“You Won’t Tell Us the Issue!” Parental Denial in Estrangement

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Parental denial in estrangement:

An estrangement case study in being told — and refusing to hear

Whenever I am asked how long I have been estranged from my parents and family, it is difficult to provide a precise answer.

The reality is that it was a long, extended evolution with no definitive starting point. It was a progression of gradually accelerating relationship dissolution derived from entrenched patterns of harmful behavior and dysfunctional family dynamics that refused to change.

Years which eventually became documented through back and forth emails and texts — primarily with my father — all showcasing sustained effort on my part to simply attempt to articulate my experience in the relationship and seek mutual effort towards repair, with continued demonstrations on theirs of a host of escalating tactics aimed to achieve my capitulation against those efforts.

A capitulation requiring zero accountability, acknowledgement or labor from them in order to improve the relationship.

But according to them, I have never told them the issues.

Even as of the last letter received from my father in February of 2025, he claimed to have no understanding of the ongoing, decades long evolving conflict.

“I sent email after email trying to ascertain what you were so upset about.”

Conveniently not mentioning that those emails were as often as not, responses from my initiation — along with a myriad of respectively generated texts, letters, phone calls, attempts at face-to-face meetings he ultimately rejected and the last one that he walked out of.

Being well grounded in estrangement research as well as a regular participant in estranged adult children support groups and social media forums, I know that my story is not unusual.

In fact, not only is it typical, it is representative.

I grew up the third child in a family I never felt part of or welcomed by — though they will contend otherwise. The enduring taunting, teasing and contemptuous ridicule received both from parents and siblings were always delivered as “just jokes” and I was “too sensitive” for being bothered by it.

Was it all bad?

Of course not. There were family outings and vacations. Holiday gatherings and other events that contain memories of joy. I was supported in extracurricular activities from earliest recollections whether swimming, music and art to the investment-heavy sport of figure skating.

I had an upper middle class upbringing that saw little scarcity.

That doesn’t negate the fact that the lingering emotional resonance when I think about my childhood is not one of feeling loved and cherished, but of feeling hurt, isolated and alone while surrounded by family. Fearful of what cuts the next interaction might wield. Keeping to myself as a shield.

Like many estranged adult children, it wasn’t until well into adulthood that I came to realize that the perpetual perception of being less than, not good enough, not lovable, “too sensitive,” was not due to a myriad of innate character flaws as I had been led to believe and had integrated as true.

It was the dysfunction within what would otherwise and by most societal lenses be considered a wonderful, loving family.

A cultural lens that also deeply fails to understand childhood emotional maltreatment — what it is, how pervasive and normalized it is, and how damaging it is throughout the lifetime of that child and ultimately corrosive to the family dynamics.

One where filial duty and obligation is paramount and where parental “sacrifice” and authority is an altar upon which adult children are expected to pay unending homage.

Currently, there is heightened media attention around estrangement that, on balance, tends to mirror the cultural preferencing of the parental narrative. Within estranged parent forums and threads, there are the consistent refrains of insistence that their adult children never told them the issue, or that things were just fine before the spouse/partner/therapist entered the picture.

Along with the ever-present claims that no-contact is a “trend” and an “epidemic” fueled by social media and an “individualistic” society.

As I have been exploring the cultural patterns and implications around estrangement, and recognizing how representative my own story is against this backdrop, I recently revisited the text thread with my father that goes back to 2018 and up to the final text (but not the final communication) in 2022.

Simply that text history — without even factoring the collective pages of back and forth emails or the many phone calls and conversations over the years — lays bare the story.

Just like my childhood wasn’t all bad and contains happy memories, so too does the thread reflect pleasant exchanges with expressions of love and affection.

There is a pattern, though, that can be observed even early on of two parallel relational dynamics and which became more apparent as the thread continues.

One that is functional, reflecting contact maintenance — me sharing photos of my family, mutual coordination of calls or visits, sharing life events; against one that reveals a deeply fractured relationship with conveyance of unmet needs, power struggles over the narrative (who/what is the problem), avoidance of accountability and escalation of conflict over politics.

A self-reinforcing dynamic is observed.

Over time, the more I pushed for acknowledgement of the relational conflict — with him, my mother and the family at large — the more he retreated or deflected. The more he retreated and deflected, the more I increased my effort to convey the dynamics I was experiencing and deeply impacted by.

We were operating under completely different and incompatible frameworks.

The escalation of conflict over politics both revealed significant differences in values and beliefs, views of politics itself, as well as served as a proxy for the unresolved family conflict. The exchanges both signified a root element of the relational conflict as well as formed a key arena for where it played out.

For me, politics were no longer about policy but morality and the exchanges were repeated bids for connection through attempts to achieve understanding of respective positions. For him, it was about identity, party loyalty and a defense of his authority position via entrenched refusals to view mine as valid.

Me: “I am still trying to see what it is that has enough value to overlook the corruption and indecency… and I am truly curious as to your perspective and how you can explain it away/rationalize.”

Him: “I really do not like your confrontational attitude. I do not have enough facts on the top of my head to refute your charges and I refuse to take time to do it. I will not change your mind and you will not change mine.”

Ultimately, it served as an amplifier and an accelerant of the issues within the dynamic.

It revealed the depth of values divergence as well as posed a threat to his need to be both the moral and intellectual superior. My showcasing of individuation through informed articulation of my differing stances was received as both insubordination and a relational violation.

His expectation appeared to be that I would ultimately concede, defer or back down. But I did not.

Therefore he abandoned the dialogue and refused to continue to engage. A cycle that is repeated throughout the text history.

Typically, the exchanges would then move into dialogue around the relationship itself. I would engage in explanations and descriptions about the relationship and he would again deflect, convey confusion and ultimately retreat.

Me: And I do not like your refusal to acknowledge that this exchange is an example of relational communication dysfunction. I have said multiple times that TOPIC ASIDE that this exemplifies the pattern of deflection that is symptomatic of how you (and others in the family) engage (or refuse to) in a way that is damaging to the ability to connect. We don’t have to agree to connect.

Him: I really do not know you, Jen. I do not know what the problem is… If you really want me to hear you better start speaking down to my level of comprehension.

I then reiterated an invitation I had extended to mutually attend a virtual event that was geared around emotional intelligence and relational communication.

Him: “Give it up, Jen. I am not going to school to learn how to talk to my daughter.”

What is reflected here is a critical mismatch in meaning-making paired with a perceived unacceptable challenge to parental authority. He and I were operating under fundamentally incompatible frameworks for what counts as knowledge, authority and legitimacy.

My truth around politics and my truth around the relationship could not be resolved versus his.

I was naming patterns while he was demanding clarity solely on his terms. And rejecting anything that didn’t meet that demand.

My attempts were around trying to build shared meaning and to convey the reality of my experience within the relationship with him and the family. He was trying to maintain narrative and parental authority control.

It would have been impossible for him to retain his position as arbiter of reality if he acknowledged mine. Therefore, his consistent approach was to claim confusion, reiterate demands for clarity despite it having been previously and repeatedly provided and then execute a role-based conversation shut down.

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The continued ruptures were not about a failure to explain my experience or articulate the dysfunction in the relationship and family system. It was always about both my relational reality and meta-clarity about the dysfunction being inadmissible.

As the exchanges continued through time, he also positioned himself as a well-intentioned, yet in function entirely unreliable, mediator between my mother and myself. Framing all related exchanges as being specific to that conflict and never acknowledging his role inside of that conflict nor within our interpersonal dynamic.

His intent was not to address or resolve. It was to restore the equilibrium without any labor or relational change on either part of theirs. It was perennially a one-way/one-sided repair demand. All effort and acquiescence being exclusively mine to bear.

Him: “Your Mother’s position is a mirror of yours. It’s my belief that you precipitated the problem by accusing her of ‘traumatizing you.’ Perhaps you might begin by explaining that.”

Me: “I will not reach out to mom… The effort NEEDS TO COME FROM HER.”

The above was after more than a year of her refusals to engage in any way following my extension of significant olive branches to resolve previous months of silent treatment from her after I had held a boundary — albeit and admittedly, messily. Those refusals to engage occurring all while using my father as her surrogate mouthpiece.

Olive branches which did include explanations as well as conveyance of understanding of her position. All of which were ultimately unsuccessful attempts to bridge the gap with someone whose unhealed trauma would not fathom having inflicted the same upon their child.

Her response to my efforts was to convey, “We can start over, but I will never listen to anything you have ever said or ever will say.”

After which both she and my father refused to admit this was the exchange and still retain that stance to this day.

I would not accept those terms nor the gaslighting and denials that followed.

What she was “offering” was a categorical erasure of me, my voice and my right to have a say in the relationship or to convey anything about my experience within it. It forecloses any potential of having a relationship.

What my father was doing in his “mirror position” statement was creating a false symmetry. One that served to collapse a parent refusing to listen and an adult child’s refusal to accept non-listening and non-engagement into a moral equivalence.

It refuses to acknowledge the inherent asymmetry within the parent/child dynamic and the equivalent asymmetrical responsibility of the party in the power position to engage in the labor of repair. It refuses to even acknowledge the fundamental wound continually and consistently inflicted: my perpetual invisibility within the parental relationships and family.

Estrangement is inevitable when silence and deflections are used as control with plausible deniability on one hand and enforcement of stasis through pseudo-mediation on the other. All while layering false accusations of not providing explanations or trying hard enough.

As per estrangement research, it often follows graduated shifts in contact characterized by accumulated unresolved tensions and distress.

Reconciliation fails because it requires not only accepting the experience of the adult child as valid but also being able to have the ability to talk about the relationship and how communication is occurring within the dynamic.

Harm must be acknowledged without explanation or counter-narrative, with recognition of the asymmetry as the underlying framework. Dysfunction cannot be attributed only to the member of the system with less power and who was not responsible for the establishment of the relational dynamics.

What is highlighted in these snippets of text history is again very representative of the patterns shared in the research and among estranged adult children but is underrepresented in the cultural discourse.

Estrangement is a process — not an event or a contained series of specific events.

There was extensive communication and explanatory attempts. This is again common both among estranged adult children as well as within the research highlighting that the “they never told us” narrative is an elaborate defensive myth.

It was never about not being told — it was about what was being conveyed being unacceptable against their expectations of role identity, authority and deference.

What is also revealed is a clear, sustained imbalance of effort and responsibility to attempt repair where denials are continually reframed as confusion. The claimed misunderstanding then becomes leveraged as absolution and moral innocence. The role reversal demonstrated by acquiring meta-awareness about the relationship was consistently perceived as threatening, leading to a staunch unwillingness to receive the information.

They were told. Repeatedly. They refused to hear.

And the refusals, with accompanying consistent sequences of denials and deflections, made the relationship nonviable.

This is the ongoing pattern within estrangement and why reconciliation under these conditions is impossible.

The same mirrored pattern exists within the larger discourse: where the cultural narrative is refusal to understand that this is the common reality for estranged adult children. It is not the result of a trend, not third party interference, not failure to communicate, not an abrupt departure.

It is the result of entrenched refusals of the parent to listen, to be receptive — because to do so is too identity challenging and uncomfortable.

It is more comfortable for them to insist on ignorance and in the process throw away what is claimed to be cherished than to reflect on what they were told and do know. Anything that requires them to engage in the labor to work on themselves and reframe their self concept is inadmissible.

So instead they insist on any convenient combination of external attributions.

Or the most exonerating of all, “they never told me.”

parental denial in estrangement