UBUNTU PHILOSOPHY · HEALTH & WELLNESS
Some of the heaviest grief has no funeral.
When a bond with a parent, a child, or a sibling goes silent, the people around us often do not know what to say — and the person living it may not know either. Estrangement is far more common than the silence around it suggests. In a national survey led by Cornell sociologist Karl Pillemer, 27 percent of American adults reported having cut off a family member. (Cornell Chronicle, 2020) This piece holds the subject with care: no blame, no single story, and no assumption that reconciliation is the goal.
“A family can be a place of belonging. It can also be a place of harm. Both can be true, and neither cancels the other.”
— Ubuntu Village Teaching
More Common Than We Say
Pillemer’s survey of more than 1,300 adults found that about 10 percent were estranged from a parent or child, 8 percent from a sibling, and 9 percent from extended family. He noted that the 27 percent figure, at least 67 million people, is likely an underestimate, because many people do not disclose a cutoff. Reported causes included harsh parenting, favoritism, divorce, in-laws, money, and differences in values. (Cornell Chronicle, 2020)
Family-studies research describes what estrangement between parents and adult children can cost: lower psychological well-being, a sense of loss, and the experience or fear of stigma. (Blake, 2017) Stigma matters here. Many people say “we’re not close” rather than naming the break, because the room may judge. Both sides can feel judged, whether they ended contact or were the ones cut off.
There is no one story. A scholar who has written about both the person who ends contact and the person who is cut off describes the experience, for some, as potentially “an inordinately traumatising experience.” (Agllias, 2017) We offer that not to rank anyone’s pain, but to say that it is real from more than one seat at the table.
Grief Without a Ritual
Family therapist Pauline Boss coined the term ambiguous loss in the 1970s for loss that lacks clarity and the rituals that normally help people grieve — no recognized mourning, no gathering, no casserole at the door. (Boss, ambiguousloss.com) The framework describes loss where someone is physically absent but psychologically present, or the reverse. Boss’s own page does not name estrangement, so we offer it here as a lens that many people find fits — not as a diagnosis, and not as a claim about any one person’s experience.
Through that lens, the particular ache of estrangement makes sense. The person is alive. The relationship is unfinished. The calendar still marks birthdays, holidays, and funerals, and each one asks the question again. Without a ritual, the community often has no script, and the grieving person is left to carry it alone.
Ubuntu begins from the opposite premise: a person is a person through other persons. (Moyo, University of Jyväskylä) Grief was never meant to be a solo task. Our reading on Acholi Mato Oput describes one tradition in which repair after rupture is held by the whole community, not left to two people alone. We do not claim Mato Oput is a model for estrangement — only that communities have long built ritual around what is broken, and that its absence in modern life is felt.
Belonging is tended together. Ubuntu Village partners with communities across Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria who are already tending theirs.
Support This WorkSafety Comes First — Estrangement Can Be Protective
For some families, distance is not a failure; it is how a person stays safe. Even Pillemer, who concludes that reconciliation is possible and worth pursuing in most cases, notes that the sadness and longing for reconnection might not exist in extreme cases involving violence or abuse. (Cornell Chronicle, 2020) We would go further: nobody owes ongoing access to a person who harmed them, and wanting distance from harm is not a moral flaw.
A trauma-informed approach, as described by the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, rests on six principles: safety; trustworthiness and transparency; peer support; collaboration and mutuality; empowerment, voice, and choice; and attention to cultural, historical, and gender issues. (SAMHSA, via Youth.gov) Applied to estrangement, that means the person who lived it decides what contact, if any, feels safe — and how fast. Reconciliation can be welcome. It can also be unwanted, unsafe, or simply not available. All three can be true of a loving, thoughtful person.
If you are on the other side, the one who was cut off, the same principles apply to you: you deserve support, and your grief is not a debate to be won. Listening without defending can be a form of care, and it can be done at a distance that keeps everyone safe.
Ubuntu Does Not Mean Staying Where You Are Harmed
Ubuntu is sometimes misread as an instruction to preserve every tie at any cost. Ubuntu names interdependence — our shared humanity — and belonging in a community that is safe enough to be human in. (Moyo, University of Jyväskylä) In many African and Afro-diasporic families, kinship has always been wider than a single household: aunties, elders, cousins, neighbors, and chosen kin hold the village together. When one thread is cut, the weave does not have to unravel.
Our piece on Family: The Strongest Bond and the Most Fragile One looks at how the same bond that sustains us can strain under pressure. If a parent or a child is out of reach for now, the question Ubuntu invites is not “Who failed?” but “Who is holding you?”
Separation Is Not Always Estrangement
We want to be careful here. Estrangement is a break in which at least one person makes a choice. Many Black families also carry a history of separations that were not chosen, and that history can color how silence between relatives is felt. We name it as context, not as a cause, and not as the same thing.
Formerly enslaved people placed newspaper notices searching for family members taken from them; the earliest in the Last Seen archive appeared in 1832, the notices became far more frequent after emancipation in 1865, and they continued well into the twentieth century. (Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery) In our own time, the Annie E. Casey Foundation reports that about 7 percent of U.S. children have experienced a parent’s incarceration, and that Black children are more than seven times as likely as white children to have a parent incarcerated. (Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2016)
Migration is another separation shaped by circumstance, often when a parent leaves to work and a child stays behind. A survey of more than 7,000 secondary school pupils in Ghana, Nigeria, and Angola found that children in transnational families generally reported poorer well-being than children living with both parents. The picture was not uniform: in Ghana, living conditions accounted for the gap, and in Ghana and Nigeria it made no difference whether a parent had gone abroad or elsewhere in the country. Changing caregivers was linked to poorer well-being in all three countries, and the authors concluded that wider population characteristics, rather than parental migration itself, were associated with lower well-being. (Mazzucato et al., 2015) The study measured children, not adult estrangement, so we offer it as context: how a family fares across distance depends heavily on the care and community around the child.
These are separations shaped by systems and circumstance, not choices made inside a family. We include them because longing for the family you were kept from, or kept apart from, is a different grief from walking away from one that harmed you, and it belongs in the same conversation about what families carry. For more on how history travels through bodies and generations, see Epigenetics and Ancestral Memory.
Gentle Practices, for the Estranged and Those Who Love Them
Name the loss. Saying “I am grieving a relationship that is still alive” can loosen shame. You are allowed to grieve someone and to protect yourself from them at once.
Find witnesses. A trusted friend, elder, faith leader, peer group, or therapist can hold what the family could not. Choose people who will not rush you toward either forgiveness or cutoff.
Decide your own pace and terms. If you are weighing contact, you can begin small: a letter you never send, a message you draft and wait on, a conversation with a counselor first. You can stop at any step.
Mark the hard days. Plan for birthdays and holidays ahead of time. Light a candle, cook a dish an ancestor loved, or spend the day with chosen family.
Let the body help. Grief lives in the body. Slow breathing, walking, and being near people who feel safe can steady a nervous system on high alert. (See Mirror Neurons and Communal Healing for how presence itself can be healing.)
If you love someone who is estranged, offer company, not verdicts. “I am here, and I am not going anywhere” does more than advice about what they should do next.
A Note on How We Hold This
This article is shared as general information and reflection, not as therapy, legal advice, or a substitute for professional care. Estrangement can involve abuse, safety risks, or deep trauma. If you are in danger, please contact local emergency services. If you are in the United States and need immediate support, you can call or text 988. If you are elsewhere, a trusted local health provider or crisis service can help. A licensed, trauma-informed therapist can help you decide what is right for you. The research cited describes patterns across groups, not the shape of your family.
No One Should Carry This Alone.
Ubuntu Village supports community-led healing across Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria — because wellbeing is held by more than one person. When you give, you partner with communities already tending their own.
Partner With UsKnow someone carrying this quietly? Share this piece with them — a little company can lighten what silence makes heavy.
Sources & Research
- “Pillemer: Family estrangement a problem ‘hiding in plain sight’” James Dean, Cornell Chronicle, September 10, 2020.
- “Parents and children who are estranged in adulthood: A review and discussion of the literature.” Lucy Blake, Journal of Family Theory & Review 9(4), 2017, 521–536.
- Agllias, Kylie. Family Estrangement: A Matter of Perspective. Routledge, 2017.
- Origins and history of ambiguous loss. Pauline Boss, ambiguousloss.com.
- SAMHSA’s Concept of Trauma and Guidance for a Trauma-Informed Approach. Summarized by Youth.gov.
- Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery. Villanova University project; National Historical Publications and Records Commission.
- A Shared Sentence. Annie E. Casey Foundation, April 2016.
- “International parental migration and the psychological well-being of children in Ghana, Nigeria, and Angola.” Valentina Mazzucato et al., Social Science & Medicine 132, 2015, 215–224.
- “I Am Because We Are… Understanding the Concept of ‘Ubuntu’” Fulata Lusungu Moyo, University of Jyväskylä, August 25, 2025.
Related Reading
I Am Because We Are. And Together, We Heal.
Michele Mitchell is the Founder, President & CEO of Ubuntu Village Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit with programs in Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria. A writer, advocate, and community strategist working at the intersection of ancestral wisdom, public health, and community power, Michele leads Ubuntu Village’s work to center communities as the protagonists of their own healing. She writes from the conviction that science and spirit are complementary, that healing is relational, and that community is the medicine. Read more about Michele, or connect with her on LinkedIn.