Boundary Holding in the Face of Rejection of Fathers by Their Children, (Alienation) Caused by Enmeshing Mothers

This post is about fathers and the ways in which they are pushed to the margins of their children’s lives in divorce and separation when mothers assume a gatekeeping role with children due to enmeshment or other behaviours which are controlling. It follows on from my post last week about how mothers are rejected due to coercive control strategies by fathers.

Background

It is impossible to write such a blog without making reference to feminism. This is because feminism is an ideological belief system which itself is based upon splitting the world into good women and bad men and one of the reasons why so many men are pushed to the margins of their children’s lives is the manner in which mothers control their relationships with children and the way in which feminist narratives control the space around family separation. In the feminist belief system, all women are born disadvantaged because of ‘patriarchy’ which feminists believe advantages men in all strata of society. Feminism has had a powerful influence on British social policy,over the years driving behaviours in separating parents in ways which are designed to put power and control over children into the hands of mothers. Having written extensively on the subject of feminism and its influence on British Social Policy, I do not intend to revisit that background here but will simply say that in deconstructing the social policy which governs post separation family life in the UK, it is clear that there has been, a built in bias towards mothers having sole control and care for children, whilst fathers have been regarded as being responsible for paying for them. Whilst there has been a shift towards greater expectations of shared care since the turn of the century, the pushback from domestic abuse and family court campaign groups in the last decade, has been focused upon restoring control over children to mothers.

These campaigns drive the expectation of mothers that they will be in control of children after separation, meaning resistance to sharing care of children is often high. Many mothers for example, who might have ordinarily shared care if the support for that been present in society, will resist that and move to a position where they expect to be in sole charge of care arrangements. This is confusing for many fathers, as the dissonance between the struggle to escape stereotypical roles and the demand to hold onto them, plays itself out in post separation arrangements.

Latterly, the campaigns around the family courts, which are interwoven between the UK and USA, are seeking to shift the narrative back to the time when women had complete control over children and men had to prove that they were safe enough to be parents post divorce or separation. These campaigns are all based upon the idea that all men are a risk to children, creating the idea of maternal gatekeeping being about child protection.

This drive, to once again embed maternal gatekeeping into policy, is underpinned by two distinct strategies –

a) to portray all cases which enter into the family court as being about domestic abuse (in some situations even the act of seeking adjudication over child arrangments is portrayed as abuse)

and

b) to seek to eliminate evidence of maternal harm of children by claiming that normal mothering is pathologised in the family courts.

In the shadow of that drive, which also seeks to establish the idea that the manipulation of children is only done by fathers via coercive control and that children’s voices are being routinely silenced, fathers who are rejected by their children are routinely labelled perpetrators and abusers. Anyone who works with children in these circumstances, is targeted for online lies, manipulation and /or abuse. In such a toxic arena, maternal gatekeeping and the problematic behaviours seen by mothers, are reframed as normal mothering when it is anything but. Little wonder so many fathers struggle when they are rejected by their children. like their female counterparts, rejected fathers deal with the immense negative transference from the ideological splitting which positions them as dangerous simply because they exist. Whilst rejected mothers are a nuisance in this feminist system, because they are difficult to explain (feminist theory would position them as experiencing the unintended consequences of a drive to control social policy in favour of mothers), there is now some acceptance that manipulation of children exists but only by fathers who must remain the real demons in this narrative.

Enmeshment

There is a current trope which seeks to claim that a close and loving bond with a child is enmeshment. This is another attempt to reframe reality by intimating that there is something untoward happening in the family courts. This is a tried and tested tactic of women’s rights campaigners and the aim is to prevent any focus by the Courts, on behaviours seen in mothers which are recognised in the psychological literature as being harmful. This approach of subsuming reality into a false premise, is a long standing campaign strategy seen in feminist control of social policy in the UK and USA. The reality is that in the family courts, behaviours in mothers which are recognised by psychologists and psychiatrists as harmful, include enmeshment which is considered to be a pathological violation of a child’s sense of self. The definition of enmeshment by the APA is –

enmeshment n. a condition in which two or more people, typically family members, are involved in each other’s activities and personal relationships to an excessive degree, thus limiting or precluding healthy interaction and compromising individual autonomy and identity.

Fathers who are rejected by their children are likely to see enmeshment between mothers and children in which the child’s developing sense of self is restricted by the projection of the mother’s unresolved psychological issues onto the child. In such circumstances the child is often controlled by the mother’s anxieties from a very early age, growing within a set of narrowly defined boundaries of what is acceptable to the mother and what is not. Such fathers are often silenced from the outset of their efforts to parent, finding themselves on the outside of the family unit, which is comprised of mother and children who are all bound together as if they are friends, confidantes or otherwise of equal status. In some circumstances, this is supported as being a healthy way out of domestic abuse situations by academics.

Boundaries

Boundary holding by fathers who are trying to care for children in these circumstances is often regarded as being abusive in itself. For example some fathers find that even wanting to see their children regularly is considered to be controlling, whilst others who are trying to hang on to relationships with their children despite dwindling time together, see their children internalising the idea that their fathers are abusing them just for wanting to see them. This is an impossible situation for fathers, many of whom are simply unable to address the tsunami of psychological pressure placed upon their children who enter into the split state of mind easily, precisely because they have grown up with the idea that their mother is wholly good and their father is at best tolerated but at worst a thoroughly bad person.

The issue facing children who are enmeshed with their mothers however, is not actually their relationship with their father but their relationship with their own sense of developing self, which is intruded upon by their mother to the degree that the violation itself feels warm and cosy, teaching the child that this is ‘real love’. In the shadow of that, father care, which is more boundaried and hierarchical (the father is the parent to the child), feels cold and uncomfortable. ‘It’s just not the same with dad‘ is a phrase I have heard many times over in situations where children are being loved and cared for effectively by their fathers but whose ability to accept that love and attention, is blocked by their mother having overwhelmed their internal boundaries at an earlier stage in life. The harm which is caused to children who are enmeshed with their mothers is well documented in the psychological literature, and is often referred to as emotional incest, without doubt many of these children are carefully groomed to believe that meeting their mother’s needs is how to maintain a loving bond.

Protecting Children

As a psychotherapist, I work with adult children who are victims of this form of abuse and it is clear in clinical practice that it causes distinct and significant patterns of harm which impact over the lifetime. One of the forms of harm which is seen, is the child’s inability to know their own mind or feel their own feelings because of the overshadowing of their experience by enmeshing mothers. In such circumstances, children grow to adulthood becoming a reflection of their mother’s unresolved issues. Having been unable to separate herself from early relationships, such a mother projects upon her children, the expectation that they will take care of her own undifferentiated needs, leading to inter-generational enmeshed families who exclude those who do not fit the behavioural requirement to coalesce around unresolved issues in the family system.

For fathers whose first conscious awareness that they have entered into such a family system often comes during and after family separation, the loss of their children is painful and frustrating because it may occur gradually and systemically as each child withdraws slowly from a relationship with them. Likening this to losing children overboard on a sinking ship one by one, fathers grieve the loss of their children’s right to a healthy sense of self as they watch their children form personalities which mirror that of their enmeshing mother. Whilst this causes rejection of fathers, it is not caused by fathers but by the boundary violations and pathological patterns of emotional and psychological control which as Steve Miller told us, might look like love but which, in fact, is child abuse.

For fathers whose children are being seriously harmed by enmeshed and controlling relationships with their mothers, the family court is the only way to ameliorate the power that such a mother has to harm children. In this respect, cases of enmeshment are nothing to do with pathologising healtht mothering and everything to do with protecting children from harm so that they are free to live their own differentiated lives and grow up without unhealthy attachment maladaptations.

In this respect, the fathers who seek help from the courts to protect their children are not abusive at all, they are protective and seeking to provide for their children the healthy parenting they are being denied.

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Dear Reader,

When I write about the behaviours of parents who harm their children, I do so from the perspective of the health and wellbeing of the child. I write about the different ways that mothers and fathers influence their children, I do so to keep the focus on the child and to help others to understand that whilst mothers and fathers are influencing and mothers and fathers are rejected, the core harm that we are seeking to address is the emotional and psychological impact on the child.

It is a fact that mothers and fathers harm their children, the research shows that the perpetrator of child homicide is most likely to be a parent or step parent. Mothers and fathers feature in reports of harm to children, either alone or alongside step parents. Therefore, writing about the ways in which children of divorce and separation are harmed by parents, is NOT about being anti women or mothers, it is not about being pro father, it is about focusing upon the wellbeing of children and how the underlying harms, which cause children to reject a parent, are understood.

In doing this work over many years, I have been subjected to constant campaigns to misrepresent the work that I do as being pro father or men’s rights. I have been the subject of conspiracy theories, lies, defamation and attempts to interfere with my work with children from all sides of this debate. At times I have been alarmed by the lengths to which some of those who have carried out these campaigns will go to, at others simply aware that what I am experiencing is a mirror image of what some parents do to their children in an effort to turn them against their other parent. At all times I have been curious that the children in the centre of this trans-generational ideological battle for parental power and rights, have simply been ignored.

The psychological and emotional harm which is caused to children who are triangulated into adult matters is immense and it lasts a long time – for some it will last a lifetime. The boundary violations in enmeshment will interfere with a child’s developing sense of self, preventing self esteem, trust in the self and capacity to build healthy relationships. The control of children by psychologically (and physically) aggressive fathers, will cause similar outcomes. When I write about this it is because I want to help children to receive the protection from harm that they need, from their healthy parent and from those with the courage and determination to help. Children in divorce and separation, have been silenced for decades, their real experiences are buried underneath the proclamations of parental rights campaigners who purport to speak for children, when in fact they are simply seeking to amplify their own voices.

Those who try to stand up for children in the shadow of this are terrorised and silenced, driven away by complaints, harassment, threats and lies. If we let this go on however, we will return to a time when children were truly not seen and not heard, a time when their needs were bound into the rights of their parents and when they were expected to manage the world without help and as if they are not impacted at all.

Children are impacted by divorce and separation and some are deeply impacted, to such a degree that they suffer from psychological splitting and a range of attachment maladaptations which occur because they are coping the best way they can in an impossible situation. Children tell me that they do not want to reject a parent they love but they do so because they have to, because there is no other choice. Many children in recovery from splitting are clear in their understanding of their behaviours, some less so but all, when they are freed from the harmful control of a parent, are able to say that their rejection was about needing to please or placate or regulate a parent who had control over them to the degree where they had to conform.

I do not use feminist theory in my psychotherapy practice, I do not do so because it is unhelpful to the recovery journey of the child who has become alienated from their own sense of self and from one of their key object relationships. I do not use parental alienation theory either, because it is again, does not provide me with anything in the work to help the child recover from the core attachment maladaptations they have been forced to make.

What I use in my practice is a wide range of psychological literature to inform my understanding of what is happening to children and a range of psychotherapeutic literature to support my intervention with families both inside and outside of the family court system. When I work with the psychological literature, I see that for all the years since the change in divorce laws in 1973 in the UK and the USA, a fight has continued between adults about children’s responses to divorce and separation. That push/pull conflict, which in some ways mirrors parental behaviours in divorce, has kept many away from the reality of what is happening to children in the middle of this. My decision in 2019, to step out of the pushing and pulling and focus only on the lived experience of children of divorce and separation, has brought me closer than I ever could have hoped to the voices of those who have lived through the experience and who have lived, (some for decades) with the impact.

In moving closer to these children through clinical work and my research, I have come to understand that their needs are many and that their relationship with the parent they were once forced to reject, holds many of the answers to the questions that these children don’t even know how to ask. In my clinical practice with families, I now routinely assist parents in the rejected position to learn how to use therapeutic parenting strategies and how to understand the ways in which children of divorce and separation are maladapted in their attachments and relational world.

There is much work left to do to achieve the goal of a therapeutic model of intervention with children of divorce and separation, but in working directly with these children I move closer every day to being able to articulate and build a therapeutic framework to meet their needs. In doing so I am aware of the courage and capacity of children of divorce and separation, to carry on with life as if it were normal in the face of untold losses and psychological suffering. I now champion parents in the rejected position who are willing to learn therapeutic parenting because I know that it is in the relationship with that parent that children who have been induced into the psychologically split state of mind in childhood, can find an easier way home to their own integrated sense of self.

In writing about mothers who enmesh and fathers who are rejected, I am not writing from an anti mother or pro father perspective, just as last week I wasn’t writing from an anti father and pro mother perspective. I am writing from the perspective of children of divorce and separation, whose authentic voices have been silenced for decades and whose right to an unconscious experience of childhood has been routinely interrupted through triangulation into adult matters for far too long.

Next week I will write about coercive control and enmeshment from the perspective of the alienated child, to offer some insight into the reality of what it feels like to be under the control of a parent whose needs come first.