I am pleased to bring you the thinking of today’s guest, Harriet Brown. She is a writer, magazine editor and professor of magazine journalism at the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. Harriet writes, researches and teaches about eating disorders and body image as well as other issues, including family estrangement.

We will be discussing a range of topics, such as the different forms of family estrangement, how to avoid fake forgiveness, what parents and children owe each other, and the distinction between estrangement and family members simply drifting apart.

What Do Parents and Children Owe One Another?

You can listen to the full conversation by clicking ‘play’ above, or on the following podcast platforms:

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The following is a taste of my conversation with Harriet:

Q: Why is it important to not skip the anger phase after being harmed?

Harriet: The great thing about emotions like anger is that if you actually let yourself feel them, they lessen over time. Time does soften it so you can have a little more perspective and insight. But if you try to skip that part, I think you never really can get there.

Q: What do parents and children owe one another?

Harriet: As a mother, I feel I owe my children trust and unconditional love. I don’t think that kids owe their parents love, though, or respect if the parents haven’t earned it.

Q: Why are there so many more online forums for parents than there are for estranged adult children?

Harriet: Maybe it’s because in these relationships where an adult child becomes estranged from parents, it’s almost always the child who has done the walking away.

When asked if there’s one last thing she’d like our listeners to hear, Harriet says, “It would really be that for some families, estrangement is a positive thing and not a problem to be solved.”

About Harriet:
Harriet started her writing life at age twelve as a poet, and eventually made her way to nonfiction. The truest thing about her as a writer is this six-word story: I write so I’m not alone. She’s lived in New York City, Madison, Wisconsin, and now Syracuse, New York, where she teaches magazine journalism at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications.

Find Harriet on Social Media:
http://www.harrietbrown.com/   (Website)
https://www.facebook.com/GoodNonfiction/ (Facebook)
https://twitter.com/HarrietBrown   (Twitter)

Harriet’s Books:
Shadow Daughter: A Memoir of Estrangement
Body of Truth: How Science, History, and Culture Drive Our Obsession with Weight—and What We Can Do About It
Brave Girl Eating: A Family’s Struggle with Anorexia

Book Mentioned in the Interview:

Nothing Bad Between Us: A Mennonite Missionary’s Daughter Finds Healing in Her Brokenness, by Marlena Fiol, which is now available for pre-order on Amazon.

About Marlena Fiol:
Marlena Fiol, PhD, is a globally recognized author, scholar and speaker. She is a spiritual seeker whose work explores the depths of who we are and what’s possible in our lives. Her significant body of publications on the topic, coupled with her own raw identity-changing experiences, makes her uniquely qualified to write about personal transformational change. She is also a certified tai chi instructor and freelance writer whose most recent work has appeared in numerous literary magazines and newsletters.

Find Marlena Fiol on Social Media:

Facebook
Twitter
Instagram
LinkedIn

Podcast Transcript:
Below is a complete transcript of the podcast. I used a transcription service to create this, please note that there may be errors. For a 100% accurate quote of what was said, please listen to the podcast itself via the links above.

Interviewer: I’m pleased to introduce today’s guest, Harriet Brown. Harriet is a writer, magazine editor and professor of magazine journalism at the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. She writes, researches, and teaches about eating disorders and body image as well as other issues, including family estrangement. Her latest book is “Shadow Daughter: A Memoir of Estrangement.”

The title of this podcast is Becoming Who You Truly Are. And this season we’re talking about forgiveness and reconciliation as paths to healing and finding our true selves. Among other things, we’re asking what does it really mean to forgive? Harriet and I will explore this question along with other issues related to forgiveness and reconciliation as they relate to family estrangement. Harriet, welcome to the show.

Harriet: Thanks for having me.

Interviewer: I’d like to begin by asking you to briefly describe your childhood for our listeners, especially your relationship with your mother when you were a child.

Harriet: I did not ever have a good relationship with my mother. Looking back, I think we were just never a good fit and I’m sure there were other issues going on too. But I always remember that relationship as being very fraught and very difficult. There was always a lot of drama in the house. There was a lot of conflict. And I basically left home as soon as I could. Sorry about that. I left home as soon as I could because I didn’t think I would survive if I had to stay there longer. So, you know, in other ways, I mean, I had grandparents I was very close with and, you know, certainly, everything looked pretty good on paper at our family, but it never felt good to me and I got out as soon as I could, which was when I was 16.

Interviewer: So what motivated you to write “Shadow Daughter?”

Harriet: I had had this really difficult relationship. And you know, a lot of people have conflicts or issues with their families, maybe when they’re growing up, maybe when they’re young adults. But, you know, things never got better for me with my mother, even though you know, we tried a lot, you know. She and I would go through these periods of trying to make things work and then we’d have some kind of big blowout, and then we wouldn’t talk to each other for a while. And then, you know, we try again, and it was this sort of ongoing painful thing. And, you know, people don’t really talk about those kinds of relationships very much. You feel a lot of shame, and you feel…there’s certainly a lot of stigma.

I mean, our whole culture is organized around, you know, families, and togetherness. And especially like a relationship with your mother, you know, I can’t tell you how many times people said to me like, “But you know, you only got one mother,” and, “You have to love your mother,” and you know, I mean, “Blood is thicker than water,” like there are all these sort of cultural imperatives around you know, making things work and so you feel a lot of shame and a lot of stigma when they don’t work for you. And I wanted to let other people know, basically, who might find themselves in this situation that, you know, it’s not you and you’re not the only one in the world feeling this way, you know.

And actually, when I started talking to other people who had had difficult relationships that led to some level of estrangement, you know, first of all, I found out there are a lot of them out there. And second of all, like, we all felt the same kind of shame and stigma. And so, for me, there was great, like, catharsis and personal healing too in researching and writing the book, and then, you know, just talking with a lot of other people who dealt with similar things.

Interviewer: Just for the sake of our listeners, the book includes not only Harriet’s own experience but many, many interviews and a lot of research that she’s done. So Harriet definitions of estrangement vary, but you write that it’s usually considered to be a problem to be solved or an obstacle to overcome. And you hold a somewhat different view of estrangement. Can you speak to that?

Harriet: Yes. So there’s really very few researchers who work on this issue at all. And one of them is this researcher named Christina Sharpe. She’s, I believe, at the University of Washington. And she talks about an estrangement continuum, you know, which I think is an interesting concept. So, you know, there are people who don’t speak to or see whoever they’re estranged from. And then there’s people who sort of, you know, avoid them, but still see them occasionally. So it’s interesting that there are a lot of different ways to kind of approach estrangement. I forgot the second half of your question, I’m so sorry.

Interviewer: No, I was just wondering most people see it as a problem, an obstacle and you write about it in a different way and I was wondering if you would speak to that?

Harriet: Yes. So I think, to the extent that there are like websites and books about estrangement, it is typically always presented as this problem to overcome or solve. So, you know, the ideal is that people resolve these things and get back into some kind of relationship. And so then when you don’t do that, or when that doesn’t work out for you, that becomes like another layer of a problem. But what I learned for myself and also I think is true for a lot of other people is that you know, you can work through issues with someone who’s difficult in that way for you. You don’t have to be like, enraged with them or walking around furious.

But for some of us, some of the time having no relationship is actually the best outcome, and that was definitely true for me. And I did go through a lot of processes of like, learning to think of my mother with compassion, and, you know, not demonizing her in any way. But ultimately it was still a way better outcome for me to not have her in my life, you know. And people hear that and they say, “Oh, that’s so sad” that represents some kind of failure, but I actually don’t think that’s true for some of us, you know.

Interviewer: So in fact, estrangement can be a solution rather than the problem?

Harriet: Absolutely, that was absolutely true for me. And from the research I’ve looked at, I think it’s true for a lot of people.

Interviewer: Dr. Joshua Coleman, another expert on family estrangement, whom you reference in your book, has also been a guest on this show. He coined the term silent epidemic to describe estrangement. And studies suggest that between 5% and 10% of parents are estranged from at least one adult child. And you spoke about the shame and I think that’s the silent part is people don’t wanna talk about it. But in terms of that 5% to 10% of parents being estranged from at least one child, based on your experience, why have the estrangement numbers grown to epidemic proportions in our society?

Harriet: Well, I don’t know that they’ve grown so much. I mean, I really truly don’t know but what I think is that basically we have needed families, you know, human beings need our families to survive, right? That’s, I think why those bonds are so tight and run so deep and why, you know, there’s so much taboo around breaking them. But I think that the world we live in today, you know, you can survive once you’re past a certain age without your family of origin. You can find what we might call families of choice, you know, friends and people who you develop those kinds of relationships with.

Whereas I think, in the past, maybe it was harder to do that maybe, you know, because I think if you live in one place and your family has lived in that one place for a long time, you know that’s a very different scenario than today. Obviously, young people often leave home and live in other situations and environments and it enables you to find your tribe basically. I think that’s part of it, and so I think, you know, a lot of people feel that they can make that break, and it won’t put their lives in danger, you know, either physically or emotionally, although there certainly are repercussions. But I think it’s always been with us. It’s just been, again, something that we don’t talk about and something that we yeah, that we really just don’t talk about.

Interviewer: And that historically, we maybe couldn’t do anything about, or at least felt that we couldn’t.

Harriet: Right. And like, you know, if you’ve been living in…if you grow up in a town and your whole family lives there, and they’ve always lived there, and you live there, that’s a different kind of scenario you know, that makes it harder in a lot of ways to make that choice I think, so you know, being more mobile, maybe is more helpful. That’s how I see it. But I think that there are some people who obviously see the flip side of that and say, you know, in the old days, people wouldn’t have made the choice to be estranged, because they had to find ways to work it out, you know.

My experience with that is that people don’t walk away from these relationships with like, parents, unless there’s really, really good reasons. And so maybe you wouldn’t have made that choice in the past, but maybe you really should have you know, that I think it often winds up being better for your mental health to do it.

Interviewer: So Harriet, how do you define forgiveness as it relates to estranged family members?

Harriet: That’s such an interesting question. I’m glad you asked it. Because I think… You know, I grappled with this for a long time myself, like, I can’t forgive my mother, you know, and what does that say about me? I’m this terrible person, I can’t forgive her. I think I had this misconception that if you engaged in a process of forgiveness, that meant you were automatically back in a relationship with that person. What I came to understand is that I could work on forgiveness with my mother, but not choose to get back into a relationship with her.

So for me, what that wound up meaning and I think it means a lot of different things to a lot of people, but for me, it was like about being able to feel some level of compassion for her, you know, to acknowledge to myself that, like all of us, she was a flawed human being who had, you know, aspects of her life that were positive and good and also aspects that, you know, put her into conflict with me. So, you know, to try to see her as more of a holistic person. And during the years when I thought that meant that I needed to be in a relationship with her, it was way too dangerous, I couldn’t really do that. So it was liberating to think I don’t have to demonize her, I don’t have to think of her as just purely a terrible person. I can see her more holistically, but not make myself vulnerable to her.

Interviewer: And just for our listeners’ sake, I’ll quote from your book. “I couldn’t even think about forgiving my mother because forgiveness inevitably leads to reconciling going back to our old relationship,” which is exactly what you’re talking about here.

Harriet: Yeah.

Interviewer: So is saying, “I forgive you,” or feeling yourself that forgiveness enough is some kind of action sometimes required?

Harriet: I don’t know because I never actually quite got to that point with my mother, you know. I don’t think I ever have forgiven her. I understand more maybe and I accept more, but I guess I really don’t… You know, and that’s something I grappled with, like, what does it mean to forgive someone? Like, what does it mean to forgive someone for…I mean, there’s different kinds of forgiveness and different kinds of reasons to forgive. So somebody might do something, a one-time thing that like, really hurts you, but then you’re able to talk to them about it, and you’re able to sort of work it through. And, you know, I think we’ve all had that experience where you can say, “Okay, I forgive you. You know, yeah, this was a hurtful thing, but we’ve processed it together, we’ve listened to each other. You know, we can go forward in a different way.”

With my mother, you know, we were never able to have those conversations. She was never able to hear what I was saying. And I felt like somehow, I wasn’t able to express, you know, what I was upset about so we never got anywhere near that. I mean, I can think about our relationship and say, yeah, you know, she was very young when she had children, she didn’t know what she was doing. I mean, I wouldn’t have either at that age. But I don’t actually forgive a lot of the things that she did, because she did some pretty terrible things.

Interviewer: In fact, I have to just say, before I go on with more questions, that one of the things I so appreciated about your book is that you ask questions, you don’t accept and you don’t dole out glib answers. And I think readers will really appreciate that. It’s a remarkable part of the book. So from your perspective, there really are some actions that are simply unforgivable is that right?

Harriet: I mean, I don’t know if it’s the actions themselves that are unforgivable. I don’t personally think you can have forgiveness with someone who doesn’t acknowledge the harm they’ve done, you know, whether it was intentional or not, you know. I mean, I was never able…yeah, I don’t think in my life I ever heard her say, “I’m so sorry that that hurt you,” about anything, to me anyway. So I think forgiveness is a… You know, I’ve read a lot of books on forgiveness and interviewed a lot of people about it. And I know that people say, “Well, you don’t need to engage with the other person to forgive. You know, that’s a process that happens in yourself.”

But that wasn’t true for me and I don’t see how you forgive. And you know, like anybody, I’ve had my share of interactions with people where I’ve hurt someone inadvertently or they’ve hurt me and I think it’s in the processing it, in the talking about it, and the hearing each other, then you can get to some different place with it.

Interviewer: That’s interesting. So I have to follow up a bit on that. You mentioned in the book that sometimes forgiveness can happen organically without that sitting down and talking about it. And that takes me to my own journey of reconciliation with my father and his Mennonite Church, which I described in my new book, “Love is Complicated.” And for us, we never sat down and talked about the abuse and the pain. And so my question for you is this, from your perspective what are the conditions under which forgiveness might emerge more organically without really talking about any of it?

Harriet: I think you always have to talk about it. I mean, I think it has to do with just understand…like, feeling that goodwill from the other person, you know understanding. Whether you talk about it overtly or not, I guess it’s just…I mean, some people are not so inclined to grapple with everything verbally, you know, which is also okay, but to get some sense… You know, like my father and I…I had a difficult relationship with him because of the problems with my mother. And, I mean, we were able to do some talking after my mother died, but it wasn’t like we worked anything out or anything, but I felt from him a different thing, you know. I felt from him…I felt that he cared about me. I felt that he loved me, you know, and that was enough.

So I guess that’s maybe what it is, that you have to have some trust in the relationship you know, whether or not you can ever resolve specific things that happened. But you have to be able to trust and go on in some way. So I don’t know. Does that make sense to you given your experience?

Interviewer: No, absolutely. I think for us it had to do with both my father and I hitting rock bottom and there was a brokenness that we experienced and we saw in the other that I think led to more softening and more of an organic process. But without that, it would not have been possible.

Harriet: That makes sense.

Interviewer: So you write that when people skip the anger phase, they wind up with a kind of fake forgiveness. I think this is a really important point and I’d love for you to say more about that.

Harriet: We hear about stories, right all the time, where…there was one story that I remember where someone murdered some…there was a murder in an Amish community. It was people from outside the community who came in and murdered people. I don’t remember the details, but at the court case, at the trial, you know, these people who had lost loved ones, you know, to this sort of senseless act of violence, stood up and publicly said, you know, “I forgive you.” And you hear about that kind of courtroom forgiveness.

And I’m always really suspicious of it because I don’t see it as a good thing. Because I think if you don’t ever process the anger part, then what are you actually saying when you say “I forgive you” to someone in that situation? I just don’t think that’s how emotions work, like you have to do more than talk about your feelings. You have to feel them. And I think anger, when you’ve been badly hurt in some way, is a really normal and healthy reaction, you know. Not necessarily walking around and acting it out all the time, but like being able to feel it and say, “This is not okay.”

Interviewer: I couldn’t agree with you more. I wrote about that just today in a blog and about not short-circuiting the forgiveness process, to face the brutal facts and the truth of it, which is going to make you damn angry.

Harriet: Yes. And the great thing about emotions is that if you actually let yourself feel them, you know, they lessen over time. And that’s I think, part of the function of it in that case too that, like, maybe you’re enraged about something and deeply hurt, you know. And then time does soften that to a place where you can, you know, have a little more perspective and insight. But if you try to skip that part, I think you never really can get there.

Interviewer: Phil Cousineau, who is the editor of a book called “Beyond Forgiveness” and he was also a guest on this podcast, he says that…one of his contributors actually in the book said that, “All forgiveness is really self-forgiveness.” Does this make any sense to you?

Harriet: Hmm, not really. I would wanna know more about that because… No. Does it make sense to you?

Interviewer: The way that it makes sense to me is that I think for healing to occur for me probably I need to forgive that I made up a victim story, a resentful victim story and I never rewrote the story and forgiving myself for that, for the pain that I caused…well for the suffering I caused for myself because the pain another person may have caused, but by not rewriting the story, and by continuing to be the victim in the story, I create suffering for myself. And it seems to me that that is what I need to do in terms of self-forgiveness. I do not know if this is what this person was referring to, but that’s what it means to me.

Harriet: Yeah, that’s interesting. And it kind of goes along, I think with things that I have read and heard in talking with, you know, people who do write and talk about this stuff more consistently, you know, that there is this sort of internal shift that you can make that maybe has to do with not seeing yourself as the victim. That may be, you know, acknowledges in some way that like, the things you hoped for or wanted or expected, you know, didn’t come to you but that’s just what it means to be human. Yeah, I don’t know, I wonder if I will ever get to that place in thinking about things with my mother. I don’t know.

Interviewer: You write that forgiveness would, and I think I’m quoting, but maybe not perfectly, you’ll tell me if I’m not, that it would reveal the transgression as intentional since unintentional acts don’t require forgiveness. And so I’m wondering is your belief then that we really don’t need to ask forgiveness for the unintentional harm that we may have done to others?

Harriet: Oh, no, I think we definitely do. I think what I was talking about there was that…I think I was thinking more about just the specific relationship with my mother that, you know, for…like, she never was able to acknowledge that anything she did caused harm to me. And you know, so we couldn’t even get to like stage one of that conversation if that makes sense.

Interviewer: Yes. You make an important distinction between family members simply drifting apart and out of, say, indifference and estrangement. Would you say more about this?

Harriet: Yeah. You know, we all know families that maybe you don’t have a lot in common with your family for one reason or another, you live very different lives. But there’s goodwill on each side. You know, it’s not about some giant emotional mountain that you have to climb with them. And I think in the book I mentioned my husband and his brother, they’re definitely not estranged, but they’re just… they’re not close. They’re very different kind of people. They live very different lives. And they talk like once or twice a year and they’re okay with that. You know, that works for them.

So I think part of it is…you know, estrangement basically…when there’s any level of estrangement, people are unhappy, at least some people are unhappy with it, you know, and want it to be different. But, you know, otherwise, there’s many different ways to have relationships, you know. And my husband and his brother are totally fine with each other. They just don’t have a need to chat any more than that or connect at all.

Interviewer: And in fact, maybe from what I’m hearing you say, it might be exactly that, that all parties are okay with it, is the difference between drifting and what we’re calling estrangement.

Harriet: Yes, that’s right.

Interviewer: I loved reading what you write about rituals. You say that there are rituals for how to deal with death but we have no rituals for estrangement. And I’m wondering, what would a ritual look like for estrangement?

Harriet: What a good question. Yeah, that’s a really good question, right, because there is grief involved with an estrangement, even if you’re the one who’s choosing it. I think it’s different if you’re the one who’s being estranged, and it’s against your will, and maybe if you feel that you don’t fully understand why. But there’s also grief on the other side and I think, you know, what is the purpose of ritual with grief? It’s to help us get through it. So, yeah, it’s a good question, isn’t it? I haven’t given it any thought but some kind of like, you know, public or private casting away and acknowledging feelings about it, right?

Interviewer: Yeah, some kind of closure.

Harriet: Yeah.

Interviewer: So about 1% of the population is clinically narcissistic. And yet, you say that the vast majority of mental health-related estrangements are or center around a family member who’s considered a narcissist. So I’m wondering, based on your experience and on your research, would you say there are more narcissists out there than we believe or are the explanations for estrangement sometimes not dead on?

Harriet: Oh, you know, I don’t have any idea, but I think that people can be narcissistic without being like clinically diagnosable, right? So there’s a lot of psychological conditions where you might not meet the full criteria, but you have elements of that that you grapple with. Yeah, I think there’s… I mean, in talking with people who have gone through estrangement, narcissism comes up a lot, but so do other mental health conditions, you know, or substance abuse issues, or alcoholism, or things like that, that you know, disrupt relationships in kind of predictable ways. But yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s a good question.

Personally, I think there’s probably a lot more people who have narcissistic elements than are like diagnosable. I mean, my mother was never diagnosed with anything. I don’t think she ever pursued a diagnosis because I don’t think she thought there was anything wrong with her. So yeah, I don’t know. Good question. But I’ve learned to trust people… You know, this is one of the issues that comes up, like, people like Dr. Joshua Coleman, who often are speaking more to the parents whose children have walked away from them say. You know, there’s this sort of myth that is prevalent in certain conversations about it that like, well, kids today, whether they’re grown or not, you know, they’re more spoiled and they will just walk away casually because they’re mad about X or Y, you know, one thing that happened.

And that’s really, really not been my experience or the experience of anyone I’ve talked to, and like I said, I’ve talked with a lot of other people. These relationships are too important and we don’t walk away from them casually or on a whim. There has to be a lot that goes on to bring someone to that decision, and I’ve learned to trust that, and I think very rarely do people just flounce away, if ever.

Interviewer: Yeah, it’s too painful, like an experience for that. You write that many narcissistic families have…or let’s say families with members who have tendencies that are narcissistic, have one or more golden children who can do no wrong and at least one scapegoat who is blamed for many of the problems. And Harriet you and I share this, oh, my gosh, we were both pretty much cast as family scapegoats. Can you say more about this in your own family?

Harriet: Yeah. I mean, it’s exactly what you just described, right. So, I have a sister who’s three years younger than me, and she was the golden child, you know. And it’s interesting, because in many ways, my life looked closer to the lives of my parents, you know, in certain ways. But she was the one who needed protecting, she was the one who they could be proud of, she was the golden child. And it’s really sad that that happens and that it’s so common. But as you say, like you can relate to that, and I think a lot of people can relate to that.

Interviewer: Absolutely. And family systems, theorists have written about it, I’m not an expert on it, but I know that it’s a pretty universal thing. So you write, and here’s another similarity between my childhood and yours, this discrepancy between what you call a shiny surface and the seething interior. My gosh, can I relate to that. This is so true in my family. We never talked about the bad stuff, the complicated stuff. In your experience, what’s the damage that results from this discrepancy?

Harriet: Well, I think there’s deep emotional damage. I know for myself, I mean, I thought that I was like crazy for most of my childhood and adolescence and young adulthood. It really, really took me until well into adulthood to even begin to think maybe…you know, because it’s like gaslighting on a certain level. You know, everyone is saying, “What’s wrong with you? Why are you so unhappy? Everything’s good, you know?”

And like I said, my family looked pretty good on paper. You know, we weren’t like poor. Our needs were met. Our physical needs were met. People would meet my mother and they would like her at first, that she was sort of personable and fun-loving and peppy, and very lively. So when the world is telling you, you know, “Everything’s fine,” but you feel like it’s not fine, I think for most kids, that makes them question themselves, and mistrust their own feelings and reactions to things. And that is a really damaging process that it can take the rest of your life to really fix and address and heal and learn to heal that relationship with yourself.

And I know for me too, there was… You know because my mother would say the right things a lot, “I love you so much,” she would say, “I just love you,” and everything you know, why aren’t things good? But that’s not what I felt from her. And so that sort of dissonance between the words and behaviors and the feelings from them also, for me, made me question my responses to everything and mistrust them and think, gosh, there’s something really wrong with me because they’re telling me these things but that’s not how it feels.

Interviewer: I’m so glad you raised the issue of losing trust in one’s own ability to perceive what is real, because it seems like that’s really one of the fundamental things. You write that when, continuing with the theme of trust, that when trust is broken, by years of losses, that nothing can really recreate that. And then later in the book, you describe a pretty heart-rending scene where you stand in your mother’s ICU before her death and you ask yourself, “What if she looked at me with love right now?” And you write, “No look or words could possibly have outweighed the years and years of actions.” Could you speak for a moment to that truth, that awareness that came to you there about what really becomes not even possible at that point?

Harriet: Well, it’s actually a conversation I had with my mother a number of times, because…obviously, before that moment. Because her….when we would have these conflicts and these dramatic fights or whatever, and then we would not talk to each other for a while and then her way of wanting to approach it was always “Well, let’s just start over.” She once proposed that she and my sister and I all take a trip together, like a big international trip together but her condition was that we all just start over and start fresh.

And what I said to her many times was when we don’t have trust between us, I think you can build it back but it takes time, you know? And it’s a process. It’s not something that’s gonna happen immediately. And you can’t just start over. You have to earn that trust from each other again, and you have to sort of relearn that, okay, you know, this person is not going to hurt me or do whatever it was. And a lot of the estrangement stories I heard, were similar in that, you know, after a break or a problem, like one person is just like, “Well, let’s just dive right back into you know, this relationship.” And the other person is like, you know, “I need to build that trust.” And then somehow that is seen as very offensive in some way.

So I think standing in my mother’s ICU room, I mean, she was dying, and I knew she was dying. So if she had looked at me in a certain way, we wouldn’t have been able to have any process or communication. I think there was nothing that could have happened at that point. Earlier, it could have but it was odd that she never…you know, it would make her very angry when I would say, “I need to, like, experience a relationship with you over time and build that trust back up.” For her, that was very hurtful.

Interviewer: So you write that without that trust there is no connection. And it seems to me sometimes broken trust leads to a very strong connection, but it’s a negative one. When does it become a non-connection?

Harriet: I mean, for me, it happened at a moment that I wrote about in the book that was just one more example of, you know, my inability to trust my mother, you know, an interaction that happened between us. And I don’t know why that one felt so different. I mean, I think it’s cumulative and I think, just like you build trust, you also build mistrust. And that there is…at least there was for me a point where it went too far and it really felt like no, that’s it. I mean, it wasn’t so much that I thought we could never repair it, but I didn’t want to anymore. That was after, you know, 50 years of wanting to and trying to, however unsuccessfully. Nope, there was a point where it was just like, I’m done. I just don’t want this anymore.

Interviewer: At one point in the book, you ask an important question. I mean, you ask many important questions, but here’s one of them. What do we parents and children owe one another? How do you answer that question today as you reflect on yourself, not only as a daughter but also as a mother of two daughters?

Harriet: I feel as a mother I feel I owe my children a lot of things. And I guess, you know, trust, and love, and unconditional love to the extent that I can give it. And, you know, I feel that I owe them a lot. I don’t know that I feel that they owe me much. I kind of feel like it’s always the role of the grown-up to sort of earn that and you know, inspire that in a child. But of course, there’s a lot of cultural messages around what children owe their parents, you know. And I don’t think that kids owe their parents love, though, or respect if the parents haven’t earned it.

Interviewer: By the way, Joshua Coleman comes down just exactly there as well. He says, “The buck stops with the parent.” So, here’s another of those wonderful questions you ask and it has to do with unconditional love that you just mentioned. Speaking as both a daughter and a mother do you believe that unconditional love continues to exist naturally between parents and their grown children?

Harriet: I do actually. I do. You know, there’s so many ways to define unconditional love, but yeah, I do. I do think that. And I guess my definition of it is just, you know, I might not like everything you do, I might not approve of everything you do, but my love for you is, you know, bigger than that and can sort of… You know, I mean, people always say, “Well, what if, your child you know, murdered someone I mean, and, you know, would you still…” And I think most parents would still feel that unconditional love [inaudible 00:41:36] other things too, right?

So, yeah, I do. I don’t know that kids feel that for parents. I mean, I really don’t know. I think it’s very different or maybe that’s my perspective because I didn’t feel that for my mother, you know? Maybe that’s just my perspective. I don’t really know.

Interviewer: So you said… I just wanna return for a moment to the issue of justification for breaking those bonds. And you say that it’s never done on a whim. It’s much too painful for that. And you also quote Elizabeth Vagnoni, who suggests that the only justification for estrangement is serious physical or sexual abuse. And in the book, you ask, “But who gets to say what’s serious and what isn’t?” How would you answer that today?

Harriet: I would say that the person experiencing it gets to say, you know, because, it’s your reality.

That doesn’t mean I get to say, you know, you set out to hurt me and you did because I don’t know what you set out to do. But I get to say this really tore me apart, this damaged me. I mean, I’m the only person who can say that, right? And then I feel like if you’re on the other end of that, if someone is saying that to you, you know, then it’s your job. You may or may not agree, you may not think what you did was so terrible, that’s okay. But it’s your job if you wanna repair that relationship to listen and respect their feelings, you know. Like, that’s just the basis of human interaction, isn’t it, that we have to respect those feelings?

Interviewer: You write that your mother’s wrath most often showed up in writing. In your experience, is it more generally true that the written medium is more likely to create those kinds of misunderstandings than face to face encounters, say?

Harriet: I don’t know. I think that’s very much… You know, each relationship is different. I mean I know like emails are…you know, we’ve all experienced the sort of little ways in which we can misunderstand each other in emails. I mean, I’m a writer so for me writing is often better for explaining how I feel about something or, you know, organizing my thoughts. But, you know, you definitely do miss things when you’re writing and not face to face with someone miss those cues. But you know, yeah, I think it just depends.

Interviewer: One of your interviewees held two extremes, both feeling the pain of abuse, and at the same time, love for that abuser. And in the book, you ask what allows us to get there? And I’m wondering what your thoughts are today about what allows us to get there, to hold both of those kinds of feeling simultaneously?

Harriet: That’s a really good question. I’m still like puzzled by that. And I don’t know if it’s a good thing or not, you know. I mean, you could tell many different narratives about that. You could say, it’s so wonderful that someone is still able to feel love and connection with this person who has hurt them so much. Or you could say that that’s pathological in some way, that that represents that this person hasn’t processed things thoroughly and is still engaged in some kind of toxic relationship with the person who has abused them and hurt them. I don’t know. I think maybe both answers are possible sometimes in different situations.

I mean, I think the bottom line is…you know, I mean, there are people who abuse others and who come to regret that and who come to understand the damage they’ve done. And I think that’s a very different thing than the people who go to their graves insisting that they didn’t do anything so terrible and that you’re too sensitive or any of the other millions of things that people say to shut down that conversation.

Interviewer: Yeah, once again, you’re not comfortable with easy answers and I like that. In your book…

Harriet: [inaudible 00:46:35].

Interviewer: In your book, you ask, why are there so many more online forums for parents than there are for estranged adult children? I don’t believe you answered that question in the book. Why are there?

Harriet: It’s because I’m not sure that there is an answer except…yeah, I don’t know actually. I really don’t know. But I think a related question is why has so much been written by, like psychologists and experts on the need for reconciliation? You know, maybe it’s just because in these relationships where an adult child becomes estranged from parents, that it’s almost always the child who has done the walking away I would say 99% of the time anecdotally. So I think probably it has to do with, you know, parents feeling victimized and wanting to take their pain and, you know, put it somewhere and find community with other people.

Whereas if you’re the person who’s doing the walking away, you know, again, even if you are convinced it’s what you have to do, and it’s the right choice for you, you still feel…because you’re going against the cultural norms and you’re going against the cultural imperatives to like, love and respect, and honor your parents, you know, that you feel so much shame about it. Maybe that’s why. Yeah, I don’t know.

Interviewer: Maybe it’s because, and now I’m conjecturing based on your writing, but maybe it’s because, for many adult children, it’s a solution. And the forums out there are usually for the problems that exist in society. And so for parents, it may be more of a problem than it is for most adult children.

Harriet: And they’re still trying to solve that problem.

Interviewer: And they’re still trying to solve it.

Harriet: That’s actually very insightful.

Interviewer: Well, it’s based on your work that I say that. So Harriet, if there were one last thing that you would like our listeners to hear from you, what would it be?

Harriet: It would really be this idea that you know, for some families, estrangement is a positive thing and not a problem to be solved. And that…you know, it’s funny, during the years that my mother was alive, and we had this difficult relationship, a lot of…I have a big extended family and, you know, a lot of people would try to get involved in the issue, they would try to solve it, which basically meant they were calling me or writing to me and saying, like, “What’s wrong with you? Why can’t you get along with your mother?” You know, “Why can’t you just zip it and just get along?” Like, “Why are you causing all this problem?”

And the thing I wound up saying to them a lot was you don’t know the whole story, you know. I don’t know what my mother is out there telling you. I don’t feel that I really wanna share everything with you. But like, just know that from the outside you may not understand a full relationship. You may not have the whole story. So I think just this basic level of respecting people’s choices and saying like, you know what, for you that might be the best possible choice and maybe it causes me pain in some way, but I respect that.

Interviewer: This has been great, and unfortunately we’re out of time. Harriet, thank you for taking the time to speak with me.

Harriet: Thank you for having me. It’s a really important conversation and I do so appreciate your facilitating it.

Interviewer: I’ve been speaking with Harriet Brown, whose latest book is “Shadow Daughter.” You’ll find details on the show notes about how to purchase her books, as well as my new book “Nothing Bad Between Us.” And thank you, our listeners for joining us today. If you know anyone who’d be interested in this podcast, please do share it with them. And if you liked it, take a moment to rate and review us on iTunes or your favorite podcasting network. Instructions on the show notes make rating and reviewing easy.

And remember we are together on this journey.