Whitney Goodman
Appearances
It's Been a Minute
Blocking your mom: why adult children are going no contact
You know, I think that certainly there are going to be outliers in every conversation where there are people who are using estrangement in maybe like a manipulative fashion or they haven't thought it through or they're doing it because they don't have the skills to negotiate what's going on in the relationship.
It's Been a Minute
Blocking your mom: why adult children are going no contact
But I think that when you give up a relationship with your family, you are giving up so much. You know, you're giving up ties to your culture, to your community, to your family.
It's Been a Minute
Blocking your mom: why adult children are going no contact
potentially losing relationships with other family members, losing out on inheritance, history, all this stuff that I think the cost is so large that it's very hard for me to believe that there's this massive group of people that I haven't met yet that are doing this in a malicious kind of way, or who are doing it to punish or not truly out of survival. And I want to point out just
It's Been a Minute
Blocking your mom: why adult children are going no contact
a different way of looking at the point that you just made about, you know, is this because we become more individualistic and are people just moving away from relationships that I think we have to flip the script a little bit here and say, it's the dynamics of the family that are making this happen. If we learn to speak more kindly to one another, to set boundaries,
It's Been a Minute
Blocking your mom: why adult children are going no contact
to tolerate our differences, have better communication skills, not have our families be places of abuse and conflict and chaos, then people won't have to estrange themselves as much. And so I don't like to put the onus of responsibility or blame necessarily always on the people who are doing the estrangement.
It's Been a Minute
Blocking your mom: why adult children are going no contact
And instead to try to look back at how is the family system operating that we are feeling like this is our best option. Because that must be really painful for those people to look at their family and say, this is the only choice I've got.
It's Been a Minute
Blocking your mom: why adult children are going no contact
I am estranged from both of my parents and six of my seven siblings.
It's Been a Minute
Blocking your mom: why adult children are going no contact
We are also recognizing how other families operate. You know, with social media and the internet, we have other lenses. into how different families work and what they're like and what they do. And that was normally something that we didn't get exposed to until much later in life. You know, I know for me, when I went away to college, I was like, oh, wow, everyone is different.
It's Been a Minute
Blocking your mom: why adult children are going no contact
Their families work differently. If you grow up in a small place in a bubble. It's easy to feel like everyone is like you. And there are a lot of adults that say, you know, I didn't realize that not everyone's parents did X to them. And then I realized like, wow, that's wrong. I shouldn't have been treated that way.
It's Been a Minute
Blocking your mom: why adult children are going no contact
And I think a lot of young people are having these awakenings much earlier because they just have so much more exposure to the way other people live.
It's Been a Minute
Blocking your mom: why adult children are going no contact
So I have one theory to explain this. And I think that we are so much more connected than we've ever been, especially with our family members using things like social media, texting, email, et cetera, that it's really difficult to just create distance from your family without setting these hard rules or boundaries with people.
It's Been a Minute
Blocking your mom: why adult children are going no contact
You can't really just like move across the country and say, oh, I can't get home for the holidays.
It's Been a Minute
Blocking your mom: why adult children are going no contact
This is something that people are doing because they thought about it and they had to do it. And it was important for them to do it. And it was the option they had to take because pursuing distance likely didn't work.
It's Been a Minute
Blocking your mom: why adult children are going no contact
I meet with hundreds of people every week in groups who have either been on the receiving end of estrangement, they're becoming estranged, And my understanding is that it really isn't happening at much greater of a frequency than it was. I also think this is not like a young people's thing.
It's Been a Minute
Blocking your mom: why adult children are going no contact
I think the reason it appears to be that way is because young people feel most comfortable speaking on social media and sharing about this stuff. Yeah. I meet people who are in their 70s down to their 20s. You know, I feel like it's a lot like divorce. Like it's something that was very taboo. It was kind of embarrassing.
It's Been a Minute
Blocking your mom: why adult children are going no contact
Yeah. And I feel like family estrangement is moving in that direction where we're talking about it more and saying like, oh yeah, people can have family relationships that are harmful or even abusive or just not good for them. And maybe they need to get out of those relationships in the same way they would need to leave any other type of relationship.
It's Been a Minute
Blocking your mom: why adult children are going no contact
Yeah, so this was really fascinating. I was able to survey a little over 2,000 estranged adults who are estranged from their parents. And something interesting that I found is that most of the reasons that people are reporting are why they became estranged are to do with emotions in some way. So
It's Been a Minute
Blocking your mom: why adult children are going no contact
About 98% of those adults said that they believed that their parents were emotionally immature and that was a reason for their estrangement. I'm sorry, wait, what was that percentage? It was around 98%.
It's Been a Minute
Blocking your mom: why adult children are going no contact
Yeah. So that was really surprising to me. And then the other ones had to do with experiencing emotional neglect. And most people were reporting that it was emotional neglect, both in childhood and adulthood.
It's Been a Minute
Blocking your mom: why adult children are going no contact
And then also emotional abuse, both in childhood and adulthood, which is something I've also found that is kind of echoed by these results, is that most of the adults aren't reporting that they can't like... get over something from childhood with their parents.
It's Been a Minute
Blocking your mom: why adult children are going no contact
Most of them are upset that the behavior is still continuing in adulthood and that nothing is being done to stop it or change it even after they have come to the parent and said, hey, I want you to work on X or I don't like this part of our relationship. In fact, I would say it's most adults that I work with say to me, like, I could totally get over the past.
It's Been a Minute
Blocking your mom: why adult children are going no contact
I just really want them to work on us having a better relationship today.
It's Been a Minute
Blocking your mom: why adult children are going no contact
Oh my gosh, that's like the biggest issue in this whole conversation. One of the biggest discrepancies that I find between these two groups is that the parents will say, I was blindsided. I have no idea why they became estranged. And the adult children are consistently saying, I told you a million times why I became estranged.
It's Been a Minute
Blocking your mom: why adult children are going no contact
Whitney, I see you nodding. Yeah, I think you're so spot on, right, about some of these larger shifts. I think when you see like, oh, I can find other people that seem like they like me and they want to be around me, I might choose to spend more time with them. I also think that generationally, I have noticed a major shift in what people value in relationships.
It's Been a Minute
Blocking your mom: why adult children are going no contact
So, you know, millennials that I work with definitely report wanting relationships with more emotional intimacy and authenticity. And when they cannot get that from their families, they might go elsewhere where we look at like some Gen X, I think Gen X is split, but like Boomer, Silent Gen was more like, you just push everything down to get along.
It's Been a Minute
Blocking your mom: why adult children are going no contact
You know, that was like the name of the game, right? And there's a lot of generational, I think, kind of infighting over that because we have different ideas about what it means to be quote unquote family, right?
It's Been a Minute
Blocking your mom: why adult children are going no contact
Yeah, I agree with you. I think when you talk about the rise of therapy culture, that I have, of course, actively participated in perpetuating online of teaching people a lot of these words that boundaries and emotional intelligence and all this stuff that, of course, people are now learning that and saying, wow, I don't know if I want to be in relationships where I'm treated poorly.
It's Been a Minute
Blocking your mom: why adult children are going no contact
And this widening of the definition of trauma, that's something that's very, very difficult for parents, right? And I'm a parent. I want to empathize with any parents listening to this who are thinking like, oh my gosh, my child is coming to me and saying I hurt them. in XYZ way. And I didn't know that I was doing something wrong, or this is something we didn't learn about till later.
It's Been a Minute
Blocking your mom: why adult children are going no contact
And that's where I feel like as parents, we have to have some humility around that stuff and say, we used to think it was okay to smoke cigarettes around our kids or smoke cigarettes ourselves. And now we know that's dangerous. That's not a good thing to do. If you exposed your child to that, you would reasonably be expected to be like, wow, we shouldn't have been doing that. I wish I knew.
It's Been a Minute
Blocking your mom: why adult children are going no contact
But I find that with some of these little T things that you're talking about, like emotions, a lot of parents across cultures are much more willing to say like, oh, that wasn't that big of a deal. Get over it. And I think we are learning as a society, especially younger generations, the impact those things can have on you. We're saying like, hey, but you actually did hurt me.
It's Been a Minute
Blocking your mom: why adult children are going no contact
And all I really want you to do is recognize that, right? And try to learn how to do better and maybe apologize so that we can have a better relationship moving forward.