Alienated: When Parents Won't Parent

By Lisa Goodpaster

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Jul 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9781665742955

Lisa Goodpaster

Lisa Goodpaster has an ability to connect and inspire while creating a safe space for anyone struggling to understand children who have been alienated. She is also a motivational speaker who helps families and professionals understand the complex issues that arise in families. Her more than two thousand hours of her own trauma therapy along with her personal experience make her the most sought after alienated child trauma informed expert in the world.

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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

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and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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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’t co-parent. That danger is a crime—parental alienation. It occurs when one parent, or in my case a stepparent’s only intention, is to break the bond between a parent and a child. It is a severe form of child abuse that has been studied for over forty years. It is a worldwide crisis recognized in other countries as a crime and monetized by our family court system.

An alienator is someone who intentionally harms a child to break the bond between a loving parent and child. The alienator in my case was my stepmom. A manuscript my stepmom wrote had been in her nightstand next to her bed, where it remained for over seventeen years. Until I recalled where she had kept it.

The evidence of that resurfaced manuscript written by my stepmom was used to destroy the truth and create a horrific narrative in its place. In 2017, the center for disease control and prevention (CDC) conducted a nationwide search for evidence used to brainwash a child. The CDC concluded this is the first evidence of written hatred towards a child they have seen. The first two Psychologists to read and validate this horrific evidence is Dr. Charles House and Dr. Smadar Avid.

According to top parental alienation experts across the globe from Brazil, to UK, Canada, Australia, United States, Ireland, along with the world health organization No child has ever grown up to prove their own alienation of their parent until now.

If there was ever a script used to invalidate a child’s existence and show how vile parental alienation is, I hope that this book will be it and that its truths will spread as wide and far to everyone needing hope, help, and a way out of the horrific pain caused by parental alienation.

May the proof of what happened to me be a beacon for good and help educate and create a conversation for change and action against such preventable abuse.

CHAPTER 1

PROOF OF MY ALIENATION

T he following Alienator sections are my stepmother’s journaled false accusations against me and a story used to brainwash me about my parents. My stepmom’s narrative is disturbing and very telling of how sick an alienator is. The following Truth sections are the facts and what my stepmom tried to get away with. Nothing has been changed in her original story. You’ll read what she had written just as I did as an adolescent.

It’s not what you say, it’s what you can prove.

ALIENATOR

Eve tried several ways to lose the baby. She would sit in tubs of hot, hot water. She drank all sorts of tea that some friends told her provoked miscarriages. She purposely jumped from high places in order to fall and hurt herself. She banged her stomach against the wall and slept on it; but, to Eve’s utter dismay, nothing happened, and Eve only got an angry baby inside her that would kick and punch back at her furiously, making her feel sick. As months went by,