You are standing in the driveway on a Sunday evening. Your twelve year old sits in the back seat of your ex-spouse’s car, arms folded, eyes locked on the phone. They will not look at you. Your ex stands on the porch with a flat, cool face and says something like, “I can’t force them. They’re old enough to decide.”
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Your chest goes cold. Your throat closes. There is a sick vertigo in your stomach that no legal brief can name. You get home, pour a drink, and start typing “kids choosing sides” into the search bar at eleven at night. You read about parental alienation. You read about narcissistic ex-spouses. You read about the courts. Somewhere between the fourth and fifth article you notice you are shaking.
I want you to slow down before you scroll another list.
I have been a licensed marriage and family therapist for over seventeen years. I have sat across from hundreds of parents inside exactly this pain, and I can tell you with the confidence mileage buys that almost every popular framing of this problem is aimed at the wrong target. Your child is not being brainwashed by a villain. Your child is not defective. Your child is not gone.
Your child’s nervous system is running a survival strategy. And once you can see it clearly, everything about how you show up in that driveway changes.
The Real Question Underneath the Alliance
When talking turns into the same fight
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The frame most articles use is legal. Alienator. Alienated. Targeted parent. That frame will hand you an attorney and a stopwatch and a list of what to document. It will not hand you back your child.
The frame I want to give you is biological. Grounded in attachment theory, your child’s brain treats you and your ex the way an infant brain treats a caregiver. Connection equals survival. Not metaphorically. Literally. The mammalian nervous system encodes bonded adults as the ground under its feet.
When two parents separate, that ground shakes. And the child’s body, long before their thinking brain gets a vote, starts running one urgent question over and over.
Am I safe?
A child in the middle of a two-parent war cannot hold both parents at once when those parents can no longer hold each other. It is neurologically too much. The child’s system will do what any small mammal does when the ground is unstable. It will find a piece of solid rock and climb onto it. That piece of rock, in a divorce, is often one parent.
You can often see the same search for solid rock in the hours after a handoff, which is why I wrote about kids’ behavior getting worse after visits with the other parent.
The alliance is not love. The alliance is not agreement with your ex’s version of events. The alliance is a foothold.
What the data shows: in 58,221 completed relationship assessments, sad was the third most common deep feeling and hopeless the fifth, at 17,094 and 9,160 people.
What “Choosing Sides” Actually Is
I want to name three specific things that are happening under the surface when a child appears to pick a side. This is where the popular framing collapses everything into one word, “alienation,” and misses the anatomy entirely.
The first is collapse of complexity. A three way system with two adults in conflict and one child in the middle is unbearable to a young nervous system. Two on one is unbearable. Three separate suffering worlds is unbearable. What is bearable is a simple story with a hero and a villain. The child’s brain is not choosing that story because it is true. It is choosing that story because it is simple, and simple is survivable.
The second is protection of the parent who cannot hold themselves. Children read the nervous systems of the adults around them with a precision that would embarrass most therapists. If one parent is visibly falling apart, weeping, drinking, obsessively litigating, showing raw distress, the child will often align with that parent. Not because that parent is right. Because that parent is the one whose survival looks most in question. The child becomes a small caregiver to the larger caregiver, which is a form of what we call parentification. They cannot afford to let that parent fall further.
The third is a bid to end the war. Some children pick a side so that the war might finally stop. If I am fully with mum, maybe dad will stop calling. If I am fully with dad, maybe mum will stop crying. The alliance is a child’s attempt to remove one leg of the tripod so the whole unbearable structure can finally rest.
None of these are ideology. None of these are betrayal. All of them are the body of a child trying to find ground where none exists.
Why the Sibling Society Is the Real Enemy
Here is the pattern I see most often in my office, and it is the one nobody warns divorcing parents about.
When a marriage collapses, parents often drop, without meaning to, into what I call a sibling society. Instead of remaining a floor above the child, two adults co-holding the parental function, they slide sideways into competing peers. Both hurt. Both scared. Both, in a way, orphaned by the loss of the couple. And now, competing for the child’s alliance.
This is not a moral failure. It is a nervous system event. When the person who used to co-regulate you becomes the person who most destabilizes you, your regulatory system goes searching for anywhere else to land. The child is right there. Small. Loving. Available.
And so the parents, without ever intending it, start doing things that only make sense between siblings. Leaking distress. Sharing the courtroom details. Making offhand comments about the other parent’s new partner. Asking the child what they think, what they saw, what they heard. Loading the child up with the weight of adult grief and calling it honesty.
The child cannot function as a peer to their parents. Their nervous system will break under that weight. And when it breaks, it does what any overloaded system does. It picks a lane. It collapses the impossible three into a manageable two, and calls that “choosing.”
That is the wound most divorced parents inflict without knowing they are doing it. Not because they are bad. Because they have lost their own ground and the only ground left in the house is their kid.
The way out of this is not more communication apps. It is not a stricter custody schedule. It is one or both parents doing the terrifying inner work of climbing back up onto the parent floor, even while heartbroken, and refusing to draft their child as an ally.
If you want a fuller sense of what that adult floor looks like structurally, I’ve written about it in what secure functioning in relationships actually means. The parental version is the same architecture, held between two adults who are no longer partners but are still, permanently, co-parents.
What the Aligned Child Is Actually Feeling
Here is where I want you to slow down. Because if you are the parent who has been pushed out of the alliance, the temptation is to see your child as cold, as brainwashed, as lost. That reading will destroy your relationship with them, probably permanently.
A child who has aligned against you is not experiencing peace. They are, underneath the crossed arms and the flat voice, in enormous pain. Their body knows something is wrong. Their body knows they are loyal to a story that requires them to amputate half of themselves. Half of their genes. Half of their history. Half of their heart.
The armor they wear when they see you is not indifference. It is guilt turned into stone. If they let the wall drop for even a second, they will feel the full weight of loving you, and that love, in the current configuration, is intolerable. So they harden. They pick fights. They roll their eyes. They refuse the visit. They protect the alliance because the alliance is the only ground they have.
What they need from you, more than anything, is a parent who does not need them to prove their love right now. Who does not audition for the position of favorite. Who does not require them to renounce the other parent as the price of admission.
They need you to remain the floor while they are unable to reach for you. That is the parental version of the secure base their body first learned to look for at eighteen months old, and still requires now, at twelve or fifteen or twenty.
The Story of Other vs. the Experience of Self
There is a move I make with almost every divorced parent who lands in my office spinning about their ex. I ask them to turn the flashlight around.
Most parents come in with the flashlight aimed outward. At the ex. At the ex’s new partner. At the therapist the ex hired. At the messages the child forwarded. At the way the ex spoke to the child in the driveway. All of this is what I call the Story of Other. It is an entire universe of grievance, and it will not, in my clinical experience, ever return your child to you.
The Experience of Self is the flashlight turned inward. It sounds like this. When my child would not look at me on Sunday, my chest went cold. My throat closed. There was a nauseating pull in my stomach. Underneath the anger at my ex, there was a much smaller thing. A boy or a girl who once believed they were unloveable, and who is now watching the person they love most on earth confirm the old verdict.
That, not the courtroom brief, is the doorway back.
Because when you can feel yourself clearly, when you can hold your own devastation without weaponizing it, you become someone your child can eventually return to. You become the floor. Not because you fought hardest. Because you refused to collapse into a sibling, no matter how much they pulled you toward that role.
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What Actually Works: The Parental Floor
Here is what I have watched restore children to a rejected parent, over years, in real families. It is not what you would guess from reading the internet.
Stop recruiting. Every text you send that even lightly asks your child to see your version of events registers in their body as a demand for allegiance. Their body is already overloaded. Do not add weight. When they finally do see you, do not litigate the other parent. Do not ask what was said about you. Do not test them. Give them a room where they are not required to be a witness or a judge or a soldier.
Regulate yourself in front of them. Your child is scanning your nervous system every second they are in your presence. If you are visibly held together, not performing okayness, but actually breathing, actually grounded, actually able to be with what is, their body will start to trust that being with you is not dangerous. This is the work. Not the words you say. The state you are in.
Do not close the door. The single most common mistake I see rejected parents make is to protect themselves by pulling back. They stop texting. They stop showing up at games. They stop sending the birthday card because they are tired of it going unanswered. Do not do this. Send the message. Show up at the game and sit quietly in the back. Send the card. You are not begging. You are being the floor. Floors do not disappear when they are not being walked on. They wait.
Do your own work on the marriage that ended. This is the part almost no divorced parent wants to hear. The version of you that was in that marriage helped create the dynamic your child is now trying to survive. This is not blame. It is the same thing I say to any couple in broken relationship work: the enemy is the loop, not the person. The unfinished business in you, the shame you carry, the protector parts that ran the show in the marriage, they are still active. And they are still visible to your child. Working on them, in real therapy or coaching, is one of the most powerful things you can do for your child, even if your child never sits in a therapy room themselves.
What About the Preferred Parent
If you are reading this and you are the parent your child currently prefers, I want to speak to you directly. Because the popular framing lets you off the hook, and I will not.
Being the preferred parent in a divorce is not a trophy. It is a warning light. It means your child’s nervous system has done triage and identified you as the one whose regulation seems more available, or whose collapse would be more dangerous. Neither of those is a compliment. Both of them are a signal that you need to actively, deliberately, repeatedly refuse the alliance your child is trying to hand you.
Do not accept the gift. Do not agree that the other parent is the bad one, even when your child says it, even when it is partly true. Say, gently and often, “I know it is hard right now with dad. He loves you. You are allowed to love him too. You do not have to pick.” Say it into the wall of resistance. Say it when your kid rolls their eyes. Say it a hundred times.
Because the child who is allowed to love both parents grows up into an adult who can love. The child who is required to choose grows up into an adult who cannot, without splitting, without contempt, without repeating the very fracture that was handed to them.
Empathy Cubed and the Return
There is a moment I have seen dozens of times in my office. Two divorced parents in the same room. Barely tolerating each other. Talking about a child who has aligned with one of them.
And then one of them, usually the one who has done the most inner work, drops the argument and says something like, “I know they have been telling you I’m the enemy. I know that must be so lonely for you. I’m so sorry we did this to you.” Not to the ex. Into the room. Into the space the child is not in.
And the other parent’s face changes.
That is what I call Empathy Cubed. It is when two people who have been suffering separately, in two locked bubbles, briefly share the same field of feeling. It is rare in divorced couples. It is often the first moment the child, wherever they are, starts to soften. Not because they know it happened. Because the whole field around them starts to change frequency.
Your child does not need you to reconcile with your ex. They need you to reach a state where you could, in principle, wish them well. That is the floor being built underneath your child’s feet, one honest breath at a time.
Common Questions
How long does it take for a child to come back after choosing sides?
Longer than you want. In my clinical experience, children who have aligned against a parent often take one to three years to genuinely soften, and sometimes longer if the alliance was intense or if there was significant parentification. The timeline is not something you can shorten by pushing. You shorten it by not adding pressure and by remaining consistently available, regulated, and non-recruiting, month after month, year after year.
Is it parental alienation or is it my child’s own choice?
That binary is the wrong frame. Almost all “choosing sides” involves some pressure from the aligned parent, some real grievance the child has with the rejected parent, and a nervous system doing survival math on top of both. Rather than fighting to prove alienation in court, most parents get further doing the inner work of remaining a steady floor, which is what actually restores the bond over time.
Should I stop trying to see my child if they refuse visits?
No. Reduce demands, not presence. Stop insisting on full visits if that is creating a battle. But keep showing up in smaller, lower-pressure ways. A text with no ask. A card. Attending the game and sitting quietly. Sending photos. Your child needs evidence, over years, that you did not disappear when they pushed you away. That evidence is what makes eventual return possible.
What if my ex is genuinely turning our child against me?
It happens. And in that case the work is still the same, and even harder. You cannot control what your ex says. You can only control whether your child, when they finally look up, finds a parent who stayed regulated, stayed available, and stayed uninterested in requiring them to renounce the other parent. That is the parent children return to. The one who did not mirror the war.
How do I talk to my child about the divorce without pulling them into it?
Say less than you think. Answer their questions honestly and briefly. Never volunteer detail about the marriage, the ex’s behavior, the finances, or the legal process. If they ask a leading question, you can say, “That’s between me and your other parent. I’m not going to put that on you.” Children experience that boundary as protection, even when they push against it. You can read more about how nervous systems process emotional overwhelm in how to communicate better in a relationship.
This is not a you problem or a them problem
“You are not fighting a broken partner, but rather a tragic, co-created system where you both hurt because you mean so much to each other.”
“Most of the hurt in a relationship comes from impact without intention.”
Figs O’Sullivan, LMFT
What to Do Next
Do not just close the tab on this.
Bring what surfaced here into a real conversation. Figlet coaches you through it, grounded in Figs O’Sullivan’s work, LMFT. Free to start.
Your child did not stop loving you. Their body found a foothold in an earthquake. Be the ground that is still there when the shaking stops.
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When talking turns into the same fight
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Figs O'Sullivan
Founder · EFT couples therapist
“What I would tell you at 10pm, if I could.”
