By Annie Wright, LMFT · Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist (#95719)Clinically reviewed May 2026Should I get back in touch with them because of COVID-19?
LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026
Crisis has a way of making old distances feel wrong. Suddenly you want to reach out to people you cut off, or reconnect with family you’ve kept at arm’s length for good reasons. COVID-19 brought this up for a lot of people. This post is a clear-eyed look at how to think about those impulses: which reconnections are genuinely life-giving, and which ones are just the fear talking.
Last reviewed: June 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT
- COVID-19 is a magnifying glass.
- Major life matters may test the boundaries of our family estrangements.
- But in certain times and with certain events, the dull ache becomes an acute pain again, triggered vividly back to the top of our mind.
- Signs You May Be Carrying Relational Trauma
- We may begin to wonder any and all iterations of the question:
- Learning what others are doing to stay connected to families that seem to be more functional, close, and connected than yours can feel so hard, so triggering.
- Wrapping up.
- Additional Resources
- Frequently Asked Questions
- COVID-19 is a magnifying glass.
- Major life matters may test the boundaries of our family estrangements.
- But in certain times and with certain events, the dull ache becomes an acute pain again, triggered vividly back to the top of our mind.
- Signs You May Be Carrying Relational Trauma
- We may begin to wonder any and all iterations of the question:
- Major life matters may also trigger your experience of estrangement in other ways.
- Learning what others are doing to stay connected to families that seem to be more functional, close, and connected than yours can feel so hard, so triggering.
- If you’re navigating family strain and estrangement through COVID-19, consider this.
- Wrapping up.
- Navigating Crisis and Estrangement Through Boundary-Affirming Therapy
- Additional Resources
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”
Mary Oliver, poet and Pulitzer Prize winner
COVID-19 is a magnifying glass.
Boundaries are the psychological limits that define where one person ends and another begins, encompassing emotional, physical, time, and energy parameters. Healthy boundaries are not walls or acts of aggression; they are acts of self-definition that communicate what you need to feel safe, respected, and whole in your relationships.
In so many ways and with so many subjects, it’s forced our focused attention to issues that, in life BC (before COVID) we may normally have pushed aside, the content we could postpone and ignore with the day-to-day movement and vigor of activity that life allowed.
If you're ready for the full healing arc, not a single piece of it, my signature program Fixing the Foundations is the structured path your relational trauma recovery has been missing.
Family estrangement refers to a state of distance, reduced contact, or complete cutoff from one or more family members, typically stemming from a history of harm, dysfunction, or irreparable conflict. Contrary to popular perception, research suggests that estrangement is most often initiated by adult children who experienced childhood abuse, neglect, or ongoing harmful behavior from parents or siblings, and that it is typically a carefully considered last resort rather than an impulsive decision.
SUMMARY
Crises have a way of making estrangement feel urgent and even selfish, suddenly you’re wondering if you should reach out to a family member you’ve deliberately distanced from, if you’re being cold, if life is too short for this kind of distance. This post helps you think through that question with clarity rather than crisis-driven reactivity, distinguishing between genuine readiness and fear-based impulse, and offering a grounded framework for making a decision you can stand behind.
COVID-19 has forced our attention to matters big and small. From big, penultimate issues like making meaning of our lives and facing our mortality. To “smaller” issues such as how robust our emergency savings accounts are. Or ways in which we’ve neglected or tended well to our health. Or family estrangement, and whether we need to reach back out to our families of origin.
This has, as far as I can tell, felt collectively hard for most of us.
And for some, in addition to all the other hard issues COVID-19 has brought to the forefront, there may also be a heightened awareness of another hard issue typically on the back burner of the mind: the family strain or estrangement you live with and the looming question of how and what to do with those relationships and the situation given the times.
Moving through the times of COVID-19 is a complex, multifaceted experience.
And if one facet of your experience has included feeling triggered by being estranged from (or strained with) your family and confused as to how to proceed, today’s post is meant to speak to you.
To support you, to see you, to provide you with tools, inquiries, and some words of comfort.
Major life matters may test the boundaries of our family estrangements.
COVID-19, much like other big and challenging life matters, brings our reality of family estrangement vividly back into our awareness.
Often, those who have estranged themselves from a parent, a sibling, a grandparent, or other family members, can go about their lives aware, of course, of the dull ache of the estrangement, but with the experience relatively normalized.
It hurts, yes, but, with time, there’s a certain acclimation to the hurt.
Normalcy to it, again, over time.
After the acute pain of the estrangement has passed, you get up, go to work, hang out with friends and your SO, cook dinner, watch Netflix, scroll through Instagram and fall asleep.
Getting up the next morning to do it all over again.
It’s not like your awareness of the strain and estrangement with your family of origin (or in-laws) escapes you, it’s not like you forget, but it’s also not at the very forefront of your attention as you move through everyday life.
A condition in which one or more family members voluntarily or involuntarily reduce or cease contact with another family member, typically in response to abuse, betrayal, value conflicts, or chronic relational harm. Jennifer Freyd, PhD, professor emerita of psychology and the researcher who coined the term betrayal trauma, notes that estrangement decisions are often preceded by long periods of hope, attempts at repair, and profound grief. They are rarely impulsive, and they are rarely without cost.
In plain terms: Family estrangement isn’t a decision driven women make lightly or easily. It usually comes after years of trying. Of hoping the relationship would change, of absorbing harm, of convincing yourself it wasn’t that bad. Choosing distance isn’t the same as giving up on love; it’s often the most loving thing you can do for yourself.
But in certain times and with certain events, the dull ache becomes an acute pain again, triggered vividly back to the top of our mind.
I’ve written about this before but, in my personal and professional experience, many concrete and also abstract events can catalyze this: weddings, family-centered holidays, anniversaries, birthdays, funerals, new babies into the family.
These external, calendric and life stage events can force the reality of our situation back into our awareness, the dull ache becoming acute or at least more of a throb.
Abstract events, too, can force this same kind of shift in our awareness: aging, illness, catastrophes, and crises big and small, whether this happens to you or the other person, these more abstract events can likewise bring the family strain and estrangement we live with back into our attention.
RESEARCH EVIDENCE
Peer-reviewed findings that inform this clinical framework:
- Culturally adapted interventions reduced PTSD symptoms more than non-adapted (7 RCTs, n=213, SMD -0.67, 95% CI [-1.06, -0.25]) (PMID: 40013535)
- Lifetime PTSD prevalence highest among Blacks (8.7%), lowest among Asians (4.0%); Blacks had higher conditional PTSD risk vs Whites (aOR 1.22) (PMID: 20346193)
- Lifetime PTSD prevalence lower in Asians (1.64%) and Latinos (3.77%) vs Whites (5.59%); Asians OR 0.26 vs Whites (PMID: 30378513)
- Blacks showed reduced posttraumatic depression (M=52.98) and anxiety (M=6.63) vs Whites and Hispanics; differences attenuated by prior trauma exposure (PMID: 35094717)
- Non-Hispanic Blacks (21.2%) and Hispanics (20.8%) had higher polyvictimization (≥4 trauma types) than Whites (15.5%); mediated ethnic disparities in mental health symptoms (PMID: 26048339)
A form of loss that occurs without closure or clear understanding, in which the person lost is neither fully present nor fully absent. Introduced by family therapist Pauline Boss, PhD, ambiguous loss describes the particular grief of mourning someone who is still alive but emotionally or relationally unavailable. As is common in family estrangement, addiction, and certain mental health conditions. Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher and author of The Body Keeps the Score, notes that ambiguous losses are among the most difficult to process because the normal rituals of grief don’t apply.
In plain terms: Ambiguous loss is the grief that doesn’t have a funeral. It’s missing a parent who is alive but never really showed up, or mourning the family you wished you’d had. This kind of grief can feel especially confusing during a crisis. When the world says ‘call your family,’ and your family is the source of the wound.
Signs You May Be Carrying Relational Trauma
Take this 5-minute, 25-question quiz to find out. And learn what to do next if you do.
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Moreover, these concrete and abstract life events can also challenge the boundaries we’ve set to not have contact with certain people in our lives.
The boundary that once set when someone was, perhaps, healthier, more resourced, more equipped, now can be tested if we discover the person is more vulnerable, more exposed.
The boundary may be tested, too, if we are more vulnerable, more exposed.
We may begin to wonder any and all iterations of the question:
“Should I get back in touch with them?”
“Is it worth it?”
“Do I keep my distance? Do I still stay no contact?”
“They don’t have anyone else, shouldn’t I be of support? I don’t want to be in touch but I feel like I should…”
“What would [my other family member] say if they knew I was getting in touch with them?”
“Dad’s estranged from Grandpa. What’s he going to do or say if I order grocery delivery for Grandpa now?”
“Mom has no one else. It’s just me. No siblings. Am I going to be responsible for her estate? Her funeral? How do I know?”
“What if they die and I didn’t say goodbye?…”
“What if I die without being back in touch with her? Do I really want to do that?”
“How do I know what to do?”
Have any of these questions been up for you as a result of COVID-19?
Has this global pandemic pressure tested any of your boundaries and caused you to question and revisit them?
Has this been an aspect, a facet of your experience we move through this world event?
Major life matters may also trigger your experience of estrangement in other ways.
There’s another piece, too, another facet that COVID-19 may be bringing to your unique experience in addition to pressure testing and challenging any boundaries you’ve established: feeling further isolated within an isolation experience and jealous of those who have different experiences.
Feeling alone and isolated is a common experience for those who have experienced family estrangements and strained relationships.
When you couple this everyday experience with the actual isolation that COVID-19 is imposing, it’s possible that you’re more acutely aware of your loneliness than before.
And, what’s more, you might feel terribly sad and jealous as you watch or hear about other people and their families making efforts to bridge the physical distance divide: Sunday evening family Zoom hangouts, gathering to sing to Grandma outside her nursing home for her birthday, virtual birthday parties, Facetime storybook readings to the grandkids, committing as a group to playing WOW or Animal Crossing on Saturday afternoons.
Learning what others are doing to stay connected to families that seem to be more functional, close, and connected than yours can feel so hard, so triggering.
And if you reside inside a marriage where your partner is estranged from family (or really strained with them), you may have all of the questions COVID-19 raises (“Shouldn’t we be in touch with them now?”) but in a double bind reckoning with your partner’s wishes, possibly upset with them, upset at the whole messy, family experience you married into and inherited.
To live with family strain and estrangement at the best of everyday times is one thing.
To live with it through an unprecedented global pandemic may feel harder.
If this is you, if in any way your boundaries are feeling challenged or if you’re feeling extra triggered and sad, I want you to know that I get it. I get what you’re going through. I see you.
This IS hard. This is sad. This is complex.
What you live with because of your family strain and estrangement will always add a different facet to your experience of most major life events in the way that someone who is close and connected to a relatively functional family won’t have to contend with.
So what is there to do if you, like so many of us, likewise have to contend with this facet of the experience along with all the other facets that COVID-19 is bringing to the world?
I have some thoughts.
If you’re navigating family strain and estrangement through COVID-19, consider this.
If you are navigating family strain and estrangement through COVID-19, I want you to consider caring for yourself and your experience in even more radically-supportive ways as you would if your hard context was being triggered by family-centric holidays or other triggering events.
I want you to practice exceptionally good and kind self-care, of course, but I want you, too, to see what elements you long for but don’t exactly have that you could recreate in the social sphere and environment you have.
Put plainly, in the same way I talk so often about the criticality of re-parenting yourself or cultivating a second-chance-family-of-choice, I want you to imagine leaning on non-triggering social supports and getting creative about how you can meet your emotional needs.
If no relationships can easily provide that for you, I want you to, at least, put yourself in contact with those who may be able to relate to your uniquely faceted experience: folks who get what it is to be estranged from their families at this time.
Wrapping up.
More than anything else, please give yourself grace and compassion for how doubly hard this experience of COVID-19 may feel for you if dealing with being estranged from your family or strained with your family.
Take all the wonderful self-care and self-compassion advice that’s being offered on the internet and double down on it.
You live with hard at the best of times. And this is clearly not the best of times.
COVID-19 is shaping up to be a marathon, not a sprint, which is a pace those of us who live with family dysfunction know so well: it’s long. And it can feel hard.
Here’s to healing relational trauma and creating thriving lives on solid foundations.
Warmly,
Annie
Navigating Crisis and Estrangement Through Boundary-Affirming Therapy
When you arrive at therapy during crisis questioning every boundary you’ve set, wondering if pandemic changes the calculus of no-contact, feeling guilty about not checking on vulnerable family members who once harmed you, your therapist helps you understand that expecting emotional support from people who’ve never provided it is like continuing to go to the hardware store for milk, and that crisis doesn’t magically transform dysfunctional relationships into supportive ones. They validate how much harder it is to maintain boundaries when the whole world seems to be pulling families together while yours remains unsafe.
The therapeutic work involves distinguishing between crisis-triggered guilt and genuine desire for reconnection. Your therapist helps you examine whether fundamental dynamics have changed or just circumstances, is your mother less narcissistic or just more isolated? Is your father actually taking accountability or just frightened and alone?
Together, you explore how emergency situations can create false urgency around reconciliation, making you feel responsible for others’ wellbeing even when they never took responsibility for yours.
Your therapist holds space for the unique grief of watching others have pandemic family Zooms while you’re doubly isolated, isolated by isolation and by family estrangement. They help you recognize that jealousy toward functional families isn’t petty but informative, pointing toward legitimate needs for connection that require creative solutions.
Together, you explore how to build pandemic pods with chosen family, create virtual gatherings with friends, or find online communities of others navigating estrangement during crisis.
Through this work, you learn that maintaining boundaries during crisis isn’t cruel but necessary self-preservation. Your therapist helps you develop responses to both internal guilt and external pressure, creating scripts for well-meaning friends who don’t understand why you won’t “just call your mom” during pandemic.
Most importantly, they affirm that living with estrangement during global crisis is genuinely doubly difficult, you’re not being dramatic or self-pitying but accurately assessing the additional burden of managing collective trauma without family support, deserving of doubled self-compassion and radical self-care.
Additional Resources
- A grounding and nourishing meditation. (spoken by me, for you)
- A recipe for robust mental health: 13 ingredients. (one of my articles)
- A pep talk for those times when you’re struggling. (one of my blog posts)
- A few words of comfort on very hard days. (one of my blog posts)
- When life feels impossible. A note from me to you. (one of my blog posts)
- 101 self-care suggestions when it all feels like too much. (one of my blog posts)
- 101 reasons why it will all be okay. (one of my blog posts)
- 99 Uplifting quotes to spark your soul and see you through hard times. (one of my blog posts)
- Adulting’s not always easy. And humaning can be hard. (one of my blog posts)
Related Reading
- What does it mean to be an ambitious, upwardly mobile woman from a relational trauma background?
- Attachment Trauma: How Early Relationships Shape Your Adult Connections
- Trauma and Relationships: When Your Professional Strengths Become Your Relationship Blindspots
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Both/And: Your Drive and Your Wounds Can Both Be Real
The driven women I work with often arrive in therapy with an unspoken fear: if they stop pushing, everything falls apart. If they let themselves feel what they’ve been outrunning, they’ll never get back up. So they frame the choice in binary terms. Keep performing or collapse. In my clinical experience, neither option is necessary.
Tasha is an executive at a major tech company who hadn’t taken a sick day in three years. When she finally came to therapy, it wasn’t because she decided to. It was because her body decided for her. Migraines, insomnia, a jaw so clenched her dentist flagged it. She told me, “I can’t afford to fall apart,” and I told her the truth: she was already falling apart. She just hadn’t given herself permission to notice. What Tasha needed wasn’t to dismantle her drive. It was to stop treating her own pain as an inconvenience to her productivity.
Both/And means this: you can be the person who delivers exceptional results at work and the person who cries in the car afterward. You can be fiercely competent and quietly terrified. You can want more and still appreciate what you have. These aren’t contradictions. They’re the full truth of what it means to be a driven woman navigating a world that rewards your output but not your wholeness.
Aarti (name and details changed) is a forty-one-year-old physician who cut contact with a sibling eight months before the pandemic began. When COVID arrived, she found herself facing the question differently than she’d expected: not “should I reconnect?” but “why does this feel different now?” What she eventually identified was that the pandemic had surfaced an older, quieter longing. The wish that the estrangement had never been necessary, that the family she’d needed had existed rather than the one she actually got. Both/And held space for both of those truths: the estrangement was the right decision, AND she was allowed to grieve the family she wished she’d had. Those two realities don’t cancel each other out.
The Systemic Lens: Why Individual Solutions Can’t Fix Structural Problems
Driven women are systematically taught to locate the source of their suffering internally. If you’re burned out, you need better boundaries. If you’re anxious, you need more mindfulness. If your relationships are strained, you need to communicate better. This framing isn’t accidental. It serves a function. It keeps the focus on individual behavior and away from the structural conditions that make individual behavior so costly.
Consider what the typical driven woman manages in a single day: high-stakes professional work, emotional labor in relationships, mental load of household management, caregiving responsibilities, her own physical and mental health, and the performance of equanimity required to be taken seriously in all of these domains. No one designed this workload to be sustainable because no one designed it at all. It accrued. The result of decades of women entering professional spaces without the domestic and structural supports being redesigned to accommodate that shift.
In my clinical work, I’ve found that naming these systemic forces is itself therapeutic. When a driven woman realizes that her struggle isn’t evidence of personal inadequacy but a predictable response to impossible conditions, something shifts. The shame loosens. The self-blame softens. And she can begin to make choices based on what she actually needs rather than what the system tells her she should be able to handle.
If what you’ve read here resonates, I want you to know that individual therapy and executive coaching are available for driven women ready to do this work. You can also explore my self-paced recovery courses or schedule a complimentary consultation to find the right fit.
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Ines is a 42-year-old executive who has been estranged from her mother for four years. The estrangement was deliberate and necessary. The product of a relationship that had been chronically harmful and that, despite years of effort, didn’t change. But when COVID arrived, something unexpected happened: the cultural messaging about connection and family activated a grief she thought she’d processed. “Everyone was talking about calling their families,” she told me. “And I kept thinking: I don’t have that. I made a deliberate choice not to have that. And somehow it still hurt.”
This is one of the more difficult things about family estrangement that doesn’t get named often enough: you can make the right decision and still grieve it. The estrangement can be entirely justified. Necessary for your safety and wellbeing. And still represent a loss that requires mourning. Both things are true. The rightness of the decision doesn’t eliminate the grief. And the grief doesn’t mean the decision was wrong.
If the pandemic has surfaced questions about your own family relationships. Whether to reconnect, how to manage contact that feels obligatory but harmful, how to hold grief for relationships that couldn’t be what you needed them to be. That’s exactly the kind of work that trauma-informed therapy is designed to support. You don’t have to figure this out alone. And you don’t have to choose between honoring your healing and acknowledging your grief. Both belong.
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Yes, it’s perfectly okay to reach out if you feel ready. Reconnecting can provide emotional support and strengthen your social network, but trust your intuition and prioritize relationships that feel safe and positive.
Consider how the relationship made you feel before losing contact and whether reconnecting aligns with your current values and emotional needs. Reflect on whether the person brings positivity or stress into your life, and take small steps if you choose to reach out.
Feeling anxious is normal because social dynamics have shifted and you might fear rejection or awkwardness. It’s important to acknowledge these feelings and remind yourself that many people are also navigating similar uncertainties.
Reconnecting can enhance your sense of belonging and reduce feelings of isolation, which benefits mental health. However, be mindful to engage with those who support your well-being and avoid relationships that cause additional stress.
If old relationships trigger trauma or negative emotions, approach reconnection cautiously and consider seeking support from a therapist. Prioritize your emotional safety and set boundaries to protect your mental health.
Further Reading on Relational Trauma
Explore Annie’s clinical writing on relational trauma recovery.
References
Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)
- van der Kolk BA, Wang JB, Yehuda R, Bedrosian L, Coker AR, Harrison C, et al. Effects of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD on self-experience. PLoS One. 2024;19(1):e0295926. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0295926. PMID: 38198456.
- Gómez JM, Smith CP, Gobin RL, Tang SS, Freyd JJ. Collusion, torture, and inequality: Understanding the actions of the American Psychological Association as institutional betrayal. J Trauma Dissociation. 2016;17(5):527-544. PMID: 27427782.
Books & Cultural Sources (Chicago Author-Date)
- Oliver, Mary. Devotions. Little, Brown Book Group Limited, 2017.
WAYS TO WORK WITH ANNIE
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Annie Wright, LMFT
LMFT · Relational Trauma Specialist · W.W. Norton Author
Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.
Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719) and trauma-informed executive coach with over 25,000 clinical hours. She works with driven women. Including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs. In repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.
Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT #95719)
15,000+ direct clinical hours
California · Connecticut · Washington DC · Florida · Maine · Maryland · New Hampshire · New Jersey · Texas · Virginia · Washington
Creator of House of Life™ and Fixing the Foundations™
The Everything Years (W.W. Norton)
Founder & former CEO, Evergreen Counseling
Regular contributor to Psychology Today. Expert commentary has appeared in Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information.
