CALLING HOME with Whitney Goodman, LMFT - Believing Your Child to Break the Cycle

Episode Date: October 15, 2026

Content warning: This episode contains descriptions of child abuse, sexual abuse of a child, infidelity, and family estrangement.A listener writes in with a lifetime of family secrets. She asks Whitney how to heal and move forward after finally breaking a cycle her parents and grandparents never did. Whitney draws the line between a parent's past regret and a child's present safety, and makes the case for why believing her daughter was the real act of breaking the cycle.Sign up to spend the holidays with us at Calling Home: https://cmnyyv4kpyt.typeform.com/to/NZRkOwOPWhitney 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.

Welcome to the Calling Home podcast. I'm Whitney Goodman. I'm a licensed Marrington Family Therapist and the founder of Calling Home. Today is a Q&A episode. I am going to read one listener's letter that they sent in and stop along the way to talk about what is coming up. I'm just doing one question today because this was a long one and there was a lot that we could dive into. Just before we start, I want to let you know that this letter does include mentions of child abuse, sexual abuse, including the abuse of a child infidelity. and family estrangement. So if today isn't the day for this type of content for you, it's okay to skip it and come back later. One more quick thing to tell you, though, calling home is turning three at the end of this month. And three years ago, this was just an idea. And because of you, it has turned into a community of thousands of family cycle breakers. And to celebrate, we are sending out an exclusive invitation to our holiday series where we will help you through the hardest stretch of the year. The invitation is going out to the email list. If you want it, you can sign up on the link in the show notes. And I've changed a few of the

details in this letter just to protect the anonymity of the person that sent this in. But if you want to ever send me a question, you can send it in a voice note or written to Whitney at Callinghome.co. And I just might choose to answer your question in a Thursday episode. All right, let's go ahead and get into the question. Hi, Whitney. I'm so thankful for your podcast and the community I found here calling home. This podcast has been such a light in one of the darkest times of my life. I wanted to send over the situation I am in now and ask for feedback if possible. For context, my parents met at 14, dated and got married at 21 right out of college.

My mom's dad died at 18 and my dad's parents got divorced the same year. And my mom has always said she only married my dad because her dad died. She would speak longingly of what kind of life she would have had if it weren't for her dad dying. They went on to have me the oldest at 23, then came my sister 14 months later and my brother three years later. So thank you so much for listening to the show and I'm really glad that it's been helpful for you. I want to pause here because to hear, I think, this message from your mom of like, I only married your dad and had this life because of the passing of my own dad. Sometimes we can internalize that message of like, I really didn't want this life. This is not what I would have

chosen. I'm only here because of this thing that happened to me. And for some children that tend to absorb those types of messages, it can really lead you to believe, like, I am a burden. My mom didn't want this life. She never would have had us if it wasn't for that event. And to get really almost insecure a feeling about like what would my mom actually be doing if she didn't have this type of life. I think it's difficult for children. to hear that their parents are not excited about their life with them, that they didn't plan for it. And of course, all of us, you know, when you're an adult, you learn and you understand that life doesn't always go as planned. And sometimes you make choices that you regret. But the difference is

not putting that on a child because it is not their burden to bear. There's also this idea that maybe this family and this marriage was formed in a state of grieving and discomfort and longing for something else. And that doesn't mean that the family is all bad or that there's something wrong with this family. It just gives us context to the foundation that this family was being built on and why things might feel a little bit shaky, especially for this daughter in this family. She then goes on to say, I grew up in a toxic and emotionally and physically volatile home. My parents were constantly fighting and truly acted like they hated each other. There were obviously moments that I look back fondly on of our family, but they were just that

moments. Most of the time, there was yelling and abuse of all kinds. One example. My mom would wake us up in the middle of the night, turn on all of the lights on in the house, and scream that we had to clean and couldn't go back to bed until the whole house was spotless. This happened many times. My dad always joke when he saw an attractive woman on TV that

hey, look, that's going to be your next mom. And he would do this in front of her. I grew up with my parents teaching every Sunday school class controlling who we could be friends with, only Christians, and ultimately got sent to a tennis boarding school my senior year in high school with my sister. They truly hated us girls and my brother was always the golden child. Gosh, okay, this is something that I was just creating a post on this, that I think a lot of people as children, you grow up in homes where things like this are happening, being woken up in the middle of the night to clean. And you don't have a frame of reference of like, this is really abnormal. There are a lot of kids that are not experiencing this.

This does not fall in the bucket of normal family problems. This is abusive. Someone withholding sleep, getting in the way of you getting rest, trying to purposely scare you and make you jolt out of bed and start cleaning is not appropriate and it's not normal. When we compare this to maybe a parent who wants you to keep your room clean and clean your room, but does that in an appropriate way of, hey, when you get home from school today, you need to clean your room before you're able to do other activities. And it is a normal approach to cleaning your room as in you need to clean up the mess that you made.

You need to do developmentally appropriate tasks. so we're not asking a two or three-year-old to vacuum the floor and, you know, wipe down all the surfaces. We're asking them maybe to put their toys away versus what you would be doing with a 15 or 16-year-old where they might be responsible for laundry and taking out the trash and more in-depth cleaning of their room. But waking up a child who is sleeping in the middle of the night screaming to clean their room is not normal or developmentally appropriate.

That and these jokes about that. going to be your next mom, not funny, and very confusing to a child, right? Especially a younger child who's like, wait, what? You're going to go out and get another mom. This is another thing that I think in some families you grow up learning like, oh, dad's just joking. He's being funny, but kids don't understand that type of sarcasm and joking. There are a lot of children in a lot of families who do not grow up with things like this. And I don't say that to make you feel wrong or weird or othered. It's that I think it's important to know that this is not something that we should condition ourselves to tolerate, right? That is not something that should be

happening in a home. Now, this is also equally as true. And we're going to be talking a lot about this when it comes to the holiday season. That those fond memories that you have, they are real too. And I think that we often feel like if we're going to address the abuse and the neglect and the really bad stuff, then that means that that has to cancel out the good memories and they can't be real and we don't have them. And that's just not accurate. And I actually don't even think that it is healthy or wise for you to try to erase all of that contradicted and make it not be real. It can be very life-saving and healing to at least feel like the person that raised you had some good memories with you and had some good times. And you know I'm not saying that in like a toxic positivity way of like, oh, it cancels out all the bad.

You guys know I never talk like that. It's more from the perspective of like you deserve the right to have fond childhood memories. You deserve the ability to like take comfort in the fact that. like we did have that Christmas and we did have that family dinner or that road trip was really fun, even if the rest of it was bad. Because that can give you a lot of safety and contentment, like in this process while you are working through, especially an abusive or neglectful childhood. You know, this month inside the Family Cycle Breakers Club, we're also talking about the scapegoat.

And we spent a month, I think it was two months ago talking about daughtering. And there were a lot of conversations about the boy in the family being the golden child without really having done anything to earn that title. And in a lot of families, these gendered roles come to be. And there can be a lot of misogyny and patriarchal values within the family that basically says, like, you were born a girl. And so you are always going to be the one that is the scapegoat, the one that is the least favored, the one that is sent away, even if your brother does nothing.

And so you have to look at that piece and really be like, is any of this actually my fault? Or is this just the body that I was born into that I cannot control? And my parents are kind of exerting their own ways of thinking about gender onto our family system in a way that doesn't make sense. And sometimes when you separate that from how you actually feel about yourself, it can be very, very helpful in the process of understanding what is yours to carry an own. what isn't. The caller then goes on to ask. I didn't have words for it then, but my mom was slash is a covert narcissist and I believe has undiagnosed borderline personality disorder. And my dad is a narcissist with psychopathic tendencies. This is from a family counselor who met with me, my husband, and both parents and my sister who now has a degree in psychology.

So I think this language can often bring a lot of relief for people, especially when it's it is the first time that you're being told, hey, there's actually something going on here. This person in your family has a problem and there is language for it. And I also want you to know that for anyone who hasn't had the opportunity, you know, to sit down with their parents with a therapist to get a diagnosis confirmed that what happened can still be real without you having this specific title for it or label. And I know that the label can be helpful in the sense that it does make it feel like, oh, this isn't just in my head. It's something legitimate that someone else can see.

And the things you experienced and the feelings you had are also really enough here for you to say, how is this relationship affecting me? How am I being treated by that person? And what does that mean moving forward? This is where I really encourage people to focus on behavior and impact more than diagnosis. diagnoses and labels, right? So what did they do and what did it do to you? What are they refusing to change or acknowledge or apologize for? Are there things that you can clearly see like, hey, every time they did this, I felt very afraid and misunderstood and scared and I didn't know what to do and I felt so alone. This was behavior that I felt like I needed to hide or conceal from other

people because I knew on some level that it was bad even if no one was telling me that it was or putting this specific label to it. So here's an example of the extremely duplicitous nature of their relationship. My mom and dad led a marriage group at church and looked perfect on the outside, but my dad got arrested in 2016 in a prostitution sting, which he was later able to get expunged from his record so he suffered no real damages. By the way, he was embezzling from his company, to pay for said prostitutes, but I digress. My mom said she would finally leave him, so my sister and I sat down and helped pick out an apartment, and we worked on a resume for her.

But within three days of his arrest, he was bailed out and moved back in with her. They acted like nothing ever happened, and we had to just forgive him because that's what Jesus would do. My mom made him do a lie detector test when he wrote out every indiscretion, and she would quiz him while he was hooked up to the lie detector. Wow, this is wild. It was several pages long. and he ultimately confessed. He started meeting with prostitutes in 2003, 2004, around when I was seven. This is such a confusing dynamic to grow up in. And I think you guys have heard so many

stories like this on the podcast, whether it's related to church or the way you present yourself in the community that looking perfect on the surface and then falling apart at home is a very typical fact pattern for abusive families. If you look at like all these documentaries that come out about families where there were these huge secrets and lies and, you know, whether that's financial crimes or there was sexual abuse going on, a lot of these families had really, really great external images. Many of them were highly regarded within their communities. There were so many people that were like, oh my gosh, I would have never seen this coming. I was watching that documentary on Netflix about the pastor, oh my gosh, I'm blanking on the name. His girlfriend or wife ends up taking

her own life after he had been abusing her for a very, very long time. And he was the like youth leader and then pastor at their church. And this guy was horrible. Like there are recordings and images and, you know, first person witness testimony about all the things that he did to this woman. And there's still people going to this guy's church, you know? So these people can be very, very good at creating a public persona that people like and respect and think is wonderful. And it's the number one, like, most frustrating thing that I hear from people who know someone who is like estranged from their family member, their adult child that they'll always say

they were the most wonderful parents. They never did anything wrong. Their child is a spoiled, ungrateful brat for not having a relationship with them. And I understand our desire to be this way, right? Because we don't want to think that anyone that we're friends with goes home and does this stuff at home. Or we also do the same things as them. And so we don't think that what they're doing is that bad. But for a lot of these people, their public persona is very well crafted. It's very well done. And they're successful at it. And so I'm not really ever surprised when I hear people who grew up in abusive homes say,

like, but we always were dressed and well groomed and, you know, we got nice things. And people loved our family and thought our parents were great. Like that's actually more common than it being like this, you know, outwardly abusive family that is showing people how they act at home. There's also this part in this story here that I think a lot of you can relate to that this caller and her sister are helping their mother get out of this marriage, you know, finding an apartment, writing a resume. Like, you are being parentified in this marriage that is also affecting you and your mother saying, I'm going to leave, I'm going to get out. and you maybe were excited for her to be liberated from this dynamic.

And you've been now recruited into managing the marriage and to be then let down and told that you need to forgive and not be given any option, really just be told like, this is what your mom's decided to do. And so now you're going to get on board and you're going to do it too. And your mom has decided to handle this in a way that doesn't really fix anything. It's not like your dad was coming to the kids and saying, I'm really sorry that this happened. I pulled you guys into this dynamic and I did something that was, you know, shameful and embarrassing to our family and is not in line with our values in the ways that we were teaching

you. Like there is a huge gap here between how your parents are acting and how your family feels and what is being portrayed to the outside. And that is so confusing for people. It's confusing for adults in marriages. It's confusing for children. children in families. This lie detector thing is also a wild way of handling this. I can see how you felt very confused by that. I also experienced essay from him at an early age, oh gosh, I think she's

talking about the dad here, and always remembered some of the details, but was only able to start to recover more memories recently after months of neurofeedback. He had been cheating on her their whole marriage, and they decided to stay together and told us we could not tell anyone, including family, which was extremely isolating and has caused many issues between the siblings still to this day. They have stayed in a toxic cycle and constantly talk about wanting to leave each other, but never leave. So I am very, very sorry that you experience this, any type of abuse at the hands of your parent. That is awful. It is wrong. It should never happen.

and it is very destabilizing and confusing to remember that and to face it in adulthood. So I appreciate you sharing that here. I'm sorry that you have something like that to share. And I appreciate you sharing your own story so that other people here can learn from you. It's very important, I think, with this type of information and these memories that you go at your own pace with some. someone that is trauma-informed, someone that works with survivors of child sexual abuse, especially child sexual abuse that has happened at the hands of a parent, and that you do not need to revisit every memory, comb through every memory, try to make them even more vivid for you

to heal from something like that. I'm trained in EMDR. It's not something that I really practice anymore because I'm doing mostly groups now at calling home, but that can be a highly effective therapy for that as well, for any of you that are interested in learning more about addressing these types of issues. You're also echoing another rule here in the family that is actually being spoken out loud. So this is an explicit rule about secrets in the family that we do not tell anyone. This is something we keep to ourselves, which then implies this is something that is bad, shameful, and wrong, but that you are not allowed to go and get support for outside of the family. And it explains a lot why your sibling relationships would be tense and challenging,

because I'm sure everyone has a very different approach, understanding, and experience with this issue, depending on their age at the time and how they were included in this family issue. It can be very, very overwhelming and unfair to kids to ask them to keep these types of secrets and to ask them to approach these adult issues just unilaterally in the way that the adult is deciding that they have to handle them. And there was no, you know, space here for you all to deal with this and process it in your own way within the family, likely because this is just how the adults were dealing with it by shutting it down and being quiet about it. Another blow-up moment was on my birthday. My mom went with me to get my nails done and spent the entire time.

time talking about how hard life is with my dad. I asked her when enough was enough, and she said that it was where she was at. I believe she wanted to leave again and does this as a cry for help, but never follows up with any actions. I went home and cried to my husband and called my sister because this always happens on my birthday, and I was done with it. My sister called my mom and called her a narcissist after a phone call of her gaslighting, and my sister said she couldn't do it anymore. They have still not spoken to this day. Gosh, I can imagine, you know, when you have a family system like this, like how much you just wanted your birthday to be like a normal conversation. And then it ends up being you kind of doing therapy for your mom and listening to her,

tell you the same things again. And it's very understandable when you've been in this loop for so long, why you would finally say, like, hey, enough is enough. When are you going to leave? It seems like your sister also had just had enough and was like, I cannot do this anymore. I, however, struggled to go no contact as my kids had a relationship with them. However, this may, my daughter confided in my husband and I that my biological father had touched her inappropriately. Oh my God, I'm so sorry. We reported to CPS and law enforcement. Since then, we have been completely ostracized from my entire family other than my sister and brother-in-law. My parents go around and say my sisters and I are wayward children and we have mental health issues. My sister has her PhD in psychology and published her

dissertation and I have an MBA in finance and work for a very successful tech company. We are both not perfect. We are certainly not as deranged as they make us out to be. First of all, that must have been so terrible for your daughter to confide in you about that after you had already experienced something like this in your family. And I think that especially because you were raised in a family culture where these were secrets that were supposed to be kept, things are being framed as like one-off things that we have to forgive. This is how SA gets repeated in families until someone is brave enough to stop it and someone has the resources and the support and the confidence. And so if you are the person in your family that has said, this is enough. I'm not letting my kids be around this person.

We're not hiding this. We're not continuing this cycle. I want you to know how incredible that is. That is so it is brave. It is inspiring. It is exactly what we talk about when you are breaking cycles. And I never want anyone to be put in that position. But if you are and you decide to do something with that. Really, you could do nothing else for the rest of your life. And I think that could be, you know, the best and biggest thing that you've ever done that will change your family for generations to come. And I don't say that lightly. You also really broke the cycle here by believing your daughter and reporting it, which it really sounds like that's not something that your family did for you. You have definitely broken a cycle in your family. And

and I imagine for your mother, it seems like she is so armored up, probably so cloaked in shame and guilt that she cannot even see her way out. To be told that your daughter experienced this and your grandchild and then to jump to my kids are like wayward lost people, you know, is, it's wild. It's extremely, extremely painful. And it's one of those. looks into the human psyche that we can see how much people can be clouded by doubt and cognitive dissonance and the way that they can protect themselves against things this egregious that they don't want to admit or see. I also want to note here kind of what this caller is doing when you're talking about, you know, your degrees and your sister's degrees that it sounds to me like

this is you defending your identity, your ability to assert independence and to know when something is wrong. And I just want you all to notice when that comes up, especially in situations like this that are just so black and white that you are doing the right thing, whether you had no degrees, you've made mistakes, et cetera, like this is still the right thing to do. I believe my daughter and will always protect her. Since removing them from our life, my daughter has grown in speech, become less angry towards her dad and brother, who she adores, stopped regressing and wetting the bed. I believe he did hurt her, and we have done everything in our power to get her into counseling and work with police and move on with our life. I feel insane. They make me feel insane.

There has been so much fallout since this started that I don't even know where to start. My brother and sister-in-law work for my parents' accounting firm and refused to speak to us. They've completely sided with them and don't believe my daughter. It seems as though they are fully in the cult that is my parents. Your daughter improving in all of these areas is a pretty well-established sign that there was something going on and things are improving after separation from that person and maybe that event no longer happening anymore. And so that's, that's real data that you're getting from this. I understand why someone in your position would feel insane. Okay. So you are living this one story

and everyone's like, what are you talking about? Like, that's not true. That didn't happen. It can make you feel absolutely crazy. And then, you know, losing a sibling and a sister-in-law on top of that and them not seeing what's going on with your family, them not prioritizing your daughter, your children is a really, really difficult thing to navigate. The last question that this caller asks is, how can I move on with my life and be the best version of myself for my husband and my kids and ultimately just heal? Side note, I have done 20 sessions of neurofeedback and it has changed my life. I highly recommend to anyone with C PTSD.

So I hear questions like this a lot. And I want to say that when you have endured this level of dysfunction and abuse in your family, moving on and healing doesn't really mean forgetting or never thinking about this again. It often means creating a life where this isn't so. so present when you have other things that are fulfilling and enjoyable to you. And when you feel like you can look at your life and say, I'm doing something different, I have purpose. I'm proud of this, regardless of what I experienced in my past, I have a new life now. And I am safe. I'm protected. I'm understood. My past, that isn't going to be repeated.

It's not going to happen again because you're doing a lot right now. You're working on your own childhood while also protecting your child's. And your child experiencing something like this as well is going to open up new wounds for you. And so there's two things being processed here, like your own childhood as well as you being a parent to this person. I think that, you know, in this case, it's like the separation is necessary because the harm has not stopped. I hear in your story and in stories like this, no remorse, no commitment to do better or to change, no accountability.

And we're talking about abuse here. Like, this is black and white to me, this type of issue. And so I think you really need to give yourself some credit. in a position like this that I saw the signs that something was going on and I did something about it. I empowered myself, look how different I am. Look how far I've come from the culture I was raised in where everything gets brushed under the rug and ignored. That is such a sign that you have changed the future of your family for yourself and for your children

and for their children. I think that you also need to give yourself some credit for how much you've healed and how much that has impacted your ability to be a good mother. You've clearly done some work on identifying the type of family system that you want to create and the patterns that you don't want to repeat. And so whenever you're feeling like, I'm not doing enough. I haven't moved on with my life. I haven't healed, you need to think about how much change you have enacted in a short period of

time after what you lived through. You know, for a lifetime, which I would assume has been happening in your family system in previous generations before you came along. I want to thank this listener who wrote in so much. This was a great question. I know it took a lot to put this into words, and I'm so glad that you have support and that you have found resources that have been very helpful for you. Thank you for sharing them with us at Calling Home so that people can learn from you. If this letter sounded like your family or anything that you've experienced, you're not alone. Many of the people in our support groups at Calling Home on our discussion boards and the people who listen to this podcast are walking through the same thing. and the holidays coming up are often when a lot of this stuff gets the loudest and the hardest

to carry. And that's why I am so excited to invite you very soon to spend the holidays with calling home. This invitation is only going out to my email list. So please sign up at the link in the show notes again. And if someone you love and care about needs this too, please send them the link or this episode. You can always send me your question to which. at callinghome.co written or in a voice note. And I will answer your question on a Thursday episode. Please don't forget to like, subscribe and leave us a review on the podcast or leave us a comment

that really, really helps the show grow. And I love seeing your comments and your reviews. Thank you so much. And I will see you again on Tuesday for another episode of Calling Home, where we'll be talking about concept free. 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 Collingholm or Whitney Goodman. For more information on this, please see Calling Holmes' terms of service linked in the show notes below.