Good afternoon to the UK column audience.
Wherever you are in the world, today is a special day.
We have a lot of special days in the UK column, but today I'm
delighted to have a lady called Debbie Richards join me.
And I met Debbie a couple of weeks ago at a very special
event where I'd been asked if I would speak to some ladies.
Now, the subject was parental alienation, but I wasn't fully
aware of that at the time. I was I, I believed that we were
going to be talking to ladies that had lost children,
principally through social services.
And what happened on that very, very interesting day was I was
able to learn more about a particular problem around
families and children and relationships and social
services. But Debbie was one of the ladies
present who was there in order really to help the ladies.
So Debbie, welcome to the UK Columns Studio.
And you've brought some really wonderful weather.
You can, you can come again because it's absolutely glorious
here in Plymouth. Now coming to the studio, we
actually had quite a chat and that that was very good because
there was a lot of background stuff that you've never
discussed with me before. But I'd like to start off with
that, that day in reading when we were there with the 24 mums
and those ladies all lost children, there was a lot of
very powerful emotion in the room.
And, and also there were ladies there that that was the first
time they'd ever been with the group and emotions were running
high. And in the first hour, Gemma
from the UK column and myself sat outside while you were
tempted to calm things down and, and help the ladies.
So my first question to you is you're in a role here trying to
help these ladies. How did you get into that role,
that support role? Well, interestingly, I am an
alienated parent. I started divorce proceedings in
December 2005 and very quickly found myself being very isolated
from my daughter, literally almost within 24 hours of asking
for the divorce. And I had hoped that he would
be, I'd like to say grown up, but that wasn't what happened.
It, it suddenly became like an all out war.
There were the people involved and I was becoming more and more
isolated and not really understanding what was going on,
seeing the levels of abuse being ramped up and and I left, chose
to leave because he'd become an alcoholic and he wasn't dealing
with the alcoholism. And after 18 years, I was really
struggling with how that was doing.
I had. I had been making my very best
effort to get to my daughter's 16th birthday.
In my head, I had grown up as a child of a broken family and I
didn't want that for my daughter at all costs.
I didn't want that for my daughter and I stayed and so
many times I wanted to walk out the door, but I didn't I stayed.
I made the best of it. I did what I could to keep it
all on an even keel. But when you're dealing with
somebody who is not prepared to deal with their own grief and
their own emotions, that's actually really hard to do.
So alcohol was his self. But it became much worse and
within 24 hours I had my daughter telling me she wanted
to live with Daddy, which was such a shock.
I wasn't expecting that. I thought we'd be grown up.
I thought we'd share those things between US and work out
how we were going to do it. I was very naive, very naive.
You know, I was 42 years old thinking, OK, you know, I've got
time to start again and get myself on an even keel, and it
didn't happen like that. But you were expecting that, OK,
the relationship had failed, but but you were still going to have
contact with children and. Exactly that I thought we were
going to have a good relationship about how we looked
after our daughter. And, you know, I trusted because
I wanted to trust, you know, and it's even now that that makes me
really sad that I was so vulnerable.
I didn't see what was happening and I didn't understand the
nuances of grief at that time. You know, we were all brought up
with grief as death. We weren't brought up with grief
being loss of relationship, disconnection from children,
loss of home, loss of security, loss of marriage, you know, all
of these different entities that were losses.
And I was being told when I moved to Newbury, I was being
told by AGP in Newbury that I was a neurotic divorcee and to
go away and take my pills. Actually, unbeknownst to both of
us, I was extremely ill and that was driving my emotion.
So my physical body was driving the the very heightened reef
that I was experiencing. And as time went on, I, I
learned a bit here and a bit there through different things.
Counselling kept me stuck, kept me on this hamster wheel.
And it actually eventually pushed me into complex PTSD and
I was very, very unwell, whilst at the same time caring for my
mum in law who had Alzheimer's, caring for my own mother who was
very, very ill. And grieving my father who died
of breast cancer. So I was, I was in a really poor
state because in the background to all of that, I was still
living with this post divorce abuse.
And it was becoming more and more ramped up until in 2015, my
daughter actually slandered me to expel me publicly from her
wedding. Without without any explanation.
There was no explanation and it wasn't actually until I
discovered that my mother had frontal temporal dementia and
she'd had it then that I realised that that might have
been the trigger because she she had just had the baby and we
organised the day where I was going.
She was living in Tame at the time, so I was going to drive
from Berkshire to go to Oxfordshire to pick her up, to
take her to visit Gran in Gloucester.
Now I was going to do the driving so that she could
concentrate on looking after herself and the baby.
And the day before I was told you're you're not wanted, we
don't want you there. I'll go on my own.
Of course, I had no idea about my mother's front attempt to
mention. Nobody did and I can only
imagine that my mother stood up for me.
I can only imagine that my mother stood up for me.
She was. In her later years she became
very, very vocal about the treatment she'd seen me live
through and it pained her greatly.
But the frontier temporal dementia made her more
aggressive and that had been seen on her scan when she had
her stroke in 2012. But they hadn't told the GP.
So for eight years she went without any support and of
course none of us knew. But this anger that was coming
out in her, of course, I can only imagine that she stood up
for her daughter and my daughter didn't like it.
So instead of having a conversation with me about it, I
was literally cut off. And within a few days of that
was this slander. And I was so shocked.
I was running a different business then.
I walked the front door, my phone went absolutely nuts
picking up the house Wi-Fi, and by the time I got indoors I had
over 150 messages on my phone from all kinds of, you know,
areas through social media with everybody wondering if I was OK
because I obviously hadn't seen this while I've been working
during the day. So.
So how had they become aware? It was all over Facebook.
Oh, I see. Right.
It was done on Facebook. It was done very purposefully.
And when I sat in the evening, as I got in the door and I was
looking at these messages. You OK?
I I just what the Hell's
happened? So this is this is essentially a
character assassination. It was a huge character
assassination. Targeted against you and put it
out over Facebook to to destroy you?
Absolutely. Not only friends, but
acquaintances and anybody who knew you, yes.
Absolutely. And it, it, it was done very,
very swiftly and very, very publicly.
And at that time we had limited contact.
So she knew that I didn't look at things like that during the
day except to do with business. I did not look at Facebook
during the day. I only looked at it in the
evening. So she knew it was going to be a
little while before I saw it. And the really strange thing is
I had noticed odd things being said on Facebook.
And it's such a powerful place to do 'cause people damage, you
know. I had noticed odd things being
written on Facebook that seemed so cryptic.
And I kept saying to my partner Simon, you know, something's
brewing, but I don't know what. And in his naivety, he said to
me more than once, or don't be daft, she's just being Emma,
she's just being a daughter, she's just having her kickbacks.
But I had this real unease in the pit of my stomach and I knew
something was brewing. And when when I looked at that,
I just sat with my jaw on the floor.
And then I got a pencil and paper and I wrote down the 30
names of the people who I didn't know that were all being
absolutely vile about me, really vile about me.
And I wrote all their names down.
And then one by one I blocked them all and they're still on my
block list now. Is it right you you haven't had
contact with your daughter since then?
No, I was. I had paid for various things
for the wedding, but being expelled from the wedding was
interesting. I found out later that she had a
a whole group of the male members of mainly his family on
a bit of a wall path ready just in case I turned up at the
hotel. She'd continued to extend the
invitation to my partner and to my youngest brother.
Yeah. So that that's divisive isn't?
It very divisive, you know, and my partner just said, no, sorry
if if you're not going to welcome your mother, then I'm
not going to be there. I'm not going to come and
celebrate your day when you can't even be respectful to your
mother. Debbie, when, when this is
happening, are are you, well, you've got you've got a partner,
but are you still on on your own or have you started to make
contact with with other women at that?
Stage at that point actually. So that was 2015 and in I would
say in 20 well say I, I joined Facebook in 2007.
I spoke occasionally about what I was experiencing over the time
and in 2008 I wrote something and it was just after I sort of
settled in with Simon and I wrote something and about half a
dozen of the people went me too. And then I sat there a little
bit and thought, oh. Help and and this is that you
write that out of nowhere you've been alienated from your family.
Well, at that point, I was writing about the rocky road of
trying to have a relationship with somebody when you didn't
understand the behaviours of the other people that were there,
the ones who were supposed to be caring for her emotionally and
mentally and and physically. When her mental and emotional
state was so angry from nowhere. Because this was not a child
that was angry growing up. So you impression I get is your
you can't define it properly in your own mind so you will
searching for answers as to what's actually happened and
then when you post comment about this other other women start to
get in contact. With and men as well, right, you
know, and people that I had connected with on Facebook
through various different communities started to all say
me too. And as time went on that became
bigger and bigger. And then I met another mother
come grandmother who was being expelled from her family for
whatever her misdemeanour was. And at the same time we had both
been exploring all the groups that were popping up on Facebook
and there were at the time very few UK groups.
In fact, at the time I don't think there were any UK groups
that I had found. Just tell us the dates roughly
when. So that would have been 2012,
OK, 2012, 2011, 2012. But what there was were large
groups, and I mean large groups, 4 and 5000 strong of US and
mainly US groups. And the anger and the vitriol
and the pain was just overwhelming.
And could could those group, did those groups have a name for for
for what they believed they were experiencing or?
In the US they use the term estranged rather than
alienation, but in the UK the term alienation is used and
there is a distinct difference between alienation and
estrangement. But a lot of people in the US
still use the word estranged. So alienation is when an adult
has the care of the child but uses language that deters the
child from feeling safe to speak for themselves.
So they shut down. They stop saying that they love
mummy or daddy. They stop saying that they want
to spend time with mummy or daddy because they soon learn
that every time they express that they do love that person
and they want to be with that person, there's a problem.
There's there's that clash of some kind, there's a behaviour
of some kind, whatever it is. And I've heard of so many
different types of of journeys that people have had.
And then estrangement essentially is when the older
teenage or early adult child has to come away from the family
because they cannot cope with whatever the dynamic of the
family is. So their own safety is moving
away from that. So it's a very distinct
difference. Because they are older, they are
able to make a more conscious decision about what they're
doing. But young children don't have
that ability. Right up to mid teens they don't
have that ability. Right, you, you just dropped it
in very quickly just now, but you but you said this is not
just women. No.
It's not so men men describing these events happening to them
as well. All the time, all the time.
And I, you know, I, I'd been working with a lovely chap some
years before all this kicked off for me.
And he lived apart from his young daughter, who he
absolutely adored, he was the loveliest person.
He was wonderful when he had her with him.
And he ended up living in his car because, you know.
As a result. Of as a result of it, because
the cost it was costing him to, to do what he needed to do to
try and have a relationship, but also because he'd been living
with his mother and his mother died.
So then he lost his home as well.
And he ended up living in a car. And I knew, I knew at that point
that something bigger was going on, but I didn't understand what
it was because he wasn't the only father I knew that had
lived in their car, you know, and, and when I was forced out
of my home, I served for surf for three weeks.
And I was fully envisioning that I may have to live in my car
because I was wondering how on earth I was going to find myself
somewhere to live. So you are painting a very clear
picture of the of the stress and the anxiety around this.
You just, you discover groups in America, but there's none here.
Well, you said there was a couple.
There were a few people. At that point, were they?
No. Not really, because.
Were they all organised or were they loose groups?
They were loose groups. They were loose groups.
There was a lot of anger, a lot of vitriol, a lot of it's
somebody else's fault. And, and the word narcissistic
and narcissism and narcissist kept popping up, but not as much
as it is now used, you know, and I really railed away from that
because that's a clinical diagnosis, but people are using
the term very loosely without truly understanding what it is.
It is a personality disorder, but we are all born with all the
traits of personality disorders. It's how we process the
experiences we've had that then push our behaviours to become
whatever way, you know, whatever label we're going to fall into.
And, and I really hate it. I don't like those labels.
They're so dismissive because they shut down what's actually
going on that there is a lot of grief going on and people aren't
seeing the grief. They're seeing.
What's happened to them is someone else's fault.
Right, Well, this is a really key, that's a really key
statement, isn't it? Because you've, you've moved
across, you've gently moved across there to a key factor for
your work now, which is how do you help people heal?
I haven't told thee audience yet, but you are the
relationship Phoenix and you are there to deal with grief and
transition and healing. Now you've been on quite a
journey yourself through which you've been kind enough to share
with the audience. So when when was it that you're?
I can imagine that there was two things going on.
There was almost curiosity as you discover more and more
groups and then you are dealing, you're having more interaction
with other women, maybe some men.
What was the point at which you felt that you needed to go on a
journey to? Was it to help yourself heal
first, that journey? Or did you start to say, well,
actually I know and I understand some things that these people
don't and I can help them? Well, it's really interesting
you asked that. So at the back end of 2014 and
the October of 2014, this other mother and I, she said she
wanted to set up a group in the UK online.
Would I be an admin in the group?
And I said yes, that's absolutely fine.
I'd really like to do that because I think that would
really help us both. You know, we started with three
people on day one, and by day seven we had 1 1/2 thousand
people and a great deal of them were American, Canadian,
Australia, New Zealand, and a few English people.
And it just grew and grew and grew.
So from 2014 right through to 2019, I helped in that group.
I supported that group. I supported a lot of people in
that group. I created some incredible
friendships that I still have now with people all over the
world, which is is the greatest gift that's come from this for
me is the connection. A journey where you meet people.
I, I can, that resonates with me because in some ways I've gone
on quite a journey over 20 years.
And if you look back, you say, yeah, the fact you met such
wonderful people, often in adverse circumstances where
people under a lot of pressure, but you meet somebody and and
you think that was a real pleasure to meet them.
Yeah, and the thing about the group was it wasn't just a place
to to moan and groan, it was actually a place to be real, you
know? And I really, and anybody got
any ideas of what I could do with this place in my garden,
the lovely Helen in Australia? And I just saw something in it
and gave my opinion. And it was something that really
helped her to focus differently. And one of the things that
somebody said to me more than once was you're very good at
seeing both sides. You're very good at bringing
balance. But I could see that because I
was the child of divorced parents and I had a tough time
as a kid growing up because it wasn't just divorce, it was the
fact that there were two different religions and neither
of them were standard religions. So I was stuck between these two
different religions as well. And being brought up in a
religion that made me do a Bible study, made me learn about the
Bible, which was, it was wonderful.
I learnt a lot and that it gave me a different way of looking at
faith, other people's faith. But also then my father telling
me at 7 years old, because his religion was completely opposite
to mine. You shouldn't know that you're a
girl. So at seven, I was completely
confused because I'd been learning everything that I'd
been learning and I was so proud of that.
You are at 7, you know. And then I've got this person
who I looked up to, even though he was not in my life regularly
and was very disjointed in my he, he shut me down in an
instant and I didn't know whether I was coming or going.
So there were those beliefs that came into my life that I wasn't
good enough for things that you know, that my knowledge wasn't
good enough, that me learning wasn't good enough.
OK, David, just push, push a little point that helping people
who who've been through bad experiences and a lot of them
can be in a bad place. They are whatever it is,
anxious, depressed, or we could put some other labels.
But to deal with people like that is itself a heavy emotional
load. So you've gone through all the
things that you've gone through and then you are starting to
give people who've also been through the mail tip to support
them. How did you deal with that
emotional load on yourself? It's so interesting, isn't it,
Because I didn't realise at that point.
I didn't actually realise until I did my grief training in 2019
that I've been practically doing it since childhood.
I didn't realise that that was a big learning curve, but I also
realised that I was able to retain good memories so I could.
I could remember conversations and strings of conversations,
different people's things, but I was able to just let it go.
And I don't know how I was able to do that.
It was just something I was able to do.
So I wasn't carrying everybody else's baggage because I had
enough of my own. You know, I had the post divorce
abuse, the sick parents, the business I was running my own
health issues and, and there was a lot going on.
So I was, I didn't have the capacity to hold on to
everything that was theirs as well.
And that actually was in my benefit because it allowed me to
be more more focused on them when I needed to be.
And that few years with the support group actually really
helped me to hone that skill. Right.
Were were you getting some formal counselling training?
So no, I wasn't, no. So I'm actually not a formal
counsellor. I chose not to do counselling
because of my own journey and how difficult that had been and
how dismissed I'd been by the GPS because actually most of the
times they dismissed me, I had serious health issues going on
and it was the health issues that were making everything
worse. So in 2018 I became, well, 2017
I became, and no even more than that actually, 2016 I went to
visit Jane Jackson in Bristol, Bristol Grandparents, which was
the group that I had found online.
Can we just we just explain that a little bit because you've
talked about alienation affecting men and women, but it
also effects grandparents. Oh does it?
Does it affects every member of the family, basically.
So in 2015 I became a grandparent for the first time.
It was the year my daughter slandered me and just literally
just shut the door on our relationship with no
conversation at all. I tried, I tried to try to to
beat that door down and then can we please have a conversation
and there was nothing. It was, you know, the term now
is crickets. It literally was it was crickets
and it was very tough. He had a stroke.
My ex, two weeks after her her wedding, I had been told by his
cousin who is one of my closest friends.
I sent a message to say I'm really sorry.
Can I do something to support you?
Can I do something to help? And I was told it was my fault
and I wasn't wanted. And I was thinking, how is it my
fault? It's been 10 years since we've
been apart. You know, how is it my fault?
But anyway, that's a whole other, that's a whole other
journey. And so there's been no real
relationship. And I just thought I'm
struggling now as a grandparent because this is a whole new
nuance of emotion and I'm really struggling with this and
nobody's understanding. The GPS, not interested.
The counselling had pushed me into PTSD, into complex PTSD and
I was a mess. And I just thought, OK, I've got
to find out if there's any other sport.
And I found Bristol Grandparents at the same time I found Hen and
grandparents. So Bristol Grandparents is run
by Jane Jackson and Henry Grandparents was set up by
Lorraine Bushel. Both of them have been given
gongs, you know, for their services to grandparents and
they're very well disturbed. Deserved because it is not an
easy journey supporting grandparents and a lot of them
much older than me. I'm, I'm 61 this year.
So who have a completely different mindset because
they're a different generation. So their their beliefs around
family are very different. You know, it's amazing how 10
year age gap can make a difference in your beliefs
because of the way we were brought up, you know, and a lot
of those people were war babies. So they were still scrambling
with the losses that had happened in the war to their
families. So there was that impact as well
and. So do do they, do they sit you
down to help you or do you sort of learn through SO?
They're meeting. Groups with them?
Yeah, they start to. No, they're, they're mainly,
they're, they're support groups mainly they're places to come
together to, you know, in those days more so they were places to
come together and to be able to Share your story with others
that understood you. You know, rather than telling
you you're going a bit loopy, you're imagining it.
You know, they're there when they grow up, when they get
married, when they do their Sitlaw change, which are all the
things we've been told. Or, you know, the other the
other nugget that we're all told is, well, you must have done
something wrong. Well, that's, that's a very
common one across all of the cases where mums and dads have
lost children. Somebody somewhere at some stage
will, you know, suck in some breath and say, well, there must
be something there. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, and it is and and and it's really funny, actually,
I I call it the Jamaican because it was part of what I grew up in
the culture in reading was the very all the different cultures.
But one of the things the the Jamaican girls did was before
they said something really unpleasant to you, you know, So
I call it the Jamaican breath. And it, yeah, that was, it was
you'd just sort of, you'd be like the rabbit in the
headlights. You'd, you'd sit there and they
think I'm telling the truth. And everybody's telling me I'm a
liar. But I'm the one who's lived
this. You you go through this and you
learn these experiences. What at what stage then does
your help, I'm not going to use the word counselling but your
help to mums, dads and grandma, grandparents who've gone through
what? What stage does are you starting
to work fully as a. So in 2019 I yeah, and, and, and
well, 2015 I had a car accident waiting for the payout.
In 2019 it came. So I paid to go and do grief
training. I thought, I'm going to use, use
this money for something really powerful for me.
And I had met somebody through business networking who was
talking about this grief training and everything she was
saying just made absolute sense. And I, you know, I was listening
to what she was saying. I was reading the back of the
book that they they taught from and it was like somebody lined
up all the dots and it made sense to me for the first time
in a very long time. It was layers and layers and
layers of grief. Every single little experience
where there was detachment, where there was abandonment,
where there was this push away. It was all grief and
understanding that allowed me to make such a difference in my
world then. So I went off to do the training
because I'd said to. Them so sorry so that that your
training but that helps you unpick your situation.
Well, you know, that's you. In a better place to help other.
People that first 2 1/2 days we had to do the process at speed
what we would take other people through over 8 weeks we did in 2
1/2 days. So you can imagine it was full
on. But within 24 hours, I was
already changing my mindset. I was already thinking about the
understanding of forgiveness and apologies and actually being
able to express and acknowledge my feelings in a really powerful
way. Instead of having it.
All yeah, and instead of being dumbed down by everyone around
me who was uncomfortable with my emotion and so we'll just shut
you up instead, which is what I experienced constantly.
And the grief training made a massive difference.
So I came away from the group that I was admining in and I
started putting the feelers out to help people with grief.
So initially my thought to do that was at that time I had been
running a grandparents support group for a year.
I was becoming more and more involved in learning about
grandparents that were also disconnected from their
grandchildren. I spent fair bit of time going
around the different groups so I went as far as Worcester to a
group in Worcester. I went to the group in Hendon
several times and have become quite close to several people
there. I went to Bristol a few times.
There is AI believe there's still a group in Oxfordshire,
funnily enough, in the town that my ex husband was born in and I
lived in when we were first married, that the irony of that
did not escape me. You know, that that was most
bizarre. So I, I was going out and
visiting all these other groups to learn more about the
grandparents and to learn more about my place as a grandparent.
You know, I was quite young compared to most of them.
And the more I was learning, the more I was understanding the
levels of grief and it. And I was trying to explain that
to people, but they weren't getting it because they just
weren't ready to hear it because somebody else had done them a
harm and they couldn't get past that.
They might have had a part to play in that arm.
And actually we all have a part to play in it.
It's just how we learn to understand what that part is.
Because nobody's going to just turn you turn the door, shut it
and lock it without there being something that you've said or
done that's upset them. But if you don't know what that
is, then you're in this place of not knowing how to change it.
Can't solve the. Problem no.
So for me, I took the view that I have to do this work for
myself. And that's exactly what I did.
I, I did the archetypal dog with a bone and I literally, I sat
down and I did the process time and time and time again, you
know, and I, I really immersed myself in it.
And doing that allowed me to deal with all the different
relationships. The one with my daughter, I had
to postpone for quite a long time because I, every time I got
to do it, there was an emotional block and I couldn't do it.
And then when I did do it, it was actually the eve of her
birthday and I slept absolutely soundly for the first time in
many, many years. And that was huge.
And that's actually where my my emblem for my business came from
in a dream. Saying that to me, what?
What are you describing release from being locked into?
Yeah, and, and it's not just the words, it's the visceral
emotion. You know, when I physically saw
my daughter, I would shake inside and I would use every
ounce of energy not to shake outside.
The tears were literally brimming in my eyes all the time
and it was the emotion that I used hold on and hold on.
And then the minute she'd gone in that house and I'd got in the
car and we got round the corner, I could not have driven home
from where she was in Oxfordshire to Berkshire.
I couldn't do it. My partner had to come with me
because the release of emotion when she wasn't visible to me
anymore was like somebody was literally opening a volcano up.
It just came out every emotion, the tears, the, the sobbing, the
gasping for breath, the holding my chest because it hurts so
much, you know, and, and physically rocking in the seat
in the car because I didn't know what to do with myself.
And it, it was an hour's drive from there back to Newbury, and
I cried for the whole hour, you know, But the visceral, physical
emotion was overwhelming. Now what, what comes into my
mind, Debbie, is as you you tell that story is coming back to
the, to the Friday event. Because in the morning when in
quite a small room, 24 ladies in quite a small room, a lot of
emotions there. And at particular points when
some of the women were speaking themselves, some of the women
could not cope with that and they broke down and started
crying. And some of them wanted to go
out of the room or were encouraged to go out of the room
where, where it could be quiet. So I sat there and I, I
witnessed that from outside because initially I was outside
the room and the door would open and, and then later when I was
inside the room and I saw the reaction of some of those women,
2 other women simply standing up and telling their story and
that, and that was too much for them.
And at the end of the day, after the meeting had finished, I, I
sat out in the, in the foyer area of the hotel.
There were three of us and we had a, we had a glass of wine
together. And while we were there, one of
the, I would, well, he's one of the hotel staff who'd been
behind the reception desk said very nicely, what, what were you
doing to the women in that room? And we, we answered, what do you
mean? And he said, well, because this
morning the door kept opening and another woman who was crying
and very distressed came out. Now we're smiling about this
because there is a little bit of black humour about this, but it
was very interesting. And we didn't, we didn't
actually give him any detail. But I think one of the ladies I
was with said, well, we're trying to help, help them.
But that was for me and, and Gemma as well.
You know, we, we were there in that room and we saw what what
was happening to those ladies. And of course, at a particular
point, you stood up and said, let's do some exercises to try
and calm some of that emotion down.
So I presume that what you did in that room was part of your
training. What I did was actually I, I
created an anchoring process for them to find a happy emotion,
find, you know, a place where they could learn to love
themselves again, but to give them a little taster of how they
could do something for themselves relatively easily.
So I brought them all a small rose quartz crystal which was in
a heart shape, and I got them to hold that in the hand and just.
Send the love to that hand. And then I got them to create
that bowl of energy and pull it into them and to feel it within
their body. Because had somebody done that
with me all those years ago, I would have been able to cope
with that car journey in a much better way because I would have
had a tool of some kind that would have allowed me to calm
and centre myself. And, and it did, it did calm the
room to a large extent. As we moved on and things were
discussed, other, other emotions came to the to the surface, but
it was clear that that did make a make a difference.
Are we allowed to say at this stage, of course, that charity,
and you can tell me a lot more, but that that charity
specifically works to help women who have gone through this type
of alienation and they are, they are at the bottom.
They are at the bottom of the pit.
In many respects, yes. You know, I, I met the lovely
Rosland at the European Alienation Practitioners event
that was held by Karen and Nick Woodall, who are very well known
for their work within the, within the law courts with
children and reconciliation of children with parents and her
aunt alienation. And at that time I'd been
reading Karen's, Karen's work avidly.
She writes the most amazing blog and I had learnt so much from
her about the dynamics of it, about the psychology of it and
the behaviours of different people within the parameters of
what goes on. So the parents, their parents,
their siblings, etcetera, etcetera and the ones that are
being alienated. So at that point, I, I, this
ticket was free because it was the first time this event was
being held. That was 2018.
And I went to it and I sat there in tears for the whole weekend
with my friend who had come from another group that I'm in.
We'd met there. And she and I, literally, we
filled a little notebook. We both had a notebook and we
filled it with notes. The whole event was around
people who were practitioners in the field, from America, from
Canada, from Europe, from London, from all over the way,
you know, all over the world. And there were legal people,
solicitors. And it was presided over by the
then leading judge of the UK for the family courts who was
retiring. So, you know, there were a lot
of there was a lot of good solid structured evidence, good solid
structured language and good solid structured education.
And I literally sat there feeling like somebody was
pulling a string of flags out of my chest with all the different
words I'd been experiencing and never been able to fully
acknowledge. Literally.
Somebody else is bringing. They were on that stage saying
all the things that I've been experiencing, but they were
talking about it from the family courts point of view and I, I
really was rabbit in the headlights again, a massive
learning curve. And that's where I met Rosalind.
And I was, I was a mess. I was weeping all over the
place. And I don't know how many
tissues I went through. I had a big bag beside me.
And yeah, it was horrible. And she introduced me to the
charity. And because I was care at the
time and, and my, I didn't have finances for myself.
I didn't have an income for myself because although I was
running my business, I didn't have an income for my business
because I was growing it. She gifted me a place and that
gift suddenly opened my world up to being in a room full of just
mothers. And although at that point I was
in many, many groups and I had met a lot of men through this
process and it's heartbreaking. The stuff I've heard, it's
heartbreaking. But this was another level and
it was where I suddenly realised that women are being expelled
from their children's lives for no good reason and the man needs
his standing. A lot of the the women had
wealthy husbands. A great deal of them were
Spanish, Portuguese, French, you know, So they were trophy wives,
if you like, until the marriage was no good to the man anymore
and then they were on the heap. And so I was beginning then to
really look deeper and understand more about the
nuances of what was going on when I first became alienated.
And I through all these people that I connected to, I was
beginning to learn the figures. So when I first became
alienated, the figure of women being alienated from their
children was being quoted at 17% of the population as opposed to
the men. So you think that's quite a tiny
figure? OK.
By the time I'd got into it and it to come to 2019 and I had
delved deeper and deeper and deeper, what I was learning was
that figure was nearer 3435%. Huge.
It's huge. Just qualify that 35% of.
Women being expelled from their children's lives and since then
since 2019. Just pin pin this down, Debbie.
So out of the total statistic about people being alienated,
35% are women. Yeah.
And I was just thinking it feels bigger than that.
I know more women. If we were to sit down and
really do a study on this, I know more women than 35%.
Right. Forgive me for just putting it.
I just want to be no, that's fine.
So how many, how many mothers are we talking about that you
think are alienated? Do you estimate that are
alienated? I, I estimate it's probably
nearer 45, nearly 50%. I would say that it's actually
5050 and the reason I say it is because there are lots and lots
of us that didn't get to go through the courts.
There are lots and lots of us that are just figures flying in
the wind. OK.
Like when you give a percentage, what is that percentage of?
Well, when you say 100%, you know, that's the round figure,
isn't it? So we're always quoted, and you
see it a lot in a lot of the groups.
There are a lot of men that have had really horrific experiences,
and in their mind, they're the only ones that are experiencing
it. And women, women are not
experiencing alienation. You don't know what you're
talking about, right? But actually, they're not
listening to us because we do know what we're talking about.
And we have masses of empathy for the men because of our own
experiences. Right.
So we're we're so therefore out of the total number of alien
aids alienation cases, you're saying 35% women, but actually
you think it's much higher than. That I think it's much higher
than that because of the fact that so many of us don't go
through the court process because our children are in
their mid late teens when we're going through our divorces.
Yeah. So then this is when these
behaviours are ramping up and there's nobody there to protect
our relationship with our children because in the court's
eyes they're deemed to be too old and able to speak for
themselves. Which is complete buncombe
because the prefrontal cortex has been talked about as not
being fully formed for many years when you're 2526.
But in recent years scientific knowledge has actually told us,
I think it was a couple of years ago, that it's actually nearer
30 and 31. So how on earth can a 1415 year
old make a really conscious decision about how they want to
move forward? Well.
Which is where the term alienation sits beautifully,
because that's when they are at their most malleable.
Yes, and and this whole whole thing stems around the
manipulation of future people and children.
Yes, you, you go to that event and you've got to judge there.
And, and now you've gone from just looking at problems to do
with alienation, parental alienation.
You're now seeing a whole raft of other problems around how
parental alienation relates and interacts with the court system,
how social services get involved.
Kafkaas comes in. So I'm trying to put myself in
your shoes, but that meeting suddenly takes you from looking
at one specific area to saying, wow, actually there's a whole
things happening. Yeah, it's much bigger.
And it really opened my eyes that 48 hours was was a huge
step forward. And of course that was the year
before I'd done the grief training.
So at that point, I did a brain and trauma training to try and
understand about not just the trauma I had been experiencing,
but how I could help the grandparents that I'd set up the
group for. But also at that point, I had
become involved with the hand and grandparents group more,
with the lobbying that Lorraine was doing in parliament.
And I fully supported her in that because at that point, I
felt we needed to have our voices heard.
You know, there was a great swathe of older people who were
dealing with this destructive grief that they just didn't
understand. A great deal of them who'd had
relationships with their grandchildren.
They'd been the caregivers, all the parents were working.
They'd been the holiday givers, You know, they'd been the gift
givers. They'd been that special person
in those children's lives. And all of a sudden they were
literally cut off, you know, and and no real explanation as to
why. And, and this of course a key,
key thing not for mums and dads when, when this happened, they
would have initially been in the place you were in.
Who can I talk to about this? Because some people you go to,
to talk to about it would dismiss you.
No smoke without fire and all the all the other things they
say. The groups are expanding in UK.
You've got involved with some particular ones that you think
are doing good work. Who else was paying attention?
The judge is paying attention, apparently.
And this is interesting. So his terminology was that
family judges are not educated properly.
They're not educated enough. And to be quite frank, they're
still not educated enough. I'm still hearing real horror
stories about how judges are are are literally guiding Kafkaas
and social services to behave in ways that are not expected
because it suits the judge narrative and that's really
destructive. Right, that's a pretty
interesting statement that a senior judge describes fellow
judges in the Family Family Law division as being uneducated.
Yeah, he said. There was not enough education
there needed. He said uneducated, we might say
ignorant. Well, exactly that, you know,
they, they, and there are, there are a few gems.
I've heard some extraordinary stories of amazing, amazing
judges who have seen through the journey that these parents are
going through and have seen through the stories that have
been made up about them and the the tactics that have been used
against them. But they are so few and far
between. They are literal diamonds in a
coal mine. You know, a sprinkle of diamonds
and a very dark coal mine. So something which I've have
seen for myself and I've heard from from parents in in dealing
with child protection cases is that they get a good judge and
that judge starts to do the right thing.
And the next thing is they turn up in court and there's a
completely different judge who then does what they regard as
malicious things. And that judge then has the
power to say, well, I'm going to keep this case to myself.
And every time that they go into court, they are faced with this
one individual who. And of course the other side of
that is that the judge has the power to instruct or or or
destruct the social worker. Yes.
So a social worker that is actually doing their job and is
standing up for the mother and standing up for the child and
saying there is parental alienation suddenly is off the
case. Yes.
So then you end up with the cycle of another social worker
and another social worker. And so the whole story becomes
more and more disjointed and the mother becomes more and more
disjointed because she is literally, as I found myself
doing so many times, telling her story again and again and again.
And it becomes. It becomes it's draining.
I'll tell you, Draining. It's it's literally like
somebody is pulling your heart out of your chest every single
time you speak. This is this is very interesting
because we're now into the area of the family court, which is
which is a key part of the stories that come to me because
some some dads I'm going to try and boost the number of dads
because I know they're out there, but principally dealing
with mums who who have lost children through the family
courts and they describe to me a template in how things are done.
So so false allegations are made against them.
Experts who are brought in who make damning judgements
Psychological report without psychologist has never met the
mother Yes is a is a common one Yes and.
Then never met the father. Indeed, and and at the end of
the day, a mother often then trying to finance what she's
doing herself, but very quickly they've run out of money and
then and then the legal firms are operating on what do they or
what do you think? Legal Aid.
Which is is is almost non
existent. So unless you have a false
allegation that's talking about there was some kind of abuse or
violence, then you can't get legal aid.
You know, it's, it's, it's a real circus.
And, and we have a local authority that can use it's own
legal teams to help prosecute that case.
So in many, in many of the cases, the mum or the dad is
faced with their own local taxes being used to fund the legal
teams that are operating. Exactly, because you've not just
got the parents, you then end up with the children having their
guardian. Yes, yeah.
And they have their own solicitor, Yeah, and they're
acting for them separately to the parents.
So that. But they're in the thrall of the
parent that's doing the alienating.
Yes, but we can say that the the the business of they say that
the court is there to protect the child.
It's a secret court in order to protect the child.
Everything is about protecting the child, but actually what the
process does to my mind is is starts to alienate the child.
Oh, completely. Yeah.
Because there's not just the process, it's the time.
You know, if if a false allegation's made, that's six
months immediately that you lose any contact with your child.
But that can be extended and extended and extended as it is.
And then COVID came along and caused absolute chaos through
the court system, you know, so they had to scramble around and
get themselves back on their feet sharpish.
But that also extended and extended and extended.
So it left children in a very vulnerable place where they were
there with that person in their ear.
They're there. They're there.
Now I hear it from my clients. He's told them that I'm making
him sell the house. He's told them that I'm not
paying maintenance and that's why they can't do this their
after school stuff. He's told them I'm not paying
XXX so he can't afford to buy them their treats.
They can't afford to go on the school trips.
They can't afford to have the clothes they want because she's
not paying. Wow.
That's the same story that the men have been hearing for years
and years and years. You know, their children have
been hearing the same thing. Your father's not paying, your
father's not doing. And they have been physically
shown the court documents. Now, that is not protecting the
children. In fact, it goes against the
rules of the court. It goes against everything the
judges, the social workers, Kafkas all tell them.
But those children are still seeing the court documents.
This is something that was, was fascinating and absolutely
educational for me in the meeting because as I said at the
beginning, I hadn't previously, I hadn't encountered parental
alienation in this detail. If I was aware of something, it
it, it wasn't for me, a very big thing for me.
It was always children being taken away under pretty vicious
circumstances and abuse. And then all of a sudden for me,
you described the meeting you went into.
You took me into that meeting and, and I learned from these
mothers as to what's happened when I put this picture
together. I, I've been into court quite a
few times with families in, I will say in the days when you
could actually get in as a Mackenzie friend, I am told more
and more the courts won't allow you actually or, or if they do,
if they do allow you in as a Mackenzie friend, they won't let
you speak. But I've actually been able to
be in court as a Mackenzie friend and speak.
So I have experience in court. I've think I've reasonable
amount of experience dealing with parents.
I've seen the evidence. I've seen be careful what I say
here paperwork that they may choose to show me.
And to me it is impossible. The idea that this system is in
the rotten state, it is simply because of incompetence.
I cannot believe this. It is.
It's orchestrated. It follows a template.
Yes, it does. It's deliberate.
Yes, it's deliberate. The whole thing is deliberate.
And if it's deliberate, Debbie, what does that mean?
Well, it means it's a lovely way for them to all get wealthy on
the backs of people that they're destroying emotionally and
families that they're destroying emotionally and children that
they're destroying emotionally who are going to be carrying
that grief into their adult lives.
And they are the teachers of our future, the doctors of our
future, the police, the ambulance, the fire brigade, the
the scientists, you know, they're the adults of our future
and they are all carrying grief that is not being legalised.
Baggage because a lot of people will will understand.
That, but they're all carrying huge amounts of grief baggage
that is destroying their emotional health.
And it's not mental health, it's emotional health.
And that emotional health is then having an impact on their
physical health, their, you know, their, their weight,
weight. Most people don't realise that
weight is an emotional problem. It's not a, an eating problem.
The eating problem comes because you need to soothe the grief.
It comes because you start to care less and less for yourself.
So you're not exercising as much, so you're not burning off
what you're eating. But it comes down to the
mindset. It comes down to the baggage
that's in here and the baggage that is physically held in the
body. You know, lots of what I've
learned along the way, feminine cancers, breast cancer, womb
cancers, they're linked to family disorder.
Diabetes is linked to family disorder.
Fibromyalgia is linked to emotional distress and trauma in
childhood. I had fibromyalgia disabling me
at one point and I had to walk around with two walk sticks,
walking sticks because I was so overwhelmed with fibromyalgia.
That didn't come out until I had the very severe surgery in 2007,
and it was picked by the distress and the stress that I
was experiencing in the early days of the divorce.
Yeah, this, this, this makes absolute sense to me.
Eye problems, foot problems, back problems, heart problems.
I've lost 3 great friends in the US who all had broken heart
syndrome and it is a thing. Broken heart syndrome is extreme
stress and distress of the emotional variety that is not
being tempered because there is no way to deal with it and
that's massive. So don't you know you have?
We have a heart and around the heart there are two areas of
tissue that are known as the heart strings.
And you heard that phrase, you know, well, they're heartstrings
pulling the heartstrings, you know, and you often see with an
elderly couple who've been together all their lives that
they'll die in a very short space of time because they are
broken hearted. That's what's going on.
Those two strings of of tissue physically break because the
body can't repair constantly because it's under the stress
and distress. So you're losing your sleep.
So your body clock that has this little set pattern of repair
can't repair. So then it stops repairing and
that part of the body suffers fibromyalgia.
ME stomach issues. I've lost count of the amount of
women I know who are going through this who have IBS.
And it's not just a little something, it's chronic because
they're being fed a pack of nonsense by the GPS because the
GPS don't want to delve into the emotional stuff because they
haven't got the knowledge. Right.
So thank you because you've now you've now taken us round
because we start this, we started this discussion on
parental alienation. We've now got to the point that
that the scale of it in this country was stick to this
country. We know it's overseas, but the
scale of it is so big that we are damaging the population.
We're certainly, we're certainly damaging the future population.
And you've also said, and I absolutely agree with you that
if we look at what is happening through the child protection and
court system, this can't be accidental to what's happening.
So where, where have we come to? We've come to this very, very
serious point where we are saying that actually families in
this country are being attacked, yes.
Yes, the very fabric of family. Some of them destroyed because
some family, some mums and dads, excuse me, don't make it through
this this process. No, it's it's quite horrific.
And you? Know we are being attacked by a
system which is destroying relationships in in.
The, and it's, it's not just destroying the first
relationship, the parent and the child, it's actually damaging
the whole dynamic of the family. You know, because we also have
all these beautiful families where there are same sex couples
and because they have children sometimes slightly outside of
the normal, because they have eggs donated or you know, sperm
donated or whatever it is, they take ownership of the child and
then the other one's left with the other child.
So the siblings get torn apart as well.
And I have many friends in that position as well, many
connections that I've met over the years in that position.
So they're not only destroying A parental relationship and a
grandparent relationship, they're destroying sibling
relationships and they're destroying cousin relationships.
That's a massive dynamic. When I sat down and worked out
for my daughter in the very early days just how many people
she became directly disconnected from by being disconnected from
me, that worked out to 13 people that were important in her life.
You know me, my brothers, her uncles, her cousins, her
grandparents, her great grandmother, you know, and all
of the other people in the circle, people that she'd known
since she was a baby that was suddenly not in her life anymore
because she literally pulled the drawbridge down and cut off half
of who she was. So if you put a a child in that
emotional place where they literally have to shut down half
of who they are, they stop functioning because half of who
they are has been put into a. Box and many from I'll say from
my side dealing with the the more social service orientated
cases. That's absolutely what mums are
saying. They witnessed the child shut
down and until the child is different.
My daughter turned overnight. It was shocking.
You know, my, my daughter and I, I always thought we had an
incredibly close relationship, but I, a, a lot of my friends
were, oh, she's my friend, she's my friend.
And I felt it was really important to actually be the
mother, you know, especially when my own mother had done her
dandis. But she'd had a tough journey
being a mum and I had felt that loss and I didn't want my
daughter to feel that loss. So I had tried to keep that
boundary of mother daughter. But I soon realised in those
early months that every other adult that was on her side, on
the ex husband side of the table were determined to destroy that
relationship. You know, and it started within
24 hours of me asking for the divorce because we, we had a
really happy relationship. We did a lot of things together.
You know, he liked to go off and do his fishing.
So I would take her to do things on my own.
We would do things together. He never wanted to come down to
my brother in Paignton to have holidays.
So she and I would go on our own to Uncle Andy's house and spend
a week at the seaside with Uncle Andy and his wife and we'd have
a wonderful time, you know. And it was, it was.
I did my best to keep her connected to her grandparents
because I didn't have that in my life.
I only had half my family. So, and then literally overnight
she became, the only way I could describe it was she became
viperous. I, I, I want to move on from
here, but can I just say on this that I'm not trained in
psychology, Perhaps I understand a bit through life, but it does
seem to me that children are being manipulated when they come
into contact and might be the one parent, but very soon
there's a team of people around that parent and that that
psychological manipulation increases, it intensifies and it
is unbelievably malicious. There is, it's so cold and
calculating and destructive that I still wonder where it comes
from. You, you see the same techniques
used across cases. You, you know, I can be talking
to a moment. I might say something.
That's exactly what happened to me.
So it is almost like we have a system, we're saying that it's
intent is to destroy families, but it's using techniques that I
found myself saying or asking myself, do do they go in a
classroom and learn this? Well, it makes you wonder.
Doesn't it? You know, and I, I don't know.
And I have to add to that because as a child, growing up
in a single parent family, my mother, the support she had was
a group called Gingerbread. And you know, she she had a
couple of very long term friendships that came from that
very, very beautiful ladies who who both had terrible times, you
know, with what was going on. And she became more and more
political in her voice in a way that I didn't understand because
I was a child. I just didn't understand.
But one of the things my mother said constantly, and this is
from the early, early 70s, you know, we, we, we were taken away
from my father because of what was happening in 1969.
So the when you know that we were taken away in the March and
the the the Chiswick Women's Refuge didn't start until the
November, so you know there was nowhere to go.
I'll just throw this in and you won't.
As you feel comfortable, are you allowed to mention who your
family was connected with? I'm careful about it, but I, I
didn't find out until my mother was dying that my father worked
for the Cray twins. So my mother was absolutely
terrified. The police were always knocking
at the door. And that was the, that was the,
the buckle point for my mother leaving my father.
You know, we, there were four of us.
We were born in four different homes because we were constantly
moving. She had a miscarriage between
the first two boys. So she had me one miscarriage
and then two others. She was terrified.
She had a terrible, terrible time.
As each one of us was born. He took the family allowance
book, He took control of the money.
He lived on steaks. We didn't.
We lived on scraps. I didn't understand why my
mother hated cooking when I was a child.
And as soon as I was able to cook, she gave it to me.
It was my job, you know? It was my job, you know.
As soon as she was able to to to give that job away, she did
because she hated cooking and it's because she'd been forced
to try and feed 4 toddlers and babies.
With the. With the rubbish, the scraps,
you know. And she just didn't.
She did not feel capable enough to do that.
Debbie, you, you are here in front of the camera with me and
and I am absolutely delighted that you, I'm going to say, had
the courage to come come down to the studio to do this.
We're just about, I think, at a point where we should bring this
one to a close. But something I want to ask you
is, is you're here in front of the camera for men and women,
mums and dads who are out there who know that they're in this
kind of alienation process or are beginning to suspect they
are. What would your message be to
families who are coming to realise that they're in this
trap? What would what would your what
would you say? Some encouraging words.
My own journey actually has taught me that looking within
and learning who I am is the most powerful tool because it
has given me my voice, it's given me clarity.
It's taken away the physical emotions that were, oh, it was
like being put in a ringer, you know.
So as I started to deal with my emotions, as I started to deal
with all the different levels of things I was experiencing and
acknowledging them, and I was learning who I was underneath,
you know, and what had made me stay in that abusive
relationship and how I'd felt badly in some situations with
what I'd been living with because I didn't know any
different, you know, that big turn around of acknowledging and
then learning how to forgive. And it's, it's people go, oh,
forgiveness. But no, it's actually how we
forgive ourselves for staying in those positions, how we forgive
ourselves for not understanding that our own things were holding
us there. So we're carrying baggage that
isn't ours. And when we can forgive and
apologise to ourselves for that, we can let go of it.
And it's it's like the sun coming.
Out right and can I add the bit to that and when when you're
letting go and the sun comes out actually you've reached a much
better position to fight your case so.
This is you become more aware of your emotions, you become more
controlled. You'd become able to speak
without crying. For me, that was a biggie for a
very long time. You know, I would literally, I'd
sit here and the tears would be falling to and I'd say, I'm, I'm
sorry, I can't help the waterfall.
That was my constant phrase. I can't help the waterfall.
But all of a sudden one day the waterfall stopped.
And I suddenly realised that if I kept on doing this inner work
and looking after me, it brings me to my why, which is I have
grandchildren. I don't know how many now I I
know I had two granddaughters. I don't know if there are any
more. I do know that I'm all over the
Internet because I've built my social media up all this time.
They're going to find me one day.
They might knock on the door. What's the point in me being
that broken, damaged person? I need to be that healthy,
balanced, vibrant person so that I can help them to process what
they're going to learn. Because I'm not going to sit
there and say it's all your mother's fault because it isn't
her fault. She was a child.
It's actually the adults that involved themselves in that and
damaged her and she doesn't understand how much she was
coerced and manipulated. But I want them to know that
they can still have a relationship with her and that
they can do it healthily and understand the grief they're
going to be experiencing at the disconnection we've experienced.
And that's, that's a big why for me.
And it's actually, it should be the why for all of us that we
fix our own things to bring us into a space of clarity and
emotional strength where we can support our children and our
grandchildren to have better reconnection later on down the
line. It's not going to happen for
everyone. I can't wave a magic wand and
say come and do your work with me because I'll make it all
better because that's not what it's about.
It's about finding us within all this grief.
Yeah. And and that that was very clear
on that very special Friday. So this is a really good point
to end on. People who are out there looking
in at us, I know that you are very keen to help people come
forward and to not only heal, but start to be active and make
a difference. I'm going to say, and you'll
know why I've come to say this, I am very, very keen for more
and more people to come forward because they're the evidence
that there's a problem. That's one thing.
And the other thing is that when enough people come forward, we
can solve the problem. So I I am absolutely hoping that
this interview will be another one where people are going to
see it and think, yes, I need to do something.
That would be wonderful, wouldn't it?
It would be, it would be absolutely amazing, you know,
for me, if I can help another person to not have the absolute
gut wrenching journey I've had for the length of time I had it,
you know, it was, it was a very long time.
Some of these people are only just starting on this journey.
And you know, there's an, there's an old phrase you need
to get your act together. And the ACT is actually caring
for yourself. You know, you're not doing your
your children a disservice. You're not doing your
grandchildren A disservice. You're actually doing them the
greatest service by sorting out your own emotional stuff.
Because the more we sort that out, the more clear you can
become in the outcome you actually want.
And and that's. And hopefully helping other
people as well, because that's the strength.
Yeah, exactly that. Debbie, thank you very much
indeed. It's been a pleasure.
Thank you.