Parental Poison:
A Glimpse into the Nightmare of Parental Alienation: Part 1
by Neil Garvey • Huntington

Kelly asked her daughter Susie if she remembered the times when Susie’s father Bill had beaten her, broken her toys or wrecked the house in an angry rage. But, Susie couldn’t remember.

This was hardly a surprise, because those events never happened. But no matter: Kelly wouldn’t let that small detail stand in her way. Every day, she would make sure to recite the events-that-never–were. And, as Kelly spoke of these horrors on a daily basis, they began to seem frighteningly real to Susie.

Couples battling through the divorce process will often exchange verbal salvos. Tragically, it is the children who get caught in the crossfire. Embittered parents bent on spreading divorce poison will enlist their children in a campaign of hatred, denigration and fear of the targeted parent. Many times, this undermining of one parent by the other occurs early on, well before the separation and divorce process even begins.

To support this unreality, Kelly began to cut back on, and even eliminate visitations. Numerous excuses, including illness, were used to keep Susie’s dad away. Phone calls, cards, letters and emails to Susie were consistently blocked by Kelly. What Bill did not realize, was that while Kelly was canceling scheduled visits, Susie was being told that her father didn’t show up or call, because he just did not care.

Ironically, Susie had always had a close, loving and affectionate relationship with her father. But the more her mother talked about the abuse, the more real it seemed. Soon, from lack of contact, Susie began to truly believe the ugly and frightening portrait of Bill, painted by Kelly. Eventually, Susie came to own her mother’s fabrications and refused to see her father, expressing only fear and anger towards him and all of his family.

According to Dr. Stanley Clawar & Dr. Brynne Rivlin, It is fairly easy to confuse children into doubting their own perception of reality, due to the high regard and awesome power most parents hold in their children s eyes.

A systematic campaign of programming, bad-mouthing and bashing– left unchecked– will most certainly result in a parent-child relationship that is at best tainted, and at worst, totally severed. This phenomenon is known as Parental Alienation.

Parental Alienation, first defined in 1985 by Richard Gardner, M.D., results from the attempt by one parent (usually the custodial parent and mostly, but not always, the mother) to behave in such a way as to alienate the child or children from the other parent. Dr. Gardner outlined the eight manifestations indicative of Parental Alienation which is present if the child:

• Wages a campaign of hatred, involving the use of inappropriate language and severely disrespectful, hostile and completely unwarranted behavior.

• Offers only weak, absurd and/or frivolous reasons for his or her anger and denigration of the alienated parent.

• Has polarized views of parents. Instead of the ambivalence that characterizes normal human relationships, the child describes the alienated parent only in negative terms. By contrast, the other parent is regarded as perfect.

• Exhorts that he or she alone came up with the ideas of denigration. The "independent-thinker" phenomenon is where the child insists that s/he arrived at the negative attitudes solely on their own.

• Supports and feels a need to protect the alienating parent, largely out of fear of the alienating parent.

• Uses borrowed scenarios and parrots expressions and phrases of the favored parent.

• Does not demonstrate any guilt or remorse over the cruelty towards the alienated parent.

• Practices hatred by association; rejecting all family and friends connected to the alienated parent


Various Courts of Appeal have recognized the harm resulting from parental alienation. The Pike County (Ohio) Court of Appeals has commented:

It is the duty of each parent to foster and encourage the child’s love and respect for the other parent and the failure from that duty is as harmful to the child as is the failure to provide food, clothing or shelter. Perhaps it is more harmful because no matter how well fed or well clothed, a child cannot be happy if he or she feels unloved by one parent.

In his book, Divorce Poison, Dr. Richard Warshak explains, Every brainwashed child once expressed love and affection for the target of brainwashing, once felt safe with, looked forward to seeing, even craved attention from the target. Every such child had a history of gratifying memories that bound the child to the target. All that is gone, disconnected from the child’s thoughts, feelings and behavior. In its place is a child who spouts only fear and hatred for the formerly loved adult.

Experts regard the attempt to poison a child’s relationship with a loved one as a form of emotional abuse. As with other forms of abuse, our first priority must be to protect children from further damage. This is not a time for silence.

Working with people who intentionally poison their children’s affections is one of the most difficult challenges for a therapist. It requires the willingness to temporarily suspend judgment, while searching for the keys to understanding how parents could visit such abuse on their own offspring.

Unfortunately, some therapists do their clients more harm than good. They reach their conclusions after meeting with only one parent and the alienated child. They never meet or even speak with the rejected parent. Incredibly, some will recklessly offer opinions (including diagnoses) to the court about the parent whom the therapist has never met.

This is a dangerous practice, indeed. Adds Dr. Warshak, One of the emerging and disturbing conclusions from recent divorce research, documented by experts such as Dr. Robert Emery, Dr. Joan Kelly and Dr. Judith Wallerstein, is that children who receive clean bills of health when examined by gross measures, such as behavior checklists and report cards, may be suffering great emotional distress that goes undetected.

The alienating parent uses this argument: If the child functions relatively well socially and scholastically and gets along with one parent, why rock the boat? Why require the child to relate to the other parent? Too many therapists endorse this misguided thinking. They devalue the parent-child relationship while ranking school and friends above family. They take an astonishingly casual attitude toward the child’s loss of a parent and a parent’s loss of a child.

In a study sponsored by the American Bar Association, Dr.Stanley Clavar and Dr. Brynne Rivlin reached the conclusion that it is damaging socially, psychologically, educationally, and/or physically for children to maintain beliefs, values, thoughts and behaviors that disconnect them from one of their parents. A 1993 article by Glenn F. Cartwright, in the American Journal of Family Therapy, further explains, The degree of alienation in the child is directly proportional to the time spent alienating. This is one of the reasons why, in serious cases, the complete removal of the child from the alienating parent, with supervised visitation, reinstated gradually, is recommended.

We often speak of preserving family values, but even disintegrated nuclear families have values and rights (like child visitation,) which must be preserved and respected to prevent further disintegration and total collapse. To do less, is to sacrifice entire generations of children on the altar of alienation, condemning them to familial maladjustment and inflicting on them lifelong parental loss.

Susie’s dad, Bill, has spent the last five years wrangling with the legal system. It has cost him over thirty thousand dollars in fees for personal attorneys, law guardians, family therapists and a variety of "experts" while making countless court appearances. Yet, in the last five years, Bill has not seen or even spoken to his daughter.

Broken-hearted and bankrupt emotionally and financially, most fathers give up. Beset by despair and hopelessness, they limp away, praying that one day, their children will finally discover the truth and return. Sadly, though, the lost years of childhood can never be replaced for parent or child and, for the alienated parent, it is a process of chronic grieving which seems to have no end. But there are ways to cope.

Editor’s Note: Part Two will appear in the April/May issue of Creations. Neil Garvey is the Co-Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Creations Magazine.