If Not You, Then Who? (Part 1)

I’ve had more than one conversation lately regarding headwinds people face while working on getting their children back, and continually doing what they need to to keep things from blowing up once they’ve made a transition from being alienated to parenting with an ex who has a pattern and proclivity towards division, isolation, and control.

First off, you’re DAMN RIGHT it’s hard. If this wasn’t hard this would never have gotten to the point it is or has been.

But WHY?

It has to do with momentum and time. Dr. Craig Childress talks about “alienation” being a cross generational coalition. That means it spans generations. It’s one of the more important reasons why when someone says Parental Alienation “Syndrome” is not helpful because it makes it sound like what is happening is new or recent. The fact is though, that what is happening to you has likely been going on many generations before you. For many of us, as recent scientific evidence bears out, the stressors that lead us into finding situations which cause us to experience this type of anguish is literally written into our DNA. It has been proven that experiences of an individual can literally re write portions of the very building blocks that make us what and who we are.

The ways of perceiving the world, the actions we take, the beliefs we hold, the responses we have, are, in truth, by and large out of our control. We walk around thinking we are making a lot of  decisions born of free will which in reality, aren’t. We get into a situation with our children where we ask ourselves, how did we get here?  And, up until recently, we by and large came up with nonsensical rationalizations and non-answers which usually did nothing to change things.

We got lost in our own desperation and misery and often gave up. We bought into the lies about what we could and could not control, what we did and didn’t have power over, and that the pain we were in would last forever so we would do anything to stop it. Some tried to do it by walking away. Others took their own lives. Others went until there was nothing left and then surrendered, taking hollow solace in statements like, “they’ll figure it out one day.”

Maybe.

But what most of didn’t really take into consideration happens after us and our children if we didn’t somehow find a way to break the cycle. We didn’t really think about our children’s children, and their children, and so on, and on, into the decades, and centuries, and possibly millennia of debilitating life draining anguish that our non effective action may lead them to.

For me, all of this was too much to allow. I had to ask myself different questions and make different resolutions.

The first one was that no matter what, failure was not going to be an option. My child would have a different experience of connection me, no matter what happened. I started looking at what I could change and many of the answers were surprising.

[Continued in “If Not You, Then Who? (Part 1)”]

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