“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 take that wall apart for you, because the confusion of it hurts us more than it needs to.

The word and the wound are not the same thing

When people say “parental alienation isn’t real,” they almost never mean that a child can’t be turned against a normal-range loving parent. They’re objecting to a term and its history.

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 diagnostic manuals, the DSM-5 and the ICD-11, don’t accept “parental alienation” as a formal clinical diagnosis, and some professional bodies caution against using the term. There’s also a real and serious concern, raised by domestic violence experts, that the word 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 respect, not against it.

But here is what seems to survive the battles: the debate seems mostly about the label. It is not a denial that a child can be manipulated into rejecting a parent they love. That harm is real. It simply has other names.

You don’t need the contested word

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

The same manuals that declined to print “parental alienation” do define child psychological abuse, which is harm done to a child through a parent’s conduct. Maine’s own law, Title 22, names this kind of harm as serious mental or emotional injury. And experts who’ve spent careers here point to solid, less-contested ground: some, like Dr. Craig Childress, argue this belongs under existing child-abuse clinical diagnostic frames; others, like Dr. Jennifer Harman, talk about 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, only as a signpost, so that if a targeted parent in Maine searches for that phrase at midnight, they may find their way here. Then I’ll set it down and intentionally use other words that name the same harm. I’ve also created a page where I mapped this particular harm onto existing Maine laws. I’m not interested in the debate. I am interested in building awareness in my state and empowering targeted parents.

So why won’t help come?

If it’s describable and it has names, 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 people who study family courts describe a system built to see bruises, struggling to see a harm that leaves none, where coercive control may get filed as “high-conflict co-parenting,” where the calm parent can look credible, and the targeted, and frightened one may look emotionally unstable, and where one professional or organization assumes another is handling it until a trapped child slips through the cracks. This particular family dysfunction often begins after separation or divorce, with a very noticeable power imbalance between the parents. Clinical and legal experts need to take a closer look at these parts, and take them seriously. The psychologist Jennifer Freyd has a name for the wound this leaves: 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 are not being dramatic, and you are not alone.

The parts that should keep all of us up at night aren’t what these failures do to us, the grown-ups. It’s what they are doing to our vulnerable children. When the legal and clinical systems dismiss or miss this, when they call this type of abuse “high-conflict co-parenting” and seemingly diminish it or walk away, the abused and silenced child is left inside of it, and the alienating parent is emboldened. Imagine how that must feel deep inside the heart and mind of this trapped child? No one is coming to help them. I will say that again. No one is coming to help them. From things I have read, some researchers who study the outcomes of alienated children warn of the long-term harm. These children carry anxiety, depression, broken trust, relationship issues, and a fractured sense of self-identity well into their adulthood. The systems that were built to protect children can, by failing to address or see clearly, leave them in harm for years. That is the real emergency and tragedy underneath all the terrible arguing over the terminology.

If you’ve been cut off completely

Some of you reading this live with silence. A child who has cut off all contact, who returns 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, and because I found it over time, it was necessary for me. Even when you cannot reach your child, you’ve got inner work to do that is all yours alone to do, and it is very important work. It is the work of finding your own stable footing and staying emotionally grounded. Find your own healing, so that you do not disappear into the grief cave. An emotionally grounded parent will be what your trapped 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 what they’re most likely objecting to is a flawed label and its misuse. It is not the truth of a child being turned against a mother (or father) 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 grieving mother deep into a cave of grief and self-doubt at the moment she most needs to be steady for her child. Please, do not go into that cave. You don’t need anyone’s permission to keep showing up, even if only from a distance, even if only in your heart, for your beloved child who is still in there, yet is feeling safer 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 J. Harman; the custody research of Professor Joan S. 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. Again, 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.