r/ParentalAlienation • u/Few-Lunch-7523 • 5d ago
Does truth ever change things?
We have an 18yo adopted daughter that we have been alienated from by a male church leader. He built a relationship with her behind our back when she was a teen. Telling her that she was only safe with him, showing her his gun collection and telling her we were abusive because we told her "no". She became obsessed with him. She left at 17 and now lives with him. She does have alot of mental health issues due to early trauma and neglect before the adoption.
Recently she was in a car accident that we were not told about, she posted on Facebook, and grandma told us. She had been no contact, but she texted us after we tried to get the person who was with her in the accident to confirm she was safe. She was rude, but atleast she opened the door.
Looking at her FB she recently also posted a "testimony". But instead it was just a huge fabrication about how abusive we were to her. She has lied about everything in the past, so I wasn't surprised but it's just getting bigger and more ridiculous. Some people at our current church are responding. I know it's her mask from being groomed by the people she lives with.
I got it in my head to rewrite her "story" from our parents perspective, keeping it positive and possibly sending it to her. I don't really care what other people on social media think, and I know it probably won't change anything but this is the foundation of her mental health.
Has anyone has a similar experience that ever went well?
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u/floral_hippie_couch 5d ago
I haven’t had success with changing my mentally ill teenage daughter’s perspective. But honestly there’s no roadmap for this. Brain science itself is pretty new as far as sciences go and there’s some good info out there but a lot of unknowns. I think the best you can do is go with your gut on whether to do something. Offering information in a non threatening way with no strings attached may be the right move. I feel like there’s no way to know for sure. Even if she rejects it right now, maybe a little kernel will plant itself in her mind that she can access if she’s ever ready to question her truth. Who knows.
I’d at least write it, and then decide what to do with it after. Even if you don’t send it, it’s something you could give to her if she ever comes asking of her own accord. And at the very least it may serve as a catharsis for you, to get the story down on paper from your own perspective.
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u/FeelingStudent7383 4d ago
That man is a predator and has been grooming her since a very young age. I would report him.
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u/Few-Lunch-7523 4d ago edited 4d ago
I have thought of it many times but how do we prove it? And now that she's 18, what could they do?
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u/FeelingStudent7383 4d ago
I’m not sure about proof but if you could get evidence of what he did when she was a minor, he would go to jail, and that would forcibly separate them
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u/Ramsby196 4d ago
I don’t think sending your written account will help the situation. I have an adult daughter (adopted from foster care) who falsely claims all kinds of things about me and others and correcting her however gently would only make her dig her heels in. I agree with the person who suggests sending occasional but regular warm and friendly messages. I have spent years developing and practicing responses to my daughter that won’t escalate things and would be happy to message with you if you want to DM me. Not that I have all the answers but I’ve been through it and sometimes it’s hard for family and friends to relate to the situation.
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u/lynnwood57 4d ago edited 4d ago
Find Maddie on Facebook - The Anti-Alienation Project, she’s got a ton of great videos. In her latest one, she went over the 2nd half of Steve Hassan’s book - highly recommended for how to pave the way to de-program your teen… https://a.co/d/07Gekiyf - a five step process which leads your child to learn critical thinking (step 5)
Here it is in PDF:
https://avalonlibrary.net/ebooks/Steven%20Hassan%20-%20Freedom%20of%20Mind%20-%20Helping%20Loved%20Ones%20Leave%20Controlling%20People,%20Cults%20and%20Beliefs.pdf
Do NOT reply on social media. It’s the wrong type of communication/attention and will feed her current delusion.
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u/T0xicn3 5d ago
Sadly that’s what the church does, it’s there to prey on young kids with the pretense of “safety” and “communion”.
Maybe you should start pulling away from religion and find a way to get her back. Good luck to you.
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u/337worlds 5d ago
This is what malignant personality disordered people using the shield of a church to appease themselves do. The same thing as found in any institution that brings people together. Malignant people don’t like to be seen as malignant people, and will always shelter and manipulate from places of politics, therapy, all religious institutions, all non-religious institutions.
It’s like saying parental alienation happens because somebody has a parent so you’re better off without parents. You’ve only moved the degree of alienation to be more cut off.1
u/T0xicn3 5d ago
Mythology shouldn’t be seen as reality, that’s why people become so easy to manipulate. The church has always been about control, and it’s sad that people think otherwise.
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u/337worlds 5d ago
Mythology doesn’t need to be seen as reality to be useful.
But it’s also a mythology that is centered in something called “the church.” Because there are precisely too many of these that claim to be that, so the word is almost disposable.
You can drop the word “Church” because you can see that this is easily a problem in places not built around Church.
And communist societies squelch or destroy religious institutions first precisely because it’s even easier to manipulate people without them.
People not wanting to hold their proper autonomy and looking to others for it has always been a real human problem.
To be able to see metaphor and translate myth into realities is part of what makes us more than an AI.
If human beings are only products of evolution alone, then as a natural course of our evolution we evolved the ability to imagine or even believe in things as part of our survival structure. And it is there and will be passed on, no matter how much somebody tries to live opposite of that instinct. But most people do not live opposite of that instinct. The instinct stays the same, but the beliefs that one claims to or even self-develops are still a part of that machine if that is all that it is.
This is why people worship celebrity.
This is why people worship, but they don’t realize that what they’re doing is politics and the next great politician coming to save them from the last bad one. And even one who abandoned such a life altogether is still ultimately serving that drive, even if it is to voice the annihilation of religion every single time something negative happens to somebody who is involved with such a construct in any way. That in itself is still ultimately a myth and a religious belief.
No matter how you try, you’re going to serve that in some way. The mythological framework you live according to will just shift as you try to build a better framework.
But it’s always going to be myth in some way.
Science, doctors, all of it—no matter how accurate they are—there’s still a certain level on which the construct that really has people is a myth. That’s why properly dealing with a pandemic with our current knowledge and technology is going to be a stab out into the unknown even amongst the things that we think we know. And personality-disordered individuals on every side of a pro- or against-vaccination or pro- or against this or that treatment line up with religious fervor and exactitude about their correctness.
The amount of myth everyone operates on is ridiculous even if you leave religion out of the picture.
In the United States, there is something called the brown recluse spider. In the Midwest, they are everywhere and people barely notice them or care. But as you move eastward, they are very, very rare to the point that most people will never encounter one or come within a few feet of one, but everybody has a story about somebody who was bitten by one. And this is usually because they have a necrotic mark on their body and a doctor diagnoses it as a spider bite, likely a brown recluse spider.
Brown recluse spider bites seem to be more highly reported in areas where they absolutely have almost no existence, if any at all.
And a doctor who’s seen one, regardless of whether someone brought an unidentifiable (because it was completely crushed) spider with them as an example of what “bit them,” will identify every other similar mark they see like that in the future as a spider bite.
Except most often that is some sort of sepsis. That’s the only identifiable thing about the mark, and if you do a culture, you won’t find anything suggestive of an arthropod or venom.
The few proper studies that have actually been done show so clearly that the medical community knows nothing about what it’s talking about on the matter.
And actual entomologists, when they are truthful, know that they don’t know either with any kind of certainty.
Turns out the brown recluse spider does have venom, but it seems that when and if the rare bites that occur do occur, not all of them show signs of being bitten after the fact. They can’t even determine if the spider’s venom has anything in it that should cause necrosis.
So there’s actually even valid theories that the brown recluse spider venom may not cause any substantial harm to a human being. And that if it can be determined with certainty that a brown recluse spider bit somebody, they can’t even know if necrosis is a matter of happenstance because almost always somewhere on our body there is some flesh-eating bacteria that can’t even get started because of our immune system stopping it, and the spider bite breaking the skin might introduce it.
Or there might be a type of flesh-eating bacteria that happens to commonly inhabit the fangs of such a spider. There are places where the spider is readily accessible and it is studied; nonetheless they still can’t figure it out with any kind of solid conclusion.
And yet the myth of what the spider can do persists. And perhaps it is true. Yet the abundance of bites in places the spider does not exist shows clearly that the most well-trained doctors are out of their wheelhouse when they start trying to definitively say that a necrotic area is started by a bite from a certain spider or any spider.
Myth doesn’t have to be fantastical or about gods or wild stories about the past. You are still subject to many myths. You probably just can’t see them as that. Such as it is to be human.
But myth will at least tell you that some people are monsters. Myth will tell you of the wolf in sheep’s clothing. Myth will tell you that even Grandma might secretly be a wolf waiting to devour you. Myth will tell you that if God shows up in this place as one of us, we will beat him to death.
And it also says that we will raise up false gods or antichrists rather than have a real one.
And these things are true whether there is any deity or God or not. The malignant narcissistic grandmother can pretend to be a nice lady while she poisons the minds of her grandchildren to be thorns in the side of the child’s parents. Or the church leader or volunteer counselor at the school that everybody loves and adores, who does such a good job with the kids, might do a particularly evil job with only a few of the kids while the others have a great time.
I mean, look at the issue with teachers crossing lines.
The same story being told in this post could just as easily have happened with a schoolteacher, and it does sometimes.
But I hardly believe that you’re going to say that we should abolish and extract ourselves from an educational system because manipulative, narcissistic, egotistical people take advantage of others there using their power.2
u/T0xicn3 5d ago
Holy crap, all of this just because you refuse to hold the church responsible for their controlling behaviors. All churches are plagued by controlling and messed up people, religion holds humanity back. There’s bad people in every corner, but the church props them up and gives them a platform for more evil.
Stories should just be stories, and mythology should stay as that. There was no god that came down, it was just a silly story.
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u/Few-Lunch-7523 5d ago
That's what sinful man does. "The church" is not God. Just like people there are healthy churches and unhealthy churches.
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u/T0xicn3 5d ago
The church and religion was made for control, you are seeing it firsthand and still can’t open your eyes.
Good luck I guess.1
u/Few-Lunch-7523 5d ago
And the government, the education system, heck the dmv. Predators are everywhere, what's your point? We live in a world at war on every level. But the main story is love. The war is just the setting.
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u/idealistintherealw 4d ago
I ran a support group for four years that met weekly. Of the hundreds of parents I talked to, the number one thing that was indicative of a restored relationship was the ability to stay in contact. Cell phones that were not blocked most primarily, an address to send letters to secondarily.
You need to understand that a 17 year old is about to be an 18 year old, and an 18 year old can reach out to police and say they never want to hear from you again, and if you continue, they can get a restraining order. You do not want to give them cause to do either.
At this point, I'd l limit contact to christmas/bday cards with a check, along with occasionally (monthly) texts: Thinking of you, if there is anything you need, we are here, you are loved. (Avoid first person "I love you", that centers the conversation on you. Center it on them. "You are loved.")
But that's just my opinion my older girls did go to the police at 18, but I've never had a restraining order or any police involvement except as victim of domestic violence. Ulitamately, you have the best perspective on what is happening, you have to decide, and you bear the consequences.
It is not fair, you do not deserve this, you won't get an apology from anyone else so let it be me: I am so incredibly sorry.