Right now I think about 1/3 of families I know well (our family, our close friends) have a No Contact or Low Contact situation with at least one member of their immediate family.
Discovered in talking to people that in MOST cases it didn't start with the current generation but is a repeating pattern.
Example: my great-grandmother left home when she married, and in those days distance meant letters, a rare in-person meet-up. My grandmother told me she only met her grandmother once before she passed. The distance was not insignificant but it WAS under a day trip.
My grandmother did the same: married, moved about a day's travel away from HER parents and - again, occasional letters but my mother said she only met HER grandmother twice that she knew of.
My mother moved a MUCH father distance. But travel was easier. I saw my grandmother several times before she died - rarely did my mother spend time with her and when she fell ill, my mother suggested I go to my grandmother's side, she wouldn't go.
My sister lived with my mother until my mother passed, and put a huge wall between me & my mother, manipulating both of us to create distance and suspicion. Too late I realized I'd been manipulated. I did what I coulld to mend our relationship in the last years of her life.
Now, one of my daughters has gone LC for the last three years, my other daughter went from LC to NC over several years.
I'm looking at this and wondering: what will happen when they have daughters?
Are we being taught generation after generation to do this?
It seems when I ask about previous generations with friends who have gone LC or NC with their parents or have kids going LC or NC, sure enough, it happened over & over.
Learned patterns of estrangement? If a daughter sees her mother & grandmother being cold to one another, then it is the norm, it's OK, in fact it may even feel comfortable.
No learned example of closeness between generations of women perpetuates the pattern.
Thoughts?