--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram.
--:-- Noel King: And I'm Noel King.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today, we're talking about family estrangement. Writer Emi Nietfeld says she felt relief when she cut her mom out of her life.
--:-- Emi Nietfeld: The holidays are basically here. It's the happiest time of the year for some, and for others, the opposite. Like for me, after Halloween, it's literally downhill. I picked up a snow globe the other day and just wanted to cry. Nobody wants to go home and see their Republican family members.
--:-- Noel King: There's an increasingly popular option for all the people who don't love seeing their parents during the holidays or any other time of the year. You can peace out.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for Today Explained comes from Adio. Adio is an AI-native customer relationship management platform that Adio says is built for the next era of companies.
--:-- Noel King: A powerful data structure adapts to your business model, syncs in all your contacts in minutes, and enriches your business with actionable data.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Adio says it also allows you to create those email sequences, those real-time reports, those powerful automations, which they claim can help you build what matters most, your company.
--:-- Noel King: You can go to adio.com slash todayexplained to get 15% off your first year. That's A-T-T-I-O dot com slash todayexplained.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Explained Emmy Neatfeld is estranged from her mother. We asked her how she described that absence in her life, and we were rather surprised by her answer.
--:-- Emi Nietfeld: Joyful. It feels like a huge relief has been lifted off of me.
--:-- Noel King: Tell us how come.
--:-- Emi Nietfeld: I love my mom. My mom loves or loved me. But throughout my whole adolescence, there was so much fighting. There was so much feeling blamed. So much of trying to navigate like her own issues with with trying to keep myself sane.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That when I eventually made the top decision to cut ties, I expected that my whole life would fall apart, that I would just miss her all day, every day.
--:-- Noel King: And you were totally shocked to find out that actually my life has been so much better since I made that decision.
--:-- Emi Nietfeld: When I was about 11, my parents' divorce was finalized and my mom won custody. and she had a problem with compulsive shopping and hoarding and it got really intense after the divorce.
--:-- Noel King: And that was also when my other parent moved across the country and we never had contact really since then.
--:-- Emi Nietfeld: And so my mom was all that I had, but she could not tell that she had a problem. And so when I was in middle school, She brought me to these therapists and psychiatrists and really pointed the blame at me and said, okay, Emmy is disorganized. Emmy is chronically late.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think she has ADHD. And I was sent for medication. I took Adderall. I took Ritalin. I took Prozac, Zoloft, antidepressants, antipsychotics, a dozen drugs in two years.
--:-- Noel King: And it only got worse from there. I spent nine months in residential treatment when I was 14. I spent time in foster care. I got out of foster care, went to boarding school, but spent time homeless.
--:-- Emi Nietfeld: My relationship with my mom just kind of got worse and worse. Because I, you know, it was like, okay, well, why did I spend that year in foster care?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And she was really like, you were troubled. Like, you had to get your angries out on another family. You were too much for me to deal with.
--:-- Noel King: And there was, I was ready to take 90% of the blame, but I couldn't take 100% of it.
--:-- Emi Nietfeld: And this especially came to a head when it came to the way that my mom had handled my sexual assault when I was 17.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And in the aftermath, my mom was like, sent me this email where it was like, you shouldn't have been drinking. You should have said no loudly and clearly.
--:-- Noel King: Just all these things that I should have done differently.
--:-- Emi Nietfeld: I was really, really struggling with PTSD. I was having an impossible time, like letting go of my own self-blame.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But this whole time, everybody just assumed that I should have a close relationship with my mom.
--:-- Noel King: And it was never even a question of could I cut ties with my mom? Could I distance myself from my mom.
--:-- Emi Nietfeld: It just was something that I had to do and was expected of me.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I started to realize, okay, I'm blaming myself thinking the very same things that my mom told me.
--:-- Noel King: And my mom clung to that. Like she would not change her views. She would not let me off the hook.
--:-- Emi Nietfeld: And I eventually was like, I'm not going to be able to get better if I'm still in contact with her.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Did you say goodbye?
--:-- Emi Nietfeld: When I called my mom, I really did not want to believe that that was the conversation that was going to end our relationship.
--:-- Noel King: But, you know, and I confronted her about it. I was like I really am struggling with how you are dealing with this assault
--:-- Emi Nietfeld: And she was like what could I tell you that would make you believe that I think it's not your fault
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I told her I was like you could say it's not your fault
--:-- Noel King: But she actually would not say it. It was just silence.
--:-- Emi Nietfeld: And I was like, wow, I really feel like I have to do this and this is the right decision for me.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It was so hard to hang up the phone. I just said, I love you again and again, knowing that that might be the last time that I said, I love you to my mom.
--:-- Noel King: And then when I hung up, I felt so much relief. Immediately. Immediately.
--:-- Emi Nietfeld: But then I started getting all of these text messages, all of these emails from my mom just pretending that nothing had happened.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I think when the media talks about estrangement, it's often framed as like the moment of estrangement is the moment that you lose somebody.
--:-- Noel King: But what I experienced, and I think a lot of people experience, is that we've already lost that relationship, or we've already lost the sense of love and safety that we want to have with somebody that makes them feel like family to us.
--:-- Emi Nietfeld: It felt more like letting go of a lie than letting go of my actual real life mom.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Does it bum you out that your daughter isn't going to know your mom?
--:-- Emi Nietfeld: I ended up getting a cousin to orchestrate my mom meeting my daughter. And so my husband took her over to a coffee shop. They spent, you know, an hour and a half together.
--:-- Noel King: And my mom got to hold her. My daughter's too young to remember it. But I think it was really important for me because it helped me believe that I'm not trying to punish my mom.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I think that the taboos against estrangement really push people to justify cutting ties in ways that aren't really healthy.
--:-- Noel King: You know, there's no estrangement police. There shouldn't be an estrangement police.
--:-- Emi Nietfeld: And this is America. We have the right to never speak to our parents again.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Really, like if you're like, oh, duty, obligation. It's like that is not America.
--:-- Noel King: Just think of all the people at Ellis Island holding a suitcase, thinking I'm never going to see my family again and being overjoyed that that's the case.
--:-- Emi Nietfeld: Back then, you really got a clean break. And now you almost have to estrange yourself because the person you don't want to talk to can text you all day, every day.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And sometimes I wonder if my mom had never learned how to email, if my mom had never learned how to text, there's a very good chance we would still have a relationship.
--:-- Noel King: Oh, man. Brutal. Yeah. No, it's true.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Because people talk about estrangement like it's a technology problem, as if TikTok and Instagram are just infecting everybody's minds with this idea.
--:-- Noel King: I think it's a technology problem in the other way, where we're way too accessible, and there's no more etiquette anymore.
--:-- Emi Nietfeld: So all we have left is boundaries, and sometimes the ultimate boundary of saying, I will never speak to you again.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Let's say in like 15 years, you know, God forbid, I'm not wishing this upon you, but I'm just asking, if your daughter maybe now has this idea that estrangement is kind of normal, because you did it, if she decided, for example, she didn't want to talk to you anymore, how would you react?
--:-- Noel King: Do you think because you've had this experience, you'd try to understand it?
--:-- Emi Nietfeld: I mean, I would be heartbroken, and I definitely think I would try to understand it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What I hope is that parents focus way more on how do I build a relationship of reciprocal affection, kindness, respect with my kids.
--:-- Noel King: Because there's a lot of people who are like, you owe your parents. They say your parents raised you, the least you can do is suck it up and stay in this relationship that's making you really unhappy.
--:-- Emi Nietfeld: And I just don't think that that tracks with the modern world or with modern life.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: People point out this breakdown between the generations. And I actually think that there's truth to that.
--:-- Noel King: And I actually think that there's not this continuity between, you know, parents and children and grandparents anymore.
--:-- Emi Nietfeld: So I can actually totally see a world where most people are estranged from their parents.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I could totally see that coming. And do I think that that would be a good thing? No. No.
--:-- Noel King: But do I think that would be understandable? Absolutely.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Emmy Neatfeld, she's the author of a book called Acceptance, which is about a lot of the stuff she just told you about, but even more.
--:-- Noel King: When we're back on Today Explained, a psychologist is going to tell us everything he knows about estrangement, and he knows quite a bit because his kid once stopped talking to him.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for today's show comes from Adio.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Adio is an AI-native customer relationship management system built specifically for the next era of companies.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And they say you can build AI-powered automations and use its research agent to tackle some of your most complex processes so that you can focus on what matters, building your company.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today explains Sean Ramos for him, but enough about me.
--:-- Noel King: Dr. Joshua Coleman is a clinical psychologist and the author of multiple books about parental estrangement.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's an area of expertise he was forced into.
--:-- Dr. Joshua Coleman: I was married and divorced in my 20s and have an adult daughter who I'm very close to. but there was a period of time in her early 20s where she cut off contact with me for several years, largely as a result of my becoming remarried and having children in my second, which is my current marriage, and her feeling in some ways displaced, that she felt kind of pushed to the side in certain ways, that she got in some ways a worse quality of life in childhood and family life than my twins from my current marriage got, which in many ways is a fairly, it's kind of a reasonable assessment.
--:-- Noel King: But at the time when she raised it, I wasn't really prepared to hear how hurt she was or how displaced she felt or in certain ways neglected.
--:-- Dr. Joshua Coleman: And I responded defensively and maybe even angrily at the time.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And, you know, of course that made it worse, as it often does.
--:-- Noel King: And so she eventually shut down contact for a while until I, you know, kind of learned to just be quiet and be more importantly, not to just be quiet, but to learn how to be empathic and take responsibility and find, you know, listen to her perspective and hear her out and be able to tolerate the mistakes that I had made and empathize with her rather than to defend myself.
--:-- Dr. Joshua Coleman: Okay, so it sounds like this was a bit of a trial and error experience for you. You discovered the wrong things to do as well as the right things to do.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Tell us more about the right things to do.
--:-- Dr. Joshua Coleman: The right things are to take responsibility and to show empathy and to find the kernel, if not the bushel of truth in your child's complaints.
--:-- Noel King: To not be defensive, to not get mad, to assume that, you know, one of my methods is to have parents write what I call a letter of amends.
--:-- Dr. Joshua Coleman: And I say you should always start your letter of amends by saying, I know you wouldn't do this unless it was the healthiest thing for you to do.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Because from the adult child's perspective, it is the healthiest thing for them to do.
--:-- Noel King: The parent's therapist may not feel like it's the healthiest thing for the kid to do, but it doesn't really matter.
--:-- Dr. Joshua Coleman: You know, the goal is to be in alignment with what your child's values are, particularly today because nothing compels an adult child to have a relationship with a parent unless they want to.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Can you help us understand how common estrangement is becoming or what the rates of estrangement are these days?
--:-- Dr. Joshua Coleman: The most recent study was out of Ohio State with a sociologist named Ryn Resnick and colleagues. And she found that 26% of fathers are currently estranged from a child in the U.S.
--:-- Noel King: Wow. Which is huge, right?
--:-- Dr. Joshua Coleman: Now, she found 6% of mothers, but other people have found something closer to 10% to 12% of mothers are, which I think it's more in that camp.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then another study by Carl Pillimer at Cornell, he found that 27% of adults over 18 are estranged from a family member, not necessarily a parent, but a sibling or other family members.
--:-- Noel King: So it's pretty darn common.
--:-- Dr. Joshua Coleman: And what's driving that? What's making it more common?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Oh, it's a number of factors.
--:-- Dr. Joshua Coleman: I think that this moral shift that I was talking about where relationships are purely predicated on the basis of whether or not the relationship is good for one's happiness and mental health and personal expression and identity.
--:-- Noel King: In the United States, we have rising rates of individualism that have occurred over the past half century, increasing atomization, increasing tribalism, the incursion of therapeutic narratives in the way that we define ourselves.
--:-- Dr. Joshua Coleman: You know, Instagram, I mean, social media, which we could spend an hour talking about divorce.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So there's a lot of reasons why it's on the rise.
--:-- Noel King: And are all those factors from social media to politics to increasing individualism, are they driving people to choose estrangement over maybe working through problems?
--:-- Dr. Joshua Coleman: And that's not a judgment. I'm just trying to understand it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, I think so, because I think that it's become considered sort of virtuous to cut off toxic people and to have boundaries.
--:-- Noel King: You know, I think in our society we have very rich and developed language around boundaries and diagnoses of other people and the like, and a kind of impoverished language around interdependency and compassion and empathy and understanding the other person's perspective.
--:-- Dr. Joshua Coleman: So I think that has fueled this idea that cutting off people is considered a really assertive self-care, act of self-care.
--:-- Noel King: And in fact, it can be. I mean, there are genuinely hurtful, destructive family members.
--:-- Dr. Joshua Coleman: So I'm not here to say one should never do that But I do think people in general are too quick to do it
--:-- Noel King: And I also don't think that younger generations are as empathic as I wish they were about A how hard it is to be a parent the parenting is often a fog of war, or B, how the absolute immiseration they're causing when they cut a parent out of their lives.
--:-- Dr. Joshua Coleman: I'm on my way back from a failed attempt to get my daughter back in my life after three years. I just wanted to talk to her.
--:-- Noel King: I have even been told that the therapists are suggesting the kids go non-contact with their parents, but they're only hearing one side of the story.
--:-- Dr. Joshua Coleman: I have to be respectful of what she's asked, which is for me to leave her alone.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But I just miss her so dang much.
--:-- Noel King: You know, parents in my practice are suicidal. They're miserable, particularly those who've been cut off from grandchildren.
--:-- Dr. Joshua Coleman: Many of these parents were loving, involved grandparents, and they're not being cut off because of their being bad grandparents or being cut off because of conflict between the parent and the adult child.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We heard from Emmy earlier in the show that had it not been for texting and email, she probably would still have a relationship with her mother.
--:-- Noel King: It was the sort of, you know, overcommunication that she felt she had with her mother that made her relationship with her mother unsustainable.
--:-- Dr. Joshua Coleman: I really do, and I'm glad that Emmy raised that because I do think that, well, I think there's been several factors.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: One of the changes that we've had in the past four decades or so is parents have become much more anxious, much more involved.
--:-- Noel King: The studies by economists have in countries with high social inequality like the United States or China.
--:-- Dr. Joshua Coleman: And parents do have to become much more involved, much more tiger mothers or helicopter parents, because it's the only way to guarantee or at least increase the probability that their child is going to have a safe landing into adulthood.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In other countries with low social inequality, say, for example, Japan or the Scandinavian countries, parents can feel more secure that their children are, you know, without enormous parental investment, still going to do okay in life.
--:-- Noel King: And so parents have been much more intensive and much more involved.
--:-- Dr. Joshua Coleman: So parents have become much more enmeshed.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But then you add cell phones onto that where parents can track their kids when they're young.
--:-- Noel King: They can know where they are.
--:-- Dr. Joshua Coleman: And then once the kids leave home, they can reach them at any time of day from any part of the world.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so many adult children, the phrase that I see in every single letter from every single estranged adult child is, you need to respect my boundaries.
--:-- Noel King: And I think that's because boundaries between parents and children have become much more diffuse.
--:-- Dr. Joshua Coleman: Is there another way or is this a necessary trend and movement?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, I wish there was another way.
--:-- Dr. Joshua Coleman: I mean, my whole mission is to give parents the tools to learn how to communicate to their adult children in ways that help them to feel cared about and understood.
--:-- Noel King: And I do think most of the first-person narratives and first-person essays that you see in the media are written from the perspective of, well, I cut off my abusive parent and I'm better off and I'm happier.
--:-- Dr. Joshua Coleman: Very little, quite frankly, I think is written about how absolutely immiserated the parents are.
--:-- Noel King: So thank you for having me on your show.
--:-- Dr. Joshua Coleman: Thank you for joining us.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, you don't have to agree with everything that your family believes in order to capitalize or have what to remember what's good about them as people and parents.
--:-- Noel King: Politics is only one part of our identity.
--:-- Dr. Joshua Coleman: And it's, you know, for some people can be an important part, but we should kind of be big enough people just to look around those sorts of differences and remember what's good about the people that we grew up with or that raised us or that are our children, because it is a cause of estrangement these days.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: For example, I have a younger brother who's a self-admitted conspiracy theorist.
--:-- Noel King: And so whenever I talk to him on the phone, and he starts to go there, I go, we're not going there.
--:-- Dr. Joshua Coleman: And he just laughs, and we, you know, because I love him, and I just don't want the conversation to get trashed in the way that it used to.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm never going to believe the videos he sends me from, you know, Andrew Tate or something, and he's not going to believe the research articles I'm going to send him.
--:-- Noel King: So, you know, we're just in different worlds, so why go there?
--:-- Dr. Joshua Coleman: I mean, if you like to fight, fine, fight, but, you know, there's ways to respectfully disagree, but we've sort of lost the art of that, I think.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Psychologist Dr. Joshua Coleman, he's got a private practice in the Bay Area, and he's the author of When Parents Hurt, Compassionate Strategies When You and Your Grown Child Don't Get Along, and Rules of Estrangement, Why Adult Children Cut Ties, and How to Heal the Conflict.
--:-- Noel King: Victoria Chamberlain made our show today, even though it's her worst nightmare.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: She was edited by Miranda Kennedy, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and mixed by Rob Byers and Andrea Christensdottir.
--:-- Noel King: The rest of the best that Today Explained includes Matthew Collette, Halima Shah, Patrick Boyd, Avishai Artsy, Miles Bryan, Hadi Mawagdi, Amanda Llewellyn, Peter Balanon-Rosen, Amina Al-Sadi, and of course my co-host Noelle King.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We use music by Breakmaster Cylinder.
--:-- Noel King: Today Explained is distributed by WNYC.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This show is a part of Vox.
--:-- Noel King: You can support our journalism by joining our membership program today. Go to vox.com slash members to sign up.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can support our journalism by positively rating and reviewing us wherever you listen.
--:-- Noel King: You can not support us by negatively rating and reviewing us wherever you listen. But who would do that?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thank you.
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