If you come from a close family, but have had a huge rift, what caused it?

[Ruminatingg]

Did things ever go back the same?

My dad fell out with his brother because his new partner was ‘difficult’. There were various incidents that didn’t seem like a lot at the time, but my uncle’s partner started to refuse to go anywhere that my dad would be and that in turn led to my uncle not going either. It was a lot of very small things that turned into a huge rift and ten years later, it’s still not the same. My dad and uncle do communicate a bit more now (their mother died which kind of forced it) but we used to all get together very regularly and we don’t anymore. It’s sad, really.

SiL turned out to have siphoned off ££££££££££ when she was 'looking after' MiL. Started off with small amounts then got gradually larger. MiL was cognitively impaired, had no access to her money, and genuinely thought that SiL wouldn't do anything like it - got very distressed when DH tried to explain what was happening once he realised and she refused to believe it of her daughter. No, things will never go back to the way things were and I hope there's a special place in hell for SiL.

What’s your rift about OP? Are you looking for reassurance for yourself, or just other peoples’ stories?

My dm and her dsis fell out. Aunt lived with dgm (aunt owned the house) so dm fell out with her also. They both died (dgm and da) without making up.
Dm got nothing in either will.
I fell out with dm in 2012.. She isn't a good dm /dgm. Our entire family seems quite disfunctional...

Im my whole family tree goes something like this, you get away you stay away, or you run away and never go back.

It’s sad isn’t it. 💐

@SirChenjinsthat is awful and unfortunately not that uncommon. My Grandma lived with us and was like a second mum to me. When my aunt and uncle would take her out, there would always be large cash point withdrawals and my uncle started “finding” a lot of money in the street. She wouldn’t believe it either. Instead of gratitude or silence, he would mock my parents for housing her and tell them how much he was getting for renting his spare room out.

@SockFluffInTheBath a mixture I think. Mine is to do with bereavement and massive overstepping of boundaries with irreversible consequences. I’ve tried to put a lot down to different grieving styles, but the bottom line is I don’t know how to move forward with people I love not even acknowledging the impacts. I also know that I wouldn’t have done that to them - I’m getting the message that I just don’t mean as much to them as they did to me and it’s been a shock. Amongst the people who definitely aren’t grieving is a sister in law who is telling me she’s going to put my things in the skip in my house, throwing away things left aside for my children and generally being a cunt.

I absolutely hate the c word. She absolutely deserves it though. No I haven’t said it to her.

My mum married a convicted paedophile who sexually abused his own daughter. Then lied about his past so he could have access to my children.

I mean, that was bad enough (the contact was never without me present and thankfully there is no reason to believe they were ever harmed because they were still quite little, he has re-offended with other children since though). But the real nail in the coffin was that she went around spreading rumours about Dh and I, so she could be like, well, look how troubled she is! I tried to help her, but she cut me off and won’t let me see my grandchildren because she’s too messed up. 🙄

I would have been willing to, with time and therapy for her, support her to leave a dysfunctional relationship and be part of the family again. But it was the smear campaign when she panicked that people would find out what actually happened that finally ended the relationship. She’s never apologised or tried to make any amends.

We’ve been estranged for 6+ years now and the relationship is not reparable. She has no family anymore and most of her lifelong friends have walked away as well. It’s very sad, but her choice.

Typical in many families it is over a will. Aunt who cared for her unmarried sister in her home for 3 years was left the property. Other sister felt she was equally entitled and refuses to speak .

How do you even begin to process that? How did you find out? I’m so sorry. That’s really really hard.

I remember your previous posts, I think @mindutopia. I'm so sorry this has happened to you and your family. 10+ minus parents here.

I think often it’s not about what it seems to be about. My mother and her sister have fallen out badly over their parents estate and who is left what. Really and truly it’s because my grandfather loved to play them off against each other and built up resentment on both sides. Horrible to see he’s still controlling them long after his death.

When my husband’s ex wife’s mum died she, her brother, her brothers little girl and my step daughter were all left equal amount in the mums will. It then came to light that for a few years before her mums death she had been helping out the brother financially by around 800 per month some months totalling around 20 thousand pounds.
From an outsider perspective I can see why.. My husband’s ex wife earns really well, savings, a paid off mortgage, doesn’t struggle at all.
The brother does.. He works but isn’t a high earner, he also struggles with his mental health.
It seems to have completely damaged the relationship, a shame because they were all really close knit. It’s been 5 years now and no sign of things sorting themselves out.

My extended family are mass-every-Sunday type Catholics, and didn’t like exH because he is an Arab Muslim and so I stopped seeing them almost 20 years ago. When I got divorced they started inviting me to things again but I wasn’t having any of it. Sometimes at Christmas and holidays I wish things could go back to how they were but they never can so that’s that.

My aunt fell out with me because my husband and children sent cards and flowers and messages of support to her partner when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer rather than them coming from me.

I was in a deep depression at that point. I was unable to even brush my teeth.

Inheritance wit my dad and his brothers, all said they were right in who had been promised what. None of us ever knew whether perhaps they’d all been told different things at different times but she was such a lovely lady, the glue of the family and a huge rift happened instead of them just talking it out. They all got back together when dad was dying sadly, I think he was happy in the end that they had a few good visits together

Money. The whole family is split because money was borrowed by one family member from another family member and not repaid, the borrower insisited it had been a gift, the lender that it was a loan. Talking about £25000. Other people were then drawn in to defend the lender and criticise the borrower, borrower then cuts everyone off rather than face the consequences of not repayin the money and now no one is talking so don't lend money to family and if you do, get it in writing.

I think people looking from the outside, and many of us at the time, would say that DM and her parents/siblings were close and that my parents and me/my siblings were also close. Yet there have been numerous 'rifts'. In our case the 'close family' was actually dysfunctional but well disguised. The 'rifts' happened when mistreated members of the family started to challenge this or when people who had been at the heart of manipulating everyone died/left.
As far as my extended family are concerned, I was always very close with my parents and siblings but DH has manipulated me in to becoming selfish and dropping my 'real' family. This is because as an only child he does not understand sibling relationships. His family are also 'twee' and have no sense of humour so they don't 'get' the way normal families work. The reality is that it's only after having my own family and seeing up close how DH's family works that I really challenged how I was treated by family and had the courage to stand up to them.

My eldest brother has cut all of us off. It began with my youngest brother and I several years ago - we didn’t really care, we’d gotten on fine but weren’t best buddies with him so when the obligatory “happy birthday” text we’d get once a year stopped we didn’t exactly cry ourselves to sleep. A few years after that he went silent on our dad and there’s been no contact since. He kept in patchy contact with our mum, would sometimes reply to her texts and usually remember Mother’s Day and her birthday. Then a couple of years ago, that stopped too.

We genuinely don’t know why. From his teens onwards he became fairly lazy and thoughtless but I think our parents just put it down to a teenage boy/young man phase that he’d grow out of. We were a solid, happy family and all of us had great childhoods, and our parents were always our biggest cheerleaders practically, emotionally and financially into adulthood.

I don’t think things will change until he decides he wants to tell our parents why or decides he feels differently. I know it hurts them deeply and they’ve tried to keep avenues open whilst always knocking on a closed door (on occasion, literally) so I really wish things would change for their sakes.

Money and inheritance. DM fell out with one of her DSis when their own mother died and left everything to Dsis, a token amount to another Dsis but nothing at all to my DM. Oh it was all high drama and 'not speaking' although they did make it up after about ten years.

My mum and her mum never got on and my mum maintained that she couldn't stand her mother, so I'm not really quite sure why she thought she ought to have inherited. I think she was more indignant on behalf of the third sister, who got the token amount despite having spent the previous years caring for their mother who had dementia.

That's a lot of mothers, I hope you can decipher it!

This happened a long time ago in the late 1930s/1940s during the last war when society was very different and social class mattered. My mother jilted her middle class fiance (who was away in the army) and married a man whom my grandparents would not accept as a son in law. He worked as a casual labourer on the docks and was excused from going to fight until quite late in 1940s. Men like that had a reputation of going around with other mens wives and girlfriends while they were away on active service. It was very much looked down on. My mother fell pregnant and they eloped.

As a result my mother was ostricised from the family for many years and never really accepted back. For example she was cut out of my grandmothers will. As a result I grew up poor and working class.

When I was 4 I was introduced to my grandmother by an aunt who acted as go between. My grandmother and I developed a very close relationship as I grew up. My gran had remained friendly with my mothers jilted fiance and he was introduced to me as "uncle Jim". It was not until I was 18 and uncle Jim died that my grandmother told me the story of the family rift. It was not until she had died, in 1979, that I revealed to my mother that I knew all about the family split.

We had a fall out in our family which lasted about 15 years, then one day said family members were back in touch like nothing had happened. I never did hear what caused the fall out and lack of contact for all those years, and being so polite nobody talks about it! ha!

narc mother here. I’ve tried lots of ways to maintain a relationship so I children could have it too. I gave up. Emotionally abusive all my life. Death by a thousand paper cuts.
my siblings are all really impacted and I’ve gone LC with them too. I’m the only one out of 5 of us in a stable, happy marriage and happy children. If I let them in, they would do their best to end that

Money and the knowledge coming to light that my BIL used to hit his children. We found out when the kids were young adults.

My grandmother and her sister were close when younger, by all accounts, but then fell out and didn't speak for 40 years. My grandmother moved away when she got married, her sister didn't and was expected to do all the care for their parents, but my grandmother then didn't get 50% of the inheritance and kicked off. My grandmother justified it by the fact that she had 5 kids and was poorly herself (true), and that she hadn't wanted to move away but had to follow my grandfather's job. And the sister justified it by saying she'd done all the caring work for two elderly parents as well as looking after her own 2 kids, with no support or financial contribution from my grandmother. I suspect my grandmother was also the golden child and the sister was the scapegoat, from bits and pieces of family lore I've heard.