Why do some adult children shut out their parents?

I have a cousin and she’s fond of saying; “There’s nowt as queer as folk.” And she is spot on. People can be strange and the behaviour of some can be difficult to understand even by members of the same family.

I was talking recently to a friend of mine and she told me a story about how she had lost contact with her brother many years previously. I was curious and thought that maybe he had travelled to some far flung country and had simply disappeared. But the truth of it is that not only is he living in the same country but he is in the same county. He chose not to have any contact. He has made it clear that he doesn’t want to keep in touch with family members and he has no explanation to offer for his decision.

Apparently he got married some thirty odd years earlier and from the day of the wedding he began to lose contact with his family. As time wore on, the contact became less and less until one day it ceased completely. This struck a chord with me because I had heard a similar story about another guy who had acted in exactly the same way.

This character is a younger man who was part of a loving family. He had behaved normally for most of his adult life and he had a good job and everything seemed to be going in his favour. Then one day he got married and went to live not too far away from his family. But the day he got married was the day he seemingly decided that he was going to have no more to do with them.

The family members have no idea what brought about this change and they are unlikely to be any wiser until such time as he decides to tell them. The way he is currently behaving gives no indication that this is likely to be any time soon. By the time he does decide to enlighten them it may be too late, because while initially they had a certain amount of sympathy for him, this has now turned to anger. The longer it goes on, the angrier they get.

Then one morning I was listening to the radio and the presenter read out an email from somebody with a similar story. As the show went on he started to get more calls, texts and emails from other people who had experienced the same thing. So much so he decided that he would dedicate an entire programme to this specific topic at some future date.

It turns out that something I had thought of as being an unusual event is actually a huge issue for a lot of people. It would seem that there are plenty of children who reject their parents into adulthood. The other surprising thing about these situations is that in most cases, the parents have no explanation or reason for why this has happened. Those involved in these situations refer to themselves as being estranged from their adult children.

Anyone looking for more information about this just needs to Google ‘Estranged adult children’.

From my little experience of this phenomenon I can say that there is a lot of pain and suffering caused to the family members that have been cut off. I’m sure there must also be a certain amount of embarrassment at constantly trying to explain the absence of a family member and having to come up with excuses as to why that person is never around. It must also be frustrating trying to figure out how that situation developed and what it was that caused that person to cut the ties in the first place.

There is one possible explanation. It could be that the adult child is in a relationship in which he or she is being manipulated by the partner and could be a victim of the Stockholm syndrome.

According to Christine Louis de Canonville, Psychotherapist, Stockholm syndrome is a psychological term used to describe the relationship that sometimes develops between a captor and a hostage. In such a relationship the hostage expresses empathy and positive feelings towards their abusive captor and often they will display a desire to defend them.

The psychological term, Stockholm syndrome came about after a bank robbery in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1973, in which four employees were held hostage by two captors for six days. During this relatively short time it was noted that the hostages had managed to develop a strong emotional attachment to their captors.

It would seem that the hostage’s empathetic feelings toward their captors were due to acts of kindness they had been shown during their ordeal. Unbelievably, these small acts of kindness seemed to negate the fact that their lives had been threatened, and even several months after being released, some of the hostages still wanted to defend their captors.

The Stockholm episode sparked off great interest and research into the phenomenon of emotional bonding between captors and captives, (abusers and victims). Studies have revealed that this behaviour in the captives does indeed occur in many situations, for example, narcissistic abuse, battering (men and women), abused children, incest victims, rape victims, cult members, prison camps, pimp-procured prostitutes, prisoners of war, etc.

If this is the case then I might have to rethink my solution for getting the misguided son back home. Before looking into this I had thought that giving him a swift kick up the backside and telling him to go home and see his mother would have been the answer. Now though, I think that this is unlikely to work and something a little more scientific might be required.