Les Carter & Ross. Parental Alienation Is Narcissistic Abuse at Its Worse. Part 1 of 2

[Music] hey there welcome to my latest podcast I am so excited about having Les Carter Dr Carter back I was incredibly grateful and gosh I had a lot of fun the last time you and I talked was it for your podcast or YouTube video yeah well I think we did it on the podcast and Ross you know I've known of your work and and of course you know when you're on YouTube you kind of check each other out so that's what we should and that's like that's why I wanted you on my podcast because I so appreciate the work you do yeah it's it's actually uh kind of cool so for the listeners and or viewers we had a conversation before we decided to press record but we were talking about how we are working to help this larger Community to grow to heal to understand and how our approach is different from a lot of people's approach churches and so that I think is what has gotten my attention about your work before we jump into the topic list how long have you been on YouTube did you discover I began the summer of uh 2018. you know and when it started talking about surviving narcissism frankly it was just it's just become more and more prominent and it's when you use that word narcissism virtually everyone who hears it will say oh yeah I know somebody in my world or I have a leader that uh in a group that I'm in or then we look at politics or we look at other kind of circumstances they're everywhere they're everywhere and so I just began to talk on a real Common Sense basis about that and it resonated and it just kind of took off and and went from there and and so I'm I'm gonna keep speaking into the topic until I run out of things to say which uh maybe maybe never yeah it's interesting because when I started the whole YouTube thing 11 years ago when my first edition of my human magnet syndrome was put out I wanted to talk about what I do I'm a psychotherapist I like to help people heal and overcome the problem that they have that draws them into these relations with narcissists and I noticed that all of the videos that I did on narcissists and this is 10 11 years ago they got exponentially more views than the videos where I tell people what to do not to do and so for me it has been this kind of Yin and Yang pull because I love talking about the problem as you and I will be doing today but I also love talking about how to solve it so when I ran across your work I realize you are you're the real thing and I hope that you keep doing it until the very last day of your life I know let's give you let's give you at least a year break I have a father who's still alive in 94. I don't know if I'll go to 94. so so do you want to introduce the topic that we were that we're planning on talking about well you know you and I were talking about how uh this this whole thing about understanding narcissism can become so difficult when you're let's say in a post divorce situation and you're trying to figure out how to uh to to parent kids right in such a way that they're not going to be damaged but then I I I've had so many cases where one parent really wants to be fair and uh you know have have the proper kind of teaching and boundaries and and all like that and the other just will sabotage it and and basically they uh that that less than healthy parent can bring all of the difficulty that contributed to the downfall of the marriage and bring it into the uh the co-parenting uh Arena and it's it's really difficult and frankly the greater amount of work to help smooth it out is going to be on the shoulders of the more healthy person even though the unhealthy person is the one that really needs to do the work and it's it's not at all an easy task no and and it's actually perhaps the most difficult task that the recovering codependent or what I call an sld or self-love deficient I want to change the word codependency to self-love deficit disorder but whether I do or not I'm going to stick with my terms but it is and I think you're spot on with that self-love deficiency absolutely I thank you I think so in this way we call it the name that it is and not some Antiquated term that comes from some ancient understanding of alcoholism and a partner of alcoholism I have from the very beginning understood the interaction of the needs of the narcissist although pathological and the needs of a recovering sld when they break up in fact I just submitted an article which is really part of my new upcoming book where it says the 15 strategies narcissists do when ending a relationship and so let's share what we know so we can help others either prepare which is my Approach my strategy if I'm given an opportunity or survive let's first talk about the terms rental alienation let's kind of Define that and the other terms that you and I talked about so why don't you start that off there and and I'll chime in well and by the way um there's uh there are a couple of books that would be very interesting for people one is called divorce poison and then um and that's a gold standard book and then another one is uh Judith wallerstein uh Second Chances and uh she did like 25 years of follow-up study with Children of Divorce and uh one of the things that they found is that you can have a certain percentage of parents who are post divorce who make it their tasks to train the children to hate the other parent in the same way they do now they won't say it like that but that's the net result and you know for example I I've had cases where let's suppose you have a 13 year old child that's visiting dad right and then Dad gives that child a gift and so the child goes back to Mom's house and the gift is um confiscated it's like we don't need that here or you already have one of those and little things like that or uh these days you know things like uh having a cell phone or how much time you spend on the computer and uh there's there's no effort whatsoever to coordinate it's like no what I'm going to do is I'm going to tell you the way it's supposed to be and if that other parent won't coordinate with me then they're an idiot and you need to you need to know how terrible they are and and it's it's terribly devastating because the only person in that equation that's really going to be damaged is is not Mom and it's not Dad it's going to be the kid yeah but narcissists when you talk about having self-love deficiency I actually have um have spoken about narcissism as being the absence of Love interesting and uh that's that's a succinct um definition that I have or another is narcissism can be defined as the uh the loss of integrity and uh it can play out in the the way we parent and so many times rather than Mom and Dad saying okay our marriage didn't work out I understand and by the way there are times when it's reasonable to go ahead and get a divorce not because divorce is wonderful but sometimes marriages can be dysfunctional enough to where we don't need to to perpetuate it uh I think we need to be judicious but you know uh mom and dad at that point would need to say uh why don't we uh at the very least uh as we split let's make this as um as beneficial to the kid as we possibly can and uh even though we may differ let's show honor and regard toward the other parent to the child because that's going to benefit the child and uh they're actually and Judith wallerstein actually shows that when you do that uh then uh you can have good results perhaps about a third of them uh based on her research are going to be damaged because the parents just simply can't go that path there's so many things you said that are so important first the term parental alienation to understand it you have to understand the inner workings of a narcissist you know as as we know they have a personality disorder so when there is a divorce there is what I call the Supreme mother of all narcissistic injuries if you stand up to disagree set a boundary a narcissist has a narcissistic injury which is a reflexive rage response that requires a narcissist to punish the person whether they realize it or not so if the divorce is the mother of all narcissistic injuries and the narcissist is unable to take responsibility peace of either personality disorder then they are going to feel righteous and empowered to punish their spouse their partner and through this rage and this narcissistic injury they are going to execute sometimes systemically sometimes reactively this plan do punish them and the best way to do that is to claim ownership of the children and to understand why they can destroy the children in the process is because at the core of all pathological narcissists and my belief is this Fury of rage and shame born out of their childhood experiences so this rage and fury that they're not connecting to is directing them to punish the person that they believe is hurting them to gain ownership of the objects their children well and I'm tracking with you Ross uh well one of the things that uh that I a starting point that I have is I try to understand narcissists is there are people in a lot of pain uh just as you said they they started out early on in life having to to gauge you know their authorities and peer group if I say this am I going to get in trouble uh if if you find out these things about me are you going to judge me and so when we talk about shame and guilt and fear it all comes from them being exposed at a very vulnerable age to a whole lot of conditional acceptance a lot of that condescension and uh and you know problems are not solved in a clean and logical kind of way and so they bring the pain that's associated with that into their adult years and then like you say when a divorce happens they're still in pain and the divorce is a painful situation and so that's what informs the way that they engage with people yes uh whereas uh when we try to help our children one of the things we want to do is we want to think wait a minute I remember what it was like when I was a child and uh and I know that I wanted to be treated with regard and I wanted somebody to say what do you think or at least give consideration or empathy to what I was feeling narcissist the pain is so strong and their shame and their fear and their dysfunction is just so self-defining that they're not able to go into that space the child is the one that's going to be the recipient of the the brainwashing that goes along with all of their internal turmoil so the pain that you're talking about I look at it from more of an attachment psychodynamic point of view is that you know children all advanced mammals require safety nurturing attention in order to develop normally and a human needs unconditional love safety and all that and if they do they they become healthy healthy as they survive and flourish in their life but the child who is from a narcissistic parent they disappointed that parent whereas the child who's going to be a future codependent or sld found a way to get the attention of the narcissist and make the narcissist want them to make them feel better so long story short the adult narcissists experienced such incredible trauma neglect abandonment abuse The Bad Seed they could never make the narcissist happy and so their experience was so egregiously traumatic that the brain the mind disassociated it just like cptsd or and so they're not aware of what you are talking about and what your spot on they have so much anger and rage and shame but they cannot get to it because it's disassociated which is why they have a narcissistic personality disorder so in these divorces is that this rage this anger is born from my point of view out of Shame and self-hate that they can never connect to and so they project it and you've talked about it I've talked about projection they put all of the the self-anger self-hate onto other people and feel Justified and they'll never know where it comes from as you're talking I'm thinking you know what you just said but they can't go into that space with Insight because it's too it's it's just not accessible to them self-hate I use the term self-loathing um and most of them will say I don't load myself it's like yeah you do um basically I mean you're so afraid of people finding out that you're flawed or you're imperfect it's like no I can't let other people know that about me I'm so afraid of that I'm so ashamed of the negative side but what they'll do is they'll uh they'll flip it around and say no it's not my problem it's you people out there that are so judgmental exactly and so they they and we we have the term it's projection they see in you what they can't come to terms with inside themselves and so that's what we really have going on here and so if you're the healthy parent one of the things that you can do is you can think well what I need to do is I need to make that narcissistic uh parent uh who's now I'm trying to co-parent with I need to get them to see the light it doesn't work yeah they are activated they cannot see the light first of all they can never see the light unless the light is um is their light or it's the lamp and so they are so activated there's abandonment there's shame there's self-hatred that they can't access but all they can do is pour it out on someone else and that in my point of view explains how someone who actually believes they love their children can destroy their Mental Health yeah yeah and Ross I know you could I can give you scores of uh illustrations about how that plays out it breaks my heart and then when the uh the more healthy the alienated parent uh comes to the counseling office and says how am I going to manage this uh it's like well uh what you can't do is you can't control someone who who has no Insight they're just gonna they're just kind of like the old the proverbial bull in the china shop right uh so what you can do is when you have your moments of influence you uh you illustrate what healthiness looks like right and sometimes it works out other times the alienating parent is so quote successful in uh in building that wall between uh yourself and the child that uh that you're somewhat limited and that's what makes this such an Insidious kind of a situation when the child thinks I can't show loyalty to my other parents okay because this narcissistic appearing is going to get mad and so they uh they wind up uh just being guarded around the healthy parent they wind up making excuses on behalf of the unhealthy parent and it's like to that child sweetheart you don't have to do that or something it's not necessary but the the narcissistic appearance says no you you need to show your complete loyalty to me and anything beyond that is is going to bring shame on to you and that's where you just mentioned they project onto the child and they they breathe into the child the very thing that took them into the wrong direction there's so many different starting points that a client comes to you who is a a parent and a victim of Parental alienation syndrome one is the healthy parent which I don't get which is great because I work on the ones that are codependent or sld but the sld the codependent many of them have been gaslit and very very succinct gaslighting is a systematic strategy to make a person think that something is wrong with them when there wasn't that in the beginning or it was only in mild proportions if you believe or understand that narcissists survive in the relationships of course by manipulation and and everything that we know about narcissism but by gaslighting by making people believe things that aren't true and that is an essential concept to understand if there is a child who has a really good solid attachment to the sld parent and the narcissistic parent starts to try to Gaslight them or demean or alienate them it's a different scenario versus what I see is the more typical type of child who has never gotten the love respect and caring from this narcissistic parent who all of a sudden claims that they do and wants to and the other one doesn't if they have been around gaslighting if they have been gaslit it means their reality has already shifted towards the type of thinking of the narcissist and these are the ones that grow up and come see us and so these children are even more susceptible to it and let's say one of our clients breaks through this and gets help from you me or someone else on gaslighting and self-love deficit disorder and cites a divorce that person the children are more susceptible to the gaslighting the parental alienation which is manipulation lying triangulation everything that we can talk about later and that's the point I I that I think is important to explain that this is not as simple as what the narcissist is doing in order to hurt the partner because of the narcissistic injury but they've already more than likely started a campaign of gaslighting and these children are already susceptible but uh what do you think of the connection of Parental alienation and gaslighting what are your thoughts about that uh well I think you're spot on my definition of it is incredibly parallel with what yours is yeah but uh the uh it's in the I I hate to put it this way the vested interest of the narcissist because they must be in control they must be in the superior position it's in their vested interests to get the child to doubt anything other than what that narcissist says and so they just kind of do it like first nature for example if um uh let's say a uh the mother who is alienated the father uh is just wants that child to to hate the father and then if the child says well uh dad and I went and did such and such and we had a really good time and we met some of his friends and uh I met some other kids and it really went well Mom rather than saying wow that was really good well tell me about you know what you know how your dad reacted and uh what was it like who were the friends and what did you do that would be healthy uh that narcissistic parent is like well uh I I don't have any idea who those people are uh they're gonna have a narcissistic injury and feel like they're threatened therefore take the position you're yeah and so somehow they have to diminish it yes now that's one little bitty small illustration but then take that and um and multiply it by literally a thousand uh there can be uh repetitive comments to that effect and so finally the the kid thinks well you know Mom seems to get mad every time I say something positive about Dad or it could be the opposite by the way I'm not um picking one over the other uh and so I've got to be more guarded myself then yeah and so the child learns the shame and learns to to filter uh who they are and what they think through the uh through the unhealthy parent a quick story I remember when I was eight years old and I can remember it's a promise I can remember almost everything my parents talked about divorce and they brought us right in the middle my dad did of course the narcissist and he says which ones who do you want to live with and it makes sense and then the kids thinking oh yeah and there was a litmus test at that point the the child who was going to be an adult codependent said which was me I felt sorry if I wanted to live with my dad because I always wanted to get the love I couldn't get but I felt sorry for my mom so I said Mom and the other three kids said that actually my brother wasn't my wasn't born yet so if we look at the children and future tense I was on a track of course I didn't know of being in developing developmentally into an sld or codependent and some of my siblings they were on the track of being a narcissist so these children already have a personality type that makes them vulnerable to parental alienation which is why in a family of say three for Wherever not all kids get sucked into it but the children who have never been the good child the the the preferred child the trophy child they are the ones that are most susceptible to parental alienation and if we fast forward to them as an adult they then are going to replicate the Next Generation they're going to probably be the next narcissist well and just like their parent that narcissistic parent probably was in their earlier years and just it becomes a generational pattern you're exactly right [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Ross Rosenberg

Views: 153,088

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Id: LO2LP1oVJfM

Length: 24min 43sec (1483 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 09 2023