From the Sidelines of Goodbyes
Hello, dear readers
Before I dive in to the main letter’s subject, here’s my super quick action item ask: Join me in continuing to haranguing various political personalities about their efforts to force us to keep using fossil fuels, and to reduce government’s limiting how much companies can pollute our water and air. You can take just a moment to send a letter here and sign your name here. Remember, the goal isn’t to change Trump’s mind, it’s to show the people answering to him that they’re answerable to us, to. Because we like clean water, breathable air, and functional biomes. Won’t take you a minute.
Ok, on to the main event.
I’ve been on a kick lately of watching older anime I’ve seen before, since between taxes and various work admin tasks I’ve had a lot of paperwork to do, and I will lose my mind without something else to devote 20% of my attention to. Just last night I finished up a rewatch of the reboot of Fruits Basket, 20+ years after I first watched the old anime. (It hits different when I’m a parent, like the many dead parents in that show, rather than a teen in the throes of young love, like the main cast.)
It makes an interesting counterpoint to a lot of the other Japanese shows I’ve watched lately, that valorize forgiving abusive parents, and prize family unity even when the family has been the locus of a lot of violence, arson, and supervillainy.
I’m not going to make any big cultural sweeping statements about Japanese vs US media. I am ill equipped to do more than surface level commentary and nobody needs that.
But it puts me in mind of the many clients I’ve had who considered and/or followed through with ceasing or severely limiting contact with the family they came from. This was on my mind anyways, because I’ve been thinking about the slew of articles during Trump 1.0 lamenting the supposedly high number of millennials cutting off contact with their parents. Most of the ones I saw placed the blame on “selfish” 20 to 30-somethings, cruelly denying their parents what they were owed for the gargantuan task of raising them.
From my admittedly very limited perspective, I think we’re about to have another wave of such cutoffs, very soon or already in progress. Middle aged millenials whose parents voted for Trump a second time are no longer able to convince themselves that they didn’t know what they were voting for.
I thought I’s share a little bit about what I’ve learned about estrangement, from my seat beside the people making those choices.
First, let me just say, in my therapist role especially, but also in life in general, I never ever regard it as my place to tell someone whether they should or should not remain in contact with someone they care about. Doing so would be both arrogant and ineffective. If you’ve ever had the impulse, I encourage you to look up the Stages of Change Theory, which I’ll do a newsletter about one of these days. It is truly one of the most useful psychological theories I’ve ever encountered.
Most stories about family estrangement in media focus on the big, explosive conflict—like I said before; violence, arson, villiany. It’s fiction and those are easy stories to make exciting.
Many of the estrangements I’ve been privy to were of a different, slower sort, heartbreaking in another way. They aren’t the sudden and “selfish” “for no reason” decisions so many articles have framed them as. I have never known someone on the cusp of ending a relationship without having spent years upon years of finding an excuse or a way not to do it. Maybe as a child, maybe as an adult, but either way. Small children are so entirely dependent on their caregivers. The drive to see them as trustworthy and caring is so powerful, because the alternative is terrifying.
But the person who is left behind rarely notices or acknowledges those years of trying. That effort is invisible to them.
Let me compare two simplified, and overlapping models of family relationships- a relationship between two individuals, and a relationship between two roles.
As I’m writing this, I’m on an airplane, on my way to visit my dad. (Hi dad!).
I don’t know how many times he’s told me he could not have imagined me. He never would have come up with the person I have become. And this is delightful to him—one of the great gifts of parenting; how wonderful it is to love someone and be witness to the wild ride of them becoming themself—all the unexpected twists and turns.
In my twenties, I discovered that my dad kept a picture of me with him in his wallet, which he used to tell people about me. Apparently it doesn’t take much to get him talking about his kids.
I remember him taking this picture, grinning. It’s from the summer in college when I lived with him. I had an art commission to work on, and the best lighting in his place was in the bathroom. So, I’d stolen a bunch of the couch cushions and piled them into his bathtub, to avoid straining my eyes. He’d come home to find me in my upholstered tub nest, blythly drawing away. That was the image he used as an encapsulation of my whole deal. Not a bad one, actually, that is a decent representation of how I operate in the world, and he recognized that. He delighted in it—in me being just very me.
He’s still very much my dad, even now I’m in my 40s. It’s not that we have no specific roles. But those roles are not the be all end all of our relationship. Who we are as specific, ever changing, individual people matters.
But in some families, roles are all that are allowed. Daughter, son, brother, sister, mother, father, wife and husband. Grandparent or grandchild. That is the sum total of the relationship.
There’s nothing wrong with those roles. But when they’re all there is, then there’s no room to adapt. And that’s heartbreakingly lonely. It’s hard to feel like you are loved fully, as yourself, when someone does not care to know you beyond the role of your relationship to them. If you are “son” or “daughter”, then that is all they need to know.
With those roles come rules.
That’s not all bad. You should treat your sister and your spouse differently.
But if the rules aren’t based at all on the individuals, they probably won’t actually match the needs of all parties involves. And, wouldn’t you know it, the person with more power in the relationship (material power or the kind of emotional pull that accumulates through historical material power) tends to be the one more likely to have their wants and needs favored.
If one half of a role-based relationship wants to try to be loved more fully as themself, and tries to open up that kind of relationship, it can be very painful to be met with indifference, while being told it’s love.
When a parent focuses conversations on whether their child is meeting milestones and expectations, with little interest in how their child is feeling, little interest in their child’s interests, and lack of following up on anything outside of expectations and health and safety checkups.
Deviations from these expectations are met with either correction or a sense of grudging indulgence. I’ve known many parents who were able to “accept” that their child was queer, for example, but who aren’t interested or willing to understand the way that impacts their life experience. So, for example, they will still vote for people who harm the queer community. Because their role of “parent” doesn’t encompass protecting them from things that happen as a result of deviations from expectations. Because knowing their child’s inner experiences doesn’t matter.
What they actually regard as their job varies by age, culture, etc. But the underlying commonality is that the roles are not set by the needs of the child, but by a sense of normalcy, obligation, and familiarity.
They are therefore completely baffled when their child tries to communicate with them outside this framework. Some of them have no relationships at all that aren’t predefined by roles above all else, and frankly don’t have a schema for even how to interact that way.
Which means they can’t negotiate boundaries. Not really. They do their role correctly, and that’s what matters. That makes it hard for them to take in feedback, to acknowledge when they’ve caused hurt (as everybody does sometimes).
I want to stress again that I am not telling anyone what to do here.
But I keep seeing this pattern, and it breaks my heart. Sometimes, even when people love each other, they end up not able to remain in each others lives, because they only know how to respect a role, and not a person. And the hurts accumulate and can’t be fixed.
And so someone limits contact, or drifts away, or says goodbye—please don’t reach out again. They give up on being seen, and known, and loved for who they are. Hopefully they find that elsewhere. Sometimes, finding that elsewhere is what makes them realize how little they’ve been seen within their own family.
It’s sad, but I don’t think it’s wrong. If you tell someone “that hurts” and they can never hear it, it makes sense to try to escape the blast radius.
This is a strange newsletter. I expect, more than most of my others, it’ll impact people in a really wide array of ways, depending on their own experiences. It’ll bring up a lot of different feelings for different people.
So let me finish on a note I think is a bit more universally hopeful—if you’ve never been known, it doesn’t mean you can’t be. You may have to learn how to know and be known, but it’s possible, I promise. Yes, even in the case of that exception that might have just popped into your head. And I hope every one of you finds that, because I promise you, there is little better in this world than to be fully known and loved.
Ridiculous bonus content because you read this far:
Till next month,
Lee Brontide
Thank you for joining me for another month of Shed Letters. If you know someone who you think would like to join us, please feel personally invited to share any of these emails, or send them an invitation to sign up here. And remember that Secondhand Origin Stories is available for free as an ebook here, or in paperback form from your local independent book shop. And don’t forget, as a subscriber to Shed Letters, you have exclusive access to my free novelette, Doll’s Eye View, the Martin focused story that takes place between Secondhand Origin Stories and Names in Their Blood.