Event: Alice

Around the time nineteen-year-old Alice began cutting ties with her family, she announced on social media that she was bisexual and grateful for her “found family.” The phrase was new to her parents, Greg and Tammy, but the sentiment wasn’t. Alice had acquired a new group of friends and had become intensely political. She chopped her hair, developed a hard sartorial edge, and became easily angered and agitated by her parents and siblings. They tiptoed around her. She dismissed them as “toxic” and “Jesus freaks.” Though conventionally religious, her parents tell me no one would have described them as preachy or culture warriors. After months of unpredictable outbursts and withdrawal, Alice decided to go no contact. Alice’s story reflects a broader phenomenon I examine in my forthcoming book, No Contact. Family estrangement isn’t new, and sometimes, especially in cases of abuse, it’s tragically warranted. Like a healthy immune system, we need the capacity to identify and expel what threatens us. But the rising phenomenon of no contact is more like an autoimmune disease in which the body’s defenses mistake what belongs to it for a threat. Those swept up in this phenomenon can lose the ability to distinguish the dangerous from the difficult; they end up attacking indiscriminately what is in fact vital. At the same time, an expanding ecosystem, comprised of therapists, influencers, and online forums, has recast estrangement as an empowering act of boundary-setting and self-care. The “family myth” to be discarded, in this view, is the belief that familial relationships are worthy of special regard in a way that entails durable obligations. The heretofore commonly understood mandate to “honor thy father and mother” becomes an antiquated notion that serves as a fig leaf for oppression. Today, estrangement plagues a substantial share of families. Cornell sociologist Karl Pillemer’s…