Nothing lifts my heart more than a telephone call, email or text from a client informing me that they have made contact or received a response from their alienated, rejecting child.
This could be after some months or many years and whatever the elapsed time it is the same feeling of relief and joy at reunification and relationship; rejected parent and alienated or aligned child rejoin the flow of our social human narrative of loving parent-child relationships.
Most of my clients have the experience of being rejected by their children in circumstances where we can identify the subtle signs of the alienation processes employed by the favoured parent.
Alienation processes seem to be particularly effective for adolescents and teenagers between the ages of 12 and 15. Children in this age group are exploring and enacting their identity, are often very fragile in their self-esteem and conditions of worth, are concerned with both connecting with and being validated by their peer group at the same time differentiating and individuating, and are acutely aware of their own powerlessness and helplessness.
Teenagers in particular can be quite ruthless in the blatant use of power to achieve self-centred ends (I wonder where they learn that from). Adolescents in particular, are developing their moral agency and are beginning to engage with an external world that does not necessarily fulfill their idealistic fairytale nations. All of a sudden when they kiss the frog, it’s still a frog.
How many of you as parents have been subjected to the simplistic and harsh black-and-white judgement of your teenagers? Vegetables good, meat bad, mum (or dad) good, dad (or mum) bad; we could go on.
Those of us with teenage children know how quickly an argument can escalate out of control before we realise that we are engaged in a power struggle that we feel we must absolutely win.
Unfortunately so does your teenager and what better way for an adolescent or teenager in a high conflict alienating situation to exercise the ultimate power of rejection, but to suddenly and without warning stage an event as a smokescreen for them to storm off into the night to live with the other parent.
This is the ultimate weapon of mass destruction. At their age and stage they have yet to develop more subtle and nuanced graduated responses to interpersonal conflict that do not involve simply cutting someone out of their lives whom they do not like as a first, rather than final repose to defending their fragile sense of self.
They have yet to develop any means of conflict resolution and frankly from their perspective they do not have a good example in front of them.
All of a sudden there may not be any email, telephone, mobile phone contact. Rejected parents sometimes report that the other, favoured or alienating parent labels them as being abusive and uses this as a pretext to shutdown all forms of communication between the rejected parent and the child. There is nothing quite like silence to let you know you are simply not connected.
In these situations, the now alienated child has the advantage of moral righteousness from which there is no easy face-saving way to reach out to you without appearing to be weak and vulnerable. It is plausible that in the last interaction you had with your hostile adolescent or teenager you were set up on frivolous grounds without you realising that you stepped on an alienating ‘landmine’.
Parents in these situations are often cut off from their children for months and even years because even though their children want to be in contact with them they cannot easily jump back from the fire into the frying pan without losing face.
The now favoured parent actively reinforces in the child the moral outrage, and sense of powerlessness that they felt with you , which would otherwise be easily resolved with the cooperation of both parents. When the child is with the favoured parent that child is made to feel extraordinarily powerful without any responsibility.
What self-respecting teenager could possibly reject that? How much more powerful can you be when your favourite parent empowers you to choose which parent you can be with and who you can love?
This completely reverses the power balance in your relationship with your now rejecting child. No wonder you feel disempowered, having lost the social authority of being a parent, you have suddenly become a supplicant! Naturally because you are hurt, rejected and emotionally injured by what has happened you play into the ‘supplicant parent’ narrative and therefore play into the alienation interactional cycle, now reinforced by the favoured, alienating parent.
Your child has rejected you because they have no face-saving way of stepping down from the moral high ground upon which they stand and which the favoured parent is fortifying around them.
Such a relationship cannot easily be restored without addressing the power imbalance in a manner that ‘horizontalises’ the parent-child relationship. One of the best ways of doing this is to use your knowledge of alienation and to address the major factors that can lead to reunification in situations that otherwise appear to be an unconscionable and irreconcilable rupture.
This approach has worked, several parents have reconnected with their children by:
- not allowing themselves to dissuaded by constant rejection:by “I’m too busy”, and persisting in the face of silence,
- by consistently trying to bring up memories in their children of the loving relationship they had with them, keeping their memory and emotional connection alive in their children ,
- appreciating the alienation process, the alienation interactional cycle and how it affects their children. This leads to responding to the underlying process rather than the content,
- strategically engaging with their ex partner, and,
- placing at the centre of their attention, their children’s needs for validation and acceptance rather than their own.
If you want a name or a label for this approach, it is the Strategic Empathic-Empathic Strategy Process.
Similar Posts:
- Parental Alienation:Evidence Based Reunification Available in Australia
- Alienated Parents: Reclaim Your Identity, It’s Not For Sale!
- Hope for Reconnection and Reunification after Parental Alienation
- Ethics Approval for Research into Parental Alienation as a Social Phenomenon
- Important Changes for Parental Alienation Services in Australia
[Edited]
My daughter is now 29 years old. When she was 19, there was a precipitating incident where I lost my temper with her. This had been brewing for around one year with her refusal to engage in chores around the home, treating the home as a place to use for her own purposes with no sense of responsibility or contribution such as completing chores. Alternatively, she would vacuum every room in the home, except mine. It was pointed!
She and I had always shared a loving and warm relationship. However, I separated from her father when she was a baby, permanently due to his abuse. He … was very emotionally abusive towards our daughter as she was growing up, so much so, that when she was 12, she refused to go on access visits any more. I took the matter back to court and new orders were written, putting the power in her hands about whether she went to her dad’s on access weekends or not. This effectively took me out of the picture, and left the relationship in their hands…
During her childhood, my ex would continually disparage me in front of our daughter, renege on access visits and push boundaries around times of dropping off and collection of our daughter, and withholding maintenance that was used for our daughter’s needs..
When my daughter was 19, she said to me when I was attempting to have a discussion around the chores issue ( at the time I was working long hours to make ends meet, had poor contracts and a lot of stress trying to manage everything, along with some health issues. My family was no support at all), and her comment to me was ‘Get over it Mum. You know nothing is going to change.’ That felt very disempowering to me. In hindsight, I would have sat down with her and told her that this situation was untenable for me and should she elect to not contribute in the home, or speak politely, or engage, then perhaps she would have to consider finding other accommodation.
She chose to leave. The next thing I heard was that she had asked my mother if she could move in with her… She had no responsibilities in my mother’s home…
This was very upsetting to me since I was excluded in all way… I did not feel supported or valued by either my daughter or my mother, or my siblings. This also enabled my daughter, with her father’s input, and my mother’s and siblings’ input, to feel justified in her actions.
So now she has been gone for 10 years. We have sporadic contact and it is as if we are polite strangers. I have, over the years, texted her every now and then to simply say ‘Hello’ and to let her know I am thinking about her…
However, now it is 10 years and nothing has changed…she would not have had the stresses to deal with as I did with an abusive ex and being a single parent with the other parent denigrating her for the growing up years of her children.
I find it sad, but it has become too hard to continue with this one-sided relationship and I do not want to continue any more. I have moved on with my life. I have let my daughter know that this situation is now untenable for me, but I am open to relating and also to work with her with a therapist to help resolve the issues. As for the one-sided relating, I do not want to continue any more. I think that 10 years is a long time and I feel as if my daughter and I are now polite strangers and that I have no meaning in her life any longer.
Suzanne, I just want to say that I know how you feel on some level. Alienation has affected my relationship with my 14 year old son, and in my heart I know that it is wrong to allow him to make decisions that us adults should be making. In my heart I know that every visit he’s encouraged to skip is a wider wedge between the relationship we have, and that it can have life long affects. Your post proves that. Why should our child have to wit until he’s in his 30’s to have an epiphany? If the court’s really are interested in the best interests of the child they will plan more based on the child’s long term well being, and not focus so much on making them happy in the present moment by giving them what they want. I know how painful this must be for you, and now I understand why parents give up. When nobody in the community (including the courts) is supporting you, and you’re spending all your emotional energy trying to be involved only to be rejected; at some point as a human being walking away can and does happen. Especially if the child is now an adult; I can understand that at a certain point, they no longer become our responsibility, and we must return to our long forgotten self care.
My step daughter is now exactly acting this way! Her father and mother divorced when she was 6 years old and I have been in her life now for 5 years (and married to her father for over 2 years). I have two sons older than her and we all thought that we were successfully blending families. She was always the quiet one, respectful and loving. We share her and her 13yr old brother 50/50 with their mother, who we always thought we had a good relationship with. Three weeks ago, out of the blue, she sent her dad a text saying that she wants to stay with her mum now and went on a rampage about everything we had done wrong with her – while we thought we were providing her a stable home environment. She does not want to be told what to wear or anything. At her mum’s house, she has free reign. So today is her 15th birthday…she actually took our call on her mum’s phone and we wished her a happy birthday. She was sad…I could hear it! That’s why this post is so true to what we are experiencing…Any positive news or views out there? My husband and I (and our other children) are all so very sad…