Adult children and parents: can the relationship still be repaired?

The question almost always comes in the same form, often towards the end of a session, when time is nearly up and the person has gathered enough courage: “Can this even be repaired?” We are talking about the relationship with a mother or father — a relationship as old as you are, in which something essential has been wrong for a very long time.

The answer I give is always the same and always in two parts. Yes — considerably more often than people think. And not in the form you imagine. It is that second part which makes the difference between a repair that is possible and a fantasy that will keep you in the waiting room for another twenty years.

In this piece I tell you what is realistic in a relationship with adult parents and what isn’t; what happens with cut-off contact, which is far more common than people say; what to do when a parent doesn’t acknowledge the past at all; how to accept a limited parent without excusing them; when distance is justified and healthy; and why forgiveness is nobody’s duty.

What can actually be repaired

The fantasy people arrive with is usually this: one day my mother will break down, admit everything that happened, apologise — and then that child in me will finally get what they never got. The scene is understandable, just and deeply human. In the great majority of cases it is also impossible.

The reason is not that the parent is a bad person. The reason is that such a scene would require them to admit, all at once, something that would collapse them in their own eyes. For many a parent — especially one who grew up in deprivation, violence or silence — the admission “I treated you wrongly” is simply more than they can carry. Their defence is not aimed at you. It protects them.

So what can be repaired? Surprisingly much, only somewhere other than you expect:

• The way the two of you talk today. Not the past — the present. Two adults can learn a different rhythm of meeting, different topics, different boundaries, even if they never speak about the old wounds.
• Your reaction. When your mother’s comment about your weight no longer triggers three days of low mood, the relationship has changed — even though your mother said exactly what she has been saying for thirty years.
• The amount and form of contact. A weekly lunch that costs you two days each time can become a monthly coffee that is pleasant. This is not a defeat. It is fitting the format to what both of you can actually manage.
• Your story about what happened. This is often the largest part of the work — and the only one entirely in your hands.

The only share you hold

The most uncomfortable and at the same time most liberating truth about an adult relationship with parents is this: you can change your share, not theirs. There is no technique for bringing another person to see what they don’t want to see.

It sounds like defeat until you notice how much room that sentence actually opens up. Your share is not small. It includes how much and when the two of you meet; which topics you accept and which you don’t; how much time after a conversation you give to turning it over; what you expect before you ring; whether you visit because you want to or so as not to feel guilty. All of that is yours.

Murray Bowen used the term differentiation for this capacity — staying in contact with your family and staying yourself at the same time. Its essence is not distance, but that your inner state is no longer automatically dependent on someone else’s mood. A differentiated person can listen to their mother’s criticism without having to defend themselves or fall apart. I explain it in more detail in the piece on differentiation; how this task begins for young adults, in the piece on becoming independent.

In practice it also means less inviting work: giving up on persuading. Many people spend years trying to prove to a parent what happened — with letters, with conversations, with gathering witnesses among siblings. That struggle is not a sign of immaturity but of hope. When the hope for acknowledgement dies, grief comes — and only after it, space.

Estrangement: more common and more serious than people say

For a long time estrangement between parents and adult children was barely spoken about, because it is taboo — in a society that assumes you simply stay in touch with your parents, admitting “my mother and I aren’t in contact” is like admitting personal failure.

Research over the past decade shows a different picture. In a large American study described in his book Fault Lines, the Cornell sociologist Karl Pillemer found that roughly one adult in four reports estrangement from a close family member. In a review of the literature, Lucy Blake showed that this is a phenomenon widespread across different countries and cultures, accompanied by a pronounced sense of shame. Joshua Coleman, a psychologist who works exclusively in this field, points to the same thing: estrangement is often the loneliest experience a person has, precisely because they don’t talk about it.

A second finding is just as important: contact is not usually cut off over trivia. A public image circulates of spoilt adult children who give up on their parents over a disagreement about politics or a wedding. The data do not bear this out. The most commonly given reasons are childhood abuse, neglect, prolonged emotional violence, addiction, repeated betrayals and a parent’s persistent inability to respect an adult child’s boundaries. The decision is almost always the result of years of trying, not a moment of anger.

There is another side to acknowledge here, which both Pillemer and Coleman emphasise: a break hurts both sides, including the one who caused it. Many a parent genuinely doesn’t know what happened, and lives with a loss that nobody recognises as a loss. Pauline Boss coined the term ambiguous loss for such situations — the person is alive but not there; they are gone but they haven’t died. That is exactly why grieving an estrangement is so hard: it has no ritual, no date and no condolences.

Five possible outcomes — and all of them are legitimate

When I work with people on this relationship, I often draw the scale you see below right at the start. Its purpose is to relieve: the goal is not the far right-hand point.

When a parent doesn’t acknowledge the past

This is the most common obstacle people run into, and it calls for a particular approach. You say something that marked you, and you get one of four answers: “I don’t remember that.” “It was never that bad.” “All parents did that back then.” Or the most painful: “So I was a bad mother, is that what you’re saying?”

What helps then:

• Don’t try to persuade. Repeating the evidence only closes a parent up more firmly. Acknowledgement doesn’t come out of an argument; if it comes, it comes out of safety.
• Separate two goals. One is “I want them to admit it”, the other is “I want this to stop happening”. The second goal is often reachable without the first.
• Speak about the present and in the first person. “When you say that, I withdraw” is a sentence that is harder to reject than “you always criticised me”.
• Accept a partial acknowledgement. Many a parent cannot say “I’m sorry”, but can say “it was hard for me back then” or “I didn’t know how”. That is not a full apology, but it is often the most that will come — and sometimes enough. What an apology actually is and what it cannot replace I explained in the piece on apology and forgiveness.
• Find the acknowledgement elsewhere. A therapist, a partner, a sibling, a friend — confirmation that it happened and that it was hard is psychologically necessary. It doesn’t have to come from the person who caused it.

That last point is often the turning point. When a person stops waiting for a single signature on their story, it turns out the story was valid all along without it.

It is also worth knowing that with older parents a good deal changes of its own accord. With age, defences often loosen, the fear of loneliness grows and the need to add up a life increases. Karen Fingerman, who researched relationships between ageing mothers and adult daughters, described their characteristic mixture of warmth and tension — in these relationships a single emotion rarely prevails. So it happens that a parent who at fifty couldn’t admit anything says, at eighty and in passing, the sentence you have waited for all your life. You cannot count on that. But it is worth not closing the door permanently when you don’t have to.

Accepting a limited parent without excusing them

There is an important difference between understanding and excusing, and it is worth drawing very precisely — because people often think they have to choose between the two.

Understanding means: I know where it comes from. The mother who couldn’t comfort had herself grown up with a mother who lost three children and shut down. The father who couldn’t show affection grew up in a house where tenderness was weakness. That understanding often arrives while drawing a family tree — I write about what travels through the generations in the piece on emotional inheritance.

Excusing means: because I know where it comes from, it wasn’t bad. That is a step you don’t have to take — and one that does harm, because it erases your experience.

A healthy formulation sounds roughly like this: “I understand why she was that way. And at the same time it damaged me.” Both halves of the sentence are true at once. The ability to hold both without one displacing the other is in fact the definition of a mature relationship with parents.

For many, the road there is a road of grief — not for a dead parent, but for the parent who was never there. That grief is real and has all the usual waves; what its process looks like I have described in the piece on sadness.

When contact is harmful: the right to distance

And now the part you hear least in public. There are relationships in which keeping up contact is not a virtue but a harm.

Signs where distance is justified and sometimes necessary: violence or threats; systematic humiliation repeated at every contact; turning the rest of the family against you; interference in your family or your parenting that cannot be stopped; responding to every boundary with blackmail, illness or withdrawal; and a state where you can’t function for days after every meeting. How to recognise the mechanism that keeps you in contact through guilt I write about in the piece on emotional blackmail.

Distance doesn’t have to mean cutting off. The best solution is often somewhere in between: less frequent contact, meetings only on neutral ground, only with your partner there, only at holidays, only by phone, lasting as long as you decide. Many people keep, through measured contact, a relationship that full closeness would destroy.

And if you do decide to cut off: let it be a decision, not an escape. A decision means you know why you are making it, that you have thought it through, that you know under what conditions a return would be possible, and that you are prepared for what it brings — including the reactions of the rest of the family, which are often the hardest part.

Forgiveness is not an obligation

In a culture where forgiveness is often presented as a moral duty or a precondition for happiness, it has to be said plainly: forgiveness is not a condition for recovery.

Research on forgiveness — a meta-analysis by Nathaniel Wade and colleagues covered a range of psychotherapeutic programmes — shows that forgiveness, when it comes, really does bring less anger, anxiety and depression. But three things are often overlooked. First, it is an inner process, not an act towards someone else — forgiveness requires no reconciliation, no contact and no absolving of responsibility. Second, it cannot be forced; forgiveness on command is suppression under a nicer name. And third, its opposite pole is not vengefulness but simply no longer sending someone a bill — which often happens by itself once life moves on.

So I never point people towards forgiveness as a goal. We work on anger no longer driving their decisions and on pain finding its place in the story. What that does to the relationship with a parent shows by itself — and sometimes it turns out that forgiveness arrived without anyone calling for it.

Where therapy helps with this

Work on the relationship with parents can go two ways. More often a single person comes and we work on their share: on boundaries, on reactions, on grieving, on the story. That makes perfect sense — a system shifts even when one part of it changes.

Sometimes, though, a joint session with an adult child and a parent is possible and valuable. Such a conversation in a therapy room has something home doesn’t: someone who holds the frame, stops escalation and makes sure everyone has their own space. How such sessions run I have described in the piece on joint sessions. Surprisingly often, a parent will say in the presence of a third person what they haven’t said at home in thirty years.

I do both within family therapy; I am a therapist in training in marriage and family therapy and I work under regular supervision. If the question in the title has been with you a long time, you don’t need to know in advance what you want to achieve. It is enough to write and we’ll start with what there is.

A last thought. A relationship with parents rarely ends in a great resolution. Far more often it ends with your noticing one day that you stayed calm after a phone call. That the sentence which once floored you now only stings a little. And that you are — for the first time — with them as an adult, not as a child still waiting.