Family estrangement often raises one difficult question: Whose fault is it? Parents may replay years of memories searching for mistakes, while adult children seek validation that their experiences and emotions were real. Public conversations frequently encourage people to identify who was right and who was wrong, reinforcing the idea that every estrangement has a clear culprit.
According to Tania Khazaal, Founder of The Renewal Collective, that question may actually prevent families from understanding what happened. In her work with parents and adult children, she has found that estrangement is rarely the result of one person being entirely responsible. More often, it develops through years of misunderstood experiences, different perceptions, and emotional wounds that exist on both sides of the relationship.
Moving Beyond the Blame Game
When discussing family estrangement, two common narratives tend to emerge. Some parents accept complete responsibility, believing they failed their children and viewing the estrangement as proof of irreversible mistakes. Others reject any responsibility, believing their child has become influenced by others or has failed to appreciate the sacrifices made throughout childhood.
Both viewpoints provide certainty, but family relationships are rarely that simple. Most conflicts develop over time through a combination of communication patterns, emotional experiences, personality differences, cultural expectations, and life circumstances that shape how each person interprets the relationship.
Why Both Sides Often Feel Hurt
One aspect of estrangement that is often overlooked is that both parents and adult children are frequently responding to emotional pain rather than trying to hurt one another.
Parents often experience profound grief after losing contact with their children. Many genuinely believe they did everything they knew how to do, yet still struggle to understand why the relationship broke down. Beneath feelings of frustration may lie guilt, sadness, confusion, and shame, the painful belief that they failed in one of life’s most important roles.
Adult children, meanwhile, may carry years of feeling emotionally unheard, misunderstood, or dismissed. For some, creating distance becomes a way of protecting themselves from experiencing further emotional pain.
The difficulty is that each person’s attempt to protect themselves often intensifies the other’s deepest wound. When parents explain or defend their intentions, children may hear excuses or invalidation. When adult children withdraw, parents often experience the silence as rejection rather than self-protection. Without recognising these different perspectives, both sides can become trapped in a cycle where each person’s defence reinforces the other’s pain.
Looking at Parents Through a Different Lens
One of the most significant shifts that can occur during reconciliation is moving from judgment toward curiosity. Instead of asking only what parents did wrong, it can also be helpful to consider the experiences that shaped them.
This does not mean minimising emotional pain or excusing harmful behaviour. Rather, it acknowledges that parents, like everyone else, were influenced by their own upbringing, relationships, cultural expectations, and emotional resources. The way they communicated, expressed affection, or handled conflict was often shaped long before they became parents themselves.
Many people later recognise that some of the qualities they value in themselves today were developed through difficult experiences. Independence, resilience, empathy, and emotional awareness sometimes emerge from challenging family dynamics rather than ideal circumstances. Recognising this does not celebrate painful experiences, but it can create space for a more balanced understanding of the relationship.
When Reconciliation Happens After Deep Hurt
For Khazaal, the belief that reconciliation is possible is rooted not only in her professional work but also in her personal life. Her husband, Ramie Haidar, experienced what many would consider one of the most painful forms of family estrangement. When he was 14 years old, his mother left the country following her separation from his father, leaving him feeling abandoned. Within months, his father remarried, and Haidar largely had to fend for himself. Neighbours often stepped in to provide meals and support while he navigated adolescence largely on his own.
The experience left him carrying years of anger, resentment, and unresolved grief toward both parents. Although those feelings were understandable, Khazaal encouraged him to consider another perspective. Rather than asking whether his mother’s decision was justified, she encouraged him to ask whether he would be at peace if he never spoke to her again.
Those conversations eventually led him to reconnect with his mother. Their first meeting lasted several hours, with both sharing emotions and conversations they had never previously expressed. It became the beginning of rebuilding a relationship that neither believed was possible years earlier.
Today, his mother lives with the family and has become an active grandmother to their children. While the past cannot be undone, the relationship they have today reflects an important truth about estrangement: understanding another person’s story does not erase the pain of what happened, but it can create space for healing when both people are willing to engage with honesty, accountability, and compassion.
The Questions We Often Forget to Ask
Modern discussions about emotional wellbeing often focus on how childhood experiences shape adult life. Questions about unmet emotional needs, attachment, and family dynamics have helped many people better understand themselves.
Less frequently discussed, however, are the experiences that shaped parents. How were they raised? What examples of healthy communication did they witness? What cultural expectations influenced the way they expressed love, discipline, or affection?
These questions do not remove accountability, but they do provide context. Family relationships develop within broader social and personal circumstances, and those influences often extend beyond the parent-child relationship itself.
Research illustrates this complexity. Studies have found that approximately 70% of estranged parents became estranged from an adult child following a divorce from the child’s other biological parent. Divorce can reshape family loyalties, identities, and emotional dynamics in ways that continue long after the separation itself. Researchers have also identified remarriage as another factor that may contribute to estrangement, as changes in family structure can create new tensions, shifting roles, and feelings of displacement.
These circumstances do not excuse harmful behaviour when it occurs. They do, however, reinforce an important reality: estrangement often develops through a combination of experiences rather than a single person’s actions.
Understanding Without Excusing
A distinction that is often overlooked is the difference between understanding someone’s behaviour and excusing it. Understanding seeks to explain why something happened, while excusing suggests that the behaviour no longer matters. The two are not the same.
Parents can acknowledge that their child’s emotional pain is genuine, even if causing that pain was never their intention. Likewise, adult children can recognise that their parents were shaped by their own histories, limitations, and emotional struggles without dismissing the impact those experiences had on them.
As Khazaal explains, understanding another person’s story does not require abandoning your own. Instead, it allows both perspectives to exist at the same time, creating space for empathy without ignoring accountability.
A More Helpful Question
The question of who is at fault is understandable, but it rarely creates the conditions needed for healing. A more productive question may be: What pain is each person trying to protect?
When families move beyond assigning blame and begin exploring one another’s experiences, they often discover a reality that is far more complex than they first believed. Most estrangements are not simply stories of one good person and one bad person. They are stories of two people carrying different histories, interpreting the same relationship differently, and struggling to feel understood.
While every family situation is unique, Tania Khazaal believes that recognising this complexity can open the door to more compassionate conversations. It may not erase the pain of estrangement, but it can replace certainty with understanding, and that is often where meaningful healing begins.
