Anger in this alienated child

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

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

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



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



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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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



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



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



That's why I was so angry.

My view of physical discipline as a child

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.

Never give up on your kids

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.

Fear of abduction

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.

I've been tense for thirty one years

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.

Alienators are never wrong

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!

About me

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.