Alienated Maine

One mother. One truth. Many families in Maine.

Maine Laws & Mapping Harm

The Strategies List page on this website provides descriptions of a specific type of post-separation and divorce harm, which is commonly referred to as “parental alienation.” Some of the leading experts in this space, regardless of what they call it, are Baker, Bernet, Childress, and Harman. Please read that page before reading this one. The information aligns directly with behaviors that Maine state law already defines as abuse, both against a partner or ex-partner and against a child. This information also addresses how a child in the middle of this vicious harm is incapable of making a “meaningful preference” in family court litigation, given the strategies used to cause this harm.

What is the solution to this harm? Enforce Maine’s laws. Proper clinical assessment, diagnosis, and treatment by a trained clinical expert in intimate partner violence and coercive control, trauma and trauma-bonding, family systems, and child attachment and bonding.

The U.S. Dept. of Justice Office on Violence Against Women defines Domestic Violence as “a pattern of abusive behavior in any relationship that is used by one partner to gain or maintain power and control over another intimate partner. Domestic violence can be physical, sexual, emotional, economic, psychological, or technological actions or threats of actions or other patterns of coercive behavior that influence another person within an intimate partner relationship. This includes any behaviors that intimidate, manipulate, humiliate, isolate, frighten, terrorize, coerce, threaten, blame, hurt, injure, or wound someone.“

Further, the DOJ OVAW describes Emotional Abuse as “Undermining an individual’s sense of self-worth and/or self-esteem is abusive. This may include, but is not limited to, constant criticism, diminishing one’s abilities, name-calling, or damaging one’s relationship with his or her children.”

Under Maine’s protection-from-abuse statute (Title 19-A §4102), “abuse” includes compelling a person by force, threat of force, coercion, or intimidation to engage in conduct from which they have a right to abstain, or to abstain from conduct in which they have a right to engage. In 2025, the legislature amended this statute to explicitly add “coercion,” broadening the legal definition to include psychological, emotional, or manipulative tactics that restrict a person’s freedom and autonomy without physical force. When an allied parent uses these strategies — limiting contact, blocking or interfering with communication, coercing or forcing the child to reject the other parent, withholding or excluding from school and medical activities and information — these are acts that compel a targeted parent to abstain from their lawful right to meaningfully participate in their child’s life through the use of coercion and manipulation. Experts in this space map alienating behaviors onto the Duluth Model power and control wheel of Domestic Violence, such as emotional abuse, isolation, threats, intimidation, and coercion, describing the very categories Maine’s domestic violence laws are designed to address.

On the child protection side, Maine’s Child and Family Services Act (Title 22 §4002) defines “abuse or neglect” as a threat to a child’s health or welfare by “physical, mental or emotional injury or impairment,” and defines “serious harm” to include “serious mental or emotional injury or impairment which now or in the future is likely to be evidenced by serious mental, behavioral or personality disorder, including severe anxiety, depression or withdrawal, untoward aggressive behavior, seriously delayed development or similar serious dysfunctional behavior.” Dr. Craig Childress’s three diagnostic indicators — suppression of the child’s attachment system, induced narcissistic personality traits, and an encapsulated persecutory delusion for secondary gain— are the kind of induced personality and behavioral pathology this statute seems to describe. He also identifies that this harm forces the child to suppress their authentic self and their feelings. Maine’s own custody statute (Title 19-A §1653) already requires that in domestic abuse cases, court-appointed evaluators must have training in “domestic abuse tactics affecting adult and child safety after separation of the parents.” The alienating strategies the experts working in this space describe are precisely those post-separation abuse tactics.

The evidence is in plain view. It’s in the child’s behavior and presentation, and in the allied parent’s actions and behavior, according to the clinical experts. Harmon advises looking at the timeline and working backward to when it began. What is causing the child’s hostility, resistance, and refusal to bond and engage with the targeted parent, a parent they had a healthy, normal-range loving relationship with prior to the marital split? What is an allied parent actively demonstrating to encourage and support a healthy co-parent relationship? What is an allied parent actively demonstrating to encourage and support a healthy relationship between the child and their other parent?

Clinical experts in this space explain that this is not merely an affinity of a child to one parent and this is not merely a child and a parent having disagreements or conflicts about doing homework, cleaning their room, or similar matters. This goes well beyond an affinity and co-parents having conflicts over parenting styles. It’s an artificially created breach of a child’s biologically hard-wired attachment and bonding system.

“…affinities are commonly seen as preferences, they are not associated with black and white thinking that can be characteristic of polarized children.” (Garber, 2020, p. 394)

Garber, like Childress suggests that clinicians look to the attachment theory as a model to follow:

“Attachment theory presents a model we might emulate. Many of attachment theory’s associated measures are empirically sound and demonstrably reliable with not only excellent discriminant validity, but also impressive predictive validity.” (Garber, 2020, p. 369)

Is Maine’s family court system adhering to the established laws? Do judges, lawyers, GALs, and other family law professionals in Maine’s family courts miss the training needed to identify this harm? Are they dismissing a targeted parent’s legitimate concerns or mislabeling this as mere “high-conflict co-parenting” and “resist-refuse dynamic?” Are they recognizing the power imbalance between the parents? Meaning, one parent is controlling and dominating the parenting situation, while the other parent has lost most, if not all, access to their child and their parental control.

It seems impossible that there is “parent-child conflict” between the child and the targeted parent, because the allied parent undermines the other parent’s role and creates the child’s resistance or refusal to spend time with the targeted parent. In contentious legal proceedings, judges may receive conflicting information and be misled by constructs and instruments that lack reliability and validity. The reasons for this failure may be multiple: perhaps some family court professionals don’t recognize or understand emotional and psychological manipulation, gaslighting, and information control as the forms of intimate partner and family abuse statute already defines them to be; Do Guardian ad Litems and evaluators have training and an understanding in child attachment and bonding issues and personality disorders, as Childress argues is absolutely essential in these cases. The sheer volume and complexity of these family cases, along with high litigation costs, may discourage family courts to default to superficial solutions rather than applying the rigorous assessment that experts like Childress and Harman demand. Are family courts failing to assess both parents and the child and to conduct a careful, thorough review of the situation and historical timeline? The child and targeted parent typically had a strong, healthy bond during the parent’s relationship or marriage. When the family court fails to properly identify and intervene, it appears it is effectively failing to enforce Maine’s own child abuse and domestic violence laws.

Additionally, when a parent suspects this form of harm, these cases must be taken seriously and expedited, according to the experts. The reason, experts say, is that the longer a child is separated from their targeted parent, the more entrenched the rejection becomes. Children have a much higher chance of recovery in milder cases and almost no chance in severe cases, even when they age out and become adults. This is the grim reality, and it will affect a child’s relationships and mental health and well-being across their entire lifetime.

The Folly of The Preference of the Child

Maine’s law (Title 19-A §1653) directs courts to consider, among the best-interest factors, “the preference of the child, if old enough to express a meaningful preference.” The word “meaningful” is doing critical work in that statute, and the research of Baker, Bernet, Childress, and Harman collectively demonstrates that a child subjected to this type of harm is incapable of expressing a genuinely meaningful preference.

Experts like Bernet observes these children parrot borrowed scenarios using the allied parent’s phrases and words, insist unprompted that their views are entirely their own (the “independent thinker” phenomenon), and display a complete lack of ambivalence, meaning they are seeing one parent as entirely good and the other as entirely bad, reveals that what appears to be a child’s “preference.” This is a rehearsed performance of the allied parents’ agenda. Harman and colleagues describe how the allied parent employs psychological manipulation and gaslighting to distort the child’s perception, disrupting the child’s cognitive schema and creating a polarization effect where one parent is idealized and the other wholly devalued. Childress explains the mechanism: the child has been induced into a false “victimized child” role by the allied parent, producing an encapsulated persecutory delusion — a child operating under a delusional belief system is not expressing a meaningful preference; they are expressing a symptom. Baker’s 17 strategies — withdrawal of love, cultivating dependency, forcing the child to choose sides, confiding in the child about adult emotional and relationship matters, and in their parents’ court litigation — document how the allied parent systematically dismantles the child’s capacity for independent thought and authentic feeling about the targeted parent. Maine courts have recognized that the reasons behind a child’s preference matter — that superficial or manipulated reasoning does not constitute a meaningful opinion.

When a child’s stated preference is the product of badmouthing, coercive control, induced delusion, and loyalty bind, as all four professionals describe, that preference is not “meaningful.” It is evidence of the harm itself, and treating it as a legitimate custodial factor rewards the alienating parent’s campaign and compounds the harm to the child.

The long-term harm to children is severe and well-documented. Research and work by experts in this field consistently identify long-term harm to children.

On the U.S. National Library of Medicine website is a paper called “The Impact of Parental Alienating Behaviours on the Mental Health of Adults Alienated in Childhood” (2022) by Suzanne Verhaar, Mandy Louise Matthewson, and Caitlin Bentley. Long-term harms are identified in adult child survivors of parental alienating behaviors, according to their research study’s findings that involved dozens of adult child survivors across eight countries:

Mental Health Difficulties

  • Depression and anxiety (reported by 55% of participants)
  • Personality difficulties, including emotion dysregulation, fear of abandonment, impaired authentic self-identity, and borderline personality disorder (40%)
  • Suicidal ideation from adolescence into adulthood (30%)
  • Self-harm behaviors, including cutting, beginning as young as age 11 (15%)
  • Eating disorders and body image issues (20%)
  • PTSD and complex PTSD symptoms
  • Psychosomatic symptoms such as chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, and cognitive “fog” (10%)

Addiction and Substance Use

  • Alcohol misuse, typically beginning in early adolescence (55%)
  • Cannabis use, including daily dependency (35%)
  • Use of MDMA, methamphetamine, and hallucinogens
  • Sex and pornography addiction (10%)

Emotional Pain

  • Grief and loss — the most commonly reported experience (60%)
  • Shame, guilt, and ongoing confusion about their own reality (45%)
  • Anger and resentment toward the alienating parent (45%)
  • Low self-esteem and feelings of worthlessness (40%)
  • Loneliness and isolation (30%)
  • Deep-seated trust issues
  • Feelings of abandonment and helplessness

Relational and Intergenerational Effects

  • Difficulty forming and maintaining healthy relationships
  • 50% became targeted parents themselves, suggesting intergenerational transmission of parental alienation
  • Attraction to partners resembling the alienating parent in personality and behavior

Harman, Kruk, and Hines (2018) found that this harm constitutes child abuse with consequences potentially more damaging than physical or sexual abuse, including depression, anxiety, addictions, poor relationships, and suicide. Research demonstrates that childhood exposure to this harm affects not only concurrent psychological functioning but also extends into adulthood, manifesting as persistent depressive symptoms and reduced quality of life, along with attachment anxiety, impaired self-esteem, loss of authentic self-identity, and sleep disorders. Baker’s longitudinal research with adult child survivors documents lasting difficulties with trust, self-identity, self-sufficiency, and healthy relationships — harm that carries into marriages, parenting, and professional life. Childress’s framework explains why: when a child’s attachment system is suppressed, and they are induced into a delusional belief system and narcissistic personality functioning during formative years, the resulting developmental damage does not simply resolve when the child turns eighteen. The adult child survivors of alienation carry the deep imprint of having been psychologically conscripted against a loving parent, and they may spend years or decades in therapy trying to identify and sort out their mental health issues and the distortions before they can form healthy relationship bonds of their own.

Be Better, Maine: Every day a Maine family court fails to identify post-separation and divorce coercive control and child emotional and psychological abuse, and take steps to intervene in these adverse behaviors, is another day that abusers get unspoken permission by the state to continue their abuse, because existing laws go unenforced. An innocent child’s healthy developmental window narrows. These children desperately need to be seen and protected.

Relevant Maine State Laws:

See also:

Garber, B. D. (2020). Sherlock Holmes and the case of resist/refuse dynamics: Confirmatory bias and abductive inference in child custody evaluations. Family Court Review, 58(2), 386–402.

Garber, B. D. (2020a). Dynamics, not diagnoses. Family Court Review, 58(2), 368–370.