The Effects of PA On The Targeted Parent

Parental Alienation causes long-term damage to children, and it also destroys the parent being targeted.

Numerous clinical studies have documented the effects of parental alienation upon targeted parents:

• Severe depression
• Anxiety
• Social isolation
• Despair
• Self-loathing and inward-directed anger
• Deterioration of executive control (ability to stay organized and focused)
• Symptoms indicating the presence of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

Imagine being in a situation where you’re watching your children suffer, watching them being deceived and turned against you, watching custody orders being blatantly ignored, and throughout all of it, you’re helpless to do anything to stop it because of an apathetic family court judge.

Even worse, the harder you fight, the more you’re children are pressured, threatened, and bullied by the alienator.

Targeted parents can feel this conflict hurting their children and take all that pain into themselves.  Many targeted parents, realizing that the family court is never going to truly intervene choose to walk for no other reason than to spare their children any additional bullying and alienation abuse.

The legal system will sort of involve itself, but only to the extent that a targeted parent can keep dumping every available penny they have into it. The process will grind on for years or until the targeted parent runs out of money, and in the end, people often blame alienated parent for failing their children.

When it’s all said and done, they’ve lost everything: their home, their savings, their children, and themselves. The only thing they get out any of this is a monthly reminder of what they’ve lost in the form of a child support order that threatens to imprisonment.

The on-going pressure, stress, despair, shame, grief, and sadness – it’s all overwhelming and unrelenting. It’s too much, and in the end you turn your anger on yourself.

In one study, 54% of targeted parents had ideations of suicide, and in another, 24% of study participants had actually attempted it.

Parental Alienation is no joke. It’s a devastating form of psychological abuse and domestic violence, made so in no small part because family court pathology enables and empowers it while holding targeted parents relatively powerless to do anything to stop it.

We have to do better.

It is beyond ludicrous that alienating parents are rewarded with custody and everything else they want for abusing both the children and the targeted parent.

Please think about that, because this is exactly just how dysfunctional and destructive the family court it is. There is literally not a single, solitary healthy aspect to any of it.

This has got to change.

Resources:

Parental Alienation – Targeted Parents And The Effects (Research); Jennifer Harman, Ph.D.

Parental Alienation – The Plight of the Targeted Parent; Dr. Craig Childress