Prologue to Book

 Mid 2011

She continued looking at me as she backed up across the parking lot and onto the grass lot which sat next to it. We were no more than twenty feet apart and she was holding her cell phone in her hand like a weapon telling me that if I came any closer she'd call the police. I knew she meant this. I knew this girl well. She's my daughter.

It was midday at the convenience store and customers were coming and going, gassing up the cars, buying things, and beginning to notice us. I had arrived only moments earlier and was putting the kickstand down on my bike when I saw a young girl coming out of the store who looked a lot like my daughter Mary, someone I hadn’t seen in eight months. She didn’t notice me and so I called her name as she started walking away. When she heard her name being called she whipped around to see who was talking to her. When she saw it was me, she immediately stopped and began yelling and screaming.

 

"Don’t come any closer or I’ll call the police. Get away from me. Leave me alone."

"Mary, I just want to talk to you," I replied in a calm voice. "I haven't seen you in months and I thought it would be good for us to talk. That's all."  I took a few steps closer thinking this might help. It didn't.

 

"Don’t come any closer," she yelled again. "I don’t want anything to do with you anymore. I don’t ever want to see you again. I hate you."

 

"Why are you saying that Mary?" I replied. "Why are you saying you hate me? I don’t understand this. You’re my daughter and I miss you like crazy and I just want to see you and talk to you. I honestly don’t know what I did to make you act this way. Won’t you at least tell me what I did?"

 

"I think you know what you did," she replied.

 

"No, I really don’t know," I answered thinking she might want to take this opportunity to clear it up. She didn’t.

 

"We used to be so close, you and me, Mary," I continued, "and whatever this is is really bad. I don’t know what happened to us. Can’t we at least talk about it for a few minutes? I think we can straighten it out if we do."

 

"No way," she yelled more emphatically than ever. "I don’t ever want to see you again. You’re not my father anymore. I don’t want anything to do with you. If you come any closer I’ll call the police. I really well. I’m calling them right now."

"Don’t do that Mary."

"Then get away."

 

I backed up and so did she, and even though we were a long ways apart, it seemed that even from that distance, I could she was crying. And I swear that underneath her bluster and gruff exterior I could hear the pain of a child who has had her life turned upside down and been left confused, alone, and stranded from a life she only recently had with a father she loved. And I heard fear in that small voice of hers as well — fear of the insanity that has now become her life and of the unrealistic choices she'd being forced to make and the unrealistic and unimaginable consequences she'll have to live with no matter which make choice she makes. 

Like any alienated child she's being forced to hate someone she loves for reasons she doesn't understand. She's being made to choose between her mother and her father — one or the other — but not both. Both is not an option. And she has to align herself with one of those sides, and distance herself from the other, also for reasons she doesn't understand. And the consequences of making that choice are are making her feel crazy because she doesn't know how to do this and she doesn't want to know. She just wants it to stop.

But that's not an option either.

And so she ends up doing what any child in her position would do — she chooses the path of least resistance, the one with the least amount of pain. She chooses to let her father go and abandon him because it's easier that way, because he won't threaten or hurt or withhold love. And even though there's a part of her, however deeply buried, 

that still knows this to be true about him, another part of her has to walk away from him. 

And that's exactly what she was doing that day out there in the parking lot — walking away from me. And it's why I sensed so much pain and sadness in her voice and why I felt so sorry for her. 

But I was in pain too, watching my little girl act this way around me, seeing this daughter of mine — a child who always loved me more than anything and would often say this very thing to me — changed so severely that I barely recognized her. It was impossible to comprehend. It was killing me. 

But even as hard as this was for me, I still felt incredible compassion for her and the position she’s being put in, and all of it was now starting to seem like a bad dream I could only hope to wake up from.

But this was no dream. This was real and happening right now out here in this parking lot and there was nothing I could do about it except stand there in that parking lot and watch Mary walk away from me — a horror and a heartbreak like none other. 

By this time a small crowd had gathered around us naturally concerned about this young girl and probably fearful of me, parents stopped in their tracks, holding their child's hands and positioning themselves between their child in me as a shield I'd seen this before, maybe not to this degree, but the same body language from people who didn't know anything about me and shouldn't fear me but who had probably been told untrue things about me: friends, teachers, therapists, doctors, etc. It's unnerving, even debilitating and yet all-too-common when you're on the receiving end of a campaign of denigration — when you're a targeted parent. It tears you down from the inside and makes you doubt yourself almost as much as the people around me were probably doubting me at that moment.

I knew there was no point to try to explain it to any of the onlookers, but I gave it a shot anyhow. "This isn't what you think. I don't know what's wrong with her. I didn't do anything to her. Someone is making her do this…" I droned on to anyone willing to listen, but I doubt anyone believed me. I probably wouldn't have believed me either. But  I also didn't care much at that point.

I got on my bike and headed home holding back tears, hurt and confused. After a few blocks I pulled over to collect myself and try to make sense of what I had just witnessed. I turned around to look back, and they're off in the distance was little Mary walking alone. Always alone it seemed she was. I stood there watching her for a while until I realized I was slipping into an even deeper depression about the finality of it all and the reality of knowing our relationship was over and there was nothing more I could do.

And then I realized something else — that for the first time in our lives I couldn't fix something for her, which, as it was turning out to be, was probably the last time I would see her. We were now strangers.

Update...

Hey everyone. Looks like I haven't been on here for a while. But I have. I'm turning the blog into a book and going through it chapter by chapter, revising and rewriting (same thing?) plus adding some new chapters in the process. 

Please keep reading and commenting.  - John

Grace's Dreamcatcher

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	Most of us greet the warmth and excitement of the rising sun as the assurance of a new day. But others wake in the morning after a restless sleep, to a day of darkness – a void that will never again be filled.This is the pain of losing a child. Loss of any kind is traumatic, but the loss of a child is truly devastating. It may be the ultimate loss we humans can ever experience on earth. ... We can try to learn to live with the pain, but such an event alters our lives forever.
	– From Growing Up In Heaven: The Eternal Connection                                                      Between Parent and Child by James Van Praagh

    

Every time I move to a new place I take Grace's dreamcatcher with me and hang it over my bed. I like to think it protects me from bad dreams or bad somethings – maybe memories of the two of us together that were wonderful at one time but are too painful now to think about. That's probably it.

April 25th is National Parental Alienation Day

April 25th is National Parental Alienation Day

Father and Daughter

Whenever I see a father and daughter walking together
late in the evening, maybe after the evening meal,
and they're holding hands
and she's telling him about her day at school,

Pain is the Point of Parental Alienation

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Pain is the point of parental alienation. It's the whole point. It's the reason parental alienation exists. You could say its parental alienation's raison-d'etre, its reason for being, because that's exactly what it is. Intense pain aimed at parents like us who love our children more than anything in the world by turning our children against us is the aim of the alienating parent.

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.

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.

Parental Alienation During the Holidays

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Pioneer Cemetery University of Oregon

The Pioneer Cemetery is located on the east side of the Knight library in the middle of the University of Oregon campus. Today it sits outside the window I found while looking for a place to sip my coffee, read, and do some writing. With its rows of century-old gravestones claiming space next to tall Douglas firs, it’s snow-covered road trailing off and away to an infinite landscape, it makes a pleasant backdrop upon which to gaze as I read, write, and think about the move I recently made and the children I left behind.