Parental Alienation

When you are lost, reconnecting starts with you remembering YOU.

Once upon a time, we were good parents.

Oh yes… I’m not allowed to use that word anymore. Parent. Why? Because something regrettable and ugly happened, something that swept in and entirely erased that role for us. You might not know what I’m talking about, and luckily so. You might think, “Once you become a parent, you are forever one.” And you are right to think that way. It’s how it should be.

But life taught me otherwise.

You see, I think you are a parent as long as you believe you are one. It’s a title held in the heart.

But when you stop thinking you are an essential part of your child’s life, when you look in the mirror and realise you’ve shrunk into someone you don’t recognise, when you become convinced that your love is not enough - that is when you cease to be a parent.

It’s a little bit like having a dream, but believing you don’t deserve it. How can you possibly achieve it with that weight on your soul? It’s the same for us. It becomes impossible to call ourselves parents when we are no longer allowed to be ones.

Once upon a time we were good parents.

Then, our child was made to believe we had no rightful place in her life, and we fell. We fell into the black hole of faceless people and endless grief.

So I have to ask: Do our own children make us parents? Is this role we held so dearly somehow disconnected from their role as ‘children’? Doesn’t the simple fact that they exist - that their lives are a map on which we are permanently etched - isn’t that enough to validate who we are?

Once upon a time, it was.

Then parental alienation came and stole everything.

What is it? You might ask. Well, I don’t want to talk about the legal term or its dramatic label. Parental alienation is the quiet, systematic undoing of a bond you believed was unbreakable.

It’s when your child looks at you with different eyes. First, you see a new, fake truth in their gaze - a certainty about you that isn’t yours. Then, that look hardens into disdain, or worse, fear. And you stand there, the same person you were yesterday, your love unchanged, yet everything around you has shifted. You are no longer welcomed in their life.

Your child has been made to believe all the terrible things you will then, in your deepest grief, come to believe about yourself: that you don’t love them (and so, they must not love you). That you don’t want them (and so, they cannot want you). That you’ve abandoned them (as they now, finally, cut you off).

It’s a perfect, cruel inversion. The same inversion that happened in your perception of yourself as a parent.

Let me be clear: you haven’t lost that role because of the alienation itself. Regardless of the toxic dynamics, you remain one. The title was never theirs to revoke.

You’ve lost it because of what you came to believe as a result of your situation.

Parental alienation is a war of perceptions. It’s a battle fought not with facts and truths, but with manufactured reality designed to make you doubt your own.

So, how do you fight it?

You fight it by remembering. You remember who you truly are, despite the abuse. You validate all that you did to raise the amazing, wonderful child your kid has become, even if they cannot see your hand in it anymore.

You reconnect by remembering reality. You stay grounded in the truth of your love and your history. You refuse to give in to the fake perceptions of that distorted world. You hold onto the real story, even if you are the only one left who knows it by heart.

Once upon a time we were good parents.

And we still are.