Money makes the world go around, The world go around, The world go around, Money makes the world go around, It makes the world go ‘round -Cabaret

So say the famous lyrics from the Broadway play, Cabaret.

It leads to yet another contradictory topic within the estrangement discourse, one that seems particularly incendiary: inheritance.

The same parents who claim to have provided selfless unconditional love, indignantly comment in discussion threads or convey in media articles their intent to disinherit the adult child who determined the relationship was too harmful for them to remain in.

Observationally, it is a topic that seems to originate predominantly within estranged-parent discussions, while appearing largely as a reaction to those discussions or decisions among estranged adult children.

But the conversations reveal far more than what estranged parents believe they’re communicating.

For estranged parents, the discussions tend to circle around whether to withhold it, revoke it, or use it as a final communication of consequence for the estrangement. Far from revealing unconditional love, it very much signals that maintenance of an involuntary relationship was an expected condition for being included in whatever material legacy the parent feels compelled to pass along after their demise.

Many estranged adult children convey in forum discussions that they anticipated such retribution as a foregone outcome when they chose estrangement.

And decided to proceed regardless.

The differences in how each group discusses inheritance reveal far more than their respective attitudes toward money or assets.

Estranged adult children forum comments:

I view the money I won’t get as a payment for my freedom.

My peace is priceless.

Money comes and goes. Peace of mind is priceless.

I would rather NOT inherit the money that my grandparents intended for me than continue to subject myself to her abuse.

No money is worth your peace.

I’m thankful that I never have to deal with my parents or siblings again, no matter how much money would have come my way when they died. It’s not worth the decades of abuse and neglect.

Estranged parent forum comments:

Part of me feels we should respect her decision to step away, including in our will.

My son decided to cut us out of his life and that of our grandchildren. We’ve decided to cut him out of an inheritance.

I don’t reward bad disrespectful behavior and if I’m a POS you don’t get my assets.

5 years of estrangement. Waiting. Hoping. Praying. Disinherited. Cashed in their insurance policies that we started for them after their adoption.

Those children don’t deserve a thing.

My one son is going to be surprised some day.

Luckily I have two other children to leave everything to.

The stark difference in language used to describe the situation reveals completely different understandings and expectations around the relationship itself.

It is, in fact, a perfect illustration of the fundamentally opposed frameworks of what constitutes family described by sociologist Rin Reczek in Families We Lose: democratized versus compulsory kinship. Democratized kinship prioritizes the quality of family relationships, while compulsory kinship demands their obligatory maintenance.

It’s the contradiction in action.

There is the expectation and demand for permanence in family relationships through maintained contact, yet actual belonging to that family becomes conditional when the parent decides whether the adult child deserves an inheritance after withdrawing from active participation in a relationship they experience as damaging.

They will always be family. The DNA doesn’t go away. But the parents’ willingness to recognize them through their assets is what is being communicated.

In essence, that is what messaging from estranged parents around inheritance is about: control and retribution.

“Inheritance entitlements are revealing of how people classify and categorise their social relationships… and how judgements about familial and emotional closeness guide this decision-making….inheritance decisions are greater than an economic decision and instead involve an interlacing of ‘material, moral and symbolic dimensions’”

Inheritance, estate and asset decisions are deliberate and extend beyond financial value. No matter the family scenario involved. Considerations may include biological and blended family relationships, children with disabilities or other circumstances requiring additional support, individuals outside the family who played significant roles, or the son or daughter who assumed greater caregiving responsibilities in a parent’s later years. And the assets themselves may carry monetary, sentimental or symbolic value.

There are layers to the deliberations and what the determinations signify.

Whether there have been overt conversations or dispositions are inferred, adult children are often well aware of how their parents feel about topics such as money or inheritance.

From the age of twelve on, I was heavily involved in figure skating. As a bit of a social loner and the black sheep in the family, the sport, its practices and competitions were my outlet.

I lived for skating.

It’s a very expensive sport.

Skates — competitive level boots and blades, ice time, coaches’ fees, competition fees, clothing, competition dresses.

It all adds up.

Whenever conflict between myself and my mother rose to a level she could not manage, she threatened to no longer pay for skating. It was her failsafe way to get me to fall back in line and go back to suppressing whatever it was that I was objecting or reacting to within the relationship.

I didn’t only observe her mentality around money applied towards me.

As an adult and years before things culminated in our estrangement, my parents were in a protracted conflict with my brother and his wife. As the eldest, he is designated the executor of their will. At one point, my mother sat me down and told me she wanted to let me and my sister know where the will was and that, if things didn’t change with their relationship, he would be removed as executor.

Being male within a patriarchal, Catholic family, it seemed highly unlikely he would be removed altogether, but the message was that he would be demoted and the will was one way that would be conveyed.

They have since reconciled.

Being the youngest, female, the long labeled “problem child,” and given the history around the use of money as control and punishment, I have very little doubt that there will be a message relayed via my parents’ wills regarding my decision to remove myself from the family system.

Money, investment and sacrifice have always been well-drilled topics and tools, particularly by my mother. As a result, I’ve made a very deliberate effort to communicate differently about the financial implications and choices involved in parenting my son.

He, too, is involved in activities that require significant financial investment. I have repeatedly emphasized to him that the financial support we provide is a choice we willingly and gladly make within our means, and that he should never feel beholden to us as a result.

We are collectively making those choices, discussing and reviewing them as a family.

That doesn’t eliminate friction, particularly given the mentality my husband brings from his own similar upbringing, where support can be withdrawn as a consequence. My intent is to separate financial investment from judgments about unrelated aspects of my son’s behavior or performance.

Support, financial or otherwise, should never create a debt of obedience or an obligation to perform at an expected level.

That clinking, clanking sound of

Money money money money money money

Money money money money money money

-Cabaret

In forum discussion threads, estranged or low contact adult children detail the ways in which their parents have dangled inheritance as incentives to maintain contact or as outright threats if they fail to reengage.

It is a fascinating and telling mentality that truly highlights the underpinnings of compulsory kinship. The parent’s primary interest is in being able to claim continuity of relationship. Or perhaps the use of inheritance as leverage reflects their desperation to use any means necessary to regain it.

Not caring about or considering what doing so conveys or the impact it has.

It seems to matter not that the adult child doesn’t actually want the relationship because of what they have experienced within it and would only be maintaining it to achieve a transactional end result.

What it further reveals is that maintaining the appearance of a relationship, and having levers of control to demand it, matters more than whether the adult child finds value, warmth, comfort, security or connection within it. Neither their experience nor wellbeing is relevant.

Their continued presence in the relationship is what matters. As is access to their own children should they have any.

As found in a thread on the topic, “Mom Dangling Inheritance As Incentive To Be In Her Life: My Mom has always used her inheritance as a carrot stick….The better part of me doesn’t care. I care more about my mental health than a bag of money. I am not going to sacrifice my wellbeing just for some potential of a cash payout or to beg for an empty promise.”

Indeed, a research study on parental intent around end of life bequests found that parents are more inclined to “reward” coresident children, those that provide greater material support and those in whom they confide often with larger shares. Such decisions reflect the extent to which inheritance can function as an assessment of familial relationships, rather than simply a distribution of financial assets.

Within the literature review portion of the paper, the author cited findings that the “proportion of American parents with wills that exclude some children has more than doubled between 1995 and 2010, from 16% to 35%. Such unequal division is more prevalent among parents who have limited contact with some of their children.”

As noted, for those adult children who make that choice to remove themselves, the potential for such an act of retribution is hardly a surprise and may well have been already factored. The language used in the estranged parent forum discussions on the topic reflects that communicative intent.

Delving further into the research, a study conducted in Switzerland, where disinheriting a child is legally restricted, nevertheless documents parents using inheritance decisions and property transfers as forms of punishment for failing to meet their expectations. Even where legal restrictions limit the ability to disinherit, the use of financial or familial assets to communicate approval or punishment remains.

Estranged adult children, on the other hand, expressed mixed feelings about expecting or accepting inheritance should it be offered. Some did not want to accept receiving a share of their parents’ property while others felt it was owed to them after enduring harsh treatment from them.

Those sentiments are borne out in forum threads with some estranged adult children not wanting to accept “dirty money” from the parents who harmed them, believing refusal would be a demonstration of their integrity, versus those that similarly believe receiving assets would represent some form of compensation for what they lived through.

The conveyed promise or threat of inheritance as control and manipulation is also a common theme. As is the potential that the adult child acquiesces to the promise of inclusion in exchange for maintaining contact, only to ultimately find that the parent wrote them out of the will anyway. They would have continued exposing themselves to a harmful relationship, endured and suffered its consequences, and potentially been disinherited all the same.

The parent “wins” by securing continued participation in the relationship, presumably without changed behavior or repair, while the adult child loses the boundaries they established and the agency they exercised, and sacrifices additional time in an untenable situation. And the adult child is left to heal from the additional harm, on top of all that came before, long after the parents’ demise.

The recognition of that possibility, weighed against known patterns of parental behavior, becomes another reason to maintain the distance.

The very act of estrangement itself is a process of calculated losses versus benefits. Research examining the experiences of estranged adult children documents their awareness of what they stand to lose, and what they have already lost, in making that decision.

Contrary to what many estranged parents seem to want to believe and what tends to be portrayed in the media, the determination to walk away from the relationship is a process that occurs over the span of years. Estranged adult children report navigating layers of complexities, considerations and tradeoffs. Far from being a spontaneous, callous or externally directed decision, there is keen recognition of the loss of irreplaceable family history, kinship and security, collateral loss of relationships, and uncertainty for the future.

Yet, the gains in personal growth, healing and happiness outweighed those losses. And the prospect of undoing that hard work through later reconnection was another consideration.

Inheritance in the context of estrangement reveals vastly different perspectives on the relationship itself.

For parents seeking retribution, it is a measure of deservedness with an intent to deliver a final form of communication. A moral judgement. A righteous, vindictive blow for the affront of failing to display filial loyalty and obedience.

The final word.

That final word could be inclusion or exclusion. Recognition or retaliation. “Pardon” or punishment. Or anywhere on the spectrum in between. The will is the last act of communication and how the parent determines to use it does in fact convey a lot. About who that parent had been and what they ultimately came to understand about the relationship and all that transpired within it.

Or what they held onto.

For the adult child, however, the potential for it to serve as retribution had very likely already been factored into all the ramifications of their decision to leave. A decision by a parent to disinherit is more communicative of the transactional, compulsory nature of the relationship and symbolic of the quality of its connection.

Or lack thereof.

It merely serves as final confirmation of all that went before.

Note: The comments quoted in this essay were drawn from public social media forums and discussion pages for estranged parents and estranged adult children. Specific forums, platforms, usernames and identifying information have been omitted to protect the privacy of participants.

Author’s Note: This essay is part of an ongoing series examining the cultural discourse surrounding parent-adult child estrangement, including the narratives, assumptions, and beliefs that shape how estrangement is understood, discussed, and experienced.

Other articles in this series include:

• The BIGGEST Myth Estranged Parents Want to Debunk
• Estrangement and the “Good Parent”
• Are Estranged Adult Children “Weaponizing” Their Own Children?
• Are Adult Children Reinterpreting “Normal Parenting” as Trauma?

A few months ago, my then 12-year-old son and I were in the car returning home after a personal training session. A weekly event we both enjoyed doing together.

It was five o’clock on a Friday.

We were engaged in our typical good-natured, playful banter when an incoming call displayed on the car’s communication console.

It was the avatar and moniker I’d programmed in my phone for my mother from whom I have been estranged for years.

Before the estrangement, she refused to communicate directly — using silent treatment as her favorite method of punitive manipulation. Alternatively, and for years in the lead up to the estrangement, she would hide behind my father for any communication about relational issues while leveraging other family members to serve as flying monkeys. Nevertheless, I always knew where an attack or criticism was coming from.

Seeing her specific programmed details pop up on the screen was a shock to say the least.

Before my brain could even process what I was seeing, my body reacted.

I observed my finger hit the “decline” icon even while trying to wrap my mind around who it was that was calling and the absurdity of it occurring. At least, I think I hit the decline button. My body had instantaneously reacted to an input my brain hadn’t yet fully registered.

It was an automatic, deeply visceral reaction.

Since the screen didn’t display “Mom” or her actual name, but something else entirely, and since my reaction was so out of character, my son naturally wanted to know who had prompted it.

It was one of those needle-screeching-across-the-record, “what the… ?” moments.

Noticing my heart racing and still in a state of shock, I told him who it was, all the while hoping beyond hope that I hadn’t inadvertently hit “accept” instead and that she wasn’t listening to our discussion.

She called again.

I declined a second time.

Controlled this time. Consciously. Deliberately.

She did not call back. Nor did she leave a message.

Fast forward from then to a few weeks ago, when I picked up my phone to see a missed call from her again. Or at least, someone showing up under her number.

Once again, no message was left.

To this day, I have no idea what the purpose of her calls were. Nor do I intend to inquire. I feel no compulsion to seek out that information from someone I’ve deliberately chosen to no longer be in relationship with, particularly when they’ve made no effort to convey the reason for their outreach.

But the purpose of sharing this experience isn’t to speculate about why my mother called.

It’s to illustrate something rarely acknowledged in discussions of estrangement: ending a relationship doesn’t necessarily end the effects of that relationship. And contact — whether sudden and out of the blue or as part of expectations to maintain some level of continued engagement — has significant implications for the person who needed distance in order to create a buffer from those effects.

And to heal from them.

Estranged-parent outrage and hand wringing within the cultural discourse takes many forms and covers many topics. The pain the estranged parent says they experience as a result. How confused and devastated they claim to be by it. How unfair to them it all is. Who or what is to blame (never them or the relational conditions they created and maintained).

All while never acknowledging the pain the adult child consistently and chronically experienced to lead to it in the first place. Nor the resulting deep, embedded, emotionally and physically manifested and experienced effects of long-term relational harm.

Among those manifestations of parental outrage, few are more pervasive, shrill, or indignant than that over lack of access to grandchildren.

Recently a clip has circulated of an estranged parent engaging an official in a town hall meeting demanding legal action to enforce “grandparents rights.”

The memes around this pervasive feeling of entitlement abound.

They range from claims that denying grandparents access harms children, to accusations that adult children are weaponizing their children over “minor disagreements,” to predictions, and even wishes, that those same children will one day punish their parents upon discovering they were “denied” a relationship with their grandparents.

There are multiple problems with these accusations and the false frameworks underlying them. But the biggest one ties back to the very reason for the estrangement in the first place.

When estranged parents demand access to their grandchildren without addressing the harm that led to the estrangement, they perpetuate the very relational dynamics that caused it. Their expectations remain the primary and only focus, while the adult child’s experience, boundaries, and the consequences for their own family are continually treated as irrelevant.

Not even considered.

And those consequences for the adult child extend far beyond the immediate interaction.

Emotionally. Physically. Mentally. Relationally.

Including what that means for their ability to show up for their own families in the ways they want and need to.

Much of the pushback from estranged adult children against their parents’ expectation of access to grandchildren centers on valid and well-formed concerns that the same harmful behaviors they experienced will be carried into the relationship with their own children.

But it isn’t the only consideration, nor does it necessarily capture the full extent of what maintaining those relationships requires.

Even if those behaviors aren’t continued with the grandchild or to the same extent, facilitating the relationship still exposes the adult child to the same harmful dynamics they chose to leave. And the effects of that exposure extend beyond them.

After all, the estranged parent who insists they are a loving grandparent also insists they were a loving parent, while refusing to acknowledge that their adult child experienced the relationship very differently.

The question isn’t really about whether they were loving. The question is how the adult child consistently experienced the relationship and whether the parent was willing to hear about, acknowledge, and change the ongoing patterns that caused harm so as to not continue doing so to them or their own children.

A persistent inability or refusal to recognize and acknowledge those harmful patterns and behaviors raises questions about whether that person is even capable of maintaining a safe and healthy relationship.

But there is an even more fundamental issue, one that goes directly to the relational dynamics underlying the estrangement itself.

The parent consistently disregards or outright rejects the harm their behaviors have inflicted and continue to inflict on their adult child.

They felt entitled to that relationship. Now that their adult child has chosen to end it, they feel entitled to bypass the unresolved harm and demand access to their children.

Once again, the expectations of the parent take precedence over the adult child’s experience, boundaries, and responsibilities to their own family.

The adult child’s pain, their history within the relationship, and their current experience may as well not exist in the parent’s view.

The disregard for the adult child’s experience that contributed to the estrangement is now being perpetuated through demands for access to their children.

It is the exact same dismissiveness and absence of consideration for their own child that they have consistently demonstrated.

And now, as an adult, that disregard extends to their agency to establish the parameters for their own family.

Parents get to determine who their dependent children are exposed to and have the opportunity to develop relationships with. That includes those with shared DNA.

That is part of parenting.

Parents also get to consider the impact on themselves and their family system when deciding whether to facilitate relationships between their children and other people, including those with shared DNA who falsely believe they have a right to those relationships.

Estranged parents seem to regard access to their adult child’s children as some sterile exchange in which there are no other interactions or impacts.

That lack of relational awareness or consideration is precisely why those demands and expectations impose further harm on the adult child who determined the relationship was not safe for them to continue in the first place.

Sometimes the adult child isn’t even fully aware of the immediate and residual impact of interactions with their parent. But those effects still permeate the family system.

Years ago, in the lead-up to the events that culminated in my estrangement from my parents, my husband shared something he’d observed for years.

It took me two to three weeks to “recover” after a visit from my parents.

I hadn’t recognized it myself.

But he had.

The ways I engaged with him and functioned within our family were fundamentally different in the weeks around and following those visits. The toll wasn’t limited to me. It affected him, our son, and the dynamics of our family as a whole.

When parents refuse to acknowledge the harm their behaviors have inflicted on their adult child, they also fail to consider what continued engagement with them would require of that adult child, or how its consequences extend into the family they’ve created.

By demanding access to grandchildren while refusing to address the problems in the relationship with their own child, they convey that they deem those problems and their effects as unimportant. And in doing so, they compound the very harm that led to the estrangement in the first place.

When an estranged adult child determines that ending the relationship with their parent also means limiting or denying that parent’s access to their own child, they aren’t simply considering the state of their direct relationship or whether harmful behaviors might be repeated with their own children. They’re also considering the ripple effects those interactions can have throughout their family system, including on a child who doesn’t yet have the developmental capacity to understand the layers of relational dynamics at play.

But who observes and internalizes them nonetheless.

Doing so isn’t “punishment,” nor is it “holding resentments over mere disagreements.” It reflects an awareness of the cumulative and far-reaching consequences of relational dynamics that the estranged parent has consistently failed to recognize or consider.

That dismissiveness of the factors involved is a factor for why the estrangement was needed.

The body of research underlying family systems theory recognizes that relationships do not exist in isolation. Family functioning is shaped by the interactions among its members, their developmental positions, power dynamics, and the internal and external stressors affecting them. There are spillover effects: distress originating in one relationship migrating over into others, affecting people who were not directly involved in the original interaction.

These are not isolated relationships with isolated consequences.

Humans are relational beings who create meaning through our experiences with others. Particularly parents and family. Chronic, repeated relational experiences throughout childhood shape how our nervous systems develop and respond to stress, threat, and safety.

Adult children who estrange themselves from harmful family relationships are removing themselves from dynamics that have been consistently damaging. That distance creates the space to recognize the physical and emotional effects of those experiences, recalibrate their responses to harmful dynamics, and begin trusting their own perceptions and instincts.

It is also about learning the skills and creating the conditions for developing healthier patterns of self- and co-regulation within the relationships they are now responsible for shaping and maintaining.

Expecting them to continue engaging with the very people whose behaviors generated those effects, particularly when those behaviors remain unacknowledged and unchanged, risks perpetuating those same patterns of physiological and emotional distress.

Resetting themselves back to zero.

In a qualitative study examining adult children’s experiences of estrangement, researchers described participants’ concerns that reconnection or engagement could undo the work they had done to recover a sense of self.

One participant explained, “‘it’s taken me literally, since I’ve been a mother, 15 years to get to this point so that’s why I’m very protective of undoing everything I’ve done.’”

It also imposes another demand: that the adult child suppress their own experience, pain, and needs, sacrificing their well-being to facilitate their parent’s relationship with their grandchildren while that same parent refuses to prioritize repairing the relationship with them.

The relationship with the adult child is apparently not worth repairing. Yet that same adult child is expected to facilitate a relationship with their own children, regardless of what doing so costs them.

Parents and adult children don’t necessarily perceive or experience their relationships the same way. Research has observed this disparity across parent-adult child relationships generally, not specifically those involving estrangement.

Parents tend to perceive their relationships with adult children as closer and more positive than their adult children do.

That disparity becomes particularly consequential when parents treat their own perception of the relationship as authoritative while dismissing the adult child’s experience of it.

“According to solidarity theory, there is a range in positive feelings between parents and children, including the extent to which they experience feelings of closeness, love, caring, and understanding in the relationship. Older and middle-aged parents typically report greater investment in the tie, greater closeness, and greater positive relationship quality regarding their children than their children do with them,” while “children tend to report greater conflict and negative relationship quality than do their parents.”

The research also found that negative interactions with aging parents are associated with increased negative emotions, while negative thoughts about those relationships can carry emotional effects into the following day. Contact with parents was associated with changes in cortisol patterns the following day, potentially indicating impact on physiological stress.

That is within “normal” parent-adult child relationships and before factoring decades or a lifetime of cumulative conflictual history, a current state of unresolved harm, and ongoing harmful behaviors and boundary violations the parent refuses to address. All while insisting they deserve access to their adult child’s children and thus attempting to force ongoing interaction without any meaningful repair.

Layer on the concern that the estranged parent will engage in the same types of harmful behaviors with the adult child’s children as they did with them, and the resulting hypervigilance compounds the mental, emotional, and physical stress.

Another common narrative within the grandparent access argument is the assertion that estranged adult children are teaching their children that family is disposable. An assertion that is usually accompanied by the vindictive prediction that they might find themselves on the receiving end of estrangement from their own children one day.

That complaint is rooted in the cultural expectations of filial loyalty no matter what. It assumes moral standing based on demonstrating that loyalty and showing unending grace and tolerance for the parent’s behaviors regardless of what those behaviors are, in favor of that loyalty demonstration and performance of gratitude.

It does not recognize that children observe behavior patterns. They see when their own parents are being disrespected. When they are experiencing harm within the relationship with their parents and are expected to endure it.

Holding the line at what is acceptable behavior within a relationship, no matter who that relationship is with, is the healthy model that estranged adult children are endeavoring to instill.

Their children are not simply learning that relationships, even family relationships, can end. They’re learning that relationships are rooted in accountability and repair, that shared DNA does not exempt anyone from those expectations, and that parents bear the responsibility for modeling those dynamics within the parent-child relationship.

They’re also learning that their experiences matter. That they should expect to have a voice within their relationships, no matter their age or position within them. And that, once they have agency of their own to live independently, they are not obligated to remain in relationships where their well-being is consistently disregarded.

That includes their relationships with their own parents.

The possibility that their children may one day hold them to those same standards isn’t a mitigating consideration. It’s an integral part of the very principle they’re modeling — and the different approach they’re taking to their relationships with their own children.

So, weaponization?

Like many aspects of estrangement, that accusation seems to be more appropriately identified as a projection.

Adult children are not weaponizing their children against their estranged parents. They are protecting themselves and their children while endeavoring to model healthier relational dynamics and principles.

Breaking the cycle.

The ones weaponizing grandchildren are the grandparents attempting to use those children as tools for their own self-interest. All while seeking to portray both themselves and the grandchildren as victims of their selfish, ungrateful adult child in the process.

Ultimately, what they continue to demonstrate are the very relational dynamics that cost them those relationships in the first place.

Are Estranged Adult Children “Weaponizing” Their Own Children? was originally published in Age of Empathy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“I was a good parent. I did everything I could for my child. I don’t deserve this.”

Some version of this is not only a common refrain in estranged-parent commentary and discussion threads, it tends to be THE refrain. Often alongside the equally pervasive, “They never told me why, and I deserve to know.”

Estrangement contains contradiction upon contradiction.

The adult child has agency, but the deferential “honor thy mother and father” should prevail. The relationship is now asserted to be a two-way street, but narrative control about the relationship only flows one way. Parents claim ignorance to the issues while adult children say they conveyed them ad nauseam. Parents insist they would do anything to repair the relationship while rejecting the very information their adult child says must be understood for repair to happen.

That last contradiction is perhaps the most revealing.

Parents describe the loss of the relationship as utterly devastating and say they would do anything to have their child back. Yet many won’t go as far as to truly examine their own beliefs about themselves, their parenting, or the experience their adult child says they had in the relationship.

Why?

There is a profound difference between being a good parent and needing to remain someone who believes themselves to be a good parent.

“I was a good parent” is not simply a self-evaluation. It is an identity — one explored in a previous essay.

We wouldn’t evaluate performance in any other role solely on the basis of the person doing it saying they did it well. Yet parenting seems to be the one “job” where the parent’s self-evaluation is routinely treated as evidence enough and where the evaluation of those most qualified to convey what their parenting was actually like is treated as inherently suspect.

When adult children attempt to describe the experience of being parented within that relationship, they are continually accused of “rewriting history.” What they actually experienced is treated as inadmissible when it conflicts with the parent’s account or challenges their self-perception.

That hierarchy of whose account is granted authority has a name: childism.

Childism is the automatic assumption of adult superiority and authority over children, reflected in the deeply ingrained societal habit of treating the adult perspective as the norm.

There is a great deal of cultural discourse around marginalized groups and the systemic underlying, permeating belief systems that continue to sustain and enforce their oppression. One group is rarely, if ever, mentioned or recognized AS marginalized and oppressed.

Children.

It is so ingrained in patriarchal society to see children as possessions of the parents with lifelong obligations to them that their right to be recognized and respected as their own, separate human beings with their own agency doesn’t even register. Add in hierarchical religious systems that also dominate culture and that lack of recognition of their humanity is compounded exponentially.

Variations of this graphic depicting family “order” with associated roles are easily found within Christian religious “teachings.” But the underlying assumptions about parental authority, hierarchy, and children’s placement and obligations within that “order” extend well beyond Christianity, or even religious parenting frameworks.

In estrangement, childism manifests in the refusal to acknowledge the adult child as an equal adult with agency within the relationship. It is a rejection of their right to maintain it at whatever level they decide is best for them, or to leave it altogether. All while paying lip service to “they are adults now,” and deflecting away from the relational asymmetry with the ever present refrains of “it is a two-way street,” “they need to be accountable too.”

Within this dynamic and as it relates to estrangement, there are other behaviors and psychological mechanisms that also intersect:

There is belief perseverance, the tendency to maintain established beliefs even when presented with contradictory evidence. And when those beliefs concern who we understand ourselves to be, questioning them can become deeply threatening. Our beliefs about what makes someone a good parent are shaped over a lifetime, often reinforced by cultural expectations that treat parental intentions, sacrifice, and authority as evidence of good parenting.

“I was a good, loving, sacrificing parent therefore your account of the relationship cannot be accurate.”

No evidence, no discussion, no sharing of lived experience can penetrate the intense need to hold onto this core belief.

This is now where identity threat enters.

“I was a good parent” isn’t simply a belief about how they parented when their children were young. It is an integral part of who the parent understands themselves to BE. Accepting their child’s account requires them to re-evaluate their entire self-concept, their parenting and the family they created.

Then there comes self-verification.

When information consistently threatens that established self-concept, the parent actively seeks to preserve it, favoring confirming information, rejecting contradictory accounts, and attempting to get others to see them as they see themselves.

Rather than examining those beliefs, they seek explanations and sources that allow their established understanding of themselves as parents to remain intact.

“They are too sensitive. Their therapist put this in their head. Everything was fine until their spouse entered the picture. They are rewriting history. Everyone makes mistakes. It’s a trend promoted by social media.”

There is no shortage of “experts,” “coaches,” or estranged parent communities to provide that verification. All while monetizing themselves in the process.

And there is another layer to what is being protected: moral identity.

Seeing themselves as good, loving, caring parents is integral to their moral identity. Within that absolutist self-concept, acknowledging the harm they inflicted upon their child becomes incompatible with maintaining it. It is unimaginable that two realities could be simultaneously true: they sincerely endeavored to be a good parent while also inflicting significant harm that ultimately led their adult child to leave a relationship they, and society, deem permanent and unalterable.

Peel back yet another layer and there is the legacy threat. “I’m not going to be around forever — how can my child do this to me when I have so little time left?”

They complied with the cultural mandate to have children, raised them and made choices and sacrifices in the process for which they feel they are owed recognition.

Their children and their children’s children represent their continuity after they are gone. This is one of the reasons there is so much angst and consternation over lack of access to grandchildren in estrangement.

With their estranged adult children no longer positioned to carry forward their values, ideals, or loving family narratives, grandchildren represent another opportunity to preserve that legacy — particularly before they are old enough to critically evaluate the family history themselves.

There is a term for that too.

Terror management.

It is the human awareness of inevitable death that creates existential dread and which then leads to the desire for symbolic immortality.

They want to be able to repair the relationship with their adult child to maintain the legacy continuum, but doing so requires accepting information that is most threatening to their parental identity.

Accepting that information would also mean recognizing their adult child’s authority over their own experience rather than maintaining control of the narrative.

Grandchildren, however, don’t carry that same relational history.

They offer a substitute relationship in which the grandparent can establish themselves as a cherished figurehead, with young children serving as relational sponges who readily reflect back affection, admiration, and reverence without the critical perspective to challenge the identity being presented to them.

To the emotionally immature estranged parent, their adult child reneged on the covert contract they never fully recognized the parent was holding over them.

The expectation that because the “loving, caring” parent sacrificed, because they successfully delivered their child to adulthood, that child now must fulfill their end of an agreement they never entered into.

To be grateful. To maintain relationship. To allow them access to THEIR child. To put them on that reverential pedestal of grandparent that is the cultural crown jewel of relational esteem and anticipated deference.

The narcissistic ego injury to not receive their “just reward” is profound.

There is no recognition that the parent’s choices were their own, made in fulfillment of obligations they voluntarily assumed. Yet the adult child is expected to repay those choices through gratitude, esteem, continued relationship, and access to their own children — obligations they never agreed to assume.

The child didn’t choose the relationship, negotiate its terms, or agree to provide compensation for the “privilege” of being born and raised.

Another person’s decision to become a parent doesn’t become the obligation of the human they decided to create.

Having fulfilled their parental role, they believe they are owed its rewards: continued relationship, access to grandchildren, and a venerated place in the family hierarchy.

Intersecting with that concept of covert contracts and providing yet another layer to be peeled, is “just-world” fallacy — a cognitive bias developed by social psychologist MJ Lerner beginning in the 1960s which posits that “a belief in a just world fulfills a need to live in a predictable environment in which one’s investments are rewarded, presumably in accordance with what one deserves.”

However, when reality contradicts that belief, people may interpret events and assign responsibility in ways that preserve their understanding of what is fair. A critical underpinning of this bias is the need to believe that the world is just for their own personal wellbeing.

“I was a good parent. I did everything right. I gave everything to my children. I don’t deserve this.”

Their beliefs about themselves and their parenting, what they believe they deserve as a result, and what their adult child conveys about their actual lived experience cannot coexist within those intersecting frameworks.

This is where childism continues to play a role. If the child, regardless of now being an adult, is disallowed full articulation and recognition of their own experience, it can be discounted and dismissed in favor of preserving the parent’s narrative.

Layer on deeply ingrained cultural expectations around marriage, family, parenting, and grandparenthood, reinforced by indoctrinated religious and cultural frameworks, and the perceived threats to identity compound even further.

Enter the discursive rhetoric of the estranged-parent-focused “experts” and content creators.

Research has consistently documented, and estranged-parent communities overwhelmingly reflect, parents’ insistence on attributing estrangement to external influences rather than their own behavior or the relational history their adult children describe.

These “experts” and content creators reinforce those very explanations, supplying an endless, repetitive stream of deflection narratives that validate the parent’s existing beliefs while persistently discrediting the adult child’s experience.

Cultural programming and pedestalling of parenting already primes them for the messaging. The prevalence of authoritarian frameworks around parenting reinforces the entitlement to the relationship and the dismissal of the adult child’s experience as valid.

The combined threats to parental identity, social standing, and legacy create the conditions in which those “expert” voices become the only ones they are willing to believe. Belief perseverance is reinforced by a cultural framework that makes alternative interpretations nearly impossible to consider.

The combination of pervasive social influence and identity protection creates a deeply entrenched sense of entitlement that manifests as an intense sense of victimhood when the adult child exercises their own agency.

First, by attempting to convey their lived experience of the relationship, they present a direct challenge not only to the parent’s authority over the narrative, but also to the moral identity bound up in their childist expectation of being the ultimate arbiter of the relationship and its status.

This also explains the aversion to “therapy language.” In their mind, it inverts the hierarchy. It puts the adult child in a position above the parent in interpretation of the relationship itself and of their parenting.

That is unacceptable.

Then, when those attempts fail, by leaving the relationship altogether, they take with them not only the relationship the parent believed they were automatically owed, but also access to their children, who represent the ultimate culmination of the parent’s role, the social recognition and belonging that comes with it, and the familial legacy they expected their adult child to carry forward.

The result of all this?

Zero ability to engage in meaningful repair. Endless circular accusations by estranged parents that they were never told why, while estranged adult children refuse to keep losing their voices repeating what they have already conveyed over, and over, and over again.

And a cultural conversation that remains at a standoff, with estranged-parent “experts” and content creators continuing to actively, and often deliberately, reinforce the very beliefs that keep it there.

In the end, the desperate need to maintain their belief of being a good parent prevents them from actually being one.

Author’s Note:
This piece is part of an exploration of estrangement and it’s cultural narratives, dialogues and implications. Related essays include:

• Estranged Parents Aren’t Grieving the Relationship — They’re Grieving the Role
• The BIGGEST Myth Estranged Parents Want to Debunk
• Are Adult Children Reinterpreting “Normal Parenting” as Trauma?

When I first started writing and publishing about estrangement, it was terrifying. Putting myself out there on such a personal and stigmatized topic was something I had never imagined I would have the courage to do.

I had always wanted to be a writer.

Creative writing was one of my college majors, but despite years of toying with the idea of blogging, I never quite took the leap. The exposure that comes with publishing was daunting, particularly with a lifetime of self-doubt seeded into my brain and body by the dismissive mockery I had routinely experienced within my family.

When the opportunity arose to be an ongoing content contributor writing an educational series for Together Estranged, I was both excited and nearly petrified. Not only would I be putting my name into public spaces, I’d be doing so on a deeply personal subject I rarely spoke about.

But the response to my articles was gratifying. My writing seemed to resonate. I discovered that I could leverage my own experience with estrangement, my interest in the research, and years of work understanding the relational dynamics behind it into something useful to others.

It was both healing and cathartic. Writing gave me a sense of meaningful contribution that my professional career had never quite provided.

My early pieces leaned heavily on research and relational theory. But as my confidence grew, I began incorporating more personal reflections, eventually publishing separately here on Medium as well.

My first truly personal essay examined the dysfunctional dynamics of the family system I was raised in and how something as seemingly innocuous as a nickname could reveal those dynamics.

It was published in November 2024.

In early February, I received a letter from my father with the title of that essay hand printed on the front of the envelope.

He had just turned 90 and wanted to use that as an opportunity to both chastise me for not commemorating it, despite the estrangement, and express his anger at my having posted my “true feelings very publicly for all the world to see.” And of course to try to set the record straight from his perspective around what my essay conveyed.

Since publishing my public response, I have not heard from him again.

And I have continued writing and publishing. Not for him. Not for anyone in the family. It was never for them.

It was for me.

For the community of adult children impacted by estrangement and to impact the cultural conversation around it.

My recent pieces have been about the cultural dialogue on estrangement, the prominent voices in that dialogue and the recurring, counterproductive narratives they espouse.

On one of my latest essays, someone whose profile didn’t reveal their identity left a lengthy comment stating,

“I respect that you have your own experience of our family and that the decisions you make about your relationships are yours to make. At the same time, those decisions have an impact on other people too. I am one of them.

I love you. I miss my sister. Your absence has brought me sadness, not because I believe you owe me a relationship, but because our relationship mattered — and still matters — to me.”

They wanted to make the point that the pain of estrangement is felt on more than one side.

Granted.

The point that the essay they commented on very clearly calls out is that the cultural discourse disproportionately centers the pain of those on the receiving end of it. Not on the pain experienced by the person who ultimately initiated estrangement, often after years of trying to address the problems within the relationship without acknowledgment or meaningful change.

I came to realize that the commenter had interacted with my articles on multiple occasions, all without my knowing who they actually were. Never realizing as I read and responded to the comments that they were, in fact, my sibling.

Looking at their profile page, it was immediately apparent that each “post” they made was timed very closely to the publication of one of my essays.

The first one in August was posted a little less than a month after I had an article published that centered on the value of anger and how it is informative and a catalyst towards action to address harm. And how it is often weaponized against the person expressing it, especially in estrangement situations.

Their claim? Anger leads to blame, externalization and distorting reality.

Interesting.

The commentary directly reflects the weaponization I spoke to in my essay and the refusal to acknowledge anger as a real, valid and appropriate reaction to being continually on the receiving end of harmful relational dynamics that no amount of calling out and attempting to address seems to change.

In January, I had an article published where I countered the common estranged parent claim that their adult child never told them the issue. That the estrangement came out of the blue. In it, I presented text exchanges between myself and my father showcasing how there was very real, direct and continuous communication along with the dynamics of refusal to accept what was being conveyed while claiming ignorance to the issues.

The post on their page later that month was to craft a “goodbye” to the family member who chose to estrange from them.

On May 7th, an article I wrote on sibling estrangement was published. On May 8th, they posted an image of a book in the garbage can.

The book?

One I had recommended to my sister to read when she reached out in July of 2024 under the framework of wanting to reconcile — On Repentance and Repair, by Danya Ruttenberg. I gave her the title, pointed out the specific chapters to focus on, and asked her to read and digest it.

Her response after reading the first chapter was to deflect from the point of the book, which is about owning your own responsibility for the harm you inflict in relationships with others when those relationships break down. Rather than digesting it for herself, as the book instructs, her response pointed back toward me and my responsibility in leaving the relationship. Not in so many words, but through insinuations and circular dialogue. The very typical “language” of our family dynamic.

It did not improve from there, and I ended further contact.

On May 9th, after the photo post that I was wholly unaware of, she posted a comment on my article:

“Unforgiveness hurts you far more than it ever hurts the other person. And in sibling estrangement, that truth becomes even more obvious. Holding onto bitterness, resentment, or old wounds doesn’t just stay in your mind — it shows up emotionally, physically, and spiritually. Carrying that weight only keeps you stuck in a place you’ve already outgrown. If you’re serious about healing fully, you can’t afford to ignore this side of your health.”

Not knowing it was her, and not that my response would have been materially different if I had, I responded purely to the content of her comment:

“LMAO. No it doesn’t. Forgiveness isn’t required for personal healing. It isn’t required to emotionally process and integrate what occurred or the harm that was inflicted. Healing is about emotional integration and growing around and beyond the wounds. It can be a lifelong process. Forgiveness is a personal decision around whether there is a role in that or not. It isn’t required.”

Further review of my comment threads reveals an exchange on the essay about estranged parents claiming to never having been told the issue.

Her comment: “‘Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them’ (often cited from A Woman of No Importance).”

My response: “Reflection isn’t ‘judgment.’ It’s part of development. Forgiveness, where it exists, follows accountability and repair — it isn’t owed. It is earned.”

Her replies came back in two separate comments days apart. First: “Beware of self-righteousness. The black devil of licentiousness destroys his hundreds, but the white devil of self-righteousness destroys his thousands.”

Then a few days later: “From both sides. What have you done?”

I chose not to respond to either. Again, having no awareness of her identity.

In reflecting upon her most recent commentary, where she revealed her identity, something else stood out: it wasn’t her first submission.

On Medium, when someone posts a comment on a piece, the author gets an email notification with the full text of the comment. Should the commenter go back and revise, there is another email with that revised content.

A comparison is fully available to review.

In her original comment, she declares, “I don’t need you to agree with our interpretation of everything that happened…” followed by “The family you separated yourself from isn’t an abstract idea. We are people who have histories, feelings, memories, and hurt too.”

No one has argued otherwise. There being experiences among all involved isn’t the issue.

What she revised and softened to was “There can be pain on more than one side” and “I think intention and impact deserve consideration in both directions.”

That all sounds fairly reasonable, right?

Except estrangement isn’t the result of the person who initiated it being unwilling or unable to recognize, honor, and acknowledge the other person’s perspective. It is often the result of their own experience being repeatedly dismissed, minimized, or ignored despite years of attempts to be heard throughout the family system.

That is precisely why they leave.

Reaching out after someone has ended a relationship following years of unsuccessful attempts to address its problems, only to insist that both sides must first be heard before reflection and repair can begin, is another form of deflection. It is the circular argument that seems reasonable on its surface but is yet another manifestation of the same dysfunctional dynamics that led to estrangement in the first place: sweeping the problems under the rug rather than addressing them.

What’s interesting is that her original comment, prior to revision, essentially served a flying monkey role, something that has been a consistent pattern.

“Our interpretation.” “The family you separated from.” “We are people who have histories…”

The typical deflective tactic being a brief nod to my experience, while then reverting to theirs and demanding to be attended to as a condition for the professed desire to reengage. While never authentically demonstrating understanding of the reasons for the estrangement in the first place.

There is a failure to understand that in estrangement situations, reciprocity can only come when there is something for the person who initiated it to reciprocate to. Authentic acknowledgement of what was harmful and why it was harmful. Demonstrations of changed behavior. A concerted and enduring effort to rebuild trust.

In the history of her inserting herself along these lines, there has often been what appears to be an echo of another interaction, an email exchange, or a conversation happening elsewhere within the family system. Then I receive something from her that seems connected, without necessarily knowing what transpired or what prompted her communication.

The article that she revealed herself on was about the “biggest myth” that estranged parents want to debunk being that adult children cutting off their family is their right and they bear no responsibility for the impact of that decision on the family members they remove themselves from.

In it, I point out the hypocrisy of the intention-versus-impact narrative often employed by estranged parents. Their intentions are used to negate the impact of their behavior, while the impact of an adult child’s decision to remove themselves from a perpetually harmful relationship becomes an accusation that the child intended to cause harm.

Her comments and declarations may sound sincere on their surface, but the suggestion that they reflect any meaningful understanding of the relationship falls apart when considered in the context of her original submission, the substance of her anonymous engagements, the posts on her page, and the long history of relational patterns they continue to reflect.

Those of us who initiate estrangement have a deep, visceral understanding of the relational history behind these seemingly reasonable overtures. Context that is entirely absent for those encountering the words without that history.

Saying, “I simply wanted you to know that on the other side of this distance is a sister who loves you, misses you, and would welcome the opportunity to listen and be heard in return,” sounds lovely.

Except there is already a sustained pattern of mostly one-sided attempts to communicate well before estrangement. And there is an entire body of published essays in which I examine the relational dynamics that lead to estrangement and share what specifically impacted me in my own story. Both with my parents and my siblings.

The information is already there to be read, considered, and understood, along with guidance toward a reconciliation framework she chose to throw into the trash.

Yet her position is to what? Have another conversation predicated on hearing them? Versus acknowledging and demonstrating authentic understanding of what I have conveyed repeatedly for decades, only to have it fall on deaf ears and remain unacknowledged?

If “reciprocity” was part of their arsenal of relational skills, estrangement wouldn’t have been necessary in the first place.

In my response, I reflected back to her that “‘I respect your experience, but my pain needs to be acknowledged too’ is not a corrective. It is the circular, unproductive dynamic in which the pain of the person trying to address problems within the relationship is repeatedly dismissed. And when they finally leave because they aren’t heard and nothing changes, their pain is displaced by demands that they acknowledge the other person’s perspective, and then displaced yet again by demands that they acknowledge the pain their leaving caused.”

There can indeed be pain on all sides.

There is a very important distinction, though.

The pain of the person who initiated estrangement developed over years of harmful relational dynamics and unsuccessful attempts to address them. The pain of the person on the receiving end, while no less real, arises in a different context: the loss of a relationship the other person ultimately felt compelled to leave because of those dynamics.

Does that mean the person who initiated estrangement did not engage in hurtful behaviors themselves? No. It means the origins, accumulation, magnitude, and impact of the pain are fundamentally different.

Demanding to be heard “in return” for the pain caused by the other person severing the relationship, or for their actions and behaviors when attempting to communicate their pain prior to leaving, is, again, a circular tactic that serves to further minimize and deflect from the core issues involved in the estrangement itself.

It is easy to declare love.

It’s just a few words typed on a page that costs nothing to write.

My family has always been good at performative and image protecting proclamations. It’s a far different thing to demonstrate it. To make that love truly felt by the other person.

And that is where the cracks have always shown.

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The Family Dynamics That Couldn’t Help But Show Up in the Comments was originally published in Fourth Wave on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Joshua Coleman, a prolific and self-appointed “leading expert” on estrangement, recently published an essay around the “estrangement myths that need to die,” and then nearly immediately followed it with another based on an estranged parent’s response to that “seven-myth” post.

Enter the eighth myth Coleman would like to expose to wither and die:

“Cutting someone off is my right, and whatever impact it has on them is not my problem or my responsibility.”

This one seems to be the DOOZY!

Saving the best for last, as they say.

It gets right at the heart of parental ego-centered butt hurt over their adult children walking away from them.

While Coleman, in his therapy-speak-nuanced, grudging way, acknowledges that yes, every adult does indeed have the “right to decide whom they have relationships with,” he immediately pivots, as his discursive and rhetorical framing always does, to entirely disclaiming that premise with everything that follows.

He moves into: “How we treat other people matters. It says something about who we are, not simply about who they are.”

Well, yes. How we treat people does matter. And in a developmental relationship, the modeling for how we treat other people and what a relational dynamic entails around reciprocal consideration comes from the parent demonstrating those skills.

He then says:

“Not being responsible for another person’s emotions is not the same as having no responsibility for how our actions affect another human being.”

Again, yes.

The parent may not have intended their behavior to inflict harm on their child, but that doesn’t make them any less responsible for having inflicted it, for gaining an understanding of how and why it caused harm, or for changing their behavior so as not to continue inflicting it.

But it is not the parent’s responsibility he is alluding to.

Here’s where he makes his move, though:

“Once we understand pain ourselves, intentionally inflicting enormous pain on someone else while refusing even to consider its impact should not somehow become a sign of strength or emotional health.”

This is now where intentionality is being introduced. And that intentionality is assigned to the adult child, who is no longer simply ending a relationship that they experience as harmful. They are now “intentionally inflicting enormous pain” upon their poor, loving, bewildered parent.

See what happened there?

Adult children are supposed to grant their parents unending grace because their intentions to be good parents were there, regardless of the actual impact of their behavior.

They loved you. They did their best. They didn’t mean to hurt you. They don’t understand what it was that you interpreted as harm.

But when an adult child removes themselves from a relationship they experience as perpetually harmful because their parent will not acknowledge the ways in which their actions and behaviors have been harmful, suddenly intention and impact reverse.

The parent’s good INTENTIONS are supposed to mitigate the harmful IMPACT.

While the harmful IMPACT of the adult child’s decision to remove themselves is used to establish harmful INTENTION.

Funny how that works.

But realizing that a decision will cause someone pain is NOT the same thing as making that decision for the purpose of inflicting pain.

Notice what disappears in that framing reversal: the adult child’s pain in all that they experienced leading to the decision to leave, and the recognition of the collateral relational losses they may endure as a result.

An adult child can be, and usually is, well aware that ending the relationship can and will cause significant emotional pain throughout the family system. That does not mean the resulting emotional devastation was the intent behind it, nor that they are not experiencing it intensely themselves.

It means that pain may be a consequence of the adult child deciding they can no longer remain in a relationship in which their own pain has gone continually unacknowledged and where the relational conditions producing it not only have not changed, but also show zero signs of the capacity to do so.

Interesting whose pain suddenly becomes morally consequential only after the adult child leaves.

Coleman then moves into a characterization that runs directly counter to what the established estrangement research consistently reveals about what happens BEFORE cutoff:

“Many parents would give almost anything for the opportunity to understand what went wrong. They would listen. They would want to know how their parenting landed differently than they intended. They would apologize. They would try to change.”

Except estrangement is consistently not described in the research nor in adult children’s accounts as a sudden, knee-jerk decision made because a parent refused to do something the adult child wanted them to do or because of a handful of harmful interactions.

It is repeatedly described as a process, often preceded by years of relational difficulty and attempts to address it. Adult children report trying multiple approaches: explaining, confronting, negotiating, setting boundaries, reducing contact, asking for change, and attempting reconciliation. Those efforts may have involved continual probing around even being able to have the conversation.

In other words, the opportunity Coleman says these parents would “give almost anything” to have has very often already existed, oftentimes repeatedly. For years.

These parents were in the relationship. They created the relationship and were responsible for it.

Their child was communicating.

It was the parent’s responsibility to be attuned to, curious about and receptive to that communication.

The problem wasn’t necessarily that the parent was never given an opportunity to listen, understand, apologize or change.

There were plenty.

And they never needed to be given them. They always had the opportunity — and the obligation — to create them.

The problem was that when those opportunities did occur in one form or another, the adult child repeatedly did not experience the response necessary for the relationship to actually evolve into something different. Or to have the potential to.

And that is how you eventually get to estrangement.

Coleman’s own account of his estrangement demonstrates the same imbalance in framing. He briefly gives a nod to the fact that his daughter needed something from him that he did not provide — his signature “kernel of truth” — but then pivots immediately to the impact on him.

“There had been no fight. No argument. No conversation leading up to it. Nothing.

It came out of a blue sky like an avalanche. One moment I had my family. The next, I didn’t. Without warning, I lost my daughter and my grandchildren in one fell swoop.

It was brutal. I barely survived it.”

Where is the recognition that the relational status was his, as the parent, to be cognizant of? Where is the discussion of the impact upon his daughter to reach the conclusion that she needed to remove herself from the relationship?

“It came out of a blue sky.”

To HIM.

His lack of awareness that the relationship was in sufficient distress for his daughter to leave it does not establish that the distress did not exist.

In fact, it raises precisely the opposite question:

How does a parent become so disconnected from their adult child’s experience of the relationship that its termination and all that led up to it feels as though it arrived from a “blue sky”?

And once again, whose experience becomes the measure of what was happening in the relationship?

We are told in vivid detail what he experienced: an avalanche. Brutality. The loss of his daughter and grandchildren. Something he “barely survived.”

But what did she experience in getting there?

What had she been trying to communicate? What had she needed from him? What happened when she tried? How long had she been hurting? Why did she ultimately conclude that leaving the relationship was preferable to remaining in it?

Her decision has a deep and impactful relational history even, and especially, if he was unaware of it.

And his unawareness of that history is not evidence that there wasn’t one.

His acknowledgment that she was hurting and needed something from him that he didn’t provide still manages to put the onus on her:

“She was hurting and trying to figure out how to express that hurt to someone she loved deeply. Maybe what she did was all she knew to do.”

Look at the framing.

She was trying to figure out how to express her hurt.

She apparently didn’t know how to communicate it differently.

She ultimately did something that inflicted enormous pain upon him.

Meanwhile, where is the examination of why his daughter apparently did not know how or feel safe enough to communicate her hurt to her own father in a way that she believed would result in being heard?

Those capacities do not materialize out of nowhere in adulthood. They develop within the relational environment of the parent-child dynamic. That is where a child learns whether difficult emotions can be safely expressed, whether conflict can be tolerated, whether their experience will be received with curiosity or defensiveness, and whether raising relational problems actually results in repair.

Or whether it doesn’t.

Coleman does acknowledge that he “crumbled under the accusations scrolling across my screen.” But even that wording is revealing.

Her communication becomes “accusations.”

Communication.

It happened.

His response becomes “crumbled.”

She acts. He is acted upon. The “fault” never finds a home. Nor a resolution.

The focus isn’t on what she experienced. It is on how he received it. What her communication felt like to him. What he interpreted it to mean about who he was as a parent, rather than what it might reveal about how he was actually showing up as one.

Interesting how “interpretation” gets subtly reversed here, too.

The adult child’s interpretation of the parent’s behavior or their experience of the relationship is treated as something to question by default. The parent’s interpretation of the adult child’s communication as “accusations” or “rewritten history,” meanwhile, is treated as authoritative by default.

And although he explicitly tells us that “she wasn’t the villain,” the fact that villain even enters the narrative tells us what moral frame has already been constructed around the interaction.

The framing becomes a brief nod to compassionately understanding her dilemma while continuing to center the story on the painful thing she did to him and diverting from what happened within the relationship that led her to believe leaving was necessary in the first place.

That is not acknowledging both sides of the estrangement. It is emphasizing the parent’s experience while barely granting the adult child a sympathetic explanation for causing it.

Those are very different things.

Coleman then reiterates that “understanding another person’s experience does not require pretending their actions did not cause tremendous harm.”

Again, YES.

But once again, notice who is being asked to understand whose experience and whose “tremendous harm” becomes the object of moral concern.

The adult child is being asked to understand the parent’s experience of estrangement and acknowledge the tremendous harm their decision caused.

Where is the examination of the tremendous harm the adult child continuously experienced WITHIN the relationship? An examination that should be the starting point within an asymmetrical, developmental relationship.

Where is the acknowledgment of the patterned relational history that preceded estrangement? Where is the parent’s responsibility for being attuned to that experience, responding to it, changing the behavior causing harm, and repairing the relationship?

It disappears.

No, scratch that.

It was never there in the first place.

The adult child’s “perception” or “interpretation” is invoked only to explain their behavior and decision to estrange, without ever really being acknowledged or validated as an experience of harm. Meanwhile, the parent’s pain, never ever questioned, becomes the basis for morally judging that decision.

And those are very different moral functions.

So yes, Coleman’s “another estrangement myth” really does underlie it all.

No matter how much lip service is paid to the agency of an adult to remove themselves from a relationship, that agency apparently becomes morally suspect the moment they actually exercise it when it involves a parental or family relationship.

The adult child can communicate. Explain. Set boundaries. Try again. Forgive. Understand. Consider the parent’s intentions. Consider the parent’s pain.

But if the relationship remains harmful no matter how many times they try to find ways to convey their experience or determine if it is even safe to try to do so, and they ultimately decide to LEAVE?

Now they are “intentionally inflicting enormous pain.”

The parent’s right to expect relationship continuity remains assumed. The adult child’s right to end it exists only in theory.

That is, according to the Estranged Parent Whisperer.

*************************************************************

Author’s Note: This piece is a follow up to a recent essay and part of an overall ongoing examination of prominent voices shaping the cultural conversation around family estrangement, with particular attention to how they frame responsibility, whose experiences they center, and whose they leave out.

Other recent explorations include:

• The Myths Behind the Estranged Parent Narrative
• The “Advice” Given to Estranged Parents About “Mistakes” to Avoid
• Are Adult Children Reinterpreting “Normal Parenting” as Trauma?

Joshua Coleman, who has positioned himself as a leading “expert” on family estrangement, would like to dispel the seven myths he claims to have identified in his work with estranged parents and adult children.

As part of his near-daily content marketing stream directed to estranged parents, Coleman provides an endless supply of exoneration narratives for why the estrangement these parents find themselves on the receiving end of is not their fault. With this one, he takes those narratives to the broader cultural level.

Let’s dig into them.

“Myth #1: Parents always know what they did.”

Here Coleman argues that maybe parents have a pretty good idea what they did but disagree with the interpretation, while sometimes they truly don’t know.

Both expose core fundamental issues within estrangement.

First: the preferencing of the parent’s interpretation of the relationship, events within the relationship, or anything about the relationship over that of their adult child.

Both parties are naturally going to have their own interpretations. That is how human experience works. But the adult child’s interpretation is not less valid because they occupied the subordinate position within the relationship. That should actually make the parent MORE interested in how their child experienced it, not less.

Second, truly not knowing why your child would get to the point of needing to sever the most biologically wired and culturally sacrosanct of relationships speaks pretty fucking clearly to how little curiosity there was about that child’s experience in the relationship BEFORE the estrangement.

If you genuinely have no idea how your child experienced the relationship badly enough to leave it, that absence of knowledge is itself information about the relationship and how you, as a parent, viewed your child within it.

“Myth #2: No contact is always healing.”

Coleman’s argument does what estranged-parent arguments so often do: tries to establish a demarcation between no contact because of “real abuse” and what he insinuates are estrangements arising from lesser relational conflicts, where separation merely intensifies anger and creates barriers to repair.

But there isn’t some magical line of severity at which a parent should suddenly start caring about their child’s experience in the relationship because the harm has finally reached a threshold to qualify as “abuse.”

Caring about their child’s experience should ALWAYS be central to the relationship.

Failing to care about or acknowledge the validity of that experience IS the barrier to repair. And when that failure becomes an ongoing relational pattern that does not change, distance may become necessary regardless of whether someone else decides the behavior clears some arbitrary determination for “real abuse.”

“Myth #3: If your child cut you off, you must have done something pretty bad.”

And here comes the familiar list of deflections.

According to Coleman, estrangement can result from divorce, remarriage, mental health difficulties, personality differences, conflicts over spouses or grandchildren, political or religious differences, competing loyalties, “unresolved childhood grievances” and, eventually, “sometimes serious parental wrongdoing.”

The list goes on and on and on.

Everywhere except sustained examination of the relationship itself.

Divorce isn’t a relational dynamic. Remarriage isn’t a relational dynamic. A spouse isn’t a relational dynamic. Political differences aren’t a relational dynamic. Even “unresolved childhood grievances” begs the rather obvious question: WHY are they unresolved?

What happened when the child tried to address them? How did the parent respond? Was their experience heard? Was there accountability? Did anything change? Was there repair?

Estrangement occurs WITHIN A RELATIONSHIP. Naming the subject or subjects around which conflict occurred does not explain why that relationship ultimately became untenable.

“Myth #4: Reconciliation requires agreeing about the past.”

Here, Coleman accurately points out that people can have differing perspectives of a relationship and that there is no single objective verdict about what “really happened.”

He is consistent in providing his own “kernel of truth” in what he offers in order to maintain some modicum of legitimacy.

Repair DOES require sustained curiosity about the experience of the other party. It also requires receptivity to that experience without immediately becoming defensive, explaining it away, supplying “context,” or treating curiosity as merely a rhetorical exercise before returning to your preferred interpretation.

Actual curiosity means being willing to discover something about YOUR impact that you may not particularly want to know and may resist hearing. True emotional and relational intelligence requires being able to sit in that discomfort.

“Myth #5: Setting boundaries means removing people who make you anxious or uncomfortable.”

Coleman’s main argument here is that relationships require “frustration tolerance, negotiation, forgiveness, and the capacity to remain connected to people who disappoint us.”

Fair enough.

The problem is where he places that burden.

As is so often the case in estrangement discourse, the burden for demonstrating greater emotional maturity and relational capacity gets placed upon the adult child, who clearly did not have those skills adequately modeled or demonstrated within the relationship in the first place.

The adult child is expected to develop greater “frustration tolerance” for the parent’s behavior rather than the parent being expected to engage in that same frustration tolerance by sitting with the discomfort of accountability.

The adult child is expected to remain connected despite disappointment rather than the parent being expected to examine the repeated, ongoing behavior producing — and maintaining — that disappointment.

The adult child is also expected to continually forgive rather than the parent being expected to change the behavior requiring forgiveness or to do the work of repair to earn it.

There is a continual convenience to the expectations that favors one side while simultaneously making themselves the victim in the process.

Accountability, changed behavior, and repair somehow disappear while judgements and expectations around the adult child’s capacity to endlessly tolerate MORE take center stage.

“Myth #6: Good therapists don’t recommend estrangement.”

Good therapists focus on the needs of their client and help them sort through the tangled history they came to therapy to untangle.

The continued blaming of therapists for “recommending” estrangement is fundamentally ignorant, particularly when coming FROM a therapist who wants to position himself as the guiding voice of wisdom for estranged parents while repeatedly offering them escape hatches from doing precisely the uncomfortable self-examination that productive therapy actually involves.

And if the identified problem is that an adult child’s therapist “works primarily from one person’s account,” that limitation applies equally to therapists working with estranged parents.

Including Coleman.

“Myth #7: Once someone goes no contact, the relationship is over.”

Here Coleman accurately points out that estrangements can be “fluid.”

Indeed, the research shows that estrangement can be cyclical, with periods of contact and disconnection occurring over time.

What Coleman doesn’t point out is the rather obvious possibility that this cycling often occurs because an adult child attempts reconnection only to discover that nothing has changed within the relational dynamic that led them to distance themselves in the first place.

So they leave again.

Eventually, that estrangement may become permanent.

Coleman’s advice is that parents should not “put their lives on hold waiting” for reconciliation.

What he conspicuously does NOT advise here is that they use that time to reflect deeply on why their child decided that separation was necessary, examine their own relational patterns, work on themselves, develop greater capacity for accountability and receptivity, and become someone with whom their child might actually experience a different relationship should they attempt reconnection.

And that omission brings us to the larger point.

Coleman concludes that taking responsibility for relational conditions and becoming curious about the other party’s experience is “a task for everyone.”

But only after spending the bulk of the essay providing parents with reasons the estrangement might be attributable to any number of things OTHER than the relational dynamics between parent and child.

And once again, he entirely ignores the fundamental asymmetry underneath the relationship he is discussing.

A parent-child relationship is inherently asymmetrical, nonconsensual, and developmental.

One person entered that relationship completely dependent upon the other. One person was responsible for creating the relational environment in which the other learned emotional regulation, conflict resolution, accountability, boundaries, rupture and repair, and what relationships themselves are supposed to feel like and what relational intelligence looks like within them.

So no, the responsibility for the relational conditions that ultimately make reconciliation possible did not suddenly become symmetrical upon the child’s attainment of adulthood.

Both adults are responsible for their own behavior.

But they are NOT equally responsible for the relationship that was created between them.

And no amount of “myth busting” makes that developmental history nor the parents’ responsibility for it and the relational environment they created disappear.

*******

Author’s Note: This piece is part of an ongoing examination of prominent voices shaping the cultural conversation around family estrangement, with particular attention to how they frame responsibility, whose experiences they center, and whose they leave out.

Other recent explorations include:

• The “Advice” Given to Estranged Parents About “Mistakes” to Avoid
• Are Adult Children Reinterpreting “Normal Parenting” as Trauma?
• What the Wall Street Journal article about therapists and estrangement ACTUALLY reveals

Business is booming in the estrangement discourse. “Experts” on all sides of the phenomenon have offerings to support what their target audience is experiencing.

Those focused on estranged adult children tend to offer support groups, educational content and tools to use as they process their experiences and engage in healing. An ecosystem that is certainly not immune to oversimplification, questionable advice or content designed primarily to validate its audience.

On the estranged-parent side, however, the offerings frequently skew toward scripts and strategies intended to restore contact with the adult child, explanatory narratives for why the estrangement isn’t really the parent’s fault, or communities where parents can frame their own personal stories of pain and grief over experiencing the unimaginable.

Make no mistake.

BOTH sides have businesses built around the pain of estrangement.

There is a difference worth examining, though, and that difference lies in what those offerings actually contribute to the individual experiencing estrangement and to the larger cultural discourse around it.

What happens when advice ostensibly designed to help estranged parents reconcile with their adult children in actuality reinforces the very ways of “understanding” the estrangement that prevent both genuine understanding and repair?

One of the most well-known figures within the estrangement discourse is Joshua Coleman, who has built an extensive commercial enterprise around the phenomenon through books, articles, Substack memberships, webinars, training programs and more.

One recent free webinar, functioning as an entry point into that marketing funnel, was titled “Six Most Common Mistakes of Estranged Parents.”

On the surface, it all looks pretty reasonable.

Summary of the “Six Mistakes”:

1. Fairness vs. practicality
   Don’t become consumed with whether the situation is fair, but instead focus on what is practical if reconciliation is the goal.
2. Using guilt
   Don’t guilt your child about the estrangement or its impact on you.
3. Qualifying/defending in amends letters
   Don’t undermine an apology with explanations, justifications or defensiveness.
4. Returning fire with fire
   Don’t respond to anger with anger or hostility with hostility.
5. Expecting reconciliation too quickly / missing progress
   Recognize that reconciliation can take considerable time and appreciate incremental gains along the way.
6. Taking their distance or negativity personally
   Don’t assume that your adult child’s distance or negativity is entirely about you as the parent.

All of that seems quite fair. That is, until the content beneath each “mistake” is examined in greater detail. Did you notice the second part of the title?

“And why they’re unavoidable.”

In mainstream media spaces, Coleman is measured in his rhetoric around estrangement and estranged adult children specifically. There is generally at least a nod to the possibility that an adult child’s account of harmful parental behavior may be legitimate, though always qualified by references to “extreme” or “real” abuse.

However, when the audience is specifically estranged parents, the tone and content changes considerably.

Mistake #1: Fairness vs practicality

On the surface, it’s understandable that a parent would experience estrangement as unfair. But how does Coleman actually speak to this?

First, he compares the parent-child relationship with non-comparable relationships.

“If it were fair, it’d be the same model that it would be with, like, our best friends or our spouses. You know, you talk it out. You assume there’s going to be conflict. You talk about how hurt you feel, or misunderstood. They talk about how they feel hurt or misunderstood, how they feel. You kind of meet somewhere in the middle, you compromise.”

The comparison ignores the inherent asymmetry of the parent-child relationship. Unlike friendships and partnerships voluntarily entered into — or exited — by adults as equals, one party creates and shapes the relational environment in which the other develops from birth.

Then add the cultural expectations of relational permanence, filial loyalty and enduring obligation.

There is, in fact, no comparison.

Nowhere in his “advice” is there discussion of the parent’s responsibility to create and maintain a relational environment where conflicts, hurts and misunderstandings can be discussed, ruptures recognized and repair undertaken.

He then downplays the role of repair.

“The kind of communication that we’re really required to do towards reconciliation [with our adult children], we don’t really typically have to do in the rest of our lives. You know, I make a big deal out of making amends, but for most people, a simple sorry is enough.”

In no relationship is “a simple sorry” necessarily sufficient to address significant or repeated relational wounds. Repair requires acknowledgment and accountability of the harm and its impact, and, where the harm reflects an ongoing behavior or pattern, meaningful effort toward behavioral change.

Then, as part of the rhetorical method he routinely employs, he moves into the grievance element under the same frame of “fairness.”

“But if we’re fair, you could demand more time with your grandchildren or restoration of contact with your grandchildren. So many estranged parents say to me, well, you know, I could really tolerate eventually not having my kid in my life, but my grandchild or my grandchildren… that I can’t really live with.”

The grievance is entirely organized around what the estranged parent perceives they have lost. Missing is any consideration of why an adult child who has concluded that a relationship with their parent is harmful might also reconsider that parent’s access to their own children or factor the cost to them to provide it.

The grandparent-grandchild relationship is treated as though it exists independently of the parent-child relationship through which it was created, rather than requiring continued contact with the very adult child who determined that relationship was harmful enough to require distance.

So, what else falls into what should be there “if it were fair” according to Coleman?

If it were fair, he advises, “you could demand more empathy and more forgiveness for whatever mistakes you did make…. You could demand more commitment… you’d get credit for all the money spent on your child.”

“Finally, if it were fair, you’d be able to talk about all the ways that your child themselves might have made parenting difficult.”

Notice the language.

Fairness. Demand. Credit. Investment.

Blame is placed upon the child for their natural developmental messiness that the parent had difficulty managing.

Notice the direction in which empathy and forgiveness are expected to flow.

The focus is on what is owed to them, the unfairness of not receiving it and the practicality, if they want to see those grandkids, of not conveying that to their adult children.

Mistake #2: Guilt

A natural offshoot of that perceived debt is the urge to deliver guilt for not paying up. Coleman’s advice: keep it to yourself.

Here he grounds this in Western cultural decay in which today’s adult children aren’t expected to have lifelong fealty nor face cultural consequences for disobedience against it.

“You know, in most cultures in the rest of the world, there’s sort of the idea that, you know, guilt, it’s appropriate that if you hurt somebody, you should feel guilty. You hurt your parent, you should hurt a little bit to kind of get you back in line.”

Back in line.

Then he moves on to mocking the discussion around what constitutes emotional abuse and suggesting that now, suddenly, guilting your adult child for estranging is akin to emotional abuse. A suggestion his tone reveals he finds ridiculous.

“Oh you’re gaslighting me. You’re not honoring my feelings. You’re not protecting my space and my peace. I’m going to tell my therapist on you.”

According to Coleman, the declining effectiveness and acceptability of instilling parental guilt is situated within a broader cultural shift away from filial obligation and toward autonomy, individuality and attention to one’s own feelings.

“And so you look at parenting in the 1920s for example, what parents wanted from their children was not only to respect them, but maybe even to fear them. But what parents have wanted from their children since the 60s and increasingly into the present is they want their children to be individuals… to be in touch with their feelings... and that’s all well and good, but it’s given our children the shovel to hit us over the head with.”

And what if a parent invokes illness in hopes of re-engaging their child?

“Just be prepared that these kids are fucking jerks and they’re not going to respond at all or they’re going to respond in some hostile, cold hearted way.”

Coleman isn’t advising against applying guilt because it is corrosive to repair or privileges the parent’s experience and emotional needs over the adult child’s.

He advises against it because it isn’t effective within a culture he characterizes as decaying because of a selfish focus on personal wellbeing, relational connection and fulfillment versus duty and obligation.

“We taught our children to be more self-interested. And they are. And so that’s why I say guilt is your enemy. Anything that makes the child feel in any way responsible for the parent’s feelings can and will be used against you.”

Coleman isn’t using this opportunity to challenge estranged parents’ understanding of the relational dynamic or the residual impact of unhealed wounds and ongoing harmful behaviors.

Moreover, he isn’t challenging the grievance. He isn’t holding a mirror up or suggesting that the parents face uncomfortable truths about what led to the estrangement.

He’s highlighting, embedding and reinforcing all of the grievances while advising them how to strategically keep them from getting in the way of the outcome they want.

Mistake #3: Qualifying amends through explanation, persuasion or defensiveness

The “amends letter,” a core technique outlined in his Rules of Estrangement, advises parents to find the “kernel of truth” in their adult child’s complaints and construct a nod to acknowledgement around it.

“An amends letter is an act of pure empathy….. If they don’t respond to the letter or to the follow up, they’re just not ready to deal with you, to have a relationship, to accept the terms.”

The way he frames the amends letter is revealing. It is what he calls the “flush them out of the bushes” letter.

It starts from the common claim that the estranged parent has no idea why their adult child has gone no contact. Coleman suggests appealing to the adult child to convey whatever their grievances are, with a promise to listen without defensiveness and an offer of family therapy if they are willing. He cautions against including the parent’s belief that the other parent or the adult child’s spouse intentionally “poisoned” them and thus caused the estrangement.

Coleman isn’t challenging those beliefs nor is he advocating that the parent think differently about what led to the estrangement. He is merely cautioning parents not to convey those beliefs to their adult child.

“It doesn’t mean you have to internalize your child’s view of what their complaints are.”

It is a communication strategy.

Scripts. Terms. Framing. “Kernels of truth.”

Not advocacy toward gaining an actual understanding that could create the conditions for genuine repair.

“You know, I’ve seen amends letters work like a charm… Sometimes I’ll see kids not respond at all. Or they’ll respond in some hateful, negative way. So I just want parents to know that you don’t have a lot of cards in your hands to play. You’ve really only got the amends letter as far as I’m concerned.”

Cards to play. Strategy.

Missing: sustained curiosity about and openness to what the adult child actually experienced in the relationship.

In fact, Coleman is quite explicit about what parents are free to continue telling themselves while performing this “act of pure empathy.”

“You tell yourself look, I did the best I could, or I was actually a really good parent and you don’t know what you are talking about or it’s not my fault that the other parent wasn’t good or poisoned you against me or, you know what? You were actually a really freaking hard kid to raise.

Or you know, your memory of me is all wrong, or your therapist should be disqualified for all the bullshit they are putting in your head… It’s all unfair… but when you make amends, it’s kind of the only way you’ve got to take the stick out of their hands that they’re hitting you with.”

And what if the amends doesn’t work? What if the adult child remains angry?

“Maybe they need to be mad at you. Maybe they need to be victimized.”

He suggests that perhaps their lives haven’t turned out well, “not because of you,” and they “need a narrative that they were abused, harmed, traumatized… in order to just feel better about themselves.”

And if that isn’t the explanation, Coleman offers others: mental illness, addiction, an ex, a spouse, a therapist.

One possibility is conspicuously absent: maybe the “kernel of truth” wasn’t anything close or in any way sufficient.

Mistake #4: Returning fire with fire

Coleman advises parents to curb the urge for retaliation, describing their experience of estrangement this way:

“You feel devalued, misunderstood, taken advantage of, kicked to the curb, shamed, humiliated.”

Those are horrible things to feel, right? What about the parent having produced those feelings in their own child?

Not a consideration.

“I mean, some kids are truly abusive. They’re abusive in their blame and their coldness and their lack of empathy. And that can cause so much pain.”

Lack of empathy can indeed cause tremendous pain. Once again, the lack of empathy under examination is the adult child’s.

And what constitutes abuse is apparently on the table when it is the adult child being accused of it, but not a true consideration otherwise.

Mistake #5: Failing to see how long reconciliation takes or recognize progress

This is actually good advice. Repair does take time. Reconciliation, if it happens, isn’t a one-and-done process, and rebuilding trust is necessarily incremental.

“Some of what adult children are doing to their parents is just so hurtful and rejecting and shaming. They make it impossible to be with them, even if they are letting them into their lives, that the parent feels understandably like, who needs this headache?”

Once again, the framing is about what the adult child is doing to the estranged parent. Not what the adult child experienced from their parent, or the impact of that, nor the acknowledgement of the work the parent needs to do on themselves to truly be in a place to rebuild the relationship.

Mistake #6: Assuming their distance or negativity is all because of you or about you

Coleman acknowledges that adult children have lives, families and careers of their own, but again turns that reality toward grievance.

“By the time we have adult children and grandchildren, they’re kind of front and center of our consciousness. We’re thinking about them a lot. Maybe all the time. Guess what? They are not thinking about us a lot.”

The dialogue then shifts from the rather ordinary reality that adult children are focused on their own lives to the parent’s diminishing time and the implication that the adult child should reconcile before that time runs out.

“I’m wasting time here. I’m only getting older. How much more time do I have for you until you can reconcile with me?”

So estranged parents should avoid guilting their child because it is the enemy to getting what they want, understand that reconciliation takes time, and deal with the fact that their time is running out.

The grievances continue to pile up.

And throughout the estranged-parent focused webinar, contrary to his more measured language used in mainstream spaces, is what is reflected in his most unqualified statement of how he views estrangement and the adult children who initiate it:

“Your kid has a right to be mad or upset for whatever ways that we, any of us, whatever mistakes we made, they have a right to be mad. But to cut off a parent, that’s just immoral. As far as I’m concerned. That’s wrong.”

And Coleman himself makes clear that he understands the distinction of the audience he is speaking to.

“Now I’m not going to say that to your kid in therapy.”

Well, no. Apparently not.

But he is saying it to estranged parents.

And that matters.

This isn’t simply a disgruntled estranged parent building a grievance platform.

This is someone routinely presented within the broader discourse as a leading expert on family estrangement, telling estranged parents that their adult children may be “fucking jerks,” may “need to be victimized,” may have memories that are “all wrong,” may have therapists filling their heads with “bullshit” and, ultimately, may be acting immorally by ending the relationship.

That doesn’t really lend itself towards gaining an actual understanding of the reasons their children ultimately made the heartbreaking decision to estrange themselves.

But it may sell Substack subscriptions and seminar recordings.

So much of the rhetoric around estrangement is what adult children are supposedly being “taught.”

Taught to be selfish. Taught to prioritize their feelings. Taught to call things trauma. Taught by therapists to blame their parents. Taught by spouses, social media and a “culture of individualism” that estrangement is an acceptable response to relational harm.

But learning how to understand an experience is not the same thing as being inauthentically “taught” that they have had it.

Adult children can obtain concepts, language and frameworks that help them make sense of relationships they have actually lived. They can reconsider experiences they once normalized, recognize patterns they previously couldn’t name, reach conclusions about what those experiences have meant in their lives and decide what they are willing to participate in going forward.

And sometimes the action they take is distance.

And what estranged parents are being taught in response has profound consequences for both individual relationships and the larger discourse on estrangement.

Advice on how to strategically frame a conversation in order to achieve a desired outcome is not the same thing as seeking actual understanding.

A parent can learn not to use guilt without examining the sense of entitlement beneath it. They can write an amends letter around some acceptable “kernel of truth” without confronting the larger truth of their child’s experience or the depth of its impact.

They can learn what not to say without ever questioning what they continue to believe.

And if the foundational belief remains that the child has been manipulated, misled, made selfish by culture, encouraged into victimhood, convinced by a therapist that “ordinary parenting” was trauma, or is simply immoral for choosing estrangement, then the adult child’s own explanation for the relationship outcome remains fundamentally rejected. No matter how many times or in how many ways they try to convey it.

Perhaps just the right words can restore contact for some period of time. But contact is not the same thing as repair. Because reconciliation cannot be reduced to finding the least costly set of words to get an adult child back into the room.

It requires a genuine willingness to understand why they left.

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The “Advice” Given to Estranged Parents About “Mistakes” to Avoid was originally published in Fourth Wave on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Within the media and cultural conversations around estrangement, the same argument appears again and again: that today’s generation of adult children, most often assumed to be millennial despite the fact that estrangement occurs across generations, are increasingly interpreting “normal parenting” as trauma.

In this narrative, the adult child’s experience of the relationship is minimized as oversensitivity, intolerance of disagreement, not “getting their way,” or an inability to cope with ordinary family conflict. According to that view, adult children are characterizing mere relational discomfort as “trauma” and being encouraged by contemporary psychology to do so.

A supporting argument frequently invoked is psychologist Nick Haslam’s opinion paper claiming that “concept creep” has expanded concepts of harm and resulted in the “pathologizing of everyday experience.”

Absent in the discussion is Haslam’s contention that this expansion reflects what he described as a broader “liberal moral agenda,” introducing an explicitly political interpretation into what is often presented as a purely scientific claim.

Embedded within this argument is an assumption that “normal” and “healthy” are synonymous. Developmental psychology has never made that assumption.

Yet upon that false assumption rests many of the most common and persistently conveyed narratives surrounding estrangement.

“They’re adults now. The relationship is a two-way street.”

The attainment of adulthood does not erase the developmental relationship or the relational environment that shaped it. The adult relationship is simply a new phase of the same relationship.

Roles change. Level of authority changes. Reciprocity increases. But the relationship remains continuous.

The parent-child relationship is not, and never has been, a mutual relationship in the way other types of adult relationships are. It is nonconsensual and asymmetrical from its beginning, and that asymmetry doesn’t disappear simply because the child becomes an adult.

In fact, the claim that “the relationship is now mutual” is entirely incompatible with the equally common “they are your parents, you owe them a relationship.”

Adult parent-child relationships do not exist on equal footing because they do not begin at adulthood. The relationship already has a deep history. It already has ingrained patterns. It already has expectations shaped by years of interaction.

Its history is carried forward because attachment, trust, expectations, and relational patterns are cumulative.

As is the erosion of them.

In ANY relationship, the impact of relational experiences accumulates over time. In a developmental one, that impact is exponential. The developmental asymmetry remains because the relationship carries its history forward.

Cultural expectations reinforce that asymmetry. Adult children are routinely reminded that “they’re your parents” and that honoring them remains a moral obligation regardless of the quality of the relationship.

No other relationship bears that expectation.

“They are rewriting history”

The history of a relationship is true and valid through the eyes of each person who experienced it. Parents and children will always have different perspectives of the same experiences precisely because they are viewing it from entirely different positions.

Parents who accuse their adult child of rewriting history are not only privileging their experience as being the default, they are denying that their child had their own experience and that their child’s experience doesn’t have to mirror theirs to be true.

It is probably one of the clearest indicators of a parent whose ego and identity is firmly anchored on their own perception of having been a “good parent” that they cannot acknowledge the experience of their adult child if it contradicts with that self image.

In reality, healthy parenting doesn’t require litigation over whose memory is accurate. Rather, it is based upon the parent having what is termed by author and clinical professor of psychiatry Daniel Siegel as “mindsight.”

“Mindsight at its most basic definition is the ability to see the mental world of the self and others. Mindsight is the mechanism beneath social and emotional intelligence.” (Daniel Siegel)

It is the ability to recognize that different people can experience the same event differently.

The accusation that estranged adult children are “rewriting history” assumes that there is a single authoritative account of the past.

There isn’t.

Developmental psychology isn’t concerned with establishing whose recollection is objectively correct but rather the subjective experience and its impact.

More importantly, healthy parenting recognizes that their child’s internal world is as real as their own and that the child has their own experience of the relationship. Healthy parenting is based on having attunement to and curiosity about those experiences.

It is also about recognizing the importance of reflective meaning making about those experiences.

That isn’t living in the past. It is processing its impact on the present.

Looking backward is not the same as living backward nor is it a process of revision. Reflection is one of the mechanisms through which the past becomes integrated and unhealed wounds become addressed rather than repeatedly reopened and relived.

“They didn’t tell me, I didn’t know, We were always close, The estrangement came out of the blue.”

Those are all very similar but yet distinct claims.

When a parent says, “they didn’t tell me,” they are making the adult child the custodian of the relationship.

That isn’t how developmental relationships work.

If mindsight is the ability to recognize that another person has an internal world separate from your own, then parenting requires something a bit further. It requires being and remaining attuned to and curious about your child’s internal world as it changes over time.

That doesn’t require special knowledge or skills. It just requires continued empathetic attention.

From the very beginning, the parent is responsible for being attuned to the needs of their infant child. Are they hungry, is their diaper soiled, do they have digestive distress? They need to pay attention to nonverbal cues to figure out what the baby’s needs are and respond, often via trial and error, accordingly.

Parents routinely reject the idea that they should have known how to parent because “there’s no guidebook.” But from the very beginning there never was a guidebook. Parents learned by paying attention, trying, observing the child’s response, adjusting, and trying again.

That responsibility for attunement doesn’t disappear when the child’s needs become emotional instead of physical.

The importance of attending to the state of the relationship is no different than the importance of attending to physical needs. In fact, it is THE most important. The parent is responsible for identifying when their child is in emotional or relational distress — whether with them or with others or in response to events — and helping co-regulate them through it.

That is the job.

When a parent says, “I didn’t know,” they are announcing that they were not in fact monitoring the state of the relationship. They assumed it would be there. That they were entitled to it without active cultivation.

Again, that is not how developmental relationships work.

They require attentiveness and sensitivity by the caregiver to the state and needs of the child. Not on a one hundred percent perfect basis, but on a merely thirty percent “good enough” basis.

“Parental sensitivity is defined as a way in which a parent perceives the child’s communication signals, makes sense of those signals by understanding their meaning for the child’s internal mental world, and then responds in a timely and effective manner to meet the child’s needs. When the patterns of communication are consistent, predictable and filled with repairs when the inevitable ruptures in attunement occur, there is the creation of a working model of security.” (Siegel)

Repair is the key element, precisely because thirty percent accuracy means seventy percent inaccuracy. It is all about recognizing and responding to natural parental imperfections.

Demonstrating the ability to discern when there have been ruptures or misattunements, and repairing them, is critical to maintaining secure attachment. It provides the confidence and security that those misattunements will not erode the relational bond.

Attachment is not something established once in childhood and is then fixed in time. It evolves as the relationship evolves throughout the child’s development. A parent cannot assume that a relationship that once seemed secure will remain so, nor can they rely solely on their own perceptions to determine the state of that relationship.

Healthy parenting requires ongoing attunement, open communication, and continued curiosity about the child’s evolving inner world.

Because the relationships continue to evolve throughout development, it is on the parent to remain attuned to the child’s inner world and to their experience of the relationship and to the world around them.

The statements “we were always close” and “it came out of the blue” both contain unexamined assumptions.

Based upon whose evaluation was the relationship close? What basis does the parent have for believing the adult child experienced the relationship similarly?

The parent’s experience of closeness and the child’s experience of closeness are not the same thing.

An adult child who learned early on that people pleasing — attending to the needs of others over asserting their own — was what maintained connection with their parent while they were dependent minors may continue that behavior even while not ever experiencing true depth of connection.

Children adapt to preserve connection with parents and caregivers upon whom they depend and with whom they have a biologically wired need to maintain that connection.

They may have spent years attempting to create a deeper, safer, or more authentic relationship without success. To the parent who was never attuned to the true state of their child’s experience, the continuation of the relationship itself became evidence that the relationship was close.

To the child, it was always superficial.

The statement “it came out of the blue” carries perhaps the biggest assumption of all: that the estrangement itself appeared suddenly.

No relationship changes overnight.

And developmental, historically dependent ones especially do not. They evolve through thousands of interactions, ruptures and repairs, or a historical lack thereof, memories of joys, disappointments and unrepaired wounds.

The parent experiences the estrangement as sudden because they are facing the adult child’s finally realized conclusion rather than having been attuned to the years of experiences that produced it.

“Parents did their best, They didn’t know any better, These concepts are all new.”

Parents doing their best doesn’t mean their best was good or didn’t inflict significant harm. That is what accountability is all about. Being accountable for one’s imperfections and unintended harm, learning from that so as to not repeat it, and to repair from it.

It is on the parent to model that.

The argument that parents “didn’t know any better” depends on the assumption that this knowledge didn’t exist.

It did.

None of the concepts of developmental psychology are new.

In fact, they are foundational to its origins going back to the 1930s and Lewin’s “Field Theory” that behavior could not be understood in isolation from the environment in which it occurred and the decades of published scholarship across multiple fields of science that followed.

But parents don’t need to be scholars of developmental psychology to understand its underlying principles inherently.

That excuse is a nonstarter.

Caring about the experience of your child in the relationship doesn’t require a degree.

What was understood and what was popularized are two very different things.

Many of the parenting practices that have come to be recognized as emotionally neglectful, authoritarian, or even abusive weren’t considered normal because developmental psychology endorsed them.

They were considered normal because culture did.

If the product of “normal” parenting resulted in emotional suppression, authoritarian control, refusal to acknowledge the lived experience of one’s child and a chronic lack of repair, then the problem isn’t adult children “redefining trauma.”

Developmental psychology has never asked whether parenting reflected the prevailing norms of its time. It has always asked a different question: what kinds of relationships support healthy human development?

Those are fundamentally different standards.

When adult children estrange as a result of the long-term effects of emotionally neglectful, chronically misattuned, or emotionally unsafe relationships, they are not redefining ordinary parenting as trauma. Nor are they asking anyone to redefine anything.

They are asking for their lived experiences to matter.

The problem was never whether culturally accepted parenting practices were normal.

The problem was using “normal” as the measure of healthy parenting.

Are Adult Children Reinterpreting “Normal Parenting” as Trauma? was originally published in The Parenting Portal on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The media and internet are all abuzz after the publishing of a recent Wall Street Journal article whose title asks, “Are Therapists to Blame for the Rise of Adults Cutting Off Their Parents?”

It is a belief held by many estranged parents and widely promoted, paradoxically, by many known therapists themselves.

The article is framed around one woman who, in her second session with a therapist, is said to have been “shocked” to have been given the advice to cut ties with her mother, but “did as she was told” because “it was an argument made from authority.”

The article’s author doesn’t seem to question why the woman followed that particular authority with whom she had barely any history or connection and not the prevailing cultural and presumably family authority to remain in that relationship no matter what.

Doing so would upset the article’s premise.

That adult children are being convinced by unethical therapists who apparently have a collective agenda to destroy otherwise perfectly healthy parent-child relationships. Regardless of the fact that said relationship is presumably precisely the reason that the adult child had sought out therapy in the first place.

The article’s framing begins before a single word is read. Its opening illustration tells the reader who the villain is, who the victim is, and who is responsible.

A parent sits passively on a branch while an adult child is actively sawing through it — notably on the side where they themselves will fall and be injured when it eventually breaks — apparently clueless to the implications at the very least to them of their own actions.

A therapist is detachedly sitting comfortably below, reading a clipboard while providing the saw. Unconcerned about the impending danger.

The message is clear: the therapist is the instrument of the cut off and the adult child is the agent being led without independent thought or critical thinking of their own. Unaware and not able to foresee the repercussions to themselves and others.

The parent is merely the helpless, innocent victim who has done nothing to precipitate the pending doom. The tragedy is unfolding for all at the orchestration of the therapist.

Notice what the illustration does not convey.

There is no history. No relationship. No conflict. No years of attempts at repair. No adult child making an independent decision after exhausting other options. The image merely shows the imminent moment of relational destruction and assigns causality to the therapist with the provision of the tool to do so.

Then comes the statistic.

"Among some 7,000 estranged parents surveyed in April, a third believed that their adult child’s therapist influenced or recommended the decision to end the relationship.”

It is presented as if it settles the issue. There is no reason for readers to doubt it. Seven THOUSAND estranged parents were surveyed and a third believe the estrangement came at the behest of a therapist? What is there to question?

Except that in the article, there was no link to the surveys, no discussion of methodology, no explanation of who was surveyed, and no indication of what the full survey can or cannot explain. It is just a shocking statistic that appears to lend apparent scientific authority to a narrative the article has already established.

After the article was published, one of the survey authors, therapist Peter Anderson who was himself interviewed for the article, publicly released the survey materials via the Open Science Framework.

Delving into what is housed there is considerably more interesting and revealing than what was portrayed in the article.

First are the basic details around the survey itself. Rather than 7,000 estranged parents surveyed in April, there were two surveys conducted in 2024 and 2025 with 1,027 participants in one and 4,226 in the other for a total of 5,253. The surveys were posted to OSF on March 31, 2026.

According to the authors, the surveys represent “citizen science, not peer reviewed research” and “carry significant limitations.” Respondents were recruited via “channels that serve parents who are actively seeking information on estrangement.”

Importantly, “this almost certainly overrepresents parents who feel most wronged by the estrangement and reflects only the parent’s perspective.

These surveys do not establish causation.

The findings describe what a self-selected group of estranged parents reported. They do not demonstrate that estrangement is unjustified, that therapy causes estrangement, or that parents are blameless. They document one side of a complex relational phenomenon.”

Notably, the findings do not reflect the perspectives of estranged adult children — the party who most often initiates estrangement. A fact that is supported within those surveys themselves as well as the broader established research on estrangement.

None of that was disclosed in the WSJ article or has seemed to be conveyed in any of the resulting media coverage since.

So what did these parents report?

When asked if their child had begun therapy within a year of the estrangement, the majority said either no or they were unsure. As for therapy influencing the decision to estrange, in both surveys, the majority reported that they did NOT believe that to be the case, or again, were unsure.

Unsurprisingly, these parents cited that prior to the estrangement, they believed the relationship was close, that the estrangement was sudden, that it was mostly or completely unjustified and that they did not contribute to the factors leading to it.

Paradoxically, even while claiming no knowledge and a close relationship, the majority also claimed that there were in fact reasons given with the majority being past emotional harm, boundary violations, toxic relationship and “other.”

That finding has been similarly identified in the body of research on estrangement where parents will claim lack of communication around the reasons for the estrangement, but when asked for further detail around the relationship will share that there has in fact been a history of conflict.

As informal as the surveys were, they corroborate that existing body of peer reviewed research that consistently finds that estranged parents do not validate the reasons cited by their adult children, claim to have been blindsided by the decision and that the factors are external to the relationship itself.

The most widely known and aggressively self-marketed “expert” in estrangement, Joshua Coleman, is credentialed on a survey of estranged mothers finding exactly that.

“These mothers tended to endorse external attributions for estrangement, including family members’ turning the child against them or children’s struggles with mental illness and/or addiction. Mothers were less likely to endorse internal attributions for estrangement compared with external attributions or to validate their children’s complaints about abuse or neglect.”

But rather than examine these patterns, the resulting firestorm of cultural conversation centers the deflection itself: whether therapists are responsible for a widely repeated but unsubstantiated claim of a “rise” in estrangement.

The significance of the Wall Street Journal article isn’t its debate over whether therapists are “causing” estrangement. Its real significance is that it exposes the ways in which estrangement narratives are built, legitimized and amplified.

A descriptive survey, explicitly described by its own authors as self-selected, one-sided, non-peer-reviewed “citizen science” that admittedly does not establish causation, is presented in one of the world’s most respected newspapers without referencing those limitations. The statistic is then repeated by other media outlets.

Each repetition strips away more context while increasing perceived authority. Before long, a descriptive finding has become accepted cultural evidence for a claim the survey itself explicitly says it cannot support.

Media amplification is only one part of a larger process. Once a narrative gains the appearance of legitimacy, it attracts an ecosystem that benefits from it, profits from it, and reinforces it.

That is credibility brokering.

The Wall Street Journal article models that process perfectly.

The process begins with a hook.

Begin with an emotionally compelling story about an adult child who is “taken” by exactly the type of unethical therapist the article seeks to expose before later coming to regret the decision.

Follow with a statistic that appears to validate the premise without disclosing its limitations or lack of independent review. Then watch as other outlets eagerly repeat the claim until the framing itself begins to acquire the appearance of established fact.

The statistic lends legitimacy to the experts who promoted it, while their expertise lends legitimacy back to the statistic.

The conversation remains on the culpability of third parties on causation of estrangement — despite the survey’s authors disclaimers within the survey that it absolutely does not — and away from the conditions of the relationships themselves.

In the process, an expanding marketplace of estranged-parent-focused creators, organizations, and services reinforces the same exoneration narratives the research consistently identifies as being what those parents cling to.

The surveys cited in the article were conducted by Peter Anderson and uploaded and co-presented by Richard Blake, another estranged-parent-focused creator whose content consistently frames research in ways that support those same deflection and exoneration narratives.

Blake repeatedly presents research in ways that strip away context, selectively emphasize findings, or extend conclusions beyond what the studies themselves support. Across his content, studies are consistently reframed or interpreted in ways that reinforce exoneration narratives while minimizing or omitting findings that discuss relational dynamics or the perspectives of adult children.

Anderson and Blake are also listed as officers of a recently created organization alongside Katt Johnston, another creator producing similar estranged-parent-focused content.

Johnston performs a complementary function. Rather than focusing on research, she presents herself as an interpreter of experience. Within her content, parental distress is centered and emphasized as the result of cultural decay, therapist overreach and manipulated, misled adult children while relational conditions and dynamics are ignored.

The organization’s name, the Ethical Standards for Mental Health Coalition, presents the appearance of professional authority. Yet there is currently little substantive public material explaining its standards, governance, evidence base, review process, or why a separate coalition is needed to define ethical mental-health practice when the profession already operates under established ethical codes and licensing bodies that regulate mental-health practice.

The organization becomes a credential in itself. Its existence can be cited as evidence of professional legitimacy, while its officers simultaneously reinforce the organization’s legitimacy through their own professional identities and public platforms.

It provides another layer of institutional framework around the same narrative advanced in the Wall Street Journal article: that mental-health professionals are helping cause estrangement by validating adult children’s accounts of relational harm.

The creators lend legitimacy to the organization through their credentials, while the organization lends institutional legitimacy back to the creators and their claims. The existence of the coalition then becomes another credential that can be cited in articles, biographies, interviews, conferences, and appearances with one another.

None of this makes what they’re selling any stronger or more legitimate. It simply creates the appearance of credibility.

It is all circularly reinforcing as is their appearances on each other’s platforms and events.

Take, for example, the upcoming “Summit” that Joshua Coleman has marketed to estranged parents “to gain insights from experts who have spent decades researching, counseling, and working with families navigating complex relationship challenges.”

Under the organizing frame of Mending Space Retreats, another institutional layer of legitimacy, estranged parents are invited to purchase access to a lineup of “experts” for hundreds of dollars in person or $245 virtually, whose work largely reinforces those external causes of estrangement that the research consistently finds estranged parents deflect to.

Besides one speaker whose work is widely recognized within the peer-reviewed estrangement literature, Kristina Sharp, the line up primarily features self-made “authorities” who heavily favor the estranged parent narratives while pathologizing adult children.

Even Karl Pillemer of the Reconciliation Project is known for promoting those efforts to reconcile even while admitting that when adult children do so, they most often have to sacrifice resolution to the issues that led to the estrangement in the first place. “Reconciliation” then, is more about cultural and filial obligation than actual relational repair.

Among the panel is another “creator” who came to be platformed around estrangement under non-disclosed circumstances. Tania Khazaal was featured during Oprah’s “correction” podcast following her original estrangement episode back in November that was widely criticized for its presentation of the phenomenon as a “trend.”

In that episode, Khazaal presented herself as a “former” estranged adult child who blamed Oprah for encouraging family cut off and who later came to regret it.

The regret of adult children for estranging is another recurring narrative frame that doesn’t have legitimacy within estranged adult children’s communities.

The framing serves her own narratives of estrangement being the result of external factors and her own “coaching” services around providing reconciliation scripts for estranged parents. None of which was disclosed in the episode.

She has since gone on to be featured in a recent article presenting her as a “translator” for estranged adult children and as the founder of “The Renewal Collective,” another seemingly authoritative organization but about which there is no information given. Upon review, the “publication” in which the article was distributed, the “Ritz Herald,” does not announce itself as an independent publication, but rather as a marketing agency.

It’s another example of credibility brokering with the expectation of a public taking the “information” and presentation at face value and not questioning validity or credibility.

The irony is glaring.

While these creators repeatedly argue that adult children are being manipulated by other therapists into abandoning their families, they position themselves as trusted authorities who should be relied on to guide devastated estranged parents towards insight around estrangement and paths to reconciliation.

In contrast, trauma-informed therapists and creators who discuss estrangement generally begin from a very different premise.

Their work centers the relationship itself.

The starting question is not, Who convinced this adult child to leave? It is, What happened in this relationship that ultimately led them to the decision to leave?

The focus is on understanding rather than exoneration or blame.

It is the examination of whether relational harm occurred while coming from the foundation of acknowledgement of the adult child’s experience as real and valid.

It examines what accountability might look like, and whether meaningful repair is possible. Reconciliation, if it occurs, is understood as the outcome of changed relationships, not persuasive arguments, determination of whose account of history is “correct,” or emotional manipulation around filial obligation.

However, the ecosystem that is being built, laundered and continually expanding of these estranged-parent-focused creators does the opposite.

Rather than encouraging curiosity about the relationship, it repeatedly directs attention outward toward therapists, spouses, social media, generational culture, politics, and other external influences.

Those explanations are then reinforced through newsletters, podcasts, webinars, conferences, organizations, media appearances, coaching programs, and mutually reinforcing networks of “authority.” In doing so, the very narratives that research consistently identifies as common parental explanations for estrangement become seemingly further validated and institutionalized.

The issue isn’t whether influence exists — it clearly does, just not in the way the article or those promoting the estranged-parent narrative would have readers believe.

The real influence is not therapists persuading adult children to leave their families, but the continual reinforcement of parental narratives that deflect attention from the relationships themselves.

Through media amplification, appearance of organizational legitimacy, and mutually reinforcing networks of “authority,” those narratives increasingly acquire the mirage of established fact, shaping the public narrative in ways that ultimately obscure the relational conditions that are at the heart of it all.

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Authors note: This article is part of a broader series examining the evolving public discourse around family estrangement, including media narratives, commercialization, and the construction of professional authority. Previous articles in this series include:

“The Estrangement Industry: How Self-styled ‘Experts’ Profit from Parental Pain”

“The Estrangement Standoff: Discourses in Denial and Deflection”

“The Oprah Estrangement Episode Revealed Far More Than it Intended”

“The Wrong Questions, The Wrong Person”

“Oprah’s Estrangement ‘Correction’ Reinforced the Narrative it Denied”