Was I Manipulated to Reject a Safe Parent?: How Choice, Memory, and Loyalty Are Shaped When Children Adapt to Adult Narratives

Nicole Anderson | English, 2026

Most adults who are estranged from a parent believe they chose that distance.

They believe it was clarity.
They believe it was autonomy.
They believe it was necessary.

This book asks whether that belief itself was shaped.

Rather than focusing on dramatic abuse or overt coercion, Nicole Anderson examines the quieter, more powerful mechanisms that lead children to reject safe parents: narrative control, emotional burden disguised as empowerment, professional gatekeeping, and systems that reward delay, silence, and alignment over truth.

Drawing on lived experience and years of close observation of family court and therapeutic systems, this book exposes how separation becomes permanent without ever being openly decided, how loyalty is conditioned long before choice is possible, how memory is reorganized through repetition and omission, and how authority figures often validate outcomes without examining how they were produced.