Calif-legal.com: Expert Article - PARENTAL ALIENATION AND ENMESHMENT ISSUES IN CHILD CUSTODY CASES by Daniel J. Rybicki, Psy.D., DAPBS

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When this disturbance appears, the family dysfunction resonates throughout the family system. It may even take on more pervasive elements by its multigenerational impact from grandparents, through parents, and on to the youngest children. Therapeutic intervention is a necessary first step, but this may fail due to premature termination when the treatment process gets too close to the pathology. Ellis (1994) describes examples of this resistance to treatment with case examples where the mother-child enmeshment led to the early withdrawal from treatment. As noted above, the long-term consequences of enmeshment left unchecked can be the development of serious emotional, developmental, and physical problems.

In one notable study, adolescents from such dysfunctional homes demonstrated limitations in their coping abilities and in their development of a personal identity (Perosa & Perosa, 1993). Dating relationships may be restricted and limitations in career exploration or development may also follow from the negative impact of mother-child enmeshment (Fullinwider & Jacobvitz, 1993). When enmeshment has been present with one spouse from their family of origin, there tends to be restricted marital intimacies in the couple which appears to reflect the perpetuation of family dysfunction (Waring & Patton, 1984). Clearly, the pathology has the potential to transmit damaging messages and unhealthy family relations from one generation to the next and beyond.

Unhealthy fusion may be increased through the process of divorce (Isaacs, 1987) where any proclivity toward enmeshment is increased. However, the simple process of divorce does not in itself account for the ongoing impact of enmeshment (Zastowny & Lewis, 1989), such that the deleterious effects of enmeshment exist independently and have a life of their own if they remain unchecked. The collusion, fusion, symbiosis, overconcern, and separation-individuation problems of enmeshment create a constant state of vigilance which maintains the boundaries between the internal and external world in a rather stable state of defense (Verheij, 1982). Families where multigenerational enmeshment exist face added pressures at points of crisis and tend to demonstrate even greater cohesion and growth-inhibiting controls over their members. Therapeutic intervention is considered essential in such families according to these authors.
Implications for Custody Evaluators:

The early descriptions of alienation and high-conflict family disturbance offered by Wallerstein and Kelly (1976; 1980) and the work on enmeshment (Minuchin et al., 1978) set the stage for closer consideration of the types of variables that can yield impaired adjustment in the parents and children of divorce. Additional controversy sparked by Gardner's formulation of the PAS combined with intense debates in the mental health and legal literature have helped to move the field further along the process of developing more complex and rich theoretical models. While more research is clearly needed, there is an emerging literature that is very clear that enmeshment and alienation dynamics can produce extremely serious developmental consequences for persons caught in such dysfunctional family dynamics. The typical custody evaluator is often faced with the task of observing these clinical features in the divorced family system. While Gardner offers a list of eight criteria for PAS, and while he has formerly suggested that evaluators use his Sexual Abuse Legitimacy Scale to distinguish false allegations of sexual abuse from bona fide allegations, it has been noted that neither approach represents a true psychological measure. In fact, Gardner has discontinued using the SAL in the face of such criticism. The new alienated child model offered by Kelly, Johnston, Lee, and Olesen sets forth several areas to evaluate, but lacks any specific formalized tools for measuring these issues. Clinical judgment remains the primary methodology for even this more sophisticated analysis.

Thus, psychological assessment of parental alienation or enmeshment is complicated by the fact that there are no specific or scientifically validated methods or scales for making this type of family evaluation. More general reliance on customary clinical tools such as interviews, family observations, collateral interviews, and psychological testing will only give the evaluator a piece of the puzzle at best. These may have some established empirical support, but there remains no set of cut-off scores or other methods for clear demarcation of estrangement versus enmeshment, to highlight one example. It may be possible to use the recent formulations by Kelly and Johnston to organize the data collected from these and other sources. Some may elect to rely on Gardner's approach. And, to the extent that some empirical descriptors are available for evaluating parents who engage in such alienating behavior or abuse, it may be possible to combine these findings by using the summary of common profiles that appear in the literature and compare them with the data from the subject in question. In this approach, the evaluator may offer a statement to the court as to the degree to which a given parent or a given family resembles the typologies listed by other authorities in the field.

Plausible rival hypotheses must be given serious consideration when the evaluator detects evidence of what might appear to be parental alienation, enmeshment, estrangement, and other such features in a given case. These complex models offer some parameters for making this type of comparison. In the case of alienation, Poliacoff (2000) suggests that the child's ambivalence towards a parent or their overt rejection of one parent may reflect several other factors such as:

• developmentally normal separation problems,
• deficits in the non-custodial parent's skills,
• oppositional behavior in the child,
• high-conflict divorce proceedings,
• other serious emotional or medical problems of one family member,
• child abuse and neglect,
• inappropriate, unpredictable, or violent behavior by one parent,
• incidental causes, such as the child's dislike of a parent's new roommate or lover,
• alienation by third parties,
• the child's unassisted manipulation of one or both parents, or
• fears for the absent parent's welfare.