Today, Explained - Breaking up with your parents

Episode Date: November 22, 2024

Writer Emi Nietfeld says she felt relief when she cut her mom out of her life. Clinical psychologist Joshua Coleman explains why family estrangement is on the rise. This episode was produced by Victoria Chamberlin, edited by Matt Collette and Miranda Kennedy, engineered by Rob Byers and Andrea Kristinsdottir, fact checked by Laura Bullard, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members A 1970's 3-generation family turkey dinner. Photo by H. Armstrong Roberts/ClassicStock/Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The holidays are basically here. It's the happiest time of the year for some, and for others, the opposite. Life for me at the Halloween is literally downhill. I picked up a snow globe the other day and just wanted to cry. Nobody wants to go home and see their Republican family members. There's an increasingly popular option for all the people who don't love seeing their parents during the holidays or any other time of the year. You can peace out.

So I cut my dad off, um, like a couple weeks ago. I fully believe in protecting my own energy. This is my polite reminder that if you are no contact with your parents, that is okay. So one thing I really did not expect when I became estranged from my parents was that I was going to have to be consoling other people about it, like semi-frequently. We're going to take a deep breath, and then we're going to talk about parental estrangement on Today Explained. BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas.

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1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Explained. Emmy Nietfeld is estranged from her mother. We asked her how she described that absence in her life,

and we were rather surprised by her answer. Joyful. It feels like a huge relief has been lifted off of me. Hmm. Tell us how come. I love my mom. My mom loves or loved me. But throughout my whole adolescence,

there was so much fighting. There was so much feeling blamed. So much of trying to navigate her own issues with trying to keep myself sane, that when I eventually made the tough decision to cut ties, I expected that my whole life would fall apart, that I would just miss her all day, every day. And I was totally shocked to find out that actually my life has been so much better since I made that decision. When I was about 11, my parents' divorce was finalized and my mom won custody. And she had a problem with compulsive shopping and hoarding. And it got really intense after the divorce. And that was also when my other parent moved across the country and we never had contact really since then. And so my mom was all that I had, but she could not tell that she had a problem.

And so when I was in middle school, she brought me to these therapists and psychiatrists and really pointed the blame at me and said, okay, Emmy is disorganized. Emmy is chronically late. I think she has ADHD. And I was sent for medication. I took Adderall. I took Ritalin. I took Prozac, Zoloft, antidepressants, antipsychotics, a dozen drugs in two years. And it only got worse from there. I spent nine months in residential treatment when I was 14. I spent time in foster care. I got out of foster care, went to boarding school, but spent time homeless. My relationship with my mom just kind of got worse and worse because I, you know, it was like, okay, well, why did I spend that year in foster care?

And she was really like, you were troubled. Like you had to get your angries out on another family. You were too much for me to deal with. And there was, I was ready to take 90% of the blame, but I couldn't take 100% of it. And this especially came to a head when it came to the way that my mom had handled my sexual assault when I was 17. And in the aftermath, my mom sent me this email where it was like, you shouldn't have been drinking. You should have said no loudly and clearly. Just all these things that I should have done differently.

I was really, really struggling with PTSD. I was having an impossible time letting go of my own self-blame. But this whole time, everybody just assumed that I should have a close relationship with my mom. And it was never even a question of could I cut ties with my mom? Could I distance myself from my mom? It just was something that I had to do and was expected of me. And I started to realize, okay, I'm blaming myself thinking the very same things that my mom told me. And my mom clung to that. She would not change her views. She would not let me off the hook. And I eventually was like, I'm not going to be able to get better if I'm still in contact with her.

Did you say goodbye? When I called my mom, I really did not want to believe that that was the conversation that was going to end our relationship. But, you know, and I confronted her about it. I was like, I really am struggling with how you are dealing with this assault. And she was like, what could I tell you that would make you believe that I don't think it's your fault? And I told her, I was like, you could say it's not your fault. But she actually would not say it. It was just silence. And I was like, wow, I really feel like I have to do this.

And this is the right decision for me. It was so hard to hang up the phone. I just said, I love you again and again, knowing that that might be the last time that I said, I love you again and again, knowing that that might be the last time that I said, I love you to my mom. And then when I hung up, I felt so much relief. Immediately. Immediately. But then I started getting all of these text messages, all of these emails from my mom, just pretending that nothing had happened.

And I think when the media talks about est estrangement it's often framed as like the moment of estrangement is the moment that you lose somebody but what I experienced and I think a lot of people experience is that we've already lost that relationship or we've already lost the sense of love and safety that we want to have with somebody. That makes them feel like family to us. It felt more like letting go of a lie than letting go of my actual real life mom. Does it bum you out that your daughter isn't going to know your mom? I ended up getting a cousin to orchestrate my mom meeting my daughter. And so my husband took her over to a coffee shop. They spent, you know, an hour and a

half together. And, you know, my mom got to hold her. My daughter's too young to remember it. But I think it was really important for me because it helps me believe that I'm not trying to punish my mom. And I think that the taboos against estrangement really push people to justify cutting ties in ways that aren't really healthy. You know, there's no estrangement police. There shouldn't be an estrangement police. And this is America. We have the right to never speak to our parents again. Really, like if you're like, oh, duty, obligation, it's like that is not American. I love that. You make it sound patriotic. Just think of all the people at Ellis Island holding a suitcase, thinking I'm never going to see my family again, and being overjoyed that that's the case. Back then, you really got a clean break.

And now you almost have to estrange yourself because the person you don't want to talk to can text you all day, every day. And sometimes I wonder if my mom had never learned how to email, if my mom had never learned how to text, there's a very good chance we would still have a relationship. Oh, man. Brutal. Yeah. No, it's true. Because people talk about estrangement like it's a technology problem.

As if TikTok and Instagram are just infecting everybody's minds with this idea. I think it's a technology problem in the other way, where we're way too accessible and there's no more etiquette anymore. So all we have left is boundaries and sometimes the ultimate boundary of saying, I will never speak to you again. Let's say in like 15 years, you know, God forbid, I'm not wishing this upon you, but I'm just asking if your daughter maybe now has this idea that estrangement is kind of normal because you did it. If she decided, for example, she didn't want to talk to you anymore. How would you react?

Do you think because you've had this experience, you'd try to understand it? I mean, I would be heartbroken. And I definitely think I would try to understand it. What I hope is that parents focus way more on how do I build a relationship of reciprocal affection, kindness, respect with my kids. Because there's a lot of people who are like, you owe your parents. They say your parents raised you, the least you can do is suck it up and stay in this relationship that's making you really

unhappy. And I just don't think that that tracks with the modern world or with modern life. People point out this breakdown between the generations. And I actually think that there's truth to that. I really think that there's not this continuity between, you know, parents and children and grandparents anymore. So I can actually totally see a world where most people are estranged from their parents. I could totally see that coming. And do I think that that would be a good thing? No. No.

But do I think that would be understandable? Absolutely. Emmy Nietfeld, she's the author of a book called Acceptance, which is about a lot of the stuff she just told you about, but even more. When we're back on Today Explained, a psychologist is going to tell us everything he knows about estrangement, and he knows quite a bit because his kid once stopped talking to him. Today explains Sean Rm's firm, but enough about me. Dr. Joshua Coleman is a clinical psychologist and the author of multiple books about parental estrangement. It's an area of expertise he was forced into. I was married and divorced in my 20s and have an adult daughter who I'm very

close to. But there was a period of time in her early 20s where she cut off contact with me for, you know, several years, largely as a result of my becoming remarried and having children in my second, which is my current marriage. And her feeling in some ways displaced, that she felt kind of pushed to the side in certain ways, that she got in some ways a worse quality of life in childhood and family life than my twins from my current marriage got, which in many ways is a fairly kind of a reasonable assessment. But at the time when she raised it, I wasn't really prepared to hear how hurt she was or how displaced she felt or in

certain ways neglected. And I responded defensively and maybe even angrily at the time. And, you know, of course, that made it worse, as it often does. And so she eventually shut down contact for a while until I, you know, kind of learned to just be quiet and be, more importantly, not to just be quiet, but to learn how to be empathic and take responsibility and find, you know, listen to her perspective and hear her out and be able to tolerate the mistakes that I had made and empathize with her rather than to defend myself. Okay, so it sounds like this was a bit of a trial and error experience for you. You discovered the wrong things to do as well as the right things to do.

Tell us more about the right things to do. The right things are to take responsibility and to show empathy and to find the kernel, if not the bushel, of truth in your child's complaints, to not be defensive, to not get mad, to assume that, you know, one of my methods is to have parents write what I call a letter of amends. And I say, you should always start your letter of amends by saying, I know you wouldn't do this unless it was the healthiest thing for you to do. Because from the adult child's perspective, it is the healthiest thing for them to do. It may not feel that way to the parent. The parent's therapist may not feel

like it's the healthiest thing for the kid to do, but it doesn't really matter. The goal is to be in alignment with what your child's values are, particularly today because nothing compels an adult child to have a relationship with a parent unless they want to. Can you help us understand how common estrangement is becoming or what the rates of estrangement are these days? The most recent study was out of Ohio State with a sociologist named Wren Resnick and colleagues, and she found that 26% of fathers are currently estranged from a child in the U.S. Wow. Which is huge, right? Now, she found 6% of mothers, but other people have found something

closer to 10% to 12% of mothers are, which I think it's more in that camp. And then another study by Carl Pillemer at Cornell, he found that 27% of adults over 18 are estranged from a family member, not necessarily a parent, but a sibling or other family members. So it's pretty darn common. And what's driving that? What's making it more common? Oh, it's a number of factors. I think that this moral shift that I was talking about where relationships are purely predicated on the basis of whether or not the relationship is good for one's happiness and mental health and personal expression and identity. In the United States, we have rising rates of individualism that have occurred over the past half century, increasing atomization,

increasing tribalism, the incursion of therapeutic narratives in the way that we define ourselves, Instagram, I mean, social media, which we could spend an hour talking about divorce. So there's a lot of reasons why it's on the rise. And are all those factors from social media to politics to increasing individualism, are they driving people to choose estrangement over maybe working through problems? And that's not a judgment. I'm just trying to understand it. Well, I think so, because I think that, you know, it's become considered sort of virtuous to cut off toxic people and to have boundaries.

You know, I think in our society we have a very rich and developed language around boundaries and diagnoses of other people and the like, and a kind of impoverished language around interdependency and compassion and empathy and understanding the other person's perspective. So I think that has fueled this idea that cutting off people is considered a really assertive self-care, active self-care. And in fact, it can be. I mean, there are genuinely hurtful, destructive family members. So I'm not here to say one should never do that. But I do think people in general are too quick to do it.

And I also don't think that younger generations are as empathic as I wish they were about, A, how hard it is to be a parent. The parenting is often a fog of war. Or B, how the absolute immiseration they're causing when they cut a parent out of their lives. I'm on my way back from a failed attempt to get my daughter back in my life after three years. I just wanted to talk to her. I have even been told that the therapists are suggesting the kids go non-contact with their parents, but they're only hearing one side of the story. I have to be respectful of what she's asked, which is for me to leave her alone. But I just miss her so dang much.

You know, parents in my practice are suicidal. They're miserable, particularly those who've been cut off from grandchildren. Many of these parents were loving, involved grandparents, and they're not being cut off because of their being bad grandparents. They're being cut off because of conflict between the parent and the adult child. We heard from Emmy earlier in the show that had it not been for texting and email, she probably would still have a relationship with her mother. It was the sort of, you know, over-communication that she felt she had with her mother that made her relationship with her mother unsustainable? Do you see that a lot in your practice, in your research?

I really do, and I'm glad that Emmy raised that because I do think that, well, I think there's been several factors. One of the changes that we've had in the past four decades or so is parents have become much more anxious, much more involved. The studies by economists tell them countries with high social inequality, like the United States or China, parents do have to become much more involved, much more tiger mothers or helicopter parents, because it's the only way to guarantee or at least increase the probability that their child is going to have a safe landing into adulthood. And other countries with low social inequality, say, for example, Japan or the Scandinavian countries,

parents can feel more secure that their children are, you know, without enormous parental investments, still going to do okay in life. And so parents have been much more intensive and much more involved. So parents have become much more enmeshed. But then you add cell phones onto that, where parents can track their kids when they're young, they can know where they are. And then once the kids leave home,

they can reach them at any time of day from any part of the world. And so many adult children, the phrase that I see in every single letter from every single estranged adult child is, you need to respect my boundaries. And I think that's because boundaries between parents and children have become much more diffuse.

Is there another way, or is this a necessary trend and movement? I mean, I wish there was another way. I mean, my whole mission is to give parents the tools to learn how to communicate to their adult children in ways that help them to feel cared about and understood. And I do think most of the first-person narratives and first-person essays that you see in the media are written from the perspective of, well, I cut off my abusive parent and I'm better off and I'm happier. Very little, quite frankly, I think is written about how absolutely immiserated the parents are. So thank you for having me on your show. Thank you for joining us. You know, you don't have to agree with everything that your family believes in order to capitalize

or have what to remember what's good about them as people and parents. Politics is only one part of our identity, and for some people it can be an important part, but we should kind of be big enough people to look around those sorts of differences and remember what's good about the people that we grew up with or that raised us or that are our children, because it is a cause of estrangement these days. For example, I have a younger brother

who's a self-admitted conspiracy theorist. And so whenever I talk to him on the phone, he starts to go there. I go, we're not going there. And he just laughs and we, you know, because I love him and I don't want to, I just don't want the conversation to get trashed in the way that it used to. I'm never going to believe the videos he sends me from Andrew Tate or something, and he's not going to believe the research articles I'm going to send him. So we're just in different worlds. So why go there? I mean, if you like to fight, fine, fight. But there's ways to respectfully disagree, but we've sort of lost the art of that, I think. Psychologist Dr. Joshua Coleman,

he's got a private practice in the Bay Area, and he's the author of When Parents Hurt, Compassionate Strategies When You and Your Grown Child Don't Get Along, and Rules of Estrangement, Why Adult Children Cut Ties and How to Heal the Conflict. Victoria Chamberlain made our show today, even though it's her worst nightmare. She was edited by Miranda Kennedy, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and mixed by Rob Byers and Andrea Christen's daughter. The rest of the best that today explained includes Matthew Collette, Halima Shah, Patrick Boyd, Abishai Artsy, Miles Bryan, Hadi Mawagdi, Amanda Llewellyn, Peter Balanon-Rosen, Amina Alsadi, and of course my co-host Noelle King. We use music by Breakmaster Cylinder.

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