Karen Woodall – Psychotherapist, Writer, Researcher, Trainer

Alienation is a survival strategy which separates someone from their own sense of an authentic self. It is a defence to prevent psychological overwhelm which is created in children during divorce and separation, when one parent overshadows the child with their own response to the event. The hardest thing to explain about recovery from alienation, is the element of the felt sense of the defence, which causes someone to believe that what they are feeling is real. This belief is firmly held and the child is convinced that they are responding to their own lived experience, which in some respects they are. The only problem is that the lived experience is built upon lies, half truths and distorted mirrors. When the child whose sense of self was built in the reflection of this discovers the truth of what has happened to them, the shifting sands of the internal felt sense of self, can feel kaledeiscopic, as if the mind is fragmenting. When this happens, the original trauma response is triggered along with the broken pieces of the internal working model of self. It can be a chaotic time, in which young people might feel as if they are having some kind of psychological crisis. Responding to this requires an understanding of how children defend themselves when they are exposed to psychological violence.

Alienation happens when a child’s natural love and attachment to both parents is interrupted and one parent’s needs take centre stage. To survive, the child has to adapt their attachment relationships to ensure that the parent who has control over them, does not turn their control strategies towards them. Because children do not have the brain capacity to rationalise or contextualise what is happening, they do not realise that the parent is already controlling them, by causing internalised anxiety and fear of abandonment. Splitting, which is a defensive response to this kind of anxiety, is one way that this defensive structure presents itself.

At first it’s simple, the child learns to keep worlds apart. At mum’s the child is one way, at dad’s another. We call this compartmentalisation. Done lightly, it’s normal and useful, just like keeping work and home worries separate. But when one parent refuses to hear about the other, insists the child changes clothes, or makes the child feel unsafe for carrying memories back and forth, that healthy compartmentalisation can harden into something else.

When a child hears negative narratives about a parent and is exposed to that for long enough, especially when they are not able to sense check their own experience with a parent, (for example if a parent is prevented from seeing them completely or, if a parent is no longer there because they have died), the parental narrative and the child’s become enmeshed or merged into one internalised belief system. Children who can ‘remember’ a parent doing harmful things to them when they were very young, for example being pushed downstairs in a pram, or not tended to in their crib because a parent was drinking, or in Josh’s case, having a nappy stuffed in his mouth when he was a baby, are demonstrating this enmeshment with parental narratives, which interfere with memory processing, leaving a sense that the memory is real and belongs to them. This can cause great confusion in therapy because if a young person feels as if the memory is real but it cannot be because the brain was not old enough to create and hold such a detailed memory, how can therapists progress with a child who is seeking to unravel what is truth and what is a lie in the foundational narratives of their lives.

Memory processing is affected by trauma and trauma is what children whose parents triangulate them into their own reactions to family separation are suffering. It is abusive to tell a child how you really feel about the other parent, it is psychologically harmful to rely upon a child as if that child is your parent or carer. It causes harm to tell a child negative stories about a parent who is no longer there, (even if those stories are true), because it creates a hatred and fear which is based upon a false belief which can never be corrected. It also binds the child into the mind of the parent who holds those feelings and causes the hardening of the false self, which then often sets off into the world to correct all the wrongs of the parent they can never find resolution with. Instead of correcting personal wrongs however, many young people who are captured in this split sense of self, cause great harm to others by imposing their beliefs on systems, seeking to see in those systems a reflection of their own internal beliefs.

Splitting causes a fragmentation within, parts of self are denied and held away from the conscious mind and a false self takes over the day to day business of survival. That false self is often narcissistic in nature, concerned with controlling how others view self and often presenting as sure, righteous and often omnipotent. The authentic part of self is overshadowed by this false self, which is why being alienated feels so real, the domination of the self by a false, split off part which is often very competent, very much in charge and confident in the world, silences other parts. These young people often present with an inflated sense of their own importance, a narcissistic rage at anyone who challenges their experience, with a fragile and weak ego hidden somewhere underneath. This fragile self is scared, confused and often deeply in need of re-parenting, it is desperate to receive what was denied when the split occurred.

Some young people who suffered from alienation are highly competent in the world on one level and very much incompetent in others. Some young people are constantly struggling to put the pieces of self back together, finding relationships very difficult and other people very scary. Others are isolated, unable to take flight and achieve their potential. All of these presentations are conversant with psychological splitting which is unresolved. All can be treated by therapists and parents in the rejected position who understand what has happened.

Recovery is the slow, sometimes painful process of undoing the defence and letting the whole self come back into consciousness. It’s not about blaming the parent the child aligned with or instantly loving the parent who was rejected. It’s about meeting all the parts of self, the defensive, the angry, the anxious, the playful, the peaceful and accepting them as parts of the whole. That takes time, it takes patience and it takes living in relationships which may at times feel painful.

If you’re an adult now and realising you were alienated, you’re already doing brave work. You are letting the healthy part come back. That part can tolerate complexity; it can hold two truths at once. It doesn’t need to erase the past but also doesn’t have to keep living from the false self which worked for a while but which is no longer providing you with safety. Defences are necessary when you are young but they hold you in a stuck place when the danger has passed. If you are trying to find ways of recovering, keep in mind that recovery isn’t linear, it is almost on a spiral where you will feel as if you are circling around the same issues but when you look back you see that each time you arrive at the ‘same’ place, it is not, it is a similar place but further on.

In recovery you might still feel flashes of anger or certainty, or guilt and shame. You might feel confused, uncertain and afraid but that doesn’t mean you’re stuck. It means you’re moving between parts as you re-integrate those split off parts that you could not cope with when you were younger. One of those parts of self is that which loves the parent you were forced to reject, which is why you are motivated to reconnect. When you do reconnect, expect the parent in the rejected position to be going through a similar journey to your own.

When I work clinically with alienated children and the adults they become, we focus on relational repair and integration rather than on proving what happened. Healing starts by recognising that alienation is a form of childhood relational trauma which is a wound to the developing self that occurred in the space where love and safety should have been.Effective treatment doesn’t look like forcing reconciliation or pushing contact. It looks like:

Safety and Stability First: Creating a secure base in therapy, in healthy adult relationships, or within the non-controlling parent’s care so the defensive self no longer needs to protect you.

Gentle Meeting of Parts: Learning to notice and name the different “selves” inside without shame; welcoming the angry protector and the frightened child instead of fighting them.

Narrative Repair: Piecing together your own life story — not the story you were fed and reclaiming memories and truths that were split off.

Healthy Boundaries: Understanding what safe, reciprocal relationships look like and how to step out of controlling or enmeshed dynamics.

Attachment-Based Work: Where possible, using safe parental or substitute attachment figures to bring comfort, reality-testing, and acceptance back into your internal world.

For some, this healing comes through specialist therapy; for others, it happens gradually as you build safe connections and learn to trust your own perception again. Parents who lost you but are healthy and ready, can be an anchor if you choose to reconnect. For many, though, the first anchor is inside, the part of you that has always known something was wrong and longed for wholeness.

You are not broken. The strategies you used were intelligent, protective responses to impossible pressures. Now, as an adult, you can choose something different. Integration is possible. The healthy part of you has always been there, waiting, almost in the shadows but not quite.

Being haunted is how so many recovering young people speak of the experience of splitting, in recovery the phantoms make themselves known as eventually, the ghosts of your parental past take their leave. As they close the door behind them, your own life awaits.