Alienated

Lisa Goodpaster

Description

The actual proof of what was used to brainwash and alienate Lisa from her mother proves that parental alienation is no phenomenon. Every parent and professional wanting to learn and understand Parental Alienation will find the answers in this compelling true story.

This gripping read will floor readers with a child’s view of the hurt parental alienation can cause even into adulthood. But it is Lisa’s story of transformation and healing that will give the reader’s hope. Parental Alienation will break your heart, but the truth will set you free.
—Ginger Gentile, director of the Erasing Family Documentary

Lisa Goodpaster’s book Alienated When Parents Won’t Parent gives the play by play of her alienator’s game exposing the secretive strategies she used and gives us a personal glimpse of the effects this type of child abuse has on the innocent bystander child who is used as a pawn to harm the other parent. This book is groundbreaking work from a true trailblazer in the field of conquering parental alienation.
—Jennifer Szeghi, The Alienator’s Chess Game Podcast Host, Reunification Specialist, Parenting Coordinator, Co-parenting Coach & Owner of Successful Parenting, LLC

My parents’ divorce and the consequences of not protecting me left me sad, lonely, disappointed and unimportant—like a sacrificial lamb. I rebelled and had to learn to defend and protect myself. I acted it out by getting angry, and I did and said whatever I needed to say and do to keep myself safe. I ignored my needs and protected everyone, and I expected everyone else to handle my emotions.

I had over four hundred survival patterns, which turned into long-term survival patterns. When we are operating in a pattern state, we are not living our authentic selves; rather, we are reactive, suppressing, numbing ourselves, and overthinking. This was for me how I imagine it’s like for most alienated kids.

I was angry and unprotected, and my parents’ inability to co-parent and their lack of awareness became the danger that allowed my stepmom to write and do what she did.

Sujets

• Vie de famille
• Parentalité et Éducation des Enfants
• Relations familiales
• Family Law
• Estrangement
• Psychological trauma
• Parenting
• Associés pour la loi
• Fiction
• Divorce

Informations

• Publié par: Archway Publishing
• Date de parution: 20 juillet 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781665742955
• Langue: English

Extrait

ALIENATED
WHEN PARENTS WON’T PARENT
LISA GOODPASTER


Copyright © 2023 Lisa Goodpaster.
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
 
 
 
Archway Publishing
1663 Liberty Drive
Bloomington, IN 47403
www.archwaypublishing.com
844-669-3957
 
Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
ISBN: 978-1-6657-4296-2 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-6657-4294-8 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-6657-4295-5 (e)
 
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023907632
 
 
 
Archway Publishing rev. date: 6/29/2023
CONTENTS
ALIENATED WHEN PARENTS WON’T PARENT
Foreword
Introduction
1.Proof of My Alienation
2.Welcome to the Jungle
3.Blinded by the Light
4.The Body Remembers
5.What Goes into the Mind also Goes into the Body?
Central Nervous System—Neurophysiologic Disorder (NPD)
6.What Not to Do
Hard Choices
7.Danger Ahead
What Helps
8.Time Reveals
9.Hail Mary Pass
Negative Love Patterns
Negative Love Patterns I Adopted from My Mom
Father’s Negative Love Pattern and Behavior
Stepmother—Alienating Step Monster Behavior towards me
My Stepmom’s Patterns as an Alienator
Manipulative Patterns
Aggression/Domination Patterns
Needing to Have the Last Word Pattern
Boundary Crossing Patterns—Body and Space
Boundary Crossing—Emotional and Mental Patterns
Withdrawing or Withholding Patterns
Escape Patterns
Perfection Patterns
Self-Centered and Status-Seeking Patterns
Negative Behavior Patterns from My Stepmom
How This Looked to Me as an Adult
10.Stephood
11.Never Say Never
Pseudo Love: Looks Like Love but It’s Not
Smothering Love: My Dad
Chaotic Love: My Mom and Stepmom
Surrogate Spouse Love: My Dad
Dutiful Love: My Mom
Good Parent and Bad Parents—My Dad, Mom, and Stepmom
12.Patterns
Abandonment Pattern at Age Four—What Happened
Age Seven—Abandonment Behavior
Abandonment Behavior as a Teenager
Abandonment Behavior as a Wife
Adult Behavior Patterns
13.In the Arena
 
Appendix I:Top Ten Signs of Parental Alienation
1.Separation or divorce is the marker
2.Inability to co-parent
3.Gossiping
4.Gaslighting
5.Rewriting history
6.Not taking personal responsibility for their actions
7.Lacking emotional awareness and empathy
8.Using someone’s past to condemn or embarrass that person
9.Playing the victim role
10.Not believing there is anything wrong with their actions
Takeaways
Is Family Court about Family or about Profit?
What Parents Don’t Understand
What does healing look like and where I’m at today?
Are You an Alienating Parent?
The Gossiping Alienator
Negative Parent and Stepparent Patterns in Stepfamilies
The Important Actions Stepparents Should Take
What Harms
Why Is Love the Reason?
In Divorce and Family Court
 
Appendix II:Definitions
Targeted Parent
Alienating Parent
Alienated Child
 
Appendix III:Stepparents—The Biggest Predictor of Child Abuse in a Home
 
Links
About the Author

 
 
 
I dedicate this book to all children and stepchildren who suffered at the expense of their parents’ divorce. To all the scapegoats and black sheep of their families who were left to navigate their lives alone while feeling lost and abandoned. To all the parents who struggle with being alienated from their children. May this book shed light on your fight for your sacred relationship with your children.
For all stepparents who have the courage to love someone else’s child and for the stepparents who struggle too. This book isn’t about bashing stepparents; it’s about exposing the truth that millions of kids have and are going through.
For the next generation of parents, may you learn from us and not bring this preventable plague into another generation.
For my son. Matthew. Raising you was the biggest honor of my life.
To my brother, Vince for always having my back.
To my parents, I love you both. I know if you both could go back and protected me you would have. I feel your love every day and know you both are holding me up from your hearts. May we all one day get to play in the light.
FOREWORD
Ms. Goodpaster is an adult child of parental alienation. That means that as a child she was alienated from a parent—her mother—and now as an adult she has awareness and insight into what happened to her many years ago. It is unusual for an adult child of parental alienation to come forward and relate the painful experiences that they endured during their childhood and adolescence at the hands of the alienating parent. In Ms. Goodpaster’s case, the alienating parent was not her father, but her stepmother. It is also unusual to have documentary evidence of how the alienator methodically indoctrinated and coerced the child to reject and hate her mother. It appears that the alienating stepmother was so obsessed with destroying Ms. Goodpaster’s relationship with both her mother and her father that she wrote a narrative of the day-by-day activities in the family. Her manuscript is a detailed series of fabricated conversations and events, apparently intended to destroy Ms. Goodpaster’s life in every way she could imagine. Ms. Goodpaster found her stepmother’s manuscript as a teenager and later came to possess it. She survived a horrifying childhood and gradually as an adult—through healthy relationships and intensive psychotherapy—came to understand and achieve some distance from the terrible time of her early life. Now she generously shares what she has learned about marriage, divorce, parents, stepparents, and other topics through this book and her website, www.stephoodproject.org .
—William Bernet, M.D. Professor Emeritus, Vanderbilt University
INTRODUCTION
Everyone calls me Tora. My late grandfather gave me that name after noticing the way I was playing with my cousins when I was six months old; he said, “Lisa is strong like a bull.” Toro of course means bull in Spanish, and when you come from a big Mexican American family with twenty-plus grandchildren and given a strong nickname, well, I felt special, and I was strong early in life even before I knew what strength really meant.
My parents legally immigrated here from different countries. A big part of my life has always been family, and I’m grateful for my Latina roots. I was surrounded by love more than hate. I love my parents equally and hold no grudges toward them or anyone else. Breaking generational trauma is done from a place of love, not hate.
I was a latchkey kid and part of the supposedly hopeless Generation X, and I was four when my parents divorced. I learned how to read people’s emotions before I knew what they meant. In my era, kids were to be seen, not heard. (Bullshit, right?) When my parents were rebuilding their lives after their divorce, I was caught between two extremes. I grew up in San Jose, California, and graduated from Silver Creek High School. By all accounts, from the outside, I seemed to have a typical childhood for someone whose parents were divorced.
The first seven years of my life were crucial, and the rest of my childhood is a cautionary tale about what parents and stepparents should never do. The hardest of times for me were always when my parents couldn’t communicate, and my most desperate times were when I didn’t feel safe and craved a stability I didn’t have.
What harmed me at such a fragile age also empowered me not to repeat the same pattern I saw my parents go through. I had no choice; I had to learn how to survive while trying to grow up in between two extremes. I learned to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. I learned what sadness felt like.
I knew what emotions looked like before I understood what they meant. I learned to read people’s emotions while suppressing my own. But I survived and defied what was meant to destroy me and my mother, and I never stopped trying to figure out what happened to me, which is known as parental alienation; in my case, it can be known as parental deprivation.
Parental alienation is not a condition that kids are born with; it’s what happens to kids by parents or especially When divorce is high conflict.
We can choose to feel cursed or courageous. We can’t change the past, but we can choose to learn from it rather than continue to repeat family history generation after generation.
This is a true account of my alienation from my parents. I’m one of millions of former children of divorce who have suffered lifelong psychological and physiological pain that I could never explain until now.
It took forty years for everything to unfold and come full circle for me. I had assumed that I was just another kid whose parents had gone through a bad divorce, but the truth is that I was alienated from my mom while I was staying silent to protect my dad.
There is a danger when parents don’