Journal of Family Therapy (1982) 4: 247-256

Custody and access: a literary lesson

Dora Black*

Myths and legends often help therapists to understand families and indi- viduals. Freud used Greekmyths creatively to illustrate universal psychic forces and more recently Ferreira (1965) and Byng Hall (1973) have explored the power of the family’s idiosyncratic myths to cause psycho- pathology. Modern story tellers address themselves to modern life and may illuminate for the therapists areas of their work. So it was for me when I read Beryl Bainbridge’s (1979) novel, Another Part of the Wood.

The exponential increase in the divorce rate over the past ten years has faced therapists with the challenging task of using their skills to help parents to solve the problem of parenting when they no longer wish to continue their marital relationship. Traditionally the decisions about custody and access have been made - or where there is agreement - approved by the Court. When a marriage breaks down most children live with their mothers but the Courts are anxious that justice is done to what is seen as father’s legitimate right to see his children. The problems that arise when there is continuing dispute about access and custody have led to the controversial suggestions that -on the one hand - the custodial parent should have complete control over the childrens’ contact with the other parent -including the right to terminate it (Goldstein et al., 1973) - and on the other hand to the idea of joint custody- where both parents reside near enough for the children to move easily from one house to the other - with a base in each. The children would set off for school on some days from mother’s house and on other days from father’s house and their friends would have easy access to them at both houses (Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, 1980).

The reality is that as Goldstein et al. say- there is no best solution in the interests of the child, once both their parents fail to live together in harmony. Their solution has been criticized as possibly denying to the child the right to know his father - and the existence of the organization Families Need Fathers? testifies more to the pain experienced by fathers

Received November 1981; revised manuscript received March 1982. * Consultant Child Psychiatrist, Edgware General Hospital. f Families Need Fathers, 198 High Road, N22.

247 0163-4445/82/050247 + lO$OS.OO/O @ 1982 The Associationfor FamilyTherapy

248 D. Black

experienced by fathers who need their families and are denied them, than vice versa. Some of these issues are explored by Bainbridge in a powerful and poignant story which unfolds like a Greek tragedy. Roland, a child of ‘only seven-or was it eight?’- his father is unsure- arrives with his father, Joseph, to spend a fortnight together (father’s ‘access’ time) in a hut on a forest farm in the Welsh mountains. Joseph is clearly at a loss to know how to entertain Roland and brings along a prot6g6 - Kidney- a simple young man he has befriended who ‘attends a clinic’ and is either mentally defective or a bit mad, or both. Father’s girl-friend, Dotty, comes too and he has asked, on impulse, a bizarre married couple, Lionel and May, with whom they are barely acquainted. There are three other men on site who make up the ill- assorted party. Joseph is an intelligent, impatient, impulsive man who is adored by Roland but who is unable to give himself up to the boy and allows himself to be distracted again and again from his promise to take Roland up the mountain. The other adults use Roland as an amusing plaything - but are too preoccupied with their own problems to care about him. Dotty-who is young and good at caring-probably perceives Roland’s needs more clearly than anyone, but she is in competition with him for Joseph’s love. Joseph means well- this extract is from the first chapter:

Out of a brown field rose themountain, partiallyobscured by mist. Tomorrow, he promised himself, he would take Roland by the hand and together they would climb to the summit and explore the tower. He would make it like an adventure for the boy, like a challenge, like a prologue to all the bigger and better adventures that they would have one day, like a stepping stone to the real mountains, capped with snow, that they would surely climb. It would be a beginning. He tried to imagine a grown Roland in a man-sized anorak, and failed. His wife had told him not to take a girl along with him. How had she put it? ‘Try to be alone with Roland for once and leave your bloody women behind.’ He studied the mountain beyond the trees. Of course it was really more of a large hill, but it would do for a start, and Roland was only seven. Or was it eight? He felt suddenly depressed at the thought of how easily Roland tired, how his clear treble voice asking intelligent questionscould degenerate into a whiningrequest to be carried. Their outing in the end could be a disaster and not a triumph (p. 14).

Roland is put to bed the first night alone- Bainbridge shows us how perceptive the child of divorce is- and how he uses the situation-

Roland, in bed, wiped at his face with the sheet and thought how cross his mother would be when he told her how frightened he had been at night. Soundlessly his lips shaped the words betraying his father, and he saw her face

Literary lesson 249

looming before him, eyes widening at the terrible story . . . ‘All alone, my little boy, left all alone.’ . . . Maybe hismother would buy him a train-set to make up for him being so unhappy out there in the wood. (p. 24).

Kidney takes tablets - Phenobarbitone - to sedate him. Joseph thinks they make him fat and hides them- he has a theory that Kidney is normal and needs encouragement only. Roland desperately wants to grow up to please Joseph.

It was only when he was with Joseph that he wanted to be big. When he was with Joseph it was always ‘Lift that, you’re a big boy now’, or ‘Climb that tree, Roland. . . . Higher . . . you’re big enough’, as if it showed he wasn’t big enough at all. Not like Kidney. If he could grow as big as Kidney, Joseph and he might do exercises in the morning on the tree and climb the mountain (p. 97).

One day they are basking in the sunshine and Joseph, looking at Roland’s bony frame, says hurtfully, ‘You’re much too thin’ . . . ‘you don’t eat enough’. Roland aches with self pity-Joseph senses it but can’t do anything but make it worse. ‘ “Little softie boy” he shouted, “Didums get all cross then? Didums feel a fool?” Tears flowed down the boy’s cheeks’ (p. 129).

Roland sets out for a walk with Kidney up the mountain - to prove to his father that he can do it and he asks permission (which father would not have given - he already suspects that Kidney is not a good influence) but father is too preoccupied to hear him. Roland discovers that Kidney has possession of the pills, that Joseph has forbidden. He wrests them from Kidney and secretly swallows them. If they make Kidney fat maybe they will help him to grow up.

He swallowed ten capsules in all, the last before they went through the gate. Ten, he reckoned, would be enough to put a lot of weight on him and make him tall and strong. Perhaps not all at once, but in a matter of days. He was only a little worried by what he had done. His mother had repeatedly warned him about aspirin and the tablets she took when she couldn’t sleep. They were a different kind of pill, he thought, pills to make you better when you were ill, not like Kidney’s pills, which were just to make him grow.

He was glad Joseph had stayed at home. The mountain had been a bit of a let- down. Only an old ruined tower, no battlements, no peep-holes, nothing, just a lot of old beer bottles.

Joseph would have yawned (p. 136).

Bainbridge again shows us another perception of the child of divorce- father must be protected from boredom.

The final chapters move inexorably to the inevitable tragedy. Joseph is alerted by Kidney to the fact that Roland has the pills but after a

250 D. Black

momentary anxiety- allayed by the sight of Roland’s peaceful slumber - he becomes involved in a complicated Monopoly game with his friends. All the adults in turn visit Roland but they are all preoccupied by their own anxieties and pay him little attention. Roland’s life ebbs away.

Joseph didn’t know his son - he hadn’t shared his life for many years - had he done so he would have known how Roland thought and reacted; he might have guessed that Roland took the pills to make himself bigger and would have known how to find out if Roland had taken the pills. He might have been able to plan a holiday which they could have both enjoyed and might not have needed to fence himself around with the self- centred people of the book-who in the end were the agents of the tragedy.

Unlike Roland, most children of divorce survive-perhaps more by luck than judgement - but how many accidents occur to children which are potentially avoidable because they are in the care of adults who do not know them intimately? Parenting young children is a time- consuming occupation - it is not a spare time pursuit to be taken up and put down at the whim of a preoccupied adult or by the order of a Judge who has been trained in concepts of justice which do not take into account the realities of the child’s needs.

Bainbridge’s skilful writing makes us aware of the burden that the Rolands of this world carry when they move from parent to parent - and the ways in which their functioning and development can be affected by the power they wield in the family system.

Separation and divorce part unhappy spouses who may then function better on their own or with new partners. For the children of divorce, it is probable that the loss of one parent outweighs the gain derived from a peaceful house. Furthermore since parenting cannot be so readily shed as marriage, and emotional divorce takes longer than legal divorce (Robinson, 1980), the parents may continue their conflict using the children as pawns in their battle or indeed the battlefield itself. Several studies have shown that the child casualties are high.

For example, Wallerstein and Kelly (1980) studied the adjustment of thirty-one children of middle-class parents who accepted divorce counselling in California. Since this group could be considered to be likely to have a good prognosis (hitherto stable children with no serious financial problems and parents willing to accept counselling), the findings were particularly disturbing. Nearly 50% of the younger children were significantly impaired in their functioning one year after the divorce and later adjustment seemed to depend on their havinggood

Literary lesson 251

and continuing contact with both parents, and on the absence of conflict between the parents.

Adolescents were another group in Wallerstein and Kelly’s study who had high rates of disturbance and self-esteem was lowered if they had little contact with the separated parents. If that parent was psychiatri- cally disturbed, however, continued contact was not always beneficial.

Children of divorce are referred to child guidance clinics twice as frequently as children from intact families and Kalter (1977) found that they constituted one-third of all his referrals. Where there is conflict about access and custody (in about 10% of cases) matters may be made worse for the child by our present legal procedures which are based upon an adversarial model where the child rarely has his own advocate. Legal processes are rarely swift and delays may leave the child in a limbo which may impair his psychological development.

Conciliation services (Frazer, 1980) play an important part in helping some parents to make decisions which will be the ‘least detrimental alternative’ ( Goldstein et al. , 1973) for the children. But in many parts of the country they do not exist; some parents will not use them, and for some situations they are not effective. Kressel and his colleagues (1980) studied couples who used a structured mediation service of three to eight sessions and a control group who used the legal adversarial system and developed a typology of divorcing couples which correlated with outcome. They found that the couples who were most successful in using the service to resolve their problems were those who had either relatively high levels of overt conflict with frequent and open communication (the ‘direct conflict’ pattern) or a notably low level of ambivalence about ending the marriage - these were those in which ‘the flame of intimacy had come to burn least brightly- and so too the heat of conflict’ (the disengaged conflict group). In contrast two other groups did poorly using structured mediation - the enmeshed and the autistic groups - both characterized by a high degree of individual and interactive pathology.

For these latter families, and especially for those where a child or children are showing signs of distress or disturbance, mental health professionals working with disturbed children and their families have an important r61e to play, because of their expertise based on knowledge derived from a study of child development, of child and adult psychiatric disorder and of family functioning. They bring to the problem their diagnostic skills, including their ability to assess the mental state of the child and to interpret it to parents and to the court, and their skilled observation and evaluation of family interaction. In addition they

252 D. Black

should be able to detect parental mental illness, and assess its effect on parenting ability.

They can be of unique service to the child by acting as his advocate when both parents are legally represented and are in conflict. Finally they bring their skill in therapies relevant to helping families to improve their functioning.

Case example

Michael and Rosalyn are seven and five years. They live with their mother who had broken up the marriage three months earlier. Both children had symptoms which led their general practitioner to refer them to a child psychiatric clinic. Rosalyn, the more robust child had nightmares, whilst Michael was failing at school and was aggressive and disobedient, especially after a weekend stay with his father. All four came to the first session. Seen together, the following system became clear.

Mother had terminated the marriage in which she had felt undermined by a husband whom she felt was immature and too possessive, especially of the children. It was her one act of bravery and self-assertion and was totally incomprehensible to father who felt affronted and hurt by her decision and was intent on trying to injure her in return. He had refused her suggestion of marriage guidance in the past but was willing to seek help for his children. There was a long drawn out legal battle going on over maintenance but custody (to mother) had been agreed. However, mother had recently restricted access - previously very generous, because she felt ‘taken over’ by father as she had done before during their marriage-and wanted to put more distance between them. She described how he came into the house to pick up the children, examined her calendar and then quizzed the children about her social life. Father had demonstrated how bound he still felt to his wife by kissing her elbow tenderly as he followed her into my room. At the same time he waxed angry about her ‘desertion’ and how unfair it was that he had lost everything- his children, his wife and his house. At least the latter she wouldn’t enjoy. He was insisting that the house was sold, not because he needed the money, but because ‘it is too painful to me to see my family living where I can no longer live’. He dismissed her contributions contemptuously, almost spitting her out. The children were clearly distressed by his anger and contempt and bothbegantoattackmother-‘shedoesn’tletusgotodaddyenough’(Michael). ‘Poor daddy, he’s lonely without us- he cries himself to sleep-she’s horrible and mean!’ (Rosalyn).

There was the quality of a well-rehearsed song and dance act about this. Mother looked distressed and father sat smiling somewhat smugly. Neither parent moved to check the children’s growing rudeness to mother which became quite shocking. Indeed I had the feeling that mother almost welcomed it because she felt so guilty about her one act of courage, and felt she deserved to

Literary Lesson 253

be punished. The children merely took over from her husband in beating her UP.

More observation of their system indicated that mother double-bound father. She sent him messages that they were separate, then called him for help in disciplining the children, or accepted his offer to meet her from the station. Neither parent had yet learnt that they were indeed divorced and accepted intrusions into each others privacy which confused the children - were they married or not? Could they hope for reunion? The rows the parents had before the divorce still continued and father used the children to spy on mother.

Father, an only child, had lived with an ailing mother who died when he was fourteen after five years of deteriorating health. He had been sent to boarding school before her death and then went on to a successful career, but his emotional life was less happy and he had had a previous unsuccessful marriage. When talking about his mother he cried copiously and I felt his ambivalent behaviour to his wife reflected his ambivalent feelings to the mother who couldn’t cope with his teenage rebellion (and sent him away) and then abandoned him by dying.

Mother came from a close warm family - she too was an only child and her father and his were professional colleagues in the same town.

The dilemma here for the therapist is to find a way of working that meets the needs of the individuals and also changes the system. The father longed for the intimacy with his children which he never had with his parents, but could only use ‘dirty’ means to achieve it which were damaging to the children because he involved them in his fights with mother and played on their emotions, e.g. with complaints of being lonely. It would be easy to agree with mother who wanted to restrict access and yet the children needed to know their father and to be deprived of him would increase their attacks on mother. Fathering could not be effective and might be more dangerous if he saw his children less. As with Joseph and Roland, occasional holidays with children he barely knew might lead to tragedy. Could I help them to find a way of improving their parenting relationship whilst respecting their separateness as adult individuals?

Like Roland, Michael had learned to exploit the situation. One day he told his mother that she sucked men’s bums. Father admitted he had used a similar expression! Michael knew that he had to give mother this derogatorymessage to win father’s approval.

Rosalyn yearned for father’s love and approval but he clearly disapproved of girls and women. To win his love she must be strong and attack mother. Her disturbance could come out only when she was asleep and off-guard. One nightmare she related was of daddy being cut up in little pieces by a horrid monster.

The way I chose was to offer to work with the parents towards the goal of joint custody as described by Nehls and Morgenbesser (1980). By specifically excluding the children from these sessions I hoped to be doing two things - modelling for the parents a need to draw boundaries

254 D. Black

so that the children weren’t used in their quarrels and also saying to the children, ‘Your parents have some work to do to sort out important decisions which only they can take - they are not decisions children can make. They will listen to you but only they can decide where you should live, where you go to school, how often you speak to and see the parent with whom you don’t live, etc.’ There have also been family sessions where the parents have talked to the children about their decisions and demonstrated that they can have an effective parental coalition whilst being separate people. It has been helpful to use the analogy of a parent teacher relationship. Indeed we test out every step by asking ourselves ‘Would he/she do/say that to Rosalyn’s teacher?’ Such painful but necessary decisions have to be made as: each parent is wholly responsible for discipline in hidher own house. Now, father, arriving to take the children out when mother and Michael are having a row, will say, ‘I’ll come back later’, rather than succumbing to mother’s frantic plea to ‘do something’. When Rosalyn eagerly reports to father that mother had a boy-friend to stay, father will remind her that she also has friends to stay the night and so does he. Before, he would rise to the bait and yell ‘Whore!’ down the ‘phone in the children’s hearing.

To achieve this change has required me to do a balancing act- throwing the weight of my authority and expertise first on one side (‘It’s none of your business how she spend her money’) and then on the other (You’re not his nanny or his wife -stop behaving as if you were’).

We have also had to help father to mourn and finally bury his mother, and to use the understanding he gained to forgive his parents for ‘failing’ him. In doing this, he also begins to forgive himself and to stop persecuting his ex-wife.

In working with the children of divorce and their families we must aim to help the parents to meet the children’s needs. At their first session I get parents to consider these needs and who should meet them. We usually produce something like this:

The needs of children

Nurturance- physical, intellectual, emotional and moral. Protection -shelter, clothing, continuity. Socialization- discipline, control, opportunity for and training in

Individuation - knowledge of life and family history and progress to

Role modelling- gender, spouse and parent behaviour.

socializing with peers and adults.

autonomy.

Literary lesson 255

For all these needs, parents usually conclude that two parents are better than one, and the therapeutic work has already begun. Usinginteractive techniques (Goldman and Coane 1977; Bentovim and Gilmour, 1981; Black and Bentovim, 1982; McDermott et al., 1978: Solow and Adams, 1977) such as task setting, mutual parent-child games playing, geneo- grams, parental retelling of life history, etc. one can assess the functioning of the family history, the attachement patterns and strengths, the mental state of the children and parents and the parenting capacity of each parent. After this assessment a treatment plan is evolved with the family setting goals and negotiating a contract.

One of the less pleasant tasks is to have the courage to recommend termination of parental contact in the rare cases when we conclude that the damage done by continuing the association will be greater than that done by ending it. This can sometimes be indicated where there is severe psychiatric disorder in a parent (psychopathy or more rarely psychosis) but may also be because the enmity of the custodial parent is intractable. In a recent case where the father had left mother for the maternal sister, the action created a conflict of loyalties for the maternal grandparents and the hatred it engendered for father in mother and grandparents made it impossible for father to exercise his right of access to the children, without door-step conflagration.

It seemed better to recommend temporary termination of access until the family’s grief and bitterness had subsided as his recurrent presence merely inflamed it.

Every problem arising from separation and divorce is different and family therapists have an important contribution to make to the well- being of the family members. They should bear in mind three principles.

(1) Observe the interaction between the subsystems, and formulate

(2) Take up a non-adversarial position, using their expertise and

(3) Address themselves to the task of ensuring ‘good-enough’

the problem to be treated.

authority to act as childrens advocate.

parenting to meet the child’s developmental needs.

In these situations parents have no ‘rights’. The only right is that of the child’s to his parents. Children should not be awarded like prizes in an endurance contest. To be a parent, especially of young children entails a willingness to spend time familiarizing oneself with their individual per- sonalities. Only in that way will tragedies like Another Part ofthe Wood be avoided.

256 D. Black

References

BAINBRIDGE, B. (1979) Another Part of the Wood. Fontana Books. BENTOVIM A. and GILMOUR L. (1981) A family therapy interactional approach to

decision making in child care, access and custody cases.JournalofFamily Therapy, 3: 65 77.

BLACK, D. and BENTOVIM, A. (1982) An interactive approach to problems of access and custody in divorce and child-care decision-making. British Journal of Clinical and Social Psychiatry (in press).

BYNG HALL, J. (1 973) Family myths used as a defence in conjoint family therapy. British Journal of Medical Psychology, 46: 239-250.

FERREIRA, A. (1965) Family Myths; the covert roles of the relationship. In: M. Pines (Ed.), Proceedings of International Congress ofPsychotherapy. Basel. Karger.

FRASER, D. (1980) Divorce -Avon style - the work of a specialist welfare team. Social Work Today, 11: 12- 15.

GOLDMAN, J. and COANE, J. (1977) Family therapy after the divorce: developing a strategy. Family Process, 16: 357-362.

GOLDSTEIN, J., SOLNIT, A. and FREUD, A. (1973) Beyond the Best Interests of the Child. London. Collier Macmillan.

GROUP FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF PSYCHIATRY (1980) Divorce, Child Custody and the Family. New York. Mental Health Materials Center.

KALTER, N . (1977) Children of divorce in an out patient psychiatric population. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 47: 23- 39.

KRESSEL, K. JAFFEE, N. TUCKMAN, B . , WATSON, C. and DEUTSCH, M., (1980) A typology of divorcing couples. Family Process, 19: 101 116.

NEHLS, N. and MORGENBESSER, M. (1980) Joint custody: an exploration of the issues. Family Process 19: 117- 126.

ROBINSON, M. (1980) Step-families: a reconstituted family system. Journal of Family Therapy, 2: 45- 69.

WALLERSTEIN, J. S . , and KELLY, J. B. (1980) Surviving the Break-up. London. Grant MacIntyre.