Ep. 101 Understanding Midlife Family Estrangement As A Coping Skill to Increase Calm During the Holiday Season

Family estrangement can feel overwhelming, especially around the holiday season when family gatherings highlight painful separations. 

In this episode, you'll learn:

 1. The prevalence of family estrangement and why it’s more common than you might think.

2. Key causes that drive family members apart, from generational value clashes to lifestyle differences.

3. Practical ways to cope with the emotional toll of estrangement, especially during the holiday season.

 Take a step toward self-understanding and healing with an Inner Challenge to help you navigate the complexities of family estrangement.

 Listen to Fan Favorite Ep. 93 5 Simple Sleep Hacks to Sleep Better Tonight

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About the Host: 

MJ Murray Vachon, LCSW, is a seasoned clinician, educator, and host of the podcast Creating Midlife Calm, recognized by Maria Shriver as a “Listen of the Week.” Over the past 40 years, MJ has led more than 50,000 therapy sessions and developed the Inner Challenge mental wellness program and the Inner Challenge Master Class, practical tools for emotional regulation, self-awareness, and resilience taught for more than 30 years in junior high schools and at the University of Notre Dame for freshman football players. Through her podcast, teaching, and coaching, MJ helps people build calmer lives, stronger relationships, and healthier communities.

Creating Midlife Calm is a podcast designed to guide you through the challenges of midlife, tackling issues like anxiety, low self-esteem, feeling unworthy, procrastination, and isolation, while offering strategies for improving relationships, family support, emotional wellbeing, mental wellness, and parenting, with a focus on mindfulness, stress management, coping skills, and personal growth to stop rumination, overthinking, and increase confidence through self-care, emotional healing, and mental health support. 

Transcript

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MJ Murray Vachon LCSW (3) 0:00

In this episode, you'll learn the most common causes of family estrangement. Welcome to Creating Midlife Calm, a podcast dedicated to empowering midlife minds to overcome anxiety, stop feeling like crap and become more present with your family, all while achieving greater success at work. I'm MJ Murray Vachon, a licensed clinical social worker with over 48, 000 hours of therapy sessions and 31 years of experience teaching mental wellness. Welcome to the podcast. Today, we're going to talk about family estrangement. As we head into the holiday season, families who are experiencing some type of family estrangement often feel every emotion that's possible. Sadness, a sense of loss, being out of control, lots of anger, and feeling powerless. In this episode, I'm going to help you understand the prevalence and common causes of family estrangement. I have found in my work with families, coming to understand how family estrangement happens can often be a strategy in helping heal these rifts between family members. As always, I will end this episode with an inner challenge, a way to help you if you are suffering from family estrangement. One of the common dynamics of family estrangement is that people often suffer in silence. This is often because people feel ashamed or powerless if they are at odds with another family member. You might be surprised to learn that one in four Americans report being estranged from at least one family member, a parent, a child, sibling, or grandparent. A study by Cornell University found that 27 percent of young adults ages 18 to 29 report being estranged from a family member. With parental estrangement being the most common form. So you might be suffering in silence, but you are not alone. I was really surprised when I read that 27%, especially for younger people because at these ages, they can really benefit from family support. And whatever the reason, if they were estranged, they're not going to be the beneficiaries of this support as they begin their adult life. No two family estrangements look alike. They are as unique and as different as individuals, are. Some occur after a family disagreement or a conflict. Other estrangements are family members that slowly distance themselves from one another over time. Sometimes the cutoff appears to be connected to the family member having a life or a relational experience that helped them see things in new ways. Could be a spouse, a job, could be information they found out about the family that they had no idea existed Sometimes the reason for estrangement is clear. Dad left more money in the will to you than to me. And other times it is vague and confusing and the person who has stepped away from the family is really unwilling to give information. I've worked with families that worked quickly to repair these estrangements and others where the estrangement has gone on for so long that no one can really remember what even started it. The causes of family estrangements are unique but I think it's helpful to talk about a number of factors that contribute to the increase in family estrangement at this time. It wouldn't be surprising to you that political and religious differences, incompatible lifestyles, divorce, parental mistreatment, or perceived mistreatment often fuel family estrangements. As a culture, we have been much more willing in the last 50 or so years to face taboo subjects. such as sexual abuse, addiction, physical and emotional abuse, and doing this has given individuals more permission to say, wait, this behavior that has happened to me in our family is wrong. Social media has also played a role in bringing to our awareness, hurts, harms and traumatic behavior. Social media has lots of messages that say, you don't have to put up with your alcoholic parent at your wedding, or how dare your sibling not recognize your partner because of his or her religious beliefs. A few times a week, I read through a social media app and I pay special attention to people are asking for advice on different family problems. Most of the responses lean towards individuals making choices so they feel better, but there isn't much advice given out that encourages people to work out their differences. To forgive human missteps, to live with different values, or ways to stay connected to someone who has hurt you. Of course, this makes sense because social media cannot be nuanced. There's really no room in a post like that to bring in the other person's perspective, or to have a conversation, or to really listen to each side's experience. So estrangement is Not engagement is encouraged, and I think this reflects our culture's current values of individual over family, as well as our desire to try to make complex things simple another cause of family estrangement is families are messy. As a trained family therapist, as a member of a number of families, I have learned two things. First, families are imperfect. They're dynamic. They're full of many personality types who have competing needs and perspectives. As members of a family age, they marry, they divorce, they add new members. Families become even more increasingly complex. We live in the context of rapid cultural change. My father used to tell the story of his two aunts in 1950 who refused to go to his sister's wedding because she, an Irish Catholic, was marrying an Italian Catholic. Just saying it sounds ridiculous. Most of us can't even imagine this being a problem. Times change. That sounds easy, but when it comes to our norms and our traditions that ground us, that give us our North Star, it is not easy for us to have the openness and flexibility to incorporate how other members of our family may live out these norms, values, and traditions. Yes, estrangement often occurs because of differences in values. Think about it. Families instill personal values through direct teaching and daily interactions. Cultural influences such as the media, education, and community shape broader societal values. Historically, families have always been the primary transmitters of value, while culture reinforces these teachings. However, that's not so true anymore. With globalization and technological advancement, cultural influences stronger, sometimes leading to a blending or clash of values across generations. Our culture changes the shape of who we are, but these norms and traditions, ground us in our everyday life and they're not being carried down from one generation to the next in the way they have in the past. Another factor that seems obvious, but I think is really important when it comes to family estrangement, first in understanding it, and second, In trying to heal it or if it can't be healed of being able to learn to accept it and live with it in a way That it does not take over your life. This factor is that no two people see things alike. Many years ago, I had to rent a room big enough for my client who had 10 siblings. She wanted to process with her siblings. A letter she had sent them informing them that their uncle had sexually abused her during grade school. Obviously. There is months of preparatory work for a client who is courageous enough to do this type of session. When the day came, we had created a process that her siblings had agreed to go through. For the first 90 minutes, each sibling wrote down and shared Their favorite memory and challenge of their mother and father, as well as this particular aunt and uncle. The memories and experiences were vast. Not one sibling shared an identical memory. The family, of course, had never sat down and had a formal process to share their perspectives and memories. They laughed, they cried, they were shocked. The purpose of this exercise was to create an opening in each of their minds, each of their hearts, so they realized even though we are one family, we share really different experiences about each of these people in our life. One of the younger siblings said, I really had no relationship with this uncle. The oldest sibling said I worked for him and I feel indebted to all he gave me. Another sibling had been given his used car. And of course my client had been sexually abused by him. Who has the accurate perspective? No one. and everyone. This exercise helped the siblings be more open to the whole story of the this uncle and this was helpful to all of them, especially my client. Even people who do terrible things can also do nice things, and people who do nice things can also do terrible things. The one sibling who was closest to the uncle asked lots of false memory syndrome, which my client was prepared for. He just didn't want this to be true. He would have to learn to hold that his sister had been deeply hurt by a family member whom he loved. People see things differently and each person has their own ability to hold wrongdoing, be it of their own or of another. Often the bridge to repair in a family estrangement is learning to let go of your own perspective and being able to be curious and hold the other person's perspective, even if you don't agree with it. Because it's our human nature to see things just from our own perspective, but when it comes to family hurt, the ability to be open and integrate another person's reality and experience is really fundamental to repair. Another factor in why family estrangement is on the increase is that we're moving away from the model of family that minimized, denied, or explained away hurtful behaviors to a more honest conversation of how these behaviors hurt family members. For most of history, people have been hurt by these behaviors and they stayed silent and unknowingly learned ways to minimize and to cover them up, humans have excused dad's temper as he didn't mean it, or mom's drinking as a way of coping with stress. it wasn't just individuals and family who minimized these behaviors, but also churches and social organizations Hurtful behaviors can be a result of untreated addiction, and mental health issues. physical, sexual, or emotional abuse. Estrangement can also occur when communication styles are rooted in shaming and coercion., hurts get passed on unknowingly from generation generation, unless there is Consciousness, awareness, and intervention to do it differently. Sometimes family estrangement is an attempt to make things better, but often without professional guidance, that attempt goes nowhere. In recent decades, mental health has given us permission to look at these age old patterns and hurts Alcoholics Anonymous began the program called Al Anon for family members who were trying their best. to be supportive of the recovery and change their own behaviors that had often been distorted as they lived with someone who was an alcoholic. Talk to anyone who's gone to Al Anon and they will tell you that it's so helpful, but the work is so hard to change these behaviors. It can also be really hard for people who are older to come to terms with the shift that we have made as a culture of facing these behaviors head on. I've had many older people say in my office, I put up with it with my mom or I put up with it with my dad. I don't know why they're all bent out of shape now. What I hear this person really saying is this happened to me and I don't know how to deal with my hurt. I just passed it on I had a good life. I was a good worker. I coached the team. Why can't they just look at all that I did right and not overly focus on those things that I did that were hurtful, it's exactly this perspective that often fuels estrangement. The inability to put oneself in another person's shoes and try to hold They're hurt, but in all honesty, if one hasn't done that work themselves, it is really difficult to give to another that which you cannot give to yourself. I remember having a client in my office whose wife left him after multiple affairs. I asked him the question, how did you learn to do this? He looked at me and he said, flippantly, my dad did it. My mom didn't think it was a big deal. I just don't get it. We're at a time where we are reckoning with these family dynamics and we're having more courage to say we want our families to be healthier, but when there's a family estrangement, we don't run to the ER like we do if there's a broken bone or to the mechanic if our car is not working. It's not uncommon to let the wound fester, to talk to others, but to not seek the help that can build a bridge back to one another. One of the things I like to encourage people to do when there's been an estrangement is to take it seriously from the start. Many families are accustomed to there being problems and then they blow over and everybody moves on without acknowledging it. At some point, the families that I've worked with, sense this time is different and I really encourage people to not let too much time pass without really trying to understand. What is happening? What is the root of this? Sometimes a period of separation or estrangement is necessary for each side to do their own individual work. In my opinion, this is work that seldom can be done in a living room. Most people I have worked with have used a professional because its emotional impact is great and how a family resolves this estrangement will affect future generations. Something that often is not talked about in the midst of estrangement. Sometimes families I've worked with, the person, is not willing to give information. That can be particularly painful and leave you feeling powerless. And, of course there are those cases with family estrangement where family members have to make the very difficult decision to not have contact for their own safety and well being. Often, people feel so alone and so ashamed, they don't talk to others. They don't reach out for help, or they actually talk to others, not in a spirit of how do we repair this, but in a spirit of, can you be on my side? There's nothing about asking other people in the family to side with you, no matter which side of the estrangement you're on, that is healthy. One of the things I encourage people to do, if there is an estrangement between family members, is to allow it to stay between them. To give them the responsibility for managing it, to give them the responsibility of repairing it. I love you both. I trust that you have it in you to repair this, to learn to listen to the other, to learn to say to the other, what is it you need in order to build a bridge back to one another again. One of the most confusing parts of estrangement can be your self identity. How do you think about who you are, who your family is? Do you continue to talk about your child that you haven't spoken to in two or three years? What do you do about grandchildren and other family members who you no longer have access to? Do you send birthday cards? Christmas gifts? Many of my clients and people I know have benefited from professional help to think through these decisions and dilemmas. The emotional impact of family estrangement is grief, loss, guilt, and a sense of isolation. For many people, these feelings worsen at this time of the year with the holidays approaching. In this episode, I wanted to broaden your perspective of family estrangement and give you not only the family dynamics that can cause this heartache, but some of the social and cultural changes that have made family estrangement more common today. I also want to encourage you to seek professional help, trying to repair the relationship or learn to accept that you and your family member are estranged. thanks for listening. I'll be back on Thursday and I'm going to talk about very concrete coping skills for you to employ this holiday season, if you are in the midst of a family estrangement, that most likely will not be repaired. But in the meantime, if you know someone who's in the midst of a family estrangement, please forward them this episode. And if you're suffering in this way, what I would like you to do is go back to the beginning and try to write down what you believe your role in the family estrangement is and just sit with it. This is your inner challenge.