For many years therapists have shied away from treating clients who suffer from severe personality disorders. In fact, many health insurance companies will deny reimbursement for treating Axis II disorders (Kersting, 2004). Yet, what happens when a parent with a personality disorder fears losing his or her children in a high conflict custody battle? How does that parent cope? According to the literature, many of these vulnerable parents commonly resort to using primitive defenses such as denial, projection, idealization, devaluation, and splitting (Bernet et al., 2017; Gordon et al., 2008; Kopetski, 1998).
Identifying Primitive Defenses
Sigmund Freud first wrote about primitive defenses in his 1894 treatise: The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence (Freud, 1894). In particular, he described an “energetic and successful kind of defence” used by the ego to “reject incompatible ideas” and their associated “affects” by denying that they “never occurred” in the first place (Freud, 1894, p. 52). From Freud’s perspective, denial represented a form of “psychosis” which he classified as “hallucinatory confusion” (Freud, 1894, p. 52). Other writers have described denial as a natural primitive defense against perceived dangers that develop early in life (Spitz, 1961). Spitz opined that “closing the eyelids” should be considered a “prototype” of the mechanism of denial (1961, p. 635). When we see something that looks dangerous, we close our eyes and make it disappear.
More recently, Clawar and Rivlin (2013) recognized a type of denial defense technique used by alienating parents they called “Denial-Of-Existence Technique” (p. 31). Among the 1,000 families they studied, they found that some parents would teach their children to deny the existence of the other parent. They explained that: “By excluding any discussion of the other parent or ignoring the topic when raised by the child, the brainwashing parent can send a subtle message to the child that the other parent is not significant. He or she does not exist in our conversation, and therefore, he or she does not, in social terms, exist” (Clawar & Rivlin, 2013, p. 31).
This behavior often peregrinates into body language used by the alienating parent that “communicates to the child that the other parent is unworthy or insignificant” or in some cases “dangerous” (Clawar & Rivlin, 2013, pp. 31 & 103). For example, blatantly ignoring the other parent at a basketball game or other important social events (p. 33). Another common denial technique identified by Clawar and Rivlin (2013) is to cut out the image of the other parent from all of the family photo albums and in some cases severing just the head of the other parent leaving the children to view just the torso as a reminder to them that the other is in essence socially dead (p. 32). Unfortunately, this happens more often than is reported and can have deleterious effects on the child especially when accompanied by “negative comments about the physical image of the target parent” (p. 11).
When a child is repeatedly exposed to a parent who uses the denial-of-existence technique, the child may develop their own version which can manifest as “borrowed scenarios” or “reflexive support of the alienating parent” (Lorandos et al., 2013, p. 17). Borrowed scenarios refers to “rehearsed statements” made by the child that are similar, or in some cases, “identical to those made by the alienating” such as “You never took me anywhere fun” when there are family pictures and videos at the targeted parent’s house which clearly document the opposite is true (p. 17).
Resolving Cognitive Dissonance through Splitting
This whole process of denial often works insidiously within the child to eventually erase and replace anything good the child experienced with the target parent. The child in this state of mind is conditioned “to doubt his or her ability to perceive reality” out of a maladaptive loyalty to the alienating parent. The alienating parent in these cases consistently resists the child’s interpretations and ultimately filters out any good memories and replaces them with a “rewritten script” that casts the alienating parent as being all good and the target parent as being all bad (Clawar & Rivlin, 2013, p. 59).
This begins to show up in the child as a “lack of ambivalence” which is associated with the primitive defense “splitting” (Bernet et al., 2017, p. 1). Splitting was first described by Freud (1938) as a legitimate defense by the ego to resolve a double-bind conflict when he wrote: “Let us suppose, then, that a child’s ego is under the sway of a powerful instinctual demand which it is accustomed to satisfy [e.g., giving and receiving love from the targeted parent] and that it is suddenly frightened by an experience which teaches it that the continuance of this satisfaction will result in an almost intolerable real danger [e.g., the loss of love and affection from the alienating parent]” (p. 275).
Thus, the splitting process happens when there is a “conflict” between the “demand by the instinct” in the child to continue to receive love and affection from the target parent and the “the prohibition by reality” that by so doing the child may be rejected by the alienating parent (Freud, 1938, p. 275). Clawar and Rivlin (2013) refer to this as the Threat of Withdrawal-of-Love Technique as they describe: “Here, the children come to fear rejection or loss of love from a parent if they express love or a desire to be with the other parent. It becomes implicitly or explicitly understood that to be loved and accepted, the child must become a cohort and also turn against the other parent” (p. 47).
A more recent description of this process is provided by Bernet et al. (2017) in the Journal of Forensic Sciences: “We consider splitting to be a maladaptive mechanism by which children protect themselves from the uncomfortable feelings of cognitive dissonance, that is, from anxiety caused by ongoing parental conflict. When there is continual warfare between the mother and father, children often find it difficult to maintain affection for both parents at the same time. They typically resolve the dissonance by the mechanism of splitting, that is, by gravitating to an enmeshed relationship with one parent and strongly rejecting the other parent” (p. 2).
Forming a Covert Coalition & Mounting a Campaign of Denigration
Once an ‘enmeshed relationship’ is formed between the child and the alienating parent, the existing “dyadic conflict” between the parents “may set off a chain of shifting alliances” (Minuchin et al., 1978, p. 30). The enmeshed relationship in this instance is often characterized by “an extreme form of proximity and intensity” that results in boundary crossing (p. 32). When boundaries are crossed, a vulnerable child “may join or be enlisted by one parent against the other” (p. 32).
This can create a loyalty conflict. Loyalty conflicts develop when a child is pressured to favor one parent over the other. Parents who pressure their child to takes sides in parental conflict frequently employ “strategies” for gaining the favor of their child such “badmouthing,” “withdrawal of love,” or “forcing [the] child to choose” (Baker & Fine, 2013, p. 95). Amy Baker (2011) explains that when these strategies are used by alienating parents it conveys a three-part message to the child:
“(1) I am the only parent who loves you and you need me to feel good about yourself, (2) the other parent is dangerous and unavailable, and (3) pursuing a relationship with that parent jeopardizes your relationship with me” (para. 2).
Children who give into these pressure tactics by rejecting a beloved parent will often display emotional or cognitive impairments which predisposes them to develop serious mental health problems such as anxiety or depression. This is why the recently published fourth edition of the APSAC Handbook on Child Maltreatment describes these alienating behaviors as “exploiting/corrupting” and “terrorizing” psychological maltreatment:
- Placing the child in a loyalty conflict by making the child unnecessarily choose to have a relationship with one parent or the other.
- Restricting or interfering with or directly undermining the child’s important relationships (e.g., restricting a child’s communication with his/her other parent and telling the child the lack of communication is due to the other parent’s lack of love for the child)
- Coercing the child’s submission through extreme over-involvement, intrusiveness, or dominance, allowing little or no opportunity or support for child’s views, feelings, and wishes; micromanaging child’s life, and/or manipulation (e.g., inducing guilt, fostering anxiety, threatening withdrawal of love, placing a child in a double bind in which the child is doomed to fail or disappoint, or disorienting the child by stating something is true [or false] when it patently is not)” (Hart et al., 2017, pp. 147 & 148).
Whenever these circumstances are the dominating aspect of a parent-child relationship, a “perverse triangle” is involved (Haley, 1973, p. 16). A perverse triangle is a “pathological relationship structure between three persons, in which two persons on different hierarchical levels [parent-child] form a coalition against the third [the other parent]” that typically takes the form of an “overstepping of generational boundaries” (Simon, Stierlin, & Wynne, 1985, p. 261). Haley elaborates by stating that “the coalition between the two persons is denied” and that “the separation between generations is breached in a covert way” (Haley, 1973, p. 17).
If left unabated, this covert “cross-generational coalition against the other parent” frequently develops into a “stable coalition” (Minuchin, 1974, p. 102). A vulnerable child drawn into this kind of stable coalition with an alienating parent, can be successfully used as a weapon in an “unrelenting campaign of denigration” against the targeted parent (Gardner, 1985, p. 4). Tragically, this can result in murder as in the case of the Lohstroh family (In the Matter of E.C.L., 2009). It that case, the mother, Deb Geisler, spent more than 2 years falsely accusing the father, Dr. Rick Lohstroh, of sexually abusing their two sons. After numerous investigations, CPS, law enforcement, and the family court all believed that the mother was manipulating the boys into believing their father had molested them and that he needed to die. One Friday afternoon, after Ms. Geisler gave her oldest son, Eric, a 20 mg dose of Prozac and left a loaded .40 caliber Glock semi-auto pistol on a night stand; Eric picked up the gun, walked out to his dad’s car, got into the back seat and shot his dad 3 times in the back killing him (MSNBC Dateline, 2009).
Unfortunately, this is not the only case where a perverse triangle has resulted in murder (Heinz, 2011). Many families fall prey to this kind of parental alienation which is why it is important to understand how it presents in clinical and forensic settings.
References
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