It’s a year and a half since Jody last spoke to her mother, and the conversation ended badly. Though their relationship was always fractious, with long spells of not speaking, Jody had been feeling anxious about some big changes in her life and was craving comfort. Listening to some old voicemails from her mother made her nostalgic enough to pick up the phone. But the call quickly degenerated.
“My mom has a proclivity for expressing her emotions in really extreme, volatile ways. She lashes out and insults people,” says Jody, who is 29 and in the process of moving overseas. Her mother has suffered long-term mental health problems, she says, and sees herself as a victim conspired against by others: Jody learned young that if she didn’t beg for forgiveness when her mother started hurling accusations, she would be frozen out. But not this time. “When it finally clicked that my mom weaponised her own emotions to manipulate mine, I stopped feeling a reflex to defend myself.” She hung up, blocked her mother’s number, and decided they would never speak again.
Though Jody is sure she made the right decision, living with it hasn’t been easy. “I still miss her, and wish I could have those moments other people have with their moms. I can’t remember what she smells like or how it felt to hug her.” But she can’t live, she says, with being continually tested, as if she were an employee permanently on probation. “What she didn’t seem to take into account is that, just like any other fed-up employee, I can quit.”
The kind of broken relationship Jody describes is almost certainly more common than you might think. In Britain, research by the charity Stand Alone suggests around one in five families may be affected by estrangement – defined as a relationship in which communication has stopped. In the US (where Jody currently lives), a study by researchers at Ohio State University found 6% of respondents were estranged from a mother and a startling 26% from a father.
While the experience is still often cloaked in secrecy and shame, it’s perhaps no longer as taboo as it was. In her recent memoir, the Labour MP Diane Abbott described her complicated feelings about being estranged from her difficult, domineering father when he died. Prince Harry’s exodus from the royal family and his wife Meghan’s estrangement from her father have been played out under glaring spotlights. And what was once a lonely, isolating experience is increasingly shared on TikTok, Reddit or in forums offering advice on how to go “no contact” (cutting ties entirely) or “low contact” (bare minimum interaction) without feeling guilty.
Though some make it look seductively easy, in essence they’re making the same case the poet Philip Larkin did half a century ago in his 1971 poem This Be The Verse: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad/They may not mean to, but they do.” The poem bleakly advises readers to “get out as early as you can”, and not have kids themselves.
“People seem to think that hashtags on social media create estrangement,” sighs Becca Bland, who founded Stand Alone after being estranged from her own parents aged 25, and has since moved on to coach estranged families. “But in the 12 or 13 years I’ve worked on this, I’ve never met someone who hasn’t had an extremely good reason to consider it.” Apart from the loneliness and pain of leaving a family, she says, young people can pay dearly for being estranged in a world in which almost a third of British 25- to 29-year-olds still live at home and parents often co-sign student loans, guarantee a young person’s rent or contribute to a first-time buyer’s deposit. All of which may help explain why the peak age of estrangement isn’t in the rebellious teens but – as it was for Jody – during the more considered, financially stable late 20s and 30s.
Sometimes estrangement is a result of physical or sexual abuse, addiction or mental health issues on one side or the other. (It’s not just children who cut parents off: sometimes it can be the other way around.) And sometimes it reflects a seemingly irreconcilable clash of religious or ethical beliefs. “If you’re from an immigrant family that has very fixed values, and you’re growing up in a society that is much more free and liberal, there’s a huge risk factor,” says Bland, who has collaborated with the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Family Research on studying estrangement. “I’d say political beliefs, too: Brexit, or different convictions about how you want society to be.” Research shows that parental separation and remarriage is a risk factor, especially if the child dislikes a step-parent or feels pushed to take sides, and estrangement is also more common among LGBTQ+ young people. (One study for the LGBT+ charity Just Like Us found almost half of respondents were estranged from a family member.)
But sometimes things are less clearcut. Sometimes estrangement can look more like the product of a therapy-literate generation that defines abuse more broadly than their own parents may have done, and believes in putting boundaries around people who make you miserable – even if they did give birth to you.
“We’ve come a long way in terms of understanding, say with domestic violence, how you shouldn’t be in a relationship where you have no equality, love or respect,” Bland says. “It’s hard to be in a family relationship where you have no say. Society and relationships have evolved, and family is going to evolve with them.” Just as baby boomers scandalised their parents by inventing the pill or destigmatising divorce, she suggests, younger generations are reimagining family life in ways that are sometimes uncomfortable to their elders.
The idea that filial love is no longer unconditional can be very frightening for parents who genuinely believe they have done their best, only to be damned by the standards of a different era. What if they never see their beloved child again? “It’s a massive power shift, and to give parents credit, there’s no support for that,” Bland says. “What we all do is copy what we know, and so many parents have copied what their parents did.” As with any relationship breakup, estrangement can leave behind it a trail of the hurt, the bewildered and the ghosted.
* * *
“Whenever I’d read stories about estrangement, I’d think, ‘But you must have done something,’” says Caroline, a gently spoken professional woman from the north of England, over the phone. But that was before one of her own adult children stopped talking to her.
Her daughter was a challenging teenager, she says: there were lots of fights, a breakdown in her college years, and Caroline sometimes felt pushed into playing parental “bad cop” after separating from her husband. But the relationship had been happy enough for over a decade, until last year. “I kept thinking something was a bit off, but I couldn’t put a finger on it. I’d send a WhatsApp message and it didn’t get responded to, and I started to think, ‘Have I been muted?’” She wondered if she was being oversensitive. But when she gently raised it, her daughter burst into tears and said she was struggling to reconcile the mother she had now with “how horrible you were” when she was little.
Caroline was horrified and bewildered: she couldn’t understand what she was being accused of. “As parents, we all have regrets, and there are things I regret. I can think of one occasion when I lost my temper and I wish I hadn’t. But overall I think I have been a really good mum, I am confident about that.” Both mother and daughter had counselling separately. But after another stormy meeting, her daughter messaged to say she no longer wanted to engage. They still swap birthday cards, but don’t speak to or see each other. “Until recently I cried every day. It feels like a bereavement, I can’t do anything about it. I go over and over it in my head and beat myself up thinking about why. I’m devastated.”
For now, Caroline is trying to give her daughter space. It hurts that her daughter is still in touch with her father, while Caroline – having done the hard yards as a single parent – is ostracised. “I often feel with mothers it’s what we haven’t done that gets held up to us, not what we have done. We organise all the Christmases and birthdays, keep them on track at school and with homework, feed them and read to them every night … A friend said to me, ‘You are the one she feels secure and safe with, so you are the one she can act out with because you will always love her.’ I know all this logically, but it doesn’t stop it feeling terribly unfair.”
* * *
Joshua Coleman specialises in untangling mysteries like this. A white-bearded California grandfather with a soothing manner, in his private practice as a psychologist, he counsels parents desperate to win back adult children who have cut them off. It’s a feeling he knows well: in his book Rules of Estrangement he describes how, at 22, his own daughter temporarily stopped talking to him. (After he separated from her mother and remarried, he writes, she hadn’t felt like “the unambiguous priority”: though they’re now reconciled, he says it took years of patiently applying the strategies he now teaches other parents.)
Is there any such thing as an excommunicated parent who genuinely did nothing wrong? “Almost every article about estrangement that I read in the US is written by an estranged adult child and it’s easy to sympathise with – their parent was abusive, they tried for a long time, finally they had to do this, it’s better for their mental health,” he tells me, over Zoom from his San Francisco office. “And those cases exist. They’re just not the sum set of the reasons people estrange themselves.” Most parents, he thinks, are muddling through as best they can. But that doesn’t mean their best was always enough for their child.
“There are separate realities in every family. A parent could credibly feel as if they did a good, conscientious job as a parent, and their child could credibly feel that their behaviour was hurtful in some way.” Typically, the adult child is trying to express something that’s important to them, even if it baffles the rejected parent.
Sometimes, he argues, estrangement can be a child’s way of disentangling themselves from an overly close relationship. “Something I see a lot of is just a need to separate from over-involved, loving parents. Parents have become much more anxious, much more invested, much more guilt-ridden, much more involved.”
Other triggers include what he suggests are clumsy therapists identifying childhood trauma where it doesn’t exist, and clashes between parents and an adult child’s partner. (In a survey of 1,600 estranged parents Coleman conducted, 70% said they only finally become estranged after their child married: be careful about criticising someone your offspring is dating, he warns.)
In his consulting room, clients often reel off long, indignant lists of everything they did for their children, from birthday parties to paying for college education. Fathers in particular tend to balk at his strategy of writing a “letter of amends” apologising to their child, he says, though mothers are often keener to do whatever it takes (interestingly, research shows men are less likely than women to end up reconciled with estranged children). “Dads will often say, ‘No, they can give me an amends letter, why should I write one? I was a good parent,’” Coleman says. But he warns them it’s usually the child who has the whip hand, as they’re the ones ultimately willing to walk out. While estrangement is increasingly seen as “the strong, assertive thing to do”, he argues, it’s also a cataclysmic event in a family that can pit sibling against sibling, cut grandchildren off from grandparents, and reverberate down generations.
There’s no hard evidence on whether estrangement is becoming more common, as opposed to being just more commonly talked about, either in the US or the UK. But Coleman’s hunch is that it’s on the rise, fuelled by polarising politics – one couple consulted him after their son announced, “If you vote for Trump in the next election, we are done” – and a growing emphasis on individual happiness over collective bonds or old-fashioned filial duty. Family relationships, he thinks, are starting to resemble romantic ones: if they’re not emotionally fulfilling, moving on is no longer inconceivable. “It’s a tectonic shift in the way we organise family relationships and a lot of parents haven’t really gotten the memo yet.”
What most confuses parents, he argues, is the way definitions of abusive behaviour have shifted since they grew up, when smacking or yelling at your kids was considered routine. “So many of the letters that parents are responding negatively to are, ‘You emotionally abused me, you traumatised me’ and that’s when parents are like, ‘What the hell are you talking about? I wish I had your childhood.’” The word “narcissist” is particularly overused, he says, to the bafflement of many parents. (Once a clinical term for pathological self-importance, it’s seeped into casual conversation to mean anyone selfish, cold, manipulative or just difficult.) “There’s been this enormous expansion over what gets labelled as pathological behaviour.” What Coleman seems to be describing isn’t just a series of conflicts between individual children and parents, but a broader clash between generations with different expectations of relationships, and often different language to describe it.
* * *
“That didn’t happen. And if it did, it wasn’t that bad. And if it was, that’s not a big deal. And if it is, it’s not my fault …” So begins The Narcissist’s Prayer by Belfast poet Dayna Craig, which holds a special resonance for the many estranged adult children plastering it across their social media feeds. The poem seems to capture their sense of being gaslit by an abusive parent but also by outsiders, asking how they can be so cruel as to cut their families off.
Lauren, from London, grew up with a mother who was absent for several years and a father she calls emotionally abusive and cruel. He didn’t hit her, she says, but he didn’t have to: the things he said were worse, calling her a whore for painting her nails, for example, or telling her to kill herself. “I never understood that ‘sticks and stones will break your bones’ thing – actually, words do hurt you.”
At 18 she left home, and tried keeping contact to a bare minimum. She would meet her father only in public places, accompanied by her partner, and communicate only by email. But it didn’t help, she says: her father railed against the loss of control, and the emails turned abusive. So she stopped speaking to him altogether, to her extended family’s outrage. In Nigerian families, she explains, aunties, uncles and cousins are closely involved, and parents and children are expected to retain an even closer bond: it was easier, she thinks, for her relatives to blame her for the relationship breaking down than to engage with what she was saying about her father’s behaviour. “It’s psychologically more comfortable to say, ‘No, that can’t be right, I would have known,’” she says. “I’d get told, ‘You’ll miss him when he’s gone’ but I’m pretty certain I won’t. People seem to require justification but I don’t feel I should have to provide it before people believe me.”
On TikTok and in estrangement forums, family and friends who try to broker reunions are sometimes bitterly labelled “flying monkeys”, after the winged flunkies who did the Wicked Witch’s bidding in The Wizard of Oz. These often well-meaning interventions are a common phenomenon, says Sarah Davies, a chartered counselling psychologist and trauma therapist, and the author of Raised by Narcissists: How to Handle Your Difficult, Toxic and Abusive Parents. But they can be distressing for adult children who have chosen no contact for very good reasons.
“I tell people to be very careful about who they share the details with in order to protect themselves from comments like, ‘But it’s your mum …’ Well, yes, that’s what makes it hard.” Friends shouldn’t rush to judge an estrangement that seems puzzling to them, she argues: if there was abuse involved, people might not want to tell everyone what happened. “You don’t fully understand what somebody has been through.”
Deciding what you are prepared to tolerate from an abusive parent is a highly individual decision that each adult child must carefully work through for themselves, Davies argues, including honestly examining their own motives for doing it: “It’s a very conscious process rather than, ‘No, I’m done.’” That said, however, she writes in the book that “if you can go no contact with an abusive parent, then do”. Is she trying to give people permission to do something that feels transgressive? “I think sometimes children of narcissists feel they need permission. When you grow up with a toxic parent, you feel guilty, you feel bad, you feel as if it’s your fault.”
Davies, who ended contact with her own parents two years ago, says Christmas, birthdays and family occasions are still tough for many of her clients: she was once unexpectedly flooded with sadness in a spa, watching mothers and daughters enjoying a day out together. Others struggle with how to respond to an ageing estranged parent who is ill or dying: should they agree to one last visit?
Lauren, however, is resolute: the next time she sees her father will be at his funeral. Millennials are often told they’re snowflakes, she says, for objecting to behaviour that previous generations put up with. “But we’re the generation that has finally had enough of, ‘Well, it didn’t do me any harm’ and, ‘That’s how we’ve always done this.’” Her determination not to keep on repeating the cycle is such that, now in her 30s, she has decided not to have children herself.
For millennial parents, the idea that good parenting means working to “break the cycle” – as Prince Harry explained in an earnest 2021 interview alongside his then pregnant wife – instead of unwittingly making the same mistakes as their parents, is a powerful one.
“Generational trauma is such a big word for my generation – what trauma has been passed down that we want to think about not repeating. Whereas my parents’ generation did not even understand it,” Bland says. “It creates tensions where people don’t understand why they’ve been cut off.” Perhaps that is particularly true for parents who survived difficult upbringings themselves.
Nancy was hard up when she got pregnant, and as a single mother had no support from her own mother, whom she calls “a piece of work”. Even before the baby was born, she realised she might have bitten off more than she could chew. “But I knuckled down, I did my best. We were never homeless. We were never so poor that I couldn’t afford what we needed,” she tells me over the phone. And for a long time, as she tells it, they were unusually close. A single mother to an only daughter, Nancy breastfed until her baby was two and says they shared a bed for years afterwards. “We never fought. I was her world, everything was always fine between us.” She managed to put her daughter through university and gave her a lump sum afterwards. “And it went from that to, ‘I don’t want to have a relationship with you, I never want you around your grandchild.’ It just shocked me, and she never told me why.”
Nancy’s daughter is a lesbian and though she insists that wasn’t an issue for her, she sounds cooler on the subject of her daughter-in-law. “I didn’t really get on well with her but I didn’t get on poorly. I accepted her, I gave her presents.” But the arguments began, she says, when her daughter got pregnant and said she wanted some space. Accordingly, Nancy says, she backed off. But after the baby was born, she called. She says she can’t remember much about the conversation: “She was taking care of her newborn and I didn’t want to press her on anything.” But whatever was said, after that came the letter cutting her off, and she hasn’t tried to resume contact: another rejection, she says, would be too painful. More than a decade on, she has never met her grandchild and, to avoid explanations, usually says she has no children when asked.
Now in her 70s, Nancy has rewritten her will to leave her house to a local housing authority and appointed new executors. “They’ll get rid of all my stuff and scatter the ashes. I don’t know how my daughter will feel about it – if she’ll feel I’ve taken something away from her.” Nancy looked after her own mother in old age, despite their difficult relationship, she says, because she thought that was what family did. But her own daughter told her their relationship “can’t be about duty”.
As we talk, Nancy seems torn between sadness and rage. “I sometimes wonder why the anger is still so strong. My therapist would say it’s to protect me from more hurt and I want to move past it. But part of me – if she would just sit down with me at the kitchen table – would like to say, ‘What the fuck, why did you do this? What did you get out of this, that your life is so much better without me in it?’ As a parent your child is central to your life but as a child your parent is not central.”
Towards the end of our conversation, Nancy reveals that her own mother had mental health problems, and that she sometimes wonders if that had something to do with her daughter breaking ties, as if to inoculate herself against something. “Maybe she thought that I was going to become like her.”
* * *
According to the Ohio State University study, the vast majority of estranged adult children eventually resume contact with their families. But it may not always be a fairytale happy ending, with some families cycling repeatedly in and out of contact.
Pippa was in her early 40s when her tolerance for the father she describes as abusive, domineering and controlling finally snapped. “He started his usual stuff of telling me how everybody thought he was wonderful and I sat there listening and said, ‘Shall I tell you what I’ve been up to?’ I told him one thing and he just went ‘hmmm’ and carried on talking about himself.” In that moment, she decided she couldn’t see him any longer.
But the most painful aspect of cutting off her father was that it meant also losing touch with her mother – who Pippa says was damaged herself, and coercively controlled by her father – as well as her siblings and wider family, whom she didn’t see for almost a decade. “We come from a family where nobody talks about feelings, nobody talks about anything; you’re not allowed to have emotions.”
They had just begun talking again, in a reunion brokered by a relative, when her mother was diagnosed with a terminal illness. Pippa moved back home to nurse her, and in the last few weeks mother and daughter finally acknowledged the time they had lost. “I did say, ‘I’m sorry I left you, and I do regret having missed things.’” But she found the experience of temporarily sharing a roof with her father traumatic.
What surprised Pippa most about the estrangement, she says, is that it wasn’t the clean break she’d imagined. “You think about them every day. It’s not like they’re gone – every single day they’re on your mind, and that’s the weird thing. They’re not in your physical space but they’re still in your headspace.”
If some estrangements seem sadly inevitable, could others be avoidable? In his book, Coleman writes that, while he’s often asked if estrangement is generally justifiable, a better question is whether it’s right to cut a parent off when you know that will ruin their life. Americans’ love for individual needs and rights, he adds, “conceals how much sorrow is left in the wake”.
When I ask if he means children should take more responsibility for their parents’ happiness, he pauses. “No, not at any cost. The parent has to be able and willing to take responsibility, to show compassion, to not be defensive, to understand why the child feels that estrangement is the healthiest thing to do. They can’t just show up with their arms folded and go, ‘I’m your father, you have to accept me.’” But trying to understand why a parent does what they do – perhaps because of their own childhood, or what’s happened to them in a marriage – can sometimes be therapeutic, he argues, even if it doesn’t make them any easier to live with.
Adult children struggling to deal with a hyper-critical or undermining parent, he suggests, could try giving them a chance to change: perhaps say that their behaviour makes family get-togethers hard and ask them to stop criticising your partner, parenting, or whatever the flashpoint is. If nothing changes, then say their behaviour makes you want to see or call them less: “I like to think of it as a shot across the bows.” Parents on the receiving end of such warnings need to be humble enough to listen. “The natural reaction is to fight strongly against it. But that’s often the thing that can turn your child even further against you, because when you start blaming, defending, criticising or guilt-tripping, none of those are going to work in your favour.”
That doesn’t mean accepting an allegation if it’s factually wrong, he explains. “But if a child says, ‘You emotionally abused me, you neglected me’ I think it’s OK for a parent to say, ‘It’s clear I have blind spots as a parent – I wasn’t aware that you felt I was emotionally abusive to you, but I’m glad that you told me and I want to learn more.’” (Keeping the lines open may be particularly important in the rare cases when an adult child breaks contact under pressure from their violent or coercively controlling partner, who is seeking to cut them off from help: if you suspect that is what’s going on, advice from the domestic violence charity Refuge is to try to speak to them away from the abusive partner about what might be happening, avoid sounding judgmental of the relationship and signpost them to resources such as the National Domestic Abuse Helpline.)
Bland agrees it’s worth considering first whether the relationship can be improved with the help of a mediator or a counsellor, if only so that you know you tried everything you could. And if it can’t be fixed? “You have to consider the boundaries in your life – how much you can do. For some people that might be going low contact – you could see each other once a year.”
After a decade and a half apart, she finds it hard to imagine reconciling with her own parents, “unless some really big things changed”, and has found peace with that. “I don’t think the struggle is greater than having a relationship with a parent who devalues you on a daily basis,” she says slowly, pointing out that having to be independent has in some ways been empowering. When she became a homeowner, at least she knew she’d done it by herself. “I’ve got a lot of confidence, a lot of fearlessness. Nothing holds me back. And that was a product of thinking, ‘I’ve got nothing left to lose.’”
But for others it’s less clearcut. For Pippa, her father’s eventual death some years after she lost her mother left her with unexpectedly conflicting feelings. “All my childhood and all my life, there was always part of me that hoped one day I would get some evidence that my dad gave a shit. So when he died, yes, there was a lot of relief, but there was also the grief that I’m never going to get the opportunity now for him to show that. Though, of course, the conscious adult knows that was never going to happen anyway.” When I ask what she wishes more people understood about estrangement, her answer is that it’s not actually an ending; more an ongoing process of living without both your actual parent, and the parent you always wanted but now realise you can never have.
Some names have been changed.
