The world seems to spend a lot of time discussing whether or not the attachment trauma of alienation exists or not. On the one hand we have parental alienation advocates and the resist/refuse devotees championing signs and symptoms and on the other hand we have the ideological academics tying themselves in knots trying to say that parent alienation doesn’t exist, whilst simultaneously trying to find a way of explaining what happened to Virginia Guiffre. It can be exhausting at times and it certainly is frustrating to watch, but you can step aside and leave it all behind when you lose the labels and start to unpack what lies behind it all. Because when you start to unpack, you find the answers to the problem you face as parent in the rejected position. You find the reason why your child has entered into this defensive presentation and you find the tools and strategies to heal your child.
At the Family Separation Clinic, we left the world of parental alienation behind in 2019 when a question we had been grappling with couldn’t be answered whilst working in that paradigm. All those signs and symptoms, all those lists of things that were supposed to explain that a child was alienated, left us with the question ‘so what?’ So what if you can list five signs, so what if you can list seventeen alienating strategies, so what if you could prove it in Court, so what?
So what if you prove that parental alienation exists, what then? Having worked with well over a hundred severely alienated children, I didn’t need to prove that anything existed and it was frustrating to have to watch parents having to prove what was happening in Court and then having nowhere to go to get treatment. It was therefore the ‘so what’ question, which led us to continue on our journey to unpack the psychology of the child’s presentation and the ‘so what’ question which led us to develop our co-therapy approach to working with families, an approach we had been using in the family court process for many years. We moved from the ‘so what’ question to the ‘what if’. What if there was a way to heal the child without having to prove that anything existed?
Treatment of the problem of a child’s defensive alignment with an unpredictable, often emotionally and psychologically disordered parent and concurrent rejection of a healthy parent, begins with understanding that this is not about high conflict, it is not about the contact a child has with the parent in the rejected position and it is not about complex divorce. In fact the term ‘complex divorce’ is just something that people who do not understand this attachment trauma, call cases they cannot resolve, precisely because they do not know what it is they are looking at. In addition, the child who is aligning and rejecting, does not have a mental condition which needs traditional therapy, the child is suffering from an attachment trauma which is caused by the asymmetrical power dynamic they are living in. The child is surviving as best they can in this dynamic and their behaviour, which is not confusing when you understand the aetiology of it, describes the entrapment they are suffering. In short, the behaviour of the alienated child tells the story of what they are experiencing, which is entrapment by a parent they are completely dependent upon. When you understand that, you are ninety percent of the way to being able to help and heal the child.
We are however, a long way from the situation where entrapment of children in parental divorce is routinely understood, prevented where possible and treated when it does happen. The gender war, which is how this issue is prevented from being understood as a children’s mental health issue, is making sure of that. Whilst ever parental rights activists keep fighting over whether this issue happens or not, the experience of the child will be overlooked and forgotten, because the louder the adult advocates shout, the more invisible the child becomes.
Stepping out of that binary battle was a blessed relief back in 2019 and in 2025, when I look back and see how far we have come in terms of treatment routes, I know that we did the right thing. Today we can bring you not only a depth explanation of what happens to alienated children, we can show you how to treat it too and not only by going to Court but by the essential tools you need for healing, the mind shifts you need to make and the thousand tiny steps you can take to meeting your alienated child’s real needs, not those imagined by people who do not understand the child’s lived experience.
We call our way of working with alienated child Structural Therapeutic Parenting. We call it this because it recognises the external asymmetry of power around the child first and then teaches you to implement strategies for bringing your child into proximity to you. Proximity is where the magic begins, because it is the use of the attachment relationship the child has with you, a relationship which never dies although it becomes distorted, which is the conduit through which all healing takes place.
Our work with you in co-therapy, lasts only as long as it takes to stabilise you so that you can respond instead of reacting, teach you to recognise the journey the child is taking and the skills that you need to help your child to integrate the fragmentation of the ego which is at the heart of this trauma. After that you have all that you need and when you can walk on your own, our work with you is done. Because the best therapist for an alienated child is a healthy, healed and whole parent in the rejected position, meaning that the quicker we can get you to that place, the better it is for you and the better it is for your child.
At the Family Separation Clinic, all of our work is focused upon helping to heal alienated children, which means that all of our focus is on unpacking the different parts of this attachment trauma, which has sent your child on a diversionary journey away from their own developmental processes. We do this so that you can understand, learn and use the skills and strategies we have developed to bring immediate change to the lives of alienated children. Rooted in our successful work in the family courts since 2009, we help you to build skills to heal even the most severely alienated children and we know it works because it is based upon successful work both inside and outside of the Court process and because you tell us so.
So on behalf of alienated children everywhere, we welcome you to join us to begin your journey from parent in the rejected position to what we call living in the lighthouse position, a place of psychological safety and stability which provides your child a light in the darkness and a path back to healing and health. We support you to change the trajectory of this trans-generational trauma pattern which has made its incursion into your family, to help you you to carry the burden so that your children and grandchildren do not have to.
Therapeutic Parenting Workshop – in person
Our first in person workshop for parents since the pandemic, will be held in central Utrecht on 5th July 2025 and we are really excited to welcome all parents from Holland and surrounding countries to join us in this experiential and dialogical day of learning. This workshop is not about the label or theory of parental alienation, it is not about how to recognise signs and symptoms, it is about the child’s lived experience and how you can shift your mindset and your responses to meet your child’s real needs as they go through this attachment trauma journey.
Packed full of easy to learn tools and strategies, the day will also include a discussion with recovered alienated children, who will tell you what works and what doesn’t when it comes to healing fragmented memories, anxiety based behaviours and how to stay sane in stage 2 of the journey (when the child has disappeared into psychological splitting and is rejecting you), so that you can understand at the deepest part of you, that love and attachment never dies and that your child needs to stay stable, focused and aware until they can get themselves free.
This will be no ordinary workshop, it will be an encounter with the most powerful person in the alienated child’s life, YOU. As such it will be alive, dynamic and above all dialogical, because you are the person with the magic and our role is to be there to help you switch that lighthouse beam on.
Karen Woodall - Psychotherapist, Writer, Researcher, Trainer 
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