I am a psychotherapist and founding partner at the Family Separation Clinic.

 

The Family Separation Clinic is a small London-based, private partnership, delivering services around the world. We specialise in cases of relational trauma and emotional harm to children in the context of divorce or family separation, which often come to light through, and are typically connected with, a child rejecting a relationship with one of their parents.

The Clinic has a history of working in complex cases being heard in the High   Court of England and Wales, as well as in other legal jurisdictions around the world. In cases where it has been found that a child has suffered emotional or psychological harm, the Clinic utilises combined treatment routes to alleviate the unconscious defences in the child and assist the child to move from a schizoid position to one of integration.

The Clinic also delivers psychotherapy, therapeutic coaching, and therapeutic parenting approaches to parents, and provides training and consultancy services to professionals including psychologists, psychiatrists, psychotherapists and social workers.

 

In its work with alienated children, the Family Separation Clinic adheres to the following principles:

 

Conceptualisation of alienation

 

We conceptualise alienation in children, first and foremost, as an alienation from the self as a consequence of defensive splitting in the child.

 

Primacy of the child

 

Whilst we seek to re-establish the psychological health of the whole family, the primary focus of all clinical work is the psychological health of the child.

 

We never regard the child as an object of a parental dispute but always as a subject of their own lived experience and it is the child’s lived experience that is the focus of all work.

 

The primary aim of all clinical work is the resolution of the splitting defence in the child.

 

Alienation is a relational problem

 

We do not regard alienation to be a problem in the child but recognise it as an induced splitting defence in response to the inter and intra-psychological pressures experienced by the child in its attempt to maintain attachment unity after family separation.

 

Aetiological uniqueness

 

Whilst acknowledging the common clinical markers of alienation in children, we do not utilise or support quasi-diagnostic approaches such as ‘eight signs’ and ‘the five factor model’.

 

Restoration of integration

 

Any intervention that restores the child’s relationship with the previously rejected parent but does not honour and attend to the child’s attachment relationship to the previously favoured parent may be considered to be a failed intervention.

 

Whilst a child may need to be protected from the harmful behaviours of a parent, a successful intervention allows and supports a child to retain a positive relationship with their internalised object relationship to that parent.

 

 

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