CALLING HOME with Whitney Goodman, LMFT - Part 2: Adult Children Share Their Perspective

Episode Date: October 10, 2024

In this episode, Whitney shares the findings from a survey of 2382 estranged adult children. She offers a deep dive into why many distance themselves from their parents. The survey reveals common themes such as unresolved conflict, emotional or physical harm, and the lasting impact of difficult childhood experiences, where self-preservation sometimes means breaking away. What You Will Learn: [07:40] A breakdown of the findings from the 2382 estranged adult children survey [25:20] The responses and how they reflect and align with our experiences  [26:04] A preview of part 3 and what to look forward to  Standout Quotes: “If your parent harmed you or you continue to be harmed by them, you have a right to protect yourself in the same way you do in other harmful or abusive relationships.” [03:52] “Parent and adult children, if they choose to have contact, both have a responsibility to show up as respective civil adults.” [04:05] Let’s Connect Have a question for Whitney? Call Home at 866-225-5466.  Join Whitney’s Family Cycle Breakers Club for further support and discussion on family dynamics at CallingHome.co. Follow the Calling Home community on Instagram. Click here to get “Toxic Positivity” on paperback.  Follow Whitney Goodman on Instagram or TikTok.  The Calling Home podcast is not engaged in providing therapy services, mental health advice, or other medical advice or services, 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 Calling Home or Whitney Goodman. For more information on this, please see Calling Home’s Terms of Service.  Mixing, editing, and show notes provided by Next Day Podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When you're with Amex Platinum, you get access to exclusive dining experiences and an annual travel credit. So the best tapas in town might be in a new town altogether. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Terms and conditions apply. Learn more at Amex.ca. www.ca.com. Hey, everyone. Welcome back for part two of my three-part series on estranged adult children and their parents.

I'm Whitney Goodman. I'm a licensed married and family therapist, the co-founder of Calling Home, and your host of the Calling Home podcast. If you haven't listened to Tuesday's episode yet about estranged parents, go back and listen to that episode where I cover all of the results of the estranged parent series. for those of you that already listened to that one, we're about to dive in to the second part where we are going to be talking about the adult children and the results that I got from their survey. If you're just listening, amazing. If you're watching, I have all my notes

here. You're going to see me reading off these a lot because I want to get the information about these questions and the survey correct. And I don't want to butcher anything. So you're going to see me reading off the paper sometimes. You can also now watch my episodes on YouTube in video format, if you're interested in that. All right, let's go ahead and dive into it. Like I said, in this episode, we're going to be talking about adult children and their perspective on the estranger from their parents. In part three, I'm going to compare and contrast the findings, talk about anything that really surprised or shocked me, and give some recommendations. And advice about things that I think that we should be doing in order to help people kind of see

eye to eye on this issue, maybe reconcile if that's what they want, or just create a little bit deeper of an understanding about what is going on between these two populations. So before we get into this, I'm going to give some disclaimers again, and I did this in the episode about parents. And I want to make sure that you all know exactly where I'm coming from and what I believe when I'm talking about this episode so that nobody's, gets confused. If you are in a strange adult child who wants me to say something like all estranged parents are toxic, you're not going to get that from this episode. I have met parents who have irreparably harmed their children in childhood and adulthood, and I have been

a staunch advocate for those adult children, and I plan to continue to be an advocate for those children. And I have met parents who have no interest in repairing things with their adult children. And I've met some who probably shouldn't try because there is no way to go back on what had happened. I have also met parents who have learned, changed, and repaired. And I have met some of these parents in our groups at Calling Home. I have met them as a therapist. And I've communicated with them just through my work on this topic. Only you can decide how you want to approach this relationship. Some of you will attempt repair and some will decide that the damage has already been done. I will try to refrain from speaking in absolutes about adult children or about parents

throughout this series. And here are a few things that I believe, and I did this in the parent episode as well. Adult children have a lifetime of experience under their parents' care. For a minimum of 18 years, the parent has power over the child. This power differential does not go away overnight, and we must consider it during these conversations. For many adults, the psychological power their parent has over them never entirely goes away. And you guys have heard me talk about this a lot. Parents should attempt to be the strong, sturdy leaders even after their children are adults. If your parents harmed you or you continue to be harmed by them, you have a right to protect yourself in the same way you would

in any other abusive or harmful relationship. Parents and adult children, if they choose to have contact, both have a responsibility to show up as respectful, civil adults. I feel feel very similarly about divorce and adult child parent estrangement. This is what I mean by that. There are benefits to working on these relationships and there are benefits to abandoning them. There are benefits to working on a marriage and for some couples, there are benefits to getting divorced. In the same way, there are benefits to making parent-adult-child relationships work and there are benefits to estrangement for some individuals and their parents. I will never encourage an adult to remain in any type of relationship where they are being

abused, harmed, or disrespected. Whether that relationship is with a parent, a friend, a romantic partner, a coworker, whoever it is, I would never encourage that as a therapist. We also need to remember that many divestic violence perpetrators and perpetrators of family violence and intimate partner violence will deny that they have been abusive. This is a well-documented phenomenon. They will argue that their behavior was warranted or that someone made them do it. And with estrangement between generations, we are often going to hear that there is a disagreement over what should be considered abusive or abuse.

and we also have agreed upon terms in the psychological community and among lawyers and physicians and government agencies about what constitutes physical abuse, emotional abuse, sexual abuse, all of those things. We have criteria for this. And so I'm going to go over that in the third part of this series. So that will be next week. Some adults are also disrespectful to their parents. And I will never refute this. We also have good evidence and data from research studies about why children may come to treat their parents this way. And I'm going to talk about that more in the third part of this series. Also, if you are in a strange parent listening, please keep in mind that some adults reported that they did not wish to repair the relationship or that their lives had improved since ending contact with their parents.

and this may be difficult to listen to those stories later in the episode. If you listen to this entire three-part series or just this part and think this does not apply to my situation, this is not accurate for me, that's okay. This is just data that we collected from a pool of estranged adult children. If you want to learn more about the survey and about how I collected this information, please go back and listen to the episode about parents. I included all of the ways that I collected, the data, who was given the survey,

how the survey was constructed, how long it was shared, et cetera, in that episode. I will also put some information about that in the show notes. You're able to go and check that out. But for those of you that are listening to the whole series, I will not bore you with that information again. All right, let's go ahead and get into those survey results.

from the adult children. I was able to collect data from 2,382 adult children that completed this survey. Like I mentioned in the episode about parents, I asked the same questions of adult children and the parents. I think I asked the parents maybe five additional questions that were specific to their experience, but otherwise I just changed the wording of the questions to reflect the different populations. And I'm just going to go through those results with you and try to refrain giving too much commentary. That way we can talk about this all in part three. All right. So who initiated

the estrangement between you and your parents? 82.7% said I did, as in the adult child initiated it. 6.9% were not sure. 6.7% said their parent. And 3.6% said it was a mutual decision. How long have you been estranged from your parents? About 53.1% have been estranged for one to five years. 21.7% under one year. 13.5%, 6 to 10 years. 6.1%, 11 to 15 years. And 5.6% over 16 years. Then I asked the adult children completing the survey how old they were. 32.8% of respondents were 33 to 39, 22.6% are 40 to 46, 20.4% are 26 to 32.2%. 20.4% are 47 and older. And only 3.8% are 18 to 25. So if you've heard the adult child episode, you'll see that the parents who filled out the survey, a lot younger children, and then maybe the adult children that filled

out this survey, which could kind of mean that these results are a little bit different because we're pulling different groups of people, just something to keep in mind that I found interesting. And a lot of that is, of course, going to have to do with the people who are following me tend to fall in a different age gap, you know, tend to be more in that like 25 to 40 age group. And it seems like the parents that are seeing this content, maybe have young children. How would you describe your childhood with your parent? If you all remember this question from the parent episode, listen to these responses. 50.3% said challenging. 24% said extremely poor. 15.4% said fair. 10% mostly good and 0.3% said amazing. I then asked the adult children if

child protective services, the Department of Children and Families, or any other type of agency like that got involved during their childhood before they turned 18. 82.3% said no, 12.1% said yes, and 5.6% said, I do not remember or I am not sure. I then asked, in your opinion, what is a valid reason for an adult child to end a relationship with their parent? And if you listen to the parent episode, you'll remember that this is the one question that I did give adult children an additional answer to, and so these results are a little bit different. 74.8% said there are many valid reasons like emotional neglect, emotional immaturity, different beliefs, etc. 22.7% said any reason is valid. 2.1% said, I'm not sure.

0.2% said an adult should try to maintain a relationship with their parent through adulthood no matter what. And 0.2% said physical abuse is the only valid reason. So this response of any reason is valid. I did not give parents that choice. So the results are a little bit different. I then asked before ending the relationship with your parent, did you attempt to set boundaries? 84.7% said yes, I attempted to set boundaries and they were not respected. 13.9% said no, I did not attempt to set boundaries. 1.3% said, yes, I attempted to set boundaries and they were respected. I then asked, true or false, your spouse and your parents do not get along. This contributed to your estrangement. 62.9% said, false, my partner and parents' relationship did not play a role

in the estrangement. 21.6% said false, I am not married or partnered. This did not play a role in our estrangement. 15.5% said, true, my spouse and my parents do not get along, this contributed to our estrangement. Is addiction and or substance use one of the reasons for your estrangement from your parents? 72% said no addiction and or substance use did not contribute to our estrangement. 18.3% said, yes, addiction and or substance usage in adulthood and childhood, 5.5% said yes, addiction and substance use in childhood, and 4.2% said yes, addiction slash substance use in adulthood. So you'll see with these questions that I really only asked the adult children about the behavior of their parents. And if that led to their

estrangement, because I knew that the majority of the people filling out this survey were likely choosing to become estranged from their parents because of a particular reason. I think that estrangement that happens when an adult child pulls away because of their own addiction or a mental health issue on their part is quite different from the pattern of estrangement that we're looking at when adult children say there is something wrong fundamentally in this relationship that is causing me to pull away. And I'll talk about that more in part three. I asked adult children, is your parents mental health issues or diagnosis one of the reasons for becoming estranged? 61.5% said yes, my parents struggles with their

mental health, and this has contributed to our estrangement. 38.5% said, no, my parents' mental health did not contribute to our estrangement. Is emotional abuse one of the reasons for your estrangement from your parents? And please remember this one for part three, because we're going to want to talk about this. 77.8% said, yes, emotional abuse in childhood and in adulthood. 9% said, no, emotional abuse did not contribute to our estrangement. 8.2% said yes, emotional abuse in childhood. And 5% said, yes, emotional abuse only in adulthood. Also, remember this one. This one was really shocking to me. Is emotional immaturity one of the

reasons why you are estranged from your parents? And I guess this is why our adult children of emotionally immature parents group filled up so quickly because listen to this. 98.6% of people who completed this survey, said, yes, my parent is emotionally immature and it has contributed to the estrangement. 1.4% said no. Do you believe your other parent has contributed to the estrangement from this parent? 36.3% said no. 33% said no, I am estranged from both parents. And 17.7% said, yes, my parent played a role in me becoming estranged from my other parent. 12% percent. point nine percent said I'm not sure if my other parent played a role in me becoming estranged from this parent. I then asked, if you have siblings, did sibling rivalry or sibling preferential

treatment contribute to your estrangement? Forty-eight point six percent said yes, sibling rivalry and sibling preferential treatment was a factor. I was pretty surprised by that one, actually. I guess I shouldn't be with like how popular our sibling estrangement and sibling relationship of content was at calling home, but I was surprised by that. 40.4% said no sibling rivalry and sibling preferential treatment was not a factor, and 11.1% said, no, I am an only child. Is physical abuse one of the reasons for your estrangement from your parents? 63.3% said no.

29.2% said, yes, physical abuse in childhood. And I want you to remember this question as well for when we discuss this in part three. 6.7% said yes, physical abuse in childhood and in adulthood, and 0.7% said physical abuse in adulthood. If you and your parent have different political beliefs, did this contribute to your estrangement? Sevent 79.1% said no, different political beliefs did not contribute to the estrangement, and 20.9% said, yes, different political beliefs are a contributor to the estrangement. If you and your parents have different religious beliefs, did this contribute to your estrangement? 87.4% said, no, religion did not contribute to the estrangement. This was surprising to me.

9.8% said, yes, my parent is upset. I left their religion. 2.7% said, yes, my parent is upset that I follow a different religion? Then I asked, is sexual abuse one of the reasons for your estrangement from your parents? 87.8% said, no. 10.5% said yes, sexual abuse in childhood. 1.3% said yes, sexual abuse in childhood and adulthood. And 0.5% said yes, sexual abuse in adulthood only. Has your parents refusal to accept your sexual identity or gender played a role in your estrangement? 93.6% said no, this is not a contributing factor.

6.4% said yes, it is a contributing factor. Remember this one as well. This is an important question. Is emotional neglect one of the reasons why you are estranged from your parents? 77.7% said, yes, emotional neglect in childhood and adulthood. 10.7% said yes, emotional neglect in childhood only. 6.4% said no, emotional neglect is not a factor. And 5.3% said, yes, emotional neglect in adulthood.

Did your parents' marriage issues or divorce contribute to the estranged men? 51.2% said no, their marital issues or divorce did not contribute to the estrangement. 24.6% said, yes, their marital issues contributed to the estrangement. 17.8% said their marital issues and their divorce contributed to the estrangement. And 6.4% said their divorce contributed to the estrangement. If your parent remarried, did this contribute to the estrangement? No, my parent did not remarry, and this is not a reason for our estrangement, was the overwhelming majority at 66.4% of respondents.

18% said yes, they remarried, and it contributed to the estrangement. And 15.6% said, no, they remarried, and it is not a reason for our estrangement. Please select your reaction to this statement. A therapist convinced me to become estranged from my parent. 43.6% said false, my therapist did not play any role in my decision. 33.9% said false. I did not attend a therapy before deciding to become estranged from my parent. 17.6% said true. I was contemplating estrangement. I'm working with my therapist ultimately led me to that conclusion. 4.3% said false. My therapist encouraged me to

remain in contact with my parent. And 0.5% said it was my therapist idea and I followed their advisement. I did not want to become estranged and they convinced me. I'll talk about this later. I'm trying to keep my thoughts to myself until the next episode. Did social media posts about estrangement or going no contact influence your decision to end the relationship with your parent? 42.9% said no. I did not view any social media content about estrangement before I made the choice to end the relationship with my parent. 30.2% said no, social media content about estrangement played no role in my decision to go no contact. 26.6% said yes, social media posts helped me feel less alone and like I was

allowed to make this choice. 0.3% said yes, I had never considered ending a relationship with my parent. Social media posts are the reason I went no contact. Before ending your relationship with your parents, did you ask them to attend therapy with you? 72.6%, so the majority said, no, I did not ask my parent to attend therapy. I was kind of surprised by that one. 17.9% said yes, and they refused. 6.1% said yes, and we went together. 3.4% said no, my parent asked me to attend with them, and I refused.

Before ending the relationship with your parents, did you ask them to attend therapy independently? 43.1%. No, I did not ask and they did not go. 35.2% yes, and they refused to attend therapy. 16.4%. No, I did not ask. They made the decision to attend therapy on their own. 5.3% yes, and they went to therapy. Before ending the relationship with your parents, did you clearly explain to them your reasoning for going no contact? 39.5%. No, I did not explain my reasoning before going no contact. 35.3%, yes, I am confident I explained my reasoning more than one time.

25.2%. Yes, I am confident I explained my reasoning at least once. So this is interesting. I can't wait to talk about that finding and also compare it to what the parents reported about that. Before ending the relationship with your parent, did you ask them to apologize for something specific? 62% said, no, I did not ask for an apology. We do have on our calling on website a when your parent won't apologize module that you

guys should definitely check out. 38% said yes, I clearly explained what I need an apology for. Do you need to change any of your behavior in order to have a healthy relationship with your parent? 52.5% said, I do not want to pursue a relationship with them. 20.4% said, yes, I need to change my behavior. 15.8% said, I'm not sure. And 11.4% said, no, I do not need to change my. behavior to have a healthy relationship. Has your parent ever apologized to you? 78.3% said no. 16.6% said yes, their parent has apologized. And 5.1% are not sure or they can't remember. If you have children, do you allow your parents to see your children? 42.2% of the people that

responded to this survey do not have children. 42% said no, they do not allow their parents to see their children. 13.4% said yes with very strict boundaries, and 2.5% said yes, they are active grandparents. Do you feel your life has improved since going no contact with your parent or becoming estranged? 87.7% said yes, it has improved. That's wild, guys. 10.4% said it has stayed the same. And 1.9% said it has gotten worse. And so I definitely want to go back and compare this to what the parents said about their quality of life.

I then asked the adult children, is there anything that your parent could do to find a resolution to repair the relationship or to reconnect with you? These are some quotes that I pulled of what adult children said. A lot just wrote no, period. My mother would need to completely change the way she interacts with me. My parents do not accept my gay daughter. Unless they loved her unconditionally, we cannot have a relationship. They need to listen to me.

Acknowledgement of abuse, apology, and therapy. Stop using drugs. Stop lying. Stop exploding. My goal is to get to a point where I'm not triggered by my mother's narcissistic behaviors and can coexist with her at larger family events. I'm not looking for a perfect parent, respect boundaries, and less verbal abuse. I then asked what is the hardest part about being estranged from your parent in adulthood,

and here are some things that the adult children said. They won't change. Seeing others with their family. Worrying about what will happen if she gets sick. Losing other family relationships, not giving my children family, intense guilt, judgment from mothers, and nothing. Letting go has brought me joy. So take a second, just like you did after that first episode, to think about if any of these

responses surprised you. Are any of these responses consistent with what you believe or what you feel as an estranged adult child? If you're an estranged parent or a parent who feels like they're trying to avoid estrangement with their child, are you surprised by any of these responses? Are they consistent with your experience? with your own child. And I want you to think about, are there any big differences that you noticed between these two surveys that we've reviewed now this week? Are there any questions you wish I would have asked?

And then next week on the 15th, the next episode is going to come out. And I'm going to talk to you about the questions that had the biggest discrepancies between them and also point out questions. where parents and adult children seem to be in agreement. I'm also going to cover the definitions and the criteria of things like emotional abuse, physical abuse, emotional neglect, emotional immaturity. So we can really have a deeper understanding about what those behaviors look like. And I want to talk more about why certain groups are denying that this stuff happened and certain groups are reporting that this is happening at such high level.

and see if maybe we can come to an agreement or an understanding about what each person in this dynamic is feeling and believing and why they're reporting the things that they're reporting. I hope that this is interesting and helpful for all of you. Please share this episode with anyone in your life who you know is an estranged adult child or and estranged parents. I would love to hear what they think. And I look forward to going over all of these results again with you next week in part three. Thank you so much. Please don't forget to subscribe to the podcast or leave a review on Apple or Spotify podcast. That's what helps me keep this podcast going. And I will see you guys next week.

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 Colin Holm or Whitney Goodman. For more information on this, please see Calling Holmes Terms of Service, linked in the show notes below.