The Slow Tear

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I had wonderful daughters who loved me immensely until one day when they didn't anymore for no apparent reason and for nothing I did.    -- My Journal

It's the slow tear that causes the most pain, that prolongs it, that produces the perpetual wasteland alienated parents are forced to live in. It's the slow severing of the relationship we once had with our children that seers into our minds the dying relationship we now have with them. 

The Loneliest Person in the World

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      Parents who feel good about themselves do not have to control their adult children. But toxic parents operate from a deep sense of dissatisfaction with their lives and fear of abandonment. Their child's independence is like the loss of a limb to them. As the child grows older, it becomes ever more important for the parent to pull the strings that keep the child dependent. As long as toxic parents can make their son or daughter feel like a child, they can maintain control.
                                                                                                 –– From the book Toxic Parents by Susan Forward. 

 
 

The alienator's life must be a lonely one. It has to be, I would think, unless she (or he) is a true psychopath and can bury her actions in the past where she no longer has to think about them or can simply lie to herself and refuse to accept the truth no matter how obvious it is. But even then, I would think, the guilt from demonizing a parent in the eyes of a child would be dagger to her heart, at least once in a while.

I would think. 

Living on a Fault Line: The Warning Signs of Parental Alienation Part II

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The city of Eugene, Oregon sits near a major fault line, which can be thought of as an extension of California's San Andreas Fault. Which, in turn, can be thought of as a sliding boundary between the Pacific plate and the North American plate that slices California in two – at least according to Wikipedia. 

All of which sounds fairly dangerous and a little bit unfathomable. And is. 

Living on a Fault Line: The Warning Signs of Parental Alienation Part I

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"We were never the aggressors; we only defended our lands, women and children."   – Sitting Bull.

(The way some parents describe their positions in custody battles.)

None of us realized we were living on a fault line of seismic activity that could easily crack open and tear our family apart. None of us saw this; neither the girls nor I.  I especially didn't see what our post-divorce situation had come to. But looking back, I now realize I should have heeded the warnings that my ex's ceaseless attempts to take my children away provided me.

PA Parents

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      The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen. 
                                                                                                                           -- Elisabeth Kübler-Ross  

There's a new kind of person emerging within our communities today, a person with qualities and characteristics that can only be gotten from a unique kind of struggle, a person who has been fire-tested, shown to be of steel, and emerged from the other side of this struggle scarred a little, burned a little, but stronger than ever and focused like no one else.

Family Court and Parental Alienation

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An insidious morass of redundancies and allegiances to a host of personal agendas least of which are those of the children.

                 – My description of family court 

As a victim of parent alienation – that is, after experiencing first-hand the alienating behaviors of a parent whose sole purpose seems to be to destroy my relationship with my children – actions that have caused two of my daughters to be consumed by what Richard Warshak calls the irrational rejection of a parent, I've had plenty of time to think about the warlike tactics and insidious poisoning that make up parental alienation and to reflect on how this behavior may have gotten its start.

Writing our Alienation Tales: Truth as a Weapon Against an Arsenal of Lies

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"It's just sheer horrific pain every day. There’s nothing like it and nothing you can do about it. You can't escape from it. Can't hide from it. It follows you, haunts you, cuts you like a knife and your gut wrenches and doubles you up. It sours you on everything and you become sick and have to sit and can't think because you can't do anything when you're cloaked in that kind of emotional pain."

–  The pain of parental alienation, from my journal - September 26, 2013

Recently I offered to help a mother write her story about how parental alienation has affected her life by taking her 13-year old daughter away from her. And during the process of responding to her story, I started examining my own reasons for writing my story – an endeavor I began a little over a year ago about how my children were poisoned and alienated from me much like this woman's child was from her. It's a topic I had thought a lot about before I began writing my story but had never written about.

Afterthoughts of Homespun Terror

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And so I've left the girls and they've left me, and we now lead lives separate from each other. And this was nothing that should ever have been possible according to the unwritten laws and rules we grew up with regarding family. These things shouldn't be possible in a world where family is valued like it is in the Midwestern Catholic family I grew up in where generations continued on connected to other generations with no thought that it could ever be otherwise.