The War At Home
Anyone who marries or is in a relationship with a person who shows signs of having a narcissistic or borderline personality disorder is vulnerable to experience parental alienation. Personality disorders are not gender specific and that means that neither alienators nor targeted parents represent any specific gender.
It’s a war like no other. Everything we love and cherish is being taken away from us. It is a war for our homes and in our home. Targeted parents didn’t start it, they don’t want to be a part of it, but we are the only ones fighting it.
It always makes me roll my eyes when I get a sense of how much our government spends to protect our county. Our children are the very heart of our country. Protecting our children was the reason homeland security was created. Yet, terrorists in the form of alienators find sanctuary hiding in 22 million homes, methodically dismantling the family structure and causing mental and emotional harm to children and healthy parents. If they are not stopped, there will be nothing left of this country to fight for.
It is easy to blame our ex-partners because they are calling the shots, but have enlisted soldiers to do the dirty work so they can remain safe and warm, behind closed doors. One of the biggest problems with fighting this war is that targeted parents continue to fight on the alienators’ turf. We are drawn out into hostile territory to defend ourselves against longstanding misconceptionsand biases that sanction and support the enemies in our midst.
Dr. Richard Warshak (2015) clearly identified 10 extremely harmful false assumptions (gender and parenting biases) that legal and mental health professionals hold about our families. He also pointed out that these professionals hang on to these erroneous thoughts, contrary to 30 years of empirical research. Even Dr. Daniel Siegel admitted in an article in Family Court Review, that he understands that there are neurobiological research that demonstrate a gender difference that can influence attachment in early infancy, but he very honestly states; “I just cannot get myself to take those findings seriously because of my own experience as a father…” (p519). 1
Targeted parents are just as guilty of falling into the trap of sociocultural biases as Dan Siegel. I’m just as vulnerable. When Joe Barrow starting posting videos of alienated children I contacted him because I thought he was being biased against women. In every video, the alienator was a mother, and I was upset. I had heard that alienation was NOT gender specific, but I didn’t really believe it. The alienator in my life was a man and the majority of people who have joined the National Alliance for Targeted Parents have been women. Even so, I was wrong, this really isn’t a war of gender. Targeted men and women need to enlist in our army, and join the NATP because we are at war and we need all the fighters we can get.
1Siegel, D., (2011). Family law and the neuroscience of attachment, part II. Family Court Review, 49, 519.
Warshak, R. A. (2015, June 22). Ten Parental Alienation Fallacies That Compromise Decisions in Court and in Therapy. Professional Psychology: Research and Practice. Advance onlinepublication. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pro0000031