Mike Jeffries--

We were sitting in a Bennigan’s Restaurant. As we devoured the restaurant’s famous Monte Cristo sandwiches as if we were participating in some sort of religious experience, a heartbreaking scene played out in South Florida that all the fried bread, meat, cheese and raspberry sauce in the world couldn’t obscure.

“What do you think of the Elian Gonzalez story?” I asked the mother of my children.

“I think he should stay with his relatives in Miami,” she responded.

“But what about his father in Cuba,” I countered. “Don’t you think he has the right to raise his son?”

“No, the little boy will have a better life here,” she said. Then she looked away – the signal that our discussion was over.

The memory of that long-ago conversation came back to me this morning when I read that Elian, now 16, marked the 10^th anniversary of his return to Cuba by telling foreign reporters that he’s not angry with his Miami relatives who fought to keep him in the U.S., and is thankful “a large part of the American public” supported him being reunited with his father in Cuba.

Elian was five years old when a fisherman found him in an inner tube off the coast of Florida. His mother drowned trying to reach the United States.  Elian’s father was separated from his mother and never left Cuba.

My ex-wife’s cold, dismissive attitude towards Elian’s father and his right to have a relationship with his child should have made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, but it didn’t. In fact, there were other signs of my future status as a severely alienated parent long before our divorce; and yours truly missed every one of them.

Targeted parents often don’t recognize the signs leading up to parental alienation. Very simply, we don’t see the forest for the trees. An unsettling comment is uttered over dinner, we think the comment is a little odd, but the conversation moves on and we don’t give it another thought. Or perhaps a verbal warning signal is fired during an argument. We rationalize the comment as something said in the heat of the moment. Once the argument is over and apologies have been exchanged, we forget all about it.

Recognizing the patterns of behavior that lead to parental alienation is a giant game of Connect-the-Dots. It usually takes a detached third party to identify the patterns. For the rest of us, these isolated incidents are nothing more than blips on a screen. When an incident occurs and it’s over quickly, we’re too close to see the bigger picture. If we recognized the bigger picture, we’d recognize that our lives were about to get far more challenging than we ever imagined.

Mike Jeffries is the author of A Family's Heartbreak: A Parent's Introduction to Parental Alienation. Formerly a journalist and currently a corporate communication professional, Jeffries articles on parental alienation, divorce, parenting and advocacy have appeared in Counseling Today, Woman’s Magazine, The Richmond County Bar Association Journal, Children’s Voice Magazine, CRC Children, and at Womansdivorce.com and Dadsdivorce.com.  He has also discussed parental alienation on radio programs in the United States, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom; and on CNN, at ChildrenToday.com and in Best Life Magazine.  The A Family's Heartbreak: A Parent’s Introduction to Parental Alienation website is located at www.afamilysheartbreak.com. Jeffries and A Family's Heartbreak: A Parent's Introduction to Parental Alienation can also be found on Facebook.

Parental Alienation 2010: You Are NOT Alone 

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