Why So Many People Are Going "No Contact" with Their Parents
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
No one gives you a choice about your parents or siblings. That's the great thing about them in some ways. Except by chance of birth I would never have been friends with my parents and probably not my siblings.
That said these are all people I love who I would never be friends with so they can't be treated like friends. Family has to be treated like family.
i am from latin america where families keep closer contact trough life and that is all i have experienced personally..
I think you would need to experience both to say what is better and even then it will change from person to person..
But i can say that it does come with its share of problems..
Of course there's a bit of tension living with another grown-up who has different rules.
But it was transformative, my wife cried when she went back, and we both miss her.
She'll be back in 3 months for another 3 months.
Of course she will live with us when her health begins to fail. (It will be another 25-30 years.)
And yes, there are different problems. But to discommunicate your parents is not an Asian thing.
These days with cheap phone calls, facebook and cheap flights mere distance won't stop the contact.
Thats my point. You have to actively block or hide from them and/or explicitly tell them no contact.
In the past you didn't have to actively hide because even if they knew where you lived and your phone number it was too expensive to do anything other than send the odd letter.
Yes in the past their would be less avenues for them to get back in contact if you went away, but that going away would be much more expensive for you too. E.g. in the past, people frequently died during such journeys. So costs were high for both parties.
So given that the costs of breaching the boundaries is lower, but so is the cost of making them, the solution is still just building them higher until it's infeasible to breach them.
A three-day bus journey for a gay man moving to San Francisco or New York is not a big ask. But his parents aren't going to come visit or expect him to go back for Thanksgiving each year.
Parents held sway over their children because so much of life was dependent upon the family. Domestic help, help during food scarcity, help during a housing crisis, etc.
Today the government provides much of these services, but usually to a lesser extent. The result is the destruction of the power of the m/patriarchs, the replacement of the family by government, etc.
On the bright side, you can now walk away from abusive families. The more families are exposed, the more we see how many are messed up.
There's an education problem with too much individuality and not enough empathy. Parents pay the price.
If your position towards another person is "I expect the following of you", that person doesn't agree with those expectations and in fact finds them intolerable, and then in response to this disagreement you just double down every time and state your expectations more forcefully, what do you think is going to happen? You leave them only one choice to remove this ongoing source of pain from their lives - to remove you from it.
As is alluded to in this article, the central theme here is narcissism. Narcissists can't legitimise the concept of compromise in their heads, because compromising would involve an acceptance that they were wrong. A narcissist will literally die before they will do such a thing.
The vast majority of energy spent on this topic is completely wasted. When there is a psychological impossibility of one or more parties to the conflict from compromising and changing their minds and attitudes, all this stuff is just pointless bickering and reopening old wounds, that helps no one.
The central problem is that narcissism is effectively incurable. Changing this is where efforts should be focused, just like we focus efforts on curing other currently incurable ailments.
The key issue as you will see from a lot of the Reddit communities mentioned as well as the examples in the article is the narcism of the parents. There is no compromise with such people, it's either their way or the highway and we are reading about the people who took the highway.
Consider another family relationship: Divorce. Apart from a few religious fundamentalists we don't see people queuing up to try and reconcile divorced couples simply because they are divorced. We don't expect such people to be comfortable in their ex's presence, we don't feel the need to apply thought-terminating clichés to shut down the idea that they might be right. For some reason there is a societal inertia that parents have a divine right to just carry on being a*holes to their children if they wish and it is the children's fault if they don't like it.
American divorce culture is also deeply dysfunctional. It's not just "religious fundamentalists" who think that. Many of us asian americans look at it and silently judge you.