There is a silence that precedes distortion…an eerie stillness, not unlike the hush before the hunter’s arrow finds its mark. In cases of psychological alienation, especially those born from maternal betrayal, the silence is never benign. It is structured. Operative. A veil drawn across the soul’s eyes.
It is in that silence that memory begins to rot.
Let us begin, as the ancients did, with the wound. In myth, wounds are never merely physical. Achilles’ heel, Oedipus’ eyes, the broken hip of Jacob after wrestling the angel; each a symbolic rupture in the psyche, a gateway through which divine truth bleeds. So too with the child whose mother has aligned herself against him. His wound is not torn by blade or whip, but by the fracturing of narrative, the inversion of moral order.
The child remembers, but only what he is permitted to recall. And herein lies the horror: the mother, once a sacred container of early truth, becomes the editor of memory. She reauthors the child’s story with poisoned ink. The father becomes a monster; the child’s love is re-labelled as fear. The sacred is made profane.
“You remember wrong,” she says—not always with words, but with flinches, absences, and well-timed tears.
And the child, longing to remain attached, complies. He trades truth for proximity. This is not merely adaptation – it is spiritual death by degrees.
The Loss of Ambivalence
In psychological literature, we call it “splitting.” In myth, it is the forging of a false idol. A once-integrated parent becomes either god or demon. The targeted parent is sacrificed at the altar of maternal survival, and the child is offered up as priest and witness.
There is no room for ambiguity in a battlefield.
Once the splitting occurs, the child’s authentic self begins to vanish, not from lack of love, but from the unbearable burden of carrying contradictory truths. He loved his father. But his mother weeps at the mention of him. He remembers joy. But joy, now, is treason.
To remain attached to the mother, the child must amputate part of himself. He must forget what he knows, or worse: he must remember it incorrectly.
This is where we see the phenomenon known clinically as co-delusion. But in narrative terms, it is closer to a spell –a metaphysical enchantment in which reality is reshaped not through force, but through emotional logic. What the child believes, he must believe to survive. The lie becomes more tolerable than the truth, because the lie secures affection. It is, in effect, an ontological bargain: love in exchange for false witness.
And make no mistake – it is abuse. But like all mythic curses, it is cloaked in virtue.
The Gorgon Mother
There is a myth not often taught in schools: that of Euryale, the forgotten sister of Medusa. While Medusa is vilified and slain, Euryale survives, wailing eternally, her eyes never dry. In some tellings, her gaze doesn’t petrify, it confuses. You look into her face and forget your own. You return home to your father and cannot recall his name.
The alienating parent is often such a figure – tragic, wounded, and yet wielding a gaze that dissolves the identity of the child. Not out of hatred, but out of psychological necessity. If the mother is fragile, then the father must be dangerous. If the mother is good, then any grief the child feels must be the father’s fault. Grief is re-labeled as trauma, and loyalty is fused with fear.
And so the child grows, not with a coherent self, but with a borrowed self—a mirror of the mother’s suffering.
This is the cruel paradox: to grieve the father would be to betray the mother. And to love the mother means rejecting the father’s memory. The child learns to regulate the mother’s moods, not his own. He becomes a tuning fork for her emotional weather, vibrating with guilt, rage, and longing.
But he does not know why.
Rescuing the Authentic Child
In therapeutic terms, the recovery of an alienated child involves not reintroducing facts, but restoring permission—permission to feel love where only fear was allowed, to hold two truths in one body, to grieve a parent unjustly lost.
The healing begins when the child realises: It is not your fault you forgot. It is not your fault you believed the story you were given. But it is your responsibility now to remember who you were before the forgetting.
Or as a boy of twelve who had been coached for four years, once whispered after a breakthrough session:
“I think I used to laugh like him. But she told me that was dangerous.”
He was right to doubt that. But also right to remember it.
Postscriptum
To those reading this who have been cast in the role of monster by those they once loved: you are not alone. The tide turns slowly, but even in myth, the curse eventually breaks. The child will remember. The light will return.
And when it does, do not say, “I told you so.”
Say, Welcome back.
The work of love is not to be right, but to be ready.
–– R.S.
Reade Saunders 
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