When Divorce Hurts Kids: What to Do and How to Navigate It, with Dr. Tina PaoneWhen Divorce Hurts Kids: What to Do and How to Navigate It, with Dr. Tina Paone
The Self-Love Recovery Podcast
Ross Rosenberg speaks with Dr Tina Paone about how divorce, narcissistic abuse and parental alienation affect children, and how play therapy can help them express what they cannot yet say. The conversation also addresses parentification, emotional incest and the importance of targeted parents getting their own support.
35:55•1 May 2026
When Divorce Hurts Kids: Play Therapy, Parentification and Parental Alienation
Episode Overview
- Children often show divorce-related distress through behaviour rather than words, especially before adolescence.
- Play therapy offers a developmentally appropriate way for kids to express confusion, fear and loyalty conflicts around family breakdown.
- Parentification and emotional incest load adult emotional responsibilities onto children, stripping away their chance to simply be kids.
- Parental alienation involves a toxic parent strategically turning a child against the other parent, which can cause long‑term psychological harm.
- Targeted parents are urged to seek their own specialist support, especially around narcissistic abuse, so they can better support their children.
“"Children are not miniature adults. They do not have the capacity to articulate what's going on inside, so their behaviours give us a tip that something's going on."”
Get ready to be moved by real-life accounts of how divorce lands hardest on children, told through the lens of therapy rooms and lived experience. This conversation brings together master psychotherapist Ross Rosenberg and Dr Tina Paone, a licensed professional counsellor and registered play therapist supervisor, to look closely at what kids actually go through when their parents split.
Rather than talking theory in the abstract, Dr Paone explains what she sees every day: children who can’t yet put feelings into words, but show their distress through behaviour. She lays out why young kids aren’t “miniature adults” and how play therapy lets them express confusion, fear and loyalty binds when they’re shuffled between two homes, new partners and step‑siblings.
You’ll hear how even in relatively “healthy” divorces, children can still act out, withdraw, or regress, and why this isn’t defiance but pain. From there, the pair move into much tougher territory: parentification, emotional incest and parental alienation. Dr Paone spells out what happens when a child is turned into a parent’s confidant, protector or ally against the other parent, and how this reshapes their attachment patterns and sense of self.
Ross adds examples from his own clinical work and his history with child clients, including a touching moment when he realises he’d been doing effective play therapy without knowing it. Dr Paone shares that she herself wrote a memoir, *Unbroken: Healing from Narcissistic Abuse and Reclaiming Me*, blending her story with her clinical lens and concrete healing steps.
The episode is especially relevant for targeted parents dealing with narcissistic ex‑partners, therapists working with families, and anyone who grew up caught between warring parents and is still feeling the aftershocks. It asks a tough but vital question: what if protecting your child starts with getting your own support in place?
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