At first I thought my stepkid just had terrible manners or a bad attitude. TBH, those might be true too. But after years of this with no improvement and actually seeing her behavior get suddenly worse, I finally realized my stepkid was being super shitty to me & Dan on purpose; she wanted to drive us away. And that is the heartbreaking nature of alienation.

On some level, she wanted us to give up on her — so she’d be free from that loyalty bind where her mom kept her trapped. Alienation is like a self-fulfilling prophecy: the alienating parent keeps telling the kid we don’t care about them. And they reject us so hard and are so awful to us that many of us do give up, because we don’t know what else to do and we think that must really be what these kids want.

Instead of giving up though, Dan & I kept trying. Kept showing up and trying our damnedest to show my stepdaughter that we were her family too. That made her so mad for so long I thought she'd never forgive us.

Fast forward to today though and here we are. Life is pretty damn normal with my stepkid these days. She even tells us she loves us now and gives us hugs and stuff, which she quit doing for years. Just goes to show that no matter how bad your relationship with your stepkids seems right at this moment, you never know when you might turn a corner. 💕

If you’re currently trapped in your own personal worst-case scenario with alienated stepkids, please know I’m sending you love. And also, please don’t lose sight of the big picture. Don’t forget that underneath the layers and layers of the rejection and anger of parental alienation, your stepkids are your family. And you are theirs. No matter how hard they try to prove otherwise by pushing you away.

There’s no aspect of stepparenting life I found more heartbreaking than the alienation we lived through, yet finding accurate advice to support you through that is incredibly hard. Which is why Dan & I set out to create the resources we wish we’d had ourselves back when we were living our own worst-case scenario, such as this workshop: ➡️ Parental Alienation: Survival Strategies for Blended Families 👀 It’s free for our paid Substack subscribers, or you can watch it by signing up for a free trial. I really hope it helps. xo

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