Parental Alienation
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Parental Alienation
Jayne Major, Ph.D. (Parenting Educator & Child Custody Consultant, Breakthrough Parenting Services, Inc. ) gives expert video advice on: What is "parental alienation"?; Why do parents engage in parental alienation?; How do I prevent parental alienation? and more...
What is "parental alienation"?
The behavior of a parent that engages a child in a discussion so that the child can either participate or hear them degrade the other parent. Some parents are so upset they will reveal too much information such as "court papers." Alienation happens when the parent does not recognize the bounds of what they can say or do.
Why do parents engage in parental alienation?
Parents that engage in parental alienation are acting out their own drama and upset about what's occurred. For most people, parental alienation is mild, and it's very common in divorces, where an unkind thing is said, a name called or something, where a parent doesn't have boundaries. Mild parent alienation is, "you tell me if you get scared at your daddy's and I'll come," so planting a seed that you're not safe with your daddy. Another form of parental alienation is saying, "is anybody over at your mother's spending the night?" Parental alienation is being inappropriate with those kinds of questions and fishing to find information from the child that the child shouldn't be involved in. So mild parent alienation often occurs and most people get a grip. Most people understand it's not appropriate to engage in parental alienation. Eventually somebody will tell them parental alienation is inappropriate, or the child can adapt. They say, "aw, there goes mom again." " Aw, there goes dad again." They can cope with parental alienation. Not adapt, but cope. In moderate parent alienation, the parent goes ballistic and calls names upon seeing the person, or speaking on the phone, and is just in a rage and a tirade about the other parent and is terribly inappropriate. And if the child sees this parental alienation often, they may be involved in aligning against the other parent. So this form of parental alienation is very serious, but those parents can be helped with parenting classes, with mentoring, with therapy, with anger management, with other things to enable them to finally calm down.
What type of parent is likely to engage in parental alienation?
We do know that even within a marriage parents maybe doing parent alienation. This is anytime a parent speaks negatively about another parent so that a child could here it. Children can cope with that usually and adjust. When parent's get a divorce its more frequent that that is likely to occur. Unless the parents are really sophisticated parents and understand it and have thought this through and don't do that and we do have those people god bless them. Some parents become so irate at the other parent that they just lose all control and they go into a rage and the child witnesses this and the parent in the moderate is likely to be programming the child to also hate the other parent or never ever say to that parent that they enjoyed any kind of time with that other parent or they had fun with that parent at all. They would never tell this parent that is so difficult anything about the other.
What is "severe parental alienation"?
In the most obsessed and severe kind, severe parental alienation is where parents become ugly or nasty. You can't work with them or solve problems with them by reasoning. Severe parental alienation are cases where you have to go to court to get any kind of resolution and these parents so nasty they will allege all kinds of lies to get their way. This is when what prevails in truth is often not the truth but what appears to be truth. The parents will allege all manner of horrible things, and they will take the least little negative issue and turn it into a huge issue. They will create their own reality and then they will end up believing their own fabrications with all their heart and soul, and are very convincing. Evidence, truth and facts are not part of severe parental alienation because they've made up their own facts. The fact that they are so believable is why judges have to rely on evaluators to sort through all of that and come up with recommendations.
How will parental alienation affect the targeted parent?
The person who's the targeted parent, wonders what the hell happened here. Because that was never their intention, they didn't marry this person or have a child with them with the idea that the person could become so unglued and become so ugly and nasty. It takes a horrible toll on the targeted parent. Psychologically they have to cope with being accused of all kinds of things that they did not do. They are always on the defensive, they are always back peddling, trying to figure out "what am I going to do about it?" Even in the relationship, when they were in a together relationship, there are some people that are so disturbed that when the targeted parent tries to solve problems with them they get a two-by-four between the eyes, and they back off and they say "that hurt!" Then they go back and they regroup and they try to solve problems with this person again, the nasty one. By the way, it's men or women. It is not more women do this than men do which is a common concept. Now that there is so much shared custody, very disturbed men can do this as much as women. So at any rate, whoever it is it's a very disturbed person because healthy people don't act like that.
How will parental alienation affect my child?
When you have a parent who's in the moderate or obsessed category one of the things that they cannot allow is for the child to love and have a positive relationship with the other parent. Now, guess who is the healthier parent? This is the target parent almost always. The obsessed person is not a healthy parent. They're very nasty and ugly, and they don't play fair at all. They will stop at any lengths to win and what they're winning is the mind of a child. They will brainwash a child (another word for it is to programme a child) to hate their targeted parent; the healthier parent, the other half of their heritage, the other half of their whole family construct. Half of that child's family, if this obsessed parent is successful, is now ‘x'ed out of the child's life. We call that a “parentectomy” where the parent has been cut out of the child's life; a “parentectomy.” The child then loses all contact with the individuals that would be most likely to love that child, nurture that child, and care for that child, and provide. They lose out on all of that and if the really disturbed parent prevails, and they often do, this child grows up with a very serious situation where one parent is psychologically disturbed. The characteristic is always that the disturbed person is expecting the child to take care of them. This is called parent role reversal, where the child is always in the position to take care of the most disturbed parent. So how does that help children? It doesn't.
How will parental alienation affect my child when he grows up?
If the alienating and obsessed parent is successful in their agenda then the child will no longer have any access or influence from the other parent, they will lose that side of their family, that side of their whole heritage, and they will grow up with a person who's a very damaged individual. So they will not be adequately parented. We do know that the picture is not a pretty picture for them in their lives, that they will have many psychological issues, relationship issues, they're going to have a very hard time in their life. Just recently, Amy J.L Baker, a researcher in child development that teaches college at Columbia University, has published a book called 'Adult Children of Parental Alienation Syndrome: Breaking the Ties That Bind'. This is an enormously valuable book for anybody that doesn't understand parental alienation and what the consequences are. She researched 4, adult children where passes had occurred in their childhood and the outcome was really extraordinary, to point out what, we need to do everything we can to get a handle on what this problem is and how to do something about it.
What is "parental alienation syndrome"?
Parent alienation describes what the parent is doing. Parent alienation syndrome describes what the child is doing. It is a very important distinction to make. They are not one and the same. Parent alienation syndrome was originally identified in 1985 by a psychiatrist, Dr. Richard Gardner. He was the pioneer in parent education syndrome, when there was a burgeoning of divorces in the early 80s, when joint custody first became a reality, starting in California. James Cook lobbied the California legislature for joint custody laws, and they were passed in 1980, and then swept the country as the concept that the best parent is both parents and you have to figure out how to share these children. Not one parent takes all the custody and the other one becomes a visitor, not in the child's life at all. So many fathers started clamouring to go to court to get access to their children, and this created a tremendous burden on the courts which has not been alleviated to this day.
How does parental alienation syndrome affect my child?
Another curious thing about children who are involved in parent alienation syndrome. That means they're no longer adapting and coping, that they've gone over and aligned with the most disturbed parent. In some cases, it's a shared psychosis that the child shares with the disturbed parent, the mother or the father. And they become one unit. The child then will make up scenarios of their own about how horrible the targeted parent is. They have no basis in fact whatsoever, it's nothing they ever experienced, but just as kids can create wonderful stories and fairy tales, and all of that, they use that technique to describe horrible things that the parent has done, which in truth they haven't done. And they can be very convincing, because they are passionate, and they're angry. Their brains have been seriously altered into such a state of confusion that they don't know the truth.
Tips & Comments
The stepmother in my situation had no boundaries.She began badmouthing me to my daughter as early as two years old. She would cross my name off of school folders, do things with my daughter that I was planning on doing, tell others she was the parent.... My daughter's father, the stepmother and their entire family got in on it. They told her at 7 she can choose them at age 12. That was the beginning of my beautiful little girl losing her childhood, losing her mom. She would walk away from me if she saw them, take things from my house, look through papers of mine. Seventeen years of alienation.... So much to tell. The last was my daughter witnessing her stepmother backing her body into mine then screaming I hit her. Two days later my daughter said it was my fault anyway. That was before a mediation. In the past they would threaten to have me arrested me if I had to be 5 minutes late to the meeting place. They told my daughter this and she said that I deserved to be arrested. I had called the grandfather looking for support and her paternal grandmother said to me that if her son thought I should be arrested then I should. I was teaching 7th grade at the time and it was my last day of school. Like I said before, there is so much more. The child loses in these situations. Good people need to intervene and help guide children to truth, God's truth and get them counseling with a person who has been educated in parental alienation.
Should my husband talk to my step daughter about PAS which done by his ex-wife?
The "eggshells" book is excellent, and so is this video. This is the second time I went into watching a video feeling guarded and a bit defensive and came away feeling surprised to find the video full of good, solid, healthy advice and enlightenment on the subject of parental alienation. However, there are good reasons for a faithful parent in a divorce to feel guarded about this subject. In reality, I believe it is the unfaithful parent and their partner who are more likely to engage in parental alienation than the faithful parent. I also believe it is more likely the unfaithful parent will engage in other unwholesome activities as well such as verbal, emotional and spiritual abuse, manipulation, deceit, slandering, and such. Where the faithful parent may feel guarded is where the courts meddle and enable the unfaithful and their partners to rob the faithful and their children of their right to live together in love in the family home, enjoying the shared family assets in peace without being assailed by the courts that would drag the faithful into court, threaten them with the gravest of losses driving them into attorney offices to pay exorbitant protection money to an attorney who would prosper more from selling his or her client up the river than helping them win their case. After all, if divorce does not favor the unfaithful, then where would be the courts source of extortion and repeat business from perpetuating injustice against the faithful and their children? Really when you think of it, this unilateral no-fault divorce legislation has given expression to America as a true w***ehouse of adultery with judges, attorneys, and other workers serving as highly paid pimps. I probably owe the pimps of the world a most deep apology for saying that. But, justice is truly prostituted in this nation. And when that happens, what we find is that the faithful parents are dragged into court and warned sternly never to say anything to the children about the divorce. This leaves the faithful parent not only stripped of their Constitutionally protected freedom of speech, but it threatens them with loss of their parental rights should they feel morally obligated to say anything to support the importance of faithfulness in marriage, even though this is every parents moral obligation in the eyes of God. Still, while every morally decent nation would defend a parent's right and obligation to teach morality, our nation threatens the faithful parent with loss of custody. That is not to say that a faithful parent has a right to teach the children to hate or disrespect or devalue the other parent. But, if the faithful parent were to say, "Honey, your mother or father did indeed do something horribly wrong against this family and it is his or her fault for having done that, but I still want you to love and honor and accept your mother or father." It would be lying and slandering to call this a form of subversive behavior or parental alienation. This is the behavior of a parent who loves the family, who loves the children, who would love to see the family remain united, but in the light of this horrible harlotry and hypocrisy and cowardice, the faithful parent seeks to do damage control emotionally, physically, in the eyes of justice, morally, and spiritually and set a good, healthy example for the children so they will not learn the pathetic relationship skills displayed by the unfaithful who run to and fro from one partner to another failing to exhibit sincere love, failing to model healthy conflict resolution skills, failing to be faithful and honest. As a parent who has gone through this and whose daughter is almost an adult now, I feel more free to speak openly and to be a bit harsh. I'm free to call unfaithfulness "playing the w***e on marriage". I'm free to call them liars, cowards, hypocrites, and to say they deserve their place in the lake of fire. I have a right to speak openly and say they are worse than child molesters as they destroy a child's one and only opportunity to grow up in an unbroken home and that they're willing to hurt their children most severely for nothing more than a roll in the hay. I can shout from the housetops, "Thank God those worthless jerks will find their place in hell for all eternity because no God with any decency or integrity or love of mankind or the universe would ever want them around in heaven to ruin it with their lies, their hypocrisy, their narcissism, their reprehensible and cowardly behavior, and their sense of arrogant stupidity and entitlement." I can ask politicians what they are going to do about unilateral no fault divorce laws? I can ask them if they will be competent and decent enough to do something about removing them or if they are willing to let another forty years go by with our nation abusing the faithful and destroying the families of children for money. I can say, "May God bless America the way America blesses the faithful and their children and the unborn", and when people become angry and offended, I can look them in the eye and say, "Oh, I am so sorry, but would you like me to repeat myself?"
Hi- I feel the same thing is happening to me! I'm so glad I found this vidio and have learned a lot from it. My ex and his wife, told my two son's that they can choose who they want to stay with and how long they want to. not sure what else is said. He doesn't talk to me about school, medical anything. My 16yr I pick up from school and he asks me to take to his dad's. We talk about this but I don't get no info. The step mom says it's all there choice. I feel they taking the kids from me the bond is getting broken a little at a time. My youngest stayed with me for 2 wks than went to his dad's. My husband and i planned a movie and than my son stayed over with us. He does text me what's going on at school. But would like to spend more time with him. My oldest is 18yrs old now a sr, and is taking a class at high school and two at the college. we talk off and on, hard getting together with classes etc. Never thought in high school I would be going through this, thought still I would like to spend time with my son's. I know they want to be on there own, But this is very hard. my ex just does what he wants. I'm thinking of contacting the courts and see what they say. Some county's don't address this, I think KS is one of them sadly. Feel so bad for everyone here, this also happened with my husband and his ex- always a reason why the kids couldn't come over. Hardly seen them the oldest now married with a child and it was nice to see her this past xmas. Very hard to know what to do. The kids suffer more. My youngest is a jr now so another year of this.
Hello all - I am glad to see that I was not the only one suffering with this. The last time I saw my children was May 2006 and the courts in Tampa, FL were a waste. I tried for 4 years with years of counseling and the judge there never wanted to make a decision and remove the children from their alienating father. To her it appeared that they were "bonded" with him when in fact they were alienated by him. I am also amazed that even older children can be so manipulated. My heart and prayers go out to you all.
My 11 year old came back from a 2 week holiday with his dad a "changed" child. I quickly realised he had been brainwashed by my x partner.My son had been told that he didn't have to do anything his mother said and he would have a better lifestyle with his father. i have no way of contacting him as his father has changed his mobile number and he has effectively cut me out of his life. It is two months and I am remaining calm but am heartbroken and feel the cruelty and pain . I am now dicovering this type of help on-line and may introduce the video to my solicitor as we are currently in litigation as his father wants my son to have a permanent home with him and eject me from my home in favour of them living here. He was an abusive man for 16 years and I do at times blame myself for staying with him as my child is now suffering his abusive and controlling ways.
Thank you. After a long Court battle with two evaluations and 3 psyc., I finally got Court Ordered counselling for my two childen now 17d and 16s. After 5 sessions with each child separately, the counsellor determined that they "are too far gone". I have not seen or heard from my children in almost two years and because of their age, as the Courts, the psyc. and my attorney recognize, they feel it's best to let the children remain with their narcassistic father. What can I do to demand the Courts to recognize this as child abuse and to protect our children against parental alienation, to demand that our children attend mandatory counselling when a divorce is filed.
I am having this same thing happening to me. I am hoping that once I get all the information I need to file papers, I will get custody again with my 14 and 17 year. My ex was an abusive husband and the boys lived with me ever since we got divorced. But once my mother got breast cancer, he manipulated them to come and live with him. I've been finding out that the past few years he has been telling them things that are NOT true and they have become quite distant from me even though I have been attempting to continue contact with them. Lately, my 14 years has wanted to come and see me more only to have his dad say he could not come because he was in trouble at home. I've told him his dad should not use time with the other parent as a punishment. I do not have the money to go to court but I plan on filing on my own and hopefully have a voice once there is a hearing. I pray for all other parents who are going through this. It truly is Hell! I am believe that while I do my part, God will reveal everything and help me get my kids back.
I am from Brasil and mother of 2 children 12 and 14 years old,I have a 10 years story on the theme starting since the begining on severe level , i lost comunication , i do not Know what to do, Brasilian Laws still not looking at these situations and are not taking care of those..... thank you for the wonderfull words i will be reading more abou it, and i hope i can save my childrens future ...... i just do not know whom to look for help!!!
I am blown away! I have four teen boys now who are severe victems of this. I am slowly trying to undo what was done. My 14 year old saw this video and was set free. I never could tell him because he was confused as to who to believe. THANK YOU!