Monthly Webinars
Chris Smith, Esq
Gatekeepers, Grandparents, Girlfriends and Boyfriends: Legal Issues in Family Dynamics
On Sunday, March 2, 2025 @ 8 PM EDT, Family Access-Fighting for Children’s Rights will present Chris Smith in a webinar titled “Gatekeepers, Grandparents, Girlfriends and Boyfriends: Legal Issues in Family Dynamics”. This will air exclusively on our Families Divided TV you tube channel.
https://www.youtube.com/@FamiliesDividedTV/videos
This presentation explores the legal challenges surrounding gatekeeping parents, grandparents’ rights, and the role of new partners in custody disputes. It examines when parental gatekeeping becomes restrictive, grandparents’ rights to visitation or custody, and how a parent’s significant other can impact legal decisions. We’ll discuss court considerations, legal remedies, and practical strategies for navigating these complex family dynamics while prioritizing the child’s best interests. Whether you are a parent, grandparent, or new partner, this session will provide insights into your rights and responsibilities in family law cases.
Chris Smith is a tireless advocate for parental equality and the rights of Fathers. He has a passion for advocating for parents who are being alienated and kept from their children and it shows by his willingness to take on difficult cases. As the founder of The Smith Firm, Chris provides legal services to clients in Oklahoma and across the Midwest in the areas of domestic litigation and family law issues, including high- conflict and hard to litigate custody cases. Chris's clients include individuals, business owners, and professionals who find themselves in a high stakes divorce or custody disputes. Mr. Smith received a Bachelor of Science from Oklahoma Christian University in 2001. He then went on to attend The University of Oklahoma College of Law and earned a Juris Doctor in 2004. Over the course of his career, Mr. Smith has dedicated himself to advocating for his clients and their rights. He understands that personal and business issues can often be connected and he believes that the relationship between an attorney and his clients should be a partnership. For that reason, he strives to work with his clients to reach positive resolutions that meet their needs. Chris is the author of the Oklahoma Divorce Guidebook which is available at his firm's website, as well as Faithfully: Issues of Faith & Family Law in the 21st Century. Staying active in the legal community is a priority for Mr. Smith. He is a member of numerous associations, including the Family Law Section of the Oklahoma Bar Association, the Texas State Bar, the American Bar Association Family Law Section, and the Oklahoma County Bar Association. He has spoke at South-by- Southwest, pitched at the Clio Cloud Conference, and presented on various issues relating to law and technology. Mr. Smith has also provided commentary for television and print media on issues of legal policy that affect workers in the legal field. Chris Smith may be reached at chris@thesmithfirm.net, or follow him on Instagram and Facebook at @attychrissmith or visit www.thesmithfirm.net
Susan Heitler, Ph. D
Skills for Handling Tough Situations
On Sunday, April 6, 2025 @ 8 PM EST, Family Access-Fighting for Children’s Rights will present Dr. Susan Heitler in a webinar titled “Skills for Handling Tough Situations”. This will air exclusively on our Families Divided TV you tube channel.
https://www.youtube.com/@FamiliesDividedTV/videos
A parent who does alienation is almost guaranteed to be, from time to time, a provocative person. What techniques can be useful to have in your repertoire so that you do not become distressed when the alienating individual makes false accusations, issues hurtful comments, and more? This session will train participants in translating projection, countering personalizing, asking how and what questions, staying calm with anger-is-a-stop-sign, guiding the three steps of conflict resolution with the Face Map, and, if time allows, more.
Susan Heitler, PhD, is a clinical psychologist. Formerly of Denver, she currently lives in Israel. She has written over a dozen blogposts for psychologytoday.com to educate the general public and psychotherapy professionals about alienation. For a list of these articles, scroll down in the alienation section of her therapyhelp.com website.
In her clinical work, her blogposts on psychologytoday.com (which have attracted over 23 million reads), and her books, Dr. Heitler focuses in particular on how people deal with the conflicts in their lives.
Her book From Conflict to Resolution was the first to bring understandings of the art of win-win conflict resolution into the general psychotherapy literature. In addition, she has written a useful workbook for the general public entitled The Power of Two. Related to the workbook, her website features a module called PowerOfTwoMarriage.com that teaches collaborative communication, anger management, and conflict resolution—skills that sustain both personal well-being and positive family relationships.
Melanie Gill, BSC, MSC/PG. DIP
The Fruit Doesn't Fall Far From the Tree
On Sunday, May 4, 2025 @ 8 PM EST, Family Access-Fighting for Children's Rights will present Melanie Gill in a webinar titled "The Fruit Doesn't Fall Far From the Tree". This will air exclusively on our Families Divided TV YouTube channel.
www.youtube.com/@FamiliesDividedTV
Narcissistic Parents and those with psychopathic features who alienate children from their other parent, provide the perfect manufacturing base to produce narcissistic children. The actual alienating environment if extremely dangerous can also push them into psychopathy.
Findings from 17 years of using attachment science in very complex cases shows the backstory and outcomes of destructive parenting, and how western societies are engulfed in the generational transfer of psychopathology that’s all and only about the cult of ‘I’. I’ll be discussing cases to show the route from normal child to one filled with hate and fear and how to stop it happening’.
‘Melanie Gill is a UK -based attachment specialist, psychologist, and forensic consultant. She uses evidenced based assessments with a focus on attachment science. She specializes in assessing adults, adolescents, families and children, formulating, and monitoring treatment and intervention plans, and uses innovative multi-disciplinary approaches that seek to assess attachment dynamics resulting in psychological problems, psychopathology, and risk, as effectively as possible. Her work places an emphasis on understanding the often-complex history behind an existing family dynamic, on the basis that a child cannot be assessed in vacuum, nor can parents and adults be understood separately from their children, other family members and their family history. She has been a political campaigner for children for many years and has recently been made Head of Psychology at The Change for Children International, an organization finding novel solutions to family court cases, and she continues to work as an Expert Witness. She is passionate about bringing psychological science and knowledge into Family Courts to improve the lives and understanding of complex families and how all humans develop.
David Keighley
Schema Therapy-A New Way of Helping Alienated Parents?
On Sunday, June 1, 2025 @ 8 PM EST, Family Access-Fighting for Children’s Rights presents David Keighley in a webinar titled “Schema Therapy-A New Way of Helping Alienated Parents?” This will air exclusively on our Families Divided TV you tube channel.
www.youtube.com/@FamiliesDividedTV
Parents who suffer parental alienation go through huge despair triggered by rejection, fear, sadness, anger, and disgust. Schema therapy has special ways of treating this maelstrom of emotions and insecurity and healing their ‘vulnerable child’ schema at the core of their being. In this webinar, David will outline how, through his experience of working with alienated parents using techniques which can inject reassurance, trust, and agency back into their lives.
David Keighley is a proud Yorkshireman and a graduate of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. His early career was spent in newspapers, radio and TV. He cut his teeth in weekly journalism, worked for the BBC as a news producer and executive, and became director of public affairs for the ITV breakfast television company TV-am. For the past 30 years, he has worked as an independent consultant in the TV news industry. He was a prime mover in setting up the world’s first regular international conference for news broadcasters, worked as chief executive of an organisation developing public service broadcasting in Africa and is an acknowledged expert in surveying and fighting media bias in all its many types. His website in that domain is www.news-watch.co.uk.
In 2007, David became a magistrate (in the UK, a voluntary public service role as a lawyer-assisted lay judge) and quickly decided he wanted to train in family court cases. He served in that role for 13 years and dealt with hundreds of cases.
In 2010 – intrigued and concerned by what he saw happening in the family courts and determined to try to help – he studied for a postgraduate diploma as a psychotherapist, qualified in 2013 and now divides his time between his continuing role in the news industry and seeing around 20 private practice clients a week, both individuals and couples. He works using psychodynamic exploration, schema therapy, EMDR, and speciality couples therapy, and has worked extensively with clients experiencing parental alienation, as well as those who have suffered childhood trauma through sexual abuse and attachment neglect. Another speciality is helping those suffering from chronic pain.
His qualifications are that he is an accredited member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, a member of the International Society of Schema Therapists, and has a diploma from the EMDR Europe organisation. He is also trained as a clinical supervisor of other psychotherapists.
David’s profile is here: https://www.brightonandhovepsychotherapy.com/practitioners/david-keighley/
That article also has links to four recent articles I have written about my practice as a psychotherapist. I don’t currently have any video presentations.
Bill Eddy, LCSW, ESQ
How Children Absorb Their Parents’ Emotions in Divorce
On Sunday, July 6, 2025 @ 8 PM EDT, Family Access-Fighting for Children’s Rights presents Bill Eddy in a webinar titled “How Children Absorb their Parents’ Emotions in Divorce”. This will air exclusively on our Families Divided TV you tube Channel.
https://www.youtube.com/@FamiliesDividedTV
When a child resists contact with a divorcing parent who has not been abusive, its common to blame this on intentional alienating behaviors by the other parent. However, research on group behavior may hold some surprising results about how people often amplify the intensity and negativity of others’ emotions. This may be especially true for children who express hatred for a parent when their favored parent does not hold such an intensely negative view but has allowed the child to overhear moments of intense negativity. Parents, professionals, and courts need to educate parents about amplification of emotions from the start of a case. While this is unlikely to stop the most extreme and repetitive alienating comments and behavior of some, it may help prevent some mild and moderate alienation from occurring. This webinar will discuss various research on how emotional intensity is absorbed and can become rigid and amplified.
Bill Eddy is co-founder and chief innovation officer of High Conflict Institute. He pioneered the High Conflict Personality Theory (HCP) and is the world’s leading expert on methods for managing disputes involving people with high conflict personalities.
Bill has worked as the senior family mediator at the National Conflict Resolution Center, a certified family law specialist representing clients in family court, and a licensed clinical social worker therapist. In 2021, he received the Lifetime Achievement award from the Academy of Professional Mediators.
He serves on the faculty of the Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution at the Pepperdine University School of Law in California and is a conjoint associate professor with the University of Newcastle Law School in Australia. He has delivered talks and trainings in more than 30 U.S. states and thirteen countries and is the author or co-author of 20 books. His popular blog on the Psychology Today website has more than 5 million views. He trains lawyers, judges, and mediators, and regularly consults on issues of alienation, family violence, and false allegations in family court cases.