Latest / The Brain Dump / The Door I Stopped Holding Open: An Honest Conversation About Family Estrangement | Episode 15

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The Door I Stopped Holding Open: An Honest Conversation About Family Estrangement | Episode 15 · The Brain Dump

• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: Hello and welcome to the Braind Dump with Sandy Boone.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: I'm glad you're here.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: This episode is really personal, and I hope that it can bring some clarity to not only us as a society, but to individuals who may be struggling with estrangement.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to start today with a personal story.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: My father came to my son's graduation.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't call him after, and I never heard from him again.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not ashamed of it.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not angry about it.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not performing acceptance that I haven't actually earned.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: I just finally stopped carrying something that only I had ever been carrying.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: And the silence that followed told me everything I needed to know about whether that was the right decision.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: I want to talk about estrangement today, not the tidy version where someone did something unforgivable and the other person made a clean break and everyone understands why.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: I want to talk about the real version, the gray, complicated, nobody has the whole story version that is showing up everywhere I look right now.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: In my own life, in the lives of people I love, in the quiet grief of people who are sitting on both sides of a door that closed and wondering what they're supposed to do with that.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: Because here's the thing I keep coming back to.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's hard to cut someone off, and it's hard to be cut off.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: And the world doesn't give either side much room to say that out loud.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: Estrangement is more common than most people realize, and more common than it used to be.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: Research from Carl Pilmer at Cornell University, who studied family estrangement extensively, estimates that approximately 27% of Americans are currently estranged from a family member.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's more than one in four people.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: And that number has been growing.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: We're in the middle of a quiet epidemic of family fracture, and it's largely happening without language, without ritual, without any of the social structures that help us process other kinds of loss.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: When someone dies, there's a funeral.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: There are casseroles and fried chicken, because if you're in the South, there is always fried chicken.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: There are people who show up and sit with you and say, I'm so sorry for your loss.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: When someone estranges, or when you estrange, there is nothing.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: There's just the absence.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: The unanswered text, the holidays that have to be restructured around a silence, nobody quite knows how to explain to the people at the table.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: And underneath all of it, there's this pressure, either spoken or unspoken, to pick a side, to assign blame, to land on a clean answer to the question everyone is really asking.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: Whose fault is it?
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to spend this episode pushing back on that question.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: Not because accountability doesn't matter, it does, but because the fault question is almost never the right place to start, and it almost never leads anywhere that actually helps.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: I want to tell you a little more about my father, not to villainize him, I'm genuinely not interested in that.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: But because his story is the clearest example I have of something I want you to understand.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: My father was emotionally absent, often physically absent too.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: And the hardest part wasn't the absence itself, it was the inconsistency.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: Because sometimes he showed up perfectly, fully present, warm, exactly the father you hoped he could be.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: And then other times nothing.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: No call, no explanation, just gone.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: And that inconsistency is its own particular kind of damage.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: Because you can't let go of someone who shows up perfectly sometimes.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: You keep waiting for that version to come back.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: We even tried to do something about it.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: We went to therapy, we talked through what we both needed, we made agreements, real ones.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: They felt meaningful in the room.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: And then we walked out and the same patterns returned, the same cycle, the same hoping and the same silence.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I stayed in it for a long time because he was my father.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: Because I kept carrying the weight of connection, believing that if I if I just kept showing up, eventually it would become mutual.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: But it didn't.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: And then my son graduated and my father came.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to tell you what I noticed that day, because this is the moment that shifted something in me permanently.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: He was uncomfortable, visibly, deeply uncomfortable.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: In truth, I felt sorry for him.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: There was a room full of people who loved us, who had shown up for our family, who knew our son, who belonged there, and my father knew no one in that room except my mother.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: He stood in the middle of all that love and looked like someone who didn't know where to put himself.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I watched him, and something became very clear.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: I looked at my son, my 17-year-old son, who knew exactly how to be in relationship, who worked the room, who hugged people, who was fully present with the people who loved him.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I realized I could not expect more from my father than I could expect from my 17-year-old.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I couldn't expect less either.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: That was the moment.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: Not anger, not a final confrontation, just clarity.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: After the ceremony, I went back to my life.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't call him.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: I waited to hear from him and there was nothing.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: And here's the part I want you to really hear, because I think it's the part that doesn't get said enough.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: The silence wasn't the wound.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: The silence was the answer.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: It confirmed what I already knew, but hadn't fully let myself accept that I had been the only one holding the door open, that the relationship existed because I kept it alive.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: And when I stopped, it stopped.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: That is not a dramatic estrangement.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: There was no explosion, no ultimatum, no final conversation.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: There was just a door that I quietly stopped holding open.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: And it closed.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: I'm at peace with that.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: Not because it doesn't carry sadness.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: It does.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: It still does.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: But because I stopped waiting for someone to show up who was never going to show up in the way that I needed.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: And that's not failure.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: That's clarity.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: But I also want to talk about the other side because I hold that too.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: My husband's family carries its own estrangement.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I've watched someone I love navigate the grief of a relationship that fractured in ways that were not clean or simple or easily explained.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: I've sat with the confusion of it, the wondering, the going back over conversations, trying to find the moment where everything shifted or where there was no clarity or where there was unreasonable expectation.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I have people in my life, people I love, people who are genuinely good humans, who are living on the side of the door where someone left and they don't fully understand why.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: That grief is real, and it is one of the most disorienting griefs there there is.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: Because with most losses, you know what you lost.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: You can name it, you can point to the before and the after.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: With estrangement, you lose the relationship, and you also lose the narrative.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: You lose the story of what happened and why.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: You are left holding a silence that doesn't explain itself.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: And the world is not kind to people on this side of the door either.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: Because the cultural conversation right now leans heavily toward validating the person who left, which often needs to happen.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: People need permission to protect themselves, to set limits, to stop participating in relationships that harm them.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: But it has also created a space where the people who were left, who may be genuinely bewildered, genuinely grieving, genuinely trying to understand what they did, can feel like they're not allowed to say that it hurts.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: Like acknowledging their pain means they're denying the validity of the person who left.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: And that's not right either.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: Both sides of this door are carrying something heavy.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I think we need to be able to say that.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: I want to offer something here that I think gets missed in most conversations about this.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: Estrangement is rarely one moment.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: It is almost always an accumulation.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: It is years of unmet needs that never got spoken clearly.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: It is patterns that nobody named until they became unbearable.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: It is expectations that were never made explicit on both sides until the gap between them became impossible to bridge.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: And often, not always, but often, both people are telling a true story.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: The person who left is telling the truth about their experience, the harm they felt, the ways they were weren't seen or supported or held, the cumulative weight of a relationship that cost more than it gave.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: And the person who was left is also telling the truth about their experience, the love they believed they offered, the ways they tried, the version of events that looks genuinely different from where they're standing.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: And both of those things can be true simultaneously.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: That is not me saying that all estrangements are equal.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: They are not.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: There are relationships that caused real harm, abuse, neglect, chronic toxicity, where distance is not just understandable but necessary, where the person who left did the right thing, full stop.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: But there are also estrangements that happen in the gray, where someone was imperfect but not harmful, where communication broke down and neither person knew how to repair it, where a third party, a partner or circumstance, a misunderstanding, became a wedge that grew wider than anyone intended.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: And in those cases, the fault question doesn't just fail to help.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: It actively gets in the way of anything that might actually heal.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: The grief of estrangement on both sides is disenfranchised grief.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: That is a clinical term for grief that doesn't get recognized or validated by the people around you.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: Grief that doesn't come with a casserole or a card or a socially sanctioned period of mourning.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: If your parent dies, people understand that you're grieving.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: They show up and they give you space.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: If your parent is alive but you have no relationship with them, or if your child is alive but won't return your calls, the world doesn't quite know what to do with that.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: You are grieving someone who still exists, you're mourning a relationship that technically could still change, and that ambiguity makes it very hard for the people around you to know how to help.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: So you carry it quietly.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: You restructure holidays and explain it with a sentence that closes the conversation.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: You see other families together and feel something you can't quite name.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: You wonder sometimes what it would have taken for it to go differently.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: That is a real loss and it deserves to be grieved like one.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: The person who left sometimes feels like they're not allowed to be sad because they made the choice.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: Choosing to leave doesn't mean you don't grieve what you wish the relationship could have been.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: And the person who was left sometimes feels like their grief is invalid because they must have done something to cause it.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: Being left doesn't mean your love wasn't real.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: But both of those griefs are legitimate and both of them deserve space.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: I've been thinking about this a lot from every angle I hold it.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: And here's what I keep coming back to.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: Most people are doing the best they can with what they have.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: That doesn't mean the best they can is always good enough.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: And it doesn't mean that the impact doesn't matter or that harm doesn't have consequences.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't mean that the people who protect themselves by creating distance are wrong to do so.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: But it does mean that most of the people on both sides of these estrangements are not villains.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: They are humans who were shaped by their own histories, their own wounds, their own incomplete understanding of how to love each other well.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: If the person who left you is a flawed human who didn't have the tools or the capacity or the awareness to show up the way you needed, that's a painful story.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: But it is a different story than being left by a monster.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: And how we frame it changes how we carry it.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're the person who left, you are allowed to hold both things, the rightness of your decision and the grief of the relationship you wished you'd had.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: These things are not in conflict.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: They are just both true.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to speak to one more group before we close.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: The people who are sitting right now in the middle trying to decide.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: You haven't left yet, but you're thinking about it.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: You're carrying a relationship that is costing you more than it's giving.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: You've tried, you've had the conversations, maybe you've done the therapy, made the agreements, and watched the same patterns return.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: And you're standing at the door wondering whether it's time to stop holding it open.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: I am not going to tell you what to do.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: That is yours to decide, and anyone who tells you it's simple is not telling you the truth.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: But I do want to offer some things worth sitting with before you decide.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: First, have you said the unsayable thing out loud?
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: Not the version of the conversation where you manage how you're received, the real version.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: The one where you say exactly what this relationship has cost you and exactly what you need for it to be different.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes people don't know.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: They genuinely don't know, because we've been too careful in how we communicated our pain.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: If there is a version of that conversation you haven't had yet, it's worth asking whether you want to have it before you decide.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: Second, what is your body telling you?
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: Not your thoughts.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: Not the story you've constructed about why you should or shouldn't your actual body.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: When you imagine continued contact, what happens?
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: When you imagine distance, what happens?
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: Your nervous system has information that your mind sometimes argues with.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's worth listening.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: Third, is the harm ongoing.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: There is a real difference between a relationship that was harmful and is now just empty, and a relationship that is actively harming you right now.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: Distance is always appropriate when harm is ongoing.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: The calculus is different when the harm is historical and the present is more about emptiness than danger.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: Fourth, are you deciding from depletion or from clarity?
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: A decision made from the bottom of exhaustion and pain is still valid, but it's worth knowing which place it's coming from.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes people need to get some distance, do some healing, and then reassess from a more regulated place.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: Not because the distance was wrong, but because clarity is easier to access when you're not in survival mode.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: And finally, whatever you decide, you're allowed to grieve it, even if you're the one leaving.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_00: Even if leaving is exactly right, you are allowed to mourn the relationship you deserve to have and didn't.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: Protecting yourself is not something you should have to apologize for.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: And if you decide to stay, that's a valid choice.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: As long as it's a choice and not a sentence.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: The door belongs to you.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: My father came to my son's graduation, I didn't call him after, and I never heard from him again.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_00: And somewhere in that silence, in the years since, I've made peace with it.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: Again, not a tidy piece, not a piece that doesn't carry anything, but the kind of peace that comes when you finally stop waiting for someone to walk through a door they were never going to walk through.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: I stopped holding it open, and the silence told me I was right.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: If you are carrying an estrangement today on either side of the door, or standing in front of one trying to decide, I hope this episode gave you a little more room to breathe inside of it, a little more permission to grieve it, and a little less pressure to have it figured out.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: The door closed, that is real, and so is everything you feel about it.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for being here.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_00: If this hits something in you, if you're navigating an estrangement and trying to figure out how to carry it, or if the relationships in your life are bringing up things you haven't had language for, that's the work I do.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: Helping people understand their patterns, their histories, and their nervous systems so they can move through the hard things with a little more clarity and a little less alone.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: If you're curious about coaching or what support could look for you right now, I'd love to talk.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for being here.