236. No Contact: How Ideology Is Breaking Families Apart, With Noelle Mering

About this episode

In this episode, I talk with Noelle Mering, fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and author of No Contact, about how "going no contact" shifted from a last-resort response to abuse into a normalized, even celebrated, way to handle political and ideological disagreement. Noelle offers a striking analogy: a healthy immune system expels real threats, but what we're seeing now looks more like an autoimmune disorder, where people can no longer tell what is dangerous from what is merely difficult. We explore Bowen's concept of differentiation, why chosen family so often fails the people who rely on it, and why parents can feel like an existential threat to a trans-identified young adult.…