Jordan was raised in a Southern Baptist household in America’s North Carolina, where she was expected to attend church multiple times a week, accept Jesus Christ as the way to salvation and honour her father and mother. That last point was right there in the Ten Commandments. So when she made the decision to stop talking to her dad, the choice stood in defiance of the lessons of her upbringing — but that was kind of the point. Jordan was tired of being told that women should submit to men, a belief ordained by her community. She was done obeying.
At first, despite the fights they’d have about religion and politics, Jordan held back from completely severing ties with her dad. But after one last explosive phone call, Jordan, now 33, had a moment of clarity: that it’s “an extreme privilege to have a great relationship with your adult children”. Her father continued to call and text her, but without receiving a sincere apology from him, Jordan didn’t budge.
This kind of estrangement flies in the face of what most of us are taught as children – that family is forever and the bonds of blood cannot be replicated. Especially in cultures that value the cohesiveness of the group over more individualistic wants and needs, family is not considered a choice as much as it is a fact. But for families like Jordan’s, that fact is fraying
"Family estrangement flies in the face of what we were taught as children: that family is forever"
According to Stand Alone, a charity that supports people who are estranged, 19% of the UK population have been impacted by estrangement. Karl Pillemer, a professor of human development at Cornell University in New York, explored the topic in his 2020 book Fault Lines: Fractured Families and How to Mend Them. There isn’t yet hard longitudinal data, he says, but lots of young people are coming forward to discuss their discontent. See: the term #ToxicFamily, with 2.3bn views on TikTok at the time of writing.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, attitudes tend to fall along generational lines. Boomers accuse millennials and Gen Zers of being too quick to sever ties, while the younger generations push back, saying they don’t have to tolerate shitty behaviour just because someone is related to them. “Norms that forced families to stick together no matter what have weakened,” says Dr Pillemer. Difficult childhood experiences, competing values, lifestyle differences and unmet expectations may all be at play. “If the relationship is aversive over a long period of time, some young people feel they have the ability to get out of it,” he explains, noting this seems to be especially true in white families. Estrangement rates tend to be lower among immigrant groups, Latino families and Black families, he adds, where cultural nuances can make some people generally less likely to say, “I never want to speak to you again.”
The year after Jordan fell out with her dad, he was hospitalised. She took an overnight flight to be by her mother’s side and say goodbye to her father, who died after she got there. Now, she finds herself grieving a complicated relationship. She thinks she did the right thing, but part of her grief is accepting that she’ll never know, given more time, if he would ever have changed.
Threaded into so many stories like Jordan’s is a similar hope — that maybe the nuclear act of permanent disconnection could eventually bring these families closer, like cutting hair to try to make it grow longer. Rose, 22, still has that hope. She used to be “Daddy’s princess,” she says, before her father’s heroin addiction escalated to the point that she felt forced to cut ties with him. “I hoped that he would say, ‘Oh, my daughter isn’t talking to me – I should try to fix this.’ Sadly, he hasn’t.” There are so many things she wishes she could tell him: that she passed her exams and dyed her hair, that she got a job working with disabled children and brought a boyfriend home to meet the rest of her family. Yet it all happens without him.
"It’s a privilege to have a great relationship with your adult children"
Others, though, may not wish for any sort of reconciliation, says psychologist Quincee Gideon, who specialises in trauma therapy. “By the time some folks go no-contact, they’ve spent years trying to set appropriate boundaries, live with disappointment, accept their family’s flaws and negotiate in so many different ways that estrangement is a relief.”
That’s how it was for 25-year-old Holly, who ended her relationship with her mother after enduring years of hostile and controlling behaviour. In an email, Holly wrote, ”I hope you choose a different path in this next part of life … I won’t be there to see it.” Her mother responded with a handwritten letter, but Holly hasn’t contacted her since receiving it. She feels at peace, despite the judgement of others. ”She’s your mother — you should love her,” a close family member told Holly, who says, “We would never tell a woman who’s been abused by a partner, ’You should go back to the person who hurt you.’ But we do for people with abusive parents and it makes me very mad.”
Having to continually justify the painstaking decision to cut off a member of your family is a daunting task. As is ending a relationship with a relative in the first place, because how a family comes together or apart is never completely rational or easily explained. It is impossibly tangled.
Every person’s case is different. Some may have regrets, some may feel better off and some, like Ant, who is in their 20s, find freedom. After a tumultuous childhood, Ant’s estrangement from their ultra-conservative parents made space for them to fully and freely live as queer and non-binary. Sometimes, their mother still calls. ”She thinks that she has authority simply because she’s the mother and I’m the child,” says Ant. ”Meanwhile, I can just hang up at any point. I’ve found a chosen family that has allowed me to actually be myself.”
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This article appeared in Issue 05 of Cosmopolitan Australia, originally from Cosmopolitan US.
