I have never felt more lost than now, during my estrangement from my child, Cory. How can this be? It’s like I have lost Cory, but I have also lost myself. What is happening???

Incredibly lost, lonely and cannot find my bearings

Dear Incredibly Lost,

Your pain is so clear. I can hear that while the cause of your pain is obvious, it doesn’t offer you enough to grasp the scale of your loss.

I think this is because you are experiencing a double loss: you haven’t just lost your child—you have lost a part of yourself.

Part of understanding estrangement grief comes from naming our lost roles: “I am Cory’s mother, and I can’t mother Cory right now.” But it’s more complex than our roles. Our ongoing interaction when we are loving someone develops into a part of us. That loving feeling, and that experience of being with our loved one, is a component of our identity—a way we recognize our own selves.

When contact with your loved one is cut off, it can be tougher to see that you have lost this internal piece of yourself, too. Loving a particular person creates a unique, resonant spot in you that is activated when you think of or interact with them.

You don’t just miss Cory; you miss who you were when you were with them. You miss the “Cory” part of yourself.

Think of it this way:

“There is a part of me that grew through loving my child. When I think of it, my heart actually swells a little. My child is nowhere near me, but this spot inside is mine, built over time through my interactions with them. When I can’t be with my child, I miss them, but I also miss the way I feel within myself as a result of our long history together. I miss the 'Me' I am when I am with them. I sometimes wish I could be with my child, not just to be with them, but to feel that version of myself again.”

When Cory leaves, that version of you goes offline. The Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön often writes about the deep groundlessness that happens when a major life relationship is lost. She points out that we are pushed to step away from a version of who we used to be, pulling us toward painful questioning of “who am I now”? It is an unwelcome transition, but it also reminds us that our identity is not fixed.

In my drawing, your estranged loved one is walking away, but the part of you that sees and experiences yourself through that relationship is walking away, too. We can be so focused on having been left, that we don’t initially see the version of us that seems to be leaving as well.

How to Grapple with Your Double Loss

• Slow down and inventory your feelings. See if you can begin to outline this part of your identity. Think of those MRI scans where a specific spot in the brain lights up in response to a stimulus. You have an internal spot that lights up at the thought of Cory. Ask what you can begin to learn about that part of yourself.

• Grieve that part of yourself with clarity. Grieving asks that you recognize your loss as completely as you can. Once this lost self is a bit clearer, you can say to it: “I know you. I feel _____ about you. I am working to accept this.”

• Look for other ways to experience those feelings and parts of yourself. If you can identify the qualities you are missing in yourself—like your capacity to play or laugh—ask if there are other ways to experience them. Cory may not want to be together right now, but are there other relationships or activities where that part of you can safely step forward? If you are too raw, give yourself time until you are ready.

• Let others help light the way. If you are having trouble finding this part of your inner self beneath the fog of grief, ask trusted friends or family to talk with you about Cory. Their comments may spark a recognition that helps you see yourself better.

• Be as kind and loving toward yourself as possible. Estrangement easily tricks us into finding fault in ourselves. While a gentle self-inventory is important, plaese conduct it with warmth and self-compassion.

_______________________________

Dear Incredibly Lost,

You have named the very heart of the disorientation that accompanies estrangement. It makes complete sense that you are struggling to locate your full self right now. These steps are meant to help you find a more centered internal space—a quiet vantage point from which you can begin the repair necessary to feel more whole again.

My wishes are with you as you look inward, find your footing, and gently reclaim your whole-est self possible at this time.

Best,

Kathy

P.S. If you want to practice moving through these stuck places together, I’m presenting a workshop on August 1 with Ann Dyer, the founder of Mountain Yoga. We’ll gather in Oakland and on Zoom for an afternoon of gentle yoga, journaling, and talking through how estrangement lives in the body. You can find more info and reserve your spot here: https://www.m-yoga.org/living-with-estrangement.html

Please reach out to me in the Comments Section or at ksinsheimermft@gmail.com

This is column #47

When I talk with my family members, I am stunned by how differently they see us. Not just as individuals and not just as a group, but even our history! Why does this happen? And, more to the point, how do we work things out when we don’t even have the same starting place in our perceptions?

Wishing for new glasses so I could see my family better

Dear Wishing for New Glasses,

I think you are at a great starting point—you have noticed a key to why we have differences—it’s about our perception. And our perceptions come from each of our unique views of each other and our experiences together. Preparing to respond to you, I remembered the parable of the 5 blind men and the elephant. (Which we could now re-name the 5 blindfolded humans and the elephant. Or the 5 blindfolded family members.)

To review for those who don’t know the parable: one human is holding the leg and thinks the elephant is like a tree. Another is feeling the elephant’s side and thinks an elephant is like a wall, etc. I used this story for the theme of my drawing this week, which features five blindfolded hearts trying to map out a giant elephant. Looking at the drawing, you will be able to tell the rest of the story yourself!

When we look at each other and our interactions, we each have unique take-aways. One family thinks that the older child is arrogant and selfish. That same child tells me he needs to save himself from a family dynamic of low self-esteem and defeatism. A friend tells me her estranged Bestie was too self-involved. The Bestie responds that her estranged friend wouldn’t stand up for what she wanted, and then blamed the Bestie when she didn’t get it.

What if each of them is telling a part of the story that could add up to a whole, but they can’t hear each other, so remain stuck in their unique but incomplete perceptions of each other and their relationships? This can often lead to family estrangement—or a painful rupture between close friends—if someone despairs of ever being heard, validated, or understood. If we get stuck in believing a particular narrative, another with a different viewpoint can feel silenced, criticized, or trapped. And if their attempts to explain themselves are not understood due to the overarching family narrative, they may feel the need to distance themselves entirely.

What do I mean by “Overarching Family Narrative”?

Families typically have stories they tell about who they are, what they are about, and how they operate. “We are a family with a fair amount of depression.” “We are a family that has fun but we sometimes spoil it.” “We are a family that works hard and isn’t so good at playing.” “We are a family that’s close but we can’t always tell each other what is on our minds.”

You don’t say what your family narrative is, but I am guessing that part of it is “We are a family that doesn’t agree about our history.” Saying that out loud may actually be the first step for you in making progress. But why does a disagreement over family history feel so terrifying that it can drive us to detach, causing family estrangement?

Are We Fighting For Survival?

Why do we cling to our perceptions so fiercely that we are willing to fracture our families to defend them? It is at least in part because our ancient neurobiology treats a shared reality as a matter of literal survival.

In our evolutionary past, if the tribe couldn’t form a shared representation of reality—if we couldn’t agree on where the danger lay or locate the enemy—the group’s defense fractured, and the tribe suffered. This same need to identify danger is sometimes present in modern times. However, in our daily family life, this need may cause conflict when understanding and compassion for difference would be more effective.

When a family member disputes your reality, your ancient survival brain registers it as a catastrophic fracture in tribal safety. The visceral distress you feel—the tightening chest, the fight-or-flight response—is a primitive evolutionary alarm.

If we cannot resolve the disagreement, our minds default to a primitive, binary way of thinking to restore order.

The great anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss noted that human cultures naturally organize a chaotic world into strict, opposing pairs: Us versus Them, Inside versus Outside, Safe versus Dangerous.

When we cannot achieve a shared reality, our collective system splits. To protect our internal reality, we map the binary onto ourselves and our loved ones: I am the truth-teller, and you are the enemy.

When being a part of the family tribe pressures you to abandon your own reality, detaching can feel like an essential act of self-preservation. This is an underlying engine of family estrangement. We pull away because the emotional vertigo of living with someone who denies our truth feels like an undeniable threat to our safety.

Tolerating Differing Realities

Moving forward asks for a profound perspective shift—it requires making space for a reality that looks completely different from your own without triggering the tribal alarm. Here is how we can begin to heal these rifts:

• Start with the assumption that you have an incomplete story. To use the parable of the hearts, if you are holding the leg and think the elephant is like a tree, your experience is real—but it isn’t the whole elephant. Accepting that a family member is holding the tail and experiencing something entirely different allows two truths to exist at the same time.

• Notice the somatic shift. When a family member presents a reality that jars you, pause and check in with your body. Notice the tension in your shoulders or the urge to interrupt. Grounding your nervous system first is essential; we cannot take in an emotional difference if our bodies are in fight-or-flight mode.

• Drop the need to convert. The goal of these difficult family conversations isn’t to get the other person to say, “You are right, my memory was wrong.” As the renowned relationship expert Esther Perel wisely points out, “It’s not hard to be right, but then you are right and alone.” When we demand that our loved ones surrender their perception to ours, we choose compliance over connection. Connection comes from seeing if it’s possible to understand what it feels like to be them in our family.

• Expect the emotional vertigo. Expect to feel thrown off-kilter by their perception of “what happened.” It is painful to take in a narrative that feels alien to you. Give yourself permission to feel discomfort without immediately rushing to fix, correct, or cast them out as the “enemy.”

• Bring compassion to the blindspots. Approach the conversation with patience for both of you. We are all blindfolded hearts doing our best to map out the giant, complicated elephant of our shared life.

___________________________________

So, Dear Wishing for New Glasses,

You are not alone in your wish to see and understand your loved ones more clearly. Navigating estrangement and learning to tolerate our differences is a life-long process. You will get better at it, and still not “get it” all of the time. Bring your patience and compassion along to help increase the vista for the new vision you are seeking.

Best,

Kathy

P.S. If you want to practice moving through these stuck places together, I’m presenting a workshop on August 1 with Ann Dyer, the founder of Mountain Yoga. We’ll gather in Oakland and on Zoom for an afternoon of gentle yoga, journaling, and talking through how estrangement lives in the body. You can find more info and reserve your spot here: https://www.m-yoga.org/living-with-estrangement.html

Please reach out to me in the Comments Section or at ksinsheimermft@gmail.com

This is column #46

My estrangement is SO deeply painful. How can I live with my loss while still putting one foot in front of the other? I don’t want to forget the ache—in truth I can’t—yet I want to stop being consumed by it. How do I bear this while I try to live my life?

— Hurting, wondering, trying to live

Dear Wondering,

You aren’t asking how to cure the pain, and you are not asking how to build a wall around it so you never have to feel it again. You are asking how to coexist with it. This is a thoughtful beginning.

In our culture, we are often taught that grief is a problem to be solved, a mountain to climb and descend, or a process to complete. But when it comes to the complex, Oceanic Loss of family estrangement, pushing toward completion won’t work. Your grief has no expiration date, and trying to force an “end date” only leads to exhaustion.

Grief experts have observed that when someone significant to us dies, we most often process our grief enough that we can place our loss in our back pockets. The relationship stays with us in a quieter way, most of the time. The grief doesn’t end, it lessens.

In estrangement, our loss is even more knotted. We have to tolerate bearing the possibility of hearing from them at any moment—or not hearing from them for years. Our grief can appear at any trigger, then recede. Since we know that this grief will wax and wane, what if, instead of trying to outrun it, we slow down? What if we accept it as our companion?

This past Saturday I heard Lisa Olivera read from her new book, When the Ache Remains, (https://lisaolivera.com/when-the-ache-remains) and this exact theme of integration kept echoing through the room—the idea that healing isn’t about erasing our wounds, but about expanding our lives enough to hold them. She offered a profound shift, writing:

“If you are aching, ask ‘what do you need, grief?’”

Completing her grief was impossible, so she found ways to see her grief as her companion. When you ask how to bear your grief as you live your life, you are choosing to listen to the ache rather than silence it.

Oceanic Loss: A Framework to Help Us Understand Our Grieving

Through my work with families, I have developed the Oceanic Loss framework, which moves through three fluid phases:

1. The initial shock of the Tidal Wave

2. The unpredictable swells of Rough Waters

3. The more resting state of Calmer Seas

Right now, you are navigating Rough Waters. The initial shock has passed, but your sea is still choppy. Your first instinct might be to fight the current or swim away from the breakers.

But walking alongside your pain—asking it what it needs—is actually how you slow down fighting the tide. It is how we learn to float with the ache, allowing the waves to rise and fall without being pulled under. The ocean of your loss doesn’t disappear, but it becomes a body of water you are learning how to navigate.

When in Oceanic Grief: How to Stay Afloat

• Slow the Internal Rip Tide: See if you can steer your self-talk to language that offers more acceptance: “Right now, I am aching. This is the rough water I am in today, and it makes sense that I feel this way. I might be able to have other experiences today as well.”

• Ask your grief what it needs today: Look for a space for your grief to walk with you rather than consume you.

• Locate the Grief Somatically: Grief lives in your body. When the pain flares, try asking: What do I need in my body? Where do I feel the ache? Is my chest tight? Take a slow, deep breath into that tender spot.

• Ground Your Physical Self: Place a hand on your heart and your feet on the floor (thank you, Dr. Becky). Let your body know that it is safe to carry this feeling, and that you aren’t going to abandon yourself.

• Find Possible Acceptance: Part of what accentuates our pain is the belief in loss’s permanent injury to us. Accepting involves perspective-taking, where we listen to the injury we feel, but also see the possibility of new experiences as we walk through our days.

• Release the Need for Ongoing Active Mourning: Parents can feel guilty in moments when they are not missing their child, falling into a magical belief that continuous ache will somehow bring them back. This is not true. Befriending your grief will not push your child further away.

• Interrogate the “Victim” Schema: If your family of origin modeled the position of the “victim” as the primary explanation for emotional pain, that stance will visit you here. Acknowledge this view, but ask if you could see your estrangement from another perspective. The purpose is to move you into an active role—one where you have more autonomy in the architecture of your days.

So, Dear Wondering,

You ask how to bear your estrangement: possibly by feeling hurt and alive at the same time. You can carry a heavy heart while noticing the sunlight filtering through the trees.

The goal isn’t to step away from the ache. It is to begin to see that while your loss is your companion, it does not need to fully inhabit you. Your loss can be accepted as part of you, but ultimately not all of you—or who you wish to become.

Kathy

P.S. If you want to practice moving through these stuck places together, I’m presenting a workshop on August 1 with Ann Dyer, the founder of Mountain Yoga. We’ll gather in Oakland and on Zoom for an afternoon of gentle yoga, journaling, and talking through how estrangement lives in the body. You can find more info and reserve your spot here: https://www.m-yoga.org/living-with-estrangement.html

Please reach out to me in the Comments Section or at ksinsheimermft@gmail.com

This is column #45

I think our category of estrangement with our daughter Sara (not her real name) is “low contact.” Sara texts us at the holidays and we see her once or twice a year. She wants us to work on ourselves before she will spend more time or have any more contact with us.

We recently learned that Sara has run into financial difficulties and is living on her savings. She is looking for work and the economy is terrible. We are afraid she will run out of money and health benefits and begin to have trouble paying her rent. We aren’t wealthy, but we have adequate resources to offer her help.

Should we do that, even though she offers us very little of herself? Is that like rewarding bad behavior?

Confused, a bit resentful, and wanting to help (all at once)

Dear Confused,

I am sorry to learn about you and your daughter’s circumstances. She is currently struggling financially and has been low contact with you. You know she has needs, but you are afraid to act. You don’t want to offend, you want to help, and you don’t want to feel exploited—even if it is by your own choice!

You are experiencing many conflicting emotions. Your protective parental instincts go out to your child, only to be met an instant later by the remembered sting of her low contact. It is painful to watch a daughter face the stress of finances, while you are juggling fear for her welfare with a simmering resentment over her boundaries.

Money is a difficult topic, period, but estrangement adds a another layer of complexity. It transforms financial support from a gesture of care into a fraught balancing act. To figure out if and how you should step in, let’s look at how money functions in family systems, and how to build a path forward.

Is Money Symbolic of Love?

In family life, money is rarely just bank accounts.

Financial Insight: As the late financial writer Jerrold Mundis observed in Earn What You Deserve, “Money is one of the premier screens onto which we project our emotional issues. We use it as a substitute for love, a weapon to punish... and a tool to control others.”

Many adult children who are financially vulnerable find themselves caught in the turbulence of what their generation calls “adulting”—the challenging process of establishing an adult identity and independence. Some step away from their families of origin because they feel unprepared for the world and feel they need separation to find themselves. They rely on peers for emotional support, but peers rarely have the capital to offer financial lifelines.

This retreat from family feels backwards to parents, who want to protect their children during life’s transitions. What makes your particular scenario so difficult is the prospect of offering material support to Sara in the absence of being able to offer comfort or advice-giving. It is chastening to feel like the only valued offer would be financial. And will Sara be able to tell that this IS an offering of love, in the form of financial support?

How Money Comes Up

In our current economy, it is difficult for younger generations to secure work that covers basic living expenses, let alone create a financial buffer. While financial struggle is an age-old human trial—and many parents survived it without family assistance—having the means to help changes the equation for you.

When resources are available, I typically see two distinct scenarios emerge in estranged families:

• Some families stretch to offer help: Parents have just enough funds to help. Even if it requires a tight squeeze, they would vastly prefer to stretch their resources than endure the worries of knowing their child is suffering.

• Some families wind up in a Tug-of-War: In these families, all members are aware that adequate resources exist, but confusion arises over control. Parents view the resources as theirs to distribute under their own terms, while adult children view it as collective “family money.” This mismatch can become an entrenched power struggle, where children sometimes estrange as a way to protest parental financial control.

How It Can Feel to Offer Money in Estrangement

Offering support during low-contact leaves a parent wondering: What does my gesture mean to my child? Am I unwittingly supporting her decision to cut me off? Parents worry that giving money validates their own exploitation, yet they simultaneously fear that withholding it will harm their child and their relationship.

Clinical Framework: As family expert Dr. Joshua Coleman warns in The Rules of Estrangement, “Using money as a tool to leverage contact, control behavior, or express resentment is rarely successful. If you decide to give, give cleanly. When gifts have strings attached, they cease to be gifts and become transactions—ones that adult children will often refuse if the emotional cost is too high.”

Sharing money under these terms is emotionally expensive. Parents frequently tell me they feel reduced to a faceless wallet or a bank.

When parents try to alleviate this agonizing “ATM feeling” by tying financial help directly to a requirement for contact, it almost always backfires. While an adult child might temporarily agree to the deal to keep a roof over their head, they are forced into a terrible dilemma: compromising their boundaries just to survive. This turns a parent-child relationship into a transaction that ultimately does not benefit your relationship.

Determining What is Best for Your Family

It is common that control over family resources lies with parents. However, when the means are there, you could think about offering structured, thought-through generosity. To ensure your offer preserves your dignity and respects Sara’s current boundaries, it’s best to lessen your emotional expectations. You may find you still have them, but you will be aware of your need for caution with your own heart.

Possible Steps for Thinking and Planning:

• Examine Your Intentions First: Have an honest conversation with your spouse. Can you afford to give this money as a gift of support? Check in with your financial and emotional baseline: are you ready to send this help without expecting an increase in contact, an apology, or a progress report?

• Propose a Structure: Do not make an open-ended offer like “let us know if you need money,” which can feel intrusive or infantilizing to an adult child fighting for independence. Instead, define a clear financial plan upfront. Offer to cover her rent for a specific period—such as six months—while she navigates her job search. Plan a check-in time, designated only for the subject of funds.

• De-Link the Money from Contact: To lower Sara’s defenses and honor her terms, clarify in writing that this gift has no hidden hooks. A simple, direct note is best: “We know the job market is incredibly tough right now and we want to make sure your housing is secure. We want to cover your rent for the next six months. We respect your need for space, so this offer comes with no expectations for increased contact.”

• Keep Your Eyes and Heart on the Long Term: Remind yourselves that stepping in during a structural crisis is not “rewarding bad behavior.” It is an honest demonstration of parental love and goodwill. You are showing her that even when your relationship is in Rough Waters, your care for her fundamental safety remains absolute.

You can’t know the outcome of your offer or support ahead of time. You are giving because you will feel better parenting in this way, and you will be relieved that your child has support in her difficult transition into adulthood.

So, Dear Confused,

Thank you for opening up this conversation on such a fraught topic. My wish is for you and your spouse to find a way to support Sara that honors your protective instincts, preserves your personal dignity, and leaves the door quietly open for future healing when the season changes.

Best,

Kathy

P.S. If you want to practice moving through these stuck places together, I’m presenting a workshop on August 1 with Ann Dyer, the founder of Mountain Yoga. We’ll gather in Oakland and on Zoom for an afternoon of gentle yoga, journaling, and talking through how estrangement lives in the body. You can find more info and reserve your spot here: https://www.m-yoga.org/living-with-estrangement.html

Please reach out to me in the Comments Section or at ksinsheimermft@gmail.com

This is column #44

Estrangement is usually approached through words: explaining, analyzing, remembering, and trying to understand. So combining estrangement work with yoga may initially seem like an unusual choice.

But estrangement does not live only in our thoughts. It can also show up in our bodies—as tightness, guarding, collapse, restlessness, or the feeling that we are bracing for something that has already happened.

Yoga can help us become more grounded, and open as we approach the emotional places in estrangement that words alone do not always reach.

Workshop Details

Living With Estrangement: A Better Way Forward

Saturday, August 1 · 2:00–5:00 p.m.

Attend in person at Mountain Yoga in Oakland or join us on Zoom

With Kathy Sinsheimer, MFT, and Ann Dyer Cervantes

Learn more and reserve your spot

“From the voice behind the Substack Dear Estranged, this workshop offers a compassionate space for navigating the reality of estrangement—when contact with someone you love is limited or nonexistent.

Therapist Kathy Sinsheimer brings clarity and care to this often-unspoken experience, offering insights and practices intended to support everyone affected by estrangement.

We begin by focusing on you: your feelings, questions, and hopes. For a little while, we step back from trying to solve the relationship itself and make room for your own experience.

From there, we explore the dynamics of estrangement—how it lives in relationships, in our thinking, and in the body. Through reflection, conversation, and gentle yoga led by Ann, you will have an opportunity to soften some of the “closed spaces” where pain, fear, and disconnection can take hold.

We then turn gently toward the relationship itself, making room for new perspectives and possibilities without forcing a particular outcome.

You will leave with additional tools, greater understanding, and a more compassionate way of holding what is. Whether your estrangement is recent or long-standing, you are not alone.”

The Mountain Yoga Website

Learn more and reserve your place in the workshop

Please feel free to contact me: ksinsheimermft@gmail.com

You and others write about an adult child’s need to estrange themselves in order to separate and individuate. Ok, I can see why an adult child needs to do that. But why do they need to make the parents so bad in the process? It’s one thing to need distance, like moving 2000 miles away so it requires planning and a plane flight to see each other, but why so negative? It’s almost as if they need a scapegoat in order to step away. And, if that’s true, why is it happening with such ferocity and frequency? I know there is a cultural trend, but still!!??

— Not Wishing to be a Scapegoat

Dear Not Wishing,

You ask a very important question about our collective need for scapegoats. It seems that in the landscape of estrangement, there is active finger-pointing. Across the generations, family members are frequently casting one another into rigid, negative roles to explain the need for rifts in their relationships. Personal flaws are quickly recharacterized as psychological deficits, individuals are labeled as narcissistic or borderline, and mental health diagnoses are frequently hurled across the divide. In the case of these rapid diagnoses in particular, I blame—see? There’s my own scapegoat—I blame the internet for making clinical labels so readily available without the necessary, responsible descriptions and warnings.

Scapegoats serve us when we cannot find the bandwidth to take responsibility ourselves. We wish to eject our difficult feelings outside of our own skin, hoping that someone else will take the blame. The image of the scapegoat comes from the Old Testament, where a goat was burdened with the community’s collective guilt and cast out into the barren wilderness, symbolically carrying away the sins of the population.

In modern terms, we still use scapegoats to unjustly weigh down an individual, group, or entity with faults, mistakes, or wrongdoings. This concept is incredibly useful in explaining the current phenomenon of estrangement, where an outside force is often designated as the cause of our personal discomfort.

In asking this question, you have highlighted a deeply painful period in the lives of families today: the widespread need that adult children are expressing for cut-off. There is a well-understood developmental need for a young person to separate—a vital stage of growth termed Identity vs. Role Confusion by psychologist Erik Erikson in 1950, though present for centuries before. Most of my readers will recognize this fluid, turbulent phase in their own histories.

What I hope to explain is how that healthy, normal developmental need has shifted from a phase we all recognize into something as absolute as a total relational cut-off. And I want to see if I can explore our situation without simply pointing fingers outside of ourselves.

Let’s start with how we are handling our analysis of this situation. Blame is currently being placed everywhere—within the family as well as on technology and society at large. Yet, where there are many locations of responsibility, we may be overlooking our own personal contributions to this phenomenon. When we look closer at this cultural moment, a striking pattern emerges: there are many scapegoats in our dialogue about estrangement.

We are living in a climate of dissatisfaction, where both generations are locked in painful, reciprocal blame, using similar language to describe one another:

• From the adult child’s perspective, parents are often seen as immature, narcissistic, lacking psychological awareness, or self-involved.

• From the parent’s perspective, adult children are frequently viewed as insensitive, coddled, withholding, unkind, or even cruel.

• And collectively, society and culture are cast as external villains, with social media, smartphones, and a hyper-individualism being blamed as the authors of the family rupture.

I want to be clear that I believe the above list includes very real contributors—it’s just that the challenges are within us as well as outside us.

The reality is that the adult children I talk with are working hard at “adulting.” It is not easy, and there is a great deal of quiet suffering involved. Many are trying to look entirely confident in their choices, yet they are often left secretly needing the very support and guidance they felt forced to cut off in order to feel independent.

At the same time, the parents I talk with are also distressed and uncomfortable. Many have lost their planned-for parental and grandparental roles while simultaneously navigating the everyday realities of aging, retirement, and a challenging social and political climate. Are our scapegoats truly helping us with our challenges?

The Universal Reflex to Offload Pain (to Scapegoat)

What does a scapegoat actually offer us? At its core, a scapegoat is a psychological relief valve. Humans have a low tolerance for sitting with uncomfortable internal anxiety. When life feels overwhelming, unpredictable, or deeply unsatisfying, looking inward and holding those responses is painful.

We look for an outside object to receive our “bad feelings,” so we don’t have to experience the weight of them within ourselves.

• For a young adult trying to forge an identity in a challenging world, it can make sense to point backward and say, “I am unhappy because of how I was raised.”

• For a parent watching a beloved child walk away, it is an equally powerful survival instinct to point outward and say, “My family is broken because of technology or an entitled generation.”

By placing the locus of the trouble in an external source, both sides offer themselves temporary psychological relief. The narrative shifts from internal vulnerability to a neat, orderly analysis: I am OK, and you are the problem.

No One is Winning

The tragedy of this moment is that everyone is participating in the same script, but not arriving at a collaborative conclusion. The adult child’s goal—the search for autonomy and a stable identity—is entirely legitimate. The parent’s goal—the desire for connection, meaning, and mutual respect—is also entirely legitimate.

But if we lack the relational tools to help these two competing, necessary goals meet in the middle, the system freezes. Instead of a gradual, messy developmental step into adulthood, we wind up with the phenomenon of cut-off. We don’t have space to value each other’s inner worlds because we do not know how to be in the complicated space of being different while staying connected.

Maturity for both a parent and an adult child begins when we drop our scapegoats. It happens when we realize that our parents, our children, and even our smartphones are not all-powerful forces responsible for our struggles. Until we can stand confidently in our own lives, owning our struggles and sitting with our shadows without needing an adversary to blame, we will find it difficult to process the very anxieties we are trying to cast away.

How to Rescue Ourselves from the Scapegoat Trap

Within yourself:

• Notice when you blame something outside yourself. This is vastly different from seeking an explanation. Fuller explanation includes an accounting of our own actions—blame looks only outward.

• Observe the desire to avoid personal “fault.” Victimhood is a highly prevalent identity in modern culture—and who doesn’t feel like a victim sometimes? But remaining in a passive, wounded position rarely brings us to a solution that offers a possibility for future growth.

• Ask yourself if there is something you could learn about yourself by taking in what your “scapegoater” is telling you. There may be useful truths within their complaints that could help your relationship.

• Work on listening to others, even if it’s painful. We don’t love to hear these truths about ourselves, but we can grow by saying “Ouch”, recovering, and working to take in the information.

Finding and Keeping Your Center to Find Clarity:

• Engage in intentional, mindful movement. Practices like breathwork, yoga, swimming, or dedicated walking help slow down a racing mind. This physical centering allows us to cultivate a perspective that exists outside of our immediate emotional reactivity and to look within.

• Ensure your self-care contains a return to internal rhythm. Build routines that actively nurture you, giving you the replenishment you need to re-find balance when it eludes you and the temptation of a scapegoat beckons.

________________________________

So, Dear Not Wishing,

I wish this for you as well—to not be a scapegoat, and to choose to not welcome one of your own. The more you can find your own balance, anchored by a broadened perspective, the more you will be able to experience a kind of centeredness that will steady you as you walk through your days.

Best,

Kathy

P.S. If you want to practice moving through these stuck places together, I’m presenting a workshop on August 1 with Ann Dyer, the founder of Mountain Yoga. We’ll gather in Oakland and on Zoom for an afternoon of gentle yoga, journaling, and talking through how estrangement lives in the body. You can find more info and reserve your spot here: https://www.m-yoga.org/living-with-estrangement.html

Please reach out to me in the Comments Section or at ksinsheimermft@gmail.com

This is column #43

I have been wanting to change my name to try to reclaim myself. I have already done this with my parents—I call them by their given names instead of Mom and Dad. It reminds me that besides being my parents, they are ordinary people, too. But that still leaves me with the feeling that I am not my own person. I’ve continued to use the name my parents gave me, but I am thinking of trying a new name. Would that help me feel more like I could reclaim myself?

—Wondering about My Name

Dear Wondering,

You ask a deep and important question: How do I claim who I am for myself? You have taken an intentional step by shifting what you call your parents. Dropping the titles “Mom” and “Dad” in favor of their given names can create a notable psychological shift. For many adult children, this isn’t done out of cruelty, but out of a desire for emotional distance. It can symbolically remove the weight of your parents authority, helping you see them not through the lens of your childhood dependency, but as separate, complex individuals who have their own histories and struggles.

But as you’ve discovered, changing what you call your parents only goes partway. It creates space, but it doesn’t necessarily fill that space with the clarity you are seeking. As you look to shed the identity you developed growing up in your home, you are wondering if changing your given name would help with that process.

Names Hold Meaning and History

Names can carry a multiplicity of meanings. Long before a child arrives, parents dream, hope, reflect upon their ancestries, and respond to internal wishes as they choose baby names. They might name a baby for an important ancestor to anchor them to a lineage, or choose a name like Roberta to connect them to a father. Sometimes a name reflects a family’s lack of preparation or a sudden surprise—like a hurried nickname when they were expecting a boy and gave birth to a girl.

Naming raises the fundamental question: How do we come to know who we are in the first place?

Psychological theories suggest that identity is initially built through how others respond to us. In early childhood, we develop what sociologist Charles Cooley called the “looking-glass self”—we learn who we are through the reflections, reactions, and expectations of our primary caregivers. If they look at us and see someone able, fragile, or responsible, we see that reflection as who we are. As we grow, we become more aware of own views and perceptions of who we are—an important step toward individuation.

In mid-late adolescence, we enter what psychologist Erik Erikson called the “Identity vs. Role Confusion” phase of development. In this stage, our central task is to more completely separate from our family narrative and form an independent sense of ourselves. Finding our adult identity requires us to turn our gaze away from the family mirror to determine which parts of us were accurately reflected, and which parts we need to re-claim for ourselves.

Does My Name = Me?

Because we are called our name multiple times daily as we grow, our given name inevitably becomes fused with who we are. Our family dynamics contribute heavily to the shaping of that identity. If you grew up feeling you needed to be the quiet one, the high-achiever, or the emotional caretaker, your birth name can become deeply intertwined with the roles you assumed.

Relationship expert Esther Perel speaks to the internal struggle between connection and autonomy—the lifelong dance of “How do I connect to you without losing me?” When an adult child experiences deep emotional suffering within the family system, they may feel the only way to develop a separate identity is to step away. This need not sever the connection, but will require adjustment from all family members.

Shedding or altering their given name is a way for some to claim their separate identity. Narrative Therapy speaks directly to this power of “re-authoring” our lives. Choosing a new name can serve as a declaration of your readiness to write a new chapter of your identity in your own words.

I think of a friend who spent her early life in the role of the cute, placating girl, and later, woman. In childhood, her natural charm was how she navigated her parents’ high-conflict relationship. As an adult, that role no longer served her; it kept her from expressing her own capacities, intelligence, and autonomy. As she worked to claim her own authority, she chose to change her name to one that felt more genuine to how she perceived herself and who she wanted to become. Her new name acted as a clear signal that she was transitioning into a life where she could be strong rather than accommodating.

Making Use of the Power of Names and Naming

If you are reflecting on your own relationship to your name, consider these practical steps and entry points:

• Notice your internal response: Do a scan of how you respond when you hear your name. What do you notice? Are you comfortable with what your name brings up, or does the resonance of your name bring wishes for change, not only in your past, but in your future?

• Explore the origin: Understand the history of your given name and consider if you wish to continue to identify with that origin or disconnect from it. Does your name currently feel like a gift, a burden, or both?

• Evaluate the relational impact: Consider the power of the name those closest to you call you. Are there aspects of those relationships that could change in a positive way if you alter the name you are called?

• Test it with loved ones: If you want to try a new name, start with a temporary change among a small circle of close, willing friends. See if the new name brings you the sense of fresh possibility you are hoping for. If it feels comfortable, you can gradually broaden the circle.

• Try reframing: If you don’t want to change your name, but you do want to change your association with it, look to Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön. She suggests that we often get hooked by the rigid narratives of our past pain, and advises learning to sit with the raw, unconditioned self underneath those labels. You can practice viewing your given name not as an anchor to childhood struggles, but simply as a word—one that you could redefine with your own adult meaning.

• Explore alternative tools: Remember that changing a name is only one path. Other powerful ways to shift your self-perception include psychotherapy, support groups, journaling, or taking up entirely new practices—such as meditation, new forms of movement (like yoga), joining communities aligned with your aspirations, or engaging in activities that feel more congruent with who you are becoming.

_________________________________

So, Dear Wondering,

Naming is clearly on your mind: both what you are called and what you call others. You are hoping to change your experience with others as well as your self-perception. There are many paths to achieving this, and changing your name is a powerful option you can try.

I support you in finding ways to experience yourself as you would like to become and being seen by others as you wish to be seen.

Best,

Kathy

P.S. If you want to practice moving through these stuck places together, I’m presenting a workshop on August 1 with Ann Dyer, the founder of Mountain Yoga. We’ll gather in Oakland and on Zoom for an afternoon of gentle yoga, journaling, and talking through how estrangement lives in the body. You can find more info and reserve your spot here: https://www.m-yoga.org/living-with-estrangement.html

Please reach out to me in the Comments Section or at ksinsheimermft@gmail.com

This is column #42

Six months ago, my close friendship of many years ended in a note on a card. We had a pet name we called each other. Over the years, we always started our cards “Dear (pet name).” This card began “Dear (my real name).” We’ve processed things over the years, and I thought we were doing a good job of airing our differences. In the card, she ended our friendship and asked me not to contact her. My heart hurts. I’ve been working with the pain, and it’s gotten better, but sometimes, Yikes!

A meditation column I subscribe to suggests that friendship loss is a growth opportunity—that every moment of growth is also a small death as you leave something behind. Can you help me see how to take some of those small steps while grieving? I might be stuck.

Shocked, Grieving, and a Little Curious

Dear Shocked, Grieving, and Curious,

I’m so sorry to hear about the loss of your friendship. Your friend couldn’t keep working on the relationship problems with you, and gave up your friendship instead. In my Oceanic Loss model, you are past the Tidal Wave (the shock phase) and are currently in Rough Waters. Several of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s phases of grief apply here; you are no longer in Denial, but you may very well be experiencing Anger and Depression as you struggle toward Acceptance.

Accepting estrangement is very challenging. You’re accepting the absence of someone who is very much alive—an experience that is incredibly different from accepting the loss of someone who has died. Their choice to estrange you is deeply hurtful because it is a form of rejection. When we are rejected, we feel devalued, dismissed, unwanted.

A very small version of this is when someone gives us the Silent Treatment. The silent one acts as if you are not worth their attention or conversation, but they remain nearby. Their silence serves as a protest over your behavior. As the recipient of the silent treatment, you know that—even though it can sometimes feel like a long silence—it is temporary. In estrangement, your loved one takes themselves away not temporarily, but in a manner that seems permanent.

Your friend couldn’t find a way to successfully share with you what she wanted you to know was wrong. I don’t know if she tried or she didn’t, but ultimately, she felt she couldn’t convey what she wanted to, so she stepped away. In a long life, I wonder if almost everyone winds up on one side or the other of this experience at least once. Having to leave someone because you can’t communicate what you feel you need to can be very painful. Being left because communication has failed is reciprocally painful. No one comes out a winner.

Friendship Breakup Hurts!

Last year, I was close to a friend breakup. I will call the friends “Susan” and “Maddy.” They were very close, exchanging messages daily and serving as an important part of each other’s support systems. For Susan, something had shifted in their relationship—she felt Maddy had become inexplicably aggressive towards her. No amount of trying to talk together conveyed how Susan felt Maddy was mistreating her.

When Maddy couldn’t take in Susan’s concerns, Susan explained she had to take a break in the friendship until she felt Maddy could stop being aggressive. Susan was devastated. Their friendship was deeply meaningful and now taking a break was her only option. Their break has become more-or-less permanent, as the communication impasse continued.

The breakup has been deeply painful for both of them. Maddy has been hurt, and Susan is in pain as well, missing Maddy and experiencing her frustration at not being understood. I think when we are the rejected one, it can be difficult to realize that the rejecting one could be feeling awful as well. I promise neither side feels good.

I hope it helps to hear that friends go through this. It must have hurt not to see your pet name on your friend’s card. I am guessing she felt a kind of powerlessness in your friendship dynamic and was trying to regain a sense of control. If she wrote your given name and not your pet name, she could gain a sense of distance. (I often find a parallel dynamic where estranged adult children call their parents by their first names. I think they are trying to re-identify their parents as ordinary humans, to remove them from their key parental role.) It probably seemed like your friend took the upper hand, but more likely she was trying to get a grip on a ledge in order not to fall.

Breakup is a Growth Opportunity? You Have to be Kidding Me!

Of course at first, when we are rejected, we don’t think: This is a growth opportunity! My friend has dumped me and I want to grow! (Ugh!) But we can try to get there.

“Every becoming is built on a small dying.” — From Meditate with Heart

In other words, when you are in pain, the energy of that pain could start a small fire in you that helps you grow through and then beyond the pain.

How IS this a growth opportunity? Take time to examine how your friendship was working for you, as well. Were there things you wanted to flag but couldn’t figure out how? Could there have been a way you were outgrowing the friendship and were unaware? Had you recreated unhealthy patterns from your earlier family life that you wanted to change?

For example, we may find ourselves reenacting relationship dynamics from growing up. Susan and Maddy had a power dynamic in their relationship modeled on their earlier family lives. Susan was a little afraid of Maddy. Maddy brought a need for power into the relationship, and for quite a while, Susan complied, trying to please Maddy to keep her happy and preserve their friendship. These roles were familiar, and worked until something shifted.

It’s possible Susan had become less amenable to placating Maddy, and this had caused Maddy to up the ante—to be more aggressive, hoping to reassert her power. This made Susan even less willing, leading to her pulling away. Enacting their dynamics from their own families initially brought them together because they were familiar. Later, fatigue with playing these roles led to the dissolution of their relationship.

She Won’t Communicate—What Do I Do?

You have been silenced in your friendship—a place no one likes.

What to do? Try journaling. You have not been silenced to yourself. Write what you would have liked to say. What you would have liked to work out. What you wanted to make understood that you couldn’t.

As you reach beyond that friendship loss to create new opportunities for closeness, one thing you will see is how you may have relied upon that friend in areas of both strength and weakness. There may be ways you have grown beyond your friend that you only see as you step into a future without her. Perhaps when you had a particular type of problem, you always took it to her, almost reflexively. Without her, what do you notice? You may find that you actually have learned and can problem-solve on your own some of the time. You may find that others have good ideas to help you with difficulties in ways that are unexpected. There may be new people that you want to know, or people who have been more peripheral in your life that you want to know better—all of whom can enrich your life now that you are looking at the world differently.

Two things are key here:

• Your friendship was valuable and important to you. It can still be in your heart and memory. In a way, your friend lives inside you and will always be there.

• There are people in your life who want to know you and support you. When you look at them with fresh eyes, you will find opportunities for new, enriching connections that you hadn’t seen before.

Ways to Reframe

• You didn’t volunteer for this growth opportunity, but embrace it. Estrangement is a deeply painful human experience. Looking for ways to grow within your estrangement will help you process and move forward.

• Journal to memorialize: Write about your friendship in valuing ways to honor the genuine good that it held.

• Talk with trusted friends: Allow yourself to be angry and let others support you in that anger. But also remember to hold space for the value of what you once had with each other.

• Create a small ceremony: Value your lost friendship with a personal ritual. This is a way to complete your old chapter and to intentionally begin a new one.

• Honor your history: That friendship will always be important and meaningful to you, even as you move on. Be as respectful of the friendship and your feelings of loss as you can be.

• Build a stepping stone: Finding a way to let the loss be a catalyst for self-discovery values both you and the journey you shared.

_______________

So, Dear Shocked, Grieving and Curious,

Your heart hurts at the loss of your deep, long friendship. There is extra sting because you were rejected by your friend. It seemed like she gave up instead of trying to work things out. Of course that is hurtful, as if you were being dismissed. My sense is that your friend didn’t have the capacity to let you know what she hoped to convey to you, and instead circled her wagons. This is a loss for both of you—you couldn’t have the difficult but generative conversations your friendship needed. You would have tried if you had been given the opportunity.

My wish for you is that your stepping stone emerges as the swirling waters subside. And that your growth from your loss serves you well as you offer your heart connection to lucky others in your future human connections.

Best,

Kathy

P.S. If you want to practice moving through these stuck places together, I’m presenting a workshop on August 1 with Ann Dyer, the founder of Mountain Yoga. We’ll gather in Oakland and on Zoom for an afternoon of gentle yoga, journaling, and talking through how estrangement lives in the body. You can find more info and reserve your spot here: https://www.m-yoga.org/living-with-estrangement.html

Please reach out to me in the Comments Section or at ksinsheimermft@gmail.com

This is column #41

You suggest being in touch with my feelings. The estrangement blogs on Substack talk about sadness, anger, resentment, grief, fear—all of it. Sometimes my estrangement is so overwhelming that I can’t tell what I am feeling. I’m not even sure I CAN feel. If being in touch with my feelings is supposed to help, what if I am numb?

And WHY am I numb? I was never good at naming my feelings. Now, I either feel numb or like I am drowning. Can you help me sort this out?

— Confused, Troubled and Numb

Dear Confused and Numb,

You are probably experiencing emotional overwhelm from having too many feelings at once. If you were never very good at identifying your feelings, and now you are flooded with them, your numbness may come from overload. Estrangement often brings a deluge of cascading responses. Picture yourself under a waterfall with the water pounding over you. Estrangement can be an emotional version of that pounding, surging, relentless stream.

You shared that you were never very good at naming your feelings. Learning to know what we are feeling—to identify what we are feeling, name it, get to know that feeling and work with it—is a lifelong challenge for many of us.

Why Feelings Go Incognito

There are three main reasons why we have trouble naming our feelings:

• A Breakdown in Connection: The psychological term for having “no words for emotion” is alexithymia. When this happens, your body can be having physical feeling responses—your heart is racing, you may be tearing up, in other words using the language of the body. However, the language of your body is not connecting to the language of your mind. You have no words.

• A Learned Defense: If you grew up in a home where your feelings were dismissed, ignored, or met with, “Stop crying,” you learned very early that having emotions was unsafe or even dangerous. You may not have had help understanding what you were feeling, or how to learn from emotional experience. To survive, you built a habit of suppressing feelings. Decades later, those neural pathways connecting your physical body to your conscious awareness have lost strength and may need to go to an emotions gym.

• The Subconscious Shield: Sometimes, your mind draws a line for self-protection. When an emotion-filled experience like estrangement is too threatening to bear, your subconscious may step in to shield you. You may wind up numb or begin to intellectualize to keep you from drowning in the impact. The numbing is protecting you.

The Contribution of Parenting

Those who raised us are our first teachers about our emotional life. Our body shows us what we are feeling with physical surges of sorrow, anger, disappointment, joy, desire. The first people who help us translate those surges into words and teach us to be emotionally aware about ourselves and others are our caregivers. A number of my readers are parents, so you will also know this from teaching your own children about their emotional lives.

When we are babies, if we show a feeling, and our caring adult can help us, they will name the feeling and offer help. They give us words: “You are sad or mad or disappointed”—whatever their best guess is about the feelings you are expressing. They also may offer solutions, like, with a baby, soothing the baby, or with a young child, offering words and possible solutions.

“You were so excited about your ice cream cone that you were swinging it around. Then the ice cream fell off on the ground and you were so mad and disappointed. First, let’s see if we can take some breaths to calm down. Then, let’s see if there is any more ice cream.” We offer words, self-soothing, and a possible solution.

You don’t say what your parents did to try to help with your feelings. Not all parents can. Learning to know what you are feeling and how to work with your feelings helps us function in the world. Not being aware can make things harder during emotional stress.

Feeling numb in the face of estrangement may seem disabling to you. Whether you felt the need to estrange, or your close other (child, sister, friend) felt the need to estrange you, it helps to know what you are feeling in order to unpack your internal experience. This, in turn, should help you metabolize your experience.

What I mean by metabolize is to digest and process—turning the thoughts and feelings into understanding and ideas for yourself in the face of your estrangement. This, in turn, could help you better understand your estranged loved one.

If you find you are struggling to feel your feelings, to know, name and express them, I want to offer some explanations and suggestions.

How Do Feelings Happen in My Body?

It helps to understand the ways feelings show up:

• Physiologically: Feelings happen in the body. You might find yourself crying before you even have a conscious thought about why. Your fists might clench and your blood might course before you register the word: Anger.

• Mental Functioning: Your brain may quickly engage with thoughts, sometimes swirling, about what is going on. Typically, emotions emerge as more raw experiences, and are often more black and white. Remember a moment when a song or a movie scene affected you. You were instantly smiling or crying. Then the feeling became more nuanced, perhaps even bitter-sweet. Feelings evolve from their initial moment and can become more complex.

• Mixed Feelings: Emotions are rarely one feeling at once—this ups the level of challenge when trying to understand your feelings. Consider the sibling whose sister made the baseball team when he didn’t. He might feel a dizzying mixture of emotions all at once: proud of his sister, envious that she gets to play, ashamed that he didn’t make the cut, angry at the coach, and embarrassed to sit in the stands.

Sorting through a crowded experience of emotions requires a feelings vocabulary and emotional facility. If your caretakers couldn’t give you those words, you aren’t failing at feeling—you just haven’t been taught the language yet.

Dr. Becky Kennedy, a clinical psychologist known for her work on emotional regulation, often reminds parents—and adults looking to heal—of a fundamental truth:

“To a child, an unnamed feeling feels like a dangerous ghost. When we name the feeling, we take away its power to terrify. The same is true for the child still living inside you.”

To move out of numbness, treat yourself with the same patience, perception, and compassion you would offer a child who is learning something new.

Getting Better at Knowing What You are Feeling

As a therapist, I, of course, recommend psychotherapy to help you be more in touch with your feelings. But, therapy isn’t for everybody. Here are some other options if you haven’t found therapy helpful, don’t have the time or resources, or feel therapy isn’t for you:

• A Two-Second Reset: Before doing any big emotional work, focus on slowing down and establishing safety. Put both feet flat on the floor until you feel your muscles anchor. Place one hand on your heart and one on your belly, and take just one breath where your exhale is longer than your inhale. Tell yourself: “I am safe in this room right now.” Take more similar breaths to help you slow down if one is not enough. Thank you, Dr. Becky, for this model.

• Conduct a Body Scan: Take time to slow down and conduct a body scan. You can find guided body scans on the internet. Pick one that you feel is your frequency: pacing, language, length and good closure.

• Journal to Express and Metabolize Your Thoughts: Make one entry where you write the facts of what is going on. Read your entry and then write your responses to what you just wrote. Be compassionate towards yourself as you write and respond.

• Explore Somatic Practices: Take expressive movement classes or begin a yoga practice that helps you focus on your breathing and your body. Look for gentle, slow approaches to opening your body that are specifically designed to help your nervous system safely reconnect with your physical sensations.

• Start Group Work: Find a support or therapy group designed to help you process your experience with others. Be sure the approach is open, supportive and at a comfortable pace.

____________________________

So, Dear Confused and Numb,

You have asked a brave question. To know your feelings better is a challenging journey. Please be sure you have enough support from friends and family, and that your helpers such as your yoga instructor or support group leader are compassionate and kind.

You will need to feel safe as you open up to a world of feelings that you have, for good reason, shut off until now.

The world of feelings is vast, rich, painful and joyful. I wish you well on your journey toward more fully feeling.

Best,

Kathy

P.S. If you want to practice moving through these stuck places together, I’m presenting a workshop on August 1 with Ann Dyer, the founder of Mountain Yoga. We’ll gather in Oakland and on Zoom for an afternoon of gentle yoga, journaling, and talking through how estrangement lives in the body. You can find more info and reserve your spot here: https://www.m-yoga.org/living-with-estrangement.html

Please reach out to me in the Comments Section or at ksinsheimermft@gmail.com

This is column #40

I have read that there are a higher % of divorced families where the adult child is estranged than if their parents hadn’t divorced. Why do you think that is happening? When our family came apart, we just couldn’t make it work. Then, we had a conflictual divorce. One of our children stopped being able to go back and forth between our two houses. I tried to help her keep seeing the other parent—we even went to therapy. Now my child is estranged from me. I hate to be a statistic when I was actually trying to save our children from the ongoing conflict my partner and I were having. And the divorce was really hard.

Now this?

— Confused, Disappointed and Wishing it Weren’t So

Dear Confused, Disappointed and Wishing,

I am sorry to hear that your efforts to save your family from high level stress in your home led to a conflictual divorce, and to a rupture in your child’s relationship with their other parent. And now, this history may have contributed to that same child estranging you! Reading what I just wrote makes me wonder if your adult life has felt like a series of connections and separations in your relationships. And, when it’s one of your children, that deeply stings.

Unfortunately, all family members suffer in divorce. When we divorce, we hope to reduce suffering, but it can be very painful to make it to the other side. Children suffer from the disruption of their home lives. They were used to one house and now they are supposed to live in two. They were used to both parents being at home, and then they only saw one parent at a time. When parents are fighting, sometimes children feel pulled to take sides. That side-taking can result in court battles if the child is unwilling to even see the other parent. Court battles make divorce last even longer, and cause even more financial strain.

Divorce is hard, and I want to be sure to say clearly that I know it must have been hard for you. The rest of this column will look at your question of how your divorce might have led to being part of that estrangement statistic you asked about in your letter.

Children make accommodations to divorce: living in 2 homes, being without one parent while living with the other can be hard on young children. Once, a pair of 9 and 10-year-old brothers told me they missed the other parent at first, but then they “got good at it.” Some children have more trouble than those brothers. Sometimes they can’t make the adjustment and refuse to follow the custody plan, like in your family. I think these kids feel that the only way to keep themselves going in the divorce is to opt out. They enact their own plans instead of following the parents’ plans. They opt to stay at one home. Sometimes they won’t see the other parent at all. This is hard on everyone, but it is the child’s way of coping. Therapy can be helpful at this point, and you did that.

Now, your child is an adult and the living arrangements are different. They are in charge of their own lives and make decisions about who to see and how much to see them. Here is how childhood experience with divorce may contribute at this point:

Children who have experienced divorce have learned that sometimes when people have big enough difficulties, they have to separate. That you can let go of someone who has been significantly important to you if you aren’t doing well enough together. Sometimes children wind up living with a newly configured family if their parent re-partners. That is something they learn how to do too, as best they can. Skills of adaptation can be learned in this environment, but it can also lead to a deep longing for choices over who you live with and relate to. And, once you are an adult, it can lead to you wanting to make choices about the degree and intensity of contact with formerly close family members—sometimes feeling that need to make the choice pretty intensely. Like the heart turning away in the drawing, it is a way to keep the wound safe. Sometimes, this can lead to a period of estrangement.

I think part of what’s really hard, here, is that you, the parent, were trying to make life better for yourself and your children. You thought that leaving your high-conflict relationship would ultimately give all of you a more peaceful and productive family life. You didn’t mean to hurt your children—you meant to make things better for everybody. And now you are estranged!

This is the last thing you would have wanted. Sometimes parents in your situation tell me that they were formerly very close to the child who has estranged. When you were divorcing and for some time after, this closeness may have felt like security for your child, and it possibly felt to you as a reassurance that you had done the right thing.

Divorce can lead to some children feeling increasingly independent early on as they manage their lives between two households. But for others, that intense dependency on you seems like the only protection from the shifting foundation of the family. Psychic muscle development takes time. Now that your child is grown, they may feel needs for independence that they couldn’t feel or actualize before, but have the capacity to enact now. When grown enough, that more dependent child may suddenly initiate a strong push away to accomplish those postponed developmental tasks that need their attention. They may feel they need to take on these tasks completely on their own, in order for the accomplishment to be truly theirs.

Self-Care, as You Accept the Possibility that You are an Estrangement Statistic

• Be thoughtful about reviewing the history of your marriage, separation, and divorce. Divorce is difficult in innumerable ways, and these may come up as you review the past. Painful memories and negative thoughts about your choices will likely arise in your “retrospectiscope”—that rearview mirror of hindsight that can shows us our past, colored with emotion and the passage of time. As you go over this history, please be as kind and gentle with yourself as you are able. That being said, if you can learn something that is useful for the future—if you can picture more from your child’s perspective—it may help you develop a more current understanding of your adult child.

• Sometimes, when remembering, it adds color to include information from your own life history. How your childhood led you to your choice of partner, and how that led to you having children with your partner but also to your divorce. Compassion for your own history, your possible missteps, fissures as well as growth—is key to making it through life, including making peace with your divorce.

• Accepting the long-term fallout of divorce is painful but helpful. You needed to divorce your partner, and you saw it as better for the family. It turned out that it was really hard for all of you, and may be a contributor to your current estrangement. This is not what you wanted, at all, but it is what is happening. See if you can accept your child’s need to estrange and know that divorce may be a factor in the estrangement. This could be painful, but might ease some of your discomfort as you navigate your way through the current distance your child has brought to your relationship.

• Self-care is essential. Continue to find and make use of the best ways to care for yourself as you travel the rocky terrain of your estrangement. Processing your estrangement could include a chapter where you sift through your divorce for clues. This makes sense, but be careful not to see it as an opportunity to beat yourself up. There is enough pain in your situation as it is—it would be kindest if you did not inflict even more upon yourself.

________________________

So, Dear Wishing,

You asked, “Now this?” We will never know if or what your divorce has contributed to your estrangement. Reviewing your divorce history may help you think more about this question.

To be clear, I am not telling you this is something you need to do. I am guessing that, since you asked the question, you have already started to wonder, and this can lead to deep excavation, so I am simply saying: while taking accountability, be compassionate with yourself in that process.

Wishing you the best on this part of your journey,

Kathy

P.S. If you want to practice moving through these stuck places together, I’m presenting a workshop on August 1 with Ann Dyer, the founder of Mountain Yoga. We’ll gather in Oakland and on Zoom for an afternoon of gentle yoga, journaling, and talking through how estrangement lives in the body. You can find more info and reserve your spot here: https://www.m-yoga.org/living-with-estrangement.html

Please contact me through the Comments section or email me at ksinsheimermft@gmail.com

This is column # 39

You mention caring for our bodies, how we feel emotion in our bodies, and even how estrangement can settle into our bodies. What do you mean? Can you explain it more? I have aches and pains. Sometimes I think I am getting sick, or I even get sick. Is that what you mean? I get how feelings are felt in the body, but are you saying they get stuck there? And what should I do if they are? Please explain.

—Tired, Sore, Sad, Wondering

Dear Tired, in Pain and Wondering,

What you are describing is sometimes referred to as “somatizing.” Your “soma” is your body. Feelings are felt throughout your body and can get lodged there. Sometimes we know we need to cry (or are crying) or yell (or are yelling). That shows us what we are feeling. But sometimes feelings are expressed more within your body, like a headache or stomach pains. These are harder to read, decipher, and yet they can be expressions of emotions as well.

Estrangement is a painful experience that gives rise to many feelings. Anger and sadness are frequent, but also we can feel adrift, longing, hurt, scared, lonely, fuzzy headed. Our feelings can fluctuate like we are tumbling in waves. Part of what’s tricky is that, when we don’t feel well, we don’t necessarily know why. The feeling or pain we are having doesn’t identify itself as coming from the argument we had yesterday, or the loss we are experiencing in an ongoing way in our lives. It’s just there, aching or tiring us or making us wonder if we have something really wrong with us.

Check Into Your Symptoms

Before we explore the somatic map of where emotion hides its pain, a vital note: Always consult your medical provider first. It is essential to have the examinations and tests prescribed by a medical professional to rule out or treat physical issues. Once you have established that baseline that you are medically safe, you could try alternative models to address the emotions in your body.

The Somatic Reality of Loss

Grief is felt emotionally and physically. For example, your nervous system can get stuck in a state of chronic hyper-vigilance, where a constant flood of stress hormones creates a persistent “bracing” that eventually leads to deep muscle fatigue and systemic inflammation.

Here is how “bracing” works: If you begin to breathe shallowly to avoid feeling the depth of your pain, your diaphragm instinctively tightens. After a period of unconsciously restricting your diaphragm, your neck begins to pull in compensation. If this pattern continues over time, that tightness becomes chronic—and you begin to experience a neck that hurts most of the time. This is one very common way emotional pain settles into a physical location. Sometimes we say feelings are lodged in the body. This is what we mean. They have taken up residence.

Loss from estrangement can steal your sleep, disrupt your digestive system, cause frequent head or muscle aches or just leave you over tired. In my Oceanic Loss model, I show the waters circulating through phases of loss. This is because loss in estrangement can be endless—you can cycle through the stages repeatedly. I will paste that image at the bottom of the column. My visual image is meant to explain and affirm what you are experiencing.

“Feel the feeling. Let it be as big as the ocean. If you can stay with the physical sensation of the pain without trying to escape it, it begins to move through you.” — Pema Chödrön

How to Begin “Unsticking” the Pain

Once your doctor has given you the medical “all clear,” consider these pathways to help assuage your pain:

• Somatic Movement: Walking, yoga, or dance therapy. These aren’t just for physical fitness; they are structural tools to physically move through and clear out the stress that resides in your muscles. Moving in these ways can feel uncomfortable at first, because it gets things (including feelings) moving. After you begin, your body and feelings will move with more fluidity, feeling more comfortable and relieved.

It is also good to move—exercise can help you feel better and healthier.

• Narrative Expression: Journaling or support groups help you put your feelings to words. Giving language to the “unsaid” provides an opportunity to name and express, ensuring the energy doesn’t remain lodged in your jaw or chest, cycling in a permanent repeat loop of pain.

• Stillness & Breath: Meditation and breathing into your diaphragm help lower your sense of tension in your body. These intentional acts signal to your nervous system that it is safe to relax the “bracing” and let the muscular armor soften, shifting you out of fight-or-flight alertness.

• Voice Work: Finding a safe environment to speak, chant, or sing. Your throat is a common place for emotional constriction to lodge. Expressing yourself out loud, somewhere you feel safe, helps clear that tension and give words to your pain.

____________________________________

So, Dear Tired, in Pain, and Wondering,

You are not alone in feeling “not quite right.” It’s important to point out that we use the same word for physical pain (remember that pain scale at the doctors: Is it a 2 or an 8?) and emotional pain. If we are hurting emotionally, we may be able to move the pain with writing or sharing or acupuncture or yoga. Loving ourselves when we are in pain can be challenging, but giving ourselves opportunities to move and express ourselves can help us make our way to more clarity or possibly just feel better.

When a primary relationship is severed, our sense of ourselves has a hole in it. Your body is trying to brace against that absence. Caring for yourself when you are feeling that emptiness can be challenging. But by giving your body the opportunity to move, breathe, and express what it is carrying, you allow the waters (your feelings) to circulate. You begin to open a way toward understanding—or perhaps, find the relief of breathing a little easier.

Warmly,

Kathy

P.S. If you want to practice moving through these stuck places together, I’m presenting a workshop on August 1 with Ann Dyer, the founder of Mountain Yoga. We’ll gather in Oakland and on Zoom for an afternoon of gentle yoga, journaling, and talking through how estrangement lives in the body. You can find more info and reserve your spot here: https://www.m-yoga.org/living-with-estrangement.html

Please reach out to me in the Comments Section or at ksinsheimermft@gmail.com

This is column #38

Mother’s Day is always a challenge. We are mothers, children, and grandchildren, and many of us have observed decades of these Sundays. On a holiday like this, there is often a collision of love and obligation; a sense of both hope and disappointment. Our love for our parents—and our children’s love for us—is likely tinged with ambivalence.

Some of us will send a text or receive a silence. Some will sign an obligatory card—or receive one—containing a sentiment that feels slightly untrue. There are those grieving a parent who is gone, and those missing a child who has simply walked away. Some of us are looking back, wishing we’d had more help growing up, while others are looking at the present, wishing for a closeness that remains out of reach. Because this day highlights a connection that inherently contains ambivalence, it will always be a day of complicated feelings. It is a tricky day.

This letter is from me, today. I want to talk about the dual challenge of being a mother and having a mother. Most mother-child relationships begin in the deepest intimacy possible: one life residing inside another. We move from that total biological union through the profound transition of birth, into the dependency of infancy, and finally into the slow, sometimes wrenching process of individuation.

Our initial bonds are physical—being carried, strapped to a chest, tucked into strollers, then trikes, then bikes, and finally into vehicles, seemingly driving independently away. There is no more intimate relationship in life, and none that requires more demanding flexibility. As the child grows and changes, the mother is pressured to grow with them.

So, the questions I am holding today are these:

• How do we love someone who is ever-changing?

• How do we master the impossible art of attaching and detaching in turn?

• If a child takes space in a way that is painful, how do we work through that grief to ensure we remain well ourselves?

• How do we remember that “grief begins with love” (thank you Julia Samuel) when that relationship includes many degrees of separation?

Mother’s Perspective:

Falling and Balancing

We spend decades trying to figure out how much space to take—a lifelong effort to find our center while in motion. In the beginning, the closeness is delicious: warmth without words. But as a child grows, that same proximity can start to feel uncomfortable. The very thing that was once a source of nourishment begins to feel like an interference. For a child to find where they begin and their mother ends, they often feel a visceral need to move away. As Jamaica Kincaid once wrote:

“The love I had for her was a giant thing that could barely fit into the world. And then it became something else—something that made me want to be anywhere else but near her.”

Expect to feel off-balance. The “dance” of motherhood and daughterhood requires us to constantly re-find our center as the relationship—and the people in it—evolve.

Many of you are navigating a painful silence from your own children, yet you are also daughters. Perhaps you sent a card today to your own mother—a woman you love, but whose presence makes you feel stifled or misunderstood. We often find ourselves “performing” closeness while internally feeling a profound ambivalence. We tolerate the discomfort because we feel we should. Sometimes, in order to feel close to our mothers, we have had to give up a piece of ourselves.

When we access our own history of wanting space, we can begin to see our children’s distance not as a failure of our mothering, but as a necessary—albeit painful—expression of their own self-discovery.

Ambivalence as an Expression of Love

As Ocean Vuong writes, the mother is the first horizon a child ever knows, which eventually makes her the first obstacle they must overcome:

“They say a mother is a story that never ends. But for a child, a mother is also the first wall you have to climb over to see the rest of the world.”

When a child begins to pull away, the mother can feel it as a physical sting. I think of a friend who once drove hundreds of miles to visit her mother, only to be met at the door with a sharp: “You don’t want to be here!” The tragedy was that it was true. My friend was holding two conflicting truths: she desired contact with her mother, and she wanted to be anywhere else at the same time. Her mother, feeling that conflict, couldn’t hold her own hurt. She fell to the aggressive side of her pain, landing in anger rather than her love that lay beneath it.

Perhaps the error we make is expecting not to feel complex feelings in these intimate roles. Since they are inevitable, we might have a better Mother’s Day if we expect them—or even embrace them. If the card could say: “I love you, but sometimes I can’t be near you.”

Child’s Perspective:

Reclaiming the Day

Motherhood is the best role you will ever star in, but it is also the hardest. At times, it is the least desirable job in the world because it requires you to embody the very person your child must push away from in order to find themselves. As Cheryl Strayed noted:

“Mothers are the people who love us with a terrifying, unyielding love, and from whom we eventually have to walk away to find ourselves. It is the most beautiful and most brutal thing we do.”

We don’t have to be defined by the card aisle. We can reclaim this day with all of the ambivalent, messy feelings. Whether we observe it with our mothers, our children, or in the quiet space where they used to be, we can honor the growth the relationship offered us.

If your phone is silent today, practice self-care (mother yourself). Appreciate the ways you have loved and been loved. The ways you have held steady—even when you were the door your child needed to step through to find their own home. Remember: grief begins with love. Silence may be a very difficult chapter—not the whole book.

Best Wishes,

Kathy

Please reach out to me at ksinsheimermft@gmail.com or in the “Comments” section.

This is column # 37

We have been estranged from our son, his wife, and our two granddaughters for over 11 years. Looking back at the beginning of that separation, we still wonder what activated the “flamethrower” he directed at us.

While we have finally established respected guardrails after years of trial and error, we deeply wish we’d had your advice at the start. It would have saved us so much sorrow, guilt, and the mistakes we made in our approach to processing what was happening to our family. We realize now that our first step should have been to stop standing in the path of our son’s “flame-throwing.”

Can you offer specific advice for parents on how to avoid or minimize that initial damage and the power struggles that follow?

— Regretful, Sadder but Wiser, With Guardrails

Dear Regretful,

Thank you for your vulnerable letter. Years of estrangement are deeply painful, and the inflamed response you describe—what often feels like a “flamethrower” at the start—is an emotional firestorm experience that few understand unless they have stood in its path.

When I use the term “flamethrower,” I am referring to the fiery, angry words that erupt from a state of deep dysregulation. If you are in fight-or-flight, you have no perspective—only raw, upset, scared, and angry feelings. Because the shock of estrangement feels like an emergency, the amygdala responds to the perceived danger by flaming up—spewing raw emotion and reactive words.

Most often this inflammation is rarely one sided. When you hear the words “I am cutting you off,” your own alarm system is likely to ignite. The sudden pain of that rejection can send you into your own state of fight-or-flight, causing your “flamethrower” to reignite in return. It is incredibly difficult to maintain a “low-heat” presence when you are shaking from a survival-level threat to your connections with loved ones.

My suggestions for the early stages of a rupture aren’t intended to imply you did something “wrong.” You probably responded as you had as a parent, with typical parental authority: making requests, setting boundaries, and communicating expectations. When your child feels the need to estrange, however, these techniques are rarely helpful. You will need to access the internal space required to catch your breath, allowing you to fully take in and respectfully respond to what your child is telling you. The roles have really switched, and you are called upon to switch with them.

A Change in Who is Piloting

When a younger child needs guidance, parents can step in with parental authority. Dr. Becky Kennedy uses the image of the parent taking over as the pilot. There are times the younger child can’t be flying the plane because they are not making good choices.

When adult children take space, they are piloting the plane without our guidance. Whether or not parents think an adult child is making good choices, they are now the pilot of their own plane.

If parents try to assert parental authority during this time—even out of a sincere desire to help—it can feel to adult children like a high-altitude hijacking. They may react with an “inflamed” intensity because they do not feel listened to or understood. Stepping back isn’t “giving up”—it’s the most important act of love you can offer: recognizing that they are now the navigator of their own life.

How Childhood Has Changed

Adult children today face challenges that were unanticipated thirty years ago. As developmental psychologist Peter Gray (a research professor at Boston College) and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt (a professor at New York University) suggest, the shift toward a more digital childhood changed the traditional training grounds for face-to-face negotiation.

Your adult child’s communication methods are different from yours—they are shaped by growing up with digital communication and its powerful component—cut off. When an adult child reaches for cutoff, it is often a sincere, self-protective measure. Cut off is a communication they grew up with. For them, distance isn’t seen as a weapon; it’s a self-protective way they feel they can regulate an inflamed nervous system and find the safety they need to grow.

The Gayle King Paradox: Intent vs. Impact

We saw this dynamic recently in a cultural moment when Gayle King asserted that if her children ever estranged her, she would sit on their doorstep until they spoke to her.

To a parent, this sounds like appropriate use of parental authority and unwavering devotion. But to an adult child who is sincerely trying to protect their own psychological health, that same act can feel like an intrusion. It signals that their boundaries don’t apply because the parent is still trying to be the pilot. When we push against a boundary, it often triggers further inflammation, confirming the child’s fear that the only way to be “heard” is to move even further away.

Recommendations for Early Estrangement

Early Estrangement is an experience of painful imbalance. These recommendations are designed to help you center yourself while developing a new, respectful understanding of your child’s perspective.

• Listen to Your Child’s Perspective: When your child voices concerns, do your best to take them in with respect. Look for the truth in what is being said and make adjustments. They are watching to see if you can respond to their requests without reverting to parental “limit setting.” You may be under a microscope for a bit: parents often feel “eggshell-y” in this phase, while adult children feel cautious and on guard.

• Be Curious, not Judgmental: If you have the opportunity for conversation, listen, being sure you understand. Say back what you have understood, checking to see if you “got it.” Ask for clarification if you are unclear. Ask “Is there more?” to hear further elaboration of what your child wants you to understand. Invoke your curiosity in order to better understand your child.

• Respect Boundaries: If they ask for space, or to meet only in neutral, public places, honor that boundary. I recall one parent whose child would only meet outside. She brought extra layers of clothing and didn’t try to alter the plan. She knew that meeting on her child’s terms was the highest value—it showed she was willing to prioritize their comfort over her own authority.

• Transition from the Pilot’s Seat: You are moving from a role of authority to a role where your child is fully in their pilot’s seat. This transition brings up many feelings, and it is best to process those with trusted friends, a support group or a therapist. Your child is doing the best they can to differentiate and likely doesn’t have the bandwidth for your pain right now.

• Accept Differing Realities: If they present a version of history that doesn’t match yours, try to understand the feeling behind what you are being told. Validating their experience doesn’t mean you have to “agree” on every fact; it means you are prioritizing the relationship over the need to be “right.”

• Assume They Still Care: Usually, it is the relationship dynamic they are struggling with, not you as a person. Many adult children express that they love their parents, but simply cannot maintain their own psychological health while remaining in the current dynamic. They are taking this step away because they are sincerely trying to figure out how to build a healthy, sustainable life.

• Summon Compassion for Everyone Involved: When a family member or friend takes space, it is because they are hurting. These boundaries—whether they manifest as silence or new rules for contact—are established for emotional safety. Offer understanding where possible, and hold compassion in your heart for yourself as well as your loved one. You are both hurting, both confused, and both wishing for a sense of security. The new boundaries are tools to help, hopefully temporarily, as you find a steadier path toward better relating.

Finding the Way Back

So, Dear Regretful, Sadder and Wiser,

Thank you for asking this on behalf of those just beginning—for the guidance you wish you had had 11 years ago.

As you look in your rearview mirror, I would appreciate hearing how these ideas resonate with your experience. Please share your own advice; your journey will undoubtedly help others find their footing.

It is deeply painful—often shocking—to be suddenly estranged. When you were reeling, you naturally hoped to course-correct, but the trail map you were using didn’t have helpful coordinates for this new terrain. It is understandable that, for awhile, you wound up further off-course than when you started.

I am glad you have found your way back to a place of stability. While “guardrails” and “eggshells” may be the norm for now, there is always the possibility that future conversations—rooted in new understanding—might pave the way for more closeness. Learning to be together, to talk together, and to resolve differences takes patience, trial and error, and above all, time.

The Bottom Line: You cannot control an inflamed response in another person, but you can modulate your own response. Stepping back or aside is an act of profound respect—it preserves the possibility of a future bridge once the Calmer Seas return.

Best,

Kathy

Please reach out to me at ksinsheimermft@gmail.com or through the Comments section.

This is column # 36

Dear Kathy,

In my family, we were taught that action yields results. We learned to work hard to get things done, but we never learned the power of not doing—until now.

Our adult son has stopped all contact. He ignores family plans and has even stopped responding to legal documents regarding his inheritance. While others suggest he just needs “space,” to us, this silence feels aggressive.

Looking back, his internal rhythm never quite synced with our fast-paced household. While we were quick to act, he was more measured and reflective. We often grew frustrated when he didn’t move at our tempo. I worry he grew up feeling like a misfit because we didn’t have the words to value his quieter, more deliberate way of being.

Why I say it feels aggressive is that we’ve ended up worried, angry, and helpless. I don’t know if he means for us to feel this way, but we do. Sometimes I want to fight, I am hurt, or I just hope we can talk. Can you help us out of this impasse?

— Paralyzed, Stymied, Sad, and Mad

Dear Paralyzed and Upset,

I, too, have been surprised to learn about the power of inaction. It holds things up, keeps the waiting recipient on standby, derails progress, and shifts the power dynamic. Inaction can be oddly powerful—and deeply hurtful. You had hoped for a congenial interaction and instead have wound up at impasse after impasse. Any move you make to bridge the gap can leave you feeling “dissed” and lonely for him.

It is important to remember that what looks like a power move to you may feel like a protective insulation to him. He may want to be free of that old feeling that he doesn’t fit in or that something is wrong with him. So, he has stepped away.

The “Mac vs. PC” Mismatch

Since you mentioned a mismatch of temperament, this likely applies: As Dr. Becky Kennedy often notes, much of parent-child conflict comes down to trying to use a “Mac manual to operate a PC child.” If your family manual was “Quick Action = Value,” your son was a PC in a Mac world. He spent years trying to fit in—to be more like you—but running that software crashed his system. His current silence isn’t an operating system problem; it’s him finally uninstalling the programs that didn’t fit who he is.

Why It Makes You Feel “Crazy”

There is a biological reason you feel “stymied.” Dr. Kip Williams, a researcher on ostracism, explains that silence triggers a “Reflexive Cognitive Search.” Because there is no data in silence, your brain loops indefinitely trying to grasp a reason for the void. This consumes mental energy. Your brain is ‘screaming’ because it is wired for reciprocity, but it is currently trapped in the echoing of your own thoughts. The true power of inaction is that it leaves no “hooks.” When someone yells, you can respond. When they make a demand, you can negotiate. But when they do nothing, there is nothing to catch. You find yourself searching for footing on ground that has no traction. You are Velcro without the sticky side, a hook without the eye, a clasp without a catch.

The “Gagged” Sensation

When you aren’t able to share your side or even communicate, you may wind up feeling gagged—like there is tape over your mouth. You are left with a mouthful of unsaid words and a throat that feels tight with the strain of holding back. Feeling silenced is one of the most uncomfortable positions a human being can occupy.

Finding the Hooks Within

If there are no connectors currently available with your child, look for the hooks within yourself. Finding your footing requires building a new “mental schema,” a new way of perceiving a behavior that is fundamentally alien to you.

This is grief work. It requires acknowledging the hole in your heart and beginning to mend it by yourself with your own tools: journaling, centering, and seeking support. It means learning to hold your child in your heart while accepting the painful reality that, for now, they are choosing to live their life separately from yours.

Finding Your Footing

How do you move when the other person won’t move with you?

• Regulate Your Own System: Take the time to slow yourself down. This offers you an opportunity for self-care and space to begin to reflect. Frantic outreach only reinforces his need for insulation. Your goal is to move from the “Tidal Wave” of panic toward a “Calmer Sea.”

• Counter Silence with Your Own Voice: Give voice to your own words. Write in your journal or talk to trusted friends. Create a collage or other art piece. Self-expression is key for you to stabilize.

• Perform a Communication Audit: Look back at your last exchanges. Did you respond with curiosity or judgment? Be prepared to offer a clean apology for specific moments where you didn’t “get” him.

• Validate His Reality: Many children leave because they didn’t feel heard. If the opportunity arises, request a chance to listen better and differently in order to take in what he was telling you.

• The Mac/PC Admission: Tell him: “I’ve been wondering if I spent your childhood trying to use a Mac manual to understand a PC child. I see now that I may have missed who you actually were, and that couldn’t have felt good.”

• Scout for New Data: Ask old teachers, coaches, or family friends how they saw him. They might offer insight into how you may not have seen or valued your child’s strengths.

• Respect the Silence: For now, respect his choice. It is a communication of impasse. Use this time to soften within yourself. Perhaps memories will emerge of difficult times that deserve your apology or curiosity if and when communication resumes.

________________________________

So, Dear Paralyzed and Hurt,

As you can see in the drawing, there are at least three possibilities: The largest circle is the Silence your loved one has chosen. They are choosing it over the fighting (upper right) or the constructive arguing (lower left).

You are in that center circle now. It is lonely, and leaves a hole in your heart that you must reluctantly begin to mend on your own. My wish for you is that you give yourself opportunities for self-expression while creating space in your mind to value your child’s experiences and differences. This will help you hold him lovingly in your mind, and possibly—just possibly—open a space for a new kind of connection.

If and when the opportunity arises, it is time to show him that you have become ready to stand still with him.

Best,

Kathy

Please contact me at Ksinsheimermft@gmail.com or in the Comments section.

This is column # 35

I have saved old texts between me and my mom to remind me of how our arguments go. She gets really upset and “flames” me. She claims to just be sharing her feelings, but she doesn’t realize that “sharing your feelings” does not include things like calling me a “selfish brat.”

When I think about reconciling with my mom, it’s after a period of time with no contact with her flaming part. I feel more loving and less mad; it’s almost like I forget what happened. To make sure I am remembering correctly, I review our old text thread. Whoosh—it all comes back to me. Suddenly, I don’t want to reconcile anymore.

I think if I want to give her a second chance, I need to delete the texts. But then, I won’t have any record and we might just go to that dark place again. What do you recommend?

— Loving, Hurt, Missing, and VERY Cautious

Dear Loving, Hurt, and Cautious,

Before texting, people saved letters from loved ones—for good and for ill. While sending a text provides what feels like immediate relief for powerful feelings, that relief is often fleeting. Sending a heated message doesn’t actually offload the weight of the emotion in a meaningful way. Once the screen goes dark, the feelings linger, the conflict remains, and the wound is now inflamed on both sides.

When you re-read those old texts, you aren’t just remembering them; you are re-inflaming yourself. You are reviving the heat of the anger at a time when you need clarity most.

We Used to Write Letters

When I think about letters that were saved, those letters were at least written by hand—a slower process. They were possibly edited and required a stamp, an envelope, and a walk to the mailbox. All of these steps take time and give space for the writer to think about the impact of their words. Today, we have “Draft” folders where we can place our “hot” emails, but when you are fired up and have access to texting, you have a flamethrower at the ready, and the urge to use it is powerful.

The Science of Recalling

In last week’s column, I described what happens when memory is retrieved. Memory is a reconstruction; we don’t “play back” a tape. Instead, we rebuild the event from fragments of memory every time we recall it.

The amygdala (the brain’s fire alarm) acts like a highlighter. If an event causes stress or fear, the brain “burns” it in more deeply. When you look at those texts, your amygdala doesn’t know the argument happened six months ago; it reacts as if the “selfish brat” comment is happening right now. This sends a surge of cortisol through your system, causing emotional dysregulation. It is nearly impossible to be “vulnerable enough” for reconciliation when your brain is screaming at you to put your armor on or run the other direction.

The Fear of Forgetting

What is it you are afraid you will forget? Are you afraid that the return of your loving feelings will erase the reality of the hurt?

In many families, children learn to suppress their anger to maintain closeness. Tactics like the “silent treatment” are often used by a parent to coerce a child into changing their behavior or offering an apology. When you are a child receiving that silence, you usually feel angry at first—but soon, the weight of the loneliness takes over. You just want to be close to your parent again.

To bridge that gap, many children learn to turn their anger inward as shame, eventually convincing themselves to let go of their outrage just to be back in their parent’s graces. If you grew up this way, or something similar occurred, those saved texts represent a tether to your own truth. They offer a guard against the old habit of succumbing to loneliness, feeling shame, and giving up the legitimacy of your anger.

Please hear me: I am not recommending amnesia. I am recommending that you find a way to honor your history without forcing your nervous system to live in the emotional wreckage of it.

Letting the Charge Disperse

In the drawing, there is an image of a dandelion seed head (sometimes called a “dandelion clock”). The individual seeds blow away in the wind; they are not scattered nearby to grow more weeds. This is the goal: letting the emotional charge scatter.

We want to find a way to store the memory that is respectful of the hurt, but is no longer a hot fire. This allows you to recall the pain when necessary for your safety, but also see a path toward building new understanding.

My Recommendations for Moving Forward

• Move the Record: You don’t have to hit “delete” today. Summarize the texts in a journal or move the thread to a password-protected file on your computer. Get the flamethrower out of your pocket.

• Befriend Your Anger: Value your anger’s importance; it has been your protector for a long time. Ask it to sit in the passenger seat during your next conversation. Let it serve as a memory bank you can consult rather than the driver of the dialogue. You want to be able to access the "data" of your anger without being hijacked by the "heat" of the emotion.

• Snapshot vs. Pattern: Consider if those texts were a snapshot of a particularly uncontained moment, rather than the whole truth of the relationship.

• Vulnerability with Boundaries: Give your hurt feelings space to be heard, but ensure you remain emotionally protected enough to stay grounded.

• Alert your support network: Tell them that you want and need their support—both to avoid reviewing the texts unnecessarily and to help you plan a healthy meeting.

Respect for yourself, your feelings, and your loved one are the keys to a possible reconciliation. By clearing the “digital inflammation,” you are giving yourself the space needed to see if a healthier reconnection is possible.

_________________________________

Dear Loving, Hurt, and Cautious,

You are navigating challenging terrain in your relationship with your mother, and it takes real courage to do so. I hope she receives your offer to talk with a spirit of openness and a willingness to truly hear you.

The truth is, as humans, we aren’t always as skilled as we need to be to get along well with each other—especially when the going is rough. By choosing to approach this conversation with a regulated heart rather than a re-inflamed one, you are taking a significant and hopefully very useful risk.

Best wishes, and please let me know how it goes!

Kathy

Please contact me at ksinsheimermft@gmail.com or in the Comments section.

This is column #34

I am having a hard time swallowing the advice given by estrangement professionals that I am supposed to respond to my estranged child’s accusations with an open mind, taking in their viewpoint and not defending myself. To understand them better, and to create an opening to reconnect—I get it. But then I find myself resisting. Strongly!!

Why should I have to give up what I know to be true in order to have contact with my child? And why does it feel like I am disappearing when I try? Why is it so hard to bear feeling misunderstood? Am I afraid the “me” who I know is going to be erased? That the me I hope people will know and remember will be eradicated by my acceptance of my child’s view of this deeply-flawed human me?

— Confused, Angry, and Frightened

A note to the reader: In this column, I will be writing about estrangement dynamics between parent and adult child, but these dynamics also apply to siblings, family members, and friends who are estranged.

Dear Confused,

It is deeply painful to hear how you are being perceived by your adult child. You tried to be the parent you hoped to be, and these accusations feel like an indictment of failure. This view of yourself is uncomfortable—even galling. You don’t want to “swallow” your child’s view, but you also don’t want to be cut off.

Tolerating the weight of your child’s view of you is frequently distasteful and can feel unbearable. I am glad you wrote, because understanding the “why” behind these dueling realities can sometimes make the “how” of responding a little easier.

Individual Perceptions: Why We Remember Differently

To understand why your child’s accusations seem unrecognizable, we have to look at the relative positions you held when these memories were made. Your point of view was as an adult—with fully developed capacities, albeit often exhausted. Your child was recording that same history through the lens of total dependency and a developing brain.

When you are small, your parents are giants. A shadow cast by a giant feels much larger than a shadow cast by a peer. Your child’s earliest memories are often shaped by that original power imbalance.

Furthermore, a four-year-old records experiences with a four-year-old’s mental development. At that age, the prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain that provides logic, nuance, and context—is still under construction. Their memories capture the raw intensity of an emotion or experience without the adult ability to understand why a parent might be frustrated, grieving, or simply tired.

How the Brain “Writes” History

Neuroscience tells us that memory isn’t a vault; it’s a construction site. As neuroscientist Dr. Lisa Genova explains:

“Your memory is not a video camera, recording an objective account of your life. Your brain is a storyteller, and it will edit, omit, and even fabricate details to make the story of your life make sense to you today.”

There are four primary reasons your “maps” of the past don’t match:

• Memory is a Reconstruction: We don’t “play back” a tape; we rebuild the event from fragments every time we recall it. If your child is currently in pain, their brain will naturally reach for the fragments that match that hurt.

• The Emotional Highlighter: The amygdala (the brain’s fire alarm) acts like a highlighter. If an event causes stress or fear, the brain “burns” it in more deeply. For you, a moment of frustration was a “Rough Water” blip. For a dependent child, it may have been a Tidal Wave of fear.

• The Trauma Lock: If your child’s experience included trauma, the brain’s recording process can change. Traumatic memories often remain flash-frozen, isolated from the logic of our adult perspectives. To your child, that moment isn’t the distant past; it is a persistent present.

• The Narrative Filter: We all have a Self-Schema—a mental blueprint of who we are. If you see yourself as a Good Provider, you will remember the overtime hours. If your child sees you as Unavailable, they will remember the missed dinners. We prioritize what fits our blueprint and edit what doesn’t.

The Mirror of Failure

In my drawing for this week, the heart on the left looks into a mirror and sees a battered, crumbling version of itself. This is the Identity Distortion of estrangement: the very uncomfortable feeling that comes from having one’s reality contradicted or denied. When this happens, we feel pummeled, torn, defeated, and partially destroyed. Who are we if we are not our memories and the sum of our intentions? It is profoundly disappointing to feel as though you have failed so colossally.

Take, for example, a mother who struggled with her own parent’s restrictive eating habits. She spent her life trying desperately to protect her children from that same fate. Yet, her children now remember her as being restrictive and controlling, especially with food. To her, their memories feel like an erasure of one of her key parenting missions. She is devastated because she is being asked to trade her good intentions, and what she believes she did, for the painful impact her children experienced.

Accepting Your Child’s View Without Losing Yourself

Reconciliation often asks you to allow the “Good Parent” and the “Flawed Parent” to exist in the same context, without one erasing the other. What is the psychological weight training to prepare you for this herculean task? Here is how you might begin to tolerate your child’s view while keeping your self-respect:

1. Validate Your Own Reality First: Before speaking with your child, repeat your version of reality to yourself. Acknowledge the “North Star” that guided your journey. That effort is real and worth valuing.

2. Respect the Developmental Gap: Accepting their viewpoint doesn’t mean your memory is “wrong”; it means their experience was different. Accepting their viewpoint is respectful and supportive of what they need to communicate.

3. Grieve the Ideals of Your Parenting Goals: It is deeply painful to accept your own failure to achieve the parenting you dreamed of. Grieving the loss of that hoped-for outcome is key to moving forward.

4. Find Your Safe “Mirror”: Lean on your support network. Talking with others who share your challenges helps you see yourself and grow without feeling like you are disappearing.

5. Practice Compassion for Both of You: Compassion—for your child’s pain and for your own losses and limitations—is the bridge that allows you to feel seen, even when your child cannot see you yet.

So, Dear Confused,

You are feeling spun around by the version of you being reflected back. Know that you are not alone, and your efforts are worth valuing. By writing to me, I can see you are reaching for further growth.

Best wishes as you hold the truth of your own story alongside this new opportunity for connection with your child.

Best,

Kathy

Please connect with me via ksinsheimermft@gmail.com or through the Comments section.

This is column # 33

Dear Kathy,

I have started to wonder if my parenting, based on parenting models of the time, has contributed to my adult child’s need to estrange me. I followed the parenting advice of Penelope Leach, who thought that my child experiencing stress was not a learning opportunity—it was toxic, and T. Berry Brazelton, who recommended: parents should be experts who interpret and soothe the “disorganization” of their child.

I spent a significant percentage of my energy every day trying to keep my children from experiencing too much disappointment or stress or failure. Now I am exhausted and they want distance from me. How did my efforts go so sideways??

— Bewildered, wiped out and defeated

Dear Bewildered,

Following the parenting models of the time and trying to protect your children from stress is understandably exhausting! As I work with families experiencing estrangement, I often see a confusing pattern: the child who resisted protection is still in contact, while the child who was more accepting—the one who seemed “closer”—is the one who is now estranged.

Unfortunately, protecting your child as the experts recommended may have led to a dependency on that very protection. Once your children are out in the world and relying on themselves, they come face-to-face with their deficits in emotional intelligence, “street smarts,” and self-care. In today’s culture, that child now feels the need to step away from you—to be on their own, or with the support of chosen others.

This becomes their skills lab for growth. Being connected to you might feel too regressive, since it doesn’t foster the resilience they desperately need to develop.

The Parenting Books of Your Time

Parenting advice is almost always a reaction to the generation that came before. For example, parents in the ‘50s read Dr. Spock, relieved that his advice was more flexible and more concerned with the child’s emotional well-being than the behavior-focused parenting they had experienced. By the time the 90s arrived, the number of parenting books on the market had exploded, increasing five-fold compared to just twenty years earlier. Nuclear families had become more isolated from relatives and community, and were turning toward “The Expert.”

The ‘90s Mandate of Constant Attunement

By the ‘90s, the pendulum swung into a high-stakes emotional engagement. We turned to experts who advised a model of “Constant Attunement”—a level of emotional engagement that was both revolutionary and exhausting:

• Dr. Penelope Leach recommended reducing our child’s stress at all costs, famously suggesting that stress was “toxic” to their developing brain.

• Dr. William Sears introduced “Attachment Parenting,” promoting “maximal responsiveness” as the only reliable path to a child’s lifelong security.

• Dr. T. Berry Brazelton taught that parents should be the experts on their own children, tasked with interpreting and soothing the “disorganization” that comes with every developmental phase.

We can respect the intent of these experts while acknowledging the impossible emotional workload their models placed on us. Without family and community to share the load, their call for constant attunement turned into an unintended parenting over-correction —seeking a “soft landing” that inadvertently left both parent and child unprepared.

As we strived to be the “everything” parent, we unwittingly made it difficult for our children to develop their own strengths.

The Resiliency Deficit

Protecting our children from the stress of addressing their own emotional challenges slowed the growth of their own resilience. We fell into what social psychologist Dr. Jonathan Haidt calls “Safetyism”—the currently held belief that to keep children safe, they should be protected from risk.

Haidt argues that human beings actually need risk to develop resilience. Just as our immune systems require exposure to germs to become strong, our psyches require exposure to “stressors” like disappointment, social friction, and minor failure to build resilience.

Resiliency expert Dr. Kathryn Hecht points out, “bravery only rewires the brain when fear is present.” To raise a child who can “handle hard things,” they actually have to handle them. Because we may have over-protected them in their youth, our children didn’t practice developing what Dr. Hecht calls “coping efficacy.” As adults, they are facing a world they feel ill-equipped to handle. Their current need for distance is an attempt to finally find, on their own, the struggle we were advised to protect them from.

The Heavy Work of Separation

When an adult child chooses distance, it can be a powerful, belated attempt at growth. The adult children I talk to often feel a desperation that sounds like this:

“Adulting is hard enough right now, and I don’t feel ready for it. Every time my parent tries to tell me what to do, it just confirms that I can’t do this myself. My parent worrying doesn’t feel like love; it feels like an extra weight I have to carry while I’m trying to navigate my life.”

Modern voices like Vienna Pharaon, MFT, remind us that boundaries are often the only way we find out who we are when we’re no longer being who everyone else needs us to be.

This isn’t a new phenomenon; it is a foundation of human development. Decades ago, psychologist Erik Erikson identified the core task of becoming an adult as the developmental stage of Identity vs. Role Confusion. Erikson observed that without a clear sense of identity—a sense of “I” that is separate from “We”—we have no true sense of self. Because your child’s youth was so supported and “safe,” they may not have adequately developed these capacities while in contact with you.

Grieving the Disappointment in Our Experts

There is a specific kind of moral injury—the feeling of being betrayed by those we trusted—in realizing that you followed the “experts” and it didn’t result in the relationship you were promised.

You are currently in the “Rough Waters” of Oceanic Loss. You aren’t just grieving your child; you are grieving the years spent protecting them, only to find that the protection prevented the necessary trial and error required to grow. You would be justified in feeling misled by the experts, but I hope you can be forgiving of yourself. You couldn’t have known that this “devotion” would leave your child needing to learn resilience only after they left home—and perhaps having to leave you behind on that path to accomplish that growth.

Grieving this failure is an important step in your work as an estranged parent. It is part of the ongoing cycle of our own adult development. Failure and resilience, for us, remain the primary ways both we and our children learn from experience.

So, Dear Bewildered,

Unfortunately, I haven’t brought you “good” news about your very hard work parenting. But I hope I have brought you more understanding of the challenges you and your children are facing. You were close and protective. You were told this is what you should do, and it felt right—even good—at the time. You were more loving and protective than your parents had been, likely a promise you made to yourself long ago.

You didn’t know you were limiting your child’s capacity for self-care; you hoped you were bringing them up to feel safe, secure, and successful. Parents and children of all generations face the strengths and weaknesses of the models their parents employed. You hoped to be an exception, but because of the complexity of the parent-child relationship and the never-ending changes in society, your children face challenges you hoped they could avoid. Grief and anger are appropriate as you address the challenge of finding strength and clarity for our current times.

Best,

Kathy

Please contact me at Ksinsheimermft@gmail.com or through the Comments section. This is column # 32.

Our daughter has gradually withdrawn from us. We only hear from her when she needs help with her children. Last year, she let us know she needed to limit contact. We wrote Amends letters, which led to her revealing she has a psychiatric diagnosis of PTSD with “triggers” that require her to take space from us. She has let me know that I am one of those triggers. Since then, I let her control the situation whenever we are in contact.

I’ve started to wonder if I’ll even want to reconnect if she ever lowers her boundaries. I am so hurt and sad, especially since I never did anything to intentionally harm her. In truth, we were very supportive parents! What is your advice?

— Confused, Hurt, and Looking for a Compass

Note on Safety: I want to acknowledge that in some families, children are mistreated and require protection. In those cases, distance is a vital tool for safety. The following advice assumes that abuse has not occurred and focuses on the complex emotional dynamics that can still lead to deep family pain.

———————————————

Dear Hurt and Seeking Direction,

It is upsetting and confusing when a relationship you remember as loving and connected is suddenly redefined through sharp words like trauma, triggers, and taking space. When you’ve spent a lifetime trying to be a devoted parent, being told you are now a source of distress feels less like a dialogue and more like a barricade.

The Gap Between Intent and Impact

You are very clear that you never intended to hurt your child. But in family dynamics, intent and impact can differ dramatically.

Consider a parent who insists a child stay on the baseball team to teach “stick-to-itiveness.” The parent’s intent is to build character and resilience—acts of support and love. But the impact on the child is a feeling of being trapped and unheard. Imagine that, in addition to the discomfort of the game, that child was also being bullied at practice but felt they couldn’t tell you. In this scenario, your “support” unintentionally became an enforcement of their suffering.

You weren’t a “bad” parent; you simply didn’t have a full understanding of their internal world at the time. You were standing on the sidelines cheering, while they were struggling with an internal experience you couldn’t see.

The “Two Things are True” Tool

Dr. Becky Kennedy often speaks about the concept of Multiplicity. It is the powerful idea that two seemingly opposite things can be true at the same time. In your case:

• It is true that you were a deeply supportive parent.

• It is true that your daughter experienced parts of her upbringing as painful or “triggering.”

One truth does not wash away the other. Accepting her reality doesn’t mean you are admitting you did something “wrong”; it means you are acknowledging that you were sometimes experiencing her growing-up years in very different ways.

The Diagnosis as a Survival Map

When your child made an appointment with a psychiatrist, she was in distress. Just as we visit a physician for physical symptoms we can’t treat ourselves, she sought a professional to help her find a path toward feeling better. Based on that consultation, she has reached a conclusion: to manage her triggers, she currently needs to avoid contact with you. While this feels like a deeply unfair verdict on your parenting, it is her current strategy for survival.

When a child shares a psychiatric diagnosis, it can feel like a final judgment on your life’s work. However, if we look for the Most Generous Interpretation (MGI), we see something different. The MGI is that your daughter isn’t trying to punish you; she is trying to survive her own symptoms. Her diagnosis provides a framework for her internal emotional experience—a way to name a struggle she has likely carried in silence for years. Interestingly, your Amends letters may have actually provided just enough safety for her to finally name that pain out loud to you. She isn’t attacking you; she is trying to stay afloat, understand herself, and heal.

Understanding the “Trigger”: Your Child’s Internal Experience

While we don’t have the specific details of your daughter’s history, we do know the nature of a PTSD diagnosis. For someone in her position, the world often feels like a series of loud, unpredictable alarms. When she speaks of being “triggered,” she is describing a moment where her nervous system has been hijacked by a memory of past pain.

These feelings are powerful, overwhelming, and often last long after the interaction has ended. In those moments, she likely feels out of control. Her decision to limit contact isn’t necessarily a commentary on your current behavior; it is a desperate move toward self-regulation. She is trying to turn down the volume on a world that feels too loud to handle.

As she works through her treatment, her strategies for staying safe may change. Right now, her boundaries feel extreme and painful to you. However, it may help to assume she is doing the very best she can to manage a profound amount of internal suffering. Seeing her withdrawal as a health strategy rather than a personal rejection may be the first step in finding a way forward for both of you.

Finding Your Way Forward

After you have taken the space you need to breathe, here are some things to consider:

• Compassion for Yourself and Your Child: You have been identified as a cause of the hurt you spent your parenting life trying to prevent. That is a profound grief. Ask friends and family to remind you of the loving parenting you did. It is okay to hold onto your memories of being a good parent even while she navigates her healing. Know that your child is hurting, and understand that she is doing her best to take care of herself and her family.

• The Bridge of Grandchildren: Your daughter’s willingness to trust you with her children is a “silent” vote of confidence. It suggests that she still views you as a safe harbor for the next generation. If you can bear it, continue to show up for them. Their love, and you showing them love, can help you feel valued during this period of distance.

• Validating Your Fatigue: You asked if you will even want to reconnect. This is an understandable question. Being seen as “the trigger” is exhausting. It is okay to protect your own heart and take some space to gather yourself. If you can find some psychic rest, your feelings may rebound, and you may find you can join your daughter in her journey later on.

• Narrative Humility: Seeing yourself through your child’s eyes is painful, but it offers a rare chance for repair. If she eventually explains her triggers, try to listen without needing to correct her. The growth opportunity here is to see her perceptions not as “the truth,” but as her truth. As part of this process, you may also come to understand yourself in new ways as you grow alongside your child.

So, Dear Hurt,

This is a painful juncture, and you do have choices. If you are able to learn more about your daughter’s situation, it may present a growth opportunity—if that is what you choose. You may also choose to step away. You are definitely in Rough Waters with this decision. The choice isn’t an easy one, but it is yours. While you weigh these options, be sure to employ effective self-care strategies and consult trusted others for their perspective.

Kathy

Please reach out to me: Ksinsheimermft@gmail.com or in the Comments section.

This is column # 31

My husband and I agreed to try to reconnect with our adult daughter. We both wrote Amends letters and sent them to her. She responded by saying she is willing to meet with just my husband, not me. She said her relationship with me is too “toxic,” so she just wants to sort things out with her dad.

I am so confused by this and really hurt. She and I were close before the estrangement, and now she is acting like that wasn’t the case. Plus, I was her primary parent. She seems to be preferring my husband now, which I find incredibly painful. On top of that, he seems excited by the possibility of reconnecting with her and isn’t very able to take my feelings into account.

I know I should be glad she wants to be in touch with us at all, but instead, I feel spun up, hurt, and worried. What if they form a pair and never include me? How will I handle my anger, sorrow, and humiliation?

— Angry and Upset

Dear Upset,

Your situation is both very painful and not uncommon. In my work with estranged families, it is frequent for a child to state a preference for reunifying with only one parent. Given your dedication earlier in her life and the closeness you shared, this adds a sharp, personal sting. It feels like a rewrite of your history together.

Reconnecting with Only One Parent?

I generally recommend trying to reconnect with one parent if that is what is offered. It can help your family feel more connected and ensure that you can provide care for your adult child if help is needed. However, it isn’t easy going because the imbalance is tough. Parents can feel pulled in different directions, and jealousy can erupt in the couple.

The Adult Child’s Perspective: Finding a “Safer Haven”

When an adult child reaches out to only one parent, it is often an act of profound vulnerability. Through their lens—and based on their unique memory of their history with both of you—one parent may simply feel more comfortable or less emotionally “charged” at this moment.

If you were the “primary” parent or the one with the more intense emotional bond, the stakes of reuniting with you might feel too high for them right now. Reaching out to the other parent is your child’s way of testing the waters. It isn’t a judgment of your worth; it is their finding the safest shore to land on as they navigate the Rough Waters of their own discomfort.

What Does “Toxic” Mean?

In estrangement, the word “toxic” can mean “too difficult” or “too painful.” You may hear it as a condemnation, but instead, think of it as a way to say it’s been too hard to connect with you. It signals that, currently, your child doesn’t feel they can be comfortable in your presence.

Your adult child may feel they have explained difficulties to you and that their perspective was either not understood or rejected. While this feels like a door slamming, try to view it as a piece of data about where the work needs to happen when things eventually move toward Calmer Seas.

For Your Couple: Navigating the Rough Waters Together

It will take deep work on your part to support your husband and daughter trying to reconnect. You will likely cycle through each stage of grief in my Oceanic Loss model more than once. The initial news probably put you back into a Tidal Wave; now, you are in Rough Waters.

In the world of estrangement, things can feel “topsy-turvy.” Know you are not alone in feeling you have fallen down the rabbit hole. Your child may only be able to start with one parent at a time, choosing the less intense relationship as a starting place, not an ending place.

Here are some ways you and your husband can make a plan to support each other:

• The Connected Parent’s Role: Talk together about parameters for your husband’s conversation. He doesn’t need to “champion” you or defend against her—that might cause her to retreat. Instead, he can be a neutral “bridge.” If she complains, he can listen without participating in the “splitting.” He can say, “I hear that’s how you’re feeling”, while staying connected to you as his partner.

• The Importance of Transparency: Agree that there will be no secrets. "Secret" lunches or texts create distrust in an already precarious and painful time for you as a couple. Knowing what is happening—not just the facts, but how it felt—prevents the fear that they are “forming a pair” to exclude you.

• Protect Your Partner Bond: Plan a “debrief” time for just the two of you after your partner meets with your child. This is to reassure both of you of your importance and value to each other as partners and to reconnect emotionally.

• Alert and Use Your Support System (Put on your Life Jacket!): Humiliation thrives in silence. Use support groups, individual therapy, and trusted friends. When we feel humiliated, it’s hard to feel deserving of compassion and self care, but this is exactly when you need it most. Tell a friend to drag you to yoga or on a morning walk—things you know you like to do but may not feel motivated to do during this time.

  _____________________

So, Dear Upset,

Know that you are valued, loved, and cared for, even when you are not being included by your child. Continue with your routines and self-care practices that help you feel good about yourself and your life.

This is a difficult phase of estrangement, and hopefully a stop along the way, not a permanent destination. Make sure when others offer you love and support, you do your best to receive it.

Best wishes for navigating your challenges in this phase of your journey through Oceanic Loss,

Kathy

Please email me Ksinsheimermft@gmail.com or connect through the Comments section

This is column # 30.

Dear Kathy,

My daughter and I are at a standoff. She insists on a version of our family history that is simply not correct. She didn’t feel supported by me, and now she is taking space. To me, facts are facts—but she treats reality like it’s something she can bend to fit her feelings. When she speaks her “truth,” I don’t just disagree—I bristle. Inside, I feel frantic, like I am literally coming apart. I know I need to find a better way to handle this, but when I try to accept her version, I feel like I’m falling. I’ve always relied on my perception of reality to feel safe and confident. If I can’t trust my own eyes, who am I? How do I reconnect with her without feeling like I’m falling apart?

— Upset, Confused, and Off-Balance

Dear Off-Balance,

You are describing a sensation of psychological vertigo. Your daughter’s insistence on having her own reality versus yours deeply troubles you. When you grew up, there wasn’t such a thing as “differing realities.” There has been a generational shift toward allowing for differences in perception—more space to recognize that each person experiences the same event in a different way. You aren’t practiced at this, and trying to do it makes you feel uncomfortable—unstable even.

Something happened between you where your daughter didn’t feel supported, and you hate having to think about her seeing you in that way. You want to argue for your “truth,” but that is getting you nowhere.

Why It “Hurts Your Head”

You mentioned feeling like you are “coming apart.” This isn’t just a metaphor; it is a neurological event. Human beings use certainty as a biological survival mechanism—we need the floor to be solid to walk. When your core perception of the world is challenged, your brain’s anterior cingulate cortex—the part that processes physical pain—actually fires.

When you hear her “truth,” your brain registers it as a physical threat to your safety. You have used your “Correct” memory as a compass to navigate the world. To accept your daughter’s version feels like demagnetizing that compass.

“As the teacher Pema Chödrön suggests, that feeling of ‘falling’ happens when the rigid ground of our certainty begins to crumble.”

Losing your balance is frightening! Furthermore, you likely don’t like how you are depicted in this different version of reality. You might look selfish, thoughtless, or unkind. It isn’t a fair version of you, and your instinct is to fight it. Your daughter’s refusal to accept your version is destabilizing because it threatens your image of yourself as a “good parent.”

The Intergenerational Ghost: Difference Can Feel Dangerous

Why does a difference in memory feel like a life-or-death emergency? For many, “The Truth” is the only thing keeping the world from dissolving into chaos. You may have grown up in a home where “The Truth” was the only safe harbor—where seeing things differently carried a heavy price of exile, shame, or conflict. In that environment, “lying” (which often meant simply seeing things differently) wasn’t just a mistake; it was a moral catastrophe. You could feel condemned or worried you would lose love if you didn’t conform to the one truth in your family system.

Perhaps, beneath a confident exterior, your sense of self is more fragile than at first glance. When you cling to your version of history, you are clinging to the only scaffolding you have to stay “held together.” To accept her differing reality feels like a structural failure that will cause your entire identity to buckle. You aren’t fighting your daughter; you are fighting your own internal collapse.

From “The (Only) One” to “The Two”

As the psychoanalyst Dr. Jessica Benjamin points out, moving from “I am right” (The (Only) One) to “We both exist” (The Two) is inherently unstable. What does Benjamin mean by “We both exist”? It means that although our perceptions are different, we can both be correct, at least to ourselves.

We are both here. We don’t agree, but we can stand next to each other, respecting how we each see things. If you acknowledge and recognize your daughter’s reality, you are acknowledging her view, her value, and her importance in your world. This is not the same as agreeing—it may be agreeing to disagree. But you don’t have to “murder” her reality in order for you to exist. You can both exist, and no murdering is necessary. You can be adjacent, differing, loving, and connected. This transition feels like a loss of power, but it is actually the birth of a real relationship.

Re-finding Your Balance

When that frantic, fragmenting feeling starts to rise, try these four shifts to stay in the room:

• Describe the Fear to Yourself: Say to yourself: “My system is feeling threatened because my ground is moving.” Acknowledging the biological reaction helps move you out of a panicked “survival mode” and back into your thinking brain. Allow yourself to feel both the act of accepting her reality and the fear that comes with it.

• Two Climates, One Horizon: Accepting these different perceptions can feel like you are in separate realities. In the drawing for this column, the realities are adjacent. Notice that both hearts are bandaged; they are both hurting and carrying the weight of this divide. The heart depicting your distress is on crumblier ground, but if you can accept these separate realities, you can look up to see you are looking at the same horizon—you have more in common than you realize.

• Focus on Impact, Not Facts: When your daughter shares her perception, don’t look at your “records” to compare experiences. Look at her face to see that she’s in pain. Listen to her words—that she has been wanting you to take in her reality. If you can focus on her experience rather than YOUR evidence, you will find you don’t fragment as much. You remain the “Good Enough” parent who can witness your child’s life.

• Continue your self-exploration: What makes your daughter’s version of reality so deeply painful? What happens that you need to defend your perception instead of trying to understand hers?

_____________________________________

So, Dear Off-Balance,

If you feel like you are falling apart, it may be because you’ve used your “Correctness” as your gyroscope for a very long time. You’ve used it to protect a part of you that feels surprisingly shaky. But here is the secret: You don’t have to be “Right” to be alive, to thrive, or even to be loved. You can accept your daughter’s reality without losing your own. Accepting and living this will profoundly help you feel more connected with her.

The goal isn’t to find out who is “lying”; it’s to find enough room in your heart for two different versions to live in the same family. When you stop fighting for the monopoly on truth, you might find that the ground isn’t actually crumbling—it’s expanding to hold you both.

Best wishes as you navigate this new, shared ground,

Kathy

Please contact me at Ksinsheimermft@gmail.com or in the Comments section.

This is column # 29