It’s in the Facts
                                                                                                                                                                    

I am hugely disappointed in our humanity. We human beings are full of contradictions and flaws and failings. I accept that fact and acknowledge my vulnerabilities. What has caused me such grief, bearing witness to the public circus of our politics and with personal experience as an alienated parent, is the malice of others.

Malice is a strong word to use in describing another person. Let us remember what it means to be malicious. Malice is hatefulness, cruelty, abhorrence. A desire to cause pain for the satisfaction of doing harm.

As a mother who has experienced parental alienation for the past 11 years, I have come to believe that my children believe I “deserve it”, deserve to be hurt. From the beginning of their deliberate decision to cut off any communication with me without comment, my children had to create a good reason to do so. After all, how do you explain to anyone else that you refuse to have any relationship with your mother from the age of 22 years? How do you tell your childhood story that will eventually include evidence of a consistently loving and supportive mother? There will be leaks friends will notice that indicate significant discrepancies, holes in the stories my children are wanting them to believe about an abusive and scarring mother. We know that repeatedly retelling a story can convince the storyteller that a false narrative is reality. And the storyteller requires an audience of people who want to believe the worst in me or people who do not know me at all. It is important to marginalize others that know our shared past.

A false narrative is a subtler and more dangerous form of misinformation.[1] For instance, if my daughter believes that she could benefit from a claim that I have been emotionally damaging to her all of her life, she may tell her listeners that I could be nice sometimes but my regular abuse of her was traumatizing. And this trauma can be the reason she is too anxious and flies off the handle with those she loves. Therefore, she does not have to assume personal responsibility for her actions because she can blame me for creating her problem in the first place.

Research indicates that we can create false memories to achieve the identity we want.[2] If my children need to believe that I am the reason they have no further contact with me, a story must exist to validate such a decision.[3]

Do I create a false narrative for my story? I could. The question may be whether I have a need to create another identity.

This discussion seems bleak. It seems that the air is filled with lies. David Brooks[4] reflects that poisonous spewing should not be underestimated. Joe McCarthy held up documents claiming evidence when there was no evidence. It speaks of paranoia. It produces alienation.

How does one hold onto a belief in anything if a mother cannot believe in her experience of a mutually loving, respectful, and life-enriching relationship with her own child? During these past 11 years, I have not spent most time wondering about what I did wrong as a mother to my two children. I ached over the loss of my belief in our authentic bond as mother and child.

If there is anything I know with certainty, with no doubt, with a belief that lives deep in my heart and soul, it is that I loved and respected both of my children with my true nature.

I now live knowing that my devotion did not mean much to my children. Certainly not enough. What I am thankful for is that my commitment means a lot to me.

In my prior writing,[5] I speak to many perspectives that I leaned into so that I could reach this state of gratitude. I do not need my children’s validation of me as a good mother. Plenty of ‘evidence’ exists that speaks for me. Even without the evidence, I live each day with my dedication to becoming a better person. I have done so for most of my adulthood. During the working day and when I prepare for sleep, I reflect on my words and my behavior. I apologize for my mistakes and I ask for forgiveness. I am grateful for the day. My intention is to be of service to others and I pray for the strength to be emotionally available to those in need. I care deeply for my family and friends and clients.

That is who I am. I live a life with a strong identity, that no longer includes being a mother to my children.

I am thankful that I do not harbor poor feelings or ill will towards my children. I am thankful that I have found my way through the misery we call parental alienation. I am thankful that my good nature was not dissolved by the injustice and pain through which I have lived. Let me make an important distinction. Surviving implies remaining alive, clinging to life, enduring. I am living. For me, it is an active choice rather than a consequence.

I am thankful for choosing life.

[1]False Narratives – And How to Cut Through Them, accessed November 24, 2020, https: //publicvoiceny.com/false-narratives/.
2] Giuliana Mazzoni, The “real you” is a myth, https://theconversation.com, (September 19, 2018).
3] Anne Bulger, “The Mother Side of the Coin”, https://annebulger.com/estranged-parent-blog.html, (January 22, 2020).
[4] David Brooks, interview with Judy Woodruff, PBS NewsHour, November 20, 2020, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/shields-and-brooks-on-the-danger-of-trumps-refusal-to-concede.
[5] Anne Bulger, “https://annebulger.com/estranged-parent-blog.html.

Decency is the Light in Adult Child-Parental Alienation
                                                                                                                                                                            
 
We are often faced with whether we want to be compassionate or whether we want to be right.

Before C-19, my husband, Paul, and I were discussing an upcoming vacation. We had to decide whether we were going to travel over a holiday or not. Paul wanted to take fewer days off from work and I wanted him to prioritize our trip instead of work. We both get prickly about how we each define overworking. I can make eloquent arguments to prove that my definition is most correct and that I am the authority on what is important to our marriage.
I had a choice. Do I hammer my points to prove I am most right, or do I love him by giving him my consideration? Who do I want to be at this moment? These moments add up and they can add up to endorsing a value, which for me, is my goodness as a human being. At that moment, I needed to touch base with not just my love but my civility in order to experience self-respect.

The American Psychological Association offers an expanded definition of civility, beyond being a formal politeness. Civility entails honoring one’s personal values, while simultaneously listening to disparate points of view.[1] Furthermore, civility is the hard work of staying present even with those with whom we have deep-rooted and fierce disagreements. It is listening past one’s preconceptions.[2]

According to Merriam-Webster, humility means “the state of being humble” and both humility and humble have their origin in the Latin word meaning “low”. Many people mistake humility or the act of being humble as submissive and meek. I believe that we all need more of a necessary humility to properly align our values and be more compassionate people. Choosing to practice humility, which is freedom from arrogance and conceit, encourages our decency and our empathy towards others and ultimately builds our civility.

Self-awareness is necessary to make a choice of conscience. Mindfulness practice helps us to build our awareness in the moment. The loud voice of my own needs can dominate my access to self-awareness. I need to catch my tendency for self-absorption and really listen.

1. First, I must patiently listen so that I can let Paul know that I understand his thoughts and feelings about missing work.
2. Secondly, I let him know my thoughts and feelings about wanting to feel more important than work.

Do we want to be right or do we want to understand each other?

I am not just talking about feeling an intimacy with each other. That is another topic. This is about how we treat each other when we have different and maybe vastly differing points of view.

Now, what are we to do when our child estranges themselves from us? The nature of estrangement is different in that we do not have a direct opportunity for discourse.  In my personal experience, I believe there is even more urgency to examine our thoughts and feelings and choose to be decent and civil in our own minds. If we discard our single-minded opinion of whether our estranged child’s perspective is correct, maybe we can put aside those detrimental thoughts and instead consider that our adult child may be struggling with some sort of unhappiness that has trapped him with noxious feelings.  Perhaps we can acknowledge that he has his story, and you have your story. In reality, we have competing perspectives. If I want to try and understand my estranged child’s perspective, I need to consider my child’s different point of view.

Nonetheless, I do not want my children’s decision to estrange themselves from me for over 10 years to define who I want to be. I have had plenty of anguish and misery about their silent rejection. I want to continue being a person who passionately believes in developing understanding in the midst of strife. I want to intentionally choose what thoughts are in my head and what is filling my heart. I know if I agonize with thoughts of injustice or doubt or heartache,  each step I take in trying to live my life is burdened and heavy with joylessness. I must guard myself against this old story that I had created because my children left me.

I have my life story. My story is about a woman who prioritized her children and loved them as she was never loved by her own mother. My children were nurtured and well-supported. I feel pride in knowing I did my best being their Mother.

And I feel the necessary humility to have learned from my mistakes and imperfections as a person and parent. I have gained perspective from my past.

We have all experienced a communication, face to face or online, in which a person expresses themselves with contempt or temper as if the substance of the message is not the point. Hatred or proving themselves right seems to be the point. Too often with parent alienation, being right about your version of reality is rigidly adhered to and defended with criticism lacking in civility. Taking this stance is one-sided by nature and self-defeating. Understandably, people are hurt but also can get more hurt. And who wants to be that person calling names and spewing venom?

How do you avoid this trap? Self-compassion will help you to develop an attitude of humility. This is not about determining who is right and who is wrong. This is about relieving, not reliving, your suffering by extending to yourself the kindness and understanding you would readily give to your best friend. In her TED Talk entitled, “The gentle gift of mercy”, Anne Lamott[3] states, “Mercy is radical kindness. Mercy is not deserved. It involves absolving the unabsolvable, forgiving the unforgivable. Mercy brings us to the miracle of apology, given and accepted, to unashamed humility when we have erred or forgotten.” 

Make peace with yourself so you can know mercy. Calm your heart in knowing that no one can take away your hard-earned memories.
​
Just be decent.[4]  Be honest with yourself and be respectful towards others. How we treat each other, and ourselves, is one of the only things that matter.[5]


[1] Nadine Kaslow and Natalie Watson, “Civility: A Core Component of Professionalism”, https://www.apa.org/ed/precollege/ptn/2016/09/civility-professionalism, (September, 2016).

[2] Institute for Civility in Government, https://www.instituteforcivility.org/who-we-are/what-is-civility/, (2020).

[3] Anne Lamott, “The gentle gift of mercy”, https://ideas.ted.com/the-gentle-gift-of-mercy/ , (April 26, 2017).

[4] Anne Applebaum, (July/August 2020),  “Collaborators”, The Atlantic, 48-62.

[5] Anne Bulger, “Proper Civility”, https://annebulger.com/estranged-parent-blog.html , October 30, 2020.

The Self Worth of an Alienated Parent

                                                                                                                                                                            
In my last article[1], I posed the question as to whether, as a Mother, you can love your children too much. I have expressed self-doubt and questioned my own role in my adult children’s estrangement from me. In a home where my children received unconditional love and proper emotional support from me and material comfort from their father, what are the sources of alienation? Why do they refuse to have an adult relationship with me?

Unconditional love can be defined as love without conditions: I love you no matter what. However, I believe a more thorough definition would include a conscious choice to love someone by accepting whom they are-with a condition. The condition is that we unconditionally love someone freely with specific boundaries. Unconditional love is not, “Love me and supply what I need…despite how I treat you.”[2] 

Unconditional love for another must take into consideration certain conditions since we must unconditionally love ourselves as well. We cannot expect love to flourish under insensitive conditions. As we teach our children, we can accept that they may not like a limitation we may impose on them. They can call us ‘Bad Mommy’. However, we should not accept that they try to hit or kick us. We set a condition that teaches them that loving someone is not about hurting someone. We do not label them as a deviant child. And we do not stop loving them because of their mistake.

What if your child grows up and holds resentment towards you because you held a boundary with them? What if they grow up and now believe you were an angry person or cold and heartless because you would not let them hit their sister? They may not recall that memory, but you do as their parent. Our children do not remember all that we strived for in their best interests. They may forget the preponderance of our unconditional love.

Here comes the part where I have no doubt. I loved my children unconditionally.

It distresses me deeply to say that is not true anymore.

I must tell you a bit about my story. My Mother and I were not cut from the same cloth. Unfortunately, she struggled with her own nature and had serious difficulties in developing any significant interpersonal relationships. My nature just could not resonate with hers. I felt that she desired connection through blaming others for her unhappiness littered with a judgment against others, to include our extended family members. Today, I understand that she lived a frightening inner life and felt threatened by too many people.

So, I did not learn about unconditional love from my own mother. When I raised my children, I did not want to repeat this pattern (I do not believe my Mother was loved unconditionally either) and I intentionally endeavored to be a different kind of mother.

Unconditional love values human worth. What does it mean to be human? Discussing humanity includes examination of human behavior. Generally speaking, human behavior is described as a response to internal and external stimuli throughout our lives, driven in part by our thoughts and feelings.[3] Being human is an incredibly active process with great potential to learn from experiences.

As a mother, I said to myself that I wanted to show my children that I valued who they were and loved them as they were learning from their experiences and making mistakes. Because we all make mistakes. Our responsibility is to learn from our mistakes since it is impossible not to make them. I have no doubt that my children did not learn about a lack of compassion and understanding from any of my lessons.

We have a responsibility to hold to the power of love that we know to be true, and to not allow the world around us to deaden that in ourselves.[4] I have not stopped loving my children. I just cannot love them the same way as I used to because of how they have chosen to treat me over the past 10 years.

Continue to be who and how you are, to astonish a mean world with your acts of kindness.[5] Do not look to others for redemption - redeem yourself. Do not allow your child’s unkind behavior to extinguish your good nature. You are not your mistakes. Your mistakes are just you being human. Learn from your mistakes. Show yourself compassion for being a human being and unconditionally love yourself.

That is what I have learned.[6]


[1] Anne Bulger, “Bitter or Better”, https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/bitter-better-anne-bulger-rn-lmft/, (August21, 2020).
[2]John Amodeo, “Is Unconditional Love Really Possible?”, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/intimacy-path-toward-spirituality/201801/is-unconditional-love-really-possible, (January 2, 2018).
[3] Human Behavior. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved September 29, 2020, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_behavior.
[4] Lucas Johnson, A Network for Grateful Living-Word for the Day, https://gratefulness.org/, (September 6, 2020).
[5] Maya Angelou, “Continue”, https://english.duke.edu/news/poem-day-continue, (May 6, 2020).
[6] Anne Bulger, “What is Unconditional Love?”, https://annebulger.com/estranged-parent-blog.html , (September 29, 2020).
​

Entitlement in the Age of Alienating Children

Our brains are inclined to hold onto negative experiences like Velcro and allow positive experiences to slip away like Teflon. We are challenged to bring to our awareness the ‘choice’: How do we want to spend our daily dose of emotional energy? Do I wish to spend my day saturated in negativity or do I want to concentrate my energy on feeling constructive and self-assured? What I have learned is that I can end up feeling bitter or better because of my choice in perspective.

Imprinting

By most Western standards, I was emotionally neglected as a young person growing up in a typical household. I am a first-generation American with Polish parents, a Father that survived to live in Poland during WWII, and the Nazi work camp where he was engaged in forced labor. When my Mother ignored the keepsake record book, “Grandma’s Memories” I wished for her to complete for her grandchildren, my Father answered the questions on separate pieces of notepaper as ‘Grandpa’. His memories as a child growing up in a remote Polish village, which currently remains a remote Polish village, include the fact that children were not given any actual attention. No “Precious Cargo” car window stickers for him. Unfortunately for me (and for her), my Mother spent her life in a world of self-sacrifice and suffering.

I grew up in Chicago in the 1960s. I was a latchkey kid as my mother worked outside the home. Summers were especially lonely, since both my parents worked full-time day jobs. I remember taking occasional three-hour round-trip public transportation, on both bus and train, to visit my Father at downtown Marshall Field’s where he worked as a tailor in the Men’s department. Many an unsavory character I met on my journey as a 9-year old. I walked alone the few miles to Riis Park, which required crossing three busy streets. I learned how to swim, not-drown, after being regularly thrown into the deep end of the pool by my older brother, my only sibling.

I developed an awareness that my Mother hardly made eye-contact with me. Neither parent thought to ask me about my day at school or whether I had any fun. The conversation was centered on whether a chore, not homework, was completed. Mostly I remember that my everyday life with them felt as if I was invisible. My best memories are the ones that I shared with my Father when he was puttering about the garden. He would hand me some green beans, or an ear of corn and I would munch away while he talked about the bugs on the cabbage or how his feet hurt from crouching.

Life Lessons

Why this story? My history influenced who I unconsciously and consciously chose to be as a parent. Just as it did for my parents. And if I were to ask my parents if they intended to emotionally neglect me, they would be aghast at the suggestion and, in all honesty, they would probably not really comprehend the question. The same would be true for my grandparents and so on.

My story includes a current 10-year chapter of parent alienation. Without explanation and to this date, both of my children have refused all of my efforts to communicate with them.

So, what happened? As a parent myself, my mantra was that I wanted to be a different mother than my mother was to me. I wanted my children to know they were both loved and respected as individuals. I wanted them to know that they were cherished. That they were noticed. I wonder if I may have swung the pendulum too far to the other side.

Like many Mothers, I assumed primary care of my children which required primary attention to their needs and wants. I took it upon myself to encourage appreciation and consideration for others. I provided them opportunities to develop determination, grit, and perseverance. They were gifted with presents but earned age-appropriate privileges. I gave my children the tools and they have continued to challenge themselves. Nothing gave me more pleasure than to watch my children engaged in life. They had not only their ordinary needs met but their emotional needs were attended to as well. As their mother, I let them know that I held them dear.

Questioning the Outcome

Did my maternal dedication breed children seeped in entitlement as opposed to children instilled with appreciation? I am still confused.

As their mother, I wanted better for my children. My former husband grew up privileged and financially secure, on the beaches of Southern California. My father was a tailor and my mother a factory worker in a lower-class Chicago neighborhood. My former husband experienced regular family vacations around the world. My mother’s purse handles were secured with duct tape. I wanted to give my children the love and attention and respect I knew very little of while growing up. In contrast, their father wanted to provide them with material goods but not his time.

Did I just say that out loud? Can you see the struggle I may have with being bitter or better? Yes, I have had these caustic thoughts and bubbling emotions, just as anyone who felt the injustice and prejudice of parental alienation. My perspective is threatened by negative thoughts about the power of money and its dehumanizing influence on people, including my children. I can feel embittered by the fact that their father’s contributions to their financial security have superseded my motherly love for them. I could spend time ‘hating’ my Ex and thinking poorly of my children. After all, for a parent who invested so much, who wouldn’t feel aggrieved?

What does it take for me to instead, be better? I remind myself of who I am. My father collected our outgrown clothing and regularly mailed packages to families in Poland. He actively supported our local church and mended clothing for our neighbors. His innate generosity is part of my inheritance. I know that I concentrated my efforts on being the best mother I could figure out being and I followed my father’s role modeling of unselfishness. And I embodied the kind of mothering Janna Malamud Smith[1] describes as “the physicians’ instructions for ensuring infants’ physical protection that gave way to the challenge of assuring children’s emotional and cognitive perfection.” “More taxing prescriptions issued from psychologists: optimally attuned love, correctly attached love-an elusive ideal that has spelled ever more intensive mothering.”

Did I go overboard in putting my identity of motherhood front and center and therefore my children front and center? I know that I lost huge parts of myself and I further wonder if I could have encouraged a sense of privilege in my children that corrupted their development of tenderness and kindness.

I still do not have an answer or a way to understand who my children are today. What I do know is that when I take responsibility for my choices, as misinformed as they might have been, then I can define myself as someone who tried her very best despite circumstances. When I can understand that I am not in control of the outcome of those efforts, I can relieve myself of inhuman responsibility. When I am willing to release myself of unfounded guilt and shame in my mistakes and failures, I can have compassion for all other human beings in this trying world.

I was the best Mother I could be knowing what I did at the time.

That is better.
​
[1] Janna Malamud Smith, “Always Accountable”, https:www.nytimes.com/2003/03/09/, (March 9, 2003).

Ways to Live with Loss

I am thankful that our society is getting educated about PTSD and PTSS (Posttraumatic Stress Symptoms). For instance, we are embracing the reality of the type of trauma burdening the minds of our soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan wars. It was just a few years before his recent death that Dick, one of my dearest friends, talked to someone at the VA about his deep-rooted nightmares associated with his service in Korea and Vietnam.

We all live with an inability to cope at times. Bessel van der Kolk[1] is a Dutch psychiatrist who has been studying trauma since the 1970’s and his work has deconstructed the concept of PTSD and the ability to cope with trauma. He defines trauma as “something that overwhelms your coping capacities and confronts you with the thought: “Oh my God, it is all over, and there is nothing I can do. I am done for. I may as well die.” van der Kolk states that people who experience significant trauma live with the reactions that arise from the disappearance of one’s ability to cope with distress. A loss of pleasure and meaning in life, increased aggression towards self and others, depression, suicide attempts, heart and lung diseases to name a few. Not everyone who experiences horrendous events develop trauma symptoms and those that do can temporarily or permanently suffer the consequences.

Ten years ago, after 25 years of marriage, and my two-year-long divorce was finalized, I moved across the country to be with an old college love. Both of my adult children suddenly stopped engaging with me. My experience of being shunned by my children produced a trauma reaction in me. Initially, I was confused and in disbelief, because it did not seem real, it could not be real. I attempted to gather information to understand what was going on with my kids. Phone calls were ignored, texts and emails were unanswered. Radio silence. Anxiety and fear became stalkers in my life, sending shocks to my nervous system with random frequency. I medicated my anxiety with alcohol which led to more self-sabotaging behaviors such as angry outbursts with my partner who was attempting to support me, not knowing how to comfort a rabid animal. I isolated myself in a world I believed no one could understand. As the years went on, I found myself saying to my loved ones, “I’m getting better” because I was, just not with a sense of confidence in my progress. I recently confessed to a few friends that I struggled with not wanting to live for a long time. I could not imagine recovering from such a primal loss.

I am not saying that I experienced PTSD or trying to associate my experience even loosely with that DSM-5 diagnosis. What I am saying is that when I read about the uniqueness of trauma memories and their nature to immediately affect the present moment with a flood of mind and body symptoms, I knew I was experiencing the horror of trauma. While I was in the process of neutralizing thoughts and feelings and triggered memories of my children (which happened with great frequency for too many years), I know that my stress response was in hyperdrive. The prolonged traumatic stress reaction was a normal reaction to an abnormal circumstance. I felt the loss of life having a meaning which gratefully functioned to ultimately develop a new perspective for myself. 

Too often I felt sick and weakened during those 10 years of managing the horror of alienation by my children. The trauma symptoms felt like a chronic illness that vacillated between an emotional crisis and crisis recovery. I lived an exhausted life. I could not sleep well as I could not control the constantly recurring thoughts. Not having any opportunity to shift my children’s decision to estrange themselves from me impacted my sense of self-control over what was happening to me. Feeling helpless and hopeless, I lost my definition as “Mama” and a huge part of how I defined my Self. I had wholeheartedly embraced my unconditional motherly love for them, and ultimately, I had to brokenheartedly accept the disillusionment released by the estrangement.
​
Introspection can be a double-edged sword. Too much can lead to over-analysis, self-consumption, deepening the groove on the record of negative and distorted thinking. Just the right amount can cultivate a new attitude.
van der Kolk’s wisdom includes learning to manage your anxiety and distinguishing between real and imagined fears as a way to combat your sense of emotional helplessness. Anxiety management activities, such as breathing exercises and yoga, are essential as ways to calm your body and therefore your mind.

In your gentled mind, you can learn to observe yourself as a passenger of a train looking outside the train window. I could see the memories of my children, joyful and painful, moving past me as the train moved forward. I just watched as the pictures moved by, with me going forward on the train tracks. Feelings of anger and sorrow bubbled up and I said to myself that I had a choice as to whether I wanted to place these memories inside of my traveling bag or whether I would let them pass by and leave them as I traveled on the train advancing forward on the tracks. I decided which memories to keep that were sweet or made me laugh.
Confucius said, “Your Life is What Your Thoughts Make It”. My new attitude included continued practice with a method called stop-thinking followed by distraction.

1.    I caught myself thinking about my children.
2.    I realized I was at the crossroads of a choice.
3.    I decided to choose to not think about them.
4.    I decided to substitute a thought that was positive in any way.
5.    Or, I decided to do something different from what I was presently doing in the moment.
6.    Practice the stop-thinking technique until you have moved through the feelings.

The goal of this exercise was to bump the needle out of the well-worn groove on the record of negativity and begin playing the record in the groove of positive thinking. I realized that I was allowing the thief of negative thinking to steal my precious sentiments and leave me with foul-smelling garbage. I had to stop retraumatizing myself with my defeating thoughts and have compassion for myself as the human being that I am. I had to stop it.

Brene Brown[2] defines vulnerability “as uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure. Waking up every day and loving someone who may or may not love us back…who may stay in our lives or may leave without a moment’s notice…that’s vulnerability”. In motherhood, I gave myself up to vulnerability as I have never done before or since. Without any consideration, I took a risk I did not know I was taking because I loved my children so dearly. My devotion was automatic.

I have scars from my terrifying estrangement because I have lived and loved my children deeply. I came to believe that I deserved the release from any further parental responsibilities to children who did not want me in their lives. This included any thoughts or memories that I did not wish to keep. I can now remember them during the years when they did love me. With continued practice, I now have the recordings of music from the positive groove of the record that calms me and gives me peace of mind. I found ways to live with my loss.

[1] Bessel van der Kolk, “Trauma in the Body: Interview with Bessel van der Kolk”, https://www.stillharbor.org/anchormagazine/2015/11/18/trauma-in-the-body , (November 18, 2015).
[2] Kate Torgovnick May, “5 Insights from Brene Brown’s New Book, Daring Greatly, Out Today”, https://blog.ted.com/5-insights-from-brene-browns-new-book-daring-greatly-out-today , (September 11, 2012).

Just Another Struggle to Have a Voice as an Alienated Parent
                                                                                                                                                                               
This article was prepared before the killing of George Floyd on May 25, 2020. The article does not explore anger in all its dimensions and instead, illustrates that anger has its place as an appropriate and natural emotion.

Dear Daughter, I look into your eyes - in a picture - it can be one of the many of you or you and me-and I ask myself; how can you act like what we had was nothing?

This is a question for my beloved 32-year-old daughter, and it is one that many alienated parents of an estranged adult child can ask themselves-over and over again.

Most recently, I read a blog for estranged parents in which the writer expressed her doubt as to whether she was an appropriate member of this group where some estranged parents expressed anger towards their adult child who decided to negate their parent-child relationship. She reported having no real anger towards their own child and instead felt a frustration towards the circumstance of estrangement. “I’m not angry with my kids. It’s not really about them.” I could relate to this writer’s lack of connection with some alienated parents’ feelings. Parents can be snarky and blaming and enraged towards their estranged child. A parent’s angry rant can seem intense and misplaced. The rawness can seem to fragment the natural fabric of compassion for someone younger, someone less informed by experience, someone to whom we are so primitively bonded.

Is there a higher road? Am I supposed to believe that the higher road does not involve anger? Is some higher road a relevant consideration in these circumstances?

Matthew Hutson[1] reports that anger results when we feel undervalued. The primary benefit of anger for an individual is preventing oneself from being exploited. When your child chooses to be estranged, parents are faced with an abnormal situation. The villainization and rejection from their child results in parents feeling devalued beyond measure and anger can serve to heighten self-protection from further emotional abuse. Hutson states that anger that progresses to rage can exacerbate a situation but swallowing the pain of devaluation can lead to depression and health problems. (Tori DeAngelis[2] asserts that anger seems to be followed by aggression only about 10 percent of the time.)

I became a parent by vocation, devoted to my children whom I deeply loved every day. I struggled for 10 years with my conflicted feelings. I actually did not know how to be angry with my children who estranged themselves after my divorce from a marriage of 25 years (a divorce they encouraged). For many years, I lived in utter confusion. Their decision to obliterate me from the face of Motherhood was incomprehensible. I could not make sense of their decision to diminish my love and maternal efforts and render me irrelevant. I felt small in thinking that they were awful for doing so.

I contorted my confusion, my diminishment, my rage into harming myself. I vacillated between two kinds of living. An exposed and vulnerable presence for my husband, family, friends, and clients, and interims of self-medicated oblivion where I could express my anguish and irreconcilable thoughts and feelings. A hell of instability and liability. Just where I could not stand to be.

Can a person resolve such a primitive injustice, an experience with elementary unfairness, a state of being that is such deviance from a maternal bonding and dedicated devotion with a cherished child? Can a person resolve this abuse without expressing a fundamental anger?

Repressing anger can actually hurt you.[3] Dr. Ernest Harburg and his team at the University of Michigan School of Public Health spent several decades tracking the same adults in a longitudinal study of anger. They found that men and women who hid the anger they felt in response to an unjust attack subsequently found themselves more likely to get bronchitis and heart attacks and were more likely to die earlier than peers.

I have been rethinking my reflexive reaction to those parents who have been so hurt that words cannot describe. And it is hurt. It is all about feeling so hurt that you cannot think right, you cannot feel right, you cannot breathe right. Every minute, every hour, every day. I am grateful that I can think and feel right on most days. But I must confess that there are days during which I still do not breathe right.

I am speaking to most parents who are broken-hearted from the utter rejection of the children they bore, the children to whom they willingly gave themselves to with their protective and nurturing hearts, the parents who were faithful and true to the spirit of parenting.

You have a right to be angry. You have a right to feel betrayed. You have a right to feel wronged.

Research shows that accepting our negative emotions as part of our human condition allows us to neutralize the intensity of the emotion. Habitually accepting negative emotions was found to not only reduce feelings of ill-being, but also was more likely to lead to elevated levels of well-being.[4] Accepting that we have anger allows us to diminish our self-judgment about feeling angry.

Until we realize, that as loving parents who have been shunned by their child, we have a right to be fully angry, under whatever the circumstances or whomever the person, we will not know the path to walk towards our release from this unjust burden. We will not be able to find the path to our better selves. It is only then with our concerted effort and determination can we choose our destiny. For us, it is a destiny without our children who will not love us. It is a destiny with others that will.


[1] Matthew Hutson, “Beyond Happiness: The Upside of Feeling Down”, Psychology Today, January 2015.
 
[2] Tori DeAngelis, “When Anger’s a Plus”, https://www.apa.org/monitor/mar03/whenanger, March, 2003.

[3] Todd Kashdan and Robert Biswas-Diener, “The Right Way to Get Angry”, https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/the_right_way_to_get_angry, October 20, 2014.
 
[4] Lila MacLellan, “Accepting Your Darkest Emotions is the Key to Psychological Health”, https://qz.com/1034450/accepting-your-darkest-emotions-is-the-key-to-psychological-health/, July 23, 2017.

Dark Times for an Alienated Parent and Ways Out
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We feel a pang of sadness when we see our child cry because someone hurt their feelings. We are distressed when our husband is moaning with pain from a life-threatening illness. We grieve when a child discards their relationship with us as our daughter or our son. We can suffer.

It’s been challenging for me to find the words to communicate, with real accuracy, what went through my head, my body, my heart when my children, suddenly and without much explanation, left my world. I woke up one morning and my life was what I knew it to be. I woke up another morning and the familiar had vanished and for me, that familiar was family.
 
We divorced after 25 years which included several years of attempting to live in the aftermath of my ex-husband’s affair.  Within months of the divorce, which my daughter encouraged me to seek for my happiness, she disinvited me to her college graduation. I discovered that the lei of flowers I ordered for the event was delivered to the wrong address because she had not notified me that she had moved. Just a few months before, while lunching at Nordstrom’s Café, my daughter told me that I “should just give Dad the money since it was his money.” Right around the same time, in our very last phone conversation, my son volunteered that he “disapproved of my behavior over the past two years”, the time during which the divorce proceeded slowly to completion.
 
We all suffer, and we all suffer differently. People can compartmentalize their feelings so that they shield themselves from everyday troublesome thoughts. Some can dismiss their thoughts with denial. Others have feelings that bubble to the surface regularly.
 
I was a bubbler. At the beginning of my dark days, I was underwater, confused and miserable. The passage of time did not make things better, only worse. I was in shock for years, my mind frozen by the lack of information and opportunity for discussion. My pain defied logic so I could not figure out the mystery of the change in our relationship that so abruptly surfaced. One day, I knew my 20 something daughter who is sitting on my lap while I talked with some friends. A short time later, I do not know my daughter who will not answer a simple text.
 
Not answering texts or emails or phone calls amplified the distress of not having any understanding and therefore, answers to why they wouldn’t talk with me again. The pain from the loss of connection with my children was piercing and shredding.
 
I pulled out every coping skill in my toolbox in addition to reading the sparse amount of information related to adult child estrangement that existed 10 years ago. My friends and family did not know what to say since parental alienation is not an issue freely discussed in any society on any continent. Therapists could not help me process traumatic grief that is so primitive and without dimension. Bessel van der Kolk (2018)[1] states, “Trauma is something that overwhelms your coping capacities and confronts you with the thought: “Oh my God, it’s all over, and there’s nothing I can do. I’m done for. I may as well die.”  
 
It is difficult to analogize my situation, but I am going to try. Imagine waking up one day to find yourself paralyzed from the neck down. You cannot figure out what happened, and you are in shock. The doctors are baffled. They may even wonder what you did to yourself. You are being told to have hope, that things may get better. Try to think positively.
 
And there you are. Even if you have well-meaning loved ones surrounding you, you are in your personal hell and you see no way out. Your whole world is instantly turned upside down and you have no control and no answers and seemingly, no future. You cannot have the life you had before. Things quickly go dark.
 
Educated guidance from therapists, well-meaning advice from family and friends, my efforts at applying coping strategies were not enough to penetrate my despair. It came to the point where I could not read another piece of wisdom that instructed me to take care of myself. I could not hear someone tell me to keep trying with my children. I could not see a better day. As with paralysis, hoping for a cure that does not exist is all you have, and yet hoping for the impossible becomes a negative feedback loop: wake up each day with hope and end each day in despair.

Sometimes, nothing works. Dependent on the situation, nothing can work to help you feel better for a long time.

That long time is very hard to live through. I almost gave up on myself.
 
What did I finally do when nothing seemed to work?

1. I realized that to survive my trauma, I had to work at having interoceptive awareness in another way that would help my brain to rewire. I took a break from thinking. I stopped reading and listening and watching. I would turn the TV channel or change the topic with friends. I paid attention to what triggered me and my bandwidth for taking in any more information.
2. I asked my friends and family to avoid passing along any news about my children. There was no good reason for me to be informed of how they were effortlessly living their lives shunning me. I do not need to know what stories they are telling. I have my story.
3. I permitted myself to forget about my children. I realize this may sound extreme and I thought so too for a long time. I thought I could not live without being defined as a mother to my children. However, my wisdom eventually informed me that I would longer want to live if I chose a path that included self-destructive perseveration.
4. I dismissed any “What would my life be like if…?” thinking. The reality I hold onto is that my relationship with my children lives in my memories-not in the present or the future. I reconciled the fact that I will never again see my son or daughter whom I love so much.
5. I got to know and believe in myself again. I discovered that I thought, in some way, that I must have committed a heinous crime as a mother. I came to hold strongly onto the reality that I was a good mother and that I am a good mother. Nothing I could have ever done justifies the cruel behavior of my children.
6. I validate myself in my work as a marriage and family therapist, a place where I could leave everything behind me. Being the compassionate person that I am, helped me to remember self-compassion. I cherish myself as I would a friend experiencing this grievous pain.
7. I accept that people, including my children, make unfathomable decisions that make no sense.
8. I massaged and got massages. I care for my vulnerable body parts susceptible to stress with warm towels, penetrating lotions, and hand massage. I found a massage therapist who is effective in kneading my muscles and comforting in his touch.

 
When I practiced these steps, I treated my trauma. I stopped torturing myself with confusion and self-doubt and feeling irredeemable and instead became skillful at rejecting negative thinking, unrealistic feelings of fear, and distorted beliefs. I chose to not give trauma a life inside of me. I treated my trauma with compassion for myself which allowed me to identify my emotional need for peace of mind, reject self-harming behaviors, and embrace my reality as a mother who raised two beautiful children. As van der Kolk (2019)[2] notes, “What we see is that the parts of the brain that help people to see clearly and to observe things clearly really get interfered with by trauma.”  I clearly remember that I am instrumental in knowing the reality of my story, a story of yesteryear and today, as a kind, loving, and devoted mother.
 
Watching a TV show or reading an article or having a conversation with a friend, I am still reminded of that unrealized potential of sharing a mother-daughter or mother-son relationship with my children. The potential for connection with each other as only a mother can have with her only daughter and her only son. The potential for the smiles we shared with each other since day one. My mind’s eye sees them in many memories. The potential for a conversation about how we thought or felt about something, anything, each other. I can hear our bantering, our sentiments, our tears. My memories now soothe me. I found my way to heal myself.

As a mental health professional and as a human being, I do not believe it is my children’s best emotional interest to forsake their only Mother. I am not sure how they cope.

Thinking about the three great spiritual questions of  “Who am I?” “Why am I here?” “How shall I live?” helps me see the light.


[1]Elissa Melaragno, “Trauma in the Body: An Interview with Dr. Bessel van der Kolk”, http://www.dailygood.org/story/1901/trauma-in-the-body-an-interview-with-dr-bessel-van-der-kolk/, (April 21, 2018).
[2] Krista Tippett, “Bessel van der Kolk: How Trauma Lodges in the Body”, https://onbeing.org/programs/bessel-van-der-kolk-how-trauma-lodges-in-the-body/, (December 26, 2019).

One Lesson I Learned as an Estranged Parent
                                                                                                                                                    
 One of the biggest traps that estranged/alienated parents can fall into is a belief that our adult children know us best. After all, they are our closest family. They speak about us and label our parenting as if they were the only ones present during this lifetime experience. They can speak with certainty as if they are the authority of who we are as people and as a parent.

I’m here to challenge this assumption.

We typically raise our children in our home for at least 18 years and our financial support often continues into their college years. There is no argument that we could have lived with each other for 18 years and had daily interaction in many direct ways.
What do we know about a child mind’s development during those 18 years and how this is related to our ability to comprehend human behavior and evaluate interpersonal relationships between primary family members?

Researchers believe that we must first understand the development of a human mind.

Being able to navigate in our social world is essential to the success of our human interactions with each other and is linked to our human survival. This takes skill, an ability we develop as we grow older. Between ages 3 and 5 years, young children begin to become aware that they can think and feel differently than someone else. And equally important, they become aware that someone else can think and feel differently from them. Kendra Cherry[1] states that “while we can make predictions, we have no direct way of knowing exactly what a person might be thinking. All we can rely on is our own theories that we develop based on what people say, how they act, what we know about their personalities, and what we can infer about their intentions.”

Kendra Cherry references the work of Wellman, Fang, and Peterson[2] when describing the five mind abilities:

1. The understanding that the reasons why people might want something (i.e. desires) may differ from one person to the next
2. The understanding that people can have different beliefs about the same thing or situation
3. The understanding that people may not comprehend or have the knowledge that something is true
4. The understanding that people can hold false beliefs about the world
5. The understanding that people can have hidden emotions, or that they may act one way while feeling another way.

These abilities of the mind influence another essential skill for our human survival, social competence. Social competence is defined by processing social information in order to accurately interpret someone else’s behaviors and make good decisions to act in socially appropriate ways. We need to be able to interpret another’s tone of voice or actions correctly if we want to understand someone else and get along with each other.

Do you believe that we are done learning about social competence by age 18 or so? I will readily admit that I continue to learn at age 64 years. I am aware that I shouldn’t pick my nose in front of others if I don’t want them to have a disgusted reaction. However, there are times, when I am arguing with my husband, that anyone might wonder about my degree of social competence in interpreting his tone and behaviors in order to understand him and not just understand me.

If we wish to be kind, considerate, and socially competent people, I believe we must continue to build our abilities to understand the other person. To understand one another requires a talent developed from skill-building. I might argue that the most important skills are a willingness and desire to understand ourselves and to understand another person who is thinking differently than you are.

My children don’t know me. Our estranged adult children, who lived with us for the first 18 years of their lives, really don’t know us, their parent, with a thorough comprehension of the five mind abilities described above and social competence. If they were completely competent in these areas, I would argue that they would not be acting as they are. As Tony Robbins[3] says, “Because if you are going to blame someone for the pain they caused, then you better blame them for all the good that came out of it too. If you’re going to give them credit for everything that is so messed up, then you have to give them credit for everything that is great.” 

And I do not know my children. My memories of my children are from when they were first born until age 22ish. They are now in their 30s. I do not know if they like their jobs or what they do on the weekends or if they are at peace with themselves. Critically, I do not know the son or the daughter that I bore, who over the past decade, can decide to ignore their mother’s pleas to talk together and work out whatever grievances they may have with me instead of dead silence.

What is clear to me is that if concentrate on what I can change, I will continue to work on my social competence so that I can continue to understand myself and to understand others, which includes having compassion for my children. Being proud of myself in following “Do Unto Others…” is how I build a strong sense of my-Self.
 

[1] Kendra Cherry, “How the Theory of Mind Helps Us Understand Others”, https://www.verywellmind.com/theory-of-mind-4176826 , (October 1, 2019).

[2] Henry M. Wellman, Fuxi Fang, and Candida C. Peterson Sequential Progressions in a Theory‐of‐Mind Scale: Longitudinal Perspectives”, https://srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2011.01583.x , (March 23, 2011).
 
[3] Tony Robbins, https://www.tonyrobbins.com/mind-meaning/life-is-happening-for-me/ .

The Poison of Parental Alienation
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 
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My Mother, born in Poland but raised in France, was famous for her malapropisms. She would say, “hahatack” instead of “heart attack”. She called my first boyfriend a “bump” instead of a “bum”. And when taken by surprise, she would exclaim, “Oh, my godness” instead of Oh, my goodness!" I think in this last example, her verbal mistake was actually most accurate.

There was a time when I was losing my God-ness by disconnecting from my goodness.

What do we know about goodness as a human value?

We feel the goodness of a person when we experience someone letting us go first in the grocery line. (We all want to get out of there, now that our cart is full, and our stomachs are often empty.) We witness goodness when we see a young child crouch down to pet the dog while looking up with a smile. We hear goodness when a waitress patiently explains the menu while we know she has repeated herself many times before. It doesn’t seem to take much to be a person who chooses goodness. Goodness is generosity and kindness and doing the right thing. It is defined as a virtue that we can learn by behaving with principled guidelines.

In the adult world, we are challenged at every turn as to whether we walk the path of goodness. What do you do when you are walking hurriedly down the street and a baby reflexively drops her pacifier right in your path? Oh wait. That might be too easy for you to do good. In traffic, do you give that car in the next lane some space to squeeze in front of you as they try to make their way to the turn lane? Or do you think they should have prepared themselves for the turn? We don’t hold the baby responsible for dropping the pacifier but our choice to do good may be affected by our harsh criticism. Do we value being judgmental more than being generous?

When it is easy to do good, it is easy for me to feel good about doing a good thing. However, I believe that goodness demands from us to do good when it is difficult to do good in order to truly do the right thing.
We are all just human beings and we need to actively choose if we want to be good or not. Being a good person is not an automatic human quality. We need to decide whether we practice goodness, or we don’t. We must decide each time and keep making the decision to be good.

It is not because we are tempted to allow our intellectual minds to determine if we blame someone for not thinking ahead about making the left turn that makes us a bad person. It is choosing to act with our mind and our heart and our spirit in concert that helps be a good person.

There was a time when I was seriously struggling with being unkind, first in my mind, then my heart, and finally in my soul or choosing the blessings of the trinity of mind, heart, and spirit creating virtue.

During the nearly 10-year period of reconciling my children’s decision to estrange themselves from me, I experienced an unfamiliar hollowness that slowly enveloped my life. There was something at work in my soul that I did not understand. I felt that I lost a connection with other people and with the world which included my love for the earth, the plants, the outdoor animals. I now believe that I went numb with the loss of my spirit.

I found myself thinking bitter thoughts about people. The person who cut me off on the road, the contractor who wouldn’t listen, my husband who came home late for the third time in a week. I could literally feel the weight of the toxicity furrowing my brow and erasing my smile.

Could I change my mind and heart despite the state of my wounded being? Would I allow the effects of the estrangement bury my spirit and therefore darken my goodness? Did I want my daily dose of emotional energy devoted to building contempt towards myself, other people, life?

Eventually, I started wondering. Did the next person who cut me off on the road have to go to the bathroom really bad? After listening to the contractor, I could ask him to listen to me. I told my husband I was glad he was home. And I felt better.

My children cut me out of their lives. They won’t give me a chance to listen or listen to me. They won’t ever come home.
I started wondering what would happen to the way that I felt, every day, if I applied goodness in my heart for them. I had to open the door to my intellectual mind and allow my heart and spirit to enter the room. I spent enough time thinking about the why and the what happened. Now I needed to think about and feel what Saint Francis was saying in his prayer that begins with “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace”. He continues by saying, “Where there is hatred, let me sow love. Where there is injury, pardon.”

When I wondered about how change could make a difference in me, I decided to substitute my existing course of thinking. Zoroastrianism's core teachings include following the Threefold Path of Asha: Good Thoughts, Good Words, Good Deeds. I began to challenge my conviction that my children ‘coming back’ to me would make all the difference in how I felt. That I would begin to smile and laugh easily again-if they only wanted me back as their Mother. What I came to understand was that the only change that would make a difference was plotting a course to reach my goodness again. Because of my sorrow and mental confusion, I was becoming a person who spent too much time dwelling on the negative feelings my loss was generating. The adversity did create differences in me. I had to remember that I could take with me those differences and uncover the Self I wished to be again. And that Self was one that prioritized living a life with goodness.

I got deeply wounded and I will be wounded again. I find that if I take care of my wounds, with compassion for myself, I don’t have to feel a grievance towards those that have wounded me. My children are as human as I am human and will meet their own crossroads. “And it’s in pardoning that we are pardoned” (Saint Francis).
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Loving my children deeply was always the right thing to do. I can continue to do so even though I have some serious scarring. Scarring from what happened to me and scarring from what I did to myself. Goodness helped me make a life-enriching choice. I love myself again. Thank godness!

7 Things to Do in the Face of Parental Alienation
                                                                                                                                                                                   
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Have you ever noticed that people get up in arms if someone is caught yelling at, dragging with a collar, or kicking their dog? They will write to the neighborhood blog or local newspaper about bad owners or abuse. I googled and found out that these behaviors do not actually qualify as animal cruelty. It’s all a terrible reflection of what people can do when they feel superior and entitled.

Have you ever noticed what happens if a child is being yelled at, dragged by the hand, spanked? We may have both painful thoughts and feelings about what we witnessed. We don’t write to the neighborhood blog or local newspaper about bad parents or trauma. We can be loudly reprimanded if we make a comment. We tend to look away.

Why am I bringing up this phenomenon? I think that our degree of social awkwardness challenges our ability to speak up. Speaking up is of itself a social skill that requires education and practice.
Too often, people are faced with a conflict: do I speak up or do I stay silent? And if I speak up, how do I do it well? I don’t want to be the messenger who gets shot! In his TEDx Talk, Adar Cohen (2019)[1] says, “It’s human nature to avoid difficult conversations, partly because they’re difficult and partly because we’re worried that having them could make things worse.” Robert Sutton believes that the Mum Effect happens because people are afraid of being blamed or having negative feelings directed towards them.[2]
 
However, not speaking up while in the presence of another is a way to duck confrontations. Just like writing on Facebook or Twitter is a way to not directly face conflict.
Part of the formula is to get familiar with the positive aspects of anger in addition to acceptance of the fact that speaking up is often conflictual and conflict is uncomfortable.
 
In a positive way, anger provides us with the energy to defend ourselves. If we consider that our survival instinct gives us choices as to whether we act aggressively (fight), run away (flight), or just stand there (fright), anger can propel us into action. It is an extremely functional emotion-in good measure. What we too often experience, in our own actions or witness to others’ actions, is that saying what you want to say-when you know the other person does not want to hear what you want to say-is anger that is not well executed.
The answer is not silence.

Moshe Ratson, LMFT (2017)[3] states that one of the benefits of anger is to protect our values and beliefs. Anger can make us aware of injustice. Anger can increase emotional intelligence in those who do not resist anger. Anger can be used in such a way as to gain its positive attributes which engages flexibility in a person’s emotional response systems which leads to more adaptivity and resilience. Who doesn’t want to be more resilient?
 
Anger requires an awareness of feeling angry and the psychological headspace to make a choice. We need to decide whether to act on the feeling of anger and how to respond instead of reacting. We also need to figure out if anger is the actual feeling we are experiencing or whether anger is covering up another feeling (usually fear or pain). We need to make a conscious choice.
 
Recently, I had a very real time experience with making this choice. My cousin, who didn’t know my preference to not hear any news about my children, spent some rare time with my estranged adult son and his infant son I know nothing about. He included the fact that I was never mentioned in the great chat they shared.
I initially felt some anger. The anger made me think about what else I was feeling. I realized that, my heart felt a little broken.
 
My son shut the door to me 10 years ago. He has refused to have a discussion via phone, text, email, in person, or in therapy.
So, how did I cope after I heard about the chat that caused me such a pang of pain and how do I speak up for myself?
 
Well, I thought about my cousin’s perspective with a goal to understand the situation. I know my cousin has good feelings towards my son. After all, my son is intelligent, witty, charismatic. My cousin once tried to speak with my son about his relationship with me, only to be the recipient of a vulgar dismissal. (I am grateful that my cousin tried to reach my son with a request to open that door). However, the consequence of avoidance is that it validates my invisibility. The silence does indeed communicate that it is acceptable that you, my son, are causing me inconceivable pain, my son that I deeply love.
 
If I get upset with my cousin for not completely understanding my need for support, I do not afford him the understanding that my predicament is not his. And he has had the experience of once being the recipient of an unpleasant exchange with my estranged son. And yes, as many an estranged parent, I still wish others would say something on my behalf, and even repeat themselves, something more about the cruel injustice that an absence of interaction sustains.

Realistically, my sadness is a result of being triggered by the old narrative that runs through my head and heart, the one that says my son has rejected me, he has ghosted me, he has hurt me, and I am powerless to change the narrative-and nobody really cares because my very own son doesn’t care. It’s a feedback loop that has drawn me into the old history. The old narrative is harmful. It hurts me and changes nothing with the relationship to my son at all.
 
What can I do instead of feeling angry and hurt? The effective way to deal with that old narrative is to catch it, identify it, and choose to live in the moment with a realistic narrative. What is the true narrative? It is to consider who I really love, who is important me, and to realize what events impact me, day to day, in a positive way.

1. I remind myself. Speaking up is a learned and practiced skill-one that I cultivate because of my own nature and because my nature led me into my profession of mental health therapy. Asking difficult and pointed questions is part of who I am and what I practice.
2.  I remember. My loved ones try to be there for me, each in their very own important ways. Some of my friends know how to bathe my pain with their empathy and some of my family know how to wish that things were different for me. All of them just love me. And I am blessed and lucky.
3.  I talk. I meet with my loved ones and my liked ones to either go deep and or stay light. I need the safety to cry and be angry and to come up for air. Talking helps me either release or it takes me to another place to feel some relief.
4.  I distract my thoughts. I have developed a few good strategies that allow me to enjoy the life I am living. I do not spend much time thinking the same painful thoughts. Not anymore.
5.  I love. I look at my husband and think that the things he can do to drive me nuts really don’t matter because he best knows the contaminating thoughts and feelings that can grab at me from time to time. He is at my side and I need to remember that. I feel the crispness of the air mixed with the sunshine as we go through winter. I am grateful that I can go to the market and buy fresh vegetables any time of year.
6.  I nurture myself as I nurture others. Every day, I watch my dog, Lily, bounding through any field or on any beach-rain, snow, or shine. I feed the birds who grace my windows with their flight and fancy. I release the Monarch butterflies from their nursery to mingle with the honeybees I raise. And I love my Clients.
7.  I write. I write in my personal journal and now I write in a public forum. Sharing the experience helps me to get it out and feel less isolated. 

It is not easy to watch people that we love interact with our estranged children. They are not qualified to comprehend this inhuman experience of parent-child estrangement. However, it is our reality and our fact of life and we need to practice useful techniques in order to rewire our brains onto another loop; a loop that lets us know that we can have a very good life without the children that we bore into it.

This is how I avoid being silent.

 
 References:

[1] Adar Cohen, “3 steps to having difficult — but necessary — conversations”, https://ideas.ted.com/3-steps-to-having-difficult-but-necessary-conversations/, (December 16, 2019).
[2] Robert I Sutton, “The Mum Effect and Filtering in Organizations: The "Shoot the Messenger" Problem”, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/work-matters/201006/the-mum-effect-and-filtering-in-organizations-the-shoot-the-messenger, (June 5, 2010).
[3] Moshe Ratson, LMFT, “The Value of Anger: 16 Reasons It’s Good to Get Angry”, https://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/value-of-anger-16-reasons-its-good-to-get-angry-0313175, (March 13, 2017).
 

I am not a Gold Star Parent
                                                                                                                                                                                                                              
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I recently watched a 60 Minutes report on “Gold Star” parents whose children have been lost to war. Please understand that by no means am I directly comparing myself to these parents who talk about their beloved children with a love and admiration about their meaning on this Earth. Their experience is so different than mine and so much the same in that we both grieve the death of a child. I can only tell you that something resonated with me in listening to these Gold Star parents. At the very same time, I realized that I felt distinctly alone.

I’m a 63-year old mother of two children, who made their baby food from scratch, cleaned stalls while they took riding lessons, kissed their faces every day. And I am a marriage and family therapist, whose two children in their thirties, have given her the silent treatment for the past nine years.

According to the 2016 report, Gold Star parents feel well supported in their lifelong grief. Best supported by those who fear becoming a Gold Star parent; Blue Star parents whose children are presently in a hostile war zone. This is not the experience of my chapter of Brokenhearted parents.

To illustrate my point, I can meet someone outside the circle of my closest friends. How common is it to ask someone of my generation about whether you have children? Where do they live? Do you get to see them often? Each time I choose how I am going to answer these innocent questions.

Herein lies the ravine of distinctions. I believe it is impossible for even those who love me dearly to not have at least a fleeting thought as to what I could have done to alienate my children. What does a parent do that results in complete estrangement from both of her children? She must have done something. In answering those same questions, a Gold Star parent would probably be awarded a respect in having raised such a good person willing to sacrifice the most. I imagine there would be an expression of sorrow for this parent’s loss and grief. It happened to her. My grief? I somehow made it happen.

I couldn’t have felt more isolated in these moments. I did not lose my children to war, to disease, to murder or accident. I lost my children because they didn’t want me in their lives anymore.

What does it mean to me as the mother of my children? What I have felt is a shame that I cannot share my deepest pain about the death of my relationship with my children with almost anyone.

Dr. Kenneth Doka (2017)[1] would say I was experiencing a disenfranchised grief, a grief that is often ignored and denied public support. I felt that any version of Blue Star parents didn’t want to get too close, maybe for fear of their worst fear happening by association. No foxhole friends.

What did happen was the finality of a divorce nine years ago. And my college and post college aged children suddenly refused to answer my phone calls, texts, or emails. I was shocked. I began apologizing for the mistakes that I could imagine. Nothing I said seemed to make a difference. They silently refused to join me in family therapy. Silent they have stayed.

Dr. Joshua Coleman (2018)[2] has researched adult child estrangement. "I think it's important that we're not too overly reductionistic in terms of the causes of estrangement. I do think that there are plenty of abusive, neglectful parents, and that estrangement is certainly understandable from that perspective. But I do not believe that constitutes the majority of people who end up estranging — even though I wouldn't contest the reasons.” "We live in a culture dominated by a psychological narrative where people are led to believe the way that their lives turned out is controlled by their childhood," says @drjcoleman.

Alone in my head, my mind whirled around with my thoughts and fears. I remember how my heart would sink when I woke up in the morning with thoughts of my children. I felt a battle raging and I knew who was going to be dying in that one. My eyes would open as I gave up and felt buried alive for yet another day.

“What did I do that was so unforgivable?”
“Why wouldn’t they want to forgive me?”

I could react and answer those questions by saying that my children are manifesting their own mental health challenges. That my children are corrupted by their paternal family inheritance. That they are asserting their own revisionist history. That women/mothers are held to a much higher standard and designating all responsibility for any trauma to me, their Mother, I am unforgivable.  
 
My world had changed without my participation. All kinds of things were happening that I didn’t want to happen.  What I came to realize was that I could participate in living a different life and it had to be one without children in it. I realized that I didn’t want to die inside. I wanted peace of mind.

Eventually, I shared my anguish, with my new husband, good friends, and family members. I began to believe what they were saying to me. Hearing their words of kindness, memories of witnessing my good mothering, belief in who they have known me to be over so many years, I began to quiet my weeping to listen to their voices. “When we bury the story, we forever stay the subject of the story,” Dr. Brene Brown [3] writes. “If we own the story, we get to narrate the ending.” 

In my story, I had to learn that my children’s alienation from me could never be commensurate with any mistake I ever made with them. I had to learn about the retrospective guilt that every parent can feel when evaluating our history of parenting our children. I had to learn that who I am is not defined by my children’s alienation.

It has been nine years. I don’t know where my children live. I no longer try to call or send a text or write an email to which I never get a reply. The absolute silence that has existed, after my divorce from a marriage of 25 years, has been deafening.

I have compassion for my children. I believe we are living in an era of nonchalance and it is their era, informed by the commonality of ghosting and social media abuse. Today, there are more adult estrangement articles that support the child’s right to sever their relationship with their parent even when the parent exerts effort at reconciliation.

Is there a formula, a guarantee that our children will appreciate our loving efforts and readily given sacrifices to raise them the best we know how? The evidence leans towards the fact that there is no formula. Abusive mothers can have relationships with their adult children and caring fathers can be estranged from their adult children.

A child can choose to negate their parent, to strip them of any history of nurturing and good care, to no longer acknowledge the bond between parent and child. What atrocities could rise to a level of nullifying my identity as my children’s mother I do not know.
 
My moment of clarity came at my Mother’s funeral last year. I looked up while giving the eulogy and saw the smirk on my son’s face and my daughter rolling her eyes. In just ‘that’ moment, I knew something very important: “This really is not about me.”  I took a deep breath. I can choose. I can choose not to have a relationship with children I do not know anymore.

Do I have regrets? I do. Do I believe I was the best parent I could be at the time with what I knew? Yes, I do.
Today, I think differently. Today, I wonder if my children are emotionally OK. Today, I wonder if my hope for them to live a fulfilled and enlightened life will come true.

Parents like me are out there, feeling forsaken and feeling diminished. Let us support each other as Mending Hearts parents. Let us feel the support of Blue Heart parents. Let us not be so alone.

I collect rocks at a local beach. Some look like Valentines, some like a child’s drawing of a heart. How many waves of the sea, bangs from other rocks, travel across the ocean floor, tiny grains of sand were part of their journey?
My children are a memory to me. My hearts of stone, solid with memories of my children, live in a basket on my kitchen counter. Memories that are mine, in a tender and unshakable heart.

References:

[1] Kenneth Doka, "Disenfranchised Grief,"
https://www.griefrecoverymethod.com/blog/2017/07/disenfranchised-grief, (July 11, 2017).

[2] Joshua Coleman, interview with Robin Young, Here and Now, ‘Generational Divide’ Can Complicate How We Think About Estrangement, Psychologist Says, Audio podcast, December 18, 2018,
https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2018/12/18/family-estrangement-generational-divide.

[3] Brene Brown, “shame v. guilt,” https://brenebrown.com/articles/2013/01/14/shame-v-guilt/, (January 14, 2013)

[4] Kristina Sharp, interview with Joshua Johnson, NPR, Why Families Break Up, Audio podcast, January 9, 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/01/09/683648550/why-families-break-up
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