CALLING HOME with Whitney Goodman, LMFT - When is it Time to Accept That Your Parents Were Not Who You Needed Them to Be?

Episode Date: July 2, 2026

One of the harder truths of estrangement is coming to terms with the fact that your parent was not who you needed them to be and in many cases is not going to become that person. In this episode’s Q&A, two questions circle that theme. First, a couple with two young children trying to integrate not one, but two sets of critical and unsupportive grandparents into their family. Second, a woman asks how to ever reach true acceptance when you’re stuck between anger and still wanting them to be different.Note: Due to a recording issue, part of Whitney's response to the second question was lost. Apologies for the briefer response to the second question!Whitney 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 Home podcast. I am Whitney Goodman and today we have a Q&A episode. Today's two questions come from really different places, but I think they're both circling the same hard truth. The moment you realize that maybe your parents are not who you needed them to be and that they're probably not going to become that person, I think that's one of the most painful realizations that there is and it gets even more complicated when you have your own kids now, and you're watching the same dynamics try to repeat themselves in the next generation. So I pulled together two letters that I think will go well together in this episode. The first is from a couple that has a two and a half year old and a six-month-old,

and they're deep in the trenches of trying to integrate two sets of grandparents into their young family. And it's not going very well. When their second baby was born, even with a postpartum depression diagnosis in the picture, what they got instead was grandparents showing up in nice clothes for a quick photo with the baby and then leaving. And they talk about visits spent chasing around their kids in a house full of breakable heirlooms while being told everything they're doing is wrong. And underneath all of that is a feeling that they're not really being valued as people or as the parents of this child.

The second letter is from someone two and a half years into an estrangement from her parents after a lifelong pattern of control, betrayal, and zero accountability. She's not really asking whether to stay estranged. She's asking, how do you move toward true acceptance when the pain isn't a single event, but a 41-year pattern, your own brain has worked over time to protect you from seeing? She's stuck between anger and grief and that stubborn wish that you just wants them to be different. Two very different situations, but the same thing sitting underneath both, the grief of accepting who your parents actually are.

Let's go ahead and get into it. My wife and I are deeply struggling with balancing and integrating both sets of boomer grandparents into our young family. Our son is two and a half and our daughter is six months old. The transition of marriage and child rearing truly feels like we have not only created many new, emotional wounds in respect to our boomer parents, but in the process we also discovered many

childhood wounds that neither of us knew we had. A recurring concept that haunts us is a stark realization that we are not or were never valuable human beings. Rather, we are akin to something like a performing circus monkey. This concept became a reality when our second child was born. Both sets of boomer grandparents offered my wife, zero, is capitalized here, for emphasis, help postpartum, despite my wife having diagnosed PPD. The only experience we actually had with them in my daughter's infancy was them wearing fancy clothes and showing up at our house for a couple of hours to snap a quick shot with the baby and they were on their way. A visit at the grandparents' house typically consists of us chasing our children around their house, filled with

breakable glass trinkets and heirlooms, all the while the grandparents sit and mock our parenting methods. We are consistently told we are doing everything wrong, that our lifestyle is wrong, and our parenting is wrong. In reality, both of our children are thriving, and we are deeply proud of both of them. We are definitely countercultural people in our parents' eyes. We love to garden, hunt and fish, be outside, and love going camping with the kids. Our parents only talk of their career achievements and consistently remind us of our lack of work ethic slash interest in advancing employment. I would deeply appreciate if you can talk about how slash why we could keep our boomer parents integrated with our young family and is it really keeping a relationship alive when they literally

left us to rot at the lowest, hardest point of our lives. Gosh, okay. Where do we begin here? Let's first start, I think, with the realization of the grandparents that you are getting versus maybe the ones that you wanted. It seems to like now, you know, you've had two children in two years. So maybe this is all kind of catching up to everybody on how this is going to work, the fact that the kids are here. Things maybe got exponentially harder for you guys once you had your second child and you were hoping that you would get a little bit more support. I had postpartum depression really bad with my first child and I understand how difficult that can be and how much more challenging it can be having an infant when you have

postpartum depression and even more challenging when you have multiple children and you're going through that. And it's absolutely understandable why you would want your parents both sets of them to be there and to be helpful and why you would feel hurt when they were unable or unwilling to do so. Now, that being said, the question that you're asking here is for me to talk about how or why we should keep them integrated into your young family. So the first thing I would want to tackle here is do you feel like out of these four people, both of your mothers and both of your fathers, is there anyone that you can go to that you think would be the most receptive to this information? It sounds like the four of them might share a lot of similar qualities and maybe get along with one another. They're acting in the same way.

So do either of you feel like in any combination you could go to one person, one set of grandparents, would one of you be better at talking to them versus the other? And is there a way that you could have a conversation about what's going on here and have you done that yet? Without knowing if this has been communicated or how it's been communicated, that's where I would start. And of course, knowing that it could go one of two ways when you have that conversation. But picking out which person might be the best entry point. So let's, for example, say that your mother-in-law might be the most receptive person in this scenario. Maybe she's the one that is the most emotionally immature or the one that you feel like you could give feedback to

and she's going to take it better than the others. Could you start by going to her, whether that's you or your partner, whoever you think would be the best to deliver this information and be like, hey, some version of this, I'm not telling you exactly what to say in this situation, but some version of we really want guys to be in our kids' lives. we want to be around you. But when we come around and it's constant criticism and judgment and we just can't, it really doesn't feel good to be around you.

And I'm wondering if we can talk about that, if you understand how that might feel for us to bring the kids around. And depending on the receptiveness of that conversation, hopefully in a best case scenario, you would be able to talk about it. They would say something like, you know, oh my gosh, we do not want you to feel that way. Or I'm sorry that we've been doing that. We think that you guys are great parents. You know, that's when it comes down to a line of like, are you perceiving and feeling something that they're not intending to do?

Or are they doing that? And they're going to double down on the behavior and be like, well, your parenting's crazy. And we should be able to comment on it and things along those lines. And I've seen this go both ways with shades of gray in between. And the reason for bringing up this with like your closest ally in these two sets of grandparents is that they might be a better person to then bring this back to the other people or try to recruit them into having a better relationship with you, particularly if there is one person or a couple in this dynamic that tends to be worse or is making

more of those types of comments. Now, if you've already done that and you feel like I don't want to have this conversation or I've already had this conversation and it did not go well, understandable. The next thing I would kind of move on to that you can think about, discuss with each other, discuss with your therapist if you have one. is thinking about why it's important for you to maintain this relationship and what you are hoping to get out of it. So there's a lot of things that we can get from grandparents, even if they're not the best grandparents in the world. There can be love that is felt on behalf of the child. There can be continuity in, you know, the family culture or religious

background or just generational history, the grandparent might be doing positive things for the child, investing in them in certain ways, whether that's emotionally, intellectually, financially, financially, et cetera, the parents could be role models in some regard for the child. In this situation, it sounds like you are very different from your parents, both of you. And you have very different values, interests. hobbies and lifestyles. So that makes it harder for this to work seamlessly. It requires a lot more effort. If you think about the people that you are friends with, they probably enjoy a lot of the same things that you do. And that doesn't mean that you can't get along with other people and that you don't like other people.

You're not able to tolerate differences. This is more about, well, it's harder to be friends and to hang out with people. consistently and go on vacation with and spend like your precious free time with people that you don't have a lot in common with. And I think that this is what makes family relationships much more challenging is that we are often a combination of like a bunch of random different people in a family system. These families are are rarely homogenous and all the same. They're usually quite eclectic. It's, you know, some people get lucky. and they have these like really cohesive similar families, but I find that that's often not the case. So if you feel like, wow, we have really nothing in common and you may not even want

necessarily their influence and their value system to put on your children now at the same time, I think there's a lot that kids can learn about being around people that are very different from them who are not cruel or abusive. So being around someone who really values working hard and career advancement and higher education and status, you know, that can be something that can open up a conversation with your children and a different way of them seeing people, even if it's just to teach them what that can look like and what that does to you and how that might not be a great way of living if that's your value system. But that's very different from being around someone who doesn't share your values and then also

exerts their will onto you. So there is a very real world where you and your parents can be completely different people. You like to camp and only work the amount that you need to to do the things that you want to do. You're not really interested in higher levels of achievement just for the sake of achieving and that's your life. And your parent could feel very differently about the world. You guys could coexist and have a very good relationship if it ended there and you found a way to appreciate what the other person was bringing to the table and how they live their life and how that works for them and the happiness that they've found through that system. What doesn't work is when you go over to your parents' house and they are disparaging you

and your way of living in front of your children and in front of you. That is a totally different situation. And so this is where when people do a lot of like, they cut me off because I have this belief or because I do this or because they don't like that I don't have as much money as them. I find that that's often not what we're talking about here. We're talking about how those belief systems are being communicated and deployed within the family system. when someone feels insecure or like you think that you're better than them or they don't like

how you're living your life, that can come out in ways that are very hurtful and harmful and full of vitriol. And that's not okay in a family system. And it makes sense why you don't want to hang out with people that do that. Now, you can again have two people in a family who are completely the opposite, and they have found a way to have love and appreciation for one another. And I know that you guys get what I'm talking about here, that there are obviously limits to this. And when someone has beliefs that are fundamentally a threat to you as a person, that's not what I'm talking about here. We're talking about career achievements and work ethic and all that kind of stuff in this question, in this episode. So I can't answer.

the question for you about why you should keep your parents in your kids' life, because I think that's deeply personal. What I can tell you is that when these relationships are healthy, and there is love and reciprocity and positive exchange and interactions, these relationships in the literature are shown to be very beneficial, especially to the grandparent. I believe. I believe, that a lot of the data that is out as of late is that grandparents tend to live longer when they have regular contact with their grandchildren. Their health is improved. There were some studies that came out on this recently that I need to pull up. But a lot of the benefit, I think, was being quantified on behalf of the grandparent. The flip side of this is you obviously don't

want to spend time around people that are constantly being abusive and critical and abrasive. And you don't want them to do that to your children. And so at this crossroads, this is where I would say, if you cannot talk to these people, you're not able to have a good conversation and you cannot get them to lower their criticism and their contempt for how you're living, then maybe there are some other adjustments that you can look into. One of those would be not doing things at home with these people in places where they feel a lot more comfortable to be so disparaging and critical or in their home where you feel like it's not comfortable to have your children there because they're going to be breaking things and running around. I get that. I have three kids and like it is really stressful

to go to people's houses who don't understand kids, don't prepare for them. Like you're just running around. You're on edge the whole time. And then if you're doing, doing that while you're also actively being criticized, you're just going wild. Like, you can't focus you want to crawl out of your skin. I know this feeling. It's terrible. So maybe the agreement becomes, you know, we're going to do things in places that are safe for us to go with them in the kids that aren't stressful, that are time limited. Maybe we only see one set of parents at a time. Maybe that disrupts this dynamic. But how can you and your partner work together to think about, if we want to maintain this relationship, what is it going to look like? Because the way that we're

doing it right now isn't working for us. It's causing us to feel very resentful. It's giving our parents an opportunity to interact this way with us. And it's causing a lot of chaos in our lives. And you might be able to do this with little to no pushback from the parents. They might be like, no, we want you to come to the house and become a little bit more domineering around that and so that's where you kind of have to decide what you want to do next. But I don't think you're at that level yet based on this question. I would first start there with the conversation, who can we communicate with, and then how else can we structure this relationship in a way that makes sense? And then the third piece I'm thinking about is that if you are very different from your parent,

you have a very different value system and you don't want to live your life like them. It sounds like you don't want to create the life that they've created. Sometimes it's important to step back from that and say, my parent got to build their life and I built my life. And this is the time where I am going to de-center their opinion of me and not give it so much weight. Because I think you have to ask yourself, like when I look at this person's life. Is it a life that I want to be living? Is their perspective on how much I work and what I do in

my free time, one that is worth listening to for me? And if it's not, you can still love and care about your parent and say, I'm not going to take advice to heart from them about these topics that I don't feel that we share the same outlook on. And you don't have to tell them, like, I don't want to listen to your parenting advice or I don't care what you have to say about that. It's more about can we de-center that, move it over to the side, and imagine it like, I don't know, just a random person that is commenting on something about you that they don't really know or they don't hold the expertise or the opinion for you to be able to take it to heart. And you said in this question, like, we're really proud of our kids. We think that they're great kids. It's,

sounds like you're proud of your parenting. And so that's something to sit down and think about, like, are there concerns really genuine? Are the things that they're saying, things that we should listen to and think about? Because, yeah, we notice that these are problems that are happening too. Do we think that our parents were the type of parents that we want to be? Are they raising kids in the same time, in the same way? Do they share our values and our belief system? Or do we want to say, you know what, this is an advice that I want to pick up. I'm going to leave it right there. And maybe I want to listen to my parents' advice about how to do something in our home or

about taxes or about my car because I feel like we're aligned on those things. But maybe this isn't the space where we're aligned. Those are many steps that I would take in a situation like this where you are. you are feeling about how do I integrate them into our family? How do we want to have a relationship? And obviously, then I don't start talking about estrangement or having a limited relationship or seeking even more distance from these grandparents unless it has been shown that they cannot be around you or your children without engaging in harmful and or abusive and or neglectful patterns that they refuse to augment, recognize, take accountability for, or change. Because this is the delicate balance with

these family relationships. We know that family relationships can be enriching, valuable, and important. And we know that harmful relationships, particularly those that are filled with abuse, harm, neglect can be uniquely and extremely detrimental to our well-being and to our other relationships in our life, including our relationship with our children. And so everybody has to use their discernment to constantly be weighing those scales of like, what is the exact right ratio of this for us? And this is going to change for you guys as your kids get older, as they notice more, as you see the way that your parent interacts with your children as they grow up. And so this doesn't have to be forever decisions. For some of you, it does because the behavior is so egregious that there is no child of any age that can be around a parent like this.

But for some of you, the behavior doesn't become an issue because it adjust as the child gets older or it becomes an. issue later when the kid is older and the behavior has intensified morphed, et cetera. So allow yourself to not project too far into the future about all of this too and just say, we have a two and a half year old and a six month old. For those kids change rapidly in the next year. They are going to be different kids. So how do you and your wife want to look at even just the next six months of this? and then can we reevaluate after we have made some adjustments and see how we feel?

All of this is really a titration experiment type of thing. Thank you so much for that question. I really appreciate it. And I think a lot of people are going to get a lot out of the question that you asked and are going to relate to it. So thank you so much. All right. Let's get to that second question. I became estranged from my parents and sister in 2020.

after a pattern of behavior of controlling, aggressive, and deeply betraying behavior. This included attempts to financially coerce my husband and I around our wedding, public outbursts and intimidation, repeated attacks on my mental health, and false defamatory accusations about my partner. My partner has helped me see how healthy families act and love, and that has been revelatory, but contributed to the breakdown leading to estrangement. My parents went behind my back to maintain a relationship with my ex and co-parent who I experienced as abusive, to which they are aware. I know they have done this to deliberately hurt and harm me, and I've asked 50 times for them not to do this. They deny that he did anything wrong and continue to support him.

They have also involved my child without my consent, including telling her untrue things about me that affects her emotionally, and this is still continuing. More broadly, there's a lifelong pattern where I felt emotionally unsupported and unprotected and abandoned physically and emotionally. And these events seem to reinforce that in a very painful way. There's been no genuine accountability or repair and instead a tendency to minimize or deflect responsibility, guilting and blaming me and my husband, and using every excuse such as their friend has died, et cetera, to get me to bend to their way. I've had hope, which has held me back as facing the truth of who they are has been too hard for me to accept. Knowing my whole life has essentially been a lie. There have been all the normal narcissistic father, parentification,

and emotional immaturity behaviors, but I kept this hidden so deep inside to protect myself as a child and then adult child. I am now still tormented and in deep pain two and a half years later. I still find it so confusing and hard to believe. It feels that both is strange or not being a strange and encountering their toxic behavior is bad for my mental health. My question is, how do you move toward true acceptance when your parents' behavior feels not just hurtful, but like a repeated pattern of control, betrayal, and lack of accountability, both in childhood and now as an adult. I feel stuck between anger, grief, and wanting them to be different, especially when

their actions have impacted my child as well. My brain has tried to protect me from the truth for 41 years. and is continuing to do that. I don't know how to move on and ever get over this and be happy with the estrangement. Okay, well, first of all, you don't need to be happy with this. You don't need to be happy with the estrangement or celebrating it. And I don't know, I don't know where anybody is getting that. This is really sad.

It's really awful to have to separate yourself from your family. and to be pushed to a point where you say, this behavior has gotten so bad against me, my child, my husband, that I have to make this decision. And of course, you're not going to feel happy about that. I want you to know that you are not alone in all of this. These are some of the most common stories that we hear inside the Family Cycle Breakers Club at Calling Home.

And there is so much more support and information, waiting for you there. You can find out more at callinghome.com. And if you have any other questions, you can always send them to me at Whitney at calling home.com. You can send them written or in a voice note. And this month, this July, at Calling Home, we are going to be talking about daughtering, which is the invisible labor that daughters do. And we're going to be talking about how that labor happens, what it can do to and how to keep doing the things that you love in support of your family, how to keep your strengths, but how to put down what wasn't supposed to be yours and also how to distribute

the labor in your family. This is also a really good content month for people who have daughters or who have women in their family that might be taking on more of this labor and who want to learn more about it so they don't go on to repeat those. cycles within their own family systems and can find a good way to utilize the strengths of their family system and their community in a way that benefits everyone and doesn't just take advantage of some. And that will be starting on July 6th. So I hope to see you there. I will be running groups on the topic every Wednesday in the month of July. And I will see you next week on Tuesday for another episode. That episode is going to be really interesting.

I'm going to be talking about brainwashing, how brainwashing actually works or doesn't work, and the impact of social influence on estrangement and third-party influence as well. So looking forward to that episode. I'll see you there. Please don't forget to like, subscribe, leave a review. Follow us on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcast. It really helps the podcast grow and keeps us sticking here with you with a free show. All right.

See you all later. The Calling Home podcast is not engaged in providing therapy services, mental health advice, or other medical advice or services. It is not a substitute for advice from a qualified health care provider and does not create any therapist, patient, or other treatment relationship between you and Calling Home or Whitney Goodman. For more information on this, please see Calling Home's terms of service linked in the show notes below.