Many relationships or lack of them are structured around manipulation rather than a conscious choice even when we believe it to be a decision made in "free will".

Indeed a troubling one-third of the population in the United States is estranged from at least one family member today. This is a disturbing trend often a result of not having the relationship skills that can create the opposite of estrangement, a loving life-giving connection.

One of the harshest forms of estrangement is alienation. Alienation is an involuntary experience of someone being isolated out of a group or relationship with whom there is normally an attachment bond.

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 cruel but common example of this is an old first grade manipulation game dubbed in the UK as "being sent to Coventry" which involves a classmate being singled out and ostracized 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 intertwined in the rampant trend of the "cancel culture" so prevalent in the last decade. In addition to a widening gap in healthy social skills, this behavior is disturbingly aggressive marked by the absence of empathy, inclusiveness, diversity, equality, and emotional intelligence.

One of the most long term damaging and disturbing forms of alienation is one that occurs in families, which is particularly pronounced in high conflict divorces though can exist subtly in less conflicted divorces too. And it also happens in families who remain intact but operate in a similar dynamic where certain members of a family are cut out for periods of time or even lifetimes.

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 family of origin system dynamics. This manipulation can lead to the child (adult 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 (spousal or ex-spousal). Given its form of abuse is primarily psychological and emotional it can be especially difficult to accurately identify it without adequate training, education and understanding on how best to identify and intervene.

Many courts frequently 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 caught in 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 fear relinquishing 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 systemic bias ruling often 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 in a psychologically diagnosable form of child abuse in the first place also opens further exploitation of the existing legal loop holes that only encourage this behavior and inadvertently renders the legal system parties involved also 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 try to pick up the pieces of what they lost. Others tragically will never reunite. In severe cases a child will suffer poorly understood mental and physical health issues stemming not from the conflict with the targeted parent rather directly from the grief from loss of that parent who the allied parent manipulated them into rejecting.

What is clear is that those who experience alienation either consciously or unconsciously are left carrying the silenced burden of unresolved loss and its frequently obscured and negative impact on their lives.

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 their other parent, please reach out. There is help and support here for you.

To learn more, schedule a complimentary session today.