He's 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.”

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 the forthcoming “Families We Lose.” “Older people have more accumulated experience, and therefore more baggage.”

All of which raises some questions: What are the causes? The effects? The solutions?

The causes are many: abuse, alcoholism and conflicts over 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 in recent decades. The stigma of parting company with family has faded. Relaxed divorce laws and growing geographic mobility are factors, too. So is the ever-accelerating pursuit of individual rights and freedom of choice. Increasingly, if anything bothers us in the least, we want out.

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.

A 2024 study 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.

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 and deeply wrong.

But now I was pushing 57, and I 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.”

Experts are disputing the longstanding assumption that breaking up with your family is automatically bad for you. Some 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.

Over the next hour, we caught 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.”

“OK,” 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.”

“OK,” my mother repeated, louder now, as if to indicate case closed, and reached out to pat my hand.

“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 person. Some may cope best going to a family therapist or support group. Others may seek to create alternative social networks to substitute as families.

Many family estrangements are temporary. Such splintering is more likely a solution that compounds the original problem. One national survey found that 81% percent of estranged adult children reported reconciling with their mothers, and 69% with their fathers.

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. 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. Going abruptly incommunicado was a disservice to everyone, probably most of all me. I had let my frustrations get the best of me. Granted, any effort to confront my family about the truth might have failed — but at least I could have gone on with my life knowing I had tried.

So, I headed to Florida for Thanksgiving in 2013. I reunited with two aunts, then 85 and 79 and both widows, and four first cousins, 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.

Second, nobody needs to dredge up whatever originally went awry. Talking about the particulars of who was right or wrong should be strictly optional.

Third, reunions may be awkward. You will never really catch up; all the years lost can never be regained. Your relationships are unlikely to ever feel quite the same.

But this much I’ve learned: 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 sang a chorus as soon as we reached our destination:

“We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here.”