Estrangement: when the silence between you is not empty

So here you are, estranged from someone you love (or maybe it feels more like loved), but my guess is if you are reading this, it is more likely to still be love – present, not past – because the ache in your own heart will be what drew you to want to read this article.

Maybe I should say that the reason I am writing this is because of an ache in my own heart, and I wanted to share the conclusions I came to, because this is a first-hand account of where it took me.

The importance of felt emotional safety 

If we don’t feel safe (as in feeling we might be dismissed or even ridiculed), we are not likely to show up anywhere authentically with our emotions, let alone in a place with someone that is loaded with complexity and nihilism, where the apocryphal is likely to be the ruling and presiding belief.

I have learnt that people can experience events and things in entirely different ways. Each is felt and believed as the true version of what was both felt and experienced. I think this is an essential possibility to acknowledge when considering whether mutual resolve might be possible, as well as whether it is likely to take place.

So neither way is right or wrong, because that is partly where residing in different camps of belief led to each person's version of enough; it's more about the need for validation of each person’s unique felt pain, and the assumed intent to harm. It is more about the two different stories around the same event(s).

So each silence is allowed a story, because each silence has a story. Each one is different and neither right nor wrong, but more about what the story eventually made each one believe. It is never about just one event but the loneliness and separation that each event drew on, because each felt wound never had a chance to heal.

This impasse is the Rubicon. The protection becomes the distance. Even though this can be rationalised by:

• justification
• perpetuated conviction
• pain
• different moral compasses.

Just because harm was never intended does not mean that harm never happened for either person. There, in the impact of the wound, is where the importance of being seen and acknowledged must take place, mutually, by being curious to both know and understand.

There it is, in putting your head upon another’s pillow, in walking in another’s shoes, so that the empathy of fellowship through what is felt and allowed to be imagined needs to take place. This can be a game changer. Maybe these mutual longings can exist through the alignment empathy brings, giving them room to breathe.

Navigating parenthood with your own unhealed wounds

This situation is very much part of the "How did we get here?" with estranged adult children, where the heartbreak is internally inconsolable, ever-present, and a huge mark on being able to feel any joy wholly. It is the epitome of the corrupt, by way of the further echo that adds to it – it was never meant to be like this, and here the silence is likely to be loaded and far from empty on either side.

Where the patterns we inherited that were never understood or healed were all we had. That can and often does prove to be a large part of the causation. That does not excuse the harm they might have caused, but it does leave room for the possibility that the harm was driven by ignorance rather than malevolence itself.

Here, the consideration that another’s story exists plays a very important part, because without it, each person’s reality and truth is not considered. But again, the pain is the pain, and even if our own pain caused the pain, it is still a wound that needs all that is necessary to be there in the healing of it.

Listening to the story 

For some, this is a big ask and also a potentially terrifying thought, because if you allow this, you have to hear something that you may be unwilling to feel. Empathy. Empathy and a presiding sense of feeling vilified don’t make a good or likely forward-thinking and feeling combination.

Love and hurt. Which one is it? Or can it not be both? Believing that someone who truly loves you can hurt you, or even wish to hurt you, is a terrifying combination of what we intrinsically believe to be each other’s opposite; that also makes you ultimately believe that love never ever even existed at all. When this comes to a child with a parent and a parent with a child, this is a very hard pill to swallow.

The silence contains it all: each other's hurt and each other’s unaligned stories. Somehow we all believe that if we put so much in, we are almost entitled to be guaranteed a happy and good outcome. If that is not the case, we feel robbed, and so profoundly disappointed it can make us question life itself.

The intention and the impact debate

What still hurts doesn’t disappear because it was never intended; even if you slip and fall by mistake, you are going to feel the impact of the fall and have to heal it. Because it was experienced, and the healing can only exist in the willingness to accept the experience. One person’s defining memory will not be another’s. Yet it still existed, and if it remains unwitnessed, it still exists. 

Every parent enters parenthood with an unfinished and unrequited story of their own, and yet in the shame of being a person, let alone a parent, who made mistakes that are largely unforgiven by those that we love, our children. Where can we rest with an identity such as this? 

Where: 

• we weren’t enough
• we got so much wrong
• we are undeserving of love
• we feel maybe even despised.

And worse still, if we feel we are superfluous to those we poured our life into.

Where can change exist, and how?

I think here, maybe independently, realising that what you might have thought was your best was not what you thought, and might not have been what was needed either. Hold this truth: real love was possible even though it caused real pain. That understanding can open closed doors as well as closed hearts.

We cannot, as parents, replay the sacrifices we made as justification or use them as a form of barter, even though, in truth, we might really want to because of what they cost us. When the prospect of further decades is replaced by fewer years ahead, it can feel as though we are left holding a poison chalice after all we poured into the life or lives we brought into the world.

That feels like a dagger lodged in our heart. So maybe it is the grown hand that replaced the precious, soft, and tiny one that is the only one that can take away the pain. This cannot happen if we expect to silence another’s experience or not allow it because of our own pain, any more than they can expect our silence of experience or history not to exist and maybe even be possible to consider.

We cannot be expected to carry the unbearable weight of such unworthiness through lack of understanding, or by the mistakes we wished so much we had never made. In this, we are hung by them forever, as if we never had a story. But we do, and so do they, and round and round the mulberry bush we will forever go if we do not ask mutually, what was this like for you?

This is the path to peace and change. Understanding someone does not mean you must surrender your own experience. Here we need to listen to understand, not to respond, but really give the space for this.  Do be curious in the uncertainty. Don’t let it be a place to prove another wrong. Maybe instead allow for their experience to exist without your defence against it.

Here, we have to be less about having all the answers and more about navigating emotionally wounded territory that doesn’t belong to us.

Accountability 

What part of the story belongs to them or us, and what courage does it take to own it? Without accountability, there is no crossing the Rubicon; there is no hope of forgiveness, and sometimes the hurt runs too deep for reconciliation. 

I know, though, that there is no guarantee, no certainty, that might be an anchor here.
Sometimes, and in some cases, reconciliation is neither safe nor advisable.

Growth isn’t comfortable. Trust is reestablished through consistent ownership of accountability, known through ongoing change rather than promises. This isn’t about becoming flawless, but more about becoming wiser through humility and sharing a place that feels safer for both to grow and move beyond living in the shadow of pain.