Why Adult Children Go No Contact: Understanding Family Estrangement with Dr. Rin Reczek

Tina Gosney  00:00

Tina, hey everyone. Welcome back to Coaching Your Family Relationships. I’m your host, Tina Gosney, and I’m really glad you’re here today, because we’re talking about one of the most painful, confusing, and really increasingly visible issues in modern family life, which is family estrangement. If you are a parent whose adult child has pulled away, maybe they’ve limited contact, they stopped responding, or they’ve just gotten no contact at all. This conversation could feel really personal, and if you’re an adult child who has needed the distance from their parent, or a sibling, or a grandparent, maybe even a different extended family member. This conversation will probably feel really personal to you too. And if estrangement has not happened in your family, but you can feel the tension, there’s more silence than there used to be. You feel afraid, hurt, and maybe even feel that disconnection growing. Then I want you to listen very closely. This is not just a conversation for people who cut off family. It’s a conversation about what family means now. So, for a long time, estrangement was treated as something that was really rare. It was pretty shameful, and people that did it were extreme. It was that thing, you know, that people families whisper whispered about, but they rarely understood. You know, there’s that son who never – he doesn’t come home anymore, and a daughter who just stops answering the texts. Sibling relationships are the most common way to estranged, but those can quietly disappear. You may even have, you know, the grandparents who don’t see their grandchildren anymore, and often you know everyone around the family has very quick explanation of how this happened. That adult child is selfish. The parent has, must have been, they must have done something terrible. Oh, they started going to therapy, and their therapist convinced them that their family was terrible, so they cut their family off, or maybe they got sucked into social media and believed things that weren’t true, or politics, or religion are to blame, or maybe even boundaries, like they just started putting up so many boundaries. Well, today’s guest is a sociologist, her name is Dr. Rin Reczek. She offers a much deeper and a more nuanced explanation in her book, that’s coming out in August, and this book is called Families We Lose: A New Explanation for Family Estrangement. It’s on pre-sell right now, by the way, so you should grab your copy. But she says, instead of seeing estrangement as a trend or a moral failure, or simply the result of one bad event, she says that estrangement points to a larger cultural clash about what does family mean. On one side, she says there’s compulsory kinship, and this is the belief that your family of origin, that’s forever, it’s no matter what. It’s this idea that family bonds have to be preserved because of biology and history and roles and obligation, it sounds like things when we say, you know, but she’s your mother, he’s your father, you only get one family, blood is thicker than water, you need to honor your parents, families stick together, you know, all of those things, it reinforced this idea of compulsory kinship, most of us were raised inside this way of thinking, and for many people, there’s a lot of beauty and meaning in it. It creates loyalty, belonging, and sacrifice, and commitment. But Dr. Reczek asked us to look at the other side of it too. What happens when family, keeping the family together requires one person to stay silent. What happens when the family image matters more than the individual’s safety. What happens when adult children are expected to submit to their parents or elders, even after they’re grown? What happens when biology is used to demand closeness, but the relationship itself does not include accountability and respect and mutual care. On the other side of the culture clash is what Dr. Rezek calls democratized kinship. This is a newer way of understanding our family relationships, where the quality of the relationship matters in this framework. Family is not just about title and blood and history, it’s about accountability, about growth, deep connection, mutual respect, and safety. And this is where the conversation begins. It just becomes really important for us, because many parents are still operating from this compulsory kinship framework, they may deeply believe we’re family, we should be able to work this out.

Tina Gosney  04:49

We’re family, so they should keep trying. We’re family, so my adult child should not walk away. But many adult children are now operating from a democratized kinship. Framework, they might be asking themselves things like, is this relationship emotionally safe? Is there accountability? Is there respect for me being an adult, for my partner, for my beliefs, for my identity, or for my boundaries? Is there room for this relationship to change? When both of those frameworks collide, the compulsory kinship and the democratized kinship. Both parties can feel misunderstood. The parent can feel really rejected, hurt, confused, heartbroken. The adult child may feel really dismissed, unheard, pressured, unsafe, and unseen, both believe that they are the one that values family more, and this is one of the most powerful shifts in this book, because Dr. Rezac talks about estrangement, is often talked about who people that leave like they don’t value family, but her research suggests something a lot more complicated, many estranged adults really deeply value their family. They’re not always rejecting family itself; they’re rejecting a version of the family that requires them to be silent, that requires them to not actually be a full-fledged adult. They’re rejecting the part that has denial or harm built into it? There they may be trying to create this different kind of family life that is built around mutuality, honesty, respect, and chosen connection. Now, that does not always mean that estrangement is easy. It does not always mean that it’s even the right answer. It does not mean also that when someone estranges and cuts off, that they handle that very well. It also doesn’t mean that parents don’t really suffer deeply when it happens, because estrangement causes real grief. It causes what we call ambiguous loss. It can affect siblings and grandparents and cousins. It affects the way you get together for holidays. It might affect, you know, the way we, our family stories. It affects the next generation, and maybe even the one after that. It can leave people wondering what happened, what did I miss, what could I have done differently. And is repair still possible? But if we only talk about estrangement through blame, then we’re going to miss the bigger story, and the bigger story is the one that really matters. The latest research shows that estrangement is not this little tiny fringe issue, it’s a significant number of American adults that report being estranged from a close family member. In fact, one in four adults in the US is currently estranged from a close family member. That’s according to a 2025 yougov.com research, where they polled over 4000 people, and Dr. Reczek’s own research with her colleagues has shown that parent adult child estrangement is more common with fathers than it is with mothers, and that estrangement often will vary by race and gender and ethnicity and sexuality. All those things factor into it. Other research suggests that many estrangements are not permanent. Some people move in and out of contact over time, over time, some relationships soften and repair, and some do not, and honestly, some should not. So, this conversation is not about creating a panic. It’s not about saying that the family is falling apart. It’s about asking better questions, questions like this. What are the adult children asking for when they ask for distance? What are parents feeling when they experience that distance as rejection? What cultural expectations are we bringing into our family relationships? Where are we confusing obligation with connection? Where are we asking someone to stay in a role instead of building a relationship with them? And where might accountability and safety and mutual respect create a different path forward? For my listeners who are parents of adult children, this episode is probably going to challenge you. It may bring up some grief, some defensiveness, some sadness, or fear, and that totally makes sense. Because estrangement is very tender, and when someone you love steps away from you, your nervous system probably experiences that as dangerous. You may want to chase them to try to get them to talk to you, to over explain yourself. You might collapse into grief, you might try to defend yourself, or you might just go into fix-it mode and try to fix everything immediately. But I do want to invite you to listen from a different version of yourself today, from your grounded self.

Tina Gosney  10:00

Not from your panicked, fearful self, not from shame or blame or misunderstanding. I want you to listen instead from your grounded self and try to understand. Listen for the framework underneath the conflict, listen for ways that family expectations are changing, listen for the places where repair may require more than just your love. It may require accountability and emotional maturity. It might require respecting the other adult’s reality, even when it’s different than yours. And I also want you to listen with compassion for yourself. Almost all the parents that I work with were doing the very best that they knew how to do with the information that they had, with the tools, the beliefs, the family patterns, and their nervous system that they had, and many adult children are also doing the best they know how to do as they try to make sense of the pain of their own identity of how they belong and how they feel safe. This conversation is not about deciding who is good and who is bad. It is about understanding the family patterns that bring us into these painful places. My hope is that today’s episode gives you some language for something that may have felt impossible to name. I hope it helps you to move out of blame and into curiosity. I hope that it helps you to see that estrangement is not a personal failure, but part of a much larger shift in how people understand family, how they understand obligation, safety, and connection, and most of all, I hope this conversation helps you think about the kind of family relationships that you want to build from here. So, here is my conversation with Dr. Rin Reczik, author of Families We Lose. I’m really pleased to have a guest on the podcast today, and I’ve been really looking forward to this interview, because it directly affects a lot of the parents that I work with, and we’re going to be talking about this current estrangement that we’re seeing in our culture right now, family estrangement, especially between parents and adult children, and a new book that is coming out soon, and this is written by Rin Reczek, and she is the author of this book. I’m going to introduce her and let her tell her, tell everyone a little bit about herself.

Rin Reczek  12:31

Hi. Well, thank you so much, Tina, for having me. It’s really a pleasure to be with you today, and speak with you on this really important topic. So, I am a professor of sociology, and I’m also the co-director of the Center for Aging Families, which is an NIH center run out of Ohio State University, and I’ve been studying family relationships for my whole career, going on 20 years now, and really kind of stumbled into the area of estrangement through the process of my research and people who I talked to, and I will say that this has been such a really special project, the culmination of which is the book Families We Lose, and I really feel and know that the people that are probably listening to this podcast are deeply affected by estrangement, and my hope is that this book, and of course, this conversation can be helpful to kind of deal with the stress of estrangement and maybe give some insight into why it’s happening and how we can manage it.

Tina Gosney  13:34

Thank you. And we really need more research, like the what the kind that you have been doing, and especially, this is such a timely topic right now. There’s estrangement is so prevalent in the news and in families, so I know that there are some people that think, you know, that this is an epidemic, and maybe estrangement, we can stigmatize it, like maybe it’s a sign of selfishness, or even like a collapse of the family, but your book really pushes back on that narrative. So, what are we actually missing when it comes to family estrangement?

Rin Reczek  14:08

Yeah, so one of the things that I noticed right away when I started to do research on this topic is one, how little empirical data we have on estrangement and what we might call in demography, like prevalence rates, and this is really not good news for us, because that means that we haven’t been tracking what has been going on in terms of like contact or estrangement between parents and their adult children over history, so we really don’t have good data, really, since the 1950s unlike what kind of relationships people have with their kids, and so what that means is there’s a vacuum in the conversation regarding how prevalent it is, and given that it has received a lot more attention in social media and news, you know, I’ve seen so many news articles, blogs, etc. about a. Estrangement, it makes us think that it’s really increasing in prevalence. I hear often psychologists talking about how many more people come to their, you know, their, you know, how many more clients come to them that are estranged, and I think, you know, that could be because it’s increasing in rates that are epidemic, or it could be simply that people are having one way more access to mental health care than they ever have had before, and two are actually willing to talk about this, and so I think that’s some good kind of just a caveat to this, and like idea of an epidemic. I don’t know how we’re rating that or scaling that, that I really often like to think about when people talk about it as an epidemic is that throughout most of history people had a lot more kids, right. So we have this is really the first generation right now of people who had like fewer than three children. So what that means is that prior to really this latest generation of what we might call the baby boomers, people had, you know, 678, kids, and that means that often what would happen is that an adult child might move away. You don’t have technology keeping you together, you don’t have an expectation that you’re going to write daily, and so you really have what some might call in a strange relationship or simply no contact, because you live across the country, and it’s very hard to visit, and you have seven other kids that maybe live in your neighborhood and can kind of care for you, so the salience of that loss is a little bit different than today. If we have two kids and one of them is estranged, well, that is actually huge, not only because you have fewer people in your network now, but also because people post their kids online, like there is a much greater expectation of contact and connection, and so that loss is felt more deeply, and so that might, those might be some other reasons that it feels like this rate is really increasing drastically right now, when it might not be, and I think it’s really an empirical question for us to to understand

Tina Gosney  17:02

that’s such good information that to put that into context to why we’re feeling that maybe those rates are rising and we’re just seeing more of it and that is such a good explanation now you in your research you studied 68 people that went no contact what surprised you about who those people were.

Rin Reczek  17:24

Yeah, so you know, to back up a little bit, I had a very wide group of people contact me to want to be interviewed for this project. It was kind of happenstance. I tell the story in the book I was inundated with people who wanted to be interviewed, which I think speaks to, like, how one open people are, which I love, and how much you know it’s really in the cultural zeitgeist right now to be talking about this, and so when I went to kind of decide who to interview, I’m only one person, I couldn’t really interview so many people as much as I want to, I was so surprised at the variety of people who are estranged across race, across gender, sexuality, social class, like these are the things that sociologists are really interested in, across age too. So this speaks to this idea that it’s simply, I think, I hear sometimes it’s the millennial generation, right, that estranges this is this is not the case. No, it’s really not. It’s really not, and so I, you know, I kind of knew, because I had done some statistical work looking at the prevalence across all these different social groups prior to this time, but it really is, unfortunately for everyone, it doesn’t, it’s not, it doesn’t matter how, for example, like the sort of religion component, which is really important to many people. People came from religious background backgrounds in a strange people came from, like, you know, what they considered to be good, tight-knit families in a strange.. and so I think that to answer this question of what was surprising, really, it was the diversity of people in every sense of the word, and how similar the underlying story really was, and to some extent they made it easy on me, because it allowed me to see the patterns very quickly, that everyone’s story is unique, but in fact they all relied on the same kinds of things that were important to them to explain their estrangement, and that’s really the heart of the book.

Tina Gosney  19:22

Well, 68 interviews is a lot of interviews for one person. How long did it take you to do that?

Rin Reczek  19:28

Well, about a year, I think. The first few months, I, you know, I wasn’t teaching at the time, and I kind of just, you know, did interviews, and I think, you know, as a clinician, someone who’s working with people who see multiple people a day, you know, how actually I don’t think draining is the right word, how enriching and how overwhelming hearing people’s stories can be, and so I did have a lot of support network to kind of talk through just. What I was experiencing, some of the stories that you’ve read in the book, I mean, they’re really painful, and so that was a lot for me, but really, just I felt like it was some of the most important work I did, just to even hear the stories of what people were telling me.

Tina Gosney  20:14

Yeah, one quote that I loved that I pulled out of your book was, estrangement isn’t the disease destroying families is the symptom of a disease that began long before? Will you say a little bit more about that?

Rin Reczek  20:29

Yeah, so I want to put that in the context for maybe parents who are listening who might say, but my family was really wonderful, and my family was not a problem, or you know, of course, we had problems, but I didn’t think it was this bad, and when I say that estrangement isn’t the disease or the outcome, it’s sort of like saying that there might be things like a fault line that underlies a family that not everyone can see or even acknowledge, maybe because it’s very painful, maybe because people hide things or aren’t able to be completely truthful. In this case, it could be that adult children are really unhappy with dynamics and aren’t able to speak it, or there might be underlying dynamics going on in the family that some people understand and some people reject, and so when I say that it is kind of the symptom, what I mean to say is that it calls attention to something else going on in the family that isn’t working, and once we diagnose that symptom, we can prevent estrangement, right, but if we aren’t paying attention to the kind of things that are happening in the family, even if we don’t agree with maybe the assessment I hear sometimes from parents are like, “I don’t, I don’t remember that, or “that didn’t happen that way, even if we have a disagreement about what the kind of situation is we still need to acknowledge the other person’s reality and work towards coming together, and so if we can kind of address these underlying fissures that are happening in family life, we don’t necessarily get to estrangement. No one in my case, okay, I will just say, no one in my study, or the studies that I’ve really read very few people in that I’ve seen accounts of are simply estranging because of something whimsical. They really have tried to work very hard to communicate or manage something that’s going on, and at least in terms of their perspective, and so that suggests that there is an issue happening in the family that’s unresolved, and that is the cause, really, of the estrangement,

Tina Gosney  22:44

and I do, I do want to talk to that just for a minute, because from the other side it can feel like just something all of a sudden one thing happened, and then our, our child or our family member was unreasonable and decided to just cut us off, right? If it can feel like a bomb went off in your family when you haven’t been paying attention to those symptoms, or you aren’t even aware that those symptoms are there, because maybe there’s a lack of being able to communicate, or a lack of being able to see somebody else’s perspective, or even know that there’s a different perspective than your own,

Rin Reczek  23:21

that’s exactly my view on this as well, and I actually feel so much empathy for people who feel blindsided in this situation. I hear that a lot from parents, and I guess I would say, based on the stories of the adult children, is that they have often a try to share, but feel that because of the natural hierarchy in the parent-child relationship, even if they say something, they don’t always feel like it really connects or lands at the level in which they thought it would, so it might be, you know, I have a seven year old and I think about, like, he’ll share something with me that maybe upset him, and I might be like, okay, sure, you know, but it really upset him, and if I don’t acknowledge it in a way that actually makes him feel that I’m going to not do that again, then he’s not feeling good about this, and it’s a simplistic example, but it is kind of what people tell me, that you know, maybe they shared something with the parent, and you know, the parent didn’t have the context for understanding how important that was, and as a result, over time, that became a really big wedge that the parent didn’t even realize was there, and maybe they would have reacted differently if they had the cognizance to understand it, and so I do again, like I think this is a communication, in part a communication thing, and also it relates to the what happens when a child goes grows up into an adult, and whether or not that relationship can transition into more of an equal. Relationship, an adult adult relationship, as opposed to an adult child relationship, and that is another piece of the puzzle. I think that for some parents there isn’t that transition that takes place, so when adult children come to them and say that this bothered me, maybe they, they can’t quite put it on the level of an adult relationship, because this, you know, I know my mom says to me, so, like, you’re always going to be my child, and I get it. And also, I’m, you know, I’m 44 so I think that these are the kind of things that,

Tina Gosney  25:31

right,

Rin Reczek  25:32

are underlying some of this,

Tina Gosney  25:33

right? And I think you’re really talking to understanding the personal and family individual development and family development through the different stages and through the lifespan, right.

Rin Reczek  25:47

Precisely

Tina Gosney  25:48

understanding what that is supposed to look like, because that’s something I don’t think most people take into account when their children grow up and turn into adults, and there’s even different stages of adulthood where you’re going to relate to your adult child in different ways, and they’re going to need different things from you at different points in their life. So, I think you’re really highlighting an important fact there. Before we get into the framework of the book, I want to ask you, because I know that there are going to – there will be some people that go through the entire podcast. If I wait to the end, they’re going to be wondering this question. I’m just going to ask it at the beginning, so that they don’t have to wonder. Is going no contact ever the wrong choice?

Rin Reczek  26:30

Oh, wow. I guess when you ask me that, I would wonder, what do we mean by the wrong choice, so is it? Are you asking, is it the wrong choice for a family, for an individual, for society? What do you? I

Tina Gosney  26:51

would say the individual, if an individual is thinking of going no contact with their family, I have a lot of different judgmental thoughts about themselves for considering that about what it means to be part of a family, and it would it ever be a wrong choice for that person to go no contact.

Rin Reczek  27:11

Oh, wow. One of the ways I think I can answer this question is by placing it in another domain, such as, is it ever a wrong choice to divorce, is it ever a wrong choice to end a friendship? And I think that, so all of those to me, and maybe they feel different to some folks. From a sociological perspective, I can understand that, because the parent child tie is one that is revered in our society, and it’s one that you, of course, like, grew up with, so, but, but, but we have other examples of things that are kind of either stigmatized. Divorce is a great example of this, historically, that is stigmatized, and often is seen as the wrong choice, and the question would be, for whom, right? And so I think that there are fewer and fewer people today, although perhaps not at all. Can look at the data on that, that would say, like, you shouldn’t be able to divorce if something, you know, if one person wants to divorce and the other doesn’t, you should stay in that relationship. And so I would liken that to similarly thinking about estrangement, so when someone’s making kind of these personal decisions for themselves, I, I, as a, as a sociologist, wouldn’t ever say that, you know, you know, people make their choices. Does the choice always lead to happiness? Maybe not, right? Maybe you, maybe you might regret it. There are these kind of components, but yeah, I would kind of place it in the realm of these other choices that we have to make in our social world.

Tina Gosney  28:47

Yeah, that’s good to move it into one of those other domains to see, like, this is also a choice that you would have to make to keep this relationship or to let it go, and so it just, it puts it in a different perspective when you can look at it in terms of friendship or marriage or partnership,

Rin Reczek  29:03

think it does in some way. It removes again what I think is more stigmatized than it would be with the parent child tie. There’s something in our cultural lexicon in the United States, I can speak to. I don’t do a lot of work outside of that, but I do think, you know the US is, I like to call it like a, it’s like a secular religious state, because it often many of people are secular, they don’t have a religious orientation, and yet it also is a very highly religious, like, has has these domains of religious thinking in our culture. What I mean by that is, honor thy father and their mother. This is not a religious

Rin Reczek  29:45

thing, actually, anymore. It is a cultural thing that, in the United States, and frankly, most places in the world share. And so I just want to say that, as like this relationship is seen as incredibly important and. And that is why I think we have so much pain when it’s gone, and I will mention this is not really apropos of the line right now, but all the people that I talked to were really sad, they wished that it could be different, and they tried for it to be different, and so even people who are choosing to estrange feel that loss, and that’s really important to acknowledge in any conversation about this.

Tina Gosney  30:27

It really came through in the way that you included their personal narratives in the book, that they had tried so many different times, that they had, that they had done so many different things, that they were very sad, and they had wished that it would be different. That was very apparent in those stories.

Rin Reczek  30:42

Yeah, and I think that this goes to the question of, like, you know, the different narratives from parent, maybe parents and children, because the children, the adult children in the book felt like they tried time and time and time again, and I didn’t talk to each of their parents, and I chose not to try to do that, because I felt like reaching out to a parent who is estranged did not feel morally of the same child I talked to, felt morally ambiguous. I wasn’t

Rin Reczek  31:09

willing to do that, but we, I don’t know if the parent feels the same way, you know, maybe the parent doesn’t understand that that child did try all those times, and that is a communication problem that for family therapists, that’s that could be really a point of, you know, insight to change the way we do family therapy, to say, like, actually, you know, this person, you know, is trying, this is their way of trying to change this dynamic, and it’s not, if it’s not read that way, change isn’t going to happen, that’s similar in marriage therapy, we think about that, right, one partner might be like bidding for change, the other isn’t understanding that, and so if we can bridge that kind of gap, I think that can go a long way in preventing estrangement.

Tina Gosney  31:49

Yeah, thank you for that. And are you ready to get into the book, the different kinship cultures? Yeah, okay, so we have the compulsory kinship, which is family, blood, marriage, you know, having children, sisters, siblings, all of that. That’s our compulsory kinship, is what you call it. And we tend to see that as forever unconditional. We’re just going to be in each other’s lives forever. This is just how it is, no matter what the quality of that is. That’s compulsory kinship. And then you have something you call democratized kinship. So, this is family must earn its place through accountability, mutual respect, real connection, and safety. So, this is really the framework that you use throughout the book. So, walk us through this compulsory kinship a little deeper. So, most of the listeners have felt that, and you know, we have things like you just mentioned: Honor thy father and thy mother. Blood is thicker than water. You only have one mother, one father. You know, we all feel and hear those things, but what is this compulsory force that is so hard for us to question,

Rin Reczek  33:02

yeah, so this is the sort of way, after listening to all these stories, I saw a disconnect between what the interviewees that I talked to felt that their family wanted and what they needed, and in my first book, which is about how families stay together, I realized that there was this – what we call it compulsory – it’s this word that essentially, right, it means forced, it has a connotation that we don’t even always know that we’re doing it, we don’t really sign up for it, it’s just sort of I use this analogy of, like, you know, it’s the water that we’re swimming in, we, you know, fish doesn’t know its own water, and really, culturally speaking, we live in a culture of compulsory kinship. What that means is that there is this expectation that we stay in relationships with our families of origin. Now, I’m not critiquing that, I don’t think that’s necessarily bad. I think that it’s important to recognize it as a force that guides our decisions, and sociologists often like to think about culture as guiding our decisions, not like we are agents, we are people who can make decisions based on personal circumstances, but really that cultural component is happening, and we have to acknowledge that it’s happening, so most of us live within this sort of cultural framework that we do this, and the people who estranged say they really live within that cultural framework, or nothing makes it more apparent when they stop relating to their parents, because then everybody in their social network is trying to bring them back in to the parent relationship. What happens for people who end up in the book estranging or going no contact is that they start to come to want something different in their family relationships, and that different thing is this democratized kinship. Now this has its corollary in marriage. For many decades, we had a marriage where there, one person was the head of the household, the man, in the sort of, in the US context, and marriage was often in an economic means. I know that’s kind of hard to even conceptualize today, but it really wasn’t an option. You had to get married, and you did not get divorced, right?

Rin Reczek  35:22

And, of course, we have this cultural revolution in the 1960s and 70s. No fault divorce comes in, and the way we think about marriage today is very different. We think about it as about love, we think about it as it needs to be a good relationship, that we don’t just need to be married just for the sake of being married, and this is what Anthony Giddens calls the peer relationship, and essentially what I find is that the adult children want the same idea in their families of origin, they want connection, they want mutual respect, they want safety and they want growth and accountability, and if they don’t feel that this relationship is living up to the standard to which they now desire, then it’s really hard for them to maintain it, and we can talk a little bit about, like, how they find this kinship, what I call kinship culture, I think that I can sort of even right now hear your listeners being like, I don’t know, I want that either. I want that too, like that’s that’s a great goal, or like the standards are too high, whatever that look, that look like, but you know, I just want to share the story that this is what they want, and this is what they don’t get in their, at least in that perception of their families of origin,

Tina Gosney  36:42

and I would just put a little caveat right there that I don’t think a lot of the adult children are, these emerging adults that are asking for that, they don’t always know how to do it either,

Rin Reczek  36:55

agree, agree, and so they’re

Tina Gosney  36:58

asking for something, but also not modeling or showing it to their parents, so it’s a lot of miscommunication on many different levels, and I think we’re in really uncharted territory there, because we’re going to talk about therapy in a little bit, but therapy is much less stigmatized today than it has been even 1015, 2030, especially 5060 years ago, right. And so here we are, trying to be healthier relational human beings, not having a lot of models to show us how to do that, but asking for something different from a different generation that has no clue what we’re asking for.

Rin Reczek  37:38

I think you nailed it. I think that’s basically what I think, that you know, at least some of the people I talked to actually really recognize that, like they might be like, I could have done it better, but I couldn’t actually, like, this is where I was, and I needed to make this decision, because it, I just, I had to estranged in order to kind of learn how to do it, and it wasn’t until I did a strange that I was able to cultivate this way of communicating, for example, but I think that this is this is exactly right, and there is also this, I think there is some generational differences in maybe cultural, maybe expectations of relationship dynamics, like you’re suggesting it does have something to do, I think, with therapy, but also just kind of changes in expectations overall. What is acceptable in relationships? What is not? How do we communicate with each other? Yeah, this is, this is a really tricky, and also the other thing you’re dealing with is a lot of baggage, because all you know, I have a great relationship with my parents. Some of the stuff that happened in childhood, I still like, you know, like we’re your kid, you’re, you know, when, and you’re going through things, and so when you’re trying to develop this democratized relationship with someone that you also have all these other dynamics and relationships with, it’s a lot of work, and so I can understand from a parent’s perspective maybe why that’s challenging, especially if it isn’t done in a very smart way.

Tina Gosney  39:16

Yeah, well, this is, I think, a good time for you to tell us what democratized kinship is, yeah, so how would you describe that, and how is somebody going to go about doing that?

Rin Reczek  39:25

Yeah, well, let me just say this, like, you know, I think that one of the things that I kind of just suggested, it, what we consider to be a good relationship changes across historical period, and it changes within, like, cultures. Democratized kinship is this reevaluation of what a good relationship is, and in the context of the book, the people who I talked to had four main things that they were like, these are these are essential things that I need. In all my relationships, often they learned about how what good relationships were through these other domains, other people, fair, you know, like we can talk about that, but there are four main things. Accountability and growth was number one. Every single person I talk to, they’re like, I just, I don’t even need explanation, I don’t. I just need my mom to tell me she understands why I was upset about this, and that she’s going to try not to do it again, and that she’s actually going to work on this, and go, maybe go to therapy, or maybe talk to, you know, people who can help her deal with this thing. That is a huge concern for people that I talked to, so the first is is accountability, acknowledging that something didn’t go well, and that you can grow from that experience. The second one is mutual respect, and I know that this is, I think, actually a little bit tricky again, because parents spend, let’s say 18 years raising children, and they are the authority, and again, as someone with a seven year old, I try really hard to work with these kind of parenting styles that give him a lot of power, but generationally this is a new form of, like, you know, we can think about authoritarian parenting, for example, or authoritative parenting, so when we’ve kind of been in charge of our children for 18 years, and then the child is suddenly like, well, I’m an adult, and I, you know, I have my own things, it’s really challenging, but the adults that I talked to were like, this is a fundamental thing, I need mutual respect, I need to be treated as an equal, and that can take lots of different forms, right, and we can talk a little bit about what those forms might be. And then the third was actually kind of surprising to me, it was intentional connection. So the folks who emphasized intentional connection as the third pillar of this democratized kinship really weren’t able to prioritize or sustain relationships that they didn’t feel were, you know, to you again, uses were connected, they didn’t feel like they were on the same page, and then they didn’t have to agree, but this is a place where, like, politics might show up, this is a place where adult children might see their parent, maybe as not supportive of their personal decisions, their personal identities, or that they didn’t, they just had nothing to talk about, like they couldn’t have a real relationship, and this was really important to them, and then the final piece of this is safety, which is just this, I mean, pretty obvious notion, but safety means for these folks not just physical safety, but emotional safety, that they, and this is a little tricky, right, like that they wouldn’t necessarily experience triggers that they often had with a parent, or that their children felt safe, or that their spouses felt safe, and so these are the four things that collectively people were talking about that they really needed, and not just the parent-child relationships, but every relationship in their lives,

Tina Gosney  43:15

and I think you would also, in equating that to, like, you’ve mentioned a marriage relationship, you would expect to have those things.

Rin Reczek  43:23

Yep, and a

Tina Gosney  43:24

partnership marriage that felt good to both of you. You would want each of those things,

Rin Reczek  43:29

you would, you would want it in a friendship, you know, to some extent, maybe some pieces over others. Right? I think that that’s how many of the people I talked to felt that these were kind of basic things, but the tricky part is that communicating that what that really means in a relationship is quite tricky, especially again with years together where you maybe weren’t able to reach those goals, so I think, like most people would agree, those sound great, but the reality of trying to shift a relationship into those dynamics is a lot more challenging,

Tina Gosney  44:11

and shifts rarely happen quickly, they happen slowly over time with one one instance after another, and never requiring that we’re always going to show up perfectly, but that we know how to repair afterwards when we don’t like that. We recognize that, oh, that didn’t go very well. Let me apologize, and let’s try again. I think that’s part of that safety that we’re talking about. I know some parents are going to be, that are listening to this, are going to be confused about the word safety, because they don’t feel like they’re an unsafe person to their family or to their adult child, but I don’t think that they really understand what that means. Are you able to go into that a little deeper?

Rin Reczek  44:54

Yeah, I can. Well, this is a really important point, and I. What I want to say on the upset is that the person who can answer that actually is the adult child, so I think each person has their own view about what that exactly looks like. So I can give you some examples of the people who I talk to, but I want to say, like, I, you know, telling you know, building your, your way of thinking about it on me is, is maybe not right, and I think, too, that the willingness to learn about someone else’s view of what safety might be is really, honestly, like the main thing. What is their view of mutual connection, or, you know, mutual support, what, or mutual respect, and intentional connect? What does that mean to you? What does accountability mean? So, getting on the same page there is the work, and

Tina Gosney  45:44

having a conversation about it is important.

Rin Reczek  46:40

Having the conversation, even if, and by the way, no one is perfect, you can’t be perfect,

Rin Reczek  46:55

right.

Tina Gosney  48:09

Well, and I like how you, you pointed out that it can mean different things to different people, and so it’s important to find out, okay, what does this mean to you? Can we have a conversation about that? Yeah, so then we’re really understanding rather than generalizing, which is important.

Rin Reczek  48:24

It really is important, and it’s really important today, because I think one of the things that’s happened in what I might call like the post Me Too movement, or the like, you know, we went through this area, era of like having language be really specific, not offending people, and there is a backlash against that, like, oh, I don’t, you know, I’m not going to be perfect, and, and I don’t care anymore, you know, all these.. I think there’s been a broader cultural conversation about, like, creating safe environments, we can put it in those terms, and that, I think, at this moment has been rejected slightly, and so when maybe parents experience their child talking about perhaps safety, it can be like, you know, I don’t want to do that work, or, you know, I think that maybe isn’t in line with what they want, and that’s that’s something that needs to be articulated and kind of figured out together to, yeah, to kind of manage that safety component.

Tina Gosney  49:21

Yeah, thank you for that. So, here’s something else that struck me when I was reading your book. So, you’re not saying that compulsory kinship is evil because some families hold together through rough patches because of it. Yeah, and every every relationship goes through periods of difficulty and disconnection, and so when does it go wrong? When does compulsory kinship go wrong? And when versus when are we just going through some rough things that we need to work through?

Rin Reczek  49:57

Yeah, like that’s a fabulous. Question, so no compulsory kinship isn’t evil, it is a, it is a very central component of how we in the United States run our social order, and what do I mean by that? We don’t have necessarily, and maybe we don’t want a government that is doing a lot of care for people, so parents and adult children, when parents age, are the people who take care of each other. So, family is a central component of our lives, and I don’t think that that’s bad. I think that can be really loving and wonderful and healthy and good and life enhancing, and many people have that. The issue is when relationships aren’t that sort of forcing people to stay in those relationships, much like we might force people to stay in marriages that are no longer healthy for them, is quite problematic for the people in them. Now, the question is, Who benefits from those relationships staying together? Right, we think about marriage in the history of marriage, and what happens, like, who initiates divorce, for example. We know women are much more likely to initiate divorce than men, and so again, we know also adult children are much more likely to initiate estrangement than our parents, and so we have to kind of question, like, okay, so if compulsory kinship is sort of guiding our decisions, this means that it takes a lot to step out of it. So, it’s a prevailing social force that all of us are born into, and in order to kind of step out of it, it requires really a lot of effort, and I will say, from the people I talk to, pain and suffering. So, I don’t know that I’m fully answering your question. I just want to say, like, yeah, I don’t know, maybe you can ask it again, and I can.

Tina Gosney  51:52

No, I think you, I think you gave some good points to think about. There is, I know a lot of parents get frustrated, they think that their children are just like cutting and running, like not putting in the effort to, to really go through difficult things and work through problems, because you know, I’ve been married for a few decades now, and it’s, we’ve gone through some periods of really difficult issues that we’ve decided to work through and stick through, but some of those periods of time were not quick resolution, they lasted for a long time, but I think the point is that we were both willing to show up and work on it and see our own blind spots, whereas I don’t know that that’s happening with parents, adult parents of adult children, that they’re able to have that kind of commitment to their relationship. I see that they’re willing to work through those difficult times.

Rin Reczek  52:50

Yes, yes, yes. I think that’s really important, and that is one of the functions of compulsory kinship, that our relationships can be challenging. In fact, the vast majority of them are right, that we stay in relationships during hard times, in part because of how hard it is to exit them, especially a marriage of a legal contract, for example, and that is, I think, something to really think about the difference there between the parents and children in that situation, if the child isn’t willing to stay and work through, I guess I would ask parents to understand, maybe why, and it might be that they don’t feel, and from the people I talk to, this is true, that they actually can heal while in the relationship, and it doesn’t mean that they won’t return, especially if the parent is able to demonstrate over time and be patient that they also are growing during that period. In fact, we know from the statistical work that most people who estranged actually do reconcile those relationships across the life course, but sometimes, especially in the transition to adulthood, and it could be the case also in the transition to other life stages, like we think about the transition to parenthood as another one, those transitional periods sometimes are disruptive and it could be that the adult child can’t just can’t can’t manage the relationship during that time. So, I don’t have a great answer for you. Should we force people to stay in relationships that they don’t want to be in? We can’t really, in this case, and that certainly wouldn’t be my purview to suggest that we should, is there, is there good that comes from sticking it out and working through relationships 100% and and I do wish that for, for many of the people who, who I talk to about estrangement, and sometimes it simply isn’t possible.

Tina Gosney  54:57

Yeah, and I don’t, I. Don’t think that we can force someone to stay and work it out right, but I think you did mention before that adult children are more, they’re likely to be the ones that then distance over the parents, that’s usually how it happens, and I think it’s a good, also good that you mentioned that it doesn’t always stay estranged. It doesn’t mean that we’re going to be estranged forever, that many work relationships do repair and come back together, and and we find our way back to each other. So, I think that is an important point to make. So, I want to go into, like, what is that transition from how do we make that transition from compulsory to democratized kinship? And you had three entry points. Yeah, so let’s go into what those three entry points are. Sure,

Rin Reczek  55:55

so when we talk about the sort of transition from compulsory to democratized kinship, what we’re saying is that people change why they’re in a family, so they transition from I’m in a family because I was born in this family and I’m biologically related to them, even this isn’t a conscious decision, or I have to because I’m financially like tied to them to intentionally deciding to be in a family or not, and the way that they come into this transitional phase is through these three vectors. So, the first is, is I call them social others. This is like just a term that we use, but it basically means other people who they encounter that embody what they see as a good relationship with their family, so this can be, I guess, I want to say the caveat first, which is that often I hear people blame like spouses or new girlfriends or like very

Tina Gosney  56:54

common, yeah,

Rin Reczek  56:55

and I, that is not my understanding of what’s going on, what I understand is happening, and from the interviews that I’ve done, and the other research that I’ve read about this topic, it’s that those people guide the person into a new desired form of family that they say, oh wait a minute, I didn’t know that this kind of mutual respect is possible, or this connection, or this safety, or this accountability, and oh, it turns out actually I want that, and so what it was doing is introducing them to this democratized kinship, they weren’t, you know, these people were not telling them that they should leave, like sometimes in the transition to adulthood, people would like to go home with a family, a friend, for like the holidays to their family, and they’d be like, wait a minute, this is so different than my family, and really learn, oh, they don’t do this, and that feels good to me, and it doesn’t even mean that they know the family of origin is bad, could just mean that they fit better in a certain cultural, like, you know, in a certain framework. And so these social others, they could be coworkers, they were actually really random. I was like, surprised, but random the people were that were introducing them to democratize kinship. Often it also was higher, like generationally, like they’d meet like other people. Like, I do think the workplace was an interesting example that I was surprised at. Then we have the sort of therapeutic context, and this is another one that I think is very tricky that I hear. I hear people talking about this in the estrangement world to say that therapists are encouraging estrangement, and that again was not what I found. Instead, what I found is that therapists would again introduce these concepts of democratized kinship to their clients, and in the process of doing that, the clients themselves would come to understand, oh wait a minute. I really need that. That is something that’s really important to me, and I’ve tried to get that, and I can’t. And so it’s not that the therapists are creating the problem, it’s that the therapist is pointing to the problem, and they’re saying, okay, what are you gonna do? Oh, here’s strategies that you could use to try to change this. My first book talks a lot about those strategies, but in this case, you know, some people would decide, actually, wait, I need to take a break. And then the third, again, scapegoat often is social media, so a lot of people talk about how this is a social media trend that people are just talking about estrangement online, and then people get this idea, and then they do it, and again, this wasn’t what I found. Actually, a lot of people talked about therapists that have podcasts, that books, Reddit communities that were not telling them to estrange, but teaching them, oh. Well, okay, my parents did that too, and this is my experience of that, or this is how I managed it, and again, people learning about the way that they wanted to manage their own relationships, and so those are the three pathways that I thought I’m sure that there are others that were again not telling people to a strange, but kind of opening the door to what other relationships might look like,

Tina Gosney  1:00:27

and you’re really talking about things that are changed, have changed in our culture a lot over the last few years, like we have more access to a bigger, wider social circle and other people beyond our family and our current culture and social media, of course. I mean, that’s, you know, self-explanatory, but then the normalization of therapy, and how therapists are helping to introduce a different type of relationship to people, so that might also be reflected in our culture, which you know a lot about,

Rin Reczek  1:01:02

I think that’s right. I see broader pieces about the potential downsides to some of these things, so social media and the therapies, and I would say I kind of get that fear-mongering about, like, about this topic in my view, I want to be in relationships where the people in them are choosing to be in those relationships, like we mentioned, and so I think, you know, teaching people how to do that is, I don’t think bad, I do think like encouraging people to estranged when you don’t know their situation, is not good, and I don’t think we should be doing that, and I don’t, I don’t see a lot of that, but I think this notion that somehow the proliferation of, hey, maybe it would be healthy if, if we talk to each other kindly, some of the therapy speak that gets critiqued as getting in diffused in our society at large, I get those critiques. It’s like people using language that isn’t maybe accurate, but I also think it can be quite helpful for people to explain how they feel. So, I think there’s this – it’s a really complicated aspect of estrangement, and I understand kind of different perspectives on it, but ultimately I think the people I talked to were so relieved to kind of experience relationships in a different way when they learned about this other way of being,

Tina Gosney  1:02:28

yeah, yeah. Can we go into a little bit how it doesn’t, estrangement doesn’t look the same in every family, and you mentioned, you know race and culture and religion before, but can we go a little bit further into that one, and like, how, how did you learn that these factors affect different families differently?

Rin Reczek  1:02:52

Yeah, well, one of the things that I found so striking is that no matter the racial, ethnic, or religious upbringing of the people I talk to every single one, except for in the case of white people, they linked it to religion, not their race, would say this is just what my culture does, this is just what my religion does, and all of them said the same thing, and I thought that’s so interesting, that’s

Tina Gosney  1:03:22

interesting,

Rin Reczek  1:03:22

even like the South, the some of the people, this is what we do in the South, or this is what we do in ex-immigrant community, or this is what we do in Catholic religion, and I found that to be a really telling thread, that’s one speaks to the like centrality of compulsory kinship and two that speaks to the universality of how every group thinks it’s their like particular culture when in fact there is often the same narrative and it got to the point where I knew in the interview you know before they would say it I was like there this is it this is the way it’s framed, and I don’t really.. I would love for researchers to pick this up. I am not a scholar of either race or religion, and so I feel this is the part where I feel like I wish that I knew a little bit more about this, and I hope people listening, maybe that you don’t do research on this, because I think it’s quite enlightening to think about this as two that it is kind of across the board, even when we think it’s our personal thing, it actually is quite sociological in that way, that everyone’s kind of experiencing the same thing, even though they don’t realize it. That is not to say there aren’t very specific circumstances that different religious groups might have, maybe a little bit stronger on some points than others, right, but I do think it did seem to me from the people I talked to that it was very common across different groups.

Tina Gosney  1:04:51

That is interesting that that we, I guess, our underlying human needs are so similar, but the how we. I have seen those not applied in certain different areas of our lives, or applied, maybe they’ve been done well, maybe they haven’t been done well, and those can be very specific according to where the culture and the race and the religion and just the way that we’ve been brought up in the culture that we live in,

Rin Reczek  1:05:21

right, and we also often can’t really recognize that in other people. Yeah, we think we’re very distinct, and we are, but also again, everyone talked about the four things that they needed in the relationship, you know. So I think that’s really interesting, and actually maybe helpful that that we can say, okay, these are the things, this is how we can think about this in a way, no matter who you are.

Tina Gosney  1:05:48

Yeah, so what would you tell parents who are listening to this that are wondering, like, you know, they’ve been told their child has told them that they have a boundary for something, or we’re not going to be talking to you, or you’re not invited to this, and and they’re really hurting and really confused and frustrated, because they don’t know what they should be doing. They don’t know, first of all, they don’t know how this came about, and they don’t know how to fix it. So, what would you tell them that your research has shown, and what have you learned from that?

Rin Reczek  1:06:26

Well, first, let me say, as a human, I’m really sorry. I know how hard that is. I have talked to a lot of parents, and the pain is real and needs to be acknowledged, and I really am sorry, and I wish it did not get to that point. I think from the research perspective, one of the things that happens in that particular moment is that the parent is so hurt that they can’t take a step back and breathe. That is the first thing I would say. Pause, because what a lot of the adult children tell me is that in that moment when the parent reacts in a way that in this case isn’t in line with democratized kinship, it does so much damage, and so if we can pause in that moment and choose something a little bit different to give us space before we react, that’s really important. You might say, like, that really hurts me, but I’m hearing you. I’m going to take some time, and I, you know, don’t go straight, but, but, like, I think it’s really critical to just not overreact, because you’re hurt anytime I’m hurt, I definitely want to, you know, and so it’s very relatable, it’s very human, but the thing is that it will reinforce the belief that the child has if you do react in that way, and I’ve heard and seen a lot of the people I talked to set, like, showed me the text from their parents or showed me the letters that were clearly, in my view, written from a place of such pain, but it did not land the way I think the parent wanted it to. Instead, it further created distance, and I’m not saying that’s fair, but I’m saying if you do want to reconcile, that that kind of contact is really not helpful. The things that you can do is work on how do I, how do I demonstrate mutual respect, how do I demonstrate safety, how I, how do I like be able to maybe form connection, and I know it’s hard when you’re strange, you can’t do any of that, maybe look at that from in other relationships that you have, maybe with your other children, with your own parents with friends, wait a minute, building some of those resources up within you and other ties, so that when that adult child does step back in, which again, statistically speaking, it, they will, you are prepared and ready to meet them and demonstrate that change, and that would be my hope for you, is that you are able to do that, and I know that’s hard, but that is from my experience with adult children, that’s what is needed.

Tina Gosney  1:09:09

Yeah, that’s also similar in my, my field, in my experience, is that if we can learn how to pause and not be reactive and give ourselves some time to think and taking advantage of that time that they’re low contact or no contact to be able to work on some of these things rather than just thinking that time will make them come around, because it, it may, they may come back over time, but if things haven’t changed in the way that they are wanting them to, then we might have that cycle repeating itself again.

Rin Reczek  1:09:44

Exactly, that happened to many of the people that I talked to, that the cycle kept repeating, and that made it so much worse. Yep. Second,

Tina Gosney  1:09:53

yeah. Well, what final words would you leave with parents and families, maybe even adult children? Who are struggling with this with their own parents, you know? What would you final words of wisdom that you would leave with them today?

Rin Reczek  1:10:07

Yeah, what I would say is that relationships are complex. It’s not a moral failing if somebody estranges from you or goes no contact with you, or if you go no contact with someone, that this is a relationship choice, and it doesn’t also have to be forever. So the more kind of internal work that you can do to learn about yourself, learn about other people in your network and your family with as least judgment as you can to grow is really important, and that will benefit all your relationships, even if you don’t end up back in this particular estranged relationship in the end. The relationships that you do have will be better for that work, and so I really do encourage people to, to go to therapy to seek out resources, not out of maybe, if we can, out of anger, but rather out of a sense of desire to grow as people, because we are really only on the earth for a little bit, and if someone chooses not to be in relationship with us, there’s there are other people that we can form connections with, and that’s just really important to remember.

Tina Gosney  1:11:22

Well, thank you so much. The book, again, is called Families We Lose: A New Explanation for Family Estrangement. And Rin Resik appreciate you being here and giving us such a great glimpse into your research and how you’ve disseminated that into the book. When does this book come out, by the way? Is it, is it coming up soon?

Rin Reczek  1:11:42

august 18 is the release date. You can preorder it prior to that time, but it officially releases then.

Tina Gosney  1:11:48

And is that on Amazon? And can they find it’s on

Rin Reczek  1:11:50

Amazon? It’s on Barnes and Nobles. The official publication is NYU Press, but any of those, any bookstores, probably will have it at that time. And I just want to thank you, Tina, for having me on. This was really a wonderful conversation.

Tina Gosney  1:12:04

Oh, it’s really been a privilege. Thank you so much.

Tina Gosney  1:12:10 I hope this conversation gave you a new way to think about family estrangement. One of the things I appreciate so much about Dr. Reich’s work is that it moves us away from the simple question, is who is to blame for this, and it moves us towards a much deeper question, which is, what do we expect family to be, because so often estrangement is talked about as if one person just stopped caring, but what we actually heard today is that for many people estrangement is not about caring less about family, it comes from caring more deeply about what family could be, a family relationship built on respect and accountability, where safety matters, where adults are allowed to grow and change and be seen as full people. I know that can be painful to hear, especially if you’re a parent who has been on the receiving end of distance or no contact. You might feel rejected or confused or heartbroken or even blindsided, and those feelings matter. And at the same time, this conversation invites us to stay curious, not to collapse into grief and shame, not to run into blaming somebody, and not to try to rush in and fix it, but to ask what kind of relationship is being asked for here? What patterns might need to change? What would accountability look like? What would emotional safety look like? What would it mean to build a relationship with my adult child as they are now, not as I remember them or who I wanted them to be. Estrangement is very tender, it’s layered, and it affects a lot more than just one person. It affects parents, children, siblings, grandparents, partners, holidays, traditions, and our family story itself. But I hope you leave this episode with more compassion and more language than you started, because when we understand the deeper patterns, we have more choices, we listen differently, we can respond differently, we can grieve honestly, and when repair is possible, we can approach it with more humility, maturity, and care. Thank you so much for listening today. If this episode helped you, or if you know someone who is struggling with estrangement, or distance, or just, you know, pain in their family relationships. Please share this episode with them. I’m Tina Gosney, and this is Coaching Your Family Relationships. And I will see you here n