After decades of physical and emotional abuse at her hands, I chose estrangement. What followed was a mix… Read more.

After decades of physical and emotional abuse at her hands, I chose estrangement. What followed was a mix… Read more.

Cutting my mother off was one of the most liberating moments of my life.

One sunny spring afternoon 12 years ago I picked up the phone to my mum. I remember my allergies were spiking, but I felt happy that my favourite season was at its peak. Happy enough to undergo a phone call with my mother – a task that always required effort. I was in my apartment; she was in the two-family house where I’d grown up. When we exhausted the safe topics of conversation – her health and the weather – she paused and said with relish something cruel and demeaning. It may have been directed at me, it may have been a dig at my sister Gerry or my Aunt Helen – I can’t recall. But I clearly recall the rest of our talk. I’ll
Reining in my fury, I reminded her not to be cruel to me. “I suppose I have to watch every word I say to you!” she replied.

“You have to watch every word you say to everyone,” I said to her. “That’s what good people do. And you are not a good person.” I said goodbye, put down the phone and those were the last words I ever spoke to her.

Throughout my childhood, Teresa Dolan beat me regularly – three times a week on average. Often, I had no idea why she was hitting me beyond a vague impression that I’d disobeyed her. She had a lot of rules that were easy to break. For instance, if I slipped and replied to her with “yes” rather than “yes, Mommy”, I was in for it. Usually, she disciplined me with her hands, but her weapon of choice was a sturdy, long-handled wooden spoon she called a “beating stick”. When it struck bare flesh on the arms or legs or face, it raised red welts.

She also battered us with hour-long harangues about our sloth, disrespect, and other shortcomings. Often, we were compared unfavourably to the Farleys, a family across the street whom she idolised. Once, she asked me, “You know what Owen Farley’s doing while you laze around here watching TV? He’s trying out for TV commercials!” At nine years old, I usually took her insults at face value, but this one seemed illogical to me because I knew that Owen’s mother arranged for him to go to those auditions, and my mother made no such arrangements. I cautiously pointed this out, and she retorted “Sure, I wouldn’t take you to any try-outs. You’d never get into a commercial.” She was right: I lacked Owen’s telegenic looks and charm. Even so, she went out of her way to quell any hope I might have harboured. This little scene she orchestrated was a form of psychological abuse.

That afternoon, I freed myself from over 40 years of her abuse. To use the term psychologists favour, I became estranged from her. Right away, I felt taller, as if a physical weight had slipped from my shoulders, and I could stand up straight at last. Blowing up the last bridge between me and her was one of the most liberating, transformative moments of my life.

She would alternate her harsh attentions with various forms of neglect. Every morning, she remained in bed while we ate oatmeal she’d cooked the night before and left to congeal in the pot. This gruel was repugnant, but we might be beaten if she found we hadn’t eaten it, so we usually took the less painful route. When I went away to university, I learnt how other people ate their oatmeal – fresh, hot – an epiphany as striking as any other I ever had on campus. (I also grew three inches at university, which I attribute to having a proper diet at last.)

When I was 14 or so, she wistfully declared me “too old to hit”. But she still had other weapons in her arsenal, like berating us in public or dialling the water heater down to its lowest setting, “Vacation”, in deep winter.

She would alternate her harsh attentions with various forms of neglect. Every morning, she remained in bed while we ate oatmeal she’d cooked the night before and left to congeal in the pot. This gruel was repugnant, but we might be beaten if she found we hadn’t eaten it, so we usually took the less painful route. When I went away to university, I learnt how other people ate their oatmeal – fresh, hot – an epiphany as striking as any other I ever had on campus. (I also grew three inches at university, which I attribute to having a proper diet at last.)

When I was 14 or so, she wistfully declared me “too old to hit”. But she still had other weapons in her arsenal, like berating us in public or dialling the water heater down to its lowest setting, “Vacation”, in deep winter.

Our species’ greatest evil happens not in battle or behind bars, but in millions of homes every day. Abuse by relatives has harmed more people than warfare, captivity, terrorism, or any other torment humans have invented. About 20 per cent of adults in the UK will experience domestic abuse during their lifetimes, according to the National Centre for Domestic Violence, and less than a quarter of that abuse will be reported to authorities. Child abuse may be even more pervasive. According to the National Association for People Abused in Childhood, over 20 per cent of British adults experienced abuse or neglect before they were 16 years old.

Family violence knows no borders of class or race, and neither does the denial of this evil. There’s a cross-cultural tendency to consider felonies committed by family as misdemeanours. We inhabit a world where people are routinely expected to eat dinner with their rapist, to pick up groceries for their assailant, or show their tormentor how to use Spotify. That belief that “blood is thicker than water” runs deep in our shared psyche.

One of the main reasons that abuse so often goes unrecognised – even by its victims and survivors – is because we often only think about physical abuse and sexual abuse, while psychological abuse (also called emotional abuse) and neglect are often dismissed. The latter is certainly the most common, arguably the most harmful, and, tragically, the least recognised. Neglect can take numerous forms, from feeding a child poorly to ignoring their hygiene to not providing decent healthcare to failing to soothe their fear or sadness. Psychological abuse also covers a broad range of toxic behaviours: insults, intimidation, humiliation, persistent criticism, the “silent treatment”, and more. It’s also the most likely form to continue past a survivor’s childhood, as my abuse did.

I managed to elude sexual abuse, but I was served ample portions of the other kinds of maltreatment. Even in my adulthood, my mother had a singular knack for undermining, which she deployed at every opportunity. And there were many opportunities, since I talked to her almost every day. These talks were my portion of the burden we siblings shared. If I didn’t let her pour her vitriol regularly on me, she might drown my sister Gerry in it. I had internalised my mother’s opinion of me, so I believed I deserved her bile. But I knew that my sister – a funny, huge-hearted social worker – deserved none of it. Living near my mother, Gerry caught the lion’s share of her wrath. So, I tried to ease Gerry’s burden as much as I could.

Early in my work with my therapist, I described these phone calls with my mother – half-hour-long sorties through a psychic minefield. Her favourite topics included: how much better off I’d be if I’d become a lawyer, how the Blacks were taking over, and how sad she was that I’d be going to Hell (I had shed the Catholicism of my youth). Then my therapist asked me a question I’d never thought to ask myself. “What do you get out of talking to her.”

“Nothing,” I replied. “Those talks aren’t for me. I’m just splitting the duty with Gerry.”

“If you’re not getting anything out of them, you have to think about whether you should be having them any more. Nobody should be in a relationship that gives them nothing.”

My journey toward parting began with my therapist’s question that day, and it’s a solid place for anyone to start investigating whether estrangement might be the best destination for them. The core of any relationship should be reciprocity; both parties give each other things they need and want. This standard sounds straightforward, but it’s quite possible to miss it, as I did, by mistakenly applying other criteria. I was maintaining contact with my mother out of love for Gerry and a sense of fairness to her, as well as firmly rooted taboos against abandoning a parent.
Those taboos are the result of an intricate web of ignorance, avoidance, and shame that permeates our society. It begins where the abuse itself begins – at home. Children lack knowledge of the world at large that might tell them their home life is aberrant. They think that however they live is “normal”, and whatever they get is what they deserve. Those who get love believe they deserve it, and those who get harassed, assaulted, or neglected believe they deserve it. Until my late teens, it didn’t occur to me that multiple beatings per week were unusual. When I learnt that they were, it took me a couple more decades to realise that they weren’t my fault. At first, the sense that everything at home was normal ensured my silence, then the sense that I was abnormal shamed me into silence.

Academic and professional institutions are also unwittingly complicit in the conspiracy against survivors speaking out. One indication of their complicity is the dearth of investigation into estrangement, its roots, and results. Both clinicians and researchers focus on reconciliation as a remedy for the wounds that family inflicts. I was very lucky to find a therapist who helped me evaluate the damage my mother had done to me and navigate the path to freedom from her abuse. But my therapist was acting on her own wisdom rather than guidelines her profession had set forth. Too many people don’t know about the healing power of estrangement because their mental health providers don’t know about it either.

As the magazine Scientific American acknowledged in 2020, “there hasn’t been much research about family estrangement.” This absence almost rises to the level of malpractice given a Cornell University study that estimated 27 per cent of American adults were partly or completely estranged from a family member. As with the other figures we’ve seen, this one is likely on the low side. Karl Pillemer, a sociology professor who led the Cornell research, said as much, citing the shame which prevents many estranged people from reporting that status. If so many people are finding that estrangement works for them, why aren’t researchers digging more and deeper to discover why—and how it might work even better?

2019 paper in the American Journal of Psychiatry estimates that one in four Americans have experienced some form of abuse as children – roughly on par with the UK numbers. As that paper shows, the impacts of this abuse are varied and often severe, putting survivors at significantly higher risk of depression, anxiety, addiction, obesity, Type 2 diabetes, stroke, suicide and more. For some people, healing from abuse will involve reconciliation; for most, it should entail therapy. And for many, it should embrace partial or total separation.

What prevents millions of people from stepping away from abusive relatives is an array of myths about estrangement thrust upon us by society, abusers, and even well-meaning friends. First is the myth that it’s rare. Above, I offer numbers that prove it’s not. But I only discovered them after I started researching the subject. As part of my research, I spoke with dozens of other survivors, almost all of whom saw themselves as outliers at best, amoral misfits at worst. A few of them told me they’d never spoken to anyone else, even their partners, about cutting off their abusers. Their silence has been enforced by other myths, especially the untruth that estrangement is unethical. When I started telling people I had cut ties, many expressed more sympathy for my mother than for me, reflexively lamenting the heartbreak she must feel at losing her son, rather than the grief I feel at never having had the decent childhood that everyone deserves. Often, their objections persisted even when I explained that my mother had committed acts against me that could earn her criminal charges – assault, battery, harassment, and more – if I were unrelated to her.

Fearing judgments like these, I spent years downplaying my estrangement. But those years – along with a lot of therapy – have also shown me that most of us survivors are nothing short of heroic. Rather than being blamed, we should be admired for retaining our humanity despite what we have been through. These realisations propelled me to write a book that would expose the myths, celebrate our heroism, and offer guidelines and encouragement for survivors who need to put distance between themselves and those who have harmed them.

For someone who hasn’t gone through estrangement, it might sound like a sudden, even melodramatic act. But I know from my own experience and that of other survivors that parting can and should be accomplished gradually, that it should ideally begin with a short hiatus from the abuser, that the survivor should make explicit rules, and that, if those rules are broken repeatedly, they should feel fully empowered to step away from their abuser.

Some abusers can redeem themselves, but most cannot. I gave my mother two years and a clear set of guidelines for acceptable behaviour before I ultimately cut my ties with her. This gave her ample time to mend her ways, and it somewhat eased my guilt about leaving her when I finally did, since I’d given her literally hundreds of opportunities to build her side of the bridge that might have connected us.

Nobody has ever treated me as badly as my mother did, and, when I hung up the phone on her for the last time, I suddenly wasn’t being treated badly any more. I now had acres of psychic space I could roam freely, space she had occupied like an invading army with her rants, demands, and slights. Until I took over that space, I never knew how happy it would make me and how much mental and physical energy I’d have when I didn’t need to manage the fallout from her abuse. Healing from the effects of her long-term maltreatment has been slower, but estranging from her helped me greatly in my uneasy efforts to care for – and about – myself.

2015 survey by the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Family Research revealed that 80 per cent of those who’d estranged from a relative found it had “a positive effect on their lives”. This study, one of the few extensive assays of estrangement’s impact, gathered responses from 807 people in the UK, US, Canada, and elsewhere. Testimonials from respondents closely mirror my own experience. One said, “I feel like it made me a stronger, more independent person.” Another reported, “I have more self-respect. I am more relaxed.” Another said, “it’s been wonderful, and I’ve been able to achieve a lot.” Still another declared that “it saved my life”.

I feel exactly the same way.

The two most common negative effects of estrangement are guilt and grief, and it would take me years to fully process these emotions. But, almost immediately after my last call with my mother, I realised that I had finally done what we should all have licence to do: We should all hold our family to the same standards that we hold our friends.
would never let a friend treat me for one week the way my mother treated me for 40 years. None of us should be imprisoned by the cosmic lottery that placed us in a cruel home. We owe our abusers nothing. We didn’t ask to be born amongst them, and they did us no favour by conceiving us or sharing our genes. It is immoral for anyone – abusers, bystanders, institutions – to expect loyalty to family from anyone who has survived family abuse. The only way relatives can earn our loyalty is by treating us with love and empathy.

I’m not denying that familial bonds can match, if not surpass, all others. My sister is one of my closest friends, and my brother Tommy was my saviour in my youth. (He died in a car crash in 1999.) I am also grateful to several uncles, aunts and cousins for uplifting me with many kindnesses during my childhood and beyond. They treated me as only dear friends could. As such, they, like my other friends, my wife, my son and my stepdaughters, are part of my true family.