What's Behind the Rise of Parent-Child Estrangement？
Episode Stats
Summary
In this episode, Dr. Joshua Coleman, a psychologist who spent 40 years counseling families and the author of Rules of Estrangement: Why Adult Children Cut Ties and How to Heal the Conflict, discusses why estrangement between parents and adult children is on the rise.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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These days, you hear more and more about parents and adult children being estranged from each
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other. Some individuals have even decided to go no contact with their parents. They
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don't want anything to do with their mom and or dad at all. To understand what's behind
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this phenomenon, today I talked to Joshua Coleman, a psychologist who spent 40 years
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counseling families and the author of Rules of Estrangement, Why Adult Children Cut Ties
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and How to Heal the Conflict. Joshua goes beyond the typical one-sided narratives around parent-child
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estrangement that tell the story of parents who got what they deserve or overly entitled
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adult children who wrongly blame their parents to unpack the larger cultural context for why
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these tensions have arisen. We discuss how society has moved from upholding and honor thy father
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and mother's sense of obligation to prioritizing individuality and optionality, and why, despite
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the fact we're more child-focused and psychologically aware than ever, familial estrangements are on
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the rise. We get into the common reasons for estrangement, the role that expanding ideas of
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what constitutes abuse and trauma an adult child's therapist can play in it, and how much
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parents can really be blamed for how their kids turn out. And we get into what parents who
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are estranged from the children can do to reconcile with them. Even if you're not personally estranged
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from a family member, the discussion of the underlying dynamics influencing all our modern
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relationships is a fascinating one. After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is
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All right, Dr. Joshua Coleman, welcome to the show.
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So you are a psychologist who specializes in working with parents and adult children who
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have become estranged from each other. And you've written a book about that called
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The Rules of Estrangement. Let's start with definitions first. What is parent-child estrangement?
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You know, people define it in different ways. The way that I think about it is when there's been
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a complete or a near-complete cutoff between the two. So there's, you know, little to no contact.
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Maybe there's the occasional birthday greeting or Mother's or Father's Day greeting, but otherwise
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Does estrangement have to be explicit? Like does either the parent or the child have to say,
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I'm done with you, I don't want anything to do with you, or can it just be like a silent
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Yeah, sometimes it works that way. I have a lot of parents in my practice where all of a sudden
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the adult child isn't responding to phone, texts, emails. Now they're cut off from social
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media. Sometimes they move and don't tell the parent. So that's probably not the majority of
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It seems like more and more adult children are becoming estranged from their parents.
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It seems like every other week I see an article about this somewhere or something on social
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media about it. Is this a new phenomenon or is the media just covering it more so we just
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hear about it more because you see it on the news or your Instagram feed?
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Yeah. I think the extent of it is new. I mean, I, you know, I think we have to assume that there's
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always been strained, distant, or even non-existent relationships between parents and adult
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children, but I don't think it's nearly the numbers that we're, we're seeing today. You know,
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a recent study by Wren Resnick at Ohio State and her colleagues found that some 26% of fathers are
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estranged from an adult child. That same study found that 6% of mothers, but other studies
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show between 10 and 15% of mothers. I don't think that those figures have always been the case.
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I mean, one of the problems from a research perspective is that we didn't really, we don't
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have a beginning, a start date to look at estrangement the way that we do other things,
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say divorce, for example. But if we just use divorce, for example, as a start date, it's
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clear that divorce is a really common pathway to estrangement. In my survey of 1600 estranged
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parents that I conducted through the University of Wisconsin Survey Center, we found that 70% of
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parents who were estranged were divorced from the other biological parent and didn't become estranged
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until after the divorce. So we know that if we just use divorce as a starting point, I would assume
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that there weren't nearly the numbers of estrangement that there were once we started making divorce a
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more common part of, of our culture. Similarly, if you look at non-marital childbirth in the 1960s,
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only 5% of children were born outside of marriage. Today, it's more like 40%. And those,
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those families are very high at risk for estrangement, particularly for fathers. So just using those as
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data points, I think those are significant. But then you add on to it, this identitarian moment that
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we're at currently where one's identity has become much more in the foreground where the moral
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framework that kind of animated families for millennia, honor thy mother and thy father,
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respect thy elders, families forever, really in the past century has given way to this much more
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personal growth, self-esteem, pursuit of happiness framework, where relationships are much more
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constituted on what the British sociologist Anthony Giddens calls pure relationships, meaning that the
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relationships that are purely constituted on the basis of whether or not the relationship is in line
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with my ideals for happiness and growth and the like. And if they're not, then not only can I cut out a
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parent or family member, I should do it. In some ways, it's an act of existential cowardice not to do
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that. And, and I think that that's historically new. Social media is absolutely an amplifier. Rising rates of
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individualism is an amplifier. So there's a lot of things that I believe are, are fanning the flames to
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this. Yeah. You're the sections in the book where you kind of explore what's driving the increase in
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estrangement. I thought it was, it was really interesting because you basically bring to the
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foreground things that have been happening in the background and how it's affecting families. And so that,
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that shift that you talk about from the framework of honor thy father and thy mother, sort of the idea of
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filial duty that doesn't really exist anymore. It seems like the relationship between parents and
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children is something different. Right. And particularly in, in Western societies, I think
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that that is probably not nearly as much the case in say South and East Asian countries and large,
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probably the majority of areas in the Middle East. So I think that it's mostly a Western phenomenon.
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You know, I don't know if you've read Joseph Heinrich's excellent book,
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The Weirdest People in the World, where WEIR is an acronym for Western educated, industrialized,
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rich democracies. And one of the things that he found is that in those societies, people are just
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much more oriented towards their own happiness and identity and personal expression and much less
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oriented towards relationships. And that's just not the case in large parts of the world. So we don't have
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good statistics about estrangement rates in other countries, but in my interviews with people in
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other countries, I find that it's far less common. Yeah. And it seems like to the expectation of the
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parent-child relationship, it's more like a romantic or a friendship relationship where it's a voluntary
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thing, right? You have to work, each party has to work for it, but it has to fit for both parties.
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And it's exactly right. That, that it's kind of predicated on the same principles as Giddens' pure
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relationship. That if it's not in line with my ideals for happiness and personal growth and mental
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health, then not only can I jettison that relationship, but I should do it. And to not
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do it is an act of self-neglect. And one of the points you make throughout the book is that it used
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to be that children had to earn their parents' love and respect, but now it's the opposite. The
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parent's job is to earn their children's love and respect. And they have to continue to do that
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throughout their children's adult lives. That's right. Well, nothing compels an adult child
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to have a relationship with that parent beyond that adult child's desire to have that relationship.
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So if the moral framework is shifted around families away from that parents are sort of owed
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a certain degree of gratitude and obligation and responsibility and respect, and it's much more
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predicated on whether or not the relationship is in line with the adult child's ideals and standards,
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that really disempowers the parent in terms of their ability to negotiate the relationship and
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greatly empowers the adult child. And this is partly a function of smaller family sizes,
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the role of therapy that, you know, we used to think that difficulties in life would actually
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make children stronger. But over the 20th century, we began to develop the idea that children are
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fragile, that they're vulnerable, that they require a kind of hothouse parenting in order to thrive and
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succeed. And in the era of personal rights in the 1960s, children's rights became very much in the
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foreground. So the era of children being seen and not heard gave way to children really being
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the center of family life. And today, I mean, I'm a boomer. And so when I was growing up, my stay-at-home
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mothers spent less time with me than career mothers spend with their children today. So children have
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moved much more into the front and center of family life. And that's really increased their authority to
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sort of dictate the terms, both when they're young, living in the home, but also when they're grown.
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Yeah. That's one of the paradoxes you point out in the book is that we're more child-focused and
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we're also more psychologically aware than ever. Like everyone's read the books on how to talk to your
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kid, written by psychologists. They talk to their kids in a very therapeutic way, yet estrangement seems
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to be rising. Yeah. I think it's similar as to the kind of high stable divorce rates that were still at
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around 50% divorce rates. And on the one hand, the good news about parent-adult-child relationships
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is that, you know, if you look at some of the large surveys, probably the majority of parents raising
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adult children or, you know, having relationships with adult children would say that they feel
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closer to them than they believe their parents felt to them at a similar age. So in many ways, it's much more
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intensive, psychologically aware, conscientious form of parenting, I think has in many ways
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really increased the quality of relationships between parents and adult children. In the same
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way that more egalitarian, psychologically intensive marriages and communication have made for better
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marriages. But both sides, both marriage and parent-adult-child relationships are based upon
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this much more kind of unstable quality, which is that if it doesn't feel good, you can leave. And
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not only can you leave, but you should leave. So it's really the culture of both kinds of relationships
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that are based on, framed much less around kind of the more moral, old school ideals around family
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and much more around this identitarian, personal happiness, personal growth, personal expression,
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orientation. So it sounds like there's pluses and minuses to this shift.
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There are indeed. Yeah. And it isn't my position that nobody should or can ever estrange themselves
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from a parent or any other destructive family member. I think in the same way that the liberalization
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of divorce laws allowed people, women in particular, to be able to leave abusive marriages, I think that
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our cultural shift that's more supportive of estrangement has allowed adult children who maybe in
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other cultures or other times would have felt obligated to stay in contact with parents who are really
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destructive to their self-esteem or happiness. They're allowed to separate from them. That's the
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upside. And the downside is that it's so easy to do it that in the same way that making divorce so easy
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to obtain means that a lot of people who probably could have and did in fact work their way through
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difficult issues when they were married, when they really couldn't get a divorce or couldn't easily
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get a divorce, they figured it out. The same, similarly with adult children who cut off parents,
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that with more time and patience and effort, they might be able to work something through with a
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parent that they now could easily discard. Yeah. I think a big source of contention between parents
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and children is that parents and children, particularly older parents, like boomers,
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they're both in two different worlds, like moral worlds when it comes to parent-child relationships.
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Like the older parent might think, well, no, it's old school. Like you'd honor thy father and thy mother.
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And like, you just got to come see me even if you don't want to, because that's what you're supposed
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to do. Um, and then the kid's like, no, that's not how it is. And then the parent gets upset and
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that's the source of tension. No, that's exactly right. And, and so much of my work is helping
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because I'm, cause it's typically the parent that reaches out to me because it's typically the parent
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is the one who's been estranged. Parents don't typically estrange their children. Some do for
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religious reasons or they, they disapprove of their child's gender identity or sexuality or who
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they married, but that's the vast minority. Typically if an estrangement happens, it's because
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the adult child has initiated it. And a lot of my work is helping parents kind of navigate the way
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that guilt no longer works. That ship has, has sailed the way that you can sort of guilt trip your
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child into, into contact, you know, or making them, reminding them of all the things that you've,
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you've done for them. And the other part and parcel of that, I know you had Nick Haslam on your,
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on your show and he wrote, you know, I think one of the most important articles to explain this
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moment, the notion of concept creep. And that is the idea that in the past three decades, well,
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he wrote the article, I think in 2016, but there's been this enormous expansion over what we consider to
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be harmful, abusive, traumatizing, neglectful behavior. So younger generations have been kind of
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steeped in this, this framework and whether it's with their own therapist or self-help or,
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you know, podcasts or Instagram influencers, TikTok influencers, ideas about who's a borderline
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parent, who's a narcissist, who's a gaslighter, et cetera, why you should cut off your parent and the
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value in doing that. Whereas older generations, Gen X and boomers, for example, were raised with a much
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more, a much more conservative view of what constitutes harmful, abusive, traumatizing,
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and neglectful behavior. So what often happens is that younger generations are coming to their parents
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after, as a result of being in therapy or some other influence and saying, well, you emotionally abused me
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or you neglected me, or this was emotional incest or, you know, any of the other terms that are so
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popular. And the parent's response is often like, what are you talking about? That wasn't abuse. I would
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have killed have had a childhood like yours. That wasn't abusive. And then of course, as you can
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imagine, then they're off to the races. Then the adult child feels really misunderstood. They feel
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like they've got evidence based on their kind of, you know, culture of information. Whereas the parent
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feels completely disrespected and hurt and misunderstood based on their ideals of what good
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parenting looks like. So a lot of my work is often helping parents to see how much the ground has
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changed and really learning how to use the language that their children are using. So it's not so
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incomprehensible to them. Yeah. As I was reading through that section about, you know, the shift
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between duty bound to more intentional relationships between parents and children, it forced me to
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reflect like what kind of relationship I want to have with my kids. And I think I'm sort of like the
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new school. Like, I don't feel like my kids owe me anything. Like they didn't ask to be born.
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Even though I've invested a lot of time and energy and money into them, like they've given me
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meaning and joy and purpose. So it seems like, you know, neither of us owe each other or anything.
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Like we both, maybe we both owe each other equally. And, you know, when I think about my kids getting
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older and leaving the house, I, I want them to come back because they want to, and not just out of
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obligation. I mean, I just, cause I just feel like it wouldn't feel good if it was begrudging and they
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were just visiting me because they felt like they had to. Well, you might not feel that way if that was the
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only way you could ever see your child or grandchildren again. I mean, the people in my
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practice, the parents and grandparents in my practice are miserable. You know, I did a retreat
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for estranged parents last year. There's 15 people in the room and one of the mothers was talking about
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feeling suicidal. And I said, by show of hands, if anybody else felt suicidal as a result of their
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estrangement and every single person raised their hands. Now those were mostly mothers. I think dads tend
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to be better at compartmentalizing, but the amount of misery that these parents and grandparents are
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feeling, I mean, to me, I don't think it's the worst thing in the world for people to, to show up
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out of a sense of duty or obligation. I mean, obviously we'd all rather our children spend time
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with us because they love us or want to spend time with us. So they think that we're so, so great.
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But I think if I had the choice between seeing my kids, you know, multiple times a year and they
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were kind of, I mean, assuming that they weren't just miserable acting miserably towards me while
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I was here, but if I felt like the only way I could get them to come would be out of some sense
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of duty and obligation, but they, you know, they could have a reasonable time. They weren't assholes
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about it. Neither was I. Then I would kind of take that, take that deal because it would be better
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than the absolute immiseration of never seeing them again, which is the fate that's facing so many
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parents and grandparents today. So I actually do think that adult children owe their parents
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something. They wouldn't be here if it wasn't for the parent. Neither would they have children
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if there's grandchildren involved. Now, does that mean that they have to accept abusive behavior?
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No. Does that mean they have to be as available to the parent as that parent wants them to be,
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or that they can, the parent can just, you know, communicate as crappily as they want to and be
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difficult or demanding or whatever? Absolutely not. The parent still has to do their part.
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They have to show up in this 21st century way, right? They still have to be, you know,
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somewhat conscientious about how they impacted their child. They have to be open to getting
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feedback about the way that their parenting may have impacted their child. So I think both sides
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owe, at the very least, they owe each other due diligence. So an adult child owes the parent
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the opportunity to work through their issues and to give them the time to do that, to do family therapy,
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to give them a pathway towards doing that, to see that the parent really did do the best they
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could raising their child as a result of their own genetics or socioeconomic class or their own
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childhood traumas or experiences or who they were married to. And a certain degree of compassion
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should be brought to bear from both sides. At the same time, parents have to do a lot of work towards
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taking responsibility and showing, you know, empathy towards their children for how they impacted
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them. They can't just say, hey, I did the best that I could, too bad. The parent still has to
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really be self-reflective and take responsibility and meet this moment where they do have to be much
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In your work, what are the most common issues that cause parent-child estrangement?
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Sure. I mean, if you look at the adult child's perspective, what they will say is
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emotional abuse is probably the biggest complaint, values differences, sometimes physical abuse.
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And that is certainly one pathway. And I do see that in my practice. But it isn't the only pathway.
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Other pathways are divorce, as I mentioned earlier. That's probably the single most common pathway
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to estrangement, particularly for fathers. Divorce can cause one parent to alienate the other parent
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with the child. It may bring in new people that the child has to compete with for emotional or material
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resources. It could cause the child to not like the new half-siblings or step-siblings. In a highly
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individualistic culture like ours, it could cause the child, young or old, to see the parents more
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as individuals with their own strengths and weaknesses, unless it's a family unit that they're
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a part of. That's huge. When the adult child marries, that can be a trigger point. If the person that the
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adult child marries doesn't like the parent or parents and says, choose them or me, you can't have
00:20:12.420
both. That's oddly not that uncommon. Mental illness on the part of the parent or addictive
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issues on the part of the parent, certainly, but also mental illness or addictive issues on the part
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of the adult child. Therapy, bad therapy or therapists assume that every symptom that an adult
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child has comes from bad parenting and they support or encourage an estrangement. And finally,
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you know, because parents have been investing much more in the past four decades or so in particular,
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some adult children don't know any other way to feel separate from the parent than to cut them off.
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In some ways, they've gotten too much of a good thing. So, I mean, in my, you know, since I'm a
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boomer, I mean, parents in my parents' generation probably erred more on the side of being, you know,
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sort of neglectful in a certain way, dads in particular. But parents of my generation and every
00:21:00.440
generation since, I think, if they erred on either side, it was towards being more intrusive, more
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enmeshed with their children. You know, people have given up on their social, you know, my mother
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used to play mahjong with the girls every week and my dad was at the Y playing scotch all weekend or
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golfing and none of them worried about us feeling neglected. And that has largely changed where
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children have really become front and center and people have given up on time with other people or
00:21:25.240
other interests. And, you know, again, it's, it's largely a net gain, but it also means that some
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kids just get too much of the parent, particularly in the age of cell phone use where there's kind of
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no escape. You know, I think a certain percentage of estrangers would never happen if it could just
00:21:42.280
have had the experience that so many of us had where, you know, we move away and maybe we
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write our parents, you know, two weeks later, maybe we call them collect once in a while. Whereas,
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you know, for my generation of parents in every generation since, you could just reach your child
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from any point in the world. And I think that can just be somewhat intrusive for some kids.
00:22:02.440
Yeah. This kid feels suffocated in order to create some boundaries. There's like,
00:22:08.460
Yeah, exactly. That's true. I mean, boundaries is the single most common word I see in every letter
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from an estranged child. You need to respect my boundaries.
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Yeah. You know, going back to that idea of abuse, you say abuse, whether it's a physical abuse or
00:22:25.240
emotional abuse, that's a legitimate reason to cut off your parents. But as you mentioned with
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Nick Haslam's work, what constitutes abuse has changed. Like it's expanded. So, you know,
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things maybe 30 years ago wouldn't have been considered abuse. Now it's considered abuse and
00:22:42.460
a reason for cutoff. Yeah. Abuse and trauma. I mean, trauma I think is grossly misused and
00:22:48.100
misunderstood. I mean, the research on trauma by people like George Bonanno at Columbia or Joel
00:22:54.800
Paris at University of Toronto shows that the traumatic experience doesn't necessarily have
00:23:00.360
the lifelong implications and deformations that were sort of made to feel like it has. Not to make
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light of it, but 25% of people may have lifelong issues as a result of traumatic experiences,
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but 75% won't. And I think our culture does a poor job distinguishing between distress and trauma or
00:23:20.960
conflict and abuse. And I think all of those get kind of blended together, which on the one hand,
00:23:26.300
I wouldn't care except that so many young adults are sort of using that as a reason to estrange the
00:23:32.220
parent saying, well, you traumatized me when I was young and therefore I don't owe you a relationship.
00:23:38.940
And so, you know, on the good news again about that is that it sort of provides people with a way to
00:23:44.240
talk about painful experiences and have a social legitimacy in talking about them that they might
00:23:49.120
not have had in other generations. But the bad news is that, yes, it has been so grossly expanded
00:23:55.380
that things that shouldn't really fall under that rubric get called that. And then, you know,
00:24:02.420
with the wrong therapist or the wrong set of information, that person is on the way to cutting
00:24:07.860
off a parent who was very good. I mean, there's a, the sociologist Eva Elluz says that today our lives
00:24:14.940
are plotted backwards. What's a dysfunctional family? It's a family where your needs weren't met.
00:24:19.680
How do you know that your needs weren't met? By looking at your present condition.
00:24:23.220
And I like that quote because so many young adults are coming into therapy or into adulthood and
00:24:29.180
thinking, well, I've got depression or anxiety or other serious psychological issues. I need to sort
00:24:34.920
of reverse engineer this and look at my childhood and figure out where the traumas were so I can
00:24:41.200
understand that. And, you know, a certain percentage of them, you know, likely were traumatized,
00:24:47.360
but another percentage aren't going to be. I mean, if we look at the research just on cohort effects,
00:24:51.620
the research of Gene Twenge or Jonathan Haidt, who showed that just the fact that you're a Gen Z,
00:24:57.080
that you're born between 1995 and 2012, roughly, means you're at far greater risk for depression,
00:25:03.160
suicidal ideation, suicide attempts, anxiety. And it's not because parents have suddenly become,
00:25:09.900
you know, worse parents and are traumatizing their kids left and right. It's because of the cohort.
00:25:14.580
It's because of what's happening generationally with cell phones and social media
00:25:17.940
and the like. So I think that parents are wrongly, you know, aggressively blamed in our culture. I
00:25:24.120
think my field does a lot of, of harm in that, that regard and sort of assuming that every adult
00:25:30.420
psychopathology has a problematic traumatizing parent at its helm.
00:25:34.760
We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors.
00:25:42.260
Yeah. That, that idea that, you know, you try to make sense of your life backwards. So if your life
00:25:46.560
is messed up and you kind of, okay, I'm going to go to the past and like, I figure out what happened.
00:25:52.080
I've seen this instance in families where one kid, adult kids, like, well, my life is terrible. And it's
00:26:01.460
Then they have a sibling who was raised by the same parents, largely the same way,
00:26:05.980
and their life is great. And they feel like, well, I thought the way our parents raised us
00:26:10.300
was awesome. So there's a lot of subjectivity in how people remember their childhood or how they
00:26:16.100
attribute their state in life now to their parents.
00:26:19.980
Yeah, absolutely. And also what their experience was. I mean, one of my, you know, things I say to
00:26:26.240
parents is you have to embrace the separate realities nature of family life that you could credibly
00:26:30.800
feel like you did a good job raising your child and your child could credibly feel like they wish you
00:26:34.760
had done something different. I mean, even if people are growing up in the same family, they may have
00:26:40.680
very, very different experiences based on birth order, who temperamentally they're more alike
00:26:45.360
between the parents, what was going on in the home at the age that it, that it happened to them.
00:26:49.500
And so for, let's say, you know, constitutionally somebody's born with an incredibly sensitive
00:26:54.260
temperament, they're going to experience parental irritability or maybe lack of availability,
00:26:59.320
even if it's within normal limits, is far more influential and problematic than say a kid who's
00:27:05.420
born with a much more robust temperament. So kids who are growing up in the same home may have very
00:27:10.720
different experiences of the parents, more based on the kind of temperaments that they're born with
00:27:16.240
than the parents being so different in how they respond.
00:27:20.040
Yeah. I mean, I could, I can see that. So temperament is kind of like personality,
00:27:23.540
right? And so, I mean, I can see the case where a kid's personality, sort of inborn temperament
00:27:28.060
kind of rubs the parent the wrong way. And like the parent tries to do their best to work with it,
00:27:33.180
but you know, some kids are just annoying, but people don't want to say that. And so,
00:27:37.640
you know, the, right. It's true. Yeah. And so the parent, you know, the kid's annoying
00:27:41.800
and then the parent responds kind of like, ah, geez, this kid's annoying. And then the kid picks
00:27:46.180
up on that. It's like, oh, my, my dad thinks I'm annoying and then becomes estranged as an adult.
00:27:52.460
Well, right. And it is true. And, you know, we look at what research is called the child to parent
00:27:57.240
effects. It's like, what kind of behaviors induce what from parents? So we know that say, for example,
00:28:01.860
if a kid has ADD, attention deficit disorder, they're just harder to parent because they're harder
00:28:08.340
to organize. They're more distractible. It's hard to just to keep them on track. So they may be just
00:28:13.800
much more irritating to raise, you know, from the parent's perspective. And the parent may express
00:28:18.520
more of that irritability and that child may, you know, later in life say, well, you're always so
00:28:22.480
critical of me growing up. And the child realistically may not really even be aware of the challenges that
00:28:28.300
they brought temperamentally into the situation. And then they feel, you know, that the parent really
00:28:34.240
failed them because they didn't really provide them with the sort of more ideal kind of parenting
00:28:38.980
that they feel like they needed, wanted, or deserved. And then, you know, if a parent responds
00:28:44.620
with, well, it's because you were so difficult, you know, then they're just greenlit towards the path
00:28:49.620
of estrangement. And that sort of, you know, is another important aspect of this is that if you grow
00:28:54.680
up and you have severe mental problems that, you know, let's say that they're not parentally
00:29:00.140
induced, it's still tempting for people to blame the parent because it's such a powerful way of
00:29:05.300
directing the shame away from the self. I mean, it's a powerful story, right? It's a very appealing
00:29:11.800
way to feel like I could have been different than where I'm at now. If you're feeling like you're not
00:29:18.640
very happy with where you are now, it sort of allows you to preserve a sense of oneself as ideal or,
00:29:24.880
you know, of limitless potential if you were given the right set of circumstances. So it's a way of
00:29:30.120
saying, well, if you had parented me differently, my life would be so much better. And, you know,
00:29:35.400
clearly sometimes that's the case, but it's not always the case. And that's also another point
00:29:39.760
of concern for parents who believe and objectively seem like they did a really good job and their
00:29:44.200
child still turned out to have significant psychological issues, either because of genetic
00:29:49.140
vulnerabilities or socioeconomic class or random bad luck. I mean, there's so many different influences
00:29:56.340
of adult outcome that have very little to do with parenting that we as a society, you know,
00:30:01.880
again, are way too focused on parents and not on all these other influences.
00:30:06.140
You mentioned therapists can play a role in estrangement. Tell me about that.
00:30:09.900
Well, I think in over-attributing causality to childhood experiences and assuming that that's what
00:30:17.300
worries me about, you know, Gen Z, we're having all these psychological issues getting into
00:30:22.080
therapy is that if a therapist isn't more sophisticated about all the various pathways
00:30:27.260
to adult, you know, depression, anxiety, et cetera, then if they're kind of a one-note symphony of
00:30:34.960
everything is due to parental childhood traumas and family dysfunction, then that really just increases
00:30:42.080
the likelihood of an estrangement because then they might say, well, you know, you feel triggered
00:30:47.740
when you're around your parent and this is why, because of these experiences, maybe be better for
00:30:52.280
you not to be around them because we don't want you to be triggered by them. And so I just think
00:30:58.280
that too many therapists today are too quick to blame parents in part because of what we were saying
00:31:03.540
earlier, that it can feel sort of empowering to the person who otherwise is going to blame
00:31:09.320
themselves. You know, if a therapist says, well, it's not your fault, it's your parents' fault that
00:31:13.680
you have these issues, that can be kind of relieving. And I wouldn't mind if it didn't end up cutting off
00:31:20.140
parents who in many cases are quite workable and want to do the right thing. And in many ways,
00:31:25.340
we're very, very dedicated. So now I think therapists and many people in my field are doing
00:31:30.160
an enormous disservice to younger adults in general, to the extent that they're blaming parents for these
00:31:35.960
issues. It's not to say that that never occurs. Of course, you know, there's real traumatic,
00:31:40.160
there are traumatizing parents, absolutely, but not at the levels that they get blamed to be.
00:31:45.480
Yeah. And something else you talk about is when an adult child goes to a therapist and maybe they
00:31:51.260
start carping about their parent. Like the therapist only hears the kid's side of the story. They're
00:31:55.840
typically, they don't have the parents. So like sometimes, you know, a not good therapist,
00:31:59.220
a bad therapist will start diagnosing the not present parents. Well, it sounds like your parents
00:32:04.320
are narcissists and you need to stay away from them. Like you can't diagnose someone you haven't talked to.
00:32:10.160
And so that's, that's not good. Right. Well, you shouldn't. And not only that,
00:32:13.260
but diagnosis also provides a kind of moral framework to reject people. It's sort of like,
00:32:18.700
well, I mean, I've seen letters from adult children where they say, well, my therapist
00:32:21.660
said that my mother's a narcissist and therefore family therapy wouldn't work. And, you know, that,
00:32:27.900
that we've become kind of the new high priest that tell people who to be close to, who not to be
00:32:34.020
close to, who's problematic. And we really have replaced religious leaders in our culture in terms of
00:32:39.200
this sort of moral position we put ourselves into in terms of who it's okay to be close to and,
00:32:45.200
and what's, what should be considered even abusive behaviors, boundary crossing, what's gaslighting,
00:32:51.460
all of that. You know, we haven't too much authority in our society to make these kinds of
00:32:56.020
determinations. And most therapists won't interview the parent and they shouldn't be giving a diagnosis
00:33:01.820
if they haven't actually met the parent. I mean, you know, somebody might sound like a narcissist,
00:33:06.560
but the way somebody presents in therapy and what they tell the therapist isn't necessarily
00:33:12.440
going to be completely accurate, which is why when I'm working with a parent, I will always
00:33:17.520
see if I can talk to the adult child because I want to get their perspective. I'll ask for
00:33:21.320
correspondence from the parent and the adult child. Sometimes parents will say, well, my kid's
00:33:26.060
impossible and they're, they're a narcissist. And I'll see the correspondence and I'll think,
00:33:30.120
actually, your kid is really trying very hard here. And your responses to them are really
00:33:34.580
problematic. So, you know, families are systems. If you're only just looking at one part of it,
00:33:40.500
you're really not in that good of a position to, to know. I mean, at least when it comes to something
00:33:47.000
so consequential as cutting off a family member, I mean, we can have opinions, but if you're wading
00:33:52.140
into something as consequential and serious as encouraging an estrangement, you better know what
00:33:58.160
hell you're advising because you have an incredibly, you know, sad, lonely, broken parent or grandparent
00:34:05.840
on the other end that has to also be factored into your analysis. Are women or men more likely to cut
00:34:12.780
off a parent? There are huge differences, but in general, men are, that probably has to do with
00:34:20.420
the sociological concept of kin keeping that women tend to be more mindful of family relationships and
00:34:27.560
be more motivated to keep track of them and the like. So statistically, it's somewhat more likely
00:34:35.240
that a son would than a daughter would, but the numbers aren't huge. Something else you talk about
00:34:41.000
that can contribute to men becoming estranged from their parents more than women are ideas around
00:34:47.880
manhood itself. Can you talk to us about that? Yeah, I particularly see this in if a daughter-in-law
00:34:54.640
doesn't like the parents, then the son can take the position of, you know, it's what I call
00:35:00.720
performative masculinity. So I work with a lot of families where the son was close to the parents
00:35:06.340
prior to getting married and the son marries somebody who's somewhat troubled and basically
00:35:10.320
says, choose them or me. And, you know, the son engages by confronting the parents and saying,
00:35:16.120
you can't talk to my wife that way, or this is my family now, or I need to protect my family,
00:35:21.320
or they're my new priority, you're not. So it does all become kind of entangled with this idea of
00:35:28.640
masculinity, which can, you know, make the dynamic that much more tricky to unravel.
00:35:33.340
Yeah. And also you just see the sort of the cultural change of the relationship between
00:35:37.680
particularly sons and moms. So you talk about this, if you go back to Civil War times, you'd see
00:35:43.360
these letters from Civil War soldiers talking about, my mom's my best gal and I love you so much.
00:35:49.380
Almost like love letters. Right. And then a shift happened where it was like, no,
00:35:53.040
if you do that, you're a mollycoddle, you're a mama's boy. So you got to put some distance between
00:35:58.440
you and mom. Right. And so now, you know, men were like, well, I don't want to be too close to my
00:36:03.560
parents because then that's kind of, or particularly to my mother, because that's kind of weird.
00:36:08.540
Right. It's considered to be like being a mama's boy is a real epithet. It's not considered,
00:36:13.140
you know, an act of strength and, um, and value. It's considered like, if you're really
00:36:18.820
close to your mother, then somehow that makes you weak, like you're hiding under her aprons or
00:36:24.000
something. And you're right. Historically, that wasn't always the case that, that the idea that
00:36:28.980
you're close to your mother or want to be close to her was considered sort of a strength and in
00:36:34.960
earlier periods. So it really wasn't until kind of the early 20th century. And, you know,
00:36:40.940
there became more of a concern about masculinity and, uh, that, so that all began to change with
00:36:46.320
Roosevelt's Rough Riders and the likes. Yeah. And so, yeah, a wife can use that if she doesn't
00:36:52.860
like her mother-in-law or father-in-law, she can use that as kind of like a screw to turn and be
00:36:57.280
like, you need to stay away from them. And if the husband's like, no, I don't want to, I want to
00:37:01.880
have the relationship with my mom. I was like, well, you're just a mama's boy. Yeah. I think it's very
00:37:05.220
easy to humiliate and shame men around their masculinity. So I think if, uh, a wife was motivated
00:37:10.800
to get her husband, uh, either confront his parents or stop talking to them, you know,
00:37:15.800
she says, well, you're a mama's boy or you're weak or we're the, we're your new family now
00:37:20.060
and you need to prioritize us. I don't like how your parents talk to me. You need to stand
00:37:24.220
up to them more. How come you're not standing up to them more? For many men, that would be
00:37:29.340
a very hard message to resist. I mean, some could, but, but many couldn't.
00:37:35.240
When you work with parents and adult children who are estranged, who gets hit hardest? Like,
00:37:41.160
I mean, is it harder on the child or the parent? I think it's harder on the parent. I mean, for the,
00:37:44.920
for the adult child, there may be enormous upsides to the estranged, but they can feel like they're
00:37:49.900
pushing back against, you know, authority figures or destructive figures. They're protecting themselves
00:37:56.120
from, from more abuse. They're standing up for themselves. They're protecting their mental
00:38:01.120
health. So it's all can be tied to a very powerful narrative of individuation and separation and
00:38:07.000
self-protection and mental health, personal growth, et cetera. So there's enormous upside for the adult
00:38:12.880
child. For the parents, there's no upside. It's all pain, sadness, loss, guilt, anger, regret. So that
00:38:20.360
also influences who's going to be doing the outreach. I mean, sometimes parents will say to me, well, how
00:38:26.300
come, you know, they can reach out to me and I'm like, well, are they reaching out to you? I mean,
00:38:31.060
yeah, they can reach out to you, but it looks like if anybody's going to make a move in anybody's
00:38:35.320
direction, it's going to have to be you because your child wouldn't be estranged unless they felt
00:38:39.780
like it was, you know, had some value to them. Yeah. This is a, the dynamic in any troubled
00:38:45.000
relationship. It's the person who doesn't want to be in the relationship. They actually, they have the
00:38:49.960
power. That's true. Absolutely. So the person who really wants it more has to be willing to take the
00:38:55.980
initiative. And that's, that's typically the parent. How does it affect grandchildren?
00:39:01.080
I think it's terrible for grandchildren. I mean, particularly for those who are,
00:39:05.220
you know, a lot of the cases that I work with, the grandparent was very involved even by the now
00:39:10.580
estranged adult child's own reckoning. They were decent grandparents and that they're really a
00:39:15.000
casualty of the parent adult child relationship. I mean, certainly some grandparents get cut off because
00:39:21.260
the adult child doesn't like how they grandparent, but I don't think it's the majority. It certainly
00:39:25.540
isn't the majority of the cases that I've worked with. And I've worked with a ton of these cases.
00:39:29.900
Typically they're a casualty. And the way that the adult child often explains it is by saying,
00:39:34.780
well, it's not good for me and my mental health, and it's not good for my children. And that's just
00:39:39.340
not right. I mean, obviously if contact with your parent is so disabling to you that, you know,
00:39:45.660
you absolutely can't parent, then probably means you need to be spending more time in therapy if they
00:39:52.540
still have that kind of an influence on you. But you should be able to have conflict with your
00:39:56.900
parent and keep your child's grandparents in their lives if they're good grandparents. Because a lot
00:40:02.280
of parents will say to me, you know, I could maybe tolerate the estrangement from my child,
00:40:07.200
but I find so intolerable emotionally is not being able to have time with my grandchild who I was so
00:40:13.600
close to. What could they possibly be thinking? Do they think that I abandoned them? And the
00:40:17.760
grandchild relationship is a very unique relationship that offers enormous benefits to
00:40:22.540
both generations. There's enormous value to grandchildren to having a good, close-loving
00:40:27.420
relationship with their grandparents. And there's incredible value to grandparents. So this idea
00:40:33.840
that if it's not good for me, it's not good for my kids, it sort of reminds me of what some people,
00:40:38.100
you know, when I used to do a lot of couples therapy would say, well, if I'm not happy in my
00:40:41.820
marriage, then my children aren't happy. And, you know, it depends on how you're expressing
00:40:46.420
your unhappiness. A lot of people are able to contain their unhappiness in a certain way where
00:40:50.820
it doesn't have a deleterious effect on their children. The children much rather they stay
00:40:55.580
together than get divorced. So I think in our culture, we really overemphasize the importance
00:41:02.460
of our own happiness in terms of the way that it radiates out and affects other people in the family,
00:41:07.860
children in particular. You advise the parents who want to reconcile with their adult child to write
00:41:15.100
an amends letter. What is that? An amends letter is getting on the same page as the adult child.
00:41:21.720
It's putting aside all defensiveness and criticism and blame and obligation and duty and guilt and
00:41:28.080
really trying to come at it from the perspective that the adult child is doing something that they
00:41:34.740
feel is really important for them to do and has a lot of meaning to them. And so I always tell parents
00:41:40.140
to start the letter with, I know you wouldn't have cut off contact unless you felt like it was the
00:41:45.000
healthiest thing for you to do. Now, from the parent's perspective, they don't necessarily feel
00:41:49.820
like it's the healthiest thing for them to do, but their adult child wouldn't be doing it unless they
00:41:53.620
did. So saying that is kind of a way of saying, look, I'm desirous of entering into your world and
00:41:59.540
having a much deeper understanding. If there are things that the parents are aware of that really were
00:42:04.200
problematic about their parenting, they should say it in a very straightforward way. Yes,
00:42:07.700
I could see how that was really hurtful to you or I could see how that was traumatizing to you and
00:42:13.000
I'm really sorry and I'm willing to work on that in my own therapy or therapy together. Or I could
00:42:18.780
see why that might make it feel unsafe to spend time with me or triggering to you or distant or
00:42:24.360
why you might be mad at me. I mean, it's just a really deep dive of empathy into the child's
00:42:29.980
experience because nothing is going to happen unless the parent is able to do that. And if they don't
00:42:35.780
know and parents don't always know, then they should say something like, it's clear that I
00:42:39.440
have significant blind spots as a parent or person that I don't have a better understanding or that
00:42:44.760
I didn't know that that felt emotionally abusive or hurtful or traumatizing to you. But it's something
00:42:50.420
that I would like to learn more about and deepen my understanding and learn how to do better in the
00:42:55.940
future. That could be a hard pill to swallow. Oh, it's a very hard pill to swallow. Yeah. As I was
00:43:00.860
reading that, that you have to like, you know, right. I know that you wouldn't have come off
00:43:04.560
contact unless it was the healthiest thing for you to do. I'm like, I don't know if I could ever
00:43:08.380
like sincerely say that, especially if I saw my kid was just doing something destructive with their
00:43:13.380
life. Well, yeah, you're saying that unless you felt like it was the healthiest thing for you to do.
00:43:19.220
I mean, normally an apology shouldn't have you felt like, because that sounds like an avoidance,
00:43:22.840
but you're, again, you're just sort of trying to get into the child's state of mind and outside of
00:43:29.460
years. No, these letters are not easy for parents to write, but they're also kind of therapeutic for
00:43:34.100
parents to write because, you know, we all make mistakes as parents. So being able to,
00:43:38.640
maybe we don't feel like we deserve an estrangement as a result of it. We all make mistakes. So
00:43:42.720
being able to kind of get it out on paper and, you know, expose yourself to it and come to some
00:43:48.420
degree of acceptance over that. I mean, not only is it, I think the best tool towards a potential
00:43:54.260
reconciliation, but I think it's also good for the parents' mental health as well. You know,
00:43:58.400
in AA, they talk about the step of make a fearless in searching moral inventory of your character
00:44:03.700
for a while. So I think that can be really useful for parents as well.
00:44:07.460
Okay. So it's just, it's all about empathy. It's just trying to show that like, I want to
00:44:11.820
understand where you're coming from. And this may require you to, you know, put yourself in therapy
00:44:18.280
speak. You might not be comfortable with that, but you have to see, okay, I understand where you're
00:44:21.960
coming from with this. I mean, can you say, I disagree? Like, I don't see it that way and still
00:44:26.780
display empathy. I wouldn't do that in an amends letter. Maybe if you're into therapy and you're
00:44:32.280
like in the 10th session or something, there's a place to do that. But really, you know, the advice
00:44:38.540
is predicated on this principle that we were talking about earlier about the way that the family life
00:44:44.320
has changed. And it's a way to telegraph to the adult child. Look, I'm willing to navigate our
00:44:49.020
relationship and negotiate it from this much more 21st century principle that relationships are based on
00:44:55.400
the principles of mental health and personal growth and happiness. And that's why the parent has to
00:45:00.360
frame it in that kind of language. That's the way they have to say you wouldn't do this unless you felt
00:45:04.820
like it was the healthiest thing for you to do. That word is really kind of intentionally coded,
00:45:09.940
not in a manipulative way, but it's just kind of like, that's the basis that the relationship
00:45:13.720
is based upon. So yeah, it's all about showing empathy because empathy is the one thing that's going
00:45:21.360
to invite the adult child. First of all, to feel cared about, like the parent's really grappling
00:45:26.200
with something. Most adult children know that these letters aren't easy to write and they respect it.
00:45:31.040
Now, that's not to say that they always work because there's really nothing I can say to any
00:45:35.460
parent that I can say, oh, you know what? If you just do this, your child's definitely coming back
00:45:39.740
to you. There's a lot of reasons why an adult child might not come back or might not be ready to
00:45:43.980
come back anyway. They may be too negatively influenced by who they're married to. Their therapist may be
00:45:48.100
telling them it's a bad idea. They may be too brainwashed by the other parent after divorce.
00:45:53.140
They may still be too hurt or mad at you for things that did happen in the past and they're
00:45:56.800
just not ready yet to accept an apology. They may need to feel separate from you and aren't really
00:46:01.580
ready to move off of that position. So the tools that I recommend are based on a probabilistic model.
00:46:08.980
Probably if you do this, there's a better chance of a reconciliation than not, but there's almost
00:46:13.800
nothing in human behavior that we can ever say with certainty. Yeah, you know what? Just do this
00:46:18.660
and your kid will come back into your door tomorrow. Yeah. And again, the men's letter
00:46:23.440
isn't going to be the thing that solves it. This is just like the opening bid to a conversation that
00:46:27.640
might take, could take years. It could. If it's well-received, it shouldn't take years because
00:46:33.880
if the parent is sincere in the desire to learn more and to take responsibility and understand why
00:46:40.020
their behavior impacted their child in the way that they did, then, you know, both people are
00:46:45.200
able to communicate honestly and openly about it, then it shouldn't take years. But to your earlier
00:46:50.900
point, that doesn't mean that the parent necessarily is going to be able to disagree
00:46:55.140
with the child's perceptions. You know, we say, well, think about it from my perspective,
00:46:59.760
at least not early on. First, the adult child really needs to feel seen, heard, cared about,
00:47:04.880
and understood. Otherwise, the parent's voice is just going to be too big if they say,
00:47:09.160
well, I don't see it that way. Or you're wrong about that. Or that never happened. You know,
00:47:13.220
that's just going to shut the door down. And the goal is to open the door and keep it open long
00:47:17.860
enough for some kind of fresh air to go between the rooms. And a reminder, going back to what we
00:47:22.840
said, you know, if you're a parent who has an estranged adult child and, you know, you feel the
00:47:28.080
words getting stuck in your throat as you try to be like, I understand, you know, because you don't
00:47:32.340
believe it. You have to, just going back to the idea, like, if you want a relationship with your
00:47:35.880
kids, it's up to you to make the first step. Like, the kid is probably fine. They got their
00:47:41.300
own family. There's more upside for them for not having a relationship with you. So they're in
00:47:45.720
control. So you got to kind of be the one to make the opening bid.
00:47:49.740
Right. It's about humility, not humiliation. I mean, these letters can feel humiliating to the
00:47:53.720
parent. But, you know, from my perspective, you're just taking the high road as a parent. We are the
00:47:58.060
parent. We, you know, it is true what you were saying earlier. Our children didn't ask to be
00:48:02.860
born. And so it is incumbent on us to, to take the high road and take responsibility. And if we
00:48:08.380
don't really understand, to try to work hard to understand, it doesn't mean you have to agree that
00:48:13.060
you were a terrible, selfish, awful person. It's more that you're trying to more deeply understand
00:48:19.000
why your child has the belief or perceptions or memories about you that they do and not get into
00:48:24.540
the right or wrong of it. It's like couples communication. You know, if you get into the right
00:48:27.960
and wrong of it with your spouse or romantic partner, you're probably not going to get very far.
00:48:32.020
But if you seek to understand what they're saying and show empathy and take responsibility for the
00:48:36.700
kernel, if not the bushel of truth in their complaints or perceptions, then you're in a
00:48:40.620
much better position. When should a parent or a child give up trying to mend the relationship?
00:48:47.480
Well, for parents, what I typically tell parents is, assuming your child is an adult, that they
00:48:52.540
should write one really good amends letter and then maybe do a follow-up 68 weeks letter and just
00:48:56.680
see if the adult child got the letter and had reactions. If they get nothing back, then I
00:49:01.720
typically tell parents not to do anything for maybe a year or so because, you know, sometimes
00:49:07.840
adult children just really need the time and the space to come back to the parent. And once you've
00:49:13.000
written an amends letter, you're sort of showing and announcing that you're open to changing and
00:49:17.140
being more empathic and to seeing it from their perspective. But you should stop right away if any
00:49:22.700
of the following are happening. One is you're getting the police called on you or you're getting
00:49:27.800
letters or gifts sent back, returned to sender, restraining orders. And if any of those things
00:49:35.160
happen, you should just stop right now because it means that things are just way too inflamed to
00:49:40.000
try. And then you can try again in a year maybe to just give your child, your adult child that. For the
00:49:45.720
adult child, you know, I think that adult children should do a certain period of due diligence where
00:49:50.800
they carefully tell the parent what their complaints are. If you come to your parents and say,
00:49:55.020
well, I've learned in therapy that you're a narcissist or you're a borderline, you're not
00:49:58.960
going to get anywhere that way. If your goal is really to have your parent understand, you're
00:50:02.740
better off talking about what you did like or value about them as parents or people. It's kind
00:50:08.520
of the compliment sandwich. You know, you want to start out with something to just soften the blow
00:50:12.800
because for all parents, hearing the ways that they fail their children is really deeply humiliating
00:50:18.600
and scary. And so if you can say, I'm telling you this because I want to have a closer
00:50:22.960
relationship with you, but I need the following to happen. And here's what I need to have happen.
00:50:28.840
If you'd like to do family therapy with me, I would welcome that. Or these are the things
00:50:32.860
I'd like you to work on in your therapy. I hope you're willing to do that. And then don't assume
00:50:38.220
that you're going to have one conversation about it. I mean, it may take a while because it's a big,
00:50:42.120
it's a big ask, but it's typically worthwhile for both people if these things can be worked through
00:50:47.160
rather than just end it. I've seen instances where parents are estranged with their adult child and
00:50:52.780
they, you know, they really want that relationship with their kid, but then the kid uses the
00:50:56.800
estrangement kind of as a bludgeon over the parent's head where they just kind of, they kind of use it
00:51:02.500
as a weapon almost. And the parent will just keep taking, they just, they want to have some version
00:51:07.560
of their kid in their life, even if it is just, you know, being told that you're an awful parent and I
00:51:12.820
hate you. They feel like they can't give up on their kid. Um, as I imagine too, like the parent
00:51:17.820
who's wanting to reconcile, they have to take care of themselves as well through this process.
00:51:23.540
Yeah, I know. It's true that, I mean, particularly if a kid is mentally ill, then they're much more
00:51:27.780
likely to be disrespectful and abusive to the parent and parents whose kids are mentally ill. If
00:51:32.980
they're not in contact, that's torturous for the parent because they're worried about them. Not
00:51:37.480
only do they have the estrangement, but they're worried about where they are, whether they're suicidal
00:51:41.640
or whether they're on the street or living in a car or whether they'll ever hear from them
00:51:45.600
again. But if they're in contact, but abusive, that's tormenting as well because they want the
00:51:51.340
contact, but they have to sort of drink from this poison well in order to have the contact.
00:51:56.100
It is in my position that, that anybody should tolerate somebody being disrespectful to them.
00:52:02.940
So I think that parents can certainly try to set limits on the adult child's abusive or
00:52:09.580
disrespectful behavior. But it's, you know, typically if somebody is more troubled, it's a
00:52:14.580
matter of love and limits. Love because it, you know, really ultimately isn't their fault that
00:52:19.260
they have the mental illness or whatever it is that's causing them to behave that way. But limits
00:52:23.780
because, you know, some people, children or parents can be really destructive in how they
00:52:29.200
interact with the other and that has to be dealt with.
00:52:32.380
Last question. Parental estrangement is part of a larger trend of just cutting people off
00:52:38.880
in your life. Toxic people. You got to cut out the toxic people from your life, but is
00:52:43.000
there a downside to leaning too much into this approach to relationships? I mean, are there
00:52:48.260
benefits to learning how to deal with difficult people in your life?
00:52:52.440
Well, there's enormous benefit to it. You know, in cognitive behavior therapy, what we teach
00:52:57.340
is that you want to be sort of go toward the things that cause you stress and anxiety. And what
00:53:03.760
I often see in the letters from adult children is, well, you know, I've worked hard to get to where I
00:53:08.900
am today psychologically. And if I see you or talk to you, that's going to undo my years of how hard
00:53:15.660
I've worked on myself. You know, and my feeling is like, well, it really shouldn't. You should be
00:53:19.000
able to, if you've worked on these issues for years, you should be able to at least start to engage
00:53:24.080
your parent. I mean, obviously, if they're completely unrepentant and they're abusive and
00:53:27.920
they yell at you and they shame you and humiliate you every time you see them, then, you know, I get
00:53:33.540
it. I couldn't ethically support, you know, an adult child continuing to get into the ring with a
00:53:38.540
parent who's just going to bloody them psychologically every time they're together. But I don't think that
00:53:43.280
those constitute the majority of these kinds of dynamics. So I think there's enormous value. I mean,
00:53:48.620
there's no other path towards getting more resilient than to sort of face ourselves with
00:53:53.800
the people who are difficult in our lives. And typically the people in our families may be the
00:53:59.640
most difficult because there's just this whole reservoir of memories of hurt and disappointment
00:54:04.440
and conflict. But I, it sort of goes back to our earlier question of what do we owe each other as
00:54:09.780
generations? And I think that, you know, there is real value in just being engaged with people that
00:54:18.400
you have this history with and working on things and working to improve them or then learning if
00:54:22.800
they can improve, learning how to tolerate the parts of them that are more difficult and also
00:54:27.380
taking responsibility for your own, the ways that you may be difficult, whether you're the parent or
00:54:32.360
the adult child and learning from that. Well, Joshua, this has been a great conversation. Where can
00:54:36.600
people go to learn more about the book and your work? Sure. They can go to my website,
00:54:41.460
www.drjoshuacoleman.com. I do webinars every Tuesday night for estranged parents and a free
00:54:48.300
Q&A every other Monday at 1130 AM Pacific. And they can get my book there as well on the website
00:54:54.780
or, you know, at bookstores and et cetera. Fantastic. Well, Joshua Coleman, thank you for
00:54:58.240
time. It's been a pleasure. Yeah, thank you. It was. My guest today was Joshua Coleman. He's
00:55:03.180
the author of the book Rules of Estrangement. It's available on amazon.com and bookstores
00:55:06.460
everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, drjoshuacoleman.com.
00:55:11.160
Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash estrangement. We'll find links to resources
00:55:15.100
where you delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the
00:55:25.800
AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanless.com where you can find our podcast
00:55:29.180
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00:55:48.580
support. Until next time, I'm Brett McKay. Reminding us how to listen to AOM podcast, but put what you've