Most of the adult children I work with arrive having already done something hard. They’ve stepped back from a parent, or they’re in the process of doing so, or they’ve been living with distance for years. What brings them to therapy isn’t usually the decision itself. It’s the discovery that the decision didn’t bring what they expected — and the slowly forming question of what the work actually is.
My approach starts from a particular understanding of what estrangement does to a person. Not just what it does to a relationship, but what it does to the self. When we grow up in a family that couldn’t quite hold who we actually were — whether through criticism, control, emotional unavailability, or something harder to name — we develop a version of ourselves that learns how to survive in that environment. That self is intelligent and understandable. It was the best available response to the situation. The difficulty is that it travels. It shows up in new relationships, in how we experience ourselves under pressure, in the grief and guilt and persistent sense of being somehow responsible for what broke. And it doesn’t simply dissolve when contact ends.
This is where I begin: not with the question of whether the estrangement was justified, but with the question of what the person became inside that family — and what it might mean to move beyond it.
The work tends to move through recognisable territory, even if no two people move through it in the same way or at the same pace.
There is usually a period of making the invisible visible — understanding the specific shape of what was asked of you, what you learned to suppress, what roles you played and what they cost you. This isn’t about blame. It’s about recognition. Seeing clearly what was required of you is often the first thing that makes it possible to choose differently.
Then there is grief. Not only for the relationship — for the parent you deserved but didn’t have, for the family occasions that no longer exist — but for something that is harder to name and less often reached: grief for the self. For the years spent being someone other than who you actually are. For the needs that went unmet, the feelings that went unexpressed, the person you might have been had things been different. This grief deserves space. It rarely gets it.
And then, gradually, something else becomes possible. Not a single moment of transformation, but an accumulating capacity to know what you actually want, value, and need — to build a sense of self that belongs to you rather than to the family system you grew up in. This is quiet work, and it takes time. But it is the part that tends to matter most in the long run.
Throughout, I hold the contact question carefully and without a position. Whether to maintain no contact, low contact, or to consider some form of reconnection is a decision that looks different once this deeper work is underway — and it belongs to you, not to me.
My work is informed by integrative and psychodynamic thinking, with particular attention to attachment, identity, shame, and the intergenerational patterns that shape how estrangement unfolds and what it leaves behind. I also draw on my doctoral research into maternal estrangement and motherhood, and on my own experience of navigating family distance — which gives me a way of understanding this territory that sits alongside the clinical, rather than separate from it.