A common experience that is talked about in a lot of groups where family estrangement is discussed is the one of being labeled with a pathological condition by the person from whom you are estranged. With their only qualifications being that they are related to you and that they knew you once upon a time,…
Online memoir by a daughter of a mother “erased” by PAS
It is rare to see an account of the experience of Parental Alienation Syndrome given from the perspective of the child. This link is to an online memoir by the child, now grown up, and writing about her experience. Her descriptions of events as she remembers them are riveting. Mother Erased: a memoir written by…
A blog written by a grandmother denied access to her grandchildren
A mother and grandmother who posts on her own blog about family estrangement and the loss of relationships with her son and grandchildren wrote to me this week. She sent me a link to her blog for inclusion here. I took a look and like her writing so much that I am happy to provide…
New Link: Rejectedparents.net – a website for parents suffering estrangement
I found a website, rejectedparents.net, that was created in 2013 to offer support and information to parents who have been rejected by their adult children. It includes a discussion group for estranged parents. Here's the link: Parents of Estranged Adult Children: Help and HealingWhen Adult Children are Estranged: Support and Information
Slate staff writer Katy Waldman’s article on Narcissism: Link
Are you a Narcissist? by Slate staff writer Katy Waldman, August 2014 If you’re new to being estranged and to online discussions of the condition, you might not have experienced the word Narcissistic (with a capital N in the context of Narcissistic Personality Disorder) occurring frequently in discussions of family estrangement. If you are a…
Baggage, baggage, and more baggage
I've been thinking a lot lately about the baggage that people carry and how people interpret who and what other people are. The series of posts I wrote about Being Wrong were motivated by my desire to get through to those who believe they are right no matter what, no matter if there is evidence…
On Baggage
On Baggage (This post was originally written on May 25, 2007.) I receive email occasionally. Most emails come from mothers who have been estranged by their adult kids. Much less often, maybe twice a year, I get an email from someone who has estranged their mother or both parents. (I rarely get emails from men…
Family estrangement in photographs
I am reading estrangement into the action taken on old photographs. They say a photograph is worth 1,000 words. The photo above is a carte de visite (cdv) from the early 1870's. The mother's face was scratched out in the negative prior to the image being printed. It would have been scratched out by the…
How do you know if you’re getting better?
When does recovery occur? When do you get over a serious loss? Some things you never "get over" but you can heal. It is possible for life to go on. You know you're getting better when you make better choices. As described in the poem below. The poem is from There's a Hole in My…
Guest Post: Life As We Know It Now
My husband and I are the parents of two estranged adult children. I consider us both survivors and warriors of a war that had lasted a very long time. We had put up with this serial estrangement – this on-again, off-again bullshit for almost 38 years – so long, in fact we didn't know which…