ABSTRACT
High conflict custody cases are troubling for family law attorneys, judges who must manage these cases, often for many years, custody evaluators, reunification therapists, individual psychotherapists, parent coordinators, and agencies like Child Protective Services that may receive multiple allegations related to the conflict. Most troubling of all is the impact to the children in these high conflict families, where their loyalties are stretched and tested in the context of “tribal warfare” (Johnston, J. and V. Roseby, 1997), their conflicting beliefs and feelings about each parent or caregiver, and their individual temperaments, coping skills and mechanisms, and fractured sense of well-being. While these families represent a very small proportion of all divorcing families and also a small proportion of custody litigating families, they nevertheless consume the “lion's share” of services in family courts and ancillary related services. For several decades, a host of interventions of all sorts have grown out of the need to address and concern about the damage that can accrue when one parent/caregiver attempts to sever the child's relationship with the other parent/caregiver. Matters grow exponentially more complex when a parent's efforts to sever another parent's relationship with more than one child are due to matters of domestic violence, abuse and/or neglect. In a recent special series of the Family Court Review (Vol. 58, Issue 2), the journal of the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts, www.afccnet.org, these issues related to the resistance and refusal of children to visit with a parent are explored in depth and from a number of differing opinions and perspectives. This case study will examine these “resist and refuse” dynamics in the case of contested custody with a 6-year-old child.
