CALLING HOME with Whitney Goodman, LMFT - My Sister Didn't Survive Our Family

Episode Date: July 16, 2026

Content warning: This episode discusses childhood abuse, domestic violence, racial slurs, and the death of a sibling.In this Q&A episode, Whitney reads a single letter from a woman who survived a childhood of severe violence, lost her sister at 24, and is now permanently no contact with a family system that still minimizes what happened. Whitney takes the letter in pieces and answers all three of her questions.In this episode, you'll learn:How to grieve a sibling whose life was overshadowed by abuse, without reducing them to what was done to themWhy thriving after you escape is not a betrayal of the people who didn'tWhat it means when an entire family, including the abuser, admits the violence happened and still asks you to come backWhy grief and boundary-holding almost always have to happen at the same timeWhitney 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.

Welcome back to the Calling Home Podcast. I'm Whitney Goodman. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist. And this is the podcast for anyone that is untangling complicated family relationships. Today's episode is a listener Q&A. And I want to tell you up front that this is a heavy one. The letter that I am going to read describes childhood abuse, domestic violence, racial slurs, and the death of a sibling. If you're in a place today where that is too much, it's completely okay to skip this one and come back for another episode. If you missed the episode on Tuesday, I had Dr. Lindsay Gibson on my podcast and that one might be more your speed today. This letter comes from a woman who wrote in sharing something a lot of estrangement

survivors carry in silence. What it means to break a generational cycle so completely that you don't just walk away from the family, but you walk away from the indefinitely. But you walk away from the entire system that treated severe violence as normal. And she's carrying all of that while grieving a sister who did not make it out of the family system. And I'm going to read this letter in pieces because I think there's too much to kind of read it all and then answer it. And then we'll pause throughout to talk about it. And I'm only going to do one question today in this episode just because this one is long and intensive. All right, let's go ahead and get into the episode. This caller writes, The dysfunction in my family began long before I was born. My mom met my dad when she was 16. He was a

textbook controller who beat her and even though her own family would wait outside with a moving truck to rescue her, she always went back. That set the stage for the home my sister and I grew up in. Constant, unpredictable, terrifying rage. We were always walking on eggshells waiting for the next explosion. My sister took the absolute worst of it. When she was nine, he beat her while screaming racial slurs. Years later, when I was home and he started pacing toward her, she dropped to the floor in the fetal position screaming, no. I got in his face and told him you'd have to hit me first. He threw me into a closet. In 2013, he was arrested for pinning her to a wall by her throat and kicking her while she was curled up on the floor.

The police took her to a shelter and my mom demanded she come back home just to keep up the appearance of a normal family. The greatest trauma of my life is that his cruelty towards her never stopped. At 24, she passed away from leukemia. This question is very hard to read. She was robbed of the chance to ever fully escape or to feel the peace of adulthood. And this is her first question after all of that, this writer. How do you mourn a sister whose entire life was overshadowed by terror? Someone who passed away before she could ever experience true peace and freedom.

How do survivors navigate the specific grief of a sibling who didn't survive long enough to escape the war zone with them? Gosh. This question, I'm pausing for a second because these questions in situations in situations, situations like this truly really bring me to tears because I feel like you are, you know, this person is grieving not only the loss of their sister, the loss of what could have been and what they endured. And so all of those losses are very different and they're all real and legitimate, and I think you can stay stuck in a lot of these different types of grief because it's difficult to piece them apart. So I want to start first by going back to this question.

You know, how do you mourn your sister and your sister being someone that could never experience true peace and freedom? I think a lot of this might be tangled up for you in the fact that maybe you weren't able to fully save your sister, especially if you are a person that tried to get in between, you know, the abuser and the victim, that being your parent and your sister. I can tell that when you're someone that does this, you are someone that was already trying to give her peace and to make sure that she was able to experience that. And you felt some duty and obligation, you know, as a sibling to help your sister get that. And maybe you're also grieving the fact that you feel like you were never able to access that for her or to fully

save her. And you are the survivor and the surviving sibling who maybe feels like, you know what, now I'm an adult and I got out and I was able to form relationship. and build a life that my sister never was able to achieve. And I think knowing what we know also about the connection between cancers and disease and childhood trauma, there can also be some underlying feelings of like, who would my sister have been if she didn't endure all of this. Now, I don't know what your particular beliefs are about the afterlife or if you have a religion that comforts you or a belief system that allows you to see the other person as being at peace or okay. But I think tapping into that, even outside of the confines of a religion,

can be very, very helpful here. I don't know that you necessarily, you know, this is a tough one for me, especially when someone passes away young or I feel like they didn't get to access a life and build a life that would have been meaningful for them because I am not particularly religious in the sense that I think that people are going to like a better place. But if that's something that works for you, I think that can be very helpful to people. I've seen it be helpful to people. But I think also knowing that they are no longer enduring that pain or that mistreatment can be helpful in terms of grieving them and knowing that they're finally at peace in the sense that they're not being treated poorly anymore. And that doesn't mean that you have to necessarily

believe that they are in heaven or that they're in a better place or any of that. But you can know that the mistreatment has stopped. And if you are someone that believes that maybe your sister can still see you at this point or she can still watch. Or she can still watch. watch what is going on from wherever she is or that she can be reincarnated as something, I think that that can also be very helpful. And so I would encourage you to try to think about where your sister might be now and what type of peace she might be experiencing. And I would also allow yourself to grieve the fact that you might be eating yourself up

or thinking that you wish that she could have had more peace while she was alive. It also might be helpful to think about any peaceful moments or good moments that you and your sister were able to share together. You know, any of these even small, ordinary good moments can be helpful. When someone has lived a life that is very overshadowed by abuse and enduring very difficult thing. Sometimes we can get stuck in only remembering that part about them too and not remembering any of the other simple or positive or joyful or connected moments that we had with that person. And it can help you to kind of create more shades of gray around your sister's life that she did have other

moments. And maybe there were other moments that you experienced with her that you can think about and not just about what was done to her, but the person that she was. I also don't think there's any timeline or moving on necessarily when it comes to losing a sibling in this type of fashion and also thinking about the fact that like she was also a witness to what was going on in your family and you are losing that as well and losing the fact that you had this other person that maybe knew what went on in the home, what you endured, that could have been a corroborating voice for you as an adult or a voice of support or maybe that you would have liked for both of you to come out on the other side of this

and to lose that is very difficult. So the goal here is not to stop missing her or to stop thinking about what she could have been or what she could have achieved in this life or experienced, but to maybe start carrying her in a way that isn't just viewed through the lens of abuse, but through the lens of who she was as your sister and as a person. And I think that can help as well. I'm going to read more of this caller's question now. Today I'm 43 and permanently no contact with both of my parents. I am raising two beautiful daughters, 15 and 10, and we are thriving. Part of my story I'm most proud of is that the cycle ends with me. By choosing total estrangement from the whole system, I'm protecting my girls from the madness I survived. And then she

asks, how do I handle the survivor's guilt of making it out alive and building a beautiful, thriving life with my daughters while my sister was robbed of that chance? I really think this goes back to what we were just talking about. I wonder if there's a way that you can keep your sister's memory alive and her influence alive for your kids. And I'm wondering if there's a way that she could still be a part of that. And I think that this goes back to, you know, how you conceptualize loss and the people that are no longer with you and how you like to include them. But I will give you. this question is making me like choke up. I will give you some things that I have seen people do that have been helpful across like different faiths and people who are totally atheist and people

who are agnostic and people who have no no belief really in that type of higher power. I think that you can encourage your family and you yourself, you know, to talk to your sister. And that might be through prayer, through thinking that she is around you in some type of form. You know, I've heard people say that they think of their relatives as a butterfly or as a bunny or a cardinal, you know, all these different signs that you might teach your children to look out for. And even thinking of ways, you know, if you're grieving the fact that your sister wasn't able to become a mother or an aunt or an active participant in your families, life and to build that for herself, how might she be seeing your family from wherever you come to believe that she is right now? How would she have been a presence? Were there things that she

loved and that she enjoyed and would love to teach your kids? And again, I think this helps you step outside of the family as this abusive unit that you both endured and think of your sister as a person that can transcend all of that. And what would she have known and learned and been like? I'm not sure I know the exact age that your sister passed out. So I think this is all going to depend on how much you were able to talk to her about these things and how much of it you're kind of improvising. But I do believe that her memory can live on in so many ways that allow you to also feel like

your sister did get this chance to make a difference and an impact in the world in many of the ways that she would have if she was allowed to build a new beautiful life as you're describing. And you can do that in a way for her, which can also be a form of grieving and celebration for you. I also want to say that, you know, your thriving is not a betrayal of your sister. And I think sometimes that guilt and grief of being the surviving sibling or the one that made it out can really take over. And so sometimes it's that you think like, I can't be happy. I can't thrive. And I'm putting words into this caller's mouth.

I don't know that you feel this way. But for a lot of you that have lost someone or you feel like you made it out of your abusive family and your siblings did not, it can feel like thriving is cruel or an insult to them. When in reality, in this situation, I kind of see it as like you are thriving for both of you. You know, the piece that you get to experience is an honor to your sister and a way of honoring her and a way of saying, you know, she didn't get to do this. And so that I'm going to make sure that I get to do it almost like double for both of us. And I think that sometimes we can allow guilt to be the reason that we sabotage, you know, our own good lives. And I don't believe that anyone that loves us that's here with us now or that has passed would want that for us. And so thinking about, you know, my sister would probably be very happy to see me thriving and to have escaped this type of system. Okay. Now I'm going to read. the third part of this question.

My dad refuses to respect my boundary. He's been digitally harassing me for over a year, emotional blackmail and what I'd call medical weaponization. He blames me for my grandfather's cancer, telling me that keeping my daughters away is literally killing him, in quotes. He tries to rewrite history, telling me my trauma is just something a therapist planted in my head, and in the same breath he brags about. about his violence.

The brainwashing runs so deep, it consumed my younger brother who told me my sister deserved the abuse. The extended family knew how dangerous he was, a cousin even privately admitted it was severe abuse, but they chose convenience and looked the other way, even taking a secret vacation with him. Almost a year ago, I blocked all of them. I refused to let them play both sides or use my pain against me. How do you navigate all of this, the grief and the guilt, while simultaneously holding a hard permanent boundary against a family system that completely normalizes the violence? Okay.

I rarely speak this plainly about family dynamics, but I am going to say this. If there has been violence to this degree in your family, and people have witnessed it, they've named it, they've named it, they told you they remember it, they've seen it, and your dad is bragging about his violence, this is clear as day to me. That is not a safe family system. If you have memories of your siblings being kicked while in the fetal position, and you know that the violence is happening, and so does your family, because your brother is admitting that the violence is happening, and he's just rationalizing it by saying that it was deserved. and your dad is bragging about the violence and you have a cousin that admits that you endured

severe abuse, then there is no other like consensus that we need to have on this. The family is admitting that this happened. So this is not a difference in rewriting history and that your trauma is something a therapist planted in your head. There is, again, consensus about what happened within the family, even from the abuser here, if your dad is bragging about his violence. So the permanent hard boundary there is, to me, a question of safety. You have children.

You cannot bring children around someone. You wouldn't do this in any other situation. So let's just call that out for what it is. Because I think there are people that would say, oh, but it's your dad. And, you know, he should get to be around his grandkids. If you had a PE coach, if you had a team, teacher, if you had a neighbor that had been physically assaulting people in front of you, children, most people are not going to then bring their kids willingly around that person.

They're going to want that coach to get fired. They're not going to leave them with that teacher. They're not going to let that neighbor babysit. So to me, it's no different just because someone has a biological tie to you. Now, you are coming here and saying, my dad was physically abusive to us as children. And now he says, I know that was wrong. I should not have abused you. What I did was terrible. I have done X, Y, and Z. I have gone and read these books to learn about violence. I have worked on these behaviors in therapy. I have gone to this group. And you have seen a sustained period of change where this person has no longer been inflicting physical harm and violence on others. We'd be having a different conversation. Then we might say, okay, what does this look like. I believe everyone is capable of redemption and change. Let's talk about how we can do that safely. That's not what you're telling me here. You're telling me that there's bragging about violence,

there's recognition of the violence, and there is a recognition of the violence that includes rationalizing it. Now, your brother rationalizing it makes sense, right? If you read books on children that grow up in domestic violence studies on this. I believe Lundy Baincroft talks about this in the book, I think it's called Why Does He Do That? I'm blanking on it, but you guys will know what I'm talking about. In that book, the author talks about how children will often align with the abuser in an attempt to save themselves, to gain power, to have protection. And so I would assume that your brother is doing this because admitting that his father is abusive and that he harms children and that he is bragging about it and is proud of it feels very threatening and dangerous to him.

It doesn't make what your brother is doing okay, but it shows how sick this family system is to me. How abuse is continuing to be perpetuated for generations is being normalized in the family and not being changed. And so when you are the parent of a child's children in this situation, your duty is to protect those children from physical harm, no matter who is doing it. And given what you're showing me here, I don't think that this is a safe situation at all. And I understand why you are feeling guilt and grief and overwhelm. And that goes to show how entrenched,

some of these patterns can be in a family and how difficult it is to set boundaries because you can be in a family with this level of abuse and still say, I feel guilty for cutting them off. And I think a lot of people can relate to that. And this is why I don't believe that there is a statistically significant population of people cutting off family members that are overwhelmingly good and kind and nice to them all the time. because I see how hard it is for people to do it even in the face of such egregious mistreatment within families. And so the way that you navigate this is that you allow yourself to feel the grief and the guilt. And you acknowledge that I am feeling this because these are the people I spent my life around. This is my father. This is my brother. I have lost my sister. You know, I have endured

this type of treatment for a lot of my life. And I thought that it was normal. I thought that that was how families function. And now I am coming out of that fog. And I'm an adult and I'm raising my own children. And I realize like, hey, it is really not normal to treat your children that way. It is abusive to treat your spouse that way. And I am dealing with reconciling these two sets of beliefs that I have this parent and a brother who I feel biologically wired to some degree to love and forgive and want to spend time around. And I'm seeing their behavior and I'm seeing that I would not really accept that behavior from anyone else. But I'm feeling pulled to accept it and to rationalize it from them.

This is also crazy making when you have people around you who are rationalizing this type of abuse to this degree and saying like, you deserve. it or any, any of the above, right? And taking vacations and sort of being like, oh, this person is, you know, someone that I want to spend time around. That is very, very disorienting. It's overwhelming. And so I think what you do is you allow those feelings to come up and you also, every time they do, and you feel pulled to put yourself back in a position with a known abuser who has not done anything to change their behavior, you reorient yourself back to your own family. You reorient yourself back towards your marriage, your children, your sister, the people that

have been victims of this. And you say, I want to protect this. I want to keep this safe. I do not want to inflict harm on these people. I know what I know. I know what I saw. I know that this stuff has been admitted to me and I know what I endured. I know these things are true. I am able to lay my head down at night knowing what I know and knowing what I need to do to keep myself and the people that I love safe. And you can still extend kindness and love to these people if that feels authentic for you in your grief and in your guilt to say, I hope my brother makes his way out of this.

I hope that my, you know, I'm not sure what the status is of your mom and all of this, but thinking, you know, of her, thinking of your sister. And even when thinking about your father, I think you can think about like, wow, what a horrible life for this person to live, to not be able to know healthy relationships or anything like that, not be able to have that experience. But ultimately, like, this comes down to safety, protection, lack of accountability, lack of remorse, and lack of even an attempt to learn how to have better boundaries. And even when someone tries to weaponize that against you and say things like, you know, you're killing your grandfather and all this other stuff, like you have to play the tape all the way through to the end. What would really happen if I came around this person? If I brought my children, if I started to spend time with them, what would that look like? Do I really want to allow myself to be moved by this guilt when these stakes are this high? I also want you to remember that grieving and boundary holding often

they have to happen hand in hand. It's like, it's such the experience for so many people. And I think they think that they're going to feel good like when they hold the boundary. And sometimes you do at first, but then it still becomes this process of like, I know I have to do this, but I don't want to and it's so hard to do it and I wish things could be different and like I just want you to know that it's normal for it to feel that way it's probably going to feel that way now I want to end this by saying you know to this caller and to anyone that can relate to this caller this cycle ending with you is not a small thing you have stepped in between you know your father and your sister in ways where no child should ever have to do that. And if you feel like you couldn't save your sister,

that is not your burden to carry. And I think you need to know that you are saving, you know, your own children and people that come after you every single day just by giving them a home that doesn't have terror in it. And you are building a more peaceful life. And I really do think that your sister is a part of that. And to everyone else listening to this who sees themselves somewhere in this story, you know, maybe you have a sibling that you lost, you have guilt for making it out of the family, and you feel like you're choosing, you know, your own comfort over their safety. You are not alone in this. And honestly, this is one of the main reasons why calling home exists. And if you want ongoing support,

with this type of issue. You can come join us inside the Family Cycle Breakers Club. That is our membership community. And you get unlimited access to support groups, private community discussion boards, and new resources every single week, including articles, videos, worksheets, and scripts for navigating really difficult moments. You'll also get our full course library, therapy guides, book recommendations, and I do a Q&A every month just for our membership community. And you'll also, you'll also. You'll also get our full course library, therapy, therapy guides, book recommendations. And I do a Q&A every month just for our membership community. And you can join at callinghome.com backslash join and I will put that in the show notes as well. If today's episode was heavy for you or brought something up, please take your time the rest of the day. I know this was a

heavy one. And thank you so much for being here. I will see you next time on calling home. 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 healthcare provider and does not create any therapist, patient, or other treatment relationship between you and Collingholm or Whitney Goodman. For more information on this, please see Calling Holmes Terms of Service linked in the show notes below.