Our culture has mistaken severance for adulthood. We tell our children a particular story about what it means to grow up. It goes something like this: You must leave. You must become independent. You must outgrow your family, your past, your origins. Success means distance. Maturity means autonomy. And if you look back, if you still need them, if you remain connected to where you came from? Well, perhaps you haven’t truly grown up at all.

Or the story swings to the opposite extreme. Stay home. Stay safe. Stay protected from discomfort. Let us ease every burden, solve every problem, cushion every fall. Or the teen and emerging adult gets accustomed to the parents filling out the forms, reminding them of appointments, and taking care of business for them. The culture now makes room for prolonged dependence, for young adults remaining in childhood well into their twenties and beyond, never facing the trials that forge them into adults.

This is the story that now lives in the marrow of our culture. And it is setting families up for dysfunction long before any rupture occurs. Both extremes create misalignment: the young who leave and sever all ties, and the young who never truly leave at all.

Somewhere along the way, we twisted the Hero’s Journey. What was once a sacred pattern (leave, transform, and return with gifts) became simply: either don’t leave or leave and don’t look back. We turned individuation into enmeshment or isolation. We confused independence with severance, dependence with nurture. In doing so, we lost the developmental architecture that once helped young people become adults while remaining in relationship. The hero’s journey has been interrupted.

In the old stories, in the myths that once guided us, the hero always returned. Odysseus sailed home. The prodigal son came back to his father’s house. The young woman who ventured into the forest brought her wisdom back to the village. The journey outward was never meant to be permanent exile. It was meant to be transformation that enriched the whole.

Our modern story has no return. The young person who “made it out” and never came back is celebrated. We admire the one who “escaped” their small town, their family, their roots. We’ve made a virtue of rootlessness and called it freedom.

Stephen Jenkinson writes that we are “awash in old people but bereft of elders.” These are the ones who know how to hold the young through their becoming, who understand that growing up is not the same as growing away. Without elders who can guide this passage, or rites that mark the transition while maintaining the thread of connection, we’ve left young people to navigate individuation alone. And we’ve left their parents bewildered about when to hold on and when to let go.

There is an ache of separation masquerading as success. Charles Eisenstein observes that we live in a “story of separation.” This is a cultural narrative that tells us we are fundamentally isolated beings who must make it on our own. In his book Sacred Economics, he writes about how “the commoditization of social relationships leaves us with nothing to do together but to consume.” When even our connections become transactional, when belonging is replaced by achievement, when we measure worth through independence rather than interdependence, something essential dies.

Estrangement, in this light, reveals itself as a symptom of a culture that has forgotten how to belong.

What happens to parents when the story changes? Parents today are caught in an impossible bind. They were raised when family connection still had cultural support, when extended families lived nearby, when neighborhoods knew each other’s children. But they’re raising their children in a world offering only two options: your children must cut all ties and prove their independence, or you must protect them from all suffering, help them become successful (often by doing things for them) which can keep them dependent.

Some parents watch their adult children move across the country, across the world. They watch as holidays become optional, phone calls become texts, texts become silence. Other parents watch their adult children remain at home well into their twenties and thirties, unable or unwilling to face the discomfort of transition. These parents continue paying bills, solving problems, easing burdens, caught between love and the growing unease of prolonged childhood. Both paths are presented as normal. Both are considered acceptable ways for growing up to look now.

Wendell Berry writes about community as “a locally understood interdependence of local people, local culture, local economy, and local nature.” But what happens when the young are taught to see cooperation as codependency, responsibility to family as a burden, and true adulthood as answering to no one? Or when they’re never taught to bear any discomfort at all, never asked to face the trials that build strength? Parents are left navigating between holding on too tight and being accused of control or letting go entirely and being accused of not caring. There is no cultural map for this. The elders who might show the way have culturally disappeared.

What happens to the young when there is no return? Young people face two equally distorted messages. Some are told they must “launch.” Become self-sufficient, self-made, independent. And if they struggle, if they falter, if they need help? They are failing at adulthood. Others are kept so protected from discomfort, so shielded from the trials of becoming, they never develop the strength to leave at all. They remain at home, dependent, unable to face the suffering inherent in transition.

Both create their own trauma. The young person who leaves must perform perfect independence, cutting themselves off from the very people who might see them most clearly. The young person who stays never learns to bear hardship, never discovers their own capacity, never goes through the fires that forge adults. In the old way, elders knew how to hold the young through suffering, not eliminate it. They understood trials as necessary, as the crucible of transformation. Now we either abandon the young to face everything alone or protect them from facing anything at all.

Eisenstein calls this the “myth of the separate self.” But perhaps we are also living in the myth of the perpetual child. Both leave everyone impoverished.

In cultures that still hold their young through becoming, there are rites of passage. Ceremonies that mark the transition from child to adult while keeping the person held within the community. The young person leaves (goes on a vision quest, goes into the wilderness, goes away to learn) but they always come back. They bring their new self home. They offer their gifts to the people. They remain in relationship. These rites always included hardship. The young person faced trials, endured suffering, discovered their capacity through difficulty. They faced these trials held by the community, witnessed by elders, contained within ritual. The suffering had meaning. The difficulty had purpose. And when they returned, transformed, they were received as adults.

We have lost these rites. There are graduations and twenty-first birthdays, but these mark time passing, not transformation witnessed. There is no communal holding, no elder guidance, no ritual container for the sacred work of becoming adult while remaining in belonging. And crucially, we have lost the understanding that suffering is part of the passage. Now we either throw the young into suffering alone or try to eliminate all suffering entirely. Neither creates adults. We have young people who leave and don’t know how to return. Some young people never leave at all. There are parents who don’t know when their job is done. Families are drifting into estrangement or enmeshment because no one knew how to bridge the gap between who the young person was and who they’re becoming.

There is another loss here, quieter but just as devastating: the breaking of the legacy thread.

Elders who have spent decades building wisdom alongside wealth and character alongside businesses, reach the time when they want to pass something on. They have learned what matters. They have stories, practices, ways of being in the world taking a lifetime to refine. They turn to offer this to their adult children, often in their 40s and 50s, and find no one listening.

Because those middle adults are busy building their own empires. Chasing their own status. Proving themselves. They have been taught to see accepting guidance from elders as admitting inadequacy, receiving inheritance (whether material or immaterial) as being dependent, and true success as making it entirely on your own. Then the legacy dies with the elder. The hard-won wisdom goes unspoken. The practices sustaining generations fade and the thread of continuity snaps.

This speaks to identity, not money (though our culture has reduced inheritance to financial transfer). It speaks to belonging within a lineage, to understanding yourself as part of a story beginning before you and continuing after you. The young learn from watching. And what they see is their parents dismissing their grandparents. Skipping the family gatherings. Building lives so separate, so self-made, so disconnected from lineage there is nothing to anchor to, nothing to inherit, nothing to carry forward.

Jenkinson writes about how we are bereft of elders, but perhaps we are also bereft of receivers. Of those willing to pause their own empire-building long enough to ask: What are you trying to give me? What do you know that I don’t yet understand I need? The old way knew different. Legacy offered a gift. Elders served as guides. And to receive well honored both the giver and the receiver, opening the truest path to becoming yourself.

When I think about my own years of limited contact with my son, I see now that we were both caught in this cultural story. Many years ago, when my son was a teenager, I found myself in the unbearable position of needing to set a firm boundary between us. His trauma was profound. Mine was activated. Our nervous systems could not safely meet. We were not fully estranged, but contact became limited, and every moment of it carried the ache of grief. The distance lasted years. I did not know if we would find our way back. I had to grieve what I could not repair, tend my own wounds, and release the story I had written about who I thought I was supposed to be as a mother. Neither of us had a map. Neither of us had elders showing us the way. Neither of us had rites that could hold the transition. We found our way back to each other, slowly, over years. But it required us to unlearn almost everything the culture had taught us about independence, autonomy, and what it means to grow up. In a real sense, we both had to grow forward, toward a new depth of maturity and connection. Over time, through therapy, somatic work, humility, and patience, we slowly rebuilt our relationship. Today, we work and teach together, guiding clinicians and coaches in attachment, relational repair, and embodied healing.

It required us to remember what the old stories knew: that we become ourselves by learning to carry our origins with us in a new way. Maturity means developing the capacity to be in relationship with ourselves and our own needs, alongside our interconnectedness with each other. Adulthood means being separate and connected at the same time. Berry writes that we have lost “the locally understood interdependence” that once sustained us. We have forgotten that we are not made to be alone, not meant to be self-sufficient. We need each other across generations, across the passages of life, across the thresholds of becoming.

What if we told a different story about growing up? What if we taught that leaving home means expanding the circle, not severing ties? You can become fully yourself and remain in a relationship. You can build your own life and still honor where you came from. What if we also taught that staying connected doesn’t mean staying dependent? You can face trials, endure hardship, discover your strength while still being held by those who love you.

What if we created rites of passage holding the young through their becoming, ceremonies saying: We see you changing. We celebrate your transformation. We will not shield you from difficulty, for difficulty makes you strong. Instead, we will witness your trials. We will be here when you return. We will remind you that you belong even as you change. What if we remembered the Hero’s Journey always included both the leaving and the return?

Eisenstein writes about moving from the story of separation to the “story of interbeing.” This means recognizing that we are deeply interconnected beings. This is remembering what was true all along. We need each other. We are shaped by each other. We become ourselves in relationship, not in spite of it. And when we forget this, when we cut the threads that connect us to our people and our past, we don’t become freer. We become more fragile. More anxious. More alone.

Healing estrangement requires reimagining what it means to grow up. This work extends beyond repairing individual relationships into the realm of cultural transformation. We need a culture valuing interdependence as much as independence, teaching young people how to leave and return, helping parents understand their role as guides and witnesses rather than owners or obstacles. The rituals, the elders, the communal structures once holding families through life’s passages must be restored. We were never meant to do this alone.

The work calls us to tell a different story and create different practices. Growing up can happen within belonging. The journey always included a return. Coming home (to ourselves, to each other, to the web of life holding us) completes the journey. This is what we were always meant to do.