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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I used to think if a parent was estranged from adult kids it was definitely BC the parent was the bad guy so to speak.  But now my young adult daughter is going this direction.

She struggled with some depression in HS, but resisted therapy.  She was generally well functioning with friends good grades etc.  She went to uni and graduated a year ago.  She is now a young adult working in the real world.  He worked through hs, college and kept jobs for a long time (over a year.). Employers, teachers etc always liked her.  In current job she seems to be doing well.  Dating a little, a couple close friends etc
  
She finally wanted to go to counseling a year ago, which we thought was great.  She likes his counselor a lot and they have been dredging up and analyzing childhood.  [b]Childhood was normal.  Bedtime stories, family trips, music lessons, private school, family dinner at night, parents who got along well. [/b]

Her grandmother was an alcoholic who died years ago.  Growing up we had a limited relationship with Grandma BC and my kids only saw her with us there, when she was sober.  My adult kids aunts and uncles, half of them are nice normal people but half of them (2), who were the product of an alcoholic family are toxic bitter people who we generally avoid but just see once a year at family weddings etc.

In analyzing her childhood she has determined that she needs to set healthyboundaries and will be cutting her off from everyone in the next few months.  I got confused and asked her if she meant everyone incl the good kind family members.  She says yes.  She also said she'll be cutting herself off completely from us as we are part of the problem by association.  She can't seem to compartmentalize people.  Her therapist is apparently in support of healthy boundaries.  I should add that daughter lives at home and us getting ready to move out, which we thought was great and we offered to help with security or downpayment.  She's talked about cutting ties with everyone and she is bitter that she was born into a family with some dysfunction.  She says she was born into the wrong family anyway.  Whole she says all this she's upset and angry and thinks everyone else has perfect families.

I was so shocked but said I support her choices for boundaries and although it makes me very sad, this is her adult decision and door is always open, and we love her.

She legit will go through with this and I am rather devastated.  What are your thoughts?  It seems pretty extreme to me.

This was my childhood, and I’m still unraveling other parts of my childhood that caused trauma. My parents were emotionally unavailable, clueless as to things happening in my life, and didn’t know their neglect caused me to have horrible selfesteem issues. We lived in a big house, bed time stories, vacations, greet schools. They just never talked about anything or showed emotion.

You’ll need to dig deeper to see your role. To this day, my parents don’t understand their role in my trauma. They haven’t tried to understand. If you want to know your daughter and be a part of her life, try harder.

[/quote][/quote]

PP, you should do some reading about Adult Children of Alcoholics.  ACOAs grew up with parents who were emotionally unavailable, so it’s not so surprising that they in turn would be emotionally unavailable to their own children.  We tend to parent in the way that we were parented. Does that makes us further perpetrators of intergenerational trauma or victims of it also?

My brother has cut my parents off.  He, frankly, has no justifiable reason to do so.  He has little ability to put himself in other’s shoes.  He is very black/white in life overall.  He has little ability to see all that he has been given by them.  He has no children, so he really has no clue what he parenting is like and often perceives himself as knowing better how to raise kids than his friends who are parents, which is laughable.

PP, we all are raised imperfectly.  It is good to consider what you missed out on in your childhood in order to give yourself some of that or to build skills that are weak as a result of that. Health boundaries are important, but cutting people of entirely is rarely a “healthy” boundary.

I’ll also say, as a mom of two kids in a divorced family, if my kids one day make judgements about my parenting, they will be doing so on the basis of a lack of information about why our family broke up and what their father’s behavior has been over the years.  In order to protect them I have kept a lot from them, but the end result of that is a lot of distortion. [/quote]

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