5 Comments

1. 

   Cheryl Kindrat on November 16, 2017 at 1:00 pm

   Well Done Dr. Childress! Amazing Presentation! You spoke they listened. Thank you 🙂

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2. 

   Paul on November 16, 2017 at 1:13 pm

   Thank you Dr Childress. Our children finally get a voice .

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3. 

   Ashley Wiltshire on November 16, 2017 at 8:58 pm

   While he is right that there is a lot of problems with the courts, his statement that no psychologists or attorneys are trying to stop this is false. In fact, we have over 500 members of PASG working to solve for this very issue. I personally have been working to resolve this for over 2 decades. And I work with numerous other professionals who do The problem is that many professionals that are involved in the family court system are not properly trained and refuse to get training and claim they know it all and are experts. And they are the ones that are destroy the children. Again is the uneducated untrained professionals, not the ones who are fighting for years to solve for it. It absolutely annoys me that he puts everyone in the same basket. In fact, we are seeing changes in the courts albeit slowly because getting the training to these masses and the legal system is a disaster at the arrogance.

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4. 

   Rick Elmer on November 17, 2017 at 1:30 am

   So grateful for you. Great job stay healthy and strong Dr. Well received hope for change.
   I have tried to forward your work to the therapist that “provided reunification therapy for a year without results”.
   I now know why now it didn’t work, and he told me if I communicated with him again he would have me up for harassment.
   Interesting.

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5. 

   Anue Nue on November 18, 2017 at 4:29 am

   It was very helpful to listen to this meeting in order to get a better handle on where Dr. Childress is coming from and going with this important work. I agree completely with him when he says psychologists need to stop using the term “parental alienation” and “go back to standard and established stuff”. I also agree that the “attachment related family pathology” which lay people refer to as “parental alienation” has to do with a combination of “attachment disorders”, “personality disorders”, “complex trauma” and “family systems pathology”.

   However, I would like to remind Dr. Childress that children are born with personalities/temperaments of their own and that the notion that parenting or nurture trumps nature just happens to be a particularly insidiously ingrained long-held “fixed and false belief” of the psychology profession, which is in it’s own right a “delusion”. Everything wrong with a child is not always automatically a result of “pathogenic parenting”. Continuing to view and treat children as if they are only the sum of their parenting experience is not doing children in general any complete service. The nature vs nurture debate died long ago. In this day and age it is established and commonly accepted that nature and nurture work together very intricately. Children are not blank slates that their parents project an image onto, nor should they be possessing and fighting over them. They are living breathing human beings in their own right and it is about time we all agree to recognize them as such.

   So although I believe Dr. Childress is on to something important here with his work, especially with regards to using family systems therapy to hep solve the problem, and, I do know that estrangement/alienation does occur quite frequently as a result of the family pathologies he has described in great detail, I would very much hope that he will reconsider his fixed stance that everything wrong with the child is more the result of one or both of the parents parenting, rather than a result of the combination of the child’s inherited DNA/personality/temperament and parenting/life experiences. Because, anyone who has ever raised children outside of a high conflict divorce or “parental alienation” situation can tell him that children and parents don’t all get along equally, nor do their personalities always click, and, sometimes they even completely clash, even in the most cohesive of families. It is not uncommon for a child in fairly stable two parent family to play favorites with parents and even switch favorites from time to time. What is uncommon in those types of healthier families is for the parents to get all bent out of shape and into a high conflict situation because the child is going through certain stages or phases etc.

   Blaming the other parent for being the cause of natural born parent/child personality clashes is a whole other pathology in itself which should most definitely be included in the group of disorders he has already identified. In fact, it might just be that the whole long-standing system of therapists consistently blaming parents for everything wrong with an adult child for decades is where all these false narratives of abuse these parents are identifying with are coming from in the first place. For instance, all one has to do is read any “toxic parent” blog penned by a therapist and regularly shared on the top psychology websites to find “insensitivity” to the child’s “feelings” listed as a form of abusive/toxic parenting.

   The last thing I have to say is that this idea of shifting the child from more time with one parent than the other parent when “symptoms” arise in the child sounds to me like cruelly using children as human guinea pigs. It’s bad enough that they have to learn to live with two different parents and families in the first place. It would seem to me that rather than advocating for splitting that child who is symptomatic up even further or somehow using/punishing the child to fix or balance out the pathology of one of the parents/symptoms of the child these parents involved in high conflict divorces should be the ones being penalized/punished or otherwise required to make the necessary adjustments to put the children first. It should be mandatory that both parents involved in high conflict divorces be required to take in depth parenting/child development courses.

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