The Hows and Whys of Maternal Alienation
Mothers pour their love into their children. From the moment our eyes meet theirs, we’re swept into the desire to nurture, protect, and provide for the development of our tiny charge. The concept that this minute human being could ever grow up to hate us is so far off the radar screen that it’s just plain unimaginable.
So what interferes with the natural bond that one puts their total faith in? Unless a child is physically tormented on a regular basis, it would seem that nothing could create a rift between a mother and her developing child. And society is all too prone to believe that separations of this kind indicate that the mother must be a heinous horror. It’s one of the reasons that women are all too silent about what actually takes place, and the abject cruelty they’re subjected to by the child’s father.
Nature vs nurture- a child’s development
Our children are not simply clean canvases on which we paint their character. They’re born with brain chemistry and infrastructure that affects their belief systems. And their ability to withstand undue influence is imprinted on them before birth.
Society is not well versed on the fact that psychopaths are born with basic nature that influences their tendencies or that children are at-risk of becoming psychopathic when they have a psychopathic parent. While bonding between mother and child seems to exist when the child is young and dependent, as the child ages, that may change. A child who does not bond based on “love,” but rather out of “need,” is more easily manipulated by external forces. Those forces can easily be someone the child wants to secure favor with, such as their father. Abandonment creates either hatred or longing that motivates the child’s perspective. It has a profound effect on their development.
It’s difficult for sole-support mothers to discern a manipulating motive behind a child’s bond when they’re growing up. Dependency in a child looks like love. It could be, but it may be nothing more than a desire for what the parent provides, and that mindset will become more apparent as they mature and become self sufficient.
Psychopathy’s Influence
Many psychopathic fathers use hostile devices such as their failure to financially support, lying and distortion throughout the legal process, threats of violence or kidnapping, refusal to co-parent in the child’s best interest, bad-mouthing the mother in the child’s presence, abandonment, and more. They can play a cruel game of beat the system over the financial support the child needs. They could simply want to get even with the mother. They could fear that their past misdeeds will be exposed as they move on with their lives….. after all, they can’t have the nasty truth following them around. So they go to great lengths to discredit the mother and shut both her and the child out of their lives.
A mother whose priority is the child may be bullied into the silence necessary to insure their protection. But, the child is deprived the supportive nurture by both parents that would encourage their growth into emotionally intact adults. Children who are financially, emotionally or physically abandoned by a psychopathic parent are at risk to become abandoners themselves, particularly if their own ability to bond is hampered by their genetics.
That is not to say that all children who are alienated are psychopathic, but children who are psychopathic are more readily alienated.
Will love conquer all?
Children will not be children all their lives. Real love between a child and a mother cannot be broken. And a child who is alienated, but truly loves the mother, may ultimately find their way back when the external force that keeps them separated has less influence.
Love, by its very nature, is forgiving. When anger occurs, the basic character of love will enable a separation to be repaired. Even in normal parent/child relationships, there could be moments when the two separate from discord, but their loving concern for each other will enable them to forgive and makeup. This is not true of children who are inherently incapable of bonding. They will find pleasure in inflicting harm and will perpetuate their anger in order to do so.
Because of the information that is now available on the internet, society has become more aware of the facts concerning the creation and existence of psychopathy and sociopathy. Often, when mothers are faced with children who, even upon maturity fail to be motivated by love for them, it’s necessary to recognize the cold fact that the child could be a psychopath. Signs include significant difficulty raising them with childhood episodes of delinquency, animal mutilation, expulsion from schools, gross disrespect for authority, inappropriate impulsivity, rule-breaking, oppositional/defiant behavior, etc.
You can’t live with them, and you can’t live without them!
A rift with an emotionally disordered child can feel like a double edged sword. While having their disturbing behavior out of your life can make you feel safe, the pain of loss is no less heart wrenching. In fact, it may be greater because you recognize they’re unlikely to ever bond.
Just as a husband can’t be cured of his psychopathy, your adult child can’t be cured of it either, and certainly not by you; particularly when their cruelty is directed at you in the most heinous fashion a mother could endure…. their deliberate absence from your life. They simply have no heart, no empathy, no conscience, no caring, and their love for you is as shallow as what you can do for them.
A split with a mature child, one that should know better, tragically succeeds in ripping the bond you feel with them to shreds. But how do you allow someone who deliberately hurts you at your very core to return to your life? Indeed, they are toxic to you. The best you can do is to tell them, “I love you more than life itself, but I’m through playing your hurtful game. So no, you can’t close this rift. Not until you recognize who you are, what you’ve done, and take convincing steps toward change.”
Loving your child should never include subjecting yourself to their intentional harm.
What an important info that most of us attach by love & the disturbed ones attach only by need never by love.
thanks for another great post !
Glad you liked it!
People are often confused by a psychopath’s interest in relationships. They’re confused by the fact that a psychopath can carry out unions for significant lengths of time.
The key to their bonding, however, unlike emotionally intact folks who are capable of love, is more asset driven. Things like wealth, sex, immigration, status, etc., is the glue that binds them to another person.
They’ll play the part as long as they have the need to do so.
I was wondering if women are ever responsible for anything or are they simply agency-less victims?
A single mother raises a child and the child grows up wrong somehow and it simply has to be the fault of the absent father or the father that sees the kid for a day a week or a fortnight…….
Ian-
Abandonment or other abuse by the father has an impact that a mother can’t possibly overcome. While you can do your best to try to counteract the effects, it causes a deep hole in the child’s soul. The mother is simply not the child’s father, no matter how hard they try to fill those shoes. The same would be true in reverse. If a child is abandoned or abused by a mother, it also causes a hole in the child’s soul that a father can’t fill.
Abandonment is a form of behavior that children learn by being abandoned. Turning your back on a parent, alienation, happens because the child has been abandoned or threatened with abandonment by the other parent. It’s not unusual for a child to get angry at a parent, but turning your back on one is quite another thing.
You seem to be grossly underestimating the loss the child endures, day in and day out, and how it effects their behavior and emotional makeup. The relationship between any abandoned or abused child and the custodial parent can be badly harmed by this circumstance, but when the child has the genetics of psychopathy, the end result can be devastating.
As you can see, but seem to have chosen to ignore, Paternal Alienation is not the topic of my post. There are countless websites that deal with Paternal Alienation. Very few that deal with Maternal Alienation. Getting the word out is important.
Say what you will but this to me is simply another attack on men disguised as “but what about the children” and “women = agency-less victim” line of thought that feminists and others have been pushing for years.
Women initiate most divorces, women initiate most physical domestic violence, women are most likely to have a affair.
You think that has no effect?
Yet your story has a distinct and overwhelming female bias as usual, you have men as those who abandon and abuse and women as the helpless victims and while you give a token visa versa comment in your reply to me your entire theme is “poor helpless women abandoned by nasty selfish men” rather than recognizing women have agency and choices that have consequences and they are responsible for those choices and consequences.
I certainly is not all womens fault but as they initiate the majority of domestic problems compared to men they get the majority of the blame for the consequences.
Ian-
This is not an attack on men at all. It’s an alert that there are psychopathic men that abandon their children. And it identifies the harm that’s created by doing so. There are good fathers in the world. There are good men who care for their children, and support their development, even through divorce. They are not what the post is about.
You are showing your bias by taking one specific issue, the abandonment of psychopathic men, and making sweeping, general, derogatory statements about women from it.
Women who raise children on their own are far from helpless. In my own situation, which you would have known if you’d read my book, I worked as many as 4 jobs at one time to provide for my child’s needs. It took time away from providing the nurture that I would have wanted to pass along, but being the sole support to provide for food, clothing, shelter, medical care, education, and other needs was paramount. There’s a reason God conjured up a system where two parents were needed to create a child. And when one abandons the task of raising their offspring, the child looses out. No matter how good a mother or father can be, there are gaps in an abandoned child’s welfare that last a lifetime.
Men struggle to impress the concept of their importance in child rearing in the media. I’m acknowledging that concept, but you consider my doing so negatively. With some people, you just can’t win for losing!
Each couple goes through their distinct issues and making sweeping generalities is foolish. But the “who did what to whom” of their failure as a couple should never result in their failure to parent their children.
Sad and extremely heartbreaking when this happens. Mothers don’t deserve that.