Book excerpt: 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, 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 blueprint for effective response. In it, you will learn how to distinguish different types of criticism, how and why parents manipulate their children, how to detect these maneuvers, 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 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.