Twelve years ago, I broke up with my mother. She beat me and my siblings hundreds of times in our youth, and she inflicted on us an array of other behaviors that qualified as emotional abuse — from insults and tirades to humiliation and gaslighting. Her abuse continued into my 40s, when, after years of futile efforts to change the dynamic between us, I severed ties with her for good.
I expected to feel guilt and grief after my decision, and I did. I didn’t expect to feel joy, but I did. Cutting ties with my mother was one of the most transformative, liberating moments of my entire life. It filled me with uplifting emotions — peace, pride, elation, anger (yes, anger can be uplifting) — that I never felt before.
But for several years, I kept my happiness mostly to myself. During much of that time, my happiness took a back seat to my shame.
Cultural taboos against estrangement — cutting or limiting ties with relatives — make even the most well-intentioned souls withhold support from those who need and deserve it most. When I tell people I’ve written a book that argues for stepping away from relatives who have done us physical or psychological harm, the most common response is concern but not necessarily for those of us who step away. Many people worry about the family members who were cut off. “Isn’t that devastating for your relatives?” they ask. Or “Isn’t no contact kind of drastic?”
Still others retain a fixation on reconciliation, even suggesting that advice to cut ties is immoral. Some openly questioned my ethics, reminding me that spanking was perfectly acceptable among my mother’s peers or assuring me that she was doing the best she could or berating me for my refusal to forgive and forget. For a long time, I was unable to offer the correct response to such judgments: No abuser’s ignorance or era or condition excuses her behavior any more than her treatment of us gives us license to abuse other people.
My experience of abuse and estrangement, along with that of dozens of other survivors I spoke with, convinces me that estrangement is often the most moral option. What’s immoral is encouraging people to remain in relationships that hurt them.
For centuries, society has pressured us to protect the family unit at all costs and vilified us when we failed to do so. Clichés like “blood is thicker than water” have lately been augmented by pundits and aggrieved relatives who complain about the proliferation of hashtags like #toxicfamily and #nocontact on social media. The critics’ complaints are varied — from dismissing it as a TikTok fad to bemoaning spoiled millennials who see trauma in the ordinary ups and downs of family life to attacks on therapists who, by advocating estrangement from family, are ignoring the profession’s guidelines to do no harm. This criticism ignores the fact that some of the most commonly cited reasons for estrangement are abuse, neglect, untreated mental illness and addiction that hurts family members.
The anti-estrangement attitude that prevails in all corners of society, from religion to psychology to pop culture, is grounded in a deep and often willful ignorance about the prevalence of child abuse, the serious harm it inflicts in childhood and beyond and the profound healing that can result from estrangement. Many people — even abuse survivors — fail to recognize the most common forms of maltreatment or grasp their deep impact on us.
Almost everyone believes that sexual assault of a minor equals abuse, and many would agree that physical assault is abuse, too, although hitting a child is legal, to some extent, in all 50 states. But emotional abuse, a more common kind of maltreatment and the one most likely to persist into a survivor’s adulthood, often goes unnoticed. The most common kind of all, neglect, is itself one of the most neglected in our culture and among the most harmful.
Only after I started researching my book did I discover the pervasive silence that hides the intertwined phenomena of abuse and estrangement. This silence starts early, and it often starts at home. Kids are hard-wired to believe that whatever they experience in the home is normal and to put their caregivers on a pedestal, regardless of how they treat them. Abusers cement that belief by convincing kids that they deserve their abuse. Institutions like schools and churches can add to the stigma, either with potentially toxic messages like “honor thy father and mother” and “turn the other cheek” or with no teaching at all. Then there are the sins of omission committed by all those — relatives, neighbors, friends — who may witness abuse but say or do nothing.
Pop culture also normalizes family dysfunction, tacitly encouraging us to endure difficult relatives rather than estrange them. Popular TV series, from “The Sopranos” to “Succession,” show us clans that stick together season after season despite abuse that would be suspect if anyone other than a relative perpetrated it. And we’re awash in a sea of self-help books, podcasts and videos that urge us to set aside our sadness, forgive and forget, be grateful for what we have, accept that everything happens for a reason and draw good things to us by thinking only good thoughts. This toxic positivity makes us ignore our emotions and stifle our pain, which lets our abusers, and the culture that abets them, off the hook.
All these forces and more obscure the scope and impact of abuse. Research suggests that child maltreatment may increase the risk that one will suffer a slew of ailments in adulthood: diabetes, high blood pressure, lung disease, cancer, stroke, depression, anxiety, addiction, relationship problems, suicidal ideation and more. Few survivors recognize these conditions as the fallout of abuse; instead, we tend to see them as normal or as innate mental or physical flaws for which we blame ourselves. Fueled by shame, too many of us keep quiet and forgo the support we might receive by sharing our experiences with other survivors.
But others are speaking out — and stepping away — at last. I began writing my book just as estrangement became an epidemic, as Joshua Coleman, a psychologist who has studied the phenomenon extensively, and Will Johnson, the chief executive of the Harris Poll, have called it. In the past year alone, stories in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Guardian, NPR, Oprah Daily, Vogue and elsewhere pondered the implications of this apparent uptick. And a Harris poll conducted in November in collaboration with Dr. Coleman buttressed the anecdotal evidence I shared above, putting the proportion of estranged Americans at 1 in 2. (The previous benchmark — 27 percent — came from a Cornell study published just four years before.) These numbers disprove one of the most persistent myths about estrangement: that it’s rare. In fact, it is perhaps becoming the norm.
Estrangement’s growing visibility reveals a shift in social attitudes brought about by several factors. Among them is the pandemic, which thrust some families into painfully close quarters and offered others a hiatus that some members came to relish. More young people are in therapy than in previous generations, and they’re more knowledgeable about concepts like trauma, narcissism and complex post-traumatic stress disorder that relate to abuse. Yet another is the opportunity social media gives people with abusive relatives to support one another and escape the isolating stigma that society, family and even well-meaning friends impose.
Whatever the causes, I’m profoundly encouraged to see signs of a decline in the shame and stigma that have so long prevented survivors from embracing the lifesaving potential of estrangement. For me, it was the healthiest possible choice, and that’s true for other survivors of parental abuse. One of them told me he cut ties with his father “to save my life.” Another declared, “I feel proud that I did it. I want to get a tattoo with the date.”
I don’t recall the exact date of my estrangement; otherwise, I might do the same thing. I consider that date as significant as my birthday. Maybe more so, because it’s the day I finally stepped out of my mother’s dark shadow and into my own light.
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