1. Alienating Parents are oftentimes charming, which is a characteristic that tricks the recipient to overlooking other very serious personality flaws. Also, when you see someone as charming, you feel attracted to that person, so subsequent information must be assimilated with that positive view point, lest you question your own judgment.
2. Alienators’ primary goal is to gain social standing at the primary expense of the target parent. In fact, isolating and having the target parent excommunicated by the community is the means by which they punish the target and fulfill their psychic drive. They will selectively share and distort information to shape (manipulate) the community. They will even try to paint themselves as the victims.
3. It is easier/safer to “blame the victim” (target parent). Other parents maintain their sense of control in the world by convincing themselves that losing their child through alienation would never happen to them because they wouldn't do anything to deserve it. It is too scary to think that this can happen to anyone, so they tell themselves that the target parent MUST have done something to warrant their own child not wanting a relationship.
4. Nobody wants to cross an alienating parent, so it’s easier to side with the aggressor. These parents can be intimidating people in general and facing their wrath is not an option.
Adapted from Chapter 6 Psychotherapy with Targeted Parents by William Goldberg and Lorna Goldberg in Working with Alienated Children and Families, A Clinical Guidebook, Edited by Amy J. L. Baker and S. Richard Sauber.
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