Tens of millions of Children have been alienated from a parent. Why aren't we talking about it more?
THE MINDFUL LIFE
Imagine being a younger version of you in childhood. Imagine looking at life ahead of you, not seeing far or clearly because it looks like a dense and intimidating forest, while in the background you repeatedly hear stories that make you afraid of the road ahead. Those stories are often paired with treats, candy, or video games that you enjoy, making you more and more comfortable to stay where you are rather than explore other possibilities. It is like being hypnotized. But after a while, it feels like a curfew that never ends. Isn’t the sun supposed to rise?
There are no visible bars to this mental prison. Rather, it is made of glass. But the glass is heavily tainted, creating a distortion of reality and the people on the other side. And among these people, is a parent, or grandparent, or older sibling you were told was bad or even dangerous. Yes, if you pay close attention, there is a parent in distress who knocks on the glass to ask you to come out. But at the same time, there is a constant force made of loyalty, confusion and fear that pulls you back, and the voice of that parent becomes fainter and fainter... and as time goes by, it becomes easier to ignore or remember that this person who loves you even exists.
I have heard countless stories of adults who, as children, were stuck in such a prison. One of them was Natasha, a young woman who had to quit law school after a series of psychological and physical injuries and who presented with obsessive-compulsive disorder along with severe cannabis addiction. As I dug into Natasha’s story more, she told me that after her parents separated her dad asked her to spy on her mom; she was about 8 or 9 years old.
The names in this article have been changed to protect patient privacy.
This deeply affected her, and years later she realized her mother was nothing like what her father had portrayed. The guilt a child experiences from how they were forced to behave or feel towards a decent parent along with simultaneous anger at the manipulative parent creates a powerful dissonance that can resonate well into adulthood. No wonder she developed OCD and sought to numb her suffering with drugs.
Emmy’s parents divorced when she was 3 years old. She felt like she was put in the middle of it. She told me that her mother manipulated her and caused distance between her father and herself. Emmy’s mother would call CPS on her father based on false accusations. She said she was her mother’s favorite until she turned 15, at which point her mother called her “moody” and bipolar. From a young age, Emmy was wrongfully put on mood stabilizers based on her mother’s claims, even though she had never met criteria for mania.
Emmy’s trauma story doesn’t end there. As she got older, she felt she never fit in. She was bullied in school and struggled connecting with people her age. She felt isolated and felt “too weird” to build connections. Her father was an alcoholic, which ran on his side of the family but was likely fueled by her mother’s alienating behaviors, although he never got drunk in front of her. In fact, she said she felt safe around father. She eventually reconnected with him when she was about 27, but that was just four months before he was diagnosed with aggressive esophageal cancer that led to his death.
At the end of her assessment, because of her depression, nightmares, OCD, fibromyalgia and difficulty functioning and holding a job, I concluded that Emmy had PTSD secondary to victimization from parental alienation syndrome, bullying and possibly factitious disorder, also known as Munchausen by proxy.
In the USA, there are 22 to 25 million parents who know their child(ren) are stuck in a glass prison. These parents are targeted by the animosity of an ex-spouse, or ex in-law, and their power to protect the very people they brought to this world is diminished. That is why we need to give a voice to these children who are held in psychological captivity without fully knowing it. Physicians need to stay alert and help a child who has a parent who “abandoned” them (or so they heard) or who is never talked about find a door out of this glass prison to figure things out for themselves.
Doctors are well positioned to detect a child whose parent seems overly concerned about unexplained or inconsistent symptoms, which could point in the direction of Munchausen by proxy or an effort to alienate the other parent. In other words, in some cases, a psychologically disturbed parent resorts to intentionally creating injuries, abnormalities in lab results or inducing mental health symptoms for the sake of appearing like the savior of their child in the eyes of the medical system. Yes, that is how ego-compromised such parents are. And this can have catastrophic consequences, especially if the child ends up being subjected to unnecessary surgical or pharmaceutical interventions.
So, if there are tens of millions of children stuck in a glass prison or a cult-like dynamic in this country, why is it not talked about more? I have encountered various mental health professionals (therapists, residents, even child psychiatrists) who had never heard of parental alienation syndrome. Yet, it is crucial to identify such dynamics because parental alienation can affect the development of secure attachments by attacking a healthy bond a child seeks and needs to have with parents who are in his or her life. And as we know from the ACE study, everything that impacts a child’s ability to form a healthy attachment can have long-lasting effects on their general health and development. Natasha’s and Emmy’s cluster of symptoms are a good illustration of how trauma affects the whole person.
Who alienates children? Individuals who are highly insecure, psychologically immature with poor boundaries, and who use manipulation and coercive control (often insidiously) of others in their environment to maintain their emotional balance. These people are highly prone to shame to the point that a deep sense of inner defect makes them prey on vulnerable people, such as their children, to meet their emotional needs and complete their sense of self. As a result, they will disapprove of their child having a relationship with their other parent after a separation by having a negative reaction if their child shares their good moments while away, or by talking badly about the other parent (although it is not necessary for parents to be involved in a divorce to experience this; poisonous dynamics can happen in so-called “intact” families).
The parent who is narcissistically fragile cannot tolerate what is perceived as rejection, cannot admit their responsibility in the failed marriage, and as a result projects blame and uses the children as containers or processors for their rage. The possessiveness toward the child might be displayed by a parent, but also a grandparent, a step-parent, or other family members.
Like Emmy who was her mom’s “favorite,” the child who is alienated often becomes a parent’s confidant or best friend. But such enmeshment should be a red flag. In her Anti-Alienation Project, a woman found out she was alienated after 20 years of being brainwashed by an unhealthy parent. This 28-year-old woman, who is very active on social media, can be an important voice for those children as she lists red flags or dynamics that she thought were normal at the time. For instance, she was made to believe that she had “one good parent and one bad parent.”
When a parent displays hatred of the other parent in front of you, they are destroying their relationship with you,” a parental alienation survivor says in one of her videos. “A healthy parent would not do this.”
“When a parent displays hatred of the other parent in front of you, they are destroying their relationship with you,“ she says in one of her videos. “A healthy parent would not do this.” She adds that another warning sign is when the child knows details about the legal proceedings surrounding the divorce or content of documents such as declarations. In the poignant documentary Erasing Family, some kids share that they remember having lied to the judge to fulfill an alienating parent’s agenda.
Every single parent on this earth makes mistakes. In the middle of divorce, when everyone is destabilized and dysregulated, mistakes are even more likely and their impacts are decontextualized, distorted and amplified. But alienators see nothing wrong in anything they have done and will deny responsibility and create a false narrative about the other parent’s inadequacies. That is why not acknowledging mistakes should make legal and mental health experts suspicious.
It is time to open our eyes and ears. Children who are caught in the middle of high-conflict divorce when one parent seeks to erase the other one out of possessiveness and a narcissistic need to win and control are violated. They are robbed of their childhood. They can no longer be themselves because they lose emotional safety from being weaponized, suddenly a proxy instrument of the destructiveness of the alienator. They become like child soldiers; they sense that they must align with the parent who is the alienator for their survival, out of fear and idealization of that imposing figure, creating a torturing loyalty conflict. Out of the need for psychological survival, they reject the parent they know will always love them because, in the short-term, that seems like the most viable solution instead of trying to process contradicting views.
We should ask children we suspect are experiencing alienation: Do you feel like your “good” parent likes that you are dependent on them? And we should also wonder if children sound like they are reciting a script when they talk about their rejected parent. Are the complaints about this parent rather vague or about things the child was told instead of directly experiencing? Our systems of care need to become more vigilant and effective advocates and give a voice to our children to help them discern the truth about their ostracized parent. And the professionals must see beyond the rejection of the child, their negative perception, nor take it at face value, and help them develop a more balanced view of both parents.
We learn to navigate interactions with others as adults from the templates that we witnessed or were part of in childhood. We talk about attachment theory, but I call this “attachment truth.” Secure attachment is the foundation for everything a person needs to thrive: physical and emotional growth, affect regulation, impulse control, cognitive functioning, harmonious relationships and general achievements. Let’s make sure all the children of our world have access to healthy, harmonious templates for ways of relating and handling conflict that will be a resilient foundation for their future relationships. I cannot think of another way to, once and for all, end the cycle of abuse.
Children are not our possessions. At the same time, children are our responsibility until they reach maturity to make their own decisions, freely, not based on coercion, fear or influence. Creating a better world starts with giving all children what they need for their optimal development, and that includes all the significant adults who have been there for them since birth and seek to cheer them up, hold their sorrows and teach them to believe in their dreams. Loving two different parents is not mutually exclusive. Parents divorce, but that is a grownup matter.
No child should ever be made to believe by a parent that they also should divorce their other parent. That glass needs to be shattered. Because these millions of children who are held hostages will eventually see on the other side that the sun has in fact never ceased to rise, drying the daily tears of all the longing parents they once misjudged or misperceived, who were there all along, believing in them, dreaming of them, sending them love through their silent tragedy, vowing to wait for them until their last breath, with arms wide open to embrace them and show them all the life possibilities for the expression of their inner gifts with the expansion of their soul.
