CALLING HOME with Whitney Goodman, LMFT - Q&A: The Pain of Parental Rejection. Why Can They Show Up for Others and Not Me?

Episode Date: March 13, 2025

I'm answering a caller's question today. This caller has a very distant relationship with her father, and she's trying to figure out what to do. He's super invested with his step-kids and those grandchildren, but he can't seem to show up for her and her children. I try to help this caller understand why she has resentment for her father's ambivalence, how to grieve that loss, and what to do about the relationship. 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. www.ca slash YMX. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the calling home podcast. I'm your host, Whitney Goodman.

Today is Thursday. So we've got a Q&A episode. These are the episodes where you call in, leave a voicemail, ask any questions related to your adult family relationship dynamics, and I come on the show and answer your questions. Today I'm going to be answering a single caller issue, but they left a two part voicemail. And so I had decided I'm just going to tackle that entire voicemail in this episode. But before we get to that, I just want to mention that we have been having the best month inside the Family Cycle Breakers Club, which is our paid community for our members. We've been

talking all about how mental health issues and mental illness can impact your adult family relationships. We're diving deeper into that topic in our groups every Wednesday at 12 p.m. Eastern time, 9 a.m. Pacific time with me. We also have launched so many new topic groups and we hired two new therapists at calling home, which is really amazing. So now you can come and join groups with me and our two other amazing clinicians, Sam and Stephanie. Sam is the therapist that was on the nuance needed podcast episode with me. We did a two-part episode where we tackled what people get wrong. on the internet about adult child and parent estrangement or just estrangement in general. You can go listen to part one on calling home and you can listen to part two on nuance needed.

But Sam has joined our team at calling home, which is so exciting. And you can join her for the adult daughters with difficult mothers groups on Mondays. And then we also have our therapist, Stephanie, that is running the family estrangement group. And the really cool thing about the family estrangement group is that anyone who is dealing with estrangement in their family can come to this group. So this is a group for people who want to hear a lot of different perspectives, who want to see what people have to say, you know, if they are an estranged sibling, if they've had to go no contact with a parent, if they are on the receiving end of an estrangement. And I really think it's one of the only places that I have found where you can

go and hear a wide variety of perspectives about how this issue is impacting families. And Stephanie's group is available on our website. Members of the Family Cycle Blackers Club can register for any of our groups. And as part of your membership, you get unlimited access to groups, Q&As with me, as well as all of the content that gets delivered to you every single Monday in your inbox. So you don't have to go on the website, searching for the content. You can just wait for it to arrive in your inbox. All right, well, let's go ahead and dive in to the caller question today. I'm going to go ahead and play part one of that voicemail now. Hi, Whitney.

My name is Kate. I've been a listener here for probably the last year or so. And I have some unique family relationships that I am in therapy for currently right now and have been for the last five years. My parents are both divorced and remarried and have been for, you know, probably 25, almost 30 years. My relationship with them is very complicated. I'm no contact with my biological mother and have been for about five years due to some unhealthy circumstances, which is a long story in itself, years of abandonment, abuse, neglect, spiritual abuse, you name it with her. But with my father, it's been something that has come up, it's been building up for many, many years.

And once I started healing parts of my relationship with my biological mother and kind of navigating that and coming out of it, I started realizing the unhealthy relationship that I have with my father as well. He's been remarried now for over 20 years. And we don't live in the same city, but like I said, We've, I've lived and been married for about 15 years in a different location than he is, and he's only been here twice to my home, maybe three times, without much contact whatsoever. My siblings, same thing, not a lot of contact.

He really is heavily involved in my stepmom's family, very much so, making an effort with them, their kids, their kids' kids, so being a very present grandchild. father as well while my kids don't have that frankly i don't have it with him as well going through and navigating my childhood with him is heavy because he what i realized later on is he did not protect me from my very abusive mother and a lot of that is coming back for me and realizing that our relationship was never healthy. There are parts of it that can be, but most of it is tied to the trauma of what happened with my mother. All right. So this caller is really talking about a phenomenon that I think is so common and so challenging. And this is something that we discuss a lot in our adult children of

emotionally immature parents group and our estranged adult child group at calling home in the family cycle breakers club. And that is the idea that you start to realize sometimes that your quote unquote safe parent actually did some damage. And maybe they did that damage by being aloof, unaware, not getting involved, outright not protecting you. But you can have a parent who looks very good in comparison to your abusive parent. And then you have this realization later in life that it's like, wait, you didn't stand up for me and you didn't protect me, right? And so when you start to have these realizations about your other parent, it is very painful and it is very destabilizing. And that is because you have likely lived your entire life. And that is,

life building up this image that I have this bad parent and I have this good parent. And that's because kids really engage in a lot of very black and white thinking. And it can help them to believe that at least I have one parent that's good, right? That's nice. That's going to be there for me that isn't like my other parent that is being very cruel towards me. But then as you get a little bit older and you maybe become more nuanced in your thinking or you start to notice that the relationship with that parent is not really holding up in adulthood, it can become really jarring and overwhelming to realize that, right? And so it sounds like, you know, this caller mentions, like, as I started healing things with my biological mother, I started to become really

aware of things with my father. And she talks about things like, we don't live. in the same city and he's only visited twice, you know, doesn't have a lot of contact with my siblings, not a lot of contact with grandkids, and just having this realization that, like, my parents seems very ambivalent about my life. They seem very uninterested, not that invested. And so while they may have not been abusive, they certainly don't seem to be engaged. And also sometimes after you get out of the home and you grow up and you're not exposed to the other parents' abuse as often, it can be a lot easier to like look at the situation with a more like level head because you are not like fighting for your life every day or caught in the same type of trauma cycle. And I think this realization that she brought up of like I was realizing that our relationship. was never healthy.

And now I'm starting to realize that he did not protect me from my mother is so challenging to kind of get that out of your head in adulthood. And you know that I am really focused on evaluating a lot of relationships between adult child and parent in the present. That is really important to me. I think that that is what gets in the way the most between adult children and their parents and makes the relationship impossible. And that's something that I'm hearing coming up with this caller as well that kind of reinforces my perspective and makes me think that maybe that is

what's going on here as well, is this idea that I'm realizing all this stuff from childhood and it's still being reinforced by what's happening in adulthood. I'm still noticing that you seem to be aloof and ambivalent and not invested and not trying to. in this relationship and that's kind of reminding me of the way that you showed up in childhood and now that I'm working through all of that trauma, it's hard for me to reconcile these two versions of you, the one that I'm relating to in adulthood and the one from childhood with all of my realizations. I'm going to go ahead and play the second part of her voicemail and then we'll dive deeper into this conversation. I'm a bit long-winded Whitney. I'm so

sorry. This is Kate again. I'll make it shorter this time. But I just, my relationship with my dad has been disrupted here in the last several months where I have decided that I wanted to stop fighting so hard when he wasn't giving any effort. My therapist and I have discussed my expectations for people might be too high. And when they fail, I just let it, you know. And that's been a difficult thing to swallow for myself. But at the same time, like, I couldn't be the one who was making all the effort all the time. He had a lot of requirements. Still does. If you call me, leave a voicemail. If you don't leave a voicemail, I won't call you back. There's a lot of stipulations on works for him and what doesn't. My brother just called me

the other day and said, you know, hey, you know, who had been in a relationship for over 23 years. He's like, did Dad ever meet any of your, you know, partners' parents? you know like have dinner or any never like he's never been a part of our lives that were separate from our own like the you know immediate family like when we were kids he has no desire to be a part of my partner's like life or understand him my in-laws had passed away they didn't come for services for you know to help us with any of navigating that he's extremely disconnected, emotionally, physically, all of it. There's just no desire. And I'm not sure what to do with it. Frankly, that's where I'm at with my relationship with my dad. But like I said,

there's a lot of shared trauma from my biological mother and we're navigating that. Well, I am. I don't think he is. But I'm not sure where to go with my relationship with him. Or my stepmom, frankly. She chose him, and I've lost communication with her as well, which is fine. I just, I don't know. It's a complex. All right. So this caller is bringing up something that a lot of you have shared with me, you know, whether that's in our groups or in your messages and comments, is that you are tired of being the one that is sustaining the relationship and fighting for the relationship. And I think this caller said, like, I want to stop fighting when he isn't giving any effort. And I think that that's a tough realization, you know, for adults and their parents

to be like, if I didn't call you, if I didn't reach out, we would probably not have a relationship, right? And there's this part in the voicemail that I really want to focus on. This caller says, you know, that she's having these conversations with her therapist. And obviously, her therapist has way more insight into this dynamic than I do. So I want to speak about this generally. But there's something in the first part of the voicemail that really stood out to me here is that the father seems to be able to make an effort with the stepwife's family. And she said something about like my kids don't have that, but those grandkids do. And so this is like really key here because there's a difference between having expectations that are too high

and seeing someone be able to achieve something in another realm of life, but not with you. So it's not that your expectations are too high. It's that you have this expectation and this person is being able to meet it elsewhere, but they're not meeting it with you. And so in that case, I would say this is not about the person being unable. It's more about them being unwilling, right? There is something maybe less threatening, easier, whatever it is about your father having a relationship with these other children and this other family. It's probably way less triggering. He's not reminded of things in the past. He's not reminded of things in the past. It may have felt like he is starting his life and his family over. There's there's all these

things at play that would help me understand why he might be doing that. But for you as the child to watch your parent be able to pull something off in another area of life, but not be able to do it with you is confusing. And I've talked about this in past episodes about emotionally immature parents. you know, Lindsay C. Gibson talks about this in her book that sometimes emotionally immature parents can be highly successful. They can have great relationships in the community and they suck at home. They're not good at relating to their children. They don't have a good relationship with their spouse, but they seemingly are able to do it in all these other areas of life. And that is so unerving and so destabilizing because you're like, wait, you can do it. You're just not doing it

with me. And I think the key piece here is that yes, they can do it in other places. But there's likely something happening there, like I just explained, that is making it easier for them to do that, is making it less vulnerable, less risky, less scary for them. And so they pull it off there. But that doesn't mean that you're not allowed to be upset about that or to say, hey, what's going on here? That you're able to do this over here and not with me. And I would not consider that to be expectations that are too high. It's okay to say that if you're able to treat your coworkers with respect, your employees with respect, your stepchildren as respect, then you should also be able to do it for me as your child. In fact, it should come easier to you

with me than strangers. And it's a red flag. I think when people can't do that for you, but they're willing to do it for others. And you're totally entitled to say, I'm not going to tolerate worse behavior as your child than you're willing to give other people. I mean, that makes sense to me, whatever that looks like for you. I'm also hearing, you know, from this caller, and this is something that's been coming up in our groups a lot lately is, like, all these stipulations for contact. You know, this caller talks about, like, you have to leave a voicemail. If you don't leave a voicemail, I'm not going to call you back. Like, I've been hearing a lot of this, you know, like my parent wants me to contact them a certain

amount of times every month, but they only want me to call them on Sundays from 10 to 2. And they want to FaceTime with their grandkids 10 times a month. And if I don't do all those 10 times, then they're yelling at me and they're getting upset. And it's like, are those reasonable expectations? You know, of course it's reasonable to have a level of frequency that you would like to talk to people. And, you know, but when we get into all of these prescriptions for this is exactly how you have to interact with me, you need to call me this many times. you need to leave me voicemails, you need to text me this any times a day. It starts to come across more as control rather than connection. And that does not feel good. If any of you listen to my

episode with Christina Kuzmick on Tuesday, she talks about this in the context of like helping her child that every time she reached out in an attempt to control, it didn't work. And it reminds me of that where you are looking at your child and almost really setting them up to fail. by saying this is the exact amount of contact I need to have with you. This is how you need to contact me. I've heard it go as far as like you need to always ask me how my day was. You need to ask me about X. You didn't call me right after this. So now I'm mad at you. And like this all comes from control, I think more than actually wanting to have a close relationship and connect. And it very much gives like phone works both ways energy like from parents that I think is so destructive to the

and is not helpful. And really, I think at the root of this caller's question is like he's not been a part of our lives and I'm not sure where to go with this relationship. And there was another episode that I recorded along these lines that I think had a little bit of a polarizing response. And that is that when someone isn't showing interest in you, no matter who that is, they're not reaching out, they're not trying to connect with you, the relationship just really isn't going anywhere. I think sometimes it's okay to just see what happens, to sit back and be like, you know what, I'm going to call you when I can call you. I am going to live my life. I'm going to, you know, just really try to live in accordance with how I want to live and not meet all

of your demands. And let's see where the relationship goes. Does it like fizzle out? do we not even talk to each other anymore? What does this relationship end up like if I'm not the one investing all of the energy? And I don't think that that is equally true for a parent. I would not prescribe that to a parent. But I think as the child, you know, if your parent is not investing any energy in you, they're not trying. And every time you try to invest energy in them, you are getting criticized and ridiculed and told that you're not doing it right, then maybe it's okay to say, like, this is the extent of our relationship and that I can't meet you further than you're willing to meet me. And the kind of like controversial take that I had on that in the other

episode was that sometimes that's just enough. And you don't have to tell them, like, I'm cutting you out of my life or I'm becoming estranged from you. Like, sometimes the, the power and the acceptance is just in like, this is how our relationship is right now. And I'm not going to kill myself trying to make it different when the other person isn't doing anything. Now, there are some of you that will hear that and say, that does not feel empowering to me. I feel like I need to stand up for myself and I need to tell this person, I don't like how this relationship is working, and I am no longer going to participate in it. And I think that there are thousands of factors that will dictate what kind of choice you make in that situation.

And I could never be prescriptive in that regard and tell you that, oh, you should just let it fizzle out or oh, you should definitely tell them that you're cutting them off. Because I think this depends on a lot of things. Your personality, how intrusive this person is being in your life, what feels empowering to you, the circumstances that led to your estrangement, all of this has to be integrated into how you handle these situations. And so sometimes it's not about deciding what am I going to do about the relationship, but more about how am I going to live my life. If I maybe decide that I am going to de-center this relationship from my worldview, I am going to try to stop thinking so much

about, am I calling my dad enough? Did I say the right thing? Did I leave a voicemail? Am I connecting with them enough? Am I prioritizing them? And instead, say, like, what would my life look like? If I just allowed this relationship to be what it is, how would I live differently in my day-to-day life? Where would my mental energy go? How much time would I spend on this? And maybe that can allow me to feel a little bit better without trying to change the other person or really even give them any ammo in my situation. And I think that sometimes what I'm thinking about is that for some of you that have these passive, aloof removed family members, calling them up and saying, I'm cutting you off actually ends up bringing 10 times more grief and chaos to your doorstock that you have to deal

with. And I've seen this play out where someone does that in an act of empowerment and then they start getting berated with emails and texts and calls and they're painted as the villain and it just like doesn't play out in the same way as if you personally decided like I'm going to live my life the way that I want to live it. I'm going to include them to the extent at which I would like to. I'm going to create peace in my life and I'm going to start acting as someone who is prioritizing like the piece of their life and their family over maybe like some of these demands that I'm being given by my parent. Thank you so much to this caller for calling in. I really appreciate your question. If any of you saw my Instagram polls about abandonment

in adult child and parent relationships last week, I received over 22,000 votes on those polls. and I also got hundreds of messages from you all, and this is something that we discussed in our estranged adult child's group. That episode is coming out on Tuesday, and that is Tuesday, the 18th of March. So if you're listening to this episode later, then it's already out. But if you're all caught up on episodes, this will be out next week. And I am so excited for you all to hear that episode, especially for any of you that can relate to this caller and the episode today. I think you will really enjoy that episode. So please make sure that you are subscribed to the podcast on Apple or Spotify so that you get an alert when that episode comes out.

Thank you so much for those of you that have been leaving reviews and rating the podcast on Apple and Spotify. I really appreciate it. I've also been responding to all of your comments lately on Spotify. So if you ever have any thoughts about an episode, any questions, things that you'd like me to cover, please don't hesitate to reach out to me. I think this podcast really works. best when we're able to do it together, and it wouldn't be possible without all of you who listen, give me feedback, and help me create these episodes for you. So thank you so much. I hope to see some of you inside the Family Cycle Breakers Club this month. You can always join at callinghome.com, and I will link that in the show notes for you. Thank you, everyone,

and have a great rest of your day. 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. 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.