Parental Alienation is a form of child abuse that is finally slowly being recognized. It’s when a child aligns with one parent and rejects the other parent for reasons that make no sense.
Parental alienation is a legitimate and serious problem that affects the child, their parents, and the whole family and society.
Alienating parents use several tactics to damage the relationship between the child and the targeted parent. Unfortunately, there is no exact set of behaviors that constitute parental alienation.
Targeted parents mothers, fathers, and families experience psychological distress as a result of being alienated from their children.
At PMH we strongly believe that support services are needed to assist targeted parents with their distress. Psychologists need to be aware of the presence and severity of parental alienation when working with families who may be experiencing parental alienation.
The alienating parent can be either the mother or the father. But also the wider family. In addition to this, not all alienation is caused by “brain-washing” from the other parent. Some rejection of a parent involves actual fault on the part of the rejected parent. Whatever the case is if you are the parent being rejected it is important for you to take ownership of your own doings.
What responsibilities do the targeted parents have?
It is the issues from our own psyches that are involved in any relational dynamic. When you are being rejected by your children it is important to own your responsibility in the dynamic. This is not victim blaming, it’s taking responsibility.
Sometimes it could be that the parent gets rejected because they weren’t strong enough to instill respect in the children to overcome the onslaught of mind-control the other parent was throwing their kids’ way.
If this is your case then you have let yourself be disrespected by your ex-spouse (partner) and your children and you didn’t protect yourself or demand respect for yourself. There is no judgment here. This is a contributing factor to the problem — one that you have the power to change.
Sometimes alienated parents don’t take on a strong parental role, but rather a weak, helpless, victim-like role in the relationship. They act more like a friend than a parent. This contributes to children being disrespectful to them, particularly if the other parent is reinforcing bullying behaviors toward the targeted parent.
Some alienated parents may dissociate or use other forms of avoidance of reality, such as denial of a problem. They may just “check out” and become oblivious to what is happening to their relationships.
What can you do to improve the situation?
I recommend you analyze yourself, your children, and the other parent. One way to do this is to write down the abuse cycle in your family. For example, suppose the other parent is rude to you in front of the kids, encourages the kids to be rude to you, or implies that you should be disrespected, and so on.
How can Parental Alienation Destroy a Parent?
Parental Alienation causes long-term damage to children, and it also destroys the parent being targeted. Numerous clinical studies have documented the effects of parental alienation on targeted parents:
- Severe depression
- Anxiety
- Social isolation
- Despair
- Self-loathing and inward-directed anger
- Deterioration of executive control (ability to stay organized and focused)
- Symptoms indicating the presence of CPTSD
Imagine being in a situation where you’re watching your children suffer, watching them being deceived and turned against you, watching custody orders being blatantly ignored, and throughout all of it, you’re helpless to do anything to stop it because of an unconcerned family court judge.
Even worse, the harder you fight, the more you’re children are pressured, threatened, and bullied by the alienator.
Targeted parents can feel this conflict hurting their children and take all that pain into themselves. Many targeted parents, realizing that the family court is never going to truly intervene choose to walk for no other reason than to spare their children any additional bullying and alienation abuse.
The legal system will sort of involve itself, but only to the extent that a targeted parent can keep adding every available penny they have into it. The process will grind on for years or until the targeted parent runs out of money, and in the end, people often blame alienated parents for failing their children.
When it’s all said and done, they’ve lost everything: their home, their savings, their children, and themselves.
The only thing they get out of this is a monthly reminder of what they’ve lost in the form of a child support order that threatens imprisonment.
The ongoing pressure, stress, despair, shame, grief, and sadness — it’s all overwhelming and unrelenting. It’s too much, and in the end, the parent turns the anger on themself.
Many parents had ideations of suicide, and some have actually attempted it.
Parental Alienation is no joke!
It’s a devastating form of psychological abuse and domestic violence, made so in no small part because family court pathology enables and empowers it while holding targeted parents relatively powerless to do anything to stop it.
How to stay healthy when you are rejected by your own child?
Here is a list of steps you can take to be healthy when you’ve been rejected by one or more of your children:
Manage your expectations. It is important not to be committed to expecting your children to change. On the other hand, it is important for you to expect respect from your children.
Ask your children what their thoughts and feelings are. Ask them what they need or wish from you and why they are rejecting you. Consider how much of what they say is based on “brainwashing” by the other parent, and how much is within your power to change.
Make your time spent with them about them, not about you or your hurt feelings.
- Look them in the eye and be affectionate.
- Think of ways to enjoy your children.
- Don’t bring your emotional needs to your children. Take care of them outside of that relationship.
- Have self-compassion.
Be kind to yourself and forgive yourself always. Don’t over think about every little thing you did wrong as a parent. No parent is perfect and children don’t need to have perfect parents in order to be kind.
Remember that no matter what you do it is important for you to focus on yourself and on no one else. Try to evaluate your life based on how you feel and what you want and need. Don’t place the responsibility for your happiness on others. As you live a happy, well-adjusted life, your kids might notice and if they have rejected you they may start feeling left out of the awesome life you’re living.
It is better for them to want to be with you than for you to make them be with you.
Thank you for reading!
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Mila’s articles cover clinical and experience-based standpoints on topics: Parental Alienation, Narcissism, Malicious Parent Syndrome, Stepparenting and Shared Parenting in TAR situations where children are involved. She provides practical, vulnerable, and real-life examples to help men recover and overcome their fears. She will help you heal: one article at a a time. She is also a Co-Founder of nonprofit organization TAR NETWORK that focuses on victims of PA: children, adults, and families. Please check the organizations which are still underdevelopment here:
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I am a grandmother who was active in raising two grandchildren after a divorce. When my narcissistic son married a narcissistic woman, I experienced some of what you write in your article. The alienation that came with this marriage caught me by surprise. It’s been hard to lose them. The alienation wasn’t about unattaching or changing roles from substitute parent back to grandmother. I would have welcomed that! I am in NA recovery and that is helping a lot. I appreciate your article and validating this topic is very real.
15 years I’ve been fighting to be a Dad and it wasn’t till the last few years that our daughter aligned with her Mother. it’s rough. The false allegations.. the confused child. It’s abuse. And because there are no black eyes or visible bruises.. The court system errors on the side of caution and wants to know what you did for the child to reject you. The lies get believed cause who wants to imagine a parent would fabricate such stories to purposely deny a child love? It’s so sad to me. I know so many children that do not have a Dad and to think that my child is not only no different, but worse off from the conflict, due to an unqualified and for profit system that errors on the side of caution. Putting the minimization of profits before a child’s well being. And as a loving Father, who would kill for his child, to be forced into a position of fear and silence to try to reduce the child’s stress and salvage whatever you can of being in the child’s life. Parental alienation is real.. A child aligning with the more aggressive parent and rejecting the targeted parent to survive is real. It is heartbreaking to witness it all first hand while everyone ignores you because, why would a child lie?
This is truth….
Even worse, the harder you fight, the more you’re children are pressured, threatened, and bullied by the alienator.
Targeted parents can feel this conflict hurting their children and take all that pain into themselves. Many targeted parents, realizing that the family court is never going to truly intervene choose to walk for no other reason than to spare their children any additional bullying and alienation abuse.
I lost one child to parental alienation via social services and judicial corruption. It is utterly devastating. I don’t know if it is for her, probably not yet, maybe one day. Her formative years were stolen from me by, what surely must be, psychopaths. I would rather lose a limb than a child, that would be far easier to deal with.
And now, my other child, the only reason I kept going, is being subjected to the same. I know exactly the process and exactly the stages. He’s not gone yet, but his mother is working on it. He’s coercively controlled and abused daily. I’m on the verge of walking away to save the horror that is about to destroy both of us over the next year or so. But of course walking away is horror too, just a quicker death.
There is little support for parents who go through this. Nothing at all for fathers. I was a good father too. All the right things. Gave love, warmth, connection, time, education, guidance, empathy, respect. A modern father. Who, in the end, along with two lovely children, is savaged by society and the wrong choice of mother.
Until society realises women kill in different ways, and do it often, because it is condoned, good fathers and children will live lives of pain and die deaths of despair.
When the alienating parent is actively doing things after specifically threatening to carry out such acts after attempting to annihilate the family soon after separation leading to mandatory psych treatment, with millions of dollars at stake in an inheritance he was involved in stealing twice denying autistic children their money and myself my inheritance from my father, violating court orders demanded to be enforced by police who refused, violating criminal laws requiring enforcement by arrest still not done by police, and to this day preventing solid employment or housing for me to prevent any solid claim in court, along with ongoing threats to kill me, stepfather, and sons if I file in civil court to enforce myself, what are my options?
A lot of this piece presupposes that the target parent is aware of the potential to be alienated.
In many cases I’ve worked with, this realisation comes too late and the target parent cannot effect communication anymore.
If the idiot governments of this world made maintenance payments dependent upon access, we’d see far less cases of alienation