Why Do Adult Children Estrange? A Rutgers Researcher Explains with Kristina Scharp

[MUSIC] Hi, everyone. I am very excited to have my friend and colleague, Christina Sharp. On the call for today, Christina is a social professor in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University, also a director of the Family Communication and Relationships Lab. She researchers the process of marginalization and the way people cope with the major disruptions to their lives. She's over 90 publications in outlets such as the Journal of Communication, Human Communication Research, Communication Monographs, and Communication Research as well as three co-authored textbooks. I'm particularly interested in interviewing Christina because she's really published in research more on family and professional and really anybody else, so gathering attention from numerous media outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, conversation, and NPR, and just to name a few. So did I leave anything out of your intro, Christina, to that kind of cover it? I can't read anything. And the walk-through aids, I can add to it. All right, good. We almost so digging in a lot of the parents in my practice are victims of Prital alienation. And I think this is a certain amount of confusion in the media the way it's talked about between what's Pritalation alienation versus what's a strange myth. And I don't know much you, but I think that the people who research alienation have kind of done a disservice because they often conflate the two in a way that sort of alienation is kind of what you and I would think of as alienation were one parent poisons a child against the other parent kind of a level of influence. And they call a strangement sort of what I would consider to be a justifiable a strangement, you know, with a child young or old refuses contact with the parent because because the parents abusive. But but I from what I read you you agree with me that that a strangement should really be considered sort of the the rubric the general category alienation sort of a subset of that. Is that is that how you think about it as well? How do you think about that? Yeah, I guess I think of I think of like an overarching umbrella that I call family distancing. Under that umbrella, I include a strangement alienation and something called family member marginalization, which is when somebody feels like they've been pushed out of their family like the the black sheep. So right. Those kind of three different processes under a larger kind of family distancing is what I call it. That's interesting. Yeah, you've written about family members who feel caught in the middle of a strange parent adult child relationships, which is certainly something that I see a lot where a non-estering sibling may be called upon to support the parents or intervene or advocate for the parents and can you talk a little bit about which your research reveals about all of that. Sure. So it's actually it's pretty dissatisfying for everyone. So I would say like all three parties, right? So the adult child, the parents and whoever feels like they're caught in the middle. Yeah. So on one hand, we have the adult children who feel like don't try to reconcile me. Do not try to share my personal information. Yeah. They're dissatisfied. The parents are often trying to get information to see how the other child is doing. They're not, you know, maliciously set out to interfere in any way, but they're, you know, they're asking, you know, they're other kid, hey, have you talked to so and so how are they doing? Right. And then the person is stuck in the middle. One person saying, don't tell anything about me. And the other person saying, like, why can't you just share how they're doing? Right. So they end up in this position where it's a no-win situation for everyone. Right. Exactly. Yeah. And it seems like parents sometimes feel betrayed by the non-estering siblings who won't carry information or won't advocate. For them, if you've seen that in your research as well. Sure. Yeah. So parents are discussing like, I really needed support. And I'm being denied the adult children are saying, I really needed support. And I'm being denied. The support, of course, is about perception. Right. Of what, of whether someone is giving you what you want. Mm-hmm. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. So everyone feels unsupported. Yeah. No, I think that's really well said. When you research, I know that you've talked about the healthiest coping practices for parents who are targeted after divorced in the case of alienation. What have you found from your research? Yeah. So I agree that alienation is different than a strangenment. Yeah. So for alienated parents who have, like sometimes alienation is really conscious, like a parent is targeting the other parent. Sometimes it's even unconscious or just a parent's just complaining about what's going on. Either way, it can have the same impact, which is alienating the child from the parent. Right. These parents often feel extremely disenfranchised, like they really have no recourse. And it's like this ongoing and changing problem for them. So the alienation is persisting over time, but the things that are triggering it are changing constantly. So it's very hard to adapt for alienated parents. It's financially stressful. It's emotionally stressful. And so enacting resilience in response to that is tough because what's worked for you in the past, even if you can figure out what's going to work for you, it might change because the situation's always changing. Right. Exactly. Well, I think parents, you know, if you feel targeted rightly or wrongly, meaning whether the targeting is overt, covert or sort of unintentional by the other parent, it's going to have human nature to want to defend yourself and explain yourself and prove the other parent's. Wrong, but what I often tell parents is, you know, defending yourself very aggressively isn't really going to work if your child has been successfully alienated by the other parent because they're basic. It's a kind of a form of a brainwashing where they really believe that what the other parent is maintaining is true. So the more you argue with that, the more you're just going to upset your child. It is mean you have to agree with it, but ideally you find some kind of kernel of truth in it. So let's say that the child says, well, mom said you were always critical of me and the parent, you know, let's say dad's defensive think that he was. He can't just say, well, oh, did your mother say that to them, you know, to you or something like that. He's far better off saying something like, well, I haven't thought about myself that way, but maybe I have been that way and I wasn't aware of it. Can you tell me more about whatever memories you have about that or other experiences you've had not to disprove the child, but to show that you're kind of on the same page with them that you're not going to pull them into the mud. Because there's a very distressing experience for the child who's being alienated and obviously it's upsetting to the parent, but it's also, you know, the research on this is that children who've been alienated don't do as well cognitively, they don't do as well psychologically. And there's kind of long term effects, right? Yeah, and it's interesting because I think whether it's a strangement or alienation, what you're saying applies to both. Because people behave based on their perceptions of what has happened. So trying to argue with your kid about reality is often a really losing endeavor. It is because people aren't like the objective truth is somewhat irrelevant. When you believe something has happened to you, that is how you're moving through space. So trying to tell someone that what they think happened didn't happen is often not a really effective strategy. Right, exactly. No, it's a very counter effective strategy because it just makes the child feel more pulled into the middle, more anxious if they see that you're upset, if they see that you're mad at the other parent, the loyalty to the other parent is going to get triggered. That's going to make you look much less sympathetic. So the more that alienated parents can position themselves as being. It's what I call being the kind of the lighthouse on the on the beach. You're steady, you're there, you're broadcasting interest affection, compassion, you're not going to put your child in the middle. And you're going to take responsibility for what you can. That's why I think it's useful for parents to say, what's clear that I have blind spots that I wasn't aware that you experienced me that way. Can we get together and work on that in therapy? Is this something because I'm most of my parents are their parents of adult children. So if they're in conversation with them, is this something we can work on in therapy? Is this something that if we get together, if I'm doing it, can you let me know? So again, I think this sort of highlights where we are in this moment as a culture, which is where parents have to be much more responsive and responsible in terms of the way that their children are adult children in particular. Are reaching out to them and wanting to have a conversation about the past. It's not the old days. This is where I think the reason that dads are much more likely to be estranged than than mothers are. You know, if the research by Rin Rezek at Ohio State is accurate, something like 26% of fathers are currently estranged and they're 22% more likely to be estranged from their daughters. I think one of the reasons that dads often fail in this regard is because they're not really used to giving up that mantle of authority and, you know, and strength. And they're kind of like, well, this is, you know, you need to treat me with respect. I'm your father. And that ship has kind of sailed. So I think part of the value of the kind of work that you're doing, and I'm doing, which is trying to teach parents this much more 21st century method of communication, which is much more egalitarian and psychological and sensitive and empathic, is really a new language. And I'm curious if you're finding that in your research as well. I haven't done a tremendous amount of research on reconciliation. So I'll be frank about that. But I do think that research, generally on conflict, is that you're right that there is a sense of, in order to move through conflict, you have to acknowledge that there's some sort of problem. Yeah. And you have to take ownership for the part of it that's yours. So you don't have to take ownership for everything. Right. Sometimes in a conflict, you have contributed something. Yeah. And so being able to acknowledge, okay, I, I, I, I see this issue. And this is how I've contributed to it. I think is really important in moving through the conflict process. And that's what the research on conflict would certainly agree with the strategies that I think you're trying to teach parents. Right. Yeah. What I have until parents, as soon as you've made your child feel defensive or misunderstood and game over, you, you completely lost your audience. So starting with empathy. And if you don't have an understanding, say that it's, I have blind spots that I don't have a better understanding or that I wasn't aware that it, that I hurt you in that way. But I, but I'm really sorry that if, if that's where my, how my behavior impacted you. Because that's the one thing that's going to help the adult child feel like you're caring about their perspective and you're not just being defensive. And it's going to reduce their, their defensiveness. So, um, yeah. I think that, um, a really difficult thing is deciding what's most important to you is what's most important to you, reconnecting with your kid or is what's most important to you being right. Right. Exactly. And oftentimes those two things can be at odds. Right. Absolutely. And what often I find with parents is, you know, I encourage parents to write what I call a letter of a man's where they take responsibility where they find the colonel if not the bush, love tooth and the child's complaints, when they don't explain, they don't offend. And so a lot of parents will say, well, I'm not going to grovel, you know, to my, to my child. I'm not going to humiliate myself. And I say it's really much more about humility than humiliation. You know, we all make mistakes as parents. And the same way that our adult children are going to make mistakes with their children. So not being able to say, well, clearly I had some blind spots or clearly I did things that were hurtful to you, you know, in AA, there's the fourth step that says you make a fearless and honest searching moral inventory of your real and character flaws, which I think is such a useful framework because every parent has character flaws, you know, whether they were in painsture or critical or intrusive or anxious or, you know, whatever. And so acting like you are a perfect parent, first of all, won't be very persuasive. To your child, but also, well, isn't really very honest. So approaching the situation with humility is much more likely to get your child's attention and sympathy and interest than just defending yourself or blaming your child or acting, you know, arrogant about it. Yeah, I'm doing a study right now, actually, and it's really interesting. We're looking at kind of different ideologies in the culture that people call upon to make sense of what's going on. And one of them is I did the best I could. Right. And certainly an ideology that exists out in the world. And the counter to that what we're hearing is trying isn't good enough. And so it's really, it's tough, right? Because people are saying, well, I did, I did either the best I could or I did better than my parents did. Right. And the response people are getting is that doesn't mean you didn't do bad things. Right. And so I think I think that there certainly a really valid point to both of those different ideas, right? Right. You can simultaneously have worked really hard and still falling short in particular areas. And that's tough, right? Yeah, right. Because I think as parents, everyone's trying to do their best. Right. No, exactly. I think it's such an important point. And particularly for parents who are really traumatized and didn't beat their kids or didn't emotionally, from their perspective, didn't emotionally abuse them. And then there's an adult child because of therapy or something that they've read or just their own personal reflection, say, well, you emotionally abused me. You harmed me. You neglected me and the parents like the hell, you know, if you want to know what a harmful abusive child it was like you should have met my father or whatever. But again, it's not going to be very persuasive to the child who feels like you really harmed or hurt them. And I think part of it so confusing for parents and adult children at this moment is that younger generations are much more likely to be in therapy, than much more likely to be exposed to the ideas of what constitutes harm, abuse, neglect, and trauma. There was Nick Haslin's concept creep study in 2016, which showed that in the past three decades leading up to 2016, we've enormously lowered the threshold for what we consider to be harmful, abuse of traumatizing and neglectful behavior. And as a result of that, the generations are often talking past each other. So the younger generations are things that they're calling emotional abuse. You know, parents are going, that's just normal conflict. You know, you're a snowflake. You know, pull yourself out by your big boy pants or whatever, which of course is not going to be a very inviting response to the adult child. And so the adult child at this point, they have the freedom to walk. They're not obligated to stay and then involved in the way that many cultures they are. And in many ways, our society obligated adult children to stay involved as well up until, you know, probably beginning of the 1970s and continuing into the present. So what that's meant is that parents have to be much more responsive and attentive and communicative. And I'm just curious what, how that reflects with your research or observations or that kind of thing. Yeah, I think that's true. And I think that even if children aren't able to distance themselves physically while they're dependent on their parents, it doesn't mean that once they are out in the world and autonomous adults, that somehow things are going to get better. So people, for my research, distance themselves to the extent that they're able while they're usually children, right? So they might reduce things like the quality of the conversations that they're having. But then later on, when they are able to work and have a job or they, you know, are off to college, then they are able to accomplish much more meaningful distance across a lot of different categories, not just this kind of communication quality or role-rested and so I think that I think sometimes parents feel shocked that, you know, my child went off to college and then they never talked to me again. But oftentimes those problems were brewing long before. Right. Wasn't just that they went off to college. Right, exactly. Because I'm just kind of a death by a thousand cuts that there have been a series of hurt feelings from the other part of the adult child that either they've tried to talk to the parent about when they were growing up or they're just conflict avoid and didn't have the capacity to talk to the parent about it. And so when they do have the freedom to not be in contact, they take advantage of that. Would you think that cell phone use has sort of complicates all this? Because, you know, I mean, I know when I, you know, I'm a boomer so when I moved from Dayton, Ohio to San Francisco in my early 20s, it wasn't like I was calling my parents every day or sending them pictures or, you know, I took about two weeks to come out here and, you know, maybe I called them collect when I got out here. But, you know, but at this point, a parent can reach a child anywhere in the world within seconds and then feel hurt or upset if they don't respond. And there's a part of me that just feels like a certain percentage of a strangeness happened because of the way that parents can be much more surveilling and intrusive and in meshed in ways that other generations couldn't because the technology didn't exist. Wow, that's probably true. I don't have any research on that. So media technology definitely has created affordances and obstacles. So in some ways, technology has helped people and people. Right. Right. So I think that technology definitely is one of those things that cuts both ways. Yeah. I completely agree. Yeah. And the positive side, if you're in contact with your child, you can see pictures of grandchildren and stay close. And, you know, the Pew Research Center said that in general, more parents feel like they were closer to their adult children than they believe their parents felt to them at a similar age. So it's kind of a good news. Bad news, the way that parents have become more surveilling in the past three or four decades, more anxious, more guilt-ridden because they're trying to get their children up through the kind of narrow bottleneck into a healthy adult watch. The good news is that helicopter parenting, as far as I can read the research, is generally shown to have positive effects. The downside, though, is that some kids just get too much of their parents. to work with at least two, a stranger to children who said, "I just don't know any other way to get my mother's voice out of my head than to be estranged." And it wasn't like a critical hospital condemning voice. It was just an anxious, guilty, intrusive voice. And so I think there are certain personages of a strange mess that happened today, in part because kids just can't organically separate from their parents. And so it's sort of like just back the hell out, you know. Yeah, helicopter parenting is tricky because on, you're right. On some measures, the kids are doing better. So like a helicopter parent often I think, I'm almost positive this is true. Like their kids have lower like unintended pregnancies or like drug use or STI contraction. But alternatively they have, they have different problems, right? Uh-huh. Do they tend to be more anxious and depressed and dependent or what are the different problems, do you know? I don't recall them. You know, not off the top of my head, but I do know, I've done like one study on helicopter parenting. There are some negative outcomes. So again, it's tricky. Like there's not, I think that probably one of the most frustrating things that happens to me, and it probably happens to you quite a bit too, is people always ask me for lists. Like what's your top three or top five? Other media loves it. Regulations for this or that. And the answer is families are different, and it's very difficult to say this is going to work for you and everyone else. That's a little bit. So giving advice to one person I think is really different than giving advice across the board, because a strange man and family distancing happens for so many different reasons, what a person does in response can look really different. Absolutely. And whether someone's open to a reconciliation, often is really very depending on why they're estranged in the first place. And so it's this, it's this difficult thing when people reach out to me from the media and say, I need, you know, what are your top tips for X, Y, and Z? Right. That's just irresponsible, because what's going to be good for one person is not necessarily going to be good for somebody else. No, absolutely. Now 100% agree that kind of the top five things to do. I mean, what I happen to tell strange parents is there's a couple of things you can do if your child is not talking to you. One is you can write a really good immense letter. Secondly, you can do a follow-up, maybe six to eight weeks later, just to see if they had any questions or reactions to it. But if your child is not responding at all to that, and they're a full-fledged adult, and they've said they want to be no contact, there isn't really-- there aren't five other things that you can do or should do. There's like 20 things you can do that's going to make things worse. Right? You can show up on their doorstep. You know, you can write them and tell them how miserable you are. You can try to manipulate them. You can get other family to go after them. You can criticize them. You can blame them. You can blame the other parents. You can blame their therapist. You can blame their spouse. All those things are going to make your situation worse. One or two things you can do is reach out. But it's really dependent on whether or not that adult child is in a place where they want to reconcile. And so I mean, a question I get, which I bet you get as well, a lot is what point should somebody cut off a parent? And what I'm telling journalists these days is, well, I'm happy to answer that. But first, we have to accept the fact that in every a strange way, even what you and I might consider to be a justifiable a strange way, it's still a cataclysmic of that in their family system. Right? Typically grandchildren get cut off from grandparents. Siblings get divided. Some pro-estrangement, you know, after the parents, some against it. Answer uncles might step into the parental role. Cousins may get cut off from contact younger cousins. So it's a cataclysmic event. And so I think in a highly individualistic society, like hours, I'm just reinforcing your point that it's giving overly simplistic advice is actually, it's ethically irresponsible to do that. And it's tough because people feel so desperate and justifiably so, you know? So people just want anything. Right. They do. And they will take whatever advice is out there. So I agree. Like, it's really tough when people don't have and done research. And they're like, well, this is what works for me. Right. Exactly. You're like, oh! Well, I see some of that with the Instagram influencers where they're like, you know, of your parents doing this, then that means that they're a narcissist. Or if you have these issues, more problematic. If you have these issues as an adult, it means you have this kind of a parent. It's like, maybe it means you have these kind of issues as a parent, but look at Gen Z, you know, those born between 1995 and 2012, roughly. I mean, they have the highest rates of anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, and actual suicide. And any other generation before them, is that because parents have in that generation become much more toxic and traumatizing and difficult, and neglectful? No, arguably, people who have been parenting for the past three or four decades are the most educated, wealthy, psychological, communicative, than any other generation before them. That doesn't mean that within that, there weren't some sets of traumatizing people. But this is a cohort effect, meaning you know, it's a core, meaning it's a generational effect, not a parental effect, but a lot of those kids are gonna end up in therapy with a so-called trauma and form therapist who assumes every problem in adulthood has a traumatizing neglectful parent in the past. And if they, you know, runs some Instagram influencer site, or they're reading some book, you know, that sort of does this reverse engineering, then they're gonna feel green-let into an estrangement in a way that's gonna be not only good, bad for them, but bad for the parent. - I think that's absolutely possible and likely happening. I also think on the other side though, there, because there's more people talking about abuse, people who might have felt like, no, like, oh, I'm the only one, or realized ashamed, or people who would have stayed in really negative situations are more emboldened to distance themselves from something that was bad. So I do think that there's pros and cons, right? That wall-in-one-hand people could be like, oh my gosh, I saw this on TikTok and now I'm, you know, no contact, but I also think people could say, I didn't realize there was other people, and there is an alternative for me. - Right, 100% agree. Yeah, I think it's a good news, bad news moment that people do have the kind of social power and social legitimization to, in relationships with people who are really destructive to their psychological and sometimes even, you know, dangerous to them physically. So it isn't that estrangements are never justified. I just think that this, in giving, in creating the permission to do it, I think it creates a lot of gray area. I think it's a culture we're confused about with the differences between conflict and abuses. I think a lot of things that are sort of normal, family conflicts get labeled and mislabeled as abuse. And I think therapy and therapist, I don't know if you're familiar with Alison Pugh's research, she's a sociologist, she wrote the book, The Tumbleweed Society, and she calls therapist detachment brokers. And her book is talking about, you know, how in this era where we don't really know sort of what our obligations are to others, therapists are sort of serving the role of helping people to feel, oh, it's okay, you know, you don't, you don't have to feel obligated to be in contact with your parent or it's been codependent or it's because you were perennified. And again, there's great utility in that in being able to sort of be liberated from the guilt and shame of prior generations that felt tied to truly destructive people, but also in doing so, we're giving a lot of power to therapists to kind of be these arbiters or these actions that have long term destructive consequences. - Sure, yeah, I would say it's a really tension-filled thing when the meaning of something changes over time, right? So the meaning of what a family is is evolving. - Right, exactly. - Anytime something so foundational, it's meaning changes, you're gonna have like this pendulum, right? Swinging back and forth. And so it's hard to evaluate it as being good or bad. It's more like this kind of ambivalent reality. - Right. - That meanings are changing and there are consequences when meanings change. - Absolutely, yeah, we live in the era of what the Polish sociologist, Zygman Bowman called liquid culture, where the moral framework said of animated generations from millennia have completely dissolved. The historian Stephanie Kuntz said marriage changed more in the past three decades than it did in the prior 3000 years. And what she means by that is in the journey we changed from kind of very clearly defined roles of what constitutes good parenting or being a good child to institutional structures that support it, church, gender, family, marriage, neighborhood, et cetera. All that's given to us. way it's changed from what's matters to me as a person, what's going to be in line with my personal development, my personal happiness, my identity, my personal growth. And so it's a kind of a liquid culture in that everything becomes very sort of personally constituted, which again it has, there's upsides and there's downsides to it. I think that one of the downsides is that family can workable family can get viewed as being really destructive and toxic and bad in ways that might cause an adult child to turn away from a parent who's much more workable than the child might believe them to be. And in part because they've been guided by university. So like as a communication professor, like to me a lot of it sometimes can be the problem that people can't do conflict well. Right. 100% agree. Like people are terrible at engaging in constructive conflict. But conflicts can be a positive opportunity for change if people could do it well. But the average person is not trained to engage in conflict well, emotions make it really difficult to have constructive conflict. And you know people always say like, oh, you have a PhD in communication and I've been communicating all my life. Like, why did you need to go to school for that? I think how are your arguments going really well? Right. No, probably not. Communication is really hard and conflict is really difficult. And although it's possible to have constructive conflict, the average person is not trained in how to do that. And people repeat patterns over and over and over again, even if they're not working. Yeah. Now I think that's so well said and so so important, particularly for this moment because parents are really being called upon to communicate and conflict have conflict resolution skills that nobody taught them. And so their adult children are coming to them and saying, look, here's the terms of the relationship. You have to take responsibility for the ways that you hurt me, abused me, traumatized me in the past and be able to talk about it and empathize with me and take responsibility for parents who just weren't raised with that that vocabulary and that skill set. And so it's sort of tragic because it sort of reminds me to do a lot of work with couples that a lot of marriages that were on the verge of falling apart were salvageable because the people just didn't have the skills. And the same is true for so many parents. They would be able to reconcile. And if their adult child's open to it and not all are, but if they are and the parent can be taught the skills, then a reconciliation is possible. But if the parent doesn't have the skills or has kind of a my way or the highway perspective, they're never going to reconcile. But you're right, good, good communication skills. It's not as easy as it sounds or is an art to it. And I think that what you were saying before really resonated with me in a study that I'm doing, which is actually parents who are directing their children because of different ideological beliefs, right? I think it goes both ways. People have very set ideas about how things should be. And it's over it over powers, right? Their desire to be in a relationship with one another. And this goes both ways. It goes from parents to kids and kids to parents. And so we see it in both ways that it's usually for different reasons. I often find that when children are saying they've been rejected, it's more on ideological lines. As opposed to children who are saying that they distance themselves or their parents, usually they're talking about abuse. So I think the catalysts are different. But people's desires to stay firm in their beliefs and their individuality about how the world should be. I think both ways, are facilitating distance between people. 100% agree. Yeah, on the parents side, you know, all most of the parents by the time they reach me, they're desperate for help and they'll kind of do whatever I recommend. But some are like, no, I'm not going to apologize. I didn't do anything wrong or, you know, I'm not going to, I'm not going to humiliate myself that way. Or they need to apologize to me. You know, if I'm going to apologize to them, they need to apologize to me, which is just it's just the wrong, it's the wrong idea. And also to your point, yeah, sometimes people, parents will do the strangling because of religious differences. Or they can't tolerate their child wanting to transition or have, or being gender non-binary or being gay or lesbian. Or they don't like the person that their, their child married and they refuse to kind of just move towards accepting of that. Or they're still remain so critical of their ex. And that's also toxic to the, to the child. So sometimes it is the parent either doing the rejecting or being refusing to do the kind of basic things that parents have to do if they want to have a reconciliation, I think it's really common. I mean, how common it, I think it's more common that the adult child is doing this, strangling. But I know, I'm uncommon that the parent might initiate an strangling for the reasons that that we're just talking about, you know. And I was reading in one of your, one of your articles that you're talking about, a strange bit being on a continuum, not a binary, which I totally agree about, agree with. And you talked about the eight dimensions, which I'm sure you can just remember off the top of your head. I could certainly try with, let's see. So one of them is communication quantity. Do I talk to you? How much do I talk to you? And that certainly varies, right? Some people can, you know, see someone at a wedding and say hello. So people are like, I'm never speaking to this person again. Some people live in the same household. It depends on how old they are, live in the same town, run into them all the time. Communication quality has to do with, do I talk to you about meaningful things? Or am I talking to you about the weather? Yeah. Right. And a relationship really isn't just how much we talk, but the meaningful connections we can make while we're talking. So it's kind of this both. Yeah, I think it's a really good point that somebody might not be formally estranged in terms of being a formal cut off, no contact, but it might be a much more superficial relationship because they don't trust either the parent or the adult child to talk about more substance to things. So anyway, go ahead. I interrupted you. There's no, no, it's fine. It's there's physical distance. I think that's a really common one. I mean, you know, I moved away. There's what I call emotional presence or absence. Do I feel like, like when you talk about my parent, do I have a lot of feelings about this? Or am I like, who is this person? Right. And then when I have this emotion is a good or bad? Uh-huh. Yeah. So sometimes it's very negative. Sometimes it's more ambivalent. I feel simultaneously, positively and negatively. Yeah. And that's kind of variance too for folks. What is role reciprocity? Are we engaging in the behaviors that you would expect a parent to do and a child to do? Right. So we have different expectations for parents and children. Are we are we doing any of them? And that kind of varies across a continuum. And then legal action. So have I taken some sort of like formal, like emancipation? Have I changed my will? Have I changed my durable power of attorney? Have I changed my name? So there are different kind of things that are more like state regulated or recognized? Yeah. And then do I want to be in a family with you? And that's also on a continuum and it changes over time. So, um, especially like, for example, with a case like a parent had a substance abuse problem. Uh-huh. While this is going on, the child might say like, 10 out of 10, I do not want to have a relationship with you. But over time, maybe they went to rehab. They got some help and that kind of moves, right? And so that's kind of why I talk about a strange being along a continuum because of the different reasons why people want distance. Their strategies and distancing will be different. Yeah. Yeah. Now, I think it's hugely important and really, really well said. And that was impressive. You named all H as off-topian. Probably because you've taught this a hundred times, right? It was my doctoral dissertation. So, you know, you're steeped in it for every year. And I think I think those things are all really important. And I don't, I don't think about that enough. And I think all of those kind of distinctions are really, really useful because within each category and each dimension, there's sort of interventions kind of on the good side and the bad side and different ways to think about it and different ways for people to strategize around it and how to respond and not to respond and what the underlying issues may be. So, I think it's that's super useful. I'm really, really happy to hear you talk about that. Well, so speaking of pathways to a strange man, I know in the, you know, for me, one of the complaints about the way a strange man gets talked about in the media is that typically, you see the through-first person essays or memoirs, it's usually, you know, truly abusive parents. And so, there's this kind of a cultural prejudice, I would argue, that only really abusive parents are getting estranged. And certainly, you know, it's a real thing. There are traumatizing, abuseful and neglectful parents out there who are getting estranged and not very surprisingly. So, both there's also other pathways which don't get talked about in, [BLANK_AUDIO] We've talked about alienation, but also divorce in my research was a huge cause, you know, because of not only alienation, but a child may independently side with one parent over the other. You know, the research on grade divorce shows that in general grade divorce, when it's the children are grown, kids in general, a much more light, well, you know that, but the audience might not. It wins a much more likely to have life with mom over a dad when parents remarried. That can be a big risk of divorce, particularly for fathers, but just the disloyalty that a kid may feel. So divorce is huge. I think therapy and therapist kind of an educated, poorly trained therapist who are diagnosing parents who aren't there can be a cause. Mental illness in the parents certainly, but also mental illness in the adult child. The role of troublesome or troubled son and large daughter in law can also be a very common pathway to a strange way. And I'm just curious, does that score with your research or if you looked at these different dimensions or how do you think about all that? So when I talk to adult children, and typically that's who I talk to as adult children, there's the most common reasons I hear are abuse, neglect, substance abuse issues, mental health issues, and ideological differences. But I think that what you're saying, like it's so interesting because on one hand why this is happening is so important. And on the other hand, it's not important at all because if you think, regardless of what is true, if you think that any of these things have happened to you, that's how you're going to react. Right. I agree. So whether it is like what the average person would consider abuse or not abuse, that person feels like they've been wronged in such a way that they're willing to like defy the norms that we have in our culture that a family is forever, which is a lot. So that threshold to me is really high because who wants to go around in the world without a family? I don't think anyone would voluntarily be like, you know, it sounds really good, not having a family. So for that person, whatever happened is enough that they were willing to cross the line that tells you that you should be with your family forever and you can't get away. And there's a lot of messages out in the world that say that, right? We have like depictions of this and like every teen drama you've ever seen. And like even like if you just go to a drug store, there's like sayings like little plaques right about. Right. Right. Mom and family is. Yeah. And so on one hand, like someone has felt it, like it was enough to do it. To say, I don't believe that anymore. And I think that that's both really hard for parents to understand, but why they should take it seriously is because for that kid, they were willing to say, I am ready to face the stigma of telling people or not, right? Or not having a place to go for Thanksgiving, not having a place to go for the holidays. Like they're willing to assume those costs, which are often super high. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think there's two levels of this discussion. One is sort of the cultural level, which is, which is that there are many pathways to a strange man and that, you know, somebody who's either mentally ill or is being misdirected by therapist or is being kind of influenced by a powerful spouse or by, in the case of alienation, that reassignment isn't justified in terms of, you know, if we're looking at sort of the true causal factors, you know, that, that some of the arrangements, the adult child's narrative is actually their conclusions about why they have the issues that they do. Let's say somebody who's concluding that they have depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, suicidal ideation because of the parents abuse as opposed to their growing up in a, you know, Gen Z cohort, for example. So I think at the cultural level, it's important that we make these distinctions. And I'm not saying that you would even disagree with that. But 100% agree with you that if the communication, strategic level, parents are never going to get anywhere trying to, you know, blame somebody's therapist or the ex husband or wife, you know, or the son-in-law or daughter-in-law or the mental illness or any of those things that, that I think the point that you're making is so key that you have to start, if you're, you know, speaking to the parent, you have to start with where your child is right now. Right now they're saying they felt like you abused them or harmed them or neglected them or you gaslight them or you crush their boundaries or you're the cause of the reasons that they have the issues that they do. You're never going to persuade them otherwise. Now, ever they arrive there, this is what they believe and you have to start with where they are, not where you are. If they can start with where you are, then it'd be a very simple conversation, right? You just, they'll be able to say, "Oh, I was so wrong, you know, thank you for screening me out." But it just never works that way. You have to start with where they are and you have to, you know, radically accept that their view is going to be very different and you have to have humility that your view may be wrong and you have to be open to re, you know, rethinking your perspective. So, that's horrible. You know, from a perspective. Yeah, exactly. It feels like insults on top of injury. Like, my kid already won't talk to me and now you're telling me I have to go tell them that they were right. Right. You know, I do have a lot of compassion for parents because they often have no idea why their child has a strange to themselves. It's like bewildering. It's really emotionally traumatizing for them. It is. And then on top of it, they have to like put all of their explanations away. Yeah. Exactly. Which is absolutely not what we want to do when we feel that someone has accused us of something that we don't believe is true. Right. Well, particularly as parents, I mean, parents are the one value we all parents hold the most dear and close to their hearts and to be told, you hurt me, you traumatized me, you neglected me. You're the reason I don't want to have a relationship with you is so horrifying to every parent. It's not surprisingly react defensively and poorly, but it's also the way that they react is also going to be the way that's going to keep their child distant from them rather than wanting to move towards them. But yeah, it is a very hard thing for parents to really know how to navigate and manage and respond productively to. I want to feel for them. I do. No, it's awful. But I want to circle back a little bit on the idea that because all of them here in the media that nobody does this slightly. I mean, I agree with that on the one hand. On the other hand, I don't think we talk enough about sort of the ways that a strange man can be tied to a kind of an identity around, you know, being more assertive and strong and the like. And so, you know, the thing I see the most from letters from a strange adult children is "Well, I'm protecting my mental health." Or if it's a man, it's usually "Well, I'm protecting my family." And so I think that a strange man, I mean, I don't think most people approach it lightly. And I think that for the parents, it's all downside, right? It's all shame, neglect, hurt, feeling mischaracterized, misunderstood, sadness, fear. For the adult child, there are feelings of guilt and shame, for sure. But it's also tied to very powerful American narratives of individuality, individualization, separation, autonomy, personal growth, personal identity, you know, associating yourself with the whole community of people who are taking this at a time when people are desperate for community and we feel very, you know, very disaffected as a culture. So I think for the adult child, there is a lot of upside. That isn't to say that it's not a painful or even from perhaps the majority of heart-wrenching experience. But I think they are insulated from a certain kind of torment that parents aren't insulated from and that there is a certain kind of an identitarian upside that I don't think it's talked about enough. But what do you think about all that? I think two things. One is I am completely not surprised that individualism is the dominant idea that is being, that's the only thing an estranged person can hold on to because the alternative right is community and family is the marker of this community. So the only way I can differentiate myself from like an ideology of community is to embrace individualism. So that is not at all surprising that that is all you're going to hear, right? That's kind of the dialectical tension person. that would compete. - Yeah. - So that makes it more - The engine of the, the strankment is gonna be through the language of individuation. Yeah. - Yeah. Like, it has to be, right? 'Cause for, for what they're trying to do, right? So that makes, I completely agree that, that is probably all you're hearing, to some extent is some sort of variation of individualism. And because we live in an individualistic society, where you have to tie yourself to an idea that is like quasi-acceptable from society. - Right. - Yeah. - Individualism, I think, is the only one that makes any sort of sense. - Right. - For people trying to do this. So that completely makes sense to me. I think another thing that we haven't talked about is like, for some people, this is really easy. Because their parent wants nothing to do with that. (laughs) - Well, that's true, too, yeah. - Sometimes distant family distance is mutual. - Right. - Or sometimes you have really bad parents. - Right, overjoy. - You've done really bad things. And so I think for both of us, both of us have, no fault of our own, a bias in who comes to talk to us. - Right, for sure. - Right, so we have, like, but I do think that it's good to acknowledge that there are a pool of people on both sides, right? - Yeah. - Where you're really bad. And they're not gonna come talk to us. They don't wanna, you know, let me tell you about the crimes I have committed against my child, they're not coming. And likewise, the people who come talk to me are gonna be like, let me tell you how my therapist is currently manipulating me. (laughs) - Right, exactly. - They're also not coming to talk to me. So I think it is good to point out that, like, both of our populations are self-selecting. So of course, what we're hearing, to some extent, it are the stories that we're hearing. - Right, yeah, I'm sure that's true. Yeah, you know what I mean? - But I always try to remind myself that, like, like people who are like, no, I just did this 'cause I saw this on TikTok. They're not the ones who are volunteering for my studies. - Right, right, right. - 'Cause they probably also know that that's probably not very good for them. But that's like not a good look. Finalaneously, like, the parent who, you know, beat their child isn't gonna be like, "Josh, why?" How do they like that? That's really not, you know? (laughs) - I do see some of those parents, but I'd probably write that there's a certain kind of self-selection bias to, you know, on both of our populations that we study. And yeah, yeah. Which the few more questions, so, you've done so much research. Did anything in your research surprise you about often people feel relief alongside grief after creating distance in their experiments? - So I would say that ambivalence is like the number one marker of the extension experience. - Yeah. - People simultaneously feel opposite, relieved and sad, happy and angry. Like, there's so many conflicting things. And I think that research is, the methods of research kind of make it seem like some people think this and some people think that. And I actually came up with a research method based on my instrument research, 'cause what I was finding is no. Like, how am I gonna show people that it's not this group feels this way and this group feels that way? - Yeah. - And this group simultaneously feels both ways. And it is very conflicting. And so I did a study during the pandemic. And a strange adult children are saying, "I simultaneously was relieved my parent didn't reach out "and furious my parent didn't reach out." - Oh, that's so interesting. Yeah. - So it's a very loose, loose endeavor for parents. - It is, yeah. - Either way, they're in trouble. - Right, yeah. When I see that often, I'll see a adult children say, "Well, if my kid ever did this, I parked myself "out on their front porch." And I'm like, "Really?" 'Cause I think your parent, if your parent tried that, you'd call the police, 'cause that's typically what happens. Right? - Yeah. - But I think the issue of an ambulance is really important, 'cause one of my theories about it is that that in some ways, the stringent so we'd reconcile the ambulance. I mean, this is a little contrary to what you're saying, but sometimes parents will say, "Well, why is this rewriting of history?" You're like, just a year before I got best mom ever on a Mother's Day card, and now I'm getting what a terrible crappy mother I was and why I'm the reason for all of her failures in life. And to me, to the extent that that can be true, it seems like that can be a way to resolve the ambulance to a kind of more of a unipolar position, right? Instead of saying, "Well, I love my mom, "she's great in this way, but I hate my mom "cause she's this way." It's kind of like, "No, my mom just basically sucks." And hindsight, I'm kind of like remembering all the bad things that she did, and it sort of gets resolved in that sort of a way. It sounds like your research shows the opposite of that, but I'm just wondering if part of the engine of a stringent for some people may be an attempt because even Gepelomer's research shows the experience of an ambulance is a very immersive. People don't like feeling that kind of constant turmoil between the loving and the hateful, aggressive, negative feeling. So I think for some, it's a way to sort of resolve that, but what do you think of that idea? - I think it's both. So what I see on my research is that the ambivalence is driving what I call chaotic disassociation. It is at this on, again, off, again, relationship that people are going, ebbing and flowing, it is probably extremely confusing. Both parties. - Both parties, yeah. - Yeah. - 'Cause I imagine in your practice, it's rare for people to say they cut me off and then we never spoke again. There is more of an on-again, off-again. And then sometimes people are able to find like an equal, like the adult child finds an equilibrium that they're able to maintain. So you ask me the most surprising thing about my research and it's this, is that accomplishing distance is not the hardest part. It's maintaining it. - That's interesting. - The maintaining of the distance is very hard for people. Because we don't live in a culture that really likes this. So we do try again. A lot of times people really do want to have a relationship with their family. So they do, they enter into this on-again, off-again relationship until they're able to maintain what they think are good boundaries for them. And oftentimes the way they maintain that is by staying angry, for example. - Mm-hmm. - Or kind of engaging in that kind of polarizing stance that you're talking about. - Yeah. - So I think it is both. So what's happening for some people is I have all this ambivalence. I'm in this on-again, off-again relationship. That is untenable for me. So I have to plant myself somewhere. - Yeah, that's interesting. That seems like a good, a useful way to frame it. That anger serves as a kind of a defense against the ambivalence to sort of not be sort of seduced back into a relationship that they for whatever reason feel is good for them. So kind of resurfacing the memories, the complaints, et cetera. And that's why when I tell parents that, if you've written a good immensely letter and you've done a follow-up to stop completely, because sometimes even more benign outreach from the part of the parent can still be triggering. And then they cause the adult child to have to sort of remind themselves in just the way that you're describing. So I think that's a really useful, really useful framework that you've just described. All right, well, great question. This is so useful. I think it's gonna be really useful for the parents and my practice who are kind of trying desperately to understand kind of what it looks like from the adult child's perspective. Because I think so many of them are completely confused. And I think your research and your way that you think about these things and the emphasis on communication is all super useful. Did we, was there anything that we didn't talk about that you feel like you want to highlight before we stop for today? Just trying to just so painful for everyone. - Yeah. - Like it really, you know, families or systems, it's painful for everybody. And I think that they're, like there's not a lot of, because it's so stressful, right? - Right. - That it's very hard to be empathetic to the people from all sides, right? Whether you're a adult child, a parent, an immediate family member is very hard to have empathy for the other people in that kind of system. - Yeah. - Because it's so traumatizing to you. - Yeah. - Right. - And so I am unsurprised that it is driving so many people to therapy because it's very hard to not only understand what's happening to you, but then that extra step of trying to have empathy for the other people, it seems like beyond what people feel they're capable of. It's really hard. And I think from everybody's perspective. - Yeah. No, I think that's really true. And that's why I always tell parents to tell their non-estrange siblings or family members to have a compassionate view of the estranging adult child to assume that they have good reasons for it, even if they're contrary to what the parent feels like they should be doing, that they should lead with, with empathy and compassion for that adult child. And it's, prison was good parenting, but it's also good modeling, a the adult child, is gonna come back into the family, that they're gonna come back into a family that's sort of more sympathetic to them, that hostile to them. So that seems like a good note to end on. Do you wanna say anything about how to reach you? Would you wanna be reached? I know you're a professor. Are you promoting a book or anything at this point, Christina? (laughing) - I have some books that are not on this changement, you know, I still have not gotten around to writing one. I've been researching this for so long. - I know, you'd be the perfect person to do it. - And I haven't written a book yet. I feel like my discipline is very article, journal article focus. So I haven't done it yet, but if people wanna reach out to me, my information certainly, they can look me up at my university and. - Yeah, Christine is at records and I'll put it in the show notes as well, after we hang out, but yeah. I guess they will let me see. - Thanks for having me here. - Yeah, I'm so happy to see you. - Yeah, you as well, so we'll be attached. - And if you found this helpful, please follow the podcast and we've a review. It helps other people find the show who could benefit from it. If you wanna learn more about my work, you can visit me at www.DrJoshuaColman.com. That is drjoshuaacolmean.com or subscribe to my substack Family Troubles. I hope to see you in one of those places soon. Take care.