Reunification Therapy
Reunification Therapy | Grand Junction | Fruita | Colorado
Reunification Therapy
Reunification, or reintegration, therapy is a specific form of systemic, conjoint family therapy that addresses contact resistance/refusal or estrangement between a parent and his or her child(ren). It is most often ordered by a court when a child is resisting contact with a caregiver. It may also be sought out by co-parents wishing to ease a child’s distress over transitioning. The goal is to therapeutically intervene to rebalance the family system so as to help a child(ren) make and maintain healthy relationships with each of his/her caregivers. The therapist’s focus is to serve the child(ren)’s needs and opportunity to have as many healthy emotional anchors as possible as this promotes the child(ren)’s development, mental health and wellbeing.
There are many reasons why a child may be reluctant to have contact with a parent. The parent and child never had a well-established relationship or the difficulties may be newly emerging. Sometimes events have hurt a parent and child’s relationship, including exposure to high conflict or violent parent interactions or child maltreatment. In some situations one parent is knowingly or unknowingly undermining or interfering with the child’s relationship with the other parent. Many times a child is reacting to the stress of being caught in the middle of parent conflict or to differences in the parents’ styles of parenting, and has aligned with one parent to relieve their internal distress, possibly leading to polarization and loyalty conflict. Usually, there is a combination of factors at play in a dynamic system where no single person is at fault.
The therapist will assess the family system and implement treatment that is designed to address the issues that are contributing to the child’s avoidant reactions. Through the identification and targeting of these contributing factors, the therapist strives to help the child(ren) and both/all parents make changes that will lead to healthier and higher quality parent-child relationships. Child(ren) generally desire more contact only as the parent-relationship improves. Waiting until a child is “ready” for contact is a paradoxical approach as, without contact, the relationship may only become more strained and resist/refuse dynamics more entrenched. The longer the child(ren) is/are apart from a critical emotional anchor, a primary caregiver, and the longer that absent period persists, the greater the potential harm to the child(ren) and the more difficult it may be to successfully intervene.
Reunification therapy varies depending on the particular parent-child contact problems. There are many different methods that may be employed, including individual sessions with the child or either parent, sibling sessions, individual sessions with other family members or significant others, joint parent coaching sessions, and conjoint sessions with two or more family members present. In reunification therapy, the family is the client. There are a variety of ways in which the child and the resisted parent may be asked to communicate and engage with one another using gradual exposure, including, but not limited to, telephone calls, electronic messaging, hand-written communication, and exchanging artifacts, items, photos and belongings. Parent-child outings which may serve as homework activities, may last for several hours or involve an overnight, and may or may not be part of the process.
Please note, one of the critical pre-conditions for reunification therapy is an acknowledgement by the court that says clearly there is no longer a question of if parent-child contact will happen, but how such contact will happen. It is also imperative, in order for reunification therapy to be effective, for the entire family system to participate and for there to be open communication between all professionals involved (e.g. individual child and parent therapists, GAL, Parent Coordinator, etc.) in a concerted effort of making and maintaining healthy relationships with all caregivers.
Reunification therapy is NOT an evaluation or a process that will result in any recommendations. This includes developing a time-sharing/access plan, evaluating a parent’s mental health or investigating/determining allegations of child maltreatment. The Reunification Therapist may make therapeutic recommendations related to the therapeutic process itself, but legal recommendations or custody recommendations are outside the therapist’s scope of competency when acting as a provider of reunification services. Reunification therapy IS a process by which families can build healthy and connected relationships in the midst of difficult transitions, particularly in situations in which one parent has not had regular contact with the child(ren). The hope of reunification is that it will result in the re-establishing of the parent/child relationship and that the family members will learn and practice skills in the process that lead to healthier functioning in the future including, but not limited to, the following:
to foster healthy child adjustment;
to facilitate the implementation of the previously agreed to or court-ordered parenting time schedule, dated _____;
to restore adequate parent functioning, parenting and roles;
to work with each parent and their child(ren) towards the goal of identifying and separating each child’s needs and views from each parent’s needs and views;
to assist the parents to fully understand the needs of each child(ren) and the negative repercussions for the child(ren) of a severed or compromised relationship with a parent in their young lives and as adults;
to work with each family member to assist them to form more appropriate parent-parent and parent-child roles and boundaries;
to protect and remove the child(ren) from adult conflict
to replace the child(ren)’s distortions with more realistic perceptions that reflect the child’s actual experience with both parents;
to assist the child(ren) to differentiate self from others and exercise age-appropriate autonomy;
improve the child(ren)’s coping skills and improve appropriate expressions of the child(ren)’s emotional experiences
to help each parent to distinguish valid concerns from overly negative, critical and generalized views relating to the other parent;
to assist the parents resolve relevant parent-child conflicts;
to improve the quality of each parent’s parenting skills and family communication skills;
to improve the adults’ understanding regarding the negative developmental repercussions for the child(ren) of disrupted or compromised relationships with their parents or other caregivers
Rationale for Reunification Therapy and Its Emphasis on the Co-Parenting Relationship
Baker (2007) and many others report that child(ren) who grow up refusing or resisting contact with a parent go on to suffer low self-esteem/self-hatred, depression, drugs/alcohol abuse, lack of trust, alienation from their own child(ren), divorce, and other problems (e.g. identity difficulties, low achievement, anger issues). Further, in adult child(ren) from divorced parents, Ben-Ami and Baker (2012) found significant associations between persistently negative attitudes toward one parent as a child and lower self-sufficiency, higher rates of major depressive disorder, lower self-esteem, and insecure attachment styles as adults.
The amount of conflict between parents during and after separation is the most powerful predictor of poor mental health in child(ren) in divorced families (Kelly, 2005; Pruett, Williams, Isabella, & Little, 2003; Schick, 2002).
Allowing dysfunctional behaviors to become entrenched through years of litigation and investigation may seriously impair children’s functioning, diminishing the chance that any intervention will be successful when a conclusion is finally reached (Greenburg et al., 2016).