Not Every Uncomfortable Family Relationship is Estrangement — Here's the Difference
Malia Reynolds, LMFT #163164 | Somatic Therapist | Specializing in Family Estrangement and Athletes
There's a version of "family estrangement" that circulates a lot in pop psychology: someone cuts off a relative over a holiday blowup, or because they've grown too far apart in their worldviews. That happens. But it's not the whole picture, and it's not usually what walks into my therapy room.
Friction in families is inevitable; it’s structurally built into the family system. Think about where you sit in your family lineage. Oldest, middle, youngest, only child. No two kids get parented the exact same way, even in the same household. And even if you're an only child, you still change, and so does your relationship to the people around you. How you understood your mother at twenty-two is not how you understand her at thirty-four. There's more life in you now, and more context. You can find a family member genuinely maddening, disagree on values, on choices, on how to live, and still find a way to be in a room together. I call that friction.
Family estrangement, as I understand it clinically and as I hold it with my clients, lives somewhere else entirely.
When I'm sitting with someone who is navigating estrangement, one of the first things I want to understand is your family lineage — the stories that existed before you were born and the ones that formed around you from day one. What were the generations before you like? What got handed down — coping strategies, addictions, mental health patterns, divorces, losses, the way love was expressed or withheld or weaponized?
So much of who you are didn't start with you. A lot of it arrived before you had any say in the matter.
That matters enormously, and it's not a place to stay. Understanding your family system, your cultural background, your socioeconomic reality, what your gender meant in your particular family and in the broader world around you — all of that gives us something to work with. It gives us your how and your why. It gives us compassion. But compassion isn't the same as stasis. As an adult, you still have a responsibility to yourself. Part of what I do with clients is help you get very honest and clear about what's actually yours to work with, what is genuinely within your control.
The estrangement that comes into my office most often isn't just about a cutting remark at Thanksgiving. It's about something older and heavier than that. It's about: What is the actual history of respect in your relationship with this person? What is the history of emotional safety? Has there been room for growth on both sides? Has there been physical or emotional abuse? Has a limit been crossed so many times it's stopped feeling like a limit? Is someone in your family genuinely struggling — with addiction, with mental illness — in ways that have made them unsafe to be close to?
That's a different conversation, and a different category of pain.
I'm someone who believes deeply in the gray areas of life. So much of what we see on social media, on television, in the cultural conversation around estrangement gets compressed into a binary: good guy, bad guy. In or out. Victim or villain. But in the therapy room, in the actual, slow, complicated work of sitting with your story, it almost never looks like that. There's questioning, there's curiosity, there's the willingness to hold more than one true thing at a time.
Gray areas don't mean you can't have boundaries. They mean your story is more complex than a headline.
And there are also moments — and I want to say this clearly — where more black-and-white is not only appropriate, it's necessary. When a limit has been violated over and over. When you have been made to feel less than human. When the harm is real and documented in your body. Holding complexity doesn't mean minimizing what actually happened to you. There's space for that kind of clarity too.
If any of this is landing, if you're somewhere in the middle of a family story you can't quite name yet, this is the work I love. I ask a lot of questions. I'm direct. I hold the therapeutic relationship with real care and real boundaries. And I do my best work when I stay as curious as possible with what shows up in the room.
→ Thank you for stopping by. Feel free to reach out to schedule a consultation at maliareynoldstherapy@gmail.com
