Two Kinds of Responsibility

On No Contact, Childhood, and a Common Misunderstanding

Photo by Alex Shute on Unsplash

One sentence appears again and again whenever people talk about estrangement between parents and adult children:

“Reconciliation requires both people to take responsibility.”

It sounds fair. Balanced. Mature. And in one sense, it is true. But I believe this sentence quietly confuses two very different kinds of responsibility: the responsibility for the original injury and the responsibility for a possible reconciliation.

Those are not the same.

Recently, I read an essay by therapist Rachel Haack arguing that reconciliation requires mutuality — that both people must acknowledge their own part in what happened. At first glance, that seems difficult to disagree with. Until you ask a simple question:

Responsibility for what?

Children are not responsible for whether they feel safe. They are not responsible for whether their boundaries are respected. They are not responsible for how conflict is handled inside the family. Even a so-called “difficult child” is still a child.

Back then, the relationship existed between an adult and a child. Today, it exists between two adults. Those are fundamentally different realities. Once we blur that distinction, responsibility becomes blurred as well.

When adult children want to talk about the past, many parents immediately hear an accusation. They respond with sentences their children have often heard before:

“So everything is my fault.”

“I must have been a terrible mother.”

“Apparently nothing I did was ever good enough.”

But that isn’t what most estranged adult children are asking for. At least it wasn’t what I was asking for.

I simply asked my mother to talk about my childhood. She never even asked what I wanted to talk about. She simply refused the conversation.

Very few adult children expect their parents to apologize for everything. Most aren’t looking for perfect parents. They’re looking for honest ones.

Most long for something much smaller:

“Yes. That happened.”

“I understand now why that hurt you.”

“I’m sorry.”

Not perfection. Not lifelong guilt. Not endless self-condemnation. Just an acknowledgment that their experience was real.

That’s what I hoped for.

Instead, my mother told me she was too old and too sick to talk about the past. The message I heard was unmistakable: what I needed from her wasn’t important enough to discuss.

That hurt more than I can describe.

— -

There is another misunderstanding that often appears in discussions about estrangement.

Many people seem to assume that no contact is primarily an act of punishment.

I don’t think it is. I think it is much more often an act of resignation.

By the time many adult children leave, they have usually spent years trying to stay. They have explained, compromised, stayed silent, made excuses, forgiven — and then forgiven again.

Many have suggested therapy or mediation.

I did.

After receiving a deeply hurtful letter from my mother, I suggested therapy to her. She never answered. Not yes. Not no. Nothing.

— -

People often ask why adult children refuse reconciliation.

I’m not even sure that’s the right question.

Many don’t refuse reconciliation at all. They hope for it for years. What they eventually refuse are the conditions under which reconciliation is offered. Conditions such as: let’s never talk about the past. Let’s pretend nothing happened. Let’s move on.

That isn’t reconciliation.

It’s silence.

Far less often do people ask how many attempts at reconciliation came before no contact. That question matters. Because no contact is rarely the beginning of silence.

More often, it is the end of years — or decades — of explaining, hoping, asking, waiting, and trying again.

Yes, reconciliation requires both sides. It always has. But responsibility does not begin at the same point.

The responsibility for childhood belonged to the adult.

The responsibility for rebuilding a relationship belongs to two adults.

Those are two different conversations.

Confusing them asks the child to accept retrospective responsibility for a relationship that was never equal in the first place.

That does not help reconciliation. It makes it harder. Because reconciliation cannot begin with a denial of reality. It begins with acknowledging it.

Adult children are responsible for the lives they build. They are not responsible for the childhood they lived. Only when the original injury is acknowledged can two adults truly meet as equals.

Not because they have always shared equal responsibility.

But because they do now.

…

Anna Olsen writes about family estrangement, parent-child relationships, boundaries, and the complicated realities behind no contact.