Before an assessor provides advice or opinion to a private family
court, and before any judge competently makes decisions regarding parental
alienation, they need to be astute in evaluating whether there is evidence of several
psychological concepts that commonly present in such cases. One of the most
easily evidenced is a strategy of Triangulation by an alienating parent.
Between the dotted lines below is an extract from the book Parental Alienation,Attachment and Corrupt Law that explains Triangulation and its importance for
assessors. Sadly, despite CAFCASS being the responsible agency where court
reporting in family cases is concerned, there is so far no indication that their High Conflict Practice Pathway literature reflects awareness, or any intended progression, towards evaluating Triangulation.
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Triangulation is a strategy used by aggressive
powers and individuals such as warring states and narcissistic parental
alienators to recruit a third party or person into a ‘divide and rule’ campaign
against another. In parental alienation, it is used to improve and embed the
alienator’s sole control and access to their children in the post
family-separation situation by recruiting naive others to their campaign. The first person to be recruited is the child.
The concept of triangulation is recorded in
clinical literature by the work of expert Jay Haley, who called the recruitment
of children into a cross-generational coalition by one parent against another a
Perverse Triangle (a cross-generational coalition is where an older person
recruits a child from a junior generation into a psychological pact against
another person). In his family systems model, family systems expert Salvador
Minuchin named it the Rigid Triangle.
Triangulation is a central plank of family systems assessment
and therapy. Any professional presenting themselves as knowledgeable enough to
assess alleged or potential parental alienation cases to the statutory standards required for them
to advise or provide opinion to courts, but knowing little or nothing of triangulation,
is probably unable to understand alienated children’s presentations beyond the
superficial explanation of ‘parental conflict’ and is not fit for the court to
instruct or listen to. They may even become triangulated into the alienator’s
campaign themselves.
In his publications, Dr Childress quotes the
principle expert, Dr Jan Haley:
“The people responding to
each other in the triangle are not peers, but one of them is of a different generation
from the other two ... ln the process of their interaction together, the person
of one generation forms a coalition with the person of the other generation
against his peer. By ‘coalition’ is meant a process of joint action which is
against the third person ... The coalition between
the two persons is denied. That is, there is certain behavior which indicates a
coalition which, when it is queried, will be denied as a coalition ... In
essence, the perverse triangle is one in which the separation of generations is
breached in a covert way. When this occurs as a repetitive pattern, the system
will be pathological.” (Haley, 1977, p. 37)
In taking control of a child's environment and recruiting them into a campaign against the targeted parent, narcissistic
alienators provide themselves with narcissistic feedback that helps to
ameliorate their own feelings of inadequacy. A role reversal is expressed within
this new dyad, known as an ‘inverted hierarchy,’ whereby the child serves the
purposes of the alienating parent, rather than the child benefiting from the
normal and empathic parenting of one or both parents.
The parent-with-care’s legal status and
how it plays out in the real world ironically facilitates their increases in
control over their children because it provides the narcissist, by default,
with greater control, not only over their children but also over the targeted parent. Alienating parents are able to use
their legal advantage to defend themselves against the attempts of targeted
parents to assist their children. If the child, and the child’s expressions can
be controlled, then so can the family court and child protection systems, as
their training and processes do not qualify or equip them to recognise the
behaviours and effects of this type of pathological parenting the child is being
exposed to. Children separated from beloved targeted parents often display
emotional and psychological disturbances that attract concerned interactions
with first-instance professionals such as teachers and social workers. In the
absence of applicable mental health training, first- instance professionals may
believe triangulated children when they falsely report their psychological
problems are caused by their targeted parents. Those services are abused,
manipulated, triangulated into the alienator’s campaign, and can end up
ensuring restrictive powers are exerted over the targeted parent. Gaining this
assistance in controlling the targeted parent increases the narcissistic feedback
felt by the alienator even more, and encourages the continuance of their
triangulation behaviours. The more professionals that allow themselves to get triangulated, the more
will follow. Triangulation can be a self-replicating and self-reinforcing process.
Teachers, social workers, lawyers and judges are not
mental health specialists and are unlikely to see past the appearance presented. If
children have been especially skilfully triangulated, they may present as
especially persuasive. As children become more influenced by the triangulation
process, and and misread by professionals, their reports about their targeted parents become more derogatory.
Professionals then (sometimes inadvertently, sometimes due to managerial pressures
and sometimes due to their implementing their ideological preferences through
their work) assist the alienator and turn against the targeted parent. This is
especially the case where the alienator makes false allegations of domestic abuse,
violence, sexual or physical child abuse, or other aberrant parenting practices,
aimed at justifying the child’s induced comments and apparent rejection of the targeted
parent.
If the alienator can successfully present themselves
and their children as victims, they may recruit professional reinforcements unwilling to adequately test allegations. Allegations do get taken at face value, without evidence, all the way to fact-finding by judges. 'Parental conflict’ is also often advanced to explain the disturbed behaviours children can sometimes present with as they become triangulated and begin to suffer other disorders associated with the alienation process. Professionals become convinced by the alienator’s scripts, parroted by their
children, and fail to investigate, identify and attribute the children’s symptomatology
to the underlying pathological parenting of the alienator. Now, no matter what
scales of pathogenic symptomatology the children advance along in response to
their alienator’s pathological parenting, the targeted parent is blamed. The
alienator succeeds in presenting themselves to be perceived as the victim of
the targeted parent and the rescuer of the children whilst, in reality, they
are actively persecuting the targeted parent and programming their children and
state authorities to do the same.
Successfully recruiting influential, professional
assistants to their three causes of (i) controlling their children (ii)
controlling the targeted parent and (iii) the whole environment their children
move in, can provide yet more feedback to the narcissistic parent and ensure their continuation and embedding of the process into more serious pathologies
to be inflicted on their children in due course.
In effect, unwary and unskilled professionals
become what Dr Childress calls ‘flying monkeys’ as they are themselves
triangulated into the alienator’s coalition against the targeted parent. It has
even been reported for professionals, such as social workers and expert witnesses,to form dyads with triangulated children and alienating parents that use official channels to
persecute the targeted parent. Some of those channels are easily available to
the alienator, funded by the state and applied without checks to safeguard against
abuse of the provisions.
The alienating parent may now have the full power
of the state reinforcing theirs and the children’s corners of the triangle
against the targeted parent. Now, all three corners are under the control of the
alienator. Their increase in power and status can elevate the narcissist parent
right up the scale away from vulnerable towards grandiose narcissism and
facilitate their own need for emotional stability that relies on their own
craving for personal credibility and control. The more the alienator moves up
the scale, the better they present themselves to the outside world, and the
more the professionals feel they have done the right thing in helping them, by supposedly
creating a calmer and more secure parental environment for the children. In reality, it is
anything but.
The naïve or conniving support of professionals
helps the alienator in family court instead of the children. The misdiagnoses
of the children’s symptomatology by non-experts can result in their being
incorrectly labelled with the wrong psychological or medical disorders and placed
into schemes to supposedly help their conditions and presumed cause of anxieties, so the
children move not only in a compromised environment whilst living at home with
the alienator, but also within a community where a chain reaction of shallow
presumptions and unquestioned, one sided evidence can lead to the professional
and social ostracism of the targeted parent, recruiting even more enablers
against them. The environment the children move in reinforces the impression
their alienator is all powerful and correct, and sends them the message their
alienator can control everything. The children may become brainwashed not
merely by the alienator but the dialogues of some support services. The
alienator may further isolate and control the interactions of the children to ensure they
only move within environments the alienator has successfully compromised,
meaning the children have no alternative influences.
Narcissist alienators manoeuvre themselves and
their children into positions where they act as primary controller of all
channels of communication towards - and from - their children. Persons
unwilling to join the alienator’s dysfunctional triangle are rejected by the
alienator and lost to the children. The alienator will only allow persons into
the triangle that perpetuate their aims. Beneficial influences for the children
may be aggressively guarded against and countered. If left to the alienator,
only dysfunctional triangulation will happened and persist. It is the duty of
external authorities to intervene and allow the formation of functional
triangles, even if it means ejecting the alienator for a period of protective separation so skilled assistance for the targeted parent and child is more likely to be effective.
In family separation scenarios, the above
characteristics, where present, were found by family systems expert Salvador
Minuchin to produce what he found in one particular case: “an inappropriately rigid
cross-generational subsystem of mother and son versus father appears, and the
boundary around this coalition of mother and son excludes the father. A
crossgenerational dysfunctional transactional pattern has developed” (Minuchin,
1974)
That case involved older and younger siblings. The
older siblings were triangulated and psychologically enmeshed with their alienating
parent and the younger children were already caught within the triangulation
process, part-psychologically enmeshed with the alienator and on their way to full
enmeshment, at which point they would no doubt fully resist all contact to their targeted
parent. Minuchin said: “The parents were divorced
six months earlier and the father is now living alone… Two of the children who
were very attached to their father, now refuse any contact with him. The
younger children visit their father but express great unhappiness with the
situation.” (Minuchin, 1974)
In her 1990 article, ‘Emotional abuse:
Destruction of the Spirit and the Sense of Self’, Judy Keith-Oaks refers to the unhealthy
communications between a parent drawing in and inflicting a triangulated
situation on their children as ‘emotional incest.’ She says:
“The parent does not have
clear boundaries between himself and the child. Boundaries between self and
others are not fixed but change in response to personal feelings and the
interaction with specific people in an environment. Boundaries exist as a protection
mechanism to maintain physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual
stability. They ensure appropriate behaviour and keep individuals from offending
others. Abusive parents tend to not have clear boundaries between themselves
and their child. Nor do they allow or facilitate the development of healthy
boundaries. An abused child therefore
does not have healthy boundaries to protect himself or to even know when he/she
is physically, emotionally, spiritually, or intellectually being abused.
Emotional boundaries help to differentiate between personal feelings and the
feelings of others. Emotional boundaries are damaged by role reversal (the
child assumes the nurturing role toward the parent), emotional incest, shaming
and humiliation, and enmeshment. Emotional incest occurs when parents share
adult secrets with the child. This typically occurs during the dysfunctional
pattern of triangulation when direct communication between adults has been
discontinued. Sharing of adult secrets with children in
effect gives the problem to the child. These children then feel the unexpressed pain of their
parents…..In families where one person’s dominance and control is prominent,
the children must have the same feelings and beliefs as the adult in charge.
While these families appear to be very close, they are in fact “enmeshed.”
Enmeshment destroys the child’s sense of emotional separateness……”
In 2015, expert clinical researchers at Plymouth
University, UK, investigated the experience of children in their families’
post-separation situations and found the presence of triangulation inflicted
more harm than the families’ separating processes. They said:
“…….children showed greater
levels of anxiety in response to the triangulation as opposed to the separation
scenarios. Qualitative analysis supported this finding and revealed that many
of the children felt ‘invisible’ due to parents’ pre-occupation with marital
conflict, felt caught in the middle of conflicts and coerced to take sides. Although able to describe their reactions
and showing greater negative emotional responses to the triadic pictures, they
were not consciously aware of the negative impacts of triangulation on their
sense of well-being.”
The observation by Judy Keith Oaks and the Plymouth
experts that children are naïve about triangulation processes being inflicted
upon them and causing their anxieties can be extended to professionals. It is
particularly significant in understanding why professionals by-stand on triangulation
and why alienators can manipulate children so they ascribe their feelings of
triangulation and attachment disruption to other causes, such as those
suggested by their alienators against their targeted parents. The findings also
fundamentally undermine the ‘Wishes and Feelings’ doctrine, explored later in
this book, in the section on ‘Corrupt Law,’ as the two key players in the ‘Wishes
and Feelings’ scenario (the child and the assessing social worker) are, in the
absence of thorough training and application of family systems processes and triangulation,
incompetent in understanding, expressing, receiving, interpreting and reporting
‘Wishes and Feelings’ to the legal standard.
Dr Craig Childress quotes key practitioners when
explaining Triangulation:
“The concept of triangles “describes
the way any three people relate to each other and involve others in emotional
issues between them” (Bowen, 1989, p. 306). In the anxiety-filled environment of
conflict, a third person is triangulated, either temporarily or permanently, to
ease the anxious feelings of the conflicting partners. By default, that third
person is exposed to an anxiety-provoking and disturbing atmosphere. For
example, a child might become the scapegoat or focus of attention, thereby
transferring the tension from the marital dyad to the parent-child dyad. Unresolved
tension in the marital relationship might spill over to the parent-child
relationship through parents’ use of psychological control as a way of securing
and maintaining a strong emotional alliance and level of support from the
child. As a consequence, the triangulated youth might feel pressured or obliged
to listen to or agree with one parents’ complaints against the other.
“The resulting enmeshment
and cross-generational coalition would exemplify parents’ use of psychological control to
coerce and maintain a parent-youth emotional alliance against the other parent
(Haley, 1976; Minuchin, 1974).” (Stone, Buehler, and Barber, 2002, p. 86-87)
The degree of assistance triangulated children need
depends on the degree of pathology in the alienating parent, their exposure to
alienating strategies, and the severity of that exposure. If alienators have or
are able to develop insight into what they are doing to their children, then some
therapy ‘in situ’ with the current family structure remaining intact may be
possible. A trial period of some months of shared care of the children between
the parents, greatly increasing the parenting time of the targeted parent and
reducing the triangulation and other alienation strategies of the alienating
parent, may help. If the alienator is narcissistic, family therapy seems unlikely to work
in situ, as narcissistic alienators tend to interfere with the therapeutic process and render it useless, and the child may have to be protectively removed from the alienator so therapy can work.
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In recent years, some of us who observe the patterns
at family courts believe there seems to have been an increase in the use of
Triangulation as a strategy by some parents in the post separation scenario to gain
access to resources linked to the custody of children such as welfare benefits
and housing provision. The only way these parents can jump the social housing
queue is to claim they are victims of domestic violence and proscribe all
contact between their children and the separated parent, at least until they
have been completely rehoused. There have been cases where, once the parent
with care has been rehoused, they have allowed the other parent unfettered access
to the children again, their previous allegations notwithstanding. This type of
triangulation may not be the result of personality disorder but calculated nest-building.
Nonetheless, the needless denial of children’s parenting time to both parents
seems a new and damaging form of pathological parenting that CAFCASS and the court system should
seriously consider evaluating for.
Regardless of whether Triangulation is being naively, actively or obsessively
deployed as an alienation strategy, or as a resource seeking strategy, cases monitored show that lawyers can play a large, facilitative role in the Triangulation process. Lawyers acting for parents who needlessly deny adequate parenting time with targeted parents are known to contact agencies through whose services the relevant children will pass, and pressure them to adopt opinions that may be harmful to the children. They contact schools, police, social services and CAFCASS, sometimes abusing their professional influence by contaminating independent assessment processes. If, for instance, the case is already in the family courts, the police and social services may be persuaded by a family lawyer not to pursue investigations for potential child abuse, on the pretence that the matter under investigation is already being dealt with in family court, when it is not. Children are therefore sometimes denied the immediate assessment and protection they need and are entitled to. Some CAFCASS officers seem to similarly side with the most vociferous lawyer, especially if the targeted parent is a litigant in person. Some family lawyers are, in these scenarios, little more than facilitators and enablers of child abuse, leading expert psychologist Dr Ludwig Lowenstein to state:
“opposing lawyers contribute to the corruption of youth, the poisoning of young minds, and the attenuation and even destruction of important parent-child bonds.”
Regardless of whether Triangulation is being naively, actively or obsessively
deployed as an alienation strategy, or as a resource seeking strategy, cases monitored show that lawyers can play a large, facilitative role in the Triangulation process. Lawyers acting for parents who needlessly deny adequate parenting time with targeted parents are known to contact agencies through whose services the relevant children will pass, and pressure them to adopt opinions that may be harmful to the children. They contact schools, police, social services and CAFCASS, sometimes abusing their professional influence by contaminating independent assessment processes. If, for instance, the case is already in the family courts, the police and social services may be persuaded by a family lawyer not to pursue investigations for potential child abuse, on the pretence that the matter under investigation is already being dealt with in family court, when it is not. Children are therefore sometimes denied the immediate assessment and protection they need and are entitled to. Some CAFCASS officers seem to similarly side with the most vociferous lawyer, especially if the targeted parent is a litigant in person. Some family lawyers are, in these scenarios, little more than facilitators and enablers of child abuse, leading expert psychologist Dr Ludwig Lowenstein to state:
“opposing lawyers contribute to the corruption of youth, the poisoning of young minds, and the attenuation and even destruction of important parent-child bonds.”
(For further reading, an
in depth, fully referenced clinical synopsis on Triangulation entitled
‘Strategic Family Therapy
for a Cross- Generational Coalition’ is written by Dr Childress at
http://drcachildress.org/asp/admin/getFile.asp?RID=121&TID=6&FN=pdf)
