Family estrangement has become a more visible and painful reality in recent years. Joshua Coleman and Matthias Barker have written extensively about this phenomenon, noting how adult children sometimes step away from parents because of subtle, ongoing dynamics that feel unresolved. We see cycles of pain and unmet needs echo across generations, often creating distances that feel impossible to bridge.

Yet estrangement is showing up in our cultural stories, not just inside the root of families. We live in an anxious age where performance, wealth, status, and the consumption of technology have become measures of worth. These forces don’t simply drive careers or economies; they drive wedges between us. They push us into silos of achievement, convincing us that independence and self-sufficiency are ultimate goals. In the process, we forget interdependence, the lifeblood of family and legacy. Once, family meant continuity, storytelling, and ritual. Now, in many families, legacy has been reduced to financial inheritance, or worse, a vague sense of name and reputation. Anxiety and the relentless drive to “be someone” fracture bonds that were meant to carry us across generations. Parents and children alike get swept into proving themselves, sacrificing relationships for what we call “freedom”, but what often feels more like isolation.

In my own work with families wrought with painful division, I have learned that sometimes estrangement is necessary. There are times when a firm boundary protects a vulnerable member from harm, especially in the face of abuse or deep dysfunction. I remember working with one family of several adult children. One adult child was volatile with rage, while another lived in fear of the violence that often erupted. The parents felt torn. How could they stay connected to both without alienating either? Together, we discovered that the parents could hold each child separately, allowing both relationships to survive without forcing reconciliation before it was safe. Over time, boundaries had to tighten, especially when one child pushed against limits that were necessary for safety. Parents learned that setting limits was necessary, even if that meant it angered the adult child and caused division in the family. This provided space for relational work and safety for the others in the family system.

In another family, a son’s heroin addiction brought the parents to the edge of life and death crises again and again. Their love was fierce, but it could not come without limits. The parents had to find ways to both love and restrict, to offer connection while setting boundaries that sometimes felt unbearably harsh. Their other adult children had to wrestle with their own responses as they watched their parents navigate this impossible terrain. And there are times when the rupture cannot be repaired. I once worked with a 20-year-old client whose history of abuse left memory imprints so strong that remaining in relationship with a parent was intolerable. For this emerging adult, the only path to healing was to cut ties completely. This was unbearable for the parent, yet absolutely necessary for the young person’s survival and growth. The parent had to face deep loss, supported in their own therapeutic work, while the youth leaned on extended family and a safe home in which to rebuild trust and begin healing. In this case, I could not hold both sides. My role was to honor the necessity of the rupture, to model the truth that sometimes limit setting, whether by youth or elders, is what love requires.

These stories remind me that estrangement and boundaries are rarely simple. They are woven of love and loss, of longing for connection and the need for safety. Sometimes, even when hard lines are drawn, families can still discover ways to remain tethered, to witness and to love one another across the divides.
Stephen Jenkinson reminds us that families need elders, not just older adults. Elders are those who carry the stories, rituals, and connections to ancestors, to earth, and to the sacredness of life. Without elders, youth are left untethered, and families lose continuity. Estrangement becomes not only a personal rupture but also a cultural symptom: we no longer know how to pass down wisdom, how to hold one another through difficulty, or how to belong to something larger than ourselves. If estrangement is a silence born of pain and disconnection, healing begins with remembering interdependence. We are not designed to live as siloed individuals, each proving our worth alone.

Families, at their best, are ecosystems of belonging, where legacy is more than wealth, and where ritual, story, and relationship weave us back into the sacred fabric of life. Ritual and faith in the larger connection to Spirit, however you bring language to this, build a connection that is eternal, even when the one here in the present is ruptured. As we send compassion and gratitude, as we move toward understanding even if that understanding means limiting contact, we move toward a life of Grace.

The invitation is to slow down, to value connection above performance, to recognize the earth, the ancestors and the eternal Spirit as part of our family system. To reclaim the role of eldering and storytelling. To remember that our lives are not measured by status, but by the relationships that endure when the striving ends. Families must wake up to their role in supporting connection and belonging. This is not passive work. It requires choosing vulnerability over performance, presence over perfection, and the courage to tend the fabric that holds us all.