Personality Disorders and the Parent-Child Relationship: Breaking the Cycle of Generational Trauma in Family Courts

This essay was awarded second place in the American Bar Association Family Law Section’s 2023 Howard C. Schwab Memorial Essay Contest. The author would like to express her gratitude to her professors, Benjamin Wilson and William Froelich, for their unwavering support in the development of this article. They not only introduced her to the vast possibilities that alternative dispute resolution can offer, but also inspired and encouraged her to explore her ideas in depth. Their guidance and mentorship fostered her intellectual growth and confidence, and without their support, this article would not have been possible.

Introduction

Generational trauma (also known as intergenerational or transgenerational trauma) is trauma experienced by one individual that passes down from generation to generation. Emerging research suggests that when an individual experiences a traumatic event or multiple traumatic events, their DNA can change in response. “Being systematically exploited, enduring repeated and continual abuse, racism, and poverty” are just some of the traumatic experiences thought to cause genetic changes in an individual, which their descendants may then inherit.

The concept is illustrated by the fictional example of BoJack Horseman. Although the show is primarily a comedy, BoJack’s mental health is a central theme of the story. On the outside, BoJack’s life is filled with fame and fortune. Nevertheless, on the inside, BoJack’s struggles range from alcoholism, drug abuse, and unstable relationships to disordered eating, depression, and self-loathing. One might wonder where these struggles come from for a horse who seems to have it all. Sure, looking at the demands of fame could provide insight into the question, but finding the true culprit requires a deeper look into BoJack’s life, namely, his family tree. In doing so, it becomes clear that BoJack’s mental health struggles did not start with him or his fame, or even with his broken relationship with his mother, Beatrice Horseman; the story goes back generations, beginning with BoJack’s grandmother, Honey Sugarman.

In the 1940s, Honey’s son died fighting in WWII. The traumatic experience triggered “intense and prolonged grief,” leading to Honey’s “inebriated, public breakdown.” Unable to deal with the emotional distress, Honey begged her husband to “fix” her by brutalizing her prefrontal cortex, ultimately leaving her with severe cognitive impairments. But our story does not end with Honey’s fix. Honey’s daughter Beatrice—who witnessed her mother’s breakdown—was tasked with keeping her fractured family together. On top of taking on this insurmountable role, Beatrice was emotionally abused and neglected by her father. The show highlights Beatrice’s abusive and neglectful parenting of BoJack, and we see how BoJack’s poor decision-making directly mirrors the abusive parenting he experienced as a child. Later on in the show, we see the impact of BoJack’s childhood on his relationship with his perceived-to-be daughter (actually his half-sister), Hollyhock, as he rebuffs her efforts to foster a healthy parent-child relationship.

Another fictional example comes from the novel Frankenstein. Frankenstein’s creator, Victor, received emotionally inconsistent affection from his parents, who treated him as “an object of their love, not a participant in it.” Having received sparing emotional intimacy as a child, Victor created Frankenstein, who would act as a source of unconditional love and affection. But in the same way that Victor was an object of his own parent’s love, Frankenstein embodied the same role, recreating Victor’s parent-child relationship, with Victor as parent and Frankenstein as child. As the cycle continued, Victor abandoned Frankenstein, and Frankenstein lacked any source of affection, leading him to a life of aggression and violence.

The parent-child relationship can substantially influence an individual’s personality, behaviors, and life path. The parent-child relationship may be impacted in situations where a parent has an untreated mental illness or a personality disorder. Generational trauma can contribute to personality disorders that can impact the parent-child relationship. Although personality disorders were once thought of as mere reflections of “weakness of character or willfully offensive behavior,” it is now accepted that they are shaped by genetics and childhood experience. With the growing research on generational trauma, there has been an increasing emphasis on providing effective treatments for childhood trauma. While family law has come a long way in recognizing the importance of trauma-informed interventions, the focus is sometimes on preventing harm to the children of divorced or separated parents rather than addressing the trauma of the whole family. In this article, I examine current issues in family law conflicts where one or both parents have a personality disorder. In Part I, I provide a background on what constitutes a personality disorder and how personality disorders develop. Next, in Part II, I explain the impacts of parental personality disorders on the parent-child relationship and a child’s development. Finally, in Part III, I provide a trauma-informed system design proposal and advocate for a caregiver-first approach to breaking the cycle of generational trauma in the family courtroom.

I. Understanding Personality Disorders

A. Personality, Personality Pathology, and Personality Disorders

A personality disorder (PD) is “an enduring pattern of inner experience and behavior that deviates markedly from the norms and expectations of the individual’s culture, is pervasive and inflexible, has an onset in adolescence or early adulthood, is stable over time, and leads to distress or impairment.”

To understand PDs, one must first understand the interaction between personality, personality pathology, and personality disorder. Everyone has a unique personality, i.e., “the phenotypic patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that uniquely define each of us.” Of importance, personalities do not simply encompass the “Big 5” traits—openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism—rather, personality “encompasses the major functional domains in human life and social interaction.” Each domain and the extensiveness of its expression, both internally and in one’s social interactions, function to create an individual’s personality. As one can imagine, the complex interplay between these domains can create difficulty for an individual with varying degrees of severity. On one end of the spectrum, an individual’s personality may lead to minor problems with no significant impact on their functioning and social interactions. Where an individual has “enduring patterns that simply make people’s lives more complicated or lead to mild or episodic but temporary distress in themselves or the people around them,” these issues may rise to the level of personality pathology. Once these enduring patterns “involve dysfunction across several or all of the domains of functioning” in two or more areas—cognition, affectivity, interpersonal functioning, or impulse control—only then may an individual have a personality disorder.

The Fifth Edition, Text Revision to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) delineates 10 PDs, divided into three separate groups based on descriptive similarities: paranoid (PPD), schizoid (ScPD), schizotypal (SPD), antisocial (ASPD), borderline (BPD), histrionic (HPD), narcissistic (NPD), avoidant (AVPD), dependent (DPD), and obsessive-compulsive (OCPD).

B. Nature versus Nurture: Not a Contest

The seemingly everlasting debate between nature and nurture has long been a source of dispute among scholars. The idea is that genes (nature) and environment (nurture) are two distinct concepts: “you’re born with certain genetic code that determines your biology and health and you have experiences that shape more malleable things like character and values.” Over the years, however, scholars have begun to understand the two models not as distinct but as two interrelated concepts. Thus, the question presents a logical fallacy: It is neither nature nor nurture. The answer is both: Environment and genetic code can shape biology and behavior. It follows that PDs emerge from “biological susceptibilities shaped by genetic dispositions in concert with environmental insults,” specifically trauma.

Thus, to understand how PDs develop, we must understand the relationship between genetics and environment, a relationship captured by generational trauma. In 1966, Canadian psychiatrist Vivian M. Rakoff found “high rates of psychological distress among children of Holocaust survivors,” leading researchers to “assess[] anxiety, depression, and PTSD in trauma survivors” and their descendants. Although there is still a lot to learn about generational trauma, some researchers believe epigenetics can explain the transmission of trauma. Epigenetics refers to “environmentally driven molecular processes that can turn genes on or off.” According to some epigenetic researchers, an individual’s environment, including a traumatic experience, can cause changes to their DNA. This DNA change can pass down, leading to biological susceptibilities in subsequent generations. The genes can then be “turned on” due to exposure to environmental factors, such as childhood adversities. With PDs, studies suggest strong evidence for the heritability of such disorders. For example, heritability estimates for BPD vary between 40% and 60% and 40% to 50% for ASPD. As discussed, however, genetic makeup is not the only cause of PDs; environmental influences also play a role.

Studies show that early attachment interactions are crucial in developing an individual’s ability “to regulate affect and stress, to mentalize, and to acquire attentional control and a sense of self-agency.” Thus, attachment theory provides key insight into how PDs develop. Attachment theory was developed in the 1950s by British psychoanalyst John Bowlby. The general idea is that an individual’s attachment patterns will mirror the attachment pattern they had with their parents as children:

If this caregiver is responsive and emotionally available when the infant needs comfort and security and has allowed independent exploration of the environment, the infant is likely to feel safe and valued in the relationship. This pattern of relating is internalized and becomes a model for operating in future relationships. Should the caregiver be unavailable when the infant is distressed, and should he or she curtail exploration of the environment, the infant is likely to feel unsafe, not valued by his caregiver, and incompetent in the world at large. Because attachment relationships are transactional, these interactions continue to be absorbed into a working paradigm about future relationships as insecure and the child approaches future relationships with an expectation that is often confirmed.

These interactions form a pattern of attachment, i.e., attachment style, that shapes personality development, expectations of social acceptance, and attitudes toward rejection and influences close relationships later in life. Two categories of attachment styles exist, separated into four specific patterns: secure attachment—which includes secure pattern of attachment—and insecure attachment—which includes preoccupied (or anxious), dismissive (or avoidant), and unresolved (or disorganized) patterns of attachment.

Scholars have discovered a link between attachment theory and the “enduring and persistent dysfunctional adaptation[s]” found in PDs. Attachment theory’s “capacity to link early childhood to later patterns of enduring adaptation” and “its description of patterns . . . analogous to dispositional characteristics of individuals with PD” support this connection. For example, individuals with a preoccupied attachment style may engage in hyperactivating strategies, i.e., using intense efforts to attain proximity to an attachment figure. Similarly, BPD and DPD are characterized by intense efforts to avoid real or perceived abandonment or neglect. Because preoccupied attachment styles are thought to result from a history of inconsistent caregiving, it then follows that a similar history can contribute to the development of PD. The cause of PDs is both nature (explained by genetic code and generational trauma) and nurture (explained by environmental influences and attachment theory).

II. The Impacts of Parental Personality Disorders on Children

A. Personality Disorders and the Parent-Child Relationship

Defining “good parenting” is a complex and highly subjective task. Even so, parents need certain psychological capacities to help their children learn skills such as emotional regulation and the ability to form healthy relationships throughout their lives. These include the capacity to manage one’s own distress and anxiety without resorting to anger, hyperarousal, or fear; plan and think ahead; respond empathetically to another individual’s distress; work with a community of adults involved in a child’s welfare, such as family, professionals, and other parents; perceive vulnerability with compassion and concern; ask for and value help; tolerate negative affects without taking impulsive actions or catastrophizing; tolerate waiting for one’s own needs to be met; and encourage pleasure and a sense of humor. Depending on the PD, a parent can lack several, or all, of these capacities. In turn, a parent’s PD can impact the parent’s interactions with their children and overall family dynamics.

Studies show that the quintessential parental quality necessary for healthy child development is parental empathy, which allows for a parent to be attuned to their child’s authentic experiences, vulnerability, and needs. Impairments in empathy manifest in a lack of concern for the feelings, needs, or sufferings of others, as well as lacking remorse after hurting or mistreating another. A parent who lacks empathy cannot comprehend their child’s feelings, from happiness and affection to sadness and distress. As a result, the parent discourages their child’s feelings and needs and is incapable of recognizing the impact of their actions. Lack of empathy is often seen in parents with ASPD and NPD. Others, such as avoidant personality disorder, also may have difficulties with empathy.

Related to the capacity for empathy, a parent’s emotional availability is crucial to the parent-child relationship. Each PD is characterized by some impact on emotional availability, leading to parents who are emotionally unavailable, unpredictable, or hostile. For example, individuals with PPD have a “pervasive distrust and suspiciousness of others. . . .” As a result, they are reluctant to confide in or become close to others, which can lead to an emotionally unavailable parent. At the same time, they are constantly wary about the harmful intentions of others. They may perceive others’ actions as attacks, even when no objective evidence supports their belief, and can be quick to respond with hostility and “overt argumentativeness.” Thus, a parent living with PPD may raise a child in an emotionally unavailable, unpredictable, and hostile environment. BPD also is characterized by “affective instability,” although for different reasons. These individuals are highly reactive to interpersonal stresses, are hypervigilant to threats of neglect or abandonment, and alternate between “extremes of idealization and devaluation,” i.e., splitting. As such, they can show extreme love and affection in one instance but shift to extreme anger and hostility in the next. “[E]xpressions of anger are often followed by shame and guilt.” Such parents “may engage in contradictory behaviors,” leading to “instability in their interactions with their children” and creating an unpredictable and hostile environment for them.

Another essential component of the parent-child relationship is the ability to focus on their child’s needs above their own. Many individuals living with PDs lack the psychological capacity to meet their own emotional and psychological needs, often relying on their children to meet those needs. The result is a “pathological role-reversal relationship” (“psychological enmeshment”) in which the parent violates, manipulates, and exploits their child’s psychological integrity to meet their needs. In comparison, “[i]n a healthy parent-child relationship, the child uses the parent to meet the child’s emotional and psychological needs.” The Frankenstein family presents a perfect example of this type of psychological enmeshment. In a desperate search for the love and affection he lacked as a child, Victor created Frankenstein. Before even being created, Frankenstein’s purpose was clear: to fulfill his creator’s need for unconditional love and affection.

This type of parent-child relationship can exist when a parent is living with a PD. For example, parents with NPD can be “seen as treating their children as extensions of themselves” and thus expect them to fulfill their own needs rather than the other way around. This role reversal, however, is not merely a consequence of a parent’s lack of empathy; individuals with BPD, for example, can empathize with and nurture others. This ability, however, is contingent on the expectation that the other person will, in return, meet their own needs. Psychological enmeshment also can result from a parent who simply cannot meet their own needs, as with DPD. Individuals living with DPD need others to assume responsibility for most areas of their lives, going to “excessive lengths to obtain nurturance and support from others. . . .” Psychological enmeshment can occur in a parent-child relationship where the parent is pathologically dependent on others to meet their needs.

Finally, some individuals with PDs have an extreme need for control. In the parent-child relationship, attempts at control can be both behavioral and psychological. Behavioral control refers to “parental attempts to regulate and structure the child’s behavior,” such as their manners, study activities, and peer involvement. Conversely, psychological control refers to parental attempts to regulate the child’s psychological experiences, such as “feelings, aspirations, and identity choices,” through “manipulative techniques,” including “contingent love, shaming, and guilt induction. . . .” Since individuals living with PDs often cannot manage their anxieties, tolerate negative emotions, or wait to have their needs met, they may resort to controlling their environments and those around them. For example, an essential feature of OCPD is a “pervasive pattern of preoccupation with orderliness, perfectionism, and mental and interpersonal control, at the expense of flexibility, openness, and efficiency. . . .” Their emphasis on perfectionism often extends to those around them, forcing “themselves and others to follow rigid moral principles” and stringent performance standards and insisting that others conform to their way of doing things. Other PDs, such as HPD, PPD, ASPD, and NPD, are also prone to parental attempts to control their children.

In a family where both parents have a PD, both parents may contribute to family dysfunction, leaving children without a healthy relationship with either parent. Furthermore, parental PDs can significantly impact children beyond the parent-child relationship and the overall family dynamics. They can influence children’s attachment patterns, increase their risk for mental illnesses, and even have damaging and long-lasting effects on their brain development.

B. Impact of Parental Personality Disorders on Children’s Development

Beginning in infancy, a child’s interactions with their caregivers shape the development of their brain. Moreover, studies show that any form of child maltreatment can cause neurobiological and permanent changes in a child’s brain. Children who have parents with PDs and experience instability in their parental relationships may experience chronic stress. This chronic stress leads to overactivation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA), the mechanism responsible for controlling reactions to stress and regulating physiological processes, including metabolism, immune responses, and the autonomic nervous system. Overactivation of the HPA causes excess secretion of cortisol (the primary hormone for the fight or flight response), leading to a reduction in the volume of the hippocampus, overactivation of the amygdala, and impairments in the prefrontal cortex (similar to Honey Sugarman’s fix).

The hippocampus plays a major role in learning, forming, and retrieving verbal and emotional memories. Excess cortisol production leads to hyperarousal of the hippocampus, which in turn leads to the misinterpretation of signals (from the natural environment, individuals, or situations) as “constant threats.” The hippocampus then sends these threat signals to the amygdala, the part of the brain responsible for regulating fear and aggression. Overactivation of the amygdala results in unstable, unpredictable, and intense emotional turmoil in response to minor stresses, a delay in returning to baseline, and impairments in the prefrontal cortex (PFC). The PFC controls an individual’s cognitive abilities by regulating thoughts, actions, and emotions; inhibiting inappropriate actions; and promoting task-relevant operations. Chronic stress during childhood may have a particularly large effect on the PFC by altering and weakening its structure, which can have enduring effects on the adult PFC. In summary, parental PDs not only cause a strain in the parent-child relationship, but also can cause their children to experience continuous stress, which can detrimentally alter their child’s brain.

III. A System Design Proposal for Working with Parental Personality Disorders in Family Law Conflicts: Introducing Generational Trauma into the Courtroom

Over the years, family courts have been moving away from the traditional adversary system, and alternative dispute resolution (ADR) has become widely accepted in resolving child custody and parenting disputes. Examples of interventions include parenting education programs, mediation, counseling interventions, assessments, parenting coordination, supervised visitation, and monitoring programs.

Although these interventions are beneficial because they recognize the impacts of divorce on children and apply a trauma-informed approach, they fall short by not considering the impacts of generational trauma on family conflicts. To remedy this shortcoming, I make four proposals: (1) appreciate that the effects of trauma are not only prevalent in families deemed “high-conflict”; (2) transition from the “best interests of the child” to a “best interests of the family” standard; (3) recognize the importance of past experiences on current relationships; and (4) apply a caregiver-first approach to treating family conflicts.

A. It’s Not About “High-Conflict”

While certain interventions are more intensive and take a therapeutic approach in handling family law conflicts, they are generally reserved for those families deemed high-conflict. For example, parents who quickly come to an agreement through traditional mediation may, at most, attend a brief parenting education program.

Studies on the relationship between high-conflict personalities and PDs find that individuals living with BPD, NPD, ASPD, HPD, or PPD are most often involved in high-conflict disputes. Other PDs that do not share the same high-conflict traits may slip through the court’s selection process. Take, for instance, a case example of an individual living with ScPD:

Betty recently found out that her husband is having an affair. When her husband confronted her with the news, she felt a sense of relief, as she often did not enjoy sex or intimacy with him and viewed their marriage as a necessity in her life, a role she had to fill. Soon after, her husband divorced her and obtained custody of their son without any contention fromBetty. Betty is currently pleased with her life, living alone in a small apartment, and receiving a monthly alimony check that covers her basic needs so she can continue to read her books and watch TV.

A court would likely consider Betty’s divorce low-conflict. That should not mean, however, that the family is in any less need of intensive intervention than had Betty been living with, say, NPD. Individuals living with Cluster C PDs are also less likely to be involved in high-conflict disputes because they have generally adopted methods of avoiding conflicts and do not seek to prolong disputes. As discussed above, however, all parental PDs can significantly impact children.

Furthermore, low-conflict divorce can be just as damaging to a child’s well-being as those that are high-conflict. In addition to exposure to interparental conflict, the quality of parenting is a critical factor that influences a child’s post-divorce adjustment. High-quality parenting is characterized by high levels of “affectively positive, affirming parent-child interactions”; responsiveness to children’s needs; and effective discipline by consistently and fairly enforcing rules. When these characteristics are missing, the risk of divorce negatively impacting a child’s mental health increases, along with increasing the risk of substance abuse and social adaptation problems post-divorce. Thus, divorce may still negatively impact a child’s well-being even when there is low interparental conflict.

Rather than using the intensity and duration of the conflict to measure when more intervention is needed, family courts should measure the risk for negative post-divorce relationships. One way to assess for a risk of a negative post-divorce relationship is to introduce a screening tool in the early stages of the divorce process. The Adverse Childhood Experiences International Questionnaire (ACE-IQ) measures Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and the association between those experiences and risk behaviors later in life. The questionnaire covers “family dysfunction; physical, sexual, and emotional abuse and neglect by parents or caregivers; peer violence; witnessing community violence, and exposure to collective violence.” In a study on the relationship between parents’ childhood trauma and the quality of co-parental relationships, researchers found that parents who reported four or fewer ACEs also reported higher-quality co-parenting. By introducing the ACE-IQ in the early divorce stages, courts can better identify families at higher risk for negative post-divorce relationships and select the appropriate interventions.

B. Rethinking the “Best Interests of the Child” Standard

When courts make decisions regarding custody or access disputes, they generally apply the “best interests of the child” standard. The standard is a “case-by-case determination of what living arrangements would best meet the particular needs” of the children. As a result, even those interventions designed to help parents build skills or provide them with treatment are based on the premise that such interventions are in the child’s best interest. The idea is that by equipping parents with better parenting and conflict-resolution skills and educating them on the impacts of divorce on their children, programs can mitigate the negative effects divorce and conflict can have on their children. Scholars have argued that trauma-informed parent education programs can promote parents’ and children’s best interests. While I agree with their stance and fully support their recommendations, I believe more is required. Generational trauma and family systems theory underscore the interdependence of parents’ and children’s interests. Moreover, studies show that improving family health can reduce children’s adverse family experiences. Thus, rather than distinguishing between the interests of the parents and the children, the standard should be transformed from the “best interest of the child” to the “best interest of the family.” By making this shift, interventions can be better focused on methods that emphasize the importance of each family member’s health on the other members and the family’s overall health.

C. The Past Informs the Future: Finding the Source of the Trauma

Most of the interventions used in family court are future-oriented. The focus is on developing skills and educating parents about the impacts of family conflicts on their children and how to address their children’s needs. When it comes to healing generational trauma, however, experts emphasize the importance of looking at the past. Thus, the first step in an intervention program is to identify the source of the trauma. One source of trauma can be an adverse childhood experience, which includes experiencing physical or emotional abuse, abandonment, or neglect; losing a family member to suicide; growing up in a household with substance abuse or alcoholism; having a parent living with a mental illness; having an incarcerated parent; or being a child of divorce or parental separation. Generational trauma also can result from a family history of systematic exploitation, repeated and continual abuse (such as domestic violence and sexual assault or abuse), racism, and poverty. Thus, identifying the source of the trauma requires an in-depth look at a family’s history.

Marriage and family therapies often use family diagrams and genograms to understand the factors impacting family dynamics. Family diagrams are “schematic diagram[s] of the three-generational family relationship system.” Genograms, the descendant of the family diagram, are a combination of the “genealogical family tree and the family diagram.” In order to create these tools, clinicians collect data on each family member, such as their “education, occupational history, physical and emotional health, birth dates, death dates and causes,” and “cultural and ethnic backgrounds.” The tools assist clinicians in evaluating (1) the “family structure and composition,” including “current marital configuration and information on sibling birth and spacing”; (2) the “particular place of the family in the life cycle”; (3) the “presence or absence of multigenerational patterns that include various symptoms and cutoffs”; (4) the family roles; and (5) the family’s overall functioning. By integrating family diagrams or genograms into family conflicts, interventions can begin to help families better understand the root of their traumas and assist legal and mental health professionals in developing a tailored plan.

D. A Caregiver-First Approach

With the growing understanding of adverse childhood experiences and their associations with adult physical and mental illnesses, chronic disease, and risk for violent victimization, we have become aware that these childhood traumas are a “major underreported source of adult health problems.” However, most methods, even those that include parents, take a child-centered approach. One complex program has emerged that takes a caregiver-first approach and addresses the unresolved trauma history of the parent or caregiver. The Intergenerational Trauma Treatment Model (ITTM) takes the position that parents are “the primary agents of change for the child.” Because a parent’s unresolved trauma may impact the parent-child relationship, courts must integrate interventions focused on treating both parents and children.

The ITTM offers a promising model. The ITTM is conducted in three phases: Phase A (”Trauma Information Sessions”), Phase B (“Caregiver Treatment Sessions”), and Phase C (“Child-Therapist Sessions Co-Directed by Therapists and Caregivers”). Phase A is a six-week course involving six 90-minute psychoeducational sessions in a group of up to 50 caregivers. Caregivers receive education on topics such as trauma; “differences in the experience of trauma for children and adults”; the caregivers’ role in the parent-child relationship; “thoughts, feelings and actions associated with cycles of self-defeating behaviors, and anger and emotional regulation.” The goals of the sessions are “(1) to develop caregiver empathy for their child’s experience, (2) to reposition caregivers[] to be better able to provide their children with security and containment, (3) to improve caregiver self-regulation and disengage them from conflict with their child, and (4) to develop caregiver hope, self-efficacy and motivation for change.”

Phase B involves an average of eight individual treatment sessions with the children’s caregivers. In the earlier sessions, the clinician assesses caregivers’ understanding of the material from Phase A and potential barriers to a caregiver’s ability to engage fully in the intervention. After assessment, the sessions focus on assisting caregivers in identifying “their most impactful childhood experience” and creating “detailed diagrams of the thoughts, feelings and actions associated with” the experience. The goals of the sessions are helping caregivers understand their trauma and “ma[ke] changes in their own faulty belief system”; increasing caregiver empathy for their child’s traumatic experiences and resulting understandable behaviors and symptoms; disengaging caregivers from “conflictual interactions with their child”; and developing caregivers’ “emotional attunement with the[ir] child and the capacity to provide containment for the child’s traumatic experience(s) and symptoms.”

Finally, “Phase C consists of three to eight [treatment] sessions for the child with the caregiver present.” The clinician begins each session by meeting with the caregiver “to review homework, share observations, and plan for the session.” The clinician then works with the child on “processing trauma and attachment-related issues,” with the caregiver observing. Finally, the clinician meets with the caregiver again to discuss and reflect on the child’s reactions, revelations, and behaviors during the treatment session. In this phase, the clinician and the caregiver act as co-leaders to positively change the child’s life experiences. The goals of the sessions are to support caregivers in helping their children “regulate their emotion[s], interrupt negative behavioral patterns or address unresolved traumatic grief.”

The possible benefit of using this model for family conflict interventions is “its explicit recognition of the strong intergenerational component” of families’ traumatic experiences. It can provide parents with the tools necessary to resolve their own trauma, which is often a barrier to effective conflict resolution and a healthy parent-child relationship. Additionally, it emphasizes the importance of familial bonds by involving parents in the children’s therapy and strengthening the parents’ therapeutic skills as they co-direct their children’s treatment. While this model is intensive and may not be necessary for many families, the combination of each of these recommendations—screening for risk of negative post-divorce relationships, transitioning to a best interests of the family standard, recognizing the importance of past experiences, and taking a caregiver-first approach—allows courts to determine appropriate interventions that recognize and address the impacts of generational trauma.

Conclusion

The parent-child relationship shapes an individual’s personality, behaviors, and life path. Moreover, with the growing understanding of generational trauma and how it impacts families, family law must begin to focus on the generational effects of conflict. While this article concentrates on parental PDs, these recommendations also may apply to any family conflicts where a parent is living with a mental illness. Furthermore, divorce itself, while unavoidable, can be a source of generational trauma. As such, family courts must learn from generational trauma and tailor interventions toward remedying its effect and breaking the cycle.