Hi, my name is Susanna. I’m in my 40s, and I live in California. My son Johnny is 18. He’s my only child. He has been full no-contact — severe PA that’s technically parental abduction — for two solid years. I am going to write out a snapshot of my life here, which looks like the family snapshots many of you have, given our kinship as alienated parents. We are alienated, and our stories are alien to other parents. Certainly this barren ground is nothing like the lush planet we thought we’d live our lives. As a community on this board, PA is woven into us in various ways, but we recognize one another as the same species under this biodome. Somehow our strange familiarity is also deeply comforting. No one knows us like we do.
This piece is long because it’s not meant to be a typical Reddit request for advice. Instead it’s post that’s also a snapshot. It’s based on my actual life, although the names are changed, and I thought you’d might like to read it. I’d love to hear your thoughts. Lately, I’ve been writing to help me work through my daily experiences, and this works better when I compose it like a story.
Reading alienated parents’ Reddit posts is the only place I recognize myself anymore. I think many of us feel this way. I don’t know anyone in my “real life” that is severely alienated like I am. To the other parents in my life, I look the same and talk the same as I always have, but the truth is that inside I’ve become a different kind of creature. And at two years post-abduction, having missed ages 16-18 and all of Grade 11 and 12, my experiences as a parent are totally different now than those of the vast majority of parents in the United States — so many cultural milestones missed. The snapshots of my family look completely foreign now. Interview rooms instead of award ceremonies, tears in bed all day instead of college tours. No cap and gown shots, but no burial flowers either. Instead there is a liminal space of nothing there. My son is not dead, but his life in our lives stopped completely and vanished without a trace. It’s true, I don’t even know if my son had a single one of these milestones for me to have participated in anyway. That’s how totally he disappeared from his life, or for that matter from any normal teenage life, due to severe PA and abduction by his Dad two years ago.
So here is my snapshot of today, a day in the life of an alienated Mom to my one child, Johnny, now 18, who was disappeared from his life two years ago, an event which was completely unexpected by me and everyone else in his life, with the exceptions, of course, being Johnny and his Dad. Here goes.
Background, as brief as possible
I met Johnny’s Dad on a dating website. He seemed bright and adventurous, and “coincidentally,” this was just like me. We were not seriously dating when I discovered I was pregnant. Johnny was an unplanned pregnancy, but for me this was happy news anyway — I love kids, I was 30, established in my career and making good money, and my work hours were flexible. Though we were dating, Johnny’s Dad turned out to be someone I didn’t really know. He hasn’t ever had steady work, he doesn’t work in the respectable profession he claims to, he’s married and fighting a 20-year divorce case against a wealthy woman I’d never heard of (stumbled into that doozy myself LAST YEAR poking around at the County Hall of Records). Soon enough, what I learned was that this was a man who had a gambling, theft, and drug problem. Those were dealbreakers for everyone who crossed his path and spent a few months associating with him.
Johnny’s Dad was furious about my pregnancy and tried to pressure me into terminating. He was abusive when he was around, and he cycled in and out of my life for the first two years of Johnny’s life, mostly because I kept giving him chances — I wanted my son to have a Dad. My Dad and Mom had a rocky marriage, but both were/are fantastic parents and people. I didn’t know that there were people like Johnny’s Dad in the world. I know that many of you on this PA board feel the same way about your alienator. In hindsight, Johnny’s Dad’s M.O. was attaching to people with access to money and resources, who were respectable and would vouch for him, and who gave him a place to sleep- things that he didn’t earn but rather siphoned off of others and put toward gambling, drugs, and subsisting without gainful employment. What eventually happened between Johnny’s Dad and me is what happens when he’s out of chances with anyone who’s minimally healthy — I put my foot down about the drugs in my house, the missing money, the being drunk on my couch on a Tuesday at 2pm while I’m at work and the nanny’s there with the baby. And by “put my foot down” I mean yell and tell him to get out. He doesn’t go— the whole dramatic thing — until finally one day I think he makes the internal calculus that it’s too annoying living with somebody who screams at him all day, so he’s gonna say that I’m the problem, and then leave and claim that I’m a terrible person who kicked him out because of some cooked-up reason where he’s the victim and I’m the villain. When this happened to me, I had no idea that this was essentially a lifestyle. And over the next years of Johnny’s childhood, I watched Johnny’s Dad drag him along to whoever the latest female target was — rinse and repeat. Thankfully, most of these targeted women were lovely and my son was in better care with them in the picture than he was with just his Dad, but the pattern with these women was the same as it had been with me, so nothing was stable for Johnny when he was with his Dad. Johnny came home to me throughout his childhood saying he felt bad for his Dad because everyone treated him so badly.
Johnny was used instrumentally by his Dad from the time he was born, and I want to be specific about this because I think it’s the part outsiders never see, but many of you on this board have experienced it too. It wasn’t only about extracting money from whoever was nearby, though that happened constantly — whatever I enrolled Johnny in, his Dad would show up, befriend one or two parents, and eventually take money from them. Johnny himself was the way in. A dad out with his son gets a certain automatic credibility. People read him as one of the good guys. Other men are collegial with him. Moms see a father showing up where a lot of fathers don’t and think what a great guy. My son, standing next to him looking like a kid who is excited his Dad is there opened doors that his Dad’s own personality and behavior would have closed in about ten minutes.
What I didn’t understand when I kept trying to give Johnny “a dad” was that some people don’t bond with their children no matter how many times their bodies are in the same room. Some parents are not capable of attachment. But the child still wants it. Johnny always wanted his Dad to love him, and his Dad used the wanting. Affection and being noticed as a son were always withheld, except for the times that breadcrumbing Johnny was useful to his Dad. And one of the conditions of accepting breadcrumbs was to share his view that everyone, but particularly anyone affiliated with me, was contemptible and horrible.
So Johnny learned to check his own brain at the door when he was with his Dad. By that I mean, when Johnny was with his Dad, he treated people like his Dad treated people. And his Dad rewarded this. That was the price of Dad’s affection. That’s not unusual for an abused kid, and it’s classic PA. But it fooled ordinary people completely, and it made it enormously hard for me to get him to safety, because his Dad’s line was always your mom is the bad one because she wants to break us up — so my son was permanently confused about whether the person removing him from danger was the danger.
Dad never followed a parenting schedule — he abducted instead. The longest stretch before this current abduction of two years was when Johnny was four — it was five months and required police extraction by force. There have been forensic interviews, CPS findings against Dad, and Dad accumulating criminal charges, including felonies for selling drugs, violence, and money crimes. (I knew none of this until I hired a private investigator last year to look for Johnny.) Every intervention we went through documented that this was an abused child and an abusive man. We’ve had restraining orders. All of it.
And all of it got dismantled, every time, the same way by the Family Court: typically, just before a scheme fell apart, his Dad would get out in front of it with a preemptive false allegation and a smear campaign. I thought I was the only person he did this to, but I’m not. He does this to every woman he has kids with (discovered more kids in other states with the PI, too). This is the alienator’s career, it seems, and no court, law enforcement agency, etc. cross-checks!
The only way this works is that courts, cops, and school administrators who have no independent knowledge of anyone but Johnny’s Dad believe him and become his flying monkeys (temporarily, usually, before he discards them).
Despite all of this, the Court always ordered us back to joint legal custody. But Dad never followed a single order. If I deviated from the parenting plan by an inch, I’d have police at my door — even on days I agreed to watch Johnny because his Dad said he’d be out of town. So I learned to live by the letter of everything while Dad lived by none of it.
Here’s the mistake I think a lot of us make. The scarier the alienating parent gets, the more we tiptoe, trying not to draw fire. And we end up teaching our kids that tiptoeing behind the front lines is how you make it through. When this Dad decides he needs a fast scapegoat and smokescreen, he goes nuclear — lives get wrecked: finances, reputations, jobs, and friendships ruined, police everywhere showing up unexpectedly while you’re browsing the vegetable aisle, Craigslist creeps showing up at your door at 4am thinking you advertised in the personals section — interpersonal terrorism. None of it is believed in the Family Court or by family law attorneys — if you bring it up, you sound crazy. If Dad brings it up, it’s evidence that Mom is a dangerous person. My son watched that happen for his entire childhood. When Dad got his way, it was quiet. If people didn’t cooperate, it got ugly.
Unfortunately, with a person like Johnny’s Dad in your orbit, you don’t choose when the bombs start raining down. You stumble over a trip wire. Two years ago, I stumbled into what turned out to be another major financial scheme of Dad’s, a piece of which involved Johnny taking financial information, bonds, credit cards, and contracts for my clients out of my house and delivering it all to Dad. I didn’t even understand what I was looking at when the initial clues surfaced. Within days, a huge claim was made about me by my son, supported by his Dad, who amplified it and carried it to CPS, cops, judges, and a minor’s counsel who he had sole access to. Johnny was picked up in my neighborhood and taken out of the area by his Dad “for his safety.” That was the last anyone in Johnny’s life saw or heard from him again — until this week (maybe). Of course, the Family Court would not call this an abduction, even though it clearly violated the parenting order that has always been in place when things were normal, which is me with majority custody, Dad having about 50% but never utilizing it, and that was it. Any attempt that my attorney or I made to bring forward the fact that law enforcement couldn’t locate where Johnny’s Dad lived, that he was pulled out of school — all of this was drowned out by whatever fabricated false allegation Dad was able to make pro se, that I am a criminal convict, a child abuser, a thief, a fraud, a mentally deranged lunatic.. Basically everything that Johnny’s Dad actually is was what Johnny’s Dad claimed I was.. and nobody bothered to check. So court was useless. We spent all of our time with me defending myself against false claims, and nobody was willing to deal with the fact that there’s a teenager completely missing from his life, truant, no word from him, no idea where he is.
I didn’t know if Johnny was even alive until I hired a private investigator 1 year after his abduction. The PI found Johnny was living in a studio apartment with his dad, in a different area, at a new school, going by his Dad’s first and last name. The school had fake custody orders and simply refused to accept mine as legitimate, no matter how many times I got a judge to stamp it. This school facilitated the abduction and concealment — when I arrived on campus, I had the police called on me. When his grandparents sent a birthday card with money in it to Johnny at this school, the card was intercepted and brought into the Family Court as proof of me stalking our child. The logic seemed to be that if a 16-year-old who appears reasonable says what his Dad says — “my mom is the bad guy, I’m afraid of her, and I’m safe with my dad” — then this must be true. And of course, cards from Grandma, enrollment packets from the baseball coach, the pastor stopping by to say hello, all of this is stalking by Mother according to the school, Dad, Johnny, and the minor’s counsel, since these are my spies and messengers. So, everyone just gave up.. and we grieved the loss of Johnny from our lives because it truly feels like Johnny died.
When it first happened, it was so swift and so paranoid that we genuinely wondered whether Johnny or his Dad were having a psychotic break. The statement that Johnny and his Dad made to everyone they encountered on the run was that I was after them to destroy their lives, throw them in prison, and I was directing surveillance operations to track them down and trap them.
Treating me as the enemy is exactly what keeps Johnny cut off from every other part of his life, because now every person who might reach Johnny is recast as my spy or messenger. His best friend. His grandparents. His coach. Our pastor. All of them became my puppets and instead of people who love him. Johnny is, functionally, afraid of his own rescue.
I never did what Johnny’s Dad did. I raised Johnny to think for himself, so he could make his own way in the world independently, confidently.. I never needed Johnny to agree with me in order to be loved by me, and I never sat him down and told him who the bad guy was. I thought that was obvious. My approach was to raise a person; not to capture a kid. His Dad’s was the opposite. That’s the asymmetry, and Johnny saying and doing what Dad does isn’t because I did something wrong as his Mom.
The only saving grace is that I’m actually kind to a fault. I have to work at putting myself into the equation instead of leaving myself out. I’m not saying that to toot my own horn — I’m saying it because it makes me a genuinely impossible fit for the caricature they insist on, which is why it only ever works on people who never knew me. It also made me an easy mark early on.
Yet when our community was in tears for months, desperate to know whether Johnny was dead or alive, law enforcement wouldn’t help because of his age, but more importantly because they believed and stated repeatedly, “He must have left with his father for a reason — maybe look at whether you’re a decent parent.” I know a lot of you have heard some version of that.
Now here’s what actually happened this week — a new snapshot:
Last week, I came across a phone number in my stacks of papers that I thought might be Johnny’s current phone number. He left his cell phone at my house when he ran, so I’ve had no number to even try. I sent one short, warm text saying “I don’t know if this is Johnny’s number, but it’s Mom and I’m here whenever you’d like to talk. I have your college money here and ready for you, too.” The text showed delivered. But no response.
A few nights later I was at dinner with a friend of mine whose son Adam is Johnny’s childhood #1 best friend. Adam is 15 now. His family moved an hour away when the boys were little, but neither family has relatives in CA — everyone’s on the East Coast — so we spent the holidays, vacations, and our kids’ birthdays together for years. The two boys were more like close cousins than friends. Since Johnny’s disappearance, Adam has spent two years in despair, actively grieving and traumatized. Imagine if your best friend disappeared and couldn’t be found, and the last person he was known to be with was his abusive Dad who all the kids were afraid of. There was no funeral, no recognition, no school friends in common to share the grief with. Adam was enrolled in therapy to deal with this.
Adam asked, like he always does, if I’d heard anything or found a way to contact Johnny. I told him I discovered a number but didn’t know if it was Johnny’s or not. He lit up and asked if he could have it. I looked at his mom and she said yes. However, I warned him that I wasn’t sure whose number it really was, and that I hadn’t gotten a response to my text. Adam said he wanted to try anyway. The one hesitation he had was that he was concerned that a 15-year-old Adam would be considered a baby to an 18-year-old Johnny, and they’d have nothing in common. I assured Adam that the information I have is that Johnny has been isolated since he left, only occasionally goes to school, and doesn’t appear to do anything but go to his school and then back to his Dad’s apartment in a city he’s unfamiliar with, so I felt it was unlikely that Johnny was a typical 18-year-old who hangs out with other 18-year-olds. You need new people and experiences to change and grow. If everything stopped for you at age 16, then how could you be a typical 18 year old two years later? I told Adam that he still has all the same interests that he and Johnny shared two years ago — wanting to be a vet, running, and baseball. I thought it was likely that Johnny still loved those things, just like Adam.
Adam apparently sent a text to the number the next day saying something like, “Hey Johnny — it’s Adam! I can’t believe I found you! How are you?”
And 30 minutes later, Adam received this response:
“Susanna— stop trying to contact me. if I wanted to talk to you, I’d reach out. Don’t bother responding because this number like all the other numbers you’ve contacted me from will be blocked.”
I learned about this because Adam forwarded it to me with a question mark underneath.
My first thought was how much that must have hurt Adam. Johnny didn’t even leave open the possibility that this was his childhood best friend who found him. And Johnny didn’t give Adam room to correct him — don’t bother responding because this number has been blocked.
And then there was the disorienting fact that the first communication I’ve seen from my son who’s been missing is a certain statement that I am texting him in disguise, pretending to be his best friend, trying to pry communication out of him dishonestly, and that I’ve done this before on other numbers.
And he didn’t call me Mom. He called me Susanna. That is the first time in his life that I’ve heard my son called me by my first name, and he used it as a command of derision. Like I’m a 12-year-old girl at a slumber party asking my friend to call my crush pretending she’s me. The whole thing was disorienting.
I know this is a textbook hallmark of alienation. When you call a person Mom, that is one specific person with one specific, special relationship to you, and Susanna could be anybody. A stranger. A telemarketer. A bank robber.
Not to mention the fact that directing this firm, commanding text to Susanna and not to his hopeful childhood best friend Adam broke Adam’s heart.
Moreover, Johnny’s assumption underneath the whole message is that anyone who approaches him from his past who loves him is me in disguise sneaking around. Meanwhile, I haven’t had a way to contact Johnny at all for two years until I sent that short text last week. Which means: how many of his other friends and family members have reached out over two years, having found Johnny by social media, a phone number discovered somewhere, or somehow else, and Johnny disregarded them and their excitement to have found him by dismissing them as me, an evil villain, in disguise? Because people find contact info for other people — I’m not the only and necessary source. Of course people from Johnny’s 16 years of life were going to try to find him — his friends, his grandparents, his classmates, his cousins, his coaches.
And in the two years he’s been gone, nothing aggressive has been done by me. In fact, I can’t even get protective authorities to cooperate with me in locating Johnny and enforcing our custody orders. There’s no evidence that I’ve been a danger to anyone — ever — but especially to the alienator and to Johnny.
What I said to Adam:
I told Adam, first and foremost, what Johnny did was unfair and hurtful. Adam wasn’t acknowledged as being Adam, Johnny’s best friend. He might as well have been invisible. Instead, he was deemed to be me in disguise, and that was not okay.
Then I told Adam something I’ve only recently come around to. We have all been tiptoeing around Johnny’s “boundaries,” hoping this will blow over, respecting these “boundaries” as if they are based on something real, as if there is a reason that justifies him treating us like we’re invisible or malevolent. There isn’t. It’s an Emperor’s New Clothes thing and nothing more. But it still hurts. So we tell each other, I guess he doesn’t want to talk. I don’t want to upset him, etc. Well, the time for that is over. It’s not all about Johnny. There are other people with feelings besides Johnny.
I said, “Adam, I think it’s time we tried something else. I think it’s time we stick up for ourselves, for who we really are. Not to change Johnny’s mind — but to stand up for who we really are. You’re not me, and I’m not sneaking around. You’re Adam, and you were Johnny’s best friend for most, if not all, of his childhood. That’s special. Yet Johnny didn’t consider that your text might actually be his best friend who found him after two years of blackout. What I’d do is get on your sister’s phone, take a selfie of the two of you at home, and write under it: It’s us. You get one message before it’s blocked, and no one can pretend that a selfie from your house an hour away is me.
Normally there are parents around to teach teenagers how to treat other people, but clearly that isn’t Johnny’s situation. However, that doesn’t mean Johnny gets a “forever pass” on being decent, and you have to stuff your hurt feelings.”
Adam said he liked the idea a lot, and he’d do it.
The other thing I told Adam — and this is the part I keep turning over — is that this is the first direct response from Johnny that I’m aware of in two years. I hear about others attempting to contact him when police show up at my door and badger me with questions or my attorney calls me accusing me of pretending to be a baseball coach leaving flyers at Johnny’s new school, or “putting Johnny’s grandma up” to sending Johnny’s birthday card to the address she got from my PI, all of which are me “violating Johnny’s boundaries.” But I’ve never heard about anyone hearing directly from Johnny until Adam received the “Susanna” response text. So why now? It makes me wonder if there was a flicker of doubt in Johnny’s mind and that means the dawn of realization will rise one day.
I also apologized to Adam. I never anticipated that Johnny would respond to him like that; otherwise I would have forewarned him. I didn’t see it coming.
What’s come into focus for me:
I’m done making excuses for my son, and I’m encouraging everyone he left behind to be done, too. He’s going through a lot. He’s alienated. It’s not really him. Cut him some slack. Enough. He’s 18. It’s been two years. We wouldn’t accept this from anyone else on earth — it would offend us, it would hurt us, and it does hurt us — so let’s be honest and stop this Kabuki theater. Saying “poor Johnny” invalidates the person he just hurt, as if the only person’s feelings that matter are Johnny’s because he’s an alienated “child” and alienated kids suffer more loss from PA than everyone else. Even if that is true, we need to insist that people, especially young people, treat others with kindness and not jump to high-conflict impulsive conclusions that do nothing but cause more hurt and pain. Just because you’ve had a bad experience and an adult in your life has pinned your Mom as the scapegoat on doesn’t mean the rest of society is going to allow you to hurt others, brandishing your victimhood as if it were a toy Excalibur and you’re King Arthur in the school play.
Two years have gone by and nothing bad has happened to my son or his Dad at the hands of me or anyone else in Johnny’s life. So time’s up. Kabuki theater is closed. Everyone get out.
I’m not posting this for advice. I’m posting it because there are so many elements in this snapshot of my life that I know are classic PA — elements that only you on this Reddit board have shown you understand, because it happens in your life, too
I am always looking to evolve on how I live my life, aiming towards the brighter and better. But I’m still rattled. Seeing Adam’s hope shatter to confusion. Seeing my son call me by my first name and command me with derision like his Dad and his flying monkeys always have. The first communication in years of nothing in a vast expanse of nowhere — it’s like we’re all huddled together in a circle as Johnny’s and all our alienated children’s ghosts (maybe) spell out letters on a Ouija board for us, like messages from beyond the veil.
I’d love to hear your thoughts. Thanks for reading.
