When going through a divorce, it is not uncommon for tensions between both parties to rise. With children involved, the tensions often only increase, as parents feel like they have too much on the line to lose.
Unfortunately, this can lead to parents making foolish and even harmful decisions that can impact their child negatively, along with affecting their ability to hold custody or even visitation rights.
What is parental alienation?
As the Psychiatric Times looks into parental alienation, they also look into questions regarding custody arrangements in specific regard to parental alienation. First, what is parental alienation? It is the process through which an alienating parent attempts to sabotage the relationship between their ex-spouse and child.
Many courts actually classify parental alienation as a form of child psychological abuse. This is due to the toxic and abusive tactics that many alienating parents turn to in order to “win” the favor of their child, like emotional blackmail, threats, coercion, manipulation and gaslighting. They often use their position of power as a parent over the child in question to manipulate their opinion, turning them against the alienated parent even if it mentally harms them.
Losing your rights
Because of the abusive nature of parental alienation, parents accused and convicted of this can actually lose their custody or even their visitation rights. Again, this is due to the abusive nature of alienation and the way that it negatively impacts the child in question.
Spite often fuels the decisions parents make that lead to instances of parental alienation, but in the end, it just creates more regrets and distance between children and the people they should be able to rely on.
