“You Don’t Love Me”: Communication Patterns Used to Promote and Reinforce Family Narratives of Parental Alienation

Parental alienation (PA) occurs when a parent manipulates their child to reject the care and relationship with the other parent (Gardner, 1985). Research has shown PA occurs in a variety of familial contexts including intact and divorced families and can be cultivated by mothers, fathers, custodial, and non-custodial parents (Baker, 2007). This proposal is an autoethnographic case study of my own experience of PA following my parents’ divorce using communication artifacts that my parents retained. These included letters and emails, personal journals and notes, and audio recordings of phone calls during the time period prior to when I lost contact with my father. Not many adult children have the opportunity to sift through their past through family artifacts that captured real-time thoughts, emotions, and events. I thematically analyzed these documents for communication patterns that created family narratives of parental alienation using in vivo codes when possible. Using a family systems and narrative sensemaking approach, I found communication patterns enacted by all the members of my family-- my mom, my dad, my older sister, and me-- that promoted or reinforced parental alienation. These communication patterns shaped specific family narratives that interacted to create cohesion and opposition within my family, eventually pushing my father out completely. This personal case study approach provided an invaluable opportunity to explore the nuanced communication patterns and family narratives that occur during the process of parental alienation within a family system without the intrusive means of observational methods