Journaled reflections on manipulation, grief, and mothering from the sidelines
When people talk about domestic violence, they often imagine bruises or sirens. They don’t talk about what happens after the court hearings. They don’t talk about what happens to families like mine, where the violence wasn’t just physical but relational. They don’t talk about what it’s like to lose your stepdaughter—not because she died, but because she was taught to hate you.
I’m sharing my raw, unedited journal entries from December 2017. This was the month I watched my stepdaughter (the daughter I helped raise) start to slip away. These are the words I wrote in real-time as the emotional cutoff began. What follows is a blend of those journal entries and clinical insight into what trauma, parental alienation, and step-parenting under abuse look like.
What is Parental Alienation?
Parental Alienation happens when a child is conditioned to reject one parent (or parental figure) without legitimate cause, usually by manipulation from the other parent. It’s more than just picking sides—it’s coercive loyalty, often disguised as protection or freedom. Children, especially teens, can’t always differentiate between autonomy and enmeshment. And when one parent uses them to hurt the other, it rewires their worldview and fractures their internal compass.
In domestic violence cases, this becomes a weapon of post-separation abuse. Especially when the legal system won’t stop it.
This is what we call a trauma rupture, a moment when betrayal severs the nervous system’s sense of safety and belonging. When it comes from someone you love, it lands as an existential rejection. You’re not just hurt, you’re spiritually displaced.
12/7/17
My stepdaughter saying she wants to live with her mother is like Aunt saying go contact her rapist husband when you’re in California. I would think right now you feel like I do, and can’t help the feeling of disconnectedness after that connection has been severed from those words. Miss you. Thinking about you ♥️
From my friend Grace:
Oh my love I don’t think she’s saying that to hurt not she’s confused & manipulated do not take this onto you it’s not your worry all you have done is give your heart as it is all you know let the universe work it out & if it is to be it will don’t accept any of the feelings she is trying to put on you she is not to blame she doesn’t yet have the brain capacity she needs to be an adult & the influence of her mother along with manipulation it’s all on her mom & I hate even spelling that evil ones name be at peace knowing you have given all it’s all you could have done seeing as you are a sweet loving woman & always will be ❤️❤️❤️❤️DNA
My husband is speaking to my connection like I have disconnected from everyone, but I have let go of the trauma, and now I feel differently toward everyone around me. I have to disconnect and not stay entangled with my stepdaughter’s chaos, which starts with her mother pulling her in.
When you’re stuck in a trauma triangle, even joy becomes scarce. You find yourself choosing between children because one is actively slipping away, and you feel like you need to earn their love back.
12/9/17
I missed taking a picture with my daughter and Santa to be with my stepdaughter. I feel bad for this.
Stepping back is a trauma-informed survival strategy. Not to disconnect from love, but to stop hemorrhaging from it. It’s a form of self-rescue. And it’s a sacred act when staying enmeshed keeps reopening the wound.
Monday, December 11, 2017
Feeling way less activated. I came home and went into my stepdaughter’s room. We talked, and she caught me up on school. She feels better. I couldn’t be involved. I had to step back. I was stepping back already, but we didn’t realize it. It is amazing the transformation that is happening. I need to remember my therapy session last Friday, we didn’t do EMDR. We talked about my stepdaughter, and he put my mind at ease.
12/12/17
My oldest best friend brought light to a learned behavior. Learned from my mom the behavior of feeling offended by someone else’s actions. It’s always a choice.
12/13/17
Seeing numbers on repeat:
ANGEL NUMBER 155
In the middle of all the emotional chaos, I started noticing repeating numbers—especially 155. At first, I brushed it off. But something about it kept calling me back. I looked it up, and the message hit me like a lifeline: It’s time for a new beginning. Trust yourself. Leap. It felt like the universe was handing me permission to move forward, even if I didn’t have all the answers yet. That number became a quiet reminder that I didn’t have to stay stuck in survival. I was allowed to create something new from the ashes.
12/14/17
My stepdaughter has left us.
These five words carry the weight of a funeral. But there is no service. No acknowledgment. Just the living grief of ambiguous loss—when someone is still alive, but emotionally gone.
12/17/17
An abused child overreacts to control. My stepdaughter is freaking out over my husband wanting to control anything in her life.
12/19/17
My husband is saying that the reason our daughter does not confide in him and only me is because of my undermining him during arguments when he is having an overreaction to something that is harsh, and I protect her in front of him instead of doing it off-line.
12/20/17
Around this time, I kept seeing Angel Number 3030, and it felt like a reminder that I wasn’t just here to survive—I was here to create. The number speaks to joy, expression, and the power of choosing presence over perfection. After so much trauma, I had forgotten that creativity wasn’t a luxury—it was medicine. 3030 reminded me that I’m allowed to follow what lights me up, that my voice, my story, and my truth are tools for healing—not just for me, but for others too. It gave me permission to build something beautiful out of what broke me. To speak. To write. To create from the heart. And to remember that this moment—this breath, this word, this page—is the beginning of everything.
12/29/17
I was brave enough to say: mothering someone who’s being taught to hate you is dangerous. You become a target for projection, gaslighting, and emotional displacement. The grief here is not just personal—it’s systemic. There are no protections for step-parents in the aftermath of abuse.
Note to my stepdaughter:
I am sorry that it’s taking me so long to get over what happened when you ignored us at the game and decided you wanted to live at your mom’s because I didn’t want you to wear something inappropriate to school. My feelings are still hurt, so it makes me feel uncomfortable. I want you to live where you will be happiest and thrive in your life. I want you to be excited about making things happen in your life and achieving your goals. Wherever that is works because I’m happy when you are happy. We love the people we love when we are happy. If our actions are not loving, something is wrong with us, not them. I’ve learned not to talk to you in the morning because you don’t like to talk to me in the morning. If I come across angry, I’m not; there are still things you don’t know yet, and you still need help remembering to do things. Have a good day.
We don’t want you to belong to us; we want to contribute to you seeing love clearly.
Love,
The wife of your Papa, I can’t say step-mom anymore because it puts me at risk of being a mother figure to you.
This is a moment of reluctant release. Not because I stopped loving her. But because keeping her became unsafe, for our health, our marriage, and our younger daughter. Letting her go wasn’t giving up. It was the only way to stop bleeding.
12/29/31
When you’re here, it doesn’t feel like you want to be here. You are disgruntled and defensive every single morning. You are not nice to your sister a lot of the time, you confront and overreact to your dad at everything he says to you, you’re using words as weapons, you dig in your heels all week about taking care of your chores and never do them without having to be asked and when you do them you have a major attitude about it, you know that we have rules and you are blatantly trying to break them to the max at your moms house making some risky behavior choices for your life that make you a liability for us that if something were to happen it would ruin our lives financially but your mother can handle it. So rather than you being here aggravated, agitated, and unhappy, and making us all unhappy.
We would rather you be happy at your mom’s house.
The Psychological Toll of This Type of Loss
- Post-Traumatic Parenting Fatigue – always scanning, anticipating rejection, adjusting yourself for someone who’s being trained to resent you.
- Loss of Role Identity – “I can’t call myself stepmom anymore.” That’s the erasure of a life role you showed up for in love.
- Body Flashbacks – pressure in the chest, throat tightness, migraines. Your body feels the betrayal even when you’re trying to be “civil.”
- Spiritual Grief – letting go of a child you still love but cannot reach. This grief is not socially recognized, making it heavier.
If you’re reading this and you’ve lost a child to the influence of a manipulative parent, you are not alone.
If you’re still crying over someone you helped raise, and you feel like you’re not allowed to miss them, you are still a parent in your heart.
And if your stepchild left, not because of something you did, but because of everything they were taught—that is not your shame to carry.
“We don’t want you to belong to us. We want to contribute to you seeing love clearly.”
You did.
You still are.
Even from here.
Strangled In La Jolla 