On the whole, despite attempts at reconciliation that I’ve made, I have to accept that my son is alienated, estranged and that I don’t have control over this reality.
Beyond this acceptance, I have to choose what I do with this reality. Live or die? If I choose to live, how do I want to live? This is where empowerment comes in.
I can choose to live my best life possible. When I choose to do this, I betray no one and honor myself, which I deserve.
We all deserve to honor ourselves and our lives with self-compassion and love regardless of the circumstances in our lives.
Most of the stories of alienated mothers are strikingly similar. The alienators can seem very similar, as if all of us alienated mothers were married to the same alienator. Pathological traits can look very similar and predictable.
Alienation is the vengeful outcome of disordered abusers and is a continuation of abuse that was already occurring in other ways and other levels – physical, mental, emotional, psychological, sexual and spiritual.
Alienation isn’t an accidental occurrence because a parent occasionally stated angry words about the other parent. It is deliberate, systematic, methodical programming using gaslighting to manipulate and brainwash, such as with a cult.
There is not much that can be done with the disordered as they are not typically looking to change what they are fine with and works for them to get what they want.
Despite our similar stories, we mothers are unique with various differences, as are our children. Some seem to be more susceptible to alienation than others.
Alienators have a combination of Cluster B disorders. Only the targeted parents will know the true combination from experience since alienators will not be tested. Out of the Fog lists and describes the Cluster B disorders.
But we can be educated for self-protection and to protect our children. Perhaps as awareness and understanding expands on pathology and the outcome of alienation, mental health and regulations in the legal system can also evolve to protect victims of alienators.
Self-care within the world of alienation is unnatural. Nothing about alienation is natural.
Within this unnatural world, to thrive, alienated parents may need to make tough choices for self-care. We can not repeatedly do that which tortures us and become unavailable to the rest of our lives.
We must begin with radical acceptance of the current situation. This does not mean we give up on our kids or ourselves. Rather, it is about not being in denial of the current situation so that we can determine next steps.
We can bravely be aware of our harsh reality, so we may choose better self-care. We can possibly then reach out to our alienated children with our healthiest selves. We are more able to respond to the situation thoughtfully with self-compassion versus reactively with anger or desperation, which can backfire.
Self-care may include blocking alienators online, not looking at hurtful posts, such as from step mothers trying to steal our places. The harsh reality is the alienators want us to see their alienating efforts to further their abuse and hurt us. Why facilitate this and help them hurt us?
Beyond blocking out and distancing ourselves from toxicity, we can try to be mindful of our bodies and minds to adequately care for them. Stay attuned to your state of mind, feelings and your needs at various levels. By being mindful of your needs, you can address and prioritize your needs better.
Your needs may include better sleep and diet. What habits can you begin now to support your needs? Taking small steps, such as better choices with diet and a sleep routine, can go a long way towards helping your mood and wanting to adapt other self-care habits.
You deserve to become your best self going into the new year.
I am an alienator. You know me well. You lived with me once and you witnessed my behavior patterns but you did not spend time studying and internalizing them. I know your behavior patterns better than you know them yourself. I know how to measure you, test you and control you. I know what your hooks are and I know that the depth of the love for your children is a weakness I can exploit. I am an emotional terrorist. I will terrify you into submission. You will do as I tell you to do, and if you do not, I will take your children away.
I am an alienator, you didn’t notice that when we lived together, but I began my work long before we went our separate ways. I created fissures and fractures within our family and I managed and manipulated reality, though for a long time you did not notice that.
I am an alienator, at times in the past you felt a chill wind blow through you when my moods changed as I raged and then sweet-talked you to smooth the ripples in your growing awareness. My mind is distorted but the projection of shadows causes you to believe it is yours which has failed you. Eventually you came to believe that it was you and not I who was crazy. You shivered as I turned down the gas light.
When you appeal to the outside world for assistance, I will turn my most charming face to the sun and open my arms wide and beseech them to believe that I only want the best for my children. I will widen my eyes and up turn my palms and say ‘what can I do when they don’t want to see you’ and suck into my airspace all those who attempt to bring change to the lives of the weapons I know I can use.
My children are assets, collateral, extensions of plans that I make to wreak my revenge upon people who challenge my views or attempt to remove the control that I have in my life.
My children are satellites orbiting sunshine coming only from me – you could never compete with the warmth that I wind around each of their hearts so that only my love is enough; making yours surplus, not needed, discarded like clothes that you bought and I won’t let them wear.
I am all that they need.
You are not.
When our love ended my rage recruited our children to a campaign of revenge that joins us together against you.
In my mind your betrayal awakened the traumas of people long dead and ignited the fuse that led to the bomb that blew up our lives. Now, the souls of our children are hostage to wrongs which come howling from hell and you are helpless to hold back the tide which will sweep you and they to the death that is living with losing your children while they are still breathing. Your loss, not mine, which you and not I will have to survive.
Sometimes you mirror me, two perfect projections that weave webs of destruction that sever our children in two, one side light, one side dark, you there in the shadows.
But mostly it is because I cannot see my behaviors, I am blind to the sight of myself in the mirror. The only reflection I need is the love of my children to feed me and give me a sense of my self which I lost even before I was born.
I am the alienator, annihilator, terminator. My aim is to end, by fair means or foul, your place in the hearts and the lives of your children.
I am easily spotted by those who know me but invisible to those who do not. You will spend your time, your energy and money telling them I am behind this while I smile and continue to shred the trust our children once held in you. I am an alienator even when I do not know it and the failure to see the shadows I cast in the projections I throw onto you, is the fault of a system so blinded by bias it is frozen like the minds of our children, the children being harmed right under the noses of those who should know how to help them but sadly, do not.
In the plain sight of you and of them, the lives of the children you love are stolen, erased and extinguished.
And your anguish and pain are the gifts that I treasure.
And your suffering compensates for the things I perceive you to have done.
And while chaos reigns and the system colludes with my delusions, the power I seek remains mine.
Along with the children.
Whose eyes are wide open but able to see nothing at all.
Sadism is behind parental alienation. Alienators enjoy bringing harm and pain to the target parent. What better way to bring pain, suffering and harm to a target parent than to take away her child who she is devoted to? And to even get societal and court approval to continue and advance their abuse? Jackpot.
The alienator’s primary motive is to cause harm to the target parent. Sadism is a root of parental alienation. It includes a lack of empathy and consciousness. It is a deliberate ongoing, destructive long term pervasive pattern and planned approach by an abuser intent on harming.
Parental alienation is not the result of a protective parent struggling to protect her child from an abuser and accidentally stating true accounts of concerning pathological traits from the abuser, such as continuous lying or accounts of true abuse.
Failed attempts at legitimate, necessary protection is not parental alienation, but a loving, caring parent struggling to protect her child. Such unfortunate, traumatic struggles are often the result when her family court has failed her and her child by not protecting them. Family court has likely failed again in looking out for the best interests of the children, as its mission hypocritically states.
Alienators know they are harming the target parent and possibly the child, but they don’t care about their child. Without empathy and consciousness, they don’t care about anyone but themselves and their twisted, controlling objectives.
The kids become collateral damage to the alienator in his focused intent to harm his target. He is indifferent at best to the irrelevant kids he is using to abuse by proxy. The kids are tools to be used as pawns for his destructive objective.
Parental alienation is the ultimate abuse to keep abusing and controlling the target. It makes alienators feel powerful and significant to bring harm and pain to someone who got away from them.
Alienators know the target parent loves and is devoted to their child(ren). What better way to punish her for leaving than to take her child away? Furthermore, she is shamed by society and receives no support. This is just icing on the cake of harm for the sadistic alienator.
Until court understands and cares about pathology (including a combination of Cluster B disorders NPD, BPD, ASPD – “sociopathy”), abuse and trauma, a struggling protective parent is unfortunately the only way to be when stuck with an alienator taking our child from us.
I wonder if those who have never lost a child to the system, or to an alienator, know that you don’t simply lose your baby in one moment. I wonder if they know that good parents that have never done anything wrong can lose their child, if the opposing parent has enough money and anger.
I wonder what they think of me. I wonder if they think I am the worst mother in the world because I am never with my child. I wonder if they know that I am in a perpetual state of sadness. I wonder if they know that just saying her name can reduce me to tears. That mentioning something she said once can open the floodgates that I still don’t know how to shut after 4 years.
I wonder if they know that you didn’t just wake up one day and accept they’re gone for good. You didn’t hug them one minute and then live your life divided by that instant, all while having it together and not grieving the loss that is, in some ways, more powerful and protruding than any death. Death is finality and closure, going home to be with Jesus, safety and an end to suffering.
Alienation and parental kidnapping is trying to go through the motions without closure, without a light at the end of the tunnel, without safety or an end to suffering. This is unending and undeserved purgatory.
You lose that child every day again and again. You lose them in big ways and then in trickling, drawn out, torturous ways. You lose them Monday through Sundays, then Christmases and their birthdays. You lose them at trick or treating, egg hunts or watching the way their eyes light up at 4th of July fireworks. You lose them again through personal changes as they grow and separate from who they were the last time you saw them and you find yourself replacing, “___ loves unicorns” with, “___ USED to love unicorns”, but having no idea what she loves now or what to say about them that isn’t past tense.
There comes a day when you lose them by the clothes they wore because you know that, even if they come back, nothing will ever fit again. Their drawers or closets look one of two ways – filled to the brim with new clothes that have never been worn, tags flapping in the closet and shoe boxes stacking the floor. Or nearly empty because you couldn’t bare staring at the outgrown and unworn things anymore, so you’ve donated them in hopes to help another child and you could no longer afford to buy clothes for a child you don’t have, after you’ve endured years of court costs and have brought yourself close to losing everything.
There’s a day when their snacks go bad in the cupboards and you have to throw them out, knowing you won’t be replacing them. There’s a day when you’re going through your phone and you realize that there hasn’t been a new photo of them in far longer than you can admit, without it knocking the breath from your lungs. There’s a day where someone makes a comment about you never posting photos of them on Facebook anymore and you don’t reply because that would mean reliving what happened to your family to a stranger.
There’s a day when school starts and you weren’t there. You don’t have any First Day Of School photos because you were denied that beautiful moment. And another when report cards come out and you don’t know how they did or if they are struggling through life as much as you are. You wonder if they got school photos and what they looked like, the outfit, the hair and the gaps in that smile, if there was a smile.
There’s a day where the beloved pets in your home no longer search for that child. They stop looking for them out the window or waiting for their cuddles at bedtime. They stop sniffing for the smell of their beloved human and move on with life, avoiding their room entirely or sometimes destroying it. Every child that comes through your home gets sniffed and scoured, in case she might be Your Child that used to brush your fur and give you treats.
There’s a day when you have to sort through things – old toys, baby head bands, lotion that has never been opened, that old toothbrush that is still living in the bathroom, the piles of unopened presents that you’ve been denied the ability to give to them and the smiles and joy that would have gone with those moments. You bargain with yourself for years about keeping things “just in case they come home”.
Throwing stuff away feels like The Ultimate Betrayal. You think about how, if they came home tomorrow, they would be DEVASTATED that all of their belongings are gone. You obsess over the hurt and pain they might feel. You donate things and each time involves crying from the depths of your soul that you didn’t even know existed. You will never get rid of everything, even when you know they are never coming back.
You see a memorial of them each day when you see their bedroom. A shrine of what was and what will never be. You close the door when you can’t bear it and you skip cleaning in there often, because each memory floods over you like a wave upon entry and drowns you. There’s a day when they lose teeth and get haircuts and hit milestones you’ll never see and that you’ll never get back.
And there’s a day when you haven’t lost a child anymore, you’ve lost their childhood altogether. You’ve been robbed of every precious moment, every once-in-a-lifetime memory, every single funny thing they’ve said and tear they’ve cried. You spend each day losing their scent in the pillows and it will never come back. You howl in pain if someone washes their things because that beautiful baby smell is now gone for eternity.
You miss their fingerprints on the glass in the home you shared. You miss their little voice in your head, what they sounded like when they laughed or how they called you “Mommy”. You desperately search old videos and watch them again and again, just to remember. Although each view is like ripping your heart into two, you do it over and over again. You rotate between obsessing over old photos and being unable to make eye contact with them at all.
There’s a day that you get choked up at families in the grocery store and feel loss in most things that otherwise wouldn’t mean anything to you. You sob when a little girl resembles your own and hugs her mother tight while waiting in line to check out. It doesn’t end. You withdraw from friends or social situations where a child may remind you of your own and the cavernous hole that is now your heart. You alienate yourself from family and friends or worse, they alienate you because they don’t know how to reach out or what to say.
There’s a day where you stop caring about yourself. You lose yourself. You lose how you were as a mommy to that child. You lose the car seat in the car, the mommy and me matching outfits and you gain a scar that is irreparable and that never stops bleeding. There’s a day where people saying to you, “That could kill you” no longer scares you, because death would be a welcome break from the pain.
You stop caring what you look like, how you dress, if you are healthy or in shape. You stop caring about your job, your home, your relationships because you are adrift in a sea of tears and nothing matters anymore. You eventually find your way back to “adulting”. You put on that smile, you get out of bed, you go to work, you clean your house, you nurture relationships and you go about life, but only as the shadow of someone that you once were.
There’s a day where you lose your faith. All of it. You no longer smile and accept gracious words from church family such as, “This pain is for a purpose”, “God has put you in this battle so you can save someone else in a similar trial”, but instead you roll your eyes or feel as though you’ve been slapped in the face. You question everything from God’s mercy, to His grace, His ability to save, His power, His abandoning your child, if He cares and finally if He even exists. You lose the verses you stored in your heart.
You lose the strength and joy that came from helping others and it becomes a distraction from your pain. Your Bible is rarely touched, you stop attending church regularly, you detach from anything that feels like a lie. Namely, God’s love for your and your children. You lose your beliefs. You lose the scripture that you knew by heart, the church family that surrounded you, the songs that you loved to sing at the top of your lungs, the journals that you poured your feelings of desperation into and lastly your desire to keep chasing The One that has seemingly deserted you and your child.
There’s a day where you wonder if they will remember you. You count the days since they’ve been gone and marvel at the fact you’re still here and that you haven’t died from a broken heart. You wonder if they will remember the way you stayed up until 1am learning new Pinterest princess hairstyles, just for them. You wonder if they will remember how you worked 60 hours a week, just to put them in dance classes.
You wonder if they will remember each bedtime prayer and story you recited from memory. You wonder if they will remember how you held them when they cried, how you baked cupcakes with them to celebrate nothing or how you danced to Taylor Swift with them and pretended you were in a music video. You wonder if they will remember the 10 hours they were given to see you in 4 years and if they will remember you both holding each other, on the floor, screaming in agony, with tears covering every inch of you both. You wonder if they will remember being pried off of you and dragged away screaming “I want my mommy.”
There’s a day that you are crushed with regret and failure. You failed to protect your child from a bad person or you lost them due to your financial situation being dire and incomparable for the fight. You want to tell that child every day that you are sorry, even though you have never intentionally done anything to harm them in any way, ever.
You wish you could go back in time and get one last kiss, one more hug or hear their voice one more time. You hate yourself for every time you scolded them or denied them another bedtime story because you were “too tired.” You think of any disagreement you’ve ever had or when you were too harsh, even if only for a moment. You think of every time you rolled your eyes when they asked for that billionth cup of water or claimed that you didn’t cut their sandwich right.
You’d go back and change it all. You’d give them one more cookie, you’d hug them every second of the day, you’d call in sick just to spend a day in their company and figure out the bills later. You’d give and change it all, but all for nothing now. You wonder which memories will be stolen or tainted by the opposing parent and if they will steal everything that was left. Even when you know the answer.
They say that time supposedly heals all wounds, but that’s not my experience so far. I know it’s not been that long in the grand scheme of things. But at 1,354 days out I can tell you I’ve not managed a single day without feeling her absence in my daily life as clear and defined as the nose on my face. She is the ghost that follows me through every motion of every day. The ghost that lives 12 minutes away from me, but that has been forcibly removed from our lives, without just cause.
She is in every nightmare where I can’t save her. She is what I chase in every bad dream. She is the shadow on my heart. She is the darkness that has crept so deep into my being that I can no longer escape it. Some days she still brings me smiles in memories. And other days I will avoid any thought of her, in case I am unable to stop my tears and back myself off of the proverbial ledge. She was my pride and joy, my everything but now she is a ghost that haunts me. One that I cannot and do not want to shake because it’s all I have left.
So again, I wonder if anyone knows the way that one feels this kind of loss. One that is the grief following the loss of a person that is still very much living. A person who was taken from you out of hatred and spite, but not neglect nor abuse on your part. Your baby. The one you carried in your tummy for 9 months and raised. I wonder if anyone remembers that I was a good mom. I wonder if they’ve ever grieved the living.
I wonder if they know that hatred, spite and vindictiveness didn’t steal just my child, it stole my life, my job, my memories, my happiness, my finances, my joy, my ability to love with reckless abandon, my son’s sister, my parents’ grandchild, my siblings’ niece, my daughter’s childhood and who I was. There’s a day where you will experience or ponder each and every one of these. And that day is every day.
I’m not 50% of each of my pathological parents. That would make me 100% pathological, which I think I miraculously managed not to be.
I’m just me, with various fractions from various places that are impossible and degrading to quantify with math.
Accordingly, my kids are not 50% me and 50% their father. It’s arrogant and demeaning to think they are 1/2 either parent like property. This concept is used a lot in the world of parental alienation and it needs to die.
Acknowledging a pathological, alienating parent for their abuse and legitimately concerning pathology does not mean we are insulting 50% of our kid. This has become a twisted concept in the legal system and another way to abuse and silence the healthy, loving, devoted targeted parent.
If anyone had clued me in about my parents’ pathology, I may have been spared considerable abuse and trauma that I am now trying to deal with.
The 50% concept is also incorrectly used in the legal system for parenting time. It assumes kids benefit from 50% time with both parents, regardless of their capability as parents. Family courts state their mission as caring for the best interests of children. However, many of their rulings show otherwise.
In an ideal world, kids would only be with healthy, loving parents.
As Khalil Gibran eloquently describes, our kids are 100% themselves and deserve our utmost care. Having them and raising them with an aspiration to reach their full potential is a privilege, blessing and honor.
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.
You participated in destroying your relationship with me when you threw me under the bus, as your father trained you to do. I don’t belong there and didn’t deserve your treatment and handling of me, with his manipulation at my expense.
What concerned and worried me most was the lack of empathy you displayed in your choice. I know this can not bode well for you and your future. What also concerned me was a displayed inability to understand another perspective. This also can not bode well for you and future relationships.
Although I felt devastated by your betrayal, I worried more for what was displayed about your developing character and ability to find happiness. My hopes and wishes for how I wanted to raise you were squashed. You certainly weren’t becoming a well-mannered gentleman at a core that I hoped to offer the world as a basis.
I did my best to prevent the current outcome. Maybe you will realize this one day. You will not be able to say I didn’t do anything about you being raised by a psychopath. It is now on you at almost 21 to determine your future and fate. Whether you will follow in his footsteps or turn a corner of your own.
Ever wonder about the source of your unfounded, unjust hatred towards me? Who has been pouring poison in your ears to turn you into a weapon of mass destruction? Surely this can not be a loving, caring, respectful source. Good luck with giving your soul to Satan. I have inadvertently done it, so I understand how it can happen. But no loving mother can then wish that experience on her beloved child.
Having endured the struggle to then untangle and retrieve my soul, I have desperately wanted to spare you the same struggle. No loving mother hopes for pain and struggle for her child. Her heart only breaks when that is all she sees for her child and can not change it.
It’s time for me to let your hand go. I don’t want to, but I need to. My heart can break just so much. God didn’t mean for me to live under a bus. It’s not that comfortable and I can’t do much with my life from there. I can’t allow my son to continue the legacy of me being a scapegoat my entire life. That is no longer my role with anyone, most especially someone I gave birth to. That is not a role my son should expect me to shoulder.
I didn’t let you go before. You were taken from me. I have no choice now but to let you go, as you’ve already left. You’ve been lost to me for too many years. I have to radically accept that harsh reality no healthy mother wants to. Like so much missing in the Mom Manual, I have had to painfully learn and accept this ugly part of my life and my motherhood on my own.
I have and will continue to grieve for the hopes and dreams I’ve had for you and our relationship. I have to let the universe hold and care for you. Just as I had to do when you were born. It somehow felt wrong having the chord cut and seeing you whisked away by strangers, surrounded by them, connected one moment, disconnected next. I just wanted to protect you and be the one caring for you with my genuine love that filled my heart, as I marveled at the most beautiful sight I ever saw.
Should you decide to find your true self, have a relationship with me and repair the damage, I would open my door. But I can’t put my life on hold for that hope. It can’t be what God has intended for my life and it would be unfair to my daughter, who needs me, wants me in her life, loves me and deserves me in her life.
I will continue to love you from afar and hope that you will find your path, as I continue to try finding my path. Your soul’s path is always your own, just as mine belongs to me.
Perhaps, one day, the two paths may meet, and our souls may find connection and embrace. I will live with that faith.
I’m trash, as my 20 year-old son recently told me. I’m also awful as he told me. As I reflect on my awful trashiness, I recall this:
Washing his dirty underwear, and being the only parent to do so.
Doing all the dirty, messy, complicated, demanding, responsible aspects of raising a child, as this was beneath his non-trashy, wonderful father.
Working overtime since I didn’t receive child support from his father.
Sometimes I took my son to work with me when his father didn’t show up for his limited parenting time. His father always had the next level of a video game to accomplish, to maintain his awesomeness. When he did utilize his parenting time, he usually had other people be with him. My son often stated his sadness and anger over not seeing him on his time and not wanting to go again.
Taking my son to all his medical appointments, including his regular orthodontist appointments half an hour away, often with a screaming, protesting toddler. Such mundane, frustrating, boring parenting work was beneath his father, including paying for his half of the bills. Besides, the word sacrifice was not a word his father cared to know, embrace, or have in his vocabulary. That was for the little people, like me.
I got an MBA, an education that had nothing to do with my interests or passions, in order to provide better for my son. I chose a direction of my life out of lack from his father, to step into the required roles of both, mother and father. Meanwhile, his father explored the glamorous, rewarding world of hedonism.
I looked for any second I could to work overtime and finish my MBA from home to be there for my son, often studying before he woke up and after he went to bed. I accomplished this in super-human, but of course, still trashy ways.
Having to leave work 45 minutes away to bring my son lunch or pick him up from school when he was sick, since his amazing, important father, who lived 5 minutes away couldn’t be bothered.
Yet it is his father who has “been there” for my son, as my son has stated, and his father is now the one undoing the damage and trauma from awful trashy me, as he has elaborated.
Considering the reality behind the label of “trash” I was given, I can consider new meaning for the word and proudly say “I’m awful trash,” just like Wonder Woman.
