Red Flags for Emotional and Psychological Harm of Children in Divorce and Separation: Behavioural Patterns Indicating Risk

Mapping behaviours when working with families affected by a child’s alignment with one parent and rejection of the other, is a key responsibility because the patterns which emerge show the risks to the child which remain extant and those which are ameliorated under scrutiny. Using a child protection lens, social workers can be trained to understand red flags of risk in children who align and reject and who are judged by the court to be suffering from emotional and psychological harm. This increases the safeguarding potential of Section 37 and 47 reporting and the movement of a private law case into that of public law in England and Wales. The reduction of risk of team splitting, through education of social workers and the improvement of understanding of the way in which mothers and fathers cause their children harm when they pressure them into alignment, leads to earlier interventions in which the alignment and rejection dynamic is not so entrenched.

When working with families in situations where a child is judged as having been emotionally or psychologically harmed, therapeutic input must be tailored to meet the needs of the family grouping. With the high likelihood of psychopathology being present in the family system, generic therapy is not appropriate and in fact can make matters much worse. This is because the unaware therapist who attempts to utilise unadapted approaches, will find themselves quickly triangulated into the role of judge and jury, with the pressuring parent aiming to convince the therapist that the Judge got it wrong. Those who find themselves advocating for the pressuring parent in those circumstances, often find out very quickly that their professional safety is conditional upon their continued allegiance. The entrapment of therapists by manipulative, often psychologically unwell parents, is a legendary red flag warning to all who work in this field.

Relational Trauma

This is a relational trauma and psychotherapists working with relationships in this arena must take the greatest care to ensure that they are not placed into any situation where they are making judgments about facts. The only judgment psychotherapists should be making in such circumstances, are whether or not a parent can change in response to interventions which are designed to peturb the dynamics which cause the child to hyper align. Disputed facts can continue to ricochet around the internal landscape of even those cases which have been clearly judged and where one parent has been clearly found to have manipulated a child. Getting involved in trying to sort out disputed facts in such circumstances, is futile and dangerous for any mental health professional.

This relational trauma involves serious emotional and psychological harm to children, as such it is a risky arena to work in because child abusers either do not want their behaviours to be understood as child abuse or they are unable to understand that their behaviours are abusive to children. When a psychotherapist ventures into such a landscape, the awareness that what is being done to the children and to the other parent, will eventually be done to the psychotherapist too, should be the highest awareness of all. The risk of negative transferential material being hurled at the psychotherapist who seeks to alleviate the pressure upon a child from a parent who does not believe they are doing anything wrong, is immense.

Negative Transference

Negative transference includes the projection of hatred, the use of shame, mocking and denigration of others and false allegations about the motives of other people. Negative transference is the split off material (made up of feelings about the self) which is unbearable in the conscious mind, which is projected into (note the word into not onto, the difference is important), the person who is perturbing the dynamics around a parent. What the person who projects wants and needs, is for the recipient of the negative projection to react, to confirm for them that what they are projecting into that person is who they really are.

When a professional gets close to the heart of the dynamic which is causing the child to align and reject, this projection of negative material into that person is a huge force, which at times can instigate an almost tsunami like mentality. This red flag of uncontained fury and rumination, can be seen on the internet at times, you can identify it by the manner in which groups descend into mockery and denigration and the passing round of rumours and half truths which emanate from someone at the heart of this deeply disturbing trauma story.

Adapted Structural Therapy

The correct therapeutic input for these families is adapted structural therapy which works with the part selves of the child affected and the parent who is in the rejected position. Constrainment of the behaviours of the influencing parent must be in place for long enough for the work of enabling the attachment relationship between the abused parent and child to emerge. Protective shields of suspension of contact between the influencing parent and child are an essential element of this work due to the latent vulnerability of children who align and reject. Giving space and time to allow the suppressed feelings to re-emerge without placing children back into a double bind position is the way in which child protection in these cases of emotional and psychological harm of children is enacted.

Mapping Patterns

Mapping the patterns of behaviours see in influencing parents is essential and the clinical trial process which is used at the Family Separation Clinic to do this, offers depth insight into how parents respond under continuous scrutiny. This is a more powerful way of unearthing behavioural patterns of concern because it means that parents have to either fully change and understand the impact of their behaviours on the child, or if they will not or cannot, their behavioural contributions are captured as evidence so that longer term decisions can be made about how to protect the child.

Mapping patterns means examining how a parent reacts to constraining of their behaviours and how this may cause an eruption of the uncontained infantile defences in other settings, away from the scrutiny the parent is under. These are primitive defences, they are not easily contained when they have been normalised and interactions with social media for example, where these kinds of primitive splitting defences are very common, can encourage the continuation or exacerbation of these. Red flags on social media can be regularly seen, watch for what is said about anyone who works in this space and the confidence and vehemence with which it is said. The more vicious the mockery and denigration, the more likely it is emanating from the negative split off material which is unbearable to the person from whom it originates. Look also for those who gather around these people and who champion them (by, for example, liking their tweets or leaving encouraging comments). These are the trauma bonded people who cannot see their own responsibilities for what is happening in their lives, who need people to be divided into good and bad people in order to feel regulated. One of the key red flag behaviours within this group of people is the belief that the media is exposing hidden truths rather than simply reporting stories which they believe will improve their numbers of followers or likes or mentions.

This arena is full of spite and venom, uncontained behaviours which are childish and false allegations which are repeated so often they become to be believed as fact, it is a dangerous place for the uninitiated, precisely because what is being exposed is the emotional and psychological harm which is done to children by some parents in divorce and separation. Learning to understand the patterns of behaviours which are seen in the concentric circles around the child who is being harmed, is a key way of ensuring that the work of protecting the child is always at the heart of what we do.

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Holding up a healthy mirror (Australia, New Zealand and Far East time zones)

Tue 31 Oct 2023 09:00 – Fri 3 Nov 2023 11:00 GMT

Children who hyper-align with one parent and reject the other, in divorce and separation, can be helped when one of their parents is able to understand their experience and, in response, hold up a healthy mirror. When the holding of this mirror is consistent, the child who has suffered from induced psychological splitting, which is demonstrated by aligning themselves with one parent and rejecting the other, can experience an integrated sense of self which assists in recovery.

In order to hold up a healthy mirror, the parent in the rejected position must first address the reactive splitting that they are likely to have suffered. Reactive splitting, which occurs when the child rejects, (often accompanied by false allegations), can cause a parent to feel natural reactions such as anger, bewilderment and shame. These feelings, which are normal in the circumstances, can become blocks and barriers to the child’s recovery as the parent refutes the allegations and shows the child their reactive feelings. In these circumstances, the child withdraws further, struggling with their own guilt and shame and begins to split off their feelings further.

Restoring health to rejected parents begins with an understanding of what has happened internally and how that has become entangled with the child’s own splitting reactions. When parents are able to map this splitting across the family system, their own reactive splitting can integrate and they can begin the work of developing the healthy mirror needed by the child.

Parents who have healed reactive splitting can then learn to apply the skills of therapeutic parenting. This is an approach to parenting children who are suffering from attachment disorder due to being emotionally and psychologically harmed. Alienated children with therapeutic parents, are shown in evaluation, to be able to recover quickly from the underlying harms which have caused their rejecting behaviours.

On this course you will learn:

• What psychological splitting is, how it occurs and why
• How to identify your own reactive splitting
• How to integrate split thinking in a fractured landscape
• How to build integrated thinking strategies
• What to embrace and what to avoid when rebuilding health in the face of alienation
• How to build the healthy mirror your child needs
• Mentalisation strategies for mirroring health
• The power and importance of consistent mirroring
• How other parents have used integrated mirroring to bring their children back to health
• Therapeutic parenting – an integrated skills set
• Building a consistent communications strategy for recovering your children
• Working with the counter intuitive approach necessary to enable alienated children to withdraw their projections
• Staying healthy amidst the chaos caused by psychological splitting

Based on successful work with many families around the world, Karen Woodall will share with you the deep knowledge of how to recover children from the nightmare landscape of psychological splitting. Karen has helped families to rebuild health and wellbeing with children of all ages and has developed a structural approach to working with alienation which is easily translated into strategies which can be used by parents.

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Online, Zoom link will be sent immediately prior to event

Holding up a healthy mirror: Becoming a therapeutic parent to alienated children
An online course for parents of alienated children and their families with Karen Woodall

The course will be delivered on Zoom, in 4 x two-hour sessions, on the following dates:

• 31 October 2023
• 1 November 2023
• 2 November 2023
• 3 November 2023

Sessions will begin at 09:00 UK time.

To check your local start time, please click the following link and enter 09:00 – 2023-10-31 – London in the right-hand boxes, here: https://dateful.com/time-zone-converter

NB: The start time is set to accommodate attendees living in Australia, New Zealand and Far East time zones, however those living in other parts of the world are welcome to attend this course.

A Zoom link for this event will be emailed approximately 30 minutes prior to the start of the first session. This link should be used for all sessions.

Cost £180 .00

BOOK HERE