In the Name of the Child: A Developmental Approach to Understanding and Helping Children of Conflicted and Violent Divorce, Second Edition

2 EDITION In the Name of the Child About the Authors Janet R. Johnston, PhD, is a sociologist with a doctorate from...

Author: Dr. Janet Johnston PhD | Dr. Vivienne Roseby PhD | Dr. Kathryn Kuehnle PhD

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2

EDITION

In the Name of the Child

About the Authors Janet R. Johnston, PhD, is a sociologist with a doctorate from Stanford University and a clinical social worker with a master’s from the University of Michigan. For three decades she has specialized in research and clinical interventions with high-conflict and violent divorcing families, parental alienation, and family abduction of children at the Judith Wallerstein Center for the Family in Transition. As professor in justice studies at San Jose State University for the past decade, her focus has been on social policies in family and juvenile courts within the context of their communities. She has been the honored recipient of multiple prestigious awards for her numerous publications and keynote presentations at scientific and professional meetings to mental health and legal professionals throughout the United States and abroad. She is the first coauthor of Impasses of Divorce: The Dynamics and Resolution of Family Conflict (1988); and Through Children’s Eyes: Healing Stories for Children of Divorce (1997). Vivienne Roseby, PhD, is a clinical psychologist in private practice and consulting psychologist to Families First Residential Treatment Center in Davis, California, where she has pioneered a developmental treatment model for children and adolescents with histories of acute and chronic trauma. She earned her doctorate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has a double major in human development and school psychology and a double minor in clinical psychology and clinical social work. She has also been a clinical consultant at the Child and Family Study Center at UC Davis and currently consults and teaches widely on developmental psychopathology as it pertains to the diagnosis and treatment of children, adolescents, and adults. She is the first coauthor of A Safe Place to Grow: A Group Treatment Manual for Children in Conflicted, Violent and Separating Homes (2005). Kathryn Kuehnle, PhD, is a widely recognized expert in the assessment and treatment of sexually abused children. A licensed psychologist with a doctorate from the University of Minnesota, she specializes in the evaluation and treatment of children, adolescents, and adults who have been victims of sexual abuse in her independent practice in Tampa, Florida. She also provides consultation to attorneys, courts, health care professionals, parents, community agencies, and the media regarding child sexual abuse, parenting, and related topics. She is the author of Assessing Allegations of Child Sexual Abuse (1996) and the coeditor of The Evaluation of Child Sexual Abuse Allegations: A Comprehensive Guide to Assessment and Testimony (in press).

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EDITION

In the Name of the Child A Developmental Approach to Understanding and Helping Children of Conflicted and Violent Divorce Janet R. Johnston, PhD Vivienne Roseby, PhD Kathryn Kuehnle, PhD

NEW YORK

Copyright © 2009 Springer Publishing Company, LLC All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Springer Publishing Company, LLC, or authorization through payment of the appropriate fees to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978-750-8400, fax 978-646-8600, [email protected] or on the web at www.copyright.com. Springer Publishing Company, LLC 11 West 42nd Street New York, NY 10036 www.springerpub.com Acquisitions Editor: Jennifer Perillo Cover Designer: Mimi Flow Composition: Monotype, LLC Ebook ISBN: 978-08261-1128-9 09 10 11 12 13 / 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Johnston, Janet R. In the name of the child : a developmental approach to understanding and helping children of conflicted and violent divorce / Janet R. Johnston, Vivienne Roseby. — 2nd ed. / Kathryn Kuehnle. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-8261-1127-2 1. Children of divorced parents—Mental health. I. Roseby, Vivienne, 1951- II. Kuehnle, Kathryn. III. Title. RJ507.D59J64 2009 618.92’89—dc22

2009006544 Printed in the United States of America by Hamilton Printing The author and the publisher of this Work have made every effort to use sources believed to be reliable to provide information that is accurate and compatible with the standards generally accepted at the time of publication. Because medical science is continually advancing, our knowledge base continues to expand. Therefore, as new information becomes available, changes in procedures become necessary. We recommend that the reader always consult current research and specific institutional policies before performing any clinical procedure. The author and publisher shall not be liable for any special, consequential, or exemplary damages resulting, in whole or in part, from the readers’ use of, or reliance on, the information contained in this book. The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

To our loving families

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Contents

Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xv

Part I - The Problem and the Challenge Chapter 1

The Family Crucible of High-Conflict and Violent Divorce . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Chapter 2

The Prism and Prison of the Child . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

Part II - The Development of Children and Youth in High-Conflict Families Chapter 3

Infants and Toddlers: Problems in Separation-Individuation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59

Chapter 4

Preschoolers: Separation, Gender and Sexualized Anxiety . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93

Chapter 5

School-age Children: The Struggle to Feel Lovable, Good, and Competent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129

Chapter 6

Adolescents: Toward Resolution or Stalemate . . . . . 157

Chapter 7

Young Adults: Struggling with the Legacy . . . . . . . . 193

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Part III - Interventions on Behalf of Children in High-Conflict and Violent Divorce Chapter 8

Building Multidisciplinary Partnerships Between the Family Court and the Community . . . . . . . . . . . . 225

Chapter 9

Co-Parenting Counseling and Parent Coordination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255

Chapter 10

Treatment of Children in Conflicted and Violent Families . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279

Part IV - Special Issues in Difficult Custody-Disputing Families Chapter 11

Domestic Violence: Differential Assessment and Parenting Plans . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 307

Chapter 12

Parental Abduction: Risk Factors and Preventive Interventions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335

Chapter 13

Parental Alignments and Alienation: Differential Assessment and Therapeutic Interventions . . . . . . 361

Chapter 14

Child Sexual Abuse Allegations in Custody Disputes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 391

Appendix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Part A Guidelines for Initial Assessment . . . . . . Part B Summary of Empirical Studies . . . . . . . . Part C Publications of Research Findings . . . . .

413 415 423 431

References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 435 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 459

Preface

Highly conflicted custody disputes are debilitating and painful for parents, take an inordinate share of family court resources, sorely challenge the expertise and patience of professionals who seek to help them, and place children’s healthy emotional development in jeopardy. This book is written primarily for a multidisciplinary audience of professionals in family law (judges, family lawyers, mediators, child custody evaluators, mental health practitioners, and family court administrators) as well as for concerned educators and divorcing parents who struggle with these matters. Despite the fact that the “best interests of the child” are claimed to be of primary concern by all parties, children in high-conflict divorce are made virtually invisible—kept out of focus and unseen—by the parents, by the courts, and by their own defensive processes. In the following chapters, we draw upon a series of research studies and our clinical observations during the past three decades with this special subpopulation of divorce, in order to bring these children and their individual needs and concerns into focus. The overall goal is to articulate children’s experiences and range of responses, and to explain how defensive strategies and symptoms of distress can consolidate into immutable, long-standing psychopathology. On the basis of this understanding, our objective is to emphasize the need for prevention and early intervention. Policies and procedures that can preempt these kinds of outcomes in divorcing families are prescribed, together with intervention and treatment approaches that are based on the developmental needs of the child. Principles and criteria for decision making about custody, visitation, and parenting plans are proposed on the basis of individual assessment of the developing child within his or her family.

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Three other works provide companion volumes to this book: a predecessor on the dynamics of the parental conflicts entitled Impasses of Divorce (1988) by J. R. Johnston and L. E. G. Campbell; a manual for the group treatment of children named A Safe Place to Grow (2005) by V. Roseby, J. R. Johnston, B. Gentner, & E. Moore; and a book of therapeutic stories for children called Through Children’s Eyes (1997) by J. R. Johnston, K. Breunig, C. Garrity, & M. Baris (also available in Spanish and Chinese languages). The 14 chapters of the second edition of the book are organized into four sections: The first two (chapters 1–2) are on the dynamics of the disputing parents and their parent– child relationships; the second (chapters 3–7) on the developmental risks to their children; the third (Chapters 8–10) on policy, programs, and clinical interventions; and the fourth (Chapters 11–14) on special issues relevant to highly disputed custody cases. More specific comparisons to the first edition are described below. In Part I, The Family Crucible of High-Conflict and Violent Divorce (chapter 1) has been revised to describe and illustrate a more contemporary understanding that there is considerable overlap between dynamics of high-conflict families and those of violent and abusive families. It shows how typical divorce impasses between parents, which are often rooted in their psychological vulnerabilities and acted out in traumatic separation, can spread to generate a form of tribal warfare in their social network with the potential of igniting violence, sometimes with lethal consequences. The Prism and Prison of the Child (chapter 2) has been revised to include more explicit descriptions of the range of parenting deficits of perpetrators and victims of domestic violence. It shows how parent–child relationships become distorted and transformed by immutable parental conflict, incidents of family violence, and the parent’s own psychopathologies that in turn endanger the child’s normal development. In Part II, three of the chapters: Infants and Toddlers (chapter 3), Preschoolers (chapter 4), and School-Age Children (chapter 5) remain the same, successively describing and illustrating common developmental threats to boys and girls of different ages and stages, together with therapeutic interventions and guidelines for parenting plans. Adolescents (chapter 6) has been modified to describe the oftentroubled transitions experienced by these youngsters during

Preface

their teenage years. Young Adults (chapter 7) is entirely new, based on unpublished longitudinal data from the children of highly conflicted and violent divorce who were seen again as young adults 15–20 years after the custody litigation. Memories of growing up in their families are described, along with the young adult’s current relationships with their conflicted parents and siblings. It reports broadly on the young adults’ social, emotional, and work functioning, specifically notes their propensity for violence and victimization, and describes in some detail their capacity to form intimate relationships with new partners during their 20s. In Part III, Building Multidisciplinary Partnerships Between the Family Court and Community (chapter 8), the historical shifts from an adversarial to a collaborative approach in family law along with some of the critical ethical and policy dilemmas inherent in this transition are reviewed. It provides an updated overview of the range of dispute resolution services and policies that are being developed and institutionalized around the country and proposes criteria as to which families need what kind of service or procedure. Co-parenting Counseling and Parent Coordination (chapter 9) describes the clinical work with parents in high-conflict divorce, giving special attention to the role of transference and counter-transference in the treatment and includes new case material. Treatment of Children in Conflicted and Violent Families (chapter 10) has been expanded. The chapter now briefly reviews the special features of clinical work with this population of children in general, describes the role of storytelling in individual work, and reports on the developments in our group model of working with children over the past decade. Part IV, the chapters on special issues with custodydisputing families are new to the second edition of the book and mostly based upon studies we and our colleagues have undertaken during the past decade. They review assessment and intervention planning with respect to four critical issues in high-conflict families—domestic violence, parental abduction, alienation, and child sexual abuse allegations in custody disputes. Domestic Violence (chapter 11) begins with the problem of substantiating allegations of violence and abuse in custody-litigating families and the dilemmas posed by unsubstantiated claims. It provides an overview of recent

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research that differentiates among a wide range of violent acts—from isolated incidents to conflict-instigated violence to patterns of abusive coercion and control—and notes the dangers in trying to make these distinctions. A differential assessment of the violence in terms of its potency, pattern, primary perpetrator, parenting capacity, and perspective of the child (called a P5 screening) is then proposed as an alternative to typing the violence. The chapter concludes with guidelines for resolving conflicting goals in custody decision making and presents a series of parenting plans for the range of domestic violence situations with criteria for usage depending upon the P5 screening. Parental Abduction (chapter 12) opens with definitions and incidence rates of child stealing by family members and provides an overview of the characteristics of family abductions and effects on victims. It then identifies a series of profiles of family situations at risk for the abduction of children and describes preventive interventions and legal remedies for a range of high-risk situations. Social policy guidelines that address the dilemma of imposing restrictions to the custody and access of parents deemed at risk for abduction conclude the chapter. Parental Alignments and Alienation (chapter 13) has been completely rewritten. Children who develop negative attitudes and behave in a hostile way to a parent for normal or expectable reasons are distinguished from those who are alienated. The theory of Parental Alienation Syndrome is briefly critiqued, and the phenomena reformulated as an “alienated child.” The chapter then provides empirical research data which support the idea that multiple factors contribute to children becoming alienated. It explores whether alienated children are emotionally troubled or responding in adaptive ways to intolerable situations, and then discusses therapeutic implications including the nature, purpose, and prognosis for mandated treatment. The chapter concludes with policy implications including the situations under which children should have their own voice and their views respected and the conditions under which the child’s primary residence should be changed to the rejected parent. Child Sexual Abuse Allegations in Custody Disputes (chapter 14) is an entirely new chapter written by coauthor Kathryn Kuehnle who has special expertise in this field. It opens with definitions of child sexual abuse and provides an

Preface

overview of its effects on victims, characteristics of perpetrators, and incidence rates. A review of what is known about children’s memory, suggestibility, behavioral symptoms, and communication capacities provides the context for the forensic evaluation tasks of interviewing children, and collecting collateral data to evaluate alternative hypothesis about the alleged abuse. Cognizant of the complexity of these issues in child custody proceedings, the chapter pays special attention to clarifying the roles of mental health professionals, and concludes with a summary of the range of potential findings that have different intervention implications. Finally, the Appendix has been expanded. Part A provides a tool for the assessment of families, Part B summarizes the samples and methodology of the series of studies, and Part C lists author publications from which our clinical observations and empirical research findings in this book derive.

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Acknowledgments

The clinical work reported in this book was undertaken by the staff of Protecting Children from Conflict, an affiliate of the Judith Wallerstein Center for the Family in Transition. We are most privileged to have had the vision, inspirational leadership, and personal encouragement of Dr. Judith Wallerstein, senior consultant and founder of the Center over the entire span of three decades. We also acknowledge the contribution and support of the many professional colleagues who worked on these projects as clinicians and researchers, most especially the coauthors of published papers listed below. In addition, Dr. Judith Goldman shared her care and compassion for children and families while providing critical clinical insights. The careful editing of this manuscript by Carol and Peter Schaffer is much appreciated. Finally, we wish to thank the families who participated in the Protecting Children from Conflict projects, without whom none of these studies would have been possible. All proceeds from this book have been dedicated to further work on behalf of this special population of at-risk children and youth. Funds for the series of studies which contributed to the new clinical findings in the second edition were provided by the Amini Foundation for the Study of Affects. Special recognition is due to the intellectual vision of the late Dr. Farsi Amini for investing in the research on alienated children and to Elizabeth Amini for her ongoing commitment and compassion to the overall project and the families it serves. We also thank the Zellerbach Family Foundation, specifically the Board and Ellen Walker, Program Executive Officer, for a decade of encouragement and funding to develop and implement systemic interventions for children of high-conflict and violent families. The research on abduction was supported by a grant from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department

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of Justice. While we are greatly indebted to each of these sources for their financial support, the opinions, findings, and conclusions in this book are wholly ours, and not necessarily those of our sponsors. Parts of this second edition have been published elsewhere in somewhat different form. Most of chapter 10, authored by Janet Johnston, formerly appeared in L.Gundsberg and Paul Hymowitz (Eds.) A Handbook of Divorce and Custody: Forensic, Developmental and Clinical Perspectives (2005, pp. 343–363). Chapter 11 is based in part on a paper published by Family Court Review (2008, Vol. 46, pp. 500–522) coauthored by Peter Jaffe, Janet Johnston, Claire Crooks, & Nicholas Bala entitled “Custody Disputes Involving Allegations of Domestic Violence: Toward a Differentiated Approach to Parenting Plans” with further insights provided by Jennifer McIntosh. Chapter 12 is a composite of two papers, one published in A. Jackson (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Domestic Violence (2008, pp. 523–530) coauthored by Janet Johnston and Samantha Hamilton entitled “Parental abduction”; and a second published by Child & Adolescent Psychiatric Clinics of North America: Special Issue on Forensic Psychiatry (2002, Vol. 11, pp. 805–822), coauthored by Janet Johnston and Inger Sagatun-Edwards entitled “Parental Kidnapping: Legal History, Profiles of Risk, and Preventive Interventions.” Chapter 13 included extracts from an article published by Family Court Review (2001, Vol. 39, pp. 316–333) coauthored by Janet Johnston, Marjorie Walters, and Steven Friedlander called “Therapeutic Work With Alienated Children and Their Families.” We appreciate the permission of each of these publishers of the material to reproduce, adapt, and use it in this book. Janet R. Johnston Menlo Park, California Vivienne Roseby Davis, California Kathryn Kuehnle Tampa, Florida October, 2008

The Problem and the Challenge

I


The Family Crucible of HighConflict and Violent Divorce

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Just as a marriage can be deemed as more or less successful or as having failed, so can a divorce be seen as being more or less successful or as having failed to accomplish its purpose. A successful divorce is one in which the adults are able to work through their anger, disappointment, and loss in a timely manner and terminate their spousal relationship with one another—legally and emotionally—while at the same time retaining or rebuilding their parental alliance and commitment to their children. A “good” divorce can relieve children of the daily stress of overt parental conflict and associated anger and depression. Fortunately, most couples appear to be relatively successful in achieving this kind of transition. Charts and markers for their voyage have been well described elsewhere (Ahrons, 2004; Emery, 2004; Hetherington & Kelly, 2002; Mercer & Kline-Pruett, 2001;

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Part I: The Problem and the Challenge

Ricci, 1997, 2006; Wallerstein & Blakeslee, 2003). This transition is not an easy one; there is extensive evidence that it constitutes one of the most difficult challenges and painful experiences that can confront children and adults throughout their lives. Moreover, this task takes time. On average, it is expectable that conflict and turmoil will continue for 2–3 years following separation although there can be great variation: some relationships take many years to terminate, and some may never be resolved (Amato & Booth, 1997; Hetherington & Kelly, 2002; Maccoby & Mnookin, 1992; Wallerstein & Kelly, 1980; Wallerstein, Lewis, & Blakeslee, 2000).

The Failed Divorce About one fourth to one third of divorcing couples report high degrees of hostility and discord over the daily care of their children many years after separation and well beyond the expectable time for them to settle their differences (Ahrons, 1981; Maccoby & Mnookin, 1992). For about one tenth of all divorcing couples, the unremitting animosity will shadow the entire growing-up years of the children. This means that children in an accumulating subgroup are caught in these family situations. Since approximately one million children each year experience their parents’ divorce in the United States, over a span of two decades, more than five million children will be affected by ongoing parental conflict; for two million children, this condition may well be permanent (Amato & Booth, 1997; Glick, 1988; Maccoby & Mnookin, 1992; Shiono & Quinn, 1994). Frequently, although not always, these parents take their disputes with each other to a family court. Current estimates are that about one fourth of all divorcing couples with children have considerable difficulty completing the legal divorce without extensive litigation (Maccoby & Mnookin, 1992). Relitigation about custody matters following the final divorce decree occurs with a smaller proportion of families (less than one fifth) but these legal disputes are often perceived to be the more intractable ones (Ash & Guyer, 1986b; Depner, Cannata, & Simon, 1992; Hauser & Straus, 1991). Interestingly, ex-spouses who are highly litigious tend to be, but are not always, the same group and are very hostile and highly discordant in co-parenting their children (Maccoby & Mnookin, 1992).

Chapter 1: High-Conflict and Violent Divorce

Highly conflictive divorced parents remain distrustful of one another; they engage in frequent arguments and undermine and sabotage each other’s role as parents. This can involve talking negatively about the other parent in front of the child or having the child pass messages including insults and threats to the other parent. Parents can refuse to communicate and assiduously avoid the other parent; they can take unilateral actions with respect to their children, such as refusing to coordinate child care arrangements, transferring the child to another school or doctor without notice, refusing visitation, and even snatching and hiding their children from the other parent (Greif & Hegar, 1993; Hammer, Finkelhor, & Sedlak, 2002; Johnston & Campbell, 1988). Most worrisome is the fact that some kind of domestic violence is reported in about one half to three fourths of families litigating on custody. This fact implies that domestic violence and families in high conflict are not distinct subgroups among the separating and divorced populations; rather that they share many of the same dynamics. Our studies have shown that the children of these parents are witness to considerable verbal abuse and physical aggression between their parents ranging from isolated incidents at the time of the separation to repeated incidents, usually at times of transfer of the child from one home to the other, amounting in some cases to ongoing harassment and abuse. Similarly, the danger can range from relatively mild (pushing and shoving) to a frightening level of severity (threats of serious harm and homicide) (Depner et al., 1992; Johnston & Campbell, 1993b; Judicial Council of California Administrative Office of the Courts, 2003). In sum, high-conflict and violent families are identified by multiple, overlapping criteria: high rates of litigation and relitigation, high degrees of anger and distrust, incidents of verbal abuse, intermittent physical aggression, and ongoing difficulty in communicating about and cooperating over the care of their children at least 2–3 years following their separation. Probably most characteristic of this population of “failed divorces” is that these parents have difficulty focusing on their children’s needs as separate from their own and cannot protect their children from their own emotional distress and anger or from their ongoing disputes with each other. Children who are subjects of chronic postseparation disputes and witnesses to violence between their parents have

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now been identified as the most “at-risk” group among the divorcing population. For this group, the major benefit of the divorce, the cessation of parental hostilities, does not accrue. Many of these children have been embroiled for years in parental conflicts that predate the separation and continue afterwards (Block, Block, & Gjerde, 1986; Emery, 2004; Kline, Johnston & Tschann, 1991). For others, the separation itself focused the disputes upon them. The most serious threat, however, is the one that we will argue within this book—these children bear an acutely heightened risk of repeating the cycle of conflicted and abusive relationships as they grow up and try to form families of their own (Cappell & Heiner, 1990; Cummings & Davies, 1994). In this chapter we briefly review the anatomy of highconflict divorces and entrenched postdivorce disputes over children, examining the psychological, interactional, and social system dynamics that jointly contribute to the parents’ impasse in achieving a “successful” divorce.

Psychological Dynamics: The Internal Level of a Divorce Impasse At first glance, the behavior of most distraught high-conflict and violent divorcing individuals evokes the diagnosis of personality disorders (DSMIV, 1994). “Basically, she’s borderline and he’s narcissistic” is a common summary remark made by clinicians who are setting the stage for a brief case consultation with a colleague. However, it is often puzzling to note that many of these people going through divorce function are relatively free from serious psychological disturbance in other areas of their lives. In their jobs or with friends and associates, they appear to cope much more adequately, think rationally, and behave in a civil manner. In the realm of their relationship with their ex-spouse, however, and especially during significant events (court dates, anniversaries, holidays), these same people can look, think, and act in a manner that is quite emotionally and behaviorally disturbed, or even psychotic. To this extent, their psychological disturbance is not clearly indicative of the ongoing character pathology; rather it is situational and relational. In actuality it has been difficult to establish a normative psychological profile for parents litigating on custody (Bagby,


Nicholson, Buis, Radovanovic, & Fidler, 1999; Bathurst, Gottfried, & Gottfried, 1997; Posthuma & Harper, 1998; Walters, Olesen, & Lee, 2004). Some personality assessments of those who are most entrenched in custody disputes, however, show that, compared to the norm, these individuals lack a firm approach to problem-solving and are more likely to perceive inaccurately, reason idiosyncratically, and cognitively simplify their world. Moreover, they are hypersensitive to criticism and inordinately concerned about their own needs and perspectives (Ehrenberg, Hunter, & Elterman, 1996; Hoppe & Kenney, 1994; Walters et al., 2004). Further observation, however, usually identifies a high degree of external stress that is associated with the divorce and the custody dispute and, not unexpectedly, significant levels of depression and difficulty coping (Walters et al., 2004). There is growing evidence that individuals with histories of early loss and trauma, in combination with unhappy marriages and stressful separations, are more likely to have difficulty with divorce and custody-related matters (Bar, 1997; Horowitz, 1988). Accordingly, a more adequate and useful orientation begins with the premise that high-conflict divorcing parents are, to varying degrees and in special ways, psychologically vulnerable and that a particular kind of stress or divorce crisis interacts with these vulnerabilities to provoke regression and to produce more rigid, defensive styles that look like or exacerbate personality disorders. Divorce is a voluntary leave-taking and as such is usually experienced as both loss and rejection. One of the parties (rarely both at the same time) wants out of the marriage. Loss—be it the loss of a loved one, loss of the marriage, loss of the intact family, loss of cherished hopes and dreams, or the threatened loss of one’s children—evokes powerful feelings of anxiety, sadness, and fear of being abandoned and alone. Rejection, on the other hand, evokes feelings of inadequacy, of having failed, and of shame and humiliation. While these responses are expectable, divorcing individuals differ in their capacity to manage and integrate these separationengendered feelings. Divorce as Loss . Some people have difficulty acknowledging their feelings of sadness and mourning the end or loss of their partner and of the marriage. Instead, they seal over

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their grief with anger and try to prevent the inevitable separation by embroiling their spouse in unending disputes. Fighting and arguing are ways of maintaining contact (albeit of a negative kind), and even throughout all the fighting these same individuals harbor reconciliation fantasies. For example, one woman disclosed that although she had really wanted her husband to take her into his arms, she smashed dinnerware in the restaurant where they met to discuss their divorce settlement. Another man broke into his wife’s home, violating a restraining order, in order to leave her flowers. As indicated by these case examples, individuals panicked by feelings of loss and abandonment may resort to violence in their desperate attempts to regain their partners and control over their lives. Depending upon their level of ego control or conversely their impulsivity and irrationality (especially if they are using alcohol or drugs to numb their pain), the violence can range in severity from isolated incidents to ongoing preoccupation with the lost partner, manifest in repeated attempts to connect—repeated telephone calls, turning up on the doorstep of the home or workplace, or hanging out where the partner shops and recreates—that may amount to harassment and stalking. In general, there are two main reasons for attempting to ward off loss by holding on in anger. First, many divorcing individuals have suffered a specific traumatic loss in their past (such as the death of a parent or sibling; the previous loss of a child by adoption, abortion, or death; or the loss of their extended family through migration or political asylum). The divorce is likely to reactivate these earlier unresolved traumas in special ways, making the person fearful of letting go. For example: Mrs. S had lost her first baby through a sudden, inexplicable crib death. She now wanted to be in total control of her new child’s physical environment. Any slight fever or illness in the child activated overwhelming concerns for the child’s survival, and she would cancel the father’s visits, leaving him furious. In order to resolve this impasse, during counseling it was important to show Mrs. S. that she was trying to “prevent the unpreventable,” the potential loss of this child, because she was still trying to undo the unbearable loss of her first baby.


Second, other individuals may have had early childhoods that were ungratifying, unsupported, or neglectful (such as being children of alcoholic or mentally ill parents). Their trauma was so early, so pervasive, and so lacking in basic emotional resources that they failed to build any stable or autonomous sense of self. In marriage, they merged with their partners. With the divorce, these people do not experience sadness over the loss of a distinct other as do those with a reactivated trauma; rather, they experience panic or intense feelings of being abandoned, cut off without hope of ever being reconnected to another. They may feel insignificant, overwhelmingly helpless, and unable to survive on their own. A case in point: “My husband left and Peter is all I have left, and now he’s trying to take him too!” Mrs. R cried. Claiming that she was “slowly dying inside, a plant without roots and water,” Mrs. R depended on 8-year-old Peter for her survival. She became depressed and extremely panicky when he was not in the house and often asked him to sleep with her, much to his embarrassment. She could not permit him to spend more than one night away from her, so that visits to his father were constrained by her neediness. In general, there are three ways in which such persons respond to their anxiety about separation and their terror of abandonment. First, some remain diffusely dependent and actively cling to the spouse, or to their child as a substitute for the spouse. In order to feel less helpless and more independent, these men and women are likely to need a great deal of support by friends, family, and counselors, including encouragement to reach out to others at work, or at church, or perhaps to begin dating again. Second, others defend against the threat of abandonment by adopting a pseudo-autonomous stance, aggressively protecting themselves and their children and refusing to capitulate to anything lest they should lose part of themselves. These individuals can become negativistic and oppositional and insist on making unilateral decisions. Basically, friends and professionals need to applaud their efforts to be independent and stand on their own while showing them that real power and control comes from knowing when and how to say “yes” as well as “no.” Third, perhaps

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the most confusing and difficult of all are those people who alternately cling and distance themselves in abrupt, contradictory shifts. To illustrate: Mrs. O demanded that her ex-spouse pick up their child from school. The following week when he complied, she alleged that her ex-spouse had kidnapped the child from school. Mr. P, in turn, demanded visitation with his child in court but then failed to comply with the order. These people appear to use the interparental struggle over the children, in part, to create an existential sense of purpose and meaning out of the void that threatens to engulf them when separated from their spouse and children. In other words, they seem to be attempting to stave off psychological fragmentation with the maxim, “I fight, therefore I am.” This third subgroup usually needs therapeutic management and the stabilizing influence of an extended family or social network to protect the child from the chaos that is generated. The ominous threat of serious, even lethal, domestic violence is not unusual with these more primitively organized individuals. These high-risk situations need to be identified in order for adequate restraints and safety measures to be put in place. In the mediation session, Mr. K showed little interest in discussing his child. All he wanted to do was to persuade his wife to come back to him. His attitude towards her constantly shifted. Sometimes she was the beautiful, good wife, and he pleaded for her forgiveness and promised to lavish her with gifts if she returned; then she became the selfish, unfaithful wife who had betrayed him and he hinted at punishment. Divorce as Humiliation. The central internal struggle inherent in high-conflict divorces and entrenched custody disputes involves a high degree of humiliation and shame engendered by the divorce and the capacity of the individual to manage those feelings without losing face or losing an integrated, viable sense of self. This is referred to as an individual’s narcissistic vulnerability. Vulnerability to shame can range from mild to moderate to severe, with corresponding distinctive clinical profiles. When there is a mild degree of shame,


people often seek the support of friends, family, and professionals to assuage the feelings of inadequacy and rejection inherent in a marital separation. Often it is a specific, vulnerable aspect of themselves that they seek to have acknowledged. For example, after a miserable, lonely marriage with a poor sexual relationship, a man may seek to have his physical attractiveness and sexual prowess acknowledged through a series of brief affairs. In the same way, a woman who has felt particularly criticized about her mothering capacity may wage a custody dispute and seek the support of the judge to have herself acknowledged as the “good” or “better” parent, who does not deserve her spouse’s criticism. Other people, with more wounded self-esteem, seek to rid themselves of any vestige of blame by actively proving that the other spouse is totally “inadequate,” “irresponsible,” or “bad for the child.” This kind of vulnerability to shame is evident when a divorcing man or woman makes exaggerated claims about his or her own capabilities and thoroughly denigrates the ex-spouse. These more vulnerable individuals have difficulty maintaining a positive, cohesive, and realistic self-identity. It is not simply an aspect of themselves they need to have acknowledged; rather, they seek total validation. In such cases, the divorce triggers an exaggerated sense of failure, which in turn provokes feelings of great anxiety and confusion that are intolerable. Their fragile sense of self-esteem depends on keeping all sense of failure outside the self, in the other or in the situation. So, in an effort to defend themselves and protect against intense shame, they present themselves with a self-righteous air of angry superiority and entitlement (Lewis, 1992). They view themselves as the “good, morally superior one,” “the responsible and nurturing parent,” in stark contrast to the ex-spouse, who is viewed as “irresponsible, unavailable, psychologically and morally inferior.” Unfortunately, these individuals enter into mediation or the court with such an attitude of entitlement, such a refusal to own any responsibility for the problem, and with the apparent single-minded purpose of demeaning the other spouse that they tend to make quite unreasonable demands on their attorneys. They also annoy or anger the mediator or judge who, in turn, may dismiss their claims or confront them in a way that furthers their humiliation and their need to defensively project blame. For example:

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Mr. A’s wife quit their marriage (and returned to live with her own family) while he was recuperating from a back injury that left him unemployed, on disability, and unsure of his future. With great bravado, Mr. A took a very condescending, critical attitude towards his wife. He went to court repeatedly to prove that she was “incompetent, unable to care for the child, or to live independently.” Hence he projected his own sense of weakness onto his wife. He was further humiliated, however, when the judge publicly drew attention to his own inadequacy and called him a “vexatious litigant.” Years later, this man is still obsessed with anger and bitterness at his ex-wife, and at the legal system, for his public shaming. Sometimes both parties are humiliated by the divorce, and during the escalating series of counter-allegations made in support of their custody suit, both seek to prove themselves the better parent by demeaning the other and, in turn, inflicting further narcissistic injury that can result in mounting rage which is acted out in mutually verbally abusive and physically violent altercations. Highly offended by any disrespect and criticism, Mr. and Mrs. C both resorted to continuous verbal assaults and frequent refusals to give in to each other. His tardiness with the child support check provoked her to be late for the child’s exchange. He would call her a “conniving bitch who jerks him around,” which would justify her canceling his visits with a sarcastic remark demeaning him as a “sadistic brute who has no idea how to look after a child.” He would swear profusely, accusing her of “mollycoddling my son, making a sissy out of him.” She would wave a finger in his face, and he would stab the air in front of her. One of them would make a particularly offensive remark, then push or poke the other. In response, Mrs. C might throw something at him or destroy an item he valued. Mr. C had an especially macho self-image and was concerned about appearing weak and letting himself be pushed around by a woman. Hence he would take a swing at her or slap her. Both would then become increasingly angry, and the physical abuse would escalate to a level that placed her at risk for injury. Invariably the police were called to intervene.


In cases of the most extreme vulnerability to humiliation, a divorcing man or woman may experience the spouse’s desertion as a total, devastating attack. In defense, the abandoned partner may develop paranoid ideas of betrayal, exploitation, and conspiracy. As these spouses survey the rubble of their marriage, they begin to rewrite history and perceive their partner as having intentionally plotted and planned, from the outset, to exploit and cast them off. An example: Mr. J explained when his wife left him for another man, “I was once naive and trusting but now my eyes are opened. Her loving femininity was all a sham. She’s absolutely evil and untrustworthy. When I first met her, she played a sweet, innocent, feminine dependent child, but when no one was looking she turned diabolical. It was all an act. She had this planned all along. She took my money, my house, my son, and left me nothing! She has everyone fooled, even the judge.” Mr. J was currently accusing his wife of child abuse. Feeling betrayed and weakened by the perceived assault, they respond aggressively with a counterattack that often becomes the central obsession in their lives. The other spouse and his or her allies are viewed as dangerous, aggressive, and persecutory figures. Having been wronged, these people feel justified in seeking retaliation, or, more urgently, they believe in launching a preemptive strike—“attack before being attacked.” This dynamic may be the precipitant to violence and child abduction in a small minority of cases. Mrs. E felt extremely betrayed by her husband’s decision to divorce her after a financial bankruptcy. She developed clearly paranoid delusions about her husband. As the litigation over his access to their son intensified, Mrs. E became highly agitated, claiming that the father was “an evil, dangerous man and extremely cunning”, similar to a recently convicted murderer who had massacred his family. In actuality, Mr. E was a shy, quiet, non-assertive man who was quite frightened of his wife’s rages and nonplussed by her allegations. He commented, however, that she had always been “a little strange” and “often had it in for someone,” but that he had not previously been the target of her hostility. Mrs. E physically attacked him on

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a number of occasions and then claimed he had attacked her. Finally, she accused him of molesting the child and fled with the boy “in order to protect my son.” If humiliation is the predominant motivation for the custody dispute, tremendous care needs to be taken by friends, family, and all professionals involved with the case to assuage the deep feeling of shame and to help the person save face and regain a viable sense of self. It is also essential not to challenge or wound that vulnerable person any further, especially in such a public arena as the court. In cases of mild vulnerability to humiliation, one can clarify and offer insight to the client (“You were angry when you were made to feel like a fool!”). In more severe cases of vulnerability, this same statement will be perceived as another intolerable attack. The client’s degree of vulnerability also determines when and how to support his or her perceptions. In instances of mild vulnerability to shame, one needs to acknowledge and support the client’s strengths (“You are a good father”). In cases of greater vulnerability to humiliation, one runs the risk that support will be construed as total validation of the client’s distorted views (“You agree that I am a good father and my wife is a bad mother”). In extreme cases of vulnerability, support to a man or woman with paranoid preoccupations may be viewed suspiciously as a seductive trap (“You’re saying that I am a good father just to get me to agree to X”). Careful assessment of the vulnerability to shame and the extent of narcissistic injury also indicates when one needs to restrain spouses (through legal orders and police action) in order to protect the targets of their paranoid ideas against potentially dangerous consequences. A high potential for serious domestic abuse exists in those cases where the divorcing individual (especially the man) is vulnerable to humiliation and rejection as well as to loss and feelings of abandonment. The psychological profiles of batterers indicate that these men tend to be insecure, hypersensitive to others’ opinions, and vulnerable to poor self-esteem. Their bullying and aggressive posturings are attempts to compensate for feelings of emotional dependency and inadequacy. They have low thresholds of stress tolerance and respond to everyday hassles with eruptions of anger and blame towards their wives and children, which quickly turn into physical abuse. In addition, they tend to


have traditional male chauvinistic attitudes and an exaggerated concept of their own masculinity, for which they need and demand acknowledgment and reassurance. Their neediness quickly turns into uncontrollable jealousy and demands, which can result in rape and battery (Dutton, 2007; Dutton & Bodnarcheck, 2005). Being highly vulnerable to humiliation and often very dependent upon the women they abuse, these men generally increase the intensity of the violence and coercive control at the threat of separation. If the separation is sudden or traumatic, it is not uncommon for the man to stalk the woman, to alternately terrorize her with ominous threats and plead with her to return. In extreme cases, there are threats or attempts at murder or suicide (Browne, Williams, & Dutton, 1999; Hotton, 2001; Johnson & Hotton, 2003; Nicholaidis et al., 2003). While most of these men, over time, are able to emotionally disengage, some remain obsessed with the woman who left them. In general, the potential for violence remains high long after the actual separation. Mrs. A left the marital home precipitously after a friend gave her the encouragement to rouse herself from her depression and end her marriage to a violent, jealous, controlling, and dependent husband. Although Mr. A had liaisons with other women, he jealously guarded his wife’s fidelity, even following her when she shopped or went to work. During counseling, Mrs. A recounted numerous instances when, after drinking, he bullied or beat her, destroyed furniture, and trashed the home, ostensibly because of her “failures” as a wife or mother. The police were called several times to disarm him and quell his violence. Mr. A vaguely dismissed the idea that he was abusive. In response to his wife’s desertion, this man was distraught and alternated childlike pleas for her to return with bribes of expensive presents, promises that he would change, and ominous threats of murder and suicide if she did not comply with his wishes. His plan to take his wife hostage at her workplace was intercepted when he was arrested for carrying a gun. In these situations, the victims (usually women) are typically intimidated and cowed both physically and psychologically by the men who use the threat of violence to control and

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dominate them (Johnson & Leone, 2005; Kirkwood, 1993). Not all the women who experience these kinds of abusive relationships suffer from the “battered wife syndrome.” Some do not tolerate the abuse and instead leave the marital relationship early, soon after the abuse is first manifest. These are assertive women with high self-esteem and good reality testing. If the women have remained in the abusive relationship for many years, they are more likely to present as fearful and chronically depressed, with low self-esteem. Uncertain about themselves, they often seem hypersuggestible, submissive, and overly dependent upon their husbands and others and tend to construe the situation so as to blame themselves for their abuse. These women often deny or diminish the extent to which they are in mortal danger from their former spouses and will not take measures to protect themselves or their children without a great deal of support and help from others.

Ambivalent and Traumatic Separations: The Interactional Level of a Divorce Impasse In terms of the couple dynamics, entrenched disputes or divorce impasses are broadly of two kinds: those that are the legacy of a destructive marital relationship, and those that are the product of traumatic or ambivalent separations. In the first kind, which is well documented in the marital therapy literature, the divorce quarrels are a continuation of the marital feud in which the spouses have deftly learned to provoke each other in a series of stereotypical, mutually destructive transactions over their years together. It is perhaps the second kind that is more important, and it relates to the manner in which the couple came together (the courtship) and the manner in which they parted (the separation). Both these transitions, often dramatic occasions, have import for the manner in which the couple negotiate the divorce transition. Couples who are extremely ambivalent about separation have long been recognized as among those who fail to settle the divorce. This subgroup of divorcing spouses basically hold onto idealized views of one another—romantic illusions—and are engaged in a never-ending search for ways of holding together their shattered dreams. It is hypothesized that their idealization of each other is connected to their courtship.


Many first met at a highly significant time in their lives—as teenagers escaping from unhappy, inattentive families; when critically ill or greatly in need of help; or when in places of danger such as war zones. For others, this first relationship was experienced as an “earth-shattering,” highly erotic love experience. Individuals or couples with these kinds of courtship histories tend to feel that they have a special mission to accomplish with each other, and that a part of their very identity has been discovered and nurtured in collaboration with one another. In leaving the marriage, they are leaving behind significant parts of themselves, forsaking images and dreams for which they continually yearn. These couples can neither live together nor apart, and so their relationship is contorted by repeated separations and unfulfilling reunions, by alternating periods of intimacy and outrage. Ms. S was driving in a car with a boyfriend of whom she wished to rid herself, when she had a terrible accident. They were both critically injured and she felt guilty and responsible. During the weeks in which she was semiconscious and he hung between life and death, in her guilt she promised herself and God that if they survived, she would devote her life to this man. Eight years later, despite the fact that this man had periodically abandoned her and had transmitted a venereal disease to her, she continued to cling to the marriage. There are special therapeutic strategies for working with couples in this kind of divorce impasse, which involve giving them insight into the meaning of their courtship, confronting them gently with the realities of their present situation, and helping them mourn the loss of their illusions. It is especially important for them to identify within themselves qualities that they thought were in the relationship or within the other, so they feel that they can leave as a “whole person.” Couples who have ambivalent separations can have longstanding problems with shared parenting after divorce, because their need to work together on behalf of their children often triggers their smoldering passions and their reengagement. These parents need special help to establish a businesslike, rule-governed, co-parenting relationship in which they take care not to seduce one another. For example, they are

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encouraged to meet and discuss their children in a neutral public place—not over a candlelit dinner! Custody and visitation arrangements that bring the parents into frequent, intimate contact with each other should be avoided. There are kind and humane ways to end a relationship. There are also particularly brutal and traumatic ways to part. In our society a not unusual way of leaving gently is to enter into marriage therapy with one’s partner, with the ostensible purpose of trying to fix the marriage, but with the unconscious knowledge that one has reached the point of no return and only wants out. After several interviews with the family therapist, the partner who wants out declares that it is of no use, there is no hope, and then quietly withdraws, leaving his or her spouse in the care of a loving, supportive therapist. Contrast this to other ways of separating that are particularly unexpected and traumatic: a sudden desertion, the humiliating discovery of a lover, uncharacteristic violence, or secret plotting and planning. (One man took his wife to dinner for their 20th wedding anniversary and gave her his gift: a petition for a divorce. A man returning from overseas military service at Christmas was greeted by a tape recorded message from his wife saying that she had fallen in love with another man. A grieving woman returned from attending her father’s funeral to find that her husband had stripped the house of all their possessions and left with the children. An older man walked out for a pack of cigarettes and never came back. A young woman missed the last bus home from work and decided then and there that she could never return. While recovering from emergency surgery for breast cancer, a woman was informed by her husband that he wanted a divorce.) Those who flee the marriage with no discussion or explanation often provoke high levels of desperate reactions in their mates (hysterical outbursts, physical struggles, child and possession snatching, suicidal or homicidal threats), which, in turn, may provoke outrageous counterreactions by the partner who is left behind. In the ordinary course of events among divorces of all kinds, couples at the time of separation begin to do a great deal of soul searching and redefinition of themselves and their hopes and goals. They also make fairly fundamental redefinitions of their spouses. In cases of traumatic separation,


there is an enormous betrayal of trust. This violation of the very cornerstone of the marriage, together with the desperate reactions and counterreactions, forms the basis for the redefinitions the spouses make of one another. The history of the marriage and the identity of the ex-spouse are negatively revised, often with the help of loyal family and friends. There is a sense of discovery as to who the ex-spouse really is and has been all along—that she or he is in fact “dangerous, crazy, bad, fundamentally untrustworthy.” Without corrective feedback, these new “understandings” set in motion long-term disputes over the children, as each parent now feels compelled to fight consciously and self-righteously to protect the children from the “bad, immoral or neglectful influence” of the other parent. Months, or years, later, each ex-spouse may well have regained his or her individual psychological balance, but the negatively reconstructed image of the other remains fixed, still provoking defensive avoidance of each other and periodic quarrels over the children. This process is well illustrated by Mrs. M, who explained that she had a dream in which she had to get not one divorce but two: one from her husband and one from a man she did not know. She went on to explain that theirs had been a romantic marriage but had recently been stressed by financial worries. When her husband obtained a job across the country, they agreed she would follow him. A month later she opened a letter, expecting it to contain her airplane tickets. Instead, she found a petition for divorce. Her shock was compounded when she later discovered that he had taken along a woman friend of hers to live with him. Not surprisingly, she felt she was divorcing a man she did not know. Perhaps more importantly, she also felt she was entrusting her children to a stranger. She now characterizes this man as “an unconscionable s.o.b.” from whom her children required protection. For some spouses the separation is so unexpected and traumatic and the ensuing events such an assault on their universe that they respond with uncharacteristic acts of violence where there had been no history of prior use of violence or coercive control in their relationship. Interestingly in such

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cases, the perpetrator is more likely to admit to the incident and is often embarrassed and regretful for actions. These incidents usually involve a sudden lashing out (slapping the other across the face), throwing something, or destroying property (a cherished keepsake or heirloom). Some women take desperate steps such as ramming the spouse’s car, cutting up his clothes, or throwing his furniture into the street. Some men physically restrain their wives from leaving. Particularly vulnerable situations are events having symbolic meaning (the final settlement, the loss of the house, changes in custody, seeing the ex-spouse with a new partner) or at special times (anniversaries and holidays). Usually, the partner who feels abandoned is the one who becomes violent, and this can be either the man or the woman. When this happens, the victim partner is shocked and frightened by the uncharacteristic behavior of the mate, feeling that the other has “gone crazy.” This unexpected violence and the counterreactions form the basis for the spouses to negatively reconstruct their earlier perceptions of one another, casting a long shadow over the postdivorce relationship of these couples. That is, a new negative image of each spouse is crystallized out of these desperate behaviors and has enormous significance in limiting the partners’ trust and willingness to cooperate in the future with respect to their children. Mr. D walked into his home one day to find his wife in bed with his friend. He stood there, shocked, sick to his stomach. In stony silence, he then left the room. During the next several days, as his rage mounted, he stripped the house of his possessions and left. When she came by his workplace to try to talk with him, he grabbed her by the throat in an attempt to get her to stop talking, yelling at her in a strange voice to “Get out of my life,” and “I never want to hear or see you again.” On one other occasion, he attacked her physically when she again approached him, insisting that they needed to discuss the custody of their daughter. Later, in counseling, they both described a marriage that had initially been a loving companionship, one in which they had never argued or fought. However, trying to survive without vocational skills or experience and the early arrival of a baby had taxed their ability to


cope. Both became emotionally distant and withdrawn; they worked separate shifts and no longer slept together. Without communicating her conclusion to her husband, she determined that the marriage had effectively ended and began to date casually. He ignored these ominous signs, thinking she would return to him, until the day he found her in bed with his friend. Traumatic separations can precipitate impasses and long-term disputes if mishandled by professionals. Attorneys need to beware of taking legal advantage of the desperate behaviors of the distressed couple by filing claims that imply that an acutely traumatized party is chronically violent, dangerous, and mentally unstable. It is especially important for mental health professionals to recognize and intervene in traumatic separations early on before the desperate actingout escalates and during the “meaning-making” stage when each party is trying to put together a story of why the divorce occurred. This is the optimal time to help them construct a more positive account, one that will help them regain selfesteem, a sense of efficacy and control, and a measured view of each other. Their account, or story, of the divorce should also be one that allows them to co-parent their children. If the traumatic separation is long past, but still clouded by defensive reconstruction and years of confirming hostile exchanges with one another, a different set of interventions is needed. Briefly, this involves attorneys and mental health professionals collaborating together on an explicit behavioral contract or parenting plan between the disputing parties that will be monitored closely over time, in order to gradually reestablish trust and a working co-parental relationship—a process that typically takes from 1 to 2 years of engineering.

Tribal Warfare: The External Level of a Divorce Impasse Divorce disputes can quickly spread and encompass the social networks of the couple, resulting in a modern form of “tribal warfare,” where significant others including extended kin, new partners, mental health professionals, attorneys, and even judges become a part of the tangle of disputing relations and serve to entrench the fight. To illustrate:

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Mrs. J left her husband after a secret affair with another man, when her children were 3 and 4 years old. By mutual agreement she kept custody. For the next 7 years, the children enjoyed summer vacations and brief visits with the father, who flew in from another state on a wave of gifts and excitement. When the mother and her new husband fell on hard times financially, they began a series of lawsuits demanding increased child support from the wealthy father. Now Mr. J. had been greatly humiliated by the separation, but the financial demands on him were the last straw. He hired what he considered the best attorney (the most aggressive one) and filed for custody of the children, now aged 10 and 11 years. In a bitter, escalating court trial, the mother wrote, and encouraged the children to write, angry letters about the father to the judge. The judge, who had recently experienced his own divorce, become incensed and, buttressed by a psychologist’s evaluation that the children were being alienated from the father, ordered a precipitous change in custody. The mother’s close-knit extended family, local community, church, and school became enraged. Fund-raising efforts and letters to newspapers and local politicians all resulted in the formation of an unholy alliance: the community against the outsiders (the father, judge, attorney, and psychologist). The children became local celebrities. Despite the father’s efforts to woo them, they spent a miserable 2 years as martyrs, living with their father who found himself doing battle both with the children and with the medley of voices that were raised in support of them. The mother felt saddened and guilty about what had happened. With great bitterness, the father was forced to relinquish custody and withdraw. As illustrated in this unhappy situation, with the deterioration of the marriage, the norm of privacy that governs the sanctity of the family breaks down. Separating spouses then may turn to others in their extended family and community for practical advice and emotional support and encouragement. Hearing only the one negatively biased version of the divorce situation, these significant others become outraged and seek to right the wrong and help the “victim.” They can form alliances with and fight on behalf of the aggrieved


party and in so doing unwittingly confirm negative, polarized, and often distorted views of the other spouse. Members of these alliances tend to claim the moral high ground by attempting to protect the children from the now demonized ex-spouse. This sets the stage for long-term disputes over the children. It is perhaps expectable that extended families will stand behind and support their own family members during a divorce. However, this support often comes with a price: obligations, interference, and counter-demands that provoke stress and fuel disputes. For example, when a young divorced mother becomes financially dependent upon her own parents, she may be unable to resist when they agitate for her return to court to demand a decrease in the father’s visits. In those more unusual cases where grandparents turn against their own offspring in favor of a daughter-in-law or son-inlaw during the divorce dispute, the conflict is compounded by a painful sense of betrayal on one side and obligation on the other. In these situations, unresolved conflicts and latent resentments within the larger kinship network can be easily displaced onto or incorporated into the custody dispute. Likewise, new partners can activate custody disputes. For example, shortly after a man’s remarriage, the new stepmother may agitate to save the children from their “neglectful” mother. On closer scrutiny, however, the real problem may be the new wife’s anxiety about securing her role in a marriage that she fears is being threatened by the man’s ties to his first family; hence the first wife is scapegoated. External level disputes of a particular subgroup are those that are conducted in the name of cultural and religious differences between parents as to how their children should be raised. Although these value differences may be hotly disputed and appear unresolvable, rarely are they the basic issues that drive the conflict. Most couples of mixed racial-ethnic background who have given birth to children have already come to some kind of resolution or acceptance of their differences and need to be reminded of that understanding. The problem is that this acceptance of each other’s differences is often recanted at the time of the separation and divorce, because of other factors that drive the conflict. For example, a divorcing man or woman may have an internal need, or experience pressure from extended kin, to return to

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his or her racial-ethnic or religious origins. In other cases, a parent may react to the insult of feeling discarded as a spouse by insisting on his or her religious values or cultural identity being given pre-eminent status in the child’s upbringing. Alternatively, having lost a sense of their identity in being cast adrift from the marriage, parents may embrace a new faith or lifestyle for the first time, become an evangelist for the cause, and insist that their child become part of it. In identifying external elements of entrenched disputes, it is important to discover who appears to have instigated the custody dispute, what triggered its onset, and which coalitions are in support of each opposing party. In particular, it is important to distinguish potentially bogus custody disputes (those driven by external forces) from bonafide ones (those having to do with genuine concerns about the child). Furthermore, legal and mental health counselors need to focus their clients’ concerns and energies on the crux of the problem; otherwise, an initially bogus custody dispute may evolve into a bonafide one. In the above examples, this may involve talking to the young mother about her feelings of obligation to her own parents, or to the man about his new wife’s anxiety over securing her role. Where religious and cultural differences are a cloak for other conflicts, these underlying dynamics need to be dealt with in counseling in order for parents to value their child’s opportunity to experience multiple perspectives and to help their child become proud of his or her mixed racial identity.

The Multilevels of a Divorce Impasse in Highly-Conflicted and Violent Families Divorce impasse refers to the constellation of factors that are blocking the divorcing family from resolving expectable separation conflicts and making the transition from an intact to a postdivorce family structure. Typically a divorce-transition impasse is a complex phenomenon, with elements that hold the dispute in place occurring at all three levels described and illustrated in this chapter: the internal level of individual psychological dynamics, the interactional level of couple and family dynamics, and the external level of the dynamics of the wider social system, as diagrammed in Figure 1.1 and illustrated below.


1.1 Sources of the Divorce Impasse

The important point is that family members can become stuck at any one, two, or all three levels simultaneously, and that the elements of each level can coalesce, locking the dispute into a mutually reinforcing pattern of entanglement. The utility of an in-depth understanding of these multilevels and interlocking elements of the impasse is that it not only shows one how to avoid compounding the problem, but also guides a strategic, focused, and minimally intrusive intervention into the family. Most difficult divorces have multiple elements of impasse that interlock, as illustrated by the following example:

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As is typical for violence-prone men, Mr. R had serious self-esteem problems, so that the rejection inherent in his marital separation was felt as deeply humiliating. When his wife secretly planned her escape and abandoned the marriage without warning, this vulnerable man was acutely traumatized, mentally “rewrote” their marital history to reflect his sense of betrayal, and became paranoid. Meanwhile, with the support of her family and attorney, his wife took action against him in court, where he was further humiliated by accusations of battering, and a court order that evicted him from his home and severely limited his contact with his children. Then he became acutely dangerous. The 4-year-old daughter became anxious about separating from her mother, inordinately fearful of her father, and refused to visit at all. The distressed 12-year-old son fought with his mother and made an alliance with his “unjustly treated” father. It is apparent in a case like this that the manner in which vulnerable parties and dysfunctional family relationships are managed by helping professionals and processed by the legal system is critically important. If mismanaged, the product of these interlocking elements of the impasse can increase threat of domestic violence, evoke allegations of parent alienation, and contribute to emotional and behavioral symptomatology in children. Identifying the multiple levels and multiple elements of the impasse in a case such as this allows one to assess which interventions are likely to be the feasible and strategic ones. For example, the psychological vulnerability of the man is often the element that is least amenable to change. But given the systemic nature of the divorce impasse, well-focused interventions at one level can have ramifying effects elsewhere. Protection of the wife and children in this case was, of course, the first priority. This involved providing her with emergency shelter and legal help (restraining orders and financial relief). Furthermore, in intervening, the court did not minimize, deny, or excuse the man’s behavior; rather it emphasized that domestic violence is a criminal act. However, it was also important to provide the man with a humane forum for dealing with his pain, and to frame the court’s intervention as a compassionate as well as a just one. In his declaration from the bench, the judge demonstrated this:


“Mr. R, what you have done to your wife is a criminal act under the laws of this state, regardless of what you say she did or said to provoke you, and there are consequences that the Court is bound to impose. What you did to your wife is also very harmful to your children, whether they actually witnessed the event or not. Living in a violent home is bad for children. Mr. R, I hear you when you say you love your wife and children, that you are sorry for what you did, and that you have promised not to do that again. The Court is going to help you keep that promise to yourself and your family by doing three things: first, by providing your family with protection until it can be sure that you are no longer a danger, and you can show that you are no longer a danger; second, by providing you an opportunity to manage your anger better and to resolve conflict in a non-violent way; and third, by providing you and your children a safe place to visit together, where they will not be afraid, and you will be given an opportunity to show that you have a loving relationship with your son and daughter.” This way of framing the court intervention set the stage for the longer term intervention that this man and his family desperately needed. In sum, when the community is less confrontational and more supportive and takes care not to unhinge a parent’s vulnerable defenses, that parent will feel less humiliated, less afraid of loss, and more able to let go of the fight and the marriage. With careful intervention, a badly injured parent will then have less need to seek revenge or to cling to the child for protection and refuge. The thesis we propose is that the outcome of a marital separation has much to do with the manner in which it is undertaken. A successful divorce largely depends on how well the stormy waters of the divorce transition are navigated by the entire family and what help or hindrance the family gets during their perilous crossing. Underneath all the anger and bitterness of high-conflict divorce lie disillusionment and shame; deeper still lie sadness and loss. What are needed are more compassionate understanding, better therapeutic skills, and more humane institutional policies and legal procedures, which can provide divorcing couples and their children with access to their deeply buried feelings or, at the very least, can prevent further infliction of

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emotional wounds that will not heal. The divorcing process within an adversarial legal system too often becomes a ceremony of degradation and shame. The challenge is to provide alternative forums—responsive to the diversity of families in our communities—that can promote mutual respect and help parents make a solemn redefinition of their rights and a serious commitment to their responsibilities within the postdivorce family. Within these forums, it then becomes possible to go beyond the legal rights of the adults involved, in order to give a voice to the needs of those who have no voice—the children.

The Prism and Prison of the Child

2

The family environment of highly conflicted, separated spouses is typified by their mutual distrust, fear, anger, bitterness, and blame. In some cases, these negative views will have a basis in the facts of a spouse’s violent, neglectful, substance-abusing, or criminal behavior. Moreover, long before the couples separated, these may have been dysfunctional families in which the children were subjected to ongoing marital conflict and erratic or emotionally abusive care by their parents suffering from personality disorders. In addition, as shown in chapter 1, there are internal psychological and interactional family dynamics as well as external-social explanations for how and why former lovers reconstrue each other’s identity in this polarized, negative light. These extremely negative views can, in part, derive from the humiliation of rejection inherent in the divorce

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and the individual’s defensive need to project all sense of failure and badness onto the ex-spouse. Alternatively, such negative views may derive from a traumatic separation experience that has shattered the couple’s previous sense of mutual trust and shared reality. Or, they may have been wittingly or unwittingly constructed and confirmed by others in a social world that is now split by new partners, kin, and professionals, whose colliding agendas serve to escalate and entrench the polarized positions. The adversarial legal system provides a particularly fertile environment for these unrealistic perceptions, fostering the projection of blame and entrenching the disputes by reframing facts and sharply focusing on who is right, competent, and good, and who is wrong, incompetent, and bad. Whatever the origin of their highly negative views, the consequence is that these parents provide a frightening, fragmented, contradictory, and profoundly confusing family experience for their children. In this chapter, we consider this experience from the perspective of the children, describing their typical concerns and attempts to manage.

How Parent Vulnerability Shapes Parent–Child Relationships Parents Who Have Been Shamed Unfortunately, ongoing postdivorce conflict and litigation erode whatever potential these divorcing spouses do have for effective parenting. Parents who are moderately humiliated (narcissistically wounded) by the divorce, and those who have experienced traumatic separations, tend to develop more or less fixed beliefs (confirmed by their social world) that the other parent is “bad, dangerous, and irresponsible,” and that they, by contrast, are the “good, safe, and responsible” caretaker. It is not surprising, then, that both parents are likely to selectively perceive and distort the child’s concerns regarding the other parent. Indeed, it is common for the couple’s expressed disappointments with each other to be mirrored in their concerns for how the other parent will treat the child. For example, if a woman has experienced her ex-spouse as emotionally neglectful, she expects him to be neglectful of her child. If the child then comes back upset

Chapter 2: The Prism and Prison of the Child

or depressed after spending time with his dad, the mother attributes the difficulty solely to the father’s lack of care. At the same time, other, more positive aspects of the father– child relationship are ignored or denied (such as the fact that this father and child have a lot of fun together and that the child feels a painful loss each time they part). In responding sympathetically to her child on his return home, the mother incorrectly interprets and then amplifies the child’s sadness and anxiety. As a result, the child’s emerging reality testing about his own feelings and ideas is ever so slightly and insidiously distorted. Furthermore, the mother’s own anxiety and distress about her child’s sadness are intensified because she is not able to communicate with her ex-husband and clarify about why the child might be upset. She is left feeling helpless about protecting her child. In other words, vulnerable parents can over-identify with elements of the child’s own emotional response when it reminds them of their own experience with the ex-spouse and ignore or deny other aspects of the child’s experience that are contrary to their own. Anxiety between the distressed parent and child over certain issues is shared and amplified and is usually triggered by symbolic actions of the ex-spouse or symptomatic behavior in the child. An illustration: In the G family, the parents had endured years of bitter, silent anger prior to the separation. As the father had increasingly failed in his professional life, the mother unwillingly assumed the role of provider. This dynamic was a formula for the man’s shame and the woman’s resentment. When the mother took their children, a boy and a girl, to another state to find work closer to her family of origin, the father experienced the loss of his children as another insult. The following year, the children returned to spend the summer with their father. When it was time for them to go back to their mother, the father refused to release his son. He explained his refusal to us in the following way: “I was standing in the backyard with Carl [the son] when we heard his mother’s footsteps coming up the path, and I saw a look in my son’s eyes that I knew so well. I guess, looking back, I always knew it was there…he looked terrified!…like she would flatten him… castrate him…run over him like a steamroller, because she’s always hated men. He could never feel safe being

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a boy, growing up around her. I ask him…not directly of course, but just, you know, ‘Is Mom yelling a lot? Is she picking on you more than your sister?’ At first he used to just shrug, but he’s starting to tell me more and more!” The insidious consequence of this projection is that Carl experiences his father’s empathic attunement most fully when he shares in this distorted perception of his mother. Integrity, reality testing, and even the child’s emerging sense of morality are sacrificed, in these accumulating moments, to the child’s hunger for the parent’s empathy. Eight-year-old Becky was delivered home late by her noncustodial mother after a most exciting visit, during which she didn’t want to stop to eat. She felt apprehensive about coming home late and guilty for having enjoyed herself hugely. As she entered the door of her father’s home, the stepmother’s fuming turned to fury when she found out the child had not been fed her dinner. Anxious to placate her stepmother and redirect the mounting fear of her anger, Becky cried that she had “begged” her mother to feed her but her mother “couldn’t be bothered.” What is more, she complained that she had spent a “horrible” day with her mother. Immediately, her stepmother quieted down; she soothed and fed the fretting child, agreeing that the mother had been “outrageously neglectful!” When parents feel severely humiliated by the divorce (have greater narcissistic vulnerability), one spouse may experience the other’s rejection, custody demands, or accusations as a total, devastating attack and, in defense, may develop paranoid ideas of betrayal, conspiracy, and exploitation. In these more extreme cases, the ex-spouse and his or her allies are perceived as dangerous, aggressive, and persecutory figures. For example: As Mr. J began to piece together the rubble from his marriage, he began to rewrite history and to perceive his partner as having intentionally plotted and planned to exploit and cast him off: “I gave her everything…backed her up with every penny, and she took it all until there was nothing left and then spit me out like a piece of dead weight. She and her boyfriend set me up. Now, he’s living in my house and abusing my child!”


In cases such as these, where the divorce represents a severe injury to self-esteem, parents have a more generalized inability to appreciate (or mirror) the child’s experience of the other parent. They are intermittently depriving or punishing the child if he or she is perceived to have defected to the other parent. Severely narcissistically injured parents cannot accurately enter into or reflect the child’s unique experience of the other parent because of their own intense pain and the defensive need to view themselves as “all good” and the ex-spouse as “all bad” or even persecutory. These parents expect and need the child to reflect their own polarized, negative views. Indeed, it is not uncommon for them to harbor distorted or exaggerated convictions that their child is being emotionally or physically abused by the other parent or his or her associates. These parents are likely to place the child intermittently in an untenable double bind, such that to please or gratify one parent will displease and hurt the other. Any spontaneous, autonomous expressions of the child’s feelings or needs tend to be ignored, denied, or experienced as a burdensome demand or as a pernicious attack upon the parent, especially if these feelings and needs seem to be related to the phobic object, the other parent. When 5-year-old Sally expressed a wish to call her father on the phone and tell him how she learned to jump rope that day, her mother withdrew into sullen anger. Inexplicably, to Sally, her mother was “too tired” to read her usual bedtime story that evening. As shown here, these parents can become emotionally abandoning, rejecting, or even vengeful toward the child who expresses his or her own individual needs (individuates), especially the need to move toward the other parent. As in Sally’s case, the punishing message is typically unspoken and is therefore impossible to be spoken about, which makes it even more pernicious. In some cases, however, the rejection is not at all subtle: Mrs. P was enraged when her 9-year-old son posed for a photograph with his father and new stepmother at his school’s awards ceremony. Peter had protested to his father at the time, because he knew full well what might happen. Sure enough, when they went home afterwards,

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his mother threw Peter’s belongings out onto the street and screamed at him to “Get out! Go live with that jerk and his whore!” Sometimes the mere presence of the child, or the child’s physical resemblance to the ex-spouse, produces a toxic, phobic reaction in the parent. The mannerisms or typical expressions of the other parent, when seen in the child, can activate resentment, even rage, toward the child, who at that moment is undifferentiated from the hated or feared ex-partner. Mr. S described his daughter as follows: “She’s kinda got a bad attitude, she’s uppity like her mother. When she comes to my house she’s surly and rude… they have brainwashed her. She’s like a little mimic of her mother…I have spanked her for it…I have to make her shape up. Finally, by the end of the weekend, she’s like my little girl again!” It is not surprising that children who are subjected to this kind of perverse conditioning can have serious difficulties discriminating their own feelings from those of their parents. They can also remain profoundly confused because, in most cases, the parents are verbally denying what their body language and actions are clearly expressing: “Of course I want her to see her mother and have a good relationship with her mother!” Mr. S declared.

Parents Grieving Loss Many parents in high-conflict divorces are especially vulnerable to separation and loss. One or both spouses may experience severe separation or abandonment anxiety as a consequence of the divorce. In some cases (as explained in chapter 1), their vulnerability is the result of previous traumatic losses. Others have experienced emotionally deprived childhoods and have failed to achieve complete separation from their early caregivers. Hence, for such persons, the marital separation triggers panic, intense fears of being abandoned, and the inability to survive on their own. Parent–child relationships in these cases are usually characterized by the parent’s clinging dependency as the parent attempts to undo the loss of the marriage by holding onto the child.


When her husband left, Mrs. L felt extreme panic. “It is like someone took a shotgun and blasted a hole right through me, and the wind is whistling right through!” she said with a shiver. For months, this pervasive sense of damage and hollowness caused her to wake fitfully from her sleep with anxiety attacks. The comfort of her small daughter’s body snuggling next to her was the only thing that seemed to calm her. During the day, she found reasons to keep Laura home from nursery school, because she couldn’t bear to be alone in the house. Laura, who felt upset, did not understand the panic, but clung to her mother and resisted visiting her father. The parent is likely to experience a renewed threat of abandonment by the child whenever he or she leaves to visit the other parent. This provokes both intense anxiety and covert hostility toward the child who is not, then, available to take care of the parent’s needs. Not surprisingly, these children themselves then become ambivalent about separating. Alternatively, some children, sensing their apparent omnipotence in caring for a distressed parent, react as if the parent’s very survival depends on their constant vigilance and caretaking. Some parents defend against their fears of abandonment by taking a pseudo-autonomous stance, rigidly insisting on making unilateral decisions on behalf of their children and refusing to cooperate with the other parent. This can result in inflexible, authoritarian parenting that is governed by one parent’s need to be in control, rather than being firm, empathic, and independent in his or her judgment. Eventually, such rigidity can evolve into power struggles with the child, especially during adolescence, which in turn can precipitate the child’s sudden defection to the other parent.

Domestic Violence and Parenting Parenting of Domestic Violence Instigators There is a wide range of capacity to parent among perpetrators of violence, ranging from frankly abusive, to poor or marginal, to adequate or even good-enough parenting. Despite their entrenched litigation to gain or retain custody

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or access of their children, however, common features are lack of warmth, coercive tactics, and rejection of their children (Anderson & Cramer-Benjamin, 1999; Azar, 2002; Straus, 1983). This pattern is especially true for those exhibiting a pattern of abuse and coercive control of their spouse and far less likely if the violence was an isolated event. Where there is a pattern of abuse, erratic role reversals, swings from permissive to rigid, authoritarian parenting, and periodic abandonment of the child are also common. Children of such primary abusers are more likely to be abused directly, to witness one of their sibling’s abuse, and to be exposed to continuing scenes of intimate-partner abuse when their abusive father or mother cohabits or remarries. More commonly, they are subjected to emotional abuse such as name-calling, cruel put-downs, and distortion of their reality by telling false and frightening stories. At times they are made the favorite at the expense of siblings who are isolated or outrightly rejected. At other times they may be encouraged in morally corrupt and criminal behavior (Appel & Holden, 1998; Bancroft &Silverman, 2002; Johnston & Campbell, 1993b). Boundary violations between adult domestic violence abusers and children are more likely especially where substance abuse is also involved, with a greater incidence of child sexual abuse being reported (Wilson, 2001). After the separation, abusive ex-spouses often make exaggerated claims about their good relationship with their children and can use family litigation as a new forum to continue their coercive controlling behavior and to harass their former partner (Jaffe, Lemon, & Poisson, 2003). Upon closer scrutiny, however, in a range of obvious and more insidious ways they try to alienate the children from the other parent’s affection (by asserting blame for the dissolution of the family and telling negative stories), sabotage family plans (by continuing criticism or competitive bribes), and undermine parental authority (by explicitly instructing the children not to listen or obey) (Bancroft & Silverman, 2002; Johnston, Walters, & Olesen, 2005b). Those domestic violence perpetrators with severe borderline, sociopathic, and narcissistic personality disorders are particularly vulnerable to both loss and shame inherent in the divorce situation and are likely to view the child as a material possession, which they can use as a weapon, a vehicle, or a conduit to the ex-spouse. In such situations, the


child is little more than a means of punishment, a trophy, or a bargaining chip. Children who are consistently treated as an inanimate object, with only a kind of functional or symbolic value (vis-à-vis the dispute with the other parent), are at risk of developing a surreal sense of not existing—feeling and acting as though they are nonpersons. For weeks after his wife left the marriage, Mr. L kept Lisa home from school to keep him company, to comfort him. Later, when the mother recovered custody of the child, this man lavished bribes and promises of exciting outings on the little girl, but then failed to turn up for the scheduled visits. When his wife refused to talk with him, he would tearfully tell the distraught child good-bye, that he would never see her again—and then he would return the next day to renew his pleadings. Whenever his wife left the child in the care of the grandmother, he would take the little girl away with him, claiming she had been deserted; then he would drop her off with sundry acquaintances for her care. The child was constantly asked to plead the father’s case with the mother: “Ask her, ‘Where do you belong?’ ‘Tell her I love her and want her back!’” When first seen in counseling, Lisa was a dazed, flaccid child. She lacked spontaneity, seemed vacant, joyless, and withdrawn. She made no demands and waited uncomplainingly for someone to attend to her needs, as if she had entirely given up any sense of herself as a viable person.

Parenting of Domestic Violence Recipients Sadly, victims of domestic violence are also likely to have diminished parenting capacities, especially those subjected to ongoing abuse and coercive control. Preoccupation with the demands of their abuser, a conflict-ridden marriage, or a traumatic separation may render parents physically and emotionally exhausted, inconsistently available, and overly dependent upon or unable to protect their children from the abuser (Anderson, 2002; Busch & Lieberman, 2007; Lieberman & Van Horn, 1998; Sackett & Saunders, 1999; Slade, 2007). For most victims, separation from the perpetrator of domestic violence provides an opportunity for improvement in both general functioning and parenting capacities. However, those who have been victimized by prolonged abuse and control are likely to suffer sustained difficulties—such as anxiety, depression, and substance abuse, post-traumatic-stress

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disorder—all of which can compromise their parenting for some time (Ferraro, 2006; Herman, 1997; Kirkwood, 1993). Female victims may have been brainwashed by the abuser into accepting their own and their children’s abusive treatment, and intimidated and embarrassed male victims tend not to protect the children from their abusive mother’s rages (Johnston & Campbell, 1993b). Poor self-esteem, lack of confidence in their parenting, and inability to control their children, especially their older sons, make the female victims an obvious target of blame by the abusive ex-spouse and may raise the suspicions of family court professionals as to their fitness to parent. During the court process, these parents may present more negatively than they will in the future, once the stress of the proceedings and life changes have attenuated. Victims of abusive relationships need time to re-establish their competence as parents and the opportunity to learn how to nurture and appropriately protect themselves and their children. Time, protection, and support allow an adequate opportunity for a distinction to be made between the majority of victims of spousal abuse who are able to reestablish effective parenting, and the small minority of cases where the victim’s mental status will be chronic—a product of prior psychological problems and a history of repeated victimization in earlier relationships such that they cannot ever parent adequately.

Children’s Range of Vulnerability and Coping Capacities The kinds of disturbed family dynamics described above may have been operative throughout a marriage, or they may have been set in motion only at the time of the parents’ separation, or after the divorce. When working with these families, it is important to obtain a detailed marital history, which will suggest how early and how pervasive the psychic damage is likely to have been to the child, who may have been exposed to varying degrees of disturbance in the parent–child relationship over time. In some cases, one or both parents may be characterologically disturbed in a more generalized way. The children may have been further stressed by abusive, neglectful, and impoverished environments—both before and after the divorce—derivatives of domestic violence, substance abuse by


parents, poverty, and dislocation from school and community. (Karr-Morse & Wiley, 1997; Kilpatrick & Williams, 1997). Before assuming a definitive, gloomy prognosis for all these children, a cautionary note is warranted: Researchers are still in the midst of the complex task of trying to understand how children of different developmental stages, both boys and girls, are affected by protracted and severe parental conflict. Systematic studies over these children’s growing-up years are sorely needed. Overall, we are impressed by the range of presentations in our clinical observations of these children. In general, the more severe, more protracted, and earlier the onset of the parental conflict in the child’s life, the more disturbed the child becomes; but this is not always so. Some children, despite extreme family conflict and disturbed parenting, appear to be relatively well adjusted, while others with less family stress appear to become enmeshed and emotionally and behaviorally disturbed. Others appear to be time bombs that explode, for example, during adolescence. There are many possible reasons for these differences (Anthony & Cohler, 1987; Rutter, 1987). For example, some children have access to other people who can support them (grandparents, a special teacher, a nanny). The presence of siblings, especially older ones, can act as a buffer. A few have benefited from effective psychotherapy. Children also differ in their personal coping resources: Those with more adaptable temperaments or those who are more attractive, more intellectually gifted, more athletically or artistically skilled, all have alternative domains within which to achieve a viable sense of themselves and their place in the world. All these factors can vary the prognosis and help determine the outcome for individual youngsters as they mature into adulthood. This great variability should be kept in mind as we consider next some of the common core concerns that these children have, how they typically try to cope, and the possible threats to the development of a positive sense of themselves and their capacity for healthy relationships.

The Children’s Core Concerns We have identified four central concerns that children have when they live with divorced and disputing parents: What is true and what is not true? How can I keep myself and my parents safe? Who is to blame? Am I like the good parent,

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or the bad parent? For these children, the answers to these dilemmas have to do with their profound fears about their ability to survive, both psychologically and physically. We assert that the various ways by which children attempt to cope with these core concerns, and defend against their fears, are likely to result in entrenched patterns of feeling, perceiving reality, solving problems, relating to other people, and dealing with emotions. Each of these central concerns will be examined together with preliminary evidence from psychological testing that suggests how personality disorders may be shaping up in these children (Exner & Weiner, 1982). What is True and What is Not True? First, depending on their

age or cognitive stage of development, children struggle with the puzzle of their parents’ conflicting claims. Some of the possibilities, from the child’s viewpoint, are truly frightening. For example, children have brought the following questions to us: “Did Daddy throw Mommy out of the house, or did another man steal Mommy from Daddy?” “Is Daddy’s new girlfriend really a witch?” “Dad made Mom have an abortion—does that mean he made her kill my little brother?” “My dad told me that when my mom was pregnant with me, she was also sleeping with a dirty crack cocaine dealer—so is he, or my dad, my father?” Hence, the child’s ability to perceive and evaluate real-life events is distorted. Ordinarily, children use their parents as a social reference for what is safe and trustworthy. These children, however, have the profound dilemma of making sense out of vastly contradictory views that are communicated through the hostility, fear, and distrust of their opposing parents (Who is safe, who is dangerous, whom can you trust?). At times, children’s own fantasies are projected into the situation, increasing their fright. Tears rolled down the face of 5-year-old Tony as he told his counselor how scared he always was when the door of his father’s car slammed shut behind him out on the street, and he made the long trek up the walkway to his mother’s front door, which would crack open barely wide enough to admit him. Tony was too young to talk about his role as psychological double-agent in this cold war between his parents. He could tell us, however, how afraid he was—afraid that a large black bird would swoop down and attack him during his perilous transition, and that neither parent would rescue him.


All things considered, it is not surprising that psychological testing indicates the following about these youngsters as a group: They are likely to be hypervigilant and distrusting of others, and they do not expect the world to be a cooperative or protective place. Unlike typically developing children, who tend to turn to others, especially adults, for their needs, these children turn inward, unto themselves, to figure out how to solve problems and interpret social reality. Unfortunately, their inner resources are likely to be meager, because these children defend against the double-binding inconsistency of their most significant relationships by avoiding complexity, ambiguity, and spontaneity. In the service of this essential need for predictability and control, their perceptions, feelings, and ideas remain simple, concrete, and utilitarian. The bind is that, as children turn inward, they must rely on an increasingly impoverished and distorted understanding of the nature of reality. Paradoxically, their path to safety leads them further and further away from new self-realizing possibilities. How Can I Keep Myself and My Parents Safe? Second, because

of the profound neediness of their distressed parents, these children can become urgently concerned about the emotional and physical well-being of a parent. (Will my mother be sad and cry if she is left on her own while I visit my father?) Convinced that somehow their own emotional survival depends upon keeping their parents safe, these worries about the wellbeing of a parent are often fused with nagging fears about their own vulnerability to being abandoned, lost, ignored, or even destroyed in the parental fight. (If I visit my father, will my mother be there when I get back; will her fury be aimed at me?) Consequently, these children are often highly attuned to managing their own as well as their parents’ emotional states. Psychological testing confirms the pervasive emotional constriction that results when children inhibit and monitor the natural exuberance of childhood in this way. Their significantly low egocentricity scores (that is, their meager sense of importance in relation to others) also points up how atypically “other-focused” these children need to be in order to maintain their parents’ equilibrium. Who is to Blame? Third, since they are often the centerpiece of the parents’ fighting, these children typically feel responsible for the outcome of the disputes. Yet, most feel helpless to control or stop the conflict. While the younger

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ones believe they cause the fighting, the older ones feel the fights occur simply because they exist: “If I were dead, they wouldn’t need to fight anymore” is a tragically self-blaming, depressive fantasy that is not uncommon. Feelings of great power and importance are juxtaposed, therefore, with paradoxical feelings of being overwhelmingly inadequate in the face of the parents’ intractable anger. Hence the child’s sense of agency, competence, or power is undermined. It follows that these children often have trouble directly asserting their own needs and wishes. Instead, they are likely to maintain an underlying oppositional and alienated stance that is masked by a compliant eagerness to please others. This façade can be maintained only until the children become overwhelmed by their own neediness, at which time they regress or explode into irritable-distressed or demanding-aggressive behavior. These findings fit with the somewhat paradoxical results of the psychological testing, which suggest that, as a group, these youngsters tend to score unusually high on levels of self-esteem, using self-report measures, but reveal their preoccupation with being bad, damaged, nonviable, and inadequate on projective measures that bypass the child’s observing ego (Johnston, Walters, & Olesen, 2005c; Roseby, Erdberg, Bardenstein, & Johnston, 1995). The tests capture both the confusing sense of importance as well as the underlying sense of insignificance and helplessness. Am I Like the Good Parent or the Bad Parent? Finally, given their parents’ continual denigration of one another, these children are clearly concerned with the problem of who is good and who is bad and with whom to identify:

Four-year-old Andy’s sandtray play captured the predicament of a small child (himself) who was in the center of a battlefield. He commented, “But the good people wore bad masks and the bad people wore good masks. I wasn’t sure which to follow!” Like Andy, many children become confused, feel shame, or denigrate themselves if they feel they have become like the “bad parent.” Hence the child’s developmental task of acknowledging, tolerating, and integrating the “bad” with the “good” into a more realistic view of each parent (whole object representation) and, at the same time, forming a cohesive,


integrated sense of the “good” and the “bad” in himself or herself (self constancy) is made extremely difficult. For example: Eight-year-old Allan could be alternately boastful and grandiose, until he was disciplined, and then he was totally deflated—he became self-flagellating and defeated. Fourteen-year-old Ian was a perfectionist with his schoolwork; if he didn’t get it one hundred percent correct, he felt horribly dumb, like his “stupid father.” When children maintain this kind of rigid separation between good and bad, they are bound to strive for an impossible perfection in themselves and other people. Each failure represents an intolerable fall from grace. This most fundamental failure (to achieve self and object constancy) is reflected in the pervasive absence of basic trust that testing reveals in these children. It is not difficult to imagine that these polarized shifts from perfectly good to perfectly bad make trusting oneself or others, from moment to moment, a virtually impossible task.

Traumatic Scenes of Violence and the Formation of Scripts As shown in the previous chapter, a large proportion of children of entrenched custody disputes will have experienced their parents’ violence in the past. Moreover, many will continue to witness ongoing verbal abuse (spiteful comments, put-downs, threats, name-calling) and intermittent physical violence (pushing, shoving, hitting, even battering). Studies have shown that children do not need to be directly abused to be hurt by this manifest conflict and violence between their parents (Jaffe, Wolfe, & Wilson, 1990). Our clinical observations lead us to propose that such traumatic scenes can form indelible sensory metaphors in a child’s memory, called “nuclear family scenes.” The sparse coping and defensive postures that children employ to try to manage the terrible threat these scenes pose are likely to become organized into patterns and form a “nuclear script” that undergirds their unconscious expectations about how family relationships work. Under certain conditions, this interior script can organize the child’s constricted, hypervigilant, rigid, and distrustful view of human relationships in general. An example:

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When we first saw him, 12-year-old Isaac could not remember any of the frightening scenes of marital violence that occurred prior to his parents’ separation, when his father would chase his mother around the house beating her. The memory of those violent scenes suddenly returned to him years later as a teenager, when he had an altercation with his father. In a halting voice he described a series of visual and auditory images to his counselor: father crashing through the door, loud angry voices, contorted angry faces, father stomping on his mother who was flailing on the floor, mother crying, mother’s face bleeding, himself frozen in the doorway watching, the police arriving, the police arresting his father, the police forbidding him to hug his dad good-bye. He then went on to describe flashbacks and fragments of other scenes of severe family conflict, intermingled with horrifying nightmares of mayhem that often disturbed his sleep. This boy’s repressed rage and utter shame at his helplessness during those childhood events, when he witnessed his father abuse his mother, undergirded his alienated, oppositional stance and highly distrustful (paranoid) personality style. At age 15, he is a careful, guarded boy, passive and emotionally expressionless much of the time, especially when conflict threatens. Intermittently, this boy is prone to aggressive outbursts at which time he hits his mother and sister. In this respect, Isaac shows that he has “turned passive into active” and has identified with his abusive father. In the remainder of this chapter, the process by which emotionally highly charged nuclear family scenes (like those that Isaac experienced) form nuclear scripts and structure personality pathologies will be described and illustrated in more detail.

How Nuclear Scripts are Formed in Early Childhood Incidents of severe family conflict and violence are believed to threaten children’s emotional security in a very fundamental sense (Davies & Cummings, 1994). To understand this, we draw upon social-cognitive theory about family scenes and scripts (or expectation states) to explain how these incidents


are stored in children’s memory (Berger, 1988; Carlson, 1984; Schank & Abelson, 1977; Tomkins, 1978). Developmental theory about children’s social cognition (Flavell, Fry, Wright, & Jarvis, 1968; Kegan, 1982; Selman, 1980) and object relations (Mahler, Pine, & Bergman, 1975; Kohut, 1977; Kohut & Wolfe, 1978; Winnicott, 1960, 1971) will complement this understanding. Accordingly, we will show that attachment patterns and internal models of family relationship are shaped and distorted by repeated incidences of parental conflict, and how the distortions are defensively maintained in order to manage feelings of helplessness, shame, and rage (Bretherton, Ridgeway, & Cassidy, 1990; Bowlby, 1969; 1973, 1980; Main, Kaplan, & Cassidy, 1985). Furthermore, it will be shown how all of this can inhibit the children’s capacity for understanding themselves and other people, for tolerating the expression of the full range of feelings, for empathy, and for moral thought and action (Kagan & Lamb, 1987). Most worrisome are recent research findings that show significant neural structural and biochemical changes in young children in response to trauma and the deficits in nurturance that appear to be relatively enduring if there is no timely intervention. Traumatic scenes of family violence are now known to impact very young children, even infants and toddlers. A primitive script (or inchoate expectation state) can initially be formed from schema of preverbal sensory and perceptual experience during infancy, long before the child has access to language to encode the experience. For babies and toddlers, then, frightening scenes of family conflict and violence may never be available for cognitive recall, but can continue to manifest themselves in scary dreams and in diffusely anxious feelings. Two examples follow: Twelve-year-old Katie recalled a repeated dream from which she invariably woke up crying. It was of two disembodied voices shouting, at first faintly, from a distance, and then increasing in volume and proximity to a deafening roar. At the age of two, this child had been witness to the scene when her father discovered her mother with a lover. When Tom was 2 years old, his father murdered his mother. After his mother was repeatedly stabbed in a nearby room, she struggled to the side of her son’s crib,

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where she died. Tom has no memory of the event, and the facts were kept secret from Tom until he was a young adult. However, from the time he can first remember, he has suffered from repeated diffuse and overwhelming anxiety attacks, wherein he feels that some unknown, dreadful thing is happening. By the time the young child has achieved representational capacity (indicated by the capacity for language and symbolic play), the script has become a pattern that organizes the child’s largely unselfconscious “rules” for predicting, interpreting, responding to, and controlling their experiences within their families. Scripts that are derived from emotionally charged scenes tend to be conflated in memory and psychologically magnified. For pleasurable scenes, the script is generally magnified by the production of variants; that is, the child who has previously been gratified by a particular scene tends to innovate by producing variations on the theme inherent within the script. For example, an infant who receives a rewarding response for cooing is encouraged to experiment with other forms of vocalization. A child given warm appreciation for being helpful seeks new ways to please. Negative scenes, on the other hand, tend to be magnified by the formation of analogs; that is, the child seeks to find and then to defend against similarities as new scenes are scanned for old dangers and previous disappointments. For example, a toddler who associates mother’s angry expression with a punishing slap freezes when a caretaker seems disapproving. A youngster who associates his father’s arrival, to pick him up for visits, with another parental fight becomes immobilized when his father calls him on the phone. Hence, scripts derived from negative nuclear family scenes generate more constriction and invariant coping responses. Children who experience particularly negative scenes tend to incorporate a greater number of previously unrelated scenes into forming and maintaining the negative script, thus minimizing creative, new ways of coping, and simplifying their perception of the world. The intolerable feelings that are aroused by scenes of severe conflict and violence between parents become defensively encapsulated and not easily recalled by the child. Moreover, parents commonly avoid, deny, or defensively distort incidents about which they are ashamed: They hope the child does not remember or did not understand what


happened. Some adults think they are protecting the child by not talking about the event. As a result, the memory of the scene remains essentially private, fragmented, and embedded in the idiosyncratic experience of the child and not easily talked about with others. This “conspiracy of silence” within the family prevents the reparative work of talking-through and emotional abreaction, which would enable the child to assimilate and master the traumatic episode. When this is not done, there is a heightened risk that the child will reenact the traumatic scene (sometimes compulsively) in nightmares or destructive play, alone or with peers (Schwartz, Kowalski, & Hanus, 1993; Terr, 1988). Traumatic scenes may become psychologically magnified when memories are intermingled, confused with one another, and reorganized around the common denominator of the nuclear family script that governs them. For example: Six-year-old Jennifer fell from a tree and broke both her wrists while camping on vacation with her noncustodial father. Though he was a loving father, this man was angry and bitter with his ex-wife. The child’s mother, angry and distraught over the accident, rushed to the father’s house to take the child home. In a physical struggle that occurred in the child’s presence, when the father tried to explain the prescribed medications, he grabbed the mother’s wrist and flung her from him. She fell down the stairs and broke her arm, leaving Jennifer screaming in fright. Most interestingly, during her counseling session, the child described the accident and the violent incident briefly and rather blandly, then appeared to distract from the topic by drawing a picture of a crying baby standing in water with a life vest around its waist. When asked to describe the picture, Jennifer recalled that when she was “a baby” (a toddler) her father had made her wear a life vest, despite her protests. She had then fallen over in her wading pool, was unable to right herself, and feared she was going to drown. This child appeared to have conjoined three traumatic experiences: the pool incident, the tree accident, and the parental fight when her mother was injured. The common denominator of these three events was Jennifer’s script of a father who tried to be protective and helpful (he made her wear a life jacket; he demanded the right use of the prescribed

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medications) but who was likely to become angry and vengeful if resisted, even potentially lethal, toward her and her mother. Oftentimes, the original traumatic scenes have been completely repressed, with only fragmented images or other sensory memories available for conscious recall. Children appear to react with indifference to these fragments that, though remaining ultra clear in their memories, are typically reported with bland or commonplace affect. This is similar to what has been referred to as “screen memory” in the psychoanalytic literature (Spero, 1990). There is also a tendency for these memory fragments to be activated in response to any new negative experience or threat of trauma. We hypothesize that, in actuality, the memory fragments are likely to be linked together by virtue of the script, which conjoins several traumatic scenes. Ironically, this process provides the child with a kind of negative sense of predictability. For example: Alicia’s mother was severely depressed, angry, and resentful about having to care for her baby daughter, during the first 2 years of the child’s life. She harbored frightening fantasies of hurting or abandoning her baby. Gradually, her depression eased. At 7 years, the child suffered a ruptured appendix and was rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery. She spent several uncomfortable days there, reacting poorly to the medical procedures, with her mother constantly at her side. Later, when she was 10 years old, her parents separated. At that time, Alicia was exposed to many scenes of high conflict, which involved her mother becoming uncontrollably angry and physically attacking her father. In the 2 years following the divorce, prominent among this child’s symptoms of anxiety and distress were frequent somatic complaints, especially pain in her left lower abdomen. She feared she was going to die and became excessively dependent upon and unable to separate from her mother. In therapy, Alicia was highly anxious and unable to talk about the divorce situation. She did, however, recall quite vividly, though with astonishing indifference, being in the hospital as well as other seemingly mundane scenes in a daycare center as a preschooler. Those scenes were probably fragments of


memories from times when she had been highly distressed about being left by her mother. This child had evolved a script wherein the threat was abandonment and destruction by her mother. She tried to manage this threat by retreating into somatic symptoms and clinging dependency, because these behaviors would evoke her mother’s caretaking response. It is interesting that the specific fears Alicia was trying to ward off by her scripted symptoms were also evident in repetitive, terrifying nightmares in which the symbolism of the angry mother and her unsafe world was barely disguised. The script produced from a traumatic scene (or scenes) will probably depend on a number of factors: the child’s limited perceptual opportunities and cognitive capacities, the current emotional-developmental issues that concern the child, and the effectiveness of the child’s coping efforts in any attempt to master or control the threat inherent in the situation. How might each of these factors help structure the particular script that is likely to be formed? Cognitive Capacities. Children often witness only part of a

parental fight. For instance, a child may hear screaming or thumps through the bedroom walls, may overhear threats and accusations from one side of a telephone conversation, or, in the aftermath of a fight, may see broken furniture, a blackened eye, or hear helpless sobbing. The child is then left to surmise the whole of the scene from these fragments. The meaning the child constructs is partly influenced by his or her cognitive capacity for perspective-taking. According to social-cognitive theory, this capacity provides a foundation for the development of interpersonal understanding, which is defined as the way children understand and reason about themselves, other people, and the interactions between them (Flavell et al., 1968; Selman, 1980). The development of interpersonal understanding parallels the child’s increasing ability to move beyond the boundaries of his or her own point of view in order to understand, maintain, and differentiate that point of view from the perspectives of others. A preschool child with an egocentric perspective and intuitive logic may form primitive scripts based on magical thinking that does not grasp the existence of any other point of view. For example:

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Five-year-old Amy explained that she was magic, “because when I come into the room, my mom and dad stop fighting.” She went on to explain, “When I go to bed, I leave my magic by the door, and it stops them fighting in the night!” The younger school-age child who has developed the capacity to grasp another’s perspective (as well as his or her own), but who can only keep in mind one perspective at a time (unilateral perspective-taking), will typically experience incidents of conflict from only one parent’s point of view and will then develop scripts for understanding herself, and relationships, which involve simple, concrete, one-way interactions: “My mom is mean, she yelled at my dad and he was sad. I make him happy!” The older school-age child, who can now begin to hold in mind two other perspectives simultaneously (bilateral perspective-taking), views the scene in a more complex way: “My dad hurt my mom’s feelings. He said she was fat. She yelled at him and called him bad words. Then he hit her. After, I talked to her and she feels better.” The adolescent, with the capacity to hold everyone’s perspective in mind as he or she scans the various possible outcomes of different actions (third-person perspective capability), can recall the same scene with more detachment. In this case, the script that evolves is likely to be more abstract and general and involves a transaction between the family members: “My parents are always cursing each other and calling each other bad names, and then they start hitting. If they’ve been drinking, there’s not much I can do. I just leave.” The thesis proposed here, which is supported by our clinical observations, is that the complexity of the script (the extent to which it includes, differentiates, and integrates different viewpoints and hence corresponds to good reality testing) depends upon the perspective-taking capability of the child when the script was formed. Furthermore, it is hypothesized that once the script is formed, the unselfconscious injunctions embedded in it can, in turn, delimit further development of the child’s perspective-taking ability under conditions that signal the threat. For example, children whose scripts dictate that they remain aligned (or, more primitively, merged) with one parent against the other are severely limited in their ability to take the first step beyond egocentrism toward differentiation of self and other. When this first social-cognitive achievement


is disrupted, further growth toward an increasingly differentiated, reality-based appraisal of self and other cannot proceed normally, unless the script can be made conscious and available for revision. To illustrate: During her preschool years, Jane was exposed to frequent terrifying scenes in which her parents would get into a brawl late at night. Her hysterical and distraught mother would pull her out of bed and literally hold her as a shield from the angry father. The father would then back off. Years later, at crisis periods during the protracted, bitter, litigation over property and child custody, Jane suddenly became inexplicably phobic and angry towards her loving father. She merged completely with her mother’s negative views and refused to visit him. She could not remember anything about the good times she had had with him and construed all of his attempts to invite her back to him as dangerous. It was not until those early memories were reviewed and reworked in therapy that she was able to tolerate her mother’s periodic rages against the father without making this irrational alignment.

Emotional-developmental Issues. The thematic content of a script that is derived from a traumatic scene may be determined, in part, by the significance of the emotional issues being confronted by the child at that particular stage of his or her development (Erikson, 1950; Mahler et al., 1975). For example, consider a situation in which three boys from the same family witness their father hitting their mother. The 2-year-old, who is normally preoccupied with concerns about separation, will be most anxious about the emotional unavailability of his mother to comfort him during the stressful experience. The script he develops for understanding and managing his relationships is likely to have a theme of separation and abandonment. The 5-year-old more likely will focus on the father’s wrath, seeing it as a potential attack upon himself because of his oedipal fantasies (his eroticized longing for exclusive possession of the mother and her resources). The thematic content of his script will probably reflect issues of competition and revenge. The attention of the 8-year-old, who is more concerned about mastery, will more likely be captured by the exercise of power and control by the aggressive father and the induction of

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submission in the victimized mother. If so, the thematic content of his script will be about maintaining superiority and control and avoiding inferiority and helplessness. There are indications from longitudinal observations (Terr, 1988, 1990) that the original traumatic scene can be reworked in the child’s memory so that, as the child’s central concerns shift over time, the content of the script reflects new developmental themes. Scripts can also be surfaced and reworked by children in conversation and play with their parents and peers, or they may be reconstituted within therapy. It is possible, however, for the script to remain fixed at its point of origin. This underscores the need to take a careful history about traumatic scenes witnessed at early ages and at critical developmental stages. The Effectiveness of the Child’s Coping Efforts. The ways in which the child and the child’s caretakers respond to violent scenes are likely to have profound effects on the kinds of scripts or expectation-states developed by the child. Typical primary responses (responses not mediated by cognitive processing) to acutely threatening scenes are freezing, flight, or fight. In younger children, freezing is the most common response, immediately followed by signs of distress such as crying and clinging. If these responses relieve the child’s initial anxiety, they are likely to be reinforced and become a part of the child’s script. Other, more complex defenses may be used, including dissociation, denial, repression, somatic responses, and splitting. An example is Jason, who typically hyperventilated in response to his mother’s screaming tirades; this immediately quieted her and induced her solicitous concern for him. Another example is Brenda, a product of a bitterly feuding divorce, who appeared to block out the visual image of her beloved father and denied that she could even see him, when she happened to meet him on the street while she was in the company of her angry mother. An episode of intense parental conflict or a scene of domestic violence usually produces a flood of negative emotions that the script serves to ward off or manage. These include primary affective responses such as fright or helplessness and secondary emotions such as shame, guilt, a sense of injustice, or a wish for revenge. These negative feelings can be overwhelming, especially when amplified by the child’s own aggressive fantasies (unconscious rivalries or destructive wishes). To illustrate:


Watching her parents argue through a crack in the door, 7-year-old Ricki clenched her fists and prayed to God to stop her father from killing her mother. In actuality, her father had done no more than slap her mother, and that only once, but Ricki, at the time, was furiously angry because her mother was abusive toward her. Her unconscious, angry wish—and her terrifying fear—was that her mother would be murdered. Children’s unconscious rules for how to defend against intolerable feelings—anxiety, fearfulness, shame, blame, helplessness, badness—will probably become embedded in their scripts. As will be shown in the following chapters, the complexity of their defenses and the coping skills available to them depend partly upon their developmental stage. Some children repress their intolerable feelings from conscious awareness. Repression of emotion inhibits children’s capacity to perceive, understand, and tolerate their own and other people’s feelings. As a result, their interpersonal understanding may have a mechanistic quality in which behavior is detached from emotional motivation and is frighteningly difficult to predict or manage outside the confines of the nuclear script. Children who are more primitively organized may cope, for example, by being aggressive, grandiose, and defiant with their peers at school but will be constricted, robotic, and defeated with their embittered and intermittently violent parents. These children do not subjectively experience the extruded feelings of fear and helplessness when they become aggressive and grandiose. Therefore, they cannot perceive or empathically understand the fear and helplessness their behavior evokes in their peers. Clearly, this coping style not only mitigates against basic self-integration but also disrupts the achievement of empathy, the basis for interpersonal morality. More sophisticated coping responses (responses mediated by cognitive processing and complex emotional reactions) may be employed and incorporated into the script, especially by older children. These include throwing oneself between the fighting parents; distracting the parents by being naughty, charming, or seductive; having an “accident;” actively avoiding the situation by retreating from the scene; or engaging in different kinds of role reversal (taking care of siblings or performing special chores and services for the distressed parent).

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Over time, these increasingly consolidated coping responses define a scripted role for the child which becomes embedded in his or her internal working model of family relationships. These specific responses to their parents tend to generalize into their other relationships. The mechanisms by which this occurs continue to be the subject of ongoing study. Two examples of this kind of generalization are the following: Four-year-old Emma typically curled up and went to sleep in the back seat of her mother’s car whenever her father and mother started violently fighting over her at the time of her exchange for visitation. Three years later, her parents had settled their disputes, but in altercations with her peers, Emma was noted to become extremely passive, languid, and almost somnolent. Eight-year-old Michael, who had long managed his parents’ frequent fighting, was typically controlling with his peers. When minor disputes arose on the playground, he would interfere and “supervise,” much to the resentment of his classmates. Sometimes these scripts appear to lie dormant for years, until the young person tries to form intimate relationships or becomes a parent (Egeland, Jacobvitz, & Stroufe, 1988; Egeland, Jacobivtz, & Papatola, 1987). When observing these disturbing, even tragic cases, however, it is important to remember that, fortunately, these are not the outcomes for most children who have witnessed violence (Kaufman & Zigler, 1987; Widom, 1989; Zeanah & Zeanah, 1989). Lacking good long-term studies, we do not yet fully understand why many children grow up without repeating these early patterns, while a significant and disturbing minority, like Carrie and Jose, described below, become victims or victimizers. Carrie’s parents’ violent marriage ended in divorce when she was in preschool. Never again did she witness her father hit her mother. In her late teens, however, she began living with an abusive young man. When asked why she tolerated his violence, she answered simply, “Because he loves me—I know he loves me because he hits me!” (Wallerstein & Blakeslee, 1989).


Ten-year-old Jose witnessed his drunken, jealous father beat up his mother on several occasions. Each time the boy tried to throw himself between his parents to protect his mother he himself was hit, which made him feel small, helpless, and ashamed. This boy grew up with a seething rage at his father and intermittently suffered a brooding depression. At age 17, Jose fell in love for the first time and quickly became intensely possessive of his girlfriend. Then she broke off the relationship. Feeling again powerless and shamed, he took a gun and threatened to kill her.

Implications and Summary Whereas nuclear scenes (in these cases, incidents of frightening conflict and violence) originally create the script (with its rules and expectations about relationships), the script itself tends to guide the child’s appraisal, emotions, and management of subsequent interpersonal events (Dodge & Somberg, 1987; Dodge, Bates & Pettit, 1990). When the child is confronted with a threat of repeated conflict or violence, the script, or expectation state, is quickly activated in response. In fact, in these highly vigilant children, defenses and coping responses that are embedded in the script can be triggered by minimal cues or enacted to preempt confrontation and conflict. In summary, children exposed to distressing scenes of interparental conflict, especially those that include violence, manage their distress, make sense of what is happening, and control their world by forming a defensive nuclear script of family relationships, which then becomes the prism through which they view the world. In other words, when danger is perceived where refuge should be, children tend to cope by developing increasingly rigid and constricted patterns of feeling, thought, perception, attention, and memory, which become organized as largely unconscious “rules” for scanning and controlling interpersonal contact. Children who have suffered traumatic exposure to episodes of severe domestic violence such as battering, rape, murder, suicide, abduction, and other critical incidents referred to as Type I trauma (Terr, 1991) have been the focus of post-traumatic stress (PTS) therapy.This psychiatric approach has been informed by a growing body of research during the past decade on biochemical and neurological changes that underlie symptoms of PTS such as flashbacks, nightmares,

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dissociative states, numbness, hyper alertness, inability to concentrate, and re-enactment. Infants and young children who have been traumatized typically respond organismically with hyperarousal and dissociation, and interpersonally with disruptions in attachment capacities to caretakers. In the developing brain, such traumatic states organize neural systems and pathways, resulting in relatively enduring traits or behavioral and emotional capacities. Specifically, the loss of the ability to regulate the intensity of feeling is viewed as one of the most far-reaching effects of early trauma and neglect (Briere, 1997; Carrion, Weems & Reiss, 2007; Van der Kolk, Van der Hart, & Marmar, 1996). From this perspective, critical incidents of traumatic proportions for children are highly influential in the development of psychopathology which has its foundations in the biological structures and biochemical functioning of the child at vulnerable ages. All this is entirely consistent with the rigidity of the scripts that we have observed in these children (Lewis, Amini & Lannon, 2000). Without intervention, these patterns (or scripts) form a prism that allows in signals of interpersonal threat while filtering out more benign information. As a result, the child feels, paradoxically, both confirmed in his or her view of the interpersonal world as dangerous and yet safe, because he or she can scan for and control the threat. As these patterns consolidate, they mitigate against the child’s capacity to trust others and to tolerate intimacy with others. The prism therefore becomes a prison as children’s opportunities for cognitive and emotional growth are limited to the confines of the script. The result, to varying degrees, is emotional constriction, avoidance of feelings and genuine interpersonal contact, difficulty experiencing empathy with others, and distortions in moral reasoning and conduct. Children show a wide range of adaptations depending upon individual temperament and other buffering resources available within the family and community. In the following chapters, we will show how children at each developmental stage are affected differently. Those who are younger tend toward the more severe forms of developmental distortion and arrest but seem more amenable to change when their family situation improves. Older children often appear to be more resilient to the acute stress associated with divorce conflict, but if given no relief from chronic conflict, they are likely to show consolidated disturbances which are more resistant to intervention.

The Development of Children and Youth in High-Conflict Families

II


Infants and Toddlers: Problems in SeparationIndividuation

3

When very young children are exposed to chronic conflict between their divorced parents, their anxieties tend to become manifest as they transition back and forth from one parent’s home to the other’s. Their difficulties may include a range of behaviors such as crankiness, irritability, clinging to one parent, and physical resistance to the other parent. These problems often escalate when the child returns from a visit. Commonly described patterns include a period of defiance or irritability that the parent cannot soothe. This resistance is likely to be followed by signs of regression. The child may have difficulty sleeping alone at night, wake with nightmares, have toileting difficulties, or want a bottle that had been previously relinquished. Outside the home, youngsters may become unpredictably volatile with peers or controlling

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Part II: The Development of Children and Youth

in their play. One mother described her 2½-year-old’s behavior when she returned from visits in the following way: “She screams and cries for hours when she comes home. She won’t let me touch her. The only thing that works is to talk about when she was a baby—that’s how I have to seduce her back to me. I talk to her about what a great dad she has—but obviously he’s not returning the favor! He’s trying to turn her against me and show her what a crummy parent I am!” The father of this little girl, on the other hand, felt that she was having tantrums because she did not want to return to her mother and should have more time with him. While the parents’ individual concerns must be carefully considered, it is essential to understand what conflicts and anxieties the child may be trying to express or manage by means of these symptomatic behaviors. When the behavior can be understood from the child’s point of view, both parents and professionals can respond more empathically and effectively. This chapter describes the developmental processes that ordinarily preoccupy young children, and the ways in which the parents’ psychological vulnerabilities and bitter conflicts can distort these processes, generating insoluble internal conflicts and intolerable anxiety. These inner dilemmas are expressed in behavior.

The Normative Process of Separation-Individuation To understand the young child’s difficulties, it is useful to begin with a basic understanding of the normal developmental processes that may be disrupted by the parental conflict. To simplify the following discussion, we will mostly refer to the primary parent as the mother, though we do not assume that this is necessarily the case. Sometimes the primary parent is the father, and sometimes both parents share primary caretaking responsibilities. In the first 3 years of life, the child’s most fundamental developmental achievement is to establish an authentic sense

Chapter 3: Problems in Separation-Individuation

of self as a person who is physically and psychologically separate from the mother (or primary parent). If the child succeeds in this, the authentic self will fuel the child’s sense of wholeness, inner vibrancy, and self-direction throughout life. Mahler and her colleagues (Mahler et al., l975) referred to this process as separation-individuation. Mastery of this profoundly important process begins in infancy and depends upon the mother’s fairly constant and empathic responsiveness to the child as a separate person. Take, for example, the mother’s ordinary preoccupation with her baby’s every coo and cry as she says, with a sort of weary pride, “That’s just his little trying-to-settle-down noises.” Or, “I’d better go up, she sounds like she’s hungry.” If the parent is accurately attuned to the child in a predictable way, a pattern of signaling and response develops between them. The mother may, for example, stay and rub her baby’s back until he shifts from an agitated cry to his “settling-down noises,” which she recognizes as the signal that her baby is now soothed and ready to sleep. Alternatively, the mother responds to cries that she identifies as hunger by scooping the baby up and feeding her. These accumulating moments form a pattern that helps the child to feel that he or she is a separate person in a responsive and predictable world. Over time, that pattern and the mothering functions that are embedded in it (acknowledging, soothing, and protecting) become part of the child’s own inner repertoire for coping. In optimal situations, this pattern of responsiveness is “good enough,” it need not be perfect (Winnicott, l960). The best-intentioned mother does not, nor should she always, understand her child with perfect empathy. As the child learns to master disruptions in the familiar patterns of care, he or she matures. In the early phases of the separation-individuation stage, the infant normally experiences these expectable variations in the patterns of care as actual changes in the mother’s identity (Mahler et al., 1975); therefore, the child’s sense of self in mother’s care shifts responsively as well. That is, when the infant experiences the mother as empathically available and responsive, she is the good-mother and the self in her care is the good-mother-me. When she is not available and responsive, she is the bad-mother and the self in her care is the bad-mother-me. If the mother’s response range is reasonably steady, the young child learns to trust that these seemingly separate or split self/other states will

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shift in predictable ways because they are inseparable parts of an immutable whole. When, for example, the young child drops his cup from his highchair for the first time, the mother may smilingly bring it back to him. She may do this several times. After the tenth time, however, she may reasonably feel irritated and decide to take the cup away. For the child, she is, at that moment, the bad-mother who is angry and uncomprehending. The child is likely to protest loudly when this unsettling event occurs. In his rudimentary way, he is disappointed because the good-mother (who gratified by steadily replacing the cup and appreciating his play) has gone away, and he does not like the bad-mother who has taken her place. In this moment, the child experiences himself as the bad-motherme who has lost his milk and his play and who made the good-mother go away. If the mother can create a reasonable and predictable balance between frustration and gratification, then the child grows in his capacity for integration. If, for example, she tolerates his loud protests or his tantrum about the lost cup, without withdrawing, punishing, or capitulating, the child learns that no part of the self is so incomprehensible, intolerable, or overwhelming that it makes the good-mother go away forever. Over time, the mother’s steadiness and predictability help the child to understand that the good-mother and the bad- mother are one and the same person. Similarly, the child learns that the good-mother-me and the bad-motherme are aspects of one self. This integration of contradictory feelings and experiences represents a major developmental achievement that has been referred to in both the psychological and the psychoanalytic literature as object constancy (McDevitt, l975). This essential capacity allows the child to maintain a positive emotional attachment to another person, even in moments when that person is frustrating or ungratifying. That is, the child who has achieved object constancy can tolerate ambivalent feelings toward the same person and still value him or her for qualities not connected with need satisfaction (Burgner & Edgcumbe, l972). When this developmental achievement is in place, the child can learn to accept his or her whole self as a person who, like mother, has a shadow side. This unfolding tolerance supports the child’s capacity for constant, realistic relationships that can survive frustration and ambivalence.


The Internalized Good-Mother By toddlerhood, the child exploring physical separateness is increasingly practicing psychological autonomy as well. She borrows from patterns of responsiveness that were learned in infancy (the internalized good-mother) to feel reassured, to figure out feelings, and to calm down. The child uses the real mother for refueling when these efforts to fly solo are unsuccessful or overwhelming. For instance, 2-yearold Sara might trip while she is running gleefully away from her mother. She tries to soothe herself, whispering, “Sara fall down, kiss the booboo, all better….” But if the sting is too much to bear, she will run to her mother for help. As the mother comforts her daughter, she helps her determine what is safe in the world beyond mother’s orbit and supports her pleasure in “doing it myself.” She may say, “Go ahead, Sara, you can run ahead, but when you get to the bricks you can walk slowly or wait for Mommy, because there are cracks that make you trip.” This refueling and support of the child’s mastery, in turn, becomes part of the internalized good-mother. The child can then continue to feel loved and protected not only by the real mother, but also by the mother’s internalized representation when she is absent. In the foregoing example, Sara may remind herself to stop when she gets to the brick part, just as her mother told her to do. In so doing, she calls upon memories and images of her mother’s support and protection in order to take care of herself.

The Role of the Father in Supporting Individuation The father has an increasingly central role to play as he excites and invites the young child to venture forth into the wider world. In a family with normally loving spouses, the mother will likely show much pleasure as the child relates to the father. She may say, for example, “Look, Daddy’s home!” and smile as the child runs happily into his waiting arms. These separations from mother to father bring feelings of pleasure and excitement. The child is venturing out, but not too far, using the father as a transitional person. Likewise, when the child can be in contact with the father without losing contact with the mother— when a little boy can wrestle with his father and still hear

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mother’s laughter as she watches them together—then growing up and becoming separate need not cost him her love. The child learns that he can find connections in other relationships and need not lose his mother in the process; that feelings of dependence can coexist with feelings of independence. This kind of integration is a blueprint for healthy intimacy, and intimacy is the cutting edge of maturation and the lifelong process of learning about the self, other people, and relationships.

Disruptions in Separation-Individuation in the High-Conflict Divorced Family In the high-conflict family, one or both parents tend to be psychologically fragile. This vulnerability may be due to the failure to achieve complete separation from their own early caregivers, unresolved past experiences of traumatic loss, or the cumulative wearing down of psychological resources that characterizes the end of a failed marriage. These vulnerable parents struggle with a chronic sense of emptiness and remain dependent on others to help them fend off fears of abandonment and maintain a positive sense of self. Not surprisingly, they tend to see others as quite powerful, and they are highly vulnerable to loss, rejection, intrusion, or demands. Vulnerabilities in the parent are likely to disrupt the infant’s and young child’s separation-individuation process long before the marital separation occurs.

Predivorce Disruptions of the Separation-Individuation Process The fragile primary parent’s responses to the infant or young child are likely to be determined by how that parent feels at any given moment, rather than by the child’s separate needs and experiences. Furthermore, the mother (usually the primary parent) may jealously guard the child’s affections so that the father is marginalized. These combined circumstances leave the child particularly isolated and vulnerable to unpredictable shifts in one parent’s emotional availability. The fragile mother may, for example, be able to comfort her young child when she is feeling calm and supported. In these


moments, the child experiences her as the good-mother and the self as the good-mother-me that is part of her. On the other hand, if the mother is feeling particularly vulnerable, she may experience the child’s cries as unreasonable demands that conspire to deepen her sense of helplessness and angrily refuse to help him. In these moments she is the bad-mother and the child in her care feels himself to be the bad-mother-me. Because the mother’s responses vary more with her own needs than with the child’s, they do not cohere into a pattern that the child can predict. As a result, the child lacks a foundation upon which to build an inner repertoire for coping. Instead, the child internalizes and maintains a split representation of the good-mother and the bad-mother, who come and go in ways that seem frighteningly random. In the face of this unpredictability, the child is likely to remain vigilantly focused on the parent, unconsciously learning how to keep the good-mother from disappearing. In a sense, the child becomes the soothing good-mother for the parent but cannot internalize a constant good-mother for himself. Nurturing continues to come from outside the self but can never be taken for granted. Not surprisingly, separations are frightening for these ill-equipped children. The dangers of individuation are further confirmed if the fragile primary parent feels shamed and rejected by the child’s natural strivings for separateness and self-expression and responds by becoming emotionally unavailable or punitive. In this situation, the child’s inner fragmentation becomes intensified. The good-mother-me is increasingly experienced as the part of the self that does not separate but instead soothes, supports, and evokes the good-mother. The bad-mother-me is then associated with the child’s normal strivings for autonomy, as well as with feelings that support these strivings, such as anger, power, and pleasure in mastery. In the context of this kind of relationship, the child’s normal maturational impulses begin to arouse intense anxiety, because they make the good-mother go away, leaving the bad-mother in her place. The child’s experience is paradoxically both powerful and frightening. He feels powerful enough to soothe the good-mother, or to make her go away; at the same time, he is helplessly and unbearably vulnerable without her. Abandonment and engulfment are the twin fears that haunt these children.

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Parents’ Clinging Dependence at the Marital Separation The child’s developmental difficulties may intensify when the marriage ends. This is because the marital separation often evokes overwhelming terrors of abandonment within the fragile parent. These terrors may belong not only to the present but also to unresolved past experiences of rejection and loss. The parent is likely to cope by clinging desperately to the child. One mother, for example, described how, after meetings with her ex-husband, she would sit and rock her silent and compliant 2-year old, as she wept out her grief and rage. She said with a helpless shrug, “I know I shouldn’t, but I have to depend on someone!” In such situations, it seems to the child as if the parent really might disappear or die without her. The power that is associated with the child’s position can neither be realized nor relinquished. Instead, it binds the child to the fragile parent in a posture that shifts endlessly between helplessness and omnipotence. At the same time, the child’s inner resources are consistently used to fend off abandonment rather than to support the emerging self.

The Father as a Toxic Figure The child’s difficulties with individuation are further heightened in the high-conflict situation when she tries to use the mother to figure out what is safe in the world beyond the mother’s orbit. In the ordinary way of things, the mother signals that the father is not only safe, but that she derives pleasure from the child’s contact with him. In the high-conflict situation, on the other hand, the mother is likely to signal (often nonverbally) that the father is toxic and potentially dangerous in ways which may have been foreshadowed prior to the separation by her repeated signals that the father was ineffective or irrelevant. The child’s own experiences with the father may not confirm these signals, and so she becomes confused about what is real. Compounding the child’s confusion is the fact that the mother is likely to draw comfort from believing that the child’s experience of the father is just as negative as her own. The distressed mother and young child draw closer together as they share in a distorted view of the father. The double-bind is that the availability of the good-mother depends upon the child’s relinquishing her real


feelings, memories, and perceptions that are associated with a positive connection to father. This bind is profoundly serious because father represents not only himself but a bridge, as well, to the world beyond the primary relationship.

Exposure to Parental Violence If the child is exposed to interparental violence, his fears of the bad-mother and confusion about the father’s possible dangerousness are dramatically heightened. Separation becomes associated with brutality and victimization that is not only imagined but acted out in real life as well. One 5-year-old boy described his memory from age three of watching his father beat his mother: “I was closing my eyes really tight. I was trying to plug my ears. I didn’t want to see the fight…he was gonna kick in the window. He was yelling at her, ‘You little bitch, give me back my television.’ I was thinking they’d just stop fighting…they’d notice I was there…I felt so scared they might hit me.” Later, this boy made a drawing of the fighting. When asked why he had made the people without faces, he said, “I didn’t put any faces because…they didn’t notice I was there.” These kinds of experiences clearly rub salt into the child’s earliest wounds, heightening his fantasies about the potential of the unintegrated shadow side of himself and his parents and compounding the feelings of helplessness and nonbeing that have already become associated with any stirrings of the autonomous self.

The Child’s Hostile Dependent Bind The hostile dependent bind that results from the young child’s difficulties with separation-individuation is likely to affect the developmental course over the long term. This is illustrated in the following projective story told by a 9-yearold girl named Tess: In her first sandtray scene, Tess placed a mother doll in one corner with a girl doll at her side. She placed a father doll in the other corner. Tess began the play by picking up the mother doll and setting her down in

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a scrunched-up position. She then commented, “She’s mad, she’s always mad and sad. Let’s leave her outside in the rain!” Tess became absorbed in pouring sand on the mother doll and was silent until she had buried her. She then said, with a kind of grim satisfaction, “We’ll leave her there for twenty-four hours…we’ll just leave her there!” At this point, Tess settled the girl doll down next to the buried mother doll. The counselor asked, “Is the girl staying then?” Tess responded, “Yeah.” The counselor asked, “Won’t she be hungry or thirsty or anything?” Tess answered, “Yeah, I guess…she’ll go to the dad’s and get food, and then she’ll come right back and wait in the rain.” Here, Tess communicates clearly her inability to find gratification anywhere but within the unbreakable tie with her mother. It is a tie braided of helplessness, longing, and anger.

The Case of Frances J How do these young children cope with the intolerable anxiety and confusion that is associated with separation from a fragile mother to a somehow dangerous father? The following case material describes the transition behavior of a 2½year-old girl named Frances. Her parents, Mr. and Mrs. J, had endured a brief but bitter marriage that had deteriorated into battles that were both verbally and physically abusive. When first seen at our service, they had just finalized a protracted court battle, during which Mrs. J had sought and been refused the right to take her daughter back to live in Texas with the mother’s family of origin. The parents continued to disagree about their time-sharing arrangement, and both justified their positions by complaining that Frances was having difficulty with transitions between the parents’ houses. According to Mrs. J, “Frances is impossible at exchanges; she throws tantrums, she’s obnoxious and she can’t seem to handle anything.” Mr. J’s description of Frances’ difficulties was similar: “She just gets really quiet when I pick her up, and when I take her back she cries…she has this major tantrum, she slaps her mother, and she’s like deaf to me.” Frances had been seen on previous occasions and had impressed the interviewer as a very self-contained little girl,


who looked older than her years, enjoyed showing the way to the playroom, and apologized if she dropped a marker on the floor. This impression of Frances’ pseudo-maturity was deepened when Mrs. J made a two-hour appointment to see a counselor at our service. When the counselor explained that she would need to see the mother alone, Mrs. J said that was fine, because Frances could play alone in the playroom with no trouble. In fact, Frances did sit in the playroom for over two hours without once disturbing the interview or straying from the little pile of toys and snacks that her mother had provided for her. Mrs. J did not find this behavior in any way remarkable. Frances’ good-mother-me posture disintegrated, however, at transitions, as illustrated by the following incident.

Transition from Mother to Father Mr. J arrived at the prearranged time and sat in the corner of the waiting room in a chair to the left of the door. He did not speak, but tapped his fingers anxiously as he waited for Mrs. J to arrive with Frances. Mrs. J arrived some five minutes later and approached the front door of the Center with Frances molded to her hip. As soon as the front door opened, Frances caught sight of her father and scrambled to get down from her mother. It is not difficult to understand that Frances was beginning to anticipate this transition with a sense of danger. She was being helplessly propelled toward the bad-mother-me state (the visit with her father), risking the loss of the good-mother. Frances also knew there was a danger that the violence between her parents could happen again. This little girl’s anxiety was further heightened by the fact that she understood, from her mother’s signals, that she was approaching a parent who was bad, in a way that she could not completely comprehend. Frances stood silently, turning neither to her father nor to her mother for comfort. Mrs. J remained standing in the doorway, vibrating with rigid indignation. Frances then walked to a point on the rug of the waiting room, about three feet from both her parents. She seemed to be at a loss. In this moment, the loneliness of her doublebinding situation was painfully apparent. She turned toward her father and opened her mouth wide, so he could see that she was eating something. It was a distant effort at contact

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and a test of her mother’s mood. Mr. J asked Frances what she was doing, and Mrs. J hissed, her voice seething with impatience, “She’s showing you she has candy in her mouth!” The epithet “You fool!” went unsaid but was hanging in the air. Frances clearly received the signal: Neither separation from mother, nor approach to father was safe. She began to twirl her hair around her fingers, then walked over and sat on the floor next to a small table where crayons and paper were spread out. She picked up the crayons, one at a time, without purpose. It is important to emphasize here that neither parent moved to comfort or direct this child in any way. Frances’ fears of abandonment were being realized as she attempted to navigate helplessly within the force field of her parents’ mutual antagonism. For a child who was often omnipotently in charge of her parents’ well-being, her present helplessness was all the more intolerable. After three or four silent and excruciating minutes, this undemanding, pseudo-competent child put her head down and began to whine as she rubbed her face back and forth on the rug. Again, neither parent stepped in to comfort her—just as neither parent would later recall that Frances showed much difficulty with this transition. Finally, Mrs. J said, “Good-bye Frances, I’ll see you when I get back,” and left. Frances stayed where she was for several seconds; then, when it was clear that her mother had gone, she got up and climbed into her father’s lap. Outwardly, she betrayed little of the panic and longing for the good-mother without which she was left to manage, in her mother’s absence.

Transition from Father to Mother After two hours with her father, Frances came back to the waiting room, bearing the burden of her anxiety about her mother’s very existence: Would Mother be there? Had she died or fallen apart without Frances? Would Mother still want her after she had consorted with the enemy? Would she accept the bad-mother-me and could the good-mother somehow be evoked once again? As soon as she saw Mrs. J in the waiting room, Frances ran to her and began to whine and demand that she be taken out to buy a salad. It was an unusual choice for a 2½-year-old but effective in winning her mother’s approbation. Mrs. J smiled in recognition. “This is


something she likes to do just with me!” she confided to the counselor. Frances’ panic and longing became apparent as she focused entirely on her mother, behaving as if Mr. J had disappeared. But Mr. J lingered on and asked Frances for a hug. She obliged, stiffly and with minimal contact, while Mrs. J stood by, barely tolerating the interaction. Frances immediately returned to Mrs. J and began to show signs of a tantrum. She became increasingly whiny and demanded to be picked up, to see in her mother’s purse, to take off her glasses, and so on. She would not listen to her mother, but badgered her angrily. It is not unusual for young children to express their frustration and rage in this way, resisting the mother’s unspoken demand to relinquish their own autonomy and their connection to the father. Some children feel angry with the mother for lying, because, after all, father was really nice and not bad like she said. The child’s anger may also be fueled, more or less consciously, by the father. Mr. J, for example, exhorted Frances to behave. He reminded her not to have any more tantrums “when Daddy drops you off,” because “it’s hard for Mommy to manage.” The unspoken message was that Frances had better take care of her mother, partly because he, too, was afraid of a scene. Frances dissolved into tears and arched her back as she was carried out to the parking lot by her mother with her father pacing along beside them. As she was put into the car, Mr. J asked for one more hug, all the while reminding Frances to be a good girl for her mother. Again, Frances was placed in an untenable double bind. The hug for her father in her mother’s presence was emblematic of her dilemma: If Frances did not hug her father, he would be hurt. If she did hug her father, she risked her mother’s rage and bad feelings. For Frances, being good meant being in the good-mother-me posture in which she nurtured, soothed, and avoided making demands. Frances might just be able to manage this posture with each of her parents separately; to do so with both simultaneously presented an insoluble conundrum.

Discussion of Frances’ Family The difficulties that Frances expressed in her transition behavior had their origins in the beginning of her parents’ relationship. Mrs. J was a psychologically fragile woman, who had failed to achieve a complete sense of psychological

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separation from her own mother. Like many fragile parents, Mrs. J had also experienced a traumatic loss, in this case the unexpected death of an older sibling. This event resulted in the more subtle loss of her mother’s emotional availability: “I never got my mom back after my sister died and I still feel that loss.” Mr. J presented himself as a passive man who believed that he could handle almost anything. His mother had died precipitously at his age of three. He said, “After that, Dad and I were always close…I was more passive, like him, but I was strong…I felt I had to lead my stepbrother and my brother, and they followed me like sheep.” Early in his relationship with Mrs. J, he again felt he had to be strong. He said, “I view her as always making herself dependent on other people and expecting other people to solve things for her…I was her white knight.” A relationship pattern developed in which Mrs. J controlled by being needy and demanding, and Mr. J acquiesced in the angry hope of satisfying his wife. This pattern was recapitulated when Frances was conceived. Mrs. J said about the pregnancy, “We planned her…I had been off the pill exactly a year and I decided we’d be careless.” The pregnancy came as a surprise to Mr. J. He said, “I didn’t feel ready, you know, to be a father, but I knew it was what she really wanted, and I thought that the baby would keep her happy.” In a sense, Frances came into the world with a mission, “to keep her mother happy,” which was unconsciously assigned to her by both parents. For a while, the infant fulfilled her parents’ hopes. As Mrs. J said, “I loved it at home with Frances. I was happier than I’d ever been.” Mrs. J described her husband’s involvement as marginal. As a result, Frances was left to cope alone with her mother’s frightening and unpredictable emotional shifts. Her father, in the meantime, became increasingly withdrawn and essentially “tiptoed away” from any involvement in the family. Like many infants and young children in these situations, Frances was symptomatic at bedtime when she needed to be able to separate and soothe herself. As Mrs. J remembered it, “Even when she was really little, getting her down at night was like putting her on the rack…sheer hell!” When Frances was 6 months old, her father became involved in an extramarital affair. In recalling this period in the marriage, Mrs. J said, “I had no idea what was going on. I just spent all my time with Frances. I was breast feeding


her, and I swear, with how I was feeling, my milk should have gone sour!” Mrs. J’s comments about her breast milk provided a stunningly accurate metaphor. Her increasingly anxious and angry dependence on Frances did produce a kind of toxic nurturing, which could not support the emergence of this child’s authentic self. Many children with separationindividuation difficulties express this experience of toxic nurturing in their play as unpredictable shifts in being given food that is sometimes good and sometimes poison. Older children with separation-individuation difficulties tend to use the same metaphor to describe their own ambivalence in the relationship. As one 8-year-old girl played out over and over again, “She’s feeding the mom sweet milk—No, it’s really poop, but the mom doesn’t know that!” When Frances was 11 months old, Mr. J left the marriage. Mrs. J felt abandoned and helpless in ways that she had spent a lifetime trying to avoid. Mr. J, on the other hand, felt guilty and ashamed that he had failed to be “the white knight” for either his wife or his daughter, and was humiliated by his own passivity. Not surprisingly, each parent became entrenched in familiar styles of coping. Mrs. J turned immediately to her family of origin and made plans to move back to Texas with her daughter as soon as possible. Mr. J sought to repair the shame about his passivity in the marriage by becoming a “white knight” for his daughter. Using his father’s financial and emotional support, he legally opposed Mrs. J’s decision to move. As he described this decision, he said, “I’ve accepted that she [Mrs. J] is not going to change but I’ve built my resolve to remain a person in Frances’ life.” The legal dispute regarding Frances’ custody went on for 22 months, until Frances’ age of two and a half. During that time, Mrs. J became increasingly depressed and entrenched in her conviction that moving back to Texas was the only course of action that could make life tolerable for herself and her daughter. She said, “I have trouble getting out of bed, I don’t balance my checkbook, I can’t concentrate, and I repeat myself all the time…Nothing’s working!” During this time Frances was essentially left in the care of a mother who was apparently determined to become dysfunctional (unless and until the court would allow her to leave) and who obsessively focused on her need for time with her daughter: “All I want is more time with Frances! I feel like her daycare provider is her real mother!”

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Frances felt increasingly isolated and, at the same time, incomprehensibly responsible for helping her mother to feel better. At the same time, her ideas about her father became more and more frightening as she overheard her mother’s anguished nightly phone calls to Texas about what was being done to her by her ex-spouse. Frances had little opportunity to resolve her fears and fantasies about her father, as her contact with him was limited to brief mid-week visits. Transitions between parents encapsulated all of Frances’ anxieties. According to Mr. J, his ex-wife used transitions to vent her anxiety and frustration: “Pick-up times are used as a forum for her to tell me what a son-of-a-bitch I am.” Mrs. J concurred that transitions throughout the time of the court trial, and after, were conducted in an atmosphere of intense hostility that was barely contained. She said that Frances “senses my sadness and frustration when he comes to the door for her…like I’ll say stuff to her like, ‘Don’t let Daddy steal you away. ’ I can’t help it, I cry and I know she sees it. When she leaves it’s like entering a black hole for me!” It is difficult to imagine the fears of loss and abandonment that Frances endured during such separations. During one particularly traumatic episode, at her age of 15 months, Mr. J had gone to mother’s home to pick up Frances for a visit. Mrs. J refused to let him take Frances, and Mr. J called the police to enforce the court order. A screaming exchange of obscenities ensued. When Mr. J tried to carry Frances to the door, Mrs. J kicked him in the groin. Mr. J managed to put Frances down and “just managed to basically stagger out of the house!” Exposure to this type of violence naturally resulted in increased levels of tension and hyper-alertness that Frances would bring to all future transitions that involved both her parents. The fear she carried was that they might fight and hurt each other. And the mother might fall apart or become violent with Frances in the same way that she was violent with the father. This could happen if Frances tried to leave her, the same way father had done. At the same time, father might indeed “steal her away,” because clearly he must be a bad man for mother to be so angry with him. Frances’ current difficulties were not limited exclusively to the transitions between her parents. She continued to have trouble sleeping separately from either parent. Mrs. J pronounced herself exhausted by Frances’ nighttime demands that she believed resulted from Mr. J’s insensitive handling


of the child’s worries. For his part, Mr. J said, “She has scenes with me about sleeping by herself. She wants me to leave the lights on, and I just feel that someone has to be firm with her and she’ll come around. She wraps her mother around her little finger!” The parents attributed Frances’ difficulties to some aspect of their own conflict and managed them accordingly: Mrs. J would not support Frances’ capacity to master sleeping alone, and Mr. J ignored her very real terrors. Mr. J’s inability to empathize with Frances contributed to her sense of loss and abandonment whenever she separated from her mother to visit her father. It should be remembered that this was a child who likely had little opportunity to internalize a good-mother that she could draw upon for comfort in times of stress. Her capacity for self-soothing was therefore very limited, and her dependence on others extreme. When Mr. J would not comfort her during their visits, she was indeed lost in a void. Not surprisingly, Frances expressed ambivalence toward her father. According to Mr. J, she would literally grit her teeth together while saying “I love you.” Frances both longed for her father and at the same time felt furious with him for hurting her mother and for being emotionally unavailable when he picked her up for visits. She would ask him, “Why do you take me away from Mommy?… Why do you make Mommy sad?” In a less conscious way, Frances was also angry with her father for abandoning her to the job of caring for her mother. With her mother, Frances was at times undemanding and pseudo-mature (her good-mother-me stance) and at other times bossy and manipulative (her bad-mother-me presentation), shifting between feelings of helplessness and omnipotence. Mrs. J described her as “The Littlest Tyrant.” She depended on Frances utterly, and Frances, in turn, had little choice but to cling to her. In her relationships with both parents, Frances’ angry feelings were often expressed but never acknowledged. In day care, Frances’ feelings could not be contained; they escaped from her in ways that seemed to lack rhyme or reason, because they could not be directed to their real objects. As the daycare provider described Frances, “She’s got aggression in her. She’ll just go up to kids and push them in the face—pinching, scratching, and hair-pulling, out of the blue…She wants discipline; she can be really testy, and I don’t give in to her, but I think her parents probably do.”

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Implications for Intervention What are the interventions that are most likely to soothe young children like Frances, calm their symptomatic behaviors, and protect their developmental progress? Ask the parents and their answers are likely to point to the visitation schedule, because the schedule determines who is going to be the primary player and receive the “good parent seal of approval.” In the first available research of its kind, Solomon and George (l999) evaluated the effects of various custody arrangements and levels of conflict in divorced families on the adjustment patterns of infants and toddlers up to 3 years of age. These researchers concluded that infants and toddlers in low-conflict situations, although expectably stressed by overnight visitations, were likely to remain securely adjusted in a wide range of scheduling arrangements. Low-conflict situations allowed the parents to have ongoing and detailed communication which supported the abilities of each to respond empathically to their child. In contrast, infants and toddlers making transitions between highly conflicted parents who could not communicate in this way appeared to be insecure, disorganized, and anxious regardless of the schedule. Under either condition, it is clear that the schedule alone does not account for differences in young children’s adjustment and cannot substitute for the kind of working relationship that parents must develop. This reframing of the agenda—that is, focusing on the parents’ communication rather than on the schedule—is the first order of business when beginning an intervention with highly conflicted parents of infants and young children. In this approach, the schedule is defined as an important buffer that may be necessary but is certainly not sufficient to ensure the well-being of the young child. To address the schedule only is like providing a paper parasol in a hurricane. As might be expected, the parasol constantly has to be taped up or replaced.

Parenting Interventions When the child is struggling with separation-individuation in a high-conflict situation, there are two focal points in the therapeutic work with parents: first, to address the panic of separation in the mother (or primary parent), and second, to heighten the father’s (or nonprimary parent’s) attunement


to the child in areas where empathic understanding is truly lacking. This process requires the mental health professional to function as a neutral figure who can maintain a reasonably accurate and compassionate representation of the child’s experiences and concerns. In this role, it is essential to assess each parent’s capacities as fully as possible. This cannot be done without taking a thorough history of each parent in his or her own nuclear family. Without an understanding of the parents’ own issues and conflicts, it becomes impossible to identify their effects on the present crisis. The history may indicate, for example, that one or both parents may themselves have failed to achieve a complete separation from a primary parent, leaving them dependent and lacking in inner resources. When the marital separation occurs, such parents experience a sense of panic that cannot be fully appreciated, lacking an understanding of its earliest origins. The marital separation (as well as the child’s attempts at individuation) may thus evoke feelings connected to previous losses that remain unresolved. Vulnerable parents often cope with these stresses in inflexible ways that are difficult to modify. In the case of Mrs. J, for example, the early loss of her sibling (as well as her mother’s subsequent withdrawal) left her vulnerable to fears of abandonment and feelings of helplessness. She tried to avoid these feelings by controlling her present-time relationships as much as possible. Not surprisingly, Mr. J’s withdrawal and her subsequent loss of control over her marriage and exclusive relationship with Frances were intolerable. Mrs. J responded by becoming all the more intractable and controlling in the postdivorce situation. In Mr. J’s history, he had experienced the death of his mother at his age of three. He managed this loss by avoiding his own emotional needs while stoically taking on practical care of himself and his siblings. Mr. J tended to recapitulate this role in his adult relationships. When their histories can be understood, the depth of each parent’s intransigence in the face of their current crisis can also be understood more empathically. Once the parents have shown a capacity for self-reflection, the mental health professional can begin to help them differentiate those aspects of their responses that belong to the present from those that belong to previous trauma. Mr. J, for example, had been able to make use of psychotherapy since his divorce and was beginning to understand aspects of the

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passive/aggressive style that propelled him into the position of an ambivalent and resentful caretaker. This insight was essential in getting him to acknowledge his current confusion about his role in Frances’ life. That is, he wanted more time with his daughter, but he was afraid that Mrs. J would fall apart without her. As a result, he blocked the move to Texas but did not insist on the kind of time with Frances that he wanted or felt that she needed. As Mr. J began to come to terms with his ambivalence and to see that he had essentially placed Frances in the role of her mother’s caretaker, he became more specific about the kind of time-sharing arrangement he wanted. When he was able to be clearer about what he really wanted, Mrs. J was able to calm her fears that he was planning to take Frances away from her forever. Careful assessment of the parents’ histories and present functioning can also help the mental health professional to evaluate their capacity to be empathic with their child. This essential quality depends on the parents’ ability to tolerate a full range of feelings in themselves and to understand that the child also has a range of feelings that are separate and distinct from their own. Evaluation of this capacity occurs naturally as the therapist attempts to heighten each parent’s empathic understanding and, in the process, discovers his or her degree of openness and flexibility. For example, when the therapist reviewed with the parents her written description of Frances’ transition, she was attempting to counteract their denial of their daughter’s helplessness and isolation and to provide instead a compassionate interpretation of the child’s experience. Mr. J used the interpretation to think about changes in his parenting behavior that could more effectively support Frances’ needs. Mrs. J, on the other hand, understood the interpretation but could not hold onto it. As a result, part of the work in each session was to help this mother recall her understanding of Frances’ experience and separate it from her own. When this kind of groundwork has been done successfully, each parent will begin to think differently about the child or at least be able to tolerate the therapist’s point of view about the child as a separate person.

Addressing the Panic of Separation At this point, the therapist can begin to sort out the parents’ realistic concerns about the child’s transitions from those


that are distorted by each parent’s feelings toward the other parent. When this sorting-out process occurs in the presence of an empathic and respectful other, each parent has the opportunity (often for the first time) to fully articulate his or her worries without being dismissed as hysterical, hypersensitive, or overcontrolling. Mrs. J, for example, was realistically concerned about Frances’ safety with Mr. J because he frequently took her on visits to his parents’ home which had an unfenced swimming pool. No matter how much Mr. J reassured his former wife that he would watch Frances at every step, Mrs. J did not feel comfortable with the situation. Mr. J tended to dismiss her concerns as one more example of her need to control every move he made. The therapist, however, supported Mrs. J’s concerns and asked Mr. J to arrange for the use of a temporary fence. At the same time, Mrs. J was equally concerned that Frances should not be exposed to Mr. J’s girlfriend, claiming that the child would be confused about who her real mother was. This issue reflected Mrs. J’s own worries about her capacities to be a competent and nurturing parent, because she herself lacked an internalized good-mother. Mrs. J’s anxiety about her capacity to be a good mother was a real concern that required careful attention. However, it could not be resolved by erasing Mr. J’s girlfriend from Frances’ life but rather by focusing on Mrs. J’s own parenting skills and supporting her as she struggled to find a way to be more nurturing and less demanding of her daughter. For both parents, the therapist’s sorting-out process was framed by a pragmatic consideration of the child’s safety and emotional well-being. Once Mr. J understood this, and could see that Mrs. J’s panic about Frances would not automatically translate into full control of his every move, he became more cooperative. Mrs. J was soothed enough by the concrete validation of some of her concerns that she was able to tolerate the redirection of others. Optimally, in families like this one, each parent begins to internalize this sorting-out process on the child’s behalf, again, depending on his or her capacities.

Addressing the Attunement of an Excluded Parent Often, the primary parent in a highly conflicted situation will communicate realistic concerns about the nonprimary

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parent’s ability to be appropriately responsive and nurturing with the infant or young child. These concerns commonly arise when the father has been excluded from involvement with the child during the marriage. When the marriage ends, the continuing exclusion of the father may be justified by the mother’s now legitimate concerns that he cannot parent adequately because “he never has.” The father may heighten the child’s anxiety by treating his or her very real terrors about separations as if they have been swallowed whole from the mother and can be dismissed once the child is with him. In these situations, the father may attempt to reassert control by dealing insensitively or even harshly with the frightened child. For example, as was noted earlier, Mr. J tended to be dogmatic and impatient when Frances had difficulty sleeping alone, and his unsympathetic response left Frances feeling panicked and helpless. In the parenting intervention, it was useful to help Mr. J acknowledge that he had missed many opportunities to get to know his daughter during the marriage. In fact, Mr. J felt very angry as well as guilty about his passive acceptance of a marginal parenting role. Once these feelings could be discussed, Mr. J began to think about working more actively toward understanding and supporting Frances in the present. As the work with Mr. J progressed, the counselor, in turn, was able to reassure Mrs. J that Frances was now getting more of the kind of support that she needed when she was in her father’s care. Again, this reasonable consideration of her concerns helped Mrs. J to trust the therapist to provide a ‘reality check’ whenever she began to worry about Frances.

Active Strategies for Soothing the Child Verbal and Nonverbal Transition Rituals . The work that

is described above sets the stage for the parents to begin developing collaborative strategies that will actively help their child to master separations. They start by learning to pay careful attention to what they communicate to the child verbally (intentionally) and nonverbally (unintentionally) at transitions. One need only sit with highly conflicted parents in the same room (before either has spoken a word) to understand how easily their hostility and tension can be absorbed


from the atmosphere alone. Physical communications and facial expressions can easily heighten the tension. An infant (particularly the infant who is already hypersensitive to mood states in her caretakers) can become anxiously disorganized when she sees the mother’s face grimace with worry or feels the father’s tight grip on her arm. After all, it is these proprioceptive and physical cues, rather than verbal information, that regularly guide the infant’s experience of relationships (Stern, 1985). Reassurance to the infant or young child depends upon the parent’s heightened awareness and willingness to control these nonverbal communications. Infants’ and young children’s anxieties can also be calmed when parents establish rituals that support the child’s capacity to tolerate the back-and-forth separations. For the preverbal child, such rituals will largely depend on concrete activities and rhythms that help to signal the transition in a predictable way. An example might be when transitions are scheduled to take place shortly after a predictably occurring activity in the child’s day, such as lunch or a nap. Some aspect of the activity can be used to signal the upcoming transition, such as a particular plate or blanket. Parents may also develop gestures that communicate that a visit is soon to begin. Developmental research (Acredolo & Goodwyn, l996) has indicated that preverbal toddlers can make highly effective use of gesturing with their parents and other caregivers to communicate and receive information. This signaling may be followed by any number of rituals that are intended to reassure the child of the parent’s calm support of the impending separation. For example, the parent and child may sing a familiar song together as they gather up the child’s belongings and transitional objects. For the young child who is faltering in the process of internalizing the good-mother, transitional objects that represent her and calm the child become powerfully important. Some transitional objects may already be in place and readily identifiable—blankets, stuffed animals, a favorite sweater (no matter how ratty and old). For other children, transitional objects need to be identified, or created, with more conscious effort: a photograph of each parent, or of a sibling, or a pet, or a tape recording of the parent’s voice. This ritualized gathering up of the child’s things is like putting together the resources that he or she will need to “make the crossing.” It takes on particular importance when the

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child makes the transition alone without, say, a sibling to buffer the stress of separation. As the mother helps the child to “gather herself” in this way, she is actively supporting the child’s separation. The ritual may be repeated when the child arrives at the home of the father as they carefully unpack the child’s bag and identify the contents one by one. Creating a special place for the child to keep his or her belongings can further help the child to feel anchored when making transitions. Contrast this ritualized soothing process with Frances’ experience as both her parents, struggling to tolerate the presence of each other, remained frankly unaware of their daughter’s solitary struggle. We have seen parents in similarly conflicted situations fight over their child’s transitional objects or refuse to allow the child to take these symbolic possessions from one home to the other. Some completely strip the child of clothing at the exchange or return the child in dirty, torn attire because of disputes over ownership of the “good” clothes. One man took the photo of her mother that his 2-year-old daughter was clutching and threw it on the street, declaring, “She doesn’t want a picture of your ugly, old mug!” Many parents refuse to acknowledge the existence of the other parent when the child is with them. “We never talk about you…we have better things to talk about!” one man snickered to his ex-wife. Others unilaterally refuse to allow the child to talk on the telephone to the absent parent or even to provide a phone number where the other parent can be reached, “because it intrudes on my time with my child.” All such experiences disrupt the child’s sense that the self is a constant—across time, settings, and relationships. As the young child becomes more verbal, the parents can also begin to talk him or her through the anticipated transition sequence. The parent may say, for example, “Today is Friday. You see your dad today. We will do what we always do. You will come home from the babysitter’s, and we will pack your bag. You can pick out what you want to take (this may include any number of transitional objects). I will read our special book (see below for an example)… then Daddy will come. You will say good-bye and give Mom a hug and a kiss, and then you will go in the car to Daddy’s house. When you go, I’ll work for a while, and then I’m planning a hike with Mathilda. I’ll miss you on the hike


because I love doing the long trails with you, but you’ll have a good time with your dad, and we’ll do a long trail together next week. When you get to Daddy’s, you will unpack like you always do and put your things in their special place. Then you will go to McDonald’s like you always do…then it will be time for a bath…just like at Mommy’s. Then Daddy will read the special book to you as well.” A similar variant can then be used by the father when the child is preparing to leave and return to mother. (The “special book” that is referred to here may be The Runaway Bunny [Brown, l954] or Love You Forever [Munsch, l986]. Both books tell stories that reassure very young children about the constancy of their parents’ love.) The “talking-through” process can be accomplished during appropriate windows of opportunity (when bathing or traveling in the car, for example), and the essential portions can be repeated during the actual transition. This kind of communication contains several messages to the anxiously separating child. First, she is held lovingly in mind while absent, and she will not disappear into the void of the badmother-me. Second, the parent can be self-supporting in the child’s absence. Third, the parent will welcome the child back upon her return (the good-mother will be constant). The more concrete and detailed these recitations, the more reassured the child will be. It is useful, for example, for one parent to know enough about the other parent’s plans to talk about them out loud. This not only helps the child to feel more in control as he anticipates the transition and the activities that will follow, but it also represents the parent’s acknowledgment of the child’s reality with the other parent. This acknowledgment can actively counter the fragile parent’s tendency to treat the child as if he essentially ceases to exist until it is time to return. Many variants of these transition rituals can be developed, depending on what is familiar and soothing to the individual child. In some respects they are identical to the type of ritual that most parents would ordinarily use to help their child anticipate any difficult separation, such as going to a babysitter, entering preschool, or going to play at a new friend’s house. Ironically, the young child’s needs for exactly this type of anticipatory preparation and calming are the most intense but yet the least recognized within the high-conflict transition.

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Active Coping Strategies for the Child In addition to transition rituals, parents can actively teach their children coping strategies. These suggestions can provide a means of relief for parents who have been repeatedly told what they should not do, but have not been helped to develop practical alternatives. For example, the parent and child may draw a picture of the child’s space or room at the other parent’s house. The parent need not have seen the room to elicit the child’s description by asking, “Where shall we put the bed? The dresser?”, and so on. The child can then be helped to draw in where the transitional objects, clothes, and other items will be placed when they are unpacked. Some children may need to take the actual objects and place them on the drawing. Each moment that the parent can remain calm and interested in the child’s experience with the other parent is a moment in which the child feels reassured that the separation can be tolerated. Additionally, the parent may use role-playing and puppets or other representational toys to act out the transition with the young child. When the transition is acted out, the verbal child may volunteer (or the parent may suggest) feelings or worries that are associated with the transition. Parents can also be helped to develop stories that communicate understanding and reassurance to the child. These will often involve animal characters who represent identifiable qualities in each parent and in the child. These stories essentially communicate to the child, “I understand how it is for you. I know that it is hard. Your reality (which I know is separate from mine) makes sense to me, and I will support you as best I can.” They can be told in moments of stress and are particularly soothing at bedtime, when anxious children are particularly vulnerable. (Examples of these types of stories may be found in a companion volume, Through Children’s Eyes: Healing Stories for Children of Divorce, Johnston, Breunig, Garrity & Baris, l997). Bedtime rituals that are an orderly and predictable progression of events leading to sleep can be very important for highly anxious children. Mr. and Mrs. J were helped to develop such a ritual for Frances’ bedtime. It began soon after dinner and involved the kind of step-by-step preparation that is common in many households (bath, brushing teeth, reading a story, and so on). In working with highly conflicted parents, the difference is simply that the elements of the ritual are consciously


identified and used as tools to support the child’s separation. In addition to the bedtime ritual and a mutually agreed upon time for going to bed, Frances had charge of the lights in her bedroom. She was also allowed free access to a range of transitional objects, which began with a torn and dirty blue blanket and eventually (as the parents began to understand their daughter’s needs with increasing empathy) came to include her dog. Large “watch-bears” were a later addition. These stuffed animals were set up at either end of Frances’ bed, and she was continually reassured that they would stay awake all night to guard her. Frances took particular delight in listening to each parent’s stern instructions to these bears to “watch over Frances all night long and don’t you dare take a wink of sleep!” Frances was also given a child’s tape recorder at bedtime with which she listened to story and singing tapes as well as poems that her mother and father had recorded. Finally, if all her other efforts to sleep failed, Frances was occasionally allowed to bring a sleeping bag into her mother’s or father’s room. As these strategies were being established, the therapist worked separately with each parent to help them actively encourage Frances’ mastery of sleeping separately and to monitor any nonverbal communications which might have countered their verbal encouragement. From Mr. J’s point of view, these strategies were consistent with his intention to help Frances feel more independent. Mrs. J, however, did not respond so readily at first. She worried that Frances would feel unloved if she were not comforted and cuddled enough. Unconsciously, she felt shut out by these efforts to help Frances toward greater autonomy. It was important to help her understand that good mothering includes protecting, but also supporting, so that “Frances can feel proud of herself.” As these strategies took hold, and Frances became less symptomatic, Mrs. J’s confidence increased, and she began to feel like the capable and good mother that she longed to be. More pragmatically, she was exhausted by her daughter’s nighttime difficulties, and she was relieved when their efforts began to help Frances soothe herself to sleep.

Neutral Transitions The child’s feelings of safety during transitions can be heightened by the presence of a benign third party, in the

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presence of whom both parents feel constrained to behave well. This is particularly true if the child has been exposed to verbal hostility or violence in the past. When a neutral third party is not available, and parents cannot manage their feelings in the presence of each other, the child may be best protected when transitions occur in a neutral setting and do not involve both parents at the same time. Often the neutral setting will be at the child’s daycare center or babysitter’s home. When the young child makes transitions from a setting other than home, it is especially important that the care provider be fully informed of the schedule and alerted on a daily basis about who will be picking up. With this information, the care provider can help the child to anticipate the transition positively and to feel that the grownups are in charge of an orderly world. Parents can help the care provider develop a modified transition ritual to assist the child in that setting. In these situations, the use of weekly calendars with stickers for mom-days and dad-days, different colored lunch boxes for mom-days and dad-days, and special clothing are all concrete ways to help the child anticipate and master the transition. On a practical note, any relevant court papers should be left on file with the babysitter or daycare provider in the event that one or the other parent claims a schedule change that must be verified.

The Need for Therapeutic Constancy In working with highly conflicted divorced parents, it is essential to understand that many of these strategies will not be easily received or readily implemented. Often the work proceeds in the “two-steps-forward, one-step-back” style. There is a natural reluctance in parents to relinquish behaviors and attitudes that help them to manage their own anxieties. It is also difficult for parents who have felt intolerably injured by each other to shift focus away from repairing the injustice and toward what is necessary for the child. Often the therapist takes on the role of a constant, caring figure who tolerates the parent’s ambivalence and remains available to repeatedly reframe the issues from the child’s point of view. The more fragile the parent, the more frequent the need to reframe. The work can be demanding and at times tedious. Nevertheless, in our experience it


is the therapist’s simple ability to remain constant, neutral, and child-focused—in spite of the seemingly endless ups and downs—that often becomes the essential ingredient in bringing about a reasonable level of stability and protection for the child.

Use of the Schedule to Buffer the Child Preliminary evidence indicates that infants and toddlers appear to be relatively secure and well-adjusted in a variety of scheduling arrangements if the level of parental conflict is low and communication and collaboration regarding the child are high (Lamb & Kelly, 2001; Kline, Pruett, Ebling & Insabella, 2004; Solomon and George, 1999). This finding is not surprising, as the child, in such cases, is likely to feel supported by each parent during transitions back and forth, as well as by the familiar routines and response patterns that parental communication and collaboration make possible. For example, if an infant cannot be soothed after he wakes from a nap, one parent may call the other for suggestions. The call may yield commonplace communications such as, “Have you tried holding him across your lap and rubbing his back?…Have you tried Sesame Street?…he loves to watch it after his nap.” Parents also need to help each other as the child’s language emerges. For example, when a child plaintively and repeatedly calls for “Be-Be” and the parent does not know that this is her new word for her favorite bear, then both parent and child will become upset. If, on the other hand, the parents have communicated about this new development, then the child can be reassured that her language works in both homes and that she will be acknowledged and understood in this new way by both parents. This reassurance, in turn, represents one more way to support the child’s continuity of experience. Moreover, these crucial communications can enhance both parents’ feelings of competence as they begin to function in the role of single parent, and help the child to feel soothed in familiar ways. Until these buffering conditions can be achieved in the work with highly conflicted parents, however, the schedule itself can serve as a protective function if it is developed with the child’s needs in mind. It is from this perspective that we consider the parameters of time sharing.

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Time-Sharing Parameters In conflictual situations, very young children appear to benefit most from schedules that resemble their preseparation patterns of contact with each parent. This approach to scheduling is essentially empirical and does not presuppose primacy of one parent or the other; it simply allows the child to rely on the predictability of events and the familiarity of physical surroundings until the parents can provide support in more flexible and cooperative ways. It represents a conservative baseline from which the parents’ work proceeds and is designed to minimize the child’s level of stress. A second consideration that must be weighed very seriously is the number of transitions the schedule will impose upon the child. The goal is to create analogs of the preseparation patterns of contact that will provide enough time with each parent to support a relationship while limiting the number of transitions. For infants and toddlers, relationship-building requires fairly frequent contact because very young children cannot hold other people in mind when they are apart from them for very long. The need for limited transitions is dictated by the traumatic nature of such separations in a highly conflictual situation. To use a concrete example: Frances’ typical pattern of contact with her father during the marriage was the time they shared, most evenings from 6 p.m. until her bedtime. Continuing this pattern on a daily basis, however, would have provoked intolerable anxiety in Frances as well as in her parents who became upset and disorganized in each other’s presence. Shifting to the time-honored “everyother-weekend” visits, on the other hand, would make the time away from her father feel like forever to this very young child. A reasonable, age-appropriate analog might involve contact with Mr. J from late afternoon until bedtime two (later on, three) times a week. Balancing familiarity of routine with limited transitions is a process that cannot be reduced to a formula. If Frances continued to be symptomatic within that arrangement, the number of transitions could be further reduced, and the number of hours per visit increased so that actual amounts of time with father need not be compromised. At times, the scheduling decision may require a choice between the need to protect the child’s familiarity


of routine (such as timing Frances’ visits to resemble her prebedtime patterns with Mr. J) with the need to conduct transitions in a neutral place. The importance of setting up neutral transitions will depend upon a review of the historical information to determine the child’s previous exposure to episodes of verbal or physical conflict as well as parents’ current abilities to control this type of acting-out. If this consideration is significant and a neutral person cannot be present in the home of one or the other parent, then the possibility of using a neutral place of transition might take precedence over familiarity of routine. For example, visits before bedtime would require that Frances be passed back and forth between her father and her mother at home. In the past, this had resulted in her exposure to frightening arguments and physical fights. Observations of transitions from mother directly to father indicated that they continued to be highly stress-inducing. In this case, therefore, the counselor recommended that Frances be picked up at her babysitter’s home by her father and returned to the babysitter, where she could spend a neutral hour or so before her mother picked her up. This arrangement was put in place two days a week. The counselor also suggested additional time for the father during one weekend day to be structured in a similar fashion, if possible. The question of overnight visits often demands the lion’s share of attention and concern in divorce situations involving young children. Currently available evidence with regard to this issue suggests that when parents remain in high conflict, when they cannot be helped to resolve their own separation panic and continually fail to empathically understand their child’s experience, and when they are unable to collaboratively establish predictable routines and rituals, then the young child’s tolerance for overnight separations is likely to be compromised. Optimally, therefore, the parents’ separation panic and capacity for attunement to their child should be attended to with some degree of success before overnights are established. This is particularly, but not exclusively, true for children between 3 and 3½ years of age, who are developmentally vulnerable to separation difficulties. When the child has experienced very few separations from a vulnerable primary parent (particularly when the other parent has been excluded), then the scheduling goal

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is to gradually limit the number of transitions and, just as gradually, increase the time of each separation from the primary parent. The criterion for graduated change is always the child’s tolerance, which can be assessed after a brief adjustment period. When parent reports are discrepant or otherwise unreliable, the mental health professional will need to consult with other people who know the child and perhaps, as well, to directly observe a transition. The final configuration in this graduated approach will vary, to a large extent, according to the success of the parenting intervention. When parents can be helped to actively support and protect their child, then the final configuration may comprise considerable time-sharing and overnights. If not, the configuration is more likely to include reasonably frequent blocks of time (typically within a range of one to three times a week), without overnights. Parents who are excluded from overnight visitation often express fears that, if they do not have overnights, they will not develop a “real” relationship with their child. In such cases, the parents need to understand that the security of their child’s primary relationship is the essential basis for his or her sense of security in other relationships, both now and in the future. They can then be reassured that a healthy capacity to separate is best achieved by the parents’ willingness to collaborate on behalf of the child. It is particularly important for the excluded parent to understand that without collaboration there can be no trust. Without trust, the primary parent will not support the child’s separation. Without that support, the child’s separation will be traumatic, and the excluded parent will bring anxiety rather than comfort to the child. At the same time, the primary parent needs to understand that a child who cannot separate is a child who literally cannot mature. This long-term view is a useful frame for helping parents to anticipate how their child’s need for each of them will keep shifting over time and how they will both need to develop a tolerance for these shifts if their child is to feel supported as he or she grows and changes. The child’s need for predictability is the final and essential consideration and requires that the schedule that is decided upon at the conclusion of the parenting work will represent a practical arrangement, one that the parents can commit to for a reasonable period of time. Barring this outcome, a highly


specific court order may be needed to ensure a protective baseline for the child. The schedule will, of course, need to be altered over the course of time, as the child’s needs and circumstances change. These revisions may be made by the parents, by a parenting coordinator (see chapter 8, section on Parenting Coordination and Arbitration), or by further order of the court.

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Preschoolers: Separation, Gender, and Sexualized Anxiety

4

As young children emerge from toddlerhood into the preschool years, they confront new developmental concerns that focus on gender and sexuality. Earlier preoccupations with becoming a separate person now shift and extend to concerns about their identity as a separate gendered person who is a boy or a girl.

Normative Developments Gender: The Preoedipal Phase The process of becoming identified as essentially a boy or a girl represents a narrowing of possibilities that earlier had seemed boundless (Coates, l990; Fast, l984). For boys and

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girls between the ages of approximately 12 to 30 months, who once believed that they possessed both the powers of having a penis and of giving birth, the reality slowly dawns that one attribute makes the other impossible. In addition to these biological realities, the child has to come to terms with other limitations, as well as possibilities, that are defined by his or her family within the context of a larger culture. In rigidly male-dominated families, for example, a girl may feel diminished as she recognizes her gender, particularly if women are not especially valued. Alternatively, in some families, a boy may become highly anxious if being male means being different from a mother who rejects his maleness, particularly if he cannot find worth in the eyes of his father (Fast, 1990).

Sexuality: The Oedipal Phase If all goes well, by approximately age three, the child will have come to terms with the fact that he is, and will remain, a boy; that she is, and will remain, a girl. On the heels of this achievement, children begin to consolidate the meaning of their gender in sexual terms (Fast, l979; Machtlinger, 1981). This new developmental focus marks the beginning of the oedipal passage. During this phase, children typically experience a rise in erotic and aggressive impulses. These feelings, and the fantasies associated with them, ordinarily become focused on the opposite-sex parent. The girl now longs to be exclusively valued as the most powerful and attractive female in the world. She wants this affirmation from the most powerful and attractive male she knows—her father. A similar longing will ordinarily draw a boy to his mother. These early explorations of sexuality seem to be organized around the child‘s egocentric belief that his or her powers of attraction are unique and so deeply compelling that all other contenders (such as the same-sex parent) will fade in comparison. Not surprisingly, the oedipal child‘s fantasies are tinged with rivalrous wishes as well as vague notions about adult sexuality in relation to the opposite-sex parent. For a boy, these oedipal wishes (as well as his sense of what it means to be a sexual male) may be expressed when he asserts that he will marry his mother and make her proud of him. A girl‘s sense of herself as a sexual female, on the other hand, may be communicated by her expressed intent to marry her father and take much better care of him than her mother ever did.

Chapter 4: Separation, Gender, and Sexualized Anxiety

A successful consolidation of gender identity and sexuality requires that the child come to terms with the realistic limits of his oedipal fantasies. Those limits are provided by the parental relationship. The child is not allowed to vanquish the same-gender parent with the power of her rivalrous aggression and become the oedipal victor. This is because the parents‘ mutuality does not ordinarily falter at this time. They continue to be “in possession of” each other and to provide consistent limits that contain the child‘s aggressive urges to take possession instead. As parents stand firm in this way, the child must come to terms with the reality that he cannot, by the force of his own demands or wishes, reconfigure the oedipal triangle. Instead, the child must find solace in identifying with the gifts and capacities of the same-sex parent and in the delayed fulfillment of sexual wishes (Ross, l982). A boy no longer expects to marry his mother but hopes to grow up and marry someone just like her. A girl will consolidate her identification with her mother in a similar way. With this success, the child begins to internalize the parents‘ jointly held standards for being good (controlling aggressive and sexual impulses) and is diverted from courting the exclusive acknowledgment of the opposite-sex parent. Instead, she becomes focused on learning how to earn acknowledgment in the world of peers. The new competencies that result can then help the child feel able and entitled to achieve his or her delayed wishes and fantasies in the future (Erikson, l950; Fast, l990).

Vulnerabilities in Preschool Children in the High-Conflict Family In high-conflict families, the child‘s normal rivalries with the opposite-gender parent are often seen as moves of a pawn conceived by one parent to undermine the other. As a result, vulnerable parents tend to feel attacked or betrayed as their child begins to change and grow. They may respond by becoming anxious, withholding, or punitive toward the child. For children in such a situation, it is not difficult to imagine that ordinary maturational impulses can begin to feel dangerous. There is no safe way forward, and no real way back. Children who are caught in this kind of untenable bind tend to become symptomatic. Mothers of boys as young as

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two-and-a-half describe feeling confused and angry when their sons begin to oppose them, to imitate their fathers, to distance themselves, and to reject their mothers. Typically, this oedipal behavior is followed by renewed signs of separation panic, as these boys become overwhelmed by the fear of losing their mothers forever. Little girls, on the other hand, often seem less overtly troubled as they confront issues of gender and sexuality. A closer look, however, suggests that girls in high-conflict families maintain a connection to their mothers by withdrawing from their own emerging power and sexuality. Some little girls, fueled by their rivalrous feelings, become oppositional with their mothers, while others reject whatever they perceive to be feminine in themselves and in their mothers. In the endless spiral of the parental conflict, these new symptoms in the children, in turn, provide further ammunition for the battle. Increases in masturbation and sexualized play that are particularly but not exclusively observed in boys in highly conflicted families, are perhaps the overt symptoms most likely to escalate the conflict. It is not uncommon for these symptomatic behaviors to trigger accusations of child molestation by one parent against the other. Such concerns about child sexual abuse should no more be automatically dismissed because of the presence of parental conflict than they should be automatically believed. Rather, we suggest here that it is the child‘s experience, including the developmental meaning of sexualized behavior and erotic play, as well as the possibility of actual abuse, that should be explored and understood.

Boys in High-Conflict Families Vulnerabilities in Preoedipal Boys: Gender Issues. When little

boys recognize that they are male, they also recognize that they are different from their mothers with whom they are usually primarily attached. Therefore, consolidating his gender identity represents a significant step toward becoming an autonomous person. When separating from a fragile mother in a conflicted relationship feels dangerous, the additional step of consolidating gender identity can feel dangerous as well. The boy in this situation must contend with already entrenched fears that his mother will disintegrate in his


absence or abandon him as punishment for leaving her, as well as with new fears that he will drive her away by becoming just like his father, who is toxic to her. The bind is that to become separate and male is to be abandoned by his mother, while staying merged with her is to risk emasculation. This conundrum invites a kind of split that is organized around gender. In this defensive solution, boys appear to experience their maleness and their sexuality as a fragmented part of the self, the bad-mother-me, who makes the goodmother go away by striving toward separateness and the toxic father. The connection to mother (as well as the longing for intimacy and nurturance that is part of that connection) becomes associated with the good-mother-me, who keeps the good-mother satisfied and close. Unfortunately, this goodmother tends to threaten rather than embrace masculinity. What is disturbing here is that this kind of splitting works against the normal integrations of the period when children ordinarily begin to weave together the bad and good in themselves and others and to understand that the shadow side is part of human wholeness and connection. Normally, at this time, children will begin to blend together the parts of themselves that feel identified with and connected to mother with those that are identified with and connected to father. This blending, in turn, creates a foundation for gender identity that is both nurturing and strong. This outcome, however, is placed at considerable risk when children find safety in fragmentation rather than integration. Mothers in highly conflicted divorce situations encourage this type of gendered splitting when they respond with fear, anger, or withdrawal to behaviors in their sons that remind them of the loathed former spouse. Although they may refrain from denigrating their sons directly, they will freely insult the father and, in the process, the male-identified aspects of these boys. One mother described her struggles with her 3-year-old son as follows: “He won‘t accept what I say, he gets halfway between yelling and crying, and the issues he chooses are totally ludicrous! Like, I try to get him to take a bath and he won‘t—so I lose it and call him a pig, just like his father.” In a high-conflict situation, the boy‘s defiance may literally mimic the father‘s behavior toward the mother. A father will often cultivate and support these behaviors because they help him to feel acknowledged and supported by his son in the

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parental conflict. The father of the 3-year-old whose mother called him “a pig, just like your father” often encouraged his son to tell him all about the mother‘s “bossiness.” After he heard his son‘s complaints, this father enjoyed explaining to his little boy, “You‘re getting too big to be bossed around! We don‘t do it that way, do we? We talk it out man to man.” In this way, the father encouraged his son to defy the mother and subtly suggested that not doing so was effeminate. Vulnerabilities in Oedipal Boys: Sexuality. When sexuality

becomes linked to gender identity during the oedipal period, a boy‘s sense of conflict and danger is likely to be exacerbated. New erotic urges toward his mother can heighten a son‘s fears of being literally swallowed up by her, with no hope of separation. These anxieties are particularly troubling if the boy has failed to achieve a solid sense of his own physical and psychological separateness during earlier phases of his development. A boy‘s vulnerability may be further intensified by fears of reprisal if, by virtue of his father‘s absence, he emerges as the oedipal victor. Fantasies of oedipal victory are often evoked when mothers try to reestablish a sense of intimacy with their sons in ways that violate appropriate physical boundaries. One mother, for example, acknowledged that she did not really want to help her son master sleeping alone because she felt reassured by his regressive longing to curl up next to her at night. Other mothers literally will not relinquish control of their son‘s bodies, remaining intrusive in toileting and hygiene long after the child could be taught to take responsibility for himself. With this loss of boundaries, boys are likely to feel erotically stimulated in ways that deepen their fears of mother‘s engulfment and father‘s aggression. The boy‘s fantasies about the father‘s rivalrous aggression have a terrifying basis in reality, if the father has actually been physically violent in the past. For oedipal boys in a high-conflict situation, then, the dilemma is to remain emasculated, impotent, and connected to mother (and devalued or abandoned by the father), or to become male, sexual, and separate like father (and devalued or abandoned by the mother). Oppositional Symptoms. The way in which this conundrum ultimately shapes the boy‘s emerging sense of self, gender, and sexuality will depend, in large part, upon the availability


and relative power of each parent. If the father is available, the boy may solve his dilemma by taking on the father‘s characteristics, thoughts, and feelings as if they were his own. All connections to the potentially engulfing mother and the good-mother-me aspects of the self that were connected to her are severed. The short-term risk is that these little boys may become imprisoned behind a wall of opposition toward their mothers which cuts them off from her nurturing as well as from their own capacities for gentleness and intimacy. Over the long term, the risk is that boys in these situations may consolidate a kind of impersonal masculinity which is defined by an absence of these nurturing qualities. Furthermore, that impersonal masculinity may be affirmed by violence, if the boy has understood violence to be an essential aspect of being male and an instrument of power and separateness. If the father cannot be available, or if the mother is so powerful that the risks of separating are too great, then boys are at risk of becoming immobilized, depressed, and confused about their masculinity, and of remaining merged with the mother. For these boys, there seems to be no safe way forward into manhood. Sexualized Symptoms. Sexualized behaviors can be deeply

compelling for boys who are caught in the web of these dilemmas. This may be, in part, because such behaviors affirm the presence of the penis and its functions. This validation of a boy‘s sexuality reaffirms his masculinity as well as his existence as a separate person (Kirkpatrick, l990); or as Eissler (l958) suggested in describing older boys, “I come, therefore I am.” When a boy‘s individuation from his mother is fragile, these new feelings can be particularly compelling. That is, when a boy cannot find within himself a reliable sense of his mother‘s acknowledgment that he is separate from her, then his sexual feelings can take on these reassuring functions instead. They provide a vulnerable boy with newly autonomous ways of feeling independently alive and comforted, which were not available before. On the other hand, because these feelings awaken a new surge of independence, a boy may experience them as dangerous new aspects of the badmother-me which further heighten the risk of abandonment by his mother (Roseby, l995). A self-perpetuating cycle can develop in which a boy‘s heightened anxiety about separation can deepen his need for the existential soothing of his

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sexually arousing play. The following case material illustrates how the changing dynamics of a parental conflict produced shifts from oppositional to anxiously sexualized symptoms in a 5-year-old boy.

The Case of Nathan M The Family History Mr. and Mrs. M had a bitterly conflictual marriage which ended when Nathan was 2½ years old. They continued to be embroiled in conflict and multiple litigations after the separation. They first came for counseling when their son was 5 years old. Mr. M was a very self-centered and immature man who saw himself as his son‘s primary parent and protector from a “tyrannical and controlling” mother. He felt, for example, that Mrs. M‘s efforts to get Nathan to clean his room were tyrannical: “She tells him if he does, she‘ll take him out for a treat! Isn‘t that just like saying that if he doesn‘t do it, she won‘t get him a treat! It‘s a real abuse of power!” Mr. M believed, with absolute conviction, that his son was struggling under the weight of Mrs. M‘s oppression in precisely the same way that he had felt himself to be oppressed by her. In actuality, Mr. M. had trouble distinguishing feelings of rage and helplessness that belonged to past relationships from those that belonged to relationships in the present—his own father had been oppressive and his mother unprotective. More significantly, he could not differentiate his own feelings and experiences from those of his young son. Mr. M was often visibly upset and would cry or rant angrily during counseling sessions (mainly about how he had been cheated out of time with Nathan), often appearing as if he were on the verge of losing control. When asked whether he thought these displays were frightening for Nathan, Mr. M said, “It is a hundred times more frightening for him to get double messages that he can‘t understand than to just see the feelings and know what‘s going on!” He said that masking his feelings would be like lying to his son. Although Mr. M could be nurturing, he more often relied on Nathan for reassurance, telling him after an outburst, “Daddy needs a hug.” Mrs. M seemed both depressed and exhausted when she was first seen. She said, “I‘ve just about had it on all fronts.


I feel totally depressed and hopeless. I wish I could just go away and leave everything and everybody.” Mrs. M had very little experience of being mothered herself and was especially vulnerable to feeling overwhelmed, helpless, and ashamed when she could not handle her son. “I feel like a bad mother. I can‘t figure out what to do…Sometimes we‘re just as close as we ever were and then…I don‘t know…he sees his father and he comes home and I swear, it‘s like looking at his father! He bosses me around, he talks to me as if I were dirt…he has tantrums. I can‘t stand it…Sometimes I feel like I want a divorce from my son!” At these times, Mrs. M would withdraw from Nathan because she could not bear the way she felt when he was so ambivalent about her. She could not see the vulnerable side of her little son at all. Nathan himself had been encopretic since the age of three. Mrs. M understood the encopresis to be a response to Mr. M‘s “crazy and unpredictable behavior,” while Mr. M felt that Nathan was just trying to achieve control in relation to a mother who “wants to be in charge of his every move.” In spite of both parents‘ failure to see their son as a person separate from themselves and their bitter conflict, Nathan was struggling toward a fragile individuation. In this distorted process, Nathan‘s encopretic symptoms appeared to provide him with an oppositional sense of having a separate existence. In addition to his struggles with separation, Nathan needed to define and anchor his masculinity. His efforts in this direction resembled a kind of merging with his father, imitating him, and taking on his thoughts and feelings as if they were his own. Not incidentally, this merger was likely the only solution that could gratify Mr. M and ensure his continuing availability to his son. From this position, which felt like the kind of masculine separation that he was longing for, Nathan attempted to see his mother through his father‘s eyes. This difficult stance was made clear as Nathan struggled to recount a violent argument that he had witnessed at age twoand-a-half. During the argument, Mr. M had broken his wife‘s wrist. In retelling the incident, Nathan carefully said, “My dad broke…no, no, my mom made my dad break her rib!”

Nathan‘s Troll Story During his initial play session, Nathan told the following story. “Once upon a time, there was boy at a wedding. This

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boy didn‘t stay long at the wedding. He tricked the bride and walked away from the wedding and went for a long walk. Then he fell into a deep troll hole where there was a girl troll looking for a boy to marry. He tried to get out of the troll hole, but he couldn‘t because the Troll King comes along and says, ‘You must stay and marry the girl troll because she wants to marry you and you will stay and marry her. You will wear the troll tail and eat troll food.’ The boy doesn‘t want to marry the girl troll, so he tries to run away but they hold his feet, and then he gets out by himself!” The story suggests that Nathan was angry with both his parents who had turned into trolls. The change from bride (good-mother) to girl troll (bad-mother) indicates Nathan‘s continuing inability to integrate the good and bad aspects of other people and himself. In the story, the good-mother was someone else‘s bride, whom he tricked and left. Nathan‘s choice of the word tricked suggests that he felt ashamed and secretive both about his sexual feelings toward his mother and his need to separate from her. Immediately upon leaving the good-mother, the boy encountered the bad-mother in the form of the female troll who wanted to marry him and make him eat troll food. Because he fears that her possessiveness toward him is sexual, this troll is not only the bad-mother but the bad oedipal mother as well. Nathan‘s story communicates his strong need to separate from her erotic and suffocating presence. Even clearer is the sense that Nathan has no refuge. His story seems to define the father exclusively in terms of his role in this distorted oedipal triangle. He is the Troll King, who wants Nathan to marry the girl troll. In other words, the father has abdicated, leaving Nathan to take his place, to wear the tail, and to eat the troll food. Nathan has been sacrificed to the devouring, sexual longings of the badmother, so that the father can escape. At the end of the story, Nathan confronts his choices. He may remain as the terrified and shamed oedipal victor, or he may scramble away, unaided and alone.

Nathan‘s Oppositional Symptoms The struggle to establish his masculinity were fraught with danger for this child. Earlier difficulties with separation from his mother were now compounded by the regressive pull of his oedipal attraction to her and the frightening injunction


from his father to “be male in my place, to take over as the consort of the bad-mother.” In spite of father‘s seeming invitation for the son to become the oedipal victor, Nathan still had to worry: Will his father become angry, jealous, and vengeful anyway? Nathan attempted to manage these myriad anxieties by merging with his father and opposing his mother, that is, by becoming the bad-mother-me. This defensive solution solved some of his difficulties. Becoming one with his masculine rival discouraged further rivalry and protected him from his mother‘s engulfing presence. However, there were new difficulties. Nathan was now doomed to oppose and reject his mother while longing for her at the same time. There was no model in Nathan‘s fragmented family, or in his split inner life, for achieving separation from his mother and maintaining connection to his father. Clearly, this boy was caught in a powerful dilemma, so that to feel separate and masculine, he must also feel and be bad. In reality, Nathan‘s dilemma was apparent in his swings between compliance and opposition in relation to his mother, swings that seemed to escalate before and after visits with his father.

Nathan‘s Sexualized Symptoms The nature of Nathan‘s symptomatic struggles altered about two weeks after the family was first seen. At that time, Mr. M became verbally abusive and threatening with his former wife. Mrs. M was very frightened. Her attorney was successful in having the visitation suspended for a time “until it could be determined that Mr. M was able to take responsibility for his behavior when he was with his son.” The threat of losing all contact with his “male anchor” seriously disrupted Nathan‘s efforts to consolidate his separateness and his masculinity. He became noticeably more compliant with his mother and with the behavioral regime she had instituted to manage his encopresis. Nathan‘s therapist commented on the change in Nathan‘s oppositional behavior in the following way: “He‘s really much more compliant, he‘s cut down on his anger, and he‘s easier for his mom to manage. On the surface it looks good, but his mother reported to me that he‘s been drawing pictures of graveyards—and in the sandtray he‘s doing a lot of burying.” When Nathan was seen by a counselor in our service during

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this time, he was asked to identify three wishes, but he insisted that he only wanted one: “If I could just die, die in my sleep.” In his preoccupation with death, Nathan seemed to communicate both a longing to be free of the paradoxical binds of his life and a wish to be rid of his separate masculine self. In an effort to manage his pain, as well as to assuage his increasingly potent mother (who could banish his father), Nathan behaved as if his father had never existed. Mrs. M described with satisfaction how, when the father telephoned, Nathan seemed to forget about him as soon as he hung up the phone. It is noteworthy that Nathan was also left with no real way to express his anger. He clearly imagined that his rage (and the autonomy that it represented) had somehow made his father abandon him and might have a similar effect upon his mother. In therapy sessions, Nathan spanked a “bad” baby doll over and over for pooping on the father doll, while the mother doll looked on. Nathan then had the father doll say to the baby, “I‘m not living with you now.” Next, Nathan spanked the baby doll over and over again for pooping on both parents‘ faces and for crying. He then put the “bad baby” in “jail” in a closet and calmly resumed his play. At one point, Nathan described a brother named Eric, who was “a very angry boy, a bad boy” who lived with his father. When the therapist referred to this comment in a later session, Nathan denied the statement and said indignantly that if he had a brother, he certainly would not be named Eric! As Nathan capitulated to the perceived demands of his powerful mother and increasingly relinquished his efforts to separate from her and connect with his father, he became overtly confused about his masculinity. In therapy group, he presented his bottom to the other children, asking to be spanked and chanting, “I‘m a boy, I‘m a girl.” For this oedipal child, the symptoms of gender confusion suggested that his loss of a sense of a separate self was inextricably associated with the loss of his masculine, sexual self as well. Here, Nathan‘s symptoms were particularly telling. He began to masturbate publicly and often. His behavior now represented the separating bad-mother-me and became a substitute for the noncompliance that had fueled his separation heretofore. It was as if this behavior alone could now soothe Nathan and reassure him that he still existed. What is noteworthy here is that this oedipal boy‘s sense of vitality and realness became anchored in his maleness and his sexuality.


This connection between feeling alive and feeling masculine indicates how a boy‘s inability to establish a firm sense of his gender and sexuality can feel life-threatening to him. Perhaps most telling is the postscript to this case that occurred when Mr. M‘s visits were reinstated. Within a brief space of time, mother and therapist, each with a different interpretation, described a behavioral reversal in which Nathan became once again emotionally labile, oppositional, and difficult for his mother to manage. At the same time, the school reported that his masturbation had diminished and become negligible.

The Case of Dante P Dante‘s Early Struggles It is not uncommon for boys who are caught in the web of an oedipal dilemma to display a range of sexualized symptoms that are not limited to masturbation. Four-year-old Dante P, for example, had been enmeshed in his parents‘ conflict since his age of 18 months. Mrs. P was a highly anxious woman, who lived in terror that her ex-spouse would molest or abuse Dante as he had abused her. Mr. P was an emotionally needy man who was deeply humiliated by her accusations. In an effort to compensate for his vulnerability, he was intermittently controlling and intrusive with both Mrs. P and his son. Mr. P tended to idealize his son, as he had once idealized his wife. Dante‘s early struggles with separation were apparent in his mother‘s descriptions of transitions to preschool or visits. He would “totally fall apart” and would become hysterical, clinging to, clawing, and attacking his mother. His acute fears were also apparent in his asthma attacks and chronic enuresis. Like Nathan, Dante symptomatically attempted to establish a boundary by controlling his body functions, in his case, by refusing to eat. As Dante outgrew toddlerhood and began to struggle with issues of gender as well as separateness, he showed the characteristic swings between opposition and compliance with his mother. In the good-mother-me state, he clung to her. As he tried to separate and establish his masculinity, he shifted to an oppositional bad-mother-me position and hit her. However, Dante experienced his father as equally demanding and

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engulfing. In this family, as in Nathan‘s, the oedipal triangle was distorted: not, in this case, because Dante was the oedipal victor, but because the child perceived himself to be the prize that both parents longed for and sought after.

Dante‘s Oedipal Dilemma In the sandtray, Dante tended to repeat a particular play involving a special dinosaur, who seemed to represent himself and two gender-diffuse superheroes who seemed to represent his parents. In the play, the special dinosaur was the desired prize, and the two supermen fought for possession of him. The dinosaur would say, “Which one loves me the best? You can keep me… and the other one can visit me.” And then the superman, who got to keep the dinosaur because he loved him best, pats him and says, “You‘re a good boy.” Dante continued, “…and then [the father] superman wanted to kill the [m]other superman cos he doesn‘t want him any more.” Dante then indicated that the mother superman was blown up and destroyed in a volcano with the help of the dinosaur. In this play Dante passively achieved a kind of separation by virtue of the fact that the father chose him. After having chosen him and praised him for being good, Dante‘s father blows the mother up. Dante seemed to believe that only by destroying the mother could he achieve separation from her. His total powerlessness in relation to her, however, did not shift to annihilating rage until he became merged with his father. The oedipal twist here is that in that merged relationship Dante felt as if he had become the object of his father‘s oedipal desire. In an effort to please his father (who worried about his finicky eating), Dante would stuff his mouth with food until he gagged. This kind of intrusion by the oedipal father bears a haunting resemblance to Nathan‘s worries about being intruded upon by the oedipal mother and “forced to eat troll food.” Naturally, this dynamic with his father, as well as his difficulties with separation from his mother, raised worrisome questions in Dante‘s mind about his masculinity.

Dante‘s Sexualized Symptoms Not surprisingly, Dante‘s play suggested a marked gender confusion (throughout his therapy sessions, Dante identified


women dolls as men and girl dolls as boys) as well as a compulsive curiosity about sexuality. His stories often included sexually explicit play in which he had the supermen insert their guns into the anus of a doll that he had undressed. During this same period, Dante‘s mother reported that he was engaging in overt sexual play with peers that involved undressing and inspecting little girls and trying to insert an object into the anus of a boy peer. As might be expected, the therapist raised the question of possible sexual abuse in this child‘s history. Although the mother was concerned about this possibility, neither the parents nor other professionals who had been involved with this family presented evidence of any such history. Rather, it was suggested that this sexualized play (like Nathan‘s) surfaced because it served particular needs in Dante. It seemed to be both self-stimulating and self-soothing, enabling him to explore his own confusion about gender as well as his normal developmental curiosity about the specifics of sexual behavior. At the same time, these activities (in which he engaged with compulsive furtiveness) seemed to support a pleasurable sense of autonomy from his relatively unbounded and intrusive parents.

Girls in the High-Conflict Family The Defensive Consolidation of Gender Identity For girls in high-conflict families, consolidating femininity and sexuality during the oedipal passage is likely to progress somewhat differently. Even if a girl is faltering in the process of separating from her mother, the recognition of her own gender need not provoke fears of abandonment and loss because the recognition is one of being like rather than different from her mother (Kirkpatrick, 1990). The risk is that girls might soothe their worries about separation by establishing a particular version of femaleness, a good-mother-me kind that does not strive for authenticity or autonomy but remains in undemanding connection to mother.

Oedipal Conflicts in Sexuality for Girls During the oedipal phase, her burgeoning sexual impulses fuel a daughter‘s longing to be admired and valued by her

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father as a female, one who is distinct from her mother. This acknowledgment requires a degree of separation from the oedipal mother and inevitably results in rivalrous feelings toward her. In high-conflict situations, daughters may experience these new feelings as too dangerous to express in behavior at all. When girls inhibit these feelings in themselves, parents tend to see them as asymptomatic, and it is often assumed that they have comfortably shelved their oedipal issues until adolescence. In fact, these little girls communicate in their stories and projective play that they have unconsciously split off these new developmental impulses because they feel like shameful and bad aspects of themselves. The problem here is that when girls disown their sexuality, they remain fully confirmed in their identity as females who are not separate from their mothers. What then remains is a sweetly feminine and asexual facade that is not regarded as problematic until adolescence. At that time, the absence of inner resources and conflicts about autonomy and authenticity tend to be expressed in a range of widely reported problematic behaviors that include precocious sexual activity and substance abuse, as well as early, unsuccessful marriages to emotionally unstable or much older men (Hetherington, l972; Kalter, l977; Kalter et al., 1985; Mueller & Pope, l977; Schwartzberg, l980; Wallerstein & Blakeslee, 1989). In some high-conflict families, girls do attempt to achieve a measure of separation from their mothers during the oedipal period. Their efforts tend to be expressed in newly oppositional behavior toward their mothers. Perhaps not surprisingly, this new defiance often has a rivalrous quality. The mother of one 4-year-old girl, for example, complained that her daughter had begun to challenge her authority in a very demeaning way, while demanding to be allowed to telephone her father at all hours. In a more limited number of families, girls seem to invite their father‘s acknowledgment and admiration during the oedipal period by attempting to merge with him. When this happens, girls may reject their mothers and whatever they believe to be feminine in themselves. One 5-year-old girl, for example, had been seen in individual therapy for some time before coming to group. In her individual work, this little girl had been struggling with her father‘s marked preference for


her older brother. When she came into a group therapy session for the first time, she was sporting a new boyish haircut, boys‘ clothes and shoes, and an unusually husky voice. One child in the group asked her, in some confusion, “Are you a boy or a girl?” and she responded, “Go figure!” This kind of process may occur when the daughter seeks acknowledgment from a father who rejects her femininity. In other cases, this kind of deliberate boyishness represents an identification with a mother who is perceived to possess more masculine power than the father. In high-conflict families, then, a daughter‘s efforts to separate from her mother during the oedipal period may or may not survive the dangers that she associates with them. First among these dangers is that her mother will abandon her if she becomes attached to her father, in reality or even in fantasy. This concern becomes particularly potent during the oedipal period because a girl‘s longing for her father at this time is likely to represent, both to her and to her mother, not only a separation but a rivalrous betrayal as well.

The Dangers of Oedipal Victory In a high-conflict divorce situation, a daughter who wins the kind of attention that she longs for from her father, but without the tempering presence of her mother, is likely to feel that she has unwittingly become the oedipal victor. When this happens, the daughter must contend with unconscious fears about her mother‘s vengeful rage. These dangers are compounded if the father is consciously or unconsciously seductive with his daughter. This can occur when fathers become exhibitionistic about their masculinity and sexuality. One father, who had recently remarried, began to walk around the house naked in his children‘s presence. He claimed that this was part of his new sense of freedom and urged everyone in his family to join him. Fathers may also become more or less consciously careless about protecting the privacy of their sexual relations with new partners. In another case, two sisters (5 and 3 years old) described to their therapist, with breathless excitement and confusion, having seen their father engaged in sexual intercourse with his girlfriend, in a sleeping bag in the living room, shortly after the girls had been put to bed. In other situations,

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daughters become the exclusive focus of their fathers‘ lives. In a sense their relationship becomes a substitute for the marriage, meeting the father‘s (and sometimes the daughter‘s) needs for intimacy. In these types of relationship, the boundaries between father and daughter are not always maintained. Sleeping and showering together, for example, may become commonplace. Visits often feel like dates. These situations can stimulate erotic feelings and fantasies that both disturb and attract these vulnerable girls. When the daughters return to their mothers after visits, they carry with them a sense of shame and secrecy that is more or less consciously associated with their fathers and their own sexuality. The mother, in her turn, may unconsciously add to the shame by treating her daughter as a soiled concubine of the father. One mother, horrified by her daughter‘s newly flirtatious behavior toward her father, described how she set limits with her daughter when she returned from the father‘s house: “I just tell her very plainly, ‘You can‘t twist me ‘round your little finger like you do with your father, little missy. Your curlicues and flounces don‘t impress me one way or the other!’” Another mother called the therapist, in acute distress and anger, because her daughter had accompanied her father and his girlfriend on a date. In her rivalrous rage, this mother essentially fused her two rivals—the daughter and the girlfriend—into one entity: “God knows what else she‘s been exposed to and has her little fingers in! If this goes on she‘ll get AIDS! You know, when I called over there he was in the bathroom washing her hair—God knows what else they do in there!”

The Oedipal Retreat When these girls attempt some exploration of their oedipal impulses, they often end up retreating from this new terrain (Edgcombe, l976). This can occur because their fears and fantasies about mother‘s anger and revenge, as well as their shame about their own emerging sexuality, become overwhelming. The need to retreat is compounded if fathers, for whatever reason, are not available to their daughters in a reliable way. As girls back away from their own autonomy and sexuality, they seem to adopt a relatively docile stance in


relation to their mothers. This compliant stance often masks a deeper ambivalence about separation that is intermittently expressed in covertly defiant or hostile ways. In the service of their retreat, many girls begin to actively resist visiting their fathers, often mimicking their mother‘s demeaning words and attitudes about him. It is as if they feel compelled to reassure themselves and their mothers that they have returned to the fold, divested themselves of their oedipal aspects, and are once again purified as the good-mother-me. At the same time, the bad-motherme, who is separate, sexual, and connected to father, cannot be entirely disowned but seems to hover at the periphery of consciousness. In their projective play, their stories, and their dreams, these girls continue to represent the oedipal aspects of themselves and their fathers, as deceitful, shadowy figures who must hide their shameful connection from the powerful mother. In the two cases that follow, these issues were played out in more dramatic ways than most. Because of this very lack of subtlety, these cases lend clarity to the conflicts about power and sexuality that girls in high-conflict families often manage in relatively asymptomatic ways.

The Case of Isobelle G The Parents Isobelle G was 4 years old when her parents, who had been involved in endless bouts of failed mediation, were referred to our counseling services. Mrs. G was a talented artist who tended to become overwhelmed with helpless anger whenever she felt misunderstood. Although she expressed these feelings very forcefully, she did not expect them to have any impact. Because of this, she had a very difficult time understanding that her daughter might be frightened of her unpredictable rages. Mr. G was a rather immature and self-involved man. He maintained a very close relationship with both his parents, to the apparent exclusion of any other social connections. Mr. G was an airline pilot by profession. Because of this, he frequently changed the visitation schedule at short notice

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and repeatedly disappointed his little daughter. He had difficulty accepting that Isobelle was having a hard time with this unpredictability because he always explained to her why he needed to change his plans. He felt that Mrs. G‘s concerns about Isobelle‘s disappointments were just irrational efforts to malign him as a father. He could not see that Isobelle herself needed to be able to count on him.

Isobelle When first seen at age four, Isobelle was a solemn and timid little girl who had noticeable difficulty allowing her mother to leave the playroom at any point during the session. In fact, separations from her mother were a struggle for Isobelle in all situations. Her mother said, “She‘ll cry, yell, claw at my leg,” at school, at bedtime, and at transitions for visits to her father. In fact, when she was first seen, Isobelle was refusing to visit Mr. G most of the time. Isobelle‘s separation difficulties were no doubt exacerbated by the fact that she was born with a congenital digestive defect that had required several surgeries to correct. Although fully recovered, Isobelle was left with a residual vulnerability to infection which required, according to her pediatrician, a “mostly common sense” approach. To Mrs. G, however, this meant being in total control of Isobelle‘s environment at all times. She was sure that Mr. G was incapable of taking care of their daughter properly, and she could not be convinced otherwise. She felt that he was “a Disneyland dad…he‘ll have all the fun with her, and I‘ll have to pick up the pieces.” Although her concern was ostensibly about Isobelle‘s health, Mrs. G was also anxious about losing the competition for her daughter‘s affection and loyalty. As she said, “Isobelle and I were so close we were famous for it. Now I‘m afraid she‘s going to pull away.” Mr. G‘s behavior contributed to his ex-wife‘s worries. He seemed to have difficulty trusting his own judgment as a parent and generally called on Mrs. G when Isobelle became upset or listless. Over the next few months, Isobelle‘s resistance to visits diminished as she began her own individual therapy, and Mr. and Mrs. G (with the help of the project counselor) began to support their daughter‘s efforts to separate. One day during this period, Isobelle came to therapy carrying a bag of


paints. She said excitedly, “My mom says I can take these to my dad‘s house! And my dad will make a special place so I can take some of my old toys too!” Permission to use her toys as transitional objects was new and appealing to Isobelle, and Mrs. G, in particular, was initially reassured by her daughter‘s eager response.

The Emergence of Oedipal Themes Isobelle‘s oedipal fantasies, no doubt loosened by her mother‘s support of her increasing attachment to her father, came into rather dramatic focus approximately 6 months into treatment. The shift began when Isobelle told her therapist that she and her father had seen the movie Hook, which features a grown-up Peter Pan who can fly. A series of sessions followed (lasting several months) in which Isobelle became increasingly preoccupied with a male and female doll who “danced beautifully together all the time and then flew away to get married.” The similarities between the grown-up Peter Pan character and Isobelle‘s father were difficult to overlook. Mr. G was, after all, an exciting, grown-up play companion, who came and went in his daughter‘s life as magically and unpredictably as Peter Pan, after flying here and there (albeit by plane) to places that Isobelle could only imagine. In his Peter-Pan fashion, he also tended to shun the more responsible aspects of fatherhood by turning to Isobelle‘s mother when parenting decisions were required. The Peter Pan image captured the essence of Mr. G for his daughter, and she seemed to fall in love with the fantasy as much as with the father. When Isobelle‘s infatuation first became apparent outside of her therapy sessions, Mrs. G made a panicked phone call to the therapist. “Isobelle is acting like she‘s going to die if she doesn‘t get more time with her dad! When the slightest little thing goes wrong she collapses in a heap and says ‘I want my dad, I want my dad, ’ over and over and over…I can‘t stand this!” Mrs. G was upset and confused by her daughter‘s behavior, but worried that, if she refused her demands to be with her father, Isobelle would become stressed and ill. Over the next 12 months, Isobelle saw her father more and more frequently, though she was often upset and confused by the continuing unpredictability of his schedule.

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The Oedipal Conflict For several months of her therapy, Isobelle was exclusively preoccupied with the dancing couple who could fly. After a trip out of town with her father, her play was expanded to include a Batmobile, which Isobelle imbued with great vitality and aggressive power as she zoomed it around the playroom. A mother doll, however, hated the Batmobile, and the little girl doll resorted to a range of tricks to get her to like it, to “feel how smooth it is!” Invariably, the mother doll would recoil, and then Isobelle would bury the Batmobile in the sand and say, “The mom doesn‘t like it, it‘s mean!” She followed this by hissing and spitting at the mother doll. This play, coming on the heels of a trip with her father, suggests that oedipal victory and its attendant dangers were looming too close for Isobelle. She seemed to blame her mother for not reconciling with her father and restoring her daughter to a safe position in the oedipal triangle.

The Oedipal Retreat Toward the end of this approximately 12-month span of play, Isobelle began to worry openly about her relationship with her mother. During one session, for example, after the doll mother had once again rejected the Batmobile, Isobelle said, “The girl hurt the mom‘s feelings.” When the therapist asked how this had happened, Isobelle replied directly, “I didn‘t want to come home…and then my mom hurt my feelings…she made me keep the [bedroom] door closed and I thought a monster would come.” At the same time, Mrs. G began to complain that she was being thrust into the role of disciplinarian “mean mom,” while Mr. G continued to be irresponsible and unpredictable. Mrs. G was also justifiably furious about having to comfort her heartbroken daughter whenever Mr. G failed to keep to the schedule. With the conflict once again heating up around her, Isobelle‘s pleasure in the dancing couple who could fly, and her fascination with the powerful Batmobile, gradually diminished. As these themes began to fade from her play, Isobelle again began to resist visits with her father. She increasingly resembled the timid 4-year-old who had actively resisted separation from her mother. Her attempted journey through


the oedipal terrain seemed to have failed in the face of overwhelming risks: that she might be abandoned by a mother who felt betrayed and that she would then be left to the care of an unpredictable father who was more consort than parent.

The Enduring Nature of Unresolved Oedipal Themes What is perhaps most striking here is the way in which these unresolved oedipal issues continued to preoccupy this child over time. When Isobelle was re-evaluated at almost 9 years of age, she repeatedly played out her struggle for separation from her mother. For example, in sandtray play, Isobelle represented herself as a trickster named Sly Wolf who regularly deceived her mother (Mother Wolf) in order to pal around with a capricious father character named Snake Butt. It is no surprise that Isobelle represented herself in her story as a ‘sly wolf’. The name captures her split sense of self as a deceiver who lacked integrity and could not be fully real with anyone. In the play, Sly Wolf would pretend to go off and play alone, when in fact she was meeting Snake Butt, her “best pal.” When Mother Wolf called, Sly Wolf would return, bringing her mother a “treat” (though Isobelle commented to the evaluator, “It‘s part poop and part sweet…pretend the Mother Wolf eats the poop part!”). This play was periodically interrupted by Snake Butt‘s hostile phone calls to Mother Wolf. When this happened, “The Mother Wolf gets a headache and has to go to her room.” In response, Sly Wolf would throw Snake Butt out of the play and soothe her mother back to feeling better. Isobelle remained enmeshed in a relationship with her mother that was both hostile and dependent. Her father abetted her occasional acts of defiance toward her mother and was sometimes hostile himself. In the final analysis, however, Isobelle painted him as a vaguely laughable figure who could be disposed of when necessary and had little power to affect the central struggle between mother and daughter. From her immobilized position, Isobelle could not safely move toward a fully autonomous or sexually realized womanhood. She was locked instead into a kind of hyperfeminine dependency that provided a fragile mask for her underlying rage and disappointment.

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The Case of Tanya P The Parents Tanya P was 7 years old when she was first brought to our counseling services by her father. He said that Tanya had been raised by her mother until her age of five, but that she had been living with him for the past 2 years. He also said that Mrs. P was unstable and could not protect Tanya, because she continually drifted into relationships with violent men. In her first interview, Mrs. P agreed that she had been involved with a number of physically abusive men in the past, Mr. P among them. She described her former husband, during their brief marriage, as emotionally dependent and violently explosive whenever he felt abandoned or rejected: “He would break things…push me around…beat me up.” When this happened, Mrs. P said that “Tanya would scream, cry, or hang on my leg…or else wrap herself in the drapes.” She also described herself as “very needy” and told us that Tanya was her “only real reason for caring at all about my life.” Mrs. P tried to be protective of her daughter, but she seemed to have little real insight into Tanya‘s needs and feelings. In fact, she precipitously took Tanya to live with Mr. P in the middle of the night, after she received a particularly violent beating from her boyfriend. As she described this critical event, she said, “I just wanted a safe place for her until I could get things worked out with this guy…it was never supposed to be a permanent thing!” While this mother had tried to keep her daughter safe, she had difficulty seeing the event from her daughter‘s point of view. She could not really understand that Tanya felt abandoned, “because…she knew I was doing it for her, and that I was coming back!” Shortly after Tanya came to live with her father, he became involved with a very straight-laced girlfriend. This young woman took a dim view of the way Mrs. P had raised Tanya and insisted that Mr. P petition the court for sole custody. Mr. P and his girlfriend prevailed in this litigation, in part because Mrs. P either could not or would not organize an effective response. Things quickly changed for Tanya at this time. Lacking any real experience of being parented himself, Mr. P quickly relinquished the job to his girlfriend. As a result, the relationship between father and daughter changed from one of playful flirtatiousness to one in which


he essentially became the anchor of his girlfriend‘s wellmeant, but overly strict efforts to establish a sense of order, discipline, and routine into Tanya‘s life. Mrs. P continued to be marginally involved with Tanya but felt too overwhelmed to challenge what she felt to be an unfair and punitive decision by the court. Any subsequent discussions of scheduling were accompanied by expressions of explosive anger by both Mr. and Mrs. P, to which Tanya was regularly exposed.

Tanya When we first met Tanya, she was a giddy, smiling 7-year-old with darting eyes that checked constantly to see if she was pleasing and holding adult attention. Her teacher described her as “very bright but socially inappropriate. She constantly needs to be the center of attention. She flirts, chases the boys on the playground…She‘ll toss up her skirts in the boys‘ faces…and really this is to be expected in kindergarten but not at this age. In a way, she‘s very immature, but in another way she acts like a teenager.” At the same time Mr. P confided, in a tone that was both horrified and disgusted, that he had found Tanya‘s diary in which she had lovingly described how good it felt to touch and play with her “packet,” the word she used for her genitals. “She‘s going to grow up to be just like her mother…I don‘t know what the hell we‘re going to do when she‘s a teenager…she‘ll be pregnant by the time she‘s fourteen!” This little girl seemed to be playing out oedipal issues that remained unresolved and continued to preoccupy her. She spent many sessions in the first 6 months of her treatment breathlessly unburdening herself of a seemingly endless supply of stories, memories, and impressions. In doing so, she seemed to be disclosing without feeling, as well as entertaining and testing the therapist: Would she listen? Would she pay attention? Would she judge? As Tanya slowly began to open up, her unresolved oedipal issues began to surface. The terrors of being abandoned by her mother to her oedipal father were dramatically re-created in the following story that she told: “One night, in the middle of the night, the little girl is sleeping and the mother comes and wakes her up and takes her to a beauty parlor. It‘s all light and bright and she puts on makeup and gets beautiful and she says, ‘Oh, you‘re going to be so beautiful

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and everything will change now,’ but then really the mother is plotting to take the girl to the children‘s adoption center. It‘s near the dog pound. If the children don‘t get adopted, they get killed.” In fact, as another of Tanya‘s stories suggests, the parents seem to have united in their abandonment of Tanya: “One day, a little homeless girl was lost in the forest with no place to go. She met a handsome king and he said, ‘Oh, you are so beautiful and you are homeless, come to the palace and marry me.’ The little girl did not know what to do, so she went to the palace. (At this point in the play the king kisses the little girl passionately.) The king says, ‘Come with me, and we‘ll sleep together in the same bed because we love each other…And the king gave her beautiful clothes, and she didn‘t look like a little homeless girl anymore…she was so lovely…but then the beautiful good fairy appears and she‘s yelling, ‘What are you doing here?! I‘m the king‘s wife, how dare you? Get into the basement! Guards, murder her! ’ And the king said he was sorry to the beautiful good fairy…and put the little girl in the basement.” Tanya‘s short-lived oedipal victory evokes the rivalrous rage of the true queen (who most likely represents combined elements of the mother and the stepmother) and ends in a life-threatening betrayal by the father. This child was caught in the web of an oedipal conflict that allowed no resolution. She could not really become “purified” by denying her father and retreating to her mother in the good-mother-me position, because Tanya spent very little predictable time with her mother. Perhaps more importantly, Tanya seemed to feel that the connection with her mother was irretrievably broken. Whether or not retreat was possible, Tanya seemed to need her oedipal feelings. Her history and her stories suggested that, in her short and somewhat chaotic life, Tanya had felt most fully acknowledged and valued as an oedipal rival or an oedipal prize. To relinquish her oedipal self, her sexuality, and her separateness would be to lose that validation and risk disappearing entirely. But becoming fully oedipal and separate from her mother was not a supportable solution either. In this position, Tanya had contended with the terrors of oedipal victory and a new rivalry with her stepmother. The result had been betrayal and a second abandonment, this time by her father. Deepening the dilemma was the fact that Tanya‘s anxiety about this entrenched oedipal conflict was likely soothed by sexual feelings that were


aroused during masturbation. These feelings, aspects of her oedipal self, were kept as a shameful secret. In this endless dilemma, Tanya literally had no safe way to be. With peers, she had only her ‘performances’ and her sexuality to offer, and this she did with the manic effort of one who fears that she might disappear at any moment.

Implications for Intervention Helping Parents to Focus on the Child‘s Needs The concerns that naturally preoccupy an oedipal child are likely to alter his or her relationship with each parent in more or less subtle ways. In the war zone of a high-conflict divorce, these changes tend to be interpreted by the parents as shifts in the child‘s allegiance. These interpretations evoke intense reactions in the parents which are frightening and confusing for the child. A mother, for example, may become angry and withholding in response to her son‘s new bravado. Her reaction occurs because the change represents not only a loss of intimacy but a defection to the father and a complete abandonment of the mother by her son. The resulting anxiety can disrupt the mother‘s ability to provide the calm and reassuring presence that her son needs. Similarly, a father may be delighted by his daughter‘s new interest in him because it signals a small victory. He may readily believe that she is moving toward him because her mother is really not parenting her as well as he is. In these situations, mental health intervention can help parents to understand that these shifts represent the child‘s normal developmental repositioning in which both parents are essential although their roles shift in salience. When this understanding is in place, the child‘s needs and experiences become the focus of concern and the parental conflict (and the allegiances associated with it) recede from consideration. Intervention with the Family of Nathan M. In the case of Nathan M (whom we met earlier in this chapter), Mrs. M became overwhelmed and essentially abandoning when her son came home from visits acting like a miniature replica of his father. However, like most parents who want to do the best they can, she was ashamed of her behavior toward Nathan at

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these times and tended to gloss over the details. These were elicited only after careful and painstaking requests from the therapist, such as: “Please forgive me for being so simpleminded about this, but if I‘m going to really understand how hard this is for you, you have to tell me as if I am a fly on the wall, moment by moment.” In this slow unfolding, Mrs. M was able to describe how she dreaded Nathan‘s homecoming. As soon as he came in the door, she would placate him with treats and television and then become suffused with helplessness, followed by fury, when he stubbornly rejected her efforts to re-establish a connection. In her dilemma, the mother would then make a demand that she knew Nathan would not obey—for example, that he unpack his things immediately or take a shower. When he refused to comply, she would end up dragging him bodily to his room and leave him there to sob and rage until he came out and begged her forgiveness. As she shared these details, Mrs. M began to understand that provoking Nathan was a way to justify her own need to terrorize him back into submission and to vent her rage at him for leaving her. Like many mothers in high-conflict situations, Mrs. M also feared that if she were unable to manage her son, she would have to give him up to his father entirely. Sometimes, she confessed, she felt so overwhelmed that she wished this would happen. As Mrs. M began to understand that Nathan‘s behaviors reflected a normal developmental struggle toward separation and boyhood, she could also begin to see that her own fears were placing her son in an insoluble bind: “Be with me, or be a man.” At this point, Mrs. M‘s questions shifted away from the conflict—“How can I stop his father from encouraging this behavior?”—and began to focus on her own parenting—“How can I understand this new maturity in Nathan and make room for him to be a boy in our relationship, so he does not have to pull away from me?” This perspective represents an essential reframing of the dilemma, which is often central to the work with highly conflicted parents. Here, parenting is defined less in terms of providing a perpetual rescue from the other parent and more in terms of actively parenting so as to support the child‘s capacities. This notion is best introduced after the parent has had the opportunity to talk about the sense of helplessness and despair that comes from trying to control the other parent. The therapist may use humor to make the point, saying, for example, “She (or he) is not going


to have a personality transplant! That hope is truly the path to just the kind of helplessness you are feeling, and you have obviously had enough of that.” Such interventions, of course, are not appropriate if the other parent in fact presents real dangers to the child‘s health or well-being. Supporting Nathan‘s Identification with His Father. It was

important for the therapist to help Mrs. M find ways in which she could actively support Nathan‘s identification with his father. She balked at first, saying, “Now why should I give him the idea that I approve of that lying son of a bitch? He certainly is not doing the same for me…and besides why can‘t Nathan just take Roger (her lover) as a role model!” In response, the therapist explained that Nathan felt himself to be a part of his biological father. The qualities in his biological father that his mother could accept represented the basis upon which Nathan would be able to weave together the mother/father identified parts of himself. The therapist emphasized that if Mrs. M could not provide this kind of support, Nathan would likely try to preserve his relationship to his father and his masculinity by pulling away from her completely. Although Mrs. M could not identify any qualities that she currently appreciated in Nathan‘s father, she was able to recall qualities in the man as she had known him when they married. It was these memories that she began to impart to her son.

Setting Rules and Expectations When parents can cooperate about rules and limit-setting, the child derives comfort from the resulting clarity about how to be good. It is this consistency that, over time, becomes internalized as the child‘s own moral standard. When parents cannot explicitly support each other by sharing the same rules, they can work toward communicating a general expectation that the child will abide by the authority of the adults who are in charge, even if the specific rules are different. That is, one parent may say, “You will do it this way in my house, and I don‘t care if you do it differently at your (other parent‘s) house. When you are here, you follow my rules, whatever they are!” For Nathan, neither the attempt to support his identification with his father nor the attempt at parental cooperation proved to be effective. In spite of the therapist‘s efforts, Mr. M

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continued to actively encourage Nathan‘s opposition in relationships with most authority figures, including Mrs. M. He was convinced that his son‘s defiance of her was an appropriate reaction to her toxic and overcontrolling parenting. Similarly, when Nathan was expelled from a summer camp for repeatedly throwing food in the dining hall, Mr. M was outraged that the camp director did not sit down with Nathan to hear his views on the topic. He felt the camp director was dictatorial and told Nathan so. When the parents‘ disparate expectations continue to confuse and double-bind the child, then a shift from joint to sole legal custody may be appropriate. In Nathan‘s case, joint legal custody was too well entrenched to shift without significant emotional and financial cost. Instead, Mrs. M‘s attorney successfully petitioned the court to issue a set of orders that limited each parent‘s ability to intrude into Nathan‘s life when he was in the care of the other. The court also specified a highly detailed visitation schedule that provided for uninterrupted blocks of time with each parent. This time frame allowed Nathan to orient himself in each home, without having to manage disorganizing interruptions. The court also issued orders that explicitly required both parents‘ cooperation with Nathan‘s therapy and both parents‘ consent prior to termination. In cases like Nathan‘s, which are managed by legally imposed boundaries rather than parental cooperation, therapy for the child (with an experienced professional) should be seriously considered, as it may afford the child his or her only opportunity to find a way toward integration.

Setting Appropriate Boundaries Controlling the Child‘s Exposure to Adult Sexuality. When children are developmentally preoccupied with their sexuality, they may easily become overwhelmed by the power of their own impulses. This is a particular risk when vulnerable parents become focused on establishing new sexual relationships. These are often conducted in an erotically charged and exhibitionistic atmosphere. Children naturally respond with strong feelings of anxiety and excitement which are often managed with sexualized play and masturbation. In high-conflict situations, these behaviors may easily trigger the abuse alarm. Clearly, it is important to help parents


understand these risks and act preventively by setting and maintaining appropriate boundaries with their children. These matters need to be addressed in a firm and practical manner that focuses on the child‘s developmental needs and experiences and avoids shaming the parents. This strategy framed the intervention with the father of 4-year-old Steven. This child, who had recently developed an anxiously aggressive swagger, confided to his maternal grandmother that he had seen his father “with no clothes on with [his girlfriend] and then he hurt her.” At about this time, Steven began wearing a belt and refused to take it off, even for sleeping. When his anxious mother brought him to our services to be evaluated, Steven took the clothes off the Ken and Barbie dolls and had them kiss and lie upon each other. He said, “Then, there‘s a big explosion…and he jumps up and down on top of her.” Steven repeated these themes compulsively over the course of several sessions. He also begged to be allowed to wear his cowboy chaps so that the evaluator could see them and demanded that she act as if she was afraid of his large size. In one session, he confided that he wanted to own a wild bull that he could ride whenever he wished. Steven‘s play indicated that he was preoccupied with and confused by whatever he had seen or overheard and that he felt ambivalent about being able to do what Daddy could do: He was both attracted to and afraid of his father‘s power. In light of this, his efforts to manage did not lack a certain 4-year-old logic, as he tried to stem the tide of newly aroused sexual feelings by the simple expedient of wearing a belt. Steven‘s father denied that his son had seen anything at all. The therapist avoided the trap of challenging what could not be proved. She said that, of course, she was sure that this man had acted with utmost caution, as any sensible father would. Instead, she focused on Steven, explaining how sensitized and curious he was likely to be about sexual matters at this stage in his life and that no matter how cautious a parent might be, it was difficult to control what children hear or imagine. She said that children at this stage of development can confuse sexuality and aggression very easily, and Steven seemed to have done that. The therapist spoke to the father as if his understanding of the need for appropriate privacy was a given. In this way, she could avoid shaming him and still provide him with information, without appearing to lecture.

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Because the parents had in fact had a violent marriage, it was entirely possible that Steven had seen both sex and violence. The focus, however, was not on proving facts but on gaining the father‘s compliance in protecting Steven from further exposure. To accomplish this, the therapist suggested that the simplest way to settle Steven down and prevent any further difficulties was to keep father‘s time with Steven separate from time with his girlfriend. In particular, she advised him not to allow his girlfriend to sleep over when Steven was in his custody. She empathically reminded him that his exwife was somewhat impulsive, and she could not guarantee that future episodes would not result in a Child Protective Services investigation. The therapist took the position that such an investigation would be upsetting for everyone, most particularly for Steven, and would best be avoided for all concerned. Likely because he felt neither challenged nor shamed and because he knew that other adults were now alerted, Steven‘s father was able to follow through on the therapist‘s suggestions. At the same time, both parents were helped to consider their child‘s developmental needs in a more focused and protective way. Maintaining Appropriate Physical Boundaries Between Parent and Child. Sometimes physical boundaries between parents

and children are violated in ways that can be both arousing and shaming to the child. These situations require a forthright explanation of the child‘s increasing need for privacy and physical integrity. When Jacob, for example, experienced a period of enuresis at age four, his mother insisted on checking his underwear at regular intervals to see if he was dry. She did not understand that his vigorous resistance represented a healthy effort to preserve his dignity and avoid her potentially arousing intrusions. Instead, she felt that it was one more instance of oppositional behavior instigated by his father. She believed that establishing compliance in this matter represented her son‘s return to her fold, as if Jacob could have no resistance to her that was meaningful or valuable in its own right. The therapist countered this belief by offering developmental information which helped the mother to understand that the problem was about her son‘s integrity and not about her former husband. This understanding countered the mother‘s helplessness and helped her to focus on her own parenting.


By contrast, in Isobelle G‘s family (discussed earlier in this chapter), the father was not particularly intrusive with his daughter. However, he capitulated to her demands to sleep with him because “Mommy won‘t let me sleep with her at her house.” Mr. G allowed this sleeping pattern to become established because, to him, it was one way in which he, and not the mother, could meet Isobelle‘s needs. He did not consider the fact that the situation reinforced Isobelle‘s oedipal fantasies in ways that would ultimately become too frightening for her to tolerate. The pattern was already well established when it came to the therapist‘s attention and consequently required a series of slow but firm approximations toward the goal of helping Isobelle to sleep alone. When parents become conscious of the need to make changes, they often do so in ways that feel abrupt and rejecting to the child. This possibility can be headed off if the therapist reviews the actual words that the parents plan to use. The concreteness of this approach can circumvent any misinterpretation of the therapist‘s suggestions.

When the Sexual Abuse Alarm Sounds The issue of child sexual abuse allegations in custody disputes is a specialized issue requiring expertise in this field and is discussed in depth in chapter 14. In this chapter we introduce this problem by discussing the dilemmas at the threshold of making a report to authorities about the possibility of sexual abuse. Unfortunately, the issue of boundaries often does not come to the fore until the possibility of child sexual abuse has been raised. Without evidence or admission on the part of the accused perpetrator, it is extremely difficult to establish the meaning of the child‘s behaviors, feelings, and fantasies and determine which of these represent a response to an eroticized boundary failure and which represent a response to an abusive sexual intrusion. Although Child Protective Services investigations tend to focus on the distinctions, for the child either scenario will inflict its own kind of developmental damage. The Value of a Timely and Rational Response. When the suspicion of child sexual abuse is raised by either party or their collaterals, it is essential to respond actively and immediately. An active response is preferable to tactics that delay because

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of the belief that the allegation is one more in an endless series of variants and will eventually die down from lack of attention. Inappropriate delay often leaves the child to cope alone with the onslaught of a parent‘s panic and anger. It is usually more effective (and ethically defensible) to respond as one would do to any potential psychological emergency. Here, the goal is to provide a response that is designed to calm the parent‘s panic and contain the acting-out. Generally, the first order of business is the child‘s well-being. The counselor will need to review, in a concrete and detailed way, what has been said to the child and what can now be communicated that will soothe him or her. Of course, when the evidence warrants a reasonable suspicion of sexual abuse, the therapist may decide to make an immediate referral to Child Protective Services. Follow-up and Collaborative Evaluation. If the therapist con-

cludes that there are no grounds for a child abuse report, the situation may still require a follow-up plan for prevention and periodic assessment. This would include working with both parents to identify and control factors that might be contributing to the child‘s behavior. Specifically, the parents will need some help in setting clear boundaries, controlling exposure to sexual activity in movies and on television, and setting explicit rules and standards to help the child understand that sexual activity is for private enjoyment only. When the child is not familiar to the therapist, or when the child‘s presentation during the preliminary evaluation is ambiguous, the therapist may request a consultation from an expert in the assessment and treatment of child sexual abuse. This would involve an expert in sexual abuse allegations who would follow specialized guidelines and protocols such as those laid out in chapter 14 (Kuehnle, 1996, Kuehnle & Kirkpatrick, 2005). It is important to stress here that the therapist‘s expert understanding of the effects of the parents‘ conflict on the child should not be confused with, or used as a substitute for, expertise in the area of child sexual abuse. Neither specialty has developed a foolproof assessment strategy that can reliably sort out the difference between a sexualized response to a boundary failure and a symptomatic indication of direct sexual abuse. What both experts can offer, when they work together, is a framework for understanding the child, the child‘s history, and the parents, as fully as possible.


Unresolved Charges of Child Sexual Abuse. When allegations

of child sexual abuse can neither be substantiated nor put to rest, the child typically continues to visit the accused parent in an atmosphere of intensely magnified mistrust and anger. In these cases, the family will need therapeutic management that provides some possibility for protection, if not healing. Hewitt (l991) has described a case management strategy for handling these types of situations. In essence, it involves helping the child to develop a list of the kinds of touching that he or she does not like. The child then shares this list with each parent, in separate meetings, and each parent is asked, in the presence of the therapist, to agree to abide by it. Both parents are also asked to affirm to the child, in the presence of the therapist, the child‘s right to disclosure. This affirmation can serve as a protection, and as a warning, for the accused parent. If the parent has been wrongly accused, then the concreteness of the parameters can prevent further accusations. If, on the other hand, the parent has in fact molested the child, he or she cannot very well refuse to publicly affirm the child‘s right to tell other trusted adults. Protecting the Child‘s Relationships with Trusted Adults.

Finally, children who are caught in this shaming and confusing web of fear and suspicion may benefit from ongoing individual therapy. Aside from the obvious potential support to the child, the very fact of the child‘s treatment can have an impact on the conflicted parents. Specifically, both parents will know that a child in treatment is a child who is being continually assessed and who is in regular contact with a safe person in a private setting. If the abuse is nothing more than a false allegation, both parents may feel reassured by this knowledge. If abuse has occurred, the perpetrator‘s concern that the child will now disclose the facts in treatment may serve to limit further incidents. When therapy for the child is not practical or financially feasible, it can be especially important to facilitate the child‘s access to ongoing relationships with trusted adults such as grandparents, school counselors, neighbors, coaches, or a volunteer big brother or sister.

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School-age Children: The Struggle to Feel Lovable, Good, and Competent

5

In the ordinary way of things, the school-age child is focused on mastering a variety of physical, intellectual, and social challenges in the world beyond the family. Peer relationships, as well as relationships with adults other than parents, become vital anchors along the way. To a large extent the child’s progress depends upon the continuing support of his or her family and the strength of internal resources that have been achieved in preceding developmental stages. In particular, the well-functioning child draws on a steady sense of self-worth and trust. This foundation can help the schoolage child to tolerate learning from failure as well as from success. In addition, the child relies on an inner standard of right and wrong to guide his or her participation in the larger community. When these achievements are in place “the inner stage is set for entrance into life” (Erikson, 1950), and the

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child can use the grade-school years to braid together what has been identified as the essential component of enduring self-esteem: the capacity to feel lovable, good, and competent (Bibring, l961).

Basic Trust and the Capacity to Feel Lovable If the child’s earliest relationships have provided a predictable supply of empathic nurturing and support, he or she is likely to develop the basic trust that is rooted in a reasonably constant sense of being lovable. Basic trust will allow the child to turn to others without fear of becoming infantilized or disappointed when life’s demands threaten to undermine this sense of self-worth. When basic trust is in place, the school-age child will expect that adults—teachers, coaches, troop leaders, other parents—will provide the same kind of empathic support that his or her own parents have consistently provided. In fact, it is these very expectations that, in turn, tend to engage the adults’ support and affirm the child’s original trust.

The Growth of Relationships and Social Understanding When 7-year-old Rose was in second grade, her best friend was a popular, willful little girl named Gillian. Rose, who tended to form intense connections with one friend at a time, was devastated when Gillian began to pal around with two other girls, who were the “princesses” of grade three. Although Gillian still wanted to be her friend as well, Rose was too resentful for compromise. She was preoccupied with feeling sad and angry about Gillian’s betrayal and was disappointed when she tried to make new friends who did not seem to be nearly as much fun as Gillian. In her after-school program, Rose became noticeably bored and sometimes rude to the other children. After one such episode, she confided crabbily to a teacher, whom she had known since kindergarten, “No one’s fun like Gillian. I hate her…and I try to make new friends but nothing works…it’s not the same. Gillian felt like my family, my sister! No one else feels that way.”

Chapter 5: Struggle to Feel Lovable, Good, and Competent

At that point, the teacher wisely suggested that friends do not always feel like family. She told Rose, who played soccer, that friendships are like sport. They require practice and even coaching. After mulling over this new idea for a bit, Rose asked who could coach her. The teacher volunteered to do so when Rose was in the after-school program. She said, “When you start to get cranky or bossy with your playmates, I’ll remind you. We’ll have a signal. Pretty soon, you will have some new friends.” After several weeks of coaching, Rose told her teacher that she had invited Gillian and another friend to play at her house the day before. The teacher asked how things went and Rose replied, “It was good…I told my mom how to coach me and it really worked!” In this situation, Rose was not questioning whether she was lovable or good. Instead, she was irritated by the loss of what she felt entitled to. Her steady ability to hold onto a positive sense of herself helped her to tolerate feeling mad, sad, and disappointed. Because Rose could tolerate her own feelings and trust that others would also, she was able to reach out for help. In so doing, she found solutions which enhanced her competence.

Relationships and the Potential for New Mastery During the grade-school years, this type of learning about relationships is increasingly characterized by an emerging ability to see oneself from the point of view of another person (Selman, l980). This developmental shift allows children to see themselves more objectively and realistically and fuels their desires to become masters of their own feelings and behaviors. The preschooler, for example, may allow himself a good cry in the first few days of nursery school, whereas the first or second grader will bite her lip as she fights for control in front of her classmates. Similarly, older gradeschoolers strive for an increasingly “cool” and unfazed appearance. Because other people can now be understood to have their own point of view, they are seen less as an extension of the self and more as fully real and separate. Children understand with growing clarity that their actions affect other people and shape others’ perceptions of them. Naturally, school-age children are more self-conscious than ever before. Ten-year-old Charles, for example, had

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been swimming with a city team for over 2 years when his coach insisted that he enter a championship meet for the first time. Charles agreed, although he was both excited and nervous. When the coach asked him why he was so nervous, Charles answered querulously, “What if I just can’t finish a race? Everyone will make fun of me at practice after that…It’ll be so humiliating!” Charles’ concerns serve to highlight the growing self-consciousness of the schoolage child. This new awareness tends to redefine what it takes to feel lovable, which is often inextricably braided with what it takes to feel competent in the eyes of one’s peers. If Charles has enough inner resources and can trust his parents or his coach for help when he needs it, his selfconscious fears can fuel new mastery. He may practice very hard to avoid humiliation and succeed at the championship. In that case, he will encounter new capacities that preserve his sense of being lovable and competent. Alternatively, he may fail at the championship and learn (with support from those around him) that being lovable does not necessarily depend on being competent. Optimally, this realization will deepen his trust in relationships and diminish his fear of failure in the future.

When Basic Trust Fails and the Capacity to Feel Lovable is Tenuous For the youngster in an embattled divorced family, this type of progress through the grade-school years may be blocked as much by current conflicts as by compromised achievements in the preceding stages of development. If, for example, vulnerable parents were not able to be consistently and empathically responsive during the separation-individuation phase, the child will fail to completely internalize a steady and self-supporting sense of being lovable (see chapter 4). Lacking reliable inner resources, the child will continue to depend on emotional supplies that are unpredictably or only contingently available. A vulnerable parent may, for example, respond empathically only if she has access to some kind of emotional support herself. In this situation, the parent’s availability is likely to seem entirely unpredictable to the child because it depends on unseen processes within the parent. The child remains preoccupied with figuring out how to control the parent’s responsiveness because his or her survival


and sense of self depend on it. In other situations, a vulnerable parent may be contingently responsive, often when the child is gratifying in a particular way. If these patterns persist, the child’s sense of being lovable feels tenuous and hopelessly confused with being good. Being good becomes defined as being able to evoke the parental response that the child desperately needs. Being bad, on the other hand, might result in a terrifying loss of the parent’s physical or emotional presence, an abandonment.

The Child’s Defensive Fragmentation If early development has been disrupted in this way, the school-age child’s “inner stage” is not set “for entrance into life.” Instead, the child remains focused on the primary players in the first act (the parents) and the central question of whether he or she is lovable in their eyes. The child will unconsciously resolve the awful ambiguity of this question by developing unconscious rules and expectations for understanding, predicting, and controlling his or her own part in the scenario as well as those of the parents. Fundamentally, these rules and expectations evolve from the child’s efforts to identify which aspects of herself are lovable and therefore good and which aspects are unlovable and therefore bad. Often, the result is a profound sense of inner fragmentation which inhibits confident progress. Eight-year-old Karen, for example, had been the subject of her parents’ bitter and sometimes violent conflict since her age of 18 months. Now in third grade, this bright and verbal child described her sense of inner disconnection by explaining to her therapist that she had “good parts” to show to the world and “bad parts” that she could not show. When the therapist asked Karen what these different parts of herself were like, she carefully divided a piece of paper in half. On one side she made a list of perfect attributes, on the other a list of negations: “awesome” versus “totally dorky;” “popular…everybody loves me” versus “creepy…everybody hates me;” “smart” versus “retarded;” “beautiful” versus “really ugly.” Karen’s struggle with this shifting sense of whether or not she was lovable and good left her feeling acutely vulnerable to the judgment of others. A central question in every interaction was whether others would see the “good Karen” or the “bad Karen.”

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How the Child’s Defensive Fragmentation Undermines Relationships Developmentally vulnerable children, like Karen, seem to understand other people in equally simplistic terms. Elevenyear-old Wendy, for example, explained that she was really good friends with her classmate Margaret at the beginning of the school year. “She was really nice to me, we were like friends…but then she wouldn’t sit next to me at the assembly, and now I know she’s really mean…she fakes it when she feels like it.” Wendy could not explain what had gone wrong between herself and her classmate, nor was she willing to explore the topic. She dismissed Margaret and the relationship with a shrug, saying, “I don’t know. I thought she was like this really neat person, but she’s really a creep. Sometimes she’s nice now, but I know she’s a big liar.” Wendy was not interested in any further explanation or exploration of her disappointment. From her point of view, she had solved the problem. Like many of the school-age children in our project, Wendy seemed to have little capacity to tolerate fluctuations in her friend’s attitude or behavior. Instead, unable to bear the threat of abandonment that Margaret’s slight evoked, Wendy reverted to a scripted understanding of her friend’s behavior. She decided that her friend had simply shifted from being “a really neat person” to being “a creep.” This understanding was entirely consistent with Wendy’s unintegrated experiences of other people and of herself. Ironically, Wendy’s inability to stand the pain of her friend’s inconstancy (without an immediate flight to the comforting confines of her script) robbed her of the chance to learn new ways of understanding relationships.

How Defensive Fragmentation Undermines Social Understanding and New Mastery When children like Karen and Wendy fail to internalize a constant sense that they are lovable, they remain dependent on the reassurance and support of others to maintain a positive sense of themselves. Whenever that support is withdrawn, the child is left feeling unbearably unlovable, bad, and even nonexistent. Because of this, every interpersonal failure, from the mildest criticism to an imagined slight, tends to be experienced as a terrifying fall from grace.


Parents in conflicted divorced situations are often baffled by their grade-school child’s intense reactions to any type of confrontation or correction. Ten-year-old Karl’s father, for example, described how he had caught his son in a white lie and confronted him. He said, “Karl seemed to literally fall apart before my eyes…screaming and crying like I had accused him of murder! He totally denied it, like it couldn’t possibly have happened, as if what I knew was true couldn’t possibly have happened, had nothing to do with anything real…I just could not bring it up again!” Karl’s fears of being unlovable and abandoned made it impossible for him acknowledge the slightest thing about himself that might be “bad.” His flight into denial robbed him of the chance to learn more about how people really see him and how to handle criticism more competently.

The Capacity to Feel Like a Good Child In most families, children learn “being good” requires following rules of conduct that are upheld by both parents in a fairly predictable way. Children enjoy their parents’ approval and their own feelings of being “good” as they learn to use the rules to gain self-control. Typically, this kind of learning ordinarily peaks toward the end of the oedipal period when “being good” increasingly involves learning to contain the rise in erotic, aggressive, and possessive impulses that is characteristic of this stage. If both parents honor and enforce a mutually held and reasonable set of rules and expectations during this critical passage, the child will likely acquire a useful moral foundation that comes increasingly from within.

The Growth of Moral Understanding and behavior The school-age years mark a significant period in the child’s moral growth. It is during this time that the child’s motives for being good evolve beyond a wish to avoid punishment and toward a wish to preserve relationships (Gilligan, l982; Kohlberg, 1981): that is, to balance being good in the eyes of another as well of in the eyes of oneself. As children struggle to achieve this kind of reciprocity, their capacity for moral reasoning and action tends to become more subtle and less

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absolute. Ten-year-old Oliver, for example, spent an entire summer wrestling with the question of whether and how to stay best friends with his classmate Scott, who had punched him in a fit of temper on the last day of school. Scott told Oliver that he didn’t mean to hit him, so he should be forgiven. To Oliver, Scott’s intention did not matter one way or the other; he was still faced with a moral dilemma: how to be good according to his own uncompromising standards that dictated that you never hit a friend, and how to be good in the eyes of Scott who seemed to think that he was entitled to be forgiven just because he “didn’t mean to hit” Oliver. By the beginning of the next school year, however, his friendship with Scott was back on track. When his parents inquired, Oliver shrugged, saying, “Well, what I think is, he didn’t really mean it so I guess it wasn’t so bad. He just oughta control himself better.” In the course of his inner struggle, Oliver began to master the moral meaning of the difference between action and intent. As a result, his understanding of right and wrong became more flexible, complex, and realistic. Oliver was able to master these complexities, finally, because he was able to hold onto his affection for Scott in spite of his disappointment and confusion. It is this capacity to tolerate discomfort and ambivalence that can catalyze new maturity.

How Defensive Fragmentation Can Undermine Moral Growth When children cannot bear the natural ups and downs of friendship because they depend so completely on others to feel lovable and good, moral growth is sacrificed to the need for connection. When 10-year-old Leslie, for example, returned from a visit with her father and his girlfriend Teresa, she confessed to her mother that she had spent her pocket money on a birthday card for Teresa. When Leslie saw that this news made her mother furious, she quickly added that her father had spanked her when she did not want to buy the card, so she felt she had no choice. In reality, Leslie’s father was a passive man who never spanked his daughter; in fact, he had trouble getting her to do anything she didn’t want to do. In addition, Leslie enjoyed a close relationship with Teresa and preferred visits that included her. Still, in that moment of confrontation, nothing else mattered to Leslie except the need to soothe her


mother and restore the feelings of being lovable and good in her presence. All Leslie’s other loyalties slipped away. It is difficult for children to follow any kind of moral standard when the need to feel loved, on any terms, is paramount.

How Defensive Fragmentation Can Disrupt the Capacity for Empathy Sometimes, when children succeed at being “good” (by meeting the exacting demands of the powerful other), they seem to feel almost superhumanly perfect. At these times, all frailties that are experienced as “bad” (unworthy and unlovable) are split off from consciousness. Empathy, the essential moral fiber of human relationships, cannot develop in this defensive fragmentation. When, for example, 9-year-old James ordered his 4-year-old stepsister to walk four blocks with him to the grocery store, she went. When he then insisted that she walk home alone (because he had met a friend at the store), the child wept and begged him to accompany her. James refused and walked away without a backward glance. When James’ father learned about his, he was appalled by his son’s coldness. Later, James told his counselor with a shrug, “She’s a stupid wimp. I would never beg like that. She could go home alone. Big deal!” James’ harsh view came from the power he gained from feeling that he was “perfectly good” because he needed nothing. He unconsciously split off from any feelings of vulnerability or neediness that might undermine this state of perceived perfection. As a result, he was unable to identify or acknowledge these feelings in his young stepsister. He turned his back on her weeping in precisely the same way that he turned his back on his own pain because it was unbearable. This lack of fellow feeling stands in sharp contrast to the empathic powers of a typically developing school-age child. When 8-year-old Peter teased his little sister until she began to weep with helpless rage, he paused to notice that she was really distressed. Making a small crooning sound of comfort, he stooped and put his arms around her. Peter was able to perform this simple act of kindness because the part of himself that felt powerful was not achieved by disowning the part of himself that felt helpless. Even when he felt powerful, he could identify and empathize with his sister’s vulnerability. Moral sensibility and action rest on this essential recognition of the humanity of the other.

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How Parental Conflict Can Undermine Moral Growth The daily realities of the parental conflict may threaten the child’s capacity to hold, with any integrity, to a consistent standard of right and wrong, even if development has been reasonably steady until that time. This is because, in a high-conflict situation, each parent is likely to explain to the child that he or she (in contrast to the other parent) is on the side of the angels. In fact, these conflicting messages tend to become more overt as children reach school age because the parents tend to see the child’s growing awareness and rationality as a new capacity to make judgments about the other parent. The child now has the potential to become an informed ally in the conflict. Parents often say that they need to fully explain the other parent’s failings to their child in order to teach appropriate standards of right and wrong. This need for moral guidance, they say, now supersedes the child’s need for protection from the conflict. As one father explained, in a tone that was both self-righteous and bewildered, “My kid’s furious with me for pointing out bad things about her mom, but it’s time she learned. How else do I help her know right from wrong, now that she’s getting older? I’m like a mirror for both of them; they hear about their faults from me and they hate it, they prefer denial!” The child’s moral confusion is intensified when the parents’ pressure to take sides feels like an invitation to lie and to believe lies. Soon no one can be believed, not even oneself. For example, when 9-year-old Benjamin’s parents separated, he confided with unusual perceptiveness to a project counselor, “I don’t know, they say bad things about each other. I don’t know who to believe. My mom says Dad’s a cheat, and she thinks I’m just lying if I defend him. She thinks he put me up to it. Dad says Mom’s mean to me, when she’s not. Dad thinks I’m just scared of her if I defend my mom!”

The Child’s Capacity to Feel Competent When children can draw on a steady inner confidence that they are both lovable and good, and if they have the continuing support of their families, they can learn from the challenges of the school-age years without becoming overwhelmed. Ups and downs may bring discomfort, ambivalence, and even


temporary regression, but these setbacks can also catalyze new growth and competence in the classroom, in the neighborhood, and on the playing fields. When development is on track, this new mastery becomes the foundation for identity achievement in the future.

When the Child’s Developmental Resources Fail to Support Competence As described in chapters 3 and 4, many children in highconflict families have compromised their capacity for trust and autonomy. As a result, any further exploration of their competence in the world beyond the family is likely to induce considerable ambivalence. Although mastering concrete skills on the playground or in the classroom can provide relief from the uncertainties of relationships bringing a welcome new sense of control, for these children progress toward self-sufficiency may cause overwhelming anxiety about loss and abandonment. In some children, this ambivalence about their own competence is readily apparent. For example, 9-year-old Benjamin (described earlier) did very well in class at the beginning of each school year and then seemed to trail off in a cloud of forgetfulness and distraction. His teacher noted, “The more I praise him, the more likely it is that he’ll somehow forget or lose his homework the next day! I have never seen a kid so set against making it.” Benjamin himself was acutely conscious of these patterns in his behavior, though he did not understand them. He explained sadly to his therapist, “Every morning I get up and I say to myself, today’s gonna be a perfect day, no screw-ups…and every day I just don’t make it.” Other children, and girls in particular, manage their ambivalence by achieving competencies that they do not truly seem to own. Ten-year-old Leslie (also described earlier) had a sometimes rageful mother who longed for her daughter to be recognized as gifted and successful. Leslie received excellent grades at school, danced well in ballet recitals, and rarely misbehaved. When asked to make three wishes for herself at age 21, she said, “I want my mother to never leave me, and I want to be a physicist.” The resolution of her ambivalence was embedded in this strikingly polarized answer. While Leslie could plan to become a physicist and thus maintain

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the satisfying sense of control that mastery gave her, she had little sense that such achievements would lead to further autonomy. In fact, all Leslie’s achievements seemed to be in the service of maintaining the connection with her fragile and demanding mother rather than in the service of her own identity. There is an almost cardboard quality to the performances of pseudo-competent children like Leslie. Their achievements provide control and safety rather than vitality or joy. Their instrumental progress provides them with the capacity to work but not to love.

When the Parental Conflict Disrupts Competence Chronic intrusion of the parental conflict will tend to rob the child of familial as well as internal support. This is because parents who have become locked into battle position often have difficulty focusing on the concerns of their school-age child in any realistic way. Too often, any setback in the child is construed as a failure of the other parent. For example, when Karen (described earlier) was assigned to a program for gifted and talented students (on the basis of her outstanding test scores), she became overwhelmed by the amount of homework in her new classes. She frequently failed to turn in her assignments because she was ashamed if they were not completed on time. Karen’s father panicked at first, then blamed his ex-wife in a fit of rage. He said that she was not sufficiently supervising Karen’s homework because she was in this as in all things, “completely irresponsible.” Without further discussion, he concluded that the only solution was for him to sue for full custody of Karen. Although her father eventually calmed down, Karen had already been robbed of much needed guidance and support. Instead, she felt compelled to perform perfectly, without assistance, so as to prevent any further eruptions of her parents’ chronic conflict. School-age children become increasingly selfconscious about the lack of support in their families. They describe their experiences with phrases about feeling “torn in half,” “fought over by a couple of mean dogs,” and “being in the middle of a stupid tug-of-war.” Children seem to use these words to convey their anger and disappointment as well as the dawning suspicion that other children’s parents do not behave the way their own parents do. This kind of


embarrassment comes up in treatment groups when the participants generate lists of “feeling words” that consistently include descriptors such as “embarrassed,” “feeling weird about my family,” “scared to tell friends about what’s going on.” Similarly, children communicate a painful consciousness of their own fragmentation and loss of integrity when they describe themselves as “two-faced,” “weird,” “confused,” “withdrawn,” “sick,” “left-out,” and “like an alien.” Because these children feel ashamed of their own fragmentation and the lack of support in their families, they tend to avoid the kind of authentic contact with other people that might make new learning and mastery possible. A self-destructive pattern emerges as children substitute increasingly rigid defensive strategies that serve to maintain distance and the appearance of control, while undermining the kind of engagement with the demands of reality that would lead to new levels of competence and mastery.

Patterns of Defensive Fragmentation This profound sense of mistrust and alienation is not always identifiable in children who tend to excel at picking up cues about what is expected of them and can mask their own vulnerabilities as a matter of survival. Not surprisingly, observational checklists and cursory interviews often indicate that they are performing adequately in the classroom, in sports, or other areas of performance but fail to capture the fragile and layered quality of their competence. Their underlying vulnerability becomes apparent only when we attempt to initiate a treatment relationship or conduct a projective assessment. The Rorschach projective test proved to be particularly useful in our attempts to evaluate and understand this group of children because the unstructured nature of this particular test tends to bypass the characteristic defensiveness of these acutely self-conscious children. Second, the Rorschach is a comprehensive personality instrument that can provide information about the child’s psychological organization—that is, how internal processes work together to shape the child’s way of understanding and responding to the interpersonal world. Without good normative data, however, it is difficult to conclude the extent to which these patterns are indicators of pathology (Exner & Weiner, 1982; Hamel, Shaffer, & Edberg, 2000).

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The Sense of Self In most cases, school-age children in high-conflict families lack basic trust in themselves and other people and do not feel particularly viable or important in relationships. In addition to showing a markedly limited capacity for trust and positive self-esteem in their quantitative scores, the content of the children’s responses in projective tests communicates a fragile and fragmented sense of self. For example: “This looks like a line in the middle of a person, pulling it apart, looks like being ripped apart.” “This looks like two witches on top of a beast’s head, and the beast is on top of a fire and the beast’s head is splitting.” “A leaf, but cut off a little, as if cut in half.” Other responses suggested the child’s unconscious grief over the loss of the real and integrated self that is sacrificed to the demands of the parental conflict. For example: “Someone that was flattened, run-over, a cat.” “This one is of a rainbow being washed away by the morning breeze, ‘cos you can see the colors are dripping and melting away.” “a flower that is dying.”

Rules and Expectations About Relationships Additional findings indicated that by the time they reach school age (if not before) these children have consolidated a set of rules and expectations about relationships that protect, on the one hand, and isolate from corrective experience on the other. Specifically, these children tend to ignore intense or complex feelings and oversimplify their own and other people’s ideas to the point of distortion. There are indications that they harbor high levels of unexpressed anger, and that these are central among the feelings these children try to avoid. While this shutting-down process works to reduce experience to patterns that can be predicted and controlled, it also closes children off from vast amounts of interpersonal learning that ordinarily occur during the grade-school years. In almost half of the youngsters who were tested, their pervasive lack of basic trust, alienation from other people, and unexpressed anger accumulated to a level of clinically significant hypervigilance. That is, their psychological energy was devoted to vigilant scanning of interpersonal and intrapsychic experience. Their responses communicate the kind of dangers that might erupt in themselves or other people


without this ceaseless hypervigilance. For example: “A monster. Right here are eyes, and he’s really mad, eyebrows like this, and dots in eyes, his face, this is his mustache, my dad has a mustache.” “Look at this demon…two legs…his head…a big roaring mouth…two eyes and he has spikes on top of its head.” “Some kind of devil or a pirate with a big greedy mouth.” Furthermore, projective responses frequently contain benign figures that contain threatening elements and vice versa. These suggest a world in which the split-off “shadow side” of human experience intrudes with terrifying unpredictability. For example: “Two clowns clapping hands, and their heads just came off.” “Santa Claus, the hat, beard, nose, tummy, and this pirate sword.” “Frankenstein doing the splits.” Because they expect so little from others, these children seem to expect everything of themselves, inflexibly using their own thoughts and ideas as virtually their exclusive way of dealing with problems. Given the barren, almost mechanistic structure of their inner lives, this strategy is not likely to help these children to feel competent amongst their peers. The defensive rules and expectations that we infer from these Rorschach findings all serve to limit the child’s access to developmentally critical information. They lessen opportunities for talking through difficulties with other people, forestall engagement with new ideas and feelings, and ultimately restrict the child’s contact with his or her own internal life and the present reality of interpersonal events. Not surprisingly, these factors create an idiosyncratic world view. All the children of highly conflicted divorces that we assessed had unusual or frankly distorted perception and understanding of the interpersonal world which further fueled their vigilant mistrust and undermined their competence.

Patterns of Organized Fragmentation: Clinical Presentations These clinical observations and test results suggest that children in high-conflict families are robbed of the kind of flexible access to an expanding range of inner experiences and interpersonal relationships that would ordinarily support maturation during the school-age years. Instead, these vulnerable children seem to manage the fragmenting pressures

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of their parents’ conflict by developing increasingly inflexible and distorted patterns of understanding themselves and other people. In some children, these patterns become organized around a core nuclear script, or schema, in response to traumatic scenes of family violence and conflict (see chapter 2). In others, the patterns seem to provide ways of managing the more subtle and chronic stresses of family relationships that are inconsistent, contingent, and doublebinding. Whatever their source, these patterns seem to serve a common purpose: to limit nuance and complexity and to reduce experiences to black-and-white terms in which thoughts, feelings, and responses are rapidly screened and unconsciously classified as safe or dangerous. In general, whatever leads to feeling acknowledged, protected, or valued is safe, and whatever might lead to shame, loss, or abandonment is dangerous. Over time, the child’s way of being in the world becomes increasingly limited to patterns that feel safe, whereas experiences that feel too dangerous become more and more inaccessible. This kind of fragmenting defense provides the child with a sense of protection and control but at the cost of his or her capacity to be spontaneous, flexible, and, ultimately, real.

The ‘Happy-Happy Joy-Joy’ Mask Some children find safety in patterns that limit their own awareness or expression of any authentic aspects of themselves. These children do not seem to be fully present as they relate to other people. They appear, instead, to offer a kind of inflexible mask that screens them from any real contact. Some children maintain this kind of distance by pleasing and distracting with their smiling responses to the cues of others. In this presentation, any feelings of anger, sorrow, or opposition seem to have been erased from inner consciousness. Karen (described earlier), who had seen her father assault her mother on several occasions, provides a case in point. When she was first seen, her counselor noted, “She talked without stopping, as if silence or stillness would be intolerable…hugging me tightly at the interview saying, ‘I like you soooo much.” Karen’s frenetic efforts to please and entertain seemed to be her way of managing the terrifying inconsistencies that she described in the following story.


“This is the story of Little Red Riding Hood. She lives in a big, dark forest. Sometimes she lives with the beautiful, good fairy and sometimes she lives with the wolf. Sometimes the good fairy tells her, ‘You are so good and so smart and so beautiful and so everything I always wanted you to be.’ But some days Little Red Riding Hood forgot to bring the fairy fifty cents…then the fairy would yell and scream and say, ‘Get out of here and go to the stupid wolf! ’ and she would wander off into the dark forest and get to the wolf’s house. The wolf would say, ‘Oh you are so beautiful and good and sweet my little puff ball…’ but sometimes he would roar, ‘Where’s my meat?’ and Little Red Riding Hood forgot the meat, and she was scared so she ran off into the forest until she got to her secret box of clothes, and she put them on and turned back into a perfect princess.” Karen’s longing for a protective state of perfection was also reflected in a drawing that she completed during group work. The task was to draw a completely private room that contained anything that could be imagined. Karen’s room contained only a magical dress-up box that could turn her into a fairy princess whenever she wanted. Later, in treatment, Karen began to refer to her inflexible sprightliness as her “happy-happy joy-joy mask.” Children like Karen seem to consolidate this kind of artificial exterior when their experience of love and protection in primary relationships has been fundamentally unpredictable. As a result, they need to feel completely in control of themselves and their contact with others in order to feel real, protected, lovable, and good. In Karen’s case, these feelings depended on an appearance of perfect responsiveness.

The Facade of Remote Self-Control Other children achieve a kind of safety by refusing to be drawn into any interaction that might jar their self-control. In this presentation, spontaneity is cut off and replaced with a kind of impenetrable remoteness that serves to mask the underlying vulnerability. For example, when Leslie (described earlier) was first seen, she marched, silent and unsmiling, into the counselor’s office where she sat down in the counselor’s chair. She spoke very little and answered all direct questions with a shrug. After some coaxing, she approached the sandtray. In her first play, a baby dinosaur

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repeatedly teamed up with “its mother” to bury a third dinosaur “who was always trying to butt in and play with the baby.” When asked if the third dinosaur belonged with the first two, Leslie said, “The baby’s not sure, but the mother comes and fights it off.” Leslie then anxiously dug out the buried dinosaur and began the play again. She masked her worries and ambivalence with an appearance of solemn, almost mechanical, self-control. This outward presentation did not shift for many months. During the intervening period, Leslie seemed to hover at an invisible interpersonal boundary. That is, she was physically in the room but was emotionally unavailable. She spent hours sifting sand with her back to the counselor but checking periodically to see if the counselor was still watching. Later, she would write messages in the sand and then challenge the counselor to decipher them. She responded to the counselor’s inevitable failures with the resigned disappointment of a tired adult. In this way, Leslie managed to communicate how she felt as she repeatedly failed to solve the endless puzzle of her parents’ paradoxical demands. In this defensive configuration, Leslie did not acknowledge her confusion or her helplessness in the face of her parents’ conflict. These feelings were split off from her conscious awareness because they were unbearable. Instead, she presented as being fully in control, both rejecting and bored, while she induced feelings of helplessness and confusion in her counselor. It was the counselor who described session after session of feeling immobilized, distant, unable to figure out what was going on, and cut off from any possibility of connecting with Leslie. After an arduous number of these numbing sessions, the counselor began to talk to Leslie about the feelings that seemed “so big for you that they floated out for me [the counselor] to catch.” Leslie at first resisted, then slowly began to tolerate this gentle but persistent acknowledgment. When this kind of tolerance develops (and there is no substitute for time and patience here), real contact in the treatment relationship may become possible. Both Karen and Leslie achieved a measure of safety and distance by presenting a pleasing or controlled facade. This kind of presentation is consistent with girls’ defensive tendencies to avoid separation and definition in high-conflict families. It also fits well with the kind of social expectations


that confront girls in their school-age years, and it provides the appearance of ‘fitting in.’ In projective play, however, the underlying constriction is often represented as a kind of death.

Intermittent Explosiveness Boys in high-conflict families often have a more difficult time organizing themselves quite so neatly. Areas of safety and danger seem to be more amorphous for them and less easily defined. Nine-year-old Kurt’s mother, for example, described him as “trying very hard to take his dad’s place. He helps me out with the kids, he’s incredibly sweet…then he gets mouthy and goes into these tantrums like you would not believe…and I don’t know what to do with him then.” His parents’ divorce and bitter conflict had robbed Kurt of any regular contact with the father whom he loved and blindly admired. He was furious with his father for leaving and with his mother for banishing him. He could not acknowledge his anger toward his father for fear of hurting him. Nor did he feel safe expressing his anger toward his mother because he knew that she was his only real support in the world. At the same time, he could not relinquish these feelings. First of all, the anger was a tolerable way to mask his underlying pain and to set a boundary between himself and his mother. As Kurt’s mother said, “He shows only the anger, not the hurt.” The anger also represented a way for Kurt to maintain a kind of connection with his often explosive father. For Kurt, it was not clear which felt more dangerous, having or not having anger. Because of his ambivalence, Kurt could not split off these feelings with any consistency. Kurt’s teacher described him as “a really nice kid…but he has a lot of anger that often comes out inappropriately. He gets berserk…out of control…the other kids back away. It happens at least once a week. After the tantrum he won’t communicate, he gets rigid and furious…he’ll try to leave if I let him. He’s trying very, very hard not to let people know him. It’s like he’s scared about some part of himself that people shouldn’t find out.” In an early session with his counselor, Kurt used a drawing to communicate the panic and despair he felt as he tried and failed to split off his anger. In the drawing, he outlined a bomb with a black center. Above the bomb he

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wrote the words “I’m afraid I’m going to explode.” When his counselor asked what other feelings might be in the bomb, Kurt pointed to the black center saying, “I don’t know, they’re all in that middle.” Kurt’s unsuccessful struggle for control, so central to a school-age child, was seriously undermining his sense of being lovable, good, and competent. He made this clear one day when he wrote over and over on his homework, “I HATE ME…I HATE ME.”

A Polarized Presentation: From Alignment to Alienation Some school-age children, particularly as they move toward adolescence, seem to achieve a sense of safety and predictability by dividing themselves and their parents into polar opposites. In this presentation, the child identifies one parent as “perfectly good” and feels and behaves like a responsive, loyal, and “perfectly good” child in that parent’s presence. The other parent is identified as “perfectly bad,” and the child with that parent is as unresponsive, oppositional, and dissatisfied as he or she is good with the other. In younger children, this organization can be quite fluid as the child finds safety and comfort in experiencing whichever parent they are with at the moment (and themselves with that parent) as perfectly good. The absent parent (and the self with that parent) then becomes perfectly bad. Over time, however, this pattern tends to consolidate so that one parent is consistently identified as “good” and the other as “bad.” The identified “good parent” tends to be the one who is most gratified and responsive to the “perfectly good” presentation in the child. In this way the emotional supports that the child desperately needs become most predictably available. For school-age children, this compartmentalized distortion of themselves and their relationships can be particularly compelling. It resolves the uncomfortable ambivalence that develops with the child’s maturing capacity to understand both sides of the conflict and thereby obtain relief from the parents’ increasing pressure to align. The interpersonal world begins to make sense and the child feels less anxious. The following case traces the evolution of this kind of pattern from early ambivalence through consolidation, into parental alienation.


The D Family Eight-year-old Belinda D was first seen in the highconflict project approximately 1 year after her parents had separated. At that time, she described a world that was both bleak and chaotic. In the sandtray, she set up a scene in which her parents were off in separate corners “fighting on the phone” while her father’s new lover, Miriam, was taking care of her own two children as well as Belinda. “Everyone’s crying. I’m trying to talk to someone about my homework… no one can help!” At this point, Belinda introduced a dinosaur who ate all the children and threatened her father’s girlfriend. Belinda had her father attempt a rescue, but he saved only Miriam. When asked for an ending to this story, Belinda said, “Everybody died where they were—frozen in death like when Vesuvius exploded, only not hot lava, poison air.” The sense one got was of Belinda’s overwhelming vulnerability in a situation where invisible and uncontrollable dangers pervaded the atmosphere like “poison air.” Even her father, who had always cast himself in the role of rescuer, was focused elsewhere. Mr. D, who was a highly narcissistic man, was unaware of his daughter’s disappointment in him. He continued to believe that he was a kind of healing force for his child, in the same way that he had once been for his former wife, whom he believed was sadly inadequate. Mrs. D in her interview described how it felt to be seen as damaged and in need of perpetual rescue: “I was so confused because I was so angry and yet I had this ‘wonderful husband’ who was also a ‘wonderful father’…I felt like a terrible mother…I wasn’t happy, and I was emotionally and physically unavailable to Belinda.” Eventually Mrs. D concluded that her options were either suicide or divorce. She chose divorce, but felt so guilty and undeserving that she left Belinda in the family home in the primary care of her father. After some months had passed, Mr. D met Miriam and reconstituted a blended family with Belinda and Miriam’s two children. Mrs. D, who was also beginning to establish a separate life, began asking for more time with Belinda. The family came to the project at this point because neither parent could agree on a schedule and the situation had become chaotic.

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Quite early in the process it became clear that each parent had very different views of Belinda. Their views were dictated less by who their daughter really was than by their conflict. Mr. D frequently confused Belinda with her mother and tended to see them both as emotionally disturbed. He said, “Belinda could hardly relate to kids in her school when she was little. Even now she’ll do anything for attention, including crawling in the garden and eating worms. She can’t pay attention to the details of her life…she says she’s stupid…terrible…wants to run away from both of us!” By focusing on Belinda’s difficulties, Mr. D could continue to see her as the victim of his wife’s damage and himself as the hero who was needed to rescue her. In contrast, Mrs. D could not acknowledge any difficulties in Belinda. She felt that doing so represented an intolerable capitulation to Mr. D’s view of her poor mothering. She said, “Sometimes she’s rude and naughty but basically she’s fine. She’s average. All the teachers say they’re all just normal kids in her class.” For Belinda, her parent’s increasingly polarized views meant that with her mother she felt more real and understood, when she was “good”; and with her father, she felt more real and understood when she was “bad.” After 2 months in the project, the situation took a dramatic turn. Mrs. D attempted suicide and was hospitalized for several weeks. Mr. D disclosed the suicide attempt to Belinda because he felt that “she really needs to understand about her mother at this point.” The terror of losing her fragile connection with her mother was intolerable for this child. Belinda responded with a relatively swift consolidation of her previously shifting allegiances. While she had appeared confused and even dazed before this, now she became increasingly polarized in her behavior and her perceptions of each parent. Mr. D described these changes: “Now she gets very distant before she goes to visit her mother; she pulls away from me, gets ruder, defiant, just like her mother. It hurts me…she says she wants to be with her mother all the time now.” Note that Belinda had rejected any semblance of closeness to her father. In this way, Belinda’s world continued to make sense and her allegiance to her mother remained intact. This increasingly merged alliance seemed to gather strength as mother and daughter shared a fused and distorted perception of the “bad” father. The mother said, “Belinda and I had a conversation the other day where we were comparing experiences with her father…you know…


that he’s sweet and nice with other people, but as soon as she’s alone with him he’ll talk in a low voice and say mean things. She doesn’t think he really loves her…he’s all over her, but he doesn’t really care about her…it’s so familiar!” After 6 months, Belinda’s behavior at her father’s house had deteriorated so dramatically that Mr. D and Miriam agreed that the custody arrangement should be reversed. Belinda would now spend most of her time with her mother and visit her father on alternate weekends. According to the mother, Belinda’s misbehavior at her father’s house was an understandable response to his controlling personality. She said that Belinda was always good at her house. Belinda agreed. “I’m good at my mom’s…she’s totally great…life would be perfect if I never had to see HIM [meaning her father to whom she now referred to by his first name] again.” Over the next 2 years, Belinda’s alliance with her mother and rejection of her father became more and more entrenched. Mr. D insisted that Belinda needed to be in treatment, but Mrs. D refused. She felt this was an all too familiar repetition of his tendency to see pathology in everyone around him. By age 12, Belinda was refusing all contact with her father, and he was describing himself as a victim of parental alienation.

Implications for Intervention Perhaps the most disturbing feature in these defensive patterns is the degree to which the child actively, if unconsciously, distorts his or her own experience in order to achieve a measure of safety and predictability. Over time, these distortions define the child’s reality, define the self. Without intervention, these children are at significant risk for developing entrenched character pathology. In this section, we focus on the need to develop custody and access schedules that protect the child’s involvement in age-appropriate activities and limit the intrusion of conflict into his or her concerns. Individual and group treatment strategies for this age group will be discussed in chapter 10.

Psychological Test Results as Leverage Conflicted parents often have a hard time recognizing vulnerability in their school-age children who tend to mask

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their underlying difficulties quite convincingly. Psychological testing that can sensitively identify developmental lags and distortions in demonstrably objective terms can be a useful way to heighten parents’ understanding and concern. Test scores can be treated as findings the evaluator shares with the parents in addition to clinical impressions which are all too easily perceived as judgments. As a result, the tone of the discussions tends to be less defensive and parents can focus clearly on their child’s needs. This therapeutic use of testing to gain leverage on the child’s behalf can be incorporated into a range of case management strategies. For example, when the parents of 11year-old John reached an impasse in their mediation, the mediator asked to have the child evaluated by another psychologist. The mediator explained that the evaluation would help them to define a child-focused direction in their work. When the evaluator completed her testing, she reviewed her findings with each parent and with the mediator, noting in particular that John’s scores differed significantly from those of a typically developing 11-year-old. Once this information was available, the mediator openly revealed to the parents how worried she was about John’s prognosis. This blend of objective data from the evaluator and real concern from the mediator helped the parents to accept that their son was really suffering because of their conflict. Their consciousness of his pain motivated them to work toward a highly detailed schedule that protected John’s commitments as well as each parent’s time with him. The schedule served as a baseline to follow when the parents were generally failing to cooperate or could not agree on a particular visitation issue.

Using the Schedule to Buffer the Child During the school-age years, the child increasingly focuses his or her interests and concerns outside of the family sphere. It is in the world of his or her peers that the child practices independence and gains competence in the process. When parental conflict consistently intrudes, the child is preoccupied instead with the burden of practical concerns, such as whether and how the parents’ fighting will disrupt the orderly conduct of his or her own academic and social affairs. Some children, like Belinda D for example, struggle with chaotic schedules which make it impossible for them


to know with any certainty which home they will be in and for what period of time. This uncertainty makes it difficult to organize homework, make plans with friends, or attend sports and other extracurricular activities with any consistency. Other children have more predictable schedules that change precipitously whenever the parents disagree or make agreements without considering the child’s agenda. Many live with chronic uncertainty about where they will live and which school they will attend because their parents, like those of Leslie, are continually contesting these very issues. Such family circumstances feel more like quicksand, pulling the child back, than a safety net enabling the child to go confidently forward.

A Structured Schedule In these situations, a structured schedule that takes into account mother’s time, father’s time, and the child’s time can be an important and practical way of protecting the child’s involvement in age-appropriate matters. This is particularly true when the child has been able to find relationships or activities outside the family that enhance his or her sense of competence in the world. The school-age child’s involvement with these types of naturally occurring supports can be as valuable as psychotherapy. Clearly, the schedule should serve to protect that involvement as much as possible. A structured schedule in which the child’s time with each parent is relatively uninterrupted also works with children’s own defensive tendencies to keep their experiences with each parent separate. In general, such schedules work best when they contain a high level of detail and provide uninterrupted blocks of time that limit transitions between parents. These schedules need not limit the parents’ ability to cooperate flexibly and responsively. Rather, they provide specific guidelines that can be used as a back-up plan when parents fail to agree.

Specificity in the Agreement or Court Order These kinds of stabilizing agreements or court orders often require a level of structure and specificity that may be difficult for mental health professionals, attorneys, and judges to anticipate or accept. This can be particularly problematic

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in court. Some judges insist that so much detail and specificity is inappropriate, a kind of babying of parents who should “grow up” and start cooperating. When this happens, orders may be issued that require precisely the kind of negotiation that broke down prior to litigation and necessitated the order in the first place. In one such case, for example, two bitterly conflicted parents were seen in the high-conflict project because they could not cooperate on clauses in their order that stated that holiday rotations were “to be agreed upon between the parents.” This order had been issued after 2 years of failed mediation and three prior hearings regarding scheduling disagreements. In such cases as this, specificity in the order or agreement can reduce the likelihood of misinterpretation, disagreement, and further conflict. Weekend and holiday visitation periods require precise definition, as do rotations from year to year and conditions for transfer of the child, as in the following example: “Christmas vacation shall be divided such that during odd years the child is with his mother from the time of release from school for that holiday (at the time specified by the school calendar) until 8 p.m. on December 24th, Christmas Eve. The child shall then be with his father from 8 p.m. on December 24th, Christmas Eve, until his return to school at the end of that holiday (at the time specified by the school calendar). This schedule shall be exactly reversed during even years. Transfer of the child at 8 p.m. on December 24th shall occur by means of mother transporting the child to the home of the paternal grandparent at that time. If this transfer site is not available, father shall notify mother no later than noon on December 23rd, and father shall then pick the child up from the mother’s home at 8 p.m. on December 24th instead.” This kind of detail requires a significant level of parent involvement before any agreement or court order can be finalized. Opportunities for this kind of input are often denied, particularly when court orders are imposed. However, failure to allow for this kind of forethought can result in further disputes that are time consuming, costly, and damaging to the child. In such situations, judges may request that parents or their attorneys submit highly


detailed proposals in writing. These could be reviewed in status conferences prior to the hearing. Alternatively, the judge may request additional mediation or evaluation for the sole purpose of obtaining very specific recommendations regarding the kind of schedule that would fit the realities of the individual family. This labor-intensive approach in mediation and arbitration as well as in court can maximize the potential for parental compliance and reduce the potential for conflict in the future.

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Adolescents: Toward Resolution or Stalemate

6

Risks to young adolescents in high-conflict families center around several themes that recapitulate strains and distortions from earlier stages. These take on special significance because of the unique developmental tasks of adolescence. Specifically, these several tasks include separating from a primary parent; forming a positive and stable sense of self; affirming one’s gender and sexuality; feeling capable, autonomous, and trusting in work and play with peers; and establishing an internal sense of right and wrong. These renewed struggles can make for particularly tumultuous and painful early teenage years for these young persons and their highly conflicted families. Adolescence, however, affords some important opportunities. Precisely because this phase of development usually revisits earlier psychological conflicts, it provides these young people with the

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opportunity to achieve a new level of resolution, as well as psychological and physical emancipation from their enmeshed, conflicted families.

Deviations from Normative Development Emotional Lability In order to provide a context for understanding the experience of the subgroup of older boys and girls in highly conflicted divorced families, it is important to be reminded of what is expectable and normal about early adolescent development (Buchanan, Maccoby, & Dornbusch, 1996; Hauser, 1991; Schave & Schave, 1989). The adolescent years are not easy under the best of circumstances. Quantum changes are taking place internally and externally at this time. Physically, there are growth spurts and the maturation of secondary sex characteristics which make coming to terms with one’s own self-image all the more compelling. Concomitant increases in sexual and aggressive energies fuel the young person’s emotional life, making him or her feel even more anxious and out of control. Emotional lability—erratic periods of excitement alternating with feelings of agitation and depression—is relatively common (Blos, 1970; Freud, 1958). The presence of consistent, emotionally well-modulated parents and other adults who can be empathic and accepting of the youngster’s tumultuous feeling states but constrain inappropriate acting-out is important. Unfortunately, these are not the ego-models available in high-conflict families where parents are absorbed in their own cycles of rage and depression. Alternately, these vulnerable parents may have such permeable emotional boundaries with their youngsters that they can easily become caught up with and resonate with the youngster’s emotional distress in an increasing crescendo that feels frighteningly out of control to both parent and child.

Adolescence as a Second SeparationIndividuation Phase It is developmentally expectable that young adolescents will begin to pull away from those persons to whom they were primarily attached; in fact, they can often become unexpectedly

Chapter 6: Adolescents: Toward Resolution or Stalemate

hurtful and critical toward parents who were once unconditionally loved and uncritically valued. Normally, this distancing is halting and ambivalent. Moments of critical disdain can mingle with unusual insight, compassion, and maturity, which, in turn, can give way to behavior that is quite childish and dependent. Intrapsychically, the internal representations of the adolescent’s beloved parents and other important caregivers are being fundamentally altered in a process that has been called “the second individuation phase,” reminiscent of the 2-year-old toddler who practices separating physically and psychologically from his or her primary parent (Blos, 1967, 1970; Esman, 1980; Kroger, 1989). Unlike the earlier phase of separation-individuation, however, the adolescent process is intimately related to moral development because it involves a de-idealization of the parent as guide and mentor in the service of achieving autonomy. As adolescents de-idealize their parents and become more emotionally disengaged, there is typically a loss of some superego control as the youngster becomes temporarily less influenced and grounded by parents’ approval and censure. Consequently, uncharacteristic misbehavior and minor delinquencies can occur. Parents typically need a great deal of self-confidence and support from one another if they are to weather the storm of assaults that normal adolescents make on their self-esteem, judgment, and authority. Clear expectations, firm, consistent limits, and appropriate monitoring of the young person’s whereabouts and behavior are important to sustain during this time. Young adolescents are particularly stabilized by the ability of parents to cooperate and provide a united front in their care and guidance. This kind of environment is not available in highly conflictual families where parents disrespect and denigrate one another. As a consequence of divided parental authority and the competition for the youngster’s affection and allegiance, an adolescent can easily dismiss one or both of their disputing parents or manipulate them both to obtain special privileges and avoid responsibility. Moreover, because disputing parents are not able to communicate and coordinate with one another, monitoring the whereabouts of the elusive, young teenager becomes almost impossible. It is not uncommon in high-conflict divorced families for young teenagers to precipitously reject or be rejected from the household of one

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parent as a consequence of fairly normal adolescent challenges to parental authority. This often happens when the acting-out becomes linked to the ongoing parental conflict. Of course, they are usually welcomed with open arms by the other parent who is highly gratified by their defection from what is perceived to be “the enemy camp.” In the ensuing struggle, the internal images of one or both parents are precipitously de-idealized, leaving the youngster without moorings. In this way, parents undermine not only each other’s authority and status as an ego ideal but the adolescent’s perception of what is fair, expectable, and responsible conduct as well. Hence conscience development is further eroded, and delinquent behavior may consolidate. The case of Jason described later illustrates this problem. The costs of separating from a primary parent and becoming psychologically autonomous are too great for some young adolescents, and they do not dare attempt the enterprise. This is especially true for those youngsters who have lived at the center of the marital battle for many years, as well as for those who have assumed the burden of sustaining an embittered, depressed, and emotionally dependent parent in the fight with the ex-spouse or with the world in general. As described earlier (chapters 3 and 4), the central developmental threat for very young children of high-conflict divorce is their difficulty separating from and inability to differentiate themselves from their primary caregivers. Now, during adolescence this critical developmental task is revisited with renewed urgency and meaning. In this respect, these adolescents are challenged to do what they are least equipped to do. Thus, this recapitulation of developmental conflicts provides both the opportunity for resolution and the threat of stalemate.

Sexual Anxieties and Oedipal Conflicts Revisited The vulnerable child’s basic fears associated with being separate and autonomous from a parent—fears of being abandoned, annihilated, disappearing from view, and being bad— are compounded by the reactivation of oedipal issues during adolescence. The young adolescent girl within an entrenched custody battle with newly awakened awareness of her sexuality will find it hazardous to use her father as a stepping


stone as she tries to extricate herself from an enmeshed relationship with her mother. This is especially true if there is no stepmother or woman friend who will dilute her father’s emotional investment in her and even more so if the father has a poor sense of appropriate boundaries with his daughter. Visits with the father become rife with situations that generate sexual anxiety: coping with the onset of her menstruation at her father’s home; sleeping, bathing, and sharing space in his small apartment; even going out with him to the movies or dinner. Receiving her father’s affection, time, and attention is highly gratifying, but also seductive, and can result in an alarming sense of discomfort. Feelings of anxiety can increase to overwhelming proportions when the young adolescent girl returns home to her mother who in these situations is perceived to be the rejected and scorned “previous lover” of her father. Unconsciously sensing her mother’s jealousy and fearing retribution, the daughter may seek to appease her by every possible means, including regressive dependency, somatic symptoms, defensive denial of her own femininity, or even refusal to subsequently separate from her mother to visit her father. Other young “oedipal victors”, less intimidated by the mother, will come home as an emissary of their father and fight with their mothers. The young adolescent boy’s burgeoning sexual impulses more typically propel him to take some refuge in his father at this time as a defense against the threat of a sexualized relationship with his mother. Unfortunately, this move involves considerable costs for those in divorced families that are fractured by ongoing disputes over custody. Although many of these mothers seem to have more understanding and acceptance of the boy’s need for the father (more than they do the girl’s need for her father), the boy’s defection to his father often results in the withdrawal of some of the loving support and allegiance of his mother. Stung by the loss, these boys can become depressed and alternately angry, challenging, and attention-demanding of their mothers. They, too, are prone to return to their mothers, after visiting the father, defensively swaggering and espousing the father’s cause. Alternatively, for a minority of these boys, the regressive pull to the mother can be too strong, sometimes because the father is too critical or emotionally disengaged, or has been thoroughly denigrated by the mother; the youngster then may not be able to separate from her to go on visits at all. In these

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cases, adolescent boys can experience considerable anxiety about their oedipal victory and defensively avoid asserting their masculinity.

Experimenting With Personas and Ego Diffusion In the normal course of development, disengagement and distancing from primary caregivers allow the young person to reorganize and reintegrate his or her images of parents and significant others at a moderate pace. In this process, the adolescent also reworks his or her own self-image, forging a unique identity gradually over the teenage years. In the early stages these adolescents identify with a series of other people or images (role models and mentors), “trying on” other personalities (like that of a pop star or sports hero) and acting “as if” they were someone else (perhaps an attractive peer). Ego diffusion and loss of a bounded sense of self are normal developmental threats at this stage (Blos, 1970; Erikson, 1950). It is reassuring and stabilizing for the young adolescent if his or her family can be relatively tolerant and consistently responsive during this experimentation phase. Parents locked in battle with each other, however, are usually hypersensitive and overreactive to their young teenager’s posturing. Feeling threatened as to how their child’s behavior might reflect on them, parents will project blame onto the other spouse: “You’re behaving like the twit your mother is!” a father will declare; or a mother will shrug helplessly, “What can I do, when his father encourages him to go around dressed like a punk!” Moreover, as illustrated in chapter 5, children of entrenched disputes are likely to have entered adolescence with a fragmented sense of self. For example, they can feel and behave, alternately, perfectly good and terribly bad; present a pleasing, compliant mask to others and defensively hide from their authentic feelings and perceptions; manage their interpersonal world by posturing in a defiant, angry manner or withdraw within a constricted, inscrutable stance. These fragmented selves continue to be reinforced by the manner in which parents relate to them in their separate homes. In these cases, the expectable ego diffusion, which is a minor digression from the quest for identity, is so threatening that


young adolescents may defensively stall and become arrested in their emotional development. Alternatively, they can become increasingly fragmented in their emotions and behavior. Symptomatically, they resemble borderline adolescents (Esman, 1989; Miller, 1978). It is not known to what extent these manifest difficulties foreshadow longstanding personality disorders. Extended follow-up studies of these youngsters into adulthood are very much needed (Masterson & Costello, 1980).

Perceptual and Judgmental Deficits It is developmentally expectable for the young adolescent to display thinking patterns that are somewhat illogical (Elkind, 1967). First, young adolescents are typically egocentric and preoccupied with the belief, usually unfounded, that they are the primary object of other people’s critical attention. This has been called the “imaginary audience” phenomenon and helps explain why they are so acutely self-conscious and easily mortified. Second, young adolescents have a tendency to construct fables about themselves with themes that stress their personal uniqueness, omnipotence, and invulnerability. They are inclined to believe that “no one else feels the way I do,” “I’m never allowed to do anything,” “It won’t happen to me,” and “I can do anything I want.” Called “personal fables,” these beliefs may allow them to take risks and act in other ways that indicate poor judgment. Interestingly, these characteristically adolescent ways of thinking probably help the young person in the process of negotiating their separateness and connectedness to other important people as they sort out who they are and what kind of person they want to be (Lapsley, 1993). Imagining how other people might perceive one (the imaginary audience) allows the teenager to experiment with relationships, while maintaining some distance and assimilating the emotional experience of being with peers and others in manageable doses. Similarly, poignant states of feeling unique and invulnerable (the personal fable) allow the young person to protect the integrity and boundaries of his or her fragile, emerging sense of self against the intrusions and demands of others. In the ordinary course of events, the faulty perceptions that can result from these kinds of attributional and judgmental biases are moderated when the young adolescent

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shares his thoughts and feelings with trusted others— especially friends. A shared view of the world that is more grounded in reality gradually emerges. As discussed in previous chapters, however, many children from families where there is ongoing conflict and intermittent violence have difficulty forming trusting, authentic connections with their peers. They feel increasingly like aliens during the acutely heightened self-consciousness of adolescence. In fact, they can feel not just foreign but peculiar, a mutant. In defense, some entertain grandiose beliefs about their own special capabilities and dismiss or diminish those of others. Hypervigilant, self-protective, and often harboring a “hostile world view,” they do not turn to others to help solve problems but instead rely upon themselves. This means that their distorted perceptions are not temporary developmental phenomena that become increasingly more realistic by helpful exchanges with close confidants. Instead, they become consolidated as invariant ways of understanding themselves and the interpersonal world.

Diminished Capacity to Relate to Peers It is well known that peers assume a great deal of importance in the normal course of adolescent development (Jordan, 1993). In fact, the peer group can function as a “transitional family” as ties are loosened with the family of origin. It is expectable that during early adolescence the choice of friends and role models tends to be somewhat self-serving, and relationships tend to be held together by projections of young persons’ separate, individual needs rather than by mutuality. In this sense, peers at this age are seen as extensions of oneself (“self-objects”) as parents once were and also serve as a way-point to more autonomous psychological functioning (Blos, 1970). Peers, especially same-sex peers, typically provide social support, protection, and anonymity within the crowd. During the middle-school years, friends, especially those of the opposite sex, may be chosen for how they reflect on one’s status and the adolescent fantasies they help create. It is expectable that during early adolescence friendships tend to be relatively shallow and lacking in constancy. In the normal course of development, it is often not until the middle or later teenage years that friendships deepen, and mutuality


and intimacy become possible. It takes a considerably longer passage of time for most normal young men and women to integrate sexuality and tenderness within a respectful and caring relationship. Unfortunately, many of the adolescents who have experienced chronic family conflict do not have the basic interpersonal tools to begin to meet the challenge of these formidable tasks. During the junior high-school years some of these youngsters withdraw into a lonely, passively observing stance at school and on the playground. Isolated from significant relationships that could repair their deeply embedded distrust and sense of shame, they are vulnerable to painful loneliness or even depression. Interestingly, some of them, especially the girls, invest themselves in their academic work. These achievements represent a refuge from their feelings and the need to relate to others. In this respect, they are often perceived to be progressing well. No one seems to notice that they eat lunch alone, escape to the library during recess, or hang at the perimeter of the group where they are neither seen nor avoided. Their isolation cuts off access to the vitally important adolescent peer culture of relationships and seems to leave many of them in some kind of “never-never” land, suspended between childhood and adulthood with no passage from one to the other. The case of Susan described later in this chapter will illustrate this kind of adolescent dilemma together with treatment issues. More likely to be noticed are those more “out of control” youngsters who act out fragmented, aggressive, and sexual aspects of themselves and others in ways that briefly focus the attention and admiration of their less adventurous peers. This subgroup seems to exaggerate all aspects of early adolescence. In school and on the street they are rowdy, unruly, gross, exhibitionistic, sadistic, and volatile. During earlier years these particular children may have been scapegoated or ignored by their classmates; now they are highly gratified by the amused envy of their peers for their “cool” and daring escapades. This might even ensure them a negative leadership role. They are inclined to take serious risks involving drugs, alcohol, and sexually promiscuous behavior. Unless they get some help, these young people may not progress to more mature peer relationships. Rather, they become caught in the whirlpool of an exaggerated early adolescence where relationships remain utilitarian and exploitative, alternately

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victimizing and victimized. Sexual and aggressive impulses in the service of self-soothing and self-protection remain split off and unmodulated by loving, tender feelings. Mutually satisfying relationships in which others are experienced as separate persons in their own right are more difficult to develop. The case of Jason described later in this chapter will illustrate this kind of problem together with case management and family therapy issues that often arise.

Evolving Cognitive Capacity to Achieve Distance From Family Conflict In the normal course of development, the wonderful and exciting project of creating a unique self and exploring relationships with others, especially peers, is helped during mid-adolescence by the evolving capacity to think and reason in abstract ways about a variety of hypothetical alternatives (“formal operational thought”). Introspection becomes more common as the teenager is able to think and reason about relationships from a third-person perspective. He or she is able to simultaneously hold a subjective point of view while coordinating other points of view. At the same time, the adolescent begins to apprehend the psychological attributes of other people, including personality dispositions that are more manifest and motivations that are more hidden (Piaget, 1979; Selman, 1980). Now having the capacity to recognize multiple perspectives, they are better able to understand more complex social interactions. Their cognitive advances enable them to achieve a more critical distance from their friends and family (Gordon, 1988). Provided they are not too harshly driven by the press of their emotional needs, teenagers from enmeshed, conflicting families can draw upon these cognitive capacities to help them gain more perspective and independence, which, in turn, can provide considerable emotional relief. For this reason, the older, intellectually advanced teenagers more clearly benefit from counseling than do their younger counterparts. They have the capacity to use friends and other adult mentors to gain a greater critical distance from their disputing parents. Furthermore, using their superior capacities to reason, differentiate, and discriminate, older adolescents are better able to separate out the good or valued parts of parents (and significant others) from the parts that are perceived to be negative.


This enables them to be more tolerant of the shortcomings of others and ultimately of their own. In the process, they can replace previous internalizations of their parents with an abstract internal ego ideal that will help guide and stabilize their conscience development. A significant proportion of teenagers in highly conflictual families, however, do not realistically differentiate the strengths and vulnerabilities of each of their disputing parents. Instead, the young person appears to become caught up in the interparental war and views one parent as the all good, perfect parent and the other as having no redeemable features. Their view of themselves is similarly polarized in that when joined with the “good” parent in a “holy crusade” against the “bad” parent, they are self-righteous and intolerant. In the most extreme cases, adolescents in these unshakable alliances with one of the disputing parents will support the interparental feud by such means as spying, sabotage, and harassment and will stridently reject the other parent, refusing visits. These kinds of attitudes and behaviors have been referred to as “parental alienation syndrome” (Gardner, 1992). It is perhaps not surprising that children who developed a fragmented sense of self during their earlier years, feeling perfectly good when joined with their primary parent and feeling bad when separated, are more likely to develop this extreme stance during adolescence. We have hypothesized that this kind of defensive splitting contributes to a concrete, simplistic, somewhat utilitarian and harsh view of interpersonal relations—a view without nuance, empathy, or compassion. While parental alienation is not unusual, it is potentially problematic in high-conflict, divorced families during early adolescence because it can solidify a merged relationship with one parent and a fragmented sense of self at a time when youngsters really need to begin to separate from both parents and consolidate a more realistic self-identity.

Case Illustrations of Interventions with Adolescents In the rest of this chapter we will illustrate many of the common dilemmas discussed above by describing the difficult passage through adolescence of one girl and two boys all of whom have lived in highly conflicted divorced families for years.

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These three cases will illustrate some of the treatment issues, not all of it effective, as evidenced in the young adult outcomes for these three teenagers (described in chapter 7: section on “Levels of Functioning”).

Susan’s Search for an Authentic Self Susan was seen in therapy from age 13 until she was 15. She was the younger child in her family; her older brother, aged 25, had left the home. Her parents had divorced when she was seven. An extremely acrimonious marital relationship preceded their separation followed by a bitter ongoing custody dispute. The mother had suffered intermittent bouts of anger and depression since Susan’s birth. After years of fending off his wife’s irate demands in a rather passive-avoidant manner, the father rallied and sought a divorce. In an avalanche of legal documents, he characterized the mother in an extremely derogatory light, citing her erratic emotional states to justify his leaving the marriage and to support his claim for custody. Feeling utterly betrayed and attacked, this vulnerable woman’s anger crystallized into hatred projected onto him. As a result of this projection as well as the man’s genuinely attacking behavior, she became phobic and paranoid about her ex-husband and sought to rescue her daughter from his “malevolent” influence. Since the divorce, Susan had been placed by court order in the joint care of her parents who lived in adjacent communities, alternating nine days with her mother and five days with her father. This arrangement was continually challenged in court by the mother who wanted sole physical custody and no more than every other weekend access for the father. In defense of his position, the father continued his vitriolic attacks upon the mother. At the outset, in accord with a child who acts in ways that comply with others’ needs and expectations, hiding her authentic feelings and perceptions, Susan’s behavior with each parent was markedly different. Not surprising, each parent viewed her very differently. Reflecting what her father wanted, Susan acted bright, chatty, “cutesy,” and entertaining when she was with him. He was delighted with his attractive daughter, and she became his companion and playmate. The only problem he acknowledged was Susan’s difficulties with sleeping and her frequent nightmares. When she returned to her mother, Susan typically “collapsed in an emotional heap.”


She was highly anxious and distressed; she talked obsessively for hours about her pervasive fears and often needed to sleep with her mother. In addition, she was lethargic, mildly but chronically depressed, complained a lot about diffuse aches and pains, and periodically resisted going to school. During these times, her mother was exquisitely sympathetic to her daughter’s every mood and her every concern. Susan’s transitions between parents were marked by severe, overt parental conflict. She dawdled whenever she packed to go to her father’s, a job made monumental because she would insist on carrying many of her stuffed animals as well as her clothes and books. She could not leave anything of significance at either house, and many of her possessions seem to represent transitional objects. Typically, her mother became enraged if the father made any attempt to talk with or even look at her at the time of the exchange. His audacity in driving into her driveway or piling Susan’s possessions by her door sent her into a frenzied rage. She screamed at him, threatened to call the police, and on one occasion physically attacked him. The father, on the other hand, would provoke his ex-wife by hanging around and “spying” on her. He would smugly document her outbursts for another round of humiliating allegations in court. Susan was marginal in her peer group, an observer from the sidelines, shy, and reclusive. She was most uncomfortable with other adolescent girls’ preoccupation with boys and clothes and was painfully sensitive to being different from them. Privately, she disparaged other girls for their “silliness.” On weekends, she preferred to play alone with her large collection of stuffed animals and miniatures or read adventure books meant for much younger children rather than spend time with peers. At school, Susan achieved very well among a highly achieving class but not without cost. She was anxious about her performance and tended to procrastinate and become overwhelmed by her assignments. She showed no interest in athletic or extra-curricular activities. Susan was brought to therapy at our Center by a court order. Though she was a pretty, well-proportioned girl with long, fair hair and a clear, pale complexion, her demeanor was generally constricted and depressed. While her mother insisted that Susan needed counseling, she questioned the therapist’s allegiance in the custody dispute and was distrustful about the content of the sessions. The father, on the

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other hand, dismissed his daughter’s need for any help. Not surprisingly, Susan too was distrustful. Her resistance took the form of controlling the agenda by talking nonstop in a monotone, almost compulsively, about mundane events in her day-to-day life. She refused to talk about her parents or their divorce. She did, however, reveal her pervasive anxiety (about earthquakes, fires, and burglaries that might destroy both her homes), her obsessive worries (about sleeping, eating, minor aches and pains), as well as her specific fears (for instance, that she was intermittently terrified of her pet Chihuahua dog). Dealing with Distrust. For many months, Susan’s obsessive

enumeration of events in her daily life would take up the major portion of the therapy hour. Toward the end of the session, however, her thought associations would become looser, and she would begin to reveal, in symbolic form, the dynamics of her central concerns. Typically, she would draw pictures, create a sandtray scene, or talk about some of the bad dreams that she had, one after another. After she had finished, she would allow the therapist several minutes to make comments or suggest interpretations. Any attempt to hurry this process would quickly stall it. Any premature interpretation made her angry and avoidant. The initial themes in the repetitive nightmares that Susan recounted suggested a terrifying world of fragmented, contradictory images of her parents. In some dreams, men (who reminded her of her father) were dangerous and out to exploit her for their own gratification. In other dreams, she watched in terror as a man, who looked like her father dressed as a policeman, was being attacked by a prehistoric lizard (who was later identified as her mother). In her dream, the lizard would invariably turn and pursue her; she would run for protection to her mother’s house, only to be confronted with a skeleton that would come out of her mother’s closet. These split views of her parents as good/bad, protective/scary, and exploitative/nurturing indicated her basic developmental conflict as she tried to determine whom to trust, who was safe. Both of her doting, protective parents seemed to have a negative side that could be activated if she dared separate from one to go to the other. Susan’s guilt over being the oedipal victor, which heightened her anxiety about being destroyed in the parental fight,


was apparent in another series of dreams. Here, she found herself sneaking into a home that looked like her mother’s and stealing underwear that she would then take to her father and an unknown woman (herself). Upon her return, she feared that she might be killed by the wicked Queen of Hearts who lived on her mother’s street (the revengeful mother). In the early stages of therapy, it was not possible to interpret for Susan the startlingly clear symbolism of these dreams—Susan, from age 12 to 13 years, was not ready to hear what they might mean. She continued to be extremely distrusting about the depths she was willing to plumb in working with the therapist. She revealed her distrust and fear in a series of drawings that she made. In one, she drew a mother and baby owl in a nest in a tree and then noted that a person walking underneath the tree threatened to disturb them. “The person was acting stupidly, clumsily!” Susan said disparagingly. In another drawing, she fantasied a dangerous household appliance (a hair drier) at her father’s house that would kill anybody who got too near it. Through these drawings and her continued resistance Susan warned the therapist not to interfere with the cozy, little bird nest (her relationship with her mother) nor to get too near the electrical charge (her dangerous father and her own sexuality). Taking the cue to be non-threatening and supportive, the therapist waited during this early period of adolescence and spent the time playing in the sandtray with Susan, using the small collection of miniature animals that always traveled with the teenager wherever she went, stuffed in her pockets or her backpack. In these play sessions, Susan revealed an enormously vivid imagination, for she lived in a fantasy world that was more reminiscent of a preschool child’s than a teenager’s. The miniature animals all seemed to be imbued with personalities based on projections of Susan’s own feelings and perceptions that she could not otherwise own. In the presence of the empathic therapist, she was gradually allowing her own split-off, repressed feelings and ideas to emerge. In the process, Susan tested to see whether the therapist could be safely used as a stepping stone to support her separation from her parents and their enmeshed conflict. This testing was revealed in a series of dreams she reported, one of which was about two tribes fighting and her being captured and held hostage. She found herself perched on a rock

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in the middle of a bog with fast-moving water and swampy forest all around her. An old lady sitting next to her promised to keep her from slipping into the murky depths. But she did not know if the old lady would be strong enough to keep her from falling or rescue her if she fell! This dream was directly interpreted to Susan as her distrust of whether the therapist was strong enough to help her. She seemed quite gratified at being understood. Supporting Separation from Parents. Susan was almost 14

years when she made her first move to separate from one of her parents (her father). Increasingly during the months that followed, she began to express irritability at her father and tested his interest in and commitment to her by making demands that he drive her places and buy her trinkets. The therapist had to work with the father to help him tolerate these challenges without becoming too angry, trivializing Susan’s demands, or blaming the mother for his daughter’s high-handed behavior. Interestingly, as Susan felt supported by the therapist in gaining some distance from her father while staying connected with him, her mother began to report with mixed feelings that Susan “has increasingly withdrawn from me… she’s taking possession of her life…is not so dependent upon me when she comes home.” It appeared that the therapeutic transference at this point rested upon Susan’s image of the mother (good-mother) who was supportive of her need to be assertive with her father. However, the fear of separating from the scary, angry mother (bad-mother) lurked in the background. Susan had a dream that someone, who looked like the therapist, was holding a gun to her head, forcing her to venture into a black hole but when she did so, she became the lethal weapon. This dream suggests her multiple fears that if she continued with the therapy, she could become not only assertive and autonomous, but dangerous. Having the capacity to destroy (her parents), she risked being abandoned or destroyed by them. Dealing with Primitive Fears of Abandonment and Destruction.

An interesting change occurred in Susan’s symptomatology at this point. She began to project menacing feelings and malicious intent onto her beloved dog. She reported scary


dreams about his claws sticking into her and not being able to release herself from him. In her waking hours, she feared he was possessed and that he was dominating and controlling her. Curiously, this delusional thinking about the dog was shared by her mother. In fact, her mother felt compelled to allow the dog to be extremely demanding (of food, attention, to be let in and out of the house) and was greatly resentful of her servitude to him. Susan finally came to the realization that her mother would hold and stroke the dog on her lap with utmost hostility and rejection in her facial and body demeanor. In all probability, the mother’s treatment of the dog was a terrifying reminder of Susan’s pre-verbal memories of her mother’s parenting, memories that were linked to her early experience of an extremely depressed mother who compulsively nurtured her every need but who probably had fantasies of both suicide and infanticide. To protect herself from this frightening revelation, Susan again merged with her mother, incorporating the mother’s views of the dog and sharing her paranoid projections. These delusions were gradually dealt with over several weeks by clarification and interpretation along the following lines. The therapist explained that the dog was simply an animal that had been “spoiled rotten” and conditioned to expect instant gratification. He was not capable of the malicious intent and demon-like qualities that Susan attributed to him. She was encouraged to be directly assertive with the dog by putting him outside when he was a nuisance, which she began to do with some relief. At the same time, the therapist talked about how her and her mother’s treatment of the dog might be similar to her own experience of her mother’s parenting. With Susan’s explicit permission, the therapist talked about her mother’s depression when Susan was a baby and about some of the confused and conflicted feelings depressed moms can have at these times. Together, they discussed her mother’s ongoing difficulty with depression, the stress of the custody litigation, and her tendency to take on too much responsibility—conscientiously doing everything herself and then feeling exploited and angry because her own needs were not met. This dynamic had probably developed first with her own family of origin, later in the marriage, and now with her daughter. Shedding tears of sadness and

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relief, Susan readily identified these characteristics in her mother’s treatment of her. From this point on in the therapy, Susan was usually able to consciously identify her mother’s changing moods, describing them vividly in colorful, symbolic language. When her parents had altercations, although anxious, she was able to narrate a more objective account of both parents’ behavior as well as her own constricted feelings. Susan acknowledged that she had always been anxious about separating from her mother. In particular, she became aware that she used somatic symptoms to elicit her mother’s nurturance and protection. She could not turn to her father who had always been a shadowy, amorphous figure in her consciousness. As she struggled to understand her fears of separation if she asserted herself in any way, Susan recalled a repetitive dream: “There’s this huge, giant wooden door. Me and Mom are sitting on this wooden bench and her arm is around me. And the giant door creaks open…and there is something behind there! I have a scared, ominous feeling…” This was interpreted to signify her inchoate fears of the unexpected and the unknown probably experienced very early in her life as a consequence of the unpredictability of her parents’ emotional availability in general, and her mother’s angry depressive bouts in particular. Paradoxically, she had come to rely upon her mother’s fierce “protection” from the fears that were generated by none other than her protector. Dealing with Guilt about Individuation. These interpretations of her early experiences led to a series of dreams in which Susan seemed to express anxiety and guilt about experiencing pleasure in ways that her mother could not do herself. These dreams may have also indicated her fear of being like her mother, doomed not to expect joy. The symbolism of these dreams involved brightly colored feathers or gemstones that Susan coveted. She wanted to gather them up for herself but felt she did not deserve them or did not have the right to take them, especially because in her dreams these treasures were often what remained of a scene of devastation (the rubble of her parents’ marriage). In the discussion that followed her reporting these dreams, Susan articulated that she felt responsible for making her mother happy.


In response, the therapist was frankly supportive of Susan’s own right to happiness, asking her to give herself permission to have a happier life than her mother’s and giving her permission not to be responsible for her mother’s unhappiness, and not to be her mother’s only confidante and friend. At this stage in the therapy, at age 15, Susan talked explicitly about getting some distance from both her parents, saying, in a manner expectable of an adolescent, “I’m bored with my parents. I don’t want to be around them!” However, she found herself ruminating excessively, which contributed to her indecisiveness and procrastination. She did not have the capacity to reach out to her peers as substitutes for her dependency on her parents. She remained essentially quite lonely. Her hunger for relationships was painful to watch. “I want to be noticed by teachers,” she said, “but I don’t know what to do to be special. I don’t want to fade into anonymity!” At the same time, she was able to connect her difficulties in making relationships with her own fears derived from her family experiences. Susan articulated her defense against the terror of her parents’ anger and her fundamental fear of losing herself: “I get real scared when my parents are mad. It’s this deep anger, this revenge thing they have! I go into a coma thing…into slow motion! It’s hard to assert myself…I turn off everything except life support! I get really dull when that happens…I turn off all the lights. So in new situations when I get scared, feel danger, I do the same thing”. Supporting Typical Adolescent Achievements. In the final year

of therapy, her first year of high school, for the first time developmentally appropriate tasks took center stage. Although Susan’s intrapsychic conflicts remained deeply embedded, they were latent, allowing her to pursue her school studies and activities with peers. She reported very few nightmares, and her somatic symptoms mostly disappeared. Her new dreams reflected mostly concerns about peers, school achievement, and sexuality. She discussed typical adolescent fears of awkwardness and self-consciousness. Periods of depression alternated with periods of optimism and excitement. Increasingly, she began reaching out to new girlfriends and expressed pleasure in peer activities; she began to enjoy movies, skating, and shopping on weekends. She even began to talk to boys, whom she insisted were “just friends.”

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Her struggle for an authentic sense of self was imbued with some hope; “Now I am trying to do new stuff. I have to make myself do it consciously. After a while it will work, and it will become second nature. I’m becoming more like myself now… more able to be myself.”

Jason’s Struggles with a Fragmented Self Jason at age 12 was the only child of his divorced parents. Their extremely conflictual marriage of 13 years had escalated to violence on the father’s part which precipitated the separation. At the time of entry to our counseling service 4 years later, the mother had remarried and had a new baby, while the father lived with his widowed mother. An initial shared custody arrangement, recommended by a custody evaluator, rapidly broke down and was shifted by court order to give the mother primary care of Jason who visited his father on alternate weekends and some holidays. The father was chagrined at this arrangement and continually agitated to have more time with his son. Though an attractive and intellectually gifted woman, the mother was impulsive, emotionally labile, erratic, and unpredictable in relationships with others. She had a shifting view of relationships and was markedly lacking in self-confidence. In the ensuing custody dispute, she relied excessively on advice from a series of professionals, attorneys, and therapists whom she initially hired and idealized and then de-idealized and fired when they failed to meet her needs and expectations. The father, by contrast, was extremely interpersonally sensitive, quick to take offense, and easily humiliated. He was also intelligent, competitive, and ambitious in his work as a football coach at a prominent college. He was defensive and distrustful to the point of being paranoid about the series of therapists and evaluators that the mother involved in the ongoing custody litigation. Both parents were highly vulnerable to criticism, to any sense of failure. Both were highly invested in Jason whom they each perceived to be an extension of themselves whenever he was gratifying, good, and achieved well. He was perceived to be an extension of the other parent when he was ungratifying and underachieving. Sadly, Jason had a congenital deformation that left him slightly crippled. He also had some emotional and behavioral problems, largely as a consequence of


the long-standing, entrenched parental disputes. Not surprisingly, the boy’s problems were a constant source of narcissistic injury for both parents. Typically, the mother became extremely anxious and disorganized, openly blaming the father, whenever Jason was unhappy or difficult to manage. She usually did this so as to publicly humiliate the father among his prominent friends, family, and colleagues. The father felt that this was intolerable and typically became enraged. During the marriage, this kind of public criticism had precipitated his controlling behavior and violence towards her. After the separation, it precipitated another round of litigation in which the mother’s requests were dismissed in court. (In the legal arena, she tended to make unrealistic requests, whereas he typically took a more rational and strategic stance.) When first seen in family counseling, Jason was a sturdily built, dark-featured pubescent boy who was quite goodlooking. He came compliantly to the court-ordered counseling sessions, and with a remarkable impassivity that belied his impatience and anger he answered the therapist’s questions about his family situation in monosyllables. Psychological testing corroborated the initial clinical impressions. This boy was hypervigilant, guarded, suspicious, and untrusting. His self-esteem was exceedingly fragile, especially as it related to his physical disability. He was quick to take offense and to see others as hostile and critical of him before checking out the reality of the situation. Defensively, Jason avoided emotionally charged situations and tried to be very good and conforming. However, he would become increasingly immobilized when stressed and then explode in anger. He also seemed depressed and confused, eliciting strong countertransference feelings from the family counselor who wished to help him in his struggle to separate from and define a viable identity within the enmeshed family conflict. However, he seemed to get little emotional relief from talking. In fact, he had a very utilitarian attitude toward counseling: If it did not further his immediate goals to get something material from one of his parents, he saw no purpose in it. Jason’s school performance was marginal. He received extensive physical therapy for his disability. Until his adolescence, he had been somewhat ignored and scapegoated by his classmates. Now in junior high school, he was fast

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achieving the reputation among his peers for being a “cool dude,” a quick, witty, and rebellious leader to whom other young, like-minded adolescents gravitated. His prankish behavior bordered on the exploitative: He schemed to extort money from other boys and seemed to get a sense of power and pleasure from terrorizing female classmates. The mother alleged that he stole from her quite frequently (money and other objects) and then blatantly denied it. For some time, the father refused to acknowledge that Jason was at all responsible for the missing items at his own home. A projective story that Jason told at the outset of counseling (using the sandtray materials) seemed to communicate his internal representations of himself in his family. He described a barren world covered with sand where there was an ongoing battle between two armies. His jaundiced view of the parental fights was symbolized by the claim that “the diseased combatants in this battle were eating one another!” His omnipotent but depressive fantasies about his emancipation as an adolescent were portrayed in this story as “a lone, blind survivor of this battle emerging from a coma a millennium after everyone else had perished.” His feelings of alienation from custody evaluators, physicians, and physiotherapists were symbolized by “half-human people who capture and examine the survivor” to satisfy their curiosity rather than to help him. The lack of internal or external superego controls in this barren world was evident in his comment, “Everyone was their own leader. When someone did something bad, there was no one to stop them. You had to be the strongest to win in the world.” During early adolescence, as Jason attempted to separate and individuate from his disputing parents, a cyclical pattern of family pathology emerged that reinforced his internal good/bad split, further fragmented his tenuous ego integrity, and undermined his conscience development. The pathological cycle was repeated several times before effective intervention was possible. Each cycle was more intense than the previous one until, finally, the conflict escalated to an untenable, dangerous level. Only then was change possible. The third and most traumatic cycle will be described here: As is expectable with young adolescent boys who are increasingly aware of their masculinity and sexuality, Jason sought his father’s interest and approval and tried to distance himself from his mother by challenging her authority.


However, he also remained ambivalently dependent upon his mother to do things for him (she had a history of being somewhat overprotective because of his physical disability). During early adolescence, his oppositional and hostile behavior was extremely threatening to her, which could be anticipated in a mother who lacked confidence in her own judgment. She became anxious, disorganized, and defensively split-off from Jason as he was perceived to have become the “bad son” like the “bad, exploitative, manipulative father.” Moreover, she told him this. Precipitously rejected by her, Jason was hurt and furious and immediately took his father’s side in the ongoing custody conflict, strongly identifying with his father’s feelings and views. Verbal conflict and power struggles between mother and son escalated. On several occasions, Jason physically threatened her, destroyed objects, and even hit her, reminiscent of his father’s violent attacks. During this phase, Jason would call or visit his father and tell him long, sad, but distorted, tales of his mother’s abuse that the father was only too willing to believe. In fact, these stories confirmed and validated the father’s views of this “out-of-control woman who lies and manipulates to get whatever she wants.” The father idealized his son—Jason became the “good boy” who had enormous potential. The father believed his ex-wife’s maliciousness towards him was destroying Jason and that his son had to be rescued from her. He was convinced that if his son had any problems, they were “entirely due to her jerking the boy around, her inconsistency, her emotional tantrums.” At his mother’s home, Jason’s conduct was appalling; he was completely unmanageable. His mother’s attempts to discipline him (by withdrawing privileges and refusing to cater to his demands) were quickly undermined by the father who compensated for the mother’s “poor treatment” of the boy by providing him with whatever he wanted. By contrast, in accord with his father’s expectations, Jason became the “perfect son” in his father’s home—he was described as “sweet, helpful, gentlemanly, and loving to everyone.” In this respect, the defensive good/bad split within the young adolescent was confirmed and validated by both parents and acted out within the two households. At the same time, Jason was not made accountable for his difficult behavior; his distorted reality testing and projection of blame were not corrected. Each parent was being thoroughly denigrated by the

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other, contributing to Jason’s precipitous de-idealization and rejection of first, his mother and later, his father. His painful sense of loss, disillusionment, isolation, rage, and depression was poignantly evident in some poetry that Jason wrote at this time. The situation exploded in mutual rejection by son and mother, and Jason came to live with the father. The father was gratified; he interpreted this as the mother having “kicked Jason out” of her home, and he was warmly receptive to the boy’s feelings of being rejected by her. His own mother was induced to take on the role of the “good mother” to replace the defective “bad mother.” Furthermore, brushing aside any evidence of imperfection in his son, he conceded to Jason’s expressed wishes to play football on a competitive team despite the boy’s physical limitations. In this respect, Jason sought to become the perfect athlete that his father, the successful coach, had always wanted. In the ensuing months, Jason struggled to maintain the “good self” and live up to his father’s idealized views of him, but the façade of this fragile, split self began to crack. He became covertly more irritable and difficult with his grandmother, especially when his father was absent. He concealed evidence of poor grades at school and did not tell his father that he was sitting on the bench during most of the football games. He only presented his father with his successes. He became increasingly delinquent—drinking, experimenting with sex, and stealing small objects and money from his father’s house. When indisputable evidence of this conduct came to light, his father began to question him and asked Jason to account for himself. As the father’s idealization of the son began to crumble, so did the son’s idealization of the father. Jason’s fantasies of his own omnipotence, invulnerability, and authority to determine his own destiny rapidly increased: he felt he no longer had to answer to anyone! He began staying out late, did not turn up for football practice, canceled his physiotherapy, and began cutting classes at school. When the father confronted his son about these infractions, Jason swore at him and tried to walk out of the room. This direct insult to his authority triggered the father’s narcissistic vulnerability, and he became enraged. A horrible physical struggle erupted between father and son. With a look of hatred on his face that the father had never


before seen, Jason screamed obscenities, accusing his father of being abusive—in language identical to that his mother had used. The father in turn ridiculed the boy, calling him “a cripple” and “a liar and a thief…just like your mother!” Each had triggered the flip side of the defensive split—the bad self and the bad other. Jason, who as a young boy had witnessed his father abuse his mother, was particularly terrified by what had been unleashed and literally felt he was fighting for his life. In desperation, he leaped out the window and ran away. He was picked up roaming the streets by a police officer who took him into protective custody and arrested the father. After Child Protective Services workers investigated the incident, criminal charges against the father for child abuse were dropped and the family were re-referred to family counseling. This incident precipitated another round of custody litigation and the most extreme levels of tension and conflict that either parent had ever experienced. The mother was infuriated that the professionals and the courts had not protected her son from “this abusive man.” She considered her son entirely blameless in the matter. Undoubtedly, the incident had activated her traumatic experience of marital abuse by the father, and she identified strongly with her son from the position of victim. The father was enormously humiliated by the abuse allegations and the subsequent public airing of the incident among his friends and colleagues by the mother. He felt deeply wounded and betrayed by his son. Jason was extremely depressed, angry, and frightened and refused any contact with his father. A Limited and Largely Ineffectual Family Counseling intervention. Although a family counselor was in place 18

months prior to this traumatic incident, she could not find an effective way to provide insight into this pathological cycle of events or to stave off the inevitable crisis. Both parents allowed her only a limited role—helping them mediate their time-sharing arrangements. She was allowed access to Jason so that she could represent his wishes, in a very literal sense, in the mediation. Attempts to moderate the parents’ extremely negative views of each other and to more realistically interpret for them the teenager’s experience in each home were largely unsuccessful. Each parent felt that the family counselor had been duped by the other spouse,

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and they were each convinced that they were validated in their negative beliefs as Jason played out his split self in both homes. Following this crisis, the family counselor collaborated with the parents’ attorneys and the family court counselors in helping the parents come to an agreement to allow Jason, who was now 14 years old, to live for a period of time with a mutual family friend in another city in order to give him some distance and relief from the enmeshed conflict. It was acknowledged that he could live in neither parent’s home for the time being. Interestingly, Jason developed a surprisingly good relationship with this wise and grandfatherly man over the following 6 months. Both parents entered into a far more realistic phase of family counseling after this distressing incident. Initially, the mother was highly agitated and trusted no one to help her. She spent her days calling her attorneys, various counselors, friends, and family members and took many impulsive actions based on their sundry advice. The most effective strategy was for the family counselor to organize the mother’s main support system, which included her new husband, her family attorney, and the foster father for her son, to provide a concerted, coordinated, and supportive response to her demands. The approach was to reassure the mother that Jason’s behavior was normal adolescent rebellion that had escalated because the parents were not able to cooperate and present a united front for him. Most of the therapeutic work was done with the father who entered into serious deliberations over what had gone wrong between himself and Jason. Beginning with tremendous compassion and empathy for the father’s pain and confusion and with respect for him as a man who wanted to be a good father, the therapist helped him analyze and understand the splitting that had occurred (the idealization and de-idealization) within Jason, which mirrored the negative projections of both parents. The therapist was firmly confrontive about the father’s responsibility in the situation, the nature of his abuse of Jason, and his own vulnerability to being shamed which had triggered his rage. With the help of his foster father, Jason was encouraged to contact his father within several months. In a series of emotional reunification sessions between Jason and his father, they reviewed together what had led up to their violent


confrontation and what had actually happened during the incident. Apologies were offered and accepted, realistic expectations of each other as father and son were affirmed, and appropriate parental authority was acknowledged. Tears were shed and hugs were exchanged as they both voiced their remorse for the pain they had caused; both father and son began to talk about their residual feelings of tension, mistrust, anger, and sadness. These reunification interviews set in motion a gradual rapprochement between father and son over the next year. When he was 15 years old, Jason asked to resume living with his father under his sole care, and the mother conceded to this request. It was agreed that she could no longer manage Jason nor could the parents guarantee a cooperative stance on his behalf. The father was gratified by Jason’s request but more sober about the responsibility it entailed. He remained somewhat mistrustful of his son’s motivations and his own judgment about the boy. In particular, he was apprehensive about possible alcohol and drug use by Jason. The father continued to use intermittent counseling to sort out appropriate management of his teenager. From time to time Jason dropped by to visit his mother, but did not care to stay too long because they quickly got into arguments and power struggles. He attended school regularly, but his academic performance continued to be marginal.

Robert’s Unholy Alliance Robert was a 14-year-old boy whose parents had been separated for about 2 years. The marriage was marked by the father’s verbal and physical abuse and the mother’s affairs with other men. The separation, initiated by the mother, was fraught with very high conflict. The father was rageful and threatening. He accused the mother of drug use and prostitution. There was possession-snatching by both parents, continual litigation about property and support, and a major dispute over custody of the three children (Robert, 14, Alice, 13, and Tina, 11). A court-ordered custody evaluation resulted in the two oldest children living with their father in the south end of the city (so that they could continue to attend their same schools and sporting activities) and the youngest living with her mother in the north end of the city. Since the parental separation, Robert had entered into “an unholy alliance”

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with his father and refused to visit with his mother or even to talk with her on the telephone. He had gotten into physical struggles with his mother and had hit her on occasion. Robert had also been abusive with his two younger sisters. This boy was a very large, sturdily built young man with the physique of a football player. (In fact, he had been a star football player until he sustained an injury at the time of his parents’ divorce.) He had recently put on a great deal of weight about which he was embarrassed. By court order, he was brought to counseling sessions by his father. Throughout the initial interviews, Robert’s eyes kept brimming with tears, and he struggled to keep them back. He was terribly ashamed of his inability to control himself. His verbal account of what was happening in his family was chaotic and incoherent (as was his father’s story). He stumbled over his words and could barely complete his sentences. Only now and then, would he come out with a very strong, clear comment, such as, “My Dad looks at it this way. She [the mother] is just doing this to get back at him!” These clear statements were obviously parroted versions of the father’s polarized, negative view of the mother. To understand Robert, as well as his good progress in therapy, it is important to know that he had had a loving and nurturing early experience with his mother. However, she became increasingly absent as he grew older, especially when she went back to work and the marriage deteriorated. The father’s relationship with the boy had always been marked by bullying domination and intermittent physical abuse as well as a great deal of love and caring. The father also derived considerable vicarious gratification from his son’s sporting achievements. At the time of his parents’ divorce, Robert could remember nothing negative about his father (neither the marital violence nor the abuse of himself); he could only indicate that if his father had been rough on him, it was probably because somehow he deserved it. Dealing with Resistance. Robert’s resistance to counseling was palpable, and he usually came late to sessions. Clearly angry and depressed, he proclaimed himself “bored, profoundly bored!” Attempts to talk about his feelings and the fact that he was hitting his sisters were greeted with a defiant, “All kids hit…they always have in our family.” The therapist noted that “hitting seems like an okay thing to do…that’s true


for your family, but it’s not true for all families.” Using information gleaned from interviews with both parents, she went on to comment that Robert had seen a lot of awful things that other kids haven’t seen, like his father hitting his mother many times. She said that he might not remember it, but he had been very brave: as a little boy he had thrown himself in between his parents and stopped them from fighting. It was possible that he had prevented his mother from getting injured—maybe even saved her life. Robert’s eyes brimmed with tears again, and he mumbled that he did not want to remember: “All this counseling is no good…it only makes me more upset…all that is behind me now. Don’t keep dragging it up.” The therapist answered gently that it was not behind him, it was in him, and it came out in his bad dreams. It kept haunting him like a ghost, and she worried that it might come out and bother him years from now. For the first time, Robert looked a bit interested and queried, how could that be? The therapist explained that in talking with people who had covered up their feelings and memories from the time of their parents’ divorce 10 or 15 years earlier, it was sometimes found that they now hit their own wives, or they got really depressed when they broke off with girlfriends because troubled relationships reminded them of the past, of their own families. “The sad part is that we are likely to hurt the ones we love the most. For example, your dad really loved your mom a lot, and he hit her. There might come a time when you love someone a lot, and you might find yourself reacting in the same way, like from the past.” The therapist went on to use the analogy of a broken arm, like the arm Robert had broken playing football. If the doctor had let it mend without setting the bone straight and putting it in a cast, he would have grown up with a crooked arm that didn’t work right! It was the same with his feelings and bad memories. She told him she understood that he felt bad thinking about all this, that he would really prefer to stuff it away. More tears threatened to overflow, and Robert grabbed a handful of tissues. The therapist went on. “You don’t trust me to help you. People have let you down. Especially you think your mom has let you down. You expect others to let you down.” It was at this point the Robert said, “I’ve let my Mom down. It’s her birthday today, and I didn’t even call her!” In reply, the therapist told Robert that he was far too hard on himself.

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“You expect yourself to be Superman! You’ve done nothing wrong—you’re not to blame!” He mumbled that “other kids have it worse than I have.” His therapist was skeptical: She told him she had seen a lot of kids, and she thought Robert had it pretty bad. She believed he was worth spending time with in counseling. He was a sensitive, intelligent, caring teenager. He was also the one in his family who seemed to carry the most responsibility. Each of his sisters was taking care of herself while he was looking after his dad and worrying about the money situation. Reworking Memories of Family Abuse and Violence. On the basis of this discussion, Robert agreed to continue with the therapy sessions and gave his explicit permission for them to talk about the kinds of fights that he had witnessed between his parents and what had happened since the divorce, especially all the things his mother had done that had upset him. During the next couple of sessions, using post-traumatic stress interviewing techniques (Pynoos & Eth, 1986), Robert re-enacted specific scenes of violence between his parents that he remembered seeing. These were very traumatic incidences in which his father had become enraged and abusive, and the mother had been victimized by his violence. When the therapist gave Robert a great deal of appreciation for his bravery and support of his mother and for his compassion for his father’s pain, the teenager was finally able to talk about these violent incidents and his moral outrage. Surfacing Family Scripts. Although this boy was beginning to recall specific critical incidents about his family, he continued to find it difficult to use language to express his feelings and ideas and to differentiate his own from those of his father. For this reason, he was invited to use the sandtray to create visual scenes that represented his view of his relationship with both parents. (The therapist explained that many people, even adults, could express their ideas better in art forms like music, lyrics, poetry, and sculpture rather than in words and that using the sandtray was a way of doing this.) In the subsequent four sessions, Robert produced an astounding series of sandtray scenes that very eloquently expressed his relationship with each parent separately and then both parents together.


The first was a scene at his father’s house. It involved his father as a superman with a large gun, venturing out with an army tank to visit the ape (the lawyer) and the “Evil Deistro” (the bank manager), both of whom were ensconced in a fortressed building surrounded by armed guards. In a corner, behind a frail fence was a boy (Robert). His explanation of this scene was as follows: “Dad has to get himself all armored up, like with guns and tanks, when he goes out to see his lawyer and the bank manager. Then he comes home, and we need protection ‘cos he fires all his stuff at us.” (The therapist commented on the fact that this showed excellent insight into his father’s behavior, especially the way his father became stressed trying to cope with legal and money matters and how that stress typically spilled over into his ranting and raving and bullying his kids.) The next scene was at his mother’s house. In one corner of the tray, he placed three babies (later identified as himself and his two sisters) who were “falling asleep, bored as heck, watching TV, and fighting with each other.” In the center of the tray was a rendition of the Golden Gate Bridge and on the other side stood the skyscrapers of the city. He noted that while her kids were left at home, his mother was off in the city dancing with her friends all night; she came home really late, and slept all the next morning. (The therapist talked about how neglected and lonely and unmothered kids feel in these situations, and he answered simply, “You’ve got it!”) The next significant scene emerged through a gradual process of building and collapsing structures in the sand. “This is my Dad,” he said, as he put together a precarious structure with the dominoes. He poured a little sand on the top and showed that as the weight of the sand increased minimally the structure collapsed (analogous to how likely his father was to decompensate under fairly minimal stress). The therapist then asked Robert to make a structure that represented himself, and he carefully built a much stronger base but showed that it became unstable at higher elevations and that the top would collapse with the weight of added sand. Again the therapist admired his insight, especially the distinctions he was able to make between himself and his father who had had an extremely abused and neglected early life. Robert then talked about the particular kinds of things that were distressing and depressing for him.

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Finally, Robert built two structures, both precarious (which represented both of his parents), that were separated by a thin card (that he said represented the lawyers). He kept pouring sand on the two buildings (his mother and father). His verbal commentary was as follows: “Both Mom and Dad are putting a lot of pressure and pushing on both sides…Both will try to last out to see who is going to make it through…who is going to cave in first?” He then showed that again and again the father building collapsed first and more devastatingly. He continued, “Mom can rebuild…’cos she has a strong family from behind…Mom can always get more help from Grandma. Dad has no one, no one except us kids, and we only cost him more money and stress!” (It was at this point that the therapist made the interpretation that in his compassion and concern for his father he has decided to support his father and help him hold up his end in the struggle for survival against his mother. Robert agreed.) Role of Parents in Treatment. This is a truncated account of the important shifts in the brief therapy with this boy, spanning about eight sessions. Gradually over the course of these sessions, his tears stopped. Robert became much more coherent in expressing his ideas and feelings, and as shown by the sandtray scenes, he was slowly differentiating himself from his father. His abusive behavior with his sisters entirely ceased. Over the space of about 3 months, Robert became receptive to telephone contact with his mother. He visited her over the Christmas period and then gradually on a regular basis. The mother was carefully counseled as to how to respond to the boy’s ambivalent overtures—a mixture of longing and hostility—and his testing of her commitment to him. The father was motivated to encourage the boy’s contact with his mother; he was told that Robert was acutely depressed and needed the kind of nurturing that only his mother could give. Eighteen Months Later. When Robert asked to see the therapist again, she was surprised and gratified to note that this boy had put himself on a healthy diet and lost all of the excess weight he had gained during the divorce transition. He was now a strikingly good-looking young man with much improved self-esteem. However, he was in somewhat of a crisis. He really wanted to live with his mother for a while,


and he wanted to know how to do this without hurting his father deeply and without his father becoming angry at him. It was only now that this boy could openly acknowledge and talk about his father’s bullying domination, the intermittent abuse, and how really frightened he had always been of his father. After three more sessions, Robert made the decision to tell his father, and he made the transfer to his mother at the end of the summer vacation.

Some Issues in Working with Young Adolescents and their Parents Probably the major obstacle in working therapeutically with adolescents of highly conflictual and violent divorcing families is their fundamental distrust of relationships. Despite the startling differences in Susan’s and Jason’s experiences, this is what they had in common. While it is expectable for selfconscious young adolescents, ambivalently and awkwardly distancing themselves from their families, to be resistant to talking about their feelings in counseling, it is not normally expectable for them to resist forming warm, trusting relationships (Springer, 1991). By contrast, for adolescents of highly conflictual families, having close relationships and talking about feelings are both longed for and perceived to be toxic and dangerous. Consequently, these youngsters devise a myriad of ways of controlling, avoiding, manipulating, and stalling therapeutic work. Yet improving their ability to access other empathic adults and to make meaningful connections with their peers is critical for the kind of self-repair that is necessary to restore their developmental stride. A consistently empathic, patient stance on the part of the therapist is needed along with utmost integrity of purpose. These youngsters are acutely aware of being exploited, betrayed, or used on behalf of someone else’s agenda. The therapist needs to closely monitor countertransference reactions of boredom and frustration (that signal disappointment to the young person) and avoid being diverted or manipulated by the youngster (that caters to fantasies of omnipotence). On the other hand, premature interpretations or pushing the young person where she or he is not ready to go will quickly stall the process. Soliciting their agreement for counseling and getting their explicit permission to broach

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certain subjects help adolescents feel respected and that they have some control over the process. Empathizing with their distrust and letting them know you understand and support their need for defensiveness is the next step. The critical task is then to empathically reflect back their own experience within their families, mirroring what it feels like to be burdened by a needy parent or caught between warring parents. However, in the quest to empathize with the untenable positions in which these young people find themselves, it is tempting to agree with them that parents are acting unfairly, irrationally, or outrageously. The danger here is that such confirmation can further undermine the adolescent’s respect for his parents and their tenuous authority over him or her. Being suddenly confronted with the imperfections of a beloved parent can also be experienced as a depressing loss. There is a risk that the adolescent will perceive the therapist’s empathy as a validation of her own distorted perceptions, in which she sees her parents in polarized terms—powerful or impotent, right or wrong, wise or stupid. In general, the task is to help the youngster make more discriminating observations and judgments (determining when a parent is making a reasonable request and when it is unreasonable, or distinguishing how the parent might be trying to do the right thing in the wrong way). Young adolescents are often impatient with this kind of discussion. However, one can sometimes capture their imagination and attention by using humor, exaggeration, contradiction, or paradox to convey new perspectives. Playing a role-reversal game with young teenagers in which they take the part of the parent can help them gain more perspective and control. Calling upon adolescents’ expanding cognitive capacities to have them devise rules or procedures to follow that are “fair” helps them to think more rationally. Using projective mediums—poetry, sculpture, music, stories, plays, artwork, rap—can bring to the surface more complex feelings and perspectives than they can, perhaps, consciously admit. The crucial work with parents of adolescents in difficult divorces and conflictual families is preventive. It involves educating them about what are expectable, developmentally appropriate moves that their adolescents are likely to make and helping them tolerate the exploration, distancing, provocation, and ambivalence. These vulnerable parents need


considerable reassurance and support to avoid overreaction or rejection when the young person makes a move to separate, especially a move toward the other parent. Ordinarily, teenagers like to make their own more flexible visiting arrangements with parents that will fit with their busy social schedules. Where parental conflict is extreme, the stakes are often too high for the young person to exercise this kind of initiative, and parents will then need help setting up more structured, even ritualistic, access plans. The most difficult and sometimes impossible task is to keep the parents’ own emotional needs and their negative perceptions of each other from invading their views of their child and judgment of the child’s needs. Helping these parents develop a coordinated, cooperative response to their youngster is optimal. However, when this is not feasible, clearly delineating who has decision-making responsibilities and establishing explicit time-sharing arrangements will help prevent the youngster from taking advantage of the parents’ differences and will mitigate against the parents’ continuing to triangulate the teenager in their ongoing disputes.

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Young Adults: Struggling with the Legacy

7

How do children of high-conflict and violent divorce fare over the longer term? Up until now, our understanding of these at-risk youngsters has been largely based upon families with custody disputes who were seen during the period of intractable parental conflict and threat of violence. Parents who had been ordered into counseling or evaluations by family courts during the custody-litigation phase provided us with a window of opportunity to see a subpopulation of divorce that may otherwise not have been seen. From this vantage point, we have described the emotional and relational cauldron that makes up the family environment of these children in the midst of tumultuous conflict and threat (chapters 1 and 2). We also have described a range of developmental threats concerning the capacity of these youngsters to develop a

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viable, stable sense of self and form trusting and mutually gratifying relationships with others (chapters 3 to 6). In this chapter we begin to explore what actually happens to these young people over the span of their childhood and adolescent years: What childhood memories of parental disputes are carried into adulthood, what kind of parenting arrangements do they live with, to what extent do their parents’ relationships with each other evolve over time, how do the youngsters’ relationships with parents and siblings change, and can they separate from their families of origin in order to leave home and make independent lives? We are also interested in the obvious signs of developmentally appropriate achievements within school and college and how these young people generally function during early adulthood—occupationally, socially, and emotionally. The central question about the legacy of the experience of living within a high-conflict, postdivorce family over the longer term is to what extent it compromises young adults’ capacity to make new partnerships of their own. Although dating, forging new romantic relationships, and maintaining intimate partnerships with significant others are normative challenges for young people in their 20s, it is important to gauge what is expectable and what is unique to this population. Studies of adults who were children of divorce in general show that they are typically anxious about intimate commitments and marriage and worry that these will not work for them (Emery, 2004; Hetherington & Kelly, 2002; Wallerstein, Lewis, & Blakeslee, 2000). Are the anxieties greater and attachment capacities of a different quality for the young people we have seen? To what extent do young adults repeat the intergenerational cycle of violence that they have experienced, and in what domains do they refrain from abusive and violent behavior? Finally, what might allow young people to transcend their early family experiences, reconfigure the negative scripts, make secure attachments, and have more emotionally fulfilling lives? To address these questions, a 15-to-20-year follow-up study was undertaken of a randomly chosen subset of young adults from high-conflict divorces who were initially seen as children during the custody-litigation phase. (See Appendix B for details of study design and interventions.) In the absence of a comparison group of low-conflict divorce, the findings are compared with those from several longitudinal

Chapter 7: Young Adults: Struggling with the Legacy

studies on the adult outcomes of children of divorce in the general community (Ahrons, 2004; Hetherington & Kelly, 2002; Wallerstein et al., 2000). Although a small study, this first longitudinal, in-depth look at young adult outcomes for children of high-conflict and violent divorce provides a number of preliminary findings that in some respects are promising but in other ways worrisome, pointing the need for further investigation.

Family Relationships Overall, what was remarkable and unanticipated was the extent to which the young adults remained closely involved with their families of origin. Except for a small subgroup who refused to see one of their parents, our children of high conflict divorce had frequent and continuing contact with both parents and with their siblings during their young adult years. Furthermore, most of their parents, for whatever reason, remained passionately committed to their offspring and the young adults felt a strong corresponding allegiance in return, despite histories of problematic parenting. We speculate that the persistence with which both their parents had pursued a continuing relationship with them over the years may have helped many of these young people feel loved and valued, despite some suspicion about their parents’ fundamental motives for doing so. At the same time, and to varying degrees, family relationships were vulnerable to being split or disrupted by parents’ sustained antipathy towards one another, which although muted with time, remained covert or latent. By and large, efforts of family courts and professionals to intervene were perceived by the young adults to be absent, irrelevant, or ineffectual. It would appear that the powerful dynamics of these families remain an active cauldron with a life of their own. These overall findings are explained further in the following sections.

The Parental Relationship In general, rather than become collegial or cooperative, our highly conflicted parents tended to disengage and assiduously avoid each other as their children grew into adulthood… Only the minority continued to actively dispute with much

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the same bitter intensity. Despite this, vivid memories of parents’ entrenched disputes and abiding antipathy, hatred, or contempt for one another, composed a signature theme in the young adults’ remembered experience of their growingup years. The young adults in our study had no difficulty in recalling their parents’ relationship or in rating their own involvement in parental disputes almost two decades previously. Using Ahron’s (2004) measure, three fourths classified their parents retrospectively as ones who “rarely talked to each other but when they did they tended to be angry, argued, or fought” (called fiery foes). The remainder described their parents either as having “arguments and feeling angry most of the time when they talked about the children” (angry associates) or as having “totally discontinued contact with each other” (dissolved duos). None categorized their parents as ones who “cooperated and consulted with each other” with respect to the children (cooperative colleagues); nor as “friends in any respect” (perfect pals). The passage of time somewhat muted the intensity of the conflict between parents somewhat such that at the followup, although almost one third of the young adults currently perceived their parents as continuing to be angry associates or fiery foes, one half of the young adults currently described them as dissolved duos. Only one fifth currently described them as cooperative colleagues. By contrast, in a community longitudinal study 22% of young adults rated their divorced parents as angry associates or fiery foes, 28% as dissolved duos, and 60% as either cooperative colleagues or perfect pals (Ahrons, 2004).

Involvement in the Conflict The young adults remembered with painful clarity the alienating co-parental behavior to which they were subjected at the time of the custody dispute and made distinctions as to which parent was more responsible for bad-mouthing the other parent. Remarkably, their memories were fairly accurate ones because their ratings were relatively consistent with how we had rated these parenting behaviors when they were children. For example, they noted the extent to which one parent sabotaged their relationship with the other parent as a child by using them to send negative messages


and expressing anger if they showed positive feelings toward the other parent. They also recalled their exposure to hostile, negative, and demeaning behavior toward the other parent including blame, ridicule, harping on personality flaws, and negative stories about the other parent’s failures and violations. When asked, the young adults noted regretfully that there were very few, if any, occasions when one parent expressed support for the other’s parenting, and some were incredulous that this might be expected. By and large, these young people were not encouraged to work out problems directly with the other parent, the other parent’s positive attributes were not acknowledged, and other family members and new partners were not restrained from talking negatively in their presence. They were seldom, if ever, told as a child that they were loved by or prepared for their access to the other parent. Parents, thinking they were protecting their children by restraining themselves from speaking their mind, would have been surprised to know that their silence together with their unspoken hostile attitudes—conveyed by innuendo and body language—were perceived as strong, clear messages by their vigilant youngsters. These negative messages—verbal and nonverbal—were perceived as being one of the most painful aspects of their situation. In response, Tina at age 23 recalled becoming closed up and withdrawn as a child. “The verbal fighting between my parents was brutal…it was hard having them talk negatively to one another. There was too much hurt and pain. I did not want to deal with it.” In fact, the primary advice to other parents was to refrain from these kinds of behaviors, and to promote children’s relationships with both parents. Bud, age 30, and already divorced, stated vehemently, “I will not subject my child to what I had as a kid. I would never keep my child from his mother…children need both their mother and father.” Others expressed compassion for how siblings were affected by the conflict. Matt, age 27, recalled, “The hardest thing about the divorce was the conflict between my parents. Parents need to get along whether they like it or not…I was a little different. I look the other way and was not as much influenced by it. Others like my brother can’t do that.” As young adults, the majority seemed to manage their parents’ abiding antipathy by maintaining entirely separate or parallel relationships with them and respecting their need

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to assiduously avoid one another. Those with siblings largely supported one another in doing so. They had learned, at best, to be good diplomats. They knew how to keep secrets that would upset or offend, and, if necessary, they lied to keep the peace. Several had eloped rather than face the daunting task of planning a family wedding. Others had separate celebrations for special occasions or developed protocols for managing the situation. Sally, age 29, explained, “At graduation, we [the siblings] had it all carefully orchestrated. Towards the end of celebrating with mom and her side of the family, one of us rounded up the others and said quite gracefully, “Come on, it’s time to go [to see Dad].” Alicia, age 30, kept her parents separated and her own contact with each limited. “I gave Dad his own place when he came to visit us…He’d get irritated with the kids. On Easter and Christmas we go over to my mom’s place for one hour. I would like to stay longer, but it is better to go wanting more than to be disappointed. We know not to talk about my mother when Dad’s around and vice versa. It just gets them going!” Matt remained close to both parents but neutral: “It was a power struggle between my parents. My father would get back at my mom and cause problems, and she would come back at him. I absolutely heard it from both of them. I really tried to see things for myself, tried to move past it, to forget and forgive. I shake it off. I have a good relationship with them both. I’ve stayed impartial, almost zone it out.”

Other Parenting Problems Most alarmingly, what emerged spontaneously in the narratives of several young adults were memories of exposure to neglectful and abusive environments that had not been detected nor foreseen by us as counselors during the time when we saw their families. Severe substance abuse by some parents had been entirely missed or minimized in importance by custody evaluators and helping professionals. Sadly, the plight of these children was compounded if they dared disclose to anyone: They recalled being threatened or getting into “big trouble” with a parent for talking to evaluators and therapists about family business and vowing henceforth to never trust counselors. After the acute legal disputes had subsided, a number of them recalled feeling lonely and neglected, left to fend for themselves for long periods by


parents who had become diverted by other interests. Recalling their vulnerability and neediness at the time, a couple of young people disclosed that they had been sexually molested by an adult acquaintance or relative who befriended and exploited them. Several who became rebellious during adolescence were subjected to physical coercion that escalated to abuse by a parent attempting to control them. We speculate that parents’ counterallegations and preoccupation with proving the other was at fault had focused the professionals’ attention on the high interparental conflict as being the problem and had obscured toxic parenting—latent or ongoing—by one of the caretakers. The more subtle kinds of fallout from the parents’ inability to support and communicate with one another and to work together as a family unit were too often ignored, minimized, or dismissed by grown-ups. The young adults recalled the apprehension they felt when their parents attended the same school or sporting event without protocols in place on how everyone should act; the embarrassment they suffered when a parent “acted weird” in the presence of their peers; the worry they experienced about a parent’s safety, health and well-being; the discomfort they had when overhearing a parent’s sexual activity with a new partner; and the burden of secrets they had to keep from the other parent. Among their most poignant memories were ones of unacknowledged grieving for an absent parent: sobbing in the corner of the playground after a parent dropped them off at school, crying under the bed covers at night, desperately missing a parent while on vacation, and worrying about when they would see a parent for visits or whether they would be returned home on time. In sum, the protection of a cohesive parental alliance, personal decorum, and the routines and rituals of everyday family life that normally structure children’s lives in intact families had broken down, or was absent, and no substitute protective parental functions had been put in place to help them cope with these new postdivorce dilemmas. Interestingly, with the exception of the more troubled young adults, most of these young people did not blame their parents for the problems; rather they were remarkably compassionate and made excuses for their parents’ failures. Indeed, their expectations of parents were modest to say the least. Harriet, age 23, was worried about her mother’s health and excused her failure to respond to her e-mails: “She’s been

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dieting too much and is very thin…It is hard for her to focus on anyone else other than herself. I allow that. I am not hurt by it. That is how she is. I have no expectations. I love her.” Joseph, age 24, was very grateful to his dad who had actually made little effort to see his son because “He once drove a whole hour through the traffic to see me before school. I will always remember that!” Some rationalizations on behalf of a parent were extraordinary, such as those of Elizabeth, age 25, who was grateful for her father not abusing her “No one says life is easy…Even though my dad is weird and used pornography…he’s never molested us.” However, even serious abuse could be brushed aside or forgiven. One young woman disclosed that her father had molested her, but quickly excused his behavior. “It only happened once when he was drinking and depressed [about mom]…I have forgiven him”. Several young people, including Elizabeth, went on to suggest that family difficulties have made them a somewhat stronger, more mature individual: “There are people who had it a lot worse than I. Compared to kids from more privileged backgrounds, it has been character-building to struggle.” Ruth, age 25, proclaimed a fierce sense of toughness and rigidity: “I am extremely independent because of what I went through. I developed a sense of self that is hard to articulate. I don’t put up with a lot of crap—I am strong enough to react and get out of the situation. I have a strong conscience. I dealt with it all. I came through it and I am OK.” Although these appear to be useful coping strategies, the young adults may have paid a price in other ways that will be discussed later.

Contact and Relationships with Parents and Siblings By court order, two thirds had spent their school-age years in mothers’ custody and one tenth in fathers’ custody with traditional holiday and weekend visiting schedules; one fourth had joint custody with shared time schedules. During their teenage years, about one half had drifted into more flexible visiting schedules or chose to live with their other parent, and the other half adhered to the court-ordered schedule, albeit insisting that it was their own decision to do so. As young adults, the large majority maintained frequent and continuing contact with both parents and expressed positive feelings, if not affection, for them both despite


unhappy memories. The majority (three fourths) reported that they currently had some kind of contact with their mothers at least weekly and all had contact at least monthly. The one exception was a girl who had not seen her mother for many years after her mother had been imprisoned for abducting her as a toddler and jumped parole when released. Likewise, most were in touch with their fathers almost as frequently, with more than one half at least weekly and more than four fifths at least monthly with the exception of one girl whose father had died. As young adults, rare or no contact with fathers was limited to one fifth of the young men and women who themselves had made the choice to exclude that parent from their lives. What is most remarkable is the absence of weakened ties to their fathers and lack of father dropout in our study compared with others. In longitudinal community studies of divorce, about one half of young adult report sporadic or no contact with their fathers (Juby, Billette, La Plante & LeBourdais, 2007; Wallerstein et al., 2000); only two thirds of young adults describe close relationships with their fathers; three fourths are close with their mothers (Hetherington & Kelly, 2002); and whereas one half have improved relationships with their mothers, one third have relationships with fathers that have deteriorated as young adults (Ahrons, 2004). The somewhat low geographical mobility of our young adults also reflects strong ongoing ties to their families. Compared with one study in which only one third of the young adults of divorce lived in the same state (Hetherington & Kelly, 2002), in our study, although a number had gone away to college, the majority (three fourths) drifted back to the area where their parents resided afterwards, others were reluctantly living elsewhere because of job opportunities, and only a couple expressed the need for distance. Siblings were shared by the young adult in about one half of the families; the remainder had been an only child. Some sibling groups had been split by custody decisions and the youths’ shifting alliances with one parent or the other over the years. Other individuals pursued separated lives and interests during high school and college. However, by young adulthood, almost all of them were now in regular contact with one another. Remarriage and the introduction of a stepparent did not feature as major issues perhaps because these changes seemed less likely to have occurred compared to

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normal community samples (Ahrons, 2004, p. 29; Wallerstein et al., 2000). Only about one half of their fathers and one third of their mothers had remarried, one tenth had stepsiblings, and two fifths had half siblings. Alienation and Estrangement. When asked to map their positive and negative feelings toward their parents over their growing-up years on a 7-point scale ranging from extremely positive to extremely negative, as a group the results reflected the normal developmental trajectory, albeit in a somewhat exaggerated form. During grade school, the large majority remembered feeling “extremely positive” towards both parents, reflecting idealization. These ratings plunged during the junior high school years when, on average, they expressed “mixed negative and positive feelings,” reflecting ambivalence and a precipitous disillusionment that is more typical in adolescents from divorced families (Wallerstein & Kelly, 1980). During this adolescent period, one fifth recalled predominantly negative feelings towards their mothers and another two fifths towards their fathers, ranging in intensity from negative to extremely negative, which included those who refused contact. On average, attitudes towards both parents then improved steadily through high school and afterwards to their current status of feeling “positive” or “very positive,” albeit with a more moderate view of their parents’ limitations and vulnerabilities as well as strengths. These average trends obscure the variation among the young adults. Predominantly positive feelings of appreciation, love, and commitment toward both parents were expressed by most of these young adults (more than two thirds) at follow-up. It was not unusual for them to express fierce loyalty toward families that they admitted were “dysfunctional.” Tina, age 25, defended hers as follows: “My family all love each other a lot. I love both my dad and my stepdad. It all happened for a reason. I have wondered if we are a dysfunctional family. I get a bit mad when someone suggests that…I feel very lucky; we have great relationships in our family.” Matt defended his family with, “What I valued about our family is the togetherness…and the toughness. We are a real tight knit group.” At the same time, this young man went on to admit wistfully, “I would have liked more support when I was growing up. My father came and watched me play football only about five times and my mom had too much else


going on. I would like to be there for my kids—be the coach on their teams.” Alicia described her family relationships as “toxic” and said, “I needed to turn down the volume,” to explain her relocation to the other side of the country. Nevertheless, she keeps returning to her hometown and is in close contact with her family of origin on a weekly basis. At the follow-up, predominantly negative feelings towards parents were expressed by only about one tenth towards their mothers and another one fifth towards their fathers, with the latter making up the group who refused all contact. All but one young man had sustained this antipathy toward their fathers throughout most of their growing up years. In sum, although the majority developed a negative stance towards one of their parents during their teenage years, all of them sought to reconnect with that parent during early adulthood, and about one half of them did so successfully. Those who failed to reconcile and continued to reject a parent were either clearly estranged by a parent’s violent, alcoholic, or abusive behavior, or they provided convincing accounts of the parent’s more subtle forms of emotional manipulation and control or lack of empathy and respect for them as a person. Interestingly, whereas young adults tended to refuse contact with a father for whom they had strong negative feelings, they kept some semblance of contact with their mothers despite feeling very negative towards her. With the exception of one young, alienated man, those who refused contact with one of their parents were not among the poorly functioning young adults and their attachments with new partners ranged over the spectrum.

General Functioning In terms of their occupational and vocational achievements, in a group where the average age of the young adult was 24, what was remarkable was that more than one half had already graduated from college and another one fifth was in the process of completing this milestone. A combination of financial support from parents, working part time, scholarships, and loans made this possible. Only a minority group, those who were among the most seriously disturbed young people, had dropped out, were unemployed, or worked fitfully in unskilled occupations. These college completion rates

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are much higher than those of other longitudinal studies of divorce where it seems that many divorced fathers do not support their youngsters after they reach 18 years of age (Ahrons, 2004; Hetherington & Kelly, 2002; Wallerstein et al., 2000). In terms of their general mental health and emotional functioning, however, the picture was quite different. Two fifths of these young adults reported clinical levels of distressful symptoms on standardized measures. This level of distress is twice that of adult children of divorce in general (Hetherington & Kelly, 2002) and 4 to 5 times greater than the general population (Derogatis & Spencer, 1982). The symptoms of distress, together with the clinical interviews, suggest character traits rather than reactive difficulties. They reported, for example, high levels of interpersonal sensitivity, paranoid ideation, and hostility as well as obsessive-compulsive and psychotic symptoms. With respect to their capacities for intimate relationships, overall the problems were more extensive. Standardized measures of their romantic relationships together with interviews provided evidence that this domain was extraordinarily challenging. One third of the young adults were currently living with a partner or spouse; one half was dating steadily or had a prior serious dating relationship; the remainder had never had that experience. Only about one third of these young adults could be categorized as secure in their attachments, defined as feeling comfortable with being close to a partner and being intimate as well as autonomous. In comparison, among college students using similar selfreport measures about one half have secure attachments (Batholomew & Horowitz, 1991; Brennan, Clark & Shaver, 1998; Hazan & Shaver, 1987;1990), and according to observational ratings from the Adult Attachment Interview (Main et al., 1985), about two thirds of adults in the general population are rated as securely attached. In sum, two thirds of the young adults were rated as having insecure attachments and were classified further into one of three patterns—fearful, preoccupied, or dismissing. The majority of those who were insecure were fearful of intimacy; that is, they were uncomfortable about getting close to an intimate other and prone to be distrustful, avoidant, and confused. The remaining individuals were classified as either being preoccupied about their attachment relationships—they worried, obsessed, and required a lot of


reassurance from their intimate partners about being close or were dismissing of them, defined as distancing themselves from partners and being somewhat counterdependent. With regard to their propensity to repeat patterns of abuse and violence that they had witnessed as children, most talked about their commitment not to hurt their partners in similar ways. The majority of the young people (two thirds) who had experienced dating or cohabiting relationships had refrained from doing so; the remainder reported partner violence that ranged from minor to severe on the Conflict Tactics Scale (Straus. 1979). Young adults from highly conflicted but nonviolent divorces were as prone to perpetrate this intergenerational cycle of violence as those from domestically violent divorces and, in fact, seemed to be less aware of the danger of doing so. Interestingly, the young women were the ones likely to be physically violent with their partners. The young men who had difficulty managing their anger were violent with their male peers or, despite their better judgment, were verbally abusive of their partners. Particularly intriguing are the discrepancies in outcomes among those with siblings, with at least one child in the sibling group having significant difficulties whereas brothers and sisters in the same family were doing comparatively well. Although the only child or the oldest of the children appears to have borne the brunt of the parental conflict, one can speculate that the care-taking role they tend to assume with their parents and siblings and the gratification received from being the special or prized child of the parental fight protect them somewhat from severe acting-out during adolescence.

Levels of Functioning The indicators of general functioning for the group as a whole described above obscure the considerable variation in degree and pattern of disturbance within the group. The young adults were categorized into four groups. Group 1 (slightly more than one fifth) comprised those having serious difficulties amounting to failure in multiple domains of functioning—in school, at work, in their personal lives, and with relationships. Group 2 (almost two fifths) had achieved well occupationally and vocationally but were significantly impaired emotionally and insecure or troubled with respect to their intimate or romantic attachments. Group 3 (one sixth) were on-track

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occupationally and reported no significant emotional distress but had insecure or somewhat problematic intimate relationships with partners. Group 4 (about one fourth) appeared to be functioning well in all domains. Females who had been violent with their partners were likely to be among the first two groups, whereas the propensity for male violence towards peers occurred in all four groups. Each of these groups is described in detail with case illustrations. Group 1: Poorly Functioning in all Domains. This most dis-

turbed group comprised young adults who had dropped out of school or college, were unemployed, or worked fitfully in unskilled occupations. Clinical indicators of impairment ranged in intensity from moderate to profound. These included tumultuous relationships with work colleagues and roommates, abuse of alcohol, serious drug addiction, selfmutilation, suicide attempts, multiple pregnancies, abortion and out-of-wedlock children, antisocial behavior, and mental health diagnoses of schizoaffective, obsessive-compulsive, and bi-polar disorders. Their intimate relationships were the most primitive; they were exploitive, abusive, or victims of abusive partners. Their attachments were likely to be classified as fearful, also referred to as disorganized, because the individual does not have a coherent strategy for dealing with intimate relationships. Some fearful attachments seemed to be rooted in basic distrust. That is, the individual did not ever have a stable, supportive, and nurturing relationship with at least one caretaker to provide the essential foundation for basic trust and relational attachment. Another source of fearful attachments appeared to be the child’s vigilance about the dual threats of unpredictable abandonment and engulfment, these being the legacy of early relationships with disputing parents who were more severely personality-disordered (narcissistic or borderline) or for other reasons insensitive to the child’s experience. It is commonly known that those who are temperamentally more vulnerable are also more reactive to stressful and traumatic life events. This was confirmed for young adults in Group 1. Those who by nature were more sensitive, dependent, and needy; less accomplished academically and athletically; and lacking artistic or creative skills were more vulnerable to negative peer influence and likely to become caught up in self-destructive behavior.


Jason (described in chapter 6, section entitled Jason’s Struggles With a Fragmented Self) had an early childhood history of emotional and behavioral difficulties and a mild congenital deformity that left him slightly crippled. After his emotionally labile mother and narcissistically vulnerable father divorced, he had bounced between his disputing parents manipulating both into alternately allying with him against the other. At the follow-up at age 25, he had been diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive and bi-polar disorders and was in and out of residential care for delinquency and serious drug problems. Since high school, he had been heavily using pot and ecstasy, progressing to hard drugs—cocaine, LSD, and methamphetamines. He did not graduate from high school and worked only intermittently. He shifted his allegiances back and forth between his parents who became intolerant of his behavior until he disclosed to them his serious addiction to cocaine. His obsessive-compulsive disorder prevented him at times from functioning. He would literally freeze and be unable to decide what to wear or eat or even which foot to lift in order to walk. At age 25 Jason described a series of brief relationships, all demonstrating his distrust, propensity to use or exploit his partner for his own needs, and paranoid tendencies. “My first was when I was 16; we went together about 3 months…. She was always very emotional…would break down crying a lot. I broke up with her. I didn’t feel like taking the time…to help her sort out her problems. The next one wasn’t as attractive, but she was very smart…I thought being around her would help me not get off-track but it didn’t. I broke it off. I wasn’t attracted to her anymore…My most significant one was Angel. That was a strange one! We moved in together, but it wasn’t helping…it was not good for me…for my self-esteem. I was too emotionally into her. She was very attractive, a fashion model. That’s not a good thing. They are always into being watched…They manipulate you a lot…She broke up with me because I wasn’t on the path to success…I saw her 2 weeks ago. Something strange happened. She got sick with this disease that made her eyes bulge out…She is no longer as attractive. She never had much personality.”

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It is notable that in response to his lover’s rejection, Jason objectifies and demeans her in a rather ghoulish sense. Some of these young people were obviously temperamentally vulnerable or prone to psychiatric disorders and needed a far more protected family environment than the one they had experienced in their growing up years. The stress associated with their highly conflicted parents interacted with their vulnerabilities and compounded their difficulties such that the tragic outcomes were a consequence of multiple losses and trauma as illustrated with Jenny. Note that the custody dispute of her childhood was echoed in her psychotic delusions. Jenny, now age 25, had been an object of a bitter custody war since she was an infant; the father repeatedly challenged the mother’s sole custody, alleging neglect. Chronically angry and depressed, he functioned best when caretaking his beloved child on regular alternate weekend visits. In turn, she felt wholly responsible for him. An intellectually gifted, articulate, and imaginative child, the only incipient symptom of mental illness was her somewhat constricted affect that was interpreted as a dissociative response to the trauma of the chronic conflict and witnessing a violent struggle between her parents. During her mid-teens, Jenny was diagnosed with a schizoaffective disorder for which she was intermittently hospitalized when she refused her medication. Tragically, her father died (a possible suicide) during this period. Her grief reaction further compromised her mental state. Although an intelligent and strikingly photogenic young woman as a young adult, she was living mostly on the streets and from time to time would return home to her mother bringing derelict men whom she had rescued (reminiscent of her father). At such times her mother reported that she would actively hallucinate, arguing with delusional voices that were apparently telling her (as her father had told her) that her mother was bad and neglectful. The serious problems that had developed during adolescence abated somewhat in a subset of Group I as they matured during their 20s, albeit these particular young people continued to struggle, and excessive alcohol and


marijuana use remained a problem. Interestingly, those who had improved or had begun to settle down were likely to have insecure attachments of the preoccupied type. Here it seems that some vestige of capacity for basic trust had been established with a primary caretaker, but the psychological task of separation-individuation remained unresolved. Note that in the case of Bruce, his mother provided him with his only semblance of a secure base. Bruce grew up in a mother custody arrangement that was sabotaged by the father’s interference, accusations of infidelity, family secrets, manipulation of the children’s affections, and the mother’s tit-for-tat angry reactions. There had been no violence. Bruce’s school progress was poor, and he tended to get into fights with peers. He eloped when he was 18 and was devastated when his wife left him. He turned to heavy drug usage in a violent peer subculture and was virtually unable to function for several years. Frightened for his own survival, he returned to his mother’s home and went through the detoxification process on her couch, and gradually got back on track. Now, a large, powerfully built but tender-hearted young man of 30, he described being tortured by his insecurity about his relationships with women. His second marriage appears to be headed for the same fate unless he gets some help. “My wife, she’s a very good person, but I am fearful of her cheating on me. Things go OK and then I get very jealous inside and insecure and start thinking she’s doing stuff behind my back. We start arguing and fighting. I don’t really know how to control it…it’s getting really out of hand. When I go to work, I get obsessed about whether she is having an affair while I am gone. I get sick to the stomach. I build these fabricated scenarios of her being unfaithful…It all bottles up and my stomach is churning and churning…My imagination goes wild. I can’t control my demons…When I have something on my mind, I don’t sugarcoat what I am saying. She goes to my mom and tells her about the crazy accusations I make of her, and my mom tells me I have to keep it under wraps but I can’t!” Bruce’s pain was palpable; he became emotionally distraught as he reported this material. He cannot sleep at night without his wife wrapped in his arms.

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Bruce suffered from terrible rage in response to feeling helpless. He talked about how he once seriously injured a classmate who had long tormented him and recalled similar fights in bars, pondering his behavior when he gets into a violent confrontation. “I’m scared as hell and then I feel this rush, and I become like a superman…It’s an incredible feeling!” He also excused and justified his violence: “We were all drinking heavily, and each time they had it coming! I haul off and pop them.” He had been arrested but not yet convicted of any crime. Group 2: Good Occupational Functioning but Emotional and Relational Problems. This group of young adults achieved

academically in ways that made both of their parents justly proud. In fact, this remains one of the few conflict-free domains of their lives. Most had also achieved expectable progress in the work domain, commensurate with their socioeconomic class and family expectations. In terms of their general mental health and emotional functioning, however, the picture was quite different. These young adults reported clinical levels of distressful symptoms including depression, interpersonal sensitivity, paranoid ideation, hostility, and obsessive-compulsive traits. The narratives of the majority of the young adults in Group 2 portrayed their love relationships as relatively troubled, mostly stormy, unfulfilling, or “on-again, off-again” affairs wherein they revealed their own narcissistic fragility or brittle self-confidence and their need for ongoing assurance from others about their identity and self-worth. Measures of attachment rated most of them as being excessively preoccupied. Others in Group 2 who were lost in fantasies about romantic relationships, inexplicably attracted and repelled, or re-enacted oedipal fantasies, were likely to be categorized as fearful on these measures. The discrepancy between academic and vocational achievements and emotional and relational functioning is well illustrated by Samuel who was an only child in a shared custody arrangement. He had spent his childhood years guiltily fending off the demands of a depressed mother who was exceedingly emotionally needy and demanding of his sole allegiance and caretaking. His father, although warm and supportive, was not able to


rescue him. Feelings of disloyalty to his mother and envy of his half-sibling prevented him from becoming close to his father’s new family. Samuel kept his distance, especially from women, nursing a sense of being very special but highly anxious about being essentially insignificant. He had completed his doctorate from a prestigious university by the time he was 25 and was on the fast track as a research scientist in a biomedical engineering firm. Despite these achievements, his well-proportioned physique, and good looks, at the age of 29 Sam suffered from recurrent obsessive-depressive bouts whenever he fell short of his perfectionist ideals; he would become almost totally dysfunctional, mired in obsessive rumination about his self-image. Sam’s father confirmed that from time to time when in these states Sam phoned him for help in daily functioning, and he has had to literally get Sam out of bed, walk him to work, and get him back onto prescribed medication. Sam was classified as fearful of attachments. He did not begin dating until he was in second year of graduate school. “I was completely socially inept…I tried to see how many I could get in one week. My casual dates were all one-night stands.” Samuel acknowledged he had never had an emotional relationship with any of the women with whom he had sex. “It’s impossible for me to get close to people. Superficially I fall in love 15 times a night. It’s all potential, all in my head. I have these images in my head, not a real person…I become attracted to that and fall in love with the fantasy. If I get to talk to them, I feed the fantasy…I get my heart broken every time I go out and begin fantasizing about someone. It’s emotional drainage. It’s rare I go out and don’t get depressed the next morning, thinking of all the opportunities I missed, obsessing over what could have been. It’s related to how I always sit and watch others and get vicarious satisfaction.” Confusion and fear of intimate connections are also illustrated by Susan (described in chapter 6, section entitled Susan’s Search for an Authentic Self) who essentially grew up as an only child in shared custody trying to obtain nurturance from an enraged, depressed mother

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and a self-centered father, both socially isolated. At 27 she had completed her degree in chemistry and was working for a volunteer organization in preparation for graduate studies. She suffered from bouts of obsessive rumination and depression and was classified as fearful in terms of attachment capacity. Susan had never dated. She spoke about her confusion as to whether she was attracted to boys or girls and her discomfort with and avoidance of physical intimacy. “I am more comfortable around women, but I have crushes on boys…I just watch them from a distance…One time a girlfriend told me about the sex she was having and it totally shocked me, I was reeling from it for the whole year. I don’t like others to talk about relationships. I don’t want to see guys with their shirts off or buff. I do get self conscious around them. I don’t want the kissing or anything. I want them to be a friend. I still find kissing vaguely repulsive.” She tearfully concluded, “This definitely is a left-over from my parents. I never saw a relationship between them!” It would be a mistake to think that these young adults were prone to simply repeat the failures of their parent’s marriages as many of them feared. Rather, they appear to be re-enacting the complex emotional and erotic dyads and triangles they had themselves experienced with their parents as children in their new partnerships as illustrated by Randy. At age 22, despite good progress in his studies at a prestigious college and being a leader in his fraternity, Randy talked about his “existential angst”; his parents talked about his need to be always “center stage.” His relationship style was rated as fearful. Randy had grown up in the primary custody of his mother. He was an only child, the prized object of two highly intelligent, competitive, selfabsorbed, doting parents. Moreover, family relationships were erotically charged; he shared his mother’s bed and was exposed to his father’s explicit lectures about sex. Both parents viewed their precocious son as extensions of themselves, infusing him with their own goals and ambitions. Growing up, Randy found himself in the precarious position of being the central loved object of both with the threat of being engulfed or abandoned, depending upon whether or not he met their expectations and fulfilled their needs. He was caught in a distorted oedipal


triangle (similar to Dante’s dilemma described in chapter 4, section entitled The Case of Dante P). In a sense, he felt viable, powerful, and alive only when his parents fought over him. Randy recreated this emotional-sexual triangle of his childhood in his first love experience at the age of 22. “She was best friends of my roommate who had developed a crush on her. She and I started going out unbeknownst to my roommate. I was faced with a dilemma—my roommate who was my best friend versus an amazing romantic relationship with this girl…Somehow he suppressed his feelings for her and we made this trio. It was incredible being together, the three of us. But my dilemma was how to divide my time between them. Both were almost codependent upon me. They both wanted me. I would be guilty for not hanging out with one when I was with the other. They started developing angst towards each other. He would banter playfully at first, and funny, then she would become angry, and then he was mean towards her—a kind of sadistic humor. She began to aggressively dislike him. This went on for two to three months. I ended up spending more time with her—almost every night sleeping with her. It was a fast moving relationship; it was wonderful, just amazing! We were never silent, talking, laughing.” It is noteworthy that this ménage a’trois collapsed and Randy regressed to being self-preoccupied and somewhat heartless towards his female lover. “My parents visited me at college. After that I don’t know what happened. I stopped finding her attractive—almost a physical repulsion. I found myself distancing from her…Then she would spend the night tossing and turning after sex and crying in inexplicable despair…It started to drive me nuts. It drove me to break it off with her. I fabricated some excuse to do so…She didn’t take it well. She said she threw up before I came to talk to her, anticipating what I was going to tell her. She was crying. I felt…numb.” Most of the young adults in Group 2 were classified as preoccupied with their intimate relationships. They were excessively emotionally needy and dependent upon their partner for attention and reassurance, and insecure

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and anxious about being abandoned or neglected. This attachment style is consistent with incomplete separationindividuation from a primary caretaker. Despite their good school and work achievements, they had a poor or vulnerable self-image. Almost inevitably their struggles for attention and reassurance involved violence toward partners, especially among the young women as illustrated by Elizabeth. Elizabeth grew up as a middle child of a large family in the custody of her overburdened single mother who was a victim of severe domestic violence and never available enough for this mother-hungry little girl. Elizabeth turned to her alcoholic, sociopathic father for attention and became the one sibling caught in his web—feeling alternately compassionate, responsible, angry, and guilty with respect to him. At the follow-up, she was 25 and had begun her graduate studies in horticulture. A tall, very slim, athletic-looking girl, Elizabeth talked compulsively with a lot of nervous energy. Many symptoms of distress were checked on the psychological measures, and she admitted to being socially isolated. She had chosen a partner beneath her in social status and alternately tried to rescue and reform him as she has done with her father. Needless to say, she continues to seek nurturance, attention, and reassurance for her vulnerable self-image and resorts to violent demands when it is not forthcoming. “I have been with my boyfriend for 3 years…he is older, 32. He’s the first real boyfriend I have had. He’s had a rough life, too…When I met Peter, he was not really going anywhere; [he was] working as a laborer with no real goals…had dropped out of college… I felt like he’s someone I can help.” Elizabeth later went on to elaborate on the constant fighting that goes on in her relationship with her boyfriend. “When we get into fights, it’s like the same frustration I have with my dad. But he, Peter, never gets upset, only me. I get totally mad, like about him being late or spending all day with his friends, and I am crying and upset, pulling out my hair, but he doesn’t react at all, just stands there! The only way to get his attention is to hit him…really hard…except he still does not react. I feel I don’t trust him. Not that he has given me any reason not to trust; basically he is always there. I don’t feel confident…I have to remind myself that


I have a lot to offer, and what does he have to offer? I call him really mean things like ‘you’re stupid. You’ve done nothing with your life!’ I bug him constantly. Sometimes I wonder why he does not say ‘I’m out of here.’” These young women appear to re-enact the conflicted custody scenario, including violent struggles that they had with their fathers as a child, whenever they feel anxious and insecure about their relationships with their partners, except that now they have reversed roles and become the aggressor. Julie (described in chapter 9, section entitled Assessment of the Impasse and its Effect on the Child) had been an anxious, phobic child with an unstable self-image, overly dependent upon and unable to separate from her mother whom she idolized, and fearful of becoming like her father whom she demonized. The problem was compounded by ongoing parental conflict and her father’s violence. For instance, when her father physically forced her to comply with his court-ordered visits (literally pulling her out of bed at her mother’s house and dragging her to the car), the child felt terrified, helpless, and furious. At age 25, Julie was a talented and dedicated art teacher who reported having numerous symptoms of emotional distress; her relationship capacity was classified as insecure-preoccupied. She admitted to having a very turbulent and violent relationship with her husband and having brandished weapons. “I know I set him off. I use very bad language. I have some of the traits of my father. I don’t hit him, but I have threatened him with a knife, and I have pushed him. I violate his space and get too close. My patience is very short. He does not push back. He calls his parents whenever we have an argument. I am more physical than he is, and I make more threats. I have tried my best to work this out, but I am not a doormat. I want to put the fear of me in him—to get the message ‘if you pull these stunts, you had better be afraid of me.’ Before I’d cry and plead with him, now I scare him!” Group 3: Good Occupational and Emotional Functioning but Insecure Relationships. These young adults were on track

with their educational and work achievements and did not register any significant emotional distress out of the normal

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and expectable range. However, relationships were somewhat problematic. They were more likely to be rated as having insecure attachments of the dismissing type also known as insecure-avoidant. Individuals who have dismissing attachments try to manage their anxiety about closeness by distancing themselves from relationships, remaining somewhat pseudoautonomous or counterdependent. This attachment style is consistent with a kind of premature but incomplete separation-individuation from a primary caretaker. In general, they defend against their insecure sense of self with a more inflated sense of self-esteem. Some seem to have a rather jaundiced view of intimate relationships. These particular young adults were attempting to protect themselves from being victimized by potentially abusive or exploitive partners. For example: As a child Jessica experienced her father as controlling and intrusive, and she consistently refused to see him during most of her growing up years. As a young adult of 23, she sought to protect herself from repeating her mother’s co-dependency in an abusive marriage by largely distancing herself from the young men who were attracted to her. “I have no glorification of marriage. I know divorce is a possibility. It might not happen but it does. I don’t enter relationships in a pessimistic manner [but] guys will cheat or do something stupid. That’s the way they are.” While expressing mild contempt for men in general, she asserted her superiority “I am vigilant; I read other people so well, and I’m pretty much right on!” This very attractive young woman went on to describe having had nonintimate friendships with young men who were characterized by their pursuing her with a great deal more interest than she reciprocated. Others, like Stephanie, seem to dismiss the need for intimate partners in general. Stephanie had been the oldest caretaking child of a substance-abusing mother. Although court-ordered into the custody of her father, he was always working, and she never felt comfortable with the rigid family regime imposed by her stepmother. As a teenager, she chose to return to her neglectful mother’s home as a base for


more independent living. At age 23, she was a tall, dark featured, attractive young woman with a career agenda. Although she seemed somewhat emotionally guarded or constricted, she reported no emotional distress. In fact she gave the impression of being strongly independent and captain of her own ship but also dedicated to the service of those less fortunate. She has not had any romantic love interest. When the one boy she hung out with as a friend in high school had a parallel intimate relationship with another girl, she felt slightly affronted but not particularly hurt. She has had sexual relationships, usually after drinking, but these have been casual affairs with no intimacy engendered. She said she did not have any models for good love relationships, citing the failed marriages of her older friends as well as the fiascos of her father and mother. She said vaguely that she would like to have a love relationship but is not too motivated to do anything about it at this time, having too many other goals to accomplish. She would also like to have children some day but not necessarily biological ones. Having seen so many needy orphaned children in her travels to third-world countries, she thought it might be better to adopt a child. Stephanie concluded by saying that she sees herself essentially as a single parent in the future with no partner to help her raise the child. Group 4: Good Functioning in all Domains. This group of young adults achieved academically and vocationally and was judged to be relatively unimpaired with respect to general emotional functioning. Although they reported mild anxiety, distress, and insecurity that they clearly attributed to their dysfunctional family histories, this level of angst seemed to be within the expectable range. Furthermore, these young adults had secure relationships with stable partners. They were comfortable with intimacy, neither overwhelmed by closeness nor afraid of being abandoned. This attachment style is consistent with individuation and a relatively stable, positive self-image. As illustrated by Robert, however, they are not free from the ghosts of their past family experiences.

Robert (as described in chapter 6, section entitled Robert’s Unholy Alliance) had a family history that involved the father’s violence and mother’s extramarital affairs and

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a divorce marked by vicious counterallegations of his mother’s drug-taking and his father’s jealous rages. At that time, he made a strong alliance to support his needy father and only later when the crisis passed went to live with his mother. At age 30, Robert had a stable job earning a high income; he was in the process of purchasing a home and had married following the experience of having a couple of long-term girlfriends. He reported no significant emotional distress. In fact, he was cheerful and self-confident. He was rated as having a secure relationship with his young wife with whom he was enchanted. By nature an inarticulate young man, he struggled to put his insights into words about what he and his wife had learned together. He explained that the “biggest thing was learning who I was, what was I willing to give up, where was my life going…and how we are different from one another.…We’re opposites. I’m a lot more laid back, live day to day. She is planning all the time, on a schedule, has back-up plans…We’ve really grown together…We went through premarital counseling. The counselor was fantastic; we went six or seven times. She told us never go to sleep angry at one another.” Pillow talk between the young married couple at night included promises to avoid repeating the mistakes of his parents. For example, he abhorred jealousy (like his father’s) and took care not to hurt his partner when they were angry with each other. When asked what he did when he had disagreements with his wife, he said thoughtfully, “We end up talking them out. Sometimes she gets frustrated. I take on my dad’s sense of humor; it is not meant to be mean or insulting, but sometimes it comes across as offensive, half facetious…When we disagree, I’m the one not likely to talk, whereas she can be pretty pushy. I tell her we need to take time-outs, whereas she wants to get very detailed about it and she’ll talk to me in a stern way. I’ve gotten angry. There are no bad scenes and nothing physical, no vulgarity, no bad language [like my parents]. You know how you can hurt people if you wanted to. A couple of times we said not nice things on both sides. I told her to give me my 5 minutes [of time-out]. She will assume things…and then gets frustrated when things don’t turn out the way


she assumes. I have always withdrawn. I never get physical. I’ve never been one to talk a lot; I have to learn how to talk and open up.” There is one serious caveat to this affirmation of Robert’s good functioning. Although he has never hurt his young wife and is proud of the fact that he is very slow to anger, he admitted to having beaten up other males on a couple of occasions (when shamed). “I have gotten physical with this friend who kept going on about how our family was messed up. I couldn’t take it anymore and I went after him. Hit him real hard! I also went after [my stepfather] …He was not treating Mom right. Everything builds in me to a breaking point. He yelled at me in front of my friends.” Robert’s tearful reactions after each of these violent incidents were not indicative of remorse. Rather, they served to release the intense emotional arousal that energized and exhilarated him. Moreover, he felt entirely justified and credits his violence with making his victims shape up. Needless to say, with these attitudes and emotional payoffs, there is potential for young men like Robert to become violent with their partners and others in the future. The histories of Group 4 relationships were not troublefree; rather they evolved over time owing to the couple’s commitment to open communication, working through, and resolving issues. Their narrative accounts reflect this ongoing but incomplete processing of their experience. However, the reworking of scripts is grounded in the couple’s capacity to trust each other and respect each other’s differences. These results were achieved by those young adults who were developing a more consolidated sense of self and a willingness to compromise on issues without feeling compromised themselves. All of them believed that they had learned from their parents’ mistakes and failures. Katie is a happily married young woman of 27, working as a teacher’s aide while pursuing graduate study in art therapy. She was the youngest child of an enmeshed ambivalent marriage in which her mother was unable to separate and take a consistent stand against the ongoing extramarital affair of the father until she found a new

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partner who took on her cause. Katie remained in her mother’s primary care, but her sibling group was fragmented by ongoing competition between the stepfather and father for the children’s allegiance. She explained the development of her secure marriage relationship as follows: “I had high-school relationships, always good, healthy ones emotionally that were fun. I was drawn to guys with [religious] faith and who treated me with respect. I met Martin during freshman year of college…we had a roller coaster relationship during the early years…broke off and got together again on a number of occasions before we settled down.” She went on to explain that at first she was bothered by the fact that they have different faiths—hers was more personal and evangelical; his was more philosophically spiritual. In the early stages, they both cheated on each other resulting in breakups. “We both have dysfunctional families, and we’re hell bent on learning from that.… It was a rough time. We both learn from our mistakes. Both of us were fighting like we saw our parent’s fight. His dad and mom did not respect each other so he was not taught how to communicate in a respectful way [to me]. He’d blame me, and [like my mother] it would end up with me apologizing and this would let him off the hook [just like with my dad]. I realized I was enabling unhealthy behavior. He was incredibly self-aware and introspective until we got into an argument and then he would get defensive”. “We now communicate about everything. [How did that come about?] He went to counseling…had to open up and see his patterns…I had to learn to put boundaries around our marriage and not let my [extended family] stuff intrude. I would do anything for family…I could spend a lot of time with my [siblings] and he has questioned that at times [when it intrudes on us as a couple]. I have also read self-help books…but [what has really helped] are my acting classes…it’s been incredible…a profound experience…they are helping me to stop censoring myself…to accept my emotions…to live more truthfully. I realize now that I get sad before I get angry, and my husband gets angry before he gets sad…It’s shown me a


lot about myself, what my prejudices are…I am sharing these [self-revelations] with Martin…he didn’t get it at first but now he’s beginning to understand. He’s proud of me doing something so challenging. Yes, we do intend to have our own kids. We already talk about what we don’t want to repeat [as parents].” In part, those young adults who are successfully extricating themselves from the dysfunctional dynamics of their families are consciously making the decision to avoid these patterns. They have also been wise or lucky enough to have chosen supportive, stable partners. Furthermore, they sought or intuitively found reparative measures. Among the young adults in this study who seemed to have a better prognosis were some who entered therapy or chose careers in psychology, drama, creative art, and dance to explore and express who they are. One became an emergency medical technician; another is an emergency room doctor. Others were reworking their negative internal models of relationships by rescuing neglected or abused children or animals. Some chose or were chosen by healthy mentors, enveloped by supportive church networks, guided by spiritual ideology, or supported by extended families with strong cultural heritages. Some are writing journals, poetry, and even books about their experiences.

Conclusion Although most of the young adults of high-conflict and violent parents disputing custody appear to function relatively well in their work lives, many of them are troubled personally and in their relationships with new partners. They have struggled and are continuing to struggle with the legacy of chronic conflict, domestic violence, psychologically disturbed parents, and problematic parenting. It is of great concern that, despite the efforts of family courts and helping professionals, so many of them to varying degrees have difficulties in one or more domains of their lives. Theirs is an extraordinary journey to make if they are to find a way of transcending their heritage. Nevertheless, as described in this chapter, there is a wide range of outcomes influenced by a complex array of psychological factors and processes. Although some young adults seem to be more or

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less successful at making this transition, far too many have remained imprisoned in the prism of their childhood family experience. As will be discussed in the following chapters, current interventions such as parent education, mediation, custody evaluations, and brief counseling, which are primarily aimed at resolving and managing parental conflicts, may be important but they are insufficient in responding to the deficits in parenting and the developmental needs of these most at-risk young people over the span of their growing-up years. Prevailing social policies and prevention and intervention programs need to be revised and redesigned with this focus in mind.

Interventions on Behalf of Children in High-Conflict and Violent Divorce

III


Building Multidisciplinary Partnerships Between the Family Court and the Community

8

The outcome of parental separation has very much to do with how the stormy waters of the divorce transition are navigated and what kind of help or hindrance these vulnerable persons get from others during their perilous crossing. In response to a sustained high rate of family disruption due to parental separation and divorce during the past 50 years, the legal and mental health communities have been struggling to deepen and refine more effective approaches to helping families with separation and divorce with the realization that it must involve a paradigm shift from an adversarial to a more collaborative, problem-solving approach in family law. Also referred to as therapeutic jurisprudence, this approach seeks to reframe laws and procedures in ways that are more cognizant of the health and well-being of the individuals it impacts (Wexler, 1990; Winick, 1997). With respect

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Part III: Interventions on Behalf of Children

to children and families, a collaborative approach suggests a fundamental redefinition of the role of family court and requires new multidisciplinary partnerships between the courts and attorneys, mediators, and mental health professionals in order to arrive at viable solutions. We briefly map these developments.

Historical Overview Incidence and Cost of High-Conflict and Violent Divorce Radical changes to the traditional structure of families occurred during the second half of the twentieth century as women entered the work force in large numbers, and the rhetoric of the Civil Rights era gained momentum. Throughout Northern America (and in some other Western countries), unwed parenting increased and rates of divorce rose rapidly (to a sustained high incidence of about one in two marriages), resulting in about 60% of all children living in single-headed, remarried, or divided households (Furstenberg, 1994; Glick, 1988). Currently, on average about one fourth of all separating and divorcing families seek the assistance of the courts. Almost half of those in court (or more than one tenth of all divorcing families) comprise the highly conflicted subgroup of people who cannot settle their disputes, even after the provision of brief parent orientation and mediation (Judicial Council of California Administrative Office of the Courts [AOC] Client Baseline Study 2003 and Demographic Trends 2005; Maccoby & Mnookin, 1992). Clearly, these families consume a disproportionately large share of the court’s precious resources in terms of costs associated with divorce. Those in this small subgroup use twice their share of family court counseling hours and, presumably, the majority of judicial time available for all custody hearings (Judicial Council AOC Difficult Cases, 2003). In addition, their children are likely to be over-represented among those receiving mental health services and to disproportionately consume resources offered by schools and the community. Highly conflicted divorcing families make heavy demands on the energies of family law attorneys, mediators, custody evaluators, counselors, and even judges. Despite the

Chapter 8: Building Multidisciplinary Partnerships

increased attention that they receive, these clients, more than any other group, are likely to be hostile and unappreciative of professional efforts. They may fail to pay assigned fees, allege bias on the part of court officers, and report or sue professionals for malpractice. A very small minority of these vulnerable clients can become paranoid, volatile, and ominously threatening. Quite apart from the excessive demands for professional time, these client behaviors are particularly stressful experiences for legal and mental health professionals and contribute greatly to staff “burn-out.” The private financial costs to the families concerned can be prohibitive. These may include extraordinary legal fees, costs of custody evaluations and therapy for all family members as well as expenses associated with psychological testing, supervised visitation and exchanges, or drug and alcohol monitoring. Time taken from employment to attend court hearings and to seek legal and mental health counseling reduces potential earnings, as does loss of productivity due to emotional stress and preoccupation with the disputes. It is not unusual to find men and women becoming emotionally and financially destitute as a result of these kinds of struggles over custody.

Legal Reform and the Growth of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) Between 1969 and 1985, a series of extraordinary legal reforms were implemented to make the process of parental separation and marital dissolution less acrimonious and the outcomes of divorce both gender neutral and more protective of the interests of children (Maccoby & Mnookin, 1992; Mnookin, 1985; Weitzman, 1985). “No fault” divorce laws replaced the previous onerous ones that required divorcing parties to establish who had violated the marital contract. Alimony and marital property rules changed dramatically around the country, ensuring a more equitable distribution of family assets between men and women. The “best interests of the child” standard (for determining which parent should be legally and physically responsible for the care of children following divorce) replaced the old “tender years’ doctrine” that assumed mothers should have custody of young children, paving the way for joint custody preferences or presumptions that were subsequently introduced in many states (Kline-Pruett & Hoganbruen, 1998).

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The next two decades witnessed an exponential growth of ADR forums both inside and outside of court. During the 1980s, the most notable of these was the introduction of custody mediation to facilitate the resolution of postseparation parenting issues in a principled, business-like manner. Subsequently, brief mediation to resolve parenting disputes prior to custody litigation has been widely utilized in the public sector across the United States by jurisdictional policies or state mandates. More comprehensive mediation for all divorce matters although available privately has been less well utilized. During the early 1990s, parenting education programs were developed and proliferated widely, most often publicly funded and strongly encouraged or mandated as an early intervention by family courts. These involve efforts to empower divorcing parents by providing them with information about divorce and the needs of their children to have frequent, continuing, and conflict-free access to them both. Toward the end of the 1990s, in an attempt by family lawyers to avoid litigation and bypass courts entirely, collaborative law established its foothold in the private sector. About the same time during the first decade of the twenty-first century, there have been efforts to divert the more intractable and chronic disputes that clog the court’s litigation calendars. Within the courts, case management and settlement conferences presided over by judges have become more common, and in the private sector, parenting coordination services have emerged and spread rapidly although limited to those who can afford them.

Is Family Conflict or Family Violence the Problem? All of these alternative dispute resolution forums tend to define the interparental conflict as the major problem, especially if it is chronic and involves the children. The message to parents is that the content of their disputes—whatever they were complaining about or alleging—is probably relatively unimportant in contrast to the negative impact of their mutual hostility, distrust, and inability to cooperate. This presumption has been challenged more recently, partly because of the efforts of victim advocates, with the growing awareness that more and more very troubled dysfunctional families have been making their way into family courts, probably because


of decreased availability of other community services to help them. That is, the content of their disputes is not bogus; rather their allegations are often well founded. Serious problems of domestic violence, substance abuse, and child neglect and abuse can be substantiated in a significant proportion of highly conflicted, custody-disputing families (Johnston et al., 2005a). Character disorder and mental illness of the adults are often implicated, and parental disputes may be generated by the children’s behavioral and learning problems or other special needs. The more difficult cases in family court are often compounded by poverty, racial and cultural minority status, and language difficulties. In short, the courts have been induced to act as receiving and triage centers for desperate parents and troubled families with nowhere else to go. Especially troubling, the sheer numbers of separating parents seeking relief in family courts have been dramatically increasing for more than a decade. Moreover, large numbers of them enter court without any legal representation.

Unified Family Courts (UFCs) The compelling needs of these troubled families have prompted the court community of professionals (judges, family court counselors, attorneys) to reach out in attempts to form partnerships with community services that can help. Unfortunately, resources are sparse or not easily accessible. The jurisdictional matters of highly conflicted and violent custody-disputing families fall at the intersection of the family, dependency, and criminal court systems so that the same families may be intermittently or simultaneously involved in all three. However, these courts traditionally operate for different purposes, apply different laws, have different burdens of proof for evidence, follow somewhat different procedures, and do not communicate well with one another. UFCs are being developed in efforts to resolve these obstacles to a more coordinated response to families with respect to the administration of law and service delivery, and have now mushroomed in multiple jurisdictions and are being increasingly adopted in many states (Babb, 2008). UFCs seek to have many or all problems in any one family—divorce, custody, domestic violence, child protection, and juvenile offending—consolidated into a single court, presided over by a single judge who manages and decides cases with

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the help of a support team of professionals. Seeking to work collaboratively, these special problem-solving courts aim to resolve family issues and administer justice in a humane and more effective manner, wedding the authority of the court to educational, therapeutic, or rehabilitative interventions. As problem-solving courts, UCFs are being developed along the same principles as other specialized courts such as drug courts, domestic violence courts, and mental health courts where court procedures are being revised to entail a proactive stance (rather than a reactive response) and more case management by judges who are especially trained, experienced, and invested in family matters (King, 1993, 1997; La Mar, 1996).

Shifting Roles and Ethical Dilemmas for Professionals Rethinking the Role of Family Court Judges In practice, the modern-day family court views itself more simply as a forum for dispute resolution with a paucity of laws to guide it (Mnookin, 1985; Mnookin & Kornhauser, 1979). Its authority and judgment, however, have powerful symbolic meaning for those clients who are emotionally distressed and dependent on others for their self-esteem. Not only is the court considered by many as a forum where the private marital fight is exposed to humiliating public scrutiny, but it is also potentially invested by its clients with a quasidivine, moral authority. In custody litigation, the judge’s decrees become dramatizations of who is the right, good, or better parent, and who is wrong, bad, or relatively inferior (McWhinney, 1995). From the clients’ perspective, in an adversarial family court where judges are induced to make ongoing decisions for highly conflicted separating couples, the assumption is that the court has greater wisdom or special knowledge about what is best for children and the capacity to oversee their day-to-day care. To the extent that judges are asked to pass judgment on family dilemmas that other professionals and the community-at-large have failed to resolve (the cases attorneys have failed to negotiate, ones that mediators have failed to settle, and the individuals that counselors and therapists have failed to help), it conveys a social policy assumption


that judges are equipped to resolve the most difficult and the most complex of all family problems. These are problematic roles based on obviously false assumptions. From a multidisciplinary, collaborative perspective, none of these functions is primarily the court’s responsibility. Rather, within the authority vested in it by law (specifically the best interests of the child) and respecting that families are entitled to the least intrusive court intervention, the role of the judge in a problem-solving court is one of leadership in bringing the issues and the parties and their helpers to the table to address a number of constructive questions that invite collaborative problem-solving: How can this fractured family coordinate its resources and care for the children after the parents’ separation? How can positive parent–child and family relationships be nurtured, protected, or restored wherever possible? How can these parents make ongoing, coordinated decisions throughout their children’s growing-up years? What help will these parents need from the community to raise their children? (Shear, 1998; Schepard, 2004). In sum, in a more collaborative family court, judges are encouraged to assume more judicial leadership and case management. In so doing they may use their authority to introduce a range of more or less unconventional measures. For example, they may initiate status and settlement conferences, raise issues not in moving papers, use telephone conferencing to expedite the decision-making process, limit the role of attorneys in child custody hearings, require that the child’s parents directly participate in hearings and conferences, terminate mental health professionals who are not working cooperatively, and mandate disputing experts to confer prior to giving their testimony (King, 1993, 1997; La Mar, 1996; McIntosh, Wells, Smythe, & Long, 2008a; McIntosh, Bryant, & Murray, 2008b). However, when judges are pressed to exercise charismatic leadership under the guise of a collaborative response, the risk is that they may be perceived to shortcut due process and interfere with the checks and balances that protect civil liberties. Courts can exert arbitrary authority and personal bias when, for example, confidentiality mandates are waived, potential defendants are mandated to attend mediation and settlement conferences, victims are pressured to testify, and advocates silenced by termination. Family judges may be induced to become social activists, overseeing social and mental health interventions rather

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than administering the law. This is arguably not the function of the court. Moreover, legal education does not prepare judges to take on this role, and many are neither willing nor personally suited to assume the task, especially if their judicial neutrality is likely to be compromised. The development of ethical guidelines for practice, ongoing judicial education, transparency, and review of judicial process are all measures that may offset these risks.

Shifting Roles of Attorneys Within an adversarial process, the family law attorneys’ role is to initiate action from a purely partisan perspective, to strategically maneuver the presentation of evidence, and to evoke statutes and case law in order to win their client’s case. Attorneys contribute to rather than resolve disputes when they are wedded solely to their advocacy role (Weinstein, 1997). Typical examples are advising the client not to talk to the other spouse, making extreme demands to increase the bargaining advantage, and filing motions that characterize the other parent in a negative light. The use of the child as a bargaining chip in settlement negotiations where access time is traded for reductions in child support is a particularly pernicious example of destructive adversarial behavior. Needing to show evidence of neglect, abuse, physical violence, or emotional or mental incompetence in order to win their clients’ cases, attorneys produce emotionally charged documents that become a public record of charges and countercharges, citing—often out of context—the unhappy incidents and separation-engendered, desperate behaviors of the emotionally vulnerable parties. The consequent public shame, guilt, and fury at being so one-sidedly represented motivates the other party’s compelling need to set the record straight in costly litigation. Invariably, attorneys cite their advocacy role to justify their intractable adversarial stance. A collaborative approach by lawyers assumes that clients are vitally interested in the effect of one parent’s “victory” on the lives of the children, and it assumes a need for an ongoing, working relationship with the other spouse/parent. From this collaborative perspective, the family attorney’s role involves counseling each client fully on his or her rights and responsibilities as a parent and as a co-parent and exploring deeply the ramifications of all of their actions on the welfare of the


children. Attorneys can then responsibly and ethically advocate their clients’ more clearly defined and deeply explored interests (Pedrone, 1998). When both attorneys pursue these goals in concert, creative win-win solutions and better substantive agreements are generated (Schneider & Mills, 2006). On the other hand, due process rights of individuals may be at risk when attorneys compromise their clients’ interests and substitute their own values in the name of working cooperatively for the children’s sake. There is a potential threat for new collaborative models of alternative dispute resolution to compromise clients’ civil liberties by subjecting families to unwarranted intrusiveness by outside agencies, including the vagaries and biases of an overzealous mental health approach. Vigilant attorneys can play a vital role in guarding against such dangers by drafting creative and unambiguous stipulations and court orders with sufficient detail to protect their clients’ rights and interests while they enter into treatment services. Treatment contracts should fully inform families about the programs they are required to attend, including goals, procedures, limits of confidentiality, responsibility for payment, expectations for completion, and accountability to the court. Furthermore, as part of a system of checks and balances, family attorneys can help by monitoring the cost and effectiveness of these contracts, especially nonvoluntary, court-ordered interventions. Providing Affordable Legal Services. There is a critical need

for affordable legal consultation to help the large majority of divorcing families make the transition through separation and divorce. Large numbers of parents are now entering family courts without legal representation: many of them are indigent, others who are thoroughly disillusioned by what attorneys can provide do so by choice. This onslaught of unrepresented litigants in family courts raises the level of frustration and confusion for clients and court personnel alike. Moreover, it creates inefficiencies in court administration and presents many ethical dilemmas for judges and others dealing with litigants who are trying to represent themselves with little or no knowledge of the law, due process, court rules, or procedures. In the public sector one response is to simplify and streamline the filing process, relax some of the procedural rules, and provide translation services so that it is more understandable for clients. Another is to provide

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pro se (self-represented litigant) clinics in the courthouse staffed by volunteers and legal interns to help fill out paperwork. The caveat here is that this assistance is only administrative; staff is told to assiduously avoid giving legal advice. Another attempted solution to addressing this serious problem has been the “unbundling and re-bundling” of legal services in an attempt to provide specific kinds of legal counsel at affordable rates with less than full legal representation. This entails delineating some of the discrete tasks that make up the lawyer’s role (advising clients, researching the law, gathering facts from the client and discovery from the opposing party, negotiating settlements, representing clients in court, and drafting documents). This is fraught with pitfalls that need to be identified for each task so that safeguards such as ethical guidelines and informed consent can be put in place for clients who receive partial or limited counsel and appropriate liability protection is assured for the legal professionals involved (Mosten, 1997, 2002; Zorza, 2002).

Revising the Roles of Mental Health Counselors Traditionally, mental health professionals who undertake therapy with parents and children pursue their work with the emotional lives of their clients in isolation from the legal decision-making process. Under the rationale of client confidentiality, they work behind closed doors, too often oblivious of the fact that divorcing families are further fragmented by competing demands from professionals with different perspectives, different agendas, and access to different information. Therapists who see only one of the parties to a highconflict divorce can encourage uncompromising stands, reify distorted views of the other parent. When asked or subpoenaed to report to court, they may communicate these biased views and even testify on behalf of their adult client with little or no understanding of the child’s needs, the other parent’s position, or the couple and family dynamics. This has resulted in situations, for example, where a child who refuses to visit a father is viewed by the mother’s mental health consultant as having been “sexually molested” and by the father’s therapist as a child who is suffering from “parent alienation syndrome.” Attempting any intervention to effect a reconciliation of such a child with the father is doomed because the parents


are intractably wedded to the views of their supportive advocates, and they will wage court battles or even abduct their children with absolute moral conviction of their rectitude. Furthermore, too often therapists are willing to begin treatment of a child in a custody dispute at the request of only one parent and with no authority from the court. Contrary to popular belief, parents in custody disputes are not characteristically aggressive or hostile individuals. Rather, under the extraordinary stress of the adversarial process, they are interpersonally sensitive and vigilant to criticism. Many appear to lack a firm approach to solving problems, reason idiosyncratically, and tend to cognitively simplify their world (Ehrenberg et al., 1996; Hoppe & Kenney, 1994; Johnston et al., 2005c; Walters, Lee, & Olesen, 1995; Walters, Olesen, & Lee, 2004). This makes them especially vulnerable to conflicting views of professionals and a legal system that polarizes positions around blame and fault-finding. The worst possible scenarios occur in those high-profile cases where the parents’ mental health and legal professionals squabble among themselves about the case, playing out the parental dispute in a community or court arena. Within a collaborative paradigm, mental health counselors view it as their ethical obligation to triage and coordinate with other professionals in working with separating and divorced families. This approach necessitates reaching consensus about clinical goals, prognosis, and intervention strategies; ensures that clients are spending their money and emotional energy in the most effective ways; and promotes healing for both the child and the family. A mental health counselor who undertakes therapy with any part of a divorcing family has the responsibility to rethink issues of confidentiality and lines of communication right from the outset (by obtaining appropriate parental permission) lest the intervention should inadvertently harm rather than help. Furthermore, when differences of opinion arise, each individual professional has an ethical responsibility to initiate contact with the other professionals involved to resolve differences. If this is not possible, the intervention of choice is to call a strategy conference with all players of the disputing network, preferably before their respective positions have hardened. In these kinds of cases, the court should have the authority to bring the parties to the negotiating table. This meeting can be used to design a strategy for case management or resolution

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and is often the first order of business in a custody dispute that appears out of control. The danger of collaborative teamwork among therapists, however, is that it can become collusive and make demands upon clients that are unnecessarily intrusive into the lives of families in domain and duration, especially when backed up by court orders. Ongoing training and supervision, as well as the provision of an outside professional consultation team, can help guard against the risks of collusion, polarization, and triangulation that are so common in the networks of these disputing cases. In addition, therapists should consider prognosis, be prepared to make explicit goals and timelines for change, and hold themselves accountable for meeting objectives or show why they should remain involved in a case if they do not do so.

Structuring ADR Services: Who Needs What Help and When What kind of help is sufficient for separating parents to settle their differences and provide “good enough” care of their children on an ongoing basis? Initially, when the different methods of ADR were introduced somewhat sequentially— first, mediation and then parent education and parent coordination/arbitration—each was enthusiastically endorsed with high expectations as to what it could accomplish. It soon became clear that none of the services was a “silver bullet.” A procedural system evolved in many jurisdictions, albeit piecemeal, comprising a spectrum that begins with preventive measures that are minimally intrusive and designed for the broadest population of families, such as divorce orientation, parenting education, mediation, and collaborative law. Those who fail to settle through these means are referred to other progressively more intrusive treatment interventions that wed mental health interventions to the social control mechanisms of the courts, such as therapeutic interventions, custody evaluations, ongoing co-parenting counseling, parenting coordination-arbitration, together with various kinds of adjunct services such as supervised visitation, substance abuse treatment, and batterers treatment groups (Howe & McKnight, 1995). See Box 8.1.


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8.1 ALTERNATIVE DISPUTE RESOLUTION SERVICES FOR DIVORCING FAMILIES

First Level

PARENTING EDUCATION AFTER DIVORCE (for all parents and children) workshops, videos, literature; divorce adjustment groups

Second Level

CONSULTATION, MEDIATION, AND COLLABORATIVE LAW (for parents in custody and visitation disputes) individual and family consultation and counseling with cooperating attorneys and/or therapists, and/or brief issue-focused mediation; children usually not included. Content and process confidential from court.

Third Level

PSYCHOLOGICAL INTERVENTION/ASSESSMENT (for parents unable to mediate disputes)

THERAPEUTIC MEDIATION and/or CUSTODY EVALUATION (impasse-directed and child-focused (court appoints or parties stipulate counseling, then to child-focused evaluation; home/individual family strategic mediation for or groups of school study investigates allegations; families; children included) includes children) Content confidential; only status report Written report and recommendations to court. to court.

Fourth Level

ONGOING PARENTING COUNSELING OR COORDINATION (for parents who continue in high conflict over children despite mediated or court settlement) Parenting Coordinator appointed by stipulation of the parties/order of court to manage ongoing conflict, coordinate other professionals involved, and to undertake ongoing parenting and child-focused counseling, mediation, and arbitration. Includes access to children or their therapists. May report to court or be challenged incourt

ANCILLARY COMMUNITY SERVICES TO THIRD AND FOURTH LEVELS: Domestic Violence, Substance Abuse, Mental Health, and Special Education Services

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This procedural organization rests on the principle that family courts should provide the least intrusive intervention into the private life of families that is sufficient for them to care for their children. Whereas it was an improvement over a one-service-fits-all approach to divorcing families, many court staff and administrators questioned whether the progressive steps model is the optimal solution. Families should not have to fail successively at each level of service before they get the kind of help they really need. A more efficient and less painful way is to try to match families to the most relevant or appropriate kind of service at the outset. This leads to a screening and triage approach that is being developed in some jurisdictions which considers the array of services listed above as alternatives that can be made available with access governed by appropriateness of fit for the particular family situation (Salem, Kulak, & Deutsch, 2007). Developing some valid and reliable prognostic criteria for who is likely to benefit from each service and for whom it is contraindicated becomes the central task. In the balance of this chapter we address this task in a preliminary way by reviewing what is known to date about each ADR service.

Divorce Orientation and Educational Programs As they embark on a difficult life transition, divorce education programs aim to provide families with charts and markers for their journey with the hope that they will be better able to manage their own affairs and make informed choices. The content of generic programs includes information about the psychological process of separation, relevant laws, legal procedures and custody options, the general needs of children for conflict-free access to both parents, and available services in the community. These programs are now widely available, sponsored by public or private nonprofit funding, and often mandated by law at filing for divorce or after petitioning for custody. The information is provided in small groups or large classes, is increasingly available in online programs, and may also be obtained through various other media such as books, videos, and television. Designed only for parents and more aptly described as divorce orientation, the vast majority of educational programs are from 2 to 4 hr in duration (Blaisure & Geasler, 1996; Braver, Salem, Pearson, & DeLuise, 1996; Geasler & Blaisure, 1999; Schepard, 1994).


The more comprehensive programs include both parents and children in a family intervention that is typically delivered over a 4–6 week period. These have been relatively slower to develop. Separating spouses generally attend the parent group together, while their children are seen in small groups. This kind of model has long been recognized as a naturally supportive and relatively cost-effective way of helping both adults and children of divorce in which peer support helps to normalize painful and confusing experiences, and they learn from one another (Bolen, 1993; DiBias, 1996; Geelhoed, Blaisure, & Geasler, 2001; Petersen, & Steinman, 1994). In these programs, divorcing parents may benefit from special information about the developmental needs of children of all ages and most especially about the needs of infants and young children whose sense of security, trust, and social development can be derailed by conflict and inconsistent or chaotic parenting styles during these critical, early years. When provided early in the process, most families probably benefit from some kind of orientation or educational programs. However, there is growing awareness that these educational programs need to be adapted to meet the particular needs of different kinds of families. For instance, modifications in the curriculum are needed for never-married parents, some of whom may have never lived together or established any kind of working co-parenting relationship (Raisner, 1997). Many such parents have new partners and extended kin who play extensive roles in child rearing, and these may need to be included. Special sensitivity is needed for separating gay, lesbian, and transsexual parents, some of whom are disclosing their sexual preferences and gender identity at the same time as the divorce. There is also a pressing need to adapt parent educational programs to meet the needs of various ethnic groups whose language barriers and cultural mores make divorce adjustment different from mainstream North American Caucasian families and at variance with presumptions in the laws of the United States about what kinds of custody arrangements are in the best interests of children (Schwartz, 1996; Zegarra, 1998). Specialized Educational Programs for High-Conflict, Violent, and Chronically Litigating Families. Specialized educational

programs are increasingly being developed and are now available in a number of jurisdictions following the recognition

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that for high-conflict, violent, and chronically litigating families generalized divorce information is both ineffective and inappropriate. In cases of domestic violence, general divorce education that encourages parental cooperation and communication may actually be dangerous for victims who are often subject to ongoing manipulation and control by the abusive partner after separation (Fuhrman, McGill, & O’Connell, 1999). To ensure more safety and emphasize the importance of maintaining boundaries for this subpopulation, parents always meet separately in groups with their peers at separate locations or times. The more comprehensive models include children who meet in separate groups with others of similar age (e.g., Roseby, Johnston, Gentner, & Moore, 2005). Model programs tend to be of longer duration from 10 to16 weeks or more and court-ordered. Cognitive-behavioral or skill-based approaches that teach effective communication and problem solving and attempt to heighten parents’ empathic awareness of the children’s plight in conflicted custody are important and effective components of these programs (Kramer, Arbuthnot, Gordon, Rousis, & Hoza, 1998). How to develop separate, “parallel” parenting arrangements governed by an explicit court order rather than attempting a cooperative, co-parenting relationship is emphasized. Group discussion and exercises aim to increase accountability for parents who have been violent so that they take responsibility for the abuse, avoid using the child as a weapon in conflict, and learn to appropriately support the other parent in the care of the child. Parents who have been victims of violence are provided with much support and taught skills in maintaining appropriate boundaries for protection of themselves and their children from abuse. The main focus, however, is on supporting and restoring parent–child relationships, and to this end the curriculum includes information about the effect of violence on children, empowers victims as parents, and teaches parenting without violence skills to the violent parent. In addition, these classes may explain laws regarding the rights of both parents to custody and access, contempt proceedings, protection from domestic violence, management of abduction risk, criteria for child protective agencies to take action, and grounds for supervised visitation. Evaluation studies of general divorce education programs indicate high consumer satisfaction and increased knowledge


and skills regardless of whether attendance is mandated or voluntary. This probably translates into greater consumer good will toward the legal process and more informed choices. For the high-conflict group programs, outcomes are positive but more modest or mixed with respect to client satisfaction, reduced conflict, and re-litigation over children (Arbuthnot, & Gordon, 1996; Arbuthnot, Kramer, & Gordon, 1997; Gray, Verdieck, Smith, & Freed, 1997; Johnston, 1999; Kramer, & Kowal, 1998; Pearson, 1996; Pedro-Carroll, Nakhnidian, & Montes, 2001). More promising results are generally obtained for those models that include children directly (Johnston, 1999; McIntosh, Wells, Smythe & Long, 2008a). These specialized educational programs for high-conflict and violent families appear to be appropriate for families that lack general knowledge about the laws and procedures of family and dependency courts, for those who are overly dependent upon litigation to make parenting decisions, and for those who are deficient in communication and problemsolving skills. More thought needs to be given as to when parents in crisis are amenable to education about their children and when such information is ineffective or will be misconstrued and used in the service of furthering parental disputes. However, educational programs are probably inappropriate or insufficient in situations requiring state intervention to protect victims: cases of serious allegations of child abuse, highly dangerous domestic violence, acute mental illness, or chronic substance abuse. They may be of little use for seriously character-disordered parents who tend to use educational information to further their strategic advantage in litigation.

Mediation Mediation is widely available in the United States, both publicly and privately. This forum uses a neutral third party to help parents develop custody and visitation plans (in most public settings) and both financial and child custody settlements (in the case of many private providers). In mediation a facilitator in conflict resolution attends to power imbalances between the parents, contains and deflects the emotional conflicts of the divorcing couple, and helps them to become more rational, focused, and goal-oriented so that they can define their issues, generate and prioritize options, and reach mutually beneficial

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agreements. It is time-limited, focuses on problem resolution of specific issues, and does not involve psychological counseling and therapy (Kelly, 1983). Mediation is widely advocated as the dispute resolution method of choice because it rests on the fundamental ideological assumption that it empowers parents to make their own decisions, avoids unnecessary state interference in family affairs, and increases satisfaction and compliance with agreements reached. Children are not usually directly included in the actual mediation sessions because it is believed that the decision making is primarily the parents’ responsibility and that parents themselves will be able to best represent the needs of their children in the process. The early mediation models were voluntarily entered into by the clients, strictly confidential, issue-focused, and clearly distinguished from therapeutic, evaluation, and arbitration processes (Cooglar, 1978; Haynes, 1981). Very quickly, eschewing the voluntary nature of these models, mandatory mediation was implemented in some jurisdictions and in some places statewide (e.g., California). During the past couple of decades, a proliferation of models has emerged as viable alternatives to be used in different contexts with different clients and for somewhat different purposes. Their names reflect their departures from the early models and distinguish differences among themselves—“facilitative mediation,” “transformative mediation,” “evaluative mediation,” and “therapeutic mediation” (Folberg, Milne & Salem, 2004). In countries and jurisdictions where children’s rights have been given greater priority, child-inclusive mediation models have been developed (McIntosh et al., 2008a, McIntosh, Bryant & Murray, 2008b; Sanchez & Kibler-Sanchez, 2004). Most notably in public settings, hybrid models such as “recommending mediation” and “mediation-arbitration” have violated the orthodox distinction between these process although not without challenge and criticism that the fundamental principles of mediation are being undermined (Barsky, 2006; Folberg, Milne, & Salem, 2004). Unfortunately, as a result of diminished public resources, public mediation services have become truncated (in time allotted and by pressure for early settlement). Further, in some jurisdictions there is provision for recommendations to be made to court if no agreement is reached quickly. As a consequence selfdetermination, client satisfaction, adherence to the agreement, and longer-term cooperation may be at risk owing to


the hurried and increasingly directive nature of the process (Welch, 2004). On the other hand, the implementation of public mandatory mediation on a broad scale has probably helped to bring mediation into the public eye and serves as a catalyst for the development of private mediation services. Mediation attains full resolution on average in one half and at least partial resolution in about four fifths of all custody and access disputes in both public and private settings. It produces high satisfaction, a sense of fairness by consumers regardless of outcome, is generally more efficient in time and cost, and has long-term beneficial effects on parental cooperation (Emery, Sbarra, & Grover, 2005; Kelly, 2004; Maccoby & Mnookin, 1992). This solidly researched “success rate” of mediation supports the philosophy that most couples have the capacity to re-order their lives in a private, confidential setting according to their personal preferences with the relatively limited help of a mediator who focuses on specific issues. To date, the outcomes of the variant models have not been distinguished from one another. The primary indicators for a successful outcome in mediation are parents who, with the mediator’s help, demonstrate the capacity to contain their emotional distress and focus on their children’s issues. Mediating parents who can behave somewhat rationally with each other and who have a history of parental cooperation tend to have more successful outcomes. Despite high levels of anger and conflict, these individuals can more easily distinguish their children’s needs from their own and tend to acknowledge, if sometimes begrudgingly, the value of the other parent in the children’s lives. It is generally asserted that brief mediation of divorce disputes, especially if offered early on, is an effective preventive measure, and mediation is the intervention of choice for tailoring access schedules to fit the specific individual needs of children and families. On the other hand, mediation is considered inappropriate for many dysfunctional families with histories of chronic litigation, severe domestic violence, or where there are allegations of child abuse and molestation (Germane, Johnson, & Leman, 1985; Girdner, 1990; Pearson & Thoennes, 1988). Poor mediation outcomes are generally predicted for parents who have rigid, highly divergent perceptions of their children’s needs which they tend to confuse with their own needs and for those who harbor a pervasive distrust of each other’s capacity to provide a secure environment.

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In sum, high-conflict and violent divorcing families have largely been identified by their failure to make effective use of traditional mediation methods that rely upon a rational decision-making process.

Collaborative Law In the private sector, the innovative practices of collaborative law have been developed as alternatives to litigation and mediation. In collaborative law, the parties and their attorneys usually commence the legal process of divorce by stipulating complete, honest, and open disclosure of all information, whether requested or not, and to engage in informal discussions and conferences for the purpose of reaching a settlement on all issues with assurance that the process cannot be subverted in order to pursue traditional litigation (Tesler, 2001). The client’s failure to comply with full disclosure constitutes ethical grounds for counsel to withdraw from the case. All consultants retained by the parties (accountants, therapists, and appraisers) are likewise directed to work in a cooperative manner, and meetings are usually conducted conjointly. Although variations of the model have proliferated among networks of legal and mental health professionals, the hallmark of this process in its purest form is that litigation using collaborative lawyers is not an option, and work products of this process are not available to any other attorney who may litigate. If clients of collaborative law choose to proceed with litigation, the lawyer must be prepared to withdraw the disqualification clause from the contract for services. Specific issues of stalemate may be resolved by a preappointed arbitrator. The concepts of collaborative law has spread widely throughout the United States and Canada, creating professional networks for cross-referrals and disseminating its values, strategies, and models of practice among participating family law attorneys (and mental health professionals). However, it is unclear how often the practice is actually used in private lawyering. In the United States there is a move to have it become institutionalized within the legal profession with the passage of the Uniform Collaborative Law Act (National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform Laws, 2007). To date, there is scarce research on how many cases are processed in this manner or on outcome effectiveness (Lande & Herman, 2004).


Collaborative law probably benefits parties when there is a need to retain the advocacy role of each attorney. This protection is not always afforded in mediation, and it is especially important that it be provided when there are imbalances of power between the parties (Grillo, 1991). The tension between attorneys’ duties to advocate and cooperate without resorting to litigation is thought to induce more creative thinking about how to produce a “win-win” situation for the parents. Furthermore, it avoids the high costs of litigation procedures, such as formal fact-finding, depositions, preparation of briefs, filing of motions, and of course, representation in court. It follows that some of the corresponding risks are the lack of scrutiny and accountability when informal legal procedures are used and the cost of starting again from scratch in court if they are unsuccessful. The cost of using multiple professionals may also be prohibitive for many, raising concerns about inequities in the administration of justice. Only those who can afford it have access to this separate, private tier of justice where matters are decided behind closed doors rather than in the public forum of the courts (Murphy, 2004). To offset these risks, these new practices demand the highest ethical standards of practice and mutual respect between counsels. For these reasons, in cases where there is distrust between the legal advocates, inability of the attorneys to maintain appropriate client control, or serious concerns about abuse and exploitation, the parties may be better protected in family court.

Therapeutic Intervention This type of intervention involves a combination of confidential counseling and mediation to resolve the psychological and family problems that contribute to chronic disputes or stalemates in reaching a custody settlement. There are numerous models, many of which involve a team of therapists. The impasse mediation model that we have researched will be described here. Families can be seen individually or in groups of five to eight other families; children are always included in the intervention, which is usually relatively brief (25-40 hr) (Johnston, 1999; Johnston & Campbell, 1988; McDonough, Radovanovic, Stein, Sagar, & Hood, 1995). The intervention is undertaken by child and family therapists

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who are also experienced divorce mediators. They begin by taking a history of the parental disputes, identifying the family dynamics that have created the impasse, and then seeking to understand how the parental conflict is affecting the children. This information is used in brief, strategic, therapeutic interventions and counseling with the family members, the goal being to develop psychologically sound child access plans and to help the parents through the emotional divorce. Unlike mediation, the completion of a custody and access agreement is not seen as an end in itself. The attorney’s role is to set up the treatment contract, translate the agreements reached into court orders, and take unresolved issues back to another dispute-resolution forum. A series of studies have indicated that about two thirds of cases that have failed brief issue-focused mediation have been successful using these therapeutic interventions; that is, they have been able to be settle and stay out of court over a 2–4-year period (Pruett & Johnston, 2004). Specifically, this type of intervention is useful when emotional issues intrude and disrupt regular mediation or attorney negotiations. Emotional turmoil can emanate from acute reactions to the humiliation and loss inherent in the divorce, from a recent traumatic separation experience, or when parents are so preoccupied with their own pain that they cannot respond to their children’s acute distress. Family impasse intervention and mediation is also the method of choice when there is “tribal warfare,”—that is, when new partners, extended kin, and professionals become embroiled in the dispute. However, this forum is not appropriate for serious allegations of abuse, and it is insufficient, although helpful, for cases where there is serious parental character pathology. Such parents are less able to obtain or sustain a reasonable perspective, and their defensive processes and preemptory needs continue to disrupt any semblance of family stability. For them, the longer term counseling described in chapter 9 is recommended.

Parenting Coordination and Arbitration Parenting coordination is a service for separated and divorced families who need ongoing help in jointly managing their parenting practices and responding flexibly to the needs of their children during their developmental changes and sometimes throughout their entire growing-up years.


It may be needed as a longer term extension to therapeutic intervention, or it may be instituted after an assessment or custody evaluation in order to help families implement and monitor a parenting plan. Co-parenting counselors should be clearly distinguished from parenting coordinators. The former are generally mental health professionals who use confidential counseling and mediation techniques to coach cooperative parenting of children. Usually they try to avoid testifying, but they may be subpoenaed to do so. Parenting coordinators (variously called special masters, wise persons, or custody commissioners), on the other hand, involve the appointment by stipulation of the parties of a mental health or legal professional who is experienced in custody matters to manage ongoing conflict and help parents make timely decisions for their children over the long term. Occasionally, such decisions may be challenged in court, at which time the parenting coordinator may have to testify (Zibbell, 1995). Parenting coordinators function as family assessors, educators, facilitators, conflict managers, and coordinators of the child’s life in a parallel parenting situation (Baris et al., 2001; Boyan & Termini, 2005; Garrity & Baris, 1994). Ultimately, they are responsible for making day-to-day decisions when parents are unable to do so in a timely manner but are required to refrain from changing legal or physical custody arrangements. There are many variations but, broadly speaking, one important difference is that some parenting coordinators act solely as arbitrators and are called in to settle an issue only when the parents and their other helpers cannot reach settlement; others act as the parenting counselor and mediator in addition to employing their arbitration powers should the couple reach stalemate. Various arguments can be made in favor of each type, the principal one being that whereas the first (pure arbitration) avoids somewhat incompatible roles, the second (arbitration as a last resort) is more efficient. Parenting coordinators are usually privately funded by the clients themselves. A detailed stipulation/court order and informed consent are prepared by the attorneys to address the terms of appointment, including how the co-parenting arbitrator or coordinator is to be chosen and how he or she will be terminated, scope of authority, responsibilities and term of service, methods of conflict resolution to be used, procedures for bringing an issue to him or her, permissible lines of communication with

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all parties (family members, children, collaterals, and other professionals), access to court rulings and records, payment for services, rules for determining when decisions should be made as court orders, procedures for challenging an arbitrated decision in court, and pursuing any grievances. Following more than a decade of development of this service, parenting coordination has emerged as an important adjunct to family courts in a number of jurisdictions (Coates, Deutsch, Starnes, Sullivan, & Sydlik, 2004; Sullivan, 2008). Although preliminary outcome data indicate dramatic decreases in relitigation and moderate levels of consumer satisfaction when these kinds of arbitration models are used (Johnston, 1994; Vick & Backerman, 1996), there are few studies to date that systematically evaluate their effectiveness in other ways (cost, benefit to children, decrease in disputes, improvement in co-parental and parent–child relationships) (Kirkland & Sullivan, 2008). With the rapidly expanding use of this powerful and potentially intrusive intervention, rising concerns about ethical standards, procedural guidelines, training, and licensing requirements for this new professional practice have resulted in the development of guideline standards of practice. These standards advise on qualifications, scope of specialized training, and ethical responsibilities for parenting arbitrators (e.g., to be neutral, fair, and transparent, disclose any possible conflicts of interest, keep full records of their activities, and refrain from dual roles) (Association of Family and Conciliation Courts [AFCC] Task Force on Parenting Coordination, 2005; Sullivan, 2004). It is generally believed that parenting coordinators are appropriate for chronic litigants and entrenched custody conflicts emanating from serious psychopathology and personality disorders in parents who have parenting deficits. They can be used to monitor potentially abusive situations involving domestic violence and intermittent mental illness of a parent. They can also be used for children who are very young or who have special medical needs and whose parents cannot communicate sufficiently to coordinate the care of the child in a timely manner. However, appointing a parenting coordinator is not appropriate as a routine response for difficult, high-conflict cases in which the family crisis is acute but temporary. The process should not be used where custody and access plans


have not been established by the court, or for major changes in custody or other circumstances. Nor is it appropriate for cases that need a thorough investigation of abuse claims. Most important, it not appropriate in cases where the professionals are squabbling among themselves. It is unfair to burden families with the cost and complication of yet another professional in their lives when those currently involved in the case cannot agree on its direction.

Custody Evaluations Custody evaluations involve fact-finding by a neutral, qualified mental health professional and a written report, usually with some kind of recommendation to the court to assist the judge in making decisions. It is not an alternative dispute resolution service to litigation; rather it is an integral part of the adversarial process itself. In fact, as forensic experts, custody evaluators are primarily servants of the court (Gould, 1998). Their expert testimony must be fully supported by relevant and reliable social science research, such that it can withstand rigorous cross-examination by attorneys who are protecting their client’s legal rights. The stakes are high because in practice, and often regardless of their quality, written custody evaluations have a powerful influence in the trajectory of the child’s life and relationships with both parents (Tippins & Wittmann, 2005). To date, comprehensive custody evaluations have generally been the standard option when families are unable to settle through mediation and attorney negotiation. Although extremely effective in producing settlements and aiding judicial decisions (85 to 90% of disputing parents settle), stipulations and court orders produced by a custody evaluation are twice as likely to be relitigated compared to those that are settled voluntarily (Ash & Guyer, 1986a; 1986b; Hauser, 1985). In practice, however, there is a distinction between privately funded child custody evaluations that appear to be growing (in terms of extensiveness, cost, and use of multi-professionals including case consultants and coaches) and court-based practices that are largely publicly funded. The latter tend to be truncated, focused evaluations that are used in settlement negotiations. In either case, custody evaluations are relatively costly (for the litigants and for the court), and they do not help with ongoing co-parenting and parenting problems.

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The problem is that custody evaluations are a source of inordinate stress and shame for many vulnerable parents, and the parents’ behavior while undergoing this kind of scrutiny may not be representative of their normal capacities. In some cases it may actually deteriorate under the stress. In other cases parents are on their best behavior. Despite the fact that during the past several decades a number of professional organizations have developed standards of practice for custody evaluations to guard against their misuse, the impact of the process itself on the litigants tends to become of secondary importance in a traditional adversarial court. (American Psychological Association [APA], 1992; American Psychological Association [APA] (1994); Association of Family & Conciliation Courts [AFCC] 2007; Gould (1998); Hysjulien, Wood, & Benjamin, 1994; Martindale, 2007; Stahl, 1994). For example, within a litigation-conscious arena, current model standards are a recipe for unnecessarily exhaustive, intrusive, and negatively biased assessments because evaluators may become more focused on establishing technical expertise and protecting themselves against challenge in court. Their findings subsequently may also be misinterpreted. For example, psychodiagnostic terms employed in the report, such as paranoid, alcoholic, narcissistic, sociopathic, batterer, or battered woman’s syndrome, have special technical meanings within the mental health professions. When used in public or in court, they become pejorative labels strategically employed to degrade or destroy the reputation of one parent and “win” custody for the other. Or, personality testing may be undertaken with no solid basis for concluding how the findings might impact parenting (Brodzinsky, 1993; Erard, 2007; Erickson, Lilienfeld, & Vitacco, 2007; Roseby, 1995; Tippins & Whitman, 2005). Under the mandate of the “best interests of the child,” the custody evaluator may try to weigh each parent’s strengths and weaknesses fairly. Too often this is perceived to figure out who is and who is not more emotionally healthy; who is and who is not “the better” parent with the presumption that the other is inferior. Particularly, in those cases in which angry, hurt, but “good enough” parents are contesting custody or time-sharing, there is generally no basis in psychology or law for choosing between parents. Evaluators split hairs to make a case for one parent or the other. Surely this is unfair, unnecessarily stressful for already vulnerable families, and may even constitute grounds for claiming violation of parents’


civil rights. Custody evaluations may have inadvertently produced de facto double standards in which those held up for parents in family courts are far more stringent than those faced by parents in dependency courts. It is in the search for the elusive “better or best parent” that personal values and cultural beliefs of the evaluator are likely to infiltrate and contaminate what is supposed to be a scientifically defensible investigative process and report. Where some kind of assessment in a custody matter seems unavoidable, other procedural best practices guidelines could be considered that are minimally invasive and reduce the negative impact of the process itself. A number of innovative practices that have been developed around the country involve a confidential evaluation made directly to the parents and their representatives without a report to court with the hope that this new information will promote a settlement, sometimes with the additional facilitation of the mediator (Markan & Weinstock, 2005; Pearson et al., 2006). For example, early neutral evaluations are a confidential settlement-oriented and accelerated dispute resolution service for intractable custody and access disputes that do not involve serious allegations of family violence and substance abuse. Typically, these are brief problem-focused assessments in which the scope of the inquiry is limited (for example, school placement for a gifted child or medical treatment of a child). An advisory dispute resolution forum can be used when a neutral expert does an assessment and renders a confidential opinion directly to the parents (a child development specialist might assess a child whose parents are disputing the need for therapy or whether a toddler should visit overnight). Emergency screening or emergency case stabilization is another tool in which a rapid assessment is made in a crisis situation and measures are taken to secure family members’ immediate safety and make referrals for treatment (e.g., following an individual’s suicide or homicide threats or in response to an acute psychotic break). If subsequent assessments are required, a presumption that the same evaluator will conduct re-evaluations and updates of the family situation can protect the child and family from the inordinate stress of multiple assessments by a series of different evaluators. (See also AFCC Task Force on Exemplary Practices). In other cases, in which parents have chronic difficulty making decisions together in a timely manner and day-today disagreements about caring for their children that do not rise

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to the level of abuse allegations, the use of extended interventions such as confidential child-inclusive mediation (McIntosh et al, 2008a, 2008b), therapeutic mediation (Pruett & Johnston, 2004; Sanchez & Kibler-Sanchez, 2004), or parenting coordination (Sullivan, 2008) might suffice. Disputes that involve a child’s resistance to visitation with a previously abusive parent or after a long separation from that parent may require therapeutic supervision or therapeutic reunification (Freeman, Abel, Cowper-Smith, & Stein, 2004). In all of these confidential assessments of the child’s needs—and the parents relative capacities to meet those needs—more attention can be paid to prescribing how the family can resolve its impasse, the ways in which children can have access to the positive contributions of each parent, and how the children’s development can be protected, which can be the basis for further mediation, counseling, or a recommended settlement. It is important to note that information gleaned from all of these confidential and more informal processes could not be admitted as evidence in litigation, even if subpoenaed, because it would not meet the higher standards of expert testimony required in court. Instead, these kinds of assessments are intended to be educational and advisory tools to be used in alternative conflict resolution forums and to promote change in parents. In sum, formal custody evaluations should be reserved for serious allegations of child abuse, neglect, and molestation, as well as contested claims of parental psychopathology, substance abuse, or domestic violence, in which standards for parental behavior in family court would be more on a par with those in dependency court. If these allegations are substantiated, the court will need to impose a protective custody arrangement and a plan for monitoring it. This means that where the facts are not really in dispute, serious family or individual dysfunction need not be evaluated further, and resources can be used for treatment rather than for further investigation.

Conclusion The adversarial court system has long been criticized for the polarization of the parties’ positions and the escalation of family conflict. In a number of ways, legal procedures, traditional professional roles, and ethical constraints have contributed to


rather than resolved family conflict and have hurt children. Moving from an adversarial to a multidisciplinary, collaborative approach in family matters requires a corresponding shift in perspectives and functions among these helping professionals and a rethinking of ethical obligations in the creation of new forms of dispute resolution and services (American Psychological Association, 1992). However, the adversarial system is not easily shed without foregoing the due process rights of individuals (Spinak, 2008). These inherent dangers in a collaborative approach need to be identified within any ADR services that are developed so that protections are put in place, institutionalized by training, ongoing review, and development of model standards of practice. For the subpopulation of high-conflict divorcing families, especially where domestic violence is an issue, effective interventions will need to be more intensive and longer term, making them costly. The problem is that, relative to the immense needs of these very troubled clients, community resources and knowledgeable, experienced professionals are scarce, at times entirely absent and at best available in select locations, and accessible only to the more privileged clients who can afford them. Most of these parents are economically disadvantaged and have to make do with abbreviated versions of the ADR services if they receive any help at all. For example, indigent parents may be provided with brief orientation instead of a parent education program, one or two sessions of mediation with a recommendation to court if they fail to agree, supervised visits by a volunteer in lieu of a custody evaluation or treatment, or a brief consultation in place of ongoing parenting coordination or therapy. These inequities in resource availability translate into inequities in the administration of justice in that families not only receive ineffective mental health interventions, but their due process and other civil rights may be trampled upon as well. This results in a policy conundrum. Should we ethically advocate for best practices and policies when only a small minority of families has access to the full services and benefits? If not, what kind of rationale should guide the development of multidisciplinary collaborative practices linking a problem-solving family court with the community? As a beginning step from a public policy perspective, it seems important to use our available resources wisely by triaging cases early in the process to prioritize the needs of families and their ability to use help.

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Co-Parenting Counseling and Parent Coordination

9

When parents in a conflicted divorce litigate in court and subsequently seek mediation, evaluation, or psychotherapy services from mental health professionals, they are likely to approach the process with an agenda that can be understood at two levels. Fundamentally, the agenda of each parent is to solicit the court’s and the professional’s alliance in viewing themselves as the entirely good, protective parent and their spouse as entirely inadequate, deficient, or bad. Although parents may not acknowledge or even be conscious of this covert intent, it is likely to be experienced quite forcefully by the judge or counselor who is confronted by two entirely polarized accounts of the situation. This covert pressure to solicit an alliance tends to be articulated as a request to change the children’s custody or visitation plan usually in ways that limit the other parent’s

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access to the child. Some parents justify their request with the rationale of protecting their child, others propose it as a solution to any difficulties their child is experiencing. To the extent that there has been a history of parental indiscretion, inadequate care, abuse, neglect, or domestic violence, then this appears to be a reasonable request. However, it is rarely the solution to the problem because parents’ views of themselves, of each other, and of the situation are entirely unconnected, and their ideas about what is best for the children are similarly polarized. In this process, wherein parents depict their child in vastly different ways, the children experience themselves as split or fragmented as they move between two worlds (Marquardt, 2005). In less than successful interventions, custody and the visitation schedules become focal issues because it is believed that in this domain the child’s contact with the other parent can be regulated. Consequently, the professionals—judge, mediator, evaluator and counselors—also try to determine the best parenting plan and may become overly involved with the minutiae of the scheduling disagreements. In an effort to be fair and objective, they may begin to shift support back and forth from one parent’s perspective to the other. When this happens, a sense of clarity and position is lost. The result can be feelings of confusion, dissonance, and futility in the face of very real pressure from each parent. These feelings can serve as a window into the child’s experience. It is the child’s experience and point of view that we try to elucidate in the following two chapters. It is the child’s perspective that can create a fragile path through the quicksand of the parents’ conundrum. Only when children can be seen as individuals separate from the parents’ polarized views, only when they are understood in the context of their struggle to manage threats of loss and the trauma of family conflict and violence, and only when parents can be helped to reframe their agendas in terms of the child’s concerns and preoccupations, can the courts and adjunct professional make parenting plans and advocate effectively “in the name of the child.” Good co-parenting work with divorcing families in entrenched and chronic custody disputes is also grounded in a basic understanding of the psychological and socialsystemic forces that generate these disputes. We have shown in previous chapters that high-conflict parents are suscep-

Chapter 9: Co-Parenting Counseling and Parent Coordination

tible, to varying degrees, to the stresses of loss and rejection that are inherent in the divorce crisis and its aftermath. Many of these parents are narcissistically fragile and have chronic difficulty in maintaining a positive and stable sense of self. When the separation occurs and in response to the custody litigation, old feelings of shame, failure, inadequacy or “badness” are evoked. These feelings produce intolerable anxiety that tends to be defensively managed by the process of splitting and projective identification: The unbearable “bad” feelings and unwanted aspects of self are projected onto the former partner (and others) so that the self can be experienced as invulnerable and “good.” The adversarial legal system that these disputing families enter in order to resolve their custody disputes is particularly fertile ground for this polarization and projection of blame. Moreover, as the parents act upon their expectations, new partners, families, and friends—sometimes even the professionals involved—reify their negatively biased views of each other. However, the problems presented by chronically disputing parents stem only partly from the acting-out of projective identifications, which, in turn, tend to be validated as reality by the social world of the divorced family. Very often, to some extent these negative views will have a basis in fact, that is, the real experience of the other spouse’s violent, neglectful, or substance-abusing behavior. The goal for the counselor, then, is to help parents distinguish their unrealistic fears and phobias from their realistic concerns about one another’s capacity to care for the child. In pursuing this therapeutic goal, the quintessential dilemma is how can the clinician manage these often intense and overwhelming transference reactions on the part of the parents and counter-transference reactions on the part of the counselor and maintain an empathic stance toward both disputing parties in order to maximize parental functioning and protect the child’s development. The purpose of this chapter is to describe co-parental counseling and coordination for families in entrenched custody and postdivorce disputes from the viewpoint of the fairly dramatic but commonly occurring changes in the emotional reactions that parents and their counselors have toward one another (called transference and counter-transference dynamics). The phases of intervention with parents are as follows: (1) initial referral and contract formation, (2) assessment of

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the impasse and its effects on the child, (3) reformulation of the problem, (4) challenge and crisis, (5) working through and resolution, and (6) termination and follow-up. Some evaluation studies of the outcomes of these interventions have been conducted and are reported elsewhere (Johnston, 1993b; Pruett & Johnston, 2004). The therapeutic approach used here draws broadly from neo-analytic object-relations, self-psychology, and similar interpersonal theories (Hedges, 1994; Kernberg, 1976: Kohut, 1977; Masterson, 1985; Masterson & Klein, 1989; Singer & Salovey, 1993; Spence, 1982) in addition to strategic and structural family therapy (Saposnek, 1998). Specifically, the concepts of projective identification, counter-transference, and empathy are congruent with Tansey and Burke’s (1989) seminal interpersonal theory of the clinical process. Projective identification is a psychological defense wherein the projector stirs up in the other person an experiential state that matches or complements the projector’s immediate experience, either consciously or unconsciously. Countertransference refers to the totality of thoughts and feelings that are generated in the clinician by the client, including realistic responses as well as those distorted by the clinician’s own idiosyncratic personal conflicts and psychological state. From this stance, counter-transference reactions are viewed not as impediments but as essential clinical data that signal the state and quality of the clinician’s relationship with the client. However, these reactions need to be sorted through and carefully processed by the clinician in order to achieve an empathic response to the client, at which point they can also be judiciously used in intervention.

The Essentials of Case Management The Legal Contract That Governs the Therapeutic Intervention To begin working with these kinds of families in a haphazard manner, without a clear purpose and structure, is a prescription for disaster. The first task is to restrain the tendency of the parents to involve the courts, attorneys, and other professionals, as well as families and friends, in acting out their conflicts (i.e., projective identifications). For this reason,


effective intervention in high-conflict custody disputes takes place within a legally defined framework (a legal contract or court order) that coordinates the actions of all professionals in the case and supports the focused role of the clinician in fashioning and maintaining a more protective holding environment for the child in the fractured family. This legal framework also provides an overarching rule-governed process for managing the ongoing conflict and the involvement of the wider network should the conflict erupt beyond the capacity of the clinician to contain it. At the outset, a legal contract or court order for the intervention needs to specify each of the following: (a) the goals of the service, (b) who will be seen in sessions, (c) the limits of confidentiality with the court, (d) the permissible lines of communication among parties and collaterals, (e) a timely procedure for resolving issues when parents are stuck, (f) payment for services, and (g) an agreed-upon process for terminating the intervention or transferring to another counselor. Specifically, the following kinds of provisions in the legal agreement have been found effective in containing conflict and promoting case control. First of all, the clinician needs to have access to all family members involved in the dispute on an as-needed basis. Second, in order to ensure that each parent is assuming responsibility for the resolution of the family conflict, each should pay for his or her own individual sessions, for half of each joint session, and for half of the children’s sessions. (If a sliding scale fee can be provided to each parent, this can take care of real inequities in resources.) Parents are usually asked to give their consent for all information to be held confidential from the court with the exception of any child abuse or threats of violence for which reporting is mandated. This means the parties must stipulate that the clinician will not be asked or subpoenaed to testify in court. The signed confidentiality agreement should be a three-way one, indicating that the consent of both parents and the clinician is required to waive it. A co-parenting coordinator who has arbitration powers assigned by stipulation of the parties or the family court acts as final decision maker for the family on issues unresolved by co-parenting counseling. Granting broad discretionary powers at the outset for the clinician to share information with other professionals and extended family members maximizes the potential for

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collaboration and limits the possibility of manipulation by the contending parties. It is particularly critical, if not imperative, for parents to sign releases for the clinician to share accumulating information with other mental health professionals involved with the family, especially the parents’ and children’s individual therapists. Releases to speak with teachers, childcare persons, and pediatricians can be added as needed. Permission for the counselor to speak with new stepparents and extended kin involved in day-to-day care of the children is also important. To maximize coordination between parents who usually cannot communicate with one another directly, it must be specified that the counselor can use his or her discretion to exchange information freely between parents in separate interviews. However, to protect children who are often in a dangerously vulnerable position between parents, it should be made clear that the children’s confidences will be privileged. The only kind of feedback parents receive about their child will be general clinical impressions unless the child consents to the release of more specific information. The special nature of individual and group work with children of highly conflicted custody disputes is addressed in the next chapter (chapter 10) and in our group treatment manual (Roseby et al., 2005). Here it is suffice to note that some kind of access to the children as part of the co-parenting counseling is essential in order for the clinician to remain focused on the needs and experience of the children rather than becoming caught up in the parents’ projections and conflicting perceptions of their offspring. If the child is being seen in separate treatment, a close working alliance with the child’s therapist is an alternative to direct access. Otherwise, the child is seen from time and time as part of the co-parenting intervention, thus providing an opportunity for good observation of the child’s defensive and adaptive responses. This diagnostic information in turn provides credibility to the counselor’s advocacy for the child with each parent. Multiple therapists working in different roles with the same family require coordination and appointment by mutual consent of parents or an impartial third party (e.g., a judge). More often than not, the need for therapy for the child is a hotly disputed issue between parents. Sometimes the child is taken to therapy by one parent without the knowledge or


consent of the other. Accepting a child for treatment under these conditions is highly questionable and may amount to malpractice because the therapist will almost always be perceived as having aligned with one parent against the other. When this happens, the child’s loyalty dilemmas are compounded, and the clinician then becomes one more party to the fight rather than a neutral person who can help the child move toward his or her own reality. Where a need for child treatment can be substantiated, the therapist’s (and to some extent the child’s) dilemma can be resolved by a court order requiring it.

Time Commitments for the Service The time demands for any one case will depend upon the level of pathology in the parents as well as the schedule of litigation and, unfortunately but necessarily, upon the parents’ capacity to pay for the intervention. However, the extent of commitment required for working with these families is often startling to clinicians who are new to this work; it is especially intensive during the beginning stages. For more severely conflicted families, the counselor should budget 3–5 hr per family per week for the first 2 months or so and expect to deal with frequent crisis demands by telephone. This generally tapers off to about 1 or 2 hr per week for the succeeding 2–6 months. Intermittent or regularly scheduled follow-up sessions or telephone counseling may follow after that period (involving 1 or 2 hr per month). For chronically entrenched disputes of long-standing duration, we have come to expect that real structural shifts should occur within 18 months to 2 years after the onset of intervention. For some families, the intervention may need to be a sustained throughout the growing-up years of the child.

The Therapeutic Model of Intervention The counselor’s overall aim is to build a functioning organizational structure out of the family chaos, which initially presents as a situation in which each parent is acting unilaterally without reference to the child’s needs or the other parent’s wishes, and each is actively sabotaging and undermining the other’s capacity to parent and protect the

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child. From the beginning, most elements of the new structure lie within the clinician who acts, in the best sense, as the charismatic center for the parents and child and who calls upon the legal contract for constraints and limit-setting when necessary. Typically, what erupts in the family over the course of the intervention are a spate of issues, problems, and crises that must be resolved one by one. Out of each successful resolution, clearer expectations emerge as to how parents need to conduct themselves for the sake of the child. Gradually, a working group becomes organized as the role of each family member is delineated and stabilized. Later, a family “constitution” is drawn up wherein these roles are codified into a set of principles and rules about how members are to treat each other, independent of intervention by the clinician or the court.

Initial Referral and Contract Formation It is best if parents are jointly referred for this service by attorney stipulation or judicial order. If there is no parenting agreement, and referral follows a failed mediation or a custody evaluation, a temporary custody and access order needs to be in place. If only one of the parties or his or her advocates try unilaterally to engineer referral of the family, the effort is often met with suspicion, resistance, and stalemate. In any case, initial contact with each party usually begins with a strategic “dance” as each parent vies for position and advantage. Telephone calls from all parties will consume considerable time, sometimes with demands that the clinician provide references, resumes, or disclosures about his or her attitudes towards controversial topics such as joint custody, fathers’ involvement with infants, and domestic violence. It is especially important for the counselor to keep a balanced perspective and maintain neutrality (both in fact and appearance) during this exploratory period. Both parents must agree to proceed before any information-gathering or counseling sessions take place. During this phase, the terms of the contract need to be carefully explained, preferably with written guidelines and consent forms. Other professionals involved with the family need to be informed and an understanding reached about their respective roles. At the outset, parents are usually seen separately, especially where there is extreme animosity and threat of violence. Each one


is then scheduled to bring in the child for a separate playinterview and for a parent–child observation session. Parents come to the intervention with a range of expectations and strong feelings, mostly negative ones. Most commonly, parents are ambivalent, skeptical, distrustful, and even paranoid. Some feel quite hopeless and despairing, convinced that no one can help. They may appear exhausted by what feels to them as a life-and-death struggle. Others are highly focused and energized by the dispute. Almost all parents express fears that the clinician will be duped by the other side. Some of these parents have a utilitarian, exploitative attitude: “What can you do for me? Can I use you to get what I want?” Simply put, they are in search of an ally in the power struggle. Their unspoken agenda may include: “Can I use counseling to delay or avoid an outcome I don’t want (an unfavorable court decision or a confrontation about my violence)?” They may see counseling as a way to prolong the marriage and deny the fact that the divorce is occurring. It is important for the counselor to tease out these various motivations and decide whether the case is a suitable one for confidential counseling and mediation or whether a custody evaluation, court hearing, or arbitration is needed instead. There are a number of unconscious or pre-conscious emotional responses of his or her own that the clinician needs to keep in check and avoid acting out. For example, the counselor might find himself or herself being vague and nonspecific about the terms of the contract (e.g., whether reports will be made to the court), or the counselor may be tempted to abandon some of the necessary structure as a concession in order to capture an ambivalent or unwilling parent (e.g., agreeing not to see the child). There may be a temptation to relinquish neutrality, favoring the less emotionally disturbed parent and backing away from the more disturbed one. Or, in response to intimidation and fear, the counselor may make unwarranted concessions in an attempt to placate a disturbed, controlling, or violent parent.

Assessment of the Impasse and its Effect on the Child Once the contract is entered into, the counselor undertakes a dispute-specific and parenting assessment of the divorced couple (giving special attention to any history of domestic

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violence in the spousal relationship) from courtship to separation. A synopsis of the early history of each parent is obtained together with a concise assessment of their current personal and occupational functioning. An overview of the developmental history of the child is also obtained with special attention to any allegations of abuse, what the child has witnessed of the parental conflict/violence, what separations and losses the child has experienced, the child’s reaction to the parental separation/divorce, and his or her attachment to each parent. The child’s symptoms of distress during transitions between parents as well as other emotional or behavioral problems (including somatic ones), school achievements, and peer relationships need to be reviewed and, if disputed, validated by information from collateral sources. This initial assessment usually takes from 6 to 8 hr. See Appendix Part A for assessment guidelines. The point of gathering this information is to formulate a working hypothesis about the “divorce impasse,” the intrapsychic and interactional factors in and between parents and others that maintain the family disputes (see chapter 1). The actual or potential impact of the parental conflicts on the child’s development is also hypothesized. This involves a specific assessment of the effects of the impasse on parenting and parent–child relationships and how all of these relate to the symptoms of distress, the defenses, and the coping style of the child. It is also useful to consider how the child’s symptoms and defensive adaptation, in turn, contribute to the parental disputes. Mr. and Mrs. F were locked in a bitter dispute over the father’s access to his 8-year-old daughter, Julie. Mrs. F, a young woman who had been abandoned by her own father and who was unable to emancipate from her intrusive mother, was convinced that she needed to protect Julie from an “uncaring, brutal” man. There was some real, though exaggerated, truth to Mrs. F’s views. Mr. F, a product of rigid, punitive, and shaming parenting, was highly affronted by his daughter’s refusal to visit him; he was also convinced that he needed to rescue Julie from a “sick dependency” upon her mother. Armed with a court order for visitation, he invaded the home, shoved the mother and grandmother aside, and dragged the


extremely frightened child, kicking and screaming, to his car. An intrapsychic split within this child mirrored the ongoing struggle between her parents, which was fueled by tribal warfare between the extended families. Anxious and phobic, Julie struggled with an unintegrated sense of herself: she was unable to separate and differentiate from her “good” mother and was fearful of becoming like her “bad” father. This was concretely manifested by her attempts to shave off one of her eyebrows that “looked like Dad’s.” Not surprisingly, the child’s disturbed behavior reinforced the parents’ negative views and blaming of each other. The counselor’s task in such a situation may involve coming up with a series of alternative hypotheses that will be carefully considered in designing the intervention. The idea is to formulate a strategic plan of attack: determining which elements of the impasse can be shifted, which must be bypassed or diffused, and how this will be done. In the F family, the questions were the following. Who and what are amenable to change? Can we show this mother how to more effectively protect her daughter by helping Julie cope with visits to her father; or is she wedded to an intractably negative view of the husband who has humiliated and deserted her? Can she tolerate some interpretation of the origins of her fears? Can we teach this father to be more empathic and responsive to his daughter’s fears, or is he too indignant, too obsessed with his “rights” as a father? Typically, an “idealizing transference” will develop during the assessment phase wherein the clinician is revered as being perfectly understanding and capable of being completely gratifying. The counselor’s empathic listening during the often intensely emotional, individual interviews is experienced as a validation of each parent’s perceptions, feelings, and reality. This is especially likely because the counselor is willing to accept any information the parent wants to supply, including talking with supportive others or reviewing video or audio tapes and prior evaluations. This kind of idealizing transference by the parents is valuable in that it can reinforce

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the hope that the counselor will be able to effect change, but it can also lead to unrealistic, positive expectations. The challenge is to meet the parents’ needs to be acknowledged in these ways without relinquishing neutrality and inadvertently confirming their distorted views. Some counselors can be seduced into wanting to gratify these idealistic fantasies during this “honeymoon” phase of treatment and will, with good but misguided intentions, hint at or promise what they cannot deliver. Specifically, a counselor may be seduced into trying to rescue one or both parents or the child, in order to prove that he or she is a more effective therapist than the string of mental health professionals that have preceded and failed. Others who are more skeptical because they have been down this road before will maintain a cool, dispassionate distance and an inscrutable demeanor that may be experienced as nonsupportive and anxiety-provoking and may even induce paranoia in the client. The optimal response is to relate empathically to the feelings expressed by both parents, explaining that one is withholding judgment about the accuracy of their perceptions while emphasizing to both that there are two sides to every story and that problems such as theirs are often very complex. This stance is likely to be experienced by parents as more understandable, even if not altogether reassuring.

Reformulation of the Problem As in other brief, focused therapies, the intervention proper usually begins with the clinician’s redefining or reframing the problems and issues under dispute, hopefully in a manner that each parent can accept. This reframing may involve direct interpretation of the impasse and an explanation of what the dispute is doing to the child. Here, the leverage for change is generally the parent’s concern for the child. To Mrs. F the counselor might say, “Your daughter sees you as the angel and her father as the devil! She is struggling with being either ‘all good’ like you or ‘all bad’ like him. This means she can’t allow herself to make any mistakes for fear she will be less than perfect—‘bad’ like him. How can we let her know that it’s okay and only human to make mistakes? Can you allow her to see that you also have strengths and weaknesses? Can


you let her know that her father has good as well as problematic traits?” Alternatively, the intervention may involve some careful modification of the parents’ views, using their primary defenses as leverage for change. For example, one may make an appeal to the self-interest of the parent, using the fact that the parent has a vested interest in saving face and appearing to be the nobler parent. To Mr. F the counselor might comment, “I’ve been impressed with how committed you are to having the opportunity to be a good father to your child and helping your child separate from her mother. Your child wants and needs a good, understanding father! Sometimes being a good parent, one who feels safe to a child, means rethinking the way we ourselves were parented.” This can lead to a discussion of the father’s own childhood experience of a rigid, punitive upbringing and parenting style. The cognitive reframing of the problem in terms of the impasse generally relieves the parents’ anxiety. It makes rational what may have been experienced as deeply shaming or as sheer craziness. When Ms. S was a young teenage mother, her 6-monthold son was severely injured in a car crash as a result of her driving at excessive speed. Her relationship with the child’s father fell apart irretrievably during the long, stressful months of the baby’s rehabilitation. At the time, feeling conflicted and guilty, the young woman ‘acted out’ by darting in front of a bus and sustaining almost identical injuries to those her son had suffered. She then relinquished the care of their baby to Mr. S. The father, rewriting history, concluded that the exciting young woman (whom he had once loved) was an “abusive, endangering” mother from whom his son needed to be protected at all costs. By both word and deed, the father conveyed his enormous fears for the child’s safety at the hands of the mother, and soon the child was phobic, unable to be soothed or managed by his mother. When the now 7-year-old boy rejected his mother, reciting the family legend of the car accident as his reason, the young

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mother’s unresolved guilt erupted into a narcissistic wound for which she fought a sustained, bitter battle for custody as a salve. A significant turning point in the clinical intervention with this young woman was an interpretation in which she was portrayed as a very caring, loving mother who could not forgive herself for her son’s accident and who effectively continued to punish herself by fighting for custody and forcing access in a manner that frightened and alienated her child. This kind of intervention often works well at an intellectual or cognitive level; however, it is often difficult to know just how much the family members can truly absorb and understand psychologically when using this method. Most certainly, at this point the bulk of the hard work in producing emotional and behavioral change still lies ahead. Here we comment on a rather radical departure from traditional approaches to psychotherapy. What is unusual in this approach is the degree of detail in the history-taking, the focus on the child’s subjective experience, and the way in which this information is used to make interpretations to the parents in order to heighten their empathic commitment to their child. What begins as a cognitive reframing is later revisited over and over again at the dynamic level in further sessions. For example, when Ms. S reacted to yet another scathing comment by her son about her incompetence as a mother, the counselor reminded her why she was so sensitive to his challenges and helped her respond in a way that made her child feel more safe. If the counselor succeeds in being both accurate in interpretation and at the same time protective of the parents’ vulnerabilities, the parents may be impressed and intrigued by the redefinition that is offered to them and gratified by the clinician’s empathic insight. When this happens, the idealizing transference is magnified. In some instances, the counselor will be experienced by one or more of the family members as the all-knowing, all-giving, omnipotent parent figure who is somehow going to “fix” everything. If this feeling takes hold, it might be important to actively discourage or modify the transference by interpreting it and predicting the potential for trouble that lies ahead. This will prolong the


clinician’s power to effect change. Alternatively, if the cognitive reframing is clumsy, inopportune, or experienced as an attack, the clinician may be dismissed as naive; in which case he or she will be swept into the most troubled waters of the next phase of intervention—the rocky shoals of “challenge and crisis.”

Challenge and Crisis Sooner or later the disputing parties will test and challenge the counselor by precipitating a crisis or series of crises. For example, one or both parents may act out by snatching or withholding the child, disputing or physically fighting at the transition between homes, or simply behaving as they always have behaved regardless of their new knowledge and the insights they have supposedly gained from the cognitive reframing. This acting-out behavior must be responded to in a timely and firm manner. Specifically, it must be confronted and interpreted according to the clinician’s developing understanding of the impasse and its effects on the child. This is problematic because the crisis is, in part, generated by the needy parents’ jealousy over the child who is always the central concern of the counselor. It is crucial, however, that the counselor be available to deal with this crisis period and be willing to work through it by firmly confronting any behavior that either hurts or fails to protect the child. For example, Mr. F and Ms. S each lost patience with their own child’s irrational fear of themselves as parents and attempted to force demonstrations of affection that further alienated their child from them. At other times, they each demanded prematurely independent behaviors which further frightened these children. At the same time that the counselor is firmly confronting parents, he or she defines principles and rules for ways that situations like this have to be handled in the future. These principles or rules form the bases of the mediation agreements that will be drawn up later. In these two cases, Mrs. F and Mr. S each reacted with outrage and increased demands for child protection when they heard and entirely believed somewhat distorted accounts relayed by the child of the other

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parent’s cruel and endangering behaviors. When the counselor carefully explored the critical incidents with both parents, far more benign interpretations arose. This affirmed the need for each parent to calmly check out stories their child brings home in the future and work to improve their child’s reality testing. Another common escalating crisis involves an infuriated visiting parent who refuses to return the child as “payback” because the custodial parent had cancelled a preceding visit in order for the child to attend an event or social function. To resolve this crisis, rules are drawn up or clarified as to the primary right of the visiting parent to make decisions about the child’s social life during visiting time and for the child to be never used as a weapon or punishment by either parent against the other. During these crises, there is generally a precipitous de-idealization of the counselor. The parents may feel bitterly disappointed, even hostile; they may accuse the counselor of naiveté, bias, unethical conduct, or ineffectiveness and failure—just as all the others before this have failed them. They may become disillusioned and depressed about the chances of anyone being able to help to them. In the worstcase scenario, the clinician can become a phobic object or the focus of the parents’ paranoid projections. Resolution of crises is critical to the successful treatment of a case. In order to be seen as a real, separate person and not a “part-object” of the parent’s idealized or de-idealized self, the clinician needs to carefully, patiently, and persistently reiterate his or her point of view about the child’s plight. Specifically, this means repeatedly focusing on the child’s needs and experience. At the same time, the counselor empathically reflects the parents’ own needs and feelings, appealing to and validating the positive attributes of each parent while differentiating each parent’s needs from those of the child. Throughout the family intervention, the counselor continues to confront aspects of the parents’ behaviors that are destructive to their child or to themselves. A common scenario is the fight over the child’s possessions, which usually erupts at the time of transfer from one home to the other. One parent becomes infuriated when good clothes and toys that they have provided for the child “disappear into a black hole” when taken to the other parent’s home. Consequently, the parents react in a number of ways


that are highly distressful for the child. They may scream and yell at each other (frightening the child), demand that the child retrieve the items or steal back ones of equivalent value (burdening or undermining the child’s conscience), insist that treasured belongings be left behind when the child goes to the other home (disenfranchising the child), completely strip the child at the point of transfer (objectifying the child), or send the child back in scruffy, ill-fitting clothes (embarrassing and demeaning the child). With each of these actions, the child’s sense of self-continuity and control is undermined. While the counselor acknowledges to each parent the symbolic and monetary value of these items (connecting it to their convictions about being exploited, cheated, or ignored by the ex-spouse), he or she draws primary attention to the destructive results of the parents’ attempts to solve the problem at the expense of the child’s self esteem. The counselor’s role is neither a passive nor a neutral one; rather, it involves taking a strongly supportive, active but confrontational stance with both parents, while advocating for the child’s needs. The idea is to align with the “good parent” attributes of each parent and to gently but firmly confront them about their negative attributes. This involves supporting their valid perceptions of the other parent and withholding support for those accusations that are invalid or cannot be confirmed. For example, the counselor may need to sort through a litany of objections that a mother makes about her 3-year-old son visiting his father and help both parents to organize their issues in terms of those that are valid concerns, those that are less important, and those that may be invalid. The counselor points out to both parents that the father’s failure to provide a child’s car seat for transportation is a critical issue and supersedes his reluctance to insist that the child has a nap or his tendency to feed the child “fast food.” And the counselor suggests that, on the other hand, his including his new girlfriend on visits may actually be a benefit to the child. Disputing parents are often puzzled and even suspicious of the counselor’s active support for both sides. They may complain that he or she “speaks with a forked tongue,” saying whatever each parent wants to hear. In actuality, the counselor is not being inconsistent or contradictory. He or she is painting a picture that each parent can tolerate, but also one that is part of a larger, more realistic, and less negatively biased view. Though the counselor starts with polarized

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partial positions gleaned from each parent, he or she tries to understand the whole situation from the viewpoint of the child’s needs, teasing out the shared reality so that there will be less and less chance of saying to one parent something that would not be true to say to the other. It is this shared reality that the counselor will impart to the child and that the child can use for mastery. The stories or narratives that the counselor may later construct for and with the children and send home with both parents to read as bedtime stories become a metaphor for that shared reality (see Johnston et al., 2008, 2002, 1997). The origins of the divorce impasse for Mrs. Y was her marriage as an attractive teenager to Mr. Y, a staid working-class man who was more than twice her age. This was a union that was precipitated by the accidental death of her high-school sweetheart when the grieving girl found comfort in the older man’s attentions. Shortly after the wedding, Mrs. Y came to realize the dreadful mistake she had made but not before finding herself pregnant with twin girls. The marriage fell apart when the babies were toddlers, and Mrs. Y resumed her lost teenage years by dating widely and taking up photographic modeling as a career. Mr. Y, feeling humiliated and betrayed by her desertion, began a concerted attack upon her mothering abilities. He denounced her as “a liar, manipulative, unscrupulous, materialistic, a user of people, inordinately concerned with the superficialities of appearances, a drug taker, and unfit to be the primary custodian.” He, in turn, devoted himself to teaching the girls “good values” that included the rough and tumble of sports and academic achievement. Mrs. Y counteraccused him for his neglect of the girls’ grooming, his carelessness with their diet, his working-class roughness, and his excessive drinking.

The litigation between the parents, supported by their extended families, raged so fiercely that both 9-yearold girls became completely conflicted in their loyalties. They lied to both parents and demeaned themselves and both parents on every one of the issues. The difficult task for the clinician in this case was to slowly redefine


the problem as being the parents’ entrenched animosity towards each other rather than either parent’s actual parenting skills and to succeed in getting all family members to acknowledge that both parents had the potential to be loving caretakers who could make valuable, unique, and separate contributions to their daughters’ upbringing. Finally, the girls were given an especially designed story about a fancy, prancing circus pony (the mother) that married a plodding draft horse (the father). The story included a thinly veiled rendition of the parental disputes along with a prescription on how the baby foals might solve the problem. Counter-transference feelings during the phase of challenge and crisis can be intense, even intolerable. The counselor often feels anxious, defensive, and angry. During this phase, not just one but both parents are likely to be raging at the clinician. Consequently, the clinician also may feel very vulnerable to abandonment, overwhelmed with disappointment, a gross sense of failure, and have an irrational fear of being annihilated by their fury. Insofar as this happens, the clinician’s often terrifying or humiliating experience can provide essential access to a visceral sense of how the child feels, and what the child fears will potentially happen if they assert themselves in any way in the dangerous place they inhabit. In this event, this important source of data about the children’s experiences, the counselor’s own countertransference reactions towards the parents, together with clinical observations of the child, can be used as leverage with the parents. Some at this point will be tempted to abandon the case or defensively withdraw into a passive, compromised stance. Others act out in retaliation, becoming hostile and accusing the clients of provoking crises. Alternatively, the counselor may participate in the splitting and projection of blame by scapegoating the other professionals involved. The counselor, however, must accept the experience of absorbing the emotional responses that distressed parents are afraid of owning (the projective identification), and this can be overwhelming. He or she may feel stupid, confused, incompetent, unethical, sly, greedy, bad, or all of these at once. One counselor commented, “My brain felt like it was being sucked out with a straw!” Another said, “I felt slimy and dirty, and I wanted to

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take a shower.” Yet another had disturbing dreams of being condemned for some unknown horrible crime. It may be necessary for the counselor to seek out consultations with an experienced and trusted colleague in order to tolerate and understand these powerful feelings. The counselor must be able to use his or her emotional reactions both selectively and therapeutically in this process. We have not found it helpful to be a passive-neutral recipient of the parents’ rage and contempt. They will not learn anything if they are allowed to act out and project in this manner. Rather, they may become even more frightened and chaotic, and the clinician can indeed become ineffective and even supportive of their pathological defenses. However, in accord with Tansey and Burke (1989), we believe the counselor needs to identify and process the origins of the counter-transference reactions before acting upon them. What guidelines should govern counter-transference disclosure? First, the counselor may consciously and selectively use his or her expectable emotional reactions (those that are normative to most persons) as a confrontational mirror to the parents’ outrageous or inappropriate behavior. Second, he or she may advocate for the needs of the child and convey what most of these infants, children, and even teenagers cannot possibly express to their parents. To this end, the counselor may openly verbalize shock, distress, disappointment, sadness, outrage, and even anger in responding to these parents’ actions that are destructive to their children but always with therapeutic wisdom and in moderation. Third, when reframing the issues and correcting the parents’ distorted perceptions, the counselor may express surprise, curiosity, puzzlement, or incredulity at the stance they are taking. At all times, the counselor must examine the motivation for his or her own observable stance and continually ponder the question, “Am I helping this person by my emotional response, or am I merely protecting myself from the manner in which they are narcissistically wounding me?” Indeed, there is likely to be a high level of drama at times with these people, and one needs to know how to take over the role of stage director to the play. We have speculated that the high level of drama and emotional intensity that these parents both generate and demand may relieve their feelings of existential emptiness, incipient depression, and fears of emotional death.


Dr. B would periodically become highly agitated when his ex-wife passive-aggressively refused to respond to his proposals for co-parenting their son. Feeling cut off and abandoned, just as he had felt when his mother periodically abandoned him as a child, Dr. B would escalate his demands into a manic frenzy, transmitting multiple abusive faxes, e-mails, and telephone messages to all and sundry. At the point when he seemed to be losing all semblance of perspective and control, the counselor would intervene, empathically interpreting the origins of his desperate panic but being highly offended by his abuse and disappointed in his self-destructiveness, insisting that he restrain his bullying behavior and helping him organize his legitimate issues and proceed in a more rational manner. The consistent availability of the counselor over the long haul is unquestionably an important component of successful treatment. While the clients have the right to withdraw at any time from the process, the counselor needs to make it clear that he or she will remain available to them along with the expectation that the parents will try to be fair, honest, and civil. Unrealistic hopes and fantasies, however, (e.g., that the other parent will disappear or be expelled from the child’s life) need to be confronted as such; the counselor makes clear over and over again, if necessary, what realistically can and cannot be done. The overarching message to these parents is that they will not be abandoned in their struggle. This is an unusual, if not unique, experience for many of these people who have indeed been abandoned and negated repeatedly not only by their own early caretakers but also within recent memory by therapists, attorneys, and other professionals.

Working Through and Resolution Progress is consolidated in an uneven manner, two steps forward and one step back. This means that the working-through phase often continues to be disrupted by intermittent crises, especially with more characterologically disturbed parents, or when the child’s symptomatic behavior continues to reactivate the conflict between them. The techniques for handling these crises are similar to those described above. However, if intransigence solidifies, the family may need to be referred to

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an arbitrator or returned to court to obtain a more structured agreement or a reality check on their unrealistic expectations about the kind of relief the court can provide. Psycho-educational child guidance work (see below), parent counseling, coaching co-parental communication with respect to the children, and, of course, monitoring parents’ behaviors and agreements are the usual order of business at this stage. When elements of the core impasse recur, ongoing interpretation is offered and strategies are developed to help the parents cope without compounding the impasse. The important products of this phase of the intervention are written drafts of a series of co-parenting agreements which not only specify time-sharing arrangements but also define the principles by which parents are to treat each other, and by which they can make good decisions about their child in a timely manner. These agreements may need to be formalized as court orders by stipulation, in which case they need to be passed on to the parents’ attorneys and the child’s attorney for processing. The counselor will know that the co-parenting agreements have been internalized when parents telephone or meet together over a complaint or a dilemma and are fairly quickly able to talk themselves into a principled resolution. In the best of situations, the counselor fades into the background, leaving in place the knowledge and guidelines that will structure the family’s ongoing interactions through the years, hopefully until the child is able to psychologically and physically emancipate. It is the mark of a successful intervention when parents view the counselor more realistically as a concerned helper and a benevolent (but human and fallible) person who is profoundly interested in their child and in them as parents. He or she takes much pleasure in the child’s growth and development and in their accomplishments as good parents. The family members now know that, despite their limitations, the counselor understands their history and their vulnerabilities and values and cares about them. Moreover, the counselor continues to provide a model for the child as to how to relate positively to both parents. Problems may arise for the clinician, however, in managing his or her own boredom and frustration at the slow pace of change, manifested in the need to deal with the same old issues again and again. Successful outcomes in co-parenting counseling with families engaged in high-conflict divorce are determined in


large part by the extent to which the therapist can maintain a working alliance with all disputing parties as well as maintain balance and equidistance in the face of the extraordinary polarization and demands for exclusive allegiance. That is, the idealization of the counselor by the clients usually gives way to de-idealization and rejection, as both parents are bitterly disappointed and angry that their perceptions and actions are not fully validated by the therapist. Consequently, challenge and crisis, resistance and regression are expected features of this work and provide opportunities for growth and change.

Termination and Follow-Up Optimally, the counselor does not terminate with these families; instead he or she remains available for the child and the parents to consult in the event of renewed conflict, developmental changes in the child, or changes in life circumstances throughout the child’s growing-up years. Effective counselors doing this kind of work become members of the divorced family’s network, similar to the old-time family physician and akin to the stabilizing influence of elders in the lives of families that are buttressed by close-knit extended family, tribal, or community ties. How can these families continue to be helped if the initial counselor cannot be consistently available to them over the long term? Unfortunately, many parents will not follow through on a new referral, in which case the most the counselor can do is to leave them with a good parenting plan, appropriate principles, and parenting guidelines to follow. Or, if it seems reasonable to do so, and with the permission of the family members, the counselor may introduce a new counselor and transfer the family through a series of conjoint sessions. Alternatively, in family and professional conferences, the emerging structure and process can be passed on to grandparents, teachers, or childcare workers. These termination and transfer meetings should include a clear definition of which behaviors to flag for further help.

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Treatment of Children in Conflicted and Violent Families

10

Decisions about when to initiate direct treatment for children of highly conflicted or domestically violent custody disputes, and what kind of therapy is likely to be helpful, must be made with considerable thought and care. There are not always clear answers to the many questions that arise, and each case needs to be considered on its own merits. For example, is child therapy the best way to allocate scarce family resources? Should the child be seen as part of the family intervention or assigned his or her own individual therapist? Should siblings be seen by the same therapist, and if so, when are conjoint sessions appropriate? How can one be sure that individual therapy for the child is well coordinated with the rest of the family intervention? Can the child benefit from individual therapy or would group therapy be more useful at this stage in the child’s development? Should the intervention be

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short-term or long-term, and what might one expect to achieve in each mode? What are the consequences if children revise their defensive processes when they continue to be in a malignant family situation? In short, what kind of therapy can one effectively conduct inside a domestic war zone?

Individual Treatment The intervention with the child is defined by several important parameters or constraints linked to the very nature of the clientele, making it somewhat different in some respects from more traditional psychotherapeutic work with children. First, these children need help in comprehending and differentiating the external threats that are encompassed by real aspects of their family situation, their parents’ disparate views and feelings, and their own internal fears. For this reason the clinician needs to function as a “reality holder” for them. Children of chronic custody disputes live in a chaos that is both overt and subtle; as a result, the child’s experience is confused, disoriented, nonviable, ignored, misinterpreted, frightened, and overwhelmed by the chaos of the parental disputes and by the conflicting realities portrayed through the passions and fears of their parents. That is to say, these children’s intrapsychic fears have exploded into the real world and are being acted out by the parents and vice versa. Consequently, their capacity to view the world realistically is rendered extremely problematic. In direct work with children, the therapist presents a view of the world that it is hoped begins to make sense for them. The child’s experience can be confirmed through empathic attunement (gleaned from the therapist’s knowledge and experience of both parents and a factual understanding of what is going on in both homes). In this way therapists lend their own ego functioning to children to help them make sense of their world and their feelings in very concrete and specific ways. The counselor may directly comment on the reality of the child’s situation. More often the commentary is indirect; that is, the counselor uses narratives and dramatic plays (in stories and scenes that symbolize the family situation) to help children understand and possibly reconfigure the internal scripts they have devised about family relationships. At the same time, the therapist stands as an ally and

Chapter 10: Treatment of Children

models by her own neutrality and acceptance of them how the child can have a respectful, caring relationship with both opposing parents. The second important parameter of the intervention derives from the fact that these children can rarely talk about their feelings and perceptions directly, at least not in the beginning. They need a therapeutic experience in which they can project their views of their interpersonal world, wherein their defensive distortions can be expressed with the possibility that they can be revised. Working through acute or chronic trauma requires access to the memory of particular experiences and the capacity to reflect on them. This is an unlikely condition for children whose experiences of trauma have been early, pervasive, subtle, chronic, and defensively distorted. These experiences have to be recovered at the perceptual level through reenactment of some kind. In therapy, this can be done through dramatic role-play, puppet play, sandtray play, story telling and dreams, and artwork (drawings and sculpture). It is through these projective media that the child’s scripts and expectations about family relationships and the injunctions embedded within them can be surfaced and commented upon, sometimes directly, but usually within the symbolism of the play. It is within the therapeutic safety of this projective play that the child can risk experiencing and differentiating his or her own feelings. This self-experience or selfempathy, if affirmed by the therapist, can be a prelude to the child’s developing capacity for empathy with others. The therapist’s role in the child’s reenactment is not a passive one. Whereas the child is encouraged to take the lead and the therapist acts as a sensitively attuned enabler and follower, most often the child will become stuck at some point and need guidance to proceed. Several kinds of impasses are common: Some children will be so constricted that they cannot play at all. Others become easily frightened and overwhelmed by their impulses and disrupt the play, or they become chaotic when certain themes emerge. Still others repeat the play over and over again in an endless repetition-compulsion. These obsessive re-enactments can, and should be, alarming to the therapist when they become retaliatory, manipulative, controlling, vicious, or violent. At such times the therapist needs to intervene to provide safety, containment, and constructive guidance so that the child can work through the morass of

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their rage and fear. For example, after watching a 4-year-old boy’s dinosaur wreak havoc time and again in his sandtray play, the therapist gently suggested that a superman ride the dinosaur and reign him in whenever he became too destructive. This theme subsequently became a ritual that the boy included in the repertoire of his play. A realistic and detailed understanding of the child’s exposure to traumatic events and the associated developmental dilemmas, as well as therapeutic skill, are needed to determine if, when, and how to intervene within the child’s impasse when it is expressed in projective play. The danger of intervention lies, of course, in imposing intrusive demands similar to those of the needy parents. The danger of nonintervention lies in abandoning these children in their struggle to cope. The therapist has the choice of exploring, clarifying, offering insight, or actually demonstrating (directly or indirectly through the symbolism of narrative or projective play) new solutions and ways of coping that will provide a way out of the impasse. The third important constraint upon the therapeutic work derives from the fact that the child’s capacity for basic trust is likely to have been compromised too often by early and chronic exposure to parental conflict and narcissistic parenting. For this reason, throughout the work with these children, the therapist must reassess the child’s capacity to use the therapeutic relationship as a reparative experience and as a developmental stepping stone. In the best of situations, the therapist becomes the new constant object whose predictable availability and attunement allow the child to revisit the possibility of internalizing this constancy. Too often, the child’s capacity for trust has been so compromised that the therapist is shut out, avoided, manipulated, or controlled by the child’s profound need to maintain distance. A therapeutic group experience may be far more useful to them. Alternatively, or in addition, one might consider creating a network of support and safety within their wider environment where reparative situations and relationships will be consistently available to them. When resources permit, this might involve making and protecting opportunities for them to have drama, dance, art, or music classes. Families with more limited resources can enroll their children in scouting, school or neighborhood sporting activities, Big Brother or Big Sister programs, or simply support the child’s involvement with favored family


members, neighbors, and other interested adults. The point is to protect the children’s access to adults who are especially and consistently attuned to their needs.

Narratives and Mutual Story Telling Many times the opportunity to provide direct therapy is limited by time and resources that are available, the parents’ willingness to facilitate it, or the child’s ability to make good use of it. Too often, the treatment is truncated or has to be terminated with unfinished work; alternatively, the child may have made some progress but reached a plateau and needs to take a break. What can the therapist do to provide a framework that will help the child with their family dilemmas or hold onto the progress made? One strategy in therapy is to provide children with an especially constructed story that embodies a symbolic rendition of their unique family situation as a whole with embedded coping strategies. Generic stories with themes common to many of the children are used in group work. Stories are important for children’s moral development in general, helping to establish and repair ego ideals (Tappan & Packer, 1991). Stories with a coherent structure including theme, development of plot, dilemmas and personalities, and resolution and ending are especially important for traumatized children who are often unable to construct narratives that help repair their disrupted sense of self-continuity and agency. The narratives that the counselor constructs for the younger children (and helps older children construct for themselves) typically contain the following elements. The story is a metaphor of family life in which there are no villains or heroes, just essentially human persons (usually portrayed as interesting and lovable animals) who have strengths and vulnerabilities. It realistically portrays the parent characters’ good intentions in getting together and having children, and in a non-blaming way, the story illustrates the parents’ irreconcilable differences and their need to separate. The plot of the narrative may be developed to show the child’s expectable feelings and dilemmas as a consequence of the parents’ divorce and disputes with each other, and most importantly, it suggests new coping strategies and solutions. Finally, it gives permission for the child character in the story to love both parents, specifically conveying how the child can

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selectively identify with the good parts of each parent and weave them into a cohesive self that is good, competent, and lovable. In ongoing work with children, these narratives can be expanded into mutual story telling. One favorite story is a land turtle that falls in love with a sea turtle. They later find their lifestyles incompatible and fight about caring for their children who are left on the beach, angry and sad. The turtle story concludes with the children relishing their likeness with and love of both parents and their ability to live both in the sea and on land (see The Turtle Story, chapter 1 in the volume entitled Through Children’s Eyes: Healing Stories for Children of Divorce by Johnston et al. 2008; 2002; 1997). Other common dilemmas (that are themes in the same volume) include going back and forth from one house to the other; having parents fight over your clothes and toys; wanting mom and dad to get back together again (in the Robbie Rabbit stories, chapter 3); grieving for a parent who lives a long distance away (The Bird Family, chapter 4); and step-family rivalries, The Dancers, chapter 6). More complex concerns are reflected in stories about finding one’s own voice in the midst of parents’ disputes (The Giraffe Who Couldn’t Speak, chapter 7); and dealing with a depressed, needy or very disturbed parent (Claudio and Petra, chapter 5; Good Times Recipee, chapter 12; and Spunky, chapter 14). These stories can be used in ongoing work with younger children, and expanded into mutual story telling with schoolage children or self-narratives by older adolescents. The stories can carry a powerful message to the adults involved when, with the child’s permission, they are shared with parents. Significant shifts in parental perceptions of each other, the divorce impasse, and the effects upon the children have been noted when the child takes a copy to each house and parents read them as bedtime stories.

Group Work It is important to realize that some children, despite their desperate need for help, may not be amenable to individual therapy at all because it is too threatening or because they do not have the developmental capacity to make good use of it. In these cases, group treatment may be better suited. What follows is a truncated account of the rationale, goals,


and group strategies for a group treatment model that was developed in the high-conflict project for children ranging in age from 5 to 14 years who live in highly conflicted and violent families. Full details of the exercises and activities of children’s groups, their structure and management, the accompanying psychoeducational group work with parents, adaptations to cultural and language differences, and data on the effectiveness of the model are available in the treatment manual itself (Roseby et al., 2005). This model, based upon a social-emotional developmental framework described in this book is considerably different from other more cognitivebehavioral models (Graham-Bermann, 1999).

A Rationale for Group Work The children in our project responded to group intervention with a degree of ease and pleasure that was readily apparent from the outset. In part, this may be due to the fact that school-age children naturally prefer to use their peers as a reference group when they can. When they discover that “I am not the only one” and that their story does not carry the shock value for others that it carries for them, their sense of shame and isolation lessens to a degree. The group becomes an alternative culture within which the children can learn from and about their peers. This is particularly important for youngsters who tend to control and avoid rather than form real relationships. The leader, in turn, can represent a benevolent adult who defines and supports a coherent moral order. The group setting also permits an activity-oriented focus that is particularly appropriate for school-age children. Activities can be structured to allow participants to titrate their approach to painful issues as they freely select a balance between watchfulness and participation. The experience of making choices is particularly central for these children for whom control over feelings is a salient developmental and interpersonal issue. Group activities can also capture the children’s imagination and provide a sense of pleasure that is all too often a foreign experience. For the group leader, the technical challenge is to maintain the group’s serious therapeutic agenda without forestalling the children’s enjoyment and real freedom to contribute to and modify the group experience. The peer-oriented action of the group structure also provides these youngsters with a kind of unselfconscious

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strength in numbers. When that atmosphere takes hold, it seems to release the group from the need to anticipate and meet the expectations of the people in charge. This kind of breathing room is particularly welcomed by children who have learned to survive the double-binding demands of their parents’ conflict by focusing vigilantly on the needs of powerful adults. Because the group setting helps to release the participants from their hypervigilance, they tend to act out their interpersonal difficulties and articulate their inner concerns more openly than in individual sessions. Group leaders, therefore, can gain a reasonably accurate understanding of the children in a fairly brief amount of time. When group leaders have this kind of insight, they can represent the children’s needs and concerns quite powerfully in collateral work with parents. This supporting work, which may be conducted individually or in psychoeducational groups, is essential to the effectiveness of the children’s group approach. It is interesting to note that conflicted parents also seem more at ease with group rather than individual treatment as a starting point for their children. These parents frequently express the belief that sharing experiences with peers will help their youngster to feel more normal and less isolated. This belief, accurate in its own right, also seems to reflect the parents’ hope that hearing about similar situations will help the child to see their own parents as less uniquely flawed because of their divorce and continuing conflict.

The Overall Goals Goals of this group model are to first, provide children with the tools—the language of feelings—to develop and process their emotional lives and second, to help them surface and challenge their internal scripts and the rules and expectations that support them. As the children’s internal scripts become disorganized, new thoughts, feelings, and ideas can be experienced in the context of group interaction. While we recognize that no single group can provide enough change to reverse long-term effects, we do know that carefully structured activities can help authentic and spontaneous new experiences to find their way under these children’s barriers. When this happens, children tend to be compelled by and attracted to the possibilities that exist beyond the scripted constriction of their worlds. They begin to know about other ways of being in

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the world. These internal shifts can propel children toward a different and healthier developmental trajectory. These overall goals are accomplished by addressing specific developmental threats that are the foundation of children’s scripts. A semistructured group intervention addresses these threats in a theoretically coherent, costeffective, and practical way. Although these strategies have been developed primarily for groups, many of the activities can also be adapted for use in individual work, most particularly for children who need a degree of structure in the early or more difficult stages of treatment.

10.1

Specific Developmental Threats and Corresponding Remedial Goal

Developmental Deficit

Remedial Therapeutic Goal

1. Hyper-vigilance, distrust, and tendency to rely upon self as only help resource when solving problems

Create common ground and safety, and pleasurable opportunities to use peers to resolve interpersonal problems

2. Constriction of feelings, difficulty modulating affect and tolerating ambivalence

Explore the language and complexity of feelings that help express and mediate between inner experience and observable behavior

3. Low egocentricity and self-efficacy, poor interpersonal boundaries

Defining and understanding the self, differentiating own from other’s feelings, ideas, and preferences, hence empowering self

4. Overly simplified, rigid, and distorted views of people and relationships

Defining and revising roles and relationships, exploring nuance and complexity, tolerating ambiguity

5. Harsh, rigid rules of conduct condemning self or other, violator versus victim stance, disillusioned, failure to hope and dream

Restoring a moral order that is compassionate and supports healthy idealism and hope for one’s future

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Activities that Address the Remedial or Therapeutic Goals of the Group The sequences of activities within the group model, though structured, are designed to evoke content relevant to the unique needs and concerns of the participants. That is, it is not assumed that specific, stressful life events such as divorce or witness to domestic violence are the central defining event or an immediate concern. Rather, in drawing, group discussion, and dramatization, the children’s own worries, fears, and preoccupations are surfaced. This balance of providing a structured therapeutic curriculum that generates content unique to each child and group represents a middle ground between a psycho-educational or cookbook approach and can limit the leader’s ability to respond to the unique needs and histories of each group member and an unstructured process group which would not necessarily address the developmental deficits in any useful way. The specific group exercises that address each of the five goals are summarized as follows: 1. Creating Common Ground and Safety. As a precondition of any effective therapeutic work, the group must be a safe place where the participants can engage in mutually enjoyable activities and learn from and about their peers. This is especially important for these children who are typically distrustful and who defend against unpredictability and chaos by tending to control and avoid rather than form real relationships. A series of exercises, mostly during the formation phase of the group but also at the opening of each session, is intended to create a supportive group milieu where their participation is warmly encouraged but never coerced.

a. Rules. Children create a brief list of rules for safe conduct within the group. It is posted in the group room during every session and added to when necessary. b. Family Drawing. Children are invited to draw their family and in so sharing this activity find common ground with others who are living in a wide range of separated, divorced, and reconstituted families, sometimes with relatives or foster parents as guardians. c. Blind Walk. Each blind walker (a group member who volunteers) is blindfolded and led through an obstacle


course that the other group members create especially for him or her. The activity builds unity and trust among the children as they help each other to find their own way in the face of unknown dangers. d. Relaxation. The leader guides the children through a progressive relaxation exercise. This helps the children to become aware of their feeling states and provides a way to ease their physical tensions. e. Group Art Project. Children work together without words to build a statue using a variety of common objects such as macaroni, straws, fabric scraps, etc. The leader emphasizes the value of peer support and cooperation. 2. Exploring the Language and Complexity of Feeling. Many

children in highly conflicted families have little experience with using language to express their own emotions. In part, this is because feelings themselves often seem frightening and uncontrollable. Labeling feelings out loud can make them seem terrifyingly personal and real. This creates a significant bind because words are an essential tool that children need in order to reflect on and communicate their own experience. Feeling words also represent the only intermediary step that can represent inner experience and delay action. This is a step that many of the children have neither practiced nor witnessed so that feelings seem all the more uncontrollable to them. For these reasons, it is important to create an environment in which the symbolic expression of feelings is not only permitted and encouraged but is especially valued. The following exercises have been found to be cumulatively useful when they are introduced sequentially throughout the first half of the group: a. Listing Feelings. The children brainstorm a list of feelings or feeling faces. The list is posted in the group room for reference in every session and is used as a tool or prompt to help communicate the individual child’s experience. b. Coloring Feelings. The children underline each basic feeling on the feeling chart with a primary color. They then combine primary colors for more complex emotions. This allows them to use colors as well as feeling words to communicate about feelings. The activity also introduces the group to the idea of blended feelings.

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c.

d.

e.

f.

This idea is crucial for those whose thoughts, feelings, and ideas about people and relationships tend to be oversimplified. Levels of Feeling. For older children, a chart with six empty thermometers (or feeling faces) is provided with the suggestion that it can be filled in with colors to show levels of feeling. Younger children make feeling faces of different sizes on lollypop sticks. These activities generate discussion about how they feel and how much they might feel in general or with respect to a specific issue or incident. The activity introduces the idea that feelings have different levels of intensity. Charades of Feeling. Each child acts out a feeling from his or her particular level on the feeling chart (or feeling faces). The group’s task is to guess the feeling as well as the level of that feeling. The leader uses questions and discussion to help the children to understand that feelings and actions are different and that feelings cannot be controlled or judged, but actions can. It is in the domain of action that children can begin to consider the question of what is right and wrong behavior in a relationship. Inside Me/Outside Me. Two sheets of paper, stapled together, with an identical outline of a human figure on each sheet are provided to each child who is encouraged to color in the top figure with colors of the feelings they show to others and the bottom figure with the feelings they keep inside. The activity helps children to understand that they do not have to control their feelings and ideas quite so much if they can control how they express them to other people. Masks. Children create masks to represent the self that they show to the world. In role-plays the children put the masks on when they need them for safety, and remove them when they feel emotionally safe to share their true feelings. In the very young children’s group, this exercise is done with a puppet play using Koko and Bunny.

Children’s responses to these exercises provide valuable insights into their interpersonal functioning and help guide subsequent interventions with them as well as with their parents. For example, an 8-year-old girl, after practicing with


feeling thermometers, charades, and drawings of inside and outside feelings, made a smiling mask that she used in every subsequent role-play involving her bitterly conflicted parents and stepparents. When the leader asked her to show the feelings beneath the mask, the idea seemed to be so frightening that she literally could not release the mask from her hand. Whereas this child needed a great deal of support for using her mask when she so clearly felt that she needed it, in other cases the leader might ask the child to consider safe persons, places, or times when they might remove the mask and communicate how they really feel. For example, 12-year-old Mary made a smiling mask, without eyes, for a role-play in which she was required to visit her father when she wanted to stay home with her mother. When prompted by the leader, Mary was able to show the furious face beneath the smiling mask to her “brother” in the role-play. Another little boy confided that he could talk only to his dog about how he felt when his parents quarreled. 3. Defining and Understanding the Self. Children in high-

conflict families tend to find safety in responding to the needs and expectations of other people. They often lose sight of their own feelings, ideas, motives, and preferences in the process and are vulnerable to losing a secure sense of themselves in relationships when they are primed to give in to others in this way. Young children have particular difficulty experiencing themselves as constant and cohesive and are prone to splitting their feelings and views of self and others into dichotomies of good/bad and feeling/non-feeling. Specific games and attributes are as follows: a. Who’s There? and One Thing I Will Always Remember About You. These are two games that teach young children that they are always kept in mind when out of sight of others that care about them. b. Koko and Bunny. Puppet plays are specifically designed for very young children, two group members. Two group members who reflect a “good me/bad me” split are Koko (a gorilla with big, wild and often uncontrollable feelings) and Bunny (a constricted white rabbit who tends to suffer somatic symptoms). These puppets act out a series of skits, some of which are taken from Sendak’s (1963) children’s book Where the Wild Things Are.

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The children usually begin by identifying with one of the puppets and learn over time with the help of Max (the integrator), also a puppet, to accept and modulate both extremes of feeling and being. c. A Fantasy Room. After the older children have learned some relaxation and self-soothing techniques (described above in 1d), they are invited to imagine and then draw a private room that no one else can enter without their permission. The room may be of any size, shape, color, or location, and may contain whatever the child wishes. The room is a way to represent the self. The walls represent a boundary between the self and others. In subsequent sessions, the leader has the option of using guided imagery to help the children enter this inner space in their minds. It is hoped that it becomes a safe place of retreat where children can identify private thoughts, feelings, or wishes. Some of the following exercises are used after the leader guides the children into their “inner room”: i) The Gift. The leader suggests that they find a gift there. Once the image is in place, the leader asks them to think about what the gift is, who sent it, and whether there is a message attached. Once the children have identified their gift, they can draw a picture of it in their room. This addition, similar to others that follow, becomes a concrete way of representing the children’s expanding sense of self. ii) The Private Wish. The leader suggests that they find a blackboard in their room. Once there, they are to imagine that they write down a private wish on the blackboard. The wish is then written on paper that is placed inside an envelope. The envelope is taped to the drawing of the imaginary room. iii) Keys to the Room. The children are introduced to the idea that they can use their “private rooms” as a retreat when they are not in the group any longer. In this activity, they practice going to the room in their minds and then leaving it again. iv) A Wish for Tomorrow. The children are asked to think about themselves as they might be


when they are adults and to make a wish for themselves at that age. The wish is written on a piece of paper shaped like an apple-seed and “planted” in a paper cup. The cup is tapeclosed with instructions not to open it until the year that each individual child becomes a grown-up adult. The issues of self-definition and interpersonal boundaries are addressed when the children engage in these activities in a private room to which they have exclusive access. Like much of the material that is produced in group, these inner rooms often reflect the children’s longing for protection and can be useful in diagnosis. Seven-year-old Penny, for example, drew a room that contained only a magic box. In the box were magic clothes that could transform her into an angel or a princess when she put them on. This chameleonlike defense is commonly observed in children like Penny who have been exposed to serious and chronic violence. Her drawing not only clarified the defense but also emphasized the inner emptiness that surrounded and maintained it. Eight-year-old Alan who had also been exposed to violent fights between his parents made a drawing that protected and empowered him in a different way. His room held floor-to-ceiling Nintendo equipment and had so many electronic locks on the door that they took up half the page. The children seem to generalize from these “private room” activities in rather concrete ways. Parents often report, for example, that their children show a new interest in making plans for privacy in their homes. Sometimes the youngsters have their own rooms, and these are rearranged; others work on creating private space wherever they can find it, or they ask for lock boxes and diaries after this work begins in group. Nine-year-old Katie’s mother reported that usually her daughter had a meltdown when her friend picked on her. So it was some surprise to her that Katie came home after being teased by her friend and said, “I just went into my private space to think about what to do.” Similar metaphors for boundary issues are clearly apparent, for instance, when an 8-year-old child from a highly conflicted family spontaneously began to make a sign that read, “Do not enter without knocking.” 4. Defining and Revising Roles and Relationships. Role-

playing is the central strategy in the group approach because

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it gives the children a constructive opportunity to act out their internal scripts. This activity usually begins after the children have some comfort with the routines of the group and have learned about the language of feelings. When children role-play their own and other people’s parts in a remembered situation, they bring perceptions, thoughts, and feelings (that have shaped their ideas about relationships) back into awareness, all of which can be available for revision. The leader prompts role-plays with a series of pictures (included in the manual) that suggest situations that are common in high-conflict families. The child who volunteers the role-play situation usually directs the role-play, telling other members the feelings, thoughts, and actions that go with their individual roles. After each role-play, the leader asks the director to develop a revised version that shows how he or she wishes the situation had gone. All of the roleplays are videotaped and are reviewed at the end of each session. Directing, role-playing, role-switching, revising, and video reviewing all provide opportunities for the children to surface and reconsider thoughts and feelings about the re-enacted event. In so doing, they gain a measure of distance and mastery. Below are some examples of role-plays. a. Role-play of child caught between parents. The roleplay for older children and the Puppet play of Bunny and Koko for younger ones both address children being pulled in opposite directions by their parents. These dramatizations evoke children’s thoughts and feelings about their role in their parents’ conflicts and how to cope. b. Role-Play of Child Going Between Houses. This role-play can capture young children’s thoughts and feelings about going back and forth between their parents. The transitions may refer to visits between different homes or within the zone of conflict in the same home. c. Masks and Role-Plays. Older children role-play situations in which they had to hide their real feelings. In the role-play they use the masks that they have created when they are hiding their feelings. At certain points in the role-play they remove the masks to tell the camera what they really feel underneath. The leader helps the children to consider when and with whom they feel safe enough to remove their masks.


The following material illustrates the work of a child who had enough capacity to allow a shift from awareness to mastery within the context of his role-play. Eleven-year-old Daniel had been the object of a bitter custody battle that had left both his parents furious and uncooperative in ways that often deprived their only son of their support and protection. Daniel tended to manage by intellectualizing most of his experience and avoiding any expression of his feelings. When the group was shown a stimulus picture of a child caught between two adults, Daniel chose to direct a scene involving a boy named Joshua: Joshua was at his father’s house, and the father was busy at his desk. Suddenly, Joshua remembered that he had left his homework at his mother’s house. In a panic, he asked his father to take him to get it. The father told Joshua that he was far too busy, and anyway, it was his mother’s job to get his homework to him. Joshua then called his mother who also said she was too busy and suggested that his father pick up the homework. Joshua ended up without his homework, feeling sad, angry, and worried about what would happen at school the next day. In the final scene, Joshua was at school. His teacher berated him about his homework as his classmates watched and giggled. Here, Daniel directed Joshua to act “embarrassed, and underneath you are furious!” This marked the end of the first role-play. At this point, the leader invited Daniel to recreate the role-play according to his own wishes. In response, Daniel chose to role-play the scene at school and took the part of the teacher himself. In this version, the teacher said to Joshua, in a very angry tone, “This is not your fault, your parents are to blame. I want a conference with them!” Here, Daniel selected other group members to play the role of Joshua’s parents. Daniel, still in the role of teacher, berated the parents furiously for putting their son in a terrible position. Because Daniel was able to acknowledge his anger and mobilize his indignation, the leader used the videotape review to validate his feelings and perceptions about what was right and fair in the situation and to consider strategies for mastery. In the discussion, the leader invited the children to talk about what would happen if Daniel let his parents know how furious he really was. In flat tones that belied his pain, Daniel said he was sure that both his parents would not care much one way or the other if they knew his real feelings. The leader wondered gently if Daniel had taught himself to

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avoid being hurt by their indifference by being indifferent as well. In this way, she identified both the rule (do not let your feelings matter to you) and the expectation (because it they will not matter to others) that supported Daniel’s script. Daniel, who tended to be verbose and argumentative, made no answer except for making unusually direct eye contact with the leader. When the session was over, the leader asked for Daniel’s permission to talk with his parents about the issues that had come up in the role-play. After some planning about what to say and how to say it, Daniel acquiesced. It is important to note that the leader must choose an intervention based upon an assessment of the needs and capacities of each individual group member and his or her family. In this case, the leader chose to follow up in the collateral work with the parents because Daniel seemed prepared to focus on coping and because she knew that at least one of his parents had enough capacity to tolerate and respond to the feedback. Nine-year-old Suzanne’s role-plays suggested a more serious and pervasive level of constriction. Her parents had been quietly unhappy before they separated when she was seven. From that time on, Suzanne’s father was uncharacteristically erratic in his behavior and on several occasions was physically abusive toward her mother. During individual sessions when Suzanne was asked about her parents’ separation and angry fights, she was quite passive and seemed unable to do anything but sift sand in an otherwise empty tray. After five sessions in group, Suzanne was able to volunteer a revealing role-play that she chose to direct and act out, playing herself. The role-play began when a “very worried” Suzanne telephoned her mother because her father did not pick her up from school at the expected time. Suzanne’s mother then arrived on the scene to take her home. A moment later, Suzanne’s father arrived as well. The parents argued and the father, infuriated by the mother’s interference, slapped the mother across the face. He then became upset and tried to apologize to the mother who was crying. The mother yelled at him to leave her alone. This ended the first role-play. Suzanne could not tolerate any discussion of her own feelings in this role-play but freely improvised a second roleplay in which she was Superwoman. In this role, Suzanne flew through the air, picked up her father, and deposited him in his own house. She then flew back to her mother, brushed her off, comforted her, and put her to bed. With this done, she


flew off to her own activities and found her way back to her father’s house when she was finished. Superwoman/Suzanne needed no one. She could take care of herself and her parents with a power so great that it defied both gravity and reality. This role-play illustrates the scripted rules and expectations that defended Suzanne against her feelings of dependence, helplessness, and fear. Specifically, it shows that she could and should protect her mother because she expected her mother to be too weak and vulnerable to protect herself. At the same time, Suzanne could and should supervise her father because he could not be expected to control himself. As is true for many girls in high-conflict families, Superwoman Suzanne unconsciously believed that her undemanding goodness was the wellspring of her power. As long as these distorted perceptions and beliefs held sway, Suzanne could not move toward a more realistic understanding of herself, other people, and relationships. When the group members discussed the video of Suzanne’s role-plays, her impossible predicament came sharply into focus. In order to provide support, the leader commented on Suzanne’s bravery and effort. The leader also admired the second role-play. Though she agreed that Suzanne would feel better if she could be powerful, like Superwoman, she mused out loud that Superwoman might sometimes become very tired and maybe even a little irritated. Suzanne acknowledged that Superwoman did at times feel this way. The group then focused on what could, in fairness, be expected of most children and whether they could, in fact, manage and protect themselves and their parents. For Suzanne, this represented a beginning shift toward greater awareness of her own needs and feelings. Without corresponding shifts in her family or extended opportunities for further working through, Suzanne’s burgeoning awareness could lead only to anxiety or depression. In this case, the leader worked with both parents to help them understand their daughter’s constriction and her underlying feelings of helplessness. She held follow-up sessions between Suzanne and her father in which they developed written agreements about how he would express his anger in the future. She worked with the mother to mobilize her capacity to protect and nurture her daughter more effectively. The leader also recommended a period of individual work for Suzanne who was a child with many miles yet to go.

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The younger children are fundamentally anxious about separation. It is useful to allow them to work through some of their fears about making transitions from one parent to the other through role-plays that the children conduct with the puppets against a backdrop of poster board scenery which shows Mom’s house, school, and Dad’s house. Group members may select Max, Bunny, or Koko to express their changing feelings and possibilities for mastery at different points in the role-play. Six-year-old Catherine, for example, described how her mother woke her up and told her that it was her day to go to her Dad’s house. She used Koko here, because she felt furious and stubborn about having to make this visit in mid-week. Catherine also used Koko at school, because she got into trouble all that day. However, she used Bunny at her Dad’s house because she was scared to tell her father that she had gotten into trouble at school. The leader then used Max to explore how a “bunmonkey” might make the transition. Interestingly, Catherine herself provided some affirmation about the possibilities for integration that might come from this kind of work. While the leader was working with Max, she spontaneously began to stuff Koko’s backpack with feeling faces. When the leader asked her about this, she said, “Well, this is how Koko could borrow a bit from Bunny, and he wouldn’t scare himself so much—you know, like Max, a bit of both.” With this possibility established, this child was able to revise the role-play, using Max to talk through feelings that Koko had acted out in ways that had felt both frightening and uncontrolled. 5. Restoring a Moral Order. Children who live with conflict tend to develop rigid and often distorted ideas about family roles, relationships, and morality. They are especially limited in their capacity to balance the tasks of managing their own feelings while considering those of others when faced with dilemmas. Their supply of conflict-resolution strategies at such times are likewise limited, especially morally defensible ones. Activities that address these problems include among others:

a. Jobs for people in your family. The younger school-age children begin this work by developing a list of “jobs” that are fair and appropriate for different family members. For children, “jobs” include role-defining behaviors such as “playing with friends,” “learning in school,” “earning an allowance”; while for parents, they may


include behaviors such as “protecting the children,” “earning money for the family,” and “figuring out their own fights.” This kind of concrete clarification and the leader’s affirmation can provide participants with alternative norms that are recognized within the community of their group. b. Role-plays about right and wrong (for older children) and Koko and Bunny have a fight (for younger children). These exercises are often developed in response to a picture of a child watching parents who are fighting or are themselves in a peer dispute. The leader uses the role-plays and the revised versions to help the children consider their thoughts and feelings about right and wrong ways for people to treat each other in relationships. During a sequence of such role-plays during the second half of the group series, children (or the puppets) role-play situations in which they or another person had very strong feelings and acted on them in a wrong or unhelpful way. The children create revised role-plays to practice alternative methods of conflict resolution. During this time the leader helps them identify moral dilemmas, distinguish between feelings and actions, and choose right rather than wrong ways to act on feelings. c. TV panel of experts. Toward the end of the group series, older children create a panel of experts about family conflict and divorce who give advice to other children who live with conflict. The panel is dramatized and videotaped as a television talk show. Questions sent in by other “fictitious” children include the dilemmas that group members have themselves, such as the following: “Dear Expert, My mom is very mad at my dad and she says lots of mean things about him. This really hurts my feelings to have her talk about him in that way. I’m scared that if I say anything, she’ll be mad at me. Is there anything I can do?” “Dear Expert, Sometimes I think that neither of my parents really wants me around. Got any ideas about that?” The activity helps the children to clarify and confirm their own ideas about relationships, especially the right and wrong ways to treat one another. Pre-adolescent children typically dispense advice with alacrity and moral authority on the very same dilemmas that in real life for them appear insoluble.

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d. Identity shields. The identity shield helps the children to consider the kind of person they want to become as they move toward adolescence. The children each receive a poster board with a shield shape that is divided into five sections: two for parents, two for important others, and one for the child’s self. They write or draw symbols of the qualities in each person that they admire and wish to keep as part of their shield. They also draw or write the qualities they reject on the outside of the appropriate section. Finally, the shield shape is cut from the poster board and the rejected qualities fall away. The shield represents an ideal, or moral compass, that can guide the children as they mature. Ten-year-old Jacob created a shield that included his mother, father, grandmother, grandfather, and himself. His mother’s section included the words, “The way she supports me in what I want to do.” Outside the section and excluded from the shield were the words “her smoking, fighting, and overprotectiveness.” His father’s section included “brains, mechanical ability, athletic ability” and excluded his “stubbornness and yelling.” The grandfather’s section included “warm, kind, fun, and neat to be around” and left out “slow to understand.” Jacob included “warm, kind, and smart” in his grandmother’s section and left “cooking and bad eating habits” on the periphery. Finally, from his own qualities, Jacob chose to include “imagination, drawing abilities, good grades, and smartness” and he left out “hiding feelings and shyness.” e. Family sculptures. The leader helps each group member form other group members into a human sculpture of his or her family that represents the child’s view of the way family members relate to each other most of the time. They are then invited to revise the sculpture and create an ideal version of their family, one the way they would like it to be. This exercise can evoke feelings of anger, sadness, and loss, deepening the work as well as the children’s vulnerability. Some can use the experience to integrate feelings about their current situations as well as to consider new ethics and ideals for the families that they might create as adults. Others barely tolerate the dawning of new thoughts and feelings, so the work must be carefully titrated and requires alert clinical judgment on the part of the leader at every step.


The level of vulnerability was very much apparent in 8-year-old Vic. This child had watched or heard his cocaineaddicted father beat his mother regularly and severely until the parents separated at his age of four. At the time that Vic was in the group, his father was preparing to remarry. Vic stated that he liked his stepmother-to-be but worried about the fights between her and his own mother who felt quite jealous of the new relationship. Interestingly, Vic had fueled the animosity between these two women by telling exaggerated tales about how badly his stepmother treated him and how rudely she spoke of his mother. He did this in an effort to reassure his mother (and himself) that she was good and that he was forever loyal. In his first family sculpture, Vic included his father standing behind his future stepmother who was wagging a finger warningly at his mother. Vic placed himself on his knees between the two women. With one arm he pushed against his stepmother, holding her back, while with the other he cradled his mother’s waist in a gesture of protection. The sculpture suggests a script in which Vic assumed the role of mother’s rescuer in a frightening and unpredictable world. This role is consistent with earlier interview material in which Vic recalled that he used to call out when his parents were fighting during the night, and this had made his father stop beating his mother. The leader began the discussion of this first sculpture by noting how much work Vic was doing and how strong he had to be. The leader also noted how much he seemed to want to love and care for his mother. Since these observations were consistent with Vic’s view of himself, he tolerated them. When the leader asked Vic how he felt about the way that his father treated his mother or if he felt tired from all the work that he was doing, he shrugged without interest. He could not acknowledge feeling anything. However, when the leader asked him if he might need a mask he readily agreed. He said it would have to be “a pretty fierce one.” Within this framework, all of the discussion took on a hypothetical distance. For example, “If you had your mask on in the sculpture, could you ever take it off?” “If you did take it off, what would be underneath?” Here, Vic was able to acknowledge that he was a little worried about his mother; however, he could not comment about his father’s bullying in any direct way. When the leader asked Vic if protecting his mother was a child’s job, he promptly said it was. When the group members referred to the “job” list and eventually disagreed, Vic became confused.

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The feelings that were evoked in this discussion were very hard for Vic to tolerate. He managed them by creating an idealized sculpture that included himself, his parents, and his brother. He positioned them with their arms around each other, fixed smiles on their faces. Vic’s soon-to-be stepmother was laid out dead at the family’s feet with a “Rest in Peace” sign on her chest. This second sculpture clarified the inflexible limits of Vic’s scripted ideas about relationships. He could not imagine feeling any real anger or disappointment toward his violent father or any realistic way to manage the ambivalence of liking the person who made his mother feel sad and angry. The sculpture represented the developmentally inappropriate and magical solution that his rigid internal script allowed. That is, he killed off his stepmother in the sculpture in much the same way that he tried to kill off his ambivalence and his anger in reality. Vic tolerated only a limited commentary on his second sculpture but enough, however, for everyone to agree that he had found a good solution to the problem of having mixed feelings about his stepmother and maybe others in his family as well. Paradoxically, this supportive agreement gave Vic the first inkling that he actually had a problem. The script that he had developed for defining his role and relationships was no longer airtight. Other solutions might be considered. As with many vulnerable children, Vic began work in the group that was to be completed in subsequent individual treatment. Here, the rigid rules and expectations that bound Vic’s internal and relational life were slowly released so that growth and maturation became possible once again.

Expanding the Use of the Group Treatment Model During the past decade, the group treatment model described here and available in manual form (Roseby et al., 2005) has been applied more broadly than to divorcing families. It has been adapted for use in multiethnic, multicultural neighborhoods, schools, and family agencies to help children who have experienced different kinds of neglectful and abusive environments as well as family conflict, loss, and violence. In this broader context, the group intervention aims to remedy a range of developmental deficits in children’s emotional and behavioral regulation, self-esteem, coping, interpersonal judgment,


and moral reasoning that derives from their exposure to a range of stressful and traumatic life events. An evaluation study of the model’s effectiveness in these settings indicated that children’s emotional and behavioral problems decreased and their social incompetence increased following the group intervention according to parents, teachers, and clinicians ratings on standardized measures (Johnston, 2003b). It is argued that this kind of group treatment is an ecologically appropriate model of intervention for large numbers of high-risk populations of children for several reasons. First, the model addresses the multiple traumas and history of cumulative stressful life events experienced by at-risk children, rather than assuming that the parental conflict or domestic violence is primarily responsible for the children’s difficulties. Second, the stigma of exposing family secrets and receiving mental health services is less likely to result in resistance to treatment by parents where the focus is on helping children cope with a diverse array of stressful life events. Third, group treatment is economically more feasible, 40% more cost effective, than individual treatment. There is a critical need to provide low-cost preventive mental health services for broad populations of at-risk children, and it appears that group interventions are the only way in which this can be accomplished.

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Special Issues in Difficult CustodyDisputing Families

IV


Domestic Violence: Differential Assessment and Parenting Plans

11

Family court practitioners and victim advocates have viewed conflicted custody matters through the lens of two different paradigms—the former perceive highly conflicted couples in a civil matter as needing dispute resolution; the latter see domestic abuse victims as needing court protection (Dalton, 1999). Many professionals in the field caught between these disparate views try to differentiate between high-conflict custody-disputing families and domestically violent families with the assumption that these are two distinct groups with different dynamics requiring entirely different interventions (Salem & Dunford, 2008). The problem is that the data generally belie any clear distinction because there is substantial co-occurrence of high-conflict and domestic violence within the same cases. This implies that they share the same dynamics to some extent. Inevitably, the problems become more

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Part IV: Special Issues in Difficult Custody-Disputing Families

complex when there are allegations of domestic violence in custody-litigating families, posing special challenges for all who work in the family justice system and requiring special consideration (Bow & Boxer, 2003). In our studies of custody-litigating families, domestic violence was alleged in the large majority of cases (two thirds to three fourths), and parental abuse of drugs and alcohol was alleged on average in about one half of cases. In a significant minority of cases, child maltreatment of some kind was alleged by parents (neglect in about two fifths, physical abuse in about one fourth, and sexual abuse in less than one fifth of families). Multiple, serious allegations of some kind of abuse were made in one half of the families with both parents accusing each other (Johnston, Girdner, & Sagatun-Edwards, 1999; Johnston, Lee, Walters, & Olesen, 2005a). Inevitably questions are raised: Do these allegations have a factual basis of spousal or child abuse involving violent, negligent, substance abusing, or criminal behavior? If so, is sufficient evidence available to sustain these findings in a court of law and, if not, what to do? Substantiation of claims can be difficult and poses dilemmas for professionals involved in making parenting plans. With regard to rates of family violence, published research is limited: Many studies are of small, nonrandomly drawn samples, use different methodologies, and employ varying definitions of what constitutes abuse and substantiation. To date, findings indicate that the majority of domestic violence and substance abuse allegations (one half to three fourths) and a large minority of child neglect and abuse allegations (one fourth to one half) in family law matters can be subsequently substantiated in some manner (Bala, Mitnick, Trocme & Houston, 2007; Bala & Schuman, 1999; Brown, 2003; Moloney et al., 2007; Shaffer & Bala, 2003; Thoennes & Tjaden, 1990). In general, domestic violence and abuse of alcohol are more likely to be confirmed for men, whereas concerns about child maltreatment are equally likely to be confirmed for both women and men. Specifically in our studies, we found that in one fourth of families where parents alleged some kind of abuse by each other, there was some validity to both parents’ claims (Johnston, Lee, Olesen, & Walters, 2005a). Although these are sobering estimates as to the extent of the problem, some researchers believe these are underestimates, citing the frequency with

Chapter 11: Domestic Violence

which genuine victims fail to report abuse for reasons of fear, shame, and lack of knowledge (Jaffe, Lemon, & Poisson, 2003; Shaffer & Bala, 2003).

Determining Credibility of Allegations Rates of substantiation drawn from research studies of highconflict separating families are of little use in determining the validity of abuse claims within any one situation where a host of practical dilemmas remain in making parenting plans for a particular family. What reliable evidence can be gleaned from the mutual finger-pointing and counter-blaming of a “he-said-she-said” variety? To reconcile these conflicting stories, a naive professional in the family court system may dismiss or minimize the claims of both spouses or erroneously conclude that the abuse is mutual when it is not. Alternatively, a women’s advocate may immediately harbor the suspicion that the male must be the perpetrator and lying about his allegations or denials. There are a number of ways to avoid premature or erroneous judgments. A good assessment will require systematic data to be gathered from multiple sources, which can yield information to support or refute the parties’ respective claims (Austin, 2000, 2001; Neilson, 2004). This includes direct verification of specific incidents (provided by police and medical reports, self admissions, and eye witness accounts) as well as corroboration of the circumstances of an allegation by neutral third parties (such as neighbors, teachers, or babysitters). Relatives may offer useful information, but their allegiance and potential bias must be considered. Conversely, the absence of denials of violence by others who are alleged to have observed the violence (older teenagers, adult children, and nonrelatives sharing the family home) may be a curious omission which suggests that it may be credible. The psychological status of the parties may be relevant although not determinative: For the alleged abuser, a diagnosis of a severe sociopathic or mental illness such as bi-polar disorder, major depression, panic disorder, schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or substance abuse problems lends credibility to the allegation; whereas for the alleged victim the presence of reality testing problems or psychotic, paranoid, or histrionic personality disorders casts doubt.

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Critical incidents need to be examined fully from multiple perspectives of family members taking into account their cultural context (Mills, 1998; Warrier, 2008). Some families, marginalized from mainstream customary beliefs and perhaps belonging to religious sects, espouse or condone practices that the majority culture considers abuse (excessive corporal punishment can be dismissed as justly deserved and appropriate discipline for an errant child; or a woman is made to feel it is her duty to submit to coercive marital sex). On the other hand, specific behaviors may be deemed especially insulting and offensive in some minority ethnic families in ways that may not be understood by most others (slapping with shoes in an Islamic culture is apparently deeply shaming). Some victims have multiple abusers (her spouse and mother-in-law in some Indian families; older stepsiblings and stepparents in remarried families), or the violence to which the children are exposed occurs between family members other than the parents (between the father and the mother’s new live-in partner). The timing of the allegation and stage of the legal proceedings are potentially relevant to assessing credibility. One of the unfortunate unintended effects of recently enacted laws and social policies that seek to protect victims of domestic violence has been to encourage their spurious use by non-abused parties and even perpetrators as a strategic ploy in custody disputes. It is possible that allegations made for the first time in the context of family litigation are self-serving in order to buttress a claim for custody or restriction of access to the other parent. However, it is more than likely there are other valid reasons for a delay in disclosure. Most family violence occurs behind closed doors and is not reported to any authorities or professionals at the time that it occurs. Victim-recipients of domestic violence who are socially isolated, emotionally abused, and subject to prolonged terror are prone to denial, self-blame, shame, and normalization of the abuse. It is common for them to acknowledge their abuse or that of their child only after they have some time and distance from the relationship. Alternatively, the abuse is first identified by a helping professional; for example, a woman may not recognize that what she experienced in the marriage meets the legal criteria for sexual assault until she discloses details to her counselor after separation.


Unfounded Allegations of Abuse. How should we interpret

the sizable proportion of allegations that cannot be substantiated? It is a serious mistake to assume that a failure to substantiate an abuse allegation automatically exonerates the alleged abuser. Rather, for the many reasons discussed above, a proportion of these allegations may be valid disclosures that simply lack sufficient data to substantiate them (Moloney et al., 2007). It is likewise a serious injustice to assume that unfounded allegations are dishonest ones. Both clinical observation and empirical studies indicate that only a very small number of unfounded child abuse allegations are due to deliberate or malicious fabrication (Bala et al., 2007; Brown, 2003). There are several diverse sources of misunderstandings and suspicions of abuse in highly conflicted families. Very often the accusing parent has an honestly held (albeit erroneous) belief about the abuse. Suspicions of child abuse, especially for young children during visitation, may arise from distressed behavior of the child of ambiguous origin or relatively benign incidents that are misreported to parents who are no longer communicating with each other. Where parents harbor fear, distrust, and negative convictions about each other, the potential for such misunderstanding is greatly increased. Such distortions are too often reaffirmed by family, friends, and even professionals, especially within an adversarial legal culture focused on finding fault. As shown in chapter 1, the psychological vulnerabilities of the parents may also play a role in unfounded allegations. Individuals (made vulnerable by their own histories of deprivation and trauma) are inordinately humiliated by the divorce and may defend themselves by vigorously deflecting the blame onto the former partner, becoming convinced that the other parent is “irrelevant,” “irresponsible,” or even “dangerous.” In cases of most severe vulnerability, albeit a small minority of cases, the narcissistic rage of the rejected partner can promote paranoia and result in serious violence, abduction, suicide, and even murder of children and victim parents. These kinds of tragedies remind us that highly conflicted divorcing families and domestic violence cases are not discrete populations but rather share common dynamics that can precipitate further violence, sometimes with lethal consequences. It follows that parents with unfounded allegations should not be simply dismissed but treated with the

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same differential concern in making parenting plans, lest they should escalate to violence and subject their children to ongoing emotional abuse.

Differentiating Among Patterns of Violence What access should violent parents have, if any, with their children? Where the violence is severe, ongoing, and clearly committed by one party, the answer to this question is fairly evident albeit often difficult to implement. But what if abuse appears to be jointly inflicted, less serious in nature, or a relatively isolated event? Domestic violence varies greatly as to its form and origins. In the quest to distinguish among patterns and causes of violence, it is not our intention to diminish the seriousness of all violence nor to excuse or minimize perpetrators’ responsibility for their behavior. Rather, we begin with the premise that all family violence is a threat to the psychological and physical well-being of victim-recipients and should be morally condemned, viewed as a violation of civil liberties, codified in law as criminal acts, and justified only for immediate self-protection. However, when it comes to protecting and reconstituting family relationships after separation and divorce, not all violence is the same and understanding those differences should lead to better court decisions and professional interventions. Before reviewing the different forms domestic violence appears to take, there are commonalities to be acknowledged. First is a very significant role of gender inequality and power imbalance and related social injustice that endorses the use of male violence and coercive control, allowing the seriousness of its effects to be widely ignored and minimized in our society. Despite broad efforts to enlighten and educate, traditional gender roles that privilege male authority—and its abuse of women and children—remain embedded within many families, cultures, and religious ideologies. Moreover, in many relationships the male has much greater physical strength and a more physically aggressive nature. That said, it is also important to note that women are not always the victim-recipients and in some, relationships may be the primary instigator of the abuse. Coercive control and domestic abuse may also be based upon other hierarchies of inequality within the family


and society—social class, education, wealth, race-ethnicity, immigration status, disability, or age—any of which may also be additional or mitigating sources of power imbalance. In early research with selected samples of victims, the male batterer and the “battered spouse syndrome” were identified and explained solely by the dynamics of male abusive use of power and control (Walker, 1984; Yllo & Bograd, 1988). Largely due to political activism by victim’s advocates, this archetype rapidly emerged as the dominant paradigm but not without challenge from other researchers in family violence who reported incidence rates of domestic violence in the larger community, which disputed gender inequality (Archer, 2000; Dutton, 2005; Straus, 1999; Straus & Gelles, 1988). During the past decade, a growing body of social science research, drawing samples from varying sources, has identified a wide range of violent and abusive behaviour in families, documenting its severity, frequency, and injurious outcomes (Graham-Kevan & Archer, 2003; Hanks, 1992; Holzwoth-Monroe, 2005; Holzworth-Monroe & Stuart, 1994; Johnson, 1995, 2006; Johnston & Campbell, 1993b). Consequently, a number of typologies have been proposed to explain these variations. Current research indicates that two types of intimate partner violence can be most clearly distinguished: coercive-controlling violence and situational couple violence. Other types, namely violent resistance and separation-instigated violence have been noted but have less empirical support (Kelly & Johnson, 2008; Ver Steegh, 2005; Ver Steegh & Dalton, 2008). Coercive-Controlling Violence. This, also referred to as battering or intimate terrorism, is a pattern of coercion, control, and domination asserted by a primary perpetrator who induces varying degrees of fear, intimidation, and submission in the partner or loved ones by threats to hurt or actual harm along with other tactics. These include verbal and emotional abuse, attacks on self-esteem, insistence on sole authority in multiple domains (social, financial, childrearing), possessiveness and extreme jealousy, social isolation, and restriction of outside contacts. (Dobash, Dobash, Wilson, & Daly, 1992; Ferraro, 2006; Graham-Kevan & Archer, 2003; Jacobsen & Gottman, 1998; Kirkwood, 1993; Nicolaidis et al, 2003; Pence & Das Dasgupta, 2006;). Although acts of

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physical violence and sexual coercion are the more obvious indicators of coercive-controlling violence, such behaviors need not be frequent or severe in order to maintain an abusive relationship; the fear generated in the victim is sufficient. The pattern of abusive behavior tends to escalate over time, especially in response to threat of loss of control of or abandonment by the partner. This may explain why the abuser is more likely to use custody litigation to harass and punish and becomes particularly dangerous during the aftermath of the separation, at which time he may stalk, harass, or take the victim hostage (Hotton, 2001; Johnson & Hotton, 2003; Palarea, Zona, Lane, & Langhinnrichsen-Rohling, 1999; Wilson & Daly, 1993). Mr. A, described in chapter 1, section on Divorce as Humiliation, clearly belongs to this type. Males are far more likely to be the primary perpetrators of this type of violence, which has been identified most frequently in studies of shelter and criminal court samples. Though less well researched, it has been observed that women are not always the victim-recipients, and in some relationships (such as lesbian couples) they may be primary perpetrators of this kind of abuse, albeit with some differences and generally less severe consequences (Marrujo & Kreger, 1996; Migliaccio, 2002; Renzetti, 1992). Compared to their female counterparts, male batterers in this category are more physically controlling and sexually abusive, cause more serious injuries, induce more fear, and are more likely to control financial issues. Males are also more likely reported to authorities (Jafee et al., 2003; Johnson, 2006, 2008; Johnson & Leone, 2005; Johnston & Campbell, 1993a; Kwong, Bartholomew, & Dutton, 1999; Leone, Johnson, Cohan, & Lloyd, 2004; Neilson, 2004; Stark, 2007; Statistics Canada, 2001). In our studies of custody-disputing families, women who are primary aggressors appear to harbor an exaggerated sense of entitlement and wield greater influence over their children as weapons of abusive control (Johnston & Campbell, 1993b). Overall, much female physical violence is relatively minor but can range in severity and become potentially lethal when a weapon (such as a gun or motor vehicle) is used. In general, women are more likely to be severely hurt or killed whether or not they initiate violence or fight back and in this sense they are victims (Bograd, 1988; Miller, 2005; Pence & Das Dasgupta, 2006; Walker, 1984).


Conflict-Instigated Violence. This, also called common couple

violence, is characterized by hostile verbal exchanges over common disagreements that escalate to intermittent physically violent struggles initiated jointly or by one or the other party over time (Babcock, Costa, Green, & Eckhardt, 2004; Ellis & Stuckless, 2006; Ellis, Stuckless, & Wight, 2006; Johnson & Leone, 2005). These couples have limited problem-solving skills and respond to conflict with angry outbursts, loud arguing, insults, and demands that if not met escalate to snatching, breaking things, pushing, shoving, and hitting, tactics that are often seen as normal and justified within their family cultures. Compared to abusive relationships (such as coercive-controlling violence), power is relatively balanced and each refuses to submit to the other’s rules or demands: neither is particularly fearful of the other, and the men generally do not have misogynistic attitudes. After separation, the violence is not likely to escalate although the couple continue to have difficulty cooperating so that disputes regarding the children’s access and care as well as spousal and child support can precipitate renewed conflict and sometimes violent incidents, especially when exchanging the child. Legal disputes over these issues are also common, with both parties making aggressive use of the family court system. In general, the violence is relatively minor and does not escalate over time but occasionally can escalate to dangerous levels with a risk of injury, more likely for the woman (Capaldi & Owen, 2001; Johnson, 2005a). Mr. and Mrs. C described in chapter 1, section on Divorce as humiliation, can be classified as this type. Violent Resistance. This is essentially reactive and defen-

sive responses of victim-recipients to a primary perpetrator of abuse. In an attempt to protect self or loved ones from impending or ongoing abuse, some individuals try to preempt their partner’s attack or respond violently in selfdefense. They tend to do so with a degree of violence that is proportional to the perceived threat. To date, violent resistance has not been clearly distinguished from other violence types in research studies (Bachman & Carmody, 1994). The concept has been used to explain the findings that females enact violence at relatively high rates in community samples and also has been asserted in legal defense of women who

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have killed their abusive partners (Browne, 1987; Browne et al., 1999; Yllo & Bograd, 1988). Violent resistance may also be employed by men who are more commonly socialized with the adage “a gentleman never hits a woman” when they use defensive avoidance or passive aggressive tactics to fend off a provocative attack by their female partners. Separation-Instigated Violence. This is identified by one or two violent episodes only around the time of the separation or custody dispute. Most importantly, there is no history of violence or coercive control in the relationship, nor is it likely to reoccur. Rather, the violence that can be initiated by either the male or female partner is an acute reaction to a traumatic separation or other stressful event that has betrayed trust and shattered the individual’s previous sense of a shared reality (sudden leaving without warning, discovery of a lover, or financial fraud). It is generally perpetrated by the left-behind partner in response to intense feelings of helplessness, bewilderment, fear, loss, and shame. At such times, both partners tend to revise prior relatively benign views of each other and reconstruct a particularly polarized and negative image of their ex-partner, concluding that he or she is “unfaithful, irresponsible, conniving, crazy, bad, or evil.” These traumatic incidences within an otherwise nonviolent family can cast a dark shadow of distrust for a period long after the separation, even though these distressed individuals may have regained their balance and relative good functioning (Johnston & Campbell, 1993a; Kelly, 1982; Wallerstein & Kelly, 1980). Mr. D’s uncharacteristic violence, described in chapter 1, section on Ambivalent and Traumatic Separations, belongs in this category.

Assessing Dimensions of Violence Relevant to Parenting Plans (The P5 Screening) As illustrated above, these different patterns of violence are not always clearly identified. Further, they are not necessarily discrete types because individual families often present as mixed types with combinations of features; within types they can range from relatively benign to highly volatile and


dangerous situations. Most important, there are no established screening or assessment tools that can reliably discriminate between types. Although, as shown in chapter 2, parenting capacities of perpetrators and victims are likely to vary greatly depending upon the nature of the violence, other than clinical descriptive criteria, instruments to reliably differentiate as to how different types of violence relate to parenting have yet to be developed. The usage of typologies of violence in the absence of reliable screening and assessment measures is highly problematic. First and foremost is the danger of misdiagnosis and placing victims in serious jeopardy. For example, it is often difficult to distinguish separation-instigated violence where there is no history of power imbalance from an abusive relationship where the victim-recipient has long submitted to her partner’s coercive-controlling expectations. In this case, her decision to leave the marriage may have precipitated his first or major physical assault. On the other hand, misdiagnosis may violate a parent’s civil liberties by imposing unnecessary restrictions on child access. For example, separation-instigated violence or situational couple violence can be mistakenly labeled an abusive or battering relationship. Violent resistance is easily dismissed as mutual combat (especially for women) or misperceived as a form of coercive control (particularly for men). Furthermore, employing typologies of violence in the absence of reliable and valid assessment instruments could lead to inordinate litigation, as attorneys and their expert witnesses debate back and forth as to the classification of the violence type in any one case. What can be done under these constraints to guide parenting plans after separation and divorce? Five distinguishing features of domestic violence cases need to be considered when making parenting plans (called a P5 screening): the potency, pattern, and primary perpetrator of the violence; parenting problems of the adults; and the preferences and perspective of the child. (See indicators for each in Table 11.1.) Differentiating among different types of violence is an iterative and cumulative process involving these five factors. Potency or seriousness of the violence is the foremost dimension that needs to be assessed and monitored so that safety measures can be put in place. The pattern of violence is a crucial predictor of the potential for future violence

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and prognosis for treatment. It also suggests what kinds of interventions are needed (substance-abuse counseling, psychotropic medication, batterers treatment). Identifying who, if either, might be the primary perpetrator suggests which parent is more likely to provide a nonviolent home. Parenting problems indicate the deficits or limits to what each parent is likely to provide in the way of a nurturing parent–child relationship. Last but not least, the preferences and perspective of the child should be considered—the damage wrought by violence to the child’s development and attachments, along with his or her capacity to recover from the trauma, manage, and benefit from the parent–child access arrangement. In general a P5 screening provides the legal or mental health professional with a working hypothesis as to the type of violence involved in any case. Furthermore, multiple indicators, especially those that are more potent, signal the more difficult and high-risk cases where full measures of protection are needed for the victim and child, and highly restricted access orders are warranted. For example, multiple indicators of potency and a clear pattern of using coercive-controlling tactics by a primary perpetrator indicate a high-risk, abusive, controlling relationship. Several indicators of moderate severity or potency and use of violent tactics to resolve conflict with neither party as the primary perpetrator suggest moderate-risk conflict instigated violence. Levels of potency commensurate with the threat posed by a violent partner suggest a violent resistor. Separation-instigated violence is hypothesized when there are few indicators of potency in an isolated incident of violence that appears to be triggered by an extraordinary stressor during the divorce. The latter type of cases may require few, if any, restrictions on custody and access arrangements in the longer term. Screening criteria for each of the five P factors is considered in turn. In general, the presence of multiple indicators signals a higher level of threat, albeit some are more important predictors than others. What say should children have in setting up access arrangements, how do children communicate their wishes and fears, and what do they need? Like all victims of violence, children need to be appropriately empowered by having their perspective taken into consideration (Cunningham & Baker, 2007). Some of these factors are not straightforward or

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11.1

Potency of Violence

A. Potency is the severity, dangerousness, and current risk of serious injury or lethality potential to erupt into explosive violence or escalate to dangerous levels:

Overt Indicators 1. Has inflicted serious abuse and caused serious injury in past 2. Has made threats to do serious harm (for example, homicide or suicide) 3. Has access to lethal weapons (for example, guns, knives)

Covert Indicators 1. Has history of mental illness and no self-insight (e.g., thought disorders, paranoia, severe personality disorder) 2. Currently obsessed with and possessive about partner (e.g., stalking / hostage taking, repeated phone calls and attempts to contact partner)

Triggers and escalators 1. Drug and alcohol use 2. High depression or rage 3. Recent stressor (e.g., separation, loss of job, financial ruin, change of custody)

11.2

Pattern of Violence

B. Pattern refers to ongoing violence and coercive control and to behavioural Psycho-biological and cognitive indicators of a person’s proclivity for violence:

Overt Indicators 1. History of repeated violence and threats to self or loved ones (e.g., frequent abuse, multiple calls to police by victim) 2. History of using coercive sex and date or marital rape 3. Disregard and contempt for authority (e.g., violation of protective orders, criminal arrest record) 4. History of being jealous and possessive of partner (following, spying, sexual jealousy)

Continued

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11.2

Pattern of Violence (Cont’d) Covert indicators

1. Partner fearful and intimidated 2. Attacks self-esteem of partner with ongoing verbal and emotional abuse 3. Insists on sole control and authority in multiple domains (social activities, how money is spent, work and leisure activities, child rearing, dress and deportment) 4. Isolates and restricts victim’s outside contacts 5. Uses legal disputes to harass and punish partner after separation

Possible Causes and Contributors to a Pattern of Violence 1. Strong sense of male entitlement (has privileged expectation as a male; disrespects women; cultural and religious beliefs that sanction male dominance) 2. Misogyny or misandry 3. Ongoing or intermittent substance abuse (drugs or alcohol) 4. Personality disorders (sociopathic, narcissistic) 5. Mental illness (especially paranoid psychosis, and severe bi-polar disorders)

11.3

Primary Perpetrator of Violence

Examine specific critical incidents to see whether one party is the primary aggressor and the other resisting in cases where violence is alleged to be mutual or jointly instigated:

Verbal Indicators 1. Victim’s story is usually clear, specific and plausible; aggressor’s account is more likely to deny, minimize, obfuscate or justify violence 2. Victim’s motive or intent is to please, placate, self-protect, and stop the violence; perpetrator’s motive or purpose is to control, punish 3. Victim more aware of hurt inflicted, expresses shame and guilt for his or her role

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Behavioral Indicators 1. “Defensive” wounds are sustained by victim; “aggressive” wounds” are inflicted by perpetrator 2. Damage and injury are more likely to be inflicted by one who has size, physical strength, and skill to do so 3. Violent responses by a victim-recipient are proportional to the level of perceived threat; perpetrators respond with excessive force and violence 4. Evidence of being the primary perpetrator in the past (e.g., existence of restraining orders against one party)

11.4

Parenting Problems

Assess capacity of parent to provide the child consistency, stability, warmth, appropriate authority, and reflective responsiveness to the child’s individual needs separate from their own:

Indicators of Direct Abuse 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Uses coercive discipline tactics, may escalate to physical abuse of child Alternately overly permissive and rigidly authoritarian Reverses roles with child erratically Violates child’s emotional boundaries or has perpetrated sexual abuse Emotionally abuses child (e.g., plays mind games, put downs, pit sibs against one another, isolates child socially) 6. Morally corrupts child by encouraging immoral and criminal behavior 7. Abducts child or threatens to do so

Use of Child as a Weapon with Partner 1. 2. 3. 4.

Demands/insists that child demonstrate affection and loyalty to self Uses child to communicate threats or negative messages to the other parent Uses child’s access to coerce or harass the other parent Rewards child for rejecting or punishing the other parent

Continued

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11.4

Parenting Problems (Cont’d) Capacity to Reflect Child’s Experience

1. Denies child’s expression of ideas, feelings in favor of own 2. Convinced that all child’s feelings or needs are identical to own or fully manipulated by the other parent 3. Unable to stay focused on child (diverts to own issues or to blaming ex-partner) 4. Provides few or highly idealized descriptors of child’s personality, preferred activities, achievements 5. Angry outbursts, transitory breakdowns into rage during discussion about child’s situation 6. Impulsive responses; makes odd, bizarre, or irrational remarks about child

Capacity to Assume Responsibility for Violence and Repair Damage 1. Minimizes or denies that exposure to own violence negatively affects child 2. Minimizes negative effects of own controlling, abusive child-rearing practices 3. Intolerant/impatient at child’s developmentally appropriate behavior or “special needs” (including symptoms of trauma) 4. Impervious/intolerant about what other parent needs in order to provide emotional security for child (regarding safety, boundaries, time to recover and rebuild trust)

Parenting Deficits Associated with Victimization by Domestic Violence 1. Anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms; substance abuse (used to mute pain) 2. Preoccupation with demands of abuser, physical and emotional exhaustion, unavailability 3. Inability to protect child from abusive partner for fear; or brainwashed by abusive parent to accept child’s abusive treatment 4. Lack of any confidence in own parenting, difficulty managing children (especially boys) 5. Propensity to act irrationally, or with apparent poor judgment

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11.5

Preferences and Perspective of the Child(ren)

1. Are their spoken preferences about access mature, consistent, and reasonable? 2. Are they so fearful and/or angry toward the parent that they are emotionally and physically unsafe or unable to be managed during visits? 3. Do they demonstrate significant and sustained emotional and behavioral distress in response to the access plan?

Potential Benefits of Access 1. 2. 3. 4.

Feeling valued and loved by both parents Sense of his/her origins and identity if no prior relationship with one parent Maintain a significant prior attachment with an absent parent Promote realistic views of an absent parent (preventing idealization or devaluation) 5. Enhance coping skills in dealing with difficult situations and relationships 6. Work through and resolve trauma

Potential Risks of Access 1. Untenable loyalty conflicts, continuing pressure of custody litigation 2. Unreliable contact with a parent who visits only periodically 3. Possibility of being re-traumatized by abusive neglectful parent, re-exposure to violence 4. Feelings of helplessness when voiced wishes for limited or no contact are ignored

easy to assess. The spoken preferences of children who have been abused or witnessed violence can take many forms and should be interpreted with caution, optimally with the help of a child specialist. Commonly youngsters from abusive homes want to have regular contact. They are likely to sorely grieve the loss of a violent parent who does not visit them, imagining that they have been abandoned, blaming themselves for the parent’s absence, and worrying greatly about that parent’s welfare. In the process, some of them idealize the absent parent. They need safe access arrangements to mute this loss and correct distorted views. It is also common for youngsters to send contradictory messages about wanting

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to have contact but being afraid of the parent, for example, by saying they want to spend more time with the parent who has been abusive or violent but having nightmares when they do visit. Other children resist or refuse visitation out of fear or intense anger. They may only feel safe enough to verbally resist or refuse visitation—even minimal contact within the safe confines of supervision—after parents’ separation. In general, it is a sign of strength and maturity when children distance themselves from an abusive or violent parent, and their expressed wishes need to be carefully considered. Sadly, some children who have witnessed or sustained abuse have become alienated by a negative campaign of propaganda by the violent parent, or, out of fear, become aligned with the more powerful perpetrator and reject an innocent victim parent. In these cases their preferences can be accorded little weight. Children’s level of fear, intimidation, and anger toward a violent parent does not necessarily correspond to the actual potency or level of threat. Some are inordinately frightened, even terrified, by uncharacteristic displays of anger or minor pushing and shoving, perceiving it to be very dangerous. Other children who have been exposed to repeated or highly dangerous incidents may appear blandly unaffected. In this case their unresponsiveness is misleading: Their constriction often belies the extensive damage to their psyches. Young children are normally strongly influenced by the caretaking parent’s level of expressed fear. Older children are more often angry and blaming, and their expressed loyalties and fears are influenced by the parent with whom they align or identify. Others in reaction to violence become behaviorally distressed (as evidenced by high anxiety, bedwetting, eating and sleeping difficulties, aggressive or depressive symptoms). In general, children of highly conflicted families and domestic violence have been rendered helpless if not traumatized. They are not likely to recover easily without help after their parents separate. As shown in chapter 2, their sense of trust, security, autonomy, and personhood are made vulnerable; their internal models of family relationships distorted. Parenting plans made on their behalf need to respect their feelings and the pace they can tolerate in repairing a damaged relationship and restoring normal, unstructured access to a parent who has been violent or abusive. These will depend


upon what trauma has been sustained and what are the potential benefits and risks of promoting access for each child. Usually, in setting up the conditions under which access occurs, one can be responsive to many of the child’s concerns (for example, who should attend, what activities to expect, where the visits take place, and how long they will last). Furthermore, children need to be prepared for resuming unrestricted access, armed with coping skills and safety plans, together with an explanation of why it has become permissible to see their visiting parent on their own again. It may be important for parents who have been violent to acknowledge their behavior directly to their child and to take steps to reassure him or her about their commitment to nonviolence and the measures they have taken to ensure future safety. However, much caution is needed to avoid subtle emotional manipulation and ensure a genuine commitment to change by an abuser. Consequently, these kinds of conversations may need to take place with the help of a counselor who is experienced with parent–child reunification (Scott & Crooks, 2004).

Dilemmas in Making Parenting Arrangements and Guidelines for Resolving Conflicting Priorities Domestic violence is a form of child abuse, and in many states in the United States perpetrators of domestic violence are assumed to be unfit to have custody of their children unless they can prove otherwise. Current public policies also favor children having “continued and frequent access with both of their parents,” and most children do love and want to see both parents. Hence, there is the dilemma of deciding how much contact the children should have with their violent parent and whether it should be monitored or supervised, and if so for how long. Constraints on a parent–child relationship such as supervised visits and related injunctions are highly intrusive interventions in the family: They not only constitute an important threat to parents’ civil liberties but also establish an artificial and potentially difficult environment for both parent and child to relate freely and fully. In general, children should be placed in the primary custody of the nonviolent parent, but what if that parent makes poor choices (such as lives with another abusive partner) or is poorly functioning (possibly because of their

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victimization)? What if the older children want to live with the parent who has perpetrated violence and are alienated from the parent who is the victim-recipient? Alternatively, what if a child is inordinately fearful, even phobic, about having any contact with one of their parents and refuses even supervised visits? How should these conflicting priorities be resolved “in the best interests of children” in ways that support and empower victim-recipients, hold abusive persons accountable, take advantage of what each parent can provide for the child, honor the legitimate wishes and needs of children, and remain minimally intrusive into the lives of families? How can all of this be achieved and at the same time ensure that helping professionals provide equitable assistance and judges make just decisions? What is needed is a risk–benefit analysis of different kinds of parenting plans that are in the best interests of the particular child and family. What are some guiding principles for undertaking this kind of analysis? It is submitted that the goals of any plan should be prioritized in the following order: 1. Protect children directly from violent, abusive, and neglectful environments. 2. Provide for the safety, support, and well-being of parents who are victim- recipients of abuse (with the assumption that they will then be better able to protect their child). 3. Respect and empower nonviolent parents to make their own decisions and direct their own lives (thereby recognizing the state’s limitations in the role of loco parentis). 4. Hold perpetrators accountable for their past and future actions (in the context of family proceedings, have them acknowledge the problem and take measures to correct abusive behavior). 5. Allow and promote the least restrictive plan for parent– child access that benefits the child, along with parents’ reciprocal rights. Premised on the notion that the goal of protecting children must never be compromised, the strategy is to aim for achieving all five goals and to resolve conflicts by abandoning those with the lower priorities. This approach provides a


pathway to a just and consistent resolution of many common dilemmas, as illustrated in the following scenarios. If a father denies his substantiated violence, or has not complied with his court-ordered treatment, access to his children will need to be restricted or suspended. Moreover, the mother should be allowed to relocate freely (drop or modify Priorities 4 and 5). However, if the mother is being abused by her new live-in partner after leaving an abusive marriage, her custody can be made contingent on her new partner’s removal from the home and she can be provided supportive counseling to ensure this happens (drop or modify Priorities 3, 4, and 5). On the other hand, if a custodial mother is the violent spouse, the father should be encouraged to seek primary custody and provided with support in his parenting role to do so. In this case, the mother needs parenting and anger-management counseling. In general, if victim parents are unwilling or unable to protect the children, they need to be provided with supportive counseling and if that fails or is refused, children may need to be removed from both parents and placed elsewhere (drop or modify Priorities 2,3,4, and 5). In the special case of mutual violence, where both parents are primary perpetrators, and dual restraining orders are in place, both need parenting education and violence remediation before any permanent custody decision is made. A highly structured access plan is needed, with monitored exchanges by a third party at a neutral site (drop or modify Priorities 3, 4 and 5). What if a child is refusing supervised contact with a parent who has been abusive, and all reasonable attempts to alleviate his distress are ineffective, even though that parent may have been successfully rehabilitated? In this case, the guidelines imply that the visiting parent withdraw his or her request for access to her child at this time, but to remain available with the likelihood that the child can benefit from the contact in the future (drop or modify Priority 5). If, on the other hand, a traumatized parent is distressed by the child’s having any access to a violent parent who may have shown good evidence of rehabilitation, consider appointing a parenting coordinator or counselor to give the victim more support, and provide more security—by placing some restrictions on the conditions of access (for example, no contact orders for parents, a very structured parenting plan, monitored exchanges,

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and credible feedback as to the father’s safe parenting of the child (drop or modify Priorities 3,4 and 5).

Blueprints for a Range of Parenting Options Differential assessment of the domestic violence in families provides a better understanding of the wide range of domestic violence situations and allows one to design custody and access arrangements that better fit the needs of individual families. Broadly, there is a range of options for children in highly conflicted and violent postdivorce families: ■ Primary parenting with suspended or supervised access; ■ Parallel parenting with monitored or neutral exchange of the child; ■ Shared parenting with ongoing joint child rearing (co-parenting).

Primary Parenting Also known as sole legal and sole physical custody, primary parenting designates the nonviolent parent as the one parent who is clearly in charge of all major decisions as well as dayto-day care of the children. The violent parent is provided limited access to important information about the children (such as school reports), and his or her access to the children is restricted by a court order for either supervised or suspended visitation with explicit details as to time, dates, place of exchange, and supervisor. Other provisions in a primary parenting plan may include safety measures for victim-recipient parent and children and mandatory batterer’s groups for the abuser together with other treatment orders as needed (such as substance-abuse counseling). Victim-recipients also may be encouraged to seek counseling, especially for their parenting problems, but they are generally not mandated. Rather, their right to self-determination is respected. Supervised Access. The purpose of supervised access is to

provide a protected setting for parent–child contact with a


neutral third person monitoring the contact or exchange of the child between parents. Supervised access can range in levels of scrutiny, security, and type of supervisor as the need arises. Highly potent situations may require an armed guard in a secure location, whereas low potency ones may use a family member, neighbor, or volunteer. Parents who have abused their children may have access to them only under vigilant supervision of a professional (a social worker who remains in their immediate presence); in more benign situations a volunteer may accompany the child on a family group outing, or a trusted family member can be present during visits within the home. Where there is a clear pattern of coercive controlling violence, supervision needs to be formalized through a supervised access center or use of a designated professional such as a childcare worker. Where the child has been traumatized by an abusive parent or been a witness to violence, a therapist may be employed to undertake therapeutic supervision in order to effect reconciliation between parent and child. Visitation or contact centers, generally staffed by trained volunteers under the direction of a professional coordinator, have grown rapidly across the United States and internationally. Although to date the outcomes of supervised access for children and parents have not been systematically evaluated, experienced professionals have accumulated a wealth of knowledge about best practices (Association of Family & Conciliation Courts [AFCC], 1998; Birnbaum & Alaggia, 2005; Lee, Shaughnessy, & Bankes, 1995; Sheeran & Hampton, 1999; Straus & Alda, 1994). Necessary Conditions for Primary Parenting with Supervised Visitation. This arrangement is appropriate where the vio-

lence on the P5 screening is rated as highly potent or acutely dangerous and where there is any of the following: a clear pattern of coercive controlling violence, a history of child abuse or serious parenting problems, active substance abuse or acute mental illness such that the child or other parent would be otherwise at risk, and when the benefits to the child outweigh the risks from the restricted access arrangement. Supervised access may also be used temporarily as a shortterm neutral setting for parent–child contact during a chaotic or traumatic parental separation, or for ambiguous cases during a period of assessment.

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Supervised access should not be a dispositional alternative when an indigent family cannot afford other types of services, and it is an inappropriate measure as a replacement for an evaluation of serious allegations of abuse or in lieu of more costly therapeutic counseling for the child or parent. Essentially, it is a brief or time-limited intervention; its purpose and value should be questioned if it is employed indefinitely. It is unacceptable to use supervised visitation to ensure an abusive parent’s right of access to the child when the child is chronically uncomfortable and distressed by that access (Johnston & Straus, 1999; Pearson & Thoennes, 1996). Necessary Conditions for Primary Parenting with Suspended Access. This arrangement is appropriate when parents have

very high P5 ratings; for refusal to comply with the terms of the supervised order; blatant attempts to use the child to harass and hurt the other parent; attempts or threats to abduct, seriously hurt, or kill a family member; and conviction for murder or serious injury of a family member. Children who are persistently distressed or refuse supervised visits, those who are estranged from and unable to reconcile with a previously abusive parent, and teenagers who are severely and chronically alienated from a parent may also benefit from suspended access. Supervised or suspended visitation should not be imposed lightly and requires the accountability of all parties. When a court order restricts a parent’s access to his or her children, it should state explicit goals with behavioral criteria that need to be met in order for the parent to graduate to a less restrictive option, ensure a timely review of progress, or arrange to monitor the situation over time. Likewise, when restrictions on a parent’s access are removed, the court or its designated agent should be sure that a parent’s violence has ceased and that he or she has made credible progress or completion of treatment for the problem (of violence, substance abuse, or mental illness).

Parallel Parenting Alternately known as sole or divided legal custody and joint or sole physical custody, parallel parenting is an arrangement where each parent is involved in the children’s lives, but the interparental relationship is structured by a court order that


minimizes contact between the parents, typically by having each parent make day-to-day decisions independently of each other when the children are in his or her care. Responsibility for major decisions is usually assigned unilaterally to one parent and sometimes divided between parents (one parent may decide on health matters and the other on educational issues). Parallel parenting will usually involve a child spending more time in the care of one parent who will be designated the primary residential parent. Alternatively, the time share can be roughly the same with each parent if the child has continuity with respect to schooling, social and extracurricular activities. The exchange itself may be monitored by a neutral third party or take place in a neutral public location (the child’s school or library). Research indicates that in some cases, over time, parental hostility declines and parallel parenting may evolve towards some form of co-parenting, although this may take years and in some cases will never occur (Maccoby & Mnookin, 1992). A parenting coordinator or counselor may need to be assigned to help set up the details of the arrangement, coach parents, monitor the arrangement, help parents manage their anger and fear, and focus on meeting their children’s needs by providing consistent, safe child care within their separate homes. There is limited flexibility in parallel parenting arrangements; adherence to details of the court order is emphasized in contrast to encouraging accommodation and compromise with respect to any changes. Boundaries and separation between parents are established by a court-ordered time-share schedule that details times, dates, holidays, and vacation schedules along with the location of the exchange. Protocols for behavioral etiquette at the time of exchange, management of emergency situations, and any attendance at child events are also made explicit in the parenting order. Provision for exchanges of necessary information between homes is also structured (e.g., by e-mail exchange between parents and structured telephone access to the child). The aim of these measures is to avoid any opportunity for a parent to bully or sabotage the other, thereby minimizing conflict and potential violence. Necessary Conditions for Parallel Parenting and Monitored Exchange of the Child. This arrangement is appropriate

when there are moderate P5 ratings and no ongoing threat

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of violence and coercive control. Most importantly, there must be adequate parenting by both parents when alone with the child. The risk of renewed conflict or a violent incident occurs only when parents meet (for example, when exchanging the child). This is also the arrangement of choice for families in which there are unsubstantiated allegations of abuse and chronically conflicted nonviolent parents who otherwise expose their children to their ongoing disputes. Graduates from supervised visits who meet their objectives and who have credible evidence of good progress or completion of treatment are usually appropriate for parallel parenting. It should be noted, however, that this parenting plan is usually only appropriate for older children who have no special needs for parents’ coordination of their daily care. This precludes infants, preschoolers, and children with special medical or dietary needs and those with behavioral and learning difficulties who usually require parents’ close communication and cooperation.

Co-parenting Co-parenting (or joint legal and joint physical custody) refers to an arrangement in which parents cooperate closely postseparation in all significant aspects of raising their children. This arrangement approximates the preseparation ideal for the children, in which both parents are actively involved in the lives of their children, share information, and problem-solve the normal challenges of parenting as they arise. It involves shared decision making on major issues such as education, health, extracurricular activities, communication, and joint problem solving between parents with the aim of developing common child-care practices across homes, including consistent routines and discipline. Joint custody does not require a particular time split (such as equal time with each parent) but rather is intended to establish a nonconflicted parental relationship that allows for ongoing joint decision making about significant issues and substantial amounts of time spent in the home of each parent. Flexibility and compromise regarding the time-share schedule are encouraged where possible, taking account of the distance between homes, and the children’s changing needs and stages of development, as well as changes in the parents’ schedules. However, a detailed court


order needs to be in place as backup when no agreement is reached about changes. Necessary Conditions for Co-Parenting. Co- parents must

have some capacity to communicate and to resolve conflicts, possess a modicum of trust and respect for one another, and have the capacity to remain child-focused. This usually precludes high-conflict and violent families with the possible exception of separation-instigated violence after the crisis has passed and the trauma resolved (shown by low ratings on the P5 screening). However, others with a substantial history of successful parallel parenting and cessation of violence and coercive control may eventually graduate to this arrangement. Finally, with substantial proof of rehabilitation, parents who have been mentally ill or substance abusers may also be appropriate for this parenting plan.

The Need for Community Resources A range of corrective programs and treatment services are needed in the community so that specific ones can be selected to fit the needs of individual families. These include batterers’ intervention groups tailored for coercive-controlling violence, and anger and conflict management that may be better suited for conflict-instigated violence. Drug and alcohol screening and treatment groups as well as psychotropic medication and mental health counseling may be necessary for some whose pattern of violence is rooted in substance abuse and mental illness. For parents with histories of violence, parenting without violence classes and parenting coordinators are appropriate. Specialized trauma counseling is needed for adults who are victims of coercive control; and family crisis counseling may be needed for separationinstigated violence. Last, but not least, specialized services for children such as reunification counseling, individual therapy, and group treatment are salient. Unfortunately, many of these community programs are neither available nor affordable, and qualified professionals to deliver services are in short supply. Families most in need are economically disadvantaged racial and cultural minorities. Victims’ support services and supervised access facilities are often geographically inaccessible. Courts are impeded by unrepresented clients, waiting lists, and the lack of culturally

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appropriate service providers and are restricted by confidentiality mandates and laws that prevent communication and coordination between courts and with community agencies. What to do in the face of this dismal lack of resources? First, there is a critical need to invest in good screening and differential assessment of the violence in order to prioritize safety in access planning. Second, the needs of families should be triaged so as to better match services to their needs as proposed in this chapter. Beyond these efforts, it is important to develop more resources. Members of the community can recruit local social networks (extended family, workplace, school, churches, and neighborhoods) to support these vulnerable parents and their children. Within the court community, judges can provide leadership, and family attorneys and mental health counselors can collaborate in developing the blue prints for parenting plans into a series of model court orders with guidelines for use. Most important, court administrators need to devise case management protocols to coordinate between services and among courts so that these vulnerable families are not fragmented further by the demands of multiple interveners and requirements to attend multiple programs with no clearly accountable goals.

Parental Abduction: Risk Factors and Preventive Interventions

12

Parental abduction of a child occurs when a member of the child’s family, or someone acting on behalf of a family member, takes action to deprive a parent of his or her lawful rights to have custody or access to the child. Although abductors are usually one of the child’s parents, they could also be grandparents, stepparents, or other relatives. Also referred to as custodial interference or parental kidnapping, it includes attempts to remove, conceal, or refuse to return the child. Violations of court orders for custody and visitation are not uncommon between disputing separating and divorced parents, but they are not viewed as parental abduction unless they involve an effort to deny a parent’s access to the child indefinitely or permanently without good cause.

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Characteristics of Family Abductions Who Abducts, When, and How Along with the rising divorce rates and greater geographical mobility of families, parental abduction has become a serious problem within and between many countries around the globe. In the United States, a nationwide victimization survey in 1999 estimated that approximately 203,900 children were abducted by a family member that year. Although more than one half of these were reported to authorities, a national study (Grasso et al; 2001) showed that police reports were officially registered in only about 15% of the cases. Charges are filed by prosecutors in only 1 to 2% of cases, and a criminal conviction resulted in less than 1%. The criminal justice system responded more harshly in those cases in which there were clear violations of existing custody orders and child endangerment was clearly indicated. This means that the large majority of cases are dealt with privately, without legal assistance, or settled in family courts as a civil matter. Most, if not all, prosecutors believe that criminal prosecution may not be in the child’s or family’s interest and that the priority should be to recover the child safely and expeditiously. By contrast, abductions by a stranger during the same year amounted to only 115 children but generated extensive media coverage, priority law enforcement and prosecution, and much public concern (Forst & Blomquist, 1991; Sedlak, Finkelhor, Hammer, & Schultz, 2002). Erroneous conceptions about abduction probably derive from the few unusually dramatic stories that make headline news. The scenario brought to mind suggests that abduction is likely to follow a long and bitter custody battle in court with a father wrestling the children from the mother, concealing their identities, and fleeing to a new or unknown location, seldom to be seen again. Research belies that the elements of this scenario are a common occurrence (Johnston et al., 1999). In about a third of cases, parents never seek court orders, and those who litigate do so only briefly, often without legal representation, mediation, or counseling of any kind. Parents who abduct are not distinctly more bitter or angry than those in most custody-litigating families. Whereas some studies have found that men are more likely to abduct, others

Chapter 12: Parental Abduction

have found that mothers and fathers are equally likely to do so although at different times—fathers, when there was no child custody order in place; mothers, after the court had issued a formal custody decree. The threat or use of force is relatively uncommon in abductions by a family member. In most cases, abducted children are not missing children—their whereabouts are known albeit one parent is refusing to allow the other rightful access. Most parentally abducted children are recovered or returned relatively quickly, within days or the first few weeks. The large majority of the cases (more than three fourths) are resolved within 1–2 months, and only a small proportion may be gone for 6 months or more; it is relatively rare that a child is never recovered. Young preschool children—on average aged 2–3 years— are more likely to be abducted by a parent probably because they are less able to verbally protest or resist, easier to transport and conceal, and are unable to tell others their history. They are also more likely to be cute and adoring dependents of their emotionally needy parents. Abduction of older children—especially teenagers—by a parent usually requires their active participation and assent. In these cases the adolescent becomes strongly aligned with or alienated from the left-behind parent, abetted by a campaign of vitriolic and negative propaganda by the abducting parent. Boys and girls are equally likely to experience family abduction. (See Hammer, Finkelhor & Sedlak 2002 for further demographic descriptors.)

Effects on Abducted Children and Left-Behind Family Except for the few high-profile cases that attract media attention, unfortunately the kidnapping of a child by a parent and its potential effects upon victims have often been ignored or dismissed as relatively unimportant. It is a commonly held myth that parental abduction is not consequential because a parent is unlikely to harm a child and that being kidnapped by a family member is not likely to be a stressful or traumatic event compared to stranger abduction. Whereas, in fact, the repercussions of parental abduction for children and their families vary greatly depending upon the circumstances of

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the case, it is potentially profoundly devastating. It ranges from being fairly benign in some cases in which young children are located rapidly, well cared for, and voluntarily returned by the abducting parent, to having severe, longlasting consequences in other cases in which children are physically, sexually, and emotionally abused or exposed to neglectful and violent environments by the abductor. For the family left behind, searching for an abducted child is not only frustrating, but also financially draining and emotionally exhausting. One study (Hatcher, Barton, & Brooks, 1992) found that left-behind parents typically expend all their resources, including borrowed funds, to hire attorneys and private investigators and for travel in search of their child. They also found that most parents and other family members of missing children experience substantial emotional distress as a result of their child’s disappearance. Compared to the general population, their level of distress equals or exceeds the emotional distress for other groups of individuals exposed to trauma, such as military combatants and victims of violent crime. Children appear to be most adversely affected in the more lengthy cases of concealment when they are abducted by a more psychologically disturbed or violent parent and have been subjected directly to abuse by the abductor. For this reason, it should not be assumed that children are safe just because they are with a parent. Research has shown that almost one quarter of the abducted children had suffered physical abuse by the abducting parent, and 7% were sexually abused (Greif and Hegar, 1993). Loss and trauma are also experienced when children are taken from a secure relationship with a primary parent by an abductor who tells negative stories such that they believe they are no longer loved or wanted by the absent parent. Being in hiding or constantly on the run to elude authorities and having their identities changed is particularly emotionally destructive for the child because it disrupts the development of a cohesive and positive self-identity. Further trauma can occur to children as a result of some of the dramatic measures taken to locate and recover them such as being snatched back by a private investigator, apprehended by law enforcement, and placed in a children’s shelter or foster care while their case is litigated in family or juvenile court. Their recovery and return home may not be


a welcome rescue when it results in the sudden loss of the abducting parent on whom they feel entirely dependent and their precipitous transfer to the custody of the left-behind parent who they may not remember or no longer trust. Those who have been indoctrinated by negative beliefs about the other parent can experience grief and rage such that they may strongly identify or align with the abducting parent and reject the other. In this respect, they are similar to alienated children described more fully in chapter 13. The aftermath of the abduction, when children are recovered, does not necessarily signal relief for the child or family. Often, a child is left upset and torn between the abducting parent and the custodial parent, and the entire family is left to pick up the pieces from the life they once had with the child. Unlike stranger abduction, the child can express feelings of love and longing for the abducting parent, which can be difficult for the parent to hear, constraining the relationship between the left-behind parent and child with tension, resentment, and fear. Typical indications of children’s distress include pervasive anxiety and fear, nightmares, sleeping problems, clinging, and irritability. In a subset of this group are children who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Regression disorders in which children revert to behaviors inappropriate for their age (bedwetting, sucking of thumb) are not uncommon among children following their return home, as are behavior difficulties, depression, declining grades, and health problems (Forehand, Long, Zogg, & Parrish, 1989; Greif and Hegar, 1993). A review of studies (Faulkner, 1999) concluded that the legacy of the abduction is often an attachment disorder, in which children are unable to develop a meaningful, healthy relationship with their left-behind parent after being reunited with them. Depression is also a common feature in the children. They may feel they are unable to trust anyone because they have lost stability in their lives and often feel angry, frightened, and abandoned. Moreover, even young children can be burdened by guilt and feel in some manner at fault for the abduction; they secretly worry that they should have resisted being taken or found their way home. It is important to also recognize that these children are often lied to by their abducting parent and can be burdened with ideas inculcated from parents of distrust, loneliness, and hostility about their family situation.

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Long-Term Consequences One researcher (Greif, 2000, 2002) followed up on his earlier study by interviewing the parents of teenagers and young adults who had been parentally abducted as children (Greif & Hegar, 1993). Significant emotional and physical problems were observed by parents in more than two fifths of the sample of youth. It was also found that of those still having problems, many continued with therapy 10 years after the parental abduction occurred. Parents reported that their teenage and young adult children were sometimes self-destructive and had a number of difficulties at home as well as in their personal and school lives. In-depth interview studies (Baker, 2007; Greif, 2000) of small numbers of older adults who had been parentally abducted and alienated from their left-behind parent as children noted that the relationship with both of their parents remained greatly ambivalent, as was their stance toward marriage and child-rearing. Feelings of loss and guilt, conflicts with siblings, and confusion about the use of their birth name upon recovery also continued to haunt these individuals. The extent to which the experiences of the relatively small number of persons who volunteered to participate in these studies are representative of the larger population of adults who were abducted as children is not known. Further, more extensive research needs to be undertaken on shortand long-term outcomes for children and their parents. In general, policy makers and researchers have argued that parental abduction constitutes more than the violation of parents’ civil rights to have access to their children. Rather, because of the serious emotional problems that may result, parental abduction of children should be regarded as a form of child abuse in and of itself. In response, many laws and policies have been put in place to combat this type of abduction; however, the justice system has a long way to go in implementing these laws in order to curtail and hopefully prevent the problem.

What Motivates Some Parents to Abduct Their Children? Early explanations tended to focus on the nature of the conflict between spouses around the time of separation, noting that parental abductors may have a desire to blame, spite, or


punish the other parent for leaving or may be trying to effect reconciliation. Others may be fearful of losing custody of their child and having a diminished role in their child’s life. Subsequent studies have found that family violence plays a large role in parental abductions (Grief & Hegar, 1993; Johnston et al., 1999). Whereas for some parents, usually fathers, kidnapping the child is a manifestation of their ongoing attempts to wield control and power over a spouse who is trying to leave an abusive relationship, for other parents, more often but not always mothers, fleeing with and hiding the child is an attempt to protect the child from a left-behind parent who is perceived to be molesting, abusing, or neglecting. In the aftermath of a failed marriage, however, which of these scenarios is true is may be unclear and vigorously contested in counter-allegations to authorities and in family courts. Family Violence. Domestic violence and substance abuse—

more often perpetrated by the male—are alleged to have occurred in two thirds to three quarters of families in which children are subsequently abducted by a parent. In most of these cases there is some evidence to back up these claims. Allegations of child abuse occur in one third to two thirds of abducting families. Whereas allegations of child sexual abuse—primarily against fathers—are often unable to be substantiated, allegations of child neglect and endangerment—more often made against mothers—are substantiated in about one fourth to one half of the cases. Sometimes both parents are implicated in neglect, abuse, and domestic violence. When one unmarried couple separated, the mother, Mary, hid her 2-year-old son from his father, Ray. Three years later, when she was jailed for a month for using drugs, Ray took the opportunity to snatch the child from the care of the maternal grandmother and went into hiding. The district attorney soon recovered the child and directed the matter back to family court where Ray was awarded custody because the boy had been pitifully undernourished in his mother’s care. Ray then disappeared with the child for the next 3 years. He surfaced when he was convicted of domestic violence against his new wife. At this time the child was placed in residential care because of his severe emotional disturbance.

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Many of these concerned parents have sought the help of family courts and child protective services to protect their children; however, the response from these authorities was perceived to be too often inadequate and inconsistent. From the parents’ viewpoint, counselors in the family and juvenile courts were often dismissive of their concerns, failed to thoroughly investigate their claims, and did not follow up or monitor the potentially unstable and neglectful environments to which their children were exposed. This motivated the parents to “take the law into their own hands” and steal their children, or it resulted in the children becoming victims of abduction by the abusive parent. (See Greif & Hegar, 1993, and Johnston et al., 1999 for further details.) Ms. O removed her grandchildren from her teenage daughter’s care and went into hiding with them after she had made repeated appeals to child protective services and the family court. No one had taken time to investigate her convictions that the children were being neglected and exposed to a violent and criminal environment on the part of the young mother’s boyfriend and associates. The grandmother’s attempt to rescue the child resulted in her being arrested and jailed overnight with charges of felony child abduction. A subsequent full evaluation supported her claims, and she was awarded guardianship of the children. Parental Personality Indicators. Our research also found that abducting parents, compared to parents litigating custody, are more likely to have narcissistic and psychopathic personality traits in which they feel entitled to flaunt the authority of the courts and law enforcement and exploit and control others with impunity without consideration of the other parent’s rights or feelings. They tend to deny and dismiss the value of the other parent to the child, believe that they, more than anyone else, know what is best for their child, and cannot see how, or even why, they should share parenting of their child with their ex-partner. Consistent with these attitudes, these individuals are more likely to have prior arrests and convictions for other criminal offenses. This may also help explain why they do not expect the family courts to be sympathetic if they pursue their quest for custody through legal means. In a small number of cases, the abducting parent is


severely mentally ill, suffering from paranoid delusions and other thought disorders and is convinced that the child’s other parent, associates, and the legal system are conspiring against them. All these parents who have severe personality and psychotic disorders are of relatively greater risk to the children whom they abduct. Mr. X was an extremely dangerous, violent, and paranoid man (with a history of having previously killed an acquaintance in a brawl). He became incensed with the “injustice” of the legal system for investigating sexual abuse allegations made against him by the mother. He was also angered by what he considered was an unfair court-ordered financial settlement. His 10-year-old son entered a psychotic collusion with his very scary father who construed the mother to be the child abuser. The boy participated in planning his own abduction and fled with his father through several East Asian countries on a terrifying journey marked by the father’s agitated, paranoid behavior, which at times erupted in violent assaults on passing acquaintances. Mr. X was finally apprehended, convicted, and sent to prison. The child, guilty and conflicted about his role, required months of residential treatment for the emotional sequelae of this ordeal. Other Contextual Factors. Economics, culture, and marital status contribute to the risk of parental abduction and compound the situation. Compared to custody-disputing families, both abducting and left-behind parents, particularly women, are predominantly of low socioeconomic status and poorly educated. They are more likely to possess few occupational skills, have low incomes, and be unemployed. They cannot afford the legal counsel that would help guide them through the courts, nor can they afford consultation with mental health professionals to advise them on their family problems or help substantiate their claims for custody. Their difficulties are compounded if they are also of cultural minority status, noncitizens, and not able to speak the language.

Mr. M’s behavior was bizarre, possibly psychotic: He was taking drugs, interested in satanic cults, and talking irrationally. He abandoned his wife when the baby was 1 month old and then returned only to abduct the child

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a year later at which time he threatened suicide and murder, ostensibly because she refused to resume the marriage. Being a poor, undocumented, Mexican immigrant and speaking only Spanish, Mrs. M did not seek legal help. A friend helped her make contact with the district attorney who retrieved the child and successfully secured the man’s conviction for felony abduction. Furthermore, a proportion of abducting parents are never-married women who do not consider that the biological father of their children has any rights to custody or visitation, especially if he fails to pay child support. Lucy and Ken as a young couple had a brief, stormy liaison. Lucy became pregnant with Ken’s child at the same time that she began dating another young man, and she moved away to live with him. Ken was unaware of his son’s existence until he received a request for child support when the boy was 5 years old, following Lucy’s application for welfare assistance. When he counterfiled for visitation, she fled with the child. She seemed nonplussed by the subsequent abduction charges and still does not consider that she did anything illegal. Extended Family and Social Network Support. In all these

cases, distressed parents who are dealing with a marital or relationship breakup and trying to rescue themselves or their children from an abusive family situation tend to turn to their own families and informal social networks for support and help rather than rely upon formal agents such as child protective services, police, and courts. Their informal networks often share more traditional views about gender roles which favor mothers and maternal kin as child care-givers or conversely, hold fundamentalist religious convictions about male authority and ownership of the child (in contradiction to prevailing custody laws that are gender neutral). In some cases, the abductor is given substantial assistance from cultlike groups or an underground dissident movement that provides not only practical assistance (food, money, and a place to hide) but also moral support to validate the abducting parent’s actions. For this reason, many family abductors do not consider their actions to be wrong and are often surprised to find that they are illegal.


In the Z family, one parent was a United States citizen and the other an immigrant from Central America. When the marriage broke up (ostensibly because of the man’s excessive dependence upon his family of origin), he and his extended family tried to deprive the mother of custody of the 2-year-old child by alleging abuse and neglect in family court. When their goals were not achieved through legal channels, the man abducted his daughter to his native country and was successful in hiding her there among his extended kin for 3 years. The child was recovered when he returned with his daughter to the United States and tried to enroll her in school. International Abductions. Parents who are citizens of

another country (or have dual citizenship with the United States) may abduct their children following separation and divorce, particularly if they have strong, idealized ties to their extended families in their homeland, deprecate American culture, and categorically reject the other parent as important to the child. When these parents feel cast adrift from their mixed-culture marriage, they may turn to their ethnic or religious roots to find emotional support and reconstitute a shaken self-identity. Often, in reaction to feeling helpless and rejected or discarded by the ex-spouse, such parents may return to their homeland with the child as a way of insisting that their cultural identity be given preeminent status in the child’s upbringing. Further, their family of origin may offer much needed financial support as well as a warm welcome home in contrast to that provided by the left-behind parent.

Identification of Risk Factors for Abduction and Preventive Interventions In our studies, we have identified six risk profiles for parental abduction and present them here with the caveat that these are not necessarily distinct types: It is significant that half of the families we studied fit more than one risk profile. We discuss each of these profiles in turn, together with corresponding strategies for intervention, noting that a combination of different strategies is often needed to settle parents’ disputes and prevent child stealing.

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Profile 1. Prior Threat of or Actual Abduction When a parent has made credible threats to abduct a child or has a history of hiding the child, withholding visitation, or snatching the child from the other parent, there is justifiable distrust and a heightened risk for further serious custody violation. This profile of risk (involving more than 40% of cases in our research) is usually combined with one or more of the other profiles. In these cases, the underlying psychological and social dynamics that motivate the child stealing need to be understood and addressed. When other risk factors are also present, one or more of the following are general indicators of threat of flight with a child: The parent is unemployed, homeless, and without emotional or financial ties to the area; the parent has divulged plans to abduct and has the resources, underground dissident networks, or support of extended family to survive in hiding; or the parent has liquidated assets and made maximum withdrawal of funds against credit cards or borrowed money from other sources. Interventions. At the request of a concerned parent, the court can take a number of specific steps when an imminent threat or actual history of abduction exists. A court order can specify which parent has custody, define arrangements for the child’s contact with the other parent, designate which court has jurisdiction, and require written consent of the other parent or order of the court before the child can be taken out of the area. If visitation is unsupervised, plans for access with the noncustodial parent should denote such relevant information as times, dates, places of exchange, and holiday periods. The court order should also specify consequences for failure to observe its provisions. Parents should be encouraged to keep a certified copy of the custody order available at all times. An explicit court order outlining the above provisions can be presented to the appropriate embassy or agency providing passports and birth certificates, with the request that the parent be notified if the at-risk parent attempts to obtain copies of such documents without the certified, written authorization of both parents or the court. The child’s passport also can be marked with the requirement that travel not be permitted without similar authorization. In addition, a neutral third party may hold the child’s and parents’ passports, and


the court may require (or both parents may stipulate) that the departing parent will post a substantial bond—especially if the departing parent is leaving the country on vacation. School authorities, daycare providers, and medical personnel also should have a copy of the custody order and can be given explicit instructions not to release the child or any records of the child to the noncustodial parent. If possible, relatives and others who might support a parent in hiding a child should clearly understand their criminal liability if they aid and abet in what some state laws consider a felony. Older children can be taught how to protect themselves against a parental abduction and how to find help if they are taken. For example, they can be given details of their court-ordered visitation and holiday arrangements so they know with which parent they should be and when, and they can learn what steps they can take to return home if needed. Supervised visitation is a fairly stringent method of preventing parental abduction and is typically used to prevent recidivism in serious cases. It may be difficult to convince a judge to curtail a parent’s access to his or her child this severely without substantial proof that the parent has already violated custody orders or committed a crime. High-security supervision is expensive and difficult to obtain, and there are no guidelines for determining how long it should be in force. Parents who have recovered their children after a traumatic abduction typically have tremendous anxieties and often try to insist on supervised visits for years afterwards.

Profile 2. Belief by a Parent that Child is Abused and the Parent has Social Support for Concerns Many parents who abduct their children do so because they truly believe that the other parent is abusing, molesting, or neglecting the child. In our research more than one fourth of parents were identified in this subgroup. These abducting parents believe that the authorities have not taken their allegations seriously and have not properly investigated their concerns. In these cases, repeated counterallegations are likely to occur between parents, decreasing effective communication and increasing hostility and distrust. Parents who have the fixed belief that abuse has occurred—and will

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continue to occur—then “rescue” the child, often with the help of supporters who concur with their beliefs. Supporters, as previously discussed, might include family members, friends, or an underground network (usually women) that helps “protective parents” (usually mothers) obtain new identities and find safe locations. In a disturbing number of such cases, the child has been previously exposed to neglectful and abusive environments (domestic violence, substance abuse, or other criminal behavior by a parent). Often an unsubstantiated allegation of sexual abuse by a father or stepfather motivates the abduction. In these cases, children’s protective agencies and courts may fail to take measures to protect the child. Instead, they may trivialize the allegations, dismissing them as invalid or the product of a malicious divorce. Some forms of abuse, such as inflicting emotional abuse or allowing a child to witness domestic violence, do not meet official criteria of direct harm to the child. In other cases, often those involving ethnic minority families living in poverty, parents may not know how to present their concerns to authorities in a convincing manner. In these cases, subsequent investigations are cursory, and courts have insufficient substantiating evidence to take action. Interventions. The first order of business in cases involving

allegations of abuse is to ensure that a careful and thorough investigation of the allegations takes place. Accusing parents are likely to be calmer and more rational if they feel that investigators are taking their concerns seriously. Accused parents are more cooperative if approached with a respectful request to help the investigators discover what might have been inciting the suspicions of abuse. During this investigative stage, authorities should take precautions to ensure that there is no ongoing abuse or, alternatively, to protect a parent—who may in fact be innocent—from further allegations. Such precautions may include supervised visitation, especially if the child is very young, frightened, or distressed and demonstrating symptoms of emotional and behavioral disturbance in response to parental visits. Counselors can show the accusing parent how to respond to the child and how to make accurate observations without confounding the evaluation process. They can also counsel the parent on how not to react visibly to the child’s


unusual verbal statements and behaviors (sexualized play) in a manner that might encourage these statements and behaviors to get unnecessary attention. Wherever possible, this intervention should involve concerned extended family members and other social support persons. Moreover, it is helpful if all relevant professionals involved with the family are authorized by the parents or court to talk with one another so that they can support the family cohesively during the evaluation process and not incite anxiety by offering discrepant, premature conclusions. Investigators, preferably with expertise in both child abuse and the dynamics of highly conflicted divorcing families, should assemble data about the allegations and the child’s symptomatic behavior and should use the data to formulate alternative possible explanations and reasoned conclusions. Investigators should share any findings with both parents and their support persons in a timely manner. In rare cases, especially if severe psychopathology is diagnosed in both parents and their extended families, the child may be placed in the temporary care of a neutral third party (with supervised visitation to both parents), allowing investigators time to sort out who or what is fueling the claims of abuse. Professionals working with cases involving allegations of parental abuse should keep in mind that lack of substantiation is not proof that abuse has not taken place. Furthermore, extreme distrust and anger often are the legacy of unproved accusations and can affect the fragmented divorced family for years, putting the child at risk for continued emotional—if not physical—abuse. These families need long-term structure for rebuilding trust between parents and ensuring the child’s protection. This structure can include one or more of the following: ■ Mandated counseling for one or both parents to ensure appropriate parenting practices where there has been poor judgment or unclear boundaries on the part of a parent; ■ Appointment of a parenting coordinator to help parents communicate with each other and make reality checks of their mutual distrust, monitor the situation, and where authorized to do so make necessary decisions for the family when disputes reoccur;

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■ Provision of long-term therapy for the child which offers a safe place for sorting through realistic fears and phobias and disclosing abuse should it occur or reoccur; ■ Appointment of a legal representative (guardian ad litem) for the child in the event of further legal action.

Profile 3. A Parent is Paranoid Delusional In this profile, one parent demonstrates flagrantly paranoid, irrational beliefs and behaviors or psychotic delusions about the other parent. These accusing parents may claim that their former partners have harmed them and their child or are involved in a conspiracy to do so. They may also claim that mind control is being exercised over them and the child. The accusing parents usually do not need the support of others in these beliefs; their own convictions are sufficiently fixed to justify what they consider to be urgent and necessary steps to protect themselves and the child. Although this diagnosis is rare (less than 4% of our studies’ samples), parents fitting this profile are often the most dangerous and frightening of abductors, especially if they have a history of perpetrating domestic violence, hospitalizations for mental illness, or serious substance abuse. Typically, they are overwhelmed by their divorce and believe themselves to have been betrayed and exploited by their expartners. They may be obsessed alternately with desires for reconciliation and fantasies of revenge. It is important to note that psychotic parents do not perceive the child as a separate person. Rather, they perceive the child as fused with themselves as a victim (in which case they may take unilateral measures to rescue their offspring), or the child is viewed as part of the hated other parent (in which case they may precipitously abandon or even kill the child). Marital separation and instigation of the custody dispute generally trigger an acute phase of danger in these psychotic individuals, which can result not only in parental abduction but also in homicide/suicide. Interventions. Family courts need to have mechanisms and procedures in place to protect the child in cases involving serious delusional thinking by a parent. As described in the


previous chapter, an assessment for potency or lethality can indicate how acute the danger is. Indications of high lethality include threats or fantasies of homicide/suicide, availability of weapons, alcohol and drug use, a past history of domestic violence, an obsessive preoccupation with and possessiveness of the ex-spouse, stalking, alternating depression and rage, and a history of prior domestic violence and violation of protective orders. See chapter 11, section on Assessing Dimensions of Violence Relevant to Parenting Plans (the P5 Screening). If the noncustodial parent is psychotic, visitation must be supervised in a high-security facility, and the custodial parent should be helped to devise a safety plan for all other times. The psychotic parent’s visitation rights may need to be suspended if he or she repeatedly violates the visitation order, highly distresses the child by the contact, or uses his or her time with the child to denigrate the other parent, obtain information about the other parent’s whereabouts, or transmit messages of physical harm, death threats, or child abduction. If an evaluation determines that reinstatement of parent–child contact is appropriate, visitation should typically begin under supervision, preferably in the presence of a mental health professional. See chapter 11, section on Necessary conditions for primary parenting and suspended access. If the custodial person or the child’s primary care person is psychotic, extreme care must to be taken so that the litigation and the evaluation process do not precipitate abduction or violence. The family court may need to obtain an emergency psychiatric screening and use ex parte hearings (without notice to the psychotic parent) to effect temporary placement of the child with the other parent or third party while investigators undertake a more comprehensive psychiatric and custody evaluation. In these emergency situations, there should be a confidentiality waiver allowing all relevant professionals to share information about the case with each another. The psychotic parent may need legal representation, and the child may need to have an attorney appointed for any subsequent litigation. Further case management may be necessary by a judicial officer or co-parenting coordinator over the longer term to monitor the implementation of any court orders for psychiatric treatment and therapy for parent and child.

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Profile 4. A Parent is Severely Sociopathic Sociopathic parents are characterized by a history of contempt for any authority, including the legal system, and flagrant violations of the law. Their relationships with other people are self-serving, exploitive, and highly manipulative. They are likely to hold exaggerated beliefs about their own superiority and entitlement and are highly gratified by being able to exert unilateral power and control over others. Cases involving sociopathic parents often include a history of domestic violence. As with paranoid and delusional parents, sociopathic parents are unable to perceive their children as having separate needs or rights. Consequently, they often use their children blatantly as instruments of revenge, punishment, or trophies in their fight with the ex-partner. Hence, the sociopathic parent believes that domestic violence and child abduction can be perpetrated with impunity. Like paranoia, a diagnosis of severe sociopathy is uncommon (less than 5% of our studies’ samples). Interventions. For a parent diagnosed with severe sociopathic personality disorder, confidential therapeutic mediation and family counseling constitute an inappropriate and possibly dangerous intervention. Such interventions are inappropriate because a sociopathic parent lacks the capacity to develop a working therapeutic alliance with a counselor. It can be dangerous because the sociopathic parent may hide behind the confidentiality of the program in order to manipulate and control the other parties, including the counselor, to achieve his or her own ends. Sociopathic parents are unlikely to respect agreements made in such a forum unless doing so suits their purposes. If a sociopathic parent demonstrates blatant disregard of custody orders and violates restraining orders, supervised or suspended visitation is the appropriate response by the court. Access to the child may be reinstated after the offending parent meets clearly stated conditions and then only in graduated steps to ensure ongoing compliance. Moreover, the court needs to respond immediately and decisively, with sanctions such as fines and jail time, to any overt disregard of explicitly defined custody and access orders in order to send a clear message that violations are guaranteed to be costly. A parenting coordinator with arbitration powers


(as stipulated by parents and ordered by the court), who is prepared to testify in court, may be needed over the longer term to monitor the family situation for any further threat of abuse or abduction. Only when control mechanisms such as these are in place can family counseling and therapy for the child be helpful in cases involving a sociopathic parent.

Profile 5. Parents Who are Foreign Nationals Parents who are citizens of another country (or have dual citizenship with the United States), especially those ending a mixed culture marriage and having strong ties to their extended family in their country of origin, have long been recognized as potential abductors. The risk of abduction is especially acute at the time of separation and divorce, when these parents may feel cast adrift from a mixed-culture marriage and may need to return to their ethnic or religious roots to find emotional support and reconstitute a shaken selfidentity. Often, in reaction to being rendered helpless or to the insult of feeling rejected and discarded by the ex-spouse, such parents may try to take unilateral action by returning with the child to their country and family of origin. This may be a way of insisting that the abducting parent’s cultural identity be given preeminent status in the child’s upbringing. In this profile (identified in more than one fourth of cases in our research studies), parents at risk of becoming abductors are those who idealize their own family, homeland, and culture and deprecate American culture. They are likely to repudiate the child’s mixed heritage. Furthermore, their own homeland may offer more emotional and financial support than is available in a location near the ex-spouses. If the country of origin has not ratified the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, the stakes are particularly high, as recovery of the child can be difficult if not impossible. Interventions. Preventive measures for situations in which

international abduction is a possibility include the range of actions discussed under Profile 1 (Prior Threat of or Actual Abduction), especially restricting removal of the child from the state or country without authorization, preventing issuance of the child’s passport, or requiring that the parent’s and child’s passport be surrendered (Crouch, 1996).

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Difficulties occur when the child has dual citizenship, as foreign embassies and consulates are not under any obligation to honor these restrictions if the request is made by the ex-spouse who is a U.S. citizen. Instead, the court may require the parent who is a foreign national to request and obtain these assurances of passport control from his or her own embassy before granting the parent unsupervised visitation with the child. The foreign national parent could also post a bond that would be released to the left-behind parent in the event of abduction. At times of acute risk, investigators can monitor airline schedules so that an abducting parent and child could possibly be intercepted prior to leaving the United States or during a scheduled stopover in a country that is party to the Hague Convention (1988). A person may petition a foreign court to issue an order that parallels the provisions of the U.S. court order and can be enforced in the foreign court’s country. This is sometimes called a mirror custody and visitation order. The foreign court order can specify visitation and holiday arrangements, including dates and flight numbers, and can include a provision to return the child to the United States if the child is taken to or detained in the foreign court’s country. This measure is potentially costly and time consuming for the parent who is a U.S. citizen because it usually involves hiring legal representation in the foreign country and crafting a reciprocal order that conforms to both countries’ child custody laws and procedures. The cost, however, may be warranted if it diminishes the risk involved and grants foreigners their understandable wishes to visit their homeland with their children, especially if the home country is not party to the Hague Convention. It is also important for all involved parties to know that U.S. laws deny permission for non-U.S. citizens who abduct a child out of the United States (and their foreign relatives and friends who assist in keeping a child abroad) to enter the United States. This information may deter non-U.S. citizens who travel in and out of the United States from being party to child stealing. Although the above measures can help prevent abductions, they do not address the underlying problems that may prompt foreign-born parents to abduct their child and flee to another country, nor do they sufficiently deter parents who are highly motivated to abduct. To help these parents settle their internal conflicts, culturally sensitive counseling and


mediation are needed to discern and address the underlying psychological dynamics. These parents should be reminded that the child needs both parents and opportunities to appreciate and integrate his or her mixed cultural identity. Parents who have idealized their own culture, childhood, and family of origin may need encouragement to adopt a more realistic perspective. It may also be necessary to provide alternative sources of emotional and financial support to help a homesick parent remain in the area and find ways to visit the foreign homeland with assurances for the return of the child.

Profile 6. Socially Disadvantaged Parents Some abducting parents feel disenfranchised by the legal system and have family and social support in another community. Several important subgroups of potential parental abductors who are intimidated by or distrustful of the judicial system are more likely to rely on their own informal networks of kin in another geographical community, to resolve family problems including custody disputes. These include the following scenarios. First, parents who are indigent and poorly educated lack knowledge about custody and abduction laws and cannot afford legal representation or psychological counseling that would help them resolve their disputes in legal ways. (In our research studies, almost four fifths of abducting parents belonged to this subgroup.) Second, parents who have had prior negative experiences with the criminal or civil courts do not expect family courts to be responsive to their plight. (In our research studies one half of abductors had an arrest record as did four fifths of left-behind parents). Third, parents who belong to certain ethnic, religious, or cultural groups may hold views about child rearing that are contrary to prevailing custody laws which emphasize the rights of both parents and gender neutrality. For example, many African-Americans, who were over-represented in this profile, expect child rearing to be the prerogative of the mother and her maternal kin. Fourth, mothers who have transient, unmarried relationships with the child’s father often view children as their exclusive property, and their extended family supports this belief. In our studies, almost half of the abducting parents had never married their child’s other parent. Many of these women had assumed they had sole custody and

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were genuinely surprised, often outright aggrieved, when they were informed that the father had joint rights to the children by law. They were especially resistant to allowing the father to visit if he had not provided child support. Fifth, parents who are victims of domestic violence are at risk for abducting their child, especially when the courts and community have failed to take the necessary steps to protect them from abuse or to hold the abuser accountable. Joint custody, mediated agreements, and visitation orders too often leave victims vulnerable to ongoing violence, despite their separation from the abuser. When such victims abduct the children, the violent partners may successfully obscure the facts about the abuse and activate abduction laws to regain control of their victims. Interventions. Of all the profiles of risk, socially and economi-

cally disadvantaged parents, especially women, have the best prognosis for an effective preventive intervention, which is limited mainly by the lack of resources in the community to help them. Some helpful community resources that these parents need include the following: ■ Legal counseling and advocacy, access to information and education about custody and abduction laws and about the rights of both parents even when there has been no marriage or sustained relationship. Abuse victims need advocates to help them obtain restraining orders and custody and visitation orders that do not place them in further danger. Parents need a userfriendly court system, a cooperative clerical staff, language translation services, and support persons who will accompany them through the legal process. ■ Access to affordable mental health counseling services for themselves and their children. Such services can help them manage their emotional distress and vulnerability and strengthen their parenting capacities at the time of separation and after divorce. ■ Family advocates to bridge the cultural, economic, and logistical chasms to access other community resources, such as domestic violence services, substance abuse monitoring and counseling, training and employment opportunities, housing options, and mental health services.


■ Important members of their informal social networks to be included in any brief intervention to provide these vulnerable families with long-term support and protection.

What is Needed for Effective and Ethical Preventive Interventions? Our studies evaluating the effectiveness of preventive measures that are discussed in this chapter found that where court imposed constraints and monitored at-risk families who were at the same time receiving these kinds of counseling interventions, parental cooperation increased and the risks of abduction decreased during the followup period. The implication is that early case management in the court—together with brief, strategic legal and psychological counseling—may be useful in ameliorating the threat of serious custodial violations. This implies strong partnerships needs to be developed between the family courts, mental health counselors, and attorneys who have specialized knowledge of laws, designated authorities, and administrative procedures that govern parental abduction of children (Dunford-Jackson, 1999; Hoff, zool). The laws with which they must be familiar include state criminal parental abduction statutes, federal legislation aimed to prevent parental kidnapping (PKPA, 1980) and ensure uniform child custody laws across statelines (UCCJA, 1968 and UCCJEA, 1997), and their counterparts in international law (Hague Convention, 1980, IPKC, 1993; ICARA, 1988, and ETIA, 1998). Congress has also enacted several laws related to missing children that may apply to parentally abducted children, such as the Missing Children’s Act of 1982 and the National Child Search Assistance Act of 1990. Among other provisions, these Acts allow all missing children to be registered without any waiting period in a central national database at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) which can be accessed throughout the country by local law enforcement. In effect, the NCMEC has become the leading national organization that offers assistance to local law enforcement and families affected by parental abductions, as well as providing a wide array of educational resources to the concerned public. Furthermore, the AMBER

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Alert System, developed in 1996, assists law enforcement in coordinating and implementing an emergency response to an abducted child who is deemed to be in danger of serious injury, by broadcasting information to the public. All of these measures have been successful in the early recovery of some parentally abducted children. However, many obstacles to the recovery of children remain (Girdner & Hoff, 1994). At the local level, and working in close cooperation with state and federal law enforcement and with the NCMEC, a number of private nonprofit organizations have sprung up around the United States to assist parents directly in locating and reuniting with their missing children. These include, among others, organizations like the Vanished Children’s Alliance in California, Child Find of America Inc. in New York, and Operation Lookout in Washington State. Many of these grassroot organizations were formed in response to specific high-profile cases of child abduction and the extensive media response and public support the matter generated. They also identify much-needed gaps in services, lobby for legislation, advocate for victims, and provide education and prevention to the public, as well as offer technical assistance to law enforcement and other community agencies. The profiles of risk for abduction described in this chapter have been derived from a relatively small descriptive study comparing samples of abducting and litigating individuals and their family situations. It is not known to what extent these samples are representative of the larger populations of abducting and litigating parents disputing custody in other jurisdictions. These descriptive data do not provide any statistical prediction of the probability that any individual or family situation that meets the criteria for one or more of these profiles will abduct, nor is it possible to estimate the probability of an abduction occurring when these criteria are not met. Given this limited state of knowledge and the difficulty predicting future behavior, what principles should guide social policies for preventive interventions? Many of the interventions prescribed above are simply good standards of professional and court practice for the provision of legal and psychological counseling, mediation, and custody evaluation services, especially to those who are economically and socially disadvantaged. The social policy dilemmas arise in those instances involving restrictions to the custody and access


rights of parents as preventive measures, thereby interfering with their civil rights. Policymakers must ask, “Is it worse not to have protected a child who is subsequently abducted or to have placed restrictions on the rights of a parent who may never have abducted? What responsibility should the court assume in protecting children from abduction in the absence of any wrongdoing by a parent, who is, for example, foreignborn and homesick for familiar surroundings?” We propose that more restrictive measures are warranted under three conditions: ■ When the risks for abduction are particularly high as indicated by prior custody violations, clear evidence of planning to abduct, and overt threats to take the child; ■ When obstacles to locating and recovering the child would be particularly great, as they would be from uncooperative jurisdictions in some states and abroad, especially in countries that are not party to the Hague Convention; ■ When the child faces substantial potential harm from an abducting parent, such as a parent who has a serious mental and personality disorder, a history of abuse or violence, or little or no prior relationship with the child.

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Parental Alignments and Alienation: Differential Assessment and Theraputic Interventions

13

Although it is common for children to have times when they are upset, negative, and angry toward one or both parents during the divorce transition, most children want to love and to feel loved and wanted by both parents; they want regular contact with them both, and they are pained by loyalty conflicts if they think they have to choose between them. It is a strikingly different scenario in the minority of cases in which a child strongly and consistently rejects one parent after divorce and resists or refuses to have any contact with that parent. How frequently does this happen? To date no large nationally representative studies have been undertaken. Relatively small studies that are beset with methodological problems, such as convenience samples with different definitions and measures, provide varying estimates, ranging from about one tenth of children in broader community samples to

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about one fourth in custody-litigating samples. The frequency of very severe cases is relatively low, but they are often the most difficult and entrenched ones that generate much controversy among perplexed and frustrated parents, family courts, as well as mental health and legal professionals alike. Whereas early research found that fathers are more likely to be rejected by a child, probably reflecting the prevalence of maternal custody and care of children, more recent data indicate that either mothers or fathers can be the target parent. Girls and boys are both likely to reject one of their parents.

What Makes Children Alienated The phenomenon of a child’s strident rejection of one parent was first recognized by Judith Wallerstein and Joan Kelly (1980) in their seminal study of children of divorce. They described it as an “unholy alliance” between an intensely angry parent and an older child or adolescent and likened it in some cases to the legend of Medea in Greek mythology in which a mother destroys her children to avenge her fury at her husband for discarding her for another woman. Later, Richard Gardner coined the label “parental alienation syndrome” (PAS) to describe a psychiatric disorder in a child in the context of a custody dispute. He identified features of PAS children as those who exhibit obsessive hatred of a target parent (an animosity that often extends to the parent’s extended family) and make various claims against that parent, which range from being weak, frivolous, and absurd complaints to serious, but false, allegations of abuse. Lacking any ambivalence or guilt towards the hated parent, these children recite “borrowed scenarios” about which they have no direct knowledge to justify their rejecting stance while at the same time claiming that their views are independently determined and not influenced by an alienating parent whom they reflexively support and idealize. Over the past decade, numerous articles have been written from a clinical perspective describing the problem of children who reject a parent, theorizing about its causes and correlates and arguing strategies for management and treatment. The number of articles that offer empirical data, however, is very small. In particular, the problem has generated considerable ideological debates among professionals and social policy makers. On one hand, PAS proponents believe that the

Chapter 13: Parental Alignments and Alienation

primary cause is an embittered divorced spouse who systematically programs or brainwashes the child against an innocent rejected parent (Clawar & Rivlin, 1991; Gardner, 1992; Kopetski, 1998a,b; Rand, Rand & Kopetski, 2005; Warshak, 2001, 2003). On the other hand, advocates for victims of domestic violence believe that too often these children and the allied parent have suffered real abuse at the hands of the rejected parent, abuse that has been largely ignored, dismissed, or greatly minimized by family courts (Bancroft & Silverman, 2002; Dalton, 1999; Faller, 1998; Faller & DeVoe, 1995; Jaffe et al., 2003; Pagelow, 1997; Sturge & Glaser, 2000; Walker, Brantley, & Rigsbee, 2004). Others have provided sociological critiques based upon a Faucauldian sociological analysis and child developmental explanations from an attachment perspective (Blank & Ney, 2006; Garber, 2004). Until recently, most of this controversy and debate occurred in the virtual absence of systematic research.

The Problem with Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS) Theory The main problem with the PAS theory is that it focuses almost exclusively on an alienating parent as the etiological agent of the child’s alienation. Our research shows that a singular focus on the aligned parent as being primarily responsible for the child’s alienation is overly simplistic and not supported by available data. Rather, the problem of a child’s rejection of a parent is a family system’s pathology exacerbated by an adversarial legal system, not an individual psychiatric disorder. PAS cannot properly be considered a “diagnostic syndrome” according to customary psychiatric nomenclature because there are no “commonly recognized, or empirically verified pathogenesis, course, familial pattern, or treatment selection for the condition.” Hence the label “PAS” does not add any information that would enlighten the court, the clinician, or their clients, all of whom would be better served by a more specific description of the child’s behavior in the context of his family.

A Reformulation of the Problem: The Alienated Child An alternative formulation (articulated by Kelly and Johnston, 2001) focuses on the “alienated child” rather than “parental alienation”. An alienated child is defined as one

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who persistently expresses strong, negative feelings (such as anger, hatred, contempt, and fear) and beliefs that appear to be irrational, distorted, or exaggerated and significantly disproportionate to the child’s actual experience with a target parent. Entrenched alienated children respond in a phobiclike manner and express unremitting, strident rejection of a parent with no apparent guilt or ambivalence. Early precursors of alienation include complaints and expressions of discomfort along with resistance and lack of pleasure in visiting the target parent, together with role reversal and separation anxieties from the preferred parent. From this viewpoint, the pernicious behaviors of a “programming” parent are no longer assumed to be the starting point. Rather, the problem of the alienated child begins with a primary, neutral, and objective focus on the child and his or her observable behaviors and expressed feelings and invites a broad search among multiple factors that might help explain the parent–child relationships.

Distinguishing Alienation from Normal Preferences, Alignments, and Estrangement Too often in divorce situations, all youngsters resisting visits with a parent are improperly labeled “alienated,” and too frequently parents who question the value of visitation in these situations are labeled “alienating parents” (Kelly & Johnston, 2001; Warshack, 2002). It is important to distinguish the extent to which a child is resisting contact with a parent after separation for a variety of expectable reasons. Children’s expectable preferences for one parent over the other are made up of many components or strands that are woven together. First, normal developmental preferences for one parent include the very young child’s familiarity, comfort, and attachment to a primary caretaker who provides “goodenough” care that often manifests in separation anxieties at times of transitions for preschoolers. Gender identification and affinity in interests with one parent are often manifest during the school-age years. Means-oriented alliances with a parent who offers the best goodies or makes fewer demands may be operative for teenagers. Second, alignments with one parent may be a reaction to the specific circumstances of the divorce. Some children, especially young adolescents, make an alignment with one parent


against the other for a number of reasons: anger and hurt at the parent’s decision to divorce and the manner of leaving the family, moral indignation at the parent’s behavior, worry and sympathy for the left-behind parent, and untenable loyalty conflicts and guilt that make the choice a relief. Disruptions to their school and peer activities, boredom visiting a parent, jealousy and resentment about the involvement of new partners and stepsiblings can also contribute to their negativity. The defining features of aligned youngsters are that they are likely to be somewhat conflicted about their angry behavior, whereas alienated children appear to lack any ambivalence or guilt about their stance. All of these normal developmental preferences and divorce-specific alignments are likely to be time-limited if they are handled in a timely manner by a warm, nondefensive parent, or may ameliorate with brief counseling as illustrated by the case of Robert in chapter 6 in the section titled Robert’s Unholy Alliance. If mishandled, however, they can contribute to the entrenched position of an alienated child. Third, children can be realistically “estranged” from one of their parents as a consequence of observing repeated domestic violence or other explosive outbursts of that parent during the marriage or after the separation. Some were themselves the target of abusive parenting. Other youngsters are estranged in response to severe parental deficiencies. These include persistent immature and self-centered behaviors; chronic emotional abuse of the child or preferred parent; physical abuse that goes undetected; characterologically angry, rigid, and restrictive parenting styles; and psychiatric disturbance or substance abuse that grossly interferes with parenting capacities and family functioning. In actuality, the extent of parental violence, abuse, and neglect ranges on a continuum from blatant overt acts that evoke universal condemnation to more subtle forms of emotional abuse, benign neglect, and lack of empathy and concern for the child that may not be acknowledged, difficult to document, and unreported or dismissed by authorities. The central task of assessment or a custody evaluation is to distinguish whether, and to what extent, the child’s rejection of a parent is based upon realistic estrangement rather than alienation (Drozd & Olesen, 2004; Garber, 2007). That said, this is not an easy task because there is often considerable overlap between the two. Estranged children may look like alienated children in that they can present

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with a mix of intense anger toward the abusive parent and subconscious fear of retaliation that can induce phobic reactions to that parent. Such children may only feel safe enough to reject a violent or abusive parent after the separation. On the other hand, alienated children can present as estranged when there have been critical incidents that provide “a kernel of truth” to their allegations of mistreatment at the hands of the rejected parent, albeit these incidents have been grossly exaggerated or misinterpreted by the child and aligned parent. In short, in many cases there is often a mixture of two strands—alienation and estrangement—both along a continuum that need to be disentangled. Too often, deficient, abusive, or violent parents accuse the other parent of alienating the child against them and vigorously resist any suggestion that their own marital violence or severe parenting deficiencies have negatively impacted the parent–child relationship. The alternative scenario is to vilify the rejected parent as having been singularly abusive, justifying their exclusion from the child’s life. The important reason for distinguishing the extent to which the child’s antipathy is rooted in the actual experience of family abuse and trauma from those children who are alienated is that the former generally needs different treatment strategies from the latter, often a post-traumatic stress intervention at the outset. Only after the trauma has been properly addressed should one consider whether interventions for alienation are necessary. The therapy of choice for truly abusive incidents is to validate the child’s experience of neglect and abuse, including witness to traumatic domestic violence—an experience that has often been denied, minimized, rationalized, and obfuscated by the abusive parent and shamed child—and to facilitate the child’s disclosure of the traumatic events (both the memory and the terrifying feelings associated with it) in a safe place. Therapists vary in their techniques, but the general idea is to systematically de-sensitize the child to the overwhelming terror and help him or her express expectable feelings. The child can be helped to cognitively restructure any fixated or erroneous beliefs about his or her helplessness, vulnerability, culpability, and fantasies of rescue and revenge. In addition, some interpretation of their expectable reactions, especially post-traumatic stress symptoms, usually helps the child understand and manage them


better (Pynoos & Eth, 1986; Silvern, Karyl, & Landis, 1995). In sum, the approach to treatment of a child who is realistically estranged—the therapist validates the child’s experience of abuse by the target parent—is the direct opposite of the stance towards the truly alienated child in which the therapist must carefully avoid colluding with the child’s distortions and erroneous negative convictions about maltreatment.

What Contributes to Child Alienation? The reformulation of the alienated child (Kelly and Johnston, 2001) posits that multiple factors contribute to a child’s rejection of a parent including a history of intense marital conflict; a humiliating separation or custody disposition; the psychological vulnerability of both parents; the child’s age, cognitive capacity, and temperament; the influence of siblings, new partners, and extended family; and an adversarial litigation process in which powerful professionals are seen as allies or enemies. Each of these will be considered in turn. Common Features of Families with Alienated Children. These

families have a history of intense marital conflict, often from the time the child was very young, wherein the child was triangulated or where the child replaced the rejected parent as the central object of a spouse’s affection. Some of the most entrenched cases are children who, for reasons discussed in chapter 3, have never psychologically separated and differentiated themselves from a primary caregiver who was only inconsistently or conditionally emotionally available, and where their transition to the hated or feared other parent was associated with a sense of being precipitously abandoned. These children have been left with a fragmented or split sense of self, experiencing themselves and their parents as either totally good or entirely bad depending upon whether they feel connected or disconnected with others, and are prone to view others in like ways as they grow older. Typical Personality Predispositions of Aligned Parents. These

include narcissistic vulnerabilities that escalate under threat and present as paranoid and borderline dynamics. Aligned parents with these dynamics have experienced the separation and subsequent custody litigation as inordinately humiliating, and in defense of themselves they project the

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blame so that they now harbor intense hostility and abiding distrust of the rejected ex-partner. To varying degrees, children are perceived as extensions of themselves, sharing their views, feelings, and experiences. Many aligned parents hold honest but erroneous or exaggerated convictions that the other parent has never loved or cared about the child and is at best irrelevant and at worse a pernicious or dangerous influence on the child. In their minds their child is urgently in need of being rescued from the rejected parent. For other more severely narcissistic and sociopathic parents, especially batterers, the child is no more than a weapon of punishment and revenge, a trophy and a tool for tormenting and manipulating their errant spouse. They deliberately seek to sabotage, damage, or destroy their child’s relationship with the other parent with impunity and appear oblivious that in the process they are emotionally abusing their child. Rejected Parents. These parents are rarely innocent victims of the alienated child and aligned parent. Rather, they often have parenting limitations that may at times rise to the level of abuse and neglect, leading to a more entrenched position of the child. In general, they have diminished empathic involvement with their children and a limited capacity to reflect on their children’s needs, wishes, and fears; not surprisingly they confuse them with those of their ex-partner. In attempts to form or reinstate a relationship with the child, they have difficulty responding in a manner and at a pace that the child can tolerate. Typical personality predispositions of the rejected parent include passivity and intermittent withdrawal in the face of conflict and a tendency to be selfabsorbed and immature. Other rejected parents have a harsh, rigid parenting style and are overly critical and demanding. Most problematic is that rejected parents are often highly offended by the alienated child’s provocative and obnoxious behavior and can erupt into explosive frustration at the recalcitrant child (such as physically forcing the child into the car, locking the child in his room, or hitting the child). Of course, these critical outbursts are then cited as evidence of their abusive behavior. Vulnerable Children. What makes some children so

emotionally dependent upon and inextricably tied to the aligned parent? To receive any semblance of nurturing from


a narcissistically fragile or wounded parent, children have to be highly attuned to that parent’s needs and demonstrate their loyalty as allies. If they fail at this task, they are threatened with emotional if not physical abandonment in numerous ways that have been described in chapter 2, section on Parents Who have been Shamed. Our research suggests that these are the psychological dynamics that drives the role reversal and separation anxieties typically seen in alienated children and their aligned parent. A less likely alternative explanation is that the enmeshment between parent and child is determined by the emotional dependence of a parent who is depressed and grieving loss (Johnston et al., 2005b). Other child characteristics predicting vulnerability to alienation are foremost the age and cognitive capacity of the child. Preadolescent and early adolescents (8–15 years) are those more susceptible because they have achieved a developmental stage when they are more pressured by loyalty demands from their opposing parents. At this time in their life they can maintain a consistent stance of anger and are more likely to make rigid moral judgments of a parent. Rarely can younger children present as fully and consistently alienated unless they have older siblings whom they emulate or who keep them under strict partisan control. We have found that in custody-disputing samples an only or oldest child is more susceptible to alienation possibly because they are more directly exposed to the parental dynamics without the buffering support of siblings. However, it is not uncommon in families with multiple children to find siblings lined up in what appears to be a virtually impenetrable alliance against one parent. In these cases, closer inspection will usually show that one child, usually the more powerful adolescent sibling, is dictating the terms of the alliance and keeping the “troops” in order. Furthermore, as that youngster grows older, becomes more independent, or leaves home, this role is passed onto the next in line. Families that are split by children’s alliances with both parents, often along gender lines, occur with less frequency and are less entrenched. The Extended Social Network. Highly conflicted divorces often split the extended social network in two, as described in chapter 1, section on Tribal Warfare, when stepparents, grandparents and even therapists and other helping professionals take sides in the dispute. The stance of alienated children

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and aligned parents is then consolidated by social support and validation of their negative convictions about rejected parents whose supporters, in turn, reassure them they are innocent victims of a malignant spouse who has brainwashed the child. Specifically, when rejected parents appeal to family court, their allegations of PAS thrive within the traditional adversarial legal system, which is focused on fault finding because it promises simple, clear-cut answers as to who is right and who is wrong. There is less willingness to concede that real abuse, abiding distrust, and blaming between parents contribute to polarized, negative views of each other and undermine any capacity they have to co-parent. Overall Family Dynamics of Alienated Children. Our program of research supports a multidimensional explanation of children’s rejection of a parent, with both parents as well as vulnerabilities within the child contributing to the problem (Johnston et al., 2005b,c,d; Johnston, 2003a). Alienating and sabotaging behavior by a narcissistically vulnerable aligned parent who offers the child warm, involved care in return for unquestioned loyalty together with critical incidents of child abuse or lack of warm, responsive, and involved parenting by a marginalized, rejected parent jointly explain why some vulnerable children lose their emerging sense of self and their capacity for realistic judgment and become psychologically enmeshed forming a pathological alliance with one parent against the other. Even when child abuse is ruled out, deficits in the parenting of both mothers and fathers are implicated in children’s alienation (Barber, 2002; Chase, 1999; Jurkovic, 1998; Kerig, 2005). It is important to note that there are different ways that these dynamics can develop, and to date research has not determined which pathway is more likely. First, alienating parents can initiate the process, or genuinely concerned parents in response to their child’s angry, troubled relationship with their ex-spouse can empathically support their child’s negative views in which case they effectively become alienating. Alternatively, a target parent may initiate the process by being inordinately critical, lacking in empathy, and preoccupied with self-interests, or they may respond with frustration and withdraw in discouragement in the face of the child’s rejection. Other triggers to the alienating dynamics might be the perplexing behavior of a distressed


child and the interference of a stepparent or misinformed therapist who incite suspicions about abuse or alienation. In summary, our research finds no convincing evidence to support a one-dimensional PAS theory that an alienating parent is primarily responsible for a child’s alienation. Nor did we find evidence that family abuse is primarily responsible for the child’s rejection of a parent. In the absence of longitudinal data that could sort out which comes first, the best explanation is a multifactor, systemic view of the phenomena. In high-conflict families, parenting capacities can become increasingly compromised, and children’s alienation can become more entrenched in a self-fulfilling prophecy effect. That is, aligned parents become increasingly negative and distrustful, target parents defensively withdraw or respond with anger and frustration, and children become more hostile, each reaffirming their negative convictions of one another.

Are Alienated Children Emotionally Troubled and in Need of Treatment? Frustrated parents, family courts, as well as mental health and legal professionals have long been perplexed and in dispute about what to do about the problem of children who reject a parent. PAS proponents recommend that visitation and therapy should be enforced through court orders in moderate cases (backed up by sanctions like fines and jail time) and that custody should be changed to the rejected parent in severe cases (Gardner, 1998, 1999, 2001). Perceiving alienated children to be similar to brainwashed members of a cult, some PAS models of treatment involve precipitously removing the child from the alienating parent to a neutral environment where they undergo psychological deprogramming. Victims’ advocates raise strong objections to courtordered visitation, enforced therapy, and especially the notion of changing custody to the hated other parent. They have raised important questions as to whether these costly and intrusive interventions are violations of parents’ civil rights and ask that more respect be afforded to children’s wishes in these matters (Walker et al., 2004; Bruch, 2001). Most significant, some clinicians have proposed that an alienated stance is a “port in the storm” for some temperamentally vulnerable children, an expectable and not a pathological response to

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an intolerable situation, and that they will probably “spontaneously recover” as they mature into older adolescents and young adults if they are not forced into relationships with the rejected parent. According to our research compared to nonalienated children in high conflict families, alienated children are likely to have a number of symptoms of behavioral and emotional distress including depression, withdrawal, somatic complaints, and aggression, but these problems are not always evident (Johnston et al., 2005c). In some situations and relationships they can appear poised, mature, and well adjusted and at other times or in other contexts they are regressed and distressed. Overall, alienated children tend to lack good internal representations of others, indicating diminished capacity for realistic, interested, empathic relations with other people. They express feelings more spontaneously but sometimes have difficulty modulating their intense emotional states. Whereas mother-alienated children tend to be somewhat selfpossessed in that they are more self-preoccupied and have inflated self-esteem, father-alienated children have more coping deficits compared to children who are not alienated. Interestingly, when solving problems, alienated children prefer to turn to others in order to sort things out. Relying more upon significant others in this sense may be more confusing and stressful when their emotionally needy parents are disputing and making conflicting demands. Probably as a consequence, they tend to perceive inaccurately and reason somewhat illogically or loosely. By contrast, children who are able to take some pleasure in contact with both of their disputing parents employ a more self-reliant, introspective style that does not involve others. Perhaps as a consequence, they seem to have more accurate perceptions and more coping capacity. On the other hand, it is of some concern that nonalienated children in custody-disputing families are likely to be watchful, guarded, and vigilant. In perceiving and solving problems, they are inclined to avoid complexity, simplifying their perceptions of situations. Children who are not alienated are also likely to be more emotionally inhibited. Interestingly, all of these are probably good strategies for survival in the typical domestic “cold war” or “war zone” between their disputing parents (Johnston et al., 2005c). In sum, these findings suggest that individual children respond differently to their chronically disputing parents,


possibly due to prior personality predispositions. An angry, rejecting, and alienated stance towards one parent is one way of adapting, and a constricted, vigilant stance in an attempt to hold onto both parents is another. Both kinds of coping responses raise questions about whether they are likely to become enduring ways of relating to others and hence risk markers for different kinds of psychopathology, specifically character disorders, as they grow older.

Designing Interventions for Alienated Children Our research points to the need for differential diagnosis of the many strands that are woven together to make up the fabric of a highly conflicted custody dispute with a child who rejects a parent in order to unravel the distorted pattern of family relationships that put the child’s healthy psychological development at risk (Kelly & Johnston, 2001; Lee & Olesen, 2001). We eschew a simplistic focus on single or primary causes of an alienated child and an adversarial stance that polarizes the family around faultfinding, assigning blame, and metering punishment (Bancroft & Silverman, 2002; Gardner, 1998, 1999). Rarely does the child need to be precipitously relocated or subjected to physical restraints or a barrage of counterpropaganda. Instead, there is a need for collaborative legal and therapeutic interventions that are family-focused and include all parties involved in the dynamics (the child and both the aligned and rejected parents) in order to support divorced parents and rebuild their parenting capacities (Johnston, Walters & Friedlander, 2001; Sullivan & Kelly, 2001). Alienated children need a family-focused intervention that includes all parties, the child, siblings, both the aligned and rejected parents, as well as other family members (e.g., stepparents or grandparents) determined to be contributing to the dynamics. The goal is to coordinate co-parental functioning and to support each parent in providing the child with warmth, nurturance, and containment. In addition, the goal is to shift the child’s (and parent’s) distorted, rigidly held, polarized, and defensively split views of one parent as “all bad” and the other as “all good” into more realistic and measured ones, rooted in the child’s actual experience of both parents. This should be a pathway to the young person

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to develop a strong, positive, authentic, and whole sense of self and the capacity to form healthy, intimate relationships with others (Johnston et al., 2005c). There are five principles of effective intervention. First, a careful clinical assessment or custody evaluation is needed to identify an alienated child, distinguish alienation from realistic estrangement, and formulate the multiple interrelated factors in the family history, marital, and divorce dynamics that have contributed to the problem. Second, it is vital to ensure continuity, consistency, and coordination of professional involvement in the case and to guard against the insidious polarization and fragmentation within the family spreading among the professionals. Third, it is necessary to implement authoritative case management to preempt and manage the ongoing conflict and keep disputes out of the legal adversarial arena where the alienation is fueled. Fourth, early and timely interventions are critical to prevent entrenchment of destructive dynamics and to restore appropriate contact between the alienated child and rejected parent. Delays consolidate and reward the child’s phobic or recalcitrant stance. And fifth, structural and therapeutic interventions need to be directed at the systemic array of factors in the family that contribute to the problem.

Case Management of Alienation In accordance with the aforementioned principles, effective intervention in cases of alienation takes place within a legally defined framework (a stipulation, consent decree, or court order). The legal contract between the parties, or court order, specifies the roles of all professionals and provides an overarching, coordinated, rule-governed process for managing the ongoing family conflict and implementing the intervention as has been described in chapter 9. The simplest and most cost-effective therapeutic model for alienation cases is for an experienced family therapist to work with all members of the family, individually and in combination, on an as-needed basis. In the more complex and entrenched cases, few therapists are equipped or willing to undertake this kind of sole responsibility. Moreover, the task of forging a therapeutic alliance simultaneously with each of the opposing family members, without being dismissed as aligned with or biased against one or the other, may be


extremely difficult. Many clinicians declare that it is virtually impossible to withstand the emotional onslaught of this work without an ongoing consultant to help process the powerful counter-transference responses that are evoked. At the very least, a sole family therapist will need an arbitrator in place who can support the therapeutic work and undertake the necessary case management, including communication with the court and ongoing decision making about access arrangements with the rejected parent. A therapeutic team of professionals—with individual therapists appointed for the alienated child and each parent in addition to a co-parenting counselor/mediator—is often the preferred model in the more difficult cases; and it may be the only viable model when parents need individual therapy, or the child is especially emotionally troubled. However, a team is expensive, cumbersome, and vulnerable to intrateam conflict. When working with different members of the family, there are intense pressures for “splitting” among the professionals; that is, previously neutral, individual therapists are often induced to support and advocate for their client’s distorted perspective whether it be the child’s or one of the parent’s. For this reason, a therapeutic team needs to set up a way of communicating with one another at the outset to identify the alliances that begin to crystallize, check out the reality of disparate claims, and coordinate their efforts. Most importantly, prior to beginning therapy the court order should provide a temporary access arrangement for the child’s contact with the rejected parent to be implemented forthwith. It should be an arrangement that the child is expected to tolerate. The court order should also specify how changes may be made in parent–child access arrangements as the case progresses. A parenting coordinator may be appointed, or the court may continue to function in this role. If the family therapist is to maintain balance and equidistance with all family members, she cannot be responsible for determining the schedule of the child’s visitation with the rejected parent. Therapeutically facilitated contact sessions (conducted by the family therapist) that initiate or maintain access between the rejected parent and an alienated child in a comfortable setting are often the place to begin. The more neutral concept of facilitated contact is preferred to that of “supervised visits” in order not to stigmatize the rejected parent. Labels such

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as “supervisor” or “visit monitor” tend to reinforce the allegations of dangerousness made against the rejected parent. On the other hand, at the initial stages within such a setting, all family members need to feel that they will be protected: the rejected parent from false allegations, the aligned parent from dismissal of legitimate concerns, and the child from any psychological or physical harm. Ideally, these therapeutically facilitated sessions will gradually expand and transform into more regular visits between parent and child, independent of the family therapist.

Therapeutic Work with Family Members Both parents need to be engaged in the therapeutic work in order to support the alienated child’s access to the rejected parent. Siblings in a consolidated alliance need to be included but in separate sessions. The therapist’s ongoing dilemma is how to maintain a working alliance with all disputing parties as well as a balanced perspective in the face of their extraordinary polarization and demands for exclusive allegiance. The immediate question is how to involve reluctant, avoidant, hostile members in the reunification process. The Aligned Parent. Building a realistic, supportive thera-

peutic alliance with the aligned parent begins when the therapist seriously listens to and addresses each of his or her allegations about the other parent and the child’s physical safety and emotional well-being while with the other parent. The goal is to help aligned parents sort through these concerns, differentiating those worries that are realistic from those that are distorted by their own fears, lack of knowledge of, or inability to communicate with the other parent. This may include monitoring areas of concern that have not been clearly proven or dismissed. It also includes validating parenting strengths that have not been recognized or honored. Gaining the cooperation of the aligned parent involves addressing the issue of why the child should have a relationship with the other parent despite the child’s reluctance or refusal to do so and despite the other parent’s alleged limitations. The therapist explains that there are profound psychological consequences for children’s developing sense of self-esteem, comfort with their gender identity, and capacity for future relationships when children dismiss or


reject one of their biological parents, and shows how their child is specifically at risk. Furthermore, the therapist points out that an alienated child needs to learn to cope realistically with the “problem” parent, rather than avoiding the problem by running away and refusing to visit or speak to the rejected parent. Noting that there will always be difficult people in the world who pose a challenge for their youngsters—be it a parent, teacher, coach, or boss—the therapist explains that this is an opportunity for their child to learn a range of coping skills and good interpersonal judgment. Capitalizing on the aligned parent’s urge to rescue the child from the other parent, he or she is invited to protect their child in a new way by promoting independence and helping the child manage the relationship with the rejected parent. The hope and promise is that, compared to their parents, these children will grow up to make better choices and to be better able to protect themselves from victimization. Usually an aligned parent will ruefully agree that this is an important goal. For those aligned parents not persuaded by the above kinds of arguments, the therapist can also talk about the legal realities of their situation, pointing out that both parents have a legal right to have a relationship with their children and that children cannot terminate those parental rights. Moreover, the judge is bound to uphold parental rights unless there has been abuse or neglect. Noting that the custody evaluation and the court have determined that the rejected parent’s alleged deficiencies do not rise to the level of abuse or neglect, the conclusion is driven home that the child’s access to the rejected parent must occur. Pragmatically, it makes sense to take this opportunity to help their child learn to manage difficult family relationships with the guidance of a therapist and protections in place against realistic concerns. Aligned parents can be counseled to help their alienated children in a number of ways once they have voiced their willingness to actively support their child’s reengagement with the rejected parent. Through discussion and role-plays that pay attention to verbal and nonverbal messages, the parent is shown how to convey to the child that he or she will not be blamed and disparaged for seeing the rejected parent or dismissed and forgotten when gone. Specifically, first, the aligned parent needs to prepare the child for visits with the rejected parent, giving them precise details of the

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arrangement for the transfer and the return. Second, the parent needs to reassure the child that he or she (the parent) will be “OK–fine–safe” during the child’s absence. Third, parents are counseled not to make special plans and activities that the child will miss while he or she is gone. Fourth, the child should be invited to find ways of enjoying the visit. Fifth, the child must be confident that he or she will be welcomed back after the visit. The therapist should comment on any pattern of rude, obnoxious, or abusive behavior on the part of the child toward the rejected parent that has been observed or reported. To highlight the problem, the therapist may express concern, surprise, or even shock. Frequently, the custodial parent will totally blame the rejected parent for the child’s aggression. Without debating the issue, the therapist can point out that this kind of rude behavior by the child is not a helpful coping response to a difficult relationship and explain the negative consequences for the child of allowing him or her to be abusive to anyone. The aligned parent should be enlisted in the effort to manage the child’s behavior toward the rejected parent. One can do this by asking how the parent would respond if the child behaved that way to anyone else in the family. Not only is this an opportunity to teach the child good values and interpersonal skills, but it is also an opportunity to help the child feel emotionally safe and in more control of the situation. The therapist can elicit specific ways the parent can teach the child more civilized, appropriate responses to telephone calls, greetings, invitations, and other approaches by the rejected parent. If at all possible, the aligned parent can also be encouraged and expected to draw the child’s attention to and express appreciation for any good attributes of the child’s other parent. Some of the psychological forces driving the alienating parent can also be muted. For example, selective use of emotional support and acknowledgment of specific strengths can act as a salve to a narcissistically wounded parent. Or the therapist can allay fears about further loss by reminding them of the goals for parent–child contact (normalized visitation, not a change of custody). Where possible, the therapist tries to differentiate the child’s experience of the other parent from the aligned parent’s own anger and disappointment. A parent may be furious about an unexpected abandonment or a betrayal for


a new lover by the ex-spouse. Or, the aligned parent may have felt ignored and rejected. Typically, in response they believe the other parent will betray, ignore, or reject the child. The child’s refusal to visit, however, may be motivated by other factors. It may be a developmentally expectable reaction. For example, a 4-year old might resist visitation because of difficulty separating from a primary caretaker. Whereas a 7-year old child who refuses to visit his other parent may fear retaliation and abandonment by the aligned parent, a pre-adolescent might be choosing a stance that looks like alienation as a way of coping with an unbearable loyalty conflict in a chronically conflicted divorce. Hence, the aligned parent is helped to differentiate his or her experience from the realities of the child’s experience. Depending upon the parents’ capacity to tolerate dynamic interpretation, a therapist might gently explore the origins of aligned parents’ response to their child by connecting with their own early history of disappointment with a neglectful, abandoning, or abusive parent. The therapist can point out how early experience sets up unconscious expectations within them as to the uselessness or the dangerousness of the child’s other parent. Considering their own past, the therapist can engage them in a conversation about their child’s future and the long-term consequences of what it is like not to have another parent in his or her life. The Rejected Parent. Rejected parents are initially more

motivated to engage in therapy than are aligned parents. After all, they are seeking allies in the war, hoping to balance the powerful alliance against them that has been formed by their ex-spouse and child. They usually present as bewildered, angry, innocent victims of this alliance and blame the child’s alienated stance entirely on “brainwashing” by a malicious and embittered other parent. Many of the target parents (especially mothers) are particularly humiliated by the child’s rejection. The therapist can credit their good intentions in seeking to develop or reinstate a good relationship with their child and in assuming the responsibilities of parenting. Their feelings of sheer frustration can be validated; they should be assured that they are not disposable parents and that they do have something important to offer their child. In this way, the beginnings of a therapeutic alliance are formed.

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However, in empathically relating to them in this manner, the therapist should beware of inadvertently confirming their often distorted, simplistic view of the situation, especially their tendency to blame the problem entirely on the other parent. Instead, it is important to provide them with a more complete explanation of what has actually happened to their child in the context of the family and the contribution of both parents, including and especially their own, to the problem. Giving them a deeper understanding of the child’s alienated stance from a developmental and family perspective helps them focus on their child and have more empathy for the child’s plight, rather than seeing the child primarily as an extension or a mouthpiece of the other parent. Once rejected parents are involved in treatment, the therapist’s primary roles are as a coach and parenting counselor. Specifically, they need considerable encouragement and practical help on how to reach out and relate to their alienated child in ways that are loving, respectful, nonintrusive, and noncoercive. Rejected parents typically have a range of problems with their parenting, and they have seldom been given opportunity to practice their parenting. Some have not learned how to communicate, play with, and discipline their children. Alternatively, the rejected parent may try to overcorrect for perceived deficiencies of the aligned parent. For instance, the aligned parent may be seen as discouraging independence, too smothering, or too lenient and permissive. In reaction, the rejected parent becomes unusually demanding of independence, strict, and punitive. Rejected parents are counseled not to counter-reject the child with anger, nor with a punitive, controlling parenting style when the child is rude and uncooperative. This means not taking the child’s rage and hatred personally. Instead they are coached on how to relate empathically to the child’s feelings while placing firm limits on the child’s unacceptable behavior. They can be taught how to be self-protective within certain limits. Rather than submit or withdraw in the face of accusations, they sometimes need to defend themselves and allow the child to hear a different reality. They can be coached to use words to their child such as “This has been an angry time, it’s been difficult for you. I know your mother’s views are…I have a different viewpoint…You can have your own viewpoint!”


When a child is highly enmeshed and poorly differentiated from the aligned parent, the rejected parent needs to know how to entice and invite the child out into a separate relationship with him or her and to remain reliably available as the child practices separating. If it is too threatening for the child to use the “hated” or “feared” parent as a stepping stone in the process of separating from the aligned parent, a stepparent or grandparent can be recruited to undertake the care of the child initially, gradually involving the rejected parent. Deeper work with rejected parents involves helping them to take appropriate responsibility for the family dynamics that contributed to the child’s alienation. For example, a father may have been mostly absent or withdrawn from his children for several years or refused to pay child support or had a secret affair with his secretary that made his spouse feel unbearably betrayed and humiliated. A woman may have had a drinking problem, screamed a lot, and verbally abused her children during the marriage. Both parents may have engaged in protracted custody litigation, putting their children in the middle of a battlefield in which the only protection was an alliance with one side. The rejected parent may be further encouraged to admit culpability with his or her child and to make apologies where appropriate as well as promises and commitments for change in the future. Working with the Alienated Child. Alienated children are

likely to be controlling, distrustful, and easily disillusioned. They enter into therapy, often reluctantly, with a scripted story and a demand for the therapists’ immediate allegiance to their position. The child’s challenge is “Are you for me, or are you against me?” The therapist is placed in a bind—the cost of a therapeutic alliance with the child appears to require the sacrifice of his or her therapeutic objectivity. Moreover, the therapist remains on trial and any hint of subsequent disloyalty threatens to precipitate his or her dismissal by the child. How does one establish a therapeutic contract with the child and manage this ongoing dilemma? The therapist begins by carefully listening to the child’s story and responding with a sincere offer to explore the best ways of helping the child with his or her problem. During a thoughtful discussion about all the different ways he or she may be able to help, the therapist also talks about some of the constraints. This includes a simple and straightforward

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explanation of the legal contract or court order that governs the family intervention. Rules about confidentiality and lines of communication need to be explained carefully and perhaps illustrated in a diagram. Most importantly, the child is told that the therapist does not have authority over the visitation arrangements with the rejected parent. However, at the child’s request, he or she may help convey the child’s opinions and wishes to those who are responsible for making these decisions. Subsequently, the child should be shown that if reasonable and realistic requests are made, they are more likely to be granted. Moreover, in these instances the child will be credited with making good choices. In exploring the basis for children’s negative views and feelings toward the rejected parent, the therapist must listen closely to them and not argue with them. “I have heard you don’t want to have any contact with your dad? Tell me, what it is about Dad that makes you feel that way? When did you start to feel that way?” Invite them to take a look into the future. “How long do you think you are going to feel that way…months, a year or two, until you are a teenager, or forever?” Once they start verbalizing explicit things that they are angry about (for example, that their father no longer pays them an allowance), the therapist can explore some of the underlying feelings and issues as well as ways in which they have tried to make their needs apparent to the rejected parent. Oftentimes, there is an opportunity to validate their frustration and develop some new coping skills. On the other hand, if the child keeps reciting the same litany of complaints over and over, he or she can be asked to describe past interactions with the rejected parent in an effort to get beneath the alienated stance or ideology. Beware of asking the child to remember “any good times” because it is usually met with a total denial. Instead, to evoke more complex and realistic memories, the therapist might review family photograph albums or home videos with the child (provided that the rejected parent’s image has not been removed from these albums). To surface the sadness underneath their angry, rejecting stance, the therapist can ask the child about the kind of mother or father that most kids need, one that he or she would like to have. Many alienated children will express sadly a wish to have a “good mother” or “good father” in their lives, and it is especially insightful to hear them describe what they think a good parent would be like.


What the child is really worried about might have much more to do with the aligned parent than the rejected parent. The therapist should mentally note the extent of the child’s idealism and denial of any problem with the aligned parent. Rather than question or attack this defense, the best strategy is to comment on their loving concern for that parent, noting how careful they are not to hurt that parent’s feelings, and to ask what they imagine might happen if that parent’s feelings were hurt. In some cases the therapist may need to use some projective medium to elicit their fears, whereas in other cases, the child will be very clear about the consequences (such as the girl who had been thrown out by her mother when she no longer refused to visit her father). When children are in a sustained role-reversal, taking care of the aligned parent, the therapist needs to commend them for their extraordinary compassion, talk about what a heavy burden it is for a child, and express ongoing concern about whether they get enough opportunities “to be a kid and to do a kid’s things.” A feature of alienated children is their bland, strippeddown, black and white thinking and poor reality testing. To introduce the possibility of complexity, nuance, and a more differentiated and realistic way of thinking to the child, the therapist can comment on what seems incongruent: “Help me understand something…You say your dad is a really mean person…You also say he favors your half-brother and gives him everything. How does this fit…Does this mean that you feel he is only mean to you, and he can be nice to others?” In this way children’s perceptions can be validated at the same time that their conclusions or assumptions can be challenged. With children who are very concrete and nonverbal and those who continue to repeat the litany and rationalize their strident, negative views, a series of nonverbal exercises might be helpful. They can be invited to color a set of thermometers of feelings, showing the different feelings they have about specific events and people, or color in double images of a figure to describe how they feel on the inside and how they appear to feel on the outside. Others who have had a volatile history can be asked to draw a graph of their relationship with their parent, showing its ups and downs over time. They can be asked to give a report card and assign grades for significant events, especially a visit where different components of the visit are specified (for example, food, movie, talk with dad, and so forth). They can be asked

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to draw up lists of pros and cons for any proposed action or decision that evokes conflict within them. It is important to process specific distressful or traumatic memories these children have had in their families. For example, some have been witness to a traumatic separation (angry yelling, pushing, and shoving), or they may have discovered a parent’s infidelity. Some felt abandoned by the rejected parent, are furious about the remarriage of a parent, feel jealous of their stepsiblings, have gotten into a physical altercation with the other parent, or may have been truly burdened or terrified by an enraged, depressed, left-behind parent. In listening to the child’s story, note, however, that many alienated children have poor reality testing and care needs to be taken not to collude with the child’s distorted thinking and memories. This means that the therapist must have reality checks available outside of what the child brings into the sessions. Later, with the child’s permission, these incidents can be reviewed and reexamined in conjoint family therapy sessions. Facilitated Parent–Child Access and Conjoint Family Sessions.

Conjoint work involves sessions with parents, parent–child dyads, siblings, and other family members like stepparents and grandparents on an as-needed basis. Most commonly, the bulk of conjoint family sessions involve implementing a graduated visiting or access plan that has been ordered by the court or agreed upon by both parents. It may begin with therapeutically expedited contact during which time both child and parent are directly coached and supported in talking and playing together. With an extremely phobic child, it might involve reading letters or viewing photographs of the rejected parent or watching the rejected parent through a one-way mirror. In other cases, depending upon the readiness of the child to meet and deal with the issues, it may involve a piece of reconciliation work in which historical incidents that have contributed to the child’s alienation are surfaced and processed. Where the rejected parent has betrayed the child’s trust, he or she must be prepared to listen to the child’s anger and disappointment without defensive denial and projection of blame. Apologies and commitments for the future can then be offered by the rejected parent and can be the basis for a new parent–child contract that is subject to review by the family therapist.


As the intervention progresses, conjoint sessions are then used to prepare the child for visits without the therapist being present to facilitate and mediate. It is helpful to plan the details of the child’s transition between parents prior to the visit and to help orchestrate or choreograph the activities of the actual visits. Planning the details (games, movies, meals, shopping, rules of behavior, accompanying persons) of the child’s contact with a rejected parent provides a sense of safety and control for the child, preempts problems, and guards against disappointed expectations on the part of the rejected parent. It is also important to debrief family members after the child’s visit. For this reason, it is helpful to schedule conjoint appointments as close as possible to these visit transitions (shortly before or after). In some cases, the family therapist’s office may be the transition place, providing a neutral buffer for the child and an opportunity to debrief. Subsequent critical incidents between family members which are a source of disagreement and complaint need to be examined carefully without getting caught up in arguments about who is telling the truth and who is lying. Listening and reacting in a neutral manner without dismissing or validating each person’s extremely discrepant views is important. Specifically, the therapist should not discount the child’s negative stories about the visits which are often reported to the aligned parent. Rather, he should check out all versions of the incident and explore the possibility that there might be different ways of looking at what happened. Each parent is co-opted into the task of helping the child improve his or her reality testing and problem-solving capacities. The therapist can explain that sometimes when children have had a prior stressful or traumatic experience, contamination of present perceptions can occur, impairing their judgment. Different ways of coping can then be explored. On the other hand, when parents or the child have clearly broken the agreed-upon “rules of engagement,” the wrongdoer should be made accountable. In some instances, it will be impossible to determine exactly what happened and who did what to whom, at which time there is a need to disengage from the argument and focus on plans, rules, and protocols for the future. Continued debriefing on a regular basis is needed until the access arrangement has been well stabilized.

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Resolutions of Alienation and Factors Affecting Outcomes With respect to the prognosis for any kind of interventions, it is important to acknowledge that systematic research is absent, longitudinal studies with alienated children are scarce (Rand, Rand, & Kopetski, 2005), and long-term outcomes for adulthood are descriptive and preliminary (Baker, 2007; chapter 7, section on Alienation and estrangement). It is especially difficult to assess the outcomes with respect to the primary and most important goal and focus of our intervention—that is, restoring children’s divided sense of self and agency, and strengthening their identity and personhood. The secondary goal of intervention is easier to assess— restoring the child’s regular contact and a mutually acceptable, realistic relationship with both parents. Our research indicates that a range of outcomes for parent–child relationships can be anticipated through the later teenage and young adult years. Generally, it is prudent to have modest expectations for change, with about one half achieving positive outcomes of any kind. Full reconciliation between parent and child and normalized access is limited to a minority of children. This kind of success usually comes from early intervention and preventive measures, before the child’s stance and family dynamics have become immutable and bogged down in litigation. Also, the prognosis is good when the aligned parent is a relatively healthy, protective parent and the rejected parent is calm and patient in forming a bond with the child, and both encourage the child to separate from one parent and reunite with the other. In these families, alienation that develops for the first time during adolescence is most likely to spontaneously abate with the youth often expressing embarrassment and guilt about their former behavior. More commonly alienated offspring achieve a strategic or emotionally safe distance from a rejected parent where contact is briefer or less frequent and limited to more structured, mutually enjoyable activities (attending a movie, a game, or family celebration together) where their antipathy is muted. As they grow older, these youth learn to manage what continues to be a somewhat difficult or stormy relationship with limited expectations on both sides. Interestingly, this is more likely for those who are alienated from their mothers.


Of those half that are not able to reconcile, most will involve a rejected parent with more significant parenting deficits, often one who loses patience or interest and walks away from the situation or carries on the battle in court. In this event, family dynamics solidify, with neither parent relinquishing their worries or fears and the youngster’s alienated stance becomes more entrenched. Other stalemates occur when the aligned parent avoids, refuses, or sabotages any therapeutic intervention, sometimes relocating or disappearing—virtually abducting the child. Most of these youth cease contact with the rejected parent entirely over the ensuring 5–10 years, sometimes precipitously, at times gradually, especially those who are alienated from their fathers. Interestingly, they are likely to initiate a cautious rapprochement during their early adult years but quickly find their hopes dashed as their earlier experiences with the rejected parent are confirmed. It is important to note that these young people retain very cynical and negative views about enforced visits and especially about being forced into therapy with a succession of counselors who were supposed to make them want to see the rejected parent. (See chapter 7, section on Alienation and estrangement.) It is our experience that, rather than persist with the unwanted court-ordered access and therapy under these conditions, adolescents, especially, may be best helped by taking time out from the stressful situation, and the rejected parent is counseled to remain available for future contact when the teenager is more ready. Attempts at therapy and reunification are suspended and the youngsters invited to “get on with their own life” and make the choice of contact at a later date. Provided that these young persons are functioning relatively well with peers and in other family relationships, this may be a reasonable compromise. In these cases, rejected parents can be counseled on how to withdraw gently and leave the door open for future contact, stressing their unconditional love and availability. Indirect access through letters, cards, or e-mail, monitored or facilitated by a therapist, may be all that is possible. Interestingly, when teenagers feel more empowered and their autonomy respected, they are more likely to initiate a reengagement. Finally, a small subset of those with negative outcomes include children who continue the good/bad splitting during their adolescent years and precipitously reverse their

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allegiance, rejecting the previously aligned “all good” parent and embracing the previously rejected “all bad” parent. These flip-flops in parent–child relationships continue to occur and are probably reflective of borderline personality dynamics.

When a Change of Primary Residence is Warranted Only in those relatively rare situations where the aligned parent is found to be psychotic, severely character-disordered, or a serious abduction risk and has corresponding serious parenting deficits do we consider a change of custody as warranted. Even then, to be awarded primary residence the rejected parent should be assessed as providing a better alternative. This means that changes of custody should not be based solely on the child’s rejection of a parent, but rather on those factors that would customarily lead to removing the child from or supervision of contact with a residential parent. Such parent factors include severe clinical pathology in the residential parent (DSM-IV Axis I & II) and parental neglect, abuse, or both. Change of custody, however, should also be considered when the aligned parent continues to be blatantly emotionally abusive, for example, makes repeated malicious, unsubstantiated allegations of abuse about the rejected parent, attempts to inculcate negative beliefs in the child, or threatens child abduction (Barber, 2002). For alienated children, questions about the appropriate custodian need to be raised if the child has a severe psychological dysfunction (DSM-IV Axis I disorders), antisocial behavior, or evidence of emotional trauma due to neglect and abuse. In each of these cases, changing custody to the rejected parent or placement with a third party and supervised contact with the custodial parent should be seriously considered.

Conclusion In summary, what helps is early prevention of alienation, a good assessment of the multiple factors that contribute to alienation within the child and family, clear court orders that affirm parental rights and restore an appropriate access plan (one that the child can tolerate), ongoing case management, and family-focused therapy (not just parent–child


reunification). What hurts is to do nothing, long delays where the child has no contact with the rejected parent; draconian punishments and threats; “parentectomies” (severing the child’s relationship with the aligned parent abruptly); ongoing litigation in the adversarial legal system; and total disregard for the child’s ongoing distress or the teenager’s need to have some choice in those more difficult cases that are resistant to resolution.

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Child Sexual Abuse Allegations in Custody Disputes

14

Defining the Problem Child sexual abuse (CSA) is defined by victim and perpetrator components. The first component of the definition focuses on the child victim lacking the cognitive maturity to bestow consent for involvement in sexual activities. The second component focuses on the perpetrator’s age and power discrepancy with the child, and the motivation for engaging a child in sexual activity. The perpetrator’s motivation may involve sexual gratification or financial benefit. CSA includes activities of physical contact and noncontact, such as fondling of genital areas, oral sex, intercourse, or exposure to indecent acts; prostitution; pornography; and other sexually exploitive activities. It may involve the sexual exploitation of a child by an adult or by another child. Generally, child on child sexual

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activity is defined as abuse when sex is forced on one child by another, regardless of age difference, or when the age differential between children is at least 3 years.

Characteristics of Victims Although the sexual abuse of children occurs across all cultural, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups, children are at increased vulnerability to be exploited by child molesters when they live in homes where parents’ abilities to nurture and supervise are substantially compromised by violence, substance abuse, poverty, poor family relationships, and single-parent status (Kuehnle, 2002). The majority of sexually abused children do not disclose their experience of abuse during childhood. A meta-analytic study, compiling and analyzing data from multiple individual studies that met specific research quality criteria, conducted by London and her colleagues, found low reporting rates during childhood by victims of CSA (London, Bruck, Ceci, & Shuman, 2000). A review of retrospective CSA disclosure studies from 1990 onward concluded that two thirds of the adults alleging CSA did not make a disclosure during childhood. The disclosure rates were similar for studies that recruited adults with known childhood histories of CSA and adults from the general population. Findings from studies using sexually abused child subjects were also consistent with the adult retrospective findings and showed significant delays in disclosure by the majority of children. Using the same data, London and her colleagues (2005) also examined the rate at which disclosures of CSA were recanted during childhood to test the assertions that a substantial number of sexually abused children recant their disclosure and those threatened with violence are most likely not to disclose abuse. The researchers’ findings did not support these conjectures. Instead of high rates of recantation, London and her colleagues found that once children have made an abuse disclosure, they are likely to maintain their allegations during formal assessments. Discrepant cases (in which a child discloses before the formal interview but denies at the time of the formal interview) represented a small minority and were found to occur most commonly among very young children. The studies that reported the highest rates of recantation were found to be flawed by inadequate substantiation of subjects’ sexual abuse status. Further research on sexually

Chapter 14: Child Sexual Abuse Allegations in Custody Disputes

abused children’s recantations is needed because of the small number of studies that have addressed this issue (for analyses of these studies, see London et al., 2005) Although a number of experts assert that a substantial percentage of sexually abused children do not disclose abuse because of the method of coercion used by the perpetrator and fear of physical harm by the perpetrator (Carnes, 2000; Summitt, 1983), in their meta-analysis London et al. (2005) found either higher disclosure rates associated with incidents that were life-threatening and involved physical injury to child victims, or disclosure rates that lacked any significant relationship to method of coercion and threat of harm. Again, the research is sparse, and further studies are needed to examine types of threats (e.g., statements or actions) used during the commission of the assault to produce physical compliance versus those used to produce silence.

Characteristics of Child Molesters Sex offenders generally, and child molesters specifically, are much more heterogeneous as a group than anticipated by original research efforts or than perceived by the press and general public. Furthermore, research to date has not conclusively differentiated between factors that relate to the etiology of child molesters and factors that perpetuate such abuse. Theories related to learning of deviant patterns of sexual arousal through early developmental experiences (e.g., sexual victimization leading to later sexual offending) and theories related to faulty attachment are among the recognized explanations for the onset of child molesting, or at least for the increased propensity to engage in such acts. For example, recent research comparing convicted child molesters with community controls indicates that child molesters are significantly more likely to demonstrate some level of attachment anxiety in combination with cognitive distortions regarding adult–child sex, low victim empathy, and problematic parent-to-child bonding (Wood, 2008; Wood & Riggs, 2008). While theories on attachment disorder and faulty learning are two prevailing conceptual models for the development of sexual deviancy, some research is also now focusing on the possible neurobiological underpinnings of child molesting. Neurobiological theories suggest that the predisposition to offend sexually against children may not be expressed

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without some underlying neurological disorder that diminishes the control of deviant impulses (Kafka, 2008). Although most sex offenders are not charged or prosecuted for repeat acts of sexual deviancy, there is considerable public and legislative alarm about such risk, probably due to some especially heinous and high-profile cases. In the last 10–15 years, research regarding factors that are associated with sexual reoffending has been propelled by enactment in many states and other countries of legislation related to community registration and monitoring of convicted sex offenders and the involuntary detainment of “high-risk” sex offenders. This has contributed to the need to determine what factors are most likely to be associated with repeat sexual offenses. Meta-analytic studies have led to the conclusion that two factors represent the most serious risk for reoffending; namely deviant sexual interest and antisocial orientation. Deviant sexual interest is the enduring interest in, fantasies about, or urges to engage in illegal sexual acts. It is distinguished from acts of a more opportunistic nature (e.g., a college student who is able to manipulate his roommate’s 13-year-old sister into intercourse) that do not necessarily represent a preoccupation with deviant sexual interest. Antisocial orientation refers to a pattern of general rule-breaking, together with a history of impulsivity, instability, hostility, and substance abuse. There is some indication from this line of research that factors traditionally associated with the development of sexual offending (i.e., negative family backgrounds and internalization of psychological problems) are not as powerful in determining the risk of reoffending (Hanson & Morton-Bourgan, 2005). Incest offenders are generally considered to be a lower risk for reoffending than child molesters who offend against strangers or nonrelatives. However, those incest offenders most likely to repeat acts of sexual deviance tend to be highest in psychopathic characteristics (Kingston, Firestone, Wexler & Bradford, 2008; Gamache, 2008).

Allegations of CSA in Litigated Child Custody Cases Prevalence Although the actual occurrence of CSA is not represented by the national incidence figures, these estimated figures


reflect rising and descending shifts related to societal trends. During the 1970s when CSA became recognized as a significant societal issue, procedures for state data collection were implemented, and the increase in reported cases was reflected in escalating incidence figures (Kuehnle, 1996). Another significant shift occurred during the 1990s when CSA reports declined. Analysis of national incidence data showed a 26% decline in CSA reports nationally, and a 31–40% decline in substantiated reports (Finkelhor & Jones, 2004; Jones & Finkelhor, 2001). Research has not resolved whether the statistics reflect, among other factors, an actual decline, a change in reporters’ behavior, a change in investigators’ behavior, or policy and program changes in child protection agencies. However, other forms of child maltreatment do not match the decline in sexual abuse cases. Professionals speculate that one of the reasons for the decline is the intense focus on and severe punishment for perpetrators of CSA compared to other forms of child maltreatment. Research, however, has not been undertaken to provide empirical evidence for this conjecture. It is not known whether a similar shift has occurred for CSA allegations embedded in litigated child custody cases. Precise information is not available on the overall national or state percentages of litigated divorce cases that involve allegations of CSA. Although some experts claim that a high percentage of litigated child custody disputes are accompanied by CSA allegations, the available research is too limited to draw reliable conclusions (Kuehnle & Kirkpatrick, 2005). Authorities estimate the rate of false allegations of CSA range from 6% to 8% for calculated lying, or from 23% to 35% if criteria for false allegations are broadened to include inaccurate memories and false statements associated with suggestive questioning and socially desirable responding (Ceci & Bruck, 1995). Proportionally, more false accusations of sexual abuse may be made in the context of divorce compared to other situations because of the potential for parents to misinterpret their children’s behavioral signs of stress or for more malicious reasons, such as attempts to manipulate the court regarding custody of the child.

Children’s Behaviors Parents and inadequately trained mental health professionals may be vulnerable to misinterpreting children’s

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behaviors because of prevailing myths regarding behaviors exhibited by sexually abused children; as such, behaviors associated with a wide range of life stressors and traumas, or developmental changes, may be misidentified as indicators of sexual abuse. Many of the behaviors or symptoms often cited on non-research-based internet sites as consequences of CSA, such as nightmares, bedwetting, regressive and clingy behavior, or sexual behavior are not specific to sexually abused children and also occur among nonsexually abused children. Although some sexually abused children may exhibit problems with their internal self regulation, involving sleep, eating, toileting, somatic discomfort, ritualistic/compulsive behavior, and fears, these behaviors are not useful indicators of sexual abuse by themselves because they are so frequently exhibited by children in the general population (Poole & Wolfe, in press). Furthermore, children’s sexual behavior does not discriminate sexually abused from nonabused children. Within the general population, a wide range of sexual behaviors is commonly demonstrated by children, including: (a) masturbation to orgasm by children 8 months of age and older; (b) frequent massaging of genitals and rubbing bodies against furniture, toys, and other objects by infants and toddlers; (c) comparing one’s body and touching other children’s bodies by preschoolers (Davies, Glaser & Kossoff, 2000); and (d) playing games that involve sexual exposure by school-age children (Freidrich, 1998; Kelley & Byrne, 1992). Among children in the general population, sexual experimentation is triggered by a combination of common curiosity, knowledge acquired through the media or through conversations and jokes about sex, and the initiative of play partners. Because contact with a curious friend facilitates sexual play, children who have many or closer friends engage in more sexual behavior than other children (Poole & Wolfe, in press). Children inserting anything into another child or engaging in oral–genital contact, however, is rarely observed in the sexual play of children who have not been sexually exploited or exposed to highly sexualized content within their family. The process of “diagnosing” sexually abused children by symptoms is inappropriate and potentially misleading. Whereas children who experience sexual abuse may meet the threshold behavioral criteria for a variety of possible DSM clinical diagnoses, including mood disorders, anxiety


disorders, and dissociative disorders, sexually abused children do not uniformly exhibit a consistent pattern of diagnostic symptoms. Importantly, a substantial percentage of sexually abused children (21–49%) do not exhibit any symptoms (Kendall-Tacket, Williams, & Finkelhor, 1993). Some of the confusion over the identification of CSA based on child victims’ symptoms has developed from Summit’s (1983) description of the potential effects of sexual exploitation on children, which later became known as the “child sexual abuse accommodation syndrome.” This description of a set of five symptoms and behaviors, purported to occur consistently together (i.e., secrecy, helplessness, accommodation, delayed unconvincing disclosure, and retraction), suggested that sexual exploitation of children has consistent, predictable, and deleterious effects. This assumption has not been supported by the research, however. The view of sexual abuse as a trigger that sets off an internal process in the child, which surfaces as predictable behavioral and emotional symptoms, does not have an empirically based foundation, and this unsubstantiated belief may misguide parents, mental health professionals, and the courts. CSA does not result in the development of a syndrome of specific symptoms, but rather, it is a life event or series of events that will produce a broad range of behaviors in child victims. The event of sexual abuse interacts with a complex matrix of factors including the child’s personality and preabuse functioning, the child’s and family’s interpretation of the event, the identity of the perpetrator, and the abuse characteristics. The interaction of sexual exploitation and this matrix of factors will produce a myriad of responses, rather than producing consistent behavioral and emotional symptoms in all children (Kuehnle, 1996). Evaluators should never assume cause and effect associations between a single aspect of behavior and the occurrence or nonoccurrence of sexual abuse, nor rely on subjective assessment of the child’s “credibility” when assisting the court in determining whether a child is the victim of sexual abuse.

Development of Memory The survival of memories through long-term storage, the influence of traumatic memories on later behavior, and the recollection or repression of memories continue to be

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investigated. As noted by Howe (2000), within these three areas there exist science and pseudoscience, both of which may be presented as fact within the legal arena. Infants show the capacity for auditory, olfactory, and visual memory, but explicit verbal memories of nontraumatic or traumatic experiences from birth through the early toddler years are not retained by older children, adolescents, and adults. This phenomenon is referred to as infantile amnesia. Although there are individual differences in the age of people’s first memories as well as cultural differences in the average age of first memory, it is rare to remember events from before the preschool years (Klemfuss & Ceci, in press). The argument for a cognitive sense of self as the primary explanation for infantile amnesia is based on the idea that the very essence of an autobiographical memory is its relation to the self. Howe and Courage (1997a, 1997b) note that what appears to assist human memory is the change in the personalization of an event; there is a shift from a memory of an event that happened to an event that happened to oneself. Although the cognitive self begins to appear around 18 to 24 months of age, it may not be sufficiently developed to support autobiographical encoding as a retrievable memory until later. Regarding memory for events, there is an important distinction between semantic and episodic memory, which is essential for interviewers of children to understand. Semantic memory is defined as the long-term storage of an individual’s world knowledge, including definitions of words and the relations among them, concepts, and algorithms. The semantic memory for an animal, such as a giraffe, involves the knowledge that it is an African mammal and the tallest of the land-living species. In contrast to semantic memory, episodic memory is memory of specific events. The episodic memory for a giraffe might represent a specific visit to Animal Kingdom and seeing a giraffe using her long tongue to pull leaves from a tree. Episodic memory is central to any discussion of children’s eyewitness testimony because professionals are usually interested in the children’s recollection of a specific event (episodic memory), not their general knowledge (semantic memory). When allegations of child abuse are raised, children are questioned about specific events, which taps their episodic memories. However, children are most familiar with being questioned about information that taps their semantic memory.


Klemfuss and Ceci (in press) summarize the process that takes place within the three main phases of the memory system (i.e., encoding, storage, retrieval). These researchers report that not everything that is impinging on an individual’s senses actually gets encoded, not everything that gets encoded makes it into storage, what does get stored rarely remains in the same state at which it arrived, and not all of that subset that gets encoded and stored in long-term memory is retrievable. They note that a false memory is different from a lie in that the holder of the false memory truly believes the report is accurate. Preschool children lack most of the techniques to minimize the creation of false memories, have the slowest processing speed, and are at greater risk for forgetting, failing to retrieve, and having their original encodings altered by misleading suggestions.

Memory of Traumatic and Nontraumatic Events Many children exposed to trauma after about 3 years of age continue to remember their experiences over time, often in vivid detail, but a subset do forget or fail to report such experiences after long delays (Greenhoot & Tsethlikai, in press). It is important to remember that while many experiences of sexual abuse are traumatic, not all experiences of sexual abuse are distressing or traumatizing. Researchers continue to argue over whether memories for traumatically stressful events are processed in a substantially different way than for nontraumatic, stressful events. Proponents of the traumatic amnesia model assert that when children are confronted with trauma they (a) are unable to process the information, (b) employ the defense mechanism of dissociation, and (c) compartmentalize the unintegrated memory, which consists mainly of sensory perceptions and affective states (van der Kolk & Fisler, 1995). Current research, however, does not provide evidence that traumatized children experience amnesia for large periods of childhood, although they may tend to avoid thinking or talking about the details of past experiences, which could reduce memory accessibility over long delays (Greenhoot & Tsethlikai, in press). In contrast to the theory of traumatic amnesia, research on traumatic events, such as experiencing natural disasters, observing the murder of a parent, and

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witnessing school shootings, tend to be remembered quite well when experienced during childhood. Pynoos and Nader (1989) note that episodic memory involves reconstruction rather than exact reproduction of the memory for the event. For example, when Pynoos and Nader investigated the memory of elementary-school children exposed on their school playground to a sniper attack, the children were found to have altered their memory or spatial representation of the incident (i.e., how far they were from the direct line of fire) in order to alter their degree of life threat and possibly to minimize the renewal of traumatic anxiety and fear. As articulated by Greenhoot and Tsethlikai (in press), children and adolescents are found to forget traumatic events such as child abuse, and some evidence suggests that they might later remember these events in spite of earlier periods of forgetting. But there is little evidence to suggest that this forgetting is driven by forces like repression and dissociation, resulting in the formation of unconscious, indelible memories that can be later recovered. Rather, research indicates that the predictors of forgetting and remembering are generally consistent with research findings on memory for nontraumatic events and memory development. Children are most likely to forget traumatic experiences when they are very young at the time of occurrence, are not reexposed to the trauma or reminders of the event, and have autobiographical memory skills that are below average. For further information on stress, trauma, and children’s memory development, Howe, Cicchetti, and Goodman (2008) address neurobiological, cognitive, clinical, and legal perspectives related to these topics on children’s memory.

Children’s Suggestibility Children’s exposure to false information can interfere with their source monitoring (i.e., the process of identifying the origin of one’s knowledge—did I hear about it or did I experience it?) and influence the accuracy of their recollections. The most robust internal child factors associated with suggestibility are the child’s age and developmental level. Whereas young preschoolers (i.e., ages 3 and 4) are the most vulnerable to suggestive interviewing, 6- and 7-year-old children show significant increases in resistance to misinformation (Ceci & Bruck, 1993). The age at which children


reach adult levels of resistance is debated, with some studies finding children as young as age 10 to show this level of resistance. Despite increasing levels of resistance, under some circumstances older children, adolescents, and adults are vulnerable to suggestibility and contamination of episodic memory (Griesel & Yuille, 2007). Harris and her colleagues, however, remind professionals that many children show remarkable resistance to false suggestions and assert that practitioners, scientists, and laypersons sometimes lose sight of that fact given the strong attention currently devoted to the risk of false reports. Preliminary research indicates that factors such as selfconfidence, intelligence, and executive functions strengthen children’s resistance to suggestive questioning containing misinformation (Harris, Goodman, Augusti, Chae, & Alley, in press). Cultural factors may also influence vulnerability to suggestions. For example, Quas and her colleagues (1999) found that children from cultures that foster or require children’s agreement with adults may be more vulnerable to adult interviewers’ suggestions (Quas et al.,1999; Quas, Qin, Schaaf, & Goodman, 1997). Bottoms, Shaver, and Goodman (1996) provide evidence that children who believe in the devil may be more susceptible to suggestions about satanic ritual abuse. As noted by Harris et al., because the findings on individual internal and external factors associated with children’s resistance to misleading questions are preliminary, legal decision making cannot rely too heavily at this time on these findings. Children’s resistance to suggestion is often an interaction of individual child and interview factors. Some research suggests that interview factors are more important than children’s individual characteristics in determining resistance to suggestion (e.g., Finnila, Mahlberg, Santtila, Sandnabba, & Niemi, 2003). Garvin and his colleagues found that the combination of suggestive questions with social pressures created the highest number of testimonial errors, with children providing increasingly inaccurate information under such conditions (Garven, Wood, Malpass, & Shaw, 1998; Garven, Wood, Malpass, & Shaw, 2000). In investigating this type of interviewing technique, Garven and his colleagues reviewed the transcripts of interviews from the McMartin and other high profile preschool sexual abuse cases where children’s memories were found to be tainted

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by the interviews. The researchers found that interviewers in these controversial preschool cases had paired misleading information with social pressures, including tactics such as (a) other people, for example, informing the child that other children had already told; (b) positive consequences, for example, giving praise or approval for desired responses; (c) negative consequences, for example, criticizing a child’s undesired responses; (d) already answered, for example, repeating a question the child had already answered; (e) inviting speculation, for example, telling the child to speculate on what might have happened. Other unfavorable external interview factors that increase children’s suggestibility errors include interviewers asking numerous specific questions, repeating closed-ended or specific questions, using a format involving yes–no question pairs, and following the yes–no question by a request to describe the event (e.g., “Did Uncle Paul…?”; “Tell me about that”). With this last example, children are at risk to provide inaccurate and possibly confabulated information (Kuehnle, 1996; Poole & Lindsay, 1995). Within the past decade, appellate courts have overturned the convictions of a number of individuals accused of child sexual abuse (e.g., State v. Michaels, 1993) because evidence was largely based on the testimony of children whose reliability was determined to be compromised by suggestive interviewing techniques, and improper expert testimony admitted at trial. Submitted in the Michaels appeal was an amicus brief on suggestibility written by the Committee of Concerned Social Scientists, and signed by 43 memory researchers (for review of the amicus brief see Bruck & Ceci, 1995). For further information and two differing points of view on children’s susceptibility to suggestibility, see critiques by Ceci and Friedman (2000) and Lyon (1999). Although young children are the most vulnerable to misleading questions, even very young preschool children’s recall can be highly accurate when misleading questions and social pressure are absent and the interview contains the following components: the interviewer (a) is neutral and does not have a preconceived “hunch” or bias; (b) uses questioning that is open-ended rather than close-ended or suggestive; (c) avoids the use of repeated suggestive questions; and (d) does not introduce a motive for the child to make a false report (Kuehnle, 2002)


Interviewing Children As observed by Brown and Lamb (in press), the quality of children’s verbal reports may be influenced by characteristics of the children themselves, the events they have experienced, and, importantly, the ways in which interviewers attempt to elicit information. Getting young children to answer questions, especially questions about potentially traumatic experiences, is an extremely challenging task. While a child’s memory about an event may be undamaged, the greatest dilemma an interviewer faces is getting the child to report that experience without tainting the original memory through suggestive questions. Although the use of closed-ended questions (“Did it happen during the day or at night?”) and leading questions (“Did Uncle Jim touch your private?”) are generally the most efficient ways to get responses from children, the more false information that is provided in a question, the higher the risk that children will incorporate that false information into their reports and into their memories. Children may also provide social desirability responses that include false information when they are trying to please the interviewer or avoid anger or embarrassment. Furthermore, children often are unaware why they behave the way they do (“Why are you touching your private?”) and there is evidence that children frequently make something up if you ask them why they are doing something (see Wilson, 2002). As a result, asking children why they are acting in a particular way may lead to a child providing false information (Poole & Wolfe, in press). When interviewing children, evaluators should keep in mind the five central factors that are found to strongly affect the witness capacities of children ranging in age from toddler through elementary school-age (Lamb, Sternberg, & Esplin, 1994; Poole & Lindsay, 1995, 2002). These five factors are (a) children’s immature linguistic skills; (b) very young children’s poorer memory for events, compared to adults’ memory; (c) children’s tendency to forget information more quickly than adults; (d) children’s tendency to be reticent and generally uncommunicative with unfamiliar adults; and (e) children’s familiarity with being tested when adults’ questions tap their semantic memory (e.g., “What is the name of this animal?”) but lack of familiarity with testing when questions tap the child’s episodic memory. Young children have more trouble and are vulnerable to acquiescing

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to adults’ leading questions when adults attempt to obtain information from episodic memory because children typically believe that adults already know the answers to all the questions they ask. Interviewers should also be aware that children need assistance in understanding the guidelines of formal interviews, which are typically novel experiences for the majority of children formally questioned (Kuehnle, 1996). Prior to beginning the substantive segment of the interview, school-age children are found to benefit from instructions on ground rules that address children’s tendency to acquiesce to adults’ leading, repetitive, and confusing questions. The general ground rules found in the most widely used interview protocols include instructions to (a) tell only what happened; (b) admit lack of knowledge rather than to guess; (c) remember that the interviewer was not present during the event of focus; (d) correct the interviewer when he/she misstates the facts; (e) not think they made a mistake if the interviewer asks a question more than once; and (f) tell all the details they can remember, even the ones that they think are unimportant (Lamb, Orbach, Hershkowitz, Esplin & Horowitz, 2007). Prior to beginning the substantive segment of the interview, school-age children also benefit from instructions and practice on how to provide narrative reports in order to lessen the number of questions asked by the interviewer. Strategies for enhancing children’s resistance to suggestibility and developing narrations to open-ended questions are less effective with preschool children, especially with children under the age 5 (Saywitz, Geiselman, & Bornstein, 1992). Lamb and his colleagues identified five types of questions (referred to as utterances) used by forensic interviewers conducting child protection investigations. Recall testing encompasses the first three categories of the interviewer utterances and recognition testing encompasses the latter two categories. Recall testing is more likely to elicit a higher rate of accurate information compared to recognition testing (Lamb, Orbach, Sternberg, Esplin, & Hershkowitz, 2002). The five types of interview utterances are the following: (a) Facilitator is a non-leading evaluator prompt for the child to continue his/her narrative (e.g., reinstatement of the child’s previous utterance, and nonsuggestive words of encouragement, such as “O.K.”); (b) Invitations elicit an


open-ended response from the child (e.g., questions, statements, or imperatives, such as “And then what happened?”); (c) Directive Utterances focus the child’s attention on details or aspects of the event that have previously been introduced by the child (the majority are WH-questions, such as “What color was that couch?”); (d) Option-posing Utterances focus the child’s attention on aspects of the event that the child has not previously introduced (these questions have also been called leading questions in other articles, and include questions such as “Were his clothes on or off?”; “Did he tell you not to tell?”); (e) Suggestive Utterances strongly indicate what response the interviewer expects from the child and/or assumes details that have not been mentioned by the child (e.g., “He told you not to tell, didn’t he?”). The majority of these questions would be identified by mental health and legal professionals as leading. When adults and children are asked to describe events from free recall (e.g., “Tell me everything that you remember…”) their accounts may be incomplete but are likely to be accurate. If children are prompted for more details with free recall prompts (e.g., “Tell me more about that.”), they often recall further accurate information. Open-ended prompts (i.e., Facilitator and Invitations) encourage children to provide as much relevant information as they remember based on their own experience. A caution to the benefits of recall testing is that open-ended questions can elicit inaccurate reports if a child has a tainted memory and has incorporated repeated misinformation into his or her memory (Leichtman & Ceci, 1995). When the interviewer shifts from recall to recognition testing, the probability of error rises significantly. With recognition testing (e.g., Option-Posing Utterances, such as “Did his finger touch the inside or outside of your private?”), there is greater pressure for the child to respond to the subject of interest presented by the interviewer, whether or not the child is confident of his/her response.

Interview Protocols Although forensic protocols for interviewing children that are generally accepted by the scientific community differ in some details, common elements can be identified. Brown and Lamb (in press) report that most importantly these protocols place primary emphasis on eliciting as much information as

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possible using open-ended invitations and questions that give control of the information-sharing process to children. Thereafter, interviewers are advised to pursue additional information or clarify ambiguous statements using the most open form of questioning possible, using focused questions only toward the end of the interview when needed. The importance of establishing rapport and the ground rules are universally highlighted, and practice interviews about neutral topics are widely recommended, as identified in the above paragraphs. Currently, there is no single structured interview protocol that has been adopted by the majority of forensic mental health evaluators for use to interview alleged child victims of sexual abuse. Further, the numerous Child Advocacy Centers throughout the United States, where many forensic child interviews are conducted, have not joined together and adopted a single interview protocol. A large body of empirical research, however, strongly supports the use of an interview protocol developed by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) by Lamb and his colleagues. The NICHD protocol appears to currently represent the “gold standard” for a forensic child interview because of its solid research base (Lamb, Hershkowitz, Orbach, & Esplin, 2008, Sternberg et al, 2002), which is absent or scant with other established protocols. American Professional Society on the Abuse of children, 1990; 1995. The NICHD protocol is a highly structured investigative tool designed to translate empirically based research guidelines into a practical instrument for use by forensic interviewers. The protocol includes the creation of a supportive interview environment (presubstantive rapport-building), adapting interview practices to children’s developmental levels and capacities, preparing children for their task as information providers (teaching communication rules, training children to report event-specific episodic memories), maximizing the interviewer’s reliance on questions that tap children’s free recall memory, using option-posing questions only to obtain essential information at the end of the interview, and eliminating suggestive practices (Lamb et al., 2002) ). The interview protocol includes a sequence of nine nonsubstantive and substantive phases, and uses the widely accepted funnel approach in which interviewers begin with openended questions that elicit narrative information, proceed to more direct questions with caution, and then move the


interview back to open-ended probes that again elicit narrative information. Preliminary findings by Lamb and his colleagues indicate that child protection (CP) interviewers who utilize the detailed NICHD protocol, compared to CP interviewers who improvise, retrieve more information using open-ended questions, conduct better organized interviews, follow focused questions with open-ended probes (pairings), and avoid more potentially dangerous interview practices (Lamb et al., 2002). The NICHD protocol may offer mental health evaluators a tool for decreasing false positive and negative conclusions that are based on poorly conducted interviews.

Distinguishing Children’s Accurate from Inaccurate Narratives In a review of the research on CSA substantiation decisions rendered by mental health evaluators, Herman (2005; in press) raised significant concerns about the reliability, validity, and accuracy of evaluators’ clinical judgments about uncorroborated allegations of CSA. Herman concluded that at least one fourth of professional judgments about uncorroborated allegations of CSA are erroneous—either false positive errors (wrongful substantiations of false allegations) or false negative errors (failures to substantiate true allegations). On the basis of Herman’s findings, when parents’ uncorroborated report is the only data available to support their child’s verbal statement, there is reason to be conservative in professional judgments and testimony. More specifically, evaluators should be aware of the factors that influence the accuracy of mothers’ memories of conversations with their preschool children (Bruch, Ceci & Francoeur, 1999). Children with tainted memories, who inaccurately believe their false statements, may be particularly difficult to distinguish from children who are telling the truth. Not only do children with contaminated memories provide the same amount of embellishments to their stories (sometimes more) as do children who have not been suggestively interviewed, but they also tend to intertwine true details about the original event with the false details. Therefore, just because a child mentions some details about an event that an adult knows to be true does not mean that all the details for the event provided by the child are accurate. At times, children with uncontaminated and accurate memories appear to be

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less credible than those whose memories are contaminated and inaccurate (Klemfuss & Ceci, in press). Edelstein, Luten, Ekman, and Goodman (2006) found that when college students viewed statements of children who were either truthful or coached to lie, their ability to discriminate groups of children was no greater than if they had flipped a coin. Also, when children are motivated to lie (to cover up their own transgressions) even professionals trained to detect deception are generally unable to reliably distinguish liars from truth-tellers (Leach, Talwar, Lee, Bala, & Lindsay, 2004). In general, mental health professionals should be cautious in their reliance on parents’ descriptions of their children’s behavioral changes because these descriptions are not always complete or accurate (Poole and Wolfe, in press). Perceptions of children’s behaviors may be distorted by cognitive bias, such as “illusory correlations,” which is the tendency to believe that two events are associated when, in fact, they are not, and “confirmatory bias,” which is the tendency to attend to information that confirms one’s preconceived belief and to ignore the data that negates one’s belief. For example, owing to illusory correlations, a parent in a custody case may extend the belief that viewing adult pornography or sleeping or bathing with one’s preschool child are markers of pedophilia and extend this conclusion to a belief that the other parent is sexually abusing their child. Because of confirmatory bias, some parents in custody cases expect their children to be anxious and fearful when visiting the other parent. As a result, they may notice only the times their children’s behavior deteriorates following a visit with the other parent and ignore reports by collateral sources that the child appeared happy and relaxed during the parent–child visitation.

Mental Health Professionals’ Roles in CSA Child sexual abuse allegations require mental health professionals to take on different roles and responses. These roles inevitably involve mental health professionals in different relationships: with the victim or suspected victim, with the perpetrator or suspected perpetrator, with family members, and with the institutions—social service agencies, police, and


courts—charged by society with investigating and responding to CSA allegations or substantiations (Clark, in press). The roles of mental health professionals in cases of CSA have both ethical and technical requirements. The need to maintain integrity of purpose and objectivity, and to avoid conflicts of interest, has been emphasized in professional ethics codes, such as those of the American Psychological Association (APA, 2002) and the National Association of Social Workers (NASW, 1996). In practical terms, the restriction against entering into multiple and conflicting roles that might impair the professional’s objectivity, competence, or integrity means that ordinarily, the functions of forensic evaluator and treatment provider should be kept separate. As observed by Clark, a child’s therapist who takes on the role of forensic evaluator must contend with the likelihood that the evaluation and testimony, when it is given, may be tainted by the therapeutic alliance formed with the victim and by the advocacy stance that a therapist ordinarily entails—or the likelihood that expert testimony may be viewed as biased, rather than as an objective report of the science. Similar concerns arise for the forensic examiner, who takes on an additional role as a therapist. The professional mindset required of a forensic evaluator and the advocacy position that emerges from the therapeutic alliance are inherently in conflict. In addition to identifying and separating professional roles, mental health professionals must decide whether they possess the training to conduct child custody evaluations interwoven with questions of CSA. In a review of the literature, Herman (2005) addressed issues of evaluator competency and provided evidence that many practitioners lack adequate levels of training, knowledge, and skills to perform high-quality forensic interviews of children or to adequately describe to legal decision makers the complexity in distinguishing true from false allegations of sexual abuse. Prior to accepting a court appointment, the custody evaluator must decide whether he or she has the expertise to conduct any or all components of the evaluation (Kuehnle & Kirkpatrick, 2006). For example, the custody evaluator may decide to conduct (a) all components of the custody evaluation and allegations of CSA with or without consultation; (b) all components of the custody evaluation and assessment of the alleged child victim, with another expert consulting or conducting the assessment of the alleged sexual offender; (c) all components

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of the custody evaluation and the assessment of the alleged sexual offender, with another expert consulting or conducting the assessment of the alleged child victim; or (d) decline to take the case altogether. Once the evaluator has identified the parameters of his or her role and met all of the obligations of a forensic evaluator (for further details see Kuehnle & Kirkpatrick, 2005), it is imperative that the evaluator work from a conceptual framework to review and organize the gathered data (Kuehnle, 1996). A conceptual framework using multiple hypotheses can control for evaluation flaws involving confirmatory bias through the delineation of rival hypotheses. When the special issue of alleged CSA accompanies a litigated child custody evaluation, the motives underlying the allegations should be examined and the development of a chronological timeline can be illuminating. For example, does the allegation of CSA spring forth from a parent demonstrating appropriate protection or manipulative hostility, a child’s attempt to protect a parent, or a child’s attempt to protect oneself? The following list is an example of potential hypotheses (Kuehnle & Kirkpatrick, 2005): (a) The child is not a victim of sexual abuse, but a sincere, hypervigilant parent inaccurately believes her/his child is the victim of sexual abuse; (b) The child is not a victim of sexual abuse but a parent is using the allegation of sexual abuse to manipulate the court system during child custody litigation; (c) The child is a victim of sexual abuse, but because of misguided loyalty will not disclose his/her abuse; (d) The child is not a victim of sexual abuse and is credible, but is estranged from the identified parent perpetrator and has misperceived an innocent or ambiguous interaction; (e) The child is a victim of sexual abuse and is credible. This organizing format, which utilizes hypotheses, allows the evaluator to systematically analyze data and, upon completion of the evaluation, to present information to the court in a clear and logical manner. The various hypotheses and the data that support each possibility should be clearly described in the evaluator’s written report. The evaluation should further reflect an understanding of nomothetic data obtained through research and whether or not this data fits the unique idiographic characteristics of the specific child, family system, or parents.


Addressing the Ultimate Issue and Recommendations There remains intense debate regarding the evaluator’s position on accepting an appointment order that directs him/her to answer the ultimate issue (i.e., whether events of CSA actually did or did not occur). The authors of this book support the position that it is not within the psycho-legal role of the evaluator to answer the ultimate issue. The evaluator’s role is to assist the court by providing data on the strengths and weaknesses of the allegation, not to determine the truth of the sexual abuse assertion. Some authoritative sources have argued that, given the current lack of a reliable scientific foundation for determining the occurrence of CSA following an allegation, it is irresponsible or even unethical for forensic evaluators to offer expert opinions about whether or not abuse has occurred ((Melton, Petrila, Poythress, & Slobogin, 1997; Herman, 2005; see Myers & Stern, 2002 for dissent). It must be emphasized that while there is some debate over whether the forensic evaluator should answer the ultimate issue during testimony, therapists should never do so. Mental health professionals acting in the role of therapist do not have the breadth of information to answer the ultimate issue on whether a child is a victim of sexual abuse, regardless of the statements made by the child to the therapist. On the basis of the court’s finding on the ultimate issue, recommendations should focus on interventions specific to the child’s needs and parents’ deficits in these complex cases. Custody and visitation determinations will be shaped by findings such as child abuse, one parent alienating the child from the other parent, the child’s estrangement from a parent due to that parent’s behavior, and other dynamics. In cases where a parent has been separated from a child as a result of a false positive finding of CSA (e.g., the child was inaccurately identified as abused), the evaluator will need to craft a reunification plan specific to the child’s age, unique characteristics of the child, and the strengths and weaknesses of each parent. Whether a parent has intentionally used a claim of CSA to manipulate the legal system should weigh heavily on custody considerations. In cases where the child is found to be a victim of incest perpetrated by a parent, the evaluator will need to craft a treatment plan specific to

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the age of the child, the relationship between the child and incestuous parent, the relationship between the parents, symptoms of trauma, and the relationship between the child and the non-sexually-abusive parent.

Summary Implications of CSA Evaluations National incidence figures do not adequately represent the vast numbers of children who are sexually abused. Research indicates that most children do not disclose their abuse and that children under certain conditions may make false allegations of sexual abuse. When mistakes are made in the identification of sexually abused and nonsexually abused children, victims may continue to be abused throughout their childhood, or nonsexually abused children may lose a nurturing parent and grow up believing they have been victimized by a person they have loved. When mistakes are made, adults and teenagers may lose their freedom to incarceration and branded for life as a sex offender, or child molesters may be left free to victimize other children. Because of the deleterious consequences that are associated with false positive or false negative conclusions, evaluating children who are alleged to have been sexually abused should be conducted only by specially trained mental health professionals. Custody evaluators who are cavalier in their agreement to conduct a child custody evaluation embedded with allegations of sexual abuse are acting recklessly and unethically when they have little training in sexual offenders, CSA victims, alienation, false allegations of CSA, and little, if any, training in forensic interviewing of children.

Appendix


A Appendix

Guidelines for Initial Assessment High-Conflict Parents 1. General Impressions ■ Appearance, behavior, ways of relating to interviewer; who referred; major concern in coming for service. In recording interviews, use the client’s own words and describe nonverbal behavior as much as possible; record interviewer’s emotional and attitudinal response. 2. Dispute-Specific Assessment of Family ■ Issues under dispute, length of dispute, precipitating factors and attempts at solution; stage of property and financial settlement

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Appendix

■ Role of stepparent (and significant others including extended kin, friends, therapists, attorneys) in agitating, moderating, or resolving interparental disputes ■ Role of child in the interparental disputes. Include child’s reactions to witnessing conflict/violence, child’s understanding of content of conflict, child’s involvement in conflict or attempts at resolution. How central is this child in the parental disputes? ■ Domestic violence. If relevant, describe the first, worst, and a typical incident of physical violence between parents. Note precipitating factors (if any), who initiated first act of violence, response of the partner; escalation (if any), presence of third party (especially children), physical and emotional consequences, calls for help and response of third party. Note involvement of drugs and alcohol by either party to the violence. 3. Historical Material ■ Socioeconomic status and background; occupational, economic history and ethnic background of parents ■ Family constellation with sibling series and position; grandparents’ marital history ■ Parent’s own growing up years—the best and most difficult times; significant losses; relations with siblings; major pertinent events and illnesses; note especially any history of violence between parents and history of child abuse; school and social adjustment, extracurricular activities, friendships, dating and early work history ■ Psychiatric history —therapy, hospitalizations; any evidence of longstanding psychological illness or acute exacerbation of symptoms immediately prior to or since separation ■ Marital history. previous marriages or extended liaisons; premarital or extramarital pregnancies; courtship, how parents met, length of courtship, reasons for marriage and expectations; age of each parent at marriage, at birth of first child; course of marriage, sexual adjustment, separations, sources of conflict and gratification, major events and stresses including work history and any significant shifts. 4. Divorce History ■ Events leading to marital failure—when and why did marriage begin to fail? Was there a third party?

Appendix

Intensity of conflicts; how much physical violence? Emotional responses of parents and children, any significant others; who actually made the decision to separate; who filed the petition of dissolution ■ Separation—how and what children were told; how spouses prepared each other for separation, circumstance of separation, child’s understanding of situation; parents’ central affective response to the divorce experience, psychological consequences of separation; major defenses and coping mechanisms mobilized by each parent (separately or in alignment with one or more children) 5. Description of Child and Child history ■ Pregnancy—attitudes to becoming pregnant; history of miscarriage; parental reactions and neonatal history; child’s early temperament ■ Parental practices—recreation, leisure, disciplines, closeness; general parenting role—who did what; was there a primary parent? ■ Special stresses—birth or death or separation (prior to this separation) from a parent, grandparent or sibling; relocations; history of illnesses and accidents; hospitalizations and/or surgery: age, how long in hospital, reaction to the hospital experience, congenital conditions, medication ■ School history—age began kindergarten; reactions to leaving home, any school phobia; grades skipped or repeated, academic performance, special learning difficulties, difficulty doing homework and how handled ■ Social adjustment with adults, teachers, peers, (especially reactions to conflict situation); ability to work independently; special behavioral problems, acting out, truancy; extracurricular activities ■ Changes since separation—what behavioral and attitudinal changes have occurred? What emotional/psychological changes have occurred? 6. Assessment of Parenting Ability ■ Parent’s attitude/feelings for child (any guilt, resentment)? Any particular psychological meaning of child to parent? What is the style of the overt relationship with the child (conflict-laden, cooperative, distant, warm)? What is the quality of the more unconscious

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Appendix

■

■ ■ ■

relationship (identification with child, needs child for scapegoat, for nurturance)? Parent’s understanding—parent’s cognitive understanding of child’s needs; parent’s sensitivity to child’s needs (intuitive understanding, actual awareness of needs, real and perceived) Parent’s coping—what is parent’s usual style of coping with child’s needs and demands (avoid, deflect, ignore, punish, impatience, desperation)? Overall estimate of parenting—characterize type/style of parenting (benign neglect, overprotective,“good enough,” very competent, loving) Critical incidents—note reported or suspected child abuse, physical, psychological, sexual, incest

7. Assessment of Parent–Parent Relationship ■ Attitudes and feelings for each other—bitterness, rage, or mixed, intensity of these feelings; extent parent still thinks about/obsess about the marriage/divorce/ spouse, yearning for the past; estimate how resolved feelings are for spouse ■ New beginnings—to what extent does parent yearn to be married; to remarry? To what extent has parent established a separate life (new friends, new relationships, job, education, hobbies)? ■ Contact/communication between parents—how much, what is the content of this communication (child issues only; child issues/ex-spouse’s family/discuss their feelings for each other; whether they have sexual relations)? 8. Current Environment and Family Situation ■ Custody and visitation arrangements; composition of immediate and extended family: who is living with whom, and where; sleeping arrangements ■ Work situation; financial situation; physical setting— home and neighborhood; note changes and social mobility ■ Child’s reactions to going to and returning from each parent’s home; visiting and its ambience, routines, discipline ■ Sibling relationships; family activities (as a family); degree of social isolation or contact with the community,

Appendix

extent of external supports—extended families, social contacts for parents and children.

Guidelines for Child Assessment 1. General Impressions ■ General topics discussed; affect expression and control during interview; subjective response to child; what did the child talk about? What did the child play with (e.g., drew, then played with dolls)? ■ What was the content of the child’s play or fantasy expression (e.g., created family of four with dolls and had them go through a normal day, with one little girl doll getting into trouble and getting punished by mother doll; with father doll disagreeing but doing nothing; or, drew pictures of brightly colored butterflies)? ■ What was the central fantasy theme and/or preoccupation of the play or of what child talked about? What was the style of the play or verbal communication (e.g., obsessive, repetitious, scattered, intense/concentrated, joyous)? Three wishes: what did child say, do, and how reacted? ■ What was the child’s predominant mood in the session (e.g., unhappy, needy, wistful, anxious)? What affect was expressed/observed in the session, and how intense was it (e.g., anger, fear, worry, love)? How was the affect expressed or reflected (e.g., child threw animal; or in the drawings; or little girl doll expressed verbally)? To what or whom was the affect directed? ■ How much control does the child show/feel regarding expression of affect (e.g., out of control, wild, desperate; anger is tightly controlled; child in control of affect; uses to manipulate parent, etc.)? Conscious awareness of loneliness, pain, anxiety in self, siblings, and parent 2. Specific Reactions to the Divorce/Parental Disputes/ Abduction ■ Child’s response to and experience with the separation/ divorce/abduction; affective response; thoughts, fantasies, and behavioral response; child’s understanding of the separation/divorce; how child understands

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Appendix

the various or conflicting explanations, private ideas regarding divorce or abduction ■ Child’s perception of marriage, relationship to parents over course of time prior to separation; guilt or fantasized responsibility regarding causing divorce/parental disputes/abduction, degree of relief or anguish over separation from and reunion with parent, any fantasies or statements indicating physical or sexual abuse prior to or subsequent to parental separation/abduction ■ Child’s response to conflict and violence; child’s understanding of parents’ disputes and memory of violent incidents; emotional and behavioral responses to discussing parental discord/violence (amount of denial, avoidance, anxiety, anger; assignment of blame; use of fantasy) 3. Child’s Relationship with Parents and Others ■ Quality of feelings/attitudes and attachment to both parents; specific material regarding loyalty conflicts/ temporary or ongoing allegiances; avoidance of preferences; current relationships with siblings ■ Any unusual alignments or special conflicts; empathy for parent; to what extent does this child feel parented? Child’s response to parent’s distress or psychopathology ■ Supportive figures and activities currently available and used, degree to which child has turned for support to extrafamilial figures, particularly teachers and peers; relationships with grandparents and other extended family members 4. Child’s Reactions to Current Visiting/Custody Arrangements ■ Visitation or custody patterns as perceived by the child; child’s desires regarding custody and visitation ■ Ambience of the home (or homes) as perceived by the child; response to custodial parent working outside the home; availability of the parent(s) psychologically, which parent child perceives as supportive, reversal or roles with parent. 5. Coping and Symptomatology ■ Defensive and adaptive resources employed to deal with stress; coping strategies; changes or presence

Appendix

of acute symptomatology, exacerbation or return of chronic symptoms; evidence of regression; premature sexual activity; pseudomaturity; drug/alcohol use; delinquent behavior. 6. Child’s Attitudes and Participation at School, with Peers, and in Extracurricular Activities ■ Child’s perspective, how well he/she gets on with peers; how many friends; pride in school/sports achievements and pleasure from participation

Formulation of the Impasse and its Impact on the Child 1. What components of the impasse prevent the family from settling the dispute? a. External—extended family, significant other, and legal provocation of the dispute; economic hardship or socio-cultural factors which help lock the impasse. b. Interactional—polarized, negative images of the ex-spouse; ambivalence about separation; special psychological significance of child; adaptive and defensive use of each other which creates the impasse. c. Individual—intrapsychic conflicts and needs of the individual members, psychopathology; or special needs of the child (such as illness or disability). 2. What is the impact of the dispute and the impasse on the child? Evaluate to what extent the dispute and the impasse are related to child’s symptomatology; assess the potential effects on the child’s development if the dispute/impasse is not resolved. 3. What are the strengths and resources available within the family and their social system to help resolve the dilemma? For example, relevant parenting capacities, availability of others, capacities of the child, and the possibility of mobilizing these.

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Summary of Empirical Studies Highly Conflicted and Violent Custody Disputing Samples A. The first high-conflict custody disputing sample of parents disputing the care of their children consisted of 80 families with 100 children (ages 1 to12 years) referred from San Francisco Bay Area Family Court Services from 1982–84. The sample was predominantly low-middle income and the ethnic composition was 63% Caucasian, 13% Hispanic, 8% AfricanAmerican, 7% Asian, and 7% other; one third was ending mixed racial marriages and had been separated for on average 2 years. In addition to clinical assessments, standardized measures of parents’ relationships (CTS, Straus, 1979); and child

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adjustment (CBCL, Achen bach & Edelbrock, 1983) were used. The families were provided with about 20 hours of counseling and mediation services (one half in individual counseling and one half in small groups) on a sliding scale fee over a 9-month period and followed up 2–4 years later. Empirical studies were examined (see Appendix Part C) on child adjustment (#1, #2) and outcomes of intervention (#3). B. The second high-conflict and violent sample comprised

90 families with 100 children between the ages of 3 to 14 years whose divorcing parents were referred by San Francisco Bay Area Family Court Services from 1989 to 1993. All the families had failed mediation and were continuing to dispute in family court; they were living with custody and visitation orders imposed by the court. One third had been through custody evaluations. The ethnic composition of the sample was 83% Caucasian and socioeconomically very diverse. In three fourths of the families there had been significant domestic violence between parents as well as ongoing disputes over children’s custody and visitation. On average, parents had been separated for 3 years. They provided research data in exchange for free or reducedfee confidential counseling and mediation (average about 25 hr per family). Following an assessment phase that included all family members, families were randomly assigned to three modes of service: counseling for parents only, counseling for parents and children as individual families, and counseling for children in groups with parents seen for consultation. These datasets include clinical records of interviews with parents and children, family history reports, child developmental histories, structured observation sessions between each parent and child, and detailed accounts of the family violence. Standardized measures included the CTS (Straus, 1979); the BSI (Derogatis & Spencer, 1982), CBCL (Achenbach & Edlebrock, 1983) and various projective measures (Rorschach, and sentence completion tests). Empirical findings were reported (see Appendix Part C) on child adjustment and custody outcomes (#6, #10, #14,#22), family violence (#13, #16, #17, #18,#27), alienation (#25, #28, #29, #30), and outcome of interventions (#15). C. A 15–20-year longitudinal follow-up study was undertaken

of a representative one third of the children in the above sample (B). To date, 75% of the families have been located

Appendix

(37 young adults from 22 families whose ages ranged from 19 to 33 years) and interviewed by the same counselor who saw them originally. Interviews with the young adults and their parents, where available, were recorded verbatim. The young adults also completed structured questionnaires on their educational and occupational accomplishments, health history, and family relationships in addition to standardized measures in several domains—their symptoms of emotional distress (BSI, Derogatis & Spencer, 1982), conflict tactics with partners (CTS, Straus, 1979), and adult romantic relationships (Bartholomew & Horowitz, 1991; Brennan, Clark, & Shaver, 1998; Hazan & Shaver, 1987). The findings from the follow-up are provided in chapter 7 of this book. D. A third sample was of families undergoing custody evaluations , drawn from an archival database of custody

evaluation collected over a decade from 1989 through 2001. It comprised 50 divorcing families with a child age 13 years and younger whose divorcing parents were referred for custody evaluations (by stipulation of the parents or by order of the family court judges in the San Francisco Bay Area) to three private psychologists. All the families were identified by their attorneys or the courts as unlikely to resolve their issues without an extensive, in-depth examination. The ethnic composition was 93% Caucasian, 90% had at least some college education, and they were relatively advantaged economically in that they could afford the high cost of a private custody evaluation. On average, parents had been separated for 2 1/2years, after a marriage of 7 years. The data consist of extensive interviews with each family member, which included developmental histories of the children and their relationships with each parent, observations of the interactions between family members, information from collateral professionals and others close to the family, reviews of written documentation provided by attorneys and parents, and full batteries of psychological tests with all parents and with children when indicated. The battery included intelligence tests (WAIS[3], the WISC[3] or WISC[R] and personality tests Rorschach, TAT (1973) MMPI (2), 1989), projective drawings, and for some subjects, sentence completion tests. Evaluations typically required 30-50 hr of data collection for each family. (See empirical studies of alienated children and their parents in Appendix Part C, #27, #28, #29, #30.)

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Normal Community Sample This sample consisted of 184 families with 351 children, ages 0–16 years drawn from Marin County between 1982 and 1986. Recruitment was by means of letters sent to parents who had recently filed for dissolution and by community outreach to professionals and institutions that serve divorcing families (schools and attorneys). Most of the parents were Caucasian (93%) and were predominantly middle class. On average they had been separated for about 8 months at intake. Both parents and their children had agreed to participate in the research in exchange for brief preventive counseling. The first third were seen in individual counseling (for about 12 hr), the second third in small groups (about 20 hr), and the last third in brief consultations (5 hr). Follow-ups were conducted 1 and 2 years later. The data set includes clinical records of interviews with parents and children, family and child history questionnaires, and structured observation sessions between each parent and child and at each follow-up. Standardized psychological measures included Depression/Anxiety Inventories (Beck, 1981), and measures of interparental hostility, conflict and cooperation (Ahrons, 1981). With respect to the children, it included the CBCL (Achenbach & Edlebrock, 1983) and various projective measures (Divorce Apperception Test and sentence completion tests). Empirical studies (see Appendix Part C) yielded findings on custody outcomes (#7), predictors of divorce adjustment (#5, #8, #9, #11, #12, #25), alienation (#25), and evaluation of services (#4).

Parental Abduction Samples Parental abduction research involved a series of studies that began with a documentary analysis of all 634 parental child-stealing cases from files opened by the district attorney in two Northern California counties between 1987and 1990. In the second phase, a small representative sample of 50 families was drawn from the 1990 district attorney’s records of the larger sample, and in-depth interviews were conducted and psychological tests administered to 70 parents from 50 families, 35 men and 35 women, half of whom were abductors and half of whom were left-behind parents. The ethnic make up of this sample was 53% Caucasian,

Appendix

24% African-American, 13% Hispanic, and 10% other; socioeconomic status was primarily low. The demographic, psychological, and dispute characteristics of these abducting families were compared with similar data from 114 parents of 57 high-conflict and violent custody-litigating families during 1990 (as described above). This comparison identified the similarities and differences between parents who resort to illegal actions and parents who use legal procedures to resolve custody and visitation disputes. The main characteristics that distinguished abducting from nonabducting litigating parents were then arranged into six profiles of risk for serious custodial interference, which are discussed below, together with implications for preventive interventions. In the third phase of the research, family court counselors from San Francisco Bay Area counties used the risk profiles to identify potential custody violators and refer them to specialized preventive interventions. Fifty identified families were assigned randomly to 10 or 40 hr of confidential, free counseling provided by mental health professionals with special training in the dynamics of highly conflicted separating and divorcing families and in abduction risk. A follow-up study conducted 9 months later evaluated outcome effectiveness of the interventions in terms of parental cooperation, satisfaction with custody and visitation, content of conflict over children, extent and type of family violence, rates of litigation, and custodial violations. Empirical findings are reported in Appendix Part C, #19,#21,#23, #24.

Interventions with Groups of High-Conflict Litigating Parents in Family Court In the first study, data were drawn from a sample of 40 families (80 parents) who were provided mediation in small groups by the Alameda Family Court Services over a series of eight sessions. These data were compared to those from a matched comparison group of 48 families in the same court that received the regular individual mediation services mandated by California law. The ethnic makeup was 70% Caucasian, and socioeconomic status was low-middle range. On average, parents had been separated for about 3 1/2 years. More than one half (56%) were disputing custody and care of their children after the divorce had been finalized, 13% of the couples had never married.

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In a second study, data were drawn from a sample of 149 parents (from 96 families) who attended a series of six educational sessions (called the Pre-Contempt/Contemnors Program) provided by the Los Angeles Superior Court. These data were compared with comparison data from a matched sample of 45 families from the same court that received regular family court services. The ethnic composition was 42% Caucasian, 30% Hispanic, 15% African-American, and 13% other; socio-economic status was low-middle range. On average, parents had been separated for 4 years and whereas 25% had never married, 45% were disputing arrangements postdivorce. The content, process, and outcomes of these two different models of interventions with families-at-impasse, otherwise known as high-conflict divorcing families, were compared and contrasted in studies conducted between 1996 and 1999. In addition to demographic descriptors, data were gathered at baseline and at a 9-month follow-up on parental cooperation, satisfaction with custody and visitation, content of conflict over children, extent and type of family violence, psychological functioning of parents and children, utilization of family court services, and rates of litigation. Empirical findings are reported in Appendix Part C, #20.

Group Treatment for Children from High-Conflict and Violent Parents The group interventions for children of high-conflict and violent families were evaluated in three family service agency sites and five elementary schools in the San Francisco Bay Area from 1999 to 2000. Sites were chosen because of the high-risk neighborhoods they served and because they also offered a range of family counseling, advocacy, and referral services to families. The families were of multiethnic origin, the two largest groups being Caucasian (42%) and Hispanic (36%). African-Americans comprised 10% and other racial groups made up 12% of the sample. Socioeconomic status of the families was low. The children were predominantly from single parent families (80%), equal numbers had never married, were separated, or already divorced. Parents who were currently married and still living together were the minority (20%). Mothers were the primary caretakers of the children in 58% of cases. Foster parents, grandparents, and other relatives cared for 15% of the children.

Appendix

Children who had been exposed to the trauma of loss and violence were identified through a variety of extant referral networks within the schools and agency sites. The groups were composed of about eight children of similar grade level and same age range (5–7 years, 8 –11years, and 12–14 years). On average, seven children attended each group series. Each group series comprised 10–15 weekly meetings, each 60–90 min long. The groups were usually led by two clinicians, one of whom was bilingual/bicultural, and conducted concurrently in English and Spanish at school sites. Baseline and end-ofschool year follow-up data was collected from at least two of the three sources (clinicians, teachers, and parents) and were available for 223 children, 106 girls and 117 boys (age 5–14 years). Teachers and group leaders completed standardized measures of social competence, and learning and behavioral difficulties, “TRC, 1986,” Hightower et al., 1986 and parents completed a standardized child behavior checklist (CBCL, Achenbach & Edlebrock, 1983). (See Appendix Part C, #20 for a report on the empirical results).

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C Appendix

Publications of Research Findings (by senior author and associates, arranged by year of publication) 1. Johnston, J. R., & Campbell, L. E. G. (1987). Instability in the networks of divorced and disputing families. In E. J. Lawler & B. Markovsky (Eds.), Advances in group processes: Theory and research (Vol. IV, pp. 243-269). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Reprinted in E. J. Lawler & B. Markovsky (Eds.), Social psychology of groups: A reader. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. 2. Johnston, J.R., Gonzalez, R., & Campbell, L. E. G. (1987). Ongoing post-divorce conflict and child disturbance. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 15, 493–509.

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3. Johnston, J.R., & Campbell, L. E. G. (1988). Impasses of divorce: The dynamics and resolution of family conflict. New York: Free Press. 4. Johnston, J., & Coysh, W. S. (1988). Evaluation of preventive services for divorcing families. Part I. Parents’ functioning. Part II. Children’s functioning. Technical Report of the Center for the Family in Transition, P.O. Box 157, Corte Madera, CA, 94976. 5. Coysh, W., Johnston, J.R., Tschann, J., Wallerstein, J. S., & Kline, M. (1989). Parental adjustment in joint and sole custody families. Journal of Family Issues, 10, 52–71. 6. Johnston, J., Kline, M., & Tschann, J. (1989). Ongoing postdivorce conflict: Effects on children of joint custody and frequent access. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 59, 576–592. 7. Kline, M., Tschann, J. M., Johnston, J. R., & Wallerstein, J. S. (1989). Children’s adjustment in joint and sole physical custody families. Developmental Psychology, 25, 430–438. 8. Tschann, J. M., Johnston, J.R., Kline, M., & Wallerstein, J. S. (1989). Family process and children’s functioning during divorce. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 51, 431–444. 9. Tschann, J. M., Johnston, J.R., & Wallerstein, J. S. (1989). Resources, stressors and attachment as predictors of adult adjustment after divorce. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 51, 1033–1046. 10. Johnston, J.R. (1990). Role diffusion and role reversal: Structural variations in divorced families and consequences for children’s functioning. Family Relations, 39, 405–413. 11. Tschann, J. M., Johnston, J.R., Kline, M., & Wallerstein, J. S. (1990). Conflict, loss, and parenting capacity: Predicting children’s adjustment during divorce. Journal of Divorce, 13, 1–22. 12. Kline, M., Johnston, J.R., & Tschann, J. (1991). The long shadow of marital conflict: A family process model of children’s adjustment post divorce. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 53, 297–309. 13. Johnston, J. (1992). High conflict and violent parents in family court: Findings on children’s adjustment and proposed guidelines for the resolution of custody and visitation disputes. Final Report to the Judicial Council of the State of California, San Francisco.

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14. Johnston, J.R. (1993a). Family transitions and children’s functioning: The case of parental conflict and divorce. In P. A. Cowan, D. Field, D. A. Hansen, A. Skolnick, & G. E. Swanson (Eds.), Family, self and society: Toward a new agenda for family research (pp. 197–234). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 15. Johnston, J.R. (1993b). Developing preventive interventions for children of severe family conflict and violence: A comparison of three treatment models. Technical Report of the Center for the Family in Transition. P.O. Box 157, Corte Madera, CA, 94976. 16. Johnston, J.R., & Campbell, L. E. G. (1993a). A clinical typology of interparental violence in disputed custody divorces. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 63, 190–199. 17. Johnston, J.R., & Campbell, L. E. G. (1993b). Parent-child relationships in domestic violence families disputing custody. Family and Conciliation Courts Review, 31, 282–298. 18. Johnston, J.R. (1995). Domestic violence and parent-child relationships in families disputing custody. Australian Journal of Family Law, 9, 12–25. 19. Johnston, J. (1998). Prevention of parent or family abduction through early identification of risk factors: A comparison of two counseling interventions. Final Report of Stage I(b) and II(b), Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. 20. Johnston, J. (1999). Developing and testing a group intervention for families at impasse. Final Report submitted to the State-Wide Office of Family Court Services, Center for Children, Families and the Courts, Judicial Council of the State of California, 455 Golden Gate, San Francisco, CA 94102. 21. Johnston, J.R., Girdner, L.K., & Sagatun-Edwards, I. (1999). Developing profiles of risk for parental abduction of children from a comparison of families victimized by abduction with families litigating custody. Behavioral Sciences & the Law, 17, 305–322. 22. Johnston, J.R., & Straus, R.B. (1999). Traumatized children in supervised visitation: What do they need? Family & Conciliation Courts Review, 37, 135–158. 23. Johnston, J., Sagatun-Edwards, I., Blomquist, M., & Girdner, L. (2001, March). Early identification of risk factors for parental abduction. Bulletin, Washington DC:

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24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

U.S. Dept. of Justice, office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. Johnston, J.R., & Girdner, L. (2001, January). Family abductors: Descriptive profiles and preventive interventions. Bulletin, Washington DC: U.S. Dept. of Justice, office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. Johnston, J.R. (2003a). Parental alignments and rejection: An empirical study of alienation in children of divorce. Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry & the Law, 31, 158–170. Johnston, J.R. (2003b). Group interventions for children at-risk from abuse and witness to violence: A report of a study. Journal of Emotional Abuse, 3,203–226. Johnston, J.R., Lee, S., Olesen, N.W., & Walters, M.G. (2005a). Allegations and substantiations of abuse in custody disputing families. Family Court Review, 43, 283–294. Johnston, J.R., Walters, M. G., & Olesen, N.W. (2005b). Is it alienating parenting, role reversal, or child abuse? An empirical study of children’s rejection of a parent in child custody disputes. Journal of Emotional Abuse, 5 (4), 191–218. Johnston, J.R., Walters, M., & Olesen, N.W. (2005c). The psychological functioning of alienated children in custody disputing families: An exploratory study. American Journal of Forensic Psychology, 23, 39–64. Johnston, J.R., Walters, M.G., & Olesen, N.W. (2005d). Clinical ratings of parenting capacity and Rorschach protocols of custody-disputing parents: An exploratory study. Journal of Child Custody, 2, 159–178. Johnston, J.R., Breunig, K., Garrity, C., & Baris, M. (2008, 2002; 1997). Through children’s eyes: Healing stories for children of divorce. Chinese edition: Psychological Publishing Company (2008); Spanish edition: Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Mexico: Paidos (2002); English edition: New York: Free Press (1997).

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Index

A Abandonment anxiety, 9–10, 34–35, 49, 172–174 Abduction. See Parental abduction Adolescents, 157–191, 202 as a second separation-individuation phase, 158–160 case illustrations of interventions, 167–191 cognitive capacities, 50 emotional lability, 158 evolving cognitive capacity to achieve distance from family conflict, 166–167 experimenting with personas and ego diffusion, 162–163 perceptual and judgmental deficits, 163–164 relating to peers—diminished capacity, 164–166 remembering family scripts, 186–188 resistance to counseling, 184–186 reworking memories of family abuse and violence, 186 search for authentic self, 167–176 sexual anxieties and Oedipal conflicts, 160–162 struggling with fragmented self, 176–183 ADR. See Alternative dispute resolution Adults. See Young adults Adversarial legal system, 28, 30, 252–253 Advisory dispute resolution, 251 Agreements, specificity in, 153–155 Alienated child. See Alienation

Alienation, 148–151 age and cognitive capacity of the child and, 369 alienated child defined, 363–364 common features and dynamics of families with alienated children, 367, 370–371 distinguishing from normal preferences, alignments, and estrangement, 364–367 extended social network and, 369–370 interventions, 371–388 the alienated child, 381–384 the aligned parent, 376–379 case management of alienation, 374–376 changing primary residence, 388 child symptoms of behavioral and emotional distress, 372–373 family-focused approach, 373–374, 384–385 five principles of effective, 374 the rejected parent, 379–381 resolutions of alienation and factors affecting outcomes, 386–388 victims’ advocates view of, 371–372 parental alienation syndrome (PAS), 362–363 personality predispositions of aligned parents, 367–368 reformulation of “parental alienation” to “alienated child”, 363–364 rejected parents, 368 vulnerable children and, 368–369 See also Alignments

459

460 Alignments, 148 normal, 364–365 personality predispositions of aligned parents, 367–368 therapy for the aligned parent, 376–379 See also Alienation Allegations, determining credibility of abuse, 308–312 Alternative dispute resolution (ADR), 236–253 background, 227–228 collaborative law, 244–245 custody evaluations, 249–252 divorce orientation and educational programs, 238–241 mediation, 241–244 parenting coordination and arbitration, 246–249 summary of, 237 therapeutic intervention, 245–246 See also Interventions; Therapy Alternative forums, 28, 39 AMBER Alert System, 357–358 Ambivalent separations, 16–18 American Psychological Association, 409 Angry associates, 196 Antisocial orientation of sex offenders, 394 See also Personality disorders Anxiety, 37 Arbitration, 242, 246–249 Artwork, 281 Assessment of the impasse and its effect on the child, 263–266 See also Assessment guidelines; Therapy Assessment guidelines—children, 419–421 1. general impressions, 419 2. specific reactions to the divorce/ parental disputes/abduction, 419–420 3. child’s relationship with parents and others, 420 4. child’s reactions to current visitation/custody arrangements, 420 5. coping and symptomatology, 420–421 6. child’s attitudes and participation at school, with peers, and in extracurricular activities, 421 Assessment guidelines—parents, 415–419

Index

1. general impressions, 415 2. dispute-specific assessment of family, 415–416 3. historical material, 416 4. divorce history, 416–417 5. description of child and child history, 417 6. assessment of parenting ability, 417–418 7. assessment of parent-parent relationship, 418 8. current environment and family situation, 418–419 At-risk group, 6 Attachment styles, 45, 62 abduction and, 339 alienation and, 363 fearful, preoccupied, disorganized, or dismissing (subcategories of insecure-avoidant), 204–205, 206–215 insecure-avoidant, 204–205, 206–217 secure, 204, 217–221 sexual deviancy and, 393 Attorneys. See Family attorneys Authentic self, 168–176

B Bad-mother-me, 61–62 Battered spouse syndrome, 16, 313 sustained problems of battered women, 37–38 Battering, 313 accusations and, 26 aligned parents and, 368 profiles of, 14–15 See also Coercive-controlling violence; Domestic violence Biochemical changes trauma and, 45, 55–56 See also Neurological changes Bird Family, The chapter 4 in Through Children’s Eyes: Healing Stories for Children of Divorce (Johnston et al.), 284 Blame, children and, 41–42 Blame projection, 30 Blind walk, 288–289 Borderline personality disorder, 6, 36, 367 Boundaries interpersonal, 293 for preschoolers, 122–125 violations of, 36

Index

Boys Oedipal, 98, 106 oppositional symptoms, 98–99, 102–103 preoedipal, 96–98 sexualized symptoms, 99–100, 103–105, 106–107 Brainwashing, 38 Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI), 424 Broad discretionary powers, 259–260 BSI. See Brief Symptom Inventory

C Case management, 228 of alienation, 374–376 essentials of, 258–261 See also Interventions; Therapy Case studies adolescents, 167–191 child therapy—group work, 295–302 infants and toddlers, 68–75 parental abductions, 341–345 preschoolers, 100–125 school-age children, 149–151 therapy, 264–275 young adults, 207–221 See also Empirical studies and research samples Child abuse, 252 as reason for abduction, 347–350 Child Advocacy Centers, 406 Child alienation. See Alienation Child Behavior Checklist, 424, 426, 429 Child Find of America, Inc. (New York), 358 Child history, 417 Childhood, early trauma and adulthood, 9 Childhood script formation, violence and, 43–55 Child molesters, characteristics of, 393–394 Child neglect, 252 Children cognitive capacities of, 49–51 effectiveness of coping efforts, 52–55 effects on abducted children and leftbehind families, 337–340 preferences and perspective of, 256, 317, 318, 323–325 See also Adolescents; Assessment guidelines—children; Infants and toddlers; Preschoolers; School-age children; Young adults

461 Children’s core concerns, 39–43 am I like the good parent or the bad parent?, 42–43 how can I keep myself and my parents safe?, 41 what is true and what is not?, 40–41 who is to blame?, 41–42 Child sexual abuse (CSA), 36, 125–127, 252, 391–412 activities of, 391 addressing the ultimate issue and recommendations, 411–412 characteristics of child molesters, 393–394 characteristics of victims, 392–393 children’s behaviors, 395–397 children’s suggestibility, 400–402 components of the definition of, 391–392 “diagnosing”, 396–397 distinguishing children’s accurate from inaccurate narratives, 407–408 follow-up and collaborative evaluation, 126 interviewing children, 403–405 interview protocols, 405–407 memory development background, 397–399 memory of traumatic and nontraumatic events, 399–400 mental health professionals’ roles in, 408–412 perpetrators’ motivations, 391 prevalence of, 394–395 prevalence of in litigated divorce cases, 395 protecting the child’s relationships with trusted adults, 127 unresolved charges of child sexual abuse, 127 value of timely and rational response, 125–126 Child sexual abuse accommodation syndrome, 397 Child therapy—group work, 284–303 advantages of, 303 case studies, 295–302 creating common ground and safety (activities for), 288–289 defining and revising roles and relationships (activities for), 293–298 defining and understanding the self (activities for), 291–293 empirical studies, 428–429 expanding the use of the group treatment model, 302–303

462 Child therapy—group work, 284–303 (Continued) exploring the language and complexity of feeling (activities for), 289–291 goals of, 286–287 rationale for, 285–286 restoring a moral order (activities for), 298–302 See also Interventions; Therapy Child therapy—individual, 280–284 for the alienated child, 381–384 compromised trust and, 282–283 external threats vs. internal fears and, 280–281 narratives and mutual story telling, 280, 283–284 projective play, 281–282 See also Interventions; Therapy Claudio and Petra chapter 5 in Through Children’s Eyes: Healing Stories for Children of Divorce (Johnston et al.), 284 Closed-ended questions, 403 Coercive-controlling violence, 313–314, 317 Cognitive-behavioral approach, 240 Cognitive capacities adolescents and family conflict, 166–167 of children, 49–51 Cognitive reframing, 266–269 Collaborative approach. See Multidisciplinary partnerships Collaborative law, 228, 244–245 See also Multidisciplinary partnerships College completion rates, 203–204 Common couple violence, 315 See also Conflict-instigated violence Common ground and safety, for children’s group work, 288–289 Community resources, 333–334 Compartmentalizing, 399 Competency, 138–141 when parental conflict disrupts competence, 140–141 when the child’s developmental resources fail to support competence, 139–140 Contradictory shifts, 10 Confidential child-inclusive mediation, 252 Confidentiality, 259–261 Conflict-instigated violence, 315, 317 Conflict resolution, 241 See also Mediation

Index

Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS), 424 Contracts, for therapy, 258–263 Cooperative colleagues, 196 Co-parenting (joint legal or joint physical custody), 332–333 Co-parenting counseling, 247 See also Interventions; Parenting coordination services; Therapy Coping capacities assessing children’s, 420–421 effectiveness of children’s, 52–55 violence and children, 38–43 Coping strategies, for infants and toddlers, 84–85 Cost of high-conflict and violent divorce, 226–227 Counter-transference, 257–258, 273–274 Court mediation/intervention, 11–12, 26–27 See also Custody; Family court; Intervention Court orders, specificity and, 153–155 Court protection paradigm, 307 Courtship, 16–18 Crisis, therapy and, 269–275 CSA. See Child sexual abuse CTS. See Conflict Tactics Scale Cultural/religious differences, 23–24, 310, 355 Custodial interference, 335 See also Parental abduction Custody bogus disputes, 24 litigation estimates, 4 Custody arrangements child’s reactions to current visitation/ custody arrangements, 420 co-parenting (joint legal or joint physical custody), 332–333 parallel parenting (sole or divided legal custody and joint or sole physical custody), 330–332 primary parenting (sole legal or sole physical custody), 328–330 supervised access, 328–330 suspended access, 330 Custody commissioners (parenting coordinators), 247 Custody evaluations, 249–252 alienation and, 365–366 background, 249 child sexual abuse and, 409–410 effectiveness of, 249 reasons for, 252 types of, 251–252 vulnerable parents and, 250–251

463

Index

See also Mediation Cycle, of conflicted and abusive relationships, 6

D Dancers, The chapter 6 in Through Children’s Eyes: Healing Stories for Children of Divorce (Johnston et al.), 284 Defensive fragmentation, 133–138 disrupting the capacity for empathy, 137 rules and expectations about relationships and, 142–143 sense of self and, 142 undermining moral growth, 136–137 undermining relationships, 134 undermining social understanding and new mastery, 134–135 Depression, 37, 339 Depression/Anxiety Inventories, 426 Desertion, 13 Destruction anxiety, 172–174 Developmental preferences, normal, 364 Developmental theory about children’s social cognition, 45 Directive utterances, 405 Dismissing attachment style. See Fearful, preoccupied, dismissing, or disorganized attachment style Disorganized attachment style. See Fearful, preoccupied, dismissing, or disorganized attachment style Dispute resolution paradigm, 307 Dispute-specific assessment of family, 415–416 Dissociation, 56, 399–400 Dissolved duos, 196 Distrust, dealing with, 170–172 Divorce. See Failed divorce; Successful divorce Divorce Apperception Test, 426 Divorce history, 416–417 Divorce impasse assessing its impact on children, 421 multilevels of, 24–28 See also Failed divorce Divorce orientation and education programs, 238–241 Domestic violence, 14–16, 19–21, 307–334 abductions and, 341–342 coercive-controlling violence, 313–314, 317 commonalities of, 312–313

community resources and, 333–334 conflict-instigated violence, 315, 317 co-parenting (joint legal or joint physical custody), 332–333 as criminal act, 26–27 custody litigation and, 5 determining credibility of allegations, 308–312 emotional-developmental issues by a child’s age and, 51–52 by gender, 308, 312–316, 327 identifying risk of, 10 incidence of, 307–309 instigators and parenting, 35–37 interventions and, 252–253 initial assessment of, 416 P5 screening, 316–325 parenting problems, 321–322 pattern of ongoing violence and coercive control, 317, 319–320 potency, 317, 319 preferences and perspectives of the children, 317, 318, 323–325 primary perpetrator, 317, 320–321 parallel parenting (sole or divided legal custody or joint or sole physical custody), 330–332 parenting arrangements and priorities, 325–328 primary parenting (sole legal and sole physical custody), 328–330 problems with usage of typologies, 317 recipients and parenting, 37–38 separation-instigated violence, 316, 317 therapy for children of, 55–56 unfounded allegations of abuse, 311–312 violent resistance (protecting self or loved ones), 315–316 See also Batterers; Script formation in childhood Dramatic role-play, 281 Dreams, 281

E Early neutral custody evaluations, 251 Ego diffusion, 162–163 Emergency case stabilization, 251 Emergency screening, 251 Emotional-developmental issues, script formation and, 51–52 Emotional liability, 158

464 Empathy, 61, 258, 280, 281 defensive fragmentation and, 137 Empirical studies and research samples, 423–429 A. first high-conflict custody disputing sample, 423–424 B. second high-conflict and violent sample, 424 C. 15-20-year longitudinal follow-up study, 424–425 D. third sample was of families undergoing custody evaluations, 425 group treatment for children, 428–429 interventions with groups of highconflict litigating parents in family court, 427–428 normal community sample, 426 parental abduction samples, 426–427 Encoding phase of memory, 399 Environment, initial assessment of current family situation, 418–419 Estrangement, vs. alienation, 365–366 Evaluative mediation, 242 Excluded parents, 79–80 See also Alienation Expectation state. See Script formation in childhood Explosiveness, 147–148 Extended families divorce impasse and, 21–23, 246 parental abduction and, 344 Extended social network, alignments and alienation and, 369–370 External level of divorce impasse, 21–25 Extradition Treaties Interpretation Act, 357

F Facilitative mediation, 242 Facilitators, 404–405 Failed divorce, 3–28 ambivalent separations, 16–18 “at-risk” group, 6 criteria for, 5 divorce as humiliation/shame, 10–16 divorce as loss, 7–10 domestic violence and, 5–6, 14–16, 19–21 interactional level of, 16–21 internal level of, 6–16 multilevels of divorce impasse, 24–28 negative redefinitions of spouse, 18–19

Index

traumatic separations, 18–21 tribal warfare: external level of, 21–24 False memories, 399 False statements, 407–408 False suggestions, 400 See also Suggestibility Family attorneys, 228 collaborative law, 244–245 providing affordable legal services, 233–234 shifting roles of, 232–234 Family counseling, ineffectual, 181–183 Family court, 38 custody litigation and relitigation estimates, 4 problems of, 229 See also Custody arrangements; Multidisciplinary partnerships; Unified family courts (UFCs) Family court judges, 228 rethinking the role of, 230–232 Family drawing, 288 Family-focused intervention, for alienated children, 373–374, 384–385 Family sculptures, 300–302 Family violence. See Domestic violence Fantasy room, 292–293 Fathers role of in supporting individuation, 63–64 as toxic figure, 66–67 Faucauldian sociological analysis, 363 Fearful, preoccupied, dismissing, or disorganized attachment style, 204–205, 206–215 See also Insecure-avoidant attachment style Feelings, group work and, 289–291 Fiery foes, 196 Financial relief, 26 Follow-up, 277 Fragile primary parent, 64–66 Fragmentation. See Defensive fragmentation; Organized fragmentation Fragmented self, 176–183 Funnel approach to interviewing children, 406–407

G Gardner, Richard, 362 Gay, lesbian, and transsexual parents, 239, 314

Index

Gender, domestic violence and, 308, 312–316, 327 Giraffe Who Couldn’t Speak, The chapter 7 in Through Children’s Eyes: Healing Stories for Children of Divorce (Johnston et al.), 284 Girls dangers of Oedipal victory, 109–110 defensive consolidation of gender identity, 107 Oedipal conflicts in sexuality for, 107–109, 113–115 Oedipal retreat, 110–111, 114–115 Goals, for group work, 286–287 Good child, capacity to feel like, 135–138 Good-mother, 61–63 Good-mother-me, 61–62 Good Times Recipe chapter 12 in Through Children’s Eyes: Healing Stories for Children of Divorce (Johnston et al.), 284 Group art project, 289 Group work. See Child therapy—group work

H Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, 353 “Happy-happy joy-joy” mask, 144–145 Harassment, 8 High-conflict and violent divorce. See Failed divorce Historical material, 416 Homicide, 5, 15, 45–46 Hostile dependent bind, 67–68 Humiliation divorce as, 10–16 See also Narcissistic vulnerability; Shame; Vulnerability Hyperarousal, 56

I Identity shields, 300 Incest, 394 Incidence and cost of high-conflict and violent divorce, 226–227 Individual treatment. See Child therapy—individual Individuates, 33

465 Individuation, adolescents and, 174–175 Infants and toddlers, 59–91 case study, 68–75 the child’s hostile dependent bind, 67–68 coping strategies for, 84–85 exposure to parental violence, 67 the father as toxic figure, 66–67 interventions—for children, 80–83 interventions—for parents, 76–80 neutral transitions, 85–86 normative process of separationindividuation, 60–64 parents’ clinging dependence at the marital separation, 66 predivorce disruptions of the separation-individuation process, 64–65 script formation and, 45–49 sexual behavior, 396 therapeutic constancy and, 86–87 time sharing parameters, 88–91 use of scheduling to buffer the child, 87 Initial referral, 262–263 Insecure-avoidant attachment style, 204–205, 206–217 See also Fearful, preoccupied, dismissing, or disorganized attachment style Interactional level of divorce impasse, 16–21, 24–25 ambivalent separations, 16–18 traumatic separations, 18–21 Intergenerational cycle of violence, 194, 205 Internal level of divorce impasse, 6–16, 24–25 divorce as loss, 7–10 Internal models of family relationships, 45 International abductions, 345, 353–355 International Parental Kidnapping Act, 357 Interpersonal theories, 258 Interventions for adolescents, 167–191 alignments and alienation and, 371–388 attorneys roles, 232–234 for child sexual abuse, 408–412 See also Interviewing for child sexual abuse collaborative law, 244–245 court, 26–27 custody evaluations, 249–252 degree of vulnerability and, 14

466 Interventions (Continued) divorce orientation and educational programs, 238–241 empirical studies, 427–428 family court judges roles in, 230–232 for infants and toddlers, 76–91 mediation, 241–244 mental health counselors role revision, 234–236 for parental abductions, 346–359 parenting coordination and arbitration, 246–249 for preschoolers, 119–127 for school-age children, 151–155 unified family courts (UFCs), 229–230 See also Alternative dispute resolution (ADR); Assessment guidelines; Child therapy; Multidisciplinary partnerships; Therapy Interviewing for child sexual abuse, 400–407 funnel approach, 406–407 National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) protocol for, 406–407 protocols for, 405–407 suggestibility and, 400–402 types of questions, 403–405 Intimate relationships, childhood scripts and, 54–55, 56 Intimate terrorism, 313 See also Coercive-controlling violence Invitations in interviewing, 404–405

J Jealousy, 15 Judges. See Family court judges Judgmental deficits, 163–164

K Koko and Bunny, 291–292, 299

L Law, collaborative, 244–245 Leading questions, 403, 405 Least restrictive plan, 326

Index

Left-behind families effects on, 337–340 See also Parental abduction Legal contract, for therapeutic intervention, 258–263 Legal defense, violence resistance, 315–316 Legal system, adversarial, 28, 30, 252–253 Legislation, parental abduction and, 357–359 Lesbians, domestic violence and, 314 Litigation family, 36 personality assessment and, 6–7 See also Courts; Custody Loco parentis, 326 Loss, divorce and, 7–10, 34–35 Lovability, 130–135 Love You Forever (Munsch), 83 Loyalty dilemmas, 261, 361 See also Alienation

M Mediation, 241–244, 246 background and goals of, 241–242 early models, 242 new types of, 242 success rates of, 243–244 See also Custody evaluations Mediation-arbitration, 242 Memory development of, 397–399 false, 399 of family abuse and violence, 186 phases of: encoding, storage, retrieval, 399 traumatic amnesia model, 399 of traumatic and nontraumatic events, 399–400 Memory fragments, 48–49 Men, victims of abuse, 38 Mental health counselors, revising the roles of, 234–236 Mental illness, 229, 309 Mental status, chronic, 38 Mirror custody and visitation order, 354 Missing Children’s Act, 357 MMPI2, 425 Model of family relationships, 54 Moral growth, 136–138 Moral order, restoring in children’s group work, 298–302 Moral understanding, 135–136

467

Index

Multidisciplinary partnerships, 21, 225–253 alternative dispute resolution (ADR), 236–252 collaborative law, 244–245 custody evaluations, 249–252 divorce orientation and educational programs, 238–241 legal reform and growth of, 227–228 mediation, 241–244 parenting coordination and arbitration, 246–249 summary of, 237 therapeutic intervention, 245–246 incidence and cost of high-conflict and violent divorce, 226–227 legal reform and the growth of alternative dispute resolution (ADR), 227–228 rethinking the role of family court judges, 230–232 revising the roles of mental health counselors, 234–236 shifting roles of attorneys, 232–234 unified family courts (UFCs), 229–230 See also Interventions; Therapy

N Narcissistic personality disorder, 6, 36, 342, 368 Narcissistic vulnerability, 10, 12, 14, 30, 32–33, 257, 311, 367–368 See also Humiliation; Shame; Vulnerability Narratives, 283–284 distinguishing between children’s accurate from inaccurate, 407–408 National Association of Social Workers, 409 National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, 357 National Child Search Assistance Act, 357 National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), protocol for forensic child interviews, 406–407 Negative redefinitions of spouses, 18–19 Negative scenes, 46 Negative views, 29–30 Neo-analytic object-relations, 258 Network support, parental abductions and, 344

Neurobiological theories, sex offenders and, 393–394 Neurological changes trauma and, 45, 55–56 See also Biochemical changes Neutral transitions, 85–86 New partners, 23, 246 Normal developmental preferences, 364 Nuclear family scenes, 43 Nuclear scripts. See Script formation in childhood

O Object constancy, 62 Oedipal phase, 94–95 adolescents, 160–162 boys, 98, 106 girls, 107–115 Open-ended questions, 405–407 Operation Lookout (Washington State), 358 Oppositional symptoms, 98–99, 102–103 Option-posing utterances, 405 Organized fragmentation, 143–148 from alignment to alienation, 148 facade of remote self-control, 145–147 ‘happy-happy joy-joy’ mask, 144–145 intermittent explosiveness, 147–148

P P5 screening, 316–325 parenting problems, 317, 321–322 pattern of ongoing violence and coercive control, 317, 319–320 potency of violence, 317, 319 preferences and perspective of the child(ren), 317, 323 primary perpetrator, 317, 320–321 Panic of separation, 78–79 Parallel parenting (sole or divided legal custody and joint or sole physical custody), 330–332 Paranoid delusional parents abduction and, 350–351 aligned parents and, 367 Parental abduction, 13–14, 335–359 assessment and, 419–420 case examples, 341–345 characteristics of, 336–337 conditions for restrictive measures, 359

468 Parental abduction, 13–14, 335–359 (Continued) contextual factors for, 343–344 effects on abducted children and leftbehind children, 337–340 extended family and social network support and, 344–345 family violence motivation for, 341–342 international, 345 interventions for, 346–359 legislation and, 357–359 parental personality indicators for, 342–343 profile 1: prior threat of actual abduction, 346–347 profile 2: belief by a parent that child is abused and the parent has social support for concerns, 347–350 profile 3: parent is paranoid delusional, 350–351 profile 4: parent is severely sociopathic, 352–353 profile 5: parents who are foreign nationals, 353–355 profile 6: socially disadvantaged parents, 355–357 samples of, 426–427 Parental alienation. See Alienation Parental alienation syndrome (PAS), 362–363 Parental kidnapping, 335 See also Parental abduction Parental Kidnapping Prevention Act, 357 Parent/child relationships assessing, 420 as children grow into adulthood, 195–196 children’s vulnerability range and coping capacities, 38–43 domestic violence instigators, 35–37 domestic violence recipients, 37–38 parenting arrangements and priorities, 325–328 parent vulnerability and, 30–35 young adults and, 195–203 Parent coordination services, 228, 246–249, 252 See also Interventions; Therapy Parenting of domestic violence instigators, 35–38 of domestic violence recipients, 37–38

Index

Parenting ability, initial assessment of, 417–418 Parenting problems assessing, 317, 321–322 undetected, 198–200 Parent-parent relationship, initial assessment of, 418 Parents abduction and socially disadvantaged parents, 355–357 excluded, 79–80 grieving loss, 34–35 supporting separation from in adolescence, 172 young adults’ contact with, 200–203 See also Alienation; Assessment guidelines—parents PAS. See Parental alienation syndrome Pattern of violence, 317, 319–320 Peers, diminished capacity to relating to (adolescents), 164–166, 169 Perceptual deficits, 163–164 Perfect pals, 196 Perpetrators, primary, 317, 320–321 Personality assessment, litigation and, 6–7 Personality disorders, 6–7, 29, 36, 229, 309 parental abduction and, 342–343 Personas, experimenting with, 162–163 Perspective-taking, 49–51 Physical abuse, 5–6, 12 See also Domestic violence Polarization, 148 See also Alienation; Alignments Positive scenes, 46 Post-traumatic-stress disorder, 37–38, 55–56 abduction and, 339 Potency of violence, 317, 319 Predivorce, disruptions of the separation-individuation process and, 64–65 Preemptive strike, 13 Preoccupied attachment style. See Fearful, preoccupied, dismissing, or disorganized attachment style Preoedipal phase, 93–94, 96–98 Preschoolers, 93–127 boys in high-conflict families, 96–107 case studies, 100–125 girls in high-conflict families, 107–119 interventions, 119–127 Oedipal phase, 94–95, 98, 106, 107–115 preoedipal phase, 93–94, 96–98

469

Index

sexual abuse, 125–127 sexual behavior, 396 Primary parenting (sole legal or sole physical custody), 328–330 Primary perpetrators, 317, 320–321 Primary residence, changing, 388 Problem reformulation, 266–269 Progressive steps model, 236–238 See also Alternative dispute resolution (ADR) Projection, 30–34, 40 Projective drawings, 425 Projective identification, 257–258 Projective play, 281–282 Pro se clinics, 234 Pseudo-autonomous stance, 9 Psychological testing, 151–152 Psychopathology, 252, 342 Punishment, rejection of parents to children as, 33–34 Puppet play, 281

R Race/ethnicity, mixed backgrounds, 23–24 Rape, 15 Reality holder, therapist as, 280 Reality testing, 16, 50, 309 Recognition testing, 404 Recommending mediation, 242 Reconciliation fantasies, 8 Redefinitions of spouses (negative), 18–19, 32–33 Referral, initial, 262–263 Regression disorders, 339 Rejected parent, 362–363 therapy for, 379–381 See also Alienation; Alignment Rejection by parent to child as punishment, 33–34 See also Alienation Relationships, rules and expectations about, 142–143 Relaxation, 289 Relitigation, 4 See also Custody Representational capacity, 46 Repressed memories, 48–49 Repression, 400 Research samples. See Empirical studies and research samples; Case studies

Resistance, to counseling, 184–186 Resolution, 275–277 Restraining orders, 14, 26 Retrieval phase of memory, 399 Risk-benefit analysis guidelines, 326 Robbie Rabbit chapter 3 in Through Children’s Eyes: Healing Stories for Children of Divorce (Johnston et al.), 284 Role-playing, 281 children’s group work and, 293–298 Rorschach test, 425 Runaway Bunny, The (Brown), 83

S Sandtray play, 281 Scheduling, 87, 152–153 School-age children, 129–155 alignment and alienation and, 148–151 case study, 149–151 cognitive capacities, 50 defensive fragmentation, 133–138, 141–143 empathy and, 137 facade of remote self-control, 145–147 feeling competent, 138–141 feeling like a good child, 135–138 growth of moral understanding and behavior, 135–136 growth of relationships and social understanding, 130–131 ‘happy-happy joy-joy’ mask, 144–145 intermittent explosiveness, 147–148 interventions for, 151–155 moral growth, 136–138 organized fragmentation, 143–148 relationships and the potential for new mastery, 131–132 rules and expectations about relationships, 142–143 sense of self, 142 sexual behavior, 396 trust and lovability, 130–135 when trust fails and the capacity to feel lovable is tenuous, 132–133 Screen memory, 48 Script formation in childhood adolescents, 50, 186–188 biochemical changes and, 45, 55–56 effectiveness of coping skills, 52–55 emotional-developmental issues, 51–52

470 Script formation in childhood (Continued) infants and toddlers, 45–49 interventions and, 55–56 older school-age children, 50 thesis about, 50 violence and, 43–55 younger school-age children, 50 Secure attachment style, 204, 217–221 Self-control, 145–147 Self-defense, 315–316 Self-definition, children’s group work and, 291–293 Self-psychology, 258 Sense of self, 142 Sentence completion tests, 425 Separation-individuation for adolescents, 158–160, 172 for infants and toddlers, 59–91 Separation-instigated violence, 316, 317 Settlement conferences, 228 Sex offenders, 393 antisocial orientation of, 394 “high-risk”, 394 reoffenders, 394 theories about, 393–394 See also Child sexual abuse (CSA) Sexual experimentation and play, 396 Sexuality Oedipal phase, 94–95 preoedipal phase, 93–94 Sexualized symptoms, 99–100, 103–105, 106–107 Shame, 10 parent/child relationships and, 30–34 See also Humiliation; Narcissistic vulnerability; Vulnerability Siblings, young adults and, 198, 200–203, 205 Skill-based approach, 240 Social-cognitive theory, 49–51 Socially disadvantaged parents, 355–357 Social policy, parental abduction and, 357–359 Sociopathic personality disorder, 36, 309 aligned parents and, 368 parental abduction and, 352–353 Somatic complaints, 48–49 Special masters (parenting coordinators), 247 Specificity in the agreement or court order, 153–155 Spunky chapter 14 in Through Children’s Eyes: Healing Stories for Children of Divorce (Johnston et al.), 284 Staff burn out, 227

Index

Stalking, 8, 15 Stepfamilies, 33–34, 416 Storage phase of memory, 399 Story telling, 281, 283–284 Strategic family therapy, 258 Structural family therapy, 258 Studies. See Empirical studies and research samples; Case studies Substance abuse, 8, 36, 252, 309 undetected, 198 women and, 37 Successful divorce, 3–4 criteria for, 27–28 Suggestibility, 400–402 Suggestive utterances, 405 Suicide, 15 Supervised access, 328–330 Suspended access, 330

T Termination, 277 Thematic Apperception Test, 425 Therapeutic constancy, 86–87 Therapeutic jurisprudence, 225 See also Multidisciplinary partnerships Therapeutic mediation, 242 Therapeutic model of intervention. See Therapy Therapeutic reunification, 252 Therapeutic supervision, 252 Therapy, 245–246, 255–277 1. initial referral and contract formation, 262–263 2. assessment of the impasse and its effect on the child, 263–266 3. reformulation of the problem (cognitive reframing), 266–269 4. challenge and crisis, 269–275 5. working through and resolution, 275–277 6. termination and follow-up, 277 for the aligned parent, 376–379 ambivalent separations and, 17–18 case management essentials, 258–261 case studies, 264–275 for child sexual abuse, 408–412 from child’s perspective, 256 confidentiality issues, 259–261 interparental struggles and, 10 legal contract that governs the therapeutic intervention, 258–261

471

Index

multiple therapists, 260–261 projective identifications, 257–258 revising the roles of mental health counselors, 234–236 role of parents in, 188–191 therapeutic approaches used, 258 time commitments for, 261 transference and countertransference dynamics, 257, 273–274 for traumatic separations, 21 See also Child therapy—group work; Child therapy—individual; Interventions; Multidisciplinary partnerships Through Children’s Eyes: Healing Stories for Children of Divorce (Johnston, Breunig, Garrity, & Baris), 84, 284 Time commitments, for therapy, 261 Time-sharing parameters, 88–91 Transference, 257 See also Counter-transference Transformative mediation, 242 Transition rituals, 80–83 Transitions, neutral, 85–86 Trauma biochemical changes and, 45 early childhood of adults, 9, 34 previous loss and, 7–8, 34 Type I, 55–56 violence and the formation of scripts, 43–55 Traumatic amnesia model, 399 Traumatic separations, 18–21, 316 Tribal warfare, 21–24, 246 Trust betrayal of, 19 children’s compromised, 282–283 failure of, 132–133 Turtle Story, The chapter 1 in Through Children’s Eyes: Healing Stories for Children of Divorce (Johnston et al.), 284 TV panel of experts role-play, 299

U UFCs. See Unified family courts Ultimate issue, child sexual abuse and, 411–412 Unified family courts (UFCs), 229–230

Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction & Enforcement Act, 357 Uniform Collaborative Law Act, 244 Unilateral actions, 5, 9, 35 Utterances (questions), 404–405

V Vanished Children’s Alliance (California), 358 Verbal abuse, 5, 12 Victim’s advocates, 313 Violence infants and toddlers exposure to, 67 script formation in childhood and, 43–55 See also Domestic violence Violent resistance (protection of self or loved ones), 315–316, 317 Vulnerability aligned parents and, 368–369 children’s range of and coping capacities, 38–43 humiliation/shame and, 10–16, 316 interventions and, 14 parent/child relationships and, 30–35 in preschool children in the highconflict family, 95–100 unfounded allegations and, 311 See also Humiliation; Narcissistic vulnerability; Shame

W WAIS-III, 425 WAIS-R, 425 Where the Wild Things Are, 291 Wise persons (parenting coordinators), 247

Y Young adults, 193–222 alienation and estrangement, 202–203 case studies, 207–221 college completion rates, 203–204 contact and relationships with parents and siblings, 200–203, 205

472 Young adults, 193–222 (Continued) distress symptoms, 204 group 1: poorly functioning in all domains (attachments fearful and disorganized), 206–210 group 2: good occupational functioning but emotional and relational problems (preoccupied attachment style), 210–215 group 3: good occupational and emotional functioning but insecure relationships

Index

(insecure-avoidant attachment style), 215–217 group 4: good functioning in all domains (secure attachment style), 217–221 intergenerational cycle of violence and, 205 intimate relationships and attachment styles, 204–205 involvement in the conflict, 196–198 the parental relationship, 195–196 parenting problems not detected, 198–200

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