Family estrangement afflicts many families in the United States. The estrangement of siblings from each other, or of adult children from their parents, and many other types are very difficult challenges in life. How have you met those challenges in your own family, if you have experienced estrangement? Have has the Restored Gospel helped you in that regard? What advice do you have, or questions do you have, about the subject?
Full Citation for this Article: Editorial Board, SquareTwo Journal (2024) "Reader's Puzzle for Fall 2024," SquareTwo, Vol. 17 No. 3 (Fall 2024), http://squaretwo.org/Sq2ArticleReadersPuzzleFall2024.html, accessed <give access date>.
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I. Emilee Pugh Bell
Sibling rifts, parental split, grandparents and uncles and aunt silent, years without communication, accusations and denials and side taking, restraining orders and mental illness, record removals and membership councils, ultimatums and manipulation and abuse and threats. I used to think that massive General Conference story-sized action would save my family. Cross country road trips, bearing testimonies, begging everyone to let everyone else to live in peace. But no matter what I did, it seemed, we fractured ever more sharply. For years I have struggled with a terrifying depression and hopeless because of the disintegration of my eternal family of mortal origin.
I don't have anything particularly new or mysterious to give you as hope, but it feels miraculous to say that I have hope. There are a few things I credit with my journey back from the precipice that is the loneliness and grief and despair I had knowing family members are living but not in my life.
1. Nothing is more powerful than just the daily, quiet moments communing with God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit in prayer and the scriptures. Remembering who I am as a Daughter of Heavenly Parents, pondering the meaning of "infinite" when combined with "Atonement of Jesus Christ," reading bout estrangement as old as eternity has given me a steadiness, an internal ledge to rest all my pain and fear and desperate loneliness and grief. The daily, simple whispers from the Holy Ghost, the ancient scriptural voices, and my own lips was a great union of the mortal and eternal that gave me a daily measure of strength to keep living.
2. Build on, lean on, celebrate the friends and family who do want to gather and connect. Nobody can replace the ones who have removed themselves from my life. But, I have found that connecting with new and old friends and family has brought happiness. And that happiness has strengthened my hope, and kept my heart softer than it would have been in case anyone wants to reconnect.
3. Family history and temple worship. Sometimes I feel like family estrangement was my inevitable, inherited family culture. My paternal grandmother was disowned when she married my grandfather because she also left the Catholic church to be baptized in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. My great-grandmother's oldest son I never remember meeting because he moved to Montana and never came back. I could tell you a dozen more stories before getting to you the estrangement in my own generation. Learning that my ancestors have survived similar grief gives me courage to live. Temple work helps me feel I am doing something to help heal my broken family.
The grief hasn't gone and I doubt it ever will, entirely. However, my imperfect but daily work in these areas the past 5 years has bit by bit helped my soul to heal to the point that I can have hope without desperation. I hope you can find that, too.
_______________________________________________________________________II. Stephen Cranney
Thankfully estrangement has not been my cross to bear, so I haven't had to deal with the messiness of the details or of actually putting in practice my abstract ideals about the issue. However, at a high level I would try to maintain contact as long as it is not directly and substantively hurting me or those around me (for example, if they were trying to steal my identity). Obviously, one-sided estrangements are something I would have limited control over, but I would occasionally reach out every now and then. Finally, anecdotally I'm seeing more people cut off contact over political, social, or religious issues, which is, short of being an actual Nazi, insane.
_______________________________________________________________________III. V. H. Cassler
I think family estrangement in this life is a very hard cross to bear. The thoughts I penned here in the previous issue of SquareTwo seem to resonate most with me at this time.
_______________________________________________________________________IV. Ashley B. Alley
As a brand new step mom, I have been learning how to navigate and support my husband during extended periods of separation from his children according to the current custody arrangement. We’ve both found great comfort in the gospel as we hold to the truths and hope of eternal families and the power of the Spirit to bind us for time and eternity. Every night, we as a couple pray for his daughters. Being united through the act of praying together for a shared purpose has brought us closer to God and to each other as well. While we cannot control the choices of the other household, we can maintain our personal relationship with God, lay our worries at His feet and trust in His plan and His ability to turn all hard things for our ultimate good.
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