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→Attachment disruption
Looking at a child's reluctance to see a parent from an attachment point of view, the one thing that claims of estrangement and alienation have in common is the obvious breakdown in the attachment between the child and the rejected parent. The idea that there has been a disruption in the child's attachment to that parent is something that both the favoured parent and the rejected parent can agree on... perhaps the only thing they can agree on. If we get rid of labels about "alienation" and "Parental Alienation Syndrome," neither of which tend to be well understood by lawyers or by litigating parents anyway, and focus on the problem of attachment disruption, we can start looking at the problem without having to worry about which parent did what and we can do that without the usual finger-pointing, rancour, blaming and anger that accompany claims about alienation.
Although the cause of the problem is still important, parents, lawyers and judges still have the same set of tools to deal with a child's resistance to seeing a parent as they do when the child's resistance is said to be caused by the malicious actions of the favoured parent or the incompetent parenting of the rejected parent. Plus, in my experience, I have never had a case of attachment disruption that resulted wholly from "alienation" or from "estrangement." In the cases I've dealt with, a child's reluctance to see a parent usually result results from a combination of factors that suggest alienation and factors that suggest estrangement; these cases are rarely one or the other.
====Resist-refuse dynamics====