Office Hours with Arthur Brooks - The Real Cost of Family Estrangement

Starting point is 00:00:00 I want to talk to you today about something that's shockingly common, which is family estrangement, where people in the same family are not talking to each other. I'm talking about a parent, I'm talking about a child, I'm talking about a sibling, perhaps I'm talking about a grandparent, not more than that. I'm not talking about your crazy Uncle Mike. When I say it's a tragedy, I actually really mean it. Over time, the majority who have experienced this estrangement or provoke this estrangement, they wind up with chronic unhappiness.

Starting point is 00:00:28 and there's a major elevated risk of depression, and they also have poorer physical health. But here's the point. There might be influencers, politicians, media, telling you to ditch your family members because they have mistaken values, bad ideas, or really vile politics. But that's wrong. The ones who don't love and care about you are the people encouraging you to pull away for your family. Hi, friends. Welcome to Office Hours.

Starting point is 00:01:01 I'm Arthur Brooks. The mission of this show is to lift people. up and bring them together in bonds of happiness and love using real research, real science, and real ideas. I want to put those ideas in your hands, not just so that you can use them in your own life, but that you can join me as a teacher of love and happiness with other people. Thank you for continuing with the show. The show is now going on a year old at this point, and we have a lot of people that are joining every day. Thank you for being one of those people and for recommending the show to other people so that we can spread our mission, so that we can

Starting point is 00:01:30 spread these ideas to other people as widely as possible. As always, please, please, do feedback on how you like to show, what you'd like to see more of, what you'd like to see less of. And the way to do that is by sending me an email at office hours at arthurbrooks.com, or you can leave a comment wherever you're watching or listening to this show. As always, please do like and subscribe. That helps us with the algorithms to reach more people. If you would like more content like this, please just subscribe to my newsletter. You can get that at my website, arthurbrooks.com slash newsletter. And if you're ready to do some work in person, if you want to meet me, I'm actually doing a retreat for the modern elder academy. I'm going to bring this to life through a series of

Starting point is 00:02:11 retreats actually in Santa Fe. And you can learn more about that. You can actually come to the retreat and talk to me that retreats at arthurbrooks.com. And on the website, by the way, there's all kinds of new ways to join communities, virtual and in real life. We're expanding the reach of all the work that we're doing on the science of human happiness. Thanks to you. I really appreciate everything that you're doing. Hey friends, a lot of you know that I keep a very high protein diet. That's important for me in my 60s because I want to maintain a good level of muscle protein synthesis, and I don't always have time to eat as much protein as I want from whole foods. That's the ideal, but it's just not manageable all the time. For that reason, I'm always looking for supplements that can

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Starting point is 00:04:18 And you can also find David Protein in stores by looking for the store locator. So enjoy. Today's show is not about happiness per se, but a major source of unhappiness, how we can deal with it, how we can cure it, how we can help other people as well. I want to talk to you today about something that's shockingly common, which is family estrangement, where people in the same family are not talking to each other, people who maybe even have, as I say today, no contact with one another. What is the effect of that?

Starting point is 00:04:48 How does it affect the people who are the recipients of or the initiators of no contact? What are the data say? What are the studies show? That's what we're going to get into. and just as important as anything else, if you are no contact with one of your family members, what can you do? What should you do? This is going to be a practical show, as always. I'm going to start by talking about why it's a tragedy, actually, for a lot of people, how we actually grieve neurobiologically when it happens. Why does it happen? What's the typical outcome? How do these things usually resolve? And then the magic ingredients to healing it in your life and perhaps so you can recommend that to the lives of other people.

Starting point is 00:05:28 Now, this has been in the news a little bit recently. I mean, you see these no contact movement things that are in the news. And one of the ways that this was brought to my attention, and I wrote about it, and I call them in the free press, was when there was a major sort of front page incident in a very famous family, that of David and Victoria Beckham. He's a famous footballer, and his wife was a pop music star, and they're very glamorous, and they're in the news a lot, and also the celebrity gossip. up there in that. And they have an adult son who's in his 20s and he announced very publicly

Starting point is 00:05:58 that he was going no contact with his parents for a list of grievances having to do with the way that he was raised and the way that they treated him and continued to treat him and his wife. I think he's 27 years old. And it really brought to the surface a lot of conversations about that. A lot of people, when I wrote my column about that, a lot of people wrote into the comment section, yeah, me too. Yeah, me too. And it was so shocking that it was really worth looking at the on this? How common is it and why actually does it occur? And that's a lot of what I want to talk about. But as I mentioned before, I want to also get to the solutions because that's what this show is really all about. Now, when I call family estrangement, and by this, I mean not having, literally

Starting point is 00:06:39 not having contact with somebody in your immediate family. I'm talking about a parent. I'm talking about a child. I'm talking about a sibling. Perhaps I'm talking about a grandparent. Not more than that. I'm not talking about your crazy Uncle Mike. I'm talking about somebody in your immediate family with whom you actually don't have a, you're not on speaking terms. When I say it's a tragedy, I actually really mean it. There's really good data from the Pew Research Center, Washington, D.C. This is one of the best sources of survey data in the world, actually. And the Pew Research Center does survey-based research in a lot of different countries. Recently, as recently as 2021, they fielded in an international survey asking people, what gave their life meaning? What gives your life meaning?

Starting point is 00:07:20 It was a long list of things that you could choose. So it's not always an open-ended survey where people could say, you know, my pet, frog, Barney. No, not that. It was going to be a list of kind of ordinary things so that we could coalesce around the most common things that we find in different countries. And one of them was family. Does family give you meaning? And it turns out that of the vast majority of the countries, as a matter of fact, 14 to the 17 countries. And the survey, family was number one.

Starting point is 00:07:47 It was above making a living. It was above health. It was above friendships. It was above everything else. It was family. This included the United States. It included most of Western Europe. It included countries all over Asia.

Starting point is 00:07:59 No joke. For the biggest part of the world across cultural differences, family is number one. And so the result of that is very easy to understand why when people lose contact with their family, they lose a major source and sense of their life's meaning. Now, as you know, this is what I write about. My book is sitting right here because I was having my latest book sitting next to me. It's called the meaning of your life. And so this is something you say, the corner pocket of what I've been thinking about for the past five years.

Starting point is 00:08:26 When somebody says, my life feels meaningless, one of the first questions I ask them when I'm actually helping somebody is, like, tell me about your family. Tell me about your family relationships. And inevitably, there'll be something like, yeah, no, I mean, I have a cordial relationship with my siblings. I don't really talk to my parents. Or I really, or I propulsively don't talk to my parents at all. I see this a lot. And this just make people feel bereft of a sense of a significant. against, the purpose, the coherence they actually feel in their life.

Starting point is 00:08:52 Lots and lots of studies on this. And I'll throw into the notes the link to the Pew Research Center data, which is really useful. Now, why? Why? And as always, I'm going to go back to a little bit of the neuroscience behind this, there's an importance of kin relations that's almost certainly biologically ingrained. As I've mentioned so many times in this show, human beings, homo sapiens.

Starting point is 00:09:16 we have brains that are very similar, basically identical to what they were 250,000 years ago in the late Pleistocene period, when all humans, virtually all humans, lived in small kin-related bands of 30 to 50 individuals, and they were responsible for taking care of each other. There was no fire department, no police force, there were no hospitals, there were no doctors, at least as we understand doctors today. And so the result is you got to take care of each other. And if you don't, well, guess what? Everybody's at risk and nobody's going to pass on their genes. and you have a very strong ingrained biological imperative to take care of each other.

Starting point is 00:09:52 Your kin-based relationships are really, really important. That's the evolutionary biology behind it, but we actually see a lot of pretty interesting experimental psychology that bears this out. So, for example, there are a bunch of psychological experiments that ask people to distribute money to other people. They've got a lot of choices. You know, they have, you know, 20 bucks and they can give some to some and some to another person.

Starting point is 00:10:13 And they have a list of people they have to get the money to. Now, on this list and these experiments, you'll have kin-based people your blood related to or family related to and you'll have really, really close friends. Almost inevitably, people are closer. They're more intimate with their friends than they are with their relatives. And if that's you, that's really, really common. There are things that you'll tell your friends. You'd never tell your mom.

Starting point is 00:10:36 There might be things you would tell your friends that you wouldn't tell your sibling or even your spouse, as a matter of fact. And your spouse is actually both in the friend group and in the family. kin group. If you're married, that's an adoption, is kind of how that works. They wanted to know who do you give more to? Intimate friends or relatives with whom you're less intimate, but related by blood, or at least by family. And what they find is that people give significantly more to family than they do to friends. They just do, because they feel this sense of familial obligation. Really interesting study on that from 2008 called altruism among relatives and non-relatives. That kind of sums it up.

Starting point is 00:11:12 And that's what they always find. They feel like they owe more. to people with whom they're less intimate socially and with whom they would actually share even fewer secrets. Now, this interestingly, generally speaking, is thought to be less in the West than it is in other parts of the world. So there is some cultural variation in this. And some people will believe that this is one of the effects of Christianity, as a matter of fact. So, you know, Matthew 544 of the Christian Bible, love your enemies, pray for those who persecute

Starting point is 00:11:42 you. But the whole concept behind a lot of the Christian teaching, which is very, very, very important. very unusual. And some would say even counter to our natural evolutionary biology is you have to treat people who are not your kin as if they were your kin. You know, I guess what's the word in Chinese in Mandarin Chinese is guanqi, you know, your kin-based relations. And the whole idea for a lot of Christianity is everybody's your guanqi. And so the concept that you got to, you know, it's okay to treat people in your family more ethically or more honestly than other people. That's that's sort of prescribed by many religions, but especially Christianity.

Starting point is 00:12:18 So there is a hypothesis that I've seen in many places that that's one of the reasons that it's so unusual that in the West people will be so good to strangers. That's not common in the evolutionary milieu. That's the whole idea. Okay. I mean, you decide whether or not that's the case based on your own experience, but that's at least a hypothesis that one commonly sees. Neuroscientists have found that our brains actually work different.

Starting point is 00:12:45 when our families are cohesively versus when they're not. To not be cohesive with our families, to have estrangement, to have schism, kind of breaks our brain, as a matter of fact. They'll talk about that a little bit more in a minute, but there's some really interesting studies from a journal called a social neuroscience on exactly how that works. And once again, this has got to be related to our evolutionary biology where our prehistoric survival depended on mutual supportive kin. And so when it's not, it's going to signal to you that you're at threat. When your family is dysfunctional, it's going to signal to you that you're in danger. of walking the frozen tundra and dying alone or something along those lines. Maybe not that dramatic, but there's something in you that says, this isn't right, this isn't

Starting point is 00:13:24 right. We've got to fix this. This isn't right. Social scientists, more modern social scientists, psychologists in particular, have looked at this. And there's a really good book, published in 2020. Once again, this goes into the show notes called Fault Lines, fractured families and had to mend them by a sociologist and gerontologist by the name of Carl Pillimer. And he has the best data I've ever seen available on families, which comes from Cornell University. It's called a Cornell Family Estrangement and a Reconciliation Project, right? Good, right? This is the best data on families falling apart and families getting back together, which studies the long-term effects of family schism. So this is a good book, and I recommend it to you. It gives you a lot of

Starting point is 00:14:03 information and the best data set available on why people break up and why people will get back together from their families, not from their, not from their couples. What he finds is the following, And this is a big punchline I want to come back to in a minute, so I want to get it right out right there now. Many people, when they walk away from their families, are going no contact with their families, more on that movement in a minute, that they do get short-term relief. I mean, nobody says, you know what? I think I'm going to stop talking to my mom so I can be miserable for the rest of my life, said no one ever. There's a reason you stop talking to mom. And in point of fact, that people do get short-term relief.

Starting point is 00:14:35 But what his research shows, because it's longitudinal date over a long period of time, that the majority of people who go no contact of their own volition, in other words, the person didn't kick them out. They kicked themselves out of their families or somebody out of their family, effectively, that over time, the majority who have experienced this estrangement or provoke this estrangement, they wind up with chronic unhappiness. And there's a major elevated risk of depression, and they also have poor physical health. So the short term versus the long term is really, really important. Sure, there's relief in the short term.

Starting point is 00:15:11 And again, I'm going to come back and talk about, the legitimate reasons for doing this. This is not an argument necessarily, a prima facie argument against estrangement. I'm just talking, I'm reporting on what people typically see. Short-term relief, long-term suffering is what it comes down to in the majority of cases. And that long-term suffering is very much associated with feelings of grief. And so family estrangement is quite similar in its long-term emotional impacts on people from the death and bereavement because of a loved one. And I have a, I've done a show on grief before, and I'll put that, I'll make sure that that's linked below as well. So if you want to look at grief and how that affects things, it's quite similar

Starting point is 00:15:51 in the case of, of estrangement. It affects your brain in much the same way as the bottom line. Okay, now, if it's so painful, it should be rare, but it isn't. It isn't rare at all. There's a very, one of the most famous lines in, in the world of literature is that of Leo Tolstoy's novel, Anna Karina. And the first line, line is super, super famous. Happy families are all alike. Every happy family is unhappy in its own way. Now, that's a famous line because he goes on to talk about all kinds of unhappy families in Anna Karenina. But it's not true, as it turns out. That truth is the opposite, but it's what we perceive. The truth is that pretty much all unhappy families, they fall into certain patterns.

Starting point is 00:16:35 Estrangement falls into very, very distinct patterns. But there are lots and lots of different ways to be happy. And that's good news, right? The whole idea that every happy family is alike. On the contrary, there's all kinds of family arrangements where the families are really happy. But the ones that aren't, the ones that are in schism, typically it falls in terms of a few patterns. And that's why it's important that we talk about this. But every schism feels uniquely miserable. And the result of the unique miseries that people are actually embarrassed by it and they're very unwilling to talk about it.

Starting point is 00:17:06 It's kind of like an injury to something really embarrassing about you that's actually. accidental and self-inflicted, and you just don't want to talk about it. That's kind of how people often feel about estrangement. They feel, you know, if they're not speaking to a family member, it's really painful, but it also feels like, am I in the wrong? Is this self-inflicted? And so there's this embarrassment, this even humiliation that goes along with it. And so they don't talk about it. And, you know, they'll talk about it with their therapist and they'll cry about it with their closest friends, but it's not something that they ordinarily talk about very publicly. But it's super common. Here are two different statistics. Now, these statistics will blow your mind. And they sound,

Starting point is 00:17:45 they're sort of the structurally different kinds of statistics because they come from different studies. But you'll get the idea of what I'm talking about here. 11% of mothers age 65 to 75 with at least two adult children. Okay. Imagine that. So mom is 68 years old. She has two grown-up kids at least. 11% of these moms are estranged completely from at least one of them. So think about that. More than one in ten moms of this age group and most women age 65 to 75 do have adult children. More than one in 10 is not speaking to at least one of their kids. Amazing, right? That's way more common than I thought. And it's way more common that you'd think if you just ask people and talk about it in ordinary life because it's something if people keep

Starting point is 00:18:29 hidden. Higher with dads, 26% of fathers have gone through at least one period of estrangement from one of their children over the course of their lives. Now, again, those are are different kinds of statistics because they come from different studies. The first study with the 11% of mothers, one of the co-authors on that from the Journal of Marriage and Family, which is the Apex Journal in this field, is once again by Carl Pilamer, who wrote that famous 2020 book. The second article comes also from the same journal, but with different authors. And that's really new. That's an article from 2023 about fathers. Now, the same thing is true with siblings. About 38% of American adults are currently right now estranged from at least one close family member. And that means

Starting point is 00:19:09 either a parent, a child, a sibling, a grandparent, or a grandchild. Okay, so it goes in both directions. And I'm not speaking to a parent, sibling, grandparent, or grandchild. I don't know if it actually incorporates in-laws. That would be interesting to me to know if it incorporates in-laws. I would suspect that that number is higher if it incorporates in-laws, but I don't know. So, but one way or another, that's high. So, why does it happen? That's what we really want to know, right? And this actually comes from good research from the University of Nebraska that asks, you know, what are the big sources of estrangement? And it turns out that there's two big ones for why adult children stop talking to their aging parents. And then we'll talk about why parents feel like and in point of fact aren't talking to their adult children.

Starting point is 00:19:59 And it might be different reasons. This is where it gets interesting. So reasons number one and two that adult children report not talking to their parents is number one that their parents have so-called toxic behavior and number two that they feel unsupported. That's why they distance themselves. Okay. Now, once again, a lot of this is sort of therapy speak. I would hypothesize that if you go back 75 years and you're talking about toxic behavior, people wouldn't really know what you're talking about. It's obviously a metaphor because there's no physical pathogen that actually comes from the behavior. but that's a new kind of terminology.

Starting point is 00:20:33 That's a parlance that we, that's pretty new that actually comes from, mostly from the, from the therapy structure that a lot of people are involved in, for better, for worse, you decide. And then feeling of being unsupported. Like, your job is to support me, support me through thick and thin, thick and thin. I have thoughts on that. And I've talked a lot about, about parental dynamics and how to take care of kids and how not to mess up your kids.

Starting point is 00:20:56 And I'm thinking about a lot. I mean, my kids are in the 20s. And so it's a very personal issue for me. me. And thank God, I have a super close relationship with all three of my adult kids and their spouses because that's awesome. And also because I have four grandsons and I want them crawling all over me. I want them around as much as they possibly can be because really my only job as a grandfather is is jokes and wrestling. So there you go. But my point is that, you know, what does unsupported actually mean? There can be a lot of cases when parents don't feel unsupportive. They feel like they're,

Starting point is 00:21:25 they're creating an environment where their adult children can be responsible. And their adult children can say, now you're just being unsupportive. And that leads to the number one answer when you ask parents, why do you have estrangement from adult child? The number one answer is, I don't know. Literally, I don't know the cause is number one, which suggests, by the way, that in the vast majority, the estrangement cases of adult children and their aging parents, it's not the parents who are saying bye-bye. It's the adult kids who are saying bye-bye. And I bet you I bet you suspected that all. Or I bet you assumed that.

Starting point is 00:22:00 I certainly did as well. But that's evidence. So that's the fact that, you know, the kids are saying you're toxic. And the parents are like, what, what? What did I do? Which might be feigning ignorance, but you decide. Right now, you're like Neo in the Matrix. You can keep scrolling, experiencing a simulation of life.

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Starting point is 00:23:11 And you're going to like how it feels. When parents do know the reason for the schism, here's number two, objectionable relationships that the kids have. And number three is entitlement. Is that the kid's entitled. So this is really interesting because you can imagine a skisible. happening when an adult child says, I'm unsupported and the aging parent says, no, you're actually entitled, which is one of the reasons that you see in so many cases that this is over money,

Starting point is 00:23:37 that, you know, and especially first generation money where, you know, the aging parents, they grew up with, you know, without nice things, as we like to say, that's a, that's a, that's a technical term. And when they kind of work for everything, they earn their success in a very big way. And they want their kids do as well and their kids feel unsupported because, you know, the old man has got a bunch of dough and, and, you know, he's not helping me. He's making me pay for my college or he's making me pay for my house down payment or whatever it happens to be. Or he's just not generous with me. And the dad is like, no, no, I mean, you're entitled. And Junior's like, no, you're unsupportive and it can go back and forth. So you can actually see looking at exactly the same phenomenon, which is a lack of support. And one say that it's emotional unsupportiveness. And the other is saying it's entitledness and you know who's right this is the problem is that when nobody backs down or nobody actually will acknowledge the point of view of the other you're going to stay in a state of estrangement so this is not that this is always based on a misunderstanding on the contrary you and your parents might understand each other plenty well and be an estrangement these the

Starting point is 00:24:43 understanding itself might be the problem now here's an interesting part of the literature that I want to call your attention to this once again comes from Carl Pillimer this great really the world's leading expert on estrangement and reconciliation. It tends to be often associated with a values breach more than a behavioral breach. In other words,

Starting point is 00:25:04 when, and especially in the case of adult kids, who start living in a particular way, the problem isn't that they live in a way that's subjection or mold of the parents. The problem is that in so doing, they will overtly reject the values of the parents. The classic case

Starting point is 00:25:20 is, you know, a young adult comes home from college and says, you know, all these values that you brought me up with, mom and dad, they're really, really bad and stupid and evil and awful. And so therefore, that's really stupid. And you need to, like, I'm, I'm back from state university technical institution and I'm going to school you guys, mom and dad. I mean, the classic, right? I mean, we see all these, it's a movie theme. It's a meme, practically. And there, but for the grace of God, go any of us, where we suddenly get super smart when we move out and we're under the sway of a lot of other adults. Right or wrong, you decide, right?

Starting point is 00:25:54 But the whole point is this, from this research. If you, as a young adult, or not so young adult, choose to live differently than your parents, that's almost certainly not going to create schism. If you reject the values of your aging parents, it will. Very important distinction. I want to underline this. Let me say it again.

Starting point is 00:26:16 Live the way you want, but don't reject the values of your parents unless you're willing to risk a schism. Because what that's saying is, I hate you. You brought me up in a particular way that was completely wrong. I reject that. Now, it's not a rejection to live in a different way, really. And the research is pretty clear that aging parents,

Starting point is 00:26:38 they can get used to a lot of stuff. The whole idea that if you come home and you're living in a different way, they're going to toss you out and you're dead to me, you're no son of mine, or, you know, whatever. That happens very rarely. But sitting around the Thanksgiving table saying, you know, you're just really vile and stupid in the way that you think, that's going to create some scar tissue. That's going to create some real damage.

Starting point is 00:27:00 So that's a pretty interesting piece of information that goes along as well. Now, let's get back to this whole idea of parents, aging parents, having an schism because of an adult child's so-called objectionable relationships. You're probably thinking about friends or a romantic partner. And that can most certainly be the case, that you are hanging out with the wrong crowd as far as your parents are concerned. You might not think so. As a matter of fact, you don't think so, but they might, and that objectionable relationship might lead to this problem. But probably not if it's just a change of behavior, because I mentioned that just a second ago. One objectionable relationship that's more common than you think is the very person or people that might be encouraging you to go no contact with your parents.

Starting point is 00:27:47 And that's a whole movement today. Going back in time a little bit, not that long ago, if you would tell me that there are non-profit organizations dedicated to no contact with parents. I would say, that's insane. Why would you have a nonprofit organization dedicated to hurting people, dedicating to ripping families apart? Okay, it's not that simple, right? It's not that simple. There might be nonprofit organizations dedicated to helping people understand when they've been victims of abuse, for example, when it's actually unhealthy, even dangerous to be around certain. family members. I get that. But the problem with that is that the, the boundaries can be kind of

Starting point is 00:28:26 fuzzy on this. And there is substantial evidence, I think quite credible, that the no contact movement, which is pretty organized at this point that's encouraging people to pull away from their families, to leave their parents behind, has gone from what we would typically think of abuse, as abuse, and gone into realms that are a lot more, well, let's just say questionable, such as when people disagree with each other, when we get into ideological disagreement, when we spar over politics. So once again, abuse, no joke. I mean, real abuse, don't get me wrong. You have to stay safe is what it comes down to. But what about when we actually get into something that constitutes abuse in the minds of some, but very much in the minds of other people. I am personally of the

Starting point is 00:29:15 view that political differences are not abuse. There's not. You know, I get it. I mean, people disagree passionately. This is America. I mean, some of you are not in America. Sorry. And this is what it means to live in a free society is to be able to disagree with each other. But I wrote a whole book called Love Your Enemies. I just quoted Matthew 544 from the Sermint on the Mount. Love your enemies. Pray for those to persecute you. Even if they're in the next bedroom. If you're ideological foes, love is really really. important across differences, big differences, to be sure. I'm not just to the Sticks and Stones school. I actually think that a free society requires that we be able to cohabitate,

Starting point is 00:29:57 that we be able to coexist with people who disagree with us. And in point of fact, people who disagree with us make us stronger and better because this is the competition of ideas. We have to have the resilience, the personal strength, to be able to put up with ideas that are not the same as ours. If for no other reason than to understand them and to be to maintain love relationships in spite of them. And many advocates in the no-contact movement suggest it's appropriate to cut off family members simply for voting in a particular way. I've seen cases again and again and again.

Starting point is 00:30:27 As a matter of fact, I will throw into the notes an article from New York Magazine title, it's okay to go no contact with your MAGA relatives. This is of a piece with the opportunism of many political leaders today on the right and the left. I'm not making a partisan point here, friends, who encouraged that cutting off familial contact is a means to fire a voters in a highly politicized political environment. As a matter of fact, in 2023, one of the presidential campaigns released a message on social media, a handy guide to responding to your crazy relatives and their nonsense this Thanksgiving. I'm not going to tell you which side it was because it could have been either, right? You know it's, you know how hijacked we've

Starting point is 00:31:17 become by the 5% fringes. But here's the point. When you have estrangement, it hurts you, is what it comes down to. It might profit somebody else. You know, somebody else is getting your vote, somebody else, some activist is getting your support. Is it in your interest? This is something that you have to think about. Let's go back to the research a little bit. Then I'm going to come back to what to do about it. I'll get off my high horse here. And let's get back to the research on this about what is likely going to happen. If you are on either side of an estrangement, you've decided to pull away or you've been pulled away from. If you're the aging parent, if you're the adult child, if you're in a no-contact situation, you might be wondering what's the ultimate outcome

Starting point is 00:31:56 likely going to be. And we got the data on that because we always have the data on everything, don't we? The data are actually incredibly encouraging. I love that. Here's the research. It shows that 81% of estranged adult children eventually become unsegregated, unestranged from their mothers. 81%. That's great, isn't it? This comes from that, once again, the Journal of Marriage and Family, such a great journal, from an article from 2023, relatively recent.

Starting point is 00:32:23 81% of estrangements resolve between adult children and their mothers and their aging mothers. They're poor aging mothers. How about fathers? 69%. Now, why? Why is it so much more likely that there's going to be reconciliation between mothers and their children versus fathers and their children?

Starting point is 00:32:39 And there are two answers to this. Number one is because estrangements with fathers, typically goes back to dad leaving when they were kids. And there are a lot of families where dad bailed. And so the estrangement occurs because, you know, who's talked to dad and who knows, 15, 20, 30 years. Maybe dad left the picture. I have a very, very close friend where dad left when, you know,

Starting point is 00:33:02 my friend was a kid. And you started another family someplace and nobody ever heard from him again. That's sort of old school in this way. It's kind of easy to find people these days. If you're an internet sleuth, you can typically find people. It's hard to stay under the radar. But the truth is maybe you don't want to because, you know, somebody who is not part of your life. And that's one reason because dad is more likely to be absent than mom.

Starting point is 00:33:22 The other reason is because dad tends to die earlier. And so you have fewer chances to reconcile when male mortality is different than female mortality. Men tend to die, depending on the socioeconomic class that you're talking about, somewhere between two and eight years earlier than women. And so the result is that a lot of reconciliation is missed as a result of that. and could have happened if men had actually lived longer. But the bottom line is, if you're in the situation on either side, most likely it's going to work out. And that does not mean that there's going to be no disagreements,

Starting point is 00:33:54 that they'll cease and the differences will disappear. I know zero conflict-free families, including my own. We have lots and lots of arguments. My kids argue with each other. We argue with our kids. They argue with us. I very frequently don't vote the same way as my kids. I very frequently don't vote the same way as my wife, as a matter of fact.

Starting point is 00:34:16 There have been times when I'm the only one in my whole family who voted in a particular way. They're all, because they're all so wrong sometimes. What can I tell you? The truth is that you get disagreements. The point is not disagreeing. The point is how do you disagree? And what do you do when you disagree is actually what it comes down to? What this means is that families that have reconciled or families that have never faced

Starting point is 00:34:39 estrangement in the first place, if they're close at all, and they have. disagreements that are common inside families, that they've figured out how to get beyond schismatic disparities and love each other in spite of that. And that gets me to the two magic ingredients in the literature that you find of families that stay together, despite the fact that sometimes they can't stand each other's choices or what they say. They do two things. And again, this is going to go back to the oldest ideas in the world. They tolerate disagreement. They don't love it necessarily, but they have a high, high, high degree of tolerance and they know how to forgive each other is what it comes down to. Now, I want to talk about that a little bit because

Starting point is 00:35:17 sometimes, I mean, you'd expect in kin-based groups based on evolutionary biology that tolerance would be higher, but sometimes it isn't in our modern society. In a lot of ways, it's easier to be intolerant to people around you because you hold them to a higher standard. It's like, how dare my wife vote differently than me? Said lots and lots of people in America in the last presidential lecture, right? Whereas, you know, the next door neighbor would be like, yeah, you're just, you know, a little nutty, sort of differently than me. Good guy. Good guy. Yeah, yeah. I'm using his lawnmower right now, right? I mean, the whole point is that you're less tolerant for the people for whom you should be more tolerant and you're less forgiving because it feels

Starting point is 00:35:57 like a personal affront a lot more than a disagreement would be even a substantial disagreement, or perhaps especially a substantial agreement would be with with somebody with whom you're, you're not a blood relation. You know, the stakes feel lower is the way that this actually works out. So, what do I mean by tolerance? You know, it's funny, that coexist bumper sticker that you actually see that has, you know, for all the letters and the words coexist and in the word coexist, they have, you know, they're turned into symbols from different religions. And, you know, I love that. I do. I mean, it's like, I confess. I'm just, you know, I'm an old hippie in my heart. And anybody who's a serious fan of the show or is followed by work, you know that I spent a lot of time studying other religions, despite the fact that I'm a devoted Catholic.

Starting point is 00:36:45 I love people who think in different ways, philosophically, spiritually. I just learned so much from other people, especially when their beliefs are based on love itself. It's fantastic. But it's very easy to not include people who think differently on some ideological or political things in that bumper sticker. And there's got to be a way to put mom in that coexist bumper sticker. There's got to be a way to have your families in that. You just, I mean, it's like, yeah, we're going to coexist. We're going to walk into the future together. You're going to be it. One of us is going to be each other's funeral.

Starting point is 00:37:17 I'm going to cry when you die or vice versa. That's the way it's going to go. And we're going to laugh at the reception after the funeral about how much we disagreed on politics. That kind of tolerance and coexistence is one that's fundamentally based on the idea that we're in it for life is what it comes down to. And that's the attitude that families that stick together have, which is, this is it. We're stuck together. We're stuck together. That's the essence of coexistence. And that's kind of a beautiful stickiness, if you know what I mean. The second is forgiveness. And forgiveness can be really, really super hard because the injuries and slights are so important. It's funny. You know,

Starting point is 00:37:48 I talk to couples a lot. And Esther and I are, you know, we're doing a lot of work with couples now. We, you know, we counsel couples on their way to getting married, you know, marriage prep in a Catholic context. We're doing secular retreats now on, on, on. on how to fall in love and stay in love. And it's really important. But we know we've been married for almost 35 years. This is our 35th wedding anniversary. And sometimes it's much, much harder to forgive the person who's closest to you

Starting point is 00:38:14 because the slights are so when your batteries are wired together, when you're love, when there's the fusion of the right hemispheres of your brain, which feels like an antenna to the divine, it's a delicate system that can be disturbed so easily. This is what families do. And so little slights get, you know, blown up into, bigger things. And it's very important to have the same standard of forgiveness that you'd have for anybody. It's like, it's okay. It's okay. I will do a show on how to forgive. I'm actually how to do that because there's a whole algorithm. There's a whole set of techniques on how to forgive other

Starting point is 00:38:48 people. But the whole point is forgiveness is not least important. It's most important for the people who are in your kin because it's hardest for most people to actually do that. And to have a culture, an overt culture, which many, many cohesive families have, which is, I promise you I'm going to forgive you when you inevitably insult me, when you inevitably hurt my feelings. And you promise to do the same thing as well and bring it and holding people to those overt promises. Making it just implicit is really not good enough. Now, one last thing before we go to some questions, because we got some interesting questions today. One more thing to consider in our current political and social environment. We are the product, my friends. And I've talked about this a lot

Starting point is 00:39:29 on the show on how we've been productized by tech. Tech has productized us and making us addicted as we are to our devices. And so I've talked a lot about how to, not to get rid of our devices, but to manage them. So we use them for learning and loving and laughing and really good things and not, you know, the scrolling and hypnosis and distraction, all the things that actually hurt us. And when we do the latter, we're being productized. We just are because somebody's making money from us. But the truth is ideologically we're being productized as well. when you hate somebody that you actually should love, somebody's probably profiting. And not always, but a lot of times they are. And I know someone who isn't, and it's you.

Starting point is 00:40:09 And again, I'm ruling out the cases of overt abuse and you have to decide what abuse actually is. But in cases where you're told it is and you're not quite sure, this is where we need to do a little bit of work. There might be influencers, politicians, media, telling you to ditch your family members. members because they have mistaken values, bad ideas, or really vile politics, and in having those views that they don't love or care about you. But that's wrong. The ones who don't love and care about you are the people encouraging you to pull away for your family.

Starting point is 00:40:46 This is especially in the case of political activism, and there's a lot of research on this. And I've talked about dark triad personalities and how they, they're so common in political activism today on both the political right and left. they use your misery to further their interests. People who don't know you, for example, they might make a case for cutting off your parents or your siblings or your kids. And it might sound appealing to you right now. But doing so is very likely to be a recipe for your loneliness and your depression and not

Starting point is 00:41:16 a better world for all. And that's what we want is a better world for all. Maybe, just maybe. The people with whom you should have no contact are the people who are encouraging you to go no contact. Let's do some questions. First one is from Anonymous, writing in the office hours at arthurbricks.com. I've always made the effort in friendships not only because I would like to receive it back,

Starting point is 00:41:38 but also because I believe this is what people are supposed to do as a good friend. Make an effort in friendship. Yeah, for sure. However, I hardly find any person who matches my effort. As a result of this, I feel lonely and drained. What do you suggest that I do? Well, okay, let's look at the facts. Most people are slackers when it comes to friendship.

Starting point is 00:41:57 Most people are not really that great at friendship. And part of the reason is because they're busy is what it comes down to. And when you do the work, most people will let you do the work. Look, every time you go out to lunch with your friends and you pay, they'll pretty much let you do that. That's just kind of how people are. So here's the first question. When you do the work, who appreciates it and who doesn't? If you have a one-sided relationship that's truly emotionally one-sided, you're going to know.

Starting point is 00:42:22 You have a good sense of intuition. We have a million ways in a reptilian brain for sensing. the social and the you to know whether or not it's all you and not them, whether they don't appreciate it, where you're approaching and they're avoiding. So when you approach and they avoid, what that means is that you're kind of, you're forcing a friendship issue where actually is not what they want, it's what it comes down to. Assess that. Think about your friendships and where that's the case. In many of the cases, what you'll find is that somebody's just letting you do the work. And if these are real friends, not deal friends, not virtual friends, real friends,

Starting point is 00:42:55 here's what you do. You go to that person and they say, I would really like it if you called more. I would really like it if you actually initiated a little bit more, if you text it a little bit more. I've seen people do this all the time and they're like, huh, really? Totally. I'm happy to do that. If somebody's offended by that or somebody blows that off, you knew they were in category one. But if they basically say, yeah, I'll do that because I'd like hanging out with you. Then they're in category two. And what are friends supposed to do? They're supposed to be open with each other. I'm supposed to talk to each other, frankly. They shouldn't be worried about something as trivial as saying,

Starting point is 00:43:27 I wish you'd call me more. I mean, that's great. With my closest friends that they say, I wish you'd call me more, I want to hear that because I love them. So that's what to do. Second, this comes from Summer Platte, writing it once again to the website. Do you know anything about attachment styles, anxious and avoidant, and how that plays into finding a partner?

Starting point is 00:43:47 Oh, do I? Oh, yes, I do know about that. I've done a lot of work on that. I teach that every year to my graduate. students in leadership and happiness. Here's how to think about attachment styles in finding a partner. And by that, I mean, I don't mean like a partner if you're a dentist and you want to send up a dental practice. I mean like your romantic partner. There are two pathologies in romantic partnership. They're called anxiousness or anxiety and avoidance. So two things that can really

Starting point is 00:44:15 mess up your partnership or mess up your ability to find a partner is that you're overanxious about your romantic life or your avoidant of actually making commitment or even getting together in the first place. And this leads to kind of a two by two diagram that I want you to imagine here right in front of you. There are people who are both anxious and avoidant. They're really anxious about relationships and so they avoid them because they're so impossible. That's called the fearful pattern and these people, they tend to stay pretty much stay single and you have to work on both dimensions. Okay. The second is people who are both anxious but non-avoid. They're really, really freaked out, but they're not avoiding. They're actually looking. This is a little bit

Starting point is 00:44:55 better, but it really leads to a lot of worry and a lot of hardship emotionally. That's called preoccupied partnering. There are people who are not anxious, but they're really avoidant. They're dismissing, is what that's called. Those are people like, I don't have time. I don't care. I don't have time for this. They tend to stay single a long time as well. And then there are people who are not anxious and not avoidant. And that's secure partnering. And that's where you want to be. That's where I am in my marriage, which after 35 years, you'd think so, right? And by the way, I've moved from other quadrants to that, as has my wife. My wife was always less anxious and always less avoidant, but I was kind of in the fearful, kind of anxious, kind of avoidant quadrant when I was in my

Starting point is 00:45:32 early 20s. And then I fell in love and I met somebody who really completed me. And I've talked about that. I've talked about that quite a bit in both my writing and my podcast. And that led me to be secure. And that's what you actually get from love that's healthy and in a healthy way. You can look in my writing and look on my website for a test to find out where you are on this two by two diagram that will actually help you because then you'll know what to deal with. I'll do a whole show on that, okay? Let's just say that I'll do a whole show on that at some point, but that's a good way to get started. Andrew Kern writes in once again to the website. I am 41 of a single. I live in Raleigh, North Carolina. I'm doing to work for you here, Andrew. I'm telling you where you live so that

Starting point is 00:46:11 people can find you. Are there any practical ways that you can advise on putting myself out there to meet women locally. Okay? It's pretty clear what Andrew's after. Good for you, Andrew. You're playing heads up. How to meet women locally instead of on the apps in the hopes of marriage is the ultimate goal. Man, this is really good. This is good stuff, man. The answer to this, yes, is that you will find that people who meet in person around particular wholesome interests are the people who are the most likely to be in the market for long-term relationships. And so that's the place to actually go. Now, for a lot of people, it's interests like a running club, a book club, volunteering at the local animal shelter, whatever happens to be. But that's where you're most likely to meet somebody who's

Starting point is 00:46:56 also there because of their interest in doing something wholesome and good. But they're also, and there's good research on this, that shows that they're most likely to have light personality traits, which are conscientiousness and agreeableness. People who meet in other places like bar, and nightclubs and believe they're not on beaches, they tend to have darker personality traits and they tend to be more interested in short-term mating. That's not what you want. Andrew, you even said that in your note. The other place is religious occasions or religious interests.

Starting point is 00:47:25 And again, I don't know if you're religious or not, Andrew, but if you are, that's the place to look. In almost every city, there will be one congregation no matter what your religion is that caters mostly to young singles and people are there for it. And people often say, yeah, but you know, I'm not really, really, really. religious. That's not what I asked. I mean, the truth is that you might get more so, especially if you meet somebody who has a religion that you're not ruling out or that you were raised and have a practice in a long time. And this might be an opportunity for you actually to go back

Starting point is 00:47:56 and say, maybe I'm open to, I'm open to persuasion. Let's just put it that way. And that can be a very beautiful way to meet people. Also, by the way, for those people who are on the apps, The apps are not terrible necessarily, but the whole point is don't stay virtual. Get out onto a date as soon as you can because you have a million ways to discern the character and beliefs and characteristics of a person in person that you don't online. So therefore, you're less likely to make a mistake the sooner you get out into real life, which is what some of the better apps are actually encouraging. There you go.

Starting point is 00:48:30 So good luck, Andrew. Let me know how it goes. We're done. Let me know your thoughts by writing into the website, office hours at arthurbrooks.com. Like and subscribe. hit the subscribe button please on Spotify, YouTube and Apple. Leave a comment. I'll read it. Even if it's negative, I want to know because I want to know what you want more of.

Starting point is 00:48:47 Follow me on socials, Instagram, LinkedIn, all the other platforms. Remember, you can actually have all kinds of enrichment that comes from these things, as long as you're getting content that's good for you and that you're learning from. And do order the meaning of your life to learn more about all the things I've talked about here today. And if you like it, maybe that's a good gift for your best. best friends next birthday or a family member family member you're trying to become reconciled with I don't know I'm making it up at this point have a great week

Office Hours with Arthur Brooks - The Real Cost of Family Estrangement

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