My DD hasn’t spoken to me since early August 2025

[KJCP]

For years I would have said my daughter ( now late 40s) and I had a good relationship. She would ring me several times a week, send videos, ask my opinion about clothes she had bought, have a moan about work, friends etc and on Mothers Day would send the loveliest messages in cards. When she got married three years ago, she and her husband asked me and my husband ( her father) to go on a safari holiday with them ( at our expense!) but we were pleased to and had an enjoyable time. Then in July 2024 she was getting stressed about work and decided to see a therapist using the company’s health insurance scheme. The result was she was told to “set boundaries”. I was told in a text that my anxieties (???) were affecting her. I needed to address these “ anxieties” or she would cut all ties with me. Since neither I nor my husband had any idea what she was talking about, she cut off contact with me. ( she has sent the odd photo of holidays to her father but never to me) To say I am upset is an understatement. As my husband says we can’t force her to contact us but is this how my life will be? Has anyone had the same experience and has anyone any advice?

I would write her a letter OP.

Be clear from the start that there is no expectation on her to call or meet you, but if she feels able you would appreciate a letter or an email back.

Say that you hear what she is saying about you needing to address your anxieties and you would like to do so, to enable you to hopefully have a relationship in the future, but you would like to understand from her perspective what she thinks those anxieties are.

Keep it simple, do not raise anything about her anxieties or behaviour previously, don't bring up things you did or didn't do with her as a child or adult. Keep it simple.

Don't talk about how upset you are, but do say that you will always love her no matter what and that you miss her.

Something like:

Dear DD

I hope that you and DH are well.

I am writing this letter as I know you do not wish to speak to me on the phone or in person.

I hear what you have said about us not being able to have a relationship until I have worked on my anxieties. This is something that I would like to do so that we can hopefully have a relationship in the future. However, in order for me to do this successfully, I would really appreciate your feedback about what those anxieties are from your perspective.

This letter is not intended to push you into any communication with me that you do not wish to have, but if you could respond via a letter or email, it would be very helpful to me in being able to work on my anxieties that have contributed to this current situation.

Without expectation of anything further, if you are amenable, I would like to stay in touch by email / letter, as I work on my issues, so that we can hopefully take steps towards repairing our relationship.

Again, no pressure intended at all, but I want you to know that I miss you and no matter what the future holds for our relationship, I will always love you.

Love Mom

It sounds like something has come out in therapy and instead of taking it seriously, you've gone all round the houses, denying there could possibly be anything, and then blamed her for it (ringing her husband to ask about it is just bizarre??!!), which all sounds suspiciously like a pattern that may have occurred throughout her life that you are not really aware of.

I think if you want a relationship you may need to open yourself up to the possibility that her perception of her childhood is different to yours and there is some underlying issue that she can't get past until you address it.

Why have you never taken it seriously and asked her what the anxieties are??

I am really confused here but think I'm starting to see the daughter's point. You've come back to the thread and given lots more information but haven't answered the one question that other posters have asked again and again, quite specifically: When your daughter told you that your anxieties were the problem, how did you react? Did you ask her what she saw as anxieties in you? Did you ask to explain what she meant and how you could work on that with her? It's been asked in many different ways and I'm still none the wiser on how you responded to her.

In your position, if my child told me that my anxieties were a problem for her, I would immediately hone in on that and ask her to explain what anxieties she means and ask what we could do about this. However my mother does what it sounds like you're doing - if she doesn't like something anyone has to say, she ignores it.

If you ignore the things she says to you and talk around them with her as you have here then it's pretty clear why she has a problem with you.

As someone who has been to therapy a number of times I can say that…the first session usually involves going through your childhood experiences, talking about your family and how your parents raised you. It makes you question everything that went on during your childhood and puts doubt into you head wether your childhood was different to others. Did your parents give you the attention you needed? Did they put you at risk? Did they have mental health issues? It makes you question everything and I suspect this is what your dd is doing?

What I have learnt to come to peace with is that no childhood is perfect, no parents are perfect. Parenting doesn’t come with instructions, we just do our best. Things happen, people suffer with mental health and of course it affects those around them. The world would be a boring place if everyone parented the same and in a perfect manor. My childhood wasn’t perfect but I wouldn’t cut my mum off.

OP you need to try and get your dd to talk, she obviously has issues from the past or issues with your behaviour/anxieties. Her feeling are valid but what can you do if she can’t discus it? All you can do is tell her you are there if she wants to talk about it.

sorry your getting a hard time on here.

Sounds like a very one sided relationship if she was the one who always had to call or message. Why didn’t you ever call her? I don’t hear from my mother unless I call her , so I stopped and we haven’t spoken in about a year.

I was thinking this too, I think OP said it as a way to prove that she doesn't harass her or push her anxieties on to her daughter, but if I was in a relationship this one sided I'd probably drop the rope eventually too.

I'm amazed OP is still wallowing over it instead of acknowledging the issue and trying to address it in some way.

Why didn’t you ring her? You say in your post she always rang you ‘moaning’ - that is a pretty awful way to describe someone sharing their life with you. You said you concealed it, but no one can ever fully conceal contempt or disinterest.

Why did you care about the worries she has?

You describe a very cold, standoffish relationship - why on earth haven’t you been over to see her face to face. Asked her to tell you everything that is making her sad. You sound annoyed not upset. You sound very keen to make this her problem, rather than reflecting on his you can repair this awful rupture.

Do you know why she has depression? Have you asked?

If this is your DD’s anxieties, surely you support her through them not complain. You sound cold and indifferent, and I am
not remotely surprised you find yourself in this position.

Have you rang her and tried to speak to her since he message

OP, in the few replies you have given, I have noticed you are asking Husband, Son etc about what these anxieties are but not her? Apologies if you have said this and I have missed it but have you actually asked HER what she believes these anxieties to be?

'Hi Daughter, I want to address these issues but i'm struggling to see them myself, can you please tell me what you are seeing that I am not so I can start to work on them as i'd like to better myself and repair our relationship?' Or something to that effect will do. If she doesn't reply she may not feel strong enough to tell you or may feel like why should she have to tell you and you shoulf figure it out. I feel this could be a long process and you will probably have to accept that. You should consider seeing a therapost yourself for some outside impartial perspective.

You might think you have no issues but we don't often see them till someone else points them out. I was once told I had 'bags of negativity' I carried with me. I didn't see it till I was told but they were so right! I walked around pessimistic and negative and it was draining for everyone. I'm thankful I was told. It has made me a better person.

I do worry about some people's motivations to become therapists. I have known a few people training to be a therapist, and they are not the most mentally stable. Obviously most therapists are fine, but its not hard to see how a therapist could use the job to play out their own issues.
No parent child relationship is perfect. I have made loads of mistakes with my grown up children I am sure, and my parents with me, but unless there is real abuse I would feel uncomfortable about the idea of cutting contact.
Your situation is so hard OP. If I were you I'd try to accept it for what it is for now. Make your own life. Send birthday cards, presents with positive messages and offers to talk things through when she feels ready. Otherwise its best she sees you carrying on with life, enjoying yourself, making other relationships that fulfil you. When she is ready to re-engage you will then be in a secure place and will manage it better. I guess the pain will be there everyday, because its a bereavement.

I was estranged from my father from late teens until the day he died. No regrets. It was a childhood dominated by his violent temper and abuse. I knew by the age of about 10 that as soon as I was able, I would end the relationship with him, and when he told me that my mother was only leaving him because I had bullied her into it (and had nothing to do with the fact that he punched her in the face whenever the mood took him) I was done. I'm sure he was wounded by it, because he stated in his will that his dying wish was that I should have nothing, but that was his burden to carry, not mine. If you want to have a relationship with your children as adults then don't treat them like shit as children. It's not hard. Don't be your child's first bully.

My relationship with my mother is less clear. We are LC. I'm sure she would like more contact with me, but I find her very difficult to cope with. I'm not a go between, or an unpaid servant, nor am I someone she can safely be spiteful to when she feels the need. I was all of those things for a long time.

My childhood was difficult, and my father prevented her from mothering as I am sure she would have liked to. I accept that. But the problems in our adult relationship have stemmed from the way she has treated me in adulthood, and the way she has responded to my children (blatant favouritism). I survived my childhood by fawning and people pleasing, which I now know is unhealthy and not good for me, and I've made a conscious effort to stop. My mother was under the impression that fawning and catering to her every whim was my personality. It's not. I can't tell her anything private or important because I can't trust her. I don't want to be told, for example, that people who use private healthcare are disgusting and selfish (especially when I had no choice because I couldn't get NHS treatment). I don't want phone calls where she rings up specifically to start an argument because she's in that sort of mood that day and feels comfortable offloading it on me, because there won't be comeback. I'm not here to fill in the gap when she hasn't got a better offer. If she wants to have a relationship with me, she has to start by being kind to me. That's the boundary, and a totally reasonable one. As yet she hasn't managed to stick to it. I'm aware that I'm not perfect, I have a lot of problems stemming from that awful childhood. I'm working really hard to sort myself out and to break the cycle of abuse in the family. But my adulthood has been really hard at times, I'm chronically ill, and I just don't have the energy for my mother's nonsense on top. If it comes back to bite me later, so be it. I'm doing the best I can for right now.

I should add, I had a lot of therapy last year for anxiety/pain management, and we spent a lot of time talking about my relationship with my mother, and yes, it did make it worse, because I was forced to face up to things that I'd been avoiding, and I think about going NC on an almost daily basis. But again, if you don't want your adult children to do this, treat them decently.

As a final comment, I wanted to say that it is really hard to be in a position where you dislike your parents so much that you can barely be in the same room with them. It's horrible to have a parent who was so cruel that the only safe and sane option was to cut contact with them completely. It is really painful to know that my mother preferred one of my children to the other so much that I had to minimise her contact with them in order to protect their sibling relationship, because when I tried to start a conversation about it, she didn't want to know. It is agony to know that when I was desperately struggling as a teen because of the violence and coercive control happening in the house, that my father didn't care and my mother was oblivious. It is also incredibly painful to know that the only way past this is to have a frank conversation with my mother that will hurt her terribly and might not fix anything anyway. People who find themselves having to go LC or NC deserve kindness and compassion. No-one wants to be in that position.

I think there's good points raised all round in this thread, even ones where I personally believe that there is more to the story than meets the eye.
One I would add is that I completely agree, noone is perfect, noone is expecting a parent to be perfect, but I strongly believe you need to continue to earn a place in someone's life (which goes both ways) and that doesn't look like the same thing for every relationship.
The parent-child relationship is so unique, and is given so much weight and held up as sacred by society, so you are not starting from an equal playing field like you do other relationships. Both sides are expecting to be endlessly forgiving, in different ways. Parents are expected to give and not take. Children are expected to be endlessly grateful. This starting position is, if you step back and think about it, an absolute minefield to try and build a functioning adult relationship on. And often, the problems arise when one side of the bargain wakes up and goes 'hang on, this relationship isnt one id keep up if it was a romantic partner or friend or colleague because we've actually got a lot of issues here...'
I think there's an underlying assumption that your range of forgiveness, understanding, overlooking, needs to run wider and deeper with a parent than with anyone else who wants a place in your life, and its very hard for us to figure out whats reasonable and what isnt, because society so far simply hasnt provided any guidelines for this.

As an example.
If a friend came to me and said 'my friend of 20 years used to speak to me very harshly about my weight because they were concerned about my health, and they themselves had a tricky relationship with their parents in this area and their own hangups, and they have largely improved but still make shitty comments. Every time they do so it impacts my relationship with my body, food, and them, and i am on edge waiting for the next comment. I have in the past tried ignoring the comments, changing the subject, saying 'thats not nice' or 'dont say that, it really upsets me' and they just say they do it because they care, then apologise and do it again a couple months later. They have otherwise been a decent friend and I have no doubt they care for me a great deal'

Responses to this vary depending on if it is a friend or a parent. For a friend, we would say 'get rid of them, they need therapy and you need to tell them honestly that its making you not want to be around them' but for a parent it would be 'you cant blame your eating problems on them, noones perfect, at least they are trying, look at everything they've done for you'
It just...doesn't feel right?

Well, you’re just sitting around wishing you had a relationship with your dd. Why not give her suggestion a try and see a therapist to start working on some of this? Maybe ask her if she’d see a family therapist together to help you figure out how you can work on yourself and then actually do that work? It doesn’t really matter if you feel like you don’t have any “anxieties” to work on, because you obviously have something going on that’s impacting your relationship with your dd.

You may even realise that you do have things going on that, once you face them, make your life a lot better - plus you get to heal your relationship. Doesn’t sound like you have anything to lose by giving it a go!

Speaking from the other perspective, this is very similar to my own situation with my mum. We are NC because she refuses to go to therapy to work on her issues. Those issues have had such a detrimental impact on my and my children’s lives, including putting my dc at risk of significant harm, that eventually it got to a point that I could no longer have her in our lives. She has buried these issues her whole life. It meant that in the end, she was defensive and mean and started spreading lies about Dh and I. She just became this horrible spiteful person because she was trying to keep people from finding out what was really going on with her. It became unbearable and started to completely erode my mental health.

I told her that we couldn’t have a relationship going forward if she didn’t address her problems and get some help. She refused. Well, actually first, she procrastinated for several months. Then she claimed to be seeing a therapist, but it turns out she just made that up and pretended to go for about 6 months. Then she finally said, she’d never go and she wouldn’t agree to family therapy either and if given the choice between therapy or never seeing her grandchildren again, she’d rather never see them again. So I said, right then, thanks for letting me know. She has had nothing to do with them for 6 years now. I haven’t spoken to her in about 3 years. All her choice.

You can lead a horse to water and all. 🤷🏻‍♀️ I’d say if your dd has said, this is what she needs to have a healthy full relationship with you, then do it. I’d run to the moon and back for my children. The discomfort of talking about hard stuff would not stop me from being in their lives.

@mindutopia Interestingly, my mother told me she'd been told by a health professional that she needed therapy to unpick why she'd got into a relationship with my father in the first place, and why she stayed for as long as she did, but she had no interest in digging into that. I remember thinking well, it might help you understand why our relationship is a car crash. Didn't say it out loud though. But I wish she would. I don't think we will ever have a decent relationship unless she faces up to it.

Sorry you are so upset and baffled OP but this won't be about nothing. Perhaps DD felt she had to have more contact with you than was comfortable because you expected it or she felt guilty not being in constant touch. You are very defensive about your part in this sad situation, but you must have had a part. The only person who can tell you is DD. You might sent her a card and present at Christmas via another family member sending love and saying that you would be glad to listen to whatever she has to say about the ways you have upset her in the past, whenever she is ready.

Son - Momma s boy, call every day at lunch time. Co-dependent golden child.
Q: do you pay for anything for him, and resent it?

Husband - Lifetime enabler.

Daughter - her calls are dull and moaney.

Mother, preferring the son. Anxious that daughter is a real person, not some endlessly smiling, dieting stepford wife, playing her role in the patriarchal panto. Anxious that daughter is real, not a blow up dolly ornament endlessly smiling to entertain the menz.

Accurate 🤔🤔😅

Re: My earlier post - My DSis, even to this day cannot understand why her DD has gone NC. Anything I have tried to tell her, the result of what my niece says and feels, she disputes. I am not
going to make it about who is telling the truth or not. They are both hurting. They are both in my opinion are loosing out!

My niece is 31, this has been going on for decades!

My DSis, most probably needs therapy, which I have suggested but in her eyes she is not the problem, her DD is.

Things my niece says her mum did to her as a child, I have put to my DSis, she strongly denies all of it. I also have to look after my DSis MH on this because she is in deep pain. She really cannot and will not take any responsibility.

Now, my niece, I don’t agree with all of the life choices she has made but I do see that as a child she saw the often bad, confusing choices her DM made. She thinks she is the kindest DM a DC could have, but she is manipulative and wants to tell her DD how to live her life. “You should do this…” “You shouldn’t have done that…” “Your not listening to me…” Which may sound mild but it’s not when it is controlling.

As@Thundertoast states parent/children relationships are complex and the expectations are like no other relationship. Even if your DC has their own issues that impact on your relationship, their feelings are valid. It’s up to us as DPs and up to our DC how we navigate these relationships.

Trained qualified psychotherapist and teach therapy at uni. We don't give advice. We facilitate insight and psychoeducate at most. Interestingly my estranged mother blames therapy and my training for me distancing from her, not her behaviors and manipulation that therapy helped me to see (some abusive, cruel and neglectful). Yeah it was the therapy that did it, put ideas in my head, made me dig up the past, got my believing all sort of nonsense for example that it was quite harmful for me as child to see her and her husband drunk and physically assaulting each other and I had a right to be frightened and upset or that not providing basic needs to your child while living a life of indulgence yourself was selfish,cruel and neglectful. That level of avoidance and lack of responsibility is very hard to work but if she ever takes any ownership we might have a chance, but it's very unlikely. She faked cancer for a year to keep me on the hook when she felt me escaping. We're done but meanwhile she has a team of people believing I went funny and vindictive due to therapy and she's a sad blameless victim. Therapy saved my sanity.

Your sister is in very strong denial. I got to learn that many, many people will remain in denial forever.

I assume you know this isn't about 'who's right'. All this tit for tat is just a symptom. There needs to be no judge on 'the truth' and if things really happened like one or the other party says. I don't know if your niece can see this (yet). Deep down she just wants a mum who listens to her, accepts her and takes accountability. I'm guessing your sister just wants a mum too.

I'm really not sure you should be looking after your sister's MH. I'm impressed by the stance you take, but don't go into enabling territory. What's wrong with taking a side, by the way?

I don't think your niece is loosing out by staying away from her mother. She lost out a long time ago, as a baby, as a 2yr old and then a 10yr old who did not have the mother she needed. That's when she was abandoned and the damage was done. It isn't being done now. Now she needs to heal. Find a way of accepting that her mother isn't mothering, process her childhood and calm her nervous system. The move forward into healthy relationships.

Oh that is so good, that’s exactly it! Bookmarking that article

i don’t think it’s odd at all. Usually the person doing the cutting off will explain at length the behaviour leading up to it. So we don’t need to ask about the other side, because we can see the posters viewpoint of what has happened.

When it’s the person being cut off, they very often say that it’s happened and they have no idea why, everything’s perfect, etc. but rarely in life is everything perfect. And rarely do people cut someone off without an explanation. So when someone says “my daughter won’t speak to me anymore, we used to be so close, I have no idea why” of course people say they want to hear the other side. They’d be happy to hear the OP saying “my daughter said it’s because of this behaviour/incident” - but it’s very, very rare we get that. They always don’t seem to know…

@Twatalert , I get everything you say! They are now NC and as I said previously my niece is starting to heal, long way to go but she is on the right journey. My DSis will never take
responsibility. Her pain is about what she is missing out on, DGC. I see it, she is a manipulator.

A therapist would not punish a parent who had the decency and self awareness to attend sessions because they realised that they had caused damage to their DC, my considering my DSis MH, is not enabling, I promise you.

@MNLurker1345 Yes, a therapist is always on the client's side. I would suspect a therapist would dive into your sister's childhood with her as opposed to taking apart the relationship with her daughter. Pennies would be dropping that way. Therapists don't punish. A good therapeutic relationship is absolutely life changing. Replace 'good' with 'emotionally safe'.