Family estrangements hit home during holidays

It’s been a decade since a 56-year-old woman became estranged from the stepdaughter she helped raise. “It was so hard. I had to learn how to compartmentalize my feelings. Because I was a blubbering idiot for probably a year and a half, two years,” she said.

They’d once been close. “She lived with us from the time she was 15, and she’s been part of my life since she was 3.”

The woman said she traces the beginning of their estrangement to when her stepdaughter got pregnant at 20. “She started acting strangely during the pregnancy. After she gave birth, she withdrew even more from us.”

The stepdaughter had a second child. Then, her marriage broke up. Her husband took custody of the kids. When she told her father and stepmother she was getting divorced, they say they told her she could live with them – under certain conditions.

“One of those was to speak to a counselor. And get a job that had insurance. So she left our house that day, and in all reality, hasn't talked to us since,” her stepmother said.

“I tried texting her every day. I tried not texting her. I tried this; I tried that. I tried talking to her. She just wasn't willing to talk. We apologized for anything that we may have done to cause her not to talk to us. She never explained herself.”

 

Parent-adult child estrangements are not new, but they are increasing as public discussions about them raise awareness. In the past, some people avoided talking about estrangements because they felt ashamed. Today, there are websites offering support to parents who say they don’t understand what’s happening to them and first-person accounts by people who feel rejected by their parents.

There also are sites supporting adult children who cut off contact with parents and a growing number of social media posts by people who say estrangements made their lives better. One social worker with a large YouTube following says on his website, “We don’t let toxic people tell us who we are anymore.”

M. Frampton Gwynette, M.D., trained in both adult and child psychiatry, has treated patients at the MUSC Health Institute of Psychiatry who are estranged from family members. “It's really complicated. There's definitely an issue going on somewhere. It could be with the parent, the kid or the relationship. But it's not going to be nothing. It's not going to be the parent forgot or the kid forgot. There's something there that needs to be addressed.”

Factors cited in family estrangements include:

• Ideological differences.
• Mismatched expectations.
• Abuse, which can be emotional, physical and/or sexual.
• Substance use.
• Mental health issues.

Gwynette said that in his experience, a couple of factors stand out when it comes to estrangements. “The two biggest ones, in my opinion, would be underlying substance use and sexual abuse.”

Substance use is often the more visible issue of the two. “If you look at why kids end up in the Department of Social Services or in foster care, the No. 1 reason is mom and/or dad are using alcohol and drugs and neglecting the kid or physically abusing the kids. So I think substance use is just a huge, huge risk factor for that.”

An adult child’s substance use can be a factor as well. “We've had discussions with patients where it's like, ‘OK, your daughter is drinking and doing drugs and doing all kinds of scary things, so you asked her to move out,’” Gwynette said.

“She moved out, but now her housing is unstable. She knocks on your door at  2 in the morning; what do you do? She wants to sleep on the couch. And it's a dilemma. It's like, ‘Do I let her come in and sleep on the couch because it’s cold outside? I'm her mother, or I'm her father.’ Or do you stay in bed and not answer the door because you don’t want to reinforce her substance use?”

Sexual abuse can lead to difficult situations too. “So let's get extreme. Say I'm a 21-year-old woman, and my brother molested me growing up. And at the Thanksgiving table, I told my parents. They said I was lying. Or they said, ‘We're not having this conversation.’

“My choice is I could go back to the Thanksgiving table and just try to get through it and stay at my parents' house in the bed where my brother would do that to me every night. Or I could say, ‘I'm not going to participate in this family. It's toxic, because what my brother did to me was awful, but what my parents did might have even been worse because they're supporting him.’”

The assumption is no longer that it’s always best for families to be together. Sometimes, an estrangement can give someone time and space to try to heal, Gwynette said. “You have to keep looking back at what's best for the person.”

Research shows that most estrangements aren’t permanent. For people who are estranged but want to try to develop a better relationship with a family member, Gwynette recommended professional help.

“I'm a big believer in family therapy, and family therapy is the hardest type of work that I'll do as a psychiatrist. It's extremely painful for families to go through. And I think the concept of darkness to light, like if there's sexual abuse in the family, nothing will tear a family up more than that. But it needs to be discussed so it can be brought out into the open and healed. People don't want to do that. It's much easier to pull away, push down.”

Despite that desire to avoid difficult subjects, Gwynette said most humans have an inherent drive to want to connect with family. “If you're a kid growing up, it's everything. To have your parents, and they don't have to be together, but to have them both involved enough to the point that you know that they love you, that's huge for self-esteem as a child and development,” he said.

“And then, as you get into adulthood, it remains hugely important as a support system, which everybody needs. I think it also adds to enjoyment and quality of life. We want to share big moments with family and be with each other at the holidays and graduations and so forth. We're created that way. That's in our DNA.”

The stepmother who said she spent years adjusting to the loss of her relationship with her stepdaughter had this advice for others involved in estrangements that caught them off guard. “You just have to learn how to compartmentalize it and speak with counselors or whatever is necessary to be able to live with it.”