Parental alienation occurs in divorce when a child develops an unreasonably strong dislike of one parent that makes an ongoing relationship or visitation with the rejected parent difficult if not impossible. Here’s how parental alienation impacts your children for years to come.
By Judge Michele Lowrance
As a domestic relations judge since 1995, I have watched the wreckage of the corrosive legacy of parental alienation and visitation interference play out over decades. We have no statistics for measuring this group because the victims are too vast. But the concentric circles include the children, the grandchildren, and the extended family as well. The declaration of war by one parent on another creates radioactive fallout, which contaminates for generations.
The alienating parent treats the target parent like a disease in the child that must be removed. They make the child’s survival contingent upon such removal. So the child must extricate the target parent without the privilege of grieving the loss. These are crippling circumstances.
I have witnessed impassioned declarations of love for a child by an alienating parent to masquerade the venom he/she feels for the other parent. Parents who do this are not interested in parental alienation as a tool for mere control. Their stakes are higher: total annihilation of the target parent’s bond with the child. Little by little, alienation in a divorce case starts to take root. And when it fully takes root, I see the child’s boundaries collapse before my eyes. Soon the child forgets how to protect him or herself, and must align with the alienating parent as if life depends on it – because it does.
Perhaps curing this degenerating influence may, in the future, be addressed by therapy. But for now, we can and must do better.
Michele F. Lowrance has been a domestic-relations judge in the Circuit Court of Illinois since 1995. A child of divorce who was raised by her grandparents, Judge Lowrance has been divorced and has devoted her professional life to helping those similarly situated.
