About Parental Alienation

Blended families are now the most common culture in the United States. Most biological parents are not together raising their children. This has created a phenomenon amongst us where, as we divorce, we are teaching our children to feel the way we adults feel about each other, to hate the parent for the affair, for the lack of trust we had in the parent, for the poor choices made with time and money, and the list goes on. This is detrimental for our children and interrupts them developmentally, academically and socially. If we give our children our adult attitudes about a parent or a coparent, even a step-parent, we are teaching our children to alienate from their family, to draw a line of right or wrong against and for family members and are coaching them to self-loathe. Children feel the depth of the pain from this and stop being children, free to enjoy life, and begin to focus on their problems and finding ways to cope, feeling that problems are all around them.

If you are divorcing, we encourage you to become informed as parents and to use intentionally neutral dialogue as parents with the professional honorable duty to raise beautiful children together, who can freely love their family as they are naturally inclined to do. We encouraged you to read the following books:

Divorce Poison, by Dr. Richard Warshak. His book encourages a set of questions that a parent asks themselves before they speak to their children:

1. What is my real reason for revealing this information to the children?
2. Are my children being harmed by the behavior I am about to criticize?  Or are they being harmed by not having the information I am about to reveal?
3. How will it help the children to hear what I am about to tell them?
4. Do the possible benefits of revealing this to the children outweigh the possible risks?
5. If I were still happily married to my spouse, and I wanted to protect our children’s relationship with him or her, how would I handle the situation?

Overcoming the Co-Parenting Trap, by Drs. John Moran and Matthew Sullivan and Tyler Sullivan. This book encourages forgiveness for the parent you are divorcing, or have divorced, to allow for healing and an end to the family feud that could last for the rest of your lives if you allow it.

We have created an Affirmation for parents to encourage and support a healthy relationship with the coparent and children. It is available on our Shop page.

When you are selecting legal and mental health professionals, please require your professional to be educated in Parental Alienation Syndrome. Most legal and mental health professionals are not and could actually align with an alienating parent against the target parent to the detriment of the parents and the children. Legal professionals can guide families to separate in a healthy way by using mental health professionals that will require repair and will set limits with alienating parents who refuse to budge. Your mental and legal health professionals should be familiar with clinical research found in these books:

Parental Alienation, The Handbook for Mental Health and Legal Professionals, by Demosthenes Lorandos, William Bernet and S. Richard Sauber, et al, and Working with Alienated Children and Families, A Clinical Guidebook, by Amy Baker and S. Richard Sauber.