Grief in Estrangement
Ending a relationship with a parent is brutal. It’s filled with disappointment, longing for unconditional love that isn’t reciprocated, and an enormous amount of grief. We tend to associate grieving with the death loss of a parent, but what happens when you’re mourning the living?
If you’re already at the point of estrangement, then I already know you’ve tried. And tried, and tried, and tried, again and again. Or for some, it was not safe to continue a relationship with them. I’m going to cut to the chase in this writing - You may always grieve your parent. I really don’t know that anyone who has estranged from one or both of their parents has ever had the grief leave them 100%. I’m sure there are exceptions to every rule, but attachment research shows us that we are hard wired to be connected to our parents/caregivers. We look to them for survival because as a species, humans literally cannot survive infancy without them. This is so significant, because as a child you can learn to override your own needs in order to appease your parent and keep that relationship going, even if it’s at the cost of your own well being.
What does tend to lighten within the grief of estrangement is the guilt, the intensity, and the overall load someone has been carrying. Many adult children are riddled with guilt for considering cutting ties with a parent. There’s a sense of obligation, force, a lot of external noise and opinions from others (including cultural beliefs), being made to feel they are the problem for bringing up any issues, and fear around what it would be like to fully disconnect from family.
Three big things happen during this process:
Logic helps keep you grounded in truth.
Emotional expression, releasing some of the physical sensations you’ve been holding, and creating space for your truth will liberate you.
Exploring play and the parts of yourself that have been suppressed in order to keep the peace will be vital in your healing.
Sometimes cutting ties fully is survival. And people who didn’t grow up that way may not understand you. It’s not your job to convince them of what you know to be healthy for yourself. Sometimes the intensity of grief can lessen and you can move towards generational healing, letting go of the burdens passed down to you from prior generations. No matter what estrangement looks like, the grief will come. Let it. A small piece of it you may always carry, but it’s not the heavy load holding you down anymore, it’s the small reminder of who you want to be in your own story moving forward, and how you want and deserve to be loved. And one day you will look in the mirror and you’ll recognize yourself, perhaps for the first time ever, liberated.
You deserve love, respect, and for someone to be curious about you. You deserve peace.
