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The Lighthouse Project is the Family Separation Clinic’s name for the courses and resources we are developing for parents in the rejected position who wish to develop therapeutic parenting skills. Therapeutic parenting for alienated children, is an adapted form of attachment based parenting which responds to alienated children’s disorganised attachment behaviours in divorce and separation. Our work over the past four years has shown us that training parents in these skills brings significant change to alienated children’s lives, our committment for the coming years is to build a school of therapeutic parenting to equip children of divorce and separation with parents who can respond to their very clear needs for support.
Our courses and resources are designed to enable you to reframe your understanding of what is happening so that you can move beyond the binary approach of ‘parental alienation’ or ‘resist refuse’ labels towards a comprehensive depth understanding of all of the dynamics which are at play in your own family system.
As you build your knowledge through our introductory Holding up a Healthy Mirror programme, you will begin to do the deeper trauma work of recovering your integrated sense of self as a parent. When you are anchored and stabilised through depth awareness of yourself and others in your family attachment trauma story, you will begin to build the skill to understand the language of the alienated child and will be able to differentiate what helps and when it is helpful and how to recognise those points in time when a child or young person is ready and able to reconnect.
Alienation is a world of projections and primitive defences, which explain the child’s behaviours as well as helping you to understand what to do and what not to do in response. When you are able to work with projections and primitive defences confidently, you will stay safe and be more able to keep your children safe over time. Staying out of the tangled world of projections will empower you and enable you to live a healthier life throughout the alienation journey as you deepen your skills with our Higher Level Understanding programme.
Learn the Language of the Alienated Child on our Higher Level Understanding Course
Our Higher Level Course which follows on from Holding up a Healthy Mirror is a brain based therapeutic parenting approach to high level attuned responding to children with disorganised attachments. This course builds upon our introductory Holding up a Healthy Mirror course and prepares you for the deeper skills of attachment parenting for children who have suffered this situational abuse.
Getting the Best out of Our Training and Support Groups
We currently have two courses which are supported by our regular listening circles and our rolling therapy group which is called ‘Lighthouse Keeping.’
Our Holding up a Healthy Mirror Course (HUAHM) is our introductory course which runs in different formats over 8 hours. This costs £180 per person and parts of it are recorded for you to watch again in your own time as you begin your learning journey with us.
Our Higher Level Understanding Course is the follow on from HUAHM, this runs in different formats over 12 hours and costs £350 per person. Once again parts of this course are recorded for you to watch again as you deepen your skill set.
Listening Circles are practical sessions for those who are undergoing therapeutic parenting training, these are drop in sessions which you can attend as a one off or regularly, they cost £40 per person and you can share your ticket with two other people. (Please note that due to interference from campaigners trying to cause harm to our work, we will require names and verification of anyone who is attending on a shared ticket and all attendees will be required to have their camera on during these events).
The Lighthouse Keeping Group is a therapy group to support all parents in the rejected position to stabilise and anchor in readiness for using therapeutic parenting with their children. This runs for two hours every other Tuesday in blocks of six sessions and costs £240 per person.
NEW for AUTUMN 2024
Coaching Groups
From the Autumn we will be offering a new service for all parents who need additional help. This will take the form of small coaching groups which will be convened around particular stages in the alienation journey (more on staging of the alienation journey comes soon so that you can work out which group is for you). Small coaching groups will be for 4-6 people maximum and will be designed to enable you to fully utilise therapeutic parenting at the deepest level. These groups will be helpful for those who are in shared care situations, those whose children are in the early stage of alienation behaviours, those whose children are in the ‘disappeared’ stage where they are completely rejecting, those whose children are returning and those with older adult children who are finding it difficult to reconnect. Small coaching groups will be run by the Family Separation Clinic and supervised by me (I will also run some of them).
Lighthouse Keeping – A Handbook of Therapeutic Parenting for Alienated Children by Karen Woodall (Publication – September 2024)
This new handbook for parents in the rejected position will be published in September 2024, it contains everything that you need to know about beginning your journey as a therapeutic parent to alienated children. Filled with depth exploration of why children become alienated (and why many don’t), this book allows you to forensically explore all of the entanglements in your family system which led to your child’s alignment and rejection behaviour as well as learn how to build the necessary skills to help your child to heal from the disorganised attachment behaviour that has arisen due to the interruption to healthy development which is caused by what is popularly called alienation (which is, in fact, an alienation of the child from their own developing sense of self). When you understand how your child became alienated in the developmental process, you will understand what is necessary to help them to integrate all of the fragmented parts of self so that they can return to life as a whole person. In doing this work you will learn how to integrate your own internal fragmented self in order to provide a stable and anchored point of safety for your child to return to.
This book helps you to work psychologically at depth to heal the layers of fragmented dynamics which are caused by (often), generations of anxieties and traumas which have remained unresolved and passed down through the attachment relationships to the children in the here and now. Learning about projections which emanate from these unresolved trauma dynamics, helps you to stay free from entanglements, working with mentalisation and attachment based trauma recovery work, you will learn how to mirror back to your child a healthy sense of self. Finally you will learn the language of parts which all alienated children speak and understand how to listen, recognise what the child is saying and respond in ways that assist integration.
Based upon work with over a hundred alienated children over the past fifteen years, this book brings you the elements we have developed and tested and have proven are successful in helping alienated children, so that parents in the rejected position can finally fully understand the what, why, when and how to help their children to fully heal from this family attachment trauma.
Lighthouse Keeping for Beginners: A Workbook for Trauma Based Healing for Alienated Children and Their Families – Family Separation Clinic – Publication -September 2024
This workbook accompanies our courses and resources for parents and wider family members.
Our courses bring parents to a place where they can confidently help their children, both are based on our work with families using a brain based approach (thinking about how the child’s developing brain has been affected by the alienation) to reframing their understanding of what has happened to their child.
Courses aim to educate parents, integrate the reactive splitting and free them from projections from the other parent and child. Many parents in the rejected position have a weakened sense of self, building up the internal ego and reuniting parents with their own sense of being a parent again (which has often been split off as part of the process of reactive splitting), is how we rebuild the internal hierarchy of the family system.
This workbook helps parents to begin the process of developing depth understanding of self in relation to others and to prepare for therapeutic parenting training so that they are ready to help their child(ren) heal.
Karen Woodall - Psychotherapist, Writer, Researcher, Trainer 
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