I greatly appreciate your comment, Sha. I am moving forward! And you nailed it with your memories comment, no one can take those away from us.
PMM

Thank you all for sharing. I stumbled onto this site looking for some way I could do to try and help my husband. Ellen, your story rings familiar for my husband and myself. His ex and maternal grandmother have worked on alienating my husband’s daughter from him since she was 3. Her anger started building when she hit her teens. It’s been two years now and she wants nothing to do with us. My husband tried working with a reintegration therapist but after the first session his daughter was even more hostile. She has ‘divorced’ her dad’s entire side of the family. We still try to reach out and go to her school functions to try to show her we love and care about her but she won’t even look at us. It’s heartbreaking really and I wish I knew how to help my husband work through his grief.

Thank you for your comment. The Foundation is developing a program of support for those who deal with this complicated and very common family disease.

For a child to reject a parent …that takes a third party influence, it takes psychological manipulation and control of another trusted caregiver.

C-PTSD in relation to parental alienation is deliberately inflicted by another person. An abuser. As such, it is a crime, which is almost entirely ignored by the law and sidelined into the civil family courts, despite being on a par with kidnap or murder.

Idk how the mental health profession find their definitions, but C-PTSD is such an obvious outcome from having a child stolen in slow motion by an abuser, encouraged by the family courts and PA denial by misandric groups / social services. While society refuses to acknowledge female violence and female-on-male domestic and post-separation abuse, this will keep happening.

And the vast scale is not realised, because most men suffer in silence, are told to accept it by everyone around them. With no solution and no support, they simply live miserable lives and/or die of despair. While their children don’t realise until twenty years later, if ever, that they were robbed of a father.

And every case is different. To even have a child with a mother capable of denying your shared child a father, implies some sort of blind spot in choosing such a “partner” to commit to. A blind spot typical of people-pleasing born of an abusive childhood, which has already planted C-PTSD seeds for a life of trauma.

Death is far easier to deal with than PA and its resulting C-PTSD. Anyone who manages such vast grief and still goes on is superhuman.

Every day is hard and I just try to keep moving forward. There are more moments of peace and happiness than a year ago, but the hole in my heart will always be there I know.
So much of what you said hits home. Again, thank you for sharing.

There is such a stark difference between those with theoretical or general knowledge and those with lived experience, whether they be an author, counsellor, lawyer, doctor etc. When you find one who has that lived experience and is skilled enough to bracket their own bias (story), you suddenly feel like you’ve won the lottery – they hear you and see you as a real person and that in itself dissipates some of the mind-fuckery – for me, anyway.

Hi Paul thank you for your article, it really struck a cord with me.

I often ask myself ‘how did I get here?’ but I already know the answer as looking back I clearly see how it all unfolded, how my ex-husband who is a covert-narcissist and predator, manipulated, deceived and played.

I see how he continues to deploy post-separation abuse on me even 2.5 years after separation, by the alientation of me with two of our four (adult) children. I see how once he no longer had ‘power’ over me, he amped up his covert abuse with the children who reside with him. Parental alienation in my eyes, is about control and punishment with multiple victims = the children, the alienated parent and even important members of the extended family.

The grief I feel, particularly as I was the stay-at-home parent and primary carer during our long-term marriage, at times threatens to swallow me. So, I hang onto the light reflecting off that one silver lining that you referred to in your comment above Paul; I have between 18-25 years of memories with my four children and one day, the two who remain estranged, will find the ground beneath their feet and find their way back.

Keep moving forward,

Sha

Thank you for your comment, Christa,

Parental Alienation (like most family disease) runs in cycles and is passed down generationally. Unfortunately, I can no longer afford therapy but was lucky enough for a few months to find a therapist who didn’t mind learning what parental alienation is. Most of the alienated parents I have come across had to educate their attorneys, judges on cases, physicians, therapists, and then some. The issue is PA is often encapsulated within a narcissistic personality disorder and there are almost always “family secrets” intertwined into this behavior model. People don’t acknowledge or discuss the subject because (despite millions of children who are targeted and alienated from their children) narcissists feel they need to protect the “family” unit, no matter how fucked up it is or was.
Thankfully I have found a 12-step recovery program (Parental Alienation Anonymous) so I can openly discuss these feelings, focus on hope, resiliency, and recovery, and clear my mind of unnecessary clutter. Not sure where I would be without it.

I am only recently able to share these stories. Until late 2021, was ill-prepared to write about them. Now that I am in a process of recovery, things have been getting clearer by the day. I see many patterns of behavior on my part and on the alienator’s part which amplifies examples of alienation throughout my daughter’s life – even as an infant – pulling my ex into court time after time when she violated the custody order. The result? A bitter ex-narc that thinks she won (despite me getting and retaining custody of my daughter for her entire life as a minor.

By learning to focus on continued behavior, it becomes easier to map out someone else’s strategy of reckoning. I see crystal clear now. I have mounds of evidence that will never be seen as my daughter is 1) emancipated, and there are no court possibilities until I release my book – then I think I’ll probably get sued which I am prepared for and 2) my daughter is now fully alienated and not looking back at any of our wonderful 18 years together. The ultimate loser in this situation is my daughter.

One silver lining: most alienated parents see the darkness, I am focused on the light. I have 18 years’ worth of memories that cannot be jarred, fucked with, or erased.

All the Best,
PMM