Working with Parents and their Children: A Focus on Parents

As the family begins to engage with the experience of separation and change, each person from their different position and role experiences individual stress, in addition to the collective stress that affects everyone. In recognising the separate stresses that led to separate stories we found it useful to work with individual family members as well as different combinations of family relationships. The goals of helping the parents move forward with their changing relationship in ways that took a positive account of the children’s point of view remained central. However, allowing individuals to tell the story of the lead-up to the present situation from their point of view, without the editing that the presence of other family members might incur, became an essential part of the work. Where the divorce involved other sexual liaisons this process always involved a series of questions around ’how much should I/we tell the children’ but similar concerns about parent/child boundaries arose in relation to issues like violence, sexual dissatisfaction, and worries such as debt or mental illness, from which parents felt children should be protected. As children become entangled with parental disputes and loyalty issues it also proved useful to see different children with a particular parent to free them from some of the conflicted stories in which they were caught up, or to enlarge the information from which they had made deductions that were wrong and which were causing them unnecessary anxiety.