"Parental Alienation"
What is "Parental Alienation"?
It is a form of domestic abuse that occurs when families seperate. In it's severest form it results in the psychological abuse of a child and their parent.
By the time cases for contact go to court significant harm may already have been inflicted as some children will be brainwashed to emotionally cut off from and reject a safe parent.
This abuse can have devastating impacts on the mental health and well being of children, parents and extended family members. The American Psychological Association (APA) found that childhood psychological abuse is as harmful to vicitims as sexual or physical abuse.
Coercive and controlling behaviours are employed by the alienating parent to ensure they have full control over the child with no competition for the child's affection. Those working in the field are reporting their clients are evenly split between men and women in roughly equal amount.
Some consider it is not necessary to have a widely adopted definition, all that is important is if there are observable signs of emotional harm in the child that need to be addressed. Unfortunately, this has not improved the performance of Family Courts in dealing with this issue. As a result this form of child abuse continues to leave a lifelong impact for such children and their rejected parents and extended family. The cycle of abuse then perpetuates.
The term "Parental Alienation Syndrome" (PAS) was first used in 1985 by Dr Richard A Gardner who observed a pattern of behaviour amongst children who were the subject of high conflict divorce proceedings. Dr Gardner's work was widely criticised for not being scientific or routed in known psychological constructs. It was not accepted as a syndrome. However, his work shined a light on a serious problem that can cause mental illness in children and targeted parents.
What he observed was in essence a form of psychological domestic violence that has been recognised by the American Psychological Association in its Firth Edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5) of Mental Disorders. "Parental Alienation" has also been introduced as an index term in the latest draft of the International Classification of Diseases v11 (ICD-11) published by the World Health Organisation under section 24 - Factors influencing health status or contact with health services for health.
| Document | Code | Description |
|---|---|---|
| DSM-5 | 309.4 Adjustment Disorder with mixed disturbance of emotions and conduct | Relating to the development of emotional or behavioral symptoms in response to an identifiable stressor(s) occurring within 3 months of the onset of the stressor(s). Both emotional symptoms (e.g., depression, anxiety) and a disturbance of conduct are predominant. | DSM-5 | V61.20 (Z62.820) Parent-Child Relational Problem | Cognitive problems may include negative attributions of the other's intentions, hostility toward or scapegoating of the other, and unwarranted feelings of estrangement. Affective problems may include feelings of sadness, apathy, or anger about the other individual in the relationship. |
| DSM-5 | V61.29 (Z62.898) Child Affected by Parental Relationship Distress | This category should be used when the focus of clinical attention is the negative effects of parental relationship discord (e.g., high levels of conflict, distress, or disparagement) on a child in the family, including effects on the child's mental or other medical disorders. | DSM-5 | V995.51 (Z62.898)Child Psychological Abuse, Confirmed | Child psychological abuse is nonaccidental verbal or symbolic acts by a child's parent or caregiver that result, or have reasonable potential to result, in significant psychological harm to the child. (Physical and sexual abusive acts are not included in this category.) |
| ICD-11 | QE52 | Problem associated with interpersonal interactions in childhood |
| ICD-11 | QE52.0 | Caregiver-child relationship problem |
| ICD-11 | QE52.1 | Loss of love relationship in childhood |
Attachment Based "Parental Alienation" (AB-PA)
'Attachment based "parental alienation" is not a child custody issue, it's a child protection issue' Dr C A Childress 2014
Dr Craig Childress, a Clinical Psychologist in the USA, has looked at a child's emotional cut-off from a safe parent through the lens of existing psychological constructs and principles. He uses knowledge of the attachment system, family systems, complex trauma and personality disorders to describe the cross-generational trauma that is driving the brainwashing and pathological disease inflicted on a child as a result of distorted parenting practices employed by a parent with a personality disorder. Notably Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) or Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) but it may also include those with Histronic or Antisocial personality disorders.
Childress explains that it is extremely rare for a child to reject a parent. Our internal Attachment System is a motivational system that has been developed over millions of years of human evolution to guard humans against predators. Children are programmed by their natural biology to bond with their parents/care figures. For a child to completely reject a parent something has gone very wrong.
Parents have different levels of skill when taking care of their children. No parent is perfect, there will be times when a parent is attuned to their child's needs and times when they are misattuned. As part of the court process for child matters, parents may find their parenting skills being assessed against a parenting scale. The scale from 1 to 100 ranges from neglect of a child (between 1-20%) through normal parenting (between 20-80%) to more widely recognised abusive parenting e.g. physical or sexual abuse (between 80-100%).
Childress maintains that children of abusive parents are not likely to reject that parent. They are more likely to develop an "insecure attachment" where the child tries to please the dysfunctional parent in order to bond more with that parent because the child doesn't want to be abandoned and "eaten by predators". The child doesn't understand at this stage that the dysfunctional parent is the predator.
There are exceptions to this, however, where the abuse is so severe that the bond is broken beyond repair. Cases such as this include when a parent engages in sexual abuse of the child, excessive violence against the child "such as beatings with fists, belts, switches, or electrical cords", excessive violence against a parent that the child has witnessed or where the parent has a substance abuse problem which puts the child in a care taking role. It should be noted, however, that breaking of the bond in the case of such abuse is usually at later stages of life from 12 years onwards depending on the type of abuse.
A child that completely rejects a normal range parent is one who has most likely been brainwashed by a Narcissistic/Borderline (NPD/BPD) parent. In this case the child displays specific signs that are not present in cases where the child has good reason to alienate the non-resident parent. The child is in effect trained to enact the symptoms of narcissistic or borderline personality disorder. It is a form of emotional Domestic Abuse using the child as a weapon which inevitably causes psychological harm to both the weaponised child and the ex partner.
Parents with NPD/BPD who embark on a program of brainwashing are re-enacting their own childhood trauma of having been abused or abandoned themselves and project this on to their own child. Both having deep rooted feelings of inadequacy, a Narcissistic parent will view the child's feelings towards the alienated parent as a challenge to their magnificence whereas a Borderline parent will relive feelings of abuse and or abandonment.
These disordered parents view themselves as victims, they have delusions that the targeted parent is an abuser like their own parent from their own childhood and, therefore, the target parent is a threat to the child. As a result the targeted parent must be annihilated from the child's life. The NPD/BPD parent achieves this by slowly working on the child to make them feel like they are a victim of the targeted parent. Eventually the child will reach the point where they too have delusions of abuse that never happened or have been significantly exaggerated to appear worse than they are e.g. a parent who allows a child a sip of diluted alcohol on a single occasion when the child shows interest in drinking it may be described as a parent who regularly forces the child to drink hard liquor.
The NPD/BDP parent transfers all their anxious feelings of inadequacy and abandonment onto the targeted parent. Their fragile personalities cannot cope with a reality where they have been rejected or abandoned. They feel threatened by the other parent. As a threat, the NPD/BPD parents do what they do best, they project all that is bad about themselves on to the targeted parent. They will say or do anything to ensure their child and court officials see the targeted parent in a bad light and to ensure they are seen as the ideal parent thus drawing the focus away from the real problem, their narcissism.
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Parental Alienation ¦ Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) ¦ Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) ¦ Co-dependency