It is a fact that there are not enough services to support famlies affected by parental alienation in the UK and so it is with great pleasure that I am able to announce to our Scottish readers that we will be opening the doors to an Edinburgh based Clinic in the very near future (May 2015). Building on our work in Wales and latterly in Ireland, we will be offering the services of the Clinic on a face to face basis on a one day a week basis in Edinburgh. Whilst this does not allow us to do more than work intensively with more than a handful of cases at a time, it does allow us to offer coaching and guidance services to parents affected by parental alienation. It also allows us to work on cases in the family courts in Scotland, showing how our work makes a difference and how these difficult cases can be approached to bring about change for children in Scotland.
We will be working in partnership with local services in Scotland such as Families need Fathers and other local services providers with whom we will be delivering a wide range of support from psychological services to therapeutic mediation, coaching and guidance. This is a big step for us in our plan to establish clinical services for families across the country that meet the needs of those affected by family separation.
We have been working in the Family Courts in Wales and Scotland for some time now and establishing a Family Separation Clinic in those locations is a logical step for us to take. Whilst our services are not free of charge (there is zero charitable funding for this kind of service delivery), we plough back all income into our not for profit business to allow us to research and develop our services to fit the needs of the parents we work with.
Fitting the services we deliver to the needs of the parents we work with is what makes our work unique in our view. We know that working with alienated children requires a shift in mindset and the ability to work against the grain. We also know that working with rejected parents requires an ability to keep on supporting them even though they face ridicule and blame and all to easy dismissal of their experience or even their importance in their children’s lives. What we do at the Clinic is not therapy in the way that people expect therapy to be, it is an active and dynamic process, it is supporting, guiding, advising, planning, strategising and devising ways of enabling a rejected parent to achieve whatever is necessary to restore a relationship with their children. On the way to that we may use therapeutic means but we fit what we do to what the parent needs to navigate the path ahead, a path we are very famliiar with now.
I am delighted to be able to say that we will be delivering our services in Scotland on a weekly basis from May of this year and look forward to welcoming families to use our services either on a whole family basis (we regularly work with the whole family) or individually. More details of our regular Clinics in Wales and now in Scotland to come next month.
