CALLING HOME with Whitney Goodman, LMFT - Q&A: Chaotic Upbringings and Setting Boundaries

Episode Date: May 2, 2024

Whitney is answering more of your questions. Today, she’ll talk to a listener that is struggling to understand her chaotic upbringing, which was marked by her parents' nasty divorce, her mother's substance abuse and mental health issues, and her father's absence. Whitney will talk about the importance of accepting and grieving these types of experiences. The second caller has questions on how to set boundaries within her culture, which is often seen as a foreign concept in her family.  Have a question for Whitney? Call Home at 866-225-5466.  Visit Mindhappy.com and use HOME15 for 15% off first monthly subscription! Click here to get “Toxic Positivity” on paperback.  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 or TikTok.  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. 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. Welcome back to another caller question episode of the calling home podcast. This is the episode where you call in, ask me your questions, and I answer. If you ever want to be featured on an episode or want to get my take on a situation that you're in with a family member, you can leave me a voicemail at 866-2-25-4-66. All right, let's hear from our first caller.

I really love your podcast. I've been on there since the beginning, and I actually just recently, very recently joined the Cycle Breakers Club. I've only been able to make it to one Oversinkers anonymous group, but I really loved it. It was at the end of February, end of the accepting parents. So I'm kind of just really just starting in. And this topic of growing up in chaos really kind of triggered something in me that I didn't know I was fully aware of or really expecting.

I have related to mostly every topic so far, but this one was kind of confusing to me. On the one hand, I wasn't a child of abuse. I grew up in a very loving home and have wonderful memories from my childhood. My brother, even though he's six years younger, he actually has quite a few good memories as well. So I hear, you know, these stories of growing up in chaos, and I think, you know, I don't really belong here. But then I can also relate to the stories of these traumatic events and impacts and emotional abuse and emotionally immature parents. So on the other hand, I did have chaos with our parents, but it was in my late-teen, early adult years. And unfortunately for my brother, he can recollect around 11 or 12.

My parents had a nasty divorce. I'll try to be brief. My dad wanted it. My mom didn't. My mom spiraled, started using alcohol, self-harming. She was in and out of rehab. She was already at that point, actually addicted to opioids. My dad, he just left. They were separated for about a year and a half, two years before the official divorce. My brother was only about 13 to 15 years old and I was about 18 to 20 years old because this was over like a two year span before I went off to college and we were just left home alone with a clearly mentally unstable mentally ill mother. My dad knew this but just really didn't come around a lot. He came around maybe once or twice but she was very competitive to him and he would just leave.

So we were left in that situation in a very young age. She would leave. She would leave. She would leave she would drive drunk in the middle of the night. We wouldn't know if she would come home alive. We didn't know if we would wake up one morning and find her dead. She did attempt suicide on more than one occasion. I slept in my brother's room to protect him and to not be alone and didn't want, my room was near hers and I didn't want to hear her throwing things and wailing. And there was never physical abuse, but there was quite a bit of verbal abuse.

But anyway, there wasn't any physical harm, and I think that that's why, you know, this topic is slightly confusing to me because I really, it's been hard for me to do this mental math of my parents were once good parents, and then everything just fell apart. It hit the fan, so to speak. So I'm just trying to kind of get a sense of like, is this typical? Has this happened? Is this, does this kind of fall into this category? Has anyone else kind of had this situation? You know, because at this point, it's really adding to the grief and to kind of this sense of false hope.

You know, my inner child is like, hey, those parents are still in there somewhere, you know, when quite frankly, I don't think, I think they're long gone. So I'm no contact with my dad. I'm extremely limited contact with my mom. And so it's just been a lot of grief, just a lot of, you know, my parents were once good parents. So what happens when their wounds catch up to them? And is that considered living in chaos, even though we technically went through all of this verbal and emotional abuse and neglect?

We didn't really grow up that way. So anyway, just your thoughts on this would be. greatly appreciated. Thank you so much for calling it and for joining the Family Cycle Breakers Club. I'm really glad that you've enjoyed it so far and found value in the groups. It's so interesting to me when I hear someone like this caller describe their life as not chaotic with their parents or their childhood because of the timing of when it happened and also because there wasn't physical abuse. Like this kind of caveat seems to be thrown in there a lot by adult children and by parents that what they're going through wasn't that bad because maybe they only witnessed abuse or it was

just verbal or whatever it is. But when I hear someone describe that they had a parent who was dealing with mental illness, who was using substances, there were times where they were left alone for long periods of time with this parent where the parent wasn't reliable. That fits the bill for chaos and for childhood chaos or household chaos. And you don't have to have experienced this for your entire childhood or only for, you know, certain years of it, like when you were five or six or two for it to be valid. You can experience this as a teenager, which is still extremely important, valuable years of your childhood where you were going through huge developmental changes and where you need reliable caregivers and be significantly impacted by that. And be significantly impacted by

that. I know that we don't like to think about it like that as parents or as children because we think of teenagers maybe as being like almost done, you know, cooking or developing or like they don't need as much from parents, but I think teenagers need like a lot of guidance, you know, in a very different way, but they're going through a lot in that period of time. So that being said, it sounds like if you can relate to what this caller is saying, like there needs to be this period of acceptance of like, hey, this is what I experienced, and it's legitimate and it impacted me. And it's possible to get different parents throughout your life cycle, right? This is why each of you and your siblings, depending on when you were born and what stage

your parents were at during that time, we'll get wildly different parents. If your parents go through something, whether that's a traumatic event, an illness, a divorce, a death, loss, grief, whatever it is, that could impact them in a really big way if they are not equipped to handle it and if they don't have the tools or the support to get through that. So it sounds like that's what happened here. And you might relate to this in your own life that like there were years of my life where my parents were much more stable. There were years of my life where my parents were really struggling. And so you can have different versions of your parents. And I hear some, you know, confusion and also grief in this

caller of like, well, I think that that person is still in there, that parent, and like, why weren't they able to be consistent? And I think this is just the reality of like being human beings, right? That we go through things and they impact us and they change how we are able to parent and how we're able to like be in the world. And when that happens, it can be very challenging for the child to navigate that. Now, as an adult, you are able to kind of hold this nuance of like my parent was this way during this time and they were this way during this other time and like I may need to grieve the fact that they weren't able to be consistent or reliable for me and I may also need to accept the fact that they are impacted by their circumstances of

their life and how they choose or are able to deal with those circumstances and the impact is something that is going to impact me. And so it's okay. for you to say, I love my parents and what they did for me during this season of my life, and I am in a lot of pain because of how they handled this other season of our life and the way that it impacted me. But I do want to reemphasize that if you grew up in a home where there was a parent who was dealing with untreated or undiagnosed mental health issues that caused erratic behaviors, if you were raised in a home where, parent was absent for large periods of time where there was a lack of consistency, this has the

impact of household chaos. And it doesn't have to happen for your entire life, your entire childhood to have an impact on you. It could be something that's happening to you with your parents now in adulthood. And that can have an impact on you and how you are navigating not only a relationship with them, but just living your life in general. So I hope that anyone that hears that that's kind of trying to like rationalize or explain a way why it might be impacting them can sort of take solace in some way and knowing that like this makes sense why it's impacting you and it makes sense why you feel the way that you do. Thank you again so much for calling in. And if you relate to this caller's question or anything I said in the response, we have a lot

of content up on the site for people who grew up in chaos to help you heal from. understand those chaotic periods in your life, whether that was your entire childhood or just parts of it. When was the last time you really got lost in play? I know for me it's been a really long time. I do crafts or play with my son, but there's so much execution and cleanup and planning that it's really hard to like fully be in the moment and let go of that mental load. That's why I love Mind Happy because they send you curated monthly deliveries that are designed to get you off your phone and engaging in new creative activities. Visit mindhappy.com and use the code Home 15, H-O-M-E-1-5, for 15% off your first monthly

subscription. Hi, Whitney. My name is Natalie, and my question is about cultural differences. I know you're Latina, or at least part Latina, and that is a big thing when it comes to estrangement and things. like that because setting boundaries and whatnot is not within our culture and when we try to set boundaries or when we try to speak up for ourselves, we are called, you know, white or we say that's a white thing or a gringle thing.

And I was just wondering if he could give advice on how we can set boundaries within our own culture when it's viewed as something different, another culture. cultures, rules or another culture's thing. Thank you so much. I hope my question makes sense. Thank you so much for calling in. This is such a hard one because I think people use culture, whether that's being Hispanic or coming from a different background as a way to deny any boundary setting or any change in the family, right? Like, this is not something that we do. You said, like, this is a white people thing. And that is, to me, just like a form of defensiveness and denial. And it's true that cultures have different norms and different

reasons for enacting those norms. But I posted about this online, I think on my Instagram in the past, that I think that your culture should be something that empowers you, that gives you a connection to something bigger than yourself, that is something that you feel proud of and connected to. and all of us have elements of our cultural or ethnic background or where we're from that we're like, you know what, I don't really want to include that anymore because that's not something I agree with. It's not something I'm proud of. It's not something that's in line with my values. And I don't think that anything that harms or hurts people should be done in the name of culture. So an example of that, you know, I talked about this in another episode

with Leslie Priscilla in Hispanic cultures like La Chancela culture where you are, you know, spanking kids, throwing a shoe with them, whatever. In other communities, hitting kids is seen as a cultural element. And that's an example to me of something that I don't think is really part of our culture. Like I think cultures are supposed to be connective and uniting and helpful and make us feel better about ourselves as a part of like membership of that group. And so if there's something in your culture that is being weaponized to harm you, like, oh, we don't have boundaries. You have to respect all your elders no matter what they do to you, even if they abuse you. I don't think that's necessarily

something that's actually part of your culture that you need to ascribe to. And there are going to be transition phases between generations like you're speaking of that they are so used to things being like rule and law within a certain culture of like, no, this is what we do and I had to do it so you have to do it too. And if we stopped doing this, it means that we are giving up on our culture. And I really take issue with that. Like I think your culture comes down to so much more than that. It's the connection to the history of your people, to the foods that you eat, the music that you listen to, where you came from, the stories in your family that are positive and uniting and that help you connect as a family. And so,

I think if you identify with someone like this caller, it's worth thinking about like what elements of my culture are in line with my values, what fits in with the world that I live in today and the way that I want to live my life or raise my children or interact with people and what parts of my culture are maybe not really parts of my culture, but they're just things that are being weaponized to keep me down to make me more easily be victimized by certain things within my family or within my culture. You know, a lot of elements that were used to keep women down used to be cultural, right? And they're not necessarily things that we ascribe to or believe in anymore.

And this can be really, really challenging when you're dealing with potentially older generations that are trying to hold on to something that maybe worked for that, that no longer works for the next generation. And we have to get comfortable in being able to say, that's okay. if that's something that you want to live with, but that's not going to be how I relate to my culture. That's not going to be something that empowers me, lifts me up is something that I want to pass on to the next generation.

And again, it's so much easier said than done, but I do think that we have seen throughout history so many moments where these cultural elements that are harmful to many people have been undone and reconstructed and rebuilt to be something that's better and more empowering for everyone. So I hope that that's helpful for you. Thank you so much for calling in with those amazing questions this week. I love getting to speak with each of you and learn more about the difficult things that you're are going through and hopefully help you navigate some of those situations. If you have your

own situation that you're working through with an adult family member, please don't hesitate to call 866-225-5-466 and leave me a voicemail. I may choose your question for an upcoming Thursday Q&A episode of the Calling Home podcast. If you would like to join the calling home community and interact with other family cycle breakers in groups, work on worksheets, read articles, and take everything you're learning from this podcast to the next level. You can join me at callinghome.com inside the family cycle breakers club. 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 Home's terms of service linked in the show notes below.