Page 11 - 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 principle 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 anointed 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 vocabulary of parental rejection I use the terms "preferred parent" and "rejected parent" to describe the "roles" of each parent
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