Reframing the “Empty Nest” as the “Open Vessel” and looking at the late-life labor of transitioning from biological legacy to soul legacy.

When we become estranged from our adult children, it’s not only our child’s presence that disappears; it can feel as though our very sense of purpose has been stripped away. For many of us, motherhood was our primary ‘crop.’ We poured our energy, our identity, our love and our hope into the soil of our children’s lives. When that connection is severed, the very earth beneath our feet can feel barren and scorched.

For so many summer afternoons after my family broke apart, I’d sit slumped in my hammock swing overlooking lake Pocasset and imagine my grandchildren as toddlers again, playing with their water toys and splashing in the now empty cove. I’d listlessly scan the porch, so often filled on the weekends with my small family not so long ago, and barely notice the beauty around me. Instead, all that registered then was the emptiness and silence.

Deep in the throws of grief, I spent so many days following the break-up of my family feeling hollow and uninspired. Determined to survive, I’d tell myself that there was a deeper truth waiting beneath the terrible void that I felt, and that my generativity and worth wasn’t based solely on my daughter’s and grandchildren’s rootedness in my life. I reminded myself of the words of another estranged mother who pointed out that the creative life force that had moved through us to love and nurture our children didn’t disappear with their absence. It still existed, still flowed through us, and was still ours. And yet, during the early years of our estrangement, I recited those words without feeling them. My best days back then seemed to be the ones when I felt “comfortably numb.”

From Biological Legacy to Soul Legacy

“According to Chinese and ancient Ayurvedic medicine, at age 60, women end their householder life and begin to develop their souls. Our fertility stops being about having children and starts being about what we create for ourselves that benefits us and the people around us.” Christiane Northrup

Northrop reminds us that our biological fertility brought our children into the world. Our spiritual fertility, on the other hand, can bring newly cultivated parts of ourselves into being. This creative, generative life force that once sustained our children isn’t gone — it’s just needing to be redirected.

The Open Vessel During the early years after my daughter left home to start her own family, seeing a mom with her small child could bring tears to my eyes. I ached to hold my little girl’s hand again, read her a bedtime story, tuck her in, chair dance the way we used to, sing silly songs, and to relive so many of the sweet moments that I once took for granted. There’s so much we mothers miss. It’s easy for most of us to understand why “the empty nest,” a phrase to describe the period following the launch of our children, is often thought of as a place of loss and lack.

When we open ourselves up to the idea of spiritual fertility however, our “empty nests” becomes “open vessels.” From this perspective, our lives as parents of grown (or estranged) children aren’t empty — they’ve opened up. They’ve become fertile ground for the curiosities, passions, and wisdom that we had little or no time for while raising our children.

The Non‑Linear Harvest
Parenting very often involves waiting for a return — a smile, a developmental milestone, a phone call, a sense of being appreciated. Spiritual fertility, on the other hand, entails finding satisfaction in the act of creation itself. Whether we’re writing, gardening, painting, baking, mentoring, or simply reclaiming our own inner lives, we’re ‘seeding’ the world without needing to assume responsibility for how, or where, it grows.

I’m reminded here of the maple in our backyard that my granddaughters used to swing on. When it lost its leaves each autumn, I knew that it wasn’t dead; its sap had just retreated to its core in preparation for the long Maine winter. I’ve come to think of estrangement a little like that. Eventually, as we start to heal, we begin to pull our energy back from the ‘branches’ of our estranged children and return it to our own trunks — to gather strength for our next season’s bloom.

An Act of Defiance

Embracing spiritual fertility can be a quiet rebellion against despair. Continuing with this metaphor, it’s the choice to continue cultivating and weeding even when the person we planted the garden for may never walk through the gate again. It’s the recognition that while our hearts may have been broken, our capacity to bring beauty, meaning, and new kinds of creations into the world remains intact.

Spiritual fertility is the capacity to keep generating goodness, meaning, and presence even in the midst of loss. It’s the quiet insistence that our love is still needed in the world, still able to take root, still capable of nourishing others. One way of doing this is through volunteering. When we volunteer, we redirect the life-force that once moved toward our children into places where it can foster new growth.

How We Bring Our Love Into the World Through Service

• By reading to children in libraries or schools, we offer the tenderness and patience that once shaped our own parenting years.

• By serving meals at community centers or shelters, we offer the same care that once packed lunches, cooked dinners, and fed our families. The nourishment we offer becomes a quiet blessing to someone who may not have been fed with care in a long time.

• By visiting elders in nursing homes, we bring companionship to those who feel forgotten or left behind. Our presence becomes a balm, a reminder that every life deserves to be witnessed.

• By mentoring young adults, we share the wisdom we’ve earned. Sometimes our guidance becomes a lantern for someone navigating their own dark woods.

• By tending community gardens, we place our hands back into the soil of life itself. Each seed becomes a small act of hope, a reminder that growth is always possible, even after long, dark winters.

• By becoming a foster grandparent, we open our hearts to children who need an extra set of loving arms to hold them steady, affirming that our capacity to care isn't lost—it simply finds new ways to bloom.

• By supporting refugees, newcomers, or those in crisis, we offer the compassion we once gave our own children and grandchildren. Our empathy becomes a bridge for someone crossing into a new life.

Each act of service becomes a way of saying: My love is still alive. My life still matters. My heart still knows how to give.

Why Volunteering is Healing to the Estranged Heart

When we serve, we step out of the narrow corridor of loss and into the wider field of human need. We remember that our love was never meant to be limited to our own family. It was always meant to be shared, to circulate, and to bless.

Volunteering doesn’t erase the ache of estrangement, but it transforms the ache into purpose. It reminds us that we’re still capable of contributing beauty, care, and meaning to the world. It allows us to reclaim our identity not just as parents, but as creators, mentors, elders, and compassionate witnesses.

Estrangement may have altered the landscape of our lives (it certainly has mine) but it hasn’t taken our ability to create. Our souls are still fertile and our growing seasons are far from over.

The Harvest

Spiritual fertility is the quiet labor of becoming.
It’s the seed that doesn’t rush,
the unseen root encased in darkness,
patiently waiting for rain.

It’s the soul’s willingness
to be transformed by loss,
to let grief break open our protective shell,
and allow something new to emerge from the shattering.

Spiritual fertility begins where tenderness returns, where our hearts find the courage to say ‘yes’ again, after disappointment, after silence, after the long, barren season when nothing bloomed.

It’s the capacity to hold our grief
without becoming consumed by it,
to remain open
when our hearts would rather close.

It’s not always visible.
Sometimes it looks like prayer.
Sometimes like smiling through tears.
Sometimes like resting
with the trust that growth is still happening in the darkness.

And when the harvest finally comes, it slips in quietly. It appears as a tender mercy, a deeper understanding, a self grown strong enough to make something sacred from what was once only ache.

It’s Your Turn

Take a moment with your journal to sit with the “Open Vessel” within you and then respond to the following prompts:

If you were to remove the labels of 'mother,' 'provider,' or 'fixer' from your current life, what are three adjectives that describe the woman whose left? Not what she does, but who she is in the quiet.

Think back to the version of you that existed before you became a parent. What was a curiosity or a 'small fire' you carried then that you let go of to tend to your family’s needs? How might that spark be trying to light again in this current silence?

In motherhood, we often measure success by a child’s happiness or presence. When thinking about spiritual fertility, what’s one 'internal harvest' you’ve gathered recently?

Note: Artificial intelligence (AI) was used collaboratively throughout this work to assist with research, drafting, and editorial refinement. AI served as both an interactive tool and as an editor. AI also created around 95% of all art used with this substack.

Radical acceptance isn't about liking your situation or giving up hope. It’s about dropping the heavy stone of resistance so you can finally breathe again.

“Everything in life that we really accept undergoes a change.” Katherine Mansfield

In the beginning I lived in the land of if only.

If only she was able to hear me.
If only just she and I could sit down and talk.
If only I had said something different that day.

That mindset kept me spinning my wheels. Every scenario I replayed was a loop that always ended in the same place—powerless, stuck in grief, angry at both my daughter and myself, and clinging to the hope that one magical conversation could undo the hurt that I was all too aware we were both feeling.

I began listening to Tara Brach in the middle of my many sleepless nights. Her gentleness soothed me while her wisdom informed me. I picked up her book, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha where I read, “Clearly recognizing what is happening inside us, and regarding what we see with an open, kind and loving heart, is what I call Radical Acceptance.” and “There is something wonderfully bold and liberating about saying yes to our entire imperfect and messy life.” Those words resonated with me. Embracing radical acceptance doesn’t mean that we like or approve of what’s happening to us. It means we free ourselves from the additional pain and frustration of wishing things that are out of our control were different.

For months I resisted reality because it felt unbearable. But resisting didn’t change anything, it only added more suffering to the pain I already carried. I was living in the past and obsessing over a future I couldn’t control. The present became a place I could barely tolerate.

One day, I sat with my journal and wrote: "The truth is, my daughter isn’t in my life right now and very likely will never be again.” My hand shook as I wrote those words. But in that moment, something shifted. I wasn’t surrendering my love for her—I was surrendering the struggle.

Radical acceptance gave me room to breathe. It allowed me to stop spending every ounce of energy on the impossible task of reconfiguring reality. Instead, I could focus on what was in front of me: my own healing, people who loved me, and the multitude of small blessings I’d ignored in the early stage of my grief.

Most of us instinctively push away pain, especially the kind that feels disorienting, unfamiliar, or too intense to bear. In estrangement, this reflex becomes even stronger, the heartbreak is so intense and bewildering that resisting it can feel like the only way to keep moving. However, when we practice radical acceptance, we stop fighting the reality of the moment — not approving it, not liking it, but allowing it to be true, and this softening immediately reduces our emotional and physiological distress. In that surrender, our nervous system begins to settle, and we can breathe a little easier, able to more readily claim a sense of dignity and self-compassion that estrangement all too often erodes.

Radical acceptance taught me this truth: Peace isn’t found in attempting to fix the past —it’s found in fully living the present.

How to Practice Radical Acceptance

“Acceptance is the only way out of hell.”
Marsha M. Linehan

In summary, radical acceptance is about acknowledging reality as it is, without judgment or resistance—even when it feels unbearable. It doesn’t mean approval or giving up hope. It means choosing not to add to our suffering by fighting what we can’t change.

Step 1: Name the Reality You’re Resisting

• Write or say aloud the truth you’ve been struggling with.
  Example: “Right now, my child and I aren’t speaking.”

• Avoid adding judgmental language (like “and that means I’m a failure”). Keep it neutral and factual.

Step 2: Notice Your Internal Resistance

• Ask yourself:

  • What thoughts come up when I face this truth?

  • What emotions arise—anger, sadness, fear?

  • Where do I feel it in my body—tight chest, nervous belly, clenched jaw, shallow breath?

Step 3: Acknowledge the Cost of Non-Acceptance

• Reflect on how resisting reality has impacted your life:

  • Have you lost sleep?

  • Avoided friends or activities?

  • Spent hours replaying conversations?

• Write: “Resisting reality hasn’t changed it—but it has increased my suffering in these ways…”

Step 4: Turn Toward Acceptance

• Repeat the truth gently:
  “This is my reality right now. I don’t have to like it, but I can stop fighting it.”

• Breathe deeply and imagine releasing the struggle like dropping a heavy stone into a river.

Step 5: Engage in an Acceptance Action

• Choose one small behavior that aligns with acceptance, such as:

  • Putting away an old text thread.

  • Journaling about something other than estrangement.

  • Calling a friend for connection instead of isolation.

Step 6: Practice Self-Compassion

• Say: “I’m doing the best I can in an incredibly painful situation. Acceptance is a gift I give myself.”

• Place your hand on your heart while repeating this for 1–2 minutes. Breathe into your heart while repeating this.

Step 7: Revisit as Needed

• Radical acceptance isn’t a one-time event. It’s something you return to whenever pain resurfaces. Each time you practice, you strengthen your ability to live fully—even in the midst of loss.

Radical Acceptance

In the quiet of my heart,
I face the truth—
the reality that my life has tilted,
my love has morphed into heartbreak,
while I sit here with head down and shoulders bent,
trying to accept ‘what is’.

I’m reminded that acceptance isn’t surrender;
it’s a fierce acknowledgment,
a nod to the pain that lingers,
and the memories that weigh heavy.
This acceptance, I’m told, offers liberation—
freedom to feel deeply without the shackles of judgment.

I breathe in the ache of their absence,
and the memories of laughter now silent.
Each of my tears tells a story of longing,
but also whispers to me of resilience.
I learn to hold space for both grief and gratitude,
letting them live side by side in this strange new landscape.

My walk is unsteady on this uncharted path,
yet I’m determined to love my life once again.
To embrace each moment as it comes—
to cradle the joy still wrapped up in sorrow,
and to seek out the lessons still hidden in heartbreak.

Radical acceptance is a journey inward;
it teaches me to release expectations—
to let go of how things should be.
It invites me to meet what’s real:
the complexity of relationships,
the ebb and flow of connection.

And as I travel down this winding road of acceptance,
I begin to find small pockets of peace—
glimmers of light breaking through shadows.
With each step forward, I reclaim my power—
not by changing the past but by choosing to fully live in the present.

In this radical acceptance lies both healing and growth;
a seed planted in fertile soil—
nurtured by compassion and understanding.
And I’ll keep working to honor the journey, every step of it.

It’s Your Turn

Journal Prompts:

• Where in your estrangement do you feel the strongest resistance to reality?

• What would it feel like to stop fighting that piece of reality, even for a moment?

• How might radical acceptance free up energy for things that nourish you?

Note: Artificial intelligence (AI) was used collaboratively throughout this substack to assist with research, drafting, and editorial refinement. AI served as both an interactive tool and as an editor. AI has also created around 90% of all art used in this substack.

“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time,” noted Thomas Merton. When words fail and the ache of estrangement feels too heavy to carry, a painting or a piece of music can hold what language can’t. Beauty helps us survive the unbearable.

When estrangement leaves us feeling broken, we often hunger for meaning; for something beyond our immediate pain. British author and public speaker, Alain de Botton tells us that philosophy and art can become our companions in sorrow, while they seldom offer solutions, they can provide comfort. and perspective. They also hold a quiet promise: that we’re not alone in our suffering.

Why Philosophy and Art Help in Times of Estrangement

• They Normalize Pain: Philosophy and art remind us that loss and longing are universal human experiences.

• They Expand Perspective: Philosophical thought widens our perspective, shifting us from personal failure to an experience that many of us have lived through.

• They Offer Language and a Container: Where words fail, art speaks. Where despair feels chaotic, philosophy organizes meaning.

Philosophy as a Lantern in Darkness

"He who has a why to live can bear almost any how." — Friedrich Nietzsche

There’s a particular kind of pain that persists regardless of circumstance — the pain that comes when someone we love becomes unreachable to us. When we’re living with this pain, we often feel exposed and destabilized, and we look for something reliable — something that offers understanding, or a way to endure what we’re facing.

Philosophy doesn’t remove this pain or make it disappear. But it can offer something steady to hold onto — imperfect, limited, but real. Across centuries, thinkers have grappled with the same experience: loss, separation, and the fragility of the bonds that connect us to one another. What they wrote down still speaks to us now — not as a solution, but as evidence that others have endured this same difficulty before us, and left behind language that still holds up.

To read them is to sit among those who understand, to feel the hush of shared humanity: You’re not alone in your grief. Others have stood where you stand, and still they walked forward.

In the pages of philosophy we can gather perspective and hold it close—not as commandments or absolutes, but as companions on a sad and lonely path.

At its core, philosophy wrestles with the very questions that can haunt us when our world implodes.

• What’s the meaning of suffering?

• How do we live well when life turns upside down?

• What’s in our control—and what isn’t?

By grappling with these questions, we might loosen the grip of despair. We’re reminded that we’re part of an ancient lineage of beings who’ve also endured heartbreak and found wisdom on the other side.

Contemporary Voices for the Modern Heart

While the ancients laid the foundation, modern-day philosophers like Alain de Botton and Martha Nussbaum offer a specific kind of “therapeutic philosophy” tailored to the fractures of the 21st-century soul. They argue that our modern obsession with “closure” and “positivity” often does a disservice to the complexity of human grief. These thinkers invite us to see our broken heartedness not as a clinical failure to be “fixed,” but as a profound intelligence, a reminder that we’ve lived and loved deeply. By moving philosophy out of the ivory tower and into our daily sorrows, they provide a framework for “tragic optimism”— the ability to maintain hope and find beauty even when we know that some things in life may never be fully mended. They remind us that while we can’t always control the storyline of our relationships, we remain the sole authors of the meaning we create from them.

“nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know…” Pema Chodrin, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

Guiding Philosophical Perspectives

• Stoicism: From Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, we learn the art of distinguishing what’s within our control and what lies beyond it. Their counsel: Peace comes when we stop trying to control what we can’t.

• Existentialism: From Albert Camus and Viktor Frankl, we learn that even in suffering, we can choose meaning. Pain doesn’t define us; our response to our pain does.

• Buddhist Thought: From Pema Chödrön and Thích Nhất Hạnh we receive tender guidance on embracing impermanence and finding steadiness in the midst of uncertainty.

Practices We can Use for Philosophical Consolation and Perspective

Morning Meditation with a Text

• The Practice: Each morning, choose a single line from a philosopher that resonates with your current state. Sit in silence for five minutes, holding that sentence in your mind and asking: “What truth does this hold for me today?”

• The Insight: This moves philosophy from a cold, intellectual exercise into a living dialogue. It allows the wisdom of the past to act as a grounded anchor for your present.

The Circle of Control Exercise

• The Practice: Draw two concentric circles. In the inner circle, list everything within your direct influence (your reactions, your self-care, your daily choices). In the outer circle, list the things you can’t change (your child’s decisions, past mistakes, the opinions of others).

• The Insight: By visually separating these two realms, you can consciously practice “releasing” the outer circle. It conserves your emotional energy for the only place where it can actually make a difference: the center of your own life.

The Narrative Pivot (Existential Agency) Based on the works of Viktor Frankl, this exercise helps you reclaim the role of author of your own life when you feel like a victim of circumstances.

• The Practice: Write down a difficult event from your estrangement in the third person (e.g., She sat by the phone waiting for a call that didn’t come). Then, write a second paragraph describing how the “character” chooses to respond to that silence in a way that aligns with her deepest values.

• The Insight: You may not have written the plot of this chapter, but you’re the only one who decides the character’s next move.

Amor Fati (Love of Fate): A concept popularized by Nietzsche, this is the ultimate challenge in philosophical acceptance.

• The Practice: Identify a specific “hard truth” about your current situation. Instead of wishing it were different, ask yourself: “If I had to live this exact experience over and over for eternity, how could I find beauty, wisdom, or strength within it?”

• The Insight: Moving beyond mere “tolerance” of your life toward a radical acceptance. It transforms “Why is this happening to me?” into “This is happening; how can I use it to grow?”

The Philosophical Dialogue

• The Practice: Imagine sitting across from a thinker who resonates with you—maybe Pema Chödrön or Viktor Frankl. Explain your current hurt to them, and then listen for how they would respond based on their writings. I think this exercise is most helpful if you do it in writing.

• The Insight: This externalizes your internal monologue, allowing the wisdom of the ages to interrupt your cycle of rumination with a more grounded, objective perspective.

A Small Sample of Readings for Reflection:

• A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis

• Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

• When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chödrön

• Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

• It’s OK that you’re not OK by Megan Devine

• Ambiguous Loss by Pauline Boss

• The Myth of Closure by Pauline Boss

• The Choice by Edith Eger

• The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller

• The Beauty of What Remains by Steven Ledder

• Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words by David Whyte

• The Consolations of Philosophy by Alain de Botton

• Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

• The Enchiridion by Epictetus

• Consolations by Boethius

Journaling Prompts

Which idea from today’s reading speaks to my heart? Why?

What am I holding onto that I can’t control?

What does it mean for me to live a meaningful life—even in estrangement?

Example: Following are a few lines that I used to meditate on yesterday morning and then journal about from Pema Chodron’s When Things Fall Apart:

“Whether it’s ourselves, our lovers, bosses, children, local Scrooge, or the political situation, it’s more daring and real not to shut anyone out of our hearts and not to make the other into an enemy. If we begin to live like this, we’ll find that we actually can’t make things completely right or completely wrong anymore, because things are a lot more slippery and playful than that. Everything is ambiguous; everything is always shifting and changing, and there are as many different takes on any given situation as there are people involved. Trying to find absolute rights and wrongs is a trick we play on ourselves to feel secure and comfortable.”

Art as a Mirror for the Soul

“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time." Thomas Merton

The Harmonic Bridge to Healing

“Everything in the Universe has its own song. A chorus of frogs. The wind in the trees. Songs inspire the soul to remember how to love. Ave Maria opens the heart to compassion. Kyrie Eleison awakens forgiveness. Shalom Aleichem beckons the tired soul to rest. Om restores harmony and unity. Music is a powerful connection to our Source.” Joan Borysenko, Pocketful of Miracles: Prayer, Meditations, and Affirmations to Nurture Your Spirit Every Day of the Year

Beyond the visual, music offers its own kind of sanctuary — one where time loosens enough to hold whatever we're carrying, however heavy. When the quiet of estrangement becomes unbearable, music gives that quiet a shape, a way of holding feelings that otherwise have nowhere to go. Philosophers have long observed that music does more than reflect our moods — it can confirm them, and it can move them. The low pull of a cello, the layered rise of a choral line: these don't just accompany our isolation, they meet it, and slowly loosen its hardest edges into something closer to shared feeling.

The Soul of Windham Hill

"Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness." Maya Angelou

There’s always been a particular sanctuary found for me in the early music produced by Windham Hill. Over the years, these compositions have reached into the deepest, most quiet places inside of me—places that often feel unreachable by any other means. There’s a spaciousness in the acoustic arrangements of artists like William Ackerman that seems to mirror the landscape of a healing heart. It’s music that doesn’t demand attention, but rather offers a soft place to just be. During times in my life when my own story has felt too loud or too painful to bear, artists like Ackerman and George Winston (especially his album, December) provided a steady, wordless pulse that reminded me of the beauty still very much alive in the stillness. The music didn’t just play in the background; it seemed to hold me.

The Weaver of Sacred Sound: Ajeet

"Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life." Berthold Auerbach

And then there’s the music of Ajeet. It touches a layer of my being that feels both ancient and deeply personal, acting as a gentle bridge between the physical world and the spiritual landscape of the heart. There’s a sacredness in her vocal textures—especially in pieces like Light of My Soul, Healing Song, Blooming, and Peace—that feels less like a performance and more like a shared prayer.

When I listen, it feels as though she’s singing directly into the depths of my experience, her voice acting as a soothing balm that encourages me to simply exhale. In the midst of the complex emotions that follow loss, Ajeet’s music serves as a reminder of my inherent “aliveness” and my connection to the earth and to all beings. It’s a sound that doesn’t just reach my ears; it settles into my chest, quieting my mind and allowing my soul to finally rest in the beauty of the present moment.

There are wounds too deep for words, griefs that language simply can’t hold. And yet, beauty often finds a way to cradle what language can’t.

Art—whether a painting, a piece of music, a film, or a single sculpture—becomes a sanctuary for what we can’t say. When we gaze at a canvas steeped in melancholy blues or listen to the deep tremor of a cello’s bow, the world speaks back to us through color, shape, and sound, whispering that our sorrow has a home and our longing is understood. In those quiet moments, we feel undeniably less alone.

As it turns out, this sense of emotional comfort isn’t just a comfort to the soul—it’s a measurable benefit to the body. A recent study from University College London summarized by the Good News Network analyzed blood samples and survey data from over 3,500 UK adults and found that people who regularly engage in art and cultural activities, like listening to music, visiting museums, attending plays or reading, show distinct changes in their DNA consistent with slower biological aging. In fact, those who participated in an artistic activity just once a week aged 4% more slowly than those who rarely did, matching the exact health benefits of regular weekly exercise.

Beyond slowing down the body’s clock, immersion in the arts—particularly music—acts as a powerful shield for the aging mind. Recent data published in the International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, which analyzed over 10,800 older participants, highlights a profound connection between musical engagement and cognitive resilience. The study found that adults over 70 who consistently listen to music enjoy a 39% decreased risk of developing dementia. While researchers note that a direct line of causation can’t be definitively established, senior author Professor Joanne Ryan emphasizes that these lifestyle choices deeply influence how our brains age. Ultimately, music and art don’t erase our pain, but they beautifully transform the silence surrounding it. They stand as an accessible, enduring testimony to the resilience of the human spirit—safeguarding both our minds and our hearts as we navigate life’s hardest chapters.

"Art is the container we pour our chaos into." Unknown

Ways to Engage with Art:

• Create a “Consolation Gallery”: Collect 3–5 works of art, music, poetry, or film that moves and comforts you. My consolation gallery includes the following: (1)The painting, Watercolors by Steve Hanks, (2) the painting, Woman with Cat and Dog by Carl Larson, (3) the album, Let it Breathe by Ajeet (4) the book, All the Honey by poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer and (5) talks by Tara Brach from her podcast.

• Practice Slow Looking or Listening: Sit with one work for 10 minutes without distraction. Notice what arises in your body and heart.

• Respond Creatively: Sketch, write a poem, or journal what this piece awakens in you. It was from doing these exercises that I first began writing poems.

Examples of Comforting or Moving Artistic Creations

Visual Art:

• Van Gogh’s Starry Night (hope through turbulence)

• Kaoru Yamada’s Morning Kitchen (simple pleasures)

• Georgia O’Keeffe’s desert paintings (resilience in stark beauty)

• Carl Larson’s Woman with Cat and Dog (the companionship of animals)

• Kaoru Yamada’s A Quiet Corner (personal sanctuaries)

Poetry:

• Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, All the Honey (Grief and Healing)

• Mary Oliver, Wild Geese (belonging in brokenness)

• David Whyte, Everything Is Waiting for You (gentle invitation to life)

• Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (on solitude and becoming)

• Danusha Laméris, Small Kindnesses (the power of everyday compassion)

• Rupi Kaur, The Sun and Her Flowers (heartache, healing, ancestry)

Music:

• William Ackerman, The impending Death of the Virgin Spirit

• George Winston, December

• Ajeet - Haseya

• Ajeet- Let it Breathe

• East Forest, Music to be Born To

• East Forest and Ram Das, Ram Das

• Tina Malia, The Shores of Avalon

• R. Carolos Nakai, Canyon Trilogy

• Mary Youngblood, Beneath the Raven Moon

• Samuel Barber, Adagio for Strings (grief expressed tenderly)

Movies:

• The Tree of Life (grief, grace, and the cosmic dance)

• Ikiru by Akira Kurosawa (finding meaning at the edge of life)

• Still Alice (fragility and love in the face of loss)

• Dead Poet’s Society ( individuality, conformity, and the cost of suppressed dreams)

• Wild (healing grief, trauma and identity)

• The Way (grief, community, forgiveness and meaning)

• The Shawshank Redemption (endurance, hope, the soul’s refusal to be broken)

• The Whale (redemption and reconnection)

• The Secret life of Walter Mitty (how healing can begin with one small step)

Reflection Exercise: The Art of Stillness

Choose a piece of music or art from one that you love or from the list above

Spend 10 minutes in silence with it. No multitasking, no rushing. Let the experience wash over you.

Afterward, write for 5 minutes:

• What did I feel in my body?

• What beauty did I notice that I usually overlook?

• What truth does this offer about living with loss?

Creative Expression as Inner Alchemy

"Create whatever causes a revolution in your heart." Elizabeth Gilbert

When we create, we step into an ancient rhythm—the rhythm of making meaning out of what could undo us. Writing, painting, dancing, shaping clay—these aren’t just hobbies in times of heartbreak. They’re lifelines.

Through creation, we give form to the formless ache inside us. We don’t create to impress; we create to survive, to listen, to speak the language of the soul when ordinary words fall silent.

Creative expression isn’t about perfection. It’s about presence. It’s about saying, Here is my pain, but also, here is my aliveness.

When we dare to create, we transform heartbreak from an ending into a canvas—a place where beauty and meaning can still emerge.

Why Creativity Heals

• It transforms pain into meaning.

• It returns us to the present moment.

• It gives us a sense of agency when life feels out of control.

Practical Invitations to Create

• Write Letters You Never Send: Express love, anger, grief without fear of judgment.

• Poetry as Prayer: Write a poem that begins with “What I long to tell you…”

• Nature Mandalas: Collect leaves, stones, and flowers to create temporary art as a symbol of impermanence and beauty.

• The Memory Garden: Plant something in honor of the love you hold—an herb, a rose, a tree.

Journaling Prompts for Creative Flow

• What color is my grief today?

• If my heart could speak in images, what would it draw?

• What does healing look like in shape and sound?

I began reading Marcus Aurelius during a sleepless night. One line in particular written by a man from a drastically different place and time from my own resonated with me: “You have power over your mind—not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.” I copied it onto a sticky note and placed it by my bed. Every time I woke with the ache of what I couldn’t control, those words reminded me: The work is here—in my own mind, in my own heart.

The philosopher Iris Murdoch once suggested that art is a tool for “un-selfing”—a way to turn our gaze outward so intensely that our own ego and pain momentarily quiet down. I felt the truth of this one rainy afternoon while scrolling through an online exhibit of the Detroit Institute of Arts while a collection of Windham Hill artists played in the background. For weeks, my world had felt small, cramped by the heavy architecture of my own grief. But as I began to practice "slow looking" with a painting of a winding river, something shifted. I wasn't just a mother carrying a heavy burden; I was a witness to the flow of light and water. In that moment my body began to relax for what seemed like the first time in weeks. I realized that while my personal story had taken an unexpected turn, the broader river of life continued to flow—and there was still a place for me within it.

And then, I began to write. At first, it was a torrent of indignation and sorrow. But slowly, my words became softer. I wrote to empty the heavy weight inside of me. In those pages, I emptied some of my pain and made a little more space for what might eventually grow in its place.

Philosophy gave me perspective. Art gave me beauty. Writing gave my deep grief and hurt a voice. Together, they stitched something in me that I was afraid was torn beyond repair. Do I still long for my little family? Yes. But that longing no longer swallows me whole. I’ve created a life that holds both grief and grace, and in that, I’ve found a quiet kind of peace that I can return to.

Closing Thought

We’ve explored three areas in this substack entry: Philosophy, Art, and Creative Expression. Each offers its own form of solace—thought, beauty, and creation. Together, they form a triad of healing: the mind steadied by wisdom, the heart touched by beauty, and the spirit awakened through making.

Estrangement leaves gaps—empty chairs, unanswered calls, silences that echo. But these practices remind us that life, even in loss, can still hold depth and wonder. Consolation isn’t the absence of sorrow; it’s the gentle presence of meaning alongside it.

We can stop desperately needing closure here. We can choose to live fully to the best of our ability even with the unanswered, we can weave threads of wisdom, beauty, and creativity into the fabric of our days. This is the essence of tragic optimism—the choice to say yes to life, even as it breaks our hearts.

We’re both the authors and the artists of our healing story. No estrangement, however painful, can take that power from us.

Following is another example of the healing power of poetry.

An example of how art can open us up and move us.

It’s Your Turn

Integration Exercise: Three Invitations

Reflect: What has Philosophy offered me? What has Art given me? What music most moves me? What did I discover through Creative Expression?

Write one sentence for each, beginning with:

• Philosophy invites me to…

• Art reminds me that…

• Creativity awakens in me…

A Day of Consolation

Design a personal ritual that blends all three:

• Begin with a short reading from a philosophical or spiritual text.

• Sit with a piece of art or music for five minutes.

• End by creating something—a short reflection, a poem, a sketch, or even a prayer.

Note: Artificial intelligence (AI) was used collaboratively throughout this work to assist with research, drafting, and editorial refinement. AI served as both an interactive tool and as an editor. AI also created around 90% of all art used with this substack.

There’s a dynamic happening in therapy rooms across the country that has only recently been addressed: a number of therapists are diagnosing parents they’ve never met.

It very often happens something like this: An adult child comes to therapy carrying real pain — and often, that pain is legitimate and deserves to be witnessed fully. Over the course of sessions, the therapist hears one perspective, from one person, about a relationship they’ll never directly observe. And somewhere along the way, a word gets used. Narcissistic. Toxic. Emotionally abusive. Sometimes it’s offered gently, as a possibility. Sometimes it’s offered as settled fact. Either way, a diagnosis — or something that functions exactly like one — has now entered the room, attached to a person who has no idea it’s being said, no chance to respond, and no clinical relationship with the person announcing it. Beyond the broader ethical and legal implications, this issue hits home for me on a deeply personal level for two distinct reasons: I know firsthand what it feels like to sit on the receiving end of this dynamic. As a parent navigating estrangement, I’ve experienced the profound pain of being labeled, and judged from afar without ever having been given a voice, a direct conversation, or a chance to present my perspective. And, having sat in the therapist’s chair myself, I hold a deep respect for both the power and responsibility of clinical practice. Seeing the therapeutic space used to render non-clinical, one-sided diagnostic labels feels like a betrayal of true therapeutic work—which should hold space for nuanced, complex human experience rather than flattening individuals into villains in order to validate a single narrative. From my perspective, this can harm both parents and adult children.

It feels really important to me to address why this is of significant concern to me — not to dismiss the real suffering that brings adult children to therapy in the first place, but because I believe that we can hold both truths: the pain is real, and the practice of remote diagnosis is a serious ethical and potential legal problem that deserves far more scrutiny than its received.

The Ethical Violation: The Goldwater Rule and Its Quiet Cousins

Before writing this article, I, a retired therapist, had never heard of the Goldwater Rule — a guideline of the American Psychiatric Association, established in 1973 after psychiatrists publicly diagnosed presidential candidate Barry Goldwater from a distance. The rule states, in essence: you cannot offer a professional opinion about the mental health of an individual you have not personally examined, and for whom you do not have proper authorization to discuss publicly.

The APA’s rule was written with public figures in mind. But the underlying ethical principle — that diagnosis requires direct clinical assessment — extends logically, and I’d argue morally, to private life as well. The American Psychological Association’s Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct (Standard 9.01) states that psychologists “base opinions contained in recommendations, reports, and diagnostic or evaluative statements... on information and techniques sufficient to substantiate their findings.”

The National Association of Social Work code of ethics states (Section 1.04) “Social workers should provide services only within their areas of competence, based on education, training, and direct experience. Diagnosing someone you’ve never met violates this principle because it assumes knowledge of their mental state without assessment” and (4.04) Making diagnostic statements about someone you haven’t evaluated is considered “unethical and professionally irresponsible.”

Professional ethics consistently assert what I believe most of us know (when we take the time to think about it) through simple common sense; a single client’s narrative, however sincere, isn’t sufficient to substantiate a diagnosis of a third party who the therapist has never formally assessed.

Yet in the estrangement space, this line seems to be getting crossed constantly — often unintentionally, sometimes carelessly, and occasionally as a marketing strategy for therapists who’ve built entire practices and social media platforms around confidently labeling absent parents.

Why This Happens: The Seduction of a Single Story

I completely understand the impulse. When someone sits across from you in genuine anguish, describing years of hurt, there’s an almost gravitational pull toward validation — and sometimes validation gets confused with diagnosis. Naming an experience (”what happened to you sounds really painful”) is clinically appropriate. Naming a person’s psychological structure whom the therapist has never met (”your mother is a narcissist”) is not only inappropriate, it’s unethical.

There’s also a structural reality: therapists almost always only hear one side. This isn’t a criticism of the client — it’s simply the nature of individual therapy. A therapist sees a curated, emotionally organized, memory-filtered narrative, told by someone whose nervous system may still be activated by the very relationship being described. That narrative deserves compassion and belief in how the client experienced the events he or she is describing. It doesn’t, however, constitute clinical evidence about the accused parent’s internal psychology, intentions, or diagnosable condition.

I know what it is to be the parent whose been characterized — accurately or not — by a therapist who never asked me a single question.

The Legal Exposure Practitioners Rarely Consider

Setting aside ethics for a moment, there’s a real legal risk here too:

Defamation exposure. If a therapist’s diagnostic language reaches the parent — through a client relaying it, through documentation subpoenaed in a custody or family dispute, or through public content — an unfounded diagnostic claim about a real, identifiable person could constitute grounds for a defamation lawsuit, particularly if it’s demonstrably false and causes reputational harm.

Scope of practice violations. Many licensing boards require diagnoses to be based on direct evaluation. A diagnosis rendered about a non-client, absent any clinical contact, may fall outside the therapist’s documented scope of practice and could be flagged in a licensing board complaint.

Custody and legal proceedings. In cases where estrangement intersects with custody disputes, elder care decisions, or inheritance disputes, a therapist’s informal diagnostic language — even said casually in session notes or in a letter of support — can be weaponized in court, presented as expert clinical opinion despite missing the foundational assessment required to support it.

Duty to the absent party. Some ethicists argue there’s an emerging (if not yet fully codified) duty of care to the third party being discussed — not a duty to treat them, but a duty not to cause them foreseeable harm through careless characterization. I’m encouraged by the work that the Coalition for Restoring Ethical Standards in Mental Health is doing to address this and other issues.

What Ethical Practice Actually Looks Like

None of what I’ve written here is to assert that therapists should refuse to explore estrangement, minimize a client’s pain, or avoid naming harmful patterns of behavior the client experienced. What I’m arguing for are therapists to practice ethically in dealing with estranged families.

Ethical practice in estrangement work means:

1. Focusing on the client’s experience, not the absent parent’s psychology.

2. Naming behaviors and impacts, not diagnosing the absent party.

3. Holding complexity — most estrangements involve mutual pain, miscommunication, generational differences and expectations, and imperfect people on both sides. There isn’t always a clear villain and a victim.

4. Refusing to become an instrument of a client’s narrative-building when that narrative requires a certainty that the therapist can’t actually have.

A Closing Thought

I definitely haven’t written this as an accusation against adult children in pain, during the years I practiced as a therapist, I’ve witnessed the suffering of many adult children who’ve been deeply wounded by interactions with their parents. I know all too well that their suffering is real, and therapy should be a place where it’s fully honored. My intention here is to offer a caution to my own profession, and as someone whose own estrangement has taught me something both painful and important: being supported by a good therapist should never require someone else, absent and voiceless, to be turned into a diagnosis.

I believe that the most rigorous, skilled and humane clinical work does something harder than labeling. It sits with ambiguity. It holds the client’s pain without always requiring a villain to explain it. And it leaves room — always — for the possibility that the people we’re estranged from are, like us, more complicated than any diagnosis could ever hold.

Twisted

In the quiet of the therapy room,

an adult child’s grief is spoken,

raw, searching, aching for comfort

and validation.

The therapist, eager to soothe the wound,

reaches for a word heavy enough to carry the pain -

narcissist, toxic, abuser.

And somewhere, a label settles over a face

the therapist has never seen,

someone with no voice in that room.

But true validation doesn’t

always need a villain

to make the suffering legitimate.

It’s possible to hold a hurting heart

without drawing a monster in the dark.

The truth is rarely a clean line;

it lives in the misty gray,

where two imperfect lives,

estranged and aching,

remain far more complex

than any one story

or clinical category

could ever hold.

It’s Your Turn

The Journaling Prompt: Explore a time in your own life where it felt incredibly satisfying to make someone the absolute "bad guy" in order to make your own hurt feel justified. What happens when you try to strip away that label and look at the situation through the lens of "the difficult gray"?

The Journaling Prompt: Family estrangement often forces both sides into a rigid narrative of "the victim" versus "the offender." Write a reflective piece exploring the "difficult gray" of your relationship with your child. What are the messy, complicated realities of your family history that a simple right-versus-wrong story completely leaves out? How can you honor your own pain while still holding space for the reality that your child is also hurting?

What if our deepest wounds aren't punishments, but a custom-made syllabus for our souls?

Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterward. Vernon Law

These days, I like to imagine Earth not just as the troubled but still beautiful planet we live on, but as a vast, living classroom — an ancient school where each soul arrives with a unique syllabus. The lessons aren't printed in textbooks or delivered by PowerPoint. They unfold in the rhythms of daily life: in the ache of loss, the joy of connection, the sting of betrayal, and the quiet triumph of forgiveness.

Research suggests that we heal from heartbreak most fully when we can recognize the lessons woven into our losses. Since beginning this Substack, that’s what I’ve been doing—reading, researching, and listening closely for the teachings held inside my own broken heart.

The wise ones tell us to stay open to life’s instruction, to move through the world with the spirit of an eager student—curious, humble, willing to learn as much from what hurts as from what heals. They say this kind of openness has a quiet, transformative power. It can change the way we live with grief, helping us see it not as an enemy to endure but as one of our most profound teachers.

When we approach life this way, even our hardest challenges—the ones that bring us to our knees—begin to shimmer with unexpected meaning. Suffering itself starts to whisper something essential about who we are and who we might yet become.

And yet, even as I write these words, something in me stirs. The creature in my belly grumbles—uneasy, not entirely convinced—reminding me that wisdom and resistance often rise together. More than once, I’ve believed I’d finally mastered a lesson that would carry me forward, only to find myself back at what feels perilously close to the beginning: sleepless nights, a heavy heart, unhelpful (and unhealthy) thoughts, waning energy, and that damned, insistent rumbling in my belly.

So I return to the lesson again—turning it over, listening anew, and processing it here in this Substack. I’m repeating what I most need to hear, teaching what I most need to learn. You may very well be grasping the lesson before I do, and if so, forgive me for the repetition.

I comfort myself with the hope that whatever wisdom I manage to gather—even if I haven’t managed to fully integrate it or live it myself —might still become a balm I can offer you. Not a salve made from theory, but from having survived my own shattering.

It’s been other parents who’ve walked through the pain of estrangement themselves—who’ve known the disorienting confusion of a story that doesn’t match their own and who’ve felt the ache of an empty holiday table—who’ve offered me far greater comfort than any book or professional.

Recently, while teaching and facilitating a circle on aging, I was reminded once again that when people look back over long lives, many discover that their deepest wounds have quietly become some of their most powerful teachings. In this Earth School we all seem to inhabit, the students inevitably become the teachers, and the curriculum very often isn’t found in textbooks but gets written in the indelible ink of our lived experience.

How do we recognize our primary lessons in this earth school? Maybe they arrive disguised as repetition—patterns looping through our lives like recurring dreams, returning again and again until we finally stop and pay attention. Maybe our deepest lessons live in the tension between compassion and self‑protection, between the longing to hold on and the harder, often necessary work of letting go. Or just maybe they announce themselves through emotional intensity.

When I was nearly five, my parents divorced, and my mother moved with my baby sister and me to Connecticut to live with our grandparents. The separation from my father was devastating. By the time my parents remarried and we returned to Maine, I’d become an anxious child diagnosed with what was called at the time, “nervous ulcers,” who became physically ill whenever her parents argued—terrified that another rupture was coming, and that we’d be uprooted again.

We know now that a child’s sense of safety is shaken when they witness their parents fighting. For children raised in high‑conflict homes—or those who have already endured the rupture of divorce—even ordinary disagreements can feel overwhelming, echoing earlier losses. One of my primary lessons, written early and indelibly, has been learning how to move through conflict without my nervous system slipping into dysregulation.

And then, some of our lessons whisper to us through symbols, archetypes, and the stories that reach into our hearts and quietly rearrange something—like the wild, bone‑deep tales of Clarissa Pinkola Estés, or the image of a small schoolhouse nestled inside a snow globe, reminding us that the whole wide world is our classroom.

We teach best what we most need to learn Richard Bach

I wonder if the clearest sign of our unique soul’s curriculum is revealed in what we feel most called to teach or carry forward. The very thing we struggled longest to learn—or the lesson that cost us the most—often becomes the gift we feel most compelled to offer the world. Looking back, it’s no surprise that the very first course I (a shy, poor girl from Aroostook County) ever developed and taught was on Women and Self‑Esteem.

There’s something deeply reassuring about imagining a world in which our wounds might ripen into wisdom, where our own searching becomes a map for others who feel lost in the same wilderness we’ve stumbled through. Each of us, in our own way, becomes a living library—volumes written in heartbreak and hard‑won grace, waiting to be read, remembered, and passed on.

And just maybe this is Earth School’s most elegant truth: that nothing is wasted, not even our pain. It’s a theme I return to again and again in this Substack, and one I keep needing to repeat to myself. Because to imagine that the pain and unimaginable loss my husband and I’ve carried over these past four-plus years has been for absolutely nothing is devastating.

When we fully embrace the belief that life on Earth is a school, we’re more likely, I suspect, to become a steward of wisdom — to make a quiet, sacred vow: I will not waste my suffering. And in honoring that vow, we may find ourselves offering just a little more light against another’s darkness, one hard-won lesson at a time.

As I imagine Earth as a kind of soul school, I picture each of us carrying a curriculum uniquely attuned to our deepest wounds and most persistent patterns. The lessons themselves aren’t ours to choose—they find us, ready or not. How many times must we repeat them before their teaching truly settles into our bones? The answer, I suspect, depends largely on us.

I’m reminded of a line from an old Dan Fogelberg song that has stayed with me across the years: “Don’t forget the lessons your mistakes have taught you, or you’ll learn them all over again.”

“We are like children building a sand castle. We embellish it with beautiful shells, bits of driftwood, and pieces of colored glass. The castle is ours, off limits to others. We’re willing to attack if others threaten to hurt it. Yet despite all our attachment, we know that the tide will inevitably come in and sweep the sand castle away. The trick is to enjoy it fully but without clinging, and when the time comes, let it dissolve back into the sea.”
Pema Chödrön,

When I was a child, I clung to just about everything — my parents, my best friend, a memory, my pennies, even the last lingering light of a summer day. Holding on so tightly wasn't just a quirk of being a sensitive child. It was the start of a lifelong pattern, an early rehearsal for a struggle I didn't have words for yet.

By curling my fingers around the pennies in my palm, willing with my whole little heart for the dark to stay away or for the flowers not to wilt and die, I was practicing a quiet, futile resistance against the natural ebb and flow of existence. I believed, with a child’s simple and innocent logic, that the strength of my grip might somehow offer the constancy and stability I so desperately needed. What I couldn’t yet understand was that the world doesn’t negotiate with our longing—it simply keeps spinning.

By trying to hold onto daylight or summer, tethering myself to what was already passing, I was unknowingly preparing myself for a much larger confrontation with reality.

That relentless holding on — white-knuckled and tender all at once — would eventually become the very weight that pulled me toward my most difficult, and most necessary lessons.

In looking back over my life, it seems to me now that my primary curriculum may very well be based in how to let go. Judith Viorst, in one of my favorite and most heavily underlined books, Necessary Losses, wrote words that have echoed through my psyche since reading them four decades ago:

“We cannot deeply love anything without becoming vulnerable to loss. And we cannot become separate people, responsible people, connected people, reflective people without some losing and leaving and letting go…The road to human development is paved with renunciation. Throughout our life we grow by giving up. We give up some of our deepest attachments to others. We give up certain cherished parts of ourselves. We must confront, in the dreams we dream, as well as in our intimate relationships, all that we never will have and never will be."

It’s been echoed in every chapter of my life. In friendships that faded, in dreams that dissolved, and the ache of watching my parents suffer, grow old and vanish into memory. But I never quite grasped it. I clung. I tried to fix, to hold, to preserve until one day, under circumstances I couldn’t have possibly predicted, I stopped.

There are so many ways we abandon ourselves. We do it quietly, almost imperceptibly at first. We say yes when our body whispers no. We soften our truth to keep the peace. We swallow the ache, the insult, the hurt, the injustice, because we fear losing a relationship more than we fear being unappreciated, taken advantage of, or misunderstood.

But self‑abandonment has a way of accumulating. Each small betrayal of our own needs becomes a thread, and over time those threads weave themselves into a pattern we can no longer ignore. Eventually, life delivers a moment that exposes the whole tapestry — a moment when the cost of silencing ourselves becomes unmistakably clear.

For me, this occurred when a relationship I would have staked my life on — one I couldn’t have imagined surviving without — blew up and burned down.

The pain that followed was unlike anything I’d ever known. It didn’t arrive cleanly or all at once. It came in waves, in ambushes, in the hollow silence of ordinary moments — her birthday, holidays, a grandchild’s milestone witnessed only in my imagination. It occupied and diminished countless moments, and settled into my bones like weather.

And then came the lessons. Brutal, relentless, arriving one after another like waves I had no choice but to learn to swim through — lessons in releasing what I couldn’t control, in loosening the grip I’d spent a lifetime perfecting, in releasing a version of my future I not only took for granted, but trusted completely.

I used to think that letting go meant giving up. Now I understand it differently. Letting go is a surrender, yes, but not abandonment. It’s the conscious release of control, of expectation, of the carefully tended illusions we sometimes confuse with love itself.

In this Earth School I’m attending, I’ve come to imagine love as the primary teacher — and a paradoxical one at that. Sometimes love asks us to hold on with everything we have. Sometimes it asks us, quietly and firmly, to open our hands. And sometimes — the hardest times — we don’t get to choose.

I’m still learning. Slowly. Imperfectly. Some days more clumsily than others.

Maybe my daughter and grandchildren carry their own lessons within this brokenness. Maybe our estrangement — as painful and bewildering as it’s been — is woven into each of our curriculums in ways I can’t see, can’t control, and may never fully understand. I can’t know what’s being asked of them. I can’t know what this chapter of their lives is quietly teaching.

But I can choose — every day, in small and deliberate ways, to keep learning my own lessons. With grace. With humility. With the kind of love that doesn’t demand return, doesn’t keep score, and doesn’t require acknowledgement to be real. With the kind of love, I’m learning, that sometimes has to be enough on its own. And I’m gently encouraging you to be open to your own lessons, however painful.

And so I continue — not because the path is clear, but because continuing is itself the lesson. I carry my grief the way one carries something precious and heavy: carefully, with both hands, and with the growing understanding that the weight itself has something to teach me. I’m no longer waiting for the pain to end before I start living again. I’ve learned, slowly and at significant cost, that life doesn’t pause for our healing — it is our healing, if we’re open to the medicine it’s offering.

In this Earth School of ours, may we each learn our lessons well. May we find the courage to stay enrolled even when the curriculum breaks our hearts. And may we trust — even in our most broken moments — that we were never meant to graduate alone.

Love,

A Fellow Student…

Earth School

Some say we come here to learn. Not facts, not formulas— but the kind of knowing that lives in our marrow, the kind that only breaks us open to teach.

Each soul arrives with at least one primary lesson stitched into its center. Mine, I think, is letting go.

I didn’t know that at first. I thought love meant holding on— to people, to roles, to the idea that I could keep what I cherished if I just held on tight enough.

But the world kept peeling things away. Friends. Dreams. My parents. Versions of myself.

The rupture with my child didn’t happen quietly. It came with accusations as sharp as shattered glass.

Then came the silence. Not the peaceful kind, but the kind that hums with all that’s been undone, and words that can’t be unsaid.

I resisted for a long time. And then I sat with the ache. Not to fix it, but to listen. And I heard it— the lesson again. Let go. Not in anger. Not in defeat. But with acceptance.

Let go, because love doesn’t always promise presence. Because even a mother may need to release what she once held in her own body.

If this is Earth School, then letting go may be my final exam. To love without tether. To bless without return. To honor my own truths. To stand in this emptied space and still call it sacred.

Core Lesson Exploration

• What do you believe is your soul’s primary lesson in this lifetime? How has it shown up repeatedly?

• Reflect on a time when life felt like a “classroom.” What was the lesson, and did you learn it—or did it come back harder?

• If Earth is a school, what kind of student are you? Resistant? Curious? Exhausted? Hopeful?

Rewriting the Lesson

• If you could rewrite the story of your estrangement as a sacred lesson, how would it begin, unfold, and end?

• What blessings—however small—have emerged from the pain?

Integration and Wisdom

• What do you now understand about yourself that you didn’t before this experience?

• How has this lesson shaped the way you love others? The way you love yourself?

• Imagine yourself years from now, having fully learned this lesson. What advice would that future self give you today?

Note: Approximate 90 % of the images (including this one) used in Poetry as a Path to Healing are created by AI.

“I assembled the fragments of myself that were coming back together in accordance with the elements - fire, water, earth and air. Each had their way with me… Fire warmed me and burned my house down. Water quenched and held me under until I drowned. Earth gave me her plants to heal, and her vines strangled my old way of being. Air breathed me whole by day and held a pillow over my face at night. All were teachers with shadow sides...” Pikxie Lighthorse

In the wake of becoming estranged from my only child and grandchildren, my concentration shattered completely. I couldn’t read a book from start to finish — couldn’t hold onto the contents of a paragraph, let alone a chapter. I’d find myself returning to the same few sentences, again and again, the thread dissolving before I could grasp it, my mind too fractured by anger and grief to do what it had always done with ease.

Sleep came in agonizing fragments, an hour, sometimes two, before I woke up. When I finally managed to get back to sleep, the cycle repeated. I’d lie in the silence of those early morning hours, exhausted and despairing, with nothing but grief, frustration, and the quiet for company.

Eventually I began listening to audiobooks. Some offered distraction. Some offered entertainment. A rare few offered something deeper — the sense of being accompanied through the darkness by a voice that understood something essential about suffering and was willing to speak honestly about it. Pixie Lighthorse’s The Wound Makes the Medicine, read in her own low and soothing voice, was one of those.

Born from the grief of her divorce and rooted in her Choctaw heritage, Lighthorse’s essays explore healing landscape with the authority of someone whose gone all the way to the bottom of her own pain and returned with something worth sharing. Her framework is based on the four elements — Earth, Water, Wind, and Fire — the ancient, primal forces of the natural world reimagined as companions for the broken hearted.

The book’s central premise is that our wounds very often make their own medicine. That the breaking down of old systems, the dissolution of the self we thought we were, and the life we thought we’d have, creates what Lighthorse calls a paste of ash and blood that draws out infection, draws out what no longer belongs, and prepares the wound, however slowly and however painfully, for genuine healing.

She writes: “This is not a book about a marriage ending or the loss of a grandiose dream but of everything loss sets off inside us, and time calls us to finally tend to... Loss is death, and losing something of great importance challenges us to get very close with nature, as well as our innate nature to heal.”

Lying in the dark, listening to her read those words in her own voice, I felt a well defended part of myself begin, almost imperceptibly, to soften.

The Wound as Teacher

Lighthorse joins a long lineage of wise voices — healers, mystics, depth psychologists, and ordinary human beings who insist that our wounds aren’t evidence of our failure. Instead, if we’re willing to sit with them long enough and honestly enough, they can become both essential and demanding teachers.

“Heartache,” she assures, “is the midwife that can birth you into new levels of healing.”

I listened to those words in the darkness of my room and felt the questions that I’d been asking grow a little braver, a little more insistent:

What if the closed and locked door between my daughter and me is, in fact, another kind of opening?

What if my pain isn’t a dead end but a passage?

What if I don’t need to transcend my suffering, or outrun it, or force my way past it — but just listen to it? To sit with it long enough to hear what it may have to say?

These questions didn’t arrive with answers attached. But in asking them yet again and being willing to hold them open rather than prematurely forcing a resolution has, I believe, helped shift how I’ve been moving through the experience of this heartbreak.

The Four Elements as Companions:

When our mind is completely overwhelmed, when grief occupies every room of our interior lives and has left little space for us to think clearly or find our bearings, abstract frameworks, no matter how wise, can feel impossibly distant. Lighthorse suggests that during these times, we might need something older. Something that doesn’t require our thinking minds but rather can be felt in our bodies when our bodies have forgotten how to feel safe. In her essays, Lighthorse draws from the four elements of the natural world as a framework for healing emotional pain and trauma. When our minds are utterly overwhelmed, each element becomes a companion, a guide, and a steady way back into our own bodies.

Earth: The Ground That Holds What Breaks

Earth is the first medicine Lighthorse offers — and perhaps the most fundamental.

When estrangement shatters our sense of identity — when the role that so often organized our days and anchored our sense of self has been suddenly and involuntarily altered — earth can steady us. It reminds us, in the wordless language of the physical world, that we still belong to something ancient and permanent. That beneath the fracturing of the story we thought we were living, we still have substance. We still have worth. We still belong to the earth from which we came, and that will, in its own unhurried time, help restore us.

When I sit on the bare ground — my hands resting on the grass and my back against the trunk of a tree that’s weathered more storms than I’ll ever know — I feel the quiet truth of what Lighthorse is pointing toward. I feel held in that moment.

Earth is the realm of slow, invisible growth — the place where seeds dwell in the darkness, undisturbed and apparently inert, gathering what they need before they’re ready to break through the surface. There’s no rushing this process. There’s no forcing it. The seed doesn’t apologize for its long stillness in the dark. It simply waits, and gathers, and when the time is genuinely right, it stretches upwards towards the light.

It’s the period where the seed is submerged completely in the soil that Lighthorse calls the necessity of wintering — the period of deep rest, interior stillness, and quiet self-nurturing that needs to happen before any visible transformation can occur. It’s not stagnation. It’s the time the soul requires before it can bloom.

Water: Permission to Feel What’s Been Held Back

If Earth holds us, Water moves us.

Lighthorse names Water as the element of emotional honesty — the force that dissolves the rigid, exhausting cultural pressure to be strong, stay positive, keep it together and offers, in its place, something far more human and far more healing: permission. Permission to cry without apology. Permission to let the grief flow rather than stagnate. Permission to soften the stories that have hardened inside us over months and years of holding on.

Tears, she insists, are never weakness. They’re never evidence that we’ve failed to cope or failed to heal. They’re the body’s own intelligence — its ancient, trustworthy way of refusing to carry indefinitely what’s become too heavy for us to hold.

Just as water cleanses the physical earth — carrying away what’s accumulated, dissolving what’s become impacted, making space for what’s trying to grow, its medicine does the same for our interior landscape. It helps wash away the residue of old stories. The accumulated sediment of self-blame. The emotional exhaustion that settles into our bodies after a prolonged period of struggle, vigilance, and grief. It offers, in the place of all that residue, something the estranged heart rarely allows itself: a clean slate. A sanctuary of renewal.

Water keeps finding its way. When it encounters a massive boulder or a collapsed path, it doesn’t force its way through with rigid aggression; it patiently, fluidly bends, flows around the obstacle, and carves a new path forward. It represents psychological flexibility and resilience. Water medicine helps us accept the reality of an estrangement with a beloved(s) or a broken dream, guiding us to adapt to a new landscape rather than shattering ourselves against it.

One of the most profound gifts of water is its ability to hold us without our having to exert any effort. It requires absolute surrender; the more you fight the water, the harder it is to float. For those of us who’ve been stuck in a hyper-vigilant state, constantly holding everything together, water offers a rare space where we can relax and be supported.

I experienced this during the first summer following my estrangement from my daughter and grandchildren.

I spent hours in the waters of Lake Pocasset that summer — floating from my house, through the shallow channel, under the spidery bridge, into the wider water of Mill Pond while tears flowed freely down my face. The lake didn’t ask me to explain myself. It didn’t offer silver linings or suggest I look on the bright side. It simply received me — all of me, the grief and the rage and the bewilderment and the love that had nowhere left to go — and held me in its cool, unhurried, entirely reliable embrace.

Looking back at that tender and agonizing time, I understand now what I could only feel then: the lake was that place where I truly allowed myself to crack open. To just be with my pain, completely, honestly, and without defense. And the waters of Pocasset and Mill pond did what water does. They soothed. They cleansed. They held my body when I could barely support myself. And the water asked nothing of me in return except the willingness to float. When was the last time you allowed water to hold you?

Air: The Breath That Clears the Mind’s Tight Fist

Air, asserts Lighthorse, is the element of perspective and spaciousness, stepping in to interrupt the obsessive mental loops that so often accompany estrangement. It can loosen the suffocating grip of self-blame, catastrophic thinking, and the unhelpful stories we tell ourselves about what happened. Air enables us to breathe deeply again—both literally and symbolically. It allows new thoughts and ideas to drift in and out of our consciousness, reminding us that nothing, not even this agonizing pain, is permanent.

Air is never stationary; it’s constantly moving, shifting, and capable of carrying new seeds across great distances. It’s the ultimate reminder that nothing in nature remains fixed forever. Air medicine, says Lighthorse, reminds us that even the heaviest, most agonizing emotional states will eventually shift. It can foster fresh insights, new creative possibilities, and alternative meanings to gently drift into the spaces left vacant by old, shattered expectations.

The most immediate, accessible access point to Air medicine is our own respiration. When anxiety strikes, our breathing becomes shallow and restricted, signaling to the nervous system that we ‘re in danger. Deep, intentional breathing serves as an immediate physiological brake on panic. It expands our chests, oxygenates our cells, and gently reminds the nervous system that, in this moment, it’s safe to expand.

Inhabiting the simple rhythm of mindful breathing was what allowed me to soothe my overactive nervous system and became my anchor, tethering me to the present and quieting the panic that threatened to consume those early, lonely, difficult days and sleepless nights.

Fire: The Alchemy That Transforms Without Destroying

Of the four elements, Fire is probably the most misunderstood — and the most feared.

We associate it, instinctively, with destruction. With rage. With the consuming force that takes what exists and reduces it to ash. And so when life brings us to the fire — when grief or loss or rupture delivers us to the edge of something that burns — our first impulse is to back away. To protect what remains. To escape the heat.

But Lighthorse understands fire differently. Fire, in her framework, isn’t the element of destruction. It’s the element of refinement. Of alchemy. Of the ancient, alchemical process by which raw material — ore, grief, identity, the stories we’ve been telling ourselves about who we are and what we deserve, is subjected to intense heat and emerges from that heat transformed. Not destroyed. Not diminished. But clarified. Purified. Freed from what was never essential and left, at last, with what is.

When we’re trapped in the cold of estrangement — when loss has settled into our bodies as a kind of chronic chill, when helplessness, shame, and despair have taken up residence in the places where self-worth once lived — what we need isn’t more analysis. Not more rehearsal of what went wrong. Not more careful management of a grief that we’ve tried to manage, contain, and suppress far beyond what our nervous systems can sustain.

We need warmth. We need the fierce, clarifying, life-restoring heat of Fire.

Lighthorse’s fire medicine can help us reclaim what the long, cold chill of grief has dampened, and in some cases, extinguished: the vital spark of agency. The strength to set a boundary and hold it. The reconnection to the life force that was always there, buried, maybe, beneath years of self-abandonment and loss, but never fully gone. Fire metaphorically burns away the accumulated weight of what’s been layered on top of it until our essential, core self begins to blaze again.

Fire is an active, radiating element. It doesn’t permit stagnation. It doesn’t allow suffering to remain inert and meaningless — it insists, with a kind of relentless creative urgency, that heat be converted into light. That what has burned be given a purpose beyond the burning.

In clinical psychology, this process has a name: Post-Traumatic Growth (PTG) — the well-documented phenomenon in which individuals who’ve survived profound trauma can emerge from it not just having survived, but have genuinely grown as the result of working through the ordeal. Very often more compassionate, more resilient, and more deeply and authentically themselves than they were before the fire found them.

Fire provides the energy for this transformation. It fuels the repair of our broken stories, the slow, courageous, necessary movement away from self-blame and toward a broader, wiser, more truthful understanding of what happened and who we are in its aftermath. It doesn’t rewrite the past. But it changes the relationship we have with it.

A common ritual utilizing fire medicine is where participants take a piece of paper and write down something that they’re ready to stop carrying. For an estranged parent it might involve writing down the unearned shame, the catastrophic “what-ifs,” or the painful accusations by their adult children that have left them feeling devastated and stuck. Next, the participant brings the paper to a fire pit, a fireplace, or a heat-safe bowl where the paper is lit on fire and allowed to burn until the words are turned to ash. The act of writing down a painful narrative and setting it aflame is a physical, embodied representation of what fire medicine represents: alchemy, boundary-setting, and active personal power and autonomy.

Taken together, working with the natural elements forms a beautiful, continuous healing cycle:

• Earth medicine steadies the body.

• Water medicine frees the emotions.

• Wind medicine clears the mind.

• Fire medicine transforms the spirit.

The Science of Rebuilding: Post-Traumatic Growth

Lighthorse is part of a long lineage of thinkers who assert that humans possess an astonishing capacity to not only endure suffering, but to be transformed and strengthened by it.

Post Traumatic Growth (PTG) isn’t about denying pain, and it isn’t toxic positivity or a forced search for a “silver lining.” It’s the very real possibility that by working through our grief and asking the hard questions, we can discover new strengths, deeper meaning, and healthier ways of being in the world—even as the ache remains.

Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun were the first to write about Post Traumatic Growth and identified five key domains where people regularly experience growth after trauma. Following is a look at each domain through the lens of parental estrangement:

1. Increased Personal Strength

When an estrangement begins, the immediate question is often, How will I survive this? I certainly asked it. In my darkest moments, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to survive; the pain felt unbearable. And yet, here I am—still breathing, still standing.

Each day that we endure the hurt, the grief, and the longing is proof of a quiet resilience we might have not known that we had. As a parent in an estrangement support group I belong to shared: “I never thought I could get through this, but I have. I’m stronger than I ever would have believed.”

Journal Prompt and Practice

• Reflection: What have you done this past year that reveals your inner strength? In what ways are you more resilient today than you were before?

• Practice: Write a short letter to yourself acknowledging your courage. Begin with: “Dear [Name], I want to thank you for...”

2. Deeper Appreciation for Life

Estrangement initially narrows our world, making joy feel entirely out of reach. But as healing takes root, many parents report a surprising shift: a greater awareness of what Terry Tempest Williams calls the holy ordinary—birdsong at dawn, a warm cup of tea, a shared laugh—become treasures. Pain sharpens our perception. It reminds us of the fragility of life, and within that awareness, we often rediscover wonder.

Journal Prompt and Practice

• Prompt: What are some holy ordinaries that you noticed today?

• Practice: Keep a brief “Three Moments Journal.” Each night, note three small things you appreciated during the day—moments you might have rushed past before. This simple ritual gently retrains the brain toward presence and gratitude.

3. Improved Relationships

A profound loss often exposes both the fragility of certain bonds and the unexpected depth of others. While some people distance themselves, others move in closer. Many parents discover deep, comforting connections with those who truly know how to truly listen and hold our pain without attempts to cheer us up or bombard us with advice. Whether by leaning into partners, family and friends or joining support groups to share a common journey, we find our lifelines.

“I lost an incredibly important relationship, but I need to remember that I also gained several deeper ones,” one parent observed. “A person I wasn’t particularly close to before becoming estranged from my son has become my anchor,” shared another.

• Prompt: Whose shown up for you during this difficult time? How can you nurture these specific connections?

• Practice: Reach out to someone whose supported you and express your gratitude with a simple message: “Your presence has meant more to me than you know.”

4. New Possibilities

Estrangement can feel like the total dissolution of the future you envisioned. Yet, over time, it can open unexpected paths for personal expression. Returning to a long-neglected passion—like writing, painting, or gardening—can deeply nourish us.

For most of my life, I’ve lived mostly looking outward.

Caretaking wasn’t just what I did — it was, for a very long time, who I understood myself to be. A caretaker. The one who held things together, who tended to everyone else’s needs that left little room for the quieter question of what I myself might need. The nurturer. Self-care existed only at the margins of my life before my estrangement from my daughter and grandchildren. I acknowledged its importance in principle, but seldom practiced it.

And then my family broke apart.

And emotional survival — not the idea of survival, but the genuine, daily, embodied practice of it, required something I’d never quite managed to fully offer myself: the same quality of nurturing attention I’d spent decades pouring outward, turned, finally, towards myself.

This wasn’t a graceful transition. It wasn’t a conscious, well-considered decision made from a place of clarity and self-possession. It was the desperate attempts of a woman who’d lost a relationships she’d focused nineteen years of her life on and had remained living in the center of her heart for the last thirty-five.

I began writing again and have written more in the past four years than I had during the twenty years before. I wrote poems that named what was difficult to name, prose that attempted to express what felt unmetabolizable, pages in my journal that became, in my worst moments, the most reliable sanctuary I had.

Engaging in much more self-care and offering myself the time to write have been significant gifts that I’ve given myself. They haven’t made up for what I’ve lost. Nothing does. While I still grieve deeply over the loss of my parents, the absence of my daughter and grandchildren from my life remains the most profound and persistent ache I carry — and no amount of self-care, however genuine, however sustaining, silences the pain of their absence.

Still, in the grief, through the grief, and because of the grief — a voice, a practice, and a purpose has grown into this substack. Even while I still grieve and it still haunts me, my life has also continued to open — this imperfect, unexpected, strange, surprisingly rich life exists right along side of all the really hard stuff.

Both are true. Both are mine.

• Prompt and Practice: List three activities you once loved or have always wanted to try. Commit just 30 minutes to exploring one of them this week, and just notice how it feels. Notice if it makes your day go any differently or if you feel or think even the tiniest bit differently.

5. Spiritual and Existential Growth

Estrangement cracks open the massive, foundational questions of identity: Who am I if I’m not an active mother or father? What matters now? For some, this triggers a deeper spiritual seeking. For others, it fosters a much broader, more tender view of what it means to be human. Before my own estrangement, I mistakenly assumed that all estranged parents with very few exceptions must have been ‘bad’ parents. After all, why else would an adult child turn away or verbally attack and shame a loving parent? Now, I understand so much better. This painful experience has dismantled my own judgments, teaching me to more fully appreciate that there’s always another complex perspective when a relational rupture occurs.

• Journal Prompt: What has this journey taught you about love, about yourself, what it means to be human, or about what truly gives your life meaning?

The Core of Healing: Meaning-Making

One of the most consistent findings in trauma research is that psychological well-being is heavily tied to our ability to create meaning from our experiences. A major life event that threatens our core identity—such as being a loving parent—causes a profound shattering of a story that we took for granted. And then, all too often, shame floods into the void, worsened by a culture that routinely equates estrangement with parental failure, although this perspective appears to be shifting somewhat as more parents and more experienced and therapists trained in family estrangement speak out.

Research highlights that parents who intentionally engage in changing their stories about the estrangement (narrative reconstruction) from “I failed as a parent” to “This is a complex relationship between two adults with unmet needs”—experience a huge reduction in self-blame, a greater sense of personal agency, and vastly improved psychological flexibility.

In fact, emerging research and clinical observations suggest that a significant number of estranged parents eventually experience post-traumatic growth by:

• Redefining their identity beyond parenthood: Moving from “I am only a mother” to “I am a whole person with unique gifts to offer.”

• Investing in a “chosen family”: Building reciprocal, caring relationships with friends, community members, or extended family.

• Turning pain into purpose: Expressing their innate nurturing instincts by volunteering, mentoring, or supporting fellow estranged parents.

Experiencing Post Traumatic Growth won’t erase our pain, but it offers it a meaningful place within a much bigger story. I’m trying to remind myself each and every day that our lives are so much richer and more complex than even our most devastating experiences.

Anyone who has ever walked a genuinely difficult road knows how exhausting it is to carry a pack filled with things that no longer serve the journey.

What do estranged parents carry? We carry rumination — the endless, exhausting rehearsal of what was said and what wasn’t said, what was done and what was left undone, what might have been different if only we’d known then what we know now. We replay the conversations. We rewrite the history. We return, again and again, to the moments we most wish we could reclaim — as though the intensity of our returning might somehow change what happened there. It never changes it. It only keeps us living in it.

We carry self-blame — that particular and persistent weight that estrangement places on a mother’s shoulders with such cruel efficiency. The tribunal that convenes, reliably, in the small hours of the morning. The inventory of failures, real and imagined, rehearsed with a thoroughness we would never apply to anyone else we loved. The belief, held somewhere beneath rational thought, that if we had simply been better — more patient, more present, more perceptive, more something — none of this would have happened.

We carry anger — and this one deserves particular tenderness, because the anger is real and it’s valid and it has every right to exist. The anger at the injustice of it. The anger at the misunderstandings that calcified into estrangement. The anger at the years passing, at the grandchildren growing, at the ordinary intimacies of mother and child that have been withdrawn without warning and without a clear path to restoration. This anger deserves to be felt, fully and without apology.

But anger carried too long, without examination and without release, becomes something else. It becomes the traveling companion that insists on stopping at every landmark of grievance, that keeps the past perpetually present, that makes the forward movement of the journey almost impossible.

We carry hope weaponized into expectation — the constant scanning of the horizon for signs of return, the hypervigilance of a heart that can’t quite allow itself to rest because resting might mean missing the moment everything changes. The checking of the phone. The interpretation of silence. The upcoming birthday that’s approached with a mixture of longing and dread that makes the ordinary anticipation of a date on the calendar feel like a kind of ongoing low-grade emergency.

And we carry, maybe most of all, the struggle against reality itself — the enormous, invisible, metabolically expensive effort of refusing to accept what’s actually true about our current circumstances, of living in permanent negotiation with a present moment we didn’t choose and can’t change by the sheer force of our resistance to it.

This is the heaviest thing we carry. And it’s the one that most needs to be set down.

What Letting Go Is Not:

Before we go any further, I want to be clear about something — because letting go is one of the most misunderstood concepts in the entire landscape of healing, and I’ve seen it cause real harm when it’s offered too quickly, too casually, or without sufficient honoring of what it actually costs.

Letting go isn’t forgetting.

It’s not the erasure of love or the diminishment of the relationship that was. It’s not the pretense that the loss is smaller than it is, or that the grief is further along than it actually is, or that the longing has ceased because we’ve decided it should. It’s not the performance of a peace we don’t feel, or the spiritual bypassing of a grief that hasn’t yet been fully metabolized.

What letting go actually is, I’ve come to believe, is something far more precise and far more demanding than the phrase typically suggests:

It’s the release of the struggle against our present reality.

Not the reality itself — not the estrangement, not the loss, not the legitimate longing for reconciliation. But the exhausting, futile, life-consuming struggle of fighting what simply, actually, currently is. The resistance that keeps us locked in a permanent war with a present moment that won’t yield to the force of our refusal to accept it.

The Buddhists call this the second arrow. The first arrow is the pain itself — unavoidable, real, and deserving of full acknowledgment. The second arrow is what we do to ourselves in response to the pain: the self-blame, the rumination, the resistance, the struggle against what is. We usually can’t avoid the first arrow. But the second arrow we shoot ourselves with. I’ve shot far too many second arrows.

Letting go, in this framework, means lowering the bow.

Traveling Light Doesn’t Mean Traveling Empty:

Letting go of the unnecessary burdens we’re carrying doesn’t leave us empty handed. We still hold the things that genuinely matter close. The love that doesn’t require proximity to remain real. The commitment to our own healing. The hard-won wisdom. The compassion for our children, for ourselves, for the whole complicated, painful, entirely human tangle of it.

These aren’t the heavy things. Not in the way that rumination is heavy, or self-blame, or the relentless resistance against reality. These are the things that, carried faithfully, make the journey meaningful. These are the things that, offered honestly, make the journey matter.

An Invitation:

If you’re reading this and carrying more than you need — and most of us are, most of the time — I want to offer an invitation:

What’s one thing you’ve been carrying that isn’t serving your journey?

Not all of it. Not yet. The pack doesn’t need to be emptied all at once, and anyone who suggests otherwise has never walked a genuinely difficult road.

But one thing. One weight that’s been with you so long that you may have forgotten that it’s optional. One stone that you’ve been carrying that you picked it up so long ago that setting it down feels dangerous, or disloyal, or like a loss you can’t afford on top of all the other losses.

What would it feel like, even briefly, to set it down by the side of the road? Not to abandon it. Not to pretend it was never real. But to leave it there — in the place where it belongs, which is the past — and to continue walking, just a little lighter, into whatever the road ahead is holding for you.

The destination, whatever it turns out to be, will be easier to reach.

On both her website, sacred journeys and in her wonderful book, Pilgrim Principles: Journeying with Intention in Everyday Life , Lacy Clark Ellman suggests that we consider seven principles “as a guide to see how they might, like a trellis, guide your journey and direct your path.” Following is a summary of those seven principles as well as suggested practices to try.

1. Seek the Sacred in the Everyday

The holy hides in plain sight—
a shaft of morning light across the floor,
the quiet hum of a kettle,
a stranger’s unexpected kindness.
You need not cross an ocean to meet the Sacred.
Pause, notice, breathe—
and the ordinary becomes luminous.

It’s Your Turn:

• Today, find one ordinary moment that feels holy.

• Pause for 30 seconds. Whisper, “Here You are.”

2. Let the Body Lead the Soul

Pilgrimage begins with motion—
feet on the earth, breath in the chest,
a body in rhythm with the road.
Each step calls the spirit to wake,
reminding you that the journey inward
starts with a simple outward stride.

It’s Your Turn:

• Take a slow, mindful walk.

• With each step, silently say: “I am here.”

• Notice what stirs within as your body moves.

3. Carry Your Gifts with Care

A pilgrim travels light—
not because they own nothing,
but because they treasure what matters most.
Time, energy, resources—
these are seeds for the road.
Use them with tenderness.
Let gratitude be your compass.

It’s Your Turn:

• Today, choose one thing to release—an object, a habit, a thought.

• Whisper, “I travel lighter.”

• Notice how it feels to let go.

4. Immerse in the World Around You

Wherever your feet rest,
be all there.
Listen to the language of trees,
the laughter of strangers,
the quiet stories walls could tell.
Presence is the pilgrim’s prayer—
to see, to taste, to belong.

It’s Your Turn:

• Sit in a new place for 10 minutes—a café, a park bench, your porch at sunset.

• Observe with wonder. Write down five details you might have missed before.

5. Root Yourself in Daily Rhythms

Even the traveler needs anchors—
rituals that tether the soul to stillness:
a candle lit at dawn,
a prayer at dusk,
a breath before each meal.
In the repetition, the heart remembers—
you are held.

It’s Your Turn:

• Choose one grounding practice for today:

  • Lighting a candle

  • Five deep breaths each morning

  • Writing one line in a journal

• Repeat it daily for a week.

6. Walk with Curiosity

Wonder is the spark that ignites the path.
Without it, the world grows small.
With it, even a crack in the pavement
becomes a portal to mystery.
Ask questions. Let go of answers.
Be astonished.

It’s Your Turn:

• Today, notice something ordinary and ask:
  “What can this teach me?”

• Write down your response without judgment.

7. Listen for the Inner Voice

Beneath the noise, beneath the ache,
there is a stillness—a meeting place
where your truest self and the Sacred converse.
Pilgrimage is not only about where you go,
but who you become when you arrive
at that quiet center within.

It’s Your Turn:

• Sit in silence for five minutes.

• Place your hand on your heart and breathe.

• Whisper: “What do I most need to know in this moment?”

• Write down the first words or image that comes.

Many blessings…

"We’re often told that 'time heals all wounds,' but for many parents, estrangement is a wound that stays open. If we can’t change the situation, how do we change ourselves?"

When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves."
Viktor Frankl

Holding Hope Without Denying the Hurt

Estrangement has often been described as living with an open wound that never fully heals. That description has been true for me — true in my body, true in the quiet of ordinary moments, true in the particular ache of holidays and birthdays and the unremarkable afternoons that somehow carry as much weight as the significant ones.

And yet.

Within this ongoing ache — not beyond it, not after it, but genuinely within it — there exists a way of moving through the world that’s become, for me, one of the most sustaining frameworks I’ve found (and you well know by now if you’ve been reading my previous posts that I’m always seeking helpful frameworks). It’s called tragic optimism. And it has, I think, the potential to change in the most fundamental and honest ways, how we understand what it means to live well inside a loss that hasn’t resolved and may never resolve.

What Tragic Optimism Actually Is:

The term was coined, I believe, by Viktor Frankl, psychiatrist, philosopher, and Holocaust survivor, whose experience of unimaginable suffering gave birth to what has been called one of the most important books of the twentieth century: Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl observed as a prisoner trapped in a concentration camp, one of the most extreme laboratories of human suffering imaginable, that the people most likely to survive — not only physically but psychologically and spiritually — weren’t those who denied the horror of their circumstances, and not those who were crushed beneath it. They were those who found, somehow, a way to hold both things simultaneously: the full, unvarnished reality of their suffering, and the equally real possibility of meaning within it.

This is tragic optimism. Not the relentless cheerfulness of toxic positivity, which insists that everything happens for a reason, that our pain is secretly a blessing, and that we should be grateful for our losses because they’ve made us stronger. Toxic positivity is, at its core, a refusal to sit with the truth of suffering — a spiritual bypassing all dressed up in encouraging language.

Tragic optimism is something entirely different. It’s the willingness — hard-won, imperfect, and requiring daily renewal — to believe two things at once that our culture often treats as incompatible:

This is devastating. And life is still worth living fully. I’m in genuine pain. And meaning is still available to me. The loss is real. And so is there possibility in what comes next.

Frankl articulated the foundation of this stance with a clarity that’s outlasted every attempt to improve upon it: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.”

For estranged parents, this isn’t an abstract philosophical position. It’s a daily, embodied, very often challenging practice.

What Tragic Optimism Looks Like in Estrangement:

It doesn’t look like pretending the estrangement hurts less than it does. It doesn’t look like performing acceptance before it’s been genuinely reached, or rushing toward forgiveness before the grief’s been fully metabolized, or insisting to the world, and to ourselves, that we’re further along in our healing than we actually are.

It looks, instead, like this: acknowledging the full depth of the pain — the longing, the confusion, the anger, the grief that arrives in ambushes in the middle of ordinary moments — without allowing that pain to become the sole author of the rest of our lives.

Choosing deliberately and repeatedly, and on the days when choosing feels nearly impossible, to seek out beauty, connection, and meaning — not as a replacement for what was lost, but as evidence that life, even this life, even now, still holds things worth turning toward.

Transforming suffering into purpose — through creativity, through service, through the willingness to take what’s been most painful and offer it, with honesty and with care, in the service of someone else whose walking the same difficult road.

The Question Estrangement Asks:

When we lose our active role as a parent — when the relationship that organized so much of our identity, our daily rhythm, and our vision of the future is suddenly and involuntarily altered — it can feel as though the story of our lives has disintegrated before our eyes or at the very least has lost its center.

If my child and grandchildren are no longer in my life in the ways I imagined, who am I now? What is the shape of a future I didn’t plan for and never would have wanted?

These aren’t questions that tragic optimism dismisses or minimizes. They’re real, they’re large, and they deserve to be taken seriously rather than answered with premature reassurance.

But tragic optimism does offer a reframe — not of the loss itself, but of the questions the loss is asking:

Who do I want to become, in the face of this? What does it mean to live with integrity and love and genuine purpose, even if reconciliation never arrives in the form I most need it to take? What’s this suffering asking of me — not what’s it taken, but what might it, over time and with honest attention, be cultivating?

These aren’t easy questions. They don’t yield easy answers. But they are, I’ve come to believe, the right questions — the ones that open rather than close, that move us toward the future rather than circling endlessly in the past.

Both Things at Once:

What tragic optimism ultimately offers estranged parents isn’t the resolution of our grief, but the expansion of the container in which we hold it.

It makes room — genuinely, not theoretically — for grief and hope to coexist. For loss and meaning to inhabit the same life simultaneously. For the wound to be real, tended and honored, and for the life surrounding the wound to be genuinely, stubbornly, courageously alive.

This isn’t a small thing. In a culture that tends to treat grief as a problem to be solved and suffering as a state to be escaped as quickly as possible, the willingness to remain present in our own pain while still reaching, however tentatively, toward meaning, is, I believe, one of the most radical and most human acts available to us.

Viktor Frankl survived the unimaginable by finding, in the most extreme darkness imaginable, something worth living for.

We’re not trapped as he was in a concentration camp. Our suffering, real as it is, isn’t the suffering that Frankl and the other prisoners endured.

But his insight belongs to each of us:

That the last freedom — the one that can’t be taken, the one that remains available even when everything else has been stripped away — is the freedom to choose what we’ll make of what we’ve been given.

Even this. Especially this.

After the Door Closed

The silence grew roots,
curling around the edges of my days and slowly choking me.
My grandchildren —
Sky, Willow, River
their faces became stars, beautiful and unreachable,
although I kept searching the horizon.

There’s no map for this place.
Only the echo of what was
and the ache of what will never be again.
Grief sits at my table,
uninvited, yet insistent,
a phantom drinking from my cup.

Still—
within my reach
a cluster of flowers insist on blooming.
I bend to touch a Day Lilly,
its fragile stem steady in the breeze,
and I wonder in this moment if beauty is its own argument for hope.

Maybe meaning
isn’t something I find
but something I plant—
seed by seed,
act by act,
a quiet rebellion
against the tyranny of loss.

I can’t force a return
but I can cup my hands
around what remains,
around what becomes,
around what’s still possible.

It’s Your Turn:

Exercise 1: The Meaning Map

Draw three circles:

• Circle 1: What I’ve lost

• Circle 2: What remains

• Circle 3: What’s still possible

Fill in each circle. Then write about what steps you can take to live from circles two and three.

Exercise 2: Transforming Pain into Purpose

Ask and then Answer:

• What is one small act of kindness or contribution I can make this week?

• How could I turn my experience into something that might help another person?

Exercise 3: Savoring the Present

Each day, pause to notice one small blessing: the sun pouring through your window when you wake, birdsong, a kind word. Write it down. Over time, these moments weave meaning into ordinary days.

Journaling Prompts

• What does a meaningful life look like for me—independent of reconciliation?

• In what ways has estrangement shaped me? What strengths have emerged?

• If I could speak to myself five years from now, what would I want to say about how I lived this chapter?

We’re often told that healing is a staircase—a steady climb from pain to peace. But anyone whose lived through estrangement knows the truth: it’s a spiral. Some days you circle back to the ache, not because you’re failing, but because you’re ready to heal a deeper layer.

"Human growth is not a straight line; it's a spiral. You go over the same ground again and again, but every time a little higher up." — Julia Cameron

For me, the phrase, “healing isn’t linear, it’s a spiral” speaks to the deeply human truth that emotional recovery doesn’t follow a straight path from pain to peace. Instead, it loops, ascends, revisits, and evolves. Here’s what that means in practice:

• You revisit old wounds from a higher vantage point: Just when you think you’ve moved past something, it resurfaces—triggered by a memory, a conversation, or even a dream. I can’t begin to tell you how often I’ve had this experience. But here’s what I’ve found: many times after the spiral brings me back around, I look down at the wound with a new insight, strength, or perspective (however modest) that I didn’t have before.

• Growth happens in layers: Like moving upward through a winding coil, healing reveals deeper truths over time. You might resolve one aspect of grief or trauma, only to uncover another layer on the next turn of the spiral. I’m still clearing those layers.

• Rhythms of emotion are natural: You might feel peace one morning and deep sadness in the afternoon. While it can be exhausting, this isn’t regression—it’s the natural upward and downward winding of the spiral. Emotions ebb and flow, and each rotation has the capacity to teach you something.

• Integration over erasure: A spiral doesn’t look back to erase the past; it builds upon it. It helps you integrate your history—making space for both pain and gratitude, loss and love, boundaries and compassion.

Linear healing implies a finish line. Spiral healing honors that some experiences—especially those tied to family, identity, or deep loss—don’t resolve neatly. They become the core around which your story winds, revisited time and again with new wisdom.

Many of us have been led to believe that healing means closure—a final chapter, a clean break from pain. But life, especially in the wake of estrangement and longing, has shown us otherwise. I’ve come to understand that healing isn’t a destination, but an upward rhythm. It winds through us like the changing seasons, each turn bringing a new shade of understanding.

When my grief over the loss of my daughter and grandchildren is especially intense, I try not to see this as a setback, but as a turn in the spiral—reminding me of how deeply I’ve loved.

I’m not failing or falling backwards when my grief suddenly and unexpectedly rises to the surface. I’m simply circling back with a little more perspective, a little higher up than before. I’m integrating, not erasing. And in that spiral, I sometimes find grace.

The Spiral of Healing

It doesn’t move in a straight line.

There’s no clear beginning,

and no final arrival.

Grief returns like a winding path

often unexpected and all too familiar,

but always from a slightly different height.

A scent, a song, a name spoken softly

pulls me back into the quiet ache.

But I’m different now.

I carry what I’ve learned,

and what I’ve chosen to keep.

Sometimes when the spiral

takes me back to the wound,

I might return home

with a little more light;

a new memory,

a little more strength,

a growing compassion.

Healing isn’t a staircase.

It’s a spiral, a slow dance,

a gradual unfolding of truth

and tenderness…

A Final Note on the Spiral of Healing

I’m reasonably certain that you’ve noticed, if you’ve been traveling with me through this substack for any length of time, that certain themes return. Letting go. Self-compassion. The slow, nonlinear work of reclaiming a self that was lost long before the estrangement arrived. The insistence that grief and meaning can coexist. The stubborn, quiet belief that this tough road, as unwelcome and as costly as its been, is taking us somewhere worth going.

These themes keep coming back. They circle. They arrive again, dressed slightly differently, hopefully carrying a little more light occasionally than the last time, or maybe just a little more weight.

This isn’t an accident. And it is not because I believe that you didn’t understand what I was writing about the first time around. Not because I doubt your intelligence or your capacity or the depth of the work you’ve already done. But because I need to ‘hear’ it again. Because the version of me writing these words today is standing at a slightly different point on the spiral than the version of me who wrote them last month — and from here, the familiar truth looks a little different, carries a little more nuance, asks a little more of me than it did before.

When I write about letting go for the fourth time, it’s because I’m still learning to let go. When I return, again, to self-compassion, it’s because self-compassion remains, for me, one of the most radical and most resisted practices available — and I need the reminder as much as anyone reading this. When I circle back to meaning, to ritual, to the stubborn insistence that this life is still worth living fully and honestly and with as much love as I can bring to it — it’s because I’m still, always, learning what those words actually mean from the inside.

Returning to what matters with new eyes, new wounds, new small victories, and the slowly deepening understanding that some truths are not learned once and then owned forever is what the concept of the spiral teaches. They’re learned in layers. They’re earned, again and again, in the living.

And each time we return to them — each time we circle back to the same essential ground and find, to our surprise, that we’re standing on it differently, we haven’t slid backwards, we’ve gone deeper.

And deeper, on this particular road, is exactly where we need to go.

It’s Your Turn

Journaling Prompts for Spiral Healing in Estrangement

Mapping the Spiral

• What moments in my healing journey felt like progress? What moments felt like setbacks? Can I see how both offered insight, helping me climb a little higher?

• If I imagine my healing as a spiral, where am I now? What have I learned since the last time the path brought me to this emotional place?

Revisiting with Wisdom

• What old wounds or memories have resurfaced recently? How do I respond to them differently from this higher vantage point than I did in the past?

• What strengths have I developed that help me hold space for grief without being consumed by the loop?

Integration Over Erasure

• What parts of my story do I wish I could forget? What parts do I now see as the essential foundation of the spiral I’m climbing?

• How can I honor both the pain and the love as my path continues to wind forward?

The Rhythm of Emotion

• What emotions tend to loop back most often—anger, sorrow, longing, guilt? What do they ask of me when they return?

• How do I care for myself when these emotions revisit? What rituals, boundaries, or creative practices help me feel grounded in the center of the spiral?

Hope in the Spiral

• What signs of upward growth have I noticed that might not be obvious to others?

• What kind of reconciliation—internal or external—feels possible now that I have gained more perspective?

It’s been years since I’ve spent time with the grandchildren I love deeply, children who lived with us for awhile when they were little, and who snuggled up to me each night as I read them stories before bed. Had I been told back then that one day I’d be cut off from them, I doubt very much that I would have believed it. I had absolute trust that ours was a bond that could never be broken and assumed that I had many years ahead to listen, to support, to teach, and to create lasting memories with each of them.

While preparing yesterday for a group I’m facilitating on aging, I began exploring legacy statements. A legacy statement is a written reflection that captures the values, beliefs, life lessons, and guiding principles we might want to pass on to future generations. It’s less about accomplishments and more about the emotional, ethical, and spiritual imprint we hope we might leave behind.

A legacy statement typically includes

• Core values you’ve lived by

• Life lessons learned through experience

• Stories or moments that shaped you

• Hopes or blessings for loved ones

• Guidance for navigating life’s challenges

• Spiritual or ethical beliefs you want to pass on

Legacy statements help preserve family history, strengthen emotional bonds, and can offer comfort, guidance, and continuity across generations. A legacy statement might become especially powerful when you’re an estranged grandparent, because it does something that estrangement tries to erase: it may keep your voice, your love, and your truth alive in the lives of the grandchildren you can’t reach (at least right now.)

So often when we become estranged from our grandchildren a false story gets created. A legacy statement quietly refuses that narrative. It says: I’m still here. My love for you is still here. Our connection is still real, even if you can’t see it or have been told that it’s untrustworthy. In this way a legacy statement can serve as a bridge across the silence.

When we become estranged from our adult children, they often control the narrative and our grandchildren typically hear only one version of the story—or none at all. A legacy statement provides an opportunity for us to communicate something important about ourselves to them about our values.

In those cases where our grandchildren have no memory of us, they often eventually become curious about where they come from. They look for roots, for meaning, for the ancestors whose stories shaped the family line. Your legacy statement may become a lantern they can find later—a way to know the grandmother who loved them, even from afar.

Estrangement leaves so many grandparents with a deep, enduring love that has nowhere to go. A legacy statement can become a vessel for that love—a way to keep it moving, to keep it alive, to give it form. It transforms helplessness into creation. Being estranged from our grandchildren can make us feel erased, misrepresented, or silenced. Writing a legacy statement can serve as an act of sovereignty. It says: My life, my love, my wisdom, my truth—these are mine to speak. It helps restore our dignity and a sense of agency. A legacy statement isn’t just a document—it’s a ritual of continuity.
Even in the case of grandparental alienation, in writing a legacy statement, you’re taking your place in the family lineage and saying: This is what I learned. This is what I bless you with. This is what endures.

Even if reconciliation never comes, your words may.
Even if you never meet again, your presence may.
Even if the relationship can’t be repaired in your lifetime, your love can still reach them in theirs.

A legacy statement is a form of hope that doesn’t depend on outcome and so I’ve decided to start creating a legacy statement that I’ll continue working on over the next few years. In the mean time, following is a very short initial version, containing a fragment of what I’m hoping to communicate to my grandchildren some day.

Dear Skylar, Willow, and River,

There are so many things I would love to say to you in person. But barring this, my hope is that love finds its own pathway, and that my words can travel where my body currently can’t. So I’m writing this for you, across the distance, with a heart that’s never stopped holding you close.

Skylar, you came into this world bright-eyed and big-hearted, a boy who seemed to meet life with an often joyous curiosity and an open spirit. Willow, you were tender from the beginning — a child who felt the world deeply, who hugged trees and made fast friends with all of life’s creatures. And River, your name fits you so perfectly. Yours is a curious and thoughtful soul and I’m often reminded of a poem by John O'Donoghue when I think of you that says, “ I would love to live like a river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding.” I have no doubt that your life will continue to unfold in wonderful and even surprising ways.

I’m hoping with all of my heart that you’ll each remember me based on who you’ve known me to be rather than what you’ve heard about me over the last four years. And that you’ll always trust your own experiences in general over and above what other people tell you. I’m the woman in addition to your mom who loved you unconditionally. Who sang silly songs to you. Who read you bedtime stories. Who took you to movies and once danced with you after the movie in the theater aisles as I once did with your mom. Who brought you to the fair with Dee Dee each summer during the years that we were allowed to spend time with you. Who took you regularly to the library, to Hobbit land, to the playground, and on other adventures. I’m the woman you once knew well and trusted. One whose lived, loved, made mistakes, learned, grown, and is committed to keep on growing. I’m someone who believes in kindness, in commitment, in the vast rewards of life long learning, and the healing power of both love and beauty in whatever form it finds you. I believe that each and every one of us makes mistakes and that what often is as important as the cost of them is what we learn from them. I believe that life can be heartbreakingly difficult some of the time and yet heartachingly beautiful most of the time. I believe that it’s possible to hold both grief and gratitude in your heart at once. I believe that our questions may very well be just as significant as the answers we come by, and in the importance of starting over when life asks it of us. And it will ask it of us.

I also want to tell you something about some of the the people in your family tree who came before you and whom I knew and loved well. People whose names you may never hear spoken, yet whose lives ultimately led to your own. Our ancestors are like roots beneath the soil: unseen, but essential. They lived through pain and joy, made tough choices, carried dreams, and kept moving forward so that one day you and I could stand where we stand now.

When I think of them, I imagine a long line of hands reaching through time, each one with their hands on the shoulders of the next. Some of their stories, I think, may live inside us, even if we don’t know them. We come from people who endured, who hoped, who learned, who loved. And whether you ever hear their stories or not, they’re part of the quiet strength you carry.

Your great great grandfather, Leonard Byram, was a seeker of truth and devoted his life to the pursuit of it. I have so many memories of him seated at his desk in the corner of the kitchen, reading, underlining passages he wanted to remember, and writing letters to other spiritual seekers. I was never close to him and yet it occurs to me now, almost 40 years since his death, that I might have been more like him than any other member of my family.

Your great great grandmother, Lena Byram, worked tirelessly - cleaning, gardening, sewing, baking cookies and creating simple and yet delicious meals. She consistently showed up for her family with a sturdy and unsentimental love. It wasn’t warm and fuzzy, but you could always count on it.

Your great great grandmother, Gretchen Murphy, had the courage to be as wildly herself and thus as unique and even a little outrageous as anyone I’ve ever encountered in my 66 years of living. If there was anyone who ever truly danced to the tune of a different drum, it was she. I see her now in my minds eye with her dark blue eye shadow, ruby red lips, and long, curly, jet black hair standing by her house in a flamboyantly flowered jumpsuit. I worshipped her.

Your great grandfather Gerald Byram (papa), my dad, was the most loving person I’ve ever known and I believe that kindness was his deepest core value. He gave so much of himself. Here’s just one of countless examples. Your mom and I decided we were going to attempt to train rats to play basketball (we got the rats but we never got around to training them) and Papa created the most amazing rat mansion for them. I’m so grateful that he got to meet all three of you.

Your great grandmother, Brenda Byram, my mom, exemplified what it meant to be a loving grandmother and was devoted to those whom she deeply loved. She had a special way of relating to people, was a gifted listener, and had a playful side that I didn’t get to see very often but when I did it was wonderful!

Your grandfather, Kevin, is the essence of what it means to be a ‘good man.’ He’s steadfastly followed a path of integrity and never once in the half century that I’ve known him stepped off of that path, no matter how difficult or narrow it became. His love for each of you has never wavered.

There’s so much more I could tell you about these two branches of your family, and if you ever choose to spend time with your grandfather and me again, I’ll gladly share the stories that I carry in my heart if you want to hear them. But what I want you to understand right now is this: you’re each a part of their stories. You carry them forward in ways that none of us can fully see or name.

And finally, I want you each to know that your worth is inherent. Nothing you do or fail to do can diminish it. You’re loved - not for your achievements, not for your choices, not for being obedient or ‘good,’ but for simply being you.

It’s Your Turn

Following are the prompts I’m planning to use in creating my own legacy statement.

Grandchildren often become deeply curious about where they come from. These prompts help you introduce them to the unseen branches of their family tree.

• The Living Lineage: Think of an ancestor you knew well but your grandchildren never met. What was a specific trait they possessed (resilience, a wild sense of humor, quiet devotion) that you see alive in the family line today?

• Unseen Hands: Write about a specific hardship a previous generation endured. How did their survival pave the way for the life your grandchildren are living now?

• The Shared Trait: Describe a physical characteristic, a talent, or a personality quirk that seems to run in the family. Where did it originate, and what does it feel like to watch it pass down?

Sharing your own formative moments helps your grandchildren see you not just as a foundational figure, but as a real person who walked the earth, learned, and grew.

• The Turning Point: Describe a time in your life when you had to completely start over. What pulled you through the uncertainty, and what did you discover about your own strength?

• A Memory of Connection: Recall a specific, ordinary day spent with your grandchildren when they were younger—a day filled with stories, laughter, a walk, or a simple routine. Describe the sights, sounds, and what your heart felt in those moments.

• The Beautiful and the Brave: Write about someone you deeply admired or “worshiped” when you were younger. What about the way they lived their life gave you the courage to be authentically yourself?

The following prompts focus on the ethical compass and guiding principles you’ve forged through decades of living.

• The Value of Mistakes: We all make them. Write about a significant mistake you made, what it cost you, and—most importantly—the crucial lesson it taught you about accountability and growth.

• Holding Dualities: Life often asks us to hold two opposing feelings at the exact same time. How have you learned to balance grief and gratitude, or heartbreak and beauty, in your own heart?

• A Definition of Goodness: When you think about what it means to be a person of true integrity, kindness, or steadiness, whose face comes to mind? What did they teach you about how to treat others?

This is your opportunity to offer direct, unconditional guidance for your grandchildren’s lives, independent of any current outcomes.

• Inherent Worth: Write a letter reminding them that their value is absolute and independent of their achievements or the choices of others. How do you want them to treat themselves when they stumble?

• Boundaries and Belonging: What is your deepest hope for how they navigate difficult relationships? How can they learn to practice deep forgiveness while still fiercely protecting their own well-being and dignity?

• The Surprise of Unfolding: If you could gift them one overarching wish for their future—whether it’s a passion for lifelong learning, an eye for beauty, or the courage to dance to their own drum—what would it be?

I want to tell you about a book that might find you at exactly the right moment, which is to say, a moment where you aren’t okay and have been exhaustively, unsuccessfully trying to become okay for longer than you might want to admit.

Megan Devine’s It’s Okay That You’re Not Okay: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn’t Understand was written in the aftermath of her partner’s sudden drowning death — a loss so immediate and so catastrophic that it shattered both her personal world and professional world. Devine was already a therapist when tragedy struck. She already knew, intellectually and clinically, a great deal about grief. And then she discovered, from the inside of her own devastating loss, that so much that our culture had taught her — and taught her to teach others — about how grief works and how it should be navigated was, at best, incomplete and, at worst, actively harmful.

What she wrote from that place of hard-won, embodied understanding is one of the most honest and most compassionate books about grief I’ve read.

And while she wrote it primarily about the grief of death, almost everything she wrote can apply to the grief of estrangement as well.

The Grief Our Culture Doesn’t Know What to Do With

Devine asserts early on in her book that our culture has failed to understand, honor, and make genuine space for grief. We live in a culture that’s deeply uncomfortable with suffering that doesn’t resolve on a reasonable timeline, that resists the tidy arc of breakdown-followed-by-recovery, that refuses to be fixed by positive thinking or the correct application of coping strategies.

We’re a culture, Devine argues, that’s relentlessly oriented toward the solution. And grief isn’t a problem that has one.

For estranged mothers, this cultural failure is experienced with particular acuity. Because the grief of estrangement isn’t only unresolved, it doesn’t come with the social scaffolding of acknowledged loss as has already been often noted by so many others writing on estrangement. There’s no funeral. No obituary. No time at which the community gathers to say: we see what you’ve lost. We honor its magnitude. We’ll sit with you in it.

Instead, there’s silence. And the unspoken question that lives inside the silence: what did you do?

Some grief can’t be fixed. It can only be witnessed.

We’re not particularly comfortable with this idea. We’re trained, from childhood, to respond to pain with solutions. When someone is hurting, we offer advice. We offer silver linings. We offer the stories of other people who went through something similar and came out the other side transformed and grateful. These are the stories that I’ve kept returning to over and over during my own dark times in search of comfort and hope.

What our culture barely has the language for is simple, undisguised presence. The willingness to sit beside someone in their pain without reaching for the nearest available fix. The ability to say, without qualification or redirection: this is real. This is terrible. I’m here. You’re not alone in it. This is what Devine calls companioning as opposed to fixing. And, she argues, it’s what grieving people most need and least reliably receive.

Because most of us have experienced what Devine calls the cultural response to grief: the rush to silver linings, the invitations to focus on the positive, the gentle but persistent suggestions that maybe it’s time to move on, to forgive, to let go, to find closure. All of it offered with the best of intentions. All of it communicating, beneath the good intentions, a message that lands like a small and recurring wound: your grief is too much. Your grief is too long. Your grief is making us uncomfortable, and we would like it to stop.

Devine’s work says something entirely different. It says: your grief is not too much. It’s the appropriate response to a genuine and significant loss. And you deserve to have it witnessed — fully, honestly, without a timeline — by someone willing to sit with you.

The Myth of Getting Back to Normal

One of the most liberating and most difficult things Devine offers is her dismantling of what she calls the myth of return — the cultural promise that grief, properly processed, will eventually return us to the person we were before the loss occurred.

She’s gentle but unsparing about this: it’s not true. And believing it — organizing our grief work around the goal of recovering our former selves — causes unnecessary suffering.

Most estranged parents already know this. Deep grief changes us. Profound loss changes us. Not temporarily, not cosmetically, but at the level of identity — at the level of how we understand ourselves, how we move through the world, what we know and what we value and what we’re capable of carrying.

The person who existed before the estrangement isn’t waiting, intact and unchanged, on the other side of the healing. The healing — to the extent that word even applies — doesn’t lead back. It leads forward, into a self that’s been altered by what it’s survived, and will need to learn to inhabit a life that’s been permanently, if not entirely adversely, changed.

For estranged mothers, this reframe is both devastating and, in its own way, deeply freeing. It releases us from the exhausting project of trying to return to who we were before — a project that’s, Devine would gently insist, already failed. And it invites us instead into the more honest and more sustainable project of learning to live forward: to build, from the new and unfamiliar terrain of a life reshaped by loss, something that’s genuinely ours.

Not the life we planned. But a life, nonetheless. And one that carries, embedded in its very fabric, the depth, the compassion, and the hard-won wisdom that only this particular loss could have produced.

Your Grief Is Not a Symptom

Devine challenges, with quiet but considerable force, the tendency in contemporary therapeutic culture to treat grief as a disorder to be diagnosed and symptoms to be resolved. The medicalization of grief — the pathologizing of what is, in fact, a completely natural human response to genuine loss — has, she argues, done enormous harm to grieving people who’re already suffering.

When grief is treated as a symptom, the grieving person receives a subtle but powerful message: there’s something wrong with you. Your response to loss is excessive. It requires treatment.

This message lands with particular cruelty on estranged mothers, many of whom are already carrying the cultural stigma of the estrangement itself — the unspoken suggestion that a child’s estrangement is evidence of parental failure, that the grief is therefore not entirely undeserved, that healing requires not just processing the loss but interrogating what they might have done to cause it. And yes, it’s definitely true that some estranged parents are guilty of neglect or abuse. It’s also true that there are adult children who’re guilty of abusing loving parents and recreating history. While I believe that it’s important for both parent and adult child to explore their individual roles in the lead up to the rupture, automatically blaming parents for the estrangement is both cruel and absurd.

What Good Support Actually Looks Like

One of the most practically useful sections of Devine’s book is her guidance on what genuinely helpful grief support looks like — both what we might seek from others and what we might learn to offer ourselves.

Her framework is disarmingly simple: presence over problem-solving. The most healing thing another person can offer someone grieving isn’t advice, or perspective, or a story of someone who went through something similar. It’s the willingness to show up, to stay, and to resist the impulse to fix.

For estranged mothers, this has two equally important applications.

The first is in how we seek and evaluate the support we receive from others. Devine’s work gives us language and permission to gently redirect the well-meaning fixers in our lives — to say, without guilt or apology: I don’t need you to solve this. I just need you to sit with me in it. This isn’t ingratitude. It’s the clarity of someone whose learned, through experience, what actually helps and what merely performs the appearance of helping.

The second application is in how we relate to ourselves.

Because many of us have internalized the culture’s fixing impulse so thoroughly that we apply it to our own inner lives with a relentlessness we would never inflict on someone else. We grow impatient with our own grief. We set timelines for our own recovery. We catalog our progress and find it insufficient. We tell ourselves — with a harshness we wouldn’t dream of directing at a friend — that we should be further along, that we should be stronger, that our continued pain is evidence of some failure of will or wisdom or spiritual development.

Devine’s work invites us to become, for ourselves, the compassionate witness we most need. To offer our own grief the same quality of patient, non-judgmental, non-fixing presence we would offer a beloved friend sitting across from us in her own devastation.

To say to ourselves, with genuine tenderness:

I see you. This is real. You aren’t too much. And you don’t have to be okay.

The Difference Between Grief and Suffering

One of the most nuanced and most useful distinctions Devine makes is between grief — the natural response to loss, which she believes should be honored and moved through rather than bypassed — and what she calls the secondary suffering that we layer on top of the grief through our own thoughts and stories and self-judgments.

The grief itself is unavoidable. It’s the appropriate and proportionate response to a real and significant loss. Attempting to skip it, suppress it, or shortcut our way past it doesn’t make it go away. It drives it underground, where it continues to shape our lives — our bodies, our choices, our relationships, our capacity for joy — in ways we can ‘t see clearly enough to address.

But the secondary suffering (what the Buddhist call the second arrow) — the self-blame, the rumination, the relentless inner tribunal that convenes at three in the morning — this is something else. This isn’t an inevitable companion of grief. It’s something we construct, often unconsciously and with the best of intentions, in the absence of genuine support and genuine self-compassion.

And it’s, Devine suggests, something we can — slowly, with help, with practice — begin to set down.

Not the grief. Never the grief, before its time.

But the story we tell about the grief. The verdict we’ve rendered on ourselves for having it. The belief that our continued pain is evidence of failure rather than of love.

That part, with enough honest attention and enough compassionate witnessing — of ourselves and by others — can change.

A Message to Carry

The message I most hope estranged mothers carry from Devine’s book, not because it resolves anything, but because it consistently returns us to a quality of self-compassion that the daily practice of living with estrangement makes easy to lose, is that we’re allowed to not be okay. That our grief isn’t evidence of weakness, of insufficient healing, of spiritual inadequacy, or of any of the other verdicts we’re sometimes tempted to render on ourselves in the quieter and more exhausted moments of this journey.

That some losses — some genuine, profound, life-altering losses — don’t resolve on a timeline that makes the people around us comfortable. And that the appropriate response to that reality isn’t to grieve faster, or more privately, or more gracefully. It’s to grieve honestly. To allow ourselves to be witnessed in it. And to extend to ourselves, as consistently and as genuinely as we can manage, the same compassionate presence we’d offer anyone else we loved who was carrying something this heavy.

It’s okay that you’re not okay.

Not as a permission slip to remain indefinitely in the darkest chambers of the grief. But as the foundational truth from which any genuine healing needs to begin — the acknowledgment that what we’re carrying is real, that our response to it is appropriate, and that we deserve to be met in it with presence rather than pushed past it with solutions.

And our grief, tended honestly and witnessed compassionately — by others, and most essentially by ourselves — isn’t the opposite of healing.

It’s how healing begins.

It’s OK to Not Be OK

You don’t have to be brave today.
The world will keep turning
even if you only breathe.

Let the ache be what it is —
a tide that rises,
a weight that asks for rest.

And somewhere beneath the noise,
your heart is still beating —
quietly, faithfully —
waiting for the moment
you remember that this, too,
is part of being whole.

It’s Your Turn

If you’re grieving or want to support someone whose grieving, in addition to reading her book, you might want to check out Megan Devine’s website or listen to her podcast. While not about estrangement specifically, I believe you’ll find some helpful information there.

Journal Prompt: Where in your own grief have you been rushing yourself? What would it feel like — even briefly, even imperfectly — to stop asking your grief to be smaller, quieter, or further along than it actually is? What might you offer yourself, today, in the way of compassionate witnessing?

The Heroine’s Journey isn’t a triumphal march back into the world—it’s a slow, quiet reorientation toward the core self so many of us abandoned long ago in the pursuit of being ‘good’ in order to gain love or keep it.

“Part of what allows us to deeply appreciate our lives and savor our time is our past despair. In fact, it has great value as a springboard for growth. There is an ancient and almost universal cycle that involves trauma, despair, struggle, adaptation, and resolution. This is a deepening cycle that prepares us for whatever comes next. It opens our hearts to others and helps us feel grateful for every small pleasure…” Mary Pipher, from the introduction to her book, Women Rowing North

If you read my previous post, The Heroine’s Journey and Estrangement, you already know that the Heroine’s Journey, as Maureen Murdock mapped it, isn’t a comfortable path to travel by any means. It doesn’t promise a tidy resolution or a painless arrival. It asks, instead, for almost everything — our illusions, our carefully constructed identities, our grip on outcomes we can’t control, and our willingness to descend into the dark. But it doesn’t end in the dark.

In my version of the Heroine’s Journey, Phase Six, “Reclaiming the Feminine” is where the light begins — not as a sudden, dramatic illumination, but as something far quieter and, in its own way, far more profound. It’s the first trembling breath of return. Not a triumphal march back into the world — nothing about the Heroine’s Journey is that clean or that simple. But a genuine reorientation, nonetheless. A slow, deliberate, and profoundly courageous movement back toward the core self that was abandoned so long ago that many women have forgotten she ever existed — or have begun to wonder, in their most honest moments, whether she existed at all.

Murdock calls this phase Reclaiming the Feminine. She doesn’t mean returning to the performance of culturally prescribed versions of womanhood. She means something far deeper, far more radical, and far more demanding.

She means the reclamation of our authentic inner lives — the intuition, the creativity, the authentic voice, the permission to have needs and name them — that so many of us may have sacrificed a long time ago, when as young girls we looked at the world around us and concluded that to be loved, we should be ‘good’. We should be compliant. We should be oriented toward the needs of others rather than our own.

Reclaiming the feminine, phase six of the heroine’s journey, is where we finally might begin to renegotiate the terms of this unconscious bargain that we made. According to Murdock this means:

The return to intuition — the quiet, persistent inner knowing that was overridden for decades by the louder demands of duty, expectation, and the need to please.

The return to the body — to the physical, sensory, embodied experience of being alive that gets lost when we live almost entirely in our heads, managing and planning and worrying and performing.

The return to creativity — to the making of things not because they’re useful or productive or impressive, but because our souls require expression the way our lungs require air.

The return to authentic relationship — not the managed, careful, self-edited connections of a woman afraid to be truly seen, but the honest, reciprocal, nourishing intimacy of a woman whose learned, at last, that she’s worth truly knowing.

The return to her own authority — the deep, unshakeable knowing that we’re the rightful authors of our own lives, not supporting characters in someone else’s story.

Murdock reassures us that the core self that we’re invited to return to was never destroyed. She was simply buried — beneath decades of self-abandonment, beneath the weight of roles and expectations and the relentless labor of keeping love flowing outward. Beneath the darkness of the underworld. And for those of us estranged from our adult children and grandchildren, beneath our grief.

She’s been here all along, claims Murdock, this beautiful core self that belongs to each of us. Waiting with extraordinary patience. Sending us signals — through restlessness, through longing, through the persistent sense that something essential is missing even in the midst of a life that looked, from the outside, perfectly adequate. Through the books that wanted to be written but weren’t. Through the degree never completed. Through the friendships that wanted to be deepened but remained carefully managed at the surface. Through the creative impulses that were dismissed as indulgent, the needs that were labeled as selfish, the boundaries that were never set because setting them felt too dangerous.

Through it all, she was there all along. And the work of ‘Reclaiming the Feminine’ is to find her again — not all at once, not dramatically, but in the accumulation of small, deliberate acts of return.

The Reclamation of the Body:

One of the first and most fundamental aspects of returning to the feminine is the reclamation of the body — and this is particularly significant for estranged mothers, many of whom have experienced the grief of estrangement as a profoundly physical phenomenon.

The body keeps score, as Bessel van der Kolk famously observed. And the body of a woman in grief — particularly the ambiguous, unacknowledged, socially invisible grief of estrangement — carries an enormous weight. The tension in the jaw. The tightness in the chest. The exhaustion that sleep doesn’t relieve. The hollowness in the stomach that arrives without warning in the middle of an ordinary afternoon.

Reclaiming the feminine means returning to this body — not to fix it or discipline it or push it harder, but to inhabit it with tenderness. To notice what it carries. To offer it rest without guilt. To move it with pleasure rather than punishment. To feed it with care. To allow it to feel what it feels without immediately reaching for the nearest form of numbing or distraction.

For some women, this return to the body arrives through yoga or walking or swimming. For others, through cooking a meal with attention and love. Through gardening — hands in the earth, the ancient feminine practice of tending and growing. Through dancing alone in the kitchen. Through sitting in sunlight and allowing, for a few minutes, the simple fact of being alive in a body to be enough.

The body, Murdock reminds us, isn’t an obstacle to the spiritual journey. It is the spiritual journey — the vessel in which all of our experience is lived, all of our grief is carried, and all of our healing eventually, necessarily, takes root.

The Reclamation of Intuition:

Women who’ve spent decades in self-abandonment — prioritizing everyone else’s needs, reading the emotional temperature of every room, calibrating their responses to avoid conflict or disappointment — often arrive in this phase of the Journey having lost contact with their own intuition almost entirely.

They’ve become exquisitely attuned to everyone else’s inner world and profoundly estranged from their own.

Reclaiming the feminine means learning to hear the quiet voice again — the one that’s been whispering beneath the noise of obligation and performance and fear. The voice that says this doesn’t feel right, I need more than this, this relationship is draining me, and this is what I really want. The voice that knows — has always known — far more than the carefully managed, socially acceptable surface self has been permitted to acknowledge.

For estranged mothers, the reclamation of intuition often carries a particular poignancy. Because somewhere beneath the grief, and the self-questioning and the desperate second-guessing of every decision ever made as a parent, there’s a woman who knows more than she very often gives herself credit for. Whose learned through lived experience and the particular education of her own suffering, a great deal about the human heart — including her own.

Trusting that knowing again — after years of having it overridden, dismissed, or weaponized against her — is one of the most radical acts of this phase.

The Reclamation of Creativity:

Creativity, in Murdock’s framework, isn’t about a hobby or a talent reserved for the artistic alone. It’s a fundamental expression of the feminine principle — the impulse to make, to shape, to give form to the formless, to bring into the world something that didn’t exist before.

And it’s one of the first things to be sacrificed when a woman enters the long self-abandonment of the first phase of Murdock’s the heroine’s journey. There’s very little time, if any, left for creativity. There are more important things we need to do. We tell ourselves things like, Who am I to call myself a writer, an artist, a maker of things? That’s indulgent. That’s selfish. That’s vain. That can wait until later — until the kids are grown, until the marriage is stable, until the grief has passed, until life is less demanding. Later all too often never comes. Until, sometimes, the underworld forces it.

For estranged mothers, the return to creativity is often one of the most tangible and most transformative aspects of ‘Reclaiming the Feminine.” It’s picking up the pen (or placing your fingers on the keyboard) after years of silence. The return to the garden. The reopening of the sketchbook. The singing again, alone in the car, not for anyone, not to produce anything, but simply because the soul needs to sing. For me, it’s become this Substack, originating from the rubble of the life I’d counted on.

In whatever form it takes, this creativity isn’t therapy dressed up as art. This is art as its own form of healing — the ancient, irreplaceable human practice of making meaning from suffering, of insisting that even the most shattering experiences of a human life can be transformed into something that reaches across the silence and says to another person: you’re not alone in this. I’ve been there. I am there. I know.

The Reclamation of Authentic Relationship:

One of the unexpected gifts that estrangement — for all its devastation — sometimes delivers is the radical clarification of relationships. When what very well may have been the defining relationship of your life is suddenly severed, you might eventually begin to look, with new and unsparing eyes, at other relationships as well. And what some estranged mothers discover is that the relationships they’ve been maintaining out of obligation, habit, or the old fear of disappointing others no longer fit as well as they did before. Many women who’ve returned from the underworld find that they no longer have the energy or the appetite for inauthenticity. Others might finally begin investing in friendships that they’ve long neglected.

And so Phase Six often involves a quiet but profound restructuring of relationships, a movement toward the connections that are genuinely nourishing, genuinely reciprocal, genuinely capable of holding the full complexity of who she is and who she’s becoming. And a gentle but clear movement away from those that aren’t.

For estranged mothers specifically, the reclamation of authentic relationship often includes the discovery or deepening of chosen family — the friends, the community members, the fellow travelers on the same difficult road, who offer a quality of understanding and unconditional presence that feels, in some ways, like a new kind of home. They’re part of the reclamation.

The Reclamation of Self-Compassion:

Maybe the most essential, and the most resisted aspect of returning to the feminine is the reclamation of self-compassion as a daily practice rather than an occasional indulgence.

Women who’ve spent their lives in service to others — as daughters, wives, mothers, therapists, volunteers, teachers, nurses, caretakers in every form — often carry a deeply ingrained and yet often unconscious belief that attending to their own needs is selfish or at the very least not as important as the tasks that everyday life demands of them.

Estrangement has a way of making this belief exquisitely painful. Because many estranged mothers blame themselves, consciously or not, for the rupture. And it’s incredibly difficult for self-blame and self-compassion to occupy the same space simultaneously.

Reclaiming the feminine means learning slowly, imperfectly, day by day to extend to ourselves the same quality of compassionate presence we’d offer any other human being whose in deep pain. To say, without self-justification or self-pity: “I’m suffering. My suffering is real and it’s valid. I’m doing the best I can with what I have. And I’m worthy of my own tenderness.

This isn’t weakness or self-indulgence. This is the necessary foundation of every other reclamation in this process because a woman can’t genuinely return to herself if she continues to treat herself as unworthy of the return.

The Reclamation of Boundaries:

For women who’ve spent much of their lives bending — as daughters, as wives, as mothers — the reclamation of the feminine inevitably includes the reclamation of healthy boundaries. Not walls. Not the armoring of a wounded heart that has decided never to risk pain again. But the clear, compassionate, self-respecting limits of a woman whose learned, through the hardest possible education, what she can and cannot afford to give and perhaps even forgive.

I’m reminded here again of Shel Silverstein’s book, The Giving Tree, one of my least favorite children’s books, and how I wish the tree would have learned by the end of the story to keep some of what belonged to her for herself. Not because she loved less, but because she’d learned that love which demands everything from the giver isn’t sustainable love, and that the tree who gives everything away has nothing left for anyone.

When we reclaim boundaries, we’re reclaiming the right to be a whole person — to have needs, to name them, to have them respected — rather than an endlessly available resource organized almost entirely around the needs of others.

The Reclamation of Joy:

This one carries, for estranged mothers, its own particular weight of guilt and complexity. Because how can a woman whose child is estranged from her allow herself to feel joy? Doesn’t joy in the midst of estrangement constitute a betrayal of the depth of the loss? Doesn’t the capacity for pleasure imply that the pain, and consequently the love, isn’t as deep as it seemed?

Joy isn’t the absence of grief. Joy isn’t proof that grief has ended or that love has diminished. Experiencing joy is the sign that we’ve chosen — against considerable odds and in the full presence of our sorrow — to be fully alive.

For estranged mothers, joy often arrives in the smallest, most ordinary of moments. Witnessing an absolutely breathtaking sunset. A poem that comes together in a way that feels like grace. A walk in the woods in the most beautiful autumn light. A grandchild’s drawing that arrives unexpectedly in the mail. A morning coffee drunk slowly, in silence, with the simple and revolutionary awareness that this moment — this particular, unrepeatable moment is more than enough.

Murdock calls this the return of Eros — not romantic love, but the life force itself. The fundamental orientation toward existence that says yes — yes to beauty, yes to connection, yes to the stubborn, irreducible goodness of being alive even when being alive is also very, very hard.

The reclamation of joy is, in the end, the reclamation of the most essentially feminine thing of all: The willingness to keep saying yes to life, even after life has broken our hearts.

Healing the Mother/Daughter Split: Wholeness Within

As the heroine begins to reclaim the feminine—her intuition, her softness, her inner truth—another layer of the journey reveals itself. It’s a quieter, more intimate, and often more tender than anything that came before. It’s the work of healing the split within her: the part of her that mothers, and the part of her that longs to be mothered.

This isn’t about her child.
This is about her.

For many women, this stage can feel like walking into a room she’s avoided for years. Inside that room lives the girl she once was—the one who learned to be pleasing, to be useful, to be good. The one who learned to earn love by anticipating everyone else’s needs. The one who believed that if she could just be perfect enough, she’d always be loved.

The heroine begins to see how often she’s lived from the place of over‑giving, over‑functioning, over‑explaining, hoping that devotion would protect her from loss. She sees how she’s cared for others all too often from a place of depletion, while the part of her that needed tenderness went unnoticed.

Now, in this stage of the journey, she turns toward that inner daughter with compassion instead of criticism. She listens to her. She comforts her. She tells her the truth: You deserved gentleness. You deserved safety. You deserved to be loved without conditions. And something shifts.

As she tends to the girl within, the mother within her softens too. She no longer tries to rescue, fix, or control. She no longer confuses self‑abandonment with love. This healing isn’t linear, tidy, or quick. But it’s profound.

The heroine begins to understand that the split she’s carried—between the one who gives and the one who needs—was never meant to be permanent. She was never meant to choose between them. She was meant to integrate them.

In this integration, she discovers a new kind of strength:
a strength rooted in self‑trust, not self‑sacrifice;
a strength that honors her needs as much as her love;
a strength that allows her to stand in her own truth.

This is the moment she begins to feel whole again—and in the case of estranged mothers, not because the external relationship has healed, but because the internal one has.

She becomes the mother she needed.
She becomes the woman she was always meant to grow into.

This is the quiet miracle of the Heroine’s Journey:
the realization that the deepest reconciliation happens within.

Integration & Return: Wisdom and Wholeness

There comes a moment—quiet, almost imperceptible—when the heroine realizes that she’s no longer standing in the underworld. She hasn’t “escaped” it, nor has she conquered it. She’s absorbed it. The darkness has woven itself into her understanding, not as a shadow to fear but as a teacher. This is the beginning of integration.

This shift often shows up in small ways. For the mother whose estranged, it might mean a softening in her chest. A sense that she no longer needs to brace herself against every memory, every silence, every ache. She isn’t “over” the pain of estrangement—she’s with it, in a new way. The grief is still there, but it no longer devours her. It’s become part of her landscape, like a river that once flooded and now runs quietly through the valley of her life.

She begins to understand that she’s changed. Not in the dramatic, triumphant way myths often portray, but in the subtle, soul-deep way that real transformation unfolds.

She carries herself differently now.
She speaks with more clarity.
She loves with more boundaries.
She trusts her intuition without apology.
She honors her needs without guilt.

This is the return—not to the life she had, but to the life she’s now capable of living.

She steps back into the world with a kind of quiet authority, a grounded presence that others can feel even if they can’t name it. She doesn’t need to explain her journey. She doesn’t need to justify her healing. She simply embodies it.

And the wisdom she carries isn’t theoretical. It’s lived. It’s earned. It’s hers.

She knows now that reconciliation, if it ever comes, will need to be mutual, not at the cost of abandoning herself. She knows that love can remain even when contact doesn’t. She knows that grief and hope can coexist without canceling each other out.

The heroine returns not as the woman she was, but as the woman she’s become,
a woman shaped by truth, tempered by sorrow, and strengthened by the fierce act of reclaiming herself.

Why The Heroine’s Journey?

There’s a story I’ve been telling myself about my estrangement from my daughter and grandchildren. Maybe you have a similar story. It’s a story of overwhelming loss. Of rupture. Of a life that was supposed to go one way and went, without warning and without mercy, in another direction entirely. It’s a story in which the central event is a devastating subtraction — something taken, something broken, something that can’t ever be undone — and in which the primary question isn’t where am I going next, but how do I survive what’s already happened. For a long time, that story was the only one I could see.

I chose to imagine the estranged mothers experience through the lens of the Heroine’s Journey because I keep searching for a larger story. One generous enough to not only hold the loss, but that also offers the possibility of healing. One that could look at the descent — the darkness, the stripping away, the long and disorienting underworld of grief — and see within it not only the story of undoing I’ve been telling myself, but also, however improbably, a story of becoming too.

I also want to share with you that I don’t write these Substack entries to suggest that I’ve mastered what I’m writing about. I’m not writing from the far shore, looking back with the serene clarity of someone whose arrived both safely and transformed. I’m writing from the middle of the river — still awkwardly swimming, still learning, still going under on particularly difficult days, and still hoping that the act of writing itself will help carry me, and just maybe someone else too, a little further toward the other side.

And so now, if you’re an estranged mother whose reflecting on your own journey, I encourage you to take a moment to notice where you are on the path. Not to judge it, not to rush it, but simply to acknowledge the truth of your experience. And please keep in mind that you can be in more than one place at once.

Are you standing at the threshold, still stunned by the rupture?
Are you deep in the underworld, feeling lost and shattered?
Are you slowly reclaiming parts of yourself you once set aside?
Are you beginning to sense the faint outline of a return?

Wherever you find yourself, let this be your reminder:
Your story is far from over, and you’re not lost.
You’re in the midst of becoming.

If you’ve stayed with me through these last two substack entries and the phases of the Heroine’s Journey as it relates to estranged mothers in particular, you may already understand that the Heroine’s Journey isn’t a story of triumph over adversity, it’s a story of transformation through it. Estrangement doesn’t resolve neatly. It doesn’t offer the clean arcs our culture prefers. But it does invite us into a deeper relationship with ourselves, one that’s very likely to be more honest, more spacious, and more whole than the one we knew before if we’re willing to do the work.

I know my daughter carries her own wounds, and I hope that she makes her way through a heroine’s journey uniquely her own—one that leads her, in her own time and in her own way, back home to herself.

This journey asks much of us.
It asks us to descend into the places we once avoided.
It asks us to question the roles we were taught to perform.
It asks us to reclaim the parts of ourselves we abandoned in the name of love or duty.
And ultimately, it asks us to return—not to the life we had, but to the truth of who we’re becoming.

The return is quiet.
It’s not marked by fanfare or applause.
It’s marked by a woman who comes to know her own worth, to trust her own voice, and who carries her grief with dignity and her hope with discernment.

If you find yourself somewhere on this path—at the threshold, in the descent, in the slow rising, the return—may you remember this: you’re not walking toward a version of yourself that’s smaller or diminished. You’re walking toward the woman whose lived through fire and learned to carry her own light.

The Heroine’s Journey

She doesn’t choose the breaking—
it arrives unbidden,
splitting the life she knew
from the life she lives now.

In the darkness she meets the parts of herself
that got left behind.
The playful one,
the free-spirited one,
the one who sang out loud and danced around the kitchen.

Slowly, she gathers herself back,
thread by thread,
truth by truth.

And when she returns,
she carries only the quiet wisdom
forged in her own depths:

that she can love without losing herself,
that she can break and still go on,
that her story is far from over,
it’s still unfolding.

It’s Your Turn

The Threshold

What part of your old identity no longer fits who you’re in the process of becoming, and what part of you is afraid to let it go?

The Descent

When you think about the “underworld” period of your life, what emotions or truths have surfaced that you once tried to avoid or outrun?

The Inner Allies

Who or what has quietly supported you during this journey—people, practices, memories, rituals—and how have these allies helped you stay connected to yourself?

The Reclamation

What qualities, strengths, or inner voices are you beginning to reclaim that you once silenced in order to survive, belong, or keep the peace?

The Return

If you imagine yourself emerging from this chapter of your life with new wisdom, what might you now know about how to live, love, and care for yourself now?

We often imagine the Hero’s Journey as a tale of dragons, quests, and triumphant returns. But the Heroine’s Journey—the mythic arc described by Maureen Murdock—is something far more intimate. It’s the journey of a woman whose pulled out of her familiar world, stripped of her old identity, and initiated into a deeper, more authentic version of herself.

"Every woman has to learn where her true source of validation is."
Maureen Murdock, The Heroine's Journey: Woman's Quest for Wholeness

*A quick note before you begin: This is, by a wide margin, the longest piece I’ve ever shared here (and likely ever will). It’s a deep dive, so grab a cup of tea, make yourself comfortable, and take your time with it.

Maureen Murdock is an American author, analyst, and teacher whose work sits at the rich intersection of Jungian psychology, storytelling, and women’s studies. For decades she’s worked as both a therapist and an educator, teaching writing and mythology and bearing witness to the interior lives of women navigating the most demanding passages of their existence. She’s the author of several books, among them Fathers’ Daughters, The Personal Mythology, and Unreliable Truth: On Memoir and Memory. But it’s The Heroine’s Journey: Woman’s Quest for Wholeness, published in 1990, that remains her most enduring and transformative contribution — the book that gave countless women a map for terrain they’d been wandering without one.

Murdock was notably a student of Joseph Campbell — the mythologist whose landmark work The Hero with a Thousand Faces defined the Hero’s Journey and shaped how generations of writers, scholars, and storytellers understand the architecture of human experience. It was Campbell’s framework, and her profound dissatisfaction with it, that ultimately gave birth to her own. The story of how The Heroine’s Journey came to be written is itself worth telling.

When Murdock approached Campbell directly and asked him how the Hero’s Journey applied to women, he told her — with the calm certainty of a man who hadn’t been asked to question this particular assumption before — that women don’t need to make the journey. That women are the destination. That they’re the embodiment of the goal the hero seeks, the sacred feminine at the center of the labyrinth, the treasure at the end of the road.

That answer didn’t merely fail to satisfy her. It stunned her and in the aftermath that followed, she wrote The Heroine’s Journey.

"The feminine journey is about going down deep into soul, healing and reclaiming, while the masculine journey is up and out, to spirit." Maureen Murdock, The Heroine's Journey: Woman's Quest for Wholeness

Because what Murdock was witnessing in her therapy practice told an entirely different story than Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey was telling. She was sitting across from women who’d spent decades doing precisely what Campbell’s hero does — striving outward, achieving, competing, and conquering. Women who’d climbed the ladders they were told to climb, met the standards they were told to meet, and arrived at the summit of their striving only to find themselves feeling hollow, disconnected from their own interior lives, and spiritually depleted in ways they couldn’t name or explain.

They’d mastered the masculine model of achievement with extraordinary competence. And in doing so, many had abandoned themselves entirely.

This, Murdock understood, wasn’t a personal failure. It was a cultural one. And it didn’t demand a self-help solution but a mythological one — a story large enough to hold the full complexity of a woman’s experience, and honest enough to name what the Hero’s Journey, for all its power and beauty, had left out.

In The Heroine’s Journey, Murdock identified a distinctly “feminine mythological path” with its own stages, including but not limited to:

Separation from the feminine

Identification with the masculine

The Road of Trials

The descent into the underworld — a confrontation with loss, grief, and the abandoned self

Urgent yearning to reconnect with the feminine

Healing the wounded mother/daughter relationship

The integration of masculine and feminine within ourselves

I’ve been impressed by Murdock’s framework — and at the same time I’ve taken liberties with it. There are two primary reasons for this:

The first is entirely practical: I read The Heroine’s Journey several years ago, and while I still have a copy, it’s on my bookshelf in Maine. I’m currently in Florida, which is to say, it’s where I can’t refer to it at the moment. And so I’ve been working largely from memory and with the assistance of google search, Gemini, and the Heroine Journey’s Project.

The second reason is more substantive: I believe that Murdock’s overall thesis — albeit one I’ve modified, potentially speaks to the journeys of so many estranged mothers. The self-abandonment practiced in the name of love. The lifelong striving to please. The catastrophic descent into a grief that has no funeral and no socially sanctioned mourning period. And the slow, difficult reclamation of a self that was buried long before the estrangement ever happened.

From my perspective, the heroine’s descent into the underworld, in particular, is reflective of the estrangement experience so many of us have lived through. And her insistence that healing requires a return to the feminine — to intuition, to compassion, to creativity, to the radical and revolutionary act of believing oneself worthy of one’s own care — aligns with what I’ve come to understand, both as a retired therapist and as a woman whose estranged from my only child, to be the essential work of healing.

Estrangement thrusts mothers into a psychological landscape we never asked to enter, never anticipated, and for which nothing in our ordinary lives prepared us. And yet — when I began to view my own experience through the lens of Murdock’s framework, something quietly but unmistakably shifted. The rupture, without becoming any less painful, began to reveal a different face. The devastation began to look, however improbably, like initiation. The darkness began to suggest, however faintly, the possibility of a return.

It didn’t make the estrangement acceptable. Nothing does. Nothing will. And I want to be careful not to suggest otherwise — not to wrap devastation in the kind of tidy spiritual packaging that dishonors the reality of what we estranged mothers who deeply loved our children and grandchildren actually live with, day after day, in the ordinary moments of our lives.

But it made it meaningful.

And meaning, I ‘ve learned slowly, at considerable cost, and with no small amount of resistance, is what can make the unfaceable, faceable. It’s what transforms a wound that might otherwise fester in silence into something that can be brought into the light, examined honestly, and offered humbly, in the hope that it might illuminate something for someone else walking the same dark path.

Meaning by no means ends the grief. But it can give the grief a purpose beyond itself.

What follows is my interpretation of the Heroine’s Journey as it maps onto the emotional, psychological, and spiritual terrain of maternal estrangement , offered not as a definitive guide or a clinical prescription, but as one woman’s attempt to find, in an ancient story, the shape of her own.

Phase One: Separation from the Feminine

“The mother/daughter relationship and the separation from the mother is so complex that in most women’s literature and fairy tales the mother remains absent, dead, or villainous.” Maureen Murdock, The Heroine’s Journey: Woman’s Quest for Wholeness

There’s no relationship quite like it. The bond between a mother and daughter is, from the very first breath, unlike any other human connection. It’s a woman’s first mirror — the relationship in which she first sees herself reflected, first learns what it means to be female in the world, first absorbs, without words or conscious understanding, the fundamental lessons about what women are permitted to want, to feel, to become. It’s her primary blueprint for existence itself. And it’s one of the most complicated relationships a woman will ever navigate.

Murdock is clear on this point: the ambivalence that so often fractures the mother-daughter bond isn’t simply a domestic conflict, not merely the ordinary friction of two strong personalities living in close proximity. It’s something far older, far more systemic, and far more spiritually significant than that. It’s a psycho-spiritual wound, she asserts, one inflicted not by individual mothers or individual daughters, but by a culture that’s historically devalued the very qualities the feminine embodies: intuition, emotional expressiveness, receptivity, embodied wisdom, and the kind of deep relational knowing that can’t be measured or monetized.

The mother-daughter relationship, Murdock argues, bears the full weight of that cultural devaluation. And the damage it does runs deeper than most of us realize.

The Root of the Ambivalence: The Original Split

To understand why daughters so often feel torn, longing fiercely for their mothers while simultaneously pulling away from them with equal force , we have to look honestly at the impossible position the culture places them in from the very beginning.

A daughter growing up in a world that rewards masculine values — achievement, control, intellectual dominance, emotional containment — very often absorbs, early and often, a devastating lesson: that the feminine world her mother inhabits is a smaller, less powerful, less valuable world than the one available to her if she’s willing to leave it behind. According to Murdock, many women separate from the feminine not because they reject it outright, but because they couldn’t find in their own mothers a model of feminine strength they wanted to emulate. They may have witnessed their mothers diminish themselves, suffer silently, disappear into caregiving, or never fully inhabit their own lives.

Consciously or not, the daughter often makes a vow: “I won’t be like her.” In rejecting her mother, or at least rejecting what her mother has come to represent, the daughter hasn’t only rejected a person or a role. She’s diminished her connection to something that lived inside her own body: her intuition, her creative fire, her emotional truth, the deep underground river of her own feminine knowing. She’s traded much of her inner life for her outer one. And no amount of external achievement — no title, no salary, no carefully constructed life — can fill the hollow that the trading leaves behind.

For mothers like myself who’re navigating estrangement, this framework carries a weight that’s both revealing and, at times, almost unbearably poignant. Because many of us who’re dealing with the wounds of estrangement were ourselves daughters who made this original split — who turned away from our mothers in various ways. While I remained a devoted daughter until the day my mother died in my arms, I’m able to see now how critical I became of her. How harshly I secretly judged her. How much resentment towards her I silently carried.

So many estranged mothers now find ourselves on the other side of the mother-daughter split. Some of us are standing in a similar place to where our own mothers once stood, feeling what some of our own mothers may once have felt, and understanding, maybe for the first time, with a clarity purchased at tremendous cost, what was sacrificed.

Viewed through this lens, the conflict between mothers and daughters isn’t only a rupture between two females. It’s a chapter in a much longer story, one that’s been moving through generations of women, most of them doing their best with what they were given, each one carrying wounds she didn’t entirely choose and passing on, despite her deepest intentions, some portion of them.

Murdock published the Heroine’s Journey over thirty-five years ago and yet her observations sadly remain as relevant today as they did then. Our culture still gives females the message that our greatest value lies in how we look, what we produce, and how well we manage everyone else’s needs while appearing to have very few of our own. But somewhere beneath the competence, the compliance, the caretaking, the giving and the holding on, a deeper self waits — patient, persistent, and unwilling, ultimately, to be abandoned forever. That deeper self is what most of the Heroine’s Journey is about reclaiming.

Phase Two: The Descent

“During this part of the journey, the woman begins her descent. It may involve a seemingly endless period of wandering, grief, and rage; of dethroning kings; of looking for the lost pieces of herself and meeting the dark feminine. It may take weeks, months, or years, and for many it may involve a time of voluntary isolation—a period of darkness and silence and of learning the art of deeply listening once again to self: of being instead of doing. The outer world may see this as a depression and a period of stasis. Family, friends, and work associates implore our heroine to “get on with it.”
Maureen Murdock, The Heroine's Journey: Woman's Quest for Wholeness

If Phase One is the long, slow turning away from the self, the descent is the moment, or the season, or the years, when everything that was built upon that turning away begins to collapse. Murdock draws on the ancient Sumerian myth of “Inanna, Queen of Heaven” here. Inanna voluntarily descends into the underworld, is stripped of everything that defined her — her crown, her robes, her jewels, her power — and hangs, dead, on a hook in the darkness. It’s not a gentle metaphor.

The descent for estranged mothers rarely announces itself with clarity or dignity. It almost always arrives, as most profound disruptions do, without warning and without mercy. A door closes. A message goes unanswered. Words are spoken — or withheld — that can’t be taken back. And suddenly the carefully ordered life, the relationships tended with such devotion, the roles that gave shape and meaning to everything — mother, grandmother, begin to dissolve.

Our descent often begins with disbelief and our minds rush in like a first responder. It gathers its tools—logic, analysis, control—and begins to attempt the work of repair. The heroine tells herself, I can fix this. She combs through memories like evidence, replaying every conversation, every silence, every word that might have gone wrong. She drafts letters, rehearses responses, and imagines outcomes. She believes that if she can just find the right combination of words or gestures, the door will open again.

This is the stage of effort, of striving, of trying to understand what happened. It’s our mind’s way of protecting our hearts from the unbearable truth that some things can’t be fixed, they can only be lived through. The heroine becomes a strategist, a negotiator, a quiet warrior of reason. She reads books, listens to podcasts, studies the psychology of reconciliation. She tells herself she’s being “reasonable,” “calm,” “mature.” But beneath the surface, her nervous system hums in alarm.

The descent isn’t a stumble, it’s a stripping. And for so many estranged mothers, it’s one of the most brutal and disorienting experiences a human being can endure — because it’s not just the loss of a beloved. It’s the loss of an identity, a future, a story she believed was permanently hers. For estranged mothers, this stripping is devastatingly specific:

The role of active mother — stripped. She may still be a mother in her heart, in her bones, in every cell of her body. But the daily living of that role — the phone calls, the holidays, the ordinary weekly check-ins — has been taken from her.

The role of grandmother— stripped. Probably the most quietly devastating loss of all, because it’s so rarely spoken about. The grandchildren who carry her eyes, her laugh, her history — growing up in her absence, sometimes not even knowing her name.

The story she told herself about her family — stripped. The narrative of a life well-lived, of love that held, of bonds that would never be broken — rewritten without her consent.

Her sense of herself as a good mother — stripped, or at least savagely questioned. Because estrangement has a way of turning the knife of self-doubt inward with particular cruelty, making so many of us rehearse every mistake, every imperfection, every moment we wish we could reclaim.

Her vision of the future— stripped. The grandchildren at holidays. The phone calls in old age. The reconciliation she’d assumed, without even knowing she’d assumed it, was simply a matter of time.

Murdock is clear that the descent isn’t something that can be rushed, or bypassed. It will need to be experienced and endured. And for estranged mothers, this is perhaps the hardest truth of all — because everything in us, everything we were trained to be in Phase One, rises up in fierce resistance.

What makes the descent in estrangement uniquely cruel is its ambiguity. This isn’t the clean, terrible grief of death, where the loss is final, witnessed, and socially acknowledged. This is what’s called in clinical language “ambiguous loss” — a term coined by Pauline Boss to describe the grief of losing someone whose still alive, still in the world, perhaps living miles away or across a city or, in my case, across the street at the time. Beloveds who’re breathing and laughing and continuing — just not with us.

As so many writing about estrangement have observed, there are no rituals for this grief. No funeral, no casseroles brought to the door, no socially sanctioned mourning period after which people expect you to begin recovering. Friends grow uncomfortable. Family members take sides or fall silent. And the estranged mother is left to carry a grief that we don’t have adequate language for.

We grieve in private. We grieve in the car, in the shower, in the grocery store when we pass the cereal our children or her grandchildren used to love. We grieve at three in the morning when the silence is loudest. We grieve the living and the lost simultaneously — and that particular grief has a weight unlike any other. We grieve without a timeline. We hang, like Inanna on her hook, in the darkness.

Murdock, drawing on Jung, reassures us that the descent, as devastating as it is, isn’t punishment. It’s initiation. The underworld isn’t the end of the story. It’s the darkness that’s necessary before transformation becomes possible.

While deep in the descent, we’re urged to offer ourselves something most of us were never taught to offer ourselves: “radical compassion.” The willingness to sit with our own pain without judgment, without the relentless inner critic cataloguing our failures, without the desperate need to assign blame in order to make sense of something that will probably never fully make sense.

The descent asks us to grieve what was. To release what can’t be controlled. To stop performing strength we don’t feel. To acknowledge, in the quietest and most honest part of ourselves, that we’re broken — and to remind ourselves that broken isn’t the same as finished.

The Gifts Hidden in the Darkness:

This is probably the most counterintuitive truth of the entire Heroine’s Journey — and the one most worth sitting with: ”the descent carries gifts.” Not immediately. Not obviously. Not in ways that feel remotely like gifts at the time.

But in the darkness, stripped of roles and certainties, something begins to stir. Questions arise that our busy, performing, caretaking selves never had time to ask. *Who am I outside of being my child’s mother? What do I actually feel, beneath the hurt and the longing? What have I been carrying that was never mine to carry? What do I need — not as a mother, not as a daughter, not as a wife — but simply as myself?*

These aren’t comfortable questions. But they are, I believe that Murdock would argue, some of the most important questions an estranged mother can ask. And estrangement — as unwelcome and devastating as it is — creates the conditions in which they’re more likely to be asked.

Phase Three: The Road of Trials

If the Descent is the fall into darkness, the Road of Trials is what happens once a woman finds herself there — disoriented, stripped of her former certainties, and desperate to find her way back to the light. According to Murdock, this phase is characterized by a series of tests, ordeals, and confrontations that the heroine will need to navigate — not by force or will or cleverness, but by developing new capacities she didn’t know she possessed.

It’s the longest phase of the heroine’s journey. It’s also, in many ways, the most exhausting — because it asks the heroine to keep moving through terrain that offers no guarantees, no maps, and no assurance that her efforts will ever be rewarded.

For estranged mothers, the Road of Trials is achingly familiar. It’s the long, bewildering middle — after the initial shock of estrangement has settled and before any resolution, reconciliation, or genuine peace has arrived. It’s the territory most estranged parents live in, sometimes for years, sometimes for the rest of their lives. And it often asks more of us than anything else we’ve ever faced.

The Nature of the Trials

Unlike the Hero’s Journey, where trials are typically external — dragons to slay, kingdoms to reclaim, enemies to defeat — Murdock is clear that the heroine’s trials are primarily internal. They’re battles fought not on open fields but in the quiet, unwitnessed chambers of the heart and mind. This doesn’t make them easier. In many ways, it makes them harder.

For estranged mothers, the trials are often disguised as ordinary moments, and they frequently demand responses that don’t come naturally to women who’ve spent decades in self-abandonment.

Trial One: The Trial of Waiting

Perhaps no trial is more agonizing for an estranged mother than the trial of waiting, waiting for a response to a letter carefully written and rewritten. Waiting for a birthday acknowledgement that doesn’t come. Waiting for a text on a holiday morning. Waiting for a sign, however small, that the door hasn’t been permanently sealed shut.

We were never taught how to patiently wait without doing. We were taught to fix, to reach, to try harder, to find the right words, to be more patient, more understanding, more forgiving, more helpful, more remorseful — as though love were a problem that could be solved with sufficient effort and ingenuity.

The trial of waiting asks us to stop trying and sit with uncertainty — not passively, not in defeat, but in the fierce and active practice of holding space for what we can’t control. It asks us to resist the desperate reaching or defending that often pushes our estranged children further away, and to trust — without evidence, without guarantee — that love can exist and even grow in the silence between us.

This just might be the hardest thing an estranged mother can be asked to do.

Trial Two: The Trial of Self-Examination

The Road of Trials inevitably leads inward. And inward is generally where the most uncomfortable confrontations occur. Estrangement has a way of holding up a mirror — one that’s neither flattering nor forgiving — and asking us to look honestly at what we see. Not with the cruelty of self-condemnation, but with the clear-eyed courage of genuine self-examination.

This trial asks us to consider questions that may wound as much as they illuminate:

Where did I lose myself in this relationship? Where did my love become suffocating rather than sustaining? Where did my own unhealed wounds spill over into my parenting? Where did I confuse my needs with my child’s needs? Where did I hold on when I should have let go — or let go when I should have held on?

These aren’t questions that yield easy or comfortable answers. And they’re not questions that assign all blame inward — estrangement is rarely, if ever, the fault of one person alone. But they’re questions that a woman on the Road of Trials must be willing to sit with, honestly and compassionately, if she’s to emerge from this journey genuinely transformed rather than merely surviving.

Murdock, drawing on Jung, reminds us that what we refuse to examine in ourselves doesn’t disappear. It goes underground, where it continues to shape our choices, our relationships, and our suffering — unseen and therefore unchallenged. The Road of Trials demands that we bring it into the light.

Trial Three: The Trial of Irreconcilable Stories

One of the most powerful — and most underestimated — trials on this road is the conflict over story. Whose version of events is true? Whose pain is valid? Whose at fault? Whose narrative will define what this estrangement means?

Some estranged mothers frequently find themselves in the agonizing position of having their entire history as a parent rewritten — sometimes publicly, sometimes within the family system, sometimes simply in the silence of an unanswered message. The story they believed they were living — of a devoted, loving, imperfect-but-trying mother — is suddenly contested in ways that feel catastrophically unjust.

The trial of irreconcilable stories asks us to do something extraordinarily difficult: to hold our own truth firmly without requiring our child to share it. To resist the twin temptations of self-justification on one hand and wholesale self-condemnation on the other. To live in the complex, uncomfortable space where two people can experience the same relationship in profoundly different ways — and both very often (although not always) can be telling their own version of the truth.

This trial also asks us to examine the stories we tell ourselves about our children, about our parenting, about reconciliation, about what justice should look like. Stories like if they only understood or when they finally see the truth or when she finally sees through his lies, or when they have children of their own… These narratives, however understandable, can become traps, keeping us anchored to a future we’re trying to control or create rather than freed into the present we actually inhabit.

Trial Four: The Trial of Isolation

The Road of Trials is a lonely road. Estrangement carries a social stigma that few other family ruptures do — a persistent cultural assumption that where there’s an estranged child, there must be a failed or toxic parent. And so estranged mothers often suffer in a particular kind of silence, unable to speak freely about their pain for fear of judgment, misunderstanding, or the well-meaning but devastating question: But what did you do?

This isolation compounds our grief. It adds shame to loss, invisibility to heartbreak. And it makes the already long and difficult road feel impossibly solitary.

The trial of isolation asks us to find our people — the other travelers on this same arduous road, who understand without explanation, who hold without judgment, who know the sound of a holiday that passes without a grandchild’s voice in it. It asks us to resist the cultural pressure to keep our suffering polished and presentable, and to dare to be seen in our most unguarded and broken places.

It’s in this trial that support groups, therapists, honest friendships, loving family, and creativity become lifelines.

Trial Five: The Trial of Identity

Perhaps the most existentially disorienting trial of all is the one that asks: Who am I, if not her (or his) mother in the way I believed myself to be?

For women like myself who organized so much of ourselves around our role as mother, who for years poured our identity, our purpose, our daily rhythm into our children, estrangement doesn’t just remove our children from our lives. It very often removes the scaffolding around which so much of our selves was constructed. And into that sudden, disorienting spaciousness come questions that are both uncomfortable, and, in time, potentially liberating: Who am I, beneath all of that? Who was I before I became someone’s mother, someone’s wife, someone’s caretaker? Who do I want to become, now that the life I planned has taken a shape I didn’t choose and never would have chosen?

Murdock is clear that the road of trials, as disorienting as it is, can also serve as a doorway to genuine selfhood. The identity crisis of the Road of Trials isn’t just a breakdown. It’s often a breakthrough in disguise — the psyche’s insistence that the self which was buried in Phase One will now need to be found, named, and claimed.

The Allies and Helpers:

In every mythological journey, the heroine doesn’t travel the Road of Trials entirely alone. She encounters allies — figures who offer wisdom, companionship, or tools she probably wouldn’t have found on her own.

For estranged mothers, these allies arrive in many forms:

• The therapist who offers growth promoting and often challenging questions instead of easy answers

• The other estranged parents who says I know exactly what you mean and means it completely

• The book that articulates something she may have felt but never had words for

• The poet who reaches into her heart and names what lives there

• The practice — journaling, prayer, meditation, creative work — that keeps her connected to herself when everything else feels untethered

What the Road of Trials Is Really Teaching:

Murdock is insistent on this point: the trials aren’t punishment. They’re our curriculum. Each ordeal carries within it exactly the lesson the heroine most needs — and most resists — in order to become who she’s capable of becoming.

Each trial forces the heroine to confront the truth she’s been trying to outrun: she can’t think her way out of heartbreak. She can’t logic her way back to safety. She can’t negotiate her way into certainty. This is the moment the journey deepens. The mind, valiant but exhausted, begins to loosen its grip. And the heroine, worn down from the trials, finally begins to understand that the only way forward is through.

Phase Four: The Descent into the Underworld:

If the road of trials introduced the initial fall into darkness, the descent into the underworld is something altogether different and far more profound. This isn’t the first shock of loss. This is the deepest chamber of the underworld — the place the heroine arrives at after the trials have stripped away every last defense, every remaining illusion, every carefully maintained performance of coping.

Murdock distinguishes this phase from the earlier descent. The first descent is what happens to the heroine. This descent is what happens within her — a profound, necessary, and ultimately sacred dismemberment of the false self that has governed her life for decades.

It’s the phase that breaks everything open.

And for estranged mothers, it’s the phase that most closely mirrors the experience so many describe but struggle to find words for — that particular depth of grief and disorientation that goes beyond sadness, beyond anger, beyond even loss itself, into something that feels like the dissolution of the very ground beneath our feet.

The Myth of Inanna Revisited:

Murdock turns here to the ancient Sumerian myth of Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth, to illustrate the heroine’s descent into the underworld. Inanna, after learning about the death of her sister’s husband, descends through seven gates into the underworld, surrendering at each gate a piece of her divine regalia: her crown, her earrings, her necklace, her breastplate, her golden ring, her lapis measuring rod, and finally her royal robe.

She arrives in the underworld naked. Stripped of every symbol of power, identity, and status she possessed. And here she’s killed by her sister Ereshkigal, queen of the underworld, and she’s hung on a hook to rot.

This isn’t a myth softened for modern sensibility. This is the raw, unflinching image of what total psychological and spiritual dismemberment actually feels like from the inside. And any estranged mother whose lain awake night after night, who hardly recognizes herself since the estrangement, whose unable to imagine who she might become when her life resumes a sense of normalcy, will recognize this terrible image with a bone-deep familiarity that requires no explanation. I have hung on that hook.

The Seven Gates of Estrangement:

Just as Inanna surrenders her regalia at seven successive gates, estranged mothers pass through their own series of surrenders — each one a layer of identity, certainty, or protection that must be laid down before the deepest transformation can begin:

The First Gate: The Surrender of the Future

The life we imagined — holidays gathered around a full table, grandchildren tumbling through our door, the phone calls in old age, the reconciliation that was surely only a matter of time — must be surrendered at the first gate. Not forever, maybe. But for now. The heroine can’t carry her imagined future into the underworld.

The Second Gate: The Surrender of the Story

The narrative we lived inside — of a close family, of the love of children that we trusted completely, of bonds we didn’t think possible to break — must be surrendered at the second gate. Not necessarily because it was false. But because clinging to it in the face of what’s actually happening becomes its own form of suffering.

The Third Gate: The Surrender of Control

The belief — so deeply held, so fiercely maintained — that if we just try harder, love better, say the right thing, wait long enough, or change sufficiently, we can change the outcome of this estrangement, must be surrendered at the third gate. This is probably the most brutal surrender of all for those of us who’ve spent our entire lives believing that love between parent and child, applied with sufficient devotion, can repair any rupture.

We can’t fix this. Not alone. Not unilaterally. And the moment of truly knowing this — not intellectually but in our bones— is the moment the third gate closes behind us.

The Fourth Gate: The Surrender of Identity

Mother. Grandmother. The woman whose family was her center, her meaning, this identity may need to be surrendered at the fourth gate. Maybe not permanently. Not completely. But in the underworld, we can’t be defined by a role that’s no longer being lived in the ways we knew.

The Fifth Gate: The Surrender of Certainty

The belief that everything we believe about the estrangement - what happened, whose at fault, what needs to happen, etc. is absolute truth will need to be surrendered at the fifth gate. Estrangement lives in ambiguity. It resists the clean lines of right and wrong, cause and effect, villain and victim. The heroine who insists on certainty in the underworld will remain lost there far longer than the one who arrives with humility.

The Sixth Gate: The Surrender of Anger

The anger — and it’s real, and it’s valid, and it deserves to be honored — must eventually be surrendered at the sixth gate. Not suppressed. Not denied. Not bypassed in the spirit of forgiveness. But truly felt, truly metabolized, and then — when the time comes — truly laid down. The underworld asks for a deeper letting go than anger alone can accomplish.

The Seventh Gate: The Surrender of Hope — As We Have Known It

This I suspect is the gate that would stop most estranged mothers in their tracks. The surrender of hope feels indistinguishable from despair. It feels like giving up, like betraying the love that’s kept us reaching, like admitting that what we’ve feared most is true.

But there’s a crucial distinction to be made here: surrendering hope as we’ve defined it — hope for a specific outcome, a particular reconciliation, a return to exactly what was — isn’t the same as surrendering hope itself. It’s rather, the surrender of the ego’s version of hope in favor of something larger, more open, and ultimately more honest.

It is the surrender of what I want in favor of what is.

And it is at this gate, stripped of everything — role, story, control, identity, certainty, anger, and ego-driven hope — that the heroine arrives at the deepest point of the underworld. Naked. Hanging on the hook. Not dead. But not yet alive in the way she was before either.

Ereshkigal: The Dark Sister:

One of Murdock’s most psychologically sophisticated insights is her treatment of Ereshkigal — the dark queen of the underworld who kills Inanna and hangs her on the hook.

Ereshkigal isn’t simply an enemy. She’s Inanna’s shadow — the rejected, banished, ignored or denied parts of Inanna that were driven underground a long time ago. She’s the rage that was never permitted expression. The grief that was never fully entered. The need that was always suppressed. The authentic, messy, and utterly unpolished self that Inanna has spent a lifetime pushing down or covering up.

In the deepest descent, Ereshkigal isn’t defeated. She’s met. She’s witnessed. She’s ultimately integrated.

For estranged mothers, this meeting with Ereshkigal, the dark sister, takes many forms:

• The grief that finally, fully arrives — truly, messily, painfully inhabited

• The rage at our adult child — felt completely rather than suppressed

• The shameful thoughts that feel too dangerous to admit — I am furious. I am jealous of mothers whose children call them. I am exhausted by my own longing. I wish I could stop loving her.

• The recognition of our own shadows — the ways in which our unhealed wounds shaped our parenting, the patterns inherited from our own parents that were passed on despite every intention otherwise

What makes this phase uniquely devastating in the context of estrangement is that there’s no clear endpoint. In Inanna’s myth, she hangs on the hook for three days and three nights before being rescued. In estrangement, the duration is unknown, unmapped, and entirely outside of our control.

We don’t know if our child will ever be able or willing to truly see us. We don’t know if reconciliation is possible. We don’t know if we’re waiting for a break through or grieving something permanent. We live in what therapist Pauline Boss calls the frozen grief of ambiguous loss — unable to fully mourn because the loss isn’t final, unable to fully heal because the wound keeps reopening.

This ambiguity is its own form of the underworld — a darkness without edges, without a visible exit, without the mercy of knowing how long it will need to be endured.

What Waits in the Deepest Dark:

Murdock is Absolute: the underworld, at its deepest point, isn’t merely a place of destruction and devastation. It’s also a place of preparation. What dies in the underworld is the false self — the constructed, performing, self-abandoning self that was built in Phase One and tested in the phases that followed. What’s being prepared in the darkness, slowly and invisibly, is something new.

The seed doesn’t experience the soil as a nurturing environment. It experiences it as crushing darkness, pressure, and the absence of light. It has no way of knowing that what surrounds it is precisely what’s required for it to split open and send its first, fragile tendril upward.

The heroine in the deepest underworld can’t see this either. She can only endure.

But enduring, in Murdock’s framework, isn’t passive. It’s the most demanding form of courage available to a human being — the courage to remain present in our own devastation, to refuse the numbing that would make it bearable at the risk of making it permanent, and to trust, without evidence, that the darkness has a purpose it hasn’t yet revealed.

The Rescue: Being Seen in the Dark:

In the myth, Inanna isn’t rescued by a powerful hero who storms the underworld with weapons. She’s rescued by two small, sexless creatures sent by the god of wisdom. They come defenseless, without weapons, only empathy.

They descend to Ereshkigal, who is herself in agony, mourning the death of her husband, and they simply grieve with her. They mirror her pain. They witness it without trying to fix it or explain it away. And in being truly witnessed, Ereshkigal is ultimately transformed enough to release Inanna from the hook.

This is one of the most profound psychological insights in all of mythology: the healing in the underworld isn’t the result of solutions but from compassionate witnessing.

True empathy doesn’t look for quick fixes or creative solutions; instead, it provides a safe, compassionate container for pain to exist without judgment. When we’re truly witnessed in our darkest moments, the heavy burden of isolation begins to lift, allowing a deep, psychological exhale. This profound act of being seen and understood acts as an emotional anchor, transforming raw devastation into a meaningful space where the slow, quiet work of healing and self-compassion can finally begin.

For estranged mothers, this means that the path out of the deepest darkness is rarely found alone. It’s found in the presence of those who can witness our devastation without flinching — a therapist who doesn’t rush the grief, a friend who doesn’t offer easy answers, or a support group where we’re reassured that as painful as it is, we’re not alone.

The Initiation and Surrender:

“Is it possible, I asked myself, that I’m being summoned from some deep and holy place within? Am I being asked to enter a passage in the spiritual life – the journey from false self to true self? Am I being asked to dismantle the old masks and patterns and unfold a deeper, more authentic self… Am I being compelled to disturb my entire universe in quest of the undiscovered being who clamors from within?” Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits

Initiation and Surrender is the still point at the center of the entire Heroine’s Journey — the breathless, terrifying, sacred moment between death and rebirth. The heroine has survived the descent. She’s passed through the seven gates. She’s met her dark sister in the deepest chamber of the underworld. She’s hung on the hook until there was nothing left to strip away.

And now something extraordinary and irreversible happens.

She’s initiated.

Not by ceremony. Not by celebration. Not by anything that looks, from the outside, like a triumph. But by the quiet, devastating, ultimately liberating recognition that the woman who descended into the underworld no longer exists as she was — and the woman who’ll ascend hasn’t yet fully taken shape. She stands at the threshold between the two.

This is the phase that’s arguably the most psychologically and spiritually significant of the entire journey — because it’s the phase in which the heroine must make the most profound surrender of all. Not of her future, or her story, or her control, or her identity as she’s known it. All of those were surrendered at the gates.

This surrender is of something deeper still. It’s the surrender of the ‘self’ she thought she needed to be in exchange for the ‘self’ she authentically is.

And for estranged mothers, this initiation arrives not with fanfare but in the quietest, most unexpected moments — in the space between one breath and the next, in the first morning she wakes and doesn’t immediately reach for her phone hoping for a message, on the afternoon when she sits quietly weeping in the presence of a friend, in the moment she realizes, with both grief and wonder, that she’s felt happiness — genuine happiness — for the first time since the estrangement began.

The word initiation carries ancient weight. In every culture across human history, initiatory rituals have marked the threshold between one form of being and another — between child and adult, between novice and elder, between the uninitiated and the one whose been through the fire and returned transformed.

But Murdock is careful to distinguish genuine initiation from what we might call spiritual bypassing — the tendency to claim transformation before it’s truly occurred, to claim healing before its been genuinely metabolized, to rush past the surrender because the surrender is too uncomfortable to fully inhabit.

True initiation, she insists, can’t be rushed. It can’t be willed. It can’t be performed. It can only be received — by a woman whose been willing to go all the way to the bottom of her own experience and remain there long enough for something real to shift. For estranged mothers, this distinction matters significantly.

There’s enormous cultural pressure — from well-meaning friends, from self-help culture, from our own desperate longing to stop hurting — to move toward healing before we’ve fully honored what we’re healing from. We’re encouraged to forgive before we’ve finished grieving. To find the lesson before we’ve fully felt the loss. To look on the bright side before we’ve sat long enough in the dark to understand what the darkness has been trying to teach us.

Genuine initiation refuses this pressure. It says: you must go all the way. There’s no door in the middle of this process you can exit through. The only way out is the way forward.

The Three Faces of Surrender in This Phase:

Murdock identifies surrender as a layered, ongoing process rather than a single moment.

The First Surrender: Surrendering the Fight

For much of the journey — through the descent, through the trials, through the long darkness of the underworld — the heroine has been, on some level, at war. At war with her circumstances. At war with her child. At war with herself. At war with the sheer injustice of her loss.

The first surrender is to surrender the fight. Not because self-defense is wrong. Not because the wounds weren’t real. But because the heroine has arrived at the place where she understands, in her body as well as her heart and mind, that the battle is costing her more than the peace would.

For estranged mothers, this surrender often comes after years of oscillating between hope and despair, reaching out and pulling back, rehearsing conversations that never happen and replaying ones that did. It comes in the form of a quiet, interior recognition: I can’t keep living in the space between what is and what I want. I must learn to live in what is.

This isn’t resignation. This isn’t giving up on the possibility of reconciliation. This is the radical act of bringing ourselves fully into the present — choosing to inhabit the life that’s actually happening rather than hovering perpetually in the anteroom of the life we hoped for.

The Second Surrender: Surrendering the Self-Condemnation

Most estranged mothers carry a version of this — the relentless inner tribunal that convenes, often in the small hours of the morning, to review the evidence of her failures. Every mistake rehearsed. Every harsh word remembered. Every moment of imperfection offered up as proof of her guilt.

Not because self-examination is wrong, honest self-examination is necessary and even healing. But there’s a profound difference between honest self-examination, which leads to growth, and self-condemnation, which leads only to paralysis and deeper shame.

Murdock, drawing on the Jungian concept of self-compassion as a spiritual practice, insists that the heroine can’t ascend from the underworld while she’s still actively attacking herself within it. The initiation requires that she extend to herself the same quality of compassionate witnessing she would offer any other human being in the same degree of pain.

For estranged mothers, this surrender is often the most radical and the most resisted. We’ve been so thoroughly trained to be responsible for everyone else’s wellbeing, so conditioned to absorb blame as a form of love, that receiving our own compassion can feel almost transgressive — like a luxury we haven’t earned.

But Murdock is clear: self-compassion isn’t self-exoneration. It doesn’t require pretending that mistakes weren’t made or that wounds weren’t inflicted. It simply insists that imperfect human beings — which is to say, all human beings — deserve the grace of being witnessed in their suffering without being defined entirely by their failures.

I did the best I could with what I knew and who I was. I’m still learning. And I deserve to heal from this.

This isn’t a small surrender. For many estranged mothers, it’s the biggest one of all.

The Third Surrender: Surrendering the Outcome

Not the surrender of love — love is never surrendered in the Heroine’s Journey. Not the surrender of hope in its deepest, most open form. But the surrender of the ego’s insistence that love must be returned in order to be real, that devotion must be rewarded in order to be valid, that our story must end in the way we need it to end in order to have been worth living.

This surrender is what some mystics have pointed toward when they speak of non-attachment — the practice of loving fully, completely, without reservation, while simultaneously releasing the demand that love produce a particular result.

It’s probably one of the most counterintuitive thing a mother can be asked to do.

And it’s probably the thing that very often makes genuine peace possible.

For estranged mothers, this surrender doesn’t necessarily mean closing the door to reconciliation. It doesn’t mean pretending not to want what you deeply want. It means learning to hold the longing and the release simultaneously — to say, in the same breath: I love you completely. I want nothing more than for us to heal our relationship. And I’m learning, slowly and imperfectly, to release my grip on whether we do.

The Mark of the Initiated:

How does the heroine know she’s been truly initiated? Not by the absence of pain — the initiated woman still grieves. Not by the resolution of her circumstances — the initiated woman may still be estranged. Not by the disappearance of longing — the initiated woman still loves her child with the full force of a mother’s heart.

She knows she’s been initiated by something far subtler and far more profound:

She’s stopped waiting for her normal life to resume.

The uninitiated woman lives in the permanent conditional — when my child returns, then I’ll be happy. When this is resolved, then I’ll feel whole. When the estrangement ends, then my real life can start again.

The initiated woman has crossed the threshold into the unconditional. She’s chosen deliberately, imperfectly, day by day, to be fully present in the life she’s actually living. To find meaning in the present moment rather than hoarding it for a future that may or may not arrive in the shape she’s so badly ached for.

She’s stopped being a woman waiting for her real story to resume.

She’s become a woman finally embracing her story — this story, the one she didn’t choose but has finally chosen to inhabit to the best of her ability, with grace.

The Paradox of Initiation:

Murdock names a paradox at the heart of initiation that’s worth spending some time with: initiation is both an ending and a beginning — and it can be impossible to tell, from inside it, which is which.

The woman in Initiation and Surrender can’t see clearly what she’s becoming. She can only feel the ground shifting beneath her, the old self dissolving, something new and nameless beginning to take shape in the space that’s been cleared by everything she’s surrendered.

This uncertainty isn’t a sign that the initiation is failing. It is the initiation. The chrysalis doesn’t know it’s becoming a butterfly. The harsh facts of the moment are that it’s dissolving, it’s neither what it was nor yet what it will be, and that something it can’t see or name is happening in the darkness.

For estranged mothers, this paradox is both deeply comforting and deeply unsettling — comforting because it means the disorientation isn’t a sign of breakdown but of breakthrough, and unsettling because it offers no guarantee of what the breakthrough will bring.

The heroine in this phase must learn to tolerate not knowing. She’ll need to learn to trust the process without being able to see where it’s leading. She’ll need to learn, probably for the first time in her life, to relax into the becoming.

The Role of Ritual and Creativity:

Murdock is insistent on this point: initiation — precisely because it’s such a disorienting, invisible, and socially unacknowledged process — needs ritual containers to hold it. In ancient cultures, initiatory experiences were carefully held within elaborate ceremonial structures that marked the threshold between one form of being and another and bore witness to the initiate’s passage. The initiate didn’t undergo the the transition alone, unnamed, and unwitnessed. The community gathered. The crossing was marked. The new self was received.

We still carry faint echoes of this in modern life. Consider the graduation ceremony — the cap and gown, the formal procession, the calling of names, the turning of the tassel. Stripped of its familiarity, it’s a deeply ancient ritual: the community assembles to witness a threshold crossing, to declare publicly that someone has been changed by what they’ve undergone, and to receive them on the other side as someone whose identity has been altered. We understand, instinctively, that certain passages in a human life are too significant to be crossed in silence.

And yet for grieving estranged mothers — undergoing one of the most devastating initiatory experiences available to a human being — there’s no ceremony. No gathering. No public witnessing. No moment in which the community assembles to say: we see what you’re undergoing. We honor what it’s costing you. We’ll receive you on the other side.

The grief is real. The change is real. But it happens largely in private, largely in silence, largely without the ritual acknowledgement that would help it be metabolized and integrated rather than simply endured.

This, probably more than anything else, is why the creation of personal ritual matters so much for women on this journey. For me, this has taken the form of returning to my journal every morning — a small, faithful act of showing up for myself before the world makes its demands. It’s taken the form of this Substack, of poetry written in a desperate and ultimately redemptive attempt to name what has so often felt unnameable, and of prose that are slowly, painstakingly helping me to metabolize what once felt unsurvivable.

Each time I’ve returned to the page, shaking or steadied, clear-eyed or hollowed out, it’s been, in its own quiet way, a ceremony. A ritual of insisting that my experience deserves to be witnessed. That my pain deserves to be given form. That even the darkest passages of a human life — perhaps especially the darkest passages — are worthy of language, of attention, of the kind of honest, unflinching tenderness we so rarely think to offer ourselves.

Writing hasn’t saved me from the underworld. But it’s given me something to hold onto while I’m in it. And it’s word by word, helping me find my way back home.

Surrender as Strength:

Murdock insists that surrender is the most demanding form of strength available to a human being. It’s far easier to keep fighting, to keep trying, rehearsing, resenting, hoping in the ego’s limited way, than it is to let go of our attempts to fix and control and just trust.

The surrender of this phase isn’t weakness. It’s not defeat. It’s not the abandonment of love or hope or the fierce devotion of a mother’s heart. It’s the graduation from a smaller version of love into a larger one. From love that requires an answer into love that needs no reply to know itself as real.

I’ll pause here, this piece has grown far longer and far deeper than I anticipated when I first sat down to write it. I’ll return next week to cover the final major phase of the heroine’s journey, Reclaiming the Feminine: Returning to Herself

And in the meantime — if you managed to keep reading this far too long entry and you’ve related to any of it, I hope that you’ve been reminded that you’re not alone, the journey is far from over, and there’s so much more waiting for you.

More soon…

Tammie

A very brief summary of the Heroine’s Journey

I taught Barbara Fredrickson’s Broaden-and-Build Theory to clients for years, and then I began using it to save myself.

“Most of our day
is gift after gift...
if we wake up to it.”
Brother David Steindl-Rast,

When I first became estranged from my daughter, my life felt suddenly unfamiliar, as if the ground beneath me had shifted overnight, leaving me in a place I barely recognized. The silence between us became a canyon I could no longer safely cross, no matter how desperately I longed to reach the other side. Nights stretched endlessly, filled with questions that had no reliable answers and a grief that felt too large to name. As a retired therapist, the tools I had once offered so confidently to others now felt strangely hollow when held up against the weight of this soul shattering loss.

Then one evening, as I reached for yet another book on estrangement, a memory stirred: Barbara Fredrickson’s Broaden-and-Build Theory of Positive Emotions.

I’d spoken of this theory for years. Fredrickson’s research showed that positive emotions don’t just make us feel good in the moment—they expand our thinking and help us build enduring inner resources: resilience, social support, even physical health. It sounds almost too simple, but I knew that if I was going to give myself every possible chance to heal, I needed to add Broaden and Build to my own toolbox.

Understanding Broaden-and-Build

Here’s the essence of the theory:

• Negative emotions narrow. When we’re afraid, ashamed, or angry, our attention becomes laser-focused on survival. We ruminate, shut down options, and brace for threat. Prolonged exposure to these emotions without healthy coping can lead to chronic stress and mental health challenges like anxiety or depression. Over time, that narrowing of focus can hinder our growth and resilience.

• Positive emotions broaden. When we feel gratitude, joy, awe, or even calm, our awareness expands. We become more creative, open, and connected.

• Over time, positive emotions build. Those micro-moments of openness to goodness accumulate into lasting strengths—mental flexibility, coping skills, social networks, and better physical health. This isn’t about toxic positivity; it’s about planting tiny seeds of hope that grow into resilience.

For an estranged parent—whose world can feel painfully small—this widening is vital. Here’s how I began applying it, and how you might, too.

Step One: Begin with Tiny Openings

At first, joy felt impossible. How could I feel happy when my relationship with my only child was in shambles? So I started smaller—with noticing.

Each morning, I created a simple ritual: sitting by the window with my coffee. Instead of reaching for my phone, I looked outside. I noticed the sunlight glinting on the water, the maple branches swaying in the breeze, the clouds drifting across a deep blue sky. Slowly, I felt a loosening in my chest as I absorbed the beauty outside and savored the rich flavor of my hazelnut coffee. These weren’t grand gestures —they were tiny cracks where light seeped in. And Fredrickson’s research reassured me: these small moments matter.

Savoring—intentionally focusing on and appreciating even the smallest positive experiences—is a practice with profound benefits:

• Increases Positive Emotions: Fully engaging with small pleasures—like a sunset, a warm bath, or a heartfelt conversation—elevates our mood and creates emotional balance.

• Enhances Life Satisfaction: For estranged parents, savoring reminds us that even with the bitterness of loss, sweetness remains if we only notice.

• Builds Resilience: Each moment of savoring strengthens our emotional toolkit, giving us resources to draw upon when grief feels heavy.

• Strengthens Relationships: Sharing positive experiences, even in small ways, fosters connection and support.

• Encourages Mindfulness: Savoring anchors us in the present, reducing anxiety about the future and softening painful rumination about the past.

• Creates Lasting Memories: Positive moments, when savored, become durable sources of comfort we can return to again and again.

Reflection Questions:

• What is one small positive experience today that made you pause, even for a second?

• When was the last time you felt a flicker of ease or beauty, even in grief?

Practical Exercise: Daily Savoring

• Choose one ordinary moment—feeling the sunlight on your face, walking outside, hearing a bird sing, sipping warm and savory tea.

• Pause for 30 seconds. Notice the sights, sounds, and smells.

• Silently affirm: This matters. This is good.

Why it works: Savoring strengthens the brain’s ability to recognize goodness, even when pain is present.

Step Two: Build Inner Resources with Gratitude

I’d encouraged countless clients to keep gratitude journals. Now it was time for me to return to this practice. At first, the lists were painfully short:

• The smell of rain that morning when I stepped outside.

• A neighbor’s wave from across the street.

• The promising new book on my nightstand.

But those lists became a lifeline. On the hardest days, I opened my journal and remembered: life still held sweetness. Each entry was a thread pulling me back to the present.

Practical Exercise: Evening Gratitude Journal

• Each night, write down three things that brought you ease or pleasure.

• If you struggle to find them, look smaller: the sound of rain, the taste of coffee, the quiet when you turn out the light.

Why it works: Gratitude rewires the brain toward abundance instead of loss, creating a foundation for resilience.

Step Three: Rediscover Connection and Flow

Estrangement often breeds isolation. I withdrew for months, too fragile to pretend that all was well. My world felt small and colorless.

But after several weeks of savoring and gratitude practice, a small shift occurred. I felt strong enough to teach a class I’d previously committed to.

As I prepared for the course, time slipped away from me. Hours passed unnoticed as I became absorbed in the work, fully immersed in something that felt both meaningful and alive. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls this state flow — a deep engagement that quiets the mind and softens emotional pain. In those rare, steady moments, the grip of grief loosened, and I felt a small return of interest in my life. Being in the state of Flow didn’t erase my pain, but it did restore a sense of purpose and well‑being during the hours that I was fully occupied.

On the afternoons that I taught my class, I sat among enthusiastic participants, soaking in the warmth of their company and wisdom. The quiet balm of community reminded me that life could still hold connection, creativity, and joy—even if not in the way I’d once imagined.

Reflection Questions

• When was the last time you felt so absorbed in something that time disappeared?

• What activities—past or present—bring you peace or joy? Even small ones?

Practical Exercise: Invite Flow Back

Choose an activity that absorbs your attention—painting, gardening, puzzles, cooking, music.

Schedule at least 30 minutes for it this week.

Afterward, notice how your body feels, how your mind feels.

Why Flow Matters

Experiencing flow is more than a distraction—it nourishes us in deep ways:

• Enhanced Focus: Flow sharpens concentration, allowing us to fully engage and block out distractions.

• Positive Emotions: Doing what we love generates happiness and well-being, essential for mental health.

• Stress Relief: Absorption in meaningful activity quiets worry and relieves tension.

• Sense of Accomplishment: Flow often involves challenge and mastery, boosting confidence and self-esteem.

• Timelessness: Losing track of time provides a refreshing break from stress and routine.

• Building Resilience: Flow encourages us to lean into challenges, strengthening coping skills.

• Connection to Self: Flow reconnects us with our passions and strengths, fostering growth and identity.

• Social Connection: Shared flow activities—team sports, collaborative projects—nurture belonging.

• Health Benefits: Regular flow experiences are linked to better mental health and lower risk of depression—a common struggle after estrangement.

Opening to Meaning and Purpose

As small moments of joy returned, I found myself asking questions I’d avoided before:

If reconciliation never comes, how do I want to live? What else can hold my love?

Slowly, I opened to new possibilities. I took on projects that mattered to me. I offered support to others. I realized that my capacity for caring wasn’t diminished by estrangement. Service became a lifeline—a way to live my values even in heartbreak.

Reflection Questions

• What gives your life meaning beyond the parent-child bond?

• Where could you share your gifts and compassion now?

Practical Exercise: Best Possible Self

1. Imagine yourself five years from now, living a life of purpose—even if estrangement continues.

2. Write for 10 minutes:

   • What does your day look like?

   • Who surrounds you?

   • What brings you peace?

Why it works: Hope-focused visualization activates optimism and strengthens your sense of agency, creating an inner map for a meaningful future.

What Broaden-and-Build Teaches Us

Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson calls this process an upward spiral—tiny moments of positive emotion accumulating into resilience, connection, and purpose. We don’t deny our grief; we allow light into the cracks of our broken hearts.

I’m still an estranged parent. The ache remains. But I’m also someone who savors sunsets, writes not so good poetry, laughs with friends, finds tremendous satisfaction from learning and offers comfort to others. Cultivating positive emotions and experiences didn’t change my past—but they broadened my future and helped me build a life that I would learn to love again.

In difficult times carry something beautiful in your heart.
Blaise Pascal

Cracks of Light

At first, the world was an underground tunnel—
dark, cold, airless,
a single question echoing in the abyss:
Why? Why? Why?

I couldn’t see beyond the ache,
my thoughts folded in on themselves
like wings too withered to open.

Then one morning,
a small defiance:
I set the sorrow down for just a moment
and lifted my face up to the sky.

A streak of pink
spilled across the horizon,
soft as forgiveness.
For thirty seconds,
I breathed it in.

Then, it was the cowbird peering in my window, next, it was the steam of tea,
curling like a promise,
and the sun sparkling on lake Pocasset.
Tiny things—
so small they wouldn’t matter
to anyone else.
But to me,
they were doors.

Each flicker of contentment
widened the frame,
until I could see
what had been hidden by grief:
there is still beauty here.

I wrote them down—
three each night,
like seeds pressed into earth:
rain on the roof,
daylilies blooming on the shore,
the warmth of my husband’s arm
pressed against my own.

And slowly,
roots of strength took hold.
My hands came awake again—
they wanted to write
to hold,
to give.

So I reached for the world
and it reached back:
a classroom,
a friend at my side,
my sweet sister
smiling in the dark.

I thought estrangement had stolen everything,
but gratitude —
quiet and steadfast—
kept finding the cracks
and shaping something new.

It’s Your Turn

Watch the following video and then choose one of these:

• Notice beauty for 30 seconds.

• Write three gratitude’s tonight.

• Schedule one flow activity this week.

Small steps matter. They start the upward spiral.

If you’ve ever felt like your mind hasn't worked the same since the rupture with your child, you aren’t imagining it. The mental fog, the exhaustion, and the inability to focus aren't a character flaw—they’re neurobiology.

“Grief rises and falls with every breath, clings to the chambers of the heart and makes each step we take a challenge. It is a dense space, filled with sensations that carry our tears and our palpable aching. We cannot escape these times; we cannot outrun what is intimately entangled in our moment-to-moment world. It is now that our apprenticeship is most called upon. We are asked to stand alongside these difficult and painful visitations, these epiphanies of lamentation.”
Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief

We often speak of grief as if it lives only in the heart, but profound loss reshapes the brain as well. Neurologist Lisa M. Shulman, author of Before and After Loss, has shown through her research that bereavement triggers measurable neurological changes—altering cognition, perception, and even our sense of self. As highlighted in a recent American Brain Foundation article, Shulman’s work reveals that grief doesn’t just feel like an internal upheaval; it literally rewires our neural pathways.

For estranged parents, this science can feel especially validating. If, like me, you’ve noticed that your mind hasn’t worked the same since the rupture with your child, you’re not imagining it. Grief alters the brain — and understanding how it does this can help us find our way back to steadiness and self‑compassion.

Our brains don’t clearly distinguish between a physical threat and an emotional one. When we experience deep loss — like the loss of connection with our child — our brains interpret the loss as a threat to our survival. Our nervous systems shift into fight‑or‑flight mode. Our heart rate increases, stress hormones surge, and our bodies (as I noted last week) become hyper-alert. This is why estranged parents often describe feeling jumpy, overwhelmed, or unable to focus.

Dr. Shulman explains that this response is an ancient adaptation. When something essential to our safety disappears — a loved one, a bond, a sense of belonging — our brains tend to narrow their focus to survival. Everyday tasks suddenly feel impossible because the brain is prioritizing threat detection over normal functioning.

For estranged parents, this can feel like living with an invisible alarm system that never fully shuts off. This has definitely been my own experience.

The “Hardwiring” of Stress

Our brains are constantly rewiring themselves through neuroplasticity. Our experiences strengthen some neural pathways and weakens others.

Experiencing moderate stress can sharpen our memory and focus. But chronic stress — the kind that accompanies prolonged estrangement — has the opposite effect. It reduces nerve growth, heightens our fear response, and disrupts emotional regulation.

When our stress circuits fire repeatedly, they become our brain’s automatic mode. Over time, this can lead to:

• Difficulty making decisions

• Shortened attention span

• Slowed information processing

• The foggy, disoriented feeling many estranged parents describe as “I don’t feel like myself anymore”

This isn't a failure of willpower or character; it’s the predictable, physical response of a deeply wounded nervous system.

Rewiring Toward Healing

The good news is that our brains can heal. The changes caused by grief aren’t permanent. But healing requires that we engage in intentional practices that signal safety back to our nervous systems.

Tools for Healing:

• Mindfulness & Meditation:
  These practices calm the amygdala and strengthen the prefrontal cortex, helping the brain shift out of survival mode.

• Creative Expression & Journaling:
  Writing, art, music, and storytelling help externalize trauma and reorganize emotional memory. Creating this substack has been instrumental in my own healing process.

• Therapy (especially CBT or trauma-informed approaches):
  Therapy helps interrupt the thought patterns that grief has hardwired, creating new pathways for resilience and meaning.

• EMDR and Brainspotting: Both of these treatment techniques are powerful, bottom-up somatic therapies. This means that instead of trying to "talk yourself out of" stress or grief using the thinking part of your brain (the prefrontal cortex), they work directly with the deeper, instinctive parts of the brain where trauma, survival responses, and deep emotional pain are held.

As Dr. Shulman notes, “If we don’t work through the traumatic experiences that we have, they will continue to be an obstacle in our lives.”

For estranged parents, this work isn’t just about recovery — it’s about reclaiming the parts of ourselves that grief temporarily eclipsed.

Grief may rewire our brains, but with time, compassion, and deliberate practice, they can rewire toward steadiness, clarity, and hope. Estrangement may have altered our inner landscapes, its most definitely rewired mine, but it didn’t take away our capacity to heal. Our brains are built for adaptation — and we’re built for renewal.

A few days before I sat down to write this Substack piece, I was complaining to my husband about how long it takes for me to complete tasks that require organization, problem solving or planning. A task that might have taken an hour before the estrangement can now swallow an entire day.

Being reminded of how grief reshapes our brains has helped me soften toward myself. It’s encouraged me to practice more patience and to return, more intentionally, to the healing rituals that steady me — meditation, intentional breathing, and the small acts that help coax my nervous system back toward ease.

Grief and My Brain

Grief rewired the pathways in my brain,
softened some places,
scorched others.

Thoughts that once moved like clear water
now stumble through fog,
searching for a familiar shore.

But even in this altered landscape,
something in me keeps learning
how to breathe,
how to listen,
how to begin again
with a quieter, humbler kind of grace.

It’s Your Turn

If you’ve noticed significant changes in how your mind functions since becoming estranged, you might find the following video helpful. It’s nearly an hour long, so if you choose to watch it, I encourage you to set aside at least an hour and fifteen minutes — enough time to view the presentation and then sit quietly with what you’ve learned.

Journaling afterward can be especially grounding. You might write down what stood out to you, what resonated, or what surprised you. And perhaps note one healing practice you’re willing to try — even a small one — as a way of gently supporting your own recovery.

Or

Following is a brief introduction to Lisa Shulman (under ten minutes) if you don’t have the time or interest right now in viewing the first video.

And finally, when you just can’t feel settled, you might find listening to the music below—preferably by candlelight—to be comforting. While I know very little about the creator, I learned just last night that AI was involved in its composition. It’s astounding to contemplate that a non-human could help shape music that carries such a deeply moving resonance and such profound messages of healing. A few nights ago, before going to bed, I went outside, put on my headphones, lit candles, clicked on the music, and settled into my hanging swing. As I swayed gently beneath the open night sky, I found myself deeply transported by the music, its healing message, the stars, the trees, and the gentle movement of the swing. For a little over thirty minutes, I felt my anxious and weary mind let go, relax, and rest.

Since becoming estranged from my daughter and grandchildren, a miserable creature seems to be clamoring inside my belly, sputtering warnings that the world is no longer safe.

For very close to four years now, since I became estranged from my only child and grandchildren, my stomach has regularly felt unsettled. It’s as if there’s an anxious little creature living inside of it that seldom rests and is frequently issuing warnings. “Somethings very wrong!” “We’re not safe!” “Not sure how long we’re going to be able to keep it together!” the miserable little thing hisses along with other vague and unsettling premonitions of doom.

From the time that the foundation of my world shifted, my nervous system seems to have forgotten how to naturally stand down on its own. Because what was once unimaginable has happened, a part of me has convinced itself that from now on it needs to stay alert and awake, scanning every creak in the house or shift in a conversation, preparing for the next terrible blow. And why not? They’ve kept on coming over the past four years. One after another, and with few exceptions, each cut deeper and more jagged than the last.

And then there’s the twitching in my feet that begins almost immediately after I sit with my feet up - a restlessness that I suspect is, at its core, an attempt at control. For far too long my mind relentlessly scanned my memories and my choices, pacing back and forth between them, trying relentlessly to “fix” the unfixable, resisting the rest that I both craved and needed. Even now, nestled comfortably in my recliner, my feet and toes begin down a well worn and ultimately futile path.

I understand, at least intellectually, that the pesky little being I like to blame for all this trouble isn’t a random intruder at all, but part of the very architecture of my grief. These anxious symptoms aren’t misbehavior; they’re signals from a wounded place inside me. And I know that instead of scolding this troublemaker who hijacks my body, I need to comfort her — to recognize that this hurting part of me is asking to be seen, acknowledged, and claimed.

So I begin by giving her a name.

I call her Sophie, short for Sophia, a name I love because it represents the wisdom that I’ve been in search of since I was a young teen. Sophie, whose unsophisticated and unpredictable, has her own primitive and wild kind of wisdom, problematic when unchanneled, and potentially explosive when neglected for too long. And because I’ve turned to writing for much of my life when grappling with painful and confusing situations and feelings, I decide to write ‘her’ a letter.

“Dear Sophie,

I’m writing this because it’s time to stop treating you like an intruder and finally welcome you in. For nearly four years, I’ve tried to ignore the havoc in my belly, the relentless twitching in my feet, and the heavy weight in my chest. But today, I see you at work here. And I recognize you now for the first time as an intelligent part of me — a messenger with needs, instincts, and gifts of your own.

And so I want to begin by saying thank you.

I realize that your constant state of high alert—the hissing, the twitching, and the pacing—is your way of trying to protect me. You saw the foundation of our world shift; you felt the full blow of estrangement, and you decided then and there that you’d never let us be caught off guard again. And so you’ve stayed awake and vigilant to make sure we survived, holding the tension so that I wouldn’t have to feel the full depth of the collapse. I see now that your hyper-vigilance, while exhausting, is a testament to how much you value our life. You’re a brave, fierce guardian whose refused to abandon your post.

But Sophie, I see how very tired you are. Living in an almost constant state of “survival mode” is exhausting, and you’ve been completely unappreciated as you’ve worked to keep us safe. I don’t want us to be estranged from each other anymore. I want to move from ignoring or overcoming your warnings to actually listening to what lies beneath them.

So I’m asking you, Sophie: What do you need from me right now?

Do you need me to sit with you in the quiet, or walk with you beneath the trees? Do you need me to acknowledge the terrible blows we’ve endured without expecting you to be “over it,” or to pretend we’re fine when we’re not? Do you want me to guide us through slow, steady breaths? Or do you simply need to know that I’m finally here — that I see you — and to hear me say that while I can’t promise we’ll always be safe from harm, I can promise that we have what we need to meet whatever comes.

I’m listening, Sophie. Tell me what will help you feel, even for a moment, that we are safe in this present moment — safe enough for you to loosen your grip and rest.

With love and growing understanding,

Tammie”

And then I sat in the silence, breathing slowly and deeply until I felt an answer forming.

“Dear Tammie,

I hear you. For the first time in a very long time, I feel like I’m not just a “problem” to be solved or a “creature” as troublesome as the rats in your attic that are in the process of being evicted. I finally feel seen.

You asked what I need for you to know and how you can help me.

More than anything else, I need you to know that I am not your enemy. I know I make your belly churn and your feet twitch. I know I keep you awake at night even when you’re exhausted. But I only do these things because I am terrified that if I stop, we’ll be left unprotected.

I’ve been carrying the “unthinkable” for us. Every time a new blow landed over these last four years, I tucked the shock into my muscles so you could keep working, keep functioning, and keep breathing. I need you to know that my “hissing” is actually just a sob I’ve been holding back because I didn’t think we could handle the impact if I let it out.

How You Can Soothe and Nurture Us

If you want to soothe the “havoc” in our belly and reduce the twitching in our feet and toes , here’s what will help me:

• Stop: Stop apologizing when we’re having an especially hard day, stop believing you need to protect those who love you from your pain when it feels overwhelming. On the especially hard days, when you urge us to “fake it till you make it,” I get the message that in spite of how far we’ve come, I still need to work even harder!

• Physical Sanctuary: I know that you love both the flow and the stillness of lake Pocasset. But don’t just gaze at it in appreciation. Breathe it in. Let its peace hold us. And I know that you’re missing your ‘sister tree’ but how about allowing the roots of the old apple tree to absorb some of the anxious vibrations from our feet? And make more visits to Reid State park and your secret “land before time.” These are our sanctuaries.

• Give Permission: Give us some time each day where we don’t have to be strong or busy or even healing. Allow us to just be broken and anxious if that’s where we’re at. Sit with me and say, “I understand why you’re anxious. I’m here.” When you validate my fear instead of trying to “fix” it with logic, my grip on your autonomic nervous system naturally loosens.

• Rhythmic Comfort: Because I live primarily in the nervous system, I don’t respond well to words alone. I need the yoga, the breathwork, the spiritual practices , and nervous system regulation exercises to help soothe and nourish us. These tell me more than any book summary ever could.

My Deepest Need

The thing I most desperately need to know is this: That you won’t leave me behind. You’ve spent so much of your life living in your head or searching outside of yourself. I need to know that even if the healing takes another four years—or forty—you won’t keep trying to ignore or override me. I need to know that you’ll continue learning to listen to the wisdom that exists inside of us, our body and soul wisdom and that I won’t always be overshadowed by information, explanations, and solutions.

I’m ready to stop pacing relentlessly, Tammie. Lets both learn how to let go and rest.

love, Sophie

When I take the time to enter these inner dialogues, I foster a profound, internal partnership. When I stop treating physical symptoms like intruders and begin viewing them as messengers, I move from a state of resistance to one of reclamation. By honoring the messages from my body —whether it speaks through a "hissing" in my belly, a weight on my chest, or a restlessness in my feet—I validate my own lived experiences and share with myself the same compassion I offer others. In this quiet act of being present, I come home to myself.

What I need I’m a lover of words who needs to pause my reading, my researching, my seeking, and start listening to what’s revealed without them…

It’s Your Turn

Write a brief letter to a specific part of your body that’s been "noisy" lately. You might consider starting with something like: “I know I’ve been treating you like an intruder, but I’m beginning to see you’re actually a witness." What has that part of you witnessed that the rest of you has tried to ignore?

Sit quietly for three minutes just following your breath. Ask your body, "What’s the one thing you’ve been trying to tell me that I haven't been ready to hear?" Write down the first words that come to mind, even if they don't seem to make sense logically.

Describe a "Physical Sanctuary"—a place in nature or a specific movement—where your body feels the most trustworthy. Why does your nervous system feel permission to let go of here?

Instead of asking, "How can I get rid of this feeling?" ask, "How can I sit with this feeling until it no longer needs to shout?" What would "sitting with it" look like for you today?

In what ways has your "body wisdom" (instincts, gut feelings, etc.) been more accurate than your "information pursuit" (logic, research, explanations, etc. ) over the last few months?

Motherhood has never been a straight line. It’s a living landscape — layered, dimensional, and continually reshaping itself as we do.

There comes a moment in every estranged mother’s life when the world grows unbearably quiet, and the roles we once inhabited with such devotion no longer have a place to land. For many of us, that quiet arrives most sharply around Mother’s Day — a day that was once simple, sometimes even joyful, now carrying a weight we never imagined we’d have to bear. Yet within that silence, there’s also a kind of truth-telling, a chance to listen for the deeper currents of who we are beyond the titles we’ve lost. It’s from that tender, complicated place that I want to speak to you now, mother to mother, heart to heart.

Because I remember the year when that silence felt almost too much to bear — the year when Mother’s Day rose on the horizon like a storm I could neither outrun nor prepare for. On that particular Mother’s Day, a thought rose up with such force it nearly took the breath from me: without my only child and my grandchildren, the very idea of “family” felt like a kind of quiet mockery now. For hours I stayed tethered to that bitterness and grief, unable to move, unable to imagine anything beyond the hollowing loss.

But that night, lying exhausted yet wide awake in the dark, something in me began to loosen. In the stillness, I found myself contemplating another kind of belonging — not the one I’d lost, but one I hadn’t fully counted or named yet.

It was from that place of wondering — that fragile threshold where grief and possibility sometimes meet — that I began to imagine a different kind of family. One not defined by a vertical line between parent, child, and grandchild, but by a wider, more sustaining web of connection. A family shaped by choice, reciprocity, and a more expansive understanding of what it means to mother and be mothered in this later stage of life.

In the book, Age Wave, gerontologist Ken Dychtwald and healthcare futurist, Joe Flower described the Matrix Family as a shift from a youth‑oriented, child‑centered model to an adult‑centered network. In From Age-ing to Sage-ing Zalman Schacter-Shalomi describes the Matrix Family as “bound together not by bloodline, genetics, and economic obligation, but by friendship, conscious choice, and shared values.” Schacter-Shalomi goes on to share “As an elder, I personally know young men and women whom I would love to adopt as my spiritual grandchildren. Perhaps you do too. There are so many young people today who need to be adopted and encouraged. ”

While traditional models view family as a rigid vertical line (parent to child), the Family Cube concept treats family as a 3D object with multiple faces. When the “child” face is missing due to estrangement, the structure remains stable because it’s supported by others: peers, mentors, and chosen kin.

What I came to understand, slowly and with no small amount of resistance, is that a matrix family isn’t a consolation prize for those of us who’ve lost the traditional one. While it would be impossible to replace my lost child and grandchildren, I began to see the quiet ways a matrix family was already forming around me: the friends who are always a phone call away, the young mother who turns to me when her world is falling apart, the neighbor who checks in after a storm, and my beloved circles of women who hold one another through birthdays, losses, and the long winters of the heart. In a matrix family, mothering becomes less about biology and more about the ways we offer wisdom, steadiness, humor, tenderness, and truth to the people in our lives. It’s a family that grows outward instead of upward — a web rather than a ladder — and it has room for every part of who we have become.

Many of us have heard the phrase chosen family, often used by people who, for various reasons, had to build their own circle of belonging outside the traditional structure. What I didn’t understand until much later is that chosen family isn’t a lesser substitute for the one we lost — it’s a legitimate, time‑honored way human beings have always created safety, continuity, and love. Chosen families form when people consistently show up for one another with honesty, care, and reciprocity; when affection is earned through presence rather than inherited through blood. In many ways, a matrix family is a deeper, more intentional expression of this same truth: a chosen family that not only surrounds us but also allows us to offer and receive the kind of mothering that still lives within us. When we begin to see our relationships through this wider lens, we realize that kinship can grow in places we never expected — and that belonging can return in forms we once believed were lost to us forever.

Although many of us were raised to believe that adult children would be our primary source of support in later life, as my sister and I believed ourselves to be for our parents, decades of research tell a different story. Studies of social relations in older adulthood show that friends and peers often provide more consistent emotional support, companionship, and daily connection than adult children, whose own work, family responsibilities, and geographic mobility limit their availability. Research on aging networks highlights that peer relationships—especially friendships formed in later life—play a uniquely protective role, offering regular contact, shared life experience, and mutual understanding that adult children can’t always provide. One study notes that older adults’ well‑being is strongly shaped by the type of relationship offering support, with friends often contributing more to quality of life than family members because of the reciprocity and ease within those ties. Peer‑to‑peer support programs further demonstrate this truth: trained older adult volunteers who assist their less able peers through home visits, transportation, and social connection significantly improve one another’s well‑being, underscoring how powerful and sustaining these horizontal relationships can be in later life. Taken together, this research affirms what many estranged mothers quietly discover: our deepest sense of belonging in elderhood often comes not from the children we raised, but from the peers who walk beside us.

Many of us also discover, sometimes to our own surprise, that supporting younger adults and young families can be one of the quiet rewards of this season of life. There is a particular sweetness in offering steadiness to a young mother whose overwhelmed, or listening with full presence to a young man who is trying to find his way, or becoming a trusted adult in the life of a friend’s child who lights up when you walk into the room. These moments aren’t about filling the space left by our own children; they’re about allowing the wisdom we’ve earned — often through heartbreak — to become a source of grounding and warmth for those who’re just beginning their journey through this troubled and yet still beautiful world. In these relationships, we feel our capacity to nurture flowing again, not out of obligation but out of genuine affection, and we’re reminded that the impulse to mother doesn’t disappear simply because its original home has closed.

If you’re wondering where such a family might begin in your own life, you don’t have to look far. A matrix family often starts in the smallest, most unassuming places — the friend who remembers to check on you after a hard week, the neighbor who brings in your trash bins without being asked, the woman in your book group who listens with her whole presence, and the colleague who sees your strength even when you feel emptied out. These aren’t incidental gestures; they’re the early threads of a different kind of kinship. When we pause long enough to notice who consistently shows up with warmth, curiosity, or steadiness, we begin to see the outlines of a family that is already forming around us. And when we allow ourselves to reciprocate — to offer our own wisdom, humor, tenderness, or truth — those threads strengthen into something real, something sustaining, something that can hold us in ways the old structure no longer can.

As this new web of belonging begins to reveal itself, we can choose to tend it with the same quiet devotion we once poured into our families of origin. Cultivating a matrix family asks us to stay awake to the relationships that feel nourishing and mutual, and to lean toward them with intention — offering a meal, initiating a walk, remembering a birthday, or simply showing up with presence when someone is struggling. And for many of us, there’ll be opportunities to “mother” again, though in a different, more spacious way: by mentoring a younger colleague who reminds you of your younger self, by being a steady adult in the life of a friend’s child, by listening deeply to a young woman who is navigating her first heartbreak, by nurturing a young family in need of love and support or by offering the kind of grounded reassurance you once longed to receive. These gestures don’t replace the children we’ve lost connection with, but they allow the mothering within us to keep flowing — not in a way that depletes us, but in a way that affirms our wisdom, our tenderness, and our ongoing capacity to shape the world through our care.

And just as important as offering care is allowing ourselves to receive it — a practice many of us find far more difficult. In a matrix family, letting others tend to us is not a sign of weakness but a quiet act of trust, a way of saying, “I, too, am worthy of being held.” It might look like accepting a ride when you’re tired, letting someone cook for you without apologizing, allowing a younger friend to help with a task you can no longer do alone, or simply saying yes when someone invites you into their circle. These small openings create space for reciprocity, the lifeblood of any chosen family. When we let others care for us — not out of obligation, but out of genuine affection — we begin to experience a kind of belonging that is steadier and more mutual than anything the old structure ever offered. It is here, in this gentle exchange of giving and receiving, that the matrix family becomes not just an idea but a lived, sustaining reality.

And as Mother’s Day approaches — that day so many of us brace ourselves for — this wider understanding of family can become a quiet refuge. Instead of measuring the day by who does not call or who is not present, we can let it become a moment to honor the relationships that are alive in our lives. You might choose to spend the day with someone who brings ease to your spirit, or write a note to a younger person you’ve gently mothered along the way, or simply sit in gratitude for the small circle of people who have shown up for you with consistency and care. Mother’s Day can become less about the absence of a traditional role and more about the presence of your lived wisdom, your capacity to nurture, and the web of connection you are consciously tending. In this way, the day shifts — not into celebration, necessarily, but into a softer, truer acknowledgment of the mother you still are and the family that is quietly forming around you.

And if you take nothing else from my story, let it be this: you are not living this day — or this life — alone. The loss you carry is real, but so is the strength that has brought you this far. You are still a mother, not because someone names you as such, but because the wisdom, tenderness, fierceness, and generosity that shaped you have not disappeared. They are waiting for new pathways, new relationships, new forms of expression. A matrix family does not erase what was broken; it simply refuses to let the breaking be the end of the story. So as you move through this Mother’s Day, may you feel the quiet truth of your own worth, and may you sense — even faintly — the beginnings of a new web of belonging gathering around you, thread by thread, heart by heart, ready to hold you in ways you may not yet know how to imagine.

In solidarity dear sister on Mother’s Day… Tammie Fowles

The Family She Gathers

She thought the story ended
the day her daughter turned away—
a door closing,
like a book returned to the shelf
before the last chapter was read.

For a long while, she lived
inside that unfinished sentence,
her hands empty,
her voice quiet,
her heart learning the weight
of unspoken things.

But grief, when listened to,
has a strange way of pointing
toward the living.

One morning she noticed
the neighbor who always waved,
the friend who showed up with a gift,
the young woman who lingered
after a workshop,
hungry for a steadiness
she herself had once needed.

And something in her—
something ancient and maternal—
stirred again.

Not the old kind of mothering,
the one with duty braided into its spine,
but a gentler offering:
a warm meal,
a listening presence,
a hand on a trembling shoulder,
a laugh shared at the right moment.

Slowly, almost shyly,
a circle began to form around her—
not bound by blood,
but by choice,
by reciprocity,
by the quiet recognition
of souls who had found one another
in the wilds of adulthood.

She didn’t call them family at first.
The word felt too tender,
too risky.

But one evening,
as they gathered on her screen porch—
passing bread,
telling stories,
letting their guard down—
she felt something loosen
in the long‑closed room of her chest.

This, she realized,
is what family feels like
when it is chosen,
when it is tended,
when it grows not from lineage
but from love.

And in that moment,
she understood:
estrangement had not ended her story.
It had simply cleared the ground
for a new one to begin—
a family woven from presence,
from kindness,
from the brave,
ordinary act
of showing up
for one another.

It’s Your Turn

The First Thread

Who in my life has offered me a moment of unexpected kindness or steadiness in the past year? What did that gesture awaken in me, and what might it be inviting me to notice about the beginnings of a chosen or matrix family?

The Mothering That Still Lives in Me

In what ways does the impulse to mother still move through me? Where does it naturally want to flow now — toward younger adults, peers, or children who cross my path? What does it feel like to let that energy have a new home?

Receiving Without Apology

When was the last time I allowed someone to care for me without minimizing, apologizing, or deflecting? What made that moment possible, and what does it reveal about my capacity to receive love in this season of life?

Reimagining Family on My Own Terms

If I set aside the traditional definition of family for a moment, what qualities or values would I choose as the foundation of the family I am creating now? Who in my life already embodies those qualities?

The Quiet Rewards of Showing Up

Recall a recent moment when you supported a younger adult or young family — even in a small way. What did that experience stir in you? How did it affirm your wisdom, your presence, or your ongoing capacity to nurture?

Grief on the left, growth on the right. In the middle? The truth. How a simple 'dual-entry' journal can help estranged parents transform their most painful memories into a testament of resilience.

When I sit down to create a dual-entry in my journal, I often experience a sense of calm washing over me. The blank pages are more than just paper; they’re a canvas for my thoughts, emotions, and reflections. While I don’t turn to it as often as I used to, this journaling practice became a lifeline in navigating the turbulent waters of estrangement from my daughter during the first few years.

On the left page, I pour out my grief. In an earlier entry I wrote: "I feel her loss like a boulder in my chest." Each word is heavy with longing, but it’s also a release. I allow myself to feel the pain fully—each pang reminding me of the love that still exists beneath the sorrow.

In contrast, on the right page, I reflect on what this grief teaches me about growth. In response to “I feel her loss like a boulder in my chest,” my entry on the right page reads: "This absence is teaching me about resilience; I’m learning to nurture myself in ways I hadn’t before.” Here, I transform sorrow into strength. Even in pain, there lies an opportunity for healing and self-discovery.

Through this dual-entry process, I've started to see patterns emerge in my feelings. When I write about missing the way she wrinkled her nose, squinted her eyes, and tilted her forehead up for me to kiss, it leads me to insights about how comfort can coexist with sadness. For instance, after recalling "the way we used to chair dance on the way to school when she was little,” I reflected: "Those memories remind me that all is absolutely not lost, I can still experience gratitude for the many beautiful moments that I shared with her and with my grandchildren.” The act of writing helps clarify my emotions. No longer do they swirl chaotically in my mind; instead, they take shape and form as I articulate them on paper.

Moreover, this journaling practice has encouraged me to reach out for support. Recognizing loneliness on the left page prompts entries on the right about connection: “Today, I’ll call _____________” (a friend who understands.) By acknowledging both sides of my experience—grief and growth—I’ve opened doors to strengthening certain relationships.

As time passes and pages fill up, I find solace in looking back at previous entries. The journey is evident; each entry reflects not just loss but also progress—a testament to my resilience as a mother navigating estrangement.

This dual-entry journal can transform how we process our emotions. It allows us to honor our grief while simultaneously celebrating personal growth and healing. In these pages lies not just sorrow but also hope—a reminder that love persists even amidst separation and that strength can accompany sorrow.

A dual-entry journal can be a really helpful tool for estranged parents to navigate the complex emotions surrounding the estrangement from our adult children. This journaling practice allows for a structured reflection on both grief and growth, fostering healing and self-discovery. Here’s how it can be effectively utilized:

Structure of the Dual-Entry Journal

1. Left Page (Grief): This side is dedicated to expressing feelings of loss, sadness, and other negative emotions associated with the estrangement. Parents can write about specific moments that evoke grief or pain.

2. Right Page (Growth): This side focuses on insights gained from the grief experiences, emphasizing personal growth, resilience, and lessons learned. It encourages parents to reflect on how these experiences can lead to positive change.

Practical Use of the Dual-Entry Journal

Daily Entries

You can set aside time each day or week to fill out your dual-entry journal. Here’s how you might approach each entry:

• Reflective Writing: On the left page, you might write about specific feelings or memories related to your estranged child. For example:

"I was plagued by sweet memories of my grandchildren all morning."

• Transformative Insights: On the right page, you would then translate that feeling into a lesson or insight that promotes growth. For example:

“These memories are reminders of how fortunate I was to have so much time with them when they were little. Can I shift my heart from grief to gratitude?

Here’s another example:

• Reflective Writing: on the left page of the journal- (Grief)

“I feel so lost without her.”

• Transformative Insights: on the right page of the journal - (Growth)

“This loneliness reminds me of my need for connection; I need to reach out to friends."

This format encourages us to acknowledge our grief while also finding meaning in it.

Benefits of Using a Dual-Entry Journal

1. Emotional Processing: By separating grief from growth, we can process our emotions more effectively without becoming overwhelmed by negativity.

2. Promoting Self-Compassion: The right side encourages self-reflection and compassion, helping us redirect feelings of blame or sadness into constructive thoughts.

3. Tracking Progress: Over time, we can look back at our entries to see patterns in our emotional responses and personal growth, which may help us understand our journey better.

4. Creating Meaning: This journaling practice helps transform painful experiences into opportunities for learning and resilience.

5. Encouraging Future Conversations: Insights gained through journaling may help prepare us for future interactions with our children by fostering understanding and empathy towards both of our perspectives.

Echoes of Absence

In the quiet corners of my heart,
I hear my grandchildren’s laughter,
feel the weight of their absence,
like a boulder resting on my chest,
reminding me of so many moments lost.

I traced the outline of memories,
each one a fragile thread in a tapestry unraveled. Trips to the library, to the movies, to the fair, bedtime stories, floating to mill pond, silly songs… The echoes whisper secrets of joy and sorrow—
how can I hold both?

I grieve the silence that stretches between us,
a chasm filled with unspoken words,
and adventures no longer shared, yet in this grief lies so very much love, and gratitude for the sweet moments we shared.

With every tear I shed a part of me whispers there’s a lesson waiting to unfold;
grief, however unwelcome, is a teacher.
The pain sharpens my vision,
revealing beauty in fleeting moments—
the sun breaking through clouds,
the warmth of an embrace from a friend.

I gather these fragments,
crafting them into something new—
a bridge towards understanding and greater compassion.
Each day becomes an invitation to grow,
to transform sorrow into some kind of wisdom.

And as I travel this path, I rest in the quiet knowing:
that comfort dwells in the reach of memory.
It’s possible to hold both gratitude and grief—
for here, life and love find their greatest depth.

It’s Your Turn

Create a dual entry journal and work with it for at least a month.

We’re taught that tears are a sign of breaking down, but what if they’re actually the way we break open? In the silence of estrangement, tears aren't a sign of weakness—they’re the soul’s most honest language.

“When tears come, I breathe deeply and rest. I know I am swimming in a hallowed stream where many have gone before. I am not alone, crazy, or having a nervous breakdown…. My heart is at work, my soul is awake.” Mary Margaret Funk

The great wisdom traditions remind us that grief isn’t an adversary to outrun, but a threshold — a doorway through which something in us is being reshaped. They caution against rushing to escape our pain, because the pain itself is often the teacher. Grief, loss, suffering, heartbreak — each carries its own hard‑won wisdom, inviting us into a deeper, more honest way of being.

Many of us — especially men — were taught to treat grief as a weakness to hide, override, or muscle past. Anger often feels safer, more acceptable, more in control. Psychologist Joshua Coleman notes that in family estrangement, mothers tend to collapse into sadness while fathers are more likely to move toward anger (mothers get sad, fathers get mad). Sadness asks us to unclench, to feel, to surrender — and that can be especially frightening for fathers who were never given permission to soften. Yet it’s often in that very softening that transformation begins.

I once read about the “gift of tears” — the way tears soften what has grown rigid inside us. For parents estranged from our children, this softening matters. Our tears can help wash away the old stories we’ve carried about blame, shame, and unworthiness, creating space for compassion to return — compassion for ourselves, for the child we miss, and for the vast complexity of the human journey. This softening, rather than a sign of weakness, is a form of spiritual strength. And nowhere is this more beautifully embodied than in a moment shared with the 14th Dalai Lama by thousands of people.

In October 2014, during a teaching on compassion at the Beacon Theatre in New York City, the Dalai Lama was reading from a text that calls us to dedicate our happiness to others and to willingly take on the suffering of all sentient beings. As he reached a passage about this radical, selfless compassion, his voice broke. He paused. And then he wept openly — wiping his tears with a handkerchief as thousands sat with him in reverent silence.

His tears weren’t a lapse in composure. They were the teaching.

They revealed that compassion isn’t an idea we think about — it’s a tenderness we allow to move through us. His tears showed that spiritual maturity far from hardening us; makes us more permeable, more responsive, more attuned to the suffering of others. They remind us that feeling deeply isn’t a detour from the path — it is the path.

In their own quiet way, tears reconnect us to our humanity and to the great river of collective grief shared by all beings. They remind us that we’re part of something larger than our pain. In this sense, tears become a gentle initiation for estranged parents — a reminder that healing often begins not with answers or reconciliation, but with the courage to let the heart speak in the only language it sometimes has: saltwater.

Science teaches that tears are far more than a simple overflow of sadness; they function as a sophisticated biological safety valve designed to restore balance to both body and mind. Research from Harvard Health and Medical News Today reveals that emotional tears have a distinct chemical composition, entirely different from the reflex tears we shed when chopping an onion.

Emotional crying acts as a built‑in detoxification system. When we cry, the body releases stress‑related chemicals such as cortisol, adrenaline, and excess manganese — substances that contribute to tension and overwhelm. At the same time, the brain responds by releasing endorphins and oxytocin, the body’s natural pain relievers. These “feel‑good” chemicals soothe both physical discomfort and emotional distress. All tears, regardless of type, also contain lysozyme, an enzyme with antimicrobial properties that helps protect the eyes.

Crying also serves as a neurological reset. After a period of intense emotional arousal, tears help shift the body into parasympathetic activation — the “rest and digest” state that slows the heart rate, deepens breathing, and brings the nervous system back into equilibrium. Many experts describe this as the brain’s way of processing complex emotions like grief, functioning almost like a reset button for emotional well‑being.

Beyond biology, tears carry profound social meaning. They’re a visible expression of vulnerability, signaling a need for comfort or connection. This often evokes empathy in others, strengthening social bonds and inviting the kind of support that fosters long‑term healing.

Tears are evidence of a finely tuned emotional system working exactly as it was designed to — protecting, regulating, and ultimately healing us from the inside out.

In A Different Kind of Fast, Christine Valters Paintner writes that tears “call us to a deep attentiveness to the longings of our heart. They continue to flow until we drop our masks and self-deception and return to the source of our lives and longing. They’re a sign that we’ve crossed a threshold into a profound sense of humility. Humility is a practice of remembering we come from Earth and to Earth we will one day return. This sign and this humility help us to hold our griefs and losses with great tenderness and compassion.”

Tears are a signal that our hearts are still alive and refusing to turn to stone. Estranged parents tend to carry a weight that has no easy language, no tidy resolution, and no socially sanctioned place to set it down. Letting our tears flow—periodically, intentionally, without apology—provides our inner world with a chance to unclench. Each time we allow ourselves to weep, even for a minute, we release a little of the pressure that builds from holding so much sorrow in silence. Tears soften what grief has hardened and remind us that our humanity is still intact. Let them come when they need to.

How to Cry

“We, men, die because our faces were not watered enough.” Pat Conroy

The inability to cry is far more common than most people realize, especially among estranged parents carrying layers of shock, grief, and emotional overwhelm. When the rupture with an adult child is traumatic, the mind often protects itself by blunting emotion — a kind of internal dimming that shields us from pain that once felt unbearable. This emotional numbing can also be influenced by antidepressants such as SSRIs or SNRIs, which sometimes make tears harder to access, though this effect is usually reversible with medical guidance. And while many people associate depression with frequent crying, the deeper forms of depression — the hollow, melancholic kind that estrangement can trigger — can leave a parent feeling too emptied out to produce tears at all.

Personality patterns and lifelong conditioning also shape how we express grief. Many estranged parents grew up in families where emotions were dismissed, minimized, or punished, making tears feel unsafe or “too much.” Others learned to stay strong for everyone else, carrying a belief that crying equals losing control. For biological fathers, social stigma adds another layer — decades of being told to “man up” can turn tear‑suppression into a permanent reflex. And in a small number of cases, medical conditions like Sjögren’s Syndrome or Moebius Syndrome can physically limit tear production, making crying difficult regardless of emotional depth.

So if the tears won’t come, it doesn’t mean you’re cold, broken, or unfeeling. It simply means your heart has found its own way to survive — a protective pause that often forms around deep grief. With time, safety, and compassion, even the most frozen places within us can begin to thaw, often in ways we don’t expect. I’ll always remember attending a marriage retreat with my husband while pregnant with my daughter. A very reserved and private man in the group began to weep, immediately pulled himself together and apologized for his tears. The facilitator of the group, a warm and wise male therapist, responded by saying “I hate to cry alone. I always try and do it with someone, and preferably in groups.” We all laughed, and I watched the man who’d been embarrassed visibly relax and begin to be vulnerable and open in a way he hadn’t been all weekend.

When and if you feel ready to invite tears, it’s better to gently open the door rather than trying to force it. Sometimes a film scene, a piece of music, or a moment of tenderness or loss can touch emotions your body hasn’t yet found words for. These small openings aren’t artificial — they’re invitations, helping the heart remember how to soften again.

50 Heartbreaking Movie Scenes

Sad Songs to Make You Cry

If tears come, let them. Don’t analyze, don’t judge, don’t rush. Just allow the release.

Afterward, see if you can sense what the tears were connected to. For many people — especially men — the challenge isn’t identifying which emotion they’re feeling, but recognizing that they’re feeling anything at all. Crying requires that first step: acknowledging that something inside you is stirring. No emotion, no tears.

Once you’ve recognized that something has moved in you, you can go deeper. Was the feeling sadness, relief, longing, joy, anger? Did it bring someone to mind — a parent, a child, a friend, a memory you rarely touch? Tears don’t always tell you the whole story; they simply signal that a story is there.

Identifying what you’re actually feeling begins with slowing down enough to notice the subtle signals your body and mind are already offering. Emotions often show up first as sensations — a tightening in the chest, a heaviness behind the eyes, a flutter in the stomach, a sudden rush of heat. Naming those sensations without judgment creates a small clearing where clarity can emerge. From there, you can gently ask yourself: What is this trying to tell me? Sometimes the emotion is obvious; other times it’s layered, tangled, or disguised as something more acceptable — irritation masking fear, anger covering grief, numbness protecting tenderness. Let the emotion reveal itself at its own pace. When you listen with curiosity rather than pressure, the feeling often steps forward and names itself.

The rest is up to you — to listen, to explore, to let the emotion reveal what it needs to. This just might be where the real work — and the real healing — begins.

How Tears Heal

My tears slip past my defenses, quiet as prayer, carrying truths kept in the dark.

They rise when my heart grows heavy with what it can no longer hold - grief, yes, but also tenderness, memory, longing, the ache of being human.

When they fall, they loosen the knots tightly wrapped around my pain. They soften what’s grown rigid after years of bracing.

Each tear is a small release, a letting go that asks nothing of me but honesty.

And when the last drop slips free, the world feels different - not fixed, not finished, but clearer, as if my soul has been cleansed and blessed with salt water.

This is how my tears heal: Not by fixing what hurt me, but by returning me to the truth of my own heart drop by gentle drop. And my spirit becomes light enough to rise again, a little less burdened, and slightly more steady than I was before.

It’s Your Turn

“There is an ancient tribal proverb I once heard in India. It says that before we can see properly we must first shed our tears to clear the way.”
Libba Bray, The Sweet Far Thing

Write about a time when tears surprised you—arriving not as collapse, but as clarity. Explore what they revealed, softened, or made possible that silence alone couldn’t.

Imagine your tears as a wise elder who visits only when something in you is ready to shift. What message does this elder bring, and what part of you finally feels seen?

Write a letter to your own heart, thanking it for every tear it has allowed you to shed. Name the burdens those tears helped you set down, even if only for a moment.

"Self-care is how you take your power back” Lalah Delia

While many see The Giving Tree as a story of unconditional love, I see it as a cautionary tale about the dangers of self-erasure. What happens when we teach that true love means giving yourself away?

I’ve never been fond of Shel Silverstein’s bestselling children’s book The Giving Tree. While many regard it as a tender story of unconditional love and sacrifice, I came to see it as a cautionary tale—one that warns of the dangers of self-neglect and co-dependency.

One‑Sided Sacrifice
In The Giving Tree, the tree offers everything—her fruit, her branches, even her trunk—without ever receiving care, appreciation, or reciprocity. This framing suggests that “real love” requires self‑erasure, that devotion is proven through depletion. For many of us, this message can quietly shape unhealthy expectations: that giving without limits is noble, and that losing ourselves is simply the cost of loving well.

Lack of Reciprocity
From my perspective, the tree’s relentless generosity isn’t just unrealistic—it’s harmful. When love is portrayed as an endless outpouring with no return, it normalizes emotional, physical, and even financial exhaustion.

Absence of Boundaries
The tree gives away everything—her apples, branches, trunk—until only a stump remains. Where’s the wisdom of self-care? Where’s the understanding that healthy love requires limits? As the saying goes, you can’t pour from an empty cup.

Emotional Impact
I remember reading the book to my grandchildren at bedtime, a moment that still lives vividly in my mind all of these years later. My bright‑eyed, big‑hearted grandson Skylar was tucked in close on one side of me, and my thoughtful, sensitive, tree‑hugging granddaughter Willow was snuggled on the other.

I’d just closed the book when I noticed Willow’s sweet face cloud over with a sadness that seemed to inhabit her entire tiny little self. When I gently asked what was wrong, she whispered that she felt sorry for the tree. I tried to comfort her, but the story had pressed too hard on her tender heart for my words to truly ease her ache.

That night was the last time I ever read The Giving Tree to a child.

When I first read The Giving Tree, I saw it as a quiet warning about our relationship with the natural world. The boy’s endless taking—apples, branches, trunk—mirrored the way modern culture approaches the earth as something to exploit rather than enter into relationship with. The tree gives because that’s her nature, and the boy takes because he’s been taught that the world exists to satisfy the needs and desires of humans. There’s no reciprocity, no appreciation, no awareness of consequence. He returns to the tree only when he needs something, and each time he leaves her diminished.

The dynamic between the boy and the tree reflected a larger cultural pattern: we consume forests, oceans, minerals, and ecosystems with the same unconscious entitlement, rarely pausing to consider the cost or the limits of what we’re taking. We forget that the earth isn’t an infinite resource but a living presence with its own rhythms, needs, and thresholds. The story felt like both a mirror and a warning, one that reflected our collective behavior back to us, and cautioned that when we treat nature as an object to be used rather than a partner to be honored, we risk reducing the world to a ‘stump’ of what it once was. And in so doing, we diminish not only the earth, but ourselves.

Like the tree, mothers are frequently expected to give without end even when their children are adults — time, energy, emotional labor, identity — often without acknowledgment of their limits or their humanity. Their sacrifices are taken for granted, their weariness treated as normal, their boundaries quietly erased.

And now, in our digital age, this ancient pattern of taking from mothers without truly seeing them has found a louder, sharper stage. In recent years, social media has become a kind of digital coliseum where mothers of adult children are routinely judged, dissected, and condemned — often by strangers who know nothing of their lives, their histories, or the complexities of their relationships. What once might have been private struggles or nuanced family dynamics are now flattened into viral narratives, soundbites, and accusations.

During this time, several patterns have emerged:

• Instant moral judgment: A single moment — a frustrated tone, harsh words spoken in hurt and anger, a boundary set, a child’s complaint — is enough for thousands of commenters to declare a mother “toxic,” “narcissistic,” “abusive,” or “unfit.” There’s no curiosity, no context, no compassion. Just verdicts.

• Weaponized pop psychology: Terms like gaslighting, trauma, narcissism, and cycle-breaking are thrown around casually, often inaccurately, and almost always in ways that cast parents as villains. These labels stick, even when they’re based on distortions or outright falsehoods.

• Public shaming as entertainment: Videos and posts that portray mothers negatively — sometimes selectively edited, sometimes fabricated — are rewarded with likes, shares, and algorithmic amplification. Outrage is profitable, and parents become easy targets.

• Erasure of maternal humanity: Social media often treats mothers as archetypes rather than people. They’re expected to be endlessly patient, endlessly giving, endlessly available. Any imperfection can become evidence of moral failure.

• Echo chambers of resentment: Entire online communities now exist where parents are collectively vilified. These spaces encourage black-and-white thinking, reinforce grievance narratives, and validate estrangement as the only “healthy” choice — even when the parent-child relationship was once loving, stable, and nurturing.

For many parents, this cultural climate is devastating. It not only distorts their stories but also isolates them, silences them, and deepens the grief of estrangement. It becomes harder for them to speak their truth, to defend themselves, or even to trust their own memories.

And beneath all of this is a painful irony: the very qualities parents are criticized for lacking — empathy, patience, emotional availability — are the same qualities denied to them by the culture that judges them so harshly.

For deeply wounded parents the work of healing requires that we engage in intentional self‑care, and yet our culture’s conditioning makes it far less likely that we’ll recognize, let alone honor, our own needs. Further, in a world that often glorifies self‑sacrifice—especially for mothers—choosing to nurture ourselves can seem like selfishness. But it isn’t. It’s essential. What all too many mothers fail to recognize is that when we tend to our own well‑being, we aren’t turning away from our families, we’re turning toward them with more presence, patience, and steadiness. Looking back on my own years of mothering, I sometimes wonder how my relationship with my daughter—and her relationship with herself—might have been different had I understood this better.

Society has long painted the “good mother” for the most part as one who gives of herself endlessly and with little regard for what she wants or needs. But a mother’s burnout doesn’t guarantee stronger families—it often breeds fatigue, depression, and resentment. Self‑care isn’t about spa days or scented candles; it’s about boundaries, rest, nourishment, and joy. It’s about mothers showing up for themselves so that they can show up for their families in a way that’s realistic and sustainable. When a parent tends to their own emotional, physical, and spiritual well‑being, the entire relational field shifts. The parent becomes steadier, clearer, and more grounded—and the child, whether young or fully grown, feels the difference.

Self‑Care Creates Emotional Stability

Children are exquisitely attuned to the emotional states of the adults who care for them. A parent whose exhausted or overwhelmed often reacts from stress rather than responding from presence. But when a parent is rested and emotionally nourished, they can listen more deeply, speak more thoughtfully, and navigate conflict with far greater clarity. This steadiness becomes a form of safety—a quiet assurance that the relationship can hold difficult feelings without collapsing.

Self‑Care Models Healthy Adulthood

Children learn far more from what we embody than from what we teach. When we honor our limits, rest when we’re tired, and tend to our own needs, we’re teaching our children that:

• well‑being matters

• boundaries are normal and loving

• self‑respect is part of healthy relationships

• each person is responsible for their own emotional life

This is especially vital for girls, who’re often socialized to be caretakers, pleasers, and perfectionists and are all too often given messages that equate love with self-abandonment. A mother who practices self-care teaches her daughter that she doesn’t have to earn rest or prove her worth through sacrifice. She learns that her needs matter—not just in theory, but in practice.

Self‑Care Prevents Burnout and Resentment

Parents who chronically over‑give often reach a point of depletion that may quietly breed resentment. Even if it’s never spoken aloud, children can feel the strain. When a parent replenishes themselves—through rest, creativity, solitude, or connection—they parent from fullness rather than obligation. The relationship becomes less about sacrifice and more about genuine presence.

Self‑Care Restores Identity and Autonomy

Many mothers lose parts of themselves in the caregiving years. Reclaiming joy, interests, friendships, exercise, etc. makes us more grounded and whole. Parents with a strong sense of self are less likely to cling, over function, or seek emotional validation from their children—patterns that can strain relationships, particularly in adulthood. Self‑care helps us return to ourselves, and from that place, we’re able to relate to our children with greater freedom and authenticity.

Self‑Care Supports Healthy Boundaries

A nourished parent can set boundaries without guilt or fear. They can say, “I love you, and I can’t do that right now,” or “I trust you to handle this,” without dissolving into worry or resentment. These boundaries aren’t barriers; they ‘re invitations for the child to grow into their own strength.

Self‑Care Cultivates Resilience—for Both Parent and Child

When we regularly ignore our own needs or repeatedly rescue our children from the consequences of their own behavior, we may unintentionally create patterns that strain the relationship over time. Children who’re continually rescued can struggle to develop independence, resilience, and confidence. Without opportunities to face challenges, tolerate discomfort, or solve problems on their own, they may enter adulthood unprepared for life’s demands. Excessive giving can also foster entitlement, leaving adult children believing they’re owed ongoing assistance and even rescue simply because it’s always been there. This dynamic often leads parents to feel used, manipulated, drained or unappreciated, while children might grow resentful or confused when the flow of support changes—tension that can quietly widen the emotional distance between them.

Self-Care and Healing

Self‑care isn’t a luxury for estranged parents — it’s the ground on which healing becomes possible. Estrangement shakes our nervous systems, our identities, and our hearts. It often leaves us feeling unmoored, ashamed, confused, or chronically braced for pain. In that state, it’s nearly impossible to see clearly, respond wisely, or grow in the ways this experience quietly asks of us. Self‑care is what helps to steady us so that the process of healing can begin.

Many of us live for a significant amount of time after becoming estranged in a state of hypervigilance, shame, or emotional collapse, unsure how to move forward. Self‑care practices like meditation, exercises, massage, spending time in nature, journaling, etc. can help us become calm enough for clarity to emerge. When our nervous systems are regulated, we’re far more likely to respond rather than react, reflect rather than spiral, and meet both both our children’s and our own pain with compassion instead of blame.

For mothers especially, estrangement can expose long‑standing patterns of self‑erasure — years of giving without replenishment, of tending to others while ignoring our own needs. Self‑care becomes a corrective experience, a way of saying: My needs matter. My well‑being matters. I’m allowed to take up space. And for estranged mothers, self-care is frequently more than a corrective experience, it can become a matter of survival.

Additionally, a parent who tends to their own growth and healing becomes more resilient, flexible, and hopeful. That resilience may become a stabilizing force in the family system. Adult children who’re distant or estranged from their parents often feel safer reconnecting with a parent whose grounded, self‑aware, and not seeking rescue or repair through them.

To the Giving Tree

I come to you now with older eyes,
no longer the boy who believed
that it was alright for you to offer everything
until hardly anything remained.

You stood there, steadfast,
branches open like a mother’s arms,
and I mistook your generosity for approval,
your sacrifice for endless strength.

I didn’t know then
that roots can ache,
that sap runs thin,
that even a generous heart
has limits it deserves to name.

You gave because it was your nature,
and I took because I believed
that trees, and bees and butterflies
were made for the wants and needs of little boys.
Forgive me for not seeing
what my blindness cost you.

If I could sit beside you now,
I would place my hand
on your weathered bark
and tell you that your worth
was never measured
by how much of yourself you surrendered.

I would tell you
that you were enough
even before the first apple fell,
that your shade alone
was a kind of blessing,
that your presence
was already a gift.

And I would ask you
to rest.
To let the wind hold you.
To remember that even a tree
is allowed to keep something
for herself.

It’s Your Turn

Self-care is giving the world the best of you, not what’s left of you.” Katie Reed

The following journal prompts are intended to support honest self-reflection on the complex interplay between love, sacrifice, and personal well-being in parenting. This isn’t to suggest that every estranged parent gave too much of themselves. Estrangement occurs for countless reasons, including circumstances where a parent may have given far too little. My purpose isn’t to excuse neglectful or abusive behavior, but rather to gently invite those who’ve consistently dismissed their own needs to consider the vital role self-care plays in healing.

1. Reflecting on Sacrifice: What sacrifices have you made in your relationship with your child? How do you feel about those sacrifices now? Do you believe they were necessary, or do you wish you had set different boundaries?

2. Understanding Love: In what ways might have your love for your child mirrored the tree's unconditional giving? How can you redefine love in the context of your relationship with your adult child to include both giving and receiving?

3. Setting Boundaries: What does setting healthy boundaries mean to you as a parent? Can you recall a time when not setting a boundary led to feelings of resentment or depletion?

4. Self-Care Practices: How do you currently practice self-care? Reflect on how prioritizing your own needs might positively impact your healing? If you were to begin practicing better self care, what might you start doing more of/less of/ differently?