Tuesday 28 August 2007

The purpose of this blog: to parents and children

This blog has multiple purposes. The main one is to try and get the attention of any parents (or indeed anyone else trying to manipulate and alienate) trying to alienate their children from their other parent (or grandparent or aunts or uncles etc).

If the other parent is a REAL abuser of any kind, then go ahead. Do what you need to do to protect your kids and yourself.

However, if the other parents is NOT a real abuser, then read on. If you find fault with your ex and talk about it in front of your kids, you're hurting your kids. If you discuss your ex's faults with your children in a "serious" tone, saying that you're "just being honest", you're hurting your kids.

It's up to parents to be the mature ones, not to put any single thought about their ex into their child's head that wasn't put there by the child's own experience and interactions with that parent.

Don't bad mouth your ex on any level. I know it's hard when you hate them, but you love your kids more, right?

Your kids deserve healthy relationships with both parents. If you're trying to alienate your child from your ex for revenge or to make yourself the favourite parent, you're hurting your child. You're denying them healthy relationships with both parents.

And get this:

YOU WILL GET FOUND OUT.

YOU WON'T GET WAY WITH IT FOREVER.

Let me say this again: one day, your child will REALIZE what you have done. TRUST ME. They will know. It may take years, as with me, but they will work it out. Life experience will show them as they grow up watching interactions between people outside your family.

AND THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT.

You will get caught out.

If you're lucky, they'll forgive you but your relationship will never be the same again. They won't trust YOU or love YOU in the same way ever again. If you've been rotten enough, you'll never see them again.

At the very least, THEY'LL BE CLOSER TO THE OTHER PARENT!!! You will MAKE this happen yourself! By attempting to alienate them from your ex (or whoever), you will drive them into their arms in the end.

Take this from someone who knows. ME. I will never speak to my male parent again.

Thursday 23 August 2007

Early memories

Probably one of the earliest memories I have of his PA behaviour was when I could only have been six or seven years old. I'm inclined to think seven because of the circumstances surrounding it. My male parent treated my mother pretty badly sometimes. If he has bullied me, then he bullied her more. If you look at photographs of them together, he has one hand on her shoulder in a gesture of ownership. I can remember arguments between them, including one that left me alone in our home while they ran off down the road. She ran from the house, taking my little sister with her (not me). He chased them. I remember her shoes left on the front lawn and him climbing the fence as a shortcut. I remember running after them both up the road, afraid because I'd been abandoned and forgotten. I remember being furious at her, so much so that when she reached out for me to hug her, I drew back. I can't remember how that was dealt with. No idea.

I remember him climbing in bed with me and my sister crying and saying "Mummy doesn't love us anymore". He specifically included me in that. I don't think my sister remembers this as she would only have been three or four, but I remembered it and I believed it. She never spoke to us about much of anything, especially not their divorce. He, on the other hand, spoke to me all the time about it. Now it just looks like he was trying to get in there first and that a grown man was asking a tiny child to share his burden and be his friend. Wrong. But because he spoke to me and insisted that he was just treating me like I was older than my actual age, I believed the things he said. Mum never defended herself voluntarily and whenever I asked her about anything, she wouldn't reply. She'd tell me not to be silly or it was none of my business. Who would you have believed at that age under these circumstances?

He liked me getting angry with her. I think what may have sealed the deal was that she lied to us. She promised that, after a holiday in England, we would return to our home abroad. She had no intention of doing so and instead, left him, the three of us living with her parents. I knew she had lied. I was amazed. At the age of seven, my trust in her had been killed, mainly by her own unwillingness to talk to me. Had she tried to give me her side - something I asked for always - then maybe his Parental Alienation would not have been successful.

Monday 20 August 2007

Alienators will lie about anyone - even their own children

He does not see me as a person. He objectified me. To him, I was a weapon to be wielded against my mother and even against her memory after she died. He wouldn't let her go even then. He kept checking in with me, kept reassuring himself that I was angry at her, that he had won. I can remember one day, back when I was still angry at her, that I actually said I was glad she was dead. Today I'm horrified that I ever felt that. I'm not even sure I did, but I certainly said the words. I also said I hated her. At the time, I did mean the latter - but that's what Parental Alienation wants to achieve, isn't it?

Then he smiled. He has two horrible smiles: one is a sick, smug smile, that I realised two years ago means he feels a victory over my mother; the other we might come to later, we might not.

Though I never said as much to him, I instantly regretted saying that I was she glad she was dead. I've never truly been glad of that and I still don't know why I said it. I was afraid of him, probably until recently, so maybe that's why I didn't retract those awful words. Because I was afraid of him, perhaps I wanted his approval too.

I don't see him anymore, not at all. He's a nasty piece of work, that man. He has no worries about behaving inappropriately towards his daughter, either. Ironically, just over two years ago, I was wondering how I was going to get him out of my life as my eldest daughter was about to hit puberty and there was no way on this Earth that I was going to let him perv over her the way he did me. I was scared though, and did not know how to go about it. He is so stubborn and obnoxious that he would never have listened to me simply telling him to go away and never come back. He would have laughed at me (because he thinks I'm stupid, thinks everyone in the world but him is stupid) and ignored me. When my youngest daughter was born, he forced a visit on my little family and me against the wishes of my then partner and myself: I wanted him to wait a couple of days but he ignored us and came anyway. My sister once disconnected the phone to stop him bugging her after she had her second baby, fortunate in the fact that she live seven hours away by car. Had I said I wanted nothing more to do with him, he would have laughed and argued and ignored me.

In the end, he disowned me! If you can believe that! His actions were one of two things, and I haven't worked out which. It may have been a power-play, and since Parental Alienation is all about the wielding of power, I usually favour this explanation. My religious beliefs are not the same as his. I chose my religious path in 1995 (before my mother was ill) and from the beginning he objected. My religion is basically Christian, nothing outrageous, no child sacrifice, no polygamy, we celebrate Christmas and don't suicide bomb. He couldn't bear it. He protested from the start, even to the point that his visits to my home increased vastly in order for him to argue and harangue and pester me about my religion. He said I was being brainwashed (he'd know all about brainwashing, wouldn't he?) and that the religion wasn't right for me. I plodded on, continuing to attend my church, all the while severely peed off that he had no respect for how I chose to live my life and raise my daughter, that he even honestly thought I was too stupid to make my own mind up about the God I believe in. This is a man who swears that he met Christ during an out of body experience. Whenever my sister and I asked why we weren't christened, he always said my mother and he wanted us to make up our own minds - so I did, and he didn't like it.

It was quite bizarre. It's like my church put him into a frenzy and he couldn't stop his mouth. He has never once pointedly explained what his problem with the church is. He just says, "think about what you're doing," "it's not right for you,", "you're being brainwashed".

After a few years, I stopped attending church and went "inactive". Can you guess what religion it was by my use of that word? :> He was ecstatic when he eventually found out and, just like with my mother, bugged me regularly in order to reaffirm his success. "So, you've given all that up, have you?", always shocked that I was never interested in his religion (reincarnation with no particular creed or faith).

In 2004, I started attending church again and still do today. I never stopped loving my church or my God, even during those years of non-attendance. I had my reasons for not going and in 2004, I realised they weren't enough any more.

Of course, I never told him. I knew he would harass me about it again. Eventually one of my kids said something. I'd never told them to keep it secret from him. And then the harassment began again. Snide comments and "think about what you're doing!", mocking of my life choices, and general disrespect gave way to emails containing links to hate sites (and what annoyed me about this, again, was that he thought I was too stupid not to have looked at those sites ten years previously! Of course I did! I made an informed decision about my religion!). He deliberately approached my daughter, then thirteen, about our religion behind my back. He thought I couldn't hear his criticism of our church and thereby ME, but I heard every word. As it was my daughter's birthday, I kept my mouth shout with the intention of speaking to him about it.

He quicky emailed me a hate site link once he had returned home. I asked him again, as I had done many times before, not to bring this subject up. "I don't want to talk to you about this" I repeated, but as usual he ignored me. When I say ignore, he literally pretends I haven't spoken and just carries on. He replied by mocking me. I said enough. I said, "If you don't respect how I live my life and raise my kids, we are going to fall out". I still don't think that this sentence was that inflammatory and neither does anyone else I've shown it to.

What came next was disgusting. He wrote the nastiest email I've ever received and it shocked me to the core. I was stunned. I had only ever witnessed that level of vitriol and hate from him towards my mother. Until then, all his dealings with me had been calm and even (for all the viciousness and vileness they contained). It was, to me, an outburst far unequal to what had preceded. It was weird. It's very easy to look back now and perhaps describe it as a defensive maneouvre because he knew he had been caught out in relation to my daughter. It may also have been a preemptive strike because he knew what was coming from me; I think he sensed that my patience with his bullying was wearing thin and that my fear of him was vanishing. I'm also certain that part of his reason for the outburst was his conviction that I was stupid and that by demanding I behave as he wanted me to, I'd back down and apologize and grovel. A postscript to this is another possible explanation, one that might be added to any of the previous: my sister had refused to speak to him for over a year, while he was in touch with me, and as such had denied him access to not only her but her four children as well. Did he deliberately engineer the situation with me so that he could have her back?

The man took my child aside and criticized my parenting behind my back. I wasn't about to back down - and he was handing me, on a plate, the perfect solution to getting him out of our lives. Outwardly, I said nothing to him. Not a word.

But inwardly, I was reeling. It was not until he "cut me off", as he put it, then, in March of 2005, that I had any idea of who he really was. That action from him opened up a can of worms that I'm still digesting - so to speak - today, two and a half years later. The email that he wrote to me - he couldn't dump his child on the phone or face to face - was so filled with hatred that it disgusted me. I don't know the person who wrote it, nor recognize the LIES it contained. That email showed me a hitherto unknown selfishness that shocked me completely - and he probably still doesn't realise this. It was filled with phrases like "I drove up and down that motorway all those years so I could still have my daughters", with afterthoughts like "and so that they could have their dad". It was all about him. He was disowning his eldest child and all he could think about was how badly I had treated him by not listening to his opinion of my religion. He mocked the death of my mother: "You've lost your mother? Well now you've lost your father too, I hope you can live with yourself".

And of course the irony is that I'm more than happy to have "lost" him. I don't want him or his perverted mind around my kids and me anymore.

The tragedy is that his behaviour in that email and subsequent lies to his brother (that I'd disowned him) made me begin to understand who this man really is. That if he can lie about me, then what else has he lied about? I was horrified and grieved to realise that the things he said about my mother may not have been true, and the more I thought and remembered and examined my memories, I came to understand that he DID lie about her to me and my sister and anyone that would listen. He lied and twisted and manipulated and corrupted and destroyed - and damaged me.

This realization is what causes me the most grief at the moment. I feel betrayed and used and abused. I feel like an orphan. I feel deprived of a father because no loving father would do what he did. This man did not and does not love me. It took 29 years but his victory is empty and he has lost because I finally see him for what he is. He deliberately destroyed my relationship with my mother and it's too late to rebuild it with her. And when I began to refuse to allow his bullying and manipulation to have any effect on me, he turned nasty on me too.

My experience of Parental Alienation

A quick Internet search of the words "Parental Alienation" together will bring up a host of documents and pages about the subject.

Most of these documents appear to be stories from angry fathers, purposefully alienated from their children by their (ex-)wives. My experience of Parental Alienation is rather different.

I sympathize with these fathers but this Blog is not about the parents: it's about the children.

I'm 37 and have been the victim of Parental Alienation since the age of six. I realized this when I was 35. For twenty nine years, my male parent deliberately tried to alienate me from my mother. Unfortunately she died in 1996, when I was 26, nine years before I realized what that man had done and was doing.

The tragedy of my life is that she died before I could do anything about it. Now I'm trying to reassess my life as a whole, because the person I thought was my dad is not who I believed him to be. The person I believed him to be never existed and instead I have had a masquerade of a parent, using me to avenge himself on my mother.

He was never denied access to my sister and me. His actions were never about that. He rarely paid maintenance either. He chose to live over four hours away from us. No one forced that decision on him. The man did not want to be divorced, I get that. I've been left too so I know how it feels.

Unfortunately, my male parent's actions were about revenge, pure and simple. He wanted to hurt my mother and used me to do it. I don't know if he has ever realised that he hurt me too. His brother, with whom I am in regular contact, once told me that my male parent said he regrets "talking to me" so much about the divorce.

"Talking to me" is an understatement. Over time, whether anyone reads this Blog or not, I will publish everything I can possibly remember in relation to my experiences and what he has done. It will probably come out of order and I might remember more as I go along.

The definition of Parental Alienation

This blog exists as my counsellor has advised me to "write" to my parental alienator and describe how I feel, tell him what I know. He will probably never read this so I'm safe to say anything (and so are you, if you'd like to comment. Please feel free).

To begin with, for those who have never come across this issue before, Parental Alienation is:

From Wikipedia
Parental alienation is any behavior by a parent, a child's mother or father, whether conscious or unconscious, that could create alienation in the relationship between a child and the other parent. Parental alienation can be mild and temporary or extreme and ongoing. Most researchers believe that any alienation of a child against (the child's) other parent is harmful to the child and to the target parent. Extreme, obsessive, and ongoing parental alienation can cause terrible psychological damage to children extending well into adulthood. Parental Alienation focuses on the alienating parents behaviour as opposed to the alienated parent's and alienated children's conditions.

This definition is different from Parental Alienation Syndrome as originally coined by Dr. Richard Gardner in 1987: "a disturbance in which children are preoccupied with deprecation and criticism of a parent-denigration that is unjustified and/or exaggerated." Parental Alienation Syndrome symptoms describe the child's behaviours and attitude towards the targeted parent after the child has been effectively programmed and severely alienated from the targeted parent. Parental alienation, on the other hand, describes the alienating parent's or parents' conduct which induces parental alienation syndrome in children.