Who Thinks Like This Part II

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There are more similarities between parental alienation, abduction, and cults then there are between parental alienation and anything else, especially divorce. In fact I don't like to see the word "divorce" associated with PAS because it muddies the issue and fills in a story in peoples' minds before they have a chance hear the real story – your story.

And even though some of the best books written on the subject of parental alienation have the word "divorce" in their titles – Divorce Poison by Richard Warshak and Divorce Casualties by Douglas Darnell – and even though these books have done much to open peoples' eyes to parental alienation and have reached vast audiences, there are also many readers who turn away from titles like this thinking they're about divorce rather than about brainwashing, thinking they're about family court rather than about kidnapping, thinking they're about visitation or child custody do's-and-don'ts, rather than about stealing your child's mind, cults, abuse, or the death of your relationship with your children – all topics PAS is closer to than it is to divorce.

You would better understand the topic of parental alienation by reading about abuse, kidnapping, cults, and even the criminal mind, than you would by reading about divorce, because these topics describe the experiences we targeted parents find ourselves in better than divorce does. Much better. They're vastly different subjects.

Which explains why so many of us alienated parents seem "obsessed" (our friends' words) with parental alienation once we learn about it, and why this topic has grown so much in the last ten to twenty years. It also explains why we get frustrated when our friends turn the topic back to divorce or custody or family court thinking that’s where we'll find a solution when all that does is drag what is a very scary and horrifying topic into the margins of the thousands of similar divorce stories and away from the spotlight and attention that it deserves.

Grace and Dad

We parents of severe PAS have had our children abducted. There's no other way to put it. We know nothing about our children unless we read about them in the paper, run into them in the community, or convince someone (usually against their wishes) to tell us how they're doing, what they're doing, where they're living, or even if they're living. And that's not an exaggeration. There are parents who don't know even this much about their children. I don't.

We alienated parents don't have a "strained" relationship with our children. We don't have a part-time relationship with our children. We have "no" relationship with our children. I would die to have a weak or strained relationship with my daughters like some parents have with theirs.

We don't even have the broken-down, failed connections to our children the worst parents in the worst-case divorce outcomes have. We have nothing. And this type of nothing can only be understood in terms of how our situations are similar to an abduction or a death, and how it's abuse for our children to manipulated to the point where they now think we're criminals, or worse, and how in this abuse there's both a victim and a perpetrator: a victim of the worst kind of psychological abuse and a perpetrator with mental issues so severe, and yet so cunning, that like some of the best manipulators in our society, they too are able to avoid detection by nearly everyone around them, including their victims.

Not only do these targeting – or alienating – parents engage in behaviors that at first glance appear to be mere divorce antagonism gone too far, but by cloaking these behaviors in the trappings we're all too familiar with, like divorce and custody antics and misleading platitudes such as, "There's two sides to every issue," or "Both parents do it so what's the problem?" they’re able to avoid detection of their goal of doing so much more than restricting access to our children or violating our parenting schedules.

To them these things are child's play. They're way beyond the annoying antics of a divorce gone haywire -- just as the scope of this problem is way beyond the purview of the family lawyer and more suited to a criminal lawyer.

What these alienating parents are doing is creating a death of a child and of a parent. There's no other way to put it. They're programming a child to never remember the parent they once loved by bringing them into the folds a cult and abusing them so severely that they’ll never be the same people again. And they're doing this in thousands of families each year resulting in an unprecedented number of children living in single- parent households and succumbing to alcoholism, drug addiction, depression and scores of other problems associated with emotional and psychological abuse.

That's who thinks like this.

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Parental alienation is abuse and it leaves deep and lasting scars that we're just beginning to understand the magnitude of.  Because of this and because of things like the scorched-earth campaigns of denigration directed towards the targeted parents and the other symptoms seen only in PAS families, we have to know there's something seriously wrong with the people responsible for these actions: the alienating parents.

And just as parental alienation is not about a contentious divorce, the motives driving the person behind it are not about reactions to a contentious divorce either. This person is not just an average ex-spouse letting off steam.

They're doing much more than this. And there's much more going on, especially when this person -- the targeting parent -- is still deeply engaged in destructive and poisonous behaviors ten years after their divorce is over, when everyone else, including their children, their lawyers, the courts, and even their own personal support team have all moved on and put this all in the past, where it should be. 

And since everyone else has moved on, this alone should compel us – the targeted parents and the abused children, the victims of this perpetual fanatical fervor – to ask the question we can’t avoid asking: who thinks like this?

We need to ask this question because we need to be able to spot people whose sole intention is to destroy our relationship with our children, even when these people are in our family -- especially when they're in our family -- because while close enough to keep their actions hidden in the folds of the family, this closeness and secrecy also allows them to keep the harm they do to our children hidden from outside eyes. And that’s where parental alienation thrives: in privacy and secret, like all abuse.

And because we can't wait until we notice the symptoms of PAS to react -- because by then it’s too late -- we need to do what many experts recommend and become aware of the conditions where this abuse thrives before we lose our children.

And along with this, we need to become aware of a mind that will do things like this and we need to be able to make a non-biased assessment of this person, objectively looking for a set of behaviors that define this illness rather than making subjective judgments in order to scapegoat them. This objectivity can be extremely difficult in families after a divorce, but it's extremely necessary.

We need to recognize the signs of a person who will risk everything, even their own children, for this purpose. Someone who will do whatever is necessary to destroy their children's relationship with their other parent no matter what this means to their children. We need to recognize the signs of this kind of mental illness.

And then we need to do something else. We need to speak up, because no one else is going to do this for us. We need to tell our stories, because we can't afford to stay silent and because this exposure might be the only tool we have. We need to do this because there's only so much we can ignore and only so much any person should take. For the sake of our relationship with our children, we need to know exactly who thinks like this.