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Dr. Richard Warshak is a widely known psychologist who has focused his career on the impact of divorce on children. As the author of the 5-star reviewed book Divorce Poison New and Updated Edition: How to Protect Your Family from Bad-mouthing and Brainwashing, he’s built a wide following among parents, grandparents, and relatives of children suffering from parental alienation child abuse.

While Divorce Poison does a great job explaining parental alienation and some of the possible countermeasures to it. But it is written for adults. While adult children suffering from the fallout of parental alienation might benefit from it, it’s not intended for reading by younger children.

There is a dire need for educational material for children to help them fight the destructive brainwashing coming from an emotionally abusive parent out to make them hate the other parent. Aside from Dr. Amy Baker’s book for middle school kids and teens that I discussed last year in my article Kids’ Parental Alienation Book: “I Don’t Want to Choose!”, there has been little material for kids available.

Helping Kids and Adults Understand Parental Alienation

Into this void arrives the Welcome Back Pluto video. Dr. Warshak teamed up with Trace Productions to create a video for everybody in the family about parental alienation, including kids. Possibly the only people who won’t benefit from it are some of the alienating parents and their allies who cannot accept that children need both their parents. Even kids who are not experiencing alienation themselves may benefit because they may become better able to help their friends and classmates cope with the abuse coming from an alienating parent.
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(Originally published January 15, 2009. Updated August 27, 2010.)

So you’re getting a divorce, or have already gotten one. Have any kids in the picture? You can bet they are confused about what you and your ex-spouse (or soon-to-be-ex-spouse) have done by breaking up the family. Kids need to understand what is going on from such a big family change as a divorce, and it’s not a simple thing for them. Why? Well, for starters:

• Children often blame themselves for the divorce.

• They need to know that divorce is an adult problem, not one caused by children.

• Child self-blame for divorce creates psychological problems, some of which can be long-term and severe.

• Children need to know that it’s OK to love both parents.

• They are often put in the middle and made to “pick sides” by one or both parents and don’t like this at all.

• They need to know that parents who try to make them “pick sides” and bad-mouth the other parent are doing the wrong thing so they won’t participate and may possibly help their misguided parent(s) control themselves.

Even in an amicable divorce involving children, there are going to be questions and worries. All of the books discussed in this posting can help with those, especially for the intended audience which is generally late toddler-hood to early grade school, about ages 2 to 9.

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In my previous article Extreme BPD / NPD Behaviors Are Internally Triggered, I discussed the puzzling ways in which normal circumstances seem to trigger abusive behaviors from Borderlines, Narcissists, and other personality disordered abusers. My advice to those who can do so is to get away and stay away from these people as they are a serious danger to your own mental health, even your freedom and your life, if you continue to have anything to do with them.

Unfortunately, not everybody can easily extricate themselves from the abuse without severe consequences. This is particularly true for parents of children whose other parent is a Borderline or Narcissist. Staying in the children’s lives means staying in the line of fire of the abuser. Leaving is likely to subject the children to even more abuse. Often the abuser has focused most of her or his rage against their former partner or spouse. But if that parent leaves, the rages, abuses, and emotional manipulations are not going to stop. They will probably be redirected at somebody else close to the abuser as loved-ones are the tops targets for these sick people. The children are a likely target for even more abuse than they have already received. This chronic abuse with no escape (as the healthy parent has disappeared) is likely to create severe psychological damage, even personality disorders, in these children as they have even less means to defend themselves against one of these sociopaths than an adult does.
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Recently a reader of our site wrote a comment about our article Talking With A Borderline citing how it didn’t show how non-Borderlines trigger the negative behaviors associated with Borderline Personality Disorder. The comment seemed to be intended to place some of the blame for Borderline behaviors on the people around them, particularly people who are essentially the targets of Borderlines who do not suffer from a personality disorder or engage in abusive behaviors themselves. This is mostly a mistake in my view. It also makes me wonder if the comment came from somebody with a Borderline son or daughter or who is personally suffering from BPD and therefore may be prone to blame-shifting as a means of coping with his or her own guilt or shame.

Most of the people around a Borderline are not abusive, yet they may trigger reactions in Borderline akin to an actual abuser even when they aren’t displaying an iota of aggression or hostility. In most of these situations, the Borderline perceives aggression or abuse in their own minds, even when a neutral disinterested person would say none is present, and then launches into a reaction that is similar to what they might do if there actually was an abuser trying to harm them. The trigger is much more internal, in the mind of the Borderline, than external. This is what makes is so difficult for others to understand why the sociopathically inclined individuals, be they Borderlines, Narcissists, or something else, behave as they do.

Extreme Reactions Product of Child Abuse

Borderlines are sometimes said to suffer from “emotional dysregulation” because they react in extreme ways to normal stimuli. This extreme reaction in many cases developed from their experience as child abuse victims, an experience most of them share, and trying to find ways to avoid being abused again. Many of them have found that extreme reactions including false blaming, projection, lying, and other behaviors associated with Borderlines and Narcissists alike are reasonably effective at either drawing fire away from them and making somebody else the target of their abuser. Other times, their extreme behaviors may somehow justify in their own minds why they are deserving of abuse, perhaps giving them some delusional feeling of control over the abuse. Over time, many of them may generalize these maladaptive behaviors by applying them to people who are not abusing them but by whom they are reminded of what it feels like to be abused.
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Dr. Tara Palmatier’s Shrink4Men website has recently been bombarded with abusive comments from somebody who sounds like she has BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder) with malicious acting out behaviors, or as I’d call her, a personality disordered abuser (PDA). The good psychologist is hoping to help identify the attacker and perhaps help her victimized ex in the process.

(from Lost and Found: Does Anyone Have an Ex-Borderline Girlfriend or Wife in the West Hempstead-East Northport-NYC Vicinity Whom You Told about Shrink4Men During the Break-Up?)

Perhaps this is not the best way to go about doing this, but I’m a big believer in implementing consequences for crazy and malicious BPD behavior, so here we are. Beginning late last week, a woman, whom I assume is the former spouse or girlfriend of a man who frequents this site, began spamming my site with puerile comments in which she engages in name calling and other typical BPD verbal attacks against Shrink4Men readers/commenters and me.

None of these comments have been approved nor will they be approved because they’re nothing more than lame attempts to hurt my readers feelings and my feelings and they would only distract from the meaningful dialogue, sharing and support that takes place here. The irony is that her attacks don’t hurt my feelings. In fact, my thoughts are, “Gee, I can see why her ex broke up with her” and “I wonder how many texts and voicemails the poor bastard who was dating/married to her is getting everyday?” If anything, her spams only reinforce my beliefs about BPD and the information presented on this site.

Now, the reason I am posting this rather than something more productive: Gentlemen, if you believe this is your ex/gf/wife, please contact me and I will send you all of her spam comments with the date, time stamp and multiple IP addresses, so that you can include them as evidence of her unstable/stalker/harassment behavior in any pending divorce/restraining order cases. If need be, I have access to an Internet security expert who can trace pretty much anything directly to the source.

Information warfare by a nasty PDA, often one who suffers BPD or NPD (Narcissistic Personality Disorder), is a frequent feature of the ending of a relationship involving such a person. But the comment spamming mentioned above is really among the less serious of attacks.

Distortion campaigns can become ruinous and virtually unfixable, especially if there are children involved. Some might call it a catch-22 situation in which anything you do to try to fix the disaster only makes it worse. When the Internet becomes involved, the risks of this may be even higher as I’ll discuss below.
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Some emotional abusers are particularly adept at using a technique called “gaslighting” (from a movie starring Ingrid Berman and Charles Boyer) to drive their victims to question their own grip on reality and even to make them feel like they are going insane. The essence of gaslighting is to make somebody believe a falsehood and to wonder why they didn’t remember or recall it previously. It is a mind game often used to distract from their own problematic behaviors and to create self-doubt in their target of abuse. Many Borderlines and some with related personality disorders from the DSM-IV Axis II Cluster B group (including Borderline, Narcissistic, Antisocial, and Histrionic) personality disorders are particularly skilled and prone to using gaslighting on their partners and people close to them.

In The Gaslight Effect: How to Spot and Survive the Hidden Manipulation Others Use to Control Your Life, Dr. Robin Stern sums up the behavior like this:

Gaslighting is when someone wants you to do what you know you shouldn’t and to believe the unbelieveable. It can happen to you and it probably already has.

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Some of the most emotionally abusive relationships and traumatic divorces involve the mentally ill. One of the most difficult of these mental illnesses is Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) because it is not easily diagnosed. Behaviors can range from extreme violence to subtle patterns of emotional blackmail and projection. On top of that, many Borderlines tend to live in denial, constantly avoiding their own feelings of emptiness, insecurity, anger, disappointment and fear that more often than not stems from an abusive childhood. It is hard to treat and help someone if they don’t want to face their own abuse — abuse that they themselves suffered or the abuse that they themselves do.
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Separation anxiety is a behavior normally found in infants and small children when a loved one is moving out of contact with them. They become worried and uncomfortable, anticipating the absence of the loved one. Often this loved one is a parent, other times it is a relative or a familiar care provider. This is a normal part of the development of children and tends to go away by the time they are around three or four years old. But not all behaviors that appear to be separation anxiety are in fact so. Alarmingly, sometimes such behaviors are the result of premeditated child abuse by the parent handing over a child to another person, particularly to the child’s other parent.

Personality Disordered Abusers Hurts Kids To Hurt Ex and Win Custody

When you’re a divorcing or divorced parent of a child you had a with a sociopath, psychopath, or other personality disordered abuser (PDA), there’s a chance you will come face-to-face with the reality that your ex is willing to abuse your child to make it look like he or she doesn’t like being returned to you. The ex wants to worsen the separation anxiety, or at least the apparent “symptoms” of it, often in front of witnesses whom will be asked to write declarations or testify in court or to talk with psychological evaluators, therapists, CPS, and court-appointed mediators. The PDA expects these reports that the child doesn’t like to be returned to you will help ensure your custody is reduced and the PDA’s custody is increased.
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We’ve all heard horror stories about parents who are falsely accused of crimes by a vicious ex who is bent on banning the children from seeing them. False domestic violence and false sexual abuse allegations are a sure-fire way to manipulate family law judges to participate in parental alienation child abuse. But they are not the only way malicious parents interfere with the contact between kids and the unfortunate parent who is targeted for malicious mischief.

In this article, I’ll outline a few of the less obvious but still damaging ways that malicious parents, particularly those engaging in parental alienation, use to cause trouble for the other parent. All of these tactics are simple, easily spun by a masterful manipulator to look like they are somebody else’s fault, and yet wrongly interfere with contact between kids and their other parent. They generally rely upon wasting the parent’s limited time with the kids and creating aggravation to upset both the parent and kids. They are more commonly used by “custodial” parents to abuse “noncustodial” parents, but in theory the small percentage of noncustodial parents engaging in parental alienation could use similar tactics.
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California Assembly Representative Jim Beall is back with another attempt to shut down destructive use of child custody evaluations. This new Assembly Bill 2475 has grown out of his failure in 2009 to pass his Assembly Bill 612 that wrongly aimed to ban discussion of parental alienation in family law courts. This time around, AB 2475 is on more solid ground as it aims to strip quasi-judicial immunity from private family court appointed experts such as psychological and custody evaluators. This would provide a legal fallback for civil suits for egregious cases of misconduct by these professionals.

Failed AB 612 from 2009

Last year, Jim Beall wanted to outlaw the discussion of parental alienation in family law cases. We and many other organizations that support shared parenting and protecting children from abuse and neglect vehemently opposed the AB 612 legislation he introduced. AB 612 was nothing but whitewashing of emotional child abuse to enable abusers to get away with hurting children and in many cases rewarding them for doing so. That bill, AB 612, was gutted by legislators who understood that parental alienation is a real phenomenon. Beall later withdrew the bill.
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