TransGenerational Trauma | She HAS a MOTHER.

Trans-Generational Parental Alienation Trauma

by World-Known PA Expert Karen Woodall

What is Transgenerational Trauma Transmission About?

Transgenerational Trauma Transmission and the way in which alienation of children, which is a relational trauma in the here and now, can be the result of an unresolved trauma in the family of the parent to whom the child is aligned.

This trauma, which has a particular pattern of behaviors, is often protected by the inward-looking and isolating nature of the family in which it is located.

Understanding how transgenerational trauma is transmitted is key to understanding this problem and if you are a parent in the rejected position, recognizing this enables you to act in ways which frees the child rather than tightening the double bind the child is in.

Where transgenerational trauma patterns are in play, children are seen to be in a fixed and fused dyadic relationship with a parent to whom they are tightly aligned, they are also likely to be highly defensive of a parent, playing the role of carer/confidante and champion/advocate all at the same time.

In such circumstances the child is disavowing their own needs for a healthy childhood in order to protect a parent who is suffering from intra-psychic conflicts.

These conflicts may themselves have been inherited from the original sufferer. Enabling the child to live a life which is free of this need to protect, advocate for and support a parent who is transferring trauma responses, is about recognizing that unresolved trauma, when visited upon a child, causes attachment maladaptations which deny the child the right to live their own life which is free of this influence.

How to use therapeutic parenting as a basis for understanding, communicating that understanding, and building the child’s capacity to develop the self despite the overshadowing of unresolved trauma is a skill rejected parents can learn.

What is Trangenerational Trauma?

The Atmosphere of Alienation in Children

2023/2020 Transgenerational Trauma:

The Atmosphere of Alienation of Children &

Unresolved Losses in the Family System

https://karenwoodall.blog/2023/04/18/transgenerational-trauma-alienation-of-children-and-unresolved-losses-in-the-family-system/

https://karenwoodall.blog/2020/04/21/the-atmosphere-of-trans-generational-alienation/

I wrote about trans-generational haunting in 2013 (Rediscovering the Lost Ones: Transgenerational Haunting and Alienation

https://karenwoodall.blog/2013/04/06/rediscovering-the-lost-ones-transgenerational-haunting-and-alienation/)

and it is this element of the work that I do, which remains the most compelling in terms of understanding how the relational trauma of divorce and separation, can let loose the ghosts which are encrypted in the family narrative.

In some cases, where a child is using the defense of psychological splitting there is a particular atmosphere which is readily recognized by experienced practitioners. While all cases of alienation in a child are marked by the child’s use of defensive splitting, some cases are marked by other additional features. The markers of trans-generational trauma are those which set these cases apart from the others.

These features are those which I wrote about in 2017 Growing Up In A World Without Windows & A Home Without Doors: Inside the Mind of the Alienated Child https://karenwoodall.blog/2017/05/03/growing-up-in-a-world-without-windows-and-a-home-without-doors-inside-the-mind-of-the-alienated-child/

and they exemplify the atmosphere of a case of trans-generational transmission of unresolved trauma which I have taken to calling Everyday Trauma and wrote about in Everyday Trauma: The Drama of the Alienated Child https://karenwoodall.blog/2019/11/11/everyday-trauma-the-drama-of-the-alienated-child/

I use the term everyday trauma to differentiate the use of trans-generational trauma transmission in families affected by divorce and separation from societal trauma. While much of the literature on trans-generational trauma transmission is from the perspective of societal traumas such as genocide, some of the more complex psychoanalytical work is focused upon the ways in which the experience of trauma in everyday life is passed through the family line like an encrypted secret. It was when I first understood how trans-generational haunting takes place, that I realized that this is what I was sensing in the atmosphere of the case of trans-generational trauma repetition.

The atmosphere of a case of induced psychological splitting in a child which is trans-generational in nature is like no other. From the outset, the things said by the children in such a case are different to other cases. What is starkly apparent, is the way in which the children’s narratives mirror that of the life stories of the parents, grandparents and sometimes great-grandparents.

It is as if the whole family lives in a world of their own and in fact, that is exactly what they do. A case of trans-generational trauma transmission, requires that anyone who is involved with the family on an intimate level, must conform to the internalized, often highly secretive narrative of the family. To be unable or unwilling to do so, demands that the person be excluded, silenced, shunned and shamed.

For practitioners, recognizing the atmosphere of this particular family dynamic, means knowing when to tread carefully and go slowly in terms of intervention.

This is because within the internalized walls of these families, within the inter-psychic subjective life of the family lies a secret.

This secret is so secret that it is either unknown by the family members, was known but is split off into the unconscious or is known and deliberately kept hidden. Depending upon whose secret it is and how far back in the generational line the secret goes, inter-psychic relationships to and with the secret will be adapted to suit the need to keep this secret.

When children are born into such families, they attach to their caregivers and inter-psychically absorb the reality that there is an encrypted secret (Salberg 2017). The secret, which is never spoken about with words, is part of the unconscious life of the growing child who will, in some situations, seek to manifest an opportunity to resolve the unresolved by recreating a scenario which is similar to the original wound. This understanding, of how a child of a parent suffering trauma, seeks to attach to every aspect of the intra-psychic experience of that caregiver, even the negative, explains how that child replicates that traumatic experience in the here and now.

It is within the atmosphere of such families that access to the unspoken and encrypted knowledge is achieved.

Bako and Zana (2020) tell us that: The instigators of the trans-generational atmosphere are the traumatized first generation, and the following generations are then drawn into the atmosphere, so the atmosphere is actually a shared intersubjective field expanded to several generations. (Page 30)

This is the atmosphere which is readily apparent in cases where fixed and fused dyadic relationships between parent and child are present and where historical patterns of loss and trauma become apparent on investigation.

This is the space in which the things are not said and not given symbolic representation (or ANY REPRESENTATION for both my daughter and myself), where the world is divided into two parts in which the trauma is frozen alongside a life which is going on in the here and now.

Entering into such spaces causes anxiety which can become unbearable for the sufferer, who will experience the threat of the loss of the intra-subjective ‘we’ which is a clinical marker for this type of case.

When this fused relational space is broken open, the projection (onto the rejected parent), onto the practitioner, of the split-off and denied danger is a defense which is designed to prevent the loss of the part of the self which is projected onto the child (Bako and Zana 2020).

It thus follows that this work is far beyond that of a contact dispute and is far beyond that of high conflict. This is the area of work which involves psychologically unwell people, where encapsulated delusional disorder is prevalent.

A case of alienation of a child can, in this context, be thought of as a defense against the disintegration of the intra-subjective life of the family or the atmosphere.

The parent who has been cast out/or who has left the family but who has refused to go away without a relationship with the child, is felt to be an interloper or intruder into the internal world of the family left behind.

In reality, when working with these families, the parent who is being rejected will often be shown to have been experiencing either rejection or inability to fit in with the family narrative for a time prior to the rejection by the child.

If we think about the birth of a child in a family affected by trans-generational transmission of trauma, as being a risk factor for the family secret to be revealed, it is easy to see why many parents are evicted from the family when they will NOT ALLOW baby to be brought up in the way which is necessary to keep the family internally regulated.

The atmosphere of alienation is suffocating, it is foggy, and it is quite often bewildering in the way that the spoken narrative is broken and not linear. The past is not another country in these families, it is happening right now, alongside the here and now and it is manifested in ways which can only be interpreted because they cannot be easily understood cognitively.

When we enter into these spaces it should be cautiously and at first reverently, because here is where a traumatic secret resides. Whilst the purpose of our work is to take the child in the here and now to a safer place, we should recognize that in doing so, someone has been badly harmed and needs help within these walls.

It may be that this tearing of the shroud which holds the secret in place will bring enough change to the family dynamic to trigger an opportunity for healing. Or it may not. This cannot be our motivating factor however because in this work it is the child in the here and now who needs our help.

Only this way will (we) I can begin to interrupt the generational march of hidden everyday trauma, caused by harm done in the past and raised to the surface by divorce and separation.

Trans-generational trauma transmission is far away from contact and conflict. It affects a group of families suffering the overall experience of alienation and it has an atmosphere unlike the others. It also requires a particular treatment route which meets the needs of the family as a whole, while protecting the child in the here and now.

If you are living this, you will know it.

If you are working with families affected by alienation, you need to know it.

2013 Rediscovering the Lost Ones;

Transgenerational Haunting and Alienation

https://karenwoodall.blog/2013/04/06/rediscovering-the-lost-ones-transgenerational-haunting-and-alienation/

"Truly the universe is full of ghosts, not sheeted churchyard specters, but the inextinguishable and immortal elements of life, which, having once been, can never die, though they blend and change and change again for ever."

–H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines

This week I have been concentrating on thinking about the area of my work with families that is truly the most fascinating, the most tragic and the most compelling in terms of developing therapeutic responses. The issue is transgenerational haunting and the way in which alienation in children is so often, in my experience, linked to this phenomenon.

Transgenerational haunting is a psychoanalytic concept which was first advanced by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok and is best described as unresolved trauma which becomes passed down through generations. These ‘encrypted secrets’, can cause children to ‘act out’ areas of their parent’s unresolved griefs, often exactly at the age that a parent experienced them.

A good example is that of a child whose father dies at the age of 11 and who grows up to become a parent, only to find that when their own child is 11, their relationship with that child is lost in some way.

It is as if there is some compulsion to repeat the past, perhaps in order to try and resolve the original wound, but in doing so, the next child is affected and the next and so the original trauma ‘haunts’ the family system.

Transgenerational haunting passes trauma through the family narrative in the form of secrets and lies and half-truths. It consists of knowing and unknowing and of unspoken things which are seen and heard but half-forgotten or buried, like treasure, or ghosts, in the unconscious. Haunting of this nature can control a family system and can cause children to carry burdens which are not theirs and it can put at risk the next generation if trauma is carried through without resolution.

For many families affected by the loss of a child through separation, one or both of the parents will, themselves have been affected by divorce and separation in their own childhood. We are now four generations from the 1973 change to the divorce laws and the same distance from the way in which our social policy was changed forever by the Finer Report in 1974. Two distinct but interlinked policy changes that created a dynamic that changed family life forever. (uk)

From the early seventies onwards, men and women who entered into marriage, (then the framework into which children were born), were free to leave it and women, who had been unable to take their children with them up to that point, were now free to do so without having to depend financially upon the father of their children.

During the seventies, the first wave of children affected by divorce grew up and scant regard was paid to the impact of that experience upon them. (Organizations such as the National Council for One Parent Families (now known as Gingerbread) UK) began to grow their services and the stigma, which had faced unmarried women previously, began to be rolled up with the issues facing women generally.

As new cultural norms were established, so were new political and legislative frameworks and soon, the idea of marriage as the precursor to family life was eradicated and made unfashionable. As Harriet Harman said, in her paper ‘The Family Way‘

“it cannot be assumed that men are bound to be an asset to family life or that the presence of fathers in families is necessarily a means to social cohesion”

And while the erosion of fatherhood began to be an accepted part of our social and cultural experience, the impact on children of this loss remained largely ignored.

The world of alienated children is a strange one to inhabit but it is one that I walk in most days of my working life. As I meet children affected by this phenomenon, I wonder what their lives would have been like had the legislation been different. In short, I am always aware, always alive to the fact that in a different time and place the issues that face alienated children would simply not have existed, or, alternatively, would exist in a different way.

This is because the alienation of children has only really become a problem since the divorce rate rocketed.

Now, the issues facing families through generations, that are linked to divorce and separation, are simply dismissed or overlooked.

There are not many therapists who are willing to step into the difficult spaces and name the problems that are wrapped up with generational family separation. Perhaps this is because of the powerful demands, (made by organizations such as Gingerbread) not to look too closely, the accusation being that in doing so we stigmatize single mothers. Confronted by this dilemma, in which the adult choices are said to outweigh the consequences for children, many therapists may back away. And yet it is in this arena that the therapist must be brave enough to work, if change is to be brought about and transgenerational haunting is to be addressed.

When I work with families affected by alienation one of the first assessment tasks, I undertake is a comparative family tree and an analysis of the family narrative. What I am looking for in doing this work are the ‘encrypted secrets’ that cause the alienation, the unresolved trauma that lead to compulsion repetition.

It is often not long before I find these secrets, in fact they are often shouting off the page before I even get beyond one generation prior to the family I am working with. Most of these traumas are to do with the loss of a parent through divorce and separation. Most of the parents that I work with have, themselves, as children, lost a parent or experience themselves, the withdrawal from a parent.

I have lost count now of the number of times, in one of our parental alienation workshops, a parent will say, with utter disbelief upon their faces, ‘I have just realized that I was alienated from my own mother/father.’ That this could remain unknown on a deep feelings level, even when it is consciously known, is something of a mystery.

But it is clear to me that this is to do with the way in which we do not, as a society, yet pay enough attention to the damage that divorce and separation does, not only to our children as children, but to the parents that our children will one day become.

Unraveling this narrative, digging up these encrypted secrets and sitting with an alienated parent as witness, is one of the key elements of the work that I do. And when it is done, it is astounding how swiftly resolution can take place, even to the point of spontaneous reunification with a lost child, seemingly unrelated to the resolved trauma but too coincidental to ignore.

There are at least four generations now of lost children and lost parents, all of whom have been affected by divorce and separation, the trauma impact of which is missing from our cultural narrative. It is this lack of attention in our culture which is, in my view, the cause of those ‘encrypted secrets’ and generational trauma.

It is as if, without speaking of the impact of the separation on children, we hope to expunge ourselves of the guilt and shame that can be caused when one looks closer.

But our lack of words, our lack of attention to the impact has, instead, driven the trauma underground. Only to have it erupt again and again in our children’s lives when they become parents and then our grandchildren’s lives as generation after generation struggles with divorce and separation.

Our lost generations of children, are scarred by divorce and separation from a loved parent and those scars are, in my view, our responsibility. We may not be able to put the genie back in the bottle and return to the times when marriage was a lifetime’s commitment, but we can (and in my opinion should) take responsibility for recognizing and understanding the ways in which our adult freedoms have impacted upon our children’s life chances. And most of all we should be big enough and wise enough to carry our own burdens, so that our children do not have to.

Learning to take responsibility for the way in which our own decisions to separate affect our children and protecting them from the loss of a parent after divorce requires us to understand and accept the impact that such actions have. And in accepting that we take responsibility for it and in doing so we give voice to the reality for children instead of scarring them by driving their experience underground.

Unspoken wounds fester and unresolved loss and trauma returns, generation after generation until it is resolved.

Until our legislation is changed so that those who govern our lands accept the state-sanctified damage that has been done and makes reparations, it is incumbent upon those therapists who work with transgenerational trauma to speak up and speak out.

For children who have no words, our voices may be the only hope they have.

Rediscovering the Lost Ones

2019 Living in a World Without Windows in a House Without Doors

https://karenwoodall.blog/2019/11/27/living-in-a-world-without-windows-in-a-house-without-doors/

I first wrote about growing up in a world without windows in 2017. The focus of this piece being the way that the alienated child grows up enmeshed with the influencing parent in an almost cult-like existence. (link Amy Baker's related research)

As I continue my research, I see the impact this has upon adults who were alienated as children and the way in which their capacity to define the boundaries of the self is compromised.

The psychological impact of growing up in isolation from the outside world while being intimately acquainted with the private lives of parents and grandparents causes long-lasting harm.

Haydee Fairnberg (2005), in her exploration of how trauma is transmitted through families, speaks of ‘the telescoping of the generations’ when she describes the way that families collapse the internal hierarchical awareness of the system within which they live.

This has been my experience in working with the most severe cases of alienation, that there exists within these families, a malfunction of structure which means that children are born into a family which keeps its curtains closed against the outside world and its doors open within that secret space.

It has also been my experience that in these isolated, closed-off places, there lies a secret.

There is a reason the windows are shuttered against the outside world, it is because within, there are no doors, no barriers, no boundaries to keep children safe.

...........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

When children come to assessment being able to tell everything about their parents (the sex life) - or M telling and explaining to the school WHY SHE NEEDED an ACTUAL Order of Protection INSTEAD of an Harassment Order THEN EXPLAINED THE DIFFERENCE and WHY it was the OFP SHE NEEDED - of their parents and in some cases their grandparents too, there is grave danger.

Throwing the windows wide open on cases like these often reveals sexual abuse in the form of normalized incestuous relationships, which take place in plain sight, while others in the family home look the other way. (Childress speaks of this same thing)

(from comments)

27 Nov 2019

Gosh Karen, This sent chills down my spine, it follows my families case to the tee. My ex-husband tried isolating us constantly and he would even say ‘I just want you by my side, I just want our little family together with the shutters pulled down’ he said it as a guise of love and seduction. He said it often and as my spell wore off I found those comments sickening. The enmeshed relationship goes between him and his Father (the Grandfather) and my eldest daughter is now a privileged member.
Willow, I thought of you particularly as your case also follows this description. But Karen, I wanted to clarify on your comment “sexual abuse in the form of normalized incestuous relationships,” so are you saying sexual abuse has physically taken place with the alienated child or do you mean the sharing of intimate information is sexual abuse in its incestuous blur of boundaries?
1. karenwoodall, 28 Nov 2019
  
  Hi HF, what I am saying is that sometimes in cases of this nature there has been sexual abuse which has not been revealed or dealt with by the person suffering it, in other situations it is emotional incest in blurring of the boundaries. I have been reading a French psychoanalysis Ancelin Schutzenberger recently whose work was groundbreaking in understanding how incest in all forms (sexual abuse of children, incestuous relationships between family members and emotional incest, causes the same impact in the body – anismus, which is a traumatic freezing of the digestive tract causing constipation and IBS and other such issues). It seems to me that in these families without windows, which have no boundaries within them, the same impact on children occurs. Ancelin Schutzenberger describes anismus as a splitting of the function of the brain which allows healthy digestion so that the gut receives two messages at the same time – hold on/effort to let go. It seems to me that what we are looking at in these families – be it sexual abuse, incestuous relationships or emotional incest in the form of spousification or parentification, all cause exactly the same problem and alienation/splitting is the core of this.

.....................................................................................................................

These are particular types of alienation cases and the more I have done this work over the years, working directly with alienated children and families and now researching their therapeutic needs, the more I recognize that alienation is not one homogenous experience.

Like cancer, alienation can be graded and staged. From the cases which are trans-generational in nature, to the child who is rejecting a parent because of the action/reaction dynamic which triggers splitting accidentally, this experience is not one simple formulaic presentation, which means that just like oncologists, those of us who work with families where a child is rejecting, must define and refine our treatment routes. Giving morphine to a patient who is not dying, will kill that patient or at least make him very sick. Refusing morphine to the patient in severe pain is a cruel act.

"Giving morphine to a patient who is not dying,

will kill that patient or at least make him very sick.

Refusing morphine to the patient in severe pain is a cruel act."

Therefore, as practitioners we cannot behave as if every case of alienation is the same because to do so is to fail the child and fail the family miserably. Intervention in parental alienation is in its infancy, now is the time to build new routes to meet the wide spectrum of needs seen in these families.

In the world without windows and house without doors, the cancer of alienation is stage 4 and spreading. It is incredibly toxic and very infectious.

To enter into these homes is dangerous for the practitioner because the purpose of the inward-looking, open boundaries is to:

A.) keep the outside world away and B.) ensure that everyone lives with the same fear-based awareness that something must be kept secret.

Anyone who has married into such a family will soon know that they are not welcome when they try to throw open the windows and close the doors. The internalized workings of the family cannot allow this exposure and so the person who attempts to bring fresh air must be put at the margin of the family. Eventually, they will find themselves shunned.

The practitioner in this space will find the alienation dynamic turned against them as triangulation, which comes in the form of disguised denigration, begins to work a particularly poisonous kind of magic.

Disguised denigration is a dynamic seen in alienation and it is based upon triangulation, a concept introduced by Murray Bowen.

Triangulation manipulates people who feel unsafe and is used by people who want to gain and maintain control.

It is activated by the manipulator who triangulates a person not present into a situation with another who feels unstable or unsafe.

It can also be used to prove to the person who feels unsafe, that the third person not present is harmful.

Disguised denigration is part of this process and it shows itself through a process of engineering rivalry between two people, one of whom is not present.

Disguised denigration is perpetrated by the expression of outward support but which on analysis can be seen to be a covert attempt to create anxiety in one person and outrage in the other.

When disguised denigration is at play, the practitioner feels it in the same way as the rejected parent feels it.

One of the most powerful signs of disguised denigration which occurs in cases of alienation is when the practitioner comes close to the understanding the truth of the alienation dynamic and how it occurs in a family.

This is when the outward expressions of disbelief and shock from the person causing the alienation to escalate.

It is also the exact point at which the drama culminates because it is when the alienator shows his/her hand.

When you see protestations of innocence and benign intent from the alienator, in a case where you have worked out how it happened, you know that the reverse intention is true.

This is when the campaign of disguised denigration will reach its height.

What follows is formulaic in how it unfolds:

The goal of this behavior is to control people in authority to ensure that they do not allow the practitioner to expose the dynamic.

To understand how this happens, the practitioner must look at the people who hold authority in the drama and watch how they are affected in the relationship they have with the practitioner who is going to expose the secret. (In most cases this will be the Judge, the Guardian and perhaps Social Workers.)

If there is a cutting off of communication between the practitioner and these people, meaning that the healthy flow between those who can rectify the problem is nullified, the alienation against the practitioner in the case is being triggered as a defense against exposure.

Triangulation is how this is done.

Evidence that this is in play is cutting off communication and splitting.

Practitioners need to be aware at every level of the dangers of being in these houses because the greatest danger is always just before the villain of the piece is unmasked.

The harm done to the practitioner, when the covert intent of the alienator, which is to protect the secret within the self, is the same as the harm done to the rejected parent.

The outcome is that the power to expose and cleanse is neutralized and the practitioner becomes the recipient of all of the negative transference – ie blame.

When this occurs, the triangulation has done its work and alienation is complete.

The family in the house without windows can continue on its way without disturbance and the monstrous is projected outwards onto the practitioner who tried to help.

This is a clever tactic which is narcissistic in nature, and which acts in itself as a splitting technique to ensure that the bad parts of the family are always projected outside.

This happens in families, and it happens in groups where alienators are present and if you are going to be Columbo in this world without windows and house without doors, you must be aware of the possibility of this happening to you each and every time you get close to the reality of how it happened.

That is why rejected parents in these types of alienation cases are evicted without mercy.

That is why it is dangerous to do this work.

Opening the windows and closing the doors is what is necessary to rebuild a family affected by this type of trans-generational trauma.
Knowing the issue from the inside out allows us to see it, feel it and speak the truth of it regardless of the consequences.
Because children in those isolated houses depend upon us to feel the fear and do it anyway.

World Without Windows

2016 There’s a Ghost in My House

https://karenwoodall.blog/2016/10/21/theres-a-ghost-in-my-house/

End of another week at the Clinic and time for me to reflect upon the work I have been doing internally as well as in the outside world. Life as a therapist is spent in the mirror of other people’s experiences as well as in contemplation of the lessons being presented by the universe (whatever one conceives that to mean).

Rarely am I content to simply allow life to be, but I am learning, helped by my own therapy and by the supervision which keeps me grounded, to live with letting life decide when and how to bowl the balls.

The better I get at getting out of the way, the more I come to know that life is lived within scripts that are handed down to us as children. Letting go of those scripts means learning to live with the ghosts in my house instead of trying to exorcise them.

Ghosts are present at the birth of every child when, as the mother is crowned with her new mantle and father is born with the child, the learnings and lessons and laughter and tears of the people long gone, are made and manifest again.

With each new child are reborn the generations long gone. In the remembering, the songs, the swaddlings and the rocking of the cradle come the ghosts of the past. Within the pregnant body of the mother to be, lies dormant her own experience of being mothered and grandmothered and great-grandmothered.

Within the expectations of the father, lies the learnings passed down from great, to grand, to father. Each ghost leaves its imprint, stronger in some places, weaker in others.

When the ghosts in the nursery meet, over the head of the newly born child, an alchemical change occurs as the parents in the here and now grapple with the ghosts and bring them into a new generational line.

When that alchemical change is successful, gold appears. When it fails, disaster strikes and the eruptions from the unconscious life of the most dominant family, brings forth the ghosts and the demons that have lain buried beneath.

Here then, is that place of transgenerational haunting, where the ghosts in the nursery overwhelm the here and now and the child, born at the right time but in the wrong place, becomes co-opted by the ghosts into the script that was written a long time ago.

Families are peculiar institutions. Some are fixed and unbending with rules that divide the people within them and others are diffuse and without boundaries, where everyone blends into one.

Life within the four walls of any family is an interesting topic, life within my own family is, for me, something akin to an archeological dig, endlessly fascinating and always turning up new treasures.

Working in this field is made all the more fascinating for me because of my long-term interest in the psychodynamics of the family.

Listening to the words not said is as rich in content as any spoken word and how the family flows and plays together as well as how the family does conflict together or apart, speaks volumes.

Excavating the scripts through which a family operates is one of the key ways we understand how alienation in a child occurs.

Hearing the voices of the ghosts in the nursery tells us much about how the family navigates conflict and change and where the bodies are buried. In alienation cases, it is incredibly rare to find alienating behaviors only in the horizontal plane of existence (here and now) and very common to find them in the vertical life of the family (the lives of previous generations).

Learning to let the ghosts in the house whisper the scripts which are driving the alienation in a child, is a particular skill.

People in families do not live largely in the conscious world but the unconscious and it is in the unconscious where the ghosts come out to play.

And when they do, repeating patterns, especially in families where the attempt to blend two tribes into a new one fails, come rushing up into the here and now to cause chaos.

In many of the families I work with, generational patterns of estrangement are very apparent.

How a family deals with conflict, through cutting someone out and sending them to Coventry, though not speaking to someone for decades at a time and through avoiding the reality of the unspoken by ignoring or avoiding it, is passed down through generations.

The dominant force in the couple relationship will bring their own ghosts to the party, thus a man whose own family tree contains no estrangements and normal relationships, might marry a woman whose history is full of those things.

He then must wrestle with her ghosts and if she is more powerful (and the troubled people usually are), then he must capitulate and live life by her script.

The same is true in the reverse when men take control and force women whose lives were previously untroubled by conflict, to live in a world where conflict and chaos are rife.

Children born to such unions will inherit that felt sense of conflict and danger and so goes the march of the next generation.

Which leaves us with what when we consider these families (2016)? Well, it leaves us with ghosts and with whispers and silences, it leaves us with glances and voices half-heard in the stillness It leaves us with fragments of truths which surround the children (we work with: and it leaves us with this:

We cannot remove from the life of the child, those ghosts which are haunting the here and now. We can only learn to work with them.
We cannot evacuate the nursery and start over again with clean sheets and fresh scripts, we can only bring resilience and strength to the children who live there.
We can educate, excavate and illuminate the dark spaces within the family so that the children can see better the ghosts that attempt to seduce them and we can build up the strength of the parent who can better protect them.
But we cannot get rid of those ghosts. We cannot remove them completely. To do so would be to remove the reality of the life that the child is born into and we are not god.
My work with alienated children increasingly tells me that whatever we do (and we can do much) to help, we can never get rid of the ghosts, but we can turn up the light so their impact is weaker.
We cannot silence their voices but we can turn down the volume.
And we can teach children the skills that ensures that when they become mother and father, the alchemical struggle brings gold and not ghosts.

There's a Ghost in My House

Anatomy of Alienation

2018 Anatomy of Alienation:

Mapping the Unconscious in Unjustified Rejection

https://karenwoodall.blog/2018/06/25/anatomy-of-alienation-mapping-the-unconscious-in-unjustified-rejection/

One of the biggest issues in cases of parental alienation is the manner in which the unconscious life of the family carries the secrets that cause the problem of alienation.

In that sense, parental alienation can be regarded as being part of the anatomy of the family, carried forward by each generation as if it were a dormant infection. Some, like Childress for example, like to call this phenomenon the ‘pathogen’. I prefer to think of it as an embedded secret that is handed down through the generations and which is activated in its power to alienate if the dynamics are right.

I have written about this many times over the years and you can read what I wrote in 2013 about trans-generational haunting and in 2016

(2018) The idea that parental alienation is not something which is distinct and different to other familial dynamics is promulgated by those who believe that it could be easily eradicated. (In my experience), far from it being easily eradicated, parental alienation is something akin to a physical disease like cancer which may never be eradicated but will be increasingly treated by improvements in medical research and trials.

****per She Has a Mother. (in 2022 Parental Alienation Anonymous defined Alienation as being a FAMILY DISEASE (get link for this....) Other diseases evolved over-time, such as when The American Medical Association (AMA) classified Alcoholism as a DISEASE in 1956 and included Addiction as a DISEASE in 1987. In 2011 the American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) joined the AMA, defining Addiction as a chronic brain disorder, not a behavioral problem, or just the result of making bad choices. (https://tinyurl.com/yw28u58d)

I often feel that parental alienation, which is the outward manifestation of the activation of the ‘secret’ which has been passed down the family line, is a cancer of the unconscious life of the family which will increasingly be understood and treated through ongoing research and development of the work which has been done by others.

In our work at the Clinic, we map the conscious and unconscious life of the family in a forensic assessment which focuses upon finding those embedded secrets, which appear as life events in the history of the family, sometimes going back as far as three or four generations.

We do this by building a three-dimensional family tree in which we begin with THE PRESENTING CHILD and work backwards as far as we can to understand FROM EACH PARENT, the narratives which govern their lives.

In doing so we encounter the ghosts in the nursery, first of all, those stories told around the crib of the newly born generation. It is through these tales from the past that we begin to unravel the mystery of the child’s rejecting behaviors in the present.

Here is a very simple map of the conscious and unconscious dynamics in a case of parental alienation. Most cases are far more complex than this, but this case shows how the ‘secret’ in the past can lead to alienation in the present.

Our encounter with the child who is using rejection of a parent after separation tells us that the child is defending against something. This is what first alerts us to the reality that this is a case of parental alienation.

If our investigation then shows us that there is nothing which could be regarded as justified in the child’s rejection and the child is showing the signs of alienation which are only ever seen in situations where a child is being pressured by dynamics, which have been configured somewhere in the family system, then we must dig deeper to understand what is happening to the child.

On the surface, we can see that the mother is being rejected and the father is saying that this is because "she could not meet Billy’s needs".

Father is further supported by his own father and together the two of them present as a fused dyad in which the narrative of "lack of capacity in mother" is strongly promoted. Indeed, mother looks like she is struggling to cope, she is underconfident and anxious during presentation. Billy echoes his father and grandfather and tells stories of how "his mother did not" feed him properly and how "she" neglected him.

The alienation-aware practitioner hears this conscious story and begins to dig deeper into the history of the family. Knowing that Billy is using rejection because of psychological splitting means that further investigation on both sides of the family is necessary.

"The alienation-aware practitioner KNOWS

further investigation on BOTH SIDES

of the FAMILY IS NECESSARY"

Hearing father and grandfather’s history, the hypothesis that in father’s childhood world, his mother went missing through death, leads to consideration of attachment trauma in which Billy’s father is compelled to repeat the untold and unresolved story of his childhood through his son, by causing his son to lose his mother in the here and now.

Further investigation on mother’s side shows that her dwindling confidence is the result of her long battle with Billy’s father, the lack of support in family services around her, and her own parents’ frustration with her inability to protect her relationship with her son.

In mapping the unconscious of this family, we can see that the ‘secret’ is the impact on Billy’s father and grandfather of the sudden unexpected death of Billy’s grandmother when his father was 9 years old. This death, which Billy’s father had never been able to grieve, lay dormant in his unconscious until the death/divorce of his relationship with Billy’s mother, which created immense shock and grief because it came as a surprise. This shock triggered the unresolved grief from the death of his mother and the subsequent entry into the belief that Billy’s mother could not meet Billy’s needs, was actually the eruption of the unprocessed grief and loss of the past, fused with the unattended and neglected parts of the child within. The person whose needs had not been met was Billy’s father and the person who had not met those needs because she died was Billy’s grandmother.

Mapping the unconscious is all very well but it leaves us with a question. If it is not Billy whose needs are not being met and it is not Billy’s mother who is not meeting his needs and if parental alienation in this case is a trans-generational trauma re-enactment,

WHAT DO WE DO about it given that Billy has been handed the responsibility for carrying this myth forward?

Given that Billy is adamant that he will not see his mother and given that Family Court (CAFCASS, UK) considers that parental alienation is all about high conflict and so only really focuses on the superficial presentation and given that social workers rarely understand how a child’s wishes and feelings can be manipulated by a parent,

HOW DO WE, reconfigure the dynamics which have caused this problem in the first place?

This is the work we are engaged in at the Family Separation Clinic, where we are building internationally recognized standards of intervention which liberate the child swiftly.

You can find out the answers to the questions above at the EAPAP 2018 Conference on August 30/31st where we will, alongside our esteemed colleagues, be presenting case studies of reunification work in severe alienation cases and where leading experts will be demonstrating the legal and mental health interlock which brings about resolution for alienated children and their families. Working alongside parent representatives, this conference brings together a unique opportunity for developing new routes to resolution which meet the needs of different European legislative frameworks. This conference is being attended by leading Judiciary from around Europe as well as key legal people, policy makers and practitioners. Here is where experience power meets research and practitioner expertise to create dynamic change.

Parental alienation is a cancer which affects families around the globe, but it can and is being beaten, here in the UK, across Europe, in the USA and Australia as well as South America and many other countries. All by using similar protocols, all drawing upon the extensive research evidence curated around the world by experts dedicated to changing the lives of children affected by divorce and separation.

COMMENTS

So obvious when written like that. It’s something I finally worked out for myself after I left my adult daughter and husband to it. The mapping for our family would be very similar to your diagram above. I’m glad I found your site because it helped me to understand ‘the why’ of it all. I can so relate to what you’ve written above.

A picture can say a thousand words, as the family diagram above does. And did so for me also – was troubled in so many ways, but I never put it together as clearly as when I drew a simple family tree.

Like many who post here, it was not just me who was severed, but the rest of my family. ….

Only a few years ago I decided to noodle a family tree. And there it was – the forest that had been hidden behind the trees for so long. I took a magic marker to the diagram and drew three X’s – removing not just those people from the tree, but all associated with them. Generations of grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins. All were neatly severed, and none of them ever healed.

Karen – your description of the “secret” is one that has always struck a cord with me. Oh, could they keep their secrets! And it explains how even today they have closed ranks to keep their secrets, regardless of the damage and misery it visits upon so many.

The realization that circumstances from our past lives does flow into and influence present-day lives.