The Outsiders

June 5, 2024

“It’s not the darkness that scares me. It’s the darkness hiding behind the light. It’s the shadow camouflaged as transparency. It’s the manipulations hiding behind a smiley- faced emoji. It’s the ambition feigning as altruism. It’s not the darkness that scares me, it’s the lie.” Author: Jeff Brown

I find myself thinking about third parties often these days. The outside influences that affect our relationships with our children. I never used to. I never thought about the influence others might have on my relationships with my children when they grew up. I was so naive and busy with life and diapers and school work. And honestly, what parent imagines that one day someone who is or becomes a part of your child’s life, could ever have so much influence that they can convince your child to turn away from you completely, and abandon the bonds that you believed were so strong and permanent. How do “the outsiders” turn it around so completely and covertly that before anyone realizes what’s happening, WE are the outsiders? Yet, Look around - it’s happening everywhere we turn. Sometimes it’s a friend or the person they choose as a life partner, often, it’s due to parental alienation and divorce, and sometimes it’s even because of a religious cult. Last week I watched “Dancing For The Devil” on Netflix, about the 7M TikTok Cult, with my husband. If you have not watched this, I recommend it. Any parent experiencing estrangement will relate completely with this documentary. As we watched, we kept glancing over at each other, listening to the Wilking family talk about their complete devastation and heartbreak over the absence of their daughter in their lives. The circumstance was different, but was it really? I mean, does it really matter “who” or “how” or “why”? The end result is the same…your child grasps onto someone outside of your family bubble and they choose to go be there, leaving you to wonder why and how? The desperation in her family’s voice, very much mimicked the desperation on our own family’s voices, the grief and pain of losing a child. The prolonged and ongoing trauma of ambiguous loss. My estrangement wasn’t caused my a third party, but the feelings, the loss, the grief are feelings are still the same.

My youngest little girl is a competitive dancer and, oh yes, I felt my whole body tighten at the idea of her being lured away by a person or predator, with their own ambitions at heart. Fear sticks in my throat every time it passes through my thoughts. What if she woke up one day as a young adult and thought; “My parents forced me to dance and they exploited me, forcing me to live out their dreams and I hate them…”. She could very well do that. Is it true? NO. Does it matter that I’ve never had a dream of dancing and can’t keep a rhythm? Or that we ask her all the time if she’s sure she wants to dedicate so much time to dancing? Will she remember it that way?! I’ve heard parents say their child grew up angry for the simple fact that they were raised Catholic, because the parents are Catholic, and the child felt like they had no choice in what to believe, despite the fact that as an adult they could choose to believe whatever they want. The reasons I’ve heard from other parents whose children have estranged, are endless… I think about this every single day now, after experiencing my own estrangement with my oldest daughter. It makes me wonder why all of the good is overlooked and tossed aside? The fun times, the kickball games, the endless performances we watched, the help with homework, the nice home and clothes, the care and the LOVE. What about the bonds? What is it that makes OUR children so vulnerable to the third party influence? That is the part that shakes me to the core, and quite honestly, irrevocably changed the way I see the world.

Have you ever considered what happens with your relationship with your child, when someone else comes along with different ideas of “what should matter, or what’s right and what’s wrong”? Or somehow convinces your child that their upbringing was actually horrible and they’d be better off getting away from you; or makes your child believe that the closeness you share, is actually toxic? What happens if your child has a gift or talent and a future in dance, and someone sees that talent and wants to remove the people closest to them so they can take control, for their own reasons, as happened in “Dancing For The Devil”? What happens when you have a child that you love with every cell in your body, but the other parent convinces them you abandoned them by choosing divorce? What happens when you don’t have the money the other parent has, to fight for custody because you were a stay at home mom and can’t find a decent paying job? What happens when the other parent continuously fills your little ones mind with horrible ideas about you, eventually convincing them they’re all true? What happens when the other parent BUYS your child and demands blind loyalty in exchange? Parental Alientation is very real and an extremely common cause of estrangement. A way for one parent to assert control over their child while inflicting the most damage to their ex - but causing irreparable emotional harm to their kids. What happens if your adult child is in a season of feeling lost and a church or individual convinces them they have all the answers, but they must not speak to anyone outside of the church? The result is the same….whether its Parental Alienation, A Cult or a Significant Other; you lose your child. I’ve read or been told about hundreds of examples where these situations have occurred. We have no control over what our kids think or believe once they’re grown adults. We have no choice other than to accept that and continue to love them and wait. God, how I pray that the love is enough to bring them back. The good memories ARE there, they have to be. There IS a bond, there must be. There was so much love, there always will be. I will never stop waiting and I’ll wait with you, and I’ll wait with Kelly Wilking (Dancing For The Devil) and all of the other estranged mothers out there. We will all wait and remain hopeful for their eventual return, because that’s what unconditional love does.