December 21, 2020 by Don Hubin, Ph.D., Chair, National Board of Directors

Earlier this month, I had the pleasure of attending the International Council on Shared Parenting’s 5th international conference, which was co-sponsored by National Parents Organization. Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, it was a virtual conference. Though there are drawbacks to this format, there are also advantages. It made it possible to bring together scholars and audience members from around the world to address the focus of the conference: shared parenting and family violence. It was truly an international conference: drawing more than a thousand registrants from 56 different countries.

Over the course of several forthcoming blog articles, I want to share with you some of the important insights that emerged in the conference presentations. The first comes from Dr. William Bernet, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.

Dr. Bernet is a world renowned expert on parental alienation. His presentation focused on what he described as “a counterintuitive feature of family violence and parental alienation,” and it addressed the vexed question of who we determine when a child’s negative attitudes toward a parent are the result of that parent being abusive and when they are the result of a campaign of parental alienation by the other parent.

The counterintuitive feature of family violence and parental alienation, established by research published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences, will certainly surprise many.

One would think that a child’s attitude toward a parent who had abused the child would be unambiguously negative. The child would want nothing to do with that parent. On the other hand, one might expect, a child who is being subjected to a campaign of parental alienation would have mixed feelings. The child has had a generally positive relationship with a parent who is now being denigrated by the other parent. Wouldn’t these experiences create internal conflict? It would certainly seem so.

That commonsense view stands to reason. But, as Dr. Bernet’s research demonstrates, it falls to experience. The truth is just the opposite.

Children who have been abused have mixed feelings about their abusive parent. They hope for a relationship with their abusive parent. While they often display ill effects of the abuse in the form of post-traumatic stress disorder, they “tend to engage in attachment-enhancing behaviors rather than attachment-disrupting behaviors toward their abusive parents.”

In contrast, children who have been alienated from a non-abusive parent by the other parent show no such ambivalence. They reject the targeted parent completely, without such mixed feelings and they accept the alienating parent just as wholeheartedly. This phenomenon is called ‘splitting’.

These surprising results make possible a very reliable diagnostic tool for helping to distinguish cases or parental alienation from cases where there is abuse. An instrument called the ‘Parental Acceptance-Rejection Questionnaire’ (PARQ) is remarkably accurate in separating these cases.

Dr. Bernet cautions that, despite its accuracy in detecting splitting, it is not by itself “a test for parental alienation.” Splitting is just one feature of severe parental alienation and mental health experts need to determine whether the other features are present.

It is important for parents, psychologists, and divorce professionals to understand this counterintuitive feature of parental alienation and family violence and to be aware of the phenomenon of splitting and the existence of the PARQ diagnostic tool for measuring splitting.