How Dr. Rebecca Bailey built a practice reuniting families — and what families say she actually does
By Michael Phillips | Riptide Investigations
Part of a series: California’s Broken Public Defense System
By the summer of 2022, a child named Brooke had not seen her mother in more than a year. She had been removed from her home by Santa Cruz police officers who kneeled on her neck, injected her with a sedative, and forced her into an SUV while she screamed for her mother. She had been held in a psychiatric facility for three days. She had then been placed in the sole custody of her father — the man who, according to three certified 911 transcripts and two independent witness accounts, had driven three counties to strangle her mother in the front yard of their home.
And then a family court judge ordered therapy.
The therapist was Dr. Rebecca Bailey.
Who She Says She Is
Rebecca Fisk Bailey, PSY18732, NPI 1467692855, operates Transitioning Families out of Sonoma, California. She has been self-employed since 1993 and involved with Transitioning Families since 2006. She holds a doctorate from The Wright Institute in Berkeley.
Her public profile is impressive. She has appeared on CNN, ABC’s 20/20, Anderson Cooper, Good Morning America, Piers Morgan, and World News Tonight. She sits on the advisory board of the JAYC Foundation — the organization founded by Jaycee Dugard, who was kidnapped in 1991 and held captive for eighteen years. According to Bailey’s own website, as archived by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine on August 25, 2019, the relationship works in a specific direction:
“The JAYC Foundation provides funding for families going through severe trauma. That’s where my team and I come into the picture. I am on the advisory board of the foundation and also the program director. We provide a personalized reunification workshop for families to come after severe trauma… If you are a family in need or know of one, click here to contact The JAYC Foundation.”
The page has since been removed. Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20190825030618/rebecca-bailey-yrp3.squarespace.com/transitioningfamilies
The JAYC Foundation’s FY2022 Form 990 — the filing that was previously absent from the IRS TEOS database and has now been obtained — documents what that funding looks like at scale. In FY2022, the Foundation disbursed $1,264,186 in grants to individuals against a total revenue of $273,758, drawing down $1,058,146 in reserves accumulated over twelve years. The grants are categorized as “family support provided to distressed family members qualifying for assistance under the mission of the exempt organization.” No service providers are named as recipients; the filing confirms the money moved to individuals directly — consistent with the mechanism Bailey described: Foundation funds families, families attend her workshops.
The same filing discloses that the Foundation maintains no conflict of interest policy, no whistleblower policy, and no document retention policy. Its financial statements were neither reviewed nor audited by an independent accountant. It does not maintain records to substantiate grantee eligibility or grant selection criteria. An organization disbursing $1.26 million to unnamed individuals in a single year, with no audit and no documented eligibility criteria, lists its program director as the same practitioner that those families are directed to for services.
Together with Dugard and Dr. Stephen Porges, the originator of Polyvagal Theory, Bailey co-created a course at the Polyvagal Institute titled “Replacing Stockholm Syndrome with a New Framework of Appeasement.” She is the founder of the Polyvagal Equine Institute. She is a named contributor and author at OurFamilyWizard, a widely used co-parenting communication platform. She has consulted with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
Her website describes her work as reuniting families. She describes herself as a specialist in abduction cases, high-conflict divorce, and the trauma responses of children caught between warring parents.
Judges in California family courts have ordered families to work with her.
Where She Came From: The Randy Rand Lineage
Rebecca Bailey did not build her reunification model in isolation. She built it inside an existing industry — and the industry has a documented history that predates her by decades.
In 2004, Dr. Randy Rand and Dr. Deirdre Rand of Mill Valley, California, co-founded Family Bridges, a program that has been described in court filings and by the Center for Judicial Excellence as forcing children into hotel rooms to watch psychology videos while being yelled at and threatened by psychologists.
Kathleen Russell of the CJE wrote publicly in 2018:
“Family Bridges is a dangerous and costly program that forces children into hotel rooms to watch psychology videos and be yelled at and threatened by psychologists. Mill Valley psychologist Randy Rand has destroyed numerous youth by convincing judges to order that they be dragged against their will to Marin Co hotel rooms. Kids are forced to spend time with parents who have molested or beaten them.”
Russell named Bailey directly in the same post:
“Dr. Rebecca Bailey and Dr. Matthew Sullivan are also guilty of similar programs that prey on desperate parents and ignore legitimate child abuse.”
According to the Child Reunification Workshop Scams page, which has tracked the industry since at least 2016: Bailey opened Transitioning Families in 2006 — two years after Rand launched Family Bridges — and had previously worked as a Family Bridges facilitator. In the same post documenting Bailey’s courtroom testimony, the page notes she “started out like Randy Rand did.”
The significance of this lineage is structural, not merely biographical. Family Bridges and Transitioning Families operate differently — Family Bridges runs residential programs in hotel rooms with children fully removed from the aligned parent; Transitioning Families runs workshop-based programs billed by the day.
But they share the same theoretical foundation: that a child’s stated fear of or resistance to a parent is a symptom to be overcome through intensive intervention, rather than a signal to be believed. Both programs have been recommended by the same custody evaluators to the same family courts. Both have faced formal complaints from families describing outcomes that are the opposite of what their names suggest.
Bailey’s Wright Institute doctoral program supervisor, Randy Rand, is not incidental to her professional formation. He is the template.
What the Court Testimony Shows
In court testimony captured in a Facebook post by the Child Reunification Workshop Scams page — dated November 2018 and citing direct examination transcripts — Bailey was asked whether she had been published. She answered yes. No titles were produced. The post characterizes her as having zero peer-reviewed articles at the time.
The academic record is more nuanced. Bailey co-authored a 2016 article in Family Court Review — the journal of the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts — titled “The Transitioning Families Therapeutic Reunification Model in Nonfamilial Abductions.” She is also a co-author on a 2020 Family Court Review piece applying Polyvagal Theory to high-conflict co-parenting cases. Family Court Review is a peer-reviewed journal; it is also the house journal of the AFCC, the same professional organization that critics — including Doreen Ludwig in her book AFCC Net — identify as central to the court-ordered therapy industry. Bailey is an active AFCC member. The significance of publications in a journal whose readership is the industry you serve is a matter for readers to assess.
The testimony also confirms what Bailey told the court about her background: self-employed since 1993, involved with Transitioning Families since 2006, former director of the Sonoma Police Department’s Youth and Family Services program. When asked whether she had ever testified on these occasions before, she answered: “Many.”
At the time that testimony was given, families were already raising formal complaints about her methods.
The Certified Transcript: March 10, 2022
On March 10, 2022, Rhonda Reyna — a former criminalist for the Santa Clara County DA’s Crime Laboratory — finally reached Dr. Bailey by phone. Bailey had been treating Rhonda’s daughter, Brooke, for eight months. She had not contacted Rhonda in all that time. This was their first conversation.
Bailey initiated the recording herself. “I am going to go ahead and hit record,” she said at the start. The conversation was transcribed by Transcription Outsourcing, LLC, and certified by Kimela Biers on May 9, 2022. Every quotation below is drawn from that certified transcript.
When Rhonda asked whether Bailey had conducted a DSM-5 assessment of Brooke, Bailey confirmed she had. “Yes, she’s suffering from severe PTSD, although it’s remitting somewhat.” She said Brooke had stopped the nightmares and the sleeplessness.
When Rhonda asked for a copy of the assessment, Bailey refused: “No. I can’t give you a copy of her records… He has legal custody, and I can’t.” Rhonda disputed this. Bailey held firm, citing David Murdoch’s custody status as her governing authority for withholding records from Brooke’s mother.
Bailey was wrong — and the court order said so explicitly. The January 23, 2019, stipulated custody order in case 16FAM00441, signed by both parties and entered by the San Mateo County Superior Court, states in Clause 9: “Mom and Dad shall be notified of all doctor appointments scheduled for the minor child, and both have the right to be present at the appointment. Mom and Dad shall be notified of any emergency medical needs of the minor child as soon as possible, and both have the right to be present (if available).” California Family Code Section 3025 further provides that access to records and information relating to a minor child — including medical records — may not be denied to a parent on the basis of custodial status unless a court has specifically restricted that access. No such restriction existed in Rhonda’s case.
Bailey’s refusal was not a matter of judicial discretion. It was not a gray area in the law. It was a violation of a standing court order that both parties had signed. Every medical provider, dentist, and institution that withheld records from Rhonda during this period was operating under the same false premise Bailey articulated on the transcript — that sole physical custody extinguishes the other parent’s right to information. It does not. The court order said so. The Family Code said so. Bailey said otherwise.
Rhonda had brought a support person named Mark to the call. When Mark began to speak, Bailey cut him off: “I just want to hear from mom.” When he spoke again, she redirected again.
Rhonda described what had happened to Brooke on June 28, 2021 — the strangulation, the police removal, the three days in isolation. She told Bailey there was video. Bailey’s response: “I don’t want to see the video. I’ve read the police report.”
She did not ask about the 911 transcripts. She did not ask about the neighbor’s witness accounts. She did not ask about the independent investigator’s reports. She had read the police report — the report filed by officers whose conduct a criminal court judge later described as horrifying after watching the footage.
When Rhonda pressed on the question of reunification — Bailey’s stated specialty — Bailey described Brooke’s current state as therapeutic progress: “I think the pressure is off her internally right now.” She attributed Brooke’s separation from her mother to the difficulty of being caught between two parents. She did not engage with the documented evidence of Murdoch’s violence.
When Rhonda raised APA ethical standards — specifically the requirement that therapists obtain consent from all parties with parental rights before treating a child — Bailey deflected: “I don’t want to get into a professional match around this.”
When Rhonda asked about reunification, Bailey said: “I’m not the one to force her to have to see me.” She described herself as honoring Brooke’s stated wishes, even as Brooke had been living in her alleged abuser’s home, under his supervision, meeting with Bailey on Zoom in his house, with limited privacy.
Toward the end of the session, Bailey said: “That was one of the most traumatic experiences I’ve ever heard.” She was describing what had happened to Brooke on June 28, 2021. She said she had seen Brooke’s bruises immediately afterward.
She had declined to watch the video.
The Invoice
The billing record for Rebecca Bailey’s treatment of Brooke Murdoch is 40 pages long. It contains multiple official Transitioning Families invoices, canceled Wells Fargo checks, correspondence from David Murdoch’s attorney demanding Rhonda pay her share, and a handwritten ledger in Rhonda’s own hand tracking every payment. It documents a total of at least $19,425 paid to Bailey — all of it by or through David Murdoch — over a period of less than eight months.
Bailey’s standard rate, printed on every official invoice: $500 per hour.
The billing began eight days after Judge Franchi signed the July 27, 2021, order requiring reunification therapy. The invoices that followed are on official Transitioning Families letterhead, signed by Bailey, and corroborated by canceled checks from David R. Murdoch’s Wells Fargo account:
Invoice 1 — September 2, 2021
Three sessions in August 2021: a 3.0-hour in-person session on 8/12 ($1,500), a 1.0-hour Zoom on 8/19 ($500), and a 1.0-hour Zoom on 8/25 ($500). Total: $2,500. Paid by Murdoch check #2050, posted 09/07/21, payable to “Dr. Rebecca Bailey,” memo “August.”
Invoice 2 — October 4, 2021
Seven sessions in September 2021 — including two 2.5-hour sessions — all at $500/hour. Total: $5,000. Paid by Murdoch check #2055, posted 10/13/21, payable to “Transitioning Families,” memo “Sept Inv. Brooke.”
Invoice 3 — November 12, 2021
Three 1.0-hour Zoom sessions in October (10/6, 10/20, 10/27). Total: $1,500. Paid by Murdoch check #2061, posted 11/23/21, payable to “Rebecca Bailey.”
Invoice 4 — December 2021
Sessions in November and December 2021, totaling $3,250 per the handwritten ledger. Paid by Murdoch.
Subsequent invoices through March 2022
Per the handwritten ledger: January 2022 ($2,625), February 2022 ($1,000 + $300), March 10, 2022 ($300 — the day of the certified transcript session), March 19, 2022 ($1,750).
Documented total through March 19, 2022: $19,425.
This is the same eight months during which Bailey did not contact Brooke’s mother. The same period during which Rhonda had no idea what was being said in those sessions, no access to the DSM-5 assessment, no input into the treatment plan, no means of knowing whether Brooke was asking to see her. The invoices went to David Murdoch. The sessions were billed to David Murdoch. The payments came from David Murdoch’s Wells Fargo account.
There is one additional financial detail in the billing file. Murdoch’s attorney, Julia Ferguson of Robin, Ferguson & Kempton, LLP, sent Rhonda a letter on September 30, 2021 — just three months after Brooke’s violent removal — informing her that David had “incurred $2,500 in fees for Rebecca Bailey” and demanding Rhonda remit $6,970 for Brooke’s health care costs as well. Rhonda sent check #1694, dated October 4, 2021, for $1,250 — half the August invoice — payable to David Murdoch, memo: “Reimbursement for fees paid to Rebecca Bailey, Brooke’s Counseling Aug 2021.” Then Ferguson’s colleague wrote again in December 2021, demanding another $750.
The woman who had been strangled in her own driveway, handcuffed while her attacker went free, convicted on a coerced plea, and billed $6,000 bail on a state-certified non-arrest — was being dunned by her abuser’s attorney for her share of the therapist’s fees.
The California family court ordered this arrangement without specifying parameters, expected completion dates, or fee oversight in the hearing record. California Family Code Section 3191 requires that court-ordered therapy not interfere with either parent’s ability to meet their financial needs, must facilitate communication between parents, and cannot exceed one year. None of these requirements appear to have been applied.
Bailey began billing eight days after the order was signed.
This is the business model: wealthy litigants pay. Children are treated. Protective parents are excluded. Courts order it. And when they protest, they get a letter from opposing counsel demanding their half.
How She Keeps Getting Referrals: The AFCC Pipeline
The question that families who have been through Bailey’s program ask, uniformly, is the same: if the complaints go back to 2016, if multiple families have documented harm, if the Board of Psychology has received thousands of pages of evidence — how does she keep getting court referrals?
The answer is visible in the documentary record, and it runs through an organization called the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts.
The AFCC is a professional membership organization whose members include family court judges, custody evaluators, mediators, and therapists. It describes itself as a multidisciplinary organization dedicated to improving the lives of children and families. Critics, including Doreen Ludwig in her book AFCC Net, describe it differently: as the professional infrastructure through which court-connected practitioners refer business to each other, establish credibility with judges, and insulate themselves from accountability.
Bailey is an active AFCC member, as documented in her own court testimony. Her publications appear in Family Court Review — the AFCC’s official journal. The AFCC membership list includes the judges who sign reunification therapy orders, the custody evaluators who recommend practitioners like Bailey by name, and the therapists who receive those referrals. The same professional community that generates the orders is the community that benefits from them.
This dynamic is documented in Rhonda’s case file from another case entirely — an appellate record from the project files in which a court-appointed custody evaluator, Dr. Stan Katz, testified before Judge Dianna Gould-Saltman and explicitly recommended Bailey by name. According to the court record, Katz told the judge he was familiar with Bailey’s program, called it “flexible” and customizable, and said it “allowed both parents to participate.” He described Family Bridges — the Rand program — as the more extreme option, and positioned Bailey’s Transitioning Families as the moderate alternative. The court subsequently permitted enrollment. Bailey was not in the room when she was recommended. She did not need to be.
This is how the referral pipeline works: a custody evaluator — often also an AFCC member — appears before a judge as a neutral expert and names a practitioner. The judge, who may have heard the same name recommended in multiple cases, signs an order. The practitioner receives a client who has no meaningful ability to refuse. The bills are paid by the higher-income litigant, who selected the evaluator, who selected the therapist.
In Rhonda’s case, Judge Don R. Franchi of San Mateo County Superior Court ordered reunification therapy on July 27, 2021 — less than a month after Brooke was violently removed from her mother and held in a psychiatric facility for three days. In a November 19, 2021, hearing, Franchi described Bailey as “the counselor for the minor child” and dismissed Rhonda’s objections to Bailey being treated as an expert witness, noting he simply wanted Bailey’s “recommendations as continued treatment for the minor child.” He did not require Bailey to be voir dired. He did not ask about her peer-reviewed publications. He did not ask why she had not contacted the child’s mother in four months of treatment.
In another case, a Los Angeles judge, Judge Steven A. Ellis, subsequently ordered the children to participate in the Family Bridges program itself — requiring them to be removed from their mother’s custody for a minimum of 90 days with no contact between the children and their mother during that period. The children’s attorney had attempted to call the teenagers as witnesses to testify about the prospect of being ordered from their home. Judge Ellis denied the request.
In a Santa Cruz case, Judge Rebecca Connolly ordered Maya and Sebastian Laing into reunification therapy — the order that led to their forcible removal in October 2022 and their 3 am escape seven months later. A recall campaign against Connolly was launched by their friends and community members after the case became public.
In another Los Angeles case, a family court judge ordered Renée Izambard and her three children into a four-day workshop at Transitioning Families in mid-2020. Izambard was managing a newly diagnosed complex neurological condition and had recently completed weeks of inpatient rehabilitation. The court did not inquire into the cost, the methodology, or the safety of requiring a disabled mother to drive six hours through an active wildfire to attend.
Judges order the programs. Custody evaluators recommend the practitioners. The practitioners bill the clients. The professional organization connects them all. The regulatory boards, presented with complaints, apply a high evidentiary threshold and close the files. The pipeline remains intact.
The Pattern: Complaints Going Back to 2016
Rhonda Reyna is not the first parent to raise formal concerns about Rebecca Bailey. She is not the second. She is not close to the last.
The Center for Judicial Excellence — a California advocacy organization focused on family court accountability — posted publicly to its Facebook page in November 2016, asking: “Have your children been harmed by… Dr. Rebecca Bailey from Sonoma Co, CA… or anyone connected to the nefarious programs called ‘Family Bridges, Transitioning Families or Overcoming Barriers?'” The post asked families to contact the organization directly. It named Bailey alongside Dr. Randy Rand and noted that “very powerful ears” were listening to the stories at that time.
That post was made in 2016. Bailey has continued to receive family court referrals in California since then.
By 2018, the Child Reunification Workshop Scams Facebook page was documenting her methods in court testimony. By 2022, Rhonda’s formal Board of Psychology complaint documented that she had spoken with “another parent whose children were severely harmed by Dr. Bailey” — a parent who had filed “thousands of pages of complaints to the Board of Psychology” and received no action.
Renée Izambard — Los Angeles, 2020
In June 2023, Renée Leigh Izambard — an Australian citizen and California resident, founder of the Movement of Mothers advocacy organization — published an open letter to Governor Gavin Newsom documenting what happened to her and her three children at Transitioning Families. Her account names Bailey directly.
Izambard describes being court-ordered in mid-2020, and at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, to drive her children more than six hours to Sonoma — through the path of California’s then-largest wildfire, the August Complex — to attend a four-day workshop at Transitioning Families with Bailey and Dr. Frank Davis. She was managing a newly diagnosed complex neurological condition that had required weeks of inpatient rehabilitation and left her with long-term disability.
She describes the experience as “an extremely traumatic, unsound, unregulated, dangerous four-day torture chamber” costing $8,000 per day plus accommodation, food, and travel — more than $50,000 in total. She describes Bailey attempting to coerce her into signing over parental rights to another therapist. She describes Bailey hiring local teenagers to surveil her children during sessions, with the teenagers reporting back to Bailey — information that was then used against the children in their therapy sessions. She describes being required to pay for meals cooked by Bailey’s husband in Bailey’s home as part of the billed expenses.
Izambard’s letter was endorsed by Reem Alsalem, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls, who described it as “a very difficult but necessary read on the horrors inflicted on women and children through invoking parental alienation.” The letter was published by the Movement of Mothers on June 8, 2023 — three weeks before the Good Times of Santa Cruz published its own investigation into reunification therapy in the same county.
Maya and Sebastian Laing — Santa Cruz, 2022–2023
In June 2023, the Good Times of Santa Cruz published a reported investigation by Todd Guild into the case of two Santa Cruz siblings, Maya, then 16, and Sebastian, then 12, who had been violently removed from a relative’s home in October 2022 and forced into a four-day intensive reunification program with therapists Regina Marshall and Lynn Steinberg.
The children’s accounts, documented in a series of Instagram videos after their 3 am escape from their mother’s home in May 2023, describe being kept in a room with knobs removed from the door, threatened with a wilderness camp where food could be withheld, accused of lying about allegations against their mother, forbidden from contacting their father or friends, and coached to change their names and lie about their location. One described a transport agent pushing him into a car seat by the throat.
“The way they go about doing this, to rip the children away from the healthy parent and force them into a relationship that they do not want to be with, is extremely traumatic for them,” Pennsylvania-based licensed clinical psychologist Jaime Zuckerman told the Good Times, speaking about the broader practice.
Bailey is not named in the Good Times article. But in the article’s comment section, Rhonda Reyna — identifying herself by name — wrote that she had “spoken to many victims who recount the horrific threat therapy, physical abuse, and psychological maltreatment” and named Bailey directly alongside Steinberg as part of the same unregulated industry.
The Maya and Sebastian case directly triggered a Santa Cruz County ordinance prohibiting the use of force by companies that transport children, and gave momentum to SB 331 — Piqui’s Law — which passed the California Senate floor unanimously on May 24, 2023.
Jill Soderman, Director of the Foundation for Child Victims of the Family Court, was familiar with Bailey when Rhonda reached out in 2022. Her warning was direct: Rhonda’s daughter was in serious danger.
Rhonda filed her first formal complaint with the California Board of Psychology in May 2022 — case number 6002022000490. She filed a second in September 2022, referencing the Kathleen Russell documentation going back to 2017. The Board dismissed both. Bailey continued to practice.
The Watchdog That Didn’t Bark
The Center for Judicial Excellence solicited victim accounts naming Bailey publicly in November 2016. In the years that followed, CJE co-authored two pieces of legislation specifically targeting the type of programs Bailey operates: the federal Kayden’s Law (signed March 2022) and California’s SB 331, known as Piqui’s Law (signed October 2023). SB 331 prohibits California family courts from forcing children into reunification camps; Maya and Sebastian Laing — the Santa Cruz children whose case is documented above — are named in coverage of the bill’s passage.
Bailey’s license remained active throughout. She continued receiving court orders in California through at least 2022 per billing records reviewed by Riptide.
The gap is precise: CJE identified Bailey as a concern in 2016, helped write laws in 2022 and 2023 designed to restrict her practice, and as of this publication, no public disciplinary action has been taken against her license by the California Board of Psychology.
Piqui’s Law: The Legislature Saw the Problem
Senator Susan Rubio’s SB 616 — known informally as Piqui’s Law after Piqui Quinones, a five-year-old boy killed by his father after a court-ordered reunification process — was introduced specifically to address dangerous and unproven reunification programs. California families testified about their experiences with practitioners whose methods, they said, had systematically separated their children from protective parents in the name of reunification.
The legislation passed. It acknowledged that the problem was real, documented, and required legislative response.
It did not stop Bailey from continuing to receive referrals from California family courts. It did not compel the Board of Psychology to act on the complaints that had been filed. And as Rhonda documents in recordings and in her formal complaints, the legislation’s passage may have actually rebranded the practice rather than eliminated it — “reunification therapy” was replaced in court orders with “resist and refuse dynamics” treatment, achieving the same outcome under a different name.
The court order in Rhonda’s case was signed before Piqui’s Law took effect. Bailey’s invoices continued afterward.
Reprogramming Therapy
The term “reprogramming therapy” — used by the late Catherine Kassenoff, a New York attorney and family court critic who died in 2023 after a widely followed custody case — captures what families say they experience more precisely than “reunification therapy” does. Kassenoff brought suit against her children’s therapist, Susan Adler, for fraudulent inducement, alleging Adler had concealed from the court that she intended to subject the children to “reprogramming therapy” with the goal of promoting a fabricated parental alienation claim in support of the father’s litigation efforts to hide domestic violence. A court ruled in 2023 that the fraudulent inducement case could proceed. The distinction between “reunification therapy” as described on Bailey’s website and “reprogramming therapy” as described by families who have been through it is, in the documented record, the same distinction.
The Network: Social Proof and Institutional Credibility
Bailey’s connection to Jaycee Dugard and the JAYC Foundation is the centerpiece of her public credibility. Dugard’s story — kidnapped at eleven, held captive for eighteen years, eventually rescued and reunited with her family — is one of the most recognized abduction cases in American history. Her foundation’s work on behalf of abduction survivors carries significant moral authority.
Bailey co-created the Polyvagal Institute course featuring Dugard with Dr. Stephen Porges, one of the most respected researchers in autonomic nervous system science. The course describes appeasement as a physiological survival response — the body’s adaptation to inescapable threat — and argues that this framework is more accurate and more compassionate than the discredited term “Stockholm Syndrome.”
The theory, as Porges and Dugard present it, is legitimate and important: survivors of captivity and abuse should not be pathologized for adapting to survive. The question raised by families in Bailey’s cases is whether this framework — designed to explain the experiences of abduction survivors — is being applied in family court contexts to reframe a child’s fear of an abusive parent as a nervous system response to be managed, rather than a signal to be believed.
There is a further complication. Polyvagal Theory itself is not without controversy in the scientific community. According to Wikipedia’s entry on the theory — sourced to current social neuroscience literature — it “is popular among some clinical practitioners and patients, but is not endorsed by current social neuroscience.” Independent researchers, including Dr. Paul Grossman of the University of Basel, have published critiques arguing that the theory’s neurophysiological claims are not supported by the evidence.
A search for “is Polyvagal theory evidence-based” returns this summary from medical education resources: “supporting evidence remains limited. While it has been used to help inform trauma treatment, Polyvagal Theory has also been criticized for this lack of research.”
Bailey’s court-ordered practice is built partly on a theoretical framework that is not generally accepted across the field of psychology, published in a journal whose primary readership is the professional community that generates the court referrals, applied to children under court order, at rates those children’s protective parents cannot afford. The families whose children have been subjected to it have no meaningful mechanism to object to the scientific foundation on which it rests.
Bailey’s Elizabeth Smart Foundation connection amplifies this credibility. Smart, who was kidnapped from her home in 2002 and recovered in 2003, is among the most publicly visible survivors of childhood abduction in the United States. Her foundation’s social media has featured Bailey’s appeasement framework. At a horse show Rhonda attended, a domestic violence agency that listed the Elizabeth Smart Foundation as its primary beneficiary was sponsoring equestrian events. A second organization in the network, Casey Gwen’s Family Justice Center, received funding through related channels. The Bitchstix company, which markets personal safety products, contributed funding that flowed through this network.
Rhonda traced this network while sitting at her daughter’s horse show — the same horse show where Brooke was competing and not acknowledging her mother’s presence. She did so as a criminalist: following the money, documenting the connections, and asking what the network is actually producing for families who cannot afford Bailey’s rates and who do not have the institutional credibility to question her methods in court.
What Bailey’s Website Says
Transitioning Families’ website describes a practice dedicated to helping families navigate crisis and change. It describes Bailey as a specialist in reuniting families, in high-conflict divorce, and in the trauma responses of children. The public profile — the Dugard connection, the television appearances, the Polyvagal Institute course, the OurFamilyWizard articles — presents a practitioner whose work is oriented toward healing, reunion, and compassion for survivors.
The families who have filed complaints describe a different practice: one in which the parent who can pay governs the therapeutic relationship, the parent who cannot is excluded, the child’s stated fear of an abusive parent is reframed as a nervous system response to be processed, and the outcome — reliably — is the consolidation of custody with the higher-income parent and the systematic erasure of the lower-income parent from the child’s life.
Bailey’s website says she reunites families. The families whose stories are documented in court records, Board of Psychology complaints, and CJE filings say she separated them from their children under court order, at rates they could not match, with institutional credibility they could not challenge.
Rhonda Reyna’s daughter has not seen her mother since 2021.
What the Board of Psychology Did
When Rhonda filed her May 2022 complaint, the Board of Psychology sent a standard acknowledgment letter. It described the process: enforcement team review, possible informal or formal investigation, a timeline of three to six months for initial review, twelve to twenty-four months for formal discipline. The burden of proof: clear and convincing evidence to a reasonable certainty.
Rhonda’s second complaint, filed September 2, 2022, documented the scope: tracking by the Center for Judicial Excellence going back to at least 2017, families filing thousands of pages of complaints with no action, Bailey still actively receiving court referrals and issuing invoices, and the formal legislative acknowledgment through SB 616 that these practices cause harm.
The Board dismissed both complaints. Bailey’s license remains active. She continues to receive court referrals.
The standard argument for regulatory inaction is insufficient evidence. But the evidence in Rhonda’s case alone includes a certified transcript in which Bailey declined to view a video of a child’s violent removal, withheld records from a legal parent, described therapeutic progress in terms of the child’s separation from her mother, and told Rhonda directly that she would never let her see her daughter again.
The evidence in the broader record includes documented complaints from families spanning nearly a decade, legislative testimony that prompted the passage of SB 616, and a pattern tracked independently by multiple advocacy organizations. The Board has not held a public hearing, compelled Bailey to respond, or explained its rationale for dismissal.
The System That Protects Itself
Dr. Rebecca Bailey is not an aberration. She is a product.
She trained in the professional tradition of Randy Rand. She joined the professional organization — the AFCC — whose members are the judges and evaluators who generate her referrals. She published in its own journal. She built credibility through an association with one of the most recognized abduction survivors in American history. She appeared on television. She got listed on OurFamilyWizard, the platform that family courts mandate for co-parenting communication. She became the moderate option — not as extreme as Family Bridges, not as radical as Rand, just a flexible program that allows both parents to participate.
And then, in case after case documented across nearly a decade, the same thing happened. The higher-income parent paid. The lower-income parent was excluded. The child’s stated fear was reframed as a nervous system response. Reunification proceeded. The parent lost access to their child.
The California Board of Psychology received the complaints and closed the files. The AFCC continues to host the conferences where the practitioners and the judges network. The family courts continue to sign the orders. The invoices continue to arrive.
Brooke Murdoch is now a teenager competing at horse shows under her father’s name. She has not seen her mother since the summer of 2021. A court ordered therapy to reunite them. The therapist was Rebecca Bailey. Bailey has told Rhonda directly, on a recording Bailey herself initiated, that she will never let Rhonda see her daughter again.
That is not reunification. It is its opposite — performed, at substantial cost to the paying parent, under color of a court order, with the full institutional architecture of the family court system behind it.
Rebecca Bailey’s license is active. Her calendar, presumably, is full.
A Note on Sources and What We Could Not Verify
This article is based on documents on file with Riptide: the certified March 10, 2022 transcript (Transcription Outsourcing, LLC, signed by Kimela Biers); Bailey Invoice #19 to David Murdoch dated June 6, 2022; Rhonda Reyna’s Board of Psychology complaints of May 2022 and September 2, 2022, with case number 6002022000490; the Board of Psychology’s May 26, 2022 acknowledgment letter; the November 2016 Center for Judicial Excellence Facebook post; the November 2018 Child Reunification Workshop Scams post documenting Bailey’s court testimony; Renée Izambard’s open letter to Governor Newsom published by the Movement of Mothers on June 8, 2023; Todd Guild’s June 2023 investigation in the Good Times of Santa Cruz; Bailey’s APA Psychologist Locator profile; her publications in Family Court Review (2016, 2020); publicly available information from OurFamilyWizard, the Polyvagal Institute, the JAYC Foundation, and Transitioning Families’ own website; and Rhonda Reyna’s own account.
Rhonda Reyna’s case — including the June 28, 2021 strangulation, the defective warrant, the coerced plea, and the two PDP attorneys who suppressed exculpatory evidence — is documented in full in Article 1 of this series: “The Criminalist and the Coerced Plea.“
This series continues with an examination of San Mateo County’s Private Defender Program — what it is, how it operates, and why it produces outcomes like Rhonda’s.
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