Family Law

• Divorce
• Child Support
  Children, exposed to high conflict custody conflicts suffer tremendously. The challenge for counselors is to find ways of sparing children the emotional pain, guilt, and stress that result when they are caught in their parents’ crossfire. Too often counselors over-identify with polarized parents and children and are co-opted. The particular challenge for lawyers is to discern whether the actions taken and allegations made by a client are based on genuine concerns for their children’s safety and well-being, or motivated by revenge, leverage for child support, and fear of losing his/her children. Too often lawyers get sucked in to these polarized conflicts and merely want to win for their clients.
• Child Custody and Visitation
  Do not rely on an attorney you randomly discovered in the phone book. The custody and visitation rights with your child are at stake. Place your faith in a professional who is both an attorney and clinical psychologist, academic and advocate, expert and author who has literally written the book on winning parental alienation cases.
• Child Abuse
  An attorney may represent the preferred parent in a case in which the child has refused contact with the rejected parent. In this role, the attorney must understand the possible causes of contact refusal including alienation, estrangement, and other mental conditions. In addition to conducting her own assessment, the attorney may want to arrange for a comprehensive evaluation of the family. That could be accomplished through an agreed order with opposing counsel or a motion to the court. If the attorney determines that her client is actively indoctrinating the child against the target parent, she will be confronted by an ethical dilemma – – – whether to zealously advocate for a parent who is perpetrating psychological child abuse or to withdraw from that task.

Criminal Law

• Criminal Defense
  Whether you are a team of lawyers in Hawaii handling a challenging criminal defense case of what you know to be false allegations of sexual abuse, or you are a lawyer in Cincinnati whose client wants his or her children back and fears they are being harmed by the custodial parent or you need coaching in how to address the psychology behind the domestic relations issue your client is facing: our firm is here to help.
• Sex Crimes
  Demosthenes Lorandos is a Ph.D. clinical/forensic psychologist who has been an attorney since 1993. He brings more than 40 years of experience in restoring the parent-child relationship after the trauma of parental alienation. He has lectured nationally and written numerous materials on parental alienation and the psychology behind false sexual assault allegations.
• Robbery
  This type of forced-estrangement refers to an induced undesired change in the child’s perceptions and feelings about the target parent similar in process to the Stockholm Syndrome. In 1973 in Stockholm Sweden the Kreditbanken Bank was robbed. The robbers held captive several bank employees for six days while attempts were made to negotiate with police. During this period, the bank employees became emotionally attached to their captors. In so doing, they refused assistance at one point from government sources, sang their captors praises, defended them and even refused to participate in their criminal prosecution, all of this after they were released from their ordeal. The bank employees, all adults and strangers to their captors prior to the robbery, developed a profound change in their thinking and their emotional experience of their captivity and their captors. This change moved from fear to affection. By terms of common parlance, they became brainwashed as a result of forced indoctrination while being held captive.
• White Collar Crimes
  PsychLaw.Net offers expert forensic psychology services to attorneys and clients facing serious criminal charges ranging from sexual assault to white collar crime to homicide. We are based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, we assist clients in criminal matters throughout the nation. We are a team of tenacious, knowledgeable experts who will not be out-worked.
• Assault
• Murder
  Malmquist (1986) reports on 16 children age 5 to 10 who had witnessed the murder of a parent. Not a single child “repressed” the memory. Rather, they all had vivid memories and were preoccupied with the murder and continually flooded with pangs of emotion about it.
• Juvenile Crimes
• Homicide
• Kidnapping
  When considering this phenomenon – adult stranger to adult stranger – and then apply the same dynamic expressed between a child and an alienating parent, it becomes easier to understand the power of this influence to change the thinking and emotional experience of another person under coercive power and control. The context in which this phenomenon occurs between an alienating parent and child is what Clawar and Rivlin (2013) refer to as “social/psychological kidnapping” which they define as “the exclusionary, proprietary control of a child’s mind (or body) by a parent.” This type of abusive and alienating control stems from an unhealthy parent-child relationship characterized by enmeshment. Enmeshment is a term used by Minuchin (1974) when he described a relationship that lacked clear ego boundaries between family members which produced a form of fusion; a condition that interfered with the development of a clear sense of self apart from the family, while still being a part of the family. When this unhealthy dynamic exists between an alienating parent and a child, the child is unable to establish a clear identity apart from the alienating parent, to the degree that actions of the child appear (to the child) to significantly impact the apparent well-being of the parent whom the child is held captive to and enmeshed with. This pathological level of enmeshment represents a potential role reversal subsuming the child’s own identity and needs into those of the parent. Under these conditions, such an enmeshed parent-child relationship, results in a pathological level of dependency and a retardation of the process of individuation within the child.