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I also have a 32 year old daughter who estranged herself from me three years ago. Quite frankly, I'm still in shock. Even though I was raised in a very sick family with an alcoholic, abusive father, I gave my children everything I could. I, too, wanted them to have a wonderful childhood – the one I never had. But I now see that I needed help and education, because apparently, I've passed on family dysfunction without meaning to. It's all so sad. I just have to try to make it through one day at a time. What else can you do? And, other family members have placed blame on me….I've always been the "fix it" person in my family, so I'm the easy target. I'm hoping I can come to a point of acceptance that my daughter's decision to estrange herself belongs to her – and I must move on.

I'd like to find a support group. Every morning, I wake up with thoughts of my beloved daughter and I just ache that she has abandoned a relationship with me.

Helen Marie said:

Dear oldredhorse,

It sounds like you were raised in a dysfunctional family situation (abusive alcoholic parent) and, unfortunately, dysfunctional patterns get passed from generation to generation unless everyone undergoes extensive counseling and education re. the destructive family situation.

My daughter turned against me after she married and had a child. I was severely physically abused, left her abusive father, went for counselling and joined a support group – which helped me move on and raise her in as 'normal' a life as possible. I have now been with a supportive and caring man for over 20 years – one she wants no parts of. She now supports and defends her abusive alcoholic father, who also sexually abused her as a child. She told me she does not want her child to know anything about her past, and if I can't keep my mouth shut, I am not welcome near her or her family. She needs counselling, but refuses to get it. She can not even discuss her past with her husband. She has become very controlling in her marriage, and I sense her anger.

When our adult children refuse to acknowledge their harmful past, refuse counseling, and do not want us in their life unless we stay stuck in the dysfunctional pattern, all we can do is accept it, and go on with our life, in hopes that some day they will realize there is a better life waiting for them too.

I am both a child who cut out my father who was an abusive alcoholic (both verbally and physically) and a parent who has been cut out by an adult child who has ben given everything, incluing the proverbial pony that every child wants. I spent my entire life as a parent building for my two daughters the childhood I didn't get. I have one daughter who is a lovely kind, compassionate, intelligent art teacher and the other is about graduate with honors and a degree in biology this May. I do believe that she has cut me from her life because she wants me to hurt– even if she hurts herself in the process.
By the way, I waited, out of respect for my mom, until after she'd died to cut my father loose. It was so incredibly freeing I never looked back.
I hope this isn't how my younger daughter feels about me, but maybe I'm being punished by the universe for cutting off my father. Who knows.

I just want to jump in for a second and say thanks to Louise and low contact for being forthright and honest about their feelings. I felt like maybe it gave me some insight. I wish I could read a post that my own ED would write so I could know where to start.
yes estrangement is a very lonely place for us all. I have hope though that it can be better someday. I am going to keep praying, reading and trying to understand.
May everyone here feel peace and love this holiday. We are all children of God and deserve it.

You say, "Estrangement is the loneliest place on earth." I agree, it's very painfull to acknowledge that the people closest to us, don't want to be near us or associate with us, BUT if the relationship lacks caring and love, or involves emotional, physical or verbal abuse – then I believe we're all better off a part.

Yes, our children should show us love and respect for raising them, IF WE were good parents. If they don't, let the spoiled brats go – they aren't worth it. However, IF WE were abusive, alcoholic, or treated them like crap – then they don't owe us their love and respect. Good for them for having the courage to move on.

That's my personal opinion – things work both ways!

Carolyn said:

Louise, I am sorry you jumped to conclusions about my post. It was not about you but more about my own daughters and for the majority of the EC that I hear about on these forums. I have written you before that I commend you for trying to reach out to your mother and I am sorry that she does not take responsibility for her part. If you have been on these forums for the past year you will read that most of the estranged mothers have done the reaching out, making amends and have taken responsibility for our mistakes and sometimes apologizing for issues we aren't even sure are the problem. Basically we have tried everything in our power to understand. We have let our children know that we will love them always and be here for them when ready. But to no avail. Most of the EC will not have contact with us and some will not even communicate why there are estranged. That can be very frustrating As you know the constant rejection and hurt can be very debilitating and when it finally takes a toll on your physical and emotional health it is time to "let go." Not that we would not welcome our EC back in our life. But in order for that to happen both parties have to want to forgive and move forward. Meanwhile we estranged mothers have to do our best to live our lives and to not let the behavior of our EC define who we are. I wish I could be of help to you but I can see that I am not able to but I do want to wish you peace in your life.

Thank you for responding Carolyn, but it seems a little thoughtless on your part to have used the Estranged Children's Forum to say what you did. As was saying that I jumped to conclusions. I didn't jump to ANY conclusion, you made it very clear in what you were saying. Take ownership of that, don't pass it off onto me.

Considering that I was the first person to post on this EC Forum..and had not been bashing my mother or parents at all, in fact quite the opposite, it would have been very kind of you to have not interrupted the general tone of the Forum with angry thoughtless statements. How about a little empathy on your part?

To be honest, the general tone of the posts which you and Sharon submitted very much reminded me of my mother and her ability to blame, misunderstand and turn a situation around on me. Are YOU all the same?

To quote you,
"Could it be that these EC learned this behavior from seeing it growing up and that as long as it is allowed they will behave that way?"

Not a very kind implication.

To answer your question, no, I did not learn this "behavior" from my father and mother. This is called my last-resort-at-self-preservation.

If your post exemplifies how you treat your own daughters, blaming and insulting them by calling their estrangement from you an "adolescent power struggle (and that you) feel sometimes they do not even know what they are fighting about other than just to be right", you need to start listening to what they are really saying to you. This ain't no power struggle, I can assure you.

As I have said repeatedly, NO CHILD WOULD EVER CHOOSE ESTRANGEMENT AS AN OPTION OUT ON A WHIM.
IT IS AN ACT OF DESPERATION AND DESPAIR.
ESTRANGEMENT IS THE LONELIEST PLACE ON EARTH.

Next time, you and Sharon should be more sensitive and vent on your own Parents' Forum. You chose the wrong venue.

Sharon and Carolyn,

To respond to Sharon's quote below:

"Divorcing ones mother might be self-empowering and fashionable, but unless a situation is fraught with blatant physical, sexual, or emotional abuse, that tactic is a passive-aggressive cop-out."

You sound very angry. Up until your post, there was nothing angry in tone on this forum. I do not appreciate the anger and frustrations you must feel in your own life being lobbed at me.
Clearly you have not read or processed anything I have posted. Shame on you for insinuating that "divorcing" my mother and family is a "fashionable" trend that I am following. It's been the most horrific thing I've ever gone through. Worse than growing up in the chaos of an alcoholic household or losing my father. This is a pain that never leaves me.
For your information, since you don't know me at all, I have never followed, or been swayed by a trend, ever; particularly when it comes to ending my relationship with my mother whom I love dearly in spite of the hurt she causes me.
You speak of being empathetic, (which if you read my posts I speak with great empathy for my mother and the awful mother she grew up with).
Your inability to understand my posts suggests that you are reading and absorbing only what you have chosen to, or have manipulated my thoughts to suit your own personal argument.

Your rush to judgement of me and my estrangement may be symptomatic of how you treat your own family?
Not that I'm judging…

And Carolyn, wow, what an about face you have had?
Are you so easily swayed from one extreme to the other?

I was trying to give some of the Parents hope for their own situations by explaining the pain that I have felt and how much I love my mother in spite of our estrangement. I thought that this might make Parents realize that if I felt this way- their EC's might too. I guess I failed there.

No matter estranged or not, I will always love and miss my mother, but I cannot have a relationship with her until she takes some ownership for her part in our problems. So far, that has yet to happen.

How dare you level accusations at me.
The insightful posts I received from Low Contact Daughter were thoughtful and kind. She was the first person I'd ever had contact with that had any understanding of my position. Some things that she said to me were accurate and some things didn't resonate with me.
I am an educated, level-headed person who has been taught to think for herself. To suggest that I was being brainwashed by a post, is ludicrous. What she posted was uncannily accurate and it distilled many years of my own thinking in a highly articulate manner.
I go to a therapist (not just sit around absorbing posts all day- this was the first and only I've ever read of ANY nature), and even she, whom I think very highly of, 90% of what she says makes sense and resonates with me, and the 10% I file away. I act as I see fit, not because someone else says I should.
Your rancorous and inaccurate summary of who I am as an EC and of the collective EC out there (none of whom I've ever met a single one of, so clearly not following a "fashionable trend" as you so deftly put it) could not be more wrong. I am not an impetuous adolescent, I am someone who's heart has been broken. Sound familiar?

I HAVE BEEN the person jumping through the hoops in my mother's and my relationship for the past 40 years.

Shame on you. Go do your own soul searching rather than picking on a complete stranger.
Go back to the parents forum and rant and rave there.
This is the wrong forum for you and I guess it is for me too.

Good luck in your journey.

Louise,
It is, of course, your choice to limit yourself to websites, blogs, and resources, which perpetuate the culture of estrangement rather than heal relationships if that is what makes you feel good. However, if you truly want more than short-term satisfaction, and would like to mend or improve the relationship with your mother, no one should be telling you that you are weak, dependent, that your mother is a "dysfunctional, incurable narcissist" from afar, and it would serve you well to broaden your perspectives. Offering empathy goes a long way towards getting it returned. There is always more than one way to view a situaion, and usually the truth lies somewhere between alternative versions rather than one being right and the other wrong. That is why makeshift psychoanalysis, emotional reasoning, mindreading, jumping to conclusions, judging, labeling or stereotyping others, generalizing, speculating about and assigning motives to behaviors from afar is disastrous to relationships and has done more damage than good. Perhaps, your mother is one of the small percent of truly narcissistic mothers out there. However, given the volume of mothers posting on this forum, most are neither narcissistic nor dysfunctional. Many are also well-read, having searched out multiple reousrces to understand and cope with their estrangements, some are professionals versed in both useful and useless psychobabble, and many have jumped through more hoops than they should have to only to be told by their seemingly, indoctrinated children that whatever they do is never quite right, good enough, or for the "right" reasons. Soon that looks more like an adolescent power struggle than adult behavior geared toward healthy conflict resolution. Divorcing ones mother might be self-empowering and fashionable, but unless a situation is fraught with blatant physical, sexual, or emotional abuse, that tactic is a passive-aggressive copout. So, if you are conflicted about and want to restore or improve rather than simply grieve the loss of a mother who could still be available to you, you might want to expand your resource list to include:

I'm OK, You're My Parents (Atkins, 2004)
Hidden in Plain Sight (Grosskopf, 2007)
Forgive for Good (Luskin, 2002)
When Parents Hurt (Coleman, 2008)
The New Don't Blame Mother (Caplan, 2000)

Louise said:

LCD,
Great, thanks so much, I look forward to hearing about
your resources :)

Hi Louise,

First of all, I wanted to say that the pain and anguish you are experiencing is a completely normal reaction to the loss of a family member after going No Contact. As you put it, you are mourning the loss of a mother you never had and it will take time and energy to work through this. How much time, no-one can really say, as it depends on many factors including the level of insight you have into what was really going on in the relationship with your mother, your personal resilience, the quality of your support networks, etc. Ultimately, it will take as long as it needs to take for you to heal emotionally…and no-one (not even a therapist) should try to dictate to you how long this will be. One caveat: if you start showing signs of pathological grief (and these are listed in the first url below), you should not try to endure this but seek professional help immediately.

I also think that the grief you are experiencing could be complicated and intensified by the fact that your relationship with your mother was deeply ambivalent, with unresolved emotional issues between you. Hence it may take longer for you to heal than someone whose relationship with their parent was more positive. There's just more 'stuff' for you to process and work through. This next article goes through the various stages of the grief reaction. It might be helpful to read through it to see which stage you are at currently, and what you might expect to experience in future:

* http://www.helpguide.org/menta…..f_loss.htm

However, note that grieving is not always a neat, linear process. People can move back and forth between stages (I did), stay 'stuck' on one stage for a time while processing difficult emotional issues, and experience 'triggers' of grief during previously important 'family' dates such as birthdays, holidays, and Christmas. In my case, my father's birthday was a trigger that resulted in me making my first post to this forum. Though I posted partly in response to your message asking for other estranged children to come forward, it was also done to remind myself of all the reasons I should keep distancing myself from a chronically abusive relative.

Although this next article applies to the daughter of a narcissistic mother who decided to go No Contact and eventually reaped huge benefits in her life, it could apply to any dysfunctional family relationship:

* http://www.daughtersofnarcissi…..essay.html

BTW, I noticed there are some links on the site above stating that you can 'erase your hurt and pain' by tapping on acupuncture points. I'm not into New Age healing, being a skeptic from way back, but if this works for you, go for it.

And here is an article about a narcissistic mother who essentially ignored and neglected her daughter for decades, with the result that her daughter eventually went No Contact. Apparently the 'ignoring' mother can be a subset of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD). I'm not sure if this is your mother's issue, though I'd put big money on the fact that she has a long-standing personality disorder of some kind, but I saw some parallels with your description of her and thought it might be useful:

* http://daughtersofnarcissistic…..other.html

One particularly helpful online psychologist/writer I found is Dr Joseph Carver. He has a good article on Stockholm Syndrome, which outlines why people sometimes find it incredibly difficult to detach emotionally from an abusive relationship. I don't know if this is complicating or intensifying the grief reaction you are experiencing but it may resonate with you and help you break the chains that bind:

* http://counsellingresource.com…..stockholm/

Note that while the above deals mainly with overtly abusive and controlling people, the same general principles would apply to those who covertly abuse and marginalise their relatives, as your mother did with you over many years. Just remember that you are not responsible for her personality disorder, nor for the abuse you suffered, nor for the eventual failure of the relationship. Some people are impossible to have a healthy relationship with, and someone who projects blame onto others, has zero insight into the effects of their damaging behaviour, and refuses to change is just that: impossible.

There are also online forums you can visit to get support while you are healing. I'd advise focussing on threads or forums set up specifically for the children of dysfunctional parents. Just avoid anything run by a guy called Dr Sam Vaknin as he is a self-proclaimed narcissist/sociopath who uses his forums to create very unhealthy co-dependency relationships with the damaged, vulnerable people who post there.

Some online forums, articles & resources that seem OK (note: I've read through the blogs they're listed on but haven't checked all of the links out myself, so cannot be certain) can be found at these urls:

* http://www.lightshouse.org/inf…..urces.html
* http://www.adultchildrenofdysf…..-dvds.html

I guess just use your discernment when reading or posting and be careful that your boundaries are respected. You will find many online friends to cheer you on and support you, all at different stages of the grieving/detachment process, and all with different perspectives on their situation and yours.

Finally, a goodbye, as it's unlikely that I'll be coming back to this board on a regular basis. It's been over 20 years since I left my parents' house as a teenager and I've reached a point now where I have largely moved on emotionally, aside from the occasional emotional lapse or trigger event. I've found that posting about my issues here has helped me gain some more clarity on them, and it's been a huge boost to my self-confidence to be able to help people like yourself who are in a similar situation. However, there comes a point (and you may find this too in time) where it becomes unhealthy and counterproductive to keep analysing the ins-and-outs of personality disordered people. It can be like gazing into an abyss, where no light or love is reflected back to you. In the end, most people seem to reach a point where they want to focus on the positive people and events they have going on in their lives, leaving the crazy stuff in the past where it belongs. This is where I'm at.

So…good luck with whatever you choose to do next and I wish you well on the road to healing. :-)

LCD.

LCD,
Great, thanks so much, I look forward to hearing about
your resources :)

Low contact daughter,
Thank you so much for your insight and thoughtfulness. I appreciate it more than I know how to say.
I am truly in awe. How on earth did you understand what I wrote- so clearly, and then respond with a summary that is everything I've always thought but could never have articulated beyond what I wrote?
Everything you’ve said is uncannily accurate.

Who are you? :)

You have said you are not a psychologist, or a counselor, but no one (not even my beloved therapist ) has so succinctly tied this up for me in a neat little package.
-I’m sure she could…but therapists like us all to figure it out for ourselves…crib notes are nice though!
You must have some credentials in this field?

To comment on a few things, just to clarify, oddly, my mother actually is a lovely person.
It’s not an act. She is ethical, more and honest (except when it comes to her emotions with me). This is in no way a defense of her but it merely was stated to show the dichotomy of the situation for me. She is not lovely to me now I completely agree, though before we were estranged, we had a very cordial, polite, surface -level relationship. She thinks we had lots of good times together…but they were times that I could just as easily have had them with a friend's mother. There was no connection, yet she thought there was. Confusing.
You brought up an interesting point however, about me loving the beautiful shining image of her. I don't mourn that. I really don't. I have no comforting memories with that person. My point was really that she's a kind, not a mean person. It's not phony. That's who she is.
What I do mourn though that I hadn't thought of until you made me think about it is, I mourn having a mother. I mourn never having had a mother. I mourn my large extended family which has never checked in with me in the past three years to see where I disappeared to.
I mourn never having had a mother I could share my life with, the one and only person whom I should be able to count on to care about the nuances of my life. I mourn not having a family to help guide me with raising my children or a family to share my children's lives with.
I know full-well that I have had a ‘privileged’ life relative to most of the world and many happy memories in spite of my family. I am, however, having such a hard time processing how I unfortunate it is to have weathered a father who was an alcoholic, lost him, did alright in raising myself in spite of that; and now this: a mother who cannot find a place in her heart for me, as though I’d been a monster to her.

I often wonder if my mother's 'fortress' is what ultimately pushed my father's drinking into high gear. I'm sure she could not handle his underlying depression and turned her back on him jut like she has me.

This will sound very needy, which I loathe to be, but how I wish I had a friend like you living near me. To have a friend who knows from experience what this crappy predicament is like and one who can do mental shorthand on what I say about this whole mess.
It has not been apparent to you yet, but I actually am a good friend to my friends.
I am a good listener, compassionate and loyal. I am not as totally self-absorbed as my posts are making me seem. BTW, this is my first ever post of any kind on the internet,
I’ve never done any chat rooms or social networking.
This is all very new to me and would not have done it unless I was at my wit’s end to find someone who could relate to what I am talking about.
I had no expectations of what the response would be. But in my wildest dreams would never have thought someone as astute as you are would have popped up!

I think one of the very hardest aspects of going through this estrangement is the extreme isolation it has made me feel because no one, not even my best, best friends, understand.
It's too heavy to be laying on them anyway…and when I do broach it, I end up curtailing what I really want to say. It's just too heavy. I find myself being angry with people viewing them as shallow and vacant…not my best friends, but more the second and third tier friends I am regularly in contact with. Unfortunately, my four closest friends all live on the East Coast. For a total extrovert, which I am, the isolation and the loneliness is the worst.
It is an living nightmare which I seem ever to be able to wake up from.

I cannot imagine how the loss as has subsided for you and how it ever will for me.
All of this is unnatural. Surreal.

Please tell me how you have such insight and brilliance on this subject?
Just because you’ve lived it does not mean you naturally can make sense of
A virtual stranger’s posts??
I’m intrigued.

Are you perhaps Dr. Josh Coleman?

Thank you again. You did not say what I wanted to hear, but hearing the truth and being understood is music to my ears.
With the utmost appreciation and gratitude,
Louise