If you once had a loving relationship with your son or daughter, and now you have little or no contact, through no fault of your own and barring parental mistreatment, you are an unwitting participant to Parent Alienation Syndrome (PAS). You are, what is known as, the rejected or alienated parent. You might also hear the alienated parent referred to as the target parent.

If you are an alienated parent, you have nothing of which to be ashamed. There may be people blaming you, but this is done by uninformed people, much the same way that people once said that spousal abuse was the fault of the victim, not the abuser. You are living out a myth perpetuated by a mentally unhealthy and vengeful ex-spouse who has enlisted your children and others into a very distorted drama. You, your children, their future, and their future with you are suffering from it.

PAS is the most severe form of parent alienation and is the result of a constellation of factors centering around one parent’s revengefully brainwashing a child or children against the other parent. The parent doing the brainwashing is called the aligned parent because the child becomes aligned with that parent against the alienated parent.

The brainwashing of the aligned parent takes different forms ranging from obviously malicious to subtly harmful. What has sometimes been referred to as the "Medea syndrome" occurs when the aliened parent is motivated by revenge and seeks to destroy the relationship between the child and his/her other parent. (Medea in classical mythology killed there children when deserted by her husband , Jason.) Research tells us these parents who use strategies to encourage complete rejection of the other parent are often significantly pathological and angry. Their ability to judge reality is impaired and they project their own pathologies onto the other parent. Some may even offer lip service to the children and others about the importance of the other parent to the children, but their actions indicate otherwise. Some of the brainwashing behaviors that might be observed are as follows:

v     Showing disrespect or disdain toward you in front of your children;

v     Hanging up on you when you call to discuss the children or talk to them;

v     Refusing to speak to you in front of the children and forbidding other family members to either;

v     Rejecting the children or withholding expressions of love or privileges for talking to you;       

v     Intimidating children for expressions of love and or enjoyment of you, or scowling or using other body language to convey disapproval;

v     Telling lies and half-truths about you or exaggerating your small faults into abuse or mistreatment of the children;

v     Rewriting history to the children to “prove” your “badness,” instilling in them fear that  you are dangerous, negligent, untrustworthy, or unsafe;

v     Scorning family members who do not join in the program of alienation against you.

Whatever the behavior, the cumulative effect is the same for the child: Loving feelings go underground and are replaced with various superficial rejecting behaviors. Depending where on the continuum of parent alienation the child is, some of the child’s rejecting behaviors that might be observed are the following:

v     Showing intense anger and disrespect in public and private to you, often imitating the attitude and behavior of the brainwashing parent;

v     Being hostile and sometimes verbally abusive;

v     Refusing to speak to or visit with you and having trivial reasons that sound good but lack substance;

v     Joining in the programming parent’s lies, and often adding to them;

v     Condemning you as “bad”;

v     Distorting your previous parenting relationship;

v     Scripting your mistreatment without real supporting details but in ways that sound superficially convincing;

v     Claiming rejection is his/her idea;

v     Showing neither regret nor remorse for their behavior and rejection;

v     Seeing you in “black and white” with no good, only bad.

It is very important for rejected parents to understand that children may choose alienation because it gives them a psychological “timeout” from being torn up by divorce hostilities. It is equally important for rejected parents to deal with their own natural feelings of being offended, without acting on them, and to look behind the child’s rejection to the cause of it.

There may also be some behaviors on your part that have contributed to the complex process of alignment, denigration, and rejection. These behaviors in no way explain the disproportionate alienation, but are cited by some researchers as contributing factors. Among these are being too passive in the face of conflict, becoming immobilized by the spousal conflict and withdrawing, failing to provide adequate emotional support to counterbalance the extreme pressure the child is under, and failing to provide corrective communications to the child regarding the alienating parent’s inappropriate behavior and lies. Perhaps you see yourself in one of these behaviors or perhaps not.

This is a general description of PAS. Your awareness of it will help to break the cycle of ignorance surrounding it. Sadly, you are also perhaps wiser about an aspect of life that many people  prefer to keep hidden, but that awareness may just help to bring about the social change necessary to protect the health and happiness of children and families.