(THIS ENTIRE ARTICLE IS FULLY IN THE POEMS) (Find article where Karen describes what the PA Abuse is!)
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Shadowlands:
The Intra-Psychic Experience of the Alienated Child
One of the manifestations of induced psychological splitting is the manner in which the child’s capacity to recall events in a normal manner is interfered with. This is due to the way in which the brain develops and the manner in which the child affected by alienation dynamics, is caused to rely upon parts of the brain which are govern fear-based reactions.
In my work with alienated children, I am able to see at close hand the way in which a child experiences distorted incoming information, on many occasions being convinced that the rejected is parent is angry or being unpleasant when in fact they are not and are witnessed as being the opposite of that by others.
Distortion of incoming experience in a child is described by the father of attachment theory John Bowlby as follows –
"In the emotionally detached children described earlier and also, I believe, in adults who have developed the kind of personality that Winnicott (1960) describes as ‘false self’ and Kohut (1977) as ‘narcissistic’, the information being blocked off is of a very special type. So far from its being the routine exclusion of irrelevant and potentially distracting information that we engage in all the time and that is readily reversible, what are being excluded in these pathological conditions are the signals, arising from both inside and outside the person, that would activate their attachment behaviors and that would enable them both to love and to experience being loved. In other words, the mental structures responsible for routine selective exclusion are being employed — one might say exploited — for a special and potentially pathological purpose. This form of exclusion I refer to — for obvious reasons — as defensive exclusion, which is, of course, only another way of describing repression." Bowlby (1980).
In those cases where alienated children are unable to hear, see, or experience the love that the parent they have rejected is giving, the repression or suppression (the difference is repression is unconscious and suppression is conscious) of the attachment bond is caused by the power held over the child via the actions of the alienating parent, actions which may look like love but which in fact are an act of interpersonal violence.
These acts of interpersonal violence however are difficult to detect because of the way they are covertly enacted. When the power of a parent dominates, suffocates, and ultimately dislocates a child from their capacity to develop a healthy sense of self and personality, violence doesn’t look like hitting, hurting, or breaking the child’s legs, it looks like care and attention and the child looks like a picture of devotion to the parent they are aligned to.
It is that picture of devotion which requires a closer look however, because what looks like devotion on the outside is, in the shadowlands inhabited by these children, something very different indeed.
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Ferenczi (1933) found evidence that children who are terrified by adults who are out of control will “subordinate themselves like automata to the will of the aggressor to divine each one of his desires and to gratify these; completely oblivious of themselves they identify themselves with the aggressor…. The weak and undeveloped personality reacts to sudden unpleasure not by defense, but by anxiety-ridden identification and by introjection of the menacing person or aggressor” Frankel (2002)
*****************************************************FIND THE ABUSE ARTICLE!!!
In working with these children, I see them acting out the position of both victim and aggressor. Victim in that they have been separated from their normal healthy attachment to a parent via attachment threat and aggressor in that they mimic the lack of empathic response to the rejected parent who is already devalued and dismissed in the inter-psychic (between two psyches) relational world.
Having been traumatically overwhelmed, the child becomes hypnotically transfixed by the aggressor’s wishes and behaviors, automatically identifying by mimicry rather than by a purposeful identification with the aggressor’s role. To expand upon Fernenzi’s observations, identification with the aggressor can be understood as a two-stage process.
- The first stage is automatic and initiated by trauma, - the second is defensive and purposeful. While identification with the aggressor begins as an automatic organismic process, with repeated activation and use, gradually it becomes a defensive process. Broadly as a dissociative defense, it has two enacted relational parts, the part of the victim and the part of the aggressor. Howell (2014)
Put simply, the child having been threatened with abandonment by the behaviors of the alienating parent in shunning, threatening, silencing, ignoring, and withdrawing of love and affection, develops a defense of splitting the self in order to comply with the instruction(s) to comply ‘or else.’ In complying, the child is a victim who then takes up the cause alongside the alienator and becomes the perpetrator via the repression of normal empathic responses to the parent they are now killing off in the inter-psychic world.
************IN POEM...FIND THIS!
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This is less narcissistic than psychopathic in terms of what the child is being forced to do although the child is neither (in my opinion). The child is simply trapped and bonded traumatically to the parent causing the fear of abandonment. The impact however, in terms of the child’s brain, is to increase related fear-based responding and shuffle memories due to the way in which the dependency on each of these important centers in the brain are in development. In my view it is this which leads to the strange behaviors seen in alienated children who can flip back and forth between normal and abnormal relating and who can ‘remember’ things completely upside down and back to front.
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NOTE: THIS ARTICLE IS FROM 2019: Having spent a decade (2019) or more in the shadowlands with alienated children, I can attest to the topsy-turvy nature of this world and the urgent need to understand and shine the lights much brighter upon it.