Hope in Darkness ‐ The Project for Change
Bill Dubree, PhD

Project Description
The destructive pathology of a parent using alienation child abuse tactics that result in a child or teenager tormenting their target mom or dad by cruel acts of rejection is a global problem of unimaginable scale. Family law systems throughout the world have consistently failed to understand the pathology or to find a solution. The use of children/teens to enact emotional violence on a parent results in 2 victims. Through role modeling and instruction Children and teens learn to acquire the maladaptive behaviors of their abusers while target parents suffer incredible trauma that threatens their productive capabilities and livelihood. And, after a half-century, the mental health providers have proven not to be the right tools for a solution. Hope in Darkness, founded by an alienated father of 2 sons, has discovered an innovative solution that promises to construct an honest and common sense understanding and description to this pathology, simplify strategies, avoid extreme costs and provide for a rapid result, in weeks, not months and years. And, it will also address the need to help restore the entire family dynamic with recommendations for the alienating parent. This is a didactic mission that will require on‐going research, information driven interventions to change the direction of family law and courts and the installation of a paradigm shift in the solution to the commonly known pathology of "Parental Alienation" that is in reality child abuse. The pathway will be based on sound principals in the psychology of learning theory behavior change.

Partners and Sponsors
Hope in Darkness has a global network of victim Targeted Parents with whom there is continuous interaction. Through a series of group Talks, one on one discussions, social media and website the information is gathered and the word is spread. Through strategic outreach, Judges, lawyers and behaviorally trained professionals are currently being accessed and will become the enlightened collaborators. To date, Target Parents are the primary basis of sponsorships with the hope of building a trust sufficient to carry the burden of providing services directly to parents and families without the burden of charging fees.

Target Audience
Target parents globally who suffer the consequences of an incremental rise in cases of children and teenagers learning tactics of emotional rejection. Family Lawyers, family court judges and the mental health community that currently provides services are a primary and essential audience.

Benefits The benefits extend to families whose capacity to protect and serve the parenting needs of their children/teens as well as the family law system that will gain meaningful cost and time efficiencies in serving needs of the vast numbers of alienation driven family conflicts. With the benefit of a faster moving, lower case load, courts will become more responsive and competent in the needs of protecting abused children and will see a higher number of case resolutions. Family lawyers will learn effective tools to reduce their client's contentious conflicts to focus attention on child/teen protection instead of custody battles. Refocusing the system on productive solutions will raise compassion and provide the framework for a collaborative courtroom experience. Finally, with improved family functioning, economic factors that affect broad ranges of personal and work place efficiencies will find a resolution.

How Will Success Be Measured?
Success will be measured in several ways. Unlike traditional therapeutic methods, transitioning to a Learning theory Solution brings a menu of quantifiable measurement strategies that on a time sampling basis will follow the entire process recording and describing outcomes at significant data collection points. Learning procedures that inform objective behavior methods are based on systematic observations that are progress driven. From the moment of validating the behaviors of the victim children/teens to the steps in re‐training emotional recovery, monitoring by recorded observation will guide the process with its unique capacity for efficiency and rapid feedback. Outside of the science, progress will be measured in the confirmation of the restoration of the child's/teen's attachment bond to their formerly alienated parent. Objective observation is also a common sense measurement tool. Further success will be measured by the reduction of incidence of negative behaviors measured against the baseline record of the alienating parent's experience field that accounts for the cause of the maladaptive learning. Changes in the level of conflict of co‐parenting behaviors as well as a guided step by step restoration of shared physical parenting without further abuse will be the final objective and measurement goal that causes a healthy family dynamic within the context of a separated family.

Failed Tools of Parental Alienation Strategies
Bill Dubree, PhD

From the time that Bowen described the construct of "Emotional Cut‐off" until Gardner established his conceptual view of Parental Alienation Syndrome, there has been endless controversy, confusion and debates about this pathology. Mental Health trained an army of therapists and counselors, many who specialized in the rising discipline of Family Therapy. As they began to encounter clients complaining about being demonized and rejected by their children, family therapists began developing a viewpoint and strategies that would inform the family law system and the courts in constructing legal remedies.

What evolved is a construct that became a virtual quagmire of idiosyncratic complexity that has not only frustrated meaningful solutions, but has rendered scores of families broken, emotionally devastated and financially broke.

Gardner's Parental Alienation Syndrome gave rise to a storm of criticism among professionals for lack of scientific rigor and the public saw a system poised to further frustrate families confronting alienation issues in a framework lacking any clear strategies. Professional mental health workers rushed to accommodate a problem without either a consistent understanding of the pathology or the clinical tools to help their clients.

To this day, there is no clear understanding or clear acceptance by the professional mental health community about Parental Alienation. In fact, it has yet to be documented officially in the DSM.

Yet, the reports of parents being rejected by their children not only persists, but has quantitatively risen to a catastrophic problem on a global scale.

It is certainly true that a child emotionally rejecting and deliberately tormenting a parent is unexpected and unusual behavior. From the viewpoint of a family joined together by attachment bonds, it is a mal‐adaptive behavior. And, because of the devastating traumatic effects on the rejected parent (Target Parent), there are two victims or more.

Clearly, there is a high suspicion of pathologies.

The dilemma for mental health and the courts is the recondite nature of confirming the cause of the child's acts of rejection. Among the taboos of non‐directive clinical therapy is to avoid confrontation with their clients. A child client will not be persuaded to disclose the dynamics of the cause. The function of therapy is to construct a safe space where the child will be presumed to speak freely and work towards understanding how best to understand the child's viewpoint towards the family and parents.

Trust, strategic empathy and support are part of the therapeutic process. More often than not, a child who firmly presents plausible reasons for rejecting a parent has the strong potential of drawing the therapist into an alliance with his or her viewpoints. Evidence gathered is through the lens of the client child where therapy may move to help ensure the negative affect can be accommodated. Gains in therapy help the child learn adjustment strategies to minimize the impact of inconvenient emotional conflicts so that life functions will be productive and unhindered.

Lacking the critical tools to engage in meaningful investigation or recognize objective, common sense intuitive suspicions, therapy will find a rejecting child a case of estrangement more often than abusive alienation techniques. Therapy will simply inform the child how to cope with the impulse to reject a parent.

Questions of the "what if's" are rarely or ever raised in the therapeutic process.

How then, can traditional non‐directive, client centered therapies help to understand or solve a festering and on‐going family crisis when no pathology is presumed or discovered?

It cannot!

Traditional therapy will proclaim a success in the same way a wrecked car without repairs is falsely deemed fixed and placed back on the street and expected to function. And, the people licensed to practice family therapy and counseling are those who inform the family lawyers and courts.

The fraud of family therapy is so outrageous, that therapists pretend that they practice "reunifications therapy". There is no such discipline trained by graduate schools anywhere in the world. So what are they doing? Answer ‐ Making it up as they go along.

Non‐Directive, Client Centered Therapy and Counseling is not the correct tool for the Parental Alienation Pathology.

• It is dangerously reckless time wasting
• It fails to protect the child
• It relies on opinions, not clear scientific techniques and objective honesty, especially true of evaluators.
• It causes frequent clinical enmeshments allied with the child's mal‐adaptive delusions.
• It relies on subjective verbal content of the client
• It is not equipped to investigate or employ methods of strategic observation.
• There is no real behavioral or clinical analysis or assessment, thus no rudder to navigate
• Opinions are often reported substituted for undiscovered evidence.

There are two better ways.

The agenda of traditional therapies is entirely different than the agenda for behavioral interventions. One is non‐directive and passive and the other is directive with the ability to objectively measure progress and success.

In the field of clinical psychology, there are a few rational and honest voices that advocate an investigation through rapid (6 weeks or less) assessment followed by a diagnosis that results in a treatment plan. One such voice, Dr. Craig Childress, has led this movement and has been a critic of the Family Law System and the habits of most of today's mental health practitioners, who operate beyond their level of competence and are clearly not the right fit for this pathology. As Dr. Childress rightly observes, the pathology is about child abuse, not parental conflicts and custody. He further clarifies the problem using the term "parental alienation", which is not clinically validated.

However, Dr. Childress has encountered extreme resistance and push back from the Mental Health community and Family Law as they continue to protect their billing turf, exacerbating the lives of entire families until they are completely broken.

Any targeted parent going through this monstrous experience knows that this has to end.

Finally, this brings us to a second and alternative method to tackle the alienation child abuse pathology, born in the scientific roots of psychology, learning theory that spawned behavior therapies.

Like Dr. Childress' assessment, diagnosis and treatment approach, behavioral techniques are rigorously investigative, rapid response solutions that aim to put out the fire as quickly as possible.

Both the Childress and behavioral approaches aim to "Protect the Child" as the first and highest priority.

And, Dr. Childress favors a psycho‐educational strategy to restore the child's authentic personality, especially the recovery of an adaptive attachment bond to the target parent.

The psycho‐educational recovery program is really a system that can be best described in learning theory and is fully compatible with the new paradigm shift with the proposed behavioral strategies.

All behavior is a function of learning. Strategic learning is conditioned learning. Where Dr. Childress' recommended psycho‐educational approach and behavior techniques differ is in three main ways:

• The behavioral approach prefers preparing the target parent to rescue his or her own child.
• The behavioral approach uses strategic reinforcement procedure to ensure a rapid re‐shaping and restoring the original ("authentic") self.
• The behavioral approach is much less costly.

The new learning approach has been modeled in what is called a procedure especially designed for moderate and severe cases of parental alienation where contact with victim child is at risk. The procedure is called the Parental Alienation Contingency Step Program or PACSP.

Just as Dr. Childress finds himself at war with the family law syndicate, Hope in Darkness, with its launch of an alternative method, needs the support of target parents and the ear of the family courts.

Hope in Darkness strongly believes, in the face of this extraordinary pathology, there is room for innovation and two solutions moving forward with similar agendas may help expedite the Paradigm Shift and rid the temple of the billing frauds and abusive time wasters.

An Explanation for the Rise of Parental Alienation
Bill Dubree, PhD

The sadness of the huge numbers of parents who have engaged with the alienation tactics of unhinged moms and dads is unimaginable. It is clearly one of the most traumatic experiences any human can endure. And, many don't.

If you have experienced parental alienation, you may have become a jaundiced, perspicacious and a critical thinker. You know the manipulations of societies and how it has been never ending. Powerful people, especially in the 20th century conspired to enact the age‐old quest for global domination through the rising age of psychology that informed propaganda tactics. Early Learning Theorists Pavlov and JB Watson, unintentionally, ushered in the magic bullet. Learning theory, which is the larval beginnings of the academic movement of psychology, spawned other social initiatives and set the stage for controlling the destiny of mass populations. The false flags since the Kennedy assassination are just the latest, but arguably the most dangerous events in our political history.

The income tax through loans from a private bank was not to fund the government so much as a mechanism for social control. The plan was to gradually raise tax burdens to the point where a social event would trigger a mass change in the core of human existence, the extended family with its antediluvian connections to tribal security and support systems. It was a major obstacle to population control. Its demise began in the late 1960's and early 1970's when tax burdens were dramatically increased on the excuse of funding the great society and the Vietnam War. It presented the perfect opportunity to break up the extended family, which had always offered support financially and otherwise, to children and elders. It resulted in the overnight rise of a society that for the first time in history delegated away the care of their families to institutions, while mom went into the workforce to carry the burden of the taxman. Children went to day care and elders farmed out to long‐term care, two institutional responses to the breakup of the family.

Concomitantly, and never discussed in academic circles, was the consequence of panic, anxiety and stress on gender, where women, faced with a gender challenge egged on and reinforced by the feminist movements raised confusion and anger to a fever pitch. It correlated with a dramatic rise in the overall divorce rate and resulted in a stressed out family, working so hard that they were more easily controlled and capitulated to the voices of power. Kids would become indoctrinated to accept the new social order and huge changes began to be noticed in the 1960's and 70's in the psychology of all members of the former extended family, especially in the areas of affect and attachment issues.

The gender challenge issue affected not only women and mothers. it affected men and dads. Coping mechanisms predictably changed personality dynamics. With the increase in divorce, pressures on the kids and elders, less leisure time, decline in critical thinking, a wave of new pathologies grew such as sociopathic behaviors with narcissistic tendencies. The affective drive system had finally succumbed to the loss of security with concomitant separation anxieties seeking an escape.

A global mental health crisis had finally replaced the comfort and security of a genetic driven tribal and extended family system that had preserved the integrity and security of mankind since its larval beginnings, millions of years ago.

The demand for mental health helped fuel an academic response especially focused in the areas of the social sciences and psychology. Therapists and counselors were trained at a fever pitch, released on the streets to an increasing backlog of people traumatized by the social revolutions. As with early innovators in mental health such as Freud, therapy followed the path of non-directive client centered procedures that wrapped the client in an empathic sense of security where the goal became learning to adapt and cope with pathologies. Through talk therapies, many clients became not only long term billings but found unexpected allies who shaped their capacities to accept and live more effectively with their mal‐adaptions, which were more often than not suppressed rather than eliminated.

Anyone going through today's family court syndicate can probably relate their experiences with the mental health professionals and know it feels like treading water with an inner tube. As the counselor allies with the client, both experience a false sense of euphoria setting in stone a mutually dependent relationship. The mental health industry holds the keys to the power in the family courts as they are the licensed informers using mystical powers and expressing opinions while their capitulating clients dance to the tune of their own self-destruction rarely questioning the gods of legally sanctioned opinion. An incestuous referral system centered in family law and the courts enables the system to prevail and even bestows its advice with the imprimatur of false praise of integrity shutting hard the doors of common sense that would otherwise not tolerate this circus.

The lesson to be learned is that we live in a society of vast pathology on all levels. A system evolved in response uniquely designed to enable and perpetuate a society plagued by an unprecedented level of stress, anxiety and depression that today is so overburdened that it seems impervious to the impulse and need for change.

Specifically, the destruction of the family unit has become the financial mechanism that fuels industries such as family law. The counter intuitive remedies of courts informed by the mental health community produces a perfect storm of conflict, confusion and endless misery. Opinions have replaced science. Therapeutic alliances have knowingly and directly empowered the sanctity of the voice of manipulated and abused children whose behaviors are mal‐adaptively compromised to follow the propaganda of parental alienation tactics. Mental health practices that follow the client has replaced meaningful and common sense needs to protect children with an endless revolving door support system that enables the abuse and through idiosyncratic opinions informs the courts how to mete out custody arrangements and is effete in its obligation to resolve conflict.

It's time for a dramatic change.