u/Texandria

A forum member here poses an interesting question in response to a recent media article which was written as if younger adults need to be reminded to try low contact instead of estranging from aging parents. The article in question cited no evidence to support its assumption that people need to be told to consider low contact before becoming fully estranged.

So let's weigh in. You know your own life experience.

• Did you consider low contact before going no contact?
• If you tried low contact, how did that pan out?
• If you didn't try low contact, what were your reasons for going directly to no contact?

Feel free to answer as fully as you want.

Laura Potter of The Guardian has authored an odd and condescending piece about estrangement. No one from a nonprofit which serves the younger adult generation of estranged families weighs in, only one psychotherapist from the younger generation of an estranged family is quoted, and no social media forum was contacted for comment.

The lede presumes readers need to be told estrangement is "not a decision to be taken lightly." That's where she calibrates her reader's mentality.

What follows is a strange Catch-22. The question list begins, "Am I avoiding difficult feelings?" This would seem like a reason to seek therapy--which this forum often encourages--yet Laura Potter doesn't suggest therapy in that section. Later in question 6: "Am I being pressured?" Potter lists therapists among outside pressures to estrange. While the piece admits parents may set the wrong example in terms of emotional regulation and communication skills, it also disparages a principal method of acquiring those skills during adulthood.

Laura Potter, if you read this, you can do better. That narrative about pressure from therapists derives from surveys of estranged parents. Those people weren't in the room for therapeutic sessions. The way to gauge that type of thing is firsthand. When this forum polled our own membership on that question, no one reported a therapist had exerted undue pressure to estrange. The most upvoted response opens:

>"I think the narrative [about pressure from therapists] comes from the 'clueless' parents grasping at straws and looking for anyone to blame except themselves."

No reasonable person estranges from a family of origin lightly. People don't wander into this forum blithely because they saw a TikTok dance or because they had a minor quarrel over dinner. A typical new member seeks out this subreddit after years or sometimes decades of trying everything they can think of to make the relationship work. CPTSD isn't uncommon among our membership. Many report ailments associated with chronic stress or disabilities resulting from medical neglect during their formative years.

In 1923, Harold Lloyd released a silent comedy film titled Safety Last. Laura Potter's decision to put safety last lacks comedic irony. Does she fathom how much of the estrangement community are survivors of abuse and neglect?

Estrangement isn't the flavor of the month. This isn't a trend. According to the American Psychological Association, there is no conclusive evidence whether estrangement rates are rising or falling.

We are a community no one wants to need.

Laura Potter, if you are planning a follow-up on this topic then you are welcome to contact our moderation team through ModMail. Journalists are supposed to seek input from both sides of an issue. Next time, don't publish something so badly out of touch. Don't underestimate your readership's intelligence. Raise the bar.

Five years ago today I joined Reddit to seek support dealing with a recurring issue related to estrangement and childhood trauma.

Each spring, summer, and fall my yard was the pride of the neighborhood. Then each winter as SAD kicked in, I would drift into a funk and neglect it. This isn't a climate where a gardener can take winters off.

A lot of old traumatic memories would surface while gardening. EM's yard was the eyesore of her neighborhood. Growing up, that was terribly embarrassing. I weeded the yard. I ran the sprinklers. I swept the driveway. I carried kitchen scraps to the compost pile. None of that was enough.

EM boasted about her compost, but she never actually used it. I wasn't permitted to take initiative, so the plants were starved for nutrients. She had hedges she refused to trim and forbade me from trimming, so they overgrew. She tried to teach me to run the lawnmower but I didn't have the strength to start the pull cord, so the grass overgrew. I offered to use the edger on our stretch of sidewalk. She insisted we didn't own an edger. I showed the edger to her in our garage. She forbade me from using it.

A neighbor complained about her yard to the HOA. EM responded not by fixing up the yard but by going to HOA meetings and getting herself elected to become a board officer. Then when another neighbor complained to the HOA president, EM threw a pass at the HOA president right in front of me. I was nine years old.

Fortunately the HOA president was faithful to his wife and extricated himself. Unfortunately that episode sealed EM's fate at the one homeowner who was functionally exempt from the yard maintenance bylaws.

Neighbors noticed the neglect. Some of the neighborhood children interpreted it as an opportunity to bully a child who wasn't getting proper supervision from a competent parent. And by 'bullying,' that means ganging up in groups and hunting me down to beat me up. Other parents figured there was probably something wrong with the kid from that house and forbade their children from playing with me. Those people probably heard EM's daily screaming too. From EM's perspective, these developments were features rather than bugs.

Five years ago this subreddit didn't exist yet, but when it did form I joined immediately.

Although nothing can undo those early years, my yard has been better these last five winters. To the fellow forum members who helped bring that progress along, thank you. And outside the virtual world, with the permission of the parents in the current neighborhood, I've become the lady who gives away houseplants and flowers and garden vegetables to the local children. It's heartwarming to see their smiles, even to share their excitement at picking a ripe tomato off a vine. No one on the block knows the real background.

Unprocessed trauma can surface in odd ways. So let's discuss that.

How has yours surprised you?

How far along in your healing journey are you in recognizing it and overcoming it?

This seems like an apt occasion to have a conversation about unprocessed trauma. How has yours surfaced?

Ronny Reyes has authored an irresponsible piece about estrangement which makes no effort to interview both sides of the topic, takes an unpublished survey at face value, and makes alarmist warnings not justified by the social science.

Reyes begins by referencing a new survey which claims one-third of estranged parents blame a therapist for their estranged offspring's decision to cut contact. Reyes fails to weigh that claim critically. So let's think about that claim for a moment.

Parents of adults don't have a right in the United States to call up a therapist and demand, "Did you advise my adult son to estrange from me?" HIPAA privacy laws cover that. Wiretapping laws prevent those parents from listening in on the conversations. Those parents weren't personally present in the room.

So how do those survey subjects know what happened there? That would be a really good question, if Ronny Reyes or his editors at The New York Post had asked it. Instead, Ronny Reyes ends his lede by warning of "a toxic rise in victimhood culture." So much for journalistic neutrality.

It might just be self-serving for estranged parents to blame the therapist. In a different survey about estrangement published last year not cited in this New York Post article, 34% of the younger generation cited abuse as a reason for estrangement, while only 4% of the older generation did. There was a 2% margin of error in that other poll. It shouldn't take a rocket scientist to look at those numbers and think, 'Hm, maybe abusive parents have been trying to cover their own reputations by throwing clinical therapists under the bus.'

The Doherty survey isn't even published social science. It raised an eyebrow to notice this new survey and its alarming finding aren't linked anywhere in Reyes's article. A few minutes down the rabbit hole indicate the survey hasn't been published in any scientific journal. William Doherty of the University of Minnesota is named as the lead researcher. Reyes says the study was conducted this past April, yet Doherty's faculty biography lists no publications since 2022. A further search of Google Scholar turns up nothing for this new survey. Even looked up preprints(dot)org in hopes of finding a paper that's at least been submitted for publication--again nothing. In other words, Doherty's professional colleagues haven't assessed the quality of this research and the research itself isn't available for independent review. Instead, the lead researcher has run to the popular press.

This isn't good practice either in social science or in journalism. It's a thing somebody does when they want to make a splashy headline. If a journalist touches this type of material at all (and he probably shouldn't), then it's all the more incumbent on serious journalism to contact clinical therapists who aren't on William Doherty's research team for comment. There's no indication in the article that any professional association of clinical therapists was contacted for comment, or even any independent clinical therapist.

Reyes quotes Peter Anderson, who conducted the survey with Doherty, as saying, “A lot of therapists are taught to believe whatever the client is saying at face value." Really? If this is so widespread then why hasn't Ronny Reyes located even one therapist who says, 'this was my training?' Then without a hint of irony, Anderson continues, "They’re forming conclusions based on one person’s account.”

Reyes provides no perspective from the younger generation of estranged families. The poll I cite above isn't mentioned in Reyes's piece, no nonprofit which serves the younger generation comments, no forum moderation team comments, and no individual who estranged from a parent weighs in. Reyes neither interviews anyone from the younger generation, nor mentions that he's tried.

The next research study Reyes cites, he presents in a misleading manner.

>More than 25% of young adults in the US are estranged from one or both parents, or have been, according to a recent study published in the Journal of Marriage and Family.

That looks like an impressive statistic unless the reader already knows which study Reyes is talking about. The publication is fairly recent (2022) but some of the underlying research is more than three decades old. Reyes fails to link to this study either, so here's a link. Basically, Rin Reczek of Ohio State University re-analyzed a series of surveys of young adults which were conducted between 1994 and 2018. Nearly all of those participants would have been Gen X and Millennials. Those aren't young adults anymore; some of them are in their fifties by now. If Ronnie Reyes has read that paper, he doesn't seem to have understood it.

So although that's real peer reviewed social science, it doesn't back up Reyes's dire assertions about a recent 'rise in victimhood culture.' There are also issues with that study which likely inflated the eye-catching 25% statistic because Reyes used an expansive definition of estrangement which classified some survey participants as estranged even though the survey participants themselves described their relationship with their parents as "fairly close."

It wouldn't have been difficult for Ronny Reyes to have reached out to this forum before publication. Our moderation team accepts queries from journalists and from academic researchers, and our forum provides instructions for contacting the moderation team.

If The York Post had reached out to this forum--which the publication didn't--I could have provided examples of the opposite phenomenon such as here and here and here. It's a semi-regular occurrence at this forum when members post about overt pressure from therapists to resume contact, even when the client has specifically stated that reconciliation isn't a goal of their therapy. I know of no instance where a member of this forum has complained of pressure from a therapist to estrange from family.

To the best of my knowledge, pressuring a client to estrange would be a breach of professional ethics. If that were a common occurrence then Ronny Reyes of The New York Post ought to be able to cite at least one instance of professional sanction for it; he doesn't.

[Note: while this post was being researched and written, a different member of this forum posted a briefer critique of a similar article in The Wall Street Journal by Elizabeth Bernstein. Both The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post are owned by the same publisher].

(edited for clarity)

At another discussion today, someone drew a comparison between an estranged parent and a drowning person. Which brings to mind a real piece of water safety. What follows builds up to a point.

Ever notice how news reports about drowning deaths often report that the would-be rescuer drowned too?

If you've taken basic or intermediate swimming classes, part of the water safety lesson is the advice that if someone is drowning, throw them a life preserver. Or maybe take one end of a pool cleaning tool and hold out the other end of the pole where the drowning person can grab it, but don't go in the water. One of the most dangerous things you could do is dive into a pool to try to save a drowning swimmer, because a drowning person will panic and do absolutely anything to get their nose above the water line for one more breath of air, including pushing a rescuer's head underwater and holding the rescuer down until the rescuer drowns.

Drowning in real life doesn't look like drowning in the movies. There's often no splash or cry for help. A drowning swimmer typically goes silent, with their body straight up and their arms outstretched, gasping for air when they think there's a chance. Another reflexive action when a non-swimmer gets into trouble--literally in over their heads--is to try to climb up a column of water as if they were reaching for a ladder that doesn't exist. It's the same set of physical motions. They're desperate for anything to push themselves up and they don't even think about the consequences.

It isn't until advanced swimming classes, specifically lifeguarding, that water rescues are taught. A person has to be a really strong swimmer to even attempt it. It's a last resort. And when things gets to that point, the guidance is the only way for a lifeguard to get out of the grip of a drowning person is to swim downwards deeper into the water, pulling the drowning person downwards too until the drowning person lets go, and then swim laterally underwater to get out of reach of the drowning person before surfacing. Then shout out a lecture loud enough that the drowning person can hear, that if you pull that shit again I'll let you die.

That is the now or never moment. The lifeguard can give one second chance. After that, the lifeguard's decision is whether one person drowns or two. Many drowning swimmers snap out of their stupor at that point; some don't. The latter situation gets reported as 'a lifeguard tried to save him but couldn't.' Yet in the water, this is how that interaction plays out. You can't save a drowning swimmer who won't take feedback.

That level of danger is a metaphor to many but not all of the people who seek out this forum. Yet at some level, dysfunctional parents who try to exploit their offspring as an emotional support critter are something like the drowning swimmer who's so desperate for the next breath of air that they have no thought for what they're inflicting on the person they want to use.

Any decent person wants to be the hero. But when the individual you're trying to help categorically won't listen to the guidance that would get them out of deep water, then you may be faced with the choice between prolonging their inevitable failure at great cost to yourself, or else getting yourself to safety and letting that other individual experience the consequences of their own choices.

You didn't fail; that failure is theirs. You tried properly.

Dr. Ana analyzes a letter from writer Franz Kafka to his estranged father.

Quite a few years ago I read a firsthand account from a man whose father tried to teach him how to drive. The father was absolutely terrible at it, to the point where it was difficult to ask any questions and get a coherent answer. The father spent so much time yelling and cursing that it was difficult to the writer to concentrate on the road.

Talking to his father about it accomplished nothing. So after exhausting everything else he could think of, the writer turned on a microphone and recorded his father's rants. After the drive that day he played back the recording.

The father--who in that instance probably wasn't as unreachable as the parents whose adult offspring seek out this forum forum--listened to the playback and the color drained from his face. He heard himself as his son heard him.

Maybe that father had been muttering curses at other drivers alone in his vehicle on his daily work commute for decades. Maybe--although the mental gymnastics of this seem incredible--that habit was so ingrained that the father didn't realize he had been speaking and yelling and cursing aloud.

For that writer, family driving practice improved after that incident.

Yet it gets one to thinking...

----

People often remark in this forum that many of the parents who push the relationship to estrangement interact as if their offspring aren't fully separate human beings. Those parents often treat the next generation as extensions of themselves.

With that in mind, and specifically thinking of cursing and insults, the thought bubbled up that maybe those parents don't really think of themselves as verbally abusing another human being, any more than some drivers think that muttering curses in the driver's seat is a meaningful insult--so long as the windows are rolled up and other drivers don't actually hear it.

The car isn't insulted; it's an inanimate object.

They have a right to vent in the privacy of their own property.

No harm done, right? A person who mutters curses about the next driver probably doesn't even remember the incident the next week.

Now try this thought experiment.

Take that same attitude and substitute child for car.

The parent probably doesn't want the outside world to hear those moments; the parent doesn't want a reputation for being unhinged. So they keep the metaphorical windows rolled up and they vent their worst self in private.

Then, because the parent's feelings weren't hurt by the incident, they probably memory hole the incident within a week. It feels like harmless venting to the speaker.

It's a mental space where that parent behaves as if they were alone.

Perhaps this explains a habitual slow drip of insults and dismissiveness and put-downs.

----

Granted, there may also be instances where a parent's verbal abuse is mindful and intentional. Both possibilities could be true. Hypothetically, if you're shopping for wedding dresses and when you try on your favorite gown your abusive mother says "You look like a slut," in front of your bridesmaids, then it would stretch the imagination to suppose that insult wasn't intended to be impactful.

Yet if a parent doesn't always care when they're thinking aloud in the privacy of their own space, then when you were looking for a popsicle on a hot day and a casual voice behind you muttered, "Get your fat face out of my freezer," maybe part of that mindset was the same as when they also muttered "Get your fat ass out of my lane" at the driver who cut them off the day before.

It's a nasty mindset either way. This doesn't excuse it.

Yet do you suppose it might explain some of the dismissive bewilderment, for those of us who (pre-estrangement) tried to negotiate a more polite and mutually respectful mode of communication before we estranged? Or perhaps the denial which met an estrangement letter?

Or perhaps, if the parent shot back the odd reply, "I put a roof over your head," it was something like the mindset of, This is my car. In other words, It's my space, nobody can hear it, this is simple venting, it's unimportant.

Except that unlike the father who road raged while his son was learning to drive, the father who felt properly ashamed when hearing his own voice played back to him, for a parent who pushes the relationship all the way to estrangement there is no way to make feedback break through. Instead it keeps being a rhetorical 'my way or the highway,' refusing to take the prospect of departure seriously until you're gone.

----

Linked below are a couple of social science studies about (verbal) road rage. It would be interesting if a psychology study examined possible links between cursing behind the wheel and cursing at offspring. Nobody who studies such matters scientifically seems to have asked that question in an experiment yet. It would be interesting if they did.

• https://pubs.sciepub.com/jsa/1/1/1/index.html
• https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590198223000271

Video made by a psychologist who works in hospice care.

"If you think empathy will help calm him down, you have never crossed the lines of someone with NPD."

Hi, received an odd request in the inbox today to delete an entire thread which had been posted to our forum six months ago; the complaint claimed privacy violations and emotional distress. The post consisted of a TikTok video of a minor Internet celebrity speaking directly to the camera. The individual on camera in that video names no one and discloses no personal information.

The threaded discussion at the post discusses this minor celebrity, citing information the individual herself discloses on her personal website and an Amazon listing for a book she authored. The discussion uses her real name, which is no secret because the domain name of her personal website is her actual name.

Basically, I found nothing of a personal nature which this minor celebrity doesn't disclose herself. It's possible I may have overlooked something in the review. Have replied to the user to offer a second review if they follow up to supply particular quotes and context.

With that said, I strongly suspect the request was submitted in bad faith. The request misstated our subreddit policy and provided only a top level link to the discussion, which translated the entire page of English language discussion into the Dutch language. The celebrity in question speaks fluent English. So this looks like either a mistake by a contractor who isn't a native English speaker, or else a deliberate attempt to obfuscate and confuse our moderation team into approving an unreasonable request.

If that suspicion is correct, then that person's likely next course of action would be to submit frivolous support tickets to Reddit's administrative staff.

Posting here to be transparent, and to invite review of my decisions today.

If you're in need of validation from a professional who *gets it*, here's a good one.

You've probably heard that famous saying, When somebody shows you who they are, believe them. That's from Maya Angelou. Except her original version is a little different.

> "When people show you who they are, believe them, the first time. Not the 29th time!" - Commencement Address to Wellesley College, May 30, 1997

Of course she's speaking to adults there. Those of us who grew up among jerks may not have had much choice, and were taught we didn't understand, and endured the 290th time and the 2900th time. Yet that doesn't oblige us to tolerate bad treatment forever. That said, it's good advice about how to draw the line in adult life: the things which were normalized in a dysfunctional home weren't normal.

Other gems from Maya Angelou:

> "Nothing can dim the light that shines from within."

> "Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can't practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage."

> "I don't trust people who don't love themselves and tell me 'I love you.'"

> "A bizarre sensation pervades a relationship of pretense. No truth seems true. A simple morning's greeting and response appear loaded with innuendo and fraught with implications... Each nicety becomes more sterile and each withdrawal more permanent."

> "Develop enough courage so that you can stand up for yourself and then stand up for somebody else."

> "Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives."

> "I still feel you should rock the boat. And if you're not in it, you should turn it over. But not unthinkingly. Protest without serious consideration is dangerous. You have to back up what you say. But once you find the truth, you ought to be prepared to stand on the street corner and use all your gifts to right the wrong."