When should someone walk away from family?

More than a quarter of young Americans have cut ties with one of their parents.

Sometimes on the advice of therapists, who say families are traumatizing. But some families say they’re the ones being traumatized.

Today, On Point: We discuss the debate over family estrangement.

Brian Briscoe, dually licensed counselor based in North Texas. Founder of Parents Living After Child Estrangement (PLACE). His daughter, Rosie, cut him out of her life in 2022.

Whitney Goodman, psychotherapist who works with family relationships, boundaries and estrangements. Author of Toxic Positivity: Keeping It Real in a World Obsessed with Being Happy (2022).

Part I

DEBORAH BECKER: Does the idea of family still hold value, or is it being defined differently? According to recent studies, at least a quarter of Americans will have cut ties with at least one parent during young adulthood. It's an experience that many On Point listeners shared.

I cut ties with my mom close to two years ago. It was a very difficult decision. But my mom seemed hell bent on perpetuating her family trauma onto me, and making sure it was passed on to me and my children. And I just decided enough was enough.

I am in my 60s. And five years ago, my daughter sent me an email, said she couldn't deal with me anymore and hasn't allowed any communication with herself or my grandson.

I decided to cut ties with my father at age 14. By that point, the damage of childhood had been done. He was very emotionally abusive, physically abusive, created a toxic environment. There was never a day of peace in the household.

BECKER: Those were our On Point listeners, Kerry Kenneally from Somerville, Massachusetts, Chris Weller in Albuquerque, New Mexico and Erin Jacque from Shutesbury, Massachusetts.

But how and when do you make such a decision? And what role should mental health counselors have in advising this? That's what we're going to talk about today. Joining us first is Brian Briscoe.

He's a father of two based in North Texas. Brian, welcome to On Point.

BRIAN BRISCOE: Hello, Deborah. Thank you.

BECKER: So your parenting and your counseling experience have led you to advocacy around the issue of family estrangement, and we'll get to that in a moment. But let's begin with your personal story of estrangement.

Tell us about the letter that you unexpectedly received from your daughter. It would have, I think, been late August, maybe September of '22. My wife and I had just returned from a vacation in Seattle and something strange began to happen. My wife came to me and said, I think Rosie is leaving the family, which is certainly an odd thing to hear.

She was disconnecting from mutual things like, family, tracking on the cell phone and really just leaving this electronic trail of ways she was disconnecting from the family. And it was all at once. And I went straight into denial and I contacted her mother, my first wife and her mother said the explanation is in the letter.

And I said what letter is that? And she said, oh, it's in your mailbox. And it was a, I think it was a three-page handwritten letter explaining my daughter's plan to cut off contact at least while she was away at college.

BECKER: And did she say why?

BRISCOE: She did. And that was one of the most difficult parts, because she has a different narrative.

There was reference to a lot of things that she saw as happening one way and I saw as having happened another way and even references to things I don't understand. I recall that she said something like, this is just like the Vincent van Gogh thing. And I don't know what that means. So I felt very much in the dark.

BECKER: And how old was she at this point?

BRISCOE: 18.

BECKER: 18. And did you try to talk to her? What did you do? You get this letter, says I'm cutting you off. You don't quite understand it. Did you attempt to have a conversation?

BRISCOE: I did. I went to her house. She was there at her mother's house. She and her brother were there and I asked for permission to speak to her.

And after a little bit of what I guess we'd call negotiating I was told that I could stand in the foyer of the house, and she would listen to me from behind a closed door in her bedroom. And I said, I appear to have made some mistakes. I'm not quite sure what they were, but I think I have the job right now of learning what they are and working on them with you.

I'm receptive. Let's go to family counseling. And Deborah, I fell to pieces, and I still struggle with not only that memory, but the memory of my son seeing me in that state and he's seen me in that state several times since then.

BECKER: You have no idea what caused this? Were there issues of physical or emotional abuse that particularly, if it was emotional abuse, that you may not have been sensitive to?

What do you think is going on here?

BRISCOE: No abuse whatsoever. And I take great pride in that, because I grew up in chaos, revolving door of husbands and abusers who my mother brought in, addiction, domestic violence. And my children were raised in an environment that did not bear any resemblance to that.

No abuse, no drugs, no alcohol. I'm as of this year, 20 years into successful recovery. Peaceful home. I have yelled at my children once in my life. So nothing that I thought was abuse, traumatic neglect. I took such great pride in being a breaker of that generational pattern. But clearly, I still came up short in her eyes. And again, just so it's clear, there were no specific issues outlined by your daughter, Rosie.

When she did this, you said you agreed to work on it, to talk more. But what was the straw? Really? The final straw here for her? Do you know?

BRISCOE: Let me take an opportunity to clarify. She did make it clear in the letter that it had always appeared that I was more interested and invested in her older brother's life.

And being as objective as I can, I could see why she would think that, it was a struggle for me as well. He's just like me. So from the moment he gets up in the morning, we flow into a conversation, whereas Rosie's altogether different. But she certainly outlined issues with ways things were corrected, taught in the household, the way things were resolved, or the way things failed to be resolved.

But again, what she portrayed in the letter as years of her having stood up for herself and trying to make the point. I don't have any recollection of, and I see it altogether differently.

BECKER: And also, you're not a stranger to estrangement, if you will, right? You mentioned your own family history, which was difficult for you and you cut off contact with your family.

So can you explain?

BRISCOE: I will. And I'll try to do this as diplomatically and sensitively as I can. My biological mother's seventh husband, and this was after a long line of alcoholics and addicts and abusers. Anyway, the seventh husband was a registered sex offender, and he sexually assaulted my grandmother.

And it was simply, I was 36 at the time. It was simply the straw that broke the camel's back. I emailed her and said, okay, this is it. I have my own children to raise. I've had decades of chaos. I've tried. I'm sober. And I left, I felt frankly, it was easy. It was a necessary thing. I was raised with trauma and chaos and abuse and neglect and we were a Child Protective Services case waiting to happen and it just never did.

BECKER: Do you think that, and I know you're a mental health counselor, right? So do you think that there's something to passing along some of that trauma, maybe even unknowingly to your daughter, that she picked up on that may be at play here?

BRISCOE: Absolutely. I'm fascinated by the field of epigenetics, which I'll take a stab at summarizing, but it basically says that our environment can do something of a partial overwrite of genetics we pass on to our children.

So we can have children who are suffering from trauma that they didn't actually experience. And I absolutely believe this is a piece of that puzzle and that it's certainly unfair to the child.

BECKER: I want to bring another voice into the conversation. Now, Whitney Goodman is a psychotherapist who works with families, especially around boundaries and estrangement.

She's also an author and she has several followers, hundreds of thousands. We should say, that's way beyond several. Hundreds of thousands of followers on social media. Whitney, thanks for being with us On Point.

WHITNEY GOODMAN: Hi. Thank you for having me.

BECKER: So I wonder when you hear Brian's story from a parent perspective about estrangement ... and I get it, it's obviously very fast, but what's your initial take?

GOODMAN: I have such deep empathy for what Brian's going through. And I think this is a story that we hear from a lot of parents on the receiving end, right? That there is this sense of confusion and also different sets of memories or experiences when we're talking about how the child perceives things and how the parent sees things.

I've seen that in almost every story that I've encountered over the last decade.

BECKER: Are we seeing more estrangement now than we did before? I know that there, not a lot of data is around about this, but the studies that I've seen suggest that it's about a quarter of American young adults have cut off at one point, cut off contact with at least one parent.

Do you think that we are seeing more of it or are we just hearing about it?

GOODMAN: In my opinion, I think we're hearing a lot more about it. I'm watching estrangement with family follow a similar pattern that we saw with divorce, where it was very taboo. A lot of people maybe had thought about doing it or wanted to do it, or they had had these rifts in relationships, but they weren't talking about it.

And a lot of the people that I work with are across like the generational spectrum, right? I have people who are 70 years old who have been estranged from their family for 40 years. And then I'm working with 25-year-olds, and it follows a similar pattern no matter what the age of the person.

Part II

BECKER:  It's estimated that about a quarter of Americans will cut ties with at least one parent. during young adulthood, sometimes on the advice of therapists. So can separating from family actually help patients?

That's what we're asking today. We're joined by Whitney Goodman. She's a psychotherapist who works with family relationships and estrangements. And I wonder Whitney, let's go back to a little bit of talking about when estrangement might be helpful to someone. What kind of guidelines do you use to help someone make that decision to cut off contact with a family member?

GOODMAN: It's of course, highly nuanced and individualized. So if I'm meeting with someone individually, I want to know what's happening in the relationship. What are they experiencing while being in a relationship with this person? And also, what have they tried? I think of estrangement or going no contact as the last final stop along the path, if you will. And so we really want to check in with what has happened up to this point. What else can we try? What boundaries can we set before we even get into a discussion of should I become estranged from this person?

BECKER: So is there something, I realize it's different for everyone, but are there certain things that you say are definite things that are happening that you would advise a patient to cut off contact.

GOODMAN: I would never make the direct advisement of you should cut off contact with this person. I would want to help them evaluate what it might look like to stay in contact with them and what the risks are. So let's say with something very obvious, like physical abuse.

There might be people that say, I still want to keep in contact with this person, even though they're harming me physically. And we're going to walk through, okay, what are the risks here? What might happen if you really want to keep in contact with this person? Can we do it in a way that's safer? And through that analysis and walking that path, they may come to their own conclusion of, you're right.

I can't feel safe or healthy in a relationship with this person if they are physically abusing me. But I find that walking that path with them and allowing them to get to that conclusion on their own is much more effective than me saying outright, Hey, you cannot have this person in your life, and you shouldn't.

I can tell them that I don't think it's a safe relationship, and then we can figure it out from there.

BECKER: And of course, we've heard from parents, many parents who say that they're blindsided, like Brian Briscoe, who's with us. They don't understand exactly what's lead to this estrangement, and we received an awful lot of voicemails from our listeners about this.

So I just want to play a couple of parent voices here. Dottie Paradis from Nashville, who talked about her daughter, and Cecilia Wilson in Black Hawk, Colorado, told us that in 2019, her daughter suddenly cut ties with her.

Let's hear from Dottie first. She told me that she was done. That she couldn't handle the quote-unquote burden.

DOTTIE PARADIS: I have tried via phone calls, emails, texting, using friends and family to find out what I did to deserve her not wanting to be in my life anymore. And I still know nothing. Granted, I wasn't the best mother, but I wasn't the worst either.

BECKER: And here's Cecilia Wilson in Colorado.

DOTTIE PARADIS: I was a single parent. I raised her up in a very loving home.

There was no animosity. She just grew further away from me and closer to her father as she became an adult. And when we disagreed over some sports tickets, she chose not to speak to me again. It has been approximately four years, and I haven't seen her since.

BECKER: Whitney Goodman, why do we hear from so many parents that they don't understand what happened?

That their young adult children have decided to cut themselves off from their lives? Are these parents mostly in denial here, or what is going on? Because it doesn't appear that it would be a sudden decision. Would sports tickets really cost someone to cut off contact with a parent?

What's happening?

GOODMAN: This is a pattern that I hear all the time from people. And I have read hundreds of letters and messages that people have sent to their parents saying, these are the reasons why I cannot have a relationship with you. And I find that what we're often hearing from the parents is like the straw that broke the camel's back, right?

The sports ticket argument, they didn't want me to come over on Christmas, whatever it is. And there was often a long line of incidents that led up to this that maybe were not recognized or were blown off. And I find that the parent and the adult child have such different interpretations of how they got to this point.

And I think some of that can be different memories. Some of that can be denial. It can just be a refusal to listen to what the adult child is saying. And then of course, we do have these outlier situations where someone might cut contact out of the blue, but in my experience, the vast majority are taking a lot of steps to illustrate why they cannot have a relationship before they get to that point of saying, I can no longer have you in my life.

BECKER: And so if you had a client who was thinking about this, you would talk with them about other steps before they made a decision. It wouldn't be sports tickets that would suddenly cause an estrangement or you to advise that an estrangement would be necessary right away.

GOODMAN: Absolutely. And I have met again with thousands of people who talk about this, and I have never come across a story where that was the case. In my work, it tends to actually be that the adult children initiating the estrangement tend to over explain and over qualify why they had to cut this person out of their life.

I have never heard someone just come in and say, I had this one argue with my parent. We had a perfect relationship before. And so I decided to cut them off. Now I will speak to my bias here that I am of course working with people who are coming to therapy, who are doing self-exploration and analysis, and those people are more likely to be those over explainers and people who do communicate in that way.

I'm sure there are people who do otherwise are out there.

BECKER: Okay. Brian Briscoe is also with us and he's a father who's been cut out of his daughter's life. He's also a mental health clinician and he works with patients who are struggling with addiction. And Brian founded a group called Parents Living After Child Estrangement, or PLACE.

And Brian, I wonder what you think. What do you think about what Whitney has told us so far about more adult children actually over explaining the reasons for making the decision to get out of their family's lives, cut ties with family, and what you think about what she's said so far?

BRISCOE: I don't actually have any issue particularly with anything she shared. I think she's spot on by and large, but there remains a disconnect. Because the over explaining, to the parents scratching their head, the over explaining comes in the form of a farewell letter. So maybe we have a parent who thinks we've had typical family grievances, and didn't agree at Thanksgiving or whatnot.

And then the next thing we know they're gone. And there's been no attempt at mediation, conflict resolution, working it out. I wish, for all the attention that this is getting, I wish that people would hear me when I say there needs to be a protocol for addressing this with your parents.

Okay. Just a few steps. All right, mom and dad, We have a troubled relationship system. It's not working well. I need space. By space, less contact. I give that parent an estimate, a month, 90 days, six months, use collaborative language, respectful language. You too, parents, children, everybody.

All right. And test those waters periodically, have coffee. Okay. In the meantime, work on yourselves. Children and parents work on yourselves, but have some method for telling them what's at stake. That's the blindsided part of this.

BECKER: But could it have been that your daughter Rosie had been trying to communicate with you for years?

As Whitney has said here, and then something happened. Maybe it didn't seem huge by itself, but it was another note in the course of mistreatment that she felt, and it prompted her to say enough is enough.

BRISCOE: I think you're right about that. Although, such things are nuanced and spread out.

And we don't necessarily grasp the weight of the intention behind what they say. And it'd be great to be clear and explicit. We have a systemic problem. We need to collaborate and address it. And I find it particularly shocking in my case, because I raised my family. We had these things that we called yellow card talks.

And I'd say, you kids have the yellow card. My job is to receive. Tell me anything on your mind, any grievance, and I just need to be a listening ear, and no such thing happened. And anyway, that simply blinds me up with all the other blindsided parents.

BECKER: And is that what you hear from most of the parents in your support group?

Do you hear that most of them feel blindsided by this?

BRISCOE: Yes, I had a group Saturday, had a group Saturday, a big group, 27 in there and asked for a show of hands. And said, how many of you had any forewarning? How many of you had a child who verbalized any intent to put space between you because of your systemic problems?

One hand went up. So there's a disconnect.

BECKER: Whitney what do you say to having some sort of a protocol for patients? If they are going to cut ties with family, perhaps there's a way to do it to make it easier or cleaner or less painful for everyone involved.

GOODMAN: I think a protocol makes complete sense and it would be very successful if we have people on both sides that can communicate well and are emotionally mature and emotionally intelligent.

And unfortunately, I think what I find in my work is that on both ends, whether that be the parent or the adult child, sometimes the communication is not happening on the same level. And so when one person is saying, this is what I see, this is what I'm hearing, they're met back with denial or vitriol or minimization.

And so it makes it very difficult to follow any type of protocol when the two people are not playing the same game.

BRISCOE: If I may, Whitney, if you don't mind me jumping in, let's do it. Let's make it a thing. I agree with you. That's a legitimate concern that you verbalize there, but what if this became part of popular vernacular, just like toxic is currently part of the popular vernacular?

What if people knew this model? What if parents out there had some familiarity with what we're agreeing on here. You have a great following. You have so much attention. This is an opportunity.

BECKER: Let's talk about that following because social media is a big player here in all of this.

And I was going through some social media posts over the weekend and some of the little quotes that you see on social media. I'll give you some examples of them. One is, quote, 'It's time to stop telling people who have cut off from their parents that they're being mean, unforgiving, or selfish.

Perhaps they're being brave.' End quote.

Another quote, 'Shout out to everyone who chose estrangement over toxic relatives.' Another, a parent who allowed their adult child to become estranged, has abandoned them. Although the adult child was the one to ultimately walk away, the parent was never willing to change or take the necessary accountability to keep them around.

Now Whitney, these are short, obviously short quotes, bits of advice, and advice given really the context of knowing a patient or a family situation. How do you balance your influence on social media, and making sure that you're giving advice that really does or is relevant for a particular situation.

GOODMAN: Really understand that with having this presence on social media comes a great amount of responsibility. And there's also this issue that you are never going to speak to everyone's situation. So a lot of the quotes that you just read, if those were being read by someone who let's say was sexually abused by a parent, was physically abused by them, I think they would make a lot of sense, right?

We would say, you did a good job maybe separating from a situation where you were going to be harmed. And if that person was being treated that way by a partner, a friend, anyone else, we would say, good job getting out of that situation. Now there are of course other families who maybe aren't speaking because of an argument, or political beliefs or values that would read that and say, wow, this seems overkill for my situation and maybe we could have worked this out by talking.

And that's the biggest issue with social media content of any kind, is that we're all going to read these posts, apply them to our situation, and then they're going to elicit some sort of response, that I do think we have to get really good as consumers of looking at certain things and saying, you know what?

Maybe this isn't for me. And the last thing I'll say is that I do find it hard to believe that anyone with a very solid relationship with their family would read or view any of this social media content and wake up one day and say, I'm going to cut my family off because I saw this post.

Could it happen? Maybe. But it seems quite unlikely to me.

BECKER: But does it minimize some of the other things, some of the questions that someone might want to ask, or the work that someone might want to do, the considerations that someone might want to take before they make such a step.

GOODMAN: It could definitely seem like it's oversimplified, right?

Because that's what social media is. It's all these like tiny blurbs that I would suggest. And I try to reiterate this as often as I can, that if you're seeing anything on social media related to your mental health and you think, huh, I think this applies to me, or this is making me think about something, that is a push to go and evaluate it further with a therapist, in a group, in an online community and dig a little deeper.

And I would suggest that no one make life decisions anywhere in their life off of just a social media post from someone that doesn't know them. It's meant to just open the door, right?

BECKER: And just very briefly, Brian mentioned the word toxic, and we've heard a lot about if someone is toxic, perhaps if a family member is toxic, they should be cut out of someone's life.

Is that enough? And how do we define toxic?

GOODMAN: Yeah. I'm very guilty of perpetuating this word cause it's in the title of my book, but I think that toxic of course is in the eye of the beholder, and we have to look at what does that mean for you? Is it causing you a lot of dysfunction? Is it making it so that it's difficult to get through your day because of your interactions with this person?

Living with them is very difficult. bad for your health in some way or being in relationship with them. And that's something that I would need someone to go deeper with a therapist on.

Part III

BECKER: Before we continue, we want to hear from more of our listeners because we got so many messages about this particular topic. Here are three listeners.

RACHEL: I am celebrating the two year anniversary of divorcing my mother. The stress from that incident caused the onset of an autoimmune disorder, which I am now actively healing. I'm also completely sober from alcohol for the first time in 11 years. No one ruins my holidays, and I get to spend them cooking for appreciative friends.

SANDY: I can now actively work through my childhood trauma because I'm no longer being exposed to the source or having to deal with being re triggered. I got pregnant. 17 and I was the black sheep then and my mother told everyone in my father's family and my mother's family to never speak to me again or she would never speak to them again.

SIERRA: There was some abuse and just really toxicity. We also heavily disagreed on A lot of moral and political things. So, um, when I met my now husband, um, it all kind of came to a head and I decided to stop contact with her. Um, unfortunately that lasted for about nine years until I felt like I was in a better place where I could set boundaries and have a more healthy relationship with her.

BECKER: Those were On Point listeners, Sierra in Austin, Texas, Sandy in Portland, Oregon, and Rachel, who's also in Austin, Texas. And I wonder Brian Briscoe, we were talking with Whitney before the break about this definition of toxic. And we heard some of our callers mentioning that as well. What do you make of how we look at toxicity for someone to decide that they are going to cut off ties with their family?

BRISCOE: Oh, it is a sensitive point in the PLACE community because many of our estranged parents have heard, I'm leaving because you're toxic.

BECKER: Let's just say PLACE, is your group parents living after child estrangement. Okay.

BRISCOE: And it is not a clinical term. It's not in the DSM-5 or any such toxic means unpleasant, jerk, any such thing.

And that's ... all well and good. There was a therapist featured in the New York Times article on this subject who said, Hey, if you're going to consider coming to work with me, take this, how toxic is your family assessment? And that's not a thing, that's no more valuable than an assessment you'd find in a grocery checkout line magazine somewhere.

And Whitney talked about the responsibility. This fellow with this toxicity assessment has a duty. People are going to think that's legitimate because of, he's the authority in the room. This is a logical fallacy, the appeal to authority, and it's undermining us. It's the prevalence of that word is causing problems.

It's really misuse of that word. I wish we could stick to clear clinical terms like the voicemail that said that I had childhood trauma. Where you assess, did you have childhood trauma? Did you do a CAPS-5 with a trained clinician? So the lines get blurred and toxic is a good example of that.

BECKER: Whitney, what do you say? Are we misusing the word toxic here?

GOODMAN: I think the problem is there's no agreement on a single definition for a lot of these things. Brian, you brought up childhood trauma. And I find that a lot of parents want to debate with me on the definition of trauma, of childhood abuse, of emotional abuse, that our definitions of these even clinical terms have really shifted so dramatically over the last several decades, that we have a lot of adults between age 20 and 40, saying this stuff happened to me.

It was toxic to me. It was abusive. It was whatever it is. And the parent is saying, Oh my gosh, you should see what I went through as a kid, that is not abuse, that is not harmful to you. And we've all entered this like disagreement of what any of these words mean. I think, when they come to adult child and parent relationships.

BECKER: But have we certainly, some counselors have said this too, and they said this in the New York Times piece, that we've lowered this threshold for trauma and does there need to be a threshold? What do you say to that? When is it just a life struggle, which is to be expected, a regular experience of life that may be difficult.

And when is it trauma and where's the line?

GOODMAN: In my opinion, none of that really even is essential to having this conversation, because we ultimately get to decide who we want to be in relationship with when we're adults. And so it's okay to even say, I don't want to have a relationship with this person because we don't get along.

And I don't particularly like spending time with them, and I know that feels very hurtful and harsh, but I think a lot of adults are reevaluating this sense of duty and obligation to spend time with people who don't treat them well or who they don't enjoy. And that's when we start feeling like we have to back this up with, they traumatized me and that's why I cannot have a relationship with them.

BECKER: So sometimes some folks may be saying that they've been traumatized because it's a way to justify not having a relationship and maybe they just don't want to have a relationship.

GOODMAN: It certainly could be. I think there is a lot more childhood trauma out there maybe than we're totally aware of.

The definition has become larger because we're learning more about adverse childhood experiences and how they impact children. We have a lot more knowledge than we did 50 years ago when we thought certain things were normal or would not impact us.

BECKER: There are, also appear to be different cultural ideas about families.

There are studies suggesting that estrangement is a step that's more often taken by young adults who are white than young adults who are of color. What role, is there a role here? Are cultural expectations different? What are you seeing, Whitney?

GOODMAN: I think culture plays a huge role. I work with a primarily Hispanic population as a therapist.

I'm in the state of Florida. And so we are often discussing how cultural norms play into maintaining relationships with family members who are being hurtful, harmful, abusive, whatever it is. And those people are often up against a lot more entrenched beliefs about the meaning of family, which can be very good beliefs, very powerful beliefs about having duty and obligation and taking care of one another. The question is always just at what cost, how is this going to impact me to continue maintaining this relationship? But I do think that we can find estrangement across many cultures. It just may not show up in the same way.

BECKER: And do you think there should not be an obligation? Do you think that folks should say, you know what? I really just don't like my parents. I don't have an obligation. I just don't want to be with them. Is that enough, Whitney?

GOODMAN: Obligation is different for everyone. I know this is such a therapist answer, but I think some people would feel obligated to care for their parents physically and maybe not have as much of an emotional relationship with them.

Others might say, I'm not gonna take care of my parents physically because they never took care of me. I think family ties are extremely important. We know that they have huge benefit to us when those relationships are good, because we also know that being in abusive or harmful relationships are bad for us across the board.

So we have to just really look at, like, our relationships. Is the obligation worth it in the end, and who's benefiting from that obligation?

BECKER: Have you ever had a situation, Whitney, where someone was saying they were thinking of perhaps cutting off ties with their family, and you listened to the situation and said, you know what, I don't think you should take that step.

It's pretty drastic, and it may have long term consequences that you might not like. Have you ever found yourself doing that?

GOODMAN: That's certainly a thought that I've had with certain cases. And in that situation, I have said, let's talk about this a little bit more. Let's look at the relationship and review the history of it, the quality of it now, because what we find, some adults, especially young adults doing is they're trying to differentiate from their family and become their own person.

And when they feel like they can't do that, when they're in contact with the family, they might take too much space or totally cut off as a way to preserve their sense of self. And so that's a time where I might want to say, you can do this in a different way that doesn't require you to make this drastic of a change.

BECKER: Brian, I wonder what some of your thoughts might be, especially in terms of the thoughts about family obligation and culture and are we redefining really, family here? We heard from some of our listeners earlier who said, I have appreciative friends now. It's easier. Are we just rethinking family?

Give us some of your reaction to what we've been talking about with Whitney and what we've heard from our listeners.

BRISCOE: You may be familiar with the term family of origin, which is basically the family under our roof when we were being raised, but we often leave out that upon entering adulthood, there's a dovetail concept, which is family of choice.

And then adulthood, you have all this autonomy. Do you choose to remain in relationship with your original family? Do you assemble a new family, et cetera? As far as obligation, I'd like to take an opportunity to point out that there's fear expressed in my support group that sometimes people leave to duck obligation.

I have people in their fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties, people in failing health who fear, who have valid fears that the child has chosen to go no contact so that they don't have to bother with caring for an ailing parent. It is a difficult adult. It is a difficult concept. It's a difficult topic to pin down.

I would say if you don't owe your parent anything, who do you owe anything then?

BECKER: Whitney, is it possible for families to reconcile after an estrangement?

GOODMAN: Oh my gosh, absolutely. And I think that's something that I want us to start talking more about, are those positive stories of reconciliation, because I have seen parents change.

I've seen adult children come around to have these conversations both in my professional work in groups and with clients. And I think it's definitely possible, just doesn't always happen as fast as we would like it to.

BECKER: And what does it take? Does it typically take a parent saying that they're going to change for that to happen?

GOODMAN: I think so. I think there has to be a recognition of not do I agree with you, but that I see your side. I see why you would feel the way that you feel. Maybe there's an apology and a change in behavior and a desire to work together. Build a new, different future together on both sides.

BECKER: Brian, have you had any contact with Rosie since she wrote you that letter cutting off contact in 2022?

BRISCOE: I've had a little bit of communication through her brother. And we try to keep him out of the middle of this. He's a sensitive soul, but circumstances do put him between us. And every communication I've sent, and I got these pre-approved, every communication I've sent, said, I remain open to talking.

Clearly, we have things to work on. I need to listen, let me know. And I've had to stop. I just ended up repeating the message, and saying nothing in return is my daughter's way of saying something, so anyway I'd say probably maybe once every six months or so. A little bit of communication through him.

BECKER: And so Whitney what do you tell parents like Brian, like what can they work, and he's a mental health clinician, what can they work on if they don't know what to work on to try to make a reconciliation possible?

GOODMAN: I think working on being receptive. When your child decides to come to you again and listening to what they have to say without any defensiveness or arguing about specific details and just working on yourself in general, how responsive you are, how activated you become and following their lead is often a big thing that I hear from adult children.

I asked my parent not to contact me, but they show up at my house or they keep texting me. And so really I'm leaning into that, like I have to take some space, because this is what's being asked of me, and I need to show that I'm being respectful of these boundaries. But I want to emphasize that I know how challenging that is for a parent.

BECKER: And Brian, in terms of the folks in your support group in place, I wonder, do they feel, or have you heard stories of reconciliation? Does it seem like it's possible?

BRISCOE: It absolutely is possible. And if I may revisit a point right quick, we do work on ourselves in our household alone. Meditation, medication, counseling.

I see a brilliant counselor, but we're behind this glass wall, and all of this change, in an effort to be the best version of ourselves is in this vacuum, there's no check in. There's no report card where we're effectively no contact. But to get back to the original question, reconciliation does happen and we're always glad for it, but it affects things. Because at least initially it results in a lot of walking on eggshells and lots of uncertainty. And the communication is profoundly affected, and you address the elephant in the bathtub.

It is awkward at best, and it is a slow process to try and heal together. I hope that perhaps the two of you can work on a protocol on both sides of this, that was begun here on On Point.