American Psychiatric Association on Disordered Parenting

1. The "American Psychiatric Publishing Textbook of Personality Disorders" describes parenting from someone afflicted with borderline personality disorder, or more generally, narcissistic personality disorder:

Further, we wonder how a child breaks free without running away? Perhaps they are forced to give in, and surrender their authenticity and become susceptible to parental alienation?

The American Psychiatric Association also has an extremely accurate description of parental alienation in ICD-10, where all the descriptive text about shared delusional disorder fits perfectly.

2. Switching to the American Psychological Association's book "Intrusive Parenting: How Psychological Control Affects Children and Adolescents", by Stone, Buehler, and B. Barber, which is based on 40 empirical studies about psychological control, as noted by Dr. Childress and copied from his |Facebook page and June 2016 Newsletter

- page 56-57: “The central elements of psychological control are intrusion into the child’s psychological world and self-definition and parental attempts to manipulate the child’s thoughts and feelings through invoking guilt, shame, and anxiety. Psychological control is distinguished from behavioral control in that the parent attempts to control, through the use of criticism, dominance, and anxiety or guilt induction, the youth’s thoughts and feelings rather than the youth’s behavior.” (p. 57)
- page 62: “This study was conducted using two different samples of youth. The first sample consisted of youth living in Knox County, Tennessee. The second sample consisted of youth living in Ogden, Utah.”
- page 86: “The analyses reveal that variability in psychological control used by parents is not random but it is linked to interparental conflict, particularly covert conflict. Higher levels of covert conflict in the marital relationship heighten the likelihood that parents would use psychological control with their children. This might be because both parental psychological control and covert conflict are anxiety-driven. They share defining characteristics, particularly the qualities of intrusiveness, indirectness, and manipulation.”
- page 86-87: “The concept of triangles “describes the way any three people related to each other and involve others in emotional issues between them” (Bowen, 1989, p. 306). In the anxiety-filled environment of conflict, a third person is triangulated, either temporarily or permanently, to ease the anxious feelings of the conflicting partners. By default, that third person is exposed to an anxiety-provoking and disturbing atmosphere. For example, a child might become the scapegoat or focus of attention, thereby transferring the tension from the marital dyad to the parent-child dyad. Unresolved tension in the marital relationship might spill over to the parent-child relationship through parents’ use of psychological control as a way of securing and maintaining a strong emotional alliance and level of support from the child. As a consequence, the triangulated youth might feel pressured or obliged to listen to or agree with one parents’ complaints against the other. The resulting enmeshment and cross-generational coalition would exemplify parents’ use of psychological control to coerce and maintain a parent-youth emotional alliance against the other parent (Haley, 1976; Minuchin, 1974)”

3. Switching to a classic book on personality disorders, entitled "Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism" by Otto F. Kernberg, 1995, page 175, he notes the inflammation of the rejected parent's minor faux pas into "distorted monstrous fantasies". It is delusion and reenactment is one tidy, understated, unassuming package, along with a the recipe for the all wonderful parent role: drowning children in misplaced consolation and understanding:

page 33: The need to control the idealized objects, to use them in attempts to manipulate and exploit the environment and to destroy potential enemies, is linked with inordinate pride in the possession of these perfect objects totally dedicated to the patient

page 175: Borderline patients gradually have to become aware of how their parents failed them - not in the distorted monstrous ways which existed in their fantasies when beginning treatment, but failed them in simple human ways of giving and receiving love, and providing consolation and understanding, and intuitively lending a helping hand when a baby, or the child, was in trouble

4. Switching to the book "Implications of Parent-Child Boundary Dissolution for Developmental Psychopathology: Who is the Parent and Who is the Child", 2014 by Kerig, originally in the Journal of Emotional Abuse, 2005:

page 12: "Rather than telling the child directly what to do or think, as does the behaviorally controlling parent, the psychologically controlling parent uses indirect hints and responds with guilt induction or withdrawal of love if the child refuses to comply." "Rather than telling the child directly what to do or think, as does the behaviorally controlling parent, the psychologically controlling parent uses indirect hints and responds with guilt induction or withdrawal of love if the child refuses to comply. In short, an intrusive parent strives to manipulate the child’s thoughts and feelings in such a way that the child’s psyche will conform to the parent’s wishes."

page 14: "In order to carve out an island of safety and responsivity in an unpredictable, harsh, and depriving parent - child relationship, children of highly maladaptive parents may become precocious caretakers who are adept at reading the cues and meeting the needs of those around them. The ensuing preoccupied attachment with the parent interferes with the child’s development of important ego functions, such as self organization, affect regulation, and emotional object constancy.”