Karen Woodall – Psychotherapist, Writer, Researcher, Trainer

2025 is set to be a big year at the Family Separation Clinic with our research with children removed from abusive parents in family court cases due to report, plus three new books for parents and professionals due to be published soon. These are just some of the outputs of over fifteen years of work with alienated children and their families and they promise to offer new beginnings in how the problem of children’s alignment and rejection behaviour in divorce and separation, is understood and treated.

New services

Alongside these new approaches to working with this problem, we are launching the Lighthouse Academy of Therapeutic Parenting for alienated children, an online safe space where you can get all the resources and support you need to help your child(ren) to recover from this family attachment trauma. Based upon work with over a hundred severely alienated children in the family court in England and Wales, our initial evaluation has shown that when healthy parents who have been rejected by trauma bonded children, are empowered to provide the consistent and predictable parenting that these children need, the results are outstanding in terms of recovery of relational health. In 2025 we will be further testing our out of court work with families through an evaluation of our intensive therapeutic parenting groups, so that we can bring this success to even more children through the input of the parent they have been forced to reject. Results from evaluation and research will be published as it becomes available.

New books

The first of three new publications in 2025 is The Journey of the Alienated Child, which I have written to provide you with a detailed walk through of how children are affected by attachment trauma in divorce and separation and what you can do about it. Looking closely at each stage, you will come to understand the predictable nature of the journey of the alienated child and how you, as a parent who until now may have felt helpless and hopeless, can adapt your input to help your child(ren) to recover an integrated sense of self. The Journey of the Alienated Child will be followed by our Workbook for parents, which will accompany the intensive groups we will deliver this year and finally the Handbook of Therapeutic Parenting for Alienated Children will offer you a complete model of theory and practice for helping children who have suffered from emotional and psychological harm in divorce and separation.

New evidence

Our outputs from research and evaluation is due this year and promises to offer a unique insight into the experience of children who were removed from harm by the family court in England and Wales. Coupled with a new route to informing policy and practice, through our partnership work with Local Authorities in several countries in Europe, we will continue to educate and train more professionals to understand and use our child protection approach to resolving these cases of serious harm of children.

New energy

With a team of people assisting the launch of our new Lighthouse Academy, we will shine new light on the problem of children who are trauma bonded to abusers, bringing creative energies to our projects, and, through partnering with some powerful advocates for children’s health and wellbeing, new communications about this hidden form of child abuse. We will share news of these projects as we go through the year and look forward to seeing the outputs from all of our work over fifteen years being shared across the world so that the reality of the harm suffered by children of divorce and separation is recognised and responded to in ways that enable children to heal from the fractured sense of self which causes the behaviour we see when children are said to be alienated.

New ways to help your children

We know that healthy parents are the best people to help their children to heal from this attachment trauma. Working with you through the Lighthouse Academy, we will help you to understand, heal and help your children to recover from the harm that they have suffered. So many parents have told us this year that this approach works, we look forward to helping many more of you in 2025.

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Winter Term at the Lighthouse Academy

The winter term 2025 begins shortly and you can book onto several courses. Begin your learning journey with us via our Holding up a Healthy Mirror course, which is a foundation in therapeutic parenting to provide you with the basic skills and knowledge you need to help your child(ren). The Higher Level Understanding course will run again in the Spring term along with two Intensive Therapeutic Coaching groups with me which will begin in May.

If you feel that working in a single sex group would be more comfortable for you we have our Staying Dad and Being Mum courses and our Lighthouse Keeping Therapy Group will begin again towards the end of January. We will soon be adding our watch on demand content for you and our new books will be available to purchase via the website too. You can find out more about everything we are doing by subscribing to our newsletter below or by following the link to our online page for the Lighthouse Academy below. We look forward to welcoming you.