Cultic Studies Review, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2005, Page 18
In the meantime, these findings may be useful to clinicians working with adults who
experienced parental alienation as a child. The participants in this study seemed to believe
that what they experienced was so unusual and idiosyncratic as to defy classification or
categorization. It is possible that utilizing the heuristic of cults may provide them with a
framework for understanding their experience and their response to it. A body of knowledge
has been developed about cult leaders and the strategies they use which may help the adult
children of parental alienation feel connected to a larger group and may provide them with a
way to think about their parents and themselves that facilitates recovery and growth.
Parents who are currently losing a child to an alienating parent may also find this framework
useful for understanding the changes they see in their children. For these reasons the
current findings should be used to spur future research and could inform practice as deemed
useful by clinicians currently working with those affected by parental alienation.
Notes
1 Other definitions of cults exist although none is definitive. See Langone (2004) and McKibben,
Lynn, and Malinoski, (2002) for a discussion of definitional issues.
2 This section was eliminated for the participants whose parents never separated/divorced.
3 Although Ofshe (1992) argues that the beliefs adopted may be situationally based and discarded
once the person is removed from the environment.
4 They also experienced other outcomes that may be unique to parental alienation (Baker, 2004).
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Dr. Amy J. L. Baker has a Ph.D. in developmental psychology from Teachers College of
Columbia University. She has expertise in attachment theory, parent involvement in their
children's education, youth development, and child welfare. She is the author or co-author
of one book and over 40 scholarly articles. She is also conducts research at the New York
Foundling Hospital. She can be reached at amyjlbaker@aol.com.
This article is an electronic version of an article originally published in Cultic Studies Review, 2005, Volume 4,
Number 1, pages 1-29. Please keep in mind that the pagination of this electronic reprint differs from that of the
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