How to reconcile with your estranged daughter

I’m a daughter estranged from both of my biological parents by choice.

My mother knows and continues stalking me. I unfriended my dad on Facebook because I was tired of seeking a relationship with him in vain. 🤷‍♀️ And he hasn’t reached out since.

Here are my tips to parents like mine, not specifically my parents themselves. 💁‍♀️

Be realistic

Expectations hold us back from accepting things as they are. They’re also difficult to let go of.

Know that you might not be able to reconcile with your daughter. The relationship may be over for good. You need to accept this as a possibility before attempting to reconnect.

Being too pushy = having certain expectations. You lose yourself in the desperation to repair the relationship. You might say something you don’t fully mean and won’t remember later. This will only damage the relationship further.

Seek therapy

Everything goes back to therapy. Therapy is where you unpack and declutter your baggage. You learn new folding techniques to make room for new baggage.

Your kids go to therapy for what you didn’t go to therapy for.

Take screenshots or copy-and-paste all your conversations with your daughter into a document. Print them. Take them to your therapist. Ask for help figuring out where you went wrong.

Your daughter has already communicated you what led to her cutting you off and you didn’t listen at the time. She’s confronted you with problems she has with your relationship dynamic, and you invalidated her. Or you didn’t listen.

No one wakes up and goes, “I’m done talking to my parents.” No one divorces their parents for no reason.

There is a build-up of unresolved problems. Estrangement is the consequence of those ignored problems. Small problems add up into larger problems; it doesn’t matter how big or small they are.

Refrain from sending a letter

Reconciliation letters are common, but they don’t help.

I’ve received letters from relatives with good intentions, even before estrangement. They were me-me-me and ignored how I felt.

Sending a letter during no-contact breaks the no-contact boundary. Attempts to reach out to someone who doesn’t want to be contacted by you is harassment.

Sending a letter before you’ve had a discussion with your daughter about why they removed themselves from your life might make the problem even worse.

The answers for removing myself from my dad’s life are in all our messages to each other. They’re in the patterns of his behavior towards me and regarding me.

Unless you can pinpoint the exact reason and are truly working to unlearn unhealthy attachments, a letter isn’t going to help.

How to talk to your estranged daughter

If your daughter gives you the chance to chat, here are some tips.

1. Allow her to be in control of the situation.

If you want your adult daughter to feel comfortable speaking to you and safe around you, allow her to be in control of the situation.

Let go of the need to be equals and control her. Desire to control the relationship/situation in the first place probably landed you here.

I will never enter a situation where I’m alone with my maternal relatives again, because I don’t trust them. They try too hard to control the situation and warp my point of view. They’re too eager for it. Even chatting on the phone, they try too hard to control what I might say.

They’ve also got a way of telling our mutuals their perspective of a situation first, to control the narrative so that I have no one who will listen to my point of view.

This is a boundary. They see it as mental illness.

I think parents struggle to accept their kids growing up, so having grown children creates this odd power struggle. What if you let go of your need for power, though, and respected them as people?

2. Mind your emotions.

Going no-contact, and making it last, you have to steel yourself. Everything prior to no-contact trains you to be a brick wall in front of the person you cut out of your life.

We’re not heartless because we cut you off. We’re shielding our hearts from further heartbreak.

It’s called grey rocking.

Outwardly expressing emotions is perceived as manipulative, even if you don’t mean to.

This isn’t to say that you should wear a stern, cold face devoid of feelings. Rather, don’t be too overly emotional about the situation. It’s likely to push her away instead of inspiring her to let you back into her life.

Coming across as desperate doesn’t win you any favors. It’s perceived as manipulative, like you’re making yourself the victim and her the villain.

Also, your emotions are not your daughter’s responsibility. This is parentification.

3. Listen to her

Accept responsibility for your actions and be ready to be held accountable. Again: don’t make yourself the victim. You’re the parent. You were the adult when she was the child.

Maybe you even reminded her of this on a daily basis! So…why don’t YOU act like it?

Refrain from blaming yourself, because this is perceived as manipulative. This includes saying, “It’s all my fault,” “I’m an awful parent,” etc.

You can think this, but don’t verbalize it/say it to her.

Not many parents get the chance to talk to their estranged kids.

Questions to ask your estranged daughter

You might have a lot of questions for your daughter. Use these as a starting point:

• Can you let me know when you feel comfortable speaking with me? If not, I understand and respect your decision.
• Could you explain to me why you’re no longer speaking to me?
• How would you like to communicate moving forward? I understand if you don’t want to at all.

Questions not to ask

• Don’t ask to see a therapist together. This is often suggested to estranged parents. It’s a bad idea because it places you in a position of power, the therapist likely having bias. Estranged children don’t want to see their parents’ therapist.
• Don’t ask your daughter to communicate a certain way. She may feel more comfortable communicating via text or email, rather than face-to-face.
• Don’t ask her to help you understand why she went no-contact. Take your printed out messages with each other to a therapist and bootstrap your way through this.
• Don’t ask her questions you already know the answer to. If she’s said she doesn’t want to speak to you at all, then leave her alone.

Accept that you might not be welcome back in her life

Forgiveness ≠ everything goes back to how it was.

When someone forgives you, that’s for them — not you.

In order to stay in their life, you have to earn their trust again. Your behavior has to actually change.

Otherwise, it’s an unhealthy relationship pattern that repeats (a cycle).

You might get the chance to have a conversation with her about why she went no-contact. You might have a mutual understanding. Things might seem like they’re going well.

Even if all goes well, this may be a moment of closure for her. Saying her piece — knowing you’ve changed or are open to it — might be all she wanted.

And you need to be okay with that. If you’re not okay with it — if you can’t accept it — you’re not ready to speak to her.

Having a parent or caregiver who repeatedly dismisses their responsibility in their child’s upbringing is tolerable until you realize you deserved better.

Therapy helps us realize we deserved parents who loved us even when we were “so hard to love”. It helps us realize the thing holding us back from living our lives fully is our trauma. The people holding us back and down and keeping us small are the people who say we’re “family no matter what”.

And when we have parents and caregivers and relatives who repeatedly remind us that, no matter how they treat us and how we feel about it, “we’re still family”…

We start creating and finding our own family. This is called a “found family”, or “chosen family”.

The hardest part for me was always wanting a mother who loved me unconditionally, instead of punishing me for her getting pregnant at 16.

Reparenting therapy works like this:

1. Therapist acts as surrogate mom and validates patient
2. Patient eventually learns to validate themselves
3. Therapist no longer acts as surrogate mom

The problem, however, is missing that bond. Even though a healthy mother-child relationship never existed, the void is still there. Society tells us we need mothers.

Humans need parents. Our parents are supposed to help us feel like we belong in the world. They’re supposed to help us feel safe in a scary world.

There is an entire community of people who offer to stand in for those roles. Sometimes, you find those people in your community.

My point is, you need to be prepared to know that your daughter doesn’t need you anymore. Maybe she’s replaced you; maybe she’s on her way to.

Leaning into that pain you feel and projecting it onto her as if she has done this to hurt you is the complete opposite of how a non-toxic parent behaves.

Instead, wonder why she resorted to that in the first place. If the “replacement” relationship is serious, she could get herself adopted. Adult adoption ends the legal relationship with someone’s biological parents.

May you have better luck than my parents. 🙃