Leyfi til að elska - mar. 2023, Blaðsíða 44

20 Journal of Family Issues 00(0)
highly motivated clients, ready to make any necessary changes, and ready to
address any of their own psychological or other barriers to optimally parent their
child. Involvement in specialized family therapy targeting parental alienation
likely requires strength of character, resilience, stoicism—as they are likely to
come up against a fierce opponent in the form of the alienating parent.
Study Implications
This study shows that targeted parents face extreme and severe alienating
behaviors used by the alienating parent. Importantly, the severity of tactics or
behaviors used indicates that parental alienation is likely to endure and
worsen if left alone. This finding adds weight to previous evidence that doing
nothing will exacerbate parental alienation (Templer, Matthewson, Haines, &
Cox, 2017).
Emotional manipulation is a particularly potent and pervasive tactic used
by alienating parents. The implications of this are twofold: (a) it is necessary
for targeted children to receive cognitive therapy to challenge their distorted
thinking (Templer et al., 2017) and (b) mental health and legal professionals
may have a responsibility to treat cases of parental alienation as a form of
child abuse.
The study also highlights that physical proximity is a critical step toward
reunification. As recommended by Gardner (1998) and supported by Templer
et al. (2017), this may be brought about through specialized family therapy
interventions for alienated families in which a key nonnegotiable feature is
the presence of the alienated family members together.
Targeted parents in this study perceive a fractured system, one that is
uncaring and ineffective to the point of perpetuating and exacerbating paren-
tal alienation. At the very least, this perception greatly contributes to the tar-
geted parent’s distress. These findings have various implications. Previous
research has outlined helpful recommendations for professionals working
with alienated families (e.g., Baker, 2010; Templer et al., 2017). For the pur-
pose of this article, two brief implications regarding the System are provided.
First, it calls for greater dissemination of parental alienation research for
more widespread and shared knowledge and understanding. Second, collabo-
ration between mental health care and legal professionals is crucial and pos-
sibly the best hope for alienation cessation and targeted parent–child
reunification (Templer et al., 2017).
With regard to family violence, the current findings indicate that it may be
helpful to consider alienating behaviors as a crime, on par with physical
abuse. Indeed, there are some nations around the world who have already
criminalized these behaviors that result in parental alienation (e.g., Brazilian
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