Sarah Cecilie reunited with her mother
Now we can all watch the extended film of Sarah Cecilie’s story. This film fills out her story of being abducted by her father from Norway to roam around the USA.
She was later reunited with her mother. Her mother and brother contribute to the film and we get more family background on all sides. Not surprisingly, her father has not felt able to record his own version of what happened and his reasons for what he did.
Sarah Cecilie’s story first appeared in the film Victims of Another War. That important film describes Parental Child Abduction and Alienation with two other adult survivors and their retrospective stories.
Both films can be found on the films page of Action Against Abduction. That’s the new name for what was Parents And Children Together (PACT).
The film: Sarah
We see Sarah Cecilie still working to make sense of a huge life time’s journey – geographical and emotional. We see the lifelong harm that Abduction and Alienation does to children and an example of how children never finish putting themselves together again. We see some healing and resolution for Sarah Cecilie – that many may never achieve – in her own more settled family life now. We see why this is such an important neglected topic, why governments, agencies, professionals and everyone must do better to prevent and intervene.
Interestingly, she uses the word ‘alienation’ when faced with pictures of herself from her two lives. Sarah feels alienated even from Cecilie, her other self. The Alienation goes deep. It is not just Alienation from her mother and her original home in Norway. Coming to terms is the best that anyone in her family has done with their abduction and alienation experience. No one has got over it.
Many thanks
We can imagine how complicated it is for Sarah Cecilie and her family to continue to make these films. We salute and welcome this major endeavour. These films are golden resources for the world to realise and learn about Parental Child Abduction and Alienation. Many thanks as well to AAA and to Glenn Gebhard and all those many others who made this happen.
the alienation experience 
I watched this video after my session with a couple on co-parenting and found this wonderful video very moving and touched on some of the issues we addressed. For example one parent talking badly about the other and trust issues. I will email this to my couple and see what they make of it.
Thank you for sharing this Nick.
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Victoria, thanks.
You may think you’re just being sensible with your couple here, but I suggest that many other therapists and counsellors of all kinds would fail to take this fully wider and systemic view of their cases and use this kind of material to help them think things through.
On the other hand you may not have the most disturbed high conflict separated couples coming to you .. they usually cannot be persuaded or even made to come for collaborative work like yours.
There are lots of other resources – personal stories and more collected research – that people could use to inform couples who are struggling to keep their separation conflict in control … for the children’s sake if not for themselves. One would like to think that the stories – stories that amount to terrible years of tribal warfare with the children caught in the middle or having to take sides – would logically help parents do better to see what best needs to be done.
Unfortunately, it only takes one parent – who may be disturbed or otherwise quite convinced or may be just ‘at it’ – to create the conflict and – either way – to require more than information or therapy to dissuade them. And the systems around are mostly actively unprepared to see the twists and turns that are happening in the different stories – if they even remember to ask for both sides of the story!
Nick
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