Cutting off family members: ‘It had never occurred to me that you could grieve somebody who was still alive’

When we think about romantic relationships becoming serious, we often focus on the joyful things: the excitement of moving in together, the fun of dreaming up your ideal wedding, the sense of peace and safety that comes with coming home to a loving partner every night. There are stressful things too, of course. For Diane, meeting her husband was a life-changing experience, but there was one conversation that she dreaded having with her future mother-in-law: revealing that Diane had chosen to have no relationship with her father.
For Diane, her parents’ relationship had been turbulent and she had little emotional connection to her father, who Diane felt was never interested in her as a person. When Diane’s parents separated when she was a teenager, she was allowed to choose whether or not to see him – and the choice was easy.
“It sounds so mean to say, but one of the happiest memories I have is when he was out of the house,” says Diane, who is now 33. “I felt like I could finally breathe. So I decided that if I don’t have to see him, I don’t want to. ” Diane’s younger sister still sees their father, who has occasionally reached out to Diane over the years – but his attempts just made Diane feel more certain of her decision.
“He actually reached out before I got married,” says Diane. “He sent me an email, and that made it very easy for me to continue having no contact, because there was no change or recognition for the part he played, and why I decided to have no contact with him. There was a lot of anger and blame on my mom.”
Diane now works with students, many of whom are estranged from family members, and she thinks it’s important to share her story and her happiness with her decision, because she understands the shame and stigma that can come with family estrangement. The fear of being viewed as dysfunctional or somehow damaged for not having a relationship with a parent can run deep.
Growing up, Diane was acutely aware of the cultural scripts and stereotypes that can surround young women who don’t have a relationship with their fathers.
“I used to not talk about it, especially when I was bit younger, because there’s a whole idea of women without father figures, having daddy issues and then being like, maybe a bit promiscuous or ‘crazy’ – there’s a definite stereotype of a girl without a stable father figure in her life. So I used to be really tight-lipped about it, because I didn’t want to become that stereotype.”
As Diane had chosen not to see her father, she also feared being judged in a different way: as someone who viewed relationships as disposable. It was this fear of being perceived as flighty or commitment-phobic that made Diane nervous to speak to her partner’s mother about the situation.
“I felt like I had to explain to her why I didn’t have a relationship with my dad, and that was that was the most nervous I ever felt about talking to someone about it,” says Diane, “because I didn’t want her to think that I’m someone who walks away from relationships really easily, or, you know, didn’t value fathers. I didn’t want her to feel nervous for her son if he was ever going to have a child with me.”
While Diane is now happily married with supportive in-laws, her experience of shame and stigma is common among people who have ended a relationship with a family member – though the silence around this topic may be lifting. While estrangements have always occurred in families, it was often unaddressed and unacknowledged, but there has recently been an increase in social discourse around family estrangement or the decision to go ‘no contact’ with a family member.
Karl Melvin is a psychotherapist, researcher and author of the book Navigating Family Estrangement. He has spent more than a decade working with adults who are estranged from one or more family members and delivering training to counsellors and social workers who are seeking a comprehensive understanding of complex family issues. Melvin notes that in countries such as the United States where divorce has been legalised for decades, the awareness of alternative family structures has become socially acceptable, but Ireland is only beginning to acknowledge just how many people have chosen to have no relationship with a family member – though the shame and judgment can still persist.
“We value family,” says Melvin. “Family is incredibly important to how we function, how we view ourselves and view our society. But then if you meet someone whose family status doesn’t conform to those traditional views and values, then it can lead to a person feeling stigmatised, or others treating that person differently. It takes a great deal of wisdom and maturity to be able to look past our own values and family experiences to see that this person made a decision based on something that probably must be very valid. I’ve never seen someone who initiated an estrangement for no reason.”
[ Ireland’s new dating scene: Finding love the old-fashioned wayOpens in new window ]
Perhaps an insight into our increasing awareness around family estrangement lies in the modern term “no contact” – both a novelty and definitive boundary in an era where we are constantly contactable. Melvin describes different types of estrangement, including physical estrangement, where people live very far from each other and don’t see each other often. Before mobile phones and email, physical estrangement may have either led to or hidden emotional estrangement, as contact and connection was more difficult. However, now that mobiles, email and social media give us endless ways of connecting with family members, the decision to cut off all contact can be more obvious and noticeable – as is the lack of attempt at reconciliation.
Fiona is in her 50s and fell out with her brother several years ago, after he started sending insulting and belittling texts to her husband due to differing political beliefs. Fiona describes her brother as having a strong personality. He often made pointed or demeaning “jokes” about others, and he wasn’t used to being challenged or confronted about his hurtful behaviour. When Fiona pushed back, her brother deflected.
“I got this Darvo thing they talk about now,” says Fiona, referring to a technique that people can use to avoid accountability. The acronym refers to the process of deny, attack, reverse victim and offender. “It was all thrown back at me. It was all my fault, and a litany of things that I had done wrong over the years. None of it is true. So I blocked him, and I have not heard from him or his wife for nearly three years, and we were all very close.”
For Fiona, cutting off contact was not a decision she made lightly and, as she points out, it’s not a decision she made once, but an ongoing decision she makes again and again. Therapy has helped Fiona feel more comfortable in her decision, but she does sometimes wonder if the ease of blocking a mobile number prevented her from having a more helpful conversation with her brother.
“Cutting off contact is a very serious thing to do, and looking back on it now, I wonder if I should have picked the phone up instead of texting, and I should have had a row on the phone. I think texting and all of that has changed the way we connect and disconnect – you can have a row with somebody then block them, and it almost isn’t real.”
[ ‘I have not had contact with my siblings for many decades, nor did I attend my parents’ funerals’Opens in new window ]
But for Fiona, the deciding factor is that her brother hasn’t tried too hard to get in touch to apologise – something that is more noticeable because of the various avenues of communication available to all of us.
“He could write me a letter,” Fiona says. “He knows where I work, and he could show up after work one day or send me an email. That’s just not good enough, you know?”
Fiona says that she experiences cycles of anger, sadness and grief, but the main feeling is loss – not just of her brother and his wife, who Fiona considered a friend, but also of her nephews and nieces.
“I have no children of my own, so I would have been very attached to their kids, and seen an awful lot of them when they were small.”
This type of secondary estrangement or inherited estrangement is an often overlooked experience, as going no contact with one person can often lead to losing contact with other family members or friends, which can be incredibly difficult for everyone.
In Melvin’s book, he describes eight different types of estrangement, one of them being inherited estrangement. “We often see this where someone wasn’t talking to their parents, but that person has kids so those kids don’t have a relationship with their grandparents. They have inherited an estrangement, even though nothing happened between them and the grandparents. Secondary estrangements are quite common, and can often start between one or more family members, and then divisions are formed, and often people insist on loyalty on one side over another.”
This type of inherited estrangement is why Amy has now had no contact with her sister for more than a year. Amy’s sister was saving to buy a house and decided to move back into the family home with her parents – without consulting them. When Amy’s sister arrived home with bags and boxes in tow, her parents wouldn’t let her move back in and a row erupted. Amy’s sister felt rejected and stopped speaking to her parents while they, feeling disrespected and taken for granted, felt that she was the one who needed to apologise. For a while, Amy tried to keep in touch with her sister, but her sister started creating more and more distance. “I think because I didn’t take a side, therefore I didn’t take her side,” says Amy. “Bit by bit, she stopped communicating with me, and will now not respond to me at all, which is quite hurtful.”
Amy tried to maintain contact, sending her sister texts here and there – but when Amy’s wedding day came, she felt that her relationship with her sister had reached a Rubicon moment. Her sister did not want to be in the same room as her parents, and so didn’t go to Amy’s wedding. For Amy, this was a huge moment where her sister showed that she was willing to sacrifice their relationship over a fight with her parents.
“It was quite hard and quite stressful,” says Amy. “My grandmother passed away six months before the wedding, and my sister would have been still talking to me at that time and she was there for the funeral for my granny – but then it was, ‘Oh no, I can’t come to your wedding.’ For me that was a very clear signal as to where the priority was, like ‘you clearly valued my grandmother more than you value your relationship with me’.”
Amy has a complicated relationship with the current rise in rhetoric around people going no contact, saying she understands and respects anyone’s decision to create boundaries with people who aren’t good for them, but also points out how binary narratives can create reductive ideas of villains and victims, where it’s assumed that if someone has cut off contact with family members, then their families must be irredeemable or have treated them terribly, when often there are two sides who have hurt the other – and other family members who have just become collateral damage.
“It definitely feels like there’s a good-versus-bad narrative, and ideas of victimhood,” observes Amy. “And it’s maybe not fair on the people involved. You’re not seeing like a whole person and acknowledging that sometimes, it works both ways. ”
For Ben, binary narratives affected him differently when he went no contact with his brother for more than a year. Ben’s brother Adam had a difficult and emotionally abusive relationship with a woman during his 20s that deeply affected him . But when Adam started dating other women, Ben was alarmed by what he saw as controlling behaviour, including harassing ex-girlfriends and concocting elaborate lies to manipulate women into staying with him. Ben tried his best to provide Adam with emotional support while also telling him that his behaviour was unacceptable, believing that his brother needed mental health support and to healthily process how his past relationship affected him. But when Adam showed no self-awareness or change in behaviour, Ben eventually felt he had no choice but to step away from the relationship.
What was difficult for Ben was the sense of blame that he felt for being the disrupter in the family, when Adam’s behaviour was the problem. When society at large and individual families value loyalty over everything else, the person who tries to set boundaries or cuts off contact can often be framed as the troublemaker who is disrupting the family’s peace – an attitude that Ben thinks is particularly pronounced in Ireland, given the country’s history of religious and traditional values.
[ Can cutting ties with dysfunctional family members be therapeutic?Opens in new window ]
“The family stuff runs really deep,” says Ben, “We internalise the notion of a family. It’s all about family loyalty, family reconciliation. But what happens when you have to be the conscientious objector? That’s how it was framed, that I was the one causing trouble. How? I’m not harassing anybody! My parents would get very guilt-trippy and like ‘We’re old, my heart could go at any point.’ I’m not the one doing anything wrong, but they’ll do anything for a quiet life.”
When families don’t address problematic behaviour or blame those who decide to go no contact with others, it places a burden on the family member who is simply asking for respectful behaviour and accountability, but is treated as the villain. “Your reward is being the outsider,” remarks Ben.
Reconnecting after estrangement can be difficult, but is not impossible. Family therapy can be helpful; having boundaried communication or going “low contact”; or sometimes individual therapy can help individuals come to terms with their relative’s shortcomings and forge a different type of connection.
Corina now lives in Ireland, but emigrated from eastern Europe to America with her mother when she was young. Her parents had broken up when she was five and she was always very close with her mother, but when Corina became a teenager and started asserting her independence, her mother couldn’t cope. Corina’s mother is very religious and when Corina moved away for college and later started dating a woman, her mother would send her long, abusive messages and intensely monitor Corina’s social media. Corina went through periods of going low contact with the mother, blocking her messages for a period just for a reprieve.
What made it difficult was that her mother could sometimes be loving and supportive – but the inconsistency meant that her affection didn’t feel safe to trust.
“The kindness was the hardest,” says Corina. “It would touch some hope in me about having this relationship with her. When I grieved losing her, I grieved a mother I never had. It had never occurred to me that you could grieve somebody who was still alive. That’s one of the hardest things for people who are in this situation, is that it’s not a socially recognised form of grief.”
Over the past few years, Corina has got back in touch with her mother, something that she says has only been possible due to a lot of therapy, acceptance and other loving relationships that bring her joy and validation. There is more distance and boundaries there, but it is a relationship.
[ Just one family member can throw restrained harmony into disarrayOpens in new window ]
For people who have experienced estrangement, support is available. Melvin’s book offers practical and emotional advice for dealing with estrangement, and the US-based non-profit Together Estranged offers resources and online support groups. While there can be a lot of loss and grief around estrangement, for some people it can a very empowering decision that may not be easy but should be recognised as an important choice for them.
For Diane, she wishes that growing up, she had more people who supported her. “You’re not less of a person because you have decided to have no relationship with a family member,” she says. “I think that takes a lot of courage and guts and a recognition of your boundaries. I really wish more people, you know, maybe said to me, ‘Good on you.’ I wish more people, maybe even if they don’t understand it, or haven’t had that experience, would be able to say ‘I think that what you’re doing is good for you right now, and fair play.”
* Some names have been changed.