Kathy McCoy - We Dont Talk Anymore: Healing after Parents and Their Adult Children Become Estranged

Also by Kathy McCoy, PhD

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For more information, visit drkathymccoy.com.

Copyright 2017 by Kathy McCoy

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: McCoy, Kathy, author.

Title: We dont talk anymore : healing after parents and their adult children become estranged / Kathy McCoy, Ph.D.

Description: Naperville, Illinois : Sourcebooks, Inc., [2017] | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017013758 | (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Parent and adult child. | Interpersonal conflict. | Interpersonal relations. | Alienation (Social psychology) | Families--Psychological aspects.

Classification: LCC HQ755.86 .M399 2017 | DDC 306.874--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017013758

To Tim
with love and gratitude

Contents

A Note from the Author

Dear Reader:

I cant know the exact circumstances that caused you to pick up this book, but please know that I do understand a great deal about the pain youre experiencing right now. My understanding has grown over the years in many different ways.

I was once a young adult child of troubled parents, struggling to make a decision about how close I dared be to them as I sought to build a new and independent life for myself while also maintaining loving ties and firm boundaries.

When I married my husband, Bob, I found that his family had a long history of intergenerational estrangement. His fathers estrangement from his own father cut Bobs ties with his beloved grandfather, a very painful loss. Some years later, after his mothers death, Bob became estranged from his father, maintaining a stubborn silence for the last twenty years of his fathers lifesomething he now deeply regrets.

As a psychotherapist, I have had many clients who suffered through estrangement from their parents or their adult children. Ive spent countless hours listening to their tearful stories, their regrets, their anger and their fears that these painful family rifts might never healand working with them to find hope for reconciliation.

When my husband and I moved to an active adult community seven years ago, accounts of parent and adult child estrangement abounded: shared in the community pool as some blinked back tears behind oversized sunglasses; whispered in the gym locker room or over coffee in the local caf. And then there was the new couple I recently visited to welcome to our neighborhood. Three hours and one box of tissues later, they had told me a heartbreaking tale of being blindsided with an estrangement from their adult son.

In 2010, I started my blog Living Fully in Midlife and Beyond. I have covered a number of topics in this blog over the years, but my posts about parents and adult children are by far the most popular. One in particular, written in 2012, stands out above all others. When Parents and Adult Children Become Strangers has been read nearly one million times by anguished parents and adult children around the world. And these readers have left hundreds of comments and pleas for advice on how to avoid or to heal estrangements.

These comments and pleas have led to this book, which covers so many of the issues that Ive heard and seen among my patients, family, and friends. What I share on these pages comes from many years of seeing and feeling the conflicts and the pain that so often divide parents and adult children.

Your situation may be uniquely your own. But youre not alone. Lets explore together what has happened and what can be done to soothe your pain and bring hope back into your life.

Love and best wishes,

Dr. Kathy McCoy

The names of the parents and adult children whose stories are the heart of this book have been changed to protect their privacy. These patients, commenters on my blog, and interviewees have contributed so much, and I am grateful for their generosity and courage.

Preface: The Silent Epidemic

While parent and adult child estrangement is often called an epidemic, it is a silent one. Reliable statistics on the percentage of parents and their adult children who are estranged are largely absent from professional and popular literature. The reason for this shocking lack of statistical evidence for a problem that appears to be increasingly common is shame: the people involved have difficulty admitting that they are estranged from a parent or adult child.

There are celebrities whose parental estrangements have made tabloid headlineslike Jennifer Aniston, who became estranged from her mother after her mom wrote a tell-all book, and Angelina Jolie, whose feuds and estrangements from her father Jon Voight have been quite public. Most people, however, keep estrangement a painful secret, even from close friends or extended family members.

Estrangement can be a secret that is relatively easy to keep. Adult children may be living at a distance from their parents. Pictures and news about rarely (or never) seen grandchildren may be readily available on Facebook. And many busy adult children dont talk to or visit their parents on a regular basis.