According to the Indicative Trauma Impact Manual, the anti-pathological, trauma informed approach to human distress, this strength-based approach is that it helps with understanding trauma reactions based on different type of trauma’s and experiences to help validate the victim’s reactions. Lack of validation comes from undereducated and undertrained professionals. It provides a logical and informed understanding to help with universal experiences and traumas.
It states that bullying (coercive control and power and control) involves repeated and intentional acts of aggression, intimidation, harassment, targeting, maltreatment to a victim which leads to a sense of isolation, defensive reactions, humiliation, blaming, and vulnerability. It can include “catfishing” (being deceived and manipulated by someone who has created a false identity online ) causing shock, betrayal, anger, and confusion, humiliation, shame, and psychological and emotional harm.
Forced therapy and attending alienation camps: Children being forced to be separated from a loving and protective parent and forced into a “forced” brain washing program is very harmful to a child. It is unsettling and distressing for children (p.61). This “conversion therapy” is a harmful and abusive practice that aims to change a child’s “reality” of abuse into “false” reality of “it didn’t really happen that way.” It is based on the assumption that alienation is a crime of sin, which it is not. This court ordered forced therapy is abusive to children due to the “aversion” therapy tactics and techniques. These were outlawed and banned when used against the children from the LGBTIQ communities. It focuses on techniques that shame, built, punish, isolate, and set up practices for a child to “betray” themselves and their reality and force them into the reality of the aversion therapy program and its objectives. This very harmful practice causes significant psychological harm and emotional harm in children. They have a sense of betrayal from adults, anger, resentment, humiliation, shame, and loss. They are threatened and controlled by individuals who tell them that they cannot see their protective and loving parent unless they “conform” to the program (isolation); told they can’t leave (threats and intimidation) the program unless they comply with program rules and directives; they are told they will have other punishments and consequences, belittled, manipulated, minimized, and gas-lit, for not complying and to “stop lying” about their reality. Never mind that the abusive parent caused the alienation – that doesn’t seem to matter. In these programs they make money off of the distress of children and the “brain washing” they lie about “working” without giving real facts about how many children came out of their programs more traumatized then they were when they went into the program. These programs do not have the best interest of the child at heart. They are power and controlled focused themselves. These programs use the same tactics that abusers use with court approval and support. This is legal abuse collaborating with mental health abuse with children from child abusing homes and relationship terrorism homes. Damage for children from this can last a lifetime. Instead of forced therapy, children should be put into a child abuse program where a certified, licensed child abuse expert helps them to sort through the feelings and traumas of having an abusive parent without that therapist threatening them, forcing isolation from their loving parent, gaslighting them, asking them to self -betray in order to go home, and using mind brain washing tools on them. These children can have a lifetime of problems for being “blamed” for their reactions to an abusive parent due to this “forced” mandates by courts.
Being forced into these programs undermines the therapeutic relationship and the concept of free and informed consent. Parents must BOTH approve of the child going into this type of program and not a judge (AB1019 now mandates that). The mental health professional providing these forced brain washing techniques limit self-trust building, personal choices by children and their experiences with an abusive parent; creating an environment where a child does not want to engage in forced therapy and therefore limits any effectiveness. It lead to children feeling helpless, depressed, having a lack of autonomy, and feeling Treat injustice towards them. They feel violated, frightened, overwhelmed, fearful, hopeless, and shamed.
This type of manipulation and exploitation of children must be stopped and outlawed just as it was years ago for the LGBTIQ community. It didn’t work for them and it doesn’t work for children from abusive homes.
