ABSTRACT
Couple relationships play a central role in maintaining or breaking intergenerational cycles. The couple relationship is the crucible where things can go very wrong but it is also the crucible within which negative intergenerational patterns can be broken, through the healing influence of a developmental partnership. Parents, whose co-parenting relationship is conflicted, will often hold firm beliefs about their child's feelings for the other parent. Children can have complex wishes and feelings with respect to their parents' relationship and can, at times, split parents so that the alliance is felt to be firmly with them. Gordon Harold and Leslie Leve carefully and comprehensively address how and why conflicted and cold parental relationships impact on children. Indeed, Harold and Leve are specifically pointing to the need for interventions that can modify children's attributions to parental discord, helping children to understand, for instance, that the conflict they are witnessing is not their fault.
