My Fantasy Regarding Parental Alienation
Whenever I am about to deliver a presentation on alienation, I yearn for a call from the organizers, I’m hoping to hear the following:
- “Linda, your presentation has been cancelled!”
- “In fact, the presentations of all your colleagues have been cancelled.”
- “We no longer need specialists in parental alienation.”
- “You have worked yourselves out of a job!”
- “The professionals who intervene in child custody had an epiphany & have come to see the light.”
- “They finally recognize what abused children have decisively and irrefutably revealed, forever.”
- “Children do not reject parents – not even abusive parents!”
Here is how I would respond – “Well, better late than never!”
The Regrettable Reality for Alienated Children
Regrettably, I have yet to receive this call. All too many professionals who intervene in child custody are still asleep at the wheel. And honestly, I cannot comprehend this.
Yet it is only logical to “make the leap” to the acknowledgment that a non-abused child would surely not reject a loving, protective parent with whom the child had had a positive relationship prior to the onset of the alienation.
In my 24-year professional work experience with 3000 abused and neglected foster children, I cannot recall a single child who had rejected a parent. And what child would be more likely than an abused child to reject a parent, yet does not do so.
To the contrary of rejecting their abusive parents, foster children seek contact with their parents. The most frequently asked questions by these children were, “When is my next visit,” and “When can I go home?”
Substantial research confirms my finding that abused children seek to bond with their abusive parents.
One such study was undertaken by Baker, Miller Bernet, Abadayo (2019) of an estimated 12,500 moderately to severely physically abused children who did not reject their parents and who sought attachment-enhancing behaviors to their abusive parents.
The research further confirms, counterintuitively, that the more intense the abuse, the more intense is the child’s bonding to the abusive parent.
Why Abused Children Seek to Bond With Their Abusive Parents
Due to our long dependency period on our parents, the instinct to have and need a parent is part of our instinct for survival.
An abused child’s counterintuitive behavior of wanting to bond with their abusive parent is rooted in numerous psychological factors:
- We believe we are half our mother and half our father, if we believe one of our parents is unloving and/or evil, we are going to believe that we are not loveable and are evil.
- Should a parent have maltreated or abused us, we believe that we are bad and thereby deserving of punishment.
- To think of oneself as bad or evil is counter-instinctual—ergo the powerful desire to bond with parents as a form of denying that the abuse had ever occurred.
- Abused children seek to bond with their abusive parents in order to gain the parent’s approval and love in hope of “undoing” the negative self-perception of being evil and bad.
Abused children do not reject their parents! Children of divorce do not reject a loving parent unless influenced.
It is alarming that so many professionals fail to recognize this logical conclusion.
Instinct for a Parent in Psychology
One does not have to be Sigmund Freud to grasp the child’s compulsion to bond to a parent.
Nor does one need a degree in family therapy to recognize that the child’s instinct for a parent is so powerful that it is rarely, if ever, overridden.
What else does the reader think accounts for the universal imposition of the incest taboo across human civilization? And so Freud counseled his patients about how to manage compliance with the incest taboo.
Freud argued that the child sublimates the desire for the parent of the opposite gender through a process in which the child identifies with the parent of the same gender in order to attract a partner like the opposite-gender parent.
What an elegant solution! Is it not a common expression, “I married my mother” or “I married my father?”
How the Arts and Literature Capture the Child’s Instinct for a Parent
Is art mimicking life or is life mimicking art? The process is cyclical over time.
And when it comes to the child’s insatiable love for a parent, peruse the literature, art, and music of the great masters to recognize the pervasiveness of the child’s exceedingly powerful instinct for a parent – almost surely occurring beginning with the birth of human civilization.
The ancient Greeks were cognizant of the child’s unquenchable, instinctive need and love for a parent—however symbolically they represented the instinct. Sophocles was so persuaded of the child’s instinct for a parent that, in his tragedy, Oedipus Rex, he had, Oedipus, the King of Thebes, fall in love with his mother and marry her after he had unwittingly killed his father. (Oops!)
Shakespeare’s Hamlet fantasized a sexual relationship with his mother, Gertrude, and contemplated killing his uncle, Claudius, who had murdered Hamlet’s father and then married Hamlet’s mother. Ultimately, Hamlet procrastinated about doing away with his uncle until after his mother’s death—accidentally imbibing the poison that Claudius had set out for Hamlet.
And ladies, let us not forget about Electra!
Travel to any art museum and study the paintings of parents and children. Perhaps the Renaissance section would be most apropos as these painters so realistically portrayed the human spirit and the child’s enchantment with, love for, and tie to a parent.
Then again, we have our own Norman Rockwell, who was indefatigable in his depiction of loving, tender, humorous, affectionate, parent-child relationships.
And then there are those performers in the world of music, my personal favorite being Pavarotti. His rendition of “Mama” is absolutely spellbinding.
I was recently again mesmerized by the performance of Verdi’s opera, Il Trovatore. If you want to be transfixed by the experience of an adult-daughter coveting her mother’s lost love and epitomizing loyalty to her mother, this would be the experience.
This adult-daughter was so committed to avenging her mother’s unseemly death that she was willing to sacrifice everything, including her “adopted” son, in order to redress her mother’s vile murder: “Madre, Madre, you are avenged.”
Conclusion
Those who are concerned about children must come to recognize that uninfluenced children do not reject their parents.
The professionals who intervene in child custody must be informed that children want and need meaningful involvement from both parents.
Substantial research and clinical literature reinforces a child’s powerful instinct for a parent and how it is part of our instinct for survival.
We must continue to educate ourselves about the pernicious, child abusive phenomenon of parental alienation.
