CALLING HOME with Whitney Goodman, LMFT - Is Estrangement a Luxury for People with Money?

Episode Date: June 23, 2026

Is estrangement a privilege for the middle class and the rich? Whitney pushes back on the argument that cutting off family is something only wealthy people do, not because the critique is entirely wrong, but because it's drawing the wrong conclusion. Whitney Goodman is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) and the founder of Calling Home, a membership community that helps people navigate complex family dynamics and break harmful cycles.Have a question for Whitney? Send a voice memo or email to [e-mail] the Family Cyclebreakers Club: https://callinghome.coFollow Whitney on Instagram | sitwithwhitFollow Whitney on YouTube | @whitneygoodmanlmftOrder Whitney's book, Toxic Positivity: https://sitwithwhit.com/toxic-positivitySign up for updates on Whitney's new book: https://cmnyyv4kpyt.typeform.com/to/PHMzjy0oThis podcast is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional mental health advice. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I saw a post a little while ago from an estranged parent creator. I think I saw it on YouTube and I can't find it now. So I'm going to paraphrase the argument, but it has stuck with me since I saw it. And I want to talk about it today, but it went something like this. Estrangement is a luxury. It is a middle class thing or a rich person thing. And look at people who actually have nothing. And they referred to people coming out of prison with nowhere to go and that these people leaving prison were really grateful for their parents and would never cut them off.

And that cutting off your family is something you only do like when you basically had it too good in life. And I actually think they were reading a message from someone that said they were like a social worker or a therapist that worked with inmates. it's no way to verify if that's true. In prison with incarcerated individuals who were saying that, like, those people would never cut off their family and they've all been abused and they've all been harmed, but they always, you know, talk about how grateful they are for their parents. And I agree with this creator on the premise of estrangement only being maybe like a middle class or a wealthy thing, but I don't think we agree for the same reasons.

But underneath this message is something really, really important that I want to talk about today. So welcome back to the Calling Home podcast. I am Whitney Goodman. This is the show for people breaking patterns and navigating complicated families. Today we're going to be talking about money, specifically the relationship between money and distance and whether you can actually afford to put space between yourself and a family member. And why for a lot of people, the answer, is no. By the end of this episode, I want you to be able to do two things. One, you're going to see exactly how money shapes what kind of relationship is even possible with your family so that you can stop blaming yourself for a situation that is partly financial and not just emotional. And two,

we're going to answer that post. Because I don't think estrangement is a rich person problem. I think the ability to choose your distance is absolutely a rich person privilege. And those are two very different things. This episode is for the person who has felt trapped and thought, I would put space here if I could, but I literally cannot afford to. This is for the person who lives with a family member, relies on them for rent or child care, or sends money home every month, and feels the emotional cost of that and doesn't know what to do with it. What I'm trying to do here is really be honest about the barriers because pretending they don't exist doesn't make anyone safer and doesn't allow us to have honest conversations about what is actually happening in families when it comes

to estrangement and particularly between adult children and their parents who are estranged. If you're an estranged adult who is estranged from a parent or from your family, there is a part of this episode where I'm going to ask you to think about people whose options are a lot narrower than yours, not to take away anything from your decision, but because that's an important piece of this conversation. And if you are a parent who is consistently saying, I did the best I could, I'm going to ask you to actually think about What happened? And whether you actually might have had more than you're admitting you had. Before we get into it, if this is the kind of thing you want real support with, that is what the Family Cycle Breakers Club is for. It is our membership community inside of calling home, a community of people who are actively breaking generational patterns with structured support, real tools, and clinicians who get it.

We are just wrapping up a month on fathers. and next month we are going to be talking about eldest daughter syndrome, which if you're the kid who became the family's safety net, financial or emotional, it's going to be super, super helpful. There are worksheets, articles, scripts, and groups where you can practice all of this stuff in a community and you can find it all at calling home.co. Money is a barrier to distance. It's a huge barrier. It's probably the most underrated or under-discussed one out there. And typically when we talk about a stranger on the internet, we're talking about it like it's purely an emotional decision. You realize a relationship is

hurting you. You weigh your options. You decide and you act on it. And for some people, like, yes, that's roughly how it goes. But for a lot of people, money is a barrier. They cannot afford to end this relationship or there will be some serious consequences for them and other people if they do. So if you have ever felt some judgment or like you're a coward for staying in these relationships or like everyone around you that is doing this has like the backbone to walk away and you don't, I want you to hear that what you might actually be missing isn't courage or bravery. The original post that I saw about this basically implied that poor people don't cut off their families, that this is like a rich or middle class

epidemic. And it's a luxury. It's something that spoiled people do when they have too many options and not enough real problems. But that argument is not actually describing who gets hurt. It's describing who can afford to leave. Money is what allows you to exit these dynamics in a lot of situations. The harm doesn't just like magically disappear because you don't have resources. If anything, the bar for what you will tolerate goes way, way up. Because if leaving a family dynamic is going to put you on the street, you have a totally different risk calculus that you're going through. Okay. So the people without resources actually end up staying through things that someone with options probably would have walked away from.

It's not that someone in a wealthier family is leaving or has less or like made up reasons. Okay. And this is why I think that that example actually proves the opposite of what it was meant to prove. Okay. So the argument that was like it was like look at people who are coming out of prison, okay? They're so grateful for their parents. They would never cut them off. Real hardship makes you appreciate your family. And let's think about what that person is actually going through the day that they leave being in prison or being in jail, okay? That person might have no income. they have a record that makes getting hired almost impossible in some cases. They may have nowhere to live.

Their parents' couch is the only thing between them and being on the street or a shelter. They may be carrying around an enormous amount of shame. And a family that still answers the phone is really the only relationship maybe that hasn't written them off. And in a lot of these cases, the terms of their release require a stable address, and that's usually going to be a family member. So of course that person isn't cutting anybody off. Their survival after leaving prison is wired directly into that relationship. And so I don't really think gratitude is the correct word for this.

Sometimes it is gratitude, like genuinely. Sometimes it's that they have no other option. And a person with no other options doesn't get to run a cost-benefit analysis on how that relationship made them feel. They need it to be okay. So they make it okay. And I'm not saying that every formerly incarcerated person has a harmful family. Okay. Plenty have families that they choose to be around. And when you talk to a lot of people who have gone to jail and gone to prison who have been away for a long time, they typically do have family histories of abuse, of other people being incarcerated, of dealing with poverty, and a lot of other barriers that tend to lead to these outcomes that aren't necessarily someone else's fault,

but you also do see these people tending to have to stick together, even in the face of abuse and mistreatment, because they are up against so many other barriers that they don't have a lot of options. You can't use the fact that these people chose not to leave their families as proof that there was nothing there worth leaving, right? And this is strictly a problem. for families with more access and more resources who are just kind of like making things up and having frivolous complaints. Because the most dependent person in the world is the least free to leave no matter what is happening inside of that relationship. To me, this is the same argument as when we say like, oh, women didn't get divorced. They valued marriage much more previously.

And it's like, no, these women couldn't get a credit card or a mortgage. They didn't have jobs. They literally couldn't leave, even if they wanted to. So staying is an evidence that their relationship is good. Sometimes it just means that this person actually cannot escape. Okay. If someone can't open a bank account, get a home, have anywhere else to go, like, that doesn't mean that the relationship was so much more amazing than the person

who decided to leave a bad relationship because they could. Now, I also want to flip this around because I think there is a second place that money often shows up in estrangement. And a lot of the adults that I have met with and worked with over the years who are estranged or close to it from parents who had money or were at least stable is that these parents, often by their own report, were very giving. They went on vacations. And one of the most common things that those parents say in that subgroup when they're trying to explain themselves is some version of like, we didn't have resources.

We didn't have the information you have now. We did the best that we could. Okay. And I think that these adults are genuinely confused by that line because they grew up in a home where they saw their parents affording things, right? They could go on a nice vacation, a comfortable home, whatever it was. And so when the parents says we didn't have the resources, the adult is sitting there kind of like, but you did. You had money. You had time. You had access to every book and doctor and therapist you could have ever wanted. You just didn't use any of it. And that's very different. And this is one of the most painful realizations that I see people come to. You know, when you grew up with resources and your needs still go unmet, you eventually

understand that the neglect isn't about scarcity. It's a choice. It wasn't that someone was too broke or too buried in all these responsibilities to show up. They just didn't. And that is very different than being failed by a parent that was. drowning for a million other reasons that were out of their control. Because I think when adults contrast that with the parent who actually had nothing, so the single mother who was working two jobs and wasn't home for dinner because she was

keeping the lights on or the parent that's stuck in an abusive relationship of their own in survival mode that couldn't protect their kids in the way they wanted to and they couldn't even protect themselves, you know, or an immigrant parent who is really trying to just figure out a new system, doesn't understand the language, you know, they're trying to find a job. Like, these adults look at those parents very differently and not always with forgiveness, but often with context, because they can see the constraint. They can see that the absence was about circumstances, not necessarily about indifference to the child's needs. But the adult who grows up with money and resources usually can't find that context for their parents' next to their parents'

because it isn't there. And so I think in a strange way in these families, the abundance of money and resources in that way can make the estrangement more likely, not because it's frivolous, but because it strips away that defense. And the parent who's saying, like, I couldn't, I didn't know how, I didn't have the resources. Like, it doesn't appear that way when you also have the resources for all of this other stuff. Okay? And I want to speak directly to any parent listening to this who has reached for that line of like we didn't know.

We didn't have the resources that I'm not telling you that you're a monster, that you should have known the things that you didn't know or that you should have reached for all of these resources. Some of you, I think, were even stretched beyond what your kids understood. And you can say that to them. I think that some of you are using scarcity as a shield when really we're talking about maybe attention, priorities, what got the best of you. And we have to be honest with ourselves as parents about that too. You know, if I'm a working mom and I go to work and I give my all at work and I am

kind and generous and nice and I have energy for all of you and then I get home and I give my kid the worst version of me all the time. They start to notice that. And they do start to understand that and maybe even take it personally. I also want to speak practically about financial entanglement because I think this is also one of the single most overlooked factors when someone is trying to figure out what kind of relationship is even possible with their family. We have made financial independence from families harder to achieve than it was a generation ago. Okay, so we have housing crisis, the cost of child care, wages that are not keeping up with any of this for families. There are some families that if they have a health care crisis, they are going to be wiped out overnight.

And a lot of adults are tangled up in this with their families. They're tangled up with their families financially, not because anyone is failing. It's, it's, you know, it's, It's just this is what surviving looks like right now, that having to be so reliant on one another. And if you are in a family, and I've spoken to many adults like this, especially when I was interviewing for my book, where a family member co-signed for your mortgage, you live in a multi-generational household, none of you can afford to live separately. You know, your only child care option is your mother.

You can't afford daycare or your immigration status is tied. to a family member. If a family member's house is the only thing standing between you and homelessness, you know, the distance doesn't just cost you emotionally then in these situations. It comes with a price and you may not be able to pay that price financially. And so you're paying it emotionally and intellectually and mentally and you're trying to juggle all of this stuff so that you can keep yourself afloat. Because we really have to remember this, that boundary setting in families is an economically stratified experience. The person who has a stable income, a supportive partner, and their own place has options that the person who is sharing a home with a family member who is

abusive to them does not have. They're not braver, they're not healthier. They just have more room and more access to make these types of decisions. And so if you've been comparing yourself or your situation to someone whose circumstances are nothing like yours, I want to tell you to stop doing that because it's just not fair to you. The timeline for change is a lot longer when you are climbing out of some of these situations first where you had to be dependent on someone who is also harmful to you in other ways. And sometimes we hold on to a fantasy. I think that we can keep the financial support and just emotionally pull back,

like take the help and hold the boundary and keep your distance. And sometimes distant families will, distant family members or distant parents even will go for this, right? Because it lets them keep a tie to you by financially providing with almost no effort or vulnerability on their part, but a lot of difficult or enmeshed family members or parents will not accept that arrangement. For them, money comes with strings and financially helping you buys them a vote in your life. They get to comment on your decisions, choices, who you are, what you're doing, where you live. And so a lot of you are genuinely facing a hard choice between financial support and full autonomy.

me. And that choice may not be available to you in this moment. And you're going to have to tolerate maybe more contact than you want in exchange for support that you can't live without right now because your life depends on it. And I want to be really careful here because I think that this can get misused. This is not me telling you to stay in an abusive situation like it's a strategy or say that you're using someone. I think that you just have to be honest with yourself about what you need to survive and stay safe before you can make a move. And if this is where you are, the relationship you choose today might not be the one that you want. It might just be the safest, most realistic one that is available to you right now. And that is harm reduction in a lot of

situations, sometimes the most functional version of a relationship your circumstances will allow is a limited boundary relationship where you keep the contact narrow and functional while you build something else. And you build towards it where you can even very, very slowly. So looking for things that can loosen the dependence slowly over time and trying to find things like community organizations, financial planning, help, housing assistance, legal aid. You know, every small step towards financial autonomy is a step toward having more say in how you relate to your family. And you just start moving the needle little by little if you are in a situation like this. And I want to slow down on one group in particular here that we touched on a

little bit earlier because I think that with immigrant families, multi-generational households and communities where financial interdependence is simply how things are done, this is more complicated. In a lot of cultures, you know, even in my family background, this is common, that pooling resources across generations helps the family survive. And the expectation is that you're going to contribute to your parents, to your grandparents, and that you live with extended family, and the family unit comes before individual independence. And that's not inherently dysfunctional in any way. For a lot of people, that is love and duty, and it is what has kept generations in your

family afloat for many generations. And I never want someone to walk away from this show thinking that that interdependence in itself is a problem. because it's not. It can be something beautiful and wonderful in families. It's a problem when that interdependence gets used as a tool of control. So when financial support comes with the unspoken price of obedience and leaving that arrangement means losing not just money, but your entire community, your culture identity, your entire safety net all at once, that is a different weight that you are carrying, then someone leaving, like, a single isolated household is carrying who is married and has

their own children and is financially independent. And, like, people have done that in their family for generations. It's just, it's different. And so you don't have to reject your culture or this idea that we take care of each other across generations to protect yourself. Those are not the only two options, even though we can feel that way. I think that there is always a way to honor what is meaningful in your culture while still protecting yourself from being used within it or from parts of your culture being weaponized against you. And you have to really use your discernment for what that looks like within your own culture and family system. I also think it's important for us to remember that we talk about this a lot. I think a lot of like cultural

criticism around this is that the family is always the bank and the adult child is the one that can't afford to leave because they're the one, you know, draining the family of financial resources and they haven't differentiated. But families have been throwing out their own kids onto the street for decades over who they love, who they date, how they identify, what they believe in. And a huge number of people end up homeless or with nothing because a parent rejected them and cut them off. That happens in families with money as well. Having resources doesn't make a family safe. It just means that the kid who gets exiled usually has like further to fall.

They are used to a different standard of living. And when we talk about money and families, sometimes the person with no resources or the scapegoat in the family or the one who is different is the one who got cut off, not the one that is doing the cutting, right? And when you become the estranged family member, when you're the one that says, I am going to walk away from the family, you also have to prepare yourself that you are probably going to lose access to financial support or to an inheritance. And you need a plan for that. And I think a lot of adults, you know, who have walked away from families say, like, they're kind of like, screw the inheritance. It's not worth it. It is not worth

the price that I have to pay. And that is your decision. I think a lot of, I see a lot of estranged parents who are quite authoritarian or threatening saying like, well, I'm going to write them out of the will and they're not going to get any money. And I think they use that as a weapon that they think it's going to bring their child back into compliance. And unfortunately, you know, a lot of the adults that I have spoken with, they just don't care about that. They are not motivated by it in the way that I think a lot of these parents think that their child would be. They have a different value system, different things that they prioritize, and they are okay with dealing with those consequences. And you have to go in, you know, with eyes wide open of what you might lose

and know that it might be weaponized against you later. There's also another group of adults that we don't speak about very often because we're typically talking about this like nefarious adult child that is just trying to like swindle their parents out of their money and steal from them. But there are a lot of adults who are financially supporting a family member or a parent who can't or won't support themselves. And some of you are paying for your abusive and harmful parents rent, covering their medical bills, putting food in their house. And for you, this distance is even more different because pulling back doesn't just end

an emotional relationship. it's going to change or end your help. And you have an extra layer to think about here. Because if your family member is elderly or disabled and they genuinely can't care for themselves, stepping back often means like you need to make sure that they are being cared for in another way. It's an obligation that you have to be thoughtful about. You want to make sure that this person is not being abused or harmed in any way.

And I think if the person you're supporting, you know, a parent or a family member is an active addiction. You keep having to bail them out of debts in some way or out of jail. You know, you have to think about that as well because I think it's so easy to just say like, well, just tell them no. But it's a completely different thing when it's 11 o'clock at night and they're crying on the phone and you're the only one that can help them fix it in that moment. And you really need to think about that and your value system and, you know, what you're going to do and have support for yourself so that you don't have to decide that in the middle of a really difficult emotionally charged moment. If you are staying close to a family member because you can't

afford not to, you are not weak. And you're not a hypocrite for maybe wanting more distance than you can take. You know, I think that everybody is working from their own unique math and like cost benefit analysis of how this relationship is impacting them and how it would impact them in different ways if they didn't have the relationship. And if you grew up with everything but your needs still went largely unmet, you're allowed to know that that phrase, like, we didn't know, we didn't have the resources, probably isn't going to sit well with you in that type of family. And if you're the one carrying your family financially or the one who got cut off and left with nothing. This is about you as well. This conversation is so much bigger than just like it's only

rich people with fake problems cutting their parents off. I don't think that it's wrong that money is in the middle of all of this either because it is. I just think we're drawing the wrong conclusions here. Money doesn't decide whose family actually hurt them. It decides who can afford to do something about it. So wherever you are in this, I hope that you really felt seen in this episode and that you understand that money is a part of this. And it is okay to think about that and to consider it. Inside the Family Cycle Breakers Club, we have so many resources exactly like this. We talk about the financial side of family, planning for the consequences of distance, and what to do when money and the relationship are tangled up together. We are heading into a

month in July on eldest daughter syndrome, which I think overlaps with a lot of this even more than you think. We're going to be talking about caregiving, money, supporting family members. And if you want that kind of support around you, you can come find us at callinghome.co. And I am back every Thursday with a Q&A episode. If something in this episode brought up a question for you that you would like answered, you can always send it to me in a voice note or email to Whitney at callinghome.com. Thank you for being here and for listening to this episode. Please don't forget to like, subscribe, leave us a review, comment on this episode. That's what allows us to keep the show going and keep it free for all of you.

Thank you so much for listening and I'll see you on Thursday. The Calling Home podcast is not engaged in providing therapy services, mental health advice, or other medical advice or services. It is not a substitute for advice from a qualified health care provider and does not create any therapist, patient, or other treatment relationship between you and calling home. or Whitney Goodman. For more information on this, please see Calling Holmes Terms of Service linked in the show notes below.