I'm a Senior Lecturer in Psychology and I specialise in family estrangement: relationships between family members characterised by reduced or absent contact, and significant relational distance. It's common enough that US population data suggest more than a quarter of adult children experience a period of estrangement from their father, yet it remains poorly understood and often surrounded by stigma and silence.
My training began at the University of Bath, where I studied for my BSc in Psychology, before moving to the Centre for Family Research at the University of Cambridge for my MPhil and PhD in Social and Developmental Psychology. It was there that I was struck by the assumptions I encountered in family research about the quality of parent–child relationships over time. The research rarely reflected family relationships like those in my own family, where there was real variation - relationships characterised by conflict and distance as well as closeness - and where those relationships changed over time. I began developing research on the relationships characterised by distance and inactivity increasingly referred to as estrangement.
Around the same time the charity Stand Alone was formed, and in collaboration with the charity I first-authored the Hidden Voices report, exploring the experiences of over 800 adults who identified as estranged from a family member. I went on to serve as a Trustee of Stand Alone from 2015 to 2022, shaping the charity's research strategy and co-convening the first international conference on family estrangement.
Estrangement has been my primary focus for the past ten years, and the work I've built on that early research has made me one of the UK's leading voices in the field. I've published 41 peer-reviewed articles and 7 book chapters on family relationships, and my work has shaped UK higher education policy on recognising and supporting estranged students, and that underpins my book, Home Truths: The Facts and Fictions of Family Life, named by the New York Times as one of the five best books on estrangement.
At UWE I teach across undergraduate, postgraduate, and professional doctorate programmes, bringing my research experience and developmental theory into how I think about families, estrangement, and change across the lifespan. I supervise doctoral students whose interests lie in family, grief, and change, and I have been an external examiner for doctoral theses at the Universities of Edinburgh and Cambridge.
My aim is to bring a compassionate, evidence-based understanding of family estrangement specifically, and family relationships more broadly, to individuals, professionals, and organisations.
