How Parental Alienation Works

What is Parental Alienation?

According to an October 2019 blog post of Psychology Today:

“Parental alienation occurs when one parent turns a child against the other parent.

• The alienation process generally begins with the alienator gradually instilling in the child negative views of the targeted parent, even though the targeted parent is generally the emotionally healthier one.
• As parental alienation becomes increasingly severe, the child acts with increasing hostility toward the targeted parent, eventually refusing contact altogether.
• By convincing the child to feel hatred and even terror at the idea of ever interacting again with the targeted parent — and blocking the child’s visitation time with the targeted parent so the child has become totally dependent on the alienator — an alienating parent essentially kidnaps the child, both psychologically and physically.”

A 2024 Psychology Today blog post gives this frightening statistic:

“According to The Parental Alienation Study Group, at least 3.9 million children in the United States are ‘moderately to severely’ alienated from a parent.”

Summary of a textbook case

During a marital dispute at home on April 12, 2019, Sean Gilligan of Santa Cruz, California lost his temper with his wife Lisa Valenzuela and wrenched her wrists, giving her the injuries portrayed in this post.

So began a process of parental alienation which continues to this day.

Instead of taking her to the emergency room, as she asked, he called the police himself and, unbeknownst to her, told them that she had attacked him. Their 15 year-old son was in the house, and so she did not tell the police what had happened lest they arrest Sean in front of him.

Displaying remarkable incompetence, they arrested her.

Sean, twice her size, was unmarked, unhurt.

At his request, the arresting officer obtained a restraining order the next morning from the duty judge which prevented Lisa for months from seeing her children or obtaining her possessions from what used to be her home.

She has to this day never once been allowed back into her former home, not once. She lost almost all of her personal possessions.

The parental alienation took root during this judicially enforced maternal absence.

The teenager stopped contacting, one after the other, Lisa, her parents, his half-sister, his cousins, you name it, her entire warm-hearted Irish family. I know this family well, and any conflicting description of them is a lie.

The boy had enjoyed normal loving relationships with all of them until his mother was abruptly and finally kicked out of her home.

No-one in the justice system did anything that actually helped this teenage boy avoid being alienated from his mother.

The police caused his parents’ separation on his father’s terms, and with the Court’s support prevented his mother from even seeing him alone for months and months.

The Court took much too long to fully examine his parental situation, even though the law is clear that the best interest of the child is for both parents to share custody. Once Lisa was arrested, however stupidly, the Court presumed that she was a bad parent.

When the Court finally did address the ongoing parental alienation, it ordered reunification therapy, designed to help bring Lisa back into her child’s life. The boy was already so alienated from his mother that he refused this therapy.

When the Court asked for guidance from social services, they recommended that consistent contact with both parents be reestablished. Sean had his son write a letter to the Court – he would claim that the boy, then 16, wrote the letter of his own accord – stating that he did not want to spend time with his mother. As a result, the Court awarded Sean sole custody of his son, who has been deprived of his mother ever since.

For me, knowing Lisa, seeing her with her older daughter (not Sean’s) and her three granddaughters, knowing how much she gives them (and me!), this is a textbook case of parental alienation. I agree with Psychology Today that it amounts to child abuse, even if the child doesn’t realize it.

It has now been six years since mother and son have had a meaningful conversation. He still has nothing to do with his mother. It breaks her heart.

(N.B. the disclaimers at the end of this post)

How was this parental alienation triggered?

In early 2019, Lisa discovered Sean’s Signal messages to and from Sarah, his much younger “best friend” at the time. Their ski vacation with Sarah’s brother and other young people had taken place just before Christmas in Colorado, several nights, and the tropical vacation that the Gilligan/Valenzuela family had enthusiastically planned together for the holidays never happened.

He called this ski trip a business trip, and in his Signal messages Lisa discovered that he and Sarah had mocked their use of this description between themselves. He left Lisa with peanuts ($300: how much did the ski trip cost for him alone?) to cover family needs while he was away skiing and to prepare for Christmas: in this Victorian marriage she only had the money that he deigned to give her.

He then accompanied Sarah to Cabo San Lucas for an “important business conference,” one which he neglected to mention to his employer, and whined repeatedly to Lisa on his return that Sarah had not had time for him there, she had been so busy with other people. How brazen: he was rubbing Lisa’s nose in it!

Throughout these months, punctuated by regular and sometimes heated arguments between the spouses, Sean consistently refused Lisa’s entreaties that he behave honorably in the circumstances and move out.  Why should he? Just because he had found a new “best friend!?”

When Lisa returned from a visit to Ireland at the beginning of April, the provocations reached a crescendo. Sarah’s hat, one featured prominently on her FaceBook page, was in Lisa’s bedroom, her tupperware was in Lisa’s dishwasher, and her food was in Lisa’s fridge. Sean gave ridiculous excuses, the kind only cheating husbands would dare offer, for each of these surprises.

How do you think was she feeling on the evening of April 12th, a week after these brutal discoveries, when husband and wife had a row?

Their 15 year-old son had a track meet the next day, which both parents had agreed to attend because running track was important to the boy. Sean announced that evening that he would not be able to attend.

When she tried to convince Sean to go to the track meet, he was texting madly on his phone. She asked him who he was texting, and he was evasive, flashing her the front of his phone to taunt her and as quickly turning it away again.

The taunts worked, and Lisa, whose vision is not great, grabbed for the phone so she could finally see the name of Sean’s correspondent.

After a short struggle, Sean dropped the phone, and then grabbed her arms. She strained to free herself, and he lost his temper and wrenched both her wrists. Then he left the house.

That’s it: that was the sum of the injury part of the row. But he is 6′ 1″, buff and a man, and she is a slender if fit 5′ 7″ woman.

By losing his temper, even though he quickly got himself under control, he had all but broken her arm.  It swelled up immediately, and the pain was quickly excruciating. She took ice from the freezer up to her room, and began icing the arm. Soon enough, she realized two things: (1) at a minimum she needed X-rays, to see whether it was broken; and (2) she could not drive herself to the Emergency Room with her arm in that condition.

She needed help, and so texted Sean at 11.56 pm and then tried to call him asking him to drive her to the ER. She could perhaps have asked a friend to drive her, but that would have involved incriminating Sean, and it was not Lisa’s way to air her dirty washing for all to see. She remained loyal.

A few minutes later, Sean texted back that he would drive her to the hospital. That never happened.

How Sean played the police

A little after 12.05, Sean called Lisa (he switched to voice at this point) and told her that he had dialed 911 and that the police were coming to their home. This made no sense to her: what was the emergency? She was incapacitated. He explained that he was afraid that he might be arrested at the ER for domestic violence if he took her there.

She was still reflecting on Sean calling 911 to protect himself, from the police and not from her, stunned as much by this news as by her swelling arms, when three police cars, a paramedic van and a firetruck arrived outside her front door. Lisa thought with horror about how her neighbors would view this little public drama.

Sean had not returned inside the home before the police arrived, and met them in the yard. There was a pause while he and the officers discussed matters. She had no idea that Sean was claiming both that he was afraid of her, and that their son was also.

Ridiculous! He’d already hurt her badly, so badly that she needed to visit the ER, and he could snap her like a twig if he felt like it. It was all backwards.

Confused and likely in shock because of her almost broken arm, Lisa stayed in her room and hoped unrealistically that they would simply go away.

That was not to be. Three uniformed officers knocked several times and then filed into her bedroom, one after the other. Lisa was on her bed in her nightclothes, icing her injured arms. One of them asked her what had taken place.

She was worried what would happen to Sean if she told the story: he had perhaps broken her arm, injuring her visibly, and would surely be arrested. Still trying to avoid airing her dirty laundry in public, still loyal, she said that she was okay and asked to be left alone.

Most importantly, she was also trying to protect her 15 year-old son, who was in his room down the hall, probably playing video games. At all cost, she did not want him to see his father arrested.

When Sergeant Karina Ceceña, the fourth officer who had been sent to the house, asked her what had happened, reassuring her that they were there to help, she again said that she was fine and asked to be left alone.

They weren’t exactly there to help. They were there because an obviously unjustifiable 911 call (Lisa was already incapacitated when it was made, by the man who had incapacitated her) had brought them there.

Simply because Lisa didn’t talk, which the police seem to have perceived was directed against them rather than protective of her son and family, she became the most obvious candidate for arrest, despite her injuries and relative physical weakness.

The Sergeant went further. “You don’t seem okay, you seem upset,” she said to Lisa. I wonder why: both her arms were injured, one more seriously; instead of being taken to the hospital, four police officers were in her bedroom “to help” her; and Sean had exposed her son and her in a public spectacle.

Sergeant Ceceña’s deductive reasoning transcended mere common sense: “I think that Mr. Gilligan is the victim here,” she announced. Not only was Sean not arrested after badly hurting his wife and making a 911 call when there was no emergency, Lisa was.

She was sitting there, on the bed in her nightclothes with her arms swelling up, with other bruises and scratches (according to the police report), and Sean did not have a mark on him, no scratch, no bruise, absolutely nothing, again according to the police report.

His sworn statement announced that he felt “stressed” and “sore.” That is the lamest victim statement I have ever heard! Poor big lug!

But apparently not too lame for this Sergeant! Let’s go back to the police’s own report of the facts here.  Remember they said that Lisa was pinning Sean down on the couch? Quite a feat, especially when they also said that she did this with no hands! Sean had “grabbed on to Lisa’s wrist because he had noticed that her fist was clenched and he didn’t want Lisa to hit him.”

So she had not hit him. He had suffered not one scratch! She’s supposed to be attacking him, but has done so by straddling him on the couch with no hands! How did he allow her to mount him?! And he has the time while suffering this improbable aggression to notice that her fist was clenched, which is why he grabbed and wrenched her wrists. Not because she was pummelling him or scratching him, which she never did, but because she might have!   

The one good thing to say about the Santa Cruz PD here is that they did not doctor their own report despite the multiple portions of Sean’s story which undermined Sergeant Ceceña’s conclusion that he was the victim.

Lisa found out weeks later from a cousin who was a police lieutenant in Silicon Valley that when called to a home for domestic violence, the police were supposed to arrest someone, a rule put in place to answer criticism that they had been letting abusive husbands off without arresting them. By trying to protect her son through not accusing Sean of his obvious violence, she made herself the victim a second time.

The expected police self-justification nearly broke down here. I wrote to then Police Chief Andy Mills complaining about this obvious wrongful arrest, and he handed the file to Sergeant Wes Morey, a diligent officer in SCPD’s Internal Affairs.

Lisa belatedly gave Sergeant Morey a sworn statement about what had happened that night, he reviewed all the body cam footage, and he admitted to her in person that if he had been there it was not Lisa who would have been arrested.

Common sense is really hard to ignore: that and the photos of Lisa’s arms.

But that’s as far as it went. The judge at her first divorce hearing (over five months after the injuries!) made much of the fact that Sergeant Morey did not put that opinion in his report; he said that he was unable to do so. “I wasn’t there!” Well, yeah, but your common sense was right on, Sergeant. It’s a great shame that the SCPD could not publicly admit it when the evidence and common sense said that it had been played by an expert gaslighter. Its failure to admit its error publicly was one of the key causes of this parental alienation.

How Sean used the Courts

Sean obtained a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) prohibiting Lisa from seeing her children, or approaching her home, by 7 am the morning after he injured her!

What chance did she have to dispute that? None. She was still in County Jail! It is one of those rare cases when one party to a dispute can obtain court action “ex parte,” without the other party being present.

This TRO expired in a week, but (of course) Sean then moved to extend it. Lisa’s expensive lawyer wanted to negotiate with Sean’s lawyer rather than risk judicial extension of the TRO. He was adamant that the Court would follow the police decision, even in the face of blatant evidence that it was incoherent.

Sean also wanted the County District Attorney to prosecute Lisa for the harm that he was claiming to have suffered. The DA rebuffed him, promptly determining that the Office could not justify prosecuting Lisa. It seemed to me that a Court properly briefed by both sides, unlike the judge who had only been hastily informed by the police the morning after, would come to the same conclusion as the DA, the only informed third party to review the facts.

But it was not to be. The lawyers’ constant back and forth delayed a court hearing for months. Neither raised the interests of the child in court, even though Lisa was telling her lawyer repeatedly about how worried she was about her son, even though he was already closing the door on her and her side of the family.

That parental alienation of the child from his mother was already pretty much complete by the time the lawyers were done with their back and forth.

The Psychology Today blog post confirms that their prolonged discussions contributed to that alienation.

“It makes sense that the earlier the intervention {when parental alienation is taking place}, the more likelihood of success both in preventing a worsening of the alienation and in healing alienation after it has developed.  The flip is true as well: Long legal battles definitely prolong and intensify alienation. The longer the courts take to intervene, the worse the alienation is likely to become, and the harder to reverse.” 

The delays involved in the lawyers negotiating this Agreement meant that Lisa was forbidden by court order for over two months from visiting or otherwise contacting her teenage son in person, at home or at school or at his sister’s lodging, anywhere.

The belatedly signed Agreement provided for therapy for their minor child, which was initially intended to be reunification therapy, involving Lisa, the “targeted parent,” as a means of reversing the parental alienation.

The Agreement was too late to reverse the alienation, and the therapy promptly turned into therapy for the minor child alone, and then equally promptly stalled at the “request” of the minor child. Right!!

Ann Hines, the therapist selected by Sean for this therapy, believed his version of events, that Sean was encouraging his son to be involved with Lisa. Ms. Hines said that the boy was not ready to see his mother.

Psychology Today explained this aspect of parental alienation:

. . . . The reality is that currently these children too often are . . . abused . . . by therapists who worsen the alienation by conducting individual treatment under the eye of the alienator without reunifying the child with the targeted parent . . . .

The next step here, agreed in September 2019, five months after Lisa was denied any access to her son, was an in-depth custody evaluation involving both parents. Lisa completed her required documentation in November; it took Sean until mid-March 2020 to do so, more months of delay before the Court examined the child’s best interests, more months of delay while the parental alienation worsened.

The “temporary” order after Lisa was injured that Sean should have sole physical custody of the minor child turned into over a year of the court misconstruing the minor child’s best interests by ignoring the parental alienation.

This judicial delay had two major consequences. First, divorce law expresses a strong preference for both parents to be as involved as possible in their children’s upbringing. That preference was never implemented here, although the Court belatedly tried to.

Lisa and her son had shared a warm and loving relationship until the night of the dispute. She has almost never seen him since: they have not shared a meaningful conversation.

Second, because of its initial inaction and subsequent long-term failure to properly examine the child’s best interests (or impose an appropriate schedule for so doing), the Court enabled Sean to complete the parental alienation which had started on April 12, 2019.

That Psychology Today blog post explained it thus:

The current triangle of family court, therapists, and alienated children get stuck in a legal morass which can sometimes take years to yield decisions—and even then too often leaves the child in the custody of the alienator. . . .

. . . . The reality is that currently these children too often are . . . abused—by the alienating parent, . . . and by the expensive and interminable court system.

Sean’s own words showed him to be the “alienator”

The boy was not aware of any violence the night it happened, according to the police, although he did hear the row which led up to it. Yet in a process completed within three or four months after his mother was forcibly removed from his life, he cut off all of his regular pre-existing contacts with her, his half sister and her new family, his maternal aunts, uncles and cousins, his warm and doting maternal grandparents. . . . all of them without exception.

Common sense and the sheer number of lost relationships, all on Lisa’s side of the family, confirms that Sean separated his son from his mother and her entire family in a deliberate process of parental alienation.

In fact, Sean called some of Lisa’s closest friends, even family members, starting the night that he had her arrested.

Why?

To try to convince them how crazy Lisa was, because her craziness, and not his losing his temper and making up stories for the police, was how he wanted to explain and justify her arrest.

In a later text exchange with her good friend Dolly, Sean regretted how “dysfunctional” Lisa’a entire family was: “it’s really tragic.” That’s what Sean texted to Lisa’s friend. “I don’t want (my son) to end up like any of them.”

So that explains it. Sean took the initiative to tell Dolly, one of Lisa’s own best friends, why his son is no longer seeing any member of Lisa’s family, not the boy’s maternal grandparents, nobody.

By so doing, Sean revealed himself to be the source of the negative feelings which he has apparently taught his son.

Dolly was one of Lisa’s closest friends, who had shared with Lisa the horrible last years of her marriage. Yet he was still trying to convince her that Lisa’s entire side of the family deserved to be treated the way that he was treating them!

And if he could feed such crap to Lisa’s own close friends, mature adults with real knowledge of Lisa and how her marriage had evolved, what was he feeding to the children?

Parental alienation cases are unique in that these children, who may be youngsters or teenagers, live in a state of high emotional risk.  They live in a war zone, having been dragged by the alienating parent into their parents’ conflict and then convinced by the alienating parent to ally with them in treating the other as an enemy.

Sadly, the targeted parent is generally the healthier parent. Alienated children, however, must relinquish that formerly loving relationship in order to survive.  They have to hate the targeted parent to please the alienating parent on whom they have come to depend.
Severe Parental Alienation: A Mental Health Emergency | Psychology Today

Sean’s and Lisa’s different approaches to their teenage son demonstrates their roles here.

Lisa understood that she should not cause Sean to be arrested in front of his teenage son. She sacrificed herself to protect her son from parental conflict.

Sean made a non-emergency 911 call, to protect himself lest difficult questions be asked at the ER. That unjustifiable call is what threw the teenager head first into the parental conflict here. Without that call, the police would not have been involved, and the boy might have escaped the worst consequences of an obviously doomed marriage.

Children have both parents inside them, and conflict between them can rip the child apart, literally. The more parental conflict there is, and the more that the children are exposed to it, the more likely it is to hurt the children.

In this case, of course, Sean is the only parent continually immersing this teenager in parental conflict, because he is the only parent who has had a relationship with him since the boy abruptly stopped talking to his mother in April 2019.

What he said to Dolly gives you an idea the half-truths, lies and complete fabrications he could have told his son, when there was no-one to hold him in check.

When experienced professionals are taken in by Sean’s gas lighting described earlier, then how can a child do any better? He can’t.

Here’s how a psychologist characterized the process of parental alienation in the Psychology Today blog post:

As alienated children become increasingly isolated from the healthier parent and therefore increasingly dependent on the alienating parent, these children generally no longer feel that they have the option of expressing positive views of their other parent. They dare not lose their one remaining parent and therefore suppress their authentic voices, the voices within them that whisper, “I used to love that other parent. I miss him/her,” or “The parent I am trusting is often good to me and often also scares me. Still, that’s the only parent I have left, so I better do what s/he wants. . . .

Alas, alienating parents are generally too narcissistic and emotionally volatile to be relied upon as nurturing caretakers.  Normal parents do not alienate; only parents with tendencies toward narcissism (It’s all about me), borderline functioning (excessive emotionality), and anti-social personalities (lying and callous with regards to hurting others) do alienation.  

And at the same time, alienated children, consciously or not, usually experience deep grieving, and also guilt, for the loss of the parent they used to love and now have rejected. . . .

What Sean obtained by Alienating his son from Lisa

The institutional failures here, police and judicial, have given Sean considerable rewards for the alienation of his teenage son from Lisa.

Look what he has obtained financially.

First, he didn’t have the inconvenience or cost of moving out, despite committing domestic violence against Lisa.

Second, he avoided the child support and spousal support that he would have been ordered to pay if he had moved out.

Third, he obtained child support from Lisa, despite having been by far the higher earner during the last years of the marriage.

Fourth, he has effortlessly held on to all of the community’s crypto (worth I suspect many millions) at the end of the marriage.

And of course Sean has obtained a great deal emotionally as well.

Lisa misses her children dreadfully, as he knew that she would. Nothing stops the little things that trigger her tears, nothing fills the big hole inside her. This is the worst abuse for a good and loving mother, an ongoing emotional wound that is almost incurable.

Maybe that’s why Sean keeps it going.

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NB 1: A lawyer friend read an earlier draft of this post, and suggested that I clarified that it concerns matters which I believe to be accurate, based on information available to me, some of which is reproduced in the post. In some cases, I can’t verify the accuracy of the facts described.

My lawyer friend explained: “In a conflict like this one, lawsuits aren’t unlikely and they are cheap to file. And scoundrels often have a big advantage because they will assert all kinds of outrageous things.” Especially if they gas light constantly!

NB 2: There are several Sean Gilligans online. The others would likely not want to be confused with the Sean Gilligan who features here. His twitter feed is @msgilligan, and this is his github page.