Yesterday members of the Organising and Scientific Committees of the European Association of Parental Alienation Practitioners met to discuss the programme schedule for the conference in Zagreb on 15/16th June 2020.
The full programme will shortly be available and we are excited that this conference, which is already almost fully booked, will bring the issue of how to work with children suffering from induced psychological splitting into full consciousness.
Whilst we continue to use the umbrella term ‘parental alienation’, as clinicians and legal professionals working with the problem, we are moving the focus to treatment routes which bring healing to the whole family. We are moving the issue away from the arguments about high conflict and whether parental alienation exists or not and into the field of mental health where it properly belongs.
There is much work to be done on behalf of children all over the world who suffer this problem and their parents who mourn the loss of their children in an intolerable landscape of emotional and psychological pain.
As we move forward with the European Association, we are focused upon education, awareness raising and healing interventions which are about integration of the splitting seen in families suffering this problem. Our project is to bring the world to full consciousness that a child who is rejecting a parent after family separation is a child who is waving a red flag and asking for help. When a child asks for help we give it. When a child shows us that they are in a situation in which they are being forced to utilise a defence mechanism of splitting, we can and should help.
Education for parents, social workers, Guardians, schools and more is on our list for the next phase of EAPAP. Building a skilled workforce who can use the principles and protocols of intervention with children and families affected by a child’s induced psychological splitting, is our major focus.
If you are a practitioner and you wish to understand this issue at the deepest levels, the programme of master classes and presentations across key subjects such as attachment and trauma, transgenerational transmission of trauma, adapted therapies which are demonstrated to work with alienated children, the psychiatric impact of psychological splitting, legal management of cases and more are all available to you in our two day intensive programme.
A book of the papers presented at the conference will be available and we will reset the landscape of work and understanding of this problem by launching practice standards to guide clinicians who wish to treat the problem successfully.
We have only 150 tickets still available, if you want to attend this conference it is time to book now.
Below is an example of the subjects we will be exploring at the conference. Recorded in 2019 in the USA for Félag um foreldrajafnrétti with whom we worked last week in raising awareness of the problems facing children suffering from induced psychological splitting with Icelandic Members of Parliament, this short clip shows the reality of what we are working with.
Parental alienation is not about high conflict and it is not just about signs and strategies. This is a family relational problem which requires the correct principles and protocols to be applied to heal the child’s splitting behaviours and then re-organise the family ‘furniture’ in ways that prevent it from arising again. In doing so, everyone in the family is assisted and children are protected both now and in the future.
Karen Woodall 
The video is really helpful – and the part about getting children to tell their story in non verbal ways reminds me that my stepson once sent a card to his Dad where he had drawn his Dad being eaten by a huge alligator, head first, whilst his Mum and Grandma stood by and watched.
Thank you.
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using a psychoanalytical approach to analysing that picture, it tells the whole story doesn’t it. The ‘alligator’ of mother and grandmother’s combined projection of aggression is eating daddy….. these children tell us the story of the trauma they are suffering if we listen properly. The tragedy for these children is that no-one listens properly to what they are saying.
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He told it in words too – but the right people chose not to listen/act.
He said in person to his Dad “I’m going to get it in the neck (for seeing you)” and wrote in a text (shown to the Guardian) ‘You have no idea how hard it is. You don’t even know the half of it”.
In a voicemail (which we still have) he pleaded with his Dad in a cold dead voice not to tell people his mother had hit him. He said it was ‘his fault’ – he’d been ‘very very naughty’, and he ‘deserved it’. In reality he’d come back from a camping trip with his Dad (the last one he ever went on) in a good mood, and was swiftly and harshly punished.
The evidence of this didn’t make any difference.
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