Parental Alienation: Why We Stopped Chasing and Started Living

Fight alienation by creating a gravitational pull.

There comes a moment in every targeted parent’s life when the mind simply refuses to obey the heart anymore. You reach a point where the exhaustion of the chase (the pleading, the knocking on a door that never opens) becomes a weight that pins you down.

For years, we operated under the belief that love was a matter of proximity. If we could just be there, if we could force contact, my stepdaughters would see the truth. We thought love was a siege; if we laid enough siege to the walls that were being built between us, eventually they would crumble.

But they didn’t crumble. They grew higher.

The more we forced, the more exhausted we became. The more we chased, the more strength we inadvertently gave to the narrative that we were the desperate one. The unstable ones. We were pouring our energy into the absence, and in doing so, we disappeared from our own lives.

It took hitting rock bottom to realise that we had it backwards. So we stopped fighting for contact.

We stopped trying to pull them into our world, and instead, we began to carry them wherever we went.

What do I mean with this?

It’s a form of letting go, just not in the way people tell you to. It’s more about a radical shift of energy.

In my forthcoming memoir, Hope Is A Gentle Flicker, I detail the pain of this journey, but the most powerful shift came when we decided to stop treating Adele and Nina like hostages we needed to rescue and start treating them like a part of our soul that we needed to keep alive.

Are you following?

We began to live as if they were there.

You might think, “Mmh, that sounds like denial.” But it turned out to be the deepest form of presence. At least in the heartbreaking situation we found ourselves living.

We started cooking their favourite meals, just to feel the memory of them sitting at the table with us once more. We baked them birthday cakes, and blew their candles recording a video we stored away for their future. I began watching those teenage series I knew they’d be watching, trying to understand what they might like and feel at their current age.

We reclaimed their existence into our daily life. We didn’t perceive it as a loss, but as a living, breathing presence in our energy field.

What I’m about to say here is very important:

When you are a parent who has been targeted for erasure, the alienator’s goal is to make you irrelevant. They want to remove you completely from your child’s environment. They want to create a world where the child feels guilty for even thinking of you.

But they cannot remove you from your own energy; they cannot block a frequency that you broadcast with consistency and love.

When you stop forcing contact, you stop feeding the narrative of your desperation. But when you keep them alive in everything you do, when you live your life as though they are walking beside you — you are doing something far more powerful than demanding time.

You are creating a gravitational pull.

You are building a home in your heart and in your physical reality that is theirs. A home that requires no coercion to enter. A place where the door is always open and the space is always held.

And children, no matter how much confusion they have been fed or how much pressure has been put on them to reject you — are sensitive to energy. They feel when they are being held in someone’s spirit. They will feel that you are not chasing them with anxiety, but holding them with certainty.

By keeping them alive in your life (as a joyful presence not as a wound) you are doing something subversive: you are proving that your love is not conditional on time, nor is it fragile enough to be broken by absence.

You show up differently. You now show up by living a life so full of love you have for them that it becomes a beacon.

One day — and I strongly believe this — they will turn towards the warmth. They will get curios about the place where they are always welcome. They will be attracted to the energy that never demanded they pick a side, but simply insisted on including them.

You must build the best life possible for yourself because — trust me — your child is watching and they will be drawn to your light, for everything they know from their other parent is darkness.

This is the work of a targeted parent. It is the hardest work there is. It is the act of holding space for a child who has been told to forget you, while refusing to let them fade from your life.

Remember: we do not force the ship to shore. We stand firm as a lighthouse, illuminating their path for when they’re ready to travel home.

Stay strong dear parent, your child will need you, and sooner than you might think.

Thank you for reading,

Sienna