The Lighthouse Project: Differentiation Skills for Rejected Parents

My whole focus in the work that I do is to find routes to recovery for alienated children and their families.  In doing so I work with many serious clinicians around the world who, like me, work directly with alienated children and families and so understand them at the deepest level.

This is not research, this is direct clinical practice and it is vital in the ongoing process of developing the scientific field of induced psychological splitting in children after divorce and family separation.

When we work with families we undertake thirty hours or so of assessment and differentiation. In our intensive structured programmes, we observe a family over many weeks and sometimes months to determine the reason why a child has become psychologically split and treat it.  In doing so, we do not wait to reconnect the child to the parent they have rejected, we do this at the start of our work under clinical conditions.  We know that this is the way to ensure that the child has the strongest chance of recovering from the split state of mind.  Doing it this way means that everything that follows is focused on reorganising the family dynamics to prevent it from happening again.

Differentiation requires us to understand, within every single one of the concentric circles around the family, what the pressures upon the child are and where they are coming from.  As we do so, we also have to understand what the risks to the rejected parent are of any proposed treatment route and whether or not they can withstand what is being asked of them in order to recover their child. Additionally, we also have to assess what the risk is to ourselves in this setting, whether or not other professionals are going to pull in a different direction and whether or not there are people involved who may deliberately or otherwise seek to undermine what we are doing.

This is a field which is criss crossed with lack of understanding, powerful personal belief systems and imbalances of power.  Being in this space is dangerous for anyone, it is a particularly dangerous for the child.

Differentiation is an essential skill too for rejected parents because depending upon who you listen to, you will be told that you are either the child’s best hope or the cause of your child’s rejection and everything in between.  Critical thinking skills are essential to possess, sharpen and protect when you are a rejected parent because just because someone says they are expert, does not make it so.

No stranger to being harangued on the internet, I have no intention of haranguing anyone in this field but I won’t stand by and watch risk of harm silently.  There is a right way to do this work, there are principles and protocols which when applied demonstrate results. And all of those require the strong protective framework of the family court.

Let me be clear here, not everyone decides to go to court in a case of alienation.  I work with parents who have decided not to do so and I am no less supportive of them than I am of those who do decide to go down the court route. I also supervise practitioners around the world who are working in very different legal systems and in doing so find that interventions have to be adapted to ensure that they will find footholds to gain traction in a case.  Each case is different, each requires careful analysis and doing what is right for the child and rejected parent will need to make decisions based upon all of the evidence in their lived experience. As practitioners we must take every small part of each case into account and that requires high levels of differentiation skill.  Rejected parents must be no less careful.

I also work with adult children who were alienated, have recovered and are still in need of therapy.  I understand from this angle, the very serious life long damage which is done by inducing a child to raise the defence of psychological splitting in their younger years.

When I give advice therefore, I do so from the perspective of my experience and expertise in assisting families to heal.  I do so from the vantage point of understanding this problem from the inside out.  I value all of my colleagues with similar experience.

As a rejected parent you are vulnerable and one of the first things we do at the Clinic is to educate families to understand the dynamics in parental alienation at the deepest level. In our coaching of parents who do not go to court, we assess from their perspective and identify the issues which are causing the most pressure, we teach critical thinking skills and how to build strategies for long term survival.

In our family therapy work, with adults and their families, we undertake a combination of psycho-genealogy and transpersonal therapeutic input and we work with families  for days and weeks at a time to resolve in real time the broken hierarchy and enmeshments that have cause the child to utilise psychological splitting.  We teach these families to think critically and to differentiate between what is helpful and what is harmful out there.  We believe that this is an important part of healing for rejected parents.

Rejected parents need to understand what the road ahead looks like and they need to be able to access support that truly helps.  Most of all they need to be held and supported and encouraged in a bond of trust that does not break.  They need protection whilst they develop strength and skill to stay the course for their children.  What they learn must be founded in evidence of outcomes.

Just as a cancer patient would not go to an auxiliary nurse for treatment (though they may go there for some elements of their care), we do not expect rejected parents to rely upon lay people for guidance and advice.  Parents helping parents is a wonderful thing, but it is also risky when it comes to parents and lay people claiming expertise. Helping rejected parents to avoid unnecessary risk is our project.

Differentiation skills for rejected parents are vital to obtain – here is your top ten critical thinking questions which will assist you to differentiate between what helps and what hinders.

1. How do I know this is parental alienation (or not).
2. What qualifications and experience do experts in this field have to have?
3. What do I want from the person who is advising me?
4. How do I decide whether I should go to court (or not).
5. What are the questions I need to ask?
6. Who am I listening to and taking advice from?
7. Can they refer me to people they have helped to recover their children and can I speak to those people?*
8. What can I expect from someone who says they can help me?
9. What is an assessment and differentiation process?
10. What are the known treatment routes for parental alienation?

Being rejected by your child makes you incredibly vulnerable, protecting yourself first, like putting on your oxygen mask is an essential piece of advice for everyone.

This is currently an unmanaged field and it is not yet regulated, meaning that people can show off shiny credentials but have very little in the way of skills to help you.

Keep your critical thinking skills sharp,

question everything and everyone, including me.

* Anyone with whom we work at the Family Separation Clinic can request and receive the contact details of parents we have worked with and can speak to those people directly. We also have adult children we have helped who are will to share their experience.  These people have all successfully recovered their relationships and have healed the psychologically split state of mind.

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Therapeutic Parenting Workshop for Rejected and Receiving Parents

14th March – Bloomsbury (10-5pm)

Our therapeutic parenting workshop aims to build your critical thinking skills. Held in Central London, our workshops are intensive and packed full of strategies for parents who are rejected or who have received (or may be receiving) their children in residence transfer cases.

Therapeutic parenting is powerful when it is used by rejected parents and it is an essential tool in assisting alienated children to integrate the split state of mind.

Our courses aim to skill you with critical thinking skills and confidence in empathic parenting to ensure that you understand the route that your child needs to take to heal the impact of parental alienation.

We have ten places left.

Book here.