A couple days ago, on August 30, the New Yorker published a piece titled ‘Why So Many People Are Going “No Contact” with Their Parents‘, by Anna Russell. I clicked on it, because I thought it would be interesting to hear other people’s experiences in this space, and – well, now you’re hearing about it. I’d encourage you to read the essay yourself – the New Yorker is mostly paywalled, but I found I was able to read my first article free (and you can always check the Wayback Machine in an emergency). It’s a long essay – a little over 6,000 words – and it’s structured roughly like this:

• Introduction to ‘no contact’ through Amy, the essay’s focal figure
• Complications and criticisms of no contact
• Ending no contact through reconciliation.

That’s a fairly normal structure. An idea is introduced, it’s nuanced and complicated, there’s some voice given to its opponents, and then we look forward to the future, to what comes next. All normal journalism. There are maybe some blind spots that feel a little weird – for instance, early in the essay, Russell says that family estrangement can happen “because of one fight,” and gives the example of parents rejecting their kids who come out as gay. That – I mean, it feels maybe slightly trivialising, as a way of framing it? Kids coming out as gay and being rejected by their parents isn’t a fight. They’re not arguing over the remote. In the most literal sense, if we take this sentence and put it in a void, parents rejecting their gay children can technically be a single fight. A kid can come home and say ‘Mum, I’m gay,’ and their mum can reply ‘Get the fuck out of the house and never speak to me again.’ In the strictest sense, yes, that is one single conversation. But there’s maybe some missing context here. Russell’s whole article focuses on adult children who stop talking to their parents. Is the child at fault in this scenario? Do they drive estrangement in any meaningful way? Should we even be calling it a fight? This sort of framing plagues Russell’s article. It seems like she’s trying to be balanced or neutral about heated issues, but it comes off like she doesn’t understand what’s at stake. Estrangement can come “from an accumulation of grievances,” she says, or “because of one fight – for example, after a parent rejects an L.G.B.T.Q. child when they come out.” Neutral, sure, but maybe missing the forest for the trees. Remember those kids as the essay goes on.

In the first section, then, we meet Amy. Amy is a homeschooled evangelical who goes to higher ed to find a Christian husband. She goes to a Christian college, which she pays for herself (did her parents not have the money or do they object to women’s education?). She’s studious, conscientious, and explores different points of view. Back home, she suggests to her parents that maybe the Bible can be interpreted in different ways. Maybe it’s not hostile to gay people. This topic immediately turns into a massive family argument, and her mother writes her a letter warning her about the state of her soul. Similar arguments erupt when Amy describes herself as a feminist (“her parents began arguing with her about abortion”), when her (Canadian) parents are pro-Trump, or when Brett Kavanaugh is elected to the Supreme Court. At six, Amy’s parents told her that her non-Christian grandparents were going to hell. By the time she’s in law school, her mother tells her she’s probably going to hell too. The final straw is Amy’s wedding. Amy tells her parents that they can’t come if they’re not vaccinated against Covid. Her parents hate the vaccine, of course, and refuse to get it. They all try and figure out some compromises, and eventually Amy draws a boundary: get vaccinated or don’t come. They don’t come. There’s a little bit of back and forth, but that’s the end of it. Amy ends the relationship and tells her family not to contact her again.

Amy’s story as described here takes up about the first half of the essay. The reporting is fairly neutral, with the occasional piece of odd framing – like the ‘single fight’ example we talked about before. There’s clear evidence of craftsmanship from Russell as a storyteller – for instance, she brings out the irony in a comment partway through the wedding debacle. Peter, Amy’s fiancé, had lost some of his own family – not explicitly to Covid, but it’s mentioned in the context of this conversation about vaccines and Covid safety. Peter tries to explain to Amy’s family why it’s important to get vaccinated, telling them “The scariest thing to us is losing another family member.” The irony, of course, is that this push about vaccines is what ended the relationship. They lose the family over fears of losing family. It almost – you know, this is hard to be certain about, but in a certain light it almost seems like Russell here blames Amy and Peter for ruining the relationship. She doesn’t overtly blame them, but the structure of the essay in this moment seems to undermine their words. Russell gives us the quote where Peter says losing family is the scariest thing, and then a couple paragraphs later, they go no contact. In the same paragraph as Peter’s quote, we see Amy deliver an ultimatum: do this, or don’t come to my wedding. Is that what you say if you’re scared of losing your family? Is that how you act? The framing of this event – putting all these things next to each other, including each of these elements in the story – they could be interpreted as undermining the sincerity of Peter’s words. Russell herself doesn’t intrude into the narrative to correct or guide those responses, leaving us with this slight twinge of uncertainty – whose side is this lady on?

And that’s the thing, right – I don’t think this is a conversation where you can stay neutral. I grew up with people like Amy. I probably am an Amy – I burned pretty hard out of a conservative church environment, and I have family I don’t speak to any more. I recognise all the things she’s been through. The reality is that conservative Christianity is hostile to anything outside its own tenets. Amy got into an argument for suggesting a queer-friendly reading of the Bible, which doesn’t sound all that dramatic, but imagine if she was queer herself. Imagine if she needed an abortion. These types of family are unsafe – if they’re only safe for children who keep within conservative lines, they’re unsafe. Near the end of the essay, Russell quotes one of Amy’s professors from college, who saw the estrangement as due to “world view” rather than any direct type of harm. “In my understanding, Amy wasn’t beaten as a child, she wasn’t neglected. She was loved. As best as her parents could love her, they tried to love her.” That perspective is honestly close to delusional. Her family has brain worms. They celebrated Kavanaugh’s election to the Supreme Court, which directly resulted in the repeal of Roe vs Wade. If they didn’t hurt their daughter, they hurt someone else’s. The Covid thing really just tops it off – that’s not a matter of world view. There are not two equal sides to that story. On one side is scientific reality, and on the other a bunch of paranoid conspiracy theories whipped up and unleashed on the public for political gain. Amy’s family wanted to come to her wedding without getting vaccinated. Amy said no. Her sister called her selfish, and accused her of putting friends over family. One brother called her manipulative and immature, and another called her a “bitter, self-obsessed psycho.” Brain worms. And Russell, through all of it, is trying to stay neutral. I don’t know why. As with those queer kids from the start, she frames the topic in a neutral way when the material facts just don’t lend themselves to a neutral interpretation. What’s that about?

After the section about Amy, where no contact is introduced and discussed, Russell moves on to complicate the idea, including through a series of criticisms. It’s not all negative – some of it is welcome nuance. Some of it’s actually funny. For instance, Russell says that she has heard a wide range of reasons as to why people cut ties with their family. As you would expect, some reasons are very good, while others are not: “Other fissures were harder to trace.” That’s very delicate phrasing. Russell might not feel confident saying it, but it’s obvious that some people will have gone no contact for silly reasons. Some of them will be genuinely petty or immature – of course. There’s no way that every no contact person is an angel. Russell similarly discusses subreddits like r/EstrangedAdultChild and r/raisedbynarcissists, where she again – very politely – observes “one can find it hard to avoid the fact that posters are not exactly unbiased.” She’s correct: we should all be conscious that Redditors might be whipping each other up into a frothing rage. That’s a welcome comment in any conversation.

Elsewhere in this section, however, some of the framing seems to imply or verges on implying that going no contact is to blow things out of proportion. In a paragraph on psychologist Sherrie Campbell, Russell tries to define a toxic person, and gets some unsatisfying answers:

“Campbell told me that toxic people are different from flawed people. ‘I mean, I’m a parent. I’m flawed,’ she said. But toxic people ‘are very bad people with good moments. They’re not good people with bad moments.’ I wondered where the line was. Campbell told me that toxic parents often use the phrase ‘Because I’m your parent’ to justify their behavior. But other parents—tired, frustrated, burned out—say that, too.”

The purpose of this section is to muddy the water on what counts as a toxic person. Campbell gives definitions, and Russell thinks that they are too broad, that they’re vague. We shouldn’t read that as a problem with Campbell specifically – it’s presented in the essay as a critique of the concept itself. We have to recognise here the difference between the research process and writing. When you’re in the research stage, it’s normal to come across vague definitions. You don’t just write down and publish the first explanation you hear. Sometimes you don’t get great answers from the experts. It’s then your job as a researcher to find better answers, either by asking follow up questions or by going elsewhere. When she writes that Campbell’s answers were vague, Russell isn’t just telling you that one person had muddy answers. She’s telling you that no better answers exist. If they did, Russell would have done the legwork to find and present them. Instead, she’s telling you these answers and immediately poking holes in them, as if to say ‘This is all I found, and it’s not very good.’ Notice the language around how Russell’s critiques are presented. At other points in the narrative, she tells us that she directly challenges how people respond. When Amy cuts off her family, Russell says “I questioned this reaction,” and “I pressed her on whether a full break was really necessary.” But with Campbell, the critique isn’t presented as a question. It’s not presented as a chance to respond, to clarify. Campbell says that toxic people are very bad people with good moments, and Russell only wonders where the line is. It’s a thought she keeps to herself. The critique of Campbell’s other comment doesn’t even have that first-person framing: we receive the rebuttal directly, from the voice of the narrator. “Campbell told me that toxic parents often use the phrase ‘Because I’m your parent’ to justify their behavior. But other parents—tired, frustrated, burned out—say that, too.” It’s presented as a rebuttal over the head of the interview subject. This framing doesn’t tell us whether Russell asked these questions in the interview, but the final product – the essay as written – suggests that even if she did, there weren’t any satisfying answers.

Again, the purpose of that section is to make it seem like the idea of a toxic person is a bit woolly – as Russell says later in the essay, “No one self-identifies as toxic.” It’s a label that people apply to their family to rationalise their decision to go no contact. It’s an excuse, a justification, a psychological salve. Russell quotes Cornell sociologist Karl Pillemer: “If you consider a family tie toxic, then there’s no reason anymore to try to work on it or to consider the other person as a human being.” That seems maybe a little extreme – do we really stop thinking of the other person as a human being? We might think they’re awful, but inhuman? The broader drift of the argument here is in favour of the parents: think of those poor maligned family members, unfairly dehumanized by being called toxic. Think of Amy’s poor parents, or those people who reject their gay kids – you can become estranged as the result of a single fight! It could happen to you. Russell’s earlier neutrality towards people who go no contact looks a little suspicious in the face of this apologia for toxic people. You start to sense that she’s more concerned about the plight of parents than the plight of the children who cut them off.

This vision of no contact extremists is entrenched by Russell’s exploration of support groups, where she finds two sorts of people. Some are happy with their estrangement, but others (the moderates) potentially want reconciliation. One interview subject wished the support groups “offered more advice for people feeling unsure about their choices.” They’re potentially underserving “the middle category of people,” we hear, people who want to be reconciled or who aren’t sure what their future relationships should look like. We get the sense that no contact extremists (who mostly live on Reddit, and who dehumanize people by calling them toxic) are making it difficult for the temporarily separated to reconcile. Russell recounts the hostile reactions on Reddit to one attempt at reconnection: “One poster said that they had been contacted by Coleman [a clinical psychologist specialising in estrangement] on behalf of their mother, who wanted to reconcile; commentators derided Coleman as ‘callous’ and a ‘flying monkey.'” Those responses are generally pretty funny, and it does illustrate the problem with Reddit, but it also completes the cast of Russell’s story. There are sad parents, angry no contact Redditors, an underserved middle group who potentially want reconciliation, and the psychologists trying to reach out and restore those relationships. That’s the vision of no contact.

In her thesis statement paragraph, Russell tells us “Some critics think the movement has gone too far.” She doesn’t name any of these critics, instead presenting a series of arguments and complaints in her own words, almost like they’re just her own actual opinions. In response to the idea that we treat our parents like we treat romantic partners – as chosen, as optional, as relationships preserved or ended according to our own desires, Russell writes “Do we owe our parents more than we owe romantic partners?” She accepts that relationships with parents may end when they “involve physical or sexual abuse,” but contends that “many estrangements happen for other reasons, including emotional abuse or toxic behaviour” – which, she reminds us, are “more difficult terms to define.” She concludes “Isn’t part of the point of your relationship with your mom that, even if she aggravates you, you still pick up the phone?” Dan Olson has this video about Pink Floyd’s The Wall, and how it was infamously reviewed by online personality the Nostalgia Critic. In the section on Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2, Olson notes that the Critic’s review “is transparently imposing his own experience of school in 1980s/1990s suburban Illinois on Waters’ experiences in primary school in the 1950s and 60s in England.” The Critic talks past Waters’ discussion of caning and corporal punishment and assesses the song based on his own high school experience in the 90s. It’s hard not to suspect that Russell is doing the same thing – imposing her own experience of her relationship with her parents onto people who might have much more complicated or negative relationships. Everybody fights with their family, she seems to think. That’s not reason to cut them off. The two types of parent-child relationship in Russell’s essay are violent and aggravating, with no real further distinctions admitted. When your parents refuse to come to your wedding because they don’t want to get vaccinated, that’s not violent, but surely we can agree it’s not just aggravating, either. When your dad refuses to walk you down the aisle because he’s been listening to scaremongering about vaccines, something is wrong with that relationship. I think there’s a question about how seriously Russell takes the feelings of children who go no contact.

In a moment of self-reflection, Russell writes “The thing about listening to someone’s else’s family drama is that it’s really none of your business. Nevertheless, we all have opinions.” Her opinions seem to fixate on the grief of parents on the receiving end of estrangement. That’s where she seems to connect most powerfully with this topic. “As a new parent myself,” she writes, “I felt scared at the idea that I might somehow screw up, and my child would reject me.” She feels “sympathy” for Amy, but only in a qualified way. It’s not sympathy over her family situation: only for her “account of her family’s intractability.” She feels sad for how Amy sees the situation. She feels sad over a perspective that she does not grant the fullness of truth. The parents receive no such qualifiers: Russell “wondered often about [Amy’s] parents and the suffering they must be enduring.” When Amy says that her parents used to send her cards, Russell focuses on the parents’ sadness, and Amy’s refusal to reply. “I thought of unread cards piling up, a testament to Amy’s anger.” It’s all Amy. Everything falls into place. Thus the section about how calling someone toxic is vague and subjective – is it good enough reason to cut someone off? Thus the discussion of the Reddit extremists, the discussion of the middle group who don’t feel supported to potentially restore their relationships. At every turn, the underlying attitude – isn’t no contact going a bit far?

Alright, we’re nearly there. Russell’s focus in her essay mostly falls on the responsibilities children have to their parents. She cites Pillemer, the Cornell sociologist, as saying that parents care more about parent-child relationships than their kids. If you’re a parent, “you’ve invested for years in your children.” But adult children have “many competing roles,” making it “structurally easier,” Pillemer suggests, “for them to exit the relationship than it is for parents.” This quote fits in around Russell’s comments about what we owe to our parents. “It can sometimes be unpleasant, even horrible, to hang out with your parents,” Russell says. “And yet severing ties can also cause harm. What is lost when we render our families optional?” I actually have a bit of a counter-intuitive view here. I agree that severing ties can cause harm, but I actually don’t think we do render our families optional. No contact, as a phenomenon, is not about making your family an optional part of your life. I don’t think you can replace your parents. It leaves a hole in your life when they’re not there. It’s not that they’re rendered optional, it’s that having them in your life is more destructive than the cool void of estrangement. No contact is its own form of horror. The guilt, the shame, the sense of abandonment and worthlessness – these are all real, living effects of estrangement. Who picks that? How bad do things have to be before you stare down that barrel? Russell is probably right that some immature people cut their families for poor reasons. I don’t doubt it. But I also don’t think they should be our focus.

Further, beyond this question of what we owe to our parents, I think we have to consider what our parents owe to us. In a section with Coleman, the family psychologist, Russell discusses how notions of trauma have changed over time. Coleman provides a paper showing “that the definition of trauma has expanded in the past three decades to include experiences that were once considered ordinary.” This line of argument is a misunderstanding of epidemiology. Changing notions of trauma don’t necessarily impact its historical presence. That is – look, let me give an example. Six hundred years ago, they didn’t know that autism existed. Would there have been autistic people around? Yeah, obviously. Our knowledge of autism doesn’t change whether it exists. Similarly, PTSD didn’t exist as a medical diagnosis until the DSM-III was published in 1980. Does that mean you couldn’t get PTSD in the Middle Ages? Obviously not. Our changing notions of trauma today don’t mean that trauma didn’t exist in the past. When Russell says that our definition of trauma includes experiences that were once considered ordinary, what that means is that people used to be traumatised as a matter of routine. Coleman tells Russell (in hushed tones, no doubt), that “he’s seen parents cut out because they say negative things about a child’s sexuality, or romantic partner, or because they refuse to accept a child’s boundaries.” You reject your child’s sexuality one time, and – look, this whole thing is silly. It’s possible that we have higher expectations of our parents today, and a better sense of what constitutes trauma, but isn’t that a good thing? Doesn’t that show progress? Some parents reject the idea that they’ve hurt their kids, arguing that “they tolerated worse behavior from their own parents.” They seem to think there’s bad behaviour, which is what their parents did, and normal behaviour, which is what they do. There’s no suspicion that we might be called to do better again. People used to smoke indoors, and now they do it outside. Does that mean smoking is good for you? Obviously not. We have further to go. Grow the fuck up.