The Medea Complex and the Parental Alienation Syndrome
I came across an article about what I think must surely be a phenomena that is massively underreported and probably extremely common on smaller scales. That is the mother's "brainwashing" of children to be against their fathers. How often do mother's co-opt their children to be allies on their sides against their mates? My sense is that it is probably epidemic. As a result of being absent more by necessity, and due to mother's closer bonds to children, enlisting them against their husbands is not difficult but its long-term affect on the emotional development of the child may be responsible for a huge amount of problems in adults mental states.
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http://www.mmpi-info.com/psychology-publications/medea.html
When doing custody evaluations, I am often struck by the frequency in which mothers aggress against their children's fathers by turning their children against him. In the process, they do great harm to their children. As a therapist, I am often struck by the resistance of patients who were brainwashed as children against a parent. I believe that brainwashing by a mother is both more common and more powerful than that of a father, since the child's bond with the mother is more intense and primitive. Such brainwashing and alienation usually leads to a life long problem with establishing and maintaining a healthy intimacy. Their mother's perception and definition of their fathers, if programmed at an early age becomes a core fundamental belief, and if questioned, the person's core sense of reality seems shaken; "If my mother lied to me about my father, then can I trust her love for me?" Thus there is a great deal of resistance to the awareness of having been brainwashed.
Fathers are very important to their daughter's feminine development. Biller's research review (1971) supports that girls who had positive relationships with their fathers were more likely to have satisfying heterosexual relationships. When a mother poisons her daughter's love of her father, she is also compromising her daughter's ability to maturely love any man. The mother is programming her daughter to be her ego extension without a will of her own, and to be with her and no one else, narcissistically bound.
Although both boys and girls are greatly harmed when they are turned against a parent, the harm is often different. Studies indicate that boys suffer the most harm when the boys are stuck with mothers who express hostility towards their fathers- the source of their male identity ( Hodges, 1991; Kelly,1993). This chapter, however, will focus only on the mother-daughter bond in the Parental Alienation Syndrome. Although the daughter's self esteem may not suffer as much as the son's, her ability to deal with separation and mature relationships with men is very deeply affected. Wallerstein's (1989) 10 year longitudinal study of girls from divorced families found that the nature of the mother-daughter relationship, and the daughter's identification with her mother were predictive of the daughters' ability to address the tasks of their relationships with men later on. Daughters who identified with hostile mothers had the poorest adjustment.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Kernic et al., "Children in the Crossfire: Child Custody Determinations Among Couples With a History of Intimate Partner Violence," Violence Against Women, Vol. 11, No. 8, August 2005, 991-1021, 1013,
Kernic et al. from the Harborview Injury Prevention & Research Center in Seattle, studied at divorce cases, including both those with a documented, substantiated, and/or alleged history of domestic violence, and those without. The study found that in 47.6% of cases with a documented, substantiated history, no mention of the abuse was found in the divorce case files. - Id . at 1005.
Kernic et al. found that "the court was made aware of less than one fourth of those cases with a substantiated history of intimate partner violence." -Id. at 1016.
Further, Kernic et al. found that fathers with a history of committing abuse were denied child visitation in only 17% of cases. Mothers in these cases were no more likely to obtain custody than mothers in non-abuse cases. This study found that mothers were "more likely" than fathers to be awarded sole custody, but does not identify what proportion of cases resulted in equal sharing of physical custody (which is available in Washington even when one parent is designated "primary"
. - Id. at 1014-1015.
We do know of many documented cases where abusive.fathers have manipulated the courts, using PAS as a factor, to try to control or continue to abuse their family members.
Yeah because family court is known for being oh so willing to give fathers the benefit of the doubt and stick it to the mothers.
Do you ever stop to read your own propaganda before posting it?
Do you know of any documented cases where fathers involved in divorces with contested custody issues used PAS to try to protect their children from abusive mothers?
Apparently all fathers are abusive or at best indifferent to abuse. Perhaps the reason no father has used this successfully is that it is such a vague and difficult to prove syndrome that it would likely be laughed out of court (if a male brought it up). The mother needs to physically abuse the child severely in front of the judge to have even a fifty/fifty chance of losing custody. So saying she is being emotionally abusive will accomplish exactly nothing.
Now she could always say the husband hit her with no evidence and gain custody immediately . . .
/also you complain that people are ignoring you then admit that you have many people here on ignore so . . . how do you know people aren't responding to you?
an 'echo chamber'.
The sad fact is that to a great many people this is seen as redundant.
Hence we hear about "the good of the mother and child". Never "the good of the father and child". That sentence just sounds weird doesn't it? Why would a father want to be around his child? He must be some sort of pervert or at best he's doing that to harm the mother-child relationship out of spite. (
from me, utter sincerity from others).
It's assumed that mothers A) want to raise their children, B) want to do what is right for their child and C) are always mentally capable doing both A and B.
Which is why the mom has to be something special to lose custody in a divorce. Whereas the dad pretty much has to be a saint *and* hope that the mother physically abuses the child in front of the judge if he's to have any hope of gaining custody.
This would be a great sentiment if women were perfect. Or if motherhood transformed even deeply flawed and selfish individuals in to wise care-givers.
But since women are human and subject to all the flaws that men are that simply means that we're limiting the options of creating a stable home for a child by assuming that the child must go with the mom. If she's the best parent sure. If she isn't then absolutely not.
This would be another area where equality would be seen as quite oppressive to women. Going from 90% or so custody to 50/50 would be considered a major step down by most women I would suspect.
/but I believe there are many people who will never acknowledge this. To say otherwise is to reveal that women are just as flawed as men and that men aren't some horrible threat to be protected from but rather are just people. And women aren't saints to be protected but rather are just people. It goes against too many deeply held views. Let's see if RQ proves me wrong. I'd very much like for her to do so and acknowledge that abuse isn't a male problem. It's a people problem.
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The most worrisome aspect of the legal fight over parental alienation syndrome may be that it divides supporters and opponents along strict gender lines: As a rule, this is classed as a women's sickness alleged by men. Fathers' rights groups are not solely to blame for the fact that an entire "disease" is predicated on the notion that women are lying liars; the inventor of the syndrome can take responsibility for that. But no hypothesis so rooted in gender bias should be credited by medical science. And because evidence of PAS is so frequently offered to counter maternal allegations of abuse, the experts testifying about PAS can be aiding and abetting a system that takes children from abused mothers and hands them right back to abusive fathers. Once again, this doesn't mean that some parents don't alienate their children in a divorce. It means that PAS is now used to discredit women whenever they claim abuse.
Much of the blame for the biased history of PAS can be laid at the feet of its originator, Dr. Richard Gardner, who developed the theory—from his own practice and without clinical studies—of mothers who foster hatred for their children's father as a ''powerful weapon'' to grab custody for themselves. This wasn't a theory born of objective empirical observation. It was a campaign against mothers rooted in the idea that they regularly lie and then "brainwash" their children into lying about paternal abuse. Because of Gardner's gender-freighted conclusions, it was probably inevitable that men, in the form of fathers' rights groups, would seize upon the battle to legitimize PAS. One of its most famous spokesmen became Alec Baldwin, who wrote practically a whole book on the subject in 2008, arguing paradoxically that corrupt judges and the courts have too much power over custody disputes and that by recognizing PAS, the courts could make the whole child-custody process more fair. (Here is Baldwin describing PAS as something women mainly do to men.)
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Gardner's long-term scientific credibility was not helped by some of his kookier pronouncements about incest ("intrafamilial pedophilia … is widespread and ... is probably an ancient tradition"
, or pedophilia ("It is of interest that of all the ancient peoples it may very well be that the Jews were the only ones who were punitive toward pedophiles." . But he still managed to become the David Barton of child-custody law, having written more than 250 books and articles, cassettes, and videotapes (often self-published) and testified as an expert in approximately 400 cases in more than 25 states.
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That's what makes the current debate over inserting PAS into the DSM-5, which has been going on for years, something of a red herring. It almost doesn't matter. Nobody really believes it's a scientific theory anymore, and Gardner has been all but discredited where it counts. That's what worries Meier most of all: "Courts and experts have stopped talking about parental alienation syndrome and started talking about parental alienation," she says. "By dropping the word 'syndrome' they purport to just be describing a behavior; and that's harder to challenge as inadmissible, even though Parental Alienation is used virtually identically to PAS, with virtually identical quasi-scientific claims and prescriptions." Back when it was a matter of science, opponents of PAS could advance arguments about admissibility and scientific legitimacy. Now it's a conclusory legal term that can barely be refuted.
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But this is just more liberal / progressive nonsense, I'm sure. Easily ignored or dismissed. Right, guys?
In all honesty, it is so clear to me that this "behavior" (drop the silly overblown term "syndrome" exists, that I was looking for a way to bring the "issue" to this group.
Failing to write a long treatise on the subject, I thought I might take the shortcut of trying to see if the issue had been addressed somewhere on the intertubes and I foolishly fell for the appeal to authority gobbledygook in an attempt to bring the important phenomenon to light.
I DO think the struggle between parents for the emotional support of the children almost ALWAYS falls in the direction of the mothers co-opting the children against the Dads (rightly or wrongly) and that is really what I wanted to discuss.
