I have been reading about children brought up in the care system and the way in which their whole lives were damaged by the way that the ‘system’ allowed them to be routinely abused.  Those children are now adults and they are seeking to be compensated for the way in which the care system failed them. And why wouldn’t they seek that compensation, their lives have been blighted by the anxiety, pain and suffering that comes from being vulnerable in a system in which the adults responsible for the care being given were dehumanized themselves.

It got me thinking about the UK’s approach to dealing with children who are unable to cope with parental separation and the way in which the lack of knowledge about the needs of those children create a system in which their needs are often overlooked, misunderstood and processed along a conveyor belt of tick boxes…

This week finds me focused on the experience of growing up in an alienating environment and the ways in which children are prepared for the kind of mind bending and brain washing behaviours which are seen in alienation.  Keeping in mind that parental alienation is the result of three things – a) the alienating strategies of one parent b) the responses of the other and c) the resilience or vulnerability of the child, thinking about the ways in which resilience in children is undermined and how vulnerability is often created in the child almost before birth, it is easy to see that in some of these families, the very conditions that lead to children being alienated from one parent are simply part of their lives and normalised. In short, they don’t know any different and, it would seem, neither do their alienating parents. This is the generational procession of emotional…

I work with social workers a lot.  I also work with CAFCASS (GAL’s for our stateside readers) and I teach and train psychotherapists, psychologists and others in the psychological helping therapies about how to work with alienated children and their families.   Most of the people I work with are aware of parental alienation and are aware that the behaviours they are seeing in the families they are working with are unusual and most know that there is something deeply wrong in the dynamic.  What they don’t know is what to do about it, how to formulate their views and how to plan and deliver an intervention which assists the child.   As part of our training to Local Authority teams and CAFCASS in the UK and to professionals developing their practice in Europe, we deliver a three day training which focuses upon the what, why and how of parental…

Helping children and young people to heal from alienation is not a difficult task when one understands the process they need to go through in order to do that.  For there is a clear and easily followed path to assisting children and young people in these circumstances. I know that because I have walked that path with eleven children so far this year and all are on the road to healing well. Last year I walked it with almost forty children and all of them are healing well, most well enough for me to not need to work with them any longer.  Over my working life in this field I have walked with and helped many children, young people and adults heal from the impact of parental alienation.  It is not a difficult task, especially if one has a healthy rejected parent to work alongside because this parent is the…