Anna Sale, creator and host of the WNYC podcast Death, Sex & Money, talks about what it's like when people become estranged -- from friends, family members and communities -- and takes calls from listeners who have been through this.
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Person 1: I have been estranged from my family since I was 16. I moved out and I just never saw them again.
Person 2: I'm in a 13-year-old journey of trying to estrange myself and my sister from our mom.
Person 3: I haven't spoken to them for the last 129 days.
Person 4: I don't even know that I'd recognize him on the street if I saw him or recognize his voice.
Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. That was a montage from Death, Sex & Money's new three-part series called Estrangement, which just released its final episode last week. Some of you have heard it and I know many of you felt very moved by it. The series covers the many ways in which people become estranged, either by choice or involuntarily and what happens afterwards.
With me now to talk about the Estrangement series and to take some phone calls from you with some of your own stories or even questions, I know people are feeling empowered and sometimes getting advice from this series, is Anna Sale, creator and host of the WNYC podcast, Death, Sex & Money, the show about the things we think about a lot and need to talk about more as Anna says. Thanks so much for joining us, Anna. This has been a wonderful and moving series.
Anna Sale: Brian, it's so nice to be with you.
Brian Lehrer: Even though it deals with some very difficult stuff. Tell us a little bit about the project, how you sourced listeners' estrangement stories, and how you structured the series into three parts for three different stages of estrangement.
Anna Sale: Well, we started talking about this months ago with our listeners and we asked a very open question. We asked if you had experienced estrangement, whether in a family relationship, which is I think how most people think about estrangement when you hear that word, but also from a community that you grew up in, a community of your origin that was really linked to your sense of identity.
We wanted to include those stories as well to also try to get at some of the stories we've heard about how the political moment where very stark differences in values had caused ruptures and really key relationships. We asked that question and we just got hundreds of stories, Brian. They ran the gamut from real traumatic experiences of abuse in families that led to people deciding they could no longer be in relationship with people they had grown up with to stories of external events like civil war in Ethiopia, causing an estrangement for one young listener between her and her half-siblings because of their different ways of experiencing and understanding what was happening in Ethiopia.
The reason we decided to structure it into three stages of estrangement is because we heard from people who were reaching out and saying, "I'm thinking about this and I am considering this. I don't know what to do. If I do decide to estrange from this critical relationship, do I tell them I'm estranging? What will it mean to the rest of my life?" That's the first episode. We talked to a middle-aged guy, who is considering leaving the religious community that he has grown up with and that he shares with his wife. He's thinking about what that would mean if he made that break and really looking very closely at the trade-offs that that would involve.
Then the second episode, we looked at people who had become recently estranged, either because they had done the estranging or because someone in their life had said, "I need to take a break from this relationship." Then the third episode was people who had been living with estrangement for years and years and years. Some of whom have decided that that is the way that they are going to live their life. They've created chosen family to build supportive networks in place of relationships that they left. Then we also heard from a woman who reconciled with her mother that she'd been long apart from right while her mother was dying. We wanted to include a story about that as well.
Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can hear some of your stories of estrangement, any of those three types of estrangement or stages of estrangement as Anna described them, or your questions, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer. We'll play some more clips from the series as we go. Anna, I wanted to ask about one of those little excerpts in the montage that we played at the top.
The person who said, "I'm in the 13-year-journey of trying to estrange myself and my sister from our mom." I was struck by that phrase, "trying to estrange myself." Can you tell us a little bit about that person's story and why one would try to estrange themselves and why it would take 13 years to accomplish it? You could just say, "I'm not talking to you anymore." [chuckles] Why was that a 13-year story?
Anna Sale: Well, I think the thing that I really learned from listening, not just to that story but to many of these stories, is I think the way that I had thought of estrangement prior to listening to these stories is I thought of, "You're either estranged or you're not estranged." I now understand estrangement as this very alive process. Because if it's a relationship where you would use the word "estranged" like say you are not in relationship with your mother, you may not be in touch with your mother, but your relationship with your mother is very much alive in your emotional life.
I have come to understand, there's this great book called Fractured Families by a professor named Karl Pillemer. He describes estrangement as a condition of ambiguous loss and also one of chronic stress. Because deciding to estrange, it's not just like a breakup where you leave a romantic relationship and then maybe you've come into a new romantic relationship and you move on.
Estrangement is much more gray and just an ongoing process of grieving, understanding, reconsidering whether that distance is appropriate. For that listener who's described it as a 13-year process, that's the kind of dynamic that I understand it as. You may, one year, decide, "I can't be with you during the holidays," and the next year, "I'm going to try to put up really firm boundaries and have this kind of healthful relationship," and then decide that that didn't exactly work out the way you wanted. It's much more of an alive process.
Brian Lehrer: Listeners, you can call with your reconciliation stories too. Maybe that's Anna's next series. Who knows? [chuckles] The reconciliation stage of estrangement or post-estrangement, you can tell those stories too at 212-433-WNYC. I'm going to play two two-minute clips from the series. First, in your first episode titled Estrangement Purgatory, we meet Brian, not me, who is caught between two worlds and considering cutting his religious ties. Let's listen to two minutes of Brian's story.
Anna Sale: He said he felt caught between two worlds. On the one hand, his growing disillusionment with the religion he grew up in. On the other, his wife and parents who are still embedded in that religion. Losing one would mean losing the other.
Brian: I'm stuck in a way because my wife is still, for lack of a better word, a true believer. That connects me to it in a way that I'm just fear-riddled that I'll lose her if I leave completely because I know I'll lose my parents completely if I leave. They'll cut me off, 100% cut me off.
Anna Sale: Brian asked us not to use his real name or to identify his particular religious community. It's Christian with meetings and services multiple times a week. He describes the community as high control.
Brian: There is real clear guidance on, gosh, everything like what you should or shouldn't watch on TV, what you should or shouldn't do and what you read, what movies you see. Even rules on what you do and don't do in the bedroom.
Anna Sale: Brian said he started to feel doubts in his mid-20s. He's in his mid-40s now.
Brian: I think as an adult, you look at your behaviors and you decide which ones are worth maintaining and which ones are not. The constant pressure to do more, more, more for the faith, it left me with this incredible feeling of inadequacy. I could never do enough. Every time you would reach for the goal line or the finish line of whatever it was you were trying to do, I felt like it moved.
Anna Sale: Like an exhaustion with trying to please?
Brian: Exactly.
Brian Lehrer: That excerpt from Death, Sex & Money's podcast about estrangement from one's religious community. Anna, as I listened to that, I thought about some call-ins that we've done on this show which asked the same question, but I guess I'd say now in a more shallow way because we invited people who've changed their religious beliefs or their religious affiliations at any time to call in and tell those stories as being seekers. The context that I presented was of hope and curiosity as people looked for their spiritual homes, but you're focusing on that guy's sense of loss, loss of community, loss of a belief system, and even loss of individual loved ones.
Anna Sale: Yes, and I think, Brian, it's both/and. For Brian, who I talked to at once, he says later in the episode, "I feel like I was taught that basically that truth and goodness was one thing," and then having seen the way that his religion can cast out other people. For him, it was the experience of seeing how his siblings were rejected from the religious community, and then the cost that that had in their individual lives. He's come to believe that that was actually the wrong thing to do.
His whole sense of what is good has been flipped upside down and so, yes, with that comes a sense of loss and a sense of betrayal. At one point, he says his older brother has now died, but he says, "I think he would really love to know the man I'm becoming." It's both/and, the sense of discovery and curiosity and seeking, but with that comes loss when you're letting go of a relationship like one with a religious community that Brian grew up in.
Brian Lehrer: Let's hear a caller story. Charles in Harlem, you're on WNYC. Hi, Charles. Thanks for calling in.
Charles: Oh, well, thank you, and good morning. I found this series fascinating. Actually, the title itself, Estrangement. What happened to me was my-- it's three-- we grew a family of-- Where do I start? I'm a little bit nervous. We grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. My sisters and I, it was three of us. I'm the middle child, older sister, younger sister, two parents, African-American parents, middle class.
My father was a cop. My mom was a school teacher. He passed away in '86. She passed away in 2001. The beginning of the estrangement happened between my younger sister and me because my mom died in estranged circumstances. Long story short, we were suing the hospital. My youngest sister settled the suit without telling her two older siblings. We were so angry and that's when the estranged began.
I like the word "estranged" because it's like we didn't know. It was like, "Why would she do that?" We were so shocked, right? Then the process began there and it was about the resources that happened, the inheritances and all the legal stuff, and all that kind of stuff that comes after when someone dies. As I'm talking about it now, I'm thinking about it. It was a 20-year process of dispersing all that stuff. What I'm realizing is that it wasn't about what the stuff represented.
I remember as I'm thinking together now, it's about the old resentments and stuff that happened in 1965, "Daddy said this in 1978 and Mommy let you have this in 1981," over a 20-year period. Honestly, Brian, when we finally got the lawyer and finally got it settled, my older sister said, "Oh, my God, it's like going through a divorce." That's exactly what it felt like. Well, I've never been married, so I don't know what a divorce was like, but I know what that was like.
Brian Lehrer: Did your sister and you ever get it back together?
Charles: No, and I'm so happy. I am so relieved. That's why I'm saying it was the process of estrangement. It had a beginning when she settled the lawsuit without telling us. Finally, as of last year, once the documents finally got settled and the seal was put on it, it was complete and the process was done. I haven't talked to her. I don't care to talk to her. The resentment is so profound. I realized that that person is not going to change. That's who she is and I have to let it go. It's the radical acceptance that that's who she is.
Brian Lehrer: Anna, since this is your beat, do you want to ask Charles any follow-up question?
Anna Sale: I guess I would just say, Charles, what you're describing, the particulars are specific to your family, but this is very common in families, these kinds of conflicts and sense of distance. There's statistics from Karl Pillemer, that professor that I mentioned earlier. He did a survey and found that nearly 27% of the US population reported having some kind of distance with either an immediate family member or extended family member.
Whether these conflicts and estrangements get fixed and there is a permanent distance like you're describing, Charles, or if it's a temporary condition that then you come back around or find a new way to be in relationship together, it's very common for families. I was struck there, Charles, how you said, "I feel relief that we are not in relationship." I think that is a word that we heard a lot about people who feel at peace with where things have landed.
Charles: Glad that I'm not alone. Thank you.
Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Charles. Thank you for sharing. I think that is really helpful to people to hear. Have you gotten that kind of response from listeners to the series? Were they surprised or relieved to hear a lot of people who had stories that, in some respects, emotionally as well as just arc of narrative were similar to them?
Anna Sale: Yes, I think the thing that I was really struck by was just the sense of isolation and aloneness that people who experience estrangement carry with them. Just think about it, any social setting where family questions come up. If you have a difficult-to-describe relationship with a family member, just figuring out how to navigate through those conversations can be tricky.
I do want to highlight, Brian, another kind of estrangement relationship that was even harder to get people to share. That is the experience of having someone cut off a relationship with you often for reasons you don't understand. That is something we heard from parents of adult children. Imagine being ghosted, having that feeling of your child has ghosted you, and then figuring out how to carry forward by honoring whatever boundary your child has drawn. That, I think, is a tremendously painful experience that is very isolating.
Brian Lehrer: Why don't you think, to what you just said, that a lot of people who are the recipients of the estrangement, the family member broke up with them, that they don't understand it in many cases? Wouldn't the person say, "I have this grievance against you, so I'm not going to talk to you anymore," and it's clear?
Anna Sale: I think that that is what I would hope for in an experience where you were drawing a line and saying, "I need to end this relationship and I can give you this information, but I don't want to talk further about it." What we heard sometimes were tools being able to block someone's phone number or unfollowing people digitally and just quitting a relationship in a moment of just exasperation. That's something that is happening. Then the person who is on the receiving end of that doesn't have a lot of recourse. They may try to reach out and say, "Please talk to me."
If the person who's done that is saying, "I need space from this relationship. Please don't be in contact with me," you can be stuck. There's a mother that we talked to in the series who's not been in relationship with her adult daughter for four years. She described this process of coming to deeply understand the lack of control she has when it comes to parental love. She has loved her child. She has loved and taken care of her child in the best way she knew how, but she's not able to control how her daughter now wants to be in relationship with her. She's had to figure out how to live with that ambiguity.
Brian Lehrer: Anna Sale is with us, our Death, Sex & Money podcast host on her series, three parts on estrangement. Let's hear somebody else's story. Rochelle in Brighton Beach, you're on WNYC. Hi, Rochelle.
Rochelle: Hi, thanks for taking my call. My story is basically that I'm estranged from one particular person in my family. It isn't out of any kind of lack of forgiveness for any particular action, even though it was a terrible childhood with this person, but they're a B-level celebrity or maybe A-level at this point. Anyway, they are one of America's favorite people to hate. The rest of my family has suffered all kinds of troll attacks.
At one point, because of the association and the potential liability of media coverage, my sister was actually denied a promotion at work. She decided not to follow through with litigation on it. Anybody who's continued to be a part of the family and allowed photos of them associated with the family be posted on private, whatever, internet pages, or social media, they're suffering.
They've been attacked. I personally have not been on any kind of social media for 10 years because I knew that that was a high risk. The consequence of that is that the family members that continue to love this person, and I do too, it's just dangerous to be associated with them, are very hurt that I'm not associated with them. Therefore, they consider it rejection of the entire family. Therefore, I'm alone on Christmas. [chuckles]
Brian Lehrer: Wow.
Rochelle: It's a matter of protecting yourself from the outside world and being separated from your inside world because of the consequences of what you'll suffer if people make perceptions.
Brian Lehrer: If I'm understanding your story right, are you saying you're not estranged from these family members because you think they did anything bad to you? You're only staying away from them because you don't want to be trolled by the public who hates your relative?
Rochelle: Yes, there's one particular person who's the media person, who's the popular person. They're not a good person. [chuckles] They're good to their children and those types of things, but I don't agree with the politics or the way that they attract attention. To answer your question, it isn't that there's any kind of particular behavior from the rest of the family that I'm trying to stay away from. It's just, literally, the attacks from the outside world because of perception of this particular person, who is responsible for their own persona and the way that they carry themselves in public.
Brian Lehrer: I'm not going to ask you to reveal. I don't want celebrity. We're talking about relationships. It doesn't sound like you want to reveal, but you feel a little betrayed by them because they've brought this on the family, it sounds like.
Rochelle: It isn't so much. Honestly, my heart's open and I love them very much. If I get them on the telephone and things like that, there's no hard feelings. It's just that it's dangerous to associate with this. It's dangerous in terms of any kind of pictures and things being-- It's like a person that's followed by paparazzi.
Brian Lehrer: You associated with them.
Rochelle: Yes, and it isn't that the family is dumb and puts things up on Facebook and things like that. There's a lot of privacy there, but there's paparazzi. There's people that follow around and snap photos. If those things get out into the public, then there's awful internet troll worms that it's outrageous, the kinds of things that have happened.
For my brother, there's all of these fake internet pages that have all these conspiracy theories tying us, not me, but the rest of my family individually to all these really horrible things. In my particular case, I've always been incredibly protective of my privacy. That's just been a value of mine. I never really was on the internet. I'm the only member of this family that hasn't been attacked or suffered from the outside public being upset about this particular person and just wanting to create havoc.
Brian Lehrer: That's terrible. A terrible position to be in. Rochelle, I hope you get through Christmas by yourself, okay? Thank you for sharing your story. That was actually Mary Trump. No, I'm kidding.
Anna Sale: [laughs]
Brian Lehrer: Anna, that's a unique one. It sounds like we should be angry at the world on her behalf, the public being willing to take things out on relatives who have nothing to do with somebody else's behavior.
Anna Sale: I think the particulars of that sound really painful, and also just the lack of control that Rochelle has in figuring out how to be in relationship with not just this one member of her family, but her entire family because of the public view that's surrounding those relationships. It just made me think that's something, not the specifics of celebrity culture or digital culture, internet culture, but that idea of estrangement being this experience where the very private and the kind of public collide.
You have to figure out how to navigate that. Think about if you are experiencing estrangement, there's something very deep that has happened in a relationship, and then you have to figure out how to talk about that with your other extended family members. You've got to figure out if everybody can still be in relationship or if, like Rochelle, you need to extract yourself from the whole family system. You have to figure out how you talk about what you're doing for the holidays with co-workers.
I think that is a major contributor to that feeling of isolation, that sense of needing to be evasive about some deep pain or rupture that you're carrying with you. I would just say, Rochelle, I think one thing that we did hear from a lot of listeners who have had major ruptures in their relationships is how healing it can be when you create a support system of chosen family. I hope that you can have some time this holiday season where you don't feel like you're on your own because I think that is another way that the pain of estrangement can compound.
Brian Lehrer: I said we were going to play two two-minute excerpts from your series. I think we're going to skip the second one partly because you told part of that story. I think it would get repetitive, Megan's story, about the person who is the estranged from rather than the one doing the estrangement, and also because I want to use our last minutes to take one more story because it is a story of estrangement and reconciliation. I want to bring the reconciliation piece into it. Lisa in Forest Hills, you're on WNYC. Hi, Lisa.
Lisa: Hi, Brian. Thank you for taking my call. Long time, long time. I have an on-again, off-again estrangement with my mother. My parents were divorced. My sister and I had a very tumultuous upbringing with her. I find that I wind up reconciling with her because of the extreme guilt that I feel of not talking to her even though she's very divisive. She's very destructive, but I just bite my tongue and just say she's getting older now. I don't think I'd ever get over it if something were to happen to her during a period that I was estranged from her. I guess in a way, that's selfish of me to just be caring about my own, whatever, but that's my situation.
Brian Lehrer: Thank you. Well, Anna, do you want to ask Lisa anything? I would imagine that comes up a lot if you're estranged from an older relative and worry about that person dying without reconciling.
Anna Sale: Lisa, the thing that makes me wonder about is one thing that we heard from people who restarted relationships is that they had to enter the relationship with a new set of rules for themselves and expectations for how the relationship was going to be. There was not just this resumption and closeness and feeling of, "Now, everything is wrapped up and fixed." When you decided to reach out to your mother, how did you re-enter that communication?
Lisa: If you knew my mother, it's almost impossible to set rules for my mother.
Anna Sale: [laughs]
Lisa: She doesn't work well with that kind of request. I, on the other side, just had to be like, "You know what? This is who she is. She's not going to change." If I have this issue where I need to alleviate my own guilt by being in some kind of communication with her, then that's my problem. I can't change who she is. The times that I've gotten back to being in communication with her, it's a little awkward in the beginning, but then it very quickly falls into the same roles and the same issues start coming up. Sometimes it causes issues with my husband. Sometimes it causes issues with my sister, but I'm just like, "You know what? It is what it is," basically is how I'm dealing with it, but hard. [chuckles]
Brian Lehrer: Yes, a good zen attitude, it sounds like, actually in complicated circumstances. Lisa, thank you very much. Did you talk to any therapists for the series, Anna? I could imagine Lisa perhaps having been to a therapist who might have said some of what we just heard in her call, which is, "Look, you're not going to change the person, so you just have to decide for yourself. Do you want to have an on-again, off-again relationship or not totally satisfying relationship or cut yourself off?"
Anna Sale: Yes, actually, some of the listeners we heard from are themselves social workers and therapists, and described still that feeling of feeling like listening to other people's stories for themselves was a sense of catharsis because how much experiences with estrangement can be in isolation. Then we've heard from many listeners who say they found this series and they found our show because their therapist recommended that they listen. I think that just speaks so much to that first step of what can feel healing is to just realize, to start off, this isn't just your family. This isn't just your own difficult relationship. This is something that a lot of people experience and you have to navigate your way through day by day.
Brian Lehrer: Do the acts of estrangement, just based on your reporting, ever change the other person?
Anna Sale: You know what? We definitely heard stories of that because it's this very blunt tool of saying, "We are stopping this dynamic of how we have been in relationship with one another." When there is time, when there is distance, it can allow people to think and listen and communicate in a new way. That is the story we heard of reunion and reconciliation at the end of a relationship between a mother and a daughter when the mother was dying of cancer.
It was because the mother reached out and restarted the conversation in a new way, saying, "I know that you have this boundary, but I want you to have this information." To the daughter, it felt like the mother was approaching their relationship in a really new way because it had been years and years of feeling like the daughter was always being asked to satisfy whatever needs the mother had. That created the opening for them to restart a dialogue and to be with each other at the end of the mother's life.
Brian Lehrer: Well, there's so much more in this series that we're not having time to talk about. There's Dinona's story. She's queer and she thought she would become estranged from her family because of that. Of course, there's so much of that in the world. Usually, rejection of the queer person, but it turned out the civil war in Ethiopia is what caused her to cut ties with some of her relatives.
That story is worth a listen, folks. The podcast touches on the alienation of estrangement, the stigma, and shame surrounding it, especially when the estrangement is familial, even if people are doing what they think they need to do. The last episode is called Estrangement's Alternate Endings. I guess we touched on some in this last stretch of conversation. Is there any other one in our last 30 seconds that you want to put on the table?
Anna Sale: The very last relationship we get to know is one where a woman grew up, had a history of abuse in her family of origin, is not in relationship with her mother. The partner that she's now married to, he also had an experience of estrangement in his family of origin. They're about to become parents. Getting to talk to them about how their experience of his estrangement and what it felt like to have a parent-child relationship that wasn't healthy or safe, how that is informing the way they are approaching the family that they are building together was really beautiful to hear and to also hear the deep sense of understanding they have between the two of them because they've both gone through this.
Brian Lehrer: It must have been somewhat satisfying to you that the act of getting in touch with you and being interviewed prompted some people to reach back out again to the ones they were estranged from.
Anna Sale: Yes, this estrangement is an unfolding process. That is the thing that I really took away from this series. It doesn't have an end. Because even if you're not in relationship with a person at the moment, that relationship has profoundly affected you. It is something that you live with.
Brian Lehrer: Unfortunately, this segment does have an end and we have reached it. We leave it there with Anna Sale, creator and host of the WNYC podcast Death, Sex & Money, which just concluded their three-part estrangement series. Of course, that's all available for download as a podcast. Anna, thanks so much for joining us. Wonderful stuff and happy holidays.
Anna Sale: Happy holidays to you, Brian. Thank you so much.
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