2022 What Lies Beneath: Working With a Clinical Understanding of Children’s Alignment and Rejection Behavior

https://karenwoodall.blog/2022/11/22/what-lies-beneath-working-with-a-clinical-understanding-of-childrens-alignment-and-rejection-behaviour/

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My work as a Psychotherapist in the Family Courts is about enabling children, who are imprisoned in the dynamics seen when internal parental conflicts become uncontained, to integrate the split state of mind and move back into a relationship with a loved parent they have been forced to reject.

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Finding out how that child has come to suffer from psychological splitting, seen when a child hyper-aligns and rejects with contempt and disdain, is the first task we undertake when we are brought into a family court case.

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Building a treatment route which is based upon child protection principles is the way we intervene.

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Assessment and Differentiation

 

(Woodall is a Psychotherapist in the Family Courts. Her Family Separation Clinic work is the FSC Model spoken about in this article.) When I am instructed in a case, it is after evaluation by a Psychiatrist or Clinical Psychologist.

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The Clinic does not accept cases for interventions where assessments have been undertaken by any other type of psychologist, including Counselling Psychologists or Educational Psychologists.

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This is because in the cases of serious harm we are involved in, children’s alignment and rejection behavior, is most often, the result of harm arising from psychopathology.

 

..... As Counselling Psychologists use a sociological framework for analysis and work with adjustment problems.

..... and Educational Psychologists use an educational framework for analysis and work with children and young people in learning situations.

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and neither of these psychologists have the experience to identify, isolate and diagnose the historical impact of patterns of pathological behavior seen in the influence of children.

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In my experience, in cases where children align and reject a parent, the analysis has to be within a framework of understanding and identifying psychopathology within the family system, and as such only a Psychiatrist or Clinical Psychologist has the special expertise required to do this.

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The FSC intervention, which is currently under evaluation, is used in serious cases of psychological and emotional harm of children in the High Court in England & Wales, Republic of Ireland and Hong Kong.

 

In the current climate of arguments about who should do this work, it is worth making it clear that our interventions do not rely upon Parental Alienation Theory or Domestic Abuse/ Feminist Theory, both of which are framed around the rights of parents.

 

Instead, our work as psychotherapists, rests upon the psychoanalytical approach called Object Relations Theory. In doing so, we place the lived experience of the child at the heart of everything we do, while working within an understanding of how parental psychopathology impacts upon the child’s adjustment and maladaptations in divorce and separation.

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Theoretical Theories in the Field of Children’s Alignment and Rejection Behaviours​

 

Domestic Abuse/Feminist Theory, argues that the notion that a child can be influenced to reject a parent is abusive in itself unless it is a father influencing the child to reject a parent, in which case that is called coercive control.

 

In DA/Feminist Theory, no mother can be considered to have influenced a child to reject a parent and all such claims are made by abusive fathers as a defence against domestic abuse.

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Parental Alienation Theory says that this is a mental disorder in the child, which is said to be caused by high-conflict divorce and uses eight signs, five factors and seventeen alienating strategies to evidence the presence of parental alienation.

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Resist/Refuse Dynamics is the term used by the AFCC which considers the problem to be systemic, arguing that to polarise the issue by identifying psychopathology in a parent is to undermine the route to resolution.

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ABPA is an attachment-based grounding of the problem developed by Dr Childress who considers that this is triggered by psychopathology in a parent.

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The FSC model, (Woodall's work. The FSC intervention, which is currently under evaluation, is used in serious cases of psychological and emotional harm of children in the High Court in England & Wales, Republic of Ireland and Hong Kong.) considers that alignment and rejection behaviors are the onset of primitive defenses in the child who is overwhelmed by the dynamics in the family.

The child’s resolution of the trauma caused by their experience of these dynamics, (which are impossible for the child to resolve due to their lack of power in the family system), is caused by the onset of the primitive defenses of denial, splitting, and projection, which causes the child to display symptoms of hyper-alignment with one parent and rejection of the other.

This, however, is NOT the true problem for the child because this is a projection. The true problem for the child is that the resolution of the problem rests upon a splitting of the ego or sense of self.

We argue, that this is the reason why a child who aligns and rejects in this way suffers harm. Splitting of the ego or sense of self is not easily or quickly resolved, leading to a lasting relational trauma which impacts over the lifetime.

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Theoretical Background to the FSC Model

Using Object Relations Theory (ORT) to understand the experience of the child in divorce and separation, it is possible to recognize the harm that is done to children when they experience the crisis of family separation. The eruption of uncontained dynamics between parents or from one parent directing these at the other is seen in ORT within the context of the principle that external relationships build internalized representations of those relationships. It follows in this model, that any disturbance in the external relational world, will disrupt the internal sense of relational safety and dependability, causing a child to adapt and maladapt their behaviors due to defense mechanisms.

 

Defense Mechanisms

Defense Mechanisms are defined as being unconscious strategies that people use to cope with feelings that are overwhelming for them. People use defense mechanisms to separate themselves from difficult and painful feelings.

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The concept of defense mechanisms comes from psychoanalytic theory, a psychological perspective of personality first proposed by Sigmund Freud. This theory has evolved and supposes that defenses are not under our conscious control. According to psychoanalytic theory, defense mechanisms are a natural part of psychological development and many people will experience them over a lifetime.

 

Defenses and Childhood Relational Trauma

There are several defense mechanisms, some of which are infantile in nature and called primitive defenses, and some of which are more sophisticated. The major defenses seen in childhood are infantile in nature, this is because as children, it is common to regress to earlier stages of development when under psychological or emotional pressure from trauma. (M had started sucking her thumb again at some point around age 8 - 8-1/2 during the 2nd time we were not allowed to see each other for another more year+ again)
 

Primitive (infantile) Defences

The primitive (infantile) defenses are Denial, Splitting and Projection, these are the mechanisms by which we are able to defend against intolerable feelings.

Denying those feelings and splitting them off or separating them out from our conscious thoughts, means that we do not have to feel the internal conflicts that arise when we are psychologically overwhelmed.

Splitting feelings off from conscious awareness means that the sense of self or ego, becomes split and the internal integrity of our map of relationships becomes fractured. When we are no longer conscious of our split-off conflicted feelings, we will begin to see them in other people, as we project them onto other people. Projection is a defense mechanism which causes us to see in others what we cannot tolerate in ourselves. The projection is a throwing out of our difficult feelings onto others, in which we see in other people, what we cannot see in ourselves.

 

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Treatment Routes

In situations where children display primitive defenses of denial, splitting and projection, our first task is to identify how this occurred, which means examining whether and where psychopathology exists in the family system.

FSC considers that it is the presence of patterns of behaviors which are seen in people with psychological profiles of concern, which pressure the child or induce the onset of psychological splitting as a defense.

In all of the serious cases of emotional and psychological abuse of a child in which the Clinic has been involved in, a parent has been seen to have a pathological profile which has triggered the onset of the defense of splitting in the child. These cases, which are currently being evaluated, have involved the removal of the child from the harm which is caused by a parent AFTER many months/years of evaluation by a psychiatrist or clinical psychologist.

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When the onset of the defense of psychological splitting has been mapped, structural interventions to relieve the psychological pressure upon the child (which is many cases mirrors the psychological control which is seen in adult to adult coercive control situations), are undertaken.

 

When the psychological pressure upon the child to use the defense of splitting is relieved, the underlying attachment-focused therapeutic work can take place.

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FSC recognises that it is not possible to use any form of generic therapy to resolve the child’s rejection and to attempt to do so is to risk further harm to the child. This is because therapy in circumstances where a child is held captive to the power a parent holds over them, is to simply replicate the dynamic which causes harm in the first place.    

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In the current climate around the world, in which one theory is pitched against the other and many hours are being spent defending theories or trying to prove them, we consider that it is vital that we do not lose sight of the fact that this is a child mental health problem which is being hidden by what we consider to be manufactured adult battles for ‘truth’.

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We, therefore, continue to do this work, both to resolve the problem for children and to build evidence based treatment routes which work for children. Despite the lurid headlines and the constant claims and counter claims, FSC work continues, because what lies beneath this manufactured fight, is the wellbeing of another generation of children. And that, beyond all else, is what matters most of all.