Parental alienation is routinely missed, misdiagnosed, and mismanaged by professionals who do not specialize in it. To the great detriment to children, non-specialists make findings in an alienation case that are not merely wrong, but are backwards.
Backwards findings in an alienation case means that the alienating parent, who is psychologically abusing the child, is found to be the protective parent; and the alienated parent, who is the protective parent, is found to be an abusive parent.
Steven Miller, MD (2013) explains why non-specialists in alienation get the dynamics so profoundly backwards:
“Cases of severe alienation are likely to be highly counterintuitive. Clinicians who attempt to manage them without adequate skills are likely to find themselves presiding over a cascade of clinical and psychosocial disasters.” (p. 11)
Alienation is so profoundly counterintuitive that non-specialists typically make a multiplicity of erroneous findings that are catastrophic for the abused alienated child.
Compounding the probability that non-specialists will almost always make backwards findings is that they tend to give unjustified weight to findings that had been informed primarily, in not exclusively, by their intuitive reasoning.
Intuitive reasoning means using one’s instincts or gut reaction to determine if someone is reporting accurately, truthfully, and fully.
How contraindicated for the safety of children to rely upon findings have been informed primarily by intuitive reasoning in a counterintuitive clinical condition!
I cite here some of the more counterintuitive issues arising in alienation cases.
A Practitioner Licensed in Any Mental Health Discipline Is Assumed to be Qualified to Render opinions in Cases of Parental Alienation
Almost nothing could be further from the truth. And nothing could be so catastrophically incorrect for an alienated child.
In order to render accurate opinions in an alienation case, one needs to be a specialist – and not merely an expert – in alienation.
Just as the medical field is comprised of various specializations and sub-specializations within the discipline of medical practice (e.g. the orthopedist who specializes in the hand, the knee, or the hip, etc.), alienation is a sub-specialty within the discipline of family therapy, which is a specialized discipline within the field of mental health.
In order for a physician to practice in their respective specializations and sub-specializations, the physician must acquire years of additional training, education, and experience beyond the requirements needed to obtain a medical license.
As with the sub-specialist in a medical condition, for a clinician to be qualified as a specialist in alienation, the clinician must obtain additional specialized training, education, and experience beyond the requirements for their primary mental health license.
Family therapy’s specialized knowledge base – which, of note, conflicts in fundamental ways with the knowledge base of every other mental health discipline – is why the discipline of Marriage and Family Therapist has been licensed as a protected title in all 50 states.
Underscoring the exceedingly specialized nature of parental alienation, Dr. Miller (2013) writes:
“Cases of severe alienation often exceed the expertise of highly skilled practitioners unless their special expertise includes treatment of severe child alignment, treatment of severe mental illness, and treatment of severe personality disorders … In addition, one must have extensive experience, outstanding intuition, and sophisticated clinical skills.” (P. 11)
The Alienating Parent Likely Suffers Psychopathology But is Deemed to Be Healthy by Non-Specialists
Research finds that severely alienating parents almost surely have one or more personality disorders.
Someone with a personality disorder has an uncanny ability to mimic normal behavior and are experts at impression management.
Because alienating parents present deceptively well, non-specialists counterintuitively deem them to be healthy and to be a protective parent.
Dr. Miller addresses the counterintuitive enigma of the psychologically-unbalanced alienating parent to present remarkably normal. Dr. Miller states that alienating parents tend to present with the 4-Cs: cool, calm, charming, and convincing.
Contributing to the erroneous finding by non-specialists that alienating parents are remarkably healthy, they have been informed primarily, if not exclusively, by fallible intuitive reasoning.
How common is it for clinicians to make erroneous findings in general – even regarding clinical conditions that are not counterintuitive?
Consider the 2009 research study entitled, “Current Status and Future Prospects of Clinical Psychology: Toward a Scientifically Principled Approach to Mental and Behavioral Health Care.”
Researchers Baker, McFall, and Shoham documented the prevalence among mental health clinicians to ignore science and rely simply upon their “experiences” with interviewing patients to inform their findings. These researches state:
“Clinical psychologists’ failure to achieve a more significant impact on clinical and public health may be traced to their deep ambivalence about the role of science and their lack of adequate science training, which leads them to value personal clinical experience over research evidence.” (p. 67)
Writing in her article entitled, “Ignoring the Evidence: Why do Psychologists Reject Science,” Newsday science editor, Sharon Begley (2009) quotes Walter Mischel of Columbia University, who stated:
“The disconnect between what clinicians do and what science has discovered is an unconscionable embarrassment” … there is a “widening gulf between clinical practice and science.” (p. 1)
I have lamentably found that the tendency to ignore science and to rely primarily upon intuitive reasoning to inform findings is rampart in the entire mental health field.
The Alienated Parent, Who is the Healthy Parent, May Not Present Well
Alienated parents are trauma victims and are typically underfunctioning because of this. They are reacting to a situation that would distress even the most psychologically stable parent.
Consider how anyone would react if they were experiencing the following trauma:
- Being unjustifiably denied court-ordered access to their beloved children
- Being falsely accused of marginal parenting behaviors and often child abusive behaviors
- Having to exhaust their finances in order to enforce their parental rights and to fight one false allegation after another
- Desperately having to attempt to protect their children from being triangulated into the legal and parental battles by the alienating parent
- Feeling pained for their children, who are being psychologically abused by the alienating parent.
As a result of trauma, alienated parents do not always handle stress as well as they prior to the onset of the alienation.
When alienated parents are counterintuitively misperceived and misjudged to have character flaws and psychopathology due to the trauma from alienation, they are victims of the fundamental attribution error (FAE).
The FAE occurs when faults that are a situational reaction to trauma are interpreted to be internal or characterological.
Because of the reaction to trauma from the alienation, Dr. Miller states that the alienated parent may present with the 4-As: anxious, agitated, angry, and afraid.
Psychological Evaluations Are Inappropriately Relied Upon to Evaluate Parenting Abilities
Psychological tests, such as the MMPI, are commonly used to assess the litigants’ parenting abilities; but these tests are, counterintuitively inappropriately suited for this purpose.
First, the authors of these tests have cautioned that the tests should be used for hypothesis generation only and not hypothesis confirmation.
This means that the test results must be corroborated by other evidence, such as in-person clinical interviews. Should the clinical interview dispute the test findings, the test findings must be discarded.
Second, the tests’ referenced population, which is the 1980 census, has not been matched to someone undergoing a contentious custody case and particularly not someone who is a victim of alienation.
Consider the following written by Joel Klass, M.D. and Dr. Joanna Peros, PSYD, RN in their article, Ten Signs of Questionable Practices in Custody Evaluations,” The American Journal of Family Law, (2011). Vol. 25 (3), (PP.81-86):
“Most psychological tests are not normed on parents undergoing the stress of custody evaluations…. Judges should know that psychological tests can carry a warning that they are not to be used without clinical correction or for forensic purposes to determine legal issues.” (P. 82)
“Far more important than the psychological test results are other real-life conditions under which the child thrives or fails.” (P. 83.)
“When a patient in a hospital is talking to you while their EKG machine is showing a straight line, you throw out the machine and not wheel out the patient.”
“So it is with psychological testing. Reality trumps all the psychological tests known….An overreliance on limited validity psychological test results can violate the basic legal right to have judgments based on actual behavior and not on thoughts, feelings, or psychological tendencies.” (P. 83.)
Gerald H, Vandenberg, PhD, ABPP, writing in “Custody Evaluation: The Expert Witness and the Assessment Process,” published in The American Journal of Family Law (2002). Vol. 16, (4). PP. 253-259) state:
“The data [from the MMPI test] must be interpreted and cross-checked using multiple sources of information and considering the overall context. For example, a “paranoid” scale on a given test may have multiple meanings both in relation to other information and in relation to context.” (P. 257.)
Third, these psychological tests have not been determined for their error rate, which may be as high as 50%. Not much weight should be given to a finding that is 50% inaccurate!
Fourth, these psychological tests are typically scored by a computer and not by a human being. I am not aware of any computer that has the ability assess for the traumatic situational context of the test taker.
Fifth, these tests reveal virtually nothing, if at all, about parenting abilities.
The best means for assessing parenting abilities is observation of the parent-child interactions in a variety of settings. Somehow this common-sense assessment tool escapes the resourcefulness of non-specialists.
When a Child Rejects a Parent, It Is Assumed That The Parent Must Have Done Something Dreadful
Because it is anti-instinctual for a child to reject a parent, non-specialists counteractively rush to judgement that the rejected parent must have done something to “deserve it.”
It is exactly because it is so anti-instinctual to reject a parent – to do so even as an adult – that the rejected parent’s culpability must not be assumed. It is catastrophically inappropriate for the child to make this assumption.
The key point to consider is not whether or how strongly the child has rejected one parent and aligned with the other. The key point to consider is why these dynamics are occurring.
In order to assess for the why of the child’s rejection with one parent and alignment with the other,the scientific method requires that all plausible competing hypotheses to explain these dynamics must be generated.
An obviously plausible competing hypothesis is that of a brainwashing of the child by the other parent. The evidence for and against each hypothesis must then be assessed in order to determine which hypothesis correctly explains the why of the child’s rejection.
Children Counterintuitively Bond to an Abusive Parent
Extensive research and my evidence-based practice of having worked with 3000 abused and neglected foster children find that children counterintuitively bond to an abusive parent. Even more counterintuitive is that, the more intense was the abuse, the more intense is the bonding.
There are several reasons why abused children so counterintuitively bond to their alienating parent. It is outside the purpose of this article to provide a detailed discussion of the reasons. But briefly, the reasons children align so strongly with an abusive parent include the hope of:
- Undoing of the abuse
- Denying the abuse had occurred
- Gaining the alienating parent’s approval
- Gaining the alienating parent’s love
- Overcoming the self-perception of being bad that resulted in the abuse
The finding of my evidence-based practice that abused children do not reject their parents and instead seek attachment behaviors is confirmed by an impressive research study by Baker, Miller, Bernet, and Adebayo (2019).
This study of an estimated 17,500 moderately to severely physical abused children found that these sought attachment enhancing behaviors with their abusive parents.
When assessing the dynamics in a case in which alienation is alleged, a marker for an alienating parent – who is an abusive parent – is the child’s intense, rigid bonding to and alignment with that parent.
The Relationship Between the Severely Alienating Parent and Child Appears to Be Healthy Bonding
Non-specialists in alienation counterintuitively perceive the unhealthy bonding between a severely alienating parent and child to be close, warm, loving, supportive, and protective relationship. Almost nothing could be further from the truth.
The alignment between a severely alienating parent and child is a “pathologically enmeshed relationship.” This pathologically enmeshed relationship is profoundly detrimental to the child across all levels of functioning—cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and interpersonal.
Pathological enmeshment is a severe psychiatric condition for the child in which the alienating parent violates the child boundaries, creates dependency, and discourages, instead of encourages, the child’s appropriate separation/individuation.
The alienating parent must employ coercive-control, mind-manipulating tactics in order for the child to override the survival instinct to have and need the other parent. The alienating parent’s behaviors in this regard clearly meet the standard definition of domestic violence.
The alienating parent’s use of coercive-control, mind-manipulating tactics are aimed to achieve the following:
- The child’s repression of her/his own loving, positive feelings, wishes, beliefs, and opinions regarding the alienated parent
- Indoctrination of the child with the alienating parent’s feelings, wishes, beliefs, and opinions regarding the alienated parent
- Undermining the child’s emotional and cognitive development in order to perpetuate the child’s dependency upon the alienating parent
- Co-opting the child in the alienating parent’s campaign to defeat and victimize the alienated parent
- Manipulating the child to act out and adopt the alienating parent’s anti-social maltreatment and victimization of the alienated parent. These behaviors meet the standard definition of domestic violence by proxy
Pathological enmeshment is a severe psychiatric condition for the child.
Pathological enmeshment—being anything except healthy bonding—is therefore profoundly counterintuitive.
An Alienation Case Appears to Be a Simple Parent-Child Relationship Problem: It Is Much More Than That
Intuitively it appears that the alienated parent-child relationship is the overt problem is of a child who is rejecting a parent.
Intuitively, it makes sense to intervene where the shoe noticeably pinches—the damaged parent-child relationship (or the symptom)—and overlook what is not visibly recognized but is truly dysfunctional—the alienating parent’s behaviors (or the cause).
But to the contrary, it is the overly-close, pathologically enmeshed relationship between the alienating parent and child that is significantly more dysfunctional than is the overly-disengaged relationship between the alienated parent and child.
Child protection is our first priority. In an alienation case, child protection requires a removal from an unreformed alienating parent who is committed to the perpetuation of the abusive alienation narrative.
When non-specialists focus on that a child perceives the parents so unrealistically instead of why the child is doing so, they are violating the clinical axioms to “treat the underlying condition” and to “determine treatment priorities.”
Dr. Miller (2013) cautions that clinical attention in an alienation case must focus on the:
“Serious comorbid psychopathology, particularly on the part of the alienating parent…the underlining psychopathology is often associated with severe cognitive distortion (including shared delusions and/or other a quasi-psychotic thinking), profound emotional dysregulation, and extreme or bizarre behavior.” (p. 11)
The Claim of 50/50 Parental Contributions to the Child’s Rejection is a Counterintuitive Presumption
There should never be the presumption of equal material parental contributions to the child’s rejection of a parent – what is known as a “hybrid case.”
The presumption of a hybrid is profoundly incorrect and is almost always the result of science being ignored. But when the scientific method is applied to the clinical condition of “child rejection of a parent,” the hybrid presumption is virtually always ruled out.
When non-specialists make the hybrid presumption, they have almost surely done so by violating the clinical axiom to “consider severity” and by committing the cognitive error of “failure to establish a causal connection” between the alienated parent’s behaviors and the onset of the rejection.
First, by violating the clinical axiom to “consider severity,” non-specialists fail to recognize that the alienated parent’s behaviors are utterly out of proportion to the child’s exceedingly anti-instinctual rejection of a parent.
Second, when non-specialists have held that the parents had equally contributed to the child’s rejection, they failed to assess each parent’s behaviors for severity.
For example, the alienated parent’s alleged contributing behaviors to the rejection (e.g. intermittent expression of anger, not keeping all promises, making children do homework before playing video games, etc.) pale in comparison to the alienating parent’s extreme, vicious contributing behaviors to undermine or sever the relationship between the alienated parent and their child.
Consider Some of the Commonly Employed Alienating Behaviors
Withholding the child from the alienated parent’s court-ordered parenting time.
Disrupting the alienated parent’s parenting time with incessant, protracted calls to the child.
Making unilateral major decisions for the child, e.g. for education, health, activities, etc. and neither consulting with nor informing the alienated parent, who has joint legal custody.
Telling the child the alienated parent had abandoned her/him when not showing up for activities not informed about.
Making the child believe the alienated parent is unloving, uncaring, dangerous, selfish, etc.
Changing the child’s surname to that of the alienating parent’s birth surname or the stepparent’s surname.
Making false allegations of domestic violence and child abuse against the alienated parent.
Making the child complicit in confirming false DV or child abuse allegations against the alienated parent.
Hybrid cases are very, very, very, very rare.
Alienating Parents Disingenuously Claim They Support Their Child’s Relationship With the Alienated Parent
Non-specialists accord alienating parents unwarranted credibility for their proclamations that they “encourage” and “support” their child’s relationship with the alienated parent.
But despite claims of their extraordinary efforts, alienating parents are somehow clueless about how to use their authority to gain their child’s cooperation. Somehow non-specialists counterintuitively fail to hold alienating parents accountable to back up their proclamations with actions.
Alienating parents’ disingenuous proclamations of support and encouragement for their child’s relationship with the alienated parent are no more than an “empty vessel” making considerable noise but signifying nothing.
Alienating parents proclaim that they reason, plead, encourage, and urge their children to keep parenting time with their alienated parent. But alienating parents fail to impose consequences when their children fail to comply.
Alienating parents instead cowardly and cynically place the blame for the alienation on their children’s shoulders by alleging that their children have minds of their own and have autonomously chosen not to have a relationship with their alienated parent.
When alienating parents project the blame for the alienation upon their children, this is an exquisite example of visiting the sins of the parent upon the child.
Alienating parents are, however, quite adept at using their authority to get children to do what they really want them to do when they really want that: it happens every time the Court imposes substantial consequences on the alienating parent should they not require their child’s compliance with the alienated parent’s parenting time.
Alienating parents cannot claim, counterintuitively, that they are simultaneously competent as a parent and genuinely support the alienating parent’s relationship with their child when the child fails to comply with the alienated parent’s parenting time.
Rejection of a Parent Is Erroneously Claimed to Be a Phase in Normal Child Development
It is intuitively reasonable for a child to distance from one parent while being close to the other as the child traverses the continuum of developmental stages. But this continuum is not on the same continuum upon which alienation is found. It is highly deceptive to assert that these two very different continuums are one.
The fact is that rejection of a parent is never healthy for the child and is never a dynamic in any stage of normal child development. Of note, this rejection is not seen even in abused children.
In alienation, however, there is a tenacious, intransigent enmeshment between the child and the alienating parent that requires the child’s fanatic, inflexible rejection of the other parent.
In normal development, the child’s closeness and distance with parents is flexible and fluctuates between the parents at different developmental stages – but never to the rejection of one parent for the sake of being close to the other parent. Nor in healthy childhood development would the closer parent permit the child to reject the other parent.
It Is Intuitively Believed That the Child’s Best Interest Is Served When Children Have a Voice in the Custody Outcome
Counterintuitively, it would appear that children would have strong, independent feelings and wishes for the outcome of the divorce and custody proceedings. But not so alienated children, who will only mimic their alienating parent’s wishes for the outcome.
And typically, suggestibility of the child by the alienating parent is not ruled out before giving weight to the child’s expressed wishes.
Giving a voice to an alienated child regarding custody is a disastrous idea because it further cements the psychological abuse that has been inflicted upon the child by the alienating parent.
Alienated children have been coercively manipulated by their alienating parent to sacrifice their relationship with their alienated parent as the price to pay in order to keep the alienating parent’s love and approval. This is an exploitive, terrorizing loyalty demand of the child by the alienating parent.
Professionals should perpetuate this abuse – however unknowingly – by indicating to alienated children that their wishes are important to the outcome of the custody proceedings.
The Cause of the Child’s Psychiatric Symptoms is Counterintuitively Attributed to the Alienated Parent
Severely alienated children frequently manifest severe psychiatric disturbances that can include panic, suicidal ideation, threats, cutting, etc. The alienated parent is intuitively asserted to have been the cause.
Despite how fanatic the assertion is made by the alienating parent, the child, and the child’s therapist, non-specialists presume it to be true. This presumption is made despite the fact that the child had not manifested any psychiatric disturbance prior to the onset of the alienation.
Such assertions are all the more fantastic given that the alienated parent has typically not had contact with the child in many, many months if not years.
It is far more likely that the loyalty conflict that the alienating parent had inflicted upon the child is the case of the child’s psychiatric disturbances.
The scientific method must be applied to the evidence in the case in order to determine the true cause of the child’s disturbances.
Successful School Performance Intuitively Suggests That the Child Is Developing Normally
Successful school performance is not sufficient evidence of normalcy in a child – particularly not in an alienated child.
Alienated children may experience the school setting as a safe-haven to freely express their opinions.
The school setting provides an environment in which children do not fear reprisals for expressing theirowngenuine beliefs and opinions.
If successful school performance were a marker against which to evaluate normalcy, then anorexics—who are on a slow suicide—would be considered emotionally stable because they are obsessed with achieving an A or A+ average.
Conclusion
In addition to alienation being a sub-specialty within the specialty discipline of family therapy, and family therapy is a specialty discipline within the discipline of mental health, alienation is a profoundly counterintuitive clinical condition.
Given the profound life-time harm to the child from alienation, a mental health practitioner should not be intervening in an alienation case unless having acquired the highly specialized training, education, and experience to be considered a specialist in alienation. To do so is to practice outside one’s area of expertise – a serious board and ethical violation.
