Karen Woodall – Psychotherapist, Writer, Researcher, Trainer

Five years ago I wrote about the central role of psychological splitting in children who align with a parent and reject the other after family separation, because what Steve Miller MD had discussed with us in 2018 made complete sense to us in our clinical practice – ie that there is only one sign which is necessary to understand whether a child is at risk of harm when they align with a parent and reject the other and that is the evidence of their split state of mind.

It is the job of psychiatrists and psychologists to understand the evidence of how traumatised children express their experience in behaviours not words and the job of those professionals along with psychotherapists like me, to treat the problem. Those who do this work therefore, need to understand the way that this trauma presents and why and to recognise that the return to an infantile state of psychological splitting in which they idealise one parent and reject the other, is, in itself, a clear signal that something is going on in the system which is overwhelming the child. When one understands that basic premise of the internal psychological harm being caused to the child, through the regression back to an earlier psychological state, during the time when they really should be developing an integrated sense of self, the urgency for protection of these children becomes extremely clear. What we should be focused on is not high conflict, contact refusal or the even more opaque description of ‘complex divorce’, which are all just labels for something that people don’t properly understand, what we should be focused upon is the hidden trauma which is the internal fragmentation of self which is suffered by alienated children.

What is splitting?

According to Klein (1946), splitting is a defense mechanism that emerges early in infancy as a way for the child to cope with anxiety and overwhelming emotions. In her work, Klein explains how infants use splitting to manage conflicting feelings, particularly the simultaneous experiences of love and aggression toward their primary caregivers, usually the mother. This mechanism helps the infant organize its internal world by dividing experiences and people into “good” and “bad” parts. However, splitting can persist into adulthood and manifest in various forms of psychopathology, particularly in borderline personality disorder and other mental health conditions. Klein linked splitting to the paranoid-schizoid position, where the infant experiences extreme anxiety and uses splitting to protect themselves from the perceived “bad object.” As the child grows and integrates these split perceptions, they move towards the depressive position, where they recognize the caregiver as a whole person, leading to feelings of guilt, empathy and concern for the object’s well-being.

What is splitting in children of divorce and separation?

What is happening to some children of divorce and separation, is that they are being pushed back into this infantile state of mind due to overwhelming anxiety caused by the dynamics around them. This regression to the paranoid schizoid position, creates defensive splits in the developing child’s sense of self. The key age for vulnerability to this regression is between 8 and 14 years, because this is the time when a child should be engaged in developing their own sense of self which is paradoxically, precisely why a regression to an infantile state of mind happens when the child is overwhelmed. The child in this position, does not have the ego strength to cope with the triangulation into the adult relationship, which is achieved via trauma bonding strategies used by uncontained adults. These bind the child to the parental need and turns them away from their own developmental processes back to the paranoid schizoid position. Defensive splitting during this period is thus harmful to the child as the internal sense of self cannot grow in an integrated way and the risk to too many children, of being exposed to this trauma is that they will not be able to achieve integration due to the interruption of their developmental journey and the self-alienation which this causes, can become a life long burden for the child to carry.

Self alienation

I wrote about the core role of splitting in what is known as alienation of children in 2019 and since then the full excavation of what this induced state of mind in children actually means has been our goal. What it means in contemporary trauma terms is a state of defensive splitting, which arises as a defensive structure in psychologically overwhelmed children and which is then projected outwards onto parents. As such a better way of describing what is happening to children who align and reject parents after family separation is therefore self alienation.

Self alienation is well recognised in the trauma literature and one doesn’t have to look too far to see it explained perfectly in terms of children being overwhelmed by circumstances they are not psychologically strong enough to cope with. As Judith Herman (1992) says –

Disconnection
Traumatic events breach the attachments of family, friendship, love, and community. They shatter the construction of the self that is formed and sustained in relation to others. They undermine the belief system that gives meaning to human experience. They violate the victim’s faith in a natural or divine order and cast the victim into a state of existential crisis. It is a shattering of “basic trust.” A sense of alienation, disconnection pervades every relationship. (Judith Herman, 1992).

Janina Fisher explains this “splitting” through developments in neuroscience and our ability as humans to dissociate from our emotions to build a more socially acceptable image. As a psychotherapist working with alienated children, I have spent many many hours observing the internal barriers that these children present to healing and understand now that this is because of what Janina Fisher (2017) terms internal not interpersonal barriers. What is recognised outside as an alienation from a relationship with a parent is actually on the inside, an alienation from the authentic sense of self the child once had.

Week after week, month after month, the therapist’s encouragement of self-acceptance and compassion is often met by the client’s “default setting” of alienation and self-hatred. Because these battlefields are internal, not interpersonal, I have to come to think of them as reflecting “internal attachment disorders” that mirror the attachment failures of early childhood and often replicate them. (Janina Fisher, 2017).

The child in a state of self alienation is suffering from internal shame caused by the inability to cope with the overwhelming psychological pressure they have been placed under and the repeated efforts to hide the reality of what is happening to them from the parent in the rejected position.

Self-alienation is an expression of deeply internalized shame. The self-alienated individual feels trapped, imprisoned by shame. Psychotherapy patients with significant relational trauma typically reveal a persistent internal battle against self-doubt, self-condemnation, and often self-loathing. They are referencing shameful fears and beliefs about themselves that are born from problematic attachment and developmental experiences. (Daniel Shaw, 2019).

and as Peter Fonagy says of the alien self –

Even the most sensitive caregiver is insensitive to the child’s state of mind more than 50% of the time. Thus, we all have alien parts to our self-structure. The coherence of the self, as many have noted, is somewhat illusory. This illusion is normally maintained by the con-tinuous narrative commentary on behaviour that mentalisation provides, which fills in the gaps and weaves our experiences together so that they make sense. In the absence of a robust mentalising capacity, with disorganised patterns of attachment, the fragmentation of self-structure is clearly revealed. (Peter Fonagy, 2021).

The signs of self alienation in children of divorce and separation

Many alienated children have a weak sense of self which they compensate for in trying to achieve big things, some present as being hyper competent as a cover for the lack of stability they feel inside. Recovering children who are in young adulthood may lurch from feeling competent to feeling hopeless, lacking an internal compass and integrated place of safety. There is a reason why so many young people who have been through reunification camps and treatments over the years emerge at the age of 18 only to denounce the parent they have been reunited with. It is because the only thing that has been addressed in the treatment route is the external circumstances, the focus has all been about the restoration of the relationship with the parent who was rejected and the internal fragmentation of self has been left in place. Many young people have simply flipped the internal script in reunification programmes, seeing the once aligned parent as the wrong one and the rejected parent as the right one. Trauma bonding is an internalised experience not an external one and I would argue that reunification programmes have been treating the wrong problem for decades because of this lack of understanding.

Healing self alienation

Self alienation in divorce and separation is a trauma response to an overwhelming psychological double bind which causes internal fragmentation of the developing personality. The behaviour that is observed in alienated children is a situational disorganised attachment which is driven by the child’s attempt to find safety in an extremely unsafe psychological environment. As the child’s behaviour escalates and the parent in the rejected position reacts to this, projective entanglements tighten the double bind around the child. As professionals try harder and harder to fix the problem by fixing the parental responses, the child is left with a sense of helplessness and hopelessness at the deepest internal level. These children are not conscious of what they are doing, they are trying to survive the unsurvivable in a world which does not (yet) fully understand their plight. Self alienation is the end result and an abandonment to their fate as campaigners on each side spend their time trying to prove that meaningless labels matter or not.

What these children need is a safe harbour to anchor in until they can heal the schizms in the mind which interfere with their healthy development and as our work with recovering children over the years has shown, the very best person to provide that safe harbour for them, is, paradoxically, the parent they were forced into rejecting. This is why we are so focused upon our project to educate and skill up parents in the rejected position, because we know that this is where the full potential for healing alienated children lies. This is why we are not interested in labels or theories which are constructed around external concepts such as high conflict/ contact refusal or complex divorce. All of those things are simply words used by people who do not really understand what alienated children are going through, which is self alienation, described here as –

Self-alienation is defined as a state of estrangement from oneself, often accompanied by emotional distancing. People who are self-alienated may be unaware of or unable to describe their own internal processes. APA Dictionary of Psychology

Therapeutic Parenting for Self Alienated Children

Using therapeutic parenting, a concept which was developed to help abused children in fostering and adoption and which we have adapted to fit the needs of abused children in divorce and separation, attachment work can be done by the parent in the rejected position who can help the child/adolescent/adult to integrate and stabilise the fragmented self so that the sense of being disconnected from the core self disappears. When parents in the rejected position step into this place of healing and provision of care, what they will find is a child who is in a regressed state of mind in some parts of self and in an omnipotent state of mind in others. Learning to work with the part selves of alienated children is therefore a key skill in therapeutic parenting and understanding how these parts present themselves is one of the modules we teach on our Holding up a Healthy Mirror course, it is also a new course in itself which will be available in 2025.

The Lighthouse Academy

The Lighthouse Academy is the name for our project to bring resources to help parents in the rejected position to help their children to heal. The Academy provides courses, books and other helpful resources to help families and has been developing since the Pandemic when we began delivering more of our work online.

Three new books will be published in the coming months to provide the foundation for the Lighthouse Academy.

1. Holding up a Healthy Mirror – the Handbook of Therapeutic Parenting for Alienated Children.
2. The Journey of the Alienated Child – A Guidebook for Therapeutic Parents
3. The Holding up a Healthy Mirror Workbook for Parents and Professionals.

When the Lighthouse Academy switches its beam on around the world you will be able to access coaching, learning, therapy and more. The books, the courses and all of our resources which are in development now, will provide parents and the professionals who work with them a comprehensive one stop shop for everything necessary to heal alienated children of all ages in the short to longer term. For those who work with the family courts, resources to help you to manage your interventions will be available and for therapists working with what have, until now, been called intractable or insoluble cases, our resources for work with children and their parents will support you to build strong frameworks for practical interventions which are evidence based. All of our work is supported by evidence and the independent research examining outcomes of cases in court as well as the testimonials of an increasing number of parents who see significant change in their children using therapeutic parenting.

Based upon fifteen years of working with the most serious cases of self alienation in children in the High Court in England and Wales and in the Netherlands, Sweden, Hong Kong, Australia, USA and Canada, the Lighthouse Academy is coming soon and we look forward to helping you to help your children to heal in the coming months and years.

References

Duschinsky, Robbie, and Sarah Foster, ‘Conceptualizing the ‘self’’, Mentalizing and Epistemic Trust: The work of Peter Fonagy and colleagues at the Anna Freud Centre (Oxford, 2021; online edn, Oxford Academic, 1 June 2021), https://doi.org/10.1093/med-psych/9780198871187.003.0007, accessed 27 Oct. 2024.

Herman, J. (1992). Complex PTSD: A Syndrome in Survivors of Prolonged and Repeated Trauma. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 5, 377-391.

Klein, Melanie. Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946–1963. Free Press, 1975

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