Broken Bonds: Understanding Estrangement, Loss, and the Path Toward Healing – Free Training with Dr. Diane Poole Heller
Family estrangement can leave you grieving someone who is still alive while wondering whether distance is protective, painful, necessary, or somehow all three. Even when contact ends, the attachment can remain intensely present through longing, anger, uncertainty, and questions about where you belong.
These ruptures do not always look like complete cutoff. Estrangement can also show up as restricted contact, tense holiday encounters, brief texts, carefully maintained boundaries, or repeated cycles of rupture and reconnection.
Dr. Diane Poole Heller brings an attachment- and trauma-informed perspective to these difficult family dynamics. She will explore how histories of closeness, abandonment, rejection, and repair can shape the way people respond to distance, pursuit, withdrawal, and protection.
You’ll also look at the grief, shame, identity shifts, and ambiguity that can accompany broken family bonds, along with an important distinction between personal healing, relational repair, and reconciliation. The goal is a more compassionate framework for understanding estrangement without reducing it to a simple question of who is right or wrong.
Why Attend “Broken Bonds: Understanding Estrangement, Loss, and the Path Toward Healing”
Estrangement can be uniquely difficult to process because the relationship may be absent while the attachment remains active. Grief, longing, anger, shame, and uncertainty can coexist, which can make it hard to know whether reaching out, holding a boundary, or accepting distance is the most workable next step.
Family rupture also rarely comes from one simple cause. Longstanding hurt, unresolved trauma, changing boundaries, conflict, shifting loyalties, differences in values or identity, and relationships that have become harmful or unsafe can all contribute, so a framework that looks beneath the surface can be more useful than assigning blame.
Dr. Diane Poole Heller is an internationally recognized teacher in adult attachment theory and trauma resolution, and her perspective brings those areas directly into the conversation about estrangement. By examining rupture through attachment, trauma, grief, and relational healing, she offers a way to understand why different people can respond so differently to the same separation and what healing may mean even when reconciliation is uncertain.
What You’ll Learn
We’ll begin by looking at what estrangement can actually look like, so you can move beyond the idea that it always means a complete cutoff. You’ll explore emotional distance, restricted contact, carefully maintained boundaries, and repeated cycles of rupture and reconnection as part of the wider landscape of broken family bonds.
From there, you’ll examine why estrangement can feel so devastating, which means looking at attachment rupture alongside ambiguous loss, shame, identity, belonging, and the secondary losses that can follow. Diane will also explore how histories of closeness, abandonment, rejection, and repair can influence the way people respond to separation.
Along the way, the session uses an attachment lens to make sense of pursuit, withdrawal, anger, shutdown, and protection, so the conversation does not collapse into a simple verdict about who is right or wrong. You’ll then consider the distinction between personal healing, relational repair, and reconciliation, and what that distinction can make possible when a relationship remains uncertain.
- What estrangement can look like beyond complete cutoff
- Why family rupture can emerge from many different pathways rather than one simple cause
- How attachment rupture and ambiguous loss can deepen the pain of estrangement
- The ways shame, loneliness, identity, and belonging can become part of the experience
- Why two people can experience the same family rupture very differently
- How histories of closeness, abandonment, rejection, and repair can shape present responses
- What pursuit, withdrawal, anger, shutdown, and protection can look like through an attachment lens
- Why focusing only on who is “right” or “wrong” can obscure deeper relational questions
- The difference between personal healing, relational repair, and reconciliation
Who This Is For
This masterclass is for anyone trying to make sense of an estranged family relationship, whether the distance involves a parent, adult child, sibling, grandchild, or another family member. It may be especially relevant if you are living with grief, rejection, difficult boundaries, uncertainty about reconciliation, or the feeling that a relationship remains psychologically present even after contact has changed or ended.
It is also intended for therapists, mental health professionals, coaches, somatic practitioners, and other helping professionals who support people through family rupture, trauma, relationship loss, identity shifts, or major life transitions. You do not need to be a clinician to attend, and the session speaks both to personal experience and to the complexities that can arise in helping work.
- Parents and adult children navigating distance, cutoff, or uncertain contact
- Siblings, grandparents, and other family members living with relational rupture
- People trying to understand grief, shame, loneliness, or ambiguity around estrangement
- Those wondering what healing could look like with or without reconciliation
- Therapists and mental health professionals working with family rupture and difficult boundaries
- Coaches, somatic practitioners, and other helping professionals supporting relationship loss and trauma
About Dr. Diane Poole Heller
Dr. Diane Poole Heller, PhD, is an internationally recognized speaker, author, and teaching expert in adult attachment theory and trauma resolution. Her work centers on helping people understand and work with attachment and trauma wounds in ways that support greater security and connection.
Her signature approach, DARe (Dynamic Attachment Re-patterning experience), offers therapists and individuals practical skills and exercises related to attachment and trauma healing. Her work with adult attachment has also focused on developing Secure Attachment Skills for adults with childhood attachment injuries.
Diane has authored several books, including The Power of Attachment: How to Create Deep and Lasting Intimate Relationships. Her trauma-healing work has supported survivors, helpers, and families affected by events including 9/11, Columbine, and other school shootings.
Alongside her writing, teaching, and training programs, she has worked as a clinical therapist. In this masterclass, her background in adult attachment theory and trauma resolution provides a grounded framework for exploring why family estrangement can remain so emotionally present and what healing may look like when relationships have broken.
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Register for the live 90-minute masterclass and Q&A. If you can’t attend live, registration also includes access to a free, limited-time replay.
- Sep 23 2026
- 10:00 am - 11:30 am
Local Time
- Timezone: America/New_York
- Date: Sep 23 2026
- Time: 1:00 pm - 2:30 pm
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- Worldwide
