I am pleased to bring you the thinking of today’s guest, Dr. Joshua Coleman. Josh is a psychologist in private practice in the San Francisco area, with particular expertise in family dynamics, including estrangement.

We will be discussing a range of topics, such as cultural shifts that have impacted families, what forgiveness means in the context of family estrangement, and the importance of connection.

Don’t Get into the Rightness or Wrongness of It…Just Seek to Understand

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

• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify
• Google Play
• Stitcher

The following is a taste of my conversation with Josh.

Q: Will you comment on some cultural shifts that have impacted families?
Josh: One of the biggest cultural shifts has been the way that the individual has become dis-embedded from the family and dis-embedded from the institutions that governed and animated family life really throughout millennia.

Q: In what ways does estrangement often feel different to parents than it does to their adult children?”
Josh: For the adult child it’s tied to a narrative of liberation from oppressive figures, of pursuit of happiness, of strength, autonomy. For the parent, it’s all downside. It’s failing at life’s most important task.

Q: Are some acts simply unforgiveable?
Josh: We’re all products of our own childhoods, our own past, our own traumas, our own genetics, our own class, our own good luck, and bad luck. And so, I think that there is a moral argument to be made to work towards a position of forgiveness, even for those who hurt us the most.

Q: Do you believe it’s true that when we miss the chance for real reconciliation, we miss the chance to heal?
Josh: I do, and that’s the kind of society that I would like to live in. I think we’ve become so preoccupied with happiness and individuality that we’ve lost sight of the importance of connection.

When asked if there’s one last thing he’d like our listeners to hear, Josh says, “The thing that I want parents to have the most is self-compassion and self-forgiveness.”

About Josh:
Dr. Joshua Coleman is an internationally known expert in parenting, families and relationships. He is a psychologist in private practice in the San Francisco Bay Area and a Senior Fellow with the Council on Contemporary Families, a non-partisan organization of leading sociologists, historians, psychologists and demographers dedicated to providing the press and public with the latest research and best-practice findings about American families. He has lectured at Harvard University, The University of California at Berkeley, The University of London and Cornell Weill Medical School. He has weekly webinars for estranged parents and blogs on parent-adult child relationships for the U.C. Berkeley publication, Greater Good Magazine.

Find Josh on Social Media:
https://www.drjoshuacoleman.com/ (Website)
https://www.facebook.com/DrJoshColeman/  (Facebook)
https://twitter.com/drjcoleman (Twitter)
https://www.linkedin.com/in/drjoshuacoleman (LinkedIn

Josh’s Books:
When Parents Hurt: Compassionate Strategies When You and Your Grown Child Don’t Get Along
The Marriage Makeover: Finding Happiness in Imperfect Harmony
The Lazy Husband: How to Get Men to Do More Parenting and Housework

Forthcoming:
Rules of Estrangement: Why Adult Children Cut Ties and How to Heal the Conflict (November 2020)

Josh also does weekly webinars for estranged parents, and a free Q&A on Mondays.

Books Mentioned in the Interview:

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari
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.

Marlena: I’m very pleased to introduce today’s guest, Dr. Joshua Coleman. Josh is a psychologist in private practice in the San Francisco area and a senior fellow with the Council on Contemporary Families, an organization of leading sociologists, historians, psychologists, and demographers who provide research and best practice findings about American families. He’s lectured at esteemed universities around the world and he’s been interviewed on many major television and radio shows.
 
Josh is the author of numerous books. The one I drew most of my questions from today is “When Parents Hurt, Compassionate Strategies When You and Your Grown Child Don’t Get Along.” So, 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. Over and over and in different ways, my guests are addressing the question, what does it really mean to forgive? Josh’s expertise on family dynamics makes him uniquely qualified to address this and other important questions related to forgiveness and reconciliation. Josh, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here.
 
Dr. Coleman: Well, thank you for having me.
 
Marlena: You coined the term silent epidemic. I’d like you to begin by describing family estrangement and why you refer to it as a silent epidemic.
 
Dr. Coleman: Yeah. Well, I think that in the past five years or so I’ve seen an explosion of these cases in my practice and I’ve seen that in other people’s practices as well when I’ve talked to other clinicians in the research world, there’s also been an explosion of studies in the past five years. You know, prior to that time there was a relative paucity of studies about estrangement. But I also think it’s a silent epidemic because there’s so much shame on both sides. There’s shame in the part of the estranged parent because parents don’t talk about it a lot because they feel like somebody is going to say, “Well, you must have done something pretty terrible for your own child to have turned against you,” which isn’t necessarily the case. And many adult children don’t talk about it as well because they fear some kind of censure for the idea that, you know, the family is forever and that kind of thing. So, I just think it exists at far greater numbers than most people realize. Every time I do a national interview, I’m besieged with referrals from parents who say the same thing, “Gee, I thought I was the only one.”
 
Marlena: Yeah. You and others have written about major cultural shifts over time that have contributed to these family dynamics that we see today. Will you comment on some of these culture shifts and how they’ve impacted families?
 
Dr. Coleman: Sure. I mean, one of the biggest cultural shifts has been the way that the individual has become sort of disembedded from the family and disembedded from the institutions that governed and animated family life really throughout millennia. So, my colleague [inaudible 00:03:36] said, for example, that marriage has changed more in the past 30 years than it did in the prior 3,000 years. And what she meant, is that the institutional forces of, you know, religion, neighborhood, culture, ideas about respecting one’s elders, all of those things have been reconfigured in a way to prioritize the rights of the individual and the happiness of the individual. And in many ways that’s been a good thing. You know, we have a bunch of people who are able to leave abusive or deeply unsatisfying marriages, adult children aren’t, you know, morally obligated in some ways to stay with parents who are cruel to them, etc.. But on the other hand, I believe it’s tilted where people are able to get married to people more in line with their gender identity, sexualities, etc. But I think that we’ve turned too far in the other direction that the search for happiness has become far too important that we’ve lost our more communitarian ideals and family being one of them.
 
And most importantly, because of my field, the field of psychology and psychotherapy we overemphasize the power of parents to determine adult outcome. Parents are somewhat important in how we turn out as adults. But in many ways, they’re not nearly as important as class, as neighborhood, as siblings, as genetics, as good luck, as bad luck. And yet we live in a culture which still is used to a kind of a blank slate idea that you’re sort of born in this blank slate and who you become is a function of who your parents make you out to be. And that’s important to this topic of estrangement because many adult children are now cutting off parents by accusing them of causing that adult child to be who they are, in ways which is really quite inaccurate.
 
Marlena: Yeah. So, in prior generations, just to follow this theme of cultural shifts, it seemed to me children needed to earn the respect of parents and it’s like the tables have turned there. And today, parents are worried they don’t have their children’s respect and they need to be more, do more. As an expert on families and family dynamics, where’s the healthy balance here?
 
Dr. Coleman: Well, I think your summary is right that it used to be the child’s job to earn the parents love and respect. And increasingly, these days, it’s the parents’ job to earn the child’s love and respect. And a lot of parents don’t assume that they’re going to have it. They’re terrified of making mistakes, of screwing up their children, of creating an estrangement. Today’s parents more than any other generation want to be best friends with their children for life. So, since the 1960s there’s been a democratization of the family. In some ways it preceded the ’60s, the 1950s with Benjamin Spock’s book which encouraged [inaudible 00:06:52].
 
Marlena: He was the bible when I was raising my kids.
 
Dr. Coleman: Yeah, same with my parents from my [inaudible 00:07:03]. But that definitely gave way to much more intensive form of parenting, the family became much more democratized, became more preoccupied with what children felt, what their needs are, much more preoccupied with their self esteem. And what has been lost in that is a certain kind of a power or authority or respect to the parent. Not authoritarian because we know from the research that overall parents who are an authoritative, who combined a combination of affectionate attitudes towards their children but also a clear idea that they are the ones in charge, that those children tend to do the best. And I think that so many parents today are tormented with guilt, with worry, with anxiety, and in many ways fueled by the internet and by the field of psychology, that they are so worried about making mistakes that they’re not sufficiently authoritative.
 
Marlena: Yeah, yeah. You mentioned class earlier. Are there class or gender differences that impact the probability or the nature of family estrangement?
 
Dr. Coleman: Well, I mean, my research, I did a survey of 1,600 estranged parents and the majority of them are in the middle to upper classes. And so I think there may be ways that the ways that middle and upper class parents are so preoccupied with developing the voice of their child, their individuality, their social capital, this idea that don’t let anyone or anything stand in the way of your happiness and your growth can later redown to the parent where the adult child feels like, “Well, it’s your fault that, you know, I have some of these issues that I have,” or, ‘I don’t like how you talk to me or treat me so I’m getting rid of you.” And part of the…You know, estrangements have always existed but I think it is relatively new and relatively rare for the idea of that estranging a parent is an act of existential courage.
 
So, if you go onto the forums for the adult children toward cutting off the parent, you know, you often see adult children saying things like, “Oh, best thing I ever did. I’m so much happier now. You know what, no more drama. You know, happier since I went no contact.” And, you know, for the parent, there’s no upside. For the adult child it’s tied to a narrative of liberation from oppressive figures, of pursuit of happiness, of strength, autonomy. For the parent, it’s all downside. It’s failing at life’s most important task. It’s being cut off from your most important members. It’s losing contact with children, with grandchildren. So, there is a very big generational divide of the meaning and the impact of estrangement.
 
Marlena: I’m glad you mentioned that. One of the other guests on this podcast, Harriet Brown, has written a book about estrangement, and she cites a study that reported that 80% of the respondents said that estrangement from their parents had led to positive changes. And that was also her personal view. And she argues very similar to what you just said, that what’s problematic is that societal stigmas are so intense that many people stay in a toxic relationship to avoid the stigma. But she very much speaks to that divide between how estrangement looks to the parent and to the adult child.
 
Dr. Coleman: Yeah, I missed that. What was the 80% figure?
 
Marlena: Eighty percent of the respondents, I don’t have the reference to the study here, but she cites a study that said that 80% of the respondents said that estrangement from their parents had led to positive changes.
 
Dr. Coleman: Yeah, that doesn’t…
 
Marlena: It’s very in line with what you were just saying.
 
Dr. Coleman: Yeah, that doesn’t surprise me.
 
Marlena: So, Josh, you’ve said that the reasons people give for estrangement often are not egregious enough to justify what you call the nuclear option. Could you say more about that?
 
Dr. Coleman: Well, I mean enough is clearly in the eye of the beholder. I mean, clearly the adult child thinks that the reasons are egregious enough or they wouldn’t do it. And I think my success in working with families, helping the parents reconcile with the adult child is helping them to empathize with why the adult child does see the mistakes of the parents as being egregious, sufficiently egregious to warrant an estrangement. But what you probably are referencing is that there’s also a generational divide in what’s considered abusive behavior. There was an important study by the Australian sociologist, Alexandra Haslam, H-A-S-L-A-M.
 
Marlena: Yes, I know, Alex.
 
Dr. Coleman: Oh, you do?
 
Marlena: Yeah, I use to be a researcher in social sciences.
 
Dr. Coleman: Oh, I didn’t know that. Oh, that’s fantastic. Yeah. So, it’s a wonderful study about the notion of concept creep and where the idea is that in the past three decades, there’s been an enormous expansion between what’s considered traumatizing, abusive, neglectful, or harmful behavior. So that one of the problems, the generational differences that generational divides around the meaning of abuse is so problematic is because they have very different ideas of what constitutes abusive behavior. So, a lot of what adult children today are considering abusive in the parents’ generation might have been considered obnoxious, controlling, manipulative or negative etc. but no parent would have called it abuse. And also the notion of neglect is this enormously wide concept where you can almost fit in anything into that including, you know I’ll hear adult children saying, “Well, you know, you didn’t catch that I was depressed and get me into therapy.”
 
So, on the one hand, it’s legitimate that a now adult child would have wished that. But the idea is that if the parent somehow didn’t do that, didn’t have the training, education, perceptiveness to do that, that now their validity as a parent has been made invalid by the fact that they didn’t catch something. And this is what I call the soulmate parenting, that parents are now supposed to be basically soulmates with their children. They’re supposed to be, you know, coaches, and mentors, and therapists and, you know, best friends. And, you know, the reality is that a great percentage of parents have achieved that.
 
You know, the heartening statistics about the democratization of the family and the more sensitive kind of parenting that we’ve been doing, especially in the past three decades, but really in the past half century has led to more closeness. The majority of parents and adult children are closer than parents have been in prior generation. In the same way, those relationships are more fragile because they’re founded upon the notion of the relationship has to have friendship as its core and that by its nature is a more fragile entity. So, it’s the same thing as marriage. Today’s marriages are in many ways… A good marriage is, one could argue, far more satisfying than marriages have ever been. Couples are best friends, they’re much more in tune with their feelings, with their partners feelings, with making marriage be a launching pad of personal growth and happiness and development. But it’s also more fragile because if it doesn’t have those qualities then, you know, that soulmate is now considered not worth staying with and should be, you know, kicked to the curb.
 
Marlena: Yeah. So, let’s talk a bit about forgiveness. Josh, you quote Martin Seligman, who’s often referred to as the father of positive psychology, as saying that the ability to forgive is linked to many positive physical and psychological outcomes. I think forgiveness may be a bit more straightforward when there’s a request for forgiveness. But this is often not the case. And I refer back to Harriet Brown who said that none of the people she interviewed were sorry for their decision to break off relations with their parents. So, in your experience, how does this complicate the forgiveness process?
 
Dr. Coleman: Well, I would probably take issue with Harriet’s perspective. My experience is that adult children who estrange themselves are ambivalent about it, that, I mean, they may land on the idea that it’s in their best interest to do it. But I think the majority feel some sense of guilt, of sadness, of longing for there to be a better relationship with the parent. My own success in working with estranged families shows me that if the parent is able to take responsibility and make amends and empathize, that, that can cause the adult child to feel much more open to that. So, I don’t think Harriet’s right about that. I think she’s right that people who as adult children estrange themselves feel like it was the right and the best thing to do given their options. But the idea that they carry no feelings of ambivalence is not only I think wrong, but also at odds with a lot of the other research that shows that most adult children kind of think long and hard before they estrange themselves. They try a number of different things. So that kind of thing.
 
Marlena: Yeah, thank you for that. I think that’s probably very heartening for listeners who are going through tough times with their adult kids. So, some of the people on the podcast and I suspect some of our listeners would agree with them have said that some acts are simply unforgivable, period. What are your thoughts about that?
 
Dr. Coleman: Yeah. Well, forgiveness is in the eye of the beholder. You know, I’ve worked with people who forgiven parents for incest, for abject neglect, for violent child abuse. And so, the issue is, in whose eyes is it unforgivable? Anybody can empathize with an adult child who couldn’t or didn’t want to forgive a parent who molested them, who physically beat them, who, you know, was neglectful in a very serious way. I mean, I would never tell an adult child that they were being immoral, or wrong, or bad, or selfish to not want to forgive a parent, or to maintain a position of estrangement because contact with a parent is such a powerful reminder of the ways that they were hurt or traumatized by a parent. However, there are plenty of…I mean, you know, we all hear parents in the news whose children were murdered, and they forgive the murderer. It’s really in the eyes of the person who’s going to do the forgiving about whether it’s sort of worth it to them.
 
But the part that I want to bring to the table, the argument that I want to bring to the table that I don’t think is very well developed in our culture is that, you know, I mean, it’s sort of a trope that parents do the best that they can. But literally parents do the best that they can, including those parents who are who are terrible, terrible parents. I mean, we’re all products of our own childhoods, our own past, our own traumas, our own genetics, our own class, our own good luck, and bad luck. And so, I think that there is a moral argument to be made to work towards a position of forgiveness for those who hurt us the most. But I would never lecture anybody about that. I would never say, “Oh, you’re being immoral not to do it.” I just think that we don’t have, you know, enough in our kind of culture which is very, I would argue more punitive, and right and wrong idea and people get what they deserve. But there’s not enough of a narrative that even parents who were terrible parents, that if they can’t be forgiven by their children, they should be forgiven by the rest of us.
 
Marlena: I just have to quote a line from your book that I absolutely love that refers to what you’re just now talking about. And I quote, “The pain carried from our childhoods often creates loose ends that snag on the rough edges of our children’s needs or temperaments.” That is just the best line. So Josh, Phil Cousineau is another guest on this podcast. And he argues that all forgiveness is really self forgiveness. Do you agree with this?
 
Dr. Coleman: I hadn’t heard of put like that but I like it, because I think part of what we’re doing when we’re not forgiving is protecting ourselves. And if you’re protecting yourself…so, you know, you can make the argument that you’re doing it from a position of empowerment. But I would also argue that you’re, and I can make that argument but I would also argue that you’re doing it from a position of victimization, you’re still holding on to the idea that that person can really still hurt you. And we know from all the research on PTSD and phobias, and a whole host of other kinds of traumas that it’s really exposing ourselves to the things that we’re the most afraid of or feel the most frightened of, that really exposing ourselves to those people or those kinds of situations that can lead us to be the most resilient. And the more we kind of hold ourselves up and build barriers and walls and feel afraid of those people who hurt us, the more we’re kind of adopting a position of victimization.
 
Now, that isn’t to say that people…You know, plenty of people are genuinely victimized by their parents so I want to be clear that I’m not saying that somehow they’re being weak or just being a victim to not want to have a relationship with anybody who’s been hurtful to them. I would never counsel somebody to do that. But I do think that we, in our culture make too…We’re too encouraging and too laudatory of the idea that, “Well, you just cut that person off and, you know, that’ll show how strong you are.” Well, not necessarily. I mean, I think to Cousineau’s point, part of what we’re defending against is our own feeling that maybe that person was right to abuse us, maybe we really did deserve to be hurt and so we have to keep them at a distance to keep that reality at a distance. So, I think to his point, the more that we can kind of forgive those who have hurt us it actually can create more resilience in us, paradoxically.
 
Marlena: Yeah. On a similar note, you write a lot about the need for self compassion. How can parents who struggle with all the guilt and shame come to a place really of self-forgiveness and self-compassion?
 
Dr. Coleman: Yeah. Well, I think that part of it is really reckoning with your own mistakes and accepting them. You know, in my work, I talk a lot about the importance of writing an amends letter to your child where you really in a very unvarnished way apologize for the things that were hurtful to them. And if you have a very different view of of it, so it’s getting back to Halsam’s concept of the concept of creep, that your child’s considering something abusive that you’ve done, you’re still better off saying that, “It’s clear that I had blind spots and how that impacted you. I wasn’t aware of it at the time that, that was so hurtful to you or felt abusive but I’m really sorry.” And the amends letter is written as an act of reconciliation but it actually is a powerful form of self-healing because the more that we can accept our own flaws and feel okay with them not like, “Oh, that wasn’t so bad,” I mean, if it wasn’t so bad you should absolutely tell yourself, it wasn’t so bad. But some of the things that we do as parents were bad and we should be strong enough and mature enough to call a spade a spade and say, “Yeah. I could see where that was hurtful to you. That was messed up on my part. I wish I could have done better. That’s one of my character flaws that I was whatever, so impatient or self-centered or preoccupied or angry or whatever it is.”
 
[crosstalk 00:24:08]
 
Marlena: Yeah, you draw an important distinction between self compassion and self pity. Can you say a bit about that?
 
Dr. Coleman: Well, self-compassion is really…Self-pity is sort of not really taking responsibility. And I don’t think you can really feel self-compassion until you…It’s kind of what we were talking about, about forgiveness, you actually have to face your own and take responsibility for the ways that you did hurt your child, or at least acknowledge the ways that they feel that you hurt them and accept that that’s a possibility. This goes to the concept of separate realities. We can as parents feel like we did a great job raising our children and our children can credibly feel like we missed something important that they really wish that we had done differently. And it’s very useful to not get into the rightness or the wrongness of it, but just to sort of seek to understand because that’s the space where potential reconciliation is going to occur.
 
So, if you’re just pitying yourself and saying, “Well, I wasn’t so bad,” or, “I was a great parent, you’re not acknowledging all the good things that I did,” there’s a kind of a brittleness in that. And there’s an odd resilience that comes from…paradoxical resilience, that comes from just frankly acknowledging the ways that you screwed up as a parent or the ways that you were hurtful or selfish, or whatever. Because the more that you can accept it is, this goes to the notion that Marsha Linehan, the Dialectical Behavior Therapy founder talks a lot about the importance of radical acceptance, just sort of accepting it for all of its, you know, thorny aspects and just kind of saying, “Yes, the reality is that I have these character flaws and I’m just going to accept them.” It isn’t like, accept them like they’re not so bad. Kind of go, “Yeah, they were hurtful to you. I regret that.”
 
Marlena: Yeah. Yeah. We’ve talked about forgiveness. And forgiving, of course, doesn’t mean that you’ll reconcile with that person. What’s the difference between forgiveness and reconciliation in the context of family estrangement?
 
Dr. Coleman: Well, I assume the adult child would be the, probably, the object of that question. So, I think an adult child could reasonably forgive a parent and still not want to reconcile with them. They could feel like, you know, I accept my parent for who they are, I accept that they did the best that they could, that the things that were deeply hurtful to me didn’t come from, you know, some sadistic desire in them just to have me suffer but came from some kind of unregulated aspect of themselves that, you know, tended from their own genetics or other kinds of things. But I still don’t want to have a relationship with them. It’s still too much of a reminder either of how hurt I felt or just simply that the values…you know that many estrangements happen as a result of differences in values. So, you know, where political values or the parent can’t accept the adult child’s sexuality or gender identity, or they’re just temperamentally so different. So, there are those kinds of situations as well.
 
Marlena: Yeah, to go back to something Phil Cousineau said, it’s not exactly a quote but it’s more or less what he said. He says, “When we miss the chance for real reconciliation, we miss the chance to heal.” Do you believe that’s true?
 
Dr. Coleman: I do, and that’s the kind of society that I would like to live in where, you know, I think we’ve become so preoccupied with happiness and individuality that we’ve lost sight of the importance of connection. And, you know, I often think about my own parents who, I mean, I was blessed with having, you know, reasonable parents that I was close to and when they moved out to the Bay Area to go to a assisted living place…I remember sometimes on the weekend I would dread going out there. I would just feel like there were so many other things I want to do then go visit them but then I would visit them and feel, you know, this sense of connection that I wouldn’t have felt if I had just pursued whatever individual, you know, fun thing that I wanted to do. And I think we’ve sort of lost sight of the fact that doing the most fun pleasurable in the moment activity may not be as meaningful in the long run as sometimes just doing the right thing which may mean being more forgiving or connecting with family members where it’s more important to them than it is to us, or just participating in a family, being part of a larger group, being a part of something that’s larger than you. So, yes.
 
Marlena: Yeah, I think what you’re referring back to is again, the shift to individualism in our culture.
 
Dr. Coleman: Yeah.
 
Marlena: Yeah. So, this podcast season about forgiveness and reconciliation was motivated in part by my new book “Love is Complicated.” It traces my own journey toward reconciliation with my father and his Mennonite Church. He was abusive and I was rebellious. And you actually describe us perfectly when you write, “Aggressive and defiant kids are damn hard to parent especially when matched with a parent who’s not well-equipped.” But here’s the thing, my father and I never sat down to talk about how much we hurt each other. Our journey toward reconciliation was more organic and borne out of a very gradual realization that we were both very imperfect, even broken, and in need of forgiveness.
 
So Josh, here’s my question. Does it always need to be hashed out? What are the conditions under which forgiveness and reconciliation can emerge organically with a lot of explicit verbalizing and talking about it?
 
Dr. Coleman: That was a great question. No, it doesn’t always need to be hashed out and frankly, a lot of the adult children that do reconcile with their parents… I mean, statistically I don’t know. It’s probably not the majority. I think the majority who reconciled do so because their parent has reached out and made amends. But not an insignificant number reconcile and don’t want to talk about it for a variety of reasons, either because, you know, they don’t know necessary want to be burdened by how hurt the parent was or that kind of thing. They may not trust the parent to be able to get in and out of the conversation without hurting them. They may not fully understand the reason that they estranged themselves. They may be embarrassed if they were estranged as a result of kind of complying with the person that they’re married to which is a not infrequent cause of estrangement, you know, when a son-in-law or daughter-in-law causes the estrangement. So, no, I don’t think that everything has to be hashed out. I think that things can happen organically.
 
But to your question, what would be the conditions that would cause that to happen? I would think, you know, a certain amount of growth on both people’s part, probably an ability on one or both people’s part to stop doing the things that are particularly provocative to to the other. But sometimes it happens because one of the people just decides that it’s just worth it to them to have that person in their life despite all of their flaws. And so, they’re just kind of willing to put up with it which is kind of the model of most cultures, you know, which is that… I mean, in our culture, we’re, you know, very preoccupied with how other people make us feel in particularly family members. And in other cultures they sort of metabolize conflict differently. They don’t sort of feel… They’re not paying as close attention. You know, people hurt their feelings or make them feel better, they criticize them. And so I think that those kind of issues are not nearly as much in the foreground as they are here. So, I would say, but those would be kind of the conditions.
 
Marlena: I’d like to talk a bit about narcissism, and I think that Alex’s concept creep may be relevant here, but I’m going to let you tell us that. People with a narcissistic personality disorder have inflated sense of their importance, sort of a lack of empathy for others, and as I understand it, it affects about 1% of us, more often men than women and typically younger as opposed to older. And yet, another guest on this season’s podcast says that the vast majority of mental health related estrangements centered around a family member, usually a mother, who’s considered a narcissist, and she conjectures that there may be more narcissists out there than the medical community believes there are. So, Josh, based on your experience as a clinician, what are your thoughts about this?
 
Dr. Coleman: I’m curious who that guest was. Can I ask?
 
Marlena: It’s the same person that I talked about earlier, Harriet Brown.
 
Dr. Coleman: Once again, I disagree with Harriet. So, here’s my theory about this. First of all, so many of the mothers that I work with are accused of as being narcissist who in fact aren’t narcissist. What I think has happened is that because parents thing has become so much more intensive, so much parents are particularly moms are much more guilt ridden, they’re much more anxious, understandably so. It’s much harder to raise a kid now. The studies show that parents today for the past few decades say that it’s much harder to raise a child than it used to be. It’s much harder to get them to the narrow bottleneck of, you know, potential colleges, into a potential career, the world that they inherit is much more uncertain. A study by international economists found that in those cultures where there’s high rates of social inequality, so for example, in the US and in China, parents are much more likely to helicopter parent. And so what that means is that the family home has become more much more heated up, much more intensified. And so my theory about this idea that there’s this wellspring of narcissistic mothers is really that…
 
Marlena: I’m sorry, that’s quite a phrase.
 
Dr. Coleman: … is really that there’s this wellspring of anxious mothers who are terrified that their kids are not going to be able to make it. And most of them are genuinely loving, dedicated mothers who, you know, from the child’s perspective…you know, I think a certain percentage of estrangements happen because the adult child feels like the parent is too involved, too intrusive, too worried, wants too much satisfaction from the relationship. You know, I was talking earlier about the fact that today’s parents want to be best friends with their children, but not all children want to be best friends with their kids. So, calling your parent a narcissist is a way to kind of pathologize that parents love of them, need of them, etc because you don’t feel like you can just say, they want more from me than I want. And unfortunately my field is all too willing to jump into the fray and, you know, label all kinds of things as pathological that I would never consider pathological. So, I really think that that’s a wrongheaded idea that there’s this big, you know, epidemic of narcissistic parents and that’s the cause of estrangement. That’s completely wrong.
 
Marlena: Yeah, I know one of your webinar series recently has been about narcissism. And I appreciate your thoughts about that. Josh, you write in very compassionate ways about the pain parents feel. But at the same time you’re very clear and very straightforward that it’s primarily the parents’ responsibility to take the lead in moving toward reconciliation with their adult children. I think your words are, “The buck stops with you, the parents.”
 
Dr. Coleman: Yeah.
 
Marlena: Why isn’t it equally everyone’s responsibility to build bridges in broken family relationships especially when everyone’s an adult?
 
Dr. Coleman: Well, I wish that it were but it’s not for two reasons. One, is that adult children just aren’t as invested in their parents’ happiness, at least in our culture. They are in other cultures, particularly Asian societies. But in the U.S. adult children just aren’t as invested in part because of the ways that families have shifted. So, it’s in the same way that an estranged adult child can feel like it’s estrangement is a path of growth and the parent feels, and it’s only a path of misery, for that reason the adult child isn’t going to be nearly as motivated to reconcile as the parent is. But I say also I think that the buck stops with a parent because, you know, the parent is the one who brought the child into life. We are always parents until we die. In fact, we’re parents after we die because we continue to have an influence on our children.
 
Marlena: Yeah.
 
Dr. Coleman: So, I do think that being, you know, we don’t have nearly enough credit for the elderly, our elders or, you know, older people in our culture and I wish that we did. I do think it’s very much of a one way street, you know, that the older people are supposed to give and expect basically nothing in return and I think that’s incredibly wrongheaded. But at the same time I do feel like it is on parents…incumbent on parents to take the high road and to acknowledge that you are kind of a parent forever and that does make it incumbent on you to show leadership around and that kind of thing.
 
Marlena: Yeah. You recommend four basic steps in moving toward healing broken relations in a family and it’s captured in the acronym HEAL. Would you summarize these for our listeners?
 
Dr. Coleman: You know what you’re going to have to do it, because I haven’t read my book in a long time, I’m sorry.
 
Marlena: All right, the first one is hope and then educate and affirm. And the last one is long term commitment to do whatever is needed. Again, to make amends, to forgive. So, we’ll just direct our listeners to your book and they will get it from there. But I’d like to touch on one of those steps. And that’s hope. Josh, you write that sometimes we have to accept that hope is a bad idea.
 
Dr. Coleman: Right.
 
Marlena: Can you provide some guidance as to when it’s wise to let go of hope?
 
Dr. Coleman: Yeah, because really, if you’re an estranged parent the two strongest things you can do are practice radical acceptance, and the other is to practice self-compassion. So, if people have read my book, they know that part of my interest in this field came from my daughter, cutting off contact with me for a couple years when she was in her early 20s. It was easily the most painful, awful thing that I ever went through. And so, the steps that I took to reconcile with her were part of what formed the basis of the research that I did for when parents hurt. And it’s also really been a central part of my identity in working with parents for the past decade or so. And by the way, I have a new book coming out in the fall called “The Rules of Estrangement, Why Adult Children Cut Ties and How to Heal the Conflict.” So, that will be coming out…
 
Marlena: Wonderful. That was going to be my last question for you is, what’s next? Excellent.
 
Dr. Coleman: But so, with my own daughter, there was a period of time, getting back to the topic of radical acceptance, where I was feeling miserable as I was want to do during that time. And at some point I found myself saying, “Hey, guess what, you may never see your kid again. Last time you saw her that may be the last time. If she as a kid, you may never see the kid. Deal with it.” And it wasn’t a particularly harsh voice. It was more just like, “This is reality, you know. You better kind of make peace with it.” And it was oddly reassuring. And even though I didn’t know that there was a name for it that is what radical acceptance is. Radical acceptance is saying, “It is what it is.” If you’ve done all the things that I recommend parents do, like right amends, take responsibility, show a certain degree of, you know, commitment to reconciling for a period of time, a couple of years or so, unless your child is a minor. If your child’s a minor you should keep trying until they’re into adulthood. But if you’ve done all those things and nothing has worked, then you’re better off just accepting that it is what it is, and there may not be anything else that you can do. Because the more that we white knuckle it in life the more we suffer. There’s a wonderful quote by Marsha Linehan, again, the founder of Dialectical Behavior Therapy, where she says, “The path out of hell is through misery. And the more that we fight our misery, the more that we stay in hell.” And what she means by that is… Isn’t that a great quote?
 
Marlena: That’s wonderful.
 
Dr. Coleman: I know. So, the more that we kind of resist where we are right now, the more that we actually intensify our suffering. And that’s why mindfulness is also a very powerful form of healing from an estrangement. Because with mindfulness what we’re doing is we’re constantly looking what we’re thinking and feeling, accepting it, moving our mind back into the present which is where whatever joy or resilience [inaudible 00:43:09] to feel and then watch whatever feeling comes up. And then whatever thoughts surface, catching ourselves, moving back into the present. That’s enormously important. And so is self-compassion because you just don’t deserve to poison yourself for the rest of your life and live a life of misery because your child doesn’t want to be in a relationship with you. You still have to focus on the parts of your life that are pleasurable, and meaningful, and valuable, and not let it just to be a complete blight on your life. There’s this great Buddhist concept called Upekha which is UP-E-K-K-A or maybe K-K-H-A. Maybe you know. But it’s the idea…
 
Marlena: I don’t know how it’s spelled but I do know the concept.
 
Dr. Coleman: The term? Yeah, I just learned it recently. But it’s the idea of a kind of serenity in the midst of incredible suffering. So, it’s the idea that you can both have something that’s enormously painful and conflictual in your life and still have a life that is meaningful. So, to get back to your question about what’s problematic about hope, well, hope is problematic if it’s causing you to white knuckle your life, to kind of feel like, “I’m really hoping that, you know, my kid reconciles with me otherwise I can’t have a meaningful life.” That’s wrong-headed. It’s okay to have one foot in hope but you need to have the other foot clearly planted in radical acceptance.
 
Marlena: Yeah, I like that. And it seems to me that hope is also wrongheaded when we think we have some sort of power to influence our adult children to come around.
 
Dr. Coleman: Right. Exactly.
 
Marlena: So, you’ve talked about the need to sometimes be affectionately detached. And here you again, you haven’t read your book for a while, but I’m going to quote a line that I absolutely love, “Detached enough to prevent every pore of your skin from being open to the acid rain that’s about to fall on you.” Would you say more about what this might look like, being affectionately detached?
 
Dr. Coleman: It’s funny. Yeah, well, affectionately detached means that you’re really, it’s part of radical acceptance. That you’re accepting that your child is who they are and that either they don’t feel about you the way that you wish they did, or they’re not in relationship with you in the way that you wish that they were. So, you’re detached enough from that that you’re not kind of just clinging to them with every thread of your being so that whatever they say or, you know, feel or express is just completely toxic and hurtful and monumental to you. But the affectionate part is that you’re not being rejecting at the same time. You’re kind of taking a position of being 10,000 feet above, you’re the adult in the room, and I’m not suggesting that an adult child who cuts himself off from a parent is not being an adult. I’m just saying that you’re modeling and showing that you can still be resilient and still be in relationship to your child and open to have a relationship with them. But that you’re going to also be in a mode where you’re more self-protective, you’re more kind of wrapped in bubble wrap emotionally so that every little thing that your adult child says or does doesn’t completely wound you.
 
Marlena: “It prevents every pore of your skin from being open to the acid rain.” Josh, how common is it to feel like the relationship is on the mend and then it all blows up again, and that it’s a very, very bumpy process?
 
Dr. Coleman: Yeah, I think it’s pretty common. I mean, I have a webinar called “My Estranged Child is Back. Now What?” Because so many parents talk about the early reconciliation period as being very confusing, of them feeling very anxious, feeling like they’re walking on eggshells. And what I always tell the parents is, “Yeah, rightfully so. You’ve been traumatized by your adult child. I mean, even if they argue that you traumatize them they traumatized you by cutting you off. So, if you’re in an early phase of reconciliation, you’re right to be somewhat hyper vigilant and cautious.” And what I typically recommend to parents is that they don’t get ahead of their adult child. If the adult child doesn’t really want to talk about the estrangement as you referenced earlier then don’t. Then follow their lead. If you feel like there are things that they’re still bugged about you can say, “Just want to let you know, I’m completely open to talking about either the cause of the estrangement or if there or if there are other things that I’m doing or do that bug you, I’m more than happy to have that conversation with you. Perhaps I haven’t done a good job in the past of showing you that I can, you know, hear your complaints, and Ithink, you know, certain amount of complaints are healthy for any relationship, etc.” Because I think, you know, some adult children would never estrange a parent no matter what and some adult children would. So, we have to assume that a kid who would do it once is more likely to do it than a kid who would never do it. So, a certain degree of cautiousness is reasonable for a parent.
 
Marlena: Yeah. Josh, if there were one last thing you’d like our listeners to hear, what would that be?
 
Dr. Coleman: You know, I think the thing that I want parents to have the most is to work on self-compassion and self-forgiveness. And I think it’s such a hard task for a parent who’s being cut off by their adult child, particularly mothers. I think the culture of motherhood is that you have to keep trying no matter what and part of self-blame is a form of…excuse me, can feel like a form of trying. And that, you know, it’s really critical to work on self-forgiveness and self-compassion and not to feel like if at some point you accept the what is that your kid isn’t for the time being going to be in relationship with you that accepting that doesn’t mean you’re being a bad parent. It just means that you’re accepting reality and accepting reality is a good thing. It’s not a bad thing. You’re not neglecting your child. You’re not taking the position that in stopping trying that, you know, you’re neglecting your child. And sometimes stopping trying what I call letting the line go cold completely can be useful because A, your kid may respect you more for it. B, they may feel like you’re respecting their wishes more. C, it may cause them to miss you more. D, it may create a dynamic or a new dynamic for the relationship to grow from. And lastly, you’re not sort of triggering them by reaching out to them. So I think that those are really the most important things I would want to end on.
 
Marlena: This has been so meaningful and we’re out of time. Josh, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with me.
 
Dr. Coleman: Marlena, thank you. And can I just add that I do, I don’t know if you mentioned it, but I also do weekly webinars for estranged parents in addition to my practice. So, those tend to be helpful for the, and a free Q&A on Mondays. All that is on my website.
 
Marlena: Yes. Excellent. And we will make sure that that is all on the show notes.
 
Dr. Coleman: Okay, thank you, Marlena. It was a great talk.
 
Marlena: Thank you. I’ve been speaking with Dr. Joshua Coleman, author of “When Parents Hurt” among other books including his latest that will soon be coming out, “The Rules of Estrangement.” You’ll find details on the show notes about how to purchase all of these books, as well as my new book “Nothing Bad Between Us.” I’ll post also a link to my website. 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.