The Deadlocked Mindset: Unlocking Belief Systems Holding You Hostage to Parental ‘Conflict’

The Family Separation Clinic is now in a new phase of development in which we will be releasing outputs from fifteen years of clinical work with families affected by a child’s alignment and rejection behaviour. As part of this phase, we will be delivering new services to help children of all ages who are in recovery from the psychologically split state of mind which is seen when we say that a child is alienated. We will also be supporting recovering alienated children who are now adults, to share their experiences in ways that can assist other young people to find a way to resolve the internalised psychological splits which cause disorganised attachments. This phase of our work is based upon the evidenced outcomes of our work with families over the past fifteen years and will provide families with the core understanding and competencies that are needed to fully heal from this attachment trauma. Helping parents in the rejected position to get ready help their children, is our first goal, helping children and young people to make the reconnection to a parent which will enable full recovery from a life lived in what we call ‘part selves’ (more on that in the coming days), is our focus.

For too long now, families affected by a child’s alignment and rejection of parents after divorce and separation have been left in the wilderness without the skills, knowledge and practical help which is needed to repair the fractures caused by family separation. Having worked with well over a hundred severerly alienated children and their families since 2009, our understanding of how and why these children behave as they do is both comprehensive and nuanced. This is an attachment trauma, in which the child who rejects is, in reality, struggling with the dynamics in the relationship with the parent to whom they are aligned. Understanding that rejection is a red flag which should be recognised as help seeking by the child (it is their only way of signalling that something is wrong), enables entry into this conundrum in a way which provides that help.

For a long time alignment and rejection behaviour in children of divorce and separation has been understood as if it is a simple case of brainwashing. Reunification processes which rest upon this belief have delivered outcomes which have liberated children to a certain extent but have not been able to treat the underlying attachment trauma which causes the alignment and rejection reaction. This is why, in our experience, many children who have been through reunification camps (as they are called in the USA), emerge at the age of eighteen with the underlying attachment trauma left untreated. A step in treatment has been missing for many of these children, who age out of the process still trauma bonded to the parent who abused them in the first place. These young people demonstrate this, by immediately becoming advocates for that parent’s position and often supporting that parent’s continued activism, itself evidence that a child remains enmeshed with a parental narrative.

In a world which is terrifyingly unstable, where interventions have removed a child from the abusive parent but failed to help the child understand why, the child remains trauma bonded. This is one of the biggest problems for children who have a parent who cannot understand that their behaviour is abusive to overcome, because if they do not, they continue to be deadlocked into a trauma bonded mindset, believing that in order to keep that parent’s love and affection they must mirror back to that parent their beliefs about the world. The impact of that on these young people’s relationships in their older lives is potentially devastating as they have grown to believe that being abused feels like love.

Finding that missing part of treatment for children, the part which unlocks the deadlocked mind of the child, has been the project we have been working on at the Family Separation Clinic for the past five years. Working with severely psychologically and emotionally abused children who have suffered alienation (which is the right name for the mindset which causes alignment and rejection because alienation of the self from the self is the core problem for these children), we have utilised a wide range of strategies designed to enable the child to unlock the prison of this mindset themselves. And we have found that in building these routes to recovery, putting the understanding, tools and core competencies for self liberation into the hands of those who suffer this, is the most powerful, dependable and replicable route to success.

In the coming weeks and months I am going to share some of those routes to recovery on the blog as we begin to make the comprehensive courses and resources available to parents so that they can become skilled in these core competencies for recovery. I am also going to show you some of the outcomes of the work we have done with alienated children over the years in partnership with those now adult children who are working together to help other children and young people. From the end of this month when they will be speaking in the Palace of Westminster in London about their experience of residence transfer (which in reality is removal from a harmful parent), there is much to learn from these now adult children, whose voices have not hitherto been heard.

In December we will be launching new Therapeutic Parenting for Alienated Children Courses and Resources which will be available to parents weekly in the UK and Europe, North America and Canada and Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong from January 2024. These are the foundational and core competencies for all parents who wish to utilise Therapeutic Parenting as a way of healing the attachment trauma in family systems affected by a child’s alignment and rejection behaviour. These courses are packed full of information about attachment and the traumatic impact on a child of parental psychopathology as well as how to respond to these behavioural patterns in ways which provide depth healing. Supported by input from parents and recovered alienated children who have made the journey back to healthy relationships with self and others, our courses are experiential and life changing. This is because the work that we do with you is informed by many years of direct work in healing families affected by this problem.

To begin this new phase, I am sharing with you an example from one of our treatment routes for alienated children. This is what we do with children who are in recovery from the attachment trauma which has bonded them to an abusive parent. This is the work that we have been doing at the Family Separation Clinic over the past five years, in which we have focused our efforts on finding ways to give children and young people the keys to unlock the deadlocked mind. This is an excerpt from a treatment route called ‘Minding your Own Business’ which we use with children who have been removed from an abusive caregiver but who remain aligned to that person due to disorganised attachment.

Unlocking the Deadlocked Mindset

Minding Your Own Business – Your Internal World

Your experience of your parents is that they have been in ‘conflict’ for a long time and so you may feel confused when you are told by adults around you that this is not your parents being in conflict but about something that the parent you used to live with has been doing. In this process of working together, I am going to help you to use your own ability to think, to help you to understand what has been happening to you and why the courts or social workers or both, have intervened. You may feel angry that you have to do this work because you know your own mind better than anyone else, but I am not going to persuade you that you don’t know your own mind or feel your own feelings. What I am going to show you is that what you think you know and what you feel because of that, is a perfectly normal thing to know and feel in the very abnormal circumstances you have been in.

Understanding Parental ‘Conflict‘

First I want you to notice how I have put the word conflict in inverted commas. I do that because I am directing you to notice that because it is highly likely that your experience of what is happening between your parents is that they are in conflict with each other. More than that, it is highly likely that you feel that the parent you were rejecting, has caused the conflict and is maintaining it by doing things that the parent you have felt closer to doesn’t like.

It is also highly likely that this feeling that your parents are in conflict, leaves you feeling in a deadlocked state of mind, deadlocked meaning you cannot find a way to understand what is happening and so you are constantly reacting to exernal stimuli, which in this situation, is the way that one parent’s feelings are always changing.

Are are of the following scenarios familiar?

1. One of your parents is more forthcoming about what is happening in the relationship between your parents, this parent shares more and as a result, seems to care more?
2. The parent who shares less, feels as if they care (about you) less and as a result you feel more distanced from them?
3. When you are hearing about something the parent who shares less with you from the parent who shares more, you find yourself feeling angry on behalf of the parent who shares more?
4. You find yourself on a see-saw of emotions, when you are with the ‘share more’ parent you feel warm and fuzzy but at times you also feel a little ‘icky’ (meaning you feel uncomfortable and you don’t quite know why), when you are with the parent who seems to share less or feels more distant, you find yourself feeling guilty without quite knowing why.
5. You regularly find yourself in conflict with the parent who shares less with you and that conflict (be honest) is always you fighting the ‘shares more’ parent’s battles.

Share More/Cares More

If one of your parents shares more about the break up or things that are happening between your parents, you might feel (have felt at the time), important and special. If this is you, it is essential to keep in mind that you are a child and that your parent has a responsibility to protect you from adult matters. Whilst hearing about what is happening between your parents, or about how your parent feels in general might make you feel important and special, it is the wrong place for you to be in the family because it means that you are being exposed to adult issues which are not your responsibility. When you are involved in parental issues in this way it might make you feel as if your parent cares more about you but in fact it means that your parent is not protecting you as they should.

Shares Less/Cares Less

The parent who shares less about the break up or adult matters is likely to make you feel as if they care less about you but this is an illusion and it is important to break through this so that you can begin the process of thinking and feeling for yourself. Sharing less about parental issues is not about caring less it is about caring more and this is why.

In a world where children have the right to be protected by the adults who care for them, the parent who does not share adult matters with you, or their feelings about the other parent, or how the break up is affecting them, is protecting you and your right to a childhood. Let me explain.

Whilst this might feel as if the parent is excluding you from things you feel you should be involved in, it feels this way because the parent who shares more with you, has breached that protective boundary that the parent who shares less with you is holding in place. Remember boundaries protect your right to a childhood in which you do not have to worry about adult matters (including your parent’s divorce), these are the most important boundaries of all because it is an adult’s responsibility to protect you and support you not the other way around.

Therefore, when you feel as if the parent who shares less with you is witholding and more distant because of it, it is because this parent is upholding that protective boundary whilst the parent who shares more and feels as if they care more because of that, is breaching it. Whilst you feel that the shares more/ cares more parent is protecting you, in fact it is the shares less/cares less parent who is protecting your right to your own feelings and your own childhood.

Boundaries

Boundaries are the invisible walls around relationships which ensure that we are able to feel our own feelings. When parents breach those boundaries there is a high risk that you will lose the ability to feel your own feelings and begin to feel as if the parent’s feelings are your own feelings. This can cause you to enter into a pattern of knee jerk reacting to a parent’s feelings because you are anxious about how a parent is feeling. If this is you, you are likely to be responding to the ‘shares more’ parent’s changing feelings, which can leave you feeling tired and worried all the time, it can also mean you find yourself in the see-saw position.

The See-Saw Position

The See-saw position is one which many children take up when parent’s divorce, it is an internal experience and you might be familiar with it. The See-saw position is when you find yourself moving between feelings about your parents in a strong way, you might notice that you feel this when you are moving between your parent’s homes or you might remember feeling it when you were still spending time with both parents. See-sawing in your feelings means that you feel yourself to be strongly on one side or the other in terms of your feelings about your parents. You may feel entirely convinced that one parent is right and the other is wrong for example, only to switch that feeling when you spend time with the other parent. If you are see-sawing in your emotional responses to your parents you are knee jerk reacting to their feelings not feeling your own. You are doing this because you feel, at a deep part of yourself, that you are not safe and that your parents can’t keep you safe. This is usually because one of your parents (or both), are making you feel unsafe inside, this is happening because there is not enough of a boundary around their feelings, which you are picking up on and reacting to.

(The above is an excerpt from Minding Your Own Business, Supporting Alienated Children in Recovery by Karen Woodall – Publication Date 2024).

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Family Separation Clinic News

Unlocking the Deadlocked Mindset is an excerpt from our interventions for alienated children in recovery which accompanies our trainings for social workers and practitioners who work with families where children align and reject. It is an example of how we work with children and young people using internal object relations theory and internal family systems therapy, which are combined in the FSC model to treat the underlying disorganised attachments which cause alignment and rejection in children. I am currently writing this into the handbook for Therapeutic Parenting for Alienated Children, which will be available in the New Year.

Courses and Resources for Winter Term 2024 I will be announcing our new Course and Learning Resources for Parents in the December Newsletter. If you would like to be added to the Newsletter please email me at karen@karenwoodall.blog with the words ADD ME in the subject line.

Details for Intensives in California and Canada will be announced in December.

Hearing the Voices of Formerly Alienated Children – A Seminar at the Palace of Westminster – November 2023

Our project to amplify the voices of formerly alienated children who are recovered and who are now working to help other children and young people, will be launched this month at the Palace of Westminster. Sponsored by Baroness Catherine Meyer who has worked hard over many years to raise awareness of the needs of alienated children and their families, this seminar is for MPs and Policy Makers to inform them of the reality of emotional and psychological abuse which is suffered by children and the importance of interventions to protect children from this harm. All of the now adult young people who are presenting, were moved from an abusive parent to a healthy protective parent in residence transfer in England and Wales, supported by the Family Separation Clinic. This seminar is by invitation only.

This seminar launches a new handbook for young people entitled Choosing Yourself When Your Parents Separate which is written by a formerly alienated young person who was removed from an abusive parent in residence transfer. The handbook will be published in early 2024 and we will write more about this, including offering excerpts from it as well as a launch seminar with the young person who has authored it, closer to the launch date.

Listening Circles 2023

Our final listening circles for 2023 are on December 5th and December 12th and you can book here

Lighthouse Keeping for Christmas – A Free Circle for Families Affected by the Trauma of Rejection – December 19th at 18:00 hrs GMT

On 19th December I will be holding a special circle for all families affected by a child’s alignment and rejection behaviour in which I will discuss the ways in which children experience Christmas and other special days without you and how if you keep the beam shining bright, Lighthouse Keeping provides a path for them to return to you. Based upon five years of working with families outside of the court system using Structural Therapy, I will share with you the importance of continuing to be there for your children even in the silence and how shining a light into the void, provides hope for children who are suffering from a deadlocked mindset.

If you would like to join this complimentary circle, please email karen@karenwoodall.blog and put the words LIGHTHOUSE KEEPING CIRCLE in the subject line.