Domestic abuse discourse is dominated by sociological and ideological frameworks which seek to explain intimate partner violence and family dynamics through analyses of gender, power and social structures (Stark, 2007). Whilst these frameworks have brought important attention to patterns of coercion and inequality, they have also created a significant blind spot, the loss of psychological depth in understanding the lived reality of children and families.

Nowhere is this more visible than in the contested discourse surrounding children who reject or resist a parent after separation. In this area, social science has increasingly attempted to explain complex relational trauma through politically and morally organised narratives which often bypass the psychological mechanisms operating within the child altogether. The result is that children’s defensive adaptations are moralised rather than understood, and clinicians working with these families are increasingly confronted by ideological certainty in place of developmental formulation.

This matters because children do not organise themselves around ideology, they organise themselves around attachment survival and so a child who rejects a parent is not making a rational social judgement. Nor is the child merely reflecting external beliefs about gender or power, instead the child is responding to internal pressures, unconscious loyalties, attachment terror, dissociation, defensive splitting and survival adaptations rooted in the deepest structures of human development (Bowlby, 1980; Liotti, 2004; Schore, 2001). Without psychological understanding, these processes become almost impossible to interpret accurately and even harder to treat.

One example of the increasing replacement of psychology by ideology can be seen in the emergence of terms such as “Child and Mother Sabotage”, developed within contemporary domestic abuse discourse to describe post-separation family dynamics in which children reject their mother when they are trauma bonded to an abusive father (Katz, 2022). The difficulty with such terminology is not merely semantic, it is also conceptual because the framework itself arrives pre-loaded with assumptions about who occupies the role of victim, who occupies the role of perpetrator and how the child’s alignment should be interpreted. In this model, The mother is implicitly positioned as the protective attachment figure, the father as the destabilising force, and the child as witness to male coercion. Should the rejection by the child be of its father however, the model is not replicated the other way around, there is no equivalent Child and Father Sabotage label for example.

What disappears in this formulation is problematic too, because the child’s inner world is erased. This is because the language of sabotage encourages observers to interpret the child’s rejection behaviour through an external moral lens rather than through an understanding of unconscious defensive adaptation. The child’s hatred, fear, contempt or rejection is thus treated as evidence of social manipulation rather than as a possible manifestation of traumatic attachment processes. In doing so, the Child and Mother Sabotage framework risks reinforcing the child’s splitting rather than resolving it.

Splitting is one of the most primitive defensive structures available to the developing mind. Under conditions of chronic relational threat, children often divide the world into all-good and all-bad objects in order to preserve psychological coherence (Kernberg, 1975; Siegel, 2012). The capacity to hold ambivalence collapses. One parent becomes idealised whilst the other becomes contaminated with projected fear, shame or rage. This is not because the child is freely choosing between objectively evaluated parents, but because the child is attempting to survive overwhelming emotional conflict.

The social science lens often cannot adequately see this because it focuses primarily upon observable social behaviours and power arrangements rather than intrapsychic process. A child may appear externally to be making autonomous statements about a rejected parent whilst internally functioning from profound attachment anxiety and unconscious identification processes. The child may sincerely believe their own accusations whilst simultaneously operating from a traumatically organised defensive system. Without psychological formulation, sincerity becomes confused with truth and repetition becomes mistaken for independent thought.

One of the clearest examples of this process can be found in the phenomenon known in psychoanalytic and trauma literature as identification with the aggressor. First described by Ferenczi (1933/1949) and later elaborated by Anna Freud (1936) and contemporary trauma theorists (Frankel, 2002; Howell, 2014), identification with the aggressor describes the process by which a child aligns psychologically with a feared or dominant figure in order to reduce terror and preserve attachment security. Under chronic relational stress, the child may unconsciously absorb the worldview, emotional tone and hostility of the psychologically stronger parent. The child attacks vulnerable aspects of self and others in order to remain connected to the source of power and protection. This adaptation is not conscious manipulation on the part of the child. It is survival.

Seen through this lens, many children who reject a parent are not demonstrating empowered resistance but traumatically organised alignment. This distinction radically alters both assessment and treatment by directing us towards the real perpetrator instead of the person the child points the finger at. It is this kind of understanding which would have protected Sara Sharif and so many of the children who have been murdered by a parent they were coercively aligned to.

If the child’s rejection is understood purely as a socially constructed response to observed behaviour, then intervention focuses primarily upon validating the child’s stated narrative and protecting the aligned relationship. However, if the child’s rejection is understood as potentially rooted in traumatic splitting and identification processes, then intervention must address fear regulation, attachment security, dissociation, shame and the restoration of reflective functioning (Fonagy et al., 2002; Fisher, 2017). The treatment pathway becomes psychological rather than ideological.

This is one reason why social science alone cannot adequately guide therapeutic intervention in these cases. Indeed, Evan Stark himself acknowledged limitations within coercive control theory when applied to children’s rejection dynamics. In Coercive Control in the Lives of Women and Children (2023), Stark recognised that social scientists are not necessarily equipped to interpret the psychological meaning of children’s rejection responses nor to determine the therapeutic pathways required to resolve them. This is an important admission because it marks the boundary between describing social patterns and understanding the internal developmental reality of the child.

Describing coercion is not the same as understanding attachment trauma.

This does not mean that coercive control is unreal, nor that domestic abuse does not profoundly affect children. Quite the opposite. Coercive control can be deeply psychologically organising for children precisely because it shapes attachment security, fear regulation and identity formation (Stark, 2007). But understanding this requires developmental psychology, attachment theory, trauma theory and psychoanalytic insight alongside sociological observation.

Without these disciplines, professionals risk collapsing into simplistic binaries of good and bad parents, protective and abusive mothers, dangerous and rejected fathers. Such binaries mirror the child’s own splitting process rather than helping the child move beyond it and it is already extraordinarily apparent in the narratives promulgated by social scientists in this space who, instead of rooting their understanding in psychological and neurobiological reality, have made up a label (CAMS) to replace a label (PA) they have spent years attacking.

And this is perhaps the most concerning aspect of current discourse. Systems which become organised around ideological certainty may unwittingly reproduce the very psychological mechanisms they seek to challenge. The family system becomes split and then the professional system becomes split alongside it. In the current DA vs PA discourse, the child’s inability to hold complexity is mirrored by institutions which themselves lose the capacity for ambivalence, nuance and reflective thought (Bion, 1962; Benjamin, 1990; Laing, 1960).

Children need more from us than ideological allegiance. They need adults capable of tolerating complexity. They need professionals who can understand how terror reshapes attachment, how shame distorts perception and how survival adaptations can masquerade as certainty. They need clinicians who understand that a child’s rejection may contain both authentic grievance and traumatically organised distortion simultaneously.

Above all, they need systems which understand that healing does not emerge through the reinforcement of splitting but through the slow restoration of integration, which requires psychology.

Not ideology masquerading as psychology, nor sociology attempting to replace it, but genuine developmental understanding rooted in the reality of the child’s inner world as it is impacted by adult behaviour during times of family crisis.

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References

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Bion, W. R. (1962). Learning from experience. Heinemann.

Bowlby, J. (1980). Attachment and loss: Vol. 3. Loss, sadness and depression. Basic Books.

Ferenczi, S. (1949). Confusion of tongues between adults and the child. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 30, 225–230. (Original work published 1933)

Fisher, J. (2017). Healing the fragmented selves of trauma survivors. Routledge.

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

Frankel, J. (2002). Exploring Ferenczi’s concept of identification with the aggressor: Its role in trauma, everyday life, and the therapeutic relationship. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 12(1), 101–139.

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Katz, E. (2022). Coercive control, domestic abuse and the five factor framework: The family model. Routledge.

Kernberg, O. (1975). Borderline conditions and pathological narcissism. Jason Aronson.

Laing, R. D. (1960). The divided self. Tavistock.

Liotti, G. (2004). Trauma, dissociation, and disorganized attachment: Three strands of a single braid. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, Training, 41(4), 472–486.

Schore, A. N. (2001). The effects of early relational trauma on right brain development, affect regulation and infant mental health. Infant Mental Health Journal, 22(1–2), 201–269.

Siegel, D. J. (2012). The developing mind (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

Stark, E. (2007). Coercive control: How men entrap women in personal life. Oxford University Press.

Stark, E., & Hester, M. (Eds.). (2023). Coercive control in the lives of women and children. Routledge.

van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.