I AM THE ALIENATOR

I AM THE ALIENATOR

by Karen Woodall

I am an alienator. You know me well. You lived with me once and you witnessed my behavior patterns but you did not spend time studying and internalizing them. I know your behavior patterns better than you know them yourself. I know how to measure you, test you and control you. I know what your hooks are and I know that the depth of the love for your children is a weakness I can exploit. I am an emotional terrorist. I will terrify you into submission. You will do as I tell you to do, and if you do not, I will take your children away.

I am an alienator, you didn’t notice that when we lived together but I began my work long before we went our separate ways. I created fissures and fractures within our family and I managed and manipulated reality, though for a long time you did not notice that.

I am an alienator, at times in the past you felt a chill wind blow through you when my moods changed as I raged and then sweet talked you to smooth the ripples in your growing awareness. My mind is distorted but the projection of shadows causes you to believe it is yours which has failed you. Eventually you came to believe that it was you and not I who was crazy. You shivered as I turned down the gas light.

When you appeal to the outside world for assistance I will turn my most charming face to the sun and open my arms wide and beseech them to believe that I only want the best for my children. I will widen my eyes and up turn my palms and say ‘what can I do when they don’t want to see you’ and suck into my airspace all those who attempt to bring change to the lives of the weapons I know I can use.

My children are assets, collateral, extensions of plans that I make to wreak my revenge upon people who challenge my views or attempt to remove the control that I have in my life.

My children are satellites orbiting sunshine coming only from me – you could never compete with the warmth that I wind around each of their hearts so that only my love is enough; making yours surplus, not needed, discarded like clothes that you bought and I won’t let them wear.

I am all that they need.

You are not.

When our love ended my rage recruited our children to a campaign of revenge that joins us together against you.

In my mind your betrayal awakened the traumas of people long dead and ignited the fuse that led to the bomb that blew up our lives. Now, the souls of our children are hostage to wrongs which come howling from hell and you are helpless to hold back the tide which will sweep you and they to the death that is living with losing your children while they are still breathing. Your loss, not mine, which you and not I will have to survive.

Sometimes you mirror me, two perfect projections that weave webs of destruction that sever our children in two, one side light, one side dark, you there in the shadows.

But mostly it is because I cannot see my behaviors, I am blind to the sight of myself in the mirror. The only reflection I need is the love of my children to feed me and give me a sense of my self which I lost even before I was born.

I am the alienator, annihilator, terminator. My aim is to end, by fair means or foul, your place in the hearts and the lives of your children.

I am easily spotted by those who know me but invisible to those who do not. You will spend your time, your energy and money telling them I am behind this while I smile and continue to shred the trust our children once held in you. I am an alienator even when I do not know it and the failure to see the shadows I cast in the projections I throw onto you, is the fault of a system so blinded by bias it is frozen like the minds of our children, the children being harmed right under the noses of those who should know how to help them but sadly, do not.

In the plain sight of you and of them, the lives of the children you love are stolen, erased and extinguished.

And your anguish and pain are the gifts that I treasure.

And your suffering compensates for the things I perceive you to have done.

And while chaos reigns and the system colludes with my delusions, the power I seek remains mine.

Along with the children.

Whose eyes are wide open but able to see nothing at all.