When a clingy, co-dependent, and or socially anxious and insecure Step-Parent strives to alienate children and grandchildren from biological parents it’s Narcissistic Abuse, plain and simple. Do not spend another moment of time wondering if Parental Alienation by a Step-Parent is inappropriate for them to strive to create as an outcome between any age child and their biological parent — it definitely is.
Alienation of Affection and of Parental Authority takes time, Machiavellian action, and a gross display of underparenting of the child targeted for social and emotional acquisition like an object. Children of divorce are At Risk for Life of mental health issues and social disadvantage without a Step-Parent striving to place them in further emotional and mental health forms of harm’s way — especially if their motives are to socially advantage themselves at the expense of the offspring and past romantic interest of their current held hostage or successfully manipulated and captured spouse.
People who seek to alienate the affections of others or to triangulate other parties to estrange the relationship while shaming are of one breed only of neurotypical personality. All meet diagnostic criteria for high levels of Malignant and Somatic Narcissism and implied forms of socially violent psychopathy.
When an otherwise healthy Step-Parent enters into a situation where children or a child of their new love interest is being abused, neglected, or mistreated by a birth parent already estranged from their mate, the smartest thing they can do is to set and enforce healthy boundaries first with their mate. Step one is letting everyone know in no uncertain terms that disputes between the ex of the love interest and with the step-parent should never be functionally allowed to socially happen.
What does that mean? It means a Step anyone stepping into someone else’s pre-existing social life and family has no earthly right to allow their current mate to do things like trash talk the ex or to place them in a position where they are expected to win children’s affection.
A biological parent of a child — male or female as the authority figure and genetic code provider — is not sacred in the eyes of most humans for no reason. A biological parent insulted about things like looks, social status, or character by a Step-Parent with a mobbing co-parent does — whether they intend to or not — incredible harm to the child’s self-esteem and sense of whether or not their own DNA is trustworthy.
A parent who abused, mistreated, abandoned, or who otherwise shirks their parental responsibility caretaking is the most likely to lose custody when and if a Guardian Ad Litem and or a judge gets involved in a custody battle. The more High Conflict Divorce the records are and show one co-parent to be in the systematic habit of striving to make life miserable or in some way terrifying or emotionally and financially duress-producing for others, the more likely the individual is to routinely gaslight their new mate into believing they are not at fault for losing primary custody of their offspring in order to win their esteem while blame shifting the responsibility for their personal moral and physical failure with their child or children onto the discard pile or Rejected Suitor creating ex mate.
Step-Parents and love interests need to realize if they have been targeted for Love Fraud and turned into a symbolic representation of a weapon that your mate uses to covertly emotionally and/or to overtly psychologically assault whoever rejected them.
Co-parents who abuse one another are awful. But a co-parent who abuses their ex, loses custody of their child and or children, abandons their mate and their family responsibility to co-parent as well as the little or littles, then uses gaslighting to con a stranger into abusing and mistreating not only the youth battled over but their former love interest who is the primary custodian of a child for the sin of rejecting them socially or romantically is such extreme Narcissistic Abuse even Dante was not aware such betrayal of hospitality existed when he wrote The Inferno (his seminal Forensic and Social Psychology infused fictional work).
If a Step-Parent walks in and saves the day for a child or for siblings of divorce, understanding that you are never the biological parent is key to creating your own emotional familial boundary. An adult who steps in to do the everyday drudge work of child-rearing without obligation is technically a hero until the moment they tell a child that their parent is [insert list of whatever litany causes the child to feel ashamed of their personal at least 50 percent of their DNA.]
Imagine being a child told your mother is ugly, sexually repulsive, a danger to the child, and to be socially mocked, publicly humiliated at every opportunity, and mobbed by family and the Step-Parent’s friends while the Step-Parent makes the lowest blow and ad hominem attacks on the co-parent of their mate’s child that they impulsively feel like blurting or they daydream up on the fly to ass into the socially violent bullying.
Imagine how SHAMING, how HURTFUL, how HUMILIATING being forced to sit there and to endure. Worse, if their non-abusive co-parent is nice. Agony if the person who married that Step-Parent was an Abuser during the child’s memory of the marriage followed by abuse and Deadbeat underparenting of the child during any time immediately or long term following the familial separation.
Imagine what it must feel like to hear that your mother or father is essentially genetic scum from a Step-Parent, from a toxic Grandparent, or from one of their Alienating successfully recruited Flying Monkeys. Imagine knowing that 50 percent of your DNA is that person — and that the people who claim to love and to care for you who you (as a child) are supposed to trust think so low of your genetic code and family unit they refuse to stop using their words to shun, shame, insult, and to harm.
Imaging the core nature of a Co-Parent who would allow or would tolerate a parent of their offspring being socially attacked in such a child and family unit destroying manner.
Imagine what kind of person would join in with the mobbing, bloodlusting to feed their own emotional hedonism and ego at the direct and indirect immediate and long-term expense of the child, of that child’s eventual mate or mates, and of the child’s children and grandchildren who will be personally and professionally influenced by the character, disposition, and health of their ancestry.
Imagine the stupidity of a person who thinks because they provide care and affection for a child that the child would somehow benefit from having LESS love or affection from or for an additional person — especially for a birth parent. People with Cluster B personality types cannot pass an empathy brain scan for complete neurological health; understanding if you allow that person a voice when raising a child or when socially approaching others like exes that they will do and say whatever it takes to sever other people’s affection while seeking to dominate and to sabotage and take over the relationship.
Alienators are parasitic in their thinking as well as in their choice of socially competitive behaviors. People striving to grow a family with love are collaborative.
One can tell the difference between a healthy Step-Parent infused family and one that is faltering by:
A) How the co-parents interact in private
B) Whether the co-parents are raising the child or children together or if they are forced due to one or more person’s toxic behavior to Parallel Parent
C) Whether or not a child has been abandoned by one or more of their birth parents
D) How the NCP (non-custodial parent) and Step-Parent and any of their kids or family members are treated by the Custodial Parent with regard to things like familial inclusion with adults as well as with kids during everyday activities, holidays, and special events
E) How the NCP speaks to and about the CP [Custodial Parent] in their own life to other adults as well as to or in front of the kids
A Step-Parent striving to alienate a child from a parent will do very specific things such as:
- deride the Co-Parent while praising an abusive or neglectful spouse
- strive to rewrite the family history related to divorce
- strive to rewrite the history of the child’s life experience or to minimize trauma exposure or neglect in order to pretend reality and the child’s mind and life doesn’t matter
- seek to get the child to fear they are not safe or socially esteemed by their OTHER co-parent, by the Step-Parent, and by that peer group’s society unless they join in on the abuse, mocking, and mistreatment of the person who gave them half their DNA
- will interfere with every visitation, phone call, or communication attempt between the co-parents
- Seeks to disturb or dominate every conversation or interaction between the child and the adult who the toxic Step-Parent claims is somehow their new right to monopolize
- Strives to replace the discard pile mate in the eyes of the family and targeted society while dehumanizing the ex profoundly and acting as if they are somehow erased from the child’s lifetime biology
There’s no excuse for enabling Parent Abuse, meaning the abuse or mistreatment of any child guardian or caregiver. People seeing the red flags of someone trash-talking the co-parent of a love interest are right to be seriously concerned that the personality trait they are seeing is socially destructive to everyone involved and is likely to do long term as well as short term multigenerational damage to things like family finances, family honor, and group as well as to individual health.
Stress illness caused by a child being exposed to an Alienator is likely to show on a brain scan and on medical tests in the bodies of children and of the targeted co-parent. The Step-Parent who plays with other people’s lives, time, and emotions in a caustic manner is technically at legal risk of being held in the 21st century as the one who is socially responsible for not only grossly offending and estranging a co-parent from their parenting mate but who also is financially responsible to cover the cost of the child and former love interest’s medical stress illness and therapy bills.
A healthy Step-Parent is an ADDITION to a family unit — never a subtraction or some kind of replacement or distraction. A loving, kind, and socially trustworthy person will place the long term needs of a child with regard to psychology over the short term pleasure of acting as a Social Predator to do something to cause stress or toxic shame in the life of another.
Granted, some parents who are Cluster B will see any non-Cluster-B person as a Social Competitor who is trying to somehow steal the affection of a child who spends time in their company or care. We say, as Narcissistic Abuse recovery experts, that if a parent starts squawking like that, it’s time to call for a Guardian Ad Litem to be put in place representing the child’s interest immediately and decreasing communication between parties to neutral drop off and pickups for visitation and to in writing (email) communication is recommended — no text, no more phone calls, and never using the child or children to pass messages or letters or notes between the co-parents.
Don’t fool around trying to force square pegs in round holes. If one co-parent was being abused and was forced to seek a divorce and ended up with custody, don’t let someone acting like a Love Fraud Predator to save their own face con you into believing it’s in any way moral or appropriate to recruit you to help shun, harm, or to humiliate or to win your own children’s affection using smear campaigning tactics to distress a former mate.
Your child is watching and listening and learning how the most important people in their natural-born lives speak to and about one another, noting that every word said about a parent is actually about at least half of the child’s personal LEGACY FILES for ancestry and all they will ever be able to obtain for genetics.
Step-parents who routinely encourage their mate and their ex to co-parent their children alone while encouraging children to love and to respect the differences between parents and households as well as from their own tend to develop lifetime, loving relationships with not only the child or children but with the person who made them with the mate.
When an incoming love interest strives to use their position in life to make their mate’s life better, that includes making sure that their children and ex are treated with respect and in a position of honor. Not to fan the ego of the child or the divorced ex, but to allow what was wonderful about the union and to make it a feature of what the Step-Parent praises and encourages the child or children to focus on and to remember regardless of whether or not their parents are married, ever were, or if the family still lives under the same roof together.
If a new love interest who clearly does not have custody of a child starts to trash talk their ex and to give every excuse why they personally are not doing things like exercising their rights to visitation, they’re not making routine daily or weekly hello phone calls, they are not participating actively in the child’s care or education, and they’re not meeting financial obligations court-ordered and PRN as life necessities for the care of their child and their ex dictates, realize the person is showing massive red flags that they — not the partner they badmouth and strive to harm in other people’s eyes — has a Cluster B disposition.
Any form of serial cheating or physical violence listed in the divorce papers is not only likely to continue as the Abuser ages but will be dished out as pattern behavior enabled by the incoming Cheerleader jockeying for the role of Alpha replacement (technically Beta) Abuser Enabler. Keep that in mind, Steps, before you go running your mouths about how wonderful your new mate is while they are in the Love Bombing phase of your relationship… if only to save face for yourself in the eyes of people who have already been victimized by the person peddling the same “poor them” shtick.
As for the parent involved with a Step-Parent alienating? Tell them to stop.
If they refuse, document the trauma exposure for the family members and the child or children as well as the impact the meddling and visitation interference has or had on you personally and on the quality of relationship with your ex. The right only response in the case where a Step-Parent or Co-Parent is trashing the other is to immediately go full stop No Contact and to end the secondary (obviously abuse riddled) relationship.
NOT to enable a Social Predator — a Stranger or Cluster B person with no knowledge of your past to compromise your present while robbing multiple generations of a future of familial as well as social and genetic health.
Parental Alienation does medical harm and social memory impression damage to all parts and sides of targeted children’s genetics.
Let a mother or father teach their own offspring about what it means to be genetically a part of a family while ensuring that the children and adults have a collaborative win-win mindfully created pro-social familial memory. How someone does or does not choose to do things like keeping their home (within reason), what time they do or do not go to bed, how someone plans to spend the day with their family, or what they are or are not doing with their new love interest is not the business of an ex or of any person who has a nefarious intention to be gathering that kind of personal information about the private life of somebody else during any period when a child is in their care fostering their own cultural identity genetic-based memories with their parent and with the people who that person thinks of as significant.
Step-Parents, stop trying to force your way into another person’s private life — and by that we mean not only the ex of the person who you are married to now or intimate with regularly and dating but into the private life your love interest is entitled to have and to keep in the present and with the people they are by blood obligated to spend the rest of their natural-born lives striving to care for and about in a healthy manner for the highest and greatest good of all children and grandchildren as well as for themselves.
People have a right to co-parent without interruption and with dignity.
Letting both co-parents decide what is or is not right for their children and for their family with your needs as a Step-Parent included in the consideration but not overriding the parental rights of the other parent and household with all social network extensions included is a mindful way to approach any marital rift or romantic debacle that left children in the wake of the adult’s emotional hedonism or adult personal problems.
