PARENTAL ALIENATION AND ENMESHMENT ISSUES IN CHILD CUSTODY CASES
By Daniel J. Rybicki, Psy.D., DAPBS
© copyright 2001, all rights reserved
(Document last updated 08/19/01)
Excerpt from Dr. Rybicki's forthcoming book on Expert Witness Testimony and Forensic Psychology.
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Relevant Clinical and Research Literature:
In recent years, custody evaluators and family therapists have encountered numerous cases of highly dysfunctional behavior evident in divorcing couples. While scientific research literature has not yet caught up with clinical descriptions, there have been several published accounts of a process that some have come to label "parental alienation." Most notable and most controversial in this history is the body of work by Dr. Richard Gardner (1987; 1992a; 1992b ). Others have popularized and expanded on Dr. Gardner's work (e.g., Darnell, 1998; 1999; Navarre, 1998), although the primary proponent of the PAS model has been Dr. Gardner. It was Dr. Gardner who labeled this process a "syndrome", implying that a set of behavioral factors or "symptoms" are present in varying combinations to form a fairly consistent profile or pattern of concerns. The implication is that this syndrome may have common causes and treatments, leading Dr. Gardner to apply his "medical model" terminology to explain his repeated clinical observations. There has been considerable debate over whether or not this account meets the requisite definition of "syndrome" (e.g., Bricklin & Elliott, 2000; Johnston and Kelly, 2001; Poliacoff, 2000; Willams, 2001), there is sufficient professional discussion of this topic to warrant closer scrutiny of just what it is that is being described in certain divorcing family systems.
Parental alienation is described by Ward and Harvey (1993) as the creation of "a singular relationship between a child and one parent, to the exclusion of the other parent. The fully alienated child is a child who does not wish to have any contact whatsoever with one parent and who expresses only negative feelings for that parent and only positive feelings for the other parent. This child has lost the range of feelings for both parents that is normal for a child." The definition suggests a range of levels of severity, and implies that several factors may contribute to this observed outcome in a family system. The alienation process is believed to set up conditions that interfere with the quality of the relationship with the alienated parent, which in turn adds to maladjustment and distortion in the child. According to Ward and Harvey, the alienating parent is motivated by residual issues from unresolved problems in the marriage or divorce. At times, the motivations may be unconscious in the alienating parent. At times, the issues are more overtly owned and expressed.
As this model implies, there is a heavy emphasis on examining the role of the parent who might act in ways which lead to alienation in the child. This viewpoint is in keeping with the position offered by Gardner whose definition of parental alienation syndrome sets forth a specific diagnosable disorder that has eight core criteria which must be met to earn this label. Gardner's formulation of the parental alienation syndrome (PAS) followed some of the formative writings of Wallerstein and Kelly (1976, 1980) which reported on observations of a clinical phenomenon in which the child's strident rejection of a parent was accompanied by strong resistance or refusal to visit with the alienated parent. This pathological alignment between a parent and a child to the exclusion of the other parent was identified several years prior to Gardner's earliest writings in the area. It was Gardner however who developed a more elaborate and detailed description and offered a series of criteria for assessing this alienation process in its most disturbing form when it appeared as a pathological syndrome.
As noted here, the clinical descriptions in the literature tend to focus on the motivations and behaviors of the alienating parent and to a lesser extent on the children involved in this process. There has been a great deal of dispute and disfavor shown amongst judges, researchers, and policy makers to this formulation, and this has led to more recent focus on a continuum of family system dynamics wherein alienation and estrangement may take place. The more acceptable view amongst a body of researchers and authors is that PAS and other forms of alienation are part of a larger set of dysfunctional family system dynamics that may become pronounced in times of marital conflict, separation, or divorce. There has been greater emphasis on the concept of the alienated child (e.g., Kelly and Johnson, 2001) which has sought to examine the methods by which a child may become estranged from a parent. The new formulations have not totally rejected the possibility of PAS being a bona fide form of disturbance, but they have described a host of other formulations and factors which must be considered, along with pointing out the range of complexity that can be associated with parent-child relationship problems in a conflictual and divorced family system (see Lee and Olesen, 2001). These authors would find less to disagree with in their view with the earlier writings of Waldron and Joanis (1996) or with Ward and Harvey (1993) who have viewed the alienation process as a form of family system disturbance. They might agree that alienation may even be a defense mechanism which may serve the purpose of maintaining the alienating parent's symbiotic dependence on the child, assist in managing the anger and revenge felt by the child or alienated parent, protecting the alienating parent's self-esteem, or avenging the alienated parent's abandonment of the family. They find multiple pathways to observations of alienation in a family system, and they find the model offered by Gardner to be too simplistic and too unfair primarily to mothers. And, while these new formulations of the "alienated child" or alienation process in divorcing families offer a much improved clinical working model, they share with Gardner the fact that they are largely untested in terms of empirical research on diagnosis and intervention strategies.
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