The Secret Life of the Alienated Child

An alienated child is a child with a set of defensive structures which enable them to carry on with life as normal, even whilst coping with the overwhelming trauma of being forced to regulate an unpredictable caregiver. Over the past fifteen years, I have worked with over a hundred severely alienated children and have come to know their experience both inside and out. What I now know about alienated children is that the behaviour which looks unpredictable from the outside, is understandable and predictable when its cause and effect is known. This year I will be working with formerly alienated children who are now young adults, to support them in telling their stories to the outside world so that the secret life they were forced to live whilst in the care of an unwell, unpredictable and abusive parent, is a secret no more.

At the end of last year, two formerly alienated children told their stories in the Palace of Westminster at a small seminar for policy makers, practitioners and parents. This quiet opening of the door to the secret world that alienated children are forced to live in, was just the beginning. This year these young people, along with others who have been assisted by the Family Separation Clinic, will speak at more events and conferences, to help the world to understand the particular difficulties that children in divorce and separation face when they are in the care of a parent who is harming them. All of these young people are now fully recovered after being found to be in the care of an abusive parent who could not or would not recognise that what they were doing was harming their child. In working with each of these children and others, I have come to to recognise that the secret world of the alienated child is no different to that of all children who are suffering abuse at the hands of a parent, it is secret for a reason and in most cases, it is a secret so deeply held that even the child is unable to be aware of it.

Alienation is a good word for what happens to children who align with an abusive caregiver and reject the other. Alienation means to withdraw or become isolated from the environment and other people and in the case of children in family separation, alienation extends even to becoming alienated from one’s own sense of self. In trauma terms, self alienation is described by Janina Fisher (2017), as having originated from a childhood experience of traumatic neglect. In the experiences of children who were found to have been harmed by a parent in divorce or separation, who were seen as strongly aligned to one parent and completely rejecting of the other, that traumatic neglect is recognised in the inability of the abusive parent to understand and put the child’s needs before their own. You can watch Janina Fisher talking about self-alienation and the fragmented selves of trauma survivors here.

In my work with alienated children I have come to understand that their experience of having to regulate an unpredictable caregiver, is hidden far from the outside world because of the utter dependency the child has upon that parent. In this respect, it is not so much that the child is hiding the abuse they are suffering, they are adapting their attachment relationships in order to stay safe in a world which feels terrifying to them, meaning that the child seeks to divine the needs of the frightening parent in order to mirror to the parent what they think they need. This is conversant with the concept of identification with the aggressor which was first identified by Anna Freud, in which the child adopts the behaviours of someone with control over them who cannot be escaped from or otherwise managed. Examples of children identifying with parents who aggress against their children are seen when a child is exposed to parental anger about something the other parent is doing, or when a child is exposed to adult issues as if they are an equal party to the person sharing information with them. In some areas of research, the idea of children working in a partnership with one parent against the other, has been presented as a good thing, in an effort to normalise a parent/child coalition (Katz, 2022). In psychological terms however, exposure to adult feelings or fragilities in the adult to adult relationship, will always pose a threat to the integrated sense of self of a child, because of the neglect of the child’s right to a sovereign sense of self which is unburdened by adult matters. This is the point at which neglect of parental duty to preserve the child’s right to a childhood protected from triangulation into adult matters becomes traumatic to the child, because the very person who the child relies upon to protect them from harm, becomes the person who is the source of fear and anxiety in the child’s life.

The deep sense of fear and anxiety felt by children who are being triangulated into adult matters, is demonstrated by the onset of attachment maladaptations and specifically, when the traumatic impact has reached a point where the child becomes overwhelmed by the anxiety caused by regulating an unpredictable caregiver. In this scenario, the child’s sense of self fragments and the onset of splitting is evidenced by the idealisation of the frightening caregiver and the demonisation of the other parent. This splitting, resolves the problem for the child, which is how to regulate a frightening caregiver whilst being in a situation where they must have a relationship with the despised object triggering the behaviour in the frightening caregiver. As children in this situation become hyper sensitised to the environment in which they live, when they are repeatedly exposed to the behaviours of a parent who has come to despise the other parent, they will quickly sense the need to fall into line with the demands of that caregiver, seeking to predict what that person needs in order to keep them regulated. In order to survive this unsurvivable traumatic act of dividing their parents into one who is loved and one who is hated, the child buries the part of self which contains the love and positive feelings for the now despised parent into the unconscious, where it languishes with all of the attendant anxieties until such time that the child is free enough from the domination of the frightening caregiver to be able to tolerate awareness of those feelings again. For some children who are deeply terrorised, awareness of this freedom takes a very long time, for others, perhaps those who are faced with parents in the rejected position who are angry, distressed or no longer there, the capacity to recover an integrated sense of self is compromised for much longer.

This is the secret life of the alienated child, a life which is so secret that even the children who experience it do not know it is there until they are faced with the consequences of what they have been forced to do to themselves and to the parent they have rejected, often much later in life. For those young people who were removed from the parent causing them harm, a parent who prior to the removal had been chaotic and terrifying at times and at others had been caring and loving, the only signs of the abuse they had been suffering was in their disorganised attachment behaviours which were identified within a family court process. When removed from the abusive parent’s care to be placed in the kinship care of the parent they had been rejecting, each of these children began to experience a consistency of care which provided the platform for recovery and in recovery, each showed the impact of splitting which lies beneath the ‘going on as normal’ part of self which is identified in the psychological literature as a response to trauma.

After fifteen years working with the secret lives of alienated children, I have come to understand how the trauma they are surviving has been manipulated and misrepresented. Children are not given to abusive parents, they are removed from them in situations where it is identified that the caregiver with control over the child is causing fear and anxiety. Whilst there is a long way to go before we achieve uniform understanding of this and whilst those of us who do this work must continue to face fierce attack upon our reputations from those trying to distract attention from the child abuse we are working with, it is a moral imperative that we continue to raise awareness of the secret life of the alienated child because if we do not do so, the secret harm they are suffering will continue to be perpetrated upon them. 

It took many years for the reality of child sexual abuse to be finally accepted as reality, it is taking just as many years for the reality of this emotional and psychological abuse of children in family separation to be seen and heard. As the young people who lived with and recovered from this secret harm begin to speak about it, I hope that the acceptance of this will increase rapidly until it is a secret no more.

References

Fisher, J. (2017). Healing the fragmented selves of trauma survivors: Overcoming internal self-alienation. Routledge.

Katz, E. (2022). Coercive Control in Children’s and Mothers’ Lives. Oxford University Press.

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Family Separation Clinic News

The Family Separation Clinic will be holding a series of events this year at which formerly alienated children who are now young adults will share their stories of being removed from an abusive parent in residence transfer. In addition, new books by these young people and a Handbook of Therapeutic Parenting for Alienated Children which is informed by work with them, will be published. This is the year in which the secret life of the alienated child will be opened up to public scrutiny, informing policy makers and practitioners all over the world about the need to assist alienated children and the best routes to doing so. We are exceptionally grateful to the young people and the parents who have cared for them, for this opportunity to build public awareness about the work of the Clinic over the past fifteen years in order to educate others about how to work with children of divorce and separation who show signs of being seriously harmed.

Evaluation outputs, testimony and books will be published over the coming year and will be showcased in conferences, seminars and other events which I will detail here in due course.