Dissociative Parental Alignment

Dissociation in Children “Caught in the Middle” 1

Dissociation in Children “Caught in the Middle” BetweenWarring Parents

The Rotating Boy

Many years ago I was referred a 9-year-old boy and his separated parents at a Mental Health Centre. The boy, whom I’ll call John,lived primarily with his mother, but was in constant contact withhis father, and periodically ran away to live with his father, landing back at mother’s each time after a few weeks. I worked, largely unsuccessfully, with the boy and each parent individually, for about two years, touching base after that occasionally for a period of about seven years. The family also accessed other treatment resources without success.

Mother was a hardworking, very intelligent graduate student, living in relative poverty on scholarships. Father was an unemployed house painter, also very intelligent and verbally articulate, with a million excuses regarding why he didn’t find abetter career, most of them involving blaming mother. The two parents hated one another, and engaged in considerable “negative intimacy” by telephone.

When he was at his mother’s house, John refused to do his homework or chores, left the house in a mess, lay around and ate and grew fat, and got into screaming matches with his mother, usually over his not doing chores such as mowing the lawn. Father was in constant contact with him, offering to rescue him, saying he could come and live with him and his latest young woman, and they’d play tennis all the time and the boy would be treated like an adult. Each time the conflict between John and his mother would build up until a final blowout, during which John would phone his father and go to live there. During the first week or so at his father’s house, John would become progressively disillusioned with father. The promised tennis matches wouldn’t materialize, Dad would be too busy with his current girlfriend to spend any time with John, and John was actually expected to do things like wash dishes. Eventually Johnwould move back with mother, and after a brief honeymoon period Dad would begin to woo him again and the cycle would repeat itself.


When I saw John during his periods at his mother’s house, he would rant on about how horrible his mother was and how he hated her. When I saw him during his periods at his father’s house, hewould show sadness about being let down by Dad. Mother would usesessions with me to learn better behavior management techniques, but nothing would work, and she and John would end up screaming at each other. Father would use sessions with me to talk about everything except his own parenting. The cycle went on for years, until when John was 16 he returned to me, having exhaustedthe other community resources. At this point he was dropping outof school. I decided to just see him individually, and in one session he suddenly had a breakthrough! He realized that the anger and hatred he’d had for his mother all the time was not hisown but his father’s, and that his mother did not actually deserve it. He was really excited about this discovery. I did not see John after this breakthrough session - but a few years later I saw his mother at a school event, and she told me that from that point on John had lived with her in harmony!

Dr. Jekyll’s Children

Where does the problem start? Often, I believe, while the marriage is still intact. When a parent is intermittently abusive, either to the partner or to a child, the child is likely to develop dissociative states. In my article “The Dissociative Dance of Spouse Abuse,” published in Treating Abuse Today in 1998, I described the dissociative interactions between the spouse abuser and his or her partner. As the abuser switches between ego states (the nice “Dr. Jekyll” seen by the outside world, the depressed and critical person of the buildup phase, and the out-of-control abusive “Mr. Hyde”) the partner begins to develop chains of state-dependent memory, so that while “Dr. Jekyll”is out, her memories of “Mr. Hyde” are hazy. She is unable to leave because it is unsafe when “Mr. Hyde” is there, and when “Dr. Jekyll” is present she finds it difficult to believe in the existence of “Mr. Hyde.”In my article I quoted from the journal of Jane, an abusedwoman, as follows :


"I remember my children, one at a time, being berated andshamed and humiliated by their father for minormisdemeanors. Me in a double-bind. Sometimes I'd try todefend them, getting in between, and this is what he wanted,his 2-year-old Mr. Hyde part, to fight with me; to destroythe mother who couldn't protect her child. The terrifiedchildren looking to me for safety, unable to find it. Thenbeing witnesses to his escalating abuse of me, culminatingin violence, because I'd stepped in to protect them. Afterthe abuse, them needing comfort, and me unable to comfortthem because at the moment when they needed it I was beingabused. Sometimes I'd say something to him about his hurtingthe child, and would see him escalate his abuse of the childbecause I’d dared to question his authority. And he couldsee it hurt me if he hurt the child. Sometimes I'd watch himberate a child and choose not to intervene, though it brokemy heart, because the outcome for the child might be worseif I did. But when I didn't step in, I appeared in theireyes to be complicit with his abuse of them”.

What does it do to a child to be placed in this kind of situation? The child is exposed to more than one Daddy - the frightening one, the nurturing one, and the regular one shown outside the home. The child is also exposed to a terrified and helpless Mommy as well a nurturing one only when Daddy isn’t around. The child needs to be able to provide nurture for both parents as well as to keep himself or herself safe. The child needs to be ready to deal with whatever parental ego state he or she is confronted with.

An important factor in the spousal abuse situation is that the abusive parent’s love may be conditional on the child’s rejection of the non-abusive parent. The abusive parent needs desperately to see himself as the “good guy” and justified in his behavior. So his explanations, as outlinedabove, tell the child that in order to be safe, the child must adopt the abusive parent’s view of the situation. If the love of the non-abusive parent is not conditional, but is frequently unavailable because of the abuse, the child needs to dissociate his awareness of the actual situation inorder to obtain what love he can.


“After a blowout, he would gather the huddled children intohis arms and explain to them kindly what a mean andthoughtless person I was -- how I'd deserved it -- what aterrible parent I was. He took a confused and traumatizedchild and gave him a verbal interpretation of what hadhappened, inserting it right at the moment of trauma -- likea hypnotic suggestion. The children could evade his abuse bylistening supportively to him bitch about me. The only safeplace for a child in a spouse-abusing household is in thearms of the abuser. This happened literally when they werebabies and infants, he would strike me holding a child inhis arms. It happened psychologically all the time; if theytook his side, they could be protected from harm. Often hewould make them take sides, call them in as witnesses insome dispute, point out to them how bad I was."

Keeping safe from the frightening parent (Daddy in the example, but it could be Mommy) involves accepting Daddy’s verbal explanation that Mommy is the bad guy, even though the child’s own eyes and ears tell him otherwise. The childalso has to keep the secret of what it is like at home. This is a prime breeding ground for dissociation, or at least of the development of fairly separate ego states.

Baker and O’Neil (1996) speculate that a child living with a“frightened-frightening” parent may develop a secure ego state for the protecting daddy, a traumatized ego state for the threatening daddy, and an avoidant or resistant ego state for the unavailable Mommy. I’d add a shamed and despairing ego state to handle Daddy’s verbal abuse, a nurturing ego state to look after Daddy when he is depressedor childlike and possibly look after Mommy when she is hurt,and a competent ego state to handle the outside world. Depending on the situation, there may be others. The degreeof split between these states depends on how long the child has to live in the situation, how severe the abuse is, how young the child is when it happens, and how terrible the consequences might be of not keeping the secret.


During the abusive marriage, a child may be called on duringa parental fight as a witness on the side of the abuser – and after the fight to comfort the parent who has been abused. He must be able to identify with the viewpoint of whichever parent needs him at the time. He also learns thatone parent has a great deal more power than the other, and that it is safe to show love for the other parent only when the abusive parent isn’t present.

One of Jane’s sons developed a form of alternating attachments ata very young age. For a period of days he would become “stuck to” one parent, either father or mother, and tell the other parent “Go away, I’m stuck to Daddy (or Mommy).” If the situation required him to spend time with the parent he wasn’t “stuck to,” the parent he was “stuck to” would have to literally peel him off their leg and hand him over to the other parent. Hewould then switch his allegiance. It seemed that he was able to tolerate thinking one parent was the “good guy” but was unable tograsp the complexity of the situation, so reduced it to simplicity by allowing himself awareness of only one parent at a time.

I use spouse abuse as my primary example, because it involves no direct abuse of the children. After the spousessplit up, the children’s life with either parent may be muchmore secure. But either parent may believe the other to be a monster, and try to involve the child in taking sides against that other parent, just as they do in the marriage. The abused partner may have difficulty believing her ex can treat children any better than he treated her. And the abuser may continue the beliefs about his ex which he used to justify the abuse.

Dissociative Parental Alignment

For the first 12 years of my psychology practice, I worked with children and families in Child & Youth Mental Health. During this time I frequently came upon situations similar to John’s. I began to recognize a common pattern – childrenwhose negative perception of one of their separated parents


appeared to be entirely the product of the other parent’s beliefs, but not consistent with the reality of the hated parent. Often the parent who alleged the other to be disturbed or dangerous was in my assessment the more disturbed or dangerous parent.

When I heard the term “Parental Alienation Syndrome” (PAS) from a probation officer with whom I was collaborating on a case, I embraced it with open arms. This was before Richard Gardner used the term to discount genuine cases of sexual abuse, and developed a poorly validated test to tell the difference between genuine abuse cases and PAS cases. A 1999 summary article by Philip Stahl in the California Psychologist describes the parental alienation situation. He makes the point that Gardner did not invent the syndrome, and quotes the original 1980 book, Surviving the Breakup, by Wallerstein and Kelly - “These young people (9 to 12) were vulnerable to being swept up into the anger of one parent againstthe other. They were faithful and valuable battle allies in efforts to hurt the other parent. Not infrequently, they turned on the parent they had (previously) loved and been very close to prior to the marital separation.”

An article by Kenneth Waldron and David Joanis in the American Journal of Family Law (1996) states that Gardner’s conceptualization of the problem and the dynamics underlyingthe problem proved at best incomplete, if not simplistic anderroneous. More extensive research on the topic has more clearly established the complex involvement and motives of all the actors in this disastrous family drama. Each of thefamily members takes a role in the alienation process, whichusually begins well before the divorce event.

I think that in dismissing “Parental Alienation Syndrome” because of Gardner we are “throwing the baby out with the bathwater.” Perhaps we need a new term. “Dissociative parental alignment?” Very few of the cases I’ve seen have involved sexual abuse allegations. All of them have involved a parent who desperately needs the child to accept his or her extremely negative view of the other parent, and


a child who succumbs to the pressure from that parent to reject, hate and fear the other parent.

Disturbed parents do indeed involve children in their disturbed world-view, in a kind of folie a deux, and in so doing cut their children off from the other more normal parent. I remembered the term “folie a deux” from my undergraduate days, but when I tried to look it up on the Internet I drew a blank. My recollection was that it referred to a paranoid view of reality which was engaged in by two people together. We see this phenomenon in cults andextreme religions, including the terrorist groups which can induce young people to die for their causes. We know a lot about how brainwashing works. We need to face the fact thatparents do it, not only when they are sexually abusing children, but when they are enmeshed with their children andout of touch with some important aspects of reality.

When parents are separated, and have access to children but no continuing access to their former spouse, fears and hatred they have for the other parent can and do easily escalate. A parent who accuses his spouse or ex-spouse of being a horrible person and/or abusing the child may be just describing reality, or may be caught in a self-reinforcing cycle of fear and anger without the opportunity to disconfirm his or her perceptions. Various psychological motivations come together to keep this cycle going : (1) anger and vengefulness; (2) fear that his or her own trauma history will be repeated on the child; (3) projecting his orher own abusiveness onto the partner; and (4) unmet childhood needs which cause this parent to need the child asa totally supportive partner or parent.

Children placed in this situation need to dissociate the reality of what the other parent is actually like in order to feel safe with the disturbed parent. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to tell whether a child rejecting a parent has been brainwashed and has dissociated the real qualities of


that parent, or whether the child has good reasons for his or her rejection. Most of my DID clients have horror stories about trying to tell on their abusive parent or parents, and not being believed.

Examples From My Practice

A man who was a very loving father to his 6-year-old daughter from his first marriage remarried and had a son with a very controlling Oriental woman. She verbally abused him constantly, in particular because he spent a normal amount of time with his daughter, who she saw as some kind of a rival. She had traditional beliefs including that a child needs a mother but notreally a father. The man was afraid to leave this woman because he believed she would cut off his access to his son, falsely accuse him of sexual abuse, or alienate his son from him. I believe his perceptions to be accurate. When I confronted the woman in a marital session about her verbal abuse of the husband,she was furious. She came in the next time with a tape recorder,to record what she believed to be my inappropriate therapeutic behavior.

A lesbian couple attended my parenting classes, then came to me for relationship counselling. The woman who’d given birth to their little girl (with sperm from a gay male friend) had a sexual abuse history and was emotionally disturbed; the other woman was basically normal and very rational. When the normal woman took an innocent photograph of the little girl (almost two years old) in the bathtub, the natural mother became paranoid, and felt this was sexual exploitation. I saw the photograph, which was not pornographic in any way. The natural mother left the relationship, and denied the other mother, who really loved her child, any access except visits at daycare, where the child was full of grief that she couldn’t have her normal mommy more than that. The natural mother eventually moved away from the area, and the normal mother had no rights because they didn’t have a legal marriage or relationship, being lesbian.

Several years ago a Roman Catholic couple attended my parenting course. My recollection is that the father, who was employed in a high-level government position, was a sane and balanced parent,while the mother was prone to emotional overreaction. I saw the


father about three times for therapy, and the mother attended onesession but walked out after ten minutes. Recently the father approached me because he and his wife have recently split up, andhis two teenage children refuse to see him. He came to see me along with his brother and sister-in-law, his sister, and his wife’s parents. They told the sad story of how five years previously, after several years of the mother’s parents helping out with the children, the mother suddenly cut them out of her and her children’s life entirely. The father went along with it to save the marriage. Now the father has been similarly cut off.His wife is having an affair, and is telling the children that it’s retaliation for the father’s affair. But he never had an affair. All these people who saw me seemed sane and balanced, although very sad. They have lost contact entirely with their children and grandchildren because of the mother’s poisoning her children’s minds against them.

A 16-year-old boy came to see me. He lived with his father, and felt that he hated his mother. He knew that just a year previously he had lived with his mother and hated his father, buthe couldn’t remember why.I had a single session with a 17 year old girl. Her whole life with her single mother had revolved around the “fact” that the man who’d been like a father to her had sexually molested her at the age of 18 months. The man had continued to have visits with her, but mother had convinced her of the molestation, which she did not remember. The girl had no other clinical signs of havingbeen sexually abused. She came to see me because she had recently visited the town where she had lived at 18 months, and spoken with her mother’s former best friend, who was a psychologist. This friend told her that she was convinced that the abuse had never happened.

In the first few cases, I saw the process occurring in a parent before I saw the results in the children. In the extended family case, I got to see it in the mother at the start and later saw the results in the children being alienated from their father. In the case of the boy, I saw the results in the child without seeing what the parents were doing. I have no way of judging whether the abuse really happened to the girl – but she described being constantly confronted with its alleged reality by her


mother, and feeling very sad that the man she loved so much could have done this horrendous thing. I have also seen parents alienate children from the school and the rest of the community, so that the child actually hates or fears school premises or personnel on the basis of what the parenthas told her.

The Myth of the Monster Parent

When a child maintains strongly that they don’t want to be with one parent at all, how are we to tell whether this is based on genuine danger from that parent or on “brainwashing” by the other parent? The literature (other than Gardner) describes certain behaviors on the part of theparent with whom the child is aligned, and also certain behaviors on the part of the child.

Both Stahl and Waldron/Joanis describe the behaviors of the alienating parent as summarized in the literature. Their merged lists include :

1) denying the existence of the other parent – e.g. refusing to look at them or acknowledge their presence,or “I don’t ever want to hear that name in this house.”

2) pairing good experiences or feelings with bad feelings – “Oh, that’s nice. I had a terrible weekend without you.”

3) merging of feelings between parent and child – “We feelthis way…”

4) talking in extremes and absolutes5) constantly attacking the other parent’s character or

lifestyle, derogatory and blaming statements about the other parent

6) putting the child in the middle (message carrying, spying, interrogation about time spent with the other parent)

7) generalizing from one or two instances to a global meaning – “Remember when your mother was screaming after us when we drove away (because he closed the window on her when she was trying to kiss the kids


goodbye) – that’s what I mean when I say she just doesn’t have control over her emotions; that’s why I get scared when you’re over there.”

8) taking normal differences and turning them into good/bad and right/wrong problems – “I don’t know what’s the matter with your father; he knows that kids need to be in bed by eight.”

9) creating alliance in the parental battle – “Do you think it’s fair for your rich father to take your poor mother to court all the time?” This can include the powerful tool of the threat of withdrawal of love, or complete abandonment, if the child demonstrates love for or interest in the other parent.” Informing children about adult issues such as reasons for the divorce, infidelity or financial issues.

10) convincing the child that kids need one primary parent or that only this parent really loves her, and the other is trying to take the child away from her.

11) portraying the child as fragile and needing protection (and also that the alienating parent needs the child’s presence to maintain balance)

12) intrusive behaviors such as constant phone calls when the child is at the other parent’s home

13) lying (false allegations)14) brainwashing – rewriting the child’s past

experiences in a way to create reality confusion – “Your father never enjoyed spending time with you… You were scared of her even when you were a baby.”

15) drawing in other family members or friends in tribal warfare

Now, some of the behaviors (#5, 6 and 7) are understandable as coming from a normal parent who genuinely believes the other parent (rightly or wrongly) to be a danger to the child. Given that children may easily dissociate negative characteristics, behaviors and memories, of people they love, the concerned parent may want to remind them, for example, that Daddy used to hit Mommy. The parent may also have figured out the meaning of behaviors which make no


sense to the child, and wants to convey that meaning to the child. The parent may also be afraid to deal with the otheradult herself, and since the child has to deal with him anyway, may prefer to send messages. However, most of the items on this list go far beyond the normal expressions of concern for a child’s welfare.

What is the message to the child living with this behavior? 1) Your father/mother (the other parent) is evil and

dangerous. S/he hurt me, and will hurt you if you try to have a relationship with him/her

2) I am fragile and need to be looked after; I need you tolisten to and validate my pain, which is caused by thatevil person

3) There is only one reality, the one I (and all those around me) know and understand, and you must accept that reality

4) I can be evil and dangerous, and can hurt you if you threaten that reality

Stahl states that the “dynamic causes the alienating parent to reject anyone who perceives things in a way that the alienating parent does not like…. Children are most susceptible to alienation when they are passive and dependent and feel a strong need to psychologically care for the alienating parent.”

Leona Kopetski (The Colorado Lawyer, 1998) says that her Family and Children’s Evaluation Team evaluated both parents and all of the children in 600 cases from 1975 to 1995. She says that the Team

“has found alienating parents to have the following characteristics :

1. A narcissistic or paranoid orientation to interactionsand relationships with others, usually as the result of a personality disorder.

2. Reliance on defenses against psychological pain that result in externalizing unwanted or unacceptable feelings, ideas, attitudes, and responsibility for misfortunes so that more painful internal conflict is


transformed into less painful interpersonal conflict. 3. Evidence of an abnormal grieving process such that

there is a preponderance of anger and an absence of sadness in reaction to the loss of the marital partner.

4. A family history in which there is an absence of awareness of normal ambivalence and conflict about parents, enmeshment, or failure to differentiate and emancipate from parents; of a family culture in which “splitting’ or externalizing is a prominent feature.

The Aligned Child

Over the years, I have seen numerous clinical examples of this process occurring. Most of the cases are fairly mild –in the vast majority of divorce situations, one or both parents try to “lobby” the children to take their side in the parental conflict, and make statements to the children critical of the other parent. Many parents have reported tome how their children seem upset and angry at them for a couple of days after spending time with the other parent, then settle down. Perhaps this upset occurs because the child arrives at the parent’s home primed with expectations that this parent will be as the other parent believes, and looks for evidence to confirm that theory. Disconfirming evidence interferes with the consistency of the child’s world-view. With time in the home, the worldview is discarded and a different one adopted.

When a child has gone back and forth many times, he becomes adept at switching world-views and doesn’t go through the transitional period as severely. But he may not have a whole picture, just two different world-views between which he switches fluently, like the Nazi doctors whose “doubling”allowed them to love their own children and torture those ofother people. Each world view is held by a different ego state. Therapists doing Custody & Access evaluations shouldnote that the view the child holds in a therapy session depends upon which parent brings him in or is picking him up. You will not get a clear picture if the child is always


brought by the same parent.

In the more extreme cases, where one or both parents engage in many of the behaviors on the list, children begin to align strongly with one parent’s view of the other, dissociating the reality of what the other parent is like, and substituting a reality which is at least in part artificial, based on what their chosen parent has told them.Waldron and Joanis describe the following behaviors on the part of the child :

1) Contradictions – the child’s own statements are contradictory,or they contradict factual history or the perceptions of unbiased individuals;

2) Child has inappropriate and unnecessary information (e.g. “My dad had an affair while my mom was in the hospital having me,”or “My mom wanted me aborted.”)

3) Child engages in character assault, including the use of globally negative descriptions for which the child has troublecoming up with specifics sufficient to justify them.

4) Collusion and one-sided alliance with the alienating parent : This is often given away by the use of blended pronouns (e.g. “When my dad left us…,” or “We don’t have enough money to liveon”)

5) Child parrots themes of the alienating parent, even using the same words – the child’s identity becomes enmeshed with that of the alienating parent.

6) Child reports on the target parent, even to professionals, theway a spy would.

7) Child displays a sense of urgency and fragility : Everything seems to have life-and-death importance (e.g. “If you make me have dinner with him, I’ll run away or kill myself”).

8) Child’s affiliations with the target parent’s associates and family change;

9) Splitting : The child cannot come up with any positives aboutthe target parent nor with any negatives about the alienating parent.

10) Marked absence of complex thinking about relationships, and simplistic characterizations of the parents (e.g. “My mom is the homebody and my dad is the entertainer.”)

11) Child demonstrates a feeling of restriction in permission tolove or be loved.


What do these symptoms sound like? An incomplete person – much like a young alter personality of a DID individual. Children in any case have difficulty holding on to both or all sides of complexities in their environment. This extreme pressure leads to letting go, at least temporarily, of one or more aspects of the complexity. When working withyoung alter personalities in DIDs, I have to constantly orient them to present reality. They tend to believe their present situation is as their past was – extremely dangerous. They expect people to abuse them. This is basedon very flimsy evidence about the present, often without even knowledge of what happened in the past. The protector parts tend to be angry and hateful, with minimal provocation, and to interpret small things as evidence that someone is out to harm them. The pain-holder parts tend to be easily afraid or hurt, and their reactions trigger the protector parts to anger. None of these parts believe it ispossible to be cared for.

The difference here is that children who’ve been brainwashedto fear and hate a parent are basing their reactions not on past abuse but on hypnotic repetition and false interpretations of reality by the parent they have the most contact with.

Attachment(s)

What are the pressures that lead a child to dissociate the reality of what one of his or her parents is like, and substitute an alternative reality? Attachment theory is important here. If love from one parent is conditional uponrejection of that parent by the other parent, especially if the parent who is conditionally loving is the primary caregiver, the child needs to make a convincing show of rejecting the other parent in order not to be rejected himself. Also, if the rejecting parent’s emotional well-being is dependent upon nurturing and validation from the child, the child needs to keep the parent alive and well by


validating that parent’s reality. To do this, the child either has to be a superb actor, or to cut off from awareness those aspects of reality which do not conform to that parent’s view of reality. The younger the child, the easier it is for them to dissociate information incongruent with their parents’ views.

Deirdre Rand quotes JR Johnston’s research as follows :Johnston found that 3 to 6-year-old children in high conflict divorce tended to shift their allegiances dependingon which parent they were with. This may contribute to children’s difficulty in transitioning from one home to another. Normally, children in this age group have not yet learned to entertain two conflicting points of view. As a result, when the child is told in mother’s home that father does not provide enough money, the child will temporarily align with mother. The child will shift allegiance to father when told in his home that mother just wastes the money.

…Johnston found that 28 to 43% of the 9- to 12-year-olds were in what she termed “strong alignments,” characterized by consistent rejection and denigration of the other parent.Children tended to make stronger alliances with the more emotionally dysfunctional parent, who was more likely to be the mother. In Impasses of Divorce, Johnston described children in strong alignments as forfeiting their childhood by merging psychologically with a parent who was raging, paranoid, or sullenly depressed. Factors within the child which contributed to the formation of strong alignments werefound to be

1) need to protect a parent who was decompensating, depressed, panicky, or needy;

2) need to avoid the wrath or rejection of a powerful, dominant parent (often the custodial parent on whom the child was dependent); and

3) need to hold onto the parent the child was most afraid oflosing, for example, a parent who was too self-absorbed or who was only casually involved with the child.


…Johnston and Roseby opined, “Rather than seeing this syndrome as being induced in the child by an alienating parent, as Gardner does, we propose that these ‘unholy alliances’ are a later manifestation of the failed separation-individuation process in especially vulnerable children who have been exposed to disturbed family relationships during their early years.”… These authors hypothesize that the more extreme forms of parent alienationin early adolescence have their roots in failed separation-individuation from the alienating parent during the earliestyears of the child’s life.”

This description sounds as if the very young children are able to switch between two different realities, in the homesof two parents, but as they get older they attempt to achieve cognitive consistency by dissociating one of the tworealities. And the one they dissociate is that of the kinder and safer parent, because they need to accept the reality of the dangerous parent in order to be safe with himor her. The ego state for dealing with the dangerous parenttakes precedence over that for dealing with the safer parent.

In the Spouse Abuse article, I describe the batterer’s partner’s situation as follows :

A key to understanding the dissociative nature of the cycle may be the situation outside the home, where the battering spouse is consistently Dr. Jekyll.--charming, pleasant, and thoughtful. The extreme contrast between the person the partner sees outside the home and the person who appears in the home is an important factor in enabling the dissociativeprocess in the batterer's spouse. Even if she may have initially been an emotionally integrated person, the repetitive nature of the phases causes her to split her memories into state-dependent chains. The abused spouse is intermittently in a terrifying environment which requires her to comply with someone who has power over her to avoid further physical harm. She responds by developing different personae, each characterized by a different primary emotion and a different belief system.


The situation outside the home is in many ways the primary reality for an adult, since it is a consensus reality. But for a young child the consensus reality is that established in the primary place the child spends his time.

Stahl says that “As the level of conflict between parents increases and as children are caught in the middle of these conflicts, the child’s level of anxiety and vulnerability increases. For many of these children, an alignment with a parent helps take them out of the middle and reduces their anxiety and vulnerability…. When the child’s anxiety is driving the split, the intensity and severity of the child’s feelings may be greater than the intensity of the alienating parent’sbehaviors.”

Kopetski writes about anxious attachment as being crucial inparental alienation :

“In a desperate attempt to maintain a relationship in the only ways possible (identification and alliance) with the parent who is, at the end of the alienation process, the only parent from a psychological and sometimes physical point of view, the child will mirror the personality and thedistorted perceptions of the alienating parent. The blame for anxiety consequent to the insecurity of attachments willbe externalized and attributed to the other parent.”

Kopetski says that “Many alienated children develop symptoms of anxious attachment or separation anxiety when they are long past theage where separation anxiety is normal…. The most common symptoms in young children are unusual distress during transitions from one parent to the other, sleep disturbances, regressions in achievement of regulation of bodily functions, and failure to achieve expected levels of impulse control. In elementary school age children, disorganization, inability to attend to school work with resultant lowered grades, social isolation and moodiness areoften seen. Teenagers often emancipate prematurely from adult control, becoming defiant and rigid….

Children need to develop the function of reality testing,


not just about their parents, but also about the world in general. It is essential that they learn not to exclude important information just because it makes them uncomfortable or conflicted. It is also important that theylearn to correct misunderstandings and change conclusions with new information…. Alienated children tend to become fixed and rigid in their opinions and ideas. They will obviously and actively reject any information that does not confirm their ideas. Too often, their ideas are strongly influenced by feelings, which they often cannot distinguish from facts without help. Having little sense of time (as most people do not during a crisis), they believe that the feelings of today will last forever.

Waldron and Joanis state“In some instances, the alienating parent’s efforts at alienating the child will be so ruthless, sophisticated, pervasive, and persistent, playing heavily on the loyalties,fears, and even trust of the child, that the child’s abilityto maintain an independent relationship with the target parent will slowly be crushed. If the child continues to see the target parent in these cases, the child will often display a split identity (clinically referred to as verticalsplitting). That is, when with the alienating parent, the child will appear thoroughly rejecting of the target parent,but when with the target parent, he or she will display affection, attachment, interest, fun, and freedom from the oppressive alignment with the alienating parent.”

A therapist wrote to me as follows : Once I was so sure that a father was the most appropriate parent to have custody of his 7-year-old daughter, I asked the judge to confirm my position with a second evaluation. Turns out the mother took the child to another psychologist where the child presented with a completely different personality who was afraid to be around her father…. In another case I worked with a teenager who had moved here with her mother to get away from an abusive father. Although the girl had said she didn’t want to be around her father, the judge ordered that she spend every school holiday with him. As a way of coping, she had developed an alter for Mommy and one for Daddy. She was quite insightful


and talked about the switching process that occurred on the plane in her trips back and forth.”

Waldron and Joanis go on to say “The effect of Parental Alienation Syndrome on the child is never benign; it is malevolent and intense. The degree of severity will depend on the extent of the brainwashing, the amount of time the child spends enmeshed with the AlienatingParent, the age of the child, the number of healthy support people in the child’s life, and the degree to which the child “believes” the delusion (In many cases of Parental Alienation Syndrome, the child will exhibit all the signs ofabsolute rejection of the Target Parent, but in private willdisclose that the rejection is just an act.)…

The child’s internal psychological and emotional organization becomes centered around the rejection of the Target Parent. The child develops identity and self-conceptthrough a process of identification with both parents, a process that begins very early in the child’s life. The rejection of the hated parent becomes an internalized rejection and leads, over time, to self-loathing fears of rejection, depression, and often suicidal ideation. These developments often are a surprise to the Alienating Parent and others, since at the time of the alienation, the child will often look mature, assertive, and confident…. The childis also internalizing the rage of the Alienating Parent as part of the self-concept, which often combines with intense guilt over the harm done to the Target Parent to become chronic feeling states. Sadness and longing often accompanythese other feelings. When the Parental Alienation Syndromeincludes grave distortions of reality, the child’s reality-testing abilities become compromised, and he or she has permission to distort other aspects of life.

… Often, the enmeshment with Alienating Parent inhibits the development of the child in other spheres of functioning. For example, the child may become socially withdrawn, regress in social situations, or be seen by others as immature. Often these won’t show up until the child reachesthe final stages of individuation in early adulthood…. A dominant emotion for the child is loss, though this may not show up right way.”


Now some of this appears to be theory, based on the idea that certain emotions are hidden and appear later. This makes sense if you see the child as dissociating the emotions she or he isn’t permitted to have during his time with the alienating parent. The social withdrawal may be anattempt to prevent his world-view from being disconfirmed.


The Dissociated Parent versus the Disliked Parent

Stahl states that alienated parents are of two types :1) those who previously had a healthy relationship with

the child, but are now being shut out of the child’s life. Passive, nurturing, and sensitive.

2) those who claim that alienation is the problem, but aredefensive, avoidant of relationships, externalize blame, have difficulty seeing their own role in problems with the children, are controlling and used tohaving things their own way, lack empathy. In other words, the child doesn’t like them because they aren’t likeable.

Stahl says :Some children tell very moving stories of how they have not liked or have been fearful of the alienated parent for a long time. They can give specific details of abuse, angry behavior, etc. prior to separation. These children often feel relieved when their parents divorce because they are now free of those problems. The differential understanding will come from the child’s clear account of inappropriate behavior, detachment in the relationship and a convincing sense of real problems (as opposed to the moral indignation of the alienated child)….

When we listen to these children in those cases where the child is detached from the alienated parent, there is littleevidence that these children are put in the middle by the alienating parent. Rather, there is a sadness to these children who wish (or may have wished in the past) for a different quality to the relationship with the alienated parent. For many of these children, they have observed significant spousal abuse during the marriage or have observed one parent being controlling and hostile to the other parent. It is the sadness and ambivalence about the lack of a relationship that is one of the key differential indicators that these children, while certainly aligned withone parent, are not being alienated.

(also) Many children seem to be aligned with one parent


primarily because of shared interests or a goodness of fit in the personality dynamics with one parent

Children who have rejected a parent because of alienation bythe other parent and blurring of boundaries between parent and child are different from those who reject a parent because that parent does not provide what they need. The latter group are sad and ambivalent about the lack of a relationship rather than expressing hate towards the alienated parent.

Long-Term Effects on Children

Not long after Jane left her husband, she took a trip with afemale friend and both of their children. Her youngest son fought constantly with the friend’s youngest daughter, showing many of the same behaviors her husband had shows towards her. When he reached adolescence, this boy, who hadbeen in joint custody since she left her husband when he wasfive, began to verbally abuse her in the same way his fatherhad.

"At five he suggested that our dad not live with us. And after I left his dad, he told me that he'd been very afraid that one day his dad would knock me unconscious or kill me. But he has forgotten all that now. He doesn't even believethat spouse abuse happened. I hear him use words in attacking me that are identical with words his father used -- words that aren't normal for a 15-year-old boy to use. I know his father has spent years brainwashing him to see things his way. And my son has clearly dissociated the frightening things that happened, when the loving daddy who was his caregiver became the ogre."

This case was not unique. Another therapist wrote of having a client whose parents occasionally let him break up their regular late night fights where they both bandied about threats to leave each other. The child developed a fear of going to sleep becausehe might miss an opportunity to “save” their marriage. Later, heforgot why he was afraid to go to sleep, but just knew he felt terribly anxious when it was time to go to bed. He developed rituals to try and soothe himself at night but found he would often lie awake until all was quiet in the house. Even after hisparents’ divorce he often needed to sleep in the same room as his


parent in order to go to sleep. Talking over these great fears of childhood in his therapy and the therapist assuring him it wasn’t possible for him to keep them together would always help him feel better for a few days, usually until one of his parents would start to berate or to criticize the other, then the ritualswould kick in again. The therapist regularly instructed the parents not to do this, but even in divorce they found it easy torun their partner down, even when it caused obvious stress and anxiety in the child.

One thing notable in this case is the way in which the childforgot the initial reason for his inability to sleep. It seemed he had transmuted his response into a general world view that bad things happened at night, and he needed to be vigilant and respond to the danger, whatever it was. We seethis frequently in survivors of childhood trauma – or even with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The person responds with emotion to a trigger which has some resemblance to a past trauma, without any conscious awareness of the connection to the trauma.

Therapeutic Treatment of the Child

I began a discussion on the Dissociative Disorders Discussion List in December 1999. about this topic. Although I am not permitted to quote directly from the discussion, I should like to thank the members of the list at that time for their important contributions to the concepts in this paper. Some of the ideas I express in the following section come from list members.

A child living with a parent who hates his other parent may not have the internal strength to really allow himself to know everything he knows on some level. So he must flipflopallegiances between mother and father. For the child to reduce his dissociation, and understand what is really goingon in his life, he needs to allow himself to feel both sides, to understand the intensity of his pulls, and to recognize the extreme danger he has perceived in allowing himself to really feel or really know. The risk is the loss


of security as he senses that the love of one parent is contingent on rejection of the other parent. Yet, in order to heal, he has to face his parent’s inadequacy in having put him in this terrible dilemma. He has to know what he hates about both, what he loves about both, and be himself, liberated from the dissociative alliances.

A therapist might say to him “Describe to me how scary it would feel to love them both at the same time.” It would beimportant not to let him off the hook about the things he states he does not know or remember about the hated parent. He could be given historical information about each parent, and encouraged to critically evaluate this information, so that he could be freed of the terrible pulls on him.

These children suffer from dissociation, even if they don’t qualify for our present categories of DID or even DDNOS. They are unable to experience one important part of their lives as it is. We need to encourage these children, and other people experiencing separation of the parts of their emotional lives and attachments, to experience the conflicted aspects of their emotional life simultaneously, rather than in a dissociated sequence.

A 25-year-old client of mine lives with her parents, although hermother touched her sexually throughout her adolescent years. Shetook a long time to disclose this or to recognize it as abuse. Now she constantly takes the opposite side to me in relation to her mother. She has told me her mother abused her, and I can listen to her talk about this. I can also listen to her talking about how judgmental her mother is. But if I, the therapist, mention her mother having abused her or being judgmental, she rushes in to defend her mother. This young woman has also spokenof her mother being loving and understanding when she is suicidal. But if I, the therapist, mention her mother being supportive, she expresses rage against her mother. She is unableto hold both sides of the conflict within herself, so externalizes whichever side she is not currently identified with into me. I have to be very careful to place the locus of the


contradictions back in her.

Sometimes, children “caught in the middle” feel that findingtheir own self essence does not put them in danger of losingtheir love objects. This may or may not be true. As these children grow into adolescence and adulthood, they need to grieve and move beyond these losses in order to be whole. The parents of these children need help to grasp that their individual and interactive use of their child as an object for their unconscious pathological needs is what delays or disrupts the child’s developing autonomy, and can set into motion dissociative coping mechanisms, that in its extreme form, results in a fragmented sense of self. Unfortunately,many parents who put their children into this kind of a bindare unable or unwilling to see what they are doing.

Onno Van der Hart has described a dissociative way of life as a “retraction of the field of personal consciousness.’ A person who is only able to experience one aspect of their life at a time needs assistance to move from “either/or” to “and/and.” Dissociation is by no means restricted to individuals with DID. Many people operate on “one cylinder,” without access to much of the information they take in with their senses. Anyone who has lived with complex attachment dilemmas, including in particular the children of warring parents, has a restricted field of personal consciousness, and needs to expand it.

In my article on spousal abuse I spoke about what the abusedpartner needs :

A major task in treatment is for the battered woman to become able to remember the abuse when her spouse is being supportive, and the supportiveness when he is abusing. To accomplish this, the following interventions have proved helpful: (1) Have the abuse victim keep a journal, instructing her

to divide it into different sections that correspond withthe different phases of the abuse cycle. Have her journaleach day in the appropriate section throughout the phases ofthe relationship. Then have her read material daily from


the sections which contain material from phases which aredifferent from the one she is currently experiencing. Thejournal is also helpful in helping the patient accessmaterial for use in therapy.

(2) After the abused spouse is able to access images fromphases other than the one she is currently in, hypnoticallyinterweave images from each phase of the relationship.

(3) Use Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing(EMDR) with images from the different phases, then overlaythe images and have the spouse see both at once.

A young DID client of mine was brought up by an abusive grandmother who was keeping her “safe” from her drug-addicted biker mother. She has recently been making peace with her grandmother, whom she calls “Mom,” but she does not want to do this by restricting her awareness of the other side of “Mom.” She recently brought me a list of all her grandmother’s abuses, and asked me to read this list solemnly, while all alters in her system listened. What a brave way of confronting the reality from which most of her has been dissociated most of her life.

All of us in our family lives are faced with conflicting emotions about those people who are close to us. It is important that we become able to move from sometimes loving them and sometimes hating them to becoming aware of loving and hating them at the same time. There are different degrees of dissociation in this process :

1) When I feel love for someone I don’t know that I sometimes hate them, and can’t remember their horrible characteristics;

2) When I feel love for someone I’m aware that I sometimeshate them, though I don’t know exactly why;

3) When I feel love for someone I’m aware that they have flaws, and know what those flaws are and that they sometimes annoy me.

4) I’m able to love someone and feel angry at them at the same time.

A big reason why anger and hatred can do so much damage is because they frequently exist in dissociated ego states. A person feeling anger at someone else isn’t at that moment


aware of the positive characteristics of that person, and ofhow important that person is to them. This means that they can say and do destructive things which they would not be able to do if their anger was not dissociated from the rest of their being. When I work with DIDs who have been perpetrators, it is the new connection of the perpetrator alters with the victim alters and the more objective “knowledge alters” that makes the perpetrator parts unable to continue to perpetrate. This same connection needs to befostered in non-DID people who suffer from less severe dissociative conditions which can nevertheless make family life unliveable.


A child being forced to spend time with the abusive parent may well develop a dissociative disorder. A therapist wroteto me as follows : “Once I was so sure that a father was themost appropriate parent to have custody of his 7-year-old daughter, I asked the judge to confirm my position with a second evaluation. Turns out the mother took the child to another psychologist where the child presented with a completely different personality who was afraid to be aroundher father…. In another case I worked with a teenager who had moved here with her mother to get away from an abusive father. Although the girl had said she didn’t want to be around her father, the judge ordered that she spend every school holiday with him. As a way of coping, she had developed an alter for Mommy and one for Daddy. She was quite insightful and talked about the switching process thatoccurred on the plane in her trips back and forth.”

ReferencesJohnston J.R. & Roseby, V: In the Name of the Child: A Developmental Approach to

Understanding and Helping Children of Conflicted and Violent Divorce. New York: Free Press, 1997.

Kopetski, Leona M. Identifying Cases of Parent Alienation Syndrome – Part II. The

Colorado Lawyer, 27 (3), March 1998, 63-66.Miller, Alison. The Dissociative Dance of Spouse Abuse, Treating Abuse Today, 8(3),

May/June 1998, 9-18.Rand, Deirdre Conway. The Spectrum of Parental Alienation Syndrome (Part II).

American Journal of Forensic Psychology, 15(4), 1997.Stahl, Philip M. Alienation and Alignment of Children. California Psychologist, 32(3),

March 1999, 23ff.Waldron, Kenneth H. & Joanis, David E. Understanding and


Collaboratively Treating Parental Alienation Syndrome. American Journal of Family Law, 10, 1996, 121-133.

http://www.fact.on.ca/Info/pas (website with articles on Parental Alienation Syndrome)

http://www.fact.on.ca/Info/pas

Dissociative Parental Alignment

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