Traditional reunification therapy is an abysmal failure for treating severe cases of parental alienation. These failures show the need for my specialized 4-day, intensive reunification program, Turning Points for Families (TPFF), which is relied upon by Courts across the United States and Canada.
Not all reunification therapies are created equal – particularly when it comes to treating cases of severe parental alienation. Most therapists who provide traditional reunification therapy are not qualified or sufficiently trained to provide safe and effective therapy for these cases.
Courts, being misinformed, often appoint these unqualified reunification therapists. Here you will learn what successful reunification therapy looks like, and what it DOES NOT look like.
The Need for Timely Reunification Therapy
When unqualified traditional reunification therapists undertake treatment for severe alienation, they are blind to the harm being inflicted by alienating parents. The child abuse is not addressed and is, instead, exacerbated.
Inappropriate reunification therapies drag on indefinitely, with little or no accountability of the therapist. The Courts and the professionals delude themselves into thinking that the alienation is being remedied. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Parental Alienation Is a Specialized Clinical Condition
Before undertaking treatment of an alienation case, therapists have an ethical obligation to self-assess if they are qualified to handle these cases.
Traditional reunification therapists fail because they lack a fundamental understanding of the dynamics occurring in severe alienation. These dynamics include complex and counterintuitive clinical issues.
Steven G. Miller, MD, who ran a forensic medical practice throughout the United States for 40+ years, elaborates upon the specialized skills, knowledge, and experience required to safely and effectively treat alienation cases. Dr. Miller (2013) states:
“Few mental health problems are more difficult to sort it out and more resistant to treatment [dependent upon diagnostic findings]than the triad of a severely alienated child, a severely determined alienating parent, and a severely rejected targeted parent.” (p. 10)
“While PA [parental alienation] certainly is a relationship problem (or set of problems), severe cases are often associated with serious co-morbid psychopathology, particularly on part of the alienating parent.” (p. 11)
“Severe cases tend to be clinical in the medical sense of the word— (including shared delusions and/or other psychotic or quasi psychotic thinking), profound emotional dysregulation, and extreme or bizarre behavior. If clinicians fail to consider the total clinical picture—including any underlying psychopathology—they may fail to appreciate the severity and complexity of the situation.” (p. 11.)
Such cases are not for the novice. Cases of severe alienation often exceed the expertise of highly skill practitioners unless their special expertise includes the treatment of severe child alignment, treatment of severe mental illness, and treatment for personality disorders. treatment of all three may be necessary to achieve a good outcome or even prevent catastrophic deterioration.” (p. 11)
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).
Unqualified reunification therapists are mystified by the exceedingly complex and counterintuitive family dynamics occurring in parental alienation. As a result, these therapists misdiagnose and misinterpret the case.
Treatment Errors Committed by Unqualified Reunification Therapists
Diagnosis dictates treatment. When therapists fail to accurately assess the family dynamics in alienation cases, they fail to deliver timely and appropriate interventions. Here are two fatal errors of traditional reunification therapies.
1. Failure to Correctly Assess the Presenting Problem
- Child psychological abuse
- Domestic violence
- Domestic violence by proxy
Traditional reunification therapists fail to recognize the above child abuse occurring in the alienating parent-child relationship.
Unqualified therapists, instead, erroneously identify the presenting problem to be a simple parent-child relationship issue between the alienated parent and child.
2. Failure to Appropriately Intervene
When child abuse is revealed in therapy, the required intervention is for the therapist to alert the Court. The Court assesses the evidence presented for child abuse. If an abuse finding is made, the Court will impose appropriate remedy. The remedy in severe alienation is almost always removal of the child from the alienating parent.
When the presenting problem is incorrectly assessed, intervention is wrongly focused on modifying the alienating parent’s allegedly deficient parenting.
Reunification therapists must inform the Court that safe and effective therapy cannot be provided as long as an alienated child remains in the care of a severely alienating parent.
Coercive-Brainwashing of the Alienated Child
The programming in alienation is analogous to the brainwashing in a cult. Effective healing for a former cult member requires separation from the cult leader. Effective treatment for alienated children requires separation from their severely alienating parent.
Healing of alienation dynamics is a double challenge: creating psychological distance between the alienating parent and child & facilitating psychological connection between the alienated parent and child.
Manipulation and Cooption of Therapists
As Dr. Miller pointed out, severely alienating parents likely have a personality disorder. People with a personality disorder do not present as whom they really are.
Alienating parents are skillful in impression management and in mimicking normal behavior. They are adept at deceiving and coopting others – especially therapists and other professionals.
Once coopted and blinded by an alienating parent, unqualified therapists commit several cognitive and clinical errors that cloud thinking and arouse emotional reasoning.
Reunification therapists must conduct ongoing self-examinations to determine if they are committing any of these cognitive or clinical errors.
FURTHER INFORMATIVE READING: Clinical Reasoning and Decision Making by Dr. Steven Miller
When reunification therapists become coopted by and align with the alienating parent, they do not recognize the alienated parent’s determination to sabotage the therapy. Alienating parents intensify their programming out of fear of successful reunification therapy.
As a result of the intensified programming, alienated children affirm their alienating parent’s false narratives, which they vehemently express in the therapy sessions.
A particularly dangerous narrative is that alienated children, and not their alienating parents, had initiated the alienation. When alienating parents blame their children for having initiated the alienation, it is an exquisite example of visiting the sins of the parent upon the child.
Coopted, aligned therapists buy into this false narrative, inappropriately validate the child’s delusional thinking, and fail to require alienating parents to relinquish their coercive and manipulative behaviors.
Alienating parents claim they are genuinely supportive for their child’s relationship with the alienated parent. Not surprisingly, they seem to always be unable to get their children to have contact with their alienated parent.
Qualified, successful reunification therapists hold alienating parents accountable for having caused and for maintaining the alienation. Qualified, successful reunification therapists require alienating parents to demonstrate genuine support for the relationship between the alienated parent and their child.
Requiring Alienated Parents to Apologize for False and Frivolous Claims
Unqualified reunification therapists request alienated parents to apologize to their children for false allegations and frivolous claims. This request, if complied with, is dangerous and violates the standard of the “best interest of the child”!
Requests by Therapists for Apologies for False and Frivolous Claims Harm Children
- Apologies are rejected as being too little, too late, and not genuine.
- Apologies reinforce an alienated child’s over-empowerment.
- Apologies provide ammunition for alienating parents to claim, “Finally your other parent has apologized. We were correct all along.”
- Apologies further disempower the alienated parent.
- Apologies further traumatize the child by confirming false or distorted abusive and/or marginal parenting by the alienated parent.
- Apologies validate the child’s negative, unrealistic, and even delusional perceptions of the alienated parent.
- Apologies are humiliating to the alienated parent.
- Apologies reinforce the alienation dynamics and thereby perpetuate the child abuse.
- Apologies reinforce the pathological enmeshment between the alienating parent and child.
- Apologies further compromise the child’s critical reasoning skills.
- Apologies further undermine the child’s reality testing and judgment.
- Apologies further undermine the child’s development of a conscience.
- Apologies given for false and frivolous claims are used in Court against the alienated parent.
Therapeutic Interventions Which Help Children With Their False and Frivolous Beliefs
- Help to relinquish their delusional thinking.
- Help to sublimate their feelings.
- Help to express themselves, both verbally and behaviorally, in compliance with social norms and expectations.
- Help to meet stage-specific developmental milestones.
- Help to improve reality testing and judgment, that had been distorted and undermined.
- Help to enhance cognitive functioning, that had been compromised.
- Help to nurture the conscience, that had been corrupted.
- Help to perceive parents realistically and not fancifully.
- Help to problem solve issues civilly and respectfully with their alienated parent .
- Help to express emotions and feelings according to social norms and expectations.
- Help to behave according to social norms and expectations.
- Help to encourage age-appropriate/stage-specific autonomy and development.
- Help to challenge the pathological enmeshment with their alienating parent.
Allowing Alienated Children to Control the Therapy
Much to the detriment of alienated children, unqualified reunification therapists routinely cede their control of the therapy process to alienated children. Doing so runs counter to the standard of the “child’s best interest.”
Harm from Empowering Alienated Children to Control the Therapy Process
Unqualified reunification therapists erroneously believe that alienated children are helpless players in the family drama. Nothing could be further from the truth. Alienating parents empower their children by having made them their allies and confidants.
Child psychiatrist, Salvador Minuchin, dramatizes this dysfunctional reversal of healthy family hierarchy as follows: “The triangulated [another label for alienated] child is an overpowered little tyrant who is standing on the shoulders of the triangulating [another label for alienating] parent. The triangulated child is therefore the most powerful player in the family drama, towering over both parents.”
I ask the reader to visualize Dr. Minuchin’s imagery of the triangulated [alienated] and then decide if this child is truly powerless.
Remediation of the Harm to Overempowered Alienated Children Requires Limit-Setting
QUALIFIED REUNIFICATION THERAPISTS DO NOT ALLOW ALIENATED CHILDREN TO:
- Decide whether or not to show up for the therapy.
- Determine what can or cannot be discussed in the therapy.
- Unilaterally decide to “take a time out” by absconding from the therapy room.
- Maltreat, disrespect, and/or emotionally abuse their alienated parent.
- Decides whether to talk and participate or not talk and not participate in the therapy.
- Determine when the therapy session is over.
- Decide if another therapy session can be scheduled.
- Physically assault their alienated parent.
When therapists permit children to maltreat their parent, it is not therapy; it is therapist-assisted elder abuse.
Unqualified reunification therapists must consult with a knowledgable alienation specialist to provide guidance and supervision of their reunification therapy.
Conclusion
All reunification therapists are not created equal. Reunification therapists have an obligation to children and to their professional ethics to self-assess to determine if they are qualified to intervene in cases of parental alienation.
Should a reunification therapist not be sufficiently qualified to provide safe and effective, evidence-based reunification therapy, the therapist must seek guidance from and collaboration with a qualified parental alienation specialist.
