I’ve heard a lot stories of people being disowned or estranged from their family for some reason or another. How common is this? Is it more common in certain areas or regions in the US? What are some issues that cause this to happen?

25 comments

  1. Common enough that most people I know are estranged from someone. Estrangement doesn’t always mean dramatic outburst, it can be literally you just don’t talk to a cousin of yours.

    Personally, I don’t speak to anyone in my maternal side of the family except for grandma and a few cousins. Everyone else is either too young and their guardian wants nothing to do with my family or drug addicted garbage. We make up for it though, we’re extremely close with dad’s side to the point that my grandparents count my mother as an additional daughter in their eyes. We have arguments with them but they’re normal arguments families have, nothing that can’t be smoothed over with some beer and apologies.

  3. It’s common enough, but I wouldn’t say it’s normal. I am not estranged from my family, per se, but I was raised to keep family at a distance. If that says anything about my upbringing haha.

    I rarely talk to my immediate family and I haven’t spoken to my extended family in years.

  4. In my 67 years only one couple in either my wife’s family or mine has been estranged/shunned/no longer welcomed was a cousin and her hillbilly husband. She was the treasurer for the family reunion and they spent all of the money. We didn’t find out until the facility we used every year called about the deposit not being made.

  6. I would imagine a significant number of people are estranged from at least one member of their family.

    ​

    I’m estranged from my father’s side entirely. I was estranged from him for the last 12 years of his life, and that essentially led to estrangement from everyone on his side. On my mother’s side, I’m not quite estranged from anyone, but there are some very tenuous relationships between some of them and me.

  7. It’s common for various reasons: sometimes it’s money, sometimes it’s because of religion, sometimes it’s just strong personal disagreement or resentment.

    It’s hard to say how common it is exactly, but I know a handful of people that don’t have much communication with one of their parents and quite a few that say they don’t talk to certain extended family members.

  8. Most people I know are not estranged from their entire family. Most people are fine with their family.

    I don’t talk to my family much more than a few times a year. I used to spend more time with them before my mom died. Turns out she was the person that really kept us connected. The rest of us don’t put the effort in when things get busy. We don’t hate each other but live in different states and don’t have as much in common anymore.

  9. It’s common enough that I know a number of folks in this situation, either them shunning their family or being shunned by their family. You might have heard it expressed in recent years as “going no-contact.”

    I intentionally disconnected from my mom & stepdad way back in late ’90 over their meddling into my adult life and their attempts to force me into unwanted roles/situations. Their various behaviors also caused my maternal grandmother to name me as her legal representative, and the only time I had to deal with my mom & stepdad was in the last years of my grandmother’s life when they thought they had an opportunity to interfere and benefit from her situation. However, they disappeared when it became evident they would not be able to control the situation the way they desired.

  10. American Individualism is a large driving factor to how easy it is to be estranged from family here in the US, compared to other very family oriented or collectivism driven countries. People are unwilling to compromise so they cut out the family that they don’t accept. Or your family doesn’t accept your identity, or support your decisions or like your lover, or maybe they’ve hurt you for so long that you decide that you can’t have them in your life so for your own well being you have to cut them out. Being LGBTQ+, interracial dating, crime, abuse, morals, political values, religion, are all very common reasons for estrangement. But sometimes it’s just the passage of time that is to blame. In America we are told that we need to leave the house as soon as we can to start building our own life, to stop relying on our parents and make something of ourselves asap, while also being told it’s fine to only see family, or sometimes in the cases of school, not be able to see our families outside of holidays, which leads to the passage of time being another big culprit in estrangement, all because we get too busy living our own lives that we forget our extended and close family. Sometimes it just happens whether you want it to or not.

  11. I don’t think it’s related to region or even to being exclusively American. I think it’s due to interpersonal conflict, disagreements and not seeing eye to eye on fundamental issues across all cultures, regions and peoples.

  12. Sometimes, it’s distance. Sometimes, it’s because of past abuse. I don’t talk to most of my extended family because I have never met them but a handful of times. They lived all over the country and it can be expensive to travel.
    Most people I know that don’t talk to immediate family is because of trauma like neglectful parents, abuse (verbal and physically), and parents that just take or demand respect without earning it or not being accepted as is.

  14. My husband has never met many members of his fathers family due to his father being estranged from them since before my husband was born.

    I have a very large extended family. One of my closest friends is my first cousin I grew up with. I spend more time with her than my sister if that shows how close we are.

    My husband and myself are from the same area in PA, I’m Black he is white. I think that Black people have a higher tolerance for not cutting family off unless they are very very bad.

    Throughout the years I’ve met a lot of people of different backgrounds who marvel at how much my extended family gets together. I never thought my experience was that much of an outlier until then.

  15. Depends on what you mean by “estranged”

    If you mean “grew apart due to distance and/or time, and now don’t talk, but don’t have conflict” then this is pretty common. We’re a super mobile nation so living far away from family is very normal. That’s part of why the idea of “family reunions” is so appealing to a lot of people, it allows them to reconnect with family, especially extended family like cousins, who they haven’t seen for years or even decades.

    If you mean “intentionally cut off” then it’s not the norm. I only know one actual person like this and am more likely to read about this online than encounter it in real life. People might have one or two family members that they don’t get along with or prefer to avoid, but Reddit’s obsession with disowning one’s family and giving it a cutesy moniker “go NC” (“no-contact”) is overrepresented on Reddit.

  16. It’s more common in the LGBTQ+ community. Sometimes its by choice of the individual, sometimes its through disowning by the family. Still not at all the majority even within that community, but it’s not surprising or unexpected. The number of families in the U.S. that will still openly disown, reject, or intentionally disrespect family members for being queer is alarming. Again, it’s not that common at all if you take the whole US population into account.

    An interesting phenomenon of LGBTQ+ history in the US is creating unity though this; the formation of “houses.” Through much of the 70s and through the AIDS epidemic, it wasn’t uncommon for an older gay person or couple to have a “house,” and “family,” where they’d “adopt” abandoned or estranged queer people (not on paper; more social and living-needs based). These were usually young adults; 18-early 20s. Those who were committed to this cause or structure from an early age would go years and years with just themselves or their partner living in their house, to 10+ people, often staying temporarily until they go off on their own, then a new estranged, or abandoned person would find the house and be welcomed in.

  17. My parents were abusive growing up. I stayed a lot longer than I should have thinking things would be different now that I’m an adult. They weren’t. It just changed into manipulation, gaslighting, and demands. I was slowly separating from them when my child came out as non-binary. My parents are conservative fundamentalists so I cut ties and only talked to them to bury my sister last year. (She was a member of my household when she died)

    My extended family on both sides have shunned me for choosing my child and “dishonoring” my parents.

    It sucks but I did what was best for me and my kids.

    Being estranged happens. Americans don’t typically rely on our parents for housing past 20 and the only financial support many people receive past 20 is being on their parents insurance. If they have been harmful, it makes sense to walk away. Most of the people I know are not estranged, which makes holidays isolating because everyone else has family, but I think the rates are much higher within the LGBTQIA and fundamentalist communities.

  18. I see it a lot but maybe because I know a lot of people who I have things in common with my extended family’s background (abuse, addiction, racism, religion).

  19. It’s more unusual to find people who are not estranged from any family member, than to meet someone who has estranged members.

    It’s normal and sometimes encouraged to cut people out of your life who don’t benefit you in some way or other. There are also groups of teens/young adults who seem to earn social credit in disassociating themselves from parents and grandparents.

  21. I do not know anyone who is estranged from their family. It seems to be common in Reddit but not in the broader population

  22. It’s more common Reddit than in real life, but my sister was estranged from our Dad for the past several years because of his history of abuse.

    I don’t think it’s just an American thing either. Maybe not in certain cultures that are more family-orientated, but I don’t think estrangement would be uncommon in Europe either.

  23. It’s common enough to where you might know someone in this situation. But it’s not common enough to be the norm.

    My dad doesn’t talk to his family – alcoholism runs in his family and that really ruins relationships and he’s cut off most of them. Also when his Mom died a lot of people tried to get her money – which wasn’t a lot but it was enough to cause fights.

  24. Only a severely disfunctional family is like that which is very rare IRL despite what Reddit would have you believe

  25. It’s common but each situation is different. For reference, we do a lot with my mom’s side of the family and we see all of them pretty regularly. She had a good upbringing and they were all always close.

    Meanwhile, we never do anything with my dad’s family. He had a complicated home life growing up and while my dad and his siblings definitely love each other, their relationship is complicated.

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