If it's okay and I like maybe...
Psychoanalyze me? Sure.
No, it's not psychoanalyzing. It's more about just asking these questions.
On some level I want my parents to think that I'm like smart and good.
Absolutely. You have a relationship with your parents.
Yeah. And you care about what your parents think. You want your parents to approve of you.
Hi, I'm Olga Hazan, Staff Rider at The Atlantic.
And I'm Rebecca Rashid, a producer at The Atlantic.
This is How To Start Over.
Today we want to analyze why conflicts with the people who raised us
can often reach a stalemate.
And how to navigate family tensions when you have deep disagreements with your family.
So, in the past few years I've heard so many stories from adults who were forced to move back in with their parents.
Or go back to wherever they grew up due to the pandemic.
I was one of those lucky adults who moved home after nearly a decade of living on the opposite coast.
And I was lucky enough to have somewhere to call home during such a difficult time.
But I think one of the really unexpected harsh realities of spending time
with the people who raised you as an adult is that
some family tensions just don't magically go away with time.
It always sort of surprises me when I find myself getting frustrated
or failing to forgive a decade's old issue.
I think it's the rare person who has no issues with their parent.
But I think with the pandemic and just how stressful the past few years have been,
all of that has gotten supercharged.
And you might have someone in your family who is an anti-vaxxer and that affects their health potentially,
whether you have to take care of them and pay their medical bills,
that can be a really stressful thing to kind of tiptoe around every time you see them.
I just think there have been a lot more opportunities lately for people to have these kind of foundational fights.
Yeah, and I think it can be difficult to admit that you're having issues with your family in the first place.
It can sort of feel like a never-ending cycle that you deal with by compartmentalizing
and putting in the back of your mind as something that's not going to change
and there's kind of no point in doing anything about.
So what do you think holds people back from acknowledging family strain or family tensions
or potentially even a strangeness as an issue?
And what do you think holds people back from discussing it openly?
I think it's a very taboo to talk sh** about your family.
People are very protective, I think, of their parents and their families.
I think there's a sense of, you don't really know them like I know them.
And also probably dueling impulses, right, of gratitude.
You know, they did so much for me and I have fond memories from the lake house or whatever.
But also lately, they've been driving me crazy.
You know, it's the same person and you're kind of struggling to reconcile those two views of them.
So what question are we trying to answer here, Olga?
And why do you think we should make an episode about this?
Well, first of all, I feel like this issue is just not talked about very much.
But also, it's just a really tricky thing to navigate.
How do you draw a boundary with someone who gave birth to you?
How do you change the nature of a relationship that's been going on since you were a baby?
How do you, you know, maybe pull away from that relationship because it's just not the right thing
for your mental health to keep engaging with that person?
I am really curious about how to pull any of that off and everything in between.
I tend to think of a strangenment as a complete cutoff or nearly complete cutoff.
But other people think of it as a very distant relationship where conflicts kind of at and at centers.
Dr. Joshua Coleman is a clinical psychologist, author, speaker, and senior fellow on the
Council on Contemporary Families. In 2021, Dr. Coleman published the book, Rules of Estrangement,
Why Adult Children Cut Ties and How to Heal the Conflict.
I spoke with him to figure out why people get a strange from their parents in the first place.
My research and my experience, there's a number of different pathways to a
strangenment. Certainly, one is trauma and abuse and childhood by the parent and that the adult
child just isn't really capable for a variety of reasons either because the parent can't really do
that the healing work or the adult child just feels too hurt and wounded by the past ever.
Forgive the parent or reconcile. Another is mental illness, certainly in the parent, but also in
the adult child that they're not able to navigate the normal slings and arrows of parent and
adult child conflict. Another happens when the adult child gets married or couples informs a
longstanding romantic relationship and the spouse of the adult child doesn't like the
estranged parent. The now estranged parent says, choose me or them, you can't have both.
In my service, a 1600 estranged parent studied at the University of Wisconsin Survey Center.
One of the things that we found was about 70% of the estranged parents had a divorce in their
past from the biological parent. Ironically, one of the causes of a strangenment that I think
is a disgust as much as sometimes a strangenment happens because the adult child is in some ways too
loved to take a hero and one of the consequences of a much more intensive anxious guilt,
written, worried, involved parenting that has been going on in the past three or four decades is
that sometimes adult children just get too much of the parent and they don't know any other way
to feel separate from the parent than to estranged themselves. What does a strangenment look like?
Does it look like just not talking? Do people send a long email saying, you've wronged me in such
and such way and now I'm never speaking to you again? Does it mean just visiting once around
Christmas time and then not really ever again or maybe there's different definitions?
Yeah, commonly what I see from parents is they get a no contact letter. Typically,
it will list the complaints that the adult child has about the parent, the failures in parenting,
which in many ways we should talk about are historically new the kinds of things that
adult children are using as rightly or wrongly as reasons for the estranged. But there's
typically a list of those and then don't ever contact me again. A, or it might be something like,
I need to work on myself, you need to work on yourself too, although not always giving the
parent what to work on. So maybe it's a parent who won't accept the adult child's gender identity
or sexuality or political beliefs or they refuse to take responsibility for the ways that they've
hurt the child adult child or another scenario would be that there was abuse, physical abuse,
sexual abuse in childhood and the parent has never been able to to make amends and never been
able to take responsibility to show any kind of empathy for how destructive their behavior was.
And so the adult child feels like, how can it possibly be around you or be close to you or
want to be close to you if you can't do the basic amend making that would make me feel like we
even have a chance. I guess we can look at both the parents and the adult child. Are the adult
children typically happier after they're estranged from their parents who they wanted to be estranged from?
And how does it affect the parents? Yeah, they're very, very different consequences. If you look at
the strange adult children, probably the majority of them say that they feel better and they feel
happier and feels like it's better for their mental health. But if you set with the parents what
you see are people who are heartbroken or confused who feel ashamed, who feel angry, who feel misunderstood,
the parent has to take responsibility and show up at the and make amends and the adult child
isn't willing to. Did kids in the, I don't know, 1800s grow up and become estranged from their parents
or was it sort of like, yeah, these are my parents, they're not perfect, but like they're my parents
so that I have to continue a relationship with them. I'm wondering how the institution of the
family has changed over the years that it has made it so that people see a strangement as an
option, I guess. In the mid 19th century, they're beginning to be a turn. Our turn has been mostly
towards individualism. So beginning in the mid 19th century, we began to be much more
interested in personal growth and happiness and that has really continued to gather more and more
esteem into the present. If you look at even the past 20 years or so, the rates of individualism
have continued to rise. Individualism, meaning how we assign meaning to events, the emphasis on
personal growth, happiness, individuality and parenting has radically changed as well. If you look
at parenting surveys in the early 1900s, what you have parents saying is that they want their
children to essentially be church going, not conservative necessarily, but people who conform
to what is expected of them. In addition, the idea was that children should respect their parents
if not fear them. I assume there's always been strangements. I don't think that there were
strangements nearly to the level of today. If you just look at divorce that alone radically
increases the probability of a strangement, what is it used to be, honor thy mother and my father
and respect thy elders. Today, it's really, does this relationship promote my happiness and my
personal growth that I'm interested. But if it doesn't, then I have nothing to do with this person.
And that's also viewed as being a kind of act of existential courage, where some prior generations,
I don't think it was viewed in that way whatsoever. So I follow all these TikTok accounts that are
like vaguely therapeutic and they're all like, if a person makes you upset even one time,
cut them out of your life. The idea of honoring your mother and father is like not anywhere on
there. But I'm wondering if you have had any personal experience with strangement or tensions with
your adult children and how that impacted your research or your thinking on this issue?
Well, yes, sadly, I came to this topic through my own personal experience. I was married and
divorced in my 20s and my daughter, now I'm very close to. There was a period of time in her early
20s where she cut off contact with me for several years. In many ways, as a expression of her
happiness about how she felt displaced when I got remarried and had twins in my second current
marriage and the ways that she felt. In some ways cast aside or neglect it or not prioritized.
And so there was a period of several years where she didn't talk to me or didn't want to spend
time with me. And it was easily the most awful, painful, hurtful, disorienting guilt-inducing thing
I've ever been through and hoped to go through again. But slowly over time we were able to
to heal the relationship and we're close again. So once we'd reconciled, I decided to write about it.
To what extent should adult children be accepting of their parents' flaws? Or should they be?
And I'm wondering how parents can do the same for their adult children. Because I feel like a lot
of these tensions come out of expectations. I think it has to do with the way that we think of
identity at this point. Currently it's sort of what you were saying about the TikTok and not
to trivialize adult children's complaints about their parents. But we feel like if we just like
something in somebody's personality and they're not willing to change, then somehow the healthy
thing to do is to cut them out. Sometimes the healthiest thing to do is to end relationship with
people who are hurtful and destructive and won't take any responsibility and the like. But there's
so much that I see adult children complaining about their parents and using as a cause for
this changement that A, the parent is willing to work on. And B, these are things that, you know,
often you hear things very psychologized and made to seem like the parent failed them and abused
them or traumatized them. Of course there are real abuses in a real, in real traumas. I'm not
trying to trivialize that. But I also hear and see things being called abusive, traumatizing,
harmful and neglectful that are really just part of the normal things and arrows of raising children
and family life and imperfections not only of the parents, but you know, children of any age
bring their own challenges to the parenting domain as well. What can maybe, you know, adult children
and or parents do to actually repair things and keep it from, you know, leading to full
estrangement? Yeah, I think on the adult child side is to tell your parents your complaints about
them because parents take a lot of self-esteem and identity from a feeling of being a good parent.
So when they're told that they weren't a good parent or that they failed their child or hurt them
or neglected them, it's very hard for parent not to get defensive. On the parent side, I think
parents do need to take the high road, take responsibility, find the kernel if not the bushel
of truth and the adult child's complaints. Show empathy, compassion, don't be defensive.
If the child is already estranged to say to them, I know you wouldn't do this unless it was
the healthiest thing for you to do. Not because the parent necessarily thinks that, but because
that's what it feels like to the adult child. So to really show a willingness to
do the work is commonly stated. People can get trapped in this endless loop of,
I'm telling you what you did wrong and like what you need to do to fix it and like I'd like to
heal our relationship and the parent is like, I didn't do anything wrong, you're an ungrateful child.
I don't know, when should you give up on all that and just say like, look, maybe it's better if
we just don't talk for a while. Yeah, often there isn't enough due diligence on either side to
give the parent a chance or being willing to do therapy with them. That's why I often tell
parents to write a detailed immense letter where they do acknowledge the things that were problematic
about their parenting because in some ways doing that is a really important path towards
self-compassion. It allows them to sort of see it all in the paper and just kind of tolerate that
as a reality. You know, when I was going through mine with my own child sort of just having to
write and say, yes, I could see why you did feel neglected. These were my failures. I didn't like
writing any of that. This in fact was very humiliating after writing it and saying it, but it did
allow me to become more accepting of those parts of myself as well. The same stays in the dark,
grows in the dark is often true of our relationships in terms of our own mistakes with our children.
So Joshua Coleman helped us understand why and how adult children sometimes become
estranged from their parents. But there's also a lot of gray area between a
strangement and a perfect, tapiole relationship with your family. Much of Dr. Coleman's research
comes from data collected on Western populations and it's not necessarily representative of all
cultures. What if you're from a culture where children are supposed to respect their parents'
decisions no matter what? For example, you might realize you need to set boundaries with your
parents, but not know how to do it. Maybe your family doesn't do boundaries. Every family needs to
maintain, in therapy terms, what we call a sense of homeostasis, a sense of what is normal, you know,
you know. I talked with Alex Lee, a therapist from Fremod, California, who focuses on therapy for
Asian Americans dealing with challenging family relationships. He spoke with me about how to
navigate that tricky middle ground with your parents and how family tensions can affect mental
health. Sometimes what is normal in a family could be potentially what's not healthy. So you may have
say controlling parents or controlling mother who wants to do well for their kids and so they
like maybe in a micromanage of kids or parents that are very absent because both parents have to
work. And so in that family dynamic, the kids are mostly left to fend from themselves. Also,
the parental mental health issues come up if you know the parent's struggle would say a personality
disorder or say if they have like extreme depression. But I always kind of go back to this idea that
families operate this way and people eventually start taking roles and they start becoming who they
are based off their family to kind of maintain this homeostasis or this sort of balance.
So let's say a client comes to you and says, you know, I can't handle how controlling my family is
or you know, I'm an adult and the way my parents treat me, I need to change something about it.
How do you decide the best way forward for them? As a therapist, I don't necessarily tell them
what to do. What I slowly try to pick up on is roles that you might play in the family,
client might come in and say, you know, like I need to do something about how I change the
dynamics and I say, okay, well, who are you in the family? Oh, I'm the scapegoat. My parents always
blame everything on me. Okay, how does that affect you as a person? Have you ever seen a baby's
crib before and you've seen like a mobile? The way I kind of describe it with my families is,
you know, when you pull a piece of a mobile, the thing kind of shifts a little bit, right?
And then when you let go of it, the mobile kind of just snaps back into place. Everything is just
kind of all balanced. When you change one piece of this family system, it causes the whole thing
to shift. And so when you change and you work on yourself or you interact with your parents
a little bit differently, maybe if they say something hurtful, right? You say, please don't say that,
right? You start sending these boundaries. What it does is that it makes people uncomfortable.
I feel like a lot of people when they are told to set boundaries with their parents. So it's like,
hey, when you say stuff about that, it makes you feel really hurt. Well, what are you? The
thought police? You're going to tell me what to say in my own home. I'll have you know, I bought
this home and I paid for it and I raised you in this. Yeah, yeah. So they tell me what the step
to of the boundary setting is. Yeah, absolutely. So whenever I focus on boundaries, it's never about
thought. I teach clients how to empathize with it. It sounds weird, right? Like you empathize with
them. You reflect back what they're saying so that you can, right? Oh, yeah. Like your
sounds like you're really upset right now, right? Putting the feelings back on that sometimes I try
to teach my clients that right? Sometimes if it gets too much, you know, maybe having teaching
the clients how to disengage. Is there, yeah, but how do you like actually enforce a boundary?
Like, do you, are you supposed to like leave the room or you supposed to? That's, that's the thing.
There's no necessarily a formula with this. You could leave the room. You could also just keep
reinforcing the boundaries and like, Hey, like, I don't really appreciate you talking to me like
this, right? I invite clients to say, what are you really feeling? I'm feeling scared. I'm feeling
on a shame. Okay. So in that moment, take a few deep breaths, get yourself grounded. And from
that place of being grounded, from that place of being a little bit more subtle, it's still
scary. It's, it's still hard, right? It's not about what to do. It's more about how do I take care
of my internal world and then act in a way that honors myself? Why is it that setting boundaries with
our parents can be so hard for me? I'm one of those people who has no issue breezing past,
you know, those people with clipboards on the sidewalk getting signatures. Like, I completely
ignore those people and feel no shame. Yeah. But it's like very hard for me to set boundaries
with my own parents. And I've always wondered like, why, why that is. Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean,
what's the difference between the, I mean, I'm going to, I'm going to kind of be a little,
if it's okay, and I like maybe like psychoanalyze me, sure. It's not psychoanalyzing. It's more about
just asking these questions, like, kind of help me think, what's the difference between your parents
and the clipboard people? I mean, I guess like on some level, I want my parents to agree with my
points of view and think that I'm like smart and good. And I don't really care what the clipboard
people think. Absolutely. You have a relationship with your parents. Yeah. You're right. That's
the difference. You have a relationship with the parents and the clipboard people you don't. And
you care about what your parents think. You want their approval. That's a natural good thing to want.
Like, you want your parents to approve of you. I validate that experience is a good and healthy
thing when there's unconditional love in a family that should come naturally, right? How sometimes
it works is that, well, no, you don't get that unconditional approval, right? I can't unconditionally
support you. And sometimes there's a cultural survival element to that, right? If I think about
a lot of immigrant families, I can't have you just do whatever you want because you need to succeed
in this country. So no, you can't be whatever you want. Like, you have to be, you know,
engineer, right? Because what I think you're doing is not good for our family. It's not good for
survival. Like, there's a bunch of stories behind that. And I help clients explore that too.
Would you ever tell someone to just detach from their family, not really communicate with them,
really? So one first thing, it's you're not like in-stranging, you're making space for yourself.
It's more about you. Like, I'm going to make space for myself. So yeah, I'm going to detach,
right, from my family. It may not always be permanent. As you grow and as you become a healthier
person, as you have better support systems around you, right? I can't give up something unless I
have something to replace it, right? Whether it's a healthier community, maybe you have your own
family that is healthy. I've run into this all the time with like my clients. I can't just abandon
my family, right? My parents need me. My parents don't speak English, right? Like, I can't do that.
And it's like, okay, well, that sounds like that's not an option. We need to try something different.
And you know, and we really, we really parsed about to see how much of that is your
symbol of safety and it's more of a symbolic thing. Or is it really, there's material
needs that are needing to be met in this family? I don't know. I feel like a lot of people get trapped
between my parents are wonderful. They did everything for me. And then also like resentment, but they
have to like off-guess. Yes, that is a very real thing. Because the truth is that most parents,
unless they are like 100% abusive, awful people, right? Parents are not all good and all bad.
And part of that healing process is that have clients recognize that my parents did so much for
me and they also damaged me. At some point, there's an invitation for my clients to kind of bring
it together and say like, yeah, your parents are both, they're human. In my own personal life,
it took me years to be able to get to that point where like I can maybe acknowledge my parents were
really helpful and really great and also like they did some things that were really hurtful.
In the middle of making this episode, I put out a Twitter call out to hear from people who have
a strained relationship with their families of origin. One person I heard from Molly had an especially
poignant story. There's a simple reason that my relationship with my parents is strained is
because third about evangelical Christian and I'm an atheist. I felt like growing off and still
feel like too allergic to sin. I saw my adoption as an answer to prayer as a mission, a pro-life
statement and then after all that, I end up not believing in what they see as the most important
thing in life. I thought believing when I was 11 and it was something that I felt like I had to
hide that I couldn't let them know about because I was afraid that it would endanger
I guess my role in the family is not exactly that I thought that they would stop loving me or not
want me per se but that that I would be a disappointment. As an adult, Molly has had years where she
didn't see her parents much because they disapproved of her life choices. She would call them but the
calls were mostly driven by a feeling of guilt and obligation. Still, she wouldn't say she cut
her parents off or that she's estranged from them. This is just what their relationship looks like,
a little less open, a little different. I think that in a lot of cases it's a good thing for people
in a family to not want to sever family ties to continue to have a sense of commitment and
obligation to other people in their family. If they reach a point where they're able to
have that relationship and not be actively hurt by it, family is a hard thing to replace.
Molly has a daughter and for the most part she's raised her without religion but she does
wonder what might happen if her daughter goes the other way and becomes religious later.
Molly's story made me realize that there are so many reasons why adults might not want to
interact with their parents frequently and that it doesn't always have to end in a
strangement. It can sometimes result in a relationship that's unideal but overall fine.
And there are ways to keep from repeating the cycle with your own kids.
So how do you deal with your parents as an adult? First, if you need to set a boundary,
do it. Just say you won't listen to hurtful comments about, say, your weight or your politics
and leave the room if they happen. If the relationship is still difficult, you might have to have
a heart to heart with them. Lead with the things you like about the relationship and how you'd like
to see it improve. Expect defensiveness but also be open to the possibility of empathy.
Finally, remember that doing all this introspection might make you an even better parent to your
own kids and hopefully help you break the cycle for good. That's all for this week's episode
of How to Start Over. This episode was produced by me, Rebecca Rashid and hosted by Olga Hazan,
editing by AC Valdez and Claudina Bade. Fact check by Anna Alvarado. Our engineer is Matthew
Simonson, a special thanks to Adrienne LaFrance, executive editor of The Atlantic.
