How every family has a Prince Harry: the rise of adult family estrangement

While few of us can relate to a feud over royal duties, tell-all memoirs and the right (or not) to top-level security, the festering situation between Prince Harry and his family is infinitely applicable to the average Joe, with studies showing that one in four of us are estranged from a parent or sibling. But while adult family alienation is common, it's far from trivial, potentially having a profound impact on the wider family and on future generations as well.

In the beginning, it was no big deal. A disagreement between two sisters over the care of their elderly parents, and not the first time the pair hadn't seen eye to eye. But this time was different. A week of not talking turned into a month. Attempts to reconcile just widened the void. Birthdays rolled by without so much as a text message and, three years later, Wellington journalist Imogen Reilly* is completely estranged from her sibling.

"The separation is total," she says. "There have been some major life events and still zero contact so that’s pretty definitive.

"The inciting incident was over the classic things – parents and power of attorney. It’s extremely common stuff, nothing special. But in the ongoing drama after the fight, lots of other stuff tumbled out, old sibling rivalries, stuff about each other's partners and how we perceived each other, and when the dust settled, it was pretty hard to come back from."

A US survey of 1340 Americans aged over 18 found that 27% of them were currently estranged from a parent or sibling. Sibling estrangement was the most common, with rifts between parents and adult children close behind. Meanwhile, as a knock-on effect of parental alienation, estrangement between children and grandparents is also on the rise, with aunt, uncle and cousin relationships obviously impacted too.

In other words, it's not just Harry. Although his situation does run the gamut.

"I see a lot of this situation," says Jill Goldson, a therapeutic mediator at the Family Matters Centre in Auckland, and author of Child Inclusion in Parenting Dispute Mediation.

"I take it very seriously. It's not healthy for people to be walking around with these kinds of schisms in their lives. The stakes are high and the longer you leave it, the more entrenched it becomes."

While pop psychology tends to promote removing "toxic" people from our lives in a bid to "protect our peace", Goldson is not a big advocate of that approach. "Not unless you're dealing with a really injurious abuser," she says. "Cutting someone off never goes anywhere good. It makes people feel terrible and it's the antithesis of everything we need for a healthy life, which is connectedness. Siblings are the people you'll know the longest in your life, while the children of people who alienate their parents can lose their grandparents and a whole side of the family."

Which brings us to Prince Harry who copped endless flak for his arguaby self-indulgent BBC interview last week but who has Goldson's sympathy. She sees intergenerational patterns in his situation. "This is a boy who lost his mum to the very thing he's gone on to replicate his whole life," she says of the media frenzy the prince attracts. "He married someone who, like his mother, was pushed back by royal strictures."

"I think he’s one of those people in the family who is a truth teller who breaks tradition and the rest of the family resist that person in their effort to try and keep things in homeostasis."

Healing such rifts is complicated, says Goldson, as they often have their roots in previous generations and can even have an epigenetic component. "However if you can get people to meet halfway and agree to go near the pain, yes, there are solutions."

But that approach takes two, and Imogen wasn't successful getting her sister along to therapy. "I made attempts," she says. "I suggested mediation and she said she wouldn’t see a therapist or counsellor as she doesn’t believe in them and she refused to 'be told what to do by a stranger'. I, on the other hand, have had a lot of therapy about this and other stuff and I have found it amazing. But in terms of resolving this conflict? It’s just me whistling in the wind, there’s no movement from the other side."

Bess Adams* is a 50-year-old Auckland-based lawyer whose relationship with her mother survives –with caveats – despite all the odds.

When Bess was growing up, her mother had shaky mental health and was an unreliable parent. But Bess adored her and believed, even as a young child, that it was her role to take care of her.

Now in her 70s, her mother's mental health has deteriorated and she's developed a problem with substance abuse. "She starts the day with a heady cocktail of Lorazepam, alcohol and cannabis. She's sh**faced by about 10.30 in the morning, and it only gets worse," explains Bess, who regularly receives nonsensical and abusive phone messages from her mother, who in turn claims to have no memory of leaving them.

Bess has often questioned why she doesn't cut her mother out of her life, as other family members quite definitively have done. "I think it's because we had an inverse parenting relationship when I was growing up. I’ve always felt it’s my role to look after her and I can’t shake it off," she says, adding that nothing of their once close bond remains. "The person who was my mother is not there anymore. I don’t get anything out of the relationship. I don’t get any love, warmth, care, anything you’d want from a parent. Nothing but misery. It’s a one-way street."

For her own sake, Bess has begun putting boundaries in place. "I do things for her. I’ll pay for groceries and things to be delivered to her. But this weekend, I got one bad message from her and I could see where it was going, so I blocked her on my phone and it made a difference to my weekend, it really did. I got to Sunday, my whole weekend hadn't been peppered with these terrible calls, and I felt happier than usual."

The phone block isn't permanent but it gives Bess a respite from the mother she once cherished.

Jill Goldson would probably approve of Bess's approach of maintaining a link while upholding some boundaries for her own wellbeing. "I think people sometimes cut each other off completely because they struggle to know how to form boundaries," she says.

But Bess isn't entirely sure that maintaining any kind of link to her mother is healthy. "There's probably a little part of me, that had unmet needs as a child, that clings."

While falling out with her sister might not have been Imogen's chosen outcome, the process hasn't been without benefits. "I actually feel like I’ve gained a huge sense of perspective," she says. “I always thought we got on well, but... after the fight, when I started blabbing all the events between us out to my therapist she said bluntly ‘And how long has your sister been trying to get away from you?’ I was like, 'ohhhhh you might have struck a nerve there. Good observation.' I never saw it until that moment but I think my sister never really felt as strongly or as positively about the relationship as I did. That was a lot to process.”

Imogen realised she'd always had a drive to be a saviour and protector in relationships, including as a sister. "It’s a pattern I kept repeating and now that I can identify it I don’t feel that urge anymore. I can see that me being the problem solver disables the other person in their own lives and comes across as domineering. My learning from this is that you can’t change or control other people or decide how they think or feel or perceive your problems/parents or whatever. You can only change yourself. And I have changed and I feel really at peace with that.

"I don’t mind being estranged. It’s only other people who still want us to get back together if I’m honest and I would say to them 'I’m not a proxy for your own sibling relationship. Look after your own life because I’m quite happy.'

"I’m not super-interested in fake relationships to keep up appearances. I would never make other people uncomfortable with our problem – I’d just avoid an occasion if I thought she was going to turn up – which is pretty unlikely. The fight really made me aware of how different we are as people, our politics and morals and I’m reconciled with the fact that we don’t speak. Not angry or sad – just accepting."

*Names have been changed.