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Myra and her niece were like sisters growing up, but a falling out during COVID has driven a wedge between them.
“We talked all the time, and we share everything about life – our problems and our good times,” says Myra, a retired executive assistant who lives in Montreal. “We never had a fight before.”
But as the pandemic wore on, Myra’s niece, who lives in Florida, talked about refusing to get the vaccine and frequently derided Myra’s decision to get the shot and wear a mask. Even small things Myra described, like abiding by the requirement to register for pool time because of pandemic restrictions, were met with sarcastic remarks.
Frustrated and upset, Myra cut off contact. They went months without speaking, save for brief messages of perfunctory well-wishing last Christmas.
The Globe and Mail is using Myra’s first name only to not jeopardize a future reconciliation.
Estrangement from a relative occurs in at least 27 per cent of families, according to research conducted by Karl Pillemer, a sociologist at Cornell University. Some therapists believe it may be even more prevalent, and may be on the rise because young adults today are more likely than previous generations to think of family as something they can choose to be part of – or not.
Common causes of these breaches include abuse, divorce, remarriage, value differences and disputes over wills and inheritances, says Dr. Becca Bland, a U.K.-based expert on family estrangement.
But as with Myra and her niece, the pandemic, and the conflicting values it exposed over vaccination, masking and other measures, has also caused many families to grow apart.
A survey released earlier this year by the Canadian Hub for Applied and Social Research at the University of Saskatchewan found that 31 per cent of people reported reduced contact with a family member or friend over the past year because of differing views – and 94 per cent said the rift was caused by clashing opinions about COVID.
Repairing estranged relationships can take years, but it can be done with tremendous amounts of communication and empathy, an effort that often begins during family-centred holidays such as Thanksgiving, researchers and therapists say.
Paper hearts with messages of hope and solidarity hang on the fence at a Winnipeg high school in 2021. In the COVID-19 pandemic's first two years, debates about vaccines and health precautions created friction within some Canadian communities and families.Shannon VanRaes/The Globe and Mail
Sandra Scott, a Winnipeg-based family therapist, has seen at least one client per week dealing with divisions related to the pandemic since the fall of 2020. “Some of the people are contemplating repair and what that can look like. And for other people the cut is too deep, and it’s more, ‘How can I move forward from this and just be away?’ ” she says.
But as the holiday season approaches, Ms. Scott expects many of the families who have been dealing with estrangement caused by the pandemic will begin to at least try to repair their relationships.
Recently, with heated debates about the pandemic fading and longing for the relationship she lost, Myra has begun to try and fix things. She sent her niece a message apologizing for their falling out. The two have begun talking occasionally, including a phone call after Hurricane Ian devastated Florida, and Myra is trying to accept her part in the rift. She sees now that she could have tried to be more patient when talking about the pandemic instead of getting caught up in aggressive arguments.
“I think the root of mending the relationship is being humble and accept that you made a mistake, even though the other person might have made even a bigger mistake or the same mistake as you,” she said. “And just recognizing that you love that person and you miss that person.”
Social norms that emphasize the importance of family can keep people together, but they can also make it difficult for people to talk about an estrangement in their lives, says Dr. Joshua Coleman, a San Francisco-based psychologist and author of The Rules of Estrangement. But there may be more people in your life who are experiencing estrangement than you realize, he says, as changing attitudes about family and its role in our lives is increasing the prevalence of the phenomenon – particularly between adult children and their parents.
“Older generations are in some ways operating from a different moral framework,” says Dr. Coleman, explaining that they may feel strongly that a person should respect their parents and elders. “Whereas younger generations are looking at it much more from the framework that relationships are voluntary ... And if the relationship doesn’t satisfy my ideals for happiness, or mental health or growth, then not only can I cut that person out, but I should cut that person out.”
People paint hearts onto the COVID-19 Memorial Wall in London in April of 2021. When British researchers looked into the pandemic's effect on families, they found 40 per cent of those estranged from relatives were thinking more than usual about reconnecting.Frank Augstein/The Associated Press
A study looking at how the COVID crisis affected estranged family members, conducted by U.K. researchers, found that of 801 people surveyed, 40 per cent said they had thought about making contact with their estranged family members more than usual, while 48 per cent said it was the same as usual, and 12 per cent said they considered reaching out less than usual.
“You would think that in a global catastrophe families would reunite,” says Dr. Bland, who helped conduct the study. “But the underlying causes were never really addressed, so families didn’t reconcile in the way that we thought that perhaps they would.”
For some people, reconciling may not be advisable, particularly when there is a history of abuse, Dr. Bland says. For others, the rupture has lasted too long and the pain and frustration is too deep to want to keep trying to mend fences.
This is the case for Keeghan and his sister.
They were close growing up in Calgary, despite their differences – she’s five years older and was interested in animation and crafting while he was obsessed with video games.
“Sometimes we’d stay up till four in the morning, just talking and laughing,” says Keeghan, who is now 22 years old and studying at university in Montreal.
But when his sister began adopting increasingly conservative positions, including homophobic views in 2019, a rift began to form between them. “Her exact words have been, ‘I know it’s not a choice to be gay, but it’s a choice to act on it,’” he says. “That’s the kind of stuff that just continued to push me away, because I’m a queer person.”
The two haven’t spoken in months, and with his sister living halfway across the country in Calgary, the distance between them makes it easier to avoid one another. “I’ll always see her at Christmas and give her a hug,” says Keeghan. “But I don’t have a connection with her.”
He is still close with his parents, and is open to one day reconciling with his sister. But to close the gap that has opened between them he says he would need to feel comfortable expressing his views on sexuality, politics and other topics in her presence without it causing a fight.
“If I was to get a real relationship with her back I would need to not be uncomfortable about speaking freely,” he says. “I’ve never had to limit topics of conversation. I’ve always been able to talk to my family about everything, and now that doesn’t exist.”
Mark, a Toronto-based mental health advocate and speaker, also isn’t ready to mend things with his estranged sibling. In his case, he feels a type of pressure to reconcile that therapists say is a common one—it’s what the rest of the family, or a parent, would want.
In a memoir published last year, Mark revealed that he had experienced abuse as a child growing up in Cape Breton, but he kept the perpetrator anonymous. “The point of the book was not to call people out by name,” he says, explaining that the project was instead to help him come to terms with that period in his life.
Mark made his brother, who was aware of what had happened, promise that when the book came out he would not share the unpublished details with anyone. “He ended up then violating that privacy by telling my sister all about it,” Mark says.
His sister then took it upon herself to seek justice on his behalf, even though that is not what he wanted and she was acting on incomplete information.
Mark was so upset that his siblings didn’t respect his wishes that he hasn’t spoken to either of them since. “I meditate on forgiveness all the time, and I just can’t quite get myself there,” he says.
But the memory of his mother, who died in 2015, weighs heavily on his estrangement. “My mother told us all the time that she always wanted us siblings to stay on good terms, that she always wanted us to speak. So there’s that guilt out there, too, that I need to do right by my mother,” he says.
Still, Mark doesn’t know how he could ever start over with his sister.
“I think she knows that it wasn’t okay what she did. But to kind of say, well, we’re going to have to build a relationship based on something else excluding that, that’s been difficult for me to do,” he says.
A masked man walks past a mural in New Westminster, B.C., in 2020.Marissa Tiel/The Canadian Press
Repairing an estranged relationship can be done, Dr. Coleman says, but it never works if you start with hostile words and laying blame. “If you can approach that person with compassion, even around the mistakes that they made, and have appreciation for the things that they did right, you have a much better chance of getting the kind of response that will enable the relationship to go forward.”
As part of his research at Cornell, Prof. Karl Pillemer has interviewed nearly 100 people who successfully mended fences, and common threads emerge. None of the steps are easy, he says, but they can work.
First, try to let go of whatever need you have for an apology. “Over and over, people who reconciled told me that they gave up the idea that you had to resolve the past issues. In particular, they realize that the other person was never going to accept their narrative of the past,” Prof. Pillemer says. “They almost invariably gave up the idea that the past could be understood mutually and instead focused on the future.”
Next, do what Myra is trying to do, and understand whatever role you may have played in the separation.
“People who were able to reconcile were able to look at whatever part they might play in it – what they could have done differently in the estrangement – and that was actually empowering for some people,” Prof. Pillemer says.
Thinking about how you’ll view the situation far down the road should also be considered, he adds.
Many of the people he has studied suffered from what’s known as anticipated regret – the feeling that months or years or decades from now you’ll wish you had done things differently.
“It seems to be a major regret of people when they reach the end of their life. Estrangement kind of haunts them and interferes with their sense of having lived a complete life,” he says. That’s why trying to reconcile, even when it brought about a less than perfect relationship, was such a relief to so many of the people he studied.
“One man said it just felt like a heavily weighted backpack was taken off his shoulders. He woke up in the morning and thought, ‘Gee, I don’t have in the back of my mind that I haven’t talked to my brother in 10 years.’ ”
Tina Gilbertson, a Denver, Colorado-based psychotherapist who specializes in estrangements between adult children and their parents, says that anyone hoping to repair a broken relationship this holiday season, or any time, may have to accept that, in many ways, they have to start a new relationship.
“You have to honour the fact that things are not the way they were, and possibly can’t ever be again, depending on the severity of the estrangement,” she says. “But a new relationship is possible if both parties are willing.”