Quibbles, quarrels, and suddenly they aren’t speaking

You haven’t spoken to your sister in 15 years, ever since she got sloppily drunk at your son’s wedding? Or maybe you’ve written your father off, because he picked your brother to head the family business. Well, you are not alone. Family estrangements occur so often that the only cozy holiday gatherings many people see this time of year are in supermarket commercials.

Tales of family estrangements go back to the time of Cain and his brother Abel and occur in cultures throughout the world. Cain notwithstanding, murder is a rare denouement.

Yet tiffs can separate individual relatives for decades and divide clans into factions. They arise from a smorgasbord of causes and are even supported by a therapeutic cheering section that believes the nuclear family shouldn’t always be governed by a no-cut contract. No statistics on the subject are kept, so it is impossible to track whether estrangements have become increasingly common as greater social mobility has put more miles between people and their extended families. But just because Grandma is in Arizona, little sister lives in Atlanta and big brother settled in Seattle doesn’t mean a family won’t remain close. Proximity has fueled as many explosions as distance.

The big bang that blasted a chasm between the Krichinsky brothers, who immigrated to Baltimore from Russia before 1920, was fired one memorable Thanksgiving Day. By the early 1950s, their extended family included wives, children and grandchildren. Gabriel, the eldest, was always late for Thanksgiving dinner. His brother Sam often threatened to carve the turkey, but he’d been warned that not waiting for the head of the family would be an insult. The first time the Thanksgiving feast was held in his son’s new house in the suburbs, Sam’s impatience ruled.

“You cut the turkey?” Gabriel bellowed, then stormed out, dragging his wife behind him. They never celebrated a holiday all together again.

The loving, volatile Krichinskys are a fictionalized version of the extended family Barry Levinson grew up with in Baltimore. Their story is affectionately told in “Avalon,” the 1990 film he wrote and directed. Levinson remembers there being stated reasons for rifts among his kin. “You’d hear it and say, ‘Really? That’s it?’

“In ‘Avalon’ the turkey was symbolic,” he says. “When Sam’s son could afford a nicer house in suburbia, there was jealousy and a change in the power structure. Sometimes we point to something that’s really not the reason, but it’s easier to talk about than the real issues.”

IT’S OUR NATURE

THIS much we know: Human beings aren’t good at getting along. Life was simpler when man was closer to the primal ooze, when surviving and reproducing were at the top of every day’s “to do” list and conflict resolution was as simple as a club. A thousand years later, in agrarian societies, the family was a social and economic unit. “Parents have fewer children today and stress independence, because they’re not gaining anything from grown-up children,” says Alan Booth, a Pennsylvania State University professor who studies family systems.

In other words, a financially independent young mother in need of a baby sitter doesn’t have to be nice to her mother-in-law. She can hire a nanny. Karl Marx called the process consumer sovereignty, a practical outgrowth of capitalism that ignores emotional interdependence.

“We have evolved as a social species,” says Thomas Bradbury, professor of psychology at UCLA. “But we haven’t developed the psychological repertoire to know how to make long-standing relationships work.”

Serious, protracted quarrels often arise from seemingly trivial disputes. When the turkey is cut or how the toothpaste tube is squeezed can be a problem, but it’s never the problem. “Often the superficial irritants are too ridiculous to address, and the deeper issues, if they’re even understood, are too much to open up,” Bradbury says. “Hidden agendas about authority, respect and control govern our behavior in ways that we can’t even articulate.”

So family rifts are perplexing allegories, in which anger can stand in for disappointment, annoyance for jealousy, money for love. “In families, arguments about sex are about sex and something else,” says Paul Schervish, director of the Boston College Social Welfare Research Institute. “Arguments about money are about money and something else.” Sagas of the rich and dysfunctional are a Vanity Fair staple, but scarcity of money can cause as much trouble as who gets which share of abundance.

Does a tree fall in the forest if it doesn’t land on someone famous? America’s sweethearts Julia Roberts, Meg Ryan and Jennifer Aniston are estranged from a brother and their mothers, respectively, so celebrity worshipers could argue that it happens in the best of families. With the exception of the exhibitionistic fringe who stage family brawls on “The Jerry Springer Show,” regular folks are as loath as the professionally adorable to make their estrangements public. Everyone interviewed for this story about their fractured families would speak only on the condition of anonymity.

A former teacher living in West Hollywood says, “My sister always seemed to be angry with me, to act as if I’d slapped her. She was jealous when I had children, which I did 10 years before her. Whenever we had family gatherings, she’d insist that my children be left home. There was no reason they couldn’t come to a Mother’s Day brunch. It was just that I had children and she didn’t. Then, as soon as she had her kids, she never heard the term ‘child-inappropriate.’ I haven’t spoken to her in about eight years.”

No specific event ended the relationship. The sisters’ encounters were so consistently unpleasant that they eventually chose to avoid each other.

Sometimes estrangements begin with a whimper, an unspoken truce in a war of attrition. And relatives can refuse to label the situation, as in “My brother and I aren’t estranged. I just don’t talk to him.”

Irene Goldenberg, a family psychologist and professor emeritus at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute, says, “Estrangements are defined by the people involved. Some people feel estranged if they don’t have a lot of intimacy with family members. With others, it’s when they don’t speak at all.”

When a fractious stew bubbled in the American melting pot, families would sometimes excommunicate one of their own for making a choice that wasn’t understood or approved of. Marrying a person of another religion or race, or coming out as homosexual, still causes estrangements, yet evidence of greater acceptance is everywhere.

“There are fewer occurrences of families ostracizing members for being homosexual or marrying outside the faith,” Schervish says. “The friends and associates of someone who is disappointed by a relative’s lifestyle are less likely to reinforce the estrangement. I know a woman who wouldn’t talk to her son when he got divorced. She’d complain to friends about him and they’d say, ‘Oh, really? My daughter is divorced.’ ”

ONE OF US?

Rules exist to maintain social order. “When a family member’s actions seem to be in opposition to core values, there is outrage because the purpose of the whole group, the tribal ethic, is threatened,” Schervish says. The New Jersey woman who welcomes her son’s Hindu bride from Sri Lanka admits there are limits to her tolerance. “I love my daughter-in-law,” she says, “but if he’d come home with a right-wing Republican, forget it. That would make me feel that he was rejecting the philosophy that’s central to our family identity.”

It’s the rare wedding that doesn’t induce at least a little tiff. “I remember a fight that started when a girl invited her biological father to walk her down the aisle instead of the stepfather who raised her,” says the Rev. Msgr. David O’Connell, pastor of St. Francis Cabrini Church in Los Angeles. “Not being invited to a significant event can cause a problem that can go on for years. There was a cousin I didn’t invite to my ordination, and 22 years later I’m still paying for that. We didn’t speak for several years.”

In the study of relationships, the most confounding question is why some people hang in, and others don’t. Phil Cowan, director of the Institute of Human Development at UC Berkeley, says family styles are a factor. “There are families in which overt fighting and expressions of anger are considered terribly scary,” he says. “They’d almost rather not speak to each other than yell or get yelled at.”

Individual personalities play a role as well. “Some people are willing to compromise and work on a problem. Others make a complete break,” says Booth, who has studied the dynamics of divorcing couples. “There’s a rigidity that goes along with saying, ‘That’s it -- the relationship’s over.’ Someone who isn’t willing to negotiate wants everything to go their way.”

But major turning points -- deaths, births, marriages -- may not lend themselves to compromise. “When a parent is ill, siblings may have different notions of what constitutes care,” says Rabbi Laura Geller of Temple Emanuel in Beverly Hills. “There are end-of-life decisions to be made. One wants to start heroic measures and another doesn’t. Who is interfering with his or her life in order to take care of Mom or Dad? Who pays for help if it’s needed? These are hard issues, because there’s no right or wrong.”

And yet, some families remain intact. “People who grew up feeling that there’s enough to go around get along with their families,” Geller says. Enough what? “Money, love, whatever. Most people think the most important family relationship is between parents and children. Freud did. But Genesis suggests the major conflict is sibling rivalry. The core of estrangement is the perception of a zero-sum game, the idea that if one child receives a blessing, the other won’t.”

Some family connections don’t have to be strained by crisis or weakened by disagreements. They were never strong to begin with. A Pasadena woman with a large group of friends hasn’t spoken to her older brother in a dozen years.

“I know that we grew up in the same house. I know we ate dinner at the same table, but we never developed whatever that friendship is that siblings are supposed to have,” she says. “He was always hostile. I was his little sister, but he was never sweet on me in the way I think brothers are.”

UCLA’s Goldenberg wouldn’t be surprised that these siblings are estranged. “The guy who doesn’t talk to his brother for 20 years was never best friends with him,” she says. “They were seven years apart and probably didn’t like each other anyway. Some families have a rich connection that’s complicated and wonderful. Even if it’s difficult and painful at times, the bond is very strong.”

THE OTHER SIDE

The idea of a harmonious family is as persistently appealing as a neighbor’s green grass. But psychological research has found people have a large capacity for misunderstanding.

“In our relationships, there can be surprisingly different interpretations of events and behaviors,” psychologist Bradbury says. “We misconstrue what other people are about and why they do certain things, often ascribing motives that aren’t neutral or benign. We may experience things together, but we occupy different psychological space.” For example, a man doesn’t let his mother-in-law cook when she comes to visit. He thinks he’s letting her relax. She thinks her talents aren’t valued or respected.

The solution, while not easy, can be distilled into strolling in someone else’s shoes. “If people recognize that their perspective on an event or a series of events isn’t the only one, it can help,” Bradbury says. “If you are sympathetic to the other person’s point of view on an estrangement, you might understand how your perception of reality isn’t shared.”

Those who maintain family ties believe the struggle is worthwhile. “Family is different from friends, even if you have long and close relationships,” Geller says. “My brothers are the only people who dream in the same landscape as I do.”