In this episode, Andrew and Barbara talk with Wendy Perry, an alienated parent who has hosted parental alienation support groups since 2011, about how to start and run a support group.
Note: This podcast was originally hosted on Barbara La Pointe’s website, which has since gone offline. I’ve reposted the episodes here so people still have access to the materials.
Transcript
Andrew Folkler: And welcome everyone to another episode of Broken Families, where we host conversations on divorce, parental alienation, and high conflict relationships. My name is Andrew Folkler.
Barbara La Pointe: And I’m Barbara La Pointe. Today we are gonna talk about support groups, how to set one up, and how to run one, and what it takes.
Barbara La Pointe: And so this is why we’ve brought on a very special guest here to really dive deep into this topic. Wendy Perry is an alienated parent due to parental alienation. She started hosting monthly parental alienation support groups back in 2011. Wendy has hosted various parental alienation awareness and education events.
Barbara La Pointe: Her meetings and events have been attended by hundreds of people from around the world, and she’s been featured by top experts in the field of parental alienation, such as Dr. Richard Warshak and many others. Wendy was the parent liaison to the American Psychological Association, and accompanied by Dr.
Barbara La Pointe: Craig Childress for the delivery of the petition to end the pathology of parental alienation for all children everywhere. She is certified by the Texas Education Agency to train all grade levels of school teachers, school counselors, and school administrators specifically on the subject of parental alienation in the state of Texas.
Barbara La Pointe: Wendy’s story was featured on the documentary Divorce Corp. She’s met with elected officials in Washington, DC to discuss parental alienation, and she’s spoken at the national press clubs and many conferences. Wendy hosts private online parental alienation support groups that have members worldwide. Her private support groups include live support meetings and focuses on helping target parents and grandparents to live their best life even though they are affected by parental alienation.
Barbara La Pointe: Wendy’s passion to encourage people affected by parental alienation is to strive to thrive, not just survive. So without further ado, warm welcome to Wendy. Welcome.
Wendy Perry: Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.
Barbara La Pointe: Wendy, you have a really powerful story, and we’ve got a lot of ground to cover with respect to support groups.
Barbara La Pointe: But I’d just like to invite you to share your personal story.
Wendy Perry: Sure. Just to give a little summary of my story, I have three children, and I was alienated from two of my three children. I was never alienated from one of my three children, and I’m reunified with one of the two that I was alienated from, and I’m still alienated from one of my kids, and I’ve been alienated from her for about 12 years now.
Wendy Perry: So it started for us when my two oldest kids were teenagers and my youngest was almost a teenager. So around that pre-teen, early teen age, which seems to be very common in parental alienation. But I do appreciate you asking me a little bit about my story because I like for people to know that wherever they are in the journey of parental alienation, I’ve been there.
Wendy Perry: I’ve been fully, completely, severely alienated. I’ve also experienced a reunification, which is not all sunshine and rainbows like people think it will be. It’s very, very challenging. And then I have the situation of being alienated from some of my kids, but not all of my kids, which is more common than people might think.
Wendy Perry: So it’s an ongoing thing for most people dealing with parental alienation. As I said, even when you have a reunification, there’s still some things to work through. And for many families, the alienating behaviors continue even if you do have a reunification, so it’s something that you always have to be mindful of.
Wendy Perry: And so that’s a little bit about my story, where we were and where we are today.
Barbara La Pointe: Wendy, I think it’s very significant that you were featured on Divorce Court. I can’t watch that without crying. I love that documentary. What was that experience like for you?
Wendy Perry: The experience of the documentary was really positive.
Wendy Perry: It was really good. They contacted me and said, “We’re making a documentary about parental alienation.” And I was very skeptical. I was very cautious. And at first I wasn’t even sure if it was real. I said, “Who are you and how did you find me?” I just thought it was very bizarre that I got a call from some random person that they were making a documentary about parental alienation and they wanted to talk to me.
Wendy Perry: And the person that called me said, “We’ve been googling parental alienation, and we’ve been googling corrupt family court cases. And every time we google those things, your name is always at the very top of the Google search. And so we wanna talk to you.” And I gave this a lot of careful consideration.
Wendy Perry: When you are an alienated or targeted parent, usually the alienating parent has always got eyes on you. They’re always watching everything you do, and always maximizing any possible opportunity to make the alienation worse. And so I really had to give it some very, very careful consideration.
Wendy Perry: And my kids’ privacy was very important to me. So I had that discussion with the makers of the documentary that those things were very important to me, and they assured me that it was going to be done in a very, very respectable way, that they were going to respect the privacy of all of the kids that were referenced in the documentary, and that it was going to be done in a way that was not disparaging to the other parent, the alienating parents.
Wendy Perry: And I think they did a good job. I think it’s a really great documentary. I think it’s a really important documentary. I wish we could find a way that anyone who was going to go through a divorce with kids would have to watch it. It’s a very eye-opening documentary about the way family court really operates if you are getting a divorce, that we would call high-conflict, or if you’re going to court for a modification.
Wendy Perry: Sometimes people end up going to family court long after the divorce is over to do a modification. But if anyone is watching who is, like I said, we would call it a high-conflict situation, then it’s very important to watch that documentary if you can. And it’s available. If you go to divorcecorp.com, you can find ways to watch the documentary.
Barbara La Pointe: And just being a Canadian, I found it very relevant to Canada as well.
Wendy Perry: Oh, absolutely. I think it’s relevant really worldwide. I’ve got people in my support groups from all over the world. And we tend to think that where we are is a very unique situation, right? Well, this is the problem in our courts in the United States.
Wendy Perry: Or it’s not. All of these issues are really global, not just parental alienation, but family court issues. So anyone anywhere should hop online and watch this documentary if you feel like it could be relevant to your life.
Barbara La Pointe: Good point, Wendy. It’s really a systemic issue.
Andrew Folkler: I imagine when people go through these kinds of struggles and these situations, some people get really caught into the whirlwind of things, but some people, it ignites that fire in them and they want to make a change. They want to get out there. And I think that leads into our first question on if they wanted to do something like set up a support group, where would that person who has all these ambitions and these goals and these bright ideas, where do they start?
Wendy Perry: That is a great question. I would say if you want to start a support group to contact me, and I would be happy to help you. I’ve helped many people with this over the years, and I actually gave trainings on this about a month ago. Specifically training people on how to start and how to host in-person support groups, and not just how to start them and to host and facilitate them, but how to maintain them, how to keep growing your support group, and how to make it as positive experience as possible for the people coming to your support group.
Wendy Perry: So I would say if you’re watching this and you have an interest in possibly starting a support group yourself, reach out to me. I will be doing another training really soon on this. The response was so great that I’ve had more people contact me and say, “Hey, I wanted to do that and I missed it.” So we will have another training on that very, very soon.
Barbara La Pointe: Well, in this new brave world of online versus in-person, what do you recommend? What are some pros and cons to virtual versus in-person in terms of support groups?
Wendy Perry: Good question. I’ve done both. So the way I started out, I started having support group meetings in 2011, and at that time, it wasn’t that long ago, but at that time really, people were not doing online meetings.
Wendy Perry: There wasn’t Zoom. There was Skype, and that was about it. And really, people just were not doing things like this online. So for many, many years we had in-person meetings every month for many years, and they were awesome. Very, very great. Now we do most of our meetings virtually, just like we’re doing this chat today.
Wendy Perry: So the pros and cons. They’re both so great, and it would be hard to say that one is better than the other, in person versus online. I think we’re very blessed that we’re able to do this online now. And like I said, in our support groups now we’ve got people from all over the world.
Wendy Perry: And we have live meetings just like this, and it’s really powerful to have that kind of diversity, to have people from all over the world to get to know each other and bond and share experiences and support each other. But I will say that having in-person meetings, there is still something really special about that, just to be in the same room with someone and to really see them face-to-face in person, be able to give them a hug, to shake their hand.
Wendy Perry: And in-person meetings, I think there is still a place for them even though a lot of what we’re doing now is online, and I think a lot of it will stay online so that we can reach more people. But in person there’s still something very special about it that you can’t get by getting together online.
Wendy Perry: And in fact, the training that I just gave was for people that have an interest in starting in-person support groups. So I think when COVID calms down a little bit, when we’re able to, I think we will start seeing more and more in-person support groups coming up again. Right now there’s not very many in-person support groups, and historically speaking, there has never been a lot of in-person parental alienation support groups.
Wendy Perry: But I think, like I said, when COVID calms down, I think people will be anxious to start having in-person support groups and there’s an interest for it. People want to attend those in-person support meetings, and people want to host them too. People feel passionate about that. So I think they’re both great, and I know some people who do both, some people who go to in-person meetings and they do online meetings both.
Andrew Folkler: I guess how often would they host these meetings? I mean, would it be just a couple hours a week or something like that, or more?
Wendy Perry: If you’re gonna host meetings yourself, what I train people on is to really assess your life and your availability and how much time and effort you really have to commit to it.
Wendy Perry: Because it is a commitment. It’s a big commitment to host parental alienation support meetings. When we were having our in-person support meetings, we had our meetings once per month, and that seemed to work really well for us. I know people who have tried to have two in-person meetings per month, and it just seemed to be a little too much.
Wendy Perry: People are busy also. So it’s kind of hard for some people to commit to come to something like that two times per month. But we would have our meetings one time per month. The meetings would last about three hours, and we would sometimes have presenters. We would have guest speakers come in and give a presentation.
Wendy Perry: We always had an itinerary, like an agenda, and a format that we followed. So it was a really good format. And we did not always have presenters or guest speakers, but we did pretty often. So now most of my meetings are done online, and we still usually do those one time per month. But we have other activities.
Wendy Perry: We have other things that we do in our support group, not just meetings. We have much more than that. So just having a meeting one time per month seems to work well for everyone time-wise, but then we have ways we connect with each other in between those live meetings.
Barbara La Pointe: All right, Wendy. Well, let’s just imagine that someone out there wants to start a support group and wants it to be powerful and transformative and very supportive.
Barbara La Pointe: What would you recommend in terms of making it engaging for anyone attending? How might we accomplish that?
Wendy Perry: Well, the first thing I would say, and this sounds like, of course, you’ve gotta be really, really thoroughly educated about parental alienation. And it sounds kinda silly to say that because you think, “Well, that’s a given.
Wendy Perry: If someone’s going to host a parental alienation support group, surely they understand it.” But sometimes that’s not the case. And so I would say if you want to host a support group and you want it to be really engaging and helpful to people, the first thing is to really get as educated as you can about parental alienation by studying the work of experts like Dr.
Wendy Perry: Richard Warshak, Dr. Amy Baker, Dr. William Bernet. And I don’t mean just going into social media groups like Facebook groups and reading people’s posts. I mean really study their books and watch their videos. The other thing that I would do is learn about how to host a support group. And it doesn’t have to be a parental alienation support group, but to learn, because there are certain things that are shown to be successful and engaging for support groups.
Wendy Perry: For example, like I mentioned a few minutes ago, have a format. You don’t just have people come and you just all hang out and you just chit-chat for three or four hours. That’s not a support group. That’s a social gathering. So you wanna have a format. You wanna have an agenda. And people really like that, too.
Wendy Perry: That’s very comforting to them to know what to expect when they come to your support meetings. And so I would do that. Start with educating yourself as much as possible, and then start learning about what do I need to do as a host or a facilitator for a support meeting to make it engaging and to make it so that it will help people?
Andrew Folkler: I imagine they would also need some level of, you could say, emotional self-regulation, the ability to be the rock for somebody else and not depend on the group for therapy, if that makes sense.
Wendy Perry: It totally makes sense. Absolutely. Look, if you are not really emotionally grounded yourself, if you are not in a stable emotional place yourself, you probably should not be hosting parental alienation support group meetings right now.
Wendy Perry: And we’ve all been there, and we know that parental alienation is an emotional roller coaster ride. So you’re still gonna have your moments. I still have my moments where maybe something happens and it’s a really bad parental alienation day. But if you are hosting a support meeting, like you said, Andrew, you need to be the rock.
Wendy Perry: In that moment during your meetings, you need to be the person who is calm, stable, rational, and it’s very, very important because these people coming to these meetings, they really do count on you for that. They don’t count on you to know all the answers, and if you are hosting or facilitating a parental alienation support group, you should not even pretend that you have all the answers.
Wendy Perry: That’s not your role. But it is very important that you be calm, and you be grounded, and I would also say it’s very important to always remember that parental alienation is not a father’s rights issue or a mother’s rights issue. Because if you host support meetings, you’re going to find that you’ve got a really diverse crowd.
Wendy Perry: You’ve got moms, you’ve got dads. You’ll have some grandparents that come. Sometimes we have aunts and uncles that come, close family members. We’ve had siblings come, older siblings. So it’s very important to stay in the understanding that parental alienation is not a gender issue. And also the people who come to your meetings will probably wanna talk about family court and legislation, things like that.
Wendy Perry: But remember, a lot of people are alienated, and they don’t go to court at all. They just deal with it on their own. And so if you are promoting that you’re having a parental alienation support group, you wanna make sure that the focus stays mostly on parental alienation. Does that make sense?
Andrew Folkler: Yeah, absolutely.
Barbara La Pointe: It sounds like you’d like to create a really inclusive and welcoming environment as well.
Wendy Perry: Very much so. Very much so. You really have to be very non-judgmental and very accepting of everyone who comes into your meetings because you’ll have, like I said, moms, dads. You’ll have younger people, older people.
Wendy Perry: Also people of all different faiths. Parental alienation does not discriminate and that shows in the people who come to your support meetings. You’ll have people of all different beliefs. And just from every opposite end that you could think of in anything, politics, religion, all of that.
Wendy Perry: So you have to be welcoming and accepting and compassionate and have empathy for everyone who comes. Because the bottom line is you’re all there to give each other support and compassion and empathy regarding parental alienation.
Andrew Folkler: So hypothetically, maybe you get somebody who does bring in some of these polarizing thoughts and frustrations in.
Andrew Folkler: Maybe they’re just in the heat of the moment and they vent off something that potentially offends another group member. How do you mitigate that tension within the group?
Wendy Perry: It’s gonna happen. If you have support meetings on an ongoing regular basis for enough times, it’s gonna happen.
Wendy Perry: And so one thing that I always recommend to people when I’m training them on how to do support groups, and something that I do myself, is I give everyone a time limit for sharing. And there’s a few reasons for this. If you’ve ever hosted any kind of meeting, you know that there’s always someone there who wants to monopolize and take all of the time.
Wendy Perry: They’ve always got something to say. And then other people don’t get the opportunity to speak. And I learned that the hard way many years ago, where I was just letting people talk as much as they wanted to. And there was an occasion where a regular who came to all of our meetings, they took all of the time, and at the end of the night, a few people did not get to speak at all.
Wendy Perry: And they were very upset, and they contacted me and said, “I’m really upset. I didn’t get to speak, and I really wanted to. I really wanted to share. I had a lot on my mind, a lot on my heart, and I needed my time, and I didn’t get to.” And they were upset with me, rightly so, because I did not ensure that they had that time.
Wendy Perry: So what we do now, and what I train other people to do, advise them to do, is if you’re going to have a support meeting, give everyone a set amount of time and an equal amount of time. And you have to be really firm with it. I actually set a timer and an alarm goes off. And then when the alarm goes off, we go onto the next person.
Wendy Perry: So to your point, Andrew, that also cuts down on the time that someone is able to, can I say rant? Go on a tangent, right? It’s like, “Oh, well, your time is up. Thank you for your opinion.” And when you’ve got a group of people together for a meeting like that, if you have someone who does what you mentioned, I wouldn’t call them out in front of everyone.
Wendy Perry: Again, you’re gonna have a really diverse group, and they’re gonna really believe in whatever it is that they’re talking about. And we’ve had this happen. We’ve had people come in who are very extreme politically, and they feel like that has something to do with parental alienation, or they’re very extreme mother’s rights or father’s rights, and they really feel like that’s the issue.
Wendy Perry: We let them have their time, and when their time is up, we say, “Thank you so much,” and we move on to someone else. And the other people at your meeting are going to understand that you let everyone have an opportunity to speak, and you let everyone have their... They’re entitled to their own thoughts and their own ideas.
Wendy Perry: You can hope that by them coming to the meetings that they start to have a little more of a balanced view. But it’s really not our place to necessarily try to change their view or to judge them, and we hope that as they keep coming, that they’ll start to see more points of view and kind of rethink things.
Wendy Perry: Now if someone is really hostile towards someone else at the meeting, of course we would put a stop to that and probably ask them to leave if they can’t calm down, so.
Barbara La Pointe: It sounds like we’re starting to talk about ground rules or some basic boundaries that you’d set up before you set up a support group.
Barbara La Pointe: So what other rules or boundaries might you suggest putting into place for a support group?
Wendy Perry: Well, a few things that I would encourage people to do is to have a sign-in sheet. I think it’s really important to have a sign-in sheet so that you know who is there. Because if you have a lot of people come in, you might at the end of it go, “Who were those people?”
Wendy Perry: Right? So it’s very good to have a sign-in sheet, have their name, have their email address, maybe their phone number. You can decide what you want to get on your sign-in sheet. And I am a firm believer in having a printed out agenda for every meeting. I think it’s really important when people come in, that you hand them this piece of paper.
Wendy Perry: You greet them, you hand them this piece of paper, and you say, “Here’s our agenda for the meeting tonight.” And that might not sound like a boundary, creating a boundary, but it actually really is, because when you have that agenda, you’ve got the time on it, like 6:00, welcome and mingle. 6:15, read the mission statement of our meetings.
Wendy Perry: 6:30, guest speaker. 7:00, sharing time. So it is setting boundaries really, because it’s telling people, “This is how we are going to do this tonight. This is how we’re all going to do this.” So that is a kind of a gentle way, I would say, to set boundaries with everyone. It lets them know that this is how we’re going to be doing this.
Wendy Perry: This is the expectation. And as I said just a second ago, when you do your agenda, one of the things you probably wanna have is the mission of your meetings. This is the mission of our support group. This is the mission of our support group meetings. And within that, that is when you would want to probably talk about that, we’re not judgmental.
Wendy Perry: We’re not father’s rights or mother’s rights. That’s where you would cover some of those boundaries.
Barbara La Pointe: Like inclusivity and valuing non-judgment and people sharing time. Anything else that would be relevant in terms of values or boundaries for a group?
Wendy Perry: I would say, again, if you’re going to have what you call a parental alienation support group, I would try to keep it really focused on parental alienation.
Wendy Perry: A lot of times in your meetings, you might wanna have a time set aside where you can talk about family court issues, or have a time set aside where you can talk about legislation, because those things are important to a lot of people, and they do cross over and touch on people affected by parental alienation.
Wendy Perry: So that would be, I don’t know if that would be a boundary, but that could be part of your format to have that, because you do want to have the opportunity to talk about those things, but you don’t want those things to become the whole focus of your support meeting.
Andrew Folkler: So a lot of people who may consider leading these support groups, they’re not gonna be psychologists or lawyers or anyone really up there as experts in certain fields. And I know you mentioned it’s important to do your research and be prepared. How do you help mitigate the knowledge that you don’t know as a person?
Wendy Perry: Well I’ll tell you, over the years we’ve actually had quite a few mental health professionals, counselors and therapists come to our meetings. And they would come to our meetings on a regular basis. They came every month for many years because they had an interest in parental alienation, both personally and professionally.
Wendy Perry: So if you start having parental alienation support group meetings, you will find that many times a mental health professional will end up coming, and they will keep coming. I have found that with other support groups, not just my own. And it’s nice to have them there. But you do wanna make it clear to everyone that they’re not there to give counseling or therapy to anyone in your meeting.
Wendy Perry: But it is nice to have their presence. But how to handle that, because like I said earlier, you don’t have all the answers, and you never want to act like you do, and you shouldn’t think that you do. So one thing that we used to do for our in-person meetings was we actually had a library of books that we would bring and sit out for all of the members, and they could just sign them out and take them home and bring them back the next time.
Wendy Perry: But it was a diverse library. It was books from a lot of the different experts, like Dr. Warshak, Dr. Amy Baker, Dr. Craig Childress. We also had some books that were written by alienated parents. There are quite a few good books out there written by parents. And so we would just offer a diversity of education for the people coming to our meetings.
Wendy Perry: And then as a host or a facilitator yourself, you should always be looking for that and reading those things yourself. New research that comes out from Dr. Jennifer Harmon. The people who are on the PASG, the Parental Alienation Study Group. Several of them are coming out with new research, new articles all the time.
Wendy Perry: So you should, just like any professional gets continuing education. You’re not a professional if you’re hosting a support group, but it is important that you stay current on the most recent research and education that’s available in regards to the subject that you’re covering in your support group meetings.
Andrew Folkler: I imagine guest speakers would be another easier way to really hone in on a very specific topic, and really share that knowledge with everyone else.
Wendy Perry: Having guest speakers is great. We had someone come who was running a family court watch group, and that was so interesting.
Wendy Perry: This person actually was really great at facilitating groups of people to go in and do court watching in family court. We also had a therapist, a licensed therapist come in who specialized in doing custody evaluations, and that was really, really interesting, too. And it does fill those gaps of some things that you might not have talked about before or that you might not know too much about.
Wendy Perry: And for anyone who’s gonna host support group meetings, I wouldn’t say you should have a guest speaker or guest presenter at every meeting, because it can take up a lot of time, and sometimes it can take up most of your time. Let’s say you’re gonna have meetings every month for a year.
Wendy Perry: I would try to have a guest speaker or a guest presenter maybe a couple, two or three times that year. It’s really, really interesting, and it also draws people in and keeps them coming back, which is nice. But that’s the other thing. You can really gauge how well your support group meetings are doing by how many people keep coming back.
Wendy Perry: And we had people that came back for years. And we had our meetings for many, many, many years, and we had a lot of people who came to every meeting every month for all of those years. And I think when they keep coming back, that tells you that they’re getting something positive from your support group.
Wendy Perry: And that’s what you want. You want people to come away from your meetings feeling better. Feeling better than when they came in. And of course, sometimes it can be very emotional. But I would say we always ended our meetings on a positive note and with people just feeling understood.
Wendy Perry: And that’s the main thing with support group meetings for parental alienation, is you want the people coming in to feel understood, to feel like they’re with other people who understand what they’re going through, because that can be very hard to find when you’re an alienated or a targeted parent.
Barbara La Pointe: That’s a really powerful point, just to be seen, heard, and understood. I mean, we’ve touched on this a little bit, but are there any mistakes that one might want to avoid if you were gonna jump into setting up a group?
Wendy Perry: I would say know your gifts, in a nutshell. If you are considering hosting a parental alienation support group, know your gifts. We’re talking about signs that maybe you should not run a support group for parental alienation. If you are extremely disorganized, I would say that’s one thing in the minus column.
Wendy Perry: If you’re gonna do pluses and minuses, if you’re super disorganized, I would put that in your minus column. Because it does take some organization when people show up for your meetings. If you are super disorganized, you don’t have an agenda, you don’t have a plan for your meeting, that is not comforting to the people who are coming to your meeting.
Wendy Perry: They’re looking for support, and understanding, but they’re also looking for calmness. And so if they come in and you’re super disorganized, that would not be a plus. The other thing is if you are really extremely shy, hosting a parental alienation support group is probably not for you.
Wendy Perry: Because you’re gonna have a lot of people to talk to. And as the host or facilitator, I firmly believe that you should greet every single person when they come in. You should be at the door, and you should say, “Hi, I’m Wendy. So nice to meet you. Welcome to the meeting. Sign in here. We’ve got coffee over here if you want coffee.”
Wendy Perry: Right? So if you have a really hard time doing that, and you can expect to have... It really varies, but let’s say on average you have 20 people. If that really causes you a lot of anxiety to think of even greeting people and talking to them, then that would, again, be in the minus column.
Wendy Perry: But besides greeting them, you’re gonna stand up and open every meeting and go over the agenda and introduce your speakers or presenters. And you should also vet your speakers and presenters. You should talk to them first. So if you’re extremely shy, probably running a support group for parental alienation is probably not the best idea.
Wendy Perry: The other thing that I would say, we talked about this earlier, is you need to be in a good place yourself emotionally, or at least able to regulate your emotions when you need to. If you are in a really, really, really topsy-turvy emotional state yourself, and you have trouble managing your emotions, then you probably should not be running a support group right now for alienated parents or targeted parents because it is very emotional.
Wendy Perry: There’s a lot of emotion in the room. You’ll have people cry. You’ll have people get up, really upset, and you need to be the one who can be calm and manage your emotions. So those are some of the things that I would say. If you struggle with any of those things, I’m not saying you should never run a parental alienation support group, but maybe not right now.
Wendy Perry: Maybe make those goals things for you to work on.
Andrew Folkler: Or worst case, if you’re a disorganized, shy person, find a organized people person and hype them up and get them to help you out.
Wendy Perry: Get a mentor.
Wendy Perry: Get a mentor. If you’re like, “But I really wanna do this.
Wendy Perry: I really wanna host parental alienation support groups, but I struggle with these things,” get a mentor. I have a mentor, and my mentor is one of the top experts in the field of parental alienation, and he has a mentor, right? So I think that’s something that we don’t really talk about in the world of parental alienation advocacy.
Wendy Perry: I’ve never heard anybody talk about it, and maybe we need to start having that conversation, that we need to have mentors. We need to have people who have gone before us, and they’re doing what we wanna do, and they’re doing it well, right? Connect with people and say, “I’ve noticed you’re really good at this.
Wendy Perry: I would like to try to do something like what you’re doing. Will you be my mentor? Will you help me with this?” And I’ve got a few people that I mentor. Like I said, maybe this is something we need to start talking about. I haven’t really heard anybody talk about that, and it can be so helpful. And people in all kinds of businesses have mentors, and if you talk to top CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and all that, they really believe in mentorships. So get a mentor. If there’s something that you wanna do, like run a support group, and you feel like, I need some help, find someone who can mentor you in that.
Barbara La Pointe: Especially for women to feel like it’s okay to reach out to a mentor. I think it’s a concept that’s more familiar to men, like you mentioned CEOs, but for women to have a mentor would be incredible as well.
Barbara La Pointe: And just getting back to maybe you’re not ready to go into hosting a support group, doesn’t mean that you can’t do it in the future after you get past the storm.
Barbara La Pointe: Would you agree with that?
Wendy Perry: Oh, definitely. Oh, absolutely.
Wendy Perry: Oh, yes. If you feel like this is something you want to do, but maybe you feel like you just need to work on your organization skills, or you need to work on your public speaking, because it’s kind of like public speaking, right, when you’re talking to the people that come to your meetings. Get some training. Get a mentor. And this is a lot of what we talk about when I give the actual formal training to people of how to host support groups. Anything that you wanna do, that you want to do well, it’s smart to do training on it. So get a mentor, get some training, and say, “I’ve i don’t feel like I’m ready to do this yet, but I wanna do it someday.” And so then start taking those steps to prepare yourself to do that someday. Definitely.
Barbara La Pointe: Cool. It’s worth it, right? It’s worth it.
Andrew Folkler: And they’re very valuable skills altogether. So whether or not it’s for your support group, or it’ll translate into work, your friends, your just your social relationships in general, all of that and just organizing your life, everything kind of comes together when you work on those skills.
Barbara La Pointe: Wendy, I’m kind of curious, ‘cause you’ve mentioned emotional intensities coming up, like people crying, for example. Do you have any strategies on how to manage that if you had someone cry or become deeply emotional in a group?
Barbara La Pointe: What would one do to address that?
Wendy Perry: Yeah. It’s really common, and I’ll share with you that very, very often when someone comes to their very first support meeting they just sit and cry, and they don’t say anything. And we go around and give everyone their turn, and when it’s their turn, they just start crying.
Wendy Perry: And what they say is, “This is the first time I’ve been in a room with other people who understand what I’m going through and who believe what I say.” And when that happens, we tell them it’s okay. It’s okay to cry. We understand. And we let them cry, and we give them the box of tissues. We pass the box of tissues down that way.
Wendy Perry: And usually someone will go over and give them a hug. And there’s no wrong way to feel when you go to a support group meeting, and I think that’s really important to say. We do hope, and we want people to come out of the meetings feeling better, feeling supported, feeling encouraged.
Wendy Perry: But it wouldn’t be right to try to control everyone’s emotions. It is a very emotional thing, and it’s normal, and it’s natural for people to get upset and to cry about being alienated. It’s one of the most painful things that you could possibly go through. And so in our meetings when people cry, and we do have people cry in our online meetings too, we let them cry, and we tell them, “I’m really sorry for what you’re going through right now.”
Wendy Perry: And you’re asking what to do. Show them empathy. That’s really what you wanna do when someone is crying, when they’re breaking down, is to show them empathy. And we never say, “Don’t cry. Stop crying. Well, your case is not that bad.”
Wendy Perry: You don’t wanna say anything like that. You want to meet them where they are in that really emotional moment and show them empathy and care.
Barbara La Pointe: That’s beautiful. I mean, I guess that’s why a group like this could be a real resource for a parent being alienated.
Wendy Perry: People who come to support meetings, some of them, they have no support at all.
Wendy Perry: Their friends and their families, their own families don’t understand and don’t support them. And that’s horrible. It’s terrible. But some people who come to support meetings, they have very supportive family and friends. But even your most supportive family and friends, they probably don’t wanna hear about parental alienation every second that you’re talking to them.
Wendy Perry: It’s like, geez, all they ever talk about is alienation. Can we ever talk about anything else? And when they come to the support meeting, that gives them an opportunity to be in a setting where that’s all you’re gonna talk about. That’s all you’re gonna hear about. This is the place where you can get it all off your chest and talk about it as much as you want to, until the timer goes off and it’s the other person’s time.
Wendy Perry: So it’s very, very important for people to have that, to have a group of people that they can get together with. It’s not just okay to talk about alienation, but that’s why you’re there. You get to talk about it. And no one’s gonna go, “Oh my gosh, talking about alienation again.”
Wendy Perry: Right? So it’s really important for people to have that outlet.
Andrew Folkler: In the context of either mobilizing legal or a policy change or anything like that, how would you introduce that within the group? How do you mobilize the group to participate in, you could say, extra activities beyond a typical support meeting?
Wendy Perry: Awesome question. Our support meetings that we had in person for many years, we were very, very, very active in the community. We were much more than just support meetings. So what we did was we had what we called action items. So on our agenda, we would have our opening and introductions, and then we would talk about action items.
Wendy Perry: And those could be a variety of things, like upcoming events in the area that were relevant to parental alienation, pending legislation, things like that. And when we would talk about those things, we would give a little update on that if we had updates on those things. But we would also give them the contact person for that.
Wendy Perry: If you wanna get involved in this event, this is who you contact. If you want to go to this conference, this is who you contact. If you want to be involved in this legislative reform movement, this is who you contact about that. So I do think that it’s an important part of your support meetings to have that, to have action items, or to have at least events that people can participate in that goes a little bit beyond or is a little bit more.
Wendy Perry: And something else that we did that I think was really important and very bonding for our support group, was we would volunteer in the community. We would go to events in the community that really were not related to parental alienation at all. But we would go out and volunteer as a group, and this showed people in the community that there’s a stigma with parental alienation, right?
Wendy Perry: There’s a stigma. There’s an assumption that, well, if you’re alienated, then you must have done something to justify that. You must have done something to make your child reject you. And so we would go and we would volunteer as a group for community events, and really put ourselves out there, and it was a really positive experience for our support group, because people would see us as nice, normal, regular people who went out and volunteered, and we were a positive force in the community.
Wendy Perry: So things like that, that’s something else that you would wanna add to your agenda or to your activities, is to possibly go out and volunteer and do things in the community as a group.
Andrew Folkler: ‘Cause I imagine a lot of people come to this group and they’re just sinking into that pit of despair with their story and the pain and the emotion that comes with it.
Andrew Folkler: And something like that can kind of reignite that fire within them, make them feel a little bit more alive, a little bit more rejuvenated in a sense, and push them towards recognizing that they can still be their best self.
Barbara La Pointe: Kind of like a community or your tribe, right?
Wendy Perry: Yeah. I think it’s so important for alienated parents and grandparents, I never wanna exclude the grandparents because alienation is really, really painful for the grandparents.
Wendy Perry: But it’s very important to keep living a balanced life even though you’re dealing with parental alienation, and that can be a challenge. It really can be a challenge for people to live a balanced life. It can be hard for them to not ruminate on it and think about it 24/7. And so if you can create those opportunities for the people in your support group to get out and have fun, get out and volunteer to make a difference in the community, even if it’s not about parental alienation, but to get out and volunteer.
Wendy Perry: Go to a domestic violence shelter if you can. Go to a food pantry. Anything that you can do together as a group to give to the community, but also it’s going back to that having a balanced life, right? I’m not just an alienated or a targeted parent.
Wendy Perry: I go out and I serve my community. I go out with the other people in my support group and go bowling or whatever. But have other activities that lead towards that more balanced life.
Barbara La Pointe: So find your purpose again. Maybe. And find hope. Do you find hope is an element that people are seeking in support groups?
Wendy Perry: Yeah, definitely. I think all alienated and targeted parents and grandparents are looking for hope. That’s probably the number one thing they’re looking for is looking for hope. And it can be kind of hard to find when you’re dealing with parental alienation. And so I think they are looking for hope, and that’s another reason to stay really up on what is out there as far as research and to get familiar with other advocates, right?
Wendy Perry: And to seek out those stories of hope. And it’s not hopeless. There is hope if you are an alienated parent or grandparent, and it can take a long time. We talk about that in our support group. How do you build your endurance and tenacity to keep reaching out and to not give up hope?
Wendy Perry: So hope is definitely something that we touch on a lot in the support groups.
Andrew Folkler: So Wendy, we are coming up to that hour mark. I did want to ask you to speak on April 25th being International Parental Alienation Awareness Day. And I know this episode’s gonna be released on the 25th, just nicely done on purpose. But yeah, I was wondering if you could speak about that a bit before we wrap up.
Wendy Perry: Yeah, definitely. And I wanted to say thank you so much for asking me to be on an episode that is specifically gonna air on Parental Alienation Awareness Day. Because in our world, that’s our big day every year. Parental Alienation Awareness Day. So I’ll give a little bit of history about it, and I’ll make it really condensed.
Wendy Perry: But April 25th of this year, April 25th, 2021, will be the 16th annual International Parental Alienation Awareness Day. And a lot of people are always surprised when they hear how long it’s been going on. So this will be the 16th year. It was started by a lady named Sarvy Emo. Now her last name is Van Maris.
Wendy Perry: Sarvy Emo Van Maris. She is in Canada, and that’s where it started. It started in Canada. And it’s a very, very important day. Every April 25th is Parental Alienation Awareness Day. So on that day, all around the world, people will observe Parental Alienation Awareness Day. And what a lot of people do is a lot of people get proclamations from their mayors or their elected officials proclaiming that April 25th is Parental Alienation Awareness Day.
Wendy Perry: So I know this year we’ve got a lot of people that have gathered proclamations, and that is really, really awesome to do. And if anyone wants help with doing that, let me know. I’m happy to help you learn how to get a proclamation. It’s actually pretty easy. The other thing that a lot of people do on Parental Alienation Awareness Day is they have a ceremony called Bubbles of Love.
Wendy Perry: So I wanna say about 10 years ago I believe, Sarvy introduced a ceremony called Bubbles of Love. So a lot of people blow bubbles. Just go to the store and get a bottle of bubbles, and they blow bubbles of love on Parental Alienation Awareness Day. So this can be kind of confusing to people, right?
Wendy Perry: Bubbles of love is a ceremony that you have in observance of Parental Alienation Awareness Day. So some people call it Bubbles of Love Day, but it’s Parental Alienation Awareness Day. A lot of people host events on Parental Alienation Awareness Day. And so you can do an event in person. We’ve done many in person.
Wendy Perry: One thing I would recommend, if you’re going to have a gathering, an in-person event for Parental Alienation Awareness Day, make it family-friendly, because you wanna have as many people come as you can, right? So you wanna be very welcoming, have it be family-friendly. Remember, it’s not a protest.
Wendy Perry: It’s not Parental Alienation Protest Day. It’s Parental Alienation Awareness Day. And so you wanna be friendly and welcoming to your whole community if you’re going to have it in person. Maybe have it at a park. Provide the bubbles for everyone. Let kids come and just have fun. And then when their parents are there, you can give them a brochure, give them a little literature about parental alienation.
Wendy Perry: But the whole point of the day is to raise awareness and education. And so we need to be approachable and amicable to create as much awareness and education as possible. So everybody mark your calendar for April 25th. Go get some bottles of bubbles. And even if you just do it yourself at home, blow some bubbles of love and take some selfies and post those online.
Wendy Perry: Because every year there’s a really nice montage video that is made showing everyone blowing their bubbles of love on Parental Alienation Awareness Day.
Andrew Folkler: Right on. Is there a common hashtag that everybody uses? I mean, I know it might be a stretch to ask that, but it would still be a great thing to include.
Wendy Perry: Definitely. It seems to kinda change a little bit every year. But I would say if you’re gonna hashtag, do #bubblesoflove, and/or do #parentalalienationawarenessday. And then we can pull up all of those photos.
Barbara La Pointe: Well, Wendy, I think Andrew and I would like to close by just taking a second to acknowledge you and the beautiful contribution that you’re making to this world, and your total awesomeness.
Barbara La Pointe: You’re amazing.
Wendy Perry: Thank you. That’s so sweet. You’re.
Andrew Folkler: Welcome. Well, before I wrap up, was there anything that maybe was just left unsaid? Or any pearl, as Barbara and I like to say, any pearls of wisdom that you would like to drop on the audience right before we wrap up?
Wendy Perry: I would invite everyone to visit my website.
Wendy Perry: It’s wendyjperry.com. And if you are an alienated parent or grandparent, I would highly encourage you to join a good support group. It can really, truly make a difference. And I would wanna leave everyone with my little signature saying, “Parental alienation can happen to anyone, so it should matter to everyone.”
Wendy Perry: And what I hope that we can all do really soon is normalize talking about parental alienation. Let’s normalize talking about it. It’s something that, like I said, it’s got a stigma attached to it, and people have sort of been hesitant to talk about it. And I really wanna see us normalize talking about parental alienation, because it really can happen to anyone.
Wendy Perry: And as you both know, it’s a really harmful abuse. And so just if you need support, reach out, and share your story with others in a good support group, and let’s normalize talking about parental alienation.
Wendy Perry: And I know with shows like this, that’s what we’re doing.
Wendy Perry: And so I really appreciate both of you doing this. I think it’s really important that we have these conversations.
Andrew Folkler: And I’d definitely be happy to bring you on board again sometime in the future, and we can dive deep into another topic or something like that. So absolutely.
Wendy Perry: I would love that. Thank you so much for having me. It’s really great to chat with you both.
Andrew Folkler: Definitely was. You beat me to my last question, which was how to best contact you. So I imagine that would be at your website.
Wendy Perry: WendyJPerry.com is my website. Also, I do have a Facebook group and that Facebook page, I should say.
Wendy Perry: That is Wendy Perry Parental Alienation and Co-parenting Education and Support. It’s kinda long.
Andrew Folkler: Well, we’ll definitely include that link, those links down below. And that is all we have time for today. Once again, thank you for taking the time to be with us, and if you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our channel either on YouTube or to our podcast through the various podcast streams.
Andrew Folkler: Don’t forget, we include a downloadable document below summarizing all these pearls of wisdom on how to get a support group up and running and what it’s going to actually take. Barbara, if listeners wanted to reach out to you, what would be the best way to do so?
Barbara La Pointe: BarbaraLaPointe.com or BarbaraLaPointe@gmail.com.
Andrew Folkler: Right on. And if you wanted to email me, you can reach me at StartNow@andrewfolkler.com. As always, thank you for taking the time to be with us at the Broken Families podcast where we discuss and help you find solutions to divorce, parental alienation, and high-conflict relationships. Have a wonderful day, everyone.
Barbara La Pointe: Thank you.
Andrew Folkler: All righty. This was...