Every Version Of Us Is Involved In Estrangement

Good parents. Good kids. Kind parents. Kind kids. Bad parents. Bad kids. Every version of us is involved in estrangement.

*This is not for parents who physically, sexually abuse(d) their children, if that is you, you can move on I am not writing to you.

I write to you, a parent who understand they had a role in their child’s decision to estrange from you. I write to you understanding you still want to be heard, you had/have your own traumas in life and you wanted the best possible life for your children. And your child still chose to estrange from you.

Parents who have been involved productively in their children’s lives and have helped their kids find the way out into this world, parents who are stereotypically considered good, though flawed, parents, still experience adult children cutting them out of their lives.

And sometimes those same parents, us, have had a huge burden to reconcile in our own lives whether that’s in the form of trauma, health issues or the very challenging ups and downs life will bring that no amount of planning can mitigate for.

The things is, we are good parents. And. Our children are good people. This is a nuance lost by so many parents in pain while facing estrangement.

A child choosing estrangement tells us something about ourselves and about our children. Our children were raised in the environments they were raised in. They have also experienced the world, other human relationships, their educational environments, their friend groups. Their unique experiences are theirs and we have no right to tell them what they feel about those experiences is wrong or not true. They don’t have the right to tell you those things either. And so we get stuck reconciling with our adult kids in many ways.

There isn’t anyone who knows what is best for you except you. You might need help figuring that out once in a while but when it comes down to it, you are the only one who will be able to choose what’s best for you.

So that means, in a moment or for a time in your life you yourself might distance from one or more people. It’s perfectly acceptable when its someone who is not related to you but when it comes to the proverbial family is everything concept, taboos rear their ugly heads.

And the truth of that doesn’t change that my kids and I will all get caught in trying to tell each other we think we know what each of us should be doing to make theirs/our lives better. But we don’t have that right or even that knowledge of each other’s lives as adults to demand they listen to our way of thinking.

Well then. What can we as adults ourselves do to gain some peace on any given day, let alone the holidays when the pain of estrangement is magnified a thousand fold? Turns out there are some great things you can do for yourself, your peace of mind and your future life that will bring you a little or a lot of that peace.

I’ve been using these and they work most of the time because I’m a human who is hurting at the moment and sometimes the hurt takes over until I can sit with it and let it run its course.

• Acknowledge your pain
• Do something for someone else
• Do something for you
• Reach out to someone who knows your situation, or join one of the many groups online with parents in your situation (do so with eyes open and be picky about which ones you join)

Here’s to peace in painful times. Here’s to you growing into the person you know you want to be. Here’s to all of us learning from this painful estrangement and here’s to the continued hope that we will have substantive relationships with our adult children in the future.

Thanks for reading, talk to you soon