How to deal with 'toxic' parents
Courts ill-equipped to handle parental alienation, leaving children at greater
risk of emotional damage
March 14, 2009

Comments on this story (25)

Susan Pigg

LIVING REPORTER


When Toronto lawyer Brian Ludmer speaks about the suffering caused by parental
alienation, the words come from his head and his heart.

He's seen the devastation of a mother's orchestrated campaign to make her
children hate their father, or how a dad can use a 4-year-old as a weapon
against his mother in the ugly aftermath of divorce.

Ludmer is, by training, a corporate lawyer. But he's being "swamped" by
desperate parents looking for help reconnecting with their children. "Experts in
this field will tell you that they've never met a lawyer who understands this
the way that I do," says Ludmer.

That's because he's also lived it.

"Parental alienation is a plague. It's rampant out there," says Ludmer, 48, who
declined to talk about his own case for fear of upsetting his children. "This
stuff has been going on for a hundred years. It's just that now it has a name."

Later this month, Ludmer will address the first international conference on
parental alienation in Toronto. He'll join the growing chorus of parents,
judges, lawyers, social workers and mental health professionals who believe the
courts are ill-equipped to deal with "toxic" parents.

"Canada seems to be a hotbed of parental alienation court activity," says Amy
Baker, a New York-based researcher who's written two books, one chronicling the
emotional suffering that travels in parental alienation's wake.

"I think there are some very brave judges who are willing to really think
through the implications of alienation and really try to deal with it.

"The bottom line is that to turn a child against a parent is to turn a child
against himself."

Two months ago, a Toronto judge stripped a mother of custody of her three
daughters after a decade-long campaign to keep the kids from their father. She
was ordered to pick up the tab for a U.S. program aimed at helping the girls,
ages 9 to 14, reconnect with their dad.

This week, an 18-year-old from Mississauga asked to be awarded custody of his
two younger brothers caught up in a decade of family "warfare." He also asked
that parental alienation experts, such as psychologists Randy Rand and Richard
Warshak, be forbidden from further contact with the boys. He called programs,
such as their controversial Family Workshop for Alienated Children, "voodoo
science."

But there's so much concern about the snail's pace of the overloaded family
court system and the lack of treatment facilities in Canada that Ludmer has been
working with a group of professionals on plans for Toronto's first Family
Reunification Clinic. They hope to have the facility open within a year,
offering treatment based on the work of Rand and Warshak.

"The most important part (of undoing alienation) is the after care," says
Ludmer, who's handled more than 50 parental alienation cases in the last four
years. "We don't want to be bundling kids on a plane and sending them off to the
United States. This will make it easier and less disruptive to get the whole
family the help they need."

The planned centre is sure to set off a storm of controversy among those who
consider Warshak and Rand's work cult-like "deprogramming" and question whether
Parental Alienation Syndrome isn't just an excuse for bad, or even abusive,
parents.

"I think the therapy often does way more harm than any so-called parental
alienation could do. It demoralizes kids, it makes them feel like they're not
being listened to and involved. It demeans them," says Joyanna Silberg of the
U.S.-based Leadership Council on Child Abuse & Interpersonal Violence, a group
of health professionals.

"One of the reasons this is so controversial is because it's become an industry
- a money-making industry - where purveyors of these so-called therapies and
evaluation procedures are using things that the scientific community doesn't
automatically accept, but know that judges are accepting in court to affect
children's lives in an extreme way."

Veteran family court judge Harvey Brownstone sums up the growing debate best:
"The jury is still out on the whole issue of parental alienation. When a child
adamantly refuses to see a parent, it is not easy to know why. It could be
they're bored, or that they don't like the parent's new partner. The situation
is usually layered and complex."

If there is a growing certainty about one thing, it's that these cases need to
be dealt with quickly.

"Time is the enemy of the alienated parent," says Baker, whose book Breaking the
Ties that Bind, chronicles the difficult lives of 40 adults who were alienated
as children. Since the books, she's met hundreds of others, including one who
went as far as plastic surgery to wipe out the shame of looking like his father.
"These cases should be fast-tracked because alienating parents exploit the
ability for the courts to delay things to their benefit. The more time they have
with the kid, the more time that kid is going to resist reconciliation."

Veteran family law lawyer Jeffery Wilson - who was involved in Ontario's first
court case around alienation in 1981 and is representing the Mississauga teen
fighting for his brothers - believes it's time for more drastic measures. It's
been estimated that some 60 per cent of litigants in "high-conflict" divorces
suffer from personality disorders that can turn a discussion of "Who gets the
kids for Christmas?" into a months-long power struggle marked by what Ludmer
calls "bad messaging and bad-mouthing."

Wilson is calling for a government-funded "High-Conflict Response Team" that
could step in before these cases hit the courts. They would have the power to
sort out complex disputes, impose binding judgments and get the kids - and their
parents - counselling and treatment.

Family Solutions is a North York-based team of well-respected psychologists and
social workers who started meeting five years ago to compare notes on difficult
cases. Now they offer everything from mediation to intensive counselling in
high-conflict divorces. They've seen a significant growth in parental alienation
and have had some success with clients who've worked with Rand and Warshak.

"There's a lot of work we still need to do," acknowledges Linda Chodos, a social
worker with Family Solutions. "We don't yet have a lot of evidence-based
research that shows what kind of intervention works best."

Rand and Warshak are based in California and Texas respectively and, in the
first phase of their workshop, meet the children and the alienated parent for
"educational" sessions that can include simple outings where they start to get
reacquainted. (Rand apparently travelled to meet the siblings of the 18-year-old
in a Montreal hotel room, but their mother, who claims to have been alienated by
the father, gave up a day later when they refused to participate in the four-day
session.)

"It's to give the child a break - a chance to catch his or her breath and to
give them just a few days not to be torn between the two parents," says Ted
Horowitz, a veteran social worker with Family Solutions.

The alienator is brought in as part of the second part of the program, all of
which is aimed at making them aware of the damage they are doing and the need to
form a new partnership around parenting.

"There is no deprogramming and never has been," says Jacqueline Vanbetlehem, a
mental health therapist with Family Solutions. "You have to really look at the
circumstances of the family before you even recommend such a program. Sometimes
the court intervention is a relief to these children because they don't have to
choose (between parents) anymore."

Warshak told the Ontario Bar Association's annual meeting last month that 17 out
of 21 children who have completed the "expensive" program have forged good
relationships with the other parent that continue more than two years later. The
results are currently undergoing peer review.

"One of the misperceptions around this is that it's meant to shift allegiances
from one parent to the other," says Horowitz. "The idea is to balance the family
- to pull them together. Both parents need to be part of the treatment, and the
children need to see their parents working together."


Toronto Star http://www.parentcentral.ca/parent/article/602350

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