To think family estrangments are very common in England

[Maldon]

I am Irish but lived here many years and it appears people going long term no contact from immediate family members is pretty common here. I can think of 5 people of the top of my head. Is it just me?

I was going to say I knew none, then realised I do know one.
Then I remembered that they're Scottish.

And having seen their actions over a number of year, it may well have been them not the family too.

I personally think that in communities where there aren't as many estrangements it is more to do with the culture vs the people being better.

Parental guilt, shaming, being raised to think that family is above all and you should respect your parents/family members no matter how they treat you etc.

If someone treats you consistently badly, you should absolutely cut them off no matter who they are. It was the best decision I ever made.

Not quite the answer to you question, but I have observed my Irish friends to be far more involved in their extended families and spending far more time with them (even if there are huge dramas!).

I think there is possibly a cultural point of difference there.

I live in the city I grew up in I have my immediate family and we are close to dhs family (live one hour away) my dad lives 20 min away I see him regularly but we are not close (emotionally) I have a sister who lives at the opposite end of the country who I see a few times a year.
But I have loads of aunts/uncles/cousins who I haven’t see since the last funeral 6 years ago. My parents rarely saw them and the only real link we had was grandparents but after they all died it dropped off.

You only hear the bad stuff on MN generally, so the prevalence seems higher. Some people aren’t very nice though, and being family doesn’t change that. Money can be the cause of many fall outs! IRL I know quite a few LC or NC situations - not my circus thankfully.

Across a few branches of my older generation family who were Irish, there were so many siblings, and poverty forced migration that it was very easy to slip off and not maintain contact with family that you didn't get on with. It was common to stay in touch with 3-4 favoured siblings and parents because that was managable.

Human nature hasn't changed, and the only relevant bit about being Irish is that they shared characteristics of being very large families (which isn't a compulsory or exclusive feature.)

It's good that it's become easier to recognise and reduce the influence of harmful family members, and to break cycles of abusive and toxic behaviour from one generation to the next.

Yes there's very low tolerance or give and take. My family fight, but we make up, love each other and are always there for each other.

I don’t know anyone IRL who is NC. Although I know a few who probably should be!!

I work for a solicitors and I’ve been surprised by the number of families who are estranged or have poor relationships with each other and want to leave one child out of their will. The thought of one of my children not speaking to me is really sad.

The first few posts on this thread were heartwarming because the posters based their opinion on the real world they observe around them. They are not being influenced by social media posts. Which are incredibly unreliable narratives often posted by people with agendas and who are outright making stuff up.

In reality the incidences of people cutting out someone entirely are rare and warranted.

People no longer stand for bad treatment from others just because they’re related to them. I don’t have contact with my parents because they’re awful people, and even then, it wasn't an easy decision and took years to have no contact with them. I know a few people who have cut contact with family, not all English btw, but knowing their situations, I think good on them. I don’t believe the blood is thicker than water nonsense. If you don’t treat people well, you deserve to lose them, especially family in my opinion.

I didn't 'fight' with my family. Some families are not only not always there for each other but are actively and intentionally damaging. My mother told my brother (in our 30s) that she didn't love me and that it wasn't that she hated me - she didn't actively want something bad to happen to me, she just didn't care if it did.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. She tried to get SS involved with my children because she regarded me as an unfit mother with severe MH problems (neither of which was true). In the end, her behaviours brought the police and SS into our lives and we had no alternative but to go nc with her or risk losing the children because she was a risk to them. And that was just a tiny part of the abuse she meted out to me as an adult. The abuse started when she rejected me before I was 3 and she resented the fact she had to care and provide for me. She spent the next 34 years actively trying to sabotage me in many ways. Some of which would have had very serious implications for my life and my career had she been successful.

It's not always about arguments.

It is common in all cultures actually, because people have become more self absorbed and nasty everywhere.

Most people don't go NC because of a fight!

I think if you have no experience of hideous relationships in your life its very hard to imagine what it is actually like, and you can only compare to what you know.

Going NC isn't about having rows or fights (or isn't just about this). Its about the last straw after years and years of emotional and/or physical abuse, and saying fuck this/ no more.

Of course it seems common online. People don't post about their bog standard normal family. People find solidarity in sharing their experiences over no longer seeing the people that caused them grief when they should have been loving them.

The thing is that even if you happen to share some DNA, you shouldn’t expect to get away with being abusive and toxic and the other person still being in your life “cos faaaahhhhmlee”. If you treat your children or siblings like shit then don’t expect them to be close to you just because society says that they should be. If you did it to anyone else they’d cut you off too.

So nobody in Ireland falls out with their family?
I find that hard to beleive, my Irish Dad and his Irish Brother have a very strained relationship and always have they are not no contact, but that's because they are part of a set of otherwise close six siblings but they don't contact each other individually.

I think it depends, I feel white British people definitely have a lower bar. Many aren't close to their families in the first place.

Exactly this.

This ^^^
I done exactly the same with both my mother and father. I was fed up of being an emotional punchbag.

I think that’s true, within my circle of friends most of them have a family member or relationship that is difficult and resentment-filled that bubbles away under the surface that isn’t addressed.

On both sides of my family there’s people who haven’t spoken in 30 + years. I don’t even know if they are still alive.

Again, you talk about low tolerance to give or take, whilst saying your family love each other. You are projecting your feelings about your family into judging people that go NC.

Its not about lower bars or not being close. People can be seemingly close whilst also suffering abuse from 'loved ones'.

I disagree with this, I don’t think being white has anything to do with it, I’m from the south wales valleys and families here are extremely close. I suspect it may be more class based than race. Middle class people who go away to university and never come back to live and so they are more distant geographically as well as emotionally are very different than working class people who tend to stay very close by.

DH and his brother have spoken about 10 words to each other in the past year... in the few hours they saw each other on Saturday.

BIL would say he's done nothing wrong. DH will never forgive him.
(BIL abandoned his eldest child and was emotionally extremely cruel towards her. We have a good relationship with DN.)

Exactly.

Two examples from my childhood.

My mum locked me in the back garden wearing only my nightie and with bare feet. There was snow on the ground. Sometimes she locked me in the glass doored porch in the sun when it was really hot.

She was an inadequate parent who 'parented' through shame, humiliation and power plays. If my brother and I argued, rather than mediate or try and resolve the situation, she would come into the living room with (what we called) "flashing eyes" and removed the plug from the TV. It was ridiculous. Small children argue and it was rarely about the TV - there wasn't enough choice at the time for it to be an issue! 😁

It irritated us because, as my brother said when he was old enough, "I'm not controlled by the TV."

Anyway, she did this for years. When I was about 10, I'd had enough and prised the screwdriver from her hand so she couldn't do it. She then ran to the phone and dialled 999 to tell them her daughter was "brandishing a screwdriver" at her.

My brother and I were both damaged by her 'parenting'. One on occasion, she had wound him up to the extent that he couldn't self regulate (he was about 10) and was pounding on my bedroom door with a knife in his hand. My mum was out on the landing, while he was doing this, shouting, "Well, I'd come at you with a knife if you were my sister!"

She rejected me (for reasons i won't go into but i understand as an adult) and rather than try and resolve it, she blamed me for being unlovable and a problem. She spent my entire childhood creating a narrative around this belief that extended into my teenage years and adulthood. She created/fabricated situations that she then used as 'evidence' of my mental instability.

For my own and my children's mental wellbeing and safety, I had no choice but to go nc with her.

ETA: It ended up being more than two! But I have hundreds of examples of this kind of thing over the years. It was an almost daily occurrence.

It wasn't a few arguments.