Parental Alienation and ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences)

Hey there, everybody, and welcome to this presentation on parental alienation, identification and intervention. I'm your host, Dr. Donnellice Snipes. In this presentation, we're going to define the concept of parental alienation, explore who becomes an alienator, identify examples of alienating behaviors, discuss how alienation fits the criteria for an adverse childhood experience as if it needed explanation, and identify symptoms experienced by children who have experienced parental alienation. And we say experienced by children because oftentimes the symptoms become apparent in childhood. But a lot of adults continue to manifest symptoms that resulted from parental alienation. So let's start out by talking about what parental alienation is not. Parental alienation, as we're going to talk about it today, is not abandonment. If a parent or caregiver just gets up and leaves, that's abandonment. That's not what we're talking about today. That has its own whole set of issues. Parental alienation is also not protection by one parent from a legitimately abusive other parent. So there are circumstances where one parent may cut ties with another parent in order to protect the child from legitimate abuse. That is not what we're talking about here today either. What we are talking about is a form of psychological abuse which can be coded in the DSM 5 under diagnostic code 995.51. Child psychological abuse. Generally, when we're talking about parental alienation, what you're looking for is three characteristics. Now in the dsm. Let me be clear. What they list is child psychological abuse. Parental alienation is a syndrome that some researchers and psychologists have come up with to categorize a particular type of behavior. But what is it? Well, three characteristics we're looking for rejection or denigration of a parent that reaches the scale of an ongoing campaign that includes brainwashing, manipulating or lying to the child about the other parent. When people are married, when they're undergoing a divorce, occasionally one parent may say something that is denigrating or unkind about the other. Now, should that happen? Well, probably not. But let's face the fact that it does happen. Now, that is not what we're talking about. We're talking about this ongoing campaign to manipulate the child. The act of manipulation takes place consciously or unconsciously. And that's an interesting little dynamic we need to look at. Sometimes the alienating parent is so dysfunctional because of their own issues, they may unconsciously be engaging in these behaviors. It doesn't make them any less harmful. But we need to recognize that it can be conscious or unconscious, and it can be done by the alienating parent. And or other reference persons. So the alienating parents, parents, the alienating parents, friends, messages that are coming from the other side about the targeted parent are what we're looking at. The messages need to come from reference persons on whom the child is dependent on whom going against them could be detrimental to the child. So again, we're looking at the alienating parent, the alienating parent's family that may be responsible for taking care of the child. The hostile attitude toward the rejected parent or the alienated parent is irrational and the alienation is not appropriate response to the behavior of the rejected parent. So what we're talking about here is a situation in which the targeted parent or the alienated parent really didn't do anything wrong. They are not a danger to the child. They may have had conflicts with the parent, but they are not a danger to the child. And the response to towards anything that the alienated parent has done is generally significantly exaggerated compared to what it probably warrants. And finally, the child's condition. Now, if they're presenting in mental health settings, they're probably having some behavioral issues, they're presenting in pediatric settings. They may have some developmental issues or some pain somatization issues, but the child's condition is at least a partial result of the influence of the alienating parent and or other important caregivers. So you can see that in this situation with parental alienation syndrome, there is an alienating parent who is actively manipulating or brainwashing. And we're going to talk later about how a lot of children who are subjected to parental alienating behaviors develop something akin to Stockholm syndrome. The prevalence rate of parental alienation in children and adolescents in the US is around 1%. What we're talking about here is the ongoing behaviors. We're not talking about the fallout and the mental health and physical health issues that result from parental alienation, which is probably much greater than that. But at any point in time, about 1% of children or adolescents in the US are being exposed to parental alienation. For the alienating parent, the parent child bond is based on the parent having his or her needs met by the child. Whether it is providing love, whether it's providing information, whether it's providing a way to get back at the alienated parent. When the child exhibits hatred and vilifies the alienated parent as a result of actions, then the condition becomes parental alienation syndrome. So at this point, the brainwashing is complete and the child has started to see that parent in the alienated parent. In all bad terms, parental alienation disrupts the primary attachment bonds. Now, we talk a lot about the infant attachment, the primary primary attachment. And that is generally to the person who is the main caregiver for the infant. However, children form what I'll call primary attachment bonds to their main caregivers, plural. So if this is going on in the family, it's going to disrupt one or more of those attachment bonds in order to have a secure attachment. What children need in relationships can be categorized using the mnemonic visceral. And I used to use a different mnemonic, but I've added a couple characteristics, so I had to monkey with it a little bit. And visceral is easy to remember because from a visceral standpoint, from a gut standpoint, what do we need in order to feel secure? We need validation. We need intimacy. And when I talk about intimacy, I'm not talking about sex. I'm talking about the ability to know and be known by another person. And this is important in all relationships. The child, the person needs safety in their relationships in order to be vulnerable. In order to engage in self disclosure and build intimacy, people need to feel safe. They need to have consistency. It's not enough to be able to sometimes trust that caregiver is going to listen or respond. The person needs to have consistency in their ability to feel safe and validated in that relationship. They need encouragement and support. Becoming vulnerable, taking chances, growing, dealing with life and the troubles of life can be really difficult. So in secure attachments, you have a person or persons who are there who serve as a safe home base that can help people pick themselves up and regroup after a failure or endure challenging times. Responsiveness. We need people who are responsive. Not only are they conceited consistently there, but they're not just bumps on a log. They respond, they, they validate how they're, how we're feeling. They provide that encouragement and support and they help us, especially when we're talking about children. Caregivers help children learn how to deal with their emotions and develop those emotional regulation tools. We need the ability to be authentic. And that is really important in relationships. And part of that is intimacy. But when we are in relationships, we need to feel like we can say, I'm angry and have those feelings validated. We need to feel like we can express ourselves. We can grieve, we can be depressed, we can be happy in whatever way that is right, feels right for us. Not everybody grieves in the same way, for example. So we need to be able to feel like we can be authentic in our thoughts. Feelings, behaviors, presentations, and be accepted unconditionally. Get that? Unconditional love. Now remember, unconditional love means I love you for who you are. I may not like some of your behaviors, but I love you as a person. In order to feel secure in our relationships, we need all of these qualities. Unfortunately, as we go through this presentation, you'll see how these get disrupted very quickly. In a situation where there's an alienating parent. So who becomes an alienator. Often this happens in situations in which the alienating parent has significant attachment dysfunction and trauma themselves. That doesn't excuse the behavior, but it helps us understand why some people may go to the extremes of parental alienation and using the child, whereas others can go through challenges in their marriage and challenges in life and even divorces and not become alienators. So in parents who become alienators or caregivers who become alienators, we often see that the alienating parent has codependent tendencies. They tend to be highly critical, but they tend to need others, and they are terrified of rejection. They need to be needed. Narcissistic. And a lot of times people who are narcissistic think that the world owes them something, thinks that they know better than everybody else. But other times, people who are narcissistic are using this grandeur to cover up this significant fear of abandonment. Antisocial people who engage in parental alienating behaviors are often challenged when it comes to empathy. And they often use, obviously, as we're talking about, use the child and use manipulation in order to get what they want, irrespective of the consequences to other people. So empathy is kind of out the door. And it's all about me and borderline. We know that people who've experienced trauma in childhood have a high likelihood of developing borderline tendencies, maybe not rising to the level of borderline personality disorder, but people who have borderline tendencies are, again, very terrified of abandonment. They have a very unstable sense of self. So when they can't control the environment, they feel out of control. And one of the preeminent behaviors we see in people with borderline personality disorder is splitting. And that is looking at people as all good or all bad, I love you or I hate you. And in the person with borderline personality, when they are engaged in conflict with the other parent, they often split that person psychologically and see that person is all bad. And they take those perceptions and communicate them to the child. And children, by their very nature, especially children under the age of 12, have more difficulty with abstract reasoning and abstract thought. They tend to think A lot more concretely, children who are even younger than that, like elementary school age, often think dichotomously all or nothing anyway. So it's not hard for a parent, the alienating parent, to support this all or nothing thinking and this splitting behavior. So how is parental alienation syndrome an adverse childhood experience? Well, we already know that from the earlier slide that it is, can be characterized as a form of psychological child abuse. So category one, it qualifies as a form of abuse or neglect of the child because there's psychological abuse going on, but there's also often psychological and sometimes even physical abuse of the alienated parent. So the child is seeing interpersonal violence, especially psychological, interpersonal violence toward the alienated parent from the alienating parent. So it's a double whammy there. Not only are they experiencing direct abuse, but they're witnessing abuse. So those are two of the adverse childhood experiences that have been identified. Parental alienation syndrome often triggers or exacerbates mental health or addictive issues in the alienated parent, which makes them less emotionally and or physically available and responsive to the child. When you are constantly being undermined and criticized and villainized by not only the alienating parent, but then also you start to see it coming from your child that is extremely traumatic to a person and almost undoubtedly triggers feelings of anger, depression, helplessness, even anxiety in the alienated. In the targeted parent. So the alienating parent is actually causing mental health issues. And we know that one of the adverse childhood experiences is living in an environment in which one or more caregivers has a mental health or addictive disorder. We've already talked about how the alienating parent likely has one or more mental health or substance abuse issues. But we are also now looking at the fact that the alienated, the targeted parent also, by virtue of this interaction, may develop mental health or addiction issues. And finally, another category, the third major category of adverse childhood experiences is abandonment. Now, I said this is parental alienation syndrome is not abandonment in the sense that a parent willingly decides one morning to get up and just leave the family. However, in parental alienation syndrome, the alienating parent sends messages to the child telling them that you're going to be abandoned, your other parent doesn't love you anymore. And they also may create situations that appear to demonstrate that the other parent is abandoning them, such as changing times of birthday parties or not telling the other parent about recitals or football games or whatever else is important to the child. And then they use that, and they say, see, they didn't show up again. So let's talk about some of these alienating behaviors. One category, if you will, is making it uncomfortable for the child to visit the other parent. They may refuse to allow children to take possessions between residences. They may say something like, if you are really going to go over there, then then you need to leave your stuff here. Or if you go over there, that parent needs to provide you with everything that you need. And if they don't, then that is evidence that they don't care about you. They also may limit the pictures of the child with the other parent. So by eliminating these pictures, they are eliminating memory triggers and indirectly trying to erase the memories the child has with that other parent. So all they see when they're with the alienating parent is pictures of them with the alienating parent. And there's like no evidence of the alienated or the targeted parent. They make it seem like the alienated parent doesn't care. They may give children choices when they actually have no choice, such as saying, do you want to go to the zoo with me today? And the child says, yes, I want to go to the zoo. Well, sorry, your other parent has custody today and they won't let you go to the zoo with me, so maybe some other time. So they get the child excited and then they dash their hopes. They may resist or refuse to keep the other parent in the loop. Talked about that they may limit the contact contact of the child with the alienated parent, making the excuse that, well, every time the child talks to you, they act out, they become more upset, so it's not healthy for the child. They may blame the other parent for their own financial problems, breaking up the family, or changes in lifestyle. If your parent would have loved you, then they wouldn't have done this, that or the other, which caused us to get divorced, or because your parent did not do what I wanted them to do, then it's their fault that all of this happened. Refusing to be flexible with visitation to respond to the child's needs. Maybe the child wants to go on a vacation with friends for spring break or something, and the alienating parent refuses to allow the child to do that unless they conform to certain demands. They may also just simply provide targeted misinformation, telling the child the other parent doesn't love them anymore, and then finding evidence to support that alienating behaviors also can fall in the category of inappropriate boundaries. Telling the child everything about the marital relationship or reasons for the divorce. And a lot of times this comes out as blaming. And it's all of the done me wrongs. That come out and none of the what my part was in it. They may ask the child to choose one parent over the other, or tell them that they're going to have to choose which parent that they want to live with, who loves them more or who they love more. And that often is a way to feed the alienating parents own ego. Having secret special signals or private rendezvous reinforce ongoing alienation. If the child is visiting with the alienated parent, the targeted parent and the alienating parent sets up a secret rendezvous or shows up at school and takes them out for lunch in order to check in on them to make sure they're doing okay. It can set up the notion that in the child's mind that, oh, I must be unsafe if my parent is having to check up on me while I'm with the other parent. Using a child to spy or gather information about how the child support is being used, about what the other parent is doing, if they're going on vacations, if they're dating, if whatever. Quizzing the child about the other parent's personal life. Telling the child not to call the other parent mom or dad, but instead call them by their name. And that is another huge way to start trying to break that bond because it violates the caregiver child boundary. When we start calling people by their first name. That's just culturally, that's not what we do. And changing the child's name so that there's no association with the other parent, this is another way that the alienating parent may try to erase the memory, erase the knowledge of the targeted parent from the child's memory. So they may change the child's last name to their maiden name, for example, making the child dependent, often medically, and creating a distance between them and the alienated parent who cannot handle it. And this can be things like allergies or ear infections or whatever else. If the alienating parent will not grant the other parent access to medical records and the child has some sort of issue medically, which a lot of children do as they grow up. They have allergies or ear infections or whatever, then the alienating parent can say, that parent doesn't care enough to know about you, or that parent isn't capable of handling your special needs. And I'm the only one that can do that. So it's important that we maintain our relationship so you can survive, basically is the crux of the message. They may create fear in the child about litigation procedures. Telling them how awful it's going to be when they're up on the stand and being cross examined and how horrible they may feel or how judged the other parent may, how the other parent may judge them when they tell the truth about all of the awful things about the other parent. Remember we're talking about splitting here. So there's no just get up there and tell the truth. There's get up there and tell the truth. And oh by the way, this is the truth. Here's all the awful stuff. A lot of times children subjected to parental alienation can't remember good times with the other parent. They can't remember nice things that the other parent did, even though the other parent has done a lot of nice things and loves them dearly, that has been systematically erased from their memory. There also may be threats of deprivation of love or, or suicide or physical violence if the child doesn't support them. If I don't have primary custody of you, I can't survive. And so, you know, it's important that you make sure that the judge grants me primary custody because otherwise I'll kill myself. And that is not okay in any situation to put a child in that position, reacting with hurt or sadness to their child, having a good time with the other parent. And this can be overt manipulation. And again, it may be unconscious responses because they truly are sad and fearful of rejection if the child loves anybody else, and expressing anger or withdrawing love to pull the child away from the other parent. So they get angry when the child talks positively about the other parent or they pout and fine, if you like that parent so much, why don't you just go live with them and then they storm off into their room. So what happens when a child is exposed to several of these situations? We may see it manifest physically headaches and stomach aches. When children are going through this, especially when they're being brainwashed, there's a lot of stress. And that stress means that HPA axis is super activated. And it will impair their sleep, it will increase inflammatory cytokines, it will increase pain issues, it will increase stress related symptoms, it may increase impulsivity and addictions in the child or adolescent because remember the prefrontal cortex is still developing. That's where we have our impulse control, our higher order reasoning, those sorts of things. And that area of the brain is still very malleable and still very susceptible to neurotoxicity. So when the child's brain is exposed to chronic stress, there are changes, physiological, structural changes in the brain that result from that stress. There may be developmental delays that result partly from the Brain changes, but also partly from the child not getting adequate quality sleep and having disrupted circadian rhythms. So they are, they may lag, they may have autoimmune issues because of the increase in inflammatory cytokines as well as the suppression of the immune system as a result of circadian rhythm disruption. And they may have sleep disruption. And we already talked about that. Affectively and cognitively. Children may exhibit Stockholm syndrome, where it is in order to stay safe somewhere deep down inside. I mean, they're 4, 5, 8. They may not be able to articulate and say, I can't survive if I don't have a parent to take care of me. But somewhere deep down inside, their brain recognizes they need a caretaker. And they're being programmed to believe that the targeted parent doesn't love them anymore. Therefore, no matter how horrible the alienating parents behaviors may seem, they have to somehow cognitively make it make sense to them to stay in that relationship. And so a lot of times they start seeing that person's behaviors as loving and protecting and caring. Children who have a HPA axis, a threat response system that is regularly on, they are under chronic stress, often develop symptoms of emotional dysregulation. They go from being kind of flat and blah to an extreme reaction. And that's because their body reacts by dumping, to use, you know, oversimplify it, an excess amount of stress chemicals when they start feeling stressed. And children who are exposed to parental alienation experience feelings of guilt and shame, anger, anxiety, depression about a whole range of things. They may also hone in on the alienating parents cognitive distortions. And they may start taking everything that the targeted parent does personally and negatively. Well, that person didn't call tonight must mean they don't love me instead of that person didn't call tonight because they were flying between here and Timbuktu and weren't able to get to a phone, all or nothing, thinking, we already talked about splitting and dichotomies and catastrophizing during alienation. One of the important characteristics of a lot of the behaviors is making it seem overwhelming. You know, it's not just, well, that would be a little hiccup or that would make me a little bit sad or I feel unhappy about that. It is huge. Everything is extreme in nature. So the child starts perceiving the world in catastrophic views. If I do this, the world will. My world may end. And when you're hypervigilant that much, when you're exposed to that much chronic stress, oftentimes you develop a negative perceptual style. You're in that fight or flight stage, so you're hypervigilant. You're looking for stressors, you're looking for threats, you're looking for nonverbal cues that you are unsafe. And guess what? You're probably going to find them. Whether they were benign or or malignant cues, a lot of times they will be interpreted as malignant or negative. The child develops environmental hypervigilance. They start becoming hyper aware of threats in the environment, of people's tones of voice, of their nonverbals, and even just microscopic micro expressions can set a person into a fear spiral. And relationally, people who've experienced parental alienation often develop attachment disorders later in life because their primary relationship map was so dysfunctional. It's hard to trust anybody. It's hard to be intimate with anybody emotionally, cognitively, physically. It's hard to feel safe. So they have difficulty in later relationships. They may have a lack of empathy because that's what they were taught. They weren't taught to think well, how will that does that person feel? They were taught only to focus on how they feel. And it may not feel safe to be empathetic either. That may be overwhelming and too, well, too overwhelming. Interpersonal manipulation if we learn what we live and if they grew up in an environment where they were regularly being manipulated, then they may develop these behaviors. Vilification of the parent in adulthood, they may still vilify the parent. Now, they may have realized what happened and vilify the alienating parent at this point. But there's still often a lot of splitting that goes on. A lot of you're either all good or all bad. There's trust and intimacy issues that also plague people who are exposed to this because the people who were in charge of protecting them actually caused them harm. Now this is not unusual to see in children who experience abuse, which is another reason it's important to recognize that parental Alienation syndrome is a form of child psychological abuse. Symptoms specific to abuse in childhood may also include reflexive taking sides with the alienating or the abusing parent. Rejection of the entire family and even community and culture of the alienated or the non abusing parent. Denial of feelings of guilt about cruelty towards the alienated or non abusing parent. It's just too overwhelming to think for a lot of children to think, oh my gosh, I caused all this pain. So they wall it off, they deny it, I'm not doing anything wrong. An adoption of what they call borrowed scenarios. So things that the alienating parent told them, even if they're completely false, they adopt those scenarios, they believe those scenarios because that is the only way to stay safe. And they have to integrate those somehow into their, into their memory banks in order to make it make sense and resolve some of the cognitive dissonance. Kids usually catch on to the manipulation, and when they do, they're often riddled with feelings of guilt and shame for what they did. Even though, you know, you're looking at them going, well, you were five, you know, and recognizing, you know, we as bystanders can recognize what a five year old did. They're not responsible when they were being actively manipulated by an adult, but the child when they realize this, has difficulty separating and stepping back from it and recognizing all the factors at play. And they also may develop contempt for the parent who manipulated them. Now, for some children, they end up in this gray place where they still have all those implanted memories, if you will, or borrowed scenarios from, from the alienating parent. So they have a hard time believing and trusting the targeted or the alienated parent. But they also recognize that the alienating parent is harmful and destructive as well. So then they feel completely alone, completely isolated, because they're like, I don't know who to trust. Interventions. Now a lot of the interventions are going to revolve around processing the trauma and processing the abuse that took place. And it takes time. Some of the interventions that are important include creating safety in the physical world as well as in the inner world of the patient. They probably have internalized a lot of messages from the alienating parent that may need to be restructured or checked for their validity. But they often have a very scary internal voice. They need to develop secure attachments. And that goes back to, you know, I said, I used to use the mnemonic craves and now I use visceral. But it's important to develop secure attachments with the wounded child, the firefighter and the manager. And those are terms from internal family systems. But inside all of us, we have a, if you want to think about it this way, we have a wounded child that bad things that happened when we were younger that never got processed, that never got resolved still sit with that wounded child who's holding them going, I don't know what to do with this. And then we have a firefighter in our mind that acts frantically to put out the fires, to relieve the distress at all costs. I'm going to do whatever I need to do to protect the wounded child. And then there's a manager who tries to control and mediate between the two of them. Now, another way to look at this. Linehan proposed the concept of the logical mind, the emotional mind, and the wise mind. However you want to conceptualize it, it's important to recognize that a lot of people who've experienced abuse, especially if they haven't processed it yet, still have that wounded inner child that operates from the place of an emotional mind. It operates impulsively to protect itself. We need to help the person learn how to validate and comfort that wounded child, help them recognize some of their current behaviors as manifestations of the inner child. When they act out, when they throw a temper tantrum as adults, are they acting in their wise mind, in their adult self, in their manager, or are they acting in their emotional mind, their wounded child? Is that child coming out and throwing that temper tantrum? We need to help the person learn how to assure the firefighter that it's under control. We can tolerate this, it's unpleasant, it hurts and we feel distressed. We want to be able to be mindful and validated in how we feel, but we also want to assure the firefighter that they don't need to come out and try to spray everything down that we got this. We want to help the person grieve the lost child, the parental relationship and other secondary losses. A lot of times the child or the adult will look back and have a lot of regrets and a lot of anger about being put through that. And it's important that they be able to inventory the things that they lost, both tangible and abstract, as a result of the violence, and be able to work through the grieving process. And finally, they need to be able to work through guilt from a context based, trauma informed perspective. What does that mean? That means stepping out of it, being that fly on the wall, so to speak, helping the now adult reflect back and look at the entire context of the situation and evaluate their part in it, if you will, evaluate the guilt that they still maintain and evaluate how culpable, if you will, they were in that situation at that time with the skills and resources that they had. So there are a lot of things that can be done that need to be done to process what happened. If people were exposed to parental alienation. Parental alienation is at its core psychological abuse and the feelings and beliefs that resulted must be processed in order to integrate that experience and fully grieve the associated losses. Parental alienation disrupts the core attachment relationship. An attachment disruption is traumatic for the child and will inevitably impact them physically, affectively, cognitively, environmentally. And that includes financially because it oftentimes impacts their work, which impacts their ability to maintain a safe, stable home environment. And relationally, I could talk a lot more about parental alienation and abandonment and other issues, but I did this presentation because somebody had specifically requested a basically high level overview of what we're talking about when we talk about parental alienation. So here it is. Don't forget to like and subscribe. And if you have videos that you want me to do, please go to the comments section and let me know. I am happy to do videos by requesting.