A decade after writing the much
praised The Custody Revolution, Richard Warshak has returned
with a book that, as far as I can see, is virtually perfect. Warshak
thoroughly, thoughtfully, and perhaps most remarkably, both
passionately and compassionately analyzes the heretofore relatively
neglected topic of Parental Alienation Syndrome or PAS. To the
author’s credit, he is not attached to the label of PAS and in fact
adopts the alternative formulation of “divorce poison” as an easily
comprehensible shorthand. As its name suggests, PAS results when one
parent intentionally inserts a wedge between a child and the other
parent. The methods of doing this (manipulation, lies, forbidding
contact, failing to bring the child to scheduled exchanges, etc.) are
many but the catastrophic results in the child’s life are the same.
Right on page one in the book’s
introduction, it becomes clear that the author will not shrink from
challenging widespread “wisdom,” as when he contests the suggestion
that a “united front” is paramount in divorce and that it is never
right to criticize the other parent. On the contrary, according to
Warshak, parents who poison their children’s relationships with loved
ones deserve to be confronted and compelled to right these wrongs. The
author succinctly lays out the elements of PAS, which essentially
amounts to brainwashing a child into shunning a parent.
Warshak also includes a wealth of
practical checklists and summaries of key points, many of which are
set off from the main text in an attractive, easily readable fashion.
For example, he provides five questions a parent can use to do a
self-test regarding one’s motives for revealing negative information
about the other parent. We learn that even after a marriage has ended,
a parent should discuss the other parent’s faults in ways that
minimize the damage to the child’s general respect and regard for that
parent, just as that parent presumably would have done while still
married to their ex-spouse.
Even more importantly, the author
regularly provides specific ways for implementing the book’s ideas in
one’s life, with one’s own children: he offers an example of what a
wife could say to his children regarding a habitually late father, and
a few pages later gives some suggestions of what to say to one’s kids
in response to badmouthing of you by your ex. Warshak adroitly notes
that three hidden requests are encapsulated when we try to blame our
spouse for a divorce (don’t be mad at me; pity me; join me in being
angry at your other parent), and none of these serves our children.
Moreover, because kids identify with both their parents, badmouthing
their other parent amount to badmouthing your own children.
Warshak
details the four main factors affecting a child’s ability to resist
divorce poison: 1) environment and manner in which badmouthing and
brainwashing occurs; 2) your prior relationship with your child; 3)
your child’s specific characteristics; 4) your response to divorce
poison. He helpfully follows this with four actions you can take
against divorce poison: 1) exercise self-restraint; 2) maintain
contact—ceasing contact won’t help no matter how tempting it might be;
3) develop a thick skin; 4) avoid being drawn into a debate with the
other parent, which is a no-win situation.
One chilling fact that comes
through crystal clear in this book is the speed and frequent
irreversibility of PAS. Following well-intentioned advice to wait and
be patient and hope things will work out will often simply result in
the loss of a relationship with one’s children. Swift, specific,
targeted action is often much better, and Warshak outlines the way to
do this in a variety of situations.
Often an author writing about a
particular phenomenon may, through no fault of their own, end up
supporting the expansion of whatever category they are discussing.
Warshak avoids this danger, grounding the discussion by providing a
very useful section with examples of whole categories of child
behavior that do NOT constitute divorce poison or PAS. One frequent
situation is a child in an explosive family who, simply to avoid a war
zone and to protect himself or herself from tension, fear and
embarrassment, sometimes tells one parent he/she no longer want to see
the other parent. If the origin of the rejection of the parent comes
from the child and not from the other parent or an ally of the other
parent, this does NOT constitute PAS.
False accusations of child abuse
are frequently associated with divorce poison. Recent studies prove
that children are remarkably suggestible and easily manipulable into
convincing themselves that something entirely fictitious actually
happened. Suggestions that children don’t lie about such things are
quite mistaken. Even experts are utterly unable to tell which children
are telling the truth and which are lying about such things. Another
temptation Warshak avoids is fostering an implicit and ultimately
unhelpful alliance with the reader, by among other things providing a
checklist to enable the reader to evaluate his or her own contribution
to any alienation that may have occurred.
Chapter 4 catalogs the many
reasons why a parent might foster divorce poison—narcissism, guilt,
insecurity, etc. Again, specific examples flesh out these potentially
hazy terms we have all heard before. Warshak has, to paraphrase Mark
Twain, an all-too-uncommon common sense, and sprinkles his book with a
good number of real life cases from his own years of work in the field
as a psychologist specializing in these issues.
Chapter 5 intriguingly fleshes
out the perhaps nonsurprising but still fascinating fact that the same
conditions that increase the risk of alienation from a parent are the
conditions that foster indoctrination into cults, such as isolation,
psychological dependence, and fear.
Chapter 6 sets forth the most
common ploys used to coerce kids into rejecting their parents and
often grandparents as well—pejorative labeling, use of first names to
describe the adults (“Bill” instead of “Dad,” for example), even
creating a new name for the child. Alienating parents are not above
exploiting an eminently understandable, momentary explosion of anger
from the alienated parent, or even provoking such a conflict with the
stage set and witnesses in place. Sometimes parents will go to the
Stalinist extreme of cutting alienated parents out of family photos
and persuading a child that certain events involving that parent never
occurred. In order to avoid the intense discomfort they would
otherwise feel, children may even convince themselves that a parent
must deserve mistreatment. Innuendo can be a very effective alienation
technique, though Warshak provides some excellent suggestions on
action steps to take to confront this ruse.
Chapter 7 contains invaluable
poison control pointers, such as guidelines for increasing a child’s
receptivity to your communication (e.g., communicate genuine empathy,
speak to someone else within the child’s earshot about things you want
the child to hear!) Advice on selecting and working with a therapist
or therapists is very well thought out. Chapter 9, the most difficult
one for the author to write, advises a parent on letting go when all
else has failed.
A parent who engineers divorce
poison breaks normal family boundaries and commits a sort of incest,
transforming a child into an accomplice and often saddling the child
with worries and fears that ought not be visited on children. Warshak
does not dwell more than necessary on the tragic results of PAS, but
it is clear that its victims suffer a lifetime of shortcomings and
problems in virtually all phases of their lives as a result of being a
pawn in a game of divorce poison. As with incest and child abuse, a
tragically high percentage of those parents who foster alienation
themselves had poor or absent relationships with at least one of their
own parents and thus are reenacting their own childhoods.
Richard A. Warshak obviously
cares deeply about parental alienation. One can scarcely help but be
moved by his plea to leave divorce poison in its bottle. Despite their
dark and eminently understandable feelings, parents must hold
themselves to a higher standard for the good of the little ones who
are the truly blameless victims here. The problem is clear, and the
way forward is also clear. Every case the author knows of in which the
court reduced an alienated child’s time with the programming parent
reduced or eliminated the alienation. When the time with the
programming parent was not reduced, nine out of ten kids remained
alienated. This magnificent book, sad though it is that it ever had to
be written, is bound to alleviate heartache for countless children and
parents.
©2003 J. Steven Svoboda
