Is Estrangement Becoming More Popular?
More people are talking about estrangement, but is that because it’s more prevalent?
I'm often asked if estrangement is becoming more common. My answer to that is, "No way!" While we see it more online today, thirty years ago, someone could leave their family and never see them again. I know people who say, "I have a brother in St. Louis," and that's all they know. They don’t have an address or a phone number—nothing. Isn’t that estrangement?
The rise in communication methods may lead us to believe estrangement is happening more often, simply because there are so many ways for people to stay in contact. In reality, people have always had complicated or nonexistent relationships with parents, siblings, or cousins. This isn’t new.
The difference is that, in the past, people may not have called it estrangement. Among certain generations, I’ve rarely heard anyone use that term. I’m not sure if people even called it that or saw it as offensive. Fifty years ago, it may have been so common that there wasn’t a specific term for it—it just happened. It was less, "My sister moved to Atlanta, and now she’s estranged from me," and more, "My sister moved to Atlanta, and we haven’t talked in 20 years." There seemed to be more grace for people who, for one reason or another, were not in contact with their families.
We may be hearing more about estrangement now because people are more aware of the word and are applying it to their experiences. The term might be new, but the behavior is longstanding.
When I read older books that describe a person having a mysterious disease, I often wonder: was it cancer? It sounds like cancer, but they didn’t have the terminology for it. People didn’t start needing glasses once glasses were invented. Eyesight hasn’t gotten worse over time—people have always needed glasses, but they didn’t always have access to that resource.
In a criminal justice class I took, we discussed crime rates and how they were much higher in the early 1900s. It’s not hard to imagine why. More Black people were killed without consequence. If someone broke into your house, you could shoot up the block. The justice system wasn’t what it is today, so of course crime was higher. But we don’t always consider that. We look at current circumstances and assume crime is at an all-time high. Sometimes, when we lack context, we think the present must be worse than the past.
Estrangement isn’t new. We may not have had the terminology or context to discuss it before, but it has always been happening. Right now, it’s a hot-button topic on social media. This can be positive, as it gives people the opportunity to connect with others who have experienced estrangement. In the past, if you were estranged, you just didn’t talk about it. Now, there’s more space for people to openly share their experiences.
That said, I acknowledge that some people may be leaving relationships that could have been saved because they now have access to more information. But people will always misapply information, and we can’t control that. Someone might read a listicle and decide, "I’m going to stop talking to my cousin because they were late to my party," but far more people are finding peace and community through the knowledge available about estrangement.
I sometimes see people in comments projecting their experiences, saying they can’t imagine choosing to end relationships with family members. They can’t fathom what their family could do to make them consider such a decision—but that’s subjective. Boundaries and thresholds for forgiveness vary from person to person. There is so much nuance when it comes to estrangement within families.
Journal Prompt
What kinds of circumstances or behaviors justify choosing estrangement from a family member?
A Few Things That Caught My Attention This Week
Rules of Estrangement, by Joshua Coleman, PhD. You can find this book on Amazon and Bookshop.
From. I can’t believe nobody told me about this show! I only found out about it because it popped up on my TV, and it is good. If you see a good show, don’t keep it to yourself; let folks know. You can watch it on Prime Video or MGM+.
Calling Home with Whitney Goodman, LMFT podcast. You can listen to this show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you stream podcasts.
This part was really insightful for me, Nedra:
"Sometimes, when we lack context, we think the present must be worse than the past."
Thanks for educating people about this. I'm a childhood trauma survivor and black, trans-masculine, femme person and an estrangee. But I'm proud to have had the courage to walk away from my family of origin and choose my family. I wouldnt be able to safely exist or have a healthy and healing lifestyle if I hadnt walked away from my family of origin. Even with them far away they had a psychological and physiological hold over me. I'm the first two time Ivy League graduate and many other things. I have two relatively safe bio fam relatives I can do the healing work with, but I have to set boundaries and educate them a lot too. I had hoards of people judging me for my family cut off. And no one knew who I really was or what I'd been through. Because for a while I thought the abuse I'd experienced was normal. But after 6 years of therapy, I found myself in domestic violence after domestic violence situation, terrible friendships, abusive environments and in repetition compulsion. My therapists even normalized the abuse cause I'm black. I walked away and educated myself, and as I healed I realized the people who judged me for having low self-worth were the reason I had it. They'd bullied, battered, and abused me my whole life. I walked away from the people judging me for my cut off too after sharing openly some of the terror I was subjected to and witnessed, and then having them judge what I'd been through. Some people just want to judge folks. Sometimes we struggle to put ourselves in other people's shoes because the concept just makes us uncomfortable. And most people, I realize, are not open about what they saw growing up or even about how they really feel about their families. The more I healed the more people I thought had healthy childhoods actually didn't. The whole world changed and I realized I wasn't broken. I was privileged to have the resources and self-awareness to own myself, my life, and my dharma. I think we pathologize trauma and estrangement within certain contexts, especially amongst black folk and people of color because of how our families were torn apart, but my dissertation research is about what skills we still need to keep our families together and how these systems and histories remain there in our families to this day. Emotional, physical, sexual, and psychological safety matter. If blood can't provide it then...we deserve, all people deserve, to be loved for who they really are and allowed to healthily individuate themselves and express themselves. Anything else is wrong. That being said, I could honestly forgive the people judging me because for a while I judged myself because as the oldest female child, I'd been conditioned to be codependent, enmeshed, and people pleasing. After feeling guilty for going on and living my life, grieving the life, family, and childhood I thought I had, having compassion for my black women caregivers and forgiving them for what they didn't know, I began to accept that my life felt better and safer without them in it. They wouldn't accept me and I knew that there was nothing wrong with me. Then you grieve that and keep going. After 4 years, and my 4th holiday creating my own traditions, I am excited and able to begin creating communities for my community and inspiring them on their healing journeys. Sometimes, we don't have the nervous system capacity to save others when we need to save ourselves, so we might fulfill our own dreams and create our own legacies, especially when the people in need of saving aren't safe for us. Everything I do, I do for my family's lineage, but you caint always make people do, think, or choose as you would. Part of loving people unconditionally is allowing them to exist and self-actualize as they will. And so I love them, but I gotta leave them where they at. And I've learned to never assume what someone else's life was like or to judge them for their boundaries. That's why we ask questions. So often our assumptions are reflections of our own codependency and that's okay too. We all got our quirks and our work to do😊😂