Following are a few situations that involve patients who did and did not suffer from mental illness, as well as average cases of normal people taken from everyday life. They represent the common life experiences that are typical manifestations of DOLF. These are all well functioning individuals who are not deficient in any way but who are suffering deeply because of lost relationships with their children. The examples illustrate the extreme distress that a parent experiences when a child is “lost” to their family. This can either be due to mere disloyalty on the part of the child, or actual hatred aimed at one parent, both parents or the entire family. Over time, the hatred has usually reached the point where it is mutual and there is no return. The overt cause is that the child is full of self-indulgence, hate for the occupants of the household, or develops an allegiance outside the home, such as to a gang, peer group, cult, or an unacceptable love connection.
It isn’t unusual to find a family that is “split down the middle” in terms of the allegiances of two children with their two parents. In one family with two grown sons, one was a lawyer and the other a businessman. When the boys’ parents decided to divorce in later life, the boys’ loyalties were split down definitive lines: one son stood behind his father, while the other chose to support his mother.
When their divorce case went to court, the son who was a lawyer acted to defend his favored parent in the legal case, his father, leaving his brother and mother to find their own resources. One can only imagine the their animosity and vigorous legal case that the lawyer-son conducted against the other two. The example illustrates that if you have one PLG parent who is at war with the other parent, plus a child who feels disfavored by that PLG parent, there is a good chance that an alliance can develop between the ALG parent and the less favored child, setting up a frightening scenario for two hostile parent-child “teams”. Like a battle between two countries, it describes the depth of a conflict that can arise and fester over time and ultimately erupt between what once began as one group of human beings, and ended up as two splintered, warring factions!
Another example is an elderly woman who came in because she was somewhat depressed. She has two grown daughters, one of whom is very attached to her. Only when I asked did she mention that she has another grown daughter who will have nothing to do with her, but is very close with her father, whom she had divorced many years ago. Regardless of the efforts she made through the years to lure back her less favored daughter, her situation remains largely the same, with the less favored daughter refusing to initiate any contact with her mother, and responding minimally even when sincere and heartfelt approaches are made to her. Now it may be argued that in this case parental alienation may have played a role. This means that the father may have been planning, plotting, convincing and influencing his daughter to hate his wife, willfully contributing to exacerbating a bad relationship between his PLG wife and disfavored daughter. Perhaps this was so. But the important fact remains that the alienated daughter, due to her anger over her Disfavored status with her mother as compared with her sister, was able to be influenced and an easy target for such alienation.
But a question that does not arise to my knowledge due to the lack of awareness in psychological circles that the mind of a child consists of very fixed and pointed instinctual intentions, is: Do the children have an agenda too? When the lines in a family are so clearly demarcated, there is good reason to believe that children too are somehow accomplices and become drawn to loving or disliking certain parents. However, in contrast to our reasons for loving certain children for their behavior toward us, this seems to depend on how much LOVE siblings feel is coming from one parent as compared with the other.
If you look around and let your feelings guide you, you will soon arrive at your own “diagnosis” as to who is the PLG and who is the ALG in your own families. You should soon be able to spot one PLG in every family you look at, such as the families of your relatives, friends and neighbors. It is important here to mention that in my experience MOTHERS ARE PLG’S IN 50% OF FAMILIES, while FATHERS ARE ALSO PLG’S IN 50%. In other words, half of families select their father as the warmer parent, while half of families choose their mother as the warmer parent. In the same way as with Favored and Disfavored siblings, it seems one should always be looking at any two parents comparatively to each other. This may be news to adults, but children are already clued in because they are supremely sensitive to the disparity in the precious commodity of LOVE that is emanating from their parents. From birth or shortly thereafter children sense, smell or “smoke out” the parent with the greater amount of LOVE to give. Through their childish charm, they may even be capable of “teasing out” more LOVE from one parent than that parent actually was ever able to show in their other life relationships. In the world of Emotions, this is not an unusual situation. At present, there is little or no predictability as to how parents will react to their children, except to say that every set of parents seems to be amenable to this type of analysis, and ultimately to this kind of division of roles.
Above are two standard examples of normal families in conflict. Looking at the global picture, with a little variation, most people’s stories are quite similar.
