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October 5 - December 30, 2016
A loyalty conflict occurs when a person feels that he must choose between two people rather than having a relationship with both of them, because of their antagonism toward each other.
When your ex makes disparaging comments about you, impinges on your parenting time, or makes statements that lead your child to believe that she can’t love both of her parents, your child may feel pressure to choose your ex and reject you.
If your ex is continually putting you down and creating situations in which your child will see the worst in you, your child may come to believe that you’re truly unworthy and someone to be rejected and discarded. This can be very confusing to your child, who still needs you and has his own positive experiences of you, which may conflict with the messages that he’s receiving.
They may conclude, “If (Mom/Dad) is no good, and (Mom/Dad) is part of me, I must be no good as well.” In this way, to turn a child against one of his parents is to turn a child against himself.
It’s as if your ex is saying to your child, “When you show me that you love your other parent, I feel hurt and angry,” which could lead your child to feel that it’s her responsibility to worry about and take care of your ex. This is obviously an unfair burden to place on a child.
If your child is caught up in a loyalty conflict involving you and your ex, she may—with your ex’s encouragement—disrespect you and become insensitive to your feelings, which could result in her behaving in an entitled, ungrateful, and uncaring manner. These behaviors and attitudes toward you can spill over into her relationships with other people. In this way, your ex is warping your child’s social and moral compass and molding your child to hold beliefs and attitudes that will serve her poorly later in life—with friends, at school, and on the job
Furthermore, any time your child is watching you interact with your ex, your ex may model for your child negative ways of seeing and responding to you. In other words, your ex’s negative attitude or behavior toward you can distort the image your child has of you. If for example your ex conveys her disdain for you or makes it appear as if something you said or did was ridiculous, harmful, or unloving, this may undermine your authority and devalue you as a parent in your child’s eyes.
Your ex may want to demonstrate that she has the power and control in this co-parenting relationship. She may want to make you feel left out and unimportant.
If your ex is sending your child poisonous messages about you, he finds fault with every aspect of your personality and conveys his disdain to your child through his words, attitudes, and actions. He exposes your child to a consistent stream of negativity, criticizing if not condemning every aspect of your personality and life. He even depicts your positive characteristics as problematic and cause for concern, if not outright contempt. He makes negative comments with a frequency and conviction that makes them believable. When your child hears these comments, she may come to believe things
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Your ex may remove your name and information from emergency-contact forms; not include your name and information when filling out new forms; or keep you from receiving important school, medical, and extracurricular documents and schedules.
If your ex is encouraging your child to betray your trust, she induces your child to keep secrets from you and spy on you.
If your ex is undermining your authority, he constantly speaks out against your house rules and erodes your value as
If your child seems preoccupied with pleasing your ex and strictly follows his demands no matter the inconvenience to her or you, your ex may have instilled a desire in your child to please him at the expense of all other relationships. This will make it increasingly difficult for you to function as an authority figure.
Some children get caught up in the intense emotions of the loyalty conflict and align themselves with one parent, becoming alienated from the other.
Usually, the first sign that your child has been affected by a loyalty conflict is that he becomes unreasonably negative toward you. He exaggerates minor flaws of yours and reacts to them as if they’re signs of your unworthiness as a person and a parent.
When on a campaign of denigration, rather than making statements criticizing the things that you do, your child makes statements that criticize you. Instead of saying, “I don’t like it when you drive so fast,” or “I wish you would make something else for dinner other than pasta,” your child tells you, “I don’t feel safe with you,” or “You never make me food I like.” Furthermore, your child denies having had any positive experiences with you in the past and may go so far as to say, for example, that he was only smiling in those home movies because you made him and he wasn’t having as much fun
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Because all parents are imperfect, you were certain to make a mistake at some point. You might have been too harsh, too permissive, too preoccupied, and so forth. And when you slipped up, your toxic ex encouraged your child to pounce on this error as if it were “The Reason” the relationship must end, even though your child started slipping away from you well before that. It’s almost as if your child was waiting for something to happen so that she could take down from the shelf a preplanned response of full-scale rejection.
We wish to stress that all parents are imperfect. All parents have some flaw or some quality that could be annoying or frustrating to their children.
If your child is caught up in a loyalty conflict, however, she may express no ambivalence about your ex, demonstrating an extreme, idealized support for him. She may behave as though she never has mixed feelings toward or negative reactions to him. Your ex may be made to seem all good, while you are all bad. As one alienated teen eerily proclaimed, “I love my father to death!” Such hero worship combined with baseless contempt for the other parent is unhealthy and unrealistic.
Keep in mind that because all parents are imperfect, the favored parent is also imperfect. In fact, the favored parent may have many quite obvious flaws—a quick temper, a drug habit, a disinterest in providing appropriate supervision—but these don’t matter to the child who’s caught up in a loyalty conflict. Whatever that parent does, the child perceives as good, simply because that parent did it.
Your child focuses on your perceived negative qualities, while minimizing if not completely overlooking your ex’s.
Lack of ambivalence represents a distortion of reality and, as such, could eventually interfere with your child’s development, well-being, and ability to function in the real world. Most people have good and bad qualities, and to believe that people are either all good or all bad is unrealistic and simplistic. A child who assumes that anyone less than perfect should be rejected is a child who will grow up to have few friends and a very hard time maintaining relationships and interacting in a mature and appropriate manner.
If your child is caught up in a loyalty conflict, he may repeatedly assert that his negative feelings about you are completely his own and not in any way influenced by your ex.
All of this can help your ex maintain a façade of wanting your child to have a good relationship with you while ensuring that it doesn’t happen.
Over the course of their development, children are typically taught how to think critically, how to problem solve, and how to determine their own truth. If your child is unduly influenced by your ex, his ability to think for himself is being compromised. He’ll need (and be expected to need) your ex to make decisions for him regarding his preferences, his choices, and his plans. His free will has been pre-empted. All decisions, likes and dislikes, and plans and goals are filtered through the needs and desires of his other parent. Your child—while proclaiming to be making decisions for
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Children who are drawn into loyalty conflicts involving their parents tend to treat one parent very badly. Essentially, they have been given permission by the other parent to break that parent’s heart.
Gratitude for your gifts, your favors, or your affection may be noticeably absent. Your child may try to get whatever she can from you, believing that it’s owed to her and that because you’re such a contemptible person, you don’t deserve to be treated with respect, gratitude, or even civility. Your authority as a parent has been denied and erased, and your child has been encouraged to treat you as if your feelings don’t exist or don’t matter.
Absence of concern for other people is likely to interfere with your child’s healthy growth and development. Without the experience of guilt for wrongdoing and without an awareness of or concern for others’ feelings, your child won’t have the internal checks and balances necessary to prevent him from behaving in a way that might hurt other people. A child who does not experience empathy could grow up to run roughshod over the needs and feelings of other people and will be unlikely to sustain meaningful, healthy relationships.
If your child is caught up in a loyalty conflict, she may start to make accusations about you that use phrases and ideas borrowed from your ex.
If your child is caught up in a loyalty conflict, she may have started to resist spending time not only with you, but also with people in your circle of friends and family. Formerly beloved grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins may suddenly be avoided. Your child may deny ever having been close or having fun with them, saying things like “I never really loved Grandma.” Your child may not only avoid them but may also denigrate them with cruel nicknames or rude comments. Your child would rather stay with your ex and clean the garage for the weekend than go on a vacation with your side of the
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You’re probably pretty distressed to feel your child slipping away from you, seemingly impervious to your love, your efforts to correct misperceptions, and your attempts to function as a parent. It’s possible that you have tried various strategies and are unsure whether they have been or will be effective.
The key message from research on children who are caught up in a loyalty conflict between their parents is that while outwardly they may behave rudely, disrespectfully, and hurtfully, inwardly they’re being torn apart (Baker 2007).
When you respond to your child in anger, it only serves to reinforce the poisonous messages your child is hearing about you. In this way, you’re contributing to your child’s rejection of you and increasing the likelihood that your child will side with your ex.
It may seem like asking a lot to treat each complaint and criticism with an open mind, even when it comes from a child who has been grossly unfair to you or from an ex who has tried to turn your child against you—but that’s what you need to do in order to avoid closing your mind and your heart to self-improvement for the sake of your child.
Parenting requires effort, and your parenting repertoire will evolve over time as both you and your child mature and develop.
When your child makes a statement, ask him gently and lovingly how he knows that to be true. Encourage him to look at the source of his beliefs.
When your child makes a statement, ask him whether he might be misled about that. Share a time when you were misled (but use an example that steers clear of parent-child issues). When watching a commercial together, casually point out how it’s designed to make you want something that you may not need. Point out situations in which your child and a friend may have different perceptions or responses to a book or movie and that just because his friend liked something doesn’t mean that your child will. He has his own truth. At the supermarket, point out to your child how the packaging and displays
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A primary goal of positive parenting is to—over time—make parental authority obsolete.
As a co-parent with a toxic ex, you can help your child assume responsibility for her choices and help her develop the inner strength necessary to resist the pressure to choose one parent and reject the other. To foster responsibility in children is essential for parenting in general and for co-parenting with a toxic ex in particular.
If you’re sarcastic or unsympathetic (“That’s what you get for being lazy!”), your child may come to think that you’re not on his side, and perhaps will develop the idea that people in general aren’t trustworthy.
Children of all ages need attention. They would prefer positive attention in the form of hugs, smiles, and the words “I love you,” but they will behave in an aversive manner (being disobedient, rude, or arrogant) to attract your negative attention (reprimanding, scolding, and so forth) if that seems to be the only way to receive attention at all. When you give your child enough positive attention, you make it less likely that he’ll provoke conflict as an attention-getting strategy. In general, positive attention will deepen the love and connection between you and your child.
Model ways to label feelings. Any time you’re experiencing an emotion yourself (e.g., frustration, disappointment), share that emotion with your child if doing so doesn’t burden or frighten her.
Validate your child’s feelings. Whenever you become aware that your child is expressing feelings, mention that you see the emotion and that it’s okay—whatever it is. Remember, there’s no right or wrong when it comes to feelings. A certain response to a feeling may be problematic (like hitting you when he’s angry), but the feeling is always okay. So you might say: “It’s okay to feel ___________ right now.” “I would be ___________ too if that happened to me.” “Everyone has his or her own feelings. There’s no right or wrong when it comes to feelings.”
Respectful Explain the consequence in a loving and kind manner, not a sarcastic, cold, or demeaning one. If you make your child feel too badly about his behavior, he won’t have faith in himself that he can improve. If he feels that you’re out to get him, he won’t want to rise to the challenge of pleasing you and doing better next time.
If your ex is bad-mouthing you and convincing your child that you’re a bad parent and damaged person, then you’re co-parenting with a toxic ex. If so, you have an ex who finds fault with every aspect of your personality and conveys disdain to your child through his words, attitudes, and actions. The two essential elements of this behavior are: A steady stream of negativity about you An absence of any positive messages about you
Your ex who’s sending poisonous messages finds fault with virtually every aspect of your personality and characteristics; everything is fair game and is likely to be criticized and picked over for critique. Your ex may criticize your hair, your clothes, your choice of hobbies, your profession, your friends, your family, your cooking, your driving, your taste in movies and music, and so forth. It’s all fodder for criticism, contempt, and ridicule.
If you examine the content of the negative messages, it usually boils down to some combination of the following: you’re unsafe, unloving, and unavailable. For example, if you get a speeding ticket, your ex may portray you as a reckless driver who’s likely to get your child into an auto accident. If you’re a mediocre cook, you may be described as someone who can’t be bothered to produce a decent meal for your child. If you arrive ten minutes late for pickup or drop-off, your ex may say that you obviously don’t love your child enough to come on time. If you arrive ten minutes early, he may say
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if your child is being exposed to negative messages about you—regardless of how little truth is in them—he may eventually absorb them and begin to treat you as someone unworthy of love.
If your ex is making negative statements about you, they’ll carry weight for your child, because your ex is an authority figure and your child will assume that she’s telling him the truth.
And, of course, no parent is perfect, so there’s usually a grain of truth to at least some of the criticisms. Your ex will usually be able to find some actual fault or apparent weakness of yours to focus your child’s attention on and complain about.
