These days, you hear more and more about parents and adult children being estranged from each other. Some individuals have even decided to go “no contact” with their parents; they don’t want anything to do with their mom and/or dad at all.
To understand what’s behind this phenomenon, today I talk to Joshua Coleman, a psychologist who’s spent 40 years counseling families and the author of Rules of Estrangement: Why Adult Children Cut Ties and How to Heal the Conflict. Joshua
goes beyond the typical one-sided narratives around parent-child estrangement that tell the story of parents who got what they deserved or overly entitled adult children who wrongly blame their parents, to unpack the larger cultural context for why these tensions have arisen. We discuss how society has moved from upholding a honor-thy-father-and-mother sense of obligation to prioritizing individuality and optionality, and why despite the fact that we’re more child-focused and psychologically aware than ever, familial estrangements are on the rise. We get into the common reasons for estrangement, the role that expanding ideas of what constitutes abuse and trauma and an adult child’s therapist can play in it, and how much parents can really be blamed for how their kids turn out. And we get into what parents who are estranged from their children can do to reconcile with them. Even if you’re not personally estranged from a family member, the discussion of the underlying dynamics influencing all our modern relationships is a fascinating one.
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Read the Transcript
Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness Podcast. These days, you hear more and more about parents and adult children being estranged from each other. Some individuals have even decided to go no contact with their parents. They don’t want anything to do with their mom and/or dad at all. To understand what’s behind this phenomenon today I talked to Joshua Coleman, a psychologist who spent 40 years counseling families, and the author of Rules of Estrangement: Why Adult Children Cut Ties and How to Heal the Conflict.
Joshua goes beyond the typical one-sided narratives around parent-child estrangement that tell the story of parents you’ve got what they deserve, or overly entitled adult children who randomly we blame their parents, to impact the larger cultural context for why these tensions have arisen. We discuss how society is moved from upholding an honor thy father and mother sense of obligation to prioritizing individuality and optionality, and why despite the fact we’re more child-focused and psychologically aware than ever, familial estrangements are on the rise. We get into the common reasons for estrangement, the role that expanding ideas of what constant abuse and trauma and adult child’s therapist can play in it, and how much parents can really be blamed for how their kids turn out. And we get into what parents who are estranged from their children can do to reconcile with them. Even if you’re not personally estranged from a family member, the discussion of the underlying dynamics influencing all our modern relationships is a fascinating one. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/estrangement.
Alright, Dr. Joshua Coleman, welcome to the show.
Dr. Joshua Coleman: Thanks for having me.
Brett McKay: So, you are a psychologist who specializes in working with parents and adult children who have become estranged from each other, and you were in a book about that called the Rules of Estrangement. We’ll start with the definitions first. What is parent-child estrangement?
Dr. Joshua Coleman: People define it in different ways. The way that I think about it is when there’s been a complete or near complete cut-off between the two. So, there’s little to no contact, maybe there’s the occasional birthday greeting, or Mother’s or Father’s Day greeting, but otherwise there is essentially no relationship.
Brett McKay: Does estrangement have to be explicit, like does either the parent or the child have to say, “I’m done with you. I don’t want anything to do with you,” or can it just be like a silent distancing?
Dr. Joshua Coleman: Yeah. Sometimes it works that way. I’ve had a lot of parents in my practice where all of a sudden the adult child isn’t responding to phone, text, emails, now they’re cut off from social media, sometimes they move and don’t tell the parent. So. That’s probably not the majority of cases, but those cases certainly exist.
Brett McKay: They ghost their parents, is what they’re doing.
Dr. Joshua Coleman: Exactly. They ghost the parent, that’s right.
Brett McKay: It seems like more and more adult children are becoming estranged from their parents. It seems like every other week I see an article about this somewhere or something on social media about it. Is this a new phenomenon or is the media just covering it more so we just hear about it more, ’cause you see it on the news or your Instagram feed?
Dr. Joshua Coleman: Yeah, I think the extent of it is new. I think we have to assume that there’s always been strained, distant, or even non-existent relationships between parents and adult children, but I don’t think it’s nearly the numbers that we’re seeing today. A recent study by Rin Reczek in Ohio state and her colleagues found that some 26% of fathers are estranged from an adult child. That same study found that 6% of mothers, but other studies show between 10% and 15% of mothers. I don’t think that those figures have always been the case. One of the problems from a research perspective is that we didn’t really… We don’t have a beginning, a start date to look at estranged with the way that we do other things, say, divorce, for example. But if we just use divorce, for example, as a start date, it’s clear that divorce is a really common pathway to estrangement. In my survey of 1,600 estranged parents that I conducted through the University of Wisconsin Survey Center, we found that 70% of parents who were estranged were divorced from the other biological parent and didn’t become estranged until after the divorce.
So we know that if we just use divorce as a starting point, I would assume that there weren’t nearly the numbers of estrangement that there were once we started making divorce a more common part of our culture. Similarly, if you look at non-marital childbirth in the 1960s, only 5% of children were born outside of marriage. Today, it’s more like 40%, and those families are very high risk for estrangement, particularly for fathers. So just using those as data points, I think those are significant. But then you add on to it this identitarian moment that we’re at currently, where one’s identity has become much more in the foreground, where the moral framework that kind of animated families for millennia, honor thy mother and thy father, respect thy elders, families forever, really in the past century has given way to this much more personal growth, self-esteem, pursuit of happiness framework, where relationships are much more constituted on what the British sociologist, Anthony Giddens, calls “pure relationships”, meaning that the relationships that are purely constituted on the basis of whether or not the relationship is in line with my ideals for happiness and growth and the like.
And if they’re not, then not only can I cut out a parent or family member, I should do it. In some ways, it’s an act of existential cowardice not to do that. And I think that that’s historically new. Social media is absolutely an amplifier. Rising rates of individualism is an amplifier. So there’s a lot of things that I believe are fanning the flames to this.
Brett McKay: Yeah. The sections in the book where you kind of explore what’s driving the increase in estrangement, that was really interesting because you basically bring to the foreground things that have been happening in the background and how it’s affecting families. And so that shift that you talk about from the framework of honor thy father and thy mother, sort of the idea of filial duty, that doesn’t really exist anymore. It seems like the relationship between parents and children is something different.
Dr. Joshua Coleman: Right. And particularly in Western societies. I think that that is probably not nearly as much the case in, say, South and East Asian countries, and large, probably the majority of areas in the Middle East. Soo I think that it’s mostly a western phenomenon. I don’t know if you’ve read Joseph Hinrich’s excellent book, The WEIRDest People in the World, where we’re is an acronym for a western, educated, industrialized, rich democracies. And one of the things that he found is that in those societies, people are just much more oriented towards their own happiness and identity and personal expression, and much less oriented towards relationships, and that’s just not the case in large parts of the world. So we don’t have good statistics about estrangement rates in other countries, but in my interviews with people in other countries, I find that it’s far less common.
Brett McKay: And it seems like to the expectation of the parent-child relationship, it’s more like a romantic or a friendship relationship where it’s a voluntary thing. Each party has to work for it and it has to fit for both parties.
Dr. Joshua Coleman: Right. And it’s exactly right, that it’s kind of predicated on the same principles as Giddens pure relationship, that if it’s not in line with my ideals for happiness and personal growth and mental health, then not only can I jettison that relationship, but I should do it, and to not do it as an act of self-neglect.
Brett McKay: And one of the points you make throughout the book is that it used to be the children had to earn their parents love and respect, but now it’s the opposite, the parent’s job is to earn their children’s love and respect, and they have to continue to do that throughout their children’s adult lives.
Dr. Joshua Coleman: That’s right. Well, nothing compels an adult child to have a relationship with that parent beyond that adult child’s desire to have that relationship. So if the moral framework has shifted around families away from the parents are sort of owed a certain degree of gratitude and obligation and responsibility and respect, and it’s much more predicated on whether or not the relationship is in line with the adult child’s ideals and standards, that really disempowers the parent in terms of their ability to negotiate the relationship and greatly empowers the adult child. And this is partly a function of smaller family sizes, the role of therapy, that we used to think the difficulties in life would actually make children stronger, but over the 20th century, we began to develop the idea that children are fragile, that they’re vulnerable, that they require a kind of hothouse parenting in order to thrive and succeed.
And in the era of personal rights in the 1960s, children’s rights became very much in the foreground. So the era of children being seen and not heard gave way to children really being the center of family life. And today, I mean, I’m a boomer, and so when I was growing up, my stay-at-home mother spent less time with me than career mothers spend with their children today. So children had moved much more into the front and center of a family life, and that’s really increased their authority to sort of dictate the terms both when they’re young, living in the home, but also when they’re grown.
Brett McKay: Yeah, that’s one of the paradoxes you point out in the book, is that we’re more child-focused and we’re also more psychologically aware than ever, like, everyone’s read the books on how to talk to your kid written by psychologists, they talk to their kids in a very therapeutic way, yet estrangement seem to be rising.
Dr. Joshua Coleman: Yeah. I think it’s similar as to the kind of high stable divorce rates, that we’re still at around 50% divorce rates. And on the one hand, the good news about parental-child relationships is that if you look at some of the large surveys, probably the majority of parents raising adult children or having relationships with adult children would say that they feel closer to them than they believe their parents felt to them at a similar age. So in many ways, this much more intensive, psychologically aware, conscientious form of parenting, I think has, in many ways, really increased the quality of relationships between parents and adult children. In the same way, that moral egalitarian psychologically intensive marriages and communication have made for better marriages. But both sides, both marriage and parent-adult child relationships, are based upon this much more kind of unstable quality which is that if it doesn’t feel good, you can leave, and not only can you leave, but you should leave. So it’s really the culture of both kinds of relationships that are based on, framed much less around the more moral old school ideals around family and much more around this identitarian personal happiness, personal growth, personal expression orientation.
Brett McKay: So it sounds like there’s plus and minuses to the shift.
Dr. Joshua Coleman: There are indeed, yeah. And it isn’t my position that nobody should or can never estranged themselves from a parent or any other destructive family member. I think in the same way that the legalization of divorce laws allowed people, women in particular, to be able to leave abusive marriages, I think that our cultural shift that’s more supportive of estrangement has allowed adult children who maybe in other cultures or at other times would have felt obligated to stay in contact with parents who are really destructive to their self-esteem or happiness, they’re allowed to separate from them. That’s the upside. And the downside is that it’s so easy to do it that in the same way that making divorce so easy to obtain means that a lot of people who probably could have and did in fact work their way through difficult issues when they were married, when they really couldn’t get a divorce or couldn’t easily get a divorce, they figured it out, similarly with adult children, to cut off parents that with more time and patience and effort, they might be able to work something through with a parent that they now can easily discard.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I think a big source of contention between parents and children is that parents and children, particularly older parents, like we are boomers, they’re both in two different worlds, like moral worlds, when it comes to parent-child relationships. Like the older parent might think, “Well, no, it’s old school, you honor thy father and thy mother, and you just gotta come see me even if you don’t want to, because that’s what you’re supposed to do.” And then the kid’s like, “No, that’s not how it is,” and then the parent gets upset, and that’s the source of tension.
Dr. Joshua Coleman: No, that’s exactly right. And so much of my work is helping… ‘Cause it’s typically the parent that reaches out to me, ’cause it’s typically the parent is the one who’s been estranged. Parents don’t typically estranged their children, some do for religious reasons, or they disapprove of their child’s gender identity or sexuality or who they married, but that’s the vast minority. Typically, if an estrangement happens, it’s because the adult child has initiated it. And a lot of my work is helping parents kind of navigate the way that guilt no longer works, that ship has sailed, the way that you can sort of guilt trip your child into contact or making them…
Reminding them of all the things that you’ve done for them. And the other part and parcel of that, I know you had Nick Haslam on your show and he wrote, you know, I think, one of the most important articles to explain this moment or the notion of concept creep. And that is the idea of that in the past three decades… Well, he wrote the article, I think in 2016, but there’s been this enormous expansion over what we consider to be harmful, abusive, traumatizing, neglectful behavior. So younger generations have been kind of steeped in this framework, and whether it’s with their own therapist, or self-help, or podcasts, or Instagram influencers, TikTok influencers, ideas about who’s a borderline parent, who’s a narcissist, who’s a gaslighter, etcetera, why you should cut off your parent, the value in doing that…
Whereas older generations, Gen X and boomers, for example, were raised with a much more conservative view of what constitutes harmful, abusive, traumatizing, neglectful behavior. So what often happens is that younger generations are coming to their parents after as a result of being in therapy or some other influence and saying, “Well, you emotionally abused me,” or, “You neglected me,” or, “This was emotional incest,” or any of the other terms that are so popular. And parent’s response is often like, “What are you talking about? That wasn’t abuse, I would have killed to have a childhood like yours. That wasn’t abusive.” And then of course, as you can imagine, then they’re off to the races, then the adult child feels really misunderstood, they feel like they’ve got evidence based on their culture of information, whereas the parent feels completely disrespected and hurt and misunderstood based on their ideals of what good parenting looks like. So a lot of my work is often helping parents to see how much the ground has changed and really learning how to use the language that their children are using, so it’s not so incomprehensible to them.
Brett McKay: As I was reading through that section about the shift between duty-bound to more intentional relationships between parents and children, it forced me to reflect like, what kind of relationship I wanna have with my kids. And I think I’m sort of like the new school, like, I don’t feel like my kids owe me anything, they didn’t ask to be born. Even though I’ve invested a lot of time and energy and money into them, they’ve given me meaning, and joy, and purpose, so it seems like neither of us owe each other anything, we both… Maybe both owe each other equally. And when I think about my kids getting older, and leaving the house, I want them to come back because they want to, and not just out of obligation. ‘Cause I just feel like it wouldn’t feel good if it was begrudging and they were just visiting me because they felt like they had to.
Dr. Joshua Coleman: Well, you might not feel that way if that was the only way you could ever see a child or grandchildren again.
Brett McKay: Yeah.
Dr. Joshua Coleman: I mean, the people in my practice, the parents and grandparents in my practice are miserable. I did a retreat for estranged parents last year. There was 15 people in the room, and one of the mothers was talking about feeling suicidal, and I said, “By show of hands, if anybody else felt suicidal as a result of their estrangement,” and every single person raised their hands. Now, those were mostly mothers, I think dads tend to be better at compartmentalizing, but the amount of misery that these parents and grandparents are feeling, to me, I don’t think it’s the worst thing in the world for people to show up out of a sense of duty or obligation.
I mean, obviously, we’d all rather our children spend time with us because they love us or wanna spend time with us or they think that we’re so great, but I think if I have the choice between seeing my kids multiple times a year and they were kind of… I mean, assuming that they weren’t just miserable, acting miserably towards me while I was here, but if I felt like the only way I could get them to come would be out of some sense of duty and obligation, but they could have a reasonable time, they weren’t assholes about it, you know, [0:17:19.7] ____ then I would take that deal because it would be better than the absolute of [0:17:24.0] ____ of never seeing them again, which is the fate that’s facing so many parents and grandparents today. So I actually do think that adult children owe their parents something. They wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the parent, neither would they have children if there’s grandchildren involved.
Now, does that mean that they have to accept abusive behavior. No. Does that mean they have to be as available to the parent as that parent wants them to be, or that the parent can just communicate as crappily as they want to and be difficult or demanding or whatever? Absolutely not. The parent still has to do their part, they have to show up in this 21st century way. They still have to be somewhat conscientious about how they impact of their child, they have to be open to getting feedback about the way that their parenting may have impact on their child. So I think both sides owe, at the very least, they owe each other due diligence. So an adult child owes the parent the opportunity to work through their issues and to give them the time to do that, to do family therapy, to give them a pathway towards doing that, to see that the parent really did do the best they could raising their child as a result of their own genetics or socio-economic class, or their uncharted traumas or experiences, or who they were married to, and then a certain degree of compassion should be brought to bear from both sides. At the same time, parents have to do a lot of work towards taking responsibility and showing empathy towards their children for how they impacted them. They can’t just say, “Hey, I did the best that I could. Too bad.” The parents still has to really be self-reflective and take responsibility, and meet this moment where they do have to be much more psychological.
Brett McKay: In your work, what are the most common issues that cause parent child estrangement?
Dr. Joshua Coleman: Sure. I mean, if you look at the adult child’s perspective, what they will say is, emotional abuse is probably the biggest complaint, values, differences, sometimes physical abuse. And that is certainly one pathway. And I do see that in my practice, but it isn’t the only pathway. Other pathways are divorce, as I mentioned earlier. That’s probably the single most common pathway to estrangement, particularly for fathers. Divorce can cause one parent to alienate the other parent with a child. It may bring in new people that the child has to compete with for emotional or material resources. It could cause the child to not like the new half siblings or step siblings. In a highly individualistic culture like ours, it could cause the child, young or old to see the parents more as individuals with their own strengths and weaknesses unless there’s a family unit that they’re a part of, that’s huge.
When the adult child marries, that can be a trigger point. If the person that the adult child marries doesn’t like the parent or parents and says, “Choose them or me, you can’t have both.” That’s oddly not that uncommon. Mental illness on the part of the parent or addictive issues on the part of the parent, certainly, but also mental illness or addictive issues on the part of the adult child. Therapy, bad therapy or therapists who assume that every symptom that an adult child has comes from bad parenting and they support or encourage an estrangement. And finally, because parents have been investing much more in the past four decades or so, in particular, some adult children don’t know any other way to feel separate from the parent than to cut them off. In some ways, they’ve gotten too much of a good thing.
So, I mean, since I’m a boomer, I mean parents in my parents’ generation probably erred more on the side of being sort of neglectful in a certain way, dads in particular. But parents of my generation and every generation since, I think, if they erred on either side, it was towards being more intrusive, more enmeshed with their children. People have given up on their social, you know, my mother used to play Mahjong with the girls every week, and my dad was at the Y playing squash all weekend or golfing, and none of them worried about us feeling neglected. And that has largely changed, where children have really become front and center and people have given up on time with other people or other interests.
And again, it’s largely a net, again, but it also means that some kids just get too much of the parent, particularly in the age of cell phone use, where there’s kind of no escape. I think a certain percentage of estranges would never happen if the kid could just have had the experience that so many of us had where we move away and maybe we write our a parents two weeks later, maybe we call them collect once in a while. Whereas for my generation of parents and every generation since, you could just reach your child from any point in the world. And I think that can just be somewhat intrusive for some kids.
Brett McKay: Yeah. This kid feels suffocated, and in order to create some boundaries, they’re just like, I gotta cut you off completely.
Dr. Joshua Coleman: Yeah, exactly. That’s true. I mean, boundaries is the single most common word I see in every letter from an estranged child. “You need to respect my boundaries.”
Brett McKay: Yeah. Going back to that idea of abuse, you say abuse, whether it’s physical abuse or emotional abuse, that’s a legitimate reason to cut off your parents. But as you mentioned with Nick Haslam’s work, what constitutes abuse has changed, like, it’s expanded. So, things maybe 30 years ago wouldn’t have been considered abuse, now it’s considered abuse and a reason for cutoff.
Dr. Joshua Coleman: Yeah. Abuse and trauma. I mean, trauma I think is grossly misused and misunderstood. I mean, the research on trauma by people like, George Bonanno at Columbia or Joel Paris at University of Toronto shows that traumatic experience doesn’t necessarily have the lifelong implications and deformation that we’re sort of made to feel like it has. Not to make light of it, but 25% of people may have lifelong issues as a result of traumatic experiences, but 75% won’t. And I think our culture does a poor job distinguishing between distress and trauma or conflict and abuse. And I think all of those get kind of blended together, which on the one hand I wouldn’t care, except that so many young adults are sort of using that as a reason to estrange the parent saying, “Well, you traumatized me when I was young, and therefore I don’t owe you a relationship.”
And so, the good news again about that is that it sort of provides people with a way to talk about painful experiences and have a social legitimacy in talking about them, that they might not have had in other generations. But the bad news is that yes, it has been so grossly expanded that things that shouldn’t really fall under that rubric get called that. And then with the wrong therapist or the wrong set of information, that person is on the way to cutting off a parent who was very good. I mean, the sociologist Eva Illouz says that today our lives are plotted backwards. What’s a dysfunctional family? It’s a family where your needs weren’t met. How do you know that your needs weren’t met? By looking at your present condition. And I like that quote because so many young adults are coming into therapy or into adulthood and thinking, “Well, I’ve got depression or anxiety or other serious psychological issues. I need to sort of reverse engineer this and look at my childhood and figure out where the traumas were, so I can understand that.”
And a certain percentage of them likely weren’t traumatized, but another percentage aren’t gonna be. I mean, if we look at the research just on cohort effects, the research of Jean Twenge or Jonathan Haidt, who showed that just the fact that you’re a Gen Z, that you’re born between 1995 and 2012 roughly, means you’re at far greater risk for depression, suicidal ideation, suicide attempts, anxiety. And it’s not ’cause parents have suddenly become worse parents that are traumatizing their kids left and right. It’s because of the cohort, it’s because of what’s happening generationally with cell phones and social media and the like. So, I think that parents are wrongly, aggressively blamed in our culture. I think my field does a lot of harm in that regard and sort of assuming that every adult psychopathology has a problematic, traumatizing parent at its helm.
Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show.
Yeah. That idea that you try to make sense of your life backwards. So if your life is messed up and you kind of, “Okay, I’m gonna go to the past and like figure out what happened. Well, it was the way I was parented.”
Dr. Joshua Coleman: Right.
Brett McKay: I’ve seen this instance in families where one kid, adult kid’s like, “Well, my life is terrible and it’s because the way our parents raised us as kids.”
Dr. Joshua Coleman: Right.
Brett McKay: Then they have a sibling who was raised by the same parents largely the same way, and their life is great. And they feel like, “Well, I thought the way our parents raised us was awesome.” [laughter] So, there’s a lot of subjectivity in how people remember their childhood or how they attribute their state in life now to their parents.
Dr. Joshua Coleman: Yeah. Absolutely. And also what their experience was. I mean, one of my things I say to parents is you have to have embraced the separate reality’s nature of family life, that you could credibly feel like you did a good job raising your child and your child could credibly feel like they wish you had done something different. I mean, even if people are growing up in the same family, they may have very, very different experiences based on birth order, who temperamentally they’re more alike between the parents, what was going on in the home at the age that it happened to them.
So, constitutionally, somebody’s born with an incredibly sensitive temperament, they’re gonna experience parental irritability or maybe lack of availability, even if it’s within normal limits as far more influential and problematic than say a kid who’s born with a much more robust temperament. So, kids who are growing up in the same home may have very different experiences of the parents more based on the kind of temperaments that they’re born with, than the parents being so different in how they respond.
Brett McKay: Yeah. I mean that could, I can see that that, so temperament’s kind of like personality, right?
Dr. Joshua Coleman: Right.
Brett McKay: I mean, I could see the case where a kid’s personality, sort of inborn temperament, kind of rubs the parent the wrong way and like the parent tries to do their best to work with it. But you know, some kids are just annoying, but people don’t wanna say that. And so [laughter], you know the…
Dr. Joshua Coleman: Right. It’s true.
Brett McKay: Yeah. And so the parent, you know, the kid’s annoying and then the parent responds kind of like, “Ah, Jesus, this kid’s annoying.” And then the kid picks up on that. It’s like, “Oh, my dad thinks I’m annoying,” and then becomes estranged as an adult.
Dr. Joshua Coleman: Well, right. And that, it is true. And we look at what researchers called the child to parent effects. It’s like what kind of behaviors induce what from parents? So, we know that, say for example, if a kid has ADD, attention deficit disorder, they’re just harder to parent because they’re harder to organize, they’re more distractible. It’s harder just to keep them on track. So, they may be just much more irritating to raise from the parent’s perspective. And the parent may express more of that irritability and the child may later in life say, “Well, you were always so critical of me growing up.” And the child realistically may not really even be aware of the challenges that they brought temperamentally into the situation. And then they feel that the parent really failed them because they didn’t really provide them with the sort of more ideal kind of parenting that they feel like they needed, wanted or deserved. And then, if a parent responds with, “Well, it’s ’cause you were so difficult then they’re just greenlit to the…
Brett McKay: Oh yeah.
Dr. Joshua Coleman: Towards the path of estrangement. And that’s sort of, is another important aspect of this is that if you grow up and you have severe mental problems, that let’s say that they’re not parentally induced, it’s still tempting for people to blame the parent because it’s such a powerful way of directing the shame away from the self. I mean, it’s a powerful story, right? It’s a very appealing way to feel like, “I could have been different than where I’m at now,” if you’re feeling like you’re not very happy with where you are now. It sort of allows you to preserve a sense of oneself is ideal or, you know, of limitless potential if you were given the right set of circumstances.
So, it’s a way of saying, “Well, if you had parented me differently, my life would be so much better.” And clearly sometimes that’s the case, but it’s not always the case. And that’s also another point of concern for parents who believe and objectively seem like they did a really good job and their child still turned out to have significant psychological issues, either because of genetic vulnerabilities, or socioeconomic class, or random bad luck. I mean, there’s so many different influences of adult outcome that have very little to do with parenting that we as a society, again, are way too focused on parents and not on all these other influences.
Brett McKay: You mentioned therapists can play a role in estrangement. Tell me about that.
Dr. Joshua Coleman: Well, I think in over attributing causality to childhood experiences and assuming that… That’s what worries me about Gen Z, we’re having all these psychological issues getting into therapy, is that if a therapist isn’t more sophisticated about all the various pathways to adult psycho… To depression, anxiety, et cetera, then if there kind of a one note symphony of everything is due to parental childhood traumas and family dysfunction, then that really just increases the likelihood of an estrangement because then they might say, “Well, you feel triggered when you’re around your parent and this is why, because of these experiences maybe be it’d better for you not to be around them, ’cause we don’t want you to be triggered by them.” And so I just think that too many therapists today are too quick to blame parents, and partly, ’cause of what we were saying earlier, that it can feel sort of empowering to the person who otherwise is gonna blame themselves.
If a therapist says, “Well it’s not your fault, it’s your your parents’ fault that you have these issues,” that can be kind of relieving. And I wouldn’t mind if it didn’t end up cutting off parents who, in many cases, are quite workable and wanna do the right thing, and in many ways were very, very dedicated. So, no, I think therapists and many people in my field are doing an enormous disservice to younger adult, or to adults in general to the extent that they’re blaming parents for these issues. It’s not to say that that never occurs. Of course, there are traumatizing parents, absolutely. But not at the levels that they get blamed to be.
Brett McKay: Yeah. And something else you talk about is when an adult child goes to a therapist and maybe they start carping about their parent, like the therapist only hears the kid’s side of the story. They typically, they don’t have the parent’s. So like sometimes a not good therapist, a bad therapist will start diagnosing the not present parents. “Whoa, it sounds like your parent’s a narcissist and you need to stay away from them.” Like, you can’t diagnose someone you haven’t talked to. And so that’s not good.
Dr. Joshua Coleman: Right. Well, you shouldn’t, and and not only that, but diagnosis also provides a kind of moral framework to reject people. It’s sort of like, well, I mean, I’ve seen letters from adult children where they say, “Well, my therapist said that my mother’s a narcissist, and therefore family therapy wouldn’t work.” And that we have become kind of the new high priest that tell people who to be close to, who not to be close to, who’s problematic. We really have replaced religious leaders in our culture in terms of this sort of moral position we put in ourselves, into in terms of who it’s okay to be close to, and what should be considered even abusive behaviors, boundary crossing, what’s gaslighting, all of that. We have too much authority in our society to make these kind of determinations.
And most therapists won’t interview the parent and they shouldn’t be giving a diagnosis if they haven’t actually met the parent. I mean, somebody might sound like a narcissist, but the way somebody presents in therapy and what they tell the therapist isn’t necessarily going to be completely accurate. Which is why when I’m working with a parent, I will always see if I can talk to the adult child, ’cause I wanna get their perspective. I’ll ask for correspondence from the parent and the adult child. Sometimes parents will say, “Well, my kid’s impossible, and they’re a narcissist.” And I’ll see the correspondence and I’ll think, actually your kid is really trying very hard here, and your responses to them are really problematic. So families are systems. If you’re only just looking at one part of it, you’re really not in that good of a position to know… I mean, at least when it comes to something so consequential as cutting off a family member. I mean, we can have opinions, but if you’re wading into something as consequential and serious as encouraging an estrangement, you better know what the hell you’re advising because you have an incredibly sad, lonely, broken parent or grandparent on the other end that has to also be factored into your analysis.
Brett McKay: Are women or men more likely to cut off a parent?
Dr. Joshua Coleman: There aren’t huge differences, but in general, men are. That probably has to do with the sociological concept of kin keeping, that women tend to be more mindful of family relationships and be more motivated to keep track of them, and the like. So statistically, it’s somewhat more likely that a son would than a daughter would, but the numbers aren’t huge.
Brett McKay: Something else you talk about that can contribute to men becoming estranged from their parents more than women are ideas around manhood itself. Can you talk to us about that?
Dr. Joshua Coleman: Yeah. I particularly see this in, if a daughter-in-law doesn’t like the parents, then the son can take the position of it’s what I call performative masculinity. So, I work with a lot of families where the son was close to the parents prior to getting married, then the son marries somebody who’s somewhat troubled and basically says, “Choose them or me.” And the son engages by confronting the parents and saying, “You can’t talk to my wife that way,” or, “This is my family now,” or, “I need to protect my family,” or, “They’re my new priority. You are not.” So, it does all become kind of entangled with this idea of masculinity, which can make the dynamic that much more tricky to unravel.
Brett McKay: Yeah. And also you just see the sort of the cultural change of the relationship between particularly, sons and moms. So, you talk about this, if you go back to civil war times, you’d see these letters from civil war soldiers talking about, “My mom’s my best gal, and I love you so much.” Almost like love letters.
Dr. Joshua Coleman: Right.
Brett McKay: And then a shift happened where it was like, “No, if you do that, you’re a mollycoddle. You’re a mama’s boy. So you gotta put some distance between you and mom.” And so now men were like, “Well, I don’t want to be too close to my parents because then that’s kind of, or particularly to my mother, ’cause that’s kind of weird.”
Dr. Joshua Coleman: Right. It’s considered to be like, being a mama’s boy is a real epithet. It’s not considered an act of strength and value. It’s considered like if you’re really close to your mother, then somehow that makes you weak. Like, you’re hiding behind her aprons or something. And you’re right, historically that wasn’t always the case, that the idea that you’re close to your mother or wanna be close to her was considered sort of a strength in earlier periods. So, it really wasn’t until kind of the early 20th century and there became more of a concern about masculinity and, that, so that all began to change with Roosevelt’s Rough Riders and the likes.
Brett McKay: Yeah. And then so yeah, a wife can use that if she doesn’t like her mother-in-law or father-in-law, she can use that as kind of like a screw to turn and be like, “You need to stay away from them,” and the husband’s like, “No, I don’t want to, I wanna have a relationship with my mom,” it’s like, “Well, you’re just a mama’s boy.”
Dr. Joshua Coleman: Yeah. I think it’s very easy to humiliate and shame men around their masculinity. So I think if a wife was motivated to get her husband to either confront his parents or stop talking to them she says, “Well, you’re a mama’s boy,” or, “You’re weak,” or, “We’re your new family now and you need to prioritize us,” or, “I don’t like how your parents talk to me. You need to stand up to them more. How come you’re not standing up to them more?” for many men, that would be a very hard message to resist. I mean, some could, but many couldn’t.
Brett McKay: When you work with parents and adult children who are estranged, who gets hit hardest? Like, I mean, is it harder on the child or the parent?
Dr. Joshua Coleman: I think it’s harder on the parent. I mean, for the adult child, there may be enormous upsides to the estrangement. They can feel like they’re pushing back against authority figures or destructive figures. They’re protecting themselves from more abuse. They’re standing up for themselves. They’re protecting their mental health. So it’s all can be tied to a very powerful narrative of individuation and separation and self-protection and mental health, personal growth, et cetera. So there’s enormous upside for the adult child. For the parent, there’s no upside. It’s all pain, sadness, loss, guilt, anger, regret. So that also influences who’s going to be doing the outreach. I mean, sometimes parents will say to me, “Well, how come… They can reach out to me?” And I’m like, “Well, are they reaching out to you? I mean, yeah, they can reach out to you, but it looks like if anybody’s gonna make a move in anybody’s direction, it’s gonna have to be you because your child wouldn’t be estranged unless they felt like it was had some value to them.”
Brett McKay: Yeah. This is the dynamic in any troubled relationship. It’s the person who doesn’t wanna be in the relationship, they actually, they have the power.
Dr. Joshua Coleman: That’s true. Absolutely. So the person who really wants it more has to be willing to take the initiative. And that’s typically the parent.
Brett McKay: How does it affect grandchildren?
Dr. Joshua Coleman: I think it’s terrible for grandchildren. I mean, particularly for those who are… A lot of the cases that I work with, a grandparent who’s very involved, even by the now estranged adult child’s own reckoning, they were decent grandparents, and that they’re really a casualty of the parent, adult child relationship. I mean, certainly some grandparents get cut off because the adult child doesn’t like how they grandparent. But I don’t think it’s the majority. It certainly isn’t the majority of the cases that I’ve worked with, and I’ve worked with a ton of these cases, typically they’re a casualty. And the way that the adult child often explains it is by saying, “Well, if it’s not good for me and my mental health and it’s not good for my children,” and that’s just not right. I mean, obviously if contact with your parent is so disabling to you that, you know, you absolutely can’t parent, then probably means you need to be spending more time in therapy if they still have that kind of an influence on you.
But you should be able to have conflict with your parent and keep your child’s grandparents in their lives if they’re good grandparents. ‘Cause a lot of parents will say to me, “I could maybe tolerate the estrangement from my child, what I find so intolerable emotionally is not being able to have time with my grandchild who I was so close to. What could they possibly be thinking? Do they think that I abandoned them?” And the grandparent-grandchild relationship is a very unique relationship that offers enormous benefits to both generations. There’s enormous value to grandchildren to having a good close living relationship with their grandparents. And there’s incredible value to grandparents. So this idea that if it’s not good for me, it’s not good for my kids, it sort of reminds me what some people when I used to do a lot of couples therapy would say, “Well, if I’m not happy in my marriage, then my children aren’t happy.” And it depends on how you’re expressing your unhappiness. A lot of people are able to contain their unhappiness in a certain way where it doesn’t have a deleterious effect on their children. Their children much rather they stay together than get divorced. So I think in our culture, we really overemphasize the importance of our own happiness in terms of the way that it radiates and out and affects other people in the family, children in particular.
Brett McKay: You advise the parents who wanna reconcile with their adult child to write an amends letter. What is that?
Dr. Joshua Coleman: An amends letter is getting on the same page as the adult child. It’s putting aside all defensiveness and criticism and blame and obligation and duty and guilt, and really trying to come at it from the perspective that the adult child is doing something that they feel is really important for them to do and has a lot of meaning to them. And so I always tell parents to start the letter with, “I know you wouldn’t have cut off contact unless you felt like it was the healthiest thing for you to do.” Now, from the parents’ perspective, they don’t necessarily feel like it’s the healthiest thing for them to do, but if their adult child wouldn’t be doing it unless they did. So saying that is kind of a way of saying, “Look, I am desirous of entering into your world, having a much deeper understanding.”
If there are things that the parents are aware of that really were problematic about their parenting, they should say it in a very straightforward way. “Yes, I could see how that was really hurtful to you, or I could see how that was traumatizing to you, and I’m really sorry, and I’m willing to work on that in my own therapy or therapy together. You know, or I could see why that might make it feel unsafe to spend time with me or triggering to you or distant, or why you might be mad at me.” I mean, it’s just a really deep dive of empathy into the child’s experience because nothing is gonna happen unless the parent is able to do that. And if they don’t know and parents don’t always know, then they should say something like, “It’s clear that I have significant blind spots as a parent or person, that I don’t have a better understanding, or that I didn’t know that that felt emotionally abusive or hurtful or traumatizing to you. But it’s something that I would like to learn more about and deepen my understanding and learn how to do better in the future.”
Brett McKay: That could be a hard pill to swallow.
Dr. Joshua Coleman: Oh, it’s a very hard pill to swallow.
Brett McKay: Yeah. As I was reading that, that you have to like write, “I know that you wouldn’t have come off contact unless it was the healthiest thing for you to do.” I’m like, I don’t know if I could ever like sincerely say that, especially if I saw my kid was just doing something destructive with their life.
Dr. Joshua Coleman: Well, yeah, you’re saying that “unless you felt like it was the healthiest thing for you to do,” I mean, normally an apology shouldn’t have “you felt like”, ’cause that sounds like an avoidance, but you’re, again, you’re just sort of trying to get into the child’s state of mind and outside of yours. No, these letters are not easy for parents to write, but they’re also kind of therapeutic for parents to write because we all make mistakes as parents. So being able to… Maybe we don’t feel like we deserve an estrangement as a result of it but we all make mistakes. So being able to kind of get it out on paper and expose yourself to it and come to some degree of acceptance over that, I mean, not only is it, I think, the best tool towards a potential reconciliation, but I think it’s also good for the parents’ mental health as well. You know, they talk about the step of make a fearless and searching moral inventory of your character flaw. So I think that can be really useful for parents as well.
Brett McKay: Okay. So it’s just you, it’s all about empathy. It’s just trying to show that, like, “I want to understand where you’re coming from,” and this may require you to put yourself in therapy speak. You might not be comfortable with that, but you have to see, okay, I understand where you’re coming from, with this. I mean, can you say I disagree? Like, “I don’t see it that way,” and still display empathy.
Dr. Joshua Coleman: I wouldn’t do that in an amends letter. Maybe if you’re into therapy and you’re like in the 10th session or something, there’s a place to do that. But really the advice is predicated on this principle that we were talking about earlier, about the way that family life has changed and it’s a way to telegraph to the adult child, “Look, I’m willing to navigate our relationship and negotiate it from the, this much more 21st century principle that relationships are based on the principles of mental health and personal growth and happiness. And that’s why the parent has to frame it in that kind of language. That’s the way they have to say, “You wouldn’t do this unless you felt like it was the healthiest thing for you to do.” That word is really kind of intentionally coded not in a manipulative way, but just kind of like that’s the basis that the relationship is based upon.
So yeah, it’s all about showing empathy because empathy is the one thing that’s gonna invite the adult child, first of all, to feel cared about, like, the parent’s really grappling with something. Most adult children know that these letters aren’t easy to write and they respect it. Now, that’s not to say that they always work, ’cause there’s really nothing I can say to any parent that I can say, “Oh, you know what, if you just do this, it’s your child’s definitely coming back to you.” There’s a lot of reasons why an adult child might not come back or might not be ready to come back anyway. They may be too negatively influenced by who they’re married to. Their therapist may be telling them it’s a bad idea. They may be too brainwashed by the other parent after divorce. They may still be too hurt or mad at you for things that did happen in the past and they’re just not ready yet to accept an apology. They may need to feel separate from you and aren’t really ready to move off of that position. So there’s… The tools that I recommend are based on a probabilistic model. Probably if you do this, there’s a better chance of a reconciliation than not. But there’s almost nothing in human behavior that we can ever say with certainty, “Yeah, you know what, just do this and your kid will come back into your door tomorrow.”
Brett McKay: Yeah. And again, the amends letter isn’t gonna be the thing that solves it. This is just like the opening bid to a conversation that might take, could take years.
Dr. Joshua Coleman: It could. If it’s well received, it shouldn’t take years because if the parent is sincere in the desire to learn more and to take responsibility and understand why their behavior impacted their child in the way that they did, then both people are able to communicate honestly and openly about it, then it shouldn’t take years. But to your earlier point, that doesn’t mean that the parent necessarily is gonna be able to disagree with the child’s perceptions or say, “Well, think about it, from my perspective, at least not early on.” First of the adult child really needs to feel, seen, heard, cared about and understood. Otherwise, the parent’s voice is just gonna be too big. If they say, “Well, I don’t see it that way,” or, “You’re wrong about that,” or, “That never happened,” that’s just going to shut the door down. And the goal is to open the door and keep it open long enough for some kind of fresh air to go between the rooms.
Brett McKay: And a reminder, going back to what we said if you’re a parent who has an estranged adult child and you know, you feel the words getting stuck in your throat as you try to be like, “I understand… ” ’cause you don’t believe it, you have to re… Just going back to the idea like if you want a relationship with your kids, like it’s up to you to make the first step. Like the kid, it’s probably fine. They got their own family. There’s more upside for them for not having a relationship with you. So they’re in control. So you gotta kind of be the one to make the opening bid.
Dr. Joshua Coleman: Right. It’s about humility, not humiliation. I mean, these letters can feel humiliating to the parent, but you know, from my perspective, you’re just taking the high road as a parent. We are the parent. It is true what you were saying earlier, our children didn’t ask to be born. And so it is incumbent on us to take the high road and take responsibility. And if we don’t really understand, to try to work hard to understand. It doesn’t mean you have to agree that you were a terrible, selfish, awful person. It’s more that you’re trying to more deeply understand why your child has the belief or perceptions or memories about you that they do and not get into the right or wrong of it. It’s like couples communication. You know, if you get into the right and wrong of it with your spouse or romantic partner, you’re probably not gonna get very far. But if you seek to understand what they’re saying and show empathy and take responsibility for the kernel, if not the bushel, of truth and their complaints or perceptions, then you’re in a much better position.
Brett McKay: When should a parent or a child give up trying to mend the relationship?
Dr. Joshua Coleman: Well, for parents, what I typically tell parents is, assuming your child is an adult, that they should write one really good amends letter and then maybe do a follow up six to eight weeks later and just see if the adult child got the letter and had reactions. If they get nothing back, then I typically tell parents not to do anything for maybe a year or so because sometimes adult children just really need the time and the space to come back to the parent. And once you’ve written an amends letter, you’re sort of showing and announcing that you’re open to changing and to being more empathic and to seeing it from their perspective. But you should stop right away if any of the following are happening. One is you’re getting the police called on you, or every you’re getting letters or gifts sent back, returned to sender, restraining orders.
And if any of those things happen, you should just stop right now because it means that things are just way too inflamed to try. And then you can try again in a year maybe, to just give your child, your adult child that. For the adult child, I think that adult children should do a certain period of due diligence where they carefully tell their parent what their complaints are. If you come to your parent and say, “Well, I’ve learned in therapy that you’re a narcissist or you’re a borderline,” you’re not gonna get anywhere that way. If your goal is really to have your parent understand you’re better off talking about what you did like or value about them as parents or people, it’s kind of the compliment sandwich. You know, you wanna start out with something [laughter] to just soften the blow because for all parents hearing the ways that they failed their children is really deeply humiliating and scary.
And so if you can say, “I’m telling you this because I wanna have a closer relationship with you, but I need the following to happen and here’s what I need to have happen. If you’d like to do family therapy with me, I would welcome that. Or these are the things I’d like you to work on in your therapy. I hope you’re willing to do that.” And then don’t assume that you’re gonna have one conversation about it. I mean, it may take a while ’cause it’s a big ask, but it’s typically worthwhile for both people if these things can be worked through rather than just ended.
Brett McKay: I’ve seen instances where parents are estranged from their adult child and they they really want that relationship with their kid, but then the kid uses the estrangement kind of as a bludgeon over the parent’s head, where they kind of use it as a weapon almost. And the parent will just keep taking it. They just, they want to have some version of their kid in their life, even if it is just being told that you’re an awful parent and I hate you. They feel like they can’t give up on their kid. So I imagine too, like the parent who’s wanting to reconcile, they have to take care of themselves as well through this process. Yeah.
Dr. Joshua Coleman: Right. Yeah. I know it’s true that, I mean, particularly if a kid is mentally ill, then they’re much more likely to be disrespectful and abusive to the parent, and parents whose kids are mentally ill, if they’re not in contact, that’s torturous for the parent because they’re worried about them. Not only do they have the estrangement, but they’re worried about where they are, whether they’re suicidal or whether they’re on the street or living in a car, or whether they’ll ever hear from them again. But if they’re in contact but abusive, that’s tormenting as well because they want the contact, but they have to sort of drink from this poison well in order to have the contact. It isn’t my position that anybody should tolerate somebody being disrespectful to them. So I think that parents can certainly try to set limits on the adult child’s abusive or disrespectful behavior, but it’s typically if somebody is more troubled, it’s a matter of love and limits. Love because it really ultimately isn’t their fault that they have the mental illness, or whatever it is that’s causing them to behave that way, but limits because some people, children or parents can be really destructive in how they interact with the other, and that has to be dealt with.
Brett McKay: Last question. Parental estrangement is part of a larger trend of just cutting people off in your life, toxic people, you gotta cut out the toxic people from your life. But is there a downside to leaning too much into this approach to relationships? I mean, are there benefits to learning how to deal with difficult people in your life?
Dr. Joshua Coleman: Well, there’s enormous benefit to it. You know, in cognitive behavior therapy, what we teach is that you wanna be sort of go toward the things that cause you stress and anxiety. And what I often see in the letters from adult children is, “Well I’ve worked hard to get to where I am today psychologically, and if I see you or talk to you, that’s gonna undo my years of how hard I’ve worked on myself.” You know? And my feeling is like, well, it really shouldn’t, you should be able to, if you’ve worked on these issues for years, you should be able to at least start to engage your parent. I mean, obviously if they’re completely unrepentant and they’re abusive and they yell at you and they shame you and humiliate you every time you see them, then, you know, I get it. I couldn’t ethically support an adult child continuing to get into the ring with a parent who’s just gonna bloody them psychologically every time they’re together.
But I don’t think that those constitute the majority of these kinds of dynamics. So I think there’s enormous value. I mean, there’s no other path towards getting more resilient than to sort of face ourselves with the people who are difficult in our lives. And typically the people in our families may be the most difficult because there’s just this whole reservoir of memories of hurt and disappointment and conflict. But I, it sort of goes back to our earlier question of what do we owe each other as generations? And I think that there is real value in just being engaged with people that you have this history with, and working on things and working to improve them, or then learning if they can improve, learning how to tolerate the parts of them that are more difficult. And also taking responsibility for your own, the ways that you may be difficult, whether you’re the parent or the adult child and learning from that.
Brett McKay: Well, Joshua, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
Dr. Joshua Coleman: Sure. They can go to my website, www.drjoshuacoleman.com. I do webinars every Tuesday night for estranged parents and a free Q&A every other Monday at 11:30 AM Pacific. And they can get my book there as well on the website o, r you know, at bookstores and etcetera.
Brett McKay: Fantastic. Joshua Coleman, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Dr. Joshua Coleman: Yeah, thank you. It was.
Brett McKay: My guest here is Joshua Coleman. He’s the author of the book Rules of Estrangement. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, drjoshuacoleman.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/estrangement where you’ll find links to resources and we delve deeper into this topic.
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. Make sure you check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you’ll find our podcast archives. And while you’re there, sign up for our newsletter. We got a daily option and a weekly option. They’re both free. It’s the best way to stay on top of what’s going on at AoM. And if you’ve done this already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to give to give a review of the podcast on Spotify. It helps out a lot. If you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it’s Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the AoM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.
