The first sentence of Leo Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina reads: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

I don’t know if we could call Reddit user Euphoric-Exam509‘s family unhappy quite yet, but it’s heading that way.

In a post on the subreddit ‘Am I the [Jerk]?’, the man said that because of their never-ending disagreements, he and his sister haven’t been talking for 5 years now.

Although he was fine with the no-contact, their mom was not. So she recently organized an impromptu intervention for her son, painting him as the bad guy.

He thought this was unfair and stormed off. However, this decision made him the family villain, and all the negative reactions planted doubts in his mind about its justifiability.

This man hasn’t been in contact with his sister for years

Image credits: ᕈ O W L Y (not the actual photo)

So his mom decided he needed an intervention

Image credits: christopher lemercier (not the actual photo)

Image credits: YuriArcursPeopleimages (not the actual photo)

Image credits: Euphoric-Exam509

As his post went viral, the man provided more information on the family conflict

Image credits: Naassom Azevedo (not the actual photo)

Experts say they’re witnessing a “silent epidemic” of family break-ups

“The declaration of ‘I am done’ with a family member is a powerful and distinct phenomenon,” says Karl Andrew Pillemer, professor of human development at Cornell University, US. “It is different from family feuds, from high-conflict situations, and from relationships that are emotionally distant but still include contact.”

After realizing there were few major studies of family estrangement, Pillemer carried out a nationwide survey for his 2020 book Fault Lines: Fractured Families and How to Mend Them.

The results show that there are many people who are in a similar situation as the author of the Reddit post. In fact, more than one in four Americans reported being estranged from another relative.

Similar research for British estrangement charity Stand Alone suggests the phenomenon affects one in five families in the UK, while academic researchers and therapists in Australia and Canada also say they’re witnessing a “silent epidemic” of family break-ups.

Image credits: Matt Bennett (not the actual photo)

Most break-ups between a parent and a grown-up child tend to be initiated by the child

Although research in the field is still limited, Joshua Coleman, psychologist and author of The Rules of Estrangement: Why Adult Children Cut Ties and How to Heal the Conflict, says most break-ups between a parent and a grown-up child tend to be initiated by the child.

One of the most common reasons for this are past or present abuse by the parent, whether emotional, verbal, physical, or sexual, and divorce, with consequences ranging from the adult child ‘taking sides’ to new people coming into the family such as stepsiblings or stepparents, which can fuel divisions over both financial and emotional resources. Clashes in values are also increasingly thought to play a role.

“While there’s nothing especially modern about family conflict or a desire to feel insulated from it, conceptualizing the estrangement of a family member as an expression of personal growth, as it is commonly done today, is almost certainly new,” Coleman explains. “Deciding which people to keep in or out of one’s life has become an important strategy.”

Coleman argues that our increased focus on personal well-being has happened in parallel with other wider trends, such as a shift towards a more individualistic culture — many of us are much less reliant on relatives than in previous generations.

“Not needing a family member for support or because you plan to inherit the family farm means that who we choose to spend time with is based more on our identities and aspirations for growth than survival or necessity,” he says. “Today, nothing ties an adult child to a parent beyond that adult child’s desire to have that relationship.”

Hopefully, the Redditor will find a way out of this whole mess.

After reading the man’s story, people thought he did nothing wrong

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