Reply to Oprah podcast on estranged families

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I was screaming when the male therapist author (Joshua Coleman) told that young couple (who went NC with the man's parents because they hated the DIL and were pissed that they got pregnant) that they are showing their DD the example that no contact is an option.

I was like, GOOD!!!! Are you kidding me? What a weird, tone-deaf, not reading the room, absurd thing to say. I never read his book or heard of him before but OP you are probably right that he lacks reflection. My God.

I thought the female therapist sitting next to him seemed irritated by him or maybe that was my hopeful projection.

Overall I enjoyed it. I watched in on youtube. I have seen that hospice nurse before and I really liked hearing from her.[/quote]

I agree! I am glad Gibson jumped in and reframed it as basically modeling healthy boundaries with people who don't feel emotionally safe. I also totally thought Gibson was annoyed with him. LOVE her. She truly operates with heart and integrity.

That said, I have mixed feelings about that couple now that IG keeps sending me posts from their feed. I truly felt for them and still do, but the stint on Oprah was likely a way to bring people to their balloon business and IG where they partner to advertise products. I admire her entrepreneurial spirit and spunk and he seems lovely, but there's a lot of BS on there. She claims to be so liberal and progressive but her main business harms the environment with forever chemicals and hurts wildlife, and their ads promote consumerism. She posts about protests she doesn't even seem to understand. He complains his parents are performative, yet his social media though charming is highly performative. It's nice to see they don't show their kids' faces and they are a cute couple, but they don't seem as earnest on there as they did on Oprah.[/quote]

Agree on Gibson. She is my empathy role model.i write up thread about her books helped me to avoid estrangement with my parents. That's in part because working through her books enabled me to see that my parents, as flawed as they are, are products of a lot of abuse and neglect in their own childhoods. They aren't emotionally immature just to hurt me, it's because they have their own wounds and have never found ways to heal and mature beyond them. I have found a way to feel both compassion for myself for my own bad childhood and lack of parenting, and compassion for them for the same. They are a link in a chain of generational abuse, not the source.

I also liked what either Nedra or Lindsay (I can't remember which said this) said to the woman who had the really abusive mother who never really parented. About the idea of letting go of thinking of this woman as a mother, since she never mothered, and considering all options. Including potentially reconciling but not as mother-daughter but as friends. I know people kind of recoiled at that, but that's essentially what I've done with my parents, specifically to enable my child to have a relationship with them. I just think of them as an elderly couple who will show my kid some attention and sometimes love, and also buy her gifts occasionally.  My kid knows I have a complicated relationship with them, but we find a way to work through it so DD has some connection to them and experiences something of that feeling if coming *from* somewhere and being connected to past generations. To me it's part of healing that generational abuse I mentioned before. I'm trying to shift us to more functional family patterns, which for me means choosing not to go no contact but instead maintaining healthy boundaries and distance from my parents' dysfunction.[/quote]

Yes, I thought it was great advice to see if you can have a relationship is a different way since she was never a mother. That said, if the mother who abandoned her daughter expects help later in life she has a lot of nerve and I hope that daughter will be able to maintain healthy boundaries.

Yes Gibson is my role model for emotional maturity. Her idea of being "relational" rather than expecting a relationship (from her book) helped me a lot with my mother. I could also detach and observe her poor behavior the way Jane Goodall would observe a bunch of monkeys or baboons. The problem is those baboons don't come over and attack you for refusing to engage, but she did help me just be very low contact as opposed to no contact.

Nedra Tawwab has a lot of wisdom, and I appreciated her books as well. She's not always as strong giving feedback on command and I didn't agree with everything she said about grandparents. I think the fact the couple treats their kids well and model respectful behavior can be enough without finding people in the community to act as grandparents. That can be wishful thinking and can set up a potentially inappropriate situation. She missed a chance to say it's far worse for the kids to witness the parents allowing emotional abuse. Tawwab shares about her own family estrangements in her books, and she has tremendous insight. I think if she had time to think about it, she would have addressed the question is a much more therapeutic way that was also realistic.[/quote]

Yes, I learned about detachment from Gibson and it totally changed my life. Not just my relationship with my parents or other family, but helped me navigate relationships with work colleagues, people in my social circle, and my in-laws, all of which I'd been struggling with. I love how she describes detachment, and in her second book she gives really good examples of how it can work in the moment when you're dealing with an emotionally immature person. It is a really helpful book just in general, not just with the parent-child relationship. I think it is also good to read if you are in a relationship with someone who has emotionally immature parents, even if they are doing better, because it can help you understand them better.[/quote]

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