Parental Alienation at Its Worst

From experience, I know that women who are experiencing the pain of divorce are consoled by understanding that they are not alone.

This is a story that I have heard only 3 times in over a decade and it is absolutely heart breaking.  In my opinion, the height of parental alienation involves children who have reached adulthood.

All three scenarios have played out similarly. During the marriage, the husbands were absent as the children grew up. When they were present, they undermined the mothers’ authority in giving consequences to the children. When the divorce process began, they began to tell the children supposed facts about the mothers.

In all three cases, the husbands were very clever in the ways that they damaged the relationships between the mothers and their children. It was especially painful for the mothers because they were the ones who nurtured and cared for the children 100% of the time. The experience of abandonment by their own children was gut wrenching.

Two of these women sought professional psychological counseling so as to understand how their children could be excluding them from their lives after they had been so close previously.

The two interesting bits of advice that both received were:

• Children gravitate toward the parent they are most afraid of losing. They are confident in the fact that the parent who was always there for them will always be there for them even though she is treated poorly.
• Children are inherently selfish so until they are about 30, they will lean toward the parent who has more money. The one who has the money to pay for vacations, cars and even college is the one who will usually win the children’s allegiance.

Several of the ex-spouses went so far as to offer to pay for weddings but only if the mothers’ names were excluded from the invitations and excluded from taking part in the wedding plans or ceremony itself.

The takeaway is that you must be patient if anything like this is happening to you. If you keep your dignity and do what is right, things will turn around eventually. No matter how much your heart is breaking, do not stoop to the level of your ex-spouse.  If you do, ultimately it will delay your children’s realization that they were used as pawns to hurt you.

The really sad part is that ultimately, the children are hurt the most. The saddest story came from a 37 year old woman who’s mother passed away before she figured out what was really going on. Now this woman has severed connections with her father because of what he did. Now she has lost both parents and has to live with the guilt of ignoring her mother. She can’t fix the relationship or say she is sorry.

Photo: Alyssa L. Miller