[Affair Recovery Radio] What Can I Do to Reduce Parent Alientation?

Parent alienation makes a bad situation worse. It shows that the cancer of the marital conflict has spread to your children.

What Can I Do to Reduce Parent Alientation <<– listen to the audio here

Hi, this Jeff Murrah with Affair Recovery Radio, and I’m glad you’re with me today. I want to thank you for tuning in and joining me today as we take you through the affair recovery process one step at a time.

The issue we’re going to be dealing with today is focusing on the question of “What can I do to reduce parental alienation?” I’ve talked about parent alienation before, yet that session was mainly focused on defining what it was.

I’m assuming that you already have some idea what it is and we’re going to be talking about what you can do to reduce the amount of parent alienation (Parent Alienation Syndrome or PAS).

Because parent alienation makes what’s already a bad situation worse. It shows that the cancer of marital conflict has spread to the relationship between you and your children.

Parent alienation, I find, is an issue both with the cheater and with the other spouse. This is not an issue that’s just limited to one spouse or the other. I’ve seen each type of situation. That’s why I wanted to go ahead and deal with it.

Now, some of you are saying “Well, that’s not an issue for me”, or “That’s only an issue for the cheater”. No, it could potentially be an issue for both of you. Parent alienation can be an issue of concern to either parent after an affair happens.

It can be driven by a spouse or even hostile in-laws. Keep in mind, if divorce proceedings are underway, those hostile in-laws can hire all kinds of lawyers and professional help, especially if they’re wealthy, and you can find yourself outgunned. That’s why it can be driven by that as well.

Parent alienation is also very much about perception, not facts. You may be a wonderful parent, but when parent alienation raises its head you’re dealing with perceptions.

How do other people look at you as a parent? How does it look in the court room?

How does it look in the photo albums and the movies and things such as that? The family record, so to speak. How does your parenting look there? Because that’s the type of stuff that could end up in court.

Since it’s all based on perception, it has different ground rules. It’s going to be important that you remember it’s not based on facts, it’s based on perception. What happens is that the spouse who is driving the parent alienation, they often manipulate and control things.

Besides manipulating and controlling, they typically have an agenda.  Making the accusations of parent alienation, or the accusations that you’re not a good parent or whatever it is that’s leading to parent alienation, or that you’re a bad influence on your kids. Their purpose is to go ahead and get you out of the whole situation. They want to alienate you from your kids, or create that whole environment.

Just because you didn’t have the affair it doesn’t mean that you’re not at risk. I know that sounds a little strange, but there are times that accusations of an affair are made,. You didn’t have one, but once again we’re not dealing with facts here. We are based on perception.

I talk about a “Parent Alienation Survival plan” and that’s what we’re going to need here. Your solution is going to be to develop a parent alienation survival plan.

As part of your plan,

  1. Document the time you spend with your kids. You can put it on the calendar, you can put it in your date book, you can put it on your smart phone, wherever, but document it. Because there’s going to be accusations and you want to have the documentation in place.

2. Clean up your reputation if you need to. What I mean by that, when you start seeing some of the signs of parent alienation start cleaning up.

That may mean that you need to change friends, you may need to edit your social media sites. You may need to change your appearance. You’ve got to deal with the question “What looks good in the courtroom?”

I know you may have spiky green hair and think it’s cool, or have the large earrings and piercings and tattoos. You may see that as an important part of your individuality, which it may be, but in a courtroom you’ve got to consider the values system of the judge and how it’s going to come across.

These issues don’t make you a bad parent. But they can give the appearance that you may not be the best choice for the kids. And that’s the type of stuff that you have to be aware of.

If you’ve got a reputation, it’s not necessarily that you’ve done anything bad, but if you’ve got some of those goofy pictures of you at a drinking party, pictures of you drunk and so forth on your social media, take them down.

If you have some friends that wouldn’t play well in court, change those friends. After this whole thing blows over you can get back with them, but for the moment make the changes necessary that you need to.

3. Fulfill your promises to the kids and respect boundaries. One of the things that people mess themselves up with, they want to get back at their spouse at this point.

In doing so, they violate a lot of boundaries and that agitates and makes the situation much worse. Likewise if you have fulfilled your promises to your children there’s going to be less room for the other parent, the alienating parent, to create any kind of hostility.

By keeping your promises, that may mean if you had promised a camping trip or if you had promised them we’re going to go to the amusement park, or we’re going to go shopping, we’re going on a fishing trip, even though things might have come up you need to do what you need to do to honor that promise.

If you have broken some of those promises and left them disappointed.  go back and clean that up. Many times when a child is disappointed by their parent, it creates distance.

A manipulative person coming in with an agenda of parent alienation will use those unresolved issues against you. You don’t want to give them any ammunition to use against you.

As part of your parent alienation survival plan, fulfill your promises to the kids and respect boundaries.

So once again, as part of your plan I’ve got three things here. Document the time you spend with your kids, clean up your reputation if needed, and number three fulfill your promises to the kids and respect boundaries. These are things that you can do now. You can start making a list of these various changes and how you’re going to document things.

Another thing you can do is resolving issues like affairs. The download “Affair Recovery Workshop” guides you in what you need for repairing your marriage. Even in the event that the two of you don’t get back together, the two of you still need to talk and have decent relations.

Hostile relations or poor communication put you at high risk for Parental Alienation. You may be able to disprove it in court, but “How much will lit cost you?” You are going to pay a price, whether in money or time.

Invest in yourself and the relationship with your spouse with the workshop today. It could save you from some major headaches and court hassles.

 

Best Regards,

Jeff

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