I’ve been coming across lots of pertinent things lately. These are some interesting notes from this article that a friend sent to me about family estrangement.
“For me, as for most people, it took an exchange so toxic, so far outside the boundaries of what’s acceptable, that something snapped inside me.
“…my only regret is that I didn’t do it earlier. Much, much earlier.
“The cultural narrative around estrangement is that it’s a problem that needs to be solved. We see and feel the supremacy of the genetically connected family in a thousand ways throughout childhood. By the time we’re adults it literally goes without saying…
“For us, estrangement isn’t a problem; it’s a solution to a problem, a response to an otherwise unsolvable dilemma. It’s a last resort when you’ve tried everything else over and over, when you no longer trust the relationship. When — as Ann Landers once wrote — you’re better off without the other person in your life.
“I’ve interviewed more than 50 people who have estranged themselves from family members, and I have yet to meet a single one who regrets it. They regret whatever situation made it necessary. They regret not having a parent/sibling/family member they could come to terms with. They regret that their problems were severe enough to make estrangement look good. But they don’t regret doing it.
“More than three-quarters of the participants in one study felt estrangement had made a positive difference in their lives. One woman I talked to who initiated an estrangement said her main feeling was relief, even liberation. Another told me it was as though she’d lived under a cloak of silence that had suddenly been lifted. A third said, “There really are cases where estrangement is the better course. It’s horrific, it’s sad, it’s tragic, and it’s better than the alternative.”
“It’s also a lot more common than you might think…The most recent research suggests that up to 10 percent of mothers are estranged from at least one adult child…
Fascinating side notes from this paper: some suggestion that the lack of a loving relationship between my mother and me was far outside the norm, and probably caused or at least exacerbated by factors outside my control.
- the mother–daughter tie has generally been found to be the closest, most enduring, and mutually supportive of all parent–child gender combinations.
- mothers report being most emotionally close to last-born children.
- parent–child relations tend to be more stable when both parents are present
- maternal depression has been shown to interfere with parent–child relationships
- mothers who have a larger number of children may be more likely to have an estranged child simply because the risk of having a child become estranged is greater as the size of the group increases.
“…and that about 40 percent of people experience family estrangement at some point. Most people, though, fall somewhere less definitive on the estrangement continuum, a term coined by Scharp, one of the few researchers who studies the phenomenon…“I find that people are just more or less estranged.”
Some families talk by phone but never visit. Some email but never talk. Some see each other once or twice a year but keep their relationships superficial. Many sustain long periods of silence punctuated by brief reconciliations.
In my case, what I did was put words to a situation that already existed, and eventually I escalated and formalized the estrangement when they refused to deal with it or even admit it.
I forced them to make a choice, and admit to an unpleasant reality:
Prove to me that I’m really a member of this family. Listen to me and defend me against this unacceptable behavior — the way you defend everyone else who’s really included in this group — or not.
Clearly, they chose not to.
They literally could not do otherwise. They could not show me respect, love, or support against an in-law’s disrespectful behavior, and then a brother’s.
Not even the level you might extend to a stranger. To them, I am less worthy of those things than a stranger.
It was far easier to judge me, instead of judging one of their own.
Instead they chose to scapegoat me again, to say it was my fault for putting the choice out there — when it was the actions of others against me that brought it out in the open — and then my fault for no longer accepting my scapegoat role.
What makes my situation different from those described here, though, is that I didn’t choose the estrangement. I was estranged by them from the very beginning. Thus the difficulty I had, the pain and the loss I dealt with, in grappling with the fact that I wasn’t a “member of the tribe”, and never had been.
What I am guilty of is wanting a family, wanting my birthright — when that “family” made it clear so many times and so many little ways over so many years, such that when the big thing happened, I was supposed to have known better than to even ask.
“In my experience, estrangement makes people deeply uncomfortable. They wonder what’s wrong with you when you can’t get along with your family. They worry that if you can estrange yourself, maybe their parents/children/siblings could do that to them. Estrangement seems to threaten the primal order of things and opens the door to a lot of questions most of us would rather not think about…
“Imagine for a moment that these people have good reasons” to be estranged, says Scharp.”