Healing Family Estrangement: What To Say, And What Never to Say.
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So what do you do when your child wants nothing to do with you and refuses to even communicate anymore? Most parents believe that if they just explain themselves clearly enough, the door will kind of magically reopen. Decades of research say the opposite. The moves that tend to feel most natural when estrangement begins are almost always the exact moves that keep it going. In this conversation, we talk about why estrangement is at historically unprecedented levels and what specific cultural forces are driving the surge. We talk about the five traps that parents tend to fall into almost universally and why, quote, fighting for fairness may be the single most damaging one. We explore what a genuinely healing move actually requires word by word and how to hold radical acceptance and real hope at the same time without letting either one hollow you out.
Our guide is psychologist and senior fellow with the Council on Contemporary Families, Dr. Joshua Coleman. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. And we'll jump right in after the break. Good Life Project Talk to me about the state of family estrangement today. What are you seeing now? And how do you feel like it's changed in recent years?
Yeah, I mean, we have to assume there's always been estrangements, but probably never at the numbers that we're currently seeing. You know, one study said that something like 26% of dads are estranged from a child and between 10 to 15% are estranged from a mother. And that's probably historically new, even though we've only recently begun to track it. And I think it's in part because of the way that there's been this huge cultural shift away from the sort of structure that families had for really millennia. Honor thy mother and thy father. Families forever respect thy elders, which is very similar to what most cultures in the world still have. And it's shifted much more into this kind of culture.
notion that family is just one more group of people that can either interfere with your mental health or promote it or your identity or your happiness. And when that becomes the case, not only can you cut out a family member, but you should cut out a family member. So there's a bunch of other contributing factors that amplify that. But I think that's the most important thing is this huge cultural shift.
It's interesting, right? Because when we think about family estrangement, and this could be whether it's a parent or child or siblings or grandparents, and we'll dip a little bit into each one of those different contexts. I feel like when an individual experiences, we're not thinking about the big cultural context here. It's like, this is horrific. It's angst ridden. It never leaves your heart and your mind and your body. And this is your day. And what you're describing is there are bigger shifts. This is not just something that's happening within the family unit or within two people or three people. There's a much bigger cultural context here that's behind this.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if we think about the pathways to estrangement, for example, people often think, well, people only cut off a parent, for example, if there's been abuse. And that is certainly a pathway to estrangement, verbal abuse or physical abuse. But also today, people get estranged over political differences. You know, a survey I did with the Harris Bowl, we found a significant people became estranged just from the last election. That's historically new, right? I mean, 20 years ago, if your kid was going to marry somebody from the opposite party, you'd say, well, as long as they love each other, that's the most important thing. Now it's like people from the opposite party are considered the enemy, and the idea of treating them even violently is considered somehow legitimate.
the role of therapy. We've become much more of a therapy culture. Therapists have become the new high priest in terms of determining who should be kept in or outside of our lives. And therapists have become what the sociologist Alison Pugh calls detachment brokers, meaning they're people who sort of help us to detach from people that in other generations we'd feel obligated to be involved with.
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