Karen Woodall – Psychotherapist, Writer, Researcher, Trainer

Narcissistic abuse is a popular concept these days but what exactly is it and how does it present itself in situations where children become strongly aligned to an abusive parent and rejecting of the other? In our work at the Family Separation Clinic, we understand that narcissistic abuse lies at the heart of so many cases of alienation of children and that the reason it is so poorly understood is because of the hidden nature of it. In fact it is so far from view that one severely abused child who was forced to reject his parent, described it as having ‘bruises on my soul – you can’t see them, but I can feel them’. 

In fact many children who suffer those bruises on their soul cannot feel them, so covert is the nature of narcissistic abuse. Those children, who anxiously mirror their parent, who are robotic in their regulation of parental mood, show a terrorised state of mind which often shows in their faces. Parents who are rejected will speak of the child look frozen and as if their eyes are without lights, a presentation I call ‘zombie face’, in which the child’s intra-psychic world has become invaded by the parasitic unpredictability of a narcissistic parent’s demands. These are the children who suffer impotent rage, in which they will turn their anger, fear and frustration 180 degrees in order to defend themselves from their awareness of what a parent is doing to them. Trapped in the mirror of parental narcissism and helpless to escape because of the control that parent has over them, they fall into the defence called ‘identification with the aggressor‘ in which they divest themselves of conscious awareness of the abuse they are suffering and their own feelings about that and split it off and project it at the healthy parent. What is deeply hidden in this process however, is the manner in which the child will first turn their impotent rage upon themselves, projecting hatred internally, so that a perpetual fight occurs within between the healthy self and the narcissistic identification with the aggressor part of self. Eventually these children become numb to the outside world as the narcissistic part overwhelms all sense of self and the bruises on the child’s soul disappear even from their own consciousness.

Recovery from narcissistic abuse is not simple for alienated children because of the way in which this problem is so poorly understood and because without external recognition of the bruises on the child’s soul, there is little hope that they will have the ego strength to be able to heal. This is why it is so essential to train parents in the rejected position to understand how this abuse works in children, because by the time children are emerging from stage two of this journey, which is the disappearance into splitting, they have been exposed to relentless narcissistic abuse for so long that they emerge disorientated and with disturbance in self organisation. Many children who emerge and begin to reach out to the parent they have rejected, show classic signs of narcissistic abuse in their attachment behaviour and in their internal battle with a split sense of self, one part of which is narcissistic, the other part of which is healthy and well.

Healing from narcissistic abuse and alienation is therefore a relational task which is best achieved through the constant healthy mirroring, which can be offered by the parent in the rejected position. On our courses we teach how to do that and how to provide for the child the consistent secure responding which enables them to recover from the bruises that they do not know exist until they are safe. In our work we explain how the shift from zombie face to the repaired attachment shows itself in children’s eyes and how to understand and respond to the shut down attachment which denotes severe narcissistic abuse. This is because we know that the harm is so hidden from view that it requires the closest of attachment focused responding to help the child to let go of the burden of self blame and the impotent rage that is interwoven with it.

If you want to help your alienated child, even if they are in the disappeared stage where they appear to be completely rejecting of you, come and join us on one of our courses or groups where we are working at the deepest level of healing. Where bruises on the souls of children are seen, understood and responded to, where narcissistic abuse isn’t just a phrase that people use but a deeply understood phenomenon in the lives of alienated children everywhere.

Starting on Tuesday 29th April 2025 – Therapy Group for Alienated Mothers

This group is a therapeutic support group which is rooted in an understanding of narcissistic abuse and how coercive control captures children post separation, exposing them to the same abuse that their mother has suffered. Focused on strengthening your ego, building assertiveness in different systems and management of the court process (where you are in proceedings), this group is about how to hack through the barriers facing mothers who are seeking to help their abused children to heal. Facilitated by Karen Woodall and running every second week between 5 and 7pm UK time (suitable for UK, Europe and North America/Canadian time zones) this is an open group which will cover all aspects of post separation abuse.

Please note that this group is based in psychological understanding and management of coercive control, it teaches how to manage the systems you face as a mother who is being rejected by children after family separation and how to manage children’s rejecting behaviours. As such this group does not subscribe to the binary splitting of parents into good mothers and bad fathers and does not use unscientific terms such as Child and Mother Sabotage or RRR or AAA but instead uses standard attachment theory to inform and guide our work.