Karen Woodall – Psychotherapist, Writer, Researcher, Trainer

“Adults can change their circumstances; children cannot. Children are powerless, and in difficult situations they are the victims of every sorrow and mischance and rage around them, for children feel all of these things but without any of the ability that adults have to change them. Whatever can take a child beyond such circumstances, therefore, is an alleviation and a blessing.”

Mary Oliver

Fear without solution

The attachment trauma which is popularly referred to as ‘alienation’ is one in which the child is entrapped by dynamics which cause them to behave in ways which are not readily understood by the outside world. The core of this behaviour is disorganised attachment, which is described as ‘fear without solution’ in attachment theory.

In all of the cases that I have worked in, children who were strongly aligned to a parent in circumstances where they were rejecting the other parent with contempt, were being abused by the parent they were aligned to behind closed doors. The failure of many professionals to see the truth of what was happening in these cases, was because the parent the child was aligned to was outwardly charming and convincing and the parent in the rejected position was dysregulated by fear and anxiety. Thus, the child’s expression of disorganised attachment behaviour was believed to be about the parent the child was rejecting and because these cases were being heard in an adversarial court system, the tension around the child was heightened not reduced and the fear in the family system increased.

The fear in these family systems, on close scrutiny, was largely anchored around the aligned parent’s anxiety about being in control of the child, who was, on investigation, being used a regulatory object. A regulatory object in these circumstances, is a term used to describe the way a parent uses a child to bolster their own defences against something psychologically intolerable. When parents who control children’s feelings about the world, other people and their own experiences, it is because of something the parent cannot tolerate in their own internal world. To use a child in this way is abusive because it creates fear and anxiety.

In all of the cases I have worked in, the child’s fear and anxiety had no solution in terms of finding safety, because the aligned parent was controlling them. The by product of this control of the child, was that the parent who could provide safety and soothing for the child, had been banished to the margins of the child’s life. What we were looking at on the outside was a child who professed idealised love for a parent who was demonstrating lack of insight alongside patterns of control which included coercion through enmeshment and/or intermittent withdrawal of love and affection. When this pattern of behaviours was present, it was always accompanied by rejection of the other parent with contempt, disdain and a lack of empathy. That pattern, is the only way that a child has to signal that something is very wrong in the family system, it is the only way the child has to show that they are being abused behind closed doors.

These cases are NOT about contact relationships after divorce or separation and they are NOT about conflict between parents either. To say so is to demonstrate a gross lack of understanding of the dynamics we call alienation. These cases in reality are about hidden harm at home, about child abuse which (as yet), has no name to properly characterise the devastating impact it has upon a child.

Fear without solution however is a way of describing the child’s plight in situations where they have no control over the circumstances of their care and no power at all, in terms of how parents provide that care. These are seriously coerced children, whose lives are dependent upon parents who have entrapped them in their own responses to family separation. In the cases I have worked in since 2009, every single parent who coerced and entrapped a child in this way, had either a personality disorder, a psychological profile of concern, an intergenerational distortion of boundaries or a pattern of control behaviours which had caused serious harm to others before it was focused upon the child. These are not, as they are popularly described by campaigners, cases where cross allegations of domestic abuse and parental alienation feature, they are not divided neatly into such a binary reality. These are cases of false allegations, primitive defences and behaviours which cause deeply traumatising outcomes for children. And the reduction of them to a ‘he said/she said’ or argument about domestic abuse versus parental alienation is an absolute travesty when it comes to protecting these children because it blocks the ability of far too many professionals when it comes to being able to see the harm these children suffer.

Too many professionals cannot see these children clearly because of their own internal biases which drive their own perceptions of what makes a bad mother or a bad father. Too many miss the harm that children are suffering, precisely because the internal reality of these cases is misrepresented as a fight between mothers and fathers. A good example of arose this weekend when I posted the following on my Linked In page, as part of a post about how fear without solution impacts upon the developing brains of children in divorce and separation.

“In the fear without solution position, children show disorganised attachments, seeking closeness and then moving away, discharging anxiety through rage and aggression and then suddenly seeking closeness. This is a truly traumatic position for the child and parent in the rejected position to be in because it can go on for a long time and can cause repeated impacts on the child’s development of self.

“The only clear connections between infant attachment and adult psychopathology are between disorganized attachment and dissociative symptoms in adolescence and early adulthood (Dozier et al. 2008a). (Shemmings & Shemmings 2011, p.62)

If you are working with children of divorce and separation and you see signs of dissociation such as numbing, memory loss, lack of linear memory, inability to recall events, distorted remembering, lack of affect in recall, you are likely working with a child or young person who has suffered this ‘fear without solution.’

Fear without solution is induced in children by parents with psychopathology, parents with an inability to put their children’s needs above their own, parents who control others and professionals who fail to understand what they are looking at and who collude with abusive parents to seal the child into the fear without solution state of mind which leads to psychological splitting.”

Several comments were left on the post, one of which said it was “fantastic and a resource she had been looking for.” That is until this person realised that I was not approaching this from the perspective of what she called the ‘protective parent’ (read mother), but from the perspective of the child who might be being abused by either a mother or a father. When this person realised that I was not an advocate for the binary split narrative of good mother/bad father, she immediately decided that I must be an advocate for what she called ‘PAS’. Suddenly the post was no longer ‘fantastic’ and her focus shifted to trying to educate me away from ‘PAS’, something I hadn’t mentioned in the first place but something which arose in her mind because of her own internal biases and the way in which the global campaign by women’s rights activists has dragged the issue of this abuse of children back into the parental rights fight.

This woman, who is herself a mental health professional, went from believing the post to be ‘fantastic’ to focusing upon trying to persuade me away from a concept that I hadn’t even mentioned in in the first place. A great example of how internal biases drive behaviours in professionals. Watching this woman’s mental gymnastics, made me realise (again), why these children are so abandoned to their fate and why, after five decades since the term “unholy alliance” was described by psychologists Judith Wallerstein and Joan Kelly in reference to an alliance between a vulnerable child and narcissistic parent after divorce, no-one really cares about them even to this day. Whilst this woman began by saying she thought the post was fantastic, she immediately shifted her position when she realised that I was not supportive of her women’s rights position. For her, the experience of the child is simply a weapon to be used to shore up the fight for parental rights. For me, the experience of the child is the only thing that matters.

These are coerced children, they are trapped in the minds of psychologically unwell parents and they are overlooked, ignored or reduced to collatoral damage in a war which is manufactured in the main in order to shift power and control from one parent to the other. Their abusers are mothers and fathers who isolate them, control them, use them and silence them, in exactly the same way as those who groom their own children for sexual abuse do. When you see what is happening to these children behind closed doors, you cannot unsee it and you certainly cannot remain silent. The problem is that too many professionals cannot see it precisely because of the constant obfuscation caused by the fighting over labels, constructs and the way in which these intract with personal belief systems.

Ruth’s story

Ruth was seven when her parents separated and her father went to live in another town. Her mother was anxious about her going to another town to spend time with her father and her own mother, Ruth’s grandmother was doubly so. Together these two women ruminated upon the location of the town, the risks to Ruth of being in the town with her father and the feelings of anxiety that harm was going to befall Ruth. Over two years, this pattern of anxiety and rumination escalated, overwhelming Ruth who began to regulate parental and grandparental anxiety by reflecting back to them the narrative they were leaking. Ruth mirrored her mother’s anxiety back to her, confirming that her father was a risk and that her mother was right. As the relief from her mother’s anxiety became apparent to Ruth, she took on a bigger role in regulating the system, telling her mother and grandmother that their suspicions were correct, she made up stories about the danger her father put her in. As time went on, the rumination in the maternal system shifted, as feelings began to be treated as facts. Now, Ruth was no longer able to see her father without her mother and grandmother becoming so dysregulated that they were frightening to her. Unconsciously Ruth realised that she had to find a way of ensuring that she could keep her mother and grandmother properly regulated and so she began to enter into the fantasy world of their feelings, reflecting back her mother and grandmother’s conviction that her father was unsafe and the town he lived in was a place of great danger. When Ruth finally rejected her father, the relief from the ‘fear without solution’ situation she had been in was immense. Previously she could not find safety in her relationship with her mother and grandmother because of their rumination, projection and belief that their feelings were factually real. She could not find safety in her relationship with her father either because he was portrayed to her as a constant threat. After rejecting her father, her mother and grandmother rewarded her with their gratitude, which was derived from their belief that she had finally seen the reality of the risk her father posed to her. Finally she found safety in a system which welcomed her, instead of repeatedly treating her as as if she was a traitor each time she arrived home.

There is a post script to Ruth’s story, which is important to tell because it describes the deep risks to these children, which are missed when they are treated as contact, conflict or complex divorce. Hidden in the grandmother and mother’s anxiety about Ruth’s relationship with her father was a secret, an encapsulated secret around which the whole family was bonded in an effort to maintain the kind of silence which is found in families where trans-generational trauma occurs. These encapsulated secrets, described so well by Abrahams and Torok, are in the very DNA of the attachment system, in families where alignment and rejection behaviour is seen. They are identified by the presence of primitive defences of denial and projection, in which the original abuse is denied but the feeling attached to it is projected forward, through the generations.

In this case, Ruth’s father wasn’t the risk that he was portrayed to be but her maternal grandfather was. The secret of Ruth’s mother being abused by her father, which was silenced by her grandmother’s inability to see it and stop it, was what was hidden within the rumination and anxiety about Ruth’s relationship with her father. The feelings which became facts in the minds of these women, were facts which had been buried into silenced feelings in the past and which erupted as an encapsulated delusion, in the crisis of family separation, in a system which was dominated by secrets and lies.

Children experiencing fear without solution, is a perfect way to describe children who are being abused at home, behind closed doors by a parent who is coercing them. Trapped in the minds of parents, often those with unresolved trauma, their disorganised attachment behaviour is the only way they have to show the outside world the harm they are suffering.

When you see it or hear it you must act to stop it. The lives of future generations of children of divorce and separation are depending on someone with the eyes, ears and courage to do so.