I’m estranged from my parents – I know how Brooklyn Beckham feels

The very public estrangement between David and Victoria Beckham and their son Brooklyn has become a form of mass entertainment. Memes circulate, headlines speculate and commentators delight in the rich and famous apparently getting their comeuppance. A powerful family fractures and the spectacle unfolds. Yet behind the noise lies something painfully ordinary: the private anguish of a family rupture, now amplified by global attention.

Family cut-offs are often framed as decisive acts of liberation. Walk away. Go “no contact”. Take control. But for those who have lived through them, the reality is far more complex. Cutting off is rarely the easier option, even when it becomes necessary. It is usually the end point of a long internal struggle, not a dramatic beginning.

I write as someone who knows this terrain. I grew up in a home shaped by extreme parental control and emotional volatility, the child of a bitter divorce in the 1970s. On the surface, our family appeared respectable and stable. Underneath, there was rage and unpredictability. Like many children in such environments, I learned early that safety depended on silence. I became vigilant, approval-seeking, alert to shifts in mood, endlessly trying to earn love that was never reliably available. I must be clear, I am not making direct comparisons between my childhood experiences and Brooklyn Beckham’s, but with the experience of family estrangement.

Years later, in my 50s, therapy helped me understand how deeply this had shaped my adult life: anxiety, hyper-vigilance, a terror of disapproval. Eventually, after long reflection, I spoke honestly to my mother. The conversation was brief, conducted over the telephone. I told her that she had frightened me as a child, and that this fear had marked my entire adult life. I knew as I spoke that this truth might end our relationship. It did. She told me she never wanted to speak to me again. I respected that boundary. We have not spoken since.

There was anger, of course. But anger is not the same as revenge. I worked through it privately, with a therapist, with people who cared for me – which is why I write anonymously. I did not turn it into content. I did not seek an audience. I did not want the injury to become an identity.

That is why the public nature of the Beckham split gives pause. When family pain is acted out on social media, in full view, it risks becoming frozen. Public solidarity can feel intoxicating, especially when reinforced by sympathetic communities or fellow high-profile defectors. Yet this can also harden positions, rewarding rupture rather than reflection. Revenge or seeming retribution offers short-term relief, but psychologically it rarely leads to peace. It keeps the wound open.

It is worth noting that in this case, of course, Brooklyn Beckham has seen his whole life played out in the public eye: the boundary between private and public has never been stable, as he demonstrates in what he posted online. Yet he is still a child in pain over the alleged conduct of his parents.

What is often resisted in discussions like this is the question of power. Many parents insist that once their children are adults, the relationship becomes equal. Psychologically, it does not. Parents inevitably retain a deeper hold over their children than children can ever have over them. This is not a moral failing but a structural fact, rooted in dependency, early attachment, and the long emotional history that cannot simply be outgrown.

Even decades later, a parent’s approval, disappointment, or withdrawal of warmth still carries disproportionate force. The reverse is not true. No adult child can wound a parent in quite the same way, because the original dependence only runs one way. This built-in imbalance matters when family conflicts escalate, particularly when they are played out publicly.

For adult children in situations of parental estrangement, alternatives to public rupture matter. Privacy matters. Pain does not need spectators to be real. The Beckhams are famous. The pain behind this story is not. It deserves taking more seriously than just posting memes.

Photographs by Justin Goff Photos/Getty Images, Samir Hussein/WireImage