The app for independent voices
Most estranged families I encounter are locked in a Drama Triangle (Karpman, 1968):
- One person identifies as the Victim (“I was cut off for no reason”)
- Another is cast as the Persecutor (the boundary-setter, the ‘accuser’)
- And someone—often a therapist, a partner, or an ideology—is seen as the Rescuer turned villain, the one who “turned them against us”
Sometimes the triangle flips.
The child is accused of playing Victim. The parent becomes the wrongly accused Perpetrator. And therapy or ‘ideology’ is framed as the dangerous Rescuer. But that, too, is a defense.
It protects the parent from the harder truth: That their love may have been real, but unsafe. That their presence came with conditions. That their child didn’t leave to punish them, they left to stay intact.
It’s easier to believe your child was brainwashed than to face that contact with you, as it was, was costing them their psychological stability.
But when a child sets a firm boundary (or goes No Contact) they’re often doing the one thing that collapses the entire triangle:
They stop playing a role.
They refuse to rescue.
They stop absorbing blame.
They stop fighting to be seen.
They walk away.
This act is rarely vindictive. It’s often the final move toward psychological adulthood. But in a system that’s invested in denial, that move is reinterpreted as cruelty.
Estrangement is not always clean. Some adult children act from unresolved trauma or rigidity. But more often, they’re stepping out of a loop that never made space for their full humanity.
Until the family system can tolerate shared grief, mutual accountability, and loss without blame, estrangement will continue to be cast as ideology, when it’s often something much more honest: a boundary that was never allowed until now.
*UPDATE: Since so many of you resonated with this comment, I turned it into its own article for anyone who wants the full breakdown of the Drama Triangle, roles, and why “no contact” is often misread.
