We live in a highly manipulated gaslit world. And one of the worst forms of manipulation is alienation. Alienation is an involuntary experience of someone being isolated out of a group or relationship with whom there is an attachment.

Alienation can come in different forms but the experience is a rendering of indifference and hostility to someone who belongs to a group. A simple but all too common example of this is a first grade manipulation game dubbed in the UK as "being sent to Coventry" which involves classmates being singled out and bullied by the group through a form of silent treatment.

This behavior is unfortunately pervasive well beyond first grade and is akin to what has become the rampant anxious-avoidance we see in today's "cancel culture" denoting a growing gap in social skills, and one that especially values empathy and inclusiveness, diversity, equality, and emotional intelligence.

One of the most disturbing forms of alienation is one that occurs in families, which is particularly pronounced in high conflict divorces though can exist also in families who remain intact.

Over 32 million parents in the US alone with numbers far larger around the world experience what is called an attachment-based parental form of alienation.

Attachment-based parental alienation describes a situation where one parent manipulates a child into rejecting the other parent, often rooted in the alienating parent's own attachment trauma and personality traits. This manipulation can lead to the child exhibiting symptoms of anxious or avoidant attachment, and a distorted view of the targeted parent.

Attachment-based parental alienation is child abuse as well as intimate partner abuse. Given its form of abuse is primarily psychological and emotional it can be especially difficult to accurately identify it without training, education and understanding on how best to intervene.

Many courts often do more harm than good along with the challenge that many alienating parents may also not be aware of the damage they are doing and are themselves fixed in the delusion of their own childhood trauma reenactment which they are projecting on the child making it difficult for assessing and often untrained parties to ascertain what is truth from fiction.

Those offending parents that are aware often do not want to relinquish control or risk losing custody in these situations even when confronted. This can be further exacerbated by a court system that also operates with a bias towards ruling in favor of the offending parent. This bias together with a widespread lack of appropriate education and training to adequately assess and treat this, and a prevailing and deliberate incentive to discredit parental alienation as something rooted as a psychologically diagnosable form of child abuse in the first place opens further exploitation of the existing legal loop holes that only encourage this behavior and inadvertently renders the legal representatives involved also now accomplices to the abuse, all of whom do not want to have to admit they've been ruling in exactly the opposite direction of protecting the actual victims of abuse.

Many children only realize much later they were the victims of attachment-based parental alienation and will seek out the parent they were manipulated into rejecting to pick up the pieces of what they lost. Others tragically will never reunite. Whatever the outcomes all of those who experience alienation work consciously or unconsciously with its negative impact on their lives and an ongoing grief in reconciling the complex post traumatic stress of having experienced this as a child and often into adulthood.

If you are a child/adult child alienated from a parent or a targeted parent of alienation, or suspect you might be inadvertently contributing to a child rejecting a parent, please reach out. There is help and support here for you.