You probably know at least one person who is “no contact” or “low contact” or who is otherwise estranged from a family member. And you might know others who are mulling the decision over. It seems like the idea of extricating yourself from a relationship with a difficult (or straight up toxic) family member is all the rage these days… but why?
Whitney Goodman, a marriage and family therapist and author of (the very good book) Toxic Positivity, explained her theory on TikTok, and it makes a lot of sense.
“Decades ago, it was pretty easy to become estranged from a family member,” she sys. “We didn’t even have to put all these labels on it. People didn’t have to say they were no contact, low-contact, estranged because they could just move to the other side of the country, maybe only talk to that family member once a year or see them on a holiday, and that was easy to maintain.
“Now,” she continues, “we have so many different outlets for people who are disruptive to our lives to contact us. So if you have a family member that is harmful, abusive, has difficulty maintaining boundaries, they can contact you on Facebook, Instagram, email, calling you, text message, What’s App. … And so this often means that people today have to take a much stronger, stricter path to limiting those relationships simply because there are so many avenues for that other person to continue engaging with them and potentially harming them.
“And I think this is why we see estrangement today being something that is so clearly verbalized and dictated and we have a lot of older people saying ‘Well, we didn’t do that back then. Everyone stayed in touch,’ when, really, you probably had some family members that were actively choosing distance and estrangement but they weren’t really calling it that because they didn’t have to.”
Honestly, we were just chalking this up to more people going into therapy and learning to assert themselves (and these might be factors, too, of course) But we hadn’t even thought about distance and technology coming into it. But it makes a ton of sense.
Commenters were quick to see themselves in this observation.
“My family has a looooooooooong history of people not speaking to one another,” replies one user. “But I went no contact and now those family members act like I’m the antichrist.”
“Even when I went to college in 09 I was able to estrange myself just by not going home,” observes a second. “Since 2020 all those family members have found ways to be so intrusive between socials, email, text…”
“Growing up it never occurred to me that my dad & his bro were estranged even tho I never met my uncle,” says a third. They go on to say it didn’t strike them until their husband made the (obvious) observation after said uncle wasn’t invited to their wedding.
According to data from a study published in the Journal of Marriage and Family, 6% of survey respondents report a period of estrangement from mothers and 26% report estrangement from fathers. This generally happens somewhere between 23 and 26 years of age (which makes sense, since this is a time when you’re striking out on your own as an adult.
So the next time an older family member tells you “We didn’t do this back in my day,” when you’re talking about going no contact, you don’t have to point all of this out, but feel free to. Or sit quietly in the self-assured satisfaction of knowing, actually, that’s definitely not true.
