Children Resisting Post-Separation Contact With a Parent,
Selected international thinking and research to inform Scotland's families, legal and professional systems to do better for the children in the middle of the more complicated and difficult separations.
Nick's GUIDE: Overview (with Diagrams), Thinking It Through, The Resources, Some Very Difficult Thinking, Nick's Conclusions, and Footnotes (including Help Now).
INTRODUCTION
Nick Child, family therapist and retired child and family psychiatrist (whose website and words you're reading) attended the event "Changing the Culture" on 31st August 2012 in Edinburgh - click here for programme and clickhere to download the full report of the event held at the Murray Stable. The event was mainly for and about family lawyers and the courts, and an imminent forthcoming review triggered by an infamous case "B v G". There were contributions from others including the Scottish Child Law Centre, Families Need Fathers, and Women's Aid. Since then other discussions have helped improve the picture and information in Scotland.
Nick's interest arose from his family therapy work and his discovery and rapid learning about the field usually called Parental Alienation (PA) - click here for more. The terms PA and PA Syndrome are so loaded with presumptions that it is less off-putting to include it within a wider range of patterns of "Children Resisting Post-Separation Contact With a Parent" (Children Resisting Contact or CRC for short). Get a packed video interview about high conflict court cases and PA from one of the most prolific famous American names, Dr Richard Warshak.
Starting from this hugely contentious complicated front door of CRC makes this topic and webpage long hard work. If we started from calmer ordinary knowledge about patterns and relationships, we would quickly understand how such high conflict patterns can arise. That they happen is no surprise. What is also no surprise is to find that the patterns, notably alienation, can happen to both genders and any sexuality. Most of the mountainous debates this page wades through below are irrelevant, since the patterns happen independently of the gender and legal aspects that add to the heated wrangles. The information on domestic abuse describes virtually identical patterns whatever the gender of the victim and the perpetrator. Compare this with this for example. And note that both sides acknowledge that both genders cause and suffer abuse. Yet in talking about the subject, people often find they are “walking on egg-shells”. Read more on how equalism makes for firmer ground here.
Mix together universal things we know about such as the following elements, and high conflict will result: Attachment patterns when attachment goes wrong, how thinking and feeling gets polarised and stuck, how neurobiological survival emotions of fight or flight fuel situations, the natural coercion of all childrearing, normal patterns of family division alliance and loyalty, how stronger and weaker personalities come into play, and the normal aspects of any separation process may naturally generate vicious circles (given the different concerns for children and differences in parenting styles along with other negative perceptions and given there is no constructive attitude or communication channels to sort these out). This recipe can explain problematic patterns in families without the gender and other issues that get dragged in. Nick is composing a short alternative webpage based on this idea, so you won't have to go through all the rest of this long page! Then you will be able to return to the many heated gender-linked debates and be puzzled about why they are getting in the way of more directly helping the families and children. Meanwhile, read on:
Dear Readers,
The above link has got a lot of information for Scotland's Children's welfare courts if they want to adopt these.
Denboba Natie
Nick Child, family therapist and retired child and family psychiatrist (whose website and words you're reading) attended the event "Changing the Culture" on 31st August 2012 in Edinburgh - click here for programme and clickhere to download the full report of the event held at the Murray Stable. The event was mainly for and about family lawyers and the courts, and an imminent forthcoming review triggered by an infamous case "B v G". There were contributions from others including the Scottish Child Law Centre, Families Need Fathers, and Women's Aid. Since then other discussions have helped improve the picture and information in Scotland.
Nick's interest arose from his family therapy work and his discovery and rapid learning about the field usually called Parental Alienation (PA) - click here for more. The terms PA and PA Syndrome are so loaded with presumptions that it is less off-putting to include it within a wider range of patterns of "Children Resisting Post-Separation Contact With a Parent" (Children Resisting Contact or CRC for short). Get a packed video interview about high conflict court cases and PA from one of the most prolific famous American names, Dr Richard Warshak.
Starting from this hugely contentious complicated front door of CRC makes this topic and webpage long hard work. If we started from calmer ordinary knowledge about patterns and relationships, we would quickly understand how such high conflict patterns can arise. That they happen is no surprise. What is also no surprise is to find that the patterns, notably alienation, can happen to both genders and any sexuality. Most of the mountainous debates this page wades through below are irrelevant, since the patterns happen independently of the gender and legal aspects that add to the heated wrangles. The information on domestic abuse describes virtually identical patterns whatever the gender of the victim and the perpetrator. Compare this with this for example. And note that both sides acknowledge that both genders cause and suffer abuse. Yet in talking about the subject, people often find they are “walking on egg-shells”. Read more on how equalism makes for firmer ground here.
Mix together universal things we know about such as the following elements, and high conflict will result: Attachment patterns when attachment goes wrong, how thinking and feeling gets polarised and stuck, how neurobiological survival emotions of fight or flight fuel situations, the natural coercion of all childrearing, normal patterns of family division alliance and loyalty, how stronger and weaker personalities come into play, and the normal aspects of any separation process may naturally generate vicious circles (given the different concerns for children and differences in parenting styles along with other negative perceptions and given there is no constructive attitude or communication channels to sort these out). This recipe can explain problematic patterns in families without the gender and other issues that get dragged in. Nick is composing a short alternative webpage based on this idea, so you won't have to go through all the rest of this long page! Then you will be able to return to the many heated gender-linked debates and be puzzled about why they are getting in the way of more directly helping the families and children. Meanwhile, read on:
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