Avoid the Pitfalls of Apologizing to Your Estranged Child

If you aren’t careful, you can make things worse

Photo by Anastasia Vityukova on Unsplash

Estranged parents want to repair their relationship with their child. Apologizing seems to be the logical thing to do. But how you do it can either bring you closer to healing, or push your child further away.

Many of us don’t know how to offer the kind of apology that will help our child open instead of shutting them down. We may have offered many apologies already and wonder why our child is not responding. What do they want from us? They want what we all want. A true apology.

What can get in the way of a genuine apology is our feelings about the estrangement. Our emotions can be all over the place. We may not know why our child walked away and are sincerely confused and hurt. We may be angry that they left without giving us a chance to make things right. We may think that they are overreacting and taking something we did the wrong way. We may feel that we have done nothing wrong and feel indignant that they did this to us.

All of these feelings are normal, but not always helpful. I have been estranged from my daughter going on 10 years now, and I have run the gamut of all those feelings as I have tried to find my way to some sense of equanimity. What I have learned is in order to offer a true apology, I have to drop all my feelings about how this is affecting me and focus on how it is affecting my daughter. This has been the hardest work I have ever had to do. And I have messed up more than a few times.

In order to make a true apology, we have to drop our image of ourselves as the victimized parent, and be vulnerable to seeing that we aren’t perfect. This isn’t easy. We have to get out of our own way. This is not about us. For now, we need to focus on our child, even if we think they are being unreasonable. If we can do this well, it can be healing for both of us. A true apology can signal to your child that you are ready to drop your defenses and really listen to them.

There’s A Right Way and A Wrong Way to Apologize

Here are some do’s and don’ts to follow. I have borrowed some of these from the book ‘Why Won’t You Apologize?’ by Harriet Lerner. I highly…