CALLING HOME with Whitney Goodman, LMFT - Does Estrangement End?

Episode Date: September 24, 2026

Whitney answers questions from listeners. The first from a woman who despite living blocks from her aging father can’t seem to connect with him. The second question is from a mother planning for the day her estranged mother tries to contact her kids.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.

Hello and welcome back to the Calling Home podcast. I'm your host, Whitney Goodman. This is the show where we talk about difficult and complicated family relationships. Today is Thursday, so we're going to be doing a Q&A episode, and I am going to be answering two caller questions. You can always send your questions to Whitney at callinghome.co. You can write them out to me or send me a voice note. The first question today is about grieving a parent who is still alive and what to do with the love and worry that doesn't go away, even when you feel at peace with you. your decision. The second is about how to talk to your kid about an estranged grandparent and how much to tell them as they get older. But before we get into it, there's a few new things happening at Calling Home. Inside the Family Cycle Breakers Club, which is our membership community at Calling Home, we now have monthly membership starting at 2499 a month, and that gets you access to unlimited support groups, our discussion boards, and more than 45 topics with worksheets, scripts, videos, and my entire course library that I've created. We also have two

new support groups, the difficult in-law relationship group with me. It's a really great group that meets twice a month. It's for anyone with a hard or strange relationship with their partner's family. And it meets on Thursdays at 10 a.m. Pacific and 1 p.m. Eastern or the adult sibling relationships group, which is run by our therapist Sam Dalton. And that's for anyone struggling with a brother or sister. or estranged from one. It meets Thursdays at 9 a.m. Pacific, 12 p.m. Eastern time. And we added another monthly Tuesday time for the family estrangement group that is open to anyone that is estranged from a family member. Everything is available at callinghome.com slash join. Okay, let's go ahead and get into your questions. Let's start with that first question about grieving a father who is still alive. Hi, Whitney. I've

been listening to your podcast for a while now and have found it quite helpful while, while navigating my difficult family dynamics. I'm writing to you with a question regarding a stranger from my father. I want to preface by noting that I've been in therapy for this and done other research to learn how to best proceed and both have been helpful. The thing I still and possibly will always struggle with is that I miss some things about my dad and because he is in his late 70s is in poor health, more or less lives alone

and doesn't have much of a support system at all. I worry about him. I would like to hear more of your thoughts about grief for the death of a relationship to a parent who is still alive. I love and care for my father, and I even miss him, or I miss components of him, and I think of him daily. I am in a good place in terms of feeling confidence and peace about my estrangement from him, but that grief and sadness is something that comes up often, especially because I know he is in poor

health, is lonely, and doesn't really have any dependable support system. I'm going to pause here because I think this is important. We've talked about this a lot on the show, and I have an entire content module dedicated to this inside the Family Cycle Breakers Club at Calling Home about complicated grief and loss. An ambiguous loss is a term that's coined by Pauline Boss. That is a mouthful. You've heard me say this a lot. That's the grief that's without closure. Oftentimes the person is alive or missing or you're estranged from them. There's no funeral. There's no like stereotypical recognition of this loss. And so it can be very, very complicated. The other thing that you're expressing here that's really normal is that you can have grief and know something is the right decision and feel peace all at the same time. And that can be very, very confusing. It doesn't always mean that your decision is wrong. But we're going to get more into that as I read more through this question, like talking about if your decision needs to shift, if this doubt or thinking about

other ways of doing this is something that you should listen to. But from what I'm hearing at the beginning of this question is like that you are missing components of him, right? And we talk about this a lot in our groups at Calling Home that even the worst, most abusive, horrible parents, partners, teachers, like you have a fond memory with them a lot of the time, right? And that can be so confusing. Even people who have certain people who have survived really terrible conditions can often come up with like one memory that they have, you know, of having a good time with that person or that person doing something nice for them. That's actually oftentimes part of the cycle of abuse is that there will be horrible treatment

and sometimes there will be really nice treatment and really good memories. And if you've ever been an abusive romantic relationship or a friendship or even had a boss, you probably notice those patterns as well. And so you missing parts of your father that were good and that you liked is completely normal and expected. And again, as we get deeper into the question, we'll talk about, like, are those components that you miss enough to bring you back into the relationship maybe in a different way? Now, the other confusing part here is that you are having worries about

aging, poor health, and dying. And this is a really common theme among adults who have a distant or a strange relationship with a parent. I think that you all are told so, so often by popular culture, the messaging that you receive in your own community, that you are certainly going to regret your decision when your parent dies. And I would say that most of the estranged adults that I have spoken to who really felt confident in their decision. When their parent died, most of them actually expressed feeling relief, not necessarily regret or guilt. The ones who did feel regret or guilt were often experiencing regret or guilt because of this lens that maybe if I stuck around, my parent would have changed. Maybe they would have been

different. I find that most of my conversations with these types of adults is not about missing the actual parent or grieving who they really were to them. It is about grieving the loss of the fantasy and the potential that things are going to get better. The other thing, and I was going to make a post about this, is that you will hear a lot of adults whose estranged, abusive, or harmful parent has died. They will switch their tune pretty quickly. often after the death of their parent. And they will move into this place of like, my parent wasn't that bad. They were actually pretty nice. I should have spent more time with them. They'll start beating themselves up very much in that same like childlike way that they did when they were

children of like, I just need to understand my parent more. I need to figure out a way to be around them. This cycle repeats itself. And then as more time passes between the death of the parent and the present day, that adult tends to soften their memories of a parent in ways that can be very, very confusing for outsiders to hear. And I've interacted with many adults like this who will start really remembering their even highly abusive parent in a very positive light and start talking about good memories they had of them. And a lot of those negative memories, they start to fade away. And those adults sometimes becomes some of the loudest mouthpieces of the message that you should have maintained a relationship with your parent because they're going to die.

And I have a theory that a lot of these adults end up feeling that way and speaking that way because they are no longer being harmed by their parent. And the fact that they are no longer being harmed by their parent has allowed them to release some of that armoring that they had up. It's allowed them to stop being consistently re-traumatized. There is no more risk of their parent harming them again. So for these adults, they're living a very fundamentally different experience than those who still have a harmful, dangerous, neglectful, abusive parent that is alive and still doing things in the present. And so their messages can become this big mismatch where the adult whose parent has passed and is no longer harming them starts kind of talking down to the estranged

adult of like, oh, you should cut them off. Look, now my parent has passed. I don't have an opportunity to fix things with them. But that, in most of the situations that I work with, ends up being a really big fantasy. Now, there are, of course, adults who are very happy that they at least semi-reconciled with their parent before their parent passed, because that was important to them. So we're going to get more into that because I think that this worry is very normal. You're trying to project how you're going to feel after this happens, and it's really hard to know how that is going to play out for you. And in a lot of these situations, closure is really a myth. It's something that you create and establish for yourself and everyone's version of, quote, unquote, closure looks very, very different.

Let's keep reading this caller's question. Some background. In case it is helpful for context, my parents moved two streets down from me about three years ago to receive support from my husband and me as they are aging and we're starting to have more medical problems. My husband and I were on board for the move because we lived an hour. and a half away from them at the time, and though my siblings lived local to them, we were the ones called upon for help fairly often. We thought it would be easier on us if they lived closer. I tried to establish boundaries early on, but they often were not respected. Less than a year after moving to our neighborhood, my dad announced that he wanted to divorce my mom. Ouch. They have never

had a good relationship, but this seemed like a betrayal after we moved them out here and did our best to take care of both of them. I could see how that felt not great and was probably very surprising. They are currently in the middle of a divorce and my mom goes between my house and my sisters, mostly because it is not healthy for her to live with my dad, as he can be quite hostile towards her. My dad has stayed in their large home and has done everything he can to draw the divorce process. I personally think that the divorce was a bid for control on my dad's part, that went further than he thought it would because when he was upset, we would all fawn to appease him. Interesting.

We didn't do that this time because we were also tired of being treated poorly. Okay. So there's an extra layer to this now that we've gotten deeper into the question here. We have a set of parents that moved close to their adult child to be cared for. And then the divorce happens. So now not only are they getting divorced, but they have brought the divorce to your daughter. step. And what was before, I think, an agreement that she would be helping to take care of your parents now sounds like it's also you getting very involved in the divorce process. And maybe I'm

projecting here, but I'm wondering if your dad felt like once he moved here, that now there was like almost the support and the infrastructure to get divorced. Like you guys would, your mom would have someone else to take care of her that wasn't your dad. Or maybe like you're saying, you know, your dad didn't really think this was going to go all the way through, and now he's in the middle of a divorce and doesn't really know how to get back, right? Now, I think that that divorce, the way this played out, probably feels a little bit like a betrayal after you are making a sacrifice to care for your parents, okay? You mentioned the fawning also, and it's really typical that there's one person in the family, in this case, being the dad, who may be reliance.

lies on that fawning to get what they want. And when they do not, their behavior often escalates. Your family system has changed quite a bit in a small period of time. Okay, there's a move to a new place, aging elderly parents, there is a divorce, you stepping in as being more of a caretaker, as your parents get older. This is like a complete shakeup of the family. And very understandable how it becomes hard for you to hold compassion for him while watching him be hostile to your mom. And there is a bit of like a loyalty double mind that you're in here where it's very hard for you to be loyal to mom and to dad at the same time. And when there is a history of poor behavior with one parent that exists already, sometimes the adult child gets very fed up. And it's like,

look, I cannot show loyalty to you or attend to you because you've been doing this for so long and I'm tired. Now, something really interesting happens as parents age and their physical body changes in front of you, that you might have this parent who was routinely hostile to you or difficult, even abusive. In this case, it sounds like a very difficult father who also treated the mother poorly. And now they may have more of like this frail body or they need you. They're getting elderly. But when you look at them, yes, you see that physical body, but you also are feeling that push, pull with them that you have felt throughout your life when they possibly had a much bigger physical presence around you. They had a much bigger emotional presence.

And it's very hard to reconcile that as a parent ages. It's also hard for the parent to reconcile that with their child and to not see that adult child that is trying to take care of them as a little kid, but to see them as someone that is collaborating with them in old age. Okay, let's get back into that question. I am the only one out of my siblings who still is very minimal contact with my father. He texts for birthdays and holidays and I respond, and I've texted him for his birthday and Father's Day and holidays as well. Since he lives down the street for me, I occasionally see him when I'm out for walks with

husband. We wave, but he never stops the car or rolls down the window to actually say hi. I haven't spoken to him outside of text or email message in over a year and a half. A part of me wants to reach out to him sometimes because I still love and care for him, but a bigger part of me feels unsafe emotionally around him and quite disgusted with his behavior towards my mother and the rest of our family, myself included. He doesn't seem to really want a relationship with me either. I have made it known to him multiple times in the last year and a half that in an emergency, I am available to help him. He has responded that he doesn't want help. I have even invited him out to a Father's Day lunch in 2025 as we were taking my in-laws out and he declined to come. I stopped trying it all after that

outside of sending text messages on special occasions. I'm going to make an assumption here that you trigger something in your father that he does not want to feel. And this doesn't feel like you cutting off a parent who is actively trying to seek you out and establish a relationship. This feels much more like an adult who is relating to a very distant, avoidant parent who maybe wants a relationship, but on very different terms than this adult wants. You sound very conflicted to me and very ambivalent, like holding multiple. feelings at once about this relationship of like, I miss parts of my dad. I don't like the way that

he's treated my mom. I invite him to things and I wave at him. He doesn't stop. He doesn't come. Your father is not beating down your door to have a relationship with you or apologizing to you or trying to say, hey, I want to make this work. This is more you also, I think, feeling distance from your father and he is not pursuing you. And that is another. type of grief as well. This isn't just about you cutting off your dad for lack of there being a healthy relationship. This is also kind of your dad pulling away from you. And, you know, you mentioned in here, he doesn't seem to really want a relationship either. You also said that you feel quite disgusted with his behavior towards my mother and the rest of the family, myself included.

I think your father knows that to some degree. And being around. you requires him to contend with that feeling and with the way that he has made you all feel and the consequences of his actions. I want you all, those of you that have children, to imagine driving down the street, seeing your child, having them wave at you and not stopping to say hello to them. I want you to imagine where you would have to be in your head to do that. That's crazy, right? That's very avoidant. That's very overwhelmed. You live that close by, and you're not really engaging with each other. And you're saying, you know, a part of me wants to reach out to him, but I'm seeing that you have reached out. You wave. You send Father's Day messages,

holidays, birthdays, birthdays, he texts on your birthdays and holidays, and you've responded. You've told him that you're there in an emergency. Like, you have been. You have been. reaching out. You didn't say, like, I'm never going to speak to you again and block his number. This is not a full, like, estrangement under my definition of estrangement where you are not having interactions with one another and you're trying to avoid having them in the future. So every time you invite your father to something and he says no and doesn't come, that's more grief. That's more ambiguous loss. Every time you're walking down the street and you wave to him in the car and he keeps driving, that's grief. There is still, as much as we don't want to admit it,

there is still a child in all of us that is like, come on, mom, dad, tell me I'm doing a good job. Like, give me an add-a-boy, give me attention. Like, we like to get that from our parents. That is just part of human nature. And so you are not done with this grieving or this relationship. there's a lot of rewounding that continues happening. And I think you've built some good boundaries here that are really based on acceptance, okay? Occasional texts, emergency situations, sending invitations to holidays that you feel like you want to invite him to.

That's okay. The grief here is the bigger issue of like it seems like you're toying with the fact that you're not doing enough or that you should be doing something different. But what I also see is a father and an adult child that are kind of both doing the most that they're willing to do under these conditions. And so you almost have to get to this place of like, I accept that my father cannot meet me further than this. I accept that this is how my father treats my mother.

And because of that, I don't really want to be around him. You know, you can still miss parts of him and engage with those parts and not love this. And this is where you have to kind of release the pressure on yourself that you are the only one that can fix this. And so when the urge comes up to reach out, to try again, you know, try to pause and notice it before you act, try to think about how do I want to be even if my father never recognizes is this effort I'm putting in. Do I want to wave even if I know he's not going to wave back? Do I want to invite him even if he's not going to come? And thinking about that. And what I think is

good about what you're doing right now is that the door is still open in a way that works for you. You may not be able to talk to your dad on the phone every single day. But if he is in an accident or in the hospital, you might want to show up and be there. And I think that that is okay. And it doesn't sound like your dad's trying to have more than that right now either based on what you've shared here. And so maybe you need to grieve that more than anything. Maybe that's what needs to be grieved more than thinking about what else you can or should do because that's very painful as well. I also want to note that you had this expectation that your parents were moving close to you for you to care for them as they aged. And now they are divorced, arguing, and your dad's not really

like connecting with you all that much. So there's a lot of loss there that needs to be thought about before you even progress past that. And at the end, this caller said, you know, to restate my question, what are your thoughts on grieving a parent that is still alive? and the feeling of conflicted emotions in long-term estrangement. I really think I want you, or anyone that relates to this caller, to back away from the word estranged and to sit with more of the idea that this is a really distant relationship with your father. And that you are going to approach this in the way that works for you right now because so much is in flux in your family. Things may change after their divorce is finalized when your father's health worsens,

all of that, that right now we don't need to commit to a decision. And I want you to maybe focus on the grief that you're carrying that this stage of life is nothing like what you all thought it was going to be as a family. And it has changed a lot. And give yourself time to move through that before you think about what am I going to do or when am I going to reach out again and allow this to be a little bit more in flux. I am really, really excited for you all to get my book. I know I keep talking about this, that the parent you have is coming out in February. It will be available for pre-order soon. But I talk so much about this distant type of relationship and how different it is from boundary violating parents.

And if you can relate to this caller, I just really can't wait for you to get your hands on that. But I do have a podcast episode called The Distant Parent. And you can go and listen to that one as well. That was a really popular episode this year if you can relate to this caller's question. All right, let's go ahead and get to that second question. This is going to be about talking to kids

about an estranged grandparent. Hi, Whitney. I'd love your thoughts on how to talk to my children about an estranged grandparent, particularly when I anticipate that the grandparent may eventually contact them directly. I'm a 40-year-old female and have been no contact with my mother for four and a half years. This wasn't a sudden decision, but the results of many years of recognizing unhealthy patterns in my relationship with my mother and gradually putting boundaries in place.

The final turning point came when I witnessed how my mother treated her own 85-year-old mother while she was recovering in the hospital from a serious car accident. I was deeply concerned by the bullying and manipulation I witnessed. My mother also yelled and screamed at me when I tried to suggest a different approach to supporting her mother, my grandmother, during her recovery. It became a crystallizing moment for me and I realized I no longer wanted my mother in my life. Okay, so here we have not a sudden decision, you know, and I think years of patterns and gradual boundaries is often what I see happening in these estrangement situations and watching a parent

treat their own parent badly is really difficult, but I think I want to do an episode on that at some point about like these generational differences. Okay, she goes on to say, at the time my three children were one and a half months, two and a half, and four and a half. I hadn't specifically decided that my mother could never see them, but I no longer wanted contact with her myself and had already been uncomfortable with her being around the children without my husband or me present. She had a history of undermining our parenting decisions and disregarding boundaries. Almost a year later, my mother contacted us expressing distress about not seeing her grandchildren. She assumed it was because she, quote, lacks acceptance of our non-binary transgender beliefs,

as our oldest child is not cisgender. This is fascinating given the whole like no contact ideology conversation that's been happening lately. My husband responded explaining that the difficulties in the relationship, had existed long before we had children. He offered to have a one-on-one conversation with her to share more about our family and our approach to parenting. Instead, she wanted the conversation to involve six other family members of her choosing, including people who had never met our children. My husband declined to participate in a group video call on the matter, and my mother accused us of, quote, controlling the narrative and subsequently had no further contact with us or the children.

Okay, so this is something that happens a lot when I've had conversations with people about ideological differences. And I mentioned that I read a book recently about this. And the book was specifically written for Christians who, well, this is the population I think it was specifically written for people who had voted for Donald Trump that are religious who really have a problem with what they call the trans ideology and did not take the COVID vaccine. That's basically like all the stories in this book. And those people were no contact with their family member. And they believed that it was because of like ideological brainwashing or, you know, because their family member could not tolerate a difference in opinion. And you hear this a lot. I was having a conversation with someone yesterday. And, you know, they're talking a lot about these ideological differences and politics and all this stuff. And I'm like, Okay, have estranged adults told you, specifically told you, that they cut their parents off just because of politics? And be like, no, well, no, they haven't really said that.

But I'm hearing that from a lot of parents and a lot of researchers. Okay, again, I'm not interested in why the parent perceives that they were cut off. I'm talking about the actual reason that the adult gave. And again, this person is saying like, well, I haven't really talked to a lot of adults that said that, but it seems like it's a really big problem. And I understand that it's being reported as a big problem by the people who are being cut off. But it's not being reported as a problem with the same intensity by the people who are doing the cutting off. So either all those people who are cutting off family members are lying and saying that it was because of all these other reasons when it was really just about politics or the COVID vaccine or trans. gender ideology, but it doesn't make sense. I've asked this several times on the podcast, on my

Instagram, on TikTok to try to connect with people who had a good relationship with their family members and then cut them off because of who they voted for or their ideological differences or religious differences. Now, I know that this happens. I know that it happens. I talk to people that it has happened to. But it does not. It does not. happen at the level and intensity of being so statistically significant, in my opinion, that we should draw a large national narrative based on those few, right? And so this is a good situation here where you can see the discrepancy of them saying she's assuming it's because she lacks acceptance of our non-binary slash transgender beliefs and our oldest child is not cisgender.

husband responded explaining that the difficulties in the relationship had existed long before we had children also you're talking about at the beginning of this you know your your children your oldest child was four so and now you've been no contact for like almost five years so i assume these issues with your child came up later and were not happening when they were one two or three years old i'm just making the assumption that maybe those were probably not conversations that you were having yet. And your husband then reiterating that, I find that then still these people that are on the receiving end of the cutoff, it's almost like it's very, I don't know, it's very commonplace among these groups to say, like, I am being persecuted because of my beliefs.

They don't want to have a relationship with me because I didn't want to do X. and they are, you know, so sensitive that they can't be around me or they're discriminating against me because of this. And the people who are doing the cutoff are saying, that's not really why. And most of the adults, I include some of these stories in my upcoming book, they say, this is the sentence I hear over and over. My parents would probably say, I cut them off because of politics. But that's not the reason why, or that was the straw that broke the camels back. I, in my long form interviews in my groups, I am not hearing people say to me, I cut my parent loving, engaged parent off that I had a great relationship with because they voted for X. It's just not something I'm hearing with

statistical significance. Not saying it doesn't happen, but again, don't think that this is the common thread in estrangement cases and something that we need to be like fighting back against. Okay, person goes on to say there's also a history of my mother being at the center of other family conflicts and undermining her nieces and nephews relationships with their mothers following divorces. Her views about transgender and non-binary people are a significant concern. She has proactively advocated time and time again for policies and actions that would negatively impact the lives of non-binary and transgender people, all while knowing that she is a grandchild who isn't cisgender. I understand how that would be extremely difficult for you,

especially when you already have a difficult relationship. Okay. And you can accept that this is who your mother is and also say that, you know, maybe this isn't a great person for my kid to be around right now while they're going through this process of figuring out who they are and developing confidence in themselves. And you have to take that into consideration because I would say this isn't just about someone being against transgender people or children, a grandparent who is highly critical and attacking of anything about a child and saying that they shouldn't do X, they shouldn't be

like this, could be about their body, their weight, their hair, their interest. That is not a positive role model or influence on a child. That has actual long-term effects. And so what we're talking about here when we take even the topic out of it is a grandparent who can't just like show up and be loving and supportive and engaged with the child. And parents have to think about that. You have to consider what that's going to be like for your child. They go on to say, my children are now six, seven, and nine. They know that they don't see their grandparents because we made a difficult decision after their grandparents repeatedly did things that made it difficult for us to have them in our lives. I've deliberately kept the details age appropriate. I've told them

that their grandparents don't share our families believe that everyone should be able to express themselves safely and explore their identities in ways that are welcomed and celebrated. I've also told them that when they are older, they can decide for themselves whether they want a relationship with their grandparents. Okay, I think this is perfect. You can explain to them that it's not their fault. It's a decision that you've made. This conversation will continue to evolve. And I think that what is important here is to make sure that it's not framed as in like your other kids didn't have a relationship with their grandparents. just because of their sibling.

And just in case it becomes sort of like a blaming thing or they become the reason, I think that it can also be about, you know, you guys being a loving and supporting family and wanting to kind of rally around the sibling. And the kids are also allowed to grieve not having a grandmother, you know? And your mother is allowed to grieve that too in their own ways. The caller then goes on to say, however, I know that once they are, teenagers, my mother will try to contact them directly and tell them her version of what happened. I know this because I have watched her do it to other children in the family regarding adult

conflicts. And she involved me in her family conflicts when I was a teenager in a way that felt unhealthy and excessive. Okay, so this is what you're going to do in a situation like this. You cannot forever prevent your children from having contact with people like this no matter who they are. So how can you prepare them? for when this is going to happen. And even just saying, like, your grandma may reach out and tell you a different story. And you can always come to me and talk about that. You're not going to be in trouble.

This isn't about you taking sides. It's that you want to keep the door open so that you can have this conversation with them. You also don't want to get in a competition about whose story is right or wrong. You want to be the safe place, the one that they can. can come to and talk about this with, okay? And especially for your child that is trans, I think it's important to navigate that in a particular way with that child, you know, that if the grandmother says hurtful things, if the grandmother tries to tell them something, you know, can you talk about what that's going to look like? And then just even practical planning, you know, with your husband

about like your kids are not teenagers. How are you going to navigate phones, social media, what they should do if they contact it, you know? They then ask, how do I give my children enough context about their grandmother as they grow up so that they understand why we made the decisions we did, all while being mindful of the impact even that knowledge could have on our transgender child? How much information is appropriate even once they are in their late teens and become adults? So young kids are really understanding, actually, about safety and family rules.

And I think when they become twins, they definitely start to understand patterns. They understand when things don't make sense. As teens, they definitely understand what it feels like to get pulled into an adult conflict. And then when they're adults, you can start to give them. more of a story. I do think that you can allow them to ask questions and follow their curiosity. It's also more important, I think, to share facts about behavior, not like verdicts about who they are and what you think about them, but more just like this happened and we made this decision. They might be confused. They might be totally cool with it. This is very child dependent.

Some might have more questions than others. And I think it's also very important that you don't try to like oversell this and like beat it in, right? Because sometimes as parents, when we feel anxious about our own choices, we try to convince ourselves by way of convincing our children, right? And so I think you have to talk about just the facts, what you were trying to protect them from and also empower them to now. these relationships as they get older and to notice like, okay, that isn't a safe dynamic. Grandma shouldn't be talking to you about these things. And that's true for like all adults. You can talk about how to navigate difficult and uncomfortable and unnecessary interactions with adult family members outside of even just the grandma. This isn't the only time they're

going to deal with a situation like this. The caller then goes on to say, I've also considered writing a private mini memoir for my children documenting my experiences growing up with my mother, significant patterns and incidents, and the reasons I ultimately went no contact. I wouldn't necessarily give it to them now, but I like the idea of having an honest record available if they ask more detailed questions when they are older. Is this a healthy approach or could creating such a record ultimately do more harm than good? Okay. First, write this for yourself.

Like, I think this can help you process, remember things. And I think that we have to think about who is this really for. This is the over-arguing part, right? Like you're trying to sell it and make it enough of a compelling story with enough detail so someone will buy it. And I think that sometimes that's a wound for your inner child, not necessarily your own children. So at first I would write this for you. And I want you to remember that you are your children's mother.

They trust you. They believe you. They want you to be happy and loved and understood. And they may not need as much convincing and selling as you think that they do about this. Especially when they start to have interactions with your mother, I find that a lot of these grandchildren end up meeting they're a strange grandparent and a lot of the time saying, I get it, mom. I get why we couldn't have a relationship with that person.

Like, she's kind of mean, especially for your child that's, friends and for their siblings, like, they're probably not going to want to be around somebody that is disparaging and rude about their sibling, you know? Like, this can happen in families for a variety of topics, not just related to this one. And a lot of adults realize that, oh, my grandparent is kind of mean. They say really rude things. I get why my mom didn't like hanging around them. And they aren't really, like, clamoring to spend time.

with this mean person that they don't know. And so I like the fact that you're saying, like, it's their choice. They get to decide. I'm going to allow them, you know, to make those adult decisions. And sometimes, like, their experience is the best teacher, you know, especially if your mother hasn't changed. And if she has and she's become different, then like, yeah, that's a bridge you can cross when you get to it. Thank you so much for sending in that question. I think both of of these callers today are making really hard decisions and then finding out that like the decision that they made wasn't the end of it. You know, you're still grieving a parent that is alive that you're having all these mini interactions with that are very debilitating and create more grief.

And then there's another caller that's looking so far down the road trying to think about how am I going to handle this with my kids when they get older. And so if you can relate to either of these people or you're somewhere in between, you do not have to figure it out alone. The Family Cycle Breakers Club at Calling Home has unlimited support groups, including the family estrangement group, which now has another monthly Tuesday time, as well as those 4 p.m. Eastern time groups on Mondays. We have the difficult in-law relationship group, and membership starts at only 2499 a month. You can join at callinghome.com slash join. We also have two topics already there for you that relate exactly to these questions. So we have a grandparents one that goes into scripts

of how to have these conversations. What a healthy grandparent is. Like I really lay all of this out in detail in worksheets, articles, scripts. Just go to callinghome.com. Insert grandparents. And you'll see all those resources. We also have a grieving complicated relationships topic. And there are, again, worksheets, articles, videos, everything you need to help you get started on this grieving process. Thank you again so much for listening. Please don't forget to like, subscribe, leave us a review or comment, especially on YouTube and Spotify. It really helps the podcast grow and keeps us being able to bring this to you for free. I'm Whitney Goodman.

Thank you so much for listening today. And I will see you again on Tuesday. 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, 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.