In reading some of the online campaigning around the family courts these days, you would be forgiven for thinking that all fathers are dangerous to their children after separation and all mothers are victims who are simply protecting their children when they cut off contact.
Alternatively, you would be forgiven for thinking that all fathers are victims of parental alienation and all mothers are making false allegations of domestic abuse.
In the midst of this you might draw the conclusion that anyone who works with alienated children is a hero or a villain depending on which side of this particular split narrative you are standing on.
Parental rights after family separation are right back on the agenda in the UK and once again, the lack of attention paid to the needs of children is simply the unintended consequences of a game of ideological football.
Depending on which side of the campaign trail you find yourself on, the issue of children’s rejection of a parent after family separation is either
a) always something children do because the rejected parent has caused it
or
b) always something children do because the aligned parent caused it.
In reality, a child’s outright rejection of a parent after family separation is something that children do because of the dynamics they are surrounded by and there is more than enough evidence outside of Gardner’s theory of parental alienation, to show that these dynamics are the very definition of coercive control of the child.
At the heart of the problem of a child’s rejection of a parent after family separation, when the child is displaying psychological splitting, is a pathological alignment with a parent who is causing, either in the conscious or unconscious (inter-psychic*) relationship, an abandonment threat. This threat, which conveys to the child that the parent either cannot or will not cope if the child is not available to regulate the parental anxiety, causes the child to hyper align with that parent.
Unlike overt forms of emotional abuse, such as denigration or terrorization of the child, boundary dissolution takes more covert forms that may be veiled under a guise of parental solicitude, effusive warmth, and camaraderie. Nonetheless, (…) the burden of meeting the emotional needs of the parent interferes with the child’s progress through development.’
Kerig, P. K. (2005). Implications of parent-child boundary dissolution for developmental psychopathology: Who is the parent and who is the child? New York: Haworth Press.
The UK government’s definition of coercive control includes the following statement –
Controlling behaviour is a range of acts designed to make a person subordinate and/or dependent by isolating them from sources of support, exploiting their resources and capacities for personal gain, depriving them of the means needed for independence, resistance and escape and regulating their everyday behaviour
A child who is already subordinate and entirely dependent upon their parents is, in the case of alienation, isolated from all forms of support other than those which are approved of by the parent who is causing the problem. A child is deprived of obtaining independence and cannot resist or escape from the parent who is influencing them. The child’s behaviour is regulated by the influencing parent when they are drawn into compulsive caregiving via boundary dissolution.
An alienated child therefore, is a child who is experiencing coercive control in their absolute dependence upon a parent who is causing the child to feel anxiety about being abandoned. This threat need not be overt but can be a simple conveyance of disapproval via the withdrawal of affection should the child fail to uphold the alignment with parental wishes and feelings.
This subtle but powerful dynamic, is seen in many cases of alienation. It causes self alienation in the child as a primary condition (self alienation is the creation of a false self which is utilised as a protective defence against the incursion into the child’s integral sense of self by the influencing parent).
In coercive control however, is where matters become complicated, because it is the case that mothers and fathers alienate their children differently.
Fathers alienate in a pattern of coercive control which we are more readily able to recognise because it is the pattern we are used to being told about. Children identify with their aggressive fathers and reject their mothers because they are unable to manage their feelings of fear of their father and so in order to keep themselves safely attached to an aggressive father, they split off and deny the part of the self which is identified with their mother which makes rejecting her whilst loving the aggressive father possible.
Mothers on the other hand, alienate their children via a pattern of coercive control behaviours which violate the child’s intra-psychic boundaries, invading the child’s internal landscape and threatening the child with abandonment. In such circumstances, children identify with their boundary violating mothers and split off and deny the part of the self which is identified with their father, which makes rejecting him, whilst loving the boundary violating mother possible.
The defence in both circumstances is splitting of the self which is projected onto the parents, which is the underlying dynamic seen in alienation.
In actual cases of domestic abuse splitting is not seen and children are likely to have to be protected against the abusive parent because they will still want to see them.
In actual cases of alienation, splitting is seen and children reject a parent outright showing little or no empathy towards the rejected parent.
Those who do this work understand this difference , meaning that children whose parents have been abusive to them, are not routinely sent to be with those parents, despite the misinformation which attempts to persuade the outside world otherwise.
The silencing of alienated children through the parental rights fight is a serious problem which causes children to remain trapped in a bell jar of the influencing parent’s psychological issues. The efforts to hide this reality in the UK, are quickening, with a ramping up of ideological warfare and an accompanying poisonous rhetoric.
Fortunately, alongside the escalating misinformation, a steady line is being plottedwhich establishes the reality of what alienation is, what it does to children and how it should be dealt with before it is entrenched. is increasingly visible.
Children who have been silenced for too long, in the face of the return of parental rights wars, require those who understand, to keep on giving voice to their experience.
*inter-psychic, meaning between two minds.
Understanding Induced Psychological Splitting in Children of Divorce and Separation – A Two Hour Online Seminar With Karen Woodall
August 6 2020 at 4pm GMT
The underlying issue seen in parental alienation is the defence of psychological splitting. This is a reflexive defence in a child which comes into play when the dynamics around the child are impossible for the child to cope with.
Induced psychological splitting causes the child to become alienated first from their own control over their sense of self, the results of this are denial and projection onto the parents of the split sense of self.
Understanding how children behave when they are psychologically splitting is important because it enables you to understand how to respond to them. What seem like strange behaviours, are actually easy to recognise and respond to when the defence is recognised.
Helping children to integrate the parts of the self which they have split off and denied is a key part of their recovery.
Suitable for parents and practitioners, this introduction to understanding alienated children will cover –
- The dynamic of induced psychological splitting, its presentation in children and the recovery process
- A psychoanalytical analysis of the problem
- Therapeutic treatment of the problem using trauma informed practice
- An introduction to the benefits of therapeutic parenting for alienated children
£30 per place
This seminar will take place on ZOOM, you will be asked for your name and email address on booking.
A ZOOM link will be sent to you the day before the seminar takes place.
Karen Woodall - Psychotherapist, Writer, Researcher, Trainer 
Why is the psychology of the behaviour of an alienating parent given such credence when the family courts, lawyers and other Services don’t for one minute raise ANY concerns about the severe impact on the massive psychological abuse on the children and alienated parent…The harsh reality is the law needs to include Parental Alienation within the law to ensure PA is dealt with including severe repercussions for the CAFCAS SW, rogue lawyers and associated magistrates who deliberately destroy lives by protecting the alienating parent. There also needs to be a massive education programme covering all judiciary, schools and SW training. The aim must always be to protect the children and not criminalise the targeted parent.
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Why? (Pete Burtenshaw)
I was on the receiving end of my husband’s (successful) attempts to target me and then alienate me and even I didn’t get what was going on (other than knowing I was being excluded from our family of three) for 20 years, so nothing, absolutely nothing, surprises me.
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Surely your alienation could have been avoided if PA was made a criminal offence and treated as child abuse. You were the target parent. You and your children were failed by a rotten system. Wouldn’t you wish for PA to be illegal or are you saying why should PA be made a criminal offence. If you are saying this, you obviously aren’t bothered about your Alienation. Or am I totally missing your point?
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Pete Burtenshaw
Mine personally? (did you mean me?)
The system didn’t actually ‘fail’ me because we were never IN the system and that’s because I didn’t recognise (until I left him five years ago) what was going on, it was so utterly beyond my comprehension I was lost for words to describe it. Therefore, if you meant me, I think you’ve missed my point.
The link to this article was posted on PASG site and I think it just about covers the problem I had in realising what was happening until it was too late to do anything about it. You can’t actually ask for help if you don’t know/recognise what’s going on in the first place…… I found the article interesting anyway : https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/resolution-not-conflict/202006/prevention-parental-alienation
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Willow, I think your angry with the wrong person. I may have totally missed your point because you never made the point. We are all victims of PA and the perps are clever in their narcissist behaviour regardless of gender. Regardless if your ‘in the system’ or not, we are all victims of a rotten corrupt system who discriminates towards one gender or the other – in my jurisdiction the fathers are the target parent. Until Parental Alienation is written in law nothing will change . The children of the rotten system will be dysfunctional with MH issues going into teenage years and adulthood..surely the question is who should be made responsible for the victims the system or the parents?
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[image: image.png] Children need 2 parents, stop parent alienation.
Op zo 28 jun. 2020 om 16:39 schreef Karen Woodall :
> karenwoodall posted: “In reading some of the online campaigning around the > family courts these days, you would be forgiven for thinking that all > fathers are dangerous to their children after separation and all mothers > are victims who are simply protecting their children when ” >
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Pete I really wasn’t angry. I think both you and I are as confused as each other re our posts above and you are right, the only point I was originally making was that even though I lived it for 20 years as a targeted parent (and for the past six years as a fully alienated parent) nothing at all in the PA world surprises me. My original ‘why’ was simply repeating your first why (as in ‘Why is the psychology of the behaviour of an alienating parent given such credence …’.) Just goes to prove how the written word can be misinterpreted I guess. The article was still interesting.
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Hi Willow, sincere apologies for my misunderstanding..We have/are living with PA. Defensive, been through one of the worst hell and life changing experiences any child, parent or grandparent can be a victims of. The big lie is perpetrated by and glorified by those who destroy lives, CAFCASS in the UK and FPAS here in Guernsey. These lowest of the lowest in human life along with crooked psychologists and lawyers who all sell their soul for a wonderful wealthy life and give their respective professions a bad name, peddle the biggest piece of propaganda since the nazis ‘Arbeit macht frei’ slogan used on the front gates of Auschwitz and that is the slogan all Alienated victims here being peddled by these advocates of evil – ‘Its all about the children’. We know this is not the case because the childs voice is NEVER heard unless the childs minds been completely alienated by the perpetrator ing parent or SW and lawyers. I strongly suspect my sm accounts have been literally hacked by a hateful and devious lawyer in partnership with my ex…I’m powerless to act..I’m of the wrong gender, sexuality and colour to be treated with human rights..this is not a racist or homophobic comment but a comment of realism of the injustices ALL fathers here who find themselves fighting to see their children. Human rights are regularly breached and Penal Notices are used to imprison fathers who have the guts to challenge the rotten, shocking corrupt family court system here in Guernsey…
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No need to apologise (smiley face)
(as for “the child’s voice is never heard”…………. it wouldn’t have helped me in the slightest if my daughter HAD been listened to in any court as she – from age 15 onwards – spoke entirely with her dad’s voice and he really didn’t like me much or want me in her life. They spoke with one voice, in total agreement and wiped out everything good.)
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I have been the targeted parent for the past year. I barely recognise the child that talks about me in such hateful terms to SW and Cafcass. I am in court end of this month presenting evidence that the hateful characature she is presenting of me is simply not born out by our previous relationship witnessed through our texts, her friends’ parents, our lodgers etc. I have no idea how it will go. There needs to be a child led approach and parental alienation advocates need to be a lot more on board with the fact that very often a child will not want to see a violent or controlling parent. Likewise, women’s orgs need to be on board with the fact that removing the child from contact with an otherwise loving parent is coercive control and therefore domestic abuse against both the child and other parent. The polarisation is indeed not helpful but Fathers rights groups need to recognise that they are hiding a lot of domestic abusers in their midst. I was shocked at the misogynistic and abusive language that is used to describe women as a class of people. Can they not see how this makes them look like schills for abusive men? I have not seen men characterised as a whole group in this kind of way, or campaigns launched against individual men in the way that father’s rights groups go after individual women accused of domestic violence, sometimes to the point they commit suicide. It makes those groups look very pro abuse.
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HI Vicki, It is interesting to read your commentary because it seems that there is an increasing desire to portray people who do this work as not understanding that children do not want to see a violent and controlling father. That is very far from the truth in terms of those who do this work. I think what you are illustrating in your comment is the populist ideas that are being argued by campaign groups who want you to believe that people who do this work regularly send children to violent and abusive fathers, it is simply untrue. For a start, the Judge is the person who makes the decision about what should happen. This comes after a hearing in which anyone who is working in the case is cross examined and often cross examined for hours at a time. This reality is currently being fogged by campaigners who want you to believe that it is someone like me who causes that to happen it isn’t. The Judge decides what should happen. Secondly, when cases are assessed, they are done so very carefully to ensure that anyone who is claiming alienation falsely, is identified. We spend up to thirty hours on assessment and those of us who do this work are trained to understand how a child who has witnessed abuse behaves and how a child who is being alienated behaves. Differentiation is very important and I have in my time, said that a claim of alienation is false because my core concern is the child and if a child is not alienated but is rejecting because of something else, that is what I will say.
To go to your point about how men talk about women, I don’t know what context you are referring to so I cannot comment but if you are talking about facebook groups or other online places, I have seen men being vicious about women and women being vicious about men and men and women being vicious together about other people. Those places are unhelpful in terms of how vulnerable people are supported.
I have seen women’s groups go after men and women go after women – I see women going after me with the kind of vicious behaviour that is at times frightening to me.
The women’s rights lobby is currently trying to establish the idea that mothers who have been alienated have been co-opted by fathers groups to create the idea that PA is gender neutral. The idea is to establish alienation as a form of domestic violence by proxy – which really means that all mothers who are alienated are victims of abusive fathers and all fathers who are alienated are abusive fathers. It is an ideological belief system which doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
Alienation is defensive splitting in children, it occurs when a child is pressured into an impossible position and it is harmful to the child over their lifetime. It is caused by fathers And by mothers, although fathers are more likely to cause it using overt strategies of control and mothers by covert strategies of control.
The campaigns for and against are full of people who are suffering and the side taking is symptomatic of splitting in which the world always has to be divided into good and evil.
Real life isn’t like that. Healthy people do not see the world like that. Healthy people are able to see that men and women do good things and bad things, they are able to hold ambivalence and they do not split off, deny and project their shadow selves at others – which is what you are describing. Coming at this issue from a parental rights perspective doesn’t help the child. It is the child who carries the lifelong impact of alienation.
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Im not sure a psychoanalytic analysis is of much use when talking about social hierarchy based violence such as sexism, racism or homophobia. Yes there are individually good and bad men and women, and alongside that there are men and women that discriminate and use violence on the basis of someone being female, Jewish, black, disabled, homosexual etc. I happen to have experienced directly sexist violence in the home and that is what I believe domestic abuse is largely based on. Parental alienation is about controlling the children as a way of either punishing the other parent, fighting back against the other parent’s abuse using the child as a weapon or to get the other parent into a subordinate position in the home. I do not see all men as bad or all women as good, but going through family court has been an object lesson in how the courts cover up male violence against women to support a deeply hierarchical system that does not recognise human rights legislation, civil rights and criminal law. To pretend that women haven’t suffered systemic discrimination such as being excluded from education, positions in the church, equal pay etc etc etc and that domestic violence isnt an extension of that male control is simply disengenuous to my mind. I definitely see my child as a victim of her father’s manipulative sexism, but I also see myself as one too. I have lost four teeth through gum infections due to stress at being separated from my child, am sleeping four hours a night and spent over £20,000 dealing with his lies and seen them supported by the magistrates, social workers and cafcass who would all rather look away from evidence from the likes of doctors, hospitals, my daughter’s headmaster etc than admit his latest alienation is just an extension of 17 years of sexist abuse. Posting about this has led to me being called a bitch and c’nt on various fathers and men’s dv websites which is what makes me think that most men’s groups lack any understanding of human rights legislation.
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I think the problem you have is that you are trying to apply an ideological stance to a relational problem and that simply replicates the problem you are trying to resolve but inverts it.
I did not say that psychoanalysis resolves the social hierarchy problem but then I don’t see the world through the lens you see it through either so we are speaking very different languages and using an interpreter which does not work for either of us. I just don’t see or experience the world as you do and I have lived through violence in the home, alienation, single parenthood and bringing up a child on my own for some years.
The problem you have is that your child is a victim of her father’s coercive control and presumably this has caused splitting in that she is rejecting you. This may feel like it is linked to 17 years of sexist abuse in a sexist system but in truth it is not, it is about his coercive control and her response to that.
Domestic abuse is often characterised as being about patriarchal power over women and that is how it is understood by many women (and men), but it is not the way that it is understood by every woman (and man) in the world.
I don’t know what your daughter’s alignment and rejection behaviour looks like – is she completely rejecting of you? Is she completely aligned with her father’s view of you?
Who is pretending that women haven’t suffered from discrimination over the years? I have never pretended that and my work is not focused on that either. Women have suffered discrimination but to believe that this means that all fathers and all men are privileged because of this is simply not based in reality.
I am sad to hear that you have suffered so badly and I hope that posting on here will help you to see that there are some men who also suffer badly as you are suffering from the loss of their child. Those men do not represent the men who call you names and dismiss you and they do not represent men’s groups either.
There is a systemic problem in the way that some services approach the family when it separates and people do swing one way or the other in terms of the split narrative – either all women are suffering or all men are suffering for example.
The truth lies in between those things and in individual experiences.
One of the biggest problems with the ideological stance on domestic abuse is that it is framed around destruction of trust between men and women and on removing the inter-dependency. It teaches that all men are like that so all women must band together to fight those men.
I think that when you attribute domestic violence to systemic sexism you give violent men excuses for their behaviours and you simply dump all men in the same boat and tell them that they are trash because they are privileged. That does nothing to change men and simply holds you in the split state of mind.
I am sorry that CAFCASS cannot see the alienation – it is a problem that each person you encounter in CAFCASS is an individual officer and that there is no uniform training.
I don’t think men’s groups lack understanding of human rights legislation any more than women’s groups do – I just think they are all unsafe places for vulnerable people to get help.
I hope you get the help that you need.
K
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I dont think all men are sexist but I do see sexism as teaching men who gets to control who in relationship to one another, the same as with racism. Not all men take advantage of that just as not all white people are racist, but plenty have deep seated prejudices that operate on a sub conscious level and women are as susceptible to those prejudices as men. I think that mens groups would do well to deal with the misogynists amongst them. I dont think women’s groups have the same level of male hating, they tend to focus on the systems of men rather than men themselves, but there are exceptions. Having an ideological stance as you put it is no different from having an analytical stance such as psychoanalytic beliefs – terms such as splitting are no different from terms such as Duluth model, we all see the world through our own prisms of beliefs. My daughter has aligned with the person she sees as intimidating and who threatens to withdraw love if she disobeys him by loving me. She also sees who is supported and therefore who is safer to align with regarding professional services. Cafcass and social services both have a contact at all costs mentality which tends to lean towards hiding male violence as a way of ensuring violent fathers do not lose control of the family unit, even when separated. This was highlighted in last week’s MoJ report into the culture of family courts. I do see PA as a real form of child abuse and parental abuse and argue the same on women’s groups who would throw the baby out with the bathwater, but would also wish that PA groups would also see that a child or parent that has suffered hierarchical violence in the home has every right to reject a parent wishing to subsume another living person’s rights to be a separate soul.
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I disagree with your analysis that terms such as splitting are the same as the Duluth model. One is a psychoanalytical term which is framed around a theory of childhood development, a tested and refined theory which has been utilised for many years to heal, the other is a model of understanding based upon an ideological idea of patriarchy, which is simply a political framework. The Duluth model teaches people to believe something, psychoanalysis helps people to heal something.
I disagree also that there is a contact at all costs culture – are you saying that CAFCASS support contact with you at all costs? Because for the contact at all costs theory to be true, it would have to apply to you too.
The flaw in your argument that CAFCASS lean towards hiding male violence to ensure that violent men do not lose contact is the number of men who lose contact based on the allegations made against them both found in court to be true and otherwise.
If your argument that children who have suffered violence in the home have every right to reject a parent but that is not listened to by PA groups, were true, you would need to explain how children’s splitting behaviours are caused by violence in the home.
You can’t have it all ways around – either the child who has been witness to abuse uses splitting as a defence against that (and none of the research evidence points to that anywhere in the world) or the child who is using splitting is suffering alienation (and all the research evidence points to that). I am aware that both sides of this particular coin accuse the other of cherry picking research but from clinical experience in working with children affected by witnessing dv and children experiencing alienation, the reality is that children witnessing dv do not behave like children suffering from alienation. Therein is the difference.
As for not the same kind of man hating, well the groups I have been witness to in the past have had the same as those men’s groups.
Alienation of children is caused by the pressure from a mother or a father, either overtly or covertly (fathers likely to be overt control, mothers likely to be covert). It is caused by boundary breaches and violations, cross generational dysfunctional relationships and power and control dynamics. In short, relational issues not ideological and remedying these will come from relational interventions not trying to shoe horn the issue into a manufactured social and political model.
We do see the world through different eyes and perhaps we always will and so it is best to end this conversation here.
I wish you well. My best advice to you is to stop making the argument on face book groups and online, all of which can be deeply toxic spaces.
Thank you for sharing and I hope you get the help that you need.
K
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You are not very open to seeing the parallels between your belief in psychoanalysis and others belief that women and children get hit by men due to a system of hatred/oppression, not just a series of random men making random choices. Ok, lets leave it there.
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I am not open at all to the parallels Vicky, because I don’t see life through the lenses you are wearing. There are no parallels between what heals someone to live a full and free life and what is designed to inculcate a belief system based upon splitting.
Men hit women because they have learned to behave badly towards women. They hit them because the frontal lobe development is impaired and because they are likely to have grown up in a violent home.
Women hit men for pretty much the same reason. Because men are heavier and bigger however, women get hurt more.
The red stockings of New York in their statement which launched second wave feminism said this –
Women are an oppressed class. Our oppression is total, affecting every facet of our lives. We are exploited as sex objects, breeders, domestic servants, and cheap labor. We are considered inferior beings, whose only purpose is to enhance men’s lives. Our humanity is denied. Our prescribed behavior is enforced by the threat of physical violence.
Because we have lived so intimately with our oppressors, in isolation from each other, we have been kept from seeing our personal suffering as a political condition. This creates the illusion that a woman’s relationship with her man is a matter of interplay between two unique personalities, and can be worked out individually. In reality, every such relationship is a class relationship, and the conflicts between individual men and women are political conflicts that can only be solved collectively.
This is a manifesto for living which inculcates splitting as a state of mind. I don’t believe in it and I don’t live it. It is political not psychological.
You don’t have to agree with me. I don’t agree with you, it doesn’t demean or diminish you in my eyes, I simply don’t agree with you.
So yes, let’s leave it there and I wish you well on your journey.
K
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Karen, do you see racist, homophobic or anti semeitic violence as just a series of random attacks that just happen to poc, gay or jewish people despite their colour, religion sexuality rather than because of it?
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I see people who have suffered in their lives and whose brain development has been interrupted by trauma, hurting other people that they believe are weaker than they are or who hold for them the projection of the split off and denied self.
I do not see life through the lens of marxist based ideology, life through my eyes, is not a hierarchy of oppression and remedying harm to others does not come from inverting that theoretical hierarchy and putting those believed to be most oppressed in charge of the world.
Doing good in the world through my eyes, means helping others who have been harmed and interrupting inter-generational trauma, understanding it and helping to heal it.
Those who believe differently are absolutely free to believe what they want to believe but I don’t need that to be imposed upon me or others and I don’t need negative projections which tell me that I am wrong if I don’t believe what others believe.
Life is about relationships for me, the past, present and future, it is about being curious and interested in others and not imposing political ideology upon them.
I understand that for you, the ideological way of thinking works and that is absolutely fine by me – but it doesn’t work for me – is that fine by you?
I don’t mind what you think or feel about me, I just don’t really need to know it and I don’t need to argue about it.
Go well in your world.
K
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Not addressing or recognising social discrimination limits how much understanding one brings to the therapy room and can actually increase trauma. Sexism and racism are all forms of pretty radical social splitting – so to not recognise that means that you are missing a major cause of trauma and may indeed be inflicting it yourself. This denial of sexism is what makes the PA lobby so unhelpful to women survivors of male violence, in much the same way as female deniers of PA are not helpful either … dont forget that Freud et al did some pretty hideous rewriting of his female patients sexual abuse in order to make his theories more socially acceptable. Psychotherapy is as much a part of a political system as anything else
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How do you know that I do not address or recognise social discrimination Vicki? Do you assume that because I do not see the world through the same lens as you that I am automatically racist/sexist/homophobic? Where does that assumption come from?
It comes from the belief system which requires its adherents to behave and belief the same things as those who introduced it. It does not allow for individual thought – as the red stockings told us, there is no individual thinking in this system, all must act collectively. If you believe and behave, you are a good person, if you do not believe or behave, you are a bad person. You can only be for equality if you are acting from within this framework.
It is an untruth, a system imposed upon others which demands adherence to a particular set of beliefs. If you do not adhere, you are condemned.
You have no idea how social discrimination is addressed by the family separation clinic, you have no knowledge of the work that is done free of charge for those who cannot afford our services and how those who can pay do so in order that we give services at low cost.
You also have no idea how many mothers have received their children back in residence transfer or otherwise through the work that we do.
In addition you have no idea that we work with as many mothers as fathers.
And yet you feel free to make assumptions based on the fact that I do not believe in the same system as you.
What does that say to me about you? It says that unless I believe in your system and conform to your system of belief, you will feel free to judge and denounce my work. In which case I would generally say to someone in this position that they would be better off finding someone who shares their belief so that you can work in the system you want to work in and reflect back and forth within that system, how wrong everyone else is. It won’t change where you get to or change your internal reality, but it will make you feel empowered in being able to argue with others that the systems ‘out there’ are against you.
Psychoanalysis is so much more than Freud and has been refined by women as well as men. If you read what I write you will find that I refer to Ferenczi not Freud, Ferenczi who stood up to Freud on the subject of sexual abuse and who was cast out by Freud because of it but who left a legacy of important knowledge and thinking about human relationships which are relevant in this field. Psychotherapy sits within many different political systems, not simply the one that you believe is operative in the world, many of those systems bear no relationship whatsoever to your belief system.
Sexism and racism are definitely about denial and projection, both splitting behaviours and I prefer to look at all relationships from that perspective. That way true liberation from imposed external belief systems and the shackles of internalised splitting is found.
Shall we stop there now – it must be clear to you by now that we are not getting anywhere in terms of changing each other’s mindsets. You want to remain in your belief system, I understand that belief system extremely well but I do not want to take it up again because I don’t want to live a blinkered life anymore and I do not want those I help to live that life either.
Finally, if you have a few minutes – go and count up the numbers of comments from women on this site in the past six months – you will find far more women being helped here than men. All alienated, all finding their strength and their feet and their voice in the world, all without having to believe in a system.
That’s called freedom.
Go well. Karen
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Its because you didn’t acknowledge it in any of your replies. I was asking questions, not making assumptions. I’ll leave it here and I do see that you help women too. I’m not stating the kind of extreme position you are projecting on to me. I’ll leave Pete to his own comments thanks
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I am not sure that I see your comments in the same way that you do Vicki, but then you don’t see mine in the same way either. We occupy different universes. Thanks for acknowledging that we help women too, that is an important point often very much overlooked by the campaign groups who share the same belief system as you. Take care, go well. K
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Your very kind Vickie..just remember PA & DV impacts on both genders and is perpetrated by both genders.. I wish you the very very best and hope the future is positive for you..
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Karen, not wishing to become embroiled in the exchange of posts between yourself and Vicki, I fully support your posts. I’m sick to death of the utra feminist agenda all men are wife beaters and child abusers. This type of false allegations are constantly being used by mothers in the family court system. Its criminal how they get away with such perjury. Speaking from experience the abuser of men and children have been women. Yes there are rotten abusive men but women are gradually becoming the perpetrator of such heinous behaviour. The big difference is the abusive women are very very clever at using their gender to escape justice. So much for equality…
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Vicki, you basically cover the same abuse of a an alienated Male here in Guernsey. Of course I veiw PA being an extension of the control by the ex once the partnership is no longer operational. It matters not on the gender of the perpetrator the DV is being continued. I see PA towards the child/dren being a form of child abuse. Both DV and the child abuse is fully endorsed, enforced and sanctioned by the system- all of them are perpetrators of injustices on an pandemic basis. Like many victims of PA you have been truly damaged by your ex and this continues. May I point out not all men are perpetrators of DV or PA..I pointed out in my original post here in Guernsey males are the target parent not females.
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Hi Vicki, my heart goes out to you. I truly truly wish you well in court..Your correct on why a child can be psychologically abused in such a way and nothing is done to cleanse such innocent minds. Sadly the MH epidemic of the future is already in the making securing jobs and bank balances of SW and quack psychologists and lawyers. Dysfunctional children of today are the customers of the family courts tomorrow. I am alienated father of near on 10 years. Here in Guernsey fathers are the target parent. This gender discrimination towards fathers does not mean I am misogynistic in any way. I respect women but challenge those who are advocates of mysandry here in the island. We have a group of ultra feminists/femimen in government who declare ‘men get everything they deserve’. These are people of power. These are people who control the laws which destroy the human rights of both fathers and children on a daily basis. Our very own FPAS your CAFCASS are truly the epitome of evil. It just so happens 98% are women. The males are no better. All are from the UK. The worst of the worst. If the Head of FPAS are removed they are then free to establish consultation posts under their married name to not only continue to destroy fathers and childrens lives here in Guernsey but also continue to practice their dark art in UK family courts..You really could not make this up..Interestingly all Heads of our FPAS and Child Services are women…All despise and hate men…not my words but theirs…The Bailiwick have no sex offenders register and is known as being easy on sex offenders with those in the upper echelons of Guernsey, masons etc are very very rarely ever prosecuted but protected…if one is taken to court a person who is found guilty DIC will face more of a sentence then a well connected person who is found with thousands of disgusting images on their computers. One professional of such a disgusting crime had over 30 character references in his support in court…welcome to Guernsey..The chocolate box cover mentality island..
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