Resources for Parental Alienation

Index for Resources: click on a person or topic, or scroll downward to see the resources

Other worthwhile topics on this web site:

General Web Sites:

Parental Alienation Murder News (and child suicide news), where a parent murders a child instead of handing the custody over, once and for all revealing that the alienator is not primarily concerned with the best interests of the child. It is about psychological splitting, where the ex-spouse must become the ex-parent. There is also an aspect of revenge, where the alienator knows that the way to hurt their ex is by erasing their children from their lives, or as DSM-5 says, someone with BPD presents as a "righteous avenger of past mistreatment." When DNA evidence shows that a jury's unanimous decision is wrong, and all the appeal's court, the Innocence Projects looks to find systemic problems. Similarly, these cases can be used to help figure out why all the mental health professionals supported the murderer, because the killing of children shows that the alienator was only acting like an all wonderful parent:

Suicides as the Result of Parental Alienation:

News:

Dr. Jennifer Harman:

    • TED Talk "Parental Alienation is a form of domestic violence" Stereotypes make it easy for a parent to villify the other parent. "Parental alienation is a devastating problem affecting millions of families around the world. Unfortunately, much like how we addressed domestic violence several decades ago, we treat parental alienation as a domestic issue rather than as a problem that affects communities, school systems, police and court systems, mental health and financial institutions, and legislative bodies. I will discuss how our social and cultural systems sanction and even promote parental alienation at the expense of our children, and what can be done about it. Dr. Harman is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Colorado State University and is the Program Coordinator for the Applied Social & Health Psychology Program. .... She has more recently applied her research expertise in social psychology to better understand and find solutions for parental alienation because she has been a target of it herself."

    • In a survey of 610 random adults in North Carolina, "13.4% of adults have been alienated from one or more of their children" . "In a survey of 610 adults in North Carolina,13.4% of parents say they are alienated from a child. An estimated 5 million adults perceive the parental alienation to be severe. The study is entitled "Prevalence of parental alienation drawn from a representative poll" and will appear in the July 2016 edition of the "Child and Youth Services Review".

    • Parental alienation: what it means and why it matters "The term “parental alienation” is not in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM, which is a manual that offers a common language and standard criteria that mental health providers use to classify mental disorders). However, “child affected by parental relationship distress (CAPRD)” is a term that has been added to the most recent edition of the DSM, the DSM-5. CAPRD includes parental alienating behaviors such as badmouthing a parent to a child. And several of the manual’s authors have clarified CAPRD to include an entire range of parental alienating behaviors and outcomes." Link to same article in the Houston Chronicle

    • Article "The Dark World of Parental Alienation" .... "We have been told that parental alienation does not exist .... Parental alienation behaviors (e.g. derogating a parent to a child) are now included in DSM-V"

Dr. Amy J. L. Baker:

Dr. Richard Warshak:

    • Dr Warshak's Web Site Includes an excellent treatment program called Family Bridges

    • Dr Warshak - Peer Reviwed - Ten Parental Alienation Fallacies That Compromise Decisions in Court and in Therapy. False beliefs about the genesis of parental alienation and about appropriate remedies shape opinions and decisions that fail to meet children’s needs. This article examines 10 mistaken assumptions: (a) children never unreasonably reject the parent with whom they spend the most time, (b) children never unreasonably reject mothers, (c) each parent contributes equally to a child’s alienation, (d) alienation is a child’s transient, short-lived response to the parents’ separation, (e) rejecting a parent is a short-term healthy coping mechanism, (f) young children living with an alienating parent need no intervention, (g) alienated adolescents’ stated preferences should dominate custody decisions, (h) children who appear to function well outside the family need no intervention, (i) severely alienated children are best treated with traditional therapy techniques while living primarily with their favored parent, and (j) separating children from an alienating parent is traumatic. Reliance on false beliefs compromises investigations and undermines adequate consideration of alternative explanations for the causes of a child’s alienation. Most critical, fallacies about parental alienation shortchange children and parents by supporting outcomes that fail to provide effective relief to those who experience this problem.

  • Welcome Back Pluto (DVD for children)

  • Divorce Poison, by Richard Warshak

  • Warshak Support for Shared Parenting

    • Warshak Interviewed by A Family Court Judge

    • Warshak Parental Alienation: Overview, Management, Intervention, and Practice Tips "counseling or psycho-therapy tend to be suitable for mild and some moderate cases ..... Counseling is not only ineffective in many cases of moderate and severe alienation. Often it makes things worse. Counselors who lack adequate understanding and competence in dealing with parental alienation may be too quick to accept at face value the favored parent and child’s representations of events. This can result in misdiagnosis and misguided treatment." ..... "If the favored parent’s behavior is considered to be a form of psychological abuse, the court facilitates the children’s continued exposure to toxic parenting rather than protecting them from further abuse..... Effective cross-examination of mental health experts often uncovers the absence or paucity of their experience in overcoming severe alienation. With very few exceptions, the expert’s experience is limited to working on cases with children who remain primarily in the care of the favored parent, or whom the court places with the rejected parent but who receive no effective help to adjust to the court orders. The expert has no long-term experience with children who present as severely alienated and who, in a reasonable length of time, recover affectionate feelings, correct cognitive distortions, and resume normal behavior with the parent who had been rejected."

Linda Gottlieb:

  • Linda Gottlieb : the DSM-5 ON PAS and Abuse

  • Linda Gottlieb's web site

    • Linda Gottlieb testifies before the Connecticut task force

    • Even abused foster children do not reject a parent: "Research Observation: Despite the abuse and neglect suffered by the 3000 foster care children who had been under my care, it was extremely uncommon for those children to refuse contact with a parent—even with an overtly abusive parent. Rather, abused children tend to protect and cling to the abusive parent. Moreover, in the rare cases in which that did appear to happen, there was always some evidence of indoctrination or programming (typically by foster parents who had the surreptitious goal of adopting the child). Thus, it is counter-instinctual for a child to reject a parent—even an abusive parent. When a professional observes a child strongly reject a parent in the absence of verified abuse, neglect or markedly deficient parenting skills—which should never be assumed based on the child’s self-reporting—one of the first thoughts should be that the other parent is an alienator. Moreover, one should never assume that, because a child has rejected a parent, the parent must have done something to warrant it."

    • Linda's essay on the parental alienation and the history of US custody law

  • Missing the Alienation

          • Most professionals believe [incorrectly] that if a child has rejected a parent, the parent must have done something to warrant it. Few people would even think of another explanation: namely that the child had been programmed or brainwashed, just like what occurs in a cult or in the well-known Stockholm syndrome. But if one were to compare alienated children to foster children — specifically, children who had been removed from their parents due to actual abuse and neglect — the difference would be obvious. Children who have truly been abused crave a relationship with their parents. Paradoxically — and this is what makes it so counterintuitive — with few exceptions, abused children protect their abusive parents. They do not disparage, attack or reject them. I myself saw this consistently during my 24 years of working in New York State’s Child Welfare System.

          • Most professionals believe [incorrectly] that it is unlikely that a child would align with an abusive, alienating parent. What is missed here is that the child is vulnerable to the manipulations of the alienating parent, such as bribery, abuse of authority and power, and permissiveness. We know how it is generally the targeted/alienated parent who enforces the appropriate discipline to fill the parental vacuum vacated by the alienating parent. By doing so, targeted/alienated parents are incredibly misunderstood and doubly victimized by the inexperienced professional, who then labels them as too harsh and not respectful of their children’s feelings and wishes.

          • Most professionals confuse pathological enmeshment with healthy bonding. To the naïve observer, the closeness and clinging seen with enmeshed parent-child relationships seems normal, even healthy. But it is not. As a result of this dysfunctional relationship, alienated children lose their individuality; must suppress their natural feelings of love and need for a parent; and are manipulated to do the bidding of the alienating parent. That is extremely dangerous and damaging to the child.

Brian Ludmer:

    • Interview with Brian Ludmer on Legal Strategies Brian Ludmer is perhaps the foremost Parental Alienation attorney. Although this is used as an advertisement for a different law firm, the points remain valid. "Q: What can you do to combat an alienating parent? Brian Ludmer: Well, the key thing is you need to strictly, frequently, and early on assert your right to the access you are supposed to have with your child. Most of the problems result from people being too timid or delaying the problem thinking there is some therapeutic answer. You can’t really stop false allegations from being made, and quite often the fact they’re being made can be used to your advantage .... Most alienators will fold rather than actually go on the stand at a trial ...question the aligned parent under oath during the case, you can get some amazing admissions that then inform the custody assessment and the judge. So, the idea is to expose them — not allow them to hide behind false affidavits and lawyer’s letters — and that typically will force their hand." [This should not be misunderstood as legal advice from this site.]

    • Brian Ludmer Law Brian is the main legal man in the parental alienation movement. He will allow other lawyers to seek high level direction from him.

    • The Book "The High-Conflict Custody Battle," available on Amazon

    • Brian Ludmer slide deck presentation to North York General Hospital

    • Brian Ludmer Interview in AdvocateDaily.com about why traditional therapy fails in parental alienation cases. "Reconciliation therapy is an intensive psycho-educational intervention that, when structured and delivered properly by specialists in the field, can be far more effective in cases of parental alienation than conventional therapeutic methods, says Toronto family lawyer Brian Ludmer"

  • MANAGING THE PARENTAL ALIENATION CASE - April 5, 2016 - V2 final - 141 page slide deck that gives high level bullet points. We have no legal credentials, but this could be an outline of the world's best strategees on how to win a parental alienation case. Give it to your attorney. To get a copy, send email to howie.dennison@gmail.com, or friend him on facebook. See also parental alienation training materials for lawyers for continuing education classes, etc.

  • Brian Ludmer's class, part 1, on parental alienation at the Columbus Bar Association, April 6, 2016. Fills in the bullets in the above slide deck.

  • Brian Ludmer's class, part 2, on parental alienation at the Columbus Bar Association, April 6, 2016. Fills in the bullets in the above slide deck.

    • The Young Mind: Law not keeping up with new understanding of suggestibility, memory "Law not keeping up with new understanding of suggestibility, memory"

    • Children Hurt in the Divorce Process This is a spectacularly brilliant article on all the potential/common harm done to a child by asking a the child which parent they prefer, and all the potential/common harm done to the child by the appointment of minor's counsel (guardian ad litem). Written by elite parental alienation attorney Brian Ludmer. The harms include further triangulating the child into the marital conflict, furthering enmeshment, over empowering the child, and focusing on the child's wants rather than their needs, which is not in the best interest of the child.

Joan Kloth-Zanard:

Joe Barrow:

Karen Woodall:

    • 8 thoughts on “The unbearable madness of knowing" Understand that there is nothing that you can do to remedy the situation without taking control out of the hands of the alienating parent.

    • Working with the alienated child: "Children need us to do this work, they need us to teach people how to stop asking them what their wishes and feelings are and to take responsibility for analyzing the child’s reactions and responses in alienation. Far too many children are being tormented by the routine seeking of their wishes and feelings which are, in alienation situations, simply the repetition of the unwell parent’s feelings and beliefs. This is an impossible situation for a child who can only, in such circumstances, repeat the words they have heard and the intentions which are conveyed as a felt sense in the intrapsychic world."

    • How to hear the voice of the alienated child : Lessons for family practitioners Popular ideology about men and women are used as part of the false alienation narrative

    • Homecoming - Helping the Reunited Child "They are also, both showing, the emergence of repressed guilt and shame and are struggling with this in terms of their ability to properly and fully settle into home life. Guilt and shame are two normal and healthy emotional responses and in ordinary circumstances, one would welcome the expression of both as a regulatory force which socialises a child. In formerly alienated children however, guilt and shame are two expressions of feeling which have long been repressed as part of the alienation process, because in order to reject a parent who is loved, a child must first adopt the psychological defence of burying all good feelings for that parent and projecting only negative beliefs and feelings upon them. This action, which is a defence and a coping mechanism which allows the child to safely survive in the world of the alienating parent, causes shame and guilt but instead of these being a regulatory force, preventing the child from complete rejection, they become unwanted feelings which must be denied, split off and repressed along with all good feelings for the now hated parent. The child enters a psychological space at this juncture, in which he is unable to locate any of those feelings, allowing him to fully and completely, join the delusional belief of the alienating parent that his rejection is justified. When the child has entered this place, anything goes in terms of allegations, projections, delusional beliefs and more, because the normal regulatory feelings are completely removed from consciousness. Instead of these healthy responses, a self righteous anger appears which can make a child appear to be completely without guilt. Sadly, though the outward appearance is such, the repression of those normal feelings does not actually wash them away but instead swallows up a whole lot of emotional and psychological energy in keeping them out of the conscious mind. Children in this condition actually look frozen in their faces and unable to do anything other than react in an almost feral knee jerk response to intervention. The effort of keeping those regulatory feelings repressed is one which takes immense amounts of energy, leaving some children lethargic, exhausted and disinterested in the world around them. This is the presentation of buried grief which accompanies many alienated children."

    • Karen Woodall discusses the need to protect the child and the child's experience of this protection.

    • According to Karen Woodall, parental alienation is becoming a little bit trendy but people are not understanding the true horror of it all, the psychological abuse aspect, and are instead failing to realize that the child must be protected.

    • The healing journey of a formerly alienated person: From Division to Resilience

  • The real meaning of parental alienation - reality testing working with parental alienation

    • Alienated Child Whispering : "I work with alienated children, I know them well. I work with them when they are alienated and fiercely determined not to see a parent and I work with them through and beyond reunification towards a place of psychological balance. This year so far I have undertaken seven reunifications with fifteen children and all have been successful. None have used force, all have utilised the reconfiguration of the dynamics around the child via the legal system with a subsequent quiet and peaceful encounter with the rejected parent. What I know about reunification of children is that it is not a mystery, it is not a magic wand and it is not something which is within the skills range of only a few people. Anyone can reunify a child if they understand how to work counter-intuitively and are sensitive the alienated child’s way of speaking. To do this one has to get out of the way of everything one thinks one knows and start again. Alienated children do not speak the same language as other children, they speak with their bodies as well as their mouths and they convey meaning as much in the unsaid as those things they tell you. When I am working with an alienated child I spend a lot of time with them doing ordinary things. We will play games, go for walks, eat cake, watch tv and hang out. When I do these things I do so to learn the language this particular child is speaking, because although all alienated children say the same things, they each have their own dialect ...... That comes after reunification however. What comes before is the shift in power dynamic which brings the attachment relationship to the fore and the work to give the child the knowledge that things have changed sufficiently for them to let go of the coping mechanism of rejection."

    • Karen's new book "Understanding Parental Alienation: Learning to Cope, Helping to Heal"

  • Alienators are not monsters. Only fearful people. The fear leads to anger

    • next

Steven Miller, M. D. (formerly at Harvard Medical):

Dr. William Bernet:

Opponents of Parental Alienation:

    • Darrel Regier Darrel Regier Bio A person who influenced DSM-5 to not include parental alienation

    • Writers of DSM-5 explain why they believe PA should not be included "The bottom line – it is not a disorder within one individual," said Dr. Darrel Regier, vice chair of the task force drafting the manual. "It's a relationship problem – parent-child or parent-parent. Relationship problems per se are not mental disorders."There is not sufficient scientific evidence to warrant its inclusion in the DSM," It is highly significant that Dr. Darrel Regier said all along that parental alienation is not a “mental disorder,” but is a type of relational problem. Darrel never said that parental alienation does not exist or is not a problem. He said it is not a “mental disorder” (i.e., an ailment located INSIDE the mind of the patient), but it is a “mental condition” (i.e., a relational problem, something located BETWEEN the patient and another person). Read this article called "Child affected by Parental Relationship distress", written by Dr. Bernet, along with two co-authors, Wamboldt and Narrow who were the authors of the same DSM-5 chapter.

    • Past President of the APA leaves children without hope "I really get concerned about spreading the definition of mental illness too wide," Elissa Benedek, past president of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), told US News & World Report last year.

Dr. Doug Darnell:

  • Doug Darnell His slightly different definition of parental alienation

Dr. Phil:

  • Dr Phil 2

    • Dr Phil 3 4 min 11 seconds. He says he has seen equal numbers of men and women alienate children. "The number one biggest mistake in a divorce is to sabotage your child's relationship with the other parent .... using your child .... child ends up in the middle". "when you have anger towards your ex and you use the child as a pawn, get them to love you" "they do that because they are hugely pissed. That's why they do it. They don't like their ex anymore and they see the child's affiliation with the other as ... I have seen them do it just as many men do it as women, just as many women as men ... that's a bad thing".

Debra Lerhmann (Texas Supreme Court Judge and Chair of the American Bar Association Family Law Association):

General Documentaries:

    • Victims of Another War This is an outstanding documentary, following the lives of three children who were taken away(abducted) by one parent and told their other parent abandoned them. It follows them into adult hood to understand the implications of this on their lives.

The harm and impact on children of emotional abuse:

    • The APA announced by a 2014 press release that "Child Psychological Abuse [is] as harmful as child Sexual Abuse." This press release was approved by the APA council. It is based on the Unseen Wounds paper , which is seminal research published in an APA journal. It also quotes findings form the American Academy of Pediatrics. It notes that "Child protective services case workers may have a harder time recognizing and substantiating emotional neglect and abuse because there are no physical wounds,” said Spinazzola. “Also, psychological abuse isn’t considered a serious social taboo like physical and sexual child abuse. We need public awareness initiatives to help people understand just how harmful psychological maltreatment is for children and adolescents.” Other research at McGill University confirms the findings.

    • APA Press Release about Psychological Child Abuse This is the press release for "Unseen Wounds" from the APA. See link immediately above.

    • Psychology Today calls it emotional abuse "There is now scholarly consensus that severe alienation is abusive to children (Fidler and Bala, 2010), and it is a largely overlooked form of child abuse (Bernet et al, 2010), as child welfare and divorce practitioners are often unaware of or minimize its extent"

  • DSM 5 and Child Neglect and Abuse

    • Assessment of the Harmful Psychiatric and Behavioral Effects of Different Forms of Child Maltreatment "Our findings challenge widely held beliefs about how child abuse should be recognized and treated—a responsibility that often lies with the physician. Because different types of child abuse have equivalent, broad, and universal effects, effective treatments for maltreatment of any sort are likely to have comprehensive psychological benefits. Population-level prevention and intervention strategies should emphasize emotional abuse, which occurs with high frequency but is less punishable than other types of child maltreatment". And also "Finally, population-level prevention and intervention strategies should not ignore the considerable psychological harms imposed by emotional abuse, which rival those of physical abuse and neglect. Taken together with high worldwide prevalence and evidence that emotional and physical pain share a common somatosensory representation in the brain, it is clear that emotional abuse is wide-spread, painful, and destructive."

    • Alienated children have sky high ACES scores, which the CDC says greatly elevates their risk for future harm.

    • The Young Mind: Law not keeping up with new understanding of suggestibility, memory "Law not keeping up with new understanding of suggestibility, memory"

    • The Science of Early Life Toxic Stress for Pediatric Practice and Advocacy "Young children who experience toxic stress are at high risk for a number of health outcomes in adulthood, including cardiovascular disease, cancers, asthma, and depression. The American Academy of Pediatrics has recently called on pediatricians, informed by research from molecular biology, genomics, immunology, and neuroscience, to become leaders in science-based strategies to build strong foundations for children’s life-long health."

    • Wounds That Time Won't Heal: The Neurobiology of Child Abuse "Neuropsychologist Teicher reveals the alarming connections scientists are revealing about child abuse - even when it is psychological, not physical, and permanent debilitating changes in the brain that may lead to psychiatric problems. The discoveries are a wake-up call for our society .... Our brains are sculpted by our early experiences. Maltreatment is a chisel that shapes a brain to contend with strife, but at the cost of deep, enduring wounds. Childhood abuse is not something that you "get over." It is an evil that we must acknowledge and confront."

    • Scars that Won't Heal: The Neurobiology of Child Abuse "Maltreatment at an early age can have enduring negative effects on a child's brain development and function ... Society reaps what it sows in the way it nurtures its children. Stress sculpts the brain to exhibit various antisocial, though adaptive, behaviors. Whether it comes in the form of physical, emotional or sexu-trauma or through exposure to warfare, famine or pestilence, stress can set off a ripple of hormonal changes that permanently wire a child’s brain to cope with a malevolent world. Through this chain of events, violence and abuse pass from generation to generation as well as from one society to the next. Our stark conclusion is that we see the need to do much more to ensure that child abuse does not happen in the first place, be-cause once these key brain alterations occur, there may be no going back"

    • The effects of maltreatment on brain development a compendium of many studies

  • Six Peer Reviewed Studies Show that Parental Alienation is Child Abuse

  • Emotional Abuse During Childhood Linked to Adult Migraine Risk

    • 8 Common Effects of Narcissistic Parenting What happens when you live in the shadow of a narcissistic parent? Chronic self-blame, Echoism, insecurity attachment, need-panic, fierce independence, the parentified child, extreme narcissism, PTSD,

    • Neuroimaging of child abuse: a critical review "Childhood maltreatment is a stressor that can lead to the development of behavior problems and affect brain structure and function. This review summarizes the current evidence for the effects of childhood maltreatment on behavior, cognition and the brain in adults and children. Neuropsychological studies suggest an association between child abuse and deficits in IQ, memory, working memory, attention, response inhibition and emotion discrimination. Structural neuroimaging studies provide evidence for deficits in brain volume, gray and white matter of several regions, most prominently the dorsolateral and ventromedial prefrontal cortex but also hippocampus, amygdala, and corpus callosum (CC)."

    • Homecoming - Helping the Reunited Child "They are also, both showing, the emergence of repressed guilt and shame and are struggling with this in terms of their ability to properly and fully settle into home life. Guilt and shame are two normal and healthy emotional responses and in ordinary circumstances, one would welcome the expression of both as a regulatory force which socialises a child. In formerly alienated children however, guilt and shame are two expressions of feeling which have long been repressed as part of the alienation process, because in order to reject a parent who is loved, a child must first adopt the psychological defence of burying all good feelings for that parent and projecting only negative beliefs and feelings upon them. This action, which is a defence and a coping mechanism which allows the child to safely survive in the world of the alienating parent, causes shame and guilt but instead of these being a regulatory force, preventing the child from complete rejection, they become unwanted feelings which must be denied, split off and repressed along with all good feelings for the now hated parent. The child enters a psychological space at this juncture, in which he is unable to locate any of those feelings, allowing him to fully and completely, join the delusional belief of the alienating parent that his rejection is justified. When the child has entered this place, anything goes in terms of allegations, projections, delusional beliefs and more, because the normal regulatory feelings are completely removed from consciousness. Instead of these healthy responses, a self righteous anger appears which can make a child appear to be completely without guilt. Sadly, though the outward appearance is such, the repression of those normal feelings does not actually wash them away but instead swallows up a whole lot of emotional and psychological energy in keeping them out of the conscious mind. Children in this condition actually look frozen in their faces and unable to do anything other than react in an almost feral knee jerk response to intervention. The effort of keeping those regulatory feelings repressed is one which takes immense amounts of energy, leaving some children lethargic, exhausted and disinterested in the world around them. This is the presentation of buried grief which accompanies many alienated children."

    • Hurting the Heart of a Child: Parental alienation is Child Abuse, by Karen Woodall: "This week I heard the hurt of a child who has been harmed by the psychological splitting that comes with parental alienation. It was a visceral experience which took me straight to the core of the problem caused for children by parents and other adults who cause a child to reject a loved parent. Overwhelming guilt and shame and the utter bewilderment that comes when a child blames themselves first. Because being in a position of utter vulnerability in relationship to adults, it is all too easy for a child to assume that if something is wrong, they must have caused it. My confrontation with the harm that parental alienation causes to a child, made me realise that, parental alienation causes similar damage to that which is caused when a child is sexually abused. It is a primal wound against the child’s sense of sovereignty over their own selves and soul. A child who has been alienated against a parent, feels guilt and shame for having been made to take part in acts of hatred against a loved parent, so much so that the feelings impact in a physical as well as emotional, mental and psychological way. The distortion of the child’s experience, in which they are aware that what they are doing is hurting the other parent but in which they are pushed to bury those normalising feelings of guilt and shame for having done so, by the parent causing the splitting reaction, causes deep wounds which take time to recover from. Trusting others after being alienated is something that many children appear to be unable to achieve."

  • Complex Trauma

    • Father Loss and Child Telomere Length Here is a magazine article that makes it less technical: Losing a Dad Changes the Biology of Children "Father loss during childhood has negative health and behavioral consequences, but the biological consequences are unknown. Our goal was to examine how father loss (because of separation and/or divorce, death, or incarceration) is associated with cellular function as estimated by telomere length."

    • next

J. Michael Bone:

Lita Ford:

Dr. Craig Childress:

Ryan Thomas:

    • Ryan speaks with his dad (cross country ski course)

Linda Turner:

Other:

    • Children Held Hostage In Children Held Hostage, Stanley Clawar and Brynne Rivlin use important new research involving over 1,000 families to demonstrate that children can and are being used by parents in the divorce battle. Their research shows how negative actions by parents toward their children show up in court proceedings where children testify or are questioned by mental health professionals. The major issue in confronting this problem of programmed and brainwashed children has been identification of a child alienated by one parent against the other; proving it in court; and then finding a solution that not only works, but that a court will buy into. The updated edition of Children Held Hostage explains these issues in detail, with practice-focused explanations on every step in the process. The authors offer further insights into gender issues and differences. Other new material includes a social-psychological profile of programmers and brainwashers; identification of the most commonly asked questions by judges, target parents, lawyers and children; an expanded social explanation to the causes, impact, and interventions; development of an abductor profile; charts to visualize key findings and processes; and much more.

"Bent science starts with a pre-determined outcome and works backward from a desired result. It is not true science. Those orchestrating the deception (“benders”) use a variety of tactics and strategies to shape, package and spin science to support their own hidden agenda and suppress opposing science.

Benders attempt to hide, dismiss and debunk contrarian research and unsupportive science. Benders will attack and harass the science and scientists that pose a threat to their interests. Using carefully crafted studies designed to confirm a desired outcome, the pre-determined conclusions are subsequently promoted and publicized to the relevant stakeholders who are often unable ( or sometimes unwilling) to discern real science from junk-science.

Misinformation, propaganda, and deception are disseminated in a variety of venues. Public relations firms are used to manipulate public perception and freelance writers are hired brandish favorable consensus statements. Authoritative reviews and critiques are ghostwritten under the names of “outside experts” who profit both monetarily and by adding a high-profile publication to their resume."

    • "A Kidnapped Mind: A Mother's Heartbreaking Story of Parental Alienation Syndrome"

    • This psychiatrist gets it right: "False accusations of hostility, divisiveness and hatred occur not infrequently in marriages with high levels of conflict and with impending separation or divorce. When of an extremely severe nature, such anger can lead to demonizing a spouse in an effort to undermine the trust of the children in that spouse and to obtain their loyalty instead. This pathological behavior is referred to as parental alienation and is clearly psychologically damaging to Catholic youth, spouses and families. Spouses who make false accusations against a husband or wife frequently have serious lifelong psychological conflicts often with excessive anger, a compulsive need to control and intense selfishness with an inflated sense of self. The goal of the accusations is primarily to control the spouse and children, as well as to gain custody of the children through divorce litigation. The origins of these actions are often from unconsciously modeling their presence in a parent or from giving into the pull of selfishness in the culture."

    • Some opinions on Bobby Kennedy and Mary Richard Kennedy. Evidently, parental alienation was involved.

    • next

Narcissistic Abuse:

    • Narcissistic Abuse – Why Does It Take So Long to Heal? "Psychological trauma is the damage to the psyche that occurs as a result of a severely distressing event like emotional and psychological abuse. One of the debilitating aspects of this abuse that is so damaging to targets/victims is the trauma or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from being in this relationship! DEFINITION: Trauma means “injured” AND the result of an overwhelming amount of stress that exceeds a person’s ability to cope or integrate the emotions involved with that experience. A traumatic event involves one experience, or repeating events with the sense of being overwhelmed that can be delayed by weeks, years, or even decades as the person struggles to cope with the immediate circumstances. Eventually this can lead to serious, long-term negative consequences that can even be overlooked by mental health professionals especially if psychological abuse is at the root of problem but not actualized as trauma inducing. This is very important for targets/victims of this abuse because if the clinician fails to look through a trauma diagnosis to isolate the problems as they relate to current or past trauma, they may fail to see that trauma victims, young and old, organize much of their lives around repetitive patterns of reliving and warding off traumatic memories, reminders, and affects" .....

    • Trauma Bonding

Gaslighting:

Songs Applicable to Parental Alienation:

Dr. Edward Kruk:

    • Parental Alienation and the Bystander Effect Denial of and indifference to this form of abuse of children is reminiscent of society’s denial in the early twentieth century of the prevalence of physical and sexual abuse of children (Warshak, 2015). Parental alienation is also a form of psychological domestic violence, as the suffering of targeted parents is deep and unending, and represents a complex trauma of profound magnitude (Kruk, 2011). In the words of Dietrich Boenhoffer, "Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act." Each of us has great potential power to act to help those in need, and to influence others to act. Above all else, in regard to parental alienation as a largely unrecognized form of child abuse and domestic violence, the message to professionals and non-professional lay people alike should be, “Don't be a bystander.” It takes moral courage to act, and in the case of parental alienation, action is urgently needed.

  • Professional Misunderstanding of Parental Alienation Mistaking alienation for estrangement Posted "They maintain that the concept of parental alienation is little more than a legal strategy used by abusive parents to deflect blame for their children’s fear and hatred of them, and argue that children who reject parents always have valid reasons, and that all "hated parents" are themselves responsible for their fate. As Richard Warshak and others have demonstrated, however, this is an erroneous argument which reinforces the "bystander effect" prevalent among legal and mental health professionals in regard to victims of alienation, discussed in my last posting. This indifference toward the profound suffering of alienated children and parents has devastating consequences." "How is it, Gottlieb asks, that experienced mental health professionals are so mistaken in these cases that they are no better at assessing parental alienation than a layperson? First and foremost, professionals who are assigned to conduct child custody evaluations or to represent a child in court lack training and expertise in the field of alienation."

Enmeshment:

    • Are you an enmeshed parent? “Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They came through you but not from you and though they are with you yet they belong not to you.” ~ Kahlil Gibran. "Enmeshed parenting describes a style of parenting that can cause problems in your child’s successful development of their own personality, ethics, and values." Enmeshement may superficially look like a good parent/child relationship but it is decidedly unhealthy.

    • Tips on Setting Boundaries in Enmeshed Relationships "Healthy emotional and physical boundaries are the basis of healthy relationships. Enmeshed relationships, however, are bereft of these boundaries"

    • J Michael Bone on Enmeshment "I have read many a misguided & ill informed custody evaluation where the seriously enmeshed relationship between the alienated child & the alienating parent is described as being “very close” implying that this kind of closeness is healthy. In actuality, this kind of enmeshed “closeness” is far from healthy & is actually stunting and crippling, anything but healthy."

    • Respect Your Child's Boundaries During Divorce According to this article, "topics that breach normal parent-child boundaries and are not appropriate to discuss with children include:

      • One parent’s lack of financial contribution

      • One parent’s hurtful behavior toward the other

      • Infidelity

      • Sex

      • Resentment toward a co-parent

      • Anger toward a co-parent

      • Anxiety about the future

      • A co-parent being “wrong” about how to parent

      • The early history of the marriage and when things started to go wrong

        • A litany of every detailed event that transpired in the parents’ attempt to save the marriage (for example, saying you went to counseling is fine, but not the focus of each session, the thoughts of the counselor, the false starts at reconciliation, and so forth)."

    • Youtube video on pathological enmeshment

Countries with Laws:

    • Mexico "Family violence commits the member of the family who transformed the consciousness of a child in order to prevent, hinder or destroy their links with one parent. The conduct described in the previous paragraph, is called parental alienation when performed by a parent, who, credited such conduct, will be suspended in the exercise of parental rights of the child and, consequently, the visitation and coexistence that, where appropriate, be decreed. Also, in case the alienating parent has the custody of the child, this will go immediately to the other parent, if it is a case of mild or moderate alienation."

    • Brazil

    • Romania

Estrangement:

    • Adults who do not speak to a parent "There is an additional danger to cutting off all contact with a parent: How will people who do this feel after their parent dies? The importance of having made some peace with a parent before he or she dies is difficult to overstate."

Steve Herman:

Dr. Sue Whitcombe:

  • Opinion piece for the British Psychological Society

    • Sue Whitcombe - Powerless: the lived experience of alienated parents in the UK "Thirty six participants [out of 54] reported that they had been subject to false allegations of domestic violence against their ex-partner and 44 [out of 54] reported false allegations of physical, sexual, emotional abuse or neglect against their child. In private family law proceedings in England and Wales, a child’s welfare is paramount. Allegations of abuse or neglect usually result in the immediate cessation of direct contact while fact finding, safeguarding and assessments are undertaken. Unable to see their child, parents experience a presumption of guilt and a need to prove their innocence."

Australia:

Italy:

England:

Mexico:

Brazil:

South Africa:

Malta:

asfd

Shared Parenting:

    • Why Young Kids Should Spend Equal Time with Divorced Parents the study, "Should Infants and Toddlers Have Frequent Overnight Parenting Time With Fathers? The Policy Debate and New Data," was published today, Feb. 2, 2017, in the American Psychological Association journal Psychology, Public Policy and Law. "Not only did overnight parenting time with fathers during infancy and toddlerhood cause no harm to the mother-child relationship, it actually appeared to benefit children's relationships with both their mothers and their fathers," said William Fabricius, ASU associate professor of psychology and lead author of the study. "Children who had overnights with their fathers when they were infants or toddlers had higher-quality relationships with their fathers as well as with their mothers when they were 18 to 20 years old than children who had no overnights."

School Information:

    • Cindy Corsi Interview on Television: Erie News Now: Cindy Corsi is a school counselor

    • Letter to a School explaining parental alienation, written by Dr. Childress

    • A School Counselor's Guide to Reporting Child Abuse and Neglect This document discusses the CAPTA definition of emotional abuse as: rejecting, isolating, terrorizing, ignoring, and corrupting a child. To summarize a paper by Amy Baker, parental alienation fits this definition as follows:

    • Spurning (In parental alienation, parent withdraws love from child to punish when connecting to other parent)

    • Terrorizing (In PA, inducing fear of other parent)

    • Isolating (In PA, child is cut off from other parent)

    • Corrupting/Exploiting (In PA, child engages in behaviors that are cruel, disrespectful, and immoral)

      • Denying Emotional Responsiveness (In PA, child is punished for connecting to other parent)

Feminism and Parental Alienation:

The Bridge 4 Us: