I don't speak to my father

What this looks like

You haven’t talked in a long time. He might not know where you live now. He might not have met your kids. Or he has, and it didn’t go well, and you’ve been keeping distance since. People bring him up and you redirect. You hear about him through a sibling or an aunt and you feel things you didn’t expect. The estrangement might have been your decision. It might have been mutual drift. You might not even know which.

You’ve been in a state of unresolved relation for a long time. The unresolved-ness is its own thing now.

What you’ve already tried

• Drafting a message and not sending it
• Going to a family event where you both pretended not to notice each other
• Therapy that asked you to grieve what you didn’t get
• Talking to siblings about whether to reach out
• Telling yourself it doesn’t bother you
• Letting another year pass

The state hasn’t resolved.

Why letting time pass hasn’t fixed it

You very likely came up needing something specific from him that he was unwilling or unable to provide, and the estrangement was what was left after the trying ran out. You may have grown up with a father whose absence was either physical or emotional, and you absorbed that fathers are people you don’t quite have access to. You may have absorbed cultural messages about the importance of having a father that have made the distance feel like a failure rather than an honest assessment of what’s been possible. You may have lived through a specific event with him that you couldn’t move past, and the silence has been protective rather than chosen.

Time on its own doesn’t resolve estrangement. It just adds more time. The longer the silence, the more the silence becomes its own fact, separate from anything that originally caused it. You both stop having access to the version of the relationship that might still have been possible.

The strategic-therapy view isn’t that you should reach out. It also isn’t that you should stay no-contact. It’s that the position you’re in shouldn’t be running by default, with the clock as the only decision-maker.

If your father is narcissistic specifically, see My father is narcissistic . If you went no-contact deliberately and feel guilty, see I went no-contact and I feel guilty .

The no-contact is doing something for you. We figure out what, and then you can decide whether you still want it doing that.

How we work with it

Strategic therapy treats the unresolved-ness as the active problem, not the silence itself. We change what you’ve been doing with the not-deciding, the redirecting, the half-drafts, the years allowed to pass, so the position stops running by default. From there you can choose to reach out, stay out, or land on a defined low-contact arrangement, and the choice belongs to you instead of to inertia.

You’ll know what kind of relationship you want with him. Or what kind of distance.