CALLING HOME with Whitney Goodman, LMFT - Boundary Violations During Crisis and Parents Who Refuse Therapy

Episode Date: February 5, 2026

Whitney answers two listener questions about harm that happened during a crisis and harm that accumulated over years. One listener is navigating repeated boundary violations from in-laws during her husband's medical emergency while postpartum—and her husband doesn't remember any of it. The other was cut off by parents who refused therapy, yet they tell everyone she initiated no contact.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.

Welcome back to Calling Home. I'm Whitney Goodman, licensed marriage and family therapist and the founder of calling home. Today's episode centers on two letters that speak to something many of you quietly live with every day. Harm that happened in moments of crisis and harm that happened over years when the people who were supposed to protect the relationship chose denial, control, or distance instead. One letter comes from a listener navigating medical trauma, postpartum recovery, and repeated boundary violations. from in-laws while holding together a marriage after an event her partner doesn't fully remember. The other comes from someone who didn't choose no contact, but was cut off after asking for accountability in therapy and is now living in that painful in between grieving parents who are still alive and grieving a family story that isn't being told honestly. Both of these experiences fall under the same umbrella, parental rejection and abandonment. It's not always loud, not always intentional, but it can be deeply destabilizing to the nervous system and to our sense of safety in relationships. For the entire month of February at Calling Home, we're focusing on

parental rejection and abandonment. Every Monday, new content drops, including articles, worksheets, scripts, and guided reflections to help you understand what happened, why it hurts, and how to move forward without gaslighting yourself or rushing forgiveness. Members of the Family Cycle Breakers Club also have access to unlimited therapist-led support groups and private discussion boards where these conversations can happen with nuance, care, boundaries, and privacy. If you listen to this episode and think, this is my story too, you're not alone and you don't have to navigate it by yourself. You can learn more about joining the family cyclebreakers club at calling home.co. Let's get into today's episode. I'm going to read you that first caller question. Hi, Whitney. I'm writing with a

question about navigating family relationships after repeated boundary violations and a medical trauma. Earlier this year, my husband experienced a sudden cardiac arrest and was placed in a medically induced coma in the ICU. Gosh, I'm so sorry. Because of this, he has limited memory of that week. During his hospitalization and recovery, his parents and sister repeatedly ignored direct requests for space, initiated stressful conversations anyway, and minimized my role as his wife, and medical decision maker. This was happening while I was postpartum and caring for a baby. Gosh, this is really difficult situation. Because my husband doesn't remember much of that period, he didn't directly witness what I was fielding alone. While he fully believes and supports me now,

the impact on me is very real. My nervous system learned that I wasn't safe, supported, or respected during an acute crisis. This wasn't an isolated incident. It reflects a longstanding pattern of disregarded boundaries, reframing harm as miscommunication, and expecting continued access without meaningful repair. Now, even limited or indirect contact with them causes fear and shutdown in my body. My husband wants to do the right thing, but he struggles with guilt and uncertainty about how to manage his family of origin going forward because he doesn't remember the events that most affected me. My question is, from a therapeutic perspective, what does appropriate spousal leadership look like when one partner's family has caused harm the other partner experienced

alone? And when parents haven't changed, is low contact actually protective? Or can it prolong harm by keeping unsafe dynamics alive? I'm trying to understand how couples can prioritize nervous system safety and marital trust without defaulting to total cutoff or staying stuck in cycles that repeatedly retramatize. Thank you for the work that you do. Thank you so much for sending this in. I first want to say that going through this with your partner is extremely difficult. Going through a postpartum with a young baby is even harder. And I want to validate for you that what you experienced is legitimate. It's real. It happened. And your husband not remembering it doesn't make it not real. Now, that being said, I want to talk a

little bit about what this might feel like for him and his perspective as kind of a lens into how you guys can work on this together. He wasn't aware during that time what was going on. And he wasn't, he isn't able to remember what happened. Right. And in some ways, this is very self-prey protective for him and very lucky because it means that he doesn't necessarily have to face the reality that this is how his family behaved during one of his most vulnerable moments and how they treated his support person and his spouse. And like you said, this isn't an isolated incident. It's something that's happened before. But I would say that these are the moments in our lives that when you have dysfunctional family members, you hope and

pray and maybe have a fantasy that if something really horrible happened, they would step up, that they would finally show you that they care and that they can be helpful and they are able to like rise to the occasion. I've even heard from people like that not that they hope something bad would happen, but they do fantasize about like maybe if I got bad enough or if I was in an accident or I became homeless, whatever it is, that my parent would like show me love in this moment and take care of me. And I would finally be able to get that connection that I'm looking for. And then this event happens. And you realize that it actually sometimes just makes them even more dysfunctional. And they do not rise to the occasion. And they do even worse of a job. And so your husband

may not want to admit this or face this reality that when I was in a coma, and my wife was taking care of me and was early postpartum with our baby, my family made this harder for her. That is such a painful truth to admit. Now, in his denial of what has actually happened, he is simultaneously rejecting you and your pain and not centering what happened to you. He's ultimately kind of choosing out of self-protection to keep himself safe. And when he does not acknowledge or accept what is actively happened, you know, what's in front of him about his family, the truth, he has to reject your pain and what you experienced.

Because those two realities cannot exist at the same time. It can't be that like I have these wonderful, loving family members that would never do that to me. moment of crisis and they also treated you this way. He has to pick one, you know, in order to like survive. And if you have this strong sense of denial and this fantasy about your family, you might want to go with, you know, oh, I don't remember. That didn't happen. And then simultaneously be, you know, rejecting your partner. And I think that this is something that a lot of couples face that you can have a spouse who has spent their entire life. engaging in what we call a fantasy bond with their parent. And that fantasy bond only exists and can be

continued if you ignore any information that disrupts that fantasy. So the parent is all good, never messes up, you know, is always helpful and understanding and kind. And anyone that presents you with other information is wrong and untrue. And it needs. to be refuted. And unlike healthy relationships where we see people as both good, bad, neutral, we are able to acknowledge their mistakes. Fantasy bonds with a parent or with a family system rely on everything being good all the time, only good things. And that's never the reality. And so it can be highly disruptive when someone comes in and kind of cracks that reality open because then you're like, oh, no, no, no, now I have to look at all the other stuff.

But the main question that you were asking here is, you know, what does spousal leadership look like when one partner's family has caused harm at the other partner experienced alone? And I think the hard answer here is that the partners have to put one another first. I, and I saw the Gottman's do a video about this the other day, and I agree with them that I have not seen a situation where a partner prioritizes their family, their nuclear family or their family of origin, sorry, above all, above their partner only believes them, rejects their partner side, and that marriage works out. Like, it's just not possible. You can value your family, be kind to them, prioritize their needs. But if they are up here and you're constantly having your spouse down here, you don't really need to be married.

You might as well just stay with your family of origin if you are demanding that they be kind of sucked up into that and not ever be prioritized because what about their family and their needs? It cannot just be that your family of origin always gets prioritized. And I think that this is true across cultures, you know, that we have to find some way to prioritize the new partnership and the new family in a way that can coexist. with the family of origin. And so I think your husband probably needs to do some very difficult inner work here on acceptance and understanding of like, this is what happened. And you can validate how difficult it is to acknowledge that about your family and to know that they did this and that it feels very painful and it hurts. And it's not something that I think anyone, wants to acknowledge about their family. And at the same time, I need that from you as my partner and as

my spouse. I need you to see that I was trying to be there for you. And these people made it very, very difficult and painful for me to do so. And I need you to see what big of an impact that is having on me as a person, psychologically, in my body, you know, to my mental health and my sleep and and all of that. And this might be something that you want to work through with a therapist or, you know, with some type of third party mediator to try to help both of you reach a point of understanding about why each person feels the way they do, but then also see how certain feelings and perspectives might be really holding you back as a couple and not making it feasible for you to move forward. Now, that doesn't mean that you have to cut off his entire family or not have a

relationship with them. I think lower contact or at least feeling like you are supported by your husband and that he's going to make sure that you don't get hurt again and that you are a priority and he believes you can help a lot and it can help you all maintain contact while still being united, you know, in your marriage. And so that's somewhere where I would start. I think that when spouses really give a lot of pressure of like, you have to cut off your mom, you can't talk to this person, it really backfires and it doesn't work well. And so instead, if the focus at the beginning could be about learning to understand one another, to validate each other's perspectives, and then coming up with a plan so that you're not subjected to more harm.

Thank you so much for sending in this question. I think this will be helpful for a lot of our listeners. All right, let's go ahead and read the second question from our next caller. Hi there, Witt. First and foremost, I want to thank you for your content recently, especially regarding all the clickbait out there right now about parents and families and going no contact. I am almost 30, first-gen-American, and first in my family to go to college,

happily married and happily employed with a master's degree in education. That's wonderful. After years of debilitating conflict that affected my mental and physical health deeply and telling them we needed to try family therapy in order to move forward, they completely cut me off. I ebb and flow through the grief knowing they would rather say they've never gone to therapy as a brag than have a relationship with their daughter. That's always such a weird brag to me.

They gave my only sibling an ultimatum on who to have a relationship with, and my brother chose my parents. That's insane. The giving the ultimatum. I haven't spoken to them since 2023. I feel I'm in an odd in between. Going no contact was the right choice, but because they were the ones to actually cut the cord after I spent years in therapy trying to prepare to do it myself, there's some sort of closure missing, but I can't put my finger on it. They share in their circles that I was the one to initiate no contact and that I'm the one

responsible for the family fracture. I hope for reconciliation one day, but I know now isn't the time. I sometimes don't know how to deal with this pain, especially around the holidays. I wonder if there are some words of guidance or affirming that no matter how this will happen and how sad it's made me, it's in my best interest. Thanks for listening. Okay. I first want to say that your story, this type of story, is becoming.

more and more common in these circles that I work with and that I talk to, that there are a lot of adults who feel actually that their parents were the ones that cut them off. They did not want to do the repair work. They would rather, they say that we're not going to therapy. And if you want to go to therapy with us, they're not going to go. And so it's this roundabout way that actually becomes more of a mutual decision to become estranged or the parent actively doing the cutoff rather than there being this like really, you know, eager parent that wants to heal and the child's like, no, I don't want to have a relationship with you. That isn't always the story. And I'm hearing more and more stories like yours that are more stories of abandonment than

estrangement. I want to validate for you that this part of your story that someone was, that your sibling was given an ultimatum of like, choose us or your sibling speaks to such a larger pattern of issues within the family that this would even happen, right? That a parent would make you choose between them and a sibling is wild. It's immature. It doesn't make sense. I think that those are parents who are exerting a lot of power and control over their child. And I recorded an episode with Patrick Tien that's coming out soon about the show Animal Kingdom. And there's actually a scene in the show that we talk about where the mother does this, like makes one of her children choose between her and the other.

And of course, you're likely going to go with the parent a lot of the time. because if your parent is doing this, they already are asserting some type of power and control over you. And this is probably a deeply embedded culture within the family. Right. So I understand why you feel like going no contact was the right choice, but that you don't have that closure because it wasn't your choice. But I want you to try to reframe this as like they have released me from this dynamic. They have shown me by doing this that they cannot participate in this dynamic in a healthy way. I have tried to go to therapy with them. I've tried to talk to them about this. I may have thought about going no contact, but they were the ones that ultimately cut off

the relationship. That while that is deeply painful and it is more of a story of parental abandonment, I think than estrangement, they're releasing me from a dynamic in which I cannot win because no child should have to beg their parent for love and kindness and respect. And if you are an adult that's saying, I want to go to therapy with you, I want to fix this relationship, I want to repair. And your parent is saying, no, I don't want to do that. They're giving you the gift of honesty. And I know that it's very hard to see that, but I think we have to listen to what's being said to us, mourn that, grieve that. It's very upsetting. It's very sad. It's painful. And know that I got an

answer from them. I can very clearly see what they are able to give and not give. I have all the information and data in front of me that I need. And now I have been released from this to go and heal and work through my pain on my own. And so can I see it as, I hate to use these positive words of like blessing or gift, but like, can I see it as a gift that I got the answers that I needed and that I didn't keep trying and trying to force these people to see me and to love me? Because they're ultimately telling me, I will only be in a relationship with you if it looks like X, and I'm not actually willing to do any of the work of reconciliation, I just want us to brush this under the rug. And it really hurts. I think that anyone that can relate to this,

this caller question, especially, you will benefit so much from what we're talking about inside the Family Cycle Breakers Club this month because we're talking about parental rejection and abandonment. And parents can abandon their kids in adulthood, emotionally, physically, etc. Before we end today, I want to pause with you for a moment because I think both of these caller questions can bring things up for you. And it's not a sign that you're doing anything wrong. You're just touching on something real. And these experiences are happening to real people. They are real and they are painful. And being rejected or dismissed or overridden by family, especially during moments of vulnerability or crisis really leaves an impact.

It affects your nervous system. We heard that from one caller today. How safe you feel in relationships and how much you trust yourself. And I want to be very clear here that needing distance from these dynamics doesn't mean that you failed. And still hurting like all this time later doesn't mean that you're stuck or dramatic. You are not required to keep engaging in relationships. relationships that never show any repair, accountability, or meaningful change at all.

For the month of February, inside of calling home in the Family Cycle Breakers Club, we're continuing our focus on parental rejection and abandonment. Every Monday new content is released to help you better understand what happened, why it impacted you the way you did, and how to move forward. Members also have access to unlimited support, groups with licensed therapist and private discussion boards because this work deserves context, time, and community. If this topic hits close to home for you, I encourage you to take care of yourself

after listening to this. And that might mean stepping away from family conversations, keeping yourself safe, or simply reminding yourself that your reactions make sense. Thank you for being here. Thank you for trusting me with your time and your stories. And I will see you next time on the Calling Home. 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 Calling Home or Whitney Goodman. For more information on this, please see Calling Home's terms of service linked in the show notes below.