Latest / Thinking Out Loud | Kimberly / Is Family Estrangement Just a Trend? | Thinking Out Loud
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- Kimberly: Is family and strangement just a trend? Some people calling it a trend, others saying we've become too sensitive, too fragile, too quick to cut people off. I've heard people blame a lack of resilience, and I've heard people blame disposable culture. The idea that we've started treating relationships the way we treat products. If it's difficult, replace it. What if it's neither? What if we're asking the wrong questions? And what if we're actually witnessing Is what happens when families have more access to one another than at any point of human history. For most of history, families naturally had distance. You left home, you wrote letters, you visited on holidays. There were built-in boundaries and expectations and standards for most families. Now, our phones come with us everywhere. People can text us, call us, message us, tag us, track us, and expect immediate responses. Family conflict doesn't stay in the home anymore. It follows us into work, vacation, date nights, and even moments that are supposed to be peaceful. Access has become constant, and constant access can become constant pressure. That's the difference than connection. Sometimes what we call being close is actually a mesh. When everyone's emotions become everyone else's responsibility, When boundaries are viewed as betrayal, when saying no is treated as disrespect, when individuality is punished and not understood, That's not intimacy. That's a system that has forgotten where one person ends and another begins. Which brings me to another thought. We talk a lot about narcissism online. Maybe some people truly have narcissistic traits. How many behaviors we label as narcissism are actually reinforced by generations of codependency? What happens when parents are taught that sacrificing everything for their children Guarantees emotional repayment later. I gave you life, I did everything for you after all I've sacrificed those statements come from an invisible contract. A debt the child never agreed to. When that debt isn't repaid, sometimes parents are forced to ask a painful question Was I loving or was I controlling? Did I give because I wanted to or did I give because I expected something in return. Those aren't easy questions for parents to ask, and they're not easy for adult children to ask either. Avoiding them doesn't make them disappear though. this conversation is much bigger than family estrangement. It's about power, it's about responsibility, it's about leadership. Here's the question I keep coming back to. In a parent-child relationship, who is supposed to be the leader? Because if we can't answer that, we can't honestly talk about accountability. If a politician writes the laws, and the laws fail the people, do we place all the blame on the citizens? We shouldn't be. If a company develops a toxic workplace, do we first blame the newest employee? We shouldn't be. We should be examining Not because leadership has to be perfect. Not because followers have no responsibility. Because leadership carries influence. Children don't choose the families they're born into. They don't choose the rules. They don't choose the emotional climate. They don't choose the power structure. Adults do. That doesn't mean parents have to be perfect, and I want be perfectly clear about that. It's never about perfection. No parent will ever be perfect. Every parent will make mistakes. That's not what this episode is about today. This episode is about recognizing that mistakes made by someone with more power often has a different impact than the mistakes made by someone with less power. Power changes the equation, baby. Maybe that's the conversation we've been avoiding with this topic. Instead of asking why are so many people becoming in strange, maybe we should also ask, What has happened inside of families? systems long before the estrangement ever occurred. Because estrangement isn't usually where the story begins. It's often where years, sometimes decades, of unresolved dynamics finally reaching a breaking point. Whether someone believes estrangement was the right decision or the wrong one. I think we owe it to ourselves to ask better questions than simply calling it a trend. Welcome back to Thinking Out Loud. I'm Kimberly. Before we begin, a quick note. This podcast is for reflection and conversation, not professional advice. Take what resonates and leave the rest. We're here to slow down and explore life's great areas, not to tell you what to think, rather to offer framework That can hopefully help you think more clearly. Let's get to thinking out loud. I feel culturally we have a leadership problem. I keep hearing people in position of leadership blaming the very people they're supposed to be leading. Whether it's politics, the workplace, schools or families, the pattern feels familiar. And instead of asking, How did my leadership contribute to this outcome? The question becomes, what's wrong with them? I don't think hierarchy automatically creates healthy leadership, especially in relationships. Take family for example. I've seen parents describe their adult children with words like ungrateful. What I sometimes hear underneath that is I paid for your life, so now you owe me a specific performance. Disrespectful that subtext can become you're no longer following the respect your elder script I expect you to follow. They're brainwashed or your therapist put these ideas in your head. What I hear is you couldn't have arrived at that conclusion on your own. Someone must have rewritten your script. Too sensitive. Too thin skinned. Sometimes what that really is meaning, you're reacting to something I did, and your reaction is making me uncomfortable. Selfish or narcissistic. Seems the message underneath this one. You prioritized your own mental health over my needs to be seen as a good parent. You're cruel or heartless sometimes what actually is being mourned is this. You stop pretending everything was okay. And that hurts me. Now to be clear, these labels aren't always manipulation. Sometimes children really can be abusive, and sometimes parents are the victim. Human relationships are complicated. I will leave space for that. I think though, we have to be willing to ask uncomfortable questions. Because every case is different. When an entire family system repeatedly produces the same pattern, is it really enough to only examine the people with the least amount of power and blame them? Children didn't create the emotional climate they're raised in. They learned it. That doesn't mean parents have to be perfect. Remember. No one's perfect. No parent is. No person is. Leadership carries influence though. And influence comes with responsibility. I want to make space for parents who have been scapegoated themselves. Who have been isolated by an abusive partner, manipulated by extended family or close family, or trapped in systems that taught them dysfunction was normal and should be tolerated. If that's you, I want you to hear this. I hope you find a way out. I hope you discover that kindness isn't weakness. I hope you choose yourself, not out of selfishness, but because healing gives you the opportunity to model something different. Different for the next generation. You can't reason someone out of a belief they are committed to protecting. You can't force accountability from people who genuinely believe abuse is simply what family does. Sometimes the healthiest thing you can do is stop participating in the cycle and begin building a different one. Because I think people sometimes confuse accountability with blame. Isn't about endlessly punishing ourselves for yesterday. It's about asking what can I do today? We can't change the choices we've already made. We can't rewrite the past. We can't decide that our best from yesterday is an excuse to stop growing today. Maybe instead of saying I tried my best, we can start saying I'm going to keep trying my best today and tomorrow. leadership isn't about never making mistakes. It's about being willing to learn from them. I don't think we take enough time to recognize how much we demand from each other. We live in a world where Access has become almost unlimited. We call someone, FaceTime them, text them, email them, comment on their posts, send them videos, see when they've been online, and know when the messages have been read. somehow we've turned that access into expectation. I can reach you can slowly become you should be available to me 24-7 girl or boy. I think many people are feeling this pressure. When people believe someone is beneath them in a relationship hierarchy, it can become easier to believe they are entitled to more from that person. This is where I think relationships can start to feel like a pyramid scheme. Not because love is transactional. Because some people have been taught sacrifice automatically creates debt. I gave you everything, therefore you owe me everything. What happens when the expectation meets a world where everyone has a phone in their pocket? Technology has completely changed family relationships. Think about previous generations. Move. You might be writing letters. You might be called once a week. You might have visited during holidays. There was distance. There was natural boundaries. access was limited. Today that is different. We can see if someone is online, we can see if they opened our messages, and we can see if they posted but didn't respond. this creates opportunities for our brains to fill in the blank. Why didn't they answer me? They must be ignoring me. They must not care. What if that conclusion came before curiosity? What if instead of asking, why doesn't my child want to talk to me? Why does my child feel like they have to avoid me? We ask, what is happening in this relationship that makes connection feel difficult? Because sometimes the answer isn't rejection. Sometimes someone is exhausted. Sometimes someone is overwhelmed. Sometimes someone is trying to protect their own mental health. Sometimes someone is trying to create life where they aren't constantly monitoring a tiny screen because they are afraid of disappointing someone. I think this is where we have to be careful. Constant access is not the same thing as healthy connection. child Having a phone does not mean you are entitled to unlimited access to their life. Your child being online does not mean they owe you a response. Your child creating boundaries does not automatically mean they don't love you. Sometimes people are simply doing what they were taught growing up. Go out and become your own person, make your own choices, build your own life, and then when they actually try to do that, they're being punished for it. Why? because someone's grieving the change. or having regrets they might have showed up in the past. Maybe accepting their child has autonomy means accepting their child is no longer an extension of them. And those are painful emotions. They are emotions that adults have to learn how to carry. Your child growing up is not abandonment. Your child having their own life is not rejection. This is especially complicated when adult children become parents themselves. why are we seeing more conflicts increasing after a baby is born? Why are we blaming daughters or son in laws for why all of a sudden Their children don't want to show up for the holidays? why do some grandparents struggle with their adult children begin Because they're parenting differently. Why do some parents feel like they have to compete with their own child? The family structure has changed. The adult child is no longer just someone's child. They are now a parent, a partner, an individual with their own values, or simply they're an adult who can make their own decisions. That transition requires Everyone to change and evolve. Sometimes instead of evolving, people try to gain control and call it adapting. They criticize, they compare, they judge, they take over. They interpret boundaries as disrespect. Autonomy is not disrespect. You are allowed to love your parents and still have boundaries. You are allowed to trust your parents and lean on them when you feel safe. you're allowed to pull away when you don't. Love does not mean unlimited access. No relationship survives without respect for the other person's humanity. You don't get to criticize someone's cluttered home while continuing to bring them things they have repeatedly say they don't want, and you do it anyways, or whine at them. You don't get to shame someone for struggling with skills they have never been taught or shown. You don't get credit for not teaching them these skills and then get mad because they're not doing it the way you expected. You don't get to use someone's struggle as proof that you were right all along. That is often a reflection of neglect. At some point, we have to ask ourselves, are we actually helping? Or are we protecting ourselves from having to look at our own role? Because I think a lot of people are waking up to something uncomfortable. Sometimes the standards we demand from others are standards we do not hold ourselves to. When constant access becomes expected, something begins to happen. The relationship stops being about connection. It starts becoming about control. when constant access becomes expected, something else begins to happen. It made me realize that I think a lot of people are using the words like close family and healthy family interchangeably. that's not always the same thing. I think it's important that we define the two words that often get mixed up all the time. I'm guilty of this myself. Ameshment and codependency. Let's start with a meshment. Ameshment is a family pattern where people's identities and boundaries become so blurred. It is difficult to tell where one person ends and another begins. The family becomes emotionally fused, individuality starts feeling like separation, boundaries start feeling like rejection, and independence start feeling like betrayal. Healthy closeness says, I love you and I want you to become fully yourself. Ameshment says I love you, but I need you to stay connected with me in a way that makes me feel safe. Those two are very different things. Healthy closeness allows two people to disagree without questioning the relationship. Emotional fusion makes disagreements feel like abandonment. Healthy closeness allows both people to have different interests. Different friendships and different lives. you're allowed to live separate lives. Fusion struggles with differences. Because differences feel threatening. Closeness is togetherness plus individuality. Fusion is togetherness at the expense of individuality. that's a huge difference. Because if your identity only exists inside someone else's approval, When they aren't happy with you. You begin hearing thoughts like, I can't be okay unless they're okay. If they're upset, I must have done something wrong. Their problems are now my problems. saying no feels like betrayal. I don't even know what I want. I need their approval before I can trust myself. Eventually, children stop learning who they are. Instead, they learn who everyone else needs them to be. They become emotional weather forecasters, walking into the room. Asking, how is mommy feeling today? How is daddy feeling today? Is today a good day or is today a bad day? Because if the adults aren't okay, then the child doesn't get to be okay either. Children become emotional regulators for adults who are supposed to be regulating themselves. That's an enormous burden to place on someone who is still trying to figure out who they are. Then there's codependency. Codependency is different, but they're cousins. If enmeshment is losing yourself inside of the relationship, codependency is believing your value comes from taking care of everyone else. It's the belief your worth depends on fixing people, rescuing people, managing everyone else's emotions. Keeping the peace, baby. Holding everything together. Sometimes we even mistake this for love. If we're honest, sometimes it's anxiety wearing a helper's costume. You don't help because you freely choose to. You help because you're terrified of what happens if you don't. You can't relax unless everyone else is okay. And eventually you your own needs disappear. The overlap between enmeshment and codependency is boundaries. Neither one leaves much room for autonomy. One loses identity through emotional fusion. The other lose identity through constant caretaking. Both teaches the same lessons. My needs come second. Other people's emotions are my responsibility. If they're unhappy, I must fix it. here's where I think families unintentionally get into trouble. When a child grows up into an adult and starts setting healthy boundaries, an enmeshed family doesn't experience that as growth. It experiences as loss. A phone call becomes, why don't you call me anymore? A boundary becomes, you've changed. A disagreement becomes, you've been brainwashed. Time with your spouse becomes you care more about them than your own family. Space becomes rejection, privacy becomes secrecy, independence becomes disrespectful, and guilt becomes the language people use to pull each other back into old roles. At what point does love quietly become obligation? at what point does staying connected become performing a role instead of being authentic? Because if the only way someone feels love is when you sacrifice yourself, that isn't intimacy, that's dependency. once I started thinking all about this, After learning more about a meshment and codependency, I couldn't stop asking myself one question. Why do we immediately jump to calling someone a narcissist? Now, I'm not talking about narcissistic personality disorder in a clinical diagnosis. And yes, there are some people who absolutely display narcissistic traits and abusive patterns. I'm asking, what if Some of the behaviors we call narcissism are reinforced by a meshed family systems and Codependent relationships. That doesn't excuse the behavior, of course. it changes where we look for the roots. if we only give someone a label, we might stop asking how they got there. Instead of asking what happened, we jump straight to that's just who they are. I think we lose something important when we do that. behavior usually serves a purpose. Even unhealthy behavior, controlling behavior, manipulative behavior, people often responding to a threat. Whether that threat is real or perceived. To our nervous system, a perceived threat can feel just as overwhelming as a real one. When people feel like they're losing connection, they may seek more attention. When people fear abandonment, they become controlling. When they feel powerless, they may demand access. When they fear being forgotten, they may create conflict because negative attention still feels like connection. When their identity is built around being needed, your independence can feel like an attack. on who they believe they are. some of these behaviors that I'm talking about are constantly demanding attention, expecting immediate responses to calls and texts, guilt tripping when boundaries are set, monitoring where people are and who they're with, making someone else's decisions about themselves, keeping score of sacrifices, using phrases like after everything I've done for you. Believing love should always require access, feeling entitled to private information, becoming angry when someone chooses differently, struggling to celebrate another person's independence. None of those behaviors happen in a vacuum. Many of them are unhealthy attempts, but attempts to reduce fear, regain control, and or protect an identity that feels threatened. I think one of the biggest pieces of that identity is parenting. Some parents spend twenty to thirty years making parenthood their entire identity, which is understandable. Parenting is consuming. It's meaningful, it changes you. however, when it becomes your identity, what happens when your children grow into independent adults? Who are you then? If no one ever helped you answer that question, independence can feel less like a milestone and more like abandonment. That's where I think the invisible contract begins. It sounds something like this. I sacrifice everything for you. I gave you my life. I put my dreams on hold. Now it's my turn. The child never agreed to this contract. they didn't expect to spend adulthood paying off an emotional or quite literally financial debt they didn't know existed or shouldn't have. sometimes children are even parenting their own parents. They're becoming therapists, marriage counselors, emotional support systems, peacekeepers, caretakers. Instead of being allowed to simply be a child, This is called parentification. when those children finally grow up and finally begin saying, I can't carry this anymore, the family often experiences that as betrayal rather than growth and an opportunity to work on the dysfunction. And I want to acknowledge something important. For adult children who spent years being punished for expressing hurt, it makes sense. That safety becomes a priority to them. For parents who were scapegoated inside of their own families, I have compassion for you too. Pain doesn't disappear simply because you become adults. I don't think healing comes from blaming the next generation for wounds we never had the chance to heal ourselves. Likewise, I don't think adult children should believe healing is only possible if they receive an apology. Sometimes the apology never comes. Sometimes the other person isn't capable of giving it. They just don't have the capacity or the understanding to give it. Sometimes accountability never arrives. Healing can't always wait for someone else's awareness. Because if you spent your life inside family systems that value the collective over the individual, creating space may feel like the only way to discover who you are. Not because you stopped loving people, rather because you simply realized you couldn't hear your own voice while everyone else was speaking for you and deciding who you were. all of this brings me to what I think the real issue is. Who has the most power? Because wherever power exists, so does influence. Who creates the culture of a country? The government. Who creates the culture of a workplace? Leadership. A CEO may never meet every employee, every employee experiences the culture that the leadership creates. Who shapes the culture of a sports team? The coach. Who shapes the culture of a military unit? Its leaders. In every environment, we intuitively understand something. Leadership influences outcome. Now, does that mean every outcome is entirely the leadership's responsibility? Obviously not. People still make their own choices. Every employee has free will. So do athletes and so do soldiers. Leadership creates the environment those choices are made within. It establishes what is rewarded, what is tolerated, what is ignored, what gets repaired, what gets punished. Leadership doesn't determine everything, it influences almost everything, though. Why would families be the place where we stop thinking this way? Children don't choose the family they're born into. They don't choose their parenting style. They don't choose the emotional climate of the home. They don't decide how the conflict is handled they do not create the family culture that they're born into and then learn to adapt in it or evolve and leave. Now I want to make an important distinction. This isn't about blaming parents. Parents are humans. it's about recognizing that responsibility increases with power. The more influence you have over another person's environment, the greater your responsibility to reflect on the culture you're creating is. Because power doesn't require perfection. It does require accountability. I think we have to ask a different question. Not why would someone estrange themselves from their family, what might be happening before someone gets to that point? Because I don't think estrangement begins the day someone leaves. I think it's often the day everyone else notices. For many people, instrangement begins years earlier. It begins with conversations that go nowhere. boundaries that are repeatedly asked of adult children to cross or simply not have. Promises that are repeatedly broken, apologies without change, feeling unseen, feeling unheard, and feeling unsafe. slowly realizing that every attempt to repair the relationship requires only one person to change the child. strangement is rarely one decision. It's usually an accumulation of hundreds of smaller moments. Moments where someone thinks maybe next time they will be different, until one day they stop believing it will, and they start accepting that it's time to leave. That's why I struggle with this idea that estrangement is a trend. Can some people be making impulsive decisions they might regret later? Of course. People are people. I don't think that's the whole story. Most Of the people I've talked to don't describe estrangement as freedom Unless it's a Dobby situation, Dobby is free, Harry Potter. Anyway, usually they're describing it as grief. They grieve the birthdays, the holidays, grandparents, parents, siblings, nieces, nephews, family traditions. The future they hoped they would have. Sometimes even grieve people who still are alive. Losing a relationship isn't the same as losing a person. It's a different kind of loss. But loss is loss. And I think that's something we don't talk about enough. Now, I also want to hold space for another truth. Not every estrangement is the right decision. Some happen impulsively, some happen because of misunderstandings that could have been repaired. some happen because of outside influence trying to isolate someone. We're all capable of making choices that we regret later or felt it was our only option. I also believe some estrangements are necessary. Sometimes the safest choice is distance. sometimes repeated boundary violations make trust impossible. And let's be clear, Boundaries are for you. And when you're repeatedly asked to go against what helps you stay in alignment with yourself, that's not okay. sometimes there is no willingness to repair. Sometimes staying in the relationship costs someone their mental health, their sense of self and their safety. Life isn't black and white, and I don't think estrangement should be celebrated. I don't think it should be an automatic condemnment. I think it should be understood. Because when someone reaches the point of saying, I can't keep doing this, I'm less interested in asking. Why did you leave? And I'm more interested in asking, what happened that made leaving feel like the healthiest option? I don't think that's where the story starts. I think it's where the story becomes visible. If estrangement is often the result of years and unresolved patterns, then what does repair actually look like? I don't think repair starts with agreement. I think it starts with curiosity. Curiosity says, help me understand what your experience was. Not let me explain why your experience is wrong. Because people don't heal from being argued with. They heal from being understood. Repair also requires ownership. Ownership isn't saying I'm sorry you feel that way. It's saying I can see how my actions affected you even if it wasn't my intention. And intention matters. Impact matters too. One does not erase the other. Repair requires listening. Not listening so you can defend yourself. Listening so you can learn something you didn't know before. Sometimes that means hearing things that are painful. Sometimes it means realizing your memory of an event isn't the only memory that exists. Sometimes it means accepting that two people can experience the same moment very differently. Repair also requires boundaries. boundaries aren't punishments. It's information. It's someone saying, This is what I need in order to have a healthy relationship with you. You don't have to like someone's boundaries. If your goal is relationship, you do have to take it seriously. You have to care about the other person's feelings. And finally, repair requires mutual effort. One person cannot carry an entire relationship. One person cannot apologize enough, communicate enough, forgive enough, and sacrifice enough. To repair something, it requires two people. A relationship can't be built if only one person is picking up the bricks. Now, here's what repair doesn't look like. It doesn't sound like after everything I've done for you Not because I'm your parent or you owe me. Obligation might keep people physically close. it rarely creates emotional closeness. mutual respect does, curiosity does, accountability does, consistency does. Repair isn't measured by whether people reunite. Sometimes the healthiest outcome is reconciliation. Sometimes it isn't. Not every relationship can be restored. Not every relationship should be. Every healthy relationship shares something in common. The people involved are willing to be influenced by one another. They're willing to learn, they're willing to grow, and they're willing to ask, What is my part in this? Because maybe that's what accountability really is. Not carrying all the blame, not carrying none of it, being willing to carry your part. I think that's where genuine repair begins. Back to where we started. Is estrangement a trend? Maybe. but I don't think that question gets us very far. Because trend doesn't explain pain. Trend doesn't explain decades of family dynamics gone wrong. Trends don't explain children adapting to environments they never chose or are toxic and unhealthy for their development. Trends don't explain the grief of mourning parents, siblings, or children who are still alive. Maybe estrangement isn't the disease, maybe it's the system. And it's exposing where relationships have stopped repairing, where boundaries are not respected. Family roles replacing genuine connection and relationships. Systems that ask people to survive instead of belong. Now that doesn't mean every estrangement is justified. No. Some probably happen too quickly. Some happen after misunderstandings that could have been repaired. And some happen because people are human. We all make decisions we wish later on we had handled differently, and some estrangements are a result of years, sometimes decades of trying, of hoping, of grieving, of waiting for change that never came, and behaviors that just get worse. Maybe the hardest question isn't why are so many people walking away from their families? maybe it's what conditions made walking away feel like the healthiest option? I don't think families become stronger pretending those conditions don't exist. I think they become stronger when we're willing to be curious about them. I'd love to hear your thoughts. when have you seen accountability strengthen a relationship instead of threatening it? Or have you ever experienced a moment when someone chose curiosity over certainty? And how did that change the relationship? Whether you leave a comment, send me a message, or simply sit with those questions yourself, I hope this conversation stays with you. Thank you for slowing down and thinking out loud with me. Until next time, take care of yourself. And remember, power doesn't replace perfection, but it does require accountability. I'll see you in the next episode. D-