Debunking myths about family estrangement.
Debunking myths about family estrangement
It’s the classic image of the holidays: Parents, siblings and grandchildren gather around the family table to feast and catch up on one another’s lives. But it doesn’t always work that way.
After years of discontent, some adults stop talking to their parents or returning home for family gatherings. Sometimes parents disapprove of a child so intensely that he or she is no longer welcome home.
In the past five years, a clearer picture of estrangement has been emerging as more researchers have turned their attention to this kind of family rupture. Their findings challenge the deeply held notion that family relationships can’t be dissolved and suggest that estrangement is not all that uncommon.
Broadly speaking, estrangement is defined as one or more relatives intentionally choosing to end contact because of an ongoing negative relationship. (Relatives who go long stretches without a phone call because of external circumstances like a military deployment or incarceration don’t fit the bill.)
“To the extent you are actively trying to distance yourself and maintain that distance, that makes you estranged,” said Kristina Scharp, an assistant professor of communication studies at Utah State University.
Last month, Lucy Blake, a lecturer at Edge Hill University in England, published a systematic review of 51 articles about estrangement in the Journal of Family Theory & Review. This body of literature, Blake wrote, gives family scholars an opportunity to “understand family relationships as they are, rather than how they could or should be.”
There are no reliable numbers on estrangement in the United States. In 2014, 8 percent of roughly 2,000 British adults said they had cut off a family member, which translates to more than 5 million people, according to a nationally representative survey commissioned by Stand Alone, a charity that supports estranged people.
Estrangement is widely misunderstood, but as more people share their experiences publicly, some misconceptions are being overturned. Assuming that every relationship between a parent and child will last a lifetime is as simplistic as assuming every couple will never split up.
MYTH: SEPARATION HAPPENS SUDDENLY
It’s usually a long, drawn-out process rather than a single blowout — a familial relationship that erodes over time, not overnight.
Kylie Agllias, a social worker in Australia and the author of “Family Estrangement,” has found that the rift “occurs across years and decades. All the hurt and betrayals, all the things that accumulate, undermine a person’s sense of trust.”
In a study published in June, Scharp spoke to 52 adult children and found they distanced themselves from their parents in various ways over time.
Some subjects moved away. Others no longer made an effort to fulfill expectations of a daughter-son role. One 48-yearold woman, after 33 years without contact with her father, declined to visit him in the hospital or to attend his funeral.
Estrangement is a “continual process,” Scharp said. “In our culture, there’s a ton of guilt around not forgiving your family,” she added. “Achieving distance is hard, but maintaining distance is harder.”
It’s been three years since Nikolaus Maack, 47, has had contact with most of his family. But he started distancing himself from his parents and siblings a decade before.
“I was staying away,” said Maack, a civil servant in Ottawa. His father’s temper had always kept him on edge, he said, and he felt holiday meals were particularly uncomfortable and demeaning. Eventually, Maack stopped attending Christmas festivities altogether.
Reached by email, Maack’s father declined to be interviewed, saying he no longer considered him to be his son and insulting him at length.
MYTH: IT’S OBVIOUS WHAT CAUSED THE RIFT
Multiple factors are usually at play in family estrangement.
In a 2015 study, Agllias interviewed 25 Australian parents, each of whom had been cut off by at least one child.
In some cases, parents reported that a son or daughter had chosen a new partner over the parents, or had chosen to limit interaction that had become damaging. In others, the adult child was punishing the parent for “perceived wrongdoing” or a difference in values.
Most parents cited additional contributors to the estrangement, including domestic violence, divorce and failing health.
MYTH: THERE’S JUST ONE PROBLEM
In a study published in the journal Australian Social Work, 26 adults reported being estranged from parents for three main reasons: abuse (everything from belittling to physical or sexual abuse), betrayal (keeping secrets or sabotaging them), and poor parenting (being overly critical, shaming children or making them scapegoats).
The three were not mutually exclusive and often overlapped, said Agllias, a lecturer at the University of Newcastle in Australia.
Most of the participants said their estrangements followed childhoods in which they had poor connections with parents who were physically or emotionally unavailable.
Maack, for example, said that he resented being routinely left in charge of his two younger siblings, so much so that he decided never to have children of his own.
He drifted from his parents for years, but the final straw came on his wedding day.
In 2014, he and his longtime girlfriend decided to marry at City Hall. He didn’t invite his family, in part because it was an informal gathering.
But he also worried that his father might be disruptive. He did not want to invite him, and felt that other family members would not want to attend without him.
“I agonized over inviting them or not for a long time,” he said, “but in the end decided ‘I can’t have them there.’”
His family found out he was married through Facebook. One brother told Maack he was hurt that he hadn’t even been told. His sister and father made it clear that they would no longer talk to him, according to Maack and his wife. Two relatives confirmed their account.
These days, one brother still talks to Maack, mostly through messages on Facebook. But they don’t talk about the rest of the family.