I’m Dr Sam Barcham, a chartered psychologist and psychotherapist specialising in family estrangement, registered with the British Psychological Society and the Health and Care Professions Council. For over a decade I’ve sat with adults navigating what comes after — the ambivalence, the grief that has no clear name, the exhausting work of figuring out who you are when you’re no longer inside that relationship.
My doctoral research explored something that rarely gets spoken about: the experiences of women estranged from their mothers who go on to become mothers themselves. What gets carried. What gets repeated. What becomes possible when the silence finally breaks.
I came to this work the way most of us come to the things that matter most — through my own experience. I’m not someone who cut contact cleanly and never looked back. I’m someone who knows what it is to hold distance and still feel the pull, to maintain boundaries and still feel their absence, to be in what I’d call low contact — present enough, but protected. It’s a harder position to explain than no contact, and in some ways a lonelier one.
Which is partly why I do this work. Because estrangement is rarely as simple as the stories we’re given about it. It’s not a door you close once. It’s something you live with, navigate, and slowly — if you get the right support — begin to make sense of.
The decision to cut contact is rarely the hard part.
Living with who you became inside that family is.
Email me today with any questions you have about therapy and how I work at sam@drsambarcham.com.
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