Is Estrangement a Social Movement?

If You Just Cut Ties Over "Politics," Read This!

So you did it. After years of saying, “hey, Mom/Dad/sibling/uncle/friend/aunt/fwb, I would rather spend time with you than discuss politics right now,”

Or, “How about if we find common ground?”

Or my favorite, “So, that’s not what happened, the actual report says that—”

You realized: they don’t change. They can’t change? They won’t change.

You don’t know which, but you know they aren’t changing, and don’t look like they’re trying.

So you did it. You “pulled the trigger,” to use a violent metaphor, and why not? They’ve been using violent metaphors to you, about you, and about your people for long enough. Why not put the trigger and not the escape hatch or the parachute? Shooting the relationship implies obliteration, and frankly, you feel like they’ve gone and obliterated it first, so why not?

You pulled the trigger and went no-contact. If their contact was a giant, jabbering face, you shoved a ball gag right into it. You plugged up the jabbering face-hole of noise and it is blessed quiet.

If you just look around for a second, there are a bunch of us who are already here and we are ready to catch you. We don’t necessarily identify ourselves right away because of the social stigma associated with cutting ties. But stick around long enough, say something noncommittal like “I don’t see my family much,” and soon people open up to you.

There are forums. This is more of a delightfully witty blog that has sardonic observations and sometimes deeply wise advice, but it’s not the type of healing forum that people like Patrick Teahan, Nate Posthelwaite, Dr. Ramani, Karyl McBride, and a lovely woman whose name I am blanking on at the moment.

There are books. So many books. A good one might be “Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents,” to go with the mood of the day.

Photo by Raphael Renter | @raphi_rawr on Unsplash

And about that, the mood, that is.

Yeah. A lot of you got here from politics. And it is happening inside of your family microcosm while also happening within the societal macrocosm. So those of us who have been on this road a bit longer are getting re-triggered and feeling like the entire country is becoming like a toxic family. (It is.) Those of you who just pulled the trigger recently, are not only reeling from this just being the early days of your estrangement, but also from the same macrocosmic dumpster fire we are collectively observing.

Which provides two things we can use.

The first, a practical concern. You are not alone. Got that? I know that. I also know that you can’t replace a family or religion or shared belief system or support network with a bunch of relative strangers on the internet (but we are better than your stranger relatives though, amirite?)

The second, a larger idea, that can turn some gloomy, but gives me hope. We are a social movement. Just by virtue of a bunch of you/us going through this in some way or another, even if it’s just estrangement from the America you thought you knew, this is a wave of action. That wave can be used to build community.

And yes, you are grieving. I’m still grieving. Grief is a normal part of estrangement, and a normal part of knowing you aren’t going to get the government you thought you were going to get. Knowing people that you love can get hurt, and that so many have already been hurt.

We are all estranged.

Last night, I listened to the audiobook of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letters From a Birmingham Jail. (It is fantastic. Everything is in that essay. It is both acorn and tree, and the voice acting in the audiobook is out of this world.) The Reverend Dr. King used the word “estrangement” in that essay! And he used it the way he used so many words, expansively.

Check it:

“Is not segregation an existential expression of man's tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness?”

Here, he uses estrangement to describe the mental gymnastics that white supremacists have to do in order to enact the brutal violence of segregation and Jim Crow law (not to mention slavery, which was the first “tragic separation” of his conscience from his mind that, as the evil forebear of Jim Crow, requiring not only mental gymnastics, but a mental synchronized swim team.

We here chose to end the “terrible sinfulness” to which Dr. King referred, and in order for that to happen we had to estrange from actual people. That’s ok. There are more of us. We will all become known to each other.

We don’t need a special bracelet or t-shirt to identify ourselves, because hopefully we will recognize each other in one another’s propensity to do what’s right, even when it’s uncomfortable. That goes for doing right by us (cutting toxic ties after doing due diligence and realizing they cannot change) and doing right by the world (showing up for the most vulnerable in society the way we have shown up for ourselves, often the most vulnerable in our families.)

Is estrangement a social movement?

Maybe not. But chosen family has always been a movement. Those of us who don’t fit neatly into the boxes already know that. The movement now is towards each other.

We are not alone.