Finding Hope and Healing After Parental Estrangement: Navigating Ambiguous Grief

For some of us the grief of estrangement is akin to that of actual death. But when a child or adult child dies there’s rarely the residual disdain one suffers when one is ghosted by a living offspring. It’s often the opposite; memories are idealized for an actual death. What estranged parents experience is commonly known as ambiguous grief, which is devastating to navigate – and sometimes one gets stuck in long term. Good memories become tainted with the pain and shame of the estrangement experience and become a never-ending loop. It is acute chronic suffering manifesting in C-PTSD, anxiety, depression, and physical stress related illnesses – AKA a shit storm.

It takes significant time, more than grieving an actual death, to heal. It’s giving up hope that things could be any different than they are. That does lead to a hopeless place. It’s in that hopeless place that one has to make the decision, to quote Shawshank Redemption, to get busy living or get busy dying. That’s where forcing oneself to not wallow and pull on one’s inner resilience to survive and thrive comes into play. It’s not the life one hoped for, but it can still be a fulfilling and satisfying life and maybe better than one imagined.

Yet biological imperative still pulls at us as parents. So many want to understand where it all went awry. And that is a fair and valuable thing to explore even when you are getting busy living. So do it. Self-examination and accountability are never a bad thing. But don’t get stuck in it and stop living now.

Particularly around the holidays there can be triggers of nostalgia that are painful. The key is to stay out of one’s head and stay focused on the present as much as possible. The present is just as important, if not more, than the life left behind.

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