Throughout our lives we outgrow friendships or different relationships, but when we choose to walk away from our parents this topic suddenly becomes somewhat stigmatised. This can, of course, apply to any family member. There is quite often an assumption, particularly if we’ve grown up in a household and a family where we have a really close relationship with our parents, we just assume that that’s how it is. Of course, for a lot of us that’s really the opposite of what we might have experienced.
There’s this saying that if someone isn’t there for you during your worst times, why should they get to be there at your best times when everything’s great? So why do we outgrow people and why is it okay to create some distance, even if that is with your family members? People so often assume that a bloodline means that you have to tolerate whatever stress and trauma your family members may decide to direct at you. Maintaining this sense of loyalty to your family shouldn’t come at a cost to your own well-being, so maybe we have to let go of those obligations that we’ve been conditioned to believe that we have. After all we all want to feel safe and to be able to prioritise our own healing in an environment with clear boundaries.
Why do we outgrow certain people and why does estrangement between parents and children, which can often bring about feelings of guilt and shame, occur? The fact is there’s usually a very good reason why this happens and it’s often a very hard decision because it actually takes a lot of courage and it can involve a grieving process. We must remember that our individual healing process may not mean reconciliation with people. It’s about taking accountability for our own actions and well-being. Hopefully by the time we have navigated our way through this session, whether you’re the one who has created distance or if you’re a parent trying to understand why your child has stepped away, you will feel validated in the actions that you have taken. It’s natural to outgrow people; we all do at some point in our life because throughout the different stages of our life we are constantly evolving and we’re constantly learning. It makes sense that we’re going to be attracted to different qualities in people and different environments will influence how calm or happy we feel at different stages of our life.
If we look back to who we were a year ago or five years ago, I think most of us would be able to see that we’ve changed and we’re not the same person that we were back then. Our values and priorities in life will change and we may start to realize that some people in our environment are actually quite superficial so conversations will naturally stop flowing because we want more depth. Maybe we have children and some of our friends don’t so our habits start to change and no longer align with the habits that we want shared with those friends.
Whenever our life takes a new direction, this can be a positive change in our life and we can start to gravitate towards relationships that are more reflective of the person that we are becoming rather than the person that we were ten years ago. Sometimes people don’t like this because maybe our actions push them out of their comfort zone or maybe on a subconscious level they know that they too need to make changes in their life but they don’t know how or they don’t have the courage to take that step. We are not responsible for someone else’s happiness; we’re only responsible for our own.
Maybe our upbringing, social conditioning, or culture cause us to believe that perhaps we’re being selfish in creating some space for ourselves. This isn’t about you saying to people, “Well I’m better than you so I want something better.” It’s about having some self-compassion and understanding what your own needs are and giving yourself permission to let go of the things that no longer serve you or things that can be a drain on your energy.
We might even see these changes occur in our professional life. Maybe as our business grows we learn more about what it is that we’re trying to achieve so our energy changes, which may attract a different kind of client. I’ve certainly found that when I first started out self-employed most of what I had coming in through the door were people just wanting some relaxation. This was partly due to changes within the industry and partly because people were then recognizing that I was a medical professional and partly because I naturally steered towards making changes and doing more charity work or helping out community projects. Working with vulnerable women because I had done more work on myself and my previous trauma so I naturally gravitated in that direction. Then because obviously I was talking about those things more, it was only natural that a different kind of energy was being put out there and so I was attracting different people.
Outgrowing people is never easy; it doesn’t matter if you’re the one pulling away or the one who is losing someone. I remember a long-term friend who I’d known since early childhood. I thought of her as a sister and I thought it would be one of those lifelong friendships; we were going to grow old together, but she pulled away quite suddenly during the absolute worst time of my life, when I was already feeling quite isolated. The grieving process doesn’t have to mean that somebody died; it can be the loss of how you thought a certain aspect of your life was going to be. The loss of this friendship for me was most definitely a grieving process. Letting go of all that shared history that spanned about 30 years was uncomfortable. Naturally I had all of those questions of “What did I do wrong?” and I still don’t have those answers.
Eventually I came to realise that it was just a part of her spiritual development and perhaps we just weren’t on the same path anymore. Perhaps we should remind ourselves that the changes we make due to spiritually evolving may simply represent the completion of a chapter in our life. Not that we don’t like someone or that we don’t appreciate what they may have done for us. Some people come into our lives so that we learn something. Once that has happened then we move on while still remembering the role that they had in our life.
Maybe the way to move forward when someone has pulled away from you is through gratitude for those memories, for the life lessons. We must always view change as an opportunity for something better or something that is meant for us at a certain time, which enables us to continue to learn, to continue to grow and connect with our inner self. Walking away does not mean that we have failed.
When we have long-term relationships with people maybe we should ask ourselves, “Am I still maintaining this relationship because it has been a constant in my life? Now it’s just convenient to have that person around because they’ve always been there?” Or am I maintaining the relationship because it adds something to my life and it’s contributing to my evolution? If every time you talk to someone your energy is drained or you have those long awkward silences, or maybe they’re wanting to do things that just don’t interest you anymore, it’s okay to choose something different for you. You don’t have to try to accommodate things that are no longer aligned to your life and you don’t have to apologise or defend your actions.
People in your life will support you and support the things that help you to grow even if they might not agree with them or be on that path themselves. If they don’t then you shouldn’t have to reduce who you are to make someone else feel comfortable or to promote their growth at the expense of yours.
Quite often when any change is about to take place in our life, we will feel some resistance, the urge to stay in our comfort zone. Maybe whoever we are walking away from will resent or criticize us because they don’t understand that we are simply entering a new chapter or that maybe they have stepped outside of your boundaries.
Being responsible for your actions does not mean that you have to justify your decisions to others. It doesn’t mean that you diminish who you are to make someone else feel bigger. Taking responsibility means staying connected to who you are on the inside, having compassion for yourself, honouring your spiritual growth. If others suddenly feel uncomfortable or triggered, it is their responsibility to do their own self-development and to understand that their happiness is not dependent on someone else having to be silent or small or uncomfortable.
One of the concepts I come back to in my transformation workshops — a well-known idea attributed to motivational speaker Jim Rohn — is that we are a reflection of the five people we spend the most time with.
When you think about those five people in your life, ask yourself honestly:
Do they inspire you to challenge and develop yourself?
Do they hold you back or keep you in unhealthy habits?
Do they encourage you in your goals?
Are they shaping your life for the better?
The more we heal ourselves, the more we look for depth in others. The less we tolerate those who are superficial and the more we notice misaligned relationships. We don’t need to feel guilty or fearful for choosing relationships that are aligned with who we are now rather than who we have always been.
One comment that often comes up from participants in my workshop is that some of their friends might say that they’ve changed but this is simply validation that we are healing and growing and that we are not remaining stagnant in an outdated version of ourselves.
So what about the more specific estrangement between parent and child, which is much more common than perhaps we realise? I can think of so many examples in my life where I needed support and there was just the assumption from other people that I would have a supportive loving family who would be there, right? If we have been lucky enough to have grown up in a supportive and loving environment, then we really don’t understand how it is possible that a child could ever walk away from a parent.
There is still a lot of stigma around this subject but think about it, if a friend came to you and said that their partner was controlling who they see and where they go or constantly making them feel like nothing or gaslighting them, we would more than likely suggest that they really consider whether they want to be in a relationship with that person or we might even outright suggest that they leave them because it’s clear that the relationship is toxic. We would never want one of our friends to be in an environment that is destroying their mental health and reducing their self-worth. So why would we tell them to tolerate the same behaviour just because it’s a parent or other family member who is causing their suffering? Why does that unspoken rule suddenly exist that the very word mother or father in itself earns the right to be respected or to receive loyalty? Connection comes from how a person acts towards you not from the title they might have.
Yet so often those who have such a label have this sense of entitlement, believing that they don’t need to make any effort to form a connection, that they can treat you as badly as they like, taking away your sense of safety without taking any responsibility for their actions because they just happen to have played a part in your creation. Therefore, you must owe them something, right? Is about building trust by offering mutual respect and an emotional safe space while taking accountability for your actions. Too many take that role of an authority figure to the extreme, feeling that it’s always the other person that needs to put in all the effort and they don’t need to do anything. Maybe they never had a good role model growing up themselves. Either way this ends up being a control-fuelled dynamic. Because we are often made to feel ashamed of walking away we don’t talk about it.
The decision to walk away from a parent is often a decision made after lengthy deliberation and with good reason, not because they don’t care about the person or because they’re cold or incapable of forgiving others. The decision to walk away is a last resort after multiple second chances, numerous attempts to be seen or heard by that parent, years of trying to meet that parent’s standards, trying to explain their viewpoint, years of being dismissed, unappreciated and emotionally abused.
It’s often not about hate. It’s actually about love. It’s about that moment when we start to love ourselves enough to want to heal. To want to feel safe and protect ourselves. To want to be happy. To want to experience boundaries and to want to break that generational cycle for our own children.
When I stepped away from my own mother, I was walking away from years of emotional unavailability, years of narcissistic behaviour, years of unacknowledged wounding that she never took any accountability for. Years of control. When I walked away from my father, it was because after having been absent for 98% of my life, he proved himself to be a huge disappointment. I guess you could say he went in the opposite direction, wanting so much, I’ll say affection, for lack of a better word, and validation that his behaviour became completely inappropriate. I completely distanced myself from my own emotional safety and peace. I wanted to set a different example to my children.
Sometimes we walk away to break those generational cycles. To rid ourselves of those wounds of our ancestors that aren’t ours to carry. To do the spiritual work that was never done by our parents. In my previous podcast on how childhood trauma affects intimacy as an adult, I spoke about parentification and how sometimes we don’t have that experience of a parent when we are a child. We have to parent ourselves and when we choose to walk away, we often have to learn how to parent ourselves again, creating new boundaries, rebuilding our confidence, re-learning what love is, re-learning what safety feels like. We have to do the work that our parents never did so that we can be loved, accepted, feel worthy, feel safe, and become the person that we needed to be as a child.
If we weren’t protected, loved, or accepted as a child, maybe that wasn’t our parents’ fault. Maybe they were mentally ill or maybe they had suffered neglect or abuse as a child. Perhaps as a result they didn’t know how to parent because they never had a good example themselves. Just because they didn’t have the emotional maturity to understand what constitutes a nurturing environment, that doesn’t mean that we have to continue the cycle. We can choose differently for us and for our children. Others don’t have to agree with our choices. They don’t have to understand why we made it and we don’t have to explain it to them because it is our choice and it should just be respected.
Becoming estranged from a parent is not just some random act of rebellion or wanting attention. It’s that we most likely needed some attention for our whole life and we got stuck in survival mode where we had to parent ourselves for so long. It’s choosing to prioritise yourself after years of a parent failing to acknowledge their manipulation and emotional neglect and after years of a parent failing to prioritise you.
The reason why this decision is so difficult and involves the grieving process is that in the situations where there was love for a parent, that parent didn’t love you enough in turn to stop the wounding. What price would we pay to our health for abandoning ourselves to the belief that blood is thicker than water? We only get one mother and one father, right so somehow that seems to make it OK for us to forget about what we need. We’re conditioned from an early age to do as we’re told, to endure whatever our parents might throw at us, often minimising our own experiences, ignoring our feelings and our truth because we’re just a child. What do we know? What can we change?
What happens when we’re no longer a child? Should we continue to betray ourselves just so we can say that we remained loyal to that person because they’re the only mother or father we’re ever going to have? All that will do is keep us stuck in the same trauma cycle that we were in as a child. To accept that the parent-child dynamic is toxic can be a hard pill to swallow because it goes against that conditioning that we had as a child. It goes against our normal, against what may feel safe to us, because that’s all we’ve ever known. Taking yourself out of that dynamic can’t always be done simply by having a conversation because many parents refused to take any accountability or own their failings even when presented with solid evidence of them. Instead of simply saying sorry they become defensive because they have no understanding of what it means to provide an emotional safe space.
In my case, my mother refused to acknowledge the pain she had caused, not only to me but also to my children, projecting her own mistakes onto me to make herself the victim who everyone should feel sorry for. She, like so many other parents, wanted the glory of being a parent, of having that title, but without doing the work that was needed. We take back our choice and we heal in the only way we know how. We grieve the life or the relationship that we never had and we let go of all those things that we yearned for as a child and never received.
We prioritise our safety without any obligation to explain why, putting boundaries into place to ensure that we never become that neglected child again.
Now obviously we all have our own version of the truth. I know that there may well be parents listening to this whose children have walked away, who are literally yelling at me, saying that they weren’t a bad parent, they didn’t do anything wrong. Maybe you’re also feeling hurt or being quite defensive at the moment.
If you want to attempt to rebuild a relationship with a child who has walked away, you must above all else take accountability for your actions. Trying to control the situation by guilt tripping them or making them feel ashamed for how they have responded in order to protect themselves and keep themselves safe will simply push them further away. This goes for any family member that you have walked away from.
You must also be genuine in your willingness to accept responsibility and change and this requires vulnerability, which of course many of us are simply not willing to do because it’s uncomfortable. It requires us to acknowledge those darker parts of our personality that we try so hard to keep hidden.
Generally adult children are only open to reconnecting and repairing the relationship if a safe environment is provided. This means not only physically safe but emotionally safe. Sometimes this won’t happen and so distance is the only solution. Keeping yourself safe is never going to be wrong or be something that you should apologise for.
It’s also important to try to understand that if your child has distanced themselves, it may not even be about the person that you are today but possibly it’s about the person you were when they were growing up. Maybe they are only just starting to deal with the trauma from their childhood. They may have even forgiven you for the experience that they had with you as a child because maybe they might understand that there was some generational trauma or some mental illness. If you still haven’t taken accountability for that, then you’re probably still not showing up for them as a parent now even though you may have changed. They choose to parent themselves and take accountability for themselves.
Some parents listening may genuinely be taking accountability and doing everything they can but there may still be a disconnect due to the child either having issues of their own or that for whatever reason they still feel hurt. Even if we don’t understand someone’s feelings, they are still valid. We can try to listen in a non-judgmental way without interrupting, without trying to defend yourself and without making it all about you or guilt-tripping them into making you the victim.
If you are genuinely willing to repair that relationship, first you need to ask yourself the following questions:
How have I shown up in this relationship?
Do I create emotional safety?
Do I know how to genuinely apologise, not for how they feel but for your part in it?
What did you do that they then felt that way even if that was unintentional on your part?
Have I taken ownership of the harm, intentional or not, that my child experienced?
Now as an adult child who did walk away, I spent far too long hiding who I was, trying to understand, to justify myself, trying to show up in the hope that one day something would change. That I would finally get some kind of acknowledgement that I was worthy. I finally put a stop to the relationship because I was tired of shouldering the responsibility that someone else should have taken for themselves and tired of mourning a relationship that had never and would never exist.
There is always room for healing but it must be based on openness, empathy, and ownership. There is no place for guilt, control, and self-absorbed behaviours so choosing boundaries over history or over a title is always acceptable even if that history is with a family member.
REFERENCES
Agllias, K. (2013). Family estrangement: Aberration or common occurrence? Australian Social Work, 66(4), 533–544. https://doi.org/10.1080/0312407X.2013.782558
Agllias, K. (2016). Family estrangement: A matter of perspective. Routledge.
Boszormenyi-Nagy, I., & Spark, G. M. (1973). Invisible loyalties: Reciprocity in intergenerational family therapy. Harper & Row.
Coleman, J. (2021). Rules of estrangement: Why adult children cut ties and how to heal the conflict. Harmony Books.
Forward, S., & Buck, C. (1989). Toxic parents: Overcoming their hurtful legacy and reclaiming your life. Bantam Books.
McBride, K. (2008). Will I ever be good enough? Healing the daughters of narcissistic mothers. Free Press.
Pillemer, K. (2020). Fault lines: Fractured families and how to mend them. Avery.