December 25, 2024
According to a recent Time magazine article, “How Estrangement Has Become an Epidemic in America,” 1 in 2 adults in the U.S. are estranged from a close relative.
Given the season, perhaps I should be writing about something more Christmassy instead of something as serious and sad as estrangement.
But since estrangement from close relatives is usually felt most acutely at this time of year, perhaps it’s a good time to address it. It may even help some who suffer with this to know they are not alone.
Few things are as painful as being estranged from a loved one, particularly when that loved one is your child. It happened to me. And it happened suddenly and severely.
For quite awhile I was in a daze - to put it mildly. One minute everything was normal and the next minute, and out of nowhere - at least as I experienced it, I was cut off, blocked, erased - and by multiple children.
In time, I would learn that I wasn’t alone. Once they heard about it, friends came forward to share with me their own accounts of being cut off, blocked, and erased by their adult children, and, in some cases, accused, as I was, of everything from neglect to abuse.
I found the same stories in online support groups, one of which is hosted by Dr. Joshua Coleman, one of the authors of the aforementioned Time article.
Dr. Coleman, a psychologist and therapist, is unique among psychologists and therapists in that he blames the estrangement epidemic - at least in part - on psychologists and therapists.
In another article, Dr. Coleman writes: “As therapists, we hold up the ideal parent or family experience as a way to shine a light on what an adult’s life might have been if she’d had better parenting. This serves the purpose of helping our client to not blame herself for self-limiting and self-hating voices, and to allow her distance from parents and others whose contact tends to amplify that voice, rather than diminish it.”
In other words, “don’t blame yourself, blame your parents.” As Dr. Coleman writes: “…therapists tempt adult children to feel contempt or even hatred for their parents.”
Such therapy has become an industry, a lucrative one. It’s not hard to see how easily psychologists and therapists - even well-meaning ones - can get clients for life, or at least keep them coming back for the next session and the next.
No one wants to blame him or herself, especially not in today’s “victim” culture, so who more convenient to blame for your troubles than your parents, and if you’re a female, particularly your father.
This becomes even more destructive when the other parent, mother or father, takes the side of the child to fan the flames of blame on the target parent.
However, one doesn’t need a therapist to learn to blame one’s parents. We are surrounded by a culture which elevates the child over the adult, a culture, particularly via movies and other media, which casts adults as bumbling idiots and children as mature masterminds - a delusion that warps into evermore damaging estrangement when that child becomes an adult.
Unfortunately, we parents have participated in our own destruction by wanting to give our children the proverbial “better life than we had.” So we are not as hard on them as our parents were on us. And whereas we more than likely received scant and rare praise from our parents, we shower our children with ours.
And the result? 1 in 2 U.S. adults are estranged from a close relative and it is usually an adult child.
I don’t know about you, but there was plenty to blame my parents for, particularly my father with whom I had a strained relationship, especially as an adult. However, it never ever occurred to me to disrespect my parents or to cut them off.
So when I look at how much gentler I was to my own children, it’s hard to understand how they could disrespect me and cut me off, that is until I take into consideration the victim culture they live in and the kind of “therapy” Dr. Coleman writes about.
So what to do? This is the constant cry of the parents in the online groups that I am in. I can tell you what I did, but I’ll leave that for a future column. Meanwhile, CHOOSE to have a Merry Christmas. That’s what I’ve done for seven Christmases now. Choose.