Three summers ago, I spent months interviewing and emailing with parents—about 90 in all—many of whom shared with me their fears of being cut off by their children over gender. The next summer I returned to the subject, in a long conversation with three mothers who had become estranged from their adult children, despite the great lengths all three had gone to keep their families intact.
I tried to make their stories make sense. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe what I was hearing. Rather, I felt that there was some missing element, some wild disproportion that set everything else askew. I thought especially about the mother who told me: “In our family, we talk things out. In our family, we don’t do that. We can talk through it. We can do hard things. You never have to be afraid to come to us.” I thought about how none of that seemed to matter any more.
As the number of people going “no contact” with their parents surges upward, the national conversation about estrangement has been dominated by those who cut ties with their families, particularly those who wear their estrangements proudly. It is rarer to hear from the family and friends they leave behind, for whom broken relationships are a source of pain and shame. For them, silence seems to offer the only possible hope of future reconciliation.
Familial estrangement has emerged as a generational divide over the role and value of ties we did not choose. While I was working on this piece, National Public Radio’s Code Switch podcast aired an interview with Rin Reczek, author of the new book Families We Lose: A New Explanation For Family Estrangement. Reczek recites what have become familiar talking points on the subject, deploying the chilly language of “compulsory kinship” and emphasizing the entitlement parents feel to relationships “sustained… no matter what.”
Noelle Mering’s No Contact: How a Seductive Ideology Broke Families and Friendships and How We Can Repair Them takes a very different perspective on the issue. The book is more traditional in its assumptions (family matters, authority structures and stabilizes, and so on) but also far more even-handed and humane. No Contact puts the experiences and needs of parents at its heart. Mering, the mother of six children, clearly empathizes with the impossible position so many parents find themselves in today, as they seek to hold onto their relationships without signing away their personal beliefs and values. Nonetheless, the book has something to say to every reader, including those who have initiated estrangements themselves and those of us seeking to understand this social phenomenon.
Expressive Individualism and the Rise of the “No Contact” Movement
There are, of course, situations where going “no contact” is an appropriate response—and indeed sometimes the only possible response—to abuse. These tragic situations are not the focus of the book. Rather, Mering seeks to understand the no-contact movement, a broad-based push to devalue intimate bonds in service of ideological and quasi-therapeutic ends, where networks (often online) encourage members to sever ties with loved ones newly defined as “problematic.” The no-contact movement, Mering writes, “erase[s] … distinctions” between unsafe relationships and uncomfortable disagreements. This movement has made estrangement into a tool of self-expression and a signal of the sincerity of one’s political and personal beliefs. As a result, we all find ourselves living in a far more breakable social universe today than the one we inhabited just a few years ago.
Mering traces the explosion of the no-contact movement to the retreat from public life imposed by the COVID pandemic in 2020, though—as she notes—the idea of cleansing one’s private life of problematic perspectives and people in order to cleanse the public sphere had already been on the ascendancy for years by then. As lockdowns pushed us to spend more time online and less time socializing face-to-face, a social media mentality took over, “foster[ing] the fantasy that identity can be self-created and disembodied, while reinforcing the social-hygiene instinct—that our interactions can be perfectly managed through blocking, unfollowing, and muting.”
The moral logic of fandoms and identity subcultures—where belonging depends on ideological purity, moral signaling, and denunciation of dissenters—became the moral logic of everyday life. What had begun as a virtual performance evolved into social reality. Offline friendships, classrooms, and even families began to mirror the same dynamics of callouts, cancellations, and self-curation that governed online life, sweeping those who hadn’t been in the world of fandoms into this harsh new reality.
Today, a new ideology tests our closest bonds. Mering sets out to untangle how we got here. To that end, she introduces the concept of the Empowerment Delusion, the idea that individuals can exercise autonomy over that which is fixed (such as attempting to change one’s sex) or beyond the reach of any individual (e.g., resolving all lingering sources of racial injustice) while embracing disempowering and self-victimizing narratives over that which they do in fact have the power to change. Together, these two beliefs “freez[e] us in narratives of despair” and put close bonds at risk.
A growing number of people—mostly, but not only, young people—experience disagreement as rejection or even the annihilation of the self. When identity becomes “self-created and self-expression [becomes] our highest moral mandate, then any challenge to one’s choices becomes existential.” Adopt a sense of your “true self” in defiance of reality, and you will burden yourself with an inherently contentious and hopelessly fragile identity, which you must then defend against impositions of every kind: from differences of perspective, from one’s own responsibilities to others, from memory, from love. Mering observes that
the language of expressive individualism allows us to subjugate our duties to one another to the expression of our inner desires, reducing the world and its inhabitants to instruments of our true self. In this framework the true self has the ultimate claim to our fidelity, and it’s the last remaining measure of our morality. In the older model [of identity] the true self can’t be defined in isolation from our interdependence and duties but rather is clarified and made whole through the integration of these more external factors into our interior lives.
An essential sleight of hand of expressive individualism is that morality is collapsed into psychological well-being. By this account, the therapeutic self isn’t trained or inclined to strengthen or repair relationships amidst challenges; rather, it’s empowered to sever them—a mindset that underlies most every moment of social rupture, from the logic of infidelity as authenticity to the logic of the no-contact movement as a means of self-preservation.
This observation rang true to my own conversations with parents of estranged trans-identified children, who told me they felt their children, in order to tear down their old identities and create new ones, needed to jettison their parents, who would always remember them otherwise than they wished to be. Mering’s analysis lays bare the inevitability of conflict and estrangement in the current political climate. But—just as the reader is about to despair—Mering pivots, directing her attention to the ways families and friends can nurture their bonds with one another, turning toward one another even in disagreement, rather than turning away.
Challenging the No-Contact Movement—and Seeking Reconciliation
Mering gives readers ways to challenge three key tenets of the no-contact movement: that “family is oppressive, authority is identical to authoritarianism, and disagreement is a threat.” Mering argues instead that “family humanizes, authority stabilizes, and disagreeing well civilizes.” Only within the family can our “deepest human longings for belonging, significance, [and] permanence” be met. It is only when our private lives meet those needs that we can step into the public realm “where individuals transcend necessity and emerge as equals.” Summarizing Hannah Arendt, Mering writes that it is “the shelter of the private sphere that allows people the stability and rootedness necessary to appear in the public as free participants,” not as beggars in pursuit of the kind of recognition that can only ever be extended to us in our most intimate relationships.
Across both domains, the public and the private, Mering argues that we must step out of the roles that have been scripted for us by the ideologies animating the no-contact movement. This means “disavow[ing] identity politics utterly, on every level and in every direction,” refusing to flatten our views of others into one-dimensional caricatures, and attending to the world around us with curiosity. Provocatively, Mering notes that this may require a certain inauthenticity at times, resurrecting the distinctly unfashionable virtue of self-governance:
Modern authenticity means that what you feel determines what you should do. The self is reduced to a bundle of desires, feelings, and impulses untethered from stable commitments or objective goods. But such an inner self is inherently fluid, and basing action on it makes our behavior unreliable and our relationships unstable.
True freedom, by contrast, lies in self-governance… as we mature into moral agents, our actions are within our responsibility, and they can and should shape who we become. In other words, identity ultimately follows action; it doesn’t precede it. Exercising this distinctively human capacity to discern the good and to repeatedly choose it makes us truly authentic and in accord with our humanity, not by following our hearts, but by leading them.
Throughout the book, Mering pairs her analysis with practical ways parents and loved ones can counteract a culture of estrangement, recognizing that wise action follows understanding. While Mering’s advice focuses primarily on steps individuals can take within the narrow scope of their own intimate relationships, she connects these individual acts with a broader social and cultural pushback. What is good for individuals and families—learning how to disagree well and coexist peaceably and productively despite our differences—is good for our societies, which have also been riven by polarization, mutual incomprehension, and the seductive but false belief that there is no need to coexist at all, that we can rather vanquish our political opponents once and for all, by silencing, sidelining, or simply outliving them.
In one of the book’s most moving passages, Mering revisits the biblical tale of the prodigal son and the father who “sees [his son returning] from far off, signifying that he is waiting and watching for his return”:
He runs to meet him. This is a small detail in the story, but it’s significant. It shows a lack of bitterness and an eagerness to restore the relationship. Had he needed a grand demonstration of repentance, he wouldn’t have run. Had he shared the calculating spirit of the older brother, he wouldn’t have run. That the father runs to his son as soon as he realizes his son is turning homeward reveals a freedom from the corrosive human responses to division: defensiveness, rumination, self-pity, and hard-heartedness. There is no shaming lecture, no relitigating of the past, only an embrace and a rejoicing in the restoration of his sonship.
The father of the prodigal son offers a model for parents of estranged children to emulate. Sometimes, waiting with openness to a child’s uncertain return is the only stance a parent can take. Mering cautions parents against any expectation of a reckoning. For those on either side of estrangement, she counsels what the no-contact movement explicitly rejects: that one develop and exercise an internal locus of control. It is not within the power of parents to compel a child’s return to their lives. They can only decide how to respond. If and when an estranged child returns to the fold, parents do not have the power to force an accounting for broken relationships and lost time, but they do have the power to forgive—as the father of the prodigal son forgives—and move forward together, without losing even more time.
Over the past few years, I have come to know something about estrangement from my own life, too. I have often lain awake in the night wondering how bonds that did not appear fragile broke so easily. I had once believed that nothing could come between this or that friend and me, and then the strangest of things did so—things that had nothing to do with those friendships, that emerged from no shared history but rather out of nowhere. I have replayed countless times the nasty words that issued from the mouths—or fingertips—of friends in which our history, their knowledge of me, and even their own voice—their words, their cadences—were entirely absent. I have dreamed more often than I would like to remember of heated remonstrations, in which I unload years of hurt and confusion and win the argument to boot. I dream, too, of reconciliations. But, most often, I dream that the rupture itself was the bad dream from which I am relieved to awaken.
When I think about the friends I lost over political beliefs nobody held ten years ago, it can be hard to swallow the bitterness. In our final conversations, I felt the urge to leave a bruise: to issue judgments far more withering than the trumped-up charges levelled against me. But my recurring dreams of reconciliation tell me something else. Somewhere underneath the hurt and anger, I still feel a bond. I am hurt when I feel that a friend has forgotten everything she knew about me. But do I have to forget everything I ever knew about my friend, too? There were reasons we were drawn to each other. The things that drew us together were not nearly so stupid as the things that drove us apart. In fact, they were not stupid at all.
Mering has thought deeply about how we might move out of our current predicament and find a new—or old—way to relate to one another again. The future will require us to find ways to stay “both separate and interconnected,” to “hold our beliefs deeply and still understand that the other person simply doesn’t,” and to know and love and forgive and be forgiven by three-dimensional people, with all their gifts and all their flaws.
As Mering says, “we all need more grace—to be extended and received.”
Noelle Mering’s No Contact: How a Seductive Ideology Broke Families and Friendships and How We Can Repair Them is available now.
