CALLING HOME with Whitney Goodman, LMFT - Q&A: Grandparent Relationships

Episode Date: May 30, 2024

Today on the podcast we’re wrapping up May and our conversations about grandparent relationships by answering some listener questions on the topic. The first caller has concerns about her partner's parents, who may have been involved in or bystanders to childhood sexual abuse in their household. She’s worried how that will affect the relationship they have with any future children. The second caller, who has cut off contact with her parents, is wondering how to maintain a relationship with her supportive sister while avoiding her parents and keeping her children away from them at family events.  Have a question for Whitney? Call Home at 866-225-5466.  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. www.ca.com. 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 you. from our first caller. Hi, Whitney. I have a question about grandparent relationships. My partner, when he was a kid, there was both CSA and child-on-child, CSA, in his household growing up.

It's unclear if his parents were perpetrating harm or just bystanders. this has come to light now that everyone involves as an adult and people have been handling it pretty differently from one another I believe that if you're not the person who caused harm second chances are definitely possible if you can understand what went wrong and what you'll do in the future to make sure it doesn't happen again but that's not an assurance that I have from his parents

They don't seem interested in understanding how their household was a situation where CSA was likely to happen. And right now we don't have any kids. We want them in the future. And I just don't know if I could consider his parents safe adults for, like, our theoretical future children. I don't think a parent whose child experiences harm is necessarily a bad parent or doesn't deserve a second child. chance, but I don't know if they deserve that second chance without any reflection on what went wrong the first time. So interested to hear your thoughts on that. Thanks, have a good day. Bye. Thank you again for calling in with your question. For anyone that doesn't know,

CSA is childhood sexual abuse. That is something I will be talking about as I answer this question. So if that is at all difficult for you to hear about, then you can definitely skip this question. and go to the next one or stop listening to this episode. I know that that topic can be very challenging. So the first thing I want to say is I'm going to try to tackle this question from both sides. So I'm going to try to explain what might be going on with the parents here and also talk about what you can do and what might be going on with you and why you're having these concerns. So I think when there's no clarity on whether there was parental involvement, that's really difficult because you're kind of always wondering, like, what exactly happened,

who's responsible for this? You know, when it's happening between children, there's certainly some liability for the adults that are around. I think a lot of parents in this situation would like to bury their head in the sand and kind of take this approach of like that couldn't have happened in my home or if it was, I didn't know about it. I didn't have anything to do with it. It was the kids or it was this other outside influence, whatever it is. And sometimes the shame and guilt and embarrassment and denial, all these feelings can be so strong with this topic, especially because this topic is very challenging and very taboo in a lot of ways. Most people want to believe that that could never happen to them or their child or under their roof, even though we know

that CSA mainly does happen among family members, with family members or a known person to the child being the perpetrator. And I can totally understand why a parent would be shocked and some of their defense mechanisms would come out. And one of them being that they would want to run away from this and deny it and not kind of face the reality of what happened, especially if it happened a long time ago and they feel like, okay, it's okay for us to kind of move on and we don't want to face this. Now, as a child of those parents, as a victim of CSA, as a partner to someone who went through that, you're having a very different experience, of course, of wanting there to be some accountability, some understanding, explanations,

healing, anything to kind of help you put the pieces together about why this happened, making sure that it's not going to happen again to your potential future children, and also feeling like the parents are on your side and they understand how challenging something like this can be and what an absolute impact this can have on your life in adulthood, you know, really for your entire life. And so I understand why any adult child, whether their parent was the perpetrator, a bystander, whatever it is, would want their parent to empathize and understand and really accept some type of responsibility for being the person that was supposed to protect their child from these situations, even if the parent

wasn't there, didn't know about it, whatever it is. They were in that role, and they can do a lot of good when they are able to heal that and have those conversations with their adult child. Now, when you talk about children in the future and wanting to make sure that these people are safe, I think anyone going through this who's been in this situation, you are justified in feeling some hesitation about there being a history of CSA and people not just completely denounce that saying it was wrong, saying what they would do differently this time. I can see if someone isn't doing that, that would give you reason to pause and be like, I don't know if I trust these people around my children. On the Calling Home website at Callinghome.com, we have the

grandparents module, which is what we're wrapping up this month. And in there, there is a checklist about if you can trust a grandparent with your child. And so I think anybody can use that checklist. It really actually applies to like any relationship, not just parents. But if you're working through a situation like this or you're wondering, like, can I trust this person with my child based on what I know and what hasn't been fixed or remedied in the family, I would definitely check out that list because I think that it could be super helpful for you.

But thank you for calling in another very difficult. difficult family situation. And I hope that this episode helps anyone navigate that that is going through it. 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, but you can get a chicken parmesan delivered. A cabana? That's a no, but a banana, that's a yes. A nice tan, sorry, nope. But a box fan, happily yes. A day of sunshine, no. A box of fine wines? Yes. Uber Eats can definitely get you that. Get almost, almost. us anything delivered with Uber Eats.

Order now. Alcohol and Select Markets, product availability may vary by Regency App for details. Hey, Whitney, I really appreciate your podcast and all the information you put out. I found everything with your organization probably within the last six months when I started going no contact with my parents. My youngest daughter is about 19 months old

and her sister will be here in July. My question is mostly about my adult sibling, but this month of questions with grandparents and grandparent relationships has definitely made this question more relevant, and I want to throw it out to you. I am so lucky in that I have a sister that has been so supportive to me and my daughter and my husband and our boundaries. Even as I went no contact, my sister has supported us. She's shown up for my daughter.

she's been the best aunt she has contributed to birthday parties and we go away and trips and essentially my thoughts are my sister's turning 30 this summer she's two years younger than me I know she's going to be starting her family soon she's approaching that point

in her life I would like to show up and do the same thing for her show up for her kids be there for things like baby showers and their kids' birthdays and celebrations and so far we've made it work and that I have not had to run into my parents,

but I don't know that I can make these events work. I don't know that I want to put my kids around my parents at these events, and I'm just looking for some advice as a sibling of how I can be there for my sister in the way that she's been there for me and my daughter. So any feedback or advice that you could give would be great, just to try to make this transition in our lives may be a little bit easier and healthy for us. So thank you for all that you do, and I hope to hear back from you. Thank you for calling in.

I think, you know, when we covered adult sibling relationships at calling home a few months ago, and we have an entire, I think, five weeks worth of content and resources on these relationships on our website in the Family Cycle Breakers Club, this was one of the things that I found to be the most difficult for people was navigating relationships with siblings and parents. when the siblings were estranged or when a adult child was not speaking to the parents or not interacting with them, but had a relationship with their sibling. And this is so difficult because there are, of course, a lot of preconceived notions or expectations about how siblings should get along, how one sibling gets along with the parents versus the other that can make this really

complicated. And what I can hear from this caller specifically, and you guys might relate to this, is like a deep desire to preserve this relationship with the sibling to be there for them and to make this work. And so that's probably going to require some creativity and some understanding on both of your parts. And so I'll walk through kind of some situations that I see that could come up that could make that tricky. And the first one would be, you know, feeling like maybe your sister is choosing your parents over you if she includes them in certain events and that makes you not able to be present. There's also a situation where the sibling could feel like why are you just not able to

be there and to do this or to be there for my kids even though my parents are there. And this can kind of create some tension because I think when people have children, they really, really want everybody to get along and they want everything to go well because that is what is best for the kids. But unfortunately, kids are born into these already existing family structures that are often deeply entrenched and that cannot be changed overnight. And so for anybody in this position, I would recommend, you know, really sitting down with the other person and getting clear on expectations and what expectations you can actually meet. So if you are saying, I will not go to events where this person is there, where my parents

are there, where whoever is there, communicate that so that the other person knows that this isn't a reflection of how you feel about them and your relationship, but it's a boundary that you have to preserve for your own family and your own children. and you can also have a conversation about how maybe you respect that the other person is doing something different. They have a different relationship with your parents or insert whoever into this situation and that the two of you are going to do your best to not assume that the other person should be doing what you're doing. I think it's also important not to make that the center of your relationship, to have conversations about other things and to make your relationship

about other things, which then brings us to the topic of support, right? And how can I be there for this person? How can I show up? And I think there's so many ways that you can do that, right? We think about like showing up with our time, showing up financially, showing up with our love, showing up in emergencies, sending cards, calling, checking in, like all of these things that you can do as an individual person without interacting with other people in the family that you might be distant from can be super helpful. And when the two of you can get clear on like, this is what would feel supportive to me and this is what is within my limits, I think you can build a really strong relationship that makes room for the fact that like not all the dynamics

in the family are perfect, but that the two of you have a good understanding about what each person can offer and what each person needs, and that will help make the relationship even stronger. If you can relate to this question, I would definitely recommend checking out our grandparents' topic section and our adult siblings topic section, because we have a lot of other resources, scripts, videos, worksheets that can help you identify the type of adult sibling that you want to be, things like that. So you can work through those worksheets, and it should give you some great questions to start thinking about exactly what we just covered in this question. Thank you again for calling in, and I hope that that response helps you out.

Thank you so much to everyone that called in this week and asked questions. I love being able to help you with these family situations and hopefully help you find a way to better navigate them with your adult family relationships. You can always call and leave me a voicemail and I may pick your question for an upcoming Thursday episode of the Calling Home podcast. Just call 866-2-25-5-4-66 and leave me a voicemail. I do these episodes every Thursday and I love being able to get to help each and every one of you with your family relationships. If you're ready to work on your adult family relationships outside of this podcast and take what

you've learned to the next level. We do have the calling home community. You can join us for weekly groups and watch videos, take courses, get access to worksheets and more. And those groups are run by me so we can actually meet. And you just need to go to www.com callinghome.com and join the Family Cycle Breakers Club. Thanks and I will see you all on Tuesday for another episode. 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 Home's terms of service linked in the show notes below.