“One day she just stopped answering my messages,” Vanessa says, as she talks about the confusion and heartbreak of losing contact with an adult child.
Unlike the Beckhams – whose simmering spat exploded into the headlines this week – Vanessa does not want to go public with her estrangement from her children.
As Brooklyn Beckham and his famous parents, David and Victoria, continue with their high-profile meltdown, she wants people to understand how it affects ordinary people, and what they can do about it.
Vanessa was working as a psychotherapist with people going through familial estrangement. “It wouldn’t happen to me,” she thought.
But then she noticed her children becoming distant, and when she asked what was wrong, they said everything was fine.
“I could sort of tell that things were changing and I couldn’t really understand it,” she says. She had a fight with one child, then others started drifting away.
“They were like ‘I don’t want to talk to you any more, you’re a nasty person. I’m not letting my children have anything to do with you’,” she says.
But neither she, nor her sole child still in contact, understands what happened and why. They have different memories of the earlier years that the others, now estranged, remember as being so terrible.
“We’re not living in the same world,” Vanessa says.
Estrangement can happen for ‘all sorts of things’
We hear about Brooklyn breaking up with “Beckham Inc”, about Harry and Meghan’s rift with the Windsors, but estrangement isn’t restricted to the weird world of celebrity.
A 2022 Ohio State University study found 6% of adult children had a period where they had little or no communication with their mothers. For fathers, the figure was 26%.
In August last year, a YouGov poll found 38% of American adults were estranged from a family member – most commonly a sibling (24%), a parent (16%), a child (10%), a grandparent (9%) and a grandchild (6%).
In 2016, University of Newcastle academic Dr Kylie Agllias published Family Estrangement, which put the Australian figure at one in 12.
Ten years on from that book, many think familial alienation has become even more common.
The reasons for estrangement can be clear cut – in the case of physical or sexual abuse, for example. But they can also be something far less obvious, such as polarised beliefs in God, in vaccination, or about Trump.
YouGov found those estranged from a parent most often cited physical, emotional or sexual abuse, manipulative behaviour, abandonment or neglect, lies or betrayal, or personality conflicts.
Those estranged from their children most commonly cited lies and betrayal, conflicting values or lifestyle, personality conflicts and the fallout from divorce.
“It can be all sorts of things,” Australian Psychological Society chief executive officer, Dr Zena Burgess, says.
“Mental health issues in one of the parents or one of the children can split a family. That’s the one I’ve most commonly seen,” she says.
“Conflict that’s driven through family dynamics, favouritism, alcohol, drugs and violence … and sometimes it can be that people just do not get along. Or it can be that they’ve grown up in a family that does not meet their needs for love, identity and belonging.”
Blended families and families that go through traumatic incidents can struggle to stay together, she says. And sometimes it’s over a rift that happened so long ago no one even remembers what really happened.
Burgess has dealt directly with many families going through estrangement, and says it’s on the rise – that it’s both becoming more common, and more visible.
‘A kind of silent epidemic’
Vanessa says she believes the increase is due in part to people’s inability to sit with the discomfort when something goes wrong in a relationship.
They self-diagnose the issue, she says: “[They] can go straight online and look it up … then they hang on to it like grim death.”
Online, people pick up self-validating words – therapy speak, about boundaries and trauma. And our brains are trained to notice and remember bad, potentially dangerous things, she says, to keep us safe – but that can also embed false narratives.
Clinical psychologist and world-renowned expert Dr Joshua Coleman in January told podcast Where Parents Talk that parent-child estrangement was “a kind of silent epidemic”.
Coleman, author of Rules of Estrangement: Why Adult Children Cut Ties and How to Heal the Conflict, says more people are being estranged and it’s happening for reasons that did not exist in the past.
He says old ideas about the need to stick with family have been replaced by a “much more identitarian perspective” that believes that “if a relationship doesn’t feel good to me, then not only can I cut that person off, I should cut that person off”.
“Protection of mental health has become a big priority.
“So there’s a lot of adult children who are cutting off parents, certainly for reasons of abuse and neglect, but also for reasons that are much more psychological, much more subtle, much more political, and that really is causing a lot of disruption.”
Typically it’s the parent who wants the relationship more, he says, because they’re in more pain.
The Ohio State University study found estrangements usually end. Eight in 10 adult children will reconcile with their estranged mother, and seven in 10 with their fathers.
According to the YouGov poll, more than two-thirds of those estranged from a child or grandchild would consider reconciliation, while less than half of those estranged from siblings, grandparents or parents would. Just 35% of children estranged from their parent said they would be willing to reconcile.
How do you even start to bring such fractured families back together?
Coleman says compassion, empathy, taking responsibility, and not being defensive all help the chances of reconciliation.
Nick Tebbey, Relationships Australia national executive officer, says the starting point is to “try to remove the emotion from the situation”.
“We are obviously going to feel grief, loss, anger and bewilderment. We need to try to move past that … to get to the facts of what led to our estrangement,” he says.
“Then it’s easier to take the first, often daunting step to reach out to that person.”
Understanding the reason for the estrangement can be more complicated when there are third parties, such as partners, in the background, he says.
“You have to reach out and say ‘I’m available to hold a conversation about whatever these issues are’, without judgment.”
Tebbey says professional counselling can help, and that it’s important to recognise that in serious cases such as those involving abuse, the estrangement may be the right thing.
“We always tell people there’s an element of self-care required here,” he says.
Burgess says it can take a long time for people to overcome their anger and resentment, but having an open conversation about what sort of relationship people want, and not expecting an immediate fix, is where to start.
“From time immemorial, adolescents and adult children have blamed their parents for every problem in existence,” Burgess says. “Because it’s convenient and it’s better than taking responsibility yourself.
“But there comes a time where we have to go ‘well, that may be how I grew up, but I have a choice about what kind of person I want to be’.
“We evolve all through our lives if we’re open to change – there is optimism, and I think we need to hang on to that.”
In Australia, support is available at Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636, Lifeline on 13 11 14, and at MensLine on 1300 789 978. In the UK, the charity Mind is available on 0300 123 3393 and Childline on 0800 1111. In the US, call or text Mental Health America at 988 or chat 988lifeline.org.
