The NPE Process

These are thoughts that I had in response to the article “Missed Connections” in The New Yorker Aug. 25, 2025. The article discusses the rise of NPEs, people who discover, usually through 23 and Me or Ancestry.com, that one of their family members, usually a father, is not genetically related to them. I have done a few comics about my own experience (Someone to Watch Over Me 3, Reaction, and The Secret) and even been on a podcast. The piece below summarizes my insights about the long ranging effects of the discovery.

I just want to comment that many people focus on the NPE discovery and the emotions that result, including blame and anger. But that is just the beginning of the process. It keeps going. 

So yes, as an NPE, you first focus on the newly discovered biological relative, usually a biological father. You feel disbelief, confusion, and excitement. Then you get angry at the lie, the fact that this relative had been hidden from you. But this lie in turn reveals something deeper about the functioning of your birth certificate family. In order for that lie to have existed, it had to have been maintained. In some cases it was maintained by one family member, in others a few, and in others by every member of the family except you. That means that for the entire course of your life, up until the moment of the discovery, your family has been actively hiding the truth from you. So what you uncover is not just a biological relative, and not just a betrayal, but a dysfunctional habit of behavior within your birth certificate family. This causes you to reframe your entire childhood. Certain odd occurrences that seemed to have no cause now have one. Certain behaviors that confused you now take on a new clarity. 

What’s more is that the pattern persists. Since the lie has existed until the moment of discovery, most families feel comfortable continuing it. And so when you ask for clarity, you are often met with disassembly, obfuscation, and sometimes hostility. And so the loving family that you thought were there to nurture you instead continue to be active perpetrators in your disillusionment.

As an NPE you lose two families. You lose the imagined family with your biological relative, the fantasy, and you lose your birth certificate family, what you had thought was the reality.