How to Deal With Estrangement of an Adult Daughter

Try to keep communication open with your estranged adult daughter.

Many factors may feed into the estrangement of an adult daughter from her family. Unresolved problems from the past can resurface, or a new relationship or cluster of relationships in the present might lead an adult daughter to reject her family. Very few parents set out to give their children a harsh or cruel upbringing, but on occasions, adult "children" can seize on an incident or period from childhood which they now hold responsible for all their misfortunes and problems. This, psychoanalysis suggests, merely evades taking responsibility for your life.

Instructions

1. Accept responsibly for events you might prefer to have handled differently during an adult daughter's childhood. But don't go overboard -- most mature people recognize that the work of parenting comes with inevitable stresses as well as joys. A misfortune, such as losing a loved one or developing a serious illness, can temporarily compromise even the best parent's abilities and emotional availability. If an adult daughter develops a grudge based on such an episode, sharing regret for the unhappiness endured back then is proportional, but accepting blame for her current difficulties is excessive.

2. Receive angry attributions without retaliation or displays of distress. Psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott argues that parental "survival" matters during periods of emotional disturbance in children -- an observation which applies equally to troubled adults as it does to teens and younger kids. This means remaining as empathic as possible to a daughter's distress and unhappiness, but resisting either defensive or masochistic responses. "I wish we could have helped you more back then," is more truthful and resilient that "Don't blame your problems on me!" or "Yes, it's all my fault and I feel terrible." Statements like the last two will exacerbate the problem, leaving the daughter feeling either more hurt or secretly guilty for having caused distress.

3. Open another channel of communication if talking breaks down altogether, as it might in times of acute distress or anger. Writing regular letters can help sustain contact and signal a willingness to go on doing so, even if no replies come back. In her work with disturbed adults and children, psychoanalyst Melanie Klein found that her patients often attributed malevolent or malicious intent to the analyst. Klein argues that, under duress, a person resorts to extreme psychological defenses -- splitting and projection. All upsetting and painful thoughts or experiences get mentally torn apart from good, comforting ones in splitting, while the defensive fantasy of projection transports the "bad" mental contents from inside the mind to the outside, pinning them onto another person.

4. Try to absorb the projected attributions thoughtfully. A person on the receiving end of negative projections will at least temporarily be seen by the "projector" as all bad. But returning the projections reactively, without thinking about them, sends them back in a worse state than they were sent out. The psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, a follower of Klein, argues that the ability to think rationally starts in early childhood, when an infant transmits her distress to her mother through crying or screaming. The mother receives the distress, thinks about it and then modifies it -- for example, by understanding that the baby needs comforting after a frightening dream, or needs a feed or even a change of diaper.

5. Accept that distressed adults can fall back on infantile states of mind. This means that they may lose the capacity to hold distressing feelings inside themselves and start projecting them instead in order to obtain relief. As such, they resemble the distressed infant described by Bion, in search of a larger, more mature and balanced mind to receive the projected messages and subject them to empathic thought. When this fails to occur, Bion argues, the projected experience bounces back into the already vulnerable mind of the projector, only this time accompanied by parental misunderstanding and refusal. In Bion's terms, a painful projection gets sent out but comes back as a "nameless dread."

6. Practice "emotional containment." Bion considers this a major function of the psychoanalyst during analytic treatment and a pivotally important aspect of parenting. Painful emotions that get sent into another person's mind should receive empathic thought -- Bion calls this "reverie." For example, a comment like "You're so hurt and angry right now and you think we don't care" shows more thoughtfulness than censorious reactions like, "Don't talk to your mother like that!" or "You're being disrespectful." Accepting projections and showing that they can be thought about offers more relief than complaining about bad behavior. Bearing these emotions without prematurely returning them or reacting to them indignantly helps sustain a fraught relationship and may enable an adult daughter to overcome her alienation.

Tips & Warnings

• An estranged adult daughter may need to distance herself from her family as part of building an adult, independent identity. Try to resist falling into despair during this prime -- maintaining a willingness to "go on being there" during difficult times can deepen and strengthen relationships after period of estrangement and generate reparative reconciliation.

• An adult daughter who deals with her feelings of estrangement by means of extreme behavioral challenges (for example, violence, threatening behavior or stealing) may require more robust responses. "Survival" here may mean using additional community resources, even law enforcement agencies, to show that you will not allow her to succeed in causing irreparable damage. Seeking psychotherapeutic help may also enable distressed parents to manage the estrangement more resiliently and empathically.

References

• "The Child, the Family and the Outside World"; D. W. Winnicott; 1964/2000
• "Envy and Gratitude and Other Works"; Melanie Klein; 1975/1997
• "Attention and Interpretation"; Wilfred Bion; 1984

Resources

• Read this Article in Spanish