Estrangement therapy

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Estrangement can be one of the most difficult relationship experiences to make sense of.

There may be no clear ending, no agreed version of what happened and no straightforward way to explain it to other people.

• You may know exactly why you stepped away and still miss the person.
• You may have been left behind and still love the person who has chosen distance.
• You may feel relieved, guilty, angry, sad or confused, sometimes all within the same day.
• And you may have spent a long time trying to work out what you should feel, what you should do and whether you made the right decision.

Therapy doesn't require you to have those answers before you begin.

People come to therapy at different stages of estrangement

You might be:

• questioning whether going no contact is or was the right decision
• missing someone you no longer have contact with
• struggling with guilt or shame
• grieving a relationship  with someone who is still alive
• replaying conversations and wondering what you could have done differently
• struggling with family occasions, milestones or changes in your life
• questioning whether reconciliation is possible
• unsure whether reconciliation is something you actually want
• trying to understand how  the estrangement has affected your identity or other relationships
• tired of thinking about it  and wanting it to take up less emotional space in your life

You don't have to fit neatly into one of these.

You don't need to work out who is right or wrong

Estrangement can create a powerful pull towards finding an answer:

• Who was at fault?
• Could I have done more?
• Was I too harsh?
• Did they have a point?
• Should I forgive them?
• Should I try again?

Sometimes those questions matter. But you don't necessarily have to answer all of them before you can begin to understand what has happened to you.

Therapy with me isn't about taking sides.

It's about creating enough space to look honestly at the relationship, the circumstances around the estrangement and the impact it has had on you.

That includes being able to hold contradictory things at the same time.

• You can love someone and still need distance.
• You can miss someone and not want them back in your life.
• You can feel relief about a decision and still grieve it.
• You can wish things had been different without wanting to return to how they were.

Those contradictions don't necessarily mean you've made the wrong decision.

Estrangement can be a lonely place to grieve from

With most losses, people around you know what to do. They send a card. They ask how you're doing. There's a shared understanding of what happened.

Estrangement doesn't usually come with that. People may not know you're grieving at all. Or they minimise it: "they're still your mother, just call her." Or they take a side you never asked them to take.

You end up managing everyone else's reactions to a decision that's already exhausting to carry.

That isolation is often part of what makes estrangement so hard to live with, not just the loss itself.

Looking beneath the surface story

Estrangement often has a surface story, what happened, what was said, who stopped speaking to whom.

But there can be much more underneath it.

• The beliefs you've developed about yourself.
• The conversations you keep replaying.
• The guilt that tells you that you should have done more.
• The shame that makes you question what kind of person you are.
• The grief for the relationship you had, the relationship you wanted, or the relationship you hoped might still be possible.
• The impact on your sense of identity, belonging and family.

Therapy can give you the opportunity to understand those layers rather than simply trying to decide what to do next.

It doesn't always stay decided

Estrangement isn't always one clean decision made once. For some people it's contact, then distance, then contact again, sometimes over years. Each return can bring its own hope, and its own disappointment.

Christmas, a wedding, a stranger asking if you have siblings, each of these can turn into a small decision point of its own: what to say, what to leave out, whether to go.

None of this means you're doing it wrong. It's often just what estrangement actually looks like over time.

What therapy can help with 

None of what's above needs sorting out first. Our work might involve making sense of what happened, processing difficult experiences, understanding patterns in relationships, working with a range of difficult emotions, or exploring what you want your life and relationships to look like now.

There isn't a required outcome.

Those questions don't have to be resolved before we start. You can bring them in unanswered. 

• Reconciliation may be something you want to explore.
• It may not be.
• You may want to maintain distance but feel less consumed by what happened.
• You may want to understand your own part in the relationship without taking responsibility for everything that went wrong.
• Or you may simply want somewhere you can speak honestly without having to manage how your feelings affect anyone else.

How I work

I work integratively, adapting the therapy to you rather than applying one particular model to every situation.

We begin by understanding what's happening for you now and what you want from therapy.

Where distressing experiences or memories are still affecting you in the present, EMDR may form part of that work.

The aim isn't to tell you what you should do about the relationship. It's to help you understand yourself, process what has happened and make choices that feel more informed and more like your own.

You don't have to have it all worked out 

If you're living with the emotional impact of estrangement and something here feels familiar, we can start by talking about what's happening for you now.

You don't need to know exactly what you need from therapy.

You just need somewhere to begin.