♪ Baby, baby/Where did our love go? ♪
One of the most disheartening and confounding aspects of parental alienation is the evaporation of your child’s lifelong love for you, sometimes in the blink of an eye.
In most cases the child’s love has not truly evaporated. It has gone underground, waiting for something or someone to light a path for its reemergence.
This helps to explain why a child can one day spit vitriol at a judge who enforces the child’s contact with a parent whom the child claims to hate or fear, and a few days later relate to the parent as if the dark days of alienation never existed.
As rapidly as alienation descends on a parent-child relationship, it can recede under the right conditions. On the surface it appears that the alienated child has lost touch with the love and connection shared for years with the parent who is now the target of hatred and vilification. But beneath the surface, the child’s mind holds scores of memories of being nurtured and loved.
The task for alienated parents and those who help them is to create the conditions under which the children can recapture their identities as children who love, and are loved by, two parents. Your child’s underground memories are your allies in fostering the rejuvenation of your relationship.
Alienated children long to restore normal relationships with the rejected parent and extended family. Sometimes all it takes is a potent catalyst. It could be a crisis that summons the support of the rejected parent. It could be an extended vacation during which the child relaxes and experiences all that would have been missed if she had allowed her alienation to block her participation.
And it could be a video program that we affectionately call “Pluto.”
When we created Welcome Back, Pluto we designed it to break through the alienated child’s fixed and stubborn negativity, to ignite the child’s motivation to shed the heavy cloak of anger, and to feel permission to let love reemerge.
Welcome Back, Pluto has helped alienated children in 28 countries and is being screened at two foreign film festivals. I could not be more pleased with the results.
Naturally, for some severely alienated children merely watching the video is not enough to overcome their plight. But an alienated mother recently reminded me about just how powerful a single viewing of Pluto can be, and how in some cases it works like . . . well . . . like magic.
Here is her note:
A HUGE THANK YOU for your wonderful Welcome Back, Pluto DVD. I don’t know why I delayed in ordering it but it was like a shroud was lifted off my son and he’s now a happier boy. The video was spot on and I couldn’t be happier to share the awesome results. My son is back to being his sweet self and is now spending time with me. I followed your recommendation in your book to continue contact and then months later watched the video and thank God I got my son back. Thank you so much for dedicating your life to helping us parents and our children remove the blindfold of PA and stop the pain and emotional devastation it brings.
And thank you. This type of feedback lets me know that I am on the right track. I am grateful to all those who take the time to write to me and to those who post reviews of Divorce Poison and Welcome Back, Pluto on Amazon.
Alienated parents often are embarrassed about their children’s rejection because they know that others may not understand how children can be manipulated to devalue a good and loving parent. The more alienated parents speak out about their plight, the more they will know that they are not alone and the more society will recognize the need to protect children from the harm of losing a loving connection to a parent and extended family.
