Navigating Family Estrangement: Understanding, Healing, and GrowingNavigating Family Estrangement: Understanding, Healing, and Growing
The Relationship Recovery Podcast
Tiffany Denny and Kirsten Franklin talk through the complex realities of family estrangement, highlighting research, trauma patterns and boundary-setting. The focus stays on helping people make clear, self-supportive choices rather than pushing one-size-fits-all advice about cutting ties or reconciling.
51:56•4 Aug 2026
Family Estrangement, Boundaries and Being ‘Team You’
Episode Overview
- Safety comes first: abuse and serious boundary violations justify strong protective action, including distance.
- Going no contact can be protective, but distance alone does not heal underlying wounds or nervous system responses.
- Estrangement is common and often rooted in generational patterns, emotional immaturity and unprocessed trauma rather than a single argument.
- Awareness of trauma and attachment is helpful, but real change requires experiential healing, not just knowing the language.
- Healthy decisions about family contact are best made from a grounded, regulated state, focusing on what the hurting part of you needs to heal.
“We're not team cut off your parents, team cut off your kids. We're team you.”
What common struggles and victories in addiction recovery and relationship healing show up inside families? This season 5 opener of The Relationship Recovery Podcast takes on the emotionally charged topic of family estrangement, with Tiffany Denny and Kirsten Franklin sharing what they’re seeing day-to-day with clients around parents, adult children and going no contact. You’ll hear them underline a key principle again and again: "We're not team cut off your parents, team cut off your kids.
We're team you." Rather than pushing blanket advice, they focus on helping people make decisions from a calm, regulated place instead of from fear, pain or survival mode. The conversation blends research with real coaching experience. They talk through data showing how common estrangement is, why so many people feel ashamed or alone, and how terms like trauma, narcissism and gaslighting can be both helpful and misused.
There’s a clear distinction between abuse that demands firm safety-based boundaries and that huge middle ground of relationships marked by hurt, emotional immaturity and generational patterns rather than outright violence. Tiffany and Kirsten also highlight the gap between awareness and true healing. Many people know their attachment style, can name their triggers and quote trauma language, but still feel stuck on what they call an "awareness bridge" – understanding what happened without knowing how to actually feel different.
They describe how nervous system responses and childhood coping mechanisms carry into adult relationships, even when contact with a parent or relative has ended. If you’re wrestling with whether to stay connected, step back or go no contact with family, this episode offers a steady, non-judgemental space to think. It doesn’t hand you a simple answer, but it does offer a powerful guiding question: what part of you is hurting, and what does that part need to heal?
Maybe that’s where true freedom starts.
Do you want to link to this podcast?
Get the buttons here!
More From This Show
The latest episodes from the same podcast.