Joshua Coleman, Ph.D.: Joshua Coleman, Ph.D.

Welcome to the Puck Venture Capital and Beyond, the show that examines the changing landscape of our world. We'll have candid conversations with VCs, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders grappling with our current challenges and providing solutions to key problems we face as a nation. I'm Jim Beer, president of CMG Advisors. This podcast brings change makers to the table to discover the inner workings behind their decision making strategies and ultimately how they got to where they are today. I think younger generations, they're more pro therapy, and they are constantly telling their parents they need to get into therapy and work on their traumas.

I've had a lot of parents go, what traumas? I had a good childhood. But again, it goes to this idea that everybody who's got issues has traumas in their path, which is a total myth. I mean, certainly some people who have issues have traumas, but not every person who has issues has traumas in their past. On this episode of the Puck, I sit down with doctor Joshua Coleman, a psychologist and a senior fellow with the Council on Contemporary Families, a nonpartisan organization providing the press and public with the latest research and best practice findings about American families.

He has written for numerous media outlets and is the author of several books centered on parent child relationships in crisis and groundbreaking concepts in creating healthy marriages. We discuss all this and more, so let's get to it. Doctor Coleman, I wanted to welcome you to Deepak. Before we jump in, maybe you could take a moment and give us a little bit about your background. Sure.

I'm a psychologist in private practice, have been in the field for over forty years. I'm also a senior fellow with the Council on Contemporary Families, written two books on the topic of parental estrangement and total of four books. I got interested in the topic of estrangement, sadly, from personal experience. I have a grown daughter who I'm very close to, but, you know, I was divorced and remarried. I was married and divorced in my 20s and had her at that point.

And then when I got remarried when she was a little bit older, she felt in many ways displaced by my second marriage and my having children in my second marriage. And as a result of that in her 20s, had cut off contact for a few years after wanting to talk to me about it, my not handling it well, my becoming more defensive or not really taking responsibility in the way that she needed me to. And so as a result, we were really out of contact for several years, which was really one of the most painful, awful, excruciating things I've ever been through and ever hoped to go through again. So, eventually, I was able to reconcile with her by just learning to just be empathic and listen and not defend and not explain and take responsibility, most importantly, and we were able to reconcile. So as a result of that, because there was no guidance at the time that I wrote my book, I wrote my first book on the topic in 2007 when parents hurt.

As a result of that, got a wide following of parents in here and other anglophone countries who are estranged. As a result of that, developed a webinar series that I've been doing for the past twelve years, ongoing free q and a every other Monday for estranged parents, which is ongoing. I've done several research projects, about estranged parents, and then most recently wrote my book, Rules of Why Adult Children Cut Ties and How to Heal the Conflict. So it's really been my mission for, you know, the past fifteen years or so to educate the public and parents and therapists in particular. Well, that that's wonderful, and I understand you you came to it from your own personal experience.

When you talk about this subject, one of the things I I've heard you mention is that you weren't prepared for the response when your first book came out. What about that response do you think affected you so much? Well, just how many parents were struggling with it? The typical response I got was, Oh, I thought I was the only one. I don't talk about it to anybody because I feel so ashamed.

I sort of assume that people are gonna feel like, Well, you must have done something pretty terrible to have your kid cut you off. Kids don't do that for no reason. While it's true that they don't you know, they have a reason for doing it, there are many pathways to estrangement beyond parental abuse. Certainly, parental abuse, neglect is in there, but it can also be divorce, the parental divorce, remarriage. It can be the role of a motivated son-in-law or daughter-in-law.

It can be the effect of bad therapy, a therapist who assumes every problem in adulthood has a parental trauma at its heart. It could be a kid who just needs to feel separate from the parent, doesn't know any other way to to do it. So there are many pathways to a stranger beyond the parent having done something so terrible to deserve it. So you say you don't have to do anything terrible to deserve it, but your work obviously has hit a nerve. How do you think your own personal experience then has impacted your work?

Well, I think it's really motivated me to get to the bottom of why this is happening so much. And my first book was written in 2007, and I would say it's only gotten worse. Something like one out of four fathers today is estranged from an adult child. Depending on who you read, between six to twelve percent of mothers are could be higher than that. You know, my own experience gave me a real feel for how much pain parents are in, how much bad advice there is.

You know, I got advice from really well meaning friends and therapists at the time I was going through mine, which only made my situation much, much worse rather than better. So I think it gave me a deep compassion, not only for the parent who's going through this, but for the adult child in terms of what their experience is, what they're needing to hear from the parent, why what the parent is doing needs to be handled in a different way. So I did a deep dive into sociology in particular, but also economics and history to kind of discover why at this particular moment we're facing this so commonly. And why do you think at this moment we are facing it in the way we are? You know, a few years ago, I read an article for The Atlantic called A Shift in Family Values is Fueling Estrangement.

And I think one of the things that parents don't realize in particular is how in the past half century in particular, we've gone from the moral framework that animated families really for millennia, which was honor thy mother and my father, respect thy elders, family is forever, to this much more personalized, identitarian, self growth, self improvement mindset. So that today, nothing compels an adult child to be in contact with a parent beyond whether or not that relationship feels good to that adult child or is in line with their own ideals for happiness and mental health and well-being. So what that means is that parents don't have the same kind of power or authority or ability to sort of compel their adult children to be in contact with them or see them or even give them access to their grandchildren. So we've had this huge moral framework shift. At the same time, we've had the role of social media, which allows a bunch of people to step into the fray with all kinds of opinions, often misguided, about what constitutes trauma, who's toxic, who you should set boundaries on, who's gaslighting, etcetera, and those kind of things also fuel conflict and division.

We have increasing atomization in The United States. We have political differences fueling estrangement. So a recent Ipsos poll found that 16% of families became estranged as of 2016, just over political differences. You know, the old day, you might not I mean, not even the old days, like twenty, fifteen, or twenty years ago, if you're you're a Democrat and your kid wanted to marry a Republican, you'd be like, well, as long as you love each other. Right?

Today, you know, the idea that if you're a Republican parent and your kid's gonna marry a Democrat, you'd feel like a hell no. And same with your if you're a Democrat and your kid's gonna marry a Republican. So politics have become this huge value signifier, which is also hugely important. And just the the stabilization of divorce, by stabilization, I mean, stabilizing at roughly rates of fifty percent. In my own research and clinical experience, I see how commonly divorce is a pathway to estrangement.

And finally, rising rates of mental illness. We have our rates of mental illness in this country are through the roof, and I know from my own research that mental illness, not only in the parent, but also in the adult child, can fuel estrangement. A bunch of things have happened in the past half century to just make family life much more tenuous and fraught. So you mentioned social media being something that has fueled this, but you also have referred to this estrangement as a silent epidemic, which is kind of the opposite of social media. Why is it that you refer to it as a silent epidemic?

Well, the silent part is more the parents who don't wanna talk about it, and some to some extent, the estranged adult children as well. What I hear from estranged adult children who are also in my practice is, well, I don't wanna tell other people because I'm gonna get lectured about, oh, you should def always call your mother and family's forever and you're being selfish, you're being mean, etcetera. But more typically, it's the parents who are being affected by the social media because we still live in a largely youth oriented culture and in a culture that's highly therapeutically oriented, meaning that we're very preoccupied with, is this in my therapeutic best interest? So I think that a lot of these these sites really fuel divisiveness rather than kind of a more collaborative framework. Well, so let's let's talk about therapists for a second.

I know in the years that I've witnessed the change in therapy going back fifty years, that there are changes about how therapists are approaching these different topics. But what is the role that you're seeing with therapy today, and how do therapists play into this? Well, there's a a sociologist that I like about Allison Pugh. She wrote an important book called The Tumbleweed Society, and she asks, well, in an age of declining obligations, what are our obligations to other people, family in particular? And she's she describes therapy today as being a form of detachment brokers, where we're sort of helping people detach from earlier ideals of responsibility and the like.

So therapists today, I think too often, not all therapists certainly, but I think many therapists help people to feel like, well, you have to do what's in your best interest and what makes you happy and protect your mental health. And if that means cutting out a family member, not only can you do it, but you should do it because doing it is representative of being some kind of ideal around somebody who's assertive and, you know, involved in self care and self advocacy and the like. So I think therapists are are huge contributors to this problem because we're not really even trained to think two generations down the line. So a high percentage of typically when an adult child cuts off a parent, they also cut off contact to the grandchildren. Well, that's also, it's a huge loss for everybody as well.

But people don't often realize, like I'm constantly, really, weekly interviewed in the media about this topic. The most common question is, you know, well, should I cut out a toxic family member, etcetera? Should I estrange my parent or sibling or whatever? And what what isn't typically asked is how is that going to impact everybody else in the family? Estrangement is a cataclysmic event.

It isn't dyadic. It's not even triadic. It affects every member in the family because people line up either to support the estranged family member or the estranging family member. So parents can get divided. Grandparents can get divided.

Siblings may feel like they have to side with their kid I mean, with their sibling or the parent. So it's a huge event. And I think as a culture and society, our preoccupation with what's good for the individual, and we in America live in the most highly individualistic culture than any other in the world as far as we can tell based on recent measures. The idea that what matters to the individual is the most important thing. Well, it turns out that's actually not not the case.

It shouldn't be our sole area of inquiry. Interesting. So how does polarization, you know, in the world that we're going through right now, how does that play into this, if at all? Well, it definitely does because it increases people's level of anxiety and agitation and their belief their temptation to see the other as enemy, as not valuable. Currently, according to the Pew Research Center, political beliefs are like the most powerful value signifier of any other one.

So if you're a Republican and you hear somebody's a Democrat, well, you know, you might feel hatred towards them or even condone violence. Similarly, if you're a Democrat, you hear that the other person's a Republican. So this, the way that politics inflame relationships, including family relationships, is very clear. It's not uncommon for me today to work with a parent who's estranged because their adult child doesn't agree with their political beliefs and feel like their political beliefs are contributing to the downfall of our country, and so they're gonna estrange the parent as a result. So it's it's a serious problem.

So I understand if somebody has diverse political feelings and it just so happens with the family, you can see where that is causing pain in today's world. But if you're seeing an increase in this, presumably there's pain associated with it, people not lightly breaking off these relationships. What do you think is contributing to the fact that there is so much pain in these relationships right now? Is there something going on in our society that's increasing that discomfort for these people? Well, there's a lot of things going on that people are are very worried and agitated about, global warming, the situation in the world, currently the situation in the Mid East, the erosion of the union.

So, you know, 1960s, for example, a parent who is a union member without a college degree could reasonably feel like they could support their children and even send one or two of them to college. Well, by the nineteen eighties, as a neoliberal economy took place, that all began to change. And there what occurred as a result is what the political scientist Jacob, I'm forgetting his last name. I wanna say Hack, but I don't think that's quite right, but called the great risk shift, a shift from corporations and government helping parents with low cost loans, low cost tuition, pensions, decent paying jobs, etcetera. It was all shifted under the backs of families.

So parents since the 1980s had become much more burdened than they were, say, in the postwar period from 1950 to the mid to late seventy's. So, you know, there's a lot of making fun of helicopter parents, but the reality is the parents have had to become helicoptering because it's the only way to get their kid through the narrow bottleneck, increasingly narrow bottleneck into a secure adult life. So all of these things have put enormous pressure on parents and the family and in some ways, you know, helicopter parenting has worked out. Some adult children feel much closer to their parents than earlier generations might. But on the other hand, it's made the parenting environment much more fraught, much more divisive, and much more heated up.

And then you bring in psychology and all of its kind of ideas about if you have a symptom in adulthood, it must come from a childhood trauma. You just have a recipe for incredible divisiveness. Gotcha. So I think I mentioned my mother studied attachment theory and taught on the subject at USC for decades, and John Bowlby was a frequent guest in our home when I was growing up. What are your critiques on the limits of attachment theory and family systems as this sort of catchall for everything?

Sure. That's a good question. So there's this Israeli sociologist that I like, Eva Oluz, who says, today, our lives are plided backwards. What's a dysfunctional family? It's a family where your needs weren't met.

How do you know your needs weren't met? By looking at your present condition. So, so many adult children and adolescents are coming into therapy with this idea that, well, if I have depression or anxiety or some form of mental illness or problems with confidence or self esteem, Well, I just have to look back at my family and figure out what the case is. And I see attachment theory being misused both by therapists and others to explain why they have the issues that they have. They assume that if they have anxiety in relationships, that they had an anxious attachment or insecure attachment to the parent.

Now, they may well have, but you can as with, you know, the pathways to estrangement with mental illness, there are many pathways to mental illness or insecurity or difficulties with relationships beyond a parent who was flawed in their attachment parenting. So I'm a believer in I mean, I'm yeah. I think attachment is a real thing. I think that there are parents who aren't able to provide their children with secure attachment and that has the potential to have long standing implications. It doesn't always have long standing implications, but it certainly has the potential to.

So I think it's a credible, reasonable theory. I just think it often gets misapplied. Well, and when it gets misapplied or even when it's not misapplied, I mean, it still begs the question, which is at what point do you realize that your parents' mistakes often go back to the fact that their parents made mistakes, and it goes all the way back to Adam and him, so to speak. And if you're ever gonna break the cycle, the question is, do you have to wait till you have kids and have them get angry at you to realize that, oh, you know, I made the same mistakes I swore I would never make. How do you help people break that, you know, pattern, so to speak?

Yeah. I think that to me, the mark of a mature adult is the capacity to see that the parent did the best they could, even if the best that they could was really terrible. And I would never encourage somebody to just forgive somebody that they feel like completely traumatized them or hurt them or or wounded them. But I do think a sign of maturity is the capacity to see the parent in a more three-dimensional way and to try to move towards compassion towards them. I think that the way that we're our culture currently structures things is if the parent did fail the child growing up, Well, then the adult child don't doesn't owe them anything by way of understanding or gratitude for all the things that they did do or sacrifices they did make or the ways that they, you know, were a much better parent than their own parent was.

So I think it's very tricky terrain in this moment to kind of help people see that. And partly because we have a very rich developed lexicon and vocabulary around boundaries and gaslighters and toxic people and narcissists, etcetera, but a very impoverished language around connection and empathy and compassion and interdependency and those kinds of ideals. So that's part of what makes these kinds of negotiations more challenging. Yeah. And I know in my own personal experience where I've had, you know, my own anger and issues to resolve, if you're always waiting for the other person to make the first move, it never happens.

And at some point Right. The question is, do you wanna be right or do you wanna essentially try to repair the relationship? And somebody's gotta be a first mover, so to speak. Exactly so. And it's typically the parent because as I was saying earlier, nothing compels an adult child to have a relationship with a parent beyond that adult child's desire to do so.

And if the parent isn't able or willing to take responsibility, to show empathy, to make amends, then it's much less likely, particularly for a kid who's estranged around the pathway to estrangement, to feel as motivated to do so. So parents, a lot of this stuff is really on parents' ability to to do that. So so much of my methodology that I talk about in rules of estrangement is really oriented towards helping parents find the kernel, if not the bushel of truth, and why the adult child needs to be estranged or why they're even upset with the parent. You know, as parents, it's very hard for us to hear the ways that we've hurt or neglected our children or, you know, any of the ways that have caused them to feel pain, particularly if we feel like we did a pretty good job. But that is not a very useful response if your kid is telling you that they felt hurt by you or traumatized or wounded or that kind of thing.

And the other thing that's challenging for parents is that, you know, the past four decades or so, probably those parents have been some of the most involved psychologically minded, well resourced parents of almost any generation, and they provided their children with a quality of life nobody ever provided them. So I often hear parents saying something like, you know, you wanna know had a bad childhood? I did. Yours was a freaking walk in the park. You know?

So as you can imagine, it doesn't go very well, but but that's the way the parent feels. So that also makes these interactions more fraught. Well, you mentioned that oftentimes the parent has to make the first move, but you also have situations where these adult kids don't really want to be in contact. And you hear, I mean, I've had friends say, I mean, I've reached out, and and they, you know, they won't take my call or they won't return my text. And what do you say in in those situations?

Well, I mean, I always encourage parents to write some version of an amend letter, and parents don't always know why the adult child has cut off contact. So if they don't know why the adult child has cut off contact, I encourage them to write something like the following. Dear son or daughter, I'm writing to see if it's possible to open up a dialogue with you. I know that you wouldn't have cut off contact unless you felt like it was the healthiest thing for you to do. That said, I don't completely understand and would like to.

It's clear that I have significant blind spots as a person or as a parent that I don't understand it, so I'm wondering if you would help me to understand it. I promise to read or listen purely from the perspective of listening and learning and not in any way to defend myself. If there are things you'd like me to work on in my own therapy or in family therapy, I welcome that. So it's like a big invitation to talk or to complain, and it's in line with the contemporary model of family, which is that which is much more psychological, much more oriented towards positive communication, egalitarianism, and those kinds of things. So, I mean, I do tell parents not just to completely stop trying, you know, for at least a year if they're getting their gifts or letters returned unopened or they're being threatened with restraining orders or they're being served with restraining orders, or they're, you know, being told to only communicate through my attorney.

It just means that things are way too inflamed for anything positive to occur. So sometimes it's better to just let the line go cold for at least a year. Sometimes that can work because the adult child can feel like you're respecting their limits or their boundaries more. They may also respect you more for not continuing to throw good energy after bad. That old saying, how can I miss you if you never go away, is also true in families, so it may cause them to miss you more?

It may invite more self reflection if they have to wonder, Oh, gee, I haven't heard from my mom for six months. You know, I wonder why. So it invites more self inquiry in ways that it might not if you're kinda constantly reaching out and they're just feeling more and more resentful and put upon. And how do you deal with parents who are like, well, you know, if I'm dead to my kid, then my kid's gonna be dead to me and I'm gonna disinherit them or, look, I don't wanna keep pressuring them because obviously I mean nothing to them and they're so hurt. How do you start to break that down and help a parent navigate the pain that they're going through?

Yeah. Well, navigating the pain is really a big part of my work and, you know, the first thing that we try to do is see if it is possible to open up a dialogue with the adult child. And I'll reach out to the adult child on behalf of the parent, but I do it by saying your parent contacted me because of my expertise, but please know that because this is my area of expertise, I know that when adult children cut off contact, they have very good reasons for doing so. So my goal isn't to encourage you to reconcile. It's more to help me help them have a better understanding of why you need to do this or if there is a pathway to reconciliation, what that might be.

Significant percentage of adult children will respond to that, not all of them and not always favorably, but a significant probably a majority will respond to me about that. But if the parent has done everything, then and this is harder for mothers than for fathers. You know, I I have this saying, moms get sad and dads get mad. Dads have have a much harder time, you know, writing the amends. They could feel like, oh, no.

They can make an amends to me. Right. You know? I was a good parent. They're so mad about, you know, what I did or didn't do.

You know? That's trivial. They're being ridiculous. Doesn't make them more likely to reconcile. But it is a much more common male father kind of a a response.

Whereas mothers sort of feel like they have to keep trying, sometimes well past the point of it being productive because the ideal of motherhood is that you should always keep trying and, you know, probably is your fault and should take responsibility, and that can be maladaptive as well. There is a place for not continuing to try if you've tried and and it's not coming to any good. At that point, you have to work on radical acceptance, meaning it is what it is. I'm not gonna keep throwing any good energy after bad. I have tried.

I've taken responsibility. It's now it's up to my child. But to your earlier question about because I see this a lot too, a lot of parents feel like, well, screw that kid. I'm not gonna why would I leave them any of my inheritance that that I would have left to them otherwise? I mean, if you have other kids, first of all, it's gonna complicate your relationship with your other children if you cut them out of the will.

Second of all, you know, in the same way that I think parents do the best that we can when we're raising our children, I think estranged adult children are doing the best that they can even when they cut off the parent, even when they're doing so in a disrespectful way. They may be doing it because they have mental illness or you haven't done a good job of really addressing their feelings or they're being too negatively influenced by the person they're married to or their ex or they don't know any other on the way to feel separate from you. So I just don't think it's fair to punish them with that. And I also think when we're thinking about an inheritance, we have to think from the perspective of what is our legacy? Do you want your legacy to be that you rejected your child from the grave?

Because, you know, I don't know about you, but my both my parents have passed and they continue to be in my thoughts and consciousness, you know, long. They've been gone for ten years. Fortunately for me, I have good decent parents, so it's a positive way. But if I had, you know, much more strained relationship with them, but they've actually left me in in their will with a loving message, that would have some kind of a a purchase for me psychologically and be meaningful to me. So I think we have to remember that we're parenting, you know, long after we we die, and you have to think about it from the perspective of of what is your legacy.

You mentioned earlier that one of the factors that's contributing to this is divorce. When you see a mother or a father using kind of the children as a weapon in in our in some ways, saying, you know, your father was this or your mother was that, how do you start to deal with that challenge when there is that divisiveness between the mother and the father that that's leading to this? Yeah. This is sadly common parental alienation where one parent poisons the child after divorce, and that can happen with gray divorces as well, divorces that happen for those in the 60 range, which are actually the most common forms of divorce these days other than people who marry, like, in their teens. So so the most rapidly numbers of divorces happen for people who are 60 and over where they're kinda looking at their lives and saying, well, do I wanna still be married to this person?

So you can have alienation happen at that age as well. And also, even if they're not being alienated, a kid can feel like, well, you broke up a happy home, so I don't wanna have a relationship with you. So but if if I'm working with a parent who's doing the alienating, you know, I come at it from a parenting perspective that I think your child is probably misunderstanding. I understand you feel like you're being protective of your child and I respect that impulse by kind of warning them about, let's say, they're sort of saying, well, your father's this and your father's that. It's I understand that you're wanting to protect your child because they were you know, your your husband was so hurtful to you, but it's really much better for your child to discover this on their own.

I think they're gonna be confused by you doing it. I think it may trim them away from parts of their fathers that may be positive that have contributed to their life. So it's better to to not go there and to sort of let let him or her figure these things out over time. If you're right, it'll become clear to them as they get older. But you really don't wanna be in the situation that so many parents are.

I'm still speaking to the parent who's doing the alienating of your kid looking back and saying, oh, well, you poisoned me against my parent even though, you know, that isn't really your intention. Now if you're on the other end of it, let's say you're the the parent, and more commonly it's dads who are being alienated by the mother because mothers are typically the custodial parent and children in general feel a greater sense of loyalty statistically to their mothers than they do their fathers, which is probably why when out of four statistically to their mothers than they do their fathers, which is probably why one out of four fathers is estranged at this point. There are other reasons, but, certainly, that's that's one of them, much more than than mothers. So if I'm working with the father, you know, father should never say or a parent, whoever it is who's being alienated, should never say, oh, you're just being brainwashed by your mother. You know, that's they just put those lies into your head.

If somebody's brainwashed, they don't know that they're brainwashed. So you're just gonna look defensive and like you can't take responsibility. So if your kid comes to you and says, you know, well, you were always so critical of me growing up or whatever, and you know you were, but you know that was your partner's, your spouse's complaint about you, you're better off not just denying it or defending yourself. You're better off always trying to find the kernel of truth or saying, gee, I wasn't aware that you felt that way. I'm really sorry to hear that.

Are there you know, do you wanna talk more about it? Can we get into family therapy and work on it? Can you let me know the next time? I do that. So you put it into the language of accountability where the child is, you know, I won't say they have to be accountable, but it puts it into a framework where they can talk about the ways that that they feel upset, and it allows the parent not to prove the child wrong because you're never gonna be able to do that.

It's more to develop a relationship that feels more open and safe and secure, and that alone can work against the ways that the child's being poisoned by the other parent. So I I have a question which relates to the therapist that you were seeing who will say to a child, If it's not making you feel good, you know, you can cut this out. What type of research is out there that helps people understand the long term negative consequences of being estranged from a parent? Because, for instance, I have friends who who don't have good relations with their kids, and they'll basically talk about how, you know, that they've tried, but their their kid just doesn't love them or just doesn't care about them. And I find myself saying, I think deep in our soul, there is this desire and this need for a parent and the power of a parent, and that maybe they're not consciously saying it, but in an unconscious level there seems to be some long term trauma that doesn't go away from these breaches in these relationships.

What's your experience in terms of the long term impact on people that don't do this work, and how should the therapeutic community be dealing with that? Yeah. No. I think it's an important question and one that isn't really asked enough. I think there I think I agree with you that even for the person doing the estranging, there is a cost to them.

There's a cost, you know, not only in guilt, but in decrease in support. You know, it's not surprising to me that we have such high rates of mental illness and loneliness and social isolation because we're constantly being invited to cut ourself off from so called toxic boundary crossing, gaslighting people and not really being given the tools to reconcile and and work through things. So I think it just leaves people feeling more guilty about it, more shameful about it. I mean, in in their own minds, they feel like, well, it was worth it. So if you go, you know, something like Reddit for the estranged adult children's forum, they'll say, oh, best thing I ever did.

Don't need the drama. I feel so much better. It's better for my mental health. And maybe maybe it is in the short term, but I'm not at all convinced it is in the long term. It's certainly not for the person who's on the other end of the estrangement, who's being estranged.

That clearly has a long term negative consequence for them. And for the person that is doing the estranging, so to speak, the the child that's saying, look, I really need to break up contact, you know, obviously, they're they're in pain, and then the question is, is the parent, when the parent is trying to reengage, just making it worse because they get defensive. And I know when I've been attacked by my kids, it is an overwhelming feeling sometimes where you want to justify yourself, right? I did the best I could, you know, because you're so, you want to be forgiven so badly. How do you counsel people to really dig deep and despite all their desire to defend themselves, to really bow low and really, really try to empathize and understand where their child is coming from?

Yeah. Well, what I tell parents is it's about humility, not humiliation. So I think your phrase bow low is is the right one. That it can feel like an act of humiliation to have to take responsibility or find the kernel of truth or show compassion or not defend or not explain. Those are really hard things, you know, for us as humans to do, but particularly for parents because, you know, most parents feel like they love their children perhaps more than anybody.

So the idea that their children would say in some way to them, you failed me, you neglected me, you hurt me, nothing could be more painful for a parent. So it does invite incredible, all the worst things. It's what I call getting into the quicksand. You know, it really makes you wanna defend yourself and explain. And the more you do that, the worse your situation gets.

So, I mean, as a therapist, I'm just super empathic to the parent and don't ask them to do anything until they really know that I get how much pain they're in and how unfair it all feels to them because they really need to know that, you know, I'm kinda by their side if I'm gonna help them to do something really hard. And, you know, tease parents sometimes and say, okay. I'm gonna help you write what I fondly refer to as the throw the parent under the bus letter, where we're gonna basically take all of your adult children's complaints and find the kernel of truth to them and take responsibility. But finding the kernel of truth doesn't mean that you're agreeing with it or, you know, or validating them. It means more that you're trying to get onto some kind of common ground.

So if your kid says you are always neglectful, you were always at work, you know, you didn't care about me, you know, you don't have to say yes. You're right. I was a selfish, you know, whatever. And say, well, it sounds like that was much more impactful to you than I than I realized. Or if you do recognize, like in my own case with my daughter, I totally understood why she felt displaced by my twins from my current marriage when I remarried and that they got a much better quality of life and, you know, I mean, I also have them full time for you know, I only had her part time.

So there was plenty to to complain about, but it still was really hard for me to to land there. Initially, I responded very defensively and aggressively like so many of the parents that I see doing. So it's not it's not easy work, but it really it's binary. Parents will always say to me, well, when do I get to say how I feel? And I'm like, well, maybe never.

You know, if you want the relationship with your child, you may never get to say how you feel. It's gonna really be on those terms. And so similarly, if the adult child's coming into family therapy with me, I'll warn the parent. I'll say, this is not marriage therapy where you both get an equal say about how things turn out, you're gonna meet somewhere in the middle. I say, no.

It's more like your spouse has left and they're willing to come back and give you another chance, but it's gonna be on their terms. That's what this is. And similarly, I'll say to the adult child, you know, that really the goal here is to help your parents to learn how to empathize better with you and take responsibility and express willingness to abide by your boundaries and that's really my role. And I'll warn the parent in advance that that's what I'm gonna do so that everybody's on the same page. Otherwise, the parent could feel sort of waylaid by me if I'm supporting their adult child and not them in the session.

But I'm trying to keep the adult child in the session so it can go forward because, you know, they are estranged for a reason. So they're often very reluctant to engage in family therapy because they're worried that the things that they're objecting to are gonna be invalidated in some way. Well, that that's fascinating. You talk about how, again, if you're doing marriage counseling, they're coming together, in a sense, as equals, and they're working on that relation from that perspective. How do you see that relationship in terms of the adult child and the parent?

How would you characterize that versus the spousal relationship? Well, you know, a lot of adult children say they want a relationship, you know, with their parent that's equal. It's actually not really a relationship that's equal. It's still going to be a parent child relationship from the perspective that the adult child gets to set the terms and the rules of engagement in terms of how often to see them or the kids, how the parent has to comport themselves in terms of whether they're being too critical or guilt tripping or whatever. And I'm particularly highlighting here an adult child who's been estranged and is considering reconciliation.

I think plenty of people have relationships with their adult children where they can be fairly open about their feelings. But, you know, it requires a lot of help on both people's part, this sort of newer form of family, which is much more communication oriented, much more psychological in nature, much more egalitarian in terms of the power imbalance where the parent can't really use their parental authority as a guilt trip or a lever to compel, you know, better or more interested behavior from the adult child. So it isn't really a relationship of a quality for a child who's been estranged because they've already shown that they're willing to to walk. So that necessarily just basic game theory gives them them more power because the parent is in much more pain, typically, of the adult child's probably in some pain, but not typically as much as the parent because there's no upside for the parent. For the parent, it's all shame, loss, regret, guilt, sorrow, anger, etcetera, fear.

For the adult child, it can be tied to ideals of individuality, of separation, of independence, of identity, preserving mental health, etcetera. So there's enormous upside from the adult child's perspective, which empowers them. There's enormous downside to the parent's perspective, which disempowers them. So those realities have to be kind of brought into the parent's awareness that they don't have the same kind of power that maybe their parents had over them or earlier generations of parents would have had. Well, if you back away from the power dynamic, and again, obviously, if there is an estrangement, the number one goal is how do you reestablish and start to rebuild that trust, which presumably can be a lifelong process.

I mean, it takes a long time to build up and obviously easily shattered. But in a healthy relationship where that trust has been reestablished, is there room for a negotiation and a dynamic where each generation is learning from the other? Yeah. You know, a friend of mine asked another friend recently, do you think I should have a kid? And the response was, well, it depends on the kid.

So I think the same is true in this dynamic. It depends on the kid and the parent. I think there's plenty of adult children who, you know, could easily have that conversation and would be willing to have it and would be deeply empathic to the parent's perspective, Whether they were estranged or not, they could learn to be more empathic and not worry that their guilt was gonna, you know, somehow be manipulating them into having more contact than they want. So I think, you know, I mean, there was a poll a while back that showed that probably a large percentage, maybe even the majority of parents today feel closer to their adult children than they believe that their parents felt to them. So a lot of the things that we've the ways parenting has changed over the past four decades in particular have largely been positive.

So but this is sort of the downside. In the same way that people the you know, today's marriages are much more egalitarian, much more balanced, that women have the power to walk for economic reasons and cultural reasons that empowers them and also allows them to shape the marriage in a way that's much more in line with their ideals for a romantic relationship. Well, the same is true, but it also makes marriage more fragile because you don't have the kind of social strictures that compel people to stay married no matter what if they have, you know, particularly if they have children. So all of this has become based much more on, you know, what one writer referred to as effective individualism, affect, not effect, meaning that the individualism is predicated upon how the relationship makes them feel. So in the same way that marriage has become more fragile, it has also become more gratifying for the people who can play by the rules.

The problem is if it doesn't work for one of the people, then they can leave same parent adult child relationships. They can be deeply gratifying because it's much more psychological and communicative, but it also means that, hey, if it's not happy, then I could walk, and there's there's a lot of social support for doing so. Got it. No. That makes sense.

In terms of the change in religion and changes in the LGBT community and in general in terms of people individuating and focusing on the individual, how has that all played into the challenges that parents and children have in in today's world? Well, I think it's made it more a fraud because it moves identity into the center of the dialogue. So I know that kids from who announced that they're they wanna transition or they are transitioning, If the parent doesn't pretty quickly back them up, then they're very much at risk of being called transphobic. And once they're labeled as transphobic, then they're often put very quickly on the path towards estrangement. Similarly, with with kids who are lesbian, gay, bi, although there's generally more support education about that.

So I think parents overall can do a better job being supportive of that than than kids who want to transition, but still it can be used as a lever against the parent that they weren't supportive enough or they're homophobic or transphobic and the like, and that can work against the parent. So, again, it has to do with the way that, you know, if relationships are purely based on how we feel, that's a pretty fragile, mercurial thing to base relationships upon, particularly if you have the idea that if a relationship doesn't make you feel good or makes you feel bad or more anxious or more guilty, then that means the other person, you know, is a toxic person or a gaslighter or a narcissist or whatever, and therefore you not only can estrange them, but you should, that makes for a very fragile society because there are really no relationships, particularly family relationships, that don't have a fair amount of conflict in them and even a certain amount of dysfunctionality. You know, the the writer, Mary Carr, who wrote the Liar's Club, she she said something like, a dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.

So I think there's there's wisdom in that that all families have a certain amount of dysfunction to them. It's really how do you metabolize that dysfunction? How do you communicate about it? In our culture, we really think it's a great idea, an important idea to communicate about everything that that bothers you about somebody. That's not necessarily true in other cultures.

You look at more at, like, collectivist cultures, for example, where getting along with people in the family and not standing out and not talking about your feelings and raising the flags of your identity is considered much more important because the the survival of the group and the group identity is more in the foreground. Whereas in a highly individualistic culture like ours, it's your feelings that matter and your identity and your individuality and your protection of your own mental health that matter. So that all can lead to much more conflict than problematic conflict. And do you see hope in terms of, like, when you look at the world today and what's going on, there has been this estrangement, but are there things that give you optimism that we are making progress in these areas? I wish I could say yes, but, currently, I can't.

But, you know, the good news is that I think it's becoming less hidden, more out there. So I think it allows for different and deeper conversations to occur. I think it allows for more education to occur. So for example, I'm you know, my mission is to educate therapists around this because I do think therapists are part and parcel of this. And I think that the more therapists who are aware of it, that can certainly be a way to begin to change it, but also in the popular media and how it gets talked about.

I think changing the dialogue of should I cut out my toxic parent to how do I work through my painful, difficult feelings with this person and move towards reconciliation? How do I preserve what's good about this relationship and contain, or isolate what's bad? You know, we're more collaborative rather than, you know, separative model is is what's highlighted. Yeah. I mean, it seems like the problem, you know, has gotten worse in the terms of the number of people that are estranged and so forth.

But it also seems like the younger generations are embracing things like therapy more than in the past and or coaching or other things. And with people out there like yourselves that are experts in this area, it seems like there's more of a willingness to at least look into these issues and do the work. Do you see that there's a generational divide? For instance, is it easier for the younger people to do the work than the parents, or what's your feeling about that? Well, it depends what we mean by do the work.

I think younger generations, to your point, are very much, more pro therapy. Right. And they are constantly telling their parents they need to get into therapy and work on their traumas. Right. You know?

I've had a lot of parents go, what traumas? I had a good childhood. But, again, it goes to this idea that everybody who's got issues has traumas in their path, which is a total myth. I mean, certainly, some people who have issues have traumas, but not every person who has issues has traumas in their past. So I think younger generations are very therapy oriented, but, again, it depends on on the therapist.

I think older generations I mean, I'm a boomer. You know, our generation, we were kind of the authors of the self growth movement, but even but back then, the sixties, you know, Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, etcetera, it was still oriented towards a larger kind of community interest, whereas it's become much more individualized, much more oriented towards what makes me as an individual feel good and what highlights my identity and self esteem. I think that's probably that's partially what's been so problematic about this shift towards therapy. But therapy and therapeutic narratives are really part of our culture now. Everybody talks about, you know, we either talk about their therapy or they use therapeutic language.

And, you know, there's a lot written about how now dating sites, one of the things people say is, you know, are you in therapy? I only wanna be with somebody who's in therapy or been through therapy, like, at some sort of, you know Right. I don't know, some kind of signifier. I mean, I guess it it can be. I mean, I'm a therapist.

I you know, I understand, but it can also be wrong headed. Yeah. Totally makes sense. So as we get close to wrapping up here, you know, on the puck, we talk to a lot of business people. Can you take a moment and walk us through how your career, for instance, has changed since the publishing of your first book, and how has your business model changed?

Sure. I mean, I wrote my first book in 2000, and that was the The Marriage Makeover Finding Happiness in Imperfect Harmony. You know, the more books that I've written, the more I'm in the media. In my first book, I probably had one or two interviews. Second book is called The Lazy Husband, How to Get Men to Do More Parenting and Housework.

I can imagine. Which endeared me to men everywhere. No. But well, the problem is no none of the men read the books. The book is actually very pro father, pro husband perspective.

Right. But I knew men wouldn't read it, so I had to, you know, do a title that would appeal to women. That I mean, I got a huge amount of media from that. I was on 2020, Good Morning America, you know, like every media outlet imaginable. But this book in particular, most recent book, Rules of Estrangement, I think because it coincides with just the rise and interest on the topic.

So at this point, my career has shifted from a largely kind of weekly therapy based practice to more doing only consultations these days with with estranged parents or estranged families, which are just one to two sessions. So it's more of a psychoeducational model. I'm doing a lot more public speaking, much more media appearances. I was contacted recently by a philanthropist who had read my book and had a reconciliation with his son, and so he's really interested in the topic of helping fathers. So I'm working with a colleague and a professor in, Canada, Susan Chuang, c h u a n g.

I'm not butchering her last name. We're doing research on the topic to help fathers who are estranged or alienated to reconcile. So I'd say those are the primary ways that it shifted. Got it. Well, this has been absolutely wonderful, and I Thank you.

It is something that comes up and you see it, and we all carry that shame to the extent that if your child is angry with you, there is nothing worse and you do feel terrible about it. And realizing there's other people in it and having a place to go and realizing that there are things that you can do to improve it is hugely important. I guess, finally, let me ask you this. I mean, in your practice and in the experiences that you've had, for those people that really do bow low and that come to you with a real desire to try to repair things with an adult child, how often are they successful? I mean, again, it goes back to this depends on the kid.

Yeah. You know, what I always tell parents is I'm just lucky. I mean, not just lucky. I mean, I always say I'm a psychologist. I have some communications skills, but, you know, I'm lucky my daughter was willing to hear me out and accept my apology.

There's a lot of parents who are probably can communicate as good as me or they can with my help, but the child just won't open the door because, you know, they're too influenced by the person that they're married to or they're still too hurt or mad about the past or their own mental illness or the divorce or all the other or they just need to know any other way to feel separate from the parent. So if I can get both in the room, my success rate is extremely high. If it's only dependent on the parents reaching out to the adult child, then I don't have specific statistics about that. But it's not as good as if I can get the the kid in the room because it's all dependent on their willingness to hear the parent out and be willing to forgive or open the door to communication. So, I mean, the other thing I should mention is that, you know, I do a weekly webinar series people can learn about from my website.

And also, I have a private Facebook group for estranged parents and, estranged grandparents that's very active. And so there's tons of support for anybody who's going through this. So, you know, people should feel free to reach out to me there. No. That's wonderful.

Yeah. And it's interesting. You you approach it from the perspective, can you get, you know, the adult child in the room? I've actually seen situations where some of the adult children that I know, parents, have reached out to parents and gotten them to go into therapy with them. Now, in one or more of those cases, the child was actually a therapist, ironically, but it can come from that direction as well, I think.

Oh, for sure. Yeah. And I and I see more and more of that too if the adult child reaching out for wanting a reconciliation because the parent isn't kinda getting up to speed in terms of what the adult child's needed. So, no, that's a good point. So, doctor Coleman, this has been wonderful.

Thank you for having me. In today's world, I can't think of anything more important because, again, if you know, it's one thing for friends to be befriending each other on Facebook, and that's terrible enough. And it's terrible that Democrats and Republicans can't talk to each other. But when when children and parents are estranged, it breaks my heart, and it's not good for anybody. Yep.

I agree. We're becoming more and more fractured as a culture, and we have to turn this around. Well, thank you for all your good work. The POC Venture Capital Beyond is produced by CMPG Advisors. If you enjoyed the conversation today and haven't yet subscribed to our show, you can find us on iTunes, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.

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