Your families contain a trauma pathology… an attachment trauma. In trauma world it’s called complex trauma, and your families are the rippling of complex trauma from one generation to the next.
The current location of trauma is in the allied parent. This person has unresolved childhood trauma, attachment-related complex trauma, that is now being transferred to the child by the aberrant and distorted parenting practices that this unresolved trauma creates.
Once we know trauma, the patterns are evident.
The pattern mimics actual trauma, so it confuses the ignorant, they think it’s actual traumatic parenting now by you, the targeted parent, that’s causing the symptom features of trauma in the child’s presentation (rejection, hostility, and expressed anxiety and fearfulness).
Those are all presumed to be the symptoms of child abuse and trauma. They’re not, but ignorance doesn’t actually know that, because ignorance has never actually worked with child abuse and trauma.
Those symptoms by the child, hostile-rejection and expressed anxiety and fearfulness, are what someone would imagine the child’s symptoms to be from child abuse, they’re wrong. Those are not the symptoms displayed by authentically abused children.
It is a display, a kabuki theater of supposed trauma and victimization – a reenactment.
It is a reenactment of the allied parent’s own childhood complex trauma experience, now played out with the current family members, each assigned their roles in the psychological drama.
The child is cast into the pivotal role as the “victimized child” who needs protecting from the “abusive parent.” The targeted parent is automatically cast into the villain’s role by the child’s “victimized child” role, as the supposedly evil “abusive parent.” This casing then allows the allied parent to self-adopt and conspicuously display the coveted rescuer role, the all-wonderful “protective parent.”
It’s all a false drama. A story, a ripple of themes created long ago, in complex trauma, relationship-based trauma, of the allied parent growing up.
Freud talked about it. He called it the transference, the transfer of trauma patterns from childhood to current family relationships, the acting out and reliving of childhood trauma in current relationships.
Bowlby talked about it. He talked about our internal working models of attachment, patterns of expectations that guide and direct all our future bonding relationships.
Beck talks about it. He calls them the schemas that are formed in childhood experience, patterns in our brain that organize our perceptions of subsequent events and relationships.
van der Kolk talks about it. He calls it the reenactment of trauma into the current family relationships.
Trauma is a dissociative pathology, it affects identity organization. People sometimes call it personality disorder pathology, narcissistic and borderline.
The allied parent’s complex trauma was reactivated by the failed marriage and divorce, triggered by the rejection and abandonment from the spousal attachment figure. Those are attachment trauma triggers.
The reactivated trauma-anxiety creates a persecutory delusion that drops into the trauma pattern of childhood; “abusive parent”/”victimized child”/”protective parent” – a false story imposed on now.
This is the origin of the persecutory delusion shared by the child and the allied parent. The allied parent “induces” the child into believing the child is being “victimized” by the targeted parent, the “victimized child” role of the false drama, the reenactment of trauma from long ago.
The allied parent is the “primary case” of the false drama, the delusion, and this parent “gradually imposes” the false beliefs onto the child – to destroy the child’s bond to the other parent.
For secondary gain. The allied parent is imposing a delusion onto the child – in order to destroy the child’s bond to the other parent; secondary gain. This is where the DSM-5 diagnosis of Factitious Disorder Imposed on Another (Munchausen by proxy) becomes a prominent diagnostic consideration.
Listen to what the American Psychiatric Association says about the parenting in this pathology.
From the APA: “Shared Psychotic Disorder can occur in larger number of individuals, especially in family situations in which the parent is the primary case and the children, sometimes to varying degrees, adopt the parent’s delusional beliefs.” (American Psychiatric Association, 2000)
From the APA: “Usually the primary case in Shared Psychotic Disorder is dominant in the relationship and gradually imposes the delusional system on the more passive and initially healthy second person.” (American Psychiatric Association, 2000)
From the APA: “The essential feature of Shared Psychotic Disorder (Folie a Deux) is a delusion that develops in an individual who is involved in a close relationship with another person (sometimes termed the “inducer” or “the primary case”).
The allied parent “imposes” a delusional belief system onto the child, the allied parent is the “inducer” of the child’s persecutory delusional beliefs in supposed “victimization” (the “victimized child”), in order to destroy the child’s relationship bond with the oher parent, the targeted parent – “targeted” for a brutal and savage form of IPV spousal abuse using the child, and the child’s “imposed” and “induced” delusional pathology, as the weapon.
None of this is me. None of this is a “new theory” of Dr. Childress. That is simply ignorance.
Google ignorance: lack of knowledge or information.
Google sloth: reluctance to work or make an effort; laziness.
Google negligence: failure to take proper care in doing something.
The ICD-10 diagnosis of a Shared Psychotic Disorder is F24. Creating a delusional-psychotic pathology in the child that destroys the child’s attachment bond to the other parent is a DSM-5 diagnosis of V995.51 Child Psychological Abuse.
Apply knowledge to solve pathology. Ignorance solves nothing.
Craig Childress, Psy.D.
Clinical Psychologist, PSY 18857
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