Penny Ruth Willis
Integrative Family Therapist,
Founder & Director of NVRnorthampton
An Integrative Family Therapist, Penny is a psychology graduate with postgraduate qualifications in counselling psychology and systemic practice, and a master’s degree in couple and family therapies.
Following many years as an NHS psychotherapist and Relate couple and family therapist, and 15 years in independent practice, Penny has now specialised in the Nonviolent Resistance approach (NVR) to child-raising problems. She is the founder and Director of NVRnorthampton, offering parent coaching, groupwork, professional courses, and supervision in the approach.
Penny has integrated her professional expertise with her personal and clinical experience of dysfunctional family systems (enmeshment, estrangement, coercive control, and betrayal), along with insights gained from 20 years of personal therapy, into a unique intervention for cases of perceived parental alienation and post-separation abuse.
With the support and guidance of PA experts, Penny and her colleagues deliver this unique NVR-based, systemic intervention to families in (or approaching) family court proceedings, as an ‘Alternative Dispute Resolution’ service.
This pragmatic, solution-oriented, child-focused and parent-centred programme can help both those facing child-parent contact problems and those who find themselves suspected of engaging in alienating behaviours.
Penny’s presentation will be an introductory summary of this non-adversarial, ethically sound, cost-effective, and highly teachable approach to tackling RRR cases.
Day 2 - Penny Ruth Willis | Breakout
'Resisting Distance: How an NVR Approach to Parent-Child Contact Problems Might 'Bridge the Gap'
Who it will interest
Mediators, family therapists, social workers, educators, legal professionals, and practitioners working with children who resist, refuse, or withdraw from contact in high-conflict family systems.
What this session is about
When children resist or refuse contact, professional-led, individual-focused interventions (therapy, persuasion, or pressure) locate the problem within the child and/or the parents (either or both). Penny examines how, in those rare cases where deliberate parental alienation has occurred, the pressure and persuasion strategies of ‘therapy as usual’ and behavioural modification approaches can inadvertently reinforce a child’s entrenched alignment, whilst leaving the wider eco-social system, in which the problem has emerged, unchanged. Confusion, fear, divisive narratives, and power dynamics remain active and obscured, undermining the effectiveness of individually-focused work and supporting the re-emergence of parent-child contact problems.
Instead of abandoning the child to these problem-maintaining interactional patterns, systemic approaches interrupt them, altering the relational environment in which the child is coping.
In this session, Penny offers Nonviolent Resistance (NVR) as a foundation for an integrative, pragmatic, ethical and highly effective approach that shifts responsibility away from individuals and mobilises the ‘response-ability’ of the multiple influential adults in the child’s kinship and broader circles.
We know that ‘it takes a village’ - this session shows how NVR works at a relational and community level, harnessing the power of the collective to both raise parental presence and also prioritise safety.
NVR offers the tools and strategies to build and maintain that ‘Bridge across the Gap’…
Key themes
Why interventions and ‘therapy as usual’ often fail in polarised systems.
Broader system ‘response-ability’ versus individual (child or parent) burden.
Relational, collective & protective responses (rather than punitive or coercive).
Supporting safety, dignity, and repair through adult action.
Incorporating ‘the voice of the child’, without adultifying or abandoning.
Attending to multiple and conflicting voices and needs.
What delegates will gain
A clear understanding of why and how NVR might help.
Insight into how adult behaviour can reduce emotional load on children.
A practical framework for adult-led action in complex cases.
Greater confidence to move away from blame, shame and punishment responses.
How it connects to other sessions
This session builds directly on Professor Ben Hine’s psychological analysis by providing a system-wide response to the risks he identifies, particularly where children’s expressed wishes are conflicted, pressured, or unsafe to act upon. It complements Professor Anne Barlow and Dr Jan Ewing’s participation framework by offering an ethical alternative when participation increases burden or risk. Together, these sessions reinforce the conference’s child-first principle that safety and responsibility sit with adults and systems, not with children.