Why does it feel like so many families are estranged now?

[Happyfarm]

I can feel it brewing in my own family. My partners parents don’t like me and it’s seeping into the relationship they have with their grandchildren. I can see it reach a point where it’s going to be damaging for them to see they are treated differently and all for whatever perceived issues they see in me.

I’m hearing it so often.

The person who rips the family apart is the person who thinks it’s ok to be abusive towards their children, to bully, to be controlling, to be manipulative, to be demanding, to make snidey comments etc.

The person who walks away isn’t the one who rips the family apart, it’s the abuser/bully they have walked away from who has done that. But, yes, they usually do double down and blame their victim when that happens.

Nobody should have to tolerate any form of abuse for the sake of ‘family’.

It's not always about abuse. Sometimes (of course, not always) it is just stubbornness and/or being unable/unwilling to handle the storm.

'Hindsight is a wonderful thing but foresight is better"

And to those who are experiencing abuse, I wholeheartedly wish you the strength to leave.

I actually don’t think it’s any different than it’s always been, except maybe when people lived in small homesteads or clans and couldn’t escape each other. We just speak about it now and it has a name and there are charities that support estranged families, etc.

But certainly in my parents generation, my dad was pretty much NC with his dad, and my mum was NC with her siblings. My uncle went NC with my grandfather before he died and refused to attend the funeral. My mum’s elder half siblings (born early 1930s) were NC with their dad growing up and I think most of his life. No one spoke about it and estranged family members almost didn’t exist. At most, they might give a polite acknowledgment across the room at a family funeral. None of them would have said they were ‘no contact’ or ‘low contact’ but they were.

I do think dysfunction tumbles through families though, which is no surprise. I am NC with my mum (she facilitated access by a known convicted paedophile to my children and also enabled his sexual abuse of other children). She absolutely wouldn’t see the connection to her own family chaos though. She definitely thinks it’s all a new fangled thing and I’m crazy. 😂

I also think when people hear of someone whose family member has gone NC with them and the reason is ‘petty’, I expect the explanation has probably come from someone with a vested interest in it sounding petty or who for reasons of trauma, cannot even vocalise. If you asked my mum why we are NC, the story you get sounds very petty. I wanted money from her and she wouldn’t give me as much money as I wanted so we cut her off from her grandchildren because we are greedy horrible people. No mention of the sexual abuse.

Interestingly, it’s also the same explanation her paedophile partner gives to explain why all his children and grandchildren are NC with him. People must shake their heads at how awful it is that they both have such terrible children who have stolen their grandchildren away from them. I know because from time to time, friends of theirs contact me to tell me what a terrible person I am (and then I tell them the real reason).

Lol most of the time the kids are much better off being away from the influence of an abusive person actually.

I think it has always happened - I can think of at least four ancient rifts across both my parents' families off the top of my head, and I'm sure I could recall heaps more if I sat down to think about it.

It might be more common now too, for the reasons PPs have suggested, but we also talk about this stuff more nowadays, and the internet and social media means that whereas these things would just quietly occur with no-one outside the family being any the wiser, now we all know everybody else's business.

Boundaries just means expecting people to treat you well.
Personally I think it's helpful that you start with a basic expectation that people treat you well, rather than that you should "ride out the storm" because "family".

Its nothing new I don't think, I think people are just more willing to talk about it with others.

My Dads mother never talked to her "mother" again after finding out she'd been lied to throughout her life and that her "parents" were actually her aunt and uncle and her "cousins" were really siblings.

My Mum stopped talking to her sister after finding out that she'd slept with my Dad.

My DPs Dad has no contact with his brother after some financial stuff that went on over 40 years ago.

The fact is, a lot of people have families that they don't really keep in contact with. When everyone stayed in the same small town throughout their lives it was a lot harder to just avoid them, now people move halfway across the country to get away from toxic parents.

Because we don’t have to rely on family as much as we did because we are wealthier and have more options than in the past.

We also don’t all live in small towns and villages where we were once were all connected- this would be big gossip if the DIL and son were estranged from the in-laws. But now, lots of us are spread out far and wide, and no one has to know if you have good relations with your family or not.

We are also less religious than we once were- where the message of forgiveness and emphasis on family is always present.

So if an issue does arise, there aren’t the same ties that we had in the past that bind us. So, it’s not as difficult to cut people off.

Now it’s a focus on love for family, in the past it wasn’t about that- it was about duty, moral obligation towards your family. So if you don’t feel the love there, then there’s nothing left.

Having said that, it has always happened. My grandmother lived in the same street as her sister and they had a fall out and never spoke for 40 years. But we weren’t allowed to talk about it. Maybe people feel able to now.

It has always happened, however I hope that this is the peak of estrangement and people learn to have healthier relationships.

I am not convinced it's more prevalent. I think the difference is that it's more specific in that people do it very consiously rather than letting things drift - because, as @Houseplanter says - in the past, you could just move a bit further away and bam, going LC became extremely easy. These days you can live 10000 miles from your family or in laws and expectations are still high.

My parents left England and moved to SA. Calls and letters from "home" were a rare treat and a huge event. Today, I'm back in the UK and I can whatsapp or call them whenever I want and vice versa. if they were high maintenance (they're not), that would be unbearable and instead of just casually going low contact without making a big deal about it, I'd have to sort of officailly cut them off.

A cousin of my dad moved to Australia - no bad bloood but it was so far away, there was just very little contact. One of her children has subsequently moved to the UK and I know they've been in contact with their mother's sibling and his children, but it's 20+ years in another country, there's not much in common there.

The New Yorker did a piece about this the other week.

I think it's just being talked about more, reducing the stigma so even more people say to friends "yeah, my family are nuts so I cut them off, and no, I don't feel bad"

Honestly I think we look at the past with rose tinted spectacles sometimes. There was tonnes of estrangement in the past but it was barely realised because without communication being so available you could go low contact and estrange without ever been seen or heard from again and people thought very little of it.

For lots of people life was very hard, there was little to no emotional support and this generation has had a massive pendulum swing because more time and money has meant many choices that were not available to past generations.

Family groups, social groups, religious groups and community groups are all slowly being fragmented.

My family were very close. All the siblings got on well together. Oldest brother was the golden chIld, but that was ok we all accepted that. Then he married. A truly horrible woman who bullied MIL for decades even when she was in her eighties and dying. MIL was terrified that if she didn’t give in to SIL she wouldn’t see her son or grandkids. She knew she was being bullied but was too weak to stand up to SIL. When she died we went no contact with that side of the family. The whole lot of the are hideous. We had put up with it for the sake of MIL for decades, but now we have a choice.

I think people have always done so, it was called “not talking to”. I definitely know a few in my parents generation. Sometimes relationships just break down beyond repair.

I find it really sad. I would love a close family situation. But it’s just not happened for reasons I don’t really understand. I’m hoping that newer generations will taken into account emotional health more and have healthier relationships so family’s don’t need to cut ties. It seems the generation of grandparents currently are still of the believe emotional and mental health is stupid.

redskydarknight

Boundaries just means expecting people to treat you well.
Personally I think it's helpful that you start with a basic expectation that people treat you well, rather than that you should "ride out the storm" because "family".

But in real life there’s times it seems people are treating others like shot eg ghosting/ nc etc where actually they’re going through shit. For family, and I’m talking obviously the families that at one point got along and were there for each other, obviously not cases of abuse, you’d say ‘there might be a reason’ and take their shot because you know there’s light at the end of the tunnel and you can help get them back. On mn: go nc

Escapetheirfamily

person who rips the family apart is the person who thinks it’s ok to be abusive towards their children, to bully, to be controlling, to be manipulative, to be demanding, to make snidey comments etc.

The person who walks away isn’t the one who rips the family apart, it’s the abuser/bully they have walked away from who has done that. But, yes, they usually do double down and blame their victim when that happens.

Nobody should have to tolerate any form of abuse for the sake of ‘family’.

I wasn’t talking about abuse, I’m talking eg someone doesn’t keep in contact so family member goes nc instead of trying to figure out what’s wrong and help the person through their stuff because they know it isn’t them x

This. It’s funny how so many people, estranged from family, for their perceived awful reasons, are suddenly up the front with Wills etc though.🙄

It’s compensation.

Yes, we have several family members on both sides who emigrated to the US and the UK in the early and mid-20thc and just never got in touch again. It's possible, of course, that they died almost immediately, but it seems unlikely they all did (individuals not known to one another, travelling at separate times over a period of a few decades).

One uncle was rediscovered in Manchester after nearly 30 years of silence. One of the men on the other side of the family left a wife and children at home (he was supposed to send for them once he'd raised the fares), but was never heard from again. It's possible he married again, bigamously, in the US.

Agree with this completely.

Often grief or anxiety can make people horrible, but if they've also got their good points, you give them a bit of leeway.

The other thing I can't understand is that when eg parents try to contact their estranged child, they're vilified for not accepting NC. Maybe, just maybe they want to reconcile but are not given the opportunity to do so.

I think the reason for that is usually when the estranged parent reaches out it’s just to attack further and switch the blame for everything onto the victim.
People don’t go NC with reasonable people. I think unless you have got to the point of needing to go NC it’s hard to understand.
Most people seem to have reasonable families with a few quirks. The good times outweigh any bad. That’s not what a toxic family is like. A toxic family is nearly all bad times, with a few ok moments. It’s soul destroying and erases your self-worth.

I don’t think many people go NC for minor things that can be sorted with a cup of tea and a chat.