An alienated child has been coached to see one parent (the favoured/alienating one), as good and the other (the target parent) as bad. They align with the good and reject the bad. The child cannot bear to hear the words ‘parental alienation’ and will angrily and defensively reject this idea. I know this from personal experience. It’s a mistake. It doesn’t help us to tell them of their alienation. It just adds fuel to the fire. But how can it possibly make things better for ‘the bad parent’ to say ‘bad things’ about their influencing ‘good parent’? All the defences will go up. They’ve been in the trenches. It feels real. They’ve been put in a warzone. They bear the wounds. It’s too much for them to think their ‘reality’ needs reviewing and unpicking. They were doing their best to survive. Trying to tell a child in this unbearable situation that they were put there by their apparently loving, aligned, ‘good’ parent, makes them feel attacked. This doesn’t help or heal anybody. It doesn’t heal your relationship, which is what you want. It is a ‘handle with care’ situation because of the abuse they (and you) have suffered at the hands of the parental alienator. What we need to do is remove the reason for their defensive behaviour. Don’t give them ‘ammo’ and try to avoid talking about ‘parental alienation’ or anything associated with it. Be there with your white flag. Peaceful. Loving. Non-reactive. Be the healthy, sane parent. If they continue rejecting you based on the unreal fiction in their mind, and when you’ve done nothing other than being the target parent (suffering spousal psychological abuse to their child psychological abuse), we wait for them to wake up to the truth. It is far easier to stay in the dark ‘unreality’ of the alienating narratives they heard for so long. But when they truly become independent-minded, if they can step out of the ‘matrix’, they can start to heal and see you in the right, true light.
#enmeshment
#coercivecontrol
#rejectedparent
#parentalalienation
#cognitivedevelopment
#parentalalienationawareness
#alienatedchild
#fathersrights
#mothersrights

