CALLING HOME with Whitney Goodman, LMFT - Estrangement Between Adult Children and Their Parents

Episode Date: January 16, 2024

In this episode of the Calling Home Podcast, host Whitney Goodman discusses the topic of estrangement between adult children and their parents. She shares insights from hundreds of stories she received from her followers, highlighting common themes such as emotional immaturity, boundary violations, addiction, and denial of problems within the family. Goodman also shares results from polls she conducted on Instagram, revealing that most respondents took one to five years to decide to become estranged, and the main causes were a history of abuse and emotionally immature parents. She emphasizes that most respondents indicated that an apology and changed behavior could help mend the relationship.  Join her Family Cycle Breakers Club for further support and discussion on family dynamics at CallingHome.co. Follow the Calling Home community on Instagram or TikTok.  Follow Whitney Goodman on Instagram or TikTok. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome back to the first solo episode of 2024 on the Calling Home podcast. I am Whitney Goodman and if you follow me on Instagram, you'll know that I have been working on this episode for the last several weeks. I'm really trying to put together a multi-part episode about estrangement that could help us see some of the different sides to these stories. I think, unfortunately, something that I've encountered is that people who are involved in estrangement between adult children and their parents specifically are quite siloed, like within their communities, right? So we have a lot of estranged parents who deserve community as well.

congregating with one another, you know, within certain, like, apps or communities or on social media, and they have found a way to interact with one another there. And then there are adult children that are also kind of coming in to some of these social media apps or maybe congregating within their own spaces. And I'm noticing that there's now, like, a lot of discourse going on between these two communities, particularly on TikTok, and there's a lot of, like, fighting, who's right, who's wrong, whatever it is. And one of the bigger themes that I have seen coming from some of these estranged parents is this belief that could be accurate, could be inaccurate, I don't know, I don't know each of these people's individual stories, that there was no abuse in their child's childhood

and that this estrangement is completely unwarranted. It's a fad. It's trendy. It's just something that they're doing to punish the parent or to manipulate, et cetera. And I want to say this again because I think I try to say this a lot, but I can't say it in every 30 second video that I put up. And so when people don't hear me say it every time, I think they think that I don't believe this. estrangement between adult children and their parents is not a clear-cut, one-sided thing all the time. Sometimes it's very black and white, right? Sometimes it's, there was a child, they were abused by their parents, and this is why they are estranging. There are other situations where there are a lot more things at play, right? And things are really complicated and nuanced,

and we cannot provide like a one-size-fits-all approach to all of those situations. I want 100% of believe that. I also think there's pain on both sides, there's confusion on both sides. There are certainly adult children who could learn to be better communicators, and there are certainly parents who could learn to become better communicators. There are a lot of adult children who are really skilled at communicating their feelings and really become very skilled at communicating their boundaries and what happened, and they've made many, many attempts to get through to their parents, and their parents still do not hear them.

And there are certainly situations where the parent is understandably confused, why the child is taking this route, or there are other things going on that may have led to a situation where the child does not fully understand. And when I say child here, I'm talking about the adult child, why this entire situation has come to be. And so I know from my experience as a therapist, my experience as a parent, and my experience as an adult child, that these situations can be complicated,

nuanced, and difficult. The thing I'm trying to figure out is why there are so many adult children who are really clearly able to articulate what went wrong in their relationship with their parents and why there are so many parents who are saying, I don't know why my child became estranged from me. They had a wonderful childhood.

And I think this is something that several other people have tried to uncover, right? There are websites dedicated to this. There's a really great list online called the Missing Missing Reasons that talks about parents within estranged parent communities and how there is kind of always this denial of like not knowing the reasons and then we see the adult children in other communities saying I've explained this to you a hundred times and I'm trying to figure out where that disconnect is. Now a couple of disclaimers before we get into this. I'm a therapist.

I'm not a researcher. I am someone that has never really wanted to do research in the academic sense because I like to hear from people and I'm much more interested in storytelling and trying to really listen to what people have to say. And that's what drew me to therapy. And sometimes we cannot reduce all of these stories into neatly packaged data. I am also someone that has built up a community offline and online that gives me access to a lot of people who are willing to and want to share their stories with me of estrangement. And so I recently went online and I was like, you know what, let me just see what I can collect here. Okay. And so I posted a question box and I said something along the lines of, if you were not abused by your parents, but you are estranged from

them, would you be willing to share your story with me? And you can DM me if you'd like. I'm going to use these stories. I will keep it completely anonymous. And I just want to track themes to see what's happening in these relationships when there's not abuse. And the reason I worded it this way is because that is a theme I am encountering a lot when estranged parents make videos and tag me in them, when I get sent them, when I come across them, that they are saying, my child did not experience any abuse in their childhood, and they still chose to become estranged from me. I would understand if a child was abused, why they would want to be estranged from their parent, but that is not my situation. And so I've heard this enough

times that I thought, okay, let's try to learn and understand some of the other reasons why someone might become estranged or no contact, whatever we want to call it. with their parent in adulthood if they were not abused in childhood. And so I had this question up and I'm like shocked, but I received truly somewhere between 350 and 450 stories, okay? And I am one person and I could not get through all these stories. And I'm not talking about like I got like a sentence from people. I've got like 75 pages here in front of me of stories that were shared with me on Instagram in a 24-hour period, okay? And these are stories that people sent to me, that they sat down, they took the time, and they explained their situation. Some of these stories are extremely long and extremely detailed. Most of them are at least two to three paragraphs, okay? So this is not someone just writing and saying, like, my mom's a narcissist. That's why I cut her off. People

typically sent me a story detailing their entire life. Now, of course, another disclaimer here. I am not an academic research institution. I do not verify the identity of these people. I'm not verifying their stories. I simply want us to look at these stories and the themes that we see as a way to maybe uncover where some of the disconnect is happening here between adult children and their parents and to try to understand what's going wrong here, especially in these cases where the parent is saying, I did not abuse my child, and the adult is even saying, like, maybe this is an abuse, but I still don't want to have a relationship with my parent in adulthood. I think that's something that we really need to understand, because we can't just

keep looking at these most extreme cases and saying, this is the only time when it's warranted or deserved for an adult child to have distance from their parent is when it fits this extreme set of criteria. We have to also understand what is happening here. and what are some of the trends, especially if we want to try to fix some of these relationships and prevent them from getting worse in the future. So basically what I did was I took these stories that people sent me and I put them into a document. And then I used a like thematic analysis software and it's called Max QDA 24. And you can put everything in here. And you can put everything in here and you can code for certain words. You can see the frequency that comes up

and how often certain things were mentioned. And I created, you know, several categories of the most commonly ranking themes that we're going to find here. And what I want to do is I'm going to walk you through some of these themes and tell you what I learned from some of these stories. If you are a parent who is low contact, no contact, estranged from their child, I hope that you will have an open mind when hearing some of these because you might learn something about why these relationships can go this way. If you are an adult child, you might find some solidarity in some of these stories. And if you are a parent to young children, you might come to discover some of the reasons why children who become adults are struggling with their parents in

adulthood. Okay. So let's get into the most prevalent theme that I found was this. Most of these stories started off with saying, I don't know if I was abused. My parents would say it wasn't abuse. I don't know if it's bad enough to be considered. abuse. And in a lot of these stories, there was kind of this caveat of like, is it abuse if it's not sexual or physical? I think my parents don't consider emotional neglect or emotional abuse to be abuse. So I've never considered what I went through to be abuse. So I want you to remember when listening to this, that these stories that were sent to me were sent to me under the guise of, I don't think I was abused or I'm not sure if I was abused or I definitely wasn't abused.

But a lot of these stories had that caveat in it of like, I don't know if this is abuse. I don't think it's abuse. It maybe wasn't that bad. My parents say it's not abuse, et cetera. So that's a big theme here. And I want to call that out because I think there is this false belief that every adult child that is estranged from their parents is like out there. just saying, I was abused, I was abused, I was abused, when really, I mean, I'm looking at

hundreds and hundreds of stories of people saying, like, I don't think I was abused. It probably wasn't that bad. And they're really trying to like downplay that. These were all also sent to me because I asked people who believed that they were not abused by their parents to send me their stories. So let's remember that. I did not receive stories from people who were confident that they were abused by their parents or who maybe were in the system. at some point in their life because their parents were found guilty of child abuse, et cetera. One of the more common themes that I found was mentions of narcissism.

So I know that this is a word that gets thrown around a lot lately. It's a buzzword. It's a therapy word that I think in some circles, yes, has been used too often. And then sometimes it's not used enough. It's one of those really complicated words. But when people were using the word narcissism, they often went on to explain a pattern of trying to get this person, their mother, their father, both of them, to see or understand their perspective and an absolute unwillingness

to. So I think what a lot of people are referring to here, if it doesn't fit the clinical definition of narcissism or the person isn't exhibiting what we would consider to be narcissistic traits that are consistent with narcissistic personality disorder, is this feeling, of like my parent cannot step outside of themselves. They cannot consider my perspective. They cannot change their view. They cannot tolerate nuance. It's like a lot of people use the phrase, it's their way or the highway in these stories. Like that was a very common statement that was used. The second most common theme that I found were stories that all contained one of these words that I think stand in for the same thing. Addiction, drugs.

alcohol and substance abuse. Many of the stories included those words. These were themes of parents using drugs or alcohol or abusing substances throughout childhood, but also many of them included parents that were still doing that today and had not changed their behavior. So I did not hear any stories of like my parents were, you know, addicted to drugs when I was a child and now they're sober and doing well but I still cut them off. They all included some sort of caveat that either their parent did not use drugs or alcohol when they were a child and now they are so they've had to cut them off or this is a pattern that has continued throughout their lifetime. Again, this was extremely common. It was the second most prevalent theme that I

found across all of these stories. Another big word that was included in a lot of these stories was the word boundaries. And I know that this is another like buzzy therapy word that we hear a lot now, but this word was often used to describe situations where the adult child had said something along the lines of, I will not be around you if you continue doing X. So boundaries was often included in the examples that also included drugs, alcohol, and substance use. So, for example, I will not be around you when you are using substances was a common theme or you cannot be around my child when you were intoxicated, things like that, and the parent would continue to exhibit that behavior. Boundary violations were of

very common reason, and these were backed up with a lot of information, a lot of data, a lot of storytelling about several situations where parents were told a boundary and continued to violate them many times in adulthood. Another very common theme was denial and ignoring problems within the family. So trying to pretend as if things didn't happen. operating under this like, let's just forgive and forget and move on mentality after big blowups or arguments had happened. And a lot of people had told stories of really trying to get their parent to maybe take some accountability or seek understanding around a situation that had happened

that had made them upset or hurt them. And there was really just no acknowledgement of that. and the family maybe tried or the parent or the couple, whoever it is, tried to kind of just bury the issue. Another one that came up a lot were these types of terms like emotional neglect, emotional immaturity, a parent really not being interested in anything about the child's life, whether that was in childhood and adulthood, that had to do with emotional health, that had to do with how they were doing, and there were quite a few examples of parents who contributed very negatively to the emotional health of the adults or the child. Emotional immaturity tend to be included often in examples that also included stories of boundary violations and narcissism.

And so I think a lot of these things are, these are words being used to describe very similar, of fact patterns and adult children have learned what these words mean and they are using them as a way to identify what is happening in their situations. So it's not typically that it's always the exact same fact pattern or the same situation, but it often kind of boils down to like, I tried to set a boundary, I tried to communicate a feeling, my feelings were not considered, it always had to be their way. I tried to do this many, many times, and eventually I hit a wall and I decided I did not want to do that anymore. These other two were found in a lot of examples. One was religion. So there were quite a few examples from different religious backgrounds,

whether that was Christianity, Judaism, Islam. They were not specific to one religion. I received several stories of parents not being willing to tolerate a child not following their religion to the degree at which they found to be appropriate. And there were many detailed stories about parents using religion as a way to shame, control, or change the child and make them maybe not be who they are and make them be who they wanted them to be. This was also common when people decided to get married or to partner with someone, and the parent did not like the religion of the partner and said something along the lines of, we will not accept that person because they are ex. Wanting grandchildren to be of a certain religion and wanting to control how that religion is in their life was also a common theme. politics were also included in a lot of the stories that I received. There was a particular one

that I remember well about a adult child saying something negative about a particular political candidate in the United States that the parent did not appreciate the comment and the parent then decided not to speak to them for several months when the adult child decided to apologize for the comment as a way to repair the relationship, the parent was not satisfied with the apology and wanted the adult child to align their politics with the parent, and this continued to be an issue. And so often I find that it's not that adult children and their parents can't have different political beliefs. I think there are many, many families. I know them personally and professionally who have different politics. It's this unwillingness to be able to be around

people without talking about those things and wanting to convert the other person to your side that I think makes things really difficult. And so when conversations in the household revolve around politics or there's always like jabs being thrown about somebody's beliefs or their beliefs are infringing on the other person's personal rights, I think that's when it gets really difficult. And so in the story that I just told, for example, this wasn't about someone having different politics. It was about a parent saying, I need you to believe what I believe. And if you don't believe what I believe, I'm not going to speak to you. And so ultimately, this adult child decided that if the parent was unwilling to be able to hold space for the fact

that both of them had different beliefs, they were willing to apologize and not disparage. This candidate in front of their parents, then they were not going to be able to have a relationship with them. And so I think it's not as simple as like, oh, my adult child stopped talking to me because I voted for ex-candidate. I mean, sometimes sure, that can be their reason, but I do think sometimes it's because the topic of conversation, the beliefs are actually taking over like the family as a whole. And it's becoming like a huge thing that it's hard to have a relationship with someone when they can't hold space for other people's realities or opinions. Speaking of that, the other thing that really came up a lot was not accepting the person's

identity. I had many, many stories that really were reduced down to, I am gay, I am LGBTQ, whatever, and my parents says they cannot accept me because of that. They do not accept my choice in partner. They did not raise their child to pick X. And that, I think, falls under also, you know, how people are trying to handle, like, religion and political affiliation. A lot of these stories were very similar. It was this belief of, like, my child should believe the same things that I believe. I did not raise them to be this way. They need to be that way, whatever. And people just could not find common ground. And that was a really common one. Another theme that was woven through a lot of these stories was just a found level of exhaustion about trying to bring up and solve the same issue over and over. That was something that I saw in like every story that I read was like, I tried this, I tried that.

I went to a therapist. I wrote them a letter. I called them on the phone. I explained my feelings in this way. And like the other person just like wasn't getting it. And so they just like surrendered and gave up at some point. A lot of, a lot of people said like, I just accepted that I can't get from my parents. Like, I've tried a million ways, and I can't get it. And I could feel that level of exhaustion in a lot of these stories. There's a few more common themes that I found. Money was a big one. You know, there were stories of money being split unequally or unfairly among siblings and not causing different types of strain between the siblings and the parents. There were stories of parents taking money from adult children, loans gone wrong, resentment around money,

expectations around money, many stories about them. Another one was instability. So parents that were unreliable that could not be dependent on, there were many stories of that. And then this one I thought was interesting that I saw in a lot, these two kind of go hand in hand, which is divorce and bringing new partners around. There were quite a few stories of people saying, you know, their boyfriend always came first, their girlfriend always came first, or I, you know, when I was an adult, my dad got remarried to a woman who was basically like, it's me or your kids, and he picked her. You know, there were themes like that, bringing unsafe people into the home, particularly when these adults were children, stories of sexual abuse that happened because

of a partner that was brought into the house and the parent not taking responsibility for that or even blaming the child in those situations or not considering that to be abuse that was their quote unquote fault. Divorce is also a huge contributor to estrangement. When there is divorce, we know that fathers are more likely to become estranged. If parents move further away, it makes it harder to sustain a relationship. There can be dynamics between the the parents that attempt to turn the child against the other parent, or they're consistently trying to ruin that parent's reputation or their relationship with the child. We certainly can see this in certain relationships or just the way that divorce is handled. In a lot of these

stories of divorce, something that I found interesting was there were a lot of mentions of a parent's infidelity and how that was handled. Children finding out about a parent's infidelity and being put in between the parents and being the one that was responsible for carrying that information or telling the other parent, there were a handful of those that were very challenging and I think when they were not addressed correctly in childhood or in adulthood, led to these patterns. So to summarize, these are the most common themes that I found in these 300 stories that I was sent and I was able to put in a document, go through, and sort. The other thing that I wanted to bring up as kind of like the second part of this episode is that you may have seen that I did do a set of polls in my Instagram stories a couple of days ago.

I had these polls up for 24 hours and I received about 2,500 responses to each of the polls. And I want to go through these questions and the responses and kind of let you know what I was thinking when I created these questions and what I interpret from the responses. So the first question that I asked was, if you are an adult who is estranged from a parent, how long did it take you to make that decision? And the responses that I gave were the options for choices that I gave were less than 24 hours, six months to a year, one to five years, and five plus years. Some people were confused about the less than 24 hours, one, and only 6% of people selected that.

But I think I'm finding in the discourse among some of the people who do not understand estrangement is that this decision is made like flippantly and in a second and people are waking up one morning and saying, I just want to become estranged from my parent. And that's not what I have seen reflected in the people that I've met with. So I wanted to see kind of how people interpreted this and what they would select. And you'll see here that, you know, if you look at these polls, we've got 6% of people saying less than 24 hours, 18% said six months to one year, 30% said one to five years and 47% said five plus years. So we have 77% of people saying that it took them one to more than five years to make this decision. So I think that tends to be the biggest

chunk of people and probably the biggest theme that we're going to see. When people selected less than 24 hours, a lot of those responses, the 6%. Some of them came along with a message to me that said, I decided in less than 24 hours after this big incident happened, but it's something that I had always been thinking about. So that's just something to consider. The second question I asked was, if you were an adult who is estranged from a parent, what led you to make that decision? Zero percent said my friends were doing it. One percent said I saw a video online and decided to do it. I think that's up to interpretation because maybe people saw a video and they were like, oh, this is something I've been thinking about. I guess it is normal. I guess other people

do do this. Or we could take that under the premise of, oh, no one had ever thought of this before they saw a video and they were like, I just want to become estranged from my parents. There's two ways of looking at that response. Five percent, I went to therapy and they told me to. So I think, you know, there is a belief that I see among some people in this space that therapists are telling people to become estranged from their parents. That's not something I have encountered. It's not something I've personally done in the therapy or would ever do. But 5% said that after they went to therapy, the therapist told them to become estranged, and that's what they decided to do. Sure, I'm sure it happens. There's bad eggs everywhere. And then 94% said I tried to fix it so

many times and couldn't. So we can see that that is the overwhelming response here. Third question I asked was, if you are an adult who's estranged from a parent, what would you say is the main cause of the estrangement? Forty-four percent said history of abuse and no repair or apology. 50 percent said emotionally immature parent. Six percent said difference in values and personality. And one percent said, I just wanted to be estranged. So we can see here that about 94 percent are either saying that their parent was emotionally immature or there was a history of abuse. I again got a lot of messages about this question saying if I could have picked both of those, I would. And then the final question I asked was, if you are an adult who estranged from a parent,

would any of these things help mend the relationship? And I think this is the most important response to pay attention to as a parent. Forty-six percent said an apology and changed behavior. 14% said them going to therapy, 22% said changed behavior, and only 17% said that nothing will repair it. So you can see here that an apology and changed behavior, therapy, changed behavior on its own would really do it for a lot of adult kids. They have not written off their parents completely. They are not saying, my parents are so beyond repair that I could never have a relationship with them again. It sounds more like they're saying right now this has become unsustainable, but if it ever changed, I would reconsider. So I think that's important.

Again, a caveat with this. This is not academic research. It's Instagram. And there is some room for error here. I'm sure some people tapped responses accidentally or they just wanted to see the answer. So they picked something. And this pool of respondents are of course all people who follow me. And so they're interested in this topic. I tend to have more adult children that follow me instead of parents of adult children who are estranged. And so, of course, there is some room for error here. The data is not perfect, and I would never claim that it is. But I do think that this does give us a really interesting look at some of the themes of adult child and parent estrangement, and it kind of tells us, like, where people's heads are at here. And so if you have

ever wandered, like, am I the only one who feels this way about my relationship with my parents? Am I the only one that went through this? I hope that some of these responses were helpful to you. If you are a parent who is feeling like, I have no idea, like, what happened, I feel like I didn't get an explanation. I didn't abuse my child and I feel like I don't understand. I hope that this was helpful in some way to hear some of these stories and to hear some of the themes that are coming up and where people's heads are at when they make this kind of decision. And again, this is a small sample. We had a couple thousand people in the polls and a couple hundred people send in their stories. But I still do think that those stories are really valuable. And because

there were such common themes among them, they have some validity in showing us this is what's going on with people. I will also say that the themes that were echoed in the responses that I received and the themes that we saw in these polls are very consistent with my experience over the last 10 years as a therapist working with people who are all involved in family relationships. And so I think that that is promising, you know, that we're seeing these trends across the data so that we can do something about it. Now, if you're listening to this and you're like, okay, now I really want to do something about this. I want to make sure that I don't do this to my children. I want to heal the relationship with my parent. I want to heal the relationship with my adult child.

I want my family to start talking about this stuff. That is really why I started calling home, and this podcast is an extension of that. But, if you would like to work on this on a deeper level, if you would like to meet people who are also going through this same stuff, people who are like-minded, who are really self-aware, working on building that self-awareness, working on building their emotional intelligence and understanding what's going on in their family dynamics, we would love to have you join calling home. For the rest of this month, the month of January, we are focusing on adult sibling relationships in the content, but we also have tons of other content.

that stays every month that we drop something new, it stays on the site forever. So you can go on there and look at things about family dysfunction, boundaries, traditions, values, all kinds of stuff. And then we have six groups a month with me. So for the price, like it's a really good deal to be able to meet for potentially six groups a month. Two of those groups are general support groups about family dysfunction in general. And then the four other groups throughout the month, are topic specific. So this month, it is about adult sibling relationships. And then next month, we are going to be talking about accepting your parents. So if this episode was interesting to you, then that might be a really good topic to join for. So if you'd like to join the Family Cycle Breakers

Club, or if you just want access to our articles, you can go to callinghome.com and sign up. We would love to have you. I cannot wait to hear what you all thought about this episode. If you found anything surprising, interesting, different, please feel free to send me a message on Instagram or leave a comment if you see this in like real or TikTok somewhere. Also, the best way to support this podcast. So I'm able to continue producing episodes for you all at this frequency and for free is to leave a review, subscribe wherever you get your podcast. So if you're listening, to this on Spotify or Apple, hit the like subscribe or follow button on those apps so that you automatically get the episodes and they download for you when they come out and leave us a

review. If you can, you can leave like a five-star review on Spotify. You can type out a review on Apple as well. If there's something you'd like to say about the podcast or how it impacted you, thank you all so much. I will be back next week with an interview with Jeffrey Greif. is an expert in adult sibling relationships. So we'll be talking more about not necessarily sibling estrangement, but just about adult sibling relationships, how to make them work and what makes certain ones successful and what makes other ones struggle. Thank you all again for being here. And I hope to see many of you inside the calling home community soon. Have a great rest of your day.

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