How to Talk to People - How to Start Over: 'Parents Are Not All Good and All Bad'

Episode Date: June 6, 2022

Some families have the frictionless ease of unconditional love and understanding, but for many the stalemate of family tensions can be insurmountable. In this episode of How to Start Over, we explore what can be done to evaluate the dynamics in lifelong family relationships, find ways to manage our emotional response when tensions boil over, and analyze what it means to change a parent-child relationship as an adult.  This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and is hosted by Olga Khazan. Editing by A.C. Valdez and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Engineering by Matthew Simonson. Special thanks to Adrienne LaFrance, executive editor of The Atlantic.  Be part of How to Start Over. Write to us at [e-mail]. To support this podcast, and get unlimited access to all of The Atlantic’s journalism, become a subscriber. Music by FLYIN (“Being Nostalgic”), Mindme (“Anxiety [Instrumental Version]”), Sarah, the Illstrumentalist (“Building Character”), and Timothy Infinite (“Rapid Years”).  Click here to listen to more full-length episodes in The Atlantic’s How To series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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No, no, it's not psycho analyzing. It's more about just asking these questions. On some level, I want my parents to think that I'm, like, smart and good. Absolutely. You have a relationship with your parents. Yeah. And you care about what your parents think. You want your parents to approve with you. Hi, I'm Olga Hazan, staff writer at The Atlantic. And I'm Rebecca Rashid, a producer at the Atlantic. This is How to Start Over. Today, we want to analyze why conflicts with the people who raised us

can often reach a stalemate, and how to navigate family tensions when you have deep disagreements with your family. So in the past few years, I've heard so many stories from adults who were forced to move back in with their parents or go back to wherever they grew up due to the pandemic. I was one of those lucky adults who moved home after nearly a decade of living on the opposite coast. And I was lucky enough to have somewhere to call home during such a difficult time. But I think one of the really unexpected harsh realities of spending time with the people who raised you as an adult is that some family tensions just don't magically go away with time. It always sort of surprises me when I find myself getting frustrated or failing to forgive, you know, a decades old issue. I think it's a rare person who has no issues with their parent. But I think with the pandemic and just how stressful the past few years have been,

all of that has gotten supercharged. And you might have someone in your family who is an anti-vaxxer and that affects their health potentially, whether you have to take care of them and pay their medical bills. That can be a really stressful thing to kind of tiptoe around every time you see them. I just think there have been a lot more opportunities lately for people to have these kind of foundational fights. Yeah, and I think it can be difficult to admit that you're having issues with your family in the first place. It can sort of feel like a never-ending cycle that you deal with by compartmentalizing and putting in the back of your mind as something that's

not going to change and there's kind of no point in doing anything about. So what do you think holds people back from acknowledging family strain or family tensions or potentially even estrangement as an issue. And what do you think holds people back from discussing it openly? I think it's a very taboo to talk shit about your family. People are very protective, I think, of their parents and their families. I think there's a sense of you don't really know them like I know them. And also probably dueling impulses, right? Of like gratitude. You know, they did so much for me and I have fun memories from the lake house or whatever. But also, lately, they've been driving me crazy.

You know, it's the same person, and you're kind of struggling to reconcile those two views of them. So what question are we trying to answer here, Olga? And why do you think we should make an episode about this? Well, first of all, I feel like this issue is just not talked about very much. But also, it's just a really tricky thing to navigate. How do you draw a boundary with someone who gave birth to you? How do you change the nature of a relationship that's been going on since you were a baby?

How do you, you know, maybe pull away from that relationship because it's just not the right thing for your mental health to keep engaging with that person? I am really curious about how to pull any of that off and everything in between. I tend to think of a strange man as a complete cutoff or nearly complete cutoff, but either people think of it as a very distant relationship or conflict. kind of at its center. Dr. Joshua Coleman is a clinical psychologist, author, speaker, and senior fellow on the Council on Contemporary Families. In 2021, Dr. Coleman published the book Rules of Estrangement, Why Adult Children Cut Ties and How to Heel the Conflict.

I spoke with him to figure out why people get estranged from their parents in the first place. My research and my experience, there's a number of different pathways to estrangement. Certainly, one is trauma and abuse in childhood. by the parent and that the adult child just isn't really capable for a variety of reasons of either because the parent can't really do the healing work or the adult child just feels too hurt and wounded by the past to ever forgive the parent or reconcile another is mental illness certainly in the parent but also in the adult child that they're not able to navigate the normal slings and arrows of parent adult child conflict another happens when the adult child gets married

or couples in forms a longstanding romantic relationship. And the spouse of the adult child doesn't like the estranged parent, the now estranged parent and says, choose me or them. You can't have both. In my survey of 1600 estranged parents that I did to the University of Wisconsin Survey Center, one of the things that we found was about 70% of the estranged parents had a divorce in their past from the biological parent.

ironically one of the causes of estrangement that I think is discussed as much as sometimes estrangement happens because the adult child is in some ways too love to take a care of and one of the consequences of the much more intensive anxious guilt-ridden worried involved parenting that has been going on in the past three or four decades is that sometimes adult children just get too much of the parent and they don't know any other way to feel separate from the parent than to estrange themselves What does estrangement look like? Does it look like just not talking? Do people send a long email saying, you've wronged me in such and such way and now I'm never speaking to you again? Does it mean just visiting once around Christmastime and then not really ever again? Or maybe there's different definitions. Yeah. Commonly what I see from parents is they get a no contact letter. Typically, it will list the complaints that the adult child has about the parent, the failures in parenting, which in many ways we should talk about are historically new the kinds of things that adult children are using as rightly or wrongly as reasons for this strange. But there's typically a list of those and then

don't ever contact me again. A, or B, it might be something like, I need to work on myself, you need to work on yourself too, although not always giving the parent what to work on. So maybe it's a parent who won't accept the adult child's gender identity or sexuality or political beliefs or they refused to take responsibility for the ways that they've hurt the child adult child or another scenario would be that there was abuse physical abuse sexual abuse in childhood and the parent has never been able to to make amends and never been able to take responsibility to show any kind of empathy for how destructive their behavior was and so the adult child feels like how can I possibly be around you or be close to you or want to be close to you if you can't

do the basic amend making that would make me feel like we even have a chance. I guess we can look at both the parents and the adult child. Are the adult children typically happier after they're estranged from their parents, who they wanted to be estranged from? And how does it affect the parents? Yeah, they're very, very different consequences. If you look at the strange adult children, probably the majority of them say that they feel better. They feel happier.

It feels like it's better for their men. mental health. But if you sit with the parents, what you see are people who are heartbroken, who are confused, who feel ashamed, who feel angry, who feel misunderstood, the parent has to take responsibility and show empathy and make amends. And the adult child isn't willing to. Did kids in the, I don't know, 1800s grow up and become estranged from their parents? Or was it sort of like, yeah, these are my parents. They're not perfect, but they're my parents so that I have to continue a relationship with them. I'm wondering how. How? the institution of the family has changed over the years that it has made it so that people

see estrangement as an option, I guess. In the mid-19th century, there began to be a turn. Our turn has been mostly towards individualism. So in the mid-19th century, we began to be much more interested in personal growth and happiness. And that has really continued to gather more and more esteem into the present. if you look at even the past 20 years or so, the rates of individualism have continued to rise. Individualism, meaning how we assign meaning to events, the emphasis on personal growth, happiness, individuality,

and parenting has radically changed as well. If you look at parenting surveys in the early 1900s, what you have parents saying is that they want their children to essentially be churchgoing, not conservative necessarily, but people who conform to what is expected. of them. In addition, the idea was that children should respect their parents, if not fear them. I assume there's always been estrangements. I don't think that there were estrangements nearly to the level of today. If you just look at divorce, that alone radically increases the probability of an estranged. It used to be honor thy mother and thy father and respect by elders. Today, it's really, does this relationship promote my happiness and my personal growth?

that I'm interested. But if it doesn't, then I have nothing to do with this person. And that's also viewed as being a kind of act of existential courage whereas in prior generations, I don't think it was viewed in that way whatsoever. So I follow all these TikTok accounts that are like vaguely therapeutic. And they're all like, if a person makes you upset even one time, cut them out of your life. You know, and like the idea of like honoring your mother and father is like not anywhere on there.

But I'm wondering. if you have had any personal experience with estrangement or tensions with your adult children and how that impacted your research or your thinking on this issue? Well, yes, sadly, I came to this topic through my own personal experience. I was married and divorced in my 20s and my daughter now, I'm very close to. There was a period of time in her early 20s where she cut off contact with me for several years in many ways as an expression of her unhappiness about how she felt displaced when I got remarried and had twins in my second current marriage and the ways that she felt in some ways cast aside or neglected or not prioritized. And so there was a period of several

years where she didn't talk to me or didn't want to spend time with me. And it was easily the most awful, painful, hurtful, disorienting, guilt-inducing thing I've ever been through and hope to go through again. But slowly over time, we were able to heal the relationship. and we're close again. So once we'd reconciled, I decided to write about it. To what extent should adult children be accepting of their parents' flaws, or should they be? And I'm wondering how parents can do the same for their adult children,

because I feel like a lot of these tensions come out of expectations. I think it has to do with the way that we think of identity at this point. Currently, it's sort of what you were saying about the TikTok and not to trivialize adult children's complaints about their parents, but we feel like if we dislike something in somebody's personality and they're not willing to change, then somehow the healthy thing to do is to cut them out. Sometimes the healthiest thing to do is to end a relationship with people who are hurtful and destructive and won't take any responsibility and the like. But there's so much that I see adult children complaining about their parents

and using as a cause for estrangement, that A, the parent is. willing to work on. And B, these are things that, you know, I often hear things very psychologized and made to seem like the parent failed them and abused them or traumatized them. Of course, there are real abuses and real traumas. I'm not trying to trivialize that. But I also look here and see things being called abusive, traumatizing, harmful, and neglectful that are really just part of the normal slings and arrows of raising children and family life and the imperfections, not only of the parents, but, you know, children of any age bring their own challenges to the parenting domain as well. What can maybe, you know, adult children and or parents do to actually

repair things and keep it from, you know, leading to full estrangement? Yeah, I think on the adult child side is to tell your parents, your complaints about them, because parents take a lot of self-esteem and identity from a feeling of being a good parent. So when they're told that they weren't a good parent or that they failed their child or hurt them or neglected them, it's very hard for a parent not to get defensive. On the parent side, I think parents do need to take the high road, take responsibility, find the kernel, if not the bushel of truth in the adult child's complaints. Show empathy, compassion, don't be defensive. If the child is already estranged to say to them, I know you wouldn't do this unless it was the healthiest thing for you to do. not because the parent necessarily thinks that,

but because that's what it feels like to the adult child. So to really show a willingness to do the work, as is commonly stated. People can get trapped in this endless loop of, I'm telling you what you did wrong and what you need to do to fix it. And like, I'd like to heal our relationship. And the parent is like, I didn't do anything wrong. You're an ungrateful child. I don't know.

When should you give up on all that and just say, like, look, maybe it's better if we just don't talk for a while? Yeah. often there isn't enough due diligence on either side to give the parent a chance or being willing to do therapy with them. That's why I often tell parents to write a detailed mens letter where they do acknowledge the things that were problematic about their parenting, because in some ways doing that is a really important path towards self-compassion. It allows them to sort of see it all in the paper and just kind of tolerate that as a reality. You know, when I was going through mine with my own child sort of just having to write and say, yes, I can,

see why you did feel neglect. These were my failures. I didn't like writing any of that. This, in fact, was very humiliating to have to write it and say it, but it did allow me to become more accepting of those parts of myself as well. You know, the saying what stays in the dark grows in the dark is often true of our relationships in terms of our own mistakes with her children. So Joshua Coleman helped us understand why and how adult children sometimes become estranged from their parents. But there's also a lot of gray area between estrangement and a perfect, happy relationship with your family. Much of Dr. Coleman's research comes from data collected on Western populations, and it's not necessarily representative of all cultures. What if you're from a

culture where children are supposed to respect their parents' decisions, no matter what? For example, you might realize you need to set boundaries with your parents, but not know how to do it. Maybe your family doesn't do boundaries. Every family needs to maintain, in therapy terms of what we call a sense of homeostasis, a sense of what is normal. I talked with Alex Lee, a therapist from Fremont, California, who focuses on therapy for Asian Americans dealing with challenging family relationships. He spoke with me about how to navigate that tricky middle ground with your parents and

how family tensions can affect mental health. Sometimes what is normal in a family could. be potentially what's not healthy. So you may have, say, controlling parent or a controlling mother who wants to do well for their kids. And so they, like, maybe micromanaged their kids or parents that are very absent because both parents have to work. And so in that family dynamic, the kids are mostly left offend from themselves. Also, the parental mental health issues come up if, you know, the parents struggle, let's say a personality disorder or say if they have, like, extreme depression. But I always kind of go back to this idea that families operate this way and people eventually start taking roles and

they start becoming who they are based off their family to kind of maintain this homeostasis or this sort of balance. So let's say a client comes to you and says, you know, I can't handle how controlling my family is or, you know, I'm an adult and the way my parents treat me, I need to change something about it. How do you decide the best way forward for them? As a therapist, I don't necessarily tell them what to do. What I slowly try to pick up on is roles that you, might play in the family. Client might come in and say, you know, like, I need to do something about how I change the dynamics. And I say, okay, well, who are you in the family? Oh, I'm the scapegoat. My parents always blame everything on me. Okay. How does that affect you as a person? Have you

ever seen a baby's crib before and you've seen like a mobile? The way I kind of describe it with my family is, you know, when you pull a piece of a mobile, the thing kind of shifts a little bit, right? And then when you let go of it, the mobile kind of just snaps back into place. Everything is just kind of all balanced. When you change one piece of this family system, it causes the whole thing to shift. And so when you change and you work on yourself or you interact with your parents a little bit differently, maybe if they say something hurtful, right, you say, please don't say that, right? You start setting these boundaries. What it does is that it makes people uncomfortable. I feel like a lot of people when they are told to set boundaries with their parents. So it's like,

hey, when you say stuff about that, it makes me feel really hurt. Well, what are you? The thought police, you're going to tell me what to say in my own home. I'll have you know I bought this home and I paid for it and I raised you in this, you know. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. So they tell me what the step two of the boundary setting is. Yeah, absolutely. So whenever I focus on boundaries, it's never about thoughts. I teach clients how to empathize with, it sounds weird, right? Like you empathize with them. You reflect back what they're saying so that you can, right? Oh, yeah. Like, it sounds like you're really upset right now, right? Putting the feelings back on that Sometimes I try to teach my clients that, right? Sometimes if it gets too much, you know, maybe

teaching the clients how to disengage. Is there, yeah, but how do you, like, actually enforce a boundary? Like, do you, are you supposed to, like, leave the room? Are you supposed to? That's the thing. There's not necessarily a formula with this. You could leave the room. You could also just keep reinforcing the boundaries, saying like, hey, like, I don't really appreciate you talking to me like this, right? I invite clients to say, what are you really feeling? I'm feeling scared. I'm feeling out of shame. Okay, so in that moment, take a few deep breaths, get yourself grounded. And from that place of being grounded, from that place of being a little bit more settled, it's still scary. It's still hard, right?

It's not about what to do. It's more about how do I take care of my internal world and then act in a way that honors myself. Why is it that setting boundaries with our parents can be so hard? For me, I'm one of those people who has no issue breezing past, you know, those people with clipboards on the sidewalk getting signatures. like I completely ignore those people and feel no shame. Yes. But it's like very hard for me to set boundaries with my own parents. And I've always wondered like why that is.

Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, what's the difference between the, I mean, I'm going to kind of be a little, if it's okay, can I like maybe like. Psychoanalyze me? Sure. No, no, it's not psycho analyzing. It's more about just asking these questions that kind of help me to think. What's the difference between your parents and the clipboard people? I mean, I guess like on some level I want my parents to agree with my.

points of view and think that I'm like smart and good and I don't really care what the clipboard people think absolutely you have a relationship with your parents yeah right that's a different you have a relationship with the parents and the clipboard people you don't and you care about what your parents think you want that's a natural good thing to want like you want your parents to approve of you I validate that experience is a good and healthy thing when there's unconditional love in a family that should come naturally, right? How sometimes it works is that, well, no, you don't get that unconditional approval, right? I can't unconditionally support you. And sometimes there's a cultural survival element to that, right? If I think about a lot of immigrant families, I can't have you just do whatever you want because you need to succeed in this country.

So no, you can't be whatever you want. Like, you have to be, you know, an engineer, right? Because what I think you're doing is not good for a family. It's not good for survival. Like there's a bunch of stories behind that. And I help clients explore that too. Would you ever tell someone to just detach from their family, not really communicate with them really? So one first thing, it's, you're not like in stranger, you're making space for yourself. It's more about you. Like, I'm going to make space for myself. So yeah, I'm going to detach, right, from my family. It may not always be permanent. As you grow and as you become a healthier person, as you have better support systems around you, I can't give up something unless I have something to replace it, right?

Whether it's a healthier community, maybe you have your own family that is healthy. I've run into this all the time with my clients. I can't just abandon my family, right? My parents need me. My parents don't speak English, right? Like, I can't do that. And it's like, okay, well, that sounds like that's not an option. We need to try something different.

And, you know, and we really parse it out to see how much of that is you're a symbol of safety and it's more of a symbolic thing? Or is it really there's material needs that are. needing to be met in this family. I don't know. I feel like a lot of people get trapped between my parents are wonderful. They did everything for me. And then also like resentment that they have to like off gas. Yes, that is a very real thing.

Because the truth is that most parents, unless they are like 100% abusive, awful people, right? Parents are not all good and all bad. And part of that healing process is to have clients recognize that my parents did so much for me and they also damaged me. At some point, there's an invitation from my clients that kind of bring it together and say, like, yeah, your parents are both, they're human. In my own personal life, it took me years to be able to get to that point where, like, I can maybe acknowledge. My parents were really helpful and really great, and also, like, they did some things that were really hurtful. In the middle of making this episode, I put out a Twitter call out to hear from people who have a strained relationship with their families of origin. One person I heard from, Molly, had an especially poignant story.

The simple reason that my relationship with my parents is strained is because they're devout evangelical Christians and I'm an atheist. I felt like growing up and still feel like to a large extent. They saw my adoption as an answer to prayer as a mission, a pro-life statement. And then after all that, I end up not believing in what they, see as the most important thing in life. I stopped believing when I was 11, and it was something that I felt like I had to hide, that I couldn't let them know about, because I was afraid that it would endanger, I guess, my role in the family. It's not exactly that I thought that they would stop loving me or not want me per se, but that I would be a disappointment.

As an adult, Molly has had years where she didn't see her parents much because they disapproved of her life choices. She would call them, but the calls were mostly driven by a feeling of guilt and obligation. Still, she wouldn't say she cut her parents off or that she's estranged from them. This is just what their relationship looks like, a little less open, a little different. I think that in a lot of cases it's a good thing for people in a family to not want to sever family ties, to continue to have a sense of commitment and obligation to other people in their family. If they reach a point where they're able to have that relationship and not be actively hurt by it, family is a hard thing to replace.

Molly has a daughter, and for the most part, she's raised her. without religion. But she does wonder what might happen if her daughter goes the other way and becomes religious later. If she became an extremely rule-based Christian, I wonder how I would deal with it if she started believing that I was going to hell. And I don't really have an answer for that. Molly's story made me realize that there are so many reasons why adults might not want to interact with their parents frequently, and that it doesn't always have to end in estrangement. It can sometimes result in a relationship that's unideal, but overall fine. And there are ways to keep from repeating the cycle with your own kids.

So how do you deal with your parents as an adult? First, if you need to set a boundary, do it. Just say you won't listen to hurtful comments about, say, your weight or your politics, and leave the room if they happen. If the relationship is still difficult, you might have to have a heart to heart with them. Lead with the things you like about the relationship and how you'd like. to see it improve. Expect defensiveness, but also be open to the possibility of empathy.

Finally, remember that doing all this introspection might make you an even better parent to your own kids and hopefully help you break the cycle for good. That's all for this week's episode of How to Start Over. This episode was produced by me, Rebecca Rashid, and hosted by Olga Hazan. Editing by A.C. Valdez and Claudina Bade. Fact-check by End. Alvarado. Our engineer is Matthew Simonson. Special thanks to Adrian LaFrance, executive editor of the Atlantic.