Dealing with Parental Alienation Syndrome

Interviewer: It seems that we have an epidemic in society today, divorce. There is just nothing wrong with it, but unfortunately sometimes we have children involved and sometimes they become pawns or sometimes victims of a divorce. How can we handle this or prevent some of the pitfalls of divorce? Interviewee: Well, first I would like to start with defining what I mean by abuse. This is a background. Most common when you think of abuse is physical abuse, but it can be nonphysical it can be psychological or emotional. But the concept that ties together is an annihilation of you as a person. I can beat you up, smash your head against windshield, that's one way of kind of annihilating you as a human being, who is capable of maybe making mistakes or having different opinion. But it can also be done without laying a hand on you and that is to tell you for example that, oh! You are too sensitive or you don't know what you are thinking about and you don't know what you talking about. I was setting that as a background and we will get to divorce. Divorces can often be brutal. But they can also involves children. Richard Gardner who is a psychiatrist coined the term parental alienation syndrome, and what he meant by that was that the custodial parent -- because of the various authority and the access the custodial parent has and of course is this is often a mother, but I do want to emphasize it doesn't have to be only the mother. I know don't want to bash mothers on this. However, the custodial parent has access to the children and he is able to well in effect brainwash the child. Interviewer: You mean we actually poison the kid against the other parent. Interviewee: Well, Shakespeare said, hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Again, I want to make this gender biased. Interviewer: It could be either way if we end this. Interviewee: Right, but I am using Shakespeare because we put it that way. Yeah, if you leave me I may you want to you pay. And one of the ways is to use the children. So what is involved with parental alienation is a kind of brainwash in which the child is given information that may be malicious about the other parent. Now, one of the problems that we face is, all of us as human beings, is that very few of us do a original research. For example I have done a recent research about the Earth being round, but I believe it because I have been told it and I also have not truly -- I don't have intuitive direct experience that I have brain and I have skull, but I have learned that inside my skull is a brain. To me it feels like there is a spirit. Again, I am laying some background to the idea that we are very vulnerable to what we hear. So a child who does not have equal access to one parent, say the noncustodial parent may learn from the custodial parent and may learn a malicious version of what's going on and this does happen, there are children who develop in such circumstances very negative opinions about the noncustodial parent. Sometimes it goes so far as to could not only painful rejection of the noncustodial parent, but sometimes refusal by the child to see a parent. The goal in this to punish the noncustodial parent possibly for leaving the other parent. But I want to try this. As I said it a moment ago, I don't want to limit it this to mothers, because fathers can do it too. And I also don't want to limit it just to what they do to children, because they do it with each other. This features of what I am going to redefine the malicious divorce syndrome. It's my implication of what the Gardner called the parental alienation is that if you are motivated to do so you can tell stories, you can tell it to your children, you can tell them to people who are not your children and as this grows as there is a kind of a pseudocommunity which is hearing stories, the victim of this can become a pawn. Sometimes a victim has no knowledge even of being the lies or the negative stories have been told and has no way to even encounter them, because he or she know about them. There was a interesting scientific, and this is not the boring science for those with -- just through posted in British Journal of Psychiatry. I have got brain scans done with abusers. I like to put it this way. There are people who look like human beings, they know how to act like human beings, and I will use Adolf Hitler as an example. Adolf Hitler hit concentration camps, not because he believed it was bad or wrong, he just knew how to act. He knew that the world will condemn it. So there are people I've learned -- I am going to call them aliens who are not human the way most of us think human beings are and as they are capable of lying -- and the study that I was about to refer to was, I brain scanned them. When they lie, their brains light up in an area in which other people that are with -- ordinary human beings lie, something goes on in here in a brain scan that doesn't occur in abusive people who are capable of lying. Another aspect of this study was that pictures shown to people, abusers and people who are not abusers. Pictures of people who were happy, people who looked like they had an unusual mood and people who are distressed. Now what happens was when the abusive people saw pictures of people in the stress, they brain did not light up in the area that it did in other people. The point I want to make about this is that they are really different, their brains are different. They may not experience your distress when they hurt you and that may make them more capable of doing things that another person might not do in billion years to another person, destroy someone. That's why call them aliens. I think they are among us, they are human beings, but they really are different. One of the problems that we have is to we often think of them as humans so we can talk to them, we try to explain when it's truly abusive explanation talking don't work. They don't really get what they are doing to you and if they do understand that they are hurting you, they don't experience it the same way. You deserve it for what you did to me and I will take away your children. The goal in terms of subject of parent alienation of the children the goal is not only to deprive the child of the parent and deprive the parents of the child time, but they are truly deprive the parent of the child's childhood. Sometimes it's going on for years. It is sometimes repaired in adulthood. Sometimes it's never repaired. Sometimes the alienated parent is so hurt over and rejected that the alienated parent gives up and there is sometimes never reconciliation. However, I want to say that often there isn't, but sometimes it's years and it can be very, very painful. It's hard to believe that a mother or father who does this, would do such a thing to a child. I know of one situation where the father has been rejected for years and years, has never spent the single holiday with his children and they are now adults and this continues and he has taken him out of his will. I just want to make the point. This is, now, in this case not a loving mother, although the children think their mother loves them. This mother has hurt her children.