Yesterday, I posted a long essay here about the experience of parental estrangement. I am sad to say, it’s an experience I know personally. Over a thousand readers responded, many to say that they share this experience, and it is as brutal as any they have known. A kind of death.
This morning’s New York Times ran a long story by a Times reporter, Ellen Barry, about parental estrangement. Over the past many months, I had spoken to Ellen Barry a number of times about parental estrangement, directing her to a number of deeply thoughtful and self-examined parents I know well, who struggle with the devastating experience of having been cut off from an adult child and grandchildren.
None of the kinds of stories of the estranged parents I’ve come to know well (and I know dozens now) were covered in Barry’s article in today’s Times. Barry focused largely on a social worker (and Tik Tok star) named Patrick Teahan, who leads a vast and growing community of young adult and millennials, unhappy (deeply so, no doubt) in their relationships with their parents. His advice: Take his online quiiz to determine how toxic your parents were in your childhood. Then send them a note, no more than a paragraph long if possible, informing them that you are “going no-contact”. Forever.
Not surprisingly, I have a great deal to say about this social worker, and about the article in today’s Times, which I believe may do untold damage to families –not only in our own lifetimes, but beyond.
When I write about parental estrangement, I never fail to acknowledge the experiences of adults who justifiably distance themselves or cut off all contact with a parent who has abused them irredeemably. Those situations exist. I know some of these too.
But there are so many other stories–and they are heartbreaking– of well-intentioned, deeply loving, self-examined parents ready to admit to their failures and to the ways their children may have been hurt by them, whose relationships have been felled by the same brutal ax of the radical (and growing) no-contact community.
I am posting a link to Ellen Barry’s article below–free without paywall, along with my response to it.
i know well how hard it is for estranged parents to speak publicly of their experience. Speaking only for myself, I can no longer remain silent.
A terrible tragedy is unfolding in families across America.
There are circumstances in which all an adult child can do to save herself is to sever contact from dangerous parents. Abusive parents. Parents who truly abandoned their responsibilities and brought harm to their children.
Then there are the others, who made mistakes, but never out of a deficiency of love or care. Now comes a world of therapy ready to endorse the idea that the only answer to pain or sorrow or discomfort in a relationship is to sever contact–employing the predictable vocabulary of “toxic narcissist”, “need for boundaries” “trauma” –a word whose definition has become looser and looser with every passing year.
The no-contact therapist quoted in Ellen Barry’s piece recommends that estranging adult children construct a mock funeral for their parent–with “an unsparing ‘goodbye letter attached to the parent’s photo, propped on an empty chair.”If more is needed to liberate one’s self from the clutches of parents, he “recommends using a foam baseball bat to hit or smash things, like eggs or plates.”
As for the estranged parents. They are unlikely to take out their baseball bats. We who have lost a child to estrangement will mourn that relationship forever. Often in silence.
You can read the Times story in its entirety in a link, below.
https://www.nytimes.com/…/therapy-family-estrangement…
Estrangement is not simply a tragedy for the parents who suffer the loss of a beloved child, and the inability to know or be known by their grandchildren. It is a tragedy that will reverberate through the generations.
GreatCosmicMothersUnite 