Estrangement Saved My Family — Maybe It Can Save Britney’s Too
Estrangement is painful but it can help to heal generational trauma
When my sisters stopped speaking to our parents and cut them out of their lives, I was devastated. I completely lost my identity, feeling like a character in a psychological thriller as I watched my family fall apart, trying to work out which one of them had undone the stitches that had kept us held tightly through several traumas. I didn’t understand: after everything we’d been through, why was my parents’ separation the one trauma to tip us over the edge?
During the 2020 lockdown, I had therapy. Whilst everyone else was watching the news and biting their nails about a new virus that reportedly started in China and swarmed the world, drastically changing our lives, I was on the phone, partially glad that the world had slowed down so that I could have the therapy I desperately needed.
I couldn’t find the answer, so I thought maybe a therapist would. But it turns out 6 1-hour sessions over the phone did not reveal the culprit of my family’s undoing, and barely scratched the surface of my traumas.
Mum says Dad’s put her through hell for most of their almost 30-year marriage. Dad said he did protect us. Mum says he didn’t. My sisters say Mum’s abusive. I…
