Welcome to the oxymoron of #FathersDay 2014. It is just like any other Fathers Day for alienated dads-another day where they are reminded how they have been deleted from their children’s lives. Maybe a ‘replacement’ dad is receiving the accolades and power tools that they used to receive.
Many alienated dads receive various invitations to attend Father’s Day functions or to otherwise participate in Fathers Day. There are endless reminders. These organisations and people mean well but alienated dads do not want to celebrate somebody else’s Fathers Day, nor do they want to respond to somebody else’s child. No one may be cheering for us. Even if they did, it may have a hollow ring to it.
We know you mean well, we know that you are going to extra lengths to provide us the validations, the recognition, even the accolades and cheers that our children used to provide. Yet, somehow, your cheers, your congratulations simply reinforce the absence of the one recognition that would mean the most-recognition from our children.
This is the harsh reality for all alienated parents, the reality that we no longer share in the communal glory of parent-children relationships. Indeed, we no longer share in that community. For many of us, our exclusion, our deletion is particularly stark on occasions such as Father’s Day.
This is where we stand, on the other side of an invisible barrier, the barrier between those of you who have children in your lives, even children who have passed, and those of us who have been unconscionably excluded and deleted from our children’s lives. You could easily crossover to us, more easily than you realise for we had no inkling of what lay in store for us. However, we cannot cross over to you. It is now a forbidden land and for many of us we feel an exclusion of almost biblical proportions.
Many of us have found new stepfamilies and have stepchildren and new children who do appreciate us. However no one replaces our first children. And in our quiet moments, after the cheer squads have gone, we remember and maybe we cry, maybe we are angry.
Do not think that your efforts to love us, to validate and acknowledge us are wasted. We need to feel that we are acceptable, loveable, that we are basically OK. Whilst we can and indeed need to feel this as an intrinsic part of ourselves, we do need to feel this from you as well. In this way we are reminded and affirmed that our children’s harsh and unreasonable rejection of us is an aberration, an abomination for which we are not responsible, for which the essence of who we are is not on trial.
So thank you to those who love us, for those of you reaching out to us in our pain. Whilst you can never fill the hole in us our children have left, you can help us make the space around that hole so much bigger.
Thank you to those who care.
Written from the heart. Great piece Stan
Thank you Rob.
And it will be a similar article on Mother’s day.
Aside from the obvious personal dimension, there seems to be something special, unaccounted for, unrecognised in the special anguish that #alienatedparents experience. Perhaps the injury to themselves that #alienatedparents do not always recognise is that our identification, our affiliation with being a parent is shattered when our children are alienated from us. It is almost as if society stops recognising us as parents.
We remain parents if our children die, we remain parents if our children go missing, we remain parents if our children are kidnapped (as we experienced recently in Iraq with ISIL/ISIS) but who are we if our children are alienated from us?
So well said Stan and a very accurate expression of the pain of loss of ones ‘live ‘ child/ren.
Thank you Stan for remembering those who suffer the heart-ache and indescribable grief of losing a child by a means so unnatural, and often invalidated by many in society. Being alienated by the very child you helped bring into this world and love unconditionally is such a senseless traumatic pain with unfathomable repercussions for all involved. What makes this even more incomprehensible is that it is mostly instigated, driven and relentlessly pursued by the ex-partner you once loved and held such hope for creating a loving happy and healthy relationship and family.
Bless you and bless all the fathers (and mothers) out there that share in this great loss.
Thank you Yvonne.
With people like you out there in the world may be some of us do not feel so isolated by our experience.
You make a good point about the senselessness both of an alienated child rejecting a loved parent and alienating parent who pursues such a relentless campaign. This is what makes it so traumatic for the rejected parent and the alienated child, that there is no coherent explanation for this phenomena. Indeed, there is no evolutionary precedent for a child rejecting a parent for the simple reason that children who reject their parents lose the protection of those parents and are more often killed by predators or by the deprecations of their environment. The alienating parent is of no help here because usually they are the parent least able to provide for the child in the longer term.
A child cannot help but be traumatised by what they have come to believe is their own choice in rejecting a loved parent. They cannot help but feel loss and grief at the rejection of a loved parent, yet this is covered over by secondary maladaptive experience of anger and rejection but without the normal ‘re-attachment’ type behaviours that would typically accompany a parent-child rupture. And there is nothing that the rejected parent can do to remedy this violation of evolutionary rules about survival. This is what makes parental alienation unique and uniquely traumatising.
Stan, when I read your article on Fathers Day I was thinking of all those days when my children did not acknowledge me. Thank you for acknowledging us on a day that reminds us of our loss.