Latest / It’s All Your Fault: High Conflict People / What is the Difference Between Alienation & Estrangement?
Transcript
- Speaker 1 (00:04): Welcome to, It's All Your Fault On True Story fm, The one and only podcast focused on high conflict human interactions, which usually involves someone with a high conflict personality. I'm Megan Hunter here with Bill Eddie. Speaker 2 (00:20): Hi everybody. Speaker 1 (00:22): We are the co-founders of the High Conflict Institute in San Diego, California. In this episode, we'll talk about the concepts of alienation and estrangement, uh, and in particular will emphasize how estrangement is different from alienation in families. It's a really interesting topic, but first, a couple of notes. If you have a question for our q and a sessions about your high conflict situation or just any question you might have, send them to podcast@highconflictinstitute.com or on our website@highconflictinstitute.com slash podcast, where you'll also find the show notes and links. So please give us a rate of review and tell a friend about us, especially if they're dealing with a high conflict situation. We're very grateful. Speaker 1 (01:15): So, Bill, let's talk about this. Um, a couple of episodes ago we were talking with Dr. Amy Baker about, um, a, the, the very, very huge topic of alienation. And in the the second part of that series, we also touched on estrangement a little bit. And I think there's, there's probably, uh, I think most definitely there's confusion in the, uh, you know, the family law community, Um, and we'll talk about how this can, whether this can also happen in intact families, not just in divorces and family court, but, uh, you know, around the topic of estrangement and, and what it really is. So let's just kind of hop in and have a discussion. Speaker 2 (01:59): Let me first talk a little bit about alienation, because this gives us some grounding for the focus today on Est Strange. So, Alienation's been a confusing issue in families, um, really for the last 40, 40 years. It's been talked a lot about, and it's when a child resists or refuses contact with one of their parents, but for no good reason. In other words, it isn't something that the rejected parent has done. What alienation is about is something that the favored parent seems to be doing, and they seem to be engaged in alienating behaviors can be bad mouthing the other parent, can be, you know, venting a lot of emotions, say about a divorce or problem in the family, and the child absorbs that parent's emotions and way of thinking. And so an alienated child, and there's, there's five factors that Dr. Baker talked about that the child actively avoids, resist, refuses a relationship with a parent, that there's a presence of a prior positive relationship between the child. Speaker 2 (03:16): And now the rejected parent, like before the divorce, parent and child got along fine after the divorce. Now the child's rejected that parent third's absence of abuse or neglect or seriously deficient parenting on the part of the now rejected parent four is use of multiple alienating behaviors by the parent saying like bad, mouthing, interfering with contact, uh, all of those things. And the is that of many, or all of eight behavioral manifestations of alienation by the child, which we're not gonna go into today. So estrangement is different. Estrangement is when a child resists contact with a parent because of something the parent is doing. So the rejected parent may be doing something, and a lot of people just get fixated on, that's the problem. They've abused the child. It's terrible, without considering alienation. Nowadays, people are considering alienation more, and sometimes they don't consider estrangement. Speaker 2 (04:27): So give you an example, and I'm running into this more often these days, is where there's a parent with a high conflict personality who yells and screams at the child who, um, you know, interferes with the child's life and is so emotionally overwhelming that the child resists contact with the parent. And I'll give give a specific example. I, I consulted in a case years ago where there was a four year old boy, and his father just was super, was very high conflict, a lot of emotion, anger, sadness, uh, he didn't want the divorce. Uh, he was angry about the divorce, and they had a 50 50 parenting schedule, which was a four year old, a little rocky, but you know, reasonable parents, some of them make this work anyway, so the child would go for his half the time with dad, and dad was just sad. Speaker 2 (05:32): He'd be crying, he'd be angry. Um, the boy would say, I wanna, I wanna go back to mom's house. And the father would call up mom and say, You know, come pick up. He's, he's too upset with me, wants to with you. And part of what I taught the mom in this case is tell to tell your son and your ex-husband, feelings aren't decisions because the father was very driven by his emotions and managing emotions was important. And so he taught the child about managed emotions or important, but the child, just, the father just kept doing this. And I, you know, was consulting with her for about 10 years. By the time he was 16, he was just, I don't wanna go be with my father, and frankly, you can't make me go. Even though mom had been totally supportive of him going. So this is a different picture from alienation. In this picture, Mom really supported the relationship, was not engaged in alienating behaviors, but dad was doing things that were, were just overwhelming emotionally to the boy. Now, he wasn't physically abusive, and I've had other cases like this. It's just, they're so emotionally out of control, it's just too much for a child to be around and they want to escape it. So that's an example. One example of estrangement these days. Speaker 1 (07:07): I have a question for you, uh, whether this would be an example of estrangement. Um, when a, uh, I think of a particular, uh, family that the parents lived in different states and the children lived with their mom. The father had an opportunity for a job in the same state where the mom and children lived, but chose to take a job in a, in different state. And so there was a move happening, and the move didn't come toward the children. I went to, you know, a way again, and one of the children was so extremely upset about that, that it took, I don't know, maybe 10, 12 years to even be in the same room with his father. And so is that an example of, of estrangement? Speaker 2 (07:55): It could be because it was actions of the father that the child was responding to, not actions of the mother. Now if the mother is bad mouthing the father for moving away, that could be a contributing factor. And some of these cases aren't totally clear cut. They're not absolute. But frankly, most of these resistant refused cases are a fairly clear cut. It's primarily one parent either engaged in alienating behaviors or a parent engaged in behaviors that make estrangement with the child. So I would wanna know more like, was dad insisted? Was dad angry with the child? Was dad insensitive about that or was dad empathetic to say, I know this is hard, but this is an opportunity and and I'll do what I can to make it comfortable for you. Because the reality is a lot of people, people do move away and the kids do okay, they go back and forth, Speaker 1 (08:59): Right? I, I, in this particular case, I recall the, uh, there there was not even any knowledge that this bothered the child. And no one understood why the child was so angry for so long and just had wanted nothing to do with dad at all. So, um, and I, from what I understood, there was no bad mouthing by the mom of, of the dad. And in fact, the opposite was true. There was a lot of encouragement of the relationship, um, between the, you know, just kind of wide open door of encouragement for a healthy relationship between them. So it was kind of the dad's relationship to lose, and he, you know, did in fact lose it for a long time. You know, kind of fast forwarding, I've, uh, since observed that the father and son have reconciled. And it took some, you know, all those years. And I think perhaps because the mother had been so encouraging of, you know, forgiveness and having a healthy relationship and letting some things go and giving second chances, I think maybe that foundation helped for the son to forgive the father and establish a healthier relationship. But, you know, somewhat speculation. Speaker 2 (10:09): Yeah, it's, it's important to know that it's worth figuring out exactly what's going on. And if anybody's engaging in behaviors that are really inappropriate or abusive, like I would say the highly emotional parent is emotionally abusing the child. It is such an overload, just like alienating behaviors is a different form of emotional abuse. So it's, it's worth investigating. And certainly when these cases come up in Go family, it's better to have someone figure it out fairly quickly than it is to spend years fighting over is it your fault or is it your fault? And that's where we get into other things. Sometimes the question is, is there physical abuse of a child? If a parent physically abuses a child, then does the child then resist contact with that parent? And I've worked with cases both ways. There's kids who've been physically abused that love the parent who's abusing them and aren't estranged or alienated from that parent. Speaker 2 (11:20): They just want the abuse to stop. There's other cases where that has caused estrangement and a child's like, I'm scared of my father and I don't wanna be around him. And that would be estrangement, physical abuse. Now, in the old days, child sexual abuse was considered a cause of this resistance. And in the 1980s, two things happened that that kind of crashed into each other. There was much more awareness and public support for protection of children from child sexual abuse. And so child protective services investigated that, removed children from homes. You know, there was, uh, preschool centers where there was concerns, all this stuff. 1980s is really when that really grew into the 1990s. At the same time, around 1980, the court said, Moms and dads are equal in terms of parenting kids after a divorce. So there's no longer presumption. Kids go with mom and dad just disappears from the kids lives, which is what was happening before 1980. Speaker 2 (12:35): So it created an equality that also created a contest between parents. And that's when alienations start coming in. And originally it was seen as moms bad mouthing dads, you know, why should your dad be having half the time, this is my job, but maybe dad was sexually abusing the child in a lot of cases in 1980s where that battle is a child sexual abuse or alienation. And there may have been a couple cases where it was child sexual abuse, but the abuser said, She's alienating the child, I'm not doing a thing. And so they became too competing, uh, points of view and, and teams develop professionals, PR organizations developed over saying, Alienation isn't real. It's really abuse, or it's not abuse, it's really alienation. And Speaker 1 (13:34): What's a judge to do? . Yeah. Speaker 2 (13:36): And the judge has, you know, half an hour to figure this out, . Speaker 1 (13:41): It's tough. Speaker 2 (13:42): Yeah. But I think today there's much more understanding, but we need to go further. There's more understanding about alienation. I, I don't know any professional now that denies it exists, that there's alienated behaviors that can influence a child, but I'm running into cases where people are falsely accused of alienation when in fact it really is estrangement. Hm. So that's why I wanna make sure people know estrangement is the opposite of alienation. It's the parent that's being rejected own behavior. And it may be emotional in most cases, sometimes physical, um, in rare case sexual, but it's good to know about and think about this. Speaker 1 (14:28): Mm. Yeah. It really is because alienation is such a big word. It's such a known word, and it's a sticky term, right? Um, there's a lot of information. There's, you know, different, uh, support groups and, you know, Facebook groups and things like that that are all about alienation. And while it's very real, there are probably many, many cases that are actually estrangement, like you say, but people don't know that term. They don't, they lump it all under alienation, which is unfortunate because then it can, you know, I actually probably do damage to the case, um, or in relationships that didn't necessarily need to be happening there. Speaker 2 (15:09): More people understand this, the more they can soften the impact and maybe even prevent it. But I, I wanna take a couple minutes about intact families, because we see, I as a family therapist, I had some intact families where the children were alienated by one of the parents against the other parent, and the other parent became like, like a third child, and the children would speak down to that parent. I know one case, very narcissistic father, and the mother had been like, pushed to the side because there were sons in the family, and the father was teaching the sons really misogyny that women, you know, women are stupid. They don't know what they're doing. Ignore what your mother said, just listen to me. So that's an intact family, and that's alienation. But there also may be estrangement in a family. And we see this with adults, and especially like you'll see adult children who no longer talk to each other, or sometimes adult children who won't talk to their parent. Speaker 2 (16:16): And in some of these cases, there's a high conflict person, like let's say the parent's a high conflict person and, and the adult childs figured my life is a lot healthier if I get some distance from this difficult high conflict person. But sometimes it's the child. We have adult children who are just treat their parents terribly. And so the parents are like, Hey, I don't know if I want anything to do here. And it's estrangement because of the person's own behavior. That's the key lesson here. And for people to understand, adults get estr, don't blame somebody else. Figure out. It may be because the person they're estranged from is acting in a way that really has pushed them away Speaker 1 (17:03): And someone's had to set a limit, You know? And that's, that's the thing I I, I think some of us get confused about the difference between, you know, uh, maybe estrangement and, and setting a limit. And, um, being all I, I know I get asked a lot about all or nothing, Is setting a limit all, Is it setting a limit or is it all or nothing thinking if I decide not to have a relationship with my sibling, what you've described kind of gives a, a good matrix, I guess, so to speak or flowchart on, on how to think about that. Speaker 2 (17:35): So this is just one factor or principle to think about in all relationships, people that work, people that are friends, and then people become estranged. Is it because of the person's behavior that they're moving away from that person? Or is it because somebody else bad mouth them, in which case it's alienation. Speaker 1 (17:57): Interesting. All. Well, I think that was a fascinating, uh, conversation Bill, and thank you for all of that really, really helpful information. Speaker 1 (18:12): Next week we'll shift into a, a really critical topic, which is high conflict in our schools. Teachers, administrators, and school boards are dealing with more conflict than ever, and they're finding that a small percentage of the conflict they're dealing with is taking the majority of their time and resources. So yeah, that's, that's our specialty at High Conflict Institute. , those, those folks that take the most time and resources and provide the most frustration. Uh, so we'll discuss three ways that parents are sort of being described, some parents and, uh, you've all probably heard about the helicopter parents. I don't know if you've heard about lawnmower parents, but now there's a new one called the Jackhammer Parent. So we're going to talk about that, and it's, it's really pretty interesting. In the meantime, send your questions to podcast high conflict institute.com or submit them to high conflict institute.com/podcast. Tell your friends about us, and we'd be very grateful if you'd leave a review wherever you listen to our podcast. We'd love seeing five stars, . All right, So have a great week and keep striving toward the missing piece. Speaker 3 (19:22): It's Speaker 1 (19:23): All Your Fault is a production of True Story FM Engineering by Andy Nelson. Music, by Wolf Samuels, John Cogans and Ziv Moran. Find the show, show notes and transcripts@truestory.fm or high conflict institute.com/podcast. If your podcast app allows ratings and reviews, please consider doing that for our show.