What brings people here
Most people who find their way to this page aren’t sure what to call what they’re carrying. They might describe it as being unable to move on, feeling guilty about a necessary decision, or finding that cutting contact didn’t bring the peace they expected. Some are in the middle of deciding whether to step back at all. Some have been estranged for years and are only now finding words for what it’s done to them.
All of that is the right reason to be here.
Estrangement sits in a particular kind of silence. It’s hard to talk about with people who haven’t experienced it—the raised eyebrows, the gentle pressure to reconnect, the assumption that it must have been something you could have handled differently. It rarely makes the obituaries or the sympathy cards. And yet it can be one of the most disorienting experiences a person carries: the loss of someone who is still alive and the grief of a family that exists but can’t be inhabited.
What therapy for estrangement actually involves
This isn’t generic talking therapy with estrangement as the topic. It’s work that takes the specific shape of estrangement seriously—the way it lives in the body, the way it reaches into other relationships, the way it raises questions about identity and self-worth that can feel impossible to untangle on one’s own.
The work we do together will depend on where you are. But some things come up again and again, and this kind of therapy is particularly well placed to address them:
The grief that doesn’t fit anywhere. Estrangement produces a particular kind of loss—sometimes called “ambiguous loss”—because the person is still alive, the relationship technically exists, and yet something is irrevocably gone. There’s no ritual for this. No casserole on the doorstep. Therapy can offer space for grief that the rest of your life may have no room for.
The question of what the relationship cost you. Not just what happened, but what you became inside it. The ways you learned to be smaller, more careful, more self-erasing. The habits of vigilance or people-pleasing or emotional suppression that made sense then and cause difficulty now. This is often the work that matters most, and it rarely gets done without dedicated space for it.
Shame. Estrangement and shame are rarely far apart. The shame of having a family that hurt you, of being the one who ended contact, of not being able to make it work. My research showed how profoundly shame can shape the experience of estrangement—keeping it hidden, preventing people from seeking support, and distorting how they understand their story. Part of what therapy can do is start to loosen shame’s grip.
The intergenerational thread. Estrangement rarely begins with you. Understanding what was passed down—what your parent or family member carried, what shaped the relationship before you were in it—doesn’t excuse harm, but makes it more legible. For parents, this work often carries particular urgency: the wish to understand what was handed to you before you hand it on.
Contact decisions. Whether to maintain no contact, low contact, or consider some form of reconnection is often not a one-time decision but an ongoing negotiation. Therapy isn’t the place where someone tells you what the right answer is. It’s the place where you can think it through clearly, without the noise of other people’s opinions or the distortion of guilt.
Who I work with
I work with adult children who are estranged from, or considering estrangement from, a parent or parents. I also work with people navigating estrangement from siblings and with parents whose adult children have stepped back from them.
My focus is on the adult child’s experience—including the long aftermath of estrangement, the identity questions it raises, and the particular complexity of being a parent yourself while carrying an unresolved relationship with your own. Although my doctoral research centred on women estranged from their mothers, the questions it surfaced apply across many estrangement relationships, and I work with people of all genders and family configurations.
I offer therapy online. Sessions are fifty minutes, weekly, and I work in an open-ended way—meaning there is no fixed number of sessions, and we work for as long as the work is useful.
Something worth knowing about my approach
I don’t think of estrangement as a problem to solve or a decision to validate. I think of it as an experience to be understood in its full complexity, including the parts that are contradictory, painful, or don’t resolve neatly.
I won’t push you toward reconciliation, and I won’t push you away from it. What I will do is help you think about your experience as clearly as possible, so that whatever you decide about your family relationship comes from a grounded sense of who you are and what you need—not from fear, obligation, or the exhaustion of carrying something alone for too long.
If you’d like to talk about whether this kind of work might be right for you, you’re welcome to get in touch.