Children Rejecting Parent

(This article expands on data provided in How to Respond to Parental Alienation and is meant for parents and professionals.)

Parental alienation can be difficult to recognize for anyone not experiencing information technology first-mitt. It's like a riptide: hidden and forceful. Rejected parents can find themselves struggling against a powerful force as information technology pulls them further and further from the human relationship they once had with their children. They feel the resistance and fight against it. Simply the more they fight, the more than exhausted they become. Information technology seems every bit if there's no i to appreciate how difficult information technology is to stay buoyant in these deceptively calm waters. They search for someone—anyone—to throw them a lifeline.

The experience of being targeted by your co-parent is upsetting. But to be rejected and hated by your own child, feeling and watching them sideslip away, and fearing that you lot'll never see them over again, is like witnessing that child die a boring decease. While they remain physically live, they become increasingly emotionally dead to you. The radiant dear in their eyes turns dark and vacuous and the joyous sound of their voice turns blueish and hateful.

In my work with rejected parents, I've oft witnessed them be tragically seduced into making mistakes while they are in the throes of the painful, intractable, and insidious drama of parental breach. This isn't because they're hopelessly flawed homo beings, but because they're in unknown and turbulent waters.  Rejected parents flounder and their mistakes can become fatal and sink their chances of reconciliation with their children.

By highlighting the five most frequent or common mistakes made past rejected/targeted parents, information technology'due south my intent that they, the members of their "hamlet," and the professionals they meet, volition improve understand and, afterwards, overcome the destructive force of parental alienation.

ane: The Rejected/Targeted Parents Misunderstand their Children and Personalize the Rejection

Alienated children are ofttimes caught in a torrent of multiple post-separation family dynamics. Although most children tin endure a loftier-conflict divorce with resilience, very few are able to avoid the powerful force of parental alienation where one parent actively—or sometimes unwittingly—seeks to split up the other parent from their children. The powerful alienation process, in effect, severs the human relationship with the targeted parent and serves to align the children's loyalty to the alienating parent.

Let that sink in:  When the children evidence any love, involvement, or affection to the targeted parent, they fundamentally feel equally though they're being disloyal and unloving to the alienating parent. Also, when the children brandish an mental attitude of hate and boldness while resisting and refusing contact with the targeted parent, they feel loyal and loving to the alienating parent. About children simply tin't withstand nor extricate themselves from this deep and powerful attachment dynamic without intervention.

A way to empathize what's happening to such children is to think of parental alienation as a type of psychological tumor that impacts the cognitive function in their brains and the emotional wiring to their hearts. It'due south invasive and at adventure of growing and metastasizing if ignored and left untreated.  While multiple postal service-separation dynamics tin contribute to its inception, the toxic attachment process that requires the children to maintain a loyalty contract to the alienating parent feeds information technology. And, as it grows, this tumor begins to negatively impact functions in the children's heads and hearts.

The Loyalty Contract

Alienated children become desperate to maintain their loyalty contract with the alienating parent. They develop a narrative to fit the contract that requires a polarized view of the alienating parent as all good and the targeted parent as all bad. Considering about relationships don't fit these polarized black and white characteristics, the children are required to misconstrue and bend reality in order to fit each parent into rigid cerebral constructs. Although children tin have an affinity toward one parent over the other, it's markedly atypical—outside of parental breach—for children to idealize one parent as perfect while denigrating the other equally disposable.

This polarization only grows over time. The growing psychological tumor potentiates the growth of an encapsulated delusional thought system: a belief in the targeted parent's extreme dangerousness, woeful ineptitude, and irredeemable incapacity to beloved, despite whatsoever evidence of a expert base-rate relationship prior to parental alienation setting in or of substantiated abuse and neglect claims. The developing narrative is not based in objective reality just is an inter-subjective narrative between the alienating parent and the children that solidifies the loyalty contract between them.

Nearly untrained professionals—therapists, attorneys, mediators, and judges—don't understand this dynamic and volition either ignore its presence or prescribe contraindicating treatments and parenting fourth dimension arrangements. For example, they observe the children experiencing symptoms of dysfunction—defiance, exact corruption, emotional withdrawal, anxiety, irritability—when in the presence of the rejected parent, while observing these aforementioned children functioning in an optimal and sometimes exceptional way elsewhere. They can't fathom that the interim-out behavior is encapsulated and dormant when the children are in the presence of the alienating parent merely becomes enlivened and agile when they're exposed to the rejected parent.

When Children'south Lying is Misinterpreted

Rejected parents mistakenly believe, and written report, that their children are lying about events and situations. This causes them to look bad equally a parent and be perceived as unfit and dangerous. From my feel working with alienated children, I know very well that they're at risk of sharing stories full of distortions, exaggerations, and manufactured incidents. On the face of it, these stories distort facts and reality and, in other situations, could exist perceived and treated as outright lies. But I don't believe alienated children are intentionally lying. I believe the procedure of parental breach causes them to slowly lose their orientation to reality.

Rather than naming the distortions and exaggerations as lies, it's more accurate to call them "confabulations"—a retentiveness mistake often plant in patients suffering from cerebral turn down due to encephalon diseases such as Dementia or Alzheimer's. In such patients, it's believed that the individual confabulates to fill gaps in memory or to keep their self-identity intact. Similar cognitive impairments nowadays in parental breach, only with psychological underpinnings rather than emanating from a neurological disease process. Whereas lies are selfish manipulations to empower the liar, confabulations serve to reduce the suffering and, in the example of parental alienation, enable children to cope.

Alienated children will make up stories, distort, and exaggerate facts to manage the "lost" retentivity of a loving connection with the rejected parent. Information technology'southward lost, considering to hang onto information technology, or find it again, will be, in effect, an agile violation of the loyalty contract with the alienating parent. The confabulations are feeble, yet drastic, attempts to knit together a cohesive narrative to justify the hate and rejection for the rejected parent while nourishing and strengthening the loyalty contract with the alienating parent.

This process doesn't empower or raise a child's mental health; it'southward a means of survival. While they may finer confabulate stories to honour the loyalty contract with the alienating parent and to maintain their polarized black and white world, it comes at an enormous toll to their mental, emotional, and relational well-beingness. The psychological tumor quickens the deterioration of any loving and caring memory tracts of the by and impedes the cultivation of any current loving and caring experiences. Their need to confabulate stories follows them into other relationships that have to neatly fit into their polarized tribal world including with extended family, friends, and professionals associated with either Dad or Mom.

The Desire to Connect Implodes

It'south painful to lookout your children's memory fade—erasing any cherished memories or revising them into tragic disappointments—while simultaneously cementing memories of all your mistakes. The rejected parent is forbidden to take any sentimental journey with their children at the risk of beingness defendant of not "getting it," not listening to them, and just wanting to minimize all the bad stuff. The parent is basically deemed manipulative and "clueless." Their ache is compounded when they're blocked from creating any new loving experiences since all those efforts are labeled as either faux, ill-timed, not plenty, likewise much, selfish, or just not quite right.

The children live with debilitating anxiety and must be hyper-vigilant to their loyalty contract with the alienating parent. Even the civility of normative salutations afforded to strangers or remote acquaintances is ignored and traded in for blatant rudeness. Normal, successful, or loving experiences aren't allowed because to have any can finer shrink the psychological tumor and that's forbidden.

Unfortunately, the path of least resistance, the one that volition cause the minimal corporeality of suffering for the children, is the path to sever the relationship with the rejected parent. The children will eventually end up providing only 1 way for the rejected parent to limited their love: stop fighting for them and permit them go.

More than fearing the rejected parent, what the children actually fear is rejection and disapproval from the alienating parent. They're in pain. The promise is that the rejected parent volition empathise, not personalize it, and dearest them, all the same. Although they encounter the rejected parent fighting for them, the children intuitively know that the odds are not in that parent's favor. They know the power of the alienating parent because they meet that parent's tribe growing, with more professionals willing to back up the false narrative and unwittingly contribute to the psychological tumor's growth.

I've witnessed children desperately plea for the targeted parent to just let them get and terminate fighting for parenting time. These children can't describe or name what's happening considering the words are unspeakable and a violation of the loyalty contract with the alienating parent. Instead, they appeal to the unconditional beloved of the rejected parent, stating, "Our life is but easier without y'all, less stressful. Please understand, this is and so stressful for united states of america. Please just stop fighting and get out u.s. alone." I've seen tormented, targeted parents, faced with these words stop fighting, release their children, and say "goodbye" in an expression of love.

How could this behavior experience anything but personal?  It'due south terrorizing to hear such pleadings from your ain children and to be told through words and/or beliefs, "Exit of our lives!"  It hurts and scares the rejected parent more than annihilation ever has. Just, every bit much equally information technology hurts, they take to recognize that it'south not about them. The more they remember it is, and the more they think their children are rejecting them from self-agency, the more hurt and anger information technology will cause. And that tin can lead to the second mistake.

2: The Rejected/Targeted Parents Believe that Increased Punishment and Subject field will Put an End to Misunderstood Attitude and Behavior

While alienated children notoriously function quite corrigible and respectfully to almost all other adults in their lives—teachers, coaches, the alienating parent'southward extended family—they're remarkably disrespectful and defiant to the targeted parent and often any developed connected to them. I've seen children ignore their parent, not even offering a civil acquittance of their presence—non a look, a bear on, nod, or a word. I've heard children both deny all positive memories and offer no vision of hope in restoring the relationship with the rejected parent. I've worked with alienated children who have destroyed parental holding, abused pace-siblings, and ignored and defied step-parents. They hole up in their room for whole weekends, pass up to eat or socialize, even endanger themselves past running away from court-ordered parenting fourth dimension. And, I have seen targeted parents' drastic attempts to apply discipline to adjourn this disturbing progression of mental attitude and beliefs.

The temptation to think this volition work is understandable since disciplining disobedient and defiant children is considered normative and reasonable. Still, to address the source of the problem simply as willful defiance and resistance reinforces to the child that the parent doesn't "go them" and will likely intensify their anger. Although they may await, sound, and act like naughty and rebellious children in need of lectures and subject, they're not.  To the opposite, alienated children are very troubled and in demand of proper understanding, compassion, intervention, and treatment.  If the rejected parent approaches them only with increasing levels of subject field, that parent somewhen plays into the children'south false narrative that they're bad, mean, and unreasonable.

I've counseled and evaluated many targeted/rejected parents who've been seduced into this line of thinking and take unwittingly fallen into an disciplinarian way of parenting:

  • The parent who eventually forced his 13-year-sometime daughter to take a shower later on she refused for the sixth day in a row during a hot summer week of daily soccer practices;
  • The parent who took the door off the 15-year-former boyish'southward room after several weekends of his isolating and refusing to come out for any family time including meals;
  • The exasperated parent recorded in a tirade that foster care is where his children belong until they tin can learn to follow the courtroom orders;
  • The parent who dropped his chronically-combative 14-year-old off at the fire station to wait for the alienated parent to pick her up considering, once over again, she would not finish screaming in front of the younger siblings in the car;
  • The parent who prohibited his star boyish athlete from going to football game practise during parenting-time which acquired his son to exist ineligible for an important game.

With proper context, 1 could argue the appropriateness of these parental actions. Merely, all of these become decontextualized and inserted into the inter-subjective narrative between the alienating parent and the children—often a child therapist is somewhen co-opted also—and downloaded every bit "data" to prove the targeted parent is bad, poor, and unfit. In some cases, child protective services (CPS) is contacted and targeted parents accept been investigated and sometimes even substantiated for neglect or abuse. The agency has marching orders to substantiate abuse and fail, non contextualize information technology.

Discipline and Negative Campaigning

While structure and field of study can't be cast aside, they can't unilaterally be the solution for the incorrigibility. This plays into the false narrative and the negative interchange in the attachment process between parent and kid. Not simply is in that location a loyalty contract being constructed in the inter-subjective narrative between the alienating parent and the children, there's an ambitious campaign to prove the targeted parent defective. If politicians can effectively use negative propaganda and messaging to win elections, then tin parents to win custody.

The alienating parent operates stealthily behind the curtain, hoping for the targeted parent to act out on center stage, and so they can shine a spotlight on them every bit the glaring problem in the family psychodrama. This campaign is strengthened when the targeted parent provides any data that can be used stripped of context, intent, and history. Yep, the targeted parent may experience nether assail, unfairly scrutinized, and held to unreasonable standards, but such is the nature of negative campaigns and their seductive impact on others. Although the targeted parent can't control the campaign, if they sympathise what'south happening, they tin work to not provide any fodder.

The other reason to avoid thinking that strict or rigid bailiwick will ready incorrigibility is the importance of reducing the negative interchange between the targeted parent and their children. It can play into the parent's acrimony toward the children and cause increased feelings of guilt and shame in them. The parenting brain says the anger is righteous and that it's normal to dislike the children's attitude and behavior. The parenting brain thinks the children should experience guilty for bad behavior, —feeling bad for ruining the birthday party—and a petty good for you shame—"shame on you for calling your stepmom a bitch." However, this negative interchange just foments the parent's anger and increases the children'southward sense of being bad.

The loving and caring bond wanes, the parent's exasperation and the children's defensiveness waxes. This becomes a barbarous and escalating bicycle, oftentimes leading to the third error: enlisting the assist of extended family members.

iii: The Rejected/Targeted Parent Enlists or Allows Extended Family and Friends to Lecture and Advise the Children

The parental breach dynamic may part in children equally a malignant psychological tumor. Only, in the "village" that is involved in raising your children—grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, step-siblings, pace-parents, coaches, teachers, and friends of the family—information technology spreads like a contagious virus.

This often happens at the same time alienating parents are securing negative allies in their village—family, friends, and professionals—to support the children's wishes and to testify to an alienating parent's love and fettle as a parent. Targeted parents sense this tendency and either enlist help from their hamlet or just support the endeavor individuals make to advise and correct the escalating behaviors and attitudes of alienated children.

Alienated children are hypersensitive and hyper-vigilant to the tribal communities developing in a climate where the breach virus spreads. They view the supportive people in the targeted parent'southward village equally a threat seeking to "social distance," while seeing supportive others in the alienating parent's village as safe with whom to "quarantine." The targeted parent'due south hamlet grows wary and frustrated with the experience of social-distancing and may begin to angrily face the children.

The children—similarly to how they feel and reply to the rejected parent's confrontations—stop upwardly feeling attacked and shamed past these social encounters. They begin to suspect that the rejected parent put them up to it, or they only feel intruded upon, invaded, or contaminated. The children brainstorm to see the rejected parent'south village as increasingly more dangerous and wish to increase their social-distancing, quarantine, and seek refuge in the alienating parent's social chimera. This, of class, increases the tension between them and the rejected parent—for example, "how cartel you treat your grandparents like that."

Children's Resist and Refuse Response

Although rude children who refuse a whole village of loving and caring people demand to exist challenged, it can backfire when the alienation virus is not eradicated through effective intervention and treatment.

Children don't experience confrontation as loving and caring; merely as shaming and critical. The alienating parent uses these conflictual encounters to reinforce the narrative of how "those" people are bad, mean, and infected by the targeted parent's influence. It reinforces that social distancing is needed for the children to be "safe" and not stressed out. The alienating parent'southward allies use those negative encounters to indicate out how upsetting and confusing they are to the children'due south emotional state. In so doing, they commit a fundamental attribution error: Because the children are upset and experience shamed by the social encounters in the targeted parent'south village, that village is unsafe and unhealthy for them. They erroneously conclude that increased social distancing is warranted to secure the children's condom and best interests.

On occasion, because of court orders and the fear of actualization in contempt of court, the alienating parent volition disallow the children's request to avoid parenting time—essentially to quarantine with the alienating parent's social circle.  They ship the children to parenting time sometimes forcibly. This show of strength is often used every bit proof that it is non the alienating parent'southward fault for the resist and pass up dynamics. Information technology is the children's "independent" selection. The false narrative is that the children make the decision to isolate or get out after contemplating what is best, healthy, and safest for them. The children function every bit if to avert contagion from the rejected parent and that parent'south village. This is accomplished by remaining physically afar, and emotionally and verbally disengaged.

These children volition isolate in bedrooms, bury themselves in homework, read books, or play video games; anything to avoid interacting with the rejected parent'due south village. They will resist and decline picnics with family or altogether parties with friends and family, and if forced to go, will socially distance. If their efforts to avoid and disengage are confronted, there's a gamble of escalating conflict. Unfortunately, what children bring dorsum to the alienating parent or the negative allies are stories of reactive invasion, criticism, and disrespect by the rejected parent's village while they leave out their own social distancing actions or overall discourtesy. The children's behavior tin escalate even to the point of physical assaults, property devastation, or running away from the rejected parent's village.

Damage Done by the Untrained and Uninformed

The vicious cycle of toggling in and out of what are at present tribal communities creates a convincing narrative to the uninformed. They intuit: the targeted parent's village must be abusive, neglectful, and dangerous otherwise the children wouldn't be behaving like this. They don't behave like this in the alienating parent's village, at schoolhouse, or on the sport's team. Again, untrained ears and eyes make fundamental attribution errors.

Consequently, centrolineal therapists volition write unethical letters and erroneously show in courtroom for reduced parenting time with the targeted parent, citing the hostile environment and the children's destabilization. Judges volition be deceived into signing an ex parte order after an attempt to run away by the alienated child following a climactic, antagonistic social come across. The alienated children eventually go what they think volition brand them safe and healthy once more:  quarantining with the alienating parent.

What they actually get from naïve and colluding professionals is greater exposure to the virus—the alienating parent and his/her village. Consequently, the psychological tumor within the child metastasizes and the rejected parent's anger grows. The temptation to seek revenge against the alienating parent can lead to another fault.

iv: The Rejected/Targeted Parent Retaliates Toward the Alienating Parent

I'thou sure it'due south become increasingly clear that a adept law-breaking (intervention, judicial oversight, engaging trained professionals, etc.) is one of the best defenses to combat alienation dynamics. This criminal offence is weakened past the mistake of succumbing to the temptation to seek revenge on the alienating parent. Why? Considering the acts of retaliation can be used past sly alienators to buttress their narrative of the targeted parent existence abusive and unfit. Also, alienated children will utilize any retaliatory actions to justify their alliance to alienating parents while pointing out how mean and dangerous the rejected parent is.

Rejected parents grow frustrated. They can't understand how the alienating parent's behaviors go unnoticed and that they're ofttimes not held accountable. This growing frustration and impatience hatches into the idea of taking matters into their own hands rather than waiting for the easily of justice or mental wellness professionals to do something to help. It seems that the professionals and court have had plenty of time and they've simply had plenty of it all.

Interim-out is a Bulwark to Reunification

Feeling frustrated and ignored, rejected parents brainstorm to compose snarky email responses, make sarcastic comments during parenting time exchanges, or blow up in a reunification counseling session well-nigh how the alienating parent is poisoning the children against them. They'll make idle threats to the alienating parent or vent on social media attempting to expose the alienating parent'south true motivation. They may seek out their ain counselor to advocate for them outside ethical roles and standards: Someone who will write critical assessments of the alienating parent'due south behavior, despite non having met nor professionally assessed the situation.  The targeted parent may even withhold the alienating parent's court-ordered parenting time to "make upwards" for lost parenting time, or extend a vacation they feel entitled to.

These deportment tin all exist understood considering the targeted parent's frustrations, but near oftentimes, they will exist used against them as farther evidence of their unfitness equally a co-parent. While retaliatory actions may feel good, they practise not practice good. The feelings of acrimony and frustration need to be expressed and managed. If non, they can easily be acted out in a fashion that ultimately dis-empowers the targeted parent and impedes their mission to gain greater access to their children and to stop the breach. If not managed well, this tin atomic number 82 to the next mistake.

five: Rejected/Targeted Parents Present as Aroused, Belligerent, and Obstinate to Professionals

Growing frustration and fears tin can lead the targeted parent to present to mental health and legal professionals in angry, belligerent, and obstinate ways. This can prevent them from getting proper help, since most professionals find parental breach dynamics counter-intuitive. In other words, they intuitively get that children volition reject and fear bad parents, but they don't empathise how children will reject and fear good parents.

Accordingly, these professionals are often scrutinizing the rejected parent's mental attitude and behavior to confirm their bias of believing that resist and refuse dynamics are acquired by a parent's corruption, neglect, or unfitness. And guess what? The rejected parent's angry, belligerent, and obstinate mental attitude and behavior plays right into the professionals' biases and the parent is misunderstood and seen as the trouble.

Uninformed professionals fail to come across the mental attitude and behavior every bit a direct result of unaddressed, unabated alienation. They erroneously conclude that the targeted parent's attitude and beliefs are the cause of the resist and refuse dynamics rather than the unfortunate result. And once the estrangement/abuse/fail construct gets supported; it becomes very difficult for targeted parents to extricate themselves from the box they're put in. Understandably, this can farther exacerbate their anger, fear, and oppositionality.

The professionals, in plow, become advocates for the estrangement theory and volition cite specific behaviors the targeted parent has exhibited to support their conclusions. They'll transcribe the barbarous voice mails, the e-mail bombs, and tirades in counseling sessions, or report any obstinance or outright opposition the targeted parent shows towards participating in diverse sessions. (Note: Although it's of import for targeted parents to non engage in faulty treatment plans that neglect to address the alienation dynamics—or worsen them—this refusal needs to be done smartly and strategically.) No affair what defense mechanisms targeted parents choose, they demand to realize information technology will take more brains than brawn to remove themselves from the estrangement box.

The way out for targeted parents is to manage their feelings and behavior, and then that the best version of themselves—rather than the wounded, desperate, and angry i—shows upwardly. They need to be grounded in the literature on parental alienation, including what type of counseling intervention helps or hinders. They need an attorney who understands alienation and knows how to piece of work with mental health professionals; an chaser whose goal is to educate professionals and advocate to retain professionals who understand alienation dynamics, all the while presenting to professionals or the court legitimate signs their client is fit, rational, and reasonable. That they're madly in honey with their children, not mad. That they wish to win their children's hearts and minds, not win a case or ane-up the co-parent.

When professionals are faced with targeted parents who are grounded and have these admirable intentions, there's a meliorate chance that the professionals will abet for justice, accountability, and healing, rather than go some other manipulated amanuensis in the alienation dynamic.

A Word to Rejected/Targeted Parents

The amass of these five common mistakes can be visible and palpable while the stealthy and insidious moves of the alienating parent often remain latent and subconscious. The greatest chance you have of pulling back the curtain on alienation dynamics is to non take center stage with the drama caused past these mistakes just to instead piece of work to pull back the curtain and put the spotlight on the alienation that's taking place.

You must exist methodical and strategic. Don't be afraid to ask for help and seek counsel. Time is your enemy and experts tin help you assess the severity of the alienation and appropriate interventions, upwards to and including court involvement. It won't injure to have a motorcoach/counselor, consultant, and a good chaser on your team.

Parental Alienation isn't but a psychological tumor that grows in your kid, it'south contagious. Its toxins can spread to you lot and your extended village. It'southward important to realize that, just as in treating a tumor that's at risk of growing and metastasizing, domicile remedies won't work to resolve alienation.

Targeted/rejected parents need assistance. And sometimes the commencement, right, next stride, is learning to help yourself. The backbreaking boxing to save the hearts and minds of your children often requires expert strategy, but information technology tin merely exist won when you are in information technology with an attuned mind and loving centre.