Divorce Poison New and Updated Edition: How to Protect Your Family from Bad-mouthing and Brainwashing

Your ex-spouse is bad mouthing you to your children, constantly portraying you in a negative light, perhaps even trying to turn them against you. If you handle the situation ineffectively during a high-conflict divorce, your relationship with your children could suffer. You could lose their respect, lose their affections-even, in extreme cases, lose all contact with them. The conventional advice is to do nothing, that fighting fire with fire will only result in greater injury to the children. But after years of consulting parents who heeded such advice with no success, Dr. Richard Warshak is convinced that this approach is wrong. It doesn’t work, and parents are left feeling helpless and hopeless. DIVORCE POISON instead offers a complete co-parenting guide for an effective response. In it, you will learn how to distinguish different types of criticism, how and why parents manipulate their children, how to detect the signs of parental alienation, and how these practices damage children. Most importantly, you’ll discover powerful strategies to preserve and rebuild loving relationships with your children.

DIVORCE POISON is a time-tested work that gives parents powerful strategies to preserve and rebuild loving relationships with their children-and provides practical advice from legal and mental-health professionals to help their clients navigate child custody disputes and safeguard the welfare of children. Whether they are perpetrators of divorce poison, victims of it, or both, parents who heed Dr. Warshak’s advice will enable their children to maintain love and respect for their parents-even if their parents no longer love and respect each other.

This essential guide provides evidence-based strategies to:

• Understand Malignant Motives: Discover why a parent might try to turn a child against the other, from revenge and insecurity to a systematic campaign of brainwashing.
• Implement Counter-Intuitive Strategies: Learn why the conventional advice to “do nothing” often fails and gain powerful, proactive tactics to respond effectively to bad-mouthing.
• Protect Your Children’s Well-Being: Equip yourself to shield your children from emotional harm and help them maintain love and respect for both parents, even when their parents no longer respect each other.
• Find Professional Help: Get practical advice for working with therapists and lawyers, and learn how to navigate the family court system to safeguard your child’s welfare.

Dr. Richard A. Warshak is a clinical professor of psychology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. An international authority and consultant to parents and attorneys on divorce and parental alienation, Dr. Warshak has spoken at the White House, and his work has been featured in a PBS documentary and in media including The Early Show, Today, CNN, CTV, the New York Times, USA Today, Macleans, the London Sunday Telegraph, the Toronto Star, and Time.