Family estrangement doesn’t have to be forever

Kerry Rego, 47, always had a rocky relationship with her dad. His past history of drinking and passive-aggressive behavior eventually led to a seven-month period of estrangement. But they began reconciling after her dad started going to Alcoholics Anonymous, which prompted him to reach out. He told her that he missed her and he hoped they could have a relationship again.

“He was willing to work on himself and willing to change the way he navigated the world, and the way he ran his relationships,” Rego says.

Estrangement is a well-worn story — in 2019, a survey found that 27 percent of Americans over the age of 18 were estranged from a family member — but less discussed is reconciliation and the process of coming back together after falling apart. The reasons for estrangement can vary, from a single breach that feels too large to overcome to years of slights and misunderstandings piling up. These kinds of emotional wounds naturally take time to heal and, crucially, no one is owed reconciliation.

But estranged parties might wonder: What does it look like to try to mend a broken relationship? Is it even possible? And to reconcile, do you have to face the things that tore you apart in the first place?

There are two possible paths to reconciliation, says Joshua Coleman, PhD, a psychologist who conducts counseling on estrangement.

One scenario includes reckoning with the issues that led to estrangement. In this scenario, an estranged child and parent may go to therapy together to understand their dynamic more deeply. “I say that the purpose of this therapy is to really demonstrate to your adult child if you’re capable of taking responsibility and then understanding why they felt [estrangement] was the healthiest thing for them to do,” Coleman says. “You might need to … deepen your understanding of how your behavior impacted your child, even if it’s at odds with your own recollections of what happened in the past.”

Coleman is most often approached by a parent who is estranged from their adult child who cut off contact. Usually, Coleman encourages the estranged parent to write a “letter of amends” where they show understanding and take responsibility.

The second path to reconciliation requires the wounded party to accept “the inherent flaws” of the person they’ve been estranged from. The former person may ultimately conclude that despite the problems present, they still want to continue an important relationship. There is no grand reckoning — more of a softening, an understanding that the person you were estranged from may never fix their flaws or change their mind but you want to be in their life regardless. “They just want family and they don’t want to continue to be estranged,” Coleman says.

This was the case with Sydney, who was outed to her evangelical parents as gay at the age of 18. (Her last name is being withheld to protect her privacy.)

After her parents found out, they determined the family would pray about it together. But what happened, Sydney, now 27, says, was unimaginable, with her parents and older brother holding her down while praying, “screaming and spitting” like in an exorcism.

“By the end of it, I was screaming, ‘I love Jesus,’” she told me. “Anything I could to just get them off my body.” In the middle of the night, Sydney’s girlfriend came to pick her up, and she didn’t speak to her parents for nearly a year until her mother approached her begging for forgiveness.

Even though Sydney’s parents’ behavior was abhorrent and a fundamental rejection of who their daughter was, she decided to give them another chance after she says they showed “genuine remorse.”

In her case, their reconciliation was part reckoning and part softening. Though her mother apologized for that night, her parents still made it clear they didn’t support her being gay. When Sydney got into a new relationship, her girlfriend wasn’t allowed to come to her parents’ house. But she has a relationship with her parents, something that had initially seemed impossible during their period of estrangement.

“They start to consider whether they might want to reestablish contact,” Pillemer says. “Often, they become aware that something has changed in the other person’s life. A substance abuser has stopped abusing substances. A person in a relationship where the spouse repelled the rest of the family has gotten divorced.”

That was the situation with Rego. “My dad gives me hope that people can acknowledge that their way isn’t the right way, that they can change and grow and be different,” she says. Now, Rego and her father meet weekly for coffee, “on a neutral ground that is not either of our homes.”

Pillemer recommends that anyone looking toward reconciliation be sure that their methods of getting in contact aren’t invasive. “Avoid anything that looks like stalking, but demonstrate your openness,” he says. Don’t show up to a family dinner unannounced, for example. One method he’s seen work is communicating by card, letter, or through a neutral third party such as a family member who is not involved in the estrangement.

A critical component of successfully reconciling is establishing boundaries. Many estrangements occur because of violated boundaries, so it’s important to protect your peace in this way. Boundaries may include topics of conversation that are not to be discussed — like someone’s political views or parenting choices — or behavioral expectations, like asking a family member not to drink or yell in your presence.

In Pillemer’s research for the Cornell Family Estrangement and Reconciliation Project, he found that effective reconciliations often had very clear terms. Sydney used this method with her parents. “I make it clear to them, if you say homophobic stuff when I’m in the room, if you say disrespectful stuff, I will leave and not talk to you,” she said.

In some cases, Pillemer says, initially instituted boundaries were later loosened, but the act of setting them in place helped facilitate reconciliation. Boundaries can be a way of focusing on the future instead of the past.

In Pillemer’s research, successful reconciliations tend to include clear terms, boundaries, and an understanding that the two parties may never agree on what tore them apart in the first place. “People gave up on the idea that they were going to reconcile their ideas of what went on in the past,” Pillemer says. “Everyone accepted that life had occurred, but that they had to look forward in the relationship.”

Both estrangement and reconciliation are not static states, Pillemer says. They are dynamic and can be moved into and out of throughout a relationship. But even an attempt at reconciliation can give people a sense of relief. “Many of [my research subjects] told me that they’d learned an extraordinary amount about themselves,” Pillemer says. “Having done it was a life challenge that they felt improved their self-concept and sense of self-efficacy.” It seems that even attempting to reconcile can help ease the intensity of feelings around estrangement.

For a parent who may be estranged from their child, it can be difficult to come to terms with the child’s view of their upbringing, according to Coleman. “It’s a psychological achievement on the part of the parent to be able to tolerate the adult child’s reckoning of their childhood,” he says. There’s a lot of work these days for both sides to do.”

Coleman tells me about his own estrangement from his daughter, who cut off contact with him when she was in her 20s. At first, Coleman responded “more defensively than emphatically” to his daughter’s view of conflict in their relationship. “I didn’t take the responsibility that I later learned is really required… It wasn’t until I radically shifted my position that she began to come back and things began to improve.”

From that experience, Coleman says he learned that estranged parents have to be empathetic and curious about the child’s reasons for estrangement and they have to take responsibility. He also learned how “nightmarish” it is to be an estranged parent, which has helped him approach estranged parents in his therapeutic practice with empathy. “Knowing what other estranged parents are going through… has been helpful to me in terms of being able to help them strategize about points of reconciliation and outline the steps that they would need to take.”

There is, of course, no guarantee that a reconciliation attempt will be welcomed by the other party. “It takes two to reconcile,” Rin Reczek, PhD, a professor in sociology at the Ohio State University, said. “Much as is the case with the reconciliation of a romantic relationship, it’s impossible to reconcile a family estrangement if one person is not interested, capable, or willing to reestablish contact and connection. We cannot coerce or force someone to reenter a relationship with us — and if we try, we risk further damage.”

And if an attempt at reconciliation fails, Pillemer says a grieving process is necessary to move forward: “Go through the experience of loss and go through the stage of it.”

Despite how prevalent estrangement is, stories of reconciliation prove that it doesn’t have to last forever. People can and do find their way back to each other. “If there’s an opportunity for someone to demonstrate that they’ve had a change of heart, give them a chance,” Sydney tells me. “You never know what could happen.”

Clarification, November 20, 3:35 pm ET: A previous version of this story was unclear about the timeline of Kerry Rego’s dad’s sobriety.