Alan M. Jaffe, Psy.D. – Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, Illinois, USA

Series: Psychology of Emotions, Motivations and Actions; Family Issues in the 21st Century
BISAC: FAM029000; PSY006000; LAW038000
DOI:https://doi.org/10.52305/TFBN3361

An estimated 3.9 million children in the United States are being systematically turned against a loving parent. That figure does not include the millions more affected globally. This is not the collateral damage of a difficult divorce. It is a calculated, sustained form of psychological harm, and this book makes the case that it is time to recognize it as exactly what it is: a new and distinct category of child abuse.

Parental alienation abuse operates through specific, identifiable tactics that one parent uses to destroy a child’s relationship with the other. This book organizes those tactics into a structured framework of fourteen categories, each defined with enough clinical precision to be observable, documentable, and actionable in both therapeutic and legal settings.

The book builds its argument methodically. It establishes a clear distinction between parental alienation as a relational process and parental alienation abuse as a form of deliberate psychological maltreatment, a distinction with direct consequences for how professionals assess these cases and how systems respond to them. It examines the psychological profiles most associated with alienating behavior, the neurobiological consequences for developing children, and the assessment strategies that allow evaluators to distinguish alienation from legitimate estrangement. It also addresses what courts, child protection systems, and interdisciplinary teams must understand before effective intervention can begin.

Children subjected to parental alienation abuse do not simply experience family conflict. They are caught in an impossible loyalty bind that erodes their self-esteem, disrupts their attachment bonds, and severs their connection to half of their own identity. The harm does not end in childhood. Adults who were alienated as children carry elevated rates of depression, difficulty trusting others, and a grief with no name because it is a grief for a parent they were taught not to love.

Rigorous in its science and grounded in decades of clinical and forensic experience, this work provides the coherent framework this serious form of abuse has long demanded.

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