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In this episode, I explore the growing reality of family estrangement and share a grounded, practical path toward healing and reconnection. I speak from my own experience—as someone who has been an estranged child and also someone who has done the work to repair those relationships. One truth that really shaped my journey is this: many parents were never taught emotional intelligence. They didn’t grow up with the language or tools we use today—words like “boundaries,” “triggers,” or “toxic behavior” simply weren’t part of their world. Because of that, expecting them to meet modern emotional standards can sometimes be unrealistic.
I introduce a powerful three-stage framework that goes beyond surface-level healing and moves into real emotional transformation.
Stage 1: Awareness (Therapy & Emotional Discovery)
This is where most healing journeys begin. Through therapy or self-reflection, individuals uncover suppressed emotions, childhood wounds, and unmet needs. Feelings like anger, shame, guilt, and resentment come to the surface, often tied to past experiences such as divorce, neglect, or emotional absence.
This stage is incredibly valuable because it gives language to pain and helps people understand why they feel the way they do. However, the problem arises when people stop here. Without further processing, awareness can turn into blame. Parents or loved ones are often labeled as the source of all pain, which can lead to emotional distance or even estrangement—sometimes unnecessarily.
Stage 2: Rewriting Their Story (Compassion & Perspective Shift)
This is where deeper healing begins. Instead of viewing parents as villains, you step outside your own role and examine their life story objectively. You consider their upbringing, struggles, limitations, and the environment they were shaped by.
By doing this, you begin to develop empathy and compassion. You realize that much of their behavior was not personal, but rather a reflection of what they knew and experienced. This doesn’t excuse harmful actions, but it reframes them in a way that allows emotional release. Anger begins to soften into understanding, creating space for healing and, in some cases, reconciliation.
Stage 3: Rewriting Your Story (Identity Transformation)
The final stage is where true transformation happens. Many people unknowingly build their identity around their pain—seeing themselves through the lens of what happened to them. In this stage, you consciously break down those beliefs and rebuild your sense of self.
You recognize that your identity is not defined by your past or by others’ actions. Instead, you create a new narrative—one rooted in clarity, strength, and self-awareness. As a result, emotional triggers lose their power, and you become more grounded and resilient in your relationships.
Key Insight
Healing is not about choosing between blame or denial—it’s about moving through all three stages. Awareness without compassion leads to resentment. Compassion without identity work leads to stagnation. But when all stages are integrated, you gain emotional freedom.
This process not only transforms how you see your parents or others—it transforms how you see yourself. And from that place, genuine connection, peace, and even repair become possible.
Read Full Transcription
Welcome to Tania Talks, the podcast where we unpack all things about cut off culture, family estrangement, and the path back to connection. I’m Tania Khazaal. In every episode, I’m going to bring you honest conversations, practical insight, and a grounded approach to healing that actually moves families and people forward.
Welcome to the Tania Talks podcast where we talk all things faith, family relationships, really interesting conversation with my sister today. I was the estranged child and I was also estranged from my sister, who is now my best friend. And I realized in a conversation that we were having is the capacity that parents have to be emotionally mature for their children is not always what we expect it to be.
And so for myself growing up, a lot of the times I felt like I had to mutter my mother, hence where I grew my emotional intelligence to where it was and to navigate all these situations. And it’s not uncommon. I mean, most parents were never taught how to contain their emotions.
They were taught to fix, to reach out, to over explain, to over justify themselves because we just grew up in a different generation. We don’t have the same tools. We don’t have the same strategies, the same language even, right? Think about 2026 by the time I’m doing this episode and all the language that everybody’s using and everything from boundaries to standards to toxic and narcissism and even the good language like Zen, they didn’t have that language.
They just knew how to kind of get by and survive. And that’s not to just make excuses for parents’ behavior. It’s more of a place of understanding because what we sometimes expect our parents to provide and give us and do for us is sometimes just unrealistic.
Even if it’s emotional needs or things that we felt like we needed, it’s oftentimes unrealistic. And so I was at a dinner with my mother and by the grace of God, I came up with, I think, a groundbreaking three-step strategy that I have completely gone through, but never actually named to this extent. And I’m so excited to share that with you guys because I want to make sure that I share it.
And I want to get really deep into what that looks like. So oftentimes a relationship with a parent is there’s one child who’s always going to be that child in that relationship. And my mother, for instance, who you can say is emotionally immature.
I just don’t like that term because she just didn’t have the same emotional language that I learned, but she sometimes will be the matriarch in the relationship with, for example, my sister, a lot more than myself, where my sister is a little bit more of that child. She allows my mom to be more of the mother and she doesn’t really mother my mother so much. Whereas for me, from such a young age, I was almost forced into that independent role and it got me to start being such a, playing more of that matriarch role that I started to more mother my mother, right? Where I was aware of emotional trends and the emotional resilience and strength that I was carrying that she didn’t necessarily have.
Now, obviously that’s a big reason that led into my estrangement in the first place before I really understood what was happening. And so when I came up with these three steps in this concept, it made me realize, by the way, I have my sister here on my side. So if you hear her chime in or want to ask additional questions so that we can get deeper into this, I really asked her to do that.
But everybody, everybody now, there’s like two out of five family members, maybe even more that is doing therapy in some capacity, right? So therapy is such a growing culture. And where I think therapy came in, especially is, you know, for anyone who follows me, I talk about how, you know, Carl Rogers introduced this person-centered therapy back in the seventies and it’s just has a growing culture because of empowerment and protecting your peace and, and really healing your, your inner wounds. And so there’s a, there’s a place and there’s a time for therapy.
And I think that therapy was especially useful during what I call stage one. So there’s three stages that I’m going to walk you through. Stage one is where a therapy is actually great.
It’s the first time you’re learning about boundaries. And when I say boundaries, I don’t mean the common label. I mean, standards being able to say no, when you don’t have your ability to have any kind of standards in a situation, this is often called boundaries.
I think that it’s important to start to learn that language. And so when you go and see a therapist, myself included, you’re starting to uncover in stage one, the language, the, the, the triggers really inside of you, things that have activated you, why you felt insecure, why you felt shame, why you felt guilt, why you felt resentful, why you felt all these ways about yourself. You, you have this certain self image, these insecurities, these things that you’re trying to process.
And oftentimes it has to do with your childhood wounds, the childhood hardships that you’ve gone through, the emotional needs that weren’t met. You know, family going through a divorce, all of the different, seeing abuse in your home. All of these have a direct impact on how you view yourself.
And stage one, seeing a therapist, seeing a psychologist is incredibly great at uncovering all of these things that you used to want to suppress. And I’m talking about the really great therapists, not the ones that could potentially start to almost alter some of the memories or things that never happened. Right, Because we do know that that exists, but stage one is powerful. The problem is, is no one is ever taught how to get past stage one. And this is why we’re seeing the growing trend of estrangement.
And I know some people will be like, it’s not a trend. It’s new. You’re right.
But what is becoming a trend is the fact that more and more people are cutting them off for things that aren’t even real abuse. Right. And that’s when I say like growing trend is because people are learning that language and now choosing to cut off versus repair.
And when you’re in this stage one and you’re healing through all of this, what typically happens is you now learn the language before you had the emotional capacity to process it. And then you’re not really given the tools to emotionally process it or repair. And when I say tools, I’m not talking about meditation, cognitive behavior therapy, um, you know, um, tapping all of the different methods that help you regulate your nervous system.
That is incredibly important, but that is just regulating your nervous system so that the past thoughts are not overwhelming you. That’s going to lead to more depression or more anxiety or more, you know, uh, mental health issues. This is where I think it’s really powerful to bring the awareness and bring to the surface, the emotions that you’ve been suppressing, the thoughts that you’ve been feeling.
It’s incredibly powerful. But when we end it there, we have a generation, which we’re seeing now that is stuck, completely stuck in that space. And when you’re stuck in that space, what happens is we oftentimes paint our parents as the villain, the people who have hurt us as the villain.
And why we do that is because, well, I just uncovered all of these emotions that I have, these negative, the anger, the frustration, the, the, everything is surfacing. And now I’m realizing the person that might have fed that, or the people that might have actually created those emotions. And because of that, you’re now going to start to naturally build frustration and resentment towards those people or that person.
And this is where it becomes dangerous. And this is why I think that people oftentimes get stuck in that space where distance is better than repair. Distance makes more sense.
And you’re trying to process your pain. And so you want to process the pain in the distance until you’re ready to come back. But stage two is so incredibly powerful.
And this is where I saw some of the biggest transformations, not just for myself, but some of the people that I’ve worked with. Actually, a lot of the people that I’ve worked with is stage two is saying, now that I’m aware of these negative emotions, these feelings that I’ve had, these unmet emotional needs, now that all of this is coming to the surface, you have to ask yourself, okay, but now what? Now what do I do? Because the solution is not just distance. Once again, abuse being the exception here.
I’m talking about real abuse. You were starved, you were molested, you were beaten, all of those things. Yes, you have to protect yourself.
Safety comes first. But in majority of the situations that I deal with, a lot of people, parents are not abusive. They’re genuinely wonderful, great parents doing a great job.
And so stage two is where the emotional healing, the most important part comes out. And that is rewriting their story. And sometimes it’s so hard. And I mean, rewrite their story, rewrite your mother’s story, your father’s story, your sibling’s story, rewrite your ex-husband’s story that was narcissistic and terrible, or your ex-wife that was narcissistic and terrible and turned the children against you. That villain of your story, and this is an incredibly powerful tool that you can do even outside of your childhood wounds, anytime you’re having a conflict with someone. But I’m going to just take it back in particular to like my mother or your parent in this case, is rewrite their story.
Because when you rewrite their story, even for the parents, by the way, this is incredibly powerful. You rewrite your child’s story from their lens, or you rewrite your parent’s story, because it helps you understand a lot of your emotional chaos that could be happening as well. Because oftentimes let’s just be realistic.
Parents are like, I know what happened. I could have been better. I think I was a little bit too reactive.
I was at a state where I was working two jobs and three jobs, and I wasn’t there for my kids the way that I should have. All of these things, there’s no guilt, there’s no shame. You’re rewriting the story to say, I’m making sense of what happened to the people who loved me, who were there, my parents, while I’m also allowing my space to be able to process their story.
So I’m going to try to get into a little bit more detail so that you can understand this concept. When you’re rewriting the other person’s story, so for example, I’m rewriting my mother’s story. You have to first completely remove yourself from this.
I’m not her daughter. I’m not, whatever relationship you have, you’re going to completely remove yourself so that there’s no emotional context. You’re just going to look at it like, this is a random person.
I just want to write their story. And I mean, go back to their childhood, go back to how their parents were with them, go back to the school that they grew up in, go back to the relationships that they’ve had, everything that you can possibly know that you do know, and start rewriting their story. And you’re going to rewrite their story so much so until you start to feel a little form of sadness start to form for that person, a little bit more understanding, a little bit more compassion.
So in my instance, which is one of my biggest breakthroughs is when I went through therapy, when I went through the estranger with my mother, I was completely justified. And it doesn’t say that it doesn’t mean that the pain is not justified. It just means, okay, but now what? So I was justified to cut her off.
I was justified for being hurt. I was justified for all the feelings that I had because the feelings were the pain was real. But when I rewrote my mother’s story and I was like, okay, she’s the youngest daughter of 16 kids.
She was the 15th child. Her dad died when she was three. Her mother absolutely neglected her unintentionally, I’m sure in ways that I would never understand.
And so she was probably forced to be overly independent and mature too young of an age, probably didn’t have too much of a childhood. I can only imagine a life of that. I do know having older sisters who probably weren’t very nice to her.
She probably watched a lot of fighting in a home between siblings. I mean, I can imagine I had an older sister. We fought all the time growing up. So can you imagine having that many more in the family? I know that she grew up fairly poor. They were living in a house with no heat at one point, eating out of garbage cans, all of these things. I rewrote her story until I was sad for her. And I genuinely felt so sad. Maybe not everyone’s parent is going to be as sad. And some parents are going to be even worse and sadder, especially if you’ve got parents who maybe have addiction or whatever it is that they’re suffering with.
But when I rewrote her story and that compassion came through, it allowed me to start processing two different feelings. Where now in stage one, where I had the resentment and I had the anger and I had the pain and these feelings, I started to transform those into understanding and compassion. Once again, not anywhere in here am I saying that no, my feelings weren’t real or that how I felt wasn’t justified or even that my pain didn’t matter, but it allowed me to say, okay, wait, all of these things in stage one that I completely made about me, stage two helped me realize that none of it was personal.
It wasn’t that I wasn’t loved enough or not loved at all, or it wasn’t that I was cared about less. None of that was true to my mother. She did an incredible job compared to how her mother was with her, even if my emotional needs were still not met.
And so when I’m going through this stage one and stage two, and now you can see why stage two is such an important piece to allow the feelings and the emotions from stage one to actually process through you and bring up that level of compassion and understanding that nobody else is really teaching. What happens is people start to, in the coaching industry, in the mentorship industry, in the therapy industry, there’s someone that’s maybe starting at stage two without going through stage one. And then there’s people that are going through stage one, but never getting to stage two, let alone stage three. And stage three is really where the transformation happens, because this is now where you’re rewriting your story. And rewriting your story is where everything comes together because you start to realize, wait, I built this an entire identity, right? And that’s what happens is a lot of times we form this identity around our pain, but our pain is not our identity. But what happens is from these childhood wounds and these hardships and these struggles that we’ve gone through in our childhood, the things that people have said to us, the things we’ve seen in front of us, the things that our parents, our siblings, our teachers, our bosses, our exes have said to us, form a piece of our identity.
And when you start to realize, when you start rewriting other people’s stories, this was actually a part of their identity, not you, but you started to form your identity based on how they were and what they were experiencing. So stage three is so incredibly important because you’re rewriting your story and saying, now that I’m aware that I formed a big part of my identity based on something that had nothing to do with me, this is your opportunity to start rewriting your story. This is where you’re able to see I can completely almost destructure and break down everything that I once believed about myself and start making space to building an entirely new one.
And when I did that, thanks to the work of some incredible people, especially Joe Dispenza, I’ve been reading his book since I was like 19 years old. And it really had me understand that I can lose my mind and create a new one. And you can do the same thing with your sense of self, your identity, who you are, and really give yourself a chance to uncover who you are.
And this work is so important and so powerful because it helps both the parent and the child, the child who’s holding onto the parent’s pain and what they’ve done to you. If you work through these steps, I can almost guarantee you that you’re going to completely transform the way that you see the people who have hurt you in your life. And even for the parent, when you start to go through this work, you’re going to see how the way that you were parented also affects how we parent, which is sometimes it’s hard to digest, but it’s so transformational because that’s really where the growth happens.
And I can tell you when you go through these stages, you become a healthier, happier, more grounded version of yourself because you are no longer now triggered by the people who are used to once trigger you. When your mother, your father say something that once used to trigger you, you don’t anymore because you understand the capacity that they’re operating from, from the place that they’re operating from. And that has nothing to do with you personally.
And so I really wanted to share this and I know that I can dive in to each of these conversations more and more. So if you haven’t already, make sure to subscribe to the podcast, listen in for each of the episodes. You can watch this on YouTube as well.
And I want to say thank you for joining me on Tania talks.