u/Anonymouse447

For those of you who have been dealing with parental alienation, high-conflict co-parenting, ongoing emotional abuse, chronic grief, or just years of living in a constant state of stress, have you noticed it starting to affect your physical health?
I’m genuinely curious about this because I feel like we talk a lot about the emotional and legal toll, but not nearly enough about what prolonged stress can do to your body.
Have you developed new health issues since this started? Things like autoimmune symptoms, stomach problems, migraines, sleep issues, heart palpitations, hormonal changes, chronic pain, fatigue, weight changes, hair loss, skin issues, getting sick more often, or anything else that your doctors have connected to stress?
I’m not asking because I think every health problem can be blamed on stress, and I know everyone’s situation is different. I’m just interested in hearing other people’s experiences with what years of grief, hypervigilance, conflict, and emotional trauma have physically looked like.
Sometimes it feels like your body eventually starts keeping score for everything you’ve had to hold together mentally.
What has chronic stress done to your health, if anything?

I really need support from people who understand high-conflict custody and parental alienation dynamics because I feel like I am reaching my limit.

My daughter is almost 12, and her father and I have been involved in high-conflict co-parenting for years. She and I were extremely close for most of her childhood, but over the last few years our relationship has changed dramatically. She became more anxious around transitions, more withdrawn from me, and increasingly angry in ways that often seemed much bigger than whatever had actually happened between us.

At the same time, she began repeating very serious things about me involving abuse, drugs, alcohol, my mental health, my parenting, custody, court, therapy, and whether I am a safe parent. I want to be very careful with how I say this because I do not believe my daughter is a liar. I believe she is a child who has been exposed to far too much adult conflict and is trying to make sense of information she never should have been responsible for carrying.

Over the years, the allegations and conflict have resulted in CPS involvement, police involvement, multiple therapists, family therapy, individual therapy, a parenting coordinator, school professionals, attorneys, and ongoing court litigation. I have spent an enormous amount of time responding to allegations, documenting what happens, involving professionals, and trying to make sure my daughter has support.

What concerns me most is that the conflict seems to follow her everywhere. It has moved beyond communication between her father and me and into therapy, school, relatives, extracurricular activities, coaches, other parents, and other parts of her community. I constantly feel like I am trying to keep her world separate from the custody conflict while watching more and more of her world get pulled into it.

There have also been repeated situations where I am told that our daughter said or believes something about me, but when I later speak with her directly, the situation does not always match how it was presented to me. At the same time, anything negative she supposedly says about me is treated as unquestionable fact, while concerns I raise about things she says regarding her father or his household are explained away as misunderstandings, missing context, or a child not fully understanding what happened.

I have reached a point where I no longer know how to respond to that dynamic. If my daughter genuinely has negative feelings about me, I want to hear them. I can listen. I can apologize. I can change things I have done wrong. I know I am not a perfect parent, and I have done a lot of work in therapy on myself. But I cannot accept allegations that are not true simply because defending myself makes me look defensive.

The most recent situation has involved her softball community. What initially started as me trying to understand boundaries around activities occurring during my custody time led me to learn information about her father's coaching role that I had not previously known. A separate concern then came up regarding professional softball experience and affiliations he had represented to our daughter and others. Because the claims did not match what I knew from having been married to him for years, I verified the information directly with the organization involved and was told they had no record of the claimed affiliation.

That discovery itself is concerning, but what bothers me even more is the larger pattern around it. Questions about boundaries or factual discrepancies become reframed as me trying to cause problems, while our private conflict continues spreading into our daughter's team and other areas of her life. I feel like I am constantly trying to keep adult issues contained while being portrayed as the person creating the conflict for asking questions or trying to establish boundaries.

We are currently back in active litigation, and I am going through extensive discovery involving years of financial records, business records, communications, therapy records, photographs of my home, journals, medical information, and other parts of my personal life. I understand that litigation involves scrutiny, but emotionally it is exhausting to feel like I am constantly being asked to prove that I am safe, sober, stable, involved, supportive, and capable of parenting my own child.

Meanwhile, the part that matters most to me is my relationship with my daughter. I miss how easy our relationship used to be. I miss being able to parent without wondering how every disagreement, boundary, or ordinary parenting decision will later be interpreted. I am scared of losing years with her while everyone argues about what is happening.

I have an attorney. I have my own therapist. My daughter has professional support. I document things. I try not to engage in unnecessary conflict. I encourage her relationship with her father. I tell her repeatedly that she is allowed to love both of her parents and that she never needs to choose.

But I am tired of feeling like I have to be perfectly calm, perfectly strategic, and perfectly documented every second while watching my relationship with my child deteriorate.

For those of you who have lived through something similar, how did you maintain a relationship with your child when you felt them being pulled away from you? How did you respond when your child repeated serious accusations or adult narratives? How did you stop yourself from constantly trying to prove the truth? How did you protect your child from the conflict when the conflict kept spreading into more areas of their life?

And for anyone on the other side of this with an older child, did your child eventually begin to understand what was happening? What helped preserve enough of your relationship for that to happen?

I am not looking for ways to beat her father or convince my daughter that he is the problem. I genuinely want to know how to get through this without losing my relationship with her or making her carry even more than she already is.