The Shame of Being Happy While Your Child is Gone

The experience of the parents that are victims of parental alienation.

Art by Glen Martin Taylor

There is a question that follows the targeted parent everywhere, and it isn’t the one people ask out loud. The question people ask out loud is some version of “How are you holding up?” or “Any news?”.

The question that targeted parents carry with them is this:

If I’m happy, does that mean I’ve stopped loving them?

The vow we (didn’t know we) made.

Somewhere in the early hours of this nightmare (parental alienation), most of us make a silent vow. We don’t speak it, and we might not even notice it forming. But it takes root anyway, and it sounds something like this:

I will not rest until my child comes home. I will not enjoy my life while they are gone. My suffering is the proof that I love them. My pain is the evidence that I never stopped.

The vow feels like the only moral response to an unbearable situation. How could you possibly laugh when your child isn’t here? How could you enjoy a meal, a trip, a relationship, a career success, when the person you love most in the world has been taught to despise you? What kind of parent would you be if you just... moved on?

So you don’t move on. You carry the weight instead. You wear it publicly so no one can accuse you of indifference and you perform grief because grief is the only safe emotion. But slowly, without meaning to, you disappear into it.

Your joy is evidence for their prosecution.

The alienating parent has already told your child a story about you. In that story, you are selfish, indifferent, dangerous, or all three. And one of the most effective ways this narrative gets reinforced is through your own happiness.

Imagine your child sees a photograph of you smiling. Imagine someone from the other side leans over and says, “See? Look how happy they are without you. They don’t even miss you.” The photograph was one second of lightness caught on camera. But now it is evidence that you don’t care about them.

This is the surveillance state the targeted parent lives inside. It’s an emotional one. Every expression of joy is potentially weaponised by people who want your child to believe you never loved them. So you might stop expressing joy. Then, eventually, you stop feeling it altogether. You did this to prove you are not the monster they said you were.

When grief becomes a cage.

Grief can become comfortable.

Not comfortable in the way pleasure is, but comfortable in the way a familiar cell is. You know the walls and the routine. You know that as long as you are inside this grief, no one can accuse you of moving on. The pain becomes a companion. It becomes your identity. And the thought of stepping outside it, produces a guilt so sharp it feels like betrayal.

What would it mean to wake up one morning and not immediately remember they’re gone? What would it mean to laugh at something without immediately catching yourself and feeling sick? What would it mean to build a life that has room for joy in it while your child is still out there believing lies about you?

For many targeted parents, the answer is unbearable. So we don’t build that life. Instead, we stay inside the familiar suffering because leaving it feels like abandoning our children all over again.

But there is a hight cost to this.

What stagnant grief takes from you.

It takes years of your life. Actual years that you will never get back.

It takes your health and your other relationships; the friend who stopped calling, the partner who couldn’t help you, the family member who didn’t know how to sit with so much pain. It takes your career, your ambitions, your sense of self outside of this one devastating role. It takes the version of you that used to have interests, hobbies, ideas, humor.

And perhaps most painfully, it takes your capacity to receive your child when they do return.

Because many children do return. And when they knock on that door, they carry their own guilt with them. Guilt for the years they missed, for believing the lies, for how they treated you. If they open that door to find you destroyed, that guilt becomes a weight they may not be able to carry. They need to find you still ‘alive’ and they need to know that they didn’t break you.

Your healing is not a betrayal of your child. It is the foundation of your future relationship with them.

Your joy must become a rebellion.

There is another way to see this. What if every moment of joy you reclaim is a refusal to let the lies win?

The alienating parent wants you destroyed. They want you bitter, broken and alone. (They want you unemployable, unlovable, unrecognisable... the list is long!). And they want your child to look at you with anger and disdain.

When you heal, you defy them. When you build something beautiful for yourself, you become a living proof that the story they told about you is false.

What your child actually needs.

Your child doesn’t need a martyr. They have already been used as a weapon in their alienating parent’s war. The last thing they need is to become the only reason for your happiness or sadness. That is a burden for them. Once again, it forces them to manage another adult’s emotions.

What your child needs (when they are ready/when the time comes) is a parent who survived. A parent who can hold them and listen to their story without focusing on their own pain.

That parent exists within you.

You didn’t ask but… Permission granted!

I don’t know who told you that you are not allowed to want a good life for yourself. I don’t know who taught you that your suffering is the only valid proof of love.

But I do know that this mindset will eventually destroy you.

You are allowed to be more than a grieving parent. You are allowed to want things that have nothing to do with your child or your family.

This does not mean you have stopped loving them or that you are okay with what happened. It simply means that you deserve a life that contains grief and joy, side by side, without one cancelling the other out.

What I know now…

My husband and I spent years inside the cage grief, believing that if we weren’t suffering, we weren’t loving hard enough. And it didn’t bring our children back one day faster. Letting go and living our best life did.

If you’re reading this, and you feel the guilt creeping in, hear me: that guilt is not your conscience. It’s the internalised voice of everyone who ever made you feel like you shouldn’t be happy without your child. And that voice is wrong.

You are not betraying your child by healing. You are preparing a place for them to come home to.

I wrote Hope Is A Gentle Flicker because I needed someone to tell me it was okay to live while waiting. If you’re struggling to give yourself permission to do so, this book might be for you.

Thank you for reading,

Sienna