Page 9 - How Children Learn to Hate Their Parents

Disrupted Parental Relationships Is Not One Thing
Let's give a name to what we have been talking about, and let's exclude names that I don't think we should be talking about except to say why we should not be talking about them. "Alienation" is not something I want to talk about as an organizing priciple and in my professional life I am almost never willing to testify to the concept of alienation except to tell the court that a self annointed alienation "expert" is not an aid to the ultimate trier of fact.
There are a lot of reasons for this but here is the short list:
1. Alienation is a concept that is presumed to have a one factor causality -- toxic parent leading to rejected (other) parent. This might happen in very specific cases under prescribed circumstances but it is not what usually happens when parental relationships are "disrupted" or "estranged" or "disenfranchised." Alienation assumes a perpetrator-victim dynamic. A good guy and a bad guy. There ARE cases like this, and cases where this is a component, but the toxic parent-victim parent scenario does not even begin to describe the majority of cases where a parent is rejected.
2. When children reject a parent it is usually because of a combination of factors. Those factors include:
Attitudes and behaviors in the preferred parent Attitudes and behaviors in the rejected parent Attitudes and behaviors in the child
In my vocabilary of parental rejection I use the terms "preferred parent" and "rejected parent" to describe the "roles" of each parent in the child's life. I do not use the terms "alienating parent" and "alienated parent" for a number of reasons, the most significant of which is that when professionals use these terms they are almost immediately seen as zealots. I am a zealot so I am the pot calling the kettle black I suppose. I just do not want people to call me an "alienation" zealot.
Alienation is not a "syndrome." Richard Gardner, the man who brought the term into existence proclaimed it was, wrote about it as if it was, but one person's opinion is not enough to get something classified as syndrome. Dr. Gardner suffered for his work, eventually taking his own life, releasing a flurry of unsympathetic detractors who threw online virtual celebrations to commemorate his tragic passing. That is how crazy the alienation world is. Dr. Gardner tried to understand why kids came to hate their parents. He killed himself and not only did "normal" people not feel sorry for him, they celebrated it. This is the kind of insensitivity that permeates the divorce and custody world, and it is the kind of cruelty that should should be avoided by people who do not want to be married or together anymore but who must remain in the business of raising a child or children together.
The terms "alienation" and "alienation syndrome" are polarizing. They polarize parents into categories of "good" and "evil", "right" and "wrong", "fair" and "unfair", "loving" and "unloving". This polarization tendency is exactly what makes using the term in litigation
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