 LikeLike Reply Anonymous says:  00 Apr 0000 at 0:00 pm An excellent article Karen. So much so that I don't know which bit to reply to and don't want to bore everyone with screens and screens of ramblings. I've not seen our three girls (now aged 00, 00, 00) since the beginning of December 0000. They walked out and returned to their mother's house when I tried to get them to go Christmas shopping for my side of the family and, after three years of going through the courts, I concluded that "doing the right thing" with the system was never going to succeed compared to the psychological manipulation they were experiencing and stepped back. I think you have it absolutely right that neither parent is totally right or totally wrong. With the benefit of hindsight I see many, many mistakes I made along the way and the main one was going to court to pursue my ideal of shared parenting because that was effectively a declaration of war as far as their mother was concerned - she was the only parent they needed. If I had had the emotional intelligence to understand the situation I should have praised their mother to the hilt because what she craves is attention and approval - and was getting it from her friends by playing the heroic single mother, protecting *her* girls against their abusive, dictatorial father. I should have known better because I was well aware of the situation when we were married and it is worth recapping that... While we were together she first appeared to be the perfect partner; I was recently separated from my first wife (reasonably amicably) and was sharing equal residence of my son. She wowed my entire family with how enthusiastically she took on a step-son but within a few years had excluded his mother (and, to my shame, I let it happen because I let myself believe she was no longer interested in him). She took redundancy and became a childminder after our first daughter was born, but not just any childminder... the first in the county to achieve a quality certification in childminding and managed to balance the demands of looking after other people's kids alongside ours. Everyone said how amazing she was. She was also running my son's beavers pack, playing organ in the village church, singing in her work choir (having returned to work after our youngest was born), cooking meals for the sick in the village, chairing the playgroup committee... but at the same time some cracks started to appear. There were feuds that I never really understood; initially with a couple of other childminders in the village, then she fell out with the vicar. To be honest I didn't pay it a lot of attention but then my mother dared question her parenting and all hell broke loose! Essentially my mum was blacklisted and not allowed to see my son or our girls. I was told that if I took them to see their Nan behind her back then "she wouldn't be there when I came back" and I spent the next five years trying to bridge an impossible gap, and my Mum trying to understand what she had done wrong and find a way to apologise. We split up after I found a secret email account. That revealed a Walter Mitty character: in some conversations she was complaining about how hard it was to be a christian when married to me (having to lock herself in the bathroom to pray and read her bible), in the next conversation she was sharing explicit sexual fantasies with work colleagues, in the next inventing stories of abuse to a friend who ran the police domestic violence unit. But the common thing about all these conversations was they were getting her attention and praise. Similarly, anyone in the real world who challenged her or threatened to expose her fantasies was totally ostracised. I could go on, but the issue I'm trying to raise is to what extent are these common warning signs of alienation and what can be done to deal with the issues before it gets to the stage that the marriage breaks down? We did try Relate at one stage but that just papered over the cracks and let us limp along for a few more years, but I had no idea of the storm that would be unleashed after we split and (in her eyes) I challenged her authority as a mother by daring to want to continue to be a hands on father. There is no way she would ever go near your clinic because the last thing she wants is someone who might see through the charade. The well meaning but inept mediators we did see fell for her stories hook line and sinker. Now my fear (or is it hope?) is that one of our daughters will get to an age and maturity when they see through her. What happens if they challenge her? My hope is that they will return to me, but my fear is that they will feel unable to do so. When we were splitting up I remember them saying to me "Mummy is telling lies about you" and I told them not to worry about it because people say silly things when they are upset. Two years later they couldn't conceive of Mummy being anything other than perfect and me being anything other than horrible. LikeLike Reply woodman0000 says:  00 Apr 0000 at 00:00 pm 