A woman lamented to advice columnist extraordinaire, Carolyn Hax: “I’m so ashamed. I don’t even know how to make it up to my mom, who through all of this always told me she still loved me, even with all the hard words I threw at her. I’m beating myself up now wondering why I chose to believe my dad when there were so many signs I was wrong.”
This daughter’s lament captures so much of what is vital to understand about parental alienation. Inducing a child’s alienation from a parent is not a victimless crime. It creates lasting harm. Shame. Guilt. Remorse. And more shame. And that’s just the child’s suffering. What of the scorned and forsaken mother, who endured years of heartbreak at the loss of her daughter?
How very sad that no one came to this girl’s aid when she needed it. No one helped her resist her father’s manipulations.
Perhaps she saw a therapist and was represented by a guardian ad litem who dismissed the problem as a temporary aberration resulting from the parents’ conflict, destined to be short-lived. Perhaps they didn’t believe that a father could wield so much influence over his daughter’s relationship with her mother. So they absolved the father of major responsibility for the problem and instead attributed it to multiple reasons with no primary cause. Or worse, didn’t believe that children can be manipulated to forsake a parent who didn’t deserve it. So they blamed the bereft victim mother, turning a deaf ear to her pleas that she had done nothing to warrant her child’s hatred, and that her vindictive and coercive ex-husband engineered and drove the process.
To defend their stance, the therapist and guardian ad litem may have cited publications by a social work professor or a law professor claiming that no solid science backs the idea that children can be manipulated to turn against a loving parent. Yes, they will admit, some parents bad-mouth and bash their ex’s in exactly the manner I describe in my publications. But we don’t know enough about the power of parental influence, the skeptics argue, to conclude that alienating behavior can cause children to align with one parent against the other.
If parents can’t influence their children, I suppose we’ll need to eliminate the entire branch of psychology that studies parenting and the impact on children of their parent’s behavior, personalities, and mental status. For that matter, let’s also wipe out the parenting advice section of bookstores.
What does it take to maintain the illusion that children can’t be manipulated to turn against a good parent, or that science does not support this possibility? Blinders. The skeptical professors review a small segment of the relevant science while overlooking huge swaths of research on the psychology of influence and persuasion; the potency of suggestion, selective attention, and confirmation bias; the impact of family violence and coercion, psychological child abuse, and intrusive parenting; cult recruitment; and other fields of social science.
Or, they cite a study of nonalienated children to make the obvious point that parents can occasionally bad-mouth each other without their children rejecting either parent. [See my April 24, 2018, post titled: Backlash Against Parental Alienation: Denial and Skepticism About Psychological Abuse.] This is especially true when the parents’ negative behaviors are mild and occasional rather than a relentless campaign of interference.
While the parental alienation deniers and skeptics ignore or spin the relevant science and avoid placing blame with the dispenser of divorce poison, the public has no difficulty recognizing the potency of parental manipulation. Carolyn Hax got it right away. “It sounds as if you have been the target of heavy manipulation,” she replied to the woman who signed her letter, “So Ashamed.” Rather than absolve the alienating father of responsibility for the tragedy he set in motion, Hax laid the blame squarely where it belongs: “The fault lies with the person manipulating you.”
Hax’s reply was followed by readers’ thoughts. Her readers were even more emphatic.
“I can tell you, having been abused for years, that part of an abuser’s framework is to isolate children from the other parent. Make no mistake about it, your dad was manipulating you to keep you away from your mother as part of the abuse.”
The last reader’s comment is the most poignant: “I teared up, thinking about how much joy you brought your mom by telling her you finally know, and believe, the truth. Trust that she meant what she said about always loving you.”
True. But, oh, how we wish this mother and daughter —and the hundreds of thousands like them—were spared the tragedy of the lost years.