When ‘Both Sides’ Isn’t Balanced — What the Responsibility Conversation Misses About Estrangement

A therapist recently posted something on Instagram that has been quietly circulating in estrangement spaces. She noticed that content holding parents accountable spreads widely, while content asking adult children to reflect tends to go quiet. She called this a “real imbalance” and asked: What does responsibility actually look like on both sides?

It’s a question worth sitting with. But I think it’s also a question that needs another question underneath it before we can answer it honestly.

The Pattern She Noticed Is Real

Let’s not dismiss the observation. Content about parental harm does spread further. There is an asymmetry in the cultural conversation, and it’s worth asking why.

I’d argue it spreads because it names something that has gone unnamed for a long time. Millions of adults grew up in homes where emotional accountability was not modeled, where their needs were met with dismissal, guilt, or silence. When someone puts language to that experience, it travels — because recognition feels like relief. Because being seen, even by a stranger on the internet, can feel like the first real breath in years.

The reach of that content isn’t proof of adult children’s unwillingness to reflect. It’s evidence of how long that experience went without a name.

The “Both Sides” Frame Assumes Equality

Here is where the post loses me.

When we apply “both sides equally responsible” to a parent-adult child relationship, we are treating it as a partnership between peers. But it was never that. Not at the beginning, and not in the years that shaped the wound.

A parent holds developmental power over a child during the years when that child’s nervous system is being formed, when their attachment patterns are being set, when they are learning whether love is conditional or safe, whether their needs are welcome or a burden. That shaping happens before the child has the cognitive capacity to evaluate it. Before they can protect themselves from it.

To arrive at adulthood, estrangement in hand, and ask that adult child to take equal responsibility for a fracture that formed in those early years - that is not balance. It is misapplied symmetry.

It isn’t a double standard that parents are asked to reflect first and more deeply. It’s developmental math.

Context Is Not a Footnote

The post also flattens something that cannot be flattened: the enormous variation in what estrangement actually is.

Some estrangements follow abuse - physical, emotional, or sexual. Some follow chronic neglect: the kind that doesn’t look like neglect from the outside, because the lights were on and the bills were paid, but the child’s interior life was never witnessed. Some follow enmeshment where the parent’s emotional needs became the child’s responsibility to manage.

And yes, some estrangements genuinely confuse the parent. The break feels sudden, disproportionate, sourced in something the parent cannot see. I work with these mothers. I know their pain intimately.

These are not the same situation. They do not call for the same response.

When we issue a both-sides question across all of this, we are asking the wrong thing. Trauma-informed work doesn’t ask: who is equally at fault? It asks: What happened? What is the nervous system still holding? What does this person need to feel safe enough to move toward something different?

That is a different inquiry. And it lands somewhere different.

What I’m Not Saying

I want to be honest about what this is not.

I am not saying adult children have no work to do. I’ve been an estranged adult child. I know the ways that unprocessed grief can harden into a permanent posture. I know that healing asks something of us regardless of which side of the fracture we’re on.

I am not saying parents are always wrong, or that the cultural conversation is entirely fair to them. It isn’t, always. That’s real too.

What I am saying is this: the question is, "What does responsibility look like on both sides?" The way it was asked can quietly do something harmful. It can function as a rebalancing that asks the adult child to tend to the parent’s experience before their own experience has been genuinely witnessed. And in my work, that is often what closes the door.

The Parent Who Goes First

In every reconciliation I have witnessed - and I have been part of two personally, as both a daughter and a mother, as well as 65+ professionally - there was a moment where someone decided to go first. To reach toward the relationship before they had any guarantee it would be received.

In the parent-adult child dynamic, that first move belongs to the parent. Not because the adult child owes nothing. But because the parent held the power first. And the adult child’s nervous system needs to experience something new from the person who shaped the old.

Leading with love before leading with your case. Staying curious about your child’s experience before you defend your own. Sitting with discomfort long enough to let their story land without immediately redirecting to yours. That is not capitulation. That is relational courage.

And it is the most powerful thing an estranged parent can do.

A Final Note

Healing is not contingent on outcome. You can do this work whether or not your child ever returns. You can become someone whose love is no longer contingent on being received.

But if reconciliation is what you’re hoping for - if that door is what you’re standing in front of - then the question isn’t “what is their responsibility?”

The question is: What do I need to become so that they feel safe enough to come home?

That’s the work. And it starts with you.