What Is Parental Alienation & Why It Is Missed by Professionals
Parental alienation is a psychological condition in which a child, typically one whose parents are involved in a high-conflict separation or divorce, forms a strong alliance with one parent (the preferred parent) and unjustly rejects a relationship with the other (the alienated parent).
Parental Alienation Explained
This dysfunctional family dynamic occurs when one parent manipulates the child into aligning with them, encouraging the child to denigrate and reject the other parent without any legitimate protective reason. The child then actively participates in the rejection and criticism of the alienated parent.
Importantly, the rejected parent’s behavior does not reach the level of abuse, neglect, or significantly poor parenting. This phenomenon is clearly observable for those who are familiar with its signs.
Manipulation of the child can occur during or after a separation or divorce, often in the context of a custody dispute. It can also occur prior to separation. It’s not uncommon for children to be pulled into their parents’ conflict and begin to align with one parent over the other as problems escalate.
Manipulating children to take sides and unjustly reject the other parent sets the stage for psychological and emotional damage to the child, often with lifelong consequences.
Key Characteristics of Parental Alienation
1. Unjustified Rejection
The child’s rejection of the alienated parent is disproportionate to any real or perceived faults of that parent. The rejection is also inconsistent with the child’s prior relationship with the rejected parent.
What was once a loving and close (albeit imperfect) relationship becomes marred with revisionist history, false accusations, and inappropriate knowledge about personal and private issues between the parents.

2. Influence of the Alienating Parent
The child’s negative feelings toward the targeted parent are often driven, encouraged, or reinforced by the alienating parent.
3. Emotional Manipulation
The child may be made to feel guilt, fear, an inappropriate sense of duty to protect the alienating parent, and loyalty conflicts, which often lead them to side with the alienating parent.
4. Distorted Perception
The child may develop a distorted view of the parents, seeing one as entirely bad or untrustworthy and the other (favored/alienating parent) as all good and typically one who has been victimized by the bad parent.
How Does The Alienating Parent Do It?
The alienating parent may use tactics such as denigrating the other parent, undermining the other parent’s authority, confiding inappropriate adult-level information to the child, limiting contact, or making false accusations, ultimately damaging the relationship between the child and the targeted parent.
Is Parental Alienation Damaging?
Parental alienation can have serious emotional and psychological consequences for both the child and the targeted parent. It can result in the loss of a meaningful relationship, and in some cases, the alienation may be considered a form of emotional abuse.
There is some controversy surrounding the concept of parental alienation, particularly in legal settings, as it can be difficult to prove and is sometimes misused in custody disputes.
However, specially trained mental health professionals are generally able to recognize the damaging effects of alienating behaviors on children and families.
“The focus is on trained mental health professionals due to the complex and often counterintuitive nature of parental alienation. When untrained or inexperienced practitioners are tasked with making decisions in these cases, both parents and children can suffer serious harm.”
Why Most Professionals Miss the Alienation
Parental alienation is a specialized subspecialty within the broader field of family therapy.

As Steven Miller, M.D., noted in his chapter of the 2013 book Working with Alienated Children and Families: A Clinical Guidebook, cases of parental alienation present a highly complex and counterintuitive clinical picture, often involving co-occurring psychopathology and personality disorders in the severely alienating parent.
Individuals with personality disorders are often adept at mimicking normal behavior, making the underlying issues harder to detect.
Unfortunately, many mental health professionals lack the specialized training needed to assess the complex family dynamics involved in cases like parental alienation.
When they lack the necessary clinical reasoning skills and disregard established science, they often rely too heavily on their inherently flawed intuitive reasoning, leading to unjustified findings and conclusions.
Why Is Parental Alienation Counterintuitive?
When we say that assessing for parental alienation is highly counterintuitive we mean that instinctive reasoning and intuitive judgments are unreliable for drawing accurate conclusions.
Much like an optical illusion, the brain can be misled when dealing with counterintuitive situations. In some cases, the human brain is predisposed to misunderstand, and parental alienation is one of those scenarios where intuition often fails to recognize the true dynamics at play.
Assessing parental alienation and making findings requires in-depth, expert knowledge of, and experience with, pattern-recognition, clinical reasoning, family dynamics, laws of bonding and attachment, and personality disorders.
A Note About Estrangement
Not all instances of a child rejecting a parent are unjustified. In cases where a parent has genuinely engaged in abuse or neglect, the child’s rejection is appropriate.
These children are considered estranged from the parent, not alienated. We fully support the stance of other professionals who emphasize the need to protect children from domestic violence and abuse.
This highlights the importance of expert skill in distinguishing between parental alienation, which can be a form of psychological and emotional abuse, and legitimate cases of physical and sexual abuse.
In all situations, the priority is always to protect children from harm.
Conclusion
Parental alienation is a very specialized subset of family therapy. If professionals are not trained properly, they will never see it and usually miss the correct diagnosis.
FURTHER READING: Learn the details about the alienation assessment process I follow as a specialist, using recognized and accepted tools.