CALLING HOME with Whitney Goodman, LMFT - Q&A: "I'm Just A Rest Stop."

Episode Date: April 24, 2025

Hi! We have two caller questions this week + my three little epiphanies: Some families are “role” families and some families are “relationship families.” Sometimes the most adult thing you can do is stand up for yourself. There is a special pain in families where people know exactly how to act around others, but give you the worst version of themselves.  Caller 1 feels like a rest stop to her father and never his actual destination. Caller 2 is asking about personality changes for elderly adults. Take the Estranged Adult Child survey before June 30, 2025: https://cmnyyv4kpyt.typeform.com/to/qQRbFnc3 Join The Family Cyclebreakers Club: www.callinghome.co/join Have a question for Whitney? Call in and leave a voicemail for the show at 866-225-5466. Follow Whitney on Instagram: www.instagram.com/sitwithwhit Subscribe to Whitney's YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@whitneygoodmanlmft 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. c a slash ymx hey everyone welcome back to the calling home podcast i'm your host whitney goodman i am so excited

to be back with you today for another q and a episode i'm going to get into my three little epiphanies and answer two caller questions later in the episode but first i wanted to just give you a couple of updates about what has been going on at calling home on tuesday this week we had an episode with emin dolin the author of the new book the power of parting I really think any of you that are navigating estrangement considering it or who are childhood trauma survivors should really check out this book. I think it's one of the best books that has been written about family estrangement thus far. And the interview with him is excellent. His book is part, you know, research and part memoir. And he also tells the story of some other survivors and people who are estranged from their family members. So definitely go and check out that episode if you missed it on. Tuesday. We are coming to the end of our focus this month. For the month of April, we've been talking about parenting after childhood trauma. Next Monday, April 28th, will be the last content drop for this month. So on Monday, members of the Family Cycle Breakers Club will get their last

worksheet, script, video, and article about parenting after childhood trauma. If you are a member, that content will live on the site forever and you can always get access to it and go back and look at it when you need it. We also have that new search feature on the website so you can just search parenting and everything about parenting will come up for you. It's really amazing. But we're going to be starting a new topic on May 5th and that is going to be grief and complicated family relationships. We're going to be talking about ambiguous loss, grieving someone you don't like, estrangement and grief and more. This is a really, really great topic for anyone that is grieving the loss of a family relationship, whether that person

is sick, alive, but you don't have a relationship or you are actually grieving the loss of their life. We are really going to be diving into how grief can be super complicated and different for people who have difficult relationships with that family member. And then I want to give you a little bit of an overview of what we're going to be talking about over the next six months. You know that our memberships at the Family Cycle Breakers Club are either six months or a year because we really think that that's what it takes to devote yourself to this content and actually work through it. I don't like convincing people or making people think that you can just kind of look at this stuff for a day and it will change your life. We really think that six months is what you need

to actually like get into the content and utilize it in a way that makes sense for you. So in June, we're going to be doing a deep dive on childhood trauma. July, we've got family secrets, why we keep them and how they make a sick. August will be culture and families. And just a hint, I'm going to be talking about how pain shouldn't be excused in a family in the name of quote unquote culture. September, we'll be talking about parentification, which is when you're forced to grow up too fast or when kids don't get to be adults.

We have a free parentification workbook on the website. So if you've gotten that before, you're going to love this month. October will be talking about money and family. And I have a great podcast interview coming your way about how. how to have conversations about money and savings with our family members. Members of the Family Cycle Breakers Club at Calling Home get access to all of this content, our entire course, and topic library, and unlimited groups every month with licensed therapists.

We have groups for estranged adult children, adult children, emotionally immature parents. There is a focused topic group for each topic every month. So in May, we will have a specific group every Wednesday for grief and complicated. family relationships. And we also have daughters of difficult mothers. And we've got our open house group where you can come and talk about anything related to your family dysfunction. You can get all of this for less than the price of one therapy session, one payment. We don't charge you every month. And it really is the best way to take what you have learned in this podcast and actually implement it in your life and take it into that action stage. Thank you so much for

listening to all that. I hope to see some of you in groups. It is my favorite thing when people come to the groups and say, I'm here because of X podcast episode, because that's exactly what we want you to do. Podcast episodes are really just an intro to these topics, and calling home Family Cycle Breakers Club is where you can actually get into the content and implement it in your life. Now let's talk about my three little epiphanies this week. The first one is some families are role families and some families are relationship families. And this is what I mean by that. In some families, your position in the family is what matters and what creates the relationship and everything goes back to that role. So a parent is a parent simply because of their hierarchy in

the family and them having that role. This means that because of that role, there are certain expectations and standards. And in certain families, the role is the most important thing. In relationship families, the relationship is more important than the role. And typically in these relationship families, we're going to see that people try to foster relationships between one another, especially between parent and child, that are formed around the basis of respect, understanding, empathy, compassion, not simply because we are in certain positions you are the child and I am the parent, but because we love one another. We're trying to form a solid relationship and our relationship is what is going to keep us close, not just our roles.

Second thing is sometimes the most adult thing you can do is stand up for yourself. And I think that I see a lot of rhetoric, especially on the internet, about, you know, adults who separate from their family being babies or immature or not being able to have hard conversations. And I think that for some of you, sometimes the most adult thing you can do is separate because you are only going to be continued to be treated poorly or like a child who does not have any authority over their own life within your family system. And I recorded a TikTok video about this this week for adults who are still treated like children within their family system. So you might want to go watch that if that is something that you would like to hear more about. And my third one is that there is

a special pain in families where people know exactly how to act around others in public, but then give you the worst version of themselves. And for those of you that grew up in a home where the people in that home were able to be kind and respectful and good communicators with others, but they became a completely different person at home. You are typically the type of person that really struggles with believing this rhetoric of they tried their best because you have seen them do better in other contexts. Let's go ahead and get to those callers. I'm going to play caller number one's voicemail now.

Hi, Whitney. My question is about generational priorities and how we show love in my family. My dad left his hometown when he was a teenager and he went away to college. He's the only member of his family who made that choice. And he's now retired, but I can tell that he carries guilt from that decision. His brothers and parents live within a quarter mile of each child. other, and my dad goes out of his way to travel to spend time with them. It's about a 10-hour drive between where he lives and where he grew up. The issue that I have is with my dad and how he

treats me and my life now that I'm an adult. I live about halfway between my hometown where my father still lives and where his family lives. He drives often to see his brothers and his parents, and he'll check in with me to see if he can stop by to visit after he's already made plans. His parents and his brothers are all retired, and that means my dad, when he's making plans with all of these retirees, doesn't ask me and my husband, who are both working, about what's convenient for us. It's clear to me that my dad's priority is his parents and his family of origin, and not myself, my sister, and my mom. So through his actions, my dad is showing that he cares more about his parents than he does the family he himself created. This doesn't

feel good. My dad's brothers spend time with their kids and their grandkids, who are all within a couple miles of each other. They seem to balance spending time with both their own families and their family of origin, which I'm sure is easier because they have the geographic proximity, but my dad seems to think I should travel to see him, much like he does to see his own parents. I'm never the destination. Instead, I'm a rest stop where he parks for a couple hours. He's served a meal and uses the bathroom. It's really hurtful, and I'm not sure how to change this dynamic. So any advice you have would be really helpful. Thank you. Okay, first of all, I want to say that you have an amazing voice for reading things on podcasts or audiobooks. Thank you so much for calling in,

and I really appreciate your question because I think there's a lot that we can unravel here. The way that you talk about your father, I think, demonstrates that you have. a lot of insight into why he does what he does, right? So you mentioned generational priorities and that he has some guilt about moving away from family and he's traveling quite a distance to see them. And maybe his guilt is what's motivating him to make that journey and to go through that. Your father is also at a stage of life where people tend to to become much more reflective and their priorities shift and they might start seeing family in a different way and they're trying to make up for lost time. They're looking back on their

previous decisions in life and seeing them in a different way than maybe they did at the time. And that doesn't mean that your father should feel guilt for what he did. He may have made the right choice by moving where he moved. And there's no way for any of us to know how things would have been, you know, if we did something different, right, how our lives would have been different. But I think we often find ourselves at different points in our life, looking at the decisions we made and saying, oh, this doesn't fit me anymore. I need to do something else. And that might be what's happening for your father here. Generationally and in terms of hierarchy in the family, there's seems to be a very clear structure here that your father is following, which means that the child

is responsible for upholding the relationship with the parent. And he's doing that in his own family. He's modeling that. He's saying, my parents are here. And so I need to go to them. I need to organize things with them. And he seems very much in that role based on what you're telling me. And I wonder if in this stage of life, he's almost lost touch with what it was like to be the one that needed to move away and prioritize his own family or his career and not be able to live near family and what that could have felt like. And I think that that's something that I see a lot between generations that we all have to work on as we age. is this looking down at the generation below you and really completely forgetting what it was like to be in that stage of life, forgetting what it was like to be a teenager, working, having young children, living far from family, whatever it is.

And often the generation below is looking up at that next generation and saying, don't you remember this? Don't you remember what this was like for you? And I think that you're doing that with your own father in some ways, right? And the line that stuck out at me that I think was just so well said and I can feel your pain in this is that I am a rest stop. So I am not a destination. I'm not worth making plans for. I'm something that is just there when needed, when convenient on the way to the place that you actually want to go and that's not a good feeling and i wonder if this feeling you know for this caller or anyone else listening to this that can relate to this like this probably isn't a new feeling and maybe you want to think about or ask yourself when are there other times throughout my life that i felt like a rest stop to my parent or when are there times where i felt like

I was just getting in the way of where they actually needed to be. Or I was there for them to spend time with me only when it was convenient. And when you grow up feeling like an option, not the priority, that feeling can sometimes get carried into adulthood and get re-triggered. And that's not to say that, you know, a child can be at the center all the time. But I think what you're asking for here in adulthood is maybe some consideration of like you know what stage of life I'm in you know that you're going to be passing through here could you show me that you're thinking about seeing me that you're considering me that's the ultimate love language right is to know that the people around you consider you and are thinking about what might be good or accessible for you or even that

they're asking questions. And at the core of this voicemail and of this question, I think is more of you asking, like, doesn't make sense that I feel this way. It absolutely does. Am I allowed to be upset about this? Sure, you absolutely are. And what can be done about it? So you're likely not going to totally shift and change the way that your father sees relationships, the way that he sort of creates a narrative around who is obligated to who in what ways. But if you felt comfortable and you felt like it could be a good conversation, you could share this with him. You could certainly ask, and I don't know if this caller has done this yet, but you could ask, hey, dad, when you're going to drive to see your parents, I'd love to see you. Would you mind

checking in with us or could we make plans in advance so that I can see you more so that we can make sure that we're available? And I think coming at it from the perspective of, I want to see you, I want to have a relationship with you, and I want you to consider me can be very helpful to come at it from that lens of connection and positive intent. And then you can get information back from your father based on how he responds. If he's open to it and understands and tries and says, oh, yeah, I can try to do that. Great. If he's anywhere within the realm of that, then that's something that you all can work on.

If he responds by saying, oh, I'm not going to do that or why are you being so difficult or I'll just call you whenever I can, and if you're available, great, then you have more information about where his priorities lie and what he's able to give you at this time. And there's another set of grieving that maybe has to happen in that type of situation, right? But at least then you have some information because I wonder if I try to assume positive intent, which I always like to do first before people give me information otherwise. Is there a chance that the father in this situation doesn't want to bother you? Thinks that this is the easiest way, thinks that this is what he's supposed to be doing.

That's a possibility. There's also a possibility that this is a deeply entrenched pattern of always feeling like you're a rest stop and not the final destination or the desired stop in the family. And that this is just more of the same. And only you can know that for yourself. But I think those are just some different options of how you can think about this, things that you can try to try to reach some common ground and understanding and different ways for you to conceptualize the situation. Thank you again for calling in, and I hope that this caller's question and my response to it helps you see these types of situations in a different way. Let's go ahead and get to that second caller. Hi, Whitney. I have a question about relationships with adults as they

get into their senior years and specifically around personality changes. And I was wondering if maybe you could explain what happens to adults when their personalities change as they get older. So I have a person in my family who has been really, really nice and easy to deal with for their whole lives, but then when they got into their 80s, they started being mean and really blunt and sharp and honestly, just not easy to be around. and so I was wondering why that happens and also if you can help me understand is it intentional when they're being mean or is it something that's more of a brain change with it that they can't control. Thank you very much for your help on this.

Thank you so much for calling in and asking that question. I think that this is something that a lot of people are going to be interested in learning about. So if you have a family member who is becoming increasingly more irritable, like direct and critical and cruel as the age. There are certainly some things that can explain that. I find that for people who already had that tendency, sometimes this can accelerate as people age, but you may also see this happen in people who were not previously like that. Aging does. affect some of the brain regions that are responsible for emotion regulation and people who are aging and elderly can sometimes struggle with emotional control. This doesn't happen to

everyone, but there can be impairments, especially around negative emotion, where they struggle to maintain those emotions effectively. And this might then result in more emotional reactivity when they are bothered or upset, irritability, a shorter fuse. If we're talking about dementia, there are some behavioral and psychological symptoms that come along with that, and irritability is one of them. And in that case, you know, these symptoms are not directly in a person's conscious control. They are symptoms of the illness. as people age, you know, they also can struggle with emotion regulation when they are stressed, fatigued, they have health issues.

You can see more irritability when those needs are not being met. And so an older adult that is in chronic pain is dealing with an illness, is not sleeping well, does not have their needs met, is trying to take care of themselves beyond their ability. would also struggle with that. There's also certain personality traits like high traits of neuroticism that can influence the type of emotions that adults are having as they age. And studies have found that higher neuroticism is associated with lower emotional well-being. And so this can lead to increased negative emotional experiences for those people. and again, results in some more irritability.

There's also some social factors here that we can consider, you know, when elderly people are more isolated, they've maybe lost their partner or their friends are passing away, their health is declining, these can contribute to mood disturbances as well. So if they are having a lot more negative emotions in the midst of some of these types of social and environmental factors, you can also look at that as a cause. I think in general, increased irritability and critical behavior in older adults is generally seen as being like unintentional to some degree. You know, we're talking about neurological changes, social changes, environmental changes. They have difficulty with their health, their physical health,

their mental health, cognitive decline, a lot of that can increase irritability. Now, that being said, I think that it is still okay and understandable, especially if this is a longstanding pattern that has intensified for the other people in this person's life to hold two truths at once, that I know that you're not trying to be this way. I can see all the factors that are contributing to it, and I may need to set boundaries and limits around how I interact with you because of how your mood is in fact, because of how your mood is impacting your behavior and consequently impacting how you treat me. And so it is okay for people who are going through a difficult time, who are struggling to struggle and to have a hard time.

but you also are allowed to protect yourself from some of that behavior. And so you can hold those two realities at the same time that they're not meaning to be this way. Life has become very difficult for them. They're going through a lot. And I have to find a way to be able to have a relationship with them if this is how these years of their life are going to go. And we ultimately cannot excuse all behavior. even if it is not on purpose. Right. We have to just find ways to interact better with that

behavior. Thank you so much to the two callers that called in this week and left those voicemails. You can always call me at 866-225-5-466 and leave me a voicemail. I pick two voicemails to respond to every single week and I love hearing from you all. Next Tuesday, I am going to have an episode out about the power of apologizing how to repair when you react from your own trauma. So definitely come back for that. And we have these Q&A episodes every Thursday. Please, if you love this podcast, you've enjoyed listening to it or you've learned something from it, please go on Apple or Spotify and leave us a review. That is how we continue to produce this podcast to you for free and we keep it growing. Thank you so much for listening.

I hope to see some of you in a group at Calling Home soon. and you can join the family cycle breakers club at callinghome.com. Thanks, and I'll see you guys next week. Bye. 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.callinghome.com and join the Family Cycle Breakers Club. Thanks, and I will see you all on Tuesday for another episode. 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.