A process developed in the Montreal family courts can restore parent-child bonds that have been ruptured by acute separation conflict or parental alienation. The PIFE (Processus d’Intervention Familiale Encadrée) is a supervised family intervention process that involves a specific type of professional collaboration between a psychologist, lawyers and a judge.
As described in recent paper by clinical psychologist Celia Lillo this process aims to be as unpolarising as possible by avoiding references to to one parent as alienated and the other alienation, speaking instead of a parent who has remained ‘closer’ and a parent who has been left out or ‘distanced’.
Parents are challenged by the court to demonstrate their collaborative efforts step-by-step through the work with the psychologist. The process starts with the parents’ lawyers meeting the psychologist about a 14-page agreement for the PIFE protocol. Following meetings with the parents to obtain their agreement the process is certified by the court. This detailed agreement plus a prompt intervention are likely to aid success in this tricky process.
The intervention phase can last up to a year, starting with a parent-child reconnection, the re-establshment of the bond and a rebalancing of weakened parent-child bonds and parental roles. During each stage the psychologist meets with the parents together and separately, the child alone and with each of the parents separately, and sometimes all tge family members together.
The close collaboration between all the professionals involved with this process is vital, with the parents receiving the same message from all participants in the process and feeling the support of a solid and coherent team.
While this type of interdisciplinary joint working might seem unlikely within the adversarial family court process, Scottish professionals involved in high-conflict court cases should consider whether these results from Canada justify trying a more collaborative approach. Shared Parenting Scotland has invited Celia Lillo to speak about tis work in our forthcoming series of webinars.
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