I'm No Stranger to Family Estrangement

At age 47, I stopped speaking to my mother, age 72 at the time, and she to me. Just ceased all communications with her. No letters, no emails, no phone calls, no visits and no messages delivered through third parties. Nothing but thunderous silence prevailed.

Never mind why for now. Let's just say I decided I had had enough.

Around the same time, I broke away from other members of my family, too — my sister, uncles, aunts, cousins, nieces and nephews. All of whom, in turn, no longer contacted me either.

The experience was like quitting a job, except I was resigning, in effect, from my respective roles and responsibilities as a son, a brother, a nephew, a cousin and an uncle.

So I'm no stranger to estrangement. I may even have a dubious talent for it. In this I take no pride. Rather, I still feel, to this day, little but guilt and shame.

So goes life for so many others, unfortunately, especially parents in midlife and later. Such breakaways reflect a phenomenon increasingly studied but still widely misunderstood: the ugly conundrum of fractured families.

"Family estrangement is extremely commonplace, more prevalent than previously believed, and different at 50 plus because we're different at 50 plus," says Lucy Blake, senior lecturer in psychology at the University of the West of England and author of "No Family is Perfect: A Guide to Embracing the Messy Reality."

A 2022 YouGov survey of more than 11,000 Americans showed that 29% of people described themselves as estranged from an immediate family member, including grandparents. Similarly, a 2020 study from the Cornell Family Estrangement & Reconciliation Project concluded that 27% of adults over age 18 are estranged from a family member.

Older adults are plainly vulnerable, too. A survey of mothers from ages 65 to 75 with at least two living adult children found that about 17% were estranged from more than one child.

"Estrangement can be especially challenging for older people," says Rin Reczek, professor of sociology at Ohio State University and author of "Families We Lose," due out in 2025. "Older people have more accumulated experience, and therefore more baggage."

All of which raises numerous questions. What are the causes? The effects? The solutions?

The causes are many: abuse, alcoholism and conflicts over issues from money and career choices to divorce, remarriage and sexual orientation. Estrangement can arise from a single incident, but most often it's cumulative.

Family dynamics have changed dramatically over recent decades. The stigma of parting company with family has faded as a dirty little secret. Relaxed divorce laws and growing geographic mobility are factors, too. So, as well, is the ever-accelerating pursuit of individual rights and freedom of choice, even at all costs. Increasingly, if anything bothers us in the least, we want out.

A study of parents ages 46 to 81 estranged from an adult child found no fewer than 22 reasons for fallouts. Almost four out of five (79%) described the child as troubled or difficult, with 67% citing disagreements about beliefs and values, 49% separation or divorce and 42% financial problems or conflicts.

Shifting attitudes toward family itself figure as pivotal in the equation. A 2022 poll observed a stark disparity between how younger and older adults perceive the concept of family. Almost three-quarters age 65 and older (70%) regard family relationships as the most important. Only about half of adults under 30 feel the same.

All of these underlying currents may bode ill for our health. Many studies show that family estrangements can threaten our health, mind and body alike.

A study last year looked at how estrangement affected the health of mothers and adult children. Those who cut ties with each other reported worse self-rated health than those still in touch positively. "Even minor periods of strain can cause long-term consequences for well-being," concluded a 2022 study of ruptures between U.S. parents and adult children.

An equally telling study queried parents ages 61 to 80 estranged from adult children in later life. Most participants experienced the breakups as "an unanticipated, unchosen and chronic loss for which they felt ill-prepared." Researchers reported some parents described estrangement as a "psychosocial death" and "a roller-coaster of grief symptoms."

Family estrangement can hit adults 50 and older especially hard. The older we get, the more family relationships generally matter to us. Split-ups may sharply undermine emotional well-being and mental stability and intensify feelings of being excluded and socially disconnected. Distance from those once close can deepen the sense of loss, loneliness, isolation and grief. 

"The effect on families can be cataclysmic," says Joshua Coleman, a clinical psychologist and author of "Rules of Estrangement: Why Adult Children Cut Ties and How to Heal the Conflict." "Parents estranged from children and even grandchildren feel devastated — unmoored, even suicidal."

My mother and I lost contact with each other for almost 10 years. I had no idea even whether she was still alive, and vice versa.

But I never stopped questioning my strategy of retreat. I asked myself almost every day whether my decision to cut myself off from her was helping me or harming me.

My doubts never quite went away. My commitment felt at once deeply right yet deeply wrong.

But now I was pushing 57. And at last, I once again felt enough was enough. My father had died. I had only one parent left. I ended the silence.

"I miss you," I wrote in an email to my mother out of the blue. "We should see each other before it's too late."

She agreed, and we scheduled a get-together.

Experts are arguing more than ever against the longstanding assumption that breaking up with your family is automatically bad for you. Some leading researchers say reconciling with family members, though generally touted as the most desirable outcome, may be ill-advised. They counsel that withdrawing from a family that's toxic, abusive, neglectful or otherwise dysfunctional may be just what the doctor ordered.

Mounting evidence supports this view, suggesting that family schisms can, in fact, be beneficial in some cases. One study of estranged parents and adult children reported some respondents feeling "relief from conflict and anxiety" from staying apart.

In the end, these split-ups may be neither entirely healthy nor entirely unhealthy, but rather — as was the case with me — both at the same time.

My mother was now 80, her hair all white, but still beautiful. We smiled and said hello and hugged.

"You look good," I said.

"You, too," she said. "My handsome son." 

Over the next hour, we catch up. She had a boyfriend. I had a new job. Then we got down to business. I tried to explain my recent change of heart.

"I came here today so I can see you and you can see me — nothing more and nothing less," I said.  "We've both made mistakes. We've caused pain to each other and ourselves."

"Okay," my mother said, nodding her head.

"Nobody has to forget anything or forgive anything, either," I went on. "But everything that happened before no longer matters. Who did what to whom — none of it means anything anymore. Right now, we're face to face, together again. At this moment that's all I care about."  

"Okay," my mother repeated, louder now, as if to indicate case closed, and reached out to pat my hand.

"I'm sorry," I said.

"I'm sorry, too," she said.

We were once again mother and son, ready to start fresh. 

So what should you do if you're estranged from a relative? Let it be and just make do? Or try to reconnect?

According to experts, it depends on your circumstances and varies by each individual. Some may cope best going to a family therapist or support group. Others may seek to create alternative social networks to substitute as "families."

Promisingly, many family estrangements are temporary. Such splinterings, rather than solutions, are more likely stopgaps that compound the original problems. One national survey found that 81% percent of estranged adult children reported reconciling with their mothers and 69% with their fathers.

"If you're considering reconciling and wondering how to make the decision best for you," advises psychologist Joshua Coleman, "just imagine how you might feel in the future, or if you knew you were going to die tomorrow."

Shortly after reuniting with my mother, I realized I'd gone too long missing in action and feeling untethered from other family members. By now I had turned 61. If our family were ever to get back together, it had better be sooner rather than later. Why doom myself to live — and die — feeling incomplete?

Why I had bailed out in the first place was complicated. I had long felt like a black sheep, neglected and all but abandoned. I fell prey to expecting too much from my family — too much attention, affection and approval. But expecting too much can be a prescription for disappointment. The happiest people, research shows, have the narrowest gap between expectation and reality.

But my biggest mistake by far was never telling anyone in my family what bothered me, much less why I had vanished from sight. Going abruptly incommunicado was a disservice to everyone, probably most of all me.

In the end, I should have known better. I had let my frustrations get the best of me. Granted, any effort to confront my family about the truth might have failed. And I strongly suspect it would have. But at least I would have tried. And I could have gone on with my life knowing I had.

But that was then, and this was now. I decided yet again that enough was enough. And so I headed to Florida for Thanksgiving in 2013. There, I reunited with two aunts, then 85 and 79 and now both widows, and four first cousins, all of whom I had last seen at my father's funeral 17 years earlier.

My experiences with family estrangement makes me a reluctant authority on the subject. So let me offer my crash course in Reunion 101.

First, apologizing — if not for your actions per se then for any hard feelings you may have caused — never hurts.

Second, nobody needs to dredge up whatever originally went awry. Clearing the air with all the lawyerly particulars about who was right or wrong should be strictly optional.

Third, reunions may be awkward. Try though you do to catch up, you never really will. All the years lost can never be regained. Your relationships are unlikely ever to feel quite the same.

This much I've learned for sure. We're all running out of runway. Ultimately, estrangement reminded me of a song we sang as kids. Any time we rode our school bus on field trips, we created a chorus as soon as we reached our destination.

"We're here because we're here because we're here because we're here," we would sing. And so on, singsong-style, stanza after stanza the same.

That's how it is with our families. We're here because we're here because we're here because we're here. And as long as we're here, we might as well try to be here together.

Bob Brody, a long-time health journalist, is the author of the memoir “Playing Catch with Strangers: A Family Guy (Reluctantly) Comes of Age." His personal essays appear regularly in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and many other publications. Read More