The Step-Parent's Side of Parental Alienation: a Therapist/Former GAL Speaks Out

"One hundred percent of what was reported back to me was untrue." That's what it's like to be the step-parent inside a parental alienation campaign — standing in the middle of a custody war that started long before you arrived.

In this conversation, licensed clinical social worker, former guardian ad litem, and 40-year psychotherapist Jessica Anne Pressler shares something we almost never hear on this channel: what parental alienation looks like from the step-parent's chair. Jessica spent 15 years inside the court system conducting custody evaluations, and she also lived through alienation herself as the new partner a mother turned her daughter against.

Jessica's story starts with a genuinely happy first year, a proposal, and then, almost overnight, a child who wouldn't come to the house anymore. We talk through the emails that arrived hours after her wedding, comparing her to a "black widow." Jessica calls this "borrowed scenarios" — language dressed up as a child's own feelings that could never have come from an eight- or nine-year-old.

We also dig into what happens to the "healthy" partner who watches someone they love get pulled away by fear of losing a child. Jessica is honest about her husband's catch-22 — caught between the family he built with her and a daughter conditioned to see any closeness with Jessica as betrayal of her mother. And she's just as honest about her own fear of abandonment, what she calls her own "traitor within," also the title of her forthcoming novel.

What You'll Learn:

✅ Why children work so hard to please the alienating parent, and how "conditional love" and fear of loss drive that behavior
✅ How to recognize "borrowed scenarios" — adult language coming out of a child's mouth
✅ Why an ex refusing to allow a child into therapy is itself a red flag worth naming
✅ What "hatred by association" looks like when it spreads to a target parent's friends, hobbies, and new family
✅ How grandparents and extended family can become "flying monkeys," and why it happens
✅ Warning signs new partners often miss before marrying into a high-conflict family
✅ Why the divorce becoming legally final can trigger an ex rather than settle things down
✅ What a target parent's household needs to be for a child: calm, safe, and free of commentary about the other parent
✅ Why BTGO tells clients not to question their kids about time spent with the other parent
✅ Where a target parent's own grief and anger belong — and why it's never in front of the kids

About Jessica Anne Pressler: Jessica Anne Pressler is a licensed clinical social worker with nearly 40 years of experience as a psychotherapist. For 15 years, she conducted custody and visitation evaluations within the family court system, giving her a rare, dual vantage point on parental alienation — as a professional evaluator and, later, as a step-parent who lived through it in her own marriage. She is the author of the forthcoming debut novel "The Traitor Within," following a woman named Cassandra through a cycle of toxic relationships and the internal "traitor" that keeps her abandoning herself first. Jessica has appeared on Been There Got Out before, and her story is also referenced in our book "When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You."