CALLING HOME with Whitney Goodman, LMFT - Q&A: Estranged Father Seeking Reconciliation, Family Choosing Ex-Husband

Episode Date: April 4, 2024

Whitney Goodman is answering more calls from the Calling Home voicemail. Today’s first call involves a listener who is estranged from her mother but still in minimal contact with her father and his family, who is seeking reconciliation. The second listener is a divorcee who was very close with her family, but is now no-contact with them while her ex-husband is invited to family events. 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 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. Hey,mx. Hey, everyone, happy Thursday, and welcome back to the calling home podcast.

This is our Q&A episode where I answer real caller questions and tell them what I think about the issue that they are having with their family. As a reminder, if you have any questions for me, you can always leave me a voicemail at 866-2-25-4-66. All right, let's hear from our first caller. Hi, so I went no contact with my mother many years ago, and I have not been able to do like a clean break, no contact with my father, because there are some positive relationships I have with his siblings, my uncles, and his mother, my grandmother is, one of the most positive relationships I have and I am struggling pretty much with the fact that I wanted to make plans for my daughter to hang out with my grandmother and she invited my father who my siblings and I have a very difficult difficult relationship with and I have set many bound injuries and told him all I want his face. I don't want to try to have a relationship with him,

but he remains upset that he's different now, and he's ready to work on things. And I am just at a place where I don't think he deserves to be in my daughter's life. And I have to go see my grandmother. She took work off. um she has been time with my baby and now I have to go and I I stopped when I found out she invited him and it was kind of without me um and I vented to my siblings about it and they said

oh well you know we'll be there together and I just feel so upset that my daughter and him will meet because I was really kind of not wanting that to happen and I I'm trying to to process all of that. And I just wonder if other people go through that as well. My parents struggled with addiction and a lot of complex issues growing up. Um, and I was very parentified. And now I just, I don't need that relationship with them. They have disappointed me every single turn where I have tried to repair things with them.

Just struggling with that. Thank you so much for calling in and asking this question. And absolutely a lot of other people can relate to this. And so I want to speak to any of you that are listening to this caller's question and thinking about it been in a really similar situation or having to manage that type of dynamic. And so first I want to speak to the emotional part of this. And then we can talk about the logistical part of this and like what you can do to to manage it, right? So the first part is that it sounds like you feel like your grandmother

did not consider your feelings or how this would impact you and your daughter and that the other people in your family that you are close to or that you have good relationships with like your siblings are kind of just putting a positive spin on this and saying it'll be okay. We'll be there together and it'll be fine. And I can understand how that would feel dismissive to you or like maybe people don't understand the weight of what this feels like. And this is unfortunately a really negative and just like distressing and hard to deal with consequence of going no contact with certain members of the family when you love and care for other members. And that doesn't mean that you should have to maintain relationships with that person just

to keep seeing everybody else. But it does mean that this is something that you have to work through and navigate and it can be a huge challenge. And so what I'm hearing from you is like my grandmother was a good person in my life. She's someone I want to know my daughter and I want her to see her. And I wonder if I had to put myself in the mindset of your grandmother, if she's also kind of feeling like, oh, well, I want my son to be here, your father. And she's wanting things to kind of resemble the way that she thought they would be. And she's being idealistic about it. And she didn't ask you because she knew on some level what you would say. Right. And so your grandmother is definitely playing a big part in this, right? And I think that

maybe you might want to consider, can I talk to my grandmother about this? Can I give her some feedback. Can I try to set that boundary? Can I try to understand where she's coming from? And I don't know how she will react to that, but that's something to consider. I also want you to try as much as you can, anybody going through this, to validate what this feels like for you to have had this very legitimate and very real experience of growing up with your father and setting these boundaries and trying to break a cycle and try to make things different for your daughter and not having everybody else get on board with that or see that. I think that can be a huge struggle, especially when children are involved and you want things to go a certain way and you want to

protect your child. Now let's move into kind of the logistics of this. I heard you say like she took time off work. I don't know if you were talking about your grandmother or you, but obviously there were plans put in place to make this visit happen. And people, have done things that are, you know, stressful and had to move things and you still want your daughter to be able to have this time. So if that's the case, I think that it is okay to consider how you could make this visit work for you on your terms with your dad being there. And so there might be a couple of different things that you put in place. One could be how much time you're going to spend there, an exit plan, if and when things deteriorate, or

or something happens that you are not okay with, setting boundaries around what kind of activities can be going on with your child. Some people who have histories of addiction in their family might say, we are not going to drink around our child. We are not going to use substances. And so that is a boundary that you can try to set. And that might even be something that if your dad says, oh, no, I have to drink while I'm there.

I want to drink while I'm there, then, okay, we're not going to be able. to make it or then my daughter will not be there. And these boundaries are hard to set, but I wonder if you can recruit any allies in your situation, whether that is your siblings, your grandmother, anyone to help you kind of protect and mitigate some of the damage that could happen here. I think it's also important that you tell yourself, you know, no matter what people went through to make this visit possible, it sounds like your ultimate goal as a mother, which I respect and I appreciate is to protect your daughter and to not put your daughter in any situations where she could be harmed or experienced something that you feel like is detrimental

to her. And so you may want to really consider, like, is it worth prioritizing the effort that people went into making this visit happen? Or do I need to consider my daughter's needs? Is this situation at a level where I feel like I cannot go there and actually have a good visit without anything really negative happening. And for everybody listening, I think that exists on such a wide spectrum, right? There are people who could go and visit with a family member that they're no contact with her that they don't like where they get a little bit annoyed or frustrated and they get through it and they're only there for like an hour and everything is fine and their kid doesn't pick up on it and they can keep things really contained. But there are also situations

where you could be around family that you are no contact with or estranged from and it becomes an abusive situation or a pattern repeats itself from childhood that you really do not want to expose your daughter to. So I know it hurts to think about like, well, my siblings are going to be there. My grandmother's going to be there. And I want to be able to have this moment. And I completely completely understand why that would feel challenging. And then to also kind of hold this other piece of like, I have my priorities and I have what I need to protect. And so I need to consider like how I'm going to do that given how everybody is and how they act. I wish you all the luck in the world with this situation. I know it's very, very difficult. And you are not alone in

feeling like this is difficult. Thank you so much for calling, and I hope to hear from you again soon. Summer's here, and you can now get almost anything you need for your sunny days delivered with Uber Eats. What do we mean by almost? Well, you can't get a well-groom lawn delivered,

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My name is Kelly, and I'm calling from Oregon. My question is, I went through a really terrible divorce quite a few years ago. I'm actually remarried and very happy, but my divorce happened probably about eight years ago, and he's a really very dysfunctional, toxic like narcissist, and he's also a drug addict. And anyways, after my divorce, much to my surprise, my ex targeted my entire, immediate family as flying monkeys. I have a very large immediate family, raised Mormon, three brothers, a sister, parents, cousins. It's actually quite a large immediate family. And I have always my entire life been extremely close to my entire immediate family.

So after my divorce, basically my entire family sided with my ex-husband. And it took about a two-year process, but they just kind of slowly started hanging out with each other. They were giving him information. It was not helpful during my divorce. It became very, very complicated, and I did not feel safe, so I began to distance myself from them. And so at this point, I am completely cut off from my entire immediate family. I haven't spoken to anybody in probably, you know, about four years.

And so my ex-husband goes to my parents' Thanksgiving Christmas. My mom turned 80. He was at her birthday party. I was not invited. The thing that has been so complicated for me is there wasn't any big blown-out fight with any of them. It was literally just this slow progression of distance and disengagement. And anyways, there isn't one day that goes by that I do not see. think about my family. It's just so been like a knife in my chest. Any insight would be very

helpful. Thank you so much. Bye-bye. Wow. I'm so sorry that you had that experience. I think there's nothing quite like the pain of your family taking the side of someone who has hurt you or who you feel like you could not stay with, you know, for whatever reason. And not only, do they take their side, but they completely, you know, isolate you from the family. So now you've lost your family and your spouse. And I can't imagine how scary of a time that must have been, you know, to go through that and to still be experiencing it in a lot of ways. The way that you described your ex-husband makes me think that they're probably quite skilled in how they navigate these situations, what details they share, how they are able to recruit people into their

narrative. And I don't have enough information to know, you know, how your family members feel about divorce, remarriage, the conditions for the divorce. But I think a lot of these things can play a role, especially in families where there is a lot of religious elements. Some families, that are highly involved in certain religious communities may feel like divorce is looked down upon. It's not something that should happen or they are going to frame the divorce or the person who initiated it in a negative way. I don't know that that's what happened in your situation, but for anybody listening who has maybe come from a family where religion was a large force of connection or community, that can be something that happens. And often people who have the

skills to recruit people into their narrative and to spin things a certain way, we'll use that as a way to isolate the other person, right, and kind of make it appear as if they did not want the divorce. They were the one who was dedicated and trying and following all of these teachings that they had learned through their religious group throughout their lifetime. And this can happen not only with religion, but with certain cultural elements, depending on where you grew up, how you were raised. All of those norms and messages can be integrated and they can unfortunately be weaponized when someone decides to go against the grain and do something different. So that's just something I would think about is like how is a certain narrative like being spun that really

isn't accurate and that is just playing into potentially some of my family members' beliefs or very strong convictions about certain things. Now, that being said, that understanding doesn't make this hurt any less necessarily. It's still extremely painful to know that someone is being believed over you and your perspective is not being considered and your reasons for why you made this decision are not considered valid for this group of people. So the unfortunate situation here for anyone who is in a position where people are being convinced of a narrative that is not true for you is that we cannot control other people's perceptions of us and outside of the way that we behave and how we choose to conduct ourselves in these relationships. And so what people

choose to believe is often a reflection of their perspective, their position, and like I said, their deeply rooted beliefs about these certain things that happen during our lifetime, like marriage, divorce, et cetera. And so as painful as it is, I think if you're in this position, sometimes you have to come back to what are my values, how am I living in alignment with what is important and meaningful to me, how am I making sure that I am living a kind, respectful, conscientious life where I consider others and I, you know, interact with them in a way that is respectful and genuine. And if I know that I am doing that and I confidently can assess that about myself, then I cannot control or change how these other people see me, even if they are my

family. And I think that's what can be the most painful about all of this is that we assume that our family members who have been around us for our entire life will have enough insight into how we conduct ourselves and our personality, our values, our morals, to understand that what this person is saying is not true about us. We assume that. But sometimes that doesn't happen in family systems. And sometimes it's not a reflection of the person that is being isolated. It's a reflection of the family unit as a whole. And so I'm giving you, you know, anybody in this position a very like therapist non-answer. But I think it comes down to coming back to what can I control about this situation. How can I conduct myself? How can I live?

my life. And I may have to start grieving the reality that right now my family members are not able to accurately see who I am and what I stand for. And they have chosen to align themselves with a narrative and a person that is harmful to me and that I cannot tolerate. This is a very challenging, very relatable situation. And I hope that any of you listening found this response helpful. This is also something that I'd like to tackle inside calling home in a module in the future. So definitely leave a comment on my Instagram or write a review for the podcast on Apple and let me know if this is a topic that really resonated with you when you listen to this episode. And I will definitely create more content around it.

Thank you so much to everyone who called in today and left those voicemails. I really love getting to know your stories and understanding how we can better help you navigate those difficult family relationship issues. As a reminder, you can always call me at 866-225-5-466 and leave me a voicemail. I may pick one of your questions for an upcoming Thursday episode. We have these caller episodes every Thursday now on the Calling Home podcast. If you're looking to take this to the next level and really work on your adult family relationships, you can also join the calling home community at www.callinghome.com. 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.