Broken bonds

Grandparenting wasn’t supposed to be like this. After years of picnic-packing, zoo-visiting, and birthday-planning, my friend’s daughter-in-law decided neither set of grandparents should spend time with the children unless one parent was present. A few months later the young family moved halfway across the country with no plans for holiday get-togethers or summer vacations. Phone calls are no substitute, especially when the little girls are often “too busy” to chat with Grandma.

Our hospice social worker, on the other hand, is resigned to separation from her daughter after the daughter went through a course of counseling that taught her to classify parental discipline as “trauma.” No parent is perfect, and there were incidents in which Mom was not entirely sensitive to her daughter’s feelings. But growing up in a normal Christian household in the early 2000s is not traumatic.

Another family I know was turned upside down when three of their adult children decided they had been manipulated by their parents and the church they grew up in. These three have cut off all but the most obligatory communication, in spite of Mom and Dad acknowledging some well-meaning errors and apologizing for them. Well-meaning or not, the kids don’t feel safe, even though they are married with children of their own.

Have you heard of “going no contact”? The cultural sage known as Oprah delved into this phenomenon in a November podcast featuring three experts in psychology. One of them, Dr. Lindsay Gibson, has done as much as anyone to mainstream “no contact” in her breakout book, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How To Heal From Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents (2015). To strip Gibson’s thesis to its starkest terms, the best way for some wounded souls to heal is to become distant, rejecting, or self-involved themselves. At least where their parents are concerned. Her first chapter recounts stories of unhappy Gen Xers and millennials—mostly women, but a few men—who were “not being sufficiently emotionally responded to as a child,” which led to their feeling “emotionally lonely,” or “emotionally unseen.”

Mature parents, Dr. Gibson claims, are always sensitive to their child’s feelings, always ready to affirm them, always open to honest conversations, even though “emotional loneliness is a vague and private experience, not easy to see or describe.” But that’s no excuse: “Some people have called this feeling existential loneliness but there’s nothing existential about it. If you feel it, it comes from your family.”

Family estrangement is nothing new, and no reasonable counselor denies the need to distance oneself from toxic or abusive parents. But “going no contact” has become symptomatic of modern isolation, with as many as a quarter of young Americans, by some estimates, breaking off from Mom or Dad or both. Dr. Josh Coleman, another member of Oprah’s panel, is alarmed at the trend among counselors who serve as “detachment brokers” rather than reconciliation mediators. Normal parenting mistakes are reclassified as abuse; exercising discipline is trauma; insisting on family standards is gaslighting. The solution is to establish “boundaries” or sever bonds altogether. Parents who were never invited into the conversation don’t know what hit them.

As with most social trends, Christians are not immune. All three examples cited above happened in conservative homeschooling families. Even some Christian counselors and youth leaders have bought into the toxic-parent trope as justification for separating rather than resolving.

Why? Part of it reflects the atomization of a culture that prizes self-fulfillment and self-care over group loyalty. For organic family, ethnic, or national bonds we’ve substituted “communities” of like-minded and affirming individuals, which break up when affirmation falls short or minds begin to differ. Millennials raised in Christian homes may also be reacting against the idealization of Christian families as the last best hope of America. They don’t want to save America, just themselves.

But idealization of the self will not heal emotional emptiness. Young people determined to forge their own identities forget that we are made and shaped by others as much as by individual personality traits. It’s only by seeing ourselves reflected in close, sometimes difficult, unions that we understand who we truly are. God, a relationship in Himself, means to shape us in relationship, beginning with our mother’s arms and father’s voice. “Honor your father and mother” is a weighty command. To break that bond for self-centered reasons makes us weightless.