Family Estrangement

"A farmer got so old that he couldn't work the fields anymore. So he would spend the day just sitting on the porch. His son, still working the farm, would look up from time to time and see his father sitting there. "He's of no use any more," the son thought to himself, "he doesn't do anything!" One day the son got so frustrated by this, that he built a wooden coffin, dragged it over to the porch, and told his father to get in. Without saying anything, the father climbed inside. After closing the lid, the son dragged the coffin to the edge of the farm where there was a high cliff. As he approached the drop, he heard a light tapping on the lid from inside the coffin. He opened it up. Still lying there peacefully, the father looked up at his son. "I know you are going to throw me over the cliff, but before you do, may I suggest something?" "What is it?" replied the son. "Throw me over the cliff, if you like," said the father, "but save this good wood coffin. Your children might need to use it." (Zen proverb)

And so it seems with the estrangement of a family member, tossed over the metaphorical cliff. Whatever sentimentality that once bound us, whatever purpose you once served, has long been displaced by my accumulated resentments. Your very presence encumbers my emancipation. You are dead to me.

By one reckoning twenty-seven percent of individuals report being estranged from at least one family member, which can involve parents, children, siblings, grandparents, or other relatives. Parent-child estrangements are particularly prevalent and the subject of this NYT piece Is Cutting Off Your Family Good Therapy? Yes, maybe, but. One place to start might be to acknowledge those “interesting” family dynamics of your own.

I recall a mental health session of young adults sharing and comparing their respective post-college adjustments to real life. All in all it was quite a positive interaction with optimistic reports of early successes both personal and professional. The participants almost seemed to try and outdo each other in the way they had “evolved” since leaving the nest. That is, until one participant posed the question: “Yeah, well how evolved did you feel when you went back home for Thanksgiving dinner?” There was a knowing silence. That kids table can be a state of mind.

The “phase changes” of life are rarely seamless. I recall once visiting my boyhood home a decade or so after having moved out of state. My parents drove me to a nice restaurant: they sat in the front, I in the back. The effect was uncanny. Here, long after having navigated early adulthood, after having experienced certain successes, I was again that eight-year-old boy sitting in the back seat. There’s a kind of shocking revelation the first time a son recognizes his cough sounds just like his father’s, the daughter’s laugh like her mother’s.

So, what other skin needs to be shed on the way to establishing one’s own “agency?” Life can be hard, sometimes brutally so, in those transition years. Yet, reading many of the accounts of adult children going “no contact,” what comes across is a kind of facile blame-shifting as they ascribe personal “challenges” to parental (or other family) failings. That is in no way to suggest there are no genuine instances of physical and/or emotional abuse but there’s a sense of an ever-lowering threshold for the label of “toxic.”

Welcome to the age of the “TIkTok therapists” to clear things up. The featured social worker has indeed made quite the lucrative Zoom business to help frame the struggling member’s problems in terms of a toxic upbringing. For $69.99/mo he’ll even write the no-contact letter, “Short, to the point, don’t tell them why, ‘you’re toxic is all you need to say’.” No wonder there are generations talking past each other with (some) parents almost pleading, “What the hell are you talking about?”

What we’re talking about is the prospect of estranged children who are likely to lose access to financial and emotional resources in an otherwise harsh world, not to mention the potential devastation to the extended family. At least we’re not harp seals, featuring pups whose mothers do not return after the ten to twelve day nursing period, to be left alone on the ice to fend for themselves. Get a job.

Among the matters not addressed in the article are suggestions, short of no contact, to address the adult child’s natural drive towards emancipation. Here’s one (from this decidedly non-therapist): maybe start by considering a first-name relationship between parent and adult child e.g. Dustin’s father to him is “Sina” not “Dad.”

Another question, especially as to adult children with children of their own, is what is it that you are modeling here? Your own children may be incorporating your over-the-cliff lesson all too well. Fast forward.

Tap. Tap.

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