The more I work with estranged parents and within this community, the more convinced I am that the label “grief” is rather inaccurate and insufficient to describe what we go through.
We’ve heard this experience called “ambiguous grief,” which makes sense on the surface given the lack of resolution/closure so many of us face.
However, this differs from grief in some fundamental ways:
- The ambiguity raises stressful questions: Will they return? When will this separation end, if it does?
- The uncertainty lends to a different emotional load; we often experience anxiety in addition to sadness, anger, etc.
- The estranging person often has an investment in our resultant emotional state. If someone loses a loved one to death, we can typically assume that the departed would not want us to suffer. With estrangement, the opposite can be true. Someone who dies can, by virtue of estate planning and such, hope to aid our wellbeing moving forward. Someone who estranges can sever connection to the extent that they are have no interest or involvement in our future wellbeing.
- It can make us doubt how well we knew the absent person.
- It can cast doubts on our own self-perception/role.
- The estranged child’s communication and interaction towards the parents can take on abusive characteristics.
- The estranged person can still be part of the larger family system, albeit often in a negative way, creating division and factions among people still connected to the parents.
- We work to heal and recover from an emotional wound that can, at any time, be re-aggravated and as painful as day one.
I’ve taken to referring to our experience as “para-grief.” Our emotional needs during estrangement differ from typical grief to the extent that few of us even commit to standard grief counseling or groups.
How do you feel our estrangement contrasts to typical grief?
