THE POWER OF PARTING

A white male survivor of childhood abuse provides an alternative look at estrangement.

When Dolan was a child, his mother regularly physically abused him and his siblings with a wooden spoon. She also “had other weapons in her arsenal, like berating us in public or dialing the water heater down to its lowest setting” or serving them barely edible food. The author uses his experience as an example of how the current emphasis of approaching estrangement through the lens of future forgiveness marginalizes and harms survivors, whose experience of childhood abuse Dolan compares to the suffering of “enslaved people, concentration camp survivors, and others who have endured the worst harm their fellow humans could inflict.” In addition to summarizing the lifelong mental consequences of surviving childhood psychological abuse, he offers a system for deciding whether to consider estrangement as a viable option for parting with abusers, explores the “spectrum” of approaches to estrangement, and describes ways to leave the door open for abusers willing to undergo significant personal healing and change. He also explores the nonexistence of rituals for processing estrangement-related grief, calling this lack of options “another instance of the de facto conspiracy our culture has constructed to ignore and compound survivors’ pain,” and encourages survivors to make use of treatments like inner-child work and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, even if they sound “nutty.” This much-needed addition to the literature around estrangement is well researched, tightly structured, and eminently practical. At times, Dolan’s zealousness and insistence on his own marginalization undermine his message and break the journalistic tone. Overall, though, this is a valuable tool for adult survivors.

A practical approach to healthy estrangement.