Karen Woodall – Psychotherapist, Writer, Researcher, Trainer

“Neuroception evaluates risk in the environment without awareness. Perception implies awareness and conscious detection. Neuroception is not a cognitive process; it is a neural process without a dependency on awareness. Neuroception is dependent on a neural circuit that evaluates risk in the environment from a variety of cues and triggers shifts in autonomic state to adaptively deal with the cues.”

Stephen Porges

Clinical Definition of Neuroception

Neuroception is a term introduced by Stephen Porges (2004), within Polyvagal Theory to describe the nervous system’s subcortical process of detecting risk, safety, or life-threat without conscious awareness. Unlike perception, which relies on conscious, cortical evaluation, neuroception is automatic, rapid, and relational, operating through neural circuits that continuously scan the environment, the body, and the behaviour of others to determine whether the individual should mobilise (fight/flight), immobilise (shutdown), or engage socially.

Neuroception evaluates:

• External cues (facial expression, voice tone, posture, proximity, conflict signals)
• Internal cues (visceral states, heart–gut signals, autonomic arousal)
• Relational cues (caregiver affect, threat signalling, coercive or fearful behaviour)

When neuroception detects safety, the social engagement system becomes available, enabling co-regulation, curiosity, flexible thinking, and relational openness.

When neuroception detects danger or life-threat, the autonomic nervous system shifts into defensive states:

• Sympathetic activation (fight/flight)
• Dorsal vagal shutdown (freeze, collapse, numbing)

This process is foundational in clinical work with trauma, attachment, and relational disturbance because it explains why individuals, including children, may display intense defensive reactions even in environments that are objectively safe. Neuroception is shaped by past relational experiences, meaning that a child can detect danger in a parent, in the case of some children of divorce and separation, this is not because danger exists, but because the child’s nervous system has been conditioned to interpret that relationship as unsafe.

Why Neuroception matters in alienation

One of the questions many people ask me about alienated children is – why does an alienated child behave with such certainty, hostility and contempt, even when there is no evidence of danger?

For many years, professionals have attempted to answer this question through cognitive explanations about children’s beliefs, loyalty conflicts, repeating narratives, pressure, fear of losing the aligned parent’s love and more. Whilst all of those are real and important to consider, they do not go deep enough in terms of understanding the child and how the environment they are growing up in is affecting their developmental selves. To truly understand the alienated child, we must look beneath thoughts and words and into the body itself, which is where neuroception, expands understanding of what is necessary in treatment.

Understanding Neuroception

Neuroception is the nervous system’s subconscious surveillance system, it continuously scans the environment for safety or threat and performs this task without conscious thought. Before a child can think, judge, reason or speak their neuroception has already decided

• “Am I safe?”
• “Am I in danger?”
• “Is this life-threatening?”

This process is relational because neuroception is shaped and sometimes distorted in the relational field the child lives in. To put it simply, what we call ‘alienation’ is not just psychological, it is neurobiological and it begins when a child’s nervous system is being taught to detect danger where non exists. In cases of alienation, a child’s neuroception is hijacked by the emotional world of a parent who transmits fear and anxiety, unresolved grievances, shame or rage, or contempt towards the other parent. This teaches the child’s nervous system to associate the other parent with danger.This does not require explicit instructions because children absorb the internal states of their caregivers and in the age group particularly affected by alignment and rejection, they are likely to be in a state where latent vulnerability to attachment maladaptation is activated.

For some children, divorce and separation is a time of high anxiety, where caregivers are occupied with strong feelings about the other parent. Heightened sensitivity to the expressions of a parent, the inter-psychic communications (inter-psychic meaning between two minds) or the catastrophising tone of voice can mean that the already anxious child’s neuroception reads all of this before they have the words to name it and because attachment is about survival, the child aligns with that parent, not because they prefer them, but because their body tells them, (based on the anxiety being detected through neuroception), that this parent is safe and the parent in the rejected position is a neuroceptive threat.

Why Alienated Children Behave the Way They Do

The behaviours we see in alienation are the surface expressions of a nervous system in chronic defence where splitting emerges as a survival strategy because the child cannot tolerate two conflicting realities. When the conflict of holding two competing realities in mind becomes too great for the developing self, the nervous system resolves it through splitting. In doing so, the ego (sense of self) is separated into two parts: the acceptable self and the self that must be erased. This is the self-alienation described throughout contemporary trauma literature (Fisher, 2017; Fonagy, Gergely, Jurist, & Target, 2002; Greff, 2020; Howell, 2011; Shaw, 2014).

When the nervous system perceives threat in this way, children move into fight (rage and contempt), flight (avoidance and refusal), freeze (numbness and dissociation) and submit (shutdown). And what looks like arrogance or cruelty is often a neuroception of predator vs prey as the parent in the rejected position takes up the role of persecutory object in the child’s mind. A persecutory object is the split off and expelled parts of the influencing parent’s intolerable aspects of self, when the child perceives the parent in the rejected position in this way, the process of projective identification, which is central to the drama of alienation, is complete.

There is a reason that alienated children look robotic or rigid in their facial structure, why they speak in strained tones with such certainty and omnipotence, these are the behaviours of a child who is in survival mode, whose nervous system has been trained to respond to a once loved parent as if they are a persecutory object or in biological terms, a predator.

A child in defensive neuroception cannot hold nuance, complexity or memory of past warmth or happiness because their nervous system will not allow it. When a child’s neuroception has encoded a parent as “danger,” logic cannot override it and this is why evidence of the past doesn’t work, explanations, reassurances do nothing to resolve the problem, memories disappear and all positive experiences are erased. Neuroception prevents the cortex from updating its story.
The child is not being difficult, their nervous system is blocking them from reconsidering the parent they have categorised as “unsafe.” This is why we protect children from parents who cause this problem, the issue is not even the relationship they have been forced to lose with the parent in the rejected position, it is the relationship with their own sense of self in their most significant developmental phase of life, which is the real harm being caused.

How Neuroception changes when the child is removed from harm

The most telling feature of alienation, and one that professionals often overlook is that when the child’s neuroceptive environment changes, for example when they are protected, regulated, and no longer infused with the aligned parent’s fear their hostile behaviour often drops almost immediately.

I have seen children who screamed, spat, raged and refused for months suddenly soften within hours or days of relational safety being restored because their neuroception recalibrates, meaning that when the danger signals disappear from the relational environment, ambivalence returns and with it affectionate memory re-emerges allowing the nervous system to relax. This is the relational brain coming online and the attachment system flowing again.

What This Means for Practice

“Frozen watchfulness” is a recognised sign of potential child abuse or severe trauma where a child is unresponsive to their surroundings but clearly aware of them. It is also described as a type of hyper-vigilance, where the child may appear numb, withdrawn, or have a “shocked” look. This is recognised by the CPS in the UK as a sign of non sexual child abuse and the reason for this look, which I call ‘Zombie face’ in alienated children, is the child’s neuroception showing that something is happening which they cannot process. When this behavioural symptom is seen concurrently with idealisation of a parent with concurrent rejection, it is the point at which further investigation must take place because it demonstrates that there is a high risk of hidden harm occuring in the relationship between the child and idealised parent. When a child is rejecting a parent because of something a parent has actually done, the rejection has ambivalence and it is not accompanied by frozen watchfulness, a presentation we refer to at the Clinic as ambivalent rejection. Whilst this too requires investigation, especially in the context of claims by the parent being rejected that this is alienation, it is not regarded as a child protection issue and is not considered to be alienation.

Understanding neuroception transforms our approach to true alienation of a child because it means we shift from using labels and theories to treatments which are based on what is really happening instead of what we think is happening. We stop trying to negotiate with the child’s cortex because the problem is not in their thinking, it is in their nervous system. When we work with children, we aim to reset neuroception through structure and safety, which is why Structural Therapeutic Parenting works because it reorganises the relational field that is driving neuroceptive threat. We understand that alienation is a trauma of relationship, not a dispute of ideas and children are not choosing sides; they are surviving. We also become more attuned to the embodied signals because the body always tells the truth before the child can articulate it. Our treatment routes respect the fact that the child requires safety before we can intervene to bring about shifts in behaviours.

Alienated children are children whose nervous systems have been reorganised under the pressure of an adult’s unresolved fear, shame, or grievance. Understanding neuroception helps us to see why they align and why they reject and why they are certain and why they appear fearless with one parent and terrified of the other. It also allows us to understand why reunification can be rapid and why emotional safety, not verbal persuasion or therapy or interventions based upon theoretical knowledge, is the key to healing

Ultimately, this the heart of the work we do at the Family Separation Clinic, by helping the child to come home to themselves, not by arguing with their fear, but by changing the relational conditions that caused it in the first place. This is why situating this problem, for some children of divorce and separation as a childhood relational trauma, will change everything for future generations. By removing the issue from the binary conflict generated by gender rights activists, and locating it within children’s mental health, we will make the problem visible to the professionals who can protect and heal the victims of this hidden child abuse, in years to come.

References

Fisher, J. (2017). Healing the fragmented selves of trauma survivors: Overcoming internal self-alienation. Routledge.

Fonagy, P., Gergely, G., Jurist, E. L., & Target, M. (2002). Affect regulation, mentalization, and the development of the self. Other Press.

Greff, D. F. (2020). Healing from emotional trauma: A comprehensive guide to understanding and transforming your life. Balboa Press.

Howell, E. F. (2011). Understanding and treating dissociative identity disorder: A relational approach. Routledge.

Porges, S. W. (2004). Neuroception: A subconscious system for detecting threats and safety. Zero to Three, 24(5), 19–24.

Shaw, D. (2014). Traumatic narcissism: Relational systems of subjugation. Routledge.