Karen Woodall – Psychotherapist, Writer, Researcher, Trainer

In the current maelstrom of campaigning against the label and theory of ‘Parental Alienation’ it is easy to overlook the reality, that children who have an attachment to a parent, do not reject that parent unless they are encouraged, permitted or forced to do so (Minuchin, 1974; Bowlby, 1988; Fonagy, et al, 1995). Whilst campaigners seek to convince people that children who witness domestic abuse will reject a parent and that rejection is justified, this does not explain why children align and reject their parents in an observable and evidenced way. This is because those who evaluate this issue through an ideological lens, are not trained to assess attachment disruption or disorder, nor do they have clinical training or experience in working with children. Ideological advocates, who evaluate on the basis of a belief system which is supported by feminist theory, who bring their inherent bias, produce outcomes for children which are often disastrous.

Children who align with a parent and reject the other are experiencing a relational trauma in which the parent who is abusing them is the parent to whom the child becomes strongly aligned. The psychological literature is clear on the matter of how children who witness abuse react, it demonstrates that terrorised children will align with an abusive parent. Children who are abused are more likely to seek to regulate the abusive parent, finding ways of placating them which are about mimicry and showing allegiance (Howell, 2009; Howell, 2014 & Frankel, 2019). Children who witness domestic abuse are more likely to seek to placate the abuser or regulate them than reject them and when they do, they do not reject with arrogance, omnipotence or contempt & disdain due to their fear and anxiety around that parent and the harm they can cause.

Parents whose children reject them know this well, they see their children acting as little automatons, reassuring the abusive parent and silencing their own feelings and needs. These are the parents who have suffered abuse, these are the parents who understand the patterns of behaviours in the family which have led to their children’s emotional and psychological capture, these are the parents and children who have suffered coercive control at the hands of an abuser.

Whatever we call children’s patterns of alignment and rejection in divorce and separation, it is emotional and psychological abuse of children which causes that distinct behavioural pattern of alignment and rejection with contempt and disdain. The behavioural pattern is seen in the child who is at the centre of this family drama is evidenced by that distinct division of expression of feelings, idealisation of one parent and cold and contemptuous rejection of the other. It is important to recognise, that the presence of contempt and disdain towards a parent is not normal or healthy but a reflection of the inter-psychic messages the child is receiving from the abusive parent. A child who is attached to a parent does not, in normal circumstances, express contempt or disdain, this is because those expressions of feelings come from a place of entitlement to look down upon a parent, something children do not do unless they are encouraged or permitted to do so. When we see a child rejecting in this way and idealising the other parent, when there is an absence of evidence to support the behaviour in the child, it is a red flag which requires further investigation.

The division of feelings in the child of idealisation and rejection with contempt denotes the child has shifted into a defensive position in which a false self has arisen. It is this false self which arises due to the defence against shame, which causes the child to suffer from self alienation (Shaw, 2023). Self alienation rests upon a splitting of the ego (sense of self), as a defense. This is an Object Relations concept in which the overwhelming of the capacity to understand/process/live with/tolerate an experience, causes a splitting of the sense of self as a defence. In the literature on trauma this is well understood and accepted, it is a defensive mechanism which prevents dissociation and which allows what Fisher (2017), terms ‘going on with life as normal.’ The problem for the child of divorce and separation, is that going on with life as normal, in the care of an abusive parent, requires that the mental shifts they make, are absent of evidence to support what has happened. This is when the Family Courts are often asked to manage a situation, this is when understanding the family trauma through a psychological as opposed to ideological lens, is necessary.

An example of the necessity to understand the problem through a psychological lens, is a child who is suffering from manipulation by a parent they mostly live with, someone who dislikes the other parent and who demands allegiance from their children in order to feel supported and regulated. This child, who every other weekend, has to go into the ‘enemy’ camp, must defend themselves against the knowledge that the parent they are spending time with, is disliked and keep in mind that they must not betray the abusive parent. In order to cope with this over time, the child will begin a series of psychological and emotional shifts towards disengagement with the parent they spend less time with, not because they dislike or do not love that parent but because they are unable to cope with the cognitive dissonance of being in the ‘enemy’ camp when the outcome for them, should they fail to uphold their allegiance, might be catastrophic. When such children have to return to the abusive parent’s care, they will reflexively discharge their anxiety about having been in a position of potential betrayal of the abusive parent. This is often achieved by feeding that parent the narratives they know are necessary to be allowed entry back into the care of that parent. This, over time, causes attachment maladaptations as the child struggles to find safety and continuity of care.

Such children are living in circumstances where their wellbeing is conditional upon regulating an abusive parent and where they must constantly be on guard against their own enjoyment of their relationship with the healthy parent. As such these children are hostages to the psychological and emotional distortions caused by an unwell or out of control, coercive or dominating parent who is frightening.

Working with these children in recovery, demonstrates again and again that this pattern of living, through crucial developmental stages in their lives, brings challenges which are unique to this group of children. Suffering from attachment maladaptations, these children are at risk for hyper parentification, denying their own needs in order to regulate and placate others, their capacity to know their own needs and to allow others to meet them, are greatly diminished by the harm they have suffered in the care of an emotionally and psychologically abusive parent.

The current campaign to ban the idea that children can be abused by their mothers in divorce and separation which is operationalised around the world, overlooks those mothers whose children are truly being harmed by coercivelly controlling fathers, in favour of mothers who have caused their children harm. It does so because this is an ideological campaign which seeks to give power to women and if some women are the unintended consequences of that, this is an unavoidable outcome of a campaign to regain power in this arena. This campaign also seeks to deny that those mothers who cause their children harm, are more prevelant than is recognised, seeking to persuade the outside world that manipulation of children in divorce and separation is rare. Having worked in this field for well over a decade now, my experience is that manipulation of children is not rare at all, it is an almost certain feature of any break-up at one point or the other. The difference between a child who aligns and rejects and a child who doesn’t is in my experience about the vulnerability of the child and the strength of parental power over the child.

As such my concern is and always has been about children in divorce and separation because I know that emotional and psychological abuse of children of divorce and separation causes attachment maladaptations. I also know that that healing those lies in the hands of the parent who has been rejected. This is why I am currently focused on delivering therapeutic parenting training for rejected parents around the world and why I am working with social workers to enable them to utilise therapeutic parenting to support the rebuilding of relationships between children with attachment maladaptations and the parent they have rejected.

Children who reject parents in these circumstances are very clear about the impossibility of their situation during the time they are under the control of an abusive parent, this is because the splitting, which is a defense, enables them to maintain access to their conscious awareness of their real feelings for the parent they are rejecting. Whilst some children (usually younger children in groups of siblings) do display some dissociative aspects which cause them to forget or not know how or why they were rejecting of a parent, almost all of the children who have been in recovery work with FSC, are clear that they knew what they were doing at the time they were rejecting and, particularly where the rejection was accompanied by false allegations, they felt immense shame and guilt.

The majority of those campaigning against the recognition and treatment of this abuse of children are academics or campaigners without any training or knowledge of psychology or psychotherapy. The ideological drive to silence this work is therefore on the basis of women’s rights (although not the rights of mothers whose children are truly abused by coercivelly controlling fathers) and in truth it is about protecting women rather than children. Thankfully, the awareness of statutory services of this emotional and psychological abuse of children is strong enough now in the UK to prevent the slide back into a time of complete ignorance. Our Social Work Training Pathway continues therefore and the evaluation of this aspect of our work, will provide solid and reliable evidence to support the continued development of awareness of how to understand and treat this problem.

When I began specialising in helping children of divorce and separation way back in the early nineties, I never dreamed that there would be so much opposition to the raising of public consciousness of the harms caused to children in these circumstances. Now, I am older, wiser and because of that, ever more determined to withstand the toxicity of this arena so that children’s needs are properly understood, articulated and met in divorce and separation.

Because whatever we call it, mothers and fathers cause harm to their children in divorce and separation and that harm is understood through the articulation of psychological knowledge and clinical evidence not ideology and parental rights. And it is through that psychological knowledge and clinical evidence, that this harm of children becomes manageable, treatable and ultimately, preventable.

References

Bowlby, J. (1988). A secure base: Parent-child attachment and healthy human development. Basic Books.

Fonagy P, Steele M, Steele H, Leigh T, Kennedy R, Mattoon G, et al. The predictive validity of Mary Main’s Adult Attachment Interview: a psychoanalytic and developmental perspective on the transgenerational transmission of attachment and borderline states. In: Goldberg S, Muir R, Kerr J, editors. Attachment Theory: Social, Developmental and Clinical Perspectives. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press; 1995. pp. 233–78

Fisher J. Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors : Overcoming Internal Self-Alienation. New York: Routledge; 2017. doi:10.4324/9781315886169

Frankel, J. (23 Sep 2019), Identification (With the Aggressor) from: Routledge
Handbook of Psychoanalytic Political Theory Routledge
Accessed on: 19 Sep 2023

Howell, E. F., & Blizard, R. A. (2009). Chronic relational trauma disorder: A new diagnostic scheme for borderline personality and the spectrum of dissociative disorders. In P. F. Dell & J. A. O’Neil (Eds.), Dissociation and the dissociative disorders: DSM-V and beyond (pp. 495–510). Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group.

Howell, Elizabeth. (2014). Ferenczi’s Concept of Identification with The Aggressor: Understanding Dissociative Structure with Interacting Victim and Abuser Self-States. American journal of psychoanalysis. 74. 48-59. 10.1057/ajp.2013.40.

Minuchin, S. (1974). Families and Family Therapy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press

Shaw, D. (2023)Shame and Self-Alienation: A Trauma-Informed Psychoanalytic Perspective,Psychoanalytic Inquiry,DOI: 10.1080/07351690.2023.2226021

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Family Separation Clinic – Autumn Schedule of Courses and Circles

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