New page: Estranged Parents Confront Their Children’s Reasons
The second of the pages about how estranged parents react to their children’s reasons for estrangement is up now: Estranged Parents Confront Their Children’s Reasons. In this example, a parent tells the forum the reasons her daughter said she had a strained relationship with her grandchildren. The forum members react with discernment and a delicate sense of the varying viewpoints involved in family relationships.
That covers a parent’s own description of her child’s reasons and the community’s response to a parent’s description of her child’s reasons. Next is the community’s response to a letter written by a member’s adult child.
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This one was really chilling for me. I have a young teen daughter who is also estranged from my mother by her own choice based on behavior that occurred when she briefly stayed with us a few years ago. Since the estrangement my mother has periodically tried to force contact, even recruiting another family member to help her overcome a block on my daughter’s phone. She sends cards and letters and messages through this other family member. When she was living with us, she barely interacted with daughter and left her feeling completely rejected but now, of course, she’s the grieving grandmother wrongfully deprived of a relationship and, goshdarnit, she has a right to that relationship even if it means using underhanded means to bypass the parents. It’s the adults, of course, to blame. My daughter is not regarded as having the agency to choose who she wants to interact with.
From an emotional standpoint, it’s difficult. I’ve always regarded my problems with my mother as my own, but now my family is involved. Ideally, my daughter should have a relationship with a loving grandparent, but my mother has forced us into a defensive position, and her attention toward my daughter just comes across as harassment because she has no respect for her wishes or boundaries. My poor kid, already dealing with the challenges of adolescence, is totally under attack from an adult that, if she really cared, would know better.
Ugh, your poor daughter. It’s hard enough to deal with normal grandparents in the early teens–they have different ideas about how young ladies should behave, they still think of you as a little kid, they’re SO uncool–without adding personality-disordered stalking to the mix. I’m so sorry she’s being chased, and that her own grandmother isn’t interested in her except as a trophy/consolation prize.
My inner 13-year-old wants her to accept an invitation to Grandma’s house, be a spoiled, foul-mouthed brat, and cap the evening by dropping a turd on something expensive and porous. Take the turd in a bag if she doesn’t want to produce on demand. Last invitation ever.
My inner 13-year-old gives terrible advice. Ignore her.
The refusal to see that it’s your daughter’s choice is infuriating. It’s like she knows your daughter (or you, or your siblings, or your other family members, or her co-workers) so well that she’d know if your daughter was naturally inclined against her, and since that’s not part of her mental model of your daughter, someone else must be sticking their spanner in her works.
My actual 13-year-old would laugh pretty hard at your advice.
Luckily, my mother now lives thousands of miles away, so it’s all remote. The downside of that is that we never really know when the shit is going to drop. I have blocks on our phones at the carrier level, but she has a different operating system and occasionally some WTF gifs and graphics get through, and once the family member was able to get around the block by opening a chat and inviting her. The family member is almost a worse problem. They’re local and refuse to get it and I really struggle to maintain a relationship with them because they’ve got their own demons to deal with as a result of contact with my mother.
Trophy/prize is a very good way to describe the situation though. She went out of her way to avoid my daughter while living in the same house (it’s a female adolescent thing — the pattern has been repeated many times between me and my stepsisters), even breaking plans with her because she had “better things to do” (shopping!). My daughter knows this, which makes the harassment all that much more distressful for her. My mother at least has no money at least (and she secretly spent all the money she very loudly put away in an account for my daughter — my daughter was devastated by that, but now she knows the reality), so there’s no strings really and her behavior has been horrifying enough that my daughter sees no reason to maintain a relationship. I suspect her attacks will taper off because the reality is that she doesn’t actually care, and then I’ll eventually have to cut off contact with the family member who feels the need to serve as her proxy.
Heh. A lot of my family is from a small town in the southern US that seems to have had a complex implicit social structure that it was women’s responsibility to run — and indeed, it was probably around my early teens (possibly a bit before) when I started getting assigned tasks in this structure.
As it turns out, an early-teens possibly-spectrum probably-trans kid is not exactly ideally placed for playing the part of the young lady sitting on a couch the formal living room and Visiting* for hours with elderly relatives that they rarely saw.
I felt a sense of confused guilt about this — particularly, that my great-grandmother wanted a relationship with me but I was too much of an impatient youth to reciprocate. But in retrospect the scenario I was posed with was kind of like trying to sing along with a song one is hearing for the first time — it seems quite a lot more possible than it is, but is actually pretty much impossible.
* “Who has died, who has a tantalizingly dramatic illness, who was robbed or nearly robbed or saw a strange person on their street, who has gotten fat.”
That sounds difficult even without the additional complications. I wonder if that’s part of the problem. That generation sees that kind of thing as an obligation, without really having a reason, and our generation tends to reject acting a certain way just because it’s what is expected. Certainly the language of the parents is full of the concept of obligation.
And maybe you could have had a wonderful relationship with your great-grandmother without the script. And those topics of conversation — Ugh.
Amazing how much can fit under the rug of “because I expressed concern”… And in one statement it minimizes the complaint, shames the objecting party for objecting, and (context-dependent) sometimes makes a positive commitment to continuing if not intensifying the objectionable behavior. Relationship napalm.
Nice dissection of the statement. Remarkable how many messages can fit into one short phrase. Estranged parents complain that we pick their words to death, but it’s not for lack of meat on the carcass’s bones.
There’s a nuance that doesn’t come through because Sandy didn’t want it to come through. She and her granddaughter fought because she “expressed concern” to her granddaughter about how the stepfather made her granddaughter walk her little brother home from school. Yep, she took up her beef with the stepfather with her granddaughter. It’s possible that she was just kvetching and her granddaughter felt she had to defend her stepfather, but look at how in her letter, Sandy flips back and forth between recognizing that her granddaughter has limited power, and telling her granddaughter that it’s her job to fix the problem. Did Sandy put it on her granddaughter’s shoulders to fix the problem Sandy had with the stepfather? We can’t say for sure, but the evidence doesn’t point to “absolutely not, are you nuts?”
All that from Sandy’s failing to say who she “expressed concern” to. You can figure it out from context, but that weakens the message, and there’s already little enough strength in that carefully watered-down phrase.
That in itself, too, strikes me as such a small thing to pursue to any degree. Why is it even worth “expressing concern” as to who deals with a petty logistical issue like this in someone else’s household, and on what basis would there be a particular objection to the granddaughter doing this?
… is the brother a half-sibling?
Come to think, there’s a common element too on the college end, because the stated objection there is around the question of how particularly the granddaughter would commute to the school, and that she might have to get a license and car to do so. Which strikes me as often being an unremarkable thing for an undergraduate student — though I admit that perhaps I’m out of touch regarding expectations here, as I was rather car-centric at that age and I gather that’s less the case now. Again, why is the grandmother involving herself in this and raising it as a thing that demands justification? Or — to call a spade a spade — what worn-out dispute is it a proxy for?
It’s somewhat more of an intuitive leap, but I think the granddaughter’s response that Sandy reports in the quote you give below implies an established pattern somewhere in the domain of intruding into decisions — the immediate “I’ve made my choice and that is it” doesn’t seem like the sort of thing one would say on the very first time ever encountering pushback, but rather more like the sort of thing that is said after prior preparation to a person who has previously used up all their credit.
“the stated objection there is around the question of how particularly the granddaughter would commute to the school, and that she might have to get a license and car to do so. Which strikes me as often being an unremarkable thing for an undergraduate student”
I was an undergraduate student around the time this was posted, and it wasn’t unusual for students to have cars.
In fact, as I’m going through and reading old comment threads, I realize another reason it’s weird for Sandy to object to her granddaughter going to any school she’d have to drive to: most people would say the grandfather’s transportation is between her and her parents/stepparents.
Maybe they’re helping her buy a car, or the mom and stepdad agreed to carpool to work on the days when she has class, or her dad is giving her his old car when he upgrades next year, or she’s going to get a bus pass. Whatever the transportation situation in the house is, the people who would actually be affected by it seem okay with letting the girl drive to school. Sandy’s just looking for ways to be intrusive.
The grandDAUGHTER’s transportation is between her and her parents/stepparents, not the grandfather’s. Typo.
The thing I notice about the dispute here is that, at least from the summary, Sandy’s complaint wasn’t (or was very little) about the granddaughter’s academic performance or about her behavior while visiting and yet the solution she decided on was to ramp up control in these areas. From a logical perspective, the chain of “I’m upset because you don’t want to spend time with me” -> “I don’t spend time with you because you act unduly parental toward me when I visit” -> “Next time you visit (assumption that this is even going to happen?) I’m breaking out ALLLLLL THE RULES.” It’s “I’ll show you” rather than a response to the thing she said she was actually concerned about.
The college fund, particularly, seems like cloaked retaliation — it’s presumably Sandy’s money and she can do what she likes with it, and it’s very popular nowadays to talk tough about the academic choices of young people. But offering money and then after the fact applying and escalating conditions is a power play — it seems like more of a way of asserting control and deniably shaming the granddaughter. “I can’t make you like me, but I can use what power I have to control what you study and treat you as if you are irresponsible and dishonest.”
This plays right into broader cultural memes about parenting, students, and young adults — the potential objections of the granddaughter to this treatment play right into the “spoiled snake person going to major in basket weaving and spend all her money on beer” thing, and the grandmother gets an additional reward on top of the joy of retaliation for being in the culturally-approved role of the harsh taskmaster keeping the irresponsible youth in line — despite there being no evidence presented to indicate that this particular youth is notably irresponsible. I think particularly for the more subtle forms of abuse, a lot of those aforementioned broader cultural memes serve an enabling role.
It’s nothing but control, and who wants to deal with that? Why can’t she simply have a relationship with her granddaughter, based on love and respect for who she is? It’s an awful undermining way to treat a young person and it’s no wonder that granddaughter has no interest in it.
Sandy had no concerns about her granddaughter’s grades–at all, period, whatsoever. She never went into detail about her objections apart from the initial argument, and all she said was–well, this:
Comments were calm and nuanced, of course. Only one commenter called the granddaughter a pissant.
No one asked a single question about why the college was unacceptable–or if they did and I missed it, Sandy never replied. It wasn’t important, anyway. From the beginning Sandy demanded that her granddaughter “prove she was worthy” of the money, and not only did the girl refuse, she informed her grandmother that her word was final and her grandmother had no say. And that, my friends, is a crime on par with shanking a nun.
It’s 100% about control.
Now that you point it out, you’re right about the cultural themes. The other members used them to fill out their picture of the situation when Sandy didn’t provide details. You see it in responses to Aubrey Ireland, too. She was the college student who got a restraining order on her parents after they stalked her, made trouble at her theatrical performances to the point that the school hired a guard to keep them away, and subtly threatened her department head when s/he protected Aubrey. The entire thing was proven hands down in court, but a significant number of commenters to news articles fell into the “irresponsible student is ungrateful to her doting parents” trap, with a side order of “and probably sleeping around and doing drugs, too.”
(Ohgoodlawd help me. Sigh.) If I may add at this late date to this discussion:
“Respect” is a recurrent issue with HCPs-High Conflict People or Parents-a term I’m using here for simplicity’s sake. When someone has been “fighting with (their parent) since they were 16” and are now an adult with kids of their own, IMO this qualifies as a “High Conflict Person”/Grandmother/parent.
The incessant demands for “Respect” by HCPs while concurrently transparently leveraging their belief in their One Up position vis a vie their Adult offspring (and teen grandchild) is not only manipulative, it is a re-framing of the conflict as a Diversion and Distraction tactic. This is analogous to the, “I know I’m not perfect” Straw Man response to requests for even the most modest behavioral modifications.
“Do it MY WAY or there’s the highway.” The last few sentences underscore the grandmother channeling her implacable comic book character Pop-Eye: “I yam who I yam, so there” while chastising the mother for her alleged parenting deficit.
It is simply impossible to negotiate an acceptable outcome to all parties when one individual demonstrates this HCP characteristic. Note the reference to her age (60) and perceived status (“nana”) within the typical fixed hierarchical Tyrant/Dictatorship of the HCP Family System: Obviously age does not necessarily confer wisdom nor does grandmother’s relationship trump the parent’s right and responsibility or even consideration of the Individuating grandchild to set Boundaries, make astute observations or decisions. Buzz words-actually bastardized antonyms-such as these permeate the HCP’s conception of themselves and their relationships within the family. They appear to be clueless or arrested emotionally/psychologically at about a 6 yr. old level in that “respect:”
-Rendered as a result of a threat or fear of retribution is not respect but self-preservation
-Rendered as a result of Guilt is not respect but emotional extortion
-Rendered on demand is not respect but an inculcated knee-jerk reflex to a Tyrant/Dictator
-Rendered as a result of Obligation is not respect but a quid pro quo “bid’ness” (business) transaction
(Heavily paraphrased from Anna Valerious, “Narcissists Suck” site.) None of these involve genuine love, positive regard, a desire for dialoge etc. and sure as hell are not “respect.” I’m well over 60-and to me or my friends/colleagues this grandmother/mother’s conception has jack to do with “respect.”
Bottom Line: Respect is EARNED. If you truly want to be respected, live your life consistently in such a way that clearly demonstrates respect for yourself AND others. Again, no DNA qualifiers or exemptions. “Authoritarian?!” Control?! OH YEAH. And dripping with scorn for the daughter, the cherry on top of the HCP melt down.
They consistently “get it” ass-backwards: When you’re a child you’re treated as an adult (frequent EP references to the offspring previous to LC/NC as “my BFF,”/age inappropriate “discussions”/demands etc.) and when you’re an adult you’re treated as a child.
Welcome to the only cohort group that apparently “grows down” instead of up.
“how estranged parents react to their children’s reasons for estrangement…”
Not just accusations of lying, but false memories and false memory syndrome. On a forum (not just EPs), an estranged mother comes to the conclusion that the reason for her son not being in contact is false memories, either placed there by a therapist or another family member. One memory related to something that happened between the son and his father (father insults son), but the mother wasn’t present. The mother still decides that the incident could never have happened and the memory must be false. Another member questions this, but her comment is met with anger and she’s accused of always siding with estranged adult children against their parents (she doesn’t. The member seems to be balanced in her views).
After doing a Google search, the belief that false memories/false memory syndrome (FMS) is a common cause for estrangement, isn’t unusual on EP forums. It’s reminiscent of the ‘cult of no-contact’ theory found on these same forums, where EPs decide that most estranged AC have been brainwashed by support groups (‘cults’) and given a script (step-by-step guide on how to cut-off contact). Does anyone know of any studies/articles looking at how the idea of false memories/FMS has been used against estranged AC or victims of child abuse?
Don’t know I have more than bits and pieces, but in case it’s any help…
I found several books on the ‘memory wars’ when looking into the background of Jennifer Freyd, whose estranged parents started the leading FMS myth perpetuating org. (It really didn’t help the situation that there were, separately, high profile forensic interviewing failures causing demonstrably false accusations in the same era. Satanic panic etc.)
There may be some coverage also as an offshoot of traumatology? Jennifer Freyd’s studies on betrayal trauma, for instance?
Muriel Salmona’s work maybe, too, but I don’t know how much has been translated into English.
Thanks a lot, Zyva. I’m a bit fascinated by the level of denial that some EPs exhibit – including my own. When you look on their forums, there’s often some new theory as to why their AC must be the problem.
No worries, Glitterbug.
I alternate between fascinated and drained. It’s frightening how much representations that lend themselves to EPs’ ducking and weaving get into the zeitgeist.
For instance, it’s been stereotyping galore towards every less fortunate cohort and only lately are there are glimmerings that people might finally draw the nuanced inference from Twenge (not so much Campbell) re supposed ‘societal narcissism’. At long last they’re talking about rising levels of loneliness. Recognizing that people are operating under constraints that make it hard to connect; it’s not that many of us would prefer to gloss over everything important and get nothing but kudos for a shiny illusive surface persona – more a technique in EPs’ repertoire, that one.