angiEmedia

(Click here for more coverage on parental alienation.)

The Fourth Annual Parental Alienation and Hostile Aggressive Parenting Awareness Day is coming up on April 25, 2009. Visit the Parental Alienation Awareness Day web site for more information.

Spreading Awareness of Parental Alienation

We think it’s really important to the well-being of our children and future generations to spread awareness of parental alienation and its destructive effects. Below is a brief explanation of what parental alienation involves, the harm it can cause, and steps that may be taken to help recover from it. We’ve also included links to books that may help you understand and deal with the problems it causes.
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Toni Valentin, mother of a 5-year-old daughter, was unhappy with the child custody arrangement she had with her ex-husband. On February 17, 2009, she and her boyfriend Dante Quezada allegedly took the daughter to her father’s brother’s home in the 300 block of West 47th Street in Los Angeles, where she believed the father was located at the time, in a minivan allegedly driven by their friend Felipe Carias. Quezada then allegedly proceeded to shoot out the windows of the home with a semi-automatic pistol, in the process shooting the daughter’s 7-year-old cousin in the chest and arm as she was doing her homework. Apparently they were hoping to kill the 5-year-old’s father while she watched. Fortunately, her cousin is expected to fully recover.
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If so, you’re in quite a bit of company. 86% of parents swear in front of children according to a recent poll of 3,000 kids aged 11 years. And they do it on average 6 times per week.

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Biological parents are not likely to sexually abuse their own children. But in recent decades, there has been an epidemic of false sexual abuse claims against biological parents. This epidemic started in earnest along with changes in laws and policies to allow fathers to have partial or full custody of children after a divorce.

The false claims of sexual abuse may be made by either parent. However, they are more common coming from mothers trying any method they can to prevent the children’s fathers from having contact, custody, and/or visitation with the children. This is a despicable strategy related to parental alienation. It is also particularly effective because of societal taboos and the difficulty of proving innocence of a crime which according to the false accuser was seen by nobody but the alleged perpetrator and a small child (who may not even be able to talk!) and of which there is frequently no physical evidence because the false reports are made about false incidents which supposedly occurred weeks or months earlier.

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A friend once said “marriage is grand, divorce is one hundred grand”. In a high-conflict divorce, he might have been underestimating. High-conflict divorces generally involve extended litigation, potentially crossing over from the family law arena into civil and criminal cases involving parties besides the unhappy couple. Expenses mount quickly, $100,000+ in legal fees can be expended even by warring couples with relatively modest income and assets. Financial ruin and even bankruptcy is not unusual.

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Minnesota is considering passing legislation to make shared physical custody of children between both parents a presumption of the court. Under the current law, the courts presume that parents will share legal custody. But physical custody is up for grabs. Detractors of the current law believe that it sets up families for bitter custody disputes and frequently results in fathers and children being short-changed of time with each other.

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Earlier this month a court in Toronto, Cananda, transfered full custody of three daughters ages 9 to 14 to their father after a long-term parental alienation campaign by their mother. She had worked for years to brainwash them to hate their father. Judge McWatt of the Superior Court of Justice found that this constituted emotional child abuse and banned the mother from all further contact with the children except for counselling programs, including a program to help the children recover from parental alienation syndrome.

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(Click here for more coverage of Borderline Personality Disorder.)

I’d like to encourage people who are aware of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) to start spreading the news about how devastating this illness is not just for those who have it and their family members, but for the entire United States economy.

I wrote this post to explain to people who may not have the ability to understand how horrific BPD is from personal experience dealing with an afflicted person. Such people can still likely understand the economic impact of this illness and how it would be far more cost-effective for US mental health care policies to be overhauled to raise awareness and get most of the victims into treatment. The increased government spending appears that it would be entirely offset by savings in government expenses (in such areas of courts and law enforcement) and increases in tax revenues due to a significant improvement in worsened productivity harming families affected by BPD.

Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is a devastating but very common mental illness that until recently has been believed based upon DSM-IV (Diagnostics and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition — a widely used reference book in the mental health field) to affect about 2% of the US population or about 6 million people in the US. Common belief is that it afflicts women about 3 times more often than men.

Recent research published in April 2008 suggests that 6% of the population may be affected and the difference between rates for males and females may be little. If this research is accurate, the United States with its population of about 300 million people has 18 million victims of BPD.

The result of BPD is a catastrophic cycle of child abuse and mental illness that runs for generations. The economic impact of this illness is worse than a 9/11/2001 terror attack each and every year. US mental health care policies are badly in need of an overhaul to deal with BPD and similar personality disorders and the drastic economic impact they have on any tens of millions of US citizens.

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Parental alienation is the systematic denigration committed by an alienating parent against a target parent in order to influence their children to dislike and mistreat the target parent. It typically also involves blocking of access to the target parent, often in violation of court orders regarding custody, exchanges, and visitation.

J. Michael Bone, Ph.D. is an eminent authority on parental alienation. [See Wikipedia: Parental Alienation] Dr. Bone’s website offers pre-recorded teleseminars on how targeted parents can overcome Parental Alienation. Available titles include:

Dr. Bone has also written a number of journal articles on parental alienation. One of these is available for electronic purchase and download here: Parental alienation syndrome: how to detect it and what to do about it.: An article from: Florida Bar Journal.

Books

One of the classic behaviors of a person suffering from Borderline Personality Disorder is the vilification campaign. The target is the person against whom the perpetrator Borderline conducts the vilification.  The intent is to destroy the target’s reputation and thereby destroy the target’s relationships with family and friends, employers, co-workers, doctors, teachers, therapists, and others. The intent may even be to force the target to leave the community, put the target in prison, or even kill the target.  As with so many things involving Borderlines and their typical inability to understand or respect boundaries, there really are no limits. They will use basically any means available to them to cause damage to their target, including denigration, endless disparaging remarks, fabrication, false accusations, and even teaching others (including their children!) to lie on their behalf as part of their vilification campaign.

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