When parents mind batter, it is frequently in an unmalicious but concentrated attempt to forge the ties that bind.
—Ruth Ingliss, Sins of the Father
THE IDEA THAT PAS IS A FORM OF EMOTIONAL ABUSE WAS PROPOSED by both Gardner (1998) and Rand (1997a, 1997b), and resonated with the experiences of the adult children of PAS. Some focused on an unnecessary level of drama and fear being injected into their lives, others spoke of the loss of the targeted parent, and others used the phrase emotional abuse to describe their relationship with the alienating parent. Hannah expressed this belief, “I think it is abusive to a child to tell them they shouldn’t enjoy being with their father.” Robin, too, felt he had been emotionally abused, “I was physically abused, mentally abused, emotionally abused by my mother and stepfather when I was growing up.” Carrie said, “The majority of our suffering was psychological/emotional,” like Joanne who felt, “Our real issues, and I think all my brothers agree with me, is the emotional abuse of having the kind of self-absorbed mother that we had. My mother using and abusing my father and, conversely, having her use us to get to him was more painful than being spanked.” For Patricia, “He stopped abusing her [the mother] physically, but it turned all to inward scars of mental abuse, for all of us.” Roberta, too, believed that she had been emotionally abused. “I think this was emotional abuse, having to deal with adult situations as a child and not being fully developed.” Ira experienced, “Emotional violence to the extreme.”
In the field of child maltreatment, different types of abuse have been delineated including physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. Although researchers have made great strides in operationalizing physical and sexual abuse and documenting its precursors and sequelae (Cicchetti, 2004; Sedlack & Broadhurst, 1996), emotional abuse has been relatively less studied, partly because it is harder to define, document, and observe. There is no physical evidence of emotional abuse; the scars, as they say, are on the inside. In addition, emotional abuse is more difficult to assess because parents may intermittently use some of the actions associated with emotional abuse, without being emotionally abusive. It is the repetition of these actions that makes the experience abusive, unlike physical or sexual abuse in which a single incident can be designated as abuse. For these reasons, the study of emotional abuse has lagged behind other forms of abuse and maltreatment of children. In fact, the American Psychiatric Association’s (2000) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual contains no diagnostic criteria for emotional abuse although it does so for other forms of maltreatment. On the other hand, the Federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (P.L. 93-247) does include a definition of emotional abuse as “a repeated pattern of caregiver behavior or extreme incidents that convey to children that they are worthless, flawed, unloved, unwanted, endangered or only of value in meeting another’s needs.” Hamarman and Bernet (2000) offered a specific set of actions that characterize emotional abuse, drawing on the earlier work of Garbarino, Guttmann, and Seeley (1986), including: (1) rejecting, (2) ignoring, (3) isolating, (4) corrupting/exploiting, (5) terrorizing, (6) verbally assaulting, and (7) overpressuring.
This definition provides a useful framework for understanding the experiences of the adult children of parental alienation syndrome. Each of these components of emotional abuse is described below, accompanied by examples that demonstrate the specific ways in which emotional abuse was experienced by alienated children. Following this discussion a list of seven additional behaviors are presented that could also be included in a definition of emotional abuse as it pertains to PAS: (1) sharing personal details about adult relationships with children, (2) making children feel responsible for adult problems and well-being, (3) exposing children to use of alchol and drugs, (4) threatening abandonment, (5) exposing children to domestic violence, (6) making children feel that the other parent does not love him/her, and (7) making children feel that the other parent is unworthy of their love. But, first an analysis of the 7 components of emotional abuse as defined by the field.
PAS AS EMOTIONAL ABUSE: SEVEN CORE COMPONENTS
The seven core components of emotional abuse are examined as they pertain to the experiences of the adult children of PAS.
The Child is Rejected
Parents who reject their child refuse to acknowledge the child’s worth and the legitimacy of the child’s needs, telling the child in a variety of ways that he or she is unwanted, unloved, unworthy. According to emotional abuse expert Ronald Rohner (2004), rejection is organized around four themes: coldness, hostility, indifference, and lack of love and care. Rejecting parents convey to the child his or her general lack of worth. The parent may also tell the child to leave, call him or her names, and tell the child that he or she is worthless. The child may become the family scapegoat, being blamed for all the family’s problems.
Rejection was prevalent in the childhoods of the adult children of PAS. Not only were they misled into believing that their targeted parent rejected them but in many cases the alienating parent as well was rejecting of them when they were young children. Iris, for example, felt rejected on a regular basis by her mother, “According to her my brother and I could do nothing right and I remember her at times telling us she wished we were never born.” Jason’s father, “was impossible to please and I never knew what he wanted and I never stopped trying.” Larissa said of her mother:
She once burst into my bedroom (she never used to knock), sobbing and boo-hooing loudly, and said that my father had told her that all she’d ever done for him was land him with two creeps (my brother and me). The moment she saw that I’d been hurt by that comment, her boo-hooing stopped, and she started to smirk…. I had no idea how easily some mothers and daughters interact, and I suppose looking back I simply wanted some sign that she genuinely cared about me. In fact I most likely wanted her affection and good opinion more than anything.
Serita felt no warmth or connection with her mother.
We had no emotional tie. We didn’t sit down and talk about things. She would tell me to do my chores if I forgot. There was no place for me to voice my concerns or my hurt. There was nowhere for me to speak about my pain, I think she was afraid that my letting all these things out would hurt her. She tried to counteract that by trying to say things…which really stick in my mind like “I am on my own; why are you relying on me? Is it my fault he’s not coming to see you? It’s him. I didn’t have any money I am on my own, you know, it is very difficult for me.”
Alix’s mother rejected her by comparing her with her father:
Q: So to tell you that you are just like your father was an insult?
A: Yeah I did hear that actually. She always wanted me to stop smiling like him because I looked just like him.
Q: How did you feel when she said that? What did that mean to you?
A: I felt like I was ugly.
Q: Undesirable in some way?
A: Yeah!
Iris explained that through the constant disparagements by her mother, she grew up with low self-esteem and a sense of worthlessness. “She always told us we were failures and would never amount to anything, that we were just like him. We would always be losers,” and when Ira expressed interest in living with his father his mother responded, “You want to live with him? Don’t let the door hit you in the ass,” reminding him that he was not a valued member of the family.
The Child is Isolated
In this form of emotional abuse, the parent limits participation in normal social experiences, preventing the child from forming friendships, contributing to the feeling that he or she is alone in the world. Isolating behaviors include not allowing the child regular contacts with peers, restricting the child’s participation in routine family activities, and locking the child in a room, basement, or attic.
None of the adult children of PAS remembered being locked in a room, but several shared that the alienating parent instilled in them a belief that they were alone in the world and should not or could not have a life of their own. As Jonah explained, “I had no life. I had no existence. I didn’t even care to be doing the things he wanted me to be doing. I was threatened and told if I don’t go with him to do the painting we are not going to have any money and that I don’t love him.” Others spoke of declining invitations to social activities in order to stay home and be with the alienating parent, of not being allowed to play with friends because the alienating parent wanted them to remain nearby. Iris was under the constant observation of her mother and siblings to make sure she never made contact with her father. If she ever tried to sneak out to the local store to make a phone call or send her father a postcard, her brothers and sisters “always intercepted it. Any time I went anywhere I had to have one of my siblings along with me.” As a young boy Edward was not allowed to play in the neighborhood. His mother wanted him to stay home:
Q: What would she say if you said you want to go play with that boy?
A: She would say, no. Can’t do that.
Q: Did she say why?
A: She’s got to keep her eyes on you.
Q: Is that what she would say?
A: She probably wouldn’t say it. But that is what was motivating her.
Q: She liked to have you around at all times? A: Yes.
Q: Was she more focused on you because you were the youngest?
A: Probably, yes.
Q: What do you remember feeling when she would say you can’t go down the street?
A: Lonely. Especially when my brothers were in school. I was by myself.
Oliver’s mother isolated him by not allowing him to leave the house, “Basically she wanted me to not see him, keep me away from him [his father], I guess out of her desire to control me. She wanted to have that much control over me and from 8 to 15 I was pretty much in her control. She drank and she told me to stay home.”
The Child is Ignored
Parents who ignore their children may not show an attachment to the child or provide him or her with nurturance. They show no interest in the child, and express no affection or even acknowledgment of the child’s presence. The parent may be physically present, but remains emotionally unavailable. When a child is ignored it is a passive form of rejection; too little rather than too much is said; and can be likened to Rohner’s (2004) indifference component of parental rejection.
The adult children of PAS felt that their alienating parents had ignored them, particularly when they associated (in word or action) with the targeted parent. In Jason’s family there was a pervasive lack of demonstrativeness, “My family did not show affection that way. There was no hugging and very little touching at all.” Others got the cold shoulder, were treated like “the enemy” or “a traitor” when they came back from visits. Most found this form of punishment to be extremely painful and frightening because it felt like the loss of their own identity. If the alienating parent did not see them, perhaps they did not truly exist. For Maria, the best way she could describe it was to say, “I was invisible. I was invisible to my mother. To this day I am still invisible to my mother.”
The Child is Terrorized
Terrorizing entails singling out one child for criticism and punishment. Parents who use this form of emotional abuse ridicule the child for displaying normal emotions and have expectations far beyond the child’s capabilities. The child may be threatened with death, mutilation, or abandonment. Terrorizing may be one of the more overt and aggressive forms of emotional abuse and most likely represents a complex trauma “that occurs repeatedly, cumulatively, over time and in the context of a specific relationship” (Courtois, 2004, p. 412).
This degree of hostility and violence was less common in the alienating families but not all together absent. Several of the adult children of PAS had been physically abused by the alienating parent, including Jason:
I don’t remember for what, probably back talk. I was like 3 or 4 years…and his favorite little saying was, “I’ll give you a dose of strap oil.” And he took his belt out and folded it over and whacked us a couple of good ones with it. That was life in the…family house for many many years. My younger sisters escaped that because as he got older and got more into his alcoholism he kind of mellowed a little bit but he had me completely terrified for most of my boyhood.
Jonah said:
I believe there is some history to that. I don’t have any memory. I think things were very chaotic when I was very young probably until around age 5 according to my brother. I guess I was pretty much…there was a lot of abuse going on by my father, physical, verbal, and even sexual against my mother and I guess I actually did sleep in the same bed with them for many years, probably until I was close to age 5.
He added:
My father would basically when he would home drunk at night would make me confess…espouse my faith and allegiance to him and that if I didn’t do that he would kill himself, and during the rages when he came home drunk—this continued for about three or four years—he would get his gun out and say he would kill himself if I didn’t do that.
Renee was “terrified” of her mother and Frank’s experience was particularly frightening:
Well the few times I remember talking to him, having a human conversation she was always downgraded, called the worst things, slut, whore, no good, and so on. The times that he wasn’t talking to us was pretty much either myself or my brother getting slapped around. I can remember one time in particular when we were told, “You are going to stand right here and watch” and he lined all four of us kids up in the living room and proceeded to literally beat the hell out of my mother and turned around and told us that is what a “no good bitch” is worth.
The Child is Corrupted
Corrupting parents permit their children to use drugs or alcohol; to watch or participate in animal cruelty; to watch pornographic materials or adult sex acts; or to witness or participate in criminal activities such as stealing, assault, prostitution, or gambling. Another form of corruption involves forcing children to verbally abuse or demean their other parent.
This form of corruption was identified by both Warshak (2001a) as well as Waldrin and Joanis (1996) as particularly relevant to PAS. Teaching children to disrespect and demean their other parent corrupts the children’s values and personality by encouraging them to be rude, selfish, and ungrateful. This was the case in the alienating families. For example, Ron’s mother required him to use foul adult language with his father. Jason shared that in his alcoholic family, he was allowed to drink from an early age, “And everybody was drinking at the time. I was drinking then too.” Another form of corruption was experienced by Jonah who was asked to spy on and keep secrets from his mother. “What he would do is have me spy on my mother when I was younger and report to him at night what she did during the day and who she talked to when I was home from school and stuff like that.”
Sarah spoke of being taken with her mother to meet other men (while her mother was still married to her father), and Oliver was asked by his mother to obtain alcohol for her. “She wanted me to go to the liquor store and get her some beer but…at the grocery store they wouldn’t let me have anything. She said she would beat me if I didn’t get her some beer. She was that type of person.” Thus, these children were exposed to alcohol use, adultery, cursing, and were asked to spy on and keep secrets from the targeted parent, behaviors that are unsavory, unwholesome, and not appropriate for children.
The Child is Verbally Assaulted
Verbal abuse consists of name-calling, harsh threats, and sarcastic comments that continually “beat down” the child’s self-esteem, and create feelings of shame and humiliation. Verbally assaulting behaviors also entail openly telling the child that she or he is worthless and calling the child derogatory and demeaning names.
Verbal assaults were common experiences for the adult children of PAS when they were young. They were yelled at, called names, and were the recipient of a litany of negative statements about their worth and character. Ron and his brother, “would be chastised and yelled and screamed at.” Betty’s mother was physically and verbally abusive to her, “My mother from that point on since I had a juvenile record would hit me, call me names, and start screaming.” And Oliver said that his mother “would start crying and cussing and cussing me out.”
The Child is Over-Pressured
Parents who overpressure their children emotionally abuse them by making them feel that their age-appropriate accomplishments are insignificant and meaningless. The parent imposes constant pressure for the child to grow up fast and to achieve too early in the areas of academics, physical/motor skills, and social interaction, which leaves the child feeling that she or he is never quite good enough. Overpressuring behaviors include excessive expectations of the child, and criticism and punishment of age-appropriate behaviors as inadequate.
Patricia’s childhood was marked by overpressure by her (alienating parent) father, who compelled her to excel in several sports.
I was really controlled by my father. When I was about 9 he started to coach my softball team. I had some natural ability, so he took the team, and pushed me to succeed for the next 15 years. Everything revolved around sports. I was a pitcher, so I pitched and hit every day! If I did not get my pitching in, I was yelled at, and sometimes hit. I also took karate, and played soccer and basketball. I always practiced pitching, even during the other sports seasons. I did not have any friends outside of sports.
Nancy too felt pressured to produce successes and accomplishments for her mother. She spoke of showing her mother that she loved her by doing things for her. “Folding the clothes, straightening the room, getting great grades in school, it was more her achievement than mine. Everything I did in my childhood she bragged about.” These adult children of PAS only felt loved as long as they achieved and performed for their parents, even if what was asked of them was beyond what they should have been required to or were able to deliver.
The Child Witnesses Parental Abuse of Drugs and Alcohol
Allowing children to watch parents hurt themselves or be out of control is a form of emotional abuse. This was experienced by several of the adult children of PAS. Their parents got drunk or began drinking in front of them. This was very stressful and frightening for many, including Alix. “So I got home and she decided to smoke cigarettes and make me watch her and she knew I didn’t like her doing that and she decided to get drunk that night and it was all to spite me because she knew I didn’t like all that. She made me watch her.” Robin’s mother and stepfather were both still in active addiction, something that caused Robin great pain and sadness. “They are both still drunks as is my older brother. He is in active addiction I am sorry to say.” Oliver said of his parents’ marriage, “They fought all the time. I have a lot of memories. Both of them were alcoholics. I have pretty good memories of their battles and they would hit each other and in turn hit me.” Ron, too, had memories of parental substance use. “My mother had a problem with alcoholism and prescription drugs and I remember her and my father fighting constantly and I also recall my mother not coming home often.” Both of Tracey’s parents drank. “When they fought we heard them. They were both big drinkers at that point. My mom would just get so drunk and get stupid I guess and my dad more or less tried to stop her from hurting herself and other people but she would get violent when she would drink.” These children experienced extreme discomfort, embarrassment, and sorrow at having to witness their parents’ self-destructive and selfish behavior.
The Child is Threatened with Abandonment
Threatening to leave a child is a form of emotional child abuse because it instills in the child a deep-seated fear of being uncared for, unworthy, and unsafe. This was not uncommon in the childhoods of the adult children of PAS, especially when they expressed a desire to have contact with the targeted parent. Such threats, for example, were frequently made by Ron’s mother. “She would say things like, ‘You can go live on the street with your father’ and stuff like that.” David’s mother made similar threats: “I remember one time I mentioned about talking to Dad and she said, ‘I’ll kick you out.’ That sticks in my mind because at the time I was thinking about calling him.” For Veronica, the threats of abandonment came in response to her mentioning her father. “I remember being about 5 and I remember saying at the table that I wanted to see him and she went into her room crying to my stepdad and he came out and shouted and said ‘You are not going to see him and if you mention his name you’re out.’” Ira’s mother’s response to his interest in his father was to imply that he would be expelled from the family. When Robin was 13 his mother tried to contact his father because she wanted to send him away, “Oh yes. Oh yes. It was like a threat: ‘You kids are pieces of crap. You are just like him and it is time for you to go. I am going to try to find him and you are gone.’”
The Child is Exposed to Domestic Violence
Exposure to violence, even when it is not directed toward a child, is frightening and traumatic. Domestic violence is particularly disturbing because children do not know whether they will be the next victim and because they are watching someone they love (one parent) hurt someone else they love (the other parent). Making matters worse is the fact that the person most likely to comfort the child (a parent) is preoccupied with either being the perpetrator or the victim of the violence. Thus, the child is frightened but unable to receive comfort.
The parents of the adult children of PAS had highly conflicted marriages, which often rose to the level of violence in the home. Both of Frank’s parents were alcoholics, “and there was a lot of fighting. “Oh lord…they were fighting about just about anything and everything. Once it was because a glass was not in the right place. My father seemed to get physical as often as he opened his mouth.” Kate also witnessed a lot of fighting. She did not know what they were fighting about, but she remembered feeling “a little freaked out and scared and I remember the yelling and I remember hands flailing. I remember mostly the loudness of it. I don’t remember the words.” In Oliver’s home the domestic violence would often turn to child abuse, “They fought all the time. I have a lot of memories. I have pretty good memories of their battles and they would hit each other and in turn hit me.” For Carl, exposure to domestic abuse occurred after his mother remarried. The marital conflict was so great Carl voluntarily moved into a foster home. “She remarried when I was 12 and I ended up leaving home when I was 15 because of their fighting.” In contrast, Maria stayed at home despite the violence and chaos, “I don’t recall them being that loving towards one another. There was a lot of emotional I would say instability and a lot of anger, a little violence. Really the screaming was mutual.” Before Ron’s parents’ divorced, he was exposed to their escalating conflict. “I would hear them yelling and screaming and I would see them yelling and screaming. It was in front of us, that’s what happened.” Carrie, as well, saw violence between her parents, “Both of them equally were very violent in terms of pushing, shoving. I remember there was a kitchen knife block on the counter and they actually pulled knives on each other. I can visualize that. I was about 3 at the time.” Tracey shared a poignant account of what it felt like to be a young child witnessing conflict between her parents,
A lot of times it was my mom who would just drop bombs on him, just cursing him out, she didn’t care what she said, every curse you could imagine and that was all you heard and the next thing you hear my mom calls us down to help her cause my dad is hurting her. There was one day when we lived in our two-story house and I was literally running up and down the steps cause my mom would call and I would make it about halfway down and then my dad would tell me to get back up the steps and I had to run back up the steps, and then I hear my mom calling me again telling me to run back down the steps, and all I can remember is seeing my dad sitting on top of my mom and my mom naked because they were fighting, and she was trying to get away from my dad, and my dad just sitting on top of her and keeping her down so she won’t go ballistic and her just screaming.
Clearly, this level of conflict and strife is unhealthy for children to witness. They cannot make sense of what is happening and are placed in an untenable position of feeling they have to protect or rescue one parent from the other parent.
The Child is Told That the Targeted Parent Does not Love Him or Her
Children need to feel loved and accepted by both of their parents. Thus, for one parent to tell a child that the other parent does not love him or her constitutes a form of emotional abuse by creating unnecessary pain and suffering for the child that can damage his or her self-esteem and sense of worth. Telling the child that the targeted parent did not love him or her was a consistent feature of the parental alienation strategies employed by the parents of the adult children of PAS. It is part and parcel of parental alienation syndrome and was pervasive in the experiences of the adult children of PAS. This aspect of PAS has been described elsewhere in the book (see Chapters 1 and 2) and only a few additional examples are provided here, the first by Veronica, “They always told us that he was bad, had always beaten us, and was having an affair with his best friend, was beating my sister. I was told that before I was born his mother wanted to get rid of me when I was in the belly and that when my brother was born with a hair lip they said that my dad hated him and wanted nothing to do with him and things like that.” Hannah shared, “The first thing we were told was our father didn’t love us. We were led to believe that our financial hardships were due to our father. He didn’t love us and he abandoned us.” Carrie’s mother, “Would tell my brother and I that Dad left us, Dad abandoned us. He didn’t love us. He loved Joan and he wanted to build a new family without us. That we were the problem.” Her mother was particularly cruel when she told her children, as she put them on an airplane to visit their father, “If this plane goes down you are going to die and your dad doesn’t care.”
The Child Is Told that the Targeted Parent Is Unworthy of Love
A corollary of telling children that one of their parents does not love them is to tell them that a parent is unworthy of their love and respect. Children identify naturally with both parents, and will, therefore, internalize negative beliefs about the denigrated parent and feel bad about themselves. As described in Chapters 1 and 2, the alienating parents were quick to suggest that the targeted parent was a dangerous, unwholesome, and unworthy person. According to Kate, “Growing up I got the idea that my dad was everything she ever hated and he was a horrible monster and I was just like him.” Likewise, Robin shared, “I was told he was very abusive and that he was an alcoholic, that he used to beat me and my brother and my mother and he would come home drunk and take money and would go out drinking with it, that he was a womanizer.” Carl’s mother spoke so often of his father’s alcoholism, he said, “The impression was always that he was an alcoholic and he was probably living on skid row. I grew up with images of my father lying in a ditch.” Ira said of his mother, “She wanted to make it clear that he (Ira’s father) was a loser.”
Personal Details Are Shared That Exceed the Child’s Cognitive and Emotional Capabilities
Telling children personal details about adult situations is a form of emotional abuse because it exploits their inability to walk away from a parent. They are a captive audience and are, therefore, unable to protect themselves from information that they are not able to handle cognitively or emotionally. As an example, Alix’s mother explained to her when she was a little girl that she was conceived from a rape. “I didn’t ask. My mom was very vocal about everything. She was like, ‘Oh he beat me around and he was drunk and he drank a fifth of vodka and he held me down and I was crying and he wouldn’t let me up’ and all this I consider lying now.” Even if this story were true, it would still be considered emotional abuse because Alix did not possess the cognitive skills or emotional capacity to process such information. Hearing such stories most likely overwhelmed and frightened her. The fact that it was not true simply added insult to injury. Kate said, “She talked a lot about how he did her wrong and she made up a lot of stories and it was difficult because I couldn’t really figure it out. It was a little too adult of a situation for me to understand.” For Hannah, “My mother did nothing but complain about him. I knew inappropriate things about their relationship. I knew he was beneath her. He was an inadequate lover. I knew that his size was a problem before I knew what that really meant.” Roberta explicitly understood that her mother’s confiding in her met her definition of emotional abuse, “I think this was emotional abuse, having to deal with adult situations as a child and not being fully developed.”
The Child is Made to Feel Responsible for an Adult’s Well-Being
One outgrowth of sharing personal details is that it conveys to children an expectation that they are responsible for solving their parents’ problems. This places a heavy burden on them, with an expectation that they cannot possibly achieve, resulting in shame and guilt for disappointing their parents. Sharing personal details and making children conscious of their parents’ problems also clues them in to the fact that their parents are unhappy, something else children should not have to know. When the parents seek emotional support and guidance from their children, they are “parentifying” them, asking the child to be the parent of the parent. Family therapists Boszormenyi-Nagy and Spark warn that when this happens, “In extreme cases, the child becomes so overburdened with demands for responsibility that he is never given the chance to be a child. Such children become specialists in dealing with infantile adults while they become depleted as children in their own right” (1983, p. 22).
This experience was common among the adult children of PAS, many of whom felt that it was their job to make their parents feel better and to help fix their parents’ problems. This is, of course, consistent with the likelihood that many of the alienating parents were narcissistic (see Chapter 1). For Sarah, when her mother confided in her, “At first it felt ok. It felt nice because at least that way she was acknowledging some of my feelings. Later I started to feel burdened and frightened with the information she was giving me.” Josh recounted the story of when he was 5 years of age his mother would share with him that she was overwhelmed with having to care for three stepdaughters and that she was thinking of taking him and leaving the rest of the family.
Mark felt, “Responsible. I felt sorry and very responsible. I had to take care of everything. I remember Grandma always telling me my mother was very sick.” Edward exploded in anger at his father because he felt that his father was the cause of all his mother’s unhappiness and he felt he had to do something, while Maria felt burdened by her mother’s, “constant playing the martyr. Oh poor me for her whole life. It was all about what I do do and don’t do for her and how horrible life is for her and what she needs and what she feels.” If Amelia mentioned her father, her mother would, “Fall to pieces so basically [I didn’t] don’t bring him up. She’d start crying and say we didn’t love her and that’s just how she is. I could never tell her the truth about anything because if I did she would emotionally break down so it put a lot of stress on me.” These children were encouraged to assume responsibility for their parents’ well-being, something in reality they had no control over. Donaldson-Pressman and Pressman (1994) describe this assumption of responsibility for parental happiness as the key to long-term negative outcomes for children raised in narcissistic families.
Not surprisingly, the adult children of parental alienation syndrome, as well, suffered negative outcomes. As Garbarino and colleagues (1986) noted, “The psychologically maltreated child is often identified by personal characteristics, perceptions, and behaviors that convey low self-esteem, a negative view of the world, and internalized and externalized anxieties and aggressions. Whether the child clings to adults or avoids them, his or her social behavior and responses are inappropriate and exceptional” (p. 63).