You grieve the family you wished theycould be
Meet the growing number of people quietly cutting ties with their own families — and the experts who say sometimes it’s the only option
LISA was not yet two years old, her brother four, when her mother settled her into her pram, told the next-door neighbours she was popping to the shops, walked to the ferry terminal, sailed to England and didn’t come back.
She went on to have three more children in England – children she would eventually leave behind as well.
Lisa, from Roscommon, is 46 now. She has met her mother three times in the years since, the first when she was 17. Over those brief, stilted encounters, her mother refused to revisit the past.
‘It was such a disappointment,’ Lisa says simply. ‘I’m her only daughter out of five children. I told her that if we couldn’t have a
‘People do not recognise it as abuse until adulthood’
relationship built on truth and honesty, there was no point.’ They have not spoken since. Raised in her mother’s absence by an alcoholic father she describes as a textbook narcissist, Lisa sometimes catches sight of mothers and daughters together in shops or cafés – moving easily in each other’s company – and feels something tighten in her chest. ‘I get a twinge of sadness or jealousy, I suppose,’ she says. ‘But you can’t miss what you never had.’
Family estrangement – the quiet, permanent severing of ties with the people you were born to – is happening in ordinary Irish families in every county, at every income level, across every generation. A door closed, a number blocked, a chair left empty at Christmas, year after year, while nobody quite knows what to say about it.
The public roll call includes many celebrities: the Beckhams, Meghan and Harry, and the late Sinéad O’Connor made her estrangement from her mother one of the rawest threads of her public life.
But for every high-profile case, there are thousands of ordinary Irish people navigating the same loss in private. Research suggests it is far more common than Irish public discourse acknowledges.
Studies from Britain – where the most extensive work has been done – indicate that one in five families is affected at any given time.
A major University of Cambridge study found that mothers are estranged from one in ten of their adult children. The most commonly cited causes include emotional abuse, differing values, divorce fallout, and the kind of slow-burning dysfunction that has no single name and no single incident at its centre.
Nobody wins in a family estrangement, some people simply decide they can no longer survive the alternative.
One pattern recurs with striking consistency – the family scapegoat. Rebecca C Mandeville is an American psychotherapist and the author of Rejected, Shamed And Blamed, the book that introduced the concept of family scapegoating abuse. Speaking to the Irish Daily Mail, she describes a dynamic in which one child is cast, often over many years, as the container for a family’s unresolved conflict, blamed for a dysfunction they did not cause and cannot fix.
‘The scapegoated child becomes the container for everything the family cannot tolerate in itself,’ Mandeville explains.
What makes the pattern so difficult to recognise, she argues, is that it is usually invisible from the outside. In her research, more than half of respondents reported being labelled mentally ill, unstable or dishonest by a parent or relative, often without clear basis.
‘Because it is gradual and relational, many people do not recognise it as abuse until adulthood, if at all,’ she says. Her book has sold more than 32,000 copies without corporate backing.
‘That,’ she says, ‘suggests how widespread this experience is.’
Mary Toolan, 51, knows this particular wound with an intimacy no clinical training could replicate. Dublin-born, living in England for 19 years, she now works as a coach and educator supporting
‘Her father bullied and ridiculed her constantly’
adults recovering from family scapegoating.
During her own childhood, her father bullied and ridiculed her constantly, drawing other family members in to join him. When she cried, she was told she was too sensitive.
When she was around 12 and finally found the courage to ask him to stop, his response was to mimic her words back at her, cackling, pulling the others in.
‘That would be family mobbing,’ she says. ‘Targeted abuse. And when you try to help yourself, it gets worse.’
What followed was a systematic dismantling of her sense of self. Smear campaigns, Mandeville explains, are a hallmark of scapegoating – the persistent devaluation that keeps one family member cast as the problem, while the system moves swiftly to destroy their credibility if they dare speak the truth.
‘The family positions itself as the victim – and that supposed victimhood is used to turn extended family and the wider community against the target,’ she says.
For Mary, the damage expressed itself in ways that took years to understand.
‘Constant verbal diminishment, the undermining of any attempt at self-assertion,’ she recalls.
By the time she reached young adulthood, her confidence was gone.
‘I’m a bad person, there’s something wrong with me, why can’t I solve this problem? That was a predominant thought every day,’ she says. ‘You become a completely different person because you have to adapt to the role they have prescribed for you. Your voice, your power, your gifts and talents – you hide all of those away.’
She calls it identity colonisation. All the while, the family presents normally to the world.
‘Behind closed doors, it’s a very different story,’ she says. ‘It’s deeply damaging.’
She went no-contact nine years ago, after a visit to Dublin left her physically ill for three weeks. She sent a text saying she needed some time out. What followed was not a family asking itself hard questions.
‘Not once did anyone ask, “Why does Mary need to take distance from us?” Not a single question,’ she says.
From a clinical perspective, Mandeville says that silence is telling. Going no-contact in cases of severe family scapegoating is rarely an act of avoidance.
‘When a family system relies on your destruction to maintain its stability – whether consciously or unconsciously – distancing from that system is a requirement for survival,’ she says.
Reconciliation without genuine change, she adds, is not healing. A corrupted system will not fix itself if it cannot acknowledge that anything is broken.
Karl Melvin is a Dublin-born psychotherapist based in London and the author of Navigating Family Estrangement. He too has been estranged from certain family members since around 2007. In his own family, he was the peacekeeper – the one absorbing tension, holding things together long after it was doing him any good.
‘There’s only so much you can do when there’s no healthy discourse about how it’s affecting people,’ he admits. ‘You’re just expected to fulfil the role.’
These roles – the scapegoat, the peacekeeper, the golden child – calcify over years until the family cannot update their picture of who you are, he says.
‘You could be the most accomplished human being on earth and it won’t change how they view you because that would require them to look inwards at their own projections and inadequacies. It’s incredibly dehumanising.’
What Melvin observes most consistently is the self-abandonment that precedes the break. One client redesigned her entire home to her mother’s taste. After the estrangement she stripped it all back, repainted every room, made every choice herself for the first time. It sounds, in the telling, like something small. It was not small at all.
Kate from Wicklow broke all contact with her father 11 years ago – a decision her two siblings have not made, and one that has been wielded against her ever since.
‘It’s been said that it can’t be that bad if your siblings stay in touch,’ she says.
Her parents divorced when she was 11. What followed was a father so consumed by the pain of the marriage breakdown that there was no room left for anyone else’s.
‘We were used as pawns to hurt my mother,’ she recalls. ‘My father used his own pain from the divorce to completely overshadow any healthy relationship with his children.’
There was no single incident. It built slowly, until it was untenable.
‘These issues existed long before social media’
‘I grieve the relationship that should have been there,’ she says. ‘But I do not miss the person that my father is.’
Going no-contact cost her his entire extended family – people who, she says, would rather she had kept her head down and tolerated it. ‘Especially since having my own child, I struggled to understand how anybody could treat their children this way,’ she says.
Ireland has a particular relationship with family mythology. The warm house, the open door, the generational closeness – these are not just cultural tropes but deeply-held articles of identity. Which is precisely why what happens behind some of those closed doors has always been so difficult to discuss. Mary Toolan names it plainly. ‘Ireland is such a small country, three degrees of separation, not six,’ she says. ‘We pride ourselves on being great craic, on having the gift of the gab. So the idea – and the truth – that one child can be systematically targeted within a family is far too confronting for public discourse. It goes against our identity as a nation of warm, hospitable people.’
Then, she adds more quietly: ‘The phrase honour thy father and mother. People don’t want to look at the skeletons in the closet.’ Melvin pushes back against the idea that estrangement is a modern invention. ‘These issues existed long before social media or therapy,’ he says. ‘We have generations of problems like alcohol abuse in this country. It’s too reductionist to blame those things.’ In families shaped by cycles of unprocessed trauma – addiction, institutional damage, the long silences of emigration – dysfunction passes down not as a choice but as a habit of being. The scapegoat is often the one who finally refuses to carry it.
What has changed is not the problem but the willingness to name it.
‘Over the last few years it’s become less embarrassing to talk about mental health,’ Toolan says. ‘The conversation is happening. The Irish psyche just hasn’t been ready for this one yet. But I think it’s nearly time.’
Melvin is also clear-eyed about those on the other side of the door. There are parents in Ireland right now who have not heard their child’s voice in years, who sent letters that went unanswered, who have never held their grandchildren.
‘Those who are involuntarily estranged often feel devastated, like the relationship was devalued overnight despite years of investment,’ she says. ‘That pain is real and it deserves to be acknowledged.’
In many estrangements there is no agreed version of events. One person’s boundary is another’s rejection, one person’s survival is another’s abandonment.
Not every story ends in reconciliation. Many end in silence that simply becomes normal. What helps, Melvin says, is not resolution but construction – building a life and relationships that are not contingent on the original wound being repaired.
Kate’s partner’s family have become the grandparents her children will grow up knowing.
‘I don’t think family is blood,’ she says. ‘I think family are the people who show up for you and make the effort to be in your life.’
Toolan’s grief did not disappear. It had no ritual, no language that Irish culture had ever offered her for it.
‘You’re grieving people who are still alive,’ she says. ‘You have to grieve the family you wished they could be – the one they were never able to become. When that realisation comes, it is devastating.’
But she came through it. The work she now does – helping others name what was done to them and find their way out from under it – is, she says, the place where her own story finally makes sense.
Somewhere in Ireland, a family sits down to dinner with an empty chair that no one names any more. Elsewhere, someone who once sat in that chair is building a different life – carefully, on their own terms, from whatever they were able to bring out with them.