We found this article about the relationship between narcissism and Parental Alienation Syndrome on PsychCentral.com. If you aren’t familiar with Parental Alienation Syndrome, this may be a useful introduction. An excerpt follows, and there’s a link to the full text below. If you have any questions about Parental Alienation Syndrome, please contact us.
It is beneficial for therapists, those in the law profession, and individuals involved with the children of narcissistic clients or partners to be aware of a concept known as parental alienation syndrome, how it is created, and what to do about it. In a normal attachment relationship, people are not interchangeable because each person is valuable in and of him or herself. However, this is not true for a narcissist. Narcissists have very shallow relationships in which people are interchangeable. One clue for a therapist to take note of when doing family therapy or parent/child conflict therapy is if the child has “interchanged” parents. If a therapist notices that a child is not connecting with a nurturing parent, but instead is calling him or her by their first name, then something is amiss in the attachment system. Basically, children do not reject parents. Under relatively healthy conditions, no matter what a parent does, children do not reject them. When you find a child rejecting a parent then you are witnessing an inauthentic attachment system.
Children are motivated to bond with parents. Even in a conflictual parent-child relationship, the child is still motivated to bond with the parent. This is a typical attachment experience between a parent and child. In parental alienation, we see detachment behavior, not attachment behavior. When therapists encounter a child rejecting a parent, not just having conflict with a parent, but completely detaching from a parent, then they are most likely witnessing parental alienation syndrome. In parental alienation there is no grief response to the separation between the parent and child.