When Did Discomfort Become Danger?

Boundaries, Emotional Safety, and What We Lose When Family Cutoff Becomes the Answer

By Lisa Franco Alexander

There was a time when families were expected to stay together almost regardless of the cost. Sometimes, that expectation was terribly wrong. People remained in abusive homes. Children were told to forgive behavior that should never have been excused. Adults were expected to tolerate cruelty because “that's your mother,” “that's your father,” or simply “family is family.” Silence was mistaken for loyalty. Endurance was mistaken for virtue. Maintaining the family unit was sometimes valued more highly than protecting the people within it.

We needed to change that.

We needed language for abuse. We needed boundaries. We needed to understand trauma. We needed to teach people that sharing DNA does not entitle another person to hurt, control, threaten or abuse them. But I find myself wondering whether, somewhere in that necessary correction, the pendulum continued swinging. When did emotional safety begin to mean freedom from relational discomfort? And when did setting a boundary begin to include the unquestioned right to permanently erase another human being? These aren't theoretical questions for me.

I am a mother.

I am a daughter.

I am a sister.

And I am an estranged grandmother.

My own life has forced me to think about family relationships from more than one side. And the more I have thought about them, the less interested I have become in determining who gets to be the villain. I am much more interested in understanding how people who once loved each other can arrive at profoundly different interpretations of the same relationship—and whether our growing certainty about those interpretations is making repair almost impossible.

From Tolerating Too Much to Tolerating Too Little

Any responsible conversation about family estrangement has to acknowledge something from the beginning:

Sometimes separation is necessary.

Abuse exists.

Neglect exists.

Violence, coercion, addiction and destructive patterns exist. Nobody should be required to remain in danger because the person hurting them happens to be family. Research reflects that reality. Among the reasons adult children commonly give for estranging themselves from parents are emotional abuse and neglect. But research also identifies other factors: mismatched expectations about family roles and relationships, clashes of personality and values, mental-health difficulties and traumatic family events.

Those distinctions matter.

Because abuse and a clash of personalities are not the same thing.

Danger and disappointment are not the same thing.

Trauma and disagreement are not the same thing.

And perhaps one of the most uncomfortable questions in today's conversation about estrangement is whether we still know how to distinguish among them. Previous generations sometimes tolerated far too much in the name of family. Have we begun tolerating too little in the name of emotional safety?

There is an enormous territory between:

I must tolerate whatever my family does to me. and I should never have to experience significant discomfort in a relationship. That middle territory is where human relationships have always lived. We disappoint each other there. We misunderstand each other there. We become defensive. We say things badly. We cross boundaries. We make mistakes. We remember differently. We have incompatible personalities, expectations and communication styles. And sometimes, if there is enough humility on both sides, we repair.

When Therapeutic Language Becomes Courtroom Language

Our culture has acquired an extraordinarily powerful psychological vocabulary. Toxic. Narcissistic. Gaslighting. Trauma. Unsafe. Boundaries. These words matter. They can give language to experiences people once couldn't describe, and they can help people recognize genuinely destructive behavior. But something changes when therapeutic language stops helping us understand behavior and begins functioning as a verdict against another human being. The person is no longer someone who behaved badly. They are toxic. They aren't someone who remembers an event differently. They are gaslighting. They aren't someone struggling to understand a boundary. They are a boundary violator. They aren't selfish, defensive, emotionally limited, frightened, insensitive or simply difficult.

They are a narcissist. And once the label becomes the identity, what opportunity remains for that person to demonstrate anything different? Psychologist Joshua Coleman has raised concerns about the ways estrangement can sometimes be approached with moral certainty, including the danger of psychological labels being applied to family members who have never actually been evaluated. That doesn't make therapeutic language wrong. It means language this powerful deserves precision. A description should help us understand behavior. It should not automatically become a life sentence.

Actions Equal Consequences

There is a question I keep returning to whenever I think about boundaries and estrangement:

Does the response fit the harm? That question is deeply personal for me. When my son was a little boy, his father was no longer in his life, and my son was fortunate to have a Big Brother through the Big Brothers Big Sisters program.

His Big Brother taught him a simple phrase:

“Actions equal consequences.”

It became part of the language in our home. My son and I even sat down together and made a list of things a growing boy might do wrong and what the consequences would be. He was an exceptionally good child, teenager and young man. But good kids make mistakes in judgment. Good adults do too. Human beings do. What mattered to me was that the consequence made sense. If the offense was small, the consequence should not be enormous. If trust was broken, the consequence should have something to do with rebuilding trust. Discipline wasn't supposed to be retaliation. It was supposed to teach.

Actions equal consequences.

I still believe that.

But there has always been another half to that principle for me, even if I didn't put it into these exact words all those years ago:

The consequence should fit the action.

There are behaviors for which complete separation may be necessary for safety. But what about the enormous territory beneath that threshold?

A painful argument.

A thoughtless remark.

An unwanted opinion.

A holiday conflict.

A boundary crossed once and regretted.

A parent who handled something badly.

A personality clash.

A different recollection of something that happened fifteen years ago.

Should every offense carry the same sentence? And should every sentence be permanent?

Before removing another human being from our lives indefinitely, perhaps there should be room to ask:

Is this person dangerous—or have they disappointed me?

Is this behavior continuing—or did something happen that could be acknowledged and repaired?

Have I clearly communicated what needs to change?

Has the person demonstrated any willingness to change?

Is there a response that protects me while leaving room for growth?

And finally:

Does the response fit the harm?

What If My Experience Is Real—and My Interpretation Is Incomplete?

This may be the hardest part. I know something about believing that a parent doesn't love you. For most of my life, I believed my mother couldn't stand me. I was her middle daughter, the one who seemed perpetually unable to live up to my father's expectations. My relationship with my mother seemed strikingly different from the relationships she had with my sisters. Even today, she speaks with my sisters regularly. She travels with them. There have been trips I didn't even know were happening until I happened upon a photograph afterward. My messages may receive only a few words—or no response at all. During the devastating Lahaina fire, my brother and I were frantic trying to find out whether our mother was safe.

We waited. We worried. We couldn't understand why we weren't hearing from her. Meanwhile, our older sister was receiving communication from her. Experiences like those don't disappear because someone tells me not to take them personally. They shaped the relationship I experienced.

And they contributed to a belief I carried for decades:

My mother can't stand me.

Then something happened that didn't fit that story. Years ago, I attended a wedding and encountered one of my mother's closest friends, a woman I hadn't seen in decades. Almost immediately, she began asking me about specific things happening in my life—where I had lived, my career, my hobbies and things I had accomplished.

I remember wondering:

How in the world does she know all of this? Her daughter answered my question.

“Your mom is always talking about you. She's proud of you.”

I was stunned. Years later, something similar happened again. Someone from my mother's life casually asked me about one of my accomplishments. Again I wondered how this person could possibly know.

Again, the answer was essentially:

Your mother talks about your accomplishments all the time. Even today, those encounters shock me. But even that revelation didn't resolve the relationship for me. Years later, after I had begun publishing books, I traveled to California to attend a funeral and support distant relatives with whom I remained close. I discovered that my mother happened to be visiting my older sister nearby—something I hadn't even known when I made the trip. I eventually had an opportunity to see her. I brought her one of my newly published books. This wasn't the first book of mine she had seen. When I published my children's book Grammie's Love Always Shines, I sent her a copy. She told me she cried when she read it.

My mother also loved to read. She talked about the books she read and how much she enjoyed reading every day. So that afternoon, I reached into my bag and handed her one of my newly published adult books. She threw it back onto the table.

“Why would I want that? I have my own books to read.”

I still have that exact copy. As I write these words in Panama, that book is sitting on the table beside me. I have never sent my mother another one of my published books.

And here's the thing:

I still don't know what the hell it meant. I know what happened. I handed my mother something I had written and published—something I was proud of—and she threw it back onto the table. I know what I felt.

Rejected.

And I know what I believed her behavior meant:

She isn't proud of me. She doesn't care about what I've accomplished. Maybe she really can't stand me. But then what am I supposed to do with the other evidence? What do I do with the woman at the wedding who knew details about my career, my travels, my interests and my life because my mother had apparently been telling her about me? What do I do with another person, years later, who knew about one of my accomplishments for exactly the same reason? How do I reconcile those things? I can't. I could decide that my mother isn't proud of me and dismiss what those people told me.

I could decide that she really is proud of me and minimize how deeply some of her behavior toward me has hurt. I don't want to do either. Maybe she is proud of me. Maybe something about expressing that pride directly to me is difficult for her. Maybe that book hitting the table meant something entirely different inside her than it meant inside me. Maybe there are dynamics between us that neither one of us has ever understood.

I don't know.

What I do know is that both things happened. My mother behaved toward me in ways that left me feeling rejected. My mother apparently spoke about me to others in ways that sounded remarkably like pride.

The contradiction is real.

My hurt is real.

Her pride may be real too.

Maybe what I believed about what her behavior meant wasn't the only possible interpretation of it. That doesn't make my hurt imaginary. It doesn't rewrite my childhood. It doesn't erase the differences I experienced between the way my mother related to me and the way she related to my siblings.

It simply leaves room for something we seem increasingly reluctant to allow in difficult relationships:

the possibility that another human being's intentions, memories and experience may not match the meaning we assigned to their behavior. Our feelings are real. Our experiences are real. But the meaning we assign to another person's behavior is still an interpretation—and sometimes information we cannot see from where we are standing would complicate the story we have told ourselves about why they behaved that way. Perhaps human beings themselves are contradictory. Someone can love us and hurt us. Someone can be proud of us and be terrible at showing that pride to us. Someone can speak warmly about us when we're absent and behave coldly toward us when we're standing right in front of them.

Someone can believe they have been a loving parent while their child has experienced profound rejection. That doesn't make the rejection imaginary. And it doesn't necessarily make the love imaginary either. Human relationships aren't court cases in which every piece of evidence has to support a single verdict. I don't have to know what all of it meant in order to know what it did to me. And I don't have to turn what it did to me into absolute certainty about everything that existed inside her. Maybe that's part of what we've forgotten.

The Same Family. Different Experiences.

This is where the work of physician and author Dr. Gabor Maté helped me put words around something I had experienced without fully understanding. Maté has explained that no two children truly experience exactly the same parents or the same childhood—even siblings raised beneath the same roof. Parents aren't emotionally static. Stress changes. Circumstances change. Age and life experience change. And each child, with a unique temperament and personality, participates in creating a unique relationship with that parent. Even identical twins can experience meaningfully different mothering. That idea stopped me. Because two siblings can grow up in the same house and experience different childhoods. One may remember warmth where another remembers distance.

One may experience protection where another experiences control. One may experience independence where another experiences neglect. Neither child necessarily has to be lying. Neither necessarily has to be remembering “wrong.” They experienced different relationships. That distinction becomes critically important when families fracture over competing accounts of the past.

A child can truthfully say:

“I experienced that as rejection.”

And a parent can truthfully answer:

“I never intended to reject you.”

The second statement doesn't erase the first. But the first doesn't automatically prove the second false. Experience and intention are related. They are not identical. Perhaps repair doesn't require two people finally agreeing on a single interpretation of their shared history.

Perhaps it requires enough humility to say:

I believe that is how you experienced me.

And:

I believe you when you tell me that wasn't what you intended.

Different doesn't automatically mean dishonest..

Different doesn't automatically mean delusional.

Different doesn't automatically mean gaslighting.

And different doesn't require one person's experience to be erased so the other's can be validated.

Sometimes the Answer Comes Without Words

My brother's relationship with our mother gives me another reason to resist certainty. He too spent much of his life believing our mother couldn't stand him. His experience was his own, and there were behaviors he found deeply painful—not only toward him but eventually toward his daughters and grandchildren. Eventually, he did something I once couldn't bring myself to do. He wrote her a letter. Years ago, a counselor suggested that I write my own mother a letter explaining what her behavior had made me feel. I couldn't do it. My brother eventually did. He told our mother what he believed her treatment had done to him and how he believed it had extended to his children.

She never answered the letter. At least not with words. But something changed. She began returning his calls. She began communicating with his daughters. And recently my brother told me that during a family gathering she was wonderful with his daughters and grandsons. I don't know what happened inside my mother when she read his letter. Maybe she agreed with every word. Maybe she disagreed with most of it. Maybe she recognized something she had never recognized before. Maybe she simply saw the consequences of behavior she hadn't understood in quite that way. I don't know. And perhaps admitting that I don't know is part of the point.

What I do know is that her behavior changed.

And that makes me wonder whether sometimes we become so focused on obtaining acknowledgment of our interpretation of yesterday that we overlook another form of accountability:

What does the person do next?

An apology matters.

Words matter.

Acknowledgment matters.

But surely changed behavior matters too. Perhaps repair doesn't always begin when two people finally agree about yesterday. Sometimes it begins when someone chooses to behave differently tomorrow.

When Only One Reality Is Allowed

Research on estrangement repeatedly encounters something that shouldn't surprise anyone who has lived inside a complicated family:

Parents and adult children often tell very different stories about why the relationship ended. Adult children may describe emotional abuse, neglect, lack of acceptance, control or values conflicts. Parents may identify entirely different causes. That doesn't automatically prove that one side is truthful and the other is delusional. It should make us curious. How can two people participate in the same relationship and emerge with such different understandings of what happened? Perhaps because there were always two experiences of that relationship. The danger begins when only one is permitted to exist. If disagreement is automatically gaslighting... If explanation is automatically defensiveness... If a different memory is automatically denial...

If an apology that doesn't adopt the entire narrative is refusing accountability... And if an attempt to communicate is automatically a boundary violation... what can the other person possibly do that would allow the relationship to heal? There may be no acceptable move left. Reconciliation requires something harder than determining who wins the history.

It requires mutual fallibility.

Two people can have been hurt. Two people can have misunderstood. Two people can remember differently. Two people can have contributed differently—and unequally—to the breakdown. And sometimes harm can occur without either human being being a monster.

A Boundary Is Not Necessarily a Cutoff

Boundaries are essential.

A boundary might say:

You may not scream at me.

If you insult my spouse, I will end the conversation.

I won't discuss this subject with you.

If you come to my home intoxicated, I will ask you to leave.

Those statements establish conditions under which someone is willing to participate in a relationship.

A cutoff says something else:

There will be no relationship.

Sometimes that is necessary.

But if we call every cutoff a boundary, we risk losing an important distinction. We stop asking about proportionality. Alternatives. Duration. Changed behavior. And repair. Protection and permanence are not necessarily the same decision. Distance may sometimes need to be a chapter. It doesn't automatically have to become the ending.

And Then I Became Grammie

Years later, I would encounter these questions from another direction entirely. As a grandmother. My grandchildren had their own relationships with me. My children's book Grammie's Love Always Shines was inspired by the ordinary things we did together—movie nights beneath blankets, sports games, swimming, zoo trips, laughter, music and the little rituals that become enormous only after they're gone. One memory has never left me. On what would become the last full outing I ever spent with my grandchildren, my five-year-old grandson quietly approached me after his little sister's soccer game. He had apparently heard “Grammie's busy” enough times that this time he came prepared.

First he asked me privately:

“Grammie, you aren't busy today, are you?”

I told him what I always wanted him to know:

“I am never too busy for you, sweetheart.”

He told me his family was going to Cedar Point and asked whether I could come. I told him that was something he had to ask his mother. But my little grandson had already developed a strategy.

Instead of asking whether Grammie could come, he proudly announced the good news:

He had checked with me. Grammie wasn't busy. Grammie had the whole day free. Grammie could come! I told him again that I could come only if Mommy said it was okay. His little sister immediately entered the negotiations over which one of them would ride with me. I smile remembering his determination. But today there is something about that memory that breaks my heart. Those children had a relationship with me that belonged to them. That same day, another family member referred to me as “LiLi.”

My grandson planted his little hands on his hips and corrected her:

“Her name is not LiLi. Her name is Grammie. She is our Grammie.”

He was five years old. He knew who I was to him. I didn't know that would be our last outing together. There is an irony in this history that I still struggle to understand. Years earlier, my then-future daughter-in-law had been visibly upset when she discovered what she perceived as unequal treatment of grandchildren within my family. She understood immediately how painful it could be when children seemed to matter differently to their grandparents.

Years later, the painful difference would be this:

My grandchildren weren't experiencing a grandmother who treated some of them as more worthy of her love than others. They experienced a Grammie who adored them equally. And yet they would lose that grandmother entirely. I cannot tell you what that decision meant from someone else's side of the relationship. I can only tell you what it meant from mine. There are conversations I wasn't present for. There are experiences and interpretations that aren't mine to tell. And if I'm going to ask other people to resist certainty about someone else's motives, I have to be willing to do the same.

But surely the question itself is worth asking:

If every relationship is unique, should one person's experience of someone automatically determine whether everyone else is permitted to have a relationship with them? My son's experience of me as his mother is his. My daughter-in-law's experience of me as her mother-in-law is hers. My grandchildren's experience of me as their Grammie was theirs. Those relationships were connected. But they were not interchangeable.

What Are We Teaching the Next Generation?

And this brings me to the question that troubles me most.

What happens next?

Children don't learn how relationships work only from what we tell them. They watch what we do. They learn what love looks like. They learn what conflict means. They learn whether apologies matter. They learn whether people can change. They learn whether disagreement can coexist with connection. They learn whether relationships can survive disappointment. And they learn what we do with people who hurt us. Family estrangement can sometimes be necessary. I will never argue that a person must remain available to genuine abuse or danger simply because the person causing it is family. But if permanent cutoff becomes culturally normalized as a response not only to abuse but also to unresolved hurt, incompatible perceptions, personality differences and relational discomfort, we have to ask what lesson travels forward.

If removal becomes an accepted solution to difficult family relationships, why would the next generation not use that same solution when we become the difficult person? Not because they're cruel. Because this is one of the ways we taught them relationships can end.

“My Mom Is the Only One Missing”

Recently, my brother told me something my son had said during a family gathering from which I was absent.

“My Mom is the only one missing.”

I have replayed those words more times than I care to admit.

My Mom.

My heart grabs onto the word my.

I'm still his mom.

And then there is that other word.

Missing.

He didn't say, “She's not here.” He said his mom was missing. The mother in me desperately wants that word to mean something.

I want it to mean that my absence was felt.

I want it to mean that somewhere beneath everything that has happened, the connection between us still exists.

And yes, I want it to mean that he misses me. But there it is again: interpretation. I know what my brother told me my son said. I know what those words mean to me. I know what I desperately hope they meant to him. But I cannot honestly tell you that I know what was in my son's heart when he said them.

Only he knows that.

Perhaps someday he will tell me.

This is the humility I am asking for throughout this entire conversation about estrangement, and I have to require it of myself too. I cannot ask an adult child to consider that the meaning they assigned to a parent's behavior may not be the only possible interpretation while insisting that my interpretation of my son's words must be correct simply because I need it to be.

All of us interpret.

We interpret silence. We interpret words. We interpret unanswered messages. We interpret facial expressions, invitations, exclusions, memories and apologies.

Sometimes we're right.

Sometimes we're wrong.

And sometimes the truth may be far more complicated than either one.

So I will allow myself the hope.

I will treasure those words.

“My Mom is the only one missing.”

But I will not turn my hope into certainty.

Because perhaps one of the greatest gifts we can give a fractured relationship is leaving enough room for the other person to someday tell us what their own experience actually meant.

I Don't Want Them to Learn the Hard Way

I sometimes hear estranged parents say that one day their adult children will understand. Wait until their children grow up. Wait until it happens to them. Then they'll know. I understand where that thought comes from. Pain desperately wants to be understood.

But I don't want that.

I don't want today's estranged adult children to become tomorrow's devastated estranged parents. I don't want another generation sitting in the silence of birthdays, holidays and ordinary Tuesdays, wondering how someone they love became someone they are no longer permitted to know. I don't want a child watching one generation erase another and quietly learning that this is simply what families do when relationships become too painful or complicated.

I want us to become better at recognizing genuine danger without redefining all discomfort as danger.

I want boundaries that protect people without automatically making reconciliation impossible.

I want therapeutic language to help us understand one another rather than become ammunition with which we prosecute one another.

I want adult children to be able to say:

“This hurt me.”

And parents to be capable of hearing it.

I want parents to be able to say:

“I remember it differently.”

without those words automatically meaning:

“Your experience isn't real.”

I want room for two experiences.

For accountability without annihilation. For consequences that fit the harm. For boundaries without vengeance. For distance when distance is truly necessary—and a door to repair when repair becomes possible.

And perhaps most of all, I want us to recover something that certainty takes away from us:

curiosity.

What did this relationship feel like from where you were standing? What did mine look like from where I was standing? What might I not know? What might you not know? And what could happen if, instead of fighting over whose experience gets to become the official history, we became curious about the experience on the other side? Maybe what I believed about what your behavior meant wasn't the only possible interpretation of it. And maybe what you believed about mine wasn't either. That doesn't absolve either of us from responsibility. It doesn't erase harm. It doesn't demand reconciliation where reconciliation is unsafe. It simply allows two imperfect human beings to remain human.

I don't want my children or grandchildren—or anyone else's—to someday understand this pain because they have inherited it. I don't want them to learn our pain by living it.

I want the cycle to stop.

— Lisa Franco Alexander

Founder | Heart's Renewal

Life After Complicated Loss™

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