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Eighteen months of silence
During a contentious divorce that dragged on for nearly two years, retired Navy SEAL Andy Stumpf lost contact with his oldest son. He called and texted, and he wrote letters to the boy's mom's house. He pulled up next to his son in the parking lot the son visited before work, and the son burned out of the lot without acknowledging him.
Imagine something you don't have the vocabulary to describe how much you love, and thinking every day that you may never get it back. Nothing in the SEAL teams made him wonder whether he was a good enough man to still exist. This did.
He stayed the course. Now the son calls to ask for advice or to bounce things off him, and the relationship is probably closer than it has ever been. Not everybody gets that outcome.
Getting through it took every tool he had written about: separating influence from concern, asking what he could do today, breaking time down into the shortest chunks humanly possible, and controlling how he talked to himself.
How common is family estrangement?
Cornell sociologist Karl Pillemer surveyed 1,340 Americans for his 2020 book Fault Lines. He found that about 27 percent of adults were estranged from a relative. The most common estrangements involved a parent or child. Pillemer also interviewed people who had reconnected and found that many reunions began with a small, low-pressure gesture.
Where does one day at a time come from?
The phrase is closely tied to Alcoholics Anonymous, founded in 1935 in Akron, Ohio. The program's early members used it to make the goal of lifelong abstinence feel manageable by shrinking it to a single day. It became a widely shared slogan across recovery groups. The approach of dividing a long commitment into the smallest possible unit has since spread to many other areas.
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