Excellent article by therapist Rachel Haack exploring who holds power in family estrangement.
Haack notes how “power hierarchies” are usually not the most helpful lens to understand family dynamics (citing the import work by Dr. Karl Pillemer). Haack also notes how, in families with adult children estranged from their parents, it is the adult children who often hold most of the relative power - especially those adult children who have achieved independence and success (which, in many cases, resulted in part from the efforts of good-enough parents).
Certainly, there are family dynamics involving misuse of power (e.g., abuse, neglect); however, Haack is addressing the growing phenomenon of adult children distancing or cutting off from parents around conflicts that are, in fact, part of human life and capable of repair.
Haack asserts, “In adult relationships, power is less about role and more about who controls access, choice, and the willingness to walk away.”
Haack addresses “structural power” in parent-child relationships when children are minors and parents are responsible for asserting natural parent responsibilities. I would add that this “healthy power differential” (elaborated by Salvador Minuchin and a core component of attachment-based family therapy) is essential for healthy human development.
Dr. Jeffrey Young (Young, et al. 2008) developed the concept of five core emotional needs: secure attachment, autonomy, realistic limits and self-control, freedom of expression, and spontaneity and play. Children, adolescents, and young adults need healthy guidance, protection, nurturance from parents across these developmental stages in order to learn (and gradually internalize) the ability to accept limits and manage distress. This is a natural process in human development that, when delivered in a good-enough manner, prepares each of us to reasonably face the challenges of the world that awaits.
To reduce this process to “power hierarchies” distorts the reality of family dynamics and focuses on an area unlikely to help family members heal – and one that will more likely aggravate family discord.
As an attachment-based family therapist, I see the impact on families who have been guided (often by well-meaning psychotherapists) to view problems in family dynamics primarily through a lens of “power hierarchies.” True healing in family therapy arises from deepening emotional connection through shared vulnerability, increasing parent understanding of core emotional needs in children, and helping parents strengthen their natural parenting instincts.
Haack emphasizes, “The insistence that parents always have power is appealing because it simplifies moral narratives. It identifies a permanent villain. It relieves one party of responsibility. But families are not static hierarchies. They are evolving systems shaped by autonomy, loss, loyalty, ambivalence, and love over time.”
In my work to integrate attachment-based family therapy and schema therapy, I have found that helping family members identify which mode is leading the urge to distance or cut-off from other members is key: is the urge emerging from “the healthy adult mode” or “wise child mode” or, in fact, coming from an “estranged protector mode” (a coping mode that detaches from the pain of unmet core emotional needs rather than try to get these needs met through healthier connections).
Family members often share with me how much they welcome this frame, how healing it can be, and how it establishes the safety and trust needed to work on the array of challenges that inevitably emerge in family life.
For families seeking therapy to work on estrangement and other family struggles, please
visit my website for more information on services or
contact me.
For psychotherapists interested in exploring training and supervision in attachment-based family therapy and schema therapy, please consider training opportunities (ABFT,
ST) or
contacting me directly for supervision in these models.
