Choosing Ourselves: A Virtual Gathering for Global Majority Adults Navigating Family Estrangement

There is no ritual for this kind of loss, no language that fits easily into casual conversation.

Family estrangement can be one of the most isolating experiences a person carries. When the relatives or family members are still alive, the grief is complicated and sometimes messy. We may find ourselves grieving not only the people, but the family we hoped for, the traditions we lost, the holidays that feel different, and the future we imagined.

For many Global Majority individuals, family is more than a relationship. It is culture, community, history, identity, and survival. The decision to create distance can carry layers of grief, relief, responsibility, and loss that are not always understood in mainstream conversations about family estrangement. This gathering was created with those complexities in mind.

If you are queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, or part of a Global Majority community, choosing distance can mean grieving more than the people themselves. It can mean grieving culture, community, belonging, ancestry, expectations, and the stories we were taught about family.

You may feel grief and relief.

Freedom and loneliness.

Certainty and doubt.

Love and distance.

Sometimes all in the same day.

Whether you identify with family estrangement, being estranged from family, adult child estrangement, or are navigating grief after family estrangement, you are welcome here.

Many of us have learned to give the short answer when someone asks whether we are close with our family. We have learned which rooms are safe to tell the truth, and which are not.

This is one of the safe rooms.

On October 20th from 5:30–7:30 PM EST, Tasha Hunter, LCSW and Marta Isabella Sierra Cifuentes, LMHC will host a two-hour virtual gathering for Global Majority adults navigating family estrangement—for every reason, at every stage.

Whether the distance is recent or decades old, whether you chose the distance or it was chosen for you, whether the relationship is completely severed or simply complicated, you are welcome here.

We will begin by sharing our own stories. From there, participants will have the opportunity to engage in small-group conversation, followed by space to gather, reflect, and witness together as a full community.

This is not a workshop, consultation, or training.

We are tending.

We are making space for the grief, relief, anger, longing, love, confusion, clarity, and complexity that can accompany family estrangement. We are creating room for stories that are often carried alone.

All sharing is optional.

All experiences are welcome here.

Every reason for distance.

Every family.

Every story.

Why We Created This Space

We created this event because we are both estranged and have spent years speaking, writing, teaching, and supporting others who are navigating family estrangement. Again and again, we have heard people describe feeling alone in experiences that are far more common than many realize.

This gathering continues that work.

Facilitated by two licensed therapists who have both personally and professionally engaged the complexities of family estrangement, grief, identity, and belonging, this space was created to offer connection, witnessing, and community around a loss that is often carried in silence.

What You Might Leave With

• The experience of being witnessed without having to justify your story
• Language for a grief that often goes unnamed
• Connection with others who understand the complexity of family estrangement
• Space to honor both the loss and the freedom that can accompany distance
• A deeper sense that you are not alone in what you carry
• Greater compassion for yourself and your own path forward

This space is intended for collective witnessing, reflection, and connection. While we cannot promise healing, advice, or resolution, we hope participants leave feeling a little less alone and a little more held.

Who This Gathering Is For

This is an affinity space for Global Majority individuals navigating family estrangement—those who identify as and live as Black, Indigenous, Asian, Latine, Middle Eastern, or multiracial.

This gathering is not a space for White-bodied individuals.

Registration

This round is capped at 20 participants so the room can remain intimate and connected.

Supporter Rate: $100
Standard Rate: $75
Reduced-Cost Rate: $50

We recognize that financial realities vary. Please choose the rate that best reflects your current circumstances.

If something in these words feels familiar—if you are carrying a story that has rarely had room to be spoken, if you are longing to be in community with others who understand the complexity of family estrangement, we invite you to join us.

If you have been carrying this story mostly alone, we hope you will join us.

Bring your story.

Bring your grief.

Bring your questions.

Bring your relief.

Bring your uncertainty.

Bring your truth.

We will hold the rest.

Because of the planning, preparation, and care involved in creating this intimate gathering, registrations are non-refundable.

PRESENTER BIOS:

Marta Isabella Sierra Cifuentes, LMHC
She is a survivor of adoption legally trafficked from Colombia as an infant. She is a queer/pansexual, polyamorous, cis-gendered woman and an adoption abolitionist. She brings all of herself into her work with clients in individual and group work. She is also passionate about supervising and consulting. Her practice is centered on adult adoptees/survivors of adoption who identify as people of color or the global majority. Her strengths, in addition to adoption trauma, are liberation/estrangement, racial trauma, identity and cultural reclamation, exploration of non-traditional relationship styles, healing from white supremacy culture, and search and reunion support (before, during, and long-term maintenance.) She is a decolonizing somatic-based therapist trained in expressive therapy and IFS which is the lens she brings to healing from complex PTSD.

Email: martasierralmhc@gmail.com / Instagram: Sierra.speaks.verdad

Tasha Hunter, MSW, LCSW

Tasha Hunter, LCSW is a therapist, author, and trainer who has lived the work she now guides others through. Estranged from her family of origin since she was seventeen, she understands — from the inside — what it means to choose distance and build a life on the other side of it.

Tasha works with adults who have survived a wide range of family dynamics: emotional neglect, physical abuse, harsh or unpredictable environments, parental abandonment, religious trauma, and addiction, among others. Her clinical approach is shaped as much by lived experience as by credential. She teaches individuals and groups how to embody self-love and self-leadership, and how to create and nurture chosen family.

She is a national and international trainer who has worked with over 1,000 clinicians. Her writing and teaching center liberation psychology, ancestral wisdom.

Email: tashahunterlcsw@gmail.com/Instagram: instagram.com/tashahunterlcsw/