Clinical Psychologist To Parents: If You’re Estranged From Your Adult Child, It Didn’t Happen Randomly
This psychologist wants parents to understand: estrangement is almost always a response, not a rejection.
Yara Amaral | Unsplash While it is common to say that rates of estrangement are skyrocketing, this is not the case. Estrangement used to be a secret, sensitive topic, and was not studied or quantified.
Parents would say to kids, “My sister and I don’t talk,” or “We don’t like that side of the family,” and nothing else was said about it. But this has changed massively in recent years.
Today, estrangement has become an open topic of conversation. All over social media, which of course did not used to exist at all, people discuss going “low contact” or “no contact” with their parents, and say how they can’t engage in relationships that are “toxic.”
But the truth is, as a clinical psychologist, if you're estranged from your adult child, it didn't happen randomly.
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It means that your adult child now has a language to discuss estrangement with you and others openly, but they would likely have had issues with you in any generation.
The idea that estrangement is new is soothing, but false, and even if it were correct, it would not give you any insight into your contribution to the issues or any practical tools to reconnect with your adult child, which is the goal of so many of my clients who struggle with difficult relationships with their adult children.
The reality that you will have to face is that estrangement is not random. “Toxic” may be a buzzword, but the idea behind the term is real and true.
Some relationships are very unhealthy, and your relationship with your adult child likely is or was one of them, even if this is difficult to admit.
Anger, passive aggression, guilt trips, power struggles, and disrespect on both sides likely characterized your communication. It can be an epiphany for many to recognize that estrangement often occurs when parents and children share similar traits, whether or not this similarity is acknowledged by either party.
The elephant in the room for many parents struggling with their kids’ estrangement is that they are or were estranged from family. This is ironic, given the popularity of the “skyrocketing estrangement rates” idea.
Sometimes, they were never fully estranged but had conflictual or cold relationships with family members when their kids were young. The children learned that the way you deal with a difficult family relationship is to cut ties either emotionally or physically, and they are now modeling these patterns with the parents themselves.
A huge body of research shows that parents and children tend to overlap significantly in mental health and personality level traits. For example, studies show that if your parent was depressed, you are 2–3 times more likely to be depressed yourself.
This is due to a mix of nature and nurture, as depressed parents struggle more with parenting, and depression is also genetically passed down. Parents and children who struggle with the same issues are not always compatible; often, they trigger one another precisely because they are so alike.
In my practice, I have seen that parents who are more closed-minded, defensive, and who struggle with their own unacknowledged mental health issues are those who are most likely to have a child sever or reduce contact with them.
Also, parents who have been divorced, parents who have been estranged from family members themselves, and parents who communicate in indirect or angry ways tend to be more likely to be estranged.
Often, parents don’t make these connections, or many other useful connections between their upbringings and that of their kids, until they are in therapy or deeply introspecting about the estrangement.
For example, if you see that your children likely learned their conflict management style from you, it can be an “aha moment,” giving you the space to see that if you change your relational style right now, your child may be able to learn a new way of interacting even at this late date.
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Keep in mind that factors like environment, especially the stressors of divorce and remarriage, can contribute massively to estrangement. Divorce is not stated by most adult children to be the reason behind their estrangement from a parent, but in the book Rules of Estrangement, 70% of the parents who he surveyed were divorced from the estranged child’s other biological parent.
While divorce itself isn’t thought of by the adult child to be the reason they no longer want to have a relationship with their parent, divorce can stress the relationship in many ways.
For example, a parent having a difficult relationship with the co-parent and putting the child in the middle may lead to resentment and bitterness on the part of the child, but they don’t consider the divorce the reason for their resentment, but rather the way the parent was thought to force their agenda and beliefs on the adult child.
Also, people who divorce are likelier to struggle with interpersonal relationships and to have personalities higher in neuroticism and lower in agreeableness and conscientiousness.
The reality is, if you have divorced, then you are more likely to struggle in relationships, and even if you are happily remarried, your divorce was likely a source of sadness and stress in your children’s lives at the time that it happened. Your behaviors were also impacted by the stress of your divorce in ways that it may be hard to remember if it happened years ago.
Even if you have happily remarried, this also impacts your child in a host of ways. If they disliked your new partner, then you are perceived as someone who picked this person over the children, even if you feel you tried to do the opposite.
And even if your children loved their new stepparent, your remarriage added the stressors of a blended family to your children’s lives. There is no judgment in this; I have been divorced and remarried myself.
However, it is delusional to think that divorce did not stress your children and make it likelier that they saw you at your most stressed, reactive, and emotional, which may well impact your current relationship with them. This is especially true if you have never acknowledged the stress of that time or blamed it solely on your other parent.
It is time to think about divorce and other impacts on your child from their perspective, which may be very different than the “party line” or traditional narrative of your family.
Therapy can be transformative in helping parents and adult children repair conflictual relationships, and repair doesn’t have to mean denying your positive memories of your child’s childhood.
If this post has made you recognize that you’ve been avoiding looking in too deeply at your contributions to your difficult or estranged relationship with your adult child, it is never too late to go to therapy and figure out other ways of looking inward so that you can reach out to them using different skills and a more objective approach.
Dr. Samantha Rodman Whiten, aka Dr. Psych Mom, is a clinical psychologist in private practice and the founder of DrPsychMom. She works with adults and couples in her group practice Best Life Behavioral Health.
