No huge blowup or dramatic exit, but the calls are fewer and the visits are shorter. Maybe you call your mom every couple of months to check in but it's basically radio silence beyond that. Or the only time you see your siblings and cousins is during the holidays, when you make the trek to visit but stay just long enough to squeeze in a piece of pie (and the obligatory small talk).
And, OK, you're in the family group chat, but in the same way a houseplant sits in a room: the silent observer. In short, your relationship with your family inhabits that weird, wide middle ground between close kin and no relationship to speak of at all. You don't have a singular blowup story or defining "you're dead to me" argument that serves as the origin story for this strained dynamic.
Trust, you have your reasons... yet you haven't cut your family off entirely (yet). It seems as though more and more people lately describe going through this exact thing in their own lives. To the point that I've given it a nickname: "estrangement lite." Is this a legit pattern, though?
I asked therapists to share their thoughts on the subject, along with advice for what to say when our kids ask why they hardly see Grandma anymore. You just sort of downsized it. Becca Gregory, LICSW, a therapist at Flow Forward Counseling, points out that we tend to think of family boundaries as a yes-or-no question.
As in, is this person in my life or not? The thing is, boundaries aren't so binary, she says, noting that they also include “where, when, how often, under what circumstances, and in what contexts you spend time with someone,” plus which topics you’ll discuss and how much personal information you hand over. But no, you won’t find “estrangement lite” in any clinical manual, which Boone thinks is a positive thing.
Therapists are more likely to discuss this dynamic in terms of limited contact, emotional distancing, boundary-setting, or changing patterns of family enmeshment. Colleen Canyon, LCSW, says there’s also a whole toolkit of low-contact behaviors: short visits, limits on phone time, and “gray rocking,” aka declining to take the bait when someone is emotionally charged. Something that therapists often see precipitate this type of pattern?
Extract — continue reading at the source.
