CALLING HOME with Whitney Goodman, LMFT - What to Do if You Inherit an Estrangement

Episode Date: August 13, 2026

Content warning: This episode contains descriptions of self-harm, physical and emotional abuse, and a parent expressing suicidal ideation.We spend a lot of time talking about the person who decides to go no contact, and much less about everyone else who ends up living with that decision. In this Q&A episode, Whitney answers a woman in her 30s who inherited and is now dealing with the consequences of her mother's estrangement from her side of the family. Second, a listener six months no contact with an abusive mother, asking the question: who is responsible for her now?In this episode, you'll learn:- How to build your own relationships without betraying a parent's decision to go no contact- Scripts for handling the question "how's your mom?" without becoming the family messenger- How to separate compassion from obligation with a parent in crisisWhitney Goodman is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) and the founder of Calling Home, a membership community that helps people navigate complex family dynamics and break harmful cycles.Have a question for Whitney? Send a voice memo or email to [e-mail] the Family Cyclebreakers Club: https://callinghome.coFollow Whitney on Instagram | sitwithwhitFollow Whitney on YouTube | @whitneygoodmanlmftOrder Whitney's book, Toxic Positivity: https://sitwithwhit.com/toxic-positivitySign up for updates on Whitney's new book: https://cmnyyv4kpyt.typeform.com/to/PHMzjy0oThis podcast is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional mental health advice. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello everyone and welcome back to the calling on podcast. I'm your host Whitney Goodman. If you've ever been listening to this show and thought, wow, Whitney's voice can never get deeper or raspier, today we are going to put that to the test because I'm at the tail end of a cold. And so I apologize if the vocal fry is more intense than usual today. Bear with me. But I think we're going to get through this and it's going to be a good episode. We are back today for. another Q&A episode where I'm going to be answering two-collar questions. But before we get to that, I just wanted to say we've been talking about radical acceptance inside the Family Cycle Breakers Club at Calling Home for two weeks now. And our groups and the feedback that I've gotten from everyone have just been so amazing. And I really love talking about this topic because I think I'm learning

so much from all of you about the ways that you are accepting your family relationships. as they are the ways you're integrating that acceptance into your life. And I wanted to share a testimonial that I got that was part of an email that I got from one of our members. I was so appreciative of it. And I felt like it did a really good job of capturing the work that we do at calling home. And this person said, when recommending your podcast to someone, I joke that I have kissed a lot of frogs when it comes to finding online content that treats estrangement and difficult

family relationships with the complexity it deserves. There are lots of creators engaging in therapy talk without nuance. As someone who has been in therapy for a decade focusing on recovery from narcissistic abuse, I found the TikTokification of narcissism to be really damaging to my personal healing. Your content has the right amount of nuance and has attracted a community in the Cycle Breakers Club that really gets it. I feel safe suggesting your podcast to people I see struggling with similar issues. Your content and groups allowed me to see my family dynamics beyond the specifics of

certain incidents in a larger context. Hearing Q&A episodes of people moving through the same phases of bargaining, surviving, and rebuilding has made me feel less alone. Listening to your deep dives on topics like a meshman has made me feel seen. And doing the work in between groups and podcast episodes has empowered me to make choices that are in alignment with the life I actually want to live. And I'm sharing this with you because I, you know, I mentioned in my episode a few weeks ago that I really wanted to stop focusing on like the detractors and the people and I haven't had Instagram on my phone, you guys, for three weeks. I have been posting through like my scheduling up after taking two weeks off of posting and like I'm feeling refreshed. I think that

I'm not taking in as much dissension all the time. It's been really great. I go on it on my computer and take care of what I need to take care of and then I'm out of there. So that's a tip for some of you. I also have like the brick app on my phone where I brick, you know, the websites because I used to go on them on my internet browser too. I was like really breaking an addiction. And I feel like after three weeks of not having it on my phone, I have finally broken the habit of opening up my phone, especially like the first moment of the day when my eyes would open. I'd be like, let's go see. what everybody's saying online. And it was a hard habit to break. And now I feel like I'm more aligned and back and ready to actually work with the people who need this help and who want

this kind of help. And so I am really, really grateful for those of you that have been doing this with me and have been sharing your thoughts. And we had a group last week. I think it was in our radical acceptance group where one of the members was just talking about how helpful the groups have been for her. And while yes, I accept the compliment, I want to say that our groups are good because of the people that come to those groups. And the people that come to those groups are really, really focused on like dealing with reality, living their lies, finding a way to move forward, being honest about what happened to them and supporting each other. And it's just like such a breath of fresh air to be in these groups because they are so different.

think from what you see online when you're looking at these topics, it's honestly like an alternate universe. So if you're looking for that, I'll end here. We would love to have you inside the Family Cycle Breakers Club at Calling Home. We have these, you know, private discussion boards where you can remain anonymous if you want to and you can come on and talk to other people. And then we also have our live support groups with licensed therapists, where you are on with your camera on, interacting with real people. And I think it's just such a better place to be having these conversations about estrangement and to be getting the support the support that you need there because it's just less divisive, more honest, it's real people, you feel safe.

So yeah, we'd love to have you. You can join at callinghome.co. We are also launching our adult sibling relationships group that's going to be twice a month starting in September. And we are also launching our difficult in-law relationship groups next month, twice a month. And then we're going to be adding another time for our family estrangement group. And our family estranging group is one of the only groups you can go to and be among people who are navigating all different sides of family estrangement. We have people who have been estranged from people who are doing the estranging. There's sibling relationships, parent-child relationships.

It's a really good place to just go in and like see the full purview of estrangement. I do not run those groups. That is a group that is run by Stephanie, our other therapists at Calling Home, and Sam is going to be running the additional time, one of our other therapists. So if you're an estranged parent who's like, I don't really feel comfortable with Whitney because I feel like she's biased or she only works with the adult children. I get that. You can come to these groups and you won't even be working with me. And our other licensed therapists are amazing. They're wonderful.

I know firsthand we have estranged parents. strange adult children, estranged siblings in these groups. All right. So let's go ahead and get into the episode. Today we're doing the listener questions. Like I mentioned, this is our Q&A episode. Every week, I answer two caller questions. You can send those into me via email at Whitney and Callingholm.com. Or you can send me a voice note. And I think we spend so much time talking about the person who makes the decision to go no contact. You know, the adult child, the sibling, the parent, the person who's walking away. And we spend a lot less time talking about the people that are affected by that decision, but aren't the ones making the decision.

Okay. So that could be the kids, the grandkids, cousins, you know, the people who don't choose the estranging, but they end up living with the consequences of it. And they're figuring out what to say at holidays, who to tell when someone gets sick or is dying. And you know, they're figuring out whether staying close to those other family members is an act of betrayal to someone that they really love and care about. And so that's what today's episode is really going to focus on. You know, definitely the first question of what estrangement does to the next generation and how you move forward when a cutoff you didn't choose becomes yours to navigate. I'm going to read the first question and I've edited it for brevity and

change some identifying details, but this is a real caller question that was submitted to me for the show. I am in my 30s and my mom has been estranged from her family for about 20 plus years now. Both of her parents, my grandparents, have passed away, but the estrangement from her siblings, my aunts and uncles, continues. I won't go into the reasons for the estrangement other than to say that I understand why my mom made that choice and a lot of the dysfunctional family dynamics that your content addresses were at play. My mom's siblings didn't respect her decision, put a lot of pressure on her about it, and as a result, they ended up on the receiving end of no contact as well. Despite their parents being long since dead, I don't think it's salvageable, and even if it were, that wouldn't be my job to facilitate.

I noticed that I am much closer to my cousin, who is the child of the sibling my mom was in contact with for the longest. Whereas the cousins who are the children of the sibling my mom had the worst slash earliest falling out with, I am much less close to. We are all adults now, but the arguments and estrangement began when we were children and or teenagers. So basically, if our parents weren't talking to each other or stopped attending family events, etc., that meant that we stopped seeing each other too. We did not live close enough to maintain those extended family relationships on our own, nor was there the technology there is today that would facilitate that. My mom made it really clear that I was free to have my own relationships with her family slash my extended family and that she would not interfere. The dysfunction wasn't the sort that meant I was in danger of abuse or anything. It was just that it was not an emotionally

safe family for my mom. I know she continues to think about them and grieve the loss, but on a practical slash logistical level, once it was done, it was done. I find myself struggling year after year with some new permutation of how to deal with the ripple effects of estrangement. Would she want to know major family news like that one of her siblings is in hospice or that her favorite brother-in-law is having severe health problems or that her other brother-in-law died? If she does not want to hear about these things, is everyone expecting me to be the liaison? If she does not want to hear these updates, how do I navigate normal casual conversation when there are all these people slash events who I have to avoid mentioning.

What should I say when family members ask how my mom is doing or express sadness over the estrangement? Is it a betrayal of her decision to cut ties if I keep them up to date on how she's doing? Should I try to help them understand or process the estrangement? What about during holidays when I might be invited to visit home by my parents, but also invited to an extended family gathering and they conflict with each other? Sometimes I feel stressed out even just mentioning one person to another person, but it's also stressful to try to avoid any mention of family members who are still in my life. I am single, and although I would love to meet someone who becomes a long-term partner, I sometimes feel

relieved that hasn't happened yet because I am stressed out about how to handle inviting or not inviting people to my possible future wedding. I have even found myself stressed out over what might happen when my mom dies? Should I tell the rest of the family? What if they want to come to her funeral? Overall, I am much more distant from my family than I would like to be, including more distant from my mom than I would want to be. And part of the reason why is that any and every interaction somehow feels very weighted from this history and my own confusion over what is the right way to handle it, how to respect people's wishes, et cetera. How should subsequent generations like me and my cousins move forward.

For those of you that are listening to this, that feel like you have been caught in the crossfire of a family estrangement like this caller and you're unsure what to do. You've inherited this estrangement to some degree. I want to say how difficult this is. And you did not choose this cutoff, right? but you are inheriting the logistical and emotional labor of it. And I think that that is a really under-discussed and under-explored position. You are not being overly sensitive about this.

And I think if you feel like this caller, I would actually go as far as saying that you seem like someone that is very caring. You want to make sure that you do this right and your family is important to you in a variety of ways, both those that you are estranged from in some capacity and you are validating an understanding of your parent that had to make this difficult decision. I also hear a really strong desire to be close, to be part of a family, and to maybe start something new with members. of the family that were not part of this, you know, especially that next generation that you are a part of.

This is not your fault. It's not something that any of you did. And there might be a real chance here for generational repair and new patterns to be started. And none of that is an offense or an affront to the decision that your mother had to make because you are ultimately having to navigate and are navigating very different circumstances. So two things can be true here, that your mother made a valid and legitimate choice to estrange herself from certain members of her family, given the circumstances at the time. And now those circumstances have changed such that you might be able to have different relationships with the surviving members of the family and their offspring. And how cool would that be if the family had made changes that were able to

sort of erase some of that intergenerational trauma or estrangement or division within the family because of the growth that had happened in the next generation? And I really hope that if that were to happen that the people in the generation that had experienced estrangement could see past their own generations issues and say, we may have experienced this, but how wonderful would it be if those that were kind of caught up in this could actually transcend that and create better family relationships? Okay. So I'm going to speak to this issue as if that is something at family would want and be happy to have. I think that even though your mother could feel some grief around that, maybe even jealousy, I hope that she would also, you know, like you said,

she has never told you that you cannot have these kinds of relationships. It sounds like she's been encouraging of you, that that would actually be a really positive thing for her. because even if she had negative relationships with her parents or with her siblings, that siblings' children and offspring are different people. They're their own people. And they should be allowed to also have the right to self-determination, to creating their own relationships in the family and also to being given a chance to show that they are not people that need to be cut off, that they are people that could have and sustain healthy relationships in the family. And I do think that sometimes this is a way that we could say, you know what, estrangement may have actually had some negative consequences at a time,

but maybe it did help us end generational patterns in this family that we are now going to rise above and heal. And how cool would that be? That's the whole point, right? Is to be able to do that. And if we can also support your mother in being a part of that and seeing that, I think that could be a really cool way to see how the family is growing in the wake of some of these issues. The core message that I want to give anybody here that's in this is that you can honor your mother's boundaries and her decision and still create your own relationships within the family, especially if those relationships are with people.

people who did not do any of this, who didn't create this issue. Particularly, I'm thinking of, you know, your cousins and the other children that were caught up in this, they should not be blamed or exiled, you know, by anybody. They weren't the ones doing the thing, right? They had to be protected or whatever was going on in the family that happened to create the estrangement at the time. Now, what I'm hearing in this question, and I think, a lot of you feel this way is that there's a lot of unknowns, a lot of guessing, right? If my mom doesn't want this, what would she want in this situation? I think that's what's causing a lot of this anxiety. And so the first thing I'm going to call out and say is the easiest thing. And maybe you've

already tried this is that you need to ask your mom directly. If she is alive, pretty open, it seems like she hasn't been telling you, you can never talk to those people. Then there might be, you know, the door is cracked to have this conversation. And I think if you even start this with saying, mom, I'm feeling a lot of anxiety about this. It's weighing heavily on me because I care about you. I want to do this right. I want to make sure that you feel like I am doing the right thing for you, while I also want you to know that these things are important to me. Can we talk about it, right? Can we have a conversation. And you can point blank ask her, you know, is there anything you want to know about that side of the family? If I get this information about deaths, serious illness, accidents,

crisis, like, do you want me to tell you? Do you have limits around that? And she might say to you, the only thing I want to know is if someone is actually dead, you know? And then you can respect that. Now you have this actual answer. What's happening here is that you don't know. what to do. And so you're kind of making this up on the fly. And it probably feels like if you do or you don't, you're going to get in trouble or do the wrong thing. That's what the anxiety is around is that it feels like I can't make an actual decision based on anything. If your mom gave you a concrete answer, and then you went to her and said, okay, so-and-so died. I'm telling you this because you said you wanted to know that. And she got upset. Well, okay, you know that you had this conversation with

her. You did what she asked. You were following instructions. And that's going to help mitigate some of that guilty anxiety that you feel. I also wonder if your mom would be able to offer you some reassurance here that you actually don't need to carry all of this by yourself. It's not your job to manage. I'm really hopeful that if you brought this conversation to her, that would be something that I would want to hear from her. And if you're a parent who has a child and you're navigating the estrangement like this, you're in that parent role, I would advise you to say something to your adult child, like, this is my thing to manage. I am the one that made this decision and I know why I made this decision. And so I don't want you to carry this burden. It's on

me to do that. I am absolving you from that role. I think if a parent was, you, able to give that to their child who feels caught in the middle, that would feel really, really good and feel great for your relationship. Now, the other thing I want to say here is it sounds like nobody really assigned you this job. You took it on yourself. And you took it on probably out of love and anxiety. And just because you are this person caught in the middle of this estrangement does not

mean that you need to carry this burden and this role on your own. You are allowed to actually say, I cannot be the messenger between the two of you. We're going to have to figure out a different way to do this. The people who are estranged from one another need to navigate that themselves. It's not just because you are the child that was born into a family where there's some estrangement between siblings or an adult and a parent that you are then having to take on that rule. I think that your intentions of doing that are very good and actually might be a way of managing your own anxiety. But I want you to name that for yourself because sometimes we are taking on burdens that actually haven't been placed on us. And then you can make that choice

from a place of choice, not from a place of feeling like it was put on you by others when that actually hasn't been explicitly stated. Now, the other thing here I think is that it sounds like you've put yourself in this binary, right? Like if I have relationships with them or if I keep them updated, it's a betrayal to my mom. And if you're, if I'm correct in understanding this person that your mom has explicitly stated to you that you're free to have these relationships. And so loyalty to your mom doesn't require deleting everyone that is, you know, connected to her from your life. This is where things can get a little bit tricky, right? Because just because your mom is estranged from someone doesn't mean that you have to also be estranged from those people.

Caviad I want to give here to make this apply to a wider set of scenarios. I have worked with people and I've had conversations with many people where there were situations of abuse. I believe this caller has said this is not an abusive situation, at least not in the sense that you might think of like physical or sexual abuse. I have had situations where there was a sibling who was physically or sexually abused by a parent and the other sibling was not abused by that parent. And that civilly says, well, they never did anything bad to me. and the sibling that was abused feels betrayed by that sibling.

And so they do not want to have a relationship with them. They feel that they cannot have a relationship with someone who maintains a relationship with their abuser. And I would say to that, that is understandable. There is also the caveat that when we are talking about family relationships, I don't think it is as cut and dry as like a friendship per se where you maintain a friendship with someone who was not harmful to you but was abusive to a friend. When we are talking about parent-child relationships, these relationships are extremely difficult

to end. There is also the component of sharing DNA with that person. That parent is half of them, regardless of if they reject them or not, that I don't think these things are ever very cut and dry. I would just like to add the caveat that's sort of saying like, Well, I don't have to cut them off because they weren't bad to me can be a slippery slope and there needs to be nuance around that. But I will say to you that just because your mom decided she did not want to have a relationship with these people, you don't have to do that or follow that

as an adult. You are allowed to make your own decisions. That being said, you might look at these people and say, well, I don't want to have a relationship with them either because They're objectively awful, harmful people. So I'm not going to have a relationship with them. The thing that we're talking about here is the next generation, though. And those people might be wonderful, even if their parents were terrible. So you could say, I want to have a relationship with my cousins because they actually did nothing to my mom.

My mom doesn't even know them. She didn't actually want to be estranged from her nieces and nephews. It was just something that happened as a result of her not having a relationship with her siblings and or her parents. I think the part here about honoring your mom is that you want to honor her boundaries, right? So when you're having this conversation with your mom and you're saying, I want to be respectful to my mom, I love her, her feelings are important to me, then I would say that sharing things with these people that your mom asked you to keep private is something that you should honor, right? That is something. That is something.

something that I would talk to your mom about. And if these other family members asked, you know, how's your mom doing, asking questions about her health, what she's up to and your mom has asked you not to share those things, it's totally appropriate to say, hey, I love you and I want to have a relationship with you. But my mom has asked me not to discuss her or I don't wish to discuss my mom with you. Can we just have that not be a part of our relationship? That's absolutely an appropriate boundary to set, and you can set that for yourself that they are going to ask. You can't control what they ask or what they say. You can control how you respond to those questions and the conversations that you have with them. And there are some scripts that you can use here, right?

So even responding to like, how's your mom? You can say something like, she's doing well, thanks for asking, but I really want to like not talk about her. I'm so glad to see you. How are you doing, you know, you can respond politely and close that door. You don't have to do this robotic, like, we are not allowed to talk about my mom. You know, make these fit your relationship. I think you're going to hear these people even express sadness about the estrangement. That might happen. You can say, I know this has been painful for a lot of people. I care about you. I want to have a relationship with you and I understand why my mom had to do what she did. There are ways for you to validate your mom's decision without being mean or cruel to the people

who feel sadness about this and also to prioritize that relationship and have a relationship. If these people are asking you to pass a message on or intervene, you know, you can say, I love you, but I cannot be in the middle of this. If you want to pass a message to my mom, you're going to have to contact her directly or find someone else to do that. And, you know, sometimes you might even accidentally bring up things in passing about the family members that you're interacting with that your mom doesn't have contact with. And I think that we can be flexible and forgiving and lead with positive intent when these slipups happen by saying, oh gosh, mom, I'm sorry that I just said that. It just came out of my

mouth. I'm going to try harder not to mention them around you. If that's something that your mom has said, if your mom shows that she's kind of struggling with hearing about how these people are doing, it's bringing up stuff for her, you guys can reevaluate those boundaries of like, I, mom, this has been hard for you. I can tell that when I talk about them, like, you're getting really emotional. Are you sure that this is something you want to hear about? And just continuing to have this open dialogue as you begin to have more and more of a relationship with these family members. There might be certain people that it's harder for your mom to hear about. She might be surprised about how easy or good it is for her to hear about certain people.

You know, you don't know until you try. Now, this person also mentioned navigating holidays, having simultaneously occurring events. I think that this is sometimes one of those things where you're going to be. you're projecting into the future, getting a little bit too anxious about maybe something that hasn't happened yet. And so I want you to like root into yourself that I'm an adult. I'm empowered to make the right decisions. I'm allowed to choose what I want to choose. And what I choose isn't a referendum on who I love more. It's not a loyalty test. It's not me declaring that I want to do this more than that. Sometimes it comes down to logistics, timing, who I have seen lately, who I haven't,

and that there are ways for me to handle this. I can go to one event for a little bit and then go to the other. I can pick a different day to celebrate with a certain part of the family, even if they're getting together on that day. I can explain in advance, hey, I already committed to this on this day. So would you like to get together another day? There are a lot of ways that you can get ahead of this. I think a lot of times we're getting into this panic of like, what if I'm getting invited to two things on the same day? What will I do?

And you're doing all this like future casting that might not totally be an issue. And so just remembering like I can handle this. I will deal with it when it comes up or I can be proactive and make sure that I am setting aside time to be able to spend time with both sets of people or maybe I'm saying, you know what, I'm going to spend Easter with these people and I'm going to spend Christmas with these people and I'm going to name it in advance and make sure that everyone is aware of what I am doing and then know that people's feelings about that are allowed to happen. They're allowed to be upset. I am allowed to have boundaries around how they treat me when they are upset. And I do not have to be moved and

changed by their upset if I feel rooted and strong and value aligned in my decisions for how I decide to spend time with my family and to prioritize them. The other caveat I want to add here is like you're doing a lot of future casting. And for any of you that are estranged, I don't want you to let the logistics of estrangement stop your life or impede you from doing things that you want to do. You know, this person's talking about like, I don't want to get married. I don't want to talk about these things because you're afraid of how scary it's going to be, and I get that fear. But don't allow these dynamics that are so out of your control and we're not even your choice to stop you from living your life. There's also a lot of grief that I want to

address here. You know, you lost a family too in all of this. And even if you understand it, you know why it happened, you validate it. You know, there's still an ambiguous loss here, and that is a different type of grief than your mothers. And you're allowed to feel that and be upset about it. I know that I have always been a proponent of like some estrangement really is necessary to protect children, to protect parents because they are terrible parents if they are being constantly negatively impacted by these bad relationships in their life and that's going to

trickle down to their children. But I have never disagreed with the fact that like later on in life, these kids might have some sort of grief that even if they know it was the right thing and they're seeing their grandparent or these people in their life and being like, I know that person wouldn't have been a good grandmother or I see why my mom didn't want to talk to her brother because he's so mean and awful, they can still have the grief of, I wish I had an uncle. I wish I had cousins. I wish I had a nice involved grandmother. You know, they're still grieving the loss of what they wish they could have had, even if they know that it wasn't there and it wasn't an option for them.

And so, or even saying, you know, I had all these cousins that I didn't get to grow up with. And I know that there's a reason for that. And it's a real legitimate reason. It still would have been nice to grow up with cousins. And it's good to have space to process that and talk about it separate from your mother because because she is your mother, she's likely going to feel some responsibility, sadness, and grief over that that gets triggered by your grief and might not come out in the best way from her because of all those feelings mixed up. She might not be able to validate you and understand that because she gets so overwhelmed

by her own stuff. This can happen with parents and their children, that you having a therapist, groups, like the groups we have a calling home a place where you can come and say, like, I get why my mom did this, but it's still very sad for me and it's awful, is good to have that separate from these families. And I just want to say, like, you're allowed to grieve the family that you didn't get to fully experience or have, you know, even while fully supporting your mother's decision and maybe even knowing, like, even if she would have kept contact with these people, I still wouldn't have had this. You know, there's grief in that as well.

Now, I think the biggest question here is, like, how does the next generation move forward in all of this? You know, you don't have to inherit all of these cutoffs and you don't have to repair them all. It really depends on your unique family configuration, what everyone is like, how willing they are to re-engage with you. as well, I think the new generation gets to redraw this map. They get to decide what relationships they want to have. It doesn't have to all be dictated by, you know, the sibling and who fell out

with who 20 years ago. You do not have to have this like carte blanche loyalty that because they are a child of this person, we are not allowed to engage with them. I actually think that's how family estrangement can continue generation after generation, even when it doesn't necessarily have to be like that anymore. Okay. So I want you to think about this being like differentiation, being your own independent adult in action, that you can love your mom, you can respect her boundaries, and you can have your own separate relationships all at once. The thing that I would say would really change my stance on that is if there was a family member who was actively engaging in abuse towards your mother, like especially physical abuse, sexual abuse, harassment,

things like that that I would say, you know what, that might be pretty hard to manage both. But if this is just silence, they're both in their own silos, the past is kind of in the past and they're living their life and like there's just no desire to repair, then maybe there's a way that you can move forward and create new relationships, especially with the next generation who had nothing to do with this. I think that the closeness that you're missing with your mom could also be really experienced on the other side of some really clear conversations and agreements and understandings and you relinquishing some of that weight. And I hope that if you go to your mom and you have those conversations and you start having these conversations with other people in the family

that you will experience some of that release. And again, I'm not your therapist. I am just a therapist offering some context on some of these relationships. So anyone that is navigating a situation similar to this, you can take some of these insights and recommendations and personally tailor them to your own situation. Take what works. Leave the rest. Thank you so much to that caller for sending in that question. I think that's really helpful for a lot of people. All right, let's go ahead and get to that second caller question. I am going to play this caller's question for you. Hi, Whitney. Thank you so much for all the work you do through calling home. I have a question for the podcast around responsibility during a time of ongoing family crisis. Some context. I have been fully no contact with my mom for about six months after multiple prior attempts to take space and reconcile.

I used to believe we had an exceptionally close relationship and that my role as the oldest was to protect my siblings from her physical and emotional abuse while keeping the family together. I knew more about my mom's anxieties, regrets, trauma, opinion, and conflict that I knew about my own. And I used all of this information about her to stay in a constant state of hypervigilance. I believe that as long as I stayed attuned to her every emotional shift and need, and as long as I provided supplementary emotional support to my dad and siblings, I could help keep everyone alive and okay. When I started to self-harm as a teenager, my parents both blamed me for being emotionally unstable.

It has taken me over a decade in therapy to understand how my own nervous system was impacted by my mom's behavior and how the ways my parents pathologized me for showing signs of stress in a stressful situation made it difficult for me to trust my own body, feelings, and sense of reality. The cracks in my relationship with my mom started to become clear when I met my wife, who saw the ways visits and calls with my mom would impact me. Coming out as gay and later as non-binary felt like steps towards living my own life

and being able to show up fully for myself, my friends, my wife, and my students. When my wife and I got married, my mom had a meltdown because she felt like we spent too much time talking about our queerness and not enough time talking about her in the best of the vows we made to each other. When I told my mom I had a gender affirming surgery, she told me she did not want to speak with me anymore and then called my brother and said she no longer wanted to live and that she wanted to hurt me. Since I've cut contact with her, my dad is no longer living with her and my siblings are all on their own paths of limiting contact. My mom is convinced that she is the victim of abuse and neglect and that we all have conspired to abandon her in her time of need. this is the first time any of us are hearing about the abuse and her stories just aren't matching what anyone else remembers about her relationship with my dad. My question is who is responsible for my mom right now. She has refused any kind of treatment, left countless therapists after single sessions, and goes into Darvo mode anytime any of us have tried to be honest with her about the impact of her behavior.

It feels deeply upsetting to me to think about her alone during this. latest spiral as her kids and husband leave one by one. At the same time, her behavior is getting worse, and she seems to have given up on her role as a mother. I've tried so many things for so many years to help her feel better in every strategy failed. She has very few friends and community connections, no relationships with extended family, and I'm working to accept that she might die before she's able to engage in any kind of accountability process that might bring her back into relationship with her family. Meanwhile, my own recovery has moved at a much more hopeful pace since cutting contact with her, and I feel like I have a chance to be present in my own life without the

constant fear of violence. But imagining my mom being responsible for herself feels extremely unrealistic, even if it's logically correct. It's unclear to me and my siblings if she is in a mental health crisis or if she is kind of being an asshole. Again, thank you for everything you do. Your work has meant more to me than I could ever say over email. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you sending in that question and thank you for the kind words. I think what you're describing pretty clearly is that you were experiencing some parentification as a child. From what I can tell from your story. You know, you're saying it was your job to protect your siblings from your mother's abuse and to make sure that your mother was okay. And it seems like that role extended into adulthood.

But as you take more and more distance, those of you that were parentified as children, you notice how much harder it is to continue being the sole emotional and or physical support. for your parent while also taking care of yourselves, right? And there's a lot of hypervigilance that comes with that, having to track your mom's moods, make sure she's okay, that you end up having to sacrifice a lot of parts of your own life, whether that be your career, your physical health, your emotional health, your relationship with your partner, relationship with your children, friends, community members, there's a real cost to prioritizing a parent who is, you know, behaving erratically and maybe going through a crisis. And I think there is a difference between being

a support person who is empathetic and supportive and wants the best for their parent and a complete act of self-sacrifice that is leading to no meaningful change in that parent. And so I think what I hear underneath this question and a lot of stories like yours is kind of like, I'm doing all this stuff and my mom's not getting better. She's not getting help. She's not improving. And I am just feeling worse and losing more. And I notice that my life gets better and improves when I don't offer her all of these types of support. So do I keep supporting her in this way at this cost when it is not working? That's ultimately like, The very sort of black and white, like if I can just reduce this down to a calculus,

is like, am I getting enough back from this relationship or am I helping this person enough to sustain the cost that it has on my life? And when you're being parentified as a child, you're not allowed to do that calculus because you need your parent to survive. You need them to have a roof over your head, which is why, you know, at some point, And some kids run away. They go live in group homes. They end up homeless because they're like, I cannot stay here.

I will not survive if I stay in this home. And you have to imagine how bad things have to get for a kid or a teenager to do that, right? Because the risk is so high. But when you were an adult, it's much easier to be like, I have my own partner. I have a job. I have a home. Like, am I going to sacrifice all of this? and my mom still isn't going to get any better or improve. And I think it gets locked up in this

fantasy, right? That maybe if I just give a little bit more, I do a little bit more, I will finally get that back. And I think that's a lot of what we've been talking about in our groups at calling home this month and in the content around radical acceptance. So if you're relating to this, definitely would love to have you come join us there in the Family Cycle Breakers Club because you'll get a lot of help with that issue. That you kind of have to say. You kind of have to step back and say, okay, I've been doing this for a long time. I've been trying to help my mom in these ways at this cost. Is she getting better? Is anything changing except my life is getting worse? And that's where you ultimately have to ask yourself, like, is doing more of this actually going to

help? And I want to answer that question, you know, very clearly, the question of who is responsible for my mom right now? And I think what I'm going to say is going to sound. a little bit cold, but your mom is responsible for herself in the same way that she's kind of telling you all the time, you know, you're responsible for yourself. I think when you have a parent that has told you that like your reactions and your self-harming yourself is a problem or, you know, all the things that you said about that. It's being blamed on you. That's the culture in the family, right? You're responsible for yourself. Even as a child, the parents are saying that to the generation below and you're still feeling this big sense of guilt of like, am I allowed to tell my mom that she's

responsible for herself or am I responsible for her? Because that's all the ingraining that I've gotten. Now, that doesn't mean that you be rejecting and cold and cruel towards your mother and you don't offer help. there's a difference between offering help and empathy and love and total self-sacrifice. And you have to find that line for yourself. That you can say, mom, I am happy to help you find a therapist. Mom, I will pay for the therapist. I will hire someone to help you with this. I will give you money for X.

You can decide how far you want to extend yourself. The options are not like, I don't care about you. you're not my problem and total assumption of her problems as your own. There is a huge gap between those two states. And I think it is very up to you in your unique situation to figure out where you lie and to try to get the scales a little bit more balanced here that like what can I offer without totally losing myself? And you have to calculate these things like my physical health, my relationship,

my job keeping a roof over my head, parenting my own children. And the calculus is going to be different for every person depending on their unique abilities, access to resources and the stage of life that they are in. And so even sitting down and kind of working through that, like I can talk to my mom once a week. I can give her money. I can coordinate this type of care, you know, figuring out exactly what you are able to offer in this unique environment.

okay, I really want anybody who feels like this to work on separating compassion and obligation. You can feel grief about your mother being alone and know that you are not obligated to reenter this dynamic, especially if it is costing you your entire life. Now, I think that this question of like, are they having a mental health crisis? Is she just being awful to us? Is she being abusive? Like when we get caught up in all of these terms, I think what we're really looking for is permission to act on what we are feeling and experiencing within this relationship. And this is why I always say, like, you guys never really hear me use diagnostic labels

about people and families because I kind of don't care what they have been diagnosed with. I think that there are people who can have no mental health diagnosis and still be completely and utterly awful to be around and they are abusive people or they are harmful to you in a variety of ways because they like the power or the control. We're not always deciding between like either they're mentally ill or they're not. And I'm only allowed to make a decision about this relationship if they have a diagnosis that tells me I'm allowed to make that decision. So the only thing that needs to happen here is radical acceptance of this is what my mom is doing, continuing to do, has always done, and sees no reason to change, stop, or do anything about right now.

And if I am acting on the facts in front of me, how can I figure out a way to honor the fact that, yes, my mom could change. She could become different. She could heal and get better. And right now, she's not doing any of that. are the consequences to me. And so if she is going to continue making that choice today, how do I want to handle this relationship? What do I need to do to protect my own well-being and life that I have built? And when we are making that decision about a parent, it is very, very difficult because you are

biologically programmed to attach and orient yourself to this person. And even in adulthood, it is very difficult to sever those ties. Also, if you have been conditioned to be parentified and to care for your parent, then it is going to be even harder to step out of that role. So this isn't something that needs to happen overnight or to be changed dramatically tomorrow. It's just thinking about how could I even step back from this and sort of insulate myself from the negative effects of this relationship while still being the caring and empathetic and loving person that I want to be, how can I do that even 5%, 10%, 20%? And why do I feel like I need to decide if my mom is in a mental health crisis or not to do that?

I'm allowed to just react to the consequences and negative effects of this relationship without someone telling me that there's like has to be a specific title to it for me to do that. And this is honestly why as a therapist and running our groups at calling home, someone could tell me all the criteria for narcissistic personality disorder. And like I don't really see a value in saying, yes, they have NPD because first I can't diagnose the person without meeting them. And let's just look at the behavior. Let's look at the impact of the relationship on you.

Let's look at what this is doing, the entrenched patterns that are happening here. And I know that getting a diagnosis for someone can help validate you. It can give you power. It can make you be able to separate yourself from their actions. But I want you to know that you also can just learn to trust yourself and your assessment of the relationship without necessarily always having that third party validation. because for a lot of you, you're not going to be able to get it. You're just guessing.

You're taking their behavior and putting it into the DSM or watching videos and being like, oh, this sounds like my parent. And you're still outsourcing that to a third party, which yes, can be helpful. But it's also okay to just say, I'm allowed to make a decision about this relationship based on how it feels for me, the behavior I'm witnessing, the impact of that behavior on my life and what I want to do about it. Now, I think similar to the last question, there's a lot of ambiguous loss happening here. You're thinking about like, will my mother die without fixing any of this, without repairing with herself, taking accountability, having reflection, or doing that

with me or any of my siblings or my other parent? And there's a real chance that that happens. there's also a real chance that she wakes up and has some sort of change in her life. The thing here is that you have to separate yourself from that outcome. It cannot be that I will only survive and thrive and live if my mom saves herself. Because you might not get that and you might waste your entire potential trying to get there. So can you say, I love my mom. I have hope for her. I am willing to be an ally or a support in these ways while she pursues growth.

And if she's not pursuing that, I'm going to protect myself over here. And I'm going to make sure that I survive and thrive and have a good life, even though she's having these challenges. And that doesn't mean that it's not going to hurt you and affect you and that you're not going to feel some of that grief while all of this is happening. but you're going to be able to do that simultaneously while also having your own life and taking care of yourself. Thank you so much for sending in that question. I hope for anyone that can relate to this caller that that answer was helpful. And if you want to work on some of that radical acceptance or that decoupling of having empathy and compassion from obligation and figuring out what you are obligated to do, we would love to have you.

inside the Family Cycle Breakers Club at Calling Home. I think people who can relate to these questions would really benefit from our family estrangement group, our estranged adult child group, and also our discussion boards where people are coming on and sharing messages from their family members, things that they're struggling with. And if you're not feeling like you want to be on camera in a group of people, those discussion boards are another great way to navigate that and to get some of the. those positive benefits of being part of a community without totally being as vulnerable as

some of you might feel in the groups. But I do think our groups are really, really wonderful and really worth it if you decide to participate. You can join the Family Cycle Rakers Club at callinghome.co. I will be back next week with another episode on Tuesday and then another Q&A episode on Thursday. So definitely submit your questions to me. Whitney at callinghome.com. dot CO can be a written question or a voice note like this person submitted today. And please don't forget to like, subscribe, leave a review, comment on this episode. I know that I may not always reply to your comments, but please know that on YouTube and on Spotify, I read all of them and your reviews on Apple Podcasts really, really help us get this show out to more people

and keep it free to all of you. And we know we want to keep doing that. So thank you so, so much. I hope to see some of you in a group soon and to hear from you. And I will see you next week. Bye, everyone. 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 Colling Home or Whitney Goodman. For more information on this, please see Calling Home's terms of service linked in the show notes below.