The Silence That Stays: On Estrangement from Adult Children

Tuesday, August 5, 2025.

“We no longer speak,”my client hesitated.

She went on to tell me that there was no final fight, no slammed door, no ritual to mark the occasion. Just the cooling of something that had once burned. First, the texts became short. Then late. Then none at all.

What remains is a kind of ambient mourning. Not a death. Not a divorce. Just a subtraction no one agreed to.

You learn, in time, how to stop checking their social media.

You learn how not to mention them at holidays. You learn to perform the part of the parent who is "giving them space," as if that were an act of generosity rather than exile.

But the truth is: you do not know where your adult child has gone. You only know that you are not invited.

How Families Disappear Without Dying

Murray Bowen called it emotional cutoff—a term that sounds clinical, maybe even neat. But cutoffs don’t happen like surgeries. They happen like erosion.

Family systems theorists tell us that estrangement is often a form of anxious relief—a way for adult children to reduce the chronic emotional reactivity left over from unresolved trauma, high-conflict environments, or patterns of enmeshment (Kerr & Bowen, 1988).

And while adult children may frame the decision as liberation, it rarely feels that way to the parents left behind. For them, estrangement is a grief with no body. A punishment without trial.

We’re learning more about estrangement through research. One large study by Gilligan et al. (2020) found that approximately one in ten American mothers over 45 is estranged from at least one adult child. In most cases, mothers did not initiate the estrangement. They were trying to parent across cultural or moral divides that widened slowly, then all at once.

Who Gets to Be the Narrator?

Most adult children who estrange do not call it estrangement. They call it boundaries. Or no contact. They speak of healing, clarity, nervous system regulation. They post memes about breaking generational curses and living their truth.

And maybe they’re right.

But in the quiet of the old house—the one they grew up in, the one where their art still hangs in the hallway—someone else is living a different narrative. One with no hashtags. One with fewer witnesses.

Estranged parents often report ambiguous loss—a kind of unresolved grief where the person is physically present or traceable, but emotionally gone (Boss, 2007). It is not uncommon for estranged parents to check the obituaries—less out of fear than out of morbid curiosity: If they died, would anyone tell me?

The Crime of Being Human

Most estranged parents were not abusive in the classic sense. Some were selfish. Some were overly involved. Some were just… trying their best under difficult circumstances.

They gave love, perhaps imperfectly.

Psychologist Joshua Coleman, who has spent two decades researching estrangement, notes that many adult children cut ties not over a single traumatic event, but over “a buildup of pain, misunderstanding, and unmet needs,” often amplified by therapy culture that idealizes emotional sovereignty and demonizes parental fallibility (Coleman, 2021).

What gets lost in the popular script is the notion that parents can grow, too.

That accountability does not require annihilation. That distance can be medicine—but not always a cure.

The Unsent Letter

You may never send it.

The one that says, I remember the way you clung to me during thunderstorms. I remember how you smelled when you were sick. I remember everything.

Instead, you keep the photos, though you no longer know who is allowed to see them.

You tell your therapist you’re doing fine. That you understand their need for space. That you support their healing.

And still, there are days when the phone rings and you forget for a second—just one second—that it won’t be them.

The Dangerous Hope

Some parents live in the purgatory of maybe. Maybe they’ll come back. Maybe one day, after therapy, a letter will arrive. Maybe they’ll soften. Maybe their children will ask questions instead of assigning blame.

Maybe. Maybe not.

Estrangement, like all forms of exile, teaches you to live without the language that used to define you.

You are no longer Mom, or Dad. You are a person with a memory.

You light a candle they will never see. You set a table they will never join. You love them, still.

And that love, it seems, has nowhere to go.

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.

REFERENCES:

Boss, P. (2007). Ambiguous loss theory: Challenges for scholars and practitioners. Family Relations, 56(2), 105–110. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-3729.2007.00444.x

Coleman, J. (2021). Rules of estrangement: Why adult children cut ties and how to heal the conflict. Harmony.

Gilligan, M., Suitor, J. J., Rurka, M., & Con, M. (2020). Adult children’s gender, parental favoritism, and estrangement in later life. Journal of Marriage and Family, 82(2), 647–663. https://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12654

Kerr, M. E., & Bowen, M. (1988). Family evaluation: An approach based on Bowen theory. W. W. Norton & Company