CALLING HOME with Whitney Goodman, LMFT - The Missing, Missing Reasons

Episode Date: February 13, 2024

In this episode of The Calling Home podcast, host Whitney Goodman discusses the topic of "missing, missing reasons" in estranged parent-child relationships. She explains that these are the reasons for estrangement that parents claim they don't know, despite their children having communicated them. Whitney will talk about how this could be due to parents not wanting their children's words to reflect poorly on them, parents genuinely not remembering the reasons due to emotional amnesia, or parents recounting stories with minimal detail. Plus, advice on why adult children should try to safely share their reasons for estrangement when possible, and parents should listen and understand without being defensive.  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.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome back to another episode of the Calling Home podcast. I am your host, Whitney Goodman. I'm so excited to be here with you today for a solo episode about the missing, missing reasons. This is a topic that you all have been asking me to talk about for a while and I have been wanting to talk about and so I'm so excited that this finally came up as a solo episode for the month of February. Before I dive into the missing, missing reasons and what those are, I wanted to just tell you a little bit about what's been going on inside the calling home community. So if you're not familiar with calling home, we have a community online that is full of hundreds of people who are working on ending patterns of dysfunction in their family.

And we have groups, articles, scripts, worksheets, all kinds of stuff. If you're like, you know what, I'm not ready to dive in that deep. I'm not sure if I want to join groups or connect with other people. You can sign up for the Emotional Home Improvement Association at callinghome.com. And that just gives you access to weekly articles delivered straight to your inbox that are about the topic that we are talking about that month. And that's a really cool thing about calling home and something that I wanted to make sure that we did was that we are always focusing on one topic at a time.

That way you're not getting bombarded with a million. in different resources and having to navigate the website and figure out like what you want or where it is. So when you go to the website, everything is broken down by not only topic, but by month. And the content that we have covered in the past will live on the website forever. So if you're hearing this later, you can always go back and access everything that we talked about in the month of February. This month, we are talking about accepting your parents. And that means we do have weekly groups with other family cycle breakers who are working on ending patterns of dysfunction in their families and working on accepting their parents. If you would like to join those groups

and you're feeling brave like, okay, I'm ready to meet other people that are dealing with this and that are working through these issues, you can sign up for the Family Cycle Breakers Club at calling home.com. And that's a great way to dive deeper into what I discuss on these podcast episodes and actually do the work rather than just like listening to the episode and taking it in passively. I think it's definitely like the next step if you're feeling like, okay, I get this information. I've integrated it and now I want to do something about it. All right. So now let's dive in to the missing, missing reasons. I want to give some disclaimers before I start this episode. The things I'm going to cover in this episode, they do not apply to all parents who are

estranged. And I want to make this clear. Not all estranged parents are abusers. There are many reasons why adult children cut off their parents that have nothing to do with maybe that specific parents' actions. There are many societal, environmental, and genetic factors that can lead an adult child to struggle with things like drugs, mental illness, personality disorders, or possibly abusive husbands or wives. Now, that being said, I will always say that if a parent is not at fault or responsible for the estrangement, I think they always bear a lot of responsibility in how they handle that estrangement, how they pursue the relationship moving forward, and how they decide to repair things with their child. We know that adult children are capable of being

abusive to parents, and parents are capable of being abusive to children. And we also know that the power differential will never be equal between parents and their children, even when their children are adults. The parent will always have spent a significant amount of time throughout that child's life being in control of them or having significant power over them. And it's hard for things to really become equal or for the script to flip just when the child becomes an adult at 18. So when I hear that a parent is estranged, I don't immediately assume that it's their fault. And I can learn a lot from the way that they behave and the things they say in the wake of that estrangement. And the way a parent speaks about their adult child in the

estrangement can provide a lot of insight into the dynamic. And I think the way that a parent speaks about other estranged adult children and other adults who are having issues with their family can provide a lot of insight into this dynamic. There is a website, and I might be saying this incorrectly, but the website is called ascendai.com. It's I-S-S-S-E-N-D-A-I.com, if you'd like to go back and see the original article called The Missing Missing Reason. And on this website, there is a very popular article, like I mentioned, The Missing, Missing Reasons. And I have been sent this article many times. I think it came out in like 2015. So I wanted to take a moment to break it down in a podcast episode. And there are some very consistent responses that a select group of estranged parents

seem to give following an estrangement. And this article really attempts to understand why so many of those missing reasons are missing. And again, the author of this article makes this very clear. when they say. This list is not about all estranged parents. It is about estranged parents who frequent forums or social media and say their children never gave them any reason for the estrangement, only to reveal that their children did tell them why, but the reasons their children give, the infamous missing reasons are missing. So I asked the question, why do so many of these adult children report telling their parents the reasons for their estrangement, while so many of the most vocal parents in these online communities report having no idea why the estrangement

happened. Let's dive into some of the theories from this article, The Missing, Missing Reasons. Number one, she says, their children's words can't reflect badly on them, is an obvious reason, right? So members who've erred their children's grievances outside of the community of an estranged parents' forums are often stung by people who take their child's side and they've learned not to give their opponents ammunition, right? And I see this a lot, especially on TikTok. I see the comments on my TikTok videos are like an alternate universe when you compare them to the engagement and the responses that I get on Instagram or what I'm hearing in my calling home groups. And so I think here, the author is commenting on the fact that many of these estranged parents

were met with questions when expressing themselves outside of a group of like-minded estranged parents. And I too, like I said, have really witnessed this play out. So a parent may share a piece of their story. And when asked a question or for more details, they immediately become highly defensive. They may even choose to no longer speak to anyone who does not validate their perspective. And I do believe that this can become quite dangerous. And this is why we are trying so hard at calling home to make it a place where adult children and parents can respectfully listen to one another. Here is the second reason she gives.

Many members truly can't remember what their children said. Anything tinged with negative emotion, anything that makes them feel bad about themselves, shocks them so deeply that they block it out. They really can't remember anything but screaming. This emotional amnesia shapes their entire lives, pushing them to associate only with people who won't criticize them, training their families to shelter them from blows so thoroughly that the softest protest feels like a fist to the face. So this is an interesting phenomenon to look out for, right?

And I'm always interested to learn more when someone only speaks about how something was said and not what was said. we can also look at how memory impacts the way certain events, you know, are discussed. And we can look at how memory really impacts people. So do parents really not remember when they say that didn't happen or I never said that, do they really believe what they're saying? And based on what we know about memory and forgetting, here are a couple of theories that I have. So, of course, memories are highly subjective, right? Our mood, our level of

arousal, expectations, prior experiences, developmental stage, knowledge, and resources will impact how we store specific memories. So a five-year-olds and a 40-year-olds are going to remember the same situation in very, very different ways. Reading, playing, learning. Stellist lenses do more than just correct your child's vision. They slow down the progression of myopia. So your child can continue to discover all the world has to offer through their own eyes. Light the path to a brighter future with stellar lenses for myopia control.

Learn more at SLOR.com. And ask your family eye care professional for SLOR Stellas lenses at your child's next visit. Some memories also simply just decay over time. So memory traces may fade if they are unused. And it's been suggested, you know, in research on memory, that certain metabolic processes in the brain may erode memories over time. And some memories are there, but we cannot access them. So if an incident didn't seem particularly important or meaningful at the time, we may not convert it to long-term memory. and it can be more difficult to retrieve that in the future. There's also this idea that interference can happen at the time of an event, right?

So it can make you not remember everything that happened. When we are distracted by other details or events that are happening at the time of an event, this stops us from committing all of the details to memory. And this is a particularly important point when we're talking about the memories of children and the memories of adults, that they're going to be different levels of interference, especially for the adults who maybe is juggling more things in that moment, that would disrupt them from fully integrating a memory maybe in the same way that their child might, and it's also possible that their child's memory is fragmented and that they are focusing on certain

things because that is what was most salient for them in that moment. There's also psychologically motivated for getting, which I think is what we hear a lot from adult children about their parents. They tend to think that this is what is going on. And sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't, but this is a phenomenon where we do this to shield ourselves from discomfort, right? So sometimes we don't remember because we truly do not want to. And this is a protective mechanism to prevent us from feeling things like shame, guilt, or other difficult feelings that accompany the memory that we would really brought. forget. And I think this one can be so jarring, you know, when you're interacting with someone and

you're like, wow, they really do not remember this at all in the way that I do. And sometimes you can even be envious of their ability, like, to compartmentalize or forget something like that. Trauma can also impact our memory, right? So it can prevent information from different parts of the brain, from combining to make a cohesive memory. You will find that people with trauma histories, they often have fragmented memories or memories that do not form like a clear storyline. And this can happen to adults.

It can happen to children. There are certain things that can happen to our brain that cause us to store things out of order or in a different way. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that we should deny the memory or accuse the person of being wrong. It's simply that sometimes there are things that are being stored in a way that is not accessible. And often with therapy, especially therapy like EMDR or other types of somatic-based therapies, you can learn to access these memories and to create more of a cohesive story over time. There is also the reality that there are people who will deny things and will deny facts even when they are.

are right in front of them. So I would bet that a lot of you listening have been in a situation where you have sent a screenshot of your conversation with someone where they said something, or maybe you've recorded a conversation, only to be told that that's not what they said. And they will deny it to your face with the proof right there in front of you. And they will never accept a memory or proof of an incident no matter how much proof you have. And so this is just absolute unwillingness to accept reality. And you cannot negotiate or argue with people who do this, okay? You will just continue to hit roadblock after roadblock. And memories are often in the eye of the beholder. So there are facts, interpretations, feelings, and a personal

narrative involved in the recounting of memories. And your parent may not truly remember a situation that had a profound impact on you. They may not remember it the way you remember it, or they may not have the same interpretation. And there are many reasons for this type of denial or forgetting, and it's difficult to know what it's rooted in. But when it comes to memory, I think this is what truly matters.

Finding a way to discuss and share each of your unique perspectives respectfully. This may include a parent recognizing their role, in a situation and making amends. And it also requires us to see that abuse is abuse. And if it happened, it happened. There's no explaining a way or seeing both sides with certain family issues. And there are times when we can find a way to share and validate both of our memories and perspectives. And only you can decide what is appropriate for your specific situation. But what I do find when I share these insights about memory is that sometimes they can be weaponized. And the person who does not agree with your interpretation of the memory or says that it's outright false will use

some of these things to say like, oh, well, people don't remember things the same way. Trauma can make you forget things or make you remember things incorrectly. But they only seem to use that when it applies to other people, but for themselves, their memories are always 100% correct. And there is no denying it, and there are no explanations for why their memory might not be totally rooted in reality. And so I think that's where it's really important that we need to go back to like what we know happened, what is real, what is true. And also remember that multiple people can be involved in a situation and have very different experiences of that situation. So if you are an estranged parent who is unable to listen to what other adult children are saying, and you find that you need to debate and criticize every single thing that is being said, this might be a sign that you are struggling to hold space for other viewpoints.

All right. So let's get to her next reason for the missing, missing reasons. She goes on to say, posts in estranged parents' forums are vague. Members recount stories with the fewest possible details, the least possible context. They don't recreate entire scenes, repeat entire conversations, or give entire text exchanges. They paraphrase hours of conversation away. The only element they describe in detail is their own grief or rage, nor do the other members press them for more information.

Compare this with the forums of adult children of abusers, where the members not only cut and paste email exchanges into their posts, they take photos of handwritten letters and screenshot text messages. They recreate scenes in detail. And if the details don't add up, the other members question them about it. They get annoyed when a member's paraphrase changes the meaning of a sentence or when omitted details change the meaning of a meeting. They care about precision, context, and history. And she goes on to give an example. For example, one woman posted that she felt wounded and

betrayed because a few days beforehand, her daughter had agreed to let the mother and one of the mother's friends drop by her house to visit. She had gone to the doctor so the doctor could examine her incision for infection. She had gotten the incision two weeks earlier when she had a C-section while miscarrying a near-term baby the day before Christmas. The mother was broken because her daughter accused her of being selfish. The members all agree that the daughter was the selfish one, that she had no right to speak to her mother like that, and that she should be more supportive of her mother in her mother's grief for her lost grandchild.

So let's just all take a minute to think about that, right? Every time I read that story, I'm like, wow. I noticed this in a lot of the comments that I get to. It'll be like, my daughter stood up in a restaurant, she cussed me out, and she walked out, and she never spoke to me again. And I'm like thinking, okay, what was the conversation about? Were you talking before she cussed you out, or did she just walk into the restaurant, start cussing you out without saying anything? What led up to this moment? And I do notice, and again, this could be because the adult children, are typically the people who are coming to therapy.

And I imagine that adults who do not go to therapy who are not interested in introspection may not be doing this. So I'm speaking about a subset of adult children that are going to therapy and trying to look at themselves is that they're almost obsessed with documenting and proving details of why things happened the way they did to a point that you almost have to really like continuously tell them this wasn't your fault. You're giving a lot of excuses and a lot of grace and making a lot of

arguments for this person. Let's kind of actually look at the facts here. And most of these people are reading me text messages and showing me emails. And, you know, of course, they're showing me what they're showing me. And we can always consider like, okay, when someone comes to therapy, they're going to present things in a certain way. But I do notice, in my own experience, this difference in being vague and being very detailed. And I think that that's an interesting phenomenon to pay attention to within these communities or on social media. So just to recap, those are several of the reasons why the author of the missing, missing

reasons feels like these reasons are missing. Okay? It's that the parent does not want the child's words to reflect poorly on them. they want to be in community with people who are not going to ask for more details, who are not really concerned with what their adult child said. It's simply enough that their adult child is not speaking to them anymore, that that demonizes the adult child in this situation. And the other fact is that, you know, the parent truly cannot remember what was said for whatever reason.

And we broke down all of those potential. causes for memory loss or remembering things differently. And then she points to the vagueness that parents are often recounting stories with the least amount of detail possible. And this might mean that they don't remember the details. It might mean that they're purposefully excluding the details. You know, there's really no way to know exactly why these details are being left out of the stories. So let's talk about how to make sure the reasons for estrangement do not go missing. I believe that adult children should make attempts to safely share with their parents why they are pursuing no contact or estrangement when possible. This is not always

possible. And if the parent has been physically or emotionally abusive when the child has shared feelings or criticism in the past, I understand why they would not want to share. And you may want to consider sharing in a way that feels less threatening in person, like via phone, email, or a letter. And I think the thing that we often get very fixated on is the explanation of a reason right before changing or redefining the relationship with a family member or with a parent. So the person becomes very fixated on what happened right before this person decided to estrange from me or to separate instead of looking at the history of the lifetime. And so there is a possibility that your adult child could stop speaking to you one day and not

provide a reason that day or the day before. But have they brought things up to you and have they tried to share those potential reasons with you over the last five, six, seven, eight years? that is something to think about. Parents should also do their best to listen and understand why their child is upset. This does not include being defensive or trying to explain away all the reasons why they are upset.

Ideally, I would like for parents to be able to repeat back the reasons to their adult child in their own words and for there to be mutual understanding. I really think this has to happen before anything else can happen. So that means not saying, I'm sorry for everything I did. It means clearly being able to explain back to your child what you are hearing from them and what you are going to do, both of you, to make the relationship better in the future.

I also want every parent, an adult child, to remember this. that you can be a parent who tried their best and be a parent who caused harm. Good deeds as a parent do not cancel out hurtful actions. I don't know if any of you recently saw the story of a woman who had her child in Walmart when it was like 20 degrees outside and he was only wearing a diaper and the child was shivering and she was putting like cold food in the cart onto the child and this was caught on video. And this mother gave a rebuttal that I thought was really telling. You know, she recorded a video online about how she has taken her kids on trips to Disney and she has

dressed them in clothes and she put up pictures, you know, showing all the new things that the kids get. And I thought this was such a good way of highlighting this dichotomy of like, you can do all these wonderful things for your child, myself included. There are many things that I'm like, oh, I'm trying to do and I'm trying to break patterns and I'm trying to institute all this good stuff. But I know there's areas where I'm messing up. My childs could grow up. And as a teenager say I work too much or he is upset that I, you know, missed out on things, or that I wasn't, you know, physically affectionate enough. And if I try to dismiss those things by saying, but I took you on trips and I paid for your school and I decorated your room, you know,

all these things that, like, for me, were signs of love and care and affection for my child and are me doing a quote unquote good job. It doesn't cancel out how he feels. It doesn't cancel out what happened in that moment. And so I think this is the dance that all parents have to participate in. Is like my child at any age bringing up pain or heart. that I have caused them is not a reflection of my worth or who I am. It is them trying to connect with me. And it is not an opportunity for me to shut down and throw back all these reasons at them why they are wrong. It is an opportunity for me to listen, to get to know how they're feeling, and to potentially learn how I can be a better parent to that specific child based on their needs.

They're going to be children who look back on their childhood fondly and say, oh my gosh, my mom threw me these big birthday parties and we had the best time and I loved it and I loved planning that with her. And there could be children who say, oh my gosh, those birthday parties were so stressful. I was an anti-social kid. I didn't really want to be around a lot of people. My mom was always so stressed the day that she planned those parties. I wish she would have been more present with me those days. And that doesn't take away from the fact that you as a parent were doing something with love and care and affection and you wanted to do that. It's just that like maybe that wasn't the best fit for that kid. And it was a good fit for your other kid. And it's okay to get this feedback from your child and to be, be like, you know what? I didn't even think about that. I was so just thinking about what I wanted to do to show love and how I wanted to be as a mother and what I thought would feel good for you. And I'm so glad that you're telling me this because now I can show up for you in a way that works for both of us and that feels good for both of us. And I know we might think like,

oh, they're being ungrateful and they're not being respectful. Look at all I did for you. but the truth is like relationships are reciprocal. We can't just give to someone without considering their wants and their needs and how it's impacting them and just say, well, I gave to you and I gave to you and now I want my things. And I think that's what's happening in a lot of these situations is that a lot of parents felt like they did their best and maybe they did and maybe they were on autopilot, but all of us are going to mess up, all of us. And I get comments and emails constantly from people saying they can't wait till I'm 60 and my kids don't talk to me anymore or some variation of that. And I think I want to point out the difference

here in how I'm thinking about this and I think how people who are working on this stuff are thinking about it is that I know my kid's going to come to me with complaints. I feel so certain about that that I think he's going to tell me stuff. next year. You know, I feel very confident in that. And so I want to know that when that happens, I have the skills to handle it. And I want you to know that. I want you to be able to say, I am ready to take feedback from my child, to integrate it, and to learn how to have a better relationship with them through every stage of the life cycle. And that includes adulthood. That includes getting to know your child as an adult and moving forward with them as an adult.

It doesn't mean that you're a bad parent or a bad person when your child does this. It simply means that they're trying to come to you and say, I want a relationship with you, but I want to do it in a way that serves both of us. I want to do it in a way that feels healthy and good and solid because I can tell you guys from experience, the kids who just walk away and they don't share why they're walking away and they ignore you and they become completely ambivalent, those are the ones who are hurting in a different way and who have maybe given up. If your adult child has expressed their pain, their concerns, their things that they would like to be better with you, you are in a good spot. You're in a spot

where you are lucky, that they feel like they can share this with you. And they want to repair and they want to do something about it. And I don't want any of us to take that step for granted. Okay? So I hope that this was really helpful in breaking down why some of those reasons are missing, if they actually are missing. And what any of you who are adult children, parents, or both can do to try to navigate these situations better in the future. Thank you so much for being here today and for listening to this episode. As always, if this episode was helpful for you, if you could please subscribe on Apple or Spotify to the Calling Home podcast

and leave us a review, it really, really helps this podcast grow and reach more people. I thank you all so much for your support on this podcast. really enjoying creating it with you. As always, if you would like to take your work on your family relationships one step further, you can join the calling home community and meet other podcast listeners just like you out there at callinghome.co, that's callinghome.com. And you can also follow us on Instagram at the calling home podcast or at calling home.com. Thank you. so much and I look forward to seeing you all next week for another episode. Have a great day.