Over the past year I have been writing a book called the Journey of the Alienated Child, which is based upon my work with severely alienated children, or to put it in a much clearer way, severely psychologically and emotionally abused children. In doing so I have come to realise just how distorted the current prevailing narrative in the UK is about these children, who have largely been in the care of a parent with a serious personality disorder or psychiatric profile before being removed and who have, as a result of that, struggled immensely to recover from the harm which was inflicted upon them. Some of the children I have worked with were removed from their mother and some from their father, sometimes children were removed from other carers who had succeeded in manipulating the child to the degree where their relationship with the healthy parent or carer was destroyed. In all of these cases, removal from the harm these children were suffering, was necessary to free their minds from the trauma bonds created by regulating a frightening caregiver in an unsafe world.
As I have been writing this new book, I have been observing the campaign to distort the reality of these children’s experiences and the manner in which it manipulates reality. Over recent months, this distortion has escalated and alongside that the evidence of the driver behind it has also emerged. Beneath the lie that children are routinely being handed to abusive parents by family court, is exactly the same schema which underpins the behaviours of the abusers that children are being removed from. A desire for control, a drive to manipulate reality, terrorisation of anyone who stands in the way and ultimately for some, a quest for money and power. If you want to understand the reality of what happens to children who live with narcissistic and personality disordered parents, all you have to do is spend a few days watching the behaviours of some of the key people in this campaign and the impact that has on people who work within the family court system. That will tell you everything you need to know about how and why the same psychopathology which causes alienation in children, is seeking to control the very system which exists to protect children.
I would say that to cause people to believe that abuse of children in divorce and separation is not real and is only ever claimed by men who wish to control their ex partner, is an egregious act of deliberate harm against children. And yet this is the narrative which is passed around uncritically, destroying the chances of mothers as well as fathers in getting the help they need to protect their child and leaving children exposed to the narcissistic abuse which causes them to reject parents who love them. In essence, these children’s sense of self is destroyed before it is even beginning to develop and their lives are, (once again), being sacrificed to groups of (largely) women who, (and this is the tell), spend a lot of time on marketing themselves and/or giving themselves (and each other), awards for their capacity to hide this horrible form of child abuse again.
To alienate a child is to cause them harm. In fact to alienate a child you have to first cause them harm because the first harm comes before the alienated state of mind not the other way around. Alienation, which is still a good word for the state of mind a child is in when they are regulating a frightening caregiver, is a fragmentation of self during the critical developmental stages a child goes through on the way to developing their own sense of self. To inflict fear and anxiety upon a child in this stage of development is not only abusive, it has long lasting impacts, first by driving the child into a state of fear and anxiety such that they will slavishly do the bidding of the parent due to the abandonment threat which has been triggered, second by forcing the child to attend to the parent’s needs throughout the developmental stages they should be focused upon.
I have worked with children at all stages of the alienation journey and have been the primary therapist in many cases where children have been removed from abuse and transferred to live in a kinship care placement with the parent they were forced to reject. Treating the child whose residence is changed is often complex, especially if there has been a domineering parent who has controlled the child’s view of the other parent over a long period of time. In such circumstances, as I have written before, what lies at the heart of the child’s alignment with a parent is fear of incurring that parent’s wrath which is combined with a fear of being abandoned. In addition, many children who are removed from harm have been told that the parent they have rejected wants to harm them or has harmed them, some abusive parents even go so far as to tell the child that they were sick because a parent wanted to see them. When children who believe a healthy parent has harmed them or is going to, in the absence of any evidence which suggests that this is either possible or even probable, they can be seen to be in an almost delusional state of mind. Some children are in fact suffering from an encapsulated or shared delusion delusion, to the degree where their false beliefs are presented with varying forms of phobic like behaviours.
Psychologically abused children do not easily relinquish their trauma bond to the parent who has caused them harm and can take time to emerge from the split state of mind which underpins this. Therefore, the treatment of children who believe that a parent they have rejected has harmed them or wants to harm them, involves creating a protective space in which they can begin to experience the world as it really is not as they have been taught to believe it is. During the time that it takes for the child to emerge from the split state of mind which holds them fast in the belief that the healthy parent is harmful, there is a need to ensure that the child is protected completely from the influence of the parent they have been trauma bonded to because trauma bonding establishes neural connections in the brain which affect the behaviours of the child. In the trauma bonded child, the established pattern of behaviour is that of self protection and survival, which means that they will repeatedly seek to please, placate and prove to the parent who is harming them that they are not betraying them. The basis of this behaviour is extreme fear and anxiety which has been created by the child’s persistent unadulterated exposure to the behaviour of the fear inducing parent and it takes time for it to shift, precisely because the child has been in survival mode for a long time. Whilst the relationship between a child and a parent they are trauma bonded to may look like love on the outside, behind closed doors the child has been exposed to alternate warmth and then withdrawal of that. They have also likely been told that the other parent will harm them or has harmed them and that professionals such as social workers are not to be trusted. They are likely to have been groomed to portray their life with the parent who is influencing them as perfect.
The split state of mind in trauma bonding is well evidenced in the psychological literature as being the cause of ego fragmentation (1) and regression to an infantile state of mind (2). All of the abused children I have worked with over the years who were considered to be alienated, have suffered from the same set of symptoms which are conversant with the split state of mind, all have suffered varying degrees of attachment disorder as they emerged from that. Trauma bonded children with a sufficiently strong ego prior to the onset of the grooming behaviour by the abusing parent, may show a swift internal reconnection meaning that they return to a reasonably familiar version of who they were prior to the onset of the trauma bond. Others take many months to begin to relinquish the belief that the influencing parent still has control over them and that the healthy parent has an underlying desire to harm them. When influencing parents breach protective boundaries, as many do in circumstances where the Court is trying to hold the boundary so that therapeutic repair can be undertaken, the child receives the message that the influencing parent has more power than anyone else in the world and the anxiety about that will cause the trauma bonding behaviour to reappear. Alienation is caused by a power imbalance around the child which causes interpersonal terrorisation and the emergence of children from the trauma bonded state of mind requires significant work by both therapist and parent in the rejected position, to ensure protection and constraint of the influencing parent is in place before the therapeutic work on attachment repair can be undertaken.
When therapeutic work on attachment rupture is underway it is always achieved through a co-therapy approach in which the therapist works alongside the parent who has been rejected to shift the child from what is called ‘blocked trust’ in therapeutic terms to acceptance and trust. The co-therapy approach to doing this work is very necessary because a) attachment repair only works between people who have an attachment – ie parent and child and b) the parent who has been in the rejected position is likely to have what is called ‘blocked care’ in therapeutic terms which is caused by reactive splitting, which is a trauma response to being rejected by a child accompanied often by false allegations which are used to justify the rejection. Blocked care leaves parents feeling helpless and hopeless and means that they may want to give up during the early stages of attachment repair work. Helping parents in a co-therapy approach means educating them, supporting them and showing them how to respond to the child on a consistent basis so that the underlying damage to the attachment relationship, which has been caused by the abuse the child has suffered, can be repaired.
Surviving the care and control of an abusive parent is an extremely challenging task for any child. Surviving the care and control of an abusive parent whose power is being challenged by the Court system adds another layer of harm because the child must attempt to stay loyal to the abusive parent in conditions where that parent’s anxiety increases along with their need to stay in control. In such circumstances, where a parent is found to be abusive and cannot show insight, children are removed to protect them from the escalating harm they are suffering or at risk of suffering without intervention. Work with children in those circumstances, focuses upon protection, consistent care provision, routine and regulation to bring the child into a stable state of mind before repair work begins.
The reality of working with children who have been seriously harmed by an abusive parent is 180 degrees away from the narrative which is being spun by campaigners. These children are not being removed from protective parents to be handed to abusers at all, they are being removed from abusive mothers and fathers in order to protect them and the healthy parent who has been rejected, who is a bystander to the trauma bonding which has occurred between their child and the abusive parent, is, where that is possible, the best person to help the child to heal.
When you listen to children who have gone through this journey you will hear the truth of how they have to fight to survive being exposed to narcissistic abuse in circumstances where there was no-one there to protect them. In the current environment of distortion and lies however, amplifying the voices of these children is an uphill struggle, however we continue to do this because it is worth every single step it takes to ensure that the outside world understands the truth, instead of being terrorised by the narcissistic lie.
References
- Isvoranu AM, van Borkulo CD, Boyette LL, Wigman JT, Vinkers CH, Borsboom D. A network approach to psychosis: pathways between childhood trauma and psychotic symptoms. Schizophr Bull. 2017;43:187-96.
2. Marshall M, Shannon C, Meenagh C, Mc Corry N, Mulholland C. The association between childhood trauma, parental bonding and depressive symptoms and interpersonal functioning in depression and bipolar disorder. Ir J Psychol Med. 2018;35:23-32
Listen to Josh, who grew up believing his father was making him sick, until he was removed from his mother who was diagnosed with factitious illness and narcissistic personality disorder. These are not, (as has been recently claimed), gender based false claims on the part of Josh’s father, they are factual, objective reality. Josh’s voice tells the truth and it is these voices that are being silenced when we allow narcissistic schemas to dominate reality.
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The Journey of the Alienated Child by Karen Woodall will be published later this year.
Karen Woodall - Psychotherapist, Writer, Researcher, Trainer 
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