Search "toxic parents", and you'll find more than 38, 000 posts, largely urging young adults to cut ties with their families. The idea is to safeguard one's mental health from abusive parents. However, as a psychoanalyst (精神分析学家), I've seen that trend in recent years becomes a way to manage conflicts in the family, and I have seen the severe impacts estrangement (疏远) has on both sides of the divide. This is a self-help trend that creates much harm.
"Canceling" your parent can be seen as an extension of a cultural trend aimed at correcting imbalances in power and systemic inequality. Today's social justice values respond to this reality, calling on us to criticize oppressive and harmful figures and to gain power for those who have been powerless. But when adult children use the most effective tool they have — themselves — to gain a sense of security and ban their parents from their lives, the roles are simply switched, and the pain only deepens.
Often, what I see in my practice are cases of family conflict mismanaged, power dynamics turned upside down rather than negotiated. I see the terrible effect of that trend: situations with no winners, only isolated humans who long to be known and feel safe in the presence of the other.
The catch is that after estrangement, adult children are not suddenly less dependent. In fact, they feel abandoned and betrayed, because in the unconscious, it doesn't matter who is doing the leaving; the feeling that remains is "being left". They carry the ghosts of their childhood, tackling the emotional reality that those who raised us can never truly be left behind, no matter how hard we try.
What I have found is that most of these families need repair, not permanent break-up. How can one learn how to negotiate needs, to create boundaries and to trust? How can we love others, and ourselves, if not through accepting the limitations that come with being human? Good relationships are the result not of a perfect level of harmony but rather of successful adjustments.
To pursue dialogue instead of estrangement will be hard and painful work. It can't be a single project of "self-help", because at the end of the day, real intimacy (亲密关系) is achieved by working through the injuries of the past together. In most cases of family conflict, repair is possible and preferable to estrangement — and it's worth the work.
