What Does Family Reconciliation Actually Require?
Part Four of Breaking the Silence: Understanding Modern Family Estrangement, a series exploring family estrangement, adult children and parents, therapy, boundaries, trauma, no contact, and what it actually takes to repair relationships.
Over the first three parts of this series, we've looked at whether therapists may sometimes contribute to family estrangement, whether family estrangement is actually increasing, and whether some of what we're calling an estrangement crisis may actually be a family transition crisis.
But eventually, we have to get to the question families sitting in my office are actually trying to answer:
If we want a relationship with each other, what does repairing one actually require?
There is a version of family reconciliation that sounds really nice.
Everyone comes together. Someone finally says the thing that needed to be said. There are tears. There are apologies. Everyone understands each other differently. Maybe there is a hug.
And then everybody goes home healed.
That is not usually how this works.
Family reconciliation is often slower, messier, and far less cinematic.
Sometimes the first sign that a family is repairing is simply that someone says something hurtful and, instead of disappearing for six months, the other person says:
Hey, what did you mean by that? Because that felt really shitty.
They talk about it.
Maybe not perfectly.
Maybe somebody gets defensive.
Maybe they need to stop the conversation and come back to it tomorrow.
But they come back.
And the relationship survives.
That might not sound particularly profound.
When you work with families who have experienced long periods of distance or estrangement, it absolutely is.
Before Reconciliation, I Want to Know Why You're Here
When I work with adult children and their parents, I start by meeting with everyone separately.
There is a reason for that.
Before we put everyone in the same room, I want to understand how each person believes the family got here.
What happened from their perspective?
What are they hoping will be different?
What would need to happen for our work together to feel worthwhile?
One question I often ask is some version of:
If we fast forwarded six months from now, what would things look like for you to feel like our time together had been successful or productive?
The answer tells me quite a bit.
Someone might tell me they want to be able to answer the phone when their mother calls without immediately feeling anxious.
A parent might tell me they want to understand what happened because they genuinely don't know how they went from talking to their daughter every day to barely knowing anything about her life.
Someone might hope they can eventually spend a holiday together again.
Those are things we can work with.
But sometimes the answers sound more like:
I want my mom to finally understand how badly she hurt me.
Or:
I want my daughter to see how selfish she's being.
Or:
I want my son to understand that he's not really a man if he can abandon his mother like this.
That's different.
Because family therapy cannot become another place to beat each other up.
The individual sessions help me understand everyone's perspective, but they also help me determine whether bringing the family together is actually appropriate.
Are we coming together because we're willing to be genuine, vulnerable, curious, and potentially build something different?
Or are we looking for a therapist to give us a new arena in which to prove our case?
Those are two very different goals.
Family Therapy Isn't a Courtroom
One of the fastest ways family therapy can get stuck is when everyone starts litigating the past.
Someone finally becomes vulnerable enough to say:
This is what that was like for me.
And immediately the other person responds:
That's not what happened.
I never said that.
You're remembering it wrong.
You know that's not what I meant.
Suddenly we aren't listening anymore.
We're cross examining witnesses.
Usually there is something underneath that defensiveness. Guilt. Shame. Fear. Sometimes genuine confusion because the other person's memory of an event feels completely foreign to our own.
But family therapy is generally not about determining whose memory should become the official family record.
There are exceptions. I am not suggesting that someone should be expected to accept a false allegation of serious abuse simply because another person says that is their memory.
But most family conflict isn't happening at that level.
It's happening around the meaning people made of thousands of interactions over many years.
And two people can walk away from the same interaction having experienced it very differently.
Repair requires enough curiosity to hear that.
My approach to this work has also been informed by training with psychologist Dr. Joshua Coleman, whose work focuses extensively on estrangement between parents and adult children. Coleman has written about the role differing memories and interpretations of the past can play in these ruptures, and the importance of humility and perspective taking when families attempt repair.
Intention and Impact Can Both Be True
This is one of the concepts I come back to constantly.
Your intention matters.
And so does your impact.
Those things can exist at the same time.
Maybe your intention was loving.
Maybe you were trying to protect your child.
Maybe you genuinely thought you were helping.
And maybe what they experienced was control, criticism, pressure, or rejection.
Acknowledging that impact does not require pretending you secretly intended to hurt them.
I often compare this to a car accident.
Most of us don't get into the car in the morning thinking:
Yep. Today's the day I'm going to hit another car.
It's an accident.
But the fact that you didn't intend to have the accident doesn't make everything that follows disappear.
There may be a police report.
Insurance companies get involved.
The car needs to be repaired.
Someone might be injured.
There are still consequences from the impact.
Even if the accident wasn't your fault, you still have to deal with what happened.
Relationships can work the same way.
Sometimes we become so focused on proving that we didn't mean to hurt someone that we stop responding to the fact that they are hurt.
You Can Apologize for Impact Without Inventing Intent
This is where apologies get weird.
I'm sorry you feel that way.
I'm sorry that's how you experienced it.
I'm sorry, but you know I didn't mean it like that.
Those technically contain the word sorry.
That doesn't necessarily make them apologies.
If I say something to my husband and I can immediately see that I've hurt him, I don't need to suddenly agree that I woke up that morning intending to hurt his feelings.
I can say:
Damn, babe. I'm sorry. That's not what I meant, but I can hear how it landed that way. I'm sorry I hurt you.
I'm taking responsibility for the impact without making up an intention I didn't have.
That's remorse.
And sometimes that's what the other person has been asking for all along.
Not:
Admit you were an evil person who intentionally destroyed my childhood.
But:
Can you care that this hurt me, even if hurting me wasn't what you meant to do?
Those are very different requests.
Accountability Has to Include Change
Sometimes families get stuck on the word accountability.
I just need her to take accountability.
Okay.
What would accountability look like?
Sometimes the person has already said:
You're right. I was wrong.
I should have done that differently.
I should have gotten help.
If I could go back, I would change it.
There comes a point when that may be about as much verbal accountability as a human being can provide for something that happened in the past.
But there is another part.
Has the behavior changed?
If someone repeatedly apologizes for screaming at you and then continues screaming at you, we're not talking about a resolved problem.
An apology without change isn't enough.
But if someone has acknowledged what happened, expressed genuine remorse, and stopped doing the thing that caused the injury, eventually we run into another question:
Are we willing to allow them to become different?
Sometimes Accountability Quietly Becomes Punishment
This is one of the harder parts of reconciliation.
There needs to be room for accountability.
There also needs to eventually be room for change to count.
If I have decided that you will forever be the person you were at the worst point in our relationship, there is almost nothing you can do to repair the relationship with me.
You can apologize.
Change your behavior.
Go to therapy.
Show up differently.
Respect my boundaries.
Do everything I said I needed you to do.
And if my response is still:
But remember what you did?
then we aren't necessarily working toward repair anymore.
Sometimes what we're actually asking for is punishment.
And I understand the impulse.
When someone has hurt us deeply, there can be a part of us that wants them to understand the pain by feeling some version of it themselves.
I want you to hurt like I hurt.
But there is a difficult truth here.
Nothing I do to you today can undo what you did to me ten years ago.
By the time many families arrive in my office, there have also already been consequences.
Maybe a parent hasn't spoken to their child in three years.
Maybe they weren't invited to a wedding.
Maybe they missed birthdays.
Maybe they haven't met a grandchild.
Maybe the adult child has spent years without a parent they once called whenever something happened.
Estrangement itself has consequences for families.
Those consequences may not feel proportionate to the person who was injured. But reconciliation can't become an endless process of finding new ways to make someone pay an old debt.
Forgiveness Does Not Mean Permission
I do think forgiveness has a place in reconciliation.
I also think we need to be very careful about what we mean by forgiveness.
Forgiveness does not mean permission.
It does not mean what happened was okay.
And forgiveness does not automatically translate into access.
You can forgive someone and decide they no longer have a place in your life.
You can forgive someone and decide they can have a place in your life, but not the same place they once had.
You can forgive someone and still have boundaries.
Reconciliation and closeness aren't synonymous.
Sometimes the healthiest relationship two people can build is much smaller than the relationship one or both originally imagined.
That doesn't necessarily make it unsuccessful.
Reconciliation Doesn't Mean Equal Access to Your Entire Life
There is no universal amount of contact that means:
Congratulations! You have officially reconciled.
Maybe you talk once a week.
Maybe you talk once a month.
Maybe you can finally answer the phone without your nervous system immediately going into overdrive.
Maybe you see each other occasionally but don't share every detail of your lives.
There are people I love who don't know enormous portions of my day to day life.
I'm a therapist. Nobody in my personal life knows what happens in my therapy sessions with clients. There is an entire part of my life that is intentionally private.
We accept that easily in other contexts.
But families sometimes equate closeness with complete access.
It isn't.
Reconciliation does not mean access.
And privacy does not automatically mean rejection.
You Both Have Responsibility for the Relationship You're Trying to Build
I don't believe reconciliation between two adults can be sustained if one person is assigned all of the responsibility for making the relationship work.
That doesn't mean responsibility is always perfectly equal.
Context matters.
If we're talking about injuries that happened when the adult child was actually a child, the parent had more power and more responsibility.
If a parent was absent because of addiction, untreated mental illness, incarceration, abuse, neglect, or choices they made during their child's childhood, there may be substantially more accountability required from that parent around those experiences.
Every family is different.
But if two adults are sitting together now saying:
We want a relationship.
then both people eventually have responsibility for the relationship they are trying to create.
This connects directly to what I wrote about in Part Three, when I explored whether some of what we're calling a family estrangement crisis may actually be a family transition crisis.
Sometimes the work isn't restoring a parent and child relationship at all.
It's figuring out how that relationship changes when both people are adults.
And responsibility in a relationship doesn't always divide neatly down the middle.
Brené Brown has described this as the “50/50 myth.” In strong relationships, there are times when one person simply has more available to give than the other. At another point, those roles may reverse.
That responsibility will ebb and flow.
No one shows up at 100 percent for every relationship 100 percent of the time.
But reconciliation can't indefinitely be one person performing and the other person grading the performance.
Eventually both people have to participate.
Stop Making Someone's Partner the Villain
This deserves its own conversation because I see it often.
She was never like this before she met him.
Our son never talked to us this way until he got married.
Everything changed when that person came into her life.
Sometimes outside relationships genuinely are unhealthy. Coercive control and abusive relationships exist, and that requires a different conversation.
But in otherwise healthy relationships, partners can become very convenient scapegoats.
So can therapists.
So can friends.
Somebody new entered the picture, our loved one started behaving differently, and therefore the new person must have caused it.
Except we're talking about whole ass people.
Adults make decisions about how they behave.
Sometimes a new relationship didn't change your adult child.
Sometimes it gave them a different reference point for what relationships could look like.
Sometimes becoming a partner or parent changed their priorities.
Sometimes they simply grew.
Blaming the newest person in the family can keep us from getting curious about what actually changed.
“That's Just Who I Am” Isn't a Relationship Strategy
Another version of this is:
That's just who I am.
Or:
That's how our family has always been.
Okay.
But it isn't working for your family, because this person is part of your family.
Families change.
People grow.
And changing how you communicate with someone doesn't mean becoming someone you're not.
Most of us already do this constantly.
I don't talk to my eight year old daughter the same way I talk to my almost two year old son.
I definitely don't talk to my husband the same way I talk to my clients.
I don't talk to my friends exactly the way I talk to colleagues.
We adjust how we communicate based on the relationship in front of us.
That isn't inauthentic.
That's being in a relationship.
If you want the relationship to become different, at some point something has to become different.
Rebuilding Trust Requires Letting Someone Surprise You
This may be one of the hardest parts.
When you've known someone for decades, you get very good at predicting them.
Or at least you think you do.
I already know what she's going to say.
He's going to get defensive.
She's going to make it about herself.
He's going to be mad.
So we enter the conversation already responding to the reaction we expect.
We become defensive.
Curt.
Guarded.
Maybe a little aggressive.
The other person responds to how we're showing up.
And both people leave thinking:
See? I knew exactly how that was going to go.
It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
In an ideal world, I would ask families to assume positive intent.
For many families doing this work, that is way too big an ask.
So I'll settle for something else.
Neutral intent and curiosity.
You don't have to convince yourself that your mother definitely meant well.
You might not know what she meant.
Ask.
You don't have to assume your daughter is intentionally excluding you.
Get curious.
Give the other person an opportunity to show up differently.
And then let them surprise you.
They won't get it right every time.
Neither will you.
But every time someone handles something a little differently, trust gets another piece of evidence that maybe vulnerability is becoming safer here.
Reconciliation Usually Starts Small
Families understandably want to know what happens next.
Should we start calling?
Should we have dinner?
Can we spend Christmas together?
Can I see the grandchildren?
Slow down.
Sometimes the first stage of reconciliation is simply showing up to family therapy.
If therapy is the only place you can communicate productively right now, that's okay.
From there, maybe it's a text.
Maybe an occasional phone call.
Maybe coffee.
Maybe a short visit.
Some of the families I work with live in different states, and strangely enough, that distance can sometimes help. It allows people to practice new ways of relating in environments that feel less emotionally risky before they attempt longer stretches of time together.
You do not have to go from estranged to family vacation.
Trust can be rebuilt in much smaller pieces.
How Do You Know Repair Is Actually Happening?
Not because everyone gets along all the time.
That's not a reasonable standard for any relationship.
Conflict isn't the problem.
The question is what happens when conflict occurs.
Can someone say:
Hey, what did you mean by that?
Can someone say:
I'm not sure what you intended, but that felt really shitty.
Can the other person listen without immediately preparing their defense?
Can someone enforce a boundary without threatening the entire relationship?
Can they get heated, take a break, and actually return to the conversation later?
Can they have a disagreement on Tuesday and still have a relationship on Wednesday?
Those are the moments I pay attention to.
Repair starts to become visible when conflict no longer automatically threatens the existence of the relationship.
And How Do You Know It Isn't Working?
Usually because we're repeating the same patterns.
We're talking in circles.
We're trying to punish instead of repair.
We're trying to correct memories instead of understand lived experiences.
We're waiting for the therapist to finally declare who was right.
Or we're showing up to therapy hoping the other person will eventually stop talking about the things we don't want to hear.
That's not reconciliation.
That's a stalemate with a therapist in the room.
Sometimes the most productive outcome of family therapy is recognizing that the relationship cannot move forward right now.
That matters too.
Successful Family Therapy Doesn't Always End in Reconciliation
I don't define successful family therapy as everyone leaving with a close relationship.
Sometimes success means people leave knowing they did everything they reasonably could.
They said what they needed to say.
They listened.
They took responsibility where responsibility belonged.
They gave the other person an opportunity to show up differently.
And there is nothing else to do right now.
Maybe the outcome is low contact.
Maybe it is no contact.
Maybe it is a relationship with significantly more boundaries.
Maybe reconciliation isn't the end result.
That doesn't automatically mean therapy failed.
Sometimes clarity is the outcome.
Your Individual Therapist Probably Shouldn't Become Your Family Therapist
This is one place where I think therapists need to be particularly thoughtful.
Individual therapy and family therapy have different clients.
In individual therapy, my client is the person sitting in front of me.
In family therapy, the family system is my client.
No one person in that system is more important than another.
That means there will be moments when I hold one person accountable more directly, and moments when I challenge someone else.
I don't think it's particularly clean for someone's established individual therapist to simultaneously take on the role of impartial family therapist.
If they do the family work well and begin challenging their individual client in front of the family, it can create problems in the existing therapeutic relationship.
That doesn't mean individual work can't happen within family therapy.
Sometimes someone genuinely wants reconciliation but has such a strong trauma response around a particular experience that they feel stuck. In my work, we might use something like EMDR or Accelerated Resolution Therapy individually to help work through that stuck point.
But I am still doing that through the lens of the family work.
I haven't become that person's individual therapist.
That distinction matters.
It also brings me back to where this series started in Part One: Are Therapists Contributing to Family Estrangement? Looking Beyond the Headlines.
Therapists have to be careful not to diagnose, pathologize, or create clinical explanations for family members we've never assessed.
Validation matters.
So does curiosity.
And sometimes good therapy means helping someone examine their interpretation rather than simply confirming it.
The Goal Is Not to Get Your Old Relationship Back
This may be the most important thing I can say about reconciliation.
The goal is not to get your old relationship back.
That relationship wasn't working.
That's why you're here.
Trying to restore everything exactly as it was misses the point.
The work is figuring out whether you can build something different.
Maybe it is closer.
Maybe it isn't.
Maybe there are more boundaries.
Maybe there is less access.
Maybe there are topics you don't discuss.
Maybe your relationship looks nothing like the relationship either of you imagined five years ago.
But perhaps it is more honest.
More respectful.
More sustainable.
And ideally, when conflict happens again, because it will, the relationship has enough flexibility to survive it.
That's reconciliation.
Not never hurting each other again.
Not never arguing.
Not perfect closeness.
The ability to have a rupture without every rupture becoming an estrangement.
There Probably Won't Be a Good Time
If you're reading this because there is someone in your family you desperately want back in your life, I wish I could tell you there will be a perfect time to start.
There probably won't be.
Someone will be upset about something.
There will be a birthday coming up, or a holiday you don't want to ruin, or a vacation, or work will be busy, or the kids will have too much going on.
There will always be something.
And the work itself will probably be hard.
You may hear things you don't agree with.
You may hear someone's version of the past and think:
That is absolutely not how I remember it.
You may have to apologize for an impact you never intended to have.
You may have to acknowledge things about yourself that you'd rather not acknowledge.
You may also have to accept that doing everything you can to repair a relationship does not guarantee the other person will ultimately want the same relationship you do.
But if this relationship is important to you, and repairing it is something you genuinely want, at some point repair has to become a priority rather than something you're waiting to feel ready for.
You probably aren't going to feel ready.
They probably aren't either.
Maybe the first step isn't a family vacation, Christmas dinner, or pretending nothing happened.
Maybe it's showing up to therapy.
Maybe it's answering a text.
Maybe it's being willing to hear something without immediately defending yourself.
Maybe it's asking, What did you mean by that? instead of deciding you already know.
Maybe it's one conversation that goes a little differently than the conversations that came before it.
Because reconciliation isn't about getting your old relationship back.
That relationship didn't work. That's how you got here.
The question is whether you're both willing to start building something different.
Not perfect.
Not without conflict.
Not necessarily as close as either of you once imagined.
Just something honest enough, respectful enough, and sustainable enough that when things go wrong, the relationship can survive the conversation that comes next.
There may never be a good time to start this work.
But if the relationship matters enough, eventually you have to decide that it's worth making time for.
Additional Reading
For readers who want to explore family estrangement, reconciliation, and relationship repair further:
Dr. Joshua Coleman, Rules of Estrangement: Why Adult Children Cut Ties and How to Heal the Conflict
Coleman's book examines estrangement between parents and adult children, the cultural and relational factors that can contribute to family cutoff, strategies for attempting reconciliation, and moving forward when reconciliation is not possible. Penguin Random House
Dr. Joshua Coleman, “How Parents Can Heal Rifts with Their Adult Children”
A shorter piece focused specifically on repairing ruptures between parents and adult children, including the roles of reflection, humility, responsibility, boundaries, and differing experiences of the past. Dr. Joshua Coleman
Read How Parents Can Heal Rifts with Their Adult Children
Brené Brown, “Comparative Suffering, the 50/50 Myth, and Settling the Ball”
Brown discusses the idea that strong relationships aren't consistently 50/50 and how people can communicate about what they have available to bring to a relationship at a particular moment. Brené Brown
Listen to Comparative Suffering, the 50/50 Myth, and Settling the Ball
Breaking the Silence: Understanding Modern Family Estrangement
Part One: Are Therapists Contributing to Family Estrangement? Looking Beyond the Headlines
Part Two: Is Family Estrangement Really Increasing, or Are We Just Talking About It More?
Part Three: Maybe We Don't Have a Family Estrangement Crisis. Maybe We Have a Family Transition Crisis.
Part Four: What Does Family Reconciliation Actually Require? (You are here)