5 Reasons Parental Alienation Happens and How Healing Is Still Possible - Episode 130

Lawrence Joss delves into the complex issue of parental alienation and estrangement, emphasizing that these challenges are not merely family issues but systemic problems that require a broader understanding and intervention. He introduces five key reasons that contribute to these dynamics, drawing insights from therapist Kathy Himlin, who has extensive experience working with families affected by these issues. The conversation highlights the emotional turmoil children face when feeling rejected by a parent, the detrimental effects of prolonged separation, and the role of the legal system in exacerbating these problems. Joss and Himlin discuss actionable steps for parents to repair relationships and the importance of attachment-focused parenting in fostering reconnection.

Key Takeaways

• Parental alienation is a systemic issue, not just a family problem.
• Children often feel rejected when they reject a parent, indicating an attachment rupture.
• Time without contact deepens trauma and reinforces feelings of rejection.
• The legal system can worsen family dynamics by prioritizing litigation over healing.
• Attachment-focused parenting can help reopen doors to connection.

Chapters

00:00 – Parental Alienation Is More Than a Family Problem
 01:06 – Who This Episode Is For & Why Awareness Matters
 01:55 – Children Reject When They Feel Rejected
 03:33 – Understanding Attachment Ruptures in Development
 05:04 – Why Time Without Contact Deepens Trauma
 07:01 – Foster Care vs. Family Court: A Critical Gap
 08:45 – How the Legal System Can Worsen Alienation
 09:29 – When Litigation Replaces Healing
 10:20 – Attachment-Focused Parenting That Reopens Doors
 13:39 – Healing Is Still Possible, Even After Years

If you wish to connect with Lawrence Joss or any of the PA-A community members who have appeared as guests on the podcast:

Email - familydisappeared@gmail.com
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/lawrencejoss
(All links mentioned in the podcast are available in Linktree)

Connect with Dr. Rebecca Bailey:
https://polyvagalequineinstitute.com

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This podcast is made possible by the Family Disappeared Team:
Anna Johnson- Editor/Contributor/Activist/Co-host
Glaze Gonzales- Podcast Manager

Connect with Lawrence Joss:
Website: https://parentalalienationanonymous.com/
Email- familydisappeared@gmail.com

This podcast is made possible by the Family Disappeared Team:
Anna Johnson- Editor/Contributor/Activist/Co-host
Glaze Gonzales- Podcast Manager

Connect with Lawrence Joss:
Website: https://parentalalienationanonymous.com/
Email-         familydisappeared@gmail.com

Transcript

Setting The Stakes

SPEAKER_01 0:00

If you're a parent watching your child pull away, or you're someone who grew up torn between parents, this episode is for you. Because parental alienation, estrangement, erasure, whatever you want to call it, isn't just a family problem. It is a systemic problem. And as we start to look at the system, we start to see places in this system where we can intervene and change the direction of our relationships or at least start to repair some of the damage that has been done. Today we're going to break it down into five reasons why, from what's happening in your child's brain to how the legal system can unintentionally make things worse, to what actually helps repair relationships. This is your mini masterclass for understanding and navigating parental alienation. Today I'm going to share some insights from my conversation with Kathy Himlin, a therapist and consultant who's worked with countless families. We'll unpack real stories, actionable takeaways, and concrete steps you can take to help your child and protect the relationship.

Five Reasons Framework

SPEAKER_01 1:06

Again, my name is Lawrence Joss, and welcome to the Family Disappeared podcast. We have some great resources in the show notes. Like, share, we're a 501c3 nonprofit. Please click the button down below and donate. You're not donating for yourself, you're donating for the people that do not know about the resources and for the next person walking through the door so we can continue to help everyone for free. Email me at family disappeared at gmail.com with suggestions, questions, observations, even dislikes. That is all welcome. Okay, reason number one the child feels rejected. Often when a child is rejecting a parent, they're often feeling rejecting themselves. It's not defiance, it's

Reason 1: Attachment Rupture

SPEAKER_01 1:47

an attachment rupture. Right? An attachment is the way that the child connects to the parent. And it can be a secure attachment, it can be an insecure attachment, it can be anxious and can be avoidant. There's so many different things that are going on, and this really takes place in a child in really early, early developmental stages. And if you're a child struggling with a parent or another family member, you're disconnected from or have been disconnected from the attachment rupture, is there too. At some point, there was some kind of attachment injury where you, as a child, had to navigate your own inner ecosystem and the parent's connection to you got restrained, got contracted, got cut off. There's so many different aspects that could happen. But we'll talk about some of that stuff as we go into the conversation a little bit more. You know, and if you're a parent and you're struggling for the kids, kids aren't thinking about schedules or fairness. You know, their actual feelings and the mechanism that they're running with is you left. You're not here. I must not matter. And they don't have the words yet to express that, especially in early developmental stages. And as they become teenagers or tweens, there's so many struggles and so many things that are running through their body, it's hard for them to discern and sort out what's really happening. So it comes out in a completely different way, and it's also taken in in a completely different way. Like you might be having conversations with your younger children, teenagers, young adults, and you're like, hey, what I'm saying is not what they're hearing, and you're running that through in your brain, but it's what they're able to take in and how they're able to decipher. That's why communication is such an important access point in the family system. We're not really going to get into a lot of the communication. We'll get into a little bit during the show, but it is a really important component.

SPEAKER_00 3:34

From an attachment standpoint, when children don't want to see a parent, they're feeling rejected themselves. They're feeling like they're not loved, they're not listened to, they're not understood. So there's an attachment rupture, we call it. The relationship's broken, basically. And physically they're not seeing them. So they're stuck in this situation with the one parent without anyone correcting that necessarily. Sometimes the other parent does, you know. I've seen some cases where the other parent's very supportive, but they're stuck here without this rejective parent countering with anything positive what's going on in their brain.

SPEAKER_01 4:05

The second reason we're going to cover today is time without contact deepens trauma. Right? Like if I have some kind of continuity in a relationship, there's always an opportunity for repair to reconnect, to work through stuff that's happening, and also to have moments of time that are kind of like sublime. Hanging out with the puppy or playing with another pet, going to get ice cream, going to see a movie, meeting a friend of a child or a friend of a parent or

Kids’ Perception And Communication

SPEAKER_01 4:35

having a meal. There's all these different interruptions to the super need to connect and repair and being potent whether you're a parent, to be seen, being loved. Like there's so much desperation. And as a child, there's there's the same kind of desperation to be loved, to be seen by a parent, to be understood. And there's this lack of intersectionality in these two different experiences the kids and the parents are happening. So oftentimes there's a complete and utter miss. And as we're talking about time without contact, it isn't neutral. That's super important to understand. And I think a lot of us think about this, but it's so pivotal to the family system. Every day without safe contact can reinforce a child's perception of rejection. I know with my children having conversations with them, even though I have a little bit of contact and I talk about certain things with them, they're like, but you weren't there, you didn't show up, this and that. And I'm like thinking in my head, that is not the experience I had. I was always there, and I always gave my children choice on how they wanted to navigate the world. In retrospect, should have I had more boundaries? 100%. Should I? Should is such a terrible word. I can't believe I'm shooting myself on a podcast. But I think that's what we all go through, parents. Like, how could have I done this better? What would have I done differently? You know, and I did the best that I could, and I know everyone out there that's struggling did the best they could too with with the tools that they had. And that's the point here is how do we influence the system of parental alienation, estrangement, erasure? It doesn't matter which word you're using or what your thoughts are around the

Reason 2: Time Without Contact

SPEAKER_01 6:06

words. There's a rupture, there's an attachment rupture in all these different discourses. How do we address it? How do we fix it? You know, and uh Kathy Himlin talks about the foster care systems and how they ensure early contact. You know, within the family law system, sometimes it's months or even years go by before you actually get to connect with your child or this child or there's some kind of reunification, and it's detrimental to the relationship. And we know that the court system is broken. It was never set up to be a family court system. It was set up as a penal and incarceration system, and the family law system came out of that. And we'll definitely make sure we address that more on a on another podcast where we go deeper into what the actual system is, the family court system and the dysfunctionality around it and why that dysfunctionality exists, because it's set up to opt that way. And here I am going a little bit sideways. Let's let's hear what uh Kathy has to say about this.

SPEAKER_00 7:01

Independency with foster kids, the average foster kid should at least have supervised visitation with family law. They don't get that, and that's what needs to change in the family law system. They're letting kids go like a month, six months, a year without even facilitating supervised visitation, which is again contributing to this rejection and now traumatizing the family because the law is different. They don't have to, and they should.

SPEAKER_01 7:28

Reason number three, the system contributes to the problem. As we were talking about in my little side rant, there is the legal system itself can worsen things. Litigation dominates attention while healing takes a back seat. It's all about who's wrong, who's right, what can I get, what can I do. And yeah, there's the parents on either side of the aisle, and there's a lot of that same energy going back and forth, and then everyone gets caught up in the actual inertia of the court system, and there's nowhere to go. And yes, a lot of times there's one parent creating that inertia and pushing into that and and and sucking time away and doing some really destructive things within the family, but noticing that ourselves, that the system is broken. Litigation is taking over the opportunity to connect to our children. You know, and everyone that's a stakeholder, and when I use a stakeholder, I'm talking about the court, I'm talking about people that do mediation, lawyers, therapists, ad lightums, places you've got to go to visit your kid with someone monitoring you. They all take away energy and time, and most importantly, they take away resources, they take away capacity for you to connect with the kids, have time with the kids, connect with yourself, do repairing work. And this is an aside, too. And that's why Parental Alienation Anonymous, a free 12-step program that has saved my life, starts to help me build resources, capacity, connection. And then I'm able to show up in that same court in a different way because I have a different set of tools. You know, and there's so many great podcasts we've already got taped on on the of the law system, the legal system. If you're new, go check them out. Yeah, let's see what Kathy has to say again.

SPEAKER_00 9:16

If we would stop being so parent litigious focused in court, if we would just focus on

Foster Care vs Family Court

SPEAKER_00 9:21

what the kids need, we would have less litigation, less fighting, less money for that. Put more money into counseling and support of the children and the family to help them heal. It's not a hundred percent cure, but it would definitely reduce the stuff that I see.

SPEAKER_01 9:36

Reason number four, attachment-focused parenting can reopen doors. And what does attachment-focused parenting mean? It means when parents stop reacting to mimicry, like when our kids are mimicking us or being overtly aggressive or being overtly passively aggressive or just completely shutting down, or even if they're being hostile and a focus on attuning to the child's emotions, that's when you start to find a crack in the wall and a little space to connect. And if you're not familiar with the word attunement, the word attunement is really about presencing another human being. Right? So you might experience that sometime in a conversation, you're making eye contact, and there's like this feeling like, wow, someone's really with me. I I feel seen, heard, you know, maybe even mistake attunement for love at times. At least I did growing up because I didn't have a lot of attunement in my

Reason 3: Systemic Failures

SPEAKER_01 10:28

family. So when people attuned to me, I'm like, whoa, this must be love. And a really important thing about attunement in my recovery is I cannot attune to my child unless I can attune to myself. Right? And when I got here, and when I say got here to a 12-step program, to my life falling apart, to not understand what was happening in my family system, to not knowing anything about parental alienation, I didn't know anything about that for 10 years, I was cut off. Like I was super cognitive, and I could argue with you and have a thought and I could be reactive, but I couldn't really feel my body. I didn't really have a lot of tools. I just had the tools that I learned in my family of origin and that I had cultivated through my first 36 years of life, which was minimal. As I started to cultivate more tools, learn how to communicate, learn how to listen, learn how to sense my own body, learn how to attune to myself, then my ability to tune to other people is fantastic. It's really, really easy for me to attune to other people, and maybe overly so where I'm super sensitive to people being present. And if they're not present, I don't necessarily want to engage. Like I want other people that are doing their work. And that's kind of like an extreme case, but that's what our kids are looking for. They're looking for us to be present with ourselves, to be grounded, to have an understanding of ourselves, and that becomes a safety cue that they can come closer and we can start to connect, and maybe that crack starts to open. So this is a lot of work. And uh, I know when I got here, I wanted a silver bullet. And I learned that I was the silver bullet, and it took a lot of pain and a lot of getting hit with two by fours and God and creating pain unnecessarily in my child's lives by not being fully integrated with myself. Yeah. And here we are. We get to influence the system differently if we do this work, and you have access to it hopefully much sooner than I did, and much sooner than so many of the other people that are contributing to this podcast. And you can change the trajectory of your relationship. Like that's the hope. Like that's the goal. That's why we're all here. That's why I'm here is maybe, maybe something different can happen in someone else's life. Okay, let's get back to Kathy.

SPEAKER_00 12:43

When they have shifted how they see their situation and they've been able to communicate with their child in an attachment language and able to attune to their feelings and needs and understand what's going on, then I've seen so many cases where the kids just soften. I've watched kids go from I don't want to ever see this parent again to now they have 50-50, or at least they have like a couple of nights every other week.

SPEAKER_01 13:10

Reason number five, healing is still

Shift Resources Toward Healing

SPEAKER_01 13:14

possible. Right? Healing is still possible. Just take a breath and take that in. You know, so many of us are so frustrated and so beat up and emotionally taxed and under-resourced and maybe financially bankrupt at this particular state, even emotionally bankrupt, resource bankrupt. You know, healing feels like an astronomical thought sometimes. And what does healing even mean? Right? So healing can mean a lot of different things. It can be the that healing our wound with ourselves, coming back to ourselves, dealing with our own family of origin. It can be changing our communication style, how we show up, what resources we have. And through that, we can connect with our kids. Right? Like I know

Reason 4: Attachment-Focused Parenting

SPEAKER_01 13:56

for me, I wanted to connect with my kids. I wanted to connect with my kids. I tried every strategy, I tried being incredibly nice, the vacations, and having boundaries to whatever extent I could, and really trying to show them a different kind of world. But I hadn't done some of that other work that I think was paramount to me maintaining that connection. Because for me, it came in and out this parental alienation wave, and then at one point it just kind of severed, you know, because I didn't necessarily have the tools. And I can tell you in my life, the healing is happening, not at the speed, the rate, and the direction that I want it to happen, but uh it is definitely different. So healing is still possible even after years and years of estrangement. Brain development continues into the mid-20s, so somewhere right around 26, 27, the brain is fully developed. But the exciting part, and if you would have told me this 10 or 15 years, that I would say the exciting part is critical thinking, where you switch from the black and the white perspective to all the different colors, only happens in your 30s, sometimes early 30s, sometimes mid-30s. For me, that fully came on board at 36 when I started going to a 12-step program where I started exploring more of a spiritual and emotional ecosystem. And once that starts to happen, adult children can connect, you know, in a safe manner for them. It can happen suddenly, unexpectedly, and it can happen, and it has happened to so many different people in our community, and there's this huge bell curve. And a bell curve is basically just different points on like a half circle where different people are on that circle. And some people it's it's instantaneous, they can drop back in, they can start to repair. Some people it's a text, an email, a conversation, and it's a slow build. And some people might just stay in that area. Maybe more time is needed, but it can happen, and it is happening in my life. And if I didn't do the work, I wouldn't have a regular relationship with my youngest daughter, and I wouldn't be maybe having a relationship with my middle daughter and still have no contact with my oldest daughter. None of this is perfect. I'm not perfect, I'm learning, trying, and moving on. And Kathy has some good stuff to say about that, so let's listen to her now.

SPEAKER_00 16:15

That's when kids will come back around. So if you keep being positive, watch many cases. These kids came around and said, I don't even remember why I was upset at you, and the relationship restarted as if it never had been interrupted for like a 10-year period of time. And I've just seen some relationships go back to blossoming the way they should have before the rejection and the estrangement happened.

SPEAKER_01 16:38

Just gonna do a quick recap here. One, children feel rejected first, right? And then the parent starts to get that same kind of feedback loop. And and and this perspective is for parents, grandparents, older relatives, and for children. Like it's important to understand the dynamic in both directions. Two, time without contact deepens trauma. We need connection. And in order to get connection, we need to take care of ourselves, find ourselves, find support outside of the system. Super important. We didn't talk about that much, but super important. Three, the system contributes to the problem. And in this case, we're talking about the judicial system. The players and the stakeholders in the system, they contribute to the problem because they are taking so much attention away and so

Self-Attunement As The Doorway

SPEAKER_01 17:29

many resources away, whether it's financial, emotional, any other resources, that the kids don't get the attention and the connection, and we don't get the time to actually start healing. Four, attachment-focused parenting can reopen doors. Get back to yourself, connect with yourself, build resources outside of the system. Not that everyone in the system is bad and negative, but having these outside resources where everything isn't so raw is paramount to recovery. And number five, healing is possible. There is a chance to reconnect. There is a way through. And thank you for coming on this journey today. This is a little bit different format. I hope you loved it. If

Community, Nonprofit, And CTA

SPEAKER_01 18:08

this episode resonated with you, please share it with someone who needs it a parent, a grandparent, an alienated, a strange child, even professionals. Like so many professionals are seeing the need for this and referring their clients to our meetings and to so many of our other resources. But the more people know, the more people have access. And lastly, awareness is one of the most powerful tools. You have to protect the next generation. You know what? I'd say the biggest move for me is from I to we. It was about me getting connection with my kids, me having this, me having that. And now it's really about we, and that's what the podcast is, that's what the program is, that's what the nonprofit is. And it's a massive step and a hard step. And I didn't want to do it, I didn't come to it easily. It just kind of happened to me because otherwise I didn't know what else to do with my life. So thanks for coming out and playing today. We are a 501c3 nonprofit. Donate. Help us share the message, spread the message, like, share, comment. Let us know what you're thinking. Thank you

Closing Gratitude And Hope

SPEAKER_01 19:06

so much for coming out and got some great episodes coming up. In case no one's told you yet today, I love you. This is a wow, wow, wow, wow, wow episode. Thanks for coming out to play, and we will see you around the playground.