Karen Woodall – Psychotherapist, Writer, Researcher, Trainer

From proving to healing

Although the literature on parental alienation has produced numerous behavioural indices and diagnostic models (e.g., Baker, 2018; Bernet & Greenhill, 2022), the construct remains constrained by its parent-centred architecture. It implies a directional causality where one parent acts to damage the relationship with the other parent, whilst insufficiently addressing the child’s internal psychological processes. The term’s location within adversarial legal disputes also renders it vulnerable to politicisation and gendered assumptions. As researchers such as Harman, Warshak, Lorandos, and Florian (2022) have acknowledged, the field is often dominated by arguments over terminology rather than analysis of the child’s developmental needs.

The result is a public discourse fixated on adult behaviours, adult intentions, and adult accusations, with the child’s internal world frequently overshadowed. When a trauma-informed approach reverses this perspective by situating the child at the centre of the trauma story, the barriers to understanding and acting to protect are removed.

Reconceptualising the lens through which we work with families

A trauma-based view conceptualises the child’s rejection not as evidence of indoctrination, but as a defensive adaptation to overwhelming relational pressure. This is consistent with decades of developmental and psychodynamic research.

Splitting, first conceptualised within object relations theory (Kernberg, 1967), emerges when children cannot tolerate ambivalence or conflicting attachments. My clinical research demonstrates that children who become alienated almost invariably enter what I have described as Stage Two: Splitting in The Journey of the Alienated Child (Woodall, 2025). Here, one parent becomes “all good” and the other “all bad,” not as a chosen belief system but as a defence against unbearable emotional contradiction. The splitting of the parental relationship into good and bad, emerges from the original splitting in the ego of the child, which is why we should be so concerned about the harm these children are suffering.

Identification With the Aggressor

Ferenczi (1933) outlined identification with the aggressor as a primary trauma response. In post-separation environments, children may align both consciously and unconsciously, with the parent whose emotional instability, psychological volatility, or dependency poses the greatest threat of relational rupture. This alignment manifests as wholesale adoption of that parent’s beliefs, affects, and cognitive style, giving rise to the pseudo-independent narratives often misinterpreted as autonomous reasoning.

Projective Identification and the Intergenerational Burden

Projective identification, extensively elaborated in psychoanalytic literature, occurs when a parent evacuates unprocessed affect into the child, who then enacts and embodies the parental emotional state (Ogden, 1982). In cases of parental rejection, the child often becomes the carrier of unresolved rage, fear, shame, or grievance, experiencing these emotions as if they originate internally. The child’s hostility becomes a form of enacted loyalty, preserving attachment to the emotionally dominant parent.

Altered Neuroception and Blocked Care

Neuroscientific accounts, particularly Porges’s (2011) Polyvagal Theory, provide further insight and shows how chronic relational threat alters the child’s neuroception, which is the subconscious detection of cues of safety or danger. The child may come to experience the rejected parent not through cognitive appraisal but through embodied aversion, hyperarousal, or shutdown. This aligns with Siegel’s (2012) work on interpersonal neurobiology and with clinical formulations of blocked trust and blocked care, in which the child’s physiological state prevents authentic relational engagement irrespective of factual evidence or past experiences.

Together, these mechanisms show that what appears behavioural or volitional is fundamentally trauma-organised survival.

Trauma literature consistently demonstrates that survival strategies such as splitting, identification with the aggressor, hypervigilance, and enmeshment are not gender-specific. They arise in response to relational threat, not parental sex. By shifting the explanatory framework from adult behaviour to childhood relational trauma, the conceptual capacity is sharpened. Mothers and fathers can both be sources of relational pressure; mothers and fathers can both be rejected. The trauma lens neutralises ideological distortions and restores analytic clarity.

A relational-trauma framework prompts fundamentally different questions. Instead of asking “Which parent caused this?” the inquiry becomes:

• What relational pressures has this child been required to manage?
• What defensive strategies has the child mobilised to maintain psychological coherence?
• How has the child’s attachment system been reorganised under stress?

These questions are clinically actionable and lead directly to interventions that support integration rather than further polarisation.

Implications for Intervention

Trauma-informed therapeutic approaches, including the Structural Therapeutic Parenting model (Woodall & Woodall, 2017), target the child’s defensive architecture and sense of relational safety. Interventions focus on re-establishing predictability, reducing emotional load, and gradually dismantling rigid cognitive constructs through co-regulation and modelling. Importantly, these approaches do not require labelling a parent as an “alienator” and therefore avoid many of the defensive responses that hinder engagement.

A relational-trauma reframing, which is grounded in established psychological and neurobiological theory, offers a clearer and more ethically robust foundation for understanding these children. It situates their behaviour within a continuum of trauma responses, dissolves ideological conflict, aligns with clinical practice, and restores the child’s inner world to the centre of analysis. In this frame we can fully comprehend and respond to the suffering of these children, whose rejection of a parent is not an expression of autonomy but an attempt to survive relational conditions that have become intolerable.

References

Baker, A. J. L. (2018). Reliability and validity of the four-factor model of parental alienation. Journal of Family Therapy, 40(1), 94–113.

Bernet, W., & Greenhill, L. L. (2022). The five-factor model for the diagnosis of parental alienation. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 61(4), 460–479.

Ferenczi, S. (1933). Confusion of tongues between the adults and the child. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 30, 225–230.

Harman, J. J., Warshak, R. A., Lorandos, D., & Florian, M. J. (2022). Developmental psychology and the scientific status of parental alienation. Developmental Psychology, 58(10), 1902–1921.

Kernberg, O. (1967). Borderline personality organization. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 15, 641–685.

Ogden, T. (1982). Projective identification and psychotherapeutic technique. Jason Aronson.

Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. Norton.

Siegel, D. J. (2012). The developing mind: How relationships and the brain interact to shape who we are (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

Woodall, K. The journey of the alienated child.

Woodall, K., & Woodall, N. (2017). Understanding parental alienation: Learning to cope, helping to heal. Routledge.