1.2 Who is involved

Favored / Alienating Parent

The alienating parent is engaging in this campaign to criticize the target parent. 1

The alienating parent really controls everything. They control access and communication to their child. 2

Target / Alienated / Victim Parent

The target parent sometimes reacts in ways that might not be helpful. But the target parent doesn’t cause this to happen. The alienating parent is the person who causes it. 1

There’s kind of a perception that both parents must be contributing to the problem for this child to be rejecting them. One parent must be doing something bad. They’re both acting badly towards each other. Interviewing and talking to targeted parents and researching them, a lot of them are really helpless. They have almost no power or control over what’s happening in their lives, in their children’s lives. 2

In many of the alienated parents that we work with are children who were alienated themselves. They may not realize it. But actually when we start to work with them, they recognize that that was part of their trauma story too. 3

Alienated Child

The child has a role because the child participates in some way in gravitating to one parent and ignoring the other parent. 1

Extended Family Members

Many grandparents, step-parents and extended family members are affected by this problem. 4

Third Party (Alienation)

Non Specialists

Professionals in this field are in a position where we are supposed to be rearing socially appropriate children to conform to society. 5

Due to the numerous counter-intuitive issues arising in alienation cases, one profoundly deleterious result is “unwitting professional collusion with the alienating parent“. Thereby exacerbating the alienation – often beyond repair.
Non-specialists in alienation are particularly susceptible to becoming co-opted by the alienating parent, who presents well. While the alienated parent, who is a trauma victim, may present poorly.
This problem cannot be overstated. We have experienced all too many cases in which a mental health professional had contributed to “a climate of fear, hatred, and terror” that led to a substantial negative impact on the relationship between the child and alienated parent and supported the child’s “refusal and resistance to parenting time with good, loving, and safe parents.” 6

Linda GOTTLIEB reviewed many cases as an expert where the forensic evaluator had absolutely no training on the suggestibility of children. They did nothing in their rapport to raise the alternative hypothesis to the child’s telling the truth, to the child was influenced as to rule out this as suggestibility by the parent. 5

The Therapist

It’s easy for individual therapists to become aligned with their clients and then to work against the direction of the other professionals. These parents are exceptionally good at manipulating people, especially if it’s one on one in a therapeutic office. One of the crazy making behaviors are therapists who are not specially trained in this area and who lack specialized knowledge and understanding of these dynamics. And then again, they become aligned with their client and add another layer of complexity to this problem. 6

A therapist and the aligned parent tend to give power and over-empower a child to make decisions. 6

The Judge

Judges are there to enforce social norms and the laws. When they ignore the influence of Parental Alienation on the child, they are unwittingly participating in child abuse. They really are. They don’t know it. They don’t realize it. They’re not educated about that because probably 90% of the mental health profession don’t get it either. 5

The Guardian ad Litem

Sometimes you have a “guardian ad litem” involved, if it’s an extremely high conflict case, and they come in to represent the children. [A “guardian ad litem” (GAL) is a person the court appoints to investigate what solutions would be in the “best interests of a child.” Here, we are talking about a GAL in a divorce or parental rights and responsibilities case.] That makes the alienating parent even more prone to want to “protect the children”. 7

  1. William BERNET, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kjyvc2zVc6c ↩ ↩ ↩
  2. Jennifer HARMAN, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Vrs_hu1HSM ↩ ↩
  3. Karen WOODALL, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qd21RcWakP0 ↩
  4. Jennifer HARMAN, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3YdldNXZnQ ↩
  5. Linda GOTTLIEB, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWuqahNnZAU ↩ ↩ ↩
  6. Ben BURGESS, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzGMqS8vpa4 ↩ ↩ ↩
  7. Shawn WYGANT, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eH8f6FjDrUc ↩