MY STORY

I married someone I thought was my knight in shining armour.

Not that I needed to be rescued, but I did love the feeling of being with someone who wanted so much to build a life together and who wanted to be the protector of our family. The image you see behind this text is from a print that I hung in our home.

I imagined I was the woman on the beautiful horse and my husband, a horse trainer, was the knight.

THE HONEYMOON IS OVER

It didn’t take long before that image started to shatter.

For the first few years of our marriage, I was isolated from friends and family. I left a successful career in the media. But after his successive job losses, I re-ignited my journalism career in a new country. Starting over meant a lower salary, and we struggled financially.

ISOLATION AND EXHAUSTION

While I held down a demanding TV reporter job and parented three young children, he began doing horse training clinics travelling 6 months of the year. I was alone with three small children for 3 to 5 weeks at a time, with a dozen horses and a household to take care of as well.

I was also trying to continue working full-time as a journalist. We had no extra money to hire any help. When he came home, I was exhausted, but I got no understanding nor support. I was told a stronger woman could handle it all.

While I was lonely, sad and burnt out, I chose not to divorce. I didn’t want to put my children through that. I thought I would hang in there until the youngest left home.

MY LEARNING CURVE

But I realized after reading the book What Children Learn From Their Parents’ Marriage that waiting would be a mistake. He had been undermining me to our children, telling them they didn’t have to listen to me.

On page one of the book, it stated that “the relationship between (their) parents…becomes the blueprint for all (their) future intimate relationships.” I realized then that I did not want my sons to treat a future partner this way, and I did not want my daughter to accept this kind of treatment.

MY BREAKING POINT

Then one morning, when I had an appointment with a business coach, one of my children woke up feeling too sick to go to school. I asked my husband if he would stay home with our child for a few hours. My husband had just returned from another 3-week trip. Instead of saying yes, he told our child that:

“Mommy doesn’t love you. She doesn’t love (names of siblings), and she doesn’t love me. She only loves herself!” 

I was shocked. I stared at him. He just smiled back at me. I followed him out to the hallway, closed the door to my bedroom where my child was, and whispered, “Don’t you ever speak to the children like that again.” But he just smirked. 

After reassuring my child that I loved them and that I would be back shortly after my meeting, I got into my car. That’s when my (then) husband yelled from the front porch not to bother coming back…that he would be locking me out of the house!

I didn’t go to see my business coach…instead I went to a community clinic to get help figuring out how to start a divorce.

Years later I would discover that telling the children a parent doesn’t love them is one of the 17 classic behaviours of alienating parents. All I knew in the moment was that I needed to divorce. His behaviour was not only hurting me, but it was clearly hurting our children.

Within weeks he was telling the children that, “mommy is mean” and that, “mommy is destroying the family.” And on and on it went, his disparaging of me went into overdrive.

I offered 50-50 custody and suggested we do mediation, but he refused to sign our mediation agreement. Instead he hired a lawyer and asked the lawyer what would happen if he took the children to live with his mother, who lived 2-thousand miles away. One afternoon while arguing with me, he told the kids to pack their bags; that they would be leaving to drive cross country to live with his mother.

That's when I knew I had to get a lawyer and take this matter to court.

ALIENATION BEGINS

He told me if I divorced him, he would become “financially insolvent.” And he kept his word.

By then, I had left my journalism job due to burnout and exhaustion. I had no revenue myself, so I turned to legal aide. The legal aide lawyer assigned to me only made matters worse. Meanwhile my children now started repeating some of the disparaging comments that they had heard their father say to me on numerous occasions. Then some of my children started refusing to see me. Things spiralled out of control quickly, and soon I was not seeing some of my children at all.

CONFUSED AND TRAUMATIZED

I was confused and traumatized by not seeing my kids. I worried about their well-being constantly. I had been their primary caregiver throughout their childhoods. Their absentee father was now convincing them that I was unsafe, unloving, uncaring, and unworthy of their love. How did he do that? How was that even possible??

The weeks without seeing my kids turned into months, and unbelievably into years. It took quite a while before I heard the term "Parental Alienation.” When I did, all my confusion started to make sense. It didn’t ease the pain, but at least this nightmare had a name, and presumably I was not the only one to be living it.

But back then, I didn’t find any other “targeted parents.” People just didn’t talk about the fact that their child was alienated from them. And when I did talk about it, people looked at me with suspicion: “you must have done something to make your children reject you.” I knew the truth of my situation, but no one else did.

Things started to change when I found a psychologist who was aware of Parental Alienation. I learned about gaslighting, emotional abuse and neglect, concepts that were not discussed much in the early 2000’s. She helped me find a new lawyer who also had experience in this confusing and emotion-charged phenomenon. With their guidance and care, I started slowly learning how to deal with alienation and how to begin reconnecting with my kids. I learned what works, what doesn’t, and why.

I eventually won custody of all my children, though that did not bring all of them back. The judge said they were old enough now to make up their own minds. So I wondered, what value was going to court anyway?

The fact that I was a journalist meant that throughout my ordeal, I kept notes. Boxes and boxes of notes and journals and calendars and papers and emails…anything and everything that was related to the situation with my family. I made notes at night of things that were said, observations I made, anything that could help me explain what was going on with my family.

HEALED AND RECONNECTED

During those years, we were followed by a psychologist who was appointed by the court to do a psycho-social evaluation of our family to determine custody. That psychologist, one of only a few experts in Parental Alienation at the time, told me that I should use my experience and skills to help other “targeted parents” who are facing this confusing and traumatizing ordeal. I vowed to do that one day, but only if my relationship with my children was rock-solid. And it thrills me to say that today, our relationship is rock-solid. We have been reconnected for over a decade now, and they support my mission.

But I also knew that I could only offer support and guidance when I felt fully and completely healed myself from the trauma. I have been on a healing journey for many years now, exploring modalities that could help me understand why Parental Alienation happened to me, how to heal the damage it caused, and what I needed to change to ensure that kind of toxic relationship never came into my life again.

I LIVED ALIENATION SO I UNDERSTAND YOUR PAIN

I knew that I could only offer guidance to other targeted parents if I was absolutely certain that what I had to share was solid advice, backed not only by my lived experience, but also by peer-reviewed research by credible investigators in the field of Parental Alienation and other related fields. After years of research, reading and interviewing these experts, I have put together the very best practices that can help a targeted parent get through the alienation journey to reach the other side, where they can reconnect with their children. And as someone who has actually lived Parental Alienation, I truly understand the depth of pain we feel as targeted parents.

This is the road map I was looking for back in 2004, when no road map existed. And I want to share it with you now, because alienation is much too hard to go through alone. I do not want you to suffer like I did, for as long as I did.

I CAME TO MY OWN RESCUE - AND YOU CAN TOO!

I kept that old print of the knight in shining armour in storage for years. I took it out recently to give it away. But looking at it, I realized that the knight was never my ex-husband: the knight was me. I was both those characters: the woman on the horse and the knight in shining armour. Two sides of the same coin. I had come to my own rescue. And it is my mission to help others do the same.