“I have difficulty with this sentence,” Catherine Turbide tells me straight away, thus opening our discussion on severe separation conflicts (SSC) by dispelling a myth, which, I must admit, was one of my tenacious assumptions about such situations.
The social work researcher has just completed her doctoral thesis on families supported by the Department of Youth Protection (DPJ) in connection with a severe conflict of separation. A telephone interview with her, combined with the reading of her conclusions, sheds light on a host of issues that previously remained, for me, intertwined with each other. I understand over the course of the exchange that the famous “CSS” are rarely situations that do not involve the co-occurrence of other problems (mental health problem, drug addiction, etc.), when they are not used squarely to “mask” a much more serious reality of domestic violence.
Thus, while some situations do involve working to restore more harmonious co-parenting and more effective communication, it also happens that one of the two parents simply cannot be part of the solution.
In these situations, the tango rather takes the form of an absurd tennis match with a wall, where the ball very often returns to us full in the face.
Another reframing brought by the researcher: despite this shared impression that this phenomenon would take more and more scale, “the data from youth protection show that the CSS do not represent the majority of families with whom these services intervene . In Canada, only 12% of cases investigated involve situations where parents bring a custody dispute. It is still situations of exposure to conjugal violence that remain the most frequently reported in situations of psychological abuse, with 51.8% of cases.
As part of her thesis, the researcher looked at the parental perspective of families who had received support from DYP workers for a CSS reason. The results of his survey show that, “for the majority of participants, the difficulties go beyond conflictual dynamics and problems in terms of co-parenting”. The pre-separation experience, the occurrence of certain significant or dramatic events in the family history, the history of inadequate parenting practices, the meaning given to certain family transitions or even the appearance of a new spouse in the life of the other parent are cited as so many elements influencing their perception of the conflict situation.
For example, if the mother perceives that her parental role includes protecting her child, which we can easily imagine, imagine that she has already disapproved of certain parental practices by her partner when they were together. Naturally, she may find it difficult to renew her trust in the father, even though the latter may have changed his practices. On the other hand, if the father feels that he has always fought for access to his children, he will tend to perceive, perhaps, the mother’s protective behaviors as schemes to keep him in check. distance.
We can clearly see that, as in any situation involving humans, deeply subjective universes of meaning, there is a great complexity to embrace when it comes to accompanying these families towards greater stability. Any clinician or professional who has acted in such situations will no doubt corroborate this impression of having had to maintain the precarious balance of a tightrope walker, the risk of falling into the abyss of an overall misreading of the situation being greater than in many other clinical settings.
However, despite the adoption of Bill 15, which includes greater consideration of situations of conjugal violence, it would still be necessary to aim for greater retention and stabilization of the personnel called upon to intervene with these families.
This reader, anonymous, writes: “We will soon meet the eighth worker from the DPJ since 2020. By the time he makes up his mind about the situation, he is first seduced, then sees what If it really is, I would still have suffered dozens of e-mails written in a peremptory tone concerning the way in which I should carry out my role as a mother for the good of my children. I will still have survived a dozen crises of my son at the time of the transfer of custody in which he will have told me word for word what his father and his spouse, both graduates of a master’s degree, wrote to me in catalogs for years. »
Staff turnover has extremely serious consequences when it comes to distinguishing the fake from the real, in baskets where the crabs are not always those whose claws are most apparent.