Loretta Maase, LPC

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Loretta Maase, LPC

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Specialized parent education and forensic case consultation for high-conflict custody cases, parental alienation, and contact resistance.

Serving parents, attorneys, GALs, and therapists nationwide. Healing Lost Hearts® offers specialized parent education programs and forensic case consultation for families, legal professionals, and mental health clinicians navigating high-conflict custody cases, parental alienation, contact resistance, and custodial interference. For Parents

If you are a targeted parent dealing with child rejection, contact resistance, false allegations, or parental alienation, Healing Lost Hearts® programs were built for you. Grounded in Parenting the Alienated Child: Reconnecting with Lost Hearts (Charles C Thomas, 2025), these programs give you the knowledge, strategies, and tools to respond effectively to your child's rejection, communicate more productively with the professionals in your case, and show up as the parent your child needs — even in the most difficult circumstances. For Attorneys & GALs

High-conflict custody cases often hinge on psychological and family-systems dynamics that fall outside legal training and trial preparation time. Healing Lost Hearts® provides direct case consultation, document and record review, differential analysis of alienation versus estrangement dynamics, trial and deposition preparation, and expert witness testimony — available nationwide, qualified in 13–15+ states. For Therapists & Mental Health Professionals

Parents in high-conflict cases frequently need more guidance and education than any single professional relationship can provide. Healing Lost Hearts® programs work alongside existing treatment — helping parents understand family dynamics, meet their children's developmental needs, and become more effective participants in their own cases and in the therapeutic process. About Loretta Maase, M.A., LPC

Loretta Maase is a nationally recognized forensic evaluator, expert witness, author, and parent education specialist with more than 30 years of experience working in high-conflict family law. She is the author of Parenting the Alienated Child: Reconnecting with Lost Hearts (Charles C Thomas, 2025), the foundational text for all Healing Lost Hearts® programs, and a Founding Board Member of PACCS (Professional Alliance for Child-Centered Safety). She has been qualified as an expert witness in 15+ states and has provided assessment, consultation, and education throughout the United States and internationally. Programs are educational in nature and are not therapy, counseling, reunification therapy, legal advice, or forensic evaluation.

08/14/2026

Children are not designed to hate a parent.

Developmentally, children form attachments to both primary caregivers as a survival mechanism. Those early bonds are the template through which a child learns to understand love, safety, reliability, and self-worth.

When one of those bonds is systematically attacked — when a child is taught that one parent is unfit, unavailable, or unloving — the damage isn't just relational. It's developmental.

Loyalty conflicts are where this damage takes root. They develop when one parent puts the child in the middle, weaponizes the child against the other parent, confides in the child, or discusses case-related issues with them.

However it's framed, the message is the same: you must choose.

Putting a child in the middle — using them as a messenger, questioning them after visits, or rewarding their complaints about the other parent — teaches a child that neutrality isn't allowed.

Confiding in a child about adult fears, finances, or the case inverts the parent-child relationship entirely: instead of the parent regulating the child's distress, the child is enlisted to regulate the parent's.

And once a child understands the custody case as something with a "winning" side, they often come to believe, or are coerced into believing, their job is to help their preferred parent win it.

What all of this does is collapse the one thing healthy development requires: the space to hold love for both parents at once, without it costing them anything.

Once a child believes loving one parent means betraying the other, they're no longer having their own relationship with either one. They're managing a conflict that was never theirs to manage.

This is why understanding child development isn't peripheral to working with families facing alienation — it's central to it:

*Young children often internalize the conflict as evidence that they caused it.

*School-age children develop rigidly polarized views — one parent "all good," one "all bad" — because black-and-white thinking is how they cope at that age.

*Adolescents may reject a parent with a ferocity that looks like conviction, but is often the loudest version of the same unresolved loyalty bind, mistaken by adults for a mature, independent choice.

A five-year-old's guilt, a nine-year-old's certainty, and a fifteen-year-old's righteous anger aren't different problems. They're the same wound, expressed through whatever tools a child has at that age.

What looks like hatred is very often a child trying to survive a bond that was never supposed to be a battlefield.

Healing Lost Hearts® helps parents understand these dynamics and respond in ways that protect their child from the loyalty bind, rather than deepen it.

— Loretta Maase, M.A., LPC
Forensic Evaluator | Parent Educator | Author

www.lorettamaase.com/classes

08/12/2026

Why does Socratic questioning matter so much when you're talking with a resistant or alienated child?

Because the moment you argue, defend, or correct, the conversation is over. The child isn't listening anymore — they're bracing.

In Parenting the Alienated Child: Reconnecting with Lost Hearts, I write about Socratic Parenting as one of the most powerful tools a targeted parent has. Instead of telling a child what to think, you ask questions that invite them to think for themselves.

"What do you remember about that day?"
"What would it feel like if that happened to you?"
"Is it possible there's more than one side to this?"

These aren't trick questions. They're not designed to win an argument or prove the other parent wrong. They're designed to gently reopen a mind that has been narrowed by fear, loyalty conflict, or pressure — without asking the child to choose a side.

Here's why it works:

* It avoids triggering defensiveness. A direct correction ("That's not true") puts the child in a loyalty bind. A question invites reflection instead of confrontation.

* It respects the child's autonomy. Alienated and resistant children are often overly empowered to reject a parent — but rarely empowered to think critically about why.

Socratic questions hand thinking back to the child instead of doing it for them.

* It keeps the door open. Even when a child isn't ready to change their view, a good question plants something that stays with them. Certainty closes a conversation. Curiosity keeps it going.

* It models the relationship you want to rebuild. Socratic Parenting isn't just a technique — it's a demonstration of warmth, patience, and respect, which is often exactly what an alienated child hasn't experienced from either side of the conflict in a long time.

Here's the part that's hardest for parents to accept: talking directly about the child's resistance, the conflict, or why they're pulling away — even gently, even lovingly — often pushes the child deeper into the loyalty bind. It doesn't matter which parent brings it up.

The moment a child is asked to explain or defend their resistance, they're being asked to choose. And that choice is a no-win, painful impasse for a child, no matter how the question is framed.

That's a bitter pill for parents to swallow. Every instinct says "explain yourself to your child, set the record straight." But the child isn't in a position to hear it as information — they experience it as pressure to pick a side.

Giving your child an out — without endorsing or supporting the false narrative, the false accusations, or the resistance itself — is the first step toward reaching them. Socratic questioning is one way to do that: it opens a door without pushing the child through it.

This is slow work. It is not a script that fixes things in one conversation. But over time, small Socratic openings can do what confrontation never could — they give the child room to reconnect with their own reality, and with you.

** Parenting the Alienated Child: Reconnecting with Lost Hearts is available through Amazon and Charles C Thomas Publishers.

** The Healing Lost Hearts® programs teach Socratic Parenting and other evidence-based strategies in depth:

lorettamaase.com/classes

Parental Alienation Awareness of America

08/11/2026

One of the techniques I describe in Parenting the Alienated Child: Reconnecting with Lost Hearts is one I call the “Mommy/(Daddy) Is Mistaken” approach.

When an alienated or resistant child repeats something negative about the targeted parent — something they clearly heard from the other parent — the instinct is to correct it. To say “that’s not true” or “your mother is wrong about that.”

The problem is that this puts the child in the middle. They have to choose whose version of reality to accept — and that choice is a loyalty conflict they cannot win.

The “Mommy/(Daddy) Is Mistaken” technique offers a different path. Rather than telling the child the other parent is lying, you gently introduce the possibility that the other parent has a different memory, a different perspective, or is simply mistaken — without attacking their character or asking the child to choose sides.

“Hmm. I remember that differently. It’s possible Mom saw it a different way. What do you think happened?”

This approach preserves the child’s loyalty to both parents while gently opening a door to their own critical thinking. It is Socratic. It is warm. And it works.

The book is available through Charles C Thomas Publishers. The Healing Lost Hearts® programs teach this and many other evidence-based strategies in depth.

lorettamaase.com/classes

08/06/2026

One of the most painful questions targeted parents ask me is this: how do I hold a boundary with a child who is already rejecting me?

The fear is understandable. You are already losing ground. Every firm response feels like it might push your child further away. So you accommodate. You negotiate. You soften every boundary until there are no boundaries left — and somehow, the relationship doesn’t improve anyway.

This is a no-win double bind.

Here is what I have learned in 30 years of working with these families.

Children — even alienated children, even resistant children — do not become more secure in a relationship with a parent who has no authority. They become more anxious. The absence of limits confirms, at the deepest level, that the parent cannot be trusted to hold the structure that children need.

Authoritative nurturing parenting — the framework at the heart of Healing Lost Hearts® — is not about being harsh. It is about being both warm and boundaried. Both loving and clear. The combination of high warmth and high structure is what children, including alienated children, respond to over time.

A boundary does not have to be delivered with anger. It can be delivered with love.

“I love you too much to pretend that this arrangement is working for either of us. And I’m going to keep showing up, with love, and with limits, because that’s what parents do.”

You don't have to figure this out alone. Learning how to hold boundaries like this — without guilt, without escalation, and without losing the relationship — is exactly what we work through in the Healing Lost Hearts® 6-Week Class. It's underway now, with individual intensives available on a rolling basis if you need a more personalized pace.

lorettamaase.com/classes

08/06/2026

High-conflict custody cases rarely fail because of a shortage of evidence.

They fail because the evidence isn’t interpreted correctly.

Therapy records that document a child’s distress without examining its origin.

Evaluations that accept a child’s stated preferences without assessing the family system that produced them.

GAL reports that reflect a single professional’s limited time with a family.

Each can create a picture that is internally consistent but fundamentally incomplete.

One of the most critical things that doesn’t add up is looking at the effect without understanding the cause. When I conduct a forensic evaluation, I tell parents there is almost always a precipitating event behind any escalation of custodial interference.

If that event is missed, whatever intervention follows is built on an incomplete picture—and will be faulty by definition.

Precipitating events aren’t always obvious, and they aren’t always about the child.

• Were you issued a new order granting more parenting time, and suddenly new allegations surfaced?
• Was there an order for family therapy, followed by the child refusing all contact?
• Did one parent enter a new relationship?
• Did the alienating parent become unemployed, or did one parent’s income change significantly?

Look back over the last few months. What happened right before the escalation reignited, renewed, or intensified?

For professionals: Without identifying that event, an intervention can’t accurately target what’s actually driving the interference.

For parents: Understanding the precipitating event is often the first step to understanding what you’re actually up against—and what needs to change.

What that kind of review looks like in practice:

• Document and record review (therapy notes, custody evaluations, GAL reports, pleadings, ALL communications for the last six months between parents, parents and children, parents and professionals that you can get your hands on)
• Differential analysis of alienation versus estrangement versus mixed family-systems dynamics
• Identification of clinical gaps in existing evaluations or treatment records
• Strategy guidance grounded in the Five-Factor Model, Baker’s Alienating Strategies, and APSAC standards
• Trial and deposition preparation, including targeted direct and cross-examination questions

If you have a case where something doesn’t add up—or where you know you need a deeper clinical read than time allows—I’d welcome a conversation.

[email protected]

lorettamaase.com

07/30/2026

Parental alienation is not simply a custody dispute strategy. At its most severe, it is a form of psychological maltreatment.

The DSM-5-TR recognizes psychological maltreatment as a significant form of child abuse. According to APSAC, it includes behaviors such as spurning, terrorizing, isolating, exploiting, and corrupting a child — and denying emotional responsiveness.

When a child is systematically taught to fear, despise, or reject a loving and capable parent — when they are triangulated into adult conflicts they cannot manage, used as a messenger, asked to carry adult-level grievances, and denied the freedom to love both parents — the developmental consequences can be profound and lasting.

Children who have been subjected to severe alienation processes may struggle, well into adulthood, with trust, identity formation, the capacity for ambivalence in relationships, and the ability to hold nuanced perceptions of people they love. They may carry a distorted relational template that affects friendships, romantic relationships, and their own parenting.

This is why early intervention matters. Not just for the parent-child relationship — but for the child’s developmental trajectory.

When courts, evaluators, and therapists treat contact resistance as a preference to be accommodated rather than a symptom to be understood, they miss the most important question in the case: what is happening to this child, and who is responsible for it?

— Loretta Maase, M.A., LPC
Forensic Evaluator | Parent Educator | Author

lorettamaase.com

07/28/2026

In 2007, Amy J. L. Baker published research identifying 17 specific strategies that alienating parents use to undermine a child’s relationship with the other parent.

I have been working with this framework for years — and what strikes me, case after case, is not how unusual these strategies are. It is how ordinary they can appear to anyone who doesn’t know what they are looking at.

They include things like: badmouthing the other parent in the child’s presence. Limiting contact and communication. Telling the child the other parent doesn’t love them. Confiding in the child about adult matters. Asking the child to spy on the other parent. Requiring the child to choose sides. Using the child as a messenger.

None of these strategies, in isolation, necessarily indicates deliberate alienation. A parent going through a painful separation may do several of these things without conscious intent to damage the other parent’s relationship with the child. That is why context, pattern, frequency, and impact must all be assessed — not just the presence of individual behaviors.

But when multiple strategies appear consistently, across multiple sources of information, over a sustained period of time — the pattern is rarely coincidental.

Understanding Baker’s framework is essential for evaluators, GALs, and therapists working in these cases. It is equally essential for targeted parents who need language for what they are experiencing.

— Loretta Maase, M.A., LPC
Forensic Evaluator | Parent Educator | Author

07/24/2026

Why Prevention — Even Now

Why do I keep returning to the same message—taking your power back, meeting your child’s needs—in a feed largely read by parents who haven’t seen their children in months or years, or who are watching that contact slip away right now?

One word: prevention.

Prevention of what, when the worst already feels like it’s happened?

The honest answer is not that things will magically improve.

The honest answer is that the only alternative to prevention is to keep losing ground—one more day of lost power, one more day of lost dignity, and one more day farther from the chance to be the safe parent your child still needs.

Wherever you are—just learning the signs of parental alienation, or deep into a legal fight just to see your child—there are still ways to protect your capacity to stay present for your child, and still ways to prevent that further loss.

Above everything else, prevention is connected to your child’s search for safety.

When a parent asks me if they’re a failure because they’re ready to walk away, my answer is always the same question: Are you focused on your own failure, or on your child’s heart and wellbeing? The moment you shift focus onto your child’s search for safety, the question of your success or failure falls away. It settles where it belongs: Where is your child, right now, in their search for safety?

Children reject or align with a parent based on instinct—the instinct to survive and find solid ground. Often that means siding with the more aggressive parent, the one who puts the child in the middle more forcefully.

Refusing to pick a side can put a child at risk of reprimand, hostility, guilt, threats, or further rejection.

In true parental alienation, what begins as that simple survival decision rarely stays simple. Left unaddressed, it can evolve into cognitive distortions, a revisionist history, and an active campaign to enlist the child in rejecting the other parent.

So how do you take your power back—even for a moment?

By being anything except what you are accused of.

By being solid.

By standing firm that you cannot be pushed away—even if you temporarily step back.

By refusing to put your child in the middle.

By seeing them, in that moment, for who they actually are: a kid.

By not being a co-parent for that moment.

Not the “other parent.”

Not the visiting parent.

Not the "supervised parent."

Just the parent who knows their child’s heart and cares about that heart more than anything else.

Taking power back means being the calm, loving parent within—even when the child is trying to provoke the very thing the other parent wants: a fight, conflict, or the unhealthy victim role. When you refuse to step into that role, you become the safe harbor the child is searching for, even if only for a passing moment.

A soft word.

A look of understanding.

An undeserved smile.

A rejected “I love you” that still lands as: I see you. I’m here. I love you no matter what.

Prevention is where your calm meets their nervous system and leaves an impression of safety.

It is being the steady parent—imperfectly, alone, in the middle of the whirlwind—and leaving a small mark of sanity outside the fight.

You may never see it grow. Many parents don’t. But the alternative is to disappear into the role you’ve been assigned, and that closes every possible door. Leaving the impression of safety keeps one open.

Prevention is meeting your stressed, dysregulated, freaked-out child with stillness from within yourself. You find that stillness by recognizing the young person in front of you is hurting—that they just want to be a kid—and they don’t know how to say it except through the defiance and rejection they’ve been taught.

Prevention is one moment of peace in your presence. And it is always worth the effort.

This is precisely what we work on in the Healing Lost Hearts® programs, grounded in the book Parenting the Alienated Child: Reconnecting with Lost Hearts.

What language actually works when your child is challenging you?

How do you respond to false narratives when every part of you wants to correct them?

How do you keep seeing the hurt that drives the rejection—when that same hurt is being used as a weapon against you?

These are the skills we practice: staying regulated, staying clear, and staying the parent your child still needs.

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@ Followers

07/23/2026

When Conflict Becomes the Third Parent

Why do some children pull away from a parent they once loved without reservation?

Most of these children had strong bonds with both parents. Then something else entered the relationship: high conflict. Children sense it before they can name it, and many try to resolve it the only way they know how — by choosing a side.

When that bond breaks down, it's rarely because the targeted parent stopped being lovable. It's because the alienating parent has turned conflict into a wedge — using tone, hostility, and pressure to create distance between the child and the targeted parent. That's the real source of the chasm.

A child absorbs all of it: the sharpened tone, the rolled eye, the remark muttered just loud enough. None of it needs to be said directly to land.

Here's the part that matters clinically: a child's nervous system doesn't start by calculating loyalty — it starts by reaching for safety.

When the alienating parent turns that safety-seeking into a test — "if you loved me, you would..." — the child begins to experience an automatic, involuntary reaction as if it were a conscious choice between two people.

That's the loyalty bind.

But underneath it, the child was never choosing who to love more. He was choosing how to survive the moment.

Here is where the targeted parent gets some power back. You cannot control the alienating parent's conduct, the court's timeline, or what your child hears when you're not in the room.

But you have total control over one thing: whether your child experiences you as part of the conflict, or as the one place it doesn't reach them. That means exiting the conflict — every time, no exceptions — the instant your child is present. Not the last word. Not correcting the record in front of them. Just stepping out of the fight.

You may not see the difference right away. But a parent who consistently keeps their child out of every hostility is planting something real — hope for the child, and hope for the parent doing the planting.

This is exactly why I wrote Parenting the Alienated Child: Reconnecting with Lost Hearts — a guidebook for a situation most parents never saw coming.

Share your thoughts in the comments — I'd love to hear how this lands for you.

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07/22/2026

This compilation of selected writings by respected scholar and author Richard Warshak will help professionals and parents dealing with the issue of parental alienation. Written in a clear, accessible style with minimal professional jargon, the fifteen chapters in this volume represent a cross-sec...

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