Parental Alienation Day: Live Light Installation

Today I am not sharing my own work, but the work of my partner. He has worked in light-design for over 17 years, and on parental alienation day 2019, finally decided to create his own designs. The development took about a month, and as any good perfectionist, there are much more and more sophisticated things to be done if there would have been more time. The LED screen is 7×2 meters.

Background Interview

I interviewed dad erased before the live stream.

What was your inspiration?

I wanted to use colour and movement within the words displayed to highlight my own personal fears, anxieties, worries, and hate (anger) in dealing with parental alienation What inspired me were a lot of the words from various Twitter, Facebook, Blogs account of people talking about their own experiences of dealing with Parental Alienation and how they miss their kids, and the fights they have with systems that are adversarial; who choose to have a winner and a looser.

The other part of the inspiration (or admiration) is how, even after 10/12 years of battling with everything being against them in most cases they eventually are able to have an ongoing relationship with their kids. The saddest ones I have not talked about are the relationships that have not been fixed, the utterly completely broken relationships, and how it affects the targeted parents and the children as well, and sometimes it doesn’t get fixed, and it is such a loss of time, such a loss of time.

How did you go about developing the installation?

How I have done it is: this is just a tiny glimpse into how I feel about parental alienation. There is so much more that you could say; you could spend years researching PA and come up with so many different scenarios and situations and feelings and words. What I am trying to say is … the more I get into it; the more feeling I get behind it, and hopefully I can express better how I deal with it or how I am not dealing with it as an alienated parent myself.

What do you want to achieve?

I want to give a voice to the unseen who are lost in an adversarial system who chooses to establish winners and losers, and ultimately fails our children.

This is the glossary for the Abbreviations Section:

SAID – Sexual Allegations in Divorce
CIAF – Child Impact Assessment Service
VotC – Voice of the Child
CMS – Child Maintenance Service
CSA – Child Support Agency
PASG – Parental Alienation Study Group
PAAO – Parental Alienation Awareness Organisation
Cafcass – Children and family court advisory and support Service
NAAP – National Association of Alienated Parents
MATCH – Mothers apart from their children
FNF – Families need Fathers
JUMP – Jewish Unity for Multiple Parenting
FPS – Family Psychology Solutions
DADs – Dads Against Double Standards
PAPA – Parents Against Parental Alienation
F4J – Fathers for justice
SPARK – Support for the Parentally Alienated thru Random Acts of Kindness
PTSD – Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
WHO – World Health Organisation
AAPA – Association Against Parental Alienation
PAS – Parental Alienation Syndrome
SPAN – Stop Parental Alienation Now
PAWWSG – Parental Alienation World Wide Support Group
FRI – Fathers Rights Ireland
EAPAP – European Association of Parental Alientation Practitioners
PAAA – Parental Alienation Awareness Association
HAP – Hostile Aggressive Parenting
PAA – Parental Alienation Awareness
NAOPAS – National Association of Parental Alienation Specialists
PASI – PAS Intervention
NPO – National Parents Organization
NPAF – NATIONAL PARENTAL ALIENATION FOUNDATION
CSPAS – Canadian Symposium For Parental Alienation Syndrome
PAD – Parental Alienation Disorder
ECTHR – European Court of Human Rights
ECHR – European Convention of Human Rights
HRA – Human Rights Act
Unicef – UN Convention on the Rights of the Child
PEF – Platform for Europeans Fathers
ICD-11 – WHO International Classification of Diseases
JM2P – I Love My 2 Parents
APIPDF – Association for Parental Equality and Children’s Rights
BOLD – bubbles of love day
HCS – High Conflict Separations
CAFE – Canadian Association for Equality

Son

The heart of a lion in winter
Compassion galore
Empathy in oodles

Smile like the sun
Like the sister

Gentle giant becoming
Fierce warrior gawky
Diamon uncut

Sadnes like a cloud of dust
Surrounds you always

Your responsibility is your life
Not hers
Not his

Stay safe
In an ocean of madness

You are missed always
Every day
Every hour

Old lion’s grey mane
Shaggy grief
Leaves traces in the dust

Narcissist

Mourning

Parental Alienation

Mourning
Time lost
Opportunities lost

My heart breaks
Every day
Watching you wait

I worry
Every day
That the sadness will take over
Engulf you too much

I am sad
For them
I know how no dad feels like
The echo is still painful

The border between
The three of you
Isn’t permanent
But it might as well be

The Mexican wall
Is her manipulation
As intangible as the other narcissist’s dream
But solid and prohibiting
All the same

They are lost on the other side
With no way to cross

Their covert and overt attempts
Scrambled
Under a gaslight burning so much oxigen
They can’t breathe anymore

Meanwhile you try to build wings
With duct tape so old it won’t hold anymore
Meanwhile you try to build a bridge
But the Lego bricks are brittle
Meanwhile you try to make a door
But the rusty hinges are jammed

You never know if they know
Off your attempts to scale the wall
You never know if they think
You abandoned them

That’s what’s on the propaganda channels
All day
All night
No matter how often they try to change the channel

They do not see your pain
They do not see your grief
They do not see your sadness
They do not see your broken hopes

The radio is too loud
There is some advertisement in-between the propaganda
Positive reinforcement with expensive presents
The media output is relentless
The words are vile

They cannot hear you hammer
They cannot hear you cry

Told you

Told you not to poke the bear
Told you not to eat the Cake
Told you not to play with them
Told you not to tread so loudly
Told you not to love your dad

Defended you against the bear
Saved you from becoming fat
Yelled at them for being mean
Taught you how to be considerate
Rewarded you for calling him names

Never told you bear was friend
Never told you cake makes happy
Never told you they are nice
Never told you that’s not how loud sounds
Never told you how much he loved you

You are mine
And mine alone
Therefore I can’t let you go
Go to be who you are meant to

So I told you
Told you not to
Told you not to do
Not to do
Whatever
Made you feel
Like you

Daughter

Life isn’t
Mutually exclusive
Love isn’t
Mutually exclusive

Your space to live
To thrive
To grow

My space to live
To thrive
To grow

His love for you
His love for me

My love for you
My love for him

There is so much space
For it all

However, protect your love
Your love for yourself

Her pain
Is not yours to carry
Her darkness
Is not yours to follow
Her abuse
Is not yours to mirror
Her hate
Is not yours to pass on
Her bile
Is not yours to swallow
Her lie
Is not yours to believe
Her violence
Is not yours to bear

Sweet child o’mine
Brave girl high heels rolling
Beautiful mind full of stars
Smile like the sun
The warmth of summer

Come home
Little bird grown
Come home

If only

If only you would talk
If only you would listen
Or entertain a thought
A thought to understand

There is so so much more
Much more you could imagine
You think you know the truth
But there are lies you cannot fathom

If only you would come
Come face to face somewhere
If only you would brave
The time with him and her

I think all you would see
Is so so so much love—love unconditionally
Although it’s not the love
That lets you away with inanity

It’s love that holds accountable
Us to one another
But none of that gets solved
By pulling down the shutter

The shutter is so easy
A safe space to hide
It is the false illusion
That let’s us keep our pride

But is the cost of pride
Worthwhile all the shunning
Is the cost of ego
Leading you into the traps of someone cunning

Because if we cannot see
Beyond our pulled down shutter
How can we ever truly see
The ‘me’ of one another

 

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

for Abi

Memories of loss

 

Shadows of could-have beens

Blown away by gossamer winds
His children echoes in his soul
A love deeply anchored in his heart

Maybe one day the fine threads will be blown back to his door

A Proxy for War 02

 

Selling your Child

When Greed couldn’t find a way,
And her battle seemed lost,
Because the warrioress had teamed up with the fog monster,
She froze imovable in stale mate.

Her rage had fallen on fallow fields.
The first time her violence did not yield harvest.

But Greed’s strongest power broke free;
Smashed through the window of sanity.
‘If I sell my only son to the fog monster,
I can still win!’

And winning, power, control
Was all that mattered
‘If I sell my only son,
I will have won the battle!’

She rejoiced shouting on top of her lungs.
The soundwave of that scream smashed her daughter into smitherins.
The lifebelt thrown by the lion,
Fighting for the girls sanity,
Lay in shreds on the battlefield.

‘Will the girl ever know?’
The lion asked.
‘What will she know?’
The warriores wondered.
‘That showing love, that saving her sanity, meant I had to make her hate me?’
‘Will she ever know, how much I love her?’

The question reveberated in the fog.
Slowly silenced by heavy grey.
It never reached the girl.
She never knew.

‘But maybe, one day?’
The warrioress mused and send a prayer.

Pebbles are Skittish

Male Victims of Domestic Abuse
The pebbles had rolled off the slopes.
They could not hold on any longer.
They were too light, too smooth, too innocent.
The tornado carried them away.
Male Victims of Domestic Abuse
Parts of his soul.
Parts of his heart.
Parts of him, carried away into the unknown.
Male Victims of Domestic Abuse
So the pebbles lived in the eye of the tornado.
Bouncing around the globe as she saw fit.
They didn’t know of the destruction.
There is peace in the eye of the tornado.
Only sometimes, when she moved too erratic,
Would the pebbles glimpse debris, vomit, spew, and racket.
Male Victims of Domestic Abuse
But they didn’t know what it meant.
When they saw bits of the debris.
They saw bits of the mountain.
They recognized the bits of the mountain.
Violently circling in the debris signature below.
So they came to associate the mountain with violence and rage.
Because that’s what they saw through the eye of the tornado.
Male Victims of Domestic Abuse
They could not hear the mountain over the noise of the tornado.
They could not see the mountain through the ball of vomit and bile.