hopefully our specialized professional services and the educational offerings via articles and books will help in more effectively preventing and intervening in parental alienation. I wish you the best and thank you for sharing your story as it can help other readers know they aren’t alone in dealing with the insidious and destructive legacy of parental alienation.
Great article. I have been living this nightmare with my kids for over ten years. I have learned over the years the many things of what not to do and they all were in the article. I need an article on what to do as a targeted parent. You gave me a glimpse on exposing the alienating parent. I need more. It hurts me everyday knowing my kids are living in an unhealthy environment and yes I have used the courts and received custody but don’t have it unless I use police. Please provide suggestions on what to do, not what not to do.
Tom: I hear your frustration. Please note this article for more information on parental alienation and links to individualized professional coaching services.
Grateful for this article, while awfully sad to experience this and be affirmed that there doesn’t seem to be a solution. I guess I’ll give them continued unconditional love, while be present and concurrently afford them space.
Same—kudos on a really well done article. Thank you.
I am in the midst of the most painful decision I’ve ever had to make—exiting my children’s lives and going “no contact” with all three of them. It’s been going on for 27 years, when my second child was born. My oldest child’s father was deceased, so I’ve dealt with a lot of scapegoating, too, from my family of origin. The sister without a husband to stand up for her is prime for a family scapegoat—Caron’s remarks from above had me nodding my head. Oh yes, this is inter-generational. In our case, both sides of the “family” have personality-disordered parents and siblings.
My youngest is in the hell of high school COVID right now, in her junior year. I got beaten badly in custody court 10 years ago because I had no money for a lawyer, and despite the irrefutable evidence of physical abuse (my ex has a conviction for assault to a female—me) and irrefutable evidence of his alcohol abuse. He had a lawyer AND he had the prime pawn—my oldest child who sat there and lied about me on a witness stand. (She also did this through two cases of restraining orders before all of this). It is astonishing, he’s not even her father. (That likely has a lot to do with it, I know.)
My oldest was committed to a mental hospital for five weeks after physically assaulting me (badly, too) at the age of 15 and leaving a journal on her nightstand that included a very detailed fantasy about having me gang raped, murdered, dismembered, and my body parts buried in various parts of the city we lived in. When I say this is severe, I mean, this IS severe. The mental hospital kept her for two months. They do that with garden variety rebellious teens. This destroyed my TA-ship, which was my ticket to financial freedom—at last. No, I could not go on with grad school—especially after I found out that the ex and my oldest had been having a highly dysfunctional and incestuous relationship, which explained the severity of her mental issues. He smoked pot with her, drank with her, bought her cigarettes, all going on under my nose. And there were sexual times, how far they went, I’m not sure, but I think by now they even ”consummated” their relationship.
When someone really wants to December you, I found out, they can. I’m careful about who I share this story with, because people will blame the mother. They were very good at deceit. I had no way of knowing, though I knew she has experiencing a really rough adolescence. I kept trying, reading books, trying to reconnect with the little girl I’d known, but she just became more and more hostile—and finally, violent.
These two continue today—she has just recently been tossed out by yet another man whom she physically abused. She’s been charged with felony breaking and entering when she terrorized an elderly couple at 2 AM because she was drunk and needed to use a phone. She pled guilty to the misdemeanor charge—and get this—she blamed me for this. And for all the many boyfriends who have dismissed her after her abuse starts. This is the woman currently living with my ex, like a perverted step mother to my high school junior. This is my daughter.
My middle child—the 27-year-old—has had a hot and cold relationship with me. Abandoned by his dad when his dad found that he’d fallen in love with an old college girlfriend in another state, he clung to me. Then he turned on me for five years. Then back for four years. I finally blocked him from calling or texting me a year ago, after severe gas lighting, just the most outlandish lies. And a whole lot of pain.
My high school junior is a cutter and her father forbade her to even be evaluated by an MD. I am not the custodial parent so I was not able to force the issue. This girl has banished me from her life as well, for years at a time. I gave in and got her her own puppy when she begged, telling me her father would never do it and that she needed one. She was right, she did need a dog. She was living alone with her father and the man has a thing for flying into rages that can go on for 45+ minutes of screaming and throwing things, etc. He probably also has intermittent explosive disorder. Nonetheless, she needed a dog. I promised, and I delivered.
And after I gave her my own dog to keep her company for six months while I trained a puppy for her, she got that puppy home (we are in different states) and she just refused to have anything else to do with me for almost three years.
But my oldest was moving in and out, playing mommy to my youngest and middle children. It’s disgusting. It’s angering. To say it is excruciating, unbearable pain, is an understatement. And these are just the Cliffs notes.
At the request of my youngest, I went to stay for a few months over the fall and winter because of her loneliness and the COVID situation. She’s got a “budding narcissist” for a boyfriend (those were my therapist’s words). I cooked every night, when before, my daughter told me she got takeout most nights and ate alone in her room. I love my family. I wanted to take care of her. Things went pretty well until just before X-mas—what a hard time of year, and for me, horribly triggering because of all the Christmases I have spent alone.
The triggers got hot, and I finally reacted. I’m sick (literally sick, as in mental health wise) of being told that I never took her cutting seriously. What??? Still?? That story? I was the only one who DID take that seriously and was blocked by my ex and banished by her. I’m sick of hearing this terrible lie. I felt like I had lost my mind—again. We managed to hold it together for X-mas, and I did like I had always done on X-mas and wore myself out, trying to make it a special one for her. There was absolutely no gratitude, and by New Year’s Eve, she had picked away at me so incessantly that I finally just gave up, trying to comfort her over her missing boyfriend and all the other woes.
The New Year’s presents I’d bought, not a thank-you for any of them. The savings account I started for her to buy her car, not even a thank- you. Just incessant picking at me: “When will you get mad, mommy?” That’s what it felt like.
I left for home shortly after New Year’s. Things calmed down and I thought we had resumed our kind of decent relationship until the perverted step-mother moved back in and I got a vicious text from my youngest telling me what a horrible, abusive person I am.
That was it. Twenty-seven years of this insanity. I’m worried about all of them, just sick over my youngest, but I cannot sustain this level of pain. I’ve been in psychotherapy for ten years, but I’m the only one who does that. Nothing will change. My ex now has all the kids cheering him on, “oh, what a great dad, what a horrible person mom is” (when they start again, they refer to me by my first name—with contempt and hatred). So, once again, I’m the abusive, cruel parent—who was trying to help her with school, trying to help with SAT prep, trying to help with daily household functioning (like regular food), and even cooking for my ex, who was loving this (and getting drunk every night—much to the chagrin of my youngest).
It will never, ever change. I have to accept that. It is the most sobering, painful, but also weirdly relieving realization, that, no, I cannot keep trying or I will spend what years I have left in a constant whirlwind of insanity. And I think my therapist was right—I’ve stayed frozen in time because nothing has ever really been resolved. I can’t beat depression with all this crazy-making going on.
So, this weekend, I am going through my closets, the bedroom I kept here for my daughter, all the 1000s of photos, cards, even baby clothes I had saved through all of this. I’m packing these things up and shipping them I hope next week. I’ve changed my phone number—no more hateful text messages OR cries for help. I have created a whole new email account. I’m done.
I will include a letter for my two younger children to let them know I loved them always, that I always will, and if they have real emergencies they can leave a voicemail for my therapist. But it’s over. I am no longer available for the abuse.
I am shattered, but as I said, there’s also a sort of relief—it will stop now. I know it will hurt and continue to hurt for all a long, long time but I won’t be frozen in this painful cycle with three other people who enjoy using me as a whipping post and creating situations that no one could successfully navigate.
I’m shattered. But I don’t want to die, and the suicidal ideation was severe. I’ve got my dog, and I have a distant cousin, and that’s it. That’s all the family I have. I will not hold out hope, because I really do not think any of them will ever recover and understand what has happened. I won’t be participating any more.
It’s hard, really hard. I hope for everyone else, whose cases have not yet reached the severe stage, that they can heal their relationships with their children. I know now that I can’t have that, and I’m doing my best to accept it.
Thank you for the article. It has helped me.
Suzanne: I must admit, your story was painful to read. I can’t imagine how painful it is to live it, so sorry. I’m encouraged you are in therapy, and working through these tough decisions with your therapist, and getting the ongoing support needed to endure an incredibly difficult transition. The severity of your situation increases my desire and conviction to provide needed evaluation, expert consultation, and coaching services to individuals and families in an effort to identify parental alienation (PA) dynamics early and prevent them from worsening to such severe levels. Unfortunately, in certain cases where the PA dynamic goes unabated for years, even decades, it can become so calcified and embedded, it becomes a monumental—sometimes unsolvable—extended family problem.
I believe in miracles, but I also believe in personal sanity, self-care, and interpersonal boundaries needed to effectuate health and wellness. It is my hope that your decision and attendant boundaries will provide you healing, a time to “unfreeze”, and become enlivened to life again. If your adult children ever seek you out through your therapist, I encourage you to engage with them only in a controlled and reliable stepwise reconciliation process with a professional, rather than just opening the door again to perhaps, another round of pain, abuse, and insanity. I wish you the best, Suzanne.
Wise and enlightened article Randy.
My son ( and his tribe) has been alienated from his 3 younger children for nearly 4 years( the oldest child, at 16 years old, refused to be alienated and was subsequently totally rejected by his mother) . The other 3 are classical victims of parental alienation (as are we all now). The oldest of the 3 is now 15years old and as her grandfather, I was considering sending her this poem, but was discouraged from doing so by the family therapist;
WHO STOLE MY DAD?
All my friends have super dads
They love and idolise.
To them, their dads are heroes
And praise them to the skies
But my own dad seems lesser.
His star not shining bright.
He doesn’t seem as good as them.
Has failed to reach the height.
But now as I get older,
And see the world more clear,
I see my dad’s been locked away
From me who held him dear.
Some have run him down to me,
Many times repeating,
Filled my head with many lies
And left my heart retreating.
So, did they steal my dad from me
Or did I keep away?
Until for me the coast is clear
To love him every day?
From now I will defend him,
As I should have done before.
It’s never right to hurt him.
Love dad for evermore.
What do you think?
Tom
Tom: Thanks for sharing your poem. I think it is powerfully illuminating in its prose and truth. If you are okay, perhaps we can share it as a Facebook post, or include it in an article sometime. We could make it anonymous, or from “Tom”. I understand why your family therapist did not want you to send it directly. I think it was an important and healing poem to write, and sometimes that is what is most integral as we journey in the healing process of having relationships stolen from us from parental alienation.
I decided to leave my wife after 18 years of marriage. We have 3 beautiful children. It has been 18 mos since I left. The divorce is now final. The children are 14,16, and soon 18. The youngest, my son, initially kept in touch. My ex has done everything in her power to keep me from my children. I was a very involved parent. Their mom is a driver. Pushed the kids all the time. She has taken zero responsibility for the divorce and has campaigned that I left “the family.” After spending $50,000 in court costs and trying to force the kids to see me, I decided to let them go. Months of texts sent with no response.
I fell into another relationship shortly after leaving. Their mom has accused me of having an affair. My children do not believe anything I say.
My question is, will giving them space (which is what they have asked for) help them heal and return? Everyone around sees what their mother is doing. Will time heal and soften their hearts?
Charles: I am sorry to hear about your situation. It must be painful, and I can see how you don’t want to do anything to further the alienation, but you’re not sure what to do. Unfortunately, each case is so different depending on the history, children’s ages and personality, professionals or extended family involved, and the severity of how much the alienating parent remains intent on alienating.
As children grow older, a rejected parent can have hope that their emancipation and individuation from the alienating parent can provide them emotional and physical space to reapproach a rejected parent. Unfortunately, some alienating parents will remain aggressively and intrusively involved with their adult children making it difficult for adult children to differentiate and establish their own beliefs and values with respect to relationships.
As I described in the article, alienated children suffer from an “emotional tumor” that can remain embedded inside them, despite an alienating parent not being integral anymore to their decision making. I’m sorry to answer, “It depends,” as it truly does. I usually encourage rejected parents to somehow communicate their ongoing love and interests in a relationship in a way that makes sense, and hopefully isn’t received as offensive, intrusive, and uncaring since alienated children are at risk of feeling assaulted and disrespected by any gesture from the rejected parent.
If you hadn’t attempted to use the court and/or professionals, I would have suggested that, but it appears you have, but sadly unsuccessfully. I have seen healing and reconciliation happen with adult children, and I have seen the relationships remain fractured. I hope you experience healing and reconciliation.
Thank you for sharing. I have been alienated from my 2 teen sons for over a year and a half. They made it clear that they no longer wanted a relationship with me. I pray for them daily. I will not force myself on them. I am here when they are ready. My love for them will never change. I’m healing and getting healthy. It’s sad how the Perpetrator becomes the victim and the victim becomes the perpetrator. Freedom is amazing and I look forward to the day that they are free from the abuser, too.
HT: I think it is good and important you are healing and getting healthy. While time can be a healer in some situations, it can be your enemy in parental alienation. I hope something creates a shift soon, and you will experience reconciliation with your sons.
Seriously, the most concise and helpful thing I’ve found so far. It’s such an important topic. Thank you for writing this.
You’re welcome. I am heartened you found this helpful; that is why I wrote it.
Im a mother of 3
I have been alienated and have had my ex dictate my life
….its not just dads who suffer
Its so hard, I do everything for my children, I have tried to kill it with kindness.
Unfortunately im taking him back to the courts.
So sad for my kids
Zoe: Yes, you are right. It is not just fathers who suffer from parental alienation, but mothers as well. The current research suggests that fathers are victims around 2/3 of the time, while mothers, 1/3. The research is still occurring and the ratio can change slightly depending on the sampling size. Regardless, if one mother suffers that is one too many, so my efforts are aimed at fighting for all children and parents who suffer from parental alienation. I hope you find justice and healing when going back to the court.
I am the targeted parent. My ex wife, oddly enough, is a family therapist, but in retrospect I see she has a history of alienation: her former husband was STRONGLY alienated by his children, and now I am the new pariah (the list includes my mother and father as well).
My daughter is 18 and doesn’t see me or talk to me, hardly at all. Child custody payments end this year: do I keep supporting her at the same level (I don’t think my ex pays a penny for support), or do I “retaliate” and lower the monthly support payment to something more equitable? I am quite wealthy, and my daughter was my sole heir, but if she has no interest in me, I can’t see supporting her further. But I realize that such a threat would be dehumanizing. I am so confused. I am here for her, it’s just that she has no interest in my existence. And as might be expected, neither does my former wife.
Dave: I’m sorry to learn of the situation with your daughter. I refrain from offering specific advice in this commentary medium out of respect for the complexity of dynamics inherently unique to parental alienation cases. While I identify 5 common mistakes in this article, there are many actions that can be assessed as mistakes or adages depending on several dynamic variables varying case by case. Also, how one parent implements a particular action or behavior can determine the success or failure. You certainly need to assess your situation and discern how to respond. I can appreciate your confusion and distress in making this decision since there are inherently competing truths. I am here for coaching and consulting if you need, and I encourage you to talk with others you trust as you discern your next right step in this painful and confusing journey.
THANK YOU for writing such an easy-to-read article highlighting the most important facts and treatment expectations. Man, I wish this had existed several years ago when we began our journey (I self-taught using Karen Woodall primarily)! It feels so good to name your problem, especially when it feels like your children are dying in front of helpless you.
We were blessed enough to have the finances to fight a 3-year custody battle to obtain court-ordered therapeutic interventional treatment. The first TI was wonderful but we had hardly any sessions before COVID hit and appointments were placed on hold until the order expired. When trying to renew, the alienating parent (with undiagnosed type I BPD) requested, and was granted, a change through our PC (who is somewhat aligned with the AP). Our new therapist is court-ordered and supposedly forensically informed, however, her treatment approach is confusing, and after all the torture we’ve been through, very hard to trust.
I’m a stepmom who’s cared for my husband’s kids since they were little. The youngest and I had become especially close prior to the AP activating the PAS button. We are undergoing therapy with our new TI however, despite me being the primary targeted parent, she refuses to meet with me because I’m not a biological parent and my daughter claims I’m too controlling and unreasonably demanding. The TI met with AP first (this has always led to a biased impression previously) and is encouraging my husband to improve his awkward teenaged girl interactions. The TI has not even begun to address the AP behaviors etc. My husband has advocated several times but she won’t even acknowledge my presence in the waiting room when bringing my stepdaughter to her appointment. The TI has not all-out said she’d never meet with me but her treatment plan has not included me at all when discussed with my husband.
This is a 180-degree approach from the last TI. Is this just a different method of counseling or should I be worried? Requesting another TI will take a minimum of 6 months and we’ve already lost too much precious time.
Jessica: YOU’RE WELCOME. While I don’t like to offer specific advice without thoroughly knowing the historical and contemporaneous family system dynamics, I will offer this: Reunification therapy is still in its infancy without a lot of standardization, so many models exist as they emanate from the individual therapist’s understanding of what the Resist and Refuse Dynamics (RRDs) are caused by, how severe are they, and in your case, how the therapist views a step-parent’s role in the family system. If I read you correctly, you have been a significant caregiver for years, so it makes sense to me that you would eventually get incorporated into the intervention.
If this case has been deemed more of an alienation case, rather than estrangement, then I would be concerned about the treatment emphasis being placed too much on helping bio-dad work on his parenting skills with an adolescent, but for the alienation, might be normative struggles of parenting an adolescent. One can’t resolve RRDs from alienation dynamics with a treatment plan that is designed to address estrangement dynamics.
Starting over, as you mention, can take time and money, and time is the enemy in parental alienation, but the enemy can also be time spent in counterproductive or contraindicated counseling interventions. I would ask the treating counselor to render a description of what he/she is treating, and a treatment plan to address the identified problems, including who is involved in the intervention, and at what stage and time. If the counselor’s narrative sounds promising, perhaps not perfect or ideal, then stay the course. If not, you may need to reconsider. Again, I would not want to give you a prescription or specific advice without knowing you and the case more thoroughly. I wish you the best. Let me know if I can be of any help beyond this response.
Thanks again for your response and giving us victims a place to reflect and giving us the tools to actively advocate for our children.
I wanted to share an update on the above situation I first posted. I was very close to directly and indirectly inquiring about the counseling methods and goals several times but simultaneously realized that there was a point to what she was trying accomplish- getting the focus off the AP’s complaints and lies and focusing on our child’s instead.
Over the past few months, my SD has come to realize she is her best self when under our parenting. She told me she understands that me holding her accountable for her school work and behavior was difficult to accept but she sees what she is capable of accomplishing and is proud of herself for the first time in years (since the judge allowed the AP emergency primary custody in 2016). The TI saw how uninvolved the AP is and even spoke with the oldest SD, identifying several alienating characteristics (which they were). She met a few times with the AP and requested a change in parenting management but the AP continued to neglect pretty much all parenting duties. The TI finally met with me to ask if I agreed with her recommendations to increase time at our house!!!
So 5 yrs and 5 months later after suffering horrific stress and emotional turmoil, not to mention financial burdens, we successfully reversed the parenting time back to what originally worked for us pre-trial 2016 (every other weekend at AP, nearly unheard of in AZ!!). The AP is under close supervision with the TI who will restrict time if alienating behavior persists.
We. Freaking. Won.
Jessica: Thanks for the update. Yes, you won the heart and mind of your child with the help of a counseling professional who appeared to understand parental alienation and make appropriate recommendations that were followed by the court. While parental alienation can feel hopeless at times, your story is an example of success.
When I went through the worst of my abuse I was so run down I could barely function. Five years of gaslighting. So I committed myself to a mental clinic for refuge. My abusive husband was a well-known medical employee in a small town and no one would listen or believe me. I attempted to get better by leaving for two weeks and stayed with my parents. When I returned with an optimistic plan to get family counseling, I was yelled at and told I was hated by one daughter; the other two were brainwashed by this time as well. I also have an older son from a previous husband. He is 46 this year and my daughters are 37, 34, and 33. They think I left them, but in reality after two attempts to return and mend the damage, I was thrown six feet across a tile floor and dislocated two ribs and was severely bruised. I left when he told me I had to leave or he would murder me. The lies then grew and grew and I did all I could to reclaim the person I used to be. I got a Master’s Degree in Education and taught. I mourn my children everyday of my life. Two daughters communicate but my son and one daughter are defending and aligning with the abuser. He was dishonest; the list of stealing and lying go on and on. Fraud, theft, and even a child out of wedlock before I knew him and a paternity case that caught up with him after he endeared himself to my son who was four at the time. This horrible act of a life of torture and grief is my reward for loving a monster that will always get away with the crimes he commits.
Gemma: I am sorry to hear of your tragic and horrific life story. Unfortunately, Parental Alienating Behaviors become the primary control and abuse tactic used in a chronically abusive and controlling relationship post separation and divorce. The misuse and manipulation of the children becomes the primary means to continue to control, terrorize, and abuse a former spouse. I am heartened you found meaning and purpose in your teaching career, and like many others with adult alienated children, I hope for healing and reconciliation in your future.
My husband is living this nightmare right now, as his ex-wife has finally been successful at completely severing contact between him and his daughter. We have exhausted our funds for court and it’s looking like the only route to reunification is a court ordered alienation assessment (practice note) which he has no funds left for and no assets to liquidate. Meanwhile he makes “too much” to qualify for legal aid. Do you have any words of encouragement for a dad who has now had to accept that the rift is permanent simply because he doesn’t have 12k to 15k in assets?
Cora: It is certainly another layer of injustice regarding the exorbitant costs for legal and mental health professional services to fight parental alienation. Once the children are weaponized by the alienator, the burden of proof it takes to show and explain to the judge what is happening is arduous and unfortunately often requires experts. In Michigan, we have the Friend of the Court (FOC) which offers “free” services–paid by State Tax Base–to all families involved in custody and parenting time litigation. The FOC offers evaluation services and, depending on what evaluator gets assigned to the case, he/she may be capable and competent enough to rule in/out parental alienation and offer recommendations to address it.
If you’re from Michigan, I would pursue the FOC. If you’re not, you can try to network and find a law firm that does pro bono legal work. Evaluators and Consultants like myself are experts and charge customary forensic psychology fees due to the litigious nature of the field, training required, and the rigorous process of following forensic protocols. Unfortunately, there is no “cutting corners” to save money on evaluations.
I am sorry for you and your husband’s predicament and I hope he can find a way to reunify and reconcile with his daughter.
I gave up. The courts failed me. It pisses me off to no end when I read these articles and most only talk about the fathers being targets. Such BS!!! I also want to point out that our grief is a money-maker for the court system, lawyers, and so called counselors wanting to help us. If this is child abuse why does it continue to be a growing problem? Because I ran out of money to fight?? How is that ok? I left an abusive x. It was the biggest mistake I ever made. The courts did not hold him accountable for stopping my visitation and child support. Ten months later they had a hearing only to allow him to keep my daughter because she had been with him so long they didn’t want to disrupt her life. A third party involved even deemed it PA. Courts agreed but still let him keep her. So, in the end, I lost my daughter because I couldn’t afford a good lawyer like him. If I knew then what I know now, I would never have left him. My biggest regret was believing as a mom I had rights. I didn’t. Please point out that this happens to moms as well.
Heart Broken: Parental Alienation (PA) has been determined to be a form of domestic abuse, predominantly manifesting in the post separation/divorce phase. Researcher and Professor Dr. Jennifer Harman has written and spoken extensively on this issue. And yes, unfortunately, court and mental health professionals can fail to hold abusers accountable and get seduced by their charm, and ability to manipulate and control. I am sorry you have been victimized by this and seemingly failed by the systems designed to uphold justice, protect children, while providing advocacy for victims, and accountability for perpetrators.
Thank you for this article. I found it trying to understand the continued accusations on me being a parent alienator by my ex-husband’s wife.
My ex left when my daughters were 4 and 10. They both found it very hard. But my eldest is on the spectrum and she needed understanding that her therapist and I tried to make him see- when he wanted rigid rules and new routines enforced.
In the beginning, I tried to do everything the psychologist suggested we do to make things easier for the girls. I don’t know exactly where it all went wrong. But once his girlfriend-now wife-got involved it all went south. She got involved 4-6 months after he left. The girls weren’t ready, but they didn’t seem to listen.
Now my eldest doesn’t hear from her dad. She herself has tried several times to close the gap. Asked her dad to draw a line in the sand. Stop rehashing old stuff. But he can’t. He wants her to be sorry and he is happy to blame me. He is not blocked from contacting her. She has her own phone. He texts seldom. She replies. Then nothing. He never ever calls her. He has told her-if she wants anything from him-she must have a proper relationship (under his standards) first. Thing is-it’s not money or stuff that she wanted or wants. It’s her dad. Uninterrupted (no wife) father-daughter time. In the beginning, he always rejected her requests (eg., Can Father’s Day just be him and his two girls? No girlfriend? He couldn’t do it.). She’s given up. Being on the spectrum it was easier for her to put him in a “box” and close the lid. Even her therapist told me to stop pushing her to reconnect.
My youngest has court orders that she is to see her dad for dinner once a week and he has her fortnightly weekends for three nights. He is the one that in the past tried to get out of his time. I have never stopped his time with his girls. I wanted us to live close together so the girls could come and go – but he wanted to move away. He wanted things to be his way and he resented the courts split of our finances We went through collaboration and a mediator (the most child-friendly approach). But he didn’t like what was proposed so he pulled out and we had to go to more expensive court lawyers to separate.
Now I’m being accused of being a parent alienator and have been for years now.
My youngest finds it so difficult because we parent differently. She misses her sister and I, and her father will not let her contact me. He’s remarried and his wife is very involved-to the point that she is the one who emails me.
I can see how reading your article would give them claims that I am the alienating parent. Now that one daughter has no contact-even though she would like it but gradually (more as a trust thing, I think) and he has his other daughter defiant, grumpy, missing her mum, unhappy, and not wanting to be with him for sleeping. She’d love to spend the day time with him then come home to us. But he won’t consider that as an option. Her favorite nights are the one-on-one dinner nights just him and her.
We don’t communicate, so negotiation for the children’s sake can’t happen. Instead I’m left with emails that can be misinterpreted as aggressive because voice tone is not present. I’ve stopped those except when absolutely needed. It’s nuts.
They have set him up as the victim. Believe wholeheartedly that he is victimized. But it was never what I would want for my girls. And both have had psychologists to talk things over with since we separated. Note: we went through at least three to start with because he didn’t like what they were suggesting he do. Now the girls have had independent therapists for several years.
Inspired by this article and understanding that it burdens all my intimate relationships. Say nothing and holding up my end for joint custody with a PA, has left me a tremendous void with the middle of my 3 sons for 12 years as he is 23 now. I call to an answering machine , I text and even now he did not talk with his older and younger adult brothers. I wish more attorneys were made aware of the reality of this plague and how it damages relationships into adulthood.
I agree that more attorneys, judges, and mental health professionals need to be appropriately trained in parental alienation so they can address it competently while children are minors, because time is the enemy. Once children age out of family court, the pathology of alienation can follow them into adulthood.
Randy, your article echoes my brother’s situation to a tee. He has a court date at the end of the month and I was wondering if you could provide a therapist that understands alienation and who could represent my brother? We live in the Bay Area/San Jose CA region.
Thank you in advance,
Julie
I am one year into a nightmare of a parental alienation case. This is the best article I’ve read that describes the situation I’m in.
I have two teenage daughters and my oldest was going to a counselor and made minor accusations of abuse. Child protective services was called and it was an open and shut case. They found no evidence of abuse. However, this false accusation was a molehill turned into a mountain. This was absolutely humiliating because I have been a great father to my girls without question.
At first, my ex-wife said she didn’t believe it and then, all of a sudden, she became hostile and would not let me talk to the girls or have any contact with them whatsoever. I tried to text them and call them and no response. She will not agree to counseling or anything to move forward and heal. She says they are happier without me in their lives and they “just want peace.” I have sought legal advice and my lawyer tells me just to wait it out. I have been in a constant state of despair. I’ve gone to counseling and I’ve been told I’m just in an impossible situation. It is important to note that my ex-wife can be described as very mean and is a daily drinker (I don’t mean a couple glasses of wine). It is also important to note that we divorced 6 years ago and it was due to her cheating. I think this is her way of getting back at me for not taking her back.
I think that you covered everything in your article that I’ve gone through with unbelievable accuracy. I have immersed myself in many articles over the last year to get some kind of understanding of what’s happening. Also my mom was my kids’ hero all these years and now they don’t want to see her or anyone in my family. My lawyer says if we go to court I could make things worse. I can’t stress enough how hard I’ve tried and how patient I’ve been with my ex-wife and trying to find some type of resolution. I have done everything in my power and I truly have a peace of mind knowing I’ve done everything I could do. She simply doesn’t want things to get better and says she will not make them do something they don’t want to do.
I guess I just wanted to share my story on here and compliment the article as being the best I’ve ever read that describes the dynamics of parental alienation and the effect it has on the alienated parent. I have lived in absolute hell the last year and I finally had to let go for my own sanity. When I told my ex-wife I was letting go after 10 months of exhausting efforts, her comment was “you give up so easy.” I’m glad she said that because it let me know she was enjoying seeing me hurt and struggle to find common ground and she had no intention of giving up an inch. I told her that the kids are going to resent her one day and her comment was “if that’s the case then so be it.” Thank you for article.
I’ve always known that even though my son loves me he would throw me under the bus when it came to his father.
In the beginning of the divorce he had my son saying I left him in the car as I went to the bar. This never happened nor would it. It continued until I threatened a slander lawsuit. That was 5 years ago. This past year, I’ve really felt my son pulling away and feeling torn.
About 3 years ago, when I realized what was happening, I told my son that neither parent should make him feel he has to choose, nor should we talk about each other in front of him or ever. That we loved him very much and that it was unfair to him to put him in the middle or to make him feel like he had to choose. I told him to please let me know if I did this and he could also let his father know if he did that. I have also given him the option to change the custody arrangement(we have a 60/40). He has always said no. I’ve let him know that no matter what he chooses I will always be here and always love him.
This year things were getting bad, and he started saying things his father would say to me. I then saw a text from his dad telling him that at 15-years-old he could choose. I didn’t tell him I saw it but I did say: “You know at 15 you can make a choice where you want to live. It’s your choice, and your father and I will love you no matter what you decide. You should not feel pressured by anyone, ever. It is your choice alone. If anyone is making you feel pressured, or putting you in the middle, you can tell that parent or ask your other parent, or aunt, uncle, or another adult to talk with us.” I believe I saw a weight lifted from his shoulders. I’ve also been somewhat honest about child support and how the other parent might feel when they have to pay it. My own father apologized about this to me.
Reading your article has been a good read. I can’t thank you enough. I have definitely been in a cycle of #1 and 2. I felt it but didn’t know what to do. I, myself, am hypersensitive to any real or perceived rejection. Thank you so much for this.
Kathleen: You are so welcome, I’m glad the article was helpful and thank you for sharing your story. It sounds like you’ve done some good work in your response to some difficult circumstances. Good Luck and Take Care.
Thank you for this article. This rejection of me has come to the surface again—almost 35 years later and 20 years after the non-targeted ex is dead and gone. I fought for and got custody to even the score—not because I felt close to my children. I won the battle, but the war was already over. She still won and is winning today. So sad.
Someone told me while I was fighting the custody, “well, who would want a child who didn’t want to be with their mother?” Good question but that’s not how life works at times.
*going for help.
Thank you so much for your article. I found it to be extremely well-written, informative, and, unfortunately for me, spot on. I’ve been dealing with being alienated from my son for years now and I found myself nodding in agreement with everything you wrote. I’m slowly coming around to the heartbreaking truth that it’s highly unlikely I will successfully be able to repair the damaged relationship with my son anytime soon, if ever. The pain of mourning the loss of your living child is indescribable, but if my trying to fight for him is only causing him greater harm, I will bear the loss and hope that he will come back to me someday.
I am curious what your opinion is in regards to my son and his half-sister maintaining a relationship. For reference, he is 13 and she is 7. Up until the pandemic started and I made the ill-fated mistake of agreeing to let him temporarily stay longer at his dad’s and grandma’s house, my son primarily lived with me, his sister, and his stepdad, with weekends and summers spent with his dad. Long story short, my mistake of letting him stay there longer (primarily based on the shutdown due to COVID)resulted in the place where I’m at now …100% alienated from my son and in the middle of a custody battle that is going nowhere real quick (with the exception of my son refusing to see or even speak to me and threatening to run away if he’s forced to; only prolonging his already too long immersion in alienation).
I want what’s best for both of my children, and prior to him staying at his dad’s, they had a very close and sweet relationship. My 7-year-old is particularly distressed by her brother’s abrupt departure but my son didn’t even make an effort to try to talk or see her until I told his dad that he shouldn’t allow our son to abandon his sister as well. They’ve spoken from time to time since then, but I’m wondering if I’m potentially subjecting the younger child to a negative perception which could result in her thinking that if she acts like her brother did and throws a big enough tantrum or makes up enough lies, she will also get her way. Is that a thing? I’m not even sure anymore. If you have any insight, it would be much appreciated! Thank you.
Natasha: Sorry to hear about how the immersion experience with dad during the height of the pandemic provided an unfortunate opportunity for a parent to use parental alienating behaviors to effectuate an alienation dynamic between you and your son.
You raise a really good but dynamic question regarding how to manage sibling relationships in alienation. You’ll notice that in the comment section I refrain from offering specific advice. My clinical experience has taught me that rarely is advise a one-size-fits-all proposition—there are too many intervening and dynamic variables within each family system and family court system. I will say that sibling relationships can go either way: sometimes they can help inoculate an alienated child or challenge the alienation campaign; or, the toxic messages the alienated child believes can be acted out with another sibling and cause contamination and the alienation spreads to other siblings. It depends a lot on ages, personality style, whether you or someone else can monitor the relationship, and other safeguarding variables.
I hope you can find professional help with someone trained in this area who might offer reunification counseling, personal consultation to you, or good legal advice. Let me know if I can help. I wish you healing and reconciliation.
I need help right now how do I GET IT PLEASE?
Sandy: I’m not sure if you’re asking for legal help and/or coaching/consultation from a mental health professional who specializes in parental alienation. You can find a description of our services here on this hyperlink. You can also do some research in your area to see if there are professionals you can seek help from immediately. I wish you the best.
Not knowing why your adult child has dismissed you is often more painful than the broken relationship. As a single mother, I did all I could to ensure my children grew up knowing they were loved. Two out of three ain’t bad? Why then has the child I gave the most to, rescued from danger and never asked him to be anything but a person of integrity, cut me from his life? His siblings describe him as narcissistic, so how did I miss this development?
Refuse to go away. I think that’s the number one positive thing a targeted parent can do, while avoiding the mistakes listed (that we all make).
It’s a mixed bag at my house. Eight years, two judges, two attorneys, two unqualified guardian ad litem’s, 6 mental health professionals, one DHR social worker who had sense (many that didn’t), a couple trips to jail on false allegations that were dismissed, two bar complaints, and we are re-filing the case all over again this month.
Results? Three out of 5 adult children ages 18-27 have close, meaningful daily relationships with me and poor to zero relationship with the alienator. Most of the three didn’t even speak a word to me for the 4 years between age 16 and 20. All six children had huge loss of Daddy gaps in their life calendar from age 12 to 20. One kicked me out and invited someone else to walk her down the aisle (she hasn’t come back yet).
Now the 15-year-old is the only one left in school and the therapist got word to me the boy is gonna ask the judge to let him skip out at 16 too. But now the judge is going to have to reconcile that the older brother whose testimony the judge listened to in the last trial has now changed to “mom manipulated me into saying that last time, and now that my head is clear… none of it was true.”
Listen, not everybody has 6 kids to practice on, so the sooner you read the article, the sooner you can stop making mistakes.
But make no mistake, this endeavor takes nerves of steel and the courage of a navy seal, and as much understanding and kindness as you can figure out how to grace your sick, twisted children with. AND, the determination to still be standing there when your children come out the other side of this fog they are lost in.
Please don’t quit. Stop making the mistakes in this article as soon as you can, accept your children are poisoned and can’t help what they are doing, get personal help with your grief, and don’t let the other party have a moment’s peace legally until every one of your children is out of their house. And love your children, and tell them you love them, and keep gently going after them. Don’t quit. Don’t quit on yourself, and don’t quit on them. And don’t pile on when they come back, they will hate the alienator on their own, they don’t need your help to do that.
I haven’t figured out how to break thru the alienation before they get lost completely in the brainwashing and disappear for a while, but I’ve gotten better at coping and better at behaving and they all have told me how important it was later that I would not go away. It makes it easier for them when they come back. The last one that came back just got out of his car, walked straight up to me, said “Hey Dad” and threw both arms around me.
Please don’t miss that. Do the best you can to not confirm the myths about you, and don’t go away.
Jamey: Your riveting response literally brought tears to my eyes. I couldn’t of said it any better. In fact, it is your speaking from first person as a targeted parent who has been in the trenches of battle with “nerves of steel and courage of a navy seal” that is so moving. It is sometimes the most difficult work I do as a coach/counselor with a targeted parent—helping them endure and cope with the battle when they feel like waving the white flag to surrender and walk away; in essence, stop fighting for their children’s minds and hearts. It is a form of what we as coaches/counselors name “meaningful endurance.” We sometimes endure relationships or situations that ultimately don’t have any meaning or purpose. But what is more meaningful than trying to salvage a relationship with our children—if not now, then, in the future. While there are always outlier situations—such as economic hardship—that warrant some form of stepping back, your story, commitment, dogged persistence, and enduring love is inspirational to me, and hopefully to other targeted parents who read your response. Thank you, Jamey, for sharing your story with us.
My advice to alienated parents: distance yourself from the situation. Don’t try to be a great parent. Do absolutely bare minimum. Ignore children complaints, ignore alienating parent complaints. Make sure you do enough just to cover your a.s just in case.
Do NOT read your ex’s communications. Do NOT argue with your ex.
Do NOT buy presents for the children.
If you act better, the children will just hate you more.
Your ex will be PISSED OFF their tricks have no effect on you. Ultimately the alienator will start to be crushed under the cognitive dissonance and will implode.
Very very extensive and good article. I had counseling and luckily did none of the mistakes yet. And I can feel for everyone who has lost their children to a disordered individual. It’s so painful to see.
I really think I have lost my daughter now. It amazes me how a once loving relationship with your child can be taken away to the point where the child ( teenager in my case ) no longer even acknowledges you, nothing. zero as if you didn’t even exist !!
You reach out to them but get nothing. You try and get on with your life. but can’t. How do you convince a 14 year old to speak to you? 😢🤷♂️ Do you go to court ? Mediation ? The mother won’t co-parent, it’s just a living hell and yet this is happening all the time.
I have been targeted for 10 years. My children’s cruel, violent, and destructive behavior has changed from simply being a behavior to being a fundamental part of their identity. The professionals have called it alienation and alienating behavior but do nothing because the kids are so completely psychologically enmeshed with the alienator. The professionals think they have to allow this abuse to continue. Even when professionals recognize the problem it often doesn’t offer hope.
Chris: I have also witnessed professionals recognize the problem of parental alienation, but fail to appropriately intervene to address the toxicity of the psychological abuse and pathogenic attachment process inherent in an alienation dynamic. It is my hope that the mental health and legal profession will eventually take this form of family abuse as seriously as they have done with child physical abuse, child sexual abuse, child neglect, and domestic violence. It is a pernicious and insidious form of mental injury causing lifelong damage to children and their relationships with significant others. I continue to dedicate a portion of my professional life to educate and train other professionals–including child protective services–on parental alienation so they will better recognize and address this form of family abuse along with the aforementioned.
Great article Mr. Flood. I was the target parent over 20 years ago. I didn’t recognize the PA until it was too late. After many court battles for missed parenting time, and lots of money spent, it never changed. I would drive 40 miles each direction to pick them up and drop them off. Many times they simply would not be at their mother’s home for me to pick them up. I learned later that their mother told them that I never even showed up to pick them up. I thought we had turned the corner, when in court, the Judge did see it, and awarded me an entire summer of visitation to make up for lost time. In the end nothing worked, and it continued and still does. The kids are adults now, in their late 20’s and 30s. I have a beautiful, large waterfront rental house that was vacant and so I invited all of the kids and their spouses and even the ex-wife for the weekend. My current wife agreed to inviting my ex, against my desire. My wife doesn’t have kids and doesn’t understand PA either. It was a disaster, the kids were disrespectful to both me and my wife, stole things from the house, and didn’t even say goodbye. My oldest daughter recently had a child, which I thought would cause her to see the PA and see the light of how both parents love their children. Nope, it has not been the case. I’m here from them, but I’ve stopped banging my head against the wall. I don’t think they will ever get over it. I’m now reconsidering what if anything to leave them when I pass. My question is should I tell them that now or just do it.
Tim: I am sorry to hear of your situation. Unfortunately, it does illuminate the importance of effectively intervening and addressing PA while family court has jurisdiction and authority over minor children and alienating parent. This article explains how PAB’s can create what I can an “emotional tumor” that grows inside children, and doesn’t necessarily spontaneous disappear when they become adults. In fact, it can metastasize and overtake all the love inside them for the targeted parent (TP) and remain a chronic condition throughout their life. I can appreciate how you are looking for significant life events–such as becoming a parent yourself–to educate your adult children on the importance and value of family. Those events do have the power to influence them, so don’t lose hope, there are more of those events to come. When it comes to what to do and how to communicate your intentions when you pass this life, I don’t want to give you specific advice because of it being so dependent on several dynamic variables. It is a personal choice with pros and cons. If you moved forward with some plan, I do think it should never be communicated as a threat, but more as a fact, with a tough love message, and in good timing. I wish you the best.
Hi Tim, thanks for sharing. My children aren’t quite as old as yours but I can relate. Just know that you’ve done what you can to be in your kids’ lives. They are adults and if they are still behaving that way, so be it. You didn’t have to invite them to your lake house nor even consider passing along any of your belongings when you pass. Keep your head up and keep moving along with your life.
Thank you Mr. Flood and Ed. While our family was still together, I took a lot of photos and home videos. We used to love watching them as a family. Recently, I asked my son to digitize the VHS tapes which he did and shared them with the family which was great, but the 2 oldest didn’t even acknowledge the videos. When watching them you could feel the genuine love of the family. Even more recently, I gave the kids a large box of 3-400 photos of the kids growing up, camping trips, birthdays, religious events etc. I asked each of them to go thru them and pick out the ones they wanted….almost no reaction. These videos and photos are years of proof of a loving family, yet they can’t even see it or believe their own eyes! These were my last hope of reuniting. In hind sight, I probably should have invited them over to view/distribute them together. Ed , I think you said it right… accept it for what it is, I can’t change their beliefs or behavior so just keep moving along with my life. One final question: Some kids are abused, abandoned, or worse, yet they still have a need/desire for the parent, to have/repair that relationship which they pursue with vigor. In the case of PA, it seems to over power that inborn desire to have that love/relationship with a parent. How can that be? or maybe a better question, is how to overcome PA once it is set in?
Tim: You question begs for early intervention because once PA is chronic and severe the prognosis for recovery is poor, but still possible. You make a good observation that even abused/neglected children have attachments/relationships with their parents. When I am working with adults with abuse or significant dysfunction in their families of origin, they often are stuck in idealizing or whitewashing their family’s dysfunctional past, or their parents’ abuse/neglect. It is an arduous therapeutic task of helping them see their parents more accurately and begin to heal from those early childhood wounds. The journey is often concluded with offering them grace as broken people, but knowing as adults they can heal themselves, set boundaries, and still maintain kinship ties. In PA, there is often only hate, rejection, unforgiveness, and no opportunity for relationship. And the sad tragedy is that alienated children are rejecting the more healthy parent while maintaining their attachment and loyalty to a toxic parent. This is why adult children of PA often struggle with their mental health and relationships. The recovery with you not only restores the relationship, but gives them also an opportunity to restore their life…may it be so. I hope this sheds light somewhat on your question, and I wish you the best Tim.
After 20 years of marriage to a man who was an alcoholic and drug abuser, I divorced. My husband was a high functioning addict who had earned a Masters degree in Psychology. He never applied this education and chose to work in construction so that he could indulge in his addictions freely. The divorce occurred in the mid 90’s. Our children were 5 and 7. No one spoke of parental alienation in those days. Our 7 year old was my husband’s “golden child”. He showed her favoritism from the first day our second daughter was born. At the time of divorce, he started going to AA, and to ACoA. Something I had begged him to do for years. He was motivated now because of fear of losing his children. I never tried to keep the children from him, in fact, after he embraced sobriety, I had an open door policy. He was welcome in my home to spend time with the girls whenever he wished to do so. In my ignorance, I truly believed we were navigating our divorce in a positive and healthy way. Little did I know that my ex was targeting me and demeaning me to my daughters at every opportunity. I’ve only discovered this fact recently from my youngest adult daughter. My youngest never bought what he was selling, but his golden child did. Essentially, my ex had brainwashed his golden child for more than two decades until she chose to permanently erase me from her and her family’s life. Erasing me from my two granddaughters’ lives. One of whom I had seen every month for the first three years of her life. We were best buddies.
Our eldest daughter had given me a run for my money from age 10 onward. She was emotionally explosive and created drama seemingly at every turn. Spending time with her was like walking through a mine field. Fine one moment, destruction the next, without any obvious rhyme or reason.
The absolute worst moments were after each visit with her father. She would verbally attack me in the most vicious way. I mistakenly blamed her behavior on the anger she must have felt about having divorced parents, when actually, it was punishment from my ex delivered upon me by his surrogate aggressor. I had no idea.
Whenever I would visit my daughter at her home, she would, within hours of my arrival or just prior to me leaving for home after a nice visit, create some type of drama. Yelling at me, calling me names, and once, almost pushing me down a flight of basement stairs. Thus began a destructive dance. I admittedly would frequently take the bait and react to her, playing into her script. Looking back, it was a toxic situation. I could never figure out what it was that I did for her to hate me so much. And she could never be specific as to what or why. Our last interaction was 3 years ago by phone. It is when she told me that we’d always had a contentious relationship and that I’d ruined her entire life. (Mind you, this child attended one of the most prestigious prep schools on the east coast, graduated from an equally prestigious private college, married a great guy who has a high level C Suite position and bought them a million dollar home, and they both have two beautiful and intelligent daughters. Plus she has the love of her family, me included.) She called me a narcissist, psychopath, and sociopath. All terms I had to look up. I saw a therapist for months afterwards and she discussed projection and felt that my daughter was projecting her own issues on to me. She never mentioned parental alienation.
The Golden Child is now a 35 year old woman. She fits the profile of an adult child who was alienated by her dad to a “T”. The most obvious characteristic is the lack of ambiguity. She views me as having ruined her entire life, without explanation; I am, in her mind, a total pariah. And she views her father as a god. They communicate daily, sometimes several times a day. She hangs on his every word. Black and white thinking and codependency. This thinking is in stark contrast to the drawer of letters and cards I’d received from her over the years filled with love and gratitude regarding our relationship, and the many albums filled with photos of the good times.
My heart is shattered and after my youngest daughter explained what had transpired between her sister and father for literally decades, I felt unfathomable betrayal. I know now that my ex emotionally kidnapped his Golden Child, my daughter, and it took 25 years for him to succeed in her fully eradicating me from her life. I feel paralyzed. No matter what I try to do to make things better, none of it will work, and all of it will be viewed as suspect. It is a terrible corner to be painted in.
I worry about my youngest daughter. She hadn’t heard from her sister in 3 years and was just invited to spend an overnight at the Golden Child’s home. It was a good visit, but also tenuous, as my youngest asked that her sister forgive and move on with family reunification. Her older sister refused. My ex arranged this invitation and my fear is that he will now set his sights and energy on estranging our youngest from me as well. There are 4 of us. I’d thought we’d survived the divorce brilliantly, and here we are, almost 30 years later, facing total destruction of our family. It is truly unbelievable. It is the saddest event that I’ve ever experienced in my 70 years of life, and I’ve experienced many sad events. I doubt that I will ever see my eldest daughter or my two beautiful granddaughters ever again during my lifetime. As much as that thought pains me, the greater pain is the thought of what my daughter will feel, when and if, she ever realizes the decades of abuse that her father inflicted and the resultant loss of love and time that we, as mother, daughter, granddaughters, could have shared. My heart breaks for all of us.
Thanks for this article. I’m the spouse of a man who I believe has been targeted over the last 15 years or so. His son is an adult now and has recently ended all contact and “disowned” him as a father after a gobsmacking series of emails that were violent and accusatory – falsely – and left us both shocked. I began researching Parental Alienation and it all fits.
They have lived in separate states for the most part, since his son was 6, after mom left with son (after kicking dad out), didn’t tell dad she was moving out of state, and filed for divorce from the new state – which was three states away. Essentially she kidnapped the child. She told dad not to call every night because it made son “sad”, and never did anything to support their relationship over a long distance such as encouraging calls on Father’s Day or dad’s birthday. Dad called on all the special days and was able to see his son only for a week on vacations at Christmas and in summer.
When they did move for a few years back to the same state, dad was able to see him on three day weekends – using a full day for travel to pick him up, and another full day to return him home, and one day to visit with him at our house. Mom never helped with travel or meeting halfway. Dad (my husband) has always believed his ex would never speak ill of him in the son’s presence, as they both knew that was bad for their son, and I believed him. So all the attempts to include this child (I’ve known him since he was 15) in our household and family have always fallen flat. He has never been sincere, I’ve never been able to connect, but he’s never been rude or argumentative either. He simply has tolerated us at stays in the TV room. He did what we asked to the letter, never more, as far as helping around the house. He never brought gifts when he was over for Christmas, but was glad to receive them (never thanked anyone unless a very insincere performative one). His dad was the one to call him, to check in, see how things were going, and on his birthday and other special days, but his son never asked about dad in return. He never showed interest. He called only when he wanted something.
We moved a few years ago to a new state, now living in the same city that my husband’s family lives in, and his son. It is the same as in the past when he’s driven through on the way home to visit his mom in that he never stops in to see his grandmother or aunts/cousins, not even asked us about our new place. During the pandemic, he and his dad haven’t talked much. So when his step-grandfather died, my husband forgot to call him to let him know. He was busy supporting his mother, for one, but it was definitely an oversight. The memorial service was in August, and the son found out on social media and called his dad at work very angry. He said, “this is the last straw” and said to expect an email and thus the series of emails. He told us to never contact him again. We’ve pieced together what seems obvious now.
I should also add that prior to the marital split, my husband wasn’t a great dad. He had undiagnosed bipolar 2, and unprocessed childhood trauma of his own. He was authoritarian and harsh (not physically abusive). He has since gotten treatment including four years of trauma therapy. A few years ago this opened the door to processing things with his son a few times, but it has seemed as if his son hadn’t been ready/willing to do that yet. Anyway, my husband’s response has been to let it go, and be here and ready if his son ever reaches out wanting to reconnect. But there doesn’t seem to be anything else to do. I can’t believe we didn’t see this before though.
I am 52 years old in my fifth year of fighting stage four ovarian cancer. I pray God will leave me here for a long time so that I too will get to be here if my son should ever want to see me again.
Hello. I am absolutely floored right now, I have a very successful 28 year old son who has alienated me through his father. I am so stunned that this has happened right in front of my eyes I never saw it.. for the most part I have blamed myself for years.. I now sit here in disbelief and my biggest question is what do I do now?? Where do I turn?? Is there help available?? And how do you get a 28 year old young man to want correct the issue? My head is literally spinning at the moment. Any insight for help years after the damage has been done would be great fully accepted.
Michele: As you can see from other comments, I refrain from offering specific advise on cases since they are often uniquely complex with multiple variables to consider. Please know that we have coaching and consultation services if you’re interested. I’m sorry about your situation and you aren’t alone with the shock and awe factor relative to the insidious and sometimes stealthily nature of some parental alienation dynamics. I wish you the best.