The truth behind the “trend” of family estrangement

and why Oprah and Mel Robbins probably need to sit this one out

“It’s not that I don’t think he loves me,” I told my therapist one early morning in July. My phone was propped up on the steering wheel of my truck, windows cracked to let in just enough salty beach air to keep them from fogging over. I watched as surfers began to pepper the clearing shoreline, and I struggled to find the words to explain.

“I know he does. That’s not what it is. It’s more like his heart is one of those houses on Hoarders. You know the hardwood floors are there, but you can’t get to them. There are too many years of newspapers and pizza boxes and laundry in the way. And I can’t go in and clean it for him… he has to want to do it. And I don’t think he’s there yet.”

On the surface, I don’t seem like a likely candidate for what Oprah Winfrey recently described on her podcast as the “epidemic” of family estrangement.

My family is small – really small. I’ve been 0 for 4 with living grandparents my entire adult life, and I lost my mother to substance abuse when I was still in high school. For a long time (before he remarried), it was just me and my dad. I was the only child of a single parent as I figured out that I was gay, and again much later when I discovered that I was trans. For a lot of parent/child relationships, either one of those moments could be the expiration date on love and understanding, but not for us. My dad didn’t always “get it,” but he tried. He and I have voted the same for as long as I can remember, we have the same taste in music, and we like chatting about art, history, and politics. He’s never forgotten a birthday or gone out of his way to hurt me or undermine the choices I’ve made for my life.

But still – here we are. I haven’t returned one of his texts in six months.

How did we get here?

Mel Robbins, lawyer, motivational speaker, and bestselling author of The Let Them Theory, recently attempted to tackle the simmering causes behind family estrangement in a New York Times article she titled “Life Is Too Short to Fight With Your Family.” In it, Robbins characterizes the rise in “no contact” between parents and their adult children as an “unwillingness to move past the things that bother us.”

“Imagine if you had a year left to live,” she writes, “would you want to spend your last Thanksgiving resenting your father’s politics? Or avoiding your sister for something she said last Christmas?”

The problem with framing family estrangement in this way (that is, as one party refusing to forgive another for a petty misunderstanding or surface-level feud), is that family relationships are almost always way more complicated than that, and those wounds go deep. What’s missing from her picture is the unspoken context buttressing these hypothetical breaking points. The father’s politics, are they in direct conflict with his child’s core identity and values? Do they support dehumanization and cruelty against people they love? What the sister said last Christmas, was it just the latest slight after decades of dismissal and disrespect? Did that sister make an attempt to apologize and repair?

It’s hard to know, because all of her examples live in the hypothetical, divorced from the personal. The people she’s talking about aren’t real. She and her article’s co-author make their points by using sweeping generalizations about those of us who have made the devastating decision to distance ourselves from our biological families. The argument that we just need to “lighten up,” as she says, is not just reductionist, dismissive, and incomplete – it’s actively harmful. And frankly, it pisses me off.

As much as figures like Robbins hope that the answer is as simple as “forgive, forget, and move on,” that’s rarely (if ever) helpful. It ignores the truth that so many of us who are estranged from our parents understand: we have spent our entire lives trying to look past the hurt to salvage relationships that are still breaking us down.

I’m going to do my best to avoid the absolutes and assumptions that plague Robbins’s article. Ultimately, I’m not an expert, and I can only speak from my own experience, but a lot of us are just now beginning to unwind the self-abandonment and people-pleasing habits that have kept us from understanding ourselves and feeling whole in our relationships, and that work never really ends.

An early statistic cited by Robbins asserts that one in four adults is estranged from a close family member. On the surface, this seems to support the claim that family estrangement is an “epidemic,” but is it? I’m reminded of graphs charting the divorce rate within the US, where we see a massive rise in separations following World War II and then again in the 1980s. These spikes correspond with societal shifts in the way we see marriage and the autonomy of women, along with the introduction of “no fault” divorce laws starting around 1970.

It wasn’t that suddenly hundreds of thousands of happy marriages were falling prey to a “divorce trend,” it was that a lot of women finally had options. It was no longer unspeakable and shameful to be divorced.

This is happening now with parenting.

Younger generations are going to therapy, are learning concepts like “reparenting,” and are watching as our peers are making much different choices with their own children than our parents made with us. Many of us are coming to terms with what it will take to heal the relational wounds that stem from emotionally immature, shame-based, (and sometimes even abusive) parenting. And as we start to name the marks that we trace back to our childhoods, we know that “live in the present” is a much different ask than “forget about the past.”

Personally? My family operated in a way that encouraged privacy bordering on secrecy. I grew up hearing “there’s no reason to go around telling people about this,” and “this stays within the family.” As capital T Traumas stacked up in my late childhood and early teens, I had nowhere to take them. I talked to no one, processed nothing, and squirreled away stacks of dormant feelings deep inside a young developing psyche.

My parents had a deep distrust of therapists, and we were much more likely to avoid than to feel. As life in my house got more complicated and my father’s support system whittled itself down to practically nothing, I can only imagine how hard it was to wake up every day, let alone raise a teenager and make increasingly complex parenting decisions.

But now, as an adult, there’s a lot between us that needs to be addressed. I’ve tried having challenging conversations with him over the years about the leftover scars of my childhood, but they have been unsuccessful. For a long time I thought I could just move on, as Robbins suggests, but I can’t. The relationship I want with him will require an excavation of the past, even though it will be uncomfortable.

This is where critics of family estrangement often miss the mark.

For many of us who are keeping our distance? We don’t want perfection. We don’t think our parents can reach back in time to make different choices for us.

What do a lot of us actually want?

1. Acknowledgement

2. Accountability

3. An Attempt at Repair

These are the most basic elements of an authentic apology, and for some of us, we know we might as well be asking our parents to lasso the moon.

This is because in order to acknowledge the part they played in any past harm (the first step before we can get close to the other two), they have to contend with shame. For the most part, our parents aren’t emotionally equipped to grapple with shame– it’s too hot to touch, too large to take a bite of. Shame is uncomfortable, and a lot of the time, their capacity for discomfort is too low to begin the work.

And frankly, we aren’t prepared to help our parents deal with that shame either. That’s a job for a professional, someone who can help them (maybe even on a weekly basis – whose to say?) dive into their relationship with their own parents. And parent work is hard! When we try to unwind our relationship with our families, we have to confront the parts of ourselves that come from them, the parts that we would rather pretend aren’t there. It’s why “you’re starting to act like your mother/father” is such a devastating blow when we hear it at the wrong time. We don’t want to know that we might have our mother’s temper, or our father’s flightiness. We want our actions to be our own, divorced from the biological or learned influence of the people who raised us.

The first acts of acknowledgement and accountability are internal, when we face the parts of us that are blocking us from self-compassion. Those are the building blocks of healing.

But ultimately, we can’t force our parents to heal.

And that’s really the difference between a boundary and a demand.

A demand is pretty straight forward: “You must do something/change something/say something/etc.” It assumes that we have any degree of control over the people around us, and we don’t. We can’t compel people to make choices, even if it feels like an undeniable need on our end:

“You need to listen to me”

“You have to be nice”
“You must start going to therapy”

A boundary has nothing to do with other people’s choices, and everything to do with our own. It’s about how we’re willing to be treated, and what we will do when our choices conflict with one another. They can sometimes feel like ultimatums, but it’s important to point out that a lot of boundaries are implied or entirely unsaid. They can be clear cut, like:

“If you keep talking to me at that volume, I will leave the room.”

“If I feel disrespected in your home, we will stop coming over for dinner.”
“If you aren’t willing to work through this in therapy, I don’t think we can have a relationship.”

Or, they can just be shifts in behavior. A parent who yells over the phone may notice that the phone calls stop coming. A sister who refuses to use their trans brother’s name isn’t invited to functions at his house.

This is where a lot of estrangements can start: with one person finally expressing a boundary.

And as much as voices like Robbins and Winfrey seem to think we’re making these estrangement decisions lightly, this is hardly a historically fertile time for many of us to be shedding family ties.

“Research has shown that people over the age of 65 report, on average, being happier than younger adults,” Robbins writes. And I believe her. Baby Boomers, for the most part, hit a generational lottery that has given them opportunities to buy homes, save for retirement, and establish some kind of enduring financial legacy for their children. Millennials, and the Gen Zers hot on our heels, haven’t been quite as lucky. For a lot of younger adults, this is exactly why some of this healing work seems to be taking so long– when we rely on our parents, we aren’t able to fully separate from them. We can’t heal wounds that keep reopening.

Robbins also says this: “You may think it’s better for your mental health to slowly distance yourself from someone you have difficulties with, but, in the long run, it will likely have a devastating impact on your happiness and well-being.”

Of all of her claims, this is the one I struggle the most to square. How could she possibly know that? That our happiness and well-being is all but doomed if we don’t repair our estrangement? This feels like dangerous advice, primarily because it seems to ask us to ignore our internal voice and distrust our intuition. Learning how to trust ourselves is one of the more challenging parts of healing, especially after we’ve spent a lifetime molding ourselves to a version of us we don’t recognize in service of our own survival. Many of us have been told for the majority of our lives to ignore or bypass our feelings for the benefit of someone else’s comfort, and we’re not doing it anymore.

My husband, much like myself, has made the decision to distance himself from his parents, but for much different reasons. While I can picture a future where my father and I have a relationship again, that’s out of the question for my husband. I won’t get into the specifics of their relationship, but I want to make it absolutely clear that they have found themselves in the realm of unforgivable. It’s been about a year since he last spoke to either of them, and I’ve watched as his mental health has shifted from tenuous to thriving.

But this doesn’t mean that he never experiences doubt.

The “self-doubt cycle” is a feature of no-contact relationships, not a bug. There are still days where I watch him struggle with the fear that he’s made the wrong decision, or that his memory is unreliable and erratic. This isn’t because there’s a real chance he’s wrong, but because decades of controlling programming rely on him feeling that way.

And correcting our internal metrics is fucking hard. We hear messages like Robbins’ constantly:

Hurry past the hard part.

Be the bigger person.

You wouldn’t want to regret anything.

What’s telling to me is that those messages are almost always pointed at the estrangers, not the estranged.

But we know how we feel. As hard as it is, we can tell when our nervous systems begin to settle, when our sense of reality starts to stabilize. We know that interactions with the people we love should build us up, not leave us needing days to recover.

And I’m getting there too.

I still notice when the voice in my head speaks with my father’s tone and not my own. I’m someone who has built a career around vulnerability, and I still seize up when I write about my family. There might always be a little kid in me who hears “there’s no reason to go around telling people about this” no matter how carefully I choose my words. But, at least this time, I think I’m ready to put myself first. We’ll see, as Robbins suggests, if I find myself living to regret it.