Understanding Estrangement through the IPNB Lens

When I was in my mid-30s, I disconnected from my parents completely. The decision wasn’t impulsive, influenced, or something I arrived at without enormous pain. It’s one of the healthiest decisions I’ve ever made.

Mine wasn’t a story of family dysfunction or accumulated hurts that many families carry. The abuse I experienced in childhood was so severe that my mind fragmented for survival and I developed Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), something I’ve written about openly. DID isn’t something a child’s mind does in response to difficulty—it’s what a child’s mind does when there’s no way out.

After I decided to cut contact, not a single family member reached out to try to understand what was going on. There were no gestures of curiosity about my decision, just defensiveness and blame. As a daughter, mother, and family therapist, I’ve come to realize this absence—a wall of defensiveness—is an important and often misunderstood aspect of estrangement. Offering parents facing estrangement the opportunity to develop insight, compassion, and curiosity about themselves and their adult child and their history as a family can be a powerful step toward repair.

Cutting off fully isn’t the only answer. Through the lens of Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB)—not a form of therapy, but rather a perspective that informs therapy by drawing from studies on attachment, neuroscience, how memory is encoded and retrieved, and the importance of making sense of our stories—therapists can help parents see how their own history sowed the seeds of estrangement.

What therapists can offer parents isn’t confrontation, nor validation of their grief, but gentle, compassionate education about how attachment works—about what children need, the difference between a parent’s role and child’s, and how a parent’s implicit memory can shape how they raise their children. When we offer that not as blame but understanding, something often shifts. The parent who came in convinced their child was being manipulated begins to wonder, maybe for the first time, what their child might have needed that they didn’t know to give.

Implicit Memory

Several years ago, I participated in an MBSR immersion retreat being led by Jon Kabat-Zinn. One afternoon, I set out alone on a walking meditation path and lost track of time. As I made my way back to the group, I could see through the windows of the meditation hall that everyone was deep in practice. I was late.

Suddenly I had a full body awareness: Uh-Oh! I’m in trouble!

I almost laughed at myself. Jon Kabat-Zinn was not going to yell at me. There were no consequences awaiting. I was a grown woman, a therapist, and someone who’d done years of my own deep therapeutic work. And yet there it was: the fear of punishment. My childhood arriving, uninvited, to my peaceful retreat.

Then, just as quickly, something else bubbled up: an awareness that no one listens to me. Yet our retreat was in silence; nobody was listening to anyone! These thoughts had no context here. But they had a history: my history. They were implicit memories, which can arrive as body sensations, emotions, a narrative, or a mental model about what’s happening, all fully present in conscious awareness and arriving with complete conviction. The feeling, the story, and the certainty are vivid and real. What isn’t in conscious awareness is that what you’re feeling or believing is actually an echo from your past.

Luckily, I knew exactly what was happening, thanks to many years of therapy and having made sense of my childhood with my therapist, Dan Siegel. I recognized it in real time as implicit memory. The feelings were present, and I was aware. But the work doesn’t make the feelings disappear, it just gives you the ability to know what you’re feeling and where it’s coming from, to hold it with clarity and compassion while it’s happening. That’s what allowed me to almost laugh at myself.

This is how implicit memory can influence a parent’s relationship with their child. Without awareness, it shapes how they interpret their child’s behavior, their child’s pain, and their child’s needs—not from a lack of love, but from a lack of awareness that the filter is even there. For example, had I not had awareness of the implicit nature of memory, that feeling of being in trouble or not being listened to could’ve had me fleeing for safety or demanding to be heard.

Working with Parents

When parents show up in a therapist’s office because their adult child has stopped calling, coming to holidays, or responding when they reach out—which, for many parents, often feels like it happened completely out of the blue and for no clear reason—they’re in a particular kind of pain. They may feel grief, bewilderment, and a complete inability to make sense of what’s happened. They provided, they showed up, and they loved. How did it come to this?

They’re devastated, confused, and underneath it all is a burning question: Is this my fault? In my experience, they often truly don’t know. Many parents simply cannot figure out what they might have done to lose their child—even when the child has told them. The gap between what they experienced and what their child says they experienced is invisible to them, because they couldn’t see it when it was happening either.

The not-knowing is usually real. And meeting it with compassion—without losing sight of their child’s experience—is where our work begins.

IPNB tells us that the mind, brain, and relationships interact to shape human development, and it helps us understand that the relationship between parent and child reflects what the parent offered, which is shaped by their own history, unresolved wounds, and issues. From birth, children are hardwired to move toward their caregivers in search of what Dan Siegel calls the four S’s of Security: to be Seen, Soothed, Safe, and Secure. It’s always the parent’s job to understand the inner world of their child, and never the child’s job to understand the inner world of the parent. This isn’t blame. It’s the most compassionate, liberating, and hopeful thing I know, because it means the possibility for change lies with the parent.

Parents need to feel seen by their therapist before they can begin to see differently. But being seen doesn’t mean being agreed with. We can hold a parent’s pain with complete compassion while also, gently and persistently, keeping their child’s experience in the room. Not as accusation, but as information. And making it clear that this is their work to do, not their child’s. You can ask them questions like, “What do you imagine it was like for your child when that happened?” “What do you think your child needed in that moment?” or, “Is it possible your child experienced that differently than you intended it?” These questions, when asked with openness and curiosity, invite the parent into their child’s inner world—maybe for the first time.

Holding Two Truths

In my work with estranged parents, two situations come up again and again.

The first is when a parent, describing their adult child’s anger, says, “I could never have spoken to my parents like that!” It sounds like a complaint about respect, but listen to what it may actually be saying. The parent is telling you that having a voice wasn’t permitted in their own family of origin—that expressing pain or anger toward a parent simply wasn’t allowed. What their child may be doing, at great personal cost, is exactly what the parent never could: saying out loud that something hurt. That sentence, spoken without any awareness of its meaning, is implicit memory in the room.

The second is when an adult child recalls a specific incident, something they’ve been carrying, and the parent says, “That never happened!” This is often the moment a therapist begins to understand the seeds of estrangement. Not because the parent is lying, but because implicit memory of their own childhood, disguised as parental principles or prerogatives, has constructed a version of events that feels completely accurate and justified. But for the child, having their reality denied is a repetition of the original wound.

These moments ask the most of us as therapists, to hold the parent’s sincerity and the child’s pain simultaneously. To help the parent begin to consider that two people can live through the same family and come away with entirely different truths—and that their child’s truth is not an attack. It’s an experience that needed, and still needs, to be honored. And that is the work of the parents.

The Simple Art of Repair

I know this work from the inside-out, not only as a therapist and daughter, but as a mother. My own history was always present in the raising of my son Sam. These are two moments where I almost got it badly wrong, and what made the difference each time was a single shift: developing the capacity to be curious, not furious, about what Sam was experiencing. Me understanding him, not needing him to understand me.

Sam was six when he told me out of nowhere that he sometimes felt like the loneliest little boy in the world. Having no idea what to make of this, I brought it to Dr. Siegel, who suggested it might be time to show Sam the photographs of him as an infant, alone in his crib in the Romanian orphanage where he’d spent the first 16 months of his life before we adopted him. I was terrified it would be too hard for him, that it might cause real damage.

“Sally, your six-year-old son has told you he sometimes feels like the loneliest little boy in the world and he doesn’t know why,” Dr. Siegel said. “You do. Your job isn’t to protect him from the truth of his story, it’s to help him make sense of it.”

What I might so easily have done—what many loving parents do—would’ve been to reassure Sam out of his own experience. “You’re not lonely honey. Look at all the people who love you.” Fully invalidating his pain. His reality. His story. My impulse to do exactly that, my wish to make his pain go away, was fully conscious. But the work I’d done had given me the ability to recognize that impulse for what it was: my own discomfort with his pain, and my desire to make it better for him. My job was to understand his inner world, not for him to understand mine.

A child who’s gently steered away from his own inner experience learns over time that his truth may not be entirely welcome or important. That there are feelings too big or too complicated to bring to the people he needs most. I knew what it was to be that child. That knowing—hard-won, still unfolding in my therapy—was what allowed me to sit with Sam’s loneliness rather than rush to fix it away. I had the opportunity to hear my son, to let him know he had a mom who listened.

When Sam was nine, kids at school started telling him that adoption meant his dad and I weren’t his real parents. I thought I was reassuring him when I said, “Oh no, I’m your real mom. The lady in Romania was the person who gave birth to you.” But I now know that this was really my defensiveness speaking, wanting so dearly to be his only mom.

What followed were weeks of Sam acting out—taking money without asking, and a blank look on his face I didn’t understand. I knew it was trying to tell me something. It took an adoption workshop and hearing adult adoptees speak about their own childhoods to understand what Sam had been trying to say. They described how painful it was when their adoptive parents discouraged any mention of their biological mothers as “real.” How natural it was to need to know where their story began. How it was never a child’s job to protect a parent’s feelings.

I rushed home and told Sam I’d been wrong. That I was his adoptive mom. That the woman who gave birth to him in Romania was his real mom. That both things were true and both mattered. I got out his adoption file and showed him his Romanian birth certificate with his birth parents’ names and their signatures.

He cried silent tears. At dawn the next morning, he woke me up to read me the letter he’d written overnight to his birth parents. “My name is Samuel Maslansky,” it began. “You don’t know me. I’m your son.”

It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever read. The moment I stopped making Sam’s origins about my feelings—as if being his adoptive mom was some sort of offense or disrespect—he could begin to know the truth of where he came from. The stealing stopped, and the blank look disappeared.

The meaning of his story to him, not the meaning of it to me.

This is how distance often grows between parents and children. Not always as a dramatic rupture, but through the gradual accumulation of moments in which a child feels it’s safer to leave parts of their experience unspoken. As a child comes to feel responsible for understanding and even protecting their parent’s feelings.

Not every estrangement can or should be repaired. Some distance is permanent and necessary, like when it’s protective of an adult child’s wellbeing or safety. In those situations, like my own, that distance deserves to be honored, not pathologized or “resolved.”

But when repair is possible, it often begins with something simpler than most parents expect. Not the right therapeutic language or a perfect explanation, but simply the parent’s understanding and acknowledgment that there were ruptures, and the opportunity to repair them was missed. When a parent can do this—without defending or deflecting—their child can finally feel seen, sometimes for the very first time.

I often think about a moment from one of my presentations. I’d been speaking to a group about rupture and repair between parents and children. During a break, a 70-something father who’d been attending with his adult son came up to me and whispered, “I just told my son how sorry I am for all the lost repairs.”

I asked him what his son said.

“He got teary,” the father told me. “And he said, ‘Thank you, Dad. That means everything to me.” Then he began to tear up too.

Our nervous system, our heart and mind, and our relationships can stay open even after decades of hurt. Even after so much has been lost. When we finally find the words to say what someone has been waiting to hear for a long time, we repair. It’s almost never too late to do so.