By now, you may have seen the clip from Dr. Amanda Calhoun, a Yale-affiliated psychiatrist, telling MSNBC’s Joy Reid that this holiday season it’s “completely fine to not be around” family members or friends who “voted in ways that are against you” — “and to tell them why.”
The doctor even modeled a potential response for viewers, “I’m not going to be around you this holiday. I need to take some space for me.”
What you may not yet realize is how wildly popular this kind of boundary advice has become in America today — entering the public lexicon over the last decade as part of “therapy speak” that is “often wrongly applied in mainstream culture,” according to Rebecca Fishbein last year in The Washington Post.
The correct usage, most experts agree, is when a relationship becomes dangerous or abusive. Yet much like that ubiquitous word “trauma,” now over-applied to a wide spectrum of even commonplace discomforts, boundaries are suddenly everywhere — and for all sorts of reasons. After acknowledging genuinely good reasons for some family boundaries, Naomi Schaefer Riley observed earlier this fall in the Deseret News that more and more family members are cutting each other off “when good reasons are not present” and where “general family tensions” now “qualify” as trauma.
In The New Yorker this fall, journalist Anna Russell called intentional family estrangement a “process by which family members become strangers to one another, like intimacy reversed,” sharing indicators that this is on the rise. Discussion about it has “just exploded,” according to Yasmin Kerkez, co-founder of a family estrangement group — with the Reddit forum r/EstrangedAdultChild now at 45,000 members. And Carolyn Hax’s article “Husband’s daughter doesn’t like me and is skipping the holidays” was the most read in The Washington Post in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving — ahead of political appointments, big movies released and college football.
When boundaries are cruel
In the 2023 Post article on how “everyone is setting boundaries,” Fishbein, the author of “Good Things Happen to People You Hate,” highlights ways in which boundaries have sometimes been misused as a means of “controlling someone else’s behavior or making demands.”
More and more, normal folks are seeing evidence in their own relationships that well-intentioned boundary talk may have veered off track. One commenter on the Post article writes, “We have a young family member who cut us off two years ago for crossing her ‘boundaries’ — to this day we don’t know what boundary we crossed as she won’t tell us nor speak to us.”
This is far from the stated motives of early boundary proponents in the 1990s, with titles like “Boundaries: Where You End and I Begin.” And it’s hard to imagine Brené Brown, who further popularized boundary talk over a decade ago, being okay with promiscuous and callous boundary setting.
Defining a boundary as “what’s okay and what’s not okay,” this influential academic has called healthy boundaries a form of respect and takes pains to differentiate what she’s encouraging from “separation,” “division” or putting up “walls.”
Nonetheless, make no mistake: walls are definitely going up in America today, and not just on the southern border.
‘Are you going to stop me from seeing my grandkids?’
“In my wildest dreams, I never thought this kind of thing could happen because we were all so close,” one mother tells Valerie Hudson, another Deseret News contributor, recounting the pain of getting cut off abruptly from her child. “It hurts so much. It is a constant ache in my heart, a constant fear it’s going to be permanent, and now I’m on eggshells with my other daughters because now I know it can happen.”
Journalist Becca Bland describes the “fearful looks” people gave her when she began sharing her lasting estrangement from parents, admitting “I embody what all parents dread — that their own children might also give up on forgiving and healing.”
Yet “we are forgivable people,” the first mother tells Hudson. “We are not horrible people that we couldn’t work through this with our child.”
“Cancel culture” Hudson laments, seems to have worked its way “into the heart of the family.” Although there are clearly “abusive, destructive, shaming, humiliating parents,” author Joshua Coleman writes, “those aren’t the only parents that are getting estranged today. There are perfectly good, loving parents and grandparents who are getting cut off.”
I spoke to one such set of grandparents this weekend. “I can’t figure out what we’ve done,” they told me. Still, their last message to the estranged family member was: “I’m sorry for whatever I’ve done, I love you, I’m praying for you and I’m here for you with open arms whenever you’re ready.”
They have three close friends going through similar unexpected estrangements. When contact with grandparents suddenly goes away, this woman says, “What does a parent tell their children when grandparents are suddenly removed from their lives?”
Riley summarizes similar heartbreak in the stories she’s witnessed: “Parents who don’t know what they did wrong, parents who would happily accept any kind of relationship with their children for just a chance at reconciliation.”
“Staggeringly few parents” see estrangement with their children coming, Hudson quotes Brian Briscoe — author of “Parents Living After Child Estrangement” — saying. Outside of typical family stressors, they often have “no idea the parent-child relationship was on the line.”
Even just the fear of potential estrangement can itself feel paralyzing. The father of “A Braver Way” podcast host Mónica Guzmán recalled fearing their earlier family disagreements could “break our relationship.” He got so worried he asked his daughter one day if they were “ever gonna be prevented from seeing our grandkids.”
An ache that continues
Journalist Anna Russell shares the story of Amy, who began to diverge from her parents’ faith sharply after starting to study at the university. Her visits became less frequent and “the topics that it felt safe to talk about just got smaller and smaller.”
Her parents openly lamented their decision for her to attend college — writing how their daughter used to be a “Bible quizzer,” but now “rarely picks up a Bible except to highlight the verses that she believes say the opposite of their obvious and orthodox meaning.”
While the one cutting off a family member may insist “it’s good for my mental health,” Coleman, author of “Why Adult Children Cut Ties & How to Heal the Conflict,” suggests a more honest evaluation must consider the rippling effects over time in the larger network of relationships (e.g., siblings divided against siblings, grandchildren estranged).
An adult child who is estranged over more minor issues, Hudson adds, is “modeling for their own children that the way to deal with strained family relationships is to sever them,” citing a woman quoted in The New York Times as carrying a “deep-seated fear that if I make one wrong move with someone I love they will cut me off forever” after watching this play out regularly in her family of origin: “I grew up in a family where extended family members would cut off other family and friends for reasons that were never really explained to me.”
In the absence of understanding, one grandmother felt prompted to just “do kind things.” So she tried that with her family member. Unfortunately, she soon found that “all those nice things” frustrated this family member even more — “she can’t stand it.”
“Every attempt we make to connect is violating their boundaries. Disrespecting them,” a mother told Hudson. “Every gift or card or birthday text is love bombing and manipulation. And oh my gosh, don’t keep it light … then you’re acting like nothing’s wrong so you for sure don’t want to fix things.” Also, “don’t tell them you love or miss them … that’s seen as guilt tripping them.”
“No matter what the parent does, the interpretive lens is rigid in its insistence the parent is doing something malign or manipulative,” Hudson observes — with rigid estrangement unfortunately functioning as a way to “deny that others have the potential to change and grow.”
Proselyting estrangement
Rather than a sad necessity to be grieved, these kinds of intentional separations are now being promoted by some influencers online as part of a broader movement to push back on cultural norms seen as over-prioritizing family.
While that option needs to be there for serious cases, unfortunately some popular influencers seem almost eager to encourage followers to draw boundaries with anyone who makes them uncomfortable — modeling language such as “My choices are not up for discussion; please don’t mention it again. … That’s a personal decision, and I’m not interested in discussing it with you.”
Alongside the classic “no contact” (”NC”), there’s now short-hand to go along with widespread encouragement nudging people to consider “low contact” (“LC”) and “very low contact” (“VLC”) relationships.
One commenter on Riley’s article, however, cautions against trite explanations for people choosing to cut out parents and family. Rather than just a “social media trend,” she writes that “deciding to estrange from parents/family is the hardest decision anyone has to make and is done as a last resort when it becomes clear that the hurtful relationship dynamics have no hope of improving.” For some, a period of no contact can feel important for “self-preservation” and a “necessary space for healing.”
“There are times in all of our lives when we need to draw some lines,” Carol Rice affirms in Public Square Magazine, before warning that if it becomes “unbalanced … such boundary advice may effectively harden and estrange relationships” — especially as influencers model language that effectively “shuts down meaningful conversation and encourages family members to essentially cut themselves off from relationships as a whole.”
Cutting off family members over more pedestrian disagreements, a commentator on Hudson’s article suggests, is the “epitome of living in an echo chamber.” In such a case, it’s more than “simply space” relationships, Rice says, to much more of a “chasm” as family respect is “hollowed out and replaced with automatic resistance and even contempt.”
Some of the boundary demands can seem downright self-absorbed — “We know you don’t like the boundaries we’ve set, but if we say it’s not a good time, it’s not a good time.” One family told me their Christmas gifts to grandchildren were resold online soon after the holiday.
In these kinds of situations, my colleague remarked, “the dispute means more to people than the relationship.”
A time for some space
To reiterate, there can be moments for any of us when a little space is healthy. That could be true with our recent election, where feelings may be raw after years of heightened anticipation.
“I do not blame people who, in moments such as this, feel the need to remove certain people from their lives,” wrote John Wood Jr. after the election, a National Ambassador for Braver Angels. Yet “democracy is not served by destroying our own opportunity to influence the people we may disagree with for the better.”
“Let us be gracious in victory and defeat,” Wood concludes, while being willing to understand “one another’s pain and frustrations.”
Rather than watering down and lowering the threshold for what constitutes “trauma,” Briscoe advocates for returning to the clinical definition of the term, which “does not include disagreements about politics or beliefs, or being irritated or annoyed by another’s personality or way of doing things.”
To “the extent to which inadvertent distance might arise from overly aggressive boundary-setting,” Rice says, children may no longer be able to hear legitimate worries parents may feel at the direction they are going. This may be time, she suggests, to rethink the way such boundaries give people a sophisticated-sounding excuse to “close themselves off to their family’s understandable and legitimate feelings.”
What happened to tolerance and forgiveness?
Thankfully, estrangement can heal, even when it’s been in place for awhile. Conservative-leaning mother Amy Hebert from Idaho tells the story of a grown son ceasing to speak with her in 2020 over political disagreements, before describing the gradual process of rekindling a relationship together three years after he went no contact.
Hunger for healing does often exist amid the estrangement. After Riley’s article, one commenter reflected on her own period of estrangement from a family she acknowledges does still love her — adding, “I currently live far away from my family and I really want to be closer to them.”
In Season 3 of “The Chosen,” Matthew’s father sets a firm boundary with the new Christ-follower, telling him, “Don’t call me Abba … I have no son.” Matthew assumes it’s over. But then he hears the Sermon on the Mount, which inspires him to give reconciliation a chance — returning home with a mixture of humility and anxiety, wondering if his father will reject him once more. Instead, however, a miracle happens.
I’ve also seen more commentaries in recent years about Jesus calling both Matthew, the tax collector, and Simon, the Zealot, to follow him. One observer noted that Jesus didn’t seem to strongly “correct” either position; instead, he “lovingly leads them in the way of the cross.” Another said it’s hard to imagine a Lord who would call them both “would see political or ideological differences as grounds for severing family ties.”
Far from counseling followers to put up walls with adversaries, it’s striking how countercultural Jesus’ advice was — encouraging attention to the exact opposite of boundary setting. Instead of barricading and cushioning ourselves off from further interaction with an adversary, he encouraged us if we happen to remember someone who “has something against you” to go out of our way to heal a rift, if possible.
President Jeffrey R. Holland, acting president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has called the gospel message a “ministry of reconciliation.” And three years before his “Peacemakers Needed” talk, President Russell M. Nelson pleaded for believers to “work tirelessly to build bridges of understanding rather than creating walls of segregation.”
When we see little hope of a breakthrough, President Holland reminds us “we can always turn to Heavenly Father and the Savior” since “their capacity is infinite. There are no boundaries to Their healing power.”
After feeling “heartbroken” for a long time, the grandmother I spoke with now feels able to “see the big picture. We all have our agency and we’re here to learn things. I know we have a Savior — and he’s felt all these feelings. ... Whether in this life or the next, it will be made right. This is only Act 2.”