Parental Alienation

Facebook

2009-03-07T08:13:00.000-08:00

There are quite a few Facebook groups dealing with Parental Alienation. Obviously, take care about which groups you join or read, and the people you speak to on there. Also, remember that your alienator will probably be able to access the same groups ... they will read whatever you say there and can/will use it against you.

Have you joined any groups?

And if you see anything from my blog used without credit, please let me know. Many thanks.

Dates - the edible kind

2008-10-06T05:59:00.000-07:00

I like dates. I LOVE dates. Right or wrong, I eat a pile of them and count them towards my five a day fruit and vegetable quota, something I am fanatical about. I could easily sit and eat a bagful.

You're wondering why I'm telling you this? Well, here's why: as an alienated child, I was so firmly entrenched in believing the mendacious brainwashing of my alienating parent that until 2008 I wouldn't eat dates. My mother told me at some point that as a little child I loved dates. I was so convinced she was a liar that I wouldn't eat them.

Over the past 3 years, since the alienator/male parent disowned (my kids and) me, as I've mentioned in this blog, the layers of deceit have slowly been peeling themselves away from my mind. Once I learned from a third party that he was lying about ME, to cut a long story short, it made me realise that if he was lying about me, then it's possible he lied about my mother. It was akin to a house of cards falling: I have slowly been reassessing my relationship with my late mother and have seen what a monstrous act of crime he committed in telling his own child from the age of 6 until 35 that her mother didn't love her. He twisted everything she said and did, criminalized her in my mind, and made her out to be the ultimate deceiver. He led me to believe I was literally living with the devil. I had no trust for her whatsoever because according to him, she didn't love me, she just wanted to control me. Everything she said or did to me was based on that, so when she told me I used to love dates, I didn't believe her. I thought she was lying in order to make me eat something disgusting, to torment me for her own pleasure ... when guess who was truly doing that?!

I'm still here

2008-08-09T16:33:00.001-07:00

In response to enquiries, yes, I'm still here. I don't have much to say about PA at the moment. Well, I don't think I do, but the subject has been on my mind again recently. Weeell, it's always on my mind to some extent, I guess, because it has shaped my adult life.

I've been trying to get my head around the Asperger's lately. That's taken up a lot of my thought processes, and has probably pushed the PA to one side.

I joined Facebook 3 weeks ago after much prompting by the offspring. It's been weird because family members I haven't heard from in a decade are "adding" me as their "friend", but then not speaking. I assume that's normal :> I've been reconnecting with one, however, who himself spent a lot of time out of touch with the family.

Joining Facebook has meant facing the presences of my male parent and my sister. I called her after seeing a comment that she made about her husband being sent to a war, to offer my support to her and particularly her children. She thanked me for calling and hung up. Neither of them have approached the offspring on FB - not that the latter would want that, but I have spent the last 3 weeks complaining about the former. I've probably been earbashing the offspring about them a bit too much.

I just don't understand. I keep saying it and it might get old, but I don't understand disowning people. Offspring also received birthday card and present from the male parent, with a note from his partner inside saying "We're thinking of you and your sibling" (paraphrased). I was completely excluded and thoroughly pissed off at such a direct and deliberately cruel exclusion of me.

My sister's children are living in fear of their father dying - and yet she won't let them have the comfort of me and mine.

My offspring keeps saying "Your family are crazy. Seriously. They're mental. You have been surrounded by insane people all your life".

My ex spent a great deal of time insisting he wasn't going to talk to me about my sister, by talking about my sister. Apparently she's angry about things from our childhood. Well, I TOO am angry about our childhood - but I forgive her. I did a long time ago. I'm not going to hold anyone to ransom over something that happened in 1978 when we were both little children, but apparently she's allowed to. It's SOOOO bizarre. She complains about things I did 30 years ago. I don't get it. She made my life miserable - and we argued, like sisters do. But I feel like she should get over it - and if there weren't any ulterior motives, surely she would? I feel as if there is something else going on here.

And then today out of the blue I realised that my grandfather, my male parent's male parent, disowned his daughter too, for not behaving exactly as he wanted her to. This man (whom I adored, despite my mother telling me he wasn't "a nice man") also kicked his wife out of the family home and made her leave her children behind. My offspring said "So maybe your male parent thinks that's normal? Does that make it less malicious?". Does it? It makes it more so, in my opinion, because he's been witness to what disowning does to children and grandchildren - but he did it anyway.

No, there is more than just me not towing the line for him and my sister. There's something else. I still think he chose her over me. Or I should say her and her kids over me and mine (and I have the older grandchildren who knew him, my sister's children didn't).

I have spent the last few months in a very dark place. I called the Samaritans at one point, because I honestly felt that I had nothing to live for other than my children, and that if I didn't have them, I would end my life. I spent weeks fantasizing about death, but not telling anyone. That mood lifted after a week of enforced decent sleep at night (hay fever medication!), but I still feel lost and by myself. I never actually even approached taking my own life, but I wished for an escape. I wished SO HARD!!

The Asperger's is helping me understand myself better in many, many ways, and is helping my life to become easier by giving me understanding. I can eliminate things that I can't deal with and alter how I approach others. What it doesn't do for me is repair broken relationships, even the ones I want to repair. I cannot even tell the people I need to because two in particular are spiteful and would take great pleasure in grassing me up to authorities in order to cause trouble, all the while pretending that they're just trying to do the right thing for my kids. My kids are FINE. They are great, they're happy, lively, thriving, balanced, well educated (because I hide everything negative from them, as exhausting as it is, and because I have replaced their lost family members with alternatives from our church and also have supported/maintained/encouraged relationships with step-relations). My Asperger's does not affect them.

Asperger's also tells me that there are some things that even "normal" people don't understand - and that's deliberately harmful behaviour towards others. Alienation is one such behaviour.

To sum up PA and Asperger's in my life: I was told I was unwanted so I felt excluded. I also have a condition which causes social isolation. I have been doubly excluded socially. No wonder I'm a wingnut ... but knowledge is power, and I know what I'm fighting now, instead of wallowing in misunderstanding.

I'm still not going back to the mailing lists. I can't be drowned out on my own blog so I'm staying here. Please do continue to email me and leave comments. Ask me more questions. Offer comments, even, but please do it nicely :>

Parental Alienation in Fiction

2008-06-21T09:46:00.000-07:00

Here's a secret: I'm a writer in my Other Life.

I've finally come up with a way of integrating Parental Alienation (and perhaps Covert Incest) into a piece of fiction. For three years a backdrop has floated around my mind but that is all it is: a backdrop. I've never had a story to go with it. It was more like an entry in an encyclopedia than a story per se: plenty of interesting and distinct characters, lovely scenery and voyages, family dynamics shifting and growing, love, hate, fear, epiphanies, a travelling circus ... I'll give too much away ... a wonderful little world - where nothing much happened. I had no real story.

But now I do! It's interesting that I can understand the mindset of the alienator now - I know why he did the things he did; I get the corrupted state of mind that allows a person to hurt his children - and as a consequence a beautiful piece of fictional history becomes something far greater and more meaningful.

Would you be interested in reading a novel about this subject?

An amazing source of help

2008-06-17T03:10:00.001-07:00

My counsellor called it "haunting". The events of my past relationship with that man are almost always on my mind in varying degrees. Usually typing up a post about a particular event helps rid me of that event to some extent; this is why some of the posts in this blog are so dramatic or heartfelt or upset, because I write them at the moments I'm experiencing the memory or the trauma. This is why sometimes I say extreme things, for example that I'm going to end the blog. That man exerted control over me in so many ways, and by saying I'm going to end the blog, I think I'm taking back control and deciding whether I will continue to talk about these things or not, on my own terms in my own time.

Usually the traumatic memories float around in my head until I find a way to make sense of them or understand them, or even just name them. To discover "Covert Incest" (which is quite a strong term but what else can we call it?) has been a revelation. Naming something gives me so much power and helps me to further understand the Parental Alienation - and even the reasons for my mother's actions. She pretty much kidnapped my sister and me and for decades I was angry about it. However, as information starts to creep out, and as I've been making sense of things over the last 3 years, as I've read about PA and now Covert Incest, I'm beginning to see that it's entirely possible she was escaping with us in order to keep us safe from him. I'm not sure she would ever have been able to name what he was doing anymore than I could until I found the CI website, but I know for damn sure his behaviour made her uncomfortable. Other people noticed his behaviour too - and thought it was creepy (they said he was obsessed with me, had a strange fascination with me). So if she was seeing Covert Incest, and if she was afraid that it would lead to actual abuse, I would have done what she did too. I would have left him and left everything behind.

Insomnia is making me incredibly miserable at the moment. I'm trying to go to bed at a reasonable time but I'm unconciously avoiding sleep. I'm actually afraid of sleeping, but I don't remember any dreams at the moment, so I don't know what's going on. I'm so tired that my memory is going and I don't even have the energy for much housework. I'm sleeping in my clothes and all I want to do is read books. So ... displacement much?

And yet I can't put my finger on what's wrong. I feel so alone - but that's normal. I only have my children. I was afraid I'd seen the male parent last week. I saw someone driving the opposite direction who looked just like him in a car just like his, but my startled expression didn't cause any reaction whatsoever from the man. I'm fairly sure it wasn't him. He just looked at me blankly with no recognition at all. It terrified me though, and reminded me that he's a creep and wouldn't think twice about driving three hours up here to spy on us. I'd bet money that he has already.

So, on to this amazing source of help. This brought tears to my eyes and caught my breath. It's from here: http://covertincest.proboards22.com/index.cgi?board=general&action=display&thread=2

It's all about Flashbacks, and I think it's worth reading and then re-reading by all of us, not just those who were affected by CI. Parental Alienation is a form of child abuse, just like CI, and therefore we have suffered harm from it. PA especially means that at some level we were emotionally neglected by one or both of our parents - and that means that some part of us is still a child. A counsellor once told me some of the things in this list and I failed to remember one that I felt was so important at the time: that self-care is vital, especially for the child in us that has stunted (because if your childhood wasn't normal, then you didn't grow properly in all areas), and that even self-parenting may be important. I need to remember that and read this list over. I might even print it off and put it up in my room because I'm so forgetful. I need to be the adult and parent myself - take care of myself the way my parents should have, and be affectionate, treat, arrange cuddles from somewhere (I have a child who is always happy to oblige, and a cat that is occasionally happy to deign to oblige), feed properly, exercise properly, ensure quiet time and rowdy time, and proper bedtimes - even if I don't sleep because then at least I'm resting. I also need to remind myself that I'm doing a GREAT job with my kids, and that I'm achieving good things in my life.

WHAT ARE THEY?

Flashbacks are memories of past traumas. They may take the form of pictures, sounds, smells, body sensations, feelings or lack of them (numbness). Many times there is no actual visual or auditory memory. One may have the sense of panic, being trapped, feeling powerless with no memory stimulating it. These experiences can also happen in dreams.As a child or adolescent, we have to insulate ourselves from the emotional and physical horrors of the trauma. In order to survive, that child remained isolated, unable to express the feelings and thoughts at that time. It is as though we put that part into a time capsule until it comes out in the present.When that part comes out, the LITTLE ONE inside of us is experiencing the past as if it was happening today. As the flashback occurs, it is as if we forget that we have an ADULT part available to us for reassurance, protection and grounding. The intense feelings and body sensations occurring are so frightening because the feelings/sensations are not related to the reality of the present and many times seem to come from out of nowhere.We begin to think we are crazy and are afraid of telling anyone (including our therapist) of these experiences. We feel out of control and at the mercy of our experiences. We begin to avoid situations and stimuli that we think triggered it. Many times, flashbacks occur during any form of sexual intimacy. It may occur with a person who has similar characteristics as the perpetrator. It may be any situation today that stirs up similar trapped feelings.If you are feeling small... you are experiencing a flashback. If you are experiencing stronger feelings than are called for in the present situation... you are experiencing a flashback.

FLASHBACKS ARE NORMAL

Vietnam vets have normalized this experience and have coined the term as posttraumatic stress syndrome. Even the diagnostic category book for psychiatry defines posttraumatic stress syndrome as the normal reaction of all people experiencing an event that is outside the range of normal human experience.Flashbacks feel crazy because the little one doesn't know that there is an adult survivor inside to help.

WHAT HELPS

1. TELL YOURSELF THAT YOU ARE HAVING A FLASHBACK.
2. REMIND YOURSELF THAT THE WORST IS OVER. The feeling and sensations you are experiencing are memories of the past. The actual event took place long ago when you were little and YOU SURVIVED. Now it is time to let out that terror, rage, hurt, and/or panic.
3. GET GROUNDED. This may mean stamping your feet on the ground so that the little one knows that you have feet and, if you need to, you can get away. As a child, you couldn't get away... now you can.
4. BREATHE. When we get scared, we stop normal breathing. As a result, our body begins to panic from lack of oxygen. Lack of oxygen in itself causes a great deal of panic feeling: pounding in the head, tightness, sweating, feeling faint, shakiness, and dizziness. When we breathe deeply, a lot of the panic feeling can decrease. Breathing deeply means putting your hand on your diaphragm and breathing fully so that your diaphragm pushes out against your hand and then exhaling so that the diaphragm goes in.
5. REORIENT TO THE PRESENT. Begin to use your five senses in the present. Look around and see the colors in the room, the shapes of things, the people near, etc. Listen to the sounds in the room, your breathing, traffic, birds, people, cars, etc. Feel your body and what is touching it: your clothes, your own arms and hands, the chair or floor supporting you.
6. SPEAK TO THE LITTLE ONE AND REASSURE HER/HIM. It is very healing to get your adult in the picture so your little one knows that he/she is not alone. Say: "You are not in danger now," "You can tell me about it," "It's OK to feel, I won't hurt you." The child needs to know that it's safe to experience the feelings and let go of the past.
7. GET IN TOUCH WITH YOUR NEED FOR BOUNDARIES. Sometimes when we are having a flashback, we lose the sense of where we leave off and the world begins; as if we do not have skin. Wrap yourself in a blanket, hold a pillow or stuffed animal, go to bed, sit in a closet... any way that you can feel yourself truly protected from the outside.
8. GET SUPPORT. Depending on your situation, you may need to be alone or may want someone near you. In either case, it is important that your support people know about flashbacks so they can help with the process... this may mean letting you be yourself or by being there in a way that is safe for you.
9. TAKE THE TIME TO RECOVER. Sometimes flashbacks are very powerful. Give yourself the time to make the transition from this powerful experience. Don't expect yourself to jump into adult activities right away. Take a nap, or a warm bath, or some quiet time. Be kind and gentle with yourself. Appreciate how much your little one went through as a child.
10. HONOR YOUR EXPERIENCE. Appreciate yourself for having survived that horrible time as a child. Respect your body's need to experience those feelings of long ago. Keep a journal as a testimony of your healing.
11. BE PATIENT. It takes time to heal the past. It takes time to learn appropriate ways of taking care of self, of being an adult who has feelings, and of developing effective ways of coping.
12. FIND A COMPETENT THERAPIST. Look for a therapist who understands the process of healing from incest.
13. KNOW YOU ARE NOT CRAZY... YOU ARE HEALING!

The person I used to be

2008-06-14T14:47:00.000-07:00

I realised yesterday just how different I am today from the alienated person I used to be.

Within myself I am immeasurably more self-confident - not arrogant, but more self-aware and sure of who I am (the Asperger's notwithstanding).

I used to be very different. The alienated Me was tense all the time, stressed, frightened. I felt permanently stupid because I had been brainwashed into thinking I didn't know anything (again, the Asperger's notwithstanding - it's an issue that does merge occasionally with the effects of alienation but I (hopefully) am well able to separate the two). He always put my opinions down and calmly explained to me why I was wrong about EVERYTHING - even the day on which I celebrate my eldest child's birthday (she was born late at night in a different timezone from the one we live in. He believes that her birthday should be the day it was in the timezone we live in, not where she was born. This logic would also change the date of my own birthday but he never mentioned that) and about how to deal with my children, my sister, my mother's family, my personal life, that it was okay for him to walk into my bedroom when I was asleep naked with my also asleep and naked then-partner next to me, to feel me up, etcetera etcetera and und so weiter. Blah blah and blahdy blah.

I second guessed myself and worried about my decisions a lot. I was always *somehow* wrong if I asked him for advice or opinions. He always spoke down to me. He put me down too, indirectly - he wouldn't defend me if someone else made negative comments about me. My sister says truly terrible things about me. He liked to regale me with these. I once had a strange feeling about the way he was speaking that led me to ask if he actually agreed with her. His reply was that he didn't know. No. Probably not. It wasn't too reassuring - though I've never been able to put my finger on what was wrong with his response, my initial reaction was: he's lying. He does agree with her. He can't tell me outright that he doesn't. NOW, however, remembering the conversations properly, he seemed vague, not in denial. I don't think he had ever thought that deeply about me before. THAT is why I think he sounded so unconvincing: he truly didn't know because he didn't have a clue about my actual, personal character. He didn't know me. He once texted me when I was at a heavy metal concert. "What are you doing there?" he asked in surprise. "Erm, watching and listening to the band" I replied. "I didn't know you liked that sort of thing" he said. I joked that he didn't know me at all - and didn't get a reply to that.

Looking back, I'm amazed at that rubbish I fell for and the things I put up with. It's very easy to look back and wonder why the hell I put up with the abuse, how I believed the lies and manipulation. It wouldn't happen now - but that person believed in her male parent. She trusted him. She believed everything he did was for her own good and that he was behind her 100%. She believed he knew her and loved her. She did not believe a word against him because she had been forewarned by him that certain people were not trustworthy and only wanted to cause her harm. She had been shown how untrustworthy and evil her own mother was, and without him she would never have been able to unravel the subtleties of human behaviour to see that even the smallest gift was nothing more than bribery. He helped that little girl to see that her mother didn't want her or love her - but that little girl was in her thirties before she realised that he exposed her to terrible terrible thoughts and actions and beliefs like the fact that she was unloved ... and then left them to mill around her mind and torment her and haunt her. He sent that little girl to her bed at night in a house she was not wanted in, filled with people who hated her, ALONE. I spent days and nights thinking about my mother not loving me. It was on my mind constantly, even as an adult. Walking home from school was difficult because I was heading for that house where my presence was unwanted, my entrance dreaded not anticipated. I tried to earn her approval, just to receive a nice word, because it was impossible for her to love me, wasn't it?

When I think about my own offspring, especially the younger one, lying in bed crying and wishing someone else were her parents and that someone would come and rescue her from that hideous existence, it breaks my heart.

I sympathise with his heartbreak. I've been left too. I have NO sympathy whatsoever for what he turned me into because of it. I would NEVER tell my children their other parent doesn't love them! Even when things go bad and I feel like bopping my ex over the head, I try to explain that his behaviour is NOT because he doesn't love them!

Kids get hurt feelings when you don't praise their paintings enough. I can vividly remember the feeling accompanying the words "Your mother doesn't love you. She just wants to control you". My stomach would turn over. My chest would feel empty. My brain would feel like it had all fallen to the front of my head above my eyes, where it would try its hardest not to let them cry. My head would fall forward and look at my knees or the ground and the muscles in my neck would become solid. I'd wordlessly ask myself how I was going to live with this. I'd wish I was my sister because "she loves her because she doesn't look like me or you". How will I live with this? Of course, I didn't know how, I wasn't even in double figures, but my heart was broken.

I became so used to that feeling (because it was permanent. He reinforced it every time I saw him) that it felt normal. When boyfriends or friends made me feel that way, it felt normal - and I'd let them abuse me too.

He didn't just tell me these things once or twice, he told me them continuously for YEARS, from 1976 until 2005. He deliberately inflicted that heartbreak on me (and he knew how it felt to believe your mother might not love you because his was kicked out of the family home when he was eleven), but not on my sister.

After 2005, I was free of him. He was out of our lives completely. It was like a detoxing. Slowly I came to understand (and it's ongoing) what a heinous crime he committed. Slowly I came to review past events and revise their definitions where appropriate. I'm like a historical revisionist now. Once I realised that he was lying about me, everything started to unravel in my mind (and that moment came a few months after he disowned me, it wasn't immediate). Understanding of what he'd done and what Parental Alienation is has grown within me since then. I did not have a sudden epiphany - but I'm a different person. I'm stronger now. I trust my own opinion. I stand up for myself more. I am calmer and more content in many ways. I trust my own plans for my life. I don't feel stupid or worry that I am a bad parent or a let-down or a disappointment or that I can't make my own decisions.

If I saw him again, I'd have an absolutely screaming fit. I'm sure of that - right now, that's how I feel. I wouldn't be able to feel calm at this point in time. I'd scream and scream and scream for him to get the hell away from us. I'd call the police if I needed to. He'd start with his excuses and rationalizing and putting me down ("Don't be so silly") but I wouldn't put my head down and put up with it. I'd scream the place down. I'm not letting that psycho anywhere near us, no matter what rubbish he spouts. My kids - well, the younger one hardly remembers him but trusts Mum. The older one knows that man has legal rights to his grandchildren and has never even attempted to assert them, let alone call since the last birthday in February of 2005. They're loyal to me and they know as much as is appropriate for them to know at their respective ages. My ex supports me.

Time was I would have believed anything he said, including his definitions of my character (a character into which I stepped and played for decades until I realised he had applied the personality traits he wanted to me, and never actually saw the ones I truly have). He told me I was a tomboy (I'm not but I believed him and played that role whenever I was around him - but never at home), that I was loud and gobby (I'm not. Asperger's can make you the opposite, it can make you hide away, shy and nervous), that I'm a typical Leo (!), that I might be the reincarnation of his previous wife (WTF?! See my post about Covert Incest!), that I'm stupid (I'm not going to brag about this. Suffice it to say I'm CLEVER. It's the one aspect of my being that I'm proud of. I have nothing else that shines, just my stupendous brain. Okay, so now I'm bragging.), that the only reason I married my ex is because he was a "big, tall American", that I allowed myself to be fooled by my mother every day of my life - that I mistook her acts of love for bribery or manipulation or guilt or showing off or competition against him, that I needed him to help me form my opinions and see things clearly.

I can't help but look back at how foggy my brain was when I was under the spell of Parental Alienation. I can remember my ex ranting at how "pathetic" he thought my male parent was. He reached a point with him when he just lost his patience and couldn't deal with him without wanting to scream. I remember not being able to understand AT ALL where my ex was coming from. I thought he was mad. When his friend formed the same opinion, I thought he was mad too. My ex's exact words stay with me today because they sum my male parent up perfectly: "He is a pathetic man". He didn't mean, he's a pathetic person. He meant a pathetic male of the species, and only now do I understand the two meanings. He meant my male parent is not a real man, according to the standards of other men. It's telling that my male parent has never, ever had any male friends. His friends have all been women - and when I remember them, I remember them as being easily manipulated, vulnerable women just out of divorces who dumped him or withdrew their friendship after a year or so. And I am sorry that he has spent so much time alone - but he has no conception of it being his fault. He thinks it's everyone else. I believed that too.

I am stunned when I realise how much rubbish I accepted.

Parental Alienation is Emotional Terrorism. It is the deliberate harm of innocents in the pursuit of selfish desires (usually revenge).

There is no need for it.

Manipulation - sometimes it's in the littlest incidents

2008-06-08T14:22:00.000-07:00

I've mentioned this incident before I'm going to repeat myself because I've possibly discovered a new interpretation of the event. It's one that has puzzled me ever since it happened in the late 70s when I was little, perhaps eight or nine.

We used to have fairly regular visitation with the male parent, once a month more often than not. He would pick us up and take us home again. I can only remember one occasion when Mum came to pick us up because she was on holiday in the area so it made sense for everyone.

We hadn't seen her for at least one week, may have been two, so we were excited to see her again. When she pulled up outside the house, I remember I had been on the sofa by the window, looking for her for a while. She walked towards the window all smiles and I shouted "She's here!". The male parent ordered me not to go to the door "in case she grabs you".

Of course I didn't understand. She was coming to pick us up and take us home. We didn't live with him. We were going home no matter what, plus the law had said so. I could see her confused expression as she beckoned me to the door, but I shook my head and mouthed "I'm not allowed". Later on I told her what he had said, and asked her why he'd said it. She had no answer and neither did I until a few days ago.

It could be that given how excited we were to see her again, he was jealous. Perhaps it annoyed him - and to have us running to the door to greet her reinforced that to both him and her. He wanted to hurt her (that's what Parental Alienation is all about, after all) so he used us to achieve that. She couldn't hear what he was saying inside the house, so didn't hear his instructions to us, but those instructions made it look like we weren't bothered about her arrival. For us not to run to the door, especially when he knew that we had seen her, made it look like we didn't care much for her arrival.

I think, at that point, it would have had no effect on her other than confusion, because both of us still loved our Mum a lot. I remember feeling the beginnings of PA back then but not enough for her to feel hated (which came later). I was only eight or nine so my sister could only have been five or six. Plus we explained later on why we hadn't come to the door - so his efforts achieved nothing.

It's the only explanation I can think of, because his makes no sense. Why would she have grabbed us and run off with us when she was coming to pick us up anyway?! He wasn't keeping us, we knew that.

Can you think of any other reason for his behaviour, other than wanting to make it look as if we didn't care that she had arrived?

Narcissism - discussion

2008-05-30T12:41:00.000-07:00

Am reading Louise's post about narcissim and am finding some very interesting correlations and validations of my belief that my male parent is a Narcissist.

Quote:

"The narcissist INITIATES his own abandonment BECAUSE of his fear of it. He is so afraid of losing his sources (and of unconsciously being emotionally hurt) – that he would rather "control", "master", or "direct" the potentially destabilising situation – than confront its effects if initiated by the significant other. Remember: the personality of the narcissist has a low level of organization. It is precariously balanced.Being abandoned could cause a narcissistic injury so grave that the whole edifice can come crumbling down. Narcissists usually entertain suicidal ideation in such cases. BUT, if the narcissist initiated and directed his abandonment, if the abandonment is perceived by him to be a goal HE set to himself to achieve – he can and does avoid all these untoward consequences. "

I've mentioned before that he disowned me (which I'm not arguing with). Well, at the time, I may or may not have mentioned this before, I was looking for a way to get him out of our lives. I'd had enough of him. I was verging on hatred for him. I wanted him away from my female children because he is a pervert and I was not going to allow him to do to them what he did to me (he was alone with one of them once in her whole life, and the other never). My eldest was coming into puberty and so in my mind I was looking for a way to keep him away from us. Simultaneously I started going back to my church - which he had always hated, for some reason. He wouldn't mind if I believed in HIS (bizarre and NOT ordinary) beliefs, but basic Christianity? He'd panic and try and stop me, criticise, mock (oh the mockery of every aspect of my life ...), bash (as in anti-Bible-bashing), nag nag nag ... it was endless. He'd get himself into such a state. I found it weird. He was proud of what he felt was emotion-free logic and self-control ("I'm rational so I'm stronger than most people"), but when it came to me going to church, he'd freak out like he was having a panic attack. He demanded compliance from me. He never got it, though I often lied to him about my church attendance. It was easier to say I wasn't going and didn't believe in it that to have to put up with endless nagging and attempts to alienate me from church. Clearly this was a control issue with him and I was being disobedient. I hadn't asked his permission to go to church, despite he and my mother not having me christened in order for me to make up my own mind ...

SO, there came the time when he really began to lay it on thick - but I felt stronger and stronger. His nagging and complaints and objection and criticism of my beliefs, my way of life, how I was raising my children, all this went on from August to March. I consistently said "I don't want to talk about this with you. If you keep on, we will fall out", and all the while I was thinking that maybe I should use this as a way of getting rid of him. Unfortunately I'm not devious enough or deceptive enough. All the while I kept us away from him, too. We live three hours from him so it wasn't a problem. And then he blindsided me - he disowned me, out of the blue, after months of me not backing down (which was simultaneously terrifying and exhilarating). He cut me off via email (how kind, the COWARD), using such foul speech, disgusting phrases and vile lies that when I told a friend about the content of his astonishing email, he said "Your DAD said those things?!" Nobody could believe what he had said, least of all me. It was disgusting - and an eye-opener, of course.

I have two theories about why he did this when he did.

Theory One (which is most supported by people who know him): my sister had previously disowned him (and me) and would not return to his life with her four children if I was in it. I told him for years that one day she would make him choose between us - and she did.

Theory Two: he saw it coming. He realised that I was becoming stronger and stronger, and wising up to him on many levels. He knew that once I finally realised just what he had done for thirty years, I would disown him - so he got in there first.

I'll never know unless I really talk to him - and as I will never see him again, no talking of any kind is going to happen. He'd never admit to any fault anyway. Alienators (narcissists) almost never do (I have seen two regretful alienators on mailing lists I used to belong to so there's hope!).

What made me begin to peel away the layers of deceipt only really began with his disownment email. It was just the start. My realisation of his betrayal truly began when I realised that he was lying about me - my uncle unwittingly told me what he believed was the "truth". It was being touted that I was the one who had done the disowning. Okay, so I was looking for a way of keeping the man away from my kids, but I had NOT disowned anybody at that point!

If you're wondering why I didn't just say "Keep away from us, we never want to see you again," remember what your alienator is like. Would they just accept that, just like that? Would they just say "Oh, okay" and walk away? No, they wouldn't. I had to find a way to get rid of that man that would leave him no way of ignoring my wishes - because that's what he would have done. He would NEVER have listened to me. He always ignored what I wanted and did whatever the hell he liked. The reason I spent so many months trying to think of a way to remove him permanently from our lives was because he, as a narcissist and alienator, believes his rights and desires are the only ones that matter, that everyone else in the world in stupid and that it doesn't matter what they say. He would have ridden roughshod over me saying anything about him staying away from us. "Don't be stupid. I'll do what I like. You're not keeping my grandchildren away from me. I'm your FATHER. You owe me". Blah blah blah.

But he initiated his own abandonment and solved my problem.

Covert Incest

2008-05-29T17:23:00.000-07:00

If you're in or involved in Parental Alienation in any way (and the odds are if you're here, then you probably are), especially if you are the child, it may interest you to look up something I've discovered called COVERT INCEST.

It's not your "usual" form of incest, involving the crime of physical sexual abuse (for which perpetrators should be hung by their parts and caned), but more an emotional sexual abuse of children (with perhaps some "lesser" sexual abuse - though I'm not trying to diminish sexual abuse. It is ALL hideous, I'm just trying to clarify the difference between the worst kind and the least worst kind). Mainly it involves focussing on children as sexual objects and also as replacement spouses/confidants. Sound familiar?

Now, don't go applying everything in your situation to Covert Incest. It's not a catch-all definition or new syndrome you can blame for everything. It's not Yuppie Flu. I just found it interesting that so many of the characteristics of the perpetrators of Covert Incest coincide with those of the Alienator.

"Get him to hit you!"

2008-05-26T17:18:00.001-07:00

I've remembered a small thing. I was once with an aggressive man who was frequently verbally and emotionally abusive towards me. This man used his physicality to intimidate me, pushed me once and ran at me to throw his fist in my face - but did not actually hit me. He meant to make me think he was going to. Of course I didn't know that at the time. I thought he was about to punch me in the face and break my nose in front of our toddler. These details are shared for background, not for sympathy. This man and I have put the past way behind us and moved forward for the sake of our shared child (who doesn't seem to remember the above incident).

That act was the last straw for me. I called my father and explained that this man had been bullying me for a very long time. The male parent said, well, if you need to leave, I'll provide you with money. We agreed that having someone else know what was going on would provoke a change, and that I was safer with someone else knowing.

Then we discussed a storyline running in a soap my stepmother watched: an abusive and violent husband beating up his wife. The male parent said, "Yes, we've noticed the parallells between you and the TV show. It wouldn't necessarily be all bad if he hit you. You should provoke him, get him to hit you, then you can get the police to get him out of the house."

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This is an example of just how manipulative an alienator can be. This parent of mine actively wanted harm to come to me in order to get rid of my partner. To me, this demonstrates a clear opinion of me as an object. I didn't want to be hit in order for my partner to leave! I wanted my partner to go to counselling with me to rebuild our family! I didn't want to provoke him because I WAS scared of him, but also because I'm not like that. It would have been a lie - but my male parent clearly saw nothing wrong with it. I cry when my offspring have hurt feelings - that parent could think about and actually want physical harm to come to me to achieve an aim - to "win" publically.

Authoritarians and abusers

2008-04-28T03:57:00.000-07:00

This man allegedly kept his daughter and three of the seven children he fathered on her imprisoned for 24 years, adopting the other three (the seventh died).

A psychologist has reported on this case at the link above, when asked the most obvious question: HOW could someone do this? That is, mentally speaking, how would someone be able to do this? How could you imprison, rape and abuse your own children?

I see this so often with Parental Alienation and indeed often ask the same question myself. How on earth could anyone actively wish to abuse anyone else?

The psychologist's answer was that a certain type of person believes it is their right to treat people as they want, especially their children. My male parent exhibits traits of this nature: he considered himself "owner" of his family, my mother and my sister and me, and said as much in public. He felt himself "in charge". "No one tells me what to do". "I know things other people don't". He felt he was cleverer than everyone else.

When no one listens to him, they are targets for verbal abuse -not just complaints or whinges, like "Oh, you're so annoying," but extreme and foul abuse. My mother and one of her sisters were called whores by him - he called my mother a whore in front of me! Amongst other things! As I've mentioned before, her cancer "was her own fault".

When I reached puberty, things changed a little. He suddenly noticed me in a different way. He leered at me, tried to stand too close and rub himself up against me (arms or legs), lay on top of me and kissed me all over my face, ran his hands up and down my back to see if I was wearing a bra ... I tried to keep myself out of the way. I stopped going near him whenever possible. I wouldn't give him hugs anymore, though he forced them. He was always looking at me with a dirty smile on his face. It's sickening to even remember it. He constantly made comments about me growing up, quite often dirty. I refused to play Scrabble anymore when he used the word "erection". I began to hate going to his house every third weekend and did everything I could to get out of it. At first, no one really listened to me, and he'd be "reasonable": "She doesn't have to come if she doesn't want to", and I was forced into it once or twice. From a logistical point of view, I think perhaps Mum felt guilty that he had driven four hours for me to refuse to go. My credibility wasn't brilliant because my PA behaviour (and Asperger's?) was wonderful for twisting incidents into crazy misrepresentations of the truth.

ANYWAY, back to the authoritarianism. Mum told him we didn't like his leering and talking and jokes and curiousness about our pubertal development. He was embarrassing us. Could he please stop? His answer made me begin to realise what a selfish man he is. He didn't apologise. He didn't even stop. In fact, he told us it was his right to do it because he was just proud. He said he wasn't going to stop because he wasn't doing anything wrong, and that he could do what he wanted. "You're my daughters, I can do what I like". I had a similar discussion with him on my sister's wedding day. She had come to me privately a few days before and said "I'm dreading him doing all that stuff on the day. Please talk to him." So I did - and had almost the same conversation.

"If you do that, it will embarrass her."
"I can do what I like".

And yay me - I stood up for us!!!! I nearly passed out with fear but I was defending my sister! And, in a roundabout way, myself.

"No, on this occasion, you can't."
"I can. I can do and say what I like".
"NO. YOU CAN'T. YOU WILL NOT DO THIS ON HER WEDDING DAY! I'll speak to C (his partner) about this if I need to, but you will not mention her growing up once. You will spoil her wedding day. She's afraid you're going to go on about her growing up. I'll tell C all about this if you don't promise not to say a word!"

And he didn't do it! The threat of being grassed up. That's interesting - I've just realised the connection (duh). He behaved himself because I threatened to tell tales on him. When I threatened to tell Mum about him going on about us growing up, he said what I said before: that he wasn't doing anything wrong. He didn't have to worry about Mum's opinion of him - for some reason. In his mind, he had already discredited her? But the current partner - he didn't want her to know. Interesting.

I think this brainwashing (that he could do whatever he likes because we are his children) is the reason I never told anyone about the inappropriate behaviour. I was un-credible anyway to some degree, so the chances of being believed were slim. Perhaps he knew that. In my mind, he could do anything he liked because he was in charge. He believed it was his right to do certain things to me, so because I was "on his side", I believed it too. I've often wondered why I let him do it. I *thought* it was wrong but because I believed everything he said, I believed I was wrong too, so I tolerated it. That's a realisation right there in front of you, folks, thanks to a Sky New psychologist and my own ramblings. I've just worked that out. I was brainwashed into thinking he could do no wrong so when he did wrong, I didn't know it. "You're just imagining it". He made all sorts excuses for his behaviours. He noticed when I wouldn't stand near him anymore and he pushed it. He deliberately pushed himself into my private space. "Nothing wrong with a cuddle", but then he'd be rubbing my breast. He did that in public once and almost laughed at me when I looked at him, moving away quickly. His grin was huge and his expression was one of conceit and utter disdain for me. "You idiot. Look what I can do - and you put up with it!". That he'd do it in public shocked me so much. I began complete withdrawal from him at that point. Although I had never left my daughter alone with him before then anyway, I was determined to keep her away from him. I left the area within a year of that.

Now that I'm not closed off ...

2008-04-22T08:06:00.000-07:00

... to there being more than the alienator's point of view, I'm going to have a phone call with my Step-dad tonight. It occurred to me yesterday that I don't actually know the full reasons why my mother left the male parent. I have a vague recollection of being told about mistreatment, but her opinion, point of view, memory, reasons, etc did not matter to me while I trusted the alienator. She had no good reason, according to him, and left because her family hate him. Her family are evil. They are wicked. Etcetera.

But they were always nice to me. I loved them. I liked being around them. I couldn't reconcile the devils he told me about with the loving family members I associated with (and so we come back to me believing I was stupid, because the Alienator told me I couldn't see the truth. I needed him to help me ...).

So anyway, should be an interesting talk with the Step-dad. He's working away from home at the moment so I don't have to worry about his wife being upset, and he seemed happy enough to talk about Mum ...

Update

2008-04-22T03:18:00.000-07:00

Just FYI, I'm not on any mailing lists anymore. I withdrew from them a couple of weeks ago so if you've sent me a message via one of them, I won't have received it. Please contact me via the email address on the profile page (on the left, down the page) or the address you found via the mailing list. I answer ALL emails (unless they're asking me what my favourite cookie is).

Will only be posting here for the foreseeable future (and yes, I'll be continuing. Sorry about my misery fit. I guess it's just part and parcel of life in general that once in a while things will get on top of us. I'm really grateful for the commenters who reminded me of the purpose of this blog: to help people. I have a responsibility to those people who come here regularly because it helps them in their own PA struggles. It's very easy to forget others when you sink like I did. Depressive episodes are inherently selfish (I mean that as a neutral statement, not that the Depressed are selfish people) and the world can disappear from view. The insomnia peaked during that week too but I'm dealing with it now.).

Thank you for your patience. I'm a trial LOL.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Perspective

2008-04-18T15:41:00.000-07:00

So, the last post WAS a gigantic self-indulgent fit of the maudlins. I was feeling quite bogged down, as you can tell. Everything got on top of me.

And then I discovered that my friend's 42 year old fiance quite literally dropped dead on Sunday last. I'm not exaggerating: he absolutely, positively just keeled over and died.

Then I stopped whinging pretty quickly.

He'd been advised of an arrhythmia (sp?) a couple of years ago but was cleared in November. You can imagine the incredible shock my friend is feeling right now. She doesn't know what's going on. We are all going to support her and take care of her, and her kids (hers, not his), but other than that all we can do is count our own blessings. She has never suffered grief before so I didn't have the heart to tell her, when she said "Ooh it's time for us to catch up!" the other day, that grief is about to kick her ass - but that she WILL feel better eventually.

So, I would say that today we should all be grateful that our loved ones may be alienated, but alive. WE are alive and, I hope, healthy.

2008-04-14T14:43:00.000-07:00

This blog may end now. I'm not sure, but I don't know if I'll post anymore.

I have recently discovered that I have Asperger's Syndrome. It's not a surprise but it's not a good thing either.

I have always imagined my social difficulties and confusion about people's behaviours to be due to Parental Alienation and my dysfunctional upbringing (although I've often said I brought myself up, having been ignored/neglected/messed with by inadequate parenting), and that with time I would grow out of them.

At the age of 37, I'm still socially inept and awkward, hence me speaking to the right people who gave me this diagnosis.

It explains an awful lot. It removes some of the blame for my difficult relationship with my mother from PA/my male parent, but it doesn't absolve him. He still did what he did. Asperger's Syndrome exacerbated the antagonism between Mum and me, to a large extent because the condition was unknown when I was a child.

I can now relax into who I am, for once in my life. Now I can learn not to panic about panicking about social situations (not a typo). The diagnosis has given me a certain level of peace with who I am. It's not my fault. I am not bad. I have not brought it upon myself. I can plan around it now without feeling foolish or childish or deliberately awkward or incapable. I planned a trip to our capital city last week, based around what I can and can't cope with, and it was the best trip I've ever had - I didn't put myself in a single situation that was bad for me because now I understand my limits, so no stress occurred.

However now I know that I'm never going to change. I am this socially inept person for the rest of my life. I am never going to be like you. I am always going to find social situations challenging and confusion and EXHAUSTING. It's never going to change because my brain is a little bit broken. I am never going to have a full social life or groups of friends I can relax with.

My mother is dead, all my grandparents are dead, my male parent is too dangerous to be around, my sister wishes me dead (because she received as much of my bad/incorrect behaviour due to Asperger's as my mother did), my brothers avoid me because of the Asperger's, my extended family all avoid me. People avoid me in general because of the Asperger's.

It's always going to be like this and I can't tell anyone why, at least not until my youngest daughter is grown up (9 years time) because I have a spiteful ex who will use it against me.

I also cannot tell anyone that I couldn't get out of bed this morning because of despair, because I am afraid my children will be taken from me. Parental Alienation and Asperger's Syndrome have ruined my life. I am planning the next 30 years around the fact that I will be by myself (although my children are good to me and always will be).

I am not about to do anything extreme, don't worry - but there are worse thoughts in my head right now than ever in my life before. This blog is the only place I can be honest and take these thoughts out of my brain, because they've been rolling around in there since the beginning of March. If it weren't for my kids, I'd have been dead a long time ago simply because of the PA, and now, if I didn't have them, this blog would not have this entry.

Please don't confuse me or associate me with anyone

2008-03-17T14:11:00.000-07:00

Further to my post a few days ago, I'd like to clarify that I'm being followed around the Internet by someone claiming affinity and similarity with me. Wherever I go, this person seems to appear within a day or two and make huge postings dominating wherever I've been.

This person seems to like all the attention to be focussed on them, to the exclusion of anyone else around, taking up entire pages of boards/blogs etc.

This person's motives do not feel genuine. They feel fake. They post nothing original until I speak, and then they paraphrase what I have said, or even copy it over to another place and make it look like their own words/feelings.

To confirm, I only post on this blog, on Hugstoheartbreak.com (twice there, I think, at most), and PASParents and PAPA Yahoo Groups. I don't use any other names nor does anyone else speak for me. I am nothing to do with anyone else.

This person may claim a "kinship" with me but it is not reciprocated because frankly they creep me out. They are also using the serious subject of Parental Alienation to gain attention. Disgraceful!

When the alienation begins

2008-03-15T15:18:00.001-07:00

In response to a question about how the anger and pulling away begin:

"I was furious first and continued to be so while I pulled away from my Mom. A lot of damage would have been avoided had she told me she loved me and that she was doing her best in a difficult situation, and also that she didn't mean to make mistakes or make me angry. Unfortunately because the PA wasn't recognized, much of the blame for the problems between my mother and me was put on me, particularly by other members of her family. I was labelled a "bad kid" and that label still sticks today. People love to tell me what a rotten kid I was, whereas I was actually a very, VERY distressed and confused child."

Expecting gratitude from alienated children ...

2008-03-15T15:05:00.000-07:00

I keep hearing about alienated aka target parents and their irritation/distress/annoyance/unhappiness/confusion that gifts, cards and money that they send to their alienated kids aren't acknowledged. I've even seen someone comment that they "never get so much as a thank you".

Folks, these kids are not your enemies and they don't actually owe you a thank you. These kids are in difficult, distressing, confusing and extremely painful places in their lives and those two words are probably the last things on their minds.

Don't send them gifts at all if you expect something in return, or if you decide to feel that your children owe you! That's not what it's about! Your attempts to reach them are about reaching them! They shouldn't be about getting something back from your child! If you feel hurt that your presents get ignored or go unacknowledged, try to put yourself in your child's place.

They are without one of their parents and may have been told that the non-present parent hates them. Your child might feel worthless. Thank yous are probably the last things on their mind right now.

If they do want to thank you, they may not be physically or mentally allowed to
: they might want to - but the other parent won't let them carry out the act; they might want to, but the other parent may have put them in such a terrible position that their life will be miserable if they so much as admit having received something from you, let alone liking it.

Also, if they are anything like me at times, they will think that you sending them gifts is the least you can do, under the circumstances. Someone on a mailing list asked a question about a child's lack of response to receiving gifts (this person was asking this question from a genuine place, not, as far as I'm concerned, from a sense of feeling like they deserve or are owed a thank you).

This was my response:

"Perhaps in her mind she feels so cheated because of the alienation/lies that she feels he owes her. Sometimes I took from my TP mother simply because I felt she owed me materially, given that she "didn't love me" or fill my emotional needs in a way that the AP told me she should. He used to say "if lying to her or cheating her gets you what you wanted, who cares? If it gets you what you want, go along with it. Use her because she's using you."" Apparently the TP just wanted to "control me and use me to control" the other parent, so why not not take from her? Use the user!

Alienated children, in one sentence

2008-03-15T15:02:00.000-07:00

"Programmed to believe [the target parent] is out to hurt them".

Quote from R. Couldn't have said it better myself.

Sending gifts and cards, etc

2008-03-15T14:58:00.000-07:00

My response to someone asking if they should continue to send gifts, cards etc, to their alienated son.

"Send him all those things, whether they come back or not.

If he accepts them with or without thanks, he accepts you to some extent.
If he rejects them, he still knows you tried (and I don't believe that children who reject gifts from parents are doing so entirely of their own free will).
If you don't, he'll think "She didn't send me anything. Dad was right. She doesn't care about me".

If may seem like you can't win, but it's not the gifts that matter here - it's that you're sending them.

Another thought has just come to me - when my mother gave me gifts to open on my birthday at my male parent's house (my birthday is in the summer so we'd spend a week or two with him), he liked to watch me open them and sat like a vulture waiting for a reponse or comparison with what he had given me. He liked to mock things she said and did and didn't exclude birthday presents, but even if he said nothing about her gifts, I was tense and stressed WAITING for him to say something horrible which would inevitably spoil the day. I can recall the dread right now as I type. And if I liked what she bought me ... I'd be in for an anti-mum earbashing at some point, whether it was about the gifts or not. He'd find some way of spoiling her efforts.

I don't blog anywhere else

2008-03-10T15:04:00.000-07:00

Just to clarify, this is my only blog. I don't have any others. None. The only other places you'll see me are PAPA and PAS mailing lists on Yahoo and hugstoheartbreak.com. I am nowhere else and am no one else!

I'm also the alienated child (although I'm an adult now), not the target parent.

When your alienated children ignore/rebuff all your attempts at contact

2008-03-09T15:39:00.000-07:00

Another post of mine to a mailing list, prompted by a parent's despair at their gifts/letters etc to their alienated children going unacknowledged.

"Following on from Robin's post which I received today, I'd like to tell you that while I infrequently thanked my mother for the things she did for me while I was growing up and even in early adulthood before she passed away, I know TODAY what she did. I remember ALL the little things she did, like the little green rabbit cuddly toy she gave me out of the blue before the big school exams when I was 16. I remember the little notes she put in with mail she forwarded me when I was away from home. I remember that I never, ever once came home to a bed I needed to make myself. I remember how she always gave me just as much for Chrismas and birthdays as the other kids, even though none of them treated her like rubbish. I remember how she saw me struggling with English Lit before the big exams and arranged for extra tuition for me, paid for with money she must have snaffled from my stepfather because she asked me never to tell him. I remember her paying for extra Spanish lessons because I was merely interested in languages, not because I needed them. I remember the little gifts she bought me when we were out together with perhaps just the baby with us who wasn't old enough to blab to the other kids or be jealous. I still have upstairs in my wardrobe garments that she made for me with her own hands (that I was too cool to wear but would never part with, even when I (thought I) hated her most). I kept bizarre things like sick notes she wrote me for school. Her hiking boots. Her purse with a receipt bearing her signature. Her curlers because even today they smell of her. I remember how one year she felt I would appreciate a box of chocolate at Easter, rather than an Easter Egg, as I was a teenager - and how outraged I was! I remember how she laughed and made sure I received a big chocolate egg the next year. I remember she used to always buy me blank videotapes because I loved to record music shows off the TV.

I can think of a million other little things that my now-beloved mother did for me, despite being the Target Parent of some incredibly nasty behaviour from me.

Just like you alienated parents, she loved me and found other ways to demonstrate that in the face of not being allowed to tell me. And she never, ever stopped. Even to the year she died, she liked to send me little bits of money here and there to spend on her granddaughter, a child I hardly let her see.

Back then, I barely paid attention to what she was doing. I hardly saw it. NOW TODAY I can look back and remember and be relieved, grateful and blessed that she did all those things and never gave up, even though the alienation lasted for twenty years of her life.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: don't give up on your children. They will remember everything you do for them, even if right now they throw it back in your face. The comfort I receive from these gestures of love from my poor mother sometimes get me through the day."

The alienator doesn't like rules

2008-03-07T06:57:00.000-08:00

If you're new to my blog, welcome and I'd just let you know that it's not in chronological order. I write things as I remember them.

First, a reminder that alienated parents may seem evil, they may even BE evil, but they are also damaged and usually hurting (especially if the Target Parent has a new partner). When dealing with them, I would advocate patience and grace.

Today's post is about the rules the alienator used to make us live by when we visited with him: few, or none.

Of course, as kids, we thought this was wonderful. No discipline, no rules, bedtime whenever we wanted, alcohol when we were teenagers (me) or TEN years old (my sister), any TV show or movie we wanted (including horror films like "Salem's Lot" and "The Car" which even today scare me half to death - I hid behind the sofa or the ironing board when he put these films on the TV or video, so I CLEARLY didn't want to watch them!), dirty words in Scrabble, rude images and jokes and personal stories (ugh), rude comments about our own growing up or sexuality etc etc etc, onwards ad infinitum.

This is all part of him trying to treat us "better" than Mum did. He wanted to make us like him more by befriending, not by parenting. He told me, as I've mentioned before, lurid details of their divorce, including information about Mum having sex with another man (allegedly) when I was perhaps only eight, details you would normally tell your friends, not your little child.

He repeated that he treated me like a grown up, whereas she treated me like I was an idiot. "I've always treated you like you're older."

He lived with a woman called Kathy for a while. She had two sons of similar age to my sister and me, with whom we got along famously most of the time. When he and Kathy hit hard times, they argued in front of us. On one occasion, the argument was about my sister and me. She was angry that the normal house rules didn't apply to us. Everything was different when we visited. We didn't get disciplined the same way her sons did (by him). His response was not a denial that this was happening, but rather confirmation: "I want things more relaxed when the girls are here". Not cool. This situation so unsettled me that I mentioned it to my Mum. I knew it wasn't right, young as I was and even though I loved that no rules applied to my sister and me at his house. She said, "The rules should be the same for all of you".

It was all part of his manipulation of our experiences with him in order to make us like him more than our mother. It worked! Whenever we had trouble at home, the first thing we would say was, "I want to go and live at Dad's". (Today I can only imagine the hurt that caused her, of which I'm ashamed more than you can know.)

He and Kathy split up, but not before he let one of her sons sit without trousers on in front of we other three children for 30 minutes, his private parts on full show, while he lectured him about bad behaviour. The whole speech/diatribe sounded like showing off. He has always bullied the male children of his girlfriends, using threats of physical violence against them if they spoke up for themselves.

Anger in this alienated child

2008-03-02T14:49:00.000-08:00

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.

My view of physical discipline as a child

2008-02-21T04:16:00.000-08:00

I used to tell people mum beat us.

Mum used to spank/smack us, sometimes with shoes and particularly with wooden spoons. I'm not advocating or condoning this form of discipline because it's wrong - by modern standards, anyway. I don't discipline my offspring this way, perhaps as a reaction against what being smacked did to me.

When I was smacked, it never made me see what I'd done wrong, rather it just simply made me angry. I never felt corrected, just hurt and unloved.

Factor in the alienation and you end up with a child being discipline by a parent, who sees the parent's actions as acts of hate. With every strike, she reinforced what the alienator said. Every time she smacked me with or without those hated wooden spoons (she broke one on my sister once), all it told me was that my mother not only hated me, but hated me so much she wanted to inflict physical violence on me.

The sheer, despairing AGONY of those moments makes me feel nauseous now, twenty years later. I was wretched after those moments and could not forgive her. My reaction was to withdraw and feel worthless, aching and silently begging to be released from the torture of a parent that hated my absolute guts. "If she loved you, she wouldn't be able to do that to you," said the male parent. "I'd never do that to you. I've never had to. You're a good girl. She just doesn't want to see it. She wants to dominate you. She hits because she's too stupid and selfish to think of any other way to discipline you." Indeed, I STILL think it was over the top, even now, even knowing that alienation was occurring. I was withdrawn and traumatized for days afterwards, but she just thought I was sulking.

What I was actually feeling was trauma and devastation so great I don't even have the words to express to you how deeply disturbed those smacks made me.

I used to tell people even when I was into my thirties, that my mother used to beat me. I believe there's a difference between beating and smacking. Beating is successive hits, several, many, lack of control involved, violence. Smacking aka spanking is one, maybe two, as a punishment after wrongdoing. I used to say "She beat the hell out of us". "She used to beat us". "She used to hit us all the time." She actually smacked us once, maybe twice at a push. For example, my sister used to yell "Didn't hurt!" so would get another one. We did not get beatings.

Let me state again: I am not a parent who condones or uses corporal punishment (unless the offspring do something dangerous, in which case it's a spanking or they continue doing something that could cause injury or death) so from the outset I am against her having hit me at all. HOWEVER in her mind, I now firmly believe she WAS just disciplining us. She was born in 1947 - unless I'm wrong, that's how her childhood discipline would have been administered. I no longer believe she hit us because she hated - but I was told otherwise.

Alienated kids say rotten things

2008-02-19T14:59:00.000-08:00

Had a bit of a wobbly about my sister, didn't I? I guess I was really feeling the injustice of the situation that day.

I've said it before but the more I type, the more I remember. There are so many memories mulling around in my head causing pain or anger that it constantly surprises me. I hadn't realised my head was so full until I started writing this Blog - and yet it's helping to clear my mind. Writing things down, getting them out, really does work.

I haven't really touched upon my bad behaviour towards my poor Mum, the target parent, yet. I know I've mentioned it and mentioned that I was AWFUL, but I haven't really given too many details, mainly because I was disgraceful so many times. My own behaviour towards her embarrasses me, especially in light of what normal offspring I have. My offspring do not exhibit any of the negative behaviours I saw in myself or my sister. They're nice kids who don't mind a bit of housework - and don't see the request to empty the dishwasher as the savage order of a slavemaster tyrant determined to take all their time and (ab)use their energy and ruin their my lives. I'm not saying they never complain about chores. They wouldn't be normal if they didn't - but they don't scream and rage like I did. I've never once heard "Why should I?". I can reason with them in a way I sure as hell wouldn't have been reasoned with.

One memory of how rotten I was to my Mum came to mind recently, perhaps because it involves my sister and she's been on my mind a lot. Mum had a weight problem. She ate her feelings and was also a bored, frustrated person. She laid down on the floor in front of the TV to do exercise. We laughed at her. She said, "One day you two will stop making fun of me." We replied, "Yeah but that won't be today! Not for a long time!". What vile children. I wanted to hurt her. I saw her weight problem as a weakness, her own fault, more proof that she was an idiot like the alienator said. It just showed she had no self control. It proved she was wrong to have left him because she was never fat when she was with him. It all proved he was right and she was wrong.

But let me tell you this: I was NEVER this analytical before and am not so now. I learned to see nuances and meaning and subtetly and hints and to twist reasoning because I was TAUGHT to do so by the alienator. He taught me that dual meanings existed everywhere and in every aspect of my dealings with my mother.

So if she was overweight, it was her own fault for leaving him - just as he had once said the cancer that killed her was her own fault.

Siblings continued

2008-02-17T14:43:00.000-08:00

So now I'm trying to work out what motivated my sister. Why is she like this? Through reading and counselling, I've come to believe that my male parent's mother being forced out of the house when he was eleven years old is a defining moment in his life. I strongly believe it has made him what he is. His reactions to upset are those of an eleven year old boy. Ditto his behaviour towards females. He does not know healthy boundaries towards females, nor how to process disagreements.

But her - I don't know what the trigger point in her is. It's going to take time to work out. Our parents' divorce is part of it. Perhaps she was told I was the male parent's favourite? If there was any counter alienation going on, I never knew about it. Indeed, I've mentioned that mum almost never defended herself.

For some reason, she hates me, plain and simple, and always has. For some reason, she feels threatened by me, and yet is as obsessed with me as he was.

She likes to tell stories about me to people, untruths and half truths. She acts like an obsessed alienator. I almost laughed when I realised this. She is like an obsessed alienator - but why? She says she wants no contact with me but spends a long time talking to my ex, fishing for information about me.

If you have any ideas, please speak up. It won't help me to resolve anything because she wishes I were dead; it will just be good to know. Once I know reasons, I'm capable of processing things and putting them behind me. I have had to resign myself to never seeing her or her kids again. I have money put aside in my will for them. I can't write to them because I'm not allowed to know where they live. I had to give up trying to reconcile with her a few years ago, you know. I couldn't cope with the upset anymore. It's so distressing even now, to know that she wishes I didn't exist and that we can't see her children, my mother's grandchildren. It breaks my heart. I was distraught when I was told about her dealings with my ex last weekend - clearly she is thinking about me.

I'm not a terrible person! I don't deserve this!! I don't deserve to be abandoned by the two of them when I have done nothing wrong! I HAVE DONE NOTHING WRONG!!!! I have tried to be there for them both and have put up with an awful lot, including inappropriate behaviours from him, and downright lies from the pair of them, and when I said "No more", I'm cast aside. I have never lied about them or cut them off. I tried to maintain relationships that anyone can see were essentially unhealthy by reading this blog, but this situation tears me up. I want to see my sister and I wish I had a healthy-minded father. My mother is dead. I feel like an orphan.

Siblings

2008-02-17T13:44:00.001-08:00

I have two brothers and one sister. My brothers live close by and we see each other often. They're cool and we all get along.

Our sister lives in another country and hates the lot of us, me in particular. She disowned me in 1999 but has never really explained why. I did something to upset her (an email joke that went round the entire family at which everyone but her laughed, even though the joke wasn't directed at her personally. An odd situation that no one else has ever mentioned being upset about). I apologised immediately and three times. Our male parent told her I hadn't meant anything dreadful but she was furious and sent several emails to me with awful things in them. I responded in kind, defending myself - I thought - articulately but assertively. I hadn't meant to cause any problems and apologized - but she didn't want to forgive. She told me never to contact her again. I didn't really believe her at the time, I must admit. I did not believe that three years after we'd lost our mother, she would purposefully cut me and my offspring out of her life, thereby cutting her own offspring out of ours. Our kids don't have any other cousins.

I honestly didn't believe she meant it - but she did. She never contacted us after that, despite my 8 year old offspring calling her now and then. We wrote to her kids, I begged her in writing to let me have contact with my nieces. I begged her to help me when my ex left. My offspring called and asked for more contact. Nothing happened.

The male parent and I were still in touch at the time and he passed on snippets to me. I'd ask him WHY she had done this. He continually said "I don't really know. She said you embarrassed her in front of the cousins in America" - which was in 1987, an event I don't remember, and he couldn't furnish any further information on. "She just says your behaviour to her is typical". "Typical of what? What does she mean?" I'd ask. "I don't really know," he'd answer. He seemed as confused as me because he could NEVER tell me why she'd done it. He actually agreed with me that it was a hard thing to do after the death of our mother. As I've said in this blog, I'd never cut anyone out of my life like that. "I know you wouldn't," he said. I couldn't believe she would do something SO hurtful for SO SO SO many people - she hurt my offspring, her own, me, our brothers, even the male parent because, git that he was, it meant he could never have all his grandchildren together. I did not understand it.

She told him I was a bitch and a slut, that I was evil, that I'd done terrible things to her, that I'd tried to steal her boyfriend (see below). She told me I was never going to have contact with her kids again. I passed this on to our male parent: "She brought the kids into it -", I began. "She said you did," he told me quickly. That confused me - because I geniunely hadn't. I was trying to keep things together. Suddenly, the sister she had called on a day basis had gone from being her best friend to her worst enemy. I was selfish. I let other people clean up my messes. I was a slut. I had barged into her territory (I had moved into our male parent's house where she was living). I was a slut (incidentally, I was NOT!). He spent a lot of time passing things on to me, snippets of what she'd said but never giving a concrete explanation. I asked him why he wasn't intervening. He said "It's up to her". I asked him if he believed I'd do the terrible things she said I'd done. "Well, no," he said. "Did you tell her that?" "Well, no."

Years before, she had said I was after her boyfriend. That one came out of nowhere and I could not understand where she had got this from. He and I had been friends, yes, civil - for her sake. Nothing else. We had never been alone together. I felt she had gone too far so one day I went to her house to speak to her about it. She said my behaviour was a "bit suspicious". I asked her to explain. "Well, you came round here on a Tuesday afternoon because you knew that was when he has his bath". !!!!! Do I need to defend that one?! "You got your t**s out for him when we were having dinner at your house." I couldn't even remember anything like that happening - until weeks later I remembered I had indeed bent over in front of him to pick something up - but I had grabbed my top and held it closed. She chose to see things another way. I mentioned this to male parent. "She wears her heart on her sleeve," he said. He said he didn't believe her.

Maybe it was wedding hysteria because she got married that year. She decided that I would be at the bottom table, far away from her and even my own offspring. I was to be at the table with guests like my own ex, people who had to be invited for propriety's sake. Kudos to the man, but our male parent flipped his lid.

Go back in time again: she was the quintessential little sister and loved to tell tales and get me in trouble. With our mother, given the fraught relationship we had, she was believed quite often. My sister lied frequently and maliciously because she knew she would be believed. I lost possessions because she said they were hers - even things I'd bought myself. I lost skin in beatings because she told our mother I'd hit her. I lost credibility because mother never believed me unless a third party stepped in - which, for example, our grandmother and stepfather often did on my behalf. The male parent did not allow her to tell tales on me, something which was a relief, I must admit. Despite the torment of his torrents against our mother, he never let that girl torture me at his house the way she did at home. I won't deny retaliating, although I did not hit her. I yelled at her a lot, just as much as she yelled at me.

Back to the wedding: he felt she was up to her old tricks. As he was paying for the wedding, they arranged a meeting to discuss costs and seating etc. That same evening he turned up early at my home very angry. He had walked out of her house. He threw the seating plan down on my table and said "Look at it. Look where she's put you!". I was hurt and embarrassed that she would want to publically humiliate me. I'd rather not have gone that have put up with that. He said, "I told her that she was going to have you as chief bridesmaid AND at the top table or I wouldn't pay for the bloody wedding. She's not doing that." Looking back, perhaps it wasn't the best way of maintaining a relationship between his daughters as in her position I'd have been furious BUT she was using me to make a public statement (but choosing only my friend and me to accompany her on her hen night says something else, doesn't it?).

In public and in front of the family, she wanted to humiliate me - but when no one else was around, she wanted me there.

She had our mother's full attention throughout our entire childhood. I used to think it was blatant favouritism because I was the unwanted, ugly, unloved child. She is very like our mother in appearance. People have always assumed that meant her character was like Mum's too, and that because I resembled our male parent, my character was like his. Whatever the reason, she had mum's attention - I resented it. Of course! I wanted some attention, not all of it, but I didn't want to be left out. I never received the love my sister did from our mum BUT I was the target of the alienator, not her. He didn't want me to receive love from mum because that would prove him wrong, wouldn't it? He wanted me angry so that no love could find its way to me, so that - as happened - she wouldn't want to be around me because I was such trouble, so difficult, such a faultfinder, so critical, so much his child.

The alienator told me that I was not loved because I was like him. "She loves your sister because they are alike, but I'm not like that. I love you both the same. I don't have favourites. I'm not like your mum. She's mean and cruel. A real parent wouldn't show favourites. She's stupid. She doesn't know how to parent."

Fast forward to now: I, the child who was supposedly like him, has not alienated anyone nor disowned them. She has. She disowned him too, for years. I warned him that she'd make him choose between us because she needs to be the most important child: it happened. It didn't surprise me but it surprised him. She cursed at him and put the phone down on him. What DID surprise me, thought, was his reaction. He has always portrayed himself as a calm and reasonable person. That's his "image" - unless he gets angry and then the rants start. When my sister disowned him, this new person emerged. It was new to me but clearly was a hidden pre-existing part of his character. He began to badmouth my sister. He said AWFUL things about her, including that she "has a nasty streak like her mother". All of a sudden she was a devil. I can't stress this enough: the change in his attitude towards her was IMMEDIATE.

But then, after he disowned me in March of 2005, my uncle said things were "defrosting" between them. Am I wrong to be suspicious? What I believe happened was that something else was going on in the background - his partner kept in touch with my sister via text message and suddenly I'm out, she's in. I think she got what she wanted: she made him choose and he chose her. For what reason, I don't know. She has double the number of kids I do. Maybe that's it. Beats the hell out of me.

And then we're back to where we started: a man who had built up an image of being a calm and reasonable person disowns his eldest daughter via an email filled with filthy abuse and mockery of her mother's death, using such vile words that my ex couldn't believe it was his ex-father in law.

The lie perpetuated

2008-02-13T17:47:00.000-08:00

My (also) alienated sister recently chased down my ex on Facebook and, from what he said, pretty much put him on the spot and started a webcam conversation with him. His poor wife was in the room too. He told our offspring who told me. He said he felt like he was betraying me by talking to someone who had disowned me and treated so badly. He actually said "If you don't want me to talk to her, I won't" (despite us having had a big, nasty argument the same day). I wouldn't and can't tell anyone what to do - but on my offspring's behalf, I also mentioned that my sister not only disowned me nine years ago but also our mutual child. He didn't realise this - and promptly knocked her off his MSN friends list.

We had a long talk during which he told me some interesting things. This woman seems obsessed with me, although she disowned me (just like the male parent did). My ex rightly did not want to be involved in issues that are no longer his, so kept changing the subject away from me - but she kept talking about me. SHE disowned me, doesn't want anything to do with me, ignored three apologies from me for any hurt she felt I had caused, has NEVER called my offspring in all these years, has made no contact with us at all, even goes so far as to tell relatives that they're not to give me her address or email address (and has never actually given me a reason for this disowning) - and yet cannot stop talking about me. The ex thought it was odd and so do I. Her words: "My sister doesn't understand me" and "I can't get on with my sister".

What does any of this mean?! SHE didn't want me in her life, she has abandoned my offspring and me and yet talked about me incessantly, so much so that my ex said "I felt like she was pumping me for information".

What's this all about?!

Incidentally, the subject title for this email relates to her telling my ex that I had disowned the male parent - which, as I've said more than once, is not true. His words: "I'm cutting you off!". I would never disown anyone. Her recounting this means that he is still telling this story. Liar!

Pity fest

2008-02-13T17:45:00.000-08:00

Guys,

I'm sorry I haven't responded to any of you over the last couple of weeks. I HAVE read your comments etc but have tried to keep my self-pity to myself for the moment as it's not pretty. I can't stand whiners so I'm keeping my whiny self out of everyone's way as much as possible until this passes - because it will. I'm really not being rude or avoiding or ignoring you. I just don't want to share the misery :>>>

"She doesn't love you because you're like me"

2008-02-09T15:11:00.000-08:00

"Mummy doesn't love us anymore."

"Why doesn't she love me?"
"Because you're like me ... because you're on my side ... because you're cleverer than she is ... because she's crazy, she's a nutter ... because you look like me ..."

My stepdad even chimed in once "You look like your dad and it hurts me".

2008-02-04T06:25:00.001-08:00

I feel absolutely empty and have done for days and days. I'm cancelling my counselling session this week because it's pointless. I cannot tell the counsellor everything I think and feel and remember, just scratch the surface. I can't tell her, for example, that when I was 20, I felt I should have my eldest offspring. I just felt I should and that was that, never mind that I was a student and abroad and unmarried. Looking back, I realised yesterday that had I not had that offspring, I would be dead by now. I don't know how I would have died but suicide isn't to be counted out, purely because I felt so incredibly and utterley WORTHLESS.

That man made me believe I was worthless to my mother. He also made me believe that if I didn't do or say or think exactly as he did, I was worthless to him too.

So today I feel worthless and useless and like none of this will ever end. I'm not going anywhere: my little family and I are fine, but I will never tell the offspring these things. They will never know that the only reason I didn't drink myself or smoke myself to death ten years ago was because of them. I have given up trying to remove the results of Parental Alienation from my brain because it's tiring and hard and never seems to end.

I said a while ago that I am redefining everything. This now extends to my future life. I am planning a different life to encompass the years beyond my children being at home. I have a new career planned which will probably consume my life because it's a subject that interests me greatly.

I cannot get over my mother being dead. I cannot get over him deliberately hurting me so much. SO MUCH. I can't bear any of it. I haven't smoked or drunk alcohol or coffee for 3.5 years but I'm considering resuming all three. I didn't feel pain like this when I smoked ten cigarettes a day or drank four cups of coffee.

Sleep - still bad, still nightmares. I feel for Britney. I hope she gets well. I hope she sleeps a lot over the next two weeks, although her loss is giving her nightmares too.

I thought realising my mother loved me would be the beginning of a new mindset or a new start to my life. It hasn't been. I feel the most incredible loss not just for my mum but also what should have been.

If I saw that man today, I'd punch his lights out. I want to hurt him so badly, I feel like a criminal - and I don't even use smacks to punish my offspring.

My childhood thoughts on the legal system and also the silent parent

2008-01-30T14:58:00.000-08:00

This is a response I gave to an email over Christmas from someone requesting my thoughts about their Parental Alienation situation. I've reread it today and noticed things that I haven't yet posted on here:

I'm not a psychologist or a professional at anything other than being a Mum. I can only speak from my own experience but I'm MORE than happy to try and help.

The mom involved sounds really insecure and terrified of losing her kids but she's going to make it happen all by herself, from what I can see. She must be hurting a lot to behave the way she does.

However, this doesn't make it right - and telling YOU that you can't tell that boy that you love him is ahborrent and wrong. When I was a child, I thought it was one of the greatest things in the world when my stepdad said he loved me/liked me/approved of me in any way at all. I loved it. I never mentioned it to my male parent because ... well, you sound like you know exactly what would happen. I was so unsettled and unsure of myself that to hear that someone loved me was a miracle. Even just a laugh after a silly joke, a pat on the back and "You're a great kid!" did me good.

Wow. I'm trying to put myself in my 13 year old brain. I remember any mention of lawyers and courts terrified me, literally. I didn't understand them and all they brought to my mind was prison. I didn't want anyone to go to prison. Also, the word "fight", as in "fighting in court" horrified me. I had visions of people beating each other up - and again prison. Every time my male parent mentioned courts and lawyers, my stomach turned over and into knots. He liked to talk about legal processes and the care system for kids and so on - hideous stuff for a child. I had visions of being taken from my home and being in a children's home without any of my family and possessions. I STILL to this day have nightmares about the law courts getting involved in my life because of what someone else has said about me and taking my kids off me - and feeling powerless because no one is listening to me. It's never happened of course and never will, but even before I had kids I had nightmares about being in prison and kept away from my brothers (who I adore).

I think the biggest issue for me at 13 was that I felt that no one was listening to me. The male parent didn't listen to the positive things I said about my mum and her family - he'd yell at me that none of it was real, that they were evil homewreckers etc etc. Mum didn't listen to the things I said about him because he was a liar and she knew it (but I didn't!). I didn't know how to tell her how much stress I felt. I was tense all the time - and snappy and nervous and grumpy. I was so SCARED all the time. I didn't know who to trust either. He was untrustworthy because he wanted to take me from my home and my brothers and my friends whether I liked it or not, and yet she was untrustworthy because he had told me all those terrible things about her that made her untrustworthy in my eyes. My stepfather once took me out in the car to a shop and back again. It wasn't a long trip. He said to me, "What's wrong?!". They knew something was wrong - and I would have told him every single thing if that car trip had been longer because before we knew it, we were home again. I tried to tell my school teachers, but my sentence, "My dad is always moaning at me" just seemed like a whiny kid. They didn't know it meant so much more. Also, because the alienator lied so much and fed me with so many lies, my credibility was severely damaged - another reason no one listened to me because they didn't realise that I wasn't lying - as far as I was concerned. I was spouting his lies.

Household rules and chores - if someone had asked me to make a rota for the chores and to chair a meeting about houserules, I would have shut right up! If I'd made the rules jointly with everyone else (and received explanations for curfew that made sense like, "If you're late, I start panicking like you wouldn't believe that you've been run over or kidnapped or fell and hit your head", instead of "Because I said so", (my own mother's personal favourite and, I admit, sometimes mine :>)), then I'd have had nothing to complain about. I felt SO pulled by what was happening that I felt powerless. I had no control over anything, not even my own mind so when I was given rules, I instinctively reacted negatively because my little brain didn't want to cope with anymore pressure.

One sentence that I wish I'd known to say when I was his age, something I would have said with the alienator during a quiet, calm, good moment: "I love both my parents."

You asked about defending yourselves and avoiding calling her a liar. It did me no good whatsoever that my mother never defended herself - it backed up and supported everything that he said about her. In her way, she was hoping it would end and also trying to be dignified, and, just like you, trying to keep things pleasant. However, there were odd occasions when she said little things that brought me up short and made me stop and think. For example, he swears that he always got up with me in the night when I was a baby. I repeated that more than once to her and eventually she said, "But I breastfed you so that can't be true, can it?" That was it: no argument, no raised voice, just a single little sentence that stopped me. It was completely true and completely logical. I remember going back to him with that information to see what he would say: he covered his tracks by spluttering, "Well ... um ... well, I carried you to her from your crib". I noticed his discomfort. However, one sentence wasn't enough and it was soon snowed under by everything else he said.

I WANTED her to defend herself and tell me he was lying or wrong. I really did. I didn't want the things he said to be true. I didn't want any more tension or yelling or anger, but I didn't want her to stay silent. I didn't want to think she didn't love me or that she loved my sister more - because I got that stuff too. It made me so jealous of my sister. I had such a hard time with their relationship. I wanted the same relationship.

I also should have had counselling because counselling has now been able to free me from all that horror. A third party telling him to believe in his own instincts could make all the difference. Also, being told that your step son's mum is angry because she loves him and is scared of losing him might help. Not sure.

Wow, I've gone on a bit. I hope something here helps you. Please do come back to me if you need to. I'm happy to help because, as this loooong email shows, it's a subject I'm passionate about!!!! You know what will work for you and your family so if none of this is any good, let me know and I'll have another think. I won't be offended!

Lies and control

2008-01-25T14:42:00.000-08:00

These two subjects are going around my head this week, along with many tears of grief.

The male parent said Mum didn't love me. So I'd ask why she didn't just let me live with him then. He said it was because she wanted to control me.

I believed it. I believed pretty much everything he said for years because he'd got in there first and she never defended herself (but she also didn't understand or know what was happenening, so she didn't know that she SHOULD have defended herself or that there was even anything to defend herself against). Every time she told me off - which is what happens to all kids! - her reprimands bounced off a mind that had been filled with hate: hate from her towards me, hate towards her from him via me, hate for myself because I was so hideous my mother didn't love me. I was so angry and thus I was horrible.

But his arguments were specious, though I didn't understand. I accepted what he said because I trusted him. Now, today, I can't remember why I trusted him, but as a seven year old I did. It made no sense to me that she kept me despite not wanting me, so I asked him about this often. He continually said she only wanted me so she could control me, that she wanted control over my sister and me and him, that she just wanted power and control. It made no sense whatsoever but it was all I had to go on.

What an ugly, damaging thing to tell your own child: that your other parent is capable of evil and that they actually want to inflict that evil on you. There is no love in this.

I understood so little, almost nothing. My mind was blank and innocent until it was filled with the anger, hatred and bitterness of a grown man.

Gah.

2008-01-13T15:27:00.000-08:00

Am exhibiting old but familiar signs of real stress at the moment and have been for about a week. I'm having sleep trouble again and skin issues. I'm losing interest in sleeping - before, I had no trouble actually going to sleep, just trouble staying asleep. I don't go to bed until I can't stay awake any longer. I'm out of my normal routine - but I've had three weeks off over Christmas - and will really only get back into my normal routine from tomorrow onwards.

I *think* it's grief surfacing, to be honest, real nasty down and dirty honest grief for my parent. Normally I go to church on a Sunday but this morning offspring came in to wake me up - and I said "I'm not going!" and rolled over. The thought of getting out of bed and even of going to church made me want to cry. I just wanted to cry for mum all day.

Instead I've done classic avoidance stuff: reading Michael Crichton and surfing the Net. I can't bear to have a quiet moment.

Thanks to Louise U

2008-01-12T15:16:00.000-08:00

I have been wishing there was some way I could know how my Mum would feel if she knew how I feel at the moment - how sorry I am for being such a (manipulated and abused) little git to her. I have a faith, as I've mentioned before, and I have been praying for weeks for some kind of experience or answer or even a dream (well, Joseph had them!) to let me know how she feels right now (because life goes on after death). Nothing was happening. I felt like I was in limbo.

And then Louise posted this.

Louise said...
I am so sorry for what you are feeling, I also feel those feelings often.

I am not only analienated mother, I was an alienated child as well.

It took me until I began going through it with my children to figure it all out.

My target parent is also in a better place without my having cleared things up before it was to late.

I know he looks down on me and forgives me as your Mum forgives you, it wasn't our fault.

Just as I forgive my children, it isn't their fault, how could I want for them to suffer grief for the way they treat me?

I can't.

31 December 2007 01:07

Louise, you answered my prayer. I've read your blogs too and I've appreciated all your comments on mine but what you said really, really struck a chord with me. I know that this is how I'd feel if I were in my Mum's position, and I feel certain that this is how she would feel too. THANK YOU so much. It took me a few days to realise this. I was actually with my counsellor when it hit me. THANK YOU. You've set my mind at rest.

Redefining EVERYTHING

2007-12-29T16:45:00.001-08:00

Since I realised that I was subjected to Parental Alienation, I have travelled through various emotional stages. Grief and pain are involved, but also healing and empowerment. My favourite change is the calming I'm experiencing. Growing up convinced my mother hated me created such panic in my spirit and in my mind that this panic had to begin to leave me before I really comprehended its existence. I no longer exist in that place; I no longer panic and feel stress because I now know I'm NOT NOT NOT that evil, wicked, horrendous, stupid, different, silly, immature, strong person, the person hated by their mother for all those faults. She categorically did not hate me and actually loved me as much as any mother loves their child - I am therefore NOT faulty. The insecurity that arose from being led to believe the above gave rise to the aforementioned panic. As I've said before, I've lived in a state of stress for thirty years because my male parent specifically told me my mother did not love me. Nowadays, I'm so much calmer and at peace with myself. It's visible and tangible and other people notice it. IT'S WONDERFUL. I am a much nicer person to be around. I'm not on tenterhooks anymore, trying to please everyone and be a smiley-happy-eager nervous simperer.

I am so much calmer and more relaxed about myself. This big knot of tension in my stomach is unravelling and it's a miracle.

Understanding the PA also means that every relationship in my life (almost) has to be redefined, in particular those with members of my mother's family as they were also attacked as part of the PA. I have avoided my mother's family for most of my life and almost entirely since she died. Whenever I have seen them at funerals, I have been stand-offish and kept myself apart from them, partly because I was convinced I was a loser-idiot, but also because I believed them to all be as psychotic as the male parent told me they were. "They're all nutters" he said often.

This redefinition is difficult, though. I've made a start and am in touch with one Aunt who was absolutely HATED by my male parent - and lo and behold, she's nothing like he said she was. Another Aunt has tried to maintain contact with me over the years but as I've tried to ignore her as much as possible, it hasn't been easy for her. Again, this Aunt was a target by the male parent: he called her a whore frequently. Now an uncle wants to be in touch and I've held off for over a month. I don't know why I'm so nervous about emailing him. As this point, I'm too afraid to see any of them, apart from the first Aunt who we visited in November, but emailing should be easy, right? I don't know. When I saw my Aunt in November, I cried a lot because we went over the problems with my Mum and what I now know. I didn't mean to blub. It just came out - just like during my chat with the step-father the other day. So at the moment I don't want to see them - but I can't understand my reluctance to email this uncle. I'll have to mull it over. I also have to hope that anyone I get in touch with will be able to see me as I am now and understand that I am not the same as when we last met. I'm hoping for forgiveness where relevant. I'm not that much of a social person so I don't want to be overwhelmed with social invitations or anything like that. I will be happy to be included in the lives of a handful of people who care about me and will talk to me about my Mum - another consquence of Parental Alienation is that I was not interested in her as a person. I didn't want to know about her interests, ambitions, childhood, personal life, nothing. To me she wasn't someone I cared to know or understand. I'm asking questions now but I didn't know the schools she went to, the places she lived, who her friends were, what music she liked. Shaming! This is embarrassing.

Another issue at the moment is that old enemy: grief. As you know, I hardly grieved for my mother (she died in 1996) but this year has been a turning point. I KNOW that I hold so much grief within me that if I let it all out in one go, I would be out for the count, so I'm pretty certain I'm holding back. Mentally speaking, I've been waiting for an opportunity to get it all out but the opportunity is not forthcoming. My counsellor pointed out that it probably never will be. I have commitments on my time, like any other mother, that do not permit me to take hours or a day off to have a bloody big cry. I remember having a cry like that (or three) when my ex left and, though it hurt like HELL, it was cathartic and healthy. I got over that break up well because I cried a lot. Life is different now. I have less time to myself now so, at my counsellor's suggestion, I'm actually letting it out in dribs and drabs, rather than holding it in and waiting for a day that might never come. While grief is painful as we all know, whenever I feel sad about mum, I sit with it for a while and feel it. It's never too big to handle, something I couldn't bear (and maybe another reason I've been putting off "The big cry" because it will also hurt like hell), and each time I feel the pain, sometimes/usually having a cry, I feel a bit better.

I truly 100% am "letting it out", but in a way I can cope with, one that won't overload me with grief. I have these sad moments usually more than once a day but my mind is freeing up. I don't feel so laden down with grief. I'm not in a place where I can cry a lot all in one go and I'm still the Queen of Distraction (ie finding things to do when I really could be taking a moment to work through the grief), but I'm feeling better.

I also know that this is a grief that will never entirely leave. The grief I felt for my ex is gone, end of story. Grief for a loved one cannot disappear, I understand that, but it can lessen and in time it won't be something constantly on my mind, like now.

Grief for Mum, the PA, my sorrow for the pain I caused her - these three things weigh me down at the moment.

A validating chat with my Step-father

2007-12-27T15:11:00.000-08:00

Offspring and I popped round on Sunday to deliver Christmas presents and I found myself talking with him about my Mum. Right now I can't actually remember how the conversation started but suffice it to say that he validated some of the conclusions I have drawn independently recently in this blog. It was awkward at some points because his wife was in and out of the room. He said more than once that he'd pop around during the Christmas holiday - and he never comes to my house, so I'm hoping this means he wants to talk more.

Most importantly, my Mum did think I hated her. I asked him outright: "Did she think I hated her?" He just nodded, didn't say anything. I explained what the male parent/the alienator had been doing and he said she hadn't known anything about it. She just thought I hated her. He also offered the following piece of information: that she gave up on me, in a sense. She withdrew, worn out with me, something you as a reader will remember me saying a while back. I've withdrawn from someone I love for the same reason so I can understand why she did it. He spoke of my teenage years being horrendous, the very time when I knew she was withdrawing from me emotionally, the very time I was becoming angrier and angrier from the hurt that her withdrawal was causing me.

He also said, unrelated to anything, "Your mum always did her best for her kids".

He said he didn't remember my male parent ever asking for custody of us, something the latter made a great big deal out of, sombrely telling us on the way home (which he used as a time to rile us up and make us angry in order to drop us off miserable with our mother) "Mummy has said no". My stepfather said if this actually ever happened, he never knew about it (something that would have been unlikely).

He remembered how poor we were: my school bag was a carrier bag from the supermarket and my pencil case a plastic sandwich bag. He remembered how my male parent kept everything after the divorce (including my school stuff), my mother's possessions, all her memories and photographs.

Actually, this is more important her thinking I hated her: he said several times, "She DID love you." We discussed the anger I displayed towards her leading her to think I hated her and he added, "You know, she knew deep down that you love her." He's having similar problems with one of my brothers - there are no alienation issues, just an angry young man who won't help himself and is slowly wearing out everyone's patience. Neither my stepfather or I really understand what's going on in his head because none of the rest of us are like him, but we are both hanging in there. This brother screams hatred and insults at my stepfather, calls him names, has hit him before or so I'm told, he has a history of self-harming, and even now calls his dad by his given name. Despite all this, my stepfather said, "I KNOW he loves me, no matter what he says or does, and your mum KNEW you loved her deep down, no matter what you said or did".

I need to sleep now but I feel a post about Mum's depression developing. Will probably post tomorrow night.

Happy Christmas

2007-12-25T14:57:00.001-08:00

To everyone who comes here.

If you're finding today hard, like I do, take a moment with me to remember and count your blessings. If you're feeling really, really bad, find five things you're grateful for. Remember that someone, somewhere has it worse than you today. If your kids/alienated parent is not in your life today, at least they're healthy, right?

I truly hope you find a way to enjoy at least some of today. In fact, I insist! I insist that after today is over, you will look back and think, "Okay, actually THAT bit was enjoyable".

Never give up on your kids

2007-12-14T05:06:00.001-08:00

If you're an alienated parent, ie the target parent, never give up on them. No matter how tired or distressed or grieved you become, giving up on them is the single WORST thing you can do. When you feel you don't have the strength to go on, remember this: giving up on your children tells them that everything the ex says about you is right. If you give up on them, it's over.

Chances are, the alienator will also dump them at some point because their alienating tactics are about control. Sooner or later (probably later), your child/ren will realise what the alienator has done. They will also grow up eventually and the control the alienator has over them will weaken. It may even bring the alienator back to breaking point again. It did with me.

The alienator did not like that his control over me had waned because I had simply grown up. No one else in my family has a problem with me, but he could not bear that I had my own opinions, most especially my own opinions about my mother's (the target parent) family.

Something alienated children do to protect themselves is to either never speak of or never say anything nice about people the alienator hates, usually the target parent's family. I LOVED my maternal grandmother with an absolute passion. Given the state of my relationship with my mother while she was alive, my grandmother's love and acceptance was a life saver to me. My male parent, the alienator, couldn't bear that I loved her. I would never mention it to him while I was growing up or I'd never hear the end of it. "THAT WOMAN and above all her eldest daughter are to blame for our divorce! If it weren't for them, your mother and I would still be together!" Of course, they weren't to blame: they weren't even in the same country as us. My mother went home to her family once she'd made her mind up to leave.

I guess it's part of the condition of an alienator. He could never accept that the divorce was only between him and my mother. He could never accept ANY part of the blame at all, ever. Even three years ago he still carried the bitterness and, as I've mentioned before, he said her cancer was karma for leaving him and that it was her own fault.

So, faced with a rant like the one above, I never told him that my relationship with my grandmother was one of the joys of my life. He reserved his nastiest rants for the "eldest daughter" mentioned above, my Aunt. He said some AWFUL things about her when I was younger than instilled such a morbid fear of her that I couldn't bear to be in the same room as her. My aunt's husband, for example, beat her up. He said it was her own fault because she had such a big mouth. As a consequence, I've NEVER had a relationship with her. She recognized on the rare occasions that I saw her that there was a problem with me. She said as much in November of this year when I saw her. She didn't know what it was: she just saw me acting like a little demon, upsetting her sister who, like my own eldest daughter, was really quite a gentle person at heart. Mum didn't know how to discipline us by herself. Aunt knew, for example, on the day of Mum's wedding to my stepfather that I was seriously upset about it and acting hatefully (click the REMARRIAGE label to the left). No one realised the reasons (previously posted: I thought I had failed to reunite my parents, a duty I had believed was mine, partly due to the male parent's pressures and behaviours, and that I was to blame for their divorce) and, to be honest I'd probably do the same too under these circumstances, my aunt took me to one side and threatened me with trouble if I spoiled mum's special day. However, no love of me was inferred so given what the alienator had brainwashed me with about mum and her family and my stepdad, her warning to a naughty child only reinforced what the alienator had told me: that these people were evil, didn't love me, didn't want me, wanted to control me etcetera, etceterea and bloody etcetera.

So, the upshot of this is that once I grew up (and I'm talking late 20s, early 30s), I was braver about expressing myself to him. I was still afraid of him and still am now, but I was more confident about saying that I loved my grandmother. He'd argue and blame her for mistreating him by causing his divorce. I remember the blank look on his face when I said, "Well, she's never mistreated me". He shut right up. I almost laughed - and it was so empowering!! He just couldn't bear it though. It was a beginning for me and the end for him. He started picking on other areas of my life after that (he didn't like my kettle, that I don't give my ADULT cats milk, that I didn't have marmalade in the house when he came to visit (get over it! I hate the stuff!), didn't believe I could wire a plug myself: "Let me do it properly for you"), real nitpicking - and continued picking fault with my religion. He could never sit down and have a proper discussion about it. He never asked me why I chose it. He just picked fault with it via sarcastic remarks and silly comments, ignoring me when I said it was a closed subject.

I think he just didn't want me anymore when he realised he didn't have full control over my mind. So he dumped me - and my kids. Unfortunately for him, that act unravelled EVERYTHING. Within six months I realised what he had done and now there's no going back. Perhaps he knew that would happen and that's why he dumped us.

Now I'm glad he's out of our lives but I'm saddened that I have such a messed up parent who was willing to screw his child up to get revenge. I wish someone else had been my father, because he is not that. I'm ashamed that he's my parent. I'm saddened that he can't be trusted around my children or me. I'm saddened by the lack of a grandparent - my kids have, in fact, lost BOTH my parents now. However, that man will NEVER be allowed near us again. End of story. Sometimes I'm paranoid about him: I'm so desperate to keep him away from us because I am afraid of him that if some guy at the supermarket resembles him, out of the corner of my eye, I panic.

I haven't disappeared

2007-12-07T06:21:00.000-08:00

I have deadlines to work towards at the moment and will be finished Tuesday 11th December. I might post before then but only if it's a biggie :>

2007-12-03T13:01:00.000-08:00

"The offender's actions create a context in which the mother and child are blind to his role in creating the difficulties in their relationship"(Lang & Kamsler, 1990, 169)

From this website.

I agree with this. I had no idea what was being done to me and I still believe my mother didn't have a clue. She just thought I hated her, that I couldn't cope with, for example, the other kids in the house, my step-father, rules and discipline etc.

Rules and discipline, more specifically HER rules and discipline ... I couldn't cope with them, no, I admit it. I thought everything she said and did to discipline me was personal because she hated me. I NEVER thought she was trying to just raise me and train me to be an adult. I had been told that she wanted to control me and that she didn't want me, as I've mentioned so many times before, and that everything she did was based on her hatred of me, not love - never love.

"I've hurt myself by hating you"

2007-11-28T03:31:00.000-08:00

"Hurt" by Christina Aguilera. This song sums me up at the moment. Christina wrote how I feel about mum.

"I've hurt myself by hating you" - couldn't have said it better.

Listen to the song or look up the lyrics on the Net. Contrary to opinion, this song is not about Aguilera's estranged father.

"Because of you" by Kelly Clarkson says some of how I used to feel towards the male parent. Not completely accurate because I'm not an alienator or as messed up as the person she's singing about, but it comes close.

Today is not a good day.

2007-11-22T02:49:00.000-08:00

Not good today. One aspect of the PA I have been involved in is that my mother passed away in 1996. I was not aware that there had been any alienation until 2005.

While I was growing up, I was painfully aware of the horrible relationship the two of us had. Now I know that neither of us understood the reasons why. I once said to my uncle, "I know she doesn't love me." He replied, "She does love you, she just doesn't understand you." That didn't make any sense to me at the time and neither of us continued the conversation for whatever reason - and then we forgot. I wish I'd taken that further.

From the time I was a teenager, I also hoped that once we were BOTH older and wiser our relationship would improve. I cherished a dream of us sitting down one day as mature, calm women, talking and talking until we were friends. My ex-mother-in-law once said "You'll find your relationship with your mother will improve as you get older". I so looked forward to this. Unfortunately, mum passed away in 1996.

Yesterday during my counselling session, we discussed not only forgiveness towards my male parent (which coincidentally last night was mentioned in a comment on this blog) but also grieving properly for my mother.

Back when I still thought all our problems were because mum didn't want me and couldn't hide it, I managed to, over a period of months, reach a point of forgiveness for her. I have a religion, as you know, which helped significantly in that. Forgiving doesn't mean forgetting, but it does mean allowing some peace into your mind about a particular person and their actions. I felt much better, though I still felt sad. My counsellor mentioned this same process in relation to my male parent and clearly, since I can only call him "male parent", I have some anger to let go of and a whole lot of forgiving to do. I will be working on this because I don't want to be angry forever. I strongly believe that this process of healing has come at this particular time in my life for a particular reason.

The hard thing today is grief. I've never really grieved for mum. You can't grieve for someone you don't think you love and who you don't think loves you. I cried a bit on the day of her funeral, but I cried more when my ex left, if I'm honest. Unfortunately, it's really starting to hit me now. Last night, I couldn't sleep because of it. I was awake for a long time, sometimes crying, sometimes just thinking about her. Uppermost on my mind is the knowledge that I wasn't there for her during the last ten weeks of her life. I felt unwanted enough that I saw her a handful of times during that period, although distance and lack of finance did play a part. My sister and I lived hours away by car but that shoudn't have mattered, should it?

This is how extreme the PA affected me at that time: I truly believed she wouldn't care see me, even though she was dying.

Now I just feel like I abandoned her and was unbelievably selfish. I wasn't there. Those words keep going round my mind and I keep breaking down today. I keep shouting silently, "I'm sorry!". She died slowly over ten weeks and I wasn't there. She saw my offspring once or twice during that period.

My sister and I felt like we were treated very badly during that period and also after mum died. Perhaps this is why - perhaps we were perceived as uncaring and selfish. Everyone flocked to comfort our younger brothers and said cruel things like "It's alright for you girls because you've got your kids," but we were left to our own devices at a time we most needed our family. Perhaps this is why. My stepfather, however, was furious that we were excluded like this so he certainly never felt we had done wrong. He's never said anything about it us since, either.

I did want to go and stay with her and even offered to when schools broke up for the summer holidays but was told a cousin had already decided to care for my mother (MY mother) during that time. My brothers had protested because they wanted me there. I don't really understand all this. Again I felt rejected, as part of the pattern, so perhaps that added to me not visiting more. I was genuinely poor and without transport at the time. The times I did visit mum were by getting lifts with other people.

So this is what's on my mind today. A floodgate of grief has opened, and perhaps it's about time, but it feels raw and horrific. It's as if she has just died and I miss her so much. I wish I could talk to her. I don't feel like talking to anyone so I'm staying at home today. My stomach is churning and my throat feels strained.

Looking back positively for the first time

2007-11-21T07:03:00.001-08:00

I've realised today that I'm looking backwards quite a bit at the moment, but not in a negative way. I am able to look back at memories of the years when the alienation was at its worst in a way I previously avoided. I've known for a long, long time that for some reason, the 70s and 80s were painful periods for me, obviously, but they were so painful I couldn't bear to remember them for long, if at all. For example, I am looking up old friends and listening to favourite music of the 80s now, when I haven't been able to before now.

Facing upto and getting an understanding of the PA has lead to me being able to not only fondly remember my life during the times when it was at its worst, but also remember my mother and her family in a positive light. I've never been able to do this. When a friend of mine said "Remember the good times," I simply couldn't. If there were any good times my mind was so accustomed to putting a negative spin on events, that they were rationalized out of existence. She was never nice to me - she was only sucking up or manipulating me into trusting her etc, were common "explanations" of mum being nice. She was never just nice to me as a normal behaviour. The male parent always explained everything away.

More later. Have to go.

How long does Parental Alienation last?

2007-11-18T13:41:00.001-08:00

It's a hard question to answer. In my case it was around thirty years. I was alienated into hating a parent, though I always had contact with both of them (sometimes whether I liked it or not). I don't fall into the category of young children who are cut off from a parent.

Having said that, all I can tell you is that the child only thinks they hate you. You might have to just wait until they grow up before they put two and two together and realise what has been done to them. If you don't have contact with them, that's probably what's going to happen anyway. If you do have contact with them, the most important thing to do is remind them that you love them. The second most important is to never, EVER join in. Don't play criticize the ex, even if you want to put out their eyelashes. As I've said before, find a safe outlet for anger but never let your children feel it. You're just supporting the ex if you do. The ex ie the alienator will have told your kids all sorts of rubbish about you so by even perhaps defending yourself in a critical manner (ie, "S/he always says that but it's CRAP. S/he's talking crap"), you're supporting the ex.

You're entitled to two copies of school reports and letters home. You're entitled to have these things sent to you directly. Offer to join the school run or clubs run. Offer to pay for a club or two. Attend everything you can and send good luck cards etc when you can't. Give gifts/cards/letters directly to your child. The mailman will deliver but the ex may or may not.

If you can possibly avoid things getting nasty, do, even if you eat more humble pie than you think you deserve. Your kids are worth it, aren't they?

My ex is also the child of a rotten divorce so, despite our mutual loathing for one another at first, we managed to work our relationship into something pretty decent because we were absolutely determined our offspring would not be victim of PA or even of warring parents without PA involved. It was HAAAAAAARD, probably the hardest thing I've ever done, and we are not perfect, but our offspring knows where we are, that we both adore her, that we plus stepparent want what's best for her. If I ever think he's trying to out-gift me, I say "Wow! That's soooo cool!!!" instead of "You're trying to out-gift me", although I have to say it rarely happens. We did have moments after the break up when he DID try to play the "Criticize the ex to all who will listen" but as most of those people are HIS friends and family, I learned none of it matters and put it out of my mind. He also tried it on me: he'd call me from his new partner's parents house to loudly berate me about the offspring's dirty feet (!). It was all posturing and I knew that and he knew I knew that so I said (with gritted teeth and clenched fists) "I'm not playing this game! Do you want to talk to the offspring?" A couple of episodes of that and he stopped. I wanted to whack him over the head with a rolled up newspaper, but it stopped.

So, back to the original question. The answer? I just don't know. It depends on how you handle things, whether you have contact with the kids, whether your ex will calm down, the courts, all sorts of things. Just don't engage the ex. Be as conciliatory as possible about everything, if you want your kids around. Forget your ego and your pride. Love those kids and SHOW them as much as possible. If your ex bans you from visitation, go to school plays and make sure they know you're there. In the long run, all this will add up and they will understand, at some point, that the alienator is a liar. That you have always loved them. Set up a website or a myspace page or something RIGHT NOW so that in a year, two years, five years, whenever, they will see that you have loved them all along.

My mother put up with me despite my hatred for her. I had everything I needed while I was growing up. She and I may disagree about disciplining our children, but she never let me down, not even when I was an adult.

One thing I would change is something I mentioned previously. She stayed silent about the alienator. She never defended herself, not even wisely. She just ignored everything he said and did, and everything I said and did, so that when I was having rages, she didn't try to get to the bottom of them. When I said "I know you don't love me!", she said "Don't be silly" and walked off. DEFEND YOURSELF but don't bitch about the ex at the same time. It's not an impossible task. Is it?

It will end one day. I can't tell you when. I just promise you it will. Your kids aren't stupid. They'll work it out.

Finally ...

2007-11-15T14:54:00.001-08:00

I'm also going to add this. When I acted out as a child/teenager, all the times I made fun of my mother or was horrible to her, I didn't care whether I hurt her. In my mind, she didn't care about me or about hurting me, so when I acted out my anger and pain, I didn't give two hoots about whether she was hurting too. I did not care about her feelings at all. When I was angry, I was hurting and letting my hurt out. I guess I was trying to hurt her (was I? Or was I just venting?) but I didn't truly believe I could hurt someone who didn't care about me. But, as I've said, I also didn't care if she was upset by anything I did. I was in so much pain, it was all I could think about.

"My mother hated me! My father told me so!"

Living with that belief felt like my insides were being eaten away by acid.

More about alienated child behaviours - Set ups.

2007-11-15T14:15:00.000-08:00

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.

2007-11-14T14:07:00.000-08:00

Referring to this post, things are swings and roundabouts, but better. The constant panic in my stomach is so much less now. I don't even have to remind myself all the time that things are different now. It's bizarre but great. I am so much calmer. I know that my mother did love me and that the alienator is a liar. I lived with the belief that she did not love me and that I was therefore unlovable and not good enough for even a mother's love since the age of six. It made me so unsure and uncertain, scared, nervous, insecure. I was afraid of everybody because I waited for them to find out that there was something wrong with me. I couldn't have really deep friendships because I am a bugger for withdrawing from people before I get too close to them. After all, what's the point, if even my mother can't love me? No one else will.

Now I'm much better at relating to people. I don't have to fill every silence with chatter so much anymore. I used to annoy myself as well as other people. Sometimes I slip but I also don't hate myself for it afterwards. Please bear that in mind if you know someone who can't seem to stop talking: it's nervousness. For some reason, they're telling you about themselves so that you know they are worthy of your attention. They're not bragging, although it seems that way. If they say "I've done that!" etc, it's to show a link with you, not to get one up or show off.

I don't hate myself so much either. I'm relating to more and more people without being nervous and if I am nervous, I'm masking it much more easily. I'm controlling my mouth and not chattering a lot of the time. I'm not saying I'm ready for any deep relationships just yet. I'm still calming down, still winding down from three decades of screaming tension because of a blatant and outrageous falsehood that was inflicted on me by a wicked person/a damaged person (take your pick or pick both). I need to get to know this new person - or is it the person who was always there? I think the latter. She was in there but hidden because that person wasn't good enough for a mother to love. I was the failed experiment/the failed prototype. The real me was hidden beneath all that and is taking time to come out - but she's coming out. My clothing choices seem to be altering first.

To parental alienators and alienated parents ... here's what I'm laughing about

2007-11-12T14:54:00.000-08:00

I have just realised this. It's what I'm sat here laughing hysterically about. In the end, the alienator lost. It may have taken decades, but he failed.

No matter what you alienators do, your kids will love the other parent forever.

They may not act like it but you will NEVER erase their love for their other parent. No matter how much you manipulate them or lie to them or deceive yourself, you will not win. They may be angrier than a ticked off bee for years, decades, even but deep down, that child of yours LOVES their other parent! Even if you cut them off from the target parent and move across the world/country, whatever. Even if your children never see their other parent again, they will still love them!

You will never stop them loving their other parent, even when you make them think that parent is evil.

NEVER!!!!!!!!

ALIENATED KIDS LOVE THE TARGET PARENT!

And I know that because I am one of those kids.

How much I actually loved my alienated parent

2007-11-12T14:52:00.000-08:00

But you know what? Even underneath ALL THIS CRAP, I loved my mother like no one else on Earth and I still do. I would never have admitted it in a million years. I remember being 13 years old and crying at school, in the corner, because I wanted to go home and be with my mummy and cuddle her. Like a little child. I knew/thought I knew that this wish was pointless and would never be fulfilled because she did not love me at all, that she loved nothing better than to reprimand me and hit me.
I felt like a dog: no matter how much you mistreat a dog, it will still come to you the moment you show it a smidgeon of kindness. I LIVED for any compliment she gave me, any moment when she might show me kindness (but not love because I had been told never to expect that), any positive act - a gift she had found in some random shop in town, when none of the other children received anything, being allowed to stay up ten minutes/half an hour later than the other kids, even being spoken to as if my opinion was worth something.
She could laugh at one of my jokes and I was in heaven for the rest of the day. I loved her so much but couldn't show it. I never expected her to love me back but hung on almost every word from her in the hope that she might like me.

How an alienated child feels ... how I wanted to be disciplined

2007-11-12T14:35:00.001-08:00

Well, I just can't stop tonight, can I? It's spilling out. That's a good thing. Instead of crying, I'm laughing ... but not in a good way. I feel a bit weird.

I thought I'd add something about the kind of discipline I would have responded to or would have liked when I was a teenager. As I said earlier, mum didn't handle teenage dramas well. The step father never involved himself. He didn't feel it was his place - but he's a good man. Mum was left to handle the alienated brat child from hell that I was by herself. She yelled. And hit. A LOT.

Bad idea.

I guess she did what she knew. She was frustrated and angry and hurt too. She had other kids and little support - not that I'm condoning whacking kids with wooden spoons and taking all their possessions away - but she mishandled me in a big way. Everything she did played into the alienator's hands. He loved it. When she took away my stuff, he said, "She has no right! That's YOUR property! Go and tell her that! Tell her she has no right!". When she told me off, he said "That's how her tiny mind works." When she punished me, he said, "She's a big fish in a small pond. She thinks she controls the world when actually she's nothing".

What I would have responded to was anything that began with "I love you but ..."

I use this approach on my offspring and so far I still get love notes and cuddles and "You're the best mum in the world", even from the teenager.

Examples:

"I love you but you're really ticking me off. Go away until you can be nice to me, please."
"I love you but you're being horrid. I'm going into the other room for a bit."
"I love you loads, you know that, don't you? (Child nods, probably crossly and resentfully) Good, but you're really winding me up so please either pack it in or go to bed."
"I love you but please shut up."

How the alienated child feels - mocking the target parent

2007-11-12T14:01:00.000-08:00

I did lots of that. I said terrible things to and about her for years and years and years. I laughed at her, made fun of her, treated her like she was stupid, picked fault with her, criticized her, belittled her, ignored her, took every word from her mouth as negative. The male parent said she rejected me. Now I know different. When my offspring is in a mood, I walk off, leave the room, disappear until it's over. I withdraw. That's what she did. She continuously withdrew emotionally because that's the kind of person she was, though as I got older the arguments blazed, until I think she just gave up on me when I was in my late teens. She probably had no energy left. I've felt like that about somebody I loved: I loved them a lot but they were such hard work and caused so much heartache, after a few years, I didn't have any energy left to give them.

She did argue back as I got older (ie teenage years), which didn't help matters one bit. She became as vicious as me, sometimes. I got so angry that I hated her, though I never said that once. I was proud of that. I can still feel the anger towards her in me now, though it was misguided and even sometimes just normal teenage fury. She made me FURIOUS and because I believed that this anger towards me was because she didn't love me, it made my heart break too. It reinforced everything the male parent aka the alienator told me about her.

Everytime she yelled at me, no matter which one of us was right or wrong, it supported the alienator's lies. It was agony. And we all know what some people do when they're hurt? They act out with anger. It was AWFUL. My teenage years were especially traumatic because neither of us realised that that scumbag male parent of mine had driven an almighty wedge between us. At that point, he had well and truly succeeded. He had got what he wanted. He revved things up during those years, telling me her actions were all about control and trying to keep me down and not allowing me to by myself and because she didn't love me or care about me in anyway.

He also liked the other angle: he'd never treat me like that. If I lived with him, life would be great because he was a much better parent than her. He cooked better ("Let me make you a fried egg without all those burned bits on it like when mummy cooks it"), cleaned better ("I know a special trick with a broom that no one else knows"), treated me better ("I've always treated you like you were a couple of years older. She just treats you like a child"), life in his town was better - better schools, near the beach, near the roads to holiday destinations, not in a city in a smaller house ("You live in a slum").

How the alienated child feels, continued

2007-11-12T13:47:00.000-08:00

These posts are really painful, not just because they're dredging up old memories and old hurts, but also because I am ashamed of how I treated my mother, the target parent. I apologise to her nearly every day and I hope that wherever she is, she can hear me (she passed away in 1996). I'm pretty sure she can. I, however, am still alive and still working through what happened to both of us and everyone else it affected.

I recently saw an aunt I haven't been in touch with for years, my mother's older sister. I told her about the alienation and asked what she knew about it. She said nobody had ever known. They - their siblings - knew something was wrong but not what. My mother kept things to herself a lot of the time. She was just a private person. Their brother said my mother didn't understand me. My aunt said, "If your mother had just said, "I don't know what to do with this kid anymore!", we'd have stepped in or talked to you or tried to find out what was wrong". This same aunt was present when my mother remarried - when I was hysterical that she was remarrying, feeling as if I'd failed to reunite the family because the male parent had made me feel it was my responsibility (at the ages of 7,8,9,10). She actually reprimanded me for my behaviour, telling me to behave myself and keep myself quiet on mum's special day. Even then, my behaviour was misunderstood.

It looked like I was just being horrible and bratty. I was actually a heartbroken ten year old, feeling she had failed her father and her family, realising that there was no hope of things going back to the way they were (which he had told me was how things should be, that their split was temporary, that she had just lost her mind for a while, that she didn't mean it, that she was being silly and stupid and stubborn, and was just being pushed into what her family wanted her to do, that she'd come to her senses) bearing in mind I could barely remember how things were.

How an alienated child really feels about the alienated parent

2007-11-10T17:12:00.000-08:00

I loved my mother even though I was alienated from her. It looked like I hated her. That's how I behaved: always angry and irritable with her, always complaining about her, rejecting her constantly, perceiving every "no" as "no, because I don't love you". I actually loved her deeply but had no way of showing it. The alienator wouldn't allow it. He wouldn't even allow me to feel it.

What looks like hatred in an alienated child is actually anger.

They don't hate you. They're angry at you because they think they hate you and they've been told you don't love them.

I hated her telling me off because I had been told she only reprimanded me because she didn't love me. Every time I was told off as children often are, my heart broke because it reinforced what I had been told. This made me angrier and angrier. It must have been harder and harder for her because she withdrew from me more and more, which made me angrier and angrier, and supported what I'd been told.

Fear of abduction

2007-11-08T05:28:00.001-08:00

Memory is so weird. Writing a couple of days ago about the time he wouldn't let me open the door when my (custodial) mother (and target) came to pick us up after spending a week or so with him, I then remember other occasions he spoke about her abducting us. He was "concerned" about it, although it was never, ever an issue. Granted, she lied to him when we were abroad to bring us home (she wanted to "go home for a holiday" after a difficult period during their marriage. That's what she told him anyway. What she actually wanted to do was get us back to our home country and be safe with her family in order to leave him), but once we were in England, it was never something that was going to happen. He was difficult about us having holidays abroad for years afterwards, including making threats before we took a once-in-a-lifetime trip to the US.

The result of this is that I was afraid of being abducted for a long, long time. I can't tell you yet when this left me. I've only just remembered this fully. All this fear instilled in me by the alienator - no wonder I was permanently tense and worried.

He never EVER had any reason to complain about access. He cannot say that it was ever denied him (other than the three month period I mentioned a couple of days ago, which they both blame on each other). He had regular access from the start, almost.

Moreover, if he was so worried about her abducting us, something he clearly made me paranoid about, why did he move four hours away the moment he returned to our home country? He couldn't have truly been worried about it or he would never have left the town we had moved to.

And in case I wasn't clear about it the other day, I HATED those road trips to his house four hours away. I also hated the fact that he lived so far away - I was being forced into all this boring, dangerous, time-consuming travel to see someone I didn't know who shouldn't have left his kids in a city two hundred miles away in the first place! Rant over.

Response to comments

2007-11-08T05:15:00.000-08:00

Anonymous said...
My children were alienated from me in 2001 they were then young teenagers. Last week one of them[ almost 20 years old] contacted a relative and asked if it would be ok for them to come over knowing I was on my way there. The visit was cordial, better than it's been in years] What do you make of this?

07 November 2007 12:54

Rowan Blackwood said...
I think it's a good start. It's hard for me to know what to say other than what I'd want if I were that child. I think I'd want to ask questions in my own time, rather than be told. If I were them, I'd want to hear "I love you" and "I'm proud of you". I wouldn't want to have anything forced on me in the way of gushing love or explanations etc. Your child is an adult - I'd just want an adult conversation with my parent. Smiles. A hug at the end with "I love you". Nothing over the top. Something relaxed and respectful. Good luck. This sounds promising! My email address is on my profile page.

Can I put this in the main blog or do you want it to remain in the comments section?

07 November 2007 14:17

Rowan Blackwood said...
Addition: I wouldn't want the subject of the split/divorce/alienation etc to come up unless I myself mentioned it. Your child is meeting you to find out if you're what the ex says you are. By being yourself, relaxed and calm and respectful (towards the ex, if necessary), you're demonstrating that you are a friend, not an enemy, and that's what your child wants to find out.

07 November 2007 14:19

Anonymous said...
Thank you!
That was what I thought.

I did everything but the hug and the I love you, I was afraid it was to soon.

Like you said, in their own time. I'll be here waiting with open arms.

You can post this where ever you like.

Thank you again your blog helps many of us alienated parents more than you know!

07 November 2007 16:02

Response to comments

2007-11-08T05:06:00.000-08:00

From 20th October post detailing the alienator's background:

Anonymous said...
Rowan,
I found your blog while searching parental alienation blogs. I am a former alienator and am now working to help families heal. I have posted on other blogs and tried to help as much as I can. I am so sorry that you are still hurting. You did not deserve to be treated the way you were. The bottom line is that alienators are very selfish and don't think of anyone but themselves. A word of caution...you need to be very careful that you don't alienate your own children. You know now how painful it is. You see, I was alienated myself while I was alienating my kids from their father. A huge step that I took to help my family heal was I remarried my husband after 16 years of divorce. I came to the realization that I was so wrong for divorcing him and keeping the kids from him. Things are improving slowly for our family. We take 1 step forward and sometimes 3 steps back, but the steps back are getting fewer and fewer. Our kids are 20 and 21 now and I work very hard to draw them closer to their dad and his extended family and work very hard to not alienate them from anyone. Because I am still tempted to alienate, unfortunately. You see, my parents are sociopaths and our kids still have to do with them. But I have had to realize that it is important for the kids to have some sort of relationship with them also...and get help in the process. I hope I make some sense to you. Keep getting counsel, but be careful who you see-not every counselor is skilled in helping people recovering from such a devastating series of life experiences. Be very good to yourself!

03 November 2007 09:06

It's a brave person who posts something like this. I applaud you for admitting what you did. You're a rare breed! Be good to yourself too - forgive yourself. Thank you for leaving your comments. I will just say this about myself, taken from this 7th November post .

I have never and will never allow my offspring to become alienated from their father. There have been occasions when, after an argument with the father, I have yelled "He's such an idiot!" or "He really does my head in", or words to that effect, but I have gone back to the offspring afterwards and reassured them that a) I was stinking mad when I said those things because daddy and I don't agree on this and that at the moment, b) that he's not actually an idiot, I just said that because I was stinking mad, c) that I shouldn't have said it and d) that daddy loves them tonnes and tonnes and no matter what happens between daddy and me, we will both always love them more than the universe.

It's not easy for anyone never to say anything bad about anyone else but you just have to have self-control and watch yourself. You're never going to be perfect, even if the worst you do is convey anger via a facial expression - but kids understand human failings when they're explained to them. Kids even understand just being angry. They know everyone disagrees sometimes. It's how these disagreements are taken forward that matter. It's how you treat the ex over an extended period that matters.

Looking for signs she wants him back

2007-11-07T14:31:00.000-08:00

This became an obsession with him and he passed it on to me. He was constantly watching for anything that might indicate, in his eyes, that she wanted him back. It was like a form of stalking. Bizarre - he was making her hate him but waiting for her to take him back too. Blinded. It got to the point that if she was pleasant to him, that meant she wanted him back - and he told me that. If she used a local word from the area of the country he was from, it meant she still loved him. I kept wondering and asking when she was going to love him again. He kept saying that things she said and did meant she still loved him and wanted him back.

It was horrible and heartbreaking at the same time. I was constantly looking for signs on his behalf that she wanted him back. It was so stressful!!. I was seven to ten years old at the time.

TWO YEARS later it was still going on - when she was pregnant by my stepfather!! When she told me they were getting married, I burst into hysterical tears. I felt distraught. I felt I'd failed. I'd tried so hard for him, to get her to love him again because that what's he wanted me to do and what he wanted her to do, too. I felt like I'd missed the crucial sign that she wanted him back, the one I should have noticed and told him about so he could come and get her back. I felt like it was my fault that she was remarrying and that I'd done wrong. I actually liked my stepfather but I didn't take their relationship seriously. Mum was just being silly and messing about. She didn't actually MEAN anything she was doing. She really loved my male parent and would realise she wanted him back at any moment. She was stupid, really stupid, and didn't know what she was doing. She was also being misled by her interfering evil family, who were also stupid.

Don't bitch about the ex

2007-11-07T14:19:00.000-08:00

No matter how much you want to. You may feel like taking a hit out on the ex or running a front page article telling the world what an evil sob/bitch your ex is, but please don't. Blog it or diarize it secretly and securely or rant at your mother/sister/best friend/brother, but don't let it get back to your kids.

NEVER tell them how much you hate your ex, even if you wish them dead.

Your kids just do not want to hear it. End of story. They don't. Your divorce is not theirs. YOU are splitting with their other parent, not them. They love their other parent. Deal with it.

It's so hard to keep quiet about how your ex has done you wrong, believe me, I know (and I'm not saying I have a perfect score, either) but your feelings have nothing to do with your kids feelings for their parent and you have no right to try and change them.

I have never and will never allow my offspring to become alienated from their father. There have been occasions when, after an argument with the father, I have yelled "He's such an idiot!" or "He really does my head in", or words to that effect, but I have gone back to the offspring afterwards and reassured them that a) I was stinking mad when I said those things because daddy and I don't agree on this and that at the moment, b) that he's not actually an idiot, I just said that because I was stinking mad, c) that I shouldn't have said it and d) that daddy loves them tonnes and tonnes and no matter what happens between daddy and me, we will both always love them more than the universe.

It's been a hard slog for the other parent and me but we have a pretty wonderful relationship now as things go. The break up was bad for while - can they be anything but? - but throughout it all, he saw the offspring, spoke to the offspring every day, and with his wife we are a parenting team. We're not best buddies and never will be, not least because that's inappropriate, but our mutual offspring knows we are a unit and want what's best.

Post-divorce trauma on all sides

2007-11-07T07:22:00.000-08:00

I've already explained how the divorce happened. I'll find a link to the page later on but I have some things to post today. If I don't post them now, they'll either vanish into the depths of my memory or they'll annoy me until I post them.

After my parents split up, traumatic for all four of us, I would say, we didn't see the male parent for a while. He stayed abroad to finish up bits and pieces with our house and general affairs. Something was badly amiss between them - clearly a spiteful divorce, but I don't mean that, I mean more than that - to cause my mum to tell us we weren't going to see him for months. If memory serves, it was three months. She specifically said "He doesn't want to see you for three months". He later said SHE had said he couldn't see us for three months. Now, I don't know to this day who said what. I honestly can't say. IF she did say that, it was the only time I have ever known her to lie about him specifically (she did lie about returning to our home country from abroad, as I think I've mentioned, but she lied to escape him. She felt she had no choice. She was afraid of him). She wasn't like that about him to me at any other point as far as I know. She always encouraged us to see him. Immediately after she told us while she was brushing my hair, we burst into tears. Either she did lie and then realised how upset we were, thereafter resolving never to deliberately do something like that again, or HE is lying. Now to be perfectly honest, even back when I thought he was a good person, I STILL could imagine him saying something like that, just to be spiteful. If we look at his "disowning" of me, it fits more that he would say it than her. I don't believe he didn't want to see us then and I don't believe he doesn't want to see my offspring and me now - he just wants complete obedience and thinks that he can manipulate people into behaving a certain way by withdrawing himself. It's like a tantrum. "If you don't come back to me, I won't see you or the children and then it will be YOUR fault that they don't know their father/grandfather".

I've heard that logic from him before. In 2005 he claimed that it was my fault that my sister stopped speaking to him. They argued about something which kind of involved me but had nothing to do with me (she thought he was stopping off at her house on the way to mine, something he used to do regularly, but on one particular occasion he had no plans to. She felt slighted and yelled at him, refusing to speak to him for a year afterwards. I kept my mouth shut and kept out of it because she's DIIIIIIFFFICULT, to say the least, and I wanted her and her kids at my offspring's birthday party. She was already ticked off at me for generally being alive and was vacillating about coming. This perceived slight when he called to actually beg her to come to the party tipped the scales and she cut both him and me off at the same time). So, because this problem between the two of them occurred during a phone call involving me, he blamed me. "I lost your sister because I was pushing for what you wanted." I NEVER once asked him to get involved or push her or nag her. Not once! I invited her and left it at that because she's as mardy as he is. If you nag, she digs her heels in - so I invited her and left it with her.

Anyway, back to the no contact for three months, I still can't say for certain. Either way, once we did see him again, he felt like a stranger. I've mentioned that before too. He kept ALL of our possessions for such a long time that I forgot them too - I forgot my toys and cuddly bears I'd been given at birth. He kept every single item from the family home, down to her clothes - and mine - kitchen stuff, furniture, ornaments, you name it. Literally EVERYTHING they had built up together remained with him and he wouldn't give it back. He was trying to force her to go back to him. It wasn't until he nagged me about my religion that I was on the receiving end of his manipulation and bullying. I didn't even realise that he may have treated me in the same was as he treated her after their divorce until recently. He does not know when to stop.

Don't get me wrong: I understand the trauma of divorce and being left by your spouse. It's happened to me. I also understand fighting for your family, tooth and nail, but this has to stop at some point, and when you're upsetting and traumatizing the very person you want back, that is, when you have to make threats to force them to come back to you, you've lost. He never understood that. He couldn't see anything wrong with threatening mum with dire consequences if she didn't go back to him. He couldn't see anything wrong with issuing hatred for mum and her family because they supported and loved her and protected her from a man who used to sleep in his car outside their home.

I have to go now and I didn't even get halfway through what I wanted to say. Back later.

To the person who asked how long alienation lasts, I will come back to that too.

Hmmm

2007-11-05T14:02:00.000-08:00

It's been a while. I've been busy but thinking too. Thoughts rolling around my head are one, that I'm an object that THAT person and two, I am also and separately a sex object to him too. Doesn't feel good. Makes me feel dirty and worthless - initially, anyway. Those feelings have been with me since I was a child (though, as I've said, I never realised until recently where they came from). I do however now remind myself those feelings have a source - and unrighteous source, and so will go. I do still feel better most days, although I have to keep reminding myself that my mum loved me. I'm reprogramming my brain. Takes time.

Alienating behaviour - I know people like juicy examples so here's another one. We used to spend at least a week in the Summer holiday with him. I hated the drives to his house - four hours each way. I never wanted to do that drive. It's vile and I resented it. I didn't want to go away from my home and, after my brothers were born, I didn't want to be away from my siblings. I hated being forced into that situation. I hated that no one listened to me. I hated that I spent a full day a month travelling on dangerous high speed roads to spend one day and a morning with him. I actually envied my friends who saw their dads on Sundays!. I'm not saying I hated every minute with him, because I didn't. Half the time it was fun - he took us to see our family, ie his siblings, our cousins, my beloved grandfather, the beach - but he spied on us when we were asleep and slobbered all over me and spent hours telling us how evil our mother/grandmother/aunts/uncles were. He snogged my neck like a boyfriend would. When it freaked me out, he said he was just showing affection and that there was nothing wrong with that. The more I withdrew from him, the more he chased me. If I didn't want to stand close to him, he would deliberately stand practically on top of me.

One Summer, our mother came to pick us up, having not seen us for two weeks. I waited for her and was watching for her out of the window. She walked up the drive full of smiles, happy to see me (my sister wasn't in the room at the time), waving, beckoning for me to open the door and come out. He freaked out. He said, "Don't open the door! She might snatch you!". What an odd thing to say. She was there to pick me up anyway. I remember the confused look on her face because she was happy to see us - me, because my sister wasn't there - and I wouldn't come to the door, as far as she was concerned. He wouldn't let her in the house, either. Wasn't his house.

He also used to regularly ask for custody. I don't know why. She was never going to give him custody, was she? He nagged for it.

The alienator's background

2007-10-20T05:51:00.000-07:00

He is the youngest of four, brought up by his father. His much older sister left home at around the time their mother was forced to leave because she wanted a divorce. His mum was gone by the time he was eleven. Imagine what that did to him? He did see her on and off but visitation was at the whim of his father who, I might add, was great in my eyes but disliked by my mother for reasons she never elaborated on. My mother believed that the alienator hated women, in that he was angry at them, due to his mother leaving him. Perhaps he, as a little boy, wanted to go with her (wouldn't you?) and wondered why she didn't fight hard enough for him? I know that the legal system at the time would not have been supportive for her.

He joined the service at sixteen and never lived at home again. He kept in touch with his siblings and father and, until she died when I was three, his mother and her husband (on and off).

After his divorce from my mother, he moved around one town, living in different places, with friends and family, until he bought a large house in 1983. I never understood why. As I mentioned earlier, he kept EVERYTHING, every single item that was in our house after the divorce, even my mother's personal possessions, my toys, kitchen equipment, the lot. He moved it all into his new house, mortgaged based on a well paying job that he then got laid off from. From then onwards, 1983-ish, he was unemployed or self-employed, though he never earned much money. He paid almost no maintenance due to being unemployed which meant my step-father paid for everything. Despite my anger towards my mother and wariness of my step-father, I was clear-headed enough to know that this man was paying for my food and home and clothes. He knows and always has known that I know this and appreciate it (see, I'm not completely stupid).

At one point the alienator was paying the equivalent of $15 a week for my sister and me. He argued with my mother and step-father about this, saying it was too much and that he was subsidizing another man's child (ie my brothers). Even I, loyal as I inexplicably was, knew he was out of order. I think even my sister, who wasn't more than ten, agreed with me and the alienator found himself shouting outside our house with no one supporting him or listening to him. I'm still not sure what that argument was really about because surely he knew that $15 wasn't enough for even one child? And how could he complain when my step-father was paying for everything else? It was illogical and I can't help but think there was something else going on.

I'm getting off the point. This post is supposed to be about factual elements of the alienators background. My mother and his current partner are his only successful relationships - and by that, I mean not short term. He was with my mother for eleven years and his current partner sixteen so far. Obviously I've had no contact with him since 2005 but as far as I know, he still works at the good job he was in, as does his partner. He's financially comfortable for the first time in his life.

I don't know what else to add to this.

Um ... weird

2007-10-19T15:59:00.000-07:00

Maybe I'm just tired (most likely) but today I feel like crap. Right after my last post, I spoke to my counsellor. It was a powerful session that began as if it were an ordinary conversation. Based on the previous session, it evolved quite strangely. In the end she asked me to talk to my child self, which made me feel like an absolute goon. I felt preposterous, so much so that I said no more than once. She offered to moved out of my sight and I kind of did what she asked. A bit. Even so, it made me absolutely sob. I felt so much pain coming out of me. The key thing I "told" myself, that little six year old she thinks I still am in some ways, was that my mum did love me. It was killer, I'm not kidding. I'm really not into psychobabble and I did not believe for a minute that it would work. She said it was a powerful technique but I failed to grasp its power until I actually sat there and did it. I wailed, and I didn't even know I had it in me. Well, maybe I did. Maybe it's all that anger.

Afterwards I felt worn out and relieved. So strange - but good. However, since then I have felt sad at all the wasted years, incredibly sad. I also feel huge amounts of sympathy for my mother for what she must have suffered without really having any idea of the motivation for my constant anger towards her.

Astonishing.

I feel grief and sadness. I also have been feeling unsure of myself again but I wonder if that's because I'm really, really tired (late nights, not the infamous insomnia that plagued me for two years after the male parent disowned me. The shock and stress of what he did and the complete change it caused in my understanding of my life and relationship with both parents kept me awake for hours nearly every night. Insomnia is an evil curse). I didn't want to go out anywhere or follow my normal routine. Found myself doing lots of my distracting things.

The "hole" is filling but far slower than I anticipated. I was all excited, wasn't I? A week ago I thought I'd be "cured" within days. Got a bit ahead of myself. I do feel better in odd ways, though. Instead of constantly feeling worthless, I think I've only really felt that way, the way I've felt most of my life, today and perhaps last night. This is good, an improvement. I suspect being so tired has an effect. I do feel intensely but manageably sad about my mother. It's timely and necessary and okay and will settle down when I've grieved enough. I'm not afraid of this grief. I MUCH prefer it to the dislike and anger I used to feel for her. Feeling sad is much nicer than feeling something verging on hatred.

I also felt violently ashamed for what I did. I know, as my counsellor repeatededly told me, that the alienation wasn't my fault. I was brainwashed from a very young age, I know, but I'm also supposed to be the clever one. I'm finding it hard to accept that I couldn't see what he truly was until I was an adult and he did it to me, until he lied about me and tried to bully me the way he did to her, all because he couldn't get his own way. I still feel stupid and complicit. The man felt me up and I still believed in him!

I have no one to protect me or take care of me. I take care of everyone else. This is okay. I have learned to take care of my offspring and am learning to take better care of myself - including self-protection. I think this is what my counsellor meant when she said to parent myself. I also need to do things my parents would both do if they were both alive, sane, able and willing. Right now, Mum would tell me to sleep more and chill out more, but also not to mess about on the Internet so much when I have important things to be doing. She'd tell me to manage my money better and be stricter with the offspring (because I think I'm too soft, given that I've always been afraid of making said offspring too angry at me, like I was with my Mum) . Critically, she would tell me that she is glad she now understands what made me the kind of child I was, that it wasn't my fault, that she forgives me and is proud of me for seeking help, for facing upto my part, however much blame you want to attach to my actions, and mostly importantly that she DID and DOES love me and that she knows I love her; she just never understood me and did not know how to show love to a child that seemed to hate her and reject her at every turn.

I'm sad but relieved that I know the truth because sophistry eats you alive and lies can kill you.

Regarding the silent parent - perhaps I was wrong about the reason

2007-10-16T03:15:00.000-07:00

I was thinking about my mother's death today and the last thing she said to me (well, almost).

It was: "Do I still annoy you?".

She said that to me, not the other way around. At the time, I had no idea what she meant but I wasn't about to lay anything on a dying woman so I said "No". "Annoyance" wasn't a term I had ever used to describe our relationship. I just thought she didn't want me so I was angry. To me, it was always as simple as that.

I've thought about that question on and off for the last ten years. When I mentioned it to the male parent shortly afterwards, I was confused. I even said, "That's just like her, putting it all on me," and I can STILL remember his reaction to this day. He just nodded and looked embarrassed. He barely said a thing. He was sombre throughout the period after her death. Could be guilt but equally could be grief for someone he loved. He did visit her grave a while afterwards which, as far as I know, he didn't tell anyone but me about. The only reason he told me me was to ask for directions to the actual gravesite itself because cemeteries are large.

The whole issue was WEIRD and confusing and I could never make any sense of it. I had ALWAYS believed it was ME who annoyed her, not the other way around.

But today I got thinking, especially in relation to her keeping silent in the face of his alienation and badmouthing etc.

Did she actually know about it?! And if she did, did she have any knowledge of the depth of it?!

Her deathbed question, which today breaks my heart, opens up a can of worms. To me, that question sounds like she didn't know. She just had a child who hated her and didn't understand why. It also explains a lot about her behaviour towards me: it wasn't all hateful and hatefilled. It must have been frustrating and distressing and confusing and depressing - because if there was ever a candiate for lifelong depression, it's my mother. She had a hard life even without this horrendous child who hated her (ie me). BOTH my parents had hard lives but I've never seen any signs of depression in him.

I'm now sick to my stomach at the thought that I was a cause of her depression. I have to be honest about this as hard as it is. I feel intensely guilty today. I have suffered depression and so know how terrible it is. It can be debilitating but I don't remember her being "happy". I remember how much she loved our youngest brother (but then we all did; that boy is the most wonderful human being I have ever known and everyone (seriously! EVERYONE) who knows him says the same thing) and for a period of time after he was born and before we moved house, she was happier for a while. Things went wrong for her after that, but she did have a period where I know she was happier than I'd ever seen her.

So, I'm wondering now if she really knew what was going on.

I have to go right now so will finish this later. Just wanted to get the beginnings of the idea online so I won't forget. I haven't forgotten my list either.

Summary of effects of Parental Alienation on me

2007-10-13T17:33:00.000-07:00

Insecurity - as in feeling physically unsafe because prior to the PA, I had felt secure in my place in the world. I felt loved and wanted. Once the PA began, I felt unloved and unwanted.

Insecurity - emotional, because I was convinced by the alienator that my mother did not love or want me, I therefore imagined I was flawed or that there was something wrong with me. He said he loved me in spite of "my ways" (which were no abnormal "ways" at all, he was trying to make himself seem like a hero). As I mentioned, I have spent the last thirty one years believing that there was something vastly wrong with me, like a medical condition or brain damage that led to me being so hateful that my mother did not love me or want me.

Social difficulties - all stemming from feelings of worthlessness begun by the alienator telling me that my mother did not love me, that she had rejected me, that she loved my siblings more.

Relationship difficulties - no close friends, but I also am solitary by nature, I think. I like being on my own but I would like calls on Christmas day ...

Sometimes a stammer, if I'm not babbling like an idiot, when in company. I think it comes from not having adults to speak to, partly. I feel so stupid because I can't stop talking, knowing that thereafter whomever I'm speaking AT will avoid me in the future. I have seen my low self-esteem problems in someone else recently and I recognize that her symptoms really annoy me - so now I know why people avoid me and dislike me and have done forever.

Parental Alienation made me think I was autistic?!

2007-10-12T03:33:00.000-07:00

I've just realised what a tragic comment I made about myself a few days ago. I said that at one point, I felt so damaged by the Parental Alienation that I thought I was autistic!

That's a horrific thing to say! A human being felt so broken and irreprable that they thought they were brain damaged! It's tragic!

Good grief. NOW, only NOW, after the breakthrough on Monday with my counsellor when she made the point that my emotional development may/probably was stunted at six years of age when the alienation began, do I feel calmer and more hopeful, as the most recent posts demonstrate. The tense little hole in me is closing and every day I'm waking up feeling better about the future. I can begin to look back at how this cruel and evil behaviour by one parent over thirty years, not even stopping when the target parent had died, truly caused me significant mental harm.

But what a telling description of just how low I sank: that I thought I was brain damaged, and this was inflicted on me by a parent.

Things I need to remember to discuss

2007-10-09T14:15:00.001-07:00

I'm making a list because otherwise I won't remember and I'm making it here because a piece of paper will vanish in my house:

What I did, as a child, because of the alienation, ie how horrible and hateful I was.
Male parent's own background.
Summary of the effects of PA (on me, anyway) for those who don't want to trawl through my posts.

I've been tense for thirty one years

2007-10-09T13:36:00.000-07:00

Going back to my social skills and lack thereof: I realised yesterday while I wrote that post that I have had a knot in my stomach for as long as I can remember. It's a tenseness, a feeling of stress, one that increases whenever I leave the house and that grows exponentially when I'm around people. It's a foreboding when I meet someone knew because I know without a shadow of a doubt that they will eventually realise they dislike me, despite us getting on well at first.

THIS is the feeling I mentioned - the not feeling normal. I can remember it not being present before a certain point and then sitting in my stomach ever since.

The feeling in my stomach began the moment he first told me she didn't love me anymore and intensified every time he told me things this:

My mother told a lie - or so I thought. She told me that we were returning to our home country for a holiday and that we'd being going back again after two weeks. We never left. We returned to this country with only a suitcase or two - and as I mentioned previously, male parent kept EVERYTHING including our clothes and toys. Male parent told me that she had lied to us, that she had never intended to go back, that she had known all along that we would not be going back abroad. "She lied to you." She also didn't love me, according to him. Was just using me. Only wanted control over me. Thought I was her toy and possession. Didn't actually want me at all. Just wanted to keep me away from him to hurt him.

I worry so much, all the time. My ex affectionately once said to me that if I didn't have something to worry about, I'd worry about that. I was a worried child. I was - and still am - permanently afraid of upsetting people and, even now, at the age of 37, if I think I've made someone angry or upset, I'll cry. When I used to get hauled into the boss's office at my last job for making mistakes, I'd cry. I couldn't help it. It used to drive me mad! I'm too old to be crying about raps at work!

But now I know where it comes from: a worried, disturbed, scared, unsettled, traumatized little girl who thinks that she's so bad, evil, unloveable that even her mother cannot love her. I have felt shame for who I am since the age of six.

This situation was brought about by the one man in the entire universe I should have been able to depend on and trust in. Parents are all flawed, I know that. I don't expect him to be perfect, not for a minute. I'm a horribly imperfect parent, but that man hurt me on purpose. With deliberate intent, he said evil things to me that have affected my entire life, my entire personality, all my relationships, my self-esteem, my mental and physical health, made me ashamed of myself, EVERYTHING. I have no friends (at the moment) because of what he did. I'm incapable of normal adult social interaction (at the moment). My stomach is in permanent knots because of what he did.

BUT today I woke up feeling hopeful about myself for the first time. The knot is still there and still almost as big as yesterday, but today I know I can get rid of it. I know that I'm not damaged beyond repair, that I'm not autistic, or insane. I just have a broken part or two - and broken parts can be fixed.

I went around my normal social interactions today watching myself as if in the third person. I was less tense than normal and less ashamed of myself. I spoke less today and felt good about it. The only time I feel relaxed and unembarrassed about myself is on the days I don't leave the house.

She did love me, no matter what he said. Nothing can change that. Nothing he says can change the fact that the person she didn't love was him, not me, and that's not my fault or my problem. I didn't do anything wrong. He abused me - parental alienation is child abuse. I have a lot of negative imprinting to alter in my mind - but now I know I'm permitted to do that and I'm allowed to do that and that I should and must do that, that I CAN do that. I have no need to feel shame, though it's not going to vanish overnight, but I actually feel better about who I am today than I did yesterday. This may not sound like a big deal but this is HUGE!!! I don't want to tell total strangers that my mum didn't want me - because I know now that it's not true. I don't have to feel worthless because I'm not, no matter what he said. She did love me and in fact loved me so much that, though the silly woman was incapable of hugging her kids even when they were in desperate need, she kept me and took care of me in the face of my hatred for her (and believe me, I wasn't nice to her).

My mum used to tell me that you have to think up nasty things before you can say them, and that to think them up means you'd carry them out. "You'd only say that if you had done it first". Now I know that everything he said, like the old saying "Many a true word spoken in jest", was true about himself, not her.

He, the alienator, lied, did and does not love me, used me, saw/sees me as a toy/possession/object, does not see me as a person with any individual worth, used me to control and hurt his ex-wife, my mother. At the moment I don't feel a thing towards him other than anger. It's odd. After he disowned me, the shock was intense: I had to understand the kind of person he was then showing himself to be. I then spent two years crying as I realised what he had done to my mother and me (and to my sister to some extent), getting into trouble at work because I couldn't keep my emotional state outside, alienating people all on my own by being so tearful and down and depressed. Today, two and a half years after he disowned me, is the first time I've felt good about things in any shape or form. My counsellor has helped me make a real breakthrough in understanding the alienation. I was all kinds of upset for a while but now I feel very little towards him beyond anger.

I'd rage at him if I met him but at this point in time, I feel like I've never had a father and am grieving for that loss. For him personally - that's who I feel little for, to clarify. I don't care if he lives or dies. It's VERY odd to say that about the parent I thought mattered most but it's true. My uncle tried to patch things up but I couldn't raise any interest, not least because male parent is a dirty pervert, but besides that, I couldn't care less about him. I don't wish him ill. I just don't care. Maybe this is numbness, who knows. Time will tell.

I'll never speak to him again, that's for damn sure, and neither will my offspring.

A hard post

2007-10-08T13:42:00.000-07:00

I'm not good with people. Socially, I'm rubbish and have been for as long as I remember. Remember me saying I felt normal until my parents divorced and my male parent began his campaign of alienation?

After that and ever since, I have never felt normal. My sister and I once discussed this as teenagers. We didn't feel right. We felt unwhole. We felt a lack of something but didn't know what to call it. Once my male parent had begun the alienation and thus once my mother had begun to pretend it wasn't happening, I stopped feeling safe.

Apparently, I also stopped developing socially in some areas too - because of the alienation. The divorce itself may also have been a culprit but I know children of divorce who are doing okay. I'm not going to say that the actual divorce of my parents and end of my previous way of life did not affect me, because it did. However, what damaged me was their behaviour afterwards, and in particular the war waged against my mother by the male parent.

I was about six years old when the first comments were made, maybe six and a half. We returned to my country when I was seven. The first comment I remember him making, which I think I've mentioned before, is the one he made in the middle of the night. Somehow he was in bed with me. I have no idea if it was his bed or mine. I know that my mother was sleeping on the sofa and he used to wake me up every night and take me into his bed. I'm fairly certain my sister was present on this occasion too. He said, crying, "Mummy doesn't love us anymore", the sicko.

According to my counsellor today, this could be the point at which part of me is emotionally stuck and undeveloped. She asked me to think about that point of my life, which didn't thrill me a great deal, but the more I thought about it and verbalized the event, the more I realised that those words shattered me and my world view. I had never known that it was possible for anyone to stop loving anyone else, let alone my parent, my beloved mother, to stop loving me. But he insisted and repeated it. Every action that she carried out that was in opposition to what he wanted "proved" him right. "If she loved you, she wouldn't do that", from mild tellings-off to bringing us back to our home country (click here for why I don't give any identifying details about myself in this blog). He's still the same dictator now: if you don't want what he wants, you're an idiot, you're selfish, you're stupid, you're thick. I think a pretty traumatized kid lay there in that bed after she heard that her mother didn't love her anymore. I told my Aunt, my mother's sister, about this a couple of years ago. She said it was lies and that she "could kill him for saying that, the bastard". "But it was true," I said, surprised. No it effing wasn't, came the outraged reply. "She used to sit and cuddle you for hours, not doing house work, just cuddling and playing with you! She adored you!" Their brother responded similarly: "She loved you, she just didn't understand you."

I guess she didn't. I rejected her - but she never spoke to me about all this. I don't know if she was stoic or just hated talking about her marriage, but she kept her mouth shut. Under ordinary circumstances that would be the right thing to do: to keep the kids out of grown up problems. But this wasn't an ordinary circumstance and, as I've said before, her silence was a killer.

I don't know what to think about him having me in bed with him. Could be innocent. I can't remember anything happening. No idea. I don't think I was afraid to cuddle him until puberty. I remember he wouldn't let me sleep in his bed when I was eleven (pre puberty).

So, anyway, thanks to my insane male parent, I am a bit emotionally stunted which makes me feel terrific, especially as I also feel stupid at the moment too. Today I feel inadequate and thick. I'm terrible in social groups and have never really had friends. I'm always the same: I try so hard to please everyone, to make everyone like me. I'm smiley and helpful (too helpful) and over eager and desperate for friends. I have felt stupid my whole life because he has treated me that way so I try to make people see that I'm not stupid. I didn't realise that I just come across as a big head, as arrogant, and as if I'm trying to put people down. People then clam up and don't want to talk to me, so I talk even more. People end up hating me and avoiding me. It's HORRENDOUS to be a social misfit, someone everyone avoids. And I know it's happening so it makes me even more desperate to be liked. A vicious circle. Now I avoid people. I do like being at home but I am afraid to go out socially. I haven't been out in years with another adult. People make me nervous because I know what's coming: that I'll babble and suck up and make myself look like an idiot, all the while thinking "Shut up! You're doing it again!".

My counsellor sees a six year old in all that, who has been told that their mother doesn't love them or want them. Remember me saying I spent my whole life trying to be her little girl? It all seems to come from there, from that moment (thirty one years ago!!!). That terrible, selfish, egocentric man has made me this social inadequate and made me think I was so unlovable that even my mother didn't want me - but that he stood by me, despite me "having my ways".

This is really, really painful. I can't stress that enough. It feels like she's right though because my whole body is reacting to it. It's awful and I want to scream my head off BUT if I know what the problem is, I can take steps to fix it. She recommends "parenting" myself, which sounds completely ridiculous but as my mother is not here to do it, I'll give it a go. If you know how to approach this, please jump in because it just makes me feel weird. She wants me to parent myself like I parented my offspring at the same age. Ooookay. Can't hurt, can it?

Just knowing the name of the problem is an excellent start because you have to remember I've lived for the past 3 decades thinking that there is something horribly wrong with me, something medical. I've even looked for symptoms of Asperger's, to the point that I wanted to go for diagnostic tests. I don't have Asperger's. I'm emotionally broken in one place - but it's fixable and I will fix it. I already feel better just knowing that I can change the problem - it's not autism and therefor permanent. It's damage and damage can be repaired.

If you're an alienator, re-read this post. Save your kids from this. My throat hurts from crying.

Alienators are never wrong

2007-10-06T18:12:00.000-07:00

Continuing from the theme of my last post, what's hardest for me to understand is, after all the long list of dirty, nasty things he did and said to me, how the hell did I succumb to the brainwashing?

I'm an intelligent person. I'm genuinely bright, but that man savaged my self-confidence and always managed to blame it on other people. Again, I'm not saying my mum was a perfect parent; she was far from it. Sometimes she was even cruel, but most of the time she did her best. He made me doubt my own mind. When I felt uncomfortable about him insisting on me going swimming during puberty or deliberately starting intimate and inappropriate conversations, I'd say so - but somehow, he was never wrong. I was. He was never wrong, never at fault, never to blame, and always had a million excuses as to why it's your own fault that you feel uncomfortable because you misread him drawing pictures of your breasts/got embarrassed by him using the word "erection" during a game of scrabble with two teenagers/kept ornaments of men with large penises around the house.

When you're consistently told something - in this case that I was imagining his bad behaviour - it sticks eventually. I feel so stupid for falling for this. I can forgive myself for believing in my dad as most kids do. I can forgive myself for not knowing he is a nutter when I was a teenager. What I can't fathom is how I allowed myself to believe in him as an adult?! I'm currently on my second university degree so I'm not uneducated. My offspring fares excellently - thriving, in fact. No criminal convictions for anyone in my house. I'm a good person. I contribute. I have responsibilites and respect from my friends. And yet, I fell for brainwashing until I was 35. I feel utterly ridiculous.

Unless I'm wrong, I've answered my own question. Brainwashing overrides your confidence in your own opinions. When someone you (secretly fear and) look up to and think is your friend builds you a world view from six years old and no one challenges it, when that person insists that they are always right and know better because they are older and male and no one corrects him, it imprints on your mind, despite the evidence of your own eyes and ears, despite your own best judgement, despite your instincts.

He abused me in many ways but always talked himself out of it and blamed ME. When you're growing up, you're trying to make sense of the world. One of my parents barely spoke to me - my mum. The other one - the male - spoke all the time and even now freely admits he may have talked too much. He bragged that he treated us like grown ups when our mother treated us like kids - hence us watching "Salem's Lot" before we were in our teens (a film so frightening I won't watch it now) - and that this meant he had more love and respect for us. I believed this too. I trusted him and he knew it so he fed my brain with rubbish and adult rubbish at that. Once he knew I trusted him, he could say anything he liked.

I think that the moment he knew that was the day they abandoned me when I was maybe seven. They argued and my mum picked up my then baby sister. She ran from the house in such a panic that her shoes came off in the front garden. He ran after her, jumping over a fence to chase her. And there was I, left in the house by myself. THAT moment is when my mental outlook, my whole perception of life changed. At that moment, I realised I was not important to either of them for myself, or at least not to him, anyway. I don't know what was going through her head. Maybe she didn't think he would chase her and that he'd stay in the house with me? I don't know. I have, until I typed the preceding sentence, consistently believed that being left behind by both of them means that both of them did not love me. I don't know. I will have to think about this. Anyway, I think the moment he realised he could use me against her was shortly after they ran off. I ran up the road after them, wondering where the hell my parents had gone and why they had left me. I found them at a house futher down. My mother was sat in an armchair crying with my sister on her lap. I was so angry that she had left me - and taken my sister - that when she reached out to me for a cuddle, I backed away.

THAT was the moment for him. He knew then that he could (ab) use me against her. No thought of the two poor little girls involved in adult arguing. No thought for the seven year old they'd just ran off and left behind. Just: "I can turn her against her mother as revenge."

Sick!

Egocentricity

2007-10-05T16:28:00.000-07:00

My male parent is a chauvanist. He thinks women should never work when they have children at home. When my daughter was very young, I worked part time out of necessity. He criticized me regularly for it, said I was leaving my daughter. He also put a fake baby voice on when I would leave for work, saying, "Mummy, don't leave me again!". Git. My mum even once said he hates women.

He treated me like a boy. Once he'd decided I was a tomboy, that was it. His mind wouldn't change. He decided what I was and has never changed his mind. Even I believed it. I'm not sure I am a tomboy. He tried it with my daughter and went through a stage of buying her nothing but boy's things, until I protested. His partner bought her girls' things alongside his choices.

When I hit puberty, he became a pervert. He leered at me, would "accidentally" rub against me, against my breast, ran his fingers up and down my back to see if I was wearing a bra. He ogled my sister and I horrifically when we breastfed. He did this to me once. The second time I had to yell at him to leave the room. He actually argued with me about it, demanding to watch. He made disgusting sexual jokes and innuendoes. He drew pictures of me and added breasts (my daughter remembers this). I blocked a bedroom door once to stop him coming in but he pushed the block out of the way - I was 21. He kissed my neck like a boyfriend would (it was after this incident that my mother told me she had been warned, when I was a baby, never to leave me alone with him ... but she did, didn't she?? Visits, long stays ...). He looked at the back of my trousers to make sure my bottom wasn't visible through the material and made comments about "around the front".

He never thought he was wrong. My sister and I complained often and long to our mother about his teasing. To hear "You're getting big" and "You're growing up" all the time was mortifying. It made us feel so uncomfortable AND spied on and observed. I understand parents say these things. It's hard to convey the tone of voice he'd say these sentences or to describe the expression on his face, but I must stress that these were not the normal words of a parent amazed at a child's growth. His expression was DIRTY when he said these things. He was perving on our adolescence, telling us boys would be queuing up for it with us. Mum spoke to him once and asked him to stop. He told us afterwards that he had no intention of stopping because he wasn't doing anything wrong, that we were the problem - he therefore didn't care about how we felt, going back to my posts about Objectification and him not seeing me as a person. I remember a similar incident when my sister was about to get married. She was SO afraid of him going on about her growing up (which he had never stopped, just as he said) that she asked me to speak to him. I did, wondering what the point was because he never listens to anyone. He, of course, said "I will say it if I want to". I said, "Please don't, you'll spoil her day." This became an argument. He said he had the right. He felt entitled to say whatever he wanted, no matter what the cost or how much he hurt her. We both repeated our cases and he only behaved himself after the intervention, I believe, of his partner.

He has an excuse for everything. This used to drive me absolutely mad. He is impossible to talk to, sometimes. He's someone you would avoid talking to because he'll give you "a lecture with diagrams", someone once said, when you've only asked him for the time.

About me

2007-10-05T16:14:00.000-07:00

There's not much I want to say about myself at the moment. I'm female and 37. I lived with my mother, the target. Male parent was the alienator. Siblings.

I think that'll do for now. I don't want to say too much for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, fear. If my male parent ever found this blog and worked out my identity, he'd be after me in a flash. He'd encase my feet in concrete and chuck me off a bridge. Though I may no longer see him as the tragic hero, he still portrays this front to his own family (though why don't they ever, ever, ever invite him over?!) . I am afraid of him. I have only dreamed about him once that I know of and during that dream I angrily told him to go eff himself. In life, I'm constantly worried he'll turn up where I live. I wouldn't be surprised if he has spied on us already. Sometimes I see men who resemble him and I panic. I feel like I want to run away. My daughter is 15 and I don't want him perving over her. I don't want him anywhere near her.

Secondly, I don't want anything to detract from its purpose. I don't want anyone to go away thinking that my words don't count because I'm somehow not like them or their situation is similar. Parental Alienation is what it is, no matter the gender of the alienator or the target or the children. Gender is irrelevant. Fathers do it. Mothers do it. All sorts of people do it. All sorts of kids get hurt. Simple.

YOUR child will be or is like me if they are in this situation, no matter who you are or what gender you are or where you live or how much you earn or your skin colour or country of origina etcetera, etcetera. The differences between YOU and ME, right here, right now, are meaningless.

I'm speaking for YOUR CHILDREN.

Comments. Questions.

2007-10-05T15:43:00.000-07:00

I'm getting panicky about continuing the previous train of thought so I'm going to hold off for a few days. Deborah's lovely comment here sums up the purpose of this blog: cleansing.

If you want to ask me anything, fire away. My email address is on my profile, plus you can leave comments.

I appreciate all the comments so much, as well as the increasing number of visitors this blog is receiving and the referring links which provide half the traffic (I'm considering reciprocating. Leave it with me). As I said at the start, my posts are about catharsis but also about warning potential/current parental alienators off carrying out their attacks on the other parent. I know that someone reading this may splutter indignantly that they have every reason to make their children hate their other parent or "see them for what they are", but believe me, you're hurting your children (and yourself because one day they'll suss you out, I guarantee), not helping them. Deep down you know what you are doing. Please stop.

I have spent much of my life trying to find out what is wrong with me. Turns out it's nothing that a good dose of counselling and catharsis can't heal. I remember sitting at a train station in my country writing in my diary when I was eighteen. I wrote: "Will someone please help me?". I did not know what I meant. It took nineteen years to find out. All through my childhood and adolescence, I knew something was wrong somewhere but I couldn't put my finger on it. The mental signals I received from each of my parents was wrong. I believed my male parent to be the greatest person on Earth - and yet he abandoned me three times, called my mother a slut, my aunt a slag, my grandmother and a second aunt lunatics, and also felt me up. My mother cared for me and tried to be my friend, but smacked me when she lost her temper from frustration and tiredness (and a second husband who cheated on her and admitted to never having been faithful to any woman, and treated her like a doormat).

I thought the problems were all my fault: that I was the screw up. When one parent does their best to care for you, and the other one is acidic and merciless in their attack of that parent, causing you to doubt your own mind, your own memories and experience of that parent, what the hell are you supposed to do? I felt like I was out of my mind sometimes.

But I never was.

A counsellor told me the following: you're not unstable, you were around unstable people.

NOW I know she was right, but I waited thirty years for those words. I thought I was evil and worthless and useless and ugly because of the words/lack of words of my parents. As I said previously, the alienator used every single situation he could find to denigrate my mother. She almost never said a word about him - so I believed him, not her. He said she was wicked, she never said she was not, so therefore my child's mind believed him.

He thought it was hilarious.

Don't get me wrong ...

2007-10-01T06:10:00.000-07:00

I lived with my mum and she was NOT perfect. She wasn't a brilliant parent either, but one of the issues I'm trying to understand is why she wasn't a great parent. She could be a real bully, when she wanted. She was also into corporal punishment BIG TIME, although this seemed to lessen with my younger brothers. Perhaps she realised what I realised when I was seven: hitting kids does not punish them or teach them ANYTHING. It just makes them angry and if they get angry enough, they will hate you. End of story.

Mum put a roof over my head, cooked my meals, clothed me, took us on holidays, helped me hugely with my education - but did not hug me.

I'm trying to understand, timid person that she was by nature, how much of the anger she displayed towards me came as a result of what the alienator did. I don't remember EVER having any anger towards her before my parents split up, nor even immediately after they split up. At first, though I was confused by all the changes, I didn't blame anyone. I wasn't angry at anyone.

My relationship with my mother changed when my male parent came back into our lives during the first year after their divorce (there were legitimate reasons for his absence of a few months: we had been living abroad and he needed to sell the house etc). All of a sudden, the floor dropped out from under me.

I trusted her. I loved her. I was quite happy living with her and her parents while she tried to get our lives sorted out. I remember this period of time. It was weird and changing but I took it in my stride. I was with family who loved me. I lived with Grandma! How great is that?! I loved it!

And then he came back to our country and the nastiness began. My memories of that period have emotions and underlying feelings attached to them, and whenever I think of his return to our country and to our lives, I feel uncomfortable and negative and sad. I was sent off for weekends with this man who I hardly knew anymore. I kept telling him my sister's characteristics as if he was a stranger. "She always does that", I'd say. I could barely rememeber him, and yet he'd been gone no more than a year. I feel odd right now, typing about this, because, to be honest, I've rarely analyzed this period of my life before. I think there's some anger there, in me, for her letting us go off with a complete stranger, four hours away in the car, to a town we did not know and the home of an uncle we had no memories of. I feel pain and sadness. A knot in my stomach. We had no control of anything! Shunted off with this guy who, surely, if I loved him or had any good memories of him, I would not have forgotten in the first place?! Just to show how long it was that we'd been away from him, he kept everything in our home and would not let us or our mother have a single thing from it, other than the clothes we had returned to the country wearing/carrying in our suitcases. He would not even let us have our toys - he held them hostage at his home. As such, by the time we saw him again, and by the time our mother had been legally coerced into letting us visit him, I had forgotten about all my toys. I just realised this recently. I have seen photos of myself as a small child with teddy bears that I must have loved - but by the time I was reunited with them, I'd forgotten them. That's so sad. I had no bond with any possessions I had grown up with.

He kept my toys from me to punish our mother, to force her to go back to him. Even things she'd owned all her life - he never gave them back to her. He considered everything from her previous life and their life together his property and kept (still keeps) everything.

Unrelated though this has been on my mind for a while: I spent my whole life trying to be mummy's little girl again, like I was before the alienation started, but always failed because he told me she had never loved me in the first place. Everything I ever did was to gain her approval and make her love me, because I completely believed that she didn't - because he told me that. This is not the end of this subject but I'm feeling a huge, distressing lump in my throat right now I'll stop for today.

Definitions: which parent is which

2007-10-01T06:07:00.000-07:00

The alienator, the male parent, is consistently referred to as either "male parent". He's not my "dad". Never was. Never will be. I've never had a "dad" because no real dad would do what he did. I did not live with this person. My sister and I talked to him on the phone once a week at least and saw him every third weekend, usually.

The other parent, the one to whom the campaign of alienation was targeted, my mother, is "target parent" or "mother" or even "mum". I lived with this parent.

Parental Alienators are liars.

2007-09-17T13:58:00.000-07:00

He tried his disowning trick on me in March 2005, over two years ago. It backfired because I never went back to him. He just thinks I'm being stubborn. He wrote a letter at Christmas that year (I think it was then, was possibly her birthday two months after Christmas) to my daughter, telling her that the not-speaking was a) not her fault (which is true, of course, but did I not already tell her that? Why does he think that I would tell her anything else? She was 13. She was big enough to know that for herself), and b) that "it won't last long".

What does that mean: "It won't last long"? What that tells me is that he disowned me quite violently (figuratively), deliberately saying the nastiest, cruellest things he could think of, making fun of me, mocking me, tormenting me and taunting me - but didn't mean it? What this latter tells me is that he didn't mean any of it and that it was all a power play. Should I expect anything less from a Parental Alienator?

It felt like a tantrum at the time, because he couldn't get his own way, and I really don't think he meant it. I think he thought he had so much power over me that I'd fall in line and come running - after all, hadn't I always done that up to that point?

But he went behind my back and verbally challenged my daughter. He challenged my parenting. He went behind my back!! How dare he?! I'm not my mother! He also nagged and nagged and nagged me about my religious beliefs. He would never let it go - but then, hadn't I always been the obedient daughter until then?

I guess it was a matter of time before I realised that he is a control freak. The nagging about my religion was a control issue. He felt he had the right to go behind my back and tell my then 13 year old that my beliefs are wrong (incidentally, she laughed about it because, she said, when he told her that his disagreement with our beliefs doesn't make him wrong, she thought, "Well, actually, it does" :>>>). He bullied me about my religion and it made me think. It made me uncomfortable - and then when I wouldn't give in and asserted myself (for the FIRST time EVER), he went ballistic.

Then he lied about me! My uncle later told me that my male parent had actually sat in front of him with tears in his eyes and said that *I* had disowned him! LIAR! LIAR! LIAR!

Add this knowledge to the shocking twisted email he sent me and my brain nearly exploded.

I feel now like a big chunk of my life was fake. He RUINED my childhood. Deliberately. HE DESTROYED my relationship with my mother. BY CHOICE. Right now, I'm so effing angry, I have dreams about screaming rage at him.

He RUINED my childhood. He RUINED my childhood. He RUINED my childhood. He RUINED my childhood.

HE DESTROYED my relationship with my mother. HE DESTROYED my relationship with my mother. HE DESTROYED my relationship with my mother. HE DESTROYED my relationship with my mother.

I'm so angry. I can't tell you how angry I am. I am furious. So filled with rage that I want to scream and cry.

My mother is dead and he's happy about it. He's happy that he made me hate her while she was alive. He's happy that my relationship with her was ruined because he made me love her more than him - but it's not true anymore and that was never real love because anything I felt for him was based on a lie and HE NEVER LOVED ME EITHER.

He could not love me if he could do that to me.

I feel angry and guilty, still. I want to tell my mother how sorry I am but I can't. Though I know life goes on after death and I know that she is aware of what I'm going through now, and that she's also aware of everything that has happened, I still feel these emotions now.

My childhood was a tragedy because of a parental alienator.

The parent that never speaks aids the alienation

2007-09-15T15:23:00.000-07:00

My mother never said much about my male parent or his actions. Not to me anyway. It confused me. I often said, even when I was very, very young, that I wished I knew both sides of the story. Without both sides, I only have the alienator's story to believe. I had no alternative and, as a seven, eight, nine year old, did not have the mental capacity to understand that there WAS another side to the story.

I understand her motives: protection of her children and herself. She wanted to keep us out of adult problems as much as possible but also did not want to dwell on a relationship she had fled. Her marriage was over, in her mind.

Unfortunately, by keeping quiet, she unwittingly made matters worse. What I wanted to hear was that she loved me and wanted me, that my male parent was lying. I needed to know this but never heard it. The only time in my whole life that I can remember her telling me that she loved me was literally on her death bed. Maybe she assumed I knew. I don't know.

She did not want to involve us in what was already a difficult and protracted divorce.

If you're in this situation with your children right now, tell them you love them OFTEN. Tell them that your divorce is nothing to do with them and that BOTH parents love them. Don't do what the alienator does: don't tell the kids that the other parent is being mean or that if they really loved their kids, they would be nicer, etcetera. Don't do that! They don't want to hear it! They don't want the details of your marriage or divorce! I had that rammed down my throat when I was far too young to cope with or digest it or understand it. Adult concepts in a child mind mean confusion and disturbance. I did not need to know. What I needed was reassurance that both my parents love me. I never got that. I got little affection from one (naturally reticent) parent and plenty of affection from the other one, but all swamped by assurances that the reason the former didn't hug me was because she didn't love me, and that the latter was the only one who really cared about me.

This confused me even more: at the age of eight I could not understand why he chose to live four hours from us. If she was so terrible a person, why did he abandon us to her?

Pick a noun ...

2007-09-14T15:57:00.000-07:00

Parental Alienation is:

Brainwashing, mind control, bullying, child abuse, selfish, revenge, childish, unhealthy, cruel, nasty.

The results are:

Pain, loss, grief, tears, hurt, betrayal, mistrust, loss, anger, more loss.

Today I am angry, hurt and bereaved. Actually I am these things every day. Today I am these things but do not want to be. I want them removed from me. I am tired of carrying them. I am angry at that person for doing this to me. I am hopeful and looking forward to the future because I will find release and peace.

I am determined.

"It's her own fault she has cancer"

2007-09-14T15:04:00.000-07:00

Continuing from previous post.

The more I think about it, the greater the adjective. I wasn't and am not shocked that anyone would say that someone deserves to develop cancer. I am absolutely stunned. Astonished. And yet, he used to say it in such a blase manner, as if it was as normal as eating breakfast. It's such a cruel, low-down, evil concept: he was glad she had cancer? Had he wished it upon her? Doesn't that, by inference, mean that he was glad my sister and I, and our two much younger brothers from our mother's second marriage, were about to lose our mother?

I remember how he behaved when she started seeing our step-dad. I've been left too, so I know how painful it is to see your ex with someone else, or even just to know that they have moved on. He was still reeling from the split so he must have been devastated. However, it didn't stop him. I guess it wouldn't. His frame of mind was then and is now the same. Even now, thirty years after their divorce, he will still happily give you a good rant about my mother with no less bitterness than when I was seven.

My step-dad wanted to make a good impression, naturally. He's a good man and I love him dearly (although it took me a long time, perhaps a decade at least, because my male parent couldn't say anything good about him either, and, as you will see, planted mistrust in my little mind about my step-dad's motives).

Step-dad ran a market stall on which he sold toys, particularly big cuddly teddy bears. He gave my sister and I a lovely bear each. I chose a tabby coloured bear, she chose a red one. We loved them! We were so poor at the time and our male parent kept EVERYTHING from the house, including our toys. He would not let our mother or us have anything. I can honestly say that by the time the divorce and visitation details had been thrashed out, I could not even remember my toys - the toys I had owned for seven, eight years! He wouldn't let us have them and so, instead of pining for them, we forgot about them. I had absolutely no bond with bears that I'd taken to bed my whole life. The bears that our step-dad gave us were like Christmas coming to two poverty stricken little girls living in a cramped house with our mother, aunt, uncle and grandparents. We were so poor that my school bag was a plastic carrier bag and my pencil case a plastic transparent sandwich bag, so you can imagine how happy those teddy bears made us.

The male parent said that we'd had only been given the bears because our step-dad was trying to buy our love. That put a damper on things. It spoiled the gift, but I guess that was what he wanted. I can still remember the feeling and the words. I was so happy: "Look what he gave me!" "He only gave you that to buy your love". To me, that meant: he doesn't really care about you. So I always thought: my step-dad doesn't care about me. He doesn't want me around. (When my brothers were born later, my male parent said, during the pregnancies, "They'll be more interested in the baby than you".)

Now this smells like more objectification to me. He didn't care how disappointed I felt or how hurt that he would trample on my OBVIOUS happiness. He had kept all my toys for so long I had forgotten them so sympathetic adults tried to help me, make up for the loss. My step-dad was just being kind. He's a good guy, although I wasn't allowed to like him.

Power games. Mind games. Selfishness. Objectification.

All I wanted was to be able to love all my parents - all three of them at this point - and not have to worry about saying anything that would set the alienator off. I just wanted to be able to enjoy all their company without him watching for an opportunity to criticize my mother or step-father or mother's family. When I showed him that bear, I wanted him to be as happy for me as I was.

Argh. I'm really angry now. It may only seem like a bear to you but it's a metaphor in a very real sense. It set the tone for nearly every conversation with the alienator after that. He was always looking - and finding - ways to criticize and belittle my home life. He wouldn't just let me be happy. I feel so hurt that his own feelings meant more than those of a seven year old. I'm still hurting now. I've hurt constantly for the past thirty years and I'm tired of it, hence the counselling and the blog. I need to let go of the pain. I want to let go of it! It just hurts so much to have a parent who doesn't love you.

Guilt, my culpability, inappropriate behaviour

2007-09-14T07:09:00.000-07:00

My counsellor said I'm perhaps "naive" and "trusting". My ex-boyfriend, co-parent and now good friend, once said I was "too trusting and that's why I get hurt".

I'm trying to work out why I succumbed to Parental Alienation as an adult. I used to think my male parent was never wrong, even perhaps when he behaved inappropriately towards me. I can remember how surprised I was whenever he did anything like that. His reaction was a smile and normal behaviour so I'd then worry that I was overreacting to him running his hand up and down my back to see if I was wearing a bra or rubbing my breast with the back of his hand when I bent over in front of him or even when he drew boobs on a picture of me my eldest daughter asked him to draw (which she remembers).

I feel so stupid at the moment. I also feel cruel and complicit in the misery the Parental Alienation caused my Mother.

I was manipulated into behaving angrily towards her. I was manipulated into attributing ulterior motives to all her behaviour. He used to tell me she was promiscuous. He said her second divorce (from a philanderer) was "karma" and that so was the cancer that killed her. He said that the cancer was her own fault and the universe avenging itself upon her. I was in my early twenties when he blamed her divorce on karma without knowing the details, and remembering wondering if he was right. At the time, I was still furious with her and "on his side" so I agreed in a way. I was not fully convinced in karma at all, not having any religious beliefs of any kind at the time, but I certainly believed that if karma existed, then she was reaping what she had sowed. He once said she would never be faithful to her second husband (I don't believe she would ever have been unfaithful, personally. Even when I was angry at her, I would never have thought it in her character) and that she would "soon be out on the randy again". That quote comes from my latter teens. It so disturbed me that I asked my then boyfriend if I should tell her. He said "Keep it to yourself". I'm glad I did.

The cancer? He shocked me when he said that the cancer was her own fault. I was in my mid-twenties and, with the help of my new found bravery from my faith (having stuck up for myself against him for the first time in my life, much to his annoyance), starting to realize that the male parent wasn't infallible. The shock of her actually developing it in the first place was frightening enough because my relationship with my mother was beginning to change. I had actually begun to look forward to a thawing, perhaps an understanding of why she disliked me so much (my beliefs at the time due to his influence). I was looking forwards to creating a meaningful PROPER mother-daughter relationship and I think she was too. I was very afraid and rightly so because she died a year and a half after the initial diagnosis. To hear something SO nasty and cruel from him stunned me and I think I can now look back and see a beginning there. At that point, though I was still confused by his attacks on my religion, I probably began to distrust him. I couldn't quite believe I was hearing that she deserved her cancer, that it was all her own fault, that she had brought it upon herself.

More later - have to do something.

"Your mother just sees you as a toy"

2007-09-08T15:57:00.000-07:00

I grew up believing that my mother did not want me or love me because the alienator told me so. I was an extraordinarily angry little girl and an even angrier teenager. He loved every single complaint about my mother that came out of my mouth. He rejoiced in them.

How sick in the head does a person have to be to be happy that their child believes themselves unwanted by their mother? He liked it. It's an insane thought: he was glad that I was miserable. This goes back to the objectification. He did not see me as a person, though he once told me that my mother did not see me as anything more than a toy. The irony! Even more ironic was the truth my mother once mentioned about a different matter entirely: you only think these poisonous thoughts about someone else if you've had them in the first place.

I have children and it breaks my heart to think that either of them could wonder if I love them. Because of my childhood experience, I have made sure every day of their lives that they know that I love them.

My living situation while I was growing up

2007-09-08T13:40:00.000-07:00

I lived with my late mother. My sister and I saw our male parent every three weeks, on average, and spoke to him on the telephone once a week. My male parent is the alienator.

My case was unusual, wasn't it?

Normally the alienator is the mother and the alienated is the father, but not all cases are the same.

It still astounds me that he could do so much damage to my head when he wasn't even there most of the time!! I don't understand that and if someone can explain it, I'd love to hear.

What I think is most likely is that he got in there first: he began telling me that my mother didn't love me the minute she said she wanted a divorce ("Mummy doesn't love us anymore!"), and he kept it up. It was consistent and continuous and a barrage and always, ALWAYS at the back of my mind - for thirty years. Every time my mother said no to me or didn't do what I wanted, I believed it was because she did not love me or want me - because he said so. Without exception. I thought every single one of her NOs was because she didn't love me. Can you imagine growing up with that? Growing up in a house with a parent you thought didn't want you? I still believed this a year ago (now I'm just confused). I grew up thinking that she was cruel and deliberately nasty - because he said so.

He said that she only wanted me in the house to get her own back on him, to control me, to exert her power over me. He commonly said she had a "god complex" and was "a big fish in a small pond". He also told me about nearly every aspect of their divorce. He made me watch KRAMER VS KRAMER so I could compare him with Mr Kramer. If you haven't seen the movie, Mr Kramer is not treated well in the divorce and my male parent put himself in his position. At one point, the couple's son falls off a swing (?) at the park and hurts himself. Mr Kramer rushes him to hospital. The incident is brought up at the court case, Mr Kramer being yelled at for allowing the child to fall. I may have details wrong here, but I've got the general idea. He ranted at me after this scene. "Look how they've taken a tiny accident and blown it up into something major!" He was furious that, he felt, they were deliberately distorting the truth against Mr Kramer in order to make him look bad. "That's what they do!" he raged. I did not really understand what he was saying, other than that the truth was not being told about him. Now, it seems to me to have been a preemptive strike? Or making excuses?

Article by Marion Trent

2007-09-05T06:56:00.000-07:00

A Look at Parent Alienation Syndrome
by Marion Trent
Divorce rates are climbing. Families are falling apart. Husbands are walking away from their responsibilities without blinking an eye. Mothers are killing their children without remorse. Ex-spouses are alienating sons and daughters from the other parent.
Sociopathy is a "personality disorder" and is characterized by a conspicuous disregard for the rights and needs of others. In the context of a familial environment this could very well begin with a perpetrator parent, who enjoys alienating a child from the victimized parent and is therefore engaging in the psychopathic style, or they could very well be a full-blown psychopath.
In broad strokes, let's assume a child is being alienated from the other parent and the child is required to be loyal to only one parent. The child will create false memories to secure the love of the perpetrator, since the other parent is "bad".
The child being stripped of their moral right to show love and compassion toward the alienated parent, will undoubtedly eventually create the psychopathic style in their own relationships in the very least-- if not, they may eventually become full-blown sociopaths themselves.
Many psychological problems will follow the child through adolescence and beyond. And many times, the perpetrators care very little about someone's psyche, even a child's.
It could very well be that the perpetrator is mimicking the style they were taught by their own parents and is not a true sociopath. Either way, it is just as damaging to the families that are involved during the alienation, and to those that will be affected when the child grows up without compassion for the other parent.
Parental Alienation Syndrome is running rampant. When engaging in PAS, parents are definitely creating the psychopathic style in their children.
Many of the perpetrators seem to be living a normal life, but underneath is a very undeveloped and emotionally stunted individual. Therefore, they may hide behind religious convictions without any regard for the child's psychological needs.
Children are being brainwashed, or told of relationship problems that existed (real or imagined) in the marriage. It is a grievous act against children to dump such information on them, but it is not a punishable crime and therefore the perpetrator gets away with it.
Is it not this behavior that perpetuates sociopathy and causes wars in our world today?
Please read "What does a severely alienated child look like?"
Why have we been so blind to this personality disorder and its style? How can we change it? How can we avoid the personality disorder in our children? How can we heal the psychopathic style in ourselves? And, why is it so difficult to connect the personality lacking a conscience to the word "Sociopath (Psychopath)"?
"The majority of psychopaths manage to ply their trade without murdering people. By focusing too much on the most brutal and newsworthy examples of their behavior, we run the risk of remaining blind to the larger picture: psychopaths who don't kill but who have a personal impact on our daily lives."

He will choose you, disarm you with his words, and control you with his presence.He will delight you with his wit and his plans. He will show you a good time, but you will always get the bill. He will smile and deceive you, and he will scare you with his eyes. And when he is through with you, and he will be through with you,he will desert you and take with him your innocence and your pride. You will be left much sadder but not a lot wiser, and for a long time you will wonder what happened and what you did wrong. And if another of his kind comes knocking at your door, will you open it?
From an essay signed, "A psychopath in prison." Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of Psychopaths Among Us. -Dr. Hare

The purpose of this blog: to parents and children

2007-08-28T06:12:00.000-07:00

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.

Early memories

2007-08-23T16:02:00.000-07:00

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.

Alienators will lie about anyone - even their own children

2007-08-20T15:01:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-20T14:44:00.001-07:00

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

2007-08-20T14:30:00.000-07:00

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.