Karen Woodall – Psychotherapist, Writer, Researcher, Trainer

A comment from a mother about coercive control within family life, prompted me to think about the patterns of relational manipulation which are witnessed by children, which leads to them aligning with the perpetrator rather than the victim of control behaviours.

This article explores the way in which children internalise what they witness, leading to the outcome which is popularly referred to as parental alienation, but which I will refer to by the terms alignment and rejection which is caused by boundary dissolution in families where primitive defences are dominant. Using this analysis, I aim to show that by understanding the presentation from a psychological perspective, it will be easier for parents and practitioners to identify this dynamic. In addition, recognising how a child has internalised what they have witnessed and the impact of that on their future behaviour, leads to a strengthening of the efficacy of therapeutic and structural intervention, to protect these children and the parents they have been forced to reject.

Coercive Control

Coercive control is a criminal act in the UK and it applies to men and women, but because of the way in which coercive control has been identified by feminists as being part of a patriachal system it is usually asserted as being a tool of dominance by men against women – The Crown Prosecution Service states the following in relation to CC:

CPS Violence Against Women and Girls Strategy

The Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) Strategy provides an overarching framework for crimes identified as being primarily committed, but not exclusively, by men against women within a context of power and control.

There is a long list of behaviours which can be regarded as CC whether in a single incident or a pattern. These are –

“Repeated or continued behaviour that is controlling or coercive”

A pattern of CCB can be well established before a single incident is reported. In many cases the conduct might seem innocent – especially if considered in isolation of other incidents – and the victim may not be aware of, or be ready to acknowledge, abusive behaviour. The consideration of the cumulative impact of CCB and the pattern of behaviour within the context of the relationship is crucial. This approach will support the prosecutor to assess effectively whether a pattern of behaviour amounts to fear that violence will be carried out; or serious alarm or distress leading to a substantial adverse effect on usual day-to-day activities.

Building on examples within the Statutory Guidance Framework, relevant behaviour of the suspect can include:

• isolating a person from their friends and family
• depriving them of their basic needs
• monitoring their time
• monitoring a person via online communication tools or using spyware
• using digital systems such as smart devices or social media to coerce, control, or upset the victim including posting triggering material
• taking control over aspects of their everyday life, such as where they can go, who they can see, what to wear and when they can sleep – this can be intertwined with the suspect saying it is in their best interests, and ‘rewarding’ ‘good behaviour’ e.g. with gifts
• depriving them of access to support services, such as specialist support or medical services
• repeatedly putting them down such as telling them they are worthless
• enforcing rules and activity which humiliate, degrade or dehumanise the victim
• forcing the victim to take part in criminal activity such as shoplifting, neglect or abuse of children to encourage self-blame and prevent disclosure to authorities
• economic abuse including coerced debt, controlling spending/bank accounts/investments/mortgages/benefit payments
• controlling the ability to go to school or place of study
• taking wages, benefits or allowances
• threatening to hurt or kill
• threatening to harm a child
• threatening to reveal or publish private information
• threatening to hurt or physically harming a family pet
• assault
• physical intimidation e.g. blocking doors, clenching or shaking fists
• criminal damage (such as destruction of household goods)
• preventing a person from having access to transport or from working
• preventing a person from learning or using a language or making friends outside of their ethnic or cultural background
• family ‘dishonour’
• reputational damage
• sexual assault or threats of sexual assault
• reproductive coercion, including restricting a victim’s access to birth control, refusing to use a birth control method, forced pregnancy, forcing a victim to get an abortion, to undergo in vitro fertilisation (IVF) or other procedure, or denying access to such a procedure
• using substances such as alcohol or drugs to control a victim through dependency, or controlling their access to substances
• disclosure of sexual orientation
• disclosure of HIV status or other medical condition without consent
• limiting access to family, friends and finances
• withholding and/or destruction of the victim’s immigration documents, e.g. passports and visas
• threatening to place the victim in an institution against the victim’s will, e.g. care home, supported living facility, mental health facility, etc (particularly for disabled or elderly victims

Interpreting the Law in Family Court

In cases where children align with a parent, CC is a prevelant underlying factor and it has often been present in the adult relationship and witnessed by children who have internalised that pattern of behaviour. When analysing such cases therefore, it is essential to understand who has power in the family system and how that has been utilised prior to the ending of the adult relationship. This illuminates what the children have been exposed to over time, which enables an understanding of the psychological impact of that on children’s behaviour. When the law is interpreted by judges using Practice Direction 12J the guidance is clear –

The circumstances encompassed by the definition of ‘domestic abuse’ in PD12J fully recognise that coercive and/or controlling behaviour by one party may cause serious emotional and psychological harm to the other members of the family unit, whether or not there has been any actual episode of violence or sexual abuse. In short, a pattern of coercive and/or controlling behaviour can be as abusive as or more abusive than any particular factual incident that might be written down and
included in a schedule in court proceedings (see ‘Scott Schedules’ at paragraph 42 -50). It follows that the harm to a child in an abusive household is not limited to cases of actual
violence to the child or to the parent. A pattern of abusive behaviour is as relevant to the child as to the adult victim. The child can be harmed in any one or a combination of ways for example where the abusive behaviour:
i) Is directed against, or witnessed by, the child;
ii) Causes the victim of the abuse to be so frightened of
provoking an outburst or reaction from the perpetrator
that she/he is unable to give priority to the needs of
her/his child;
iii) Creates an atmosphere of fear and anxiety in the home
which is inimical to the welfare of the child;
iv) Risks inculcating, particularly in boys, a set of values
which involve treating women as being inferior to men.

Understanding the Psychology of Coercive Control

Coercive control is located in power asymmetry and in my experience in working with children who align with a parent and reject the other, the psychological aspect of this is, as well as physical, mental, emotional and financial strategies, must be understood. Whilst the most common image of someone who uses coercive control is a man who is threatening and overtly frightening, there are many forms of control which are coercive and not all of them are easy to identify, (given that men who are controlling can be charming and women who are controlling can appear warm and friendly).

The psychological aspect of coercive control is, therefore, in my clinical experience, the most powerful aspect of this dynamic and understanding what lies beneath the facade is vital. Victims of this type of psychological control may appear to be angry or frustrated or dissociated and lacking in warmth, this is because they are gradually dehumanised and stripped of their agency, belittled and humiliated in a strategy which has built into it, periods of deliberate rescue and attendance when the victim feels heard and supported and mistakes this for being loved. (Stark, 2007).

Coercive control behaviour involves narcissism, Machiavellianism, and primary and secondary psychopathy, all part of what is called the dark triad of personality traits.

Within families where such personality traits are dominant, the use of primitive defences of denial, splitting and projection are powerful expressions of a lack of emotional and psychological maturity. Primitive defences are those which cause people to see the locus of control outside of themselves (other people are always to blame for what is happening) they cause cruelty and lack of empathy towards others, (Rotter, 1966). Narcissistic rage, which occurs when the control someone has over their experience of the world is punctured, emanates from a primary psychological wound which has arrested development of the psyche at the paranoid/schizoid stage of splitting, (Kerig, 2010). For those who coerce children using primary defences, everyone else is to blame and anyone who highlights the controlling behaviour or who tries to remove it, is an enemy who must be defeated. This is because the wound which is defended against via the dark triad personality traits, is defended with intensity, due to a deep fear of being engulfed by the warded off shame which is at its origin. Put simply, the coercively controlling person, is defending the self against a wound in childhood which would, if allowed to become conscious, threat to overwhelm and fracture the fragile personality causing dissolution of a carefully constructed facade. The controlling behaviour is a defence against anyone being able to cause that to happen. That does not excuse the behaviour, it does however, explain the intensity with which those defending against such a wound, will rage at anyone who threatens to expose the reality and that includes partners, children, other family members and professionals involved in trying to help the family. The levels of rage may fluctuate and may involve a wide range of shaming and blaming behaviours which include mockery, efforts to humiliate and threats of harm. The driving force behind such behaviour is the defence against the warded off shame contained within the narcissistic wound.

Children’s Internalisation of External Relational Dynamics

At its core, Object Relations Theory focuses on the concept of “objects,” which refers to representations of people, typically originating from early relationships, that individuals carry within themselves. These internalized object representations serve as templates through which people perceive and engage with others throughout their lives. These objects can be both real and imagined, encompassing individuals, parts of individuals, or symbolic entities.

Klein’s work (1932), laid the foundation for Object Relations Theory, emphasizing the role of early childhood experiences and the unconscious mind in shaping these internal object representations. Her ideas were further developed by Winnicott (1953), who emphasized the importance of the mother-infant relationship in forming the individual’s sense of self and reality. Otto Kernberg (1988), expanded on this theory, focusing on how these internalized objects can influence a person’s personality development and interpersonal functioning.

What this means is that a child who grows up in a household in which there are patterns of coercive control underpinned by dark triad personality traits, primitive defences and an external locus of control, will internalise those normalised patterns of behaviour. When the crisis of family separation occurs, such children remain vulnerable to the reactions of a controlling parent due to the internalisation of what they have grown up watching. These are the children who are more likely to align with the abuser and reject the parent who is trying to escape the abuse. These are the children who are experiencing parental coercive control.

The Silencing of Children

Through a feminist lens, coercive control is only perpetrated by fathers against mothers and on the limited occasions when it is accepted that mothers control children, it is emphasised that this is very rare. In my clinical experience it is not rare for mothers to control children and through that continue a pattern of control of fathers. Whilst mothers do not do this in the same way as fathers, for example it is a much more covert strategy which looks on the outside like a close loving bond but which in fact is intrusive. Those mothers who control, have usually also controlled the family dynamic prior to the adult relationship ending and have indoctrinated the children to believe that others are persecutory if they do not share the same worldview.

The key to understanding children’s rejection of parents therefore lies in the child’s relationship with the aligned parent. On examination, this relationship is often enmeshed and children are often parroting or mimicking the abusive views of the parent who is controlling them. This is a well known defence of ‘identification with the aggressor’ (Freud, 1966; Howell, 2014), in which the weaker party in a control situation, protects the self from conscious awareness of their own feelings of anger, frustration and rage at what is being done to them and replaces this with idealisation. The presence of this is determined by the behaviour of the weaker party, which includes anxious regulation of the abuser, mimicry of their behaviours in denigrating others and rejection of the hated and rejected object relationship which has wounded the abuser.

The lack of understanding of this pattern of behaviour in children who have witnessed coercive control in the home, means that those campaigning against the family courts (often using the very same primitive defences which are seen in coercive control – shame, blame, inter-personal terrorism, false allegations etc), have attempted to shift the public discourse towards the belief that children in these circumstances are rejecting parents because they are abusive and that there is something untoward happening in the family courts which is facilitating this. The evidence of this is regularly seen on social media, where conspiracy theories about people who do this work are rife. Public shaming of professionals, personal attacks and campaigns of harassment which erupt from time to time, are all evidence of primitive defences in those who are defending against split off and internalised shame via grandiose behaviour. The reason these campaigners strongly advocate for children to be listened to without question, is because they believe that children are reflecting their own experience and it is their own voice they seek to amplify through those compliant children who are in fact, being terrorised. In such circumstances, the voices of children who reject parents when they are, concurrently, idealising the parent to whom they are aligned, cannot be safely relied upon due to likely presence of those defences outlined above which hide the true harm these children are suffering.

The illumination of coercive control strategies which are perpetrated by both mothers and fathers against their children, enables children who are trapped in a world of primitive defences and silenced because of that, to be liberated to live healthier lives. It also means that mothers and fathers who are rejected in situations where coercive control has been used against them before, during and after family separation, can be properly recognised and supported as victim/survivors.

Working outside the feminist framework which dominates this space and instead using the psychological literature as a matrix for understanding, children can be protected and their life chances can be vastly improved via the healthy care which is provided by the parent who has escaped the psychological prison of coercive control.

References

D’Souza, Márcia & Lima, Gerlando & Jones, Daniel & Carre, Jessica. (2019). Do I win, does the company win, or do we both win? Moderate traits of the Dark Triad and profit maximization. Revista Contabilidade & Finanças. 79. 10.1590/1808-057×201806020.

Freud, Anna. (1966) The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence. International Universities.

Howell, Elizabeth F. (2014) “Ferenczi’s Concept of Identification with the Aggressor: Understanding Dissociative Structure with Interacting Victim and Abuser Self-States.” American Journal of Psychoanalysis 74, no. 1: 48–59. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24603172 (accessed August 28, 2015).

Kerig, Patricia & Stellwagen, Kurt. (2010). Roles of Callous-Unemotional Traits, Narcissism, and Machiavellianism in Childhood Aggression. Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment. 32. 343-352. 10.1007/s10862-009-9168-7.

Kernberg, O. F. (1988). Object relations theory in clinical practice. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 57(4), 481–504.

Klein, M. (1932). The psycho-analysis of children. W W Norton & Co.

Rotter, J. B. (1966). Generalized expectancies for internal versus external control of reinforcement. Psychol. Monogr. 80, 1–28. doi: 10.1037/h0092976

Stark, E. (2007). Coercive control: How men entrap women in personal life. Oxford University Press.

Winnicott, D. W. (1953). Transitional objects and transitional phenomena: A study of the first not-me possession. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 34(2), 89-97.