Family group chat on WhatsApp: leave, mute, or stay?

Patient Guide

The phone buzzes in the middle of the afternoon, and it's the family group chat again. On the cost of fighting, the cost of silence, and what is lost when being there turns into a contest.

October 19, 20269 min read

Illustration for the article: The family group chat on WhatsApp: leave, mute, or stay

The phone buzzes on the table in the middle of a meeting, and the preview alone is enough to tell where it’s coming from. “Family,” with a heart after the name, the way someone christened the group one Christmas many years ago. Dozens of unread messages since lunchtime.

It started with a video forwarded by an uncle, the same one who sends good morning with a picture of flowers every morning. A cousin replied with a link from the opposite side. Someone sent a long voice message. The oldest aunt wrote “everyone, let’s stop, we’re family,” and nobody answered her. Now there is a twenty-minute silence, the kind in which everyone in the group is reading.

At night, the person opens the chat, reads everything, types a reply. Deletes it. Writes another, shorter one. Deletes it again. Thinks about leaving the group, pictures the notification popping up for everyone, and gives up. Locks the screen. Ten minutes later, opens it again to see if anyone has said anything.

Maybe this scene is exactly yours. Maybe it belongs to someone close to you who has been quieter at Sunday lunches lately. What it has in common in almost every version is the feeling of facing three bad options (fighting, disappearing, or swallowing it) without finding a fourth.

The group was never just a group

From the outside, it looks like nothing much: an app conversation full of stickers, birthday reminders, and old chain messages. From the inside, it is something else. For many people, the family group chat has become the living room that no longer exists. It is where you find out that Grandma went to the doctor, where the photos of the newborn nephew show up, where the family goes on being a family even when it is scattered across different cities.

That is why it carries a weight no other group carries. Being there is a way of belonging. And what you belong to, in this case, is not only the real family, with its quirks and old hurts, but also the family as you would like it to be: the one in the holiday photo, everyone smiling, nobody at odds with anybody. That idealized family lives largely in that group, and it is the one that seems threatened when politics comes in.

When someone says they are thinking of leaving the group, they are rarely talking about an app. They are talking about leaving a place.

The forwarded message that hurts

There is a particular pain in receiving, in the family group chat, a message that was not written for you and still lands on you. It has no addressee. It arrived forwarded, sometimes marked as having circulated widely before it got there. The person who sent it did not write it. But they chose it.

And it is the choosing that hurts. In a newspaper, on some random profile, the same sentence would go almost unnoticed. In the family group chat, it says something about how that person, who has known you since you were a child, sees the side you are on. Sometimes it says, unintentionally, how they see you. The content of the message weighs less than the feeling of having become, for someone so close, the other.

This works in both directions, and it is worth keeping in mind. The uncle who felt stung by the cousin’s link felt exactly what she felt about his video. Each of them, on their own side, is convinced they were the first to be hurt, and each has their proof saved in the chat history.

When the group switches into combat mode

The English psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, who worked with groups during and after World War II and gathered his observations in Experiences in Groups (1961), noticed that every group swings between two ways of functioning. In one, it is focused on the task that brings it together and is able to think. In the other, it starts to act as if it had been brought together by an assumption that no one has said out loud. One of these assumptions he called fight-flight: the group behaves as if it existed only to fight an enemy or to escape from it.

In these weeks, the family group chat swings in exactly this way. On ordinary days, its task is simple: keeping people connected to one another. In campaign season, it can slide into fight-flight without anyone noticing the moment it happens. Those who argue are fighting. Those who mute the notifications, or leave, are often fleeing. And those who stay silent, reading everything in the middle of the night, are usually doing both on the inside.

What Bion helps us see is that, in this mode, the group stops thinking. Not because people are incapable, but because the logic of fight-flight does not need thought, it needs a side. That is why the arguments in the group all seem so alike. And that is why no one comes out of them having changed their mind.

The cost of fighting and the cost of silence

Many people have already made their choice. In July 2022, in a Datafolha survey of Brazilian voters, 53% said they had stopped posting about politics on messaging apps, and 49% said they had stopped talking about the subject with friends and family to avoid arguments. On each question, close to half of those surveyed chose to stay quiet.

It’s understandable. Fighting comes at a high price: the restless night, the sentence that can’t be taken back once it’s sent, the feeling of having been, for a few minutes, someone you don’t recognize. But silence has a price too, and it tends to be collected more slowly. Someone who swallows everything gradually becomes a little absent. They answer birthdays with an emoji and nothing more. They stop sending the photos. They arrive at Sunday lunch already tired of a conversation that never even happened. Resentment that goes unspoken does not disappear. It builds up, and it often leaks out later, over something that has nothing to do with politics.

There is no way out without a cost. There is the choice of which cost you are willing to pay, and that choice tends to be better when it is made with your eyes open, rather than on the impulse of a message at eleven at night.

Being in the group without needing to win

Leaving the group is sometimes treated as an insult, sometimes as cowardice. It may be neither. There are moments when stepping away from a place that has only been hurting is a way of preserving the relationship, not breaking it, as long as the bond keeps existing through other channels. Muting can be the same thing on a smaller scale. And staying can also be a legitimate choice, even for someone who disagrees with almost everything they read.

What matters is not so much which of the three you choose, but to what end. Leaving to punish is different from leaving to breathe. Staying quiet out of fear is different from staying quiet because that particular argument, there, isn’t worth the strain. Seen from the outside, the actions look the same. On the inside, they are opposites, and it is on the inside that they take their toll.

There is also a less obvious possibility, which is being in the group without needing to win the argument. The need to win almost always hides another one, the need to be recognized by those people: to hear from them that you are right, to have your own place confirmed. That confirmation does not come through argument. No one in a family was ever won over by a well-written reply in the group chat. When you realize that what you were looking for there was recognition, not victory, it is sometimes possible to stay without getting hurt so much, and without hurting others.

When the group takes up more space than it should

For most people, the discomfort with the group follows the calendar and eases once the election is over. For some, it doesn’t. It is worth paying attention when the group starts to take over the day: when you wake up thinking about what was said, when the conversation keeps running in your head at work, when your sleep starts to suffer because of it. And it is worth paying even closer attention when the hurt seems bigger than the message. When a sentence forwarded by a brother hurts like the confirmation of something old, of a place you have always occupied in the family, it is probably not only about the election.

In my practice, a fight in the family group chat is often the doorway to conversations that have nothing to do with politics. The sister who was always right. The father who never listened. The role of the one who gives in to avoid a fight, taken on very early in life. The election just dressed these stories in new clothes.

Psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy offers a place to think about what the fight, or the silence, is carrying. Not to decide for anyone whether to leave or stay, but so that the decision can be made from something more than the anger of the moment. And when the distress starts to take over the day, it makes sense to seek an evaluation, rather than waiting for the end of the campaign to sort it out on its own.

The group will still be there after the 25th, with the photos, the birthdays, and the usual good-morning messages. What can change is the question each person brings into it.