When Loving Your Family Means Loving Them from a Distance

Family
Written By The Mental Health Clinic

You know the feeling. Your phone lights up with your family members name and something in your chest tightens before you've even decided whether to answer. Or you're sitting in the driveway outside your parents' house, taking a breath you didn't know you needed, steeling yourself for whatever version of yourself you're about to become inside those walls.

This is not about not loving your family. Most people who consider creating distance from family love the people they're stepping back from. That contradiction, loving someone and recognising that proximity to them costs you something real, is one of the least talked-about experiences in mental health. And yet, in clinical practice, it's one of the most common.

Creating distance from family, whether that means reducing contact, establishing firm limits around certain relationships, or removing yourself from the family system entirely, is rarely a simple or sudden decision. For most people, it's the end of a long road. If you're somewhere on that road right now, trying to figure out what's happening and what to do about it, this article is for you. Our therapists at The Mental Health Clinic work with people across Alberta who are navigating exactly these questions, and what we hear consistently is that people needed someone to say this out loud sooner.

What Does it Mean to Create Distance from Family or Go No Contact?

Creating distance from family means intentionally reducing or restructuring contact with one or more family members to protect your psychological wellbeing.

Low Contact vs No Contact: Understanding The Spectrum

It exists on a spectrum: from emotionally detaching while maintaining surface-level contact, to low contact (less frequent communication with clear limits), to no contact (ending the relationship entirely).

It is not the same as estrangement through conflict or drifting apart over time.

Why Creating Distance From Family is Often Misunderstood

The distinction matters.

A lot of people carry shame about this decision because it gets conflated with abandonment, resentment, or giving up. Those things can exist, but they're not what drives most people to this point.

What drives most people is exhaustion. Years of trying to make something work that the other person has shown, repeatedly, they aren't willing to meet you in.

Examples of Low Contact With Family

Low contact might look like phone calls a few times a year, visits only at neutral locations, or keeping conversations carefully surfaced.

No contact means exactly what it says: no calls, no texts, no showing up at events.

Emotional distance within maintained contact is perhaps the most nuanced, staying present physically while protecting your inner life from the relationship's impact.

None of these options are failure. They're strategies. And for some people, they're the most loving choice available, both for themselves and sometimes for the relationship itself.

The Role Your Family Assigned You (and Why it Follows You)

Murray Bowen's family systems theory describes the family as an emotional unit, a system that distributes roles among its members to maintain its own equilibrium. Those roles get assigned early, often in childhood, long before you had the language or the power to question them.

Common Family Roles in Dysfunctional Family Systems

The responsible one: Often called the “parentified child,” this role develops when a child takes on emotional or practical responsibility beyond their age. They may manage siblings, mediate conflict, or become the stable one in a chaotic household. As adults, they often struggle to rest, ask for help, or tolerate others being disappointed in them.

The scapegoat: This is the family member who absorbs blame when tension rises. Conflict, stress, or dysfunction gets projected onto them like they are the problem. They may be labelled dramatic, difficult, or rebellious. In reality, the scapegoat often names problems others avoid, which makes them threatening to the system.

The achiever: Sometimes called the “golden child,” this role reflects well on the family through performance, success, or compliance. Achievement becomes a stabilising force in the system. As adults, these individuals may tie self-worth to productivity and feel intense anxiety around failure or imperfection.

The peacekeeper: This person absorbs conflict so others do not have to. They minimise tension, smooth things over, and prioritise harmony over honesty. Over time, they may lose access to their own anger or needs because expressing them risks destabilising the system.

The invisible one: This role develops when a child learns that having needs creates problems. They withdraw, self-silence, and avoid drawing attention. As adults, they may struggle with feeling unseen, disconnected, or unsure of what they actually want.

These roles aren't chosen. They're assigned by a system that needed them filled, and then reinforced across years of interactions until they feel like identity.

Why Family Roles Become Your Identity

Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy distinguishes between the "role-self" (the part of you that learned to perform a particular function within the family) and your authentic self. The gap between those two things is where a lot of family-related suffering lives.

In therapy, clients often describe a strange doubling effect: knowing clearly who they are in their daily life, then feeling that person quietly disappear the moment they walk through the family door. It's not imagined. It's a real neurological shift.

Emotionally Immature Parents and Fixed Family Roles

Lindsay Gibson's research on emotionally immature parents adds another layer to this. Emotionally immature parents tend to need their children to remain in fixed positions within the family system because those positions serve the parent's emotional regulation.

When you shift, when you grow, when you stop playing your part, it destabilises something in them. And the system responds.

Why Families React When You Set Boundaries or Create Distance

Here’s what often happens when you begin to step out of your assigned role: the family system pushes back.

Family systems are built around stability. When one person changes, especially the person who carried a stabilizing role, the system feels disrupted.

Why Setting Boundaries Can Escalate Tension

You might be labelled difficult, selfish, or “not yourself lately.” Other family members may increase pressure, question your decisions, or suddenly express concern in ways that feel less like care and more like surveillance.

The dynamic intensifies because the system is attempting to restore its previous equilibrium. You are the variable that changed.

This is not a sign that you are wrong. In clinical practice, the person who begins to differentiate, who holds onto their own perceptions and limits under pressure, is often identified as the problem. That identification is painful. It is also often a signal that something real is shifting.

Triangulation and Family Backlash

Bowen described this through the concept of triangulation, where tension between two people pulls in a third to manage or diffuse it.

When you stop absorbing tension, it has to go somewhere.

Siblings may take sides. Extended family members may apply pressure. Social exclusion from family networks can follow.

A common pattern we see clinically is that the person who sets the first clear limit becomes framed as the one who “destroyed the family” or “abandoned” someone. That reframing is painful, and it is often inaccurate.

The Anxiety That Follows

The anxiety and identity confusion that comes with this phase can be significant.

You may oscillate between clarity and doubt. Between certainty and self-questioning.

That oscillation does not mean you are unstable. It often means you are navigating a system that is actively resisting change.

Anticipating this does not mean accepting blame for it. It means preparing for it.

Identify who in your extended network feels steady and trustworthy. Decide in advance what you are willing to discuss and with whom. You do not have to manage the system’s reaction to your limits.

What Are Emotionally Immature Parents and How They Affect Adult Children

An emotionally immature parent is not necessarily an abusive one.

Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents

Emotional immaturity in parents describes a cluster of patterns. Common signs include:

  • Difficulty tolerating their children's emotional experiences

  • A need for the relationship to centre their own feelings

  • Low capacity for genuine self-reflection

  • Role reversal, where the child regulates the parent’s emotions

  • An inability to repair ruptures or acknowledge harm

These patterns often show up consistently over time, not just during isolated incidents. This is not a clinical diagnosis. But it is a pattern, and a recognisable one.

Types of Emotionally Immature Parents

Lindsay Gibson's work identifies four types of emotionally immature parents:

  • Emotional – driven by intense feelings that dominate interactions.

  • Driven – focused on achievement, image, or performance.

  • Passive – withdrawn, avoidant, or emotionally unavailable.

  • Rejecting – dismissive, critical, or overtly distancing.

Each presents differently but shares a core: they relate to their children through the lens of their own needs rather than their children's. The result, for the child, is a particular kind of loneliness. You were physically present in the family. But you were emotionally alone in it.

How Emotionally Immature Parents Affect Adult Children

Clients who grew up with emotionally immature parents often describe feeling responsible for their parent's emotional state from a very young age. Not because anyone told them explicitly, but because the signals were clear: when the parent was unhappy, something was required of the child.

Attachment Patterns Formed by Emotionally Immature Parenting

John Bowlby's attachment theory helps explain why these early relationships have such lasting impact.

The attachment style you develop with your earliest caregivers, whether secure, anxious, avoidant, or disorganised, shapes how you experience closeness, conflict, and emotional safety across your entire life.

When a parent is emotionally immature, the attachment formed is often anxious or avoidant. You learn that closeness is unpredictable, that your needs may or may not be met, that love has conditions even if no one says so directly.

Why These Patterns Continue into Adulthood

That learning doesn't vanish when you turn eighteen.

It shows up in the hypervigilance you might feel before a call, the way criticism lands with a weight that seems disproportionate, the exhausting cycle of hoping this time will be different and being disappointed again.

Why Letting Go is Usually the Last Step, Not the First

The narrative around cutting off family tends to flatten the process into a single dramatic moment. In reality, it almost never works that way.

Why Going No Contact With A Parent is Rarely Impulsive

Most people who arrive at significant distance from a family member have tried, genuinely and repeatedly, to make the relationship work differently.

They've had the conversations, sometimes many of them. They've set limits and watched them be ignored. They've reduced contact gradually, hoping the relationship might recalibrate. They've gone to therapy, often specifically to work on this relationship. They've extended compassion for their family member's history, their limitations, the things that may be structural rather than chosen.

In clinical practice, we often see people reach out not to end a relationship, but to repair it. They want to communicate more clearly. They want to set boundaries without escalation. They want to rebuild connection in a way that feels mutual and sustainable.

We help clients move through those steps carefully and deliberately. Sometimes, with support and structure, the relationship shifts in meaningful ways. Sometimes repair is possible. Sometimes, despite genuine effort, it becomes clear that the other person is not in a space for reflection or change. When that pattern holds consistently over time, distance stops being reactive and starts becoming protective.

Reactive Estrangement vs Considered No Contact

There's an important distinction between a reactive estrangement, cutting someone off in the heat of conflict, and a considered one, where the decision comes after years of evidence that the relationship, as it exists, is causing consistent harm.

The former can sometimes be repaired. The latter is different. It's not anger. It's conclusion.

Grieving a Living Parent and Ambiguous Loss

Grief is present in both, but it hits differently when the decision is considered.

You're not grieving the relationship you had. You're grieving the relationship you never had, and the growing certainty that you won't.

Grieving a parent who is still alive, sometimes called ambiguous loss, is one of the most disorienting experiences people bring into therapy. There's no funeral. No social permission to mourn. Just a quiet, ongoing ache that doesn't have a clear name.

Acceptance vs Resignation in Family Estrangement

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), developed by Steven Hayes, offers a useful framework here. ACT distinguishes between acceptance, making room for reality as it is, and resignation, giving up on what matters.

Accepting that your parent cannot give you what you needed is not giving up on yourself. It's releasing the exhausting project of waiting for something that the evidence suggests won't come.

How Cultural Expectations and Family Loyalty Affect Estrangement Decisions

For many people, the difficulty of creating distance from family is not only psychological. It is cultural, communal, and sometimes spiritual. Family loyalty is not a neutral value.

Cultural Expectations Around Family Loyalty

In many communities across Alberta, including South Asian, Middle Eastern, Indigenous, East African, and Eastern European communities, family is the primary unit of identity, protection, and belonging.

Stepping back can mean losing more than a relationship. It can mean losing community, language, tradition, and a sense of home.

When Family Loyalty and Personal Safety Collide

In therapy, this tension often shows up as a split between two internal positions: the part of you that knows what you need, and the part that was raised to believe that prioritising those needs is selfish or disloyal.

Neither part is irrational. Both are responding to something real.

Cultural expectations can be used to keep people inside dynamics that harm them. They can also reflect meaningful values such as care for elders, collective responsibility, and interconnectedness.

The question is not whether your culture is wrong. The question is whether maintaining a specific relationship requires you to sacrifice your psychological safety.

Navigating Estrangement Within Collectivist Cultures

There is no universal answer. What matters is whether you can honour your cultural values while also protecting your wellbeing, or whether those values are being used to override your boundaries.

Navigating this in a cultural context that does not validate your experience can make the process significantly harder. Working with a therapist who understands your cultural background and the pressures attached to family loyalty can make a meaningful difference.

How to Decide if Creating Distance from Family is the Right Choice

Values Clarification Exercise for Family Estrangement (ACT-Based)

One of the most clarifying things you can do when you're uncertain about a family relationship is to separate what you genuinely value and appreciate in a relationship from what consistently hurts or drains you. This is not about keeping score. It’s about noticing patterns. To get the most out of this exercise you are encouraged to write out your responses.

Step 3: Evaluate Reciprocity

Answer these questions plainly:

  • If I stopped putting in as much effort, what would happen?

  • Am I the one who initiates most contact?

  • Am I usually the one repairing conflict?

  • Do I feel responsible for keeping the relationship stable?

Reciprocity does not mean perfect balance.

It means shared responsibility.

Step 4: The Clarifying Questions

If this were a potential new friendship, is this someone I would choose to be in my life?

If this were a current friendship, would I continue choosing this relationship at this level of effort?

Sit with these answers.

Step 1: Define Your Standard

On a blank page, write: “In a healthy close relationship, I expect…”

Examples:

  • I expect to be spoken to respectfully.

  • I expect effort to go both ways.

  • I expect my boundaries to be taken seriously.

  • I expect accountability when harm is done.

Be honest about your baseline.

Step 2: Compare Your Standard to Reality

Now review each expectation and ask:

  • Does this relationship consistently meet this standard?

  • When I express hurt, is it acknowledged or dismissed?

  • When I set a boundary, is it respected or pushed?

  • After repeated conversations, has anything meaningfully changed?

Do not focus on rare good days. Look at the overall pattern across months or years.

Signs Creating Distance from Family May Be Healthier Than Staying Close

Repeated Boundary Violations

Persistent limit violations after clear communication are significant. If you have communicated a limit clearly, more than once, in more than one way, and it continues to be ignored or actively challenged, that tells you something about the other person’s capacity or willingness to respect you in this relationship.

Consistent Emotional Impact After Contact

Pay attention to how you feel consistently after contact, not in individual moments but as a pattern over time. If contact reliably leaves you more anxious, more depleted, or more disconnected from yourself, and that pattern holds across different circumstances, it is worth taking seriously.

Trauma Responses Triggered By Contact

Contact that triggers genuine trauma responses, not just discomfort or friction but dissociation, panic, or significant functional impairment, is a clinical signal that something beyond ordinary relationship difficulty is happening.

Broader Impact On Your Life

If the relationship is materially affecting your functioning in other areas of your life, such as your work, your other relationships, your physical health, or your sense of self, those are not small costs to absorb indefinitely.

This is not a decision to make quickly, alone, or without support. But it is also not a decision you owe anyone an explanation for.

How to Explain Family Estrangement to Other’s

This is one of the most difficult parts of the whole thing, and it doesn't get talked about enough.

You'll be at a work event and someone will ask about your holiday plans. You'll meet a partner's family and someone will wonder why yours isn't more present and the question will come, in some form or another: why aren't you close with your family?

You don't owe anyone a full explanation. Not even people who care about you. Your history with your family is yours.

Simple Responses When Asked About Family Estrangement

Most people ask out of social reflex, not genuine inquiry. A brief, calm answer usually satisfies the moment without requiring you to either lie or disclose more than you want to.

A few options:

"We're not very close."
Simple. True. Complete. Most people won't push past it.

"It's complicated and not something I get into, but I'm doing well."
This acknowledges that something is there while clearly closing the door.

"I have a small circle I'm close to."
Useful when chosen family or close friends are filling roles biological family didn't.

Why You May Feel The Urge to Over-Explain

The urge to over-explain comes from the same guilt and shame discussed throughout this article. A lengthy explanation is often a bid for understanding or validation. That is a human need. But a casual acquaintance isn't the right place for it.

A brief, grounded answer is not dishonest. It is boundaried.

You'll likely rehearse these and still find them uncomfortable the first several times. That is normal. The discomfort eases with repetition.

Therapy for Family Estrangement and Emotionally Immature Parents in Alberta

If what you've read here resonates and you're finding it difficult to navigate on your own, therapy can help.

Family estrangement, emotionally immature parents, and the grief and identity work that comes with changing long-standing family dynamics are areas where having a skilled therapist makes a meaningful difference.

Therapy Approaches That Support Family Estrangement Work

At The Mental Health Clinic, our therapists work with approaches including Internal Family Systems (IFS), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), and Narrative Therapy. These modalities are well-suited to the identity and grief work that family estrangement often involves.

  • IFS helps people separate their authentic self from long-standing family roles.

  • ACT supports values-based decision making without being driven by guilt or fear.

  • Narrative therapy helps externalize grief and long-held identity narratives.

We offer virtual counselling across Alberta for adults, teens, couples, and families, wherever you are in this process. Whether you're in Calgary, Edmonton, Red Deer, or a smaller community across Alberta, you're not the first person to be here, weighing this, trying to find a way forward that honours both who you are and what you've been through. If you are considering distance, rebuilding connection, or grieving a relationship that has shifted, support can help you move through that decision with clarity rather than urgency. That process deserves time and support.

Frequently Asked Questions About Creating Distance from Family

Is it normal to grieve a parent you've chosen to distance yourself from?

Yes, and this grief is often more complicated than grief following a death. When you create distance from a living parent, there's no social framework for the loss, no ritual, no permission to mourn openly. What you're grieving is often layered: the relationship as it was, the relationship you needed and didn't have, and the possibility of repair you've had to stop waiting for. This kind of grief, sometimes called ambiguous loss, can surface as sadness, anger, relief, and guilt in the same hour. All of those responses are valid and often coexist.

What is the difference between low contact and no contact with a parent?

Low contact means maintaining some level of communication or in-person contact but with reduced frequency and clearer parameters around how you engage. You might speak by phone a few times a year, attend certain family events, or keep conversations to specific topics. No contact means ending communication entirely: no calls, texts, visits, or responses to messages. The right choice depends on the specific relationship, the nature of the harm, and what you're able to manage. Neither option is permanent by definition, and neither requires external justification.

What do I do when other family members take sides after I create distance?

This is one of the most painful parts of changing a family dynamic, and it's more common than most people expect. When you step back from your role in the family system, the system adjusts, and often not in your favour. Other family members may feel destabilised, pressured by the person you've distanced from, or genuinely confused about what's happened. Decide in advance what you're willing to discuss and with whom. A simple "this is something between me and [person], and I'm not going to discuss it" is a complete answer. Focus your energy on the relationships in your extended network that feel safe and mutual, and allow the rest of the system time to adjust without requiring you to manage it.

How do I handle the guilt of limiting contact with family?

Guilt in this context is almost universal, and it doesn't mean you're making the wrong decision. Guilt is the feeling that you've violated a rule. In family systems, the rules are often unspoken and deeply ingrained: family comes first, loyalty is unconditional. When you act against those rules, even when acting against them is healthy, guilt is the natural neurological response. Ask yourself: am I actually harming this person by creating distance, or am I failing to meet an expectation that was never reasonable? Those are different things. Working through this with a therapist is often the most effective route, because the guilt is usually tied to early conditioning that isn't easily reasoned away on your own.

How do I know if my parent is emotionally immature or if I'm just being too sensitive?

This is one of the most common questions in clinical work around this topic, and the self-doubt it reflects is itself informative. Emotionally immature parents tend to consistently centre their own emotional experience, struggle to acknowledge harm they've caused, and resist self-reflection when their behaviour is raised. The question isn't whether you're sensitive. Sensitivity is not a character flaw. The question is whether the pattern of the relationship, over time, across different circumstances, consistently leaves you feeling unseen, responsible for their feelings, or unable to express your own experience without it being redirected. Patterns matter more than individual incidents.

Can I access therapy in Alberta if I'm dealing with family estrangement or emotionally immature parents?

Yes. Virtual counselling has made mental health support accessible across Alberta, including in rural and remote communities where in-person options are limited. The Mental Health Clinic offers virtual therapy for adults, teens, couples, and families across the province. When looking for a therapist for this kind of work, it can help to ask specifically about their experience with family systems, intergenerational patterns, and approaches like IFS or ACT, as these modalities tend to be well-suited to the identity and grief work that family estrangement involves.

Educational Disclaimer

This article is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. If you're experiencing mental health concerns that interfere with your daily functioning, please reach out to a qualified mental health professional. If you're in crisis, contact your local crisis line or emergency services immediately.

The Mental Health Clinic
Next

Why Do I Feel Anxious Around My Family? Understanding Family Triggers