After Family Estrangement, There's Still a Lot of Work to Do
Three common forms of emotional labor that keeps a person in a relationship with the family member they're estranged from.
This week we’re revisiting the topic of family estrangement: the practice of setting boundaries with family members in a way that reduces or eliminates contact.
Family estrangement is a hot topic in an increasingly polarized country.
Julia and I personally encounter family estrangement frequently in our work with folks who are leaving Evangelical, Mormon, and Pentecostal religions, a common protest against family members who vote for The Seven Mountains Mandate, and less for policies that align with the life of Jesus.
Today, we’ll talk about family estrangement more conceptually, although we highly encourage you to read
’s recent narrative of navigating family estrangement in her family. Keep Kelly’s description in mind as you read the rest of this article.While many contemporary therapists and wellness influencers attempt to reduce relationships with unhelpful family members in binary terms—you can either have the relationship, or not have the relationship—the reality is that the process of family estrangement is far more complicated.
For starters, as we wrote about in November, there are a lot of strategies that family members can practice when intentionally distancing from their larger families due to family chaos, abuse and other forms of bad behavior, and wildly differing values.
I named other variables that could inform the family estrangement process:
“The quantity and severity to which you access these tools are up to you, and dependent on numerous factors, including your own financial and socioeconomic stability, the stage of life of the family that you’re building, and the larger support network that your family is embedded within.”
That article was strictly conceptual, a primer for people who are at the early stages of conceptualizing what distancing from family members could look like.
Reducing the quantity of contact? Moving and staying geographically distant? Increasing the amount of anger that you disclose to your family member?
Seems simple enough.
One of the reasons that family estrangement is so difficult is because of the unspoken, unexpected amounts of labor that a person might experience during the process.
After all, family estrangement is not one watershed moment, scripted with directness and emotional projection that would make the best screenplay writers jealous. It’s an ongoing process.
On Wednesday, I explored how the family estrangement process involves a lot of grudging acts: Activities and communication that we would rather not do, but which we perform nonetheless out of a sense of obligation, maintenance of homeostasis, and desire to maintain relationships with less challenging people in your family (among other reasons).
I summarized the complex impacts of grudging acts in the following way, including a quote from sociologist Wendy Bottero:
While it’s important to make decisions that enable us to care for ourselves, most of us do not have the privilege to live in a land of hyper-individualism. The concept of grudging acts reminds us of our interconnectedness, and the complicated decisions that we have to make to ensure that we stay tethered to complicated humans.
Or, as Bottero writes,
“Grudging acts show the centrality of evaluation in everyday life, a centrality that reflects our condition as needy, vulnerable beings, suspended between things as they are and as they might become, for better or worse, and as we need or want them to become.”
For today’s article, let’s assume that you’ve gotten to the point where you’re practicing some version of family estrangement. Perhaps you’ve found a way to decrease the quantity of meaningful contact, and reduced the effort that you’ve put into the relationship with your family.
Then what?
I want to explore the research of Ashley Barnwell, professor of sociology at the University of Melbourne. She developed the Family Estrangement Survey, and interviewed 1200 people who had experienced some level of family estrangement, by far the largest contemporary study pertaining to the practice of setting boundaries with family.
Before we delve into the how Barnwell defines the emotional labor of family estrangement, there are four very important statistics to consider about who is practicing family estrangement, and how it’s being practiced.
Only 5% of research participants said that they cut off the entire family. Most family estrangement practices involve diminishing the relationship with only one family member, all while attempting to maintain relationships with other family members.
90% of her 1200-person sample reported that estrangement was an ongoing practice. Family estrangement doesn’t have a finite end point or destination in the way that divorce does, where a judge can declare legal credence that a marital relationship is over.
More importantly, our relationships with our parents and siblings have a unique emotional intensity. Our parents and siblings were present for and perhaps responsible for the development of our childhood fears and insecurities in ways that our partners and adult friendships are not, even if they bear the brunt of the ineffective behaviors from our childlike parts.85% of people who participated in the study were women. During our exploration of grudging acts on Wednesday, we described how grudging acts are often affectively (emotionally) experienced.
’s recent article about emotional labor; she describes it in a much more conversational, descriptive way.)
Every system requires someone(s) to perform labor behind the scenes: spatial and temporal preparation, facilitation, cleanup. When that labor is unacknowledged, un/underpaid, and/or dismissed and assumed, the performer of that labor commonly experiences a combination of anxiety and resentment, emotions that can either be internalized or externalized.
As women are commonly the performers of unacknowledged labor in domestic spaces, it’s no surprise that 85% of the folks who participated in this study were women, and that women are much more likely to do the mental load and emotional mathematics of simultaneously advocating for themselves without completely disrupting the family system.
(As a note, check outOnly 35% of research participants initiated the family estrangement. On Monday, I talked about how many former Evangelicals have family members dedicated to religious spaces who initiated family estrangement. They take Jesus’ exhortation to “hate father and mother, wife and children, brother and sisters, [to] be my disciple” quite literally. I wrote:
“Realistically, if family estrangement happens, it’ll be because a family member has drawn a line in the sand that places their religious values over a relationship with her/us in a way that prohibits the relationship from continuing. Perhaps it’ll be one of the books that we publish that excoriates Christian Nationalism. Or having a queer child, or highly defending an older nephew or niece who identifies as queer. Or something seemingly inane.”
But most importantly, Barnwell discovered an important feature about family estrangement.
Family estrangement practices do not actually end the relationship.
Instead, family estrangement introduces a new type of emotional labor.
The relationship is by no means over.
Let’s briefly define the term emotional labor.
, in her new book Emotional Labor, describes it as “the editing work of emotions that someone would do in order to have an effect on the emotions of someone else.”If grudging acts are the external behaviors that a person does to maintain relationships and homeostasis, emotional labor reflects the internal work that a person does.
And Barnwell discovered that research participants who had an estranged relationship with a family member performed emotional labor in these three common ways.
Managing disclosure.
In communication theory, boundaries refer to the information flow between two people; how much does a person choose to share, both to people within the system and outside the system?
In an open system, information transfers quite freely within and beyond the strictures of the system. In a closed system, information does the opposite.
For people who practiced family estrangement, the ways that they disclosed information, especially information about the family, become much more constricted. They literally wrote and read from a script when speaking to and about their family. They had clear rules about what people inside and outside the system received what (if any) information.
They described how limiting information about what they shared might protect them from how a disclosure of familial dysfunction could create shame or embarrassment. Research participants feared bad responses, from awkwardness or upsetness, and often described running imaginary practice conversations in their head on repeat.
Checking on
Even folks who practiced family estrangement limited the information they shared themselves, family members schemed and implemented back-door, secretive ways to get information about the person they were estranged from.
They commonly checked in on an estranged family member through social media. They utilized other family members or acquaintances to report on how the estranged person was doing, and then spent a lot of energy checking in on the emotional status of the intermediating family member.
I really appreciate Barnwell’s exploration of the emotional process of doing emotional labor. Research participants commonly described a cocktail of deep grief around the hardships and ambiguity of the relationship and embarrassment for returning to the relationship (even in mentally) and being unable to “keep their boundaries”. Barnwell describes it this way:
“Checking on is a practice where the ambiguity of the loss is evident, as the estranged family member is still out there connected via various virtual and relational threads.
Checking on estranged family members sometimes brought a sense of embarrassment, or at least a feeling of needing to conceal the practice, especially where it ran counter to a stated commitment to or acceptance of distance.”
Dealing with reminders.
The most common ways that research participants described emotional labor was the grief around being unable to continue practice family with parents, siblings, and relatives. Barnwell summarizes:
“It’s important to note the comparative aspects of family display, where the presentation of others “doing family” became a sight against which to measure one’s own familial relationships, and to feel a sense of ambiguous loss.”
Social occasions, such as Christmas, birthdays, and Mother’s/Father’s Day, were the most common events, where the estranged family members have to figure out how to navigate the pressure of being reunited. They reported wrestling both the urge to initiate the reengagement, and the intense anxiety that another family member might unexpectedly initiate the reengagement.
Grief also appeared when being around other, more (outwardly) functional family systems, such as seeing families in public or waiting in line to pick up their children from school.
Because so much of emotional labor is internal and secretive, the overwhelm and exhaustion derived from the quantity of emotional labor most significantly impacts partners, spouses, children, and sexuality.
Julia and I offer free 30 minute consultations with couples who are interested in pursuing relationship and sex therapy/coaching. (60 minute consultations for paying members of Relationship 101!)
We specialize in working with who participated in an Evangelical, Mormon, or Pentecostal community, and are looking to discover or rediscover the role that sexuality might play in your life and relationship.
Let’s heal together!
Jeremiah and Julia