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Children Caught In The Crossfire · Inside The Consulting Room - Understanding the Child Behind the Behaviour

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, this is Kim Lee, child and adolescent psychotherapist from the Children's Consultancy, and I am combining episode two and three about high conflict, separation and divorce, because it seems that one follows on so well from the other that I do it all in one go.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: Now we talked a bit about the nature of conflict and to some extent the effects on children.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: I want to go more though into what are perhaps best described as some of the hidden dynamics that are to do with power and control.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: Very often, what appears as a disagreement between parties often conceals power dynamics.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: And essentially what we're looking to understand is how conflict in many ways is a sort of struggle for psychological positioning.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: And certainly in entrenched conflict, each party may feel misunderstood, wronged, powerless.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: And then conflict becomes an attempt to regain control, restore dignity, and to reassert the narrative.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: And although this is rarely conscious, it is deeply influential.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: A big part of this, of course, is how children might be used for emotional leverage.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: Because children can communication and legal processes can become the vehicles in which the struggle for control gets acted out through.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: And this looks sometimes like narrative framing, which I think we might regard as a stuck position and maintaining position oneself in relation to that.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: So it's essentially when polarization occurs.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: What we also see is moral positioning.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: One parent is right, the other is wrong, and so on.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: Attempts to influence perception and emotional withdrawal or escalation.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: Now, for children, this is absolutely toxic because it does hideous things when they've got one parent behaving in this kind of way and the other parent behaving differently.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: And although the aim is often not about an intention to harm, that nonetheless, and despite the fact that it may be construed as a psychological survival reaction from the parent, it does do harm.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: Now, quite often we see cycles of behavior, relational patterns, and the victim persecutor-rescuer cycle, which I've referred to in previous um podcasts, also known as the drama triangle triangle, is one of the most common.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: And really, these systems move through these rotating roles of victim persecutor and rescuer, and by which I mean that an individual may take a position of victim, perceiving the other as persecutor, being persecutor and dealing with the victim in that way, or indeed becoming a rescuer and trying to make everything okay.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: For more information on that, you may want to look at transactional analysis and the book Games People Play would be a useful one.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: This comes, the drama triangle was created by a man called Steve Karpman back in I think the late 70s.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: If you just Google drama triangle, you'll you'll see all you need to see.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: Now, when one party appears or believes they are taking control, it might reduce the anxiety that they're experiencing in the short term, but in relational systems it amplifies conflict.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: So where control rises, emotional safety falls, and this is particularly the case for children.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to now move on to when children become the psychological center of conflict.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: Children don't create conflict systems, but they often become the emotional center of them.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: Now there's something called emotional triangulation, and when conflict is unresolved, children may be pulled into the emotional field between the parents, and this can occur through loyalty pressures, emotional disclosure from the parent, or what we call alignment dynamics, where child may align themselves with one parent or indeed the other way around, but or both, in order to avoid conflict exposure.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: Very often I will see cases where one of the presenting difficulties could be considerable separation anxiety.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: And although we can look at that in an isolated way, looking more systemically, very often there can be something that is happening between the child and the caregivers, the caregivers together, which creates an anxiety in the child that then finds expression through fearfulness, difficulty in separating.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: So, in a sense, what happens is that we we can we can see the child's difficulty as it's expressed, but it's almost like a gateway into something else that's going on.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: But what is concerning is that children can sometimes become relational regulators, um, and and by that I mean that they position themselves in ways to soothe the parent or avoid the conflict or something which essentially means that they're not going to be exposed to more conflict.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: Children often feel loving one parent betrays the other.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: Speaking freely about the other parent causes harm, and that emotional truth is unsafe, it's unspeakable.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: So, in order to cope, children might split themselves emotionally, align themselves in a kind of defensive way, or withdrawal.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: And these are survival adaptations, they're not deliberate choices.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: And children may move toward one parent and away from another, not necessarily from influence, but from emotional safety calculations.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: Now, this is quite important because when we think about the legal framework in which these kinds of behaviors are communicated, very often, as I've said in a previous podcast, this notion of parental alienation becomes used as a stick to beat the other with.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: And in truth, it it is very, very rare, in my experience, to have a parent who is directly alienating the other parent.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: Almost always there will be a safeguarding concern, an emotional harm concern, or the fact that the child has taken a position where they simply cannot manage to be with the parent who has damaged the other parent represents unsafety and so on.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: But all of this, of course, creates a real psychological burden.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: And what children feel responsible for in the uh adults' emotional worlds they carry.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: And that that demonstrates, or rather, that leads them into experiences of anxiety, uh, guilt, and emotional overload.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: And this is one of the most significant risks in high conflict systems.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I want to go on a bit more about this in terms of there are levels of high conflict that have to do with significant acrimony, and the outcomes for children and young people who are caught in situations like this is never good.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: They suffer emotionally, psychologically, they will not do well educationally most often.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: They may go on to develop quite powerful mental health difficulties.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: In adolescence, we can see how that may then move into concerning behaviors where risk of harm becomes more apparent.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: There's quite a lot of data available on this, and in fact, the government website a government website, which has to do with the effects of separation and conflicts and contacts and so on.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: The evidence is just unquestionable.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: I've said before that one of the things I try and do is to bring parents in conflict to a position of understanding the effect of this upon children and what the child needs.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: It is hard work, and it's hard work because sometimes people are so locked into their own defensiveness and pain that they almost can't see the child, or if they do, they see the child as an object, and I'm not suggesting that both parents may see it in this way, but the children internalize everything.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: I can't say this enough.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're listening to this and you are in a situation where conflict is constantly being played out, then it really is time to get some get some advice, because the effects on the the primary caregiving parent are very, very significant, and those will be internalized by the child.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: Legal advice is good, clinical advice is also good, but I think the single most important thing to do is to look at the best ways to protect your child or your children from what is happening.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to look in the final episode at resolution.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: Is resolution possible?
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: And can change occur?
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you again for listening.