One day in the mid-two-thousands, a teen-ager named Amy waited to hear the voice of God. She was sitting in a youth Bible-study group, surrounded by her peers, and losing patience. Everyone else in the group seemed to hear God speak all the time, but Amy had never heard Him, not even a peep. Her hands didn’t shimmer with gold dust after she prayed, as others claimed theirs did, and she was never able to say, with confidence, “The Holy Spirit told me to do it.” She went home that evening, determined to try again the next day. A few years passed and she still heard nothing. She began to wonder if something was wrong with her. “God didn’t talk to me,” she wrote later, in a blog post. “I was afraid that meant either he wasn’t there, or I wasn’t good enough.”
Amy, the eldest of five siblings, was homeschooled by evangelical parents in the suburbs of Alberta, Canada. (She asked that I use only her first name.) She was bright, and happy, and remembers days spent reading “David Copperfield” aloud with her siblings. It was only when she left for college—Ambrose University, a Christian liberal-arts school—that aspects of her childhood began to strike her as peculiar. Amy remembers her parents telling her, when she was six, that her grandparents were going to Hell because they weren’t Christians. She grew up believing in creationism, and was startled to feel persuaded by the evidence for evolution in her college textbooks. She grappled with the “problem of evil”: If God is all-knowing and all-powerful, how can he allow so many terrible things to happen? “I started to diverge from my parents,” she told me recently.
Part of Amy’s original motivation for going to college, which she paid for herself, was to find a husband: she had been taught that men were better spiritual leaders than women, and hoped that a partner could help her hear God. Ambrose was socially conservative. No drinking. No sex outside of marriage. She found a boyfriend, but the relationship didn’t last, and soon she wasn’t sure she wanted to get married at all. She enjoyed her courses, and took such thorough notes that, on one occasion, other students offered to buy them. “Amy came to university like a sponge,” Ken Nickel, Amy’s philosophy professor, told me. “She wanted to understand.” On visits home, she stumbled into conflicts. During a family vacation in 2013, she told her parents and siblings that she didn’t think the Bible implied that it was wrong to be gay. “I think, naïvely, I was just, like, Oh, they’ve just never heard this interpretation,” she said. “And they’ll be, like, ‘Oh, my gosh, thank you for letting us know!’ ” Instead, as Amy tells it, one of her younger brothers became upset, and quoted Bible verses to make the opposite argument. Her mother sent her a letter expressing concern for her soul. During the drive home after her graduation, it came up that Amy identified as a feminist, and her parents began arguing with her about abortion. She cried in the back seat.
Amy attended law school, and a few years later returned to Ambrose to speak at an event. While visiting, she learned from the university’s president that her parents had sent him a letter expressing displeasure about Amy’s transformation. Their daughter used to be a “Bible quizzer,” they wrote, but now “rarely picks up a Bible except to highlight the verses that she believes say the opposite of their obvious and orthodox meaning.” Her mother said that Amy had a difficult relationship with her brothers, whom she now regarded as “misogynists.” If her parents could start over, they would discourage her from attending the school. “She used to be a calm and steady young woman but now suffers from a sometimes debilitating anxiety in spite of how faithful and unwavering God is in His support and provision,” the letter read. “She has turned her face from Him towards despair.” Amy told me that learning about the letter was “destabilizing.” She wasn’t yet estranged from her family—that would happen a few years later—but she found herself visiting less often.
Family estrangement—the process by which family members become strangers to one another, like intimacy reversed—is still somewhat taboo. But, in some circles, that’s changing. In recent years, advocates for the estranged have begun a concerted effort to normalize it. Getting rid of the stigma, they argue, will allow more people to get out of unhealthy family relationships without shame. There is relatively little data on the subject, but some psychologists cite anecdotal evidence that an increasing number of young people are cutting out their parents. Others think that we’re simply becoming more transparent about it. Discussion about the issue has “just exploded,” Yasmin Kerkez, the co-founder of Family Support Resources, a group for people dealing with estrangement and other family issues, told me. Several organizations now raise awareness and hold meetings or events to provide support for people who are estranged from their families. Becca Bland, who founded a nonprofit estrangement group called Stand Alone, told me that society tends to promote the message that “it’s good for people to have a family at all costs,” when, in fact, “it can be much healthier for people to have a life beyond their family relationships, and find a new sense of family with friends or peer groups.” Those who have cut ties often gather in forums online, where they share a new vocabulary, and a new set of norms, pertaining to estrangement. Members call cutting out relatives going “no contact.” “Can I tell you how great it was to skip out on my first Thanksgiving?” one woman who no longer speaks with her parents told me. “I haven’t heard family drama in years.”
Amy didn’t immediately confront her parents about the letter, but it snagged in her mind. “The topics that it felt safe to talk about just got smaller and smaller,” she told me. Amy recalls that they often argued about Donald Trump; she was upset when Brett Kavanaugh joined the Supreme Court, and more so when her brothers celebrated. On visits home, she took to filling a coffee mug with alcoholic cider. “Things were tense,” she told me. Her parents had already noted a shift when they wrote to her university, concluding their letter, “I don’t have the language to tell you how much we miss her.” Like many others, Amy would eventually go no contact.
When I was small, my mother used to read me a children’s book called “The Runaway Bunny,” by Margaret Wise Brown, the author of “Goodnight Moon.” Now I read the story to my own toddler. In the book, a bunny tells his mother that he wants to run away. “If you run away,” his mother says, “I will run after you.” First, he says that he’ll escape by becoming a fish in a trout stream, but his mother counters that she’ll become a fisherman and catch him. If he becomes a rock on a mountain, she’ll become a mountain climber. And on it goes. “Shucks,” he sighs eventually. His mother replies, “Have a carrot.” Since its publication, in 1942, “The Runaway Bunny” has never been out of print. The idea that a child might reject his parents is frightening. But there’s a question buried in the story as well: Is it even possible? If we make ourselves into a boat and sail away, will our family turn out to be the wind?
The field of family estrangement is still in its infancy. The tome-like “Handbook of Family Therapy,” a mainstay among psychologists, does not contain an in-depth entry on estrangement. “The cliché ‘hiding in plain sight’ is really appropriate here,” the family sociologist Karl Pillemer, who teaches at Cornell, told me. Kristina Scharp, a director of the Family Communication and Relationships Lab, at Rutgers University and Michigan State, defines estrangement as an “intentional distancing” between at least two family members “because of a negative relationship—or the perception of one.” Sometimes it comes from an accumulation of grievances. Other times, it’s because of one fight—for example, after a parent rejects an L.G.B.T.Q. child when they come out. According to a survey conducted by Pillemer in 2019, twenty-seven per cent of Americans are currently estranged from a relative. If you haven’t experienced it yourself, you probably know someone who has.
When Bland, a journalist from London, became estranged from her family, in 2010, she found that social gatherings became awkward. She began telling people that her parents now lived in Australia. Really, she wasn’t sure where they lived. When she was honest about her estrangement, people gave her “fearful looks,” she later wrote. “Perhaps because I embody what all parents dread—that their own children might also give up on forgiving and healing.” Non-estranged people, she found, often assumed that estrangements would end. “They think that it’s always reconcilable,” she said. “I think that’s an idealism. It’s based on a myth that families all really love each other.” In 2012, Bland wrote about her estrangement for the Guardian, hoping to give others permission to make the same choices if necessary. “I didn’t [walk] away from my own situation at a younger age than I did, for fear of being judged,” she wrote. After the article was published, she heard from dozens of people who had also cut out their families. “I became aware that everybody felt really alone,” she said.
Stand Alone, which Bland founded soon afterward, ran support groups, conducted research, and offered practical advice for estranged individuals. Young people out of touch with their parents “couldn’t get a student loan, or they didn’t have a guarantor to co-sign for a lease,” Bland said. The organization successfully campaigned in the U.K. to make it easier for estranged university students to get financial aid. In the U.S., similar groups have also sprung up. Together Estranged, founded by the entrepreneur Seth Forbes, in 2020, holds monthly virtual support groups, and special sessions around the holidays. Family Support Resources, founded by Kerkez and her husband in 2019, hosts an annual “Moving Beyond Family Struggles” summit, and offers guidebooks and private coaching. Communities online have developed their own lingo: “LC” stands for “low contact,” “VLC” for “very low contact,” and “NC” for “no contact.” The Reddit forum r/EstrangedAdultChild now has more than forty thousand members. Another group, r/raisedbynarcissists, is creeping toward a million.
Advocates argue that we tend to support someone who leaves a bad partner, but look at families differently. “We are inundated in a culture that is obsessed with biology,” Scharp told me. “We’re told things like ‘Blood is thicker than water’ and ‘A family is forever.’ So, if you have a happy family, it’s really hard to imagine estrangement.” She said that, when people hear about estranged families, they think, “ ‘All families fight. Families forgive each other.’ Yeah, I mean, sometimes.” When someone discloses an estrangement, Scharp doesn’t say, “I’m so sorry.” Instead, she asks, “How do you feel about that?”
Amy has curly brown hair, wears glasses, and speaks in an efficient manner. She is passionate about social justice and runs a law practice in Calgary targeting police and prison misconduct. “She definitely has strong views,” her cousin Robyn told me. “She will stand up for the thing that she thinks is right.” When Amy and I spoke one day, she was walking her rescue dog in the park. That afternoon, she was hosting a fund-raising barbecue. “We have, like, two cubic feet of chicken wings,” she said.
By 2019, the year after Amy graduated from law school, she had a new boyfriend, Peter, a Jewish social worker. Once, she told me, she mentioned making breakfast with him, and her mother said that she didn’t appreciate finding out that way that the two were sleeping together. Amy took a job in the far northern reaches of Canada. She was making a good salary and she offered to bring her parents north for a visit, but the timing never quite worked out. Then the pandemic began, and travel stalled. Peter proposed to Amy in June, 2020. They had a video call with Amy’s parents, who seemed happy for them, and the couple set the wedding for September, 2021, hoping that a vaccine would be available by then.
Two years earlier, Amy had told her parents that she knew about their letter to Ambrose, and in 2020, at a gathering for a relative who had passed away, her mother asked if they could talk it over. She e-mailed the letter to Amy, who hadn’t yet read it. “This is risky, but I feel like the unknown has not helped us,” Amy’s mother wrote. “I hope you’ll give me a chance to explain the dark place I was in. I wish I’d never written it. Let me know when you’re ready to talk. Love, Mom.” Amy didn’t want to read the letter, so she had a friend summarize it for her. “I’m really hurt that you wrote these things about me,” she wrote back to her mother. “I am struggling with all the feelings this brought up for me, but I’m ready to talk.” When they talked, though, the conversation devolved into an argument. At one point, Amy asked if her mother believed that she was going to Hell, and her mother said yes. Amy’s take: “There’s a sense in which that feels like the most loving thing to say, because it feels like the truth.” Still, it stung. “Like, nothing else I do as a human being is going to be important to you, as long as I don’t ascribe to this particular belief,” Amy said. (Her parents and most of her siblings did not respond to multiple requests for comment. One sibling declined to comment.)
