Al Iman Family Services
Al Iman Family Services offers social, educational, counseling, and psychotherapy services rooted in Islamic theology to enhance the quality of life for families in need.
The two stories below are composites drawn from patterns I encounter regularly in clinical practice. If something in them feels familiar, I want you to stay with that feeling. It matters.
| Layla’s Story |
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| Layla is 34 years old. She describes herself as someone who cannot form close relationships without eventually pushing people away, and she has never been able to explain why. She grew up with her mother after her parents divorced when she was six. Her mother, she now understands, was deeply hurt by the divorce. What she only began to piece together in her late twenties was that most of what she ‘knew’ about her father had come from a steady stream of her mother’s pain: he was selfish, he did not really love them, he had ‘moved on’ to his new life and left them behind. By the time Layla was a teenager, she had stopped calling him. In therapy, she wept through several sessions not because she hated her father, but because she realised she had been taught to. She had lost nearly thirty years of a relationship with a man who, as she eventually found out, had spent years trying to stay in her life and been turned away. |
| Kareem’s Story |
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| Kareem is 28 years old and comes to therapy presenting with anxiety and what he describes as a deep inability to trust anyone fully. He grew up with his father after his parents separated when he was eight. His father, he says, was not a bad man, but he was a wounded one. Every conversation about his mother was shadowed. Not always with direct criticism. More often with sighs, with loaded silences, with comments that she ‘had her priorities.’ When Kareem visited his mother, he came home to a quietness in the house that felt like punishment. He learned, without anyone telling him directly, that loving his mother was somehow disloyal. He is only now, in therapy, beginning to understand that the anxiety he carries is rooted in having spent his entire childhood feeling like he had to choose between two people he loved, and that no matter what he chose, he was betraying someone. |
Layla and Kareem were not physically abused. Their homes were not violent. But both were subjected to something that researchers now understand to be a serious form of emotional harm: parental alienation. And both are still, as adults, paying the price for it.
Parental alienation is a process in which one parent, consciously or not, works to damage, undermine, or destroy their child’s relationship with the other parent. The result, in its more serious forms, is a child who rejects one parent completely, not because that parent has actually harmed them, but because they have been systematically taught to.
The term was first introduced by child psychiatrist Richard Gardner in 1985, who described it as a ‘campaign of denigration’ against a targeted parent driven by the other parent’s influence (Gardner, 1985). While the term ‘Parental Alienation Syndrome’ remains debated in clinical and legal settings, the underlying behaviors and their effects on children are broadly recognised by mental health professionals, family courts, and researchers worldwide (Warshak, 2015; Baker, 2005).
It is important to say clearly at the outset: parental alienation is not the same as a child legitimately pulling away from an abusive or neglectful parent. That is called parental estrangement, and it may be a healthy self-protective response. Alienation happens specifically when the rejection is manufactured, not earned. When a child who had a loving relationship with a parent is gradually turned against them through manipulation rather than through anything that parent has genuinely done.
| How common is it? |
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| Research estimates that over 3.8 million children in the United States are moderately to severely alienated from a parent (Harman et al., 2019). A UK survey of over 1,000 separated parents found that approximately 39% reported experiencing parental alienating behaviours, rising to 59% when specific behaviours were assessed directly (Hine, 2024). This is not a rare or edge-case problem. It is happening in Muslim families, in every community, often in silence. |
Parental alienation rarely begins with dramatic declarations. It is usually quieter than that, and that is part of what makes it so hard to name and so hard to stop. It accumulates over months and years, in small moments that each seem survivable, until the child’s internal world has been reshaped in ways they cannot trace back to any single cause.
Below are the most commonly documented tactics. Some are deliberate. Others are driven by unprocessed pain, and the parent doing them may not fully recognise what they are doing. Both are harmful. Intent does not cancel impact.
| Tactic | What It Looks Like in Practice |
|---|---|
| Constant criticism of the other parent | Regularly telling the child that the other parent does not love them, is dangerous, is irresponsible, or cannot be trusted. |
| Using the child as a messenger | Sending messages, financial demands, or emotional complaints through the child rather than communicating directly with the other parent. |
| Blocking or interfering with contact | Cancelling visits without genuine reason, not passing on phone calls, scheduling activities that deliberately conflict with the other parent’s time. |
| Interrogating the child after visits | Questioning the child closely about what happened, what was said, who was present, and using the child’s answers to build a case against the other parent. |
| Rewarding rejection | Giving the child special treatment, gifts, or approval when they express negative feelings about the other parent. |
| Sharing adult grievances with the child | Telling the child about legal disputes, financial problems, the other parent’s personal failures, or asking the child to take sides in adult conflicts. |
| Creating false memories or narratives | Subtly suggesting things that did not happen or reinforcing negative interpretations until the child begins to believe them as real memories. |
| Threatening emotional withdrawal | Making the child feel that closeness with the other parent is a betrayal of the alienating parent’s love and loyalty. |
| An important note on self-reflection |
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| If you are reading this list and recognising patterns in your own behaviour during or after a separation, please do not close the article. The fact that you are reading and noticing matters. Parental alienation is often driven by unprocessed grief and pain, not malice. Recognising the pattern is the first step toward protecting your child from carrying the weight of your wound. |
This is where I want to be very direct, because I think many adults who engage in alienating behaviours genuinely believe they are protecting their child. They are not. The research on what parental alienation does to children, both in childhood and across their whole lifespan, is extensive and consistent.
A child being subjected to parental alienation is placed in a state of chronic psychological conflict. They are, in effect, being asked to cut off one half of their own identity, because they are made of both parents. Every message that says ‘your father is bad’ or ‘your mother does not really care about you’ lands not only as a statement about that parent but as a statement about the child themselves.
Research documents consistent short-term effects including elevated anxiety and depression symptoms, behavioural problems at home and at school, difficulty forming peer relationships, and what researchers describe as a loss of the child’s ability to trust their own perceptions and emotions (Baker and Ben-Ami, 2011). The child has been asked to see reality through the alienating parent’s lens, and over time they lose confidence in their own internal compass.
The research on adult survivors of childhood parental alienation is particularly important, because this is what I see repeatedly in clinical work. People arrive in therapy years, sometimes decades, after the alienation occurred, often not naming it, often not recognising it, but carrying its effects in their bodies and their relationships.
| Long-Term Effect | What the Research Shows |
|---|---|
| Identity confusion | Children who are alienated from one parent lose access to half of who they are. The message received, consciously or not, is that part of them is bad or unacceptable. |
| Low self-esteem and self-worth | Baker (2005) found high rates of self-deprecation and even self-hatred in adult survivors. The child internalises the rejected parent as part of their own rejected self. |
| Depression | 70% of adult survivors in Baker’s (2005) study reported significant episodes of major depression. Verhaar et al. (2022) confirmed elevated rates of trauma responses and anxiety disorders. |
| Difficulty trusting others | Adults who were alienated as children often report a persistent difficulty trusting that people will stay, or that love is not conditional on loyalty and compliance. |
| Relationship instability | Baker and Fontaine (2012) found higher rates of divorce among adults who experienced childhood PA. Two thirds of their sample had been divorced at least once. |
| Repeating the pattern | 50% of Baker’s (2005) adult subjects reported that parental alienation had recurred in their own family systems, affecting their own children. |
| Substance use | Approximately one third of Baker’s (2005) sample had serious problems with alcohol or drugs in adolescence, using substances to cope with unprocessed grief and loss. |
| Delayed grief | Because the loss was not named as loss, many adult survivors carry unprocessed mourning for the relationship with the targeted parent that was taken from them. |
| The finding that should stop every alienating parent in their tracks |
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| Baker’s (2005) research found that 50% of adult survivors of parental alienation reported that the pattern had recurred in their own family systems. The wound is passed on. When you alienate your child from their other parent, you are not only damaging your child. You are increasing the likelihood that your grandchildren will one day sit in a therapist’s office with the same unprocessed grief. |
This section is for the adults who were alienated as children and have not yet named it or connected it to what they are experiencing now.
One of the most common patterns I see in clinical practice is adults who arrive presenting with depression, relationship difficulties, anxiety, or a vague and persistent sense that something is fundamentally broken in how they connect with people, and who have never connected these experiences to what happened in their childhood home after their parents separated.
Here are some questions worth sitting with honestly:
Do you struggle to fully trust people you are close to, even when they have given you no reason to doubt them?
Do you feel a chronic low-level guilt that you cannot fully explain, particularly in relationships?
Do you have a complicated relationship with one of your parents that you have never fully understood?
Do you find yourself in relationships where you feel you have to choose between people, or where loving one person feels like betraying another?
Do you carry an unexplained grief or sadness that surfaces when you think about your childhood?
Did you grow up hearing one parent spoken about negatively, and do you now wonder how much of what you believed was true?
Do you find it difficult to forgive, or do you carry deep resentment toward a parent you were taught to see as the source of the family’s problems?
| The delayed recognition |
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| For many adults, the realisation that they were alienated from a parent does not come until their late twenties or thirties. Baker (2005) found that the emergence of intense feelings of pain, guilt, and anger often coincided with early adulthood, when people gain enough independence and perspective to begin questioning the narrative they were given as children. This realisation, when it comes, is often devastating. It involves grieving not only the relationship that was taken from them but the years of their life they spent believing a story that was not true. |
I want to be honest about something. In my years of clinical practice within Muslim communities, I have encountered parental alienation in its most damaging forms. And I have seen it justified, or at least left unchallenged, in religious and cultural settings where the marital grievance is treated as the primary story and the child’s experience is treated as secondary.
Islam has no room for this. None. The principles of the tradition, when applied honestly and without the filter of adult grievance, offer one of the clearest possible condemnations of parental alienation.
| وَلَا تَقْتُلُوا أَوْلَادَكُمْ مِنْ إِمْلَاقٍ |
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| “Do not kill your children out of poverty — We will provide for you and for them.” |
| — Al-An’am 6:151 |
The Quran uses the word amanah, a sacred trust, to describe the relationship between parents and children. An amanah is not yours to do with as you please. It is something held temporarily, to be honoured, protected, and returned intact. Using your child as an instrument of your marital pain is a violation of the amanah. It is a form of harm that Allah has explicitly prohibited.
| “He who severs family ties will not enter paradise.” |
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| — Sahih Muslim, 2556 |
| الرَّحِمُ شُجْنَةٌ مِنَ الرَّحْمَنِ |
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| “The rahim (womb-ties) is a word derived from Ar-Rahman. Allah says: whoever maintains it, I shall maintain connection with them; whoever severs it, I shall sever connection with them.” |
| — Sahih al-Bukhari, 5988 |
These are not gentle suggestions. The language of these hadiths is among the most serious in the entire Sunnah. And yet parental alienation is precisely a severing of rahim. It is one parent engineering the cutting of the child’s bond with the other parent, which is a bond of blood, a bond of rahim, a bond that the Prophet peace be upon him described as derived from Allah’s own name.
The parent who cultivates their child’s rejection of the other parent is not just damaging a relationship between two adults. They are, by the Prophet’s own criterion, engineering a severing of rahim. The sin belongs to the one who engineers it, not to the child who was shaped into carrying it out.
| “There shall be no harm and no reciprocating of harm.” |
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| — Ibn Majah, 2340 — authenticated by al-Nawawi as a foundational principle of Islamic law |
La darar wa la dirar is one of the five foundational legal maxims of Islamic jurisprudence. It means, simply, that causing harm is forbidden. The research is unambiguous: parental alienation causes measurable, documented, lasting harm to children. Depression. Damaged identity. Broken relationships. Substance use. Intergenerational transmission of the same wound. By this principle alone, regardless of the marital grievance, parental alienation is islamically prohibited.
The Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, placed the welfare of children at the centre of post-divorce arrangements. In the well-known hadith, a woman came to him and said: ‘O Messenger of Allah, my womb carried my son, my breast suckled him, and my lap nurtured him, but now his father wants to take him from me.’ The Prophet, peace be upon him, ruled in her favour, making clear that the child’s wellbeing, not parental grievance, was the deciding principle.
Islam does not regard divorce as permission to harm. The Quran explicitly states: ‘Do not harm them in order to oppress them’ (Al-Talaq 65:6), a verse revealed in the context of post-divorce arrangements. The Arabic term used, tudaarra, means to cause damage through conflict. It is a direct address to parents who are tempted to use the children and the post-divorce environment as a site of ongoing war.
| Principle | Arabic Term | How It Applies to Parental Alienation |
|---|---|---|
| Children are a trust from Allah | Amanah | Both parents hold their child as an amanah from Allah. Using a child as a weapon in a personal dispute is a violation of that sacred trust. |
| Maintaining family ties is obligatory | Silat al-Rahim | The Prophet said: ‘He who severs family ties will not enter paradise.’ Deliberately cutting a child off from a parent severs rahim. |
| Causing harm is forbidden | La Darar | The foundational principle ‘la darar wa la dirar’ (no harm shall be inflicted) applies directly. Parental alienation is measurable, documented harm to a child. |
| Justice toward children | Adl | Islam commands fairness in all dealings. A child has the right to know, love, and be loved by both parents. Denying this is an act of injustice against the child. |
| Truthfulness | Sidq | Planting false narratives about a parent in a child’s mind is a form of lying that the Prophet described among the worst of character traits. |
| The child’s wellbeing is paramount | Maslaha | Islamic jurisprudence considers the welfare of the child the overriding concern in custody. Alienation harms the child regardless of the grievance between parents. |
Whether you are someone who suspects they were alienated as a child, a parent who recognises some of the patterns described above in their own behaviour, or a family member watching this happen to someone you love, the next steps below are for you.
The most important thing I can tell you is this: what you are carrying is real, and it has a name. You were not weak, you were not oversensitive, and you did not imagine it. What happened to you was a form of emotional harm, and many of the difficulties you may be experiencing in your relationships and your sense of self are understandable responses to that harm.
Name it. Speak with a therapist who has experience with attachment, family systems, and trauma. Many adults who were alienated as children have never had a space in which their experience was acknowledged as what it was. That acknowledgment itself is therapeutic.
Be patient with the grief. There is a particular kind of grief that comes with recognising parental alienation as an adult: you are mourning not only a relationship but the years you lost and, sometimes, the parent you may still be able to reconnect with. This grief deserves space and professional support.
Consider reconnection carefully. If the targeted parent is still alive and accessible, reconnection is possible. Research on reunification (Haines et al., 2023) shows it is genuinely possible but requires careful navigation. A therapist can help you approach this in a way that protects you and the process.
Break the cycle consciously. If you have children of your own, the research suggests you may be at elevated risk of repeating aspects of the pattern, either by alienating or by being alienated. Awareness of this risk is your most powerful protection against it.
This takes courage to acknowledge, and I want to meet that courage with directness rather than judgment.
The pain of a marital breakdown is real. The sense of injustice, of having been wronged, of needing your child to understand what happened, these are human feelings and they are not shameful. But your child is not the container for those feelings. And the harm you are causing by placing them there is documented, serious, and reversible only if you act before the pattern becomes entrenched.
Seek individual therapy urgently. The grief and rage that drive alienating behaviours need somewhere to go. A therapist can give them that space without the cost being paid by your child.
Make a sincere tawbah. From an Islamic standpoint, using a child against the other parent is an act of harm that requires genuine repentance and, where possible, repair. This is not an abstract theological point. It is a practical spiritual step.
Protect your child’s relationship with their other parent actively. Not just passively, not just by stopping the negative comments, but actively. Speak of the other parent with fairness. Facilitate contact without interference. Let your child love both of you without it costing them anything.
Consider co-parenting therapy. There are professionals who specialize in helping separated parents learn to cooperate in the interest of their children, even when the relationship between the adults is irreparably broken. This is a legitimate and effective intervention.
Being on the receiving end of parental alienation is one of the most painful experiences a parent can go through. Your child, whom you love and who you know loves you, is being shaped to turn away from you, and very often there is little you can do to stop it directly.
Do not retaliate with counter-alienation. Research and Islamic principles align here: responding with your own denigration of the other parent harms the child further and weakens any legal or clinical case you may need to make. Keep the high ground, genuinely, not strategically.
Document carefully. If you are concerned about a legal process, speak with a family law solicitor and begin keeping clear records of incidents, missed visits, and your child’s statements.
Maintain a consistent, warm presence. Even if contact is limited or obstructed, the child needs to know you are there, that you have not given up, and that your love is not conditional on anything. This consistency is protective.
Get your own support. Targeted parents experience a form of grief that is complex and underrecognised. Individual therapy for yourself is not a luxury in this situation. It is necessary for your wellbeing and for your capacity to parent effectively through what is a genuine trauma.
Parental alienation is happening in our communities. It is happening in families that pray together, in families that attend Islamic school, in families that are known in the masjid for their apparent stability. It is happening to children who cannot name what is being done to them, and it is leaving wounds that surface years later in marriages, in therapy offices, and in the spiritual lives of adults who no longer understand why they carry so much unresolved pain.
A few things are worth carrying into your pastoral work:
When a separated parent comes to you for advice, listen for what they say about the other parent in front of their children, and what they say about how they talk about the other parent. This is often where alienation is most visible.
Do not give Islamic validation to alienating behaviour. A parent who describes blocking contact, speaking negatively about the other parent to the children, or using the children as messengers in adult disputes is not demonstrating proper Islamic conduct, regardless of what the other parent did in the marriage.
The child’s wellbeing is not subordinate to the marital grievance. The two conversations need to be separated clearly in pastoral work: what happened between the adults, and what the children need, are distinct questions that require distinct answers.
Refer early. Parental alienation is a clinical matter as well as a pastoral one. Mental health professionals who work with families and children should be brought in alongside community support, not as a replacement for it.
Watch for adult survivors. The person sitting across from you who is struggling with their faith, their relationships, or their sense of self may be carrying the unprocessed wound of a childhood that was shaped by alienation. Knowing that this exists, and knowing what it looks like, will help you refer them to the support they need.
لَا تُضَارَّ وَالِدَةٌ بِوَلَدِهَا وَلَا مَوْلُودٌ لَهُ بِوَلَدِهِ
| “No mother shall be harmed through her child, and no father shall be harmed through his child.” |
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| — Al-Baqarah 2:233 |
This verse was revealed in the context of custody and child-rearing after divorce. Its message is direct: the child is not a site of warfare between the parents. No one, on either side, has the right to use the child as an instrument of their pain, their anger, or their desire for vindication.
Parental alienation is a serious form of emotional harm. It is backed by decades of research, documented in courts across the world, and experienced silently by millions of children who grow into adults with wounds they cannot always name. It is also, from an Islamic perspective, a violation of amanah, a severing of rahim, and a form of darar that the Prophet peace be upon him explicitly prohibited.
If you are reading this and recognising yourself in any part of it, whether as a survivor, a parent, or a community member who has watched this unfold close to home, I want you to know that there is no shame in naming this honestly. The shame belongs to the silence, not to the person willing to break it.
Your child deserves to be loved by both of their parents. Your pain, however real and however justified, does not change that. And healing, for all of you, begins the moment someone is willing to say so out loud.
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Ayman Al-Taher, RP Imam | Registered Psychotherapist | Islamic Scholar Al-Iman Family Services (AIFS) | Mississauga, Ontario www.aifs.ca | [email protected] | 647-563-6632 |
Baker, A. J. L. (2005). The long-term effects of parental alienation on adult children: A qualitative research study. The American Journal of Family Therapy, 33(4), 289-302.
Baker, A. J. L., and Ben-Ami, N. (2011). To turn a child against a parent is to turn a child against himself: The direct and indirect effects of exposure to parental alienation strategies on self-esteem and well-being. Journal of Divorce and Remarriage, 52(7), 472-489.
Baker, A. J. L., and Fontaine, J. H. (2012). The long-term correlates of childhood exposure to parental alienation on adult self-sufficiency and well-being. The American Journal of Family Therapy, 40(2), 169-183.
Gardner, R. A. (1985). Recent trends in divorce and custody litigation. Academy Forum, 29(2), 3-7.
Haines, J., Matthewson, M., and Turnbull, M. (2020). Understanding and managing parental alienation: A guide to assessment and intervention. Routledge.
Harman, J. J., Bernet, W., and Harman, J. (2019). Parental alienation: The blossoming of a field of study. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 28(2), 212-217.
Hine, B. (2024). Parental alienating behaviours: Prevalence and impact among separated and divorced parents. Survey study commissioned by Stewarts Law, UK.
Verhaar, S., Matthewson, M. L., and Bentley, C. (2022). The impact of parental alienating behaviours on the mental health of adults alienated in childhood. Children, 9(4), 475.
Warshak, R. A. (2015). Ten parental alienation fallacies that compromise decisions in court and in therapy. Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, 46(4), 235-249.
Ibn Qudamah, M. (n.d.). Al-Mughni. Various editions.
Al-Nawawi. (n.d.). Al-Arba’in al-Nawawiyyah (Forty Hadiths of al-Nawawi). Various editions.
Al-Suyuti, J. (n.d.). Al-Ashbah wa al-Naza’ir (Islamic Legal Maxims). Various editions.
Need support? Imam Ayman Al-Taher, RP offers Islamic psychotherapy and marriage, family and youth counselling in Mississauga and online across Ontario. Book an appointment.
