Throwaway Parents
Written by: Rob
Print This Article
Use of Our Content (Reposting and Quoting)
(Click here for more coverage on parental alienation.)
The article to which this post links was written by Shari Schrieber, a child of parental alienation who is now a therapist. She loved her father very much, and felt intense pain as her mother cut him out of her life starting at age five. Her mother falsely accused her father of molestation and succeeded at mostly driving her father out of her life.
In retrospect, she wishes the courts had assigned custody of her to her father rather than to her mentally ill mother. She believes that her mother’s inability to emotionally provide for her as a child caused many problems in her life that took years for her to overcome. These problems could have been avoided if the courts would have had her live with her mentally healthier father. He wanted to be involved in her life, but the courts and her mother refused to permit it. Instead, they insisted she should live with her mother even though her mother was mentally ill and caused enormous damage because of it.
In the article, Schreiber mentions how personality disordered parents are often unable to emotionally provide for their children. Such parents may be able to meet basic physical needs of the children such as shelter and food. But their children develop low self-esteem, inability to trust, inability to have healthy relationships, and a variety of mental health problems themselves as a direct result of their primary parental relationship being with an emotionally chaotic or unavailable mentally ill person.
Click below to read the article:
THROWAWAY DADS; Children’s struggle for wholeness in the wake of divorce.
This article doesn’t seem very authentic or credible to me. I think she is telling people what they want to hear to sell a service.
The author describes and attributes very advance thoughts to how she felt about her father at the age of five when he left. Does this sound like a five year old “Being without him trapped me in unimaginable pain and emptiness, as there was no one capable of comforting me, or filling this void in his absence. Dazed, I wandered around for months with what seemed like a huge hole in my middle–like a cannon ball had been shot through me. At the age of five, my capacity to articulate this pain was naturally limited–but in retrospect, I’d managed to envision an extremely accurate picture of my loss.”
There is good documentation on the web that this author is not a therapist, but rather a hair stylist (google her name and “barber”) who got her masters later in life but never passed her MFT boards (google her name and license cancelled). She has made claims of treating sophisticated mental illness’ including borderline personality for 20-25 year which, chronologically, means she is either not being truthful or that she treated mental health patients when she was a hairstylist.
It’s hard to take her writing seriously.