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When her mum called her, stress would ring through Marie’s body like an alarm going off. So “I stopped answering the phone,” she says. She forms the words purposefully, as if reading from a script. This was one of the “boundaries” she discussed carefully with her therapist three years ago when she reached a point of crisis in managing her maternal relationship.
She has never explained her decision to her mother, but it followed a lifetime of what Marie, who is in her 40s, feels has been rejection, shaming and feeling like the “black sheep of the family”. Marie’s mother, she says, would always make everything about herself. “Everything I did was just … everybody has it worse. You know, I’d say, ‘I don’t feel very well’ and she’d reply: ‘Yes, well, I’ve got diabetes.’ I was scared to have a voice.”
One day, Marie phoned her mum and told her she had received a diagnosis of neurodivergence. She was met with a dismissive “hmm”. “My therapist said to me: you can’t control their behaviour, but you can control what you allow in and how it affects you.”
So as well as stopping answering the phone, she decided that she, her husband and her children would no longer visit her mother, who lives a few hours away. She will also only call her mum when she has a clear purpose; to check on a grandparent, or reveal necessary news. “I call when I need to,” she says. “If I told her something personal, she would tell everybody in the family … there was no emotional security.” And if her mother complains? Marie reverts to that script again. “I don’t even apologise,” she says. “I say, ‘Oh, I’ve just been busy. How are you?’ And deflect.”
In the world of family estrangement, the approach Marie is describing is known as “low contact” or LC. While complex to navigate, it avoids the absolute cutting all ties of “no contact” (NC) – a subject that has been widely discussed thanks to the very public approach adopted by Brooklyn Beckham towards his parents – and between princes Harry and William. TikTok is awash with users proclaiming the benefits of no contact. The 400,000 posts on the topic include lines such as “Take back your power!” and “No contact is self-respect”.
But Marie did not want no contact. “The love I have for my mother will always be there,” she says. She wanted to ensure her children were able to see their grandmother and didn’t want to risk severing ties with her wider family. For her, low contact is “easier to live with” than none, with “less guilt”. And while the relationship has not dramatically improved, Marie feels the door has opened slightly for a potential conversation in the future.
Georgina, who is in her 30s, has also gone low contact. “The whole household when we were growing up was about not upsetting my mum,” she says, adding that she often felt like the subject of her mother’s “volatility”. Finally, a family fallout prompted her to choose “very low” contact with her parents and siblings.
But like Marie, she wants her children to have a relationship with her parents and siblings and their children – and for her kids to build their own relationships with their cousins. Her mother looks after her grandchildren once a week and returns them home, but Georgina keeps the conversation short. When her siblings are nearby, she meets them so the children can see each other. “It is very child-focused,” Georgina says.
Georgina never told her mother she was reducing contact. “My mum came to my door after I hadn’t spoken to her for weeks and she said some awful things,” she says. It was difficult to remain firm, but she agreed to contact with the grandchildren – enough to make her mother “feel OK”.
Katherine Cavallo, a family and couples psychotherapist with more than 25 years’ clinical experience, often works with clients experiencing family estrangement. She says low or no contact has become more prevalent in recent years, which some figures back up. A recent YouGov poll found that 38% of American adults are estranged from a family member. Cavallo believes this is due to an increased awareness of unhealthy relationships and the impact of childhood experience on mental health. “Obviously, that’s a positive,” she stresses, but “there’s also quite a lot of misinformation out there, and a lot of over-pathologising of family and friends as abusive or narcissistic” when perhaps they might not be.
She says that younger generations often do not share the same sense of “duty” towards their family as older ones do – which is not always a negative thing. But culturally, she describes “a growing trend towards emotional growth associated with individualism and a lack of tolerance of relationships that might interfere with that”.
“I think the push for estrangement has been damaging for a lot of families,” she says. She adds, however, that she would recommend no contact if there were significant risks, such as violent or abusive behaviour. Cavallo does a risk assessment before any kind of family reunion work is considered. But low contact, she says, “is a good example of a kind of compromise. It gives an opportunity to explore what is possible without making a final decision and can be helpful in taking off the pressure.”
It’s worth bearing in mind that no contact can simply be avoidance of difficult feelings. “Some people tend to think going no contact will make the challenges go away,” she says. “But, you know, your mother’s always going to be your mother, your brother’s going to be your brother. The relationships don’t go away by not having contact. And this is about finding ways to manage that which are a bit more nuanced, and can hopefully be more helpful.”
Boundaries can be creative, too. As well as focusing on length of contact and frequency, “I often suggest doing an activity rather than talking,” she says. “It might be helpful to meet in a neutral place, go bowling or play mini golf, particularly if there are children involved, without there being dialogue or opportunities for disputes.” Or you could “send each other photos, so you can maintain the relationship without there being dialogue”.
There is also the potential regret to consider. Philip Karahassan is a psychotherapist with experience working with bereavement. He says many struggle to manage grief after the death of a family member with whom they had no contact. He highlights one person who did not even know their family member had a terminal illness: “The amount of clients that came to me and said, ‘I never got to say goodbye.’ While Karahassan is clear that every family is different, he is generally supportive of going low contact. “By taking that approach,” he says, people “are taking more control because they’re creating the boundaries that they want in that relationship.”
It is useful to remember that, not so long ago, lower contact between families was considered normal. Dr Lucy Blake, senior lecturer in psychology at the University of the West of England, explains the mainstream view within family therapy from the 1960s onwards was that “a typical family relationship is one where people have infrequent contact”. It is largely due to technological advances that people so often get in touch – if not through a visit or phone call, then via messages or social media or WhatsApp groups. Before mobile phones, the idea of calling a parent once a fortnight was seen as perfectly normal, and in some ways was healthier, she says. Low contact could be a way of countering the “idyllic” families presented on social media, she says, and for “easing those expectations”.
Caroline is in her 50s and decided to go low contact with her mother three years ago, after a “tumultuous” lifelong relationship. After a lunch in which her mother was highly critical of her, Caroline was taken to hospital with a suspected heart attack – which turned out to be a panic attack. She decided she could not continue the relationship as it had been.
She was clear with her mother about what she was doing. “I said, ‘Mom, I need to take some space.’ I set up all the support systems around her, and then I backed off. I told her I would contact her when I was ready to talk.” Crucially, she avoided saying her mother was the issue. “Me telling her it’s her would just create a bunch of stuff.” She still calls her every day, but her boundary is five minutes. “I have to keep it very limited, otherwise something comes up that really bothers me.” She sees her mother once a month. The space, without total avoidance, has led to self-reflection. “In going low contact I recognised some of this was triggers inside me that I needed to heal, not my mom,” she says.
Caroline’s perspective on this is nuanced, seeing as her own adult children went no contact with her in 2024 after fallout from her difficult break-up with a partner. Today, her eldest son is still doing low contact. While she says this is incredibly painful, she is aware of her own “emotional immaturity”, due to her relationship with her mother. “Do I think time is passing us by and hope it doesn’t last for ever? Yes, but I’m not going to guilt him, because I know how he feels.” She adds: “For me, low contact is a tool that allows us to get the help we need, so we can decide if we want a full-time relationship with a person or not.” She advises parents: “Use this time wisely, because your child is probably going to come back and see if you have made any changes.”
Clearly, this level of self-reflection is the ideal, and not possible for all. The author and life coach Harriet Shearsmith says that some people find it difficult to maintain boundaries – and that doing so can take a toll emotionally. While, for some, low contact relationships can work, others experience pushback from relatives, such as a family member exploding and angrily asking, “Why aren’t you calling me?” or “playing the victim”. Others report silent treatment, or being talked about negatively to other family members. “It is not always a safe option,” she says.
Like families themselves, low contact is complicated. For Marie, in a difficult patch of her own low contact, her overriding advice is clear: build up your support. “I would definitely advise having therapy while you’re doing it,” she says. “And try to find people around you who matter, relationships you can pour your all into.” As you attempt to reduce one bond, others become paramount.
