Family estrangement is one of those topics that has been quietly sitting in the corners of therapy rooms for many years. Yet right now, it feels like it has stepped out into the open. In this article we will take a look how family estrangement shows up in our consulting rooms.

Want to learn more?  Join us on Friday 19th June 2026, where Victoria Settle (Tori) leads a full-day online workshop that we’ve called Family Estrangement: The Power of Silence.

You may have seen the headlines recently (Spring 2026). Celebrities speaking openly about cutting ties with parents, siblings, or their own adult children. Public figures describing estrangements that have lasted years, even decades.

What might once have been treated as a private family shame is increasingly being spoken about out loud, and the response from the public has been significant. People recognise it. Many are living it.

The statistics reflect this. Around a quarter of people have experienced some form of family estrangement, and roughly one in ten has cut ties with a parent or an adult child. These are not small numbers. When you factor in those on the receiving end of an estrangement they did not choose, the picture becomes even more complex. Estrangement does not happen to one person in isolation. It ripples.

What This Means for Your Clinical Work

As counsellors and psychotherapists, we see the impact of estrangement regularly, even when clients do not name it as such.

It shows up in the grief that does not quite fit any recognised category. It appears in the shame that prevents someone from talking honestly about their family at a dinner party, or in the loneliness of navigating milestones, marriages, births, and bereavements without the people who were supposed to be there. It can arrive in the room wearing many different faces.

What makes estrangement particularly challenging to work with therapeutically is that it resists simple narrative. Unlike bereavement, there is often no clear ending, no socially sanctioned mourning process, and no agreed-upon story of what happened. The person who chose to walk away may carry guilt, relief, and grief in equal measure. The person who was cut off may oscillate between anger, bewilderment, and a desperate need to understand what went wrong. And then there are those who find themselves somewhere in the middle, distanced rather than fully estranged, caught in a long silence with no clear resolution in sight.

Attachment theory offers us a genuinely useful lens here. On the surface, estrangement can look like an anti-attachment act, a dramatic severing of one of the most fundamental bonds we have. But looked at more carefully, it often makes a great deal of attachment sense. Walking away from a family relationship, or being banished from one, is rarely arbitrary. It is frequently the result of years of relational pain, unmet needs, and repeated ruptures that were never repaired.

The Complexity Beneath the Surface

Estrangements arise from a wide range of circumstances. Childhood abuse or neglect. Divorce and the fractures it creates across generations. Clashes of values or expectations. Mental health difficulties within the family system. Betrayals, large and small. And sometimes, no single dramatic event at all, just a slow accumulation of experiences that eventually made the relationship feel impossible to sustain.

What all these situations share is that they involve a communication of something profound, often something that could not be said in words. Silence, distance, and absence can function as a form of expression when direct speech has failed, felt unsafe, or been dismissed too many times. Understanding what is being communicated through the estrangement, whether by the person who withdrew or the one who was excluded, is often where the most meaningful therapeutic work begins.

It is also worth sitting with the reality that estrangement is not inherently pathological. For some clients, it represents a necessary act of self-protection. For others, it is a source of deep regret and ongoing pain. Our role as therapists is not to evaluate whether the estrangement was the right decision, but to create the space for the full emotional reality to be explored without judgement.

Expanding Your Practice: A Day Worth Your Time

If this is an area you want to develop your thinking in, we have an excellent CPD day coming up in June that is directly focused on this topic.

On Friday 19th June 2026, Victoria Settle (Tori) leads a full-day online workshop that we’ve called Family Estrangement: The Power of Silence. Tori is the current Chair of Education and former CEO of The Bowlby Centre in London, and an attachment-based psychoanalytic psychotherapist and supervisor. She is a regular and popular presenter for Brighton Therapy Partnership, and this is one of her most anticipated workshops to date.

The day will explore estrangements through an attachment lens, considering why some people walk away from their families, and why others find themselves banished. There will be space to think about estrangements involving parents, siblings, sons and daughters, and to consider together what is being communicated when someone withdraws from, or is cut off from, the family unit.

The workshop runs from 10.00am to 4.00pm via Zoom. Tickets are priced at £115 (standard) or £99 (discounted, available until 24th May, subject to availability). Can’t make the date? A catch-up recording is available for 28 days after the event.

You can find full details and book your place here: Family Estrangement: The Power of Silence.

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