A Clean Break

I thought my relationship with my father was over. But cutting off a toxic family member, as I discovered, doesn't have to be all or nothing.

- Kim Pittaway

“I'M DONE,” I thought as I hung up the phone. “I’m never speaking to him again.” After a lifetime of arguments and anger and a blowup I was certain marked the end, my relationship with my father was over.

It wasn’t that simple. Of course.

Going “no contact” is having a moment. Counsellors with huge YouTube followings offer advice on how to write a no-contact letter to toxic family members. Reddit forums, such as “raisedbynarcissists,” offer support to people coping with narcissistic parents. In the U.K., the charity Stand Alone offers support and conducts research on family estrangement, while in the U.S., the Cornell Family Estrangement and Reconciliation Project, under sociologist Karl Pillemer, studies how “reconcilers” manage reconnection after periods of limited or no contact.

A 2014 Ipsos study conducted for Stand Alone found that one in five U.K. families were affected by estrangement, while Pillemer’s U.S. research, the basis for his 2020 book Fault Lines: Fractured Families and How to Mend Them, found that 27 percent of respondents were currently estranged from a close relative. Relationships with fathers are particularly vulnerable: One U.S. study suggests that one in four adults will be estranged from their father at some point, while just one in 20 will be estranged from their mother. And with growing political polarization further complicating family relationships, those numbers could be even higher.

As awareness of emotional abuse and healthy boundaries have grown, the kind of emotionally corrosive behaviour that may have once been tolerated is getting called out. “We've been sold this notion that blood is thicker than water,” says New York-based Eamon Dolan, author of The Power of Parting: Finding Peace and Freedom Through Family Estrangement. It’s a notion that pressures family members into accepting toxic behaviours they would reject in any other relationship.