In my work as a therapist with parentified daughters who have experienced childhood trauma, I understand intimately how these two emotions get suppressed in the interest of surviving trauma in the attachment relationship.
It’s not safe to feel a sense of loss about your parent when you are tasked with meeting their demands and trying to meet their unrealistic expectations.
It’s not safe to feel a sense of anger when your parent violates your boundaries or holds you to unfair standards as their child when you are trying to preserve attachment with them.
This is the essence of how attachment trauma happens and how emotions like grief and anger fail to complete inside: to get our need for proximity and closeness to the parent met as a child, we cut off the natural emotional reactions to the parent’s bizarre, inappropriate, or unstable behaviors. Dr. Gabor Mate encapsulates this concept best when he says:
“When authenticity threatens attachment, attachment trumps authenticity.”
Now, enter, adulthood. Enter, attachment trauma recovery. Enter, healing.
Maybe you’ve been on this journey for a while and you’ve done some inner work around these attachment wounds. You’ve started to recover the healthy anger that got lost in the service of attachment and you’ve started to grieve the parent you needed over the parent you received. You’re feeling sturdier in your sense of self and have differentiated to a large degree from your parent and family of origin. Your adult life looks nothing like your childhood and the way you treat yourself looks nothing like what was modeled for you by your parents.
Maybe, like many of the parentified daughters I work with, you have children of your own or recently have begun your motherhood journey. And the wounds you thought you processed and “worked on” are now revealing larger taproots. You’re starting to question your relationship with your parent in a more investigative, scrutinizing way. You’re remembering scenes from your childhood and you’re struggling to empathize with your parent. How could they treat me this way, when me doing this to my child is incomprehensible? Maybe you’ve taken this line of questioning a step further — are they going to do this to my child? Am I willing to take the risk — of them lashing out at my child this way or being this irresponsible?
Maybe you’ve had an arms-distance, low-contact relationship. You’ve learned to “sidestep”, a relational strategy coined by author of Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents Lindsay Gibson to describe how some adult children of emotionally immature parents deal with their parents, which involves ignoring the bait and limiting engagement. But now you’re thinking… even low contact is too much. Even an extremely limited, distant, boundaried relationship is work you don’t want to pour into them. And as you’re bonding with your baby, as you’re raising little children, maintaining a one-sided relationship with your parent is beginning to feel like too much.
You may have already reached this point or considered it even if you don’t have children of your own, but becoming a parent puts the relationship under a microscope. You stop making excuses for your parent once you understand the responsibility of parenting. And you stop wanting a relationship with your parent when you realize they never appropriately embodied this responsibility in a real way, while your life is consumed with it.
Going no-contact, as parent-adult child estrangement expert Dr. Whitney Goodman sees it, is rarely an impulsive decision and often arrives after years and years of trying to make an impossible relationship work. It’s usually a well-thought out decision that has been processed and planned for a long time. But what most parentified adult children don’t anticipate about estrangement is the grief work that follows. We’ve been grieving before this decision. Loss is tinged in this decision because we have to accept that our parent did not meet our needs, and in fact, created more injury than connection.
The grief that your child-self was trying to avoid with all of the strategies they learned to survive attachment trauma — strategies like people-pleasing, walking on eggshells, or being hyper-responsible — comes crashing in when you actually cope with the loss of the parental relationship. It’s one thing to recognize that the relationship is not what you want or need and another thing to actually say, I am no longer psychologically investing in this relationship. That declaration reverberates in the inner world and activates young, proximity-seeking parts. These parts are now face-to-face with their deepest fear, a primal fear that we all carry as mammals, which is to be separated from the parent.
You may have coped with the psychological loss of a parent in trauma healing work but now you cope with the loss of ongoing relationship.
It’s important to name this if you were thinking about estrangement or if you are navigating it now.
A part of you may always miss your parent. Parts of you may also feel relieved and empowered in making the conscious decision to go no-contact. You can make room for the dialectics of this kind of loss and hold space for all parts of you, including the young ones who simply want proximity to a parent, even if that proximity hurts, and the adult part that is choosing safety and stability in a season of life when you can’t afford to lose your peace of mind.
I’ve heard psychologists often describe estrangement as a process that requires a lot of effort. In one podcast episode that unfortunately I cannot recall to properly cite, Esther Perel says that “it takes a lot of psychic energy to keep a door closed” in referencing estrangement. The logic is that your parent will always be your parent, and just because you don’t talk to them or see them on an ongoing basis doesn’t mean this relationship is extracted from your psyche. I find these conceptions of estrangement slightly misleading and unhelpful.
It takes a lot of psychic energy to keep the door open on a harmful relationship, too. Parentified adult children don’t have good options when it comes to navigating relationship with their parents. In my opinion, the emphasis needs to be on the relationship parentified adult children have to their inner world of parts and their own healthy adult awareness or Self-energy, rather than the relationship to the parent. Risks and benefits to contact with your parent need to be named and evaluated from season to season in your life because they will change with the season. Childfree-you you may have had the space to deal with your mother’s temper tantrums, for example, but mother-you doesn’t. Single-you may have had space to deal with your father’s entitlement, but married you doesn’t.
Estrangement is one option of many for navigating a difficult relationship with difficult parents. It’s not the pinnacle of healing and it’s also not the last resort. You’re allowed to learn from this process and change your mind on the journey.
If you’re interested in exploring this topic further, I’ve enclosed an inventory below for paid subscribers.
Thank you for reading, and as always, remember that all of you makes sense, all of you belongs, and all of you matters in the greater story of who you are,
~Sarah
♥ Join the Book Club: Embodied Healing with IFS is now open for registration
♥ Preorder my book now, The Internal Family Systems Workbook For CPTSD (or sign up for the book club & get a signed copy for free ;))
♥ Get on the waitlist for my postpartum support group Nurtured
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.