Still angry. Still so angry.
These are the words of the men and women who have decided to distance themselves from their families. The very people they loved did not protect them. The mother they trusted could not defend them against abuse – sexual, physical, verbal. The father they adored was cold.
These are the betrayed, and they are everywhere. When I asked people to contact me about being estranged from their families, 70 contacted me in under an hour.
Here we are in the days before Christmas and, all over Australia, some of us will celebrate the best way we can. And that's making sure we are very distant from our parents, from our families.
It's a time of year we are meant to eat, drink and love each other, and for some of us that means sharing the love far beyond our families, without our families. We reach out to the rest of the world to choose warmth and support. Our families have abandoned us. Or we have abandoned them.
This from a woman I will call Jacqueline. (I always prefer to use people's real names but these are people who still fear their parents and the power that once was wielded over them.)
"I did not contact my parents for a number of years because of sexual abuse by my father and complicit behaviour from my mother. It took the birth of my daughter and a caring and supportive partner for me to begin the healing necessary to let them back into my life."
Jacqueline, astonishingly, forgave her father but still struggles with her feelings about her mother.
"My mother and I still have a very complicated relationship, where on the one hand she is contrite about her lack of insight and her ignoring of the warning signs but also very angry at me if I 'besmirch' my father by talking about it.
"I find Christmas wearing and false when I'm with my family."
I can hear Kylie Agllias, a world-leading social work researcher and educator on estrangement, sympathising with this story on the other end of the phone. She says it's not uncommon for people to forgive the abuser but remain in cold bleak fury with the person who didn't protect them from the abuse.
She's been researching this area for a decade and is in Australia briefly, from South Africa, to talk about her new book Family estrangement: A matter of perspective. She says we need to stop pretending estrangement is somehow unusual.
There is, she says, estrangement in nearly every family, even in hers. There is no set reason but some familiar factors: the families are stressed, the child feels no warmth and has no sense of being valued; the children are abandoned, betrayed. The parents, maybe one, sometimes two, are abusers.
Estrangement is much more common than we recognise, she says.
"People generally estrange because they believe that they have no alternative if they are to live a happy and healthy life."
Paul, now in his late 40s, decided to stop talking to his father altogether. The odd text is all that remains of a relationship which was violent, cold and chaotic.
"I've gone years and years without speaking to him."
His parents divorced but Paul says living with a man who broke everything before him in a rage – hearts, possessions, the future – forged a real consideration of what a good life should look like.
"I've spent a lot of my life trying not to be like him or trying to ensure I never become like him," says Paul.
"And I've never told anyone this before but that's part of the reason we don't have children.
"I wanted to be a different sort of person."
His siblings, much younger, more protected from the storms, keep in touch with his father. Has his father changed?
"No. He is still a miserable bastard."
Those of you who are born fixers, stop looking for happy endings. I know I've told friends to reconcile – because that's what would make me happy if, heaven forbid, my children should ever become estranged.
But reconciliation should only happen if it's actually useful for everyone in the relationship, when everyone understands and accepts what happened in the past. You can't reconcile when the relationship is still bad, when there is abuse and a power imbalance in the relationship, says Agllias. So those of you who are perpetually advocating 'making-up', just back off.
"While reconciliation is desirable and possible for some people, this is not a desirable, healthy or possible state for everyone ... estrangement is a highly stigmatised state that needs further open discussion so people don't feel ashamed to discuss what is essentially a traumatic loss for many."
My heart is torn by the lovely young woman, let's call her Miranda, who was married three years ago. Her parents divorced some time ago, time enough for her mother to marry twice more. But that was not long enough for her father to forgive her mother. Instead, a week before the wedding, Miranda's father's partner wrote Miranda an email saying neither would be attending. Apparently the fact that Miranda invited her mother was all too much for her father to bear.
"It is easy to say I don't care but I do because he's my dad. You want your dad there on your wedding day. It is one of the most painful things I have ever been through."
And she has not spoken to him since.
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