In this episode, Andrew and Barbara talk with Joe Goldberg, founder of the Canadian Symposium for Parental Alienation Syndrome, about how parents can heal from alienation and get their child the services they need.
Note: This podcast was originally hosted on Barbara La Pointe’s website, which has since gone offline. I’ve reposted the episodes here so people still have access to the materials.
Transcript
Andrew Folkler: Welcome, everyone, to another episode of Broken Families, where we host conversations on divorce, parental alienation, and high-conflict relationships. My name is Andrew Folkler.
Barbara La Pointe: And I’m Barbara La Pointe. Today, we are going to discuss parental alienation, PA, and how parents can heal from alienation. Plus, we will explore getting their child the services they need.
Barbara La Pointe: It’s why we’ve brought on a special guest speaker to help us really dive deep into this topic, and in fact, we are gonna dive deeper today on the Broken Families podcast than we’ve ever gone before, so put your brain seat belts on. Mr. Goldberg is a widely recognized expert in parental alienation and a high-conflict family law consultant.
Barbara La Pointe: His firm, Goldberg and Associates, based in Winter Park, Florida, provides nationwide services both in the United States and Canada. His expertise includes parental alienation and child custody disputes. Mr. Goldberg’s focus is on complex family law issues involving families with parent-child relational problems that result from alienation.
Barbara La Pointe: He is the founder of the Canadian Symposium for Parental Alienation Syndrome. He’s organized multiple continuing educational conferences on the topic of parental alienation at the Metro Toronto Convention Center in Ontario, Canada, Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, and at the University of Toronto and Dawson College in Montreal, Quebec.
Barbara La Pointe: So without further ado, welcome Mr. Goldberg.
Joe Goldberg: Thank you, Barbara, and thank you, Andrew.
Joe Goldberg: Nice to be here.
Barbara La Pointe: May I call you Joseph?
Joe Goldberg: Please call me Joe.
Barbara La Pointe: Okay. Joe, let’s just start with the point that you say, beautifully share, that you are a supporter of people who feel victimized by parental alienation, and there’s a lot of those people out there suffering and not healing from parental alienation.
Barbara La Pointe: But at the same time, you’re a little bit critical of the parental alienation theory.
Joe Goldberg: Well, more than a little critical.
Joe Goldberg: Substantially critical, because it does need significant updating. And my perspective comes from a review of a voluminous amount of new research, medical research and social science research, that provide a better account for why these dynamics occur, why people behave the way they do, why children in particular are compromised in these high-conflict family dynamics.
Joe Goldberg: So some of the examples of these new factors that account for the behavior of a child, let’s call this child an alienated child, their behavior can also be explained as a result of an abundance of stress. When you have chronic stress, that often is what happens when you have families going through separations and divorce, in high-conflict dynamics.
Joe Goldberg: The stress has an impact on a child or an adult’s brain chemistry. And there’s a lot of neural circuitry that automatically switches our ability to think our way through a problem in a cognitive and a reflective way toward more habitual ways of handling a situation that are more on the primitive side of how we cope with things that we’re unable to adjust to or manage.
Joe Goldberg: When you have an abundance of stress, that’s just one of the factors. A lot of the problems that people have are attributed to self-regulation failure, and that’s a term that is used to explain what happens when people lose the capacity to manage their thoughts, their emotions, and their behavior.
Joe Goldberg: And there are various things that can tilt the balance of a person’s ability to self-regulate themselves. It could be the depletion of certain substrates in our body like blood glucose. Also, if a person doesn’t have the motivation, if they acquiesce, they give in to a situation rather than try to work through it.
Joe Goldberg: Or if they are suffering from sleep deprivation. If they become involved in something called deindividualization where a person loses their identity and they somewhat morph with the identity of a group. This is what you see oftentimes happening to people who are immersed in a larger group of people.
Joe Goldberg: But it can also happen in smaller populations like in a cult where you see people sort of take on the identity of the cult leader. It can even happen in a one-on-one scenario where what used to be referred to as folie à deux where a person becomes aligned with someone that has somewhat delusional thoughts and they take on the attitudes and behaviors of that person.
Joe Goldberg: Today that’s called shared delusional disorder. So there are many different explanations for why children are impacted by the parental conflicts and this also helps to explain why a parent that may be alienating a child is doing so because that parent has lost their ability to self-regulate themselves.
Joe Goldberg: So it’s not like it’s their fault. It’s like an illness. It’s like a sickness that they can’t control.
Barbara La Pointe: Joe, can we just back up to the beginning? ‘Cause I think what I’m seeing in my practice is probably the same thing that you see, is parents going through this, and children, for such a prolonged period of time.
Barbara La Pointe: And as you know, our bodies were never designed to sustain stress for so long. So I think it is possible that we could lose, as you were saying, your ability to self-regulate. But what’s the difference between self-regulation and just self-control? ‘Cause there’s some pretty serious consequences for parents if you lose self-control and then subsequently can’t self-regulate.
Joe Goldberg: Well, self-control is defined as the ability to override a dominant response to alter the course of some inevitable outcome. Whereas self-regulation has more to do with the capacity to manage a wider range of systems that are happening to a person collectively through the mental processing, mental processes that we have, and also the physical challenges that are placed on our body.
Joe Goldberg: So as an example, there’s a term called allostatic load that’s referred to in the literature. Allostatic load essentially refers to when a person goes through chronic stress for events in their life. The wear and tear of that stress on the mind and the body starts to challenge the homeostasis of our ability to function effectively.
Joe Goldberg: And so allostatic load is another term that helps explain what’s happening to people. It’s difficult to have confidence in parental alienation theory when all they wanna talk about is blaming the child for behaving the way they do because of the influence of this other parent.
Joe Goldberg: And to completely disregard all the scientific literature that’s come out over the last 20 years, they certainly, the experts of parental alienation have had ample time to broaden their perspective on the definition of parental alienation, but they have made no effort to do that.
Joe Goldberg: And so I have a problem with that.
Barbara La Pointe: ‘Cause just to confirm and clarify that I’m understanding, you’re saying that just one parent blaming another parent is perhaps just too simplistic...
Joe Goldberg: Correct...
Barbara La Pointe: And you’re also advocating for a reformation, a revisit, a reformation of the theory itself.
Joe Goldberg: Right. Well, the first person that actually did a reformulation of the theory of parental alienation was Janet Johnston back in 2001. She took the basic theory of parental alienation and said, “No, this can’t be just simply cause effect by a parent’s alienating behavior. There have to be other factors.
Joe Goldberg: You have to consider the contributions of the other parent. You have to consider the influence of other family relatives. You have to consider whether or not there’s some aspects of justified rejection.” So it turned into a process where people were able to think about parental alienation as a much broader definition, to create sort of a checklist to consider.
Joe Goldberg: And these are important factors when you’re trying to provide a model for treatment. If you’re gonna dismiss important factors that could be causing this behavior in the child or in the adults, you’re not going to come up with a effective treatment for this problem, and that is actually what we’re dealing with today.
Joe Goldberg: We’re dealing with models for treatment of parental alienation that are failing. They’re not succeeding. In fact, most of the models for treating parental alienation are not even therapeutic models. They’re psychoeducational models. That’s what Family Bridges is about. That’s what Overcoming Barriers is about.
Joe Goldberg: That’s what Foundations is about, that Childress has been talking about. So the one model that is thought of for treatment for parent-child relationship problems is reunification therapy. And that in itself is a difficult model because there are so many different populations of children that are entered into this treatment.
Joe Goldberg: So some of these populations of children are, of course, not alienated. They’re victims of bonafide abuse or neglect, or they’ve been kidnapped. They haven’t seen a parent for many years. So trying to use the principles of treating children in those other populations with children who were victims of alienation has turned into a catastrophe.
Barbara La Pointe: I think that is sort of the hope that I found really interesting in your message, just acknowledging that where is the healing? What are the solutions? And you mentioned that not very many people know that reunification therapy is flopping over, sadly, on its head.
Barbara La Pointe: It’s not working to really serve and help families. So what advice do you give with respect to that?
Joe Goldberg: Well, there are some non-therapeutic interventions for one thing that I’ve noticed are very helpful in giving children, even young children, the tools to develop their psychological skills. For example, for a lot of my clients, I recommend Psychoeducational Tutoring by Dr. Joseph Strayhorn.
Joe Goldberg: People can look it up, Psychoeducational Tutoring. It’s a wonderful way of giving children the opportunity to learn important values in life and to learn how to use their critical thinking. One of the things that they often talk about when they talk about alienated children is how damaged their critical thinking is.
Joe Goldberg: And so Psychoeducational Tutoring is a magnificent alternative, non-therapeutic by the way, it’s not therapy. But it involves basically having a tutor that’s well-educated and trained by Dr. Joseph Strayhorn’s organization, and they have five appointments a week with the child, and they work on a variety of skills to help that child use their critical thinking and to help advance their values.
Joe Goldberg: And the cost of the program is $100 a month. So you also have to be able to provide solutions for families that are affordable because some of the problems with some of the alternative models being used today like Family Bridges or whatever, to ask a family to plunk down $20,000 for a four-day program and expect a miracle, I don’t think people are really well-served by pinning their hopes on that kind of intervention.
Joe Goldberg: One that isn’t even affordable to almost every family out there. And sadly, this is what’s being promulgated as the solution. These intensive parental alienation programs. There’s no success rate. At the best, they’re rated as promising. They’re not given any higher grade than that.
Joe Goldberg: And there are other programs. There are mindfulness programs for children that will help them. There’s also other kinds of therapeutic interventions that may have more promising hope in helping families to focus on self-regulation, to help them understand the things that they can do, the strategies that they can learn, to audit what causes these stressful events and how to manage them more effectively.
Joe Goldberg: Because if you can reduce that for an individual, for a parent let’s say, if you could take them from way up to way down on that stress scale, their interactions with their co-parent would be a lot different. They would have more ability to work their way through problems than they but unfortunately the way that this whole system is set up with lawyers trying to fill their clients’ heads with whatever they want rather than knowing how best to serve them.
Joe Goldberg: So lawyers unfortunately create a lot of the conflict and they get clients that come into their office. They want sole custody. A lawyer tells them, “I can’t give you that, but I can tell you that if your child was afraid of the other parent, if they felt unsafe, if the other parent acted in some way that would justify withholding access, then maybe I could argue that.”
Joe Goldberg: So just the suggestions from a lawyer can be all that that client needs to create the conflict. And of course a lot of people that are going through separations and divorce, they run to an attorney but they don’t even know that there are differences between attorneys. There’s collaborative attorneys and there’s attorneys that just litigate.
Joe Goldberg: And so the decision that you make in selecting a lawyer also has a huge impact at the starting gate to how things are gonna develop.
Andrew Folkler: And what should that decision process be as far as choosing your attorney, just in a general sense?
Joe Goldberg: Well, I think if you have children and you have a less than perfect relationship with your ex-spouse or ex-partner, what I try to tell people as widely as I can, before you get a lawyer, talk to an expert, talk to a consultant, get a lot of advice about what kind of lawyer you might need, get advice about what kind of interventions you might be better served by than listening to an attorney tell you what they think you should do, because lawyers are not familiar with a lot of different types of interventions.
Joe Goldberg: They go with what they know, and most of them, even ones that have been practicing law for 20, 25 years, they don’t have a clue what to do in these very complicated cases. If they don’t have an expert helping them, they’re not gonna be able to help the client. So the last thing a person should do is run to an attorney.
Joe Goldberg: The first thing they should do is run to a consultant.
Barbara La Pointe: It’s kind of music to my ears what you’re saying, Joe, because hiring and retaining an attorney is a major, major decision, and there’s serious consequences to switching attorneys or firing your attorney, or having multiple attorneys.
Barbara La Pointe: That’s not looked upon favorably in family court. So it’s kind of like you hook up with your attorney, and you hope it works out, ‘cause if it doesn’t, there’s some consequences to that. It’s a big, big decision, so I really like what you’re saying about reaching out to a consultant, ‘cause it is a major factor.
Barbara La Pointe: Now, if your high-conflict ex has a high-conflict attorney, that also complicates things, I think. But when you were talking earlier, if we back up ever so slightly, about attorneys creating conflict or making these suggestions for conflict, that really touched a heartstring because it happens often.
Barbara La Pointe: And there’s a couple of things. What we know, correct me if I’m wrong, that high-conflict personalities often drive parental alienation, not always, but often. And even someone with a personality disorder will have worsened symptoms under prolonged stress, more of their personality disorder. It might become worse under the legal conflict.
Barbara La Pointe: And then when someone loses their thought force or loses their ability to self-regulate, sometimes lawyers will exploit that. So there’s some really sad things that happen in this world.
Joe Goldberg: Yeah, this is true. And there’s so many different elements to a high-conflict case.
Joe Goldberg: One of the things that I do as a consultant involves psycho-legal education. In other words, I try to inform a client what the roadmap looks like up ahead. And they don’t know. Usually they don’t have any clue. They don’t have any idea. They’re so overwhelmed emotionally, they’re so stressed that they just wanna put this in the hands of an attorney and just say, “Just tell me what I need to do.
Joe Goldberg: I’ll just do it. But I wanna have some custody. I wanna have some access. I wanna have some say in decisions.” Unfortunately, they don’t know that the more conflict there is, the better it is for the lawyer. They make a lot of money leaving matters unresolved.
Joe Goldberg: They don’t steer the ship. They just let the clients go, and they’re not available to take their calls when emergencies come up, and they’re not available when they’re most needed, maybe to give advice. That’s why a consultant is in a different situation. They would be available. They would be able to tell somebody what to do or what not to do, what to say, what not to say to their former partners, ex-spouses, to the children.
Joe Goldberg: They don’t understand how sometimes just something very innocent being said could be all that it takes to tilt that child’s behavior over the edge. Because oftentimes a child may say, “I don’t wanna see you. I don’t wanna have anything to do with you.” And then the parent says, “Well, all I did was send an email to say, ‘I love you and I think about you, and I miss you, and I hope that you’re okay.’.
Joe Goldberg: What was wrong with that?” And so I could sit down and I could talk to a client and I could say, “Well, to you, that didn’t seem like a big deal. That seemed like, well, what’s wrong with that? Who would argue with that?” But for a child who is so overwhelmed with stress and having to cope with the environment that they’re living in with the other parent being overwhelmed and overly stressed, it just takes the slightest interaction to just reinforce the fact that that parent isn’t listening to them.
Joe Goldberg: They don’t want you to contact them right now. So there’s a reason for that, and they’re not being cruel when they say it. It’s a cry for help because they’re at their maximum limit right there, and anything, even something small and innocent, is difficult because some side of them would love to be able to say thank you or I appreciate it, but they can’t even do that because that becomes a problem psychologically.
Joe Goldberg: And there are things that also, I haven’t talked about this, but there are things that happen in our unconscious mind that steers our behavior. Like a lot of people believe that our behavior is all being steered by our conscious thoughts, our conscious decisions. But quite the opposite is true.
Joe Goldberg: It’s the unconscious mind that collects most of the data and peers into the future. And it’s only when our unconscious mind becomes aware of something that is unexpected or could be a potential threat that it wakes up our conscious mind and it tells us, “Pay attention. A ball is coming at you,” so you move out of the way before it hits you.
Joe Goldberg: So for children, let’s say, that are compromised. I don’t like to say the word alienated too much, but okay, I’ll say it. Let’s say kids that are alienated, so they pick up a cue in their environment unconsciously that triggers them. And it’s not even the actions of the other parent alienating them or committing some act of alienating behavior.
Joe Goldberg: The children already have a survival instinct to protect themselves. And when somebody says something or if their unconscious mind captures something that triggers that survival instinct, they revert automatically to this rejection of the parent because that’s the only way they know how to cope with this overwhelming threat to them and to their psyche.
Joe Goldberg: So that’s why I say I have a problem with the theory of parental alienation. It needs a lot of updating. It has to consider many of these factors involving stress, the unconscious mind, self-regulation of course. All this is evidence-based. It’s all scientific based. There’s no reason not to include it in understanding the behaviors of the children and the behavior of the parents.
Joe Goldberg: Maybe the target parent has a little bit more capacity to manage their self-regulation because their motivation is so high. They’re so boxed out of the relationship with the child that their motivation just keeps increasing. What can I do? How can I change this? They’re looking, they’re searching desperately for help, for answers.
Joe Goldberg: But the other parent is overwhelmed and they don’t have the ability to co-parent. They don’t have the ability to parent the child within a normal range of behavior. So parental alienation theory is something I’m critical of today. That’s not to say that it doesn’t have valid points, that it could be the genesis of how this accumulated stress has caused the constant self-regulation failure in the child.
Joe Goldberg: But it’s part of the story, it’s not the whole story.
Andrew Folkler: Absolutely. There’s quite a few points that you hit on in that last segment that I think really ring true. And as a formerly alienated child, how you explained it is how I’ve explained it to other people. Not only just we had very similar lingo, like to survive, being in survival mode, for example.
Andrew Folkler: And you’re, as a child, you’re constantly analyzing your surroundings just for self-preservation. And all of that, of course, is dependent on what their home situation is like. And so they know what set of behaviors will aggravate the parent that they’re staying at home with, and how that can instigate more conflict and they’re gonna be avoiding that at all cost.
Andrew Folkler: And so it would be easier to create conflict with the target parent to push them away rather than stand on their own two feet, ‘cause they’re too young to better understand how to do that or that that’s an option. And so all of that really rings true, especially for me, and I definitely see a lot of parallels in the way you explained it and the way I’ve explained it to other people.
Joe Goldberg: For sharing that.
Barbara La Pointe: That’s a lot. I guess with self-regulations, that’s become an important point in our conversation, just to point out that if a parent, I’ll use the example of a mother, cannot self-regulate, the child is going to model that or feel that as well.
Barbara La Pointe: When you look at the family as a system, and each member is not disconnected from the other member, it also starts to widen the lens of empathy, compassion, and understanding of families. And I’m not sure family courts and lawyers are doing that...
Joe Goldberg: And oftentimes you have families that have multiple children.
Joe Goldberg: And so they’re looking at, let’s say, an older sibling who is very rejecting of a parent. They can see that their older sibling just cannot control themselves. There’s no self-control. They fly off the handle at the most innocent kind of comment at times.
Joe Goldberg: And other siblings are having an impact on each other. And so it’s hard to maintain a relationship with the parent in an environment where you have multiple family members in conflict with one parent and with some of the siblings who are not in alignment with them.
Joe Goldberg: And this adds to more stress and more breakdown in self-regulation. And so it’s not always just an alienating parent’s input, it’s the input from other family members, siblings. Again, I would say, here’s an interesting thought. There’s a lot of people, a lot of parents who alienate their kids, when they go through separations and divorce.
Joe Goldberg: But not all of them turn out to be alienated. Why is that? But the experts don’t seem to be too interested in explaining that away, because sometimes a parent can be naive when they say something, like they’re badmouthing the other parent in front of the kids, or they express their hatred for a parent in front of the kids.
Joe Goldberg: But that doesn’t necessarily turn the kid against that other parent.
Joe Goldberg: And so trying to understand why it doesn’t always succeed. If alienation was a formula for how to indoctrinate a child and control their behavior, why doesn’t it work across the board?
Joe Goldberg: So my explanation to that is that children have established relationships with parents and others that they get input from. And sometimes to protect themselves, they don’t necessarily fight and debate with the parent that is out of control, unregulated. They hide what they feel to protect themselves from manipulation, and they do it better than other children.
Joe Goldberg: And so I think that’s one example of an explanation why alienating behavior doesn’t always succeed. But I think it’s an area for future research.
Barbara La Pointe: That’s really fascinating. One thing that sprung to my mind was self-regulation is about dialing down the intensity of your reactions or your triggers, just to dial the intensity down.
Joe Goldberg: Down-regulate...
Barbara La Pointe: So but the longer you’re in conflict, the less able you are to do that. So just it comes back again, in my view, to minimizing the conflict where it’s very, very intense. ‘Cause I think a parent might do that, especially at the beginning, unintentionally alienate when they’re in the heat of a high-conflict legal battle, maybe with suggestions from a lawyer or not.
Barbara La Pointe: But as they come out the other side of that legal conflict, it could de-intensify potentially.
Joe Goldberg: Well, being able to down regulate conflict involves learning strategies.
Joe Goldberg: People used to think self-control was all about willpower, but nothing could be further from the truth. Self-control doesn’t have anything to do with willpower. What it has to do more with is the ability to form or break habits.
Joe Goldberg: And when you set a goal towards a habit, you’re putting less energy and effort into doing something because you’re doing it because it’s something you’re motivated to do, something you wanna do. It becomes routine. And so self-control is more about that. And learning the right strategies for how to manage your self-regulation, this is a much better approach to helping parents to co-parent, to minimize conflict to children, so that they can understand how, when they’re out of control they’re hurting their kids, and they can change that.
Joe Goldberg: That’s possible to change in spite of the toxic environment of the legal community. And sadly, I have to include elements of the mental health community as well, because you have a lot of underqualified and incompetent people who are providing services to these families, and they’re practicing outside the boundaries of their core competencies.
Joe Goldberg: They’re using therapeutic approaches to problems that don’t work and are outdated, and there are much better approaches. I would even, as an example, I sometimes talk about ABA therapy. Which is mainly used for children that have autism, but it’s also used to help children that have oppositional defiant disorder or severe emotional problems.
Joe Goldberg: It’s a form of behavior modification where there’s a specific kind of therapy that could shape a child’s behavior towards a specific goal that you want. So if you want to help a child overcome their irrational fear of a parent, there’s a way to do it maybe with ABA, with an ABA therapist rather than a cognitive behavioral therapist.
Joe Goldberg: But a lot of this is just being swept aside by experts in parental alienation. They seem determined and fixated on reunification therapy or these intensive parental alienation therapies. And like I said at the beginning of our podcast, those approaches, those models are not working.
Andrew Folkler: Almost sounds like they’re trying to find a magic silver bullet, and there is no silver bullet.
Joe Goldberg: Well, there’s a way of whittling down this problem. It’s a very big problem, but if each family member is steered into interventions that help them on an individual scale, then you have a much better outcome, much greater probability of a good outcome.
Joe Goldberg: And that’s all that parents really want. I don’t think that they would care if you told them it’s not a matter of them being alienated. What you really care about is how do I get my relationship back with my kid?
Joe Goldberg: And that’s all that should really matter, is how do we achieve that objective?
Joe Goldberg: If we know something isn’t working, we don’t keep chipping away at it with the same methodology. We have to think outside the box. We have to try new models, new approaches, and we have to base it on science and evidence. And parental alienation theory is substantially lacking the research it needed to get into the DSM.
Joe Goldberg: It’s easy to be misused by professionals to win court cases. There’s profiteering, sadly, that experts in parental alienation benefit from by gravitating towards this theory. And unfortunately, when you put all that together, and that’s all that people hear about, and that’s all they’re talking about on social media, then everybody thinks that the problem that they have is that they haven’t been educated about parental alienation, therefore if they don’t understand it, there needs to be more awareness about it and more discussion about parental alienation.
Joe Goldberg: And then once you’re knowledgeable and you’re educated about it, then you’ll be able to solve your problem. And then you have professionals like lawyers who are trying to tell people how to prove parental alienation. You’ve got people on social media saying, “Oh, document everything,” and, “Fight and never give up, and just keep pushing and pushing and pushing.”
Joe Goldberg: And for every bit of advice that I hear these experts talking about in parental alienation, I feel like wanting to have a debate with them. How I could show them where that kind of logic does more harm than good. And that’s why I’m so grateful to have a chance to be on your podcast to try to present a new perspective.
Joe Goldberg: Because a new perspective, a new approach, new models are needed for parental alienation. And that’s what people are crying out for.
Andrew Folkler: Absolutely. On that train of thought with how much parents are really only caring about rebuilding that relationship with their children, I know there’s a few maybe you could say template cases where maybe either the child has grown up and still estranged or during the divorce process or post-divorce process where custody has been allotted and there’s alienation.
Andrew Folkler: How would these parents go about, generally speaking, to getting that relationship with their child back, or at least starting to build it back?
Joe Goldberg: So Andrew, you’re talking about adult children?
Andrew Folkler: I know that that would be one case, but I was just trying to figure out how to broadly frame that question.
Andrew Folkler: Why don’t we start with adult children. We can address any other scenarios as well, if you’d like.
Joe Goldberg: Well, adult children, children over the age of 18 that are beyond the ability of the courts to intervene at that age. If you do nothing, nothing is likely to change if the child was severely rejecting.
Joe Goldberg: I think that my experience as a consultant has helped me work with some parents who have adult children and there has been some success and some experimental approaches that I’ve suggested to parents. But before you could get into helping a parent repair a relationship with an adult child of alienation, again, I’m calling them adult children of alienation for lack of a better descriptor, you really have to have an expert in parent-child relationship problems review the history, the forensic history of what went on.
Joe Goldberg: And sometimes if I’m doing that for somebody, I might have to go back and look at what happened over 10 years or 15 years and look at court records and look at emails and text messages and letters between the family members and read a voluminous amount of material before I would even think of giving somebody an opinion about what they could do.
Joe Goldberg: Because if you don’t really dive that deep into the dynamics, into the forensic background of what happened in that family, you’re no better than a palm reader as far as I’m concerned. You really have to understand not only all the material, but you have to spend time talking to that parent and getting some of your questions answered so you really have a good feel for what happened.
Joe Goldberg: And only then, I think, could you develop some approaches to contacting that child, that adult child, with an approach that could break the ice. So for example, one of my favorite strategies is to tell the parent, “We need to tell the child that I’m contacting you not with the hope of having a relationship with you.
Joe Goldberg: I don’t really have those hopes anymore. But I do believe that it’s important for us to have occasional communications with one another because it’s beneficial. There are some mutual benefits to us communicating with each other.” And interestingly enough, these kids, you won’t hear from them unless there’s something in it for them.
Joe Goldberg: Pay for my college or buy me a car or bail me out of this problem I’m in. Otherwise you don’t hear from those kids. But there are mutual benefits and a carefully worded email or letter to them explaining that it would be good just to have occasional contacts can be an icebreaker.
Joe Goldberg: And sometimes you get feedback from that child, that adult child, that says, “Well, I don’t think so, but what are you talking about? What kind of mutual benefits you referring to?” So it presents an opportunity to continue a conversation, and if you know the next right thing to say to them, it can open the door.
Joe Goldberg: And anything that opens the door to getting the two of you talking to each other again can lead to an amazing future outcome, and I’ve seen it happen. So that’s just an example, but I don’t want to say that it’s what everyone should do. I think you really need to talk to a consultant. I think everything has to be looked at as a different individual dynamic.
Joe Goldberg: You can’t just shoehorn somebody into a strategy or boilerplate something that works automatically for everybody. So a good consultant will try to find a way, even if there isn’t a way. They’ll try to find that way.
Andrew Folkler: That makes a lot of sense. And in my case, when I was trying to deal with estrangement from somebody, I dealt with it in a similar way, but what I did was I used humor more often. You can tell that I’m a millennial because what I sent was just a meme.
Andrew Folkler: Just a funny little picture I saw, and it was like, “Hey, thought this was funny. Thought you might like it.” And that was it. There was no other commitment to it. I wasn’t asking for any commitment or even acknowledgement. And what I was doing with that was to try and build rapport through just being funny.
Andrew Folkler: And in doing so, I could then work my way up to short conversations. And when people ask me about it, what I explain to them is I went through a process of getting very small micro-commitments before asking for the big commitment, which is usually like, “Hey, let’s meet up.”
Andrew Folkler: Or because a lot of these parents, they’re asking for something really huge with no rapport, and in fact, you could say they have this huge trust debt with this person or with this child. And so it would be no different than me walking up to a stranger and saying, “Hi, my name’s Andrew. Let’s get married.”
Andrew Folkler: And it’s just, you can’t. It doesn’t work out that way.
Joe Goldberg: Right. Too much distance and there’s too much history. And they may be adults, but they’re still very vulnerable and triggered, easily triggered. And sadly, sometimes even when you have, this is something that goes beyond your question, but I’ve also seen in many, many situations, tragically, that when sometimes severely rejecting children do come back and normalize a relationship with a parent, and it continues for a succession of years, something can happen that could easily break it apart again, and it goes right back to zero.
Joe Goldberg: And that’s a real loss when you experience it a second time. But there’s reasons for that. I’d love to see future research explore why this does happen, why sometimes alienated children do repair their relationships and it goes on for a period of years and then it falls apart again.
Joe Goldberg: Because something can trigger it. Something could, or in some cases may be something that the other parent said impacts them again. And so whatever independence or autonomy that they once had, they feel it’s being robbed again, or they’re being manipulated or forced into doing something.
Joe Goldberg: You could see sometimes some parents have control of certain financial benefits for the child. Even as an adult, they’re dependent on that parent for financial resources. And sometimes they’ll do something that can be very hurting to the parent that they’ve repaired a relationship with.
Joe Goldberg: Why tell them they can’t come to a wedding because the other parent who’s paying for it won’t like it if they do show up? And so all that love and everything that you repaired that you thought was so good is creating a conundrum for this adult child again. And this isn’t an area that you hear a lot about in terms of parental alienation because you’re talking most of the time about minors and what we can do to help them.
Joe Goldberg: And so little attention or an under amount of attention is being given to adult children. And there’s so many millions of families all over the world that are experiencing these dynamics day in and day out.
Barbara La Pointe: I guess I could just add from my perspective, more of a healing and energetic perspective, that anything that’s not fully, fully healed 100%, even if there’s just a little residue of wounding there, will come back up for healing later. But that’s what came up for me when you were saying that.
Barbara La Pointe: But this is such an important topic affecting so many people. We’re almost closing in on our hour, Joe. I’ll read you a couple of questions that actually you posed as relevant for people. What would you say to a parent that’s read a lot of books about parental alienation?
Barbara La Pointe: They are in social media, they’re informed, but they still haven’t had their questions answered. What should they do?
Joe Goldberg: Well, a lot of people have no awareness that there are some people who do the work that I do. But unfortunately, it’s such a small minority of professionals that they wouldn’t otherwise learn about it except for maybe in a podcast like this.
Joe Goldberg: The best option is for them to talk to a consultant, somebody that has not only an experience with understanding the dynamics of alienation, but also experience in dealing with court cases. And that’s usually where for minors these events are played out, in front of a judge with lawyers often making decisions between one another on behalf of their clients what should be done. You have to have a consultant who’s going to be caring about your financial resources at the same time because most people don’t have financial resources.
Joe Goldberg: Most people are pro se. They couldn’t afford an attorney, let alone hire a consultant. But even people in that situation need to talk to a consultant because they’re gonna get much better information about what they could do or what they could try to work towards doing in the future. Maybe the timing isn’t right, but they could cobble together a strategy where, for example, when we were talking about lawyers earlier in the program, we were talking about the differences between a collaborative lawyer and a lawyer that does litigation, but there’s also a third category, which is attorneys that work on what’s called a limited scope retainer.
Joe Goldberg: And so that’s an attorney who’s not an attorney on the record, but you’re hiring that attorney, and that attorney is giving you legal advice. That attorney is maybe able to help prepare motions and court documents on your behalf. There are paralegals that do this work, too, at a much lower rate.
Joe Goldberg: But overall, being able to come up with a plan, a strategy for how to repair your relationship, you’re not gonna get it by going to an attorney. You’re gonna get it by going to a consultant who has a broad range of experience with these issues. And they’re gonna take your financial situation into consideration.
Joe Goldberg: They’re gonna take everything into consideration and try to come up with a plan A, a plan B, a plan C to give you some opportunities to work towards. So that’s my general advice to people.
Barbara La Pointe: Some empowering solutions there. You brought up pro se, and so it seems like a perfect time to just pose two questions that actually came from our audience, and you might be able to broadly speak to them or not.
Barbara La Pointe: But this particular woman has written in, and she says, “My ex and common law girlfriend are actively alienating my daughter. She’s 13. Is it advisable to use the words parental alienation in my documentation applications to the court?” She doesn’t have a lawyer. “Or should I just simply describe the behavior and leave out the label of PA?”
Joe Goldberg: Well, I don’t think there’s anything wrong in referring to alienating behavior because that’s a general descriptor of what a parent is doing. Essentially, it’s a parenting style that involves some very negative behavior on the part of that parent aimed specifically at damaging the child’s relationship with the other parent.
Joe Goldberg: But there’s a lot of confusion when it comes to terminology. Like parental alienation is not the same as parental alienation syndrome, but those two terms are conflated oftentimes even by lawyers. And they don’t mean the same thing at all. When people are talking about parental alienation, even though it’s gone through three or four iterations of its definition over the last 25 years, it basically describes a child’s rejection of a parent due to the negative influence of the other parent.
Joe Goldberg: That’s the classic description of parental alienation. Whereas parental alienation syndrome, which is a term that was coined by Dr. Richard Gardner back in the ‘80s, was his observation of children that had eight characteristics, eight symptoms.
Joe Goldberg: That it formed a syndrome. And those behaviors refer to the child’s behaviors.
Joe Goldberg: So terminology, it matters. Unfortunately, the terms keep changing from target parent to favored parent to in parent, out parent. All these different alterations just creates more problems for the theory of parental alienation because one day you’re talking to somebody and they’re saying, “Well, the in parent said this and the out parent said that.”
Joe Goldberg: And somebody’s saying, “Well, what do you mean by in parent or out parent?” Well, they used to call it the favored parent or the non-favored parent, or they used to call this the alienating parent or the targeted parent. So terminology can get confusing, especially for people that don’t know very much about parental alienation in the beginning, and then there’s all these modifications to it over time.
Barbara La Pointe: Just curious as a consultant, do you ever see false allegations with respect to parental alienation? Does that show up in your practice?
Joe Goldberg: Half the people that come to me for help are being, in their opinion, wrongly accused of alienating their children against the other parent, and they are desperate to find help because they don’t believe that they’ve done anything to turn the child against the other parent.
Joe Goldberg: And they deserve just as much help as parents on the flip side of the coin, because only an expert in parental alienation is gonna be able to help both sides, because they know what is and they know what isn’t.
Joe Goldberg: An example of that, so for example, when you talk about parental alienation syndrome, like Gardner said, well, it can’t be passed if there’s bonafide abuse.
Joe Goldberg: Because if there’s bonafide abuse, if there’s bonafide neglect, then the child has justified reasons to reject the parent. So if a parent was committing acts of domestic violence against the other parent, if they were drug addicts and they were constantly embarrassing the child in public with their substance abuse problems.
Joe Goldberg: And then have that parent accuse the other one of parental alienation because the child is rejecting them, well, they’ve got a good argument. And so yeah, a lot of times people use parental alienation as a ruse to try to have control of custody of a child or access to a child that they’ve been blocked from or denied access to.
Joe Goldberg: But that doesn’t mean that parental alienation isn’t valid to the extent that there are parents that actively and obsessively want the child to feel as negatively against that parent as they do. And will go to great lengths to try to persuade that child to believe that this is a rotten, no-goodnick parent, and you shouldn’t really care about the fact that you’re not seeing him or her, that they’re horrible.
Joe Goldberg: “Look what they did to me.” And they’ll tell them all kinds of stories and expose them to adult information, things that a child should never hear growing up. But they don’t have any boundaries, and there’s no limits on their filter. So you do this enough to a child, it could cause them to turn against the other parent.
Joe Goldberg: But like I said earlier, not all the time. Some children have almost an immunity to it. They’re cognitively able to maybe compartmentalize what that alienating parent’s behavior is all about and how they’re able to separate their relationship with that other parent to protect that and preserve that relationship even if they have to go through great lengths to hide it from that alienating parent.
Joe Goldberg: If that makes sense to some people. I hope it does.
Andrew Folkler: Absolutely. And it also sounds like, and it’s like an elephant in the room for me, that there is an element of personal responsibility if you’re still estranged from that child. There’s an element of personal responsibility that you have to present well.
Andrew Folkler: You have to be someone worth being around. And I don’t say that harshly or rudely but with respect to any social situation, you have to be somebody that that child is going to be wanting to be around. And I say that from experience as well given that the vague estrangement example within my own life was largely caused by some of the behaviors I had done in the past.
Andrew Folkler: And so having to amend that and build relationship and build trust based off that trust debt that I was explaining earlier, that there is an element of personal responsibility that we have to hold ourselves accountable for. Otherwise we’re shooting ourself in the foot or hitting ourselves in the head with a hammer and complaining that it hurts.
Joe Goldberg: Yes, I understand. It’s also important to let people know that parental alienation is a component of the problems that these children have, but it’s not inclusive of some of the other problems within the profile of what’s going on inside them.
Joe Goldberg: Because a lot of these children also exhibit other profiles and problems like self-injuring behavior. I see a lot of cases where these kids are cutting or they have eating disorders. So self-injuring is an outcrop of what happens because these children have difficulty with their feelings and sometimes that becomes a distraction issue.
Joe Goldberg: So people think, “Well, we gotta rush the kid to a therapist because they’re self-injuring,” and that therapist is unaware of these other factors in trying to treat the child. So sometimes you need multiple mental health professionals to assist children in these circumstances.
Barbara La Pointe: Another good point. Well, Joe, we’re at the top of the hour, but I really feel that you offer hope for a new generation and some beautiful, generous solutions not often talked about, so I want to thank you for that.
Joe Goldberg: Thank you very much, Barbara, and Andrew. Thank you both.
Andrew Folkler: Absolutely. So before I do our little wrap-up statement, was there any final pearls of wisdom, anything that you felt maybe was just left unsaid that we could share with the audience real quick before we wrap up?
Joe Goldberg: Well, I would say that try to understand that parental alienation theory is not all that it’s cracked up to be. And keep your options open for a new wave of approaching this problem.
Andrew Folkler: I love that. Joe, what would be the best way for listeners to reach out to you if they wanted to learn more about your practice or learn more about you and your look on parental alienation theory?
Joe Goldberg: Well, I would provide you with my website, which is parentalalienation.ca. And I would ask people to go to the media tab on my website to listen to this podcast, because what you won’t see on my website in text is the new concepts that we’re talking about today.
Joe Goldberg: You’ll only hear about it from me on these podcasts that I’m doing now.
Andrew Folkler: Absolutely. All righty. And all right, looks like that’s all we’ve got time for today. Once again, everyone, thank you for taking the time to be with us. And if you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our channel, either on YouTube or through our podcast through the various podcasting platforms.
Andrew Folkler: Barbara, if listeners wanted to reach out to you, what would be the best way for them to do so?
Barbara La Pointe: You’re welcome to reach out anytime to barbara@barbaralapointe.com.
Andrew Folkler: All righty. And if you wanna email me, you’re welcome to email me at startnow@andrewfolkler.com. As always, thank you for taking the time to be with us at the Broken Families podcast, where we discuss and help you find solutions to divorce, parental alienation, and high-conflict relationships.
Andrew Folkler: Have a wonderful day, everyone.