Relational trauma is a way of describing the impact of abuse, abandonment or other forms of harm which are inflicted in relationships. Childhood relational trauma is the experience of being abused by a primary caregiver in circumstances where the child is powerless to resist and powerless to understand that what is happening in the relationship is unhealthy. The risk of this happening to children in divorce and separation is high when the child ends up largely under the control of one parent and the other is pushed to the margins of the child’s life. However, this is not the only way in which a child enters into the splitting defence which lies at the heart of this problem, the risk of a child aligning with a caregiver who is frightening is high, meaning that even if a child is spending only brief time with a parent, if that parent is unpredictable or frightening, the onset of disorganised attachment behaviours can be seen, leading eventually in some cases to the child’s aligment with the parent they do not live with and rejection of the parent who has been providing the majority care. The splitting defence, which is induced in children who feel unsafe and who are trying to survive in an unpredictable world, causes what is popularly called alienation, which in my clinical experience, is an alienation from child’s healthy self caused by the onset of a false defensive self.

Manipulation of the child’s internal sense of self so that an alignment with a controlling parent develops, causes a corresponding rejection of the other parent when the child’s capacity to hold two different realities in mind collapses. Being able to hold more than one reality in mind is a core developmental phase in children and denotes that a child is capable of recognising that their own feelings may differ from other peoples. This capacity to differentiate self from other, is what is erased when a child is manipulated in divorce or separation, either through exposure to a parent’s escalating anxiety or through deliberate behaviours which are designed to pressure the child into alignment. Bad mouthing of the other parent may or may not be involved in such a process, this is largely a coercive control strategy used to ensure that the child becomes enmeshed in the parental view of the world. This is a form of trauma bonding which goes largely unnoticed in the current manufactured controversies about the label parental alienation, it happens to children in the care of controlling/enmeshing mothers and fathers and it causes serious long term harm to the developing sense of self.

The core of the problem for children is that the defence of psychological splitting, in which they project onto parents an idealised/demonised version of reality, interrupts normal developmental processes. All children beyond the age of two or three begin to understand that the world is not divided into good and bad and if normal developmental stages are reached, ambivalence, which is the capacity to recognise that good people can do bad things and vice versa, is achieved.

That ambivalence lasts until they reach their teenage years, when splitting becomes, once again, part of the developmental process. This is why when teenagers align and reject after divorce, it is essential to ensure that the splitting behaviour is indeed pathological, rather than assuming that transitory alignment and rejection behaviours are always alienation. For some teenagers for example, the splitting behaviours will come and go, the love you/hate you attitude of many teenagers is a good example of this. It is this lack of consistent presence of this behaviour which suggests that this is not the pathological response seen when a young person is becoming alienated. For others, the splitting response to parents becomes so entrenched that it is impossible to shift, in addition it escalates, often to a degree where both parents are rejected and the teenager isolates from all relationships, a condition which causes interruption of the normal phases of teenage development, much of which relies upon peer relationships to build an internalised sense of self.

The problem for all children who become triangulated into adult matters in divorce and separation, is that this process prevents them from developing their own sense of self as they become focused upon defending or aligning with one parent and rejecting the other. This robs the child of the capacity to develop their own sense of self in relationship to others, in essence it steals the time that should be spent on healthy processes and replaces that with anxiety, confusion and an inappropriate concern with managing the family system. Children who are seen to be alienated are always seen to be inappropriately concerned with the management of the family system either consciously or unconsciously and this is one of the clearest differentials which demonstrates that the child has lost the capacity to focus on their own developmental processes. Whilst this behaviour presents differently in children, close observation will show that the child is directing their energies towards stabilising the system by regulating the parent to whom they are aligned, a condition which interrupts development of personality. It is in these circumstances that children become most at risk of developing anxiety based patterns of behaviour which are sometimes called borderline or unstable personality disorder. In these circumstances it is less about disorder and more about the traumatic impact of being alienated from the development of a coherent sense of self.

Supporting Integration in alienated children and young people

Because the underlying defence of psychological splitting has been induced in the child through pressure placed upon them in the family system, attachment relationships become disorganised, leading the child to shift from a stable presentation in relationship to primary caregivers and other family members, to an unpredictable shift between coming close and lashing out and moving away. This behavioural response in the child is projected at or into parents (meaning that the child attempts to make the parent behave as if they are the person they have been led to believe that they are). In such circumstances, if parents who are in the rejected position respond in the way that the child is attempting to trigger, the child has the excuse they need to justify the rejection. As such this is an appalling act of self destruction in children who are hypnotically transfixed by fear induced by a frightening or unpredictable caregiver. This is the core harm that we are working to heal when we treat children who are aligning and rejecting. It is a deep wound which the child is induced to ‘self’ inflict, as such it takes some depth work to help the child to heal.

The journey of the recovering child

Because the alienated child has lost out on healthy relationships in which developmental stages can be successfully achieved, the core goal in healing is to provide for the child a stable healthy relational ‘other’, with whom they can return to the work of those developmental stages. Whilst some of this work can be done in therapy (this is the primary work that I do in severe alienation cases), the best scenario for this work to be done is with the child in close proximity to a parent who understands how to provide a stable, anchored relationship over time. In my experience, this person is a healthy parent in the rejected position, by which I mean a parent who has survived the impact of being rejected and who has recovered their own stable position in relationship to the child’s unpredictable behaviours. This is an essential element for the recovery process because the child in recovery can be as unpredictable as the child who is entering the split state of mind. Even when older children or young adults are in recovery they will regress back to being more childlike as the unmet developmental needs resurface in the reawakened attachment relationship, meaning that all recovering children will regress before they are able to achieve a stable and integrated sense of self. The table above describes what you can expect to see in recovering children of all ages, being ready and able to recognise the different behaviours in different stages is vital, being able to respond to the different needs of recovering children, even more so.

I have been learning how to heal alienated children for fifteen years now and have seen throughout this journey, the way in which integration can be supported. Documenting this as part of my own learning has led me to build replicable treatment routes which can be used by other therapists, social workers and mental health professionals in partnership with healthy parents in the rejected position. As I progress towards the publication of my new books, I will be sharing some of the learning from the successful work that I have done with families and showing, through the testimony of the now adult children I have worked with, how utilising this approach to helping alienated children to heal, provides a long term solution to this inter-generational childhood relational trauma.

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Therapeutic Parenting – Upcoming Events

Listening Circles

July 2nd – Writing to your alienated child

July 16th – Understanding trauma bonding

Saturday Seminars

July 20th – Ghosts of the unremembered and unresolved past – transgenerational trauma transmission and alienation.

August 31st – The language of the alienated child.

(Both of our Saturday Seminars will be delivered twice, AM uk time and PM uk time to meet the needs of Asia-Pacific and UK/Europe and US/Canada parents).