Episode Details

One parent goes away for a weekend. In her absence the other gets the kids cooking, setting the table and washing up, and within a day of her return the whole arrangement is gone. Jon tells that story as the thing he can point at most cleanly: it was never about the chores. Somebody needed those children to keep needing her.

Jon posts under the name Male Victims of Female Narcissists, and he has been a guest here several times. He was married for twenty-seven years and describes a covert dynamic rather than an obvious one: no shouting for most of it, no obvious cruelty, just a steady, patient rearrangement of the family around one person. He has said he was the frog in the kettle, and that the temperature came up so slowly he did not notice until the water was hot. He deliberately waited until his children were out of the house before filing, hoping to give them something intact. Two of the four have not spoken to him since.

In this episode, Jon and Lisa go through what the pattern looked like from the inside. A long power struggle over the children that started when they were toddlers. A parenting goal aimed at dependence rather than independence, and what that produced in an adult son who could not order for himself. Triangulation and gatekeeping, where every conversation, even with his own parents and sisters, routed through one person first. The children as an audience and then as reporters, and the attention they earned by carrying information back. Lisa connects each piece to the alienation factors she teaches from Dr. Amy Baker's research, and adds the borrowed scenario: a child repeating a complaint in vocabulary that was clearly handed to them.

The rest is about repair, and its pace. Jon describes what his ex said the day he told her he wanted a divorce, and what it revealed about how long the ground had been prepared. He explains why he will not defend himself to his children, will not discuss their mother with them, and will not accept a relationship built on being used, and how he holds that line while leaving the door open. He describes rebuilding trust with his youngest over dinners, one at a time. And he lays out the parable he keeps coming back to, of a father who lets life do the teaching rather than chasing, and who is still there when his child turns around. He also talks about why the space he runs is largely gender-neutral, and who actually shows up in it.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• Why alienating behavior often starts years before anyone files anything
• Fostering dependence: what it looks like at three, at thirteen, and at eighteen
• Triangulation and gatekeeping, and being the last person told in your own house
• Why children of a covert abuser become the supply, and why the pattern takes longer to see
• The borrowed scenario: when your child repeats a grievance in words that were never theirs
• Why correcting the record with facts rarely moves an alienated child's position
• How to decline a relationship built on disrespect without closing the door on your child
• Why chasing an alienated adult child backfires, and what waiting actually looks like

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Why alienation starts long before the separation
4:00 Independence vs dependence, and being the last to know at home
8:30 Infantilizing: the candy bar at the skydiving center
12:00 The weekend she was away, and how fast it was dismantled
16:00 Covert vs malignant, and children as the supply
20:00 Kids as reporters, and what they get rewarded for
24:00 The spin, the borrowed scenario, and why facts don't settle it
31:00 "Some of your children will never speak to you again"
34:00 Four kids, four outcomes, and refusing disrespect
39:00 The prodigal son, and waiting without ch