ManMaid
ManMaid
(24) Parental Alienation from the Specialists’ Perspective
Caring for Men and Boys. This episode is based on a YouTube video, the link to which is in the notes; it features interviews with parental alienation specialists who attended the Parental Alienation Study Group Conference in Philadelphia, USA in September 2019.
The specialists interviewed in alphabetical order are
Amy Baker
William Bernet
Linda Gottlieb
Jennifer Harman
Steve Miller
Karen Woodall
Nick Woodall
Shawn Wygant
And Good Guy of the week is Andrew Taylor from New Zealand who did a lovely thing for dog owners and their pups!
Parental Alienation from the Specialists’ Perspective.
Caring for Men and Boys. This episode is based on a YouTube video, the link to which is in the notes; it features interviews with parental alienation specialists who attended the Parental Alienation Study Group Conference in Philadelphia, USA in September 2019.
The specialists interviewed in alphabetical order are
Amy Baker
William Bernet
Linda Gottlieb
Jennifer Harman
Steve Miller
Karen Woodall
Nick Woodall
Shawn Wygant
Linda Gottlieb defines parental alienation as ‘the rejecting of a parent for a non-protective reason; the child would be perfectly protected and safe with the rejected parent, the rejection is therefore unreasonable and due to the alienating influence of the other parent’.
To give you an idea of the size of this problem I share Jennifer Harman’s research findings that in the US, 22 million adults are the victim of alienating parental behaviours and of those 22 million, none are reciprocating with alienating behaviours themselves.
Harman goes on to tell us that if abuse by the rejected parent is ruled out, we have to recognise that the child is being abused by other parent; being abused by the alienating parent not recognising their child’s right to a relationship with their other parent and not supporting that. Harman tells us that in these situations the child is weaponised; she calls it domestic violence because the intent of the alienating parent is to harm the alienated parent; the alienating parent will probably exhibit many other forms of harmful and abusive behaviours, just to hurt the other parent; she goes on to say, paradoxically, and in my experience a factor that can get misinterpreted by the Family Court, the weaponised child, as with any abused child, will fiercely defend their abusive parent, ‘tooth and nail’ according to Harman.
Karen Woodall sees a red flag when a child who is not being abused says vehemently ‘I’m not going to see my parent’.
And Nick Woodall says that, a child whose parent signals that it is not acceptable to have a relationship with the other parent will acquiesce to that; their greatest fear being that the favoured or alienating parent will become emotionally unavailable to them.
Linda Gottlieb is concerned about parents being falsely accused of sex abuse; “that it is terrible, terrible”, she says “if the child believes the false story that they have been sexually abused and terrible that they share the same risk potential for PTSD as if it had actually happened. It’s criminal behaviour, absolutely criminal behaviour” she says. “The alienator is assaulting the child’s memory, their thinking, their feelings as well as their relationship with a parent. Assault is a crime”.
A common question that Harman is asked by mental health professionals and lawyers is, ‘how do I know if it’s alienation or abuse?
Amy Baker says, if you follow a model, there’s no way an abused child can be mistaken for an alienated child. As long as accurate ways of determining whether a parent has been abusive are used.
Steven Miller tells us that one indicator is, when a child is strongly rejecting of one parent and strongly aligned with the other parent, probably that’s an alienated child, not an estranged one.
Alienating parents use a lot of the same loyalty strategies that people trying to groom children for sexual abuse use. There’s a lot of research that shows how profoundly dysfunctional and destabilising an alienating parent is to a child’s wellbeing. A normal parent will not try to undermine the relationship between their child and the other parent and appreciates that their child has a need for the other parent. An alienating parent lacks empathy for the child.
In her 2018 paper, the link to which is included in the notes, Amy Baker identifies four criteria for identifying parental alienation;
1. a prior positive relationship between the child and the now rejected parent
2. the absence of maltreatment by the rejected parent
3. the use of alienating behaviours by the favoured parent and
4. the presence of behavioural manifestations in the child that are associated with alienation.
I’m going to identify and explore these behavioural manifestations in more depth in the next episode.
Karen Woodall likens parental alienation with ‘murdering a parent who is still alive; not wanting that parent in their consciousness’; she worries greatly that in doing this, the child has murdered a part of themselves, and are forced to live with that and often, it’s only in young adult hood that the graver consequences of this become apparent.
Miller advocates the use of evidence-based science to work with these cases; and identifies the need to distinguish between science and a belief system, between science and speculation and between science and ideology (I wonder if the ideology he is referring to is radical feminism).
Harman says she doesn’t work with possibilities but with what is probable; and that when making decisions about children it’s necessary to go with what the evidence says and that the evidence suggests abused, children don’t often vehemently reject the abusive parent, rather they fight to maintain the bond.
Baker asks ‘why should we care if a child is alienated or just estranged? And answers her own question, ‘because’ she says, ‘the treatment is different’.
Miller tells us that there is a concept in statistics and probability, that turns out to be extremely relevant to these clinical cases. That concept is a’ base rate’; ignoring the base rate is ‘base rate neglect’. According to Kahneman & Tversky in a 1973 paper, base-rate neglect refers to the phenomenon whereby people ignore or undervalue the probability in an individual case, typically in favour of less informative, but more intuitively appealing information.
Miller says, practitioners using intuition tend to have great confidence in incorrect conclusions and that ‘if a practitioner doesn’t have what he calls, ‘special level pattern recognition’, they are liable to make a lot of mistakes and miss important patterns’.
He goes on to identify quite complex skills that are required in these circumstances, specialist skills that are not commonly taught and not common amongst the people who deal with these cases. These include some advanced medical concepts such as reasoning backwards, the skill of being able to work backwards from the effect in order to arrive at the cause; and ‘conditional probability’ is another important concept; the likelihood of an event or outcome occurring, based on the occurrence of a previous event or outcome.
Harman believes that those who are unskilled in the field may wrongly assume that both parents must be contributing to the problem, that the parents are reacting badly to each other, a six of one and half a dozen of the other approach; but the alienated parent has almost no control over what’s happening in their lives, or in the lives of their child, while the alienating parent really controls everything; they control access and communication, there is no equivalency here.
Miller describes alienating parents as tending to be master manipulators, accomplished liars, brilliant at impression management and the aggressor who is winning; the alienated parent is a trauma victim. The wilting Vs blossoming of the child under the care of the favoured parent is profoundly frustrating and extremely painful for the targeted parent to go through. In my own experience as a practitioner, I have experienced more than once, the alienated parent being blamed for the wilting; yet another trauma to add to their pile.
Shawn Wygant describes typical alienating parents as narcissistically vulnerable; as feeling very threatened when part of their identity is diminished within the dissolution of their marriage or intimate relationship; they tend to externalise blame, project it outwards toward the alienated parent and their child gets stuck in the middle.
Miller tells us that alienating parents are usually suffering from Borderline Personality Disorder, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, or some type of Sociopathic Disorder.
Karen Woodall maintains that the rejection of a parent is a very serious and unnatural thing for a child to do. She says, ‘we are born helpless and attach to our primary carer so that we are not abandoned; because being abandoned is our biggest fear, what happens in these circumstances is, a child feels forced to go against their natural way of being, and to reject their other parent; then they have to live with that and suffer the consequences, consequences that can cut deep and be very long lasting. The impact on the child is often not seen in the here and now but as I said earlier, becomes apparent much further down the line.
This episode has been very sad, so I want to end on a hopeful note; recovery and repair is possible. For example, Linda Gottlieb regularly offers a 4 day, intensive reunification programme which she calls ‘a therapeutic vacation’; it involves facilitation between the parties and activities that the child likes. Linda tells us that when the alienating parent can show genuine support for the relationship between the child and their other parent, there can be a rapid and positive shift in how the child behaves; they can accept the rejected parent in a flash.
Good guy of the week
While dogs may be man’s best friend, stick fetching may be a dog’s best friend.
When Andrew Taylor from Kaiapoi, New Zealand, noticed that there was a lack of good sticks for throwing at his local park, he decided to take matters into his own hands. He began chopping off excess branches from some trees in his yard and decided to create a “stick library” for all the local pups.
After chopping up the branches into several dozen conveniently-sized pieces, he put them into a hand-crafted box emblazoned with the words ‘stick library: please return’ and took it to the park.
Andrew and his daughter hosted a small neighbourhood inauguration party for the Stick Library where more than 50 dogs and their owners enjoyed a game of fetch with the sticks.
As people started to arrive, there was disbelief about how simple the idea was but Andrew’s daughter, Tayla Reece, said it was an idea that no one else had thought of. She said “all the dog owners appreciate it; they have all experienced stick searches that aren’t always fruitful and the idea just made really good sense to them. Dogs and their owners alike had so much fun. Well, what a terrific idea Andrew Taylor.