Post Estrangement: Changing what you hope for.

During the early days of estrangement you hope and dream that it had never happened.  This is the denial stage when you still have the misguided notion that it is all a bad dream and you will just wake up one day and it will be back to family life as usual.  That whatever they were upset about will be dealt with and you just go back to being a normal family.  A family that goes through difficult times but manages to stick together and work things out.  Blood is thicker than water and all those kinds of messages run through your mind as you struggle with the hardship of being shunned. 

Then you get to the stage where the estrangement has been going on for long enough that you accept that it is real.  Your child really has done this thing called estrangement.  They have also cut ties with those members of the family that do not agree with them.  You realize that this is a power struggle and they want above all else to be “right”.  They drop anyone who suggests that compromise might be in order. 

During this stage you start to ask all the harrowing “why” questions, that unfortunately resolve nothing.   But you cling to hope. It is a desperate kind of hope.

Your hopes change to wishing for your estranging adult child to recognize the damage they are causing to the family and that they will somehow come to their senses and do what is necessary for the family to reconcile.  You have these hopes that it is a “personal growth phase” they are going through and when they “grow up” they will realize how silly their behaviour is.  You hope that this Mother’s Day or this Christmas or this Birthday everything will be resolved.  You send letters and then hope they will reply or hope they will open the door to communication.

During this stage you place all your hopes on the adult child that has estranged.  You hope their hearts will soften, you hope they will care enough to make amends.  You hope they will change.

And as you hope for change; and have your hopes demolished day in and day out by the continuing silence you come to realize that this hope is slowly destroying you.  This hope causes you pain every morning and every evening when your hopes are once again unfulfilled.  This hope keeps you stuck in wistful thinking and magical make believing.  This hope takes power out of your hands and places that power into the hands of the very person(s) causing you to suffer. 

This stage, I fear, was the longest and also the hardest part of the grieving journey for me.  It kept me stuck in the past.  It kept me repeating useless questions like:

• What made her turn out to be the kind of person who can do this?
• Why doesn’t she see that this is not the way to communicate and work things out?
• Why won’t she respond to my letters and my apologies?
• What did I do that was so horrible that deserves this kind of punishment?

Until finally I woke up one day and realized I was losing myself in useless hope.  I was giving up my own power by placing all the hope for healing into the hands of the very person who caused the wound in the first place.

That was when I realized I had to change the direction of my hopefulness.  

Instead of placing my hope outside myself and giving power to the estranger, I had to place hopefulness on my own shoulders and upon the actions I could take to regain peace in my life.

To live means to hope, but the hope needs to be about what I need and what I want to have a better life.  That meant I had to become hopeful that I could and would survive this traumatic event.  I had to build and then believe in the hope that regardless what my estranging daughter did or did not do I could create a meaningful life.  

• I stated to hope that I could heal
• I stated to hope that I could create a different life than I expected but good none the less
• I started to hope that I could find joy and happiness again
• I started to hope that I could live an exciting and enthusiastic life even though…..
• I started to hope for new and rewarding friendships
• I started to hope that a future without what I had expected can still be good.

And as I started to place my hopes in what I could do for myself, I was able to start the long journey toward healing, toward reclaiming the right of every human, a full and rewarding life here and now in the present.

Hope placed in my abilities to change and transform was essential for me to recognize that just because the life that I dreamed of did not turn out, I still had dreams to pursue, and challenges to be met and living to do. 

And best of all, I started to realize that I deserved this!

Because I am worth it!

Renate Dundys Marrello

2014 - 04 - 19 

My Facebook Reflections Page

Photo credits - as marked or unknown