Even when your ex-spouse is not consciously trying to turn the children against you, certain conditions, when paired with bad-mouthing and bashing, heighten the risk of this occurring. These are the same conditions that foster indoctrination in cults: isolation, psychological dependence, and fear. These factors may not be essential. But in most cases of unjustified alienation, at least one of these factors is present. They are the soil and nutrients that increase the probability that poisoned messages will take root and crowd out loving memories. In order to maintain or reestablish loving contact with your children, you must protect them from this environment.
Let us take a closer look at how these conditions lay the groundwork for manipulating children’s affections. Then, in chapter 6, we will examine the strategies and tactics used by parents within this habitat to twist their children’s minds. Chapters 7 and 8 expand on the advice introduced here.
A precondition of all brainwashing is some degree of isolation of the subject from other sources of support. Sometimes the isolation is complete. For example, before Patty Hearst’s formal indoctrination into the Symbionese Liberation Army, she was kept in a locked closet for several days. She was deprived of contact with any person, including her captors. This disoriented her. It made her more malleable. It made her more receptive to her captors’ view of reality. Some religious cults require members to undergo a “disconnecting” process of enforced separation from friends and relatives.
How does this apply to parents intent on poisoning their children’s relationship with a target parent? Isolation makes children more vulnerable to divorce poison. It does so for two reasons. First, isolation breeds dependence. Second, it prevents exposure to competing views of reality. Isolation removes the child from the influence of people who would counteract the effects of bad-mouthing and bashing.
One common means of achieving isolation is to keep the target from seeing the children. When the parent arrives to pick up the children for a scheduled period of possession, no one is home. Or a parent schedules the children for activities that coincide exactly with the time they are supposed to be with the target. One father scheduled elaborate vacations every time his daughters were to spend extended time with their mother. When the mother objected, the girls became angry with her because she was interfering with their chance to go skiing or to Disney World.
Manipulative parents will also try to restrict children’s communication with the other parent and the other parent’s relatives. A father who is poisoning his children against their mother, for example, cannot risk allowing them to talk to their maternal grandmother. During such a conversation the children would be apt to repeat the negative messages programmed by the father. Their grandmother would then surely contradict these messages. She would remind the children of how much their mother loved them and provide evidence to support her position.
Alienating parents usually screen telephone calls and let the answering machine take all calls placed by the target. Of course, these calls are never returned. In many cases the children are not even informed of the calls. This can be very effective in promoting alienation. A sixteen-year-old girl told me that her main reason for wanting no contact with her father was that he made no effort to talk with her for a ten-month period following the separation. Although she refused to see him throughout this time, she expected to hear from him. When he did not call, she assumed that he was not genuinely interested in a relationship. This was exactly what her mother had programmed her to believe. The father, on the other hand, told me that he made numerous attempts to reach his daughter by phone and that his ex had intercepted each of these calls.
Any attempt by the target parent to have contact with the children is generally thwarted. Letters are concealed from the children or returned unopened. Information is withheld about children’s illnesses, academic problems and achievements, and important school and extracurricular activities. Basically, the children never learn of the other parent’s interest and love. This sets them up to feel rejected by the target and makes them more dependent on the parent doing the bad-mouthing and bashing. As birthdays and holidays pass with no cards or gifts, the children feel unwanted and angry toward the parent who has disappointed them.
As with most psychological problems, alienation is most likely to be alleviated if you do something about it right away. Some therapists routinely advise parents to wait patiently until the child is ready to see them; in most cases this is bad advice. Except in rare circumstances, you should not permit your children to be totally isolated from you. You must act decisively. This does not mean using physical force or creating frightening confrontations. If peaceful means do not work, including therapy, it is time to consult a family law attorney experienced in representing parents in similar situations. When your ex is intent on keeping the children from you, it may take a court order to reunite with your children. As one psychologist, Dr. Mary Lund, put it, “Court orders for continued contact are the cornerstone for treatment” in these cases.
The importance of taking an active stance in the face of isolation tactics has been noted in several studies. In his study of ninety-nine alienated children, Dr. Gardner found that every case in which the court decreased the child’s time with the programming parent resulted in a reduction or elimination of the alienation. By contrast, when the court did not reduce the child’s time with the programming parent, nine out of ten children remained alienated.
The largest study of brainwashed children was published by the American Bar Association. A husband-and-wife research team, Dr. Stanley Clawar and Dr. Brynne Rivlin, found that increasing the child’s contact with the alienated parent was the most effective way to reverse alienation. Here is what they reported: “Of the approximately four hundred cases we have seen where the courts have increased the contact with the target parent (and in half of these, over the objection of the children), there has been positive change in 90 percent of the relationships between the child and the target parent, including the elimination or reduction of many social-psychological, educational, and physical problems that the child presented prior to the modification.”
Most of the strategies to control divorce poison described in chapter 7 require contact with your children. Some severe cases of alienation may call for another approach, particularly when there is a strong risk of destructive behavior. Also, contact does not guarantee the prevention of alienation. I have seen many cases in which children reject the parent with whom they spend the most time. The favored parent garners sympathy for his cause by convincing the children that the custody arrangements are unfair. Sometimes children are encouraged to disrespect their custodial parent, disobey her, destroy property, fail in school, and withdraw from extracurricular activities in order to demonstrate that living with the rejected parent is unviable. In most families, though, the solution to pathological alienation begins with renewing contact between the children and the rejected parent.
TAKE ACTION
Be firm about maintaining regular contact with your children. If you are unsuccessful, propose therapy for the family with an experienced professional; if your ex or the children refuse to participate, consider legal action. See chapter 8 for important tips.
A more extreme tactic is to move with the children to another city, state, or country. Living far apart from your child is bound to strain your tie to each other, even if your ex earnestly supports the relationship. If your ex wants to thwart the relationship, geographical distance will make this much easier to accomplish. When your child moves, you may be saying your final good-byes. Remember Ophelia, whose plight we learned about in the previous chapter? Her daughter moved away with her father and stepmother, Ophelia’s former best friend. Following the move, the girl kept making excuses to avoid being with her mother.
Your ex can keep your child apart from you even when you live in close proximity, but relocation magnifies the power to obstruct contact. A parent can simply fail to take the child to the airport, or arrive late and miss the flight, or not have the children at home when the other parent arrives from out of town.
Relocation is not always part of an alienation scheme. The urge to move may be triggered by remarriage, valuable educational and occupational opportunities, the wish to be closer to extended family, or an attempt to get away from a violent, intrusive, or overly controlling ex-spouse. But in many cases the move is clearly designed to separate the children from their other parent. Even when a compelling reason is given, it may not be genuine. The new job that is touted as a justification for moving may be secondary to the parent’s true intent of diluting the strength of the child’s relationship with the long-distant parent.
TAKE ACTION
If your ex lacks strong roots in your geographical area (most family, friends, or job opportunities are elsewhere) or has expressed a strong desire to move away, you must act before the divorce is final. Ask your attorney to set in place whatever safeguards are possible to prevent your children from being moved away from you. This may mean a geographical restriction on how far either parent could move with the children, or at least the requirement that you be given ample notice before such a move can take place, so that you can take legal steps to oppose it. You may have to be a joint custodian in order to reduce the risk of relocation. It is usually easier to prevent a move than to reverse it once the children are already situated in a new home and school. You will find additional information about relocation at www.warshak.com.
Some moves are not specifically orchestrated to rupture the child’s relationship with the other parent. These parents really do prefer to live somewhere else. But their reasons are not compelling. They do not welcome separating the child from the other parent, but they also are not particularly bothered by it. Essentially, these moving parents fail to appreciate the value of their children’s relationship with the other parent. Thus, when they want to move, they see no drawback to doing so. They don’t program their children to hate the other parent, but their words and deeds program the children to regard regular contact with that parent as expendable.
Phyllis dreamed for years of living in Paris. She was so eager to fulfill her ambition that she dismissed all reservations expressed by Peter, her nine-year-old son. While Phyllis rhapsodized about France’s fabulous cultural opportunities, Peter despaired at the thought of leaving his father, relatives, friends, school, baseball team, and neighborhood. Contemplating the Mona Lisa was a poor substitute for his weekly dinners with his grandmother. His father, who coached the baseball team, would be unable to attend games in Paris, if they even had Little League.
Phyllis denied that she was trying to alienate Peter from his dad. She thought that he should still love and admire his father. But she also wanted to convince him that his father’s presence was not an important value when compared to something as exciting as living abroad. Not surprisingly, the father did not agree.
In court Phyllis testified, honestly, that she was not trying to disrupt Peter’s relationship with his father. Her goal was not to keep them apart. The proposed separation was merely a by-product of her wish to pursue her own happiness and fulfillment. And that, her lawyer argued, was enough reason to place five thousand miles between father and son. Because a happy mother makes for a happy child.
The judge might have rejected such an obvious rationalization were it not for the testimony of a psychologist. This expert witness, brought in by the mother’s lawyer, claimed that research studies proved that a mother’s happiness was more important to a child’s emotional well-being than such factors as the type of contact he had with his father, the stability of his living arrangements, and the familiarity of his environment. If Phyllis’s desire to move to France were frustrated, the expert testified, she might become depressed and this would create more problems for Peter. Although the studies he cited did exist, a careful reading of them would not support the conclusions he reached. Unfortunately, the judge was not made aware of the errors in the psychologist’s interpretation of the research. In the end the judge allowed Phyllis to move with Peter out of the country. I never learned what happened to Peter’s relationship with his father after the move.
Some courts allow a custodial parent to move a child out of the country even if the court determines that the move conflicts with the child’s best interests. Instead of the traditional focus on the child’s needs, judges in these courts believe the proper test should focus on the custodial parent’s motives. When the court is not convinced that the motives are vindictive, the parent is allowed to move the child away from the noncustodial parent. If Phyllis’s case had been heard in one of these courts, she would have prevailed without having to argue that the move was good for Peter.
Relocation means that, at least when school is in session, you will not be an active participant in raising your children. You will be absent from the rhythm and flow of daily routines, negotiations, and accommodations that provide a sense of living together, as opposed to “just visiting.” You will miss sharing meals with your children, helping with homework, quizzing them on spelling words, signing report cards, driving them to soccer games, working on science fair projects, reminding them to do chores, enforcing rules, reading them bedtime stories. You will not kiss them good night.
Even if you see your child during the school year, you will try to squeeze two months of living into a three-day weekend. Your child will be entertained. You might have a good time, but it will be mutually frustrating, and it will be heart-wrenching, at the end, to say good-bye, knowing that at least another month will pass before you see each other again.
As one father told me, “The little pleasures of friendship and affection with a child pop up at any time—they don’t follow a schedule. Sarah talks about her delights, her worries, her dreams when they cross her mind—when she’s in the middle of playing, or doing chores, or having breakfast—and if a father isn’t there, involved in this, he doesn’t really know what’s going on.”
The loss of yearlong contact with your child certainly changes the complexion of the relationship. If you have the misfortune to face this loss in your child’s early years, the damage is more fundamental. Child development experts agree that frequent, face-to-face contacts with your infant are the building blocks of a healthy relationship. When it comes to being a parent, there is no substitute for on-the-job training. It helps you learn how to recognize and respond sensitively to your baby’s moods and rhythms. And it helps your baby learn to associate your presence with comfort and pleasure.
In previous work I have emphasized the importance of allowing infants and toddlers to spend overnights with each parent after divorce. Bedtime rituals, lullabies, stories, snuggling, nighttime comforting, and morning routines all serve to bond parent and child to each other. These experiences form the bedrock of a lifelong relationship. This was brought home by a Stanford University study. The researchers found that divorced parents who cared for infants during the night were much less likely to drop out of their children’s lives. I am pleased to report that the consensus of divorce experts is now shifting in the direction of appreciating the unique value of such regular contact.
Young children who move away from a parent lose the opportunity to experience the day-to-day contact that experts regard as the sine qua non of a solidly grounded parent-child relationship. A parent who truly supports the child’s relationship with the long-distance parent can help bridge the gap. Women whose husbands are away in the military do this routinely. They talk about Daddy constantly. “When Daddy gets home, he’ll take you to the park. That’s the doll that Daddy gave you. Let’s watch the videotape of Daddy reading you a bedtime story. Here’s a picture of Daddy riding you on his shoulders.” In this manner they help their children maintain a positive connection to the absent parent. Without such efforts, you have little hope of occupying the space in your child’s mind reserved for a parent.
As a virtual stranger to your baby, you will not be able to make up for lost time by spending long periods of time together. A prolonged separation from your ex will stress your infant and make it less likely that your child will associate time with you as a pleasurable experience. Until your child is older, if you don’t have regular contact, you may get to see each other only when you travel to your ex’s city.
When children are older, living in separate cities creates other complications. Even if your ex accepts your involvement with the children, the logistics of maintaining a long-distance relationship can be formidable. The task calls for much creativity and flexibility.
If you travel to your children’s hometown and stay at a hotel, you will be better able to fit into the fabric of their lives—attend soccer games, drive them to and from recreational and social activities, attend school events, and visit with teachers. But the experience is a mixed blessing. As you observe the children in their home territory, you will become painfully aware of how much you are missing by living apart from them. As Miriam Galper Cohen describes in her excellent guide, Long-Distance Parenting, “Being in a child’s home surroundings gives you a very different experience of your own child. It can be a very sad, touching time for a long-distance parent, yet rewarding in its own way.” The drawback is that the children will not be part of your everyday life. If you remarry, the children will miss opportunities to form close relationships with your spouse and their stepsiblings and half-siblings.
TAKE ACTION
When you travel to see your children, bring the certified legal documents that spell out your rights to access. You may need to show these to legal authorities if your ex denies you contact.
If the children travel to your home, contacts will generally be limited to school vacation periods. The children will be out of their usual element. As they become more involved with local friends, they may resent having to travel far from their neighborhood. They may regard trips to your home as unwelcome intrusions in their social and recreational activities. They miss out on athletic events, parties, and other opportunities for socializing and strengthening friendships. Relocation creates a conflict for children between seeing the absent parent and maintaining normal peer activities, a conflict that is usually avoided when the parent lives in close proximity. Vindictive ex-spouses exploit this conflict by reminding the children of how much they are missing when they travel away from home. With older children, it is sometimes difficult to determine how much of their resistance to spending time with a parent is driven by divorce poison and how much is due to the children’s genuine preferences.
When the children do make the trip to your home, your relationship will take on a different tone. You won’t be involved in their daily life and routines. You won’t be supervising homework and chores, setting and enforcing limits, arranging and supervising interactions with peers, and dealing with conflicts. As one divorce study put it, you won’t be a “full-service” parent.
Your lack of attendance at school activities may take a toll on your children’s school performance. A large U.S. Department of Education study found that the children in grades one through twelve who get mostly As, enjoy school, and participate in extracurricular events are more likely to have fathers who attended typical school events, such as parent-teacher conferences and concerts. In addition to these benefits, children in grades six through twelve with school-involved fathers were less likely to be suspended, get expelled, or repeat a grade.
Even without such consequences, relocation usually results in a decline in the depth and richness of parent-child relationships. We symbolize this decline by labeling the contacts children have with their nonresidential parent after divorce as “visits,” a term that connotes that a person is set apart, in some fundamental way, from others at the same location. A visitor is a guest in the home. The term reflects the reality that, for many children, divorce transforms their relationship with one parent into something less than a normal parent-child relationship. As the children become guests, the visited parent becomes a host who entertains. So many divorced fathers fall into this pattern that the phrase “Disneyland dad” is commonly used to describe the altered relationship.
Whether or not your ex intends it, moving your children far away from you communicates a powerful message. It tells the children that their relationship with you ranks lower than their relationship with the parent who moves. If the intent is to turn the children against you, living far apart brings your ex closer to the goal. It moves you to the periphery of your children’s existence. And it isolates the children from benevolent contact with you that could interfere with brainwashing. Remember, with divorce poison at work, absence does not make the heart grow fonder, it makes alienation grow more profound.
TAKE ACTION
If you are powerless to prevent a relocation, and you think your ex will try to obstruct contact with your children, try to get court orders that ensure open lines of communication between you and the children. The local parent may be required to provide a separate phone for the children to receive your calls, or maintain equipment for virtual visitation, such as a computer with a webcam and internet access for video chats.
The ultimate exclusionary maneuver is to hide the child from the other parent. According to the U.S. Justice Department, every year more than 200,000 of our nation’s children are abducted by family members.
Brainwashing almost always accompanies kidnapping. As the mother desperately searches for her son, the boy is told that the reason Mom doesn’t call is that she no longer cares about him. Sometimes the abducting parent tells the child that they are going on a vacation. The vacation just keeps getting extended. In one headline-grabbing case, a mother located her two daughters eighteen years after their father abducted them. The girls had been told that their mother was dead. When they were finally found, the by then adult children refused to have anything to do with their mother.
TAKE ACTION
Recovering kidnapped children is not for amateurs. The moment of recovery must be handled with care and skill, as must the reunification process. If your ex is concealing your children from you, contact the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (www.missingkids.com). There is reason to be optimistic: The agency recovers ninety-seven out of one hundred missing children.
Often an abducted child is programmed to believe that her father is dangerous and that she and her mother must hide from him for their own safety. Some parents in this category genuinely believe that their children risk physical or sexual abuse at the hands of the other parent. If they are unsuccessful in convincing the court of the danger, they decide to take the law into their own hands, kidnap their children, and go underground. One study found that mothers were more likely to abduct their children after the court had issued a custody ruling, whereas fathers were more likely to steal children in the absence of a custody order.
Unfortunately, groups exist that encourage, sanction, and facilitate such drastic practices. They help manufacture new identities and provide places to hide. Usually the parents are so focused on their own view of reality that they fail to see how much they are damaging their children. As I discussed in The Custody Revolution, it invariably results in trauma. Even when parents have a legitimate concern about their children’s welfare, kidnapping is such a terror-filled ordeal that parents must search for a less drastic solution.
I receive many calls from distraught parents, both mothers and fathers, whose children are obviously the victims of very poor custody decisions. No matter how bad off the children were—in one case both children were expressing serious suicidal thoughts—it was never advisable for the parent to abduct the children. That would have merely added to the children’s burdens. Fortunately, the parent was able to work through the legal system to make the necessary changes.
If you think your ex might try to steal your children, you must take preventive measures. But first determine whether your fears are realistic. In research sponsored by the U.S. Department of Justice, Dr. Janet Johnston and Dr. Linda Girdner have identified a list of factors associated with a high risk for abduction. Do any of these describe your ex?
If none of these factors describe your ex, a kidnapping is unlikely. The presence of one or more factors heightens the risk, but certainly does not mean that an abduction is inevitable. Nevertheless, it makes sense to take precautions.
If you have good reasons for believing there is a high risk of abduction, you will want the court to issue very clear orders that specify exactly when each parent has authority over the child, and include firm penalties for violation of the orders, such as fines and jail time. It will be important to keep a certified copy of the orders with you at all times. Provide copies to school, day care, and medical personnel, and have one available for baby-sitters. If your ex refuses to return the child, the court orders need to be on hand and easy for law enforcement authorities to interpret.
The child’s contact with your ex may need to take place under supervised, tightly restricted conditions when there have been prior abductions or other violations of court orders, or when the consequences of abduction are likely to be most severe, as with an ex who suffers from a serious mental disorder or has a history of violence or substance abuse, or who is a virtual stranger to the child because of lack of prior contact. If the contacts are unsupervised, your ex may be required to report in periodically, or wear the type of electronic transmitter used in cases of house arrest. If consistent with the court order, give teachers, day care attendants, and baby-sitters instructions not to release your child or your child’s school records to your ex. Also, you may want the court to order your ex to post a large bond that would be released to you in the event of a kidnapping. You may also want your attorney to write a letter explaining the criminal penalties for aiding and abetting a felony. You could send this letter to anyone who might support your ex in hiding your child.
If your ex genuinely believes that you are a danger to your child, or that you have abused your child, cooperating with a full investigation of the allegations may be your best hope of allaying such concerns and reducing the likelihood that your ex would think that kidnapping is the only recourse.
If there is a strong risk of your child being removed to another country, special travel restrictions and controls need to be in place. These might include some of the following:
Isolation achieves physical separation. But brainwashing also requires breaking symbolic and emotional connections. This is accomplished through a process that cult scholars call “stripping.” People in cultlike religious sects, for example, are often required to dress and wear their hair in a manner that clearly sets them apart from society. (Think of the Moonies.) Books, music, and art that provide exposure to the wider culture are banned.
Parents intent on alienating their children from their ex-partner also engage in a stripping process. They do so by purging their home of any reminders of the other parent. They remove all photographs of the absent parent. Some even go as far as cutting their ex-spouse out of family photos. They avoid mentioning the other parent at times when this would be natural. And they discourage their children from speaking positively about the other parent. This is usually done in a subtle manner. A child begins talking about his father, and the mother withdraws her attention or changes the subject. Before long the child understands, “Mom doesn’t want to know that I am thinking about Dad.”
When I am evaluating a parent suspected of brainwashing, say a father, I ask, “What do the children tell you about their mother?” If he answers, “They never talk about her,” this alerts me to the possibility that such talk is discouraged. It could be that their mother has instructed the children not to talk about what goes on in her home. But if the father believes that the children just aren’t interested in talking about what they do with their mother, I become suspicious.
Parents generally want to know about their children’s activities. They ask, “What did you do at school, at camp, at the birthday party, at your friend’s house?” No part of the children’s lives is beyond inquiry. If the one exception is the time they spend with their mother, children quickly learn that their father does not want to hear about it.
When a father genuinely respects the importance of his children’s relationship with their mother, he expresses interest in what they do with her. By his attitude he lets his children know that talk about Mom is welcome around him. They are not made to feel that they have to park their thoughts about her at the door before entering Dad’s home.
TAKE ACTION
Set a good example for your children by leaving photographs of your ex on display and showing an interest in their life with their other parent. If your ex has stripped the home of reminders of you, give the children a photograph of you and your ex together to take home with them. If your ex destroys the picture, give the children a small picture that they can keep in their possession. It is easier for children to appreciate the irrationality of stripping when they see the other parent acting differently. By taking the high road you let your children know that you accept them as they are without requiring them to conceal their positive feelings for the other parent.
Sometimes the stripping process is quite literal. One mother met her little boy on the doorstep whenever he returned from his father. Each time she went through the same ritual. She took off all of his clothes. Then she placed them in a green plastic garbage sack, which she left on the front porch. When there were leftovers from the lunch his father packed, these too would go in the sack with the clothes. By the time the father received the bag several days later, the food was rotten and the clothes stank. Through this ritual, her son learned that anything associated with his father was unwelcome in his mother’s house.
This mother’s behavior was so extreme that it frightened her son. This, in turn, made him more receptive to her distortions about his father. Fear is usually a precondition to brainwashing. Like isolation, fear increases psychological dependence on the bad-mouthing and bashing parent.
When a child observes his mother vent her anger in an irrational, uncontrolled manner, his main concern is to avoid becoming her next target. With the hope that she follows the dictum “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” he will turn on his father as the price he has to pay to stay in her good graces. Not to do so is to risk having her wrath fall on him.
Jill picked up her son from preschool one afternoon. She was still fuming about an incident that had occurred earlier in the day with the boy’s paternal grandmother. Jill had demanded that her ex-mother-in-law give her household objects to which Jill was clearly not entitled. The mother-in-law, who had already been extremely generous with her time and money on behalf of her grandchildren, refused to comply with Jill’s latest demands. On the way home from the preschool Jill called her ex-mother-in-law on her cell phone. With her little boy sitting beside her, she began ranting. She called his grandmother a “greedy cunt” and screamed into the phone, “I hope you die a lonely old woman.” After the tirade Jill turned to her son and said, “Grandma is a mean old witch. Right?”
How was he to respond? He correctly perceived that his mother was out of control. He had just witnessed her verbal assault on a grown-up who refused to see things her way. Although he adored his grandma, he certainly was not going to contradict his mother while she was in this state. His safest option was to join in his mother’s hatred.
Jill lacked the maturity or the commitment to her children’s welfare to consider what effect her tantrums were having on them. Although she did not see the connection, most people would have no trouble understanding why, shortly after this incident, her son began misbehaving and having tantrums of his own. Or why her daughter faced a dilemma when completing a routine school assignment. She was given a sentence completion exercise in which one of the sentence stems was, “The person I most admire is…” She automatically began to complete the sentence with, “Grandma.” But then she changed her mind and wrote “Mom and Dad” over the “Gra—.” One can imagine the mental gymnastics she went through responding to this one simple task. She could not afford to alienate her mother by revealing positive feelings for the hated ex-mother-in-law. But she also did not want to show a preference for her mother over her father. Her response was the safest she could think of at the moment. This is just one example of how parents’ attempts to alienate children’s affection for others permeate the children’s lives.
A five-year-old girl faced the same dilemma. She figured out a unique solution to the conflict between her wish to be loyal to her mother and her love for her grandmother, whom she knew her mother hated. She told her grandmother “I hate you,” and then added that whatever she said was the opposite of the truth. With this clever device, the girl could simultaneously gratify the need to align with her mother and express her love to her grandmother.
TAKE ACTION
Consider encouraging the children to ask their other parent to stop bad-mouthing you in front of them. This is best done when the other parent is calm and in a good mood. If your children tend to be overly anxious and fearful, you might not want to do this. If your ex is liable to punish the children for even this mild act of self-assertion, let the children know that you understand and accept why they want to remain silent in the face of their parent’s anger toward you. Some bad-mouthing parents will inhibit destructive criticism when they hear directly from their children about how uncomfortable this makes them. Expressing feelings forthrightly will also enhance your children’s self-esteem.
If your children are physically isolated from you and psychologically dependent on a vindictive ex, the chances of preventing or reversing alienation are slim. Any plan to counteract the bashing and brainwashing must place a priority on physically reuniting the children with the estranged parent. This must be done in a thoughtful manner, carefully safeguarding the children’s welfare. But as long as the children are exclusively dependent on the parent doing the bad-mouthing and bashing, there is little hope that they will be able to resist the mental manipulation maneuvers that we are now ready to examine.