I am a psychotherapist working primarily with a relational model with families affected by divorce and separation. For quite some time I thought I was working with something called ‘parental alienation’ which is a label applied to situations where a child rejects a parent after divorce and separation.
It was only through my curiosity, about the label parental alienation and the theory behind it, that I came to realise that what I am really working with is Childhood Relational Trauma, in which children of divorce and separation, become triangulated into the adult drama of relationship dissolution.
In 2019, I began to examine the theory of parental alienation and recognised that as a psychotherapist, there was nothing in that theory which could teach me how to work with alienated children. As such, I had reached a cul de sac in my learning journey, which left me feeling frustrated, as a therapist I needed more, I didn’t need to learn about the problem, I need to understand how to treat it. In late 2019 therefore, as the Pandemic hit the world, I returned to my roots and began a journey of discovery along with my husband Nick Woodall, with whom I have worked for many years. Retracing our steps back through the psychological literature, we discovered together that our background training in humanistic and psychodynamic therapy and our shared interest in Object Relations Theory, held all the answers we needed to build a therapeutic treatment route for alienated children and their families.
This discovery heralded a new way of thinking and working with the problem which is still popularly called parental alienation but which is much better described clinically as a Childhood Relational Trauma. This is the journey that I continue on with, building a theoretical framework which is rooted in an understanding of the trauma impacting upon the child which is at the heart of this problem.
The label parental alienation is something I do not use anymore, largely because it is unnecessary in my work which is rooted in the psychological literature and because doing so does not lead me anywhere in terms of treatment. I do not think it leads parents anywhere in terms of helping their children to recover from the trauma they have suffered either.
My work with families is about healing, it is about helping families to understand the trauma they have suffered and through understanding that and making it conscious in the family system, freeing themselves from the longer term impacts. My work with children is about healing the splitting which causes an alienation of the self from the self, a trauma reaction which is, I would argue, almost inevitable for some of these children.
My longer term goals, alongside the work I am doing with Nick Woodall, are to build a full package of therapeutic interventions which can be used by other practitioners to heal children of divorce and separation from the trauma they are suffering or have suffered in the past. In doing this, our goal is to illuminate fully, to beam a light upon, the childhood relational trauma which has been suffered by so many children of divorce and separation over many decades.
Karen Woodall - Psychotherapist, Writer, Researcher, Trainer 