Homecoming: The Treatment of Splitting In Alienated Children

Children who reject a parent outright after divorce and separation, when this is accompanied by idealisation of the parent to whom they are aligned, are seen in clinical observation, to use the infantile defence of psychological splitting. Using an understanding of psychological splitting as the core symptom of the child’s alignment and rejection, enables therapists to recognise that the child has regressed in their capacity to articulate their internal experience. Children in the age group 9-15 who are seen to be in this state of mind, are seen to display a range of behaviours which suggest that they are operating from ‘parts’, a concept introduced by Richard C Shwartz in Internal Family Systems Therapy. Working with the concept of ‘part selves’, is how we at FSC understand and work with children who are seen to use splitting. In situations where families are in crisis or conflict, part selves offers a way of understanding the internal fragmentation of the self which is seen when children align and reject. With this knowledge, therapists can begin to work with the child’s internal attachment maladaptations, which have occurred due to the pressure upon the child from within a family system which has been in flux.

Before this work begins however, the family system must be stabilised and the power held over the child by the influencing parent must be ameliorated. This can occur with intervention from the Court, through management of the power through intensive family work or when the child moves into a phase in which they are beyond the impact that the family system has upon them. Sometimes a parent in the rejected position can ameliorate the power through bargaining or negotiation, however this is rare and occurs only when there is enough insight in the parent who is influencing the child. The reality for children who align and reject, is that the dynamics which cause this are unusual, these are outwith the ordinary every day behaviours of many parents in divorce and separation. Personality/psychiatric disorders, unresolved childhood trauma in a parent who is projecting that onto a child, primitive defences and sometimes a fixation on a desire for justice are all prevelant in the group of families affected by this dynamic. In some situations, ideology becomes a fixation, (as in the inability to recognise that children have the right to a relationship with all of the important adults in their lives, where those adults can provide safe and healthy care), in others the projection of blame and shame. In all of these situations, children are triangulated into the adult relationship and the resulting maladaptations made by the child, places them central to the drama which then unfolds.

Taking a Child Centred Focus

It is the child who is at the centre of this drama because it is the child who enters into splitting first as a defence against the double bind situation they find themselves in, when they become aware that it is not acceptable to love both of their parents. Ego Splitting, which is what is seen in children in this situation, is a defence which protects against dissociation and which allows the child to ‘go on as normal’ as Janina Fisher might put it. The problem for children in divorce and separation, is that the going on as normal strategy causes a series of actions and reactions, which lead the family into such an entanglement that it becomes impossible for the family alone to unravel. This series of actions and reactions can be understood and unravelled when the work to assist begins from the point of view of the child.

The Child’s Experience

The child who begins to experience pressure in the family system is usually a child with a latent vulnerability to attachment maladaptations, this has usually been caused by trauma in the early years or, a frightening experience in terms of being in double bind situation with a parent, or being in the care of a parent who feels out of control.

The child begins to suffer from anxiety, at a level which impacts upon everyday life, ordinary things become difficult for the child to cope with. School becomes a problem, navigating friendships is a problem, moving from one household to the other becomes a problem. The child is vulnerable in this space and does not have access to understanding and help from a trusted adult, usually because the influencing parent is unable to parent effectively and the parent who is more at distance is disturbed by the shifts in the child’s behaviours or placed too much at distance by them.

The child then begins to show attachment insecurities such as separation anxiety, omnipotence, discharge of anger, self harming behaviour as they struggle to find a way out of the double bind situation they are in. This is the way that children of divorce and separation try to go on with life as normal, this is why their parents know there is something wrong. Unfortunately what happens at this point is that parents begin to blame each other, the influencing parent because they do not have insight into their own behaviours and the rejected parent because they are helpless to help the child whilst knowing that something is very wrong.

The child does not do this on purpose, they do it either as a direct response to manipulation and lies being told about the other parent or as an attempt to get out of the space which is becoming increasingly conflicted. By the time the alignment and rejection behaviours are firmly locked into place, the family system is usually so entangled that there is no possibility of unravelling the dynamics without help and the help which is often available, often makes things much worse due to the lack of understanding of what has occurred in such a family.

Developmental Factors

Children who are under pressure in post divorce arrangements are vulnerable to a wide range of behavioural shifts and attachment maladaptations which change the course of their life chances. Most children who are deeply impacted are between the ages of 8-15 when their social, emotional and psychological development is underway. During this phase there is also a huge spurt in neurodevelopment, meaning that behavioural maladaptations occur in a period which affects the development of the brain. Whilst it is not possible to determine whether some alignment and rejection reactions in children occur because of particular shifts in brain development, (for example, some children become very self conscious or over reactive to events and relational issues during a particular period of brain development due to the way in which the amygdala, the part of the brain concerned with emotions, impulses, aggression and instinctive behaviour is relied upon before the pre-frontal cortex, which helps with healthy decision making behaviour, is fully developed), it is possible however, to understand all of the factors which make up the unique aetiology of each child’s display of alignment and rejecting behaviour. This is achieved through a longitudinal observation which FSC calls a ‘clinical trial.’

Risks of Non Intervention

The biggest risk of non intervention in cases where children align and reject in divorce and separation is the entrenchment of splitting, which causes a child to maladapt their attachment relationships so that they push away a parent who is loved in order to regulate a parent who feels out of control. Whilst this resolves the immediate dilemma for the child, it causes a loss of an integrated sense of self, which over time, builds problems in terms of self awareness, self esteem, self confidence and capacity to relate to other people. It also places the child at risk of becoming further alienated from other loved ones due to the lack of healthy relational development. It further causes children to be unable to receive healthy nurture and incoming care due to their belief that relationships are transactional in nature, requiring them to give before they receive love and support. This puts children into high risk category for being controlled by others in later life, it also causes children to be parentified people pleasers who eschew their own needs in order to meet the needs of others. Some of these children do not understand what healthy emotional and psychological needs are because they have grown up meeting the needs of the parent who controls, manipulates or otherwise uses the child for personal gain.

Treating the Problem

These cases are emphatically NOT about child arrangements or contact, these cases are about children’s mental health and as such should always be assessed using a child protection lens. A child who is aligning strongly with one parent and rejecting the other, especially when that is accompanied by contempt, is a child who is trying to manage an impossible situation. The child is at risk of harm and the red flag of that harm is the alignment and rejection behaviour. What is required when working with such cases is a longitudinal observation of the family system in which all aspects of the dynamics are scrutinised, tested and reviewed. Snap shot evaluations, where a parent attends a meeting with a psychologist for example, do not fully demonstrate the dynamics of the family system in action and whilst it is important to get that snap shot, (for example to rule in or out the diagnosable conditions which may be present in the family), the approach which unearths the underlying relational dynamics is one which attends to the family over time.

Some influencing parents will be on their best behaviour at the outset of such an observational intervention but most cannot maintain that over a long period. At the FSC we often observe families where children are seen to align and reject, over period of up to a year or more, working with them to test capacity to change entrenched behaviours, adding in new therapeutic parenting skills where possible. In doing so we come to see the whole of the family system as it is adapted to the structural shifts being made and through that we can see who is able to change and who is able to change, or indeed, who will not change.

Goals of Treatment

The goal of treatment is to recover the whole child, by providing a containing space in which the child can experience an integration of the splitting which has caused the alignment and rejection behaviour. The recovery of the whole child is not achieved by creating a counter rejection of the aligned parent (which simply flips the internal script without treating the splitting) but by re-encountering the rejected parent and allowing the proximity to the parent to reactivate the attachment relationship. Whilst some formerly aligned parents do have to be kept away from a child due to their lack of insight and inability to change their behaviours, the child is never allowed to pathologise this parent in their own mind but is helped instead to understand that the parent sees the world differently to most other parents. The work of integration of the splitting within the mind of the child, takes place in everyday settings, on walks, in swimming pools, in activity based outings, with animals and in any situation which provides for the child to be in proximity to the formerly rejected parent. What must precede this however, is the building of a safe container in which the child can undergo this work with the parent who is rejected, well away from the parent to whom they were once aligned. This safe container is built here in England and Wales via the strongest Court management and increasingly alongside social workers who are skilled in understanding emotional and psychological abuse of children and how it presents in children of divorce and separation.

Only when the integration of the child is seen, (denoted by the return of the child’s capacity to tolerate all aspects of the caregiving relationship with the formerly rejected parent), should testing of contact with the formerly aligned parent begin. This should always proceed with great caution because the child who has been influenced by an out of control or frightening parent, will remain attuned to that parent’s intra-psychic conflicts for a very long time. Teaching the child to understand the intentions of others, through building mentalising skills, protects the child and builds resilience to the influence of the parent in the future.

Therapeutic Parenting

Therapeutic parenting is now routinely used at the Family Separation Clinic as a preparation stage for the recovery of the whole child. Reframing the narrative of rejection, helps parents to understand the role that they play in enabling their child to recover a whole sense of self. It also brings relief from the reactive splitting which is experienced by parents in this position when their child rejects. Coping as a rejected parent is immensely difficult in a world which does not (yet) fully understand that some children of divorce and separation are suffering from a relational trauma which is not of their making. It is made increasingly difficult when the experience is misrepresented by campaigners who seek to distort the narrative of children’s rejecting behaviours and shift the scrutiny away from the idealised parent who is the root cause of the child’s maladaptations. By educating rejected parents to recognise their own trauma and enable them to stabilise in the face of this, therapeutic parenting skills can be readily absorbed and used when the time becomes possible for proximity to the abused child to begin again. Therapeutic parenting helps rejected parents to understand the behaviours of the alienated child in recovery and recognise the incredible role they can play in helping the child to fully heal. Alienated children who have such a parent are able to recover a whole and integrated sense of self rapidly, leading them back to full health and recovery from the traumatic splitting they have been forced to endure.

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Essential Information for parents in England and Wales

Parents in England and Wales need to have a clear understanding of how the Family Courts, Institutions, Local Authorities and others involved in child protection, regard the label ‘Parental Alienation’ now that the President of the Family Division of England and Wales has issued guidance on the matter. The guidance ,which is contained in Sir Andrew McFarlane’s ruling in Re C (Parental Alienation: instruction of expert) [2023] EWHC 345, is clear that the label ‘parental alienation’ is not helpful in working with cases where children align and reject with parents in divorce and separation.

“it is not the purpose of this judgment to go further into the topic of alienation. Most Family judges have, for some time, regarded the label of ‘parental alienation’, and the suggestion that there may be a diagnosable syndrome of that name, as being unhelpful. What is important, as with domestic abuse, is the particular behaviour that is found to have taken place within the individual family before the court, and the impact that that behaviour may have had on the relationship of a child with either or both of his/her parents. In this regard, the identification of ‘alienating behaviour’ should be the court’s focus, rather than any quest to determine whether the label ‘parental alienation’ can be applied.”

Commentary from the Family Separation Clinic

Re C (Parental Alienation: instruction of expert) [2023] EWHC 345This guidance also makes clear that the role of an expert in such situations is not to identify ‘parental alienation’ but to show the pattern of behaviours which have caused a child to align with one parent and reject the other, referred to in this judgment as alienating behaviours. Psychologists and Psychiatrists might use diagnostic approaches which are drawn from the relevant literature, Psychotherapists will use observations of the relational dynamics within the family system, for example, attachment maladaptations such as parentification or enmeshment and other issues which may impact upon the child. When we are working with what is popularly labelled ‘Parental Alienation’ we are working with the psychological and emotional harm of children and with the rise in understanding of what is happening to the child who is at the heart of such a case, its management and treatment, even in the most severe situations, is vastly improved. Emotional and psychological abuse of children, is also accepted by institutions such as the NSPCC who recognise that manipulating a child is emotional abuse.

If you are a parent in England and Wales and you are going through the Family Courts, it is therefore important that you focus upon the harm which is caused to children and the behaviours of parents which cause that harm, rather than the label parental alienation. In working with social workers, mental health workers and others, it is useful to conceptualise what you see happening to your child in behavioural terms rather than using Parental Alienation Theory (8 signs/ 17 Strategies/5 Factor model etc). Whilst the label ‘parental alienation’ may continue to be popularised short-hand for the psychological and emotional harm which is inflicted on children, The President has made it clear that it is not recognised as a diagnosable condition and is not what is focused upon in Court.

In our work in the family courts and with social workers and other practitioners, The Family Separation Clinic uses the term ‘Childhood Relational Trauma’ to describe the harm caused to children in divorce and separation when they align with a parent and reject the other. We consider the core symptom of the problem in the child to be psychological splitting and the impact upon the child is the development of a false or defensive self. This is accepted in the family court and is readily understood by social workers and other mental health professionals, leading to a greater understanding of the problem facing the child and an increased capacity to provide successful treatment routes.

Family Separation Clinic News

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Consultancy to Local Authorities The Clinic offers consultancy to Local Authorities where private family law cases have crossed the threshold for emotional and psychological harm. Offering highly specialised guidance and evidence based reunification protocols, the Clinic provides training, support and intervention in public law in ways that enable successful intervention in seemingly intractable cases where children are rejecting a parent after divorce and separation. Click this link for more information.

Autumn Schedule for Course and Listening Circles

We will announce the autumn schedule for courses and listening circles shortly. This autumn we have another live delivery of Holding up a Healthy Mirror Course for parents in Australia and New Zealand and a follow on intensive Higher Level Development Course for Australia and New Zealand. I will also be running listening circles in the morning UK time as well as the evening UK time so that Australian and New Zealand parents can get assistance on a drop in basis soon.

Therapeutic Parenting for Alienated Children Handbook

I aim to complete this handbook to accompany the courses and circles shortly.

Intensives in Therapeutic Parenting for California, UK and Australia

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News Coverage of recent High Court Case of Re A&B – No 5

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