CALLING HOME with Whitney Goodman, LMFT - Are Adult Children Really Cutting Off Parents for Normal Mistakes?

Episode Date: June 9, 2026

When therapists say adult children are cutting off their parents for “normal parenting mistakes,” they're almost never specific about what that means. Whitney asked 300+ people to define a normal parenting mistake and the responses said it all. The episode explores what happens when there's no repair, no accountability, and no willingness to engage with a parenting misstep, unintentional or not, that genuinely hurt. Whitney Goodman is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) and the founder of Calling Home, a membership community that helps people navigate complex family dynamics and break harmful cycles.Have a question for Whitney? Send a voice memo or email to [e-mail] the Family Cyclebreakers Club: https://callinghome.coFollow Whitney on Instagram | sitwithwhitFollow Whitney on YouTube | @whitneygoodmanlmftOrder Whitney's book, Toxic Positivity: https://sitwithwhit.com/toxic-positivitySign up for updates on Whitney's new book: https://cmnyyv4kpyt.typeform.com/to/PHMzjy0oThis podcast is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional mental health advice. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A mistake. My mom accidentally left me behind at church because she thought I was riding with my dad. A choice. When I told my mom I was being abused, she told me to keep it a secret so I wouldn't jeopardize her chances of adopting three more kids. I guess one normal parenting mistake was when I was 14. My dad tried to hunt me with a machete shouting that he'd chopped my head off. My father abused me until age 16. He stalked me. He continues to stalk me. He self-published books describing how I deserved abuse as I was a terrible child. You know, normal parenting mistakes. Those are three real responses out of hundreds that I got from you all last week. I asked, when therapists say that parents are being cut off by their adult children for, quote, normal parenting mistakes, what are some examples? I asked because I keep seeing this framing floating around. A therapist will say with no specifics that estrangement is rampant or an epidemic, and that adult children are walking away from normal mistakes. And I wanted to know what regular people thought a normal parenting mistake actually was. And the answers were not what I expected. Welcome back to the Calling Home podcast. I'm Whitney Goodman. This is the show for people doing the work

nobody handed them a manual for, breaking patterns, navigating complicated families, figuring out what they actually owe the people that they came from. Today we're talking about the frame. Today we're talking about the framing of normal parenting mistakes. We're going to look at what concept creep actually is. That's the academic term for what's happening to words like trauma. And we're going to ask whether the word normal might be doing some creep of its own. We're going to walk through what 300 plus of you said when I asked the question. And we're going to land on what I think this whole conversation is actually about, which turns out to be a different thing than what it sounds like. This episode is not for parents who are listening because they want me to validate that their adult child is

unreasonable. It's also not for adult children who are looking for a permission slip to call ordinary friction abuse. There are real versions of both of those problems and we'll talk about them. But the goal is to look honestly at a phrase that I think is doing too much work in the cultural conversation right now on both sides. Before we get into it, two quick things. If anything we talk about on the show today feels like the work that you, You have been trying to do alone. You don't have to do that anymore. The Family Cycle Breakers Club as our membership community at Calling Home,

and it's a community of people actively trying to break generational patterns and build better families with structured support, real tools, and clinicians who get it. The link is in the show notes to join. If you have any question that you want to answer on a Thursday Q&A episode, you can send it to Whitney at callinghome.co. I'm really excited to have those episodes back, the first one since I've been back from a I'm out last Thursday. All right, let's go ahead and get into the episode.

The question I posted was on threads and I shared it to my Instagram story. And I also asked this question in the Instagram group that I have for adults who are estranged from a parent. And that was, when therapists say parents are being cut off for normal parenting mistakes, what are some examples? The reason that I asked this is because I've been hearing this framing for a long time. and it never really sits right with me, and I haven't been able to fully articulate why until I started reading these responses. So here's the version of the claim that I keep hearing. It's not said exactly like this, but it's something like this.

Adult children today have unreasonable expectations of their parents. They've been told by therapists that any imperfect parenting is harmful. So they're cutting off perfectly good parents for things that were just normal. The therapy industry, and especially therapists on social media are blamed for this. The implication is that adult children have been radicalized into seeing harm where there isn't any. And now look, I'm a parent. I have three children, okay? The expectations for parents are higher than they've ever been.

We'll not disagree with that. I think that we get caught up in a lot of frivolous, weird niche details about parenting. Not every parenting mistake is harmful. And we're going to talk about that. that. But the rise in certain expectations for parents is also a very, very good thing, in my opinion. There's a version of this critique that has a point, like I was just saying, and we'll get there. But the reason that I asked this question initially is because that whenever I'd hear this framing, I noticed that the person was almost never describing what they mean by normal parenting

mistakes. Okay. I've never seen a list from any of the people talking about this. I've never heard it describe. If you can find a video of this out there, a podcast, an article anywhere where someone clearly demonstrates what these normal parenting mistakes are, please, please, please send it to me. I would love to look at it. This is mostly talked about in the abstract, right? It's normal mistakes without ever describing what is actually normal. And I had a hypothesis that if you actually asked people what they considered a normal parenting mistake versus what they consider something else, you would find that the word normal was actually doing a lot more heavy lifting than anyone was admitting. And let's just say that based on the people that I heard from, that hypothesis

is turned out to be well supported by what people are telling me. Before I walk you through what people said, I want to give you the academic context for this whole conversation. A lot of this is based on, I think, this one study, right? There's a researcher named Nick Haslam at the University of Melbourne, who in 2016 coined the term concept creep. It's a real thing. The paper is now widely cited, and his argument is that a handful of psychology concepts, abuse, bullying, trauma, addiction, mental disorder, and prejudice have expanded over the last few decades in two directions. Okay. So they've expanded horizontally, meaning they've come to cover qualitatively new kinds of experiences. And they've expanded vertically, meaning they've come to cover less severe versions of what

they used to mean. Okay. So for example, the word trauma, which used to refer mainly to like catastrophic life-threatening events that produce PTSD, that has crept to include experiences that we may have previously considered in the range of really hard or really hurtful. And the word has spread sideways from clinical use only into everyday speech. You're going to hear the word trauma a lot in TikToks, Instagram videos, and the way people joke about being traumatized by something that happened at work. And Haslam and his colleagues have actually quantified this, right? A 2023 paper of his analyzed 870,330 psychology abstracts and found that the semantic severity

of the word trauma has declined since the 1970s, meaning that in the literature itself, trauma is being used to describe less and less severe events over time. And it's absolutely describing something that I think some of you've probably felt, that you are seeing the word trauma being used in a way that feels disproportionate to what's being described. So, you know, you could say like a kid describing their parents not picking them up as traumatizing and a TikTok creator saying that like they're in a trauma bond with a person they had a bad breakup with. Like this stuff exists. We've seen that there's a lot of misdiagnosis or what people are considering to be over diagnosis of certain mental health.

diagnoses and it's true that the word and its definition have expanded. I agree with that. It's being misused and mislabeled at times, but I want to push back on this a little bit because I think this is how this gets used and weaponized in certain conversations. Concept creep is a description of how language changes. It is not an argument on its own that every individual person using the word is wrong. And the fact that trauma has broadened in the literature does not tell you whether the specific person in front of you is saying, my parent was emotionally abusive, and that they're misusing the word. That's, that's a totally separate question. And it doesn't mean that we get to say that all of these people who are saying they're traumatized are actually not

traumatized because there's been concept creep. And we're going to talk a little bit more about the word normal and concept creep in the opposite direction as well. Here's the part I think that gets missed in that conversation. If trauma is covering more lesser severe things, normal has been creeping in the other direction and has existed in that other direction for a very long time. And this is what I mean. a lot of things get defended as normal parenting and historically have been defended as normal parenting that now we know is harmful. And the people who are defending it have always done so with the word normal. Spanking, for example, for a long time, normal.

A lot of people will still argue that it's normal. It drives me insane. You will find in every comment section. I am who I am because my parents hit me. Spanking is not abuse. Like, it's so old at this point. It's like you're arguing with a wall. We have so much evidence that that is no longer beneficial, shouldn't be normal, shouldn't be common, isn't helpful to kids, okay? Beating kids with belts. For a long time, normal in many homes. Mocking, shaming, screaming is discipline. Normal. Ignoring a child's emotional state because they need to

toughen up? Normal for a lot of families. Normal for a very considerable period of time. Telling a child to keep an abuse disclosure secret was in many families and is still is normal, certainly not unheard of. They would tell them to conceal certain things because it would be catastrophic to the family. Pulling your teenagers and your children into the role of unpaid emotional caretaker for a parent. Extremely normal. Still is. getting your kid in public or in private. There are still adults alive today who saw that happening in front of them and would not intervene because they think that it is normal. I saw a video of this happening in front of a Trader Joe's in North Carolina the other day with a two-year-old

whose parent punched them in the chest in front of three eyewitnesses. And these parents are now recording like video responses on TikTok arguing about why this is normal. discipline and they have a right to do that to their child. This is all considered normal in certain ecosystems and it is not in fact normal at all. So the word normal is doing work in both directions. It's not just that the trauma word has expanded. It's that these normal parenting mistakes frame is actually being used to mean common. Okay. And a lot of you said this. Someone wrote normal as in common or understandable, those are two different things. A lot of parenting mistakes are normalized, but they are unacceptable. Another wrote, that's how we did things back then. It's not normal

parenting mistakes. It actually creates generational trauma, and we know this. It's well documented in the literature. And a third person said, normal being common doesn't mean the mistakes aren't catastrophic. So the entire critique of estrangement as overcorrection rests on the assumption that there a stable shared definition of what counts as a normal parenting mistake. And there isn't. There never has been. Who's normal? Who's era? Who's culture? Whose tolerance? When a therapist says people are cutting off their parents for normal parenting mistakes, they're treating normal as if it is a fixed point and it is not. And I think, I suspect that if they actually, because I've asked many, many people, tell me what your normal parenting mistake was.

estranged parents will tell me, I'm being cut off for normal parenting mistakes. Tell me. What were they? What was the normal parenting mistake? And they will not share. And that leads me to believe that they know that what they're talking about is actually it was common. It happened in a lot of households. But it wasn't necessarily something that should have been happening or that was okay. And if you are listening to this and you're saying, no, I'm happy to share what my normal parenting mistakes are, please, go ahead. I'll share a few with you. I would think that for me as a parent, a normal parenting mistake would be like occasionally forgetting something, maybe being in a little bit of a bad mood when things were stressful and then apologizing for taking that out

on my child, being a little bit late to pick them up sometimes, even though if you're consistently there on time otherwise and you're not like abandoning them all the time, I would consider normal parenting mistakes to be things that happen infrequently are repaired that exist within the context of high stress moments in the family, not all the time. And that the parent is able to recognize to the child was a mistake and shouldn't have happened and that they're able to repair for, right? You know, one of my kids will say like, mom, I can't believe you forgot my water bottle. I can't believe you did that, like said this to me. And I was like, well, actually, but it's your responsibility to bring your water bottle to school.

Let's come up with a system to make sure that you bring your water bottle to school. And my kid didn't have his water bottle that day at school. I would consider that normal parenting thing, you know, forgetting to sign a paper, things like that. These things that like, they're not traumatic. They don't, they, they, they're not the overarching theme of the child's life. They are things that happen and we can repair and we can show love in those moments, but they are not things like I got screamed at every single day or my parents were always fighting in my house and at each other's throats. That's not a normal parenting mistake, in my opinion. And I don't think that the evidence speaks to that either, but I would be happy to hear

different viewpoints on that, if you would like to share in the comments what you think normal parenting mistakes are under your definition. All of us have parents that have made normal parenting mistakes. I think many of those people still have relationships with their parents today because every parent makes mistakes, myself included. So now I want to walk through what the response is to my question actually looked like because I think they tell us something important about what this conversation is really about. And I read all of these responses. There were around 300 something of them. I categorize them. And I want to walk you through what came up most often and what I think it means. Okay. The number one response by an enormous margin was some version of this. It's not the mistake.

It's the lack of accountability, repair, and changes after. Hundreds of people in different words said the same thing. So I'll raise you a few of them. Adult children are not cutting off their parents for normal parenting mistakes, they're cutting them off for their lack of accountability, repair, and growth. It's not the mistake. It's the lack of accountability, apology, or change in behavior. Any therapist who thinks it's about the mistakes and not the lack of repair might need to review some of their previous course material. I can forgive the lousy job you did, but I cannot forgive the shit you are still doing, in all caps. The crazy thing about this is parents likely wouldn't get cut off if they just apologized. It's okay to make mistakes, but adult children are cutting off their

parents for doubling down on said mistakes. No repair, no accountability, no change equals no relationship. You want a relationship with your kids, then you have to change. They are not saying parents need to have been perfect. They're saying that when imperfection happened, the repair didn't. And when there was no repair, distance was the only option left at times or the only option that they felt like they could choose from. There was a comment that I saw that I think distilled this better than any of the other responses. And someone wrote, I was physically abused by one parent and emotionally neglected by the other. I have a better relationship with the parent that abused me now because they took full accountability,

took steps to repair the relationship on my terms, and put in maximum effort to fixing things. The other parent has never taken accountability for their mistakes, and our relationship is almost non-existent because of that. That one says a lot, right? the second most common response was like some snarkiness, right? A lot of people said something like, oh, you mean normal parenting mistakes like and then followed it by something that was obviously not a normal parenting mistake. And these responses were everywhere and the pattern of them was almost identical. So someone would frame a real mistake, then frame what actually happened to show the contrast.

So one said, a mistake was my mom wouldn't let me swim after eating. Yeah. that's not really a mistake, but I guess I get what you're saying. Like, that's just something that was, like, annoying to the child or, like, a thing at the time that bothered them. A choice, my mom driving off and leaving me in a parking lot by myself as a nine-year-old because she wasn't happy with the way I got in the car. Obviously, that's not a normal parenting mistake. Failing to take them to the hospital for days after breaking a bone because they thought the kid was faking. Whipping me with a leather bullwit, my brother bought as a souvenir in Mexico.

locking us in a cellar without light where the floor was half water and full of broken canning jars. Sitting on me to rip out my baby teeth and yanking my joints out of socket to relieve her stress. Sorry guys, some of these are really terrible. I'm reading these on purpose, though, because the framing of normal parenting mistakes requires you not to picture these things. It requires you to see them as truly this very, very small minority of people that are cutting off their parents, that they are the tiniest group, and for these people it's okay, but for all the other people, they're actually just talking about normal parenting mistakes. And when you make it specific, that framing really falls apart. The vast majority of people answering these questions

were not describing parents who like lost their patience occasionally. They were describing parents who did things that no reasonable person in any era would call normal and were now upset about being held accountable for it. The third theme was the doubling down problem. So parents who, after being told that something they did was hurtful, refused to stop, apologize, or engage in repair. And multiple people described patterns where they had communicated this clearly, sometimes for years, about a specific behavior. And the parent's response was to do it again and to call the adult child the problem. One person said, refusing to stop doing something even after the child has communicated clearly. and repeatedly for years that this behavior hurts the child, doubling down by telling the adult child that the parent's feelings are more important and thus it doesn't matter if the child is being hurt. The refusal to update the relationship after being told why the cutoff happened. The fourth theme, and this one is going to be uncomfortable, I think for some of my own colleagues,

was suspicion of the framing itself. A lot of people pushed back on the premise of the question, by asking who exactly is even telling therapists that adult children are cutting off their parents for normal mistakes? And someone said those therapists have believed the parents without context. Another said what therapists are saying this and to whom? If it's to the parents who have been cut off, that session is not in good faith. They are not representing themselves in order to learn accountability but to be validated. Only parents who have been cut off or who claim their therapist says this. I have never heard a good therapist say that. And I want to take this point seriously because I think it's important. A lot of the therapists who repeat, like the normal mistakes framing, I think,

are repeating it because it's what they're hearing in their offices from the parent, right? And I think that this is coming exclusively from a specific type of parent, which I like to call the perpetually estranged parent. This is a subgroup of parents that I think follows a very specific set of behavioral rules, language patterns, and an inability to demonstrate insight. This is not all estranged parents, because let's remember that we see this in the data. A lot of times estrangement is temporary. And a lot of estranged parents and their adult children find their way back to them and them each other. And they do repair. Okay. So the ones that are saying this tend to fall into a specific subgroup of parents.

And I find that those also tend to be the loudest and the ones who are engaged the most in the public discourse. Okay. And I have a podcast episode on this called The Perpetually Strange Parent and you're going to see a lot more about my work on this in my book, The Parent You Have, that is coming out early next year. A fifth and smaller cluster of these responses pointed at very specific things parents did that parents themselves probably still consider normal.

Okay. So like bigotry that the child or grandchild was on the receiving end of, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and refusing to evolve on positions that materially harmed someone in the immediate family. And these are the ones, I think, that the cultural conversation has the hardest time with because they get framed as like cutting your parent off over politics. Okay. But what's actually being described is a parent treating a member of the immediate family with contempt and then describing the consequence. of that is just like, I'm not allowed to say anything. And they cut me off because of a belief that I hold. The relationship was fine otherwise. You know, it's that type of rhetoric. One person said, my parents tell

people I cut them off because of politics. There would be no clarification that I have in writing that one of the many reasons I went no contact with them is because of their persistent racism. To them, that falls under both politics and normal differences. That gap between what a parent calls normal and what the child actually experienced is often the issue here. If you step back from the individual responses, you do see a pattern here. And the question that I asked you all on the surface, I think, was asking for examples of normal parenting mistakes. But almost no one answered the question the way that it was asked. What people overwhelmingly responded to was a different question, which is what is, what is,

what is actually driving cutoffs. And what they said in a thousand variations was it's not the original event. It's the response to being held accountable for it. And I think that's why the normal parenting mistakes framing is misleading. It treats the cutoff as if it's the verdict on a single event, as if the adult has weighed the parent's worst day and decided that it's. unforgivable. That's almost never what's being reported. What's happening is the adult child has tried to bring the event up over years, often in the gentlest way that they could manage, and the parent has refused to engage in that process. The parent has gotten defensive,

gaslit, blamed, doubled down, recruited other family members, told everyone outside the conversation that the kid is being unreasonable. And eventually, the adult child has gone, I cannot keep doing this. stepped back. Now, I don't want to leave this concept creep concept on the table without doing it justice because I think there is a real version of this critique and it deserves to be named, right? Here's what I think actually has some weight. There is a version of online therapy content that does, of course, flattened complicated family dynamics into like a bumper sticker. Okay. There is a version of this where the term narcissist is getting handed out like candy where it does not apply or where a creator will list 10 signs of a toxic parent that don't really

describe very clear behaviors that would be associated with neglect or abuse, right? And they're not talking about how often those behaviors happen. Did they happen consistently? Was there repair after it? Things that would either protect from some of the negative consequences of that behavior or make it hurt worse. Okay. So when I push back on this rhetoric of normal parenting mistakes framing, I'm not saying every cutoff is justified forever. And I'm not saying that every adult child is reading what's going on

in their family clearly all the time. And not every person that uses the word narcissists and empath and anxiety is doing so 100% correctly on the internet. It's everywhere. You can see it. what I'm saying is, is that even when I take all of that seriously, even when I look at the concept of concept creep, I still don't believe that this framing of adult children are cutting off parents for normal mistakes is the number one framing. Okay. And that theory doesn't survive when you talk to other adults about why they end up. the relationship with their parent. It just doesn't hold up. So both can be true, right? The trauma

word has expanded. Normal has also expanded or has existed as a very expansive definition for quite some time. And most adult children who go no contact do so after years of trying. The therapy industry has some bad faith voices in it. And there's also some important psychoeducation that is existing at scale here. And both can be happening at the same time. When someone shows up in my office or in one of our groups at calling home and they've gone no contact with a parent, the story really never is. They just made a mistake one time and I couldn't get over it. The story usually starts with like the most recent thing. And then there's a pattern behind that. Right. And the most recent thing was typically just like the snap, the straw that broke the camels back, but it was the last line in an attempt or a series of

things. And one of the most common questions that comes up in our groups is, do I really need to cut them off? And the fact that the question keeps coming up, I think, tells you something important, right? That these are not people walking away casually. There are people who even like months and years into no contact are still checking themselves. Okay? And someone wrote this saying, it is the hardest breakup known to man. No one is casually going no contact. Another wrote, you really have to be badly wounded by your parent to separate yourself from them. We are hardwired to love our parents and society demands that we do so. That matches what I see clinically. It doesn't match the other framing. I want to spend some time talking about some of these fringe cases, though, because I think we

owe it to the conversation. You know, there are situations, of course, where the picture is a little bit murkier and people could land in a couple of different places, right? So triangulation does happen. Sometimes one parent in a divorce or in a high conflict family has been actively undermining the relationship between the child and the other parent. And that adult child might arrive at a conclusion about a parent that is partially true or not true at all. or only true at one point in time and has since improved. And I think that this is painful for everyone, including the parent in the situation. You know, there was a response from someone to my question that had been on the wrong end of this and said that her ex had lied to their kids. The kids believed

him. She had to wade it out. She respected her adult child's wish and that eventually they were able to repair. Right. And so these types of estrangements can be temporary. circumstantial and situational when there's a lot of conflict happening in a family. There can also be adult children who are struggling. You've heard me talk about this a lot, that sometimes the cutoff is happening during a season when the adult child is in active addiction, a mental health crisis, relationship turmoil, and the parent has been trying to set boundaries or limits, and the person decides to take space because of that. I had an episode come out a couple weeks ago about distance that.

is not estrangement. And we talked a lot about this type of distance that can happen when you are going through a hard time or you are struggling. I'm going to speak directly to the parents now. I think it's really important that you stop asking whether the original event was normal. That's not really the question here. The question is what's happened since it was brought up? What happened between the two of you when it was brought up? And if the answer is that you got defensive, you blame them, you told them they were being dramatic, told other family members they were being unreasonable or used silence as a punishment, that's probably the thing that they're responding to. Not the original event, the repair or the absence of repair.

That's the issue. I think we have to take it really seriously that your child is probably not asking you to be perfect. They're just asking you to be different or to care. They are probably asking you to be the kind of person who can hear that they were hurt without making it all about you and taking care of your feelings. And I think that a lot of adults, they want to be close with their parents, right? And I think they would go back to the relationship if they knew that their parent could do that.

The barrier isn't the past. It's the present day capacity that isn't happening in this. in this relationship. And don't assume that estrangement isn't reversible. The path back almost never comes from convincing them they were wrong. Okay. Right? It comes from demonstrating, like, without drama and just slowly that you can be in a

relationship with them and talk about what happened without the conversation turning into like a fight or at all being about you or becoming defense. I think it's also important that parents don't weaponize the normal parenting mistakes frame against their children, right? The moment you tell your adult child that they cut you off because of normal parenting mistakes, like when you start sharing this with other people and say that's what happened, it really just shows me that you probably don't understand their reasoning. And so maybe you need more of an explanation. Maybe you're willfully not accepting what has been told to you. But there's something missing there where that's the only description, right? We need to be more specific.

Okay, if it was normal parenting mistakes, what is the normal parenting mistake in your specific situation? Okay. And do your own work in the meantime. Okay. So therapy, friends, a peer support group. I know a lot of parents do enjoy Joshua Coleman, who's been studying parental estranged men, and he's one that parents like. And he also really encourages parents to do their own work in the meantime so that they can come to the conversation having genuinely worked through their part. And that leads to better, more meaningful outcomes in reconnection.

So way better if you're that parent. And to the adults listening to this who have had to pull back from a parent. And, you know, I want to say something carefully here that almost everything I've said in this episode is in service of you and in support of you having to make this hard decision. And the framing of normal parenting mistakes is a framing that does real harm to people who tried for years and finally stepped back. And I want everyone to feel less alone than that. And again, because I say this every week on the podcast, we are very big on self-awarely. awareness and accountability here. And so I want to give you a few questions that you can ask yourself to create some more insight and honesty. And if you've already done this, if you feel like it's

going to be, you know, not helpful for you, you can skip it. But my first question is, have you tested your theory about the dynamic with your parent and your thoughts on it with anyone outside of the family? A therapist, a friend you trust, someone who can help you question a narrative that might be rooted in the past and not the present that maybe has changed or that you are just feeling really guarded around. Sometimes that can help us loosen some of our defenses when possible and when it is appropriate to. Okay. Have you given your parent a chance to repair over time? Have you allowed them to kind of work through therapy and their own process on their own, not with you involved, but just giving them the space and the time to do that

if that's something that they are interested in. Are you using cutoff to avoid a conversation you don't want to have? Sometimes distance can be avoidance that we think is wisdom. And I think you have to be honest with yourself about which one it is. And a lot of you really have been. And are you using language that fits your parent and what they actually did? And is that language helping you. I think sometimes we can use words or therapy language to describe the parent and it can be incredibly empowering and liberating and helpful. And sometimes it doesn't quite feel right. And we think that we need to use those labels in order to move forward and you don't. This is not a call out. Most people who go no contact or become as strange for genuine reasons

have already asked themselves all of these questions a hundred times. And if you've asked them and still landed where you land in, great. But if you haven't asked them, I think they're good questions to ask. Before I wrap this up, I want to say this. You know, the framing of normal parenting mistakes treats this whole conversation as a debate about events. And if there is a list of things parents did, and we have to score them and figure out which ones were bad enough to justify a cutoff, and that's not what's happening. The actual conversation is about what happens after, the repair or the absence of it. And what I want you to think about instead is, instead of was the mistake normals, how did this

impact our relationship? How is it impacting our relationship today? Why can't we talk about it without the parent getting really defensive and me feeling unheard? What is it about this issue that feels like something to blow off for them but feels really big to me. I want to come back to where we started. A mother who told her child to keep an abuse disclosure secret so she could adopt more kids. A father with a machete, a father who's self-published books about how his daughter deserved to be abused. If you are a therapist who has been telling parents or telling the public that adult children are cutting off their parents for normal

mistakes, I want you to picture those three responses and ask yourself whether the framing you're using has any room for the people who wrote them. If you're a parent and I know some of you are listening, I want you to know that I do not believe most of you are these people. I don't. But the framing of normal mistakes was designed in part to spare you the harder conversation, which is whether there's something you've been refusing to look at. If you're an adult child, and I know more of you are listening here than parents probably,

whatever you stepped back from and the answers I got from people in your same position tell me you almost certainly didn't do it casually. The work if you want a relationship is not about deciding whether the mistake was normal. The question is whether you can sit in the same room together and have an honest conversation about what happened with understanding from the parent and honesty from the adult child. If you can do that, I think almost anything is recoverable. If you can't, then it's very rare that it is. If this episode hits something for you and you want to keep doing this work in a structured way with people who get it, the Family Psycho-Wikers Club is where we do that.

It's our membership community at Calling Home. And we talk about family conflict, repair, and what reconciliation actually requires from both sides. We have community, structured guidance, and clinicians who care. The link is in the show notes. If you have a question for a Thursday episode, send it in writing or a voice note to Whitney at calling home.com. So thanks for spending this time with me and thank you to the hundreds of you who answered the question that built this episode. I will see you on Thursday. The Calling Home podcast is not engaged in providing therapy services, mental health advice or other medical advice or services.

It is not a substitute for advice from a qualified health care provider and does not create any therapist, patient or other treatment relationship between you and Colling Home or Whitney Goodman. For more information on this, please see Calling Home's terms of service linked in the show notes below.