Why Does It Still Hurt After All These Years?

Every year on the ninth of March, Vikram’s phone shows him the same reminder. “Amma’s birthday.”

He set it up a long time ago. He has not deleted it. His mother is seventy-one and lives in Nagpur, in the house he grew up in. They have not spoken in four years.

His wife once asked why he keeps the reminder. He said he did not know. What he did not say was this. If his mother had died, there would be a photograph on the wall with a garland on it, and a date the family observed together. As it is, there is a notification, and he swipes it away.

Four things are happening at once

Why does it still hurt after four years? The sociologist Karl Pillemer, in Fault Lines, gives an unusually precise answer. He describes four separate threats that an estrangement poses, and they arrive together.

The first is chronic stress. A rift is not one blow. It is a condition that continues. And Pillemer points to research showing that going over a painful event in your mind has much the same effect on the body as the event had. You keep the stress alive by replaying it.

The second is broken attachment. Pillemer draws on John Bowlby, the psychiatrist who founded attachment theory. Our bond to the people who raised us is biological, and it does not switch off because they were difficult. What follows a loss is shock, then yearning, and reminders that sting. This is how a person can long for someone they do not much like.

The third is rejection. The psychologist George Slavich studies what he calls targeted rejection, where one person deliberately shuts another out. Pillemer reports his finding that people who go through it are about three times as likely to become depressed as people who suffer other severe life events. Rejection also registers in the brain regions that respond to physical pain. “It hurts” is a description.

The fourth is not knowing.

A loss with no ending

In the 1970s the family therapist Pauline Boss began working with the families of soldiers missing in action. She saw that they suffered in a particular way. Their person was physically absent and psychologically present. She called it ambiguous loss.

Pillemer borrows the idea for estrangement, and I think it fits exactly. Nothing has ended, so nothing can be mourned. Grief freezes. Friends do not know what to say, because there is no ritual for this. There is no thirteenth day for a mother who is alive in Nagpur.

It explains something Pillemer admits shocked him at first. Some of the people he interviewed said a death would have been easier. A death closes. A rift can reopen any morning, or never. He found it worse still where contact comes and goes, because each brief return restarts both the hope and the rejection.

The one who left feels it too

Vikram was the one who stopped calling. Does that exempt him?

It does not seem to. Pillemer writes that people who end a relationship usually feel relief at first. Later, most of them describe something more mixed. The attachment is still there. So is the uncertainty. Choosing the silence does not make you immune to it.

Why naming it helps

None of this is a cure. But “Why am I still upset about this?” turns out to have an answer, and the answer is not that you are weak or obsessive. There are four well-documented reasons, and you are living with all of them.

One of the four is more workable than the rest. You cannot end the uncertainty on your own. You can notice when you replay the old scene, and how often.

If your mood has been low for weeks, or you are not sleeping, please see a doctor or a counsellor. Pillemer says plainly that he is a sociologist and that his book does not replace that help.