CALLING HOME with Whitney Goodman, LMFT - The Power of Parting With Eamon Dolan

Episode Date: April 22, 2025

This episode is for anyone who is navigating estrangement. I sat down with Eamon Dolan, the author of the new book, The Power of Parting. We discuss: The hidden epidemic of child abuse at the hands of their family members Why estrangement is so taboo and challenging Eamon's steps for navigating estrangement and how to approach it Why our family members need to treat us like friends If you are an adult who is estranged from one or both of your parents, please complete my Estranged Adult Survey before June 30, 2025. Join The Family Cyclebreakers Club at Calling Home: 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 yamex. Hey everyone and welcome back to the Calling On Podcast. I'm so excited today for my guest, Eamon, Dolan.

Eamon is the author of the new book, The Power of Parting, Finding Peace and Freedom Through Family Estrangement. Today we're discussing his book, and we are talking about his own family experience with childhood abuse and trauma, his estrangement from his mother, as well as his extensive research into childhood trauma, abuse at the hands of family and estrangement. For any of you that have had to navigate the process of family estrangement who are considering it or who loves someone that is in that situation as well, I think this episode will be immensely helpful to you. You can get the book, The Power of Parting, Finding Peace and Freedom

Through Family Estrangement. Wherever books are sold, I will link it in the show notes. And you can find more about Eamon at Eamon Dolan on Instagram. let's go ahead and dive into the interview. I think that you have done something that a lot of people are very scared to do, which is endorse estrangement as not only an option, but sometimes a good option and the right option. And I'm just wondering, like, how did you convince yourself to do? to do that publicly and to take that on. I think it's a really big task. Well, first I had to convince myself privately. That is to say, of grace, I had to go through the process of figuring

out that how I was treated in my childhood and indeed in my adulthood by my mother in particular wasn't normal. And then subsequently to figure out that that wasn't my fault. And that entire process took 40-something years. Once I figured that out, I gave my mother, I should say that I didn't have a book like this when I was figuring out about estrangement. That's part of the reason that I wanted to bring this book into the world so that others might have some of the help that I could have used back in the day. But it turns out that by happenstance, I stumbled on more or less the right way to approach a process like this. I took some time away from my problematic relative. I caught my breath. I set some rules that would, if she followed them, that would help her

to treat me more like my friends did or, you know, just good people in my life. I gave her a lot of time to follow those rules. I'm boiling stuff way down here. It takes a, you know, it takes about a third of a book to explain this fully. And then ultimately, after two years of this, I decided that she wasn't going to change, that she was still going to treat me worse than anybody else in my life, and I stepped away. It was several years after that that I started thinking about a book on this subject. I'm a book editor. That's my day job.

And one of the things we editors do is come up with ideas and look for great people to make books out of those ideas, wish lists. So this notion, I looked around for a book, first of all. In fact, I looked around for a book when I was in the process of what we've become estrangement, there was nothing. And then I looked around years later for books on estrangement, and I didn't find some, but they were mostly geared towards the people being estranged from. Yes. And they treated estrangement as a tragedy. And I I knew from personal experience on the other side that it was difficult, and I spend a lot of time in the book talking about how to deal with the difficulties, but it was also one of the most positive, transformative experiences of my life. And I wanted a book that would take that approach.

And I spent three years looking around, doing what we do, you know, going on the internet and scouring Google Scholar and asking every literary agent we know. and, you know, I couldn't find anybody until I drink state with one agent who I worked with a lot and, you know, knew my skill set and, you know, knew my backstory. He said, you should write it yourself. It's incredible. And I think that I think that person must have been such a force in your life to kind of validate that you can be the voice for people that are going through this. And there is such a difference, I think, when you're hearing from a person. who has had the real life experience versus a clinician like myself or some researchers that have written about estrangement that I think really come at it from more of a sociological perspective

versus lived experience or practical steps, you know, to walk through this. And I definitely, I want to get to some of those steps that you outline in the book later. But I want to go back to something that you say at the start of your book, which is that, that our species' greatest evil happens not in battle or behind bars, but in millions of homes every day. And this is something that I talk about a lot as well. And I want to know why you think we are so resistant to admitting that that is a reality, you know, as a culture. Well, I think it's neurological, it's psychological, and I think it's sociological. I think all of those disciplines and all of those forces in our bodies and in our society conspire to make

us think about family in a particular way. The neurological is probably the base. We come out of the shoot wanting and needing connection with our parents, with our caregivers of a particular sort that we'll do just about anything to get. And if we don't get that connection, it is natural and I think this is also true, certainly in a psychological level, but I think on a neurological one as well, we'll do anything we can to justify the way we're treated. I think related to that is the fact that every kid thinks that however they're raised is normal. And it does, you know, if you were treated with love and respect, you think that's normal. If you were, as I was, if you were beaten or you were sexually assaulted or you were neglected,

you think that's normal. And that was my pattern, and that was the pattern in just about every case of all the survivors I spoke with, and I spoke with over 30. I mean, this is deeply, deeply rooted in us. And then that's supported by what you might in very broad terms called sociological factors. Pretty much all of the institutions in our society support the notion of the biological family as being above every other relationship and subject to, frankly, fewer rules than most other relationships.

Absolutely. We are, blood is thicker than water. We honor thy father and mother. I quote Alice Miller, the great Swiss psychologist in my book who says, and I'm paraphrasing it here, but she says, every religion without exception supports the notion that family is more important than any other institution, other than the reason. other than the religion itself. They're in cahoots, basically. I was raised Catholic, and so I know the honor of thy father and mother stuff, and the blood is thicker than water stuff,

and the Blessed Virgin Mary, it was a stand-in for all mothers. There were never any exceptions to these rules. We were expected at any cost, at any cost, pardon me, to hear to this relationship, no matter what was done to us. You know, as I say in the book, it took me a long, long time to realize what, for me, is maybe the most important single sentence in the book, which is we should hold our family to the same standards that behold, our friends. Yes, I completely agree with you on that. And I think it's so bizarre how we have relegated the family to have this, you know, higher standing in our lives than anything else.

And I loved your history that you go into in the book about the relationship between religion and the nuclear family and all of that, that we've made the families such this big important thing, but then not held them to the same standards at all of any other person that we might in our life. And I think because of that as children, you are much more likely, of course, to internalize those beliefs and say, well, they're my family. And so I have to just like accept their behavior no matter what. One of the things that I found out while researching the book that I think never would have occurred to me otherwise is that guilt is a coping mechanism. It's a way for us to assert some sort of control in a situation that otherwise we have no

control over. We tell ourselves, if I could just behave better, if I could just lose the weight, if I could just ace that exam, this would all be okay. So this gives us the illusion that there's something we could do that would earn what we deserve from them. Yeah. In the book, you talk about how you would speak to your mother every day, even at a point when she was treating you poorly. And I run groups with adults who are estranged from their parents or who have difficult relationships with their parents every week. And this is a story that I hear a lot is like I was in constant contact with this person that I could tell was making me feel bad and was treating me poorly. And in your story, you talk about how that was like your duty as a sibling, right,

to kind of take that off of your sister. And, And I think so many people can relate to that. And I'd love to hear more about kind of what was going through your mind when you were, on some level, choosing to relate to your mother in this way and what you were hoping you were doing for your sister or for yourself through that consistent contact with your mother. Well, this revelation that you're alluding to came to me early in my therapy. I was very lucky that I found a therapist who was much more alert to. the truths about family than most therapists are, then the profession is. Maybe we'll get into that later in a conversation. But she, again, about a year into my therapy, she, I was telling her about these conversations with my mother. And these were half hour, 45 minutes long, just about

every day, in which she would basically blow off steam. She would complain about the neighbors or my shortcomings or what was wrong with my sister or the blacks were taking over. And I would just sort of sit and take it. One of the other survivors I talk to and whose story I tell in the book had a very similar experience. She was on the phone one time with her father and she got off the phone and her husband said, you were on the phone for 45 minutes with him and you said three words. The tirades, harangues, that kind of harassment is really common. And I thought it was just my duty. I thought it was my duty as a son. I thought it was my duty to my sister. My sister lived closer to my mother than I did at the time. And I thought, as I said to my therapist, when she asked,

like, what do you get out of those conversations with my mother? I said, I get nothing. Those aren't for me. They're to, you know, they're to split the duty with my sister. I wanted to take some of the heat off of Jerry. And I felt that my duty to her and my duty to this vague but deeply rooted notion of family required me to have those conversations. My therapist said, should reconsider any relationship that you from which you get nothing. And that really, that is what started me on the road to this. She said all relations, there should be an element of reciprocity in all relationships. All relationships should give, you know, should find you giving something and getting something in return. The white chocolate macadamia cream cold brew from Starbucks is

made just the way you like it. Handcrafted cold foam topped with toasted cookie crumble. It's a sweet summer twist on iced coffee. Your cold brew is ready at Starbucks. Bank more oncores when you switch to a Scotiabank banking package. Learn more at scotiabank.com slash banking packages. Conditions apply. Scotia Bank, you're richer than you think. It wasn't. Yeah. It's so fascinating how that duty and obligation can shift throughout life, right? and how you were practicing that in adulthood in a different way. And I think it's wonderful that your therapist called that out and saw it for what it was. You mentioned this earlier, you know, that children really lack the knowledge of what is, quote, unquote, normal if they, what they're experiencing is actually bad.

What I am noticing now, especially in the conversations about adult child and parent estrangement, is that when adults bring this up, in adulthood, they're then being accused of blaming everything on their parents. Right. And I'm wondering how you see the role of blame in healing from this type of estrangement and how blame can even be something that was helpful for you or powerful for you in your process. Blame, I think, is essential, at least at the start of the process. You have to define where your hardship is coming from in order to be able to address the hardship. So that entails what we might loosely call blame. But if a person, if I'm going to just use the shorthand of abuser in this instance, if an abuser will not take accountability for what they've done to you or what

they're doing to you, then you have to do it yourself. I love that you said that because I think that there's all this conversation of like, you're an adult now, move on from what your parents did. And my whole thing is like, who else are you supposed to blame? If your parent was abusive to you, they are the ones holding the blame. We would not resist that in any other situation or someone assaulted you on the street or did something to you right. We would say that person is at fault. But for some reason, when it comes to family, that feels very dicey. And I don't know if that's been your experience as well with other survivors that you spoke to? Very much so. I would say it was the case with just about every survivor I spoke with.

One of the things that was for me so therapeutic about working on this book, and I believe there was an element of therapy for the survivors I spoke with as well, is we all found out that we weren't alone, that these experiences that we thought were just ours and just our fault turn out to be part of a pattern that is probably one of the most common patterns in our species, you know, alluding to what I said before about the, you know, our worst, our species' worst evil happening, not in battle or behind bars, but in our homes. And one of the things that I realized that was, you know, related to that is the survivors as I spoke with who like me were able to estrange either partly or totally. And that's another

myth that the book explodes is this idea that estrangement has to be this clean break. It doesn't. It's on a spectrum. You can adjust as time goes on. You don't have to jump off a cliff if you don't want to. You can take steps of any size you want. But anyway, one of the things that we all realized the ones who had estranged, especially the ones who'd been away for a few years, is that family is whatever we, whoever we want it to be, especially as adults, we have the capacity, the deeply rooted capacity to make family out of strangers. And again, we're, for a variety of reasons, we're sold this idea that our genetic family is on a higher plane.

But in relational terms, that is simply not true. The people who treat us worst don't deserve to be in our family. people who treat us well do deserve to become part of our family. I talk a lot about chosen family in the book. And one of the things I'm most proud of is that I've earned the right to be in my son's chosen family. That's got to be so powerful for you as a parent and as someone's child to feel like my kid is choosing to have me in their life, you know, especially when they are given the choice. Because many children, you know, until you're old enough to leave your home, you don't have a choice about who your parent is. You are required to find a way to accept them and keep them in your life because you need them a lot of times for survival.

And so when that choice is then available to you, I think it can be really empowering for an adult to decide whether they want to have their parent in their life or not. Agreed. And I think that word empowering here is really crucial. The abuse of relationship is core is about an abuse of power. And when you make the decision to reassess that relationship, and especially when you set, as I call them in the book, rules, what we also would call boundaries, you are automatically changing the power balance. Even if things don't work out the way you want them to, even if the person can't follow the rules, can't come back into your life, you are still taking a position of power, a stance of power that you have never had before, and that itself has huge, elicits huge positive changes. I'm wondering how important

you feel it is for survivors of childhood trauma and abuse at the hands of their parents to admit that they were abused, like to use that word or that descriptor. And how important was that in your own process? It's very hard for people to do. I think one of the hardest things about estrangement is the preamble to estrangement in which you start to face the possibility that you weren't treated the way you should be treated. And again, there are a lot of inborn and externally imposed excuses that we use. Well, you know, I wasn't treated that badly or I was never hit.

You know, my dad was beaten, but he never beat me, which ignores the fact that psychological abuse and neglect are just as harmful in their effects as physical abuse. Or, you know, you say, well, they did their best. and for me, you know, one of the real is, you know, that was something said to me and said within me by my inner critic often. And I realized at one point that their best was the worst than anyone had ever done to me. Yeah. It took me a long time to get there, though. And I worried, too, and a lot of people justifiably worry about this, is if I cut off this relative, will I lose the connection to other people in my family? I believe that that worry

is often overstated in this is anecdotal because of course there's little research on this stuff which maybe we'll get to too. There's a shocking lack of research on all of this stuff that we're talking about now. But talking to my 30 plus survivors, I found that in most cases their family, they didn't lose their entire family. And in cases when they did lose their their birth family, there were alternatives. One of the remarkable things that I discovered while talking with survivors is how many brilliant solutions they came up with out of necessity because there is so little research on this, because there's a prejudice in psychology and psychiatry and related professions in favor of reconciliation rather than estrangement. So these people

would have to come up with their own fixes. And one of the fixes, that a woman I call Ellie and the book came up with when she severed ties with her family was she still wanted that genetic connection that she valued so much. So she sent off a swab to 23 and me and she got a list of more distant relatives. She reached out to those relatives.

These are people she also has a genetic connection with, but don't abuse her. And I thought that kind of thing was ingenious and effective for her. Yeah, that's a really powerful way to maintain connection with that part of you while also not subjecting yourself to more mistreatment. I think you're right that the threat of losing the entire family is very overstated. I have also found that people have found a lot of ways to maintain connection with other people

in their family, even as close as, you know, siblings where one is and distrains from the parent. And one is it's not always possible, but I think that sometimes that is a abused tactic that can be used by the person of like, you cannot lose your connection with me because then everyone is going to abandon you. And it's not always said that overtly, right? But there is certainly that threat of like, well, if I stop talking to mom, everyone's going to turn their back on me because they are all rallying around mom. Right. This is not, for reasons it will be quickly become obvious, this is not in the book.

When I was doing a book signing last week in Brooklyn, a couple of my relatives came out to the signing. My aunt on my mother's side, my mother's sister, and my uncle on my father's side, my father's brother. And my aunt apologized to me. Wow. She said, I didn't know how bad. you kids had her, she had read the book, but also, and I had to stay away sometimes because

your mother was abusive to me as well. And I knew that. I knew that my mother bullied her and harassed her and unloaded her tirades on my aunt as well. And my, you know, my uncle said something similar. And I'm saying this both because it was very moving to me, but also because it's indicative of something that I think is much truer than we realize. Families often have a sense of who the villains are. Absolutely. They can't always address it directly. They oftentimes will be bystanders for decades,

but on some level, they often know. Yeah, that story is incredibly moving because I think that's something a lot of people listening will be like, wow, I wish I could have that recognition or that moment, but at the same time, when you do, there's this caveat to it of like, well, you kind of knew and you didn't do anything about it. And that can be really hard to hold both of those things,

especially thinking about the child version of you. Yeah, for sure. And I do feel that it was unjust that I wasn't protected by my family. It was. At the same time, and of course, one of the great things my therapist says to me often is, all behavior is multi-determined. We do things for more than one reason. And also, we feel more than one feeling at the same time. So I do feel that sense of injustice, but also I really admire my aunt and my uncle and other relatives who come forward recently as I was working on

the book to acknowledge the truth of my experience. I really appreciate that validation very much. What was that like knowing that some of your family was going to read the book? It made me a little anxious, but at the same time, I felt I had a sense of mission about this book, as might have come out when we were talking earlier about my motivation for writing it. Estrangement helped me so much in my life. It's one of the three best things I ever did, the other two being marrying my wife and having my son. And I wanted other people to know that something like that feeling was possible.

So frankly, that superseded any concerns that I have. about how would my cousin feel or how would my uncle feel. Yeah, yeah. I think that makes complete sense of kind of having those two feelings at once but being driven more by the mission than the fear, which I think will be helpful for people to hear. I wanted to talk to you about a story that you share in the book that really stood out to me, which was when you got an accordion for Christmas. And I think I do know why this story jumped out at me so much. And I, I think, I do know why this story jumped out at me so much. And I think it's because it's so indicative of a pattern that I'm seeing, especially among estranged parents who speak about this topic of like, but I got you gifts and I've had a roof over your head and I do all these things. And I, you know, for those people who haven't read the book, you know, you go on to talk about how you had shown your mom what you actually wanted for Christmas and remind me what it was.

It was like a car or something. Yeah, it was a set of toy race cars called Xcelerators. Yes, yes. And you were very specific about what you wanted, right? Showing pictures, et cetera. And then she gets you this accordion that it sounds like was too big for you. You couldn't use it. And I just thought that that was such a perfect example of a parent not listening, not taking into account your feelings, your needs, really being totally focused on themselves and almost in a way to be cruel. I think, to a child, and then getting to frame the child as being ungrateful, which is a word that we hear often in the estrangement community, right? And so I just want to hear, you know, in your own words, I think, what it's like to look back on that situation and like your quote unquote lack of gratitude and how you actually see it now. The one thing I'll add to your description of the accordion story is, as you're

you say, I would bring ads from the paper to my mother and saying, here, look, the accelerators are on sale at Corvettes, and she would take them. I'm going to use her accent. My parents came from Ireland, so they had Irish accents. She'd take them from me, and she'd say, ah, you're going to love what I get you for Christmas. So this would happen repeatedly. So come Christmas morning, I had this expectation that the accelerators would be waiting for me under the tree. And I would say that that was a form of psychological abuse. That was a kind of gaslighting. She was telling me what I would feel and what I should feel rather than having any understanding of what I would actually likely feel. So I just want to flesh out the abusive nature of this scenario from

the get. So the box is about the same size as the two boxes. So it's a big box. It has my name it, and I'm so excited. I open it up, and as you point out, it was an accordion. An accordion was the farthest thing from what I wanted. It was essentially the opposite of accelerators. And I only realized how much of a burden, figurative and literal burden, it would be a few days later, when I realized that I'd have to be taking lessons on this thing, that I'd have to practice every day. And, well, anyone who hears an accordion might think it's a form of an abuse, but to have to play the accordion as badly as I did was a form of abuse for me. Because there was a performative aspect to it, too. I'd be expected, you know, to play it for a company

when they came over. So I was bound to embarrass myself. I was bound to feel unworthy. I was reminded often of how much they paid for the accordion, or I wasn't told that, but I was told that they paid a mint for it. And again, how ungrateful I was for not being able to play it better and not being thankful for this thing that had been bestowed upon me. And years later, when I started thinking about rethinking our relationship, that sense of ingratitude, well, she brought me into the world, well, she put a roof over my head, all that stuff you just said,

rang like a gong in my skull, I heard her voice. You're a most ungrateful child. And I felt that in, you know, in my 40s. And it was only later that I realized this essential falsehood that we owe our parents everything. The relationship is set up for a variety of reasons as an asymmetrical one in our parents' favor. When in fact, it runs the other way.

They owe us. And especially in our adulthood, they owe us the same things that anybody else we want in our life, owes us, to treat us kindly, to respect us, to empathize, to comfort us to see things from our perspective and not from their own. Of course, that's a huge difficulty that abusive relatives have. There is, again, very little research on this, but I think either full-on narcissistic personality disorder or other narcissistic traits figure prominently in the way abusers treat their kids because they can really only see

their kids as extensions of themselves, possessions, possessions, rewards, property. And of course that's not how a person who treats you well should see you. Absolutely. And I want to really pull out

something important that you're saying here because I think a lot of the people listening to this episode will likely have felt that feeling of, I am ungrateful, I'm spoiled, I'm entitled. These are words I hear a lot from estranged parents being wielded back at their children. And I think there could be this thought of like, well, you got a gift, right? And it's not about the gift. Your mother could have very

easily told you, we can't buy those cars this year because we can't afford them. Whatever someone's reason was. The problem here that is so manipulative, if you would have seen this play out in any other type of relationship is telling someone they're going to get it, smiling, acting like it's going to happen, giving them all of this feedback of like, oh, you're going to love it, it's going to be so great. And then like pulling the rug out from under them at the end with this surprise that then ends up being like punitive, right, in the long run. And that's the manipulation, not necessarily about the gift per se. And I think a lot of parents who are like that in those moments would be like, why are you being so ungrateful? I got you a present. You know,

and then that gets to be the second, like, weaponization and wounding there that leaves you with that feeling of, gosh, they're right. I am so ungrateful. And the whole thing kind of comes full circle, which I think plays out a lot in these situations. Right. You're exactly right. And you know, the gift or the education or the vacation, they're all props. They're essential. I mean, it is, the law is not on, generally speaking, not on the side of victims and survivors. One of the things I note in the book, and that astonished me when I discovered it, it is the only legal form of physical assault in all the 50 states is hitting your kid. Yeah.

That hasn't been, no other form of physical assault has been. been legal in this country since the end of the civil war. You don't do that to an animal. No, that's true. Great point. It's absolutely, it is the most bizarre thing to me that I've ever encountered. I can't even, I honestly, it's one of those issues that I can't even have a conversation with someone that wants to try to debate why that should be okay because it's inconceivable to me

how you're going to end up in jail if you walk down the street and like smack somebody because they did something that you don't like, but you can do that to your kid and argue that it's teaching them. It's insane. It's actually insanity. I agree. And it is state and societally sanctioned insanity. And it's up to us as survivors to recognize this and to point it out whenever we can. I'm glad I got that point across, but I'm sorry, I derailed your train of thought a little bit here. No, no, no. No, you're all good. I am happy to follow. any of these paths that we decide to go down. That's the beauty of these conversations. Before we wrap up in the last few minutes here, I really wanted to just give everyone

kind of a top level overview of some of the steps that you give in how to part. And I think people should absolutely go read about these more in depth in your book because you do such an excellent job of explaining them there. But the first step that you give is setting rules. So can you just tell us a little bit of what that looks like? Of course. If I may, I'll go back to step zero, which is taking a break. Good, good, good, yes. Taking a break is, I think, pretty much essential because as long as you're in contact with the, again, I'm going to use the shorthand of abuser to cover whatever, you know, bad behavior the relative is inflicting on you.

As long as you're in conflict with, sorry, in contact with the abuser, you're going to be following. their script. You're going to be seeing yourself in the world through their eyes. And you're going, also you're going to be, in most cases, the maltreatment will continue. So you're not going to be able to have a clear perspective on the situation unless you find a way to step away. So I stepped away for a few weeks. That's what I'd advise if you can manage it. And when I did, I found within days, there were a few days. what you might consider them sort of a hangover. But once the hangover subsided, I just began to see, I just felt lighter. I felt freer. And I also felt more clearheaded in general terms,

but especially about the nature of the relationship. I recognize, oh, this is what it's like without that, without the tirades, without the cruelty. This is what it could be like here on, here on the outside. So once you have some of that perspective in mind, you can get to step one, which, as you say, is setting rules. And basically, I think a great way to start in terms of setting rules is thinking about the differences between how the relative in question treats you and everybody else treats you. Friends, acquaintances, colleagues, strangers. What are the most problematic differences. I discovered several. There are three big ones in my case, that she, she treated me much more cruelly, me and my sibling, I should say, she treated us much more

cruelly than anybody else in my life treated me. There were these, these tirades that I mentioned before. And she played the mother card. You know, she constantly reminded me that you have only one mother and that you have some sort of special duty to her that you must fulfill at all costs at all times. So those were the three basic rules that I, the three big rules that I set out for her. And I will say one thing I did wrong or say suboptimally was I also identified what forms the abuse took. Often we don't realize, and there's a lot of reasons for this, many of them having to do with dissociation, with avoidance, with when we're kids, we often don't remember what happened to us because it's essential for us to put those memories away. We just don't have

the capacity as a kid to deal with this stuff. And that habit of dissociation will often continue into our adulthood. But oftentimes we don't remember right away everything that was done to us. So in addition to diminishing it and saying, oh, I wasn't, you know, other people had a worse than I did. We often don't recall. Taking some time away and thinking things through helps you realize more fully what was actually done to you. I wrote those things down and they really helped me, but I read them to my mother in my first conversation where I set out rules. And in retrospect, I realized that I should have held back. I should have just presented this as what I needed for our relationship to continue rather than, you know,

than saying, this is what you did wrong. It was the truth, but if I did want the relationship to have a chance to continue, I need it to frame it differently. So that's the right way to do it. And then once you establish the rules, then consistency is key. It is on you and up to you to firmly but politely maintain those boundaries, patrol those boundaries at every turn. If you slip, if you let them get away with something, if you find yourself feeling sorry for them, you're going to hurt yourself.

You can still be firm. You can still be polite. Remember, you're setting rules that you would expect of any good person. In my case, I gave her two years before I realized ultimately, oh, she just would be incapable of following the rules. And I would always be stuck in this abusive circumstance unless I stepped away. I think those steps are extremely helpful. And I love the way that you lay them out. And it gives people sort of just a roadmap to walk through what would be best for them and the amount of contact or no contacts that they need to have. And I think it's a really great nuanced approach to that. So thank you very much. Oh, thank you, Whitney. And I think you're exactly right to hit that. It's like you get to set the terms of the estrangement. You don't even have to tell them you're estranged. What's crucial about estrangement is the fact that you're doing what you need to do with this person so that you feel good about yourself. You feel healthy. Absolutely. You're protecting yourself. That's what it is. I think it's important to come from that angle for sure. All right. Well, thank you so much for joining me today for this episode.

I really appreciate it. And I would like to encourage everyone to go find your book, The Power of Parting, finding peace and freedom through family estrangement. 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 Colin Colm or Whitney Goodman.

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