In the Winter edition of NAPO, an article was published based upon a programme aired by the BBC on 4 September 2023 called 'Mums on the Run – Failed by the Family Courts, presented by the BBC journalist Ed Thomas. The programme featured research from Manchester University (1) in which interviews were undertaken with forty-five mothers, some of whom, it is claimed, have fled the UK with their children to The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus because of fears of systemic failures in the UK family courts.

 

In March of this year, Family Law News published a piece by well respected legal professionals suggesting that the articles and media reports about these cases are based on the self-reports of mothers, some of whom may not have disclosed that findings of serious harm were made against them in the family court process (2). Later in the month, Sacha Lee, from the law firm Dawson Cornwell and Alex Verdan KC, from 4PB, published an article in Today's Family Lawyer (3), which queried the lack of context for the claims that were made by the BBC programme and raised concerns about the 'fear-mongering' headlines that are used in media reports which suggest that children are routinely being forced into contact with abusive fathers. In the background, a number of judgments which describe the harm that is caused to children who are triangulated into adult matters during family separation have been published, demonstrating that the awareness of this form of emotional and psychological abuse of children is very much alive in the family courts.

 

As a psychotherapist specialising in working with children who are found to be harmed by a parent in divorce and separation, my experience of working in the family courts is at odds with the article published in the Winter edition of this journal, in particular the assertion that experts are doing harm in such cases. In writing this article therefore, I am aiming to contextualise the issue from the perspective of the treatment of children who have been found by the family court to be abused by a parent by showing that far from doing harm, treating experts are, in fact, resolving the complex therapeutic needs of children who are psychologically and emotionally bonded to an abusive parent. In doing so I draw upon my extensive clinical experience of working directly with families, including the public judgment referred to above.

 

As a specialist service treating children who have been removed from a parent by the family courts due to serious harm, the Family Separation Clinic uses relational psychodynamic theory to understand the problem of children's alignment with an abusive parent and a combination of psychotherapeutic approaches, including structural family therapy to treat it. This is because we consider this to be a relational trauma which is defined in the literature as harm which occurs in personal relationships, often over time and which has an impact upon self esteem and confidence, trust and dependency in relationships. (Draczynska, 2023; Schore, 2013; Steele, Boon & Van der Haart, 2017). In addition, we recognise that children who are bonded to an abusive parent are captured in an asymmetric power dynamic and that, in the same way that children who are physically or sexually abused are typically unable to reject an abusing parent due to anxiety based alignments, (Shengold, 1989), children who are emotionally and psychologically abused are often unable to shift this presentation without being protected by the Court.

 

When the Court intervenes through fact finding - a process which has recently been determined by the President of the Family Division in Re C Neutral Citation Number: [2023] EWHC 345 (Fam) as necessary in cases featuring issues such as parental alienation or domestic abuse - it provides a factual matrix which identifies victim and perpetrator in disputed cases. This creates the framework for structural interventions, which have attachment based therapy at the core, to be delivered when children remain aligned to an abusive parent.

 

This article explains why a child who remains aligned to an abusive parent benefits from intervention aimed at restoring the relationship with the rejected parent, understanding of which rests upon recognition of why children align with the parent who is found to be abusive and acceptance that emotional and psychological abuse of children in divorce and separation, is no less damaging than all other forms of harm.

 

Understanding the child who aligns and rejects

 

In circumstances where a child is aligned with a parent who has been found to have caused harm to them, the greatest risk to the child’s medium to long-term emotional and psychological well being and development is not whether a child is spending time with the parent who is rejected, but the psychological maladaptations that are induced in the child that causes them to act counter to the evolutionary imperative to remain in close physical and psychological proximity to a primary attachment figure (Fairbairn, 1943; Ainsworth, 1969; Bowlby, 1988; Benoit, 2004; Nolte, Guiney, Fonagy, Mayes & Luyten, 2011; Fisher, 2017). The dilemma for the court in finding that a child is strongly aligned to a parent who has been found to have caused the child harm becomes, therefore, how to intervene in a way which restores the child's relationship with a parent who is capable of providing healthy care but who is being rejected. The task of psychotherapeutic intervention in these circumstances, is to address the core dynamics which configure around a child in such a position, so that the child can recover from the internal psychological mindset which causes this state of mind (Woodall, 2021).

 

The child who is psychologically bound to an abusive parent, is captured in a dynamic which is sometimes referred to as a trauma bond (Kobita, Tyrka, Kelly, et al, 2008). A trauma bond is a recognisable psychological dynamic which is seen when a person forms a deep emotional attachment with someone that causes them harm. It often develops from a repeated cycle of abuse and positive reinforcement in situations where there is an asymmetrical power imbalance between two people (Bowlby, 1980; Dutton& Painter, 1981; Ferenczi, 1931, 1932, 1949; Howell, 2014a; Stark, 2023). Children who suffer from trauma bonds in divorce and separation are those who have been drawn into a pattern of harmful dynamics, whether created intentionally or unintentionally, by one parent against the other, sometimes due to the psychiatric or psychological profile of that parent, at other times due to the coercive control strategies used by a parent. As a result, the child is often joined with the parent who is causing harm, in a fused dyadic coalition against the other parent and resistant to efforts to ameliorate that behaviour (Haley, 1997; Vanwoerden, Kalpakci, & Sharp, 2017).

 

Whilst the cause of children’s behaviour may include deliberate bad mouthing or undermining of the child's trust in a parent, more often the patterns are rooted in relational dynamics such as boundary violations, which cause a child to become pathologically enmeshed with a parent who is frightening or unpredictable (Ferenczi 1931; Bromberg,1998; Howell, 2012). Other patterns, which are seen in situations where children align with a parent are focused around coercion and anxiety based control behaviours which cause the child to disavow their feelings of love and affection for a parent and identify with the beliefs and behaviours of the abusive parent. This is a defensive position called 'Identification with the Aggressor' first identified by Ferenczi (1931) in his paper Confusion of Tongues, in which he described children who become transfixed and robotic in the face of psychological power held by adults. This was later explored by Anna Freud (1936), as an unconscious mechanism in which an individual identifies with someone who holds power which cannot be ameliorated. The identification may involve mimicry of the behaviour of the person with power. Developing the theme of how people identify with those who wield power over them, Ferenczi (1949) described a process which is created in two parts.; the first as a defence against trauma, the second as a repeated process which causes the development of behaviours which align with the abuser. In essence the child becomes a victim and an aggressor, a presentation which is conversant with many of the children who present as rejecting of a healthy parent and aligned to a parent found to have caused them harm.

 

The alienated child and attachment disruption

 

The Family Separation Clinic draws upon the psychoanalytic formulation and clinical descriptions of the term alienation to understand the experience of the child. Alienation as a word, meaning ‘the state of being, or the process of becoming, estranged from either oneself or parts of oneself’ (Rycroft, 1995, p. 6) is useful in terms of understanding what is happening to the child who aligns with an abusive parent and rejects the other. The psychoanalyst, Pearl King (2005, p. 177) for example, highlights the work of noted psychiatrists Donald Woods Winnicott and R. D. Laing, who conceived of alienation: in terms of a split in the self, so that the individual has, as it were, two selves – that is, a “true self” which he identifies with and a “false self” which he operates from and which may be variously described as a compliant or placating self, care-taking self, an un-embodied self, or a false-self system. Contemporary trauma clinician Fisher (2017), describes this state of mind as self alienation, a survival mechanism which enables the abused child to live with the effects of the harm they have suffered whilst remaining attached to the abusive caregiver. The disavowal of parts of self in order to survive is described as becoming estranged from the self by Horney (1992, p. 111). We do not, therefore, conceptualise this problem, primarily, as a child's alienation from a parent but, instead, recognise children's alignment with one parent and rejection of the other as arising from alienation of the self from the self, which is the emergence of a dominant false self state, which is precipitated by pronounced defensive splitting, in which the child’s normal attachment relationships become temporarily or permanently incapable of being activated consistently. The cause of the alienation of the self in the child is therefore attachment disruption within the context of a severe asymmetrical power imbalance.

 

Whilst attachment is the psycho-biological connection that develops between infants and their primary caregivers, it also provides the relational template for the child as (s)he grows and reaches adulthood (Bowlby, 1988). Initially, the attachment bond provides the infant with a safe haven in which it can rely on his or her primary caregivers for comfort at times whenever she or he feels threatened. It also provides the child with a secure base that creates a foundation from which she or he can develop their own coping skills. Attachment is an instinctive behaviour and a basic adaptation for survival in infancy (Ainsworth, 1989; NICE, 2015). The evolutionary imperative for attachment to caregivers is not contingent upon the quality of the care provided by the attachment figure. As Benoit (2004, p. 543) notes:

 

[A] normally developing child will develop an attachment relationship with any caregiver who provides regular physical and/ or emotional care, regardless of the quality of that care. In fact, children develop attachment relationships even with the most neglectful and abusive caregiver

 

Although children will, typically, develop separate and unique attachment bonds to each of their parents, in the intact family the child will have what may be described as a unified attachment experience where shifts in the child’s attachment focus are fluid and do not stimulate psychological stress. However, in the post separation family, the child must find ways to maintain their attachment bonds in a fractured, rather than unified, relational world and when dynamics put pressure on the child’s attachment system, transition between parents may become difficult and, in some circumstances, impossible for the child to achieve. It is in these circumstances that the child may develop the defence of ego splitting, in which the ability to hold two realities in mind is lost and a true self/false self split arises (Klein, 1946). This can be triggered by a fear of abandonment, and the consequent threat to attachment security which drives the child to seek stability. Simply put, the child who is exposed to anxiety about the potential loss of a caregiver, (in circumstances where, a threat of control or loss or abandonment is conveyed), is faced with the overwhelmingly contradictory and unmanageable pressure of retaining one primary attachment figure at the expense of the other, leading to an unconscious drive to stabilise the threat. To resolve this, the child develops a true/false sense of self as a defensive mechanism (Klein, 1946; Winnicott, 1986; Fisher, 2017; Hinshelwood, 2018; Vliegen, Tang, Midgley, Lutyens, & Fonagy, 2023). Fisher (2001, p. 2) suggests that splitting ‘allows for the separate but simultaneous awarenesses that what is happening is wrong, while keeping intact their idealization of and loyalty to the adults who mistreat them.’ This is the key unconscious defence mechanism induced in children faced with the irreconcilable feeling they must reject one parent in order to retain and/or regulate the unpredictable or frightening abusive parent. Fisher (2017) suggests that children who make these attachment maladaptations are at risk of later diagnoses of bipolar and borderline personality disorder.

 

Closely associated with pathological splitting is the primitive defence of projective identification which is often present in children who are in hyper-alignment to a parent who has been found to be abusive. Projective identification may be seen as ‘an unconscious phantasy in which aspects of the self or an internal object are split off and attributed to an external object’ (Bott Spillius et al, 2011, p. 126), and Kernberg (1989), summarised projective identification as a defence that has the primary purpose of expelling intolerable anxieties from the self and projecting them into another, with the unconscious aim of inducing in the object what is projected in the actual interaction with the object. (Klein, 1946; Segal, 1973, Ogden, 1982; Cashdan, 1988). In clinical work, children who are aligned with parents who have been found to have caused them harm, are observed to be coping by splitting off and projecting their anxieties at the parent who is being rejected, in an effort to induce in that parent, behaviour which justifies that rejection. Critically, Klein (1946, p. 103) notes that, ‘the violent splitting of the self and excessive projection, have the effect that the person towards whom this process is directed, is felt as a persecutor.’

 

It is through the unconscious processes of splitting and projective identification, that the abused child disowns the feelings of overwhelming anxiety and powerlessness which are experienced when they are in the care of a parent who has found to have harmed them and, importantly, is able to ascribe their own feelings of anger and fear onto the parent that they must rejected. Indeed, because projective identification specifically (though unconsciously) involves ‘the behavioural and emotional manipulation of others’ (Cashden, 1988, p. 56), the child may induce negative responses such as emotional dysregulation in the parent they feel they must reject, thereby disowning the guilt response that would otherwise regulate their behaviour towards that parent.

 

Whilst a child’s hyper-alignment to one parent and subsequent rejection of or resistance to the other can sometimes be precipitated by overt parental behaviours, such as inducing a child believe they have been abused, making the child feel they are unsafe in the other parent’s care, involving the child in a hostile narrative, or encouraging the child to make false or fabricated allegations, the child’s behaviour is very often driven by parental behaviours that are woven into the parent-child relationship. Clearly problem does not emerge ‘out of the ether’ but is woven into the very fabric of the family system and parent-child sub-system, and that it is in the disruption to that system that is created by the family breakdown that these pathological inter-psychic dynamics are brought to the surface.

 

Treatment of alienation in children - resolution of the alignment and rejection dynamic

 

When it is found by the court that a child is being harmed by the parenting they are aligned to and the parent who is being rejected is considered to be healthy and capable of providing good enough care, it is this parent who is best placed to provide the environment which is most conducive to the child's recovery from the attachment maladaptations described previously. This is because the harm suffered by the child is a relational trauma and it is within healthy relationships that such trauma can be repaired. (Fisher, 2017; Dana, 2020; Howell, 2020; Vliegan, Tang, Midgley, Luyten & Fonagy; 2023). Children in circumstances where they have been trauma bonded to an abusive parent will, however, be hyper-vigilant and often unable to trust their own experiences due to the invalidating strategies of the abusive parent (Linehan and Koerner, 1993). In addition, when fear and anxiety has been at the core of the abusive parent-child relationship, the child will continue to feel the necessity to respond to parental behaviours, particularly those which are unpredictable (Haliburn & Mears, 2012). Creating a stable and predictable environment for kinship care with the parent who has been rejected, is therefore the first priority in treatment and it is imperative that parents who provide such placements are aware of the ways in which their child(ren's) behaviour may be affected by the harm which has been caused to them. Therapeutic parenting training for parents in the rejected position, provides awareness, education and skills for responding to children who remain strongly aligned to abusive parents who will display behaviours which are conversant with disorganised attachment on intervention.

 

Disorganised attachment is the most recently recognised attachment pattern and may represent early developmental trauma (Liotti, 2011). The key feature of disorganised attachment is the lack of a coherent response to caregivers when stressed and an appearance of being driven to be close and at the same time move away from a caregiver (Main and Hesse, 1989). In many cases of children's alignment and rejection in post separation families, disorganised attachment behaviour is observed in the child in relationship to the parent who is in the rejected position and is not seen in the relationship with the parent to whom the child is aligned. This is because the child who is in an aligned relationship with a parent who is causing anxiety, will be compliant, watchful and attentive to the needs of the behaviour of the unpredictable parent they are being exposed to. In this respect the child who is being abused in this way is very like the child who is being sexually or physically abused but who is unable to tell due to the defensive strategies which keep them feeling safe. Recognition of the harm the child is suffering relies upon the Court and professionals involved to understand the counter intuitive nature of defensive behaviour in children who cling to a parent who is observed to be causing them harm.

 

The Family Separation Clinic provides structured therapeutic trials within a court managed process, which protects the child and then tests parental capacity to change behaviours. Where progress towards restoration of the child’s natural relationship with a rejected parent becomes stalled, the court may consider removal from the parent found to be harming the child may be required in order for the child’s maladaptive defences to drop. Whilst this is popularly called 'transfer of residence,' it is better understood as removal from harm and placement in kinship care, within the context of child protection.

Case Study: Josh (his real name).

 

When he was eleven years old, Josh was removed from the care of his mother in private proceedings in the the family court and management of his case was transferred to public law when the local authority placed him in foster care. Josh's mother was found to have caused him serious psychological and emotional harm by causing him to believe that his father was dangerous and preventing him from living normally by isolating him from the outside world. As a result Josh was socially and developmentally much younger than his age and still very rejecting of his father due to his belief that his mother was his only protector. Over subsequent weeks, with the dedicated help and commitment of his social worker, Josh recovered his relationship with his father to the point where he went to live with him and his wife. I worked with Josh's father for several years before and after Josh being removed from the care of his mother and the work that we did together, is told in the book 'Please let me see my son' by Thomas Moore (2007).

 

Josh speaks with insight about his experience of being brought up by his mother. In reflecting on what it felt like to be removed from her care he realises now that he experienced a long process of psychological trauma, which included being made to believe that he was physically unwell, when in fact his mother was suffering from Factitious Disorder. This psychiatric disorder occurs when family members or caregivers falsely present others, such as children, as being ill, injured or impaired. Josh reflects on the moment when he finally realised that his hatred of his father was rooted in his mother's control of his experience of the world and that he wasn't physically unwell:

 

'It was a glass shattering moment, to find that what I had believed was true was in fact not true, and that my father was not the dangerous person I had always believed him to be, but a good man who wanted to give me love and support. At the same time I came to see that all the time I had spent thinking that I was unwell and weak and vulnerable, wasn't real, it was a delusion that I had had no way of escaping.'

 

Josh is now writing about his experience as well as training to be a social worker and spoke recently at a Seminar the House of Lords.4 He hopes he can provide for other children and young people, the support which frees them from being trauma bonded to a parent who is psychologically unwell.

 

Therapy with families affected by a child's rejection, involves training the parent with whom the child now lives in skills to respond to disorganised attachment behaviour. This approach, relies upon a once rejected parent to tolerate the child's projections of hatred and fear whilst reflecting back consistently positive responses. Caregiving to a rejecting child is often hampered by what is called in attachment terms 'blocked trust,' which occurs when an abused child remains trauma bonded to the abusive parent and rejects incoming care from others. Blocked trust can result in 'blocked care,' which is when the healthy caregiving circle of reciprocity (the child accepts care and reflects back to the parent positive responses which in turn encourage the parent to keep giving care), is blocked (Baylin and Hughes 2014). In such circumstances, compassion fatigue can overtake caregivers, causing dissociation and disconnection from the child. Intensive support to parents in such circumstances, plus education and guidance on recovery from disorganised attachment behaviours, ensures that formerly rejected parents can utilise the attachment relationship to provide a child with the consistent caregiving which supports recovery. Protecting the child through supervised contact with a parent who has been found to have caused harm, until the reflexive need in the child to regulate that parent is dramatically reduced, is key to ensuring that attachment focused work can properly rebuild the child's integrated sense of self.

 

Conclusion

 

Cases where children are removed from the care of a parent who has been found to have caused serious emotional and/or psychological harm are treated by the Family Separation Clinic using a social work model which incorporates psychoanalytic understanding, structural therapy, attachment focused interventions and training in therapeutic parenting to formerly rejected parents. Treatment takes place after fact finding, which guides the input of the therapist whilst the Court provides the external structural management of the power and control dynamic which lies at the heart of such cases. Where children remain rejecting of a parent who has been found to be good enough, and in circumstances where the child is trauma bonded to the abusing parent, structured trials of therapeutic work take place; sometimes after the child has been removed from a parent who lacks insight.

 

It is the child's need to regulate a parent who has been unpredictable and potentially frightening that causes the ongoing rejecting behaviour which, in attachment terms, is called 'blocked trust.' Unblocking the trust between the child and parent they have rejected relies upon the capacity of the parent to provide care for the child which is rooted in therapeutic parenting, a skill which is taught to all parents who provide any element of kinship care after a child has been removed from the care of a parent found to have caused the child harm. Therapeutic parenting offers an adapted form of care which can release the child from the disorganised attachment behaviours which are seen when a parent triangulates a child into adult matters, providing protection to the child from those harmful behaviours, whilst ensuring that the child maintains some form of relationship with an abusive parent (albeit indirect at times) ensures that the child is enabled to recover an integrated sense of self.

 

Ultimately, the child who has been abused after divorce or separation must find a way to relate to both parents, even if the abusive parent does not change their behaviours. Whilst some children must be protected from a parent for a number of years, eventually they will have to encounter that parent and learn how to cope with the vicissitudes between healthy and unhealthy relationships. Working with parents in the rejected position to recover the attachment relationship with their child and then working alongside them to address the disorganised attachments which are seen in such situations, provides healing from harm in a system which is protective of the child's need for relational health. Oversight from the Court during the early phases of this work, provides structural protection, that enables effective work to take place away from the abusive dynamics which cause the problem in the first place.

 

Treating experts are working to heal children who are strongly aligned to parents who have caused them serious harm via interventions which address relational trauma. Rather than being the cause of the problem, parents who were previously rejected, who are themselves found to be victims of post separation abuse, are the conduits through which this healing work takes place. This work supports children to recover from the effects of abuse in kinship care placements with their mother or their father and in overseeing this process, the family court takes responsibility for ensuring that abused children in divorce and separation are enabled to recover from serious harm.

 

About Karen Woodall

I am a psychotherapist specialising in the treatment of families where children are found to have suffered emotional and/or psychological harm in divorce or family separation. I have worked in the family courts of England and Wales or fifteen years, and also in the family courts of the Republic of Ireland, Sweden, and Hong Kong. In recent years, most of my work has been in the High Court of England and Wales with children with complex therapeutic needs, after findings of serious harm, in private and public law cases. I work with children who are removed from harm in kinship care placement with the parent they were formerly rejecting and in foster care placements which are sometimes called 'stepping stone' transfers. I was commended for my work in a complex case of emotional and psychological abuse of children who were removed from their mother and transferred to the care of their father, by Keehan J (Neutral Citation Number: [2023] EWHC 1864 (Fam)) in the last of five published judgments. My PhD research is with adult children who rejected a parent as a child and my training to social workers and other professionals is delivered through the Family Separation Clinic, a private partnership based in London. I write about the issues affecting children who are found to be harmed in divorce and separation, the need for standardised treatment routes and the outcomes for families affected at my blog which is read around the world.

 

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1 Dalgarno, E., Ayeb-Karlsson, S., Bramwell, D., Barnett, A., & Verma, A. (2024). Health-related experiences of family court and domestic abuse in england: A looming public health crisis. Journal of Family Trauma, Child Custody & Child Development. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/26904586.2024.2307609

2 Alienation and Domestic Abuse- What on Earth is Going On? Darren Howe KC, Fran Wiley KC, Clare Ciborowska, Kirsten Japp – Family Law Week – 8.3.2024

3 S, Lee & A, Verdan KC - Family court reporting: how effective and accurate is it? Today's Family Lawyer - 18.3.2024

4 My Experience is real – Adults who were alienated as children speaking about their experience of being removed from the care of a parent who caused them harm – House of Lords Seminar organised by the Family Separation Clinic – 23.11.2023