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About Jacqueline
Jacqui dedicates her practice to consulting with parents, counsel, and the Court to understand and address severe parental alienation.
Jacqui focuses her expertise on parental alienation. She holds a wealth of knowledge and experience working directly with alienated children and their parents. Understanding how the courts, lawyers and mental health professionals sometimes face unknown territory when dealing with these cases, she now confines her practice to consultation. Her goal is to help parents, counsel, and the courts deal with these cases effectively and maintain a focus on the children's best interests. Helping alienated parents and children is her passion, and she uses all of her mastery toward helping families move forward.
Jacqui holds a Bachelor of Social Work and a Master of Arts in Social Policy. She also holds a Certificate in Conflict Resolution, and is a member of the Parental Alienation Study Group. Jacqui has taught in the areas of high conflict and alienation for universities, associations, and various community mental health and child protection agencies. Although providing assessment and treatment of parental alienation for years, Jacqui's most valuable knowledge and experience of alienation have been gained working with one of two Canadian team leaders of Building Family Bridges: A Workshop for Troubled and Alienated Parent and Child Relationships. Along with her colleagues, she spearheaded the development of the Family Bridges Aftercare Process to address the needs of alienating parents post Family Bridges.
For over 30 years, Jacqui has successfully worked with high-conflict families providing mediation, arbitration, therapy, custody and access assessments, therapeutic reconciliation, and parenting coordination. She has developed a foundation of knowledge and expertise to identify how parental alienation cases tend to be under-recognized and left untreated.
Jacqueline has built a foundation of knowledge and expertise, identifying how to move these challenging cases forward.
Jacqui consults with mental health professionals, community organizations, child protection agencies and the court to manage severe parental alienation. Several family court judges have recognized her proven track record in working successfully with high conflict and alienation. She has been accepted by the Ontario Superior Court of Justice to give expert opinion evidence. She has acted as a participant expert concerning alienation and issues germane to high-conflict families and assessments. Under the Family Rules (20.3) auspices, she has been retained to advise the court regarding her opinion relevant to alienation.
Jacqui now dedicates her practice to private consulting with parents and counsel to understand and address severe parental alienation and its emotional and psychological impact on children. At the core of her practice is the understanding that parental alienation is a form of emotional and psychological abuse perpetuated upon children. Jacqui embraces that “parental alienation is something done to a child and not a manifestation of a problem within the child.”[1]Too often alienated children are psychologically and emotionally pathologized when they have been the collateral damage of one parent seeking to eliminate their other parent from their lives.
Few professionals specialize in severe parental alienation or understand the need to protect children from parental behaviours that seek to minimize or renounce the other, previously cherished parent. Jacqui works to support parents, lawyers, judges and community agencies to effectively work with these cases, understanding that parental alienation is a unique form of maltreatment of children and can’t be categorized as high conflict exclusively.
Identifying the pitfalls that escalate parental alienation is essential to helping children to have a healthy relationship with both parents.1 Jacqui has gained a reputation for understanding and working with severe parental alienation. Many lawyers, parents, and mental health professionals, who have consulted with Jacqui, have developed more effective responses when dealing with alienated children and better understand the effective treatment options available to them.
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[1] From Understanding and Managing Parental Alienation: A Guide to Assessment and Intervention, (p.6), by Janet Haines, Mandy Matthewson & Marcus Turnbull, 2019, London: Routledge. 10.4324/9780429316111