For parents not as close to adult children as they would like

Parent Cafe
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Thank you!

It’s so interesting that siblings can and do have different experiences with the same parents. I see that myself - my daughters are different people, so at times they each needed something different. I’d like to think I rose to the occasion. I can see we have different relationships now amongst us - not bad, just different.

The human part of me doesn’t understand how three siblings - my brother, the oldest, my sister the middle and me the youngest - remember things so differently. Not disputing that can happen, since it’s evident right in front of me, but it is perplexing.

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I agree that different perceptions of the same childhood are understandable but difficult to grapple with. Sometimes I think birth order, gender, personality, etc all play a part. My brother is three years older than me and was a difficult child. Looking back, he probably had undiagnosed learning challenges and adhd. He was 15 when our father went into rehab. I do believe that his childhood was more difficult than my own, even though we grew up in the same home.

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Agree. While my brother and I are not super close, the one thing that strongly binds us is that we view our childhoods identically even though we are very different types of people. It’s incredibly validating that he sees things the exact same way. Neither of us is estranged from our mother but neither of us likes her and we see her as little as possible without declaring any sort of estrangement.

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Hah - five kids in my family, five different viewpoints about our childhood (including differences in how the identical twins view our childhood). We had a relatively normal childhood for the 60’s, no substance or other abuse. Humans are interesting (and complex).

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Thank you, I’m going to watch the video and read the article.

MTA: Oh, my gosh, Dr. Coleman is the expert we’re meeting with on Zoom next Monday!! I won’t tell you how much he charges…

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I read a piece once that said something to the effect that siblings don’t have the same parents, because parents change every time another child arrives. So sibling #1 got two terrified youngsters w backseat-driving parents of their own. Sibling #2 got more experienced parents trying to raise a kid w entirely different personality, no in laws geographically around. Me, I got tired parents who had lost a child, lost a parent, and could see the things they wanted to do differently. It helps me understand my sibs reactions to things.

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I’ve probably mentioned them before, but I just love TJ Therrien’s videos where he plays the oldest, middle, and youngest child in a family. This is my favorite one:

The dad’s reaction to each kid is priceless. He tells the oldest one that he loves him, he screams at the middle one to get out of there, and he’s just annoyed by the youngest. So if you asked these three kids their impressions of their parents, the oldest would say, “They’re wonderful!” The middle would say, “Oh, my gosh, they were so brutal with me.” The youngest would say, “Whatever.” Those are EXACTLY the dynamics in our family. It’s helped me understand why our middle kid is acting the way he is. Of course, in his eyes, it was our lack of self control that made us yell at him.

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I was 3rd on 7 kids. My older sis had to be responsible and independent. Dad really wanted my older brother to be an athlete and brilliant—he tried but was uncoordinated and a late bloomer. It was hard on that brother that academics came easily to me and my brother 2 years younger. We cast a big shadow over older brother. Younger brother was also effortlessly athletic and had lots of energy and was charismatic. The youngest of the 7 of us is truly Mr Charisma — charming and knows nearly everyone. The other 2 younger sisters are very different. One is very social and the other very reserved. I’m happy we all get along well enough.

I was very “responsible.” When mom went back to school when I was in Jr High, I was given a signed blank check every morning, after school came home, did homework, went grocery shopping for our family of 9 and made dinner. Mom had gone back to college to get a 2nd masters in special ed and after class she’d go to the convalescent center/nursing home t visit her mom & all the residents & staff there.

I never had a curfew and never needed one. My dad was hard on my older brother and they had a co-dependent relationship eventually.

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Mysiblings like to say that their curfew was 10:30, and mine was April…. Then my father would say I was by far the most responsible and cautious so I didn’t need a curfew — very true. I so wanted to be the “easy” child.

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Thank you for this article. I found it really interesting although I have not seen the Oprah episode. I appreciated this statement about ambivalence.

Ambivalence as a Feature, Not a Flaw

Karl Pillemer’s research emphasizes that long-term relationships are inherently ambivalence-generating. Love and irritation live together. Warmth and disappointment take turns in the driver’s seat. This is not evidence of pathology. It is evidence of reality.

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I posted reference to that the other day, but wasn’t sure it was allowed to actually put the link. I thought it was a good article.

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I’m also grateful for you sharing this article with us @Leigh22.

Additionally, my thoughts below are me thinking in print for ME…this is not a prescription for what others should do. But in reading others’ thoughts, I often find it helpful for me, so I hope that this contribution is viewed in that light.

For context on this quote, the author did put a caveat that this idea was not related to situations where there had been real trauma:

The capacity to stay in relationship through discomfort, rather than exiting the relationship to avoid discomfort, becomes one of the most essential relational muscles we can cultivate.

This part really hit home for me. It’s something that my pastor talks about in terms of the messiness of needing to live and interact with people in a way that our divine creator wants us to, even when we don’t see much value in interacting with those people. It reminds me of the relationship I had with one of my parents. It reminds me even more of my relationship with one of my siblings, which is the closest that I’ve thought about having an intentionally estranged relationship with someone.

Ideally, I’d love to have awesome or great or good relationships with my whole family. But perhaps by staying in relationship with them, I still believe it’s possible to move a poor relationship to an okay-ish one to a fine one in the hopes of maybe getting into a good (or better) relationship in the future.

This is true for my father’s side of the family. He would have regular calls with his parents/siblings (varying between weekly/monthly), but I can count on one hand (maybe two) the number of times I saw those individuals (collectively) in my life. I at least know the names of my aunts/uncles, but I don’t even know all the names of my cousins, and there’s probably not more than one or two that I would recognize if I was just walking down the street. Again, there was no formal estrangement, but I’ve got very little in the way of ties to that whole side of the family.

And going back to the article:

Clinicians are not empty vessels. We are shaped by the stories we hear, the patterns we internalize, and the pain we resonate with.

This is why, as clinicians, we must actively widen our aperture. We must listen not just to the voices we are predisposed to feel aligned with, but also to those whose experiences unsettle or contradict us. Intellectual humility must be a professional discipline.

One could switch out “clinicians” and switch it to “humans”, and I think this would be spot on and would help so many people in the world today.

He may cost a fortune, but it seems promising that your son selected a therapist that the author thinks is pretty balanced in terms of parent/adult child perspectives.

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Oh, we found this expert on our own, just for ourselves. We’re waiting on our son to find someone for family counseling. We want to be prepared. From what I read, family counseling in these situations can be brutal.

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A law school friend has basically stopped communicating with me for no reason I can figure out. It’s sad and painful but I’m sure only a fraction of the pain others must feel at estranged familial bonds.

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This has been a really thought-provoking thread, and one of the ones that has resonated the most for me in my years on CC. Thank you to everyone who shared your stories.

I spent years in shame over the rift in my family, and didn’t say a word to anyone. Guess what I found? Nearly everyone has a story in their family.

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My mother drank and was emotionally abusive. My sister has been estranged for 30 years, and I took care of my mother for the last 8 years of her life. Who is healthier? I honestly think my sister’s estrangement has been healthy. People don’t know about what went on in our house. My mother was well-off and well-liked in the community. When people criticize my sister (she did not go to the memorial and of course I organized it) I bristle and tell them she had good reason. I also don’t like the praise I get for what I did. Yes it was healing in some ways, but honestly, as the oldest, I just did what my sense of duty called me to do. I miss my mother and my sister might too, but she protected herself as she needed to do.

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As the OP, I am so glad this thread has been helpful to others and I appreciate the links posted by others.

Thanks to great therapy and meds (to say nothing of very supportive friends), I manage my sadness at very little communication with my daughter and son-in-law (basically texting on birthdays and holidays). I tend to be a glass-half-full person, and I have to believe that things will improve for us. Once in a while, I think: but what if it doesn’t get better before I die or become too disabled to communicate? But I can’t dwell on that, I just can’t.

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Excellent article.

”I want to hear from the grandchild who never knew his/her grandparents, and what they miss.” - And important point. The grandparent relationship is so different from parenting. It’s sad that grandchildren are robbed of that opportunity.

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Rachel Haack did another post or article or whatever about estrangement today - The No Contact Gospel - by Rachel Haack, MA, MFTI

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I don’t want to derail this thread, but I read Amy Griffin’s memoir, “The Tell” a while back and the part where she describes how her husband just started being completely candid and honest about painful subjects (e.g., familial estrangement or substance abuse issues in the family) was really impactful to me. I am am not estranged from, but have a difficult relationship with my brother (who is a difficult person and likely suffers from mental health issues). I have generally been pretty closed-mouth on the topic of him, when asked. Since reading that book, I am much more candid about my responses to people’s inquiries (e.g., “No, we won’t be seeing him at Thanksgiving. We have a strained relationship and don’t get together often.” ). It has been really liberating. I don’t feel as though I’m carrying around some burden of shame, and yes…more often than not…people have a relatable story in their own lives.

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