Luna, 26, no longer speaks to her father. There was no single betrayal, no dramatic rupture. What ended the relationship was his insistence on obedience and dominance.
“In his head it’s like, ‘I’m the father, you’re the daughters, we do things my way,’” she told me. Luna explained to him that she was “not willing to have a relationship like that,” and her terms for contact were simple: “We could only have a relationship where you understand that I’m a person, and I’m not just gonna do whatever you want me to do whenever you want me to.”
He refused to accept those terms. So after numerous attempts to make it work, she walked away.
Family estrangement has become a fixture of talk shows, advice columns and social media. It’s also the subject of my new book, “Families We Lose.”
Much of the current media coverage on estrangement tends to frame it as an epidemic that is the product of therapy culture.
