Latest / It’s All Your Fault: High Conflict People / How Brainwashing Works on a Child’s Brain
Transcript
- Speaker 1 (00:05): Welcome to, it's All Your Fault On True Story fm, the one and only podcast dedicated to helping you understand and increase your effectiveness with high conflict situations. I'm Megan Hunter here with my co-host Bill Eddie. Speaker 2 (00:19): Hi everybody. Speaker 1 (00:21): We are the co-founders of the High Conflict Institute in San Diego, California. We provide training, consultation, and educational programs to clients worldwide. Uh, now in last week's episode, we mentioned that we would be introdu interviewing Kelly Chile, um, about high conflict in education. However, there were some illnesses, so that one will be coming down the road, one of the, uh, soon, but today instead we're going to discuss, uh, how brainwashing works on a child's brain. A little bit different topic. Uh, bill developed a training on this topic recently during which he learned some new information that he'll share here. But first, a couple of notes. If you have questions about a high conflict situation, please send 'em to us at podcast high conflict institute.com or through our website@highconflictinstitute.com slash podcast where you'll find the show notes and links as well. Please give us a rate or review and tell your friends, colleagues, and family about us, especially if they're dealing with a high conflict situation. We're very grateful. Speaker 1 (01:34): So, bill, you've dedicated a great deal of your professional life to researching and understanding child alienation known as parental alienation more widely. Recently, you did a webinar for parents, grandparents, and professionals on the issue of parental alienation that you called How Brainwashing works on a child's brain, and it was quite well received. That's the feedback we got from that group. Apparently you learned some new things in preparing for that that I'd love to discuss with you today. So first, can you give us a quick explanation, you know, kind of some background information on what parental alienation is and why you used the strong term of brainwashing, because yeah, that's a, that's a big word. Speaker 2 (02:22): My whole career really started in 1980 as a therapist. The term parental alienation has been around, and it seemed to start in 1980 when the idea of both father and mother having equal rights of time with children, um, really came into to attention in the court systems. And sadly, it created a conflict between fathers and mothers fighting over parenting time. And the idea of one parent turning the child against the other parent started to show up. And so they called that parental alienation. At first they called it parental alienation syndrome, but it's pretty clear it's not a syndrome. It's not quite that clear cut. On the other hand, what happens, and this is all about separation and divorce cases, as a child resists or refuses to spend time with one of their parents. And it seems that it really comes a lot from the influence of the other parent saying negative things and being undermining and sabotaging time and all of that. Speaker 2 (03:39): Um, but the idea is resistance and refusal is what professionals like to use because it doesn't necessarily come from that other parent. But my experience in about 20 cases as a family lawyer and about 30 cases as a consultant is it does come a lot from the other parent. So you have a favored parent and a rejected parent. So that's in a nutshell, some things about parental alienation and parental alienating behaviors is what's been the focus in the last maybe 10, 12 years in courts rather than a syndrome. Now, the term brainwashing is associated with that. People think of it like a child being a hostage, uh, with one parent saying all these negative things, kind of like, you know, in a war zone where someone's a hostage and then eventually they take the side of their captors and they call that brainwashing. But by studying information about the brain, I think it may actually fit because of changes in a child's brain, which I'll get into. Speaker 1 (04:51): Yeah, I was thinking about that, uh, hostage situation and, and brainwashing. I wonder if it's, uh, some people are more susceptible to that brainwashing in a situation like that or in a, an alienation case and some are just, uh, adapting to survive. Speaker 2 (05:09): Yes. And so it, it seems to really have to do with a person, say, resilience coming in. And it also has a lot to do with their age, which I'll explain. So we see younger children, 4, 5, 6 not being as susceptible as children nine through 14, and then children 15, 16, 17 also not as susceptible, but some it happens with. So yeah, and I think, you know, in war zones that some people got successfully brainwashed and some people resisted it. And I think so much has to do with, um, their, their own brain biology and, um, you know, what they, they come in with. Some people's brains are more vulnerable than others. Speaker 1 (06:01): What comes to mind is the JC Dugard case, uh, the young woman who was kidnapped in, I think in Nevada and taken to California for years and years as a, as a hostage and kept, kept under wraps for a long, long time. And, um, she's a very healthy, productive surviving, uh, woman and mother and, um, amazing human being after many years of captivity. Um, and, and was eventually, you know, obviously released. So, uh, very fascinating. Anyway, so let's move on to neurons. What, in this, uh, research that you did, did you learn about neurons in a child's brain? Speaker 2 (06:38): First is I knew that humans, adults have about a hundred billion neurons in our hits and that children have nearly that as well. But the big difference between childrens and adults is adults from life experience have formed connections between the neurons or what we call synapses, and that the neurons have an axon that kind of reaches out to the dendrites of other neurons in the brain when they both fire at the same time. So like, if you're hungry and, and you have a cookie, your brain goes, hunger and cookies go together. Let's form a connection. Let's form a synapse or a few of them. So different things happen. That's how you learn sports. You go, okay, now I'm supposed to run, now I'm supposed to catch. And your brain makes a web or network of all these neurons that work together. So kids are born with the neurons, but not the connections and life experience causes these connections like love from their parent, scary situations, all of that. Speaker 2 (07:54): So that's what's really going on in the child's sprain, is forming these connections. But let me add another piece, and that is if you have something that's repeated a lot, so experience and repetition make the neuron connection stronger and then, uh, thicker. So the neuron forms what they call a mile in sheath, m y e l i n sheath, that makes it speed up how fast it can pass information and how more solid it is. And so different life experience, some is stronger than other. And I like to think of the violin sheath as like turning a cow path into a superhighway in your brain. So learning experience that's repeated is stronger and stronger just like practicing the violin or practicing, uh, pitching in a baseball game. Speaker 1 (08:58): Ah, that makes sense. Um, so you, you said you always wondered why parental alienation seems to take hold primarily between the ages of nine, uh, ages of nine and 14. You mentioned that a minute ago. Um, so what did you figure out here about that? Speaker 2 (09:15): This whole 40 some years that I've been exposed to the idea of alienating behaviors, it seems that it's kids, you know, starting around nine or 10 that start taking sides. And I've actually had a case I watched, I got into the case as the lawyer for the mom, and when the child was six years old and over the next few years there was conflict. Dad had been, uh, a domestic violence, uh, abuser and he, he didn't have control of mom anymore after the divorce, but he wanted control of the boy. So he was very intense with the boy. And so there was four different psychological evaluations done with this boy and the family. And before he was 10, I think he was saying, I love my parents equally and, you know, I'm, whatever is, I'm just kind of stressed about their divorce. Starting about 10, he started saying, my father really understands me and my mother doesn't. Speaker 2 (10:25): And unusually he was two-thirds of his time with his mother, but his father was intensely emotional with him. And so he ended up by age 16, he refused to see his mother and, and ran away to live with his father full-time. So I saw this happen, but let me say what I learned, what I learned is that the brain goes through a pruning of synapses, and there's two periods in child development when this particularly happens. One is around age five, where the brain prunes away the connections you're not really using. And the saying is, use it or lose it. And that's a saying that brain scientists have, because if you're not using these synapses, these connections, then we're gonna throw them away to make room for new connections. Speaker 1 (11:19): That's exactly like, um, the apps on my phone, I get an update a message once in a while. Like, you have a lot of apps. What let's, you haven't used these for a while, you wanna get rid of 'em Speaker 2 (11:29): . Exactly, exactly. Well, I think of that as, as you know, as I get older is names that, you know, some of the old names just fade away and I see people and go, oh my goodness, you know, new names have taken their place. And now I'm like, I recognize your face, I know your life story, but I can't remember your name. . Speaker 1 (11:50): Yeah, I'm, I'm right there with you Bill Speaker 2 (11:52): . Yeah, so anyway, the other period is early adolescents that between about nine and 10 to about 12 is your, your memory neurons are going, we haven't used these for a while, so we're gonna push them away. And the ones that are getting used a lot get mile and sheaths and speed up and get more attention. So what happens is between nine and 14 approximately is if you're not getting a lot, if you're getting a lot of intense emotions and intense emotions, build stronger connections. So if you're getting a lot of intense emotions from one parent and, and the other parents either not in the picture because they're being shut out or they're around, but they're being careful not to talk about the divorce and not, you know, they've been told by the court not to do that and they follow that rule, but the other parent can't help themselves. Speaker 2 (13:00): They're so emotional and may have a high conflict personality that the child gets that becomes stronger and stronger and the other memories get weaker and weaker. And so an example is a grandparent that says, my, my 13 year old grandson, um, says he doesn't recognize me, isn't know me, and yet I have pictures with me from years ago. So between I think maybe eight and 13, her memory was erased. And this seems to be the process by which it happens that the, the neurons, the, the synapses that aren't getting used get pushed out by the superhighways of the new memories that have more emotional intensity. And so that combination of the ones being lost and the others being strong, the last thing about this I wanna say is so the brain forming these myelin sheaths forms what they call white matter, and the neurons without these myelin, she are gray matter. Speaker 2 (14:17): And they say through a, through childhood that the white matter starts pushing out the gray matter and your brain becomes more and more, uh, settled, more and more used to, it's got its interstate system of superhighways and the other stuff is pushed or fades away. So to me, that explains nine to 14 people's children's memories actually are changed and to some extent washed out some of the earlier memories. One more thing is the research says this can be a good thing if a child's experienced trauma in their early years. But what I see is it can be a bad thing if a child experienced a loving relationship with a parent that now doesn't get to see the child. Um, and that can really, really push, push that aside so they become almost a stranger. Speaker 1 (15:19): That is fascinating. That is absolutely fascinating and explains so much. I I wow. Uh, just a wow it, it's, it's, and it's, it's sad to think that that parents don't par parents need to know this, whether they're divorcing parents, divorced parents, separated or even intact families. That's, that's very fascinating. And I Speaker 2 (15:43): Think lawyers and judges and even psychologists who do evaluations, cuz the idea that, you know, Johnny doesn't wanna see his father or doesn't wanna see his mother, mother, it's not a gender thing. It's really an intense emotional parent thing. And that they, we really need to not go, oh, okay, well we'll wait until he's ready and then they're never ready because they stay with the favored parent who's got these emotionally intense messages and it gets worse and worse and worse. That's, that's the other question I didn't put in here is why does it get worse during a high conflict divorce case? And this makes sense. It's the repetition and pushing out the other memories. Speaker 1 (16:30): Yeah. Interesting. And then we, we fast forward 10, 15 years when the children become adults and they start figuring this out and uh, sort of backfires on the, the parent who's been the favored parent in many cases. Speaker 2 (16:46): I know cases where even as of 40, the child, the adult child's parent who's 60 or 70 still hasn't, um, reconciled with them. But there are many cases where there is even in early twenties. So it's, yeah, but this is something we really need to be careful to avoid. I think kids need two parents. Speaker 1 (17:07): Absolutely. So what did you learn about why alienated children have such, uh, strange or frivolous reasons why they resist or refuse contact with one of their parents? Speaker 2 (17:20): So this is a right and left hemisphere thing. In many ways, the nonverbal communication between human beings seems to involve mostly the right hemisphere of the brain. So when the left hemisphere is talking or listening to words, the right hemisphere is paying attention to tone of voice, facial expressions, hand gestures, so emotional, especially the intense emotional messages seem to go mort through the right brain. And one of the, the researchers that I like, uh, Alan Shore has a book cover that I show in the, uh, slides when I give this seminar that shows the right brain and the right brain of the other person, the two people's right brains communicating with each other, kind of lines connecting them. So what seems to happen with children that are getting alienated is they, they experience these intense emotions and intense negative emotions and associate it with the other parent. Speaker 2 (18:32): So let's say it's dad telling his daughter all these negative messages about mom and the daughter's absorbing the intense emotional messages and how the brain works is that makes us not like this person. And so, but you don't know why cuz it's coming in through your right brain emotional intensity and not left brain logic. Well, I found there's a brain researcher, Antonio Damasio, and he explains in one of his books that the left brain is good at fabricating reasons to justify what the right brain is experiencing. Now his research was with people with a split brain where for some reason or rather the corpus callosum between the, the, the bridge between the hemispheres in the middle of the brain for some reason was severed or needed to be surgically severed. And that meant that your left and right hemispheres weren't working as much together and were seeing different information. Speaker 2 (19:47): But to me by even by explaining that the left brain is good at fabricating what the right brain may be feeling in those situations, to me helps understand why they come up with fri frivolous reasons. And I've had cases where, you know, the child said, I don't wanna see my father because the way he wears his hair. Well he is got longest hair, but a lot of people have longish hair or a boy or a girl says, I don't wanna see my mother because she's no good at math and my dad gets me, you know, he's good at math. And and people wonder why do they have these strange reasons? Well it's because they dislike the parent because of the emotional intensity they've absorbed, but they don't know why. And so their left brain's going, why, why would you hate somebody? Well it must be they're no good at math or the way they wear their hair then, and that just doesn't make sense. Speaker 2 (20:50): And I might add this is very much the way that, um, ethnic discrimination, racism, and other prejudice works. And sometimes I call alienation parent prejudice because children absorb it from the emotions of the parent that's most intense about the other parent who's maybe calm and reasonable and in many ways healthier. So that seems to be where this comes from, that it's really also a brain thing and it's not, someone sits down and says, now I want you to hate your father, hate your mother. They just do these little things. That's why my theory I call a thousand little bricks. It's these little things that stack up and drive a wedge between a child and one of the parents. Yeah. Speaker 1 (21:46): Like your dad left us. Speaker 2 (21:47): Yeah. It's like us . Speaker 1 (21:51): That's four words that are are extraordinarily powerful. Yeah. Umno another brick in the wall. Um, so you also wondered why the child's rejection or hatred of one parent is so pure and extreme and not at all ambivalent. So what did you figure out with that? Speaker 2 (22:08): Yeah, so when you think about it, and this is something I learned when I was getting my master's in social work degree to become a therapist, I had a professor that said all relationships are ambivalent and ambiguous. And it just was a little strange to me, but now I think I really understand it. So relationships are ambiguous cuz you don't know the edges, you don't know what someone will do in a new situation, um, who's gonna like whom your, your two best friends don't like each other. Things are ambiguous but ambivalent that we all, all our relationships, even a happy marriage has some parts that you go, I'm not so happy about that part. Um, the Gottman's, John and Julia do a lot of research on, on marriage, um, said healthy marriages have a five to one ratio of positive to negative interactions. It's not that there's no negative, it's just there's a lot more positive. Speaker 2 (23:13): Well children I think have ambivalent relationships with their parents. There's things they love about their parents and things they don't like so much, you know, they won't let me have ice cream or watch, you know, a certain movie or this and that and you know, most kids at some point yell at their parents, I hate you. And then the same day they end up hugging their parents saying, I love you. So this is, human nature is an ambivalence to real relationships. But what we see in cases of alienation is that the child rejects the parent. In a pure sense it's a hundred percent you say, tell me something positive about your dad. I can't think of a thing or something positive about your mom. I can't think of a thing. And I wondered, why is it so pure? It doesn't have the normal ambivalence. You would think a child would say, well you know, I'm just not comfortable with you. Speaker 2 (24:17): I'd rather not spend very much time, but it grows and becomes pure. Well I think this goes back to the mile sheaths where we have the reinforced emotional message crowds out the old memories, the old reality. And what reinforces in my mind that this is this emotional intensity pushing out the, the absent memories is if you have, as occasionally happens in severe alienation cases, the court changes custody and has the parent who's been rejected have custody and have the other parent have 90 days without contact with the child. So that, let's say it's dad can reconcile with, with his child without those negative messages for 90 days. And what happens in so many alienation cases is that the child within, you know, a day or two or three is totally happy again with the rejected parent that they've been purely disliking. And I think it's because they're having a real relationship again, which has, there's a lot of positives here. Dad's a friendly guy, you know, he's, he's secure and he's not, you know, a bad mouthing mom. He's, he's fun to be with and that's why a lot of reconciliation programs like that have activities like camp activities, things like that. And so it's, it's so rapid, you know, 24 to 48 hours that, that they click. Again, it's because of that absence of these negative emotional messages and the presence of positive, uh, relationship. So to me that explains why it's so pure. It's because it's a purely negative messages crowding out the positive. Speaker 1 (26:22): Hmm, interesting. So final question, um, in, in your, your seminar you gave an example of a 15 year old girl who wrote a letter to her divorced father intending to end all contact with him. What were you trying to explain and what happened in that case and what should have happened? Speaker 2 (26:42): Yeah, so this was fascinating because by 15 the alienation has taken hold usually. And so you get the court cases 15, 16, 17 year olds and the the judge says, Hey, nothing I can do. So in this case, I represented mom who was a very anxious woman and daughter lived with her primarily. And the divorce was a few years earlier, but two years earlier there had been a court hearing and, and the judge kind of, uh, chewed out the mom for alienating the daughter against the dad and said, stop talking about the father. Stop badmouthing the father. And so my client, who was a very anxious person said, for the last two years, I have not mentioned her father. I, I do not talk about him, I follow the court's orders. I've been very strict about that and I believed her, but she was very anxious. And as I've been talking this whole half hour is the emotional intensity is a big factor in how the brain gets wired and the stronger messages are the more emotionally intense messages. Speaker 2 (28:03): So the daughter is absorbing her mother's anxiety. The daughter knows where it comes from in a sense, it comes from her being upset about dad. And so children unconsciously, I think over the years, start trying to calm, they're upset parent cuz emotional intensity is hard to take. So they agree with the parent and they reject the other parent. And that seems to calm down some of these highly emotional parents. Anyway, so they went to court, the father, you know, went back to his lawyer and they filed for a hearing, they went to court and the judge was very angry with the mother again, you know, here we go again. It's clear you're alienating your daughter against the father. Um, the father's angry because his daughter's rejecting him and the father's lawyer's very angry. Well, can you imagine my client's anxiety went through the roof . Speaker 2 (29:08): And so what happened is the judge ordered reunification counseling between dad and the daughter. Well, as I have learned, that doesn't work 99% of the time that fails. I've had many cases where I've represented the rejected parent and that's been ordered and that fails because that's not the source of the problem, source of the problems, the intense emotions of mom in this case. Anyway, so dad and the daughter have like two or three sessions and the daughter's very firm and adamant, you know, dad, this is it and I just don't want it. It's my own idea. And she probably believes it and consciously, you know, thought that's the case. But the dynamics show me that she was trying to calm down her mother and had probably spent the last five or six years doing that. So what should have happened? And so the, the, the dad ended the reconciliation counseling, this is pointless, it's going nowhere. Speaker 2 (30:15): Two or three sessions, I think they were gonna have six. And he said, I I I quit. I grew up and many alienation cases end that way with the rejected parent giving up. I've had many of those parents. But I had this case before I had developed the New Ways for Families method. And what I learned from cases like this is you have to have both parents involved and they both need to be working on managed emotions, moderate behavior, flexible thinking instead of all or nothing, thinking and checking themselves instead of pointing fingers at the other person. Now, I don't know if she had gone through new ways for families, if the mom would have been able to calm down enough to support the daughter having a relationship with the father. But that didn't happen in this case. And it's sad. I think we all made mistakes may, I don't know, that was probably 15 years ago. Speaker 2 (31:14): So that the daughter is probably 30 by now. Um, I don't know if she has a relationship with her father or not, but this is an example of how by not understanding the brain, a lot of bad decisions are made just really by lack of awareness. Now there's one more thing I want to say that I I didn't mention anywhere before and that is alienation seems to come from the favored parent being angry about the rejected parent around the child. There's another dynamic that looks similar and maybe we should do a, uh, podcast on this. And that's estrangement where the parent is angry at the child and the child wants to get away from that parent because of their own experience with the emotional intensity of the parent. And I've had cases like that and they look like alienation on the surface, but it's actually the opposite. Speaker 2 (32:19): The parent who's emotionally intense is being rejected by the child because of their own real experience. And so they go to the other parent to try to, in a sense be rec rescued from this intensity. And so it looks like the favored parent may be doing something when in fact the favored parent may not be doing anything and the rejected parent is the source of the child's rejection and the same if they're physically abusing the child. Um, things like that. But it's easy to confuse those two things. And I want to make sure people don't just assume all rejection of a parent is caused by the other parent, cuz sometimes it's caused by the parent who's being rejected. Speaker 1 (33:10): Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Good, good note there, bill. So we'll ha we'll have to do an episode on that, uh, topic of estrangement in, in relation to this. And also I think we should probably consider doing an kind of a follow up episode down the road about what to do, you know, if you're, let's say you're that adult child now who's kind of catching on, listen to this episode and catching on to maybe what happened in your past with your parents or even parents who are currently in the midst of something like this. So, we'll, we'll have an episode, um, along those lines and, and listeners, if you'd like to dig deeper into this topic and here Bill's seminar, you can, um, get that in our show notes, uh, in the links. Um, it's on a, a website run by Family Access and they do charge a small fee, uh, that, that I think goes to them as a nonprofit. So you'll find that link in the show notes along with some links to our books, particularly Bill's book, don't Alienate the Kids. And another one, splitting, protecting Yourself while Devor divorcing someone with borderline or narcissistic personality disorder. Speaker 1 (34:24): Send your questions to podcast high conflict institute.com or submit them to high conflict institute.com/podcast. Tell all your friends about us and we'd be very grateful if you'd leave us a review wherever you listen to our podcast. Um, until next time, have a great week and keep learning skills to address high conflict behavior so you can be har part of helping everyone find the missing piece. Speaker 3 (34:53): It's Speaker 1 (34:53): All Your Fault is a protection of True Story FM Engineering by Andy Nelson. Music, by Wolf Samuels, John Coggins, and zip Moran. Find the show, show notes and transcripts@truestory.fm or high conflict institute.com/podcast. If your podcast app Laos ratings and reviews, please consider doing that for our show.