I joined facebook again after about 12 years of not wanting to be in that toxic economy. My goal has been to connect with people who travel. It’s been wonderful this time around and I am protective over that little growing curated community.
A post has been circulating recently in several of the women only groups I’ve joined that calls out this unfortunately common epidemic of adult children who choose to estrange from parents. The post mentions its opinion on some of the “why” of estrangement including social media, therapists and quotes the bible.
It’s been posted in these groups I’ve joined, which are not focused on estrangement but have wide age ranges of us in them. The post itself is fairly benign. The comments were intense. The comments in one of the groups inspired my post to you today.
Of two of the groups the estrangement note was shared in, one group has over 12,000 women and another has over 500. Statistically in this large a community of women, the majority of us have experienced assault/abuse/dysfunction. And of the women who have experienced these things, statistically the violence has been committed by white cis men.
I say this because folded into that statistic is the pathologizing of women to keep us silent. And when we experience the trauma of abuse, try to tell someone it happened and are told to shut the fuck up - all while abusers are lifted again and again and again without any consequence…well, we get pissed.
Anger tells us something and part of our work to heal ourselves along with our families whether they choose continued estrangement or not, is on us to learn what the anger can be used for, what it tells us and how to engage in the world while anger lives inside us.
The responses to the post shone a magnifying glass on the combined, nuanced and widely varied pain we have in experiencing the trauma of estrangement from both the perspective of adult women who have chosen to estrange and moms who have experienced adult children making this choice.
What moved me to heartache was the realtime commenting of women adult children expressing their pain and women whose children have chosen estrangement expressing their pain all in a single thread while mirroring some of the gaps in communication that have brought many of us to this pain of estrangement.
I’ve said it in other posts and will keep saying it: this is a common experience with unique circumstances among families. Being severed from people we love or we feel were supposed to protect us or want to repair the hurts we have caused the people we love and were supposed to protect, but didn’t, takes on so much nuance because we in fact are individuals. We’re imperfect. We’re wounded. We’re stubborn. We’re healing. We’re in pain. We’re human beings and the nature of us is imperfection.
I know that estranging from people who did not protect me was crucial and I know I took bad parenting into a marriage to a violent domestic abuser and I did not protect my kids in too many ways and protected them in others. Now I am on the receiving side of adult children choosing to estrange from me. And my heart is shattered. And I do the work to heal my heart and the trauma I have in hopes these writings will help someone else whose heart is shattered, maybe even my children or grandchildren.
It’s a cycle we are sometimes unconscious of. It’s so common and is it unique in each family. Treat it that way and be careful of the hearts of others.
Thanks for reading, talk to you soon.