Anger in this alienated child

This is an email I posted to a mailing list today in response to alienated parents discussing their angry alienated children - and their frustration and confusion about that anger. I've been reading so many account of loving children quite quickly developing anger and even hatred towards one of their confused and scared parents, anger that is very difficult to discuss with a child who then refuses to speak to the target parent.

I hope it explains potential reasons for bizarre anger in alienated children.

The main thing I heard from the alienator is "Your mother {insert yourself here} doesn't love you". End of story.



They will hear plenty of other bunkum to "prove" this, and I've read all your stories on this list showing what lengths alienators will go to to "prove" themselves right.



But what it all boils down to, that is what I heard over and over at the root of all alienating attacks/lectures, repeated and reinforced, used as "evidence", appearing in almost every sentence out of the alienator's mouth about my target parent was that "She doesn't love you".



"She does that because she doesn't love you."

"That's because she doesn't love you."

"If she loved you, she wouldn't do that."

"If she loved you, she'd do this."

"I hate to say this but I don't think she loves you."

"She doesn't want you because she doesn't love you."

"You remind her of me so she doesn't love you."



THIS is the foundation of everything I heard from my alienator, and THIS is why I was SOOOOOOOO angry and vile to my mother.



Anger is not an isolated emotion. No one is just angry. People are angry because ... [insert reason]. I was angry because I felt HUGE, MASSIVE, ENORMOUS hurt, pain and despair that my own mother didn't love me, that my own mother didn't want me. I despaired that I was so unlovable that my own mother didn't want me.



I remember watching a tv serial of the Phantom of the Opera when I was in my early teens, starring Teri Polo. She played Christine but also, in a flashback, the mother of the Phantom. The narrator spoke of the child being so hideously and disgustingly deformed that society rejected it - but that its mother loved it and was proud of it, that the mother could not see the ugliness everyone else in the world saw. I was a child already suffering problems because I believed my mother didn't love or want me, and when I watched that scene, I believed that I was so ugly and unloveable that not even my mother could overcome her disgust of me.



That's why I was so angry.