Parental Alienation
Damaging a child’s relationship with their parent can have harmful and long-lasting effects. It is possible to rebuild a positive relationship with your child.
What is parental alienation (PA)?
“It’s when there’s a lot of fighting between parents. It’s usually when they are divorced, but not always. Sometimes the children side with one parent and refuse to have anything to do with the other parent, even though they previously had a good relationship with the parent they are now rejecting.” (W. Bernet, Working with Alienated Children and Families, 2013).
Why should we be concerned about PA?
When left untreated, PA can develop rapidly into child emotional and/or physical abuse. This type of abuse has long-term consequences that last well into adulthood, as evidenced by numerous research studies.
For example, Bentley & Matthewson found that all of the adults in their study who were alienated as a child reported mental health problems, including anxiety, panic attacks, depression, emotional dysregulation, attention problems, post-traumatic stress disorder, dissociation, eating disorders, suicide ideation and self-harm (The Not-Forgotten Child: Alienated Adult Children’s Experience of Parental Alienation. 26 June 2020, The American Journal of Family Therapy).
