Family Doesn't Come With a Key

I paid for my mom to go through the Forum.

Same seminar I'd done a few years before. The one half the internet calls life-changing and the other half calls a cult. It changed mine, so I bought her a seat. Maybe she'd finally see her own story. Maybe we could have something real.

She treated it like a joke. Wouldn't participate. Tried to derail the class.

A hundred people in that room working on themselves, and she made it about her.

And I still wasn't done. Because of this:

She's your mother. Try harder.

So I kept trying.

I didn't know I was allowed to stop trying.

Here's the thing. I'd been running a rule my whole life that I'd never once looked at. Anybody who wanted access to me got it. Family got it automatically. Saying no was mean. Setting a boundary was abandonment.

A good son doesn't say no to his mother.

My therapist, Robin, was the first person to say it out loud to me. "Being in your life is a privilege. It's not a right." It's the seventh framework in Fix Your Thinking, Fix Your Life (all fourteen are here), and I wish to hell I'd heard it at twenty. (How it finally ended with my mom, in 2018, is in chapter 7 of the book.)

You're not the only one

The guilt makes you feel like a monster for even thinking about it. Like you're the first person in history to consider closing the door on family.

You're not even close.

Karl Pillemer, a sociologist at Cornell, ran a national survey for his book Fault Lines and found 27% of American adults had cut off contact with a relative. That's at least 67 million people. About 10% had cut off a parent or a child.

So why does it feel like you're the only one? Because nobody says it out loud. Who's gonna? A Cambridge study with the charity Stand Alone surveyed over 800 estranged adults, and 68% said there's a stigma around it. A lot of them said they felt judged. Same study: about four out of five also found something good on the other side. More freedom. More room to be themselves.

Yeah, people who sign up for a charity's survey aren't a random sample. But I know which column I'm in.

Keeping the peace costs something

Sarah Woods, a family medicine researcher at UT Southwestern, looked at 2,802 adults followed for twenty years in a national study called MIDUS. People with more family strain had more chronic health conditions and rated their own health worse ten years later. How good their marriages were? No link to later health at all.

Ten years later, the family stuff was still showing up in their bodies. The marriage? Nothing.

Nobody tested whether cutting family off makes you healthier, so I'm not going to claim it does. But I know what it felt like to stop bracing every time the phone rang. I could finally breathe.

It almost never ends with one fight

People who haven't been there picture one huge blowup. Somebody says something unforgivable, the door slams, done.

Kristina Scharp, a communication researcher, interviewed 52 adult children who'd distanced themselves from a parent. Every one of their stories started with maltreatment, abuse or indifference. And a lot of them didn't make a clean break. They caved to pressure to reconcile, pulled back, caved again... on and off, until the distance finally held.

Mine wasn't one fight either. It was the last of more fights than I can remember.

You don't need them to agree with your story

My mom tells people I abandoned her. For years I thought I needed her to see it my way before I was allowed to step back. Like I had to win the argument first.

Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan, a psychologist at Ohio State, and Joshua Coleman, author of Rules of Estrangement, surveyed 1,035 mothers whose adult kids had cut them off. Only 18% said they were at fault. 79% said other family members had turned the kid against them.

Mothers only, recruited from an estrangement mailing list, so don't hang your life on the exact numbers. But sit with that one. If you're waiting for the other person to sign off on why you left... you might be waiting forever.

She gets to tell it however she wants. I don't have to show up to argue about it.

The door still opens

I'm not telling anybody to torch their family.

Rin Reczek, a sociologist at Ohio State, dug into national data on more than 16,000 parent and adult-child relationships. Most periods of estrangement ended: 81% of the ones with mothers and 69% with fathers. The data can't say why, or whether the peace lasted. Most of those doors opened back up. Mine hasn't. That's my call. Yours is yours to make.

How to catch it

You rehearse before every call

You script it in the car. You brace before you pick up. You need a whole evening to recover after. If talking to someone takes a warm-up and a cool-down, they have more access than they've earned.

You fold by Sunday

You set it on Friday. They push. You fold by Sunday, and you tell yourself you were being the bigger person.

Bullshit. You got talked out of it.

They have a key because they've always had one

Nobody ever decided they get the whole house. They just never got told no. Ask yourself when you last chose to give it to them... or if you ever did.

Where to start

Nedra Glover Tawwab, a therapist and author of Set Boundaries, Find Peace, sorts boundaries into six kinds: physical, sexual, intellectual, emotional, material and time. Go down that list with one person in mind. One of them will jump out at you. Start there.

Then you need the words. Most of us never set the boundary because we never figured out what we'd actually say. So we say nothing, and stew about it, and pick up the phone anyway.

This is the exercise from the end of chapter 7:

I gave her every chance I knew how to give. Buying her that seat came from the part of me that still wanted a mom. That part deserved a shot.

It didn't deserve to keep getting its ass kicked.

Being in your life is a privilege. It's not a right.

Who would you call first if something went wrong tonight? Who do you dread hearing from? Why are those two different people?

Write the sentence. Say it out loud in the car.

Then decide who gets a key.