Karen Woodall

This is the official website of Karen Woodall where I write about Coerced Alignment of children in divorce and separation and Lighthouse Keeping, which is our adapted therapeutic parenting training for parents in the rejected position.

My new book is called The Journey of the Alienated Child, it will be published by Routledge in Autumn 2026.

I am currently writing the Clinical Handbook for working with coerced children with Nick Woodall who is co-founder of the Family Separation Clinic and you can find out more about that and other books we are writing and resources we are creating by following the links below.

For information about my clinical work including training and supervision for professionals training please go to the Family Separation Clinic

For details of our Lighthouse Keeping Courses and Resources

For Watch on Demand Services please go to FSCparenting.com

Our new Lighthouse Keeping Club subscription service will be available in 2026 for details of this and other resources to support you, please subscribe to our Therapeutic Parenting Newsletter below.

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1 comment on A Clarification Regarding Contemporary Family Quarterly

A Clarification Regarding Contemporary Family Quarterly

I have become aware this morning that an article bearing my name, together with my photograph and biographical information, has been published in the Summer 2026 edition of an online magazine called Contemporary Family Quarterly.

I want to make absolutely clear that I did not submit the article to this publication and was not approached for permission for its publication or for the use of my photograph. Indeed, I recently declined a request to have my new book reviewed in the magazine.

I understand that this publication is sponsored by or associated with the Parental Alienation Study Group (PASG). For clarity, I left PASG in 2019 and have had no involvement with the organisation since that time. I do not wish the appearance of my work in this publication to suggest, in any way, that I have renewed that association, contributed to this publication, or endorsed its position.

My work has developed considerably since 2019. I do not use parental alienation theory, or any other similar diagnostic frameworks, for understanding children’s rejection of a parent. My current work is concerned with children’s relational and attachment adaptations within family systems, and with understanding the child’s unique experience, without imposing predetermined labels or constructs upon it.

I have contacted the publishers today seeking an explanation for the reproduction of my work, and requesting that the position be rectified.

Karen Woodall

11 September 2026

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One response to “A Clarification Regarding Contemporary Family Quarterly”

  1. socrates1010

    Odd or bizarre things happen within this realm. Karen. Sometimes when and from where you least expect them. I am sorry you are having difficulty with this.

    I was personally thrown into this world over a dozen years ago, though I had known of the phenomenon from an earlier family generation. None of it made sense. Not the behaviours of my husband or subsequently of my children….nor the ideas and behaviours of the supposed experts. This was not a mutual conflict situation (as the “experts” claimed) — my husband and I had never argued in over 20 years of marriage — may sound hard to believe, but I had grown up with a father who had to be fawned-to 110%….which was the source of that approach to life. He demanded, I submitted…never any conflict in that way. The pattern replicated in my marriage. And I am well-versed enough in Depth Psychology to have understood eventually what it all meant.

    So where did the inaccurate idea originate that “Parental Alienation” was simply about two spouses/parents who could not get along? That was my initial clue that thy did not know what they were talking about.

    I read through the majority of books on the subject of PA. Especially by the most suggested authors. Where I was told that my children would never be healed until the whole family law system was healed (how encouraging…). Or I was treated to the never-ending controversy over the 1980s Richard Gardner theory of PA — which seemed nothing more than an anecdotal observation by him that sometimes children of parents in divorce situations might reject one parent for the other. That theory was about as deep as a fingerbowl. So why the chronic fixation on it? In fact, all the “experts” seemed to do was to fixate mistakenly on Gardner, or later, on feminist theory. How was this going to get us anywhere?

    No one in the fields of Psychiatry or Psychology seemed to care what, exactly, had mind-snapped the delusional attacking parent or the children in the first place (though you would think this should have been their initial concern).

    Nor were they particularly concerned with the $64,000 question of “What is the Fix?!” In fact, fixing this situation seemed incidental to most of these “experts”. Which convinced me they were operating in yet another rabbit hole, where reality was skewed. Though I do think that many Re-unification Programs were sold on the basis of some mystical shaman-type having the magical answer…when the truth was that having a court authority take custody of the children away from the alienating/attacking parent was likely the first magic bullet here, and the sellers of Re-unification Programs were simply riding that coat-tail, pretending there was magic in their own brew.

    I saw greater pattern alignment, myself, with the psychological situations in cults and gangs and totalitarian herds of one kind or another, than I did with the very basic Gardner theory and the fixation on it.

    We have had many decades of the “experts” failing to understand this situation, and failing to fix it. Reminds me of how long it took the formal fields of Psychiatry and Psychology to understand the 1970s Cult Movement, and what was actually going on. It was parents of the young cult recruits who saw the truth far before any of the supposed experts did.

    You need to understand evolutionary imperatives and the unconscious layer of the human being and aspects of Neuroscience, in order to understand what you are looking at in “Parental Alienation” (now a misnomer). Without that, all you get are the silly Gardnerian arguments and the high-conflict assertions, the faux Re-unification Programs, and no real FIX.

    Therefore, I can see why you left the PASG in 2019, Karen. And why you do not wish to be associated with them now. They have no understanding and no FIX. in fact they seem to lack comprehension as to why anyone would even need understanding and the FIX. I left that narrow little world long ago too. There were never any authentic answers to be found there.

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