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Let’s skip the part where I pretend this is a comfortable question.
Consider this number: recent surveys suggest that somewhere between 27 and 38 percent of Americans are currently estranged from at least one family member. Karl Pillemer’s landmark Cornell Family Estrangement and Reconciliation Project put the figure at 27 percent — roughly 67 million people. A more recent YouGov poll of nearly 4,400 adults found it closer to 38 percent. And among younger generations, the trend toward what is now commonly called “going no contact” is rising sharply. Notably, when researchers ask why, the most common answer is not abuse, not addiction, not years of documented harm — it is something a family member said or did. A single offense. An argument. A piece of unsolicited advice delivered at the wrong moment. Estrangement, once a last resort, has become an item on the menu — and for a growing number of people, it is being ordered far too quickly, before the meal has even arrived.
In the previous article, I made the case that mothers — and parents generally — have less control over their children’s outcomes than our culture tends to assume. Free will is real. Genetics matter. Zip codes matter. And the research on parental influence is more nuanced than the blame-and-credit economy most families operate in.
But I have also sat across from enough people in forty years of practice to know that some of you are reading that and thinking: you don’t know my mother. And you’re right. I don’t. Because some parents really did screw up. Not in the normal, human, everyone-falls-short way. In the serious way. The neglect. The abuse. The addiction that swallowed the household whole. The cutting words delivered so consistently they became the voice inside your head. The violations that were never acknowledged, never apologized for, never even named.
So what do you do with that? What do you do when the wound is real, the source is still alive — or still inside you even if they’re not — and someone like me has the nerve to suggest you consider forgiveness?
Let me try to answer that honestly.
What Forgiveness Actually Is
The research on forgiveness is, at this point, remarkably consistent and quite compelling. Studies from institutions including Stanford, the University of Wisconsin, and the Mayo Clinic have found that forgiveness — genuine, worked-at forgiveness — is associated with lower blood pressure, reduced anxiety and depression, stronger immune function, and measurably better cardiovascular health. People who forgive sleep better. They report higher life satisfaction. They are less likely to abuse substances or engage in self-destructive behavior. And research consistently finds that people who are more forgiving report significantly higher relationship satisfaction — meaning that releasing old grievances does not just improve your health. It improves your chances of being in a loving, lasting relationship with a partner who actually benefits from the version of you that isn’t still fighting old battles.
Here is the finding that I share with almost every patient who bristles at the word: the person who benefits most from forgiveness is not the one being forgiven. It is the one doing the forgiving. Forgiveness is not a gift you give to the person who hurt you. It is a gift you give to yourself. Holding onto bitterness and resentment, as the old saying goes, is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.
But before we go further, I want to draw a distinction that I consider absolutely essential, because collapsing these two things causes enormous unnecessary suffering:
Forgiveness and reconciliation are not the same thing.
Forgiveness is an internal process. It is the decision — made privately, often painfully, usually more than once — to release another person from the debt you feel they owe you. To stop letting their failures live in your nervous system rent-free. You can forgive someone completely and never speak to them again. You can forgive someone who is deceased. You can forgive someone who has never apologized and never will.
Reconciliation is something different. Reconciliation is relational. It requires the other person. It requires change, accountability, and demonstrated safety. And it is entirely optional.
Why We Hold On
In my very first book, Your Mind: An Owner’s Manual for a Better Life, I devoted an early chapter to a principle that I have come back to throughout my career: all behavior is purposeful. Every single thing we do — including the things that seem self-defeating — is serving some function, meeting some need, protecting us from something we fear.
Resentment and bitterness are no exception. When people hold on to grievances, particularly toward parents, it is almost never simple stubbornness. It is almost always protection.
Sometimes the protection is straightforward: if I stay angry, I stay guarded, and I won’t be hurt like that again. The bitterness becomes a kind of armor. Understandable. Exhausting. And ultimately more imprisoning than protective.
But there is another function of held resentment that I find even more important to name, because it is less obvious and more insidious: blame is easier than responsibility. It is genuinely easier to hold my mother responsible for dressing me funny as a kid, for the way her criticism shaped my self-esteem, for the template she gave me for relationships — than to pick up that template, examine it, and decide to build something different. As long as my unhappiness has a clear author, I am relieved of the harder work of becoming the author of my own life.
And then there is a third reason people resist forgiveness, and it is one I have enormous sympathy for: forgiveness can feel like someone got away with something. It can feel like you are retroactively approving of what was done to you. Like letting go of the anger is the same as saying it wasn’t that bad. So you hold on — not out of weakness, but out of a fierce, honorable insistence that what happened to you was wrong and you will not pretend otherwise.
I understand that completely. And I want to say clearly: releasing the resentment is not the same as excusing the behavior. You can know, fully and without apology, that what was done to you was wrong — and still choose not to carry it for the rest of your life. Those two things can coexist.
Consider the theological model of forgiveness, because I think it is the most instructive one we have. There is no place in scripture where God looks at human failure and says, on reflection, I overreacted — your sins were not so bad after all. He never minimizes. He never pretends the offense was smaller than it was. And yet he says: though your sins be as scarlet, I will wash them white as snow. He says he will cast our sins into the depths of the sea, and separate us from our transgressions as far as the east is from the west. The offense is acknowledged in full — and then it is released. That is the model. Forgiveness does not say it wasn’t that bad. It says it was exactly that bad — and I am choosing not to be defined by it any longer. The person who hurt you does not get away with anything in the economy of consequences. But you are no longer their warden. And that distinction can change everything.
When Reconciliation Makes Sense — And When It Doesn’t
Now to the practical question: should you reconcile?
The answer is genuinely situational, and I want to resist the cultural pressure — sometimes well-meaning, sometimes not — to insist that family bonds obligate us to ongoing relationship regardless of ongoing harm. They do not.
If the person who hurt you is still hurting people — if they are verbally abusive, if they have never taken any responsibility for what they did, if they pose a genuine risk to your children or grandchildren — then reconciliation is not indicated. Protecting yourself and your family is not an act of unforgiveness. It is an act of wisdom. You can forgive from a safe distance. You can wish someone well while keeping them out of your living room.
But I have also watched something quietly extraordinary happen in my office more times than I can count: a patient who had written off a parent entirely, out of pain and self-protection, slowly coming to discover that the person standing in front of them today is not the same person who caused the original wound. People do change.
Suffering has a way of teaching lessons that easier circumstances never could. And I have seen parents who were genuinely terrible at the job — impatient, self-absorbed, emotionally absent — become grandparents of remarkable tenderness and presence.
They only knew what they knew. They only had what they had. That is not an excuse — it is a context. And context, while it does not erase the injury, can make it possible to see the person who inflicted it as something more than a villain. As a human being who was themselves shaped by forces they didn’t fully choose, doing their imperfect best in a role that no one is ever fully prepared for.
If that person is sorry — genuinely, demonstrably sorry — there may be something worth returning to. Not for their sake. For yours. And perhaps for the sake of your children, who deserve to know their grandparents if knowing them is safe.
A Personal Word
I do not often write about my own family in clinical articles. But I would be a hypocrite to spend this many words encouraging reconciliation without acknowledging that I have lived it.
My father criticized me savagely when I was a boy. I could not wait to get away from him. Then, when he was 57 — the same age his own father had died — he had a heart attack. Speaking from what he believed was his deathbed, he told me something I had never known: that he had been devastated by the loss of his father when he was only fifteen years old. He swore, in that grief, that he would never let anyone get that close to him again. And he never did — not his wife, not his five children. The wall went up at fifteen and it stayed up for decades.
He lived another twenty-three years after that conversation. And in those years, something remarkable happened. The man who had been my biggest critic became my biggest fan. The wall came down. We found each other.
He passed before he could meet my daughter Vienna Maria. This morning — the same morning I am finishing this article — she received her holy baptism, four months old, radiant, completely unaware of the long and complicated road that brought her family to that font. I would have given anything for him to have had a front row seat. I like to think he did.
There is not a shred of animosity left for my father. Only warmth, and gratitude, and the quiet joy of knowing that we did not waste what time we had. That is what reconciliation, when it is possible, can look like. And it is worth every difficult step it takes to get there.
While There Is Still Time
In 1988, Mike and the Mechanics released a song called The Living Years. It is, in my opinion, one of the most psychologically honest songs ever written about the relationship between parents and children. The narrator is singing about his father — the silence between them, the things left unsaid, the arguments that calcified into distance. And then his father dies, and the chance is gone.
The line that has stayed with me for decades is this: I just wish I could have told him in the living years. Not after. Not at the graveside. In the living years. While there was still time to hear the answer.
I have sat with more people than I care to count who are living in the aftermath of that song. Who held on — to the anger, to the principle, to the protection — and then one day got a phone call, and the time was gone. And what they grieve is not usually the parent themselves. What they grieve is the conversation that never happened. The door that was never opened. The possibility that was never tested.
If there is someone in your life — a mother, a father, a parent of any kind — from whom you are estranged, and the estrangement is more about old pain than present danger, I want to gently ask: is it time? Not to pretend the past didn’t happen. Not to abandon your own hard-won boundaries. But to find out whether the person standing on the other side of that door today might surprise you.
Forgiveness does not require you to forget. It does not require you to reconcile. It does not require you to minimize what was done to you or to pretend that it didn’t shape you. It only requires you to decide that the wound, as real as it is, will not be the last word on your story.
You get to write what comes next. That is not a small thing. That is everything.
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