Trans-generational trauma repetition is something that we look for when we’re assessing a family. And we will often find unusual patterns of behaviors in families where a child has rejected a parent and has become aligned with the other. But that’s just the top level story. That’s just the door that opens. Beyond that, what we see are patterns of very strong enmeshment and very strong idealization which are mirrored through the generations. 1
(1) Previous Generation Trauma
If we go up a generation, we’ll see that the mom who is very, very enmeshed with her daughter was also enmeshed with her mother. We’ll see that the father, who has parentified his daughter or brought her into an inappropriate spousified relationship, is also in a very enmeshed relationship with his mother. These patterns of behavior have been passed down the generation and normalized. 1
(2) Disorders / Trauma of the alienating parent
And we think from research, Jill Solberg particularly, talks about trans-generational trauma being handed down through the generations through the attachment processes. And it’s a complex issue. 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. And what we find is that, particularly in cases where perhaps a mother has been sexually abused in childhood and she’s not been able to reveal it and her child at the age of nine, the same age that she was when she was sexually abused now accuses daddy of having touched her inappropriately. What we find is that, in these circumstances, the mother’s inability to express and resolve the trauma is passed in the inter-psychic relationship, the relationship between the mind of the mother and the mind of the child and when her daughter reports sexual abuse, that is comfort for the mother, because someone else is suffering in the way that she suffered. 1
(3) Separation and Divorce
We have some very, very high functioning people in the world who de-compensate when the family separates. The family separation is a highly stressful, difficult environment for people to live through. For those very high functioning individuals who, you may not ever have seen any signs that this was coming, the breakdown of the family allows the trauma to come through into the here and now. But the trauma isn’t in the here and now. The child isn’t being abused in the here and now but somebody was being abused. Somebody, at some point, was being abused. What we have to look for in these cases, and they have a particular quality, is whose trauma story are we listening to? 1
Sometimes it’s child abuse that’s inadvertent, a parent is simply incapable of holding back their own psychopathology. Very often these are trans-generational transmissions of trauma that come crashing out in the here and now. 2
(4) Pulling Child to the alienating parent
And what’s happening is that the child is responding to a psychopathology within the aligned parent. A parent who threatens to cut off the child’s attachment with the other parent simply by signaling that they’re unhappy with it, parents who perhaps psychologically decompensate every time the child is due to leave them to go to the other parent. Those are the kind of pressures that cause a child in the interpsychic world between the aligned parent and the child to cut off that relationship. Because actually, the rejection is simply a kind of a projection of the pathological alignment. And that’s what we’re looking for. Why has this child become bound to one parent? 2
In every parental alienation case, what you have at the heart of it is an imbalance in power. There is an asymmetrical power relationship between the parents. One parent has the power over the other and has the power over the child. You’re looking at the power dynamics, because they’re very much at the root of it. 2
What we typically find is that these kind of fractures and the dynamics that caused the alignment have been present in the family very often for a long time since the child was born. 2
You have a child who’s been brought up in the shadow of the aligned parents’ difficult behaviors, sometimes quite pathological behaviors. And they grow extraordinarily sensitive emotional antennae. So they’re always scanning the horizon to work out what kind of behavior is acceptable and what kind of behavior isn’t acceptable. And if you’ve got a parent who demonstrates, who shows, who through their behavior signals to the child, that it’s not acceptable for the child to have a relationship with the other parent, then the child will respond to that because their greatest anxiety is that that parent will become emotionally unavailable to them, they will be ostracized by that parent. And the parenthas got the power over the child and through that the power over the other parent. 2
In other cases we work with parents for whom they are very much a victim of their own history. An example of that would be a mother who had been sexually abused in her own childhood. And because that was never dealt with, it remained unresolved. And in the drama of the family separation, that can come spilling out into the here and now. And typically what happens there is that they will project their unresolved trauma onto the child and almost believe that the child is being abused themselves. And what that does in psychological terms is, it allows that parent then to go and rescue their own inner child. Therefore the other parent who becomes the rejected parent is simply a kind of an innocent bystander. But in those cases it’s difficult to describe that behavior as being deliberate. 2
(5) Third party alienation
(6) Intervention
This is something that needs to be stopped. It needs to be prevented, not least because the danger is that it gets passed down the generation to that child’s own children and even beyond that. 2
(8) Long Term effect
If you don’t treat a child that’s been alienated, a child who’s been pathologically split, the real danger for that child is that they will go through the rest of their lives with a propensity to split, by which I mean, that all of their life will be one of black and white rather than shades of grey. Now, we see this very often when we work with adult children who were alienated. Those are children who very often don’t trust their own judgment. They find it very difficult to have relationships that are stable with other people because they don’t trust the other person and they don’t trust themselves. 2
(7) Therapy
But a part of them remains disconnected, a part of them remains split off. The child is almost alienated from a part of themselves. Even where there is a reconnection between the child and the formerly rejected parent, the child can still feel a sense of incongruence and there still can be difficulties in that relationship. And in those cases, very often what can be the most useful is to get some professional help from somebody who knows how to do that work, how to deal with trauma, and the associated kind of difficulties that that produces. 2
(9) Next generation effect
These trauma transmissions and trauma repetitions are very much unexplored in Parental Alienation. Yes, trauma passes through the generations through the attachment relationship. 1