Don’t call her your mother - Village Magazine

December - January 2017 6 3

“D

ON’T HUG Your Mother”

This is the order our father gave to

my brother JP and me as we were on

our way to visit our mother. It was just over a year

after our parents had separated. We were ten

and twelve years of age.

My father’s demands were the beginning of a

process whereby he systematically forced my

brothers and me to be hostile to our mother. It

soon escalated to the point where we were being

banned from seeing her and shortly after that we

were banned from even speaking to our mother

on the phone or even referring to her as our

mother. Failure to comply with our father’s

demands resulted in punishments, both physi-

cal and psychological.

The result: we did not have any contact with

our mother for eighteen years.

When we looked back on our childhood as

adults, we thought that what had happened to

our family was rare and we held this belief until

quite recently. We were midway through writing

a memoir about the experience when, curious to

find out if there were any other books similar to

ours, we searched a few terms in Google and

made a discovery. To our amazement, we discov-

ered that our plight was not an exceptional case

at all; rather it was happening regularly in Ire-

land and worldwide.

The name of this epidemic is ‘Parental Aliena

tion’. A prominent American clinical and research

psychologist and author, Dr Richard Warshak,

defines it as “the process, and the result, of the

psychological manipulation of a child into show

ing unwarranted fear, disrespect or hostility

towards a parent and/or other family members”.

It is not defined as a condition by, for example,

the World Health Organisation.

We continued to research and we found web

sites, forums and Facebook groups for Parental

Alienation with many thousands of members.

The majority of the members are parents who

assert that they have been alienated from their

children whom they love and long to see. We

knew that our mother felt this pain for eighteen

years so we could sympathise with these people.

Once we became aware that Parental Aliena-

tion was continuing to damage children’s lives

today, we became determined do something. We

wanted to finish our book and get it in the public

eye to show the detrimental effects of Parental

Alienation, especially given the scant coverage

the problem received in Ireland.

The court services tell us that out of the 5,700

custody and access applications made in 2014,

a total of 2,016 applications were rejected. It con-

cerns me that some of these applications were

likely to be made by parents of children who were

being manipulated and brainwashed like myself

and JP had been. We were coached by our father

to tell a solicitor, judge or psychologist that we

didn’t want to see our mother.

There has been recent legislation in light of

the Children’s Referendum (in 2012) which

alludes to Parental Alienation. The Children &

Family Relationships Act was enacted in January

2016. It improves upon the old legislation in that

it states that the Court shall facilitate that the

views of a child are not borne out of undue influ-

ence of a parent.

The Law Society submitted recommendations

in anticipation of the bill, referring directly to

‘Parental Alienation’, stating that, “the Court

may find it very difficult if as a result the child is

refusing all contact and seems convinced that the

other parent poses a danger”.

I commend the Law Society for this but I

believe the legislation alone doesn’t tackle the

problem adequately. In my opinion, proper train-

ing is required for solicitors, judges and child

psychologists to understand and identify Paren

tal Alienation.

The Irish Parental Alienation Awareness Asso-

ciation has dramatically called for alienation to

be made an indictable offence. Andries van

Tonder, its secretary, says that in Mexico, the

parent encouraging alienation can be impris-

oned for 15 years. “It is a serious form of child

abuse to turn a child against a parent”, he

maintains.

In April 1993, when my brother JP was asked

by our father’s solicitor how seeing our mother

would affect him, he listed off our father’s words,

even copying the numeric sequence our father

had applied: points one, two and three. JP spoke

like an adult, yet he had just turned fourteen.

Speaking the words of the alienator parent is a

characteristic of Parental Alienation that was

identified in the early 1980s. It appears this

solicitor didn’t identify that in 1993. Without

proper training regarding Parental Alienation, I

am not convinced that a solicitor would identify

it in 2016.

'Don't Hug Your Mother: A Memoir' by JP and

Brendan Byrne is available from Amazon.

Don’t call her

your mother

Parental Alienation in

Ireland in 2016

by Brendan Byrne

Of 5,700 access

applications 2,016

applications were rejected,

some from parents of children who

were being brainwashed like us.

We were coached to say we didn’t

want to see our mother.