This is a short post to enable readers to discern the difference between someone who can help you with parental alienation and someone who thinks they can.
The person who thinks they can help you is someone who –
- Can describe parental alienation
- Can tell you what the difference is between parental alienation and estrangement
- Can tell you that they know how to work with parental alienation
- Can tell you they can solve the problem quickly
- Uses their membership of parental alienation interest groups to legitimise their work.
The person who can help you is someone who –
- Can describe the assessment and differentiation route they will use
- Can describe the different ways that they will work with your family to help you
- Can describe the interventions used around the world which are known to be effective
- Can demonstrate that they have carried out these treatment routes with other families successfully
- Will provide you with a written work plan or treatment plan with the costs attached
- Will give you names and contact details of parents they have helped
- Will give you names and contact details of legal and mental health professionals in the field of parental alienation who can vouch for you.
- Uses their qualification and experience in the field to legitimise their work.
There has been an explosion of self styled parental alienation coaches and therapists and experts who are seeking to promote themselves as the person who can help you. Reports of people spending thousands of pounds to get nowhere in their case or worse, being blamed for their child’s rejection of them are regularly received by those of us who do this work. Evidence that people are setting up websites selling information which can easily be found for free on the internet is everywhere.
This is becoming a dangerous space for parents and the project of the European Association of Parental Alienation Practitioners to codify best practice and protect parents from this risk is now urgent.
Our work with EAPAP, which brings together serious clinicians from around Europe, is now being mirrored with intent to do the same in North America. This is the protection that parents urgently need.
Our commitment in 2020 is –
- To set practice standards for anyone who wishes to work in the internationally recognised approaches to helping families affected by alienation.
- To provide information and education which is easily accessible to parents around the world.
- To hold the EAPAP 2020 conference and bring together the most skilled clinicians in Europe around an agenda which is focused upon treatment routes for parental alienation which are based upon international evidence.
- To explore with North American colleagues, a mirror approach to enable practitioners in the USA to work with EAPAP to the same standards of intervention.
- To develop a workforce which is highly skilled, supervised and motivated to bring successful outcomes to families affected by parental alienation.
From 2020 onwards, parents will have access to information and guidance about choosing a practitioner, understanding how recognised practice makes a difference and what can be expected from a practitioner in this field.
Education for the Judiciary and for legal and mental health professionals will also be available to develop a benchmark for interventions around Europe.
The European Association of Parental Alienation Practitioners is a group which brings together the most senior and experienced practitioners in the field of parental alienation from Europe. This is a voluntary endeavour which is funded by the hard work of these clinicians who give their time for free to develop this organisation to protect parents the practitioners who work with them.
EAPAP 2020 – Parental Separation, Alienation and Splitting: Healing Beyond Reunification will be held on 15/16th June 2020 in Zagreb, Croatia.
This conference will bring together practitioners in the field of child abuse, trauma and attachment to explore the ways in which existing therapies and models of understanding of abuse and trauma can be translated into work with abused children of divorce and separation.
Taking place over two days, the conference will deliver intensives in different aspects of parental alienation to present a cohesive set of standards for international assessment, differentiation and intervention.
This is a practitioner only conference, streaming of parts of the conference will be available for parents and a parents Q&A session will be co-ordinated on day two.
The speaker list for the EAPAP 2020 conference, which will be announced shortly, includes leading practitioners and researchers in the field of –
- Intergenerational Trauma
- Family Violence
- Attachment
- Personality Disorder
- Family Therapies which are adapted to suit the needs of alienated children and their families
- Object Relations Theory
- Mind/Body Therapies for Trauma
The focus of the conference is upon treatment of induced psychological splitting which is the internal issue which is seen in parental alienation. All aspects of treatment will be explored at the conference where practice standards will be launched.
Karen Woodall 
I found there are a number of supposive experts who charge from $10,000 to $40:00 for education or reunification therapy/ weekends intensive. These people prey on the vulnerability and utter desperation for alienated parents to get their children back and emotionally sound. I would love to see affordable therapy available in conjunction with family law courts using these specialist. Parental alienation also belongs in the specialist family violence arena in family law where alienated parents are treated with the same dignity and respect as those victims of domestic violence but we are desperate for law reform in my country on this whole specialised area. Just who does the work to raise awareness of the signs, assessment and therapy plan to the Lagal arena???? The mental health and legal interlock is just falling apart on the legal side as it is in the dark ages on this issue. From the family report writers to lawyers to judges. The legal side is woefully ignorant. I wish someone could champion the lead on this side as much as the exciting changes happening on the mental health side.
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Missing link.
My great respect for your work and being a motor in Europe in this field. I am a target mother.
i have read Your mails for a long time. And understand a lot as a highly educated teacher. Still i find a missing link. Your strategy is to give therapy hours to the families.
How do you get the aliented child to the hours. ? The alientor doesnt want ( saying the child doesnt want ) By courtorder ? meaning the courts have to be educated. Also meaning that it is the well economic children only who get help, laywers are expencive.
My answer is change the Law of children TOO. There are movements here in Scandinavia. Sweden is in front. comitees in change the Law and Family work,are settled down in Norway. We are looking forward to their rapport in 2020.
Hope Your comitties make requests about law to goverments. Using their INFLUENCE.
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Indeed. The is is why EAPAP was founded. We will push, press and demand change as well as helping families we will advocate for them. K
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Sadly, I did have the court orders for my alienated eldest child to attend specialist therapy and the Father (alienator) but of course, he couldn’t get her to therapy, as he said in his own words ‘I can’t force her’ as fo himself he is supposed to go until the head therapist says he doesn’t need to but he has ignored it. The judge’s response was ‘oh well, that didn’t work’, ultimately the court could not force him to go but yet the judge kept our alienated daughter in his care equal time and of course my time is not happening equal shared care it’s woeful.
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