3 Mistakes Helping Professionals Make with Family Estrangement

What kind of mistakes do professionals make when working with clients experiencing family estrangement?

This blog will take a dive into my research and identifies three key errors that professionals may make when they work with someone who has no contact with a family member.

Guiding estranged adult children towards specific outcomes

Adults who are estranged from a family member, and particularly those who are estranged from a parent, have told us in research that they don’t want to be pushed towards a certain outcome for their relationships when they seek support.

They value a much more exploratory, humanistic approach where the helping professional facilitates the client to understand, know and supports what is best for them.

I often receive requests via the Standing Together website for a therapist who will work ‘against estrangement’ or who doesn’t support families being apart. I feel it’s tricky ethically to make a stance on the idea that we should guide away from one particular outcome. When we work in a humanistic context, we accept that we don’t know more than the client about what is best for them, and we support them to find and feel empowered to act on their truth and authenticity.

There are moments in relationships where time and space is appropriate, if a client feels they need it. This is particularly true if there is a lot of conflict, rejection, control or abuse in the relationship, which is shown to have an adverse impact on health and wellbeing.

We forget how much of a healer the simple balm of time and space may be. Encouraging your clients to respect this need, if someone has stated it, will make the grounds for later reconciliation much more fertile. Taking a stance of any kind, for these clients, can derogate trust in the healing relationship and therapeutic alliance. It can also enforce the stigma.

If you have a strong value position on outcomes for estrangement, and you meet a client who needs a more open approach, it is worth considering if you are the right person to work with them. Referring them on will be in their best interests in the long run.

Guiding clients to make apologies that they don’t truly mean

‘Apologise even if you don’t mean it...’

An apology is an expression of regret and a gesture that we know we weren’t mindful of the other person with our behaviour. It can move the relationship dynamic along, and show maturity, ownership and a willingness to do things differently. It can be very healing, if it’s genuine.

To make an apology without fully feeling regret may well lure someone back into the relationship for the very short-term. It might get a client a conversation or a response. Yet in this work we are looking towards changing the dynamic in a family relationship for longer than a few weeks or a month. We don’t want things to keep breaking down for the client, or deepen mistrust, as this is going to bring yet more pain in the long run.

If a client hasn’t done the work to process why a person may feel hurt by a behaviour, and, importantly, if they haven’t worked to emotionally give the other person enough respect to hold this view, this won’t add up to true movement in the relationship dynamic.

People who raise grievances are also looking for the change that goes with the apology, not just the words. It is always going to become clear that it was an empty apology as the reconciliation develops and they have more conversations.

What is the client then left with? The apology is seen by someone else simply as the manipulation to get them back into relationship. It may hurt the dynamic more than heal it.

I feel it is our role to encourage clients to not simply do anything to get someone back. Relationships must have honesty and integrity to be healthy, and we don’t want them to be manipulations. We need to ask clients to examine what they genuinely feel they can change and do the work to see themselves.

I encourage clients to tell others who raise grievances that they are grateful for the courage and love it took to raise issues, and that they are taking time to hear, consider and process what they can take responsibility for. There’s no ‘one-liner’ that will get someone else back into your life, and insincere apologies are definitely not, in my view, the best places to start to build empathy.

Building expectations that a client can change other people

We can take responsibility for our trauma healing and grow from our adversity. I know, I sound like a coach! Yet sadly, however amazing you are as a helping professional, it’s rarely ever possible for us (or the client) to change another human who is acting out their trauma on others and causing harm.

I’ve seen many clients send letters that are beautifully written, heartfelt, that express so eloquently how they feel and what they need. I always manage their expectations that it might not be met with change, or it could be read but not heard and acted upon immediately (or ever).

I feel it’s wise to send letters of grievance, and raise issues, with the mindset that it is a duty to themselves to affirm their very valid relationship needs, rather than solely as a strategy to change someone else’s behaviour or wake them up. The most realistic hope we can hold with letters of grievance is that we will be heard fully.

For those who are acting out their trauma on others, or with damaging self-defeating and sabotaging behaviour, the growth that may be desired by others will come when we ourselves realise we need to change. Others may be a potent mirror to another person, but it is the individual that has to have the courage to look in that mirror and know fundamentally that it’s time to show up differently. We can’t force them into that realisation, or rescue them from their choices.

So in all this work, I feel it is our responsibility as the helping professional to help clients bring healing back to the self, and guide them to work within the realm where growth can happen. And that starts with them. Can I work to accept others where they are at right now? Can I step back from the need to rescue them? What level of relationship is appropriate given how they are showing up or how they responded to me?

We can, in the latter stages of healing, be grateful for relational adversity and embody the gold it has brought to our lives. For you as a helping professional, you are likely to have come to this work, so research suggests, as you have been through tough and challenging events. I’m sure you will feel the strength of your healing journey and taking yourself on.

It’s our advertises in life, and how we respond to them, that shape us all into the unique and beautiful people we are. We rightly have a stage of resenting our adversities, but we can move forward into a new outlook with time and compassion. And that is the freedom we do have - to respond powerfully to that in the world that is outside of our control.