The NSPCC has published a news story on the role of face-to-face health visits in identifying early safeguarding concerns and providing support to new parents. The news story reports that in 2021/22, 83% of families received their first health visit within 14 days compared to 88% in the previous year. The NSPCC are calling for health visitors to be a key focus of the Government’s NHS workforce plan in 2023.
Category: NSPCC
Mental Health of Adults Alienated in Childhood
The participants described their perception of how exposure to parental alienating behaviours in their childhood affected their mental health in adulthood. There were 459 references to mental health impacts across the entire dataset. Four broad themes were identified: (1) Mental Health Difficulties; (2) Addiction and Substance Use; (3) Emotional Pain; (4) Coping and Resilience. Each theme is presented below using data extracts from individual participants, which represent their experience. Example quotes from participants’ transcripts are provided. These are their exact words. Larger themes have been broken down into sub-categories as described below.
3.1. Mental Health Difficulties
Participants reported experiencing a range of mental health difficulties. Some of these difficulties were self-diagnosed and some were reportedly formally diagnosed by a clinician. Participants also described their perception of how exposure to parental alienating behaviours impacted their adult lives. Although we cannot infer causation, it was the view of the participants that their exposure to parental alienating behaviours and experience of being alienated from a parent were associated with their mental health difficulties. There were 66 references to mental health difficulties across most of the dataset, with eight sub-themes identified and described below.
- Depression and Anxiety: 55% of participants spoke about experiencing depression and anxiety in their adulthood and the impact they said it had on their ability to function in their daily lives:
“I was a functioning depressed person where I would go to work, I could handle kids, but I would fall apart after that. And the psychiatrist said, “I’m prescribing you this” and he writes it down on his little tablet and he hands it to me, and it says, “move out of your (alienating parent) mother’s house.”
Some participants wondered how their early experiences impacted their depression and anxiety:
“…. It’s quite scary the depths in terms of my negativity and capability to go into depression…I don’t know to what extent this comes from having been denied the attention of a primary caregiver (alienating parent) for some of my formative years.”
2.
Eating Disorders/Body Image Issues: 20% of participants reported experiencing eating disorders and/or body image concerns that developed in adolescence. There was variability in accounts, with some participants able to explain how the origins of their difficulties arose compared to others who were less certain. The extent to which these difficulties persisted into adulthood for these participants was unclear:
“I started getting an eating disorder, I had bulimia… I didn’t understand either, I didn’t understand why I was doing these things either…”
3.
Personality Difficulties: 40% of participants described difficulties related to personality dysfunction ranging from a formally diagnosed case of borderline personality disorder, (BPD) to a variety of difficulties, including emotion dysregulation, fear of abandonment, splitting, excessive reassurance and validation seeking, mistrust in self, impulsivity, inability to resist urges, and the need to impress others:
“I have noticed as well is I have a very needy vibe in relationships where I’m capable of if I’m getting everything I need, possibly in a borderline narcissistic way…”
Some participants also reported experiencing longstanding controlling or perfectionist tendencies which they related to exposure to parental alienating behaviours, mainly aimed at pleasing the alienating parent:
“I’ve had… you know…really struggled with perfectionism because I didn’t really know what would set my parents off and if I wasn’t perfect, I’d get disciplined.”
4.
Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD): One participant reported suffering from diagnosed PTSD after living an unstable lifestyle. This participant described moving from one place to another and being exposed to unsafe people after her alienating parent reportedly forced her to move out of the family home at 17 years of age. This participant said the effects of these experiences still caused her difficulty in adulthood:
“I was suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder and all I was doing was hiding like a, a mollusc in a shell, away from the world… I didn’t understand what the posttraumatic stress was, I didn’t understand why I was in a perpetual state of anxiety, and I couldn’t switch it off. It’s taken me 30 years to be able to understand that.”
5.
Psychosomatic Symptoms: 10% of the sample reported experiencing psychosomatic symptoms such as fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, hypersensitivity to sound and the environment, cognitive “fog”, and alopecia, which some suspected were due to their exposure to parental alienating behaviours:
“I do have moments still today where I can fog over, I have foggy moments, so it has affected me, and I’ve had would you call it chronic fatigue for a lot of life… but it had yeah affected me in a big way physically you know… people say it’s from abuse and stuff like that… I think it has a lot to do with what I’ve experienced, the constant grief…”
6.
Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD): One participant spoke about ADHD symptoms and possible related diagnoses. They wondered if they had these diagnoses based on the difficulties they had. They also wondered if these symptoms were related to their exposure to parental alienating behaviours in childhood:
“I think I’ve got serious ADHD; I think I might have mild Asperger’s, I’m not sure… I’m possibly even bipolar, these are all the most likely what ifs, I’ve not got a diagnosis… I do wonder though that considering the symptoms of ADHD and considering I’ve probably had it at an early age, I do wonder if this alienation thing exacerbated it…”
7.
Self-Harm: 15% of participants described experiencing self-harm through cutting with incidents starting from the age of 11 and continuing into early adulthood:
“When I was cutting my legs, I was only 11 years old…I was quite ashamed of that… I had this metal ruler that my brother had given me, and I was doing that but, on my legs, you know, and it was sort of… these little things that started happening over time became my normal.”
“I would hurt myself a lot and one time I ended up in a psychiatric hospital.”
8.
Suicidal Ideation: 30% of participants reported experiencing suicidal ideation from adolescence into adulthood. Some were able to link their suicidal ideation directly to their exposure to parental alienating behaviours:
“I often had suicidal thoughts. That was throughout my 20s. So, I wouldn’t really want to relive like my age from 20 to 25. On an emotional level, it was a horrible life at times. So, I think a lot of emotional instability, but without being able for me at that point, to link it to what I lived, in childhood.”
Some participants described their suicidal ideation plans in detail:
“I thought about suicide where I wanted- I’d drive my Mustang 140 miles per hour down these country roads- You know how easy would it be for me to run into that tree?… I remember standing in the kitchen right before this emancipation thing (from alienating parent) happened, and there was a knife on the counter, and I considered it.”
Further, 50% of the total sample reported becoming targeted parents in adulthood. Of these participants, four reported experiencing suicidal ideation and described how thoughts of their children stopped them from dying by suicide:
“I did get suicidal more than once- I didn’t go through with it. The thing that did stop me was thinking about my kids and wanting to see them again.”
3.2. Addiction and Substance Use
A total of 41 references were made across 55% of the dataset concerning addiction and substance use impacting participants in adulthood with three sub-themes identified and described below.
- Alcohol: 55% of participants reported their alcohol consumption started in early adolescence and peaked in their late teens–early 20s:
“I started drinking at 16 but that was more as an escape from home life when I was drinking with my friends from work. Because they’d have parties on weekends and whatever, but you know, I wouldn’t drink much back then. It wasn’t until I was in my 20′s that I drank a lot more.”
One participant described how the smell of alcohol reminded her of her alienating parent, thus acting as a deterrent from alcohol for her:
“I can’t drink wine I’ve only ever had two glasses of wine in my life—mum was a really big wine drinker she was such a big wine drinker and I’d be her little butler when she was drinking- I’d go and get more wine, so I’d go empty out half her bottle of wine and fill it up with water and she was so drunk she didn’t know. But yeah, I don’t touch wine. I hate the smell of wine…”
2.
Drugs: 35% of participants described using cannabis daily, occasionally, or reported a previous cannabis addiction; 20% of participants reported recreational use of MDMA; 5% of participants reported dangerous use of methamphetamine and hallucinogens. Some of these participants reported relying on these drugs when going out and consuming high doses of their drugs of choice. Some of these participants recalled using substances to numb painful emotions or to feel normal:
“Anything to get away and not feel- but try and feel at the same time. It was a weird position to be in.”
3.
Sex/Pornography: 10% of participants spoke about leading promiscuous and impulsive lifestyles to find connections with others:
“Drugs, alcohol, sex. Just went on a complete spiral out of control. Taking things so that you don’t feel, but then almost like an addiction trying to attach yourself to people so that you can feel something at the same time. Really quite strange.”
3.3. Emotional Pain
Participants described how their exposure to parental alienating behaviours in childhood was associated with emotional pain in adulthood. There was a total of 83 references to emotional pain across 95% of the dataset. The theme of emotional pain was broken into eight sub-themes described below.
- Shame and Guilt: 45% of the participants recalled feeling guilt or shame about their experience. Some had come to understand that although they knew their experience was not their fault, they could not avoid feelings of guilt that lasted into adulthood. Some participants were confused by their guilt or were unable to explain why they felt guilty:
“There’s a lot of blame and guilt, and it’s still there like sometimes I’m like “oh, maybe that was, maybe this is my fault, maybe I have done this, maybe this is wrong, maybe that was lies, maybe this isn’t…” You know there’s a lot of, it’s still a lot of confusion, within myself about what to believe and what not to believe…”
2.
Self-Esteem: 40% of participants reported how being exposed to parental alienating behaviours in childhood had impacted their self-esteem into adulthood, with some feeling worthless and unequal to others. One participant reflected on how low confidence and self-esteem was linked back to not having a voice in childhood:
“For so long, it didn’t matter who I met or from what walk of life they were—it could’ve been a street sweeper, it could’ve been a barrister, I immediately thought that I was the lesser person…I didn’t place a lot of value on myself, and I realise now that I was very vulnerable to being mistreated or abused. I realise now that at some level, I accepted this behaviour and agreed that it was what I deserved…I was always fearful that I’d get ripped off because I didn’t have a voice. I guess that’s what we learned as children- we never had a voice.”
3.
Loneliness and Isolation: 30% of participants reflected on loneliness and isolation. Some chose to isolate themselves from the outside world. Others felt lonely or isolated, which they attributed to exposure to parental alienating behaviours:
“Sometimes you can feel a bit lost and forgotten, especially if you’re in a situation where you’re a fairly highly functioning human, but you have all these things that are still the background, and they just, they just remain there. And not many people understand, and so that can be quite lonely…”
4.
Helplessness: 20% of participants reflected on their feelings of helplessness in terms of their exposure to parental alienating behaviours in childhood or their current experience of being a targeted parent:
“My God I’m still stuck in this mess that someone else created…”
5.
Grief and Loss: 60% of participants described their feelings of grief and loss with the most predominant responses involving a sense of loss around childhood, family, and denial of access to the targeted parent:
“I’ve spent probably the last year, almost straight really grieving and mourning, having to work through this because it was so well hidden, it was so normalised, I was grieving. Grieving my childhood. Grieving the parents, I didn’t get. Grieving the person that I thought I was and who I actually was.”
6.
Anger: 45% of the participants reported feeling varying degrees of anger mainly aimed at the alienating parent. Some reported mild degrees of anger, while others were very specific in their resentment towards their alienating:
“I blame my mother and fuck you, fuck you, you fucked it for a fucking long time, you fucked it love. And there’s a part of me that has such major resentment, major, you know…if she wasn’t so old, if I could drag her into court to sue for that, I would do it.”
7.
Abandonment: 15% of participants spoke about how their feelings of abandonment had impacted their lives as adults:
“I don’t believe anyone’s going to stay.”
8.
Trust Issues: Other participants described how it was difficult for them to trust others, and themselves, due to their vulnerability:
“At this point I find it sometimes hard with people, when I meet people to, to build up trust. I think parental alienation also, it causes a lot of.. trust issues.”
3.4. Coping and Resilience
A total of 95% of participants made references to coping and resilience around their PA experience, with 269 references broken into three subthemes of maladaptive coping, adaptive coping, and meaning making.
- Maladaptive Coping: 50% of participants reported using coping styles that were maladaptive, including stoicism, avoidance, indifference, mistrust, creating barriers, vengeful thinking against the alienating parent, and withdrawing, with 59 references made across the dataset.
- Adaptive Coping: participants described using adaptive coping strategies with a total of 56 references made by 80% of the group. They described using adaptive coping skills in adulthood to deal with their exposure to parental alienating behaviours in childhood. These strategies included cognitive reframing, acceptance, forgiveness, healing, self-education about PA, self-care, and engaging in therapy or support groups.
- Meaning Making: all participants spoke about trying to make meaning of their experience in adulthood with 154 references to topics such as using self-reflection and gaining perspective, confusion about their experience of being exposed to parental alienating behaviours in childhood; coming to the realisation the alienating parent was lying; memories; life lessons; conflicting thoughts about their experience and contributing to research into parental alienation.
Verhaar, S.; Matthewson, M.L.; Bentley, C. The Impact of Parental Alienating Behaviours on the Mental Health of Adults Alienated in Childhood. Children 2022, 9, 475. https://doi.org/10.3390/children9040475
Every child is worth fighting for
We have an important responsibility as the NSPCC to rally people together and make the biggest impact we can to stop child abuse and neglect
Parental substance misuse Strategy and guidance
Statutory guidance across the UK highlights the responsibility of those in the education, community and care sectors to promote children’s welfare. This includes providing support to children and families experiencing substance misuse.
- Child protection in England
- Child protection in Northern Ireland
- Child protection in Scotland
- Child protection in Wales
- Key guidance for schools in the UK
In each nation of the UK the government has also set out how agencies should work together to tackle substance misuse.
Dangerous Mind Games
We’ve all been burned by psychopaths largely because we fell for their lies and their lines. The better informed people are with their techniques of deception, the more they can recognize them and protect themselves against them. A psychopath gets you within his power largely through deception. As Cleckley noted in The Mask of Sanity, the main reason why people are easily taken in by their lies is not because the lies themselves are that convincing, but because of the psychopaths’ effective rhetorical strategies. What are those?
1. Glibness and Charm. We’ve already seen that these are two of the main personality traits of psychopaths.
2. Analogies and Metaphors. Because their facts are so often fabrications, psychopaths often rely upon analogies and metaphors to support their false or manipulative statements.
3. Slander. A psychopath often slanders others, to discredit them and invalidate their truth claims. He projects his faults and misdeeds upon those he hurts. To establish credibility, he often maligns his wife or girlfriend, attributing the failure of his relationship to her faults or misdeeds rather than his own.
4. Circumlocution. When you ask a psychopath a straightforward question that requires a straightforward answer, he usually goes round and round in circles or talks about something else altogether. .
5. Evasion. Relatedly, psychopaths can be very evasive. When you ask a psychopath a specific question, he will sometimes answer in general terms, talking about humanity, or men, or women, or whatever: anything but his own self and actions, which is what you were inquiring about in the first place.
6. Pointing Fingers at Others. When you accuse a psychopath of wrongdoing, he’s likely to tell you that another person is just as bad as him or that humanity in general is. The first point may or may not be true. At any rate, it’s irrelevant.
7. Fabrication of Details. In The Postmodern Condition, Jean-François Lyotard shows how offering a lot of details makes a lie sound much more plausible. When you give a vague answer, your interlocutor is more likely to sense evasion and pursue her inquiries.
8. Playing upon your Emotions. Very often, when confronted with alternative accounts of what happened, psychopaths play upon your emotions. They’re as dangerous to their partners as any hard drug is likely to be. If their partners know about their harmful actions and about their personality disorder, then at least they’re willingly assuming the risk. Everyone has the right to make choices in life, including the very risky one of staying with a psychopath. But at least they should make informed choices, so that they know whom they’re choosing and are prepared for the negative consequences of their decision.
Deception constitutes a very entertaining game for psychopaths. They use one victim to lie to another. They use both victims to lie to a third. They spin their web of mind-control upon all those around them. They encourage antagonisms or place distance among the people they deceive, so that they won’t compare notes and discover the lies. Often they blend in aspects of the truth with the lies, to focus on that small grain of truth if they’re caught. The bottom line remains that psychopaths are malicious sophists. It really doesn’t matter how often they lie or how often they tell the truth. Psychopaths use both truth and lies instrumentally, to persuade others to accept their false and self-serving version of reality and to get them under their control. For this reason, it’s pointless to try to sort out the truth from the lies. As M. L. Gallagher, a contributor to the website lovefraud.com has eloquently remarked, psychopaths themselves are the lie. From hello to goodbye, from you’re beautiful to you’re ugly, from you’re the woman of my life to you mean nothing to me, from beginning to end, the whole relationship with a psychopath is one big lie.
Claudia Moscovici, psychopathyawareness Continue reading “Dangerous Mind Games”
What are the long-term effects of parental alienation on the child who has been alienated?
The results are devastating for the alienated child and can last a lifetime. Not only does the child miss out on a lifetime of having an enjoyable and fulfilling relationship with the parent they have been conditioned to reject, they also develop some serious pathological behaviors and attitudes that carry in to their adult lives.
Following are descriptions of some of these disturbing effects:
- Splitting: This is the psychological phenomenon of seeing people as either “all bad” or “all good,” or “black or white.” Everything is polarized and the person has an inability to see shades of gray. Think of the borderline personality disordered person who has to split in order to cope with relationships and life in general. This is not a disorder you want your child to possess and leads to endless problems.
- Difficulties forming and maintaining relationships: Alienated children struggle with developing healthy relationships because they have been conditioned to “get rid of people” whenever they experience a perceived threat. Since most people are flawed, the alienated child would need the skill of knowing how to accept flaws in others in order to maintain the relationship. Skills such as flexibility, acceptance, forgiveness, do not exist when you reject people outright for minor infractions, as alienated children have been trained to do.Whenever someone causes a perceived threat to this person, he/she is triggered to remember, “I know how to handle this,” and they proceed to reject the other person easily. Their mind tells them, “You just hurt my feelings. I’m going to close you out and now you’re done.”
- https://pro.psychcentral.com/recovery-expert/2020/08/long-term-results-of-parental-alienation-to-the-alienated-child/
Child Cruelty Offence
The Council is consulting on updated sentencing guidelines for offenders convicted of child cruelty offences in England and Wales.
The draft guidelines update the existing guidelines, which came into force in January 2019, and reflect new maximum sentences introduced by the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022.
The Council’s proposals would introduce a new ‘very high culpability’ level for the most serious cases relating to two offences:
- causing or allowing a child to die or suffer serious physical harm; and
- cruelty to a child including ill-treatment, abandonment or neglect.
The proposed sentence for the new ‘very high culpability’ levels take into account the increased statutory maxima and are higher than the sentence ranges in the current guideline.
How does FDAC work?
Cases are referred into FDAC by local authorities. This can happen as part of pre-proceedings activity or when the local authority is issuing care proceedings. There is discussion between the local authority and the specialist team before any referral. The process followed by the team is similar whether the case is in proceedings or not.
Substance misuse specialists and social workers from the team carry out an early and quick assessment of the parents. An intervention plan is agreed at a meeting attended by the parents, social workers and guardian. The parents then begin a ‘trial for change’. The team provide a key worker for the parent who does direct work with the parent and co-ordinates all the services identified in the plan.
Can Family Drug and Alcohol Courts play a part
The inter-relationship between co-occurring DA, substance misuse and child maltreatment.
The nature and scale of co-occurrence of substance misuse and DA.
The response to the co-occurrence of DA and substance misuse within the family and criminal justice system, and in treatment interventions.
The potential of Family Drug and Alcohol Courts to play a part in the response to co-occurring DA and substance misuse.
What are the implications and recommendations from this review for policy, practice and research?
For more information about UCLan’s research in this area go to http://www.uclan.ac.uk/researchgroups/ and search for <name of research Group>.
For information about Research generally at UCLan please go to
http://www.uclan.ac.uk/research/
Wounds That Time Won’t Heal
In dissociative identity disorder, formerly called multiple personality disorder (the phenomenon behind Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”), at least two seemingly separate people occupy the same body at different times, each with no knowledge of the other. This can be seen as a more severe form of borderline personality disorder. In borderline personality disorder, there is one dramatically changeable personality with an intact memory, as opposed to several distinct personalities, each with an incomplete memory. People with dissociative identity disorder have two or more (on average, eight to fifteen) personalities or personality fragments that control their behavior at different times. Often there is a passive, depressed primary identity who cannot remember personal history as fully as can the other more hostile, protective, or controlling identities.
Your Journey to Healing Starts Here 
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