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What is alienation?
Put aside all the emotions likely to have brought you here. Chances are you're living a nightmare (or representing someone who is living a nightmare) and you're desperately searching for answers. Now is not the time to take a course in child and family development, but here you are, nonetheless.
Look at the world through the child's eyes.
Responsible caregivers routinely tell their children who to trust and who not to trust. "Don't talk to strangers" and "Stay away from that man in the overcoat" and "you're right, Uncle George is kind of creepy." These are messages that undermine trust in a healthy (or adaptive) way. Change the words a bit and the messages the opposite occurs. Words can enable a child's trust: "Yes, Uncle George is a very kind man, sweetie."
These messages, spoken and unspoken, help families determine membership. These are the tools of affililiation. When a child's security with a targeted figure ("Uncle George") is decreased, alienation has occurred. When a child's security with a targeted figure is increased, alignment has occurred.
These messages are necessary and natural. We each communicate who is "in" and who is "out" constantly at work and among friends, on the basketball court, in church and elsewhere. Teenage cliques are the best examples because the messages and the resulting "in" and "out" groups are so obvious.
When these same tools are used by rageful adults within an otherwise secure family system to win selfish alliances, they become weapons of abuse.
Alienation seldom occurs alone
The empirical research that is available strongly suggests that alienation seldom occurs alone. In almost every instance studied, there are concurrent and mutually compatible elements of ESTRANGEMENT and ENMESHMENT to various degrees.
ESTRANGEMENT is used in this field in a very specific manner to describe a child's resistance to or refusal of contact with a caregiver for objectively valid reasons. For example, when a child resists seeing a violent and abusive mother, the dynamic is referred to as estrangement. In this instance, the child's resistance is warranted and appropriate to her experience of the parent.
By contrast, if the same child resists or refuses contact with a parent in a manner disproportionate to that parent's genuine sensitive, responsive caregiving, (co-parental) alienation may be occuring.
ENMESHMENT describes a relationship that is lacking in healthy interpersonal boundaries. Enmeshment between a parent and child must be understood as a function of the child's development, understanding that healthy boundaries between parent and infant are quite different than the healthy bounadries for the same parent-child pair one or ten or twenty years later.
In some enmeshed parent-child pairs, the child is prematurely promoted to serve as a peer or even as the adult's caregiver. These are adultification and parentification, respectively. In other parent-child pairs, the adult cannot allow the child to grow toward healthy independence. This is known as infantilization.
To what degree alienation, estrangement and enmeshment are at work in a given family will determine the best combination of psychotherapeutic and court-ordered remedies. Child-Centered Family Evaluation (CCFE) is the only means of making this determination.
Alienation is NOT a syndrome.
Many people hear this controversy as a pointless matter of semantics. In fact, its quite important:
Some very well-known professionals argue that alienation is a syndrome that is instilled in a child by a malicious parent. Richard Gardner referred to this as Parental Alienation Syndrome, or PAS .
A syndrome is a diagnosable constellation of symptoms within an individual (cf.., Down's Syndrome). Were alienation a syndrome (as in PAS), then it would be possible to confirm or disconfirm its existence by assessing the individual him- or herself. It is not.
Think of alienation as a verb, as in "to alienate a child from a caregiver" rather than as a noun. Alienation can (and often does) contribute to diagnosable symptoms (e.g., anxiety, depression) and/or behaviors (e.g., resisting contact with one parent) within a child, but itself remains a dynamic that exists in the relationships, not in an individual. Be clear that the reverse is not true: Although it is possible to diagnosis anxiety or depression and/or to observe contact resistance within a child, these are never sufficient cause from which to therefore conclude that alienation is afoot.
Evaluating allegations of
alienation in the family courts.
Can alienation be inferred from
Alienation cannot be "diagnosed" in a child.
Because alienation is a dynamic (a verb) that occurs within a family system, it can only be inferred with more or less certainty by a neutral, child-centered mental health professional who has conducted a comprehensive family systems assessment or CCFE
a review of records without a CCFE?
Dad believes that Mom is alienating 10 year old Billy. Dad hasn't seen Billy in 12 months because Billy completely refuses to go with him. Dad takes Mom to court, claiming that she is in contempt of the standing visitation (contact) orders. Dad is motivated to participate in a CCFE hoping to resume contact with his son, but Mom refuses. The court won't endorse it. Dad calls Dr. Garber asking for expert opinion in an effort to educate the court.
Dr. Garber can interview Dad, review pounds of court documents, psych evals and treatment records. He might even speak with references, but in the end these data are not sufficient grounds with which to conclude that alienation has occurred. In this (all too familiar) situation, the strongest statement possible is that the available data are consistent with the suggestion of alienation.
Inevitably, an expert's observation that data are consistent with (rather than conclusive or dispositive of) will be criticized as incomplete: The same data may simultaneously be consistent with other outcomes and additional data that the expert was not given access to (interviewing Mom and Billy? What about the several other pounds of documents?) might prove otherwise.
Does this mean that expert opinion derived in this manner is not useful. No. In many cases, it may be the best option possible and it can make a critical difference in the child's life, but it must be understood for its necessary and inherent limits.
Is alienation abuse?
Yes. But as of this writing, there are no known case law precedents or child protective service (CPS) standards of practice.
In New Hampshire, for example, the law states that, "children do best when both parents have a stable and meaningful involvement in their lives" (RSA 461-A:2)
This may be interpreted to suggest that anything which interferes with a child's opportunity to enjoy "stable and meaningful" contact with a parent is counter to the law. Thus, one caregiver's efforts to undermine a child's relationship with another should be a matter of dire importance. Unfortuately, it apparently does not rise to the level of constituting abuse.
What are the best remedies
when alienation occurs?
From the child's point of view, there are only two healthy outcomes: Each parent supports the child's opportunity to make and maintain the healthiest relationship possible with the other parent and each parent him- or herself is the best parent he or she can be.
Courts cannot mandate these outcomes.
When courts become involved, the label "alienation" seems to take on a life of its own. Lawyers and litigants alike commonly talk about alienation as if it were a crowbar with which the court might wrench a child out of one home and into the other.
Indeed, Gardner did recommend that in cases of severe and entrenched alienation, the child should be forcibly transferred out of the alienating home so as to live with the despised and rejected caregiver. Such a radical "parentectomy" is intended to correct the emotional abuse imposed by the alienting parent.
Although there are some cases in which such a move may, indeed, serve the child's best interests, this choice must be reached with tremendous care, with special attention to the impact that the family dynamic is having on the child's social, emotional, physical health, and academic functioning and often after exhausting all other solutions.
Feinberg & Loeb on remedies (1994)
Canadian court changes custody (Rogerson v. Tessario 2006)