CALLING HOME with Whitney Goodman, LMFT - Dr. Josh Coleman

Episode Date: September 26, 2023

Psychologist and author Josh Coleman joins Whitney to talk through navigating difficult relationships between parents and their adult children. Dr. Coleman emphasizes the importance of parents being willing to engage in open, non-defensive conversations with their adult children to rebuild connections. He also discusses the cultural shift in family dynamics over the past half-century, with younger generations placing more emphasis on mental health, happiness, and personal growth. Whitney and Dr. Coleman agree that both parents and adult children have a role to play in repairing relationships, but ultimately, the responsibility lies with the parents. They also discuss the impact of high expectations on parent-child relationships, with Dr. Coleman suggesting that parenting only plays a small part in how individuals turn out, with genetics, social class, and other factors playing a larger role. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

My guest today is Josh Coleman, an author and psychologist who developed a set of 10 rules for navigating tumultuous parent and adult child relationships. Parents who are willing to shatter the power dynamic and engage in uninterrupted conversation with their adult children can pave the way toward rebuilding these connections. I'm Whitney Goodman. Welcome to the Calling Home podcast. I'm glad you're here. So back in 2020, I started to see a huge influx of people coming in to talk about estrangement and difficult relationships with their parents. And there's not a lot of people out there talking about this. So I came across Josh's work because he is one of those people. And he really focuses on getting in the mindset of the parent. So these are some comments that I've gotten, you know,

on my posts or articles I've written lately. Doing our best is what most of us did. Yet all these grown kids these days still think that wasn't good enough, just wait. They have to whine and complain about everything and blame everyone around them. They have a victim mentality. That's how kids are these days. All I see is grown adults blaming their parents for all of their problems. You all need to grow up because there's no growth, just blame. So I'd love to hear what you think about these statements. I mean, one of the ways that I think about this is that, you know, there's just been such a cultural shift in the past half century or so in terms of family. And, you know, I think that that so many parents today who have adult children were raised in

an era where respect thy elders, honor that mother and thy father, families forever. And they're also raised in a much less psychological era. We know where identity wasn't nearly as important, the idea that you would communicate so much about your feelings and have an orientation towards growth and happiness and that relationships, including family relationships, should just be based upon that. So I think there's often a way that the generations are talking past each other around that where, you know, what both sides say, there's some truth to that when the adult child says you're being insensitive, you're not being psychological, you're gaslighting me, you're not respecting

my boundaries, you're not taking responsibilities for the way that you hurt me. It's often true. But then from the parents' perspective, you know, when they say something like, well, you're overreacting, you're over-psychologizing, you're making me responsible for things I didn't necessarily do. There can be truth to both sides, which is why I think a program like what you're doing is so useful, because both sides have something to say. And our goal, I think as therapists, is to help people talk to each other and not past each other. Yeah, 100%. And I think when we talk about both sides, it gets a little dicey, right, because of the inherent power differential that exists between parents and their children, even when they are adults? And I'm wondering if you can

speak to that. No, I think that's hugely important. And a lot of my work with parents is helping them see that power differential and that they do have to take responsibility and know, A, how important that is, and that even if a parent doesn't feel like they did something that was particularly hurt for or whatever, if their adult child now says that they did, it's critically important to any relationship that they do do that, do take responsibility, because a lot of therapeutic value can happen in that. The relationship can grow from that. And the adult child, you know, these days can just, they can just walk. They can say, well, look, if you're not going to be able to have a relationship with me that feels more equal and more respectful and more in line

with my psychological ideals, then why would I? Why would I want to do something that's bad for my mental health? Yeah, that's a perfect segue into the next thing I wanted to talk about, because I think that's one of your first rules in like the 10 new rules for parent adult child relationships is that the child ultimately has more power in this dynamic. And I sent out a newsletter to an email newsletter to my audience while back about these 10 rules. And it was like one of the most popular things I've sent out. So I wanted to talk about a few of those because I think they're good like jumping points to have this discussion. But rule number two that you wrote is, your relationship with your adult child needs to occur in an environment of creating happiness

and personal growth, not an environment of obligation, emotional debt, or duty. That's like a huge cultural shift, right? It is, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, I think younger generations are much more oriented towards mental health and happiness and growth. And, you know, it's kind of ironic because I'm a boomer and our generation sort of started the self-growth movement. So you'd think we'd be better at it.

But I think it was just, it wasn't new. nearly as much part of the culture as it is now. I think the culture has become much more therapeutic, there's much more language about therapy, there's much more of an orientation towards protecting mental health. And the society is also struggling more. There's more anxiety. There's more depression.

So parents have to become much more sensitive and tune into that if they want a relationship with their adult child. Yeah. Why do you think parents struggle so much with that one? I think part of it is the way that mental, illness or diagnoses that expanded. I don't know if you know that study by Nick Haslam, the Australian psychologist who has this idea of, he calls it concept creep. And he says that over the past three or four decades, there's been this enormous expansion over what should be

considered harmful, abusive, traumatic, neglectful behavior. So often parents are hearing from their adult child something like, well, you emotionally abused me, you traumatized me, you neglected me. And the parents often react like, how could you say that? You have like an ideal child. I would have killed for your childhood. I had an abusive child, but yours is a walk in the park, which of course, you can imagine doesn't go anywhere with the adult child who feels like they were emotionally abused or they're being told that by, you know, their therapist or other sources. So I think this is another way that the generations are just talking past each other and can create so many problems. I mean, what I tell parents to say is, don't say

that tell your adult child that you didn't emotionally abuse and say something more like, it's clear that I have significant blind spots, that I wasn't aware that that felt emotionally abusive to you. And I'm really glad you're telling me. I mean, they may not feel happy to hear that because every parent really wants to feel like they were a great parent. But in saying that, I'm glad that you're telling me, they're opening the door to a conversation

that is much more based upon mental health and happiness and collaboration and communication, which is really that is the nature of communication today. Yeah, I think you're speaking to such an important point that like as our ideals shift and what is considered like safe or productive shifts, we we kind of go and look back at it and say, wow, I can't believe my parents did that. But for some reason, it's so much more charged when it comes to like mental and emotional things than I know my parents didn't practice like safe sleep things maybe with me or maybe they let me like do something that I

would never let my kid do. But when I bring those kind of things up with parents, they're much more easily able to say, like, oh, times have changed. They don't get as defensive, I think, as they seem to with this emotional stuff. Why do you think that is? Well, I think the idea that you hurt, harmed, abused, neglected, traumatized your child. I mean, those, no parent wants to feel that way. Every parent, to them, that's just horrifying that idea. So it evokes a really defensive reaction. That's why, if I'm working with the adult child and not the parent, I say, well, you know, try to use language that they can actually hear that doesn't feel so worrisome. I think it's fine to say, and emphasize why you're telling them that so they don't feel so scared or

humiliated by it that they just can't even hear it. So you might want to start by saying the things that you liked or valued or appreciated about them, assuming that there's something there that you can, and not everybody can. Some people's, you know, childhoods realistically work just terrible, and so it's hard for them to do that. But then say what your goal is, that my goal in having this conversation with you isn't to hurt you. It's really because I would like to see if there's a way to have a closer relationship. But I actually need to talk to you about the things that felt bad to me or felt hurtful. And I understand that may be hard to hear, but I'm coming from a place of desire to be closer, not to alienate you. Now, realistically, some parents just

can't go there. I mean, as I say in my book, I've fired parents and I've had parents fire me because they're not willing or able to be empathic and take responsibility and not be defensive and not blame the adult child in the ways that they just simply have to be. Right. I think you're bringing up such a good point that if your adult child comes to you and says, I want to talk about XYZ, it's because they have some glimmer of hope that things can get better, right, and that they want to have a relationship with you. Because you said earlier, like, they can just cut ties and run most of the time.

They don't have any legal obligation to you, you know, outside of just like a cultural or moral obligation. And parents have to remember that, I think, when that defensiveness rises up that, like, this means there's hope and that they actually feel safe telling me this. Right. Ideally. I mean, I think they're realistically, there are mentally ill parents and there's mentally ill adult children. So, 100%. So in the same way that some parents just are going to blame and shame and criticize and humiliate. There are those adult children out there who just want to, you know, rake their parents over the coals and then walk away, you know, because they feel so mad or hurt or what upset aren't necessarily open to reconciliation.

Right, right. And it can be so difficult, I think, to find the nuance in those situations, especially for people who are listening to a podcast like this, reading books that we don't know your specific situation. And so to take this sort of advice and just apply it to anything, it may not fit you. That's right. That's a good thing to emphasize. And I say that to parents as well.

You can and should do everything right. It may work and it may not. And similarly with the adult child, if you're pushing your current, hopefully they'll be receptive and not defensive, but they might not. Right. That brings us to Rule 3, which I think is such an important one for parents, that you're not the only authority on how well you performed as a parent. Your adult child gets to have their own narrative and opinions about the past.

I think this is one of the hardest ones that I see for parents. Like, it's so hard. It's so true. Yeah, it's so hard for a parent, particularly if they're being, they thought they were doing a great job and they were better parents and their own parents were. And now their children are saying, well, I'm learning in therapy that you're a narcissist or you neglected me or it's your fault that I have these relationship problems. If a parent just goes, no, you're wrong. You had a great childhood. I mean, it's a dead-in conversation.

Parents have to be interested in what their adult children are telling them open to it and be, you know, fight their feelings of defensive. or just nothing is good. No good will come of it. It just makes things, things are either, the relationship may continue, but it won't grow. It may just faster or it just may not continue at all. Yeah. That's also like a cultural belief too, you know, that do children have, you know, memories of their childhood that are reliable? Should we listen to them? Or is the parent always above the child, even when they're an adult in terms of power? And when you think that, it's hard to listen to your child. Right. It's true. Yeah. If you have the idea that you're the ultimate authority

about it and your memories are right, then you have to have the belief, which is backed by the science, that memories is very easy to distort. People can have false memories. Parents can think that their kid's childhood was much better than it was. I tell both families, you know, members of the family, parent and adult child, to have the model of separate realities in mind, that you could be a parent and reasonably feel like you're a great parent and still must something really important about who your child was. And your, you know, child could similarly have the same thing. And in any family, I mean, I have two brothers. We have very different recollections of who our parents were, I mean, they're gone at this point. But still, you know, if we talk about her childhoods,

oh, mom wasn't like that. You know, she was more like this. And it depends on kind of what your role was in the family. So, so memory is just, it's not a great thing to get into a big fight about it. You know, it's better. for parents in particular, because often if it's a matter of debate for them to say something like, I don't recall it that way, but you may be right. And, you know, if you are right, of course, you feel upset about that. And, you know, again, the goal for parents in particular is that you want to promote a non-defensive interaction. So. For sure. And accepting that the perspective of a child can feel so profoundly different in scary moments. Like, I like to bring up situations that are not parents being bad parents, but that can still be scary for a child.

child, right? So that could be like illness, divorce, you know, any of these big things that were maybe a good decision, the parent handled it well, but because the child was young, they have such a different perspective of it. And it seems hard, I don't know if you see this in your work, like it's hard for parents to go back and put themselves in the mind of the child. Yeah, no, I think that's really well said. And that we don't always know our children. And I mean, adult children don't always know that they're parents either, but one of the things I love about doing family therapy between parent and adult child is that it gives the child the opportunity to say, well, actually, this is what I was thinking at that point. This is what I was feeling when that happened. And if the parent is smart, they're just listening and learning.

They're not going, oh, that wasn't right. That's not what happened. They're really using it as an opportunity to deepen their understanding of the child and have a much more intimate relationship with them. And, you know, we all experience our parents or other family members through the filter of our own kind of genetic inheritance. You know, we all come into the world with a certain disposition, whether it's towards anxiety or depression or neuroticism or extroversion or introversion. And all those things filter how we experience other people in the family as well, which is why just is kind of an idea of, no, it was like this, it wasn't like that. It just isn't useful conversation. Right, right.

And that's another good point that, like, sometimes parents and children aren't a good match just simply because of personality or temperament or things like that. That's true. And it's like luck of the draw, kind of. It really is luck of the draw. I totally agree with you. I mean, you could have a kid who's just born gay and has these really conservative parents in Alabama, you know, or a kid who's super extrovert with these really quiet introverted parents or vice versa. I mean, sometimes it really is a mismatch between personalities. and a lot of misunderstandings can come from that as well.

So, no, you're absolutely right about that. Yeah, that's always a hard one for me to work with, I think, because, of course, that one can move into the territory of abuse in some situations or of gaslighting and stuff. But there's also these people on the other end of the spectrum that it's like, I just can't get along with my parent. Or, like, they don't like the same things I do. They don't show interest in my life.

And I don't know if you're seeing more of that coming up in your work. Well, yeah, particularly because both sides are wanting a more intimate kind of confiding relationship. I think both parents, there's surveys done about parents raising children today and the vast majority say that they want to be best friends with their children when they're grown. That's kind of a lot to put on the adult child, right? I mean, I had decent parents, but I don't think they aspired to be my best friend. I don't think I was trying to be best friends with them. And it just creates these really high expectations that parents have for intimacy. with their adult children. So a lot of the conflict I see is that parents feel very hurt or rejected by the fact that their adult child isn't returning that text right away or that phone call or that Facebook post. And then they start complaining and feeling hurt. And then the adult child feels like, hey, I've got my own life. Now you're not respecting my boundaries. And they're kind of off to the races at that point. So I think the ways that we have really amplified our expectations of closeness is also creating a lot of problems. And I think just, you know, cell phones are

are creating problems. The fact that parents are just one text away from their parents, from any place in the world, also can create this kind of surveilling attitude between parent and adult child that just when I was growing up just didn't exist. I mean, I might not talk to my parents for, particularly when I moved out to California from Ohio. I mean, I could go several weeks without calling them or mailing them or anything. And like I said, they were decent people. I liked my parents, but I didn't feel any need to be in contact with them. But these days, you know, two weeks. You didn't call her contact. I mean, oh my gosh, 24 hours. Right. Exactly. Like, I'm thinking, like, I'm a millennial. Like, I'm the, you know, the generation that got, I got cell phones,

like, around middle school, high school. And, like, if I went 48 hours without telling my parents I was breathing, they would be like, are you okay? Are you alive? Exactly. What's going on? Do you still love me? Yeah. The comment that you made about, like, parents wanting to be best friends with their kid, though, I noticed that evoked a little bit of anxiety in me because I'm the mother of a two-year-old. And I find myself being like, am I doing a good job? I hope my kid wants to, likes me when I'm older, when he's older. And I think now that we have all this language about estrangement, we're talking about it more, that parents in my generation are starting to really feel like there is a scorecard, like they're going to get graded.

at the end of this, and it's a very different anxiety than what I see among, like, Oomer parents, whatever, that are just like, I'm going to do the things, pay the bills, keep the roof over the head, and, like, I should get a star at the end. That's right. No, I think you're really right that we've really raised the anxiety for parents. I think mothers in particular, there's this kind of perfection of the culture has evolved, where if you don't do everything right, it's what I call being a soulmate parent. You know, it's not enough to just raise your kid and get them out of the house and maybe into college.

Now you have to be their tutor and their advocate and their therapist, you know, and their whatever, their best friend, their coach. And it's just way too much. It's sort of similar to what I see in romantic relationships that people, you know, have these really high expectations about what they're supposed to get, how much value and meaning and pleasure they're supposed to get from the romantic partners. was a similar process in parenting, and part of that is a function of the way that parents just don't have the kind of friends that they used to have. Like, if you look at surveys, the sociologist Robert Putnam talked about in his book, Bowling Alone, that parents used to have many more friends, social activities. Like when I was growing up, you know, my mother was playing mahjong with her friends on the weekends.

My dad was at the Y. They weren't worried about neglecting me. They have their leagues that they were, they were always out with their friends. They had, you know, date nights before they even called it date night. You know, whereas every generation's probably starting in the past, you know, three decades ago, or just they've given up practically friendships. Everything's been sucked up into the nuclear family and redistributed to the children. And even on the one hand, I think that these higher expectations,

as much more psychological orientation, is created in some ways a good environment between parent and adult child. You know, the reality is that more people do have close relationships with their adult children than in prior generation. So that's the upside. The downside is that it's also made things much more fragile because the expectations are so high. So it's a very different world. It is for sure.

I want to look at rule number six that you've wrote about because I think it's an important one. You were the parent when you were raising your child and you're the parent until they die. You brought your child into this world. That means if your child is unable to take the high road, you still have to if reconciliation is your goal. That is absolutely right. Yeah. I know the parents listening. Are you sure, though? Oh, no, parents get mad at me.

You were saying that they get mad at you. They get mad at me too. They're like, you know, why do I have to take all the responsibility? They can make amends to me. You know, I'm not going to make amends to them. I'm like, well, fine, but if you want to have a relationship with your kid, then don't make amends to them. Don't take responsibility.

It's like, it's your kid. It's not mine. But it's also just my first. philosophy, our children didn't ask to be born, and even if we've given them a great life, we start to take the high road. And I think that extends to wills, for example. I mean, some of the parents in my practice are cutting their children out of their wills because they're strange, and some of their adult children are, frankly, kind of mean to them. So on the one end, I empathize, and I'm like, well, what do you want your legacy to be? You want your legacy to be that

you're basically cursing your child from the grave, that they hurt you while you're alive, so you're going to hurt them for the rest of their life. You're going to make it. difficult between your siblings if you leave it to one sibling and not the other. Do you want your legacy to be that you're punishing your child because they, for whatever reason, that may have been perfectly valid? I mean, the other thing I say to parents is just because you think you were a good parent doesn't mean that you were and doesn't mean that your child might not have a really good reason to be upset with you. We all have our blind spots, A, and B, in the same way I think parents do the best job that they can raising their children. I think adult children do the best

job that they can in terms of how much closeness that they feel like they can have with the parent. I think the buck has to stop with the parents. It does. And there can be such a temptation when your adult child is behaving in a way that you would consider to be unhealthy to get on their level and to match it. And I feel like that's the worst thing you can do in this situation because then both of you are contributing to the dysfunction. Instead of being the one that's like, I'm going to be up here and I'm here when you're ready. I'll help you. you get out of the hole, I'm not going to kill myself in the process, but I'm not going to replicate what you're doing. No, I think that's brilliant. I love that. I have this lecture that I give to

parents called the five most common mistakes of estranged parents. And that's mistake number three, returning fire with fire. Yeah, just because if your kids being abusive to you, if you're abusive back, I think this is a mistake that a lot of therapists make with parents of adult children, to be either estranged or estranging, his parent therapist will sometimes say, well, you need to confront that behavior and you need to challenge them and you need to stand up to them. And I'll sometimes get that from parents in my practice as well. I wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal for Father's Day. And one of the things that I said in it is that, you know, instead of saying to your adult child who's estranged, why are you doing this to me? Say, you wouldn't do this unless you thought it was the

healthiest thing to do. And that's the opposite of returning fire with fire. It's basically being an adult and modeling good behavior because the adult child feels that way. So if you just say, why are you doing this to me? Then you're just perpetuating conflict. You're not resolving anything. Yeah. And I think that, I guess that kind of leads into the question I want to ask is, do you think that there are adult children who truly, like,

want to be estranged from their parents? I think it's super complicated. Yeah. Perfect therapist answer. Hey, you know, you get a therapist on your show. what are they going to say? Exactly. Set myself out.

Yeah, you sure did. Well, I think that there are people who need to be a strange, well, let's look at it this way. I think there's many pathways to estrangement. You know, one, as we've been kind of talking about, is abusive parents, difficult childhoods, adverse, you know, experiences in childhood where the adult child, now adult child just feels like they were too traumatized to trust the parent. That's one pathway. There's also, when the adult child gets married and they don't like the parents, or the parents don't like that person, and that spouses choose them, Remy, you can't have both. Mental illness in the parents, certainly, but mental illness in the adult child.

The role of therapy, I do think that therapists these days are too quick to recommend estrangement. I think divorce is huge that after divorce, that's a really common pathway to estrangement. And some adult children, as we've been kind of touching on, don't know any other way to, feel separate from the parent than to cut them off. I've had a few different estranged adult daughters say about their mothers. I just don't know any other way to get my mother's voice out of my head than to cut off contact with her. And it's in part because the way the parenting has changed over the past three or four decades, because parents have become much more intrusive and guilt-ridden and worried and anxious and involved. And that's not always a good thing for the

adult child. Some adult children just don't know any other way to feel separate than to cut the parent off. So did I even come close to answering your question? You did, you did. I think you're also talking about a phenomenon that I'm anecdotally seeing more is like that type of estrangement, if we want to call it that, especially happening between the ages of like 20 and 30 when a child is trying to differentiate and become their own person and the parents are overbearing or over-involved and they don't know any other way like you're saying, but to initiate that cutoff. Yeah, it's really, it's very interesting to me. And I think sometimes childhood, you know, so-called traumas or harm and sometimes can get kind of inflated as a way to rationalize it, you know, as a way to say,

well, this is why I need it. But it's really, they just need to feel separate from the parent and don't know any other way to feel separate. And I think that, you know, the way that parents have become much more anxious is a problem because it really is true that for some adult children, their parents' voice is to prominent in their head, particularly they're anxious, over-involved voice. So yeah, that can't be a pathway to estrangement. Yeah, and there's certainly parents, I think, that would like to dictate every decision that the child makes, right? And so instead of saying no or setting a boundary, or that may be not even safe to do, they say, okay, well, I can't have you in my life because I can't be the way you want me to be. Right. They want to feel like they're in charge

of their own life. And that's why I would say that virtually every letter I see from an estranged adult child has the word boundaries in it because they want to feel like they're in charge of their own life. And it's confusing for parents because, you know, realistically, parents today have been doing a better job probably than their parents did, were more invested financially and psychologically and emotionally. So they imagine that they're kind of owed a bigger extraction of loyalty or availability or even authority, but it just doesn't work that way. Yeah. I wrote an article called, you do not. owe your parents that created a little bit of like pushback. And I'm wondering what you think about

that concept, because you just verbalize like this payoff that parents get from raising their children. What does that look like for parents? Well, I think both generations owe the other something. You know, I think both owe them due diligence if nothing else. So from the parents' perspective, I do think the buck stops with them. I do think that they owe the adult child, the willingness to find the kernel, if not the bushel of truth in the adult child's complaints, to take the high road, to be dedicated, to be empathic, to be compassionate, to not get down into the weeds. From the adult child side, I think that they owe the parent the willingness to repair,

to be open to doing therapy with the parent, if that financially is a possibility, to see the parent in a more three-dimensional way, to realize that the parent, did the best they could, even when the best that they could may have been terrible, but you know, most parents don't really want their kids to suffer, even if they do make them suffer. So, so I feel like both sides owe the other side nothing and both sides owe the other side everything. Yeah. I think we're aligned on that, that it sounds like it's, it's about reciprocity. It's not that you, you as the child owe me everything because I gave you these things in childhood

and now I don't have to do anything else. Yeah, exactly. the mistake that parents make. Well, I was a good parent. I did a great job. So now you need to be as available to me as I want or forgive me for my mistakes. And that just isn't, it's just not the right way to approach that kind of a dialogue. Right. Right. Which that's the other thing that I hear a lot from my own clients and online is like, I'm not mad about what my parents did. I'm mad that they keep doing it today, even after I've told them that it upsets me. Is this something that you see in your work as well? Sure. I mean, you know, it's like with marriage, I mean, some things,

people just, it's just who they are. They may not be able to change, and it may not be because they want you to suffer or they're ignoring you. But it may just be that you've sort of reached their capacity or their limits for change or growth. And at that point, you get to decide how much you want to, you know, be around them or not given that. I think in general, both parents and adult children change the most if they feel like the other person is approaching them with compassion and empathy and that kind of thing. So I think sometimes both parents and adult children bring out the worst in each other when they approach the other with criticism and that kind of thing. Yeah, very true. Which brings me to my next question is like I think there are a lot of people

out there who would like to bring up these issues with their parents. But they don't necessarily know how or maybe they've done it and they've gotten bad results. So I wonder if you have any tips for that. Yeah. I mean, again, I think really to have it at the forefront of your mind that telling your parent about the mistakes that they made is genuinely touchy territory because parents, all parents, I would say, want to feel like they did a good job. And it's really humiliating and shame-inducing to feel like you failed your child. So you have to approach it with that in the back of your mind that whatever you say is probably going to be very triggering or upsetting to them. That's why I think prepping the conversation is really useful. Again, if your

parent did nothing right, then I guess you can't really say that you tried the best that you could or there are a lot that I value about you. But you still probably want to prep, you know, in general complaints, which is the best way to go to start with something positive and in something positive and make it clear that you're raising the topic not to criticize the remaining. them feel bad, but because you actually want to have a closer relationship. And here's what that would look like. And you could say, I just want you to listen. You don't have to respond. I just want you to listen. Maybe we can have another conversation about it. But these are some of the things that they did impact me and affected me. And ideally, you would recognize that and show some empathy

around it. And if you're not, that I guess it's probably better to just not say anything. Or maybe we can go into family therapy around it or that kind of a thing. A lot of adult children tell me that they've brought up issues to their parents hundreds of times, right? I'm sure you hear this as well. And then you have parents who will say, I have no idea why my adult child won't talk to me. And this is like something that I see consistently in my office, on the internet, etc. Why is this disconnect happening? Well, I think some adult children don't tell their parents. I think some parents are legitimately surprised, typically the conflict. avoidant adult child or who has legitimate reasons not to tell the parent because they have a

history of the parents just being overreactive or defensive or fragile or that kind of thing. But I also think what you're saying is also true that sometimes parents have a hard time believing it or hearing it because it's so at odds with their own experience of themselves as parents or their version of the child's childhood or they just can't really empathize or see why that matters to the adult child, particularly if there's a big disparity in terms of what the child is saying was formative about that experience growing up. So if the adult child says, well, you didn't do X or Y, and that's why I have this issue. And the parent was like, I only did that once. Or, you know, I don't think that that's tied to why you have this issue. If they started

debating them, then it's not going to go very well. Yeah. It's almost like the shame causes some sort of amnesia sometimes. I think of people where it's like, oh, that conversation, never happened, but it very much has. And I can see how that would definitely happen to people. Are there things that parents can do to help lower their defensiveness in these moments? I think the main thing is the principle of separate realities that you can credibly feel like you're a decent parent. Your kid could credibly feel like you miss something really important. I think that's important, realizing that if your adult child's bringing this to you, it's not to shame or hurt or humiliate you.

as much as I can feel like that, it's actually to have a closer relationship with you, that those kind of conversations are actually a great way to have the close relationship with your adult child that you may really long to have with them and that it won't happen without that, that you should know yourself in terms of your own defensiveness. If you have your own childhood traumas, that might make it harder to hear the way that you hurt your child or traumatize them or abuse them. It may make you blind to that, particularly if you feel like you were a much better parent, just because you were a better parent doesn't mean that you were a great parent in terms of what your child may have needed

from you. So, you know, sometimes parents are resistant to doing the kind of work that I advise them to do. And I say it's about humility, not humiliation. You know, it's really just about showing up as somebody who's not defensive, who's willing to look at themselves and take responsibility and do that from a place of love and concern for their child. And a metaphor that I find helpful, particularly with parents who were victims of parental alienation, where after a divorce, when parent places the child against the other parent, is to sort of think of yourself as a lighthouse if you're the parent. You're just on the beach, you're steady, you're always on, and your kid may be pushed up and down by the waves out at sea and periodically surface and get their orientation of where you are. You're just there broadcasting compassion and love and openness and willingness. And in a divorce, you're not dissing the other parent. You're not criticizing them. You're not defending. sending yourself from any of that. I think that kind of orientation is really helpful as well. Yeah, so remembering, like, two things can be true at once.

Exactly. I don't have to sink down, you know, to the other person's level. And that sometimes these things, they take time and, like, require you to be steady throughout that, even when it's painful. Yeah, I think that's well said. It's so, it's so difficult. And I do, I feel for parents that are going to, through this because I talk about this that like I started working in addiction treatment like

right out of school. And I had this misconception that like anyone who ended up there had a bad family, right? That was like a blind spot for me. It was like they had to have something going on that made them become an addict. And then I would start to meet with the families and realize like this is happening in a lot of different situations. You know, and it can happen to anyone sometimes. We want to feel like we can protect ourselves from that. And so I'm bringing this up to talk about really like the shame that comes with estrangement, both on behalf of the adult child and the parent and not feeling like you can talk about this stuff around people. No, shame is huge.

So I don't know how much you know about my background, but I'm a daughter who's fully grown millennial. who I'm very close to, but there was a period of time for a few years after my divorce and my remarriage where she felt kind of displaced when she was younger, and she was the few years in her early 20s where she cut off contact with me, which was really nightmarish. And at that time, there was nothing written to help. And I made all the mistakes that, you know, so many of the parents in my practice make. But eventually, I was able to reconcile with her and kind of learned a lot through that process. But the time I was kind of like, oh, I can't talk to anybody. about this, because here, I'm a psychologist. I'm certainly supposed to know better, you know,

and the feeling, like, if you're the parent, you feel like people are thinking, well, you must have done something pretty terrible. And if you're the adult child, you're feeling like, well, people are going to think you're this terribly selfish person because families forever and you should, you know, call your parent. So I think both sides do feel a lot of shame about it, and that keeps it kind of more silent as an epidemic, which it really is at this point, and not out in the open where it really deserves to be. Yeah, and that's where you start to see a lot of black and white thinking, I think, especially on social media where people will share and they'll be like, well, so-and-so must have been abusive or, you know, I get a comment every day, like, pick up the phone and call your mom and I'm like, I'm not talking about my own mom, like, I'm a therapist. I understand what you're trying to say. And, you know, there's a lot of shame around it where people want to put you in a box that, like, if you don't have a good relationship with a parent, or the parent doesn't have a good relationship child, it's an immediate red flag.

Right. That's true. Yeah. Yeah. We still have very strong ideas about what families should look like. And, you know, the reality is that good family relationships are great for people, but bad family relationships aren't good for people. So, you know, that's why I think both of us are oriented towards helping people have the tools to make what can feel like a bad family relationship turn into a good one because a lot of suffering can happen if that's the case. Yeah. And it seems that the... the one common thread to making that happen is that both parties really have to be willing to do their part and to own their role. And sometimes that really means that the parent

has to be the stronger one. Yeah. It's very true. I mean, people sometimes say, well, how successful are you? Because usually the parent is the one reaching out. I'm like, well, I'm really successful if I can get the adult child in the room with me. But otherwise, it's kind of an unknown. own, but no parents do have to take leadership for a variety of reasons. One is nothing compels an adult child to be in contact with a parent beyond their desire to do so. Second of all, the estrangement from the adult child's perspective is in line with their ideals of mental health and individuation and assertiveness and happiness. And they probably have support from their therapist in terms of doing it. So there's a lot of upside from the adult child's perspective. From the

parents' perspective, it's all downside. It's all guilt, sorrow, regret, anger, social isolation, shame. So parents do have to take the lead, and they have to take the lead because they're the parent from my perspective. And it's kind of, they should take the high road. Yeah. There was an article that I read in The Atlantic by Arthur C. Brooks. I don't know if you've seen it, the title is the key to a good parent-child relationship is low expectations. I wanted to know what you think about just that that title or that framework? Well, I mean, I think it's in line with what you and I were talking about earlier about parents having the expectation that they're going to be or should be best friends with their child. I think that corrupts things. But I also think

that adult children have too high of expectations of what their childhoods should have been like. I do think if there's a way that younger generations are making too much out of things that the parents did and sort of imagining that some of the ways that they turned out, I mean, from my perspective, I don't know how you think about this, but, you know, parenting is a relatively small percentage of how we turn out. I mean, more powerful are genetics, the era that you're born into, good luck, bad luck, you know, neighborhood, social class, siblings. So parents in the big scheme of things, I mean, parents can do a lot wrong. So a parent can traumatize somebody. But that doesn't mean that if one's life has turned out poorly as an adult, if you have significant depression or anxiety or other kinds of issues like confidence, self-esteem, that there's necessarily a trauma hidden in there that you have to root out that can be traced back to your childhood. So there's a saying by the Israeli sociologist, Eva Luz, who says that today our lives are plotted backwards. What's a dysfunctional family? It's a family where your needs weren't met. How do you know your

needs weren't met by looking at your present condition? And I think, you know, I agree with that. I think it is problematic because at this moment that we're in where we're sort of assume, too much causality in terms of parenting in ways that I think is making families more fragile. I hear you. And I think it's important to, you know, differentiate between like the buckets of people that we're talking about here, right? Because, you know, we know that physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, all of this neglect. That all happens in families. And I think when I'm speaking to people like that, I want to be really clear to be like, there's a big chance that that has had a big impact on who you are today. And there's also this other bucket that

I think you're speaking to as well, like people whose parents maybe didn't talk about emotions. They were a little bit cold. You know, they weren't very like loving or warm or maybe they were working all the time to put food on the table and they weren't necessarily doing things that are malicious. But if we try to plot them backwards, we can say, oh, you felt unloved. because of X, Y, and C, and that we have to use nuance and different lenses, I think, to plot all those different types of people. This was a wonderful conversation. Is there anything you feel like we missed that you wanted to get to? I don't think so. I thought it was pretty thorough. Yeah, and that was great. It was really great talking to and good to know more about your work and everything.

Well, thank you so much for chatting with me today, Josh. I think people really are going to benefit from this episode. And I think that a lot of parents learned so many ways that they can connect with their adult children and hopefully have better relationships with them. I'll be back with another episode next Tuesday. Until then, I'll see you at home again soon. Thank you.