Somatic Coping Skills

TLDR: Estrangement and low contact often come after years of trying to be known, believed, and understood. Healing begins when you honor your experience, even when your caregivers will not.

Estrangement between parents and adult children is often misunderstood. People who have not lived through emotional neglect or chronic misattunement tend to assume that distance happens suddenly or without cause. They create stories about disrespect or entitlement, or they label adult children as ungrateful or overly sensitive.

But estrangement or low contact is almost never the first boundary. For many, it is the last one.

Most adult children who step back from a parent do so after years of trying. Years of trying to bring up their feelings. Years of trying to repair the relationship. Years of trying to share their childhood experience in a way that would evoke understanding. Years of trying to be seen by the very people who shaped them.

When attempts to connect are continually met with dismissal, defensiveness, or denial, the adult child eventually realizes that distance is the only place where their nervous system can rest. That distance is not rejection. It is protection.

The Anger of the Adult Child Makes Sense

Something many caregivers struggle to grasp is that their adult child’s anger is not cruelty. If anything, it is evidence of a wound that was never allowed to heal. Growing up, the child had to silence any anger they felt because their survival depended on staying connected to their caregivers.

Children are profoundly dependent. They cannot risk losing attachment. This means that any frustration, hurt, or injustice they felt had to be tucked away. They learned to minimize their own pain, rationalize adult behavior, or internalize blame.

As adults, those stifled emotions finally have room to surface. What looks like anger toward a parent is often the release of feelings that were once unsafe to express. It is the younger self finally saying, “This hurt me,” and hoping it will matter.

This anger is not a sign of disrespect. It is a sign of truth.

Why Caregivers Often Feel Victimized

Many estranged or low-contact parents feel victimized when their adult children speak honestly about their childhood. They interpret the truth as an attack. They may say things like:

“You’re rewriting history.”
“Why won’t you let the past go?.”
“You’re too sensitive.”
“I did my best, and that should be enough.”

What they often fail to understand is that intention does not erase impact. You can try your best and still cause harm. You can love your child and still fail to meet them emotionally. You can provide physical needs while neglecting emotional ones.

What makes this dynamic particularly painful is that many caregivers lose the ability to differentiate between the adult their child is today and the child they once were. When a forty year old speaks up, the parent responds to them as if they are having a conversation between equals. But childhood wounds do not disappear just because the body ages.

When you share your pain, you are not speaking only as the adult you are now. You are speaking on behalf of the younger you who was never comforted, never believed, and never fully understood.

The Role of Perspective: Adults Forget What It Was Like to Be a Child

A common thread among emotionally immature caregivers is the loss of perspective about what it feels like to be a child. Adults forget that children experience the world through a completely different lens. Children do not have adult logic, adult emotional skills, or adult coping strategies.

They interpret tone, tension, conflict, withdrawal, and inconsistency with a child’s brain. They make meaning based on what they observe and what they feel, not what the adult intended.

When caregivers dismiss their adult children’s truth, they are dismissing the child who lived that truth. And that dismissal reactivates wounds that have remained open for decades.

Why Distance Sometimes Becomes Necessary

Not every adult child will choose low contact. Some will stay in a relationship with their parents and find other ways to integrate their healing. Others will maintain partial connection, creating boundaries that protect their emotional wellbeing.

And some will choose no contact at all.

There is no single way to navigate this. Relationships are nuanced and deeply personal. Choosing distance is not a failure. It is an act of self-agency. It is acknowledging that staying close to someone who cannot hear your pain continues to injure you.

Low or no contact is often not a punishment. It is a grief response. It is the boundary people create when they finally accept that their caregiver is unwilling or unable to meet them.

What Healing Can Look Like

For many, healing from emotional neglect begins when they are finally believed by someone. This might be a partner, a friend, a therapist, or even a community. Just one corrective emotional experience can shift the trajectory of healing.

Being heard without having to defend yourself.
Being understood without needing to justify the pain.
Being seen as you were, not as others tell you you should have been.

These moments matter. They are powerful because they speak directly to the younger part inside you who spent years feeling unseen.

But the deepest healing comes from self-validation.

If your caregiver cannot acknowledge your childhood experience, you can. You can turn toward the parts of you that still ache and say, “I believe you.” You can honor the reality of what you lived through even if others refuse to. You can validate the grief, the longing, the anger, and the confusion.

The work is not to convince your parent to understand.
The work is to understand yourself.

If This Post Brings Up Strong Feelings

If you feel anger rising, your reaction makes sense. If you feel sadness, that makes sense too. If you feel relief, or clarity, or a sense of being recognized, that also makes sense. Your response is not wrong. It is information. It points to the places in you that needed acknowledgment and finally felt it.

Dear one, you were not wrong about what you needed. You were not wrong about what hurt you. Your longing for attunement was human. Your desire to be known was valid. And your healing does not depend on whether your caregivers ever understand your story.

Thank you for letting me see you,