Fault Lines: Fractured Families and How to Mend Them

by Karl Pillemer

Estrangement is hidden within the confines of the family and, when revealed, implies failure, poor judgment, and suspicious family secrets.

you that your family’s situation is not the worst or the weirdest in the world, and that you are not alone.

Cornell Family Reconciliation Project. The research includes the most extensive in-depth interview study ever conducted on family estrangement and reconciliation.

families. We want closeness, but we simultaneously seek independence. We feel obliged to assist our family members, but we also resent their demands. When it comes to our typically untidy family lives, most people nod in agreement with the fully ambivalent old expression “Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em!”

Of all the regrets older people have, a family estrangement is often the most painful.

but I found myself stuck. I had learned an enormous amount about the “fractured families” in the subtitle. I was pretty much lost, however, on the topic of “how to mend them.”

fathers lamented the absence of loving grandparents in their offspring’s lives, while elders longed for a lost relationship with grandchildren.

when I asked individuals in the throes of a family rift what counsel they would offer, I most often received the answer: “Well, if I knew what to do about estrangement, I would have already done it myself!”

I was haunted by the image of a vast canyon with crowds of people on either side, standing paralyzed at the edges.

separation, stonewalling, and avoidance

I haven’t depended on them since I was a teenager. But the idea of not having any contact or any relationship with them doesn’t cross my mind—it really doesn’t. I’d have to change my self-image, to be somebody else, in order to abandon them.

“My dad’s not capable of saying he’s sorry, because he doesn’t really understand the ramifications of his actions. I can still be in a relationship with them and not own whatever they have going on. The biggest thing is being comfortable with who I am and the choices that I’ve made.”

scarred by fault lines and vast rifts. Yet Tricia and, as it turned out, many other people managed to build a bridge.

sample of one hundred reconciled individuals from across the country and all walks of life.

Scientific findings can help us step out of our own immediate situations and see how larger social and psychological forces push and pull our emotional responses to relationships.

estrangement is shaped by attachment and rejection,

self-esteem and defensiveness sheds light on how people become st...

Individuals in family rifts become so fixed in their own narratives that it becomes impossible to assess the facts of the situation or to adopt new perspectives in light of changed circumstances.

pervasive family rifts are in our society. These facts can help dispel the sense of isolation

Connections among parents, children, and siblings are “hardwired” into us, such that complete separation is among the most painful experiences in adulthood.

chronic stress,

aftershocks of a family rift for other relatives, which often force them to take sides. This “collateral damage” can separate grandparents from grandchildren

single event that appears to have been the cause. I term these incidents “volcanic events,”

the process of overcoming an estrangement can be an engine for personal growth.

We are living through one of the most extraordinary demographic changes in history: the dramatic increase in the human life span. This means that the amount of time children spend in the home with their parents is only a fraction of the shared lifetime they will have together. Indeed, after our offspring reach age eighteen, we are likely to have thirty, forty, or even fifty more years to go in the relationship. Our sibling ties may now last ninety or more years. The huge “longevity bonus” means that our family relationships can affect us—positively or negatively—for many decades.

estranged people should not feel they are isolated in corners, because it’s not just happening to them, and they should share it. It’s letting the news out that you are not alone. This is happening in many families, and when someone hears our story, they may then say, “We have it too.”

I heard one particular phrase over and over: “I thought I was the only one.”

My mother completely rejected me. She said some harsh things to me and told me that I had made a vow to God and I had disobeyed my marriage vows. I would hear from people I knew that she was talking about me and praying for me that I would see things the way that she wanted me to see things. I had made a decision to better myself and to become happy, and my mother could not understand that and didn’t want to understand it. So we were estranged for over five years.

Society’s expectations for family life compound the feelings of aloneness. We still hold to the cultural ideal that the family should be, in the famous words of Christopher Lasch, “a haven in a heartless world.” Family means unbreakable bonds, loyalty in even the most trying circumstances. We present our family lives in idealized ways on social media. On Facebook, there are many photos of happy family events, but few of relatives sulking and weeping after a fight.

It is different from family feuds, from high-conflict situations, and from relationships that are emotionally distant but still include contact. As later chapters in this book make clear, the declaration of “I am done”

Over one-quarter of Americans surveyed—27 percent—reported currently being estranged from a relative. Extrapolated to the U.S. adult population, that’s around 67 million people.

When I removed those who said they were not upset at all about the rift, the percentage of estranged people dropped from 27 percent to 22 percent—not a major reduction.

half of the respondents had not had contact with the relative for four years or more.

do family rifts primarily occur in a small subset of the population? I learned that the answer to that question is clearly no.

middle-aged people are more likely to report being estranged because they have a larger potential pool of relatives with whom rifts might occur.

Most parents and children make it through life without becoming estranged. But lots of people experience just such a fracture and suffer greatly as a result.

The playwright Anton Chekhov described the common belief that everyone else’s life is better than our own, writing: “Think of all the people who go to the market to buy food, who eat in the daytime and sleep at night, who prattle away, merry . . . But we neither hear nor see those who suffer, and the terrible things in life are played out behind the scenes.” Psychologists have shown that we overestimate our own emotional problems in comparison with others’, because most of us suppress our negative emotions when we are out in public. We are, as the psychologist Alexander Jordan has pointed out, “embarrassed by our own sadness.” He explains: “With everyone reluctant to express their genuine attitudes lest they be embarrassed or rejected by peers, people end up feeling more alone in their private attitudes than is warranted.”

The more she tried to get me to see things her way or believe her beliefs, the further it pushed me away. I want to understand what led us here. You’re always thinking of what has transpired and how you were treated. I reached a point where I was continually saying, “Why me,

our values differed. I made my choices to be happy. In my eyes, I think God would want me to be happy. But my mother was not open and didn’t want to hear what was going on with me.

done trying, done working to make the relationship better, done accommodating demands, done overlooking intolerable behavior, done apologizing for a lifestyle to someone who does not approve, or done with disrespect for a spouse

I’m not going to drain myself. I feel like I’ve wasted far, far too much of my inner and outer life wrestling with family-of-origin issues. I just don’t want to waste any more of it. I don’t want to give that emotional energy away anymore.”

each situation is unique; of my 270 interviews, there are 270 individual routes to standing on the edge of the rift with a relative on the other side. No two families are alike; history, personalities, and traumatic events combine in infinitely diverse ways.

If it is not possible to pinpoint a single cause of family rifts (and a Nobel Prize awaits whoever does), we can do the next best thing: Identify what some journeys to estrangement have in common.

six common routes to the destination “I’m done.”

There was a pivotal moment when I felt like he wanted to have a relationship with us only on his terms. He would cancel or not show up for something all the time, but if I canceled on him or if I was too busy, he was deeply offended. He would yell at me and insult me. The last time, he was yelling at me on the phone, and I reached a point where I said to him, “I’m going to hang up the phone, because if you can’t speak to me like an adult, then I don’t want to speak to you. When you’re ready to speak to me like an adult, then call me back.” And he never did. And here we are.

in-laws can be seen as interlopers who disturb the family’s equilibrium. Cindy Barber summed up this fact succinctly: I figured out a long time ago that the only trouble with in-laws is that they are not you. They don’t have the history you have. That’s what makes your family easier to deal with, because you know what to expect. But your in-laws’ biggest sin is they’re not you and they’re not your family.

my parents took the stance of “No, it’s just her, this was all Camille, and we’re not going to apologize for it.” It’s clear to me that when Camille came into the picture, it shined the light on a lot of dysfunction that my family had, but they couldn’t see that. I was very much a scapegoat in my family, and Camille shook the family system.

Money may not be the root of all evil, but it is at the heart of many estrangements. Conflicts over money that contribute to estrangements include failing to pay back a loan, deceiving a family member out of his or her funds, and not providing financial support when a relative believes it is necessary.

an estate can be equal without being perceived as fair. For example, a daughter who gave up work to care for her frail parents may expect to receive a greater portion of the estate than her brother who never even visited.

Research has shown that inheritance exerts a powerful symbolic force that transcends the financial impact. As the sociologist Jacqueline Angel points out, wills can convey favoritism or disapproval in a way that is legally irrevocable and eternal. Everyday objects that take on intangible worth are fought over.