Grandparents do not go unscathed when the marriage of a couple fails and results in the implacable hostility of at least one of the partners against the other. Once a partner has been alienated or rejected and prevented from having good contact with the children of the relationship, the extended family, including grandparents are also frequently prevented from further contact.

Grandparents at present do not have any legal rights to be involved with their grandchildren’s lives. When there is implacable hostility expressed by the custodial parent this can cause great pain to the innocent grandparents, especially when they have had a warm and caring relationship with the children in the past.

The children themselves are in a conflict situation and unable to understand why their beloved and loving grandparents have been taken from them. Frequently they hear negative and malicious and mostly untrue comments from the custodial parent with who…

• Often seen in high-conflict situations where an adult is unable to get over the separation and uses the child to control or seek revenge on the target parent. These parents cannot acknowledge their child’s needs, may view children as belonging just to them and often cannot see the damage they are inflicting on their children.
• Sometimes these types of situations can develop so a child is significantly influenced by one parent to completely reject the other parent, placing them in a situation where they must view one parent as bad and one parent as good.  This leaves no space for a child to love both parents. The child is forced to deny or reject a part of themselves. Any intervention should be guided by the assessment of a qualified professional.
• Can extend beyond the parent-child relationship and include other significant adults in a child’s life such as grandparents or step-parents.
• It is…

I recently heard (secondhand) a critique by a mental health professional about an attachment-based model of “parental alienation.”  This mental health professional was apparently concerned about “labeling” the alienating parent’s pathology as being related to personality disorder processes (“Why do we need to “label” the parent as having a personality disorder?”)

I wish to take this opportunity to address this concern for “labeling” the pathology of the allied and supposedly favored parent.

Identifying pathology is the central and primary function of mental health professionals.

To say that we shouldn’t identify the nature and severity of psychological pathology is like saying the legal system shouldn’t identify the nature and severity of the violations of the law.

Judge: “I really feel uncomfortable labeling someone as a murderer. Can’t we just say they’re a doer of bad things?”

Psychologist: “I know the person has prominent hallucinations, delusions, and conceptual disorganization, but why do…