Family Estrangement: The Space Between Love & Self-Protection with Dafna Lender (284)
Therapist Uncensored Podcast
Sue Marriott LCSW, CGP & Ann Kelley PhD
4.7 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 4 November 2025
⏱️ 55 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Behind every family estrangement is a story of love, hurt, and boundaries
Dr. Ann Kelley is joined LIVE from Psychotherapy Networker with Dafna Lender, to explore the complex dynamics of parent-child estrangement. Focusing on the emotional and psychological impacts of cutting off family relationships, together they highlight the cultural influences that contribute to these estrangements, the therapeutic perspectives on navigating such situations, and the importance of empathy and boundaries in managing family dynamics. This conversation is about learning to hold both empathy and boundaries – understanding why someone might step away, and how to stay grounded and compassionate in the process. It’s an honest look at the
heartbreak, the healing, and the hope that can emerge when families face difficult truths.
Time Stamps for Navigating Family Estrangement: The Space Between Love & Self-Protection with Dafna Lender (284)
03:06 Understanding the impact of estrangement
05:58 Cultural influences on family cutoffs
09:14 Therapeutic perspectives on estrangement
17:54 Boundaries and the spectrum of estrangement
32:52 Navigating boundaries and self-protection
46:31 Finding meaning in senselessness
52:21 Exploring values in relationships
About our Guest – Dafna Lender
Dafna is a family therapy expert and attachment specialist. Dafna is an international trainer and supervisor for practitioners who work with children and families. She is a certified trainer and supervisor/consultant in both Theraplay and Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy (DDP), as well as an EMDR therapist. Dafna’s expertise is drawn from 28 years of working with families in many settings: at-risk after school programs, therapeutic foster care, in-home crisis stabilization, residential care and private practice. Dafna is author of Integrative Attachment Family Therapy (2023) and the co-author of Theraplay the Practitioner’s Guide (2020). She teaches and supervises clinicians in 15 countries in 4 languages: English, Hebrew, French and Spanish.
Resources for Navigating Family Estrangement: The Space Between Love & Self-Protection with Dafna Lender (284)
Dafna’s website – Resources, courses & additional information
Integrative Attachment Family Therapy: A Clinical Guide to Heal and Strengthen the Parent-Child Relationship through Play, Co-regulation, and Meaning-Making – Get your copy of her paperback
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Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | So the empathy for your parent actually serves to give you perspective and make it a little less bad. |
| 0:12.5 | When you are understanding where your parent came from, the context widens. |
| 0:18.7 | And it isn't that they were evil or that you were evil and deserved it, |
| 0:21.7 | and now you need to do, you know, now you need to punish them. |
| 0:24.7 | Exactly. |
| 0:25.2 | Yeah. |
| 0:25.8 | They have a story and you can understand them. |
| 0:31.1 | You can choose to forgive them without reconciling, which is totally legitimate. |
| 0:34.7 | But it eases, you know, there's the sense that it's so raw, |
| 0:38.3 | it's so swollen, it hurts so much to be in contact with this parent and seeing them in |
| 0:43.3 | context and knowing their story of where they came from, how they grew up, you know, |
| 0:47.0 | they abused, they were immigrants, they had mental illness, they were this and that, |
| 0:51.1 | it makes the human context so much wider for you to understand. |
| 0:56.7 | Right. And it therefore eases some of the sting of how personally you take it. |
| 1:06.1 | Welcome to Therapist Uncensored. Building on decades of professional experience, this podcast |
| 1:11.3 | tackles neurobiology, modern attachment, and more in an honest way that's helpful in healing humans. |
| 1:17.3 | Your session begins now with Dr. Anne Kelly and Sue Marriott. |
| 1:33.2 | Hey, you guys, while we know relationships are wonderful, they are also really hard. |
| 1:38.4 | Many of us believe that they shouldn't be, that if we have good connection and good communication, things will just go smoothly. But it's really that belief that can make us feel stubborn and even |
| 1:43.5 | more hopeless. So relationships |
| 1:46.1 | take work. It does for Sue and I. We can make it look easy. It's not. And one of the ways is because |
| 1:51.2 | many of us, we differ. We differ in what activates us, what makes us feel threat, the expectation. |
... |
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