1.3 How to identify

If you have a child who is rejecting a parent, you cannot tell just based on that one piece of information if the child 1

  • is alienated / unjustifiably rejecting a parent (because they’ve been manipulated by the other parent)
  • or estranged
  • or appropriately, realistically, justifiably rejecting a parent (because that parent has engaged in egregious abuse, neglect etc.)

Not all children who reject a parent are alienated. It is essential for proper management and treatment of cases of child alignment that alienated children be identified and differentiated from estranged children. 1

The treatment of children rejecting an abusive parent would be very different. The ideal clinical intervention would be what is called Abuse Specific Treatment. Where the maltreating parent and the abused child are together in a way that supports the child’s realistic negative perceptions of the abusive parent. And the abusive parent atones for what they’ve done and modifies their parenting behavior. 1

Crazy making behaviors are what make these cases so challenging for the professionals involved. There are so many different moving pieces and components to these cases that it’s hard to track them all and to address them all. We have other professionals involved in the case who sometimes take different sides. We’re working against each other. The crazy making behaviors add to the complexity of these cases. 2

Not everyone recognizes it. And ‘recognize’ has at least two meanings. It could mean to recognize it existing at all or to recognize it in a given case. So the problem is you’ve got both of those issues.
For the people who don’t recognize that it exists, when you say you don’t believe in Parental Alienation, you’re saying the equivalent of “I don’t believe that any parent ever undermines the other parent with a child.”
In terms of recognizing it in a given family or child, Parental Alienation can mean a bunch of things. It could be a family dynamic which involves at least three people. It could be the behavior of a parent, an alienating parent. Or it could be the result of that behavior in a child, an alienated child. Anyone who’s looking to identify it, needs to look at the big picture and to consider all three corners of a triangle – parent, parent, child. Professionals as mental health, legal and other professionals including judges and people who make important decisions. 3

In a normal healthy triangular situation in family conflict, it’s resolved by someone within the triangle. If you have parent-parent-child, the blame shifting travels around. Somebody takes it on the chin one day, somebody takes it on the chin the next day, or whatever. And somehow the conflicts are resolved. It’s only when it becomes rigid and fixed where somebody is always being the scapegoat that it becomes problematic and pathological. In the literature it’s referred to as a “pathological system” that’s very difficult to identify. 4

Five Factor Model

All the theoretical, practical, clinical and research knowledge was codified into a diagnostic framework called the Four-Factor Model. 1 William BERNET extended the model with an explicit first criteria “Contact Refusal” resulting in the Five Factor Model. 5

Children should be considered alienated only when all factors are present.
  1. Contact refusal
  2. Positive relationship prior to contact refusal.
  3. Absence of abuse or neglect on the part of the alienated parent.
  4. Alienating behaviours of the preferred parent.
  5. Child manifesting symptoms of Parental Alienation.

The five-factor model provides us with one consistent and coherent evidence-based model to conceptualise and understand the presence and indicators of parental alienation dynamics in a family at a given moment in time. More importantly, it helps us to differentiate between PA and true estrangement thus, privileging the welfare and safety of children and young people. 5

The bar is set pretty high (all factors need to be present) to not place or consider an abused child as an alienated child. 1

(1) Contact refusal

Children are not born with genes that program them to reject a father or mother. 6

It’s very difficult to get a child to reject a parent. Children are instinctual creatures and to reject the parent is counter instinctual. If something’s counter-instinctual, children won’t do it unless they’re being induced to do it or manipulated to do it or encouraged to do it by someone. When you see a child who’s rejecting one parent, especially strongly, and you see the same child strongly aligned with the other parent, probably, that’s an alienated child, not an estranged one. 3

This is evidence-based science, you don’t just get to make it up. It’s important to distinguish between science and a belief system or science and ideology or science and speculation. Not only is it counter-instinctual for the child to reject the parent, but children don’t even reject abusive parents or physically abusive parents. 3

The child is being so strongly influenced by the alienating parent in these situations that they don’t want to visit them because they’re afraid of going against that parent’s wishes. 6

To reject a parent is a very unnatural thing for a child to do. We are born helpless into the world and we attach to our primary caregivers as a way of avoiding being abandoned. And our biggest fear is that we will be abandoned. And unfortunately what happens to children in these circumstances is that they are forced to reject a parent against their natural way of being in the world. And then they’re forced to live with and suffer the consequences of that which are very, very deep, and they’re long-lasting. 7

The critical thing is to recognize this as being an attachment disruption. Typically children will form a very strong attachment to both of their carers. Parents don’t have to do anything special for the child to attach to them. It’s evolutionary imperative for the child to do this. And the child will be uniquely attached to both mum and dad. 8

(2) Positive relationship prior to contact

There was a prior positive attachment / relationship between the child and the now rejected parent. So that means that whatever the normative flaws are of that parent, it didn’t prevent them from having a close loving attachment bond to the child who’s now rejecting them. 1

  • Does that parent have the basic competencies?
  • Did they put in the time and effort to establish an attachment with their child?
  • The now rejected parent was a normative parent.

(3) Absence of abuse or neglect on the part of the alienated parent

The rejected parent did not engage in

  • abuse
  • neglect
  • seriously deficient parenting

It seems counterintuitive, right? You must have done something really bad to not want to see your mom or dad. They must have done something horrible, because what kid would do that? But when you look to the child abuse literature and you see children who have been sexually abused, children who are abused align with them. They are close with them. They want them to love them even though they’re hurting them. 9

There are lots of threads of research that show that abused children don’t reject the abusive parent. In Harry HARLOW’s research with the primates, he created this thing called monster mother, these mechanical mothers who abuse their babies. And he found that the babies actually clung to the monster mothers more than baby monkeys raised by non-monster mothers. So abuse actually induced more proximity seeking and clinging behavior. There’s several really important credible strands of research that support that maltreated children don’t reject their maltreating parent the way that alienated children reject their non-abusive parent. 1

A great example would be a documentary about Michael Jackson “Leaving Neverland”. A documentary about the two adult boys, men now, who were abused by him allegedly when they were younger. And they defended him tooth and nail, denied they were abused, denied all this stuff. They were his soldiers. They were helping him and trying to prevent him from going to jail for abusing other boys. And it wasn’t until he died and they had their own children, that they came to the realization that they had been abused by him. 9

When you see a child rejecting a parent who’s allegedly so abusive, you actually would not see that behavior. It’s highly improbable. There’s always a possibility. But Jennifer HARMAN is a scientists and doesn’t work with possibilities. Because when you’re making decisions about children, you need to go with what the evidence says. And the evidence says, abused children don’t often act that way. So if we rule out that there is no abuse, and this child is not wanting to see them, we have to recognize that they’re being abused by the other parent to not have a relationship with them. 9

If you can rule out that the now rejected parent was abusive or neglectful, then you move on to factor three and four. If there was abuse, it can’t possibly be alienation. So that’s how we ensure that we don’t misdiagnose children. We don’t want any abusive parents being considered targeted parents. We don’t want any abused kids to be considered alienated kids. 1

When one parent accuses the other parent of child abuse, typically, the accused parent angrily denies the allegation and may counterclaim that the accusing parent is alienating the children to gain custody. Claiming PA can be a winning strategy. Under the PA rubric, the accused parent is the “innocent” parent, while the accusing parent is the “bad” parent. Psychologists Lenore Walker and David Shapiro note that an accusation of PA “will inevitably put the [accused] parent in the position of being the ‘good’ injured party while the alienating parent is seen as the ‘bad’ party.
There are many reasons that [PA] may have gained such widespread attention, primarily that it provides custody litigants and their attorneys with a ‘powerful weapon they can . . . use in a court of law to defend themselves.’

(4) Alienating behaviours of the preferred parent

Typically when you’re talking about a brainwashing process of trying to get a child who loves the targeted parent to hate them, you have to go through a process of vilifying the targeted parent. When you weaponize a child, one kind of abuse we call “corrupting emotional abuse”. And that’s a process whereby the alienating parent will take a child who has love and affection for the targeted parent and will corrupt it by vilifying the targeted parent, by creating this campaign of denigration that grinds and wears away the child’s investment and the love and affection that they have for them, so that the child can feel what the alienating parent is feeling. 4

The alienating parent has this reward system. Once they get an ally out of the child to hate the other parent, once the child has been successfully programmed to believe or at least go along with the alienating parent’s vilification scripts, then the alienating parent will exploit the child. So will say it’s the child that doesn’t like the parent. It’s a bait and switch. You have a corrupting emotional abuse and typically parents who corrupt their children will often exploit them in these kinds of circumstances. The child then becomes a weapon. That’s why we use the term weaponized. And it’s extremely powerful when the child goes along with it and internalizes it and starts to believe it. Over the course of time, sometimes three months, six months, nine months, 12 months, and especially in small children, it can happen really quickly. 4

Alienating parents use a lot of the same strategies of loyalty inducing things that people who are trying to groom children to be sexually abused use. These parents are very abusive and they’re using strategies that other very abusive people also use. 9

After brainwashing the children the same parent campaigns with the children to destroy their relationship with the other parent. 6

The favored parent has engaged in many of the 17 Primary Parental Alienation Strategies which foster a child’s unjustified rejection of the other parent. 1

Did that favored parent do the things that we know can cause alienation? 10

  1. Badmouthing
  2. Limiting Contact
  3. Interfering with Communication
  4. Interfering with Symbolic Communication
  5. Withdrawal of Love
  6. Telling Child Targeted Parent Does Not Love Him or Her
  7. Forcing Child to Choose
  8. Creating the Impression that the Targeted Parent is Dangerous
  9. Confiding in Child
  10. Forcing Child to Reject Targeted Parent
  11. Asking Child to Spy on Targeted Parent
  12. Asking Child to Keep Secrets from Targeted Parent
  13. Referring to Targeted Parent by First Name
  14. Referring to a Stepparent as “Mom” or “Dad” and Encouraging Child to Do the Same
  15. Withholding Medical, Academic and Other Important Information from Targeted Parent / Keeping Targeted Parent’s Name off of Medical, Academic, and Other Relevant Documents
  16. Changing Child’s Name to Remove Association with Targeted Parent
  17. Cultivating Dependency
Badmouthing

The parent uses venomous words to speak about the little child’s other parent in a plot to destroy the purest of love and taint it with hate. This plot is designed with only one purpose and that is to take the most established pristine relationship between parent and child and taint it with hate. 11

These cases become particularly challenging when there are (multiple) allegations of child sexual abuse that are unfounded. And those are of course weaponized by the alienating parent. If a parent helps the child to rinse the conditioner out of their hair and if the child were to make a developmentally appropriate comment about the parent helping and touching the child in the shower, that gets misunderstood. 2

Many parents who are alienated are falsely accused of abuse as a strategy to get custody. 12

If a child believes the false story that they’ve been sexually abused by their parent, they are at the same risk potential for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as if it actually had happened. This is absolutely criminal behavior. The alienator is assaulting the child’s memory, feelings, thinking, relationship with the parent. Assault is a crime. And it should be looked at that way. 13

A person with a personality disorder is expert at mimicking normal behaviour. They fool all too many people in the clinical profession and when the clinician relies on just what they’re reporting, it’s relying on what’s called intuitive reasoning. 13

The rejected parent is put under a microscope, and all of their mistakes are blown way out of proportion. And the rejected parent is always on the defensive, always trying to defend themselves from an onslaught of allegations that are not objectively true. 2

They’ll engage in legal and administrative aggression making false reports of abuse, calling police to do wellness checks on them when their children are visiting. Even though there’s nothing wrong, to make it appear that that parent is dangerous. They will send them threatening and harassing emails and text messages and bad mouth them to everybody around. All of these behaviors actually directly map on to the behaviors that intimate terrorists use, where they have a lot of control and power and engage in coercive, very hostile and aggressive tactics towards the other person to control them and exert their power over them. 9

Something that’s very counterintuitive is that the alienating parents tend to present very well. And the alienated / targeted parents tend to present not well or poorly. And there’s a specific reason for that. What’s going on here is the alienating parent tends to be a master manipulator, often an accomplished liar, brilliant at managing impressions and is the aggressor who’s winning. The other parent is a trauma victim. The alienator presents with the four C’s: he or she is cool, calm, charming and convincing. By contrast, the alienated / targeted parent has the four A’s: he or she is anxious, agitated, angry or afraid. And if you don’t know to look for that pattern and you interview each one, you think you’ve got it all figured out after the first interview with each person. If you do recognize that pattern, then you know it may be the other way around. 3

Limiting Contact

One of the strategies of an intimate terrorist and an alienator is to socially isolate the child and the target of the behavior. They will take away friendships that they had. 9

Cult leaders use a lot of coercive strategies and they undermine and kind of socially isolate that person over time. And then they join the cult and they become estranged or separated, alienated from their whole families. And they’re completely at the mercy of this person. And it’s really hard to leave a cult and so to do an intervention and to reunify that cult member is really challenging. And it’s the same thing for children who had been alienated. 9

If a child is kidnapped by a stranger, there’s a psychological component which is the most damaging part of the kidnapping. The kidnapper has exclusive proprietary control over what relationships that child can have. They are no longer allowed to leave the premises, they are no longer allowed to have friends, they’re no longer to see their parents. That psychological component happens in brainwashing and programming parents who engage in alienating tactics.
And in some cases there was actual kidnapping. In one case where the parent had kidnapped the children to another country. It took the other parent two years to get the children back. 4

Some cases the judge will scoff and kind of laugh when you mention that the children were kidnapped locally (like within the same jurisdiction) because they don’t recognize it. They’re thinking it only has to be this severest of cases to qualify for “kidnapping”. 4

Forcing Child to Choose

The aligned parent tends to give power and over-empower a child to make decisions. 2

A parent isn’t always about doing fun things with your kids. Sometimes you need to make them do things they don’t want to do because it’s good for them. They’ll make their child to go to school, they will make them go to the doctor to get shots or to the dentist. All these things that they don’t want to do. And you do those things because you’re a parent. That isn’t emphasized when it comes to spending time or having contact with the rejected parent. 2

There was a parent with an elementary aged son and the parent was insisting to respect his wishes and not push him to have even contact in the therapist’s office with the alienated parent. There was no risk to the son seeing his parent in the therapist’s office. But the parent wanted to respect his wishes. Now that same parent pushes him in school to do things that he probably doesn’t want to do. He’s a great athlete. He’s successful in all these areas, in part because the parent pushes him in those areas. But in this domain, the parent has chosen to respect his wishes. 2

(5) Child manifesting symptoms of Parental Alienation

The child is actually acting like an alienated child. And there are eight behaviors that differentiate alienated kids from non-alienated kids. And even kids who have been abused don’t treat their abusive parent the way that alienated kids treat the targeted parent, who based on factor two and three has been a normative parent. 1

Originally developed in 1985 by Dr. Richard GARDNER and reviewed by Dr. William BERNET (president of the Parental Alienation Study Group and Professor of Psychiatry at Vanderbilt University), these eight symptoms all occur in the child rather than in either parent. 14

  1. A campaign of denigration
  2. Weak, absurd, or frivolous rationalizations for the deprecation
  3. Lack of ambivalence
  4. The “independent-thinker” phenomenon
  5. Reflexive support of the alienating parent in the parental conflict
  6. Absence of guilt over cruelty to and/or exploitation of the alienated parent
  7. The presence of borrowed scenarios
  8. Spread of the animosity to the friends and/or extended family of the alienated parent

On the opposite, alienated children very rarely exhibit those eight behavioral manifestations at the level that alienated kids do. 338 clinicians providing therapy to severely or moderately physically abused children were asked how often it happens that they see them exhibit these eight behaviors. Some of them do it for some of the time. But if you ask how many of these kids do it very often (compared to alienated kids), then the data is very clear. Maltreated kids do not behave like alienated children. 1

Eight Symptoms of Parental Alienation

(1) A campaign of denigration

The child is aligned with the alienating parent in a campaign of denigration and hatred against the target parent with the child making active contributions. 6

These kids sort of take pleasure in saying bad things about the targeted parent to other people. So they

  • happily share with other people sort of a smear campaign against the targeted parent
  • even can’t wait to tell the judge things like their mother’s a whore / their father’s a monster

On the opposite, alienated children in therapy are hard to get themselves to confront the parent and own that they’re sort of mad that the parent hurt them. They are not just sort of wiping out the humanity of that parent. 1

The campaign of denigration happens in the past, the present and the future. 1

The Past (Memories)

“This looks like you were having a good time with your mom here on that photograph?” 1

When you ask an alienated child about good memories they have of the parent that they now reject, the kids are a sort of extreme that they will deny ever having a good memory with that parent. They erase the past. 1

  • I never had good times with that parent
  • I was pretending in that photograph
  • That’s not me, that has been photoshopped
  • My parent would hurt me if I didn’t smile for the camera

Even when you watch a video of them playing, hugging and kissing that same parent, they deny that they’re really having fun. 6

When you ask the alienating parent, they might answer

  • The other parent used to be a good parent up until…

On the opposite, abused kids do not erase the past. They still can have positive memories with the abusive parent. 1

The Present (Current Behaviour)

In the present children don’t just reject a parent. They are some or all of the following. 1

  • hostile
  • rejecting
  • provocative
  • arrogant
  • entitled
  • rude
  • nasty

They say 1 13

  • Don’t ever darken my doorway
  • You’re a piece of garbage
  • I hate you
  • I hate everything about you
  • We never want to see you again
  • We never go into your sleazy apartment
  • Forget about us
  • Marry someone else and have kids with that person

They do not say 1

  • I don’t really want to live with you. I’m feeling closer to the other parent
The Future (Outlook)

If you ask an alienated child 1

  • What could your parent do to fix this?
  • What does your parent need to do to repair the relationship?

They will answer something like 1

  • Nothing, I can’t imagine ever wanting to have a relationship with this parent again

(2) Weak, absurd, or frivolous rationalizations for the deprecation

One of the things that helps us identify a PA case is, the justification for rejecting that parent doesn’t hold up. 2 The reasons they give are disproportionate to their complaints. So the level of hostility compared to the complaints is patently disproportionate. It just doesn’t really make sense. 1

When you ask an alienated child 1

  • What’s the deal?
  • How come you won’t even have a cup of cocoa with your parent on their birthday?
  • What’s your beef with your parent?

The will answer (with a straight face) things like 1 13 6

  • I do not know
  • You know, it’s just an intangible
  • The wooden floors in the house are scratched
  • My father’s car smells like coffee
  • My mother wears cowboy boots with skirts
  • We hated the trip that he took us on to Hawaii last year
  • The bad parent wanted me to take out the garbage
  • The bad parent took me to Disney Land when I didn’t want to go

These are just incredible, bizarre explanations that are taken seriously. 13 An objective outside observer would look at that and say “That isn’t a good reason to reject a parent.” 2

The child may provide reasons that they can’t explain or even understand when asked. 6

On the opposite, abused children don’t have weak, frivolous and absurd reasons. They’ve actually been maltreated. And they’ll talk about it in a credible way. 1

(3) Lack of ambivalence

It’s often done in an absolutest black and white way where the rejected parent is all bad with no redeeming qualities. 2 So these kids see one parent as all good, the other as all bad and really have a hard time even thinking of any criticisms of the favored parent. 1

It is a facet of the human brain that we are hardwired to be able to have mixed feelings about people. In fact, the more we love somebody, the closer we are to them, the more likely we are to have mixed feelings, because the more likely they are to disappoint us. 1

And so it’s highly unnatural for a child to see one parent like literally as like a hero, and the other as like a villain. 1

This is not a natural reaction unless there’s been proven abuse or neglect of the child by the target parent. These extreme reactions that we’re talking about happen when there has been no abuse or neglect. It’s typical for most children that there will be things that they like and dislike about each parent. It’s very black-and-white for them when they say that they love one parent and they hate the other. It’s almost like amnesia with the child’s good memories with the alienated parent appear to be completely destroyed and less positive memories are exaggerated or distorted to be much worse than they were originally. 6

To feel authentic, a child has to attach to every part of a primary caregiver, the negative as well as the positive, the spoken as well as the unspoken. 7

On the opposite, abused children don’t lack ambivalence. They don’t start worshiping the other parent like “well one parent beat me, so now the other is a hero”. They can still see the good and the bad in both parents. 1

(4) The “independent-thinker” phenomenon

The child states that the decision to reject the target parent is their own. The custodial parent will sometimes testify in court that they want the child to visit the targeted parent but the child doesn’t want to. A judge wouldn’t usually accept that a child doesn’t have to attend school because they don’t want to. So why would the court accept that a child not visit the targeted parent for the same reason. In fact it’s a red flag for me if the alienating parent says that it’s not fair to make a child to do something like visit the targeted parent if the child doesn’t want to. 6

And it does seem to be that they want to really own it for themselves. 1

At some point these kids figure out that people think they’ve been brainwashed, programmed, coached or whatever term we want to use. And so they say things like 1

  • This has nothing to do with the favored parent.
  • Don’t even think that the favored parent had anything to do with this
  • This is all my own (thinking)
  • I just came up with this

(5) Reflexive support of the alienating parent in the parental conflict

  • The kids will take the favored parent’s side in every interparental conflict
  • The favored parent is always right

Anything that the alienated parent will say to the child is interpreted by that child as negative and hostile towards the other parent who they’re trying to protect. It’s impossible for this person to reciprocate. 9

After all these kids are just trying to please an alienating parent who says they’re there to protect them. The child is aligned with the alienating parent who is usually the custodial parent. For obvious reasons that parent has the most power over the children. 6

The alienated children will defend them tooth and nail, just like you see these kids defending the people who are abusing them sexually. 9

On the opposite, abused children don’t take the other parent’s side. If two parents disagree they don’t say, “Because mom beat me, she must be wrong about what day of the week it is.” (Amy BAKER, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2zNV1Jvc5I))

People know the famous Stockholm Syndrome where in 1973 two bank robbers took four people hostage for six days. And at the end of that time the hostages resisted rescue, criticized the rescuers for rescuing them and refused to testify. The point is that they identified with their abusive captors so strongly in only six days. What does that tell us? It tells us that people will identify with the abusive person. It seems to be some type of a coping mechanism or survival strategy. But that’s for adults in only six days. Imagine if it’s a small child or an adolescent with your own parent. 3

Non-specialists tend to mistake something called pathological enmeshment with healthy bonding. And they will do that almost every time if they don’t specialize in alienation, estrangement, enmeshment and in particular how to tell them all apart.
That term “pathological enmeshment” in this context is a family dynamic in which the parent has essentially engulfed the child – body and soul – for emphasis. Other words people use are: hijacked the child, co-opted the child.
The net result is that the parent has obliterated the normal, healthy, interpersonal boundaries that should exist between a parent and a child – obliterated or erased those boundaries. 3

But when non-specialists see it, what they see is a child who seems close to mom or close to dad. They can sit in an interview and the parent is rubbing the child’s back and holding hands and the child tells you how great the parent is and how bad the other parent is. Anyone who doesn’t have specialty level expertise is liable to leave that interview thinking what a great relationship. I’ll repeat the phrase, non-specialists almost always, and I don’t use a term like that lightly, almost always mistake pathological enmeshment for healthy bonding. 3

(6) Absence of guilt over cruelty to and/or exploitation of the alienated parent

Alienated children lack of remorse for the really shoddy treatment of the targeted parent. These kids treat the targeted parent really badly. These kids act as if they just don’t care about the targeted parent’s feelings. 1

The child doesn’t seem to care if the targeted parents feelings are hurt. There is little or no gratitude for any gifts, support or the other nice things that parent might have done. The child may even state that the alienated parent doesn’t deserve to see them. 6

On the opposite, abused children don’t generally lack remorse. 1

(7) The presence of borrowed scenarios

The children’s responses have a rehearsed or coached quality often reflecting expressions and actual words used by the alienating parent. 6

These kids repeat back phrases, ideas, beliefs, statements and whole paragraph scenarios that come from the favored parent. The child is sort of pretending and then eventually comes to believe for themselves, that these are their ideas, even though they may not know the words they’re saying or they don’t understand it or they can’t provide any examples. 1

When you ask “why”, then you get

  • I just want good childhood memories 1

It is a borrowed scenario because

  • Children don’t generally think they’re entitled to only have good childhood memories 1

It’s important to remember the children’s cognitive development happens in stages. For example an 8 year old child does not have the cognitive ability of an adult. When asked about their reasons the child may make up a silly explanation or even admit that they don’t understand what they’re saying. Children are great imitators and mimics. They will take on the beliefs and attitudes of their parents and make them their own. We often hear a six-year-old child making statements that a 16 or 20 year old would make. Statements that are far ahead of their normal level of conceptual and cognitive development. For example they might say, “Daddy’s new girlfriend is a real slut.” But if you ask them where they heard that or what that means they won’t be able to tell you. 6

(8) Spread of the animosity to the friends and/or extended family of the alienated parent

Ultimately the children’s campaign of denigration spreads to their friends and family, neighbors. Anybody who has anything good to say about the targeted parent is ultimately cut off by the kids. 1

Grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins are all tarred with the same brush. So the relationship with the child becomes lost to all of these relatives as well. 6

On the opposite, abused children don’t cut off the friends and family of the abusive parent. 1

Three Levels of Parental Alienation

It has to do with the intensity and the number of those eight behaviors.

(1) Mild Alienation (1-3 behaviors)

Mild kids 1

  • are coming for their visits
  • show some sort of challenging behaviors towards the targeted parent, but basically they’re relating to that parent in a reality based way
  • might be upset, but it’s primarily based on the behavior of the targeted parent
  • maybe sometimes don’t trust that parent or they are having some doubts, but it’s basically at a low level

(2) Moderate Alienation (3-5 behaviors)

Moderate kids 1

  • are resisting coming in general
  • when they come, they’re very cold, distant and very challenging
  • act like they don’t trust nor like the parent
  • eventually if they have enough time, enough consecutive days together, they calm down and then sort of come back

(3) Severe Alienation (6-8 behaviors)

Severely alienated kids 1

  • either don’t come at all or if they come, they are shut down emotionally
  • are there in body so that the favored parent doesn’t get in trouble for interfering in the parenting time
  • could go as extreme as literally bringing a duffel bag with water, food and sheets to sleep on
  • say “I want nothing from you”
  • go in their room and spend the entire time on the phone with the favored parent
  • are like a shell at that point

Reciprocity of Alienating Behaviors

We often think that this is a problem between two parents who cannot get along, and it’s not. It’s typically one-sided. 12

We need to differentiate between families in which parental alienating behaviors are 9

  • reciprocal – typically resulting in loyalty conflicts
    The parents who were reciprocating and both doing it were not alienated from their children.
  • non-reciprocal – typically resulting in parental alienation
    Those parents were the ones who were the most alienated from their children. If a parent has very little power to reciprocate, to do anything, they are the ones whose relationship is the most damaged with their child.

Three Types of Alienators

Psychologist Dr. Douglas DARNELL identified three distinct types of alienators: 6

  • naive
  • active
  • obsessed

Naive Alienator

Parents should not limit access between the child and the other parent. Most divorced parents do participate in some sort of naive form of alienation. However they recognize the importance of the child spending time with the other parent. And children will come to accept that their parents disagree or argue at times. 6

Active Alienator

In reaction to personal hurt or bitterness, the parent who is an active alienator will often lash out against the other parent in front of the children. After calming down they may realize that they were wrong and try to repair the damage. Nevertheless, these parents continue to be passively rigid and uncooperative with the other parent. 6

Obsessed Alienator

The obsessed alienator is a parent with a cause to align the child to his or her side and campaign against the targeted parent to destroy whatever relationship may be left. 6

Power and Control Wheel

Jennifer HARMAN and Mandy MATTHEWSON combined several gender-neutral adapted “power and control wheels” used in the Duluth Model which is the most widely known protocol for intervening in cases of domestic violence (https://www.theduluthmodel.org/wheels). The power and control wheel is a well-known tool used in this protocol to conceptualize the behaviors used by perpetrators of intimate partner violence. They combined the post-separation power and control wheel, the abuse of children wheel, and the power and control wheel because the behaviors used by alienating parents are represented in all of them. 15

  • Using Emotional Abuse
  • Using Coercion
  • Using Threats and Intimidation
  • Using physical/sexual Abuse Behaviors
  • Using Isolation
  • Minimizing, Denying, Blaming
  • Using Priviledge
  • Using Economic Abuse
  • Using Children

Third Party Alienation

On their mission to destroy the relationship between the other parent and the child they employ an army of officials: doctors, therapists, guardian ad litems, attorneys, mediators, moderators, parenting coordinators, custody evaluators just to name a few who’s specialized training and parental alienation may be non-existent or they may be insufficiently informed or misinformed. 11

They’ll have extended family question whether or not that targeted parent is actually a good parent. Often it’s tied to just parents, extended family and the support network around that parent not understanding the problem that this person is a victim of domestic violence. 9

A lot of times, when families are embroiled in a high conflict divorce separation and the courts get involved, frequently there’s a team mentality where an alienating parent will try to gather up people on their side. In our adversarial system there you have a contest between evidence to see who’s the better parent. So in that fight alienating parents in particular will try to gain the favour of all the professional participants.4

Third party alienation simply means that when a professional participant like a Guardian ad Litem or a Child Protection Services (CPS) worker or most often a therapist is solicited to become an ally for the alienating parent’s story. Once they buy into the story then they most frequently become like what we call a rescuer. And so they are no longer trying to help the family as a whole. They’re taking a side against the targeted parent based on either false drama scripts or exaggerations of things that really aren’t harmful or dangerous to the child. 4

So, in this dynamic we see something called a perverse family drama triangle which is, the alienating parent will form a coalition with the child against the targeted parent and then will try to gather up professional participants to take their side, the alienating parent’s side. This frequently develops out of an enmeshed relationship between the alienating parent and the alienated child. As soon as the alienating parent has got the favour of the child on their side, then it’s much easier for them to exploit the child in front of a “guardian ad litem”, in front of a therapist. 4

Sometimes when you have investigations that involve allegations of abuse, you’ll have law enforcement involved, you have Child Protective Services (CPS) workers. And so, these people get involved and embroiled in what amounts to a narrative script that’s formulated by the alienating parent in an effort to control the situation. 4

Because typically alienating parents are what we call “narcissistically vulnerable“, they feel very threatened when part of their identity has been diminished within the dissolution of the marriage. So, they externalize the blame and project it outward towards the targeted parent. And the children get involved in that and they’re caught in the middle. So, there’s an extreme amount of pressure put on the child to exhibit loyalty towards the alienating parent. And that same amount of pressure that’s put on the child is also then projected on to the professional participants. 4

So what you end up having in a perverse family drama triangle is the identification by the alienating parent as the rescuer. And the child is a victim of being hurt or harmed in some way by the targeted parent through some either exaggerated or completely fictitious dramatic script. And these are the kind of dramatic scripts that you see normally in family therapy where somebody is being scapegoated. 4

And you’ll have a child who naturally gravitates to have affection for the targeted parent will then go to a therapist who has been told by the alienating parent. The child then mimics and parrots what the alienating parent says bad about the targeted parent. And so the therapist will write little notes to the court saying this child does not want to have any kind of relationship with the father or the mother. And they don’t like them. The child will then comply with that by not being affectionate towards the targeted parent. 4

An alienating parent thinks “I’m going to lose contact with this child that I need to have in my life every day because they’re there. And if I feel threatened, I’m going to get as many people as I can to help me make sure that I have that child with me all the time”. “And that person over there who cheated at me or did something horrible to cause it to break down. They don’t deserve to have a part in this child’s life because they aren’t part of our tribe”. And then once that’s developed into a campaign of denigration, then you go out and get people outside of the tribe to become part of it. And that’s what we call third party alienation. You get a third person who’s not involved in the conflict to come take sides. 4

There is a difficulty in getting the judge to understand what’s going on – especially when you’re talking about third party alienation. The judge may be seeing before him/her a Guardian ad Litem lawyer that he has a personal relationship with. The judge doesn’t know the targeted parent as well as he/she knows the lawyer Guardian ad Litem. When the alienated/targeted parent says that this Guardian ad Litem doesn’t have it right, that there’s Third Party Alienation, then the judge says “Wait a second. I know this person. They wouldn’t fall prey to any false stories. They really know what’s going on. I’m gonna take their word for it”.

  1. Amy BAKER, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2zNV1Jvc5I ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
  2. Ben BURGESS, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzGMqS8vpa4 ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
  3. Steven MILLER, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zk675aYGHV4 ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
  4. Shawn WYGANT, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eH8f6FjDrUc ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
  5. William BERNET, https://parentalalienation.eu/the-five-factor-model ↩ ↩
  6. Theo BOERE, Carmen BARKLEY, Larry WATERMAN; Parental Alienation Documentary, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYV8GBrJv9k ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
  7. Karen WOODALL, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qd21RcWakP0 ↩ ↩
  8. Nick WOODALL, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itK1Ln6qh3c ↩
  9. Jennifer HARMAN, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Vrs_hu1HSM ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
  10. https://parentalalienation.eu/awareness/17-alienating-strategies ↩
  11. Susan SHOFER, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cu4XXnKPwCM ↩ ↩
  12. Jennifer HARMAN, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3YdldNXZnQ ↩ ↩
  13. Linda GOTTLIEB, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWuqahNnZAU ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩
  14. Richard GARDNER, http://richardagardner.com/Pas_Intro ↩
  15. Jennifer HARMAN and Mandy MATTHEWSON, Parental alienating behaviors, in: ‘Parental alienation: Science and law’ from Demosthenes LORANDOS and William BERNET ↩