More about alienated child behaviours - Set ups.

Well, more about MY alienated child behaviours, anyway.

I was a pretty rotten kid to my mum. I'm mortified now, to be honest. I did REALLY well at school consistently. Academically - I'm was a good kid. Behaviour-wise to her? I was awful. A certifiable IDIOT. I never broke any laws but I broke rules - and I didn't care. I didn't smoke but I used to go to bars and nightclubs secretly when I was 14. I was not promiscuous. I dated loads of boys but never did anything with them. I never got thrashed on alcohol (apart from on one occasion the alienator decided it would be a good idea for me to get smashed out of my head to teach me a lesson, at the age of 15. He and his cousin allowed the cousin's 13 year old and me to get absolutely wasted. My mother was never told and it's something that made me wonder about him. Of course, at the time, I didn't think there was anything wrong with it because he was always right ... I'm pretty horrified by this event). I simply don't like alcohol very much, never have, and haven't drunk any for years because of my religion.

Because, as I've said many times already, I had been told that every time she said no it was because she didn't like me, that it was because she wanted me to be unhappy, that she wanted to control me, that she wanted to stop me having fun, this had a devastating effect on me as a teenager. I've touched on it before this but I have things to add.

I truly believed that when she said no, it was for all the above reasons - so sometimes I went out of my way to get what I wanted because in my opinion I was entitled to have/do what I wanted. If the only reason she said no to me was because she hated me, then that wasn't reason enough. That was my logic. She was only saying no from spite, therefore what I wanted to have/do was rightfully mine and I had every right to go behind her back and have/do things anyway. Of course, it never entered my mind that she was, for example, making me come home at 11pm for my own safety and well-being. She was only stopping me dating at 13/14 for my own protection - but in my mind, it was holding me back from something everyone else was doing for her own personal, evil reasons.

So, I lied a lot. I went to nightclubs and bars at 14. She had no idea. It never occurred to me that what I was doing was in any way wrong or inappropriate because I had been conditioned by the alienator to believe that she did not want what was best for me. She wanted control and dominion, not what was best for me.

What a psycho he is ...

One of the reasons I hated those road trips to his house was because they were spent assassinating my mother's character, life, choices and motives. "She just wants to control you" was a frequent phrase. I'd rant about teenage woes which SHOULD have been met with: "Well, she loves you, she's just trying to do right by you" or whatever. What I was met with was almost as if another teenager was in the car ranting with me and agreeing with everything I said, then putting a spin on it. He wound me up and sent me home filled with anger and fury at her unfairness and evil ways. "She has no right to treat you that way."

The trips home were the worst. Now I realise that he was priming us/me (especially, as the older child) for our arrival. One particularly tragic trip comes to my mind now. He was going through the motions: "She doesn't really want you. She just wants to get back at me and control you at the same time. She just thinks your her toys. If she loved you, she would never have broken the family up. If she loved you, we'd all be together". I can remember saying, "Yes, she only thinks we're her toys". He was pleased and agreed with me. He said he was going to ask for custody because he believed we wanted to live with him. Based on those conversations in the car, I'm not surprised he thought that - but he had COACHED me into saying those things. It was bizarre, like brainwashing sessions lasting four hours, the same things over and over again, until I parrotted everything back at him and went home pissed off.

I can even remember one occasion when he said "Wouldn't it be lovely if a judge was at your mum's house when we got home and he says you can come to live with me?" Think about what that did to my little brain. I believed every word he said: that he was a better, kinder parent who loved me, and she was an evil witch with a tiny mind who wanted nothing good for me at all. He revved me up during that particular journey. I got so excited about the thought of a judge waiting for us to allow me to and live with the alienator that I was practically jumping up and down. I remember leaning over the front seat, eager beyond belief that this was possibly going to happen. He allowed me to believe all this and I got to the point at which I ACTUALLY believed it was going to happen. I craned my neck from my seat in the car to look for the judge at the front door with the paperwork allowing us to turn the car back around and go "home". I thought about the new school I would be attending the very next day.

Of course, it didn't. Judges don't generally work child custody cases on SUNDAY evenings. They also don't turn up at people's houses to order them to change custody details. He knew perfectly well from the outset that it wasn't going to happen. He knew I was going to be disappointed. It was what he WANTED.

That man, the alienator, put ALL those thoughts into my mind. He set me up - and my mother (and my sibs and step-parent, because PA affects everyone in the family). I was no more than ten. He let me believe my troubles were about to be solved, knowing FULL WELL that it was all a great big impossibility and a LIE of the most devious and nasty kind. He set me up for disappointment in order to hurt my mother and he didn't mind hurting me in the process. Perhaps I was so objectified that it never entered his mind that he was hurting me too.

It took me a while to realise why he did this. Manipulators can't allow their subjects to be happy. He did not want me to be happy when I got home. He wanted me to be angry so I would take that anger out on my mother. He wanted me to be angry with her. He wanted to punish her and also make it look like I wanted live with him. He wanted to deliver me to her front door filled with anger and hatred.

I still don't know if he understands that he hurt me as well as her. I really don't know. He told my uncle that he "talked to me too much about the divorce" but I don't know what he meant by that. I don't know if that includes the alienation. I suspect, sometimes, that he is beginning to know what he did because his disowning of me was an attack out of the absolute blue. I think he was then realising that I was thinking for myself so he got an attack in first. He can tell anyone who wants to listen that I was the problem, not him. Like a child, he can tell tales first.