CALLING HOME with Whitney Goodman, LMFT - Q&A: Siblings with Emotional Baggage; Generational Trauma

Episode Date: April 11, 2024

Whitney is back to answer more questions from the Calling Home listener community. The first caller discusses her struggle with an adult sibling who hasn't done the same emotional healing work she has, causing her to absorb their emotional baggage. How does she separate herself from feeling their pain? The second caller asks about the impact of generational trauma, specifically relating to her father who is a Holocaust survivor. 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

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Order now. Alcohol and select markets. Product availability may vary by Regency app for details. 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 866-225-5-4-66. All right, let's hear from our first caller. Hi Whitney. My question is about adult sibling relationships

and kind of navigating your siblings when they haven't done the work and the healing that you have done to kind of come to an acceptance with your imperfect parents and your imperfect childhood and the ways that you were let down and not given what you need. I feel like I've done a lot of great work over the last few years to just come to a healthy place with acceptance and as a parent do

things better and differently, but I still see in one of my siblings there's a lot of hurt and disappointment and still this desire for change in our parent. And I know at this point in life there isn't going to be that sort of change. They're a very emotionally distant parent who is very physically present in our life. So I would like to not have to carry that, you know, kind of baggage of my sibling because I'm so empathic. I feel like even though I've done the work because this sibling of mine has not,

and we've had many conversations about it, I'm kind of at a point where I want to stop absorbing their stuff and know that, as my therapist says, it's their side of the street to clean, and I want to allow them to need to do their own work in healing and be okay where I'm at and not kind of take on their stuff as I feel like I'm doing a lot. I'm curious what you think about that. Thank you.

This is such a relatable question. We talked about this so much in our adult sibling groups inside the calling home community with the Family Cycle Breakers Club a few months ago. And for any of you looking for resources for adult sibling relationships or related to this question, we still have all of those articles, worksheets, scripts, etc., all up on the site, and you can visit Callinghome.com to access those. But first thing I want to say is you are allowed to release that. And I want to give you permission to say, like, I am going to let my siblings pain and struggle go and allow them to manage this in the way that they see fit. Because the reality is, is that

every child that grows up in a home with parents is having a completely different experience for a variety of reasons. Their age, their birth order, their personality, their temperament, the age of the parent when they had them, their, you know, relationship with their siblings where they were living at that time, the parents' access to financial resources, that it's very likely that you and your sibling have had a different experience and have chosen to take a different approach. And I don't know this specific person's, like, role in the family or how they have decided, you know, to approach this. I can hear that you've been to therapy and you've done a lot of work and I think that's amazing. And it's hard when our siblings don't take that same path or they don't want to take that same path and we see them struggling to accept what is.

But I do hear this a lot from particularly oldest children, the golden child, the childs who tend to. to be more highly sensitive, that they are the ones that are like, I'm going to go and I'm going to fix this and I'm going to repair it. I'm going to read the books. I'm going to go to therapy and I'm going to get better. And then other siblings can react in a different way of like, I'm going to pull away. I'm going to get angry. I'm not going to forgive. And they're dealing with the same thing, right? You're dealing with the disappointment of who your parent isn't and will never become. But you're dealing with it in fundamentally different ways. And I think one presents as being way better and way more healed, but really at its core, it's just ways

of dealing with pain. And so I wonder if you can look at your sibling and say, I get why you're doing this, because I get what you experienced. And I understand your path to figuring this out, even if I don't agree with it. And I don't want it to be my path. And I hope that we can agree that we are just handling this in fundamentally different ways. And I'm here, you know, when you're ready to like come join me where I'm at or vice versa. I also hear in this question and in a lot of the conversations that I've had with people about this, this desire for the family to be good and whole again. You know, we want our siblings to forgive our parents if we have or to get on board with healing and accepting them because it would be nice if we could all be in that place. It would be

nice if we could all be at Christmas and feeling this level of acceptance, you know, or sitting around the Thanksgiving table and laughing and everybody be on the same page about like, hey, this is how mom is. She's not going to get better. She's not going to change. And we accept that. But it rarely ever works like that. And sometimes it works like that for a brief moment. And then people fall back into other things. And so I understand for anybody in this position, why you feel pain and frustration and a desire for your sibling to catch up to you and to do what you're doing and to get to the place that you're at. And that may never be possible. And it could ultimately really harm your relationship with that sibling to try to force them to recover.

in the same ways, at the same speed, you know, in the same manner that you have, ultimately because they had a different relationship with that parent and they've been hurt in different ways and they're experiencing them different ways in the present. And so if we can all just kind of sit back and be like, this family was kind of dysfunctional, you know, we experienced things that we didn't want to experience that didn't impact us in a great way. And we're all deciding to deal with that differently and this is a consequence of the dysfunction not being worked on previously, how can we all find a way to have peace and enjoyable relationships with one another and work with where we're at in this moment? I know that that is very, very challenging

and I hope that you'll look at our adult sibling relationship module at callinghome.com because we have a lot of other resources like how to start this conversation, how to have a separate relationship with the sibling, et cetera. With Amex Platinum, access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot trackside.

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more oncores when you switch to a Scotia Bank banking package. Learn more at scotiabank.com slash banking packages. Conditions apply. Scotia Bank, you're richer than you think. Hi, Whitney. My name is Rose. I'll try to keep this brief. My two older siblings and I have parents that are both emotionally immature and emotionally

very distant. We grew up comfortable as far as, you know, physical safety and things. of that nature, but to keep a long story short, just parents who themselves were not shown or taught in their youth how to be emotionally regulated or, I guess, emotionally available to sight-loving us very much. And for my father, I wanted to pick your brain on generational trauma. his father went through the Holocaust, and I don't want to get into those details because they're incredibly awful. So I know that on top of everything that my father has gone through, he has had to deal with a father who suffered something horrendous and how that affected him. And, of course, how his emotional distance and coping mechanisms he had through life affected, you know, my siblings and I.

I haven't really spoken about this with other Holocaust children or grandchildren outside of my siblings. But I guess my question would be, are there any differences you see with parents who have suffered a great trauma like that and how that gets passed down, generationally speaking? Your thoughts would be greatly appreciated. I really love all the work you put out, and I know it's helped me a lot, and I know my siblings have done similar work. so thank you so much. Thank you so much for calling in. So there's absolutely a connection between a parent living through an event like the Holocaust or even having parents who live through an event like that that will lead to symptoms of trauma, PTSD, things like that

that make it difficult to emotionally connect, make it challenging for the person to develop emotional maturity, and we can absolutely see a connection between emotionally immature parents, emotionally disconnected parents, and trauma that they experienced. There's a couple of good books out there. I'm thinking about, it didn't start with you by Mark Woolen, I believe is the name. And then I also did an episode with Fern Schumer Chapman. She is the author of the book, Brother, Sister, Strangers. She's also previously written about Holocaust survivors, and she is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, if I'm remembering correctly. And she discusses in her book, her relationship with her sibling and with her mother, particularly, and how that experience of living

through this event impacted their family. And so that might be two really interesting books for you to consult with and look at their work. It sounds like you're trying to understand why your parent is the way that they are. And I think that that's one of the first steps. in this journey of trying to work through, like, where is my relationship at with my parent? How do I want it to look like? And how am I going to contend with the relationship that we have and make it better or make it survivable for me? And a lot of people gain a lot of peace and clarity from working through that process. And I think some people may find enough reasons in that exploration to say, okay, this makes sense why my parent is this way. And I

understand it. And so that makes it feel less like it was my fault or like there was something that I could have done to fix it. Now, on the other hand, you can take this to an extreme of kind of using it to consistently defend, explain a way, or excuse behavior that's still happening in the present. And I think that certain children, particularly like golden children, children who really want to appease their parents, have to be careful not to use all these explanations to excuse away their own pain. And we have to learn how to like hold both things at the same time of like, I can be hurt by this behavior and I know why it happened and it wasn't necessarily my parents' fault. And both of those things are true and accurate for me at this

moment with my parent. With that being said, it is, you know, perfectly understandable why you would feel maybe guilty or unsure about exploring any hurt that you experienced with an emotionally unavailable parent within these circumstances, knowing that your parent lived through a war, the Holocaust, any of these really extreme things, they were immigrants, they struggled, they had their own abusive childhoods. It can make us feel like we are abandoning our parents or turning our backs on them or blaming them for something that's not their fault. when we try to examine their behavior. And this is where I like to tell adult children who are doing this work to really separate from this concept of blame and focus more on understanding so that you

can move forward and break patterns in your own family. You want to understand why your parent is behaving the way they are, what they've been through, and also how you've been affected by it and impacted by it so that you know how to fix it and you know what to do differently so that those trauma histories and patterns of dysfunction don't just keep repeating themselves simply because you've said, well, that wasn't anybody's fault and it was just this bad thing that happened and we're going to kind of like push it down. And I think that's unfortunately the position that a lot of parents from older generations were in because they were simply trying to survive. There wasn't this time to like sit back.

and untangle all of this trauma and dysfunction when you are going through some of these life-altering extremely stressful traumatic events. And so if you are the person that now has kind of been saddled with all the effects of that trauma and you are living today in 24 where you have all these resources in this space and the ability to think about and analyze this stuff, it's normal for feelings of like guilt or shame or this thing of like, I can't, I can't talk about this, I can't be upset about it because what my parent went through was so much worse, when really I think you're just trying to understand and explore that pattern so that the negative consequences of that event can end with you. I hope that that was helpful. And we have an

entire module at www.callingholm.com that is about noticing the dysfunction in your family and being the first person to start working on it. There's worksheets, articles, videos, scripts, a guide to find a therapist, all of that there. So I think for anybody who can relate to this, that would be particularly helpful. Thank you so much to everyone who called in today and left those voicemails. I really love getting to know your stories. understanding how we can better help you navigate those difficult family relationship issues. As a reminder, you can always call me at 866-225-5-4-66 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 relationship, you can also join the call. calling home community at www. www.callinghome.com. 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.