Holding up a healthy mirror: Becoming a therapeutic parent to alienated children

An online course for alienated parents and their families with Karen Woodall

The course will be delivered on Zoom, in 4 x two-hour sessions, on the following dates:

• 14 March 2023
• 21 March 2023
• 28 March 2023
• 4 April 2023

Cost £180 .00

About this course:

Children who hyper align with a parent and reject the other in divorce and separation are usually in the age group 8-14 years. This is because this age group is in a stage in which their sense of self and personality is under development and the ego is not strong enough to regulate the anxieties which are generated by the experience of attachment disruption in family separation.

What we know about children who experience these difficulties, is that they can be helped when one of their parents is able to understand their experience and in response, hold up a healthy mirror. When the holding of this mirror is consistent, the child who has suffered from induced psychological splitting which is demonstrated by aligning themselves with one parent and rejecting the other, can experience an integrated sense of self which assists in recovery.

In order to hold up a healthy mirror, the parent in the rejected position must first address the reactive splitting that they are likely to have suffered. Reactive splitting, which occurs when the child rejects, (often accompanied by false allegations), can cause a parent to feel natural reactions such as anger, bewilderment and shame. These feelings, which are normal in the circumstances, can become blocks and barriers to the child's recovery as the parent refutes the allegations and shows the child their reactive feelings. In these circumstances, the child withdraws further, struggling with their own guilt and shame and begins to split off their feelings further.

Restoring health to 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.

On this course you will learn:

• What psychological splitting is, how it occurs and why
• How to identify your own reactive splitting
• How to integrate split thinking in a fractured landscape
• How to build integrated thinking strategies
• What to embrace and what to avoid when rebuilding health in the face of alienation
• How to build the healthy mirror your child needs
• Mentalisation strategies for mirroring health
• The power and importance of consistent mirroring
• How other parents have used integrated mirroring to bring their children back to health
• Therapeutic parenting – an integrated skills set
• Building a consistent communications strategy for recovering your children
• Working with the counter intuitive approach necessary to enable alienated children to withdraw their projections
• Staying healthy amidst the chaos caused by psychological splitting

Based on successful work with many families around the world, Karen Woodall will share with you the deep knowledge of how to recover children from the nightmare landscape of psychological splitting. Karen has helped families to rebuild health and wellbeing with children of all ages and has developed a structural approach to working with alienation which is easily translated into strategies which can be used by parents.

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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