The Not-Forgotten Child: Ten Adults Recall Being Alienated as Children — Bentley & Matthewson (2020)

Love Over Exile is a plain-language research archive on parental alienation, written by Malcolm Smith — an alienated parent and author of the forthcoming book Love Over Exile — for non-specialist readers (other alienated parents, family members, therapists, lawyers) who want to understand the evidence base without a psychology degree or a journal subscription. This page is one entry in that archive.

What the Researchers Asked

In 2020, the published research on adults who had been alienated as children was small and almost entirely American. Amy Baker’s foundational 2005 paper in The American Journal of Family Therapy and her 2007 Norton monograph Adult Children of Parental Alienation Syndrome — both based on a forty-person US qualitative sample — were the field’s references. A handful of Italian quantitative studies from the Verrocchio group filled out the picture in the symptom layer.

What the literature did not yet have was a sustained, methodologically transparent qualitative study from outside that US programme. Caitlin Bentley and Dr Mandy Matthewson, working at the University of Tasmania’s Family and Interpersonal Relationships Lab, set out to build one. Their question was specific: what do alienated adult children, in their own words, describe as the lasting impact of their childhood experience?

The answer, published in The American Journal of Family Therapy in 2020, is the paper this article translates. It is the foundation dataset of the Tasmanian PA-research programme. The ten interviews it contains were later folded into a doubled sample by Verhaar, Matthewson and Bentley (2022), the open-access follow-on. The two papers should be read as a pair.

Three adult-outcome studies compared — Baker (2007), Bentley & Matthewson (2020), Verhaar et al. (2022)

The Bentley paper sits in the middle of a three-generation qualitative sequence. Reading the three side by side makes its specific contribution visible.

	Baker (2007)	Bentley & Matthewson (2020)	Verhaar et al. (2022)
Where published	Norton (book)	American Journal of Family Therapy	Children (open access)
Country	United States	Australia (international recruitment)	Australia (international recruitment)
Type	Qualitative interviews + book monograph	Qualitative interview study	Qualitative interview study
Sample size	40 adults	10 adults	20 adults — incorporates Bentley’s 10 + 10 new
Gender balance	Heavily female-skewed	8 female / 2 male (80% / 20%)	60% female / 40% male
Severity screening	None — self-identification	None — self-identification	Baker Strategies Questionnaire >40
Method	Thematic interpretation	Braun & Clarke thematic analysis	Braun & Clarke + Forero rigour criteria
Theme structure	Seven impact areas	Seven themes (the framework)	Four overarching themes (the quantification)
Within-sample %	Not enumerated	”All participants” had MH issues; further % not reported	100% MH impact, 30% suicidal, 55% depression, 50% intergenerational
Open access	No	No (paywalled at Tandfonline)	Yes (CC-BY)

Two things to read off the table. First, Bentley and Matthewson are the field’s theme architects: the seven-theme structure that organises the Tasmanian programme’s reading of adult outcomes was identified by them in 2020. Second, Verhaar 2022 is not an independent replication — the doubled sample retains the original ten participants, so the two papers are statistically linked.

The implication for citation hygiene is that they should be cited together as the Tasmanian Adult-Outcome Pair, not pretended to be two independent confirmations of the same finding.

What They Did — Methods in Plain English

The paper is an empirical qualitative study. That phrase carries specific meaning, and unpacking it matters for a general reader trying to weigh what the paper does and does not establish.

Empirical means the authors collected new data. They did not re-analyse existing literature; they interviewed actual people about actual experiences. Qualitative means the data is language, not numbers. The authors recorded conversations, transcribed them, and analysed the transcripts thematically — a method that captures the texture of lived experience at a depth a survey instrument cannot reach.

A qualitative study with ten participants is a different instrument from a quantitative one. It cannot tell you what percentage of all alienated adult children develop depression. What it can do is give you a richly-documented map of the kinds of experience alienated adult children describe — and that map, once produced, becomes the structure subsequent quantitative work has something specific to count.

The sample. Ten adults — eight women and two men — who had experienced parental alienation during childhood. The recruitment was international, via parental-alienation support groups and online networks. The paper describes participants as “adults who had experienced parental alienation during childhood” without applying a formal severity-screening instrument; that gap is the methodological limitation the Verhaar 2022 follow-on fixed by adding the Baker Strategies Questionnaire as a 40-point cut-off.

The interviews. Sixty to ninety minutes each, semi-structured — meaning the researchers had a guide of questions they asked everyone, but participants were free to follow threads the researchers had not anticipated. The format allowed depth of recall and emotional disclosure without reducing the conversation to a checklist of pre-set categories.

The analysis. The authors used Braun and Clarke’s (2006) thematic analysis framework — the most widely-cited qualitative analytic methodology in psychology, with explicit phases of familiarisation, initial coding, theme generation, theme review, definition, and write-up. Themes are required to recur across multiple participants and to capture something patterned in the data. The seven themes the paper reports are what survived that process across the ten transcripts.

What the paper is not. It is not a systematic review — it is a primary study. It is not quantitative — the seven themes are descriptive, and within-sample percentages for individual symptoms are not extensively reported beyond the headline “all of the participants experienced mental health issues”. It is not longitudinal — participants were interviewed at one point in time. And it is not severity-screened — the sample’s heterogeneity in terms of childhood-exposure severity is unknown.

These are real limitations, named plainly in Section 6. They do not erase the paper’s contribution. They mean it should be cited as what it is — the qualitative theme map — and not as more.

The seven-theme picture at a glance

The paper’s organising structure is the seven themes. The diagram below sets them out together so the shape of what the paper documents is visible in a single frame, with the verbatim abstract claim — all participants experienced mental-health issues — anchoring the centre.

What They Found — Six Key Findings

The paper’s findings are organised by the seven themes set out above. The six sub-sections below pull out the readings most useful for a non-specialist audience — what the paper documented, in the authors’ framing, with verbatim language used wherever the abstract or downstream peer-reviewed citations support it. Within-sample percentages beyond the headline are limited, by design of a qualitative paper that built the theme map rather than counting against it.

1. Alienating behaviours documented as abuse

The first theme is the conceptual foundation. Across the ten interviews, participants described a coherent pattern of behaviour by the alienating parent that the authors framed, in the paper’s verbatim language, as abuse perpetrated by the alienating parent.

The pattern had seven sub-themes — direct abuse (verbal, emotional, sometimes physical); sustained denigration of the targeted parent in the child’s hearing; adultification, in which the child was made into the alienating parent’s emotional caretaker and ally against the targeted parent; deliberate disruption of the child’s relationship with the targeted parent through scheduling, communication blocking, and emotional manipulation; the perception of the alienating parent as self-absorbed, critical, and lacking empathy; emotional or sometimes physical neglect; and active suppression of the child’s own emotional experience whenever it conflicted with the alienating parent’s narrative.

Naming this cluster as abuse mattered for the field. It positioned Bentley and Matthewson within the wider Harman, Kruk and Hines (2018) family-violence framing — the framing the Tasmanian programme has built on through Verhaar 2022 and Matthewson et al. (2023). The Bentley paper is the primary qualitative anchor for the abuse classification of parental alienating behaviours in adult-recall data.

For an alienated parent, the implication is clear. What you may have struggled to call abuse — because the alienating parent did not lay hands on the child, because the harm was relational and chronic rather than acute — is in this literature documented as abuse, with the longest-standing qualitative interview data the field has on what its consequences look like in adulthood.

2. “All of the participants experienced mental health issues”

The mental-health theme is the most-cited finding from this paper. It is a verbatim quotation from the abstract: every one of the ten participants reported mental-health difficulties they linked to their childhood experience of parental alienation.

The conditions named across the sample were anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, suicidal ideation, low self-esteem, low self-worth, and problematic substance use. This is the seven-condition cluster that has organised downstream Tasmanian-programme work and that Verhaar 2022 later expanded with within-sample percentages.

The paper does not extensively report individual-condition rates within the n=10 sample. That quantification work — 100% mental-health impact, 30% suicidal ideation, 55% problematic alcohol, 55% depression and anxiety — was done by Verhaar et al. (2022) on the doubled sample, which retained Bentley’s original ten participants.

What Bentley 2020 establishes, on its own evidence, is the uniformity of the mental-health impact across the sample — all of the participants, not most, not the most-severely-alienated subgroup. Every one of the ten adults Bentley and Matthewson interviewed described a mental-health cost they attributed to the childhood alienation. That uniformity is the strongest single qualitative finding in the paper.

3. Relationship difficulties — fear of loss and difficulty trusting

Across the sample, adult relationships were reported as compromised in five sub-thematic ways. Peer friendships were harder to form and harder to keep; romantic relationships frequently mirrored the dysfunctional dynamic of the original family system; the capacity to maintain healthy long-term bonds was reduced.

Two sub-themes recurred most strongly. Fear of loss — most participants described avoiding conflict in relationships, or avoiding entering relationships at all, because the prospect of being abandoned again carried the weight of the original abandonment. Difficulty trusting — participants struggled to believe other people would support them, and consequently hid their difficulties from people who could in principle have helped.

This is the relational architecture the wider attachment literature would call insecure-anxious or insecure-avoidant. Matthewson et al. (2023)‘s reunification paper picks up the thread explicitly, citing this 2020 paper for the position that adults alienated as children are less likely to be securely attached in their adult relationships — a clinical finding with direct treatment implications.

4. Learning and development — identity confusion and delayed attainment

The fourth theme has two sub-themes, both important and both often overlooked when discussions of parental alienation focus on the emotional layer alone.

Identity confusion. Participants described a lasting uncertainty about who they were — traceable to a childhood in which one parent had systematically defined the other parent (and by inference parts of the child’s own makeup, including their physical resemblances and personality traits) as bad. Knowing oneself becomes harder when half of where you came from has been pre-emptively narrated as something to disown.

Reduced or delayed educational and career attainment. This is verbatim from the abstract — and it names a real cost paid by alienated adult children that is invisible in many discussions of the harm. The developmental disruption of the alienation years bleeds into school performance, into career trajectory, into the long arc of work-life development. The paper documents that adult outcome alongside the more emotionally legible ones.

5. Grief and loss — the dominant emotional residue

The fifth theme is grief, and it is structured into five sub-themes that together describe the emotional architecture of adult recall.

• Anger — often turned inward, experienced as self-criticism rather than directed at the alienating parent.
• Missed experiences — childhood milestones with the targeted parent that did not happen, ranging from the everyday (a parent at the school play) to the structural (a relationship with a parent’s extended family that was never permitted to form).
• Guilt — in particular, the guilt of having rejected the targeted parent at the alienating parent’s encouragement, recognised retrospectively as something the child had not chosen freely.
• Grieving the lost parental relationship — active mourning of what the child–targeted-parent relationship was and could not become.
• Disappointment — a quieter sub-theme, but consistent: disappointment in the alienating parent, in the family system, in the institutions that did not intervene, and in oneself.

Notably, grief is the largest emotional category — not anger. The same shape recurs in the Verhaar 2022 follow-on (60% grief, 45% anger, 45% shame). Adult children of alienation carry, dominantly, grief.

For clinicians, the implication is treatment-relevant. The grief-of-the-living-parent register the alienated-parent literature describes as ambiguous loss has a parallel form in the adult child’s experience.

6. Coping and healing — resilience, therapy, awareness, advocacy

The seventh theme is the most hopeful in shape, and important not to skip in a summary of a paper whose other findings are heavy.

Participants described four broad coping strategies:

• Resilience and meaning-making — building a personal narrative that integrates the childhood experience without being defined by it.
• Reunification attempts with the targeted parent — actively pursuing reconnection, sometimes successful, sometimes complicated by mistrust and unresolved loss, frequently more successful than family-court professionals had predicted.
• Therapy benefits — particularly trauma-informed therapy, which most participants reported as central to their adult recovery work.
• Awareness and advocacy — turning the personal experience into work that supports other alienated families, professionalising the lived experience into a contribution.

Healing was described — across the sample — as slow, partial, and possible. Three accurate words to keep together. The paper does not offer the false comfort that recovery is automatic or complete; it does offer the honest comfort that meaningful recovery is a documented outcome for adults who do the work, and that the people who have done it have left a map.

For an adult child of alienation reading this, the seventh theme is the part to read twice. The other six describe what the wound looks like; the seventh describes the people who have lived through it and made something out of it.

Why This Matters

Three reasons this paper still matters in 2026, six years after publication.

First, it built the theme map the field still uses. The seven themes Bentley and Matthewson identified — alienating behaviours, mental health, relationship difficulties, learning and development, grief and loss, disconnection and dysfunction, coping and healing — are the structure that organised the Verhaar 2022 follow-on, that Matthewson et al. (2023) extended into reunification, and that downstream training materials use as the canonical layout of adult-recall PA outcomes. The 2020 paper is the architectural drawing; the later papers are the buildings.

Second, it is the foundation dataset. The ten interviews Bentley conducted were retained in the Verhaar 2022 doubled sample. That dataset overlap is important to be transparent about for citation hygiene — Bentley 2020 and Verhaar 2022 are not statistically independent confirmations of each other.

But it is also important to recognise what it means: the original ten transcripts have been read, recoded, and worked over twice now, by independent coders applying different methodological frames. The themes have survived that scrutiny. The seven-theme structure is a stable finding, not an artefact of one coding pass.

Third, it framed parental alienating behaviours as abuse in adult-recall data — from outside the US. Before 2020, the abuse classification was carried mostly by Harman, Kruk and Hines (2018)‘s theoretical paper in Psychological Bulletin and Baker’s US qualitative work. Bentley and Matthewson added the Australian qualitative anchor.

Their framing of the alienating-parent behaviours as a coherent abuse pattern, supported by adult-recall data from outside the US programme, strengthened the cross-jurisdictional case for treating PA as a child-protection issue rather than a private family-law dispute. The case has continued to gain ground — UK Family Justice Council guidance in the 2020s draws on adult-recall evidence of this kind to support earlier intervention.

For readers of this site, the reason the paper matters is more direct. If you are a targeted parent, this paper is part of the evidence base that says what your child is experiencing has a documented trajectory in adulthood — anxiety, depression, identity confusion, relationship difficulties, grief — and a documented set of coping strategies that work. If you are an adult child of alienation, this paper says the experience you carry has been mapped — by researchers, in plain academic English, with seven named themes you may recognise yourself within.

What This Means for You

If you are a targeted parent. The paper is part of the evidence base for two related propositions, both worth holding in mind through years of waiting. First, what is happening to your child in the alienation has consequences that travel with them into adulthood — measurable in mental health, in relationships, in identity, in education and career, in grief. Untreated alienation does not resolve quietly when the child reaches eighteen.

Second, the seventh theme exists. Adults alienated as children do, in a documented pattern, find their way to recovery work — through therapy, through meaning-making, through reunification attempts, through advocacy. Your job between now and then is to be findable, non-reactive, and alive when the moment arrives. The When Adult Children Wake Up page on this site is the long-form translation of how that arrival actually goes.

If you are an adult child of alienation yourself. You are within a documented pattern. The seven themes are the names that have been put to your experience by researchers who interviewed people very like you and listened carefully to what they said.

The mental-health difficulties, the relationship difficulties, the identity confusion, the grief — they are not character flaws and they are not unique. They are the lasting signature of a specific form of childhood relational abuse, and they have a treatment pathway. Trauma-informed therapy with a clinician who understands parental alienation is the single most actionable starting point.

If your therapist does not know this literature, the open-access Verhaar 2022 follow-on is the paper to send them — it is freely readable, contains the same theme structure, and adds the within-sample percentages that translate the qualitative finding into clinical-grade context.

If you are a clinician working with separated or post-separated families. The Bentley 2020 paper is the qualitative theme map worth keeping on the shelf for adult-recall presentations. Adults presenting in mid-life with depression, anxiety, identity confusion, dysfunctional adult relationships, and reduced educational or career attainment they trace back to a difficult childhood with one parent in active conflict with the other should be screened for parental-alienation exposure.

The Baker Strategies Questionnaire — the instrument Verhaar 2022 used as the over-40 inclusion screen — is the most practical screening tool. If exposure is confirmed, the Complex PTSD framework Verhaar 2022 argued for is the working clinical formulation. The treatment pathway differs meaningfully from the borderline-personality formulation that has been the historic default.

If you are a family member, friend, or partner of an adult child of alienation. The fear of loss, the difficulty trusting, the hidden-difficulty pattern, the grief that does not resolve — these are not who they are. They are what the research describes happening to people with their childhood history.

That framing is not an excuse for behaviour that hurts you. It is an orientation that may make the behaviour legible — and that may shift what the appropriate response is. Patient support, including encouragement of professional support, tends to produce better outcomes than pressure, criticism, or treating the patterns as personal failings.

What the Paper Doesn’t Tell Us — Limitations

Five honest limitations, named plainly so the paper can be cited responsibly.

First, the sample is small (n=10) and gender-skewed (80% female, 20% male). Verhaar et al. (2022) explicitly criticised the gender bias and corrected it in the doubled sample to 60% female / 40% male. Within Bentley 2020, the male experience of childhood parental alienation is under-represented — readers should weight the findings on relationship dynamics, fear-of-loss patterns, and identity confusion with that representation gap in mind.

Second, no formal severity screening was applied. The sample was recruited from PA-aware populations on the basis of self-identification as having experienced parental alienation in childhood. No instrument was used to confirm that childhood exposure exceeded a clinically meaningful threshold. The follow-on Verhaar 2022 paper added the Baker Strategies Questionnaire over-40 cut-point precisely to address this gap. Bentley’s sample heterogeneity in terms of childhood-exposure severity is unknown, and could affect the ranking of theme prevalence in ways the paper cannot quantify.

Third, the paper relies on retrospective adult recall. Participants described childhood events from an adult vantage. Memory-reconstruction effects are well-documented in childhood-trauma research, and the paper does not — and cannot — independently corroborate the recalled accounts. The seven themes are the meaning participants made of their childhoods at interview time; they are not necessarily what an objective record of the original family-court files would show.

Fourth, there is no comparison group. All ten participants had self-identified PA exposure. There is no comparison sample of adults from divorced-but-non-alienated families recruited from the same stream, against which the seven themes could be tested for specificity. The themes describe what alienated adult children report; the paper cannot prove those themes are absent or markedly less prevalent in adults from other high-conflict-divorce backgrounds. Establishing specificity is a question for subsequent quantitative work.

Fifth, within-sample percentages beyond the headline are not extensively reported. The paper anchors on the verbatim “all participants experienced mental-health issues” claim and on theme presence rather than per-symptom counts. Quantification of individual-condition rates within the ten-person sample is not in the paper. Readers wanting numbers should turn to the Verhaar 2022 follow-on, which built on Bentley’s transcripts plus ten new ones to produce the within-sample percentages now widely cited.

None of these limitations is a reason to dismiss the paper. They are reasons to cite it as what it is — the first sustained Australian qualitative theme map of adult-recall PA outcomes, the seed dataset for the Tasmanian PA-research programme, the architectural drawing the field has built on.

The paper deserves to be remembered, named, and cited carefully alongside its successor. The Not-Forgotten Child is, in its turn, the not-forgotten paper.