The 8 behaviours — which ones do you recognise?

Understanding PA
1

Dr Amy Baker’s research on the specific tactics alienating parents use has been incredibly helpful for me. When you’re in the middle of it, being able to name what’s happening gives you something solid to hold onto. Here’s my summary, with examples from my own experience:

1. Badmouthing the targeted parent
Painting you as dangerous, irresponsible, or morally corrupt. In my case, the church community framed me as a “worldly sinner” who had abandoned God — and by extension, abandoned my children’s salvation.

2. Limiting contact
My visitation was one weekend every two weeks. Every attempt to increase it was met with resistance, then ultimately with false allegations that severed contact entirely.

3. Interfering with communication
When you’re reduced to strained text messages about logistics, and even those dry up — you know this one is at play. No photos shared, no updates about school or daily life. Nothing.

4. Interfering with symbolic communication
Birthday cards, Christmas presents, letters — you send them and you simply don’t know if they ever arrive. The silence is deafening.

5. Withdrawal of love
“If you really loved God, you wouldn’t want to be with him.” When a child learns that loving both parents isn’t safe — that’s the loyalty bind at its most cruel.

6. Telling the child the other parent is dangerous
False allegations. In my case, three separate accusations of sexual abuse — all eventually dismissed — but each one severed contact for months and caused irreparable damage to my children’s perception of me.

7. Forcing the child to choose
My children were caught between two worlds — the church’s narrow reality and the wider world I now lived in. They were made to feel that choosing me meant rejecting everything they knew.

8. Creating the impression the other parent doesn’t love them
“He left us. He chose the world over God and over you.”

Which ones do you recognise? Sometimes just ticking them off a list helps you realise: this isn’t in my head. This is a documented pattern.

Malcolm

Dr Baker’s 8 alienation strategies are documented in:

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God, this list. I could tick off almost every single one.

The phone calls especially — that’s what still gets to me four years later. My ex would hand the phone to the kids and I’d hear them in the background: “Mummy’s on the phone” in this flat, resigned voice. Like I was some obligation they had to get through. When they were little, they used to fight over who got to talk to me first.

Numbers 2 and 8 were the killers for me. Every single weekend there was suddenly a party, a football match, a “special family day” that I wasn’t part of. And then telling them I was “too busy with my new life” when I was spending every free moment fighting to see them. The cruelty of it still takes my breath away sometimes.

My therapist says recognising the patterns is the first step to not internalising them. Some days I believe her.

3

Same here with 2, 3 and 8. The phone calls that never get answered while they tell the kids you don’t call — that’s brutal.

4

God, all of them. Literally all eight.

The false allegations one (#6) is destroying my life right now — three court hearings because my ex convinced everyone I’m dangerous when I’ve never laid a hand on my kids. Meanwhile my 12-year-old won’t even look at me because she believes whatever lies he’s telling her.

The phone calls going straight to voicemail thing is torture, Malcolm. I feel you on that one.

5

God, all of them. Every single one.

The phone thing especially — 2 years of “the twins are at swimming” or “they’re doing homework” and then finding out later they were told I’d stopped calling.

6

Jesus, all 8. I’m documenting everything now but seeing it laid out like this is brutal.