This form of childhood psychological abuse is not well known in the court system with judges, lawyers, social workers or other mental health workers.
I have created this blog today to address the importance of educating such professionals with various links & resources that I have found extremely useful in my own healing journey from having lived through this form of abuse as a child myself. I have found in my professional work & personal development of continuing education these types of workshops and information sessions extremely helpful in understanding how we can best serve and work with children who have become a psychological hostage of splitting of growing up believing one parent was/is all good, and another parent was/is all bad.
Craig Childress is an expert on this topic as a clinical psychologist and has delivered at the link below a very informative 1 hour 47 minutes about pathogenic parenting of the narcissistic borderline parent (the enmeshed all good, all wonderful programming parent) to the normal range healthy targeted parent as “abusive, alcoholic, dangerous or threatening”. In actuality, the minute a child thinks they are a victim of that targeted parents’ *abuse*, the narcissistic borderline parent amplifies it, because in their delusion: The ex partner also has to become the ex parent as narcissistic borderline parents have no ambiguity in their prosecutory delusions.
The lack of empathy in the range of the generally almost always the oldest child (as a result of that narcissistic programming) is a form of psychological means of survival to the point of even sacrificing themselves to appease the emotionally abusive & dysregulated pathogenic parent (who almost always has sole custody because the pathogenic parent enjoys legally abusing and destroying the targeted parent) and systematically disrupts any relationship that the child has not just with their healthy range parent, but with all other relationships that child will have as well in the future. Isolation & extended family dynamics of abuse keep the child a hostage in a false belief of lies (smear campaigns), enabled by all those around them. They are known as flying monkeys because everyone follows the abusive parents’ narrative due to the fact that the abusive parent is too much for anyone to handle, but abusive parents hide behind their children while their children take the blunt of the pain of having to choose one parent over the other.
Below is a link to my interview with “The Anti-Alienation Project” and thankfully through continuing education I came across and have been implementing IFS (Internal Family Systems) which is a great way to understand our individual family systems of upbringing and childhood, as what Family Systems Therapy is all about. A child is the product of their environment & trying to treat a child alone without factoring in their environment shocks me to the level of malpractice that goes on in psychologists’ office. Everyone should have education about this form of abuse, long term effects & impact on relationships continuing a repeated pattern of abuse until the grief is fully processed.
Below you’ll see Madi speak about 5 ways parents alienate without saying a word, all these role reversals that happen in an alienator’s care. Displays of emotion (like the use of tears), is a way they manipulate but they are not necessarily really sad because they have pseudo-empathy, not real empathy. An alienated child does not have empathy for their targeted parent because all their energy is being used to emotionally regulate the pathogenic parent.
No contact vs Estrangement. How narcissists use No contact to punish another. When I went No contact with my mother, it’s because of the grief. Make sure you know who’s manipulating, learn all the red flags of abuse….. when you’re a REAL survivor of abuse vs. a manipulator to abuse, that’s how you know. Passive aggressive vs. assertive. Almost all passive aggressive behaviors come from a narcissistic personality.
