Estrangement Is the End of a Long Process

A Personal Reflection On Parental Estrangement

The Artist’s Sitting Room in Ritterstrasse - Adolph Menzel 1851 - The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Open Access (public domain)

Recently, I wrote a note on parental estrangement in response to an answer Philippa Perry gave in her advice column. I was surprised by how compelled I felt to write it, but I followed the impulse and trusted that it mattered.

Until then, I hadn’t spoken publicly about being estranged from a parent. It’s a subject understandably saturated with emotion on both sides, and I was anxious about sharing my experience. The response, however, has been significant, and many people have asked me to publish the note as a standalone piece.

So here it is.

I am estranged from my mother. Just over a year now, though we’ve had many shorter periods of estrangement before. I’m also a mother myself. That matters because it has shown me, every day, that different choices are possible.

For me, estrangement is not banishment or a refusal to forgive. I truly forgive my mother for the past. What I cannot do is continue to put up with the same behaviours in the present. This is the distinction that is often missed.

Many parents genuinely do not understand what they’ve done, and continue to do, because the harm is cumulative rather than dramatic. It is made up of ingrained patterns that felt normal at the time: dismissal, control, unpredictability, emotional pressure, boundary-crossing. These things often don’t register as ‘abuse’ to the person doing them, but the child remembers them clearly.

It’s also important to acknowledge that political and moral worldviews aren’t abstract within families. They shape how welcome you feel, what parts of yourself you can bring into the room, and whether the relationship is a place of rest and safety, or of defence. When those views involve bigotry, even subtly, their impact is cumulative and embodied, not merely ideological.

There is also an asymmetry here that often goes unexamined. Adult children are frequently asked to choose their parents over their values, to tolerate views they find offensive in the name of family loyalty. We rarely ask parents to make the same choice. To decide that the relationship matters more than being right, than saying the opinion out loud.

What is also missing from many discussions is that boundaries are not universally legible. Many women of my mother’s generation were not allowed boundaries themselves. They learned to equate love with endurance, access, and self-sacrifice. So when an adult child sets even a simple boundary, it can be experienced as rejection or punishment. But when boundaries are repeatedly ignored or minimised, distance becomes the only remaining option.

I also think it’s important to acknowledge cultural change. Parenting expectations have shifted. In the past, parents were expected to do less emotionally for their children. Now we expect more attunement, more repair, more accountability. That shift is not a moral failing of earlier generations, it was all they knew, but it does mean that some relationships break under the strain of generational change.

Another factor is that many parents end up parenting alone, whether through the physical absence of another parent or an emotional one. My mum did it alone. That matters. The impossible dual role so many parents, but especially women, are forced into, often with little support, needs to be acknowledged.

I would not speak to my children in the ways I was spoken to. I would not treat them the way I was treated. I would not expect access to them at the expense of their nervous systems. I also have the support, knowledge and skills that make this difference possible. And our relationship is stronger for it.

Feeling unjustly accused is an almost inevitable part of the process of addressing harm. As a mother, I recognise this feeling from the inside. When my children bring anger or hurt to me about something I’ve said or done, I can feel unjustly accused too. It stings. It triggers my defences, my sense of having tried my best, everything I have sacrificed. I fear losing their love. I panic. But I understand that this feeling is mine to manage. It belongs to my ego and my heart, not to my children. And if you centre your child (and they are always your child, even when they are an adult), listen, and make change, the feeling passes.

I want to be clear, too, that I have made many mistakes as a parent. I may not have spoken to my children in the ways I was spoken to, or become physically abusive, but they absorbed hypervigilance from my poor mental health, from my attempts to hide how I was feeling because I didn’t know how else to cope, and from the emotional withdrawal that followed. I believe repair has mattered, and that it has protected our relationship, but I still carry guilt about the ways I’ve shaped their struggles, now and in the future. I take responsibility for that every day in the choices I make.

Part of this process, for me, is not arguing with my children about their reality. If they tell me how something felt to them, even if they say I said something I don’t remember saying, or that my tone was harsh when I thought it wasn’t, I try not to dispute it. They are describing their perception, their experience. Mine is simply a different one, not a more accurate one. Denying their reality does not repair harm.

This is not about having no empathy for our parents. I understand intellectually why my mum struggled in the ways she did. It is also clear to me that she did better than many in her position would have. Her behaviour, and the ways she harmed me, were shaped by her own trauma. But knowing that does not change how my body and nervous system experienced it, and still do. When she behaves in similar ways now, it puts me back into damaging, overwhelming emotional states. I have to be OK for my kids. I have to be OK for myself.

I also hold compassion for parents grieving estrangement. Both sides can be acknowledged. It is a terrible loss. I hope I am always able to find ways through any difficulties in my relationship with my own children. But I also think it’s harmful to frame adult children’s decisions as ideological, fashionable, or cruel. For many of us, no-contact is not a statement or a punishment. It is a personal limit reached. It is a way of protecting emotional safety and the possibility of growth.

There is also immense internal and social stigma in being estranged from the people who are supposed to love you most in the world, not only on the parent’s side, but on the child’s too. People make flippant comments to me all the time: ‘you’ll miss them when they’re gone’, or ‘love is forgiveness’. I am acutely aware of the timeline. I worry every day that I am being incredibly selfish, something I was told often growing up.

Being estranged from my mum is devastating. I love her. I worry about her. I think about her every day. I see her in me all the time, and that is complicated too.

It will never not be desperately sad that she isn’t in my life. But my life has also been better without her in it. It was incredibly hard to acknowledge, and even harder to say out loud. And yet, in the past year, I have begun to heal properly for the first time. I spent years in therapy only to be constantly pulled back into emotional turmoil through my relationship with my mother. Estrangement makes more sense when understood as the end of a very long process, not the beginning of one.

Estrangement, for me, has been about accepting reality. About letting go of what the relationship should have been, and responding honestly to what it actually is.

I live with the grief of my decision every day. I also live with more safety, more clarity, and more capacity than I’ve ever had before. Both things are true, and neither cancels the other out.

*This piece reflects my experience. It isn’t a prescription or a debate. Comments are open but please respond with care.