Do You Really Not Know Why?

My son has not spoken to me in two years, and I have no idea why. I gave him good schools. I paid for his MBA. I never once raised a hand to him.

He did send a long email at the time. Four pages, full of exaggerations, things from twenty years ago that he has twisted. I did not reply because there was nothing in it to reply to. I would apologise tomorrow if only someone would tell me what I did.

Alok, I think someone did tell you. It was four pages long.

Not knowing, as a form of protection

The sociologist Karl Pillemer noticed a pattern in his interviews with people who had been cut off. They would begin by saying they had no idea why it happened. Then, over the next hour, they would supply the reasons themselves. There were years of conflict. There were particular fights. Very often there was a letter from the relative setting it all out, which they had dismissed as mad or untrue.

He calls this defensive ignorance. One of the sons he interviewed said he would almost guarantee that an estranged parent has such a letter in a drawer somewhere, pages long and unanswered.

I do not think this is lying. Pillemer does not think so either. We need to see ourselves as decent people, and being cut off by your own child is an attack on that. The mind defends itself by discounting the information. He cites the psychologists David Nussbaum and Carol Dweck on the cost. Defensiveness repairs our self-esteem, and it does so by ignoring whatever prompted the criticism. We feel better and learn nothing.

It runs in both directions. Pillemer met grown children who placed every bit of the blame on a parent’s character, and parents who blamed a whole generation. His own conclusion is that estrangement is rarely one person’s doing. It is built from hundreds of small exchanges in which both people made choices.

Understanding is not confessing

Here Pillemer is careful, and it matters. Looking for your part is not the same as accepting all the blame. You may look hard and decide you did little wrong. One man in the book learnt from an uncle that his parents had always favoured his brother and blamed him. He turned out to be less at fault than he had feared, and that helped him too.

What is asked of you is narrower. Psychologists call it perspective-taking. It means working out how the situation looks from where the other person stands. You are not required to feel sorry for him or to agree. Pillemer cites research showing that this takes deliberate effort. Our own view arrives without effort. Someone else’s has to be reasoned out.

Three ways to do it

The first is a question Pillemer put to his interviewees. Picture your relative at lunch with a friend. The friend wants to know what happened between the two of you. What does your relative say?

The second is to write that answer down. This is not a list of your grievances. It is his account, in his voice. If that is too hard, Pillemer suggests an exercise from a study of married couples by the psychologist Eli Finkel and his colleagues. You describe the conflict as a neutral outsider who wishes both of you well. He notes that it has not been tested on estranged relatives. For the couples, it helped.

The third is to widen the circle of people you consult. After a rift we collect listeners who agree with us. Pillemer points out that online there are forums for estranged parents and forums for estranged children, and almost nowhere that the two meet. Each group confirms its own members. He advises finding someone who cares about you and is not already on your side. A support group, or a relative at some distance from the quarrel.

“Sorry for whatever I did”

You say you would apologise if someone told you what for. Pillemer has a hard word about that offer. An apology for anything at all implies that there is nothing in particular to be sorry for. It is among the least persuasive things a person can say to a relative who has left.

What persuades is a specific sentence. “I criticised your wife in front of you, and I should not have.”

So read the four pages again. You do not have to agree with them. Look for the two or three lines that are true.