How to Support Your Alienated Child When You Cannot Fully Protect Them
Your child comes to visit you dysregulated. Now what do you do? - STRT May 2026
“I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.”
~ Carl Jung
My house, my rules.
When I was around 10 years old, I ran away from home.
I had gotten into a heated argument with my stepmother (the alienator), which ended with her saying, “If you live in my house, you live by my rules. If you don’t want to listen, then you can get out!”
So, I walked out the door.
No one expected me to go anywhere. If anything, I think my stepmother thought I would pout outside until she called me back inside. But I was young and angry, and also heavily inspired by Beverly Cleary’s Runaway Ralph, a children’s novel about a mouse who ran away from his family on his toy motorcycle and went to summer camp.
Note: I am not blaming a children’s novel for my decision to runaway from home. This event would have never happened had my stepmother been more tactful and empathetic. I also carry responsibility for my actions which I will share below.
Outside, the skies were overcast, and the morning dew on the grass made my shoes damp. Autumn was coming soon. I wanted to go to church to play with my friends, but my stepmother was convinced I was still sick, even though I said I felt fine.
When I was outside, I considered walking to church myself. It was about 3 miles away, and all I would need to do was walk along the main road. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I shouldn’t go to church. Other family members were going, and I didn’t want them catching me. So I decided to go to my friend’s house. However, there were two problems.
My friend lived in the rural areas outside of town, and I didn’t know the way.
I thought I was smart enough to figure it out.
For most of the walk, I was alone with my thoughts, thinking about how unfair life was and how much I enjoyed sleeping over at my friend’s house. There I was free. After about 3 miles of walking, I took a shortcut across the fairgrounds and found myself in an unfamiliar part of town.
A few people would pull up to me and ask if I needed a ride home. In the early 2000s, parents were quite paranoid about child kidnappings, so it was no surprise that many adults offered to drive me. But I didn’t know my friend’s address, so it didn’t matter anyway. I would tell them that I was walking to a friend’s house and that I would be okay.
Eventually, I was stopped by a young woman who wouldn’t accept my reassurance and told me, “Either you get in the car and come with me, or I will call the police.”
And so, I did the one thing every child my age was told never to do… I got into a stranger’s car.
The lady turned to me as I buckled in: “I’m Tasha.”
I introduced myself and then tried to give her directions to my friend’s house. It didn’t take Tasha long to figure out I had no idea where to go, and her maternal instinct was right—I was a kid who was hopelessly lost (and refused to acknowledge it.)
Tasha decided the best thing to do was to take me to her house. I remember her house was built on a hill with a flight of concrete steps to the door. I ran up the steps, slipping on the weathered steps, and scraped the skin off my shin. Looking down, there was a 2-inch gash, revealing the white bone of my tibia. Tasha told me to wait outside as she got some cream to treat the wound.
Later, she brought her son out. He was barely a year old, and while I was playing with him, she called the police. When the police came, I knew the jig was up. I wasn’t mad at Tasha; if anything, I was deeply grateful for her kindness to me.
The ride home was quiet. The officer never said much other than to ask how I was doing. By the time I got home, the whole neighborhood was waiting for me. Even my father—who had to drive 90 minutes one way to work—was there. In the middle of the crowd was my stepmother, sobbing while other mothers in the neighborhood comforted her.
I went up to her, gave her a one-armed hug, and then went inside the house.
My parents spoke to me with trepidation for a long time after that event. Kids at church and at school knew me as the kid who ran away, and rightly so. I was at least five miles away from home when Tasha found me.
I didn’t quite understand the gravity of my actions at that time. In fact, they didn’t know that I had tried running away before this, but I walked back home because I couldn’t figure out where my friend’s house was.
Now that I am older, I recognize that the desire to run away stemmed from growing frustration in my life, as I was being pushed to be someone I didn’t want to be while carrying the weight of adult problems as a child. I wanted to be respected, which is an unacceptable ask for an alienator.
Make no mistake that running away from your problems never makes them go away. I would argue that it adds more difficulty in your life as your old problems come back to you. But I also recognize the real consequences of staying in an abusive home.
Though it has faded over the past 20+ years, I still have that scar on my shin today.
What can you do when your child cannot leave?
Most children do not have the language or the psychological distance to recognize what is happening while they are in it. Many only begin to understand the dynamics of their childhood in adulthood, when they have space, perspective, and the ability to think and reflect independently.
There are exceptions. Some children sense that something is wrong. They may notice inconsistencies, feel pressure to think or speak a certain way, or experience internal conflict, but even when a child begins to recognize these patterns, they are still operating within a system they cannot meaningfully change.
This is the core constraint that defines their world.
Children do not have legal authority over their environment. They do not choose where they live, how custody is structured, or which adults influence their daily life. Even older teenagers (who may be more perceptive) are limited in what they can act on. Emancipation at 16 is one option, but it requires court filings and consent of the parent/guardian. Leaving is not a realistic option in most cases, and attempts to force independence prematurely often create new risks rather than solving the original problem.
Just as important, children are still developing the very capacities needed to navigate complex situations. Their brains are still developing, which impacts their ability to make sound judgments, regulate their emotions, and engage in long-term thinking. This means that even when something feels wrong, they may not have the tools to interpret it accurately or respond effectively.
For a parent who still has contact, this means the goal is not to accelerate awareness of their abuse and alienation before the child is ready.
The goal is to stabilize the situation as much as possible, protect what is still intact in your relationship with your child, and prepare them for the day they are able to see and choose for themselves.
All Roads Point to Adulthood
“The child is the forgotten citizen.”
~ Maria Montessori
Forgotten in this context is more than just out of sight, out of mind. What Maria Montessori was teaching with this quote is that society systematically treats the child as a human being with enormous consequences but very little standing. In her framing, the child is central to the future of civilization and yet is routinely excluded from serious moral, social, and political consideration. Montessori argued that while adult society gradually improved living conditions and public recognition for adults, the child’s world often moved in the opposite direction, with less freedom, less participation in adult life, and less respect for the child’s developmental needs.
Pop culture seems to glorify the idea of framing a child as a parasitic hindrance to your professional and personal development, as if the performative adult status games have some kind of higher moral value.
The irony to me is that the same values that these adults would aspire to—love, patience, kindness, leadership, empathy, purpose, meaning, and many more—are the values that you put to the test as a parent.
The point is that alienation—and by extension, the legal and sociological response to alienation—falls under this umbrella of the forgotten citizen.
Children know this, albeit unconsciously. Most do not have the tools or the capacity to meaningfully address this power imbalance. When a child cannot change their environment, the only viable path is to focus on internal preservation and long-term preparation for independence.
Engaging in alienating behaviors is a form of self-preservation, but the challenge is that many kids in constricting environments do not develop the skills needed to be safely independent.
As a child, I thought I was smart enough to walk what would have been over 10 miles to a friend’s house because I felt so imprisoned by my stepmother. Yet, throughout this experience, I never thought to myself that my mother was a better solution because I had been taught that life with her was that much worse.
All this philosophy leads to the big question…
How, as a parent, do you support your alienated child, the forgotten citizen?
Montessori’s answer to the forgotten citizen was never rescue but the cultivation of an environment in which the child can thrive. Your child doesn’t need an adult to fight every battle on their behalf. They do, however, need an adult who builds a home worth returning to.
For the alienated parent, that answer is both harder and simpler than it sounds.
Harder, because you are building inside the constraint of alienation, which you didn’t choose, with limited time, and against active opposition from the alienator.
Simpler, because the work is not about winning. You are cultivating for long-term growth. You are not trying to undo what the alienator is doing in real time. That is an unwinnable game. You are planting things in your child that will outlast the environment they are currently trapped in.
You are switching your thinking from “What do I do when they come to stay with me,” to “What does my child take with them when they walk out the door?”
That reframe changes your role in alienation, intentionally cultivating your child’s future self in spite of the abuse they will endure. I discuss this in detail at the micro-level in my previous article, "Transforming Alienated Children Back to Their True Selves."
But what does this look like long term?
The alienator’s most effective weapon is not the lies they tell about you. It is the skills they suppress in your child, including their capacity to trust their own judgment, to feel and name their emotions, to think independently, to build a life on their own terms, to finance their goals, and to stand firmly on their values.
These are the things that abuse tactics break down in a person. A child who cannot trust themselves, cannot reason for themselves, and cannot survive without the alienator’s approval is a child who stays in close proximity for a long time.
This leads to either your child staying enmeshed or breaking free on their own accord. Alienated children, especially adults, may reach a breaking point due to a consistent violation of a boundary, like interference with marital affairs or with their children. That may lead them to walk away from the alienator, but that is not guaranteed.
What that means is your cultivation work has a dual purpose.
Every skill you build in your child is simultaneously a gift to their future self and a direct counter to what the alienation is taking from them. You are not just raising a child. You are consistently building and shaping the person they need to become to undo the damage of the alienation and to eventually walk away from the abuse.
Montessori’s prepared environment was only as good as the prepared adult who built and maintained it. She was explicit about this. The child’s environment reflects the inner state of the adult who constructed it. An anxious adult builds an anxious environment. A reactive adult builds an unstable one. So, preparing the environment begins with preparing yourself.
For the alienated parent, that means two things specifically.
Your grief needs somewhere to go that isn’t toward your child.
The loss you are carrying is not like ordinary grief. It does not have a clear endpoint. The pain is chronic and ambiguous, reopened by every missed holiday, disrupted visit, court date, and ignored phone call or text. Since the wound never fully closes, it requires ongoing infrastructure to process. This can take the form of a therapist, a peer group, or a personal ritual or practice that carries the weight of it outside your relationship with your child.
This is not optional.
A parent who has not built that infrastructure will expose their child to their grief, and it bleeds into the environment. The child who feels like a burden to their parent’s pain cannot also feel like the free recipient of their parent’s cultivation. Those two experiences cannot coexist.
The prepared parent has somewhere to put the grief. That is what makes the space around the child safe and peaceful enough to grow in.The second thing is you have to make peace with having no control over the timeline.
Every section that follows requires playing the long game. The parent who is auditing every visit and communication for signs of progress, who needs to see evidence that the reunification is moving at their expected rate, and who is engineering moments rather than being present with them, is operating from a place of scarcity, and your children will feel it.
The prepared parent has accepted (not out of resignation but with conviction) that the timeline belongs to the child and that a visit where nothing notable happens is fine. If the child leaves slightly calmer than they arrived, it is not a failure. The prepared parent holds the conviction that a decade of slow, consistent cultivation is more likely to produce a reunion than hopes for a silver bullet. The meaning of the work is in the consistency of doing it, not in the immediate outcomes they can measure.
This is the hardest inner work on this list. It requires the parent to find something sustaining in the cultivation itself, independent of results. The parent who finds that sustaining thing becomes someone the child can eventually return to. The parent who cannot find it burns out, grows bitter, or becomes the kind of parent who makes the child feel responsible for their recovery.
Here are the nine things worth cultivating in your child through your interactions.
1. Emotional Preservation
The alienating environment erodes your child’s inner life through the cumulative pressure of performative loyalty, the need to suppress their own perceptions, and having to manage the alienating adult’s emotional state before their own. Over time, a child in that environment learns that their feelings are inconvenient, their instincts are unreliable, and their inner world is not safe to inhabit.
What you are building against that is a child who still has access to themselves.
This does not require therapy language or structured emotional exercises. All you need to do is, when your child is with you, treat their emotional experience as real and worth something. When they are angry, you don’t talk them out of it. When they are confused, you don’t rush to resolve it. When they are sad, you sit with them in it rather than trying to cheer them up.
It is one thing to ruminate on your emotions (staying in repetitive loops of negative emotions). But understanding the chain of events from what caused those emotions to what happened afterward, and the reason behind them, is empowering.
I ran away as a child in a moment of anger. I was not angry because of being told that I couldn’t go to church. I was angry because I had been repeatedly dismissed and told what was true, despite what I could clearly see myself. My alienator was so fixated on what she wanted that she relied on domineering tactics to get it. Even the softest people get pushed into a corner where they want to fight back. Understanding that nuance in your emotions is critical to your success as an adult and, for alienated children, to their capacity to break free.
Ask them questions that probe more deeply into what they are feeling to help them process their internal thoughts and emotions. This will likely be the first time they have even had the chance to do so.
This takes a great deal of practice and is an excellent place to leverage labels and mirrors, which I speak of in detail in my article: How to Talk With Your Alienated Child When They Don’t Want to Talk to You.
There is nothing more disarming to someone screaming in your face than to look back calmly and to politely ask a pointed question. And it also works well in less hostile situations.
A practical way to start is to ask what and how questions, and then you wait.
What was the best part of your week? What was the hardest? What are you thinking about lately? How did you handle it?
Lead with curiosity and genuine interest. The child who has spent the week/month/year being told what to think, feel, and believe will notice, even if not consciously. There is also a real possibility that they think you are digging for information to use against them, because that is what they are used to. If they react defensively, the counter is to go first and model what emotional groundedness and stability look like
Share something real about yourself. Keep it contained and safe enough that it wouldn’t damage you if the alienator heard it repeated (best to assume they will).
If they shut down when you ask about their week: “That’s okay. Honestly, I had a hard week too. I was dealing with something at work that kept nagging at me, and eventually I realized I just needed to sit with it for a while before I knew what to do. You don’t have to talk if you’re not ready.”
If they say they are not thinking about anything: “I get that. Sometimes I don’t know what I’m thinking either until I’ve had some quiet. When I was your age, I used to go outside when I needed to sort things out. Does anything like that help you?”
If they seem sad but won’t say why: “You don’t have to tell me what’s going on. But I want you to know I’ve had days where everything just fell apart, and I couldn’t do anything about it. You just put one foot in front of the other and keep moving forward. And I am always here if you want to bounce ideas off me.”
If they are visibly angry and you don’t know why: “I’m not going to ask you to explain it. I’ve been that kind of angry before. Some days you’re not even sure where it’s coming from. You’re not in trouble for feeling angry here. What would help you feel better?”
Now, let’s also address the real constraints here. The alienator does not need to be in the room to disrupt your communication with your child. A phone call mid-visit, a text loaded with accusations about you, or a child who arrives already dysregulated from a conflict before they walk in your door…these are not accidents. They are all forms of interference intended to thwart your reconnection efforts.
When that happens, your first job is not to reconnect, but to regulate yourself and let the child decompress without an agenda. The parent who can sit with a dysregulated child provides stability, which the alienating home almost never offers.
The alienator’s disruption tactics work because they are designed to make you react, compete for the child’s attention, express hurt at being shut out, and push for connection when the child is unavailable. This is a mind game, and the way to win is not to play.
For more info about mind games, read my article Deconstructing Mind Games: Part 1
The visit where nothing notable happens, but the child leaves calmer than they arrived is not a wasted visit. That is a small win that, over time, compounds with other wins that lead to the big win.
Your goal is for your child to trust their own experience because that is the foundation on which every other item on this list depends.
2. Critical Thinking and Epistemic Autonomy
The alienator’s control depends on one thing above all others…the child’s inability to trust their own reasoning.
Every mind game, rewritten memory, and pre-packaged conclusion handed to the child is designed to make them a receiver of reality rather than an examiner of it. A child conditioned to accept what they are told without question is not just easier to control, but they are also vulnerable to every manipulative relationship they will encounter for the rest of their life.
But here is where parents need to be careful.
Attempting to build critical thinking by engaging it directly around alienation is a mistake. That is the one territory where the child’s defenses are highest, and the emotional stakes are most dangerous. A child in a loyalty bind who feels their perceptions of the alienator are being questioned will not experience it as an invitation to think. They will experience it as an attack. The conversation escalates, the child dysregulates, and the parent has confirmed every warning the alienator planted.
You build this skill elsewhere, especially with smaller issues.
You build it by watching a movie together and asking them what they thought of it. When they get a bad grade, and you ask what they think went wrong before offering your own suggestions. When they have a conflict with a friend, and you ask what they think the other person was feeling. When you share an adult decision you made and walk them through how you got there, including where you were uncertain.
You are building the habit of examining. The child who has practiced that habit across a hundred low-stakes moments will develop a muscle they can use toward their own life.
This is very much a situation of giving a person a fish; you feed them for a day, but if you teach them to fish, you feed them for a lifetime.
The alienator tends to reward certainty and punish doubt. A child who questions anything in the alienating home quickly learns that uncertainty is dangerous. So your role is to make uncertainty safe and to model not knowing, to say “I’m not sure. What do you think?” without it becoming a crisis.
3. Physical and Mental Health Baselines
Emotional regulation, clear thinking, and the capacity to handle stress all run on a biological basis. Sleep, movement, and nutrition are foundational for everything we do as human beings. A child who has learned to maintain that baseline has a resilience resource that travels with them into any environment, including one they cannot control.
The alienating home is often chaotic in ways that impact their physical health. Irregular sleep, poor nutrition, sedentary habits, pornography, high amounts of screen time, and chronic stress are common in high-conflict households. Late nights, unrestricted screen time, and permissive routines are not just lifestyle differences. A child who has unlimited freedom at the other home will resist any structure you introduce, and they will tell you so. The comparison will be made explicitly and often.
Do not take the bait.
Your home has a culture, and culture is not enforced. You inhabit it. You cook because that is what happens here. You go to bed at a reasonable hour because that is what this family does. You go outside because that is part of being in this space. You do not negotiate these things as if they are up for debate, nor do you justify them defensively when the child pushes back.
When the child says, “But at mom’s/dad’s, I can stay up until midnight,” the answer is not an argument about what the other home allows. You hold firm to your standards and say, “That’s her house. This is ours.”
But what about the child who rebels outright? Here, the mistake is to make the rule the battlefield. The child who is performing resistance is not actually fighting your bedtime. They are managing their loyalty. If you fight them directly, you confirm that you are the obstacle. Hold the culture without drama and let reality do the teaching.
Let natural consequences speak. The child who stays up late is tired the next day. Your job is not to say I told you so, but to ask with genuine curiosity: “You seem tired. What do you think is going on? What makes you want to stay up late at night?”
It hands the reasoning back to them, building the habit of connecting cause and effect in their own experience, which is the same muscle critical thinking depends on. Yes, in that moment, they think you don’t understand them. All kids think that. But they will notice that you are not punishing them. Over time, they will make the same mistake again and again until they realize you are letting reality guide them, while you remain the calm, curious adult who helps them make sense of it.
The alienator’s permissiveness is designed to make your home feel restrictive by comparison. The counter is not to relax your standards, but to make your culture warm enough that the standards feel like part of something worth belonging to, rather than rules being imposed on them.
And Montessori’s point about the prepared adult applies directly here. A parent who has not established their own rhythms of physical care cannot model them convincingly. If you are sleeping poorly, not moving, and eating carelessly, your child absorbs that as the standard, regardless of what you say.
The preparation begins with you.
4. Spiritual and Philosophical Grounding
A child in the middle of alienation is not ready to make sense of it. The wound is too close, the loyalty bind too active, and any attempt to frame their suffering at that level will either land as manipulation or collapse into confusion. Do not start there.
So, start with smaller things.
When your child doesn’t make the team, fails a test, loses a friend, has a breakup, or faces something that genuinely stings, help them process with pointed questions.
What do you think that was trying to teach you? What would you do differently? What did you find out about yourself that you didn’t know before?
You are teaching them to find meaning in struggle. The alienating environment tends to reinforce victimhood. The child is taught that difficulty is something that happens to them, that others are always responsible, and that the correct response to pain is blame. Every time you model, taking something hard and finding what is useful in it, you are offering a different approach.
Over time, a child who has practiced finding meaning in small failures builds the capacity to find meaning in large ones. And when they are eventually old enough to examine what happened in their childhood with clear eyes, they will have the internal language to make sense of it rather than be destroyed by it.
The same goes for the alienated parent. If you need a place to start, I recommend my article, Finding Meaning in Alienation When All Hope is Lost.
5. Accountability
The alienating environment teaches children that mistakes are weapons.
The past is cataloged and pulled out at every argument. It is always used against you at the worst possible time. The child learns that to be wrong is to be diminished, that admitting fault invites attack, and that the safest posture is denial and deflection. They will carry that lack of accountability into every relationship they have unless they see something different modeled consistently.
When you make a mistake in front of your child (and you will), own it plainly.
Trust me, it is easier than it sounds. Oops…I made a mistake. Then you move on.
Spill a glass on the counter? Oops… then you clean it up. The moment you say things like, “Oh, I can’t get anything right…” that means you have an authoritarian, judgmental voice in your head chastising you over little things. Yelling, scolding, and threatening all extend the time from the mistake to recovery and don’t measurably decrease the likelihood of repeat mistakes.
No need for theater, excessive self-flagellation, or guilt-tripping that makes the child responsible for managing your emotional recovery.
I got that wrong. I’m sorry. Here is what I should have done.
You would be amazed at how quickly people let go of their anger and move on once the person who made the mistake takes accountability.
On a parental level, this shows the child that accountability and dignity can coexist.
The alienated child will sometimes test this directly. They will provoke, observe whether you get upset, and watch carefully to see whether you take accountability. They may even accuse you of screwing up and name a few “unforgivable sins.” Your reaction tells them whether they can trust you.
For a child who has been taught that mistakes are permanent and defining, watching an adult recover from one with grace is genuinely novel. For them, the accusing and scolding was expected to be a long-winded battle. But if you are quick to take accountability, they won’t know what to do next, save for jumping to the next accusation.
If they do so, that is a manipulative game, and you can pivot to asking them questions about what is really bothering them. If the manipulative behaviors persist, set a boundary and step back.
6. Financial Literacy
Financial literacy is a prerequisite for your child’s independence.
The alienated child who reaches adulthood without financial literacy is vulnerable to financial dependence, a powerful tool alienators use to extend control beyond childhood. The adult child who does not know how to budget, save, build credit, or generate income has fewer viable exits. They stay longer and incur debts to the alienator just to progress in their own life. It is infinitely harder to leave the alienator if they are paying for your living expenses, university tuition, car, recreational expenses, and other basic needs.
A parent who is financially reactive, avoidant, or illiterate cannot model financial competence, regardless of what they tell their child. Which means this item has a prerequisite… You do your own work first.
Get honest about your own financial patterns, where they came from, and what you are actively building. You don’t have to know everything, but showing your child through your example that you are willing to learn and teach them along the way is empowering. You are showing that financial health is a practice and that it is never too late to build it.
You do not need formal money lessons. Read finance books (Morgan Housel’s book The Psychology of Money is a great start), talk to financial planners, and watch free trainings online.
Most financial literacy is about discipline. Don’t spend money you do not have on things you do not need. Look for opportunities to invest money in things that support your life, skills, and assets. Pay down bad debts while increasing your skills in the marketplace.
Financial literacy is also absorbed through exposure and conversation. Let your child see you make financial decisions and explain your reasoning. Talk about what things cost and why. Introduce saving toward something specific early, so that delayed gratification becomes a practiced skill. As they get older, talk about how credit works, what debt with compound interest costs, show them the amortization calendar of your mortgage, the difference between an asset and a liability, HSAs, retirement accounts, and how income compounds when it is managed rather than spent. If you are an entrepreneur, teach them the skills that led you to start your own business.
The alienator’s interference is often financial manipulation. They may spend your child’s money, open credit and loan accounts in their name, withhold support, use money as a means of control, and shape the child’s perception of which parent is generous and which is not. The child who grows up watching financial weaponization without a counter-narrative will internalize it as normal and accept their situation as unchangeable. Do not let that happen on account of their ignorance.
Your home needs to be the place where they see money handled with agency and intention. A child who understands money has choices.
And choices are what freedom is made of.
7. Professional Competency
The goal here is not to steer your child toward a career, but to see what they are drawn to and take it seriously.
The alienated child is often told implicitly or explicitly that their interests are inconvenient, inferior, or wrong. The parent who pays genuine attention to what the child loves and invests time in understanding it is doing identity work as much as career work.
You are signaling to them that they are someone whose interests are worth taking seriously.
If they love drawing, you can find out what people who draw for a living actually do. If they are obsessed with gaming, you talk about the people who build those games, design them, and run the communities around them. If they want to be an athlete, a chef, or a musician, cultivate those passions. Sure, many of these early-career hopes are likely unrealistic and just a phase. You can still engage with that seriously, because the skills you need may transfer to another sustainable career. If your child wants to film movies, encourage it. They may not end up as a film director, but many of those skills do translate to advertising.
A child who develops genuine mastery in the direction of their curiosity has both a vocational foundation and an identity anchor. This pairs well with finance, as money is usually needed to learn the fundamentals of the trade.
Helping them learn skills they deem critical to their interests is a gift no one can take away. The alienator can take away toys, clothes, and handwritten letters and throw them away. They cannot throw away your child’s skills. And deep down, your child will know who taught them the skills they use.
8. Relationship Discernment
Who your child chooses as a partner will be one of the most impactful decisions of their adult life.
The alienated child is statistically at higher risk of repeating familiar relational dynamics because the patterns they grew up in feel normal. Conditional love, emotional volatility, and transactional loyalty can seem like passion or intensity rather than red flags.
Relationship discernment begins with what they observe in you.
A child who watches you accept poor treatment will internalize it as the standard through absorption. What feels familiar feels like love, which means your own relational choices are part of their education. You don’t have to be perfect, but be honest and self-aware.
It can be valuable to say, “I stayed in something that wasn’t good for me, and here is what I learned.” It is ok to reflect on and own the cost of a poor choice. It does not define you. Take accountability and move on. The rest is none of the child’s business.
As they get older, the conversations can become more direct, such as what respect looks like in practice, how power operates in relationships, and the difference between intensity and intimacy. If they are at an age where sexuality is relevant, that conversation belongs here, too. Do you truly think the alienator will give them an honest and empowering discussion about sexual relationships? And trust me, school is unlikely to either.
When I was a child, I was taught everything about sexual biology, but I knew nothing about relationships. There is a huge difference between learning to put a condom on a banana and talking about helping your partner at the most vulnerable levels.
Give your child an honest account of what vulnerability, trust, and physical intimacy look like and why those dynamics deserve the same deliberate attention as any other significant decision.
You can also point to the consequences. Choosing poorly is expensive. A child who enters adulthood understanding that their choice of a marital partner impacts everything in their life, is one who is less likely to marry someone who continues the cycle of abuse or alienation
. Also, a good partner will stand up for them when the alienator is acting abusively.
9. Environment Design
The last thing you are cultivating is the most abstract and, in some ways, the most important.
Your child will eventually leave and go out on their own. When they do, they will make choices (consciously or not) about who surrounds them, where they live, and what they allow into their daily life. Those choices will shape them as powerfully as anything that happened in childhood. The alienated young adult who walks out the door without any framework for intentional environment design often trades one unhealthy system for another.
The child who has been through alienation has had their environment chosen for them their entire childhood. They have had very little practice making intentional choices about who surrounds them and what they allow into their life. When they reach independence, that lack of practice shows up as taking the first available option, doing what feels fun and exciting rather than what is mature, staying in situations longer than they should, and surrounding themselves with people who feel like family because they replicate the original dynamic.
What you are building is the habit of asking: “Is this environment making me more or less myself?”
You model this every time you make a visible, deliberate choice about who you spend time with and explain your reasoning.
As they get older, the conversation can become more direct. What to look for in a community, a city, a workplace, a friend group. How the people closest to you set the ceiling on what feels normal and possible.
As the saying goes, you are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with.
Concluding thoughts
May is a poignant month for me. May 22nd, 2013, is when I left my alienator, which makes this 13 years since I broke free from the alienation. As of posting this article, I have now been free from alienation for the same amount of time that I was alienated.
Another personal win for me is that my younger brother, who was alienated from my mother alongside me, has gotten married. His wedding reception in May will enable us to see my youngest brother, who was alienated from us for 5 years after I left in 2013. I have not seen him in person for 13 years now—the same amount of time my mother hadn’t seen me during our alienation.
While I wouldn’t frame it as atonement, it is hard not to think of it like that. Alienated children don’t quite see the impact of their actions during alienation, but after they see the truth, there is a great deal of guilt involved that leads to over-corrective behaviors and thinking.
As a parent, you can facilitate their healing journey by helping them engage in constructive behaviors while reining in any compensating behavior. You can help by receiving them with patience, naming what you see without judgment, and giving them room to find their footing without the pressure of making up for lost time.
I was lucky. Somehow, I learned these skills (some even from the alienator!), and that gave me the tools to break free. But your child is a unique person who has experienced a far different life than mine. What reached me may not be what reaches them. The timeline that applied to me is not theirs, and the breaking point that moved me will look different for them.
All you can do is keep building a bridge for your child by teaching them the skills to be their own person.
Major Book Update!
After a short hiatus from book writing due to parenting, work, and other things eating up my time, I have gotten back to working on the book.
I spoke to my attorney to get some basic release forms so I can start interviewing experts, reunited parents, and adult formerly alienated children.
For parents who are still actively alienated, I have put together a questionnaire you can complete to support the book's research. The data will be compiled into a research report, and all findings will be anonymized to protect the privacy of the parents and children.
If you are an alienated parent who would like to support the research, you can fill out the survey below. There are two phases. Phase 1 takes about 10 minutes, and Phase 2 takes about 25 minutes. I split them up in case you need more time to complete the survey, since it goes in-depth on specific alienation dynamics. Only one response per person is allowed, as multiple responses would contaminate the data.
Keep in mind that while I will anonymize the findings, specific quotes, trends, or even stories may be shared in the book’s findings.
My goal is to complete the research phase before June, including all SME interviews, so feel free to share the questionnaire link with other alienated parents.
For more information about how the data will be used, please see the legal disclaimer on the form.
Until next time,
Andrew Folkler
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As always, I deeply appreciate your support and am grateful for your feedback as I develop these articles.
Reading this piece I was reminded of a newish book by Trevor Noah that I listened to recently. It is called Into The Uncut Grass. It alludes to the feelilng of powerlessness that children feel. It's hard for kids in general but in situations where the child is put in the middle it must be worse. I cannot comprehend the behavior of adult alienators. I am so sorry that you have that situaion. When I divorced many years ago, we went first to the Pediatrician to ask how we could lessen the impact on our child (nothing really does). I knew the worst thing I could do was to deny my son a relationship with his Dad.
Thank you, thank you for this latest chapter of your work Andrew. Eagerly awaiting the book and various stages that you hit in its writing.