Being part of and building a family yourself can be, I think, one of the greatest joys in life. 

And it can also be one of the most painful, challenging parts of it, too. 

And one aspect that may make it particularly hard is if you and your family are estranged. 

“Families. They keep me in business.”

This is something I’ll say from time to time with my therapy clients and, while this is usually meant as a joke, the seed of truth in that statement is that families – our families of origin and the families we try and choose to create ourselves – are complex, ever-changing, often triggering, living systems ripe with opportunity for growth and challenge.

And this – the challenging aspect of being part of a family – is, even more, the case if you come from a dysfunctional, abusive, neglectful, or chaotic family background.  

So, as a specific, topical follow up to my post from two weeks ago – “Siblings cope with trauma differently. Here’s why.” – I want to talk about what can possibly happen between siblings (and other family members) when trauma happens in a family and people deal with it differently.

I want to talk about family estrangement.

Specifically, why and how family estrangements happen, how surprisingly common estrangements are (but how we don’t necessarily hear about this!), how to cope with estrangement in your own family, and the rarely-discussed aspect of being estranged from your family that we *need* to acknowledge.

If you’d like to feel less alone in your experience of dealing with family estrangement, please keep reading.

What is family estrangement?

“You are never so a stranger as when you become a stranger.”  ― Luigina Sgarro

While there is no one, single definition, as I define it clinically, family estrangement is a loss or cessation of relationship that previously existed between family members, whether this is family-of-origin, in-laws, or families-of-choice.

Family estrangements can happen between parent and child. Sibling to sibling. Child to grandparent. Child to aunt/uncle. Or any iteration of relationship combination in between. 

They can happen between two people or a larger number of people. 

You can initiate one, or someone else (or multiple others) can initiate one.

Family estrangements bridge culture, country, socioeconomics, professions, religions, and gender. There’s no one single population group predisposed to family estrangement. 

Family estrangements are not relegated to happening in only certain life stages. They bridge time and can happen in adolescence, young adulthood, middle age, and late in life.

Moreover, family estrangement exists, I believe, on a spectrum of contact and distance. Ranging from having an informal strained, impersonal kind of occasional contact. (Think barely speaking to each other at holiday gatherings.) To having absolutely no contact at all and a formal cessation/boundary to the relationship. (Such as a legal disownment, a no-contact order, etc.)