Parental Alienation - Domestic Violence and Abuse |
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The Learning Theory Solution
Parental Alienation - Common Sense Reunification - Behavioral Approach
Background and Need for A Complete Paradigm Shift
Time and again, the Family Courts and the Mental Health community enable and ensure that the effects of child abuse become cemented into a foundation of learned pathologies. Deferring to the "child's best interests" has become the rational for totally counter intuitive, dangerous and almost ridiculous strategies that escalate conflict, cause incredible expense, torments the victims, rewards the abusers and results in an endless and avoidable catastrophe. Mental Health training in the USA today is by and large focused on trying to create balanced solutions spending fruitless hours of empathetic listening to support and respect the victim client's feelings where more often than not, an alliance forms between the therapist and the child's alienation driven delusional behaviors. Either by incompetence, blindness or willful ignorance, mental health practitioners watch the client session-by-session, week-by-week, slow, steady walk towards increasing enmeshment cheer leading the abused victim's embrace of increasing capitulation and encouraging the belief in the pathology as an adaptive adjustment. The victim's reluctance to behavioral change is not only maintained but also systematically strengthened. Meanwhile, the victim client and targeted parent are forced to dance to the never-ending tune of their own destruction.
There is no more despicable and dishonorable profession than one that systematically enhances a client's victim status, especially with the belief that compassionate supportive talking is a viable remedy. Family court law and all its enablers behave as though stupidity and enabling time wasting abuse were a virtue. Their actions rise to the level of mal-practice totally devoid of any reasoned humanity or ethics.
After almost half a century of useless and unproductive results, the strategies and procedures have become ingrained into Family Law to the point where there is now an expectation of failure that has been embraced as acceptable practice.
The casualties of this idiotic system, that proposes time and again the same failed strategies and expecting different results are unimaginably horrible. It is time to throw out the entire system before it destroys another generation of children and their targeted parents that consistently result in catastrophic trauma, grief and pathologies.
Hugs are the Goal
Other pathways need to be immediately explored.
Learning theory provides a viable alternative that can simply explain the etiology of what is called parental alienation in terms that are intuitive, comprehensible, and logical and that provide a solution pathway. When we are told that a child or teenager is rejecting a parent without an obvious reason, it suggests that there is a cause and an effect. Given that survival and quality of life of virtually all humans is contingent on forming attachments, there is reason for great concern.
Learning theory is based on the concept that all behavior is a function of learned conditioned experiences.
Parental Alienation in a learning theory context is the process of shaping a mal-adaptive response to a family member who formerly elicited a positive response. Affect, which is the inferred observable part of attachment bonding, is diminished or not observable when confronted by the target parent.
Observation is the method by which we can measure the incidence of behaviors. With the powers of observation, we can form objective descriptions of behaviors that by their frequency define a pattern subject to interpretation on the adaptation continuum.
Forceful, aggressive behaviors that demonstrate rejection and consistently occur in the majority of encounters with the targeted parent are deemed suspicious, especially if the response to the targeted parent occurs in the absence of any observable cause such as the targeted parent using threats, acts of intimidation or physical violence.
Whether reasoning by science or common sense, the average person on the street, observing forceful rejection behavior of a child or teen in the context of an encounter with their target parent would be persuaded to think that there must be a cause.
Here is where the science of learning theory deviates strongly from clinical work. In learning theory, the observation is deemed the point of suspicion. Learning theory views the observation in the context of a baseline of prior and confirmed behavioral history. It measures the alienated child/teen''s behavior against the objective information of prior experiences with both the target parent and the allied parent. If the target parent presents no evidence, recorded, observed or reported of abusive conduct, the presumption is that the cause is with the allied parent.
Learning theory presumptions are not arbitrary. Conditioning or learning always occurs within a space that is physical and/or less direct social and sensory, as through distant contact by phone. In either case, the influencers are those circumstances that are physical, social and sensory that form what can be called as an experience field. All influences in a long gap of time are presumed to occur within an experience field. Familiarity with close proximity to people, living environments, personal belongings, familiar utilities in use, etc ‐ define the field of experience that shapes the behavior of the victim child/teenager. Each and every contact with any person or object in the experience field is an encounter that becomes familiar and by mutual association with all contacts in the field help the shaping, strengthening and maintenance of behaviors learned within the field. Over time, behaviors are elicited by encounters within the experience field and become predictable.
Learning occurs in several ways. Instruction, modeling or imitating and guided participation with physical enhancements are three ways behavior is shaped through learning. An encounter say with a parent in a specific place where there is a deliberate act to influence the child/teens behavior that carries a threat of consequences will cause the behavior to conform to that parent's expectations. This would be an example of instruction form of learning. The child/teen would also learn by imitating their allied parent's aggressive or hostile behavior, using words and actions that reflect and copy the alienator's behavior. The allied parent may use physical means to accomplish behavioral objectives.
Each learning circumstance is an encounter in an experience field that is a cause and effect learning paradigm shaped by consequences of positive rewards or negative threats such as withholding a phone, loss of privacy, etc.
When there is observation of predictably reliable rejection behavior against a target parent where the baseline of the experience does not support a cause or effect relationship to explain the mal-adaptive behavior, then the presumptions of the established science and peer reviewed acceptance of learning theory and conditioning become the basis of confirmation.
Let us consider an example of cause discovery. You decide to place your hat in a locked room with the dog. The hat is one of a few objects in the room. You leave the house, return to the room, find your hat torn to pieces and are left with virtually no other rational explanation than the dog ate your hat. The room with its objects is the experience field of that dog. The dog for whatever reason has learned that it can eat the hat. Given additional opportunities in similar circumstances, it would raise the probability of prediction that such behavior would be repeated.
A child/teen who formerly occupied two experience fields, that of the allied parent and the target parent would learn behaviors that would over time be triggered by learned associations that are different within each field. In spite of the possible parallel or overlap of some associations, it is reasonable to say that patterns of behavior associated with different experience fields produces predictably different behaviors. We know that behaviors are at the same time both simple and complex, especially given the overlap of many potentially similar reactive associative encounters in different experience fields.
Learning theory suggest a pathway to modify or change behaviors. In fact, it is the only way behaviors will change.
By process of elimination, comparing the child's behavioral patterns in one experience field measured against another, direct observation of the allied parent's alienation indoctrination is not necessary. There is a clear path to understanding as easily as there is common sense clarity on cause and effect. Just like the dog and the hat. To think otherwise, would be to ignore the obvious and that could guide very deleterious decisions.
Based on the validation of a child/teen's mal-adaptive behavior that underscores a damaged attachment system, loss of empathy and compassion, inability to express behaviors of regret or apologies, adoption of clinically defined sociopathic or narcissistic behavior patterns, it is imperative to physically remove the child/teen from the abusing experience field as rapidly as possible. It is counter-intuitive, illogical and unreasonable to do otherwise. This move will place the brakes on the abuse of not one, but two victims, the target parent and the child/teen.
(See the law supporting reversal of residence and alienation)
Clinicians are trained in client centered talk therapies, that often suggest, reinforce and help train outcomes. Because of their vulnerability to the perils of subjective trust combined with a strategy to support (follow) the client, they are vulnerable to being influenced by their client's delusions and unwittingly be drawn into an alliance with their own delusions. This is a recurring and dangerous reality now documented through more and more failed reunification efforts with therapy that follows the client rather than removing the client from a dangerous circumstance. When the therapist joins the client's delusions, both the therapist and the client feel better. No matter how the therapist judges his or her own progress or success, the suggestion to the court is that it will always take more time. Time is the ally of strengthening mal-adaptive learning.
What a tragic way to resolve the destruction of a family. And, most courts sustain the custody rights, often-primary rights, for the abusing, allied parent. How offensive is that?
It is counterintuitive, ridiculous and even stupid to think that a child/teen presented with a therapist and returning an hour later to the experience field directly associated with causing the mal-adaptive behavior will change anything. More likely the resistance and reluctance will be reinforced.
Any trained behavior analyst would immediately understand this obstacle.
Once the decision has been made to remove the child/teen from the alienation experience field, the conditions that shaped, strengthened and reinforced the child/teen's mal-adaptive behavior are no longer present. Over a century of research in learning theory has shown that by removing the reinforcement influences immediately begins to weaken the strength of the mal-adaptive behaviors. With the learning theory principal of extinguishing an undesired behavior, a strategy can be implemented to train desirable competing behaviors.
And, it doesn't normally take long. -->
The Learning Program To Recover Family Victims
The learning theory approach has a strategy. Besides gathering observational evidence to identify the experience field that caused the mal-adaptive behavior, there is a reinforcement (learning) procedure that will be prepared that draws on the research experience of behavioral sciences, including elements of Wolpe's Systematic Desensitization Process, Skinner's Operant Conditioning and Watson's stimulus-reinforcement work going back to the 1920's.
A big step in this process borrowed from the performance management field of Aubrey Daniels, a protégé of Skinner, is to train the trainer.
Learning theory maintains that the most effective therapist for a behavior change agent is the former close now alienated parent. That parent has a power greater than any outside therapist could compete. It is important to remember that the target parent is not motivated by money, billing hours or business agendas.
Would You Like For Hope In Darkness To Help Facilitate A Common Sense Behavioral Strategy
Hope in Darkness can engage with your Attorney and Court to enlighten them in a Common Sense approach that can be part of the content of your Motion. We will also make every effort to help the judge in understanding and adopting a better strategy, one that will relieve the court and the family of endless years of useless and ineffective orders.
Parental Alienation is not that hard to understand, observe and validate. The complexities of the mental health system and court evaluators who rely on opinions not facts is the reason why you have become a milk cow for usurious billings.
An honest and simplified perspective of Parental Alienation is in everyone's best interest and it is time to stop watching the fire but extinguish it as fast as possible.
Let's stop the circus and bring your kids home.
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