Parental Alienation: I Watched What Happened to My Father Happen to My Husband & It Broke Me (2024)
For most of my life, I believed the story I had been told about my father.
I was repeatedly told that he was “evil,” while the abuse happening inside my own home was minimized, excused, or ignored. My mother’s second husband abused me from the time I was a small child, yet the adults responsible for protecting me treated my father as the enemy.
That contradiction confused me for years.
Then a mandated reporter finally exposed what was happening. The State became involved, and the people who should have taken responsibility responded by abandoning and scapegoating me. Instead of asking what had happened to the child, the family’s attention shifted toward protecting the adults and controlling the story.
I was the child who had been harmed, yet I became the problem.
That is one of the cruelest realities of growing up in an abusive family system: when the truth threatens the family’s image, the person carrying the truth is often punished more severely than the person who caused the harm.
My Father Was Not the Man They Said He Was
My father, William R. Stowell, was a private, intelligent and deeply talented man. He was a civil engineer, designer and musician who loved the outdoors. He graduated with third honors from Gould Academy and later earned a degree in civil engineering from the University of Maine.
More importantly, he was kind, gentle and emotionally intelligent.
When I was older and finally had the opportunity to know him outside the narrative created for me, I discovered a man who wanted to be my father. When I returned to Maine after college with no money, no car and very little support, he helped me obtain transportation so I could work. That act helped me begin rebuilding my life—and rebuilding my relationship with him.
During the time we had together before he died, he became a source of wisdom, safety and healing. He was not perfect. No human being is. But he was not the monster I had been taught to fear.
He was my safe parent.
The tragedy is that I did not fully understand that until time was already running out.
Then I Watched the Same Pattern Happen to Lee
Years later, I watched another loving father become the target of a destructive family narrative.
This time, the father was my husband.
Lee loved his sons and wanted a meaningful relationship with them. I supported that relationship because I understood what it felt like to lose precious years with a parent. I never wanted his children to experience the confusion and grief I carried.
But when Lee tried to become more involved in his sons’ lives, conflict escalated. His character was attacked. His distress was used against him. His relationship with his children became increasingly difficult to maintain, and I watched people accept a carefully constructed version of him without asking what might be happening behind the scenes.
Suddenly, I was no longer looking only at Lee’s life.
I was looking directly at my childhood.
Two fathers from different families had been reduced to accusations. Their love for their children was overshadowed by narratives created by people who held more influence over those children. Their mistakes and emotional reactions were magnified, while the conduct directed at them was minimized or erased.
Watching it happen to Lee helped me finally understand what had happened to my father—and what had happened to me.
Abusive Family Systems Need Someone to Blame
In healthy families, adults take responsibility for the harm they cause. They listen when a child says something is wrong. They seek help, change their behavior and protect the vulnerable person.
In abusive family systems, accountability is treated as a threat.
When the family’s public image matters more than the child’s safety, someone must carry the blame. The person selected may be the parent who challenges the abuse, the child who reveals it or the family member who eventually refuses to remain silent.
The designated scapegoat becomes the container for everything the family refuses to confront.
Once that role is assigned, almost anything can be used to support it:
- Trauma responses become “bad behavior.”
- Illness becomes “attention seeking.”
- Boundaries become “cruelty.”
- Silence becomes an admission of guilt.
- Speaking becomes an attack.
- Leaving becomes abandonment.
- Defending yourself becomes proof that you are unstable.
The rules are designed so the scapegoat cannot win.
We eventually stopped trying.
We Played the Game—and Disappeared
By the end, Lee and I were living with brain injuries, trauma and serious physical illness. We were struggling to understand what was happening to our bodies while also trying to survive the psychological impact of being dehumanized.
The things we heard from family members shocked us.
We were treated as if our medical problems were character defects. People appeared willing to believe we were exaggerating or faking, even as our health continued to deteriorate. I was later found to have serious heavy-metal exposure, but by then a narrative had already formed around us.
I was told that members of my family believed I would eventually die by suicide.
Consider what that feels like to hear while you are already sick, frightened and struggling to stay alive.
They did not respond to that possibility with meaningful compassion, protection or concern. Instead, I felt erased—as if my death had already been written into their version of the story.
We were so physically and cognitively overwhelmed that we did not know how to respond. We could not keep explaining ourselves to people who had already decided not to understand.
So we played the game.
We stopped arguing. We stopped begging people to see us. We stopped trying to correct every accusation. We quietly prepared to leave, sold the house my father had left me and disappeared from their lives.
The closing happened on the abuser’s birthday.
Happy birthday to me.
Some people might call that a coincidence. After everything we endured, I call it poetic justice.
My father once told me that the four walls of his house would protect me after he was gone. They did. That home sheltered us until we were finally able to escape the environment that was destroying us.
Then it gave us the means to leave.
Jennifer and Lee: Until Death Do Us Part (2024)
Erasure Is a Form of Control
Family erasure does not always mean that photographs are destroyed or names are removed from records. Sometimes it happens through stories.
A person is erased when their motives are rewritten, their illness is mocked, their love is denied and their reactions are discussed without any mention of what happened to them.
My father was erased through a narrative that reduced his entire humanity to his faults.
Lee was being erased when people accepted accusations about his character while overlooking how deeply he loved his children.
I was erased when my childhood abuse, declining health and desperate need for safety mattered less than protecting other people’s reputations.
When survivors finally leave, the family may tell others that they are cold, vindictive or mentally unstable. What is often missing from that story are the years of abuse, the failed attempts to repair the relationship and the countless opportunities the family had to stop causing harm.
No contact is rarely the first choice.
It is usually the final boundary left after every other boundary has been ignored.
When You Finally See the Pattern
Many survivors spend years asking, “Why didn’t I see it sooner?”
Because you were trained not to see it.
You were taught to distrust your memories, minimize your pain and accept the family’s explanation of events. You may have needed those people for food, housing, belonging or survival. Recognizing the truth too early may have been emotionally or physically dangerous.
Sometimes the pattern becomes visible only when we watch it happen to someone we love.
That is what happened to me. Watching Lee be blamed, dehumanized and separated from his children illuminated my father’s experience. It also showed me why I had been punished after the abuse in my childhood was exposed.
The faces were different, but the strategy was painfully familiar:
Protect the image. Control the narrative. Discredit the person who knows the truth.
Once I saw it, I could not unsee it.
We Disappeared to Get Treatment and Save Our Lives
We disappeared because we wanted to live.
Leaving gave us the distance necessary to seek medical care, understand our trauma and begin connecting the events of our lives. It allowed me to remember who my father really was instead of who I had been told he was.
My father was not perfect, but he loved me.
Lee is not perfect, but he loves his sons.
I am not perfect, but I did not deserve to be abused, abandoned, scapegoated or erased.
Neither do you.
If your family tells a story in which one person is entirely responsible for everything that went wrong, look closer. Ask who benefits from that version. Ask whose voice is missing. Ask what happened before the reaction everyone keeps discussing.
The truth is usually found in the parts of the story you were discouraged from examining.
We survived long enough to examine them.
Now we are telling our story.
Telling the Truth Is Not Revenge
I am not telling this story because I want to destroy anyone.
I am telling it because silence allowed other people to define my father, my husband and me. Silence did not protect us. It protected the narratives that harmed us.
“I Just Want to Disappear”: The End Result of a Lifetime of Dehumanization and Abuse (2024)
Related Reading
- Parental Alienation: I Watched What Happened to My Father Happen to My Husband & It Broke Me
- “I Just Want to Disappear”: The End Result of a Lifetime of Dehumanization and Abuse
- Jennifer and Lee: Until Death Do Us Part
- Keeping Your Memory Alive: Happy Birthday Dad
- William R. Stowell Graduated Third Honors from Gould Academy
Jennifer and Lee 