CALLING HOME with Whitney Goodman, LMFT - Is "Concept Creep" What’s Driving Estrangement?

Episode Date: October 20, 2026

Whitney is fed up with how the "concept creep" of estrangement gets used to shut down conversations about real family harm. She traces the term back to psychologist Nick Haslam's actual 2016 research, then walks through decades of data that make the case these harms aren't new, just newly named.Sign up to spend the holidays with us at Calling Home: https://cmnyyv4kpyt.typeform.com/to/NZRkOwOPWhitney Goodman is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) and the founder of Calling Home, a membership community that helps people navigate complex family dynamics and break harmful cycles.Have a question for Whitney? Send a voice memo or email to [e-mail] the Family Cyclebreakers Club: https://callinghome.coFollow Whitney on Instagram | sitwithwhitFollow Whitney on YouTube | @whitneygoodmanlmftOrder Whitney's book, Toxic Positivity: https://sitwithwhit.com/toxic-positivitySign up for updates on Whitney's new book: https://cmnyyv4kpyt.typeform.com/to/PHMzjy0oThis podcast is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional mental health advice. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

All right, welcome back to the Calling Home Podcast. I am your host Whitney Goodman. Today we have a episode where you're going to hear me rant about something that is annoying me. And I know you guys like these episodes. We'll see how this goes. But I do believe that concept creep has been taken over by concept creep. I think that phrase is experiencing some of its own concept creep. creep. So we're going to go ahead and get into it. I do want to remind you, though, that we are sending out

our holiday invitation soon. It is going to go to the email list. You need to click the link in the show notes and sign up if you would like to receive our holiday invitation from calling home. It's going to go out on Sunday, October 25th. So depending on when you're listening to this episode, make sure that you get on that list before 8 a.m. Eastern time on the 25th of October. All right, let's get into the episode. So thinking that something wasn't harmful and then learning that it is later and having new information is not concept creep. I'm probably going to say the phrase concept creep a thousand times in this episode and I'm already feeling like I'm saying it weird just from saying a few times already. So bear with me. The reason I'm talking about this

phrase today is because it has really become the battle cry of the group of people who I think think, and I'm going to talk more about this in this episode, that we have left behind like a version, particularly of the American family that we need to get back to, that we miss dearly and that was significantly better than the families that we have today. And I'm never going to tell you that the American family today doesn't have issues, things that could work on. I've spent my entire career devoted to helping families do just that. But this idea that there was this ideal family where we were all villagers helping each other, everyone loved each other. We were connected. We were, you know, these families were birthplaces of grace and compassion and

understanding and tolerance for diversity of thought is just a lie. And the framework that is being put forward today is that we have these wonderful families like I just described. And then came in therapists and therapy language and trauma talk and all this stuff. And now we have destroyed that family. and we need to get back to it because it was so wonderful. And if we didn't have this concept creep where now everything is trauma and everything is bad, we would still have that family. And in this episode, I am going to break down why that logic is so, so flawed.

And who was really benefiting from those old version of families and why the new modern family is just never going to be able to get back to that version? of yesteryear that we are longing for that's actually kind of fake and made up. So you've been hearing a lot about concept creep lately. I think in mass media, it's been mentioned a lot in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, like all of these articles about estrangement name this phrase somewhere in them. And Nick Haslam was a psychologist at the University of Melbourne. And he coined the term actually in 2016.

It's pretty, it's 10 years old. And it describes how harm-related concepts like trauma, abuse, bullying, and prejudice have expanded over time to cover more experiences. This is true. It has happened. But there are two kinds of expansion that he talks about, okay? One is outward, where the concept covers new types of experiences and downward, where it covers milder versions of the original. which is typically what a lot of people are getting upset about, that we are calling everything trauma and that the definition has expanded too much. Okay. Now, Haslam holds a dual perspective on this. He actually doesn't talk about concept creep as much in the same way that a lot of people who utilize his term speak about it. He thinks that expansion can legitimize the pain of people who suffered in silence or without words for their experience, and this leads to better support and more cultural awareness. It also risks pathologizing ordinary everyday distress, lowering resilience, and diluting the severity of the original concepts. Both true. We need to hold both of these

things at the same time. And I do think that we risk popularizing these terms to such a degree and having them misused and misapplied by people who are not trained or knowledgeable, particularly through social media, there is risk there. This is not just like it doesn't matter how we use those words. But Haslam himself has said that concept creep is neither good or bad. He is not trying to demonize what has happened to this degree. And he's written that broader concept. do help recognize forms of suffering and maltreatment that had previously gone unrecognized.

So people who use this term to dismiss family members that are talking about what they endured at the hands of their family, especially to dismiss things that we now know are harmful, particularly emotional neglect, are really taking us a stronger position than he wanted to in his work. We also need to recognize that Haslam's lab, while it has contributed some really important findings to the field, this is a small body of research, okay? Especially when you compare it to the amount of research that we have on childhood neglect, adverse childhood experiences, domestic violence in the home, violence in communities, children experiencing violence at the hands of their parents, what children go through who have been parentified, both. emotionally and physically, we have a lot more information on that than we do on how concept creep may have damaged us. So we're not comparing apples to apples here. And I think it's really important

that we remember that when we are having these discussions. The main types of studies that he did were language tracking studies. So there were about 800,000 psychology abstracts from 1970 to 2018. And there was a 2023 paper on semantic inflation of trauma and individual difference studies. Like he did the harm concept breath scale and studies on what broad definitions predict. And these studies did show that the words expanded. But they don't test whether a given expansion was warranted. So this means that they don't test whether the newly included experiences actually cause harm. And that's a separate question that a lot of outcome research on, again, childhood neglect, adverse childhood experiences, childhood abuse, growing up in poverty, being parentified.

Those are the things that are actually answering the question of like, do these things cause harm? When Haslam's group looked across DSM additions as well, they found no generalized pattern of diagnostic inflation. So if some diagnoses expanded, like ADHD and autism, but there was no across the board widening. And I think what we need to remember here when we look at how diagnoses like ADHD have proliferated and been spoken about in the mainstream media, a lot of that is because it is misinformation, not because that was the actual widening of the term. And those are two very different things. And this is where that second part of Haslam's argument happens online. So,

So this trauma language and this diagnostic language is getting reduced to 60-second videos. You're getting diagnosed off of a checklist. Or there's someone who doesn't have this level of knowledge that is proposing that things X equals this when it actually doesn't. Okay. So of course, we know you hear this from a lot of therapists. Not every disagreement is gaslighting. Hard days are not trauma.

I don't think anyone who is actually knowledgeable of the information is proposing that that's what we should believe. And so this is less about do we need to change the definitions and do we need to correct misinformation and people who are actually not describing the diagnostic criteria correct or using the correct language? And can we do that in a way that is empowering and create the, resilience and gives a lot of, you know, credence to those people that have actually experienced real harm because when we make everything trauma, that's not a good thing either. And so I am not proposing that at all, but that's very different from the way that concept creep is being used. I think the answer to this misuse is better education and responsible use, not trying to go back

to the old narrow definitions that we use to hold that do not now account for. for the outcome research that we have on the impact of these things. Now, our understanding of trauma has really changed over time. For most of history, trauma meant a physical wound. You know, in the Civil War, they talk about soldiers with anxiety and heart symptoms and exhaustion, and they were diagnosed with something called Soldier's Heart. In World War II, we heard about shell shock and lack of moral fiber. And each label was really putting the problem more and more in the soldier's character instead of what happened to them. And then in the 1980s, we see PTSD enter the DSM. So Vietnam veterans and clinicians working with rape survivors were pushing for

this inclusion. And the research backed it up. This wasn't just like, I think we should expand it because we feel like it. You know, the stressor in order to meet the criteria for PTSD had to be something that would evoke significant symptoms of distress in almost everyone. And in 1987, they changed this to outside the range of usual human experience. So war, torture, disaster, we're all included, but child abuse and neglect were not named. You know, as late as 1987, that's not that long ago. In 1994, the definition was broadened to include events a person witnessed or was confronted with. And then in 2013, we see PTSD be moved into its own category, which is trauma and stressor-related disorders. And they added a separate criteria for children

six and under. The ICD-11 also added complex PTSD for prolonged interpersonal trauma, like ongoing abuse in childhood. So this is all relatively new over the last decade that we are seeing some of these major shifts. And I also want you to see how these changes in the DSM and how we come to understand trauma and traumatic events, especially for children, were very slow moving over the last 40 years. In the 1990s is when we started to see the ACE study happened. So at Kaiser Permanente, They had more than 17,000 adults that were looked at. And emotional abuse and emotional neglect were among the original categories. And those adverse childhood experiences were far more common than anyone expected.

Adults with four or more aces were 12 times more likely to have attempted suicide, seven times more likely to be an alcoholic, and 10 times more likely to have injected drugs. There was a 2009 follow-up that found that people with six or more aces died nearly 20 years earlier on average. So this was a small subgroup that they followed up with. So every time these definitions expanded, it found people who had been suffering that had not been recognized or treated. And the old definitions were just way too narrow to capture these people.

It doesn't mean that these people were not suffering and that they didn't have negative outcomes. They did. We just were not looking at them. There's also a lot of things that we used to think we're fine and we know something different now. So I mentioned spanking. The old belief was that spanking teaches respect and that good kids need it. And you will still see this belief literally everywhere if you go looking for it. Like there is people filming themselves spanking their kids for TikTok videos.

It's, it is insane. There was, in 2016, they looked at 75 studies, so about 160,000 children, and spanking was linked to 13 of 17 harmful outcomes, including aggression, mental health problems, lower self-esteem, and worse parent-child relationships. It wasn't linked to better behavior at all. And spanking and physical abuse showed the same kind of effects with spanking at a lower level. There was also a study in the Lancet in 2021, 69 studies that followed children over time. So these are meta-analyses.

And spanking predicted more behavior problems later. No study found that it improved behavior or any positive outcome. More spanking predicted worse outcomes. Then there was the Harvard study in 2021, 147 children ages 10 to 11, the kids that had been spanked, showed heightened threat responses in the brain with no region where the response differed from children who had experienced more severe abuse. And this is what leads people to often say spanking is abuse. The brain does not know anything different. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommended against spanking in 2018. That's not that long ago, even with all this information.

Sweden banned it in 1979 and Thailand became the 68th country. to ban corporal punishment of children in 2025. Still fully legal in the United States, still celebrated and recommended in a lot of communities around the country. People still argue for it and think that it is biblical, it is good for kids, etc. Emotional neglect is another area where we have experienced a lot of change. In 1928, there was even a parenting book by John B. Watson. bestselling. And that book told parents never to hug or kiss their children and to shake hands

with them instead. So we have large swaths of the population that have been neglected that have then gone on to raise children. There was also the Harlow's monkey studies in the 1950s that many of you have heard of and the still face experiment in the 1970s. Babies became distressed within minutes when a parent went emotionally flat. We also know that children in Romanian institutions were randomly assigned to foster care or to stay in the institution. The ones who stayed in those institutions had lower IQ, differences in brain development, and attachment problems. This was extreme deprivation, though, but we now see this as proof that emotional deprivation

affects development. Okay. In 2023, there was a Stanford meta-analysis of 78 studies that looked at more than 36,000. people, okay? Emotional neglect and emotional abuse had the strongest link to alexathymia, which is difficulty identifying and describing your own feelings. And they were stronger predictors than physical or sexual abuse. Emotional abuse was also highly normalized within families. We believe that words didn't really hurt and you'll hear a lot of parents say, well, at least I didn't hit you. In 2014, there was a study that looked at 5,600,

16 kids in trauma treatment. And psychological maltreatment on its own was linked to problems as severe as physical or sexual abuse. And on some measures, it was worse. There was also a study in psychiatry journal that looked in 2015, that looked at 2,292 children ages 5 to 13. And about half with documented maltreatment. So emotional abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, sex. sexual abuse and neglect had broadly similar effects on anxiety, depression, rule breaking, and aggression. The authors noted that emotional abuse happens often, yet it gets taken the least seriously in comparison to those other types of abuse. And you'll hear this when people talk about estrangement or children talking about their childhoods that they'll say, well, I understand

cutoff for things like sexual abuse or physical abuse, but they will neglect to name. all the other types. And I think that's because of how normalized it's become in our families to emotionally abuse and emotionally neglect children and one another. There was also a study in 2009 that showed that there was lower oxytocin in women who experienced childhood maltreatment and it was strongest the correlation when there was emotional abuse. And oxytocin, if you know, is the hormone that really matters for bonding, trust and stress regulation. Constant criticism is another one that is really brushed under the rug, but that we know has a large impact on people. And we really believe, and I think many people still believe this, that criticism

toughens kids up and keeps them humble. There was a study in 2014 by Wing and Kenny that looked at 967 families and yelling, name-calling, and insults at age 13 predicted more depression and more behavior problems at 14. The behavior parents were trying to correct actually got worse through their yelling, name calling, and insults. Parental warmth also didn't cancel out the effect. So about 90% of parents reported using harsh verbal discipline at some point. Another study in 2022 by Coran and Hill, there were 84 studies in this analysis about 24,000 college students from 1989 to 2021, students' sense of their parents' expectations and criticism rose over time, and both were linked to perfectionism, which is tied to depression and anxiety.

There's also a lot of good research that I included in my book, Toxic Positivity, about expressed emotion and critical families predict relapse in depression and other condition. And, you know, the research uses terms like harsh verbal discipline and parental criticism. And I think one of the biggest problems here is that parents who do these things don't believe that they are doing it. So when you hear words, and this is actually documented in research on abuse, that parents who were abusive will admit that they did the behavior, they would say, yes, I hit my kids. they will not say that they were abusive, even if we are saying that hitting your kids equals abuse because they do not define hitting your kids as being abuse. They think abuse means like you were one inch away from losing your life. They think abuse is a kid that got beat and locked in a

closet. You know, so they don't see themselves as being abusive, but they will often admit to doing the behavior because they don't think that the behavior was wrong or bad. They think that it was justified. And when a parent has a reason for their abusive behavior that they believe excuses it, they will not consider themselves abusive or even consider their behavior to be bad. And constant criticism, yelling, name-calling, and insults often really fall into that category. Now, I also want to point out that none of these things became harmful recently. They have always hurt kids. We just didn't have the research or the language or the knowledge to identify it yet. The way that concept creep is getting used in estrangement discourse is that

this is the argument that they propose. The broadening definition of trauma is what's driving estrangement, not the behavior itself. If we kept calling these practices normal, because they're normal, and they use this phrase normal parenting practices all the time, we wouldn't see this much estrangement. But calling it, normal was standard for many, many generations. And adults lived with the consequences, were told it was normal, and took those impacts on as personal failures. Then many of them passed them down to their own kits. And a parent not knowing at the time doesn't change the impact on the child. The child's new language for that impact isn't what caused the original

rift. The overwhelming majority of adults I talk to tell me that it's not about what their parent did. It's about what they keep doing even after getting new information. And so the difference here is, is that we are using concept creep as a way to double down and say, hey, I know there's all this information that me screaming at you and yelling at you and hitting you has long-term negative effects, including physical effects on the body, like leading to chronic disease, et cetera. But it was normal when I was growing up. And so now I'm presented with all this information that it was bad, but I still want to yell at you.

And I still want to criticize you. And I should be allowed to do that because it was normal when I was growing up. So I'm going to keep doing that. And if you tell me to stop doing that, well, then you are just a weak snowflake that needs to figure out how to tolerate my constant criticism. I'm just going to say it like it is. That is really what's going on here. Now, we're nostalgic, I think, for a family that we think concept creep and new information has stolen from us that I really think never existed. So there was a historian by the name of Stephanie Coontz. There was a book

called The Way We Never Were that was written in 1992. It was actually revised in 2016. And it's about the breadwinner dad, the homemaker mom, and dependent kids, like, ideal and how that was really just a product of the post-war era. And the real families of the 1950s had plenty of conflict, repression, and anxiety. Many of them were poor and barely getting by. And so who that model worked for really depended on who you were. You know, marital rape wasn't a crime in every state until 1993. Women couldn't reliably get a credit card in their own name until 1974. Children with disabilities were being sent to institutions. Most families looked close from the outside because the people being hurt had no way to leave. They had no words for what was

happening. They had no recourse at all. And so looking close like this, you know, leave it to beaver family that's like posing outside their house, all smiling and dressed well, and being connected are very, very different things. And many families only had that first part of looking close without having the actual connection. And so what I hear from a lot of colleagues and others that I disagree with is like there was this good version of a family. And then trauma, therapy, healing language came and corrupted it. And if we just made words mean what they used to mean, we would get back to that family. So many of the people making this argument fall into one of three groups.

They benefited from the old structure. So they were in control of it and the family's needs circled around them. So it felt like closeness and warmth. Or they endured something in their own family and now they feel like they're owed the family that they were promised, where everyone caters to them, or they believe that they could have created that type of family. And the only reason they didn't is because their child is exaggerating, misremembering, or was corrupted by media and therapy and these expanded definitions of trauma. I think what we need to remember is that in like the 1950s and the 1960s, distance really did a lot of the work that now more intense

boundaries are kind of trying to make up for. Okay. So six in 10 adults, young adults now live within 10 miles of where they grew up. And a lot of young adults are actually living with their parents again because of the cost of housing. Long distance calls back in the day also used to cost a lot of money. In 1989, only 8% of adults talked every day with a parent who lived in a different town. Daily contact with any parent went from 30% in 1989 to 42% in 2005. So even though we're proposing that we are in the midst of an estrangement epidemic, we're actually seeing that a lot of adults are living with their parents, young adults, especially, and they're having more contact than they ever did.

In the 1980s, just over half of parents had contact with a grown child once a week or more. now 55% of young adults talk to a parent daily or nearly daily and another 25% several times a week. I believe, and I have a theory, that many people in previous generations were estranged. They just didn't call it that. They moved away, they called on Christmas, and they never had to call this anything. Now a parent who is hurtful, very immature, violates boundaries, is abusive or degrading or highly critical can reach out to you every single day by text, group chat, social media, and even through your own children. And so this might be less about behavior being labeled differently and more about

how often people are exposed to it. I really think that technology has seemed to amplify what was already there in the relationship. And distance was often a relief for people with money and independence. And so women who depended on a husband or kids or disabled family members often couldn't move away. They had to make do with what they had. And often these relationships appeared a lot more close and functional than they really were. I also want to point out here when we talk about concept creep and estrangement that there's

also been some creep in the definition of what we consider to be estrangement. My book, the parent you have, will be out on February 16th, 2027. It is available for pre-order if you would like to make sure that you get it now and get your order in. But I talk in the book about how the definition of estrangement is very, very different for a lot of people. The 57 adults that I interviewed for my book all had varying levels of contact. I define estrangement in my book as the complete ending of the relationship and really trying to avoid having further contact with that parent. There were estranged adults that I spoke to that called themselves estranged, but were still speaking to their parents fairly regularly, even as much as once or twice a week

for an extended period of time. And so now we have people who really want constant access to their family members. And it can be a positive way to engage. it is also a way to engage in a lot of monitoring. So there are text, group chats, FaceTime, phone calls, DMs, Venmo transactions, access to bank accounts, Instagram stories and photos, location on things like Life 360. And there are so many more ways to keep in touch and monitor than there were before. There are even stories, you know, of parents and family members watching the social media of people that their kids spend time with, reaching out to them, monitoring.

And I'm not talking about a parent who sees your posts and is excited for you and is engaging with your content. I'm talking about watching that is more surveillance that gets weaponized later. And distance used to be the off switch for this. You know, when you moved away, a parent who was hard on you couldn't reach you. And leaving ended that access. now leaving actually just moves. You know, your access now is on a screen. And so when distance no longer does that job, I think people have to create distance in other ways and often on purpose. And for those people,

estrangement might be the only off switch that they have access to. Now, for most of the adults I talk to, estrangement really isn't about concept creep or therapy language. It's the relationship becoming unsustainable. in a modern framework that has no built-in limits where every small boundary gets overridden. And so I think people really want the old family with the modern access that they have now at the same time. And that nostalgic version of family worked partly because people could disappear. Many of these families want that version back with the group chats, location sharing, and social media still on. They want all the access. and information, and they don't want to act like it's there. And so that family may have existed

on a small scale, but it certainly doesn't exist now for people who still want all of that access and to be able to treat their family members poorly. I've said this before, and I'm going to say it again. Telling someone who feels harmed by you that they're a victim of concept creep will never fix your relationship. And I am very, very discouraged by and disillusioned by any therapist or professional that would stand in front of a crowd of estranged parents and basically tell them that their adult children have been captured by woke media and therapy concepts and concept creep and to then be basically given a standing ovation for externalizing this blame outside of the relationship and just giving the parents another thing to point at.

Because when we have conversations like this, we then don't speak about curiosity, empathy, repair, or accountability. Because we're just saying to them basically like, this wasn't trauma when you were growing up. So it shouldn't be now. And that is not going to help their relationships. If the adult sees it as harmful, they feel hurt, and they're bringing it to you, that is a gift. And I think a lot of the adults that I work with, they stop bringing it up at all when they just get met with this rhetoric that is basically speaking down to them. Like, you've just been brainwashed and you've no idea what you're talking about. So what you do from here matters.

I think you really have to put aside whether their definition of harm matches yours, or the one you grew up with and instead focus on having a relationship and a conversation. I want you to focus on why did they feel hurt? Why did it have an impact? What is the person feeling? Can you help me understand? When you're ready, can I share what I thought I was doing? Can we talk about how we would better handle this in the future? I see your perspective. And even if I don't fully agree, I don't want to hurt you. Our relationship is, important to me. What is your perspective? Do you need time to think about this? I want to earn your trust and show you that this matters to me. And if you didn't know then, you can learn now. You can do

something different. You can stop and you can change. Every parent does something they thought was right at the time that had an impact, including me. And when a parent tries to learn and grow, their child usually has a much easier time understanding, showing grace, and keeping a relationship with them in the present. For any parents listening, I want you to remember that this is a relationship that you are building and you are part of that relationship. And so whenever you get really hung up on or interested in content about social ills, concept creep, and trends, I want you to remember that all of these people that are producing this type of content that are writing these articles, they're oftentimes doing it for a reason. It insights anger, chaos, creates more articles. This content goes viral. And when they're not encouraging you to also engage in curiosity and accountability and they really want you to look

outward instead of turning to the person that you are in a relationship with and building those relationship skills, that's a problem. That's something that you should really be thinking about before taking that type of advice. I really think that instead of trying to go backwards, we need to stop trying to get back to a family that never existed and start building a modern family that exists in real time. Technology can strengthen bonds. It can give us access to family that we wouldn't have otherwise had access to, but we also have to learn how to handle distance, how to respect boundaries, how to deal with someone not responding right away, and how to tolerate distance even when the constant access is available, and you want it to soothe your own anxiety.

Adults, and this means adult children and parents, are allowed to set boundaries around technology, access, and surveillance. Distance and boundaries can help us how to be able to. have closer relationships when both people respect them. You need to try to let the relationship find its own rhythm in different seasons of life. Parents and adult children both need to look at where else they can get their emotional, physical, structural, and financial needs met so they aren't relying on one person for all of it. And so for many adult children, that means accepting a parent may not be able to give you the support encouragement or advice they want. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. As always, please don't forget to like,

subscribe, leave a review or a comment on the podcast, and I read every single one of them. So thank you so much to all of you that have done that. Just a reminder that the holiday invitation for calling home is going to go out on a Sunday, October 25th. So please make sure you're on that list before 8 a.m. on the 25th so that you get the invitation. The email will arrive in your inbox. And you can click the link in the show notes to sign up. Thank you so much and I will see you again on Thursday for another Q&A episode. The Calling Home podcast is not engaged in providing therapy services, mental health advice, or other medical advice or services. It is not a substitute for advice from a qualified health care provider and does not create any therapist, patient, or other

treatment relationship between you and Colling Home or Whitney Goodman. For more information on this, please see Calling Home's terms of service linked in the show notes below.