Why People don’t believe that Parental Alienation exists

There have been times when I have really struggled to understand why people do not believe parental alienation exists after all I had all the evidence, a gap where T should be in our lives.  If a child no longer sees or has contact with their non resident parent and the relationship was previously close and loving, what has gone on for this separation to happen?  I know that in telling even close friends about the PA journey to losing T, they just did not seem to believe me, it was more like telling someone of a conspiracy theory, shadowy truths and the terrible feeling that I must had done something to aid getting to this place I had arrived at.  And in the bigger picture kind of a way, maybe I did, I will always take responsibility for the things I do HOWEVER, at no point did I never want my son to be in my life.

I have so many emails from parents who do not have any contact with their children any more, they are not murderers or paedofiles but are treated worse then if they were.  That are children have been stopped from continuing a relationship with the absent parent and more often than not, the extended family as well just on one parents say so is the evidence that PA exists surely?

Here in the UK there are several names for a situation whereby a parent doesn’t see/have contact with their child that has been created by the other parent.  Implacable Hostility, Hostile Aggressive Parenting, Oppositional Defiance Disorder are just some of the things that came up whist I was trying to work out what was happening.  As well, of course, there is good old separation and divorce.  So there are already various names for what is happening between 2 parents and by implication, the child.  I think I went through many of these things as tried to grab onto them by way of trying to understand what was happening.  By the time I got to Parental Alienation, it had actually happened.

I have spoken so many times about Parental Alienation to various people including my Barrister and their eyes glaze over.  I have asked often just what exactly the problem is with PA (S).  It is obvious to me that my son was alienated from me by his father.  My solicitor has told me that partly it is a commitment problem, if the legal world stick with that label, it may well change again in time with different explanations and more research done, there is a cost implications, there are not enough experts, not many professionals are aware of this and therefore would have to be trained, the list goes on.  But I have another suggestion and I think it is because we all have the capacity to alienate.

Simply put, anyone who is not on good terms with their partner has the capacity to alienate their children even inadvertently.  We can all do it at some time or other to another person even in the slightest degree.  We have probably all put down another person to make ourselves feel better at times, this is, to my mind, is how alienation starts.   The real problem though is that there is no one else in the room when alienation is going on the child/ren.  It is simply his word against mine as to what was said and in a court of law the only thing that the law has to work with is the state of a child’s mind.  Now how many people have you met lately that you would trust with your child’s mind?  I would get garlic and silver bullets out to keep CAFCASS away from children now.

In my past, over and over again, my ex said things to me or about me in front of T, that were of such a derogatory nature but I couldn’t prove it, all I had was a little boy who was rapidly becoming more and more rude, angry and hostile towards me.

Whilst going through the court process, I asked almost everyone that I came into contact with about PA and what they thought about it.  I did not ask about the syndrome part of it as that applies to the child.  Simply, I wanted to know what other people who work with parents thought about Alienation.  I have not met many people who work in the legal world who seemed happy with the term Parental Alienation.  So if you have been through the alienation process and your child is no longer a part of your life and you feel that no one is listening, it seems to me that it could well be that the people who you are talking to you shut down because in their heads either a) it does not exist because there is no label or b) because they believe you did some alienating yourself.  I still cannot see just why that should mean that PA should not exist though.

To me, we have every right to speak freely of another person but we also have a responsibility to make sure that our susceptible children are not around to keep receiving a message about another parent.

If we can get others to identify, to understand that they may be doing the alienating behaviour themselves if only in a very mild way, then maybe we can get others to start to understand better just what alienation is about and exactly where it starts.  The next step would be to explain why someone would want to do that in the first place.