What happens when targeted-alienated parents do not recognise any aspect of themselves in their alienated children? Even if a relationship is possible, it may be a shadow of what it once was. Targeted-alienated parents may need to stop selling their identity as parents to their alienated children and reclaim it as their own.
A Distorted and Delusional Parent
Favoured-alienating parents create a distorted and delusional family environment that replicates their psychologically and socially damaged history. This environment shapes children to normalise excluding a parent they love and devalue and de-identify them as parents. For example, they call their targeted parent by their first name or “them” or “it”. Empathy, critical thinking, independence and identity are the casualties for alienated adult children. Insecurity, anxious preoccupation with loyalty to their often delusional favoured parent is the price they pay for their favoured parents’ conditional love.
Alienated Parents: Grasping at Shadows
There may be little left of the child that once was. Holding onto an idealised image of the child they once knew may limit relationship opportunities and challenge targeted-alienated parents to accept this reality as the starting point for remediation. Some parents cannot bear to end even a dysfunctional relationship. They have vested so much of their validation and identity into it.
For some targeted-alienated parents, a disrespectful, contemptuous, and objectifying relationship is the only relationship their alienated children allow them to have. For example, teenage and adult-alienated children may use their targeted-alienated parents as “human bank accounts” without moral regard. These targeted-alienated parents risk normalising their children’s alienation for as long as they maintain such an exploitative relationship with them.
Devaluing Alienated Parents’ Identity-and Reclaiming It
Some parents desperately want their alienated children’s validation and re-identification as parents at the risk of colluding with alienation. They need proof of their identity as a parent through a relationship with their children, as expressed in the theme, “if I am not a mother/father, then I am nothing”. Such a relationship focuses on an insecure, identity-seeking attachment the alienated child controls.
Targeted-alienated parents can relieve their children of the responsibility to identify them. Accepting their own identity avoids entrapping them and their alienated children in desperately seeking the identity they withhold. Targeted-alienated parents no longer hold the responsibility for maintaining the relationship; that will be up to their children. They accept that every parent must eventually let go of their child. They must allow them to find their way in the world even if it is no way at all. Such parents also hold the moral high ground, finding it morally objectionable to become part of the alienation process and therefore reinforce it. They know that such a relationship is harmful to both them and their children.
Own Your Narrative. Your Identity is Not For Sale!
These parents recognise that no amount of empathy and understanding can help their alienated children to change. They accept their alienated children cannot assume responsibility for rejecting the parent they love but are accountable for change nonetheless. It is up to targeted-alienated parents to decide their identity is not for sale. When they do, they relieve their alienated children from the responsibility of identifying them and create new opportunities.
These parents who reclaim their parental identity also control their narrative. Nobody else decides who they are or their value but them. They recognise that their alienated children need to make different choices. They can help them with those choices but cannot make them for their children. Targeted-alienated parents who control their narrative are the examples to which their alienated children should aspire. They are the shining light showing the way through the darkness. Society has to recognise these parents, stop blaming them, and support and mirror their example.
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- Parental Alienation Awareness Day: Be Aware of the Social Pandemic!
- Should I Tell My Alienated Children about Parental Alienation?
- Progress on Research into The Lived Experience of Parental Alienation in a Social Context
100% spot on.We know when someone we love deeply dies we feel they are all around us we look for little things to reinforce their presence. As an alienated parent we do similar things always looking for little things, hoping they are going to return, reunite and everything will be as it was before. The heartbreak is a constant destruction, not only our spirit but the very soul of our being. Regaining our former self before we were a parent is definitely the key to moving forward. Finding who we are, parenthood does not define our whole self. We will always love our child. I’ve accepted my daughter has choosen not to have me in her life. I have accepted for her and me it is best to let her go so she can grow in the direction she feels best suited to her life. Whether right or wrong this is not for me to judge. It is like a death only the bereaved believes there is still life, and that is about what sums up alienation it is Still Life. Thank you for this blog reinforced my moving forward. Love and strength to everyone who feels so wretched from this loss.
what do you mean by control your own narrative pls? can you provide an example?
Good question. Once targeted-alienated parents understand what an alienating narrative comprises; mainly conditional narratives that devalue the targeted parent, make them out to be unsafe unavailable empathic and unnecessary they can develop counter narratives. These counter narratives challenge alienated children’s acceptance of both the devalued, degraded parental identity and the conditions that they have to accept it to earn the love of their favoured-alienating parent.The targeted-alienated parent empowers themselves and reclaim their identity by always starting from the position that they remain unalienable parents, their very existence stands in resistance to their stigmatisation in their family and beyond.These are some of the principles that have to be put into practice in each individual encounter. See also Parental Alienation Awareness Day: Be Aware of the Social Pandemic!
This is extremely helpful in reframing…thank you!
Stan, this is a very thorough and useful piece. I can see this from first hand experience and it is insidious and extremely harmful.
While the courts know something about it, how is it even possible to stop in the home behind doors? It’s not. Sadly the child is abused and used as a weapon.
Great article. So little is written beyond the advice to keep trying to reunify and/or keep sending cards, letters, etc. even when one knows there is no hope for reestablishing a functional relationship on any level. I often feel like alienated parents should not be encouraged to “never give up” at any cost. After years of fighting for justice and getting nowhere, the failed system, coupled with the relentlessness of the narcissistic alienator was literally destroying me. I finally had to ask myself some tough questions. What good are we as parents if our mental and financial health is completely destroyed in the process?
This is a realistic article. The wishful notion that damage from pathogenic parenting must surely be repairable, is a harmful false notion, and risks understating the degree of ruination being inflicted (albeit by stealth). The alienating parent has established a war of attrition, and family court protocols play into their hands, often leaving alienated parents utterly impotent. After a while, the child can no longer reveal their authentic love for you, later however, this morphs to an inability to admit, even to themselves, that they have any authentic love for you. Give it a little longer, or a lot, and inevitably they can reach a point of doubting that they have any. Memories of you have faded or become overlaid with relentless disinformation that successfully slanders you into an ogre figure. Indeed, all their behaviors indicate that they have no love for you. As our kids age out, no matter how tolerant, patient, and magnanimous we may sustain ourselves to be, we come to realize that they quietly revel in our displeasure at the unceasing contempt they show for us. Not enough people are admitting to this sometimes being the final outcome. Of course we must always be prepared for a flicker of an epiphany, but part of that preparation includes the fact that no such dawning may ever come.
Thank you for this article. Everything I’ve read only encourages the targeted parent to forgive, forget, and accept whatever their child has to offer if they seek out a relationship later. I’ve worked extremely hard to rebuild my life. I recently reconnected with one adult child to discover they only want to manipulate, denigrate, and financially exploit me. While alienated children are most certainly victims themselves I think emphasis should be placed on the fact that no one deserves to be abused. Parents can be abused by their children.
Having had to walk away from my 16 year old this July after failed therapy, and thousands of dollars spent. Multiple times her father had her run away in 2 hour visitations, where he watched me. I totally devastated knew the only way to normal life and a whole me was to let go.
As Christmas approaches not looking forward to it. This article really helped. forgive, forget, and accept
I was married for 21 years. Our marriage counselor explained that my mate was a narcissist and misogynistic and I was a doormat! I also got reverse counseling, as in “if I’d only try harder!” Haha
Our daughter was 14. My ex took all the money out of our home and business and married his “true” love and left me sick and penniless. I was evicted from our own home. I moved into my sister’s dirt basement while he took our daughter on lavish vacations.
She has hated me for 34 years now. I stopped trying to connect with her last year. She acts just like her father, extremely emotional and a victim. The Lord has protected me in so many ways.
I have been modestly successful and had the same job for 17 years. God will sort it out someday. I just get up every morning and do the rightest thing possible.
At a place where all was lost, and my severe alienation case got so bad that after years of teenage alienation, I was invited back to see the ” family” and grandchildren, only publicly humiliated. I was invited to the wedding a year before and then asked not to attend a week prior. My heartbreak was unprecedented. I was given no reason why and have not been contacted since. They were stolen from me at a young age. He made more money and threatened me. We were close through the tween years, and then they disappeared. I can’t move on. I’m so hopelessly stuck with half-written letters to my children everywhere. I didn’t know this was a thing and have felt so alone all these years while my mother blames me and says I must have been a horrible mother. Your article is good, but what do you do when the Narcissistic Alienator has everyone walking on eggshells? You hear him and cringe because you don’t know what you’re getting. I know what he has done to them and me; the children are his victims. But now they are grown, and I don’t exist anymore. They married into wealth so that they won’t need me financially. Do I wait? My Dad died of cancer when I was their age. It CAN NOT end like this!?! Any thoughts? My case is textbook- severe. She’s ghosted my side of the family where they were once close.