Have you tried to reconcile with an estranged dm?

[Zrt]

If you did, how did it go? I'm considering this but I don't know if I'm making a big mistake. I wonder what proportion of estrangements are permanent?

Why now too?.

Has she or other relatives tried to contact you?.

Did abusive behaviour towards you cause this to happen?. If yes to both if the above I would not contact her.

She did reach out once but I ignored it at the time. There were flying monkeys that I had to contend with (neighbours).

Given what you have further written I would not make contact with her.

Flying monkeys have their own agenda and are not interested in hearing your side of things so their opinion should be ignored.

I did. It’s worked out ok-ish. I now have a better understanding of her abusive behaviour towards me as a child (we’d been estranged since I was 14). Not because we talked about it as such, but because I am now interacting with her through the lens of an adult. I don’t feel any particular love, attachment or bond so nothing has changed in that sense, but it’s helped me to make peace with some things in my mind.

Everyone’s situation is going to be different. I think you’ll probably get a lot of ‘I wouldn’t’ on here based on similar threads, but the fact is you only get one life and one set of parents and it has to be entirely your decision. If you want to make contact, that’s absolutely fine and you can always withdraw the contact if it isn’t working out for you. I was estranged from my dad when he died. I had a couple of friends strongly advising me not to make contact because of how he’d behaved towards me at times. I regret every day not spending more time with him and I wish I hadn’t let myself be so influenced by them. If you don’t want to make contact, that’s also fine. But please don’t let other people try to influence your decision. What do YOU want? Because you are the one who has to live with the decision.

Yes. Only to be reminded why I cut contact in the first place.