In my own professional opinion, the vast majority of estrangements between parents and their children have to do primarily with the codependent relationship lifestyle that nobody realizes has been in charge of their relationship dynamics for as long as it has. I have blogged so much about codependency over recent years....and it is still worth mentioning here. Seatbelts on please---this will get ugly and difficult to read!
Codependency is about pursuing the "addiction" style of relating in one's own important enough and chosen primary relationships. In this context, are we addicted to one or more of our children? Are we trying to get one or more of our children addicted to us? Have we spent our entire lives trying to make sure they will be loved enough, understood enough, comforted enough, encouraged enough, forgiven enough (etc. etc. etc.!) so as to ensure that they will love us forever in return and never truly leave or abandon us? Well, good luck with that! No parent is perfect. No parent will ever do "everything" right when it comes to raising their child(ren). Yet when we are addicted to our children, we DO NOT recognize how we are working to cultivate an unnatural dependency on us (as their parent(s))---which will ultimately render him/her/them fundamentally INcompetent over the course of time. Is that what we want to teach our kids given the way we relate to them? "You can't live without me!" "After all I've done for you, you owe me!" "You can't do anything right unless I do it for you!" OMG! STOP! This addiction to our kids is premised, oh by the way, on our own toxic need to be NEEDED by him/her/them! We think we will get our kids approval, acceptance, and love by teaching them how to become comfortable with being served by us. That won't work. They'll just find someone else to replace us and when they do, we may get booted out of their own lives quicker than we can blink, o.k.?!
So for the kids raised by this type of "smother mother" or "helicopter dad"...he/she/they feel like nothing was right enough in mom's or dad's eyes when it deviated from mom or dad's "plan". What plan you may ask? Their child's "life" plan, that's what! Don't misunderstand, nobody wants to raise a child who will end up becoming a sociopath on blast with zero empathy attached....yet it IS ironic how this seems to be the common and unfortunate result when speaking to parents who have been cut off by their son(s) and/or daughter(s) for no legitimately understood reason(s). "He has no empathy for me or his mother at all. It's just gone. He used to be a kind hearted kid, but now he takes every opportunity to jump down our throats even when we text him to say "Hi!". Yep, it can be like that for sure. "It seems like as soon as my daughter met her now-husband, he was working to separate her from us like we were some kind of poison", states another mom. Yes, it can be that way also when codependency is at the heart of any given family system's relationship life.
Since the average estrangement is reported to last on average for four years, the good news is that nothing will remain the same forever. However, when untreated or mistreated mental illness and/or a personality disorder is involved--these stats are no longer valid. In my own case, my parents and brother were highly codependent with one another since he was born and crowned as the "golden child" of our family system. As is still true today in many cultures all around the globe, when "men rule and girls drool"...life can get quite messy for the kids involved in this type of family environment. Parents can argue all they want proclaiming "We loved all our kids equally!". However, ANY kid knows when a sibling is declared golden at the expense of the others. As such, some parents' eyeballs need a good washing to determine if "this" was their issue as codependent parents when raising their kids. In the case of my brother, he was too dependent on our parents' "loving care" to leave and start his own life interdependently from theirs. Yet he also became involved in an alternative lifestyle that, sadly, ended up literally killing him after 45 years of practice. My brother was, in life, more child-like than a full adult emotionally speaking. He did not know how to regulate his emotions. He did "go off" quickly like a firecracker when triggered by someone saying something he took the wrong way immediately. He assumed the worst more often than he did any other choice. He and my parents can thank their toxic codependent relationship lifestyle for that. It did not help him grow up into the kind of man they believed they would get---yet, as my parents hoped for, their son did live with them their entire lives until his own death less than a decade later.
Next post, I will address how parent/adult child estrangements feed the worst of our dysfunctional human nature...