Talk to me about family estrangement

In My Humble Opinion
61

Its a fantasy.

With my sister, she ended up in rehab. So we were all there for family week - a week of intense “family” therapy. I won’t say it was useless - but in some ways the therapy hurt the family relationship (but we weren’t estranged) worse than no therapy would have. She had to want to change - she wasn’t ready to change - therefore therapy wasn’t helpful. And in rehab, family therapy turned out to be a great way for the addicts to blame their families for their problems - I wasn’t supported or validated enough so I drank.

But if you don’t want to actually move to a breach, if you haven’t tried setting limits and the “ignore feature” on a relationship - sometimes that can be successful. We had that relationship with my grandmother. We’d pay lip service to having a relationship with her, but I don’t think I saw her more than twice a year in the ten years before she died. A lot of times a breach happens because every encounter is difficult and the quantity of encounters is overwhelming. If you can keep the encounters to a minimum, and keep your boundaries intact during them - sometimes the relationship survives. It isn’t a HEALTHY relationship. It doesn’t satisfy your desire for “a mother who always loved and supported you.” But it can keep some of the guilt away.

62

With my dad, I was able to get past the hurt, and forgive him, and have a relationship with him. It was as if I had to be at peace with him to be at peace with myself. (Though, to be honest, I still ALWAYS kept my guard up.) I lived in Michigan, and him in Tennessee, so it wasn’t that hard.

I moved down here two years ago, and he died exactly one year to the day after I moved. I’m glad that we had that last year together, and glad that I was able to take care of him when he fell, had surgery and then died. My mom and my sister have never forgiven me for having any relationship with him whatsoever, and probably never will.

With my sister, we have never been close, but there have been attempts in the past. We even talked about going to counseling together, with one stipulation-- hers – that we don’t bare any family skeletons… :rolleyes:

Even with this provision, I was willing to go. We couldn’t find a counselor that both of our insurances would cover and I even volunteered to pick up a part time job to pay for it. She bowed out, saying she didn’t want to ask that of me.

Now get this- she went ahead and met with the counselor and told her (and the family) that I just didn’t show up! That apparently I just didn’t care enough!!:smack:

This is indicative of my sister’s behavior toward me. The last time she hurt me is the last time she will hurt me. I’m done. No interest in reconciling. No interest in trying to get her or my mom to ever see my side, understand, or see me in anything but a negative light. I give up.

I can’t say it won’t work in your family. I know I’ve longed for a bond with my mom and my sister since I was 10 or 11 years old. It was worth it to me over the years to try again. See if they’d act human. Try not to be too hurt when they didn’t. Maybe it’s still worth it to you. Maybe it will one day work for you. Or maybe one day they’ll hurt you so much that you just. won’t. care. any. more.

63

My sister is currently estranged from our mother, for about the past 2 years. I truly just want some insight on my situation.

About 2 years ago my mother decided she was unhappy in her marriage to our father, her husband of 30 years. Since then, my sister has an angry, burdensome grudge she is holding against our mother. They used to be extremely close but she just doesn’t seem to even want to try to understand my moms perspective on why she made this decision. Part of this I believe is because my dad had always been an amazing husband and father and he is our “Superman” so seeing him hurt so badly by my mother has caused my sister (and I) a lot of pain. However I have taken the time to try to understand my mothers perspective and continue a relationship with her, because I understand that sometimes people fall out of love.

My mother was diagnosed with cancer about 1 year into the divorce. My sister did come along for a little while to the hospital during mom’s surgery, however since my mom has been “in the clear” my sister has returned to not speaking to my mother, not returning her calls, etc. I can now she how much this is affecting my mom. Knowing my sister is in town and never stops by to say hi, even though my mom is taking care of my sisters dog and has been since she moved out of the house she shared with our father. It is to the point that every time I see my mom she seems to be angry and depressed, which makes me sad because if this is her decision why isn’t she happy? SHe is always asking me if my sister has said any thing, to which I respond “NO” because my sister is the type who doesn’t talk about her feelings, she doesn’t even talk to my father about it.

I feel completely helpless, especially knowing that my mom could very well still have cancer, I don’t want something to happen and my sister have to live the rest of her life knowing some one she loved passed away while she was angry at them. every time I have tried to talk to my sister about it the conversation turns to anger, and I don’t want that because we are very close, basically best friends and we do a lot together. Our relationship has grown since the divorce and I still carry on a very close relationship with my sister and my dad, and my mom separately. I just dont know what I can do to, if not mend the relationship between the two of them, at least get my sister to talk to my mom about why she is angry and how she feels. I can see it is a huge burden to the both of them.

PLEASE and thank you for listening. I just want some insight from people who have gone through similar things. Feel free to ask me for more details.

64

Oh, wow. I think this was the very first thread I started here. :eek:

It’s a tough lesson to learn, but except in very specific limited circumstances, an adult can’t “get” another adult to do anything. Their relationship with each other is for them to work out - while as a third-party observer you may have insights or perspective they may not have, it’s still not up to you to fix this situation.

I’m sorry I don’t have better news, but I’d like to welcome you to the posting community here.

65

A happy ending:

A friend of mine had a punch up at a wedding many years ago with his brother and they hadn’t spoken for years.

They reconnected through Facebook recently and neither of them can remember what the problem was :smiley:

66

My girlfriend is estranged form her son almost 15 years now, her grandaughter maybe 12 years, her bothers and sisters about the same amount of time. She has had a drinking problem and durring that period she had gotten pretty bad. Faithfully she has sent out birthday, christmas, graduation etc cards with a gift and never a reply. Last week her grandson left her message thanking her for a birthday card with some money. He told her he loved her. She listens to that message about 10 times a day.

67

Since this got reanimated, may as well:

My mother’s sister and sister-in-law have been estranged since my grandmother died about 10 years ago. As I remember it, the will was the main bone of contention. Sis lived with Ma, gave away knick knacks grandkids would’ve wanted to pick from, to remember her by.

My older brothers are currently estranged. The oldest, about 10 years. Family tired of his wife’s behavior. Mostly of the holier than thou variety. Other older brother, about 3 years, because sister married on their anniversary.

68

It seems like every several years someone pisses off the rest of the family enough that they get blacklisted. For me it’s usually a cousin or an aunt. I can’t say that I really even notice. In contrast, my wife’s family is full of people who barely get along and pretend to like each other, with any and every gathering having the potential to become a cavalcade of drama. I don’t know how (or why) they do it.

69

I stopped talking to my family for a while. I felt like they were being hypocritical. I’m not a perfect son, but I did the best I could with what I had to work with - and was not very successful career wise.

They were very narrowly focused on what they felt was important. They were very much into academia and career success; but for them it came at the expense of having a close knit family or even friends. They were bitter, friendless, overworked people who nobody was very interested in being around; so for them to have a critical opinion of what I did for a living, or anything I did with my life seemed preposterous.

They eventually changed the way they saw things and became much more empathetic to my situation, so now we all get along. I can’t really say I’ve really met many people who went through that kind of change as adults, so I am very fortunate.

70

I have a civil estrangement from my parents. It’s been going on since about 2009. And it has saved our family.

What I mean is, I decided about 5 years ago that I would:

  1. Speak to them much less, and only contact them when I have a good reason (news to communicate, a family holiday). I do not spend extended amounts of time in their company for any reason.

  2. No longer have conversations with my parents about things that lead to upset or jerkish things being said.

  3. If one of them does try to bait me by saying something jerkish, I simply don’t respond. At all. I put a neutral look on my face and change the subject.

I am lots happier. My parents are the same miserable people that they always have been, but we don’t have arguments anymore. They also have stopped talking to me about some things they know I don’t want to hear about. For example, my mother hates my father and likes to call up and complain about every little thing he does. She has been doing this to me my entire life. A few years ago, I told her, “I really don’t want to spend all our time together listening to you complain about Dad.” She stopped. Of course, now she calls my younger sister to complain about Dad, but my little sister can make her own choices about what she wants to tolerate.

Before this, I would get upset every time my parents said or did anything jerkish. I would try to address it (because I believe in direct communication) and these attempts would be met with vitriol or passive-aggression. I was always cast as “the bad guy” in the family for trying to problem-solve.

Now my behavior is always very neutral, so they have little to complain about…even though my neutrality annoys the hell out of them.

Family is complicated. I would like to cut all ties to some of them, but it’s not worth upsetting the family members who are still important to me.

71

Both my wife and I have some sort of estrangement with our families.

My wife has not had anything to do with her mother in about 16 years, the wife calls it a divorce. But then she suffers from PTSD from the emotional abuse she endured at her mother’s hands as a child, so there is that. She still has occasional long distance contact with her father and his parents but we aren’t close with any of them.

I just sort of drifted away from my family. When I was single any contact with them was because I called or stopped by or whatever. After I got into a relationship I realized that if I didn’t reach out then I never heard from them (mother, father & 3 sisters). I grew up in Michigan. Somehow they all ended up out in Arizona and I now live in Vermont. My father passed a few years ago and I went out and stayed with my mother and oldest sister for a week. Things were cordial while I was there and I helped out with several things to do with getting affairs in order. But after I came home I heard nothing from any of them. I tried keeping up the contact by sending a few gifts the next big holidays. I would get replies months later saying things like they would have enjoyed the gift but they were out of the country for three months when it arrived. After a few tries I just let it lie again and it went back to not hearing anything ever.

I figure the next contact I get will be when my mother passes.

I had an OK relationship with my sisters when we were young, although being undiagnosed Aspergers made me the “odd kid” in school which I know they resented. The parents always had issues with communication and were divorced and remarried over the years. Their drama was never pleasant but not enough to write them off.

I’m not really sure what was going on in anyone else’s head during any of this time. They never said and i never had reason to ask. I just found better things to do then keep reaching out to them and they never made any attempt to contact me once I stopped.

I don’t really feel the lack. I am very happily married and am a very strong introvert. We have a few close friends and that is plenty. So I don’t miss big family get togethers. Occasionally I get curious about what they may be up to, but not enough to do anything more than a Google search.

Sometimes estrangement is just lack of interest.

72

I haven’t been near my mother since a few months after Dad’s funeral - say a dozen plus years. She was always a little nuts and her hatred of me was almost a family joke. But after she found Dad dead about 4 feet from where she had found her mother (my gramma) dead, she went totally off the deep end. It doesn’t help that my voice and my late Dad’s are close enough that we used to pass for each other on the phone and that we share a lot of mannerisms.

My brother can deal with her physical health so her mental health has never been an issue for him. And for me, since I can’t do anything to help, its best that I “do no harm” and just stay away. It isn’t my first choice, but it works.

73

I don’t have much to do with my father, the last time I saw him was at my mother’s funeral. He was an abusive jerk and I just don’t have room in my life for him.

74

Families are just people, but since you’re closer to them and their problems, rifts can develop quickly. My oldest son and I didn’t communicate for several years, due to his marrying a manipulative, religious nutjob who didn’t approve of my son’s more forthright family. She turned him against everybody in the family and even had him listening to country music (the horror). I just waited out the marriage, and sure enough he suddenly divorced her and married a lovely English woman he met on the internet. Next time I saw him, he sheepishly apologized for years of silence. Had no idea what sort of evil his ex was working on him until he was finally free of her. So it ended well, and I’m staying at their house on the next visit.

My youngest has decided I’m not worthwhile to talk to and has been openly hostile on Facebook (when he bothers to address me, usually after drinking). I’ve tried to approach him about talking out whatever issues he has with me, but he doesn’t respond (I’m sure part of it was divorcing his mother over 20 years ago). So I guess we’re officially estranged. It saddens me, but I don’t know what to do about it.

My brother and I are not presently communicating, by my choice. He’s always treated me like I’m some sort of asshole, especially in public, and I finally had enough of it when my sister died last year. I won’t go into details, but he can fuck off.

Cripes, family drama is the worst.

75

I’ve been estranged from my father and that side of the family since I was 18. I’m 44 now. I ran into my father 7 or 8 years ago at a Chinese restaurant and saw my “half sister” for the first time (she was probably about 18). I haven’t seen my “half brother” since he was around 7. His father, my paternal grandfather, died a few years ago and I wasn’t mentioned as a surviving relative in the obit. My paternal grandmother is my last remaining grandparent and I haven’t seen or spoken to her since I was 18.

76

“I also got to see my 80 year old mother cry.”

While you can’t “fix” stuff, I suppose you can do some research and make your mom an appointment to talk with someone about it (assuming she isn’t interested in the group therapy thing).

Can’t know whether your brother is a sociopath (if he is, naturally, there’s no need to worry about his state of health in terms of his behavior’s effects). Sounds like his demons have convinced him that he’ll fall apart and blow away if he admits X to himself that is unbearable and as such the delusion stands … or what would happen if he faces the actual domestic enemies (which would not be the family, as you’ve described it, but the demons).

77

I haven’t interacted with my father for, what, 26-27 years. The last straw, as odd as it is, was when he (and possibly his second wife) decided to mount a legal challenge to end what was to be lifetime spousal support to my mother, who’d been married to him for 25 years and never had a “career” (had a bank teller job after the kids were of a certain age, and never made more than $13-15k yr, as compared to my father who made many times that). The support was a measly $700 a month, which might sound like a lot in the early '80s except for the fact that inflation was what it was (car loans at 15% for example). He was 54 and had retired after 30 years from the Navy and was getting quite a nice chunk of change monthly (and has paid out into seven figures these 30 years on, with yearly COLAs) … and this on top of embarking on a civilian career. Mother (by virtue of her supposedly divorce shark attorney) got screwed out of her marital share of his military retired pay, which is separate from the topic of spousal support (the law firm told her that she wasn’t entitled to pursue, which wasn’t true), so this $700/month meant quite a lot and without it her life radically changed for the worse for a number of years. (Until we children were into our 20s and had jobs where we could make up the loss.)

I might’ve maintained a cordial but shallow relationship with him, and possibly even hammered out one or more “issues” he left each of his family with given his mental problems and supposed or actual alcoholism. (I qualify that because it’d be just like him to use that as an excuse for everything he did; whereas he was perfectly fine with other people, he was what we considered a fearful monster. I didn’t and don’t believe that alcholism would be so selective in terms of its effects.)

I’ve not seen my eldest brother for about as long, and yet another brother fell out of touch in the early 2000s. I rarely communicate with a third. We all just do our own thing, and have since mother died in 2000. She was the glue.

78

I am estranged from one of my sisters. And I had a good example of how to cut a sibling loose from my father.

Sis and I area year apart and going back as far as childhood, she has been manipulative and assholish. A couple of years ago, after I had had virtually no contact with her for a few years, one sister actively avoided her and Bro had cut her off, she had a blow up with the remaining sister during an overlapping visit to the folks’ house. Just about the only one she still has much contact with in the family is Dad. I’ll likely see her for the last time at our last parent’s funeral.

My dad had one brother with whom he was estranged from one brother for many years before the brother passed and another he was semi-estranged from for nearly as long. Asswipes, both of them.

The stepchildren that I raised haven’t seen their bio mom since they were small children. They (and their grandmother from that branch) don’t even know if she is alive or dead. Oddly enough, during their dad’s brief remarriage a few years ago, they were also estranged from him. After his divorce, things got patched up, but for awhile there, the only parent that they were speaking to was the woman who raised them for nine years.

Like the meme goes, our families know how to push our buttons because they were the ones who installed them.

79

I am totally estranged from my younger sister Kate because she is a sociopath who has blamed every problem in her life on me. I do not talk to her or associate with her, only getting news of her from our older sister.

Illustration: Kate’s license has been revoke for numerous drunk driving offenses. She called my older sister one night claiming “I borrowed a used car and got into an accident that wasn’t my fault and broke my leg.” Turns out she had borrowed a used 2012 Benz and wrapped it around a tree, and broke her little toe. How was that MY fault? “I was thinking about Annie’s problems and got distracted.”

When I burned my foot by dropping a pot of cooked pasta a couple of weeks later, her response was “She did it on purpose cause I broke my leg.”

Total asshole.

80

Lots of estrangement on my husband’s side. (We’re the second marriage; the first ended in a bitter divorce subsequent to his ex’s infidelity).

His son has refused to have anything to do with his dad for most of the last 6-8 years. Typically the only substantive contact has involved the son demanding something major - such as my husband’s house when he and I got married, the semi-permanent loan of his truck when the son sold his car to pay debts - or else the son would cut off contact with us. We couldn’t afford to just give the house and thought it highly probably he would not maintain the property or pay us rent. Each ‘no’ answer has been met with first a furious emotional attack then silence and refusal to associate with us for years at a time. I feel sympathetic to my husband’s heartbreak but some secret relief that we no longer endure much toxic drama from this kid.

His oldest daughter left her mom’s on her 18th birthday to live with her boyfriend. She moved back in with her mom just shy of a year later (about a year ago). Since the first departure, she’s had very little to do with my husband. We see her roughly once every 3 months and anytime we have gifts for her. She does show up for holidays, too.

His youngest daughter went off to college last August and lives with her mom when she isn’t there. Since then, we’ve seen her about 2-3 times outside of occasional holidays and anytime she will receive gifts.

I’m not sure why the estrangement with all 3 kids is so total, other than the fact that my husband’s ex hates him and has encouraged the kids to skip contact with their dad. I’m not sure how far her “him or me” attitude has gone, but that’s surely part of it. I’ve tried very hard to treat the kids with love and respect, so I don’t think it’s a step-parent issue. Whatever the triggers, I don’t see this estrangement changing. Tragically hard for my husband.