When children and adolescents are placed in
psychological treatment outside their homes—even treatments that last only a
few days—they are sometimes held incommunicado by their therapists and staff
members. Not only are they kept without phones or money, but they are told that
if they do not cooperate they will be sent to wilderness camps or residential
treatment centers where they will not be able to reach anyone they know. This
can happen in many forms of treatment, but it seems to be especially
characteristic of programs that purport to treat “parental alienation”, in
which a child of divorced parents rejects contact with one of the parents.
Under the heading “When threats substitute for
therapy”, I wrote the following description of a parental alienation treatment on
this blog in September 2016. I’m repeating this right now because “Polly” and
two other young people have now told their stories on a television program.
I’ll give the link to that program later in this post.
“I recently received a long email from a young woman
I’ll call Polly. She is 17 years old, has finished high school, and recently
went to court to become legally emancipated. But her emancipation petition was
not Polly’s first experience with the courts. Her parents, who are divorced,
have become locked into an accusation of “parental alienation”—the idea that
Polly and her sister, who preferred to live with their father and avoid their
mother’s household and her boyfriend, must have this preference because their
father had “brainwashed” them into believing bad things about the mother.
(Proof of this claim was that the girls insisted that it was their own
decision!)
Polly’s mother contacted a California therapist whose
psychology license had been revoked but who said he could practice a
“psychoeducational” method called Family Bridges. As is the case for many
proprietary treatments, it is not easy to find a description of Family Bridges.
However, Polly has described what happened to her and to her younger sister
when a judge ordered the girls to travel from their home state to California
and to participate in Family Bridges.
According to Polly’s report, when the girls tried to
refuse, they were taken away from the courthouse by employees of a “youth transport
service”. (These “services” and the little regulation they undergo were
discussed by Ira Robbins at www.americancriminallawreview.com/files/7714/0539/9315/Robbins.pdf.)
The transporters responded to Polly’s crying and lying down on the ground by
telling her that her father would go to jail if she didn’t go, and hinting that
she herself would be confined in a residential treatment center. The two girls
were taken to a town in California, where they were met by their mother, the
mother’s boyfriend, and several psychologists, who met them in a hotel room and
apparently do not have an office. The plan was to provide the girls with
treatment that would convince them that their father had made them think that
their mother was abusive.
The treatment, or “psychoeducation”, consisted of
watching and discussing a number of video presentations. These included
material about visual illusions, about how people may express opinions that are
not really their own because of social pressures, and about the well-known
study by Milgram in which participants who believed they were giving other
people serious electric shocks often continued to do so when ordered by an
authoritative experimenter. The implications of these presentations were
apparently that the girls should understand that opinions they thought were
their own had actually been created in their minds by their father—a plan with
its own logic, perhaps, but not one based on any evidence that deeply emotional
beliefs can easily be changed, nor indeed on any evidence that they had been
influenced in their opinions by the father.
At almost 18, Polly was almost four years past the age
when adolescents are normally given the chance for informed consent to medical
or other therapeutic procedures. Instead, threats were used to force her
cooperation, and her concerns and opinions were ignored. The threats came into
the picture when Polly continued to be resistant and to speak rejectingly to
her mother in spite of this “treatment”. According to Polly, one of the
psychologists told her, “If you continue that behavior, you will be sent
somewhere else. You seem like you need more help than we can give
you”—superficially an offer of help for a vulnerable person, but in essence a
threat of further disruption to her life. Arrest was threatened if she did not
mind her mother, and for several days both girls were told that if they did not
cooperate they would go to a treatment facility for juvenile offenders or to
wilderness therapy-- these both being
situations where teenagers are held incommunicado, have no opportunity to
report abuse, and live in austere, even dangerous conditions. Back at the
mother’s house, too, incarceration in a residential treatment center was the
threat used to obtain obedience.
If Polly had not succeeded in her emancipation
petition, or if she had been much younger, no doubt her behavior would have
continued to be manipulated by threats--
and perhaps some of the threats would even have been acted upon. What if
her behavior had changed in response to those threats? Would that have
indicated that the “treatment” was effective—or simply that people respond at
least temporarily to sufficiently serious threats?
One other question: when people are trained to do
interventions that in practice include threats, are they trained in effective
threatening?”
Now, in November, 2018, “Polly”-- real name Arianna—has joined with two other
young people who have experienced Family Bridges to describe their feelings in
the aftermath of the program, in the following Bay Area television interview:
https://www.nbcbayarea.com/investigations/No-Oversight-for-Programs-Advertising-They-Reconnect-Children-with-Alienated-Parents-499412851.html?fbclid=IwAR0cptVAebcW0R3Z3uxd5OyklJzBsiVI2lczvgXWuesB99TF3b8L6Ki94Kg
Journal articles by Richard Warshak, a major advocate for Family Bridges, fail to
note the concerns raised by Arianna, Sam, and Leo, or to discuss how the use of
youth transport service workers can alter the children’s experiences. Even a
2018 article by Warshak in the Journal of
Divorce & Remarriage ignores these points, although many psychologists
today are voicing serious concerns about adverse events associated with some psychological
treatments and the need to report these as part of any research program.
Family courts need to be aware of the information
provided by the reports of young adults about Family Bridges and other “parental
alienation” treatments and to take these into account as seriously as they take
the claims of program proponents. In addition, judges-- and the public in general—should be alert to
the rhetorical device employed by Linda Gottlieb in her contribution to the
television interview, when she abuses analogies to create the argument that parental
alienation can be equated with child sexual abuse.
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