Why Does Modern Culture Encourage “No Contact”? w/ Noelle Mering

One-third of Americans over age 18 report being estranged or going no contact with friends or family. About 10 to 11 percent of parents suffer little or no contact with an adult child. Now, we've always had separations in family due to mental illness or divorce or severe abuse, but today's no-contact movement is disturbingly different. All of a sudden, people who disagreed about things forever before, no longer couldn't disagree about them well anymore, that all of a sudden there's no conversation to be had, that you were and your ideas were a threat to my flourishing and also for the collective.

Social media spread the social contagion like the bubonic plague. A significant proportion of mental health professionals even now encourage clients to go no contact over what a generation ago. ...was entirely reconcilable differences in politics, religion, or lifestyles. Today, simply disagreeing about these things can become a personal, existential threat. Now, I've been covering this phenomenon for over a year. See last year's Christmas special. The mainstream media's engagement with the no-contact movement has overwhelmingly focused on the adult children who choose to cut off their parents, friends, and siblings.

But author Noelle Mearing's latest book, No Contact, looks at family estrangement from the point of view of the abandoned family. I sat down with her to get an in-depth explanation of why us? Why now? Is this really just a widespread liberation of children from the repressive, toxic structures of their backwards families? Or are social forces at work manipulating them to turn their backs on the people, homes, duties, and benefits? Only family can give. Will the end of the Trump era mean the reunion of millions of Americans around the Thanksgiving table?

No contact is one of the most painful experiences anyone can go through, and, as I found out in this conversation, talking about it helps. When reading the book, I was struck by Nicole's compassion and awareness of situations where cutting off or limiting contact with your family of origin are necessary. We all know someone who was in a truly abusive relationship who had to get out, but mainstream accounts of no contact routinely equate a child escaping sexual abuse with an adult child shunning her Christian parents because they wouldn't take the COVID vax.

This kind of equivocation is what Nicole calls trauma hijacking, and it seems to have created a kind of broad social practice of affirming adults who cut off their families for any reason at all. You raise up, use sort of stories that are deeply sympathetic, like stories of abuse that are really traumatic, and then you start to slowly conflate them with other examples. So, you know, Eventually, I think what happens in trauma hijacking is that the perpetrator or the cause of the oppression, the cause of the suffering is no longer the individual perpetrators, but it becomes the norm itself, that the norm itself of the family is itself systemically oppressive or inherently oppressive, and that it creates this social urgency.

We need to kind of see beyond this. We need to see how we can evolve out of this, because this is a harmful institution. And then, you know, people who kind of defend it become either old-fashioned at best, or enablers of the perpetuation of oppression at worst. But how does a child from a loving home come to see her mom and dad, with all their imperfections and their disagreements, as tools of oppression?

Parents usually feel disoriented when this happens to them. They're left asking, am I crazy? When did I go wrong? Or how did this happen to us? It turns out there's not a single answer. I think of it as being three kind of layers of causality. One is sociological factors, another is ideological factors, and another is sort of spiritual nihilism. But sociologically, I mean, obviously, the internet and social media is a huge driver. I call in my book, TikTok Psychologists, where there's all these short-form videos inviting young people to examine their history for signs of toxicity.

And, of course, your parents are going to be an immediate place to go if you're kind of looking at your history and you're a young adult without a ton of history. But then combined with that is sort of currency of victimhood that we've given people, that you can have a voice, a platform. What you say is going to be attended to more closely and given more importance, and it's going to become, in some ways, unassailable. You kind of can't question the narrative of the person who's endured oppression.

So, you know, combined with the habits of social media blocking, muting, and following, these are all factors. But then the deeper ideological factors I think at play are, well, once the grievance identity is enormous, but secondly, that the family is no longer considered to be a pre-political natural institution, that academics have for a long time perpetuated this idea that is now sort of seeped into the culture, that the family is a social construct, and it is nested in power structures. And so, the inevitable friction that anyone experiences in family life, once you recast that as you are in power, Not in power, then there's no sort of capacity or opportunity for love to grow through that friction, and you no longer have the impetus to kind of develop that capacity to endure it, because it feels as though I can just reframe this under a lens of, you've got power and you're oppressing me.

And so, family relationships don't really survive that sort of reduced metric. There's also sort of the ideological understanding that we can evolve out of the family. If it's a social construct, then we can... And so, one of the things that oftentimes kids will say is that they're going to go find a found family or chosen family. And that's going to be one that emanates purely out of their autonomy with this idea that the things that are given to us are sort of constraints upon us, which is a really radically different understanding of love.

I talk about that a lot in the book, that the dynamics of givenness and choice is really important here. But I think through all of this, you see this kind of combination of this new identity that I think oftentimes people are induced into, which is. Radical autonomy and radical victimhood, which combined is a really bizarre way to look at your life because it's saying radical autonomy, I can have power over things that aren't actually within my control, like the meaning of sex, family, bodily reality.

But then radical victimhood, I'm totally powerless and at the mercy of systemic forces outside of myself or the wounds that somebody has inflicted upon me that is now calcified into my identity of woundedness. So, I'm giving up. There is a third dynamic at play, however. Nicole talked about a nihilism that has infected our entire civilization and cuts right at the heart of the family.

And then add to it, there's a spiritual dynamic here. So, one of the ways that I found this to be most striking is that oftentimes young adults in the movement will say, I didn't ask to be born. You chose to have me. And so, you owe me. I don't owe you anything, which is obviously an inversion of the commandment to honor thy father or the mother, the idea that our obligations are sort of reciprocal out of love as we get older.

But it's also a reflection of a deeply despairing understanding of your life. That my life is not a blessing, it's a burden. You inflicted me with my life. And so, it's understandable a lot of these kids aren't moving into parenthood themselves. Now, this seems right to me, and it reminded me a lot of the pro-abortion narratives. Lines like, I wouldn't want to bring a child into this world, or Anne Hathaway's infamous quip, abortion is another word for mercy, implying that life maybe is not worth living.

The family stands in the way of that nihilism. A man and a woman form a new household and bring forth the next generation, both by reproducing and then by nurturing that child. By their very actions and their very existence as a family, they're saying, life is good, and it is worth building a future we may never see. Until a few years ago, it just went without saying that a marriage, children, and family were the normal way most people found happiness. But in progressivism's nihilistic worldview, the family is primarily a weapon of repression.

But not just the family. Anything that is given to us, that we receive, any unchosen duties, are structures of oppression. The only way to happiness is to create your own life. In the immortal words of Princess Elsa, no right, no wrong, no rules for me. I'm free. We are suffering from what Nicole calls the empowerment delusion.

That idea that the things that emanate out of my autonomy, out of my choice, what I choose is always preferable to the thing that is given to me, which is, by definition, then cast as restraint. So, the sad thing about it is that these kids will say, okay, I'm going to have my chosen family, and then, you know, oftentimes, to create sort of a shared history, that when they don't really have a shared history, there becomes this shared sharing of their traumas.

Which is another way in which they're sort of induced to kind of scan their past for negative biases or traumas. Anyway, but it's almost, it actually evokes sort of like an evangelical sharing of your testimony. You know, this kind of ceremony, here is how I was saved, but instead it's here is how I was harmed, and then we now can bond over that. Yeah, it's like the screw tape version of that. Yes, exactly. Now, it all sounds great in theory. You can ditch your annoying family and build a group of friends or comrades who...

Don't rub you the wrong way, ever. The thing is, chosen families don't have the same staying power as actual families that you didn't choose. But the chosen families, one of the sad things they profile in the book is that there are just oftentimes, more often than not, they find that it is a movement that's hoist on its own petard. That if the only thing keeping us together is our choice, well, I can be unchosen. I'm very vulnerable then moving forward.

This one man who is very insightful, he talks about how he, you know, was radical and just left off his family of origin in his 20s and found chosen families, and now he's older, and he's saying, you know, it's really interesting. You know, it worked out really well when I was young, when I had energy. I was really fun. I had some money. I had my health, and I'm getting older now. I'm not as fun as I used to be, you know, and I need people who are obligated to me.

And then again, time and again, I've just found people who are. Saying something similar, that their chosen family they thought would be there through thick and thin, and then sometimes that chosen family, those members maybe get married, maybe have children on their own, and then that young woman is just left being kind of ancillary to them, whereas for her, they're everything to her. And so, there's this asymmetry there, and then it becomes sort of this repeated source of abandonment, oftentimes, in these people's lives, that they just get unchosen and unchosen.

Sometimes, that can be a catalyst to return to their family of origin. But the question remains, exactly how does a good Christian kid end up believing in the empowerment delusion? Nicole walked me through what that journey typically looks like.

By far and away, the most families I talked to genuinely seemed like people just caught up at a phenomenon which they didn't anticipate. And, you know, one way to summarize the answer to what you're asking, I think, would be that oftentimes parents are raising their kids for the generation that they were raised in and not the ones that their kids are being raised in. And so, I heard from several parents who said that they just felt like they were caught flat-footed with all the technological advances.

They weren't able to keep up with it. They didn't understand how deeply absorbing it was. And how truly kind of was a vehicle for this sort of social contagion of division, which is, you know, social contagion, in part because it plays on all of our human temptations to deflect from responsibility and to accuse and to hate and all these things.

But it's also, you know, I think oftentimes we've heard of this, you know, the next generation getting, you know, getting woke. I mean, I think in 2020, I don't think we can underestimate how... How malforming it was to train a young generation of kids whose brains were still being formed that strangers and other people that they encounter on the street had to be masked because they were a threat, a vector for a disease that you could catch. A lot of the parents talked about their kids going off to college and then getting really absorbed into a lot of radical social justice ideas.

And then when that became militant, that sense of needing to is incredibly powerful, and at some time, even if your family is really healthy, Your peer group becomes far more of an influential factor in your mind, and so if your peer group is getting really radicalized and demanding belonging, contingent upon adopting the same level of radical ideology, I think it can be hard to resist for young people who desperately want to belong, as anyone does at this age. It's a different level of militancy that I don't think that we'd seen maybe a few generations ago, or when I was being raised, or even millennials.

So, is there any hope? Nicole did speak with families who had experienced the pain of no contact, but then the joy of at least the beginnings of a reconciliation. So, I asked her if she saw any patterns, or if she could give any advice to families who are hoping against hope for some sign that forgiveness is on the way. It's never fully in the control of the parents. So, you know, just to say for any parents who are not reconciled that, you know, that there's not some magic trick that other families did better.

You know, you could be doing everything wonderfully, and it's just upon the freedom of the other. You know, I find that there's a normal sort of reactivity that happens when you're in deep pain, you know, that we oftentimes make choices out of that deep place of emotion that can actually be contraindicated to reconciliation. So, the two extremes would be, one, to sort of chase after the child. Sometimes parents who, you know, even very, I interviewed some very progressive parents who, you know, they were dealing with a child with gender.

ideology kind of transitioning stuff and they started kind of at first they didn't want to support it with money because they're just a little uncomfortable about the health ramifications they didn't have moral problems but then they wound up they just kept doing more and more and kind of moving uh affirming in greater ways even that they originally said they were going to because their highest principle became maintaining the relationship and that paradoxically paradoxically is not really a great way to maintain a relationship You need to have something higher than that relationship, because otherwise, you're going to just compromise any principle that you have for the sake of it.

So, not chasing, and then the other one is trying to exert control. So, oftentimes, if there is a political, you know, oftentimes, kids will use politics as a leverage for access to them in order to kind of correct their parents. They'll say, you know, if you can't vote that way and be in a relationship with me. So, it's sort of this coercive way of kind of getting you to recant your wrong. think. But those parents oftentimes, you know, sometimes they would be kind of inclined to just argue with them more and send one more article.

This, if I are perfectly worded argument for why, you know, this is a just thing to do or what have you, or why they're on the right side. And, you know, I've told those parents, you know, that their kids oftentimes aren't reasoning themselves into the position they're in. So they're not going to really be reasoned out of it.

And they oftentimes will realize it themselves. This is not a rational. Rupture. If you want to get off this train of ideology, As soon as you turn around, I'm going to run and embrace you. I'm not going to stand there in judgment of you or make you give this grand defense of why you did it and now this big apology for why you're coming back. I'm not going to dunk on you either. I'm not going to be like, you were wrong, I was right.

There's a graciousness and sort of a nobility of real authority, real authority, even if it's not recognized in the child, that the parent really needs to step into that role of nobility and authority. That makes them not chase nor try to control. It seems to be the best way. And then there's something happening on the kids' side, too, that leads to reconciliation. You know, when what young woman I profiled, she became a mom herself, and all of a sudden, for practical reasons, she's like, I just need to be back in contact with my parents.

And her parents didn't demand the big apology. They never really addressed it directly, but now she's so grateful for it. Others hit rock bottom, as I said earlier, and they just really need people, and so they'll come back. But what about the parents who are still waiting, who experienced this estrangement, but still have no closure?

It is like death, but there's no social norms surrounding it, or fewer. So, there's a lot of shame and secrecy that can be surrounding no contact. And as much as we say, if our kids succeed, as much as we say, oh, they're just amazing, I didn't do anything really, but there's always a sort of your ego gets in there. It's like, well, it's probably because I was their mom. That's why they're doing so great. And the same is true in the inverse.

If our children aren't doing well, it's easy for moms, especially to kind of rack. themselves with guilt. Like, what if I'd done differently? What does this, what does this reveal about me? And so a lot, I heard a lot of moms particularly who are struggling with guilt, you know, what does this say about me as a mother? Um, and so I think in that case, it's, it's incredibly important to have, as I said briefly earlier, a sounding board, you know, to have some objective voices, somebody wise who knows you well, be it a spiritual director, a really good therapist, maybe, um, your husband, good friends, a collection of good friends who are honest and loving.

Um, So that you can kind of avoid those sort of mental spirals that are so easy to go down, little rabbit holes of regret or condemnation or questioning. We just want to see things accurately, see things with truth, you know, and not exaggerate in either way.

So, I think that is really helpful. Another thing is to, you know, there is oftentimes cascading results or effects of no contact, that it is not just this one relationship that is ruptured. Right. Other people are put in the middle of it, you know, siblings who feel like they have to choose sides. Even in this one case I profiled, this woman, her turning point was really when she just took to bed for months or weeks on end, sobbing, and just barely could even leave her bed.

And finally, her husband, who is sort of a more stoic man, sat down next to her with tears in his eyes, and he said, I need you, too. And she thought, oh, gosh, you know, what am I doing to this man I love, you know? And so, she realized I have to keep living. And so, I think trying to find how can we stop the cascading ruptures, you know? How can I keep from putting people in the middle of it? How can I be tending to these relationships that are so vital, the grandchildren that I have, or the child, or the husband, the friendships?

The ties that bind families together are powerful. They are bonds that Throughout history have survived war, destruction, and the rise and fall of empires. But as we're finding out today, they are not indestructible. Our estrangement epidemic is evidence that decades of warped philosophies about the human person, politics of grievance, and weakening religious convictions can erode even the bonds of blood. Academics, media personalities, politicians, and false prophets tore down the invisible. structures that protected the fundamental human society for centuries. Ordinary human friction has been pathologized, and as a result, millions of imperfect but normal parents have lost years with their own children and grandchildren.

And those adult children, many by their own choice, have turned their backs on where they came from, who they are, and their right to belong to something real. We got here because of ideology. And as Nicole points out, it's not ideology that will save us. We will only turn the tide if we, as individuals and collectively, can rediscover the joy of unchosen gifts, of life, memory, family, and our country. If we can remember what we are and who we are called to become.

If we can jealously guard our time together and our conversations, building interior lives that Prefer human connection to disembodied TikTok algorithms. If we can learn to forgive, to ask forgiveness, and receive mercy with grace. If you would like to buy Nicole's book, which I cannot recommend highly enough, you can check out the link in the description. And if you liked this episode, be sure to subscribe to The LOOPcast. We bring you a new episode of The Deep every Thursday at 4 p.m. Eastern.