How awful that much-loved 30-year-old son cut all contact

[soupsetpleasehelp]

I'm actually writing as I have a very, dear old friend whose DS has completely cut her off. He is in his early 30s and he grew up between his parents (in a different country so no risk that this is outing) after his dad left the mum, shared contact which is common over there. The dad has since then had numerous relationships, and was horrible towards my friend in the early days, and wouldn't provide enough economic support etc. All the main care really came from my friend.

Anyhow, she was always extremely close to her son and was (is) the most warm, loving mum (person) you could imagine. Her son was always her first priority (but I wouldn't say he was spoilt) and we, her friends, always used to meet up with him and he was super cuddly and loving with his mum. No wonder, she was always very encouraging. However, over the last few years he's gone into modelling and has had a few girlfriends, the most recent one who is from a wealthy family.

My friend's son has slowly cut contact from last Xmas until a hard cut off earlier this year. He kept bringing up old (what I would have considered normal experiences) from when he was a child, when he felt she didn't meet his needs with regards to taking him e.g. to the doctors immediately after a fall (she did the next day when he complained of more pain, he initially said it was OK) and he had a fracture. Well, I'm sure lots of parents would have been the same. She is the most far from neglectful you could imagine, a wonderful person.

My friend has taken onboard that perhaps she and her parents at times talked about her ex husband (the father) in not too rosy a terms but I don't think it was a bad case of it at all, just a few occasions (tbh we all knew how awful the father was to my friend).

I wonder at times whether he due to mental health issues is gaslighting his mum, and now that he is in the modelling world and with rich girlfriend and parents, he somehow is embarrassed about his mum (who is very overweight and lives in a small flat) and that this has created some sort of dissonance which have led him to almost create false memories of how awful she was when he was growing up.

I hate seeing my friend upset and I would like to offer to write a letter to the son (and perhaps to his girlfriend and her parents as they only have his word) as I know both my friend and remember seeing her son grow up from 0-5, then seeing them regularly almost every year until he was in his late teens/early 20s. She honestly is a natural with kids and the kindest friend.

I would like to hear from all of you out there that have been affected by this either as the person being cut off, or the person dropping contact. What would be the best way to approach this letter?

Upthread, RedDarkSkyKnight linked a Joshua Coleman article. I read it, and then clicked on another one of his that takes a deeper dive into parent-child estrangement. Like me, he thinks that many estrangements are for good reasons, but not necessarily all.

https://www.drjoshuacoleman.com/post/a-shift-in-american-family-values-is-fueling-estrangement

Perhaps he, a family expert, can say it better than I:

"Some of those adult children want no contact because their parents behaved in ways that were clearly abusive or rejecting. To make matters worse for their children and themselves, some parents are unable to repair or empathize with the damage they caused or continue to inflict. However, my recent research—and my clinical work over the past four decades—has shown me that you can be a conscientious parent and your kid may still want nothing to do with you when they’re older.

"In less grave scenarios our American love affair with the needs and rights of the individual conceals how much sorrow we create for those we leave behind. We may see cutting off family members as courageous rather than avoidant or selfish. We can convince ourselves that it’s better to go it alone than to do the work it takes to resolve conflict. Some problems may be irresolvable, but there are also relationships that don’t need to be lost forever."

From an expert, not from me.

100% agree

Well, I just posted some thoughts from a family expert, initially linked by another poster. who's been working in this field for four decades. His thoughts on the matter are the same as mine. But if there are no unjustified estrangements, I guess you must think he's ignorant, too. Why don't you write and tell him? 😂

our American love affair with the needs and rights of the individual conceals how much sorrow we create for those we leave behind. We may see cutting off family members as courageous rather than avoidant or selfish. We can convince ourselves that it’s better to go it alone than to do the work it takes to resolve conflict.

This!!

Exactly. Thank you!

The amount of abuse and bullying on this thread for someone not agreeing with their opinion, from those who apparently know what it is to be abused, is so hypocritical.

How embarrassing, you thought this was a really whitty comment and added on your sarcastic little laughing face.

Why are you being so nasty?

How rude. She's not ignorantly waffling. She's giving her opinion as she has every right to.
I happen to think she's a voice of reason and decency amongst some very callious and ruthless opinions. I'm always shocked on here to read how quick people will go nc with parents and all the posters encouraging it.

It's spelt witty, not whitty. 🤭

I'm always shocked by that, too. The internet attracts some truly selfish and callous individuals who encourage others to be the same.

@Tandora Nasty? Ooh burn. Was I supposed to be nice? Do you think Noisy has been nice on this thread? Do you think repeatedly hounding people sharing their childhood trauma and experiences of why they've gone NC with abusive parents is a nice thing to do? Do you think sarcastically correcting the spelling of a word with a giggly face is nice? To call others selfish and callous when demonstrating that kind of behaviour and ignoring other posters boundaries over and over again is nice?

As you WELL KNOW, I have made VERY CLEAR throughout the thread that I think victims of any kind of abuse have every right not to be in contact with their abusers.

I've stuck up for my opinion that not EVERY estrangement is deserved. THAT'S what gets your goat. You can't bully me into agreeing with you.

I think many posters on here are abusive themselves, calling me a cunt and all manner of other names and character assassinations, merely because I WILL NOT be forced into an opinion that I don't hold.

The problem with resolving conflict between parties, is that first, all parties must agree that there is a conflict to resolve.

A parent, who is used to being dominant and the one who dictates, within the relationship, is very possibly not going to agree that there is anything that needs resolution, because as far as they are concerned, from their own perspective, everything is hunky dory. And they may well have support in that, from their friends, and from within their family.

I think, as parents, we all know that sometimes we get things wrong, heck, some of us might even acknowledge sometimes we get things very wrong. However, I also think it's human nature for us to minimise our trespasses, and focus on all that we did right. Oftentimes, particularly if they don't feel able to air their grievances, or feel heard and acknowledged, let alone apologised to, the recipients of our wrongs are not quite as quick to sweep the shit under the carpet, much to our uncomfortable confusion. . .

People don’t have to agree with you. Sharing a different opinion on a public discussion board is not a violation of your boundaries, nor is it hounding you.

I called you no names and at no point assassinated your character, I genuinely hope that anyone who did had their posts removed
BUT you will not stop pushing your own agenda - someone has gone NC with you and it would be offensive of anyone to speculate why, but you seem to think that by belittling the experiences of others and claiming that its for those of us who have had that difficult choice to justify it that it will somehow mean you can be certain that there is no way you hold any responsibility for what has happened to you.
I don't need you to agree and neither does the person who has gone NC with you, what I would like (but can't demand) is that you stop continually posting things that make some of us feel thrown straight back into the circumstances that made us go NC in the first place.
Some might say it comes across as you are stubborn and inflexible and like you need to always prove you are right and cannot see another point of view - those are some of the behaviours that might make a family member go NC with someone so maybe have a think about that

About the spelling, it was an oops! face, by the way. I assumed you made a typo or that your voice-to-text is being weird.

I've repeatedly made clear so many times that I don't blame people who have horrible families who have abused them in any way for going NC. So I cannot understand why people who are NC for those reasons think my opinion is aimed at them.

You are going to get a range of opinions on the internet. You can't expect an echo chamber.

I posted an expert's opinion, which happens to be the same as mine. It's perfectly rational to think that most, but not all, estrangements are reasonable. Why any victim of horrible parents would think that that opinion is aimed at them is beyond me. I can only conclude that some people cannot bear an opinion that doesn't align perfectly with theirs, and will mercilessly bully someone who doesn't agree with them and who holds a rational opinion in line with SMEs. (Subject matter experts.)

That's abusive.

Oh yes of course it was.

You know we can see you made a grammatical error before you edited your post too? Oops!

I did? What was it?

I do think that most estrangements are for good reasons.

But there remains a small subset of people who are just horrible and who deeply hurt those close to them for minor reasons. Those people create huge amounts of heartache, and I think it's terrible.

Can someone explain to me why that opinion is so triggering, because I really don't get it. It seems quite a reasonable take to me.

Do you not know how the edit function works? 🤭

I know how the edit function works, but I don't know what error you're referring to.

I read that article already and really think its bullshit—I am a therapist myself so the argument from authority (ohhh! He’s a therapist!) doesn’t impress me. In my experience as a therapist I see little evidence that children capriciously cut themselves off from parents even when those parents are abusive—still less that they do so for no reason at all.

His point in the quoted portion is literally trivial, in the scientific sense. It is trivially true that theoretically a parent could do a pretty good job by their own lights and still be rejected or avoided by a child later in life. What does that prove? Perhaps their own lights were not good enough. This is the “we took you to stately homes” argument. I have a wealthy client whose mother made her co sleep until she was sixteen—showered her with gifts and bombarded her with phone calls snd forced intimacy. Is that great parenting that should be rewarded by close, intimate, family life for the rest of my client’s life? Her mother thinks so. My client doesn’t. The person who has the right to make the decision is the child. The parent does what they want but has to accept the consequences if their treatment isn’t acceptable or desirable to the child.

Iif families are less tight snd incestuously co dependent than previously so what? If people were happier sticking together they would do so. If they aren’t happy sticking together through thick and thin who is to complain about it?

Not all estrangements are the dumpee's fault. Many are. Why is this view so hard to understand?

I don’t think anyone is struggling to understand that it’s not always as simple as “You've been cut off, so it must be all your fault”. I’m sure most people understand that every case is different. But it’s your insistence on suggesting that some estrangements are “unjustified” or happened for “no reason” that is causing consternation.

Another poster put it better than me when she said that the decision to cut someone out of your life isn’t something you have to make a case for in court. We all have individual rights and freedoms and we don’t have to justify these decisions. But I simply don’t believe anyone does it for “no reason”, as you’ve repeatedly suggested. Maybe you personally, and indeed others, are unconvinced by the reasons, but they exist. No one wakes up and thinks out of the blue, “I might cut my parents permanently out of my life today” in the way you might think “I might have a couple of extra inches off my hair this time” or “I might book Portugal instead of Spain”.

You’ve criticised people for apparently assuming the blame was entirely with OP’s friend in this situation - yet all most people said was that it’s rarely something that happens out of nowhere and that maybe there are things OP doesn’t know. You, however, decided the friend’s son must be an awful, selfish person who is entirely at fault, seemingly purely on the basis that he’s a model with a rich girlfriend.

I mean, my mum was horrifically abused by her parents and all their friends thought they were wonderful parents - in fact at their funeral they went on how wonderful they were and my mum was horrified.

No one knows what goes on behind closed doors, and you only have one side - in the same way your friends sons girlfriend only has one side.