Why everyone needs to care about parental alienation...Oh the gossip never ends!

One may ask why I titled this post "Why everyone should care about parental alienation ...oh the gossip never ends". You may be happily married and both you and your spouse have a healthy and loving relationship with your children. Parental alienation does not affect you. It may not directly, but one day it will either directly or indirectly.

I do believe that everyone at one time or another has experienced alienation in one form or another. Some common words used to define alienation are; isolation, estrangement, separation and unfriendly. One area that alienation can happen quite a bit is in a work environment. Perhaps you have overheard gossip or rumors, or even participated as well in the conversations. The gossip and rumors can be started because one person does not like the other and their intentions is to persuade others to their side. Sometimes people gossip or tell rumors because they have nothing better to do or they like the attention they get. Other times they do this because their goal is to isolate the person they are talking about and they wish to discredit them for their own personal gain. It starts as a malicious attempt to slander someone and possibly to improve the social standing of the person who made up the story. Gossip gives one power over another. People who gossip believe lies, want to believe lies, and persuade others to believe lies. Gossip is censorship and a gross injustice. The one involved has no right to defend themselves. The subject of the gossip is the one who suffers alienation. Parental alienation is nothing more than gossip, rumors, lies and a gross injustice about a parent. The children are the ones that hear this gossip and believe it. The child ends up siding with the alienating parent and discredits the other parent with no basis of truth.

You may think there are no similarities between gossip at work or other situations where this happens and parental alienation. This is where you are wrong. You may think about the town gossip and know that you do not believe a word they say. You may even think about things you have heard and said "oh how preposterous". Alienating parents are preposterous but they are also very convincing. Unfortunately they convince the children, judges, attorneys and therapists about the rumors and gossip they tell about the other parent. Gossip has the uncanny ability of drawing more and more conclusions on less and less info.

You may be thinking that eventually the truth will come out. The truth is there, but often is not wanted to be heard. Many times, the alienating parents tells such lies that a target parent can not find the documentation to support the truth. If the target parent has documentation to support the truth against the lies told about them, it is not wanted to be heard. If a child seeks the truth, they do not want to know the bad things about the alienating parent. In my case, the alienating parent stated that I was guilty of some illegal behaviors. I did not have records of arrest, but I can only imagine that it was stated I either had connections or had not been caught yet. How does one "prove" they are not guilty of such indiscretions? The alienating parent, on the other hand, has records of arrest, not for what I was accused of, but for other violations.

Have you ever given any thought to what the destructive lies, gossip, rumors and allegations do to a child? Not only can they believe that the target parent does not care for them or love them, they can grow up to believe that this behavior is specific to the gender that the alienation is being maintained about. For instance a daughter can believe that all men are sexual predators, abusive to women, have extramarital affairs and fail to support their families. She may grow up with a resentment towards men and this will affect her relationships and interactions. A son can believe that all women are manipulators, they spend money that is not there and are not capable of making decisions. They may grow up to treat women abusively and this will also affect their relationships and interactions. Of course there are other scenarios as well. The one thing that alienated children are being taught is that they do not need to have respect for the target parent. This will unconsciously tell them that they do not have to have respect for the gender that they are being alienated against. This will affect future relationships and interactions.

Abuse follows a cycle and unless that cycle is broken it will continue. Think about that the next time you hear the latest "gossip". How much someone talks to you about others may be how much they talk to others about you!

Parental alienation is abuse! Stop the abuse!