Targeted Parents Surviving Parental Alienation: Six Domains of Harm and Eight Ways They Cope — Lee-Maturana, Matthewson & Dwan (2020)

Love Over Exile is a plain-language research archive on parental alienation, written by Malcolm Smith — an alienated parent and author of the forthcoming book Love Over Exile — for non-specialist readers who want to understand the evidence base without a psychology degree or a journal subscription. This page is one entry in that archive.

Most parental-alienation research looks at the child, or at the parent doing the alienating. This study does something rarer and, for many readers here, more personal: it looks squarely at the parent who is being pushed out — and asks what the experience does to them, and how they survive it.

What did Lee-Maturana, Matthewson and Dwan actually study?

The study set out to answer two plain questions about targeted parents: what are the consequences of the alienation for them, and how do they cope? To find out, the researchers interviewed 54 self-referred targeted parents — parents who came forward because they believed they were the target of a campaign to turn their child against them.

The sample was almost evenly split by gender: 28 fathers (52%) and 26 mothers (48%). Most lived in Australia (70%), with the rest spread across New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, Europe, the Middle East and South America. The majority were aged between 41 and 50.

The method was a qualitative descriptive design with thematic analysis — semi-structured, in-depth interviews, read closely for recurring themes. It is part of a four-year parental-alienation research programme at the University of Tasmania, led by Dr Mandy Matthewson.

A word of honesty up front, because it governs how the findings should be used. This is a small, self-selected, retrospective qualitative study, and some of the conditions parents reported were self-diagnosed rather than clinically confirmed. That makes it superb at documenting the range and texture of what targeted parents go through — and unsuitable for estimating how common any of it is, or for proving that alienation alone caused it.

The six domains: where the damage lands

The headline contribution is a map. The consequences of alienation did not fall into one neat category — they spread across six life domains at once. Setting them out with the proportion of parents who reported each shows both how wide the injury is and where it concentrates.

The emotional domain was reported by 89% of parents and was led by depression (33%), stress (23%), anxiety (21%) and post-traumatic responses (15%). But the study's real value is showing that the injury does not stop there.

The behavioural domain (74%) carried the study's hardest finding. The cognitive domain (57%) covered overthinking, poor concentration and distorted thinking. The physical domain (33%) covered health problems, weight change and headaches. The social domain (22%) covered isolation and lost friendships.

The hardest number: almost one in four had attempted suicide

Within the behavioural domain, the two most reported effects were sleep disturbance (43%) and attempted suicide (23%). Nearly one in four of the 54 parents reported having tried to take their own life.

It matters how this figure is read. It is a whole-sample finding — it describes the study group as a whole, and the paper does not break it down by gender. It would be inaccurate to claim the study found any one group of parents especially at risk of suicide; that claim simply is not in the paper.

What the figure does establish is that the distress of being alienated from your child is not ordinary unhappiness. It can become life-threatening. The authors read it alongside Poustie, Matthewson and Balmer's 2018 study, The Forgotten Parent, which first drew attention to suicidality in this group.

If you are struggling with thoughts of suicide, please reach out now — contact your local emergency number, or a crisis line such as the Samaritans (116 123 in the UK and Ireland) or the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (US). You are not the failure the alienation has tried to convince you that you are.

Why the grief never closes: ambiguous loss and disenfranchised grief

The most useful idea in the paper is the lens it puts over everything else. The authors explain the chronic, grinding quality of targeted-parent distress through two established grief concepts — and the pairing is what makes sense of the whole picture.

Ambiguous loss, Pauline Boss's term, describes a loss with no closure. The child is alive and out there in the world, but psychologically and practically gone. There is no body, no certainty, no end point — so the grief cannot resolve the way grief after a death eventually can.

Disenfranchised grief, Kenneth Doka's term, describes grief that society does not recognise or give you permission to mourn. Because there has been no death, there is no funeral, no card, no compassionate leave, no ritual. Friends do not know what to say, so they say nothing, and the parent is left to grieve a loss no one around them treats as real.

In the authors' own words: "When targeted parents lose contact with their children, they suffer ambiguous loss, which can lead to disenfranchised grief." Put the two together and the chronicity makes sense — the loss can neither complete nor be openly mourned. That is why a targeted parent can still be raw years later, and why others so often fail to understand it.

The financial wound is part of the injury

It would be easy to treat money as a practical footnote, but the study refuses to. Finances and work was the third most affected domain (59%). Parents described being financially ruined by the cost of repeated litigation, and some lost their jobs because they could no longer function.

One participant put the cruelty of it in a single line: "It's crazy that I had to spend so much money to not see my children." The study's contribution here is to count economic devastation as a genuine consequence of alienation — a measurable harm that compounds the emotional one, rather than a separate practical inconvenience.

How do parents survive it? Eight coping strategies

Just over half the parents (56%) described how they coped. The strategies they named fell into eight broad groups — and, importantly, 44% said they were not coping well, or at all. The list below is therefore a description of what people reach for while carrying an unclosable loss, not evidence that these strategies resolve it.

The two most frequently named strategies — mental activities and reaching for professional help and social connection — point in a hopeful direction: parents fared better when they did not carry the loss alone. That is the practical takeaway most worth holding onto, even though the study cannot prove it.

A companion study: who targeted parents are

This 2020 paper has a sibling. The same lead author, with Matthewson, Dwan and Norris, published a systematic literature review in 2019 — Characteristics and Experiences of Targeted Parents of Parental Alienation — which pooled the existing research on who targeted parents are and what they go through. The two papers are best read together: the review establishes the landscape; the 2020 interview study fills it with first-person detail.

| Dimension | Lee-Maturana et al. (2020) — this study | Lee-Maturana et al. (2019) — companion review | |---|---|---| | Type | Primary qualitative interview study | Systematic literature review | | Question | What are the consequences, and how do parents cope? | Who are targeted parents, and what is already known? | | Evidence | 54 first-person interviews | Synthesis of existing published studies | | Journal | Journal of Child and Family Studies (29:8) | Australian Journal of Psychology (71:2) | | Contribution | The six-domain harm map + eight coping strategies | The evidence baseline the interview study builds on |

Together they form the targeted-parent strand of the University of Tasmania programme — the parent-side counterpart to Bentley and Matthewson's work on adult alienated children and Verhaar's on adult mental-health outcomes.

How this sits with the wider evidence base

This study is one piece of a larger, increasingly consistent picture. Verhaar, Matthewson and Bentley (2022) document the long-term mental-health cost to the children once they are grown; this paper documents the cost to the parent in real time. Harman, Kruk and Hines (2018) reframe alienating behaviours as a form of family violence — which helps explain why targeted-parent distress so often presents as a trauma response rather than ordinary sadness.

And the grief framing connects directly to Harman, Matthewson and Baker's cascade of losses (2022), which sets ambiguous loss and disenfranchised grief at the centre of the alienation experience for everyone it touches. The honest summary is that no single one of these studies is large or definitive — but read together, qualitatively and consistently, they describe a real and serious injury.

The table below sets this study against its two closest companions in the same qualitative tradition, to show how the three divide the work between them — one studies the parent in real time, the others the grown child looking back.

| Study | Who it studied | Sample | What it adds | |---|---|---|---| | Lee-Maturana et al. (2020) — this study | Targeted parents, in real time | 54 parents | Six-domain harm map + eight coping strategies; 23% suicide-attempt figure | | Verhaar, Matthewson & Bentley (2022) | Adults alienated as children | 20 adults | Long-term mental-health cost once the child is grown | | Bentley & Matthewson (2020) | Adults alienated as children | 10 adults | The lived "not-forgotten child" experience from the inside |

The division of labour is the point: Lee-Maturana and colleagues document what the alienation does to the parent while it is happening; Verhaar and Bentley document what it leaves in the child decades later. Put side by side, the parent-side and child-side evidence describe two ends of the same wound.

What are the honest limitations?

Three limitations should travel with every citation of this study. First, it is small and self-selected: 54 parents who came forward because they identified as targeted, which means the sample cannot tell us how common any of these consequences are in the wider population.

Second, the accounts are retrospective and partly self-reported — some conditions were self-diagnosed rather than clinically confirmed — so the figures describe how parents experienced and reported their lives, not verified clinical diagnoses.

Third, it is descriptive, not causal. Qualitative descriptive research documents lived experience with great fidelity, but it cannot prove that alienation alone caused any single outcome. Its value is exactly what it claims: a clear, humane map of what targeted parents go through and how they try to survive it.

Why this matters — for parents and the people around them

For a targeted parent, this study offers something quietly powerful: recognition. If you have felt that the loss of your child to alienation is a grief no one around you understands or permits, this paper names precisely why — ambiguous loss that cannot close, disenfranchised grief that society will not acknowledge. You are not being dramatic, and you are not alone in it.

For clinicians, family, and friends, the message is just as direct. The distress is real, it spans six domains of a parent's life, and for almost one in four it has reached the point of a suicide attempt. The most protective thing the people around a targeted parent can do is the simplest: treat the loss as real, and refuse to let them carry it by themselves.

Primary Sources Cited

• Lee-Maturana, S., Matthewson, M. L., & Dwan, C. (2020) — Targeted Parents Surviving Parental Alienation: Consequences of the Alienation and Coping Strategies. Journal of Child and Family Studies 29(8), 2268–2280. DOI 10.1007/s10826-020-01725-1.
• Lee-Maturana, S., Matthewson, M. L., Dwan, C., & Norris, K. (2019) — Characteristics and Experiences of Targeted Parents of Parental Alienation: A Systematic Literature Review. Australian Journal of Psychology 71(2), 83–91. DOI 10.1111/ajpy.12226.
• Poustie, C., Matthewson, M., & Balmer, S. (2018) — The Forgotten Parent: The Targeted Parent Perspective of Parental Alienation. Journal of Family Issues 39(12), 3298–3323. DOI 10.1177/0192513X18777867.
• Harman, J. J., Kruk, E., & Hines, D. A. (2018) — Parental Alienating Behaviors: An Unacknowledged Form of Family Violence. Psychological Bulletin 144(12), 1275–1299. DOI 10.1037/bul0000175.
• Boss, P. (1999) — Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief. Harvard University Press.

Last reviewed and updated on 7 June 2026 by Malcolm Smith.