When Adult Children Go No Contact: From Brooklyn Beckham to Yours

In this episode of Everyone Dies, we explore the rising "epidemic" of family estrangement. We begin with a high-profile case study: Brooklyn Beckham’s recent public declaration of "no contact" with his parents, David and Victoria Beckham. Using this as a jumping-off point, we examine the modern language of therapeutic boundaries and why more adult children are choosing to walk away. https://bit.ly/3P6DlUQ

In this episode, we discuss:

• (02:09) The Reality of Rupture: A first-person account of a parent "shrinking" themselves and walking on eggshells for years before the final break.
• (10:08) Defining Ambiguous Loss: Understanding the psychological trauma of an ongoing loss that has no funeral and no clear closure.
• (17:37) Supporting the Estranged: Practical guidance for friends and family on what to say—and what not to say—to a parent living through this silence.
• (26:18) The Path Forward: Learn the importance of space, respecting boundaries, and the mindset required for potential long-term reconciliation.

Whether you are a parent navigating the pain of a "no contact" request or a friend looking for the right way to offer support, this episode provides a compassionate, editorial look at one of the most difficult relational challenges of our time.

Featured Resources:

• S6E45: When Closure Isn’t Possible: How to Find a Way Forward Through Grief - Learn More about Ambiguous Loss
• If You Know an Estranged Parent, Please Read This by Rachel Haack (Thank you Rachel for letting us feature your work in this podcast)

#AmbiguousLoss #FamilyEstrangement #GriefWithoutDeath #NoContact #EstrangedParents #EveryoneDiesPodcast #UnspokenGrief #ComplexGrief #MentalHealthAwareness

Transcript

Hello and welcome to Everyone Dies. Relax and settle in for our podcast about serious illness, dying, death, and bereavement. Because even though everyone dies, no one must face it unprepared.

In this episode, we explore the experience of parents whose adult children have severed contact. Drawing on healing language and the concept of ambiguous loss, we examine why this form of grief is uniquely disrupting. The child is alive but voluntarily absent.

I'm Marianne Matzo, a nurse practitioner, and I use my experience from working as a nurse for 47 years to help answer your questions about what happens at the end of life. And I'm Charlie Navarrette, an actor in New York City, and here to offer an every-person viewpoint to our podcast. We're both here because we believe that the more you know, the better prepared you are to make difficult, sometimes life-altering decisions.

And please note, this podcast does not provide medical nor legal advice. Please listen to the complete disclosure at the end of the recording. In the first half, Charlie has a first-person account from a woman with a difficult relationship with her adult daughter and has our recipe of the week.

In the second half, we're exploring what to say to parents whose adult children choose to be estranged from their parents. In our third half, Charlie's talking about some of the benefits and issues that may arise when an adult child goes no contact. Listen, folks, for our first half, our funeral lunch recipe is fried ravioli with cacio e pepe dip.

Crunchy, buttery, and crispy, these seasoned cheese ravioli seem deep-fried despite just a quick trip into a hot oven. The cacio e pepe dip is the texture of a creamy dressing with an oomph and an ooh mama saltiness from the cheeses and a good dose of pepper. All the flavors with parenting rolled into a dip.

Bon appetit. Experts are reporting that we may be in an epidemic of adult children cutting off contact with their parents. In one recent study, researchers found that 26% of young adults are estranged from their fathers and 6% are estranged from their mothers.

The parents report that these estrangements often happen without notice or explanation, leaving them feeling deeply hurt and in the dark. You may have experienced an adult child wanting no contact with you or have seen this happen with friends or family, but for those of you who have no experience with estrangement from their child, I have an excerpt from an anonymous social media post that gives a pretty good idea of some of the issues that are involved. When have you shrunk yourself to maintain a relationship, no matter how one-sided or hurtful? This question raises a lot of major issues.

Ever since she was in college, I have shrunk myself. She is now 44 and the attacks and anger had escalated for 22 years. Nothing I did or said was okay.

I was old-fashioned, ignorant, uptight, too worried about money, etc., etc., so I shrank myself some more. Any thought or plan I had was stupid. She was happy to say or just roll her eyes so I kept my thoughts to myself.

Any vacation I took was boring, so I just went and didn't mention it. I was actually relieved at the one-sided conversations because at least she wasn't criticizing me and I was getting to hear all about her. She wanted to become a writer, so I offered to help her, only because I've helped many of my PhD students and postdocs with their publications with great success and wanted to help her too.

But she scorned my help, so I shrank myself some more. I had never discussed my books or writing with her because she was so derisive all along. I never even told her when my new ones came out.

I just said, if you ever want to run anything by me or discuss publishing, just let me know. But she scorned it and me. I didn't see how I was constantly shrinking myself to try to accommodate and appease her.

I saw it as supporting and celebrating her. A therapist, with whom I had started trying to repair the relationship, eventually said it shouldn't be repaired. She was aggressive, angry and likely to escalate her attacks and said by trying to uplift, celebrate her, I was becoming one of her flying monkeys.

I can now clearly and definitively say and share with all the suffering parents here that appeasement does not work. No amount of shrinking yourself or walking on eggshells will work. After I was shrunk away to, yes dear, how lovely what you did, just as on that Twilight Zone episode where the whole town tipped those around a little bratty boy, she published lies about me and her dad and others in a book that came out this year.

After self-publishing other books that were variously cringeworthy, but in which I always managed to find things to praise and celebrate. This openly libelous book was a final straw. That and her social media podcast interviews where she slanders us directly.

We thought about taking legal action, but I don't want the hassle. It's cool now if they claim to have had horrible parents and a terrible childhood. It gets them attention in the media.

So that's how she markets her books, with lies about us. I did let her know when the book came out that that's it, and not to contact me because her attacks were deliberate lies, unjustified even in a memoir, and were so unkind and unfair. A cheap marketing device.

She hasn't contacted me and I'm glad, but heartbroken. We share a distinctive last name and I'm frankly ashamed to be related to her with her sleazy lies. She used to be the nicest, funniest, sweetest kid with a really good attitude and sense of humor.

The child I raised is dead. The adult who now exists is unrecognizable to me and I want nothing to do with her and no association with her. So I am thinking of changing my name when I move.

Please go to our webpage for this week's recipe and additional resources for this program. This is the part where we ask for your financial support. Your tax-deductible gift will go directly to supporting our non-profit journalism so that we can remain accessible to everyone.

You can donate at www.everyonedies.org. That's every, the number one, dies.org. Or at our site on Patreon under Everyone Dies. Marianne? Thanks, Charlie. On January 19, 2026, Brooklyn Beckham took the very public and very unusual step of going public with his own famous family drama.

In a series of Instagram stories, the model laid out reasons for his estrangement from his parents, retired hockey star David Beckman and former Spice Girl Victoria Beckman. Here's just a small sample of what he had to say. Quote, I've been controlled by my parents for most of my life.

I grew up with overwhelming anxiety. For the first time in my life, since stepping away from my family, that anxiety has disappeared. My wife has been consistently disrespected by my family, no matter how hard we've tried to come together as one.

Toward the end of his posts, he says, quote, I do not want to reconcile with my family. I'm not being controlled. I'm standing up for myself for the first time in my life.

End quote. There are situations where estrangement is the only sane or safe option. Anyone who's sat in a therapy room with real families knows this.

Yet it appears to be more common for adult children to announce their departure from their families with similar language that includes some variation of, I'm choosing to honor my healing vibration. I wish you peace. Please do not contact me again.

I need you to respect my boundary. This is called going no contact, while others may choose minimal contact. And what follows, almost without exception, is months of trauma and anguish.

Parents and extended family members reaching out, trying to understand what happened, carefully drafting texts, seeking professional guidance to help them craft the right words, only to be met with silence. The irony is that today's adult children were often raised by parents who invested more emotional effort, more psychological attentiveness, and more relational mindfulness than any other generation before them. Rachel Hack, a marriage and family therapist who wrote the following advice to friends of estranged parents who want to help but don't know what to say.

She's given us permission to share it with you today. You may not be the one living through it, but you might know someone who is. A friend, a neighbor, a woman you've shared dinners with for years, a man you've watched become a father then a grandfather, at least in theory.

Somewhere along the way, you caught a subtle reference, a vague phrase, a pause that lingered too long. Quote, we really don't talk much anymore. And then the subject changed.

Right now, a substantial number of parents are living through the devastation of being cut off from their adult children. You see it more openly now on social media, in headlines, in therapy languages, made its way into the public discourse. This pain long predates our collective awareness of it.

What's new is not the suffering. What's new is how widespread, visible, and culturally normalized it's become. I'm not writing today to explain why this is happening.

I'm writing to help you understand what your friend is carrying, and how you might help without fixing, advising, or unintentionally wounding them further. Because their pain they're living with has a name. In the therapeutic world, we call it ambiguous loss.

And we did a show about ambiguous loss when Charlie was talking about closure. So look in the show notes for a link to that. So we talk about ambiguous loss.

It's one of the most taxing and destabilizing forms of grief there is. It's the grief of having a living child who is profoundly absent. There is no funeral, no ritual, no socially sanctioned timeline for healing.

The uncertainty weighs on the nervous system day after day. Many parents in this position are thinking about their children every single day. Not occasionally, not abstractly, daily, even hourly.

Their nervous systems are hijacked. Their psyche is in a perpetual search for a bond that has been severed. It's a loss that is constantly running in the background with no identical path to integration.

They think about their son and daughter. They think about the grandchildren they may never see, or only see through photos if at all. They grieve about missed holidays, birthdays, ordinary conversations, inside jokes, shared memories that now live only in one direction.

They notice every other family. They notice grandparents holding grandchildren in restaurants. They notice casual mentions of Sunday dinners.

They notice the ease with which other families move through milestones they no longer have access to. These moments are not neutral to them. They land as brutally subtle reminders of what is missing.

And still, they do not want to be a burden. They say very little. They learn how to hold it in.

They celebrate for others. They change the subject. They carry it privately.

And in that way, many estranged parents are far more isolated and lonelier than any around them realize. They feel ashamed, exposed, privately humiliated by a story they never imagined would belong to them. Some struggle to get out of bed.

Some wrestle with intrusive thoughts about their worth as parents, as people, as human beings. They see their doctors for more physical problems, unsure of how to communicate the symptom of a broken heart. A few, far more than we'd like to acknowledge, grapple with suicidal thoughts, not because they want to die, but because their sense of self has been stripped down to rubble.

They are not, in my experience, telling themselves a simple victim story either. In fact, I've yet to meet a parent who says, I did absolutely nothing wrong. What I see far more often is the opposite.

These parents are constantly re-litigating themselves. They replay conversations in their minds. They comb through memories for what they might have said differently.

They rehearse apologies they may never get to offer. They wonder what they missed. They imagine how they might try again if given a chance.

They hold a running internal trial in which they are both the defendant and the prosecutor. They are often harder on themselves than you, I, or society could be. Estrangement frequently becomes a stuck place.

The child who's cut off, no contact, is no longer coming to the table. There's no ongoing dialogue, no shared process of repair. So the parents are left in ambiguous space, a dark valley of the soul where their child is alive, but in many ways psychologically and relationally lost.

They want their child back, not in a controlling way, not in a way that denies conflict or pain, but in the most basic human way. They want to be in a relationship again. They want to know their child.

They want to be known. So they live in a constant tension, trying to prepare their hearts for the possibility that this may not change, while also trying not to extinguish hope entirely. They try not to live in constant desperation.

They also try not to distract themselves to the point of numbness, feeling guilty at the idea of acceptance or moving on. In short, their inner world is busy. Their nervous systems are busy.

Their psyches are busy, managing a kind of grief that has no clear edges and no clear end. They know the question that hangs in the air from others. What did you do? They know the cultural script.

Parents who are cut off must be abusive, narcissistic, irredeemable monsters. I want to tell you something directly from years of sitting with families on all sides of this divide. You would be shocked at how many estrangements do not involve cruelty, abuse, or malice.

In most cases, these are not monstrous parents. They are ordinary people who love their children, made mistakes, navigated conflict imperfectly, and then found themselves, often through a long and complex series of interactions, on the outside of a relationship that they never intended to lose. Estrangement rarely has a single cause.

Research is clear that it emerges from multiple pathways. It's shaped by timing, temperament, misunderstanding, external stressors, escalation, ideology, fear, and silence. It is almost never as simple as the stories we tell about it online.

So, what can you do as a friend? You may be in a rare position. You may have known this parent for decades. You may have watched them raise their children.

You may carry a fuller story of who they are than the one they now hold about themselves. So, I want to offer you something simple and profound. Be a witness.

Do not interrogate, do not advise, do not troubleshoot. Witness. Your friend is unlikely to ask for this.

Most parents carry this guilt privately, believing it is theirs alone to bear. It impacts their marriages, their relationships with their other children, and their sense of safety in a world, but they rarely bring it forward. You can.

You can say, gently, I see this. I know you don't talk about it much, but I want you to know I'm aware. And it feels right.

And if you truly have a history, you could say more. Tell them what you've seen over the years. Tell them what you admire, the ways you've known to show them up as a mother or father.

Speak concretely. Speak honestly. Sometimes these parents have often lost all perspective on who they really are.

They have collapsed their identity into the worst possible explanation. I am a failure. I am worthless.

Your witnessing can interrupt that collapse. Witnessing can also happen beyond private conversation. It can mean speaking up when a strange man comes up in a broader cultural conversation, at dinner tables, in a group chat, in passing commentary, and simply saying, I know someone who is living through this, and I also know they're not a monster.

They're not an abuser. They're not a narcissist. Offering that kind of truth helps widen the story and reminds others that estrangement is more complex than the caricatures we're often given.

This is not about taking sides. It's not about joining the conflict. It's not about relaying messages or triangling yourself into the relationship.

It's about standing in the truth of who this person has been and reminding them that their entire story cannot be erased by this chapter. There are also things I would urge you not to say. Please resist the instinct to ask, haven't you called? Haven't you apologized? Have you taken accountability? Why don't you just reach out? Why don't you show up and force the conversation? In most cases, these parents have already tried again and again, often at great emotional cost.

Some of the suggestions that seem obvious from the outside have proven deeply counterproductive on the inside. Estrangement is not a simple relational rupture with a simple relational fix. When we rush to solutions, we often communicate unintentionally that their pain is the result of insufficient effort or insight.

They just haven't done the right thing yet. What helps far more is saying this. I'm here to listen.

You're not a burden to me. Your grief matters. You don't have to carry this alone.

Witnessing is one of the most powerful forms of care that we have when control is not an option. So if you're wondering how to support a friend who may be living through estrangement, this is my invitation to you. Notice, stay present, speak what you know to be true, and let that be enough.

Thoughts, Charles? Oh, dear. Well, there were times with Michael, my son. Long-time listeners know this.

He was murdered several years ago. Yeah, we were estranged. And again, nothing to the, well, maybe one time, to the level that you are speaking, but there would just be you know, misunderstandings.

And it's, yeah, for me, it's like, why? Okay, a misunderstanding I understood, but it just seemed, you know, why can't we go out and get a pizza? Yeah, I mean, it would, fortunately, toward the end of his life, we were getting along much, much better. He was, you know, he had just started nursing school. It was, it was good.

It was good. But yeah, there were just a few really rough spots along the way. And, you know, I just, you know, I missed him at those moments.

But I don't even think I told you. I don't remember. No, I don't remember you saying that.

So, no, I get it. And again, what you're describing, it was not a continuous estrangement with Michael. You said there would be, you know, a few episodes, but I mean, that's compared to what you're saying.

The situations, you know, you're describing, it was, yeah, it was nothing long-term. So, just that. Well, there's more and more stories in, you know, like New York Times Magazine and just a variety of media outlets where you'd say, oh, this is a thing that is a bigger thing than maybe we would have thought.

Yeah. Because it's being talked about. And it's only really in the last, I don't know if you've noticed, but like in the last six months that you see it being talked about.

And then recently, one of Oprah's friends, or I don't know exactly who it was, was talking about estrangement. And she was like, what are you talking about? And she ended up, I don't know, I think she's doing a podcast or something now, but she ended up talking about it. And, you know, as with many things with Oprah, really kind of opened a box of, you know, here's what's going on and people talking about it.

And then like not too long after it, the whole Beckham story broke. Okay. So it seems to be, at least in the media, becoming more recognized and talked about.

Shine a light on it to, yeah, because it's out there. And that's why we thought we would do sort of that focus on ambiguous loss and giving our listeners some ideas in terms of what they can say that can actually be helpful to the estranged parent. Well, thank you for that.

My pleasure. Yeah, really. In our third half, I'm talking about long-term issues for going no contact.

Dealing with estranged adult children can be emotionally challenging, but understanding the reasons for estrangement and taking active steps can help pave the way for potential reconciliation. In the beginning, the parent often tries to understand the estrangement, even though it might not make sense to them. The parent may first need to acknowledge the pain they are feeling.

Estrangement can provoke feelings of shame, guilt, and bewilderment. It's essential to recognize these emotions and understand that they are a natural response to the situation. Second is to accept the child's reality.

Understand that the estrangement likely occurred for reasons that felt necessary to your child. They may have been protecting their mental health or sense of self-worth, and dismissing their feelings can delay any chance of reconciliation. Reconciliation can take time, and as much as you may want things to go back to normal, forcing the issue before your child is ready isn't helpful.

As painful as it is, your child has a right to decide what kind of relationship they want with you, even if that's no relationship. If you try to push your way back in, you are setting yourself up to be rejected by them. Respecting your estranged adult child's wishes may make them feel like you are respecting their wishes more, and they may respect you more for not continuing to set yourself to be rejected by them.

Time apart can be a good opportunity to work on yourself and reflect on the past, including any regret you may have about your behavior or decisions. Estrangement does not have to be permanent. Your child may need time to cool down, heal, or find a sense of safety in their own life.

Giving them space, without passive aggressively checking in or putting pressure on them, may be the best path toward eventual reconnection. Staying no contact may cause them to miss you. The old saying, how can I miss you if you never go away, is sometimes true in families.

Although it is painful, family separation can teach us important lessons that can benefit other relationships. You can learn from estrangement, and respecting their wishes may invite more self-reflection on their part, and may even say to themselves, hmm, my mother hasn't reached out in seven months, I wonder what's going on. While this is not easy, a relationship may need time and space to allow things to become less inflamed.

Please stay tuned for the continuing saga of Everyone Dies, and thank you for listening. You can find more episodes from our series about grief on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your favorite podcast app. Follow and subscribe to the show.

Share it with someone who needs a little hope today. This is Charlie Navarette, and as my favorite cousin Tom, who died a few weeks ago, would say, if you didn't visit me when I was alive, don't come and see me when I'm dead. Good night, sweet prince.

And I'm Marian Matzo, and we'll see you next week. Remember, every day is a gift. care practitioner or other qualified health providers with any questions that you may have regarding your health.

Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard from this podcast. If you think you may have a medical emergency, call your doctor or 911 immediately. Everyone Dies does not recommend or endorse any specific tests, practitioners, products, procedures, opinions, or other information that may be mentioned in this podcast.

Reliance on any information provided in this podcast by persons appearing on this podcast at the invitation of Everyone Dies, or by other members is solely at your own risk.