Parental Alienation: Today's Invisible Abuse

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    It may be the most common kind of child abuse — and the most challenging to deal with. But psychological abuse, or emotional abuse, rarely gets the kind of attention that sexual or physical abuse receives.  

              -- "Psychological Abuse: More Common, as Harmful as Other Child Maltreatment,"

                 by  Laura Blue, TIME,  July 30, 2012

When I first realized my girls and I were victims of parental alienation I went on a wild search across the internet to find out all I could about this problem — this abuse. And what I found is that it's a mixed bag out there: a bag that contains almost as much misinformation on the topic as it does reliable and credible information. And it's not because parental alienation isn't a problem. Far from it. It's because it's a problem that stays hidden, ignored, mysterious, and even silenced for lots of different reasons.

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.

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.