Parenting under the best of circumstances, is challenging. It creates the greatest joys of life as well as its deepest agonies. It is, to say the least, challenging. When you add Parental Alienation into the mix, the word “challenging” becomes pale and weak.
Parenting, when Parental Alienation is present, requires super-human strengths and the patience of Job.
Parenting under the best of circumstances, is challenging. It creates the greatest joys of life as well as its deepest agonies. It is, to say the least, challenging. When you add Parental Alienation into the mix, the word “challenging” becomes pale and weak. Increasingly, even as we become better and being clearer and more precise as to what will help remedy a Parental Alienation court case, it appears to be the case that Judges often hesitate to follow such recommendations.
I am typically contacted by parents who find themselves in the throes of parental alienation. Occasionally, I am contacted by a Family Lawyer, but primarily it is parents who reach out to me.
After I have some sort of consultation with a new parent and we both decide that my help is indicated, that parent will contact their lawyer, if they have one. It is at this point that my involvement can become derailed. Some may wonder: Why is it helpful to have a consultant in addition to my attorney in a case involving parental alienation? There are several reasons. A few are listed below.
First, cases involving parental alienation virtually always find the targeted parent being falsely vilified in some manner. Experience has taught that if this is not properly dealt with, these false allegations never tend to “go away.” You don’t know what you don’t know. Let me repeat that. You don’t know what you don’t know.
At first glance, this would appear to be a truism, or an obvious statement. However, while it is obviously true, it far from obvious. In fact, as we move through the minutes and hours of our days, we encounter countless ambiguous or unclear situations and circumstances. In an effort to understand the many ambiguous piles around us, we sort them and stack them into orderly piles by making specific assumptions about their meanings, so as to make them sensible to us. This is an automatic cognitive reflex for us humans and we do it thousands of times daily. In the process of doing this, the assumptions that we use become the building blocks of the edifices that we construct that then forms our reality. This is the eighth in a series of eight posts devoted to discussion of the eight symptoms originally described by Richard Gardner, MD in 1985. As a quick sidebar, I would like to also point out that while Gardner’s model has drawn some fire regarding the use of the word “syndrome”, much of such objection is smoke and mirrors, in my opinion.
This is the seventh in a series of eight posts on the eight symptoms of the Parental Alienation, as first described by Richard Gardner, MD. This seventh symptom is "The Presence of Borrowed Scenarios" which refers to the false and distorted stories and things “absorbed” by alienated children about the targeted parent. This is the sixth in a series of posts about the eight symptoms of Parental Alienation Syndrome, first described by the late Richard Gardner, MD. The sixth symptom and the subject of this post is Absence of Guilt over Cruelty to and/or Exploitation of the Alienated Parent.
As we have written elsewhere, Parental Alienation (PA) cases are different in that the surface appearance is very different than the underlying reality.
This “things are not as they seem” reality is however not always easy to reveal persuasively to the trier of fact. Many of the tools, strategies and tactics used in non-PA type cases are unhelpful or even may be counterproductive. These cases must be approached with this in mind. Cases where Parental Alienation (PA) is present are very different than cases where it is not. Very often however, these cases do not appear that way at first glance.
When parents’ divorce, there is often animosity between the parties, and in many, if not most cases, this acrimony will subside with time. In cases with PA however, the acrimony will typically increase, and the sooner this can be identified the better. The problem is that they often look very similar at the outset. |
J. Michael Bone, PhD.Dr. Bone is an experienced consultant for cases involving Parental Alienation and has spent over 25 years working with high conflict divorce as a therapist, expert witness, mediator, evaluator and consultant, both nationally and internationally. Archives
June 2019
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