Understanding the projective pantomime

The topic for this listening and learning circle will be:

Understanding the projective pantomime: How children become recruited into distorted family roles.
With Karen Woodall

Wednesday 22 July 2026
This seminar will be delivered on Zoom between 17:00 and 19:00 UK Time.

To check your local start time, please click the link below, ensure ‘Date’ is selected, and enter 17:00 - 2026-07-22 - London in the right-hand boxes, here: https://dateful.com/time-zone-converter *

A Zoom link for this event will be included in your order confirmation (if you do not receive this, please check your spam folder).

Cost £40.00 (including tax)

T&Cs: Please read our terms and conditions here

* we are unable to offer refunds for missed events.

About this listening and learning circle

One of the most confusing experiences for parents living through attachment disruption is watching a child begin to behave as if they are acting within a script which no longer reflects lived reality. 

Children may appear to adopt rigid roles, repeat emotionally charged narratives, reject one parent whilst idealising another, or begin performing versions of family life which feel strangely exaggerated, polarised or disconnected from their earlier experience. Parents often describe the sense that their child has become caught inside a relational drama which the child themselves cannot fully see or understand. 

In this Listening Circle, Karen Woodall will explore the concept of the projective pantomime, a way of understanding how children can become recruited into distorted family roles through unconscious relational pressures, attachment fear, splitting and projection. 

Together we will think about: 

• How children become drawn into emotionally organised family roles
• The impact of anxiety, projection and unresolved trauma upon family relationships
• Why children may begin repeating rigid or distorted narratives
• Splitting, idealisation and rejection within attachment relationships
• The child’s survival self and the pressure to maintain alignment
• Identification with the aggressor and trauma based loyalty conflict
• Why direct challenge or fact correction often intensifies resistance
• Therapeutic parenting responses which reduce pressure and preserve connection
• How parents can maintain emotional steadiness whilst refusing the roles assigned to them 

This is not a legal advice session. It is a psychologically informed reflective space designed to help parents think more deeply about the relational dynamics affecting their child and family system. 

This Listening Circle offers a professionally facilitated reflective space in which parents can develop greater understanding of the unconscious processes shaping family relationships, whilst remaining emotionally supported and clinically informed.. 

Please read our terms and conditions here

About Karen Woodall
This series is delivered by Karen Woodall and is based on her successful work with alienated children over fifteen years. Drawing upon her psychotherapeutic experience as well as her research and direct work with alienated children in recovery, Karen offers you a unique insight into the world that the alienated child inhabits whilst helping you to understand how to build a path for the child to walk upon to return to you. Beyond that, Karen will assist you to understand the alienated child in recovery and their unique needs for longer term therapeutic parenting which helps them to integrate all of the lost parts of self. The wealth of knowledge and experience of direct work with families to help them to integrate and recover from this serious trauma that Karen offers, makes this series an experiential, warm and effective opportunity to create your own positive outcomes for your alienated child(ren). Karen's new parenting handbook, The Journey of the Alienated Children, will be published by Routledge later in 2026.