The restoration of health, for rejected parents, begins with an understanding of what has happened internally and how that has become entangled with the child’s own splitting reactions. When parents are able to map this splitting across the family system, their own reactive splitting can integrate and they can begin the work of developing the healthy mirror needed by the child.

Parents who have healed reactive splitting can then learn to apply the skills of therapeutic parenting. This is an approach to parenting children who are suffering from attachment disorder due to being emotionally and psychologically harmed. Alienated children with therapeutic parents are shown, in evaluation, to be able to recover quickly from the underlying harms which have caused their rejecting behaviours.

The topic for this session will be:

Helping the parentified child

Parentification of children in separated families is a serious attachment disruption which causes life long problems if it is not recognised and treated. Some signs of parentification are:

• Being involved in marital conflict
• Being used as a subsitute for a partner
• Being made to feel responsible for the wellbeing of a parent
• Caring for your younger siblings
• Being treated as a grown up and not being seen as a child
• Feeling responsible for managing your family
• Feeling socially isolated
• Feeling anxious, depressed, hopeless in life
• Not understanding your own emotional and psychological needs
  

The problem for alienated children who are parentified, is that they do not know that this is a distorted relationship because their parent encourages this and often praises the child for it. This entrenches the problem for the child, who grows up believing that they are powerful in the family system (and via this the world in general), because of the messages they have received.

Helping the parentified child requires particular strategies which are designed to enable the child to uncover and understand their own needs. This learning circle will be focusing upon those strategies and how to find the opportunities to use them.

This is a bi monthly drop in group which can be attended regularly or just as a one-off. The circles will be facilitated by psychotherapist Karen Woodall until the Christmas period of this year. Each session will focus on a particular element of therapeutic parenting for children with attachment difficulties due to divorce and separation and will comprise of 45 minute input and then an hour and 15 minutes of group discussion. Participants can attend to listen and learn and to share and receive knowledge. The basic requirement is simply curiosity about helping alienated children. The cost of each session is £40.00 (including sales tax).

Please note:

A link to the event will be emailed to you, separately. This may not be sent until a few hours before the session is due to begin. If you have not received the link, please check your spam folders. If you are still unable to find the email, please contact parenting@familyseparationclinic.co.uk

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