Episode 5 – The Birthday Card
Parental alienation doesn’t always arrive in courtrooms or custody battles. Sometimes, it shows up on a birthday — in the silence. In the space where a reply should be.

This episode explores what it feels like to be an estranged parent on your child’s birthday. To send love out through a letter, a card, a voice — and get nothing back. No message. No call. Just the ache of being erased by the one person you’d do anything to reach.

I talk about addiction, sobriety, recovery, and the grief of showing up as a father even when you're no longer seen as one. If you're navigating estrangement, alienation, or the quiet heartbreak of loving from a distance — this one’s for you.

Keywords: estranged parent, parental alienation, sobriety, addiction recovery, fatherhood, birthday grief, emotional distance, shared custody, co-parenting collapse, healing alone

This is the episode I didn’t want to record — but had to.
The relapse didn’t happen all at once. It started slow. Quiet. Hidden behind the kind of silence that comes after you lose your kids and no one’s answering your messages.

In this episode, I walk through the final days before I called 911 on myself. The truth about what led me back to alcohol. The therapist who never even spoke to my children. The moment I realized I wasn’t just losing access to them — I was being erased.

This isn’t a polished story about recovery.
This is what collapse actually looks like when you’re an estranged parent trying to hold on.
No redemption arc. No performance. Just the raw moment where everything fell apart — and what happened next.

Part of The Black Box Movement podcast.
Sober. Estranged. Still here.

What does alienation actually look like before it’s obvious? In this episode, M walks through the quiet unraveling of shared custody, the emotional dependence on parenting time, and the collapse that followed Christmas 2022.

This is not a legal breakdown. This is not an addiction recovery step list. This is the record of a father who reached out for help — and watched that vulnerability get turned against him.

If you’ve ever wondered what the early signs of estrangement feel like from inside the house, this is it.
If you’ve been through family court, addiction recovery, or post-divorce grief — you’ll hear yourself in this.

Topics:
Parental alienation, addiction recovery, mental health, estrangement, co-parenting, custody, fatherhood, emotional collapse, sobriety, grief

In the early days of sobriety, I started writing a letter to my kids. Not to fix anything. Just to survive.

That letter became a lifeline. I rewrote it almost 200 times across a full year — through relapse, recovery, and total estrangement. When a reunification therapist finally read it to my children, they said it didn’t sound like me. They didn’t believe I wrote it.

This episode walks through that rejection, the early emotional chaos of parental alienation, and how that letter — and their disbelief — became the foundation for something bigger: this podcast, and The Black Box Movement.

Read the original letter reflection:
https://blackboxmovement.substack.com/p/they-didnt-believe-it-was-mine

Learn more about the project:
https://theblackboxmovement.carrd.co

Topics: parental alienation, estrangement, relapse, early sobriety, reunification therapy, emotional repair, letter writing, family court, addiction recovery, fatherhood

Addiction. Estrangement. Sobriety. Silence. This is the first episode of The Black Box Movement — a podcast for estranged parents, recovering addicts, and anyone rebuilding after collapse. Based on the memoir of the same name, this episode explores what it means to be erased, to relapse, and to start over — even when no one’s watching. If you're facing alienation, grief, or recovery in silence, you're not alone.
📘 Memoir → theblackboxmovement.carrd.co
🎧 Audiobook coming soon.