CALLING HOME with Whitney Goodman, LMFT - Are Therapists Biased Against Estranged Parents?

Episode Date: February 26, 2026

Why aren’t therapists centering estranged parents at least as equally as their children? Whitney breaks down what bias actually means in a clinical context.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 Club⁠⁠Follow Whitney on Instagram | sitwithwhitFollow Whitney on YouTube | @whitneygoodmanlmft⁠⁠Order Whitney’s book, Toxic PositivityThis 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.

Hello and welcome back to the Calling Home podcast. I am your host, Whitney Goodman. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist and the founder of the Family Cycle Breakers Club at Calling Home. That is our membership community where you can join and meet other people who are working on building a better family just like you. I'm coming here today to let you know that I am so pregnant and my maternity leave is starting on February 28th. So what does that mean for the podcast? I have pre-recorded episodes that are going to be released every Tuesday from the start of March until the end of May. I will be back recording the episodes at the end of May when my maternity leave is over. So don't worry, you're still going to get one episode every week. And for those of you that are members of the Family Cycle Wiggers Club, I will still be doing my live and recorded Q&As once a month for my entire maternity leave. and you will be getting the same content from me delivered every Monday to your inbox. We will have our other wonderful licensed therapist, Sam and Stephanie, our group facilitators that run the family estrangement group, as well as the daughters with difficult mothers group

will be stepping in for me for the groups that I run at Calling Home, but those groups will still be happening. And I know that they will still be amazing and you are in good hands. you will also hear from me on a private discussion boards while I'm out. I know I will be checking in on there and saying hi and responding to you. So as always, you can join the family cycle breakers club at Calling Home at www.callinghome.com.com.com.com. Even while I am out, everything will still be running. And look out for some really great episodes of the podcast that I've recorded that I know that you are going to love with some special guests as well. But today for my last episode, before I go on maternity leave, I want to talk about the myth of being unbiased. There is a lot of chatter online

about therapists being biased about estrangement, particularly between adults and their parents. and a lot of the big parent estrangement creators like to talk about these biases and they like to talk about their favorite creators that are unbiased. And I find this to be really, really interesting. And so I wanted to record an episode about why therapists don't need to hear both sides and exploring therapeutic neutrality and why that doesn't always mean equal validation of all perspectives, especially in cases of abuse or where there are power dynamics involved. The question that I hear all the time and that I see a lot in these spaces, you know, is why are you so biased towards the adult child? Why don't you present both sides? A good therapist should be

unbiased. And I get this. I think that when you're in pain, when you're the one that's being cut off, or when you feel misunderstood or vilified, you want somebody to validate. your experience. You want fairness and you want someone to acknowledge that maybe your adult child is wrong. And I think adult children in this dynamic can of course be wrong. And I've said this many times that adults can hurt their parents. They can do things that are unkind. They can act in ways that are abusive and disruptive. All of that is true. And I really don't like to get so caught up in who's right, who's wrong. I think these are often debates about perspective and experience and feelings rather than facts. And that's, I think, where we get a little bit

lost here. But I want to dig into today is really like what does it actually mean to be unbiased as a therapist? And why do therapists align with their clients? Why don't we want to hear both sides to do effective therapy. And why is neutrality actually impossible and frankly unethical in certain situations when we're talking about abuse and specific power dynamics? So let's talk about bias first. What does bias really mean? When people accuse a therapist of being biased, I find that what they usually mean is actually you're not validating. my perspective. You're siding with the other person. And I see this reflected a lot in content about divorce, marriage, sharing the mental load in relationships, infidelity, custody battles,

like anything where there is sort of this power dynamic or this dichotomy of like man versus woman, one parent versus the other, I see this. But bias in the clinical sense when we're talking about therapy actually means allowing your personal prejudices or relevant factors to cloud your professional judgment. When a therapist is bias, it means that you're making assumptions based on stereotypes rather than the individual situation and letting like your own unprocessed stuff get in the way of understanding your client. And of course, all therapists have biases that if they go unchecked and unevaluated can come out through their work. They can transfer those biases onto the client, make assumptions about them, et cetera. And a lot of people who are

not trained to do therapy and do not have the experience of compartmentalizing their own experiences, not looking at things through that lens, tend to do this in their content. And I actually, for myself, have found that I don't like to work with issues that are too close to home for me that are currently happening in my life. Like when I was going through postpartum, I found like I really, I really, don't want to work with someone who's going through something like this right now because it's too triggering for me and I'm too in it to be effective. And I've always kind of had that with me throughout my career. And I've told you all, you know, I'm not estranged from my parents. I'm not

an estranged adult child. This is not something that I'm currently like working through. This has more been something that I have found to be an issue that I really enjoy working with and learning about and I've always worked with family dynamics, but this dynamic has been particularly intriguing to me. But my personal experience with estrangement is not part of my work with this population. So I think that I try to not bring that to the table, especially because because it's not something I'm dealing with. Now, that doesn't mean that every adult who is estranged from a parent can't also be an effective clinician in that area.

They absolutely can. But I think that if you are a person dealing with estrangement who does not have training outside of your personal experience, you are inherently biased because you are only speaking about yourself. You have not done any other work outside of your own. experience, which is still valid and productive, but it's that. It's your experience. Now, being unbiased as a clinician doesn't mean that the therapist has to give equal weight to every perspective that exists around a situation. I think this is where things get really misunderstood.

The therapeutic alliance is what is the driver of change in therapy, which means that therapists need to align with their clients in order to be effective. And there have been studies on this, that the quality of the therapeutic relationship accounts for as much variance in client outcomes as a specific treatment method used. So it means that when I am working with an adult child who is estranged from their parents or navigating a difficult relationship with their parents, my job is to understand their experience, validate their feelings. That doesn't mean that I agree with them.

or I say that they're always right. In fact, I find myself and I heard this feedback from clients to be quite a confrontational style of therapists. Like I am going to call you out. I'm very direct. I think you all can tell that from my personality through this show that, yes, I validate and will say that's hard. That's very challenging.

But I'm also going to tell you, is there another way we can look at that? Do you think that there's anything else that has contributed to this? it's not that everybody just gets like carte blanche acceptance of every feeling and decision that they make in therapy. That's not how therapy works. That's not how therapists have treated me. That's bad therapy if that's what you're getting. Your therapist should first build a solid relationship and foundation with you, but then

they should challenge you. Of course. I remember when I was working in addiction, like an addiction treatment center residential facility, I would have people all the time tell me like, I'm just here. because I like drinking beer. I like the taste of it. And that's like a thought that I would be like, you blew up your whole life because you like the taste of beer.

Like, really? Explain that to me. You know, there's ways that your therapist can challenge you while still being kind and validating and saying like, yeah, beer's good, but like, come on, man. Be honest with me, right? So therapists align with their clients by basically telling them, like, I'm in your corner. I'm trying to understand your world from the inside out.

It doesn't mean that I endorse everything you do or think or say. It just means that I'm on your team and I'm trying to help you get out of this problem or this hole that you're in. And again, there's research on this that when clients feel truly understood and accepted, they're more willing to be vulnerable. They can explore difficult emotions and they can make meaningful changes. So if you feel like I'm on your side, I want you to get better, I also, because I care about you, I'm going to challenge you, then you are going to trust me more. And I think that that's a foundational belief that therapists need to have that we need to treat our clients with respect, see them as human beings, believe that everyone is capable and willing to pursue change if they are coming into our offices and treat them with that level of dignity and respect, right? But there's some nuance to this because being aligned with my client doesn't mean, again, that I rubber stamp every decision that they make.

If someone comes into my office and tells me that they're planning to harm someone else, I'm going to intervene. If they're engaging in self-destruction or self-harm, I'm going to challenge that and also try to protect them and keep them safe. But those interventions come from a place of being on their team, not from standing outside their experience, judging it being critical, and trying to enforce rules and change on them. There's a huge difference between those two things. And when I'm working with adults who have gone no contact or are estranged from their parents

or are thinking about pursuing that path, I'm aligned with them in trying to understand why they want to make that choice and what has led them to make that choice. That doesn't mean that I say, oh, your parents are evil. Reconciliation is impossible. It means that I try to honor. their experience and their autonomy to make decisions about their own experiences in that relationship. And I help them see, hey, if somebody is hitting you, that's not right. This isn't normal. This is actually considered abuse. And here is information that we have about that.

This is what can happen when a parent abandons you for six months and leaves you, with someone that you don't know. You know, we can rely on our ability to consult with other clinicians, to read research, and to use the vast experience that we have working with people like this person to help inform them of the consequences of certain behavior, what happens when you ignore X, Y, and Z, how growing up with these types of influences can impact you. And that's just presenting them with information that they can find in a book. on Google.

You know, it's all out there. It's just being expressed in this relationship, in this medium. Now, I know this is where I'm going to lose some people, but stick with me. When someone comes into my office or comes into our groups at Calling Home or writes on our discussion boards, I don't need to fact check it with everyone else involved to help them. and therapy is not a courtroom. I'm not a judge trying to determine what is the objective truth here.

I'm a therapist trying to help someone heal and understand their subjective experience and their pain. So if someone comes to therapy and says, I'm anxious at work, I don't go and interview their boss, their spouse and their mother to verify that they're actually. actually anxious. They're experiencing it. They're telling me what they're experiencing, and I'm in that space and that experience with them. And the same is true for relational trauma. If an adult tells me that they experienced emotional abuse growing up, I'm not going to just say, okay, you experience emotional abuse. First thing I'm going to say is, can you tell me what emotional abuse is for you. What would you describe from your childhood as being emotionally abusive? I want to understand their definition of that, what they are calling emotional abuse. I want to validate

for them what is backed up by research and data and experience as being emotional abuse. I want to know how they've been impacted and how they've come to understand their experience of emotional abuse. So it's not that someone walks in and says, I was emotionally abused by my parents, and I just say, okay. Like, no, we are going to dive deeper into that, of course. And I need to understand what they experienced. I'm actually less concerned with the label of emotional abuse and more about their experience of that.

It's also that their experience, regardless of the parents' intent, is valid to me. So that doesn't mean that I accept everything at face value with zero critical thinking. You know, part of my job is to help people explore their own narratives, consider alternative perspectives when it's therapeutically useful, and challenge any cognitive distortions when they emerge. But that's very different from saying, okay, I hear your story. But let me talk to your mom to make sure that you're telling the truth. and then I only believe what is perfectly aligned between mom and child or what mom says.

That's not being unbiased. Now, there's also a lot of work on betrayal trauma out there. And there's research that shows that when someone experiences harm or abuse from someone that they depend on, like a parent, that person who experienced the abuse actually often minimizes that trauma as a survival mechanism. And I have seen through my experience working with this population that people are actually often underreporting what happened to them, not over exaggerating. You also cannot be neutral about abuse. So I want to be really clear about this. Neutrality is not possible and it's not ethical when we're talking about abuse. And I think the

problem here is that we sort of expect, or there's this false belief, that abusive people are going to admit to being abusive. And by far and large, parents who are abusive to their children try to deflect, negate, and explain away that abuse. We have this documented in courtrooms, in custody hearings. That is what happens. It is very rare they are going to get a parent that says, yes, I abused my children. I was abusive to them. They might. They might. say yes, I did that, but I did that because X, and they tried to explain it away. They might minimize certain details, but it's very rare that you're going to get a parent that opens up TikTok and says, I abused my kids. There's a couple of people, you know, I just interviewed

someone for the podcast a couple of weeks ago about that and estranged parent who has like come out and said, I'm a formerly, you know, abusive parent and estranged parent. But it's not the norm that you're going to find that. So I think that therapists need to take a clear stance against abuse. Therapists cannot side with the abuser. That is part of our ethical obligation to our clients. And so if I'm sitting across from someone who tells me they were hit as a child and my response is, you know, I really need to hear your parents side of the story to see if that actually happened. I have just betrayed that client. I've communicated that their experience doesn't matter, and I will not believe it until

I get their credibility reinforced by the person that they're telling me abused them. And I know some of you might jump in here and say, like, but what if that adult child is lying? Like, yes, some people lie, but statistically false allegations about abuse are rare. They're much less common than we think, and the far bigger problem is underreporting and disbelief of real abuse. And when you review the research on estrangement, you will find that most adult children who go no contact do so after years of trying to repair the relationship. It's not a rash decision.

It's usually a last resort after repeated boundary violations in validation or harm. and I actually find that I hear from a lot of clients who have worked with therapists, that their therapist actually pressured them to stay in relationship with those parents and not to pursue any type of estrangement or distance from them. The other thing that gets left out of the conversation often is that power dynamics do not disappear in adulthood. So this is one of the biggest myths that I try to challenge. And that is that the power dynamic between the adults and the parent is,

evaporates, like as if turning 18, 25, or 40 suddenly makes this relationship equal. And that's not how attachment works. It's not how family systems work and it's not how trauma works. When you grow up with parents and the relationship with them is tainted with fear, unpredictability, or harm, it creates lasting impacts that last into adulthood. And becoming an adulthood, an adult, does not change that dynamic with that parent. Those adults still carry the weight of those early dynamics, and they carry those implicit messages they received about their worth, their voice, and their right to have boundaries.

And when they try to assert themselves as adults, they're often met with the same patterns that harmed them as children. They're just maybe more sophisticated, or the parent is saying, hey, you're an adult now. You're not allowed to respond. to me in that way. So when I center the child's experience, I am not ignoring the parent. I'm acknowledging the reality that the adult child was a less powerful person in that relationship

for most of their life. And they're now trying to reclaim their agency. And that's not bias. That's an understanding of power dynamics and attachment and development that happens throughout the lifespan. Now, I also find that when we're talking about biases, we're often talking about confirmation bias. And when people say they want unbiased content about estrangement, what they often mean is they want content that confirms what they already believe. That's what they see as unbiased. And I find this when I look at, you know, a post that was clearly made to cater to the experience of an estranged parent.

And you'll see thousands of comments. Everyone needs to see this. I knew this was true. Thank you so much for speaking for us. Finally, someone who is unbiased. And this is confirmation bias. It's the tendency to seek out information that supports your existing beliefs and dismiss the information that challenges them. And I see this often at work when people will say to me,

all you do is promote estrangement. And I've stopped responding to this because I truly have, I don't know, 3,000 posts on my Instagram alone and then podcast episodes, an entire content library, a company that I've run for years that is dedicated to helping people build better families that is about boundaries, active listening, reconciliation, repair, apologies, and no one wants to look at any of that. They only see the content that says,

I think estrangement is a valid choice. And it's like, this is all you talk about, even if that is 10% of what a clinician talks about. And I see this across the board for any therapists that have talked about this topic, right? And so there is this sort of searching for this confirmatory belief that therapists want to blow up families and promote estranged,

And so anything that falls outside of that purview is ignored. And we're only focusing on like the 10% that is kind of talking about estrangement being a valid choice. And so I think that when estranged parents find content that says, you know, maybe your adult childhood could read reasons for cutting you off or maybe you need to look at your own behavior. That feels biased to them. It doesn't match their narrative that they're the victim, their child is. ungrateful or manipulative or wrong. And when they find content that says adult children are cutting off their parents for no reason, this generation is entitled and can't handle conflict, that feels unbiased

because it feels fair and it aligns with what they already think. As humans, we are so skilled at rationalizing our own beliefs and dismissing evidence that contradicts them. And we are not objective evaluators of information, especially this type of information that is so deeply personal and threatening to our internal concept because we are motivated to protect our self-image and our worldview. And so I think we have to think about when we're looking at something and saying this is biased, okay, compared to what? What is it biased compared to? Is it compared to belief that you did nothing wrong or to the narrative that you've constructed to protect your from the pain of rejection. And I am not saying that estranged parents don't have valid feelings.

They absolutely do. Losing a relationship with your adult child is devastating. But that doesn't mean that your perspective is the only one or the right one. And I say to many adult children, you know, you need to behave a certain way in line with your values, not be abusive yourself, not hurt other people in adulthood if you want to have peace in your life. And I don't think that every adult is right and every parent is wrong. But I do think there are deep, longstanding power dynamics here that we need to address. And so when there is defensiveness, cognitive dissonance and the inability to hear any other perspective, that's when things get uncomfortable, right? And we think that someone is being biased. I want to talk about

cognitive dissonance, which is the psychological discomfort we feel when we hold two conflicting beliefs. And so for the estranged parents, those beliefs might be, I love my child and try my best, and my child says I hurt them. And when we experience this conflict, we are motivated to reduce it, often by dismissing or reframing that challenging information, right? So instead of sitting with the possibility that I love my child and I tried my best and I hurt them, we decide that it's actually the therapist talking about adult children experiences is biased. And if they were more unbiased and real, they would side with me. And we only hold the belief of, I love my child and I tried my best.

and look for other beliefs that align with that to reduce the discomfort. There's also the barrier of defensiveness. So when we feel attacked or criticized, we go into protection mode. And then you're not in a state anymore where you can be curious or open. You need to defend yourselves at all costs. And we are all prone to that, myself included. I have found myself fighting with people that I should not engage with at all. I've gotten better about that over time, but you need to have a lot of experience stepping back

from that to not fall into that place. At least that has been my experience. And I want to validate that I understand why a lot of parents are defensive. They're grieving. They feel rejected. They're in pain. But the pain doesn't change the fact that that defensiveness often prevents any healing or repair of that relationship. And so when you are in extreme distress and you feel unheard and misunderstood, it's almost impossible for you to absorb any new information that feels threatening to your identity. And you need that information delivered in a way that feels safe and doesn't trigger those defenses. But sometimes the content itself is in such opposition to your own beliefs and defense.

that no amount of gentle delivery will make it actually easy to hear. And unfortunately, that's not the content creator's fault. I think that's just the nature of growth. It's uncomfortable. Accountability is really uncomfortable. Facing that we've hurt people, especially our children, is deeply uncomfortable. So I want to be really clear here that often when I'm centering the adult child experience in my content. And I think when other therapists who create content do this, it's because that's who they're serving. That's who's coming to them for help. And that is who has been historically and systemically the less powerful person in that parent-child dynamic. That doesn't mean that adults cannot be abusive to their parents and that sometimes that dynamic doesn't

shift. That doesn't mean that things like mental illness and substance abuse and personality disorders and all these things don't exist. It means that there are therapists and resources that are often specifically for estranged parents and that's important and that's valuable. But talking about the adult child's experience is not the same as being biased against parents. I think it's about recognizing that adult children are the ones that lived through the childhood. They experience the family dynamics from the position of dependency and powerlessness. And most of these adults who have become estranged or talking about estrangement have tried extensively to communicate their needs and they've been repeatedly dismissed or invalidated. And our culture often bends over backwards to,

to protect and center parents. There's immense pressure on adult children to reconcile, to forgive, to honor their parents, regardless of how they've been treated. And I think sometimes someone needs to say, like, your pain matters too. And it's not just about you being obedient and deferring everything to them. Abuse is also not a both sides issue. And if abuse occurred, the person who was abused doesn't owe. oh, equal time to the person that harmed them,

and their therapist doesn't need to get validation of that. I think holding both the parent perspective and the child perspective as always equal is a false equivalence. It ignores the context, power, and impact, and it can be very harmful to survivors. Now, I think if I were to be truly neutral in the way that some estranged parents want me to be, here's what that would look like. I think they would want me to say something like, well, maybe your parent abused you.

Maybe they didn't. I can't really say without talking to them. And even if they did, they probably had their reasons. Have you considered their perspective and how hard it was to raise you? How hard it was for them at the time. I would have to hedge every statement

about abuse or harm with the word allegedly or according to one side. I would spend equal time. validating parents who claim they did nothing wrong and adult children who are trying to heal from trauma. I would never be able to challenge a parent's narrative or suggest they might need to take accountability. And I want you to ask yourself, like, does that sound like good therapy to you? Does it sound like it would help a client heal? I think it sounds like abandonment in favor of protecting people who aren't even in the room.

And so if you're an estranged parent listening to this, and I'm really proud of you for making it this far, if you are, I understand how hard that is. And I know that you might be feeling defensive, angry, or hurt. I'm not trying to villainize you. And I'm not trying to say you're a bad person or that you don't deserve love and connection. I think you deserve all of those things.

But I am saying that if you want reconciliation, with your adult child, you're going to have to do something really hard. You're going to have to sit with the possibility that you hurt them, even if you didn't mean to. You're going to have to stop trying to be right and start trying to understand. You're going to have to prioritize their healing over your comfort. And I think that that work is often done best with a therapist who's trained to help you. And for those of you that are the adult children listening,

I want you to know that you're not crazy for setting boundaries. You're not cruel for having to protect yourself. Your experience matters. And you don't need your therapist or your parents or a friend or the stranger on the internet's validation to know what you went through and whether it was real. My role or any therapist's role is not to be a neutral referee or to be a judge or an attorney, it's to be an advocate for the people who need support

in reclaiming their lives from the pain that they experienced. And that's not biased. That's just doing your job. I want to thank you so much for listening to this episode of Calling Home. If you want to learn more about the Family Cycle Breakers Club and connect with a community of people who understand what we're going through, head to www.callinghome.com.com. And as always, if this episode resonated with you, please share it with someone who needs to hear it. Leave us a review, subscribe to the show. It makes my day when I get to read your reviews and your comments. And just as a reminder, I will be on maternity leave until the end of May, but you will still get an episode from me every Tuesday until the end of the month of May. and I will still be doing what I do inside the Family Cycle Breakers Club at Calling Home.

I will see you next time. Bye. 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.