Family forensic psychologists serve crucial roles in educating the court, attorneys and families themselves about psychological issues that they need to understand to resolve family conflicts successfully. We also know from our professional experience that how a problem is framed and the descriptors we apply to behavior can have an enormous impact on both the progress of a case and outcomes for families. Some recent experiences have underscored the importance of this concept and of maintaining careful, conscious practices for considering the language we select and how it impacts problem solving, professional interactions and outcomes for families. These concepts are relevant across many issues that family forensic psychologists (FFPs) deal with when providing services to court-involved families.
Does our language imply that a problem is solvable or hopeless? Does it adequately acknowledge complexity in individual functioning and family interaction, or does it oversimplify and imply blame? When we discuss the state of professional knowledge on a contested issue, do we add light or heat? Do we open doors or close them?
Discussions about language, its use and meaning arise in many areas of psychology. Recent debates about evidence-based and evidence-informed practice, the types of evidence we should consider and inferences we can draw exist throughout psychology. Some of these discussions impact directly on how we provide services, what services we recommend for families and how we implement service and treatment plans. In most areas of family forensic psychology, we do not have absolute findings telling us what will work with a particular family. But the importance of being evidence-informed in our practices (Sexton et al., 2011) impacts on our ethical obligations as well as outcomes for families. It is critically important that we carefully explain what we are relying on (or not) and why. These debates emerged as we completed our upcoming edited volume on evidence informed intervention, as they have arisen in many discussions about the levels of evidence that inform, or should inform, the services that we provide to families. How manualized must an intervention be to contribute to our knowledge about what works? If we don't have a randomized controlled trial (RCT), does that mean we know nothing? Sexton and colleagues (2011) provide useful constructs for considering the level of evidence supporting an intervention, which Greenberg and Lebow (2016) applied to family law cases. Simply put, our argument has been that as psychological knowledge has advanced, we may harm families by either ignoring what is known or insisting that only RCTs can be seriously considered as enhancing our knowledge.
The legal context tends to both oversimplify and exaggerate those issues, such that judges or other professionals are presented with broad assertions about whether psychological evidence exists and how it should be interpreted. In a prior column, I discussed the use of psychological science in family forensics and how conclusions can be distorted by how literature is selected, excerpted and presented. Currently, a task force of the Association of Family and Conciliation courts is drafting proposed guidelines for the use of research in family justice settings. Their work emphasizes, among other things, ensuring that one is evenhanded, inclusive and careful about generalizing from one research study or one research method to other populations or specific families. While that project focuses on research per se, similar principles can be applied to the use of any scientific literature. Practitioners need to be wise in considering scientific literature, including original studies, research reviews and nonempirical scientific literature. A critical function of the scientific literature includes professional discussion of how to interpret scientific findings and how to appropriately apply, generalize and adapt prior knowledge to the unique circumstances of an individual family. In a legal context that is often attracted more to headlines and absolute findings than to complexity and nuance, it is critical to consider a variety of perspectives and maintain appropriate boundaries between scientific knowledge and advocacy. Maintaining those boundaries can be a challenge for any FFP.
Another area in which psychological language can be powerful is in the use of diagnostic terminology. Accurate diagnosis and assessment may be critical for both understanding families and securing appropriate services, particularly when a child or parent has a specific, treatable or manageable condition. As discussed in prior columns, diagnostic language originally created for the purpose of accurate assessment and treatment planning can take on different meanings when used or abused as part of a legal struggle. It has become common in high conflict disputes for parents to label one another as having a personality disorder, with the implication that the other parent is untreatable or that the alleging parent has no responsibility for peaceful co-parenting. While many court-involved parents have enduring patterns of relationship dysfunction, others are responding to crises created by parental separation or involvement with the court. The risks and benefits of introducing these diagnoses in the legal context were discussed extensively in the 2016 (Vol. 32, No. 3) edition of this column and can also be found in (Martindale, 2016). For purposes of this discussion, it is sufficient to note that the language we select can have impact on the resolution of the case and that FFP's should consider whether their selection of language is more likely to add clarity or inflame the situation. We should be familiar with research on interventions for parents and families and cautious in proclaiming parents to be failures or families to be hopeless based on incomplete information.
The impact of high conflict family relationships on children is another frequent concern of FFP's and is another area in which language and conceptual choices are critical. The previously discussed issues of selection of professional literature and the labels that may be applied to parents are also relevant here. Historically, disrupted parent-child relationships were often viewed as the fault of one parent or the other, adding to the focus on blame, which is already an unfortunate part of high conflict disputes. Some terminology, such as "parent alienation syndrome," specifically implies that the preferred parent is to blame. At the other extreme, advocates may dispute well-established findings about children's developmental needs and vulnerability to external influence and assume that disrupted relationships are entirely the fault of the nonpreferred parent. Caught in the middle are the children impacted by these disputes and the ethical psychologists who try to resolve family issues while being buffeted by intense interpersonal and political forces. Discussion of family problems and children's impaired coping abilities can be distorted into arguments over which parent is to blame or what it means to support a child's independent needs.
Even among ethical professionals, intense controversy exists about how to conceptualize, label, describe, understand and treat high conflict family dynamics. Psychologists disagree about what scientific literature is relevant and how it can be appropriately applied to troubled families. To address some of these controversies, APA recently established a Working Group to Review Scientific Literature for High Conflict Family Relationships with Child Involvement. The charge for the working group is to review the scientific literature on families experiencing high-conflict family relationships and custody issues. The group will review and synthesize the current peer-reviewed scientific literature and scholarly research in this area and recommend next steps for advancing knowledge development and application in this area.
No one expects the task of the working group to be easy, as discussions of such emotionally loaded issues never are. Parents tend to be absolutist on these issues. Unfortunately, professionals sometimes mirror those dynamics. Parents may also be vulnerable to appealing but overly simplistic descriptions of the problem that mirror their own biases the internet has become a potent force in inflaming disputes. Bias may be difficult to recognize, and conscious, deliberate efforts to manage it are important. Our ability to resolve these problems may depend on whether we can maintain conscious habits for considering different perspectives, defining our terms and carefully considering the impact of the language we use.
References
Greenberg, L.R. (2016). Diagnostic Language and Litigating Parents: When is it Useful? The Family Psychologist, 32, No. 3.
Greenberg, L.R., & Lebow, J. (2016). Putting it all together: Effective intervention planning for children and families. In Parenting Plan Evaluations: Applied Research for the Family Court (2nd ed.). Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. (Reprinted from: Not in File).
Martindale, D.A. (2016). Diagnoses in child custody evaluation reports. The Matrimonial Strategist, 34(2)
Sexton, T., Gordon, K.C., Gurman, A., Lebow, J. , Holtzworth-Munroe, A. and Johnson, S.(2011).Guidelines for Classifying Evidence - Based Treatments in Couple and Family Therapy. Family Process, 50(3), 377-392. doi:doi:10.1111/j.1545-5300.2011.01363.x.