A child in the midst of a brainwashing campaign is learning more than just to despise and think negatively of a parent. He or she is being taught how to hate in general.
If a child is taught to hate or have contempt for his or her own parent, they will start paying attention to the negative aspects rather than the positive. The child won’t notice the good traits or actions of the other parent, but focusses instead on anything that can be framed in a bad light. This is fueled and encouraged by the alienating parent because they do not want to hear the child talk about anything positive about the ex.
Teaching a child to hate is also teaching them how to be a negative person in general. And this takes years of therapy to eventually overcome, if it can be overcome at all.
If a child is taught to despise a parent over perceived personality or parenting “flaws” due to a hostile ex’s brainwashing, this outward hostility doesn’t just stop there. It also moves towards other people the brainwashing parent can’t stand (due mostly to jealousy or fear).
The best example is the targeted parent’s extended family. Not only is the targeted parent badmouthed and maligned, but in most cases so are his or her relatives (and thus the child’s, too). Enlisted in the demonization of the ex and the ex’s family also are any other children the brainwasher might have from another marriage or relationship. The lies never get hoisted only onto the ex’s child or children, they get spread like a manure spreader to every other member of the family tree.
But it doesn’t stop there.
Since most brainwashing parents are very insecure people, they dish out their feelings of disgust towards a lot of people in their lives. And who picks up on these feelings? The child who has to listen to it (the only children who can rise above the badmouthing are teenagers who who are harder to convince, especially over people they have known their entire life).
Over many months and years, a child can’t help but share the brainwashing parent’s beliefs and contempt. It’s hatred that’s been taught to the child, and instilled in their very core (and this isn’t severe child abuse?). You can think of this indoctrination as a hate bootcamp.
What happens next, over time, is these children see other people– not just the parent they’ve been taught is bad– through the abusive parent’s eyes. Labels are quickly thrown on people, and if the parent is a narcissist (view this post on narcissistic parents), watch out. Their kids will also absorb many of their toxic traits.
Don’t underestimate how closely our actions as parents are watched, and eventually mimicked, by our kids. If you tend to yell, they yell. If you beat them with a belt, they’ll lash out physically at others as well. If you lie a lot, don’t expect them to be amazing little truth tellers. So it doesn’t take much effort for a parent who’s hating an ex-wife or ex-husband to get his or her young child to join in fully on the hatred bandwagon.
Kids develop into adults through a combination of their own inherent nature (DNA) and nurture (parenting), but when they’ve been marinating in false feelings of hatred for a decade or more, it’s extremely difficult to reverse even for an experienced therapist. The damage to their psyche is tremendous, and the perpetrators of this abuse are committing an evil act.
Teaching a kid to hate is child abuse, and the only remedy for these young and innocent victims is to remove them from that abusive home. Unfortunately, this is a major uphill battle to undertake, as family courts, CPS, and child therapists today simply don’t understand this form of abuse.
Mental child abuse is the most common form of child abuse in America, and the most difficult to stop” – BrainwashingChildren.com
