Being removed from a child is a trauma beyond words for most parents. It is a deathless death where even grief is denied, as the child is not deceased. Many describe it as the 'The Alice in Wonderland' reality. Certainly, how it happens is something you can only truly grasp when you have had to experience it, vicariously as a concerned therapeutic professional with expertise in this field, or from the eyes of the grieving parents and their traumatised children.
If a court has been involved then we find that parents, already emotionally exhausted having fought to keep their children for so long, sometimes for years, leave the court to go home to a house where the child has already been removed in their absence that day. If there was no court and removal has happened privately at the hands of someone the parent once loved, the cognitive dissonance is equally as damaging.
The grief of these parents is something that is so painful it has no name. And there are few who can help because nobody who cares is privy to the cruelty of that these people have to endure in the moments and months and years preceding this point.
These fragile people, consisting of barely more than dust instantly petrify with the shock. There is nobody there to help them and many professionals and family members and friends are left struggling with what can be done to support them in the months that follow.