I found myself responsible for speaking factual, unsavory information while medicated . My efforts to extract myself from his energy was ever present . Total opposites after the mirroring that he was everything , had and knew all in a non competitive way .. it was very difficult that person did not exist .
When a child hears one parent badmouth the other, or when both parents badmouth, they feel upset, anxious, angry, confused, and deeply uncomfortable. At first – unfortunately, they can grow accustomed to it. Children have attachment bonds to both parents they love and who love them. What the alienating parent is doing, with their badmouthing (lies, defamation, casting aspersions, insults etc) is damaging the child and ‘target’ parent’s relationship, whether it is wilful and completely conscious or not.
During divorce proceedings and post-divorce, parents might not be at their best. It is a highly stressful situation. Disagreements and misunderstandings can get blown out of proportion, and this isn’t helped by an adversarial legal system. But the children are also stressed at this time. What they do not need is their sense of vulnerability and anxiety being compounded by alienating behaviours such as badmouthing. It’s actually an unkind, abusive and sinister thing for a parent to do. To tell a child their other parent is unloving, unavailable, and unsafe and to repeat these aspersions until the child succumbs to them (just to make it stop) is child psychological abuse. It is traumatic.
There are subtle, covert ways the alienating parent can make the child feel they’ve lost a parent. Calling that parent by their name rather than ‘mum’ or ‘dad’ is one example. The child might start doing the same. The parent is devalued, demeaned and demoted to nothing more than a distant relative. The alienating parent may take some half-truths and exaggerate them. For example, ‘they’re lazy’ can become ‘they’re deliberately not working hard enough, so they don’t have to contribute to our financial well-being, and they’re lying about what they earn’, and ‘they don’t care about us’.
No party should disparage the other. Nor should any third party, especially within the hearing range of the child. Children should not be privy to what one parent thinks about the other. It doesn’t curb someone’s right to free speech, it’s just good parenting.
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