Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

We Don't Talk Anymore: Healing after Parents and Their Adult Children Become Estranged
We Don't Talk Anymore: Healing after Parents and Their Adult Children Become Estranged
We Don't Talk Anymore: Healing after Parents and Their Adult Children Become Estranged
Ebook341 pages4 hours

We Don't Talk Anymore: Healing after Parents and Their Adult Children Become Estranged

Rating: 0 out of 5 stars

()

Read preview

About this ebook

Understand the painful silence of estrangement and finally heal the rift

Estrangement from an adult son or daughter is one of a parent's worst nightmares. Becoming estranged from a parent can be equally painful for an adult child, who may miss the relationship they once shared. For both it can mean angry silences and anguished days and nights wondering what went wrong.

Written by Kathy McCoy, one of the nation's more revered experts on family relationships, We Don't Talk Anymore is a insightful and relevant new exploration of estrangement for both parents and adult children. Each chapter also provides compassionate, practical tips focused on what both parents and adult children can do, including:

  • Finding courage to reach out to your loved one
  • Understanding the conflict and discovering a new and fulfilling connection
  • Letting go and rebuilding your life

Families deserve clarity and understanding. We Don't Talk Anymore will show you those first steps toward dealing with a painful topic and finally healing.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherSourcebooks
Release dateOct 3, 2017
ISBN9781492651147
We Don't Talk Anymore: Healing after Parents and Their Adult Children Become Estranged

Related to We Don't Talk Anymore

Related ebooks

Relationships For You

View More

Related articles

Reviews for We Don't Talk Anymore

Rating: 0 out of 5 stars
0 ratings

0 ratings0 reviews

What did you think?

Tap to rate

Review must be at least 10 words

    Book preview

    We Don't Talk Anymore - Kathy McCoy

    courage.

    Preface: The Silent Epidemic

    While parent and adult child estrangement is often called an epidemic, it is a silent one. Reliable statistics on the percentage of parents and their adult children who are estranged are largely absent from professional and popular literature. The reason for this shocking lack of statistical evidence for a problem that appears to be increasingly common is shame: the people involved have difficulty admitting that they are estranged from a parent or adult child.

    There are celebrities whose parental estrangements have made tabloid headlines—like Jennifer Aniston, who became estranged from her mother after her mom wrote a tell-all book, and Angelina Jolie, whose feuds and estrangements from her father Jon Voight have been quite public. Most people, however, keep estrangement a painful secret, even from close friends or extended family members.

    Estrangement can be a secret that is relatively easy to keep. Adult children may be living at a distance from their parents. Pictures and news about rarely (or never) seen grandchildren may be readily available on Facebook. And many busy adult children don’t talk to or visit their parents on a regular basis.

    But even if you keep your estrangement from the eyes and ears of friends and extended family, it is there. Others may not see it. But it’s part of your daily reality—and it hurts. Some of this pain comes from feeling so very much alone.

    If you’re a parent who is estranged from an adult child, you never imagined this could happen.

    When you think back on your years as a parent, there are so many happy memories: holding your baby in your arms for the first time; hearing your toddler’s first words; cheering your little one on through Little League and dance recitals, soccer games, and school plays; comforting your child through disappointments and times of feeling awkward or unpopular; hanging on through the normal storms of adolescence; dreaming of rediscovering each other as beloved family and dear friends once they’re grown.

    Except that dream hasn’t come true.

    Maybe there was an argument, angry words, and a separation that has only deepened with time. Maybe your child left for college or is working, perhaps married, and has a home of his or her own—and suddenly doesn’t seem to have much time for you. Maybe you and your adult child have become distant because of disagreements over or with his or her spouse or partner. Maybe you are divided by differences over lifestyle or religion. Maybe your feelings are hurt because your child’s in-laws seem to be getting preferential treatment and more access to the grandkids.

    Maybe, from the safe distance of that separate home of his own, your adult child is suddenly regaling you with angry accounts of your failings as a parent. And while you are quick to admit that, like any parent, you’ve made some mistakes, you can’t remember anything you did, any choice you made, that wasn’t made with love and wanting the best for your child. Maybe your adult child insists that nothing is wrong, from his or her perspective. She explains the unanswered emails and voicemails, the unacknowledged gifts and letters in two words: I’m busy. But you’re feeling that something is very wrong. You’re feeling estranged or semiestranged from your adult son or daughter.

    Estrangement—whether full or partial—is one of a parent’s worst nightmares. It is a nightmare shared by an increasing number of parents, if the explosion of painful stories and comments on online chat rooms and blogs, as well as the numbers of parents seeking professional help, are any indication.

    If you’re feeling estranged from an adult son or daughter, you’re far from alone, but you have probably been feeling very much alone. Many parents suffer in silence and shame, reluctant to discuss or even to admit the estrangement to friends and extended family.

    Estrangement can mean not only angry silences between you and your adult child, but also feelings of isolation from others: solitary moments of shame and rage; times of feeling bewildered and unable to fathom the cause of this rift; lonely holidays and fictional accounts for friends of visits with grandchildren rarely seen. It can mean anguished days and nights of wondering what went wrong and how to bridge this emotional chasm.

    If you’re an adult child estranged or semiestranged from a parent or parents, the emotional distance within your family may be no surprise. Even if you didn’t initiate the estrangement from your parents, you may have seen it coming for years as you grappled silently with your feelings and experiences, your divergent beliefs, your sexuality, your feelings of being disrespected and disregarded.

    Maybe you’ve put distance between yourself and your parents because being close is just too painful. They have expectations that have little to do with the person you are and what you want for yourself. There are the clashes over beliefs and traditions that have diverged over the years. There is the criticism that, though your parents insist that it is given with love, threatens to undermine your confidence at close range.

    You may be in a fight for your independence from parents who seem determined to keep you a perpetual child. You know that they mean well, but their hovering, their unsolicited advice, their increasingly intrusive questions are driving you into a full retreat. You’re less inclined to call these days and even less likely to visit. Maybe you’ve even underscored your desire for independence by accepting a job hundreds or thousands of miles away from your hometown.

    Maybe you’ve come to the painful conclusion that your parents were (and perhaps still are) abusive. Perhaps you are receiving therapy, and your therapist has suggested keeping your distance as you grapple with what has happened and what you would like to have happen in your life.

    Or you may feel hurt that your parents are even uttering the word estrangement when, really, you’re simply busy, even overwhelmed with the demands of your adult life. When you’re working and commuting long hours, when you’re in a new marriage, when you’re combining all of the above with caring for your young children, there aren’t enough hours in a day to get everything done, let alone go spend a day with the folks or an hour on the phone with your mother every day. You hear the pain in her voice when you tell her you’re too busy for long talks or visits. You sift through your priorities, trying, without success, to figure out how to meet the challenges of your own independent life and how to be a loving son or daughter as well. It isn’t easy, especially when your attempts to compromise are met with words that sting.

    If any of the above sounds familiar to you—as the parent of an adult child or as that adult child—this book is for you.

    In the pages to come, we will explore together some of the reasons that parents and adult children find themselves estranged, how to deal with the pain this causes, and what to do to help make your dream of reconciliation come true. You will also find help in living with the anguish of a relationship that can’t be mended immediately—or ever.

    The focus of this book is on you: how you can begin to bridge that painful distance between you and your loved one, how you can solve the mystery behind your estrangement and find clues to reconnecting, and how to rebuild a satisfying, sane life for yourself—with or without regular contact with each other.

    Together, we will explore your dreams and your realities, your feelings of love and anger and grief, and the ways that, however your relationship with your adult child or your parent evolves, you can build a satisfying life filled with love, peace, and warm connection.

    SECTION ONE

    WHAT’S GOING ON?

    CHAPTER ONE

    Exploring the Mystery of Estrangement

    I just don’t understand, Linda said, as she dabbed at her tears with a crumpled tissue. I don’t understand what has happened to my daughter and me. We used to be close, even when she was a teenager and always challenging my rules and opinions. We enjoyed doing things together. I thought it would be even better when she finished school, was working, and was an independent adult. I hoped we’d be best friends. But something has happened the past few years. She rarely calls me and often doesn’t return my phone calls or emails. Do you know how that feels? I’m sad and angry and, most of all, confused. I don’t know what could have caused her to pull away from me like this…

    Linda was one of many parents I have seen over the past decade who complained about an increasingly distant relationship with an adult child. To many, it’s a painful mystery. How could a previously close and loving relationship change so dramatically? Why do some adult children drift away, both physically and emotionally, from their parents?

    Many adult children who feel growing distance from their parents don’t find it such a mystery. I keep my distance from my parents because their opinions and unasked for advice just drive me up the wall, says Jillian, twenty-seven years old, single, and living one thousand miles from her hometown. I love my parents, but being with them is tough going.

    And some young adults question the idea of estrangement altogether. My parents think we are estranged, but, really, I’m just busy and not able to call or visit as much as they’d like, says Brandon, a thirty-year-old IT professional. And, too often, when I do go home, there’s a scene with one or both of them over my supposed selfishness. But estrangement? I don’t think so.

    Both parents and adult children may wonder (and not always agree on) what it means to be estranged from someone you love.

    There is physical estrangement—when parents and an adult child are cut off from each other with months or years passing without contact.

    There is emotional estrangement—when one or all of you feel your relationship become increasingly distant, with only periodic, often perfunctory contact with each other. There may be times when hope returns, when an adult child calls or comes by or invites you over for dinner. Or when parents call a truce and invite an adult child over for a visit or a special night out. But, all too often, this respite may be followed by more silences, angry or otherwise. And the parents or the adult child are left baffled and at a loss to explain just why you are drifting apart.

    For many, estrangement isn’t a sudden event, but a process that takes place over time. It may be a gradual loosening of ties as a result of life choices and events. It may have started with a specific conflict that led to angry silences and, subsequently, to an emotional chasm that took on a life of its own. Or it may have evolved from an erosion of intimacy and goodwill as the adult child has struggled for independence and the parent or parents have struggled to maintain close ties. It may have started with new alliances or with divergent views of a shared past.

    This phenomenon, which psychologist Joshua Coleman, an expert on parent–adult child conflict and estrangement, calls the silent epidemic* has captured the interest of many researchers in the fields of psychology, sociology, and gerontology. As a result, this research and some clinical observations can be distilled into the following:

    TEN FACTS ABOUT PARENT–ADULT CHILD ESTRANGEMENTS

    1. You Are Not Alone

    When you’re estranged from an adult child or from a parent, you may feel very much alone. Shame can be a part of this feeling, as estrangement from parents or grown children isn’t something people talk about in casual conversations.

    Are you kidding? Diane, estranged from her thirty-four-year-old son for five years and never having seen her toddler granddaughter, scoffs when asked if she confides in friends. I feel so ashamed, like a failure as a mother. Since my son and his family live out of state, it’s easy to make up stories about Skype conversations and plans to visit in the future. I check out what they’re doing and capture photos of my granddaughter on Facebook, print them, and put them in little frames around my living room. I’m heartbroken, but I’m too embarrassed to tell my friends that I’ve never met my grandchild.

    But as lonely as an estrangement can feel, it’s not uncommon. A U.S. study of adult children found that 7 percent reported being emotionally detached from a mother and 27 percent were detached from a father.*

    2. Fathers Are More Likely to Become Estranged as a Result of Divorce, Either in the Distant Past or via a Recent Gray Divorce

    Sometimes the distance has grown from resentments over a long-ago marital split and alienation fueled by parental anger and life choices. And sometimes a gray divorce, a split that occurs in long-married people over the age of fifty, sparks conflicts with adult children who feel compelled to take sides or who resent the changes this brings to their own lives.

    I’m really angry at my dad for leaving my mom after thirty-six years of marriage, says Jenna, thirty-two, married and pregnant with her first child. I know they’ve never been that happy together, but they made it work all those years. Why give up now? It’s not like either of them had anyone else waiting on the sidelines. They had an argument, and it was like the last straw for him. My poor mom never expected this after all these years. Now my baby will never know grandparents who are together and, well, normal grandparents. I feel really hurt about that. And I think Dad is being really selfish. I have nothing to say to him anymore.

    Jenna’s situation is not unusual. A study of late-life divorce and its impact on relationships between the divorcing parents and adult children found that while fathers were more likely to experience a decline in contact with adult children, the divorced mothers were more likely than married mothers to report an increase in weekly contact with adult children.

    These differences in contact may happen for a number of reasons. Newly divorced mothers are more likely to ask adult children for help with tasks previously performed by the departed spouse. They may be more likely to talk about their feelings with adult children. Newly divorced fathers may find it difficult to talk about their feelings, including depression, with anyone. And they are likely to remarry more quickly and in greater numbers than mothers. These remarriages can be as disruptive to father–adult children relationships as the original divorce.*

    3. Mothers Are More Likely to Become Estranged as the Result of Continuing Demands for Closeness or Giving Unsolicited Advice

    This kind of estrangement can spring from conflicting needs and perceptions about how much contact is too much, what advice can feel like criticism (particularly in the areas of child rearing), and what actions can feel intrusive. The mother may feel she’s just being helpful. The daughter or daughter-in-law may have a very different view.

    My mother thinks she is being just so helpful and always says ‘But I’m your mother. Who else is going to care enough to tell you the truth?’ and I can’t stand it, says Laurel, a twenty-nine-year-old financial analyst whose apartment is across town from her parents’ home. And it drove me crazy when she thought it was perfectly okay to just drop by my place! I mean, that was just one of many ways I felt she didn’t respect my independence. It was so embarrassing. One Sunday morning, my boyfriend and I were having coffee—me in my robe, my boyfriend in his underwear—when my mother knocked on the door, totally unexpected and uninvited. I told her later I felt this wasn’t acceptable. She got mad and we haven’t spoken for five months now.

    Some parents, like Laurel’s mother, are astounded when their adult children object to behavior they find normal and perfectly acceptable. Social policy researcher Dorothy Jerrome has observed that the principle of an open house is one-sided. Casual visiting by children [to the parents’ home] is acceptable; if done by parents, it is intrusive, and in breach of the norm of noninterference.

    4. An Adult Child Who Is at Odds with Mother’s Core Values Is More Likely to Become Estranged than an Adult Child Who Is Arrested or Involved in Substance Abuse

    This was a surprising finding in a study of estranged mothers headed by Megan Gilligan of Iowa State University.‡ Dr. Gilligan and her colleagues interviewed 566 mothers between the ages of sixty-five and seventy-five. They found that sixty-four of these women had at least one estranged child. The mothers reported clashing values, such as in religion or partner choice, as a major factor in their estrangement from an adult child, while at the same time being quite tolerant of other adult children showing socially deviant behavior.

    For example, Ruth, a seventy-five-year-old devout Catholic who participated in the study, had two sons and one daughter. She was estranged from her middle child, Mark, because he had divorced and remarried, life choices quite at odds with the Catholic faith. However, Ruth did not appear to be bothered by the fact that her other two children both had histories of substance abuse, DUI arrests, and—in the case of the other son Paul—other problems with the law. In fact, she talked of Paul with pride because he was still in his first marriage, stating that Paul is my success story!

    Another study participant, Beverly, who was seventy and the mother of three grown children, reported that she was estranged from her second son, Robert, who was married, a parent, and financially stable, because he’s not very truthful. I don’t like it when people say things that aren’t true. But she reported a warm relationship with her oldest son David, who was in prison, had a history of drug abuse, and had fathered multiple children with different women, none of whom he had married. She kept in close contact with him, sending him money despite the fact that her resources were limited. The researchers noted that she expressed some disappointment in David, but was more sympathetic than critical.

    Many estranged mothers don’t have such dramatic contrasts in the way they view their differences with their adult children. But when adult children have feelings and choices that are in opposition to a mother’s most fervent beliefs, estrangement is much more likely to happen.

    5. Estrangements Are Less Likely to Spring from Verbal Sparring than from a Conflict of Needs

    This is often the need of the adult child to be independent and in control of his or her own life and the need of a parent to remain closely connected and, ultimately, in control. When tensions arise over this conflict, the adult child may seek autonomy by making a complete break with parents.

    As researchers have examined conflicts between parents and adult children, another sobering fact has emerged: that parents are more emotionally invested in their relationships with their children than their children are with them. This is called the developmental stake hypothesis.*

    This generational difference is consistent across the lifespan. As parents age, closeness with an adult child may become even more important to them, with the adult child often their primary social contact. However, the parents’ needs may escalate just as the adult child’s responsibilities to his or her own growing family and career are also increasing. Perhaps the parents have new limitations as they become increasingly frail. Poor eyesight may make driving difficult or impossible. Doctor appointments suddenly dominate parental calendars. For both physical and emotional reasons, as their friends die and their social ties weaken, aging parents may become more dependent on adult children. This dependence can prompt intergenerational ambivalence—the adult child wanting to help parents while resenting or feeling overwhelmed by their increasing neediness, and parents who may be grieving their physical and social losses and may be having mixed feelings about needing their adult child so much. All of this can spark conflict and distance between parents and adult children.

    Jack is a forty-five-year-old engineer and his wife Kara a forty-two-year-old nurse working the night shift so that one parent is always home with their three children, who are now young adolescents. The old saying that teenagers need parents less is wrong, Jack says. We both need to be there for them and keep an eye on them in these important growing-up years. Our parents need us, too, but we’ve learned to keep our distance. Otherwise we get overwhelmed with requests that we just can’t meet. Of course, in a crisis, we’d be there in a minute. But just to keep them company or to help them feel not quite so bored…that just doesn’t feel reasonable right now. My in-laws seem to understand and accept this. But my parents got very offended when I tried to explain our pressures and priorities to them. Their reaction is ‘If you can’t come over just because we want to be with you, don’t bother to come over at all, even in a crisis.’ They don’t seem to understand that they can’t always come first with me. And this has come between us big time.

    6. Some Emotional Distance Actually Can Improve the Relationship and Make Estrangement Less Likely

    The paradox of an intimate yet distant parent–adult child relationship can be a source of pain or a path to new intimacy, according to research by K. L. Fingerman of Pennsylvania State University.*

    She has found that while some parents and adult children report close ties, this closeness nonetheless involves psychological distance. She noted that parents tended to stop trying to direct their children’s lives, and their grown children, in turn, sought to protect their parents from worry, often by not discussing their problems with their parents. She noted that this distance tended to improve the relationship and can serve as a bridge to a different kind of intimacy.

    I used to see my daughter’s not telling me everything as a kind of loss of closeness, but now I’m realizing that it has helped curb my unsolicited-advice-giving habit, says Wendy, a sixty-one-year-old mother of a thirty-three-year-old single businesswoman. What I don’t know won’t worry me. And I don’t regale her with all my aches and pains in return. When we talk, it’s enjoyable. It may be an impassioned discussion of politics or some other news development. Or it may be about feelings in general. But our visits are more frequent these days. For a while, I wouldn’t see her for weeks, sometimes months, at a time. Now that we’ve both stepped back and re-evaluated, our relationship feels closer and better than ever.

    7. Helping an Adult Child Financially Can Actually Increase the Likelihood of Estrangement

    While we often see parents and adult children become estranged when parents can’t or won’t offer their grown children financial help, offering such help can also lead to conflicts and estrangement.

    Financial contributions are often an expression of power relations between the generations, observes researcher Marc Szydlik. He notes that much-needed financial support may be seen by the adult child as a kind of bribery or as a way of having more of a say over an adult child’s life.*

    An adult child’s financial neediness may also spark conflict with parents who are upset that a son or daughter is not meeting expected age-appropriate goals for financial independence and responsibility.

    Giving our son a loan to buy a new car and get into an apartment was a mistake, says Chris, the forty-seven-year-old father of twenty-three-year-old Tom. We couldn’t afford to just give him the money, but we wanted to help him get a start in life, and so we gave him the loan. He has been very casual about paying it back. We get twenty-five dollars maybe once or twice a year. At that rate, it will never get paid back in our lifetimes. So, yes, it pisses me off when he hits Starbucks every day or buys electronics stuff or goes out partying with friends every night or goes off with friends for weekend trips. I don’t think he realizes how much he’s spending on frivolities and how much we need to be paid back sooner rather than later. When I mention this to him, he blows up and accuses me of trying to control his life. He hasn’t spoken to us for two months now.

    8. An Estrangement Isn’t Just between a Parent and an Adult Child

    Estrangements can impact the whole family. This is something we see in therapy all the time, especially with siblings, grandparents, aunts, and uncles who get dragged into—or insert themselves into—family conflicts. Being on the frontline of an estrangement can bring up a myriad of feelings, old conflicts, and rivalries.

    Just what I needed: old family drama on top of my current crisis, says Jean, a fifty-eight-year-old widow estranged from her thirty-five-year-old son

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1