Sarah fell in love with Ireland as a child – between her stepdad’s National Geographic magazine subscription, a book series set in the country, and her love of mythology. But Ireland was not home, and she only moved here when familial circumstances demanded a shift in dynamics and a new location.
“I left home at 15 when my mother and stepdad divorced, and all hell broke loose with my mother without my stepdad as a buffer,” she says. As a result of her mother’s bullying behaviour, she made a conscious choice to cut off connection and to make Ireland home. “In later years, I realised that the reason my mother and I had a frayed relationship was because I wasn’t living up to her ‘trophy kid’ expectations. I picked my own path, did my own thing and I wouldn’t be controlled by her. Her methods worked on everyone else, from her manager to her friends and some other family, but I slipped away from her fingers.”
Psychotherapist Karl Melvin says “families are complex and often struggle with the weight of personality clashes, intense pressures, expectations to fulfil a role or duty, unsupported mental health struggles, and abusive behaviours”.
“The latter is not the cause of all estrangements, but it is a dimension we can’t disregard and will inform the potential impact, both on individuals and the family collective,” says the author of Navigating Family Estrangement: Helping Adults Understand and Manage the Challenges of Family Estrangement.
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When Sarah moved, she blocked her mother’s phone number and didn’t share her Irish number with her for years. “She tried to get to me through my partner, but I didn’t care enough and neither did he after he realised how badly she used to affect me.
“I always found it hard to cut her off completely, but I knew in order to protect my own mental health I had to keep boundaries. Of course, she broke all of them and would take a mile after I’d given her an inch.”
The physical distance gave Sarah a fresh start and garnered the necessary space she needed from her mother. “It felt like a safety blanket – knowing she couldn’t just show up at the door and start manipulating everyone around me.”
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Melvin notes that disconnection may be “No-contact for some, where they want nothing to do with each other”. He also recognises that others may require a balance of “Low-contact”, where there is a strained relationship, but regular interactions.
“Due to the stigma surrounding this issue and the culture of avoidance, silence, and pushing issues under the carpet, there could be lots of low-contact families who go through the motions of family life, but any closeness is superficial at best and underpinned by a degree of distrust and defensiveness,” he says.
Family estrangement can feel like a living loss, but Sarah is comfortable with the choice she made and “wouldn’t want it any other way”.
With distance protecting her mental health, she feels a freedom from the “narcissism and manipulation” of an abusive parent. “There is always a struggle and grief when you cut people out of your life,” she says, “even if it’s in your best interest. But I feel like I’ve made a new family here in Ireland. I still speak with family members who always cared, but Ireland is my home and my chosen family is here.”
According to Melvin, “There is no one-fits-all approach to healing, just a combination of acknowledging this grief, regularly opening up to those in their support circle, and constantly refining how they look after themselves. I encourage all of my clients to not set an impossible healing schedule and focus on the day-to-day challenges and, hopefully, over time, they might slowly make some progress.”
Declan, who currently lives in Scotland, says his relationship with his family “is tenuous at best”.
While he doesn’t go back to see his parents in Belfast too often, when he does, he needs time to “recover” from the reconnection. “It really takes it out of me,” he says. “Just being in that place, walking those streets again, carries too many reminders of how it once was.”
Declan did not choose to break from his family. The decision was made for him. As a neurodivergent teenager in the 1980s and ’90s, using alcohol to self-medicate, there was no common language and little understanding to support him. “Initially, I was kicked out of the house, leaving me homeless,” he says. “I’m from a small town, and was always bumping into family members. We would behave like we didn’t know each other. My brothers weren’t allowed to speak with me. It was a tough time.”
‘Could it have been handled a bit differently, some attempt made to see what was going on for me at the time?’
— Declan
Nothing is ever mentioned within the family about this period in his life, he says, but it has significantly affected his relationships. While his brothers maintain a close connection to his parents, the breaking of his connection with his family can frustrate him. He feels he has “come to terms with this” or is at least coming to terms with it.
Relationship struggles and family estrangement issues are never linear.
“Due to the devastating losses an estrangement can bring, the idea of healing can feel like they are skating uphill,” says Melvin. “There can also be regular setbacks, just when they feel they have a handle on their inner or outer world.”
Declan tried for many years to bridge the gap in the relationships, but feels “too much water has flowed under that bridge for there to ever be a healthy relationship”.
In particular, his connection with his mother is difficult. “She is a tough woman. But so was her mother. And I’m sure her mother before that. I have come to see that my parents carry their own traumas. Sadly, most people in the North of Ireland do. Not exclusively. Plus all the generational stuff we all inherit piled on for good measure.
“So, I don’t blame them as much, but it still bubbles to the surface. Could it have been handled a bit differently, some attempt made to see what was going on for me at the time? Instead of just being thrown out on the street like that?”
Melvin suggests that “the general estrangement discussion on social media, which often pits estranged parents against adult children and vice versa, continues to highlight the generational gap between perspectives and how each side is invalidating the other side’s experience due to fundamental differences in how they were raised and what is now considered normal”. He also notes that the “flavour of estrangement is different for each family”.
Declan feels comfortable with the disconnection now. “It took a long, long time though. In fact, I’d say it’s only been [in] the last five or six years that it has come about through a lot of therapy, EMDR in particular [Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing, a psychotherapy treatment designed to alleviate distress associated with traumatic memories], and discovering my neurodivergence and learning to deal with that day-to-day. I haven’t told them [family members] about any of that. I don’t tell them very much about my life at all.”
In this regard, Melvin advises affected individuals to “stop trying to manage the impact on your own. Many people become conditioned to be uber-independent and never express emotion, and so reaching out for help will feel alien.
“When asking for help, being specific in what they can do will reduce frustration for everyone. And learn to value your story and experiences. This is privileged information, and they need to treat it as such if they want others to do the same.”
