Parental Alienation Memoir Review – A Parent’s Heartbreak
michael jeffries memoirs, The heartbreak of a family: a father’s introduction to parental alienation, describes his transition from beloved father to exiled provider. It’s a painful but gripping read. The book is part ‘Dear Diary’, part window into the therapist/patient relationship, and part scholarly treatise on the various neuroses and personality disorders that led to the living hell Jeffries experienced, and somehow still does. lives.
Like a pointillist painting, where the further back you go, the clearer the image becomes, Parental Alienation is a series of apparently innocent miscommunications or concerns for a child’s welfare; and it’s only when the dots are connected that you see the full picture.
Jeffries went from the American Dream of a wife and two loving children to the nightmare of Parental Alienation, which is a situation in which one parent, usually the mother, actively works to destroy the relationship between the other parent and the child. The once loving son turned on him by an ex-wife whose own fears of abandonment and insecurities destroyed the father-son relationship.
When Jeffries decided it was time to move on from their marriage, he unknowingly triggered his ex-wife’s emotional imbalance, leading her to involve their youngest son in her psychosis. It started when she made the 11-year-old boy sleep in her bed and continued to the point where the father/son bond was strained to the point of breaking.
In harrowing detail, Jeffries presents the progression of his son’s conversion from a loving young man to an emotionally drained teenager who simply cannot tolerate the continued pain of contact with his father. In remarkably clear language, Jeffries explains his son’s transformation and the tactics used by his ex-wife to create the transformation.
By detailing the seemingly innocuous actions of a concerned father, Jeffries is able to connect the dots of how a mother turned her son against his father. He paints a picture of the powerlessness of the judicial system to help him, based on the courts’ inherent bias in favor of the mother, and the difficulty of attacking what appears to be nothing more than a mother’s concern for the well-being of her children. her. No one wants to believe that a mother can be so devious, deceitful, and dangerous, but she can be.
This book is an excellent exploration of the “wonderland” twist that is parental alienation. Lies, deceit, and volcanic eruptions of anger over seemingly minor transgressions—these are the battles in a war with no winners.
For every man who is enduring this hell, for every lawyer fighting against this form of child abuse, and for all therapists who have to treat children with collateral damage, this book should be a first resort in their armamentarium.
In clear, concise language, Dr. Joel Davies and Michael Jeffries explain both the real-world effects and the underlying subconscious motivations of this form of abuse.
These are difficult cases to prove, because on the surface everything appears essentially normal. Only when you connect the dots can you see the whole picture. As stories like Jeffrie’s become public, awareness will rise, and hopefully parents and their children will be able to reunite or, better yet, never be apart.
The book is available at http://afamilysheartbreak.com/