“The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you are looking for.” ~ Joseph Campbell

If you found your way to this page, there’s a good chance you found it the way I once did. Late, probably. Searching for words for something happening to you and your child that you could feel in your body long before you could name it. And somewhere in that searching, you ran into a contested term: information telling you, with great confidence, that the thing you’re describing isn’t real. “Junk science.” A discredited term. The little bit of ground you’d found disappeared, and on top of your grief, you may suddenly be carrying the task of defending your own reality.

I’m only a Maine mom with lived experience, not a professional. But I’ve spent years inside this, and I want to gently approach that controversial wall, because the confusion it creates hurts us more than it should.

The word and the wound are not the same thing

When people say “parental alienation isn’t real,” they don’t seem to mean that a child can’t be turned against a normal-range loving parent. They may be objecting to a term, its history, and potential for misuse.

The term started decades ago as a “syndrome,” built on shaky claims that have since been widely challenged. Perhaps partly because of that rocky origin, the major clinical manuals, the DSM-5 and the ICD-11, don’t accept “parental alienation” as a diagnosis, and some professionals caution against using the term. There’s also a real and serious concern, raised by domestic violence experts, that the term gets misused in court, flipped around, and aimed at protective targeted parents to discredit their genuine fears. As a mother, I hold that concern with understanding and respect.

The debate seems to be about the term and its misuse, and the unintentional harm it can cause to real victims of post-separation abuse. It doesn’t appear to be a denial that a child can be manipulated into rejecting a parent they love. Safe and Together Institute, an organization strongly opposed to using the term “parental alienation,” describes this in a recent blog post. I encourage you to read it, as well as their website in general. Here’s a quote from that blog post:

“We…refuse to use jargon when discussing post-separation coercive control, court-based abuse, or the pattern of abusive parents alienating protective ones.” -R R Mandel

They, too, acknowledge that the harm is real. They simply use different descriptors.

You don’t need the contested word

You do not need a disputed term to name what is happening to you and your child.

The same manuals that have declined to print “parental alienation” do define child psychological abuse. Maine’s own law, Title 22, references a harm of serious mental or emotional injury. And experts who work in this space, like Dr. Craig Childress, argue that this harm belongs under existing child-abuse diagnostic frames. Others, like Dr. Jennifer Harman, share how these behaviors are a form of coercive control, the same pattern domestic violence experts have long mapped. The experts don’t agree on everything. But they may agree that there’s more than one way to describe a child and the targeted parent being harmed in this way.

That’s why I keep “parental alienation” in quotation marks and try to use it sparingly, so that if a targeted parent in Maine searches for that phrase, they may find their way here. Then I’ll intentionally use other words to identify the same harm. I’ve also created a page that maps this harm onto existing Maine laws. I’m not interested in the debate. I am interested in building awareness and empowering targeted parents in my state.

So why won’t help come?

If it’s describable and it has terms, why is help so slow or not forthcoming at all? The honest answer has nothing to do with whether your child is truly being harmed.

It seems some professionals who study family courts describe a system built to see bruises, where coercive control may get filed as “high-conflict co-parenting,” and a child’s resistance and refusal to spend time with the targeted parent gets labeled as “resist-refuse” or as a parent-child relationship problem. In this situation, the alienating parent may appear calm and confident, and the targeted parent may appear emotionally dysregulated. There is also a child who may assert they don’t want to spend time with their targeted parent, and it’s their own idea. A professional or organization assumes that another is handling the situation. For reasons like these, the targeted parent and child may slip through the cracks.

Some experts say this family harm often begins after separation or divorce, with a very noticeable power imbalance between the two parents. Some say it is a continuation of coercive control, domestic violence behaviors, and power imbalances that had already existed within the relationship or marriage. Clinical and legal experts should take a very careful look at these behaviors and patterns and respond appropriately if they aren’t already. The psychologist Jennifer Freyd has a name for the wound that clinical and family court failures leave: institutional betrayal, the particular grief of being failed by the very professionals and systems you were told to turn to for help. If you’ve felt that, you aren’t alone.

What should keep all of us up at night isn’t just what the systemic failures do to us, the targeted parents. It’s what the failures are doing to our vulnerable children. When the clinical and legal systems are untrained, or they dismiss, miss, or mediate and bargain, when they consider this type of abuse “high-conflict co-parenting” or “resist-refuse,” an abused and silenced child is left inside of it, and the allied parent is emboldened to continue the harm.

No one is coming to help them. I will say that again. No one is coming to help them. Imagine how that may feel deep inside the child’s heart and mind. Some researchers who study the outcomes of alienated children warn of the long-term harm. They share that these children carry anxiety, depression, broken trust, relationship issues, and a fractured sense of self-identity well into their adulthood. Is that what we want for our children? The systems that were built to protect children can, by failing to recognize and address, leave them in harm’s way for years. That is the real emergency and tragedy underneath the terminology controversy.

If you’ve been cut off completely

Some of you reading this live with silence. A child who has cut off most or all contact, who returns little to nothing, who may not even know you are still here, still loving them. That is the grief of an ambiguous loss of your living child. It feels like a death, but they are still out there, unreachable.

I want to share something else with you because I found it helpful. Even when you cannot reach your child, you’ve got inner work to do that is all yours alone to do, and it’s important work. It is the work of finding your own emotional grounding. Find your own healing, so that you do not disappear into the grief cave. An emotionally grounded parent will be what your child needs to come home to, whenever and however that becomes possible, and when they are ready.

A gentle word, if you’ve been doubted

Now, if someone tells you this “isn’t a real thing,” you’ll know it is not the truth of a child being turned against a parent who loves them. Your truth lives, and it is fully intact.

Campbell wrote that the cave you fear to enter holds the very thing you’re looking for. The cruelty of this fight over a term is that it can send a parent deep into a cave of grief and self-doubt at the moment most needed to be steady for a child. Please, try to avoid the grief cave. Instead, enter the inner healing cave. You don’t need anyone’s permission to show up for yourself and do the inner work. You don’t need anyone’s permission to keep showing up for your child, even if from a distance. The inner work you do also benefits your child, who is still in there yet feels safer living beneath a mask.

The controversy over the term will probably outlive us. Your child’s need for you will not wait until it is settled.

With heartfelt care,

A Maine mom

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A small note on the sources: this reflects my own reading and understanding, as a mother, of the work of others, including the Duluth Post-Separation Power and Control Wheel; the DSM-5 definition of child psychological abuse; the child-protection model of Dr. Craig Childress; the coercive-control research of Dr. Jennifer Harman; the custody research of Prof. Joan Meier and the Safe and Together Institute; Jennifer Freyd’s concept of institutional betrayal, which I learned about via Childress’ publicly shared content; and Title 22 of state of Maine law.

I’m a Maine mom with lived experience. I am not a clinical or legal professional.

The Joseph Campbell quotation is from The Hero with a Thousand Faces, a book I highly recommend for families living in this terrible space.