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 to prove, you know, 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 favor of all the professional participants. Sometimes, you have a guardian ad litem
involved, if it's an extremely high conflict case, and they come in to
represent the children. And then, of course, that makes the
alienating parent even more prone to want to, quote, 'protect the children'. So, in this dynamic, we see something
called, you know, a perverse family drama triangle which is, the alienating parent
will form a coalition with the child as against the targeted parent and then we'll
try to gather up professional participants to take their side, the
alienating parent's side. And this frequently develops out of an
enmeshed relationship between the alienating parent and the alienated child. And so, as soon as soon as the alienating
parent has got the favor 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, in front of, sometimes when you have investigations that involve
allegations of abuse, you'll have law enforcement involved, you have CPS workers,
Child Protective Services 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. Because typically, alienating parents are
what we call, narcissistically vulnerable. They feel very threatened when a 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 placed on, projected on to the
professional participants. So, what you end up having is, you have,
in a perverse family drama triangle, you have 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. In a normal, healthy triangular
situation, triangle in family conflict, it's resolved by someone within the triangle. If you have parent-parent-child,
somebody, 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. So it's referred to in the
literature as a pathological system. That's very difficult to identify. Third party alienation simply means
that when a professional participant like a guardian ad litem, or a CPS worker, or
most often a therapist, is solicited to become an ally for the
alienating parent's story. So once they buy into
the story, then they most frequently become like
what we call a rescuer. And so they're no longer trying
to help the family as a whole. They're taking a side against the targeted
parent based on mostly false, either false drama scripts, or exaggerations
of things that really aren't harmful or dangerous to the child. 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, it stems from
two kinds of abuse. The first 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. So, the alienating parent
has this reward system. Once they get an ally out of the child to
hate the other parent, then the child, 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 we'll say, here, it's the child that
doesn't like the parent. So, it's a bait and switch. You have a corrupting
emotional abuse and usually, typically, parents who corrupt their
children will often exploit them in these kinds of circumstances. So then 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. So over the course of time, sometimes
three months, six months, nine months, 12 months, and especially in small
children, it can happen really quickly. 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, and then 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. And then so, the child will then
comply with that by, you know, not being affectionate towards the targeted parent. Well, EMDR therapy is a recognized therapy
for real instances where a child or a parent or an adolescent
has experienced real trauma. And it's called Eye Movement
Desensitization and Reprocessing. That's EMDR, okay. So, what it was designed for was soldiers,
who had seen death, or people who had been surrounded by death and real horrific
experiences, that those are initially called potential traumatic stress
stressors, because not all soldiers come back and exhibit
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. So, there's a whole process, when you get
a child into therapy, who's in the middle of a high conflict divorce, there's a
process of differential diagnosis. You have to establish whether or not the
child has actually experienced a traumatic event that involves some sort of horrific,
like death, for example, and whether or not they are dysfunctional
because of that trauma. And so that process in
and of itself takes a while. So typically, what happens with EMDR
therapists, they are often exploited by alienating parents. They'll take them for the therapy and say,
My child is experiencing this trauma. And it's because of all these bad things
the targeted parent is doing to them. An incompetent therapist will take
it at face value and just say, PTSD, post traumatic stress disorder. And they'll write it down,
and then they'll start treatment. So, and they don't even find out, or test. Is the trauma being experienced by the child
being involved in the divorce, in general? Are they experiencing it between the
alienating parent and the child out of a sense of loyalty conflict? Or, is there something actually going on
in the targeted parent-child relationship where there's actual real
emotional abuse or physical abuse? In my experience, I've been involved in
about 162 cases across the United States. The times that I run into the EMDR
therapy, where the therapist has become aligned with the alienator, they
didn't go through that process. The EMDR therapy, the problem with it if
you have a non-abused child, and that's not traumatized by alleged bad behavior
by the targeted parent or fictitious allegations that had been made by the
alienating parent, then the EMDR part of the protocols is for them to imagine the
trauma that the alienator says this child is experiencing at the
targeted parent's house. So, then they imagine trauma that
they really haven't experienced or exaggerated dramatic scripts. And they call it up into their mind.
And they're supposed to think about it. So, in the worst case scenario, one of the
cases I dealt with was a 12-year old boy, who, the stepmother and the father in this
case, had told him that his mother didn't really want him when he was little and
wished that she had aborted him. And then along with it was the script
that, Oh, by the way, when you were four, your mother tried to kill you with a knife. So, this whole 'kill you with a knife' script, and the boy says, I don't remember that. It never happened to me. So, they take him to the EMDR therapist,
and they do this movement with their fingers back and forth while they try to
bring up this, Oh, your mom, remember the time that your mom tried to kill you with a
knife, just try to bring it up in your mind. And they, when the child tries to
bring it up in memory, it's not there. So, but then it's been suggested. So, they go home, and it's been
talked to, through conversations, Oh, you really did experience this,
I remember I saw your mom do it. And so, research into these kinds of
scenarios and controlled experiments have shown that 80, 90, 50, sometimes 50 up to
90% of participants will develop a false memory just by having
that suggested to them. When you have dramatic false scripts like
being rejected and potentially killed by a mother, in the case that I was talking
about, this little boy then is traumatized by a false memory and then comes to find
in himself what's now become part of his autobiographical story, that,
Hey, my mom didn't want me, she did this horrible, nasty thing. Maybe what my dad and my
stepmom are telling me is really true. That's where you have the development of
an alienated child and it has long term negative consequences if not arrested, and
so the child can, because a normal healthy child has a normal sense of ambivalence,
which you would say the child would be able to contextualize the realities of
both parents, as they're, my mom and dad both do good and bad things. I love them both.
It's okay. For an alienating parent, they think, 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 in the mirror is to cause it to break down. They don't deserve to
have a part in this child's life because they're part of our tribe. And then once that's developed into a
campaign of denigration, then you go out and using your, you get people
outside of the tribe to become part of it. And that's what we would
call third party alienation. You get a third person who's not involved
in the conflict to become take sides. If a child is kidnapped by a stranger,
there's a psychological component, which is the most damaging
part of the kidnapping. In other words, the kidnapper has
exclusive proprietary control over what relationships that child can have. They are no longer allowed to, in severe
cases, allowed to leave the premises, they are no longer allowed to have friends. They're no longer to see their parents. So, the psychological, that psychological
component happens in brainwashing and programming parents who
engage in alienating tactics. And in some cases, cases that I've dealt
with, there will be actual kidnapping. I had one case where the mother had
kidnapped the children to another country. And then the father, it took two
years to get the children back. Some cases that I've been involved with,
the judge will will scoff and kind of laugh when you mention that the children
were kidnapped locally, like within the same jurisdiction, and because they don't
recognize it, because they're thinking in terms of, that it only has to be this
severe list of cases to qualify for, I quote, kidnapping. The difficulty in taking a family conflict
and getting the judge to understand what's going on, especially when you're talking
about third party alienation, because the judge may be seeing before him or her, a
guardian ad litem lawyer that they have a personal relationship with. So, when the alienating parent or the,
let's say the alienated parent, the targeted parent, says that this
guardian ad litem doesn't have it right. The judge doesn't know the targeted
parent as well as he or she knows the lawyer guardian ad litem. So there's then you say, there's third
party alienation and 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. That was a 10-year old boy. And he had an 8-year old brother. And the mother was really, really
angry that she didn't get full custody. And they ended up with joint
custody, shared custody, like 50-50. She developed the idea that her 10-year old
son, Eric, was sexually abused by the father. And she took that allegation and took the
boy to a therapist, who then treated the boy as a sexual abuse victim. Now, this is while, this was referred to
CPS for an investigation, Child Protective Services
and law enforcement. And they went through two
years of investigating this, the father passed two polygraph tests. And the CPS and law
enforcement said it didn't happen. Move on, get over it. But the court system
really wasn't aware of it. It didn't get into the court record. And the therapist continued to treat
this boy as if he was sexually abused. So then, we have a brainwashing
effect, a rehearsal effect. And so over six months, a year, 18 months,
two years, finally, this boy is convinced that his father was sexually
abusing him, and was believing it and developing false memories for it. While that was going on, the psychiatrist,
one of the psychiatrists who is providing medication for the boy was dosing him
with Prozac at the request of the mother. Now, you're dosing him with Prozac under
the premise that his feelings against his father are escalating, because now he's
thinking that my dad has done all these nasty things to me. And my mom wants him dead. And there was even evidence that the
mother had threatened to kill him and she was arrested for it, threatened
to poison him with insulin while he was sleeping, to kill him. And so, all of these kill messages were
going forward and going forward until one day, one week that they went to the
therapy, and the therapist put, the mother had put the idea in the therapist said,
and the therapist put the idea in the 10-year old boy's head, Eric, that
his little brother was sexually abused by the father as well. The mother was upset about it,
Eric was upset about it. And this was sort of the trigger mechanism
that caused this boys to completely snap in wanting to fulfill what is the wish
for, what his mother wanted him to do was to kill his father. So she left a loaded gun, a pistol. And he went out and shot his father and
killed him in the driveway when the father came to pick them up for visits while the
younger brother was in the car. And then he went back into the house and
gave his mom the okay sign. And then when the little brother was asked
to write about an event, a scary event in their life, in school, he wrote down that
his mother had told his brother, older brother to kill their father. So, this was an extreme example, because
you have two alienators, you have the mom and you have the therapist. It boils down to training. Therapists, psychologists, mental health
professionals, in general, social workers, and legal professionals should be trained
in these kinds of dynamics that occur. And part of that training should be that
when families are embroiled in conflict, that the family should be treated as the
client, not one of the family members, because if a child is suffering from some
sort of emotional issues within a family conflict, it's because, if you don't address
the family as a whole, the child's problems exist within
the context of the conflict. The training, training
would be a really big help.
