Just Another Struggle to Have a Voice as an Alienated Parent
This article was prepared before the killing of George Floyd on May 25, 2020. The article does not explore anger in all its dimensions and instead, illustrates that anger has its place as an appropriate and natural emotion.
Dear Daughter, I look into your eyes - in a picture - it can be one of the many of you or you and me-and I ask myself; how can you act like what we had was nothing?
This is a question for my beloved 32-year-old daughter, and it is one that many alienated parents of an estranged adult child can ask themselves-over and over again.
Most recently, I read a blog for estranged parents in which the writer expressed her doubt as to whether she was an appropriate member of this group where some estranged parents expressed anger towards their adult child who decided to negate their parent-child relationship. She reported having no real anger towards their own child and instead felt a frustration towards the circumstance of estrangement. “I’m not angry with my kids. It’s not really about them.” I could relate to this writer’s lack of connection with some alienated parents’ feelings. Parents can be snarky and blaming and enraged towards their estranged child. A parent’s angry rant can seem intense and misplaced. The rawness can seem to fragment the natural fabric of compassion for someone younger, someone less informed by experience, someone to whom we are so primitively bonded.
Is there a higher road? Am I supposed to believe that the higher road does not involve anger? Is some higher road a relevant consideration in these circumstances?
Matthew Hutson[1] reports that anger results when we feel undervalued. The primary benefit of anger for an individual is preventing oneself from being exploited. When your child chooses to be estranged, parents are faced with an abnormal situation. The villainization and rejection from their child results in parents feeling devalued beyond measure and anger can serve to heighten self-protection from further emotional abuse. Hutson states that anger that progresses to rage can exacerbate a situation but swallowing the pain of devaluation can lead to depression and health problems. (Tori DeAngelis[2] asserts that anger seems to be followed by aggression only about 10 percent of the time.)
I became a parent by vocation, devoted to my children whom I deeply loved every day. I struggled for 10 years with my conflicted feelings. I actually did not know how to be angry with my children who estranged themselves after my divorce from a marriage of 25 years (a divorce they encouraged). For many years, I lived in utter confusion. Their decision to obliterate me from the face of Motherhood was incomprehensible. I could not make sense of their decision to diminish my love and maternal efforts and render me irrelevant. I felt small in thinking that they were awful for doing so.
I contorted my confusion, my diminishment, my rage into harming myself. I vacillated between two kinds of living. An exposed and vulnerable presence for my husband, family, friends, and clients, and interims of self-medicated oblivion where I could express my anguish and irreconcilable thoughts and feelings. A hell of instability and liability. Just where I could not stand to be.
Can a person resolve such a primitive injustice, an experience with elementary unfairness, a state of being that is such deviance from a maternal bonding and dedicated devotion with a cherished child? Can a person resolve this abuse without expressing a fundamental anger?
Repressing anger can actually hurt you.[3] Dr. Ernest Harburg and his team at the University of Michigan School of Public Health spent several decades tracking the same adults in a longitudinal study of anger. They found that men and women who hid the anger they felt in response to an unjust attack subsequently found themselves more likely to get bronchitis and heart attacks and were more likely to die earlier than peers.
I have been rethinking my reflexive reaction to those parents who have been so hurt that words cannot describe. And it is hurt. It is all about feeling so hurt that you cannot think right, you cannot feel right, you cannot breathe right. Every minute, every hour, every day. I am grateful that I can think and feel right on most days. But I must confess that there are days during which I still do not breathe right.
I am speaking to most parents who are broken-hearted from the utter rejection of the children they bore, the children to whom they willingly gave themselves to with their protective and nurturing hearts, the parents who were faithful and true to the spirit of parenting.
You have a right to be angry. You have a right to feel betrayed. You have a right to feel wronged.
Research shows that accepting our negative emotions as part of our human condition allows us to neutralize the intensity of the emotion. Habitually accepting negative emotions was found to not only reduce feelings of ill-being, but also was more likely to lead to elevated levels of well-being.[4] Accepting that we have anger allows us to diminish our self-judgment about feeling angry.
Until we realize, that as loving parents who have been shunned by their child, we have a right to be fully angry, under whatever the circumstances or whomever the person, we will not know the path to walk towards our release from this unjust burden. We will not be able to find the path to our better selves. It is only then with our concerted effort and determination can we choose our destiny. For us, it is a destiny without our children who will not love us. It is a destiny with others that will.
[1] Matthew Hutson, “Beyond Happiness: The Upside of Feeling Down”, Psychology Today, January 2015.
[2] Tori DeAngelis, “When Anger’s a Plus”, https://www.apa.org/monitor/mar03/whenanger, March, 2003.
[3] Todd Kashdan and Robert Biswas-Diener, “The Right Way to Get Angry”, https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/the_right_way_to_get_angry, October 20, 2014.
[4] Lila MacLellan, “Accepting Your Darkest Emotions is the Key to Psychological Health”, https://qz.com/1034450/accepting-your-darkest-emotions-is-the-key-to-psychological-health/, July 23, 2017.
This article was prepared before the killing of George Floyd on May 25, 2020. The article does not explore anger in all its dimensions and instead, illustrates that anger has its place as an appropriate and natural emotion.
Dear Daughter, I look into your eyes - in a picture - it can be one of the many of you or you and me-and I ask myself; how can you act like what we had was nothing?
This is a question for my beloved 32-year-old daughter, and it is one that many alienated parents of an estranged adult child can ask themselves-over and over again.
Most recently, I read a blog for estranged parents in which the writer expressed her doubt as to whether she was an appropriate member of this group where some estranged parents expressed anger towards their adult child who decided to negate their parent-child relationship. She reported having no real anger towards their own child and instead felt a frustration towards the circumstance of estrangement. “I’m not angry with my kids. It’s not really about them.” I could relate to this writer’s lack of connection with some alienated parents’ feelings. Parents can be snarky and blaming and enraged towards their estranged child. A parent’s angry rant can seem intense and misplaced. The rawness can seem to fragment the natural fabric of compassion for someone younger, someone less informed by experience, someone to whom we are so primitively bonded.
Is there a higher road? Am I supposed to believe that the higher road does not involve anger? Is some higher road a relevant consideration in these circumstances?
Matthew Hutson[1] reports that anger results when we feel undervalued. The primary benefit of anger for an individual is preventing oneself from being exploited. When your child chooses to be estranged, parents are faced with an abnormal situation. The villainization and rejection from their child results in parents feeling devalued beyond measure and anger can serve to heighten self-protection from further emotional abuse. Hutson states that anger that progresses to rage can exacerbate a situation but swallowing the pain of devaluation can lead to depression and health problems. (Tori DeAngelis[2] asserts that anger seems to be followed by aggression only about 10 percent of the time.)
I became a parent by vocation, devoted to my children whom I deeply loved every day. I struggled for 10 years with my conflicted feelings. I actually did not know how to be angry with my children who estranged themselves after my divorce from a marriage of 25 years (a divorce they encouraged). For many years, I lived in utter confusion. Their decision to obliterate me from the face of Motherhood was incomprehensible. I could not make sense of their decision to diminish my love and maternal efforts and render me irrelevant. I felt small in thinking that they were awful for doing so.
I contorted my confusion, my diminishment, my rage into harming myself. I vacillated between two kinds of living. An exposed and vulnerable presence for my husband, family, friends, and clients, and interims of self-medicated oblivion where I could express my anguish and irreconcilable thoughts and feelings. A hell of instability and liability. Just where I could not stand to be.
Can a person resolve such a primitive injustice, an experience with elementary unfairness, a state of being that is such deviance from a maternal bonding and dedicated devotion with a cherished child? Can a person resolve this abuse without expressing a fundamental anger?
Repressing anger can actually hurt you.[3] Dr. Ernest Harburg and his team at the University of Michigan School of Public Health spent several decades tracking the same adults in a longitudinal study of anger. They found that men and women who hid the anger they felt in response to an unjust attack subsequently found themselves more likely to get bronchitis and heart attacks and were more likely to die earlier than peers.
I have been rethinking my reflexive reaction to those parents who have been so hurt that words cannot describe. And it is hurt. It is all about feeling so hurt that you cannot think right, you cannot feel right, you cannot breathe right. Every minute, every hour, every day. I am grateful that I can think and feel right on most days. But I must confess that there are days during which I still do not breathe right.
I am speaking to most parents who are broken-hearted from the utter rejection of the children they bore, the children to whom they willingly gave themselves to with their protective and nurturing hearts, the parents who were faithful and true to the spirit of parenting.
You have a right to be angry. You have a right to feel betrayed. You have a right to feel wronged.
Research shows that accepting our negative emotions as part of our human condition allows us to neutralize the intensity of the emotion. Habitually accepting negative emotions was found to not only reduce feelings of ill-being, but also was more likely to lead to elevated levels of well-being.[4] Accepting that we have anger allows us to diminish our self-judgment about feeling angry.
Until we realize, that as loving parents who have been shunned by their child, we have a right to be fully angry, under whatever the circumstances or whomever the person, we will not know the path to walk towards our release from this unjust burden. We will not be able to find the path to our better selves. It is only then with our concerted effort and determination can we choose our destiny. For us, it is a destiny without our children who will not love us. It is a destiny with others that will.
[1] Matthew Hutson, “Beyond Happiness: The Upside of Feeling Down”, Psychology Today, January 2015.
[2] Tori DeAngelis, “When Anger’s a Plus”, https://www.apa.org/monitor/mar03/whenanger, March, 2003.
[3] Todd Kashdan and Robert Biswas-Diener, “The Right Way to Get Angry”, https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/the_right_way_to_get_angry, October 20, 2014.
[4] Lila MacLellan, “Accepting Your Darkest Emotions is the Key to Psychological Health”, https://qz.com/1034450/accepting-your-darkest-emotions-is-the-key-to-psychological-health/, July 23, 2017.
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