Psychiatry & Psychotherapy Podcast - What is Parental Alienation?

Episode Date: September 30, 2022

In this episode of the podcast, we interview Alyse Price-Tobler, who is a practicing clinical psychotherapist (MCAP) and also in her final year of her PhD., and Dr. Mandy Matthewson on the topic of parental alienation.   Note: This will be discussed as a form of family violence and child abuse. As such, the content of this presentation will involve discussion of child abuse and its consequences. Please speak to someone if you become distressed during or after this presentation.   By listening to this episode, you can earn 1.25 Psychiatry CME Credits. Link to blog. Link to YouTube video.

Hello and welcome to the Psychiatry and Psychotherapy Podcast. I'm here to talk about getting rid of burnout, increasing job satisfaction, and feeling like an expert in what you do. One thing that created a lot of burnout and angst for me was trying to get continued medical education right at the last minute. So why not join the CME membership and do CME while listening to this podcast. Go to Psychiatrypodcast.com, sign up, sign in, take the test, and the certification is emailed to you in seconds. Dr. Puter and his guests have no conflicts of interest to announce. And before we start the show, Dr. Peter wanted me to announce that this episode does contain some descriptions and accounts of abuse, which may be disturbing for some of you. So just know that

before going into this episode. Also, Dr. Peter wanted me to let you know that he was impacted by the recent Hurricane Ian in Florida and is currently without power. But his family is safe and secure. I was actually able to talk to him earlier today, and they're going to be just fine. But if you're trying to reach out to him about the podcast via email or social media, he may take some time to respond given the current circumstances. Okay. Now with that said, let's start the show. All right, welcome back to the podcast. I am joined with Mandy Mathewson. She is a doctor, a professor, a senior lecture of psychology. She is the lead researcher in the family and interpersonal relationships lab in the University of Tasmania.

She is a clinical psychologist in private practice and on the board of directors of parental alienation Australia and the parental alienation study group. Her primary area of research has been individuals and families exposed to parental alienating behaviors. and we're going to go through details of what that is, the historical context, the interventions, preventions. And also with her is Elise Price-Tobler, and she is in her final year of her PhD, and she's a practicing clinical psychotherapist in private practice. She works with adolescents and adult survivors of parental alienation,

and she has some lived experience with that herself. and so I think you had left a message when you were writing in to get some of the things on the website, people leave little comments and why they're interested. And I saw that you were interested in this topic. And I think that's how we sparked up this conversation of having this episode. And you guys work together, right? Mm-hmm. Yes.

Dr. Matthewsson's my supervisor, my PhD supervisor. Okay. Yeah, and it was funny because we jumped on this, and I remember you specifically from a webinar that I taught. I remember your face. And that was fun as well. So let's start with what is parental alienation? Dr. Matthewson, I'll call on you. You've got to make a call.

So parental alienation can be defined as the outcome of a process where one parent uses a variety of behaviors, known as parental alienating behaviors, to, damage the relationship between the child and the child's other parent. And I guess you can consider parental alienating behaviours to be a form of family violence and child abuse because certainly coercive control is at the centre of those behaviours. Okay. So basically when one parent uses different techniques to get the kid to have no relationship with the other parent. Yes. That's the internet. So how this might show up is there's a divorce going on, and one of the parents slowly poisons the kids to hate the other parent. Is that correct?

That's correct. And we do see it typically in the context of child custody disputes, but it can also happen in intact families, and you can see it as parental gatekeeping. And so if you track the history of a family, you might. see that it started before family breakdown. Okay. And so is the parent that's doing this doing it consciously or unconsciously? Like are they, you know, like are they purposefully doing it or do they know that they're doing it?

Well, it's thought that there are two broad categories of alienating parents. So one of the ones who do this naively, and once they're educated about alienating behaviors and the impact, they tend to do. change their behaviors. But then they're the ones who seem to do it as quite a deliberate attempt to really damage and hurt the other parent, and they do that via the children. Okay. So soon to be Dr. Price Tobler, give me some examples of how, what are parental alienating behaviors? Okay. So, well, they can also be intergenerational to. I just like to mention.

So a lot of the time, we have two types of parents. We have the parent who's targeted. We call them targeted parents. And we also have the parent who's called the alienating parent, who's practicing the alienating behaviors. So this can be intergenerational. So in my family's case, for instance, my parent, who's the alienating parent,

learned a lot of these tactics and techniques from their parents and grandparents. So a lot of it's intergenerational trauma as well. So there's a lot involved in here that mental health practitioners really need to take on board. And yeah, so some of the things. So in the journal of emotional abuse, for example, Karrig describes the psychological control and manipulation of a child. They say, rather than telling the child directly what to do or think,

as does the behaviourally, sorry, controlling parent or what we call the alienating parent, the psychologically controlling parent uses indirect hits 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. So 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 ensuring pre-occupied attachment with the parent interferes with the child's development of important ego functions such as self-organization, affect regulation, and emotional object constancy. So that's Kerry 2005, has given us that description. That's really good. So if I'm going to like try to paraphrase that, and this is the first time I've heard it. So you have a kid that maybe is more sensitive that notices. To emotionally regulate a parent, they have to adopt the narratives or the thought process or adopt like a narrative like the other parent is bad, for example.

And so to regulate one of the parents, the kid becomes almost like a, it moves out of the kid role, right? Because kids should be the ones that receive emotional needs. now the kid is the one giving the stabilization to the family unit to the alienating parent. And what that does is it stabilizes the parent at the cost of the kid. Yes. So I'm guessing for you and your story, you seem like a very empathic person. You may be read one of the parents and kind of understood what you needed to do when you were young to survive, right?

Yes, yes. In a chaotic system. Yes. So there's another really good part here. I'll just quickly read this out, which explains what we're talking about now. So if the allied parent has a heavy psychological investment in the child's symptomatic possibility

and rejection of the targeted parent, then the allied parent will steadfastly deny the coalition and continually place the child out. front. That's supposedly making an independent decision. So here we've got a role reversal relationship where the child is used to meet the parent's needs. But in a healthy child, a parent-child relationship, the child uses the parent to meet the child's emotional psychological needs. But in a role reversal parent-child relationship, the parent uses the child to meet the parents' emotional and psychological needs. That's pretty much what happens. So,

they can do that from the moment of birth sometimes a lot, actually. Yeah. Yeah. People who are listening may think to themselves, okay, this is something that I experienced. Prental alienation didn't have to happen. Like, you could definitely have real reversals without parental alienation. But I think it gets more complicated when, like what you said, like one of the parents are using the child now as a weapon against the other parents. and a regulatory object. And a regulatory object. So a weapon, a regulatory object.

And then that kid becomes, you know, like what happens to that kid? They become very enmeshed with that parent. And Mandy's, this is her expert area. So Dr. Matheson would be good to come in here. I think just as just as it was quickly summarized, what happens with what Elise was discussing is a process that we call adultification, so treating the child as so they are much older than their chronological age, and parentification, so using the child as a parent to meet their needs,

but also alongside of that can be a process of infantilisation. So when it suits the alienating parents' needs, they'll then treat that child as though they are much younger. And so the child just never really known. knows where they stand. The outcomes of children who are in that position, who are then also put in a position where they have no choice but to reject the other parent,

they then become very traumatized. And often they go on to experience very complex trauma presentations. It's a, yeah, it's an interesting type of trauma because it's not like the traditional life or death trauma. Or how do you, like, how do you, like, how do you differentiate this kind of interpersonal trauma, attachment trauma, from like some other life or death, sort of near-death experience trauma? Well, in some situation, there might be a life or death component to it

because there are sanctions to that child if they do express any desire to have a relationship with the other parent or any interest. And so these children are subjected to physical abuse as a consequence. they might also be experiencing serious neglect as well when we see parental alienation at the severe end. So there can be that life or death element to their trauma. But also there is some research that shows that coercive control that goes on with parental alienation, puts the child in a dissociative state, and then they can go on to have a variety of trauma presentations.

Right. Okay. that that's really helpful so imagine in your psychological world you love both mom and dad and now you're being forced to only love one of them then the emotion and desire for connection you have to dissociate from you do and so that's where that sort of dissociative experience comes in and also to make the needs of the alienating parent you have to dissociate from yourself Right. So you have to dissociate from your own emotions and desires because you are primarily meaning their desires and their emotions. So you're you're kind of like stuffing your own experience. Yeah. Yes. So the sense of self is very poor that just autonomy is not something

that's usually practiced in a household within the severe parental alienation or moderate to severe. There's not much of that going on because they don't like to hear the children's voices. The children need to have their voices. Yeah. I think this, it's Nancy McWilliams, and there's other people as well that have written about how like therapists often are taking a therapist role in their family, a peacemaker role, their empathy is used as a superpower to sort of meet the needs of the parents to regulate the family structure. So I imagine some people are listening to this and they're like, you know, I can kind of resonate with like how hard it is to get in touch with my own desires. And I'm really good at being a therapist. I'm really good at being a,

psychiatrist and helping other people, but it's harder to get in touch with my own desires, my own emotions. And so this might be connecting some dots if you're to some of my listeners who are thinking to themselves now, like, oh, like when, when was I able to have desire and as a kid. Yeah. And have it supported in a safe environment. Yes. Yeah.

Okay, so how comfortable, at least, do you feel with sharing a little bit about your story? Oh, very comfortable. I'm very used to talking about it. Yeah, absolutely. I'm more than happy to share. I think it would be helpful to kind of give some, to give the audience, like, an idea of someone who's gone through this and now is helping other people as well. Yeah. Well, the first thing I'll say about parental alienation is as children, it's a lot of the time within

society, like we're born completely helpless and we're very reliant on our parents. So we're wired to attach to our parents at birth and in order to prevent from being abandoned. And for children of PA and there's different levels. We've got mild, moderate and the severe level. And my experience is from the severe level of parental alienation. And I'll just, Mandy, do you want to just give a description of sort of what severe is in your world? Yeah, so severe parental alienation means the relationship between the child and the targeted parent has been complete. severed, that there is no contact and the child has aligned very heavily with the alienating

parent and have developed what we might call a trauma bond with that parent, a very close enmeshed relationship. And they are anywhere from wanting no contact with the other parent to absolutely hating the other parent or forming a belief that the other parent is dangerous in some way in the absence of any evidence or facts to support that belief. and if that child was asked to have contact with the targeted parent, they'll have a very intense, strong emotional reaction to that idea. And for a lot of us, we already have a relationship with our targeted parents.

So we can have a very strong relationship with them and love them dearly. And what we're actually asked is to reject them and idealise the alienation. parent. So it's a behavior that we need to start speaking about within our society because it's everywhere. We've been watching it for decades and decades now. And if we hear a child say, I don't want to see a parent after a separation, it's a really big, strong message. There's a big red flag there. This is not normal for children to be saying this sort of thing. So clinicians, or they need to be watching for these sentences. And, and, our societies ignored the voices of these children for too long and not listening to the voices

of these children, it shuts them down and teaches them that what they say isn't heard or taken seriously. And this is one of the things that I noticed when I was very, very young and my family went through high conflict divorce. Nobody listened to our voices. I heard a lot of, oh, kids are resilient. They'll be fine. Kids get through it, they won't mind, and it's just not the case.

And it can lead kids to feeling very alone, very unsafe, and in extreme circumstances, they can slide into selected mutism, which actually was what happened to me when I was in my teenage years. So it's a very interesting paradigm, and I think we can overburdened children with the power to make decisions a lot after separation, and that's not appropriate a lot of the time and it's things that I think the court system needs to take into consideration and think about. But we're recognising that we need to take notice of the children who are experiencing PA

and especially severe levels of PA in order to get these children to not reject their parent. And yeah, one thing I can say today is if you're hearing people who were separating collecting alliances and want you on their side and they're denigrating the other parent. Try and really stay on the fence because a lot of the alienating parents will collect alliances from everywhere. And that is very difficult because they're the child right in the middle of that.

And a lot of the time the children are hearing the denigration and the children feel it's a very, very difficult process for the child to say, yes, I miss my parents. or I want to go see my aunt or uncle because children of alienation, when this starts, it's tribal warfare pretty much within the parental alienation phenomena. Because for these kids, a lot of the time the alienating parent will only want them to themselves and see their own family. So it's not, they won't be allowed to see extended family, grandparents, aunts, uncles that we've grown up with.

And they'll even alienate the animals. So you're not allowed to talk about the animals that you used to know and that were a part of your life. So it's very long, very extensive. And in our case from everything that goes on in my family, parental alienation of this level doesn't stop, even right up into, I actually think the alienation, tactics will probably go for the rest of my life until maybe my alienating parent passes away,

but then she's still got alliances that she's still got on her side who are still practicing it. So it's very full on. Wow. Yeah. Yeah, I have a couple patients coming to my mind as we talk about this. And it, like, one of the, like, there's very subtle behaviors that I see, like, like the parents will always be fighting but in front of the kids the the parental alienating figure will blame the like act very sweet and then blame the other person see my my partner you know

your mother or father is the one who's causing all of our issues like I want to work things out and yet behind closed doors when the kids don't see is that this person's, you know, not trying to work things out, right? So I think it might be worth talking a little bit about, like, what are all the different ways in which parents can alienate one kid from each other? Because I think, you know, just kind of like looking at splitting, how splitting occurs, how this kind of, what are like the tactics? So is there a list or something? you can read off or is they're like, how do we go? Dr. Matthewsons got a few.

I should have a whole book on them. For them to work, there has to be this alignment. So it starts with that in meshed relationship and that process of adultification, parentification, and infantilization. So the child is essentially trapped. And so what happens is the child is then, the child's sense of reality is corrupted by the act.

alienating parent. And so they start to see the parent that they had a loving relationship with as being deficient in some way and that they need to align and trust completely the alienating parent. And then in comes the other behaviours. So denigrating the targeted parent to the child, in front of the child, anywhere the child can hear it so that they can start to believe those things to be true. They might be coerced into believing that the targeted parent is dangerous when they're not. So they can then have quite a fear of that and the phobic reaction to the targeted parent or even the thought of the targeted parent.

The alienating parent will then start to interfere with the time that child spends with the targeted parent because any time with a targeted parent might just dispel any of those beliefs that the child is being led to take on board. And they will do anything to damage the loving connection between the child and the child's other parent. So they'll intercept birthday cards, Christmas presents. They'll make it also appear as though receiving gifts from the other parent is somehow inappropriate.

Yeah. And there's a long list of many things. Or I've seen, they twist the meaning of the presence. Yeah, he's an agenda. This is just showing how narcissistic your blank is because he's only thinking about himself. Or this is how, you know, your mom is just a drug addict or a borderline, you know. It seems like there's certain words that are used to alienate the kids from the other parent, like, you know, to label someone else, a clinical diagnosis seems to be one of those

things I've seen. I don't know. Have you guys seen that? It's rife, isn't it? Dr. Matthewson, we see it all the time. Yes, and I'll accuse the target of parent of being the abusive parent, and they will have a string of allegations that they will say the other parent perpetrated. And I guess when a parent does make an allegation against another parent, you have to, listen, you have to take it seriously, you have to investigate it. And so then the child is dragged into that investigation and exposed to lots of adult content until you get to the end of it. That is the absolute worst. It's like, yeah. And then if you don't get a very skilled team, like looking at it, you could like suggest things to the kid that aren't there. And even the topics,

Like even the topics of like sexual abuse talking about that. And like it just is, it's way beyond what is, you know, appropriate for, you know, young kids. I don't know. Nothing fires me up more than that. It's just like. Yeah, I know. I think as a society, we find the topic of sexual abuse very difficult to discuss. And so the idea that a parent can then coerce a child into belief.

believing that they were sexually abused by a parent when they were not, is also, it's more disturbing to consider or discuss. And then it goes one step further as well, because often in my experience, they call it firing the silver bullet in court. So if there's a child carcidity dispute going on, and one of, it's usually the alienating parent will now accuse the targeted parent of sexually abusing the child or being, domestically violent. So then all the light now is shining on the targeted parent and now

the investigations start. And even if, and a lot of the time they're false allegations, some of the time they're not. So if in the case of a false allegation, now all the lights on the targeted parent, immediately from my experience, the targeted parent is now not allowed to see the child. That's the custody being fought over. And they, eventually can see the child, one client that I had ended up having to go through 10 weeks of domestic violence counseling and then had supervised visits, and they watched to see whether he was going to be abusive towards the child. And the whole time, the court stopped. So, and then started up later on down the track when that person was cleared. And I've had a couple cases like

that where the men could not afford to pay the social workers. Like it was it was so expensive. It's expensive. You know, you have a social worker there watching your interaction with the playing with your kid or you know, I don't know, how it is in Australia. So that was really difficult for the parent. And all the, yeah, it's just so painful, especially if they really are very innocent. It occurred to me a couple years into my practice because I've seen so many divorces that there's almost like a script

for divorce lawyers to try to push their clients in to kind of create more conflict. I don't know if you've seen that. Dr. Matthewson? I think the whole family law system is designed to keep parents pitted against each other and arguing with each other. Right.

And why do you think they're created in that way? Or what is the factor that's leading to that in your mind? I think it's the systems that we've inherited. It's been happening for centuries. In fact, parentality nation's been happening for centuries. It's everywhere once we look. It's very difficult for someone to come in and say, that's changed this entire system that we've known for centuries.

Right. I think it's tough because a lot of this goes on, like you said, like the parent who's alienating the child against the other parent is often running a script that's very unconscious. And it's not like there's sophisticated Machavelian, you know, people orchestrating this very complex system of things. There's something about when they go through divorce, they've gone all bad on the other person, where they go all bad, and then they start to reconstruct their previous life with this

other person is all bad, to kind of like allow them to make the decision to move away from their partner. It's so hard to hold in tension. Like, there was great times, and there was horrible times, but we didn't work out, you know? It's like, it's easier to just go all black. And then by going all black or people who are more prone to go all black, like start to kind of like try to convince the kids that their narrative is the most true narrative as a way of protecting their own psyche or stabilizing their own psyche. Yeah. And then we're in the false memory area. And a lot of the adult survivors grow up with false memories of what happened. And for a lot of us, myself included.

We, my siblings and I spent a lot of our time discussing things that we were told when we were children to terrify us and different situations and what our parts of the memory are because having different ages of siblings, we all have different perspectives. We spent a lot of time talking about that. What was your perspective of that day? I'll give you an example of one that we still struggle with is we were abducted. as children about seven, eight and nine and taken into state. And we had our names changed and we were taken on a plane.

So abduction and parental alienation sometimes go hand in hand or quite often. I call it abduction. Some people say I moved out overnight and took the children. To the children, when we grow up, it's kind of like, well, we never saw that parent again. And then you said terrible things about it. It's kind of like we were abducted. So that's wrong language, but I feel like I'm allowed to use it because it did happen to our.

And when we were taken, the events at the airport that happened because we were separated and moved through under different names all separately because we were white-haired kids, we were told we're easy to spot. My targeted parent would be coming to take us and or their friends would be coming so we wouldn't know who was coming. So these are the stories that we're getting told. And so here we are traveling into state and then starting a new life, which involved moving schools all the time so that we couldn't be tracked or taken or murdered.

So they're the, and we, a lot of the time, would be by ourselves while our parent worked, because now we're a single parent family. And a lot of the time, we're now adultified children because we're running the house. So doing all of the chores and everything and then still looking after the siblings. And then running and hiding and changing and all of this sort of stuff. So we have all these false memories that have been implanted. And for kids who grow up in this environment, there's not much playing out in the yard because you could be seen or, you know, hanging out with mates because you don't know who's going to come.

So you get told of these stories and then you grow up going, what do you remember? And every so often this crazy story will come up from one of my siblings. And I'll go, I've never heard that. Oh, my God, that puts a whole different spin on it. So we have the false memory stuff. And for the rest of our lives, we're figuring out this big black jigsaw puzzle with a million pieces in it that are all black trying to figure out what happened. And this goes forever. This never stops for us.

Wow. Yeah, that is that is really, really difficult to sort of untangle and to be, you have to almost believe the narrative to survive initially. Well, we do believe it. That's the thing, because we're not getting told anything else. Yeah. We're only hearing one story. So it's all we've got. And they're out, they're the people who are supposed to look after us and we're supposed to trust them. so to have a parent lying to you is very, very confusing for the kids. Yeah. Mandy, do you have any thoughts on this?

Any anything you want to share? Yeah, there's a couple of things. Is it right if I ask a Lisa question? Oh, absolutely. What did you find out after that about what your targeted parent was actually doing? Like, did he actually pose a risk of harm? Was he actually going to come and take you and murder you, for example? Yeah, so the interesting thing here is in my heart.

I loved him and knew him. So part of me, and this is a message for the targeted parents out there who are worried sick that their kids are so brainwashed, they can't think straight. A lot of the time we are, but then there's a part of us in our heart that still loves and misses that parent. but we're not allowed to show it, we're not allowed to speak about it, because then we're now not in alliance with the alienating parent anymore. So we still have to be what they want,

because if we're not, they target us. So we keep very, very quiet, but then I met, I reunited with my dad 25 years later. So, and I got to have all these conversations with him, and he, I actually have an interview that I made with him talking about all of these things. I was lucky enough to be brave enough to step into the space

and talk about what it was like for him and why he decided to not keep seeing us and things like that. And it's very powerful, but that gave me pieces to the puzzle that were missing for all those years. And he said, you can intuitively tell.

You just had this love for them. He was never going to, to hurt me or my siblings. He was never going to take us, never, ever, ever, nor were any of his friends. And he knew where we were the whole time because he had a friend in the tax department who was tracking us. So he knew where we were, but he didn't want to come near us because one time he went to have a look at us in the schoolyard. And one of my siblings saw him and we were trained that if he turned up at school, we would have to tell someone and then the police got called. So he was so terrified to step into the space. He just didn't. So he walked away because he

saw the look on my sibling's face was so, he was so terrified. At that point, he said, I have to walk away from this situation. I cannot have anything to do with hurting the children. So he walked away. And 25 years later, I got back in touch with him. And we reconnected for the last 25 years and then I lost him about a year and a half ago, but I've had 25 years with him. And I've, he, I am a mini version of him. Even though I didn't grow up with him, we had all the same personality traits. We liked all the same foods and wines and things to do. And I didn't grow up with him.

That's awesome. And we had a very, very close relationship. I think that's a really key part of parental alienation. that the targeted parent does not actually pose a risk of harm to the child. Because I have no doubt there are situations where a parent and children do need to go into state to be safe from a parent who really does pose a risk of harm. But that's not the case with parental alienation, that the risks that are alleged are not actually legitimately there.

Yeah. I guess where would you draw the line of like, okay, this is actually a parent that should be alienated from the kids? So when does a parent actually pose a risk of harm and should not be spending time with their child? Yeah. I think that comes after very thorough evidence-based risk assessment that aren't always conducted very well in these cases. Of like physical, sexual, emotional, emotional abuse. All of that. Neglect. Bonafide abuse.

Yes. Bonafide abuse. Okay. Yeah. Because I think in the cases that I've seen, like, there's been tense arguments between, you know, both parents in front of the kids. But nothing, yeah, it's just obvious to me that it's like, there's alienation going on. Yeah, I think it's really painful. And also, Dr. Puder research shows that kids who've been physically abused often want to go back to that parent.

They don't say, I never want to see that parent again, which is what parental alienation children say. So it's very interesting because some of my adults that I see in my practice who've been sexually abused and were sexually abused for a long time. say, oh, I loved that parent. I'll always love that parent. And one of my clients actually said, well, he had needs. Mom wasn't there. I fulfilled the needs. But the rest of the time, he was a great parent.

He'd make all our lunches for us and take us to school and everything. And it's kind of like, well, in my head, whoa, but that's their normal. But alienated children say, we never want to see those kids again. I mean, that parent again, sorry, as long as I live. It's a really strange dynamic. Do you have any thoughts on that, Dr. Matthewson? Because it's a bit of a odd. There's some research that has been published,

and I can't quite remember the authors off the top of my head on the publication date, but they show that children who are exposed to parental alienating behaviours are the ones who will say, I never want to see that other parent again. Whereas the children who have been abused by the other parent, they still want a relationship with that parent, they'll even say they want a relationship with that parent.

They just want the things that are hurting them to stop. Yeah, that's... Right. And I think, you know, if someone is sexually abusing a child, then that should be obviously reported to CPS and appropriate legal steps be taken. But I think what you're saying, which is really interesting, is that if someone is truly abused, usually... unless they've gone through some of the parental alienation sort of priming, they usually won't

want no contact. Is that correct? That's what some of the research is saying, and it's backed up by some of the adults that I work with clinically are saying the same thing. So, but yeah, so it's quite different to the presentation of the children in PA. Okay. And you talk about some of the research of personality disorders in the alienating parents. So the parents kind of pushing the kids into, you know, not having any contact with the other parent. What kind of personality disorders have you found in those parents? There's some research to show that they might present with some combination of personality traits and they might fit within what we call the borderline

personality traits, histrionic. And we talked earlier about narcissistic traits, but here we are talking about diagnosable narcissistic traits and they might be paranoid in their orientation to their world and to other people. And when you put all of that together, I think what you're looking at is a complex trauma presentation in of itself. Yeah. So they, they themselves have gone through trauma, is what you're saying? They were probably alienated from a parent themselves. Yes. I've had to be it something, a huge abandonment type wound happened. And they're using a child to regulate themselves within that abandonment wound. Yeah.

Yeah. One thing you mentioned is that a lot of the research on this is just coming out in the last couple years. Like there isn't a ton of ancient sort of research. Can you touch on that a little bit? I think there have been. documented cases of parental alienation in, you know, for the last couple of centuries. And there has been a growing body of research, but the majority of research in this area has

been published probably in the last five or six years. So as more researchers coming to the field, as the focus of the research has also changed, there's been a lot of publication, a lot of awareness as well. And so I think one, one, One researcher calls it a blossoming field of research. Jennifer Harmon, I think, Dr. Harmon. It's blossoming. I like that word. So what are some things, like let's say someone's going through divorce and they're listening

to this, what are some things that they can do to not split the kids against the other parent? Well, this is a tricky area. From my perspective, I do see couples. and the couples who are heading towards alienation if they separate are pretty obvious to spot. So the clinicians who work with them need to be able to identify some of the behaviours that we see in here. And a lot of the time an alienating parent will try and get us as an alliance with them. and they will, if we don't align with them, they will stop therapy.

This has been pretty consistent from what I can see. Dr. Mathisson's also a practitioner. Do you have, what are you seeing? Yeah, I see with an alienating parent, if they don't believe that you are with them and for them, then you're not with them and they will reject you as well. But I think if you're going through a family separation, the needs of the child has to be prioritised over and above the needs of the parents.

And if you're struggling to do that, then you need to get support from the right practitioner where you're going to be open to therapeutic confrontation to challenge the beliefs that you might have that might be feeding parental alienating behaviour. And don't, we've got to be very careful as practitioners not to collude with alienating parents. And sometimes it gets even trickier. Sometimes both parents can be alienating parents.

Yes. Yeah, they're both fine for it. Yeah. And it can be male or female. Absolutely. Yeah. What about, like, what, I always tell parents don't talk negatively about the other parent. in front of your kids.

And please, can you and your spouse make an agreement to not argue in front of the kids? Like, argue behind closed doors. Can you and the parent agree to have a concerted front to just be like, you know, if mom says this is not gonna happen, then dad doesn't go against it and then make mom look bad because, oh, mom's trying to control you, like mom doesn't want you to have

any fun. Yeah, you could do that. You know, so kind of like, once one parent comes up with like a way of parenting, if the other parent disagrees with it to have that discussion behind closed doors, but to agree, but to kind of agree with it as a concerted front in front of the kids. Does that make sense? Yes. So I'm looking for those kind of tips, if you guys have any of those kind of tips for parents as well.

The child has to be the primary focus, not the arguing between. the parents. The child, it should be, what's the best interest of the child should be being asked here? Not who won that argument, because they're just all tennis matches. It has to be what's in the best needs for the child, not necessarily out. Because children, and I know behind closed doors, what I like to think is don't even have that conversation in the house with a child, because children, we're hyper alert. to conversations about whether we're going to get to see our targeted parent or not. We listen.

We're listening to conversations to hear. Are we going to get to see them? What are they doing now? What's going on? Because a lot of these are secret conversations and children are naturally very curious. And we really want to know what's going on when we're going to see our other parent. So we listen. We're always listening.

And this is the thing that a lot of people don't realize. of yeah, we're sure we're in bed to sleep. Most of the time, we're not. If we hear that phone ring, we're up. We're hyper-alert children. We know. And we listen to all this stuff and we're gathering all this. And then we just go into a really deep hole of grief and sadness.

It's grief that's very interesting because when I lost my father recently, the grief was exactly the same emotion as when I was a child. and I couldn't see him. It felt, and this is quite interesting, it felt exactly the same for me. So grief in young children, and we know the studies, children in grief over lost parents,

it's the same level of grief as adult grief. So it's exactly the same grief and grief as grief. And it was just amazing to me that it just felt so much like when I was little, and I kept getting re-triggered into that space and having to go to my counselor, so myself, and work through it the whole time. So this stuff is very long, hard work for us. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

I imagine that took years to unpack her still, you know. Still, we're still unpacking it because every single wedding, the alienation stuff will come up because is that parent coming? Are their friends invited? who's not talking and then the fighting at the weddings. It's kind of like huge or funerals or any event, birthdays and any event. If there's parental alienation in the family, it's going to present and we're going to be re-triggered every single time.

And one of the photos I recently found was a picture of my great-grandfather on his 100th birthday in the nursing home with his 100th birthday cake. and because we were all alienated when he had his when he had his hundredth birthday I was 22 I had a two-year-old son so he had a granddaughter and a great-grandson none of us were at his birthday so and he's like so this is the intergenerational trauma that we're seeing so people think yeah kids are resilient let's get divorced they don't think and if there's parental alienation they don't think about the consequences on all of us for the next generations who are coming for years and years and years.

Wow. Yeah. There's such a ripple effect. And I think, you know, for so many kids, then holidays are just not fun, you know, unfortunately. Oh, they're a nightmare for a lot of kids. And so just going into another holiday is just really hard. And many of our patients will have that or us, you know.

And so it's like how do you kind of recapture some of the, some of the beauty of holidays with this kind of stuff going on in the background. It's like, good luck. Yeah. There's a lot of the time the alienating parent will still be texting and calling the child who's on holidays. What's going on? Show me where you are.

You know, so, so they never get to be 100% in the space a lot of the time with the targeted parent. With the targeted parent, yeah. Yeah. And just adding a lens of criticalness to the targeted parent, you know, where it's like, it's just hard to, it's hard for the parent that's targeted. So let's shift to the targeted parent and kind of any advice that you have for that person. Like let's say someone's listeners, then they're like, okay, that's exactly what's going on. I'm the targeted parent. And my kid won't talk to me. What do you do? Like they won't meet me.

They won't talk to me. They're completely buying the narrative of this other parent, that I'm an evil person that's dangerous. I would say find a good therapist, a good practitioner who might know something about these topics who can support you through what is going to be a roller coaster ride for you. And tell me more like, okay, So let's say I'm the therapist. I'm seeing this person. Tell me what what do I do to help them?

Like what pearls of wisdom could you give to me? I guess that's yeah. I think firstly as a practitioner, arm yourself up with knowledge of parental alienation and how it operates. And really importantly provide that parent with a space where they can tell their story and that they, can feel supported and believed. Because if you're on the receiving end of lots of false allegations and you've been through so many investigations, then you go meeting the next person thinking, are they going to believe me?

Are they going to think I'm the one who's the perpetrator? Okay. So having a practitioner who's in your corner can make a big difference. So there's a lot of supportive counselling in that. but also providing the targeted parent with information so that they can be knowledgeable about what's happening. And also targeted parents might want to join support groups, and there are a number of support groups around the world,

and some of them are online so that they don't have to leave their homes to access it. And I'll put a list of those on this document we'll put on psychiatry podcasts, along with links to your articles and books. so people can dig into it further. Okay, but like let's say, let's just paint this scenario. Like, let's say you were the father of someone that you've been alienated from. And now they're an adult. So they're no longer living with your ex.

And let's say you have the ability to text them, but they will never meet up with you. and like everything that they see that you do is interpreted through this like lens yeah right of like you are a bad person and it's it's like impossible to dig out of that it feels impossible to dig out of that hole like what are some of the steps that you can take or should take like let's say you're in therapy you're processing it you're grieving it it's it's a horrible thing you've been grieving the loss of this it feels like a death to you as well. You miss your child so much. How can you start to reconnect? First step is that you have to get yourself as healthy and as well as you possibly can.

So you need to do the grief, the work, the grief. If you've been traumatized by your experience, you need to work on that so that you can be as healthy and as well as you can be for what is going to be another roller coaster ride. And so learning about parental alienation, learning about the experience that your child may have had, learning about it as a form of abuse and trauma, because the child that you're trying to connect with is not the little child you last saw.

They are now a traumatized adult. And any process of reunification needs to really be driven by that child who is now a traumatized. adult. You can make connections so you can just send text messages every now and then, not every day, not every week, just every now and then, thinking of you, hope you're well. If you have a social media presence, be really mindful of what you're posting on social media and what that says about you and is that inviting to your child. Is it presenting a positive image. That's also a realistic image because sometimes the children will make contact via social

media. They don't know if they can trust you. So they will test the waters. They'll check you out and then they'll retreat and they might retreat for a very long time until they test you out again. See if you're safe and they're not sure and then they'll retreat again. So there's this sort of approach withdraw a cycle that can go on for a very long time. And so you have to be ready for that. You have to be patient and you have to be coping as well as you can be with what's going to be a cycle of inevitable getting your hopes up and then getting disappointed again. Yeah. I think that that's crucial because when you get disappointed, when they get disappointed, it can be completely heart-wrenching. And then that can take them out of the parent role.

and there's wisdom in remaining in the parent role of like generous, giving, consistent, not erratic, present, helping their needs. Unconditional positive regard. So one of the things that I tell parents is like, I think I have hope for you. It's going to take time and consistency. And if you show up and are consistently thinking about them, showing your thoughtfulness, over time and just willing to weather out that this is, and I think what you said is really, really helpful.

You're not dealing with the same child that you had when the rupture happened. There's been trauma, interpersonal trauma. They've had to believe things. They've had to dissociate from desires to connect with you. They've had to believe alternative narratives, which have twisted their reality. They've had to grow up. They've been parentified at times. been in the prentification process they have met the needs of other people and not and been

dissociated away from their own desires their own emotions so it's like how do we you know how do they find themselves again can be tricky and the other thing dr pooter is that we're not call we're not ever taught breach and repair sequencing we're taught to do what we're told we're taught to be soldiers. So when we're confronted with wanting to go through what we call a stage of realization and meet up with our targeted parent, we want to talk to them because some big life events happened or tragedy or some things happen. We want to connect with them. We don't know a lot of the time how to have the conversations with them that are really difficult because a lot of these kids not taught breach and repair, like I said. So when we go in, it's,

they hear anything negative, they're likely to retreat. So do not talk about your side of the story or what happened during the divorce or how terrible your other parent was. Children of alienation generally don't want to hear that because unless we ask the question, and this is what I said to my father, unless I specifically ask you a question and then I may may not want the whole answer, but I need to drive that space. Don't just be spilling information on me about something that happened 50 years ago, you know, that of your perspective, because he, I said to me, got to remember, like,

all we ever heard was the other perspective about you. So I want to find out for myself different things, and I'll ask you. So please, and what he did, my dad stayed in Carl Rogers' unconditional positive regard with me. He never challenged me. He never argued with me. And there were times where I was yelling at him, screaming at him, hung up on him, didn't speak to him. And he weathered it the whole time because we keep going in and out of.

We were told this, you did this. Hang on a sec. Now I like you. Now I hate you. Now it's until we start to stabilize. It's a long process. And a lot of the adult children that I work with need somebody to walk with them during that process as well.

and it can go very pear-shaped or it can go amazingly. And so basically what I'm trying to say is targeted parents, just the space is hard when the kids come back in, especially as adults. And it's just my favorite thing is UPR, UPR, UPR, just be a soft place to fall because they're not used to having a soft place to fall. They're used to having someone who's criticizing them, watching them, making them align with them, not having any autonomy. me so you be the person who gives them all of that. It's an unreal feeling that a lot of alienated

kids have not experienced. Yeah, that's, that is treasure right there. That is so well said. And if you, if you miss that, go back and listen to that part again, because it is, it's really helpful to think of yourself, if you were the one that's been alienated as, the person that can listen and for once in the kid's life not put them in the place of they are catering to your needs and your emotions and your desires but you are there for them and their emotions and their desires and taking care of them being a parent and you don't need to set the record straight overnight you don't need to you know it's probably more important that you bring your essence and your character and your values in how you interact

and how you listen, you know, and so. And empathy for the child who comes through too, yeah, especially adult child, because a lot of the time I have to give the perspective to the targeted parents that I work with, think about it from the child's point of view. If they're not responding to you, we see the text, we see the messages. Well, not in my case because they didn't have it back then. But I used to watch the mail to see if letters or presents came through from my paternal grandparents and my dad and my aunts and uncles and things.

But they used to be hidden, but I knew the postman delivered them. They can't, they can destroy the present, they can hide them, they can do whatever they want. We know that they do that. But to us, the fact that you've sent it tells us your thinking about us. You still love us. We don't fall down the well of extreme grief and abandonment ourselves. We're still holding hope that you're going to still be in our life. Yeah.

So I think that's so important. Consistency, giving mine, you know, gifts, letters. If you can find the address of the person, care packages. And like what Mandy said, not every day, not every week, but once in a while, you're thinking of them, you're showing your thoughtfulness. and then when you get to interact, it's not about you and defending your position or getting your emotional needs met.

It's about meeting their needs, being the parent, and doing that consistently over time, unconditional positive regard. And then I think this comes back to what you first said was that the parent needs to get as healthy as possible. And so if they have already done the psychological work of a year of therapy, right? Maybe it's a year, maybe it's a couple years,

grieving the loss and how hard this period was. I mean, nothing is more gut-wrenching than having a child taken away from you. Absolutely just gut-runching. It's hard for me to sit with someone like that, but it's like it's meaningful therapy. It's doing that work allows you to in the future be more present with their needs and their desires and their emotions and not be stuck in your own experience as the parent. And so that kind of comes full, that comes full circle. to me and why that's so important and imperative. And don't take it personally if the kids are not responding, because a lot of the time they'll be getting their phones checked,

or they'll have their calls listened into. And if they're sending text messages saying, I love you and I miss you, and the alienating parents sees that, you're living already in a house full of family violence already. So if you step out of that alignment with the alienating parent, you're now going to become the targeted child. So you almost have to protect yourself from the abuse.

You have to put your head down, shut up and do what they say. So they could be watching. They're guaranteed they're watching you, what you're doing, but they may not be able to respond. So the first thing I say to targeted parents when they come into me is don't take it personally because you've got to think, what is this child being exposed to? But that's terribly difficult for the targeted parent to hear because they're thinking now,

oh my God, my kid's in violence. And it's a really hard area for a practitioner to work in. And we have to be very skilled and very careful with what we say. I say to target parents, when you send a message and you don't get a response, there is a reaction, but you don't get to see it yet. You might get to see that reaction. and the benefit of your contact three years, five years, ten years, so don't stop. Yeah, that's really good.

Yeah, working with the hopelessness that comes from the no response, right? I think it's so potent in the way that you say it that way because it's like there is hope. Yeah, yeah. Three years, five years, you have to have a time course that's larger, you know, because if that kid knows that the, other parent is going to read those texts, they may write something back like, I don't want to talk with you. And they do. And then they may show that.

The targeted parent will often get their phone too and write messages that are not from the children or emails that are not from the children. And a lot of the time you might notice within an alienating parent's home, the kids have to have the phone on speaker all the time. So it's heard. And then you're getting the looks. You know, I've done your micro-expression workshops, and the micro-expressions, the children know micro-expressions and even breath, even the way they breathe, they're susceptible to. So, they're that good at reading.

They have to be. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, what you're saying is the child is watching the alienating parent, the parent that's alienating them from the other one. and they know they queue they know how to it's like

if they're spending the majority of time with that parent that's alienating them from the other parent and they start to question the narrative it becomes just an absolute an absolute horror show for them with the parent

that's actually there with them that's right and it can only be an eyebrow raise or a breath and we're like back in line. That's how quick it is. And nobody, a lot of people in the general public never see that. They think it looks like the child's very close to the parent. And you'll often see them in therapy.

They'll be sitting right on the parent and they'll be simpatico. But to those of us who are trained, we're kind of like what's going on here. It's a meshment. So you've got to know what you're doing in this space as a practitioner. So good. Well, okay, so we're going to wrap this up. Is there kind of any final thoughts that you want to get out, final things that are kind of lingering that you wanted to say maybe Dr. Matthewson, you want to go first? Something I wanted to say earlier that I'll raise now is that targeted parents come in all gender identities. So they're not just mothers, they're not just fathers. They can also be, you know, cis men and women, trans men and women. people who are non-binary, I think that's really important, but also really important to acknowledge that this is happening to children.

And so all practitioners working in these fields really do have an obligation to find out about parental alienation because not to find out about it means that you are potentially leaving a child in an abusive traumatic situation. Yeah. And the attorneys that are representing the families in court, we've got to ask, they need to ask themselves sort of at what stage do they think that they may be participating in the abuse of a child too? Because, you know, we've got all that biting going on. And family court is a $50 billion a year industry in America.

High conflict divorce. Is that correct? Dr. Matthewson, that was my last figure I thought, 50 billion. dollar a year industry and high conflict divorce in America. Absolutely. Got a lot of attorneys who were in this space. Yep. I always tell my patience, and if you're a lawyer listening to this and you're a good lawyer,

then God bless you, but I always tell my patience. A lawyer will say, how do I move the money from that bank account into my bank account? And so, you know, they're not always trying to make things as smooth or as chemical as possible, either consciously or unconsciously. You know, I mean, we all have bias, and I think it's like, you know, it's important to realize that there is a bias of money, and money drives people. Not all people. I think there are idealists out there, people who live by their ideals and their ideals

are what give them meaning. And I can see that from you, from both of you, you're idealists, you know, it's like, you're not in this field to make a ton of money. I hope you guys do well financially, but I'm sure that the meaning is empowering more than anything else. So I appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you.

Well, I had Elise Price-Tobler write up a very detailed summary in which we will be adding some of the stuff from this episode, adding a ton of resources. So check your show notes on the psychiatrypodcast.com. We'll have it there. And you can, we'll have links to their websites and how to get in touch with them or hire them. Or, you know, if you're listening to this

and you think you might be going through this, I think it's worthwhile to just hire an expert for at least an hour just to process it. I mean, don't be alone in this. Like, you know, you guys do coaching worldwide, right? Yeah, I have clients zooming in from all over the place. Yeah. Yep.

So, you know, find someone who is a therapist with some experience in this if you're going through it. Or if you have a good therapist, have them listen to this episode. And maybe they can educate themselves a little bit more on what you might be going through. So we'll leave it there for today. and so good to see you guys and thank you so much. You too. Yes, our pleasure. Thank you.