Rules of Estrangement: Why Adult Children Cut Ties and How to Heal the Conflict

by Joshua Coleman

In

psychology this dynamic is commonly referred to as parental alienation. Developmental psychologist Amy Baker notes seventeen primary parental alienation strategies that have been identified through research studies, which fall into five general categories: (1) poisonous messages to the child about the targeted parent in which he or she is portrayed as unloving, unsafe, and unavailable; (2) limiting contact and communication between the child and the targeted parent; (3) erasing and replacing the targeted parent in the heart and mind of the child; (4) encouraging the child to betray the targeted parent’s trust; and (5) undermining the authority of the targeted parent. Taken together, these parental alienation strategies often foster conflict and psychological distance between the child and the targeted parent.

According to Peter Myers, an estate attorney in San Francisco, a will can be written in a way that stipulates that the inheritance be solely administered by your adult child. In addition, it can stipulate that if your child divorces, the money follows him or her out of the marriage.

An ex-husband supports his daughter in her estrangement from her mother.

Adult Children Are Not the Ultimate Authorities About What Happened in Their Childhoods. Just Because You Check a Few Boxes on a Survey Doesn’t Mean Your Parent Is a Narcissist. Actually, You Do Owe Your Parents. Estranging an Involved Grandparent Who Never Abused Your Child Is Child Abuse and Elder Abuse. Unless Your Therapist Has Met Your Parent, Their Diagnosis of Them May Be Completely Incorrect.

That’s because healing from your estrangement requires that you develop a kind of poise, balance, and resiliency in the face of ongoing pain. Buddhists call this state of mind upekkha. You need the resources drawn from good sleep, a reasonable diet, regular exercise, and people who care about you to be able to exist in the presence of pain and face it head on.

You became estranged because bad things happen to good people. And even if you made monstrously terrible decisions with your children, nothing makes you deserving of a life without them in it. If your kids are unable to see you as worthy of love, acceptance, and forgiveness, then you have to find redemption in that small crack in the continuum of catastrophe, as Walter Benjamin put it. And guard it with your life.

“We need to recognize that to deny people their complications and contradictions is to deny them their humanity,” notes Meghan Daum in The Problem with Everything. Developing compassion for parents, adult children, intimate partners, and friends is helpful not only because it makes us more resilient, but because it allows us to see them more clearly—their awkward or ineffectual attempts to care for us; the confounding nature of their struggles; the history they carry stumbling into the present. While many say that finding compassion for those who hurt them is one of the hardest things they’ve ever done, others discover that it’s freeing in ways they hadn’t imagined. It binds them to a common humanity where we are all in some measure flawed, torn, and hurt. And dying for understanding. NOTES INTRODUCTION estranged parents who all say the same thing: The word estranged means different things to different people, including researchers.