What's missing from conversations about family estrangement

There's one pesky word survivors often bring up, yet it's often erased from the broader narrative.

Recently, I spoke with family estrangement experts for research into sibling abuse, family dynamics, and the difficult decision many survivors make to distance themselves from their sibling as well as parents and other family members. It’s a decision that is not made lightly. Rather, it’s the end result of years if not decades of struggling to make things work with difficult family members, often family members who deny that the abuse happened, minimize its impact, or even blame the victim.

On the cusp of Thanksgiving, it’s on my mind thanks to a glaring editorial in the New York Times: “Life Is Too Short to Fight With Your Family” (alt title: “A Simple Way to Avoid Holiday Family Drama”). The authors, Mel Robbins (“Let Them” self-help guru) and family estrangement researcher Dr. Karl Pillemer, tell the typical story: Family estrangement happens due to disagreements about values and politics, but you should ignore your crazy father’s tirades in the name of family unity and enjoying the good he brings to the table. Life is too short! They suggest treating your family member like a “friend” and going to a “bingo parlor” or “weaving workshop” together.

This take could not be more divorced from our current political and personal reality, and that’s reflected in the comments. Almost all of them center around one key theme: abuse.

Here are some excerpts from the top reader picks:

I respectfully disagree. There may be people in your life who emotionally and/or physically abuse you. It took me well into middle age and a lot of therapy to realize I did not have to take it anymore because of some fantasy about family and blood ties. I am so much happier now, and it’s been years and years.

One of the best life decisions I ever made was the decision to walk away from horrific family members.

This article misses the mark. At no point does it acknowledge that many of us who are estranged have done the hard work of trying to repair a relationship and realized with intention that distance was hard but better, and also that we are not sad and alone at the holidays - we are with people who are kind to us and love us as we are; those people happen to not be related to us is all.

This article is insulting to those who have recognized that the tenacity of family ties allows for sustained abuse and have decided to tap out to salvage their own sanity. I’ve broken the cycle for my own children and I’m proud of that.

Estrangement isn’t something that happens because you had nothing better to do on a random Tuesday. Estrangement (in my case, at least) came after years and years of trying to have a functioning relationship with someone who abused me, and her enablers. Articles like this one show those of us who have made the incredibly difficult choice to estrange that the abuser often gets a pass, while the one who has challenged the status quo is told to ‘stop holding a grudge’. The victim is so often pushed aside and labelled “difficult” and told again and again that ‘life is short, forgive and forget!’, but I ask, how can you forgive and forget decades of trauma and ridicule and abuse just so you can say ‘pass the potatoes’ in order to make others feel comfortable?

Stop trying to make people feel guilty for choosing to take care of themselves. No one chooses estrangement because it’s fun. They choose it because it’s necessary.

Despite many, many, many voices chanting the same story, far too often, the problem of abuse is missing from conversations around family estrangement.

The op-ed cites a “family relationships crisis” but not once does it mention abuse. Read any article on family estrangement from the past ten years. Very few of them mention the word. One of the most expansive articles on the topic in the New Yorker, which spanned over 6,000 words, gave it about a paragraph:

Some critics think the movement has gone too far. Do we owe our parents more than we owe romantic partners? Few would argue that one should continue a relationship with a parent when it involves physical or sexual abuse. And yet many estrangements happen for other reasons, including emotional abuse or toxic behavior—more difficult terms to define—or differences in world view. It can sometimes be unpleasant, even horrible, to hang out with your parents. And yet severing ties can also cause harm. What is lost when we render our families optional? Isn’t part of the point of your relationship with your mom that, even if she aggravates you, you still pick up the phone?

This excerpt reflects an assertion that I believe sits at the center of the generational divide on what makes estrangement legitimate versus not. If you’re estranged due to abuse, it must be bad enough. It must be physical or sexual. Emotional abuse? An invention of the younger generation. Much harder to define. Invisible. The definition has expanded so just about anything is emotionally abusive, they chant.

But this is a lie.

When I read through scores of stories about family estrangement from the perspective of the estranged, what I find are genuine complaints about the most insidious form of abuse. Emotional abuse is real, and it’s just as harmful, if not more harmful, than physical or sexual abuse. It is a legitimate reason for estrangement, hard stop. Does Tiktok take things too far? Sometimes, surely. But I think far more often people understand exactly what emotional abuse is and why it’s harmful, because it’s caused them immense pain for years.

Why emotional abuse is often at the core of family estrangement and why it matters

One of the very few studies on sibling estrangement found that the most common description for a sibling by the person who had chosen to estrange themselves from them was abusive. Other descriptions were arguably synonyms — aggressive, bullying, controlling, manipulative.

Contrary to what the critics say, emotional abuse is well understood. Here’s a simple explainer if you need a clear definition. DCS can define it for you. Here’s more info from Prevent Child Abuse America, plus a call for an “urgent need for a paradigm shift to take it seriously from researchers and leading child protection organizations, plus a scientific article on why it’s just as harmful if not more than other forms of abuse. That took about a minute of Googling. So, is emotional abuse really hard to define? No. Is it hard to learn about? Nope! It simply challenges outdated perspectives about abuse, and that’s scary for people who have been emotionally abusive and do not want to face their own shame, take accountability, or change their behavior.

Another scary fact: Families contain abusive people who go on to abuse other people. Imagine if we listened to their family members rather than dismissing them. Imagine if we listened to children.

Research repeatedly shows that emotional abuse and emotional neglect are linked to the most negative health outcomes for adults (see this 20-year study). It’s a truism in domestic violence survivor spaces: The emotional abuse hurt more and did more lasting damage than the physical abuse. Bruises heal. The voice of an abuser can haunt for years.

Shifting the focus back to parents and family members, the impact is the same if not worse because emotional abuse starts in childhood and, for many, is the only thing children know until they begin to venture outside the family home. By then, however, it’s a blueprint for relationships. The lesson learned is that love and harm can and do coexist. Love hurts.

Here’s a simple way to think about the toll of emotional abuse, as a developmental pediatrics expert and neuroscientist explained it to me:

Would you rather have a parent who cannot afford to buy you a winter coat but loves you, or would you rather have a parent who can buy you all the things in the world but dismisses your feelings, tells you your reality is not real, and refuses to comfort you when you are sad?

The answer is pretty clear. Just about everyone would choose love over a coat.

While more research is needed, my belief based on interviews, surveys, and numerous case studies is that emotional abuse is often the reason for family estrangement and it should not be downplayed compared to other forms of abuse. It should be taken far more seriously.

The bare minimum we ask from parents, aside from material needs like safety and shelter, is that they nurture our feelings and help soothe us when we’re sad or afraid—in fact, emotional nurturance is key for childhood development, according to the CDC.

Estranging yourself from a parent and/or sibling who cannot acknowledge your feelings, respond to them with care, and treat you with self-respect is not a crazy, unhealthy, terrible, or selfish thing to do. It’s an act of self-preservation in the face of spiritual and emotional annihilation. In many cases, that’s what family members are, sadly, asking us to do: erase yourself for me. Deny your feelings and your reality for me. Keep the peace and keep us all warm by setting yourself on fire. And you better keep it burning.

The simple truth is, love and abuse cannot coexist.

To paraphrase bell hooks, abuse is the opposite of love. Young people are choosing their own families because their families of origin insist that love and abuse must coexist, that they must accept the bad for the good, but we know better than to accept this old lie. Our health and our well-being matter, so we care for ourselves, we seek love elsewhere, and we find that we deserve it after all. The core lie we grew up with—that we must tolerate abuse—is not true in other relationships. We find that we’re easy to love, we find that love comes with respect, and in many cases, we learn that from our friends.

People hurt each other, we’re imperfect, and we can make apologies, take accountability, and repair relationships. But if a relationship is repeatedly abusive, it makes sense to break up—even when that relationship is with your family.

The authors of that ragebait op-ed call on us, those who have chosen estrangement, to treat our family members like our friends. What if they called on our family members to do the same? Their call to change is pointed in the wrong direction. It’s those that we flee from that need to learn how to love. We’ve tried to teach them. We tried so damn hard. From afar, many of us are still hoping that they could someday learn.

If you were abused by a family member and struggle to protect yourself, know that you can give yourself the care that you were denied.

What people who are estranged want to say about their experiences is so clear if we would just listen to them. The impact of abuse — and the necessity of protecting oneself — should not be understated or invisibilized in conversations around estrangement. In fact, abuse is central in many cases.

If you’re estranged from family to reduce your exposure to hurtful if not abusive behavior — such as explosive anger, screaming, hateful rants, aggression, manipulation, gaslighting, threats, self-erasure, or rejection of your identity — your choice is valid and admirable. There is nothing wrong with protecting yourself from abuse. Estrangement can be okay — and vital — for self-protection and self-preservation. It can also be temporary, change over time, or end if family members truly change.

If this is your story, know that you are not alone. Whether or not our stories are told as loudly as other narratives, they’re real.

Happy Thanksgiving. However you spend it, I hope you’re surrounded by people who truly love you and treat you with the respect, care, and nurturance you deserve and have always deserved.

Chosen family is family.🧡