What is Parental Alienation and How Can Therapists Successfully Treat it?

What is Parental Alienation and How Can Therapists Successfully Treat it?

Curt and Katie chat about a controversial topic: Parental Alienation. We look at what parental alienation is, the controversies and complexities surrounding this process, how to assess for parental alienation, and how to effectively treat the family system. We talk about how traditional therapy methods are inadequate and potentially harmful in these cases and what to do instead. This is a continuing education podcourse.

Transcripts for this episode will be available at mtsgpodcast.com!

In this podcast episode we explore Parental Alienation

We both have worked with families that 

What is Parental Alienation?

• The impact a parent/guardian has over how a child interacts with another parent/guardian
• Complex dynamic within a family where conflict is present
• Breakdown of relationship based on behavior of alienating parent toward targeted parent
• The Four Factor Model from Baker (2020)

How do you assess for Parental Alienation?

• Challenges with correctly identifying this process/dynamic
• Controversies and lack of recognition of Parental Alienation as a separate diagnosis from Parent-Child Relational Problem
• Identifying what Parental Alienation is not
• Clues that stories from kids are manufactured versus authentic stories of child abuse
• The need for access to the full family system to obtain sufficient information
• Exploring: What is alienating behavior? How does it work?

Effective Case Conceptualization and Treatment for Parental Alienation

• The importance of a family systems approach
• Involvement of government systems
• Uncovering the generational or individual trauma for all members of the system
• How to engage the tools available to advocate for important treatment elements to be in place
• The importance of understanding scope and how to write recommendations to court
• Preventing therapist shopping and treatment avoidance
• Harmful recommendations that can hinder progress within these systems
• Treatment teaming and avoiding isolation
• Educating about Parental Alienation
• Supporting the targeted parent to improve the relationship with the child
• Working with alienating parent to prepare for improvement in child’s relationship with targeted parenting
• Co-parenting and conflict resolution
• Therapist communication with all members of the system

Receive Continuing Education for this Episode of the Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide

Hey modern therapists, we’re so excited to offer the opportunity for 1 unit of continuing education for this podcast episode – Therapy Reimagined is bringing you the Modern Therapist Learning Community!

 Once you’ve listened to this episode, to get CE credit you just need to go to learn.moderntherapistcommunity.com/pages/podcourse, register for your free profile, purchase this course, pass the post-test, and complete the evaluation! Once that’s all completed - you’ll get a CE certificate in your profile or you can download it for your records. For our current list of CE approvals, check out moderntherapistcommunity.com.

You can find this full course (including handouts and resources) here: learn.moderntherapistcommunity.com/pages/podcourse

Continuing Education Approvals:

When we are airing this podcast episode, we have the following CE approval. Please check back as we add other approval bodies: Continuing Education Information