CALLING HOME with Whitney Goodman, LMFT - Why Can't I Be Me When I'm With You?

Episode Date: September 8, 2026

People don't walk into a therapist's office and say they're having a differentiation problem. They say they feel like a different person around their family, or that they have a whole life their parents know nothing about. Whitney walks through what differentiation actually is, and the four very different situations people are in when they can't be themselves around family.In this episode, you'll learn:- What differentiation means in Bowen family systems, and the three ways it commonly goes wrong- The difference between a family that disagrees with you and one that targets who you are- Why going no contact doesn't automatically differentiate you from your familyWhitney 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.

I'm going to read you what some people have said about how it feels to be themselves in their families. It never felt safe for me to express my true self in front of my family. As for hobbies, I learned that I needed to hide them too. When I happily talk about a food I liked, my mother would say, that's all you ever talk about. Our conversations remain superficial. After all these years living together, I just feel like a stranger among them. They don't know me at all. Every time I talked about my real emotions and my real opinions, they either rejected me or made fun of me or got angry. I pretend I'm okay when I'm hurt. I keep my interest to myself so no one can know me that well. It just wasn't worth telling them anything anymore. It was so superficial, it actually became a huge strain on me. Welcome back to the Calling Home podcast.

I'm Whitney Goodman. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist and the founder of Calling Home. This is the show for people who are breaking patterns. and navigating complicated family relationships. Today's episode is called, Can I Be Me When I'm With You? People don't usually walk into a therapist office and say something like,

I'm having a differentiation problem. They say I feel like a different person around my family. They say, I get in the car after Thanksgiving and I don't recognize the version of me that just sat at the table for hours. Or they say, I have a whole life my parents know nothing about, and I don't know how it got that way. Or they say some version of, I love them, and I cannot be honest with them, and I don't know what to do. We're going to be

talking about two psychological concepts today that can help you with this. The first one is differentiation, which is a term from Bowen family systems, and it describes your ability to stay connected to your family while still holding on to your own thoughts, feelings, and values. And Marie Bowen's own definition of a well-differentiated person is someone who recognizes the reality that we need to depend on other people and someone who can stay calm and clear-headed in the face of conflict, criticism, and rejection. And someone who can stay clear-headed enough to tell the difference between what they actually think and what they are just feeling in the moment.

Individuation is a broader lifelong process of developing your own self. You have your own identity, your own preferences, your own sense of direction, separate from your family's expectations and beliefs. And Carl Jung treated individuation as one of the central tasks of life. So today we're going to be talking about building the capacity. to stay emotionally connected to people while keeping your own identity and your own clear values. And I'm going to walk you through four different situations or things that I think people deal with in their families, four different patterns.

One is the family that demands sameness where being different is treated as a betrayal. And if you're not like them, they will reject you. The second is the family that punishes the family member who is different. So where the difference is not a hobby or a career choice but who the person is and the family often aims like racism, sexism, homophobia, and contempt directly at them, typically over and over for years. The third is the person who never really got to build a solid sense of self in the first place for a variety of reasons.

And they don't have a clear sense of what they think or what they want. and they might genuinely find that some of this gets better as they get more solid. And then there is the person who is estranged because there is a real assumption out there that once you have gone, no contact, the differentiation work is finished. And it's not. Some of the most fused people I have encountered actually have not spoken to their families in a decade. As we move through this episode, this is not.

a referendum on families that are very close. Closeness is not the problem. Sharing family values is not the problem. There are families who spend an enormous amount of time together, who talk every day, who share a faith and a language and a set of traditions and whose members are still perfectly free to be themselves inside of all of that. And even in families where there is a lot of cohesiveness and sameness, that's not always conformity. You can have closeness and individuality at the same time, and you can individuate without rejecting your family or your culture. And the goal here and the goal of this episode and the goal of differentiation is not to become

so secure in yourself that you can tolerate being mistreated. That is not differentiation. That is just a sophisticated way of talking yourself into staying somewhere that is hurting you. There is a very big difference, okay? And I hear a version of this constantly. It's usually something like, I just need to work on myself more so their comments don't bother me. And sometimes that's true. Sometimes the comments should bother you. And the fact that they bother you is not a deficiency or something wrong with your nervous system. And so we're going to spend some time on that. And if what we talk about in the show is the work that you've been trying to do on your

own. You do not have to keep doing it by yourself. The Family Cycle Breakers Club is our membership community at Calling Home, and it's a community of people actively working on generational patterns with structured tools, clinicians to support you. And we are spending all of September on exactly this topic. So if you relate today, this is definitely the month that you want to join. You can join at at Callinghome.co, and the link is in the show notes. Let's get into the episode. So first let's talk about what differentiation actually is and why a lot of people get it wrong. Bowen believed that the family was an emotional unit, okay, not a collection of individuals who happened to share the same last name. He said that when people feel distant or disconnected

from their families, that that's more often feeling than fact and that families affect their members' thoughts and feelings and action so profoundly that it often seems like everyone is living under the same emotional skin. And this means that a change in one person's functioning is predictably followed by changes in everybody else's for better or worse. So your sister might get sober and then your mom gets even more anxious. Or you start therapy and your dad starts avoiding you more. You get a new job in another state and now there's like a constant family crisis that

needs your attention. It also means that anxiety is contagious in family. families. And when family members get anxious, Bowen proposed that the anxiety escalates by spreading among the family members. And as anxiety goes up, being emotionally connected to your family stops being comforting and starts being stressful. When the system is under a lot of pressure, someone usually absorbs it. Bowen described one or more members who end up feeling overwhelmed, isolated or out of control and said that these are the people who accommodate the most in order to reduce tension in everybody else. And the one who does the most accommodating literally

absorbs the family's anxiety. And that person, he argued, is the family member most vulnerable to problems down the line. And so if you're listening to this podcast, there's a decent chance that that was you. Sometimes it is the oldest daughter, sometimes it's the kid who was quote unquote easy. Sometimes it's the one who could read the room the fastest. And whoever it was, they were doing a job in the family. And the job was typically to keep the temperature down, manage everyone, do not add on to the pile. And Bowen also said that groups vary in how much pressure they put on people to conform. And individuals vary in how susceptible they are to that pressure. And we have to be really careful here because I think family systems can slide sort of into

blaming the person who got the worst of it in the family. And Bowen's framework really says that the less developed a person's self, the more impact other people have on their functioning. And often the harder they work to control other people actively or passively. And he described three ways a poorly differentiated person. can look. The first one is the chameleon. So this is a person who adjust what they think and say and do in order to please whoever is in front of them, whatever group they're in at that time. Then you also have the bully. So bullies depend on approval and acceptance as much as

chameleons do. They push other people to agree with them instead of agreeing with everybody else. And disagreement threatens those bullies as much as it threatens the chameleon. So think about that in relation to the parent in your family who cannot tolerate being contradicted about anything ever, you know, even if it's just like how to get somewhere. They need constant reassurance that they are right and assimilation with their perspective. And then there's the rebel. So Bowen described the extreme rebel as somebody who's also poorly differentiated. If you pretend to be a self by just routinely opposing whatever other position people take,

that's not really differentiation. That's not a solid self. So if your entire identity is organized around being the opposite of your family or of your family member, you're still organizing your identity around your family. Now, on the opposite end of this, a person who is well differentiated recognizes that they really do depend on other people. They're not pretending to be an island. And they can stay calm and clear-headed enough in the face of conflict, criticism, and rejection to tell the difference between thinking that comes from facts and thinking that is clouded by emotion or proximity to that source of emotion, which a lot of times is the family. Bowen also describes two levels of differentiation.

There is a functional level, which is kind of around like what is happening in your life. And then there is a basic level, which is much more stable and doesn't get changed as much by circumstances. So changes in the basic level can happen, but only when changes in the functional level are sustained over a long period of time. But this does mean that you can become differentiated later in. in life. This is something that you can work at. And I have seen people achieve tremendous change in these areas, you know, with my own eyes over the last decade. But this is not something that you just change like in a weekend or by reading one book. The person has to make structured long-term effort to change it. And then this is also why we have the resources at calling home for six

months or for a year because this cannot happen overnight. Bowen also said something that I am a little bit on and I think requires more nuance. He believed that people had to resolve their emotional issues with their family of origin before they could become a mature and healthy adult. And he explicitly encouraged people to reconnect with their families and work it out with them because he believed the change in the self happens through the change in relationships. I agree with that. But I think for a big part of this audience, that can be dangerous. Bowen was writing this at a time and in a context where the possibility that some families were actively harmful to their mothers was not really disgust. And so we're going to come back to that later in the episode as well.

I want to start with the first situation, which is the families that demand sameness and we're being different is treated as a threat. And this doesn't usually show up in like one dramatic moment. It's a lot of small things, death by a thousand cuts, a thousand small corrections throughout your lifetime. You know, you bring up a topic and there's a subject change. You come home with a new interest and somebody's critiquing you for it. You dye your hair and your mom's making a face at you. You bring up a book and everybody's criticizing you and joking about it.

You know, if you change something about your politics or your faith, everybody goes crazy. And one of the quotes that I read to you at the beginning of this episode described someone feeling like they were being made to doubt whether their interests and preferences were even real. So that feeling of like, am I too young to know what I know, to an experience, to uneducated? Is that not me? And so if the family asserts that you would not actually like a certain thing, that it's not for you and that if you tried it, you would find out they were right, then why even bother? And there's a certain level of control in these families because it doesn't always look like control. It just looks like them knowing you well, right? Like, we know what you like.

You wouldn't like that. And a family that does not allow any individuality is often operating under a system of emotional emmeshment and control that is trying to appear as closeness, right? personal boundaries are a threat to the family unity and autonomy is disloyalty. So if you are trying to think independently, set a personal boundary, have a different preference, then often that is labeled as selfish, ungrateful, rebellious. And this happens for a few reasons, okay? Sometimes it's survival conditioning. In rigid families, keeping everyone like a lot.

is often mistaken for keeping the peace. And if everyone feels the same way, then nobody fights. It's a really bad strategy, but I think that this has often been used in generations where this was a survival tactic. It was something that families did to maintain cohesiveness, even something that they did when the family had faced discrimination or exile in the past, and this was something that they learned how to do. Sometimes it comes from, a fear of losing control. Parents and older generations can even see the kid's independent choice as rejection of them personally, rather than just them growing up. Okay. And sometimes it's about the parents' own self-image. Some family members project their unresolved fears, their expectations,

their own fragile self-esteem onto other people like their children, or they see their relatives or their children as an extension of themselves. And so when you decide to do something different, it feels like you are actually rejecting them. And then there's a more extreme version of this that I think we've talked about a lot in our groups at Calling Home, and that is that some people do not view children as separate people. They are extensions, they are props, their emotions, and their choices are supposed to mirror the family's needs. And the way that that gets enforced is through,

shame and guilt. Now, I think that the way some families handle this can be very disorienting. The family will, you know, have a person that is trying to separate a little bit or get some help or take up space. And then the family will accuse them of being the selfish one or they're narcissistic or they've been brainwashed. And healthy individuation can often be labeled as destructive individualism when that's not what happened. And this might be the point where people tell you, like, well, who cares what they think? You know, like, that never really works. The first thing I would say to you here is that it makes sense why you want them to

understand you and to validate your choices. And often the first thing you need to stop trying to do is trying to get them to see your preference as valid or the right thing. This is the loop that a lot of people get stuck in, right? So they are rejecting your job or your partner and you're trying to cite evidence and explain and you're just handing them back this idea that they get to be the judge and they get to decide. And you just need to present the right evidence in their court.

And then you are going to be given like the go ahead from them. But differentiation is not about you like winning the argument or. becoming an adult in the right way. It's about you learning how to hold your position without needing them to endorse or ratify it. And this doesn't mean that you stop caring about their input or their advice on certain issues or even what is appropriate in your family. It's just about there being a certain level of nuance and individuality and you being able to make a decision for yourself, while also considering the needs and wants of the family. You can be an healthy individual within a system.

Now, one of the big things that happens when people try to make a change in a system that doesn't want to change is that you get something called a change-back reaction. So when you stop doing your job in the system or what you've always done, the system is going to work to push you back into place. And sometimes they do that through anger, guilt, a crisis, a family member calling you up and being like so-and-so told me what you're doing. This isn't always a sign that you're doing something wrong. Sometimes it is.

Sometimes it's just that you are shaking up the system. And people are trying to push back on you to get the family unit back to what it was because that's where everyone is comfortable. You also need to be really honest with yourself about what you're actually deciding here. So being fully yourself in a family that punishes it is risky. There's a cost to it. And there's also a real cost to hiding yourself for life. And not everyone deserves or should be allowed to see all of you, right? If you are going to keep certain parts of your life out of family conversations, because that is genuinely the least bad viable option for you right now,

that's a strategy. That's something that you can choose and you can feel empowered to do. And that can be very, very different from being forced or shamed into hiding something when it comes from you and it is your choice. Okay. It's also worth noting that when your authenticity gets punished, you learn to hide it. And it is very hard to have any actual intimacy and connection without attachment. And instead, you get something very, very superficial. So when the family demands sameness in the name of closeness, they actually usually end up with a lot more distance than the families who can tolerate a lot of difference. And that's the irony here is that when they demand safeness to get closeness, they are often getting the opposite. Now I want to talk.

about a different situation. Everything that I just described assumed that the differences in the family or the disagreement were about preferences like career, hobbies, food, politics, parenting, and these can be frustrating, but I think negotiable for a lot of families. But this next example is not that. There are certainly families that target you for who you are. So who you choose to partner with or love, or the daughter being treated as less capable, less serious, less worth investing in than her brother. The family who has a family member of color, who they are racist against, the disabled family whose life is discussed as a tragedy while they're sitting in the room, or a family member who is trans, who has been told that their family

loves them, but they just won't use their correct name, or they just think. that what they're doing is wrong. If your family is using racism, homophobia, misogyny, or contempt at you, that is not a differentiation problem on your end. No amount of developing a more solid sense of self makes that acceptable or okay. And the work of becoming a more solid you does not obligate you to sit and take that. And if anyone has ever told you that the reason you are getting those types of comments from your family is because you're just not secure enough about yourself yet, I want you to consider the possibility that you get those comments from your family because they do not want you to feel more secure about yourself. I think that it's really important

that families get very clear on the difference between disagreement. and dehumanization. And I know this sounds obvious, but it's often not. You know, if you grew up in a family where there was a lot of, like, we just don't agree with your lifestyle, was treated as a difference of opinion as if, like, you have different football teams that you're fans of. You may have spent many years of your life trying to argue your way into being seen as a full human being in your family. And you're allowed to recognize that, like, this is not a debate. that you want to keep on having. You cannot be persuaded out of your own existence, and you don't need to argue with a family that is trying to do that to you. We also need to be real about how often

this stuff is repeated. These are not one-off remarks, okay? When a family member is continuing to say the same remark to you at a gathering for 15 years, like, that's not a slip-up. That is something that they are clearly doing that is a pattern and often these patterns have a function within the family. Okay. They are establishing that you are on the outside and we are over here. When something becomes repetitive and you can recognize that, you need to label it as such and approach it as something that is being done routinely and often systematically to create some sort of outcome.

Now, the biggest test around differentiation in these types of issues is that you can stop needing them to see you and understand you. And I know that this is so hard because it's all we want from our families, but this is the thing that is going to give you the most freedom in the end. For a lot of you that are battling family systems like this, so much of your energy is going into getting your family member to understand you and to see you and to admit. why something they said was harmful. And sometimes that conversation is worth having. And I think all of you at some point try to have that conversation. But when you've had that conversation a hundred times and nothing has changed, you have to stop needing their acknowledgement to be who you are. You also get to

be in charge of your exposure to this. So you are allowed to limit your exposure. to people who have been continuously trying to shame and harm you, ridicule you, call you names, I don't care who those people are in your life. You are allowed to adjust your exposure. And this is not a failure of differentiation. You know, deciding how much access someone gets to you can actually also be the clearest expression of you having a well-functioning and well-established inner self. And if this is your situation with your family, I think it's a very good. I think It's so important that you have someone outside the family who sees you accurately, okay, who can tell you that you are not who they say that you are.

And that can be a friend, a trusted family member, a therapist, a group of people. You know, I think this is one of the reasons why we have these groups at calling home is so that you can come to a place and be like, oh, these people get me and they are not treating me like that. and I can see that that is possible. Now let's talk about that third situation, which are the people who were not able to build a solid sense of self. And if they could improve that, it would really change the outcome and how they feel in their

families. Okay. Some of you are not necessarily dealing with a family that punishes difference, but you're dealing with the fact that you did not get to develop a clear sense of who you are for a variety of reasons that might be your family's fault. or other factors. And now as an adult, you're trying to establish that. Okay. So some of you might struggle with making decisions without constantly checking with other people. You're afraid of disappointing others. Your boundaries are unclear. You are not entirely sure about what you

think about things until someone tells you what to think. You people please, you feel responsible for how everyone around you is feeling all the time and this feels very, very exhausting. What you want to be able to do is describe yourself consistently and feel sure of yourself. Okay. And this is a key part of developing your own personal identity. This is not necessarily about how confident you seem, but more about the descriptions that you give yourself being stable and that you actually believe them. Now, if you're individuating as an adult and developing this secure sense of self, I want you to know that this is not just like a stage that you missed and it's not too late. It's an ongoing process that lasts across the lifespan. Okay. And so you may be in the stage where you are exploring options, you're committing to some of them, or you're in more of the maintenance stage where you keep exploring the commitments that you've already made and you either deepen them or reviving them. them. And this is something that you are doing as you grow up, as you move through different

stages of life and as your life changes. Okay. And the way that you build a self is really through having small preferences that you exercise regularly, often in low-stakes situations. So try things like picking the restaurant, saying what movie you want to see, asking yourself, like, what do I think? When people ask you what you think, give an actual answer. I know that this sounds very simple, but this is really just you building a track record of your own preferences and it being okay. You also, in this work of differentiation, and honestly, I think this is true for all of these subsets that we've been through, have to work on tolerating other people's disappointment. You know, a lot of us cannot survive people being

upset with us. And if disappointing your family or disappointing your mom feels like a physical emergency, like something you're not allowed to do, you are going to fold every single time. And so you have to learn to sit and allow the discomfort to rise and fall when somebody is unhappy with you without immediately trying to fix it. And this is very hard. It's like an exposure therapy thing that you have to do, right? The other thing I want to point out here is that becoming more differentiated doesn't always change how your family interactions go. Sometimes people will not respond well to your differentiation and you having a stronger

sense of self. And sometimes they will. Sometimes because you stop scanning and negotiating and rehearsing and like absorbing into the room, you become a lot stronger and those people can no longer use their old tactics on you to kind of wear you down and make you change. And people respond differently to that. Some of them say, okay, I'm going to stop and I'm going to kind of join in this change. Others escalate their behavior. And that's when we're talking about two different issues here that have to be approached differently. I want to talk to the estranged listeners now or

anyone that is very low contact because I think there is an assumption. that when you separate physically and or emotionally from your family, that you are going to become differentiated. Okay. But I want you to remember that rebel that we talked about. This is the person who's poorly differentiated, but pretends to be a self by routinely opposing whatever position other people hold. And so if your family is still the thing that you are defining yourself against, they're still setting the terms. You are still reacting in opposition to them, okay? And this doesn't mean that you should do everything the same as your family or always give them a vote. It's that you are making choices about your own life and your first thought isn't, well, what would they say about this?

You know, your career, your parenting, your marriage, your body, not all of that should be organized around what your family is going to think about. it. Sometimes ending a relationship with a family member is the healthiest and most protective thing that you can do, but that removes the exposure. It doesn't always change who you are. For some of you, it will allow you to actually differentiate and individuate and form your own self because you have some space. And you could not do that when you were in close contact with your family. And then once you form that strong sense of self, you can decide. whether returning to the relationship in some capacity makes sense for you or does not.

Differentiated estrangement and distance really sounds like I know who I am. I know what happened. I have a clear read on this relationship and what it can and cannot be. And I have made a tactical evaluated decision about my level of contact. This distance is a decision that I am. making, not a reaction. Now, for those of you that are estranged, I want to revisit this piece that Bowen believed you had to resolve your own emotional issues with your family of origin in relationship with them in order to become a mature adult. And he encouraged reconnection. And I heard someone say the other day that a therapist shouldn't be allowed to be a therapist

if they have any cutoffs in their life. Obviously, I disagree with that. I think that's like a crazy absolutist take. But I think what both... Bowen was really getting at here was the avoidance is important, not the resolution. And he believed change happens in the self through change in relationships. And then unresolved conflict follows you into your present life. And that's right, right? A lot of estranged people can feel that that's true. But I think that the assumption that the resolution has to happen in that relationship with the original person is not always rooted in reality for everyone. Sometimes that relationship is dangerous. Sometimes that person is deceased. They've made it very clear that they won't have a relationship

with you. They're distant. They've backed away from that person. And so the idea that like this healthy adulthood version of you is kind of gated behind the participation in this relationship with another person that we cannot control, I think puts your development in. their hands. And if they're not willing to cooperate, you have to do this on your own. Okay. So this work is something that you have to do. You can do it in therapy, in a group, in a marriage, in a friendship, through your role as a parent. You can do it without necessarily relying on the other person to engage in that work with you. I think that a lot of the information about differentiation and even and some of the stuff I said in this episode today can be misused, and I've seen it weaponized.

So a person can learn that differentiation means staying connected while holding on to yourself. And they learn that a well-differentiated person can stay calm and clear-headed in the face of conflict, criticism, and rejection. And so then they conclude, reasonably, that the goal is to be the kind of person who can be in the room with anything. And then that becomes the reason to keep going back to this relationship repeatedly, right? And you start telling yourself, I shouldn't be so reactive. If I were healthier, this wouldn't bother me. My therapist says I need to regulate myself better.

I'm going to keep going back to this and working on not getting activated. And then if they're never going to change, I can just change my response. And my response is the problem. And I understand this logic, right? we have taken a framework about developing a self and applied it to justify the ongoing erasure of that self. You've made your own distress, the thing that needs fixing, which means you're agreeing with the family's core position that the problem isn't the family, it's you.

But differentiation is not distress tolerance for mistreatment. being able to stay calm during a hard conversation is a skill. Being able to stay calm while someone degrades you is not a higher form of that skill. That's dissociation, it's compliance, and it comes at a major cost to you. So your reaction is information, and the goal is not to completely silence that reaction. The point about being clear-headed is that you should be able to, understand the difference between thinking that is based on a careful assessment of the facts and thinking that is clouded by emotion that kind of takes you completely out of what is

actually happening in the relationship. And that doesn't mean that your feelings are all just like noise that you should get rid of, right? Sometimes when we look at the facts, the person who has hurt you many, many times shows every sign of continuing. And feeling bad in their presence is not your failure to regulate. You are making a correct assessment about that relationship. And so being unbothered is not the goal. I want you to move away from that. Okay. The goal is that you know what you think. You know what you're willing to be around. And you are able to act on that. And a well-differentiated person is not a person who feels

nothing. They are a person that can make their own choices and make those choices while being grounded in themselves and being able to hold space for this is what works for me, this is what works for the family, how can we meet somewhere around the middle, depending on the situation? And some situations are not about differentiation at all. So if there is violence, if there are threats being made, control, and there's a pattern of behavior that is consistently leaving you frightened, that is not a situation where more like solidity in yourself is going to fix that. So I don't want you to spend years trying to become secure enough to withstand a situation that you should be getting away from.

You might need a safety plan, a person who knows your situation in detail, not a more solid sense of self to be able to withstand abuse. So for any of you listening, I want you to be able to clearly differentiate between these things. You also do not need to accomplish this stage of self-development to protect yourself. Okay. You are allowed to remove yourself from harmful situations while you're still uncertain and not feeling solid about yourself. There is no threshold of like psychological development that you have to reach before you are allowed to prioritize your own safety. I think there are some people who use the language of differentiation to avoid friction in

relationships, right? Not all requests are boundary violations. Not all disappointment is a red flag. Not all expectations are control. And that is not a win either. Okay. The real definition here, the real goal is the capacity to stay emotionally connected while keeping our own identity and and clear personal values. So we want to be connected at the same time. And that's going to look different in every relationship. And this is something that's important for you in romantic relationships with friends and in family relationships.

I think a lot of the calculation that is being run here is about, can I be honest here in this relationship? And does the honesty cost me much more than I can afford in this relationship? Sometimes honesty is just the price we pay is a hard conversation, but in other relationships, it costs us safety, housing, the relationship, and those are very different prices to pay. And so you have to decide what the calculus is in these relationships. We are spending the entire month of September on this inside the Family Cycle Breakers Club at Calling Home, and we're going to get really, really practical so that you learn exactly how to do this.

So how to separate from what your family thinks. The specific mechanics of holding positions without arguing them all the time. We'll spend a lot of time on what this looks like if you are estranged or if you are in low contact. And we will work together to figure out where your own ceiling is in terms of how much you are willing to or want to tolerate in the name of growth in these relationships. There will be worksheets, scripts, and also the group with me. every single Wednesday to work on this even deeper with other people like you.

If you've been trying to do this by yourself and it hasn't been going well, we would love to see you this month at Calling Home. It's at Callinghome.com. And the link is in the show notes. I would love to see you so much for listening. Please don't forget to like, subscribe, leave a reviewer, comment on this episode. And I will see you again on Thursday for another Q&A episode. The Calling Home podcast is not engaged in providing therapy services, mental health advice or other medical advice or services. It is not a substitute for advice from a qualified health care provider and does not create any therapist patient or other treatment relationship between you and Collingholm or Whitney Goodman. For more information on this,

please see Calling Holmes Terms of Service linked in the show notes below.