passages-civilized-families-describe-war-child-territory

# Civilized families describe the event with words... > Civilized families describe the event with words that leave no marks: a falling out, boundaries, taking space, choosing sides, no contact. Family research keeps a colder word for one part of the machinery, triangulation, the process by which a conflict between two people recruits a third until the third becomes an ally, a messenger, a witness or a weapon, and the research is specific about who gets recruited. Children are pulled across the generational line because the people fighting are also the people on whom the child depends for belonging, information, safety and identity; the post-divorce literature documents children pressured to declare allegiance, fed the denigration of the other parent, used to gather information, enlisted into polarized alliances, and left experiencing the adults' war as a problem of their own loyalty. A 2026 meta-analysis of twenty-six studies and more than eight thousand participants confirms the obvious with numbers: children who feel caught between parents have worse relationships with them. And the recruitment does not expire at eighteen. Studies of families surrounding an estranged parent and adult child find the relatives themselves taking sides and feeling caught, which means one broken bond does not stay between two people; it reorganizes the entire troop. {{A family estrangement begins between two people and ends with everyone being asked to declare which animal they belong to.}} {{The child was never the judge in the family war. The child was the territory.}} **Source:** [[books/Chimping Out|Chimping Out]] ## Share on Social Media ``` “Civilized families describe the event with words that leave no marks: a falling out, boundaries, taking space, choosing sides, no contact. Family research keeps a colder word for one part of the machinery, triangulation, the process by which a conflict between two people recruits a third until the third becomes an ally, a messenger, a witness or a weapon, and the research is specific about who gets recruited. Children are pulled across the generational line because the people fighting are also the people on whom the child depends for belonging, information, safety and identity; the post-divorce literature documents children pressured to declare allegiance, fed the denigration of the other parent, used to gather information, enlisted into polarized alliances, and left experiencing the adults' war as a problem of their own loyalty. A 2026 meta-analysis of twenty-six studies and more than eight thousand participants confirms the obvious with numbers: children who feel caught between parents have worse relationships with them. And the recruitment does not expire at eighteen. Studies of families surrounding an estranged parent and adult child find the relatives themselves taking sides and feeling caught, which means one broken bond does not stay between two people; it reorganizes the entire troop. A family estrangement begins between two people and ends with everyone being asked to declare which animal they belong to. The child was never the judge in the family war. The child was the territory.” — Bryant McGill https://bryantmcgill.com/passages/passages-civilized-families-describe-war-child-territory ```