Newsletter #101
On Family Strains and Estrangement
Happy New Year! As we putter through the early days of 2024, I discuss a topic in this newsletter that may be a bit sensitive so soon on the heels of the holidays. However, I assure you that I mean no harm.
The People You Inherit
“You can pick your friends, but not your family.”
This saying, or a variation of it, has been a characteristic way of speaking about family for many decades. That alone is telling. Though the saying is, on its face, neutral and fact-of-the-matter, it comes quite close to implying that only the relationships we choose are desirable. Even without saying as much, that is the most common interpretation of the expression.
It's common because it’s so often experienced by people across generations, regions, ethnicities, and religions. “People are difficult” is the creed everyone subscribes to. Of course, that would mean that even the people we willfully choose to relate to (friends) bring their own burdens. Whether we’re talking of blood or water, people bless and burden our lives.
I couldn’t help but recently notice the many self-help articles—religious or not—about dealing with difficult family relationships. It’s so telling that to survive Thanksgiving and Christmas we require so much counsel and advice. Don’t most adults know how to purchase some presents or bake a little? Who doesn’t at least understand the concept of a budget, or a credit card payment date? No, we mostly have these tasks under control. But we need tips and pointers to manage uncomfortable conversations, expectations, assumptions, disappointments, baggage, and unsolicited advice.
Boundaries
It's no surprise, then, that the concept of boundaries is salient for so many people. The concept was perhaps best popularized by Henry Cloud and John Townsend in their bestselling book (you guessed it), Boundaries. Since 1992, this crucial volume has been widely read and spawned spinoffs dealing with marriage and family.
A few excerpts helpfully convey Cloud and Townsend’s central assertions:
Boundaries define us. They define what is me and what is not me. A boundary shows me where I end and someone else begins, leading me to a sense of ownership. Knowing what I am to own and take responsibility for gives me freedom. Taking responsibility for my life opens up many different options. Boundaries help us keep the good in and the bad out. Setting boundaries inevitably involves taking responsibility for your choices. You are the one who makes them. You are the one who must live with their consequences. And you are the one who may be keeping yourself from making the choices you could be happy with. We must own our own thoughts and clarify distorted thinking.
In this first excerpt, the authors link boundaries to identity, ownership, freedom, responsibility, choices, and happiness. Many assumptions are at work here, though the authors put the matter quite plainly: boundaries are fundamental to our sense of self, agency, and destiny. Take them seriously.
If we take this line of thought further, it has huge practical implications for respectful, desirable relationships. Again, Cloud and Townsend:
We can't manipulate people into swallowing our boundaries by sugarcoating them. Boundaries are a ‘litmus test’ for the quality of our relationships. Those people in our lives who can respect our boundaries will love our wills, our opinions, our separateness. Those who can't respect our boundaries are telling us that they don't love our nos. They only love our yeses, our compliance. ‘I only like it when you do what I want.’
Cloud and Townsend personalize their assertions by placing them in the context of personal relationships. We start to see people who respect boundaries, and those who don’t. Moreover, we see what this respect (or lack thereof) means. Either they truly love who we are, or they don’t.
Finally, the authors show the consequences of boundaries being established. Notice how in this excerpt they include the salutary consequences, and not solely the negative ones:
When we begin to set boundaries with people we love, a really hard thing happens: they hurt. They may feel a hole where you used to plug up their aloneness, their disorganization, or their financial irresponsibility. Whatever it is, they will feel a loss. If you love them, this will be difficult for you to watch. But, when you are dealing with someone who is hurting, remember that your boundaries are both necessary for you and helpful for them. If you have been enabling them to be irresponsible, your limit setting may nudge them toward responsibility.
The implication of taking boundaries seriously is that they aren’t meant to remain an internal, unspoken preference. They should be expressed and enforced. If what they say about personal identity, dignity, and flourishing (see excerpt #1 above) is true, then it follows that boundaries must be set.
The Devil in the Details
Perhaps most people wouldn’t object to the concept or even implementation of boundaries. Broadly, we all have boundaries, whether we’ve named them aloud or not. The moment we erect a fence around our property, lock our doors, or choose a secure password on our devices, we reveal our belief in boundaries. But what kinds of boundaries, and to what end(s)?
My local newspaper has a weekly opinion piece from one of several contributors. One of the latest commentaries was about family estrangement. Mrs. Lowe writes of her own experiences with having to cut ties with her family, presumably her parents. Without going into too much detail, she states that toxic behaviors had endured from her childhood into her life as a young adult. I’m content to take her word for it. The world is filled with screwed-up adults, and most of them aren’t even in prison!
I pored over her article. In view of my own recent holiday experiences, I tried to understand what they are often like for people whose families do nothing but bring pain and shame to their lives. I continue to think about what my family’s boundaries are—implicitly or explicitly—as well as what they should be.
As is the case with so many different subjects, we can get carried away with rights and ignore responsibilities. We can turn a healthy view of individual dignity and autonomy into a worldly one. We can confuse forgiveness with overlooking things. These and a hundred other errors accompany the challenge of family strains and estrangement.
Clearing Up a Few Things
Let’s return to where we began: “you can pick your friends, but not your family.” True. But even the assumption that friendships should be favored over family relationships on the basis of choice is wrongheaded. Have we not chosen friends who ended up being something other than friends? Has a friend ever betrayed your trust? If so, why blame them? You chose them! So, we must admit our fallibility in judging people’s character—present and future—with total clarity. All relationships are inherently risky because people are fallen. That fallenness extends to our judgments, attitudes, and actions.
Even the idea of picking friends is quite individualistic, to the point that it ignores the fact that even friendships aren’t accidental. Contingency and happenstance figure into these relationships also.
Most assuredly, you’re more likely to end up being friends with the neighbor kid across the street who also plays baseball than you are the kid who lives across town who isn’t interested in sports. Circumstances and proximity had a LOT to do with this friendship. And it’s highly unlikely that on a specific day on some Tuesday in September you consciously said aloud, “Jimmy, I hereby declare you to be my friend.” Rather, friendship became the reality of a relationship which preceded a lot of self-conscious selection.
If you’re keeping score, relational risks accompany every human relationship, and there are also important limits to our modern notions of “choosing friends.” Not every human decision or experience is so self-conscious, informed, and intentional.
Let’s also scrutinize the purpose of boundaries. To what ends do we need boundaries? This is something that cannot be quickly skirted. When we speak about protecting ourselves—our identity, freedom, self-determination, and the like—we need to audit what we’re saying very carefully. We’re seldom aware of the ways we’ve imbibed modern values in the course of articulating what we think are simply “common-sensical” or even Christian values.
Freedom is a good example in this respect. Many believe in a kind of freedom that is “doing-whatever-you-want-in-an-unhindered-way-freedom.” Clearly, this view is foreign to the New Testament’s vision of freedom. Freedom in the classical sense, shaped as it is by the biblical traditions, is both a freedom from and freedom to. There are things that human life should be ordered toward in terms of virtue (Choosing the good), but also that humans deserve to be free from (coercion, violence, etc.). These things don't only serve humanity’s proper end, but they lead to human flourishing.
So again, how do boundaries serve this vision of freedom? Is setting boundaries between you and your in-laws about you being free to not ever hear unsolicited advice, or is it about you simply being free, in the end, to chart the course of your family’s life?
Identity is inevitably linked to this, also. Cloud and Townsend mention it above in the first excerpt. It certainly is a moving target. One of the prevailing visions of identity in Western culture is that identity is something created, not received. (See the Barbie film.)
Besides being unbiblical, family life places special strains on this approach. Sometimes families seek to squeeze other family members into their own self-conceived mold: “We’re Millers! And Millers are Democrats (or Republicans)!” In this scenario, a family identity has been conflated with a political one. This is inherently instable, an exercise in self-creation. Moreover, it can easily become a litmus test for which members of the family have stepped outside the proper boundaries of family identity.
Conversely, if another family member pursues a vision of self-created identitarianism, say, of the transgendered identity sort, they immediately force the hands of all those around them to choose: either accept my interpretation of reality or you’re dead to me. (Ironically, “deadnaming” is the expression used by many trans persons to describe the offense of calling someone the name they used to be known by, as opposed to their new name.)
Ultimately, in a fallen world, family strains and estrangements are inevitable, stubborn, and heartbreaking.
Even when we accept this truth, we cannot stop there. As Christians formed by God’s Word and people, we must also remember three important caveats.
First, family estrangement—specifically the kind which is chosen—may indeed be a necessary one in the most egregious of cases. (I prefer to call it separation.) There may be a time when Christians have to maintain intentional and prolonged social distance between themselves and specific family relations for the sake of physical safety and emotional and spiritual health. Yet this must never be a first resort. It must come in the context of a series of intentional, sacrificial, and humble efforts to find some kind of détente. May we never start “cutting ties” to short-circuit the long and hard work of discipleship in family life.
Second, we all experience situations and seasons of family strain. When we do, we must remember that sanctification isn't something God brackets out from these experiences. In fact, God’s Spirit is right there in the middle of our family messes, working on our hearts.
How many pages of Holy Scripture are filled with family drama and chaos! Is this not most of the book of Genesis? If we can muse in Sunday School how God must have used Jacob’s conflicts with Esau to shape him, and Joseph’s alienation from his brothers to shape him, then most assuredly, we can remember this when our faith is put to the test in family life.
Finally, we must choose and communicate our boundaries wisely and clearly. So often people experience perpetual frustration with their family members for not meeting their expectations. Yet have they been communicated? Often, they haven’t. We’ve assumed that people could interpret our social and emotional queues, or that they somehow live inside our heads with us. They ought to know! Obviously, they don’t.
We’re tempted to assume that they don’t care, and that they’ve simply ignored what we’ve requested. Perhaps. But the onus is on us to choose boundaries that are sensible and determine if they have been communicated in a way that is understandable and appropriate to the relationship.
Family life is intended to be a blessing. When it isn’t, let’s at least start by leaning in, looking, and listening closer. Then we can talk about boundaries more reasonably.
Follow-Up:
I haven’t often discussed the papacy at Churchatopia, though I find the subject fascinating, significant, and frustrating. Even the most cursory observers will note how Pope Francis has taken a very different approach to doctrinal and moral questions—especially in terms of how they are framed—than Pope Benedict, who I favorably quote in Newsletter #51. (Ross Douthat’s book on Francis, To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism, is still essential reading on this matter.)
The current Pope made news recently when he spoke in what has become strategic ambiguity about the prospects of Catholic clergy blessing same-sex unions. I have many thoughts on this latest development, but Carl Trueman’s are concise and helpful. His article is worth reading in its entirety, but here’s an excerpt:
The confusion surrounding the pope’s recent statement Fiducia Supplicans, a document that is ambiguous about whether Catholic clergy can bless those in same-sex relationships, says much about the times in which we live. Catholic theologians will argue that Rome has not changed, that the fog of distinctions contained in this latest statement means that it does not affect core Roman dogma. But that is not the point: The watching world cares nothing for such sophistry and sees here a fundamental cultural shift. And it seems naive to think that a fundamental change in pastoral practice will not lead to a significant transformation of attitudes. Such compromises—and this is most surely a compromise—always end up being far more sympathetic to the position they are moving toward than that from which they are moving away. When the pope sows chaos within his church on the matter of gay blessings, it is likely to affect us all—Catholic clergy and laity, certainly, but also us Protestants.
What I’m Reading or Rereading:
Walker Percy, Signposts in a Strange Land.
Brian Klass, Incorruptible: Who Gets Power and How it Changes Us.
John le Carré, Silverview: A Novel.
Quote of the Week:
When in the presence of silence, I do not feel an emptiness, rather I feel something. Something looming, something active, something that is at work on me. Having had over the last few months the occasion almost daily to sit in silence for a few brief moments, I came to describe the experience as the feeling of silence carving away at my interiority like a sculptor chipping away at stone, as if silence were stripping me of all that was not essential.
L.M. Sacasas, “The Thing That is Silence.”
Common Grace Wisdom (CGW): On Admitting You Were Wrong on “Gender-Affirming Care”
Jamie Reed was an important name in the news in 2023. She made headlines by becoming a whistleblower on the Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital. She saw the protocols in place to treat gender dysphoric youth, and how these increasingly were at odds with careful medical judgment.
Predictably, she was pilloried by the LBGTQ lobby. Yet what was most troubling was how news journalists even questioned her motives, presuming she had certainly abandoned her prior, progressive, ideological commitments. (Would that inherently make her whistleblowing illegitimate?)
However, Reed shows in her recent article at The Free Press that her changing her mind on the medicalization of minors was quite in keeping with her liberal views, particularly her commitment to evidence-based science.
Like others I’ve cited in past CGW features, Reed departs from a biblical worldview in quite a few important ways! Nevertheless, it’s interesting when sometimes reason (common grace, mostly) lays hold of someone and leads them to say, “No more.” See for yourself in, “The Courage to Admit You’re Wrong.”
Parting Shot
Now is the time for me to discern between mere readers and friend-readers. Friends, keep me accountable. Ask me now and again how I am coming along with a book proposal. The idea has incubated long enough; it’s time to see if a publisher will bite!
Pastor Watts, How is your book proposal coming along? When you can, please provide a small inside look or exerpt. Thank you!