Trauma bonding occurs when an unhealthy attachment is developed by a person who has experienced trauma in an interpersonal setting with the abuser – an attachment that is so strong it is emotionally difficult to let go. In divorce and separation, children become trauma bonded to a parent who is unpredictable or frightening in circumstances where the world feels out of control. When this occurs, the rejection of a parent is a by product of the trauma bonding, in essence it is the trauma bond which is the core dynamic to be investigated.
This year, the Family Separation Clinic is hosting an International Symposium in Cambridge which centres the voices of those children who are now adults who were removed from abusive mothers and fathers to the care of the parent they had been rejecting. The purpose of the Symposiumn is to enable professionals to understand the real stories of why children are removed, so that evidence based understanding of what is happening when children align and reject is available. Practitioners from all over the world will present at the Symposium, sharing case studies and experience from their work with trauma bonded children and the intricate work which is necessary to liberate children from attachment maladaptations.
Amidst the constant manufactured controversies about whether children can be manipulated by one parent against the other in divorce and separation, there are many myths which likely arise from a lack of clinical experience in working with families directly. This issue is not about high conflict between parents, it is not about the contact relationship that a child has with a non resident parent, this is an issue which arises from the dynamics which are converging around the child in a family where the crisis of family separation has triangulated the child into the spousal relationship. One way or another, children who align and as a result reject a parent, have been exposed to adult matters and have become trauma bonded as a result. When that exposure is sustained, causing a child to feel unsafe, the need to regulate, protect and soothe a parent as a survival mechanism takes over.
This post introduces Anna, who was removed from the care of her father at the age of eleven. Anna didn’t want to leave her father and had been rejecting of her mother for some time before removal. Anna is now twenty one years old. As you read Anna’s story, notice the lack of overt manipulation on the part of her father and observe how much of what happened to Anna occured in the silence around her mother’s absence. Trauma bonding is about so much more than the commonly understood alienating behaviours and to fail to understand that, is to fail those children who are held hostage to a parent’s mindset in plain sight.
Anna’s Story
My dad was a very well known in the town where I lived, he had a position of power and because of that everyone knew who he was. I was very proud that he was my dad and I felt that I was special because of it. My dad was often depressed although I didn’t know what depression was back then, I just thought he was really sad all of the time and that it was my responsibility to make him happy. I tried very very hard to make him happy and when he cheered up sometimes, I felt as if I had done a really good job.
When my mum left home I now know that she went to live with her parents but I didn’t know then because from the day she left we were not allowed to talk about her. My dad was even more sad after she left and often didn’t get out of bed, when he did he would put on his ‘happy face’ as he used to say and go into work. I don’t know what people at work thought about all the time he was not going in to do his job, I know that my school teachers were worried about us because they used to ask if my dad was ok, but no-one seemed to intervene, at least at that time.
After about six months my mum came to the house and my dad would not let her in. I remember hearing some angry voices at the door and then silence. We were still not allowed to talk about my mum and at times it seemed as if she had never existed. I don’t remember wondering where she was, I just remember every single day I worried about my dad and whether he would be sad and whether or not he would be out of bed when I got home from school. At that time I started to do the cooking for us all and I started to do the shopping shortly after, sometimes I would go to the local co-op and sometimes I would order things online with my dads bank card, he seemed to like that and so I became the house keeper if you like, it made me feel good and as if I was doing something to help him.
The atmosphere in our house was eternally sad and low and worrying. The whole of my tenth and half of my eleventh year was lived in that way, still nothing from my mum and with no mention of her it was as if she had disappeared into thin air, I remember beginning to feel angry about her leaving us.
When the social workers came to the house my dad got out of bed and was angry and there was a lot of shouting in the house that day, then it all went quiet for a couple of weeks until a court person came to see me at school. She asked me about my mum and I said that I didn’t want to see her, when she asked why I didn’t know what to say, I was so immersed in the process of keeping my dad happy that I couldn’t think of anything that I could say so I said I hated my mum because she had hurt me. I also said other things that I won’t go into here because it isn’t necessary but they were all untrue. This person then went away and I thought that that was the end of it but it wasn’t. Two days later the social workers and two policemen came to the house and told me to get into the police car because we were going to live with my mum. I was astonished (and very angry) and I told them I wasn’t going. I went to my room and tried to barricade myself in but they came in anyway and made me go downstairs into the car. My dad was crying, it was really horrible.
And then we arrived at my mum’s house and she was outside waiting and suddenly I felt a really strong feeling of love for her. I can’t explain how that happened only that I saw her there and she smiled and waved as the police were parking the car and I suddenly wanted to jump out and run to give her a hug, which is what I did. My siblings came after me and were jumping all over her too, it was such a happy feeling and quite shocking because I think I had thought that my mum was like the devil and someone never to even think about. That is the story of that day and how it felt to me. What came next is how I learned to understand what happened to me and why I couldn’t escape. I didn’t see my dad for a long time and later I found out he had left the country, I have seen him since and though it hasn’t been easy, I have persevered because I love him, he is still very sad though and that is always difficult to navigate without immediately feeling that it is my responsibility to take care of him.
Disorganised attachment behaviours in trauma bonded children
My work with children who are trauma bonded to an abusive parent has shown me the devastating impact that this dynamic has on them and the ways in which they will give up all of their personal freedoms in order to ensure that they meet an abusive parent’s needs. Far from being a problem which is rooted in ‘contact’ or high conflict, trauma bonding is a sustained campaign of interpersonal terrorism between a parent with total control and a helpless child who has no control. The big lesson is that trauma bonded children do not reject the parents who have control over them, but instead show compliance, extreme allegiance and often bizarre behaviours which, when understood in context, convey the real story of what is happening to the child.
Trauma bonding causes alienation, both in the child’s relationship to their own authentic sense of self and in the relationship with the parent in the rejected position and causes disorganised attachment behaviours in the child.
Disorganised attachment is also called fearful-avoidant attachment style, it is denoted by inconsistent and unpredictable shifts in behaviours. Children with a disorganized attachment style seek loving connection but then lash out and detach from a caregiver. Disorganised attachment is situational to children in divorce and separation who move from the fearful-avoidant behaviours to the more infantile psychological splitting of strong alignment and complete rejection as a defence against the onset of a set of actions and reactions in parents, that the onset of their own disorganised attachments have triggered. What we call alienation, is a family attachment trauma which if not properly understood by the professionals who encounter it, will be exacerbated and entrenched in the child’s intrapsychic world for years to come.
Understanding and treating this family attachment trauma fully requires significant clinical experience as well as an extensive knowledge of the literature on attachment, trauma, relational psychodynamics and structural therapy. Working directly with children who align and reject has required me to go to this literature again and again to find the right routes to helping children to unravel their entanglements in the parental relationship. Using structural management of the coercive control dynamics (asking the Court to put in place the necessary restrictions on a controlling parent) and then attachment based therapies delivered alongside the parent in the rejected position, children can be liberated from the internalised attachment maladaptations so that they can move on developmentally.
“We went through this long process of psychological trauma only to find out that our abusers are trying to distort the public narrative about this problem, it is time for those of us who suffered to make sure that our stories are heard and properly understood”.
These children who are now adults, know what it is to be helpless and trapped and in some instances to not know they were trapped until they were freed to live normal lives. As one of these now grown up children said “We went through this long process of psychological trauma only to find out that our abusers are trying to distort the public narrative about this problem, it is time for those of us who suffered to make sure that our stories are heard and properly understood”.
The children who are coming have all moved on in their lives healthily and are all able to articulate their experiences of being removed to the care of a parent they had been rejecting. This year, it is time for their voices to be heard.
Bookings for the Recovering Futures Symposium on 12th September 2024 at Cambridge University UK can be made as follows
Attend in Person – (£90 for 1 day ticket including lunch and refreshments throughout the day)
The Symposium is open to professionals in all fields concerned with child protection, divorce and separation, children’s rights and wellbeing, domestic abuse and coercive control, attachment and trauma etc. The Symposium is designed to be a safe place in which the issues concerning the wellbeing of abused children are discussed and furthered without interference from those who are recognised as being disruptive of this work and as such, all attendees will be screened on application to ensure that they are genuine in terms of their interest in the subjects which are covered. Applications to attend can be made below and we welcome all professionals with an interest in helping abused children in divorce and separation to attend.
Attend Online – (£40 for 1 day ticket)
The event will be live streamed throughout the day and we welcome everyone with an interest in this subject to attend in full or in part (please note there will be no recording of this event).
Live streaming gives you access to all presentations including the testimonies of the young people who were removed from a parent due to abuse and transferred to the care of the parent they had rejected. (Please note that due to the ongoing interference with our work by campaigners who seek to deny the lived experience of children and young people who are trauma bonded to an abusive parent, we will be protecting the privacy of these young people online and only streaming their testimony live by audio).
Karen Woodall - Psychotherapist, Writer, Researcher, Trainer 
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