What’s Happening Inside Your Child’s Mind? | Parental Alienation Explained

Lawrence Joss discusses the complexities of child development and attachment with Melanie Gill, an attachment specialist. They explore how parental influence shapes a child's brain development, the impact of disrupted attachment, and the long-term effects of cognitive dissonance and deception on children. The discussion emphasizes the importance of understanding these dynamics to foster compassion and healing within families.

Key Takeaways

• Understanding child development is crucial for parents.
• Attachment relationships are fundamental to brain growth.
• Disrupted attachment can lead to lifelong patterns.
• Children adapt to survive in dysfunctional environments.
• Cognitive dissonance creates confusion in children.
• Lying has neurological costs for children.
• Emotional regulation can be reversed in unhealthy dynamics.
• Compassion is key to healing transgenerational trauma.
• Community support is essential for healing.
• Education and understanding can lead to better parenting.

Chapters

0:00 - Opening: Why Kids Suddenly Change
 2:31 - Community Welcome And Mission
 3:17 - Framing The Science Of Attachment
 4:16 - Healthy Vs Disrupted Attachment
 6:00 - Survival Adaptations Become Patterns
 8:29 - Cognitive Dissonance In Alienation
 10:40 - The Neurological Cost Of Lying
 12:23 - Reversed Emotional Regulation
 14:05 - Compassion, Tools, And Next Steps

If you wish to connect with Lawrence Joss or any of the PA-A community members who have appeared as guests on the podcast:

Email - familydisappeared@gmail.com
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/lawrencejoss
(All links mentioned in the podcast are available in Linktree)

Please donate to support PAA programs:
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This podcast is made possible by the Family Disappeared Team:
Anna Johnson- Editor/Contributor/Activist/Co-host
Glaze Gonzales- Podcast Manager

Connect with Lawrence Joss:
Website: https://parentalalienationanonymous.com/
Email-         familydisappeared@gmail.com

Transcript

Opening: Why Kids Suddenly Change

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Do you look at your kids sometimes or your parents and you're just amazed? You're like, what's going on? What's changing? There's this abrupt thing happening, and I just can't track it. I don't get it, and I feel lost and confused. Well, I do. I've had that over and over and over again. And the more I learn, the more I start to do interpersonal work, the more that I can understand. And today we're going to be looking at some of our discussion with Melanie Gill, an attachment specialist and a forensic expert, that is going to help us take a look at what's really happening inside the child's brain developmentally, what's going on, what are the causes. And we're also going to relate it to more if you're looking upwards in the other direction, to parents and grandparents who will address some of that too in parts of my conversation. And this isn't theory. We're going to be looking at neurological development, like what's really happening in the brain. This isn't just stuff that's just made up. We're actually going to look at tangible, real scientific evidence. And I know as a parent, like watching this different things happen to my kids and these abrupt changes, it's like, is this irreversible? Will this ever change? Like, what do I do? Danger, danger, stranger, you know, stranger danger, whatever the saying is. So we're going to talk about that too. Like, is this permanent? Is there something that can be done? And again, this isn't about alarm. This isn't about feeling scared. This is about educating and understanding the neurological experience. And the more that I understand, the more compassion that I can have for my children and my grandchildren and other people in my life because I can understand what the arc is. And even for my ex-wife, like I can understand the arc that she went through. She was an alienated child. So I can see developmentally what happened to her too, and how this is, again, a transgenerational trauma that's shown up in my family too. So there's compassion and spaces for healing that I never thought would be accessible, but they are accessible as long as I'm open to it. And then I can take the information, I can apply it on a systemic level. I talk about systemic a lot because I know when I got here, I was so traumatized I was the only person in the world. Everything was about me, me, me, I, I, how do I get my kids back? But it's really a systemic issue. And when I really understood, even on just on the family system level, the two, three, four, six people in the family, I finally got to get some relief. So I hope this will be a wonderful and informative show for you today. If you're new to the community, welcome. My name is Lawrence Joss. This is Family Disappeared. We have a wonderful community. Parental Alienation Anonymous is a free 12-step program. The links are in the show notes. Please like and share. We're trying to reach as many people as possible and help as many people as possible. And we want to hear what you have to say. Good, bad, or indifferent. You know, and good is good. Like we like to hear good, that keeps us going too. Get community. Have community. You're not going to do this alone. Talk about these things we're talking about with other people. You might agree, you might disagree. It doesn't matter. But get other people that are rowing in the same direction that are also doing some interpersonal work, that are working on themselves and not just coming from a place of a traumatic or trauma or secondary trauma response. It's really, really important to have people around you that are working to find their feet too. And just to reiterate, like parental alienation doesn't just affect families, it affects how a child's brain works. And with that, let's see what we got here today. So, number one that I'm going to start with over here is disrupted attachment. So attachment is how we connect to our parents. And in this case, we're talking about at birth. Generally, the child connects to the parent, the parent is taking care of the child. So the limbic attumment's coming from the parent to the child, super healthy. And then there's another case where the parents may be super anxious or scared, or there's other stuff going on in their life. So maybe they don't have a lot of skills and resources. So then the child starts to regulate the parent's nervous system. So the limpic attunement's going in the wrong way. Like the child's the one that's supposed to be getting the attention and the attunement. So the child's brain from birth is developing. It's looking for safety cues, it's looking for emotional presence, it's looking for regulation, and it's looking for attunement. And attunement is when the other person that they're trying to connect with is present. You know what I mean? Eye contact, touch of the skin, heartbeat, maybe beating in the same kind of rhythm, or if someone's off on the telephone or doing something else and tending to the baby a little bit and stuff like that, that would not be connection. That would be the opposite of connection. So Melanie is going to describe now how healthy attachment affects the child's brain and what that looks like. So let's listen to what she has to say.

SPEAKER_01 4:41

Attachment is absolutely fundamental to how everybody develops, how their brain develops. And it's through your attachment relationships from you know the minute you're born that your brain starts growing, and your your brain doesn't develop properly without being in conjunction with somebody else's brain. And that's you know, your your parents' brain. And if your brain doesn't get that, then your your brain is harmed. Your brain is very severely harmed.

Survival Adaptations Become Patterns

SPEAKER_00 5:10

So basically, when I'm connecting with my mom and I come out of her womb, if she's present and emotionally available, my brain starts to grow at a regular pace with her. But if she is emotionally disturbed or not regulated, then there's a severe effect on my brain and how I start to develop as a child. So just to reiterate what Melanie is saying, I pop out of the womb and my mom's there and she's attuned to me and she's present and she's taking care of me, my brain starts to grow at a regular pace, and I start to form a healthy attachment. If she's not there and not really present and not really available, and there's different danger signals, my brain doesn't develop the same way and it develops slower. So there's a severe effect on how my brain starts to grow and develop. It doesn't get smaller or bigger, it just develops slower. That's not actually the brain size. So the second point we're going to talk about is how survival adaptions become patterns. So initially, something happens with the child, they're not getting this attunement and presence and safety. So their brain starts to adapt and change and they start to figure out different strategies for survival so they don't die. So Melanie in the next clip talks about how these strategies can protect the child in the moment. Like they're really, really useful in the moment. They're life-saving. But in the long run, they start to form some dysfunctional patterns and coping strategies that will follow them their whole lives into adulthood. And this is coming out of the family system, like the original family system. And this follows the kids all over the place. Just like when I was born, I picked up stuff that I didn't get necessarily from our parents, and I took that into my life and into my next relationship.

SPEAKER_01 6:52

So the brain will adapt to it because it doesn't have any choice. Say, with a constantly angry parent, what a baby learns very, very, very early on is that it's best not to cry because crying will probably make that parent angrier. And so you get these very, very quiet babies, very quiet babies who don't protest because if they do protest, that's really dangerous. In one of the webinars I have, there's a piece of film that I show. You see this little girl trying her best. She's only two, she's trying her best to cheer her mother up, to get her mother to think positively.

Cognitive Dissonance In Alienation

SPEAKER_00 7:37

So the third point is living inside cognitive dissidence. And cognitive dissidence is just two conflicting ideas that just don't make any sense, and you don't really know how to live with them. But this is a really intricate part about parental alienation. As you know, children are caught in this paradox where there's two parents and they might have two different realities. So they're bouncing back and forth between these two different realities, and they're getting told what is and what isn't, and their brains are trying to figure out which is true and which isn't true. And it's not on that level. Like they're not thinking about it super cognitively like we're discussing it, but they're just running this through the system, and then they actually got to default to one, to one reality in order to survive. And that's a cognitive dissonance where they can't, they can't, they can't, they can't. You know what I mean? Like they got to go, oh, the fire is too hot. I need to go left or I need to go right. So unfortunately, one version of reality gets erased. So Melanie's gonna discuss what this looks like on a long-term basis as this is repeating over and over and over in a kid's brain.

SPEAKER_01 8:37

In these cases, what you see is this thing called cognitive dissonance. It means that basically the brain is faced with these two choices which are the opposite of each other. So what the brain will do is will get rid of one and you're left with with just one thing, and that that means the brain can settle. Now, people usually do that, you know, now and again. So that capacity is there to use now and again. In children in these situations, they're doing it over and over and over again, and that is damaging the brain, essentially. It's damaging the brain over and over every day, minute by minute.

SPEAKER_00 9:15

This is kind of like a scary one, the fourth talking point. The neurological cost of lying. The neurological cost of lying, just saying it all, like, whoa, some good stuff. I'm pretty sure everyone can relate to this that sometimes some of the stuff that comes out of your kids' grandkids, and this can even be parents or grandparents, Mel is just wonky. You know what I mean? It sounds like a lie, it's deceptive, you're like not sure what's going on. But the reality is in living in these systems, like different members and specifically the kids, the people whose brains aren't fully formed, like they have to start to be deceptive. They have to start to lie to whatever group degree that they are in order to survive, and also for the narrative to line up with what they're living. Because if they're not saying something that's in line with what they're living, then there's again a cognitive dissonance, like they can't even get through the day. And then the anxiety becomes out of hand, and we do see that in a lot of cases as well. So, this idea of lying, coercion, whatever word you want to use, it affects the brain. It has an irrelevant and lasting effect on the brain. So, in this next little bit, like Melanie will discuss why this is so destabilizing to the people that are having to lie or be deceptive, like neurologically, why this is so.

The Neurological Cost Of Lying

SPEAKER_01 10:36

Not only are you lying to your children, you are also expecting that your child will become involved in your lies, will validate your lies, will believe your lies, and then will also lie. And that level of complexity will damage children's brains. Lying damages your brain. The more you lie, the more you're going to lie because your brain gets used to it. Now, the trouble with children is that that bit of the brain is switched off in attachment relationships because why on earth would your parents lie to you? The brain is in absolute turmoil and is damaged as a result of it.

Reversed Emotional Regulation

Compassion, Tools, And Next Steps

SPEAKER_00 11:18

Now, last talking point is when emotional regulation gets reversed. So we touched on this briefly in the beginning of the show when I was talking about limbic attunement, and I was using the the idea of the mom is generally energetically taking care of the child, and that's healthy, a healthy attachment. And sometimes the mom's dysregulated, not present, they can be substance, they can be trauma in their own lives. It could just, yeah, it could just be their coping mechanism because they're feeling overwhelmed as being a first-time parent. So then the child starts taking care of the parent. So again, this disrupts healthy development and puts an un a disproportionate amount of burden emotionally on the child. It's not sustainable. I can also identify like the control mechanisms, right? The control mechanisms of my ex needing the the kids to to help regulate her nervous system. And I also want to qualify by saying this like we all have trauma in our lives, and my ex had trauma in her life too. And I'm just identifying this attachment disorder that was going on that I didn't even have the word attachment disorder. I just want to reiterate what we're talking about here is not my opinion, is not Melanie's opinion. This is based on science and the neurological growth and development of people, kids in particular. And this is not placing blame and pointing fingers and saying someone's good or someone's bad. Like these are just things that we have in our family systems. And unfortunately, in a lot of our circumstances, they blow up in disproportionate amounts in different kinds of direction, and it's devastating. But this is about learning new tools, understanding what's happening in the system, being able to see what's happening in our child or another loved one, and being able to identify it. And for me, just being able to identify that gives me a peace of mind that I couldn't find because I was so confused. I was like looking in a mirror and expecting to see my face, and you know, I was seeing a puppy. You know, it's like it's discomblobulating. But this has really helped me understand what's happening. It doesn't necessarily make it easier all the time, but it doesn't make me feel crazy as often. So if you'd like to hear the full conversation with Melanie, we're going to put the link in the show note for the full interview. Thank you for coming out to play today. Great resource in the show notes, free 12-step program. We are a 501c3 nonprofit. Please donate and donate often monthly. And what you can. And if you have resources, please donate a bunch. If you don't, donate a little. And if you don't have those kind of resources, donate another resource, like volunteering. And you can always get hold of me at family disappeared at gmail.com. Please like, comment, share, jump up and down, hold signs, do whatever feels appropriate. And thanks for coming out to play today. Please share this with anyone you think it might be useful to. And in case no one's told you yet today, I love you. I hope you have a beautiful day, and I hope to see you around the neighborhood somewhere.